LING 222
Introduction to Syntax
Summer 2009
Hedberg
Notes: Chapter 1: What is Syntax?
Notes: Chapter 2a: Lexical
Categories
Notes: Chapter 2b:
Grammatical Categories (revised notes)
Notes: Chapter 3: Clause
Structure (revised notes)
RESEARCH NOTE: The American Heritage Dictionary says
that 'finite' in grammar means, "Limited by person, number, tense and
mood. Used of a verb that can serve as a predicate or the initial element of
one." We would have to add
'aspect' to that list. The word
derives from Latin, fi:nis 'end'. I think that 'end' or 'finish'
does have something to do with time and therefore tense. In modern linguistics, the finite
grammatical morpheme is seen as the head of the sentence, so that in English, a
sentence is called a TP (Tense Phrase).
You'll get to this in LING 322. An interesting current issue is whether
the sentence in a language like Mandarin Chinese that doesn't have any tense
morphemes but does have plenty of aspect and mood morphemes should be called an
Aspect Phrase or a Mood Phrase.
RESEARCH NOTE: The Computational Linguistics Olympiad: Like I mentioned in class today, this is a contest held internationally for high school students every year. Here is the description of SFU Lingusitics Department's effort this past year: http://www.sfu.ca/linguistics/undergraduate/naclo.html. Here are the sample problems that the web site for the North American Olympiad has put up: http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/practice.html. These are quite fun to do and don't require any background in linguistics. I hope you enjoy some of these problems, and you might like to get your younger brothers and sisters involved (or even your parents!). Linguists all love solving puzzles because that is what much of linguistics is all about. Anyone could spend their whole life studying the structure of any one language, and there are 5,000-7,000 still alive in the world today, plus a lot of dialects. If you investigate the web site, you'll find out that Google is a sponsor!
Review: Verbs in
English Simple Sentences
Research
Notes: A Formal Syntax Account of
the English Auxiliary System
RESEARCH NOTE: A Short History of Linguistics. We talked about the American Structuralists in our discussion of whether Nuu-chah-nulth distinguishes nouns from verbs. We are now talking about Noam Chomsky with regard to his 1957 affix hopping formal grammar treatment of the auxiliary system in English. This document presents a brief history of some of the most important figures in the history of linguistics, and I hope you will explore the links.
I was asked to post answers to the midterm review. Here is a version: Answers to MTI Review.
Notes: Chapter 4: Heads and
Their Dependents
Notes: Chapter 5: How do we Identify Constituents?
Notes: Chapter 6: Relationships within the Clause
Notes: Chapter 7: Processes that Change Grammatical Relations
RESEARCH NOTE: Now that you have your second midterm back and have some inkling about how to test for the difference between complements and adjuncts of the verb, you might be interested in reading the short article that (retired) Professor DeArmond and I wrote which is coming out any day now in the on-line journal Snippets. Our article, which will be only 500 words long is about how there are really three types of dependents of the verb: primary complements, secondary complements and adjuncts. Secondary complements share some syntactic characteristics with ordinary (primary) complements and share some characteristics with adjuncts. If you look at more than one approach to constituency tests distinguishing complements from adjuncts, it turns out that the tests conflict in regular ways. Here is the slightly longer version of the article that lays the data out more clearly and has some extra interesting data on locatives. You now have the background to understand most of this article. (You can look up "valency" on Wikipedia). It is interesting that Dr. DeArmond and I came up with the discovery reported in this article because we were using different tests in our LING 222 classes to test for complement versus adjunct of the verb.
Recycled review exercise from Midterm 2: This is a review exercise I handed out before the second midterm. We covered Luise–o (on head marking), but didn't get to the German (on dependent marking). I hope to have time to revisit the German problem now in the context of Case-Marking (chapter 6). Look at this problem, which is expressed in IPA transcription instead of German orthography, and try to get a handle on how case marking works in languages. Note in particular that not all transitive verbs take accusative case—some take dative; and some prepositions require their objects to be in accusatives and some in dative. Finally, some prepositions allow either, and maybe (?) the difference has to do with complements versus adjuncts.
Notes: Chapter 8a: Wh-constructions: Part 1
Notes: Chapter 8b:
Wh-construtions: Part 2