December 15th
The answers to the practice problems for the final exam are here. Good luck!December 10th
I have put up an answer key to the 7th problem set here. I give the correct tree for wach problem, except number 4, which we went over in class.December 7th
I have put up more extensive notes covering semantic ambiguity here. If you are having trouble with question 2 on the 7th problem set, I recommend looking over these notes.December 6th
You can find a pdf of the 7th problem set here. Also, here are some notes about the problem set, telling you the categories for each of the words. Finally, you can find an updated list of the phrase structure rules (including rules for CPs) here.
Finally, I still haven't put up the notes talking about ambiguity, which is what you need to solve problem 2 (and also 3, since 3 builds on 2). Here's the basic idea:
- There are two phrase structure rules for putting in PPs. One rule puts the PP inside of V-bar. The other rule puts the PP inside of N-bar.
- Some sentences contain a PP which can be analyzed using either rule.
- The meaning of the sentence changes depending on which rule you use, as follows:
- If the PP goes in V-bar, then the whole PP tells you something about the action described by the verb.
- If the PP goes in the N-bar, then the PP tells you something about the thing described by the noun.
For example, consider the sentence "John saw the man with the binoculars." This sentence can mean two things: One meaning is that there is a man with binoculars, and John sees that man. Here, it is the man that has binoculars. The way we capture this is by saying that the PP "with the binoculars" goes inside the N-bar, next to the noun "man".
The other possible meaning for this sentence is one in which John uses binoculars to see the man. Here, the man isn't described as having binoculars. Instead, the action of John's seeing the man is said to be done with the help of binoculars. We capture this meaning by saying that the PP "with the binoculars" attaches to the V-bar containing the verb "see". Since the PP is attached to the V-bar, which is headed by the verb "see", we get an interpretation in which the PP modifies the verb, and the meaning is that the seeing was done with binoculars.
I hope these brief notes will help everybody with the homework - good luck!
December 3rd
I have some notes up about the passive construction we talked about on Monday here. Please take a look at it. I will put up notes about structural ambiguity soon.November 30th
Since the second midterm, we moved on to topics in advanced syntax, and the relationship between syntax and semantics (meaning). I have compiled these notes covering our discussion of the syntax of questions and, more generally, CPs in English.
November 14th
In Friday's class we added rules that allow us to construct full sentences from our phrases. In doing so, we made a rather subtle argument about the structure of sentences. First, we noticed that many sentences in English consist of a subject NP, followed by a modal, followed by a VP, as in the following sentences (the modal is in bold):
- That guy might kick me.
- Michael should pass the ball.
- That pig can eat slop.
We also saw that only one of these modals can occur at a time. Thus, the following sentences are not grammatical in (standard American) English (the star before the sentence indicates ungrammaticality):
- *That guy should might kick me.
- *Michael can should pass the ball.
- *That pig can will eat slop.
In order to capture these facts and generate these sentences, I argued that the modals are heads of
category T, and that sentences are themselves TPs, built according to the following rules:
These rules give structures like the following to the preceding sentences:
What about sentences without modals, like the following?
- That guy kicked me.
- Michael passes the ball.
- *That guy might kicked me.
- *Michael should passes the ball.
The following trees show how our system works for the two sentences above with past and non-past tense:
This completes the rules that you will need for your second midterm. These rules will not generate every sentence of English (not by a long shot), but they provide a starting point. In order to help you practice for the test, I want you to try giving a tree to the following three sentences (i.e. TPs), using the rules we've argued for in class.
- A large frog might eat the salad.
- The giant dog from Nebraska can quickly eat the big tasty burgers.
- The professor of linguistics gave a quite boring lecture about linguistics.
(Note that the words have the following categories: a=Det, large=Adj, frog=N, might=Modal, eat=V, the=Det, salad=N, the=Det, giant=Adj, dog=N, from=P, Nebraska=N, quickly=Adv, eat=V, big=Adj, tasty=Adj, burgers=N, professor=N, of=P, linguistics=N, gave=V, quite=Deg, boring=Adj, lecture=N, about=P, linguistics=N)
November 5th and 7th
Please refer to this list of phrase structure rules, which I compiled to help you complete the homework assignment. (Note: I have uploaded a new version of this document that corrects the error in the prepositional phrase rules.)
Also to help you with the assignment, I am providing you with this document which tells you the category of each of the words appearing in the phrases on the assignment. Make sure that you have the categories for the words right before going on to building the trees!
We were forced to fix our rules for building noun phrases to account for the fact that entire
adjective phrases can appear inside the noun phrase. This was captured by updating our rules
to the following list:
But this begs the question of what the structure of an AP (adjective phrase) is like,
and forces us to give some phrase structure rules that will let us build APs correctly.
We settled on the following two rules:
These rules tell us that an AP is made of an of an optional degree word followed by an A-bar.
The A-bar in turn consists of an adjective and an optional PP (prepositional phrase).
These rules correctly generate phrases like the following, a fact you should confirm for yourself:
Note that the degree word quite and the PP around the ears are both optional;
you can have a perfectly good AP without either one of them. This follows from our rules, since
both of these elements appear in parentheses there.
Both our rules for building noun phrases and our rules for building adjective phrases refer to
an optional prepositional phrase (PP), which we don't yet know how to build. The following set
of phrase structure rules will do the job for us:
These phrase structure rules will correctly generate prepositional phrases like the following
(again, you should confirm this fact for yourself):
Notice that in the above tree I have not abbreviated the structure of the NP. This is important:
Our rules for building prepositional phrases tell us that a P-bar can be followed by an NP.
To build the NP, we have to look to our NP rules.
We can combine the rules we have developed so far to make rather complicated phrases like
the following. You should check to make sure you see which rule was used in building this tree,
going from top to bottom.
