The Study of Language - Syntax - Theoretical Linguistics

SyntaxSyntax

Productive &

GenerativeInfinitene

ss

Recursiveness

Noam Chomsk

y

Etymology: Noam Chomsky, the American linguist,

introduced the concept of generative grammar in the 1950s.

One of the most influential syntactic

theories in the 20th C.

He adopted the term from mathematics.

This is the horse and the hound and the horn That belonged to the farmer sowing his corn That kept the cock that crowed in the morn That waked the priest all shaven and shorn That married the man all tattered and tornThat kissed the maiden all forlornThat milked the cow with the crumpled hornThat tossed the dog that worried the cat That killed the rat that ate the malt That lay in the house that Jack built.

Surface structure

Deep structure

Form

Meaning

Lexical (polysemy)

one word, several meanings: bank, present, book..

Syntactic / structural

Sentence can be interpreted in many waysAn American history teacher.

Looking at sentence structures as a mathematic equation/ function (dynamic) using the symbols of syntactic description instead of tree diagrams.

S =sentence PN =proper noun Art =article NP =noun phrase * =ungrammatical sequence = consists

of ( ) =optional constituent { } =only one of these constituents

N = nounV =verbAdv =adverbVP =verb phrasePro =pronounAdj =adjectivePrep =prepositionPP =prepositional phrase

It is a rule that takes one structure as an input and then outputs (produces) another structure.

Derived from the pharse structural rules.

Structural Analysis (SA)

The structure of the input

Structural Change (SC)

The structure of the output

The man painted the wall. (input)

(deep)

The wall is painted by the man. (output)

(surface)

transformation

I am as strong as him.

I am not stronger than him.

Deep structure Surface structure

same

different

The bag is too heavy for me to carry.

The bag is so heavy that I cannot

carry it.

Deep structure Surface structure

same

different

“I like photography”, she said. (deep)

She said she liked photography. (surface)

I turned the TV on.

I turned on the TV.

Imperative form (removing the subject) Do your homework.

Exclamations Jeez! My God! Hurray! Boo! Yikes!

S

NP VP

V NP Adv

S

NP VP

V NP Adv

Adv

Provide one more superficially distinct sentence which would each have the same underlying structure .

No one could deny that she is pretty.Sara is not the tallest girl in the class.

He drove too fast for the police to catch.

Mai Mustafa Fouad Ra’fat Ali

3rd year, General Roll No: 40

English Dept. English Dept. Faculty of EducationFaculty of Education

Alex UniAlex Uni