Syntax 2 - Student

Syntax
Structural ambiguity
Syntactic categories
Phrase structure trees
Phrase structure rules
/
Syntax: Infinite Use
of Finite Means
To grammar even kings bow.
J. B. MOLEIRE, Les Femmes Sovontes, II, 1672
It is a remarkable fact that any speaker of a human language can learn and store
in his or her mental lexicon thousands of words, each of which is an arbitrary
pairing of sound and meaning. Even more astonishing is our ability to combine
these words to produce and understand an infinite number of novel sentences,
as we showed with the following sentence:
This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt
that lay in the house that Jack built ...
To further illustrate, consider the following:
Snorlax is asleep.
The monster is asleep.
The friend of the monster is asleep.
The rightmost person in the first row is asleep.
The person immediately to the left of the rightmost person in the front row
is asleep.
The person behind the person immediately to the left of the rightmost
person in the first row is asleep.
Snorlax is asleep.
Pikachu noticed that Snorlax is asleep.
75
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76 CHAPTER 3 Syntax: Infinite Use of Finite Means
Nobody cares that Pikachu noticed that Snorlax is asleep.

Squirtle knows that nobody cares that Pikachu noticed that Snorlax is
asleep.
We can do this because we know (a finite number oO rules, which can be
applied repeatedly. All spoken language is governed by rules-the set of rules
is called a grammar. Every speaker has a mental grammar of the rules of his
or her language that he or she follows in producing, understanding, and mak-
ing judgments of well-formedness (grammaticality) about his or her language.
If we modify the order of words or omit some of the words, the sentences
sound "weird" or "odd." (Recall that the asterisk or star preceding a sentence
is the linguistic conventio or indicating that the sentence is ungrammatical or
ill-formed according to the rules of the grammar.)
*Asleep is Homer.
*Professor the is asleep.
*Rightmost person the in the first row is asleep.
*Homer asleep.
*Right most person front row is asleep.
The oddness of these sentences indicates that some rule of the language has
been violated. The sentences are ungrammatical.
To further illustrate this idea let's look at a simple made-up rule of English
that we'll call the "everybody knows" rule:
Rule: If S is a sentence of English then Everybody k.nows that S is a sentence
of English.
This rule can be iterated (repeated) any number of times to produce an arbitrary
number of new sentences.
Snorlax is asleep.
Everybody knows that Snorlax is asleep.
Everybody knows that everybody knows that Snorlax is asleep.
Everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows that
Snorlax is asleep.
This simple rule in the mind of a speaker enables him or her to produce and
understand a potentially infinite number of sentences. The "everybody knows"
rule describes (generates) an infinite set of sentences. Any sentence that con-
forms to the rule is judged well-formed and any sentence that does not conform
to the rule is judged ungrammatical, such as the following:
*Knows everybody that Snorlax is asleep.
Given any sentence a speaker could create another sentence by adding a
(nother) prepositional phrase, relative clause, or by embedding one sentence
inside another as in the "everybody knows" examples. Or simply by adding
another adjective:
The kindhearted boy had many girlfriends.
The kindhearted, intelligent boy had many girlfriends.
The kindhearted, intelligent, handsome boy had many girlfriends.
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What tho Syntax Rules Do 77
All languages have mechanisms of this sort that make the number of sen-
tences limitless. Like words, discussed in the previous chapter, sentences are
composed of finitely many discrete units that are combined by rules. Thus lan-
guages make infinite use of finite means. In this respect knowledge of language
is like knowledge of integers. There is no limit to the number of even integers
you could enumerate: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, .... Clearly, you didn't memorize all of them.
Rather, you know a rule that allows you to produce new integers from old ones.
Rule: If E is an integer, E+2 is an integer.
This ability to make infinite use of finite means shows the creative nature of
human linguistic knowledge-not creative in the sense that we are all accom-
plished poets, but creative in that none of us is limited to a fixed repertoire of
expressions. Rather, we can exploit the resources of our language and gram-
mar to produce, understand and make judgments about a limitless number of
sentences embodying a limitless range of ideas and emotions.
The part of grammar that represents a speaker's knowledge of sentences and
their structures is called syntax. The aim of this chapter is to first show you
what syntactic structures look like and then to familiarize you with some of
the rules that determine them. Most of the examples will be from the syntax of
English, but the principles that account for syntactic structures are universal.
What the Syntax Rules Do