The final element in our list of phrase structure rules was the set of rules for building verb
This list turned out to be a bit more complex than the others.
The first of these rules says that a verb phrase consists of an optional adverb followed by a V-bar.
The V-bar is where things get a bit complicated. The second rule tells us that the V-bar can consist
of a V-bar followed by a PP. Notice that this rule is recursive, meaning that it will let us put as
many PPs in a verb phrase as we like.
The final three rules correspond to three different kinds of verbs. The first of these rules says that a V-bar
can consist simply of a verb. This is the rule that is used for intransitive verbs, which do
not have a direct object. The second of these rules says that a V-bar can consist of a V followed by
a single NP. This rule is used for transitive verbs like kill, which take a single
direct object. The last of these three rules says that a V-bar can consist of a V followed by two NPs.
This is the rule used for ditransitive verbs like send, which take object NPs. Examples
of each kind of verb and the corresponding V-bar are given below.
November 3rd
Problem Set 6 was passed out in class today. If you didn't get a copy, you can download it here.We dissected phrases of various types, focusing in particular on noun phrases. We ended up analyzing rather complicated noun phrases, such as the big ugly dogs in Northampton, which we analyzed with the following phrase structure tree:
We noted that the entire phrase is an NP (noun phrase), because it "acts like a noun". In other words, this phrase goes in the same place in a sentence as a noun does, so we call the entire phrase a noun phrase. The phrase is headed by the word dogs, which itself has the category N (noun). This is not an accident: Every phrase is headed by a word of the same category as that phrase. Thus, the head of an NP is always an N, the head of a VP is always a V, and so on. This idea is very important, so make sure you get it.
I introduced the idea of phrase structure rules, which we can think of as little formulae that tell us how to build phrase structure trees like the one above. After looking at the structure of noun phrases in detail, we settled on the following phrase structure rules:
The first rule above says that an NP can be made out of a Det (determiner) and an N'. But the Det is in parentheses. This means that it is optional. So, the NP can also just contain an N', without a Determiner. More concretely, the rule tells you that you can make two kinds of "treelets" (parts of a tree), as follows:
Similarly, we can think of the other two rules as instructions for what to do with N-bars. Each rule gives us possible N-bar treelets, as follows.
Now, we can use the instructions provided by our phrase structure rules to build a phrase structure tree for the noun phrase the big ugly dogs in Northampton. The following table shows how I use one rule at each step to build the correct tree for this NP (notice that I am leaving the PP complement of dogs unanalyzed for now).
Phew. Let's take a breath, and look at a simpler noun phrase. In fact, let's look at a noun phrase so simple that it contains only one noun, for example dogs. Notice that our rules will give us a structure for this as well:
It may seem strange to give such a complex structure to something so simple, but it is very useful to be able to treat a simple noun like dogs the same way as a complex noun phrase like the big ugly dogs in Northampton. Our rules let us do this, by analyzing both of these as noun phrases.
Before moving on to other kinds of phrases, consider how our rules are able to assign structures to the following noun phrases:
You should look at these examples, and make sure you understand how the three phrase structure rules we have are able to correctly generate each of the structures.
For Wednesday:
The rules we made for building noun phrases are just the beginning. We have to do the same thing for verb phrases, adjective phrases, and prepositional phrases. In addition, there is one thing we need to fix in our rules for building noun phrases. Look at the following phrase structure tree, and figure out why our rules are unable to handle this example. How can we fix the rules so that this example can be generated?
(Notice that I have there is a PP (prepositional phrase) and AP (adjective phrase) that I have left unanalyzed in this phrase structure tree.)
For next class, I want you to fix whichever rule(s) necessary to generate the phrase above.
October 29th
We dove into syntax this week, and have seen that words are not just organized as "beads on a string" into sentences. Instead, words group together with other words to make phrases. These phrases can then combine with other words or other phrases to make bigger phrases, and so on. The sentence is built up from these phrases.We know that every word in a sentence belongs to a lexical category. The categories that we focused on today were noun (N), verb (V), preposition (P), and adjective (A). We saw that when we make phrases out of words, the phrase itself also has a category. So, for example, a phrase like the book behaves like a noun. Similarly, the phrase drink a beer behaves like a verb. Because of this, we label these phrases noun phrases (NP) and verb phrases (VP). We also have phrases that act like adjectives (AP) and phrases that act like prepositions (PP).
I also introduced you to the idea that a noun phrase can have a smaller phrase of the same category inside, which we labeled N' (pronounced "N-bar"). Similarly, we have V', A', and P' inside of VP, AP, and PP, respectively. The trees below illustrate these ideas:
(The triangles below a phrase are used as an abbreviation, indicating that we are not showing the internal structure of that phrase.)
Notice that each of these phrases (NP, AP, PP, and VP) has a word of the same category (N, A, P, and V, respectively) inside of it somewhere. This is important. The category of a phrase will always be determined by the category of one of the words in that phrase. Look at these trees and see if you notice any other patterns.
Today was a kind of "crash course" in how phrases are built up from smaller parts. Instead of introducing the way that phrases are built up in a systematic way, we looked at a number of examples, and tried to decide how to group words together into phrases. I did this so that you would get a taste of how hard it can be to actually figure out how the words in a sentence should be grouped into phrases. Starting on Friday, I will present you with a more systematic, unambiguous way of grouping words into phrases. This system will constitute our theory of syntax. Once I have introduced this theory to you, we will be able to go back and see how well it captures the way that sentences are formed in English and in other languages.
Just for fun: You should all be able to read and appreciate this entertaining blog post, now that you all know the basics of articulatory phonetics and phonology. The moral? Don't believe everything you read in the media about language.