10
votes
Accepted
"STARBUCKESE" syntax problem
I would analyze this as the result of a fixed phrase (which contains a preposition) fossilizing and becoming used as an adjective.
An (in house) lawyer
An (over the counter) drug
A (venti with room) ...
- 64.1k
9
votes
Is triple branching necessary in making a syntax tree for 'the girl in the room waved to me'?
Most generative theories of syntax insist that all branching must be binary, mostly for theoretical reasons: it's taken as an axiom that syntax trees are built using the Merge operation, which ...
- 64.1k
8
votes
Accepted
A question about C-command
Traditionally, c-command does not reach out of a prepositional phrase. Here are two definitions of c-command taken from the literature:
C-command: A node A c-commands a node B if, and only if A's ...
- 5,658
7
votes
Accepted
What software is used to make these X-bar trees?
This is almost certainly done with LaTeX, or one of its friends, and the tikz-qtree package. It is an improvement of the qtree package with nicer node placement. If you are not familiar with LaTeX, ...
- 3,768
6
votes
Accepted
Analyzing negation with a syntactic tree
Totally depends on your syntax theory.
Some prefer to do it with a NegP, as suggested bei @eijen:
Others assume the negation to be in I:
And then again you could see negation as an adverb ...
- 6,478
6
votes
Syntax Trees examples
Although what is "correct" always depends on theory, there are various things that are definitely not quite right with your trees.
Tree #1
the founder of the church of England
The whole thing ...
- 6,478
6
votes
Accepted
Who is credited for the syntax tree in synthetic linguistics
"Tree" has been a thing in mathematics for some time. "Phrase structure" is a particular mathematical theory of syntax introduced by Chomsky. As far as I know the first phrase structure tree is on p. ...
- 82.2k
6
votes
Accepted
How to treat adverbial phrases in X-bar theory
Short answer
'[I]n the many places where I was guilty of the reprehensible and shockingly common confusion of the notions of "adverb" and "adverbial"; these defects, for which I ...
- 3,962
6
votes
Is triple branching necessary in making a syntax tree for 'the girl in the room waved to me'?
As far as I know X' typically only allows binary branching.
Regardless, in this case tree A (on the left) is definitely better than tree B (on the right) as B suggests that "in" is a ...
- 6,993
5
votes
Infinitive verbs in syntax tree
This answer is based on chapter 2 (section 8: "Infinitival to) of Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the structure of English by Andrew Radford (2004), and "Auxiliaries: To's company" (2012) by Robert ...
- 194
5
votes
How do contractions work in syntactic movement?
Summarizing the paper by Zwicky and Pullum commented by @sumelic above: They suggest that most contractions are clitics, but <-n't> is an inflection.
Most English contractions, such as <-'s> &...
- 6,831
5
votes
How do contractions work in syntactic movement?
I'm not convinced the notion "clitic" is really needful to explain what is going on. Some syntactic rules depend on what the words are, and you can't always trust traditional English orthography to ...
- 12.4k
5
votes
Accepted
How do you draw a syntax tree for a sentence with a dummy subject?
Good question! It depends on the details of your sentence.
For sentences like "it is raining" or "there is a rhinoceros", the dummy subjects "it" and "there" act for all (syntactic) intents and ...
- 64.1k
5
votes
Why two appearances of the past participle "ganado" in this derivation?
One of the main reasons for positing a v layer separate from V is the behavior of ditransitive verbs. In particular, all the objects of a ditransitive verb seem to form a constituent of their own, ...
- 64.1k
5
votes
Accepted
Why are these adjectives being presented as adverbs in syntax tree (Carnie, 3rd Edition)?
The distinction between "adjective" and "adverb" is not always clear in English, where many words can be used interchangeably as either. But the usual definition is that adjectives ...
- 64.1k
4
votes
How order of the syntax tree is formally/strictly proven?
Good question. Constituency is the theory behind such a tree diagram. There are a bunch of different Constituency tests which you can do on paper:
[ [John] [ [hit] [ [ [the] ] [ball] ] ] ]
Wh-...
- 638
4
votes
How does an AdvP attach in X-bar syntax?
The AdvP here isn't a complement or a specifier, but a separate third thing: an adjunct, a modifier that's attached to an entire, completed phrase.
In other words, you have your VP "love the ...
- 64.1k
4
votes
Accepted
Argumentation for the existence of Tense phrase
The usual argument is that the present-tense marking only ever appears once in the phrase. If you put another verb before the main one, that one takes the tense marking instead:
John spends […]
John ...
- 64.1k
4
votes
What is HMC in generative grammar?
This stands for "Head Movement Constraint". It was introduced by Lisa Travis in her 1984 MIT dissertation Parameters and Effects of Word Order Variation, p. 131:
Head Movement Constraint: ...
- 3,768
3
votes
Complex Sentence
A complementizer converts some phrase (usually an S) into a complement. In the form of a phrase structure rule,
Complement -> Complementizer S
In your example, the complementizer "that" converts ...
- 12.4k
3
votes
How to search Penn TreeBank for arbitrary patterns?
There are quite a few tools which can do this.
For example:
Tregex mentioned by Jon Gauthier.
I know a few others:
PML-TQ https://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/pmltq/
Tundra https://weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebingen....
- 131
3
votes
Is there a grammar of syntax that takes into account inherent syntactic ambiguity in natural languages?
Yes, cognitive and construction grammars do take ambiguity into account. However, they have to give up a lot of the formal properties of traditional constituency and dependency grammars.
It resolves ...
- 10.6k
3
votes
Are there right-branching agglutinative languages?
Elamite is agglutinative and (mainly) right-branching, though quotative phrases are left branching.
https://archive.org/stream/TheElamiteLanguage1969/Reiner1969TheElamiteLanguagetext#page/n15/mode/...
- 23.8k
3
votes
What is the x-bar tree of 'I am proud of my students'? (having trouble with proud)
(Disclaimer: I am not a specialist in Syntax)
According to the X-bar Theory, Adjectives, as any other lexical category, undergo three different levels of projection. They can have Complements (which ...
- 2,549
3
votes
Accepted
Parse Tree Formatter Tools?
Here is a script I quickly assembled from pieces of code I had lying around:
https://trinket.io/python3/a33a025467?toggleCode=true&showInstructions=true
Beware that this script parses your tree ...
- 6,478
3
votes
Accepted
Syntax tree for "the Middle East"
"Middle East" is generally considered a single lexeme. While it started out as an ordinary adjective + noun combination (along with "Near East" and "Far East"), it's "fossilized" now: you can't swap ...
- 64.1k
3
votes
V to T movement in German
du Schach gespielt hast as you say is an embedded clause, and string-identical to the underlying form Carnie is referring to. (To answer your first question.)
As for the question on how to detect V-&...
- 638
3
votes
Trying to add labels/descriptions and boxes to syntax tree in LaTeX
Here is a version using the package forest:
\usepackage{forest}
\useforestlibrary{linguistics}
\forestapplylibrarydefaults{linguistics}
\usetikzlibrary{positioning}
\forestset{sn edges/.style={for ...
- 6,478
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