语言学导论第四章.ppt

Chapter 4 Syntax syntax syn together + tax to arrange syntax句法学 --- a branch of linguistics that studies how words are combined to form sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences Preliminaries Interpret the following sentences/phases: 1.The son of Mary’s daughter is the daughter of Mary’s son. 2.We eat what we can. What we can’t, we can. 3.the love of God Decide how the following pairs of sentences are related with and different from each other: 1.John is easy to please. 2.John is eager to please. 3.客来了。 4.来客了。 Exercise: How many possible English sentences can we make with the words ‘old, man, wolf, a n , the, killed’? The old man killed a wolf. A wolf killed the old man. The man killed an old wolf. The old wolf killed the man. A man killed the old wolf. An old wolf killed the man. Word order: SVO, SOV, OVS, OSV, VOS, VSO, syntagmatic relation组合关系 horizontal/ chain relation链状关系 e.g. The man smiles. paradigmatic relation聚合关系 vertical/ choice relation 选择关系 e.g. The ____ smiles. man boy girl 1 categories: a group of linguistic items which fulfill the same or similar functions in a particular language such as a sentence, a noun phrase or a verb. Kate likes classical music. sentence classical music noun phrase like verb 1.word-level categories three criteria for determining a word’s category meaning inflection distribution 2.phrase categories: The category of phrases is determined by the word category around which the phrase is built. [NP a poor boy] [VP run quickly, like music] [AP extremely cold] [PP mainly about] A phrase usually contains the following elements: specifier head complement Phrase structure rule: NP Det N PP : the man in the car VP Qual V NP : often sing songs AP Deg A PP : very close to it PP Deg P NP : so in love XP rule: XP specifier X complement the man in the car seldom sing songs very good Xˉ theory: XP specifier Xˉ X head complement seldo