''Then you should say what you mean; the March Hare went on.
"I do," Alice hastily replied, "at least-I mean what I say-that's the same thing, you know.•
"Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that 'I see what I
eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!"
"You might just as well say; added the March Hare, "that 'I like what I get' is the same
thing as 'I get what I like'!"
"You might just as well say; added the Dormouse ... "that 'I breathe when I sleep' is the
same thing as 'I sleep when I breathe'!"
"It is the same thing with you," said the Hatter.
LEWIS CARROLL, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
The rules of syntax combine words into phrases and phrases into sentences.
Among other things, the rules define the correct word order for a language.
For example, English is a Subject-Ver~bject (SVO) language. The English
sentence in (1) is grammatical because the words occur in the right order; the
sentence in (2) is ungrammatical because the word order is incorrect for English.
1. The President nominated a new Supreme Court justice.
2. *President the Supreme new justice Court a nominated.
The rules of the syntax also specify the grammatical relations of a sentence,
such as subj ect and direct object. In other words, they provide information
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about who is doing what to whom. This information is crucial to understanding

the meaning of a sentence. For example, the grammatical relations in (3) and (4)
are reversed, so the otherwise identical sentences have very different meanings.
3. Your dog chased my cat.
4. My cat chased your dog.
The word order of a sentence is crucial to its meaning. The sentences in (5)
and (6) contain the same words, but the meanings are quite different, as the
Mad Hatter points out.
5. I mean what I say.
6. I say what I mean.
Although the structure of a sentence contributes to its meaning, as illustrated
in the examples 3-6, grammaticaliry and meaningfulness are not the same thing.
Consider the following sentences:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
A verb crumpled the milk.
Although these sentences do not make much sense, they are syntactically
well-formed. They sound funny, but their funniness is different from what we
find in the following strings of words, which are not syntactically well-formed:
*Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.
*Milk the crumpled verb a.
There are also sentences that we understand even though they are not well-
formed according to the rules of the syntax. We can easily interpret Yoda's
words to Luke Skywalker although the word order is incorrect for English.
"... when gone I am ... the last of the Jedi will you be"
To be a sentence, words must conform to specific patterns determined by the
specific syntactic rules of the language.
Some sentences are grammatical even though they are difficult to interpret
because they include nonsense words, that is, words with no agreed-on mean-
ing. This is illustrated by the following lines from the poem "Jabberwocky" by
Lewis Carroll:
'Twas bri!Ug, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
These lines are grammatical in the liQguistic sense that they obey the word
order and other constraints of English. Such nonsense poetry is amusing pre-
cisely because the sentences comply with syntactic rules and sound like English.
Ungrammatical strings of nonsense words are not entertaining:
*Toves slithy the and brillig 'twas
wabe the in gimble and gyre did
Grammaticality does not depend on the truth of sentences. If it did, lying
would be easy to detect. Nor does it depend on whether real objects are being
discussed or whether something is possible in the real world. Untrue sentences
Sentence Structure 79
can be grammatical, sentences discussing unicorns can be grammatical, and

sentences referring to pregnant fathers can be grammatical.
The ability to produce, understand, and judge the grammaticality of a sen-
tence depends on whether it conforms to the unconscious rules of our mental
grammar. This grammar is different from the prescriptive grammar rules that
we are taught in school. We develop the mental rules of grammar long before
we attend school, as we shall see in Chapter 9.
Sentence Structure
I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming
sentences.
GERTRUOE STEIN, "Poetry and Grammar," 1935
The job of the linguist is to describe the structure of the sentences in a language
in a way that matches the linguistic knowledge of its speakers. We can compare
two competing hypotheses. The first says that a sentence consists simply of a
string of words organized in a flat structure as in (1).
1.
The child found a puppy
We have already seen that word order is an important aspect of syntactic knowl-
edge and this simple diagram correctly captures the SVO word order of English:
The subject (S) the child, comes before the verb (V) found, which comes before
the object (0) a puppy.
Let us contrast this kind of description with another, one that says that sen-
tences have a tree-like structure in which words are grouped together into
natural units nested within other natural units in a hierarchical arrangement,
as in (2).
2. - - - - - root
the child found
a puppy
The "tree" in (2) is upside down with its "root" encompassing the entire sen-
tence, "The child found a puppy," and its "leaves" being the individual words
the, child, found, a, and puppy. The tree diagram in (2), embodies the hypothesis
that these words are organized into subunits (or subtrees) and that speakers
mentally represent sentences not as flat strings of words, but as complex struc-
tures with an internal organization. The subunits (or subtrees) of the sentence
are called constituents.
In the tree diagram in (2), the words a and puppy form a constituent, as
indicated below:
We can also represent constituents by using square brackets around the words
[a puppy]. Constituents can be nested inside one another. So, [a puppy] occurs
inside the constituent [found a puppy], as illustrated in the following tree.
Using bracket notation, we would write this as [found [a puppy]].

