Syntax - a multi-perspective introduction

[Miekko]

My syntax teacher finally taught us trees yesterday.

She does weird things with various phrases like instead of using just NPs she'll use "DPs", for "determiner phrases", which dominate NPs... I challenged her about it yesterday and she said that it was the "correct" way and that some guy had written about it in 1987 or something, and collected evidence... apparently... such as how you can shorten "those pictures" to "those"...
I still think she's wrong; just wondering what your thoughts on this are...

That is the variety I've been taught, and I agree with it.

The same variety has CPs (complementizer phrases) to dominate the entire clause, and TPs to dominate the VP.

Even above main clauses?

I haven't yet got round to asking why Ds are no longer put in Spec-NP, but apparently there's some justification along the lines that Ds allow NPs to refer to things in the world as opposed to concepts. Hence the difference between "I shot the boar" and "I had boar for lunch". Though that still doesn't sound terribly convincing to me ? I may have got the details wrong. Or it may just be a weak theory, but I'm more inclined to think the former.

Please remind me to ask that ? I have a syntax supervision on Monday.

Yours, Tim.

Yes, even above main clauses.

One of the motivations is that many languages mark questions with a particle in initial position - and some others mark questions by moving the verb there (which is argued to be a realisation of the CP somehow, at least I saw a paper to that effect in Linguistic Inquiry or somewhere), but no language has particle + verb movement going at the same time. Some other languages apparently also mark other things sentence-initially, in a way not entirely unlike how subclause-initial particles convey information about the role of the subclause.

[Echobeats]

these I should look up some more formal definitions of:
c-command

domination

A node c-commands its sister and all its sister's daughters.

A node dominates all the nodes below it on the tree (so its daughters, its daughter's daughters, etc.)

[Miekko]

these I should look up some more formal definitions of:
c-command

domination

A node c-commands its sister and all its sister's daughters.

A node dominates all the nodes below it on the tree (so its daughters, its daughter's daughters, etc.)

you beat me to it. I was afraid there was some details I had forgotten.

There's also something called 'utt?mmande dominans' - dunno the English name - where every dominated node also is the daughter of the dominating node, so none of the daughters have daughters of their own. What's the English name?

[Echobeats]

There's also something called 'utt?mmande dominans' - dunno the English name - where every dominated node also is the daughter of the dominating node, so none of the daughters have daughters of their own. What's the English name?

Pass.

What does att utt?mma mean anyway? My favourite online Swedish dictionary doesn't have it, but gives att t?mma as "to empty". So my guess would be something like "exhausting", maybe?

What does it actually refer to? A node that doesn't have any granddaughters, or what?

[Salmoneus]

But what about when they DO cross? Surely you can't claim that they actually used a different sentence just to avoid having evidence that conflicts with the arbitrary 'straight lines are good' theory of linguistics?

Lines aren't present in people's speech. They're drawn by syntacticians. "You can't draw lines that cross" is one of the constraints of the theory.

No, but I assumed that the lines weren't arbitrary - that they were actually meant to link elements of the sentence that were in some way connected. What happens when those elements are not adjacent?

So, for instance:

Adje[tense-agreement]ctive[subject-agreement] first_part_of_the_verb[subject-agreement] subject-classifier first_part_of_mode ob[case]je[tense-agreement]ct ad[subject-agreement]verb object-classifier sub[case]je[tense-agreement]ct poss[case]es[case-agreement]s[tense-agreement]or_of_object second_part_of_verb second_part_of_mode...

How does one draw that tree?

[Miekko]

There's also something called 'utt?mmande dominans' - dunno the English name - where every dominated node also is the daughter of the dominating node, so none of the daughters have daughters of their own. What's the English name?

Pass.

What does att utt?mma mean anyway? My favourite online Swedish dictionary doesn't have it, but gives att t?mma as "to empty". So my guess would be something like "exhausting", maybe?

What does it actually refer to? A node that doesn't have any granddaughters, or what?

Exhausting would be a good translation, but I'm not sure that that is the term in actual use. Anyway, exhausting dominance is when every dominated node is *directly* dominated - no intermediate nodes present at all. In X-bar, I think this concept might've been sort of made obsolete.

[Echobeats]

There's also something called 'utt?mmande dominans' - dunno the English name - where every dominated node also is the daughter of the dominating node, so none of the daughters have daughters of their own. What's the English name?

Pass.

What does att utt?mma mean anyway? My favourite online Swedish dictionary doesn't have it, but gives att t?mma as "to empty". So my guess would be something like "exhausting", maybe?

What does it actually refer to? A node that doesn't have any granddaughters, or what?

Exhausting would be a good translation, but I'm not sure that that is the term in actual use. Anyway, exhausting dominance is when every dominated node is *directly* dominated - no intermediate nodes present at all. In X-bar, I think this concept might've been sort of made obsolete.

Yeah, you can't have that in X-bar. Projection principle.

[Echobeats]

But what about when they DO cross? Surely you can't claim that they actually used a different sentence just to avoid having evidence that conflicts with the arbitrary 'straight lines are good' theory of linguistics?

Lines aren't present in people's speech. They're drawn by syntacticians. "You can't draw lines that cross" is one of the constraints of the theory.

No, but I assumed that the lines weren't arbitrary - that they were actually meant to link elements of the sentence that were in some way connected. What happens when those elements are not adjacent?

So, for instance:

Adje[tense-agreement]ctive[subject-agreement] first_part_of_the_verb[subject-agreement] subject-classifier first_part_of_mode ob[case]je[tense-agreement]ct ad[subject-agreement]verb object-classifier sub[case]je[tense-agreement]ct poss[case]es[case-agreement]s[tense-agreement]or_of_object second_part_of_verb second_part_of_mode...

How does one draw that tree?

Can you come up with a real example of a sentence like that that's grammatical in some natural language?

[pharazon]

But what about when they DO cross? Surely you can't claim that they actually used a different sentence just to avoid having evidence that conflicts with the arbitrary 'straight lines are good' theory of linguistics?

Lines aren't present in people's speech. They're drawn by syntacticians. "You can't draw lines that cross" is one of the constraints of the theory.

No, but I assumed that the lines weren't arbitrary - that they were actually meant to link elements of the sentence that were in some way connected. What happens when those elements are not adjacent?

So, for instance:

Adje[tense-agreement]ctive[subject-agreement] first_part_of_the_verb[subject-agreement] subject-classifier first_part_of_mode ob[case]je[tense-agreement]ct ad[subject-agreement]verb object-classifier sub[case]je[tense-agreement]ct poss[case]es[case-agreement]s[tense-agreement]or_of_object second_part_of_verb second_part_of_mode...

How does one draw that tree?

Can you come up with a real example of a sentence like that that's grammatical in some natural language?

My O'odham grammar gives this example of a legal permutation of word order:

S-ke:g 'o wuḍ 'uwǐ g Klisti:na
s-attractive AUX COP woman DET Christina
Christina is an attractive woman

It doesn't say how likely it is to come up, so possibly it's just a weird poetic thing, but on the other hand it doesn't seem like a weird poetic thing would be listed as a legal variant in a grammar without noting such.

Edit: Merc suggested it might be s-ke:g as a predicate, i.e. "The woman, Christina, is attractive", but not so; adjectives in O'odham can modify nouns, but can also act as stative verbs with no change in forms, so that would have to be S-ke:g 'o 'uwǐ g Klisti:na.

[Echobeats]

OK ? can you tell me further what the default word order is for a sentence like that? Then I might be able to have a go. I suspect there's something like topic-fronting going on. Oh, and what does s- mean?

Yours, Tim.

[pharazon]

OK – can you tell me further what the default word order is for a sentence like that? Then I might be able to have a go. I suspect there's something like topic-fronting going on. Oh, and what does s- mean?

O'odham is nonconfigurational, so ...

s- doesn't mean a whole lot... it marks a word as being a stative verb, but plenty of stative verbs don't have it.

[TaylorS]

Question:

I am a begginer when it comes to syntax, so I was wondering if this is right?

We haven't described very exactly how to deal with adjective attributes, yet, but if you replaced the NPs's branches with a big triangles, it'd be entirely correct.

The "Aux" shouldn't be in there. There is no auxiliary for this.

Also, the correct sentence is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"; if you don't use "jumps" there's no "s" in the sentence.

Thanks, I wasn't sure about the sentence so I just made something up

I know my NOOBishness when it comes to syntax is showing, buy why would the Germanic dental past tense inflection be considered an auxillary? Sure, it originated in Proto-Germanic as an auxiliary, something like "jump did", but linguistic change has no memory, it's a morphological inflection now.

[Mbwa]

I think they're saying it wouldn't be.