Hi, on reflection I was wondering what your thoughts about NPs with a direct object marker are. Clearly a generic NP rule would cause over generation as subject NPs with a direct object marker would be generated.
James Christian On 19 June 2010 21:59, <[email protected]> wrote: > James, > > On 19 Jun 2010 at 14:37, James Christian wrote: > > > > > Hi, by syntax I'm assuming you mean the constituent structure of the > > sentence. e.g. things like: > > S --> NP VP > > VP --> V NP > > NP --> (Det) N > > In the LFG formalism such rules are referred to as the c-structure > > of a sentence. What are your > > feelings about functional distinctions? e.g. consider the following > > sentences: > > 1) Mary hit the dog on the head > > 2) Mary hit the dog in the park > > 3) Mary hit the dog on Monday > > 4) Mary hit the dog on the head in the park on Monday > > Sentences 1, 2 and 3 could be generated with similar c-structures > > but the PP's in each clearly > > have different functional meanings. That is to say that the PP in 1 > > indicates the part of the dog > > that was hit, the PP in 2 indicates where the dog was and the PP in > > 3 indicates the time the dog > > was hit such that we can combine the three different functions and > > produce unambiguous > > sentence 4. > > For this reason I find a c-structure definition of PP's to be > > inadequate. Different PP's clearly have > > different functions. The most common functions being temporal PP's > > and locative PP's. We even > > see that there is some grammatical structure to the way that these > > PP's can be used. Consider > > the following sentences: > > 5) Mary hit the dog on Monday on the head in the park > > 6) Mary hit the dog in the park on Monday on the head > > 7) Mary hit the dog on the head on Monday in the park > > While the common meaning behind sentences 4, 5, 6 and 7 can be > > extracted by a native > > speaker of English some version of the sentence is more acceptable > > than others as ranking > > experiments would show. > > This is precisely why I go with a strict separation between syntax and > semantics. The > internal structure of the PP is the same regardless of what it "means": > > PP -> P NP > > This phrase structure rule (the same as your c-structure as far as I know, > I just use an older > term because I'm an older term myself ;-) describes virtually all > prepositional phrases in BH. > Once we start looking at function or meaning, we're out of the realm of > syntax. > Syntactically, 5, 6 and 7 differ in the order of the PP's and nothing > else. The order of these > PP's is determined by meaning/semantics, i.e. what makes the most "sense" > to the speaker > and hearer, but that is not a syntactic decision. Syntactically all three > are well-formed: NP > subject, VP predicate with NP direct object followed by a string of > properly formed adjuncts > (in this case, PP's). > > Does that clear it up? I believe this approach can be vastly useful for > discovering a > generative grammar of BH because it takes us down to the very basic > structure of the > language and, as you suggested in a separate post, works from the bottom up > rather than > the reverse. > > > Dave Washburn > > http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur > _______________________________________________ > b-hebrew mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew > _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