There is one more constituent in the tree in (2). Do you know what it is? If
you guessed [the child] you would be correct.
A constituent consists not just of the words, but of the subtree that branches
into the words, and it ends at the node where the branches meet. A constituent
corresponds to a node on the tree. And to be a constituent all the words under
the node must be included. The words that form a constituent are contiguous
(next to one another), but not all contiguous words form a constituent. In the
following tree, the words found a are contiguous but they do not form a constitu-
ent. They are not contained exclusively under the same node.
the child
not a constituent
We began our discussion with a simple sentence "The child found a puppy,"
but this simple sentence belies a complex internal structure. The tree diagram
in (2) groups the words of the sentence into the constituents the child and found
a puppy, corresponding to the subject and predicate of the sentence. A further

division of the phrase found a puppy divides naturally into two branches, one for
the verb found and the other for the direct object a puppy. This division conforms
to our intuitions about the natural units of the sentence in a way that a different
division, say,found a and puppy, would not.
Constituents and Constituency Tests

In addition to our intuitions of naturalness, various linguistic tests reveal the
constituents of a sentence. The first test is the "stand alone" test. If a group of
words can stand alone, for example, as an answer to a question, they form a
constituent. So, in response to the question "What did the child find?" a speaker
might answer a puppy, but not found a. A puppy can stand alone while found a
cannot. We have a clear intuition that one of these is a meaningful unit and the
other is just a list of words.
The second test is "replacement by a pronoun." Pronouns can substitute for
natural groups. In answer to the question, "Where did the child find a puppy?"
a speaker can say, "I found him in the park." Words such as do (which is not a
pronoun per se) can also take the place of the entire predicate found a puppy,
as in "The boy found a puppy and the girl did too." If a group of words can be
replaced by a pronoun or a word like do, it forms a constituent.
A third test of constituency is the "move-as-a-unit" test. If a group of words
can be moved together and remain grammatical, they form a constituent. For
example, if we compare the following sentences to the sentence "The child
found a puppy," we see that certain elements have moved:
It was a puppy that the child found.
A puppy was found by the child.
In the first example, the constituent a puppy has moved from its position fol-
lowing found; in the second example, the positions of a puppy and the child have
been changed. In all such rearrangements, the constituents a puppy and the child
remain intact. Found a does not remain intact, because it is not a constituent.
Nor does child found for the same reason. Even though both these pairs of words
occur next to each other in the original sentence The child found a puppy; they
do not pass constituency tests, illustrating again that sentences are not simply
string of words.
Some sentences have prepositional phrases in the predicate, for example:
The puppy played in the garden.
We can use our tests to show that in the garden is also a constituent, as follows:
Where did the puppy play? In the garden (stand alone)
The puppy played there. (replacement by a pronoun-like word)
In the garden the puppy played. (move as a unit)
It was in the garden that the puppy played. (move as a unit)
The prepositional phrase in this example passes all three constituent tests. But
in general a constituent need not pass all three tests. It is sufficient to pass one.
As before, our knowledge of the constituent structure of a sentence may be

graphically represented by a tree diagram. The tree diagram for the sentence
"The puppy played in the garden" is as follows:
the puppy played
the garden
The move-as-a-unit test can also tell us when what appears to be a con-
stituent, such as a prepositional phrase, is in fact something different. The two
phrases ran up the hill and ran up the bill are superficially quite similar, but we
see in (3) and (4) that they behave quite differently. Consider fJISt the expression
ran up the hill, as in (3a). The rules of the syntax allow the word orders in (3b, c)
as variants, revealing that up the hill is a constituent. By contrast, the expression
n.m up the bill in (4a) does not have these same options, as shown in ( 4b, c),
which means that up the bill is neither a prepositional phrase nor a constituent.
3. (a) Jack ran up the hill.
(b) Up the hill Jack ran.
(c) Up the hill ran Jack.
4. (a) Jack ran up the bill.
(b) *Up the bill Jack ran.
(c) *Up the bill ran Jack.
Structural Ambiguity
DID ~OU r
THE WAI rR€ ~<-"C IT MU<'f NOT HAVE
NO<;€ R tNG "THAT LoUD.
GAP
Hilary B. Price/King Features Syndicate
Syntactic trees reflect our judgments about the internal organization of sen-
tences; flat structures do not. They can also account for other linguistic judg-
ments, such as when a sentence is ambiguous. A sentence is ambiguous if it
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has two or more meanings. Sometimes an ambiguity arises because a word has
more than one meaning, as in the following sentence:
This will make you smart.
The two interpretations of this sentence are due to the two meanings of sman-
"clever" and "burning sensation." This is referred to as a lexical ambiguity
and will be discussed further in Chapter 4. Other times multiple meanings arise
because a sentence has more than one tree structure associated with it, result-
ing in a structural ambiguity. Each tree will correspond to one of the possible
meanings of the sentence. For example, the sentence:
Sue saw the man with the telescope.
has two different meanings:
Meaning 1: The seeing is done with the telescope. 1.She used a telescope to see the man
Meaning 2: The man is holding the telescope. 2 She saw the man who had a telescope
Notice that none of the individual words is ambiguous. The ambiguity is struc-
tural: The sentence has two different trees. Meaning 1 corresponds to the tree
in (1), what we might call the instrumental meaning in which Sue is using the
telescope to see the man. In this tree, the the man and the prepositional phrase
with the telescope do not form a constituent.
1.
- - - not a constituent
Meaning 2 corresponds to the tree in (2). In this case, the phrases the man and
with a telescope do form a constituent, reflecting the meaning in which the man
is holding the telescope.
man - - - a constituent
with the telescop<;
The availability of these two structures leads to a prediction: If we do a con-

stituency test that forces the man with the telescope to be a constituent (e.g. move
it as a unit), then meaning 1 (instrumental) should disappear and we should
only have the meaning corresponding to the tree in (2). The following sentences
confirm this prediction:
It was the man with the telescope that Mary saw.
The man with the telescope was seen by Mary.
What Mary saw was the man with the telescope.
None of these sentences has the interpretation in which the seeing is done
with the telescope. In each, the only possible meaning is that the man is holding
the telescope. This shows us that the structure of a sentence contributes impor·
tantly to its meaning, a point we will come back to in Chapter 4.
Structural ambiguities of the sort just discussed provide striking evidence in
support of our hypothesis that sentences have a tree-like (hierarchical) structure,
and against the idea that they are simply strings of words. The flat structure
hypothesis could not explain how there can be two different meanings associ·
ated with the same string of words.
The cartoon at the head of this section illustrates both lexical and structural
ambiguity. The lexical ambiguity is on the two meanings of ring; the structural
ambiguity is whether nose ring is understood as a compound noun or a noun
followed by a verb.
Syntactic Categories
There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome.
MARK TWAIN, "The Awful German Language; in A TrompAbrood,l880
In the previous section, we illustrated how tree structures reflect our knowledge
of the hierarchical organization of sentences. Speakers also have implicit know!·
edge of the categories of each of the sub groupings in a sentence.
Each grouping in the tree diagrams of "The child found a puppy" is a member
of a large family of similar expressions. For example, the child belongs to a family
that includes the police officer, your neighbor, this yellow cat; he, John, and countless
others. We can substitute any member of this family for the child without affecting
the grarnmaticality of the sentence, although the meaning of course would change.
A police officer found a puppy.
Your neighbor found a puppy.
This yellow cat found a puppy.
A family of expressions that can substitute for one another without loss of
grarnmaticality is called a syntactic category, or more informally, a "part of
speech." The child, a police officer, John, and so on belong to the syntactic category
n oun phrase (NP). NPs may function as subjects or as objects in sentences. An NP
often contains a determiner (such as a or the) and a noun, but it may also consist of
a proper name (Ann), a pronoun (I), a noun without a determiner (fish), or even a
clause or a sentence (that dogs bark). Even though a proper noun such as John and
pronouns such as he and him are single words, they are technically NPs, because
they pattern like NPs in being able to fill a subject, object or other NP slot
John found the puppy.
He found the puppy.
Boys love puppies.
The puppy loved him.
The puppy loved John.
Sentence Structure 8.5
NPs can be quite complex, as illustrated by the sentence:

