Chapter 8: Syntax

Chapter 8: Syntax

1. Syntactic Rules

   • All and Only
     • In parsing you must take into account all grammatically correct phrases and sentences and only those grammatically correct phrases and sentences.
       • The rules must be checked and applied so that they lead to well-formed structures.

2. Structural Ambiguity

   • It occurs when a sentence lends itself to two different underlying interpretations that must be represented differently in the deep structure.
     • Example

3. Generative Grammar

   • One of the goals of parsing is to have a small and finite (limited) set of rules that is capable of producing a large and partly infinite number of well-formed structures. And not just to describe them.
     • It reveals 2 phenomena: 1. How some superficially different phrases and sentences are related 2. How some superficially similar phrases and sentences are different.

4. Deep and Surface Structure

   • There is an adjacent similarity between two superficially different sentences. A difference between their superficial structure, that is, in the different syntactic forms they have, however, these two sentences are identical on a less superficial level.
     • The underlying level where the building blocks (noun phrase + verb + noun phrase) can be represented is called deep structure, it is an abstract level of structural organization.
       • Example

5. Syntactic Analysis

   • Noun = N
     • Art = article
       • Adj = adjective
         • V = verb
           • NP = noun phrase
             • VP = verb phrase
   • Parsing in a more dynamic format
     • • If we include another constituent
   • {} these indicate that only one of the elements enclosed in braces should be selected.

6. Phrase Structure Rules

   • Set of syntactic rules, they establish that the structure of a sentence of a specific type will consist of one or more constituents in a particular order.
     • 1. a sentence (S) rewrites as a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP)
       • 2. a noun phrase rewrites as either an article plus an optional adjective plus a noun, or a pronoun or a proper noun
         • 3. a verb phrase rewrites as a verb plus a noun phrases

7. Lexical Rules

   • specify which words can be used when we rewrite a constituent

8. Tree Diagrams (in English)

   • Visual representation of the underlying syntactic structure, symbols are used to label parts of the tree, and there are levels of parsing.

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