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An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory

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An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory Hilda Koopman Dominique Sportiche Edward Stabler 1 Morphology: Starting with words 1 2 Syntactic analysis introduced 37 3 Clauses 87 4 Many other phrases: first glance 101 5 X-bar theory and a first glimpse of discontinuities 121 6 The model of syntax 141 7 Binding and the hierarchical nature of phrase structure 163 8 Apparent violations of Locality of Selection 187 9 Raising and Control 203 10 Summary and review 223 iii 1 Morphology: Starting with words Our informal characterization defined syntax as the set of rules or princi- ples that govern how words are put together to form phrases, well formed sequences of words. Almost all of the words in it have some common sense meaning independent of the study of language. We more or less understand what a rule or principle is. A rule or principle describes a regularity in what happens. (For example: “if the temperature drops suddenly, water vapor will condense”). This notion of rule that we will be interested in should be distinguished from the notion of a rule that is an instruction or a statement about what should happen, such as “If the light is green, do not cross the street.” As linguists, our primary interest is not in how anyone says you should talk. Rather, we are interested in how people really talk. In common usage, “word” refers to some kind of linguistic unit. We have a rough, common sense idea of what a word is, but it is surprisingly difficult to characterize this precisely. It is not even clear that the notion is one that allows a precise definition. It could be like the notion of a “French language.” There is a central idea to this vague notion but as we try to define it, we are led to making arbitrary decisions as to whether something is part of French or not. Furthermore, as we will see, we may not need any precise version of this notion at all. Nevertheless, these commonsense notions provide a reasonable starting point for our subject. So we will begin with the usual ideas about words, objects of the kind that are represented by the strings of letters on this page separated by blank spaces. When we become literate in a language, we learn the conventions about what is called a word, and about spacing these elements in texts. Who decides these conventions, and how do we learn them? We will gradually get to some surprising perspectives on this question. 1 2 1. MORPHOLOGY: STARTING WITH WORDS As we will see, some reasons have been put forth to the effect that words are not the basic units of phrases, not the atomic units of syntax. Accord- ingly, the atoms, or “building blocks” that syntax manipulates would be smaller units, units that we will see later in this chapter. We will also see that that there are reasons to think that the way these units are combined is very regular, obeying laws very similar to those that combine larger units of linguistic structure. We begin by looking at properties of words informally characterized and see where it leads. As mentioned above, the subdomain of linguistics deal- ing with word properties, particularly word structure, is called morphology. Here we will concentrate on just a few kinds of morphological properties that will turn out to be relevant for syntax. We will briefly introduce these basic ideas: 1 Words come in categories 1 Words can be made of smaller units (morphemes) 1 Morphemes combine in a regular, rule-governed fashion. a. To define the regularities we need the notions of head and selection b. The regularities exhibit a certain kind of locality 1 Morphemes can be silent 1.1 Words come in categories The first important observation about words is that they come in differ- ent kinds. This is usually stated as the fact that words come in categories, where categories are nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, adverbs, de- terminers, complementizers, and other things. Some of these are familiar from traditional grammar (e.g. nouns, verbs), others probably less so (com- plementizers, or determiners). Open class categories: (new words can be freely created in these categories) Noun (N) table, computer, event, joy, action Verb (V) run, arrive, laugh, know, love, think, say, spray Adjective (A) big, yellow, stable, intelligent, legal, fake Adverb (Adv) badly, curiously, possibly, often Closed categories: Preposition (P) on, of, by, through, into, from, for, to Determiner (D) the, a, this, some, every Numerals (Num) one, two, three, ten, thirteen Complementizers (C) that, if, whether, for Auxiliaries (V) have, be Modals (v or M) will, would, can, could, may, might, shall, should Coordinators (Coord) and, or, but Negation/Affirmation (Neg/Aff) no ,too 1.1. WORDS COME IN CATEGORIES 3 Each of these categories will need to be refined. For example, there are many different “subcategories” of verbs some of which are distinguished in the dictionary: transitive, intransitive, and so on. Most dictionaries do not specify refinements of the other categories, but they are needed there too. For example, there are many different kinds of adverbs: manner adverbs slowly, carefully, quickly degree adverbs too, enough frequency adverbs often, rarely, always modal adverbs possibly, probably (Notice also that the degree adverb too in This is too spicy is not the same word as the affirmative too in That is too, which was mentioned earlier. Similarly, the complementizer for in For you to eat it would be a mistake is often distinguished from the preposition for in He cooked it for me.) There are even important distinctions among the determiners: articles a, the demonstratives that, this, these, those quantifiers some, every, each, no In fact, there are important subcategories in all of the categories mentioned above. This classification of words into categories raises the fundamental ques- tions: • What are these categories, that is, what is the fundamental basis for the distinctions between categories? • How do we know that a particular word belongs to a particular cat- egory? Traditionally, the categories mentioned above are identified by semantic criteria, that is, by criteria having to do with what the words mean. A noun is sometimes said to be the name of a person, a thing or a place; a verb is said to be the name of an action; an adjective the name of a quality; etc. There is some (probably very complicated) truth underlying these criteria, and they can be useful. However, a simple minded application of these criteria is not always reliable or possible. Sometimes words have no discernible meaning (the complementizer that), nouns can name actions (e.g. Bill's the repeated betrayal of his friends), verbs and adjectives can denote states (John fears storms = John is fearful of storms), etc. It is important to keep meaning in mind as a guide but in many cases we will need more more reliable criteria. The most fundamental idea we will use is this one: a category is a set of expressions that all “behave the same way” in the language. And the fundamental evidence for claims about how a word behaves is the distribution of words in the language: where can they appear, and where would they produce nonsense, or some other kind of deviance. 4 1. MORPHOLOGY: STARTING WITH WORDS 1.1.1 Word affixes are often category and sub-category spe- cific In morphology, the simplest meaningful units, the “semantic atoms,” are often called morphemes. Meaning in this characterization can be taken ei- ther to be "paraphrasable by an idea" (such as the plural morpheme -s which stand for the idea of plurality, i.e. more than one); but it can also be "indicat- ing a grammatical property" such as an accusative Case ending in Latin or Japanese (such as Japanese -o) which marks a direct object. We will mostly concentrate on the former sort here. Then a distinction is often drawn be- tween morphemes which can occur independently, free morphemes, and those that can only appear attached to or inside of another element, bound morphemes or affixes. Affixes that are attached at the end of a word are called suffixes; at the beginning of the word, prefixes, inside the word, in- fixes; at the beginning and end circumfixes. Words can have more than one morpheme in them. For example, English can express the idea that we are talking about a plurality of objects by adding the sound [s] or [z] or [iz] at the end of certain words: book book-s table table-s friend friend-s rose rose-s Nouns can do this (as well as small number of other items: demonstratives, pronouns): in English, the ability to be pluralized comes close to being a distinctive property of Nouns. If a word can be pluralized (and is not a demonstrative or a pronoun), it is a noun. Notice that the characterization of this suffix is partly semantic. So for example, we know that the [s] sound at the end of reads in the following sentence is not the plural affix, but some kind of agreement marker in the following sentence: She read-s the newspaper This fits with the idea that -s is a semantic atom, a meaningful unit that has no other meaningful units as parts. We can see that there is no plural version of any verb, or of any preposi- tion, or of any adjective. If a word can be pluralized (and is not a demonstra- tive or a pronoun), then it is a noun. The reverse does not always hold. That is, there are some nouns which cannot be pluralized, such as the so-called mass nouns like furniture or milk.
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