The girl that Professor Snape loved married the man of her dreams.
The NP subject of this sentence is the girl that Professor Snape loved, and the NP
object is the man of her dreams. We know this because each of these lengthy
expressions fills a slot otherwise occupied by a simpler NP as in Mary loved
John.
Syntactic categories are part of a speaker's knowledge of syntax. That
is, speakers of English know that only items (a), (b), (e), (f), and (g) in the
following list are NPs even if they have never heard the term noun phrase
before.
1. (a) a bird
(b) the red banjo
(c) have a nice day
(d) with a balloon
(e) the woman who was laughing
(f) it
(g) John
(h) went
You can test this claim by inserting each expression into three contexts: What/
who I heard was Who found ? and was seen
by everyone. For example, *Who found with a balloon? is ungrammatical, as is
*Went was seen by everyone, as opposed to Who found it? or John was seen by
everyone. Only NPs fit into these contexts because only NPs can function as
subjects and objects.
There are other syntactic categories. The expression found a puppy is a verb
phrase (VP). A verb phrase always contains a verb (V), and it may contain
other categories, such as a noun phrase or prepositional phrase (PP), which
is a preposition followed by an NP, such as in the park, on the roof, and with a
balloon. In (2) the VPs are those phrases that can complete the sentence "The
child "
2. (a) saw a clown
(b) a bird
(c) slept
(d) smart
(e) ate the cake
(f) found the cake in the cupboard
(g) realized that the Earth was round
Inserting (a), (c), (e), (f), and (g) will produce grammatical sentences, whereas
the insertion of (b) or (d) would result in an ungrammatical sentence. Thus, (a),
(c), (e), CO, and (g) are verb phrases.
Lexical and Functional Categories
·Very trnditirmal. He's tlu noun. She's tlu a.d}« liw. •
C> The New Yorker Collection 2003 William Haefeli from cartoonbank.com All Rights Reserved.
Syntactic categories include both phrasal categories such as NP, VP, AP (adjec-
tive phrase), PP (prepositional phrase), and AdvP (adverbial phrase), as well as
lexical categories such as noun (N), verb (V), preposition (P), adjective (A), and
adverb (Adv). Each lexical category has a corresponding phrasal category. Fol-
lowing is a list of phrasal categories and lexical categories with some examples
of each type:
Phrasal categories
Noun Phrase (NP) men, the man, the man with a telescope sees, always
Verb Phrase (VP) sees, rarely sees the man, often sees the man with a
telescope
Adjective Phrase (AP) happy, very happy, very happy about winning
Prepositional Phrase over, nearly over, nearly over the hill
(PP)
Adverbial Phrase brighdy, more brighdy, more brighdy than the Sun
(AdvP)
Lexical categories
Noun (N) puppy, boy, man, soup, happiness, fork, kiss, pillow
Verb (V) find, run, sleep, throw, realize, see, try, want, believe
Preposition (P) up, down, across, into, from, by, with, over
Adjective (A) red, big, happy, candid, hopeless, fair, idiotic, lucky
Adverb (Adv) again, always, brighdy, often, never, very, fairly
Many of these categories may already be familiar to you. Other categories
may be less familiar such as the category determiner (Det), which includes
the articles a and the, as well as demonstratives such as this, that, these, and
those, and "quantifiers" such as each and every. Another less familiar category
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Our knowledge of syntactic categories is also revealed through our intuitions

