SYN108 - More on Constituents I

[@nabilabdullah9487]

Excellent, smooth introduction to x-bar theory, without advertising it from the beginning.

[@ignacioperalta8808]

Hi, professor. Francisco from Argentina. Very good explanation. Thanks a lot

[@oer-vlc]

Create your (free) account on oer-vlc.de and become a member of the Virtual Linguistics Campus where you have free access to all courses, to the largest language data collection and huge multimedial glossaries. See you there!

[@mohammedzaheerkhan8191]

Your ways of explaining the topics are inspiring and awesome. Great good luck. With warm regards. 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷

[@antoniotivane9323]

many thanks Prof for great explanation

[@조은-c7p]

Your video is very useful to study syntax for foreigner as well. Thank you so much!

[@anibalcastillo1308]

Thank you very much, professor. We're trying to promote Generative Linguistics in Venezuela. Your videos come very handy for us.

[@oer-vlc]

Maybe you want to use any of our courses on oer-vlc.de, they are open, free and ready for use.

[@deadman746]

Quite a large number of problems can be solved by getting over the classical prejudice that there must be one and only one structure for an utterance.

[@hannahh8119]

Dankeschön, das hat mir sehr beim Verständnis geholfen, auch wenn ich es immer noch kompliziert finde. :)

[@pawelwysockicoreandquirks]

Very interestesting lecture!! A few thoughts of little value, probably. What would happen in a sentence like: John does see the young girl. Would the main verb and the auxiliary be treated as seperate elements? I do ralize, of course, that mood markers are special in how they affect the meaning of an entire sentence.

[@bachtiar2542]

thank you so much bro for the amazing explanation

[@alexandracovell2358]

Hello... How would you solve the constituency of the following sentence: "I saw her FIXING THE FENCE"? How would the syntax tree be like? Thanks

[@elhassanialahlou9828]

thank you sir

[@asadkamaljan871]

Great lecture sir

[@andersonalejandroalbacubil4066]

Where in the UK could I study linguistics or sociolinguistics?

[@labonnobari5214]

very helpful and effective video

[@zahraahalo9632]

thank you very much

[@engimaticcontent6396]

John killed marry😭?why do we use main verb as an auxillary verb form?like our professor changes ed from into the auxiliary form of tense

[@fevvievonasistio9406]

thank you

[@navamiananthan4198]

Why is auxiliary and verb not seen as VP? Why is auxiliary shown as a separate branch? Can anyone please solve my question?

[@oer-vlc]

The answer can be found in the course VLC201 - The Structure of English: kzbin.info/www/bejne/o4fdZ5KfmJV_rNk, unit: "Approaches towards the verb". Register (fir free) on oer-vlc.de and then self-enroll to VLC201.

[@proximityconcord7259]

Very helpful

[@rahenoavari]

thanks a lot

[@Pingijno]

specifiers = modifiers

[@bonbonpony]

Why some linguists tend to talk about an adjective (for example) MODIFYING the noun? How is it _modifying_ it? I don't get it. I would rather go with SPECIFYING or DESCRIBING myself, because that sounds more like what they actually do :q They don't change the noun, they just add more information about it (that is, specifying some of its features).

[@MichaelAUnger]

Hi! Maybe a late reply (and it's possible you've already figured this out), but linguists say that an adjective modifies a noun not because of any semantic definition (at least not on its own), but because in syntactic theory, "Specifier" is a term defined by a structural relation (Specifier = Daughter of XP and sister of X'), so saying that any adjective "specifies" a noun would be incongruous with that structural definition of "specifier" because some adjectives don't occur with that structure ("red", for example, in "The red ball"). And, in a way, adjectives DO change a noun because they change/modify the overall structure of the NP (or N', as is sometimes the case). Terms like "specifies", "modifies", etc. all tend to come down to certain structural relations in the syntax of a language rather than the ideas we have about what certain words do to others, simply because it's easier to come to a common understanding of what it is that language is and what words do that way (which is, after all, the ultimate goal of many linguists!).

