SENTENCE - has been defined in over 200 ways:
1. Emotive sentences: Gee! Wow. Darn! Yes! No!
2. Imperatives: Go! Leave! Taxi! All aboard! Down with alcohol!
3. Elliptic sentences: Who took the car? John.
4. Small talk phrases: Hello. Good-bye. Good morning.
Our definition: a SENTENCE has a subject and a predicate.
1. Simple sentence contains at least one subject and one predicate:
We // see the cat. John // picked flowers.
The man with the green golf club // left.
2. Compound sentence: two or more simple sentences joined together:
We see the cat // (and) you see a dog.
(and, but,. or = coordinating conjunctions)
3. Complex sentence: one of the syntactic roles is played by an embedded sentence:
I made // the students read Chomsky.
I saw // Mary run.
I know //(that) you snore
main clause//subordinate clause, or imbedded sentence S' (S-bar)
that = subordinating conjunction, or complementizer (comp)
Parts of speech -syntactic classes of words: verb (V) noun (N) adjective (Adj) adverb (adv) pronoun (Pron) preposition (P) conjunction (Conj: and, but, if),
article (Art: a, the), verbal particle (off in turn off the light).
1. Fronting (Prepositional phrases can be fronted, verbal particles cannot):
The mouse ran up the clock--Up the clock he ran.
The man ran up a big bill.--*Up the big bill he ran.
The asterisk * marks ill-formed (ungrammatical) examples
2. "It" test:
The mouse ran up it (the clock). but not *The mouse ran it up.
The man ran it up (a bill). but not *The man ran up it.
Not all languages have the same parts of speech.
Parts of speech have no real world meaning.
The sky darkens, the darkening of the sky, a dark sky, the darkness of the sky.
Syntactic patterns and categories are not limited semantically.
Noam Chomsky: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
*green sleep colorless furiously ideas.
Syntactic atom - the basic unit of syntax
Phrase structure rules: express syntactic equivalence
S -> NP (subject) + VP (predicate) NP -> Pron He ate the bone. NP -> N Fido ate the bone. NP -> Art. + N The dog ate the bone. NP -> Art.+Adj.+N The big yellow dog ate the bone. NP -> Adj.+N+S' Our dog which we raised from a puppy ate the bone. VP -> V He slept. VP -> V + NP He made a kite. VP -> V + PP He looked at us. VP -> V + NP + PP He made a kite at school. PP -> P + NP
Recursion: the ability of a syntactic element to repeat in the same structure:
Recursive, or parallel, NP Subjects:
John arrived. John and Mary arrived, John, Bill and Mary arrived.
Recursive, or parallel VP Predicates
John worked. John worked and sang. John worked, sang and ate.
Recursive modifiers (adjectives)
bad car bad red car big bad red car big bad rusty old red car
Some items cannot be recursive:
articles not recursive: the book *the a the book
conjunctions not recursive: John and Mary *John and or if Mary
19th century German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt:
"Language makes infinite use of finite means."