about nonsensical sentences. Recall the sentences in (1) and (2) below. Although
neither of these sentences makes sense, we have a clear intuition that (1) is
grammatical in a way that (2) is not.
1. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
2. *Sleep colorless green furiously ideas.
This is because sentence (1) obeys the word order constraints of English while
sentence (2) does not In other words, we recognize the category of each of the
words: Colorless is an adjective, ideas is a noun, colorless green ideas is a noun
phrase, and sleep furiously is a verb phrase, and know that they fit properly
together in (1) but not in (2) . We are not taught these categories nor their word
order. We know this implicitly before we go to school. They are part of our
grammar that we develop as a child growing up (see Chapter 9).
In these sentences, we can identify when the order is correct and when it is
not, even though the meanings of the different words and constituents do not
jibe. An idea cannot be green or colorless, (except in a metaphorical sense), but
even if ideas had color we would say colorless green ideas and not ideas green
colorless or green ideas colorless.
Similarly, we may not be able to make sense of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky,
but we can identify the words brillig, slithy, and mimsy as adjectives, toves, wabe,
borogoves, and momeraths as nouns, and outgrabe, gyre, and gimble as verbs, all
based on their position in the sentences.
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the momeraths outgrabe.
Speakers know the syntactic category of the various constituents and how
they are ordered with respect to one another. They also know how to group
words into units---constituents. This knowledge is graphically represented in tree
structures that reveal the grammatical organization of the words of a sentence.
Tree structures also explain how the grouping of words in a sentence relates to
its meaning, such as when a sentence or phrase is ambiguous. And even when
the meaning is nonsensical the structure must obey the syntactic rules of the
language. The rules of syntax also permit speakers to produce and understand
a limitless number of sentences never produced or heard before-the creative
aspect of linguistic knowledge, illustrated at the beginning of this chapter. A major
goal of linguistics is to show clearly and explicitly how syntactic rules account
for what speakers implicitly know about their language.
Phrase Structure Trees

Who climbs the Grammar-Tree distinctly knows
Where Noun and Verb and Participle grows.
JOHN DRYDEN. ""The Sixth Satyr of j uvenal."1693
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Now that you know something about constituent structure and grammatical
categories, you are ready to learn how the phrases and sentences of a language
are constructed. We will begin by illustrating trees for simple phrases and then
proceed to more complex structures. The trees that we will build here are more
detailed than those we saw in the previous sections, because the branches of the
tree will have category labels identifying each constituent. In this section, we
will also introduce the kind of syntactic rules that generate (a technical term
for describe or specify) the different structures.
The tree diagram in (1) provides labels for each of the constituents of the
sentence "The child found a puppy." These labels show that the entire sentence
belongs to the syntactic category of S (because the S-node encompasses all the
words). It also reveals that the child and a puppy belong to the category NP, that
is, they are noun phrases, and that found a puppy belongs to the category VP
or is a verb phrase, consisting of a verb and an NP. It also shows the syntactic
category of each of the words in the sentence.
1. s
~
NP VP
/"'. ~
DetN V NP
I I I /"'.
the child found Det N
I I
a puppy
A tree diagram with syntactic category information is called a phrase struc-

ture tree or a constituent structure tree. Phrase Structure trees (PS trees)
represent three aspects of a speaker's syntactic knowledge:
1. The linear order of the words in the sentence
2. The identification of the syntactic categories of words and groups of words
3. The hierarchical structure of the syntactic categories (e.g., an S is com-
posed of an NP followed by a VP, a VP is composed of a V that may be
followed by an NP, and so on).
The syntactic category of each word is listed in our mental dictionaries, as we
will discuss in more detail in Chapter 4. This lexical information guides the syntax
of the language. Words appear in trees under labels that correspond to their syntac-
tic category. Nouns are under N, determiners under Det, verbs under V, and so on.
The larger syntactic categories such as VP consist of all the syntactic catego-
ries and words below that node in the tree. The VP in the PS tree above con-
sists of syntactic category nodes V and NP and the words found, a, and puppy.
Because a puppy can be traced up the tree to the node NP, this constituent is a
noun phrase. Because found and a puppy can be traced up to the node VP, this
constituent is a verb phrase. In discussing trees, every higher node is said to
dominate all the categories beneath it. S dominates every node. A node is said
to immediately dominate the categories one level below it. VP immediately
dominates V and NP, the categories of which it is composed. Categories that
Copyright 2019 Cengage Leamlng. All Rights Rc~rved. May not be copied, scannoed, or dupUcated,ln whOle or In par1. WCN 02·200-202
are immediately dominated by the same node are sisters. V and NP are sisters
in the phrase structure tree of "the child found a puppy."
PS trees are also useful for defining various grammatical relations in a precise
way. For example, the subject of a sentence is the NP immediately dominated
by S (the chUd in the tree in (1) and the direct object is the NP immediately
dominated by VP (the puppy in the tree in (1 ).
Phrase Structure Rules

