Group 2- Syntax

Josel Ira Dancel

AB English 2-3
Sentence Relatedness
Another aspect of our syntactic competence is knowledge that certain sentences
are related to on another, such as the following pair:
The boy is sleeping.

Is the boy sleeping?

These sentence describe the same situation. The sentence in the first column
asserts that a particular situation exists, a boy-sleeping situation. Such sentence are
called declarative sentence. The sentence in the second column asks whether such
a boy-sleeping situation holds. Sentences of the second sort are called yes-no
questions. The only actual difference in meaning between these sentences is that
one asserts a situation and the other asks for confirmation of a situation. These
elements of meaning is indicated by the different word orders, which illustrates that
two sentences may have a structural difference that corresponds in a systematic
way to a meaning difference. The grammar of the language must account for this
fact.

Transformational Rules
Phrase structure rules account for much of our syntactic knowledge, but they do not
account for the fact that certain sentence types in the language relate
systematically to other sentence types. The standard way of describing these
relationships is to say that the related sentences come back to a discussion of
auxiliaries. Auxiliaries are central to the formation of yes-no questions as well as
certain other types of sentences in English. In yes-no questions, the auxiliary
appears in the position preceding the subject. Here are few more examples:
The boy is seeping. Is the boy sleeping?
The boy has slept. Has the boy slept?
The boy can sleep. Can the boy sleep?
The boy will sleep. Will the boy sleep?
A way to capture the relationship between a declarative and a yes-no
question is to allow the PS rules to generate a structure corresponding the
declarative sentence. Another formal device, called a transformational rule, then
moves the auxiliary before the subject. The rule move aux is formulated.
The basic structure of sentences, also called deep structure or d-structure,
conforms to the phrase structure rules. Variants on the basic sentence structures
are derived via transformations. By generation questions in two steps, we are
claiming that for speakers a relationship exists between a question and its

corresponding statement. Intuitively, we know that such sentences are related. The
transformational rules is a formal way of representing this knowledge.
The derived structure--the ones that follow the application of transformational
rulesare called surface structure or s-structures. The phonological rules of the
languagethe ones that determine pronunciationapply to s-structures. If no
transformation apply, then d-structure and s-structure are the same. If
transformations apply, then s-structure is the result after all transformation have
had their effect. Many sentence types are accounted for by transformations, which
can alter phrase structure trees by moving, adding, or deleting elements.
Other sentence pairs that are transformationally related are:
Active-passive
The cat chased the mouse. The mouse was chased by the cat.
There sentence
There was a man on the roof. A man was on the roof.
PP Reposing
The astronomer saw the quasar with the telescope. With the
telescope, the astronomer saw the quasar.

The Structural Dependency of Rules

Transformations act on phrase structures without paying attention to the particular
words that the structures contain. These rules are said to be structure dependent.
The transformational rule of PP Reposing moves any PP as long as it is immediately
under the VP, as in in the house, the puppy found the ball; or with the telescope,
the boy saw the man; and so on.
Evidence that transformations are structure dependent is proven by the fact
that the sentence With the telescope, the boy saw the man is not ambiguous. It has
the meaning the boy used a telescope to see the man,
Another rule of English allows the complementizer that to be omitted when it
precedes an embedded sentence but not a sentence that appears in subject
position, as illustrated by these pairs:
I know that you know
That you know bothers me.

I know you know

*You know bothers me.

This is a further demonstration that rules are structure dependent.

Agreement rules are also structure dependent.
This guy seems kind of cute.
These guys seem kind of cute.
Now consider this sentence:

The guy we met at the party next door seems kind of cute.
The guys we met at the party next door seem kind of cute.
Agreement takes place between the head nounthe first occurrence of refusal
and the structural highest verb in the sentence, which is the final occurrence of
do, despite the 7 intervening words.
A final illustration of structural dependency is found in the declarativequestion pairs. Consider the following sentences:
The boy who is sleeping was dreaming.
Was the boy who is sleeping dreaming?
*Is the boy who sleeping was dreaming?
If the rule picked out the first Aux, we would have the ungrammatical sentence Is
the boy who __ sleeping was dreaming. To derive the correct s-structures,
transformation such as Move Aux must refer to the phrase structure and not the
linear order of elements.
Structure dependency is a principle of Universal Grammar, and is found in all
languages.

Syntactic Dependencies
WH Questions:
Move WH Rule
Wh phrase acts as the object
What will Charlie buy?
Wh phrase acts as prepositional phrase object
Where has your mother gone?
Wh phrase acts at the embedded subject
Which team do you think will win?

Universal GrammarPrinciples and Parameters

Universal grammar provides the basic design for all human languages, and
individual languages are simply variations on its basic design
All languages have phrase structure rules that specify the allowable dstructure. However, languages may have different word orders within the phrase
and sentences.
A parameter must be set according to the requirements of the language
being acquired. For example:
The null subject parameter
Japanese : head final--- taro ga nani o mitsuketa no?

English : head initial what did taro found?