LNC123-75 Syntax exercises

What is Syntax?
In the 1960s, linguist Noam Chomsky proposed a revolutionary idea: We are all
born with an innate knowledge of grammar that serves as the basis for all language
acquisition. In other words, for humans, language is a basic instinct. The theory,
however, has been met with criticism.

The ability to walk upright for long periods of time is distinctly human; it sets us
apart from our closest genetic cousins, the great apes. However, walking is both in-
nate and learned, and while every human child is born with the underlying mecha-
nisms needed to do so, the skill will never manifest without proper guidance and
examples.

In this respect, Chomsky taught that language is much like walking. Although hu-
mans learn by example, he proposed that we are all born with a fundamental under-
standing of the underlying mechanisms of language. Chomsky’s original work,
called universal grammar, is the reason why humans can recognize grammatically
correct yet nonsensical phrases, such as “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
Past research has shown our ability to distinguish words from nonwords even with-
out an understanding of the language, is a skill that even non-verbal babies possess.
Researchers have long failed to prove this same instinctual knowledge also exists
for grammar.

Look at the following word sequences. Disregarding the sentence meanings, use
your knowledge as a native English speaker to see if any of them strike you as pe-
culiar or funny in some way.

A. The boy found the ball.

B. The boy found quickly.
C. The boy found in the house.
D. Found the boy in the house the ball.
E. The boy quickly found the ball in the house.
F. The quickly boy ball found the house in the.

syntax:

descriptive grammar:
LNC123-75 Syntax exercises

prescriptive grammar:

Fuchsia killer whales strike menacingly at the snack machine.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

An inkling smashed the tree in the water.

Although they do not make much sense, they are syntactically well-formed. They
sound funny, but not in the way that

Furiously sleep ideas green colorless

water in smashed the tree inkling an.

Jabberwocky, the poem by Lewis Carroll to show how there is an underlying struc-
ture that is important.

’Twas brillig in the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
:

*Toves slithy the and brillig ’twas

wabe the in gimble and gyre did.

So, we can clearly see that syntax is not attached to meaning. Recently, re-
searchers from New York University recruited volunteers to listen to word phrases
spoken in both English and Mandarin Chinese, including predictable sentences like
“New York never sleeps,” grammatically correct yet less predictable sentences like
“Pink toys hurt girls,” and word lists like “eggs, jelly, pink. These sentences were
specifically designed so all obvious indications of grammar, such as voice intona-
LNC123-75 Syntax exercises

tion cues, were missing. This ensured the only indication of grammar would come
from the subjects’ own minds, not the sentences themselves.

As subjects listened on, researchers measured their brain activity using two tools:
magnetoencephalography and electrocorticography. The first measures tiny mag-
netic fields created by brain activity and the second measures brain activity in pa-
tients undergoing brain surgery.

Results revealed brain activity changed depending on whether the volunteers had
listened to a sentence, a phrase, or a word list. This showed that the subjects were
able to process the grammar minus the obvious learned cues.

According to David Poeppel, the lead researcher, our brains lock onto every word
to comprehend phrases and sentences. He said, “The dynamics reveal that we un-
dergo a grammar-based construction in the processing of language.”

Syntax is also clearly not dependent on the truth of a sentence. If it did, lying
would be impossible. As well as discussing whether or not something is possible,
or real. Untrue sentences can be grammatical, sentences discussing unicorns can
be grammatical.

This leads us to the question of why are some combinations of expressions syntac-
tically well-formed and others are not? Look back at the previous examples.

There are two main syntactic properties which govern the combinations. The first
is Word order.

Word English Proportion Example

order equivalent of languages languages

SOV "She him loves." 45% Sanskrit, Hindi, Ancient

LNC123-75 Syntax exercises

Greek, Latin, Japanese, Korean

SVO "She loves him." 42% Chinese, English, French, Hausa, Italian, Malay,
Russian, Spanish

VSO "Loves she him." 9% Biblical Hebrew, Arabic, Irish, Filipino, T

uareg-Berber, Welsh

VOS "Loves him she." 3% Malagasy, Baure

OVS "Him loves she." 1% Apalaí, Hixkaryana

OSV "Him she loves." 0% Warao, (certain dialects of) Korean

It’s important to keep in mind that languages may follow these patterns most of the
time, but language is a living, changing entity and there are plenty of examples
where it is perfectly acceptable to present a different order. For example, in Ger-
man, main clauses follow an SVO word order, while subordinate clauses follow
SOV:

a. Otto liest das Buch. (Otto is reading the book) SVO

b. Ich weiß daß Otto das Buch liest. (I know that Otto is reading the
book). SOV

Even in English, in order to add emphasis, we can rearrange the order:

a. Are there any questions? VSO

b. George said you don’t like him. Oh, George, I like. OSV
c. It’s Frank I can’t stand.

