INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - PHRASE STRUCTURE: VP

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - PHRASE STRUCTURE: VP

Thus to conclude verb phrases consists those elements that arc considered as strictly verbal. Which, accordingly, would consist only of main and auxiliary verbs, plus infinitive or participle constructions. For example, in the following sentences we can see that the word in italics make

Verb phrases :

*Rita has given her friend a book.

*The tourists were being eaten alive by the maneater. 

*The crowd kept screaming like a maniac.

The functionalist frameworks and traditional European reference grammars often agree to this constricted definition of verb phrase. It is ireconcilable with the phrase structure model, because the strings in bold are not constituents under that analysis. However, dependency grammars and other grammars view the verb chain as the fundamental unit of syntactic structure, as opposed to the constituent. It is also to be noted here that the verbal elements in bold are syntactic units consistent with the understanding of predicates in the tradition of predicate calculus.

 
INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - PHRASE STRUCTURE: VP

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - PHRASE STRUCTURE: NP

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS 

& 

PHONETICS - PHRASE STRUCTURE: NP 

Syntax is a set of rules that govern the structure of sentences in a given language in order to convey a complete thought. A basic feature of a language's syntax is the sequence in which the subject (S), verb (V), and objeet (O) usually appear in sentences. A sentence is a linear sequence of elements. The purpose of the Phrase Structure Rule is to identify these clements and to elassify them. 

S----NP VP

Noun Phrase (NP) is the expression used to refer to entities like things, people, places, ideas etc. Noun Phrase has a noun as its Head Word which performs the function of a phrase. In NP a noun can be identified by removing all other words from the phrase, without damaging the sentence structure.

A tvpical NP consists of a noun (the head of the phrase) together with zero or more dependents of various types. These dependents, since modify a noun, are called adnominal. 

These are: 

Determiners (Det) 

Modifiers (Mod) 

A determiner is word, phrase or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase in the context. Determiners are of three types :-

i. Pre-determiners are used to express proportion of the whole, to show surprise or other kinds of emotions. Like all, both, half, double, two-third, what etc 

ii. Central-determiners are used before a noun or a post-determiner and preceded by a pre- determiner. They are used to give information about definiteness and indefiniteness of the NP to modify it and to indicate which entities are being referred to. Like a, an, the 

** Possessives and demonstratives etc..

iii. Post-determiners follow the deternminers and are used to express level or position in a Group, to indicate quantity of the NP, Like Ordinals, Cardinals and all the quantifiers. 

A modifier is an optional element in a phrase structure which is said to modify and add descriptive information to the head word in the structure, on which it is dependent. According to their modifiers are divided into two types:- 

i. Pre-modifiers are placed before the head word. They can be an adjective or a noun and describes or restricts its meaning in some way. 

ii. Post-modifiers are placed after the head word. It follows the NP it qualifies or limits. It is a one-way dependency/function.

NP Modifiers are grammatical functions. They are five in numbers:- 

1. Noun Phrases 

2. Adjective Phrases 

3. Prepositional Phrases 

4. Verb Phrases 

5. Adjective Clauses.

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - PHRASE STRUCTURE: NP

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - CATEGORIES AND CONSTITUENTS

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - CATEGORIES AND CONSTITUENTS

**In this module categories and the constituents which are considered as the objects of syntax (phrase and clause formation) are discussed. 

**A category is a minimal unit in syntax that selects a particular word or lexical item to be put under it. 

**Lexical items that share properties are combined into the same category. 

**According to the typologists Parts of Speech comprises of ten traditional categories, namely Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb, Pronoun, Preposition/Ad position, Conjunction Numeral, Article, and Interjection.

**Syntacticians primarily distinguish categories into lexical categories eg. noun, verb, preposition and adjective. 

**Cognitive view on categories entails that categories correspond to a set of entities featuring identical properties and they tend to exhibit a prototype structure. 

**Part of speech acts like how a word is going to function in the sentence. 

**The current argument shows that the categories can be identified in terms of their morphological and syntactic distribution in a language.

**Two sets of rules in grammar can explain the categories, categorial rules and lexical rules. 

**A constituent is a group of words that functions together as a unit. NP,VP, ADJP, AdvP and PPs are all called constituents. 

**If a group words can be replaced by single word or lexical item then the group of words will qualify as a constituent. This test is called as replacement test. 

**If a group words can be produced as an answer to a question, then that group of words can form one constituent. 

**In case a group of words can be moved within a sentence then that will confirm the group as a constituent. iii) Constituency hood can also be attested through passivization.

** Ellipsis test is widely used for the constituency hood of the VP. In this test, the VP is dropped from the second clause and replaced with did so too.

**Coordinate structures are constituents linked by a conjunction like and - or. Only constituents of the same syntactic category can be conjoined.

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - CATEGORIES AND CONSTITUENTS

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - MORPHO-PHONEMICS

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - MORPHO-PHONEMICS

Phonology is regarded as the foundation for other branches of linguistics. Morpheme, a minimal distinctive unit of meaning, constitutes of nothing but a set of phoneme(s), a minimal unit of sound. The phonemes tend to behave interestingly when they get combined to produce a morpheme or other longer units such as syllables, words, phrases and sentences. Their combine (phonological) effect often crosses over so called boundaries in several subtle and visible ways. Sometimes the effect could be synchronic and sometimes it may be diachronic in nature. These effects may be regular or completely sporadic in their occurrences. In the discipline of morphophonemics, we study as to how morphological and phonological factors affect each other usually at morpheme boundaries involving separate phonemes. Morphophonemic properties of English or any other language for that matter are of great importance in order to analyze other linguistic properties of that language.

 
INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - MORPHO-PHONEMICS

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - WORD FORMATION IN ENGLISH

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - WORD FORMATION IN ENGLISH 

We can summarize this module in the words of Alexander Onysko and Sascha Michel - "[R]ecent voices stressing the importance of investigating word formation in the light of cognitive processes can be interpreted from two general perspectives. First of all, they indicate that a structural approach to the architecture of words and a cognitive view are not incompatible. On the contrary, both perspectives try to work out regularities in language. What sets them apart is the basic vision of how language is encapsulated in the mind and the ensuing choice of terminology in the description of the processes.. . [C]ognitive linguistics concedes closely to the self-organizing nature of humans and their language, whereas generative-structuralist perspectives represent external boundaries as given in the institutionalized order of human interaction."

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - WORD FORMATION IN ENGLISH