Dewi Deviarini Istia Puji Rahayu

Miftah Nuraulia Putri Nurani Rusmana Putri

Nurmalita Yasmin

Grammaticality, Deep vs. Surface Structures, and

Ambiguity

English Morphology & Syntax

What is Syntax ? Syntax is the study of sentence patterns of

language. Syntax is the part of the grammar that

represents a speaker’s knowledge of the structures and formation.

The aim of this study is to show you what syntactic structure is and the rules that determine syntactic structure are like.

Syntactic Structure• Syntactic structure is a set of words or phrases in a

language which share a significant number of common characteristics.

• Syntactic structures commonly include :1. Part of Speech

(Noun, Verb, Adverb, Adjective, Pronoun, Determiner, Preposition, Auxiliary, etc.)2. Phrase Structure Grammars

(Noun Phrase, Adjective Phrase, Verb Phrase, Adverb Phrase, Preposition Phrase.)3. Sentence, as the core of the structure.

Grammaticality

What is Grammaticality ?

Sequences of words that conform to the rules of syntax are grammatical (well formed).

Those that violate the syntactic rules are ungrammatical (ill formed).

e.g grammatical (well formed) :o The cat is on the mat.o The mat is on the cat. e.g ungrammatical (ill formed) :o The cat on is the mat. o The mat on the is cat.

What Grammaticality Is Not Based On

Grammaticality is not based on what we learn in school.

Children acquire most of the syntactic rules of their language even before learning to read.

Does not depend on having heard a sentence before.

Example: Enormous crickets in pink socks danced at the prom.

Does not depend on a sentence being meaningful.

Example: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. There are grammatical sentences that you

might think are ungrammatical. Example: The horse raced past the barn fell.

Grammaticality does not depend on truth. Example: I look like Piola Pascual.

Deep vs. Surface

Structures

Syntactic Structure

Syntactic Structure

Deep Structure

Surface Structure

Deep Structure• Deep structure is the basic structure of

sentences. It is specified by the “phrase structure rules”.

• Phrase structure rules create initial syntactic trees.

PS : S N VP VP V NP NP Det N

• E.g. of deep structure

S NP VP

John V NP

loves Mary

Transformational Rules• Transformational rules is a syntactic rule that

applies to an underlying phrase structure tree of sentence.

• It derives a new structure by moving or inserting elements.

• It is a way to capture the relationship between a declaration and question.

• E.g. ‘passive’ transformation S

NP VP

John V NP

loves Mary

• Delete its subject: S

NP VP

V NP

loves Mary

• Move the object to subject position:

S

NP VP

Mary V PP

loves by John

• Insert the passive auxiliary:S

NP VP

Mary V PP Aux V by NP

was loved John

• Insert the passive morpheme:S

NP VP

Mary V PP

Aux V by NP

was loved John

• The passive structure is related to the active because it was formed from it

• Suppose all structures start off with a more abstract underlying form which is then ‘transformed’ into the structure we actually see:

underlying form

transformations

surface form

Surface structure is actual form of a sentence. It is forms of sentences resulted from modification/ transformation.

Surface structure is a form of language that is based on deep structure.

Surface Structure

Examples1. Same deep structure and different surface structure• You push the chair (active sentence)• The chair is pushed by you ( passive sentence )• Push the chair! (imperative sentence)

Note : three sentences have the same abstract representation ( deep structure ) which is you as a person push the chair.

2. Same surface structure and different deep structure.e.g.John saw the man with a telescope

Note : Who has the telescope? John, or the man?

Phrase Structure Rules

S = NP + VP

VP = V + NP

NP = det + N

Syntactic Analysis

John has a telescope

The man has the telescope

Ambiguity

An ambiguous sentence is a sentence that has two meanings. Some sentences are ambiguous because they contain a word that is ambiguous.

Such cases are called lexical ambiguities (the lexicon is just the set of words in a language).

By contrast, some sentences are ambiguous without containing any ambiguous words. These cases can be explained when it is observed that the sentences in question can be given two distinct syntactic trees, leading to what is called a structural ambiguity.

Structural vs. Lexical Ambiguities

1. John is sitting near the bank.a. Meaning 1: bank = financial institutionb. Meaning 2: bank = slope at the side of a river

(1) has two meanings, which appear to be reducible to the two meanings of the word 'bank'.

(2) Mary will hit the student with the booka. Meaning 1: Mary will hit the student. She'll do so

with the book. (=The hitting is done with the book)b. Meaning 2: Mary will hit the student who is

holding the book. (=The student is holding the book)

☞ None of the words in (2) is ambiguous. So why is the sentence ambiguous? Because it can be given two distinct syntactic trees.

Thank

You