The ball is in the house cannot present as

*The ball the house in.

LNC123-75 Syntax exercises

Interestingly, in Japanese, prepositions follow the noun phrase. Therefore they are
called postpositions. Sono hito to (with that person)
that person with

Co-occurrence

The child found the puppy.

Another example of co-occurrence are transitive verbs.

Transitive verbs are verbs that cannot exist on their own; they require an object.
Using the example above, the verb found requires an object. What was found?
The fact that found requires additional information is called an argument. By ar-
gument we mean that certain other expressions are required to occur as well.
found actually requires 2 arguments: what was found and who found it? Who is
the subject, the child, and the puppy is the object. The object is called the comple-
ment of the verb.

Sentences can require multiple complements:

The policeman told the child’s mother he found a puppy. (the child’s mother and
he found a puppy are both complements of told.)

You cannot add unnecessary arguments.

The policeman child’s mother told he found a puppy. (too many subjects)

The policemen told the child’s mother he found a puppy snake go-cart. too many
objects

Nouns and determiners can also illustrate this point the restriction to the number of
arguments.
LNC123-75 Syntax exercises

Sally has {this, my, a } dog. {denotes possibilities}

* Sally has dog.
* Sally has this a dog.
* Sally has this a my dog.

It is possible to add information to the sentence by way of adjuncts. These are

completely optional additional phrases. Let’s look at some examples:

The boy found the puppy.

The boy found a cute puppy.
The boy found a cute, little puppy.

These are examples of attributive adjectives—they are not necessary for the sen-
tence to be grammatically correct. What’s more, we cannot just add them to any
sentence.

*The policeman told a cute the child’s mother.

* The policeman ran cute.
Agreement

Just as there are strict requirements regarding the kind of argument expressions can
have, there are also strict requirements on gender, number, and other grammatical
information that must agree in order for the sentence to be correct. We mentioned
some of these inflectional affixes:

Other languages, such as Latin based-languages use more inflectional markers on

the verbs. The conjugation of the verb changes for each subject, so that in Italian,
for example, you can actually leave off the subject of the sentence.

Io ho venti anni. ___ ho venti anni. I am 20.

Lexical Categories

Nouns

Adjectives
LNC123-75 Syntax exercises

Verbs

Adverbs

Pronouns

Determiners

Adpositions (think fancy prepositions)

Let’s practice putting the elements of sentences in their lexical categories. Here are
some sentences—but first, a quick note about auxiliary verbs. They are helping
verbs. Think I am going, am is auxiliary. He might cry, might is auxiliary.

1. Classify each word in the following sentences according to the categories:

N V P Det Prn A Adv Aux

Noun Verb Preposition Determiner Pronoun Adjective Adverb Auxil-
iary
Verb

Write the corresponding letter underneath the word.

Some people like cats. Careful owners wash their cars.

Europeans peopled America. She might drive down my street.

I heard a wooden sound. She quickly realized she was wrong.

LNC123-75 Syntax exercises

The man with the wooden leg ate my hamburger.

phrasal categories. It is through the organization of these syntactic categories that

we can produce a complete list of the phrase structure rules of a language, or, its
grammar.

Here are the basic phrase structure rules for English:

S ⟹ NP VP

NP ⟹ (Det) (Adj) N (PP)

PP ⟹ P NP

VP ⟹ V (NP) (PP) (Adv)

Now go back up the the sentences above and use parentheses to separate out the
phrasal categories.

We use this information to construct tree diagrams. The tree diagram allows us to
understand the syntactic categories, how they work together, any components or
constituents…

He left He left quickly

LNC123-75 Syntax exercises

The tall man left quickly The man hit the ball.

Recursion.

This is the farmer sowing the corn

that kept the cop that crowed in the morn,
that waked the priest all shaven and shorn,
that married the maiden all forlorn
that milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
that tossed the dog,
that worried the cat,
that killed the rat,
that ate them malt
that lay in the house that Jack built.
The man hit the ball with the bat.

the girl with the feather on the ribbon on the brim

LNC123-75 Syntax exercises

Making tree diagrams can also help us when we have ambiguity in meaning.
Think of the sentence

I killed a mouse in my pajamas. Was the mouse in my pajamas? Or was I wearing

pajamas when I killed the mouse? Observe:

We can disambiguate the meaning using the tree structure. Depending what or
who the PP is associated with.
LNC123-75 Syntax exercises

How about this one: The student wrote his thesis on acid.