The information shown in a PS tree can also be represented by another formal
device: phrase structure (PS) rules. PS rules capture the knowledge that speak-
ers have about the possible structures of a language. Just as a speaker cannot
have an infinite list of sentences in his or her head, so he or she cannot have an
infinite set of PS trees in his or her head. Rather, a speaker's knowledge of the
permissible and impermissible structures must exist as a fmite set of rules that
characterize a tree for any sentence in the language. To express the structure
given above, we need the following PS rules:
1. S-+ NPVP
2. NP-+ Det N
3. VP .... VNP
You can think ofPS rules as templates that a tree must match to be grammati-
cal. They express the regularities of the language and make explicit a speaker's
knowledge of the order of words and the grouping of words into syntactic cat-
egories. For example in English an NP may contain a determiner followed by a
noun. This is represented by rule 2. This rule conveys two facts:
A noun phrase may contain a determiner followed by a noun in that
order.
A determiner followed by a noun is a noun phrase.
Phrase structure rules specify the well-formed structures of a language pre-
cisely and concisely. To the left of the arrow is the dominating category NP.
The categories that it immediately dominates appear on the right side, in this
case Det and N. The right side of the arrow also shows the linear order of these
components. Thus, the subtree for the English NP looks like this:
NP
A
Det N
Rule 1 says that a sentence (S) contains (immediately dominates) an NP and

a VP in that order. Rule 3 says that a verb phrase consists of a verb (V) followed
by an NP. These rules are general statements and do not refer to any specific VP,
V, or NP. The subtrees represented by rules 1 and 3 are as follows:
s VP
A A
NP VP V NP
A VP need not contain an NP object, however. It may include a verb alone, as

in the following sentences:
The woman laughed.
The man danced.
The horse galloped.
These sentences have the structure:
s
A
NP VP
I
v
Thus, a tree may have a VP that immediately dominates only V, as specified by

rule 4, which we include in our grammar:
4. VP-+ V
The following sentences contain prepositional phrases following the Verb:
The puppy played in the garden.
The boat sailed up the river.
A girl laughed at the monkey.
The sheepdog rolled in the mud.
The PS tree for such sentences is
~
------------
NP
~
VP
Det N v pp
I I I ~
the puppy played P NP
I~
m Det N
I I
the garden
To generate structures of this type we need two additional PS rules as in 5 and 6.

5. VP .... VPP
6. PP-+ P NP
Another option open to the VP is to contain or embed a sentence. For example,
the sentence "The professor hoped that the students read the chapter" con-
tains the sentence "the students read the chapter." Preceding the embedded
sentence is the word that, which belongs to the category of complementizers
C(omp), a functional category like T(ense) and Det. Here is the structure of such
sentence types:
s
NP VP
/'---._
Det N v-------------
CP
I
the
I
professor hoped
I
c
I
------------s
that --------------
NP
/'---._ ~
VP
Det N v NP
I I I ~
the student~ read Det N
I I
the chapter
To allow such embedded sentences, we need to add these two new rules to
our set of phrase structure rules.
7. VP-+ V CP
8. CP .... CS
CP stands for complementizer phrase. Rule 8 says that CP contains a comple-
mentizer such as that followed by the embedded sentence. Other complementiz-
ers are if and whether in sentences such as
I don't know whether I should talk about this.
The teacher asked if the students understood the syntax lesson.
which have structures similar to the one above.
Here are the PS rules we have discussed so far. The rules have been slightly
renumbered to keep all the VP rules together. We will introduce some other
rules later. Phrase structure rules
1. S-+NPVP
2. NP -+ DetN
3. VP-+VNP
4. VP-+V
5. VP-+ VPP
6. VP-+VCP
7. PP .... PNP
8. CP-+CS
Building Phrase Structure Trees

Everyone who is master of the language he speaks ... may form new . . . phrases, provided
they coincide with the genius of the language.
JOHANN DAVID MICHAELIS, "Dissertation,"1739
The phrase structure rules can be used as a guide for building trees that follow
the structural constraints of the language. In so doing, certain conventions are
followed. The S occurs at the top or "root" of the tree (remember the tree is
upside down). So, first find the rule with Son the left side of the arrow (rule 1)
and put the categories on the right side below the S, as shown here
s
A
NP VP
Continue by matching any syntactic category at the bottom of the partially

constructed tree to a category on the left side of a rule, then expand the tree
with the categories on the right side. For example, we may expand the tree by
applying the NP rule to produce:
s
/"---..
NP VP
A.
Det N
The categories at the bottom are Det, N, and VP, but only VP occurs to the left
of an arrow in the set of rules and so needs to be expanded using one of the VP
rules. Any one of the rules will work. The order in which the rules appear in the
list of rules is irrelevant. (We could have begun by expanding the VP rather than
the NP.) Suppose we use rule 4 next. Then, the tree has grown to look like this:
s
~
NP VP
A. A.
DetNVPP
We continue in this way until all phrasal categories are expanded, that is,
none of the categories at the bottom of the tree appears on the left side of any
rule. The PP must expand into a P and an NP (rule 7), and the NP into a Det
and anN. (Proper names and pronouns which are NPs and not nouns are an
exception to the "full expansion convention.") We can use a rule as many times
as it can apply. In this tree, we used the NP rule twice. After we have applied
all the rules that can apply, the tree looks like this:
s
~
NP VP
A /"....
Det N V PP
/"....
P NP
A
Det N
By following these conventions, we generate only trees specified by the PS

rules, and hence only trees that conform to the syntax of the language. By impli-
cation, any tree not so specified will be ungrantmatical, that is, not permitted by
the syntax. At any point during the construction of a tree, any rule may be used
as long as its left-side category occurs somewhere at the bottom of the tree. By
choosing different VP rules, we could specify different structures corresponding
to sentences such as:
The boys left. (VP - V)
The wind blew the kite. (VP - V NP)
The senator hopes that the bill passes. (VP _. V CP)
Because the number of possible sentences in a language is infinite, there are
also an infinite number of trees. However, all trees are built out of a finite set
of phrase structure rules.
The Infinity of Language: Recursive Rules

Though incomplete, the set of PS rules we have introduced thus far is sufficient
to illustrate the mechanisms by which languages generate a limitless number
of sentences. Consider the following set of sentences, similar to those discussed
at the beginning of this chapter.
1. Homer caught a pokemon.
2. Marge noticed that Homer caught a pokemon.
3. Bart wonders whether Marge noticed that Homer caught a pokemon.
4. Lisa knows that Bart wonders whether Marge noticed that Homer caught
a pokemon.
We see that sentence 1 is embedded inside sentence 2, sentence 2 inside sentence
3, sentence 3 inside sentence 4. We could continue this process indefinitely. This
is made possible by the fact that rule phrase structure rule 6 (VP - V CP) in
combination with rules 8 (CP - C S) and 1 (S - NP VP) form a recursive set,
in which the symbols S and VP occur on both the left and right side of the rules.
Therefore, the rules allowS to contain VP, which in turn contains CP, which in

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Syntax

To grammar even kings bow.

J. B. MOLEIRE, Les Femmes Sovontes, II, 1672

Nobody cares that Pikachu noticed that Snorlax is asleep.

What the Syntax Rules Do

about who is doing what to whom. This information is crucial to understanding

can be grammatical, sentences discussing unicorns can be grammatical, and

the child found

Using bracket notation, we would write this as [found [a puppy]].

a puppy, corresponding to the subject and predicate of the sentence. A further

Constituents and Constituency Tests

As before, our knowledge of the constituent structure of a sentence may be

the puppy played

Hilary B. Price/King Features Syndicate

The availability of these two structures leads to a prediction: If we do a con-

NPs can be quite complex, as illustrated by the sentence:

Lexical and Functional Categories

·Very trnditirmal. He's tlu noun. She's tlu a.d}« liw. •

Our knowledge of syntactic categories is also revealed through our intuitions

Phrase Structure Trees

A tree diagram with syntactic category information is called a phrase struc-

Phrase Structure Rules

Rule 1 says that a sentence (S) contains (immediately dominates) an NP and

A VP need not contain an NP object, however. It may include a verb alone, as

Thus, a tree may have a VP that immediately dominates only V, as specified by

To generate structures of this type we need two additional PS rules as in 5 and 6.

Building Phrase Structure Trees

Continue by matching any syntactic category at the bottom of the partially

By following these conventions, we generate only trees specified by the PS

The Infinity of Language: Recursive Rules

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