CHAPTER 8: Syntax

Syntactic rules

To analysis for all the grammatically correct phrases and sentences and only those grammatically correct phrases and sentences in whatever language are analyzing.

A Generative Grammar

rule:“a prepositional phrase in English consists of a preposition followed by a noun phrase,”

Deep and Surface Structure

- Surface structure:the different syntactic forms they have as individual English sentences.

- Deep structure:is an abstract level of structural organization in which all the elements determining structural interpretation are represented.

Structural Ambiguity

When a sentence has different meaning represented differently in deep structure

Ex: “Annie had an umbrella and she bumped into a man with it.”

      “Annie bumped into a man and the man happened to be carrying an umbrella.”

Syntactic Analysis

In syntactic analysis we use some conventional abbreviations for the parts of speech identified

Ex: N (= noun), Art (= article), Adj (= adjective) and V(= verb).

Phrase Structure Rules

Started to create is a set of syntactic rules called phrase structure rules.

-first rule    :a sentence (S) rewrites as a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP).

-second rule:a noun phrase rewrites as either an article plus an optional adjective plus a noun, or a pronoun, or a proper noun.

-third rule   :a verb phrase rewrites as a verb plus a noun phrase.

S → NP VP

NP → {Art (Adj) N, Pro, PN}

VP → V NP

Lexical Rules

Turn structures into recognizable English that can be used when rewrite constituents such as PN.

Tree Diagrams

A diagram with branches shows the hierarchy of the structure

NP:

VP:

Tree Diagrams of English Sentences

Just Scratching the Surface

We try to develop better ways of analyzing the syntactic structure of complex sentences, we inevitably need a larger analytic framework. (We have barely scratched the surface structures.)