[@christopheclugston]

Strangely you avoid Determiner Phrases in these videos. Why is that?

[@oer-vlc]

As I said in "More on Constituents II" from 10:13 onw. additional cases, for example more complex NPs, incl. the DP or aspects of coordination will be dealt with in further E-Lectures, i.e. "More on Constituents III" and in the respective Video Scribes. Starting with a DP is didactically not a very good option.

[@christopheclugston]

The Virtual Linguistics Campus You do not feel that it is good to start straight with Minimalist Grammar? So then you should start with Transformational Grammar and advance through Government and Binding, etc. to understand Chomsky, right?

[@bonbonpony]

04:00 And why is this a problem? Couldn't it be that a structure is a part of itself, recursively? I don't know about linguistics, but in computer science we use Chomsky's hierarchy of languages for syntactic analysis of computer code in compilers and other tools, and recursive structures like these are perfectly fine. Actually, they are what distinguishes regular grammars (those that can have only linear recursion = iteration) from context-free (and higher) grammars (in which structures can contain themselves and branch like a tree, an arbitrary number of levels deep). For example, a multiplicative expression (ME) is a list of factors which can be primary expressions (PE). An additive expression (AE) is a list of multiplicative expressions. BUT, a primary expression can be either a number, a symbol, or another additive expression enclosed in parentheses! This way, one can nest as many additive expression inside other additive expressions, which makes a nice closure for expressions. 04:27 If this level really should be different from AP, then why just call it "Adjectival Phrase", or "AjdP" (since its head is the adjective), as opposed to the Adverbial Phrase, "AP", with the degree adverb (Deg) as its head? 08:35 Well, d'uh :q Because they're all OPERATORS with OPERANDS :> (as we call them in computer science), so no wonder they have the same structure: because their _modus operandi_ is the same. There is a programming language called LISP, which makes a thorough use of this pattern; its syntax looks like this: (operator operand1 operand2 operand3 … ). For example, we can write (+ 2 3) to add these two numbers (or more). We can also nest these symbolic expressions to get recursion: (+ 2 (* 3 4)) first multiplies 3 times 4 to get 12, and then adds this result to 2. One can represent such S-expressions as trees (see the analogy?). So imagine now that the operator is your top-level node of a particular sub-branch (e.g. NP), and all of its sub-nodes are the operands. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? ;> 10:20 That's what I was talking about. But this is only the _linear_ recursion which is equivalent to iteration (i.e. a list of items of the same kind) and could be replaced with a flat tree with multiple branches (in which order matters). This still qualifies as Chomsky's first level: regular grammars.

[@deadman746]

I'm late to the party, but I can't resist pointing out that using Chomskyan grammar for natural languages has long been discredited. I'll write more if anybody cares.

[@bonbonpony]

@@deadman746 I care. And I have the same feeling about this approach grammar analysis. Even in machine parsing of programming languages, applying Chomsky grammar theory directly turns out to be impractical, and there's usually at least two "levels" of grammar: the "concrete" grammar that describes the syntax of instructions (think of them as "sentences"), and "abstract" grammar that describes the "logical structure" of expressions, in which all the unnecessary clutter from concrete syntax has been removed or replaced with annotations, and only the core logical structure remains. I think that the same should be done with the theory of grammar of human languages, because here we also have the same problem: there are different ways of marking up possessiveness, determinacy, plurals, gender; complex structure of "verb phrases"; auxiliary verbs for expressing tenses and moods… All of that clutters the syntax tree, it's often is hard to express, or the elements that indicate a tense or mood are separated all over the tree, making it harder to see how do they belong together. But they must follow this pattern in order to reflect the syntax of the original sentence. This is the "concrete syntax", and it should be then transformed into "abstract syntax", by pruning the tree of all that clutter and replacing it with attributes and annotations inside the nodes of the core structure. But nobody seems to do it that way :q These two levels of grammar (physical and logical) are conflated and confused together, making the whole subject more complex than it should be.

[@entisar-yemen]

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[@Suvorovceva]

A song is a DP, not NP. The same is with "the house"- DP!