Syntax sobirova odina a student of Kokand University What is syntax?

Syntax

• SOBIROVA ODINA
• A student of Kokand University

What is syntax?

• the study of the internal structure of sentences: how to put together words to form sentences
• Noam Chomsky’s theory of syntax: accounts for the productivity of our utterances in terms of structure-building rules (phrase structure rules)

Syntax is independent of Semantics (though related).

• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
• (grammatical but semantically deviant)
• *Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.
• (ungrammatical and meaningless)
• *The boy quickly in the house the ball found.
• (ungrammatical but meaningful)

How do we start?

• We rely on our grammaticality judgments in doing syntactic study.
• We strive to propose a system that produces all and only grammatical sentences in English (or any other lang.)

Syntactic Categories

• Knowledge of language
• Represented by your syntactic knowledge
• Syntactic categories
• Lexical categories (i.e. word-level categories): noun, verb, adjective, preposition, etc.
• Phrasal categories: NP, VP, AP, PP, etc.
• Phrase structure
• Syntactic composition of phrases
• Structural ambiguity

Constituents

• A set of adjacent words that can form a meaningful unit and can be replaced by a pro-form (e.g. pronouns) and/or moved as a unit are said to form a constituent.
• A constituent can consists of just one word or multiple words.

How to find constituents

• Subj. verb. Obj.
• Odina met Mohinur.
• The tall boy met the tall girl.
• A boy from Kokand met a girl from Tashkent.
• A boy from Kokand met the tall girl.
• Karim met a student who majors in mathematics.
• What is subject? Something that the main verb agrees with.

rules of thumb

• answers to questions
• substitution (pronouns, names, do, etc.)
• clefting (It was … that …)
• coordination

Two Types of Ambiguity

• Ambiguity = multiple meanings
• Lexical Ambiguity
• I’ll meet you by the bank.
• 1. A financial institution
• 2. A river bank.
• Structural Ambiguity
• due to different syntactic structures associated with the same “string of words”

Structural ambiguity

• I hate raw fish and onions

• Give an unambiguous paraphrase.

Structural ambiguity

• I hate raw fish and onions

Structural ambiguity

• I hate raw fish and onions

• Give a second unambiguous paraphrase.

Structural ambiguity

• I hate raw fish and onions

Structural ambiguity

• The price includes soup or salad and french fries

• Draw two distinct trees for the blue
• portion of the sentence.
• Then provide paraphrases.

More examples of structural ambiguity

• I killed the king with a knife.
• ambiguous
• (2) I killed the king with the red hair.
• unambiguous