Ling2-101b Syntax session – April 30th, 2018

Diagnostics for structure

Tests for constituency (2): Movement
Canonical positions for English: S-V-O (the neutral, unmarked
order)
(1) You should give your book to Paul.
Examples of non-canonical positions (arising from displacement of
the object):
(2a) Your book, you should give [ _ ] to Paul.

(2b) *Your, you should give [ _ ] book to Paul.

(3a) They had to talk about it and talk about it they did.
(3b) *They had to talk about it and talk they did about it.

(4) The woman in red will read the letters in the garden.
Sentence

NP aux VP
the woman in red will VP PP

read NP in the garden

the letters
Let us see now if the test of moving constituents applies in (4).
(5a) Read the letters in the garden, the woman in red will.
(5b) Read the letters, the woman in red will in the garden.
(5c) *Will read the letters, the woman in red in the garden.
(5d)*Will read the letters in the garden, the woman in red.
Either VP (V+NP+PP) or VP (V+NP) can be fronted, which shows a)
that both are constituents of the sentence, while (will+VP) is not,
and b) the structural representation holds.

Tests for constituency (3): Question formation

(6) The woman in red will read the letters in the garden.
(i) Can you formulate questions for each of the underlined phrases?
(ii) What is the answer for: 1) What will the woman in red do? 2)
What will the woman in red do in the garden?
Constituents are those strings of words that can answer wh-
questions.
Tests for constituency (4): Deletion/Ellipsis
Constituents that are recoverable from the preceding context have
been omitted in the following examples.
(7) The woman in red will read letters in the garden and so will I
[___].
(8) Everyone says you can’t win the race but I think you can [__].
Tests for constituency (5): Focalising - Cleft and pseudo-cleft
sentences
The cleft-sentence is a syntactic way to promote a constituent of a
sentence to the foreground:
(9a) It is letters that the woman in red will read [__].
(9b) It is in the garden that the woman in red will read letters [__].
(9c) It is the woman in red who [__] will read letters in the garden.
(9d) *It is in red that the woman [__] will read letters in the garden.
However, this test cannot disprove the will+V constituency as it
does not affect the VP. Can we resort to pseudo-clefting?
(10a) What the woman in red will read in the garden is books.
(10b) What the woman in red will do in the garden is read books.
(1ob) What the woman will do is read books in the garden.
Pseudo-clefting proves that the verb can form a constituent with its
object and the place adverbial but not with the auxiliary.
Tests for constituency (6): Co-ordination
Linking constituents by means of a co-ordinating conjunction such
as and, or, but.
(11a) [NPThe woman in red and the man in white] will read [NP
letters and books] [PPin the garden and by the pool].
(11b) The woman in red will [VPread letters and have dinner] in the
garden.
(11c) [SThe woman in red will read letters] and [Sthe man in white
will do some gardening].
This test also confirms the hypothesis about VP layering.
Syntactic structures
Phrase/Constituent structure tree: a tree diagram with syntactic
category information, which reflects the hierarchical structure of
categories. The larger syntactic categories, such as S/CP, VP and NP
consist of all the syntactic categories and words below that point
(node). Every higher node dominates all the categories beneath it.
A node immediately dominates the category one level below it (VP
immediately dominates V and NP).
Categories immediately dominated by the same node are called
sisters. For example, in an NP, NP is the dominating category while
Det and N are sisters.
NP VP S
Det N V NP NP VP
Note that a VP does not need to contain an NP as is the case with
intransitive verbs.
Write phrase structure rules for the VP in the following:
The woman left.
The man cut his throat.
John hopes that he’ll pass the exam.
… and for the NP in the following:
the man
the student with the beard
King of England
the man that came