[Introduction to Linguistics] Word Classes and Constituency
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ก.พ. 2015
- Visit our website: bit.ly/1zBPlvm
Subscribe on TH-cam: bit.ly/1vWiRxW
Like us on Facebook: on. 1vWwDRc
Old video. Updated video in the playlist on the channel.
Today we look at word classes and constituency in syntax. We look at a few constituency tests and do a practice problem.
See if you can find the constituents in the following sentence:
"The boy on the train arrived late to the party"
Hello, welcome to TheTrevTutor. I'm here to help you learn your college courses in an easy, efficient manner. If you like what you see, feel free to subscribe and follow me for updates. If you have any questions, leave them below. I try to answer as many questions as possible. If something isn't quite clear or needs more explanation, I can easily make additional videos to satisfy your need for knowledge and understanding.
The only one who explains good , thank you so much ,keep it up !!
You are a gifted teacher!
you are the best , thank you so much
Dear sir, thank you for your work.
The videos of lecture are so excellent that I got much help.
Gracias por los videos!!! Me ayudan bastante
your explenatoions helped me a lot, grazie, antonio
you're the best teacher that i have ever seen.
If he doesn't show his face, how were you able to see him??
very good! compliment from Taiwan!! thank you!
Learn a lot!! Thank you!
I found this very helpful thanks. I'm wondering if there is any hierarchy to constituents, ie. subconstituents, and in what context they may be referred to as such? For example if I was doing some syntactic analysis would I simply label each constituent a,b,c, and so on and then refer to them as such, or would I have to refer to a NP constituent or VP constituent?
Thank you for the video
Hi! Thank you so much for these insanely informative videos! May I ask, do adjectives have categories like nouns do? (persons, places, things) Greets from Eastern Europe! :)
Referring & Attributive, sort of. If you look at my [Syntax] series, there's a video on adjectives.
I'm a bit confused. . . Is tense overlooked in a coordination test? The sentence says "The blue key opens the door. . ." But when we add in "and red key" shouldn't "opens" change to "open"? Can you help me understand this?
'To the patio the blue key opens the door' sounds fine to me.
A prepositional phrase cannot be the subject of the sentence.
I like the way how you explain it
What kind of questions can be expected from such topics?
It seems that I can use QA to replace "the blue" with "which" in "The blue key opens the door to the patio" and get "Which key opens the door to the patio". That doesn't seem right to me, so is my intuition about "the blue" not being a constituent wrong, or am I applying the QA method incorrectly?
Do we need to do all 5 tests before we determine constituent/not?
What is the syntactic distribution ??
Thanks for these videos TrevTutor! I'm completely new to linguistics and just wondered what purpose identifying all of these multiple constituents serves? It seems a more complicated and vague notion than working with vp's, ap's etc, or subject / verb / object etc. I guess I'm just trying to contextualise all this.
PPs, APs, etc. are constituents. Constituent tests help us figure out which words combine together to make these phrases. Or more simply, constituent tests help us figure out which branches join together.
TheTrevTutor your video is so much help full thanks alot
i still don't get the coordination method..
constituency is a little bit hard to get at first but it gets easier with practice.
these videos are amazing. can clefting be a constituency test?
Yes!
I think so .
Isn't that the same as the substitution test?
Thanks so much for the videos! Quick question: What is the best constituency test to group auxiliary verbs with main verbs?
With the sentence: "He was eating under the tree" I can group "He was" by asking, "Who was eating under the tree?" "He was". However no test I applied could isolate "was eating."
Any help would be appreciated!
Both "he was" and "was eating" are not constituents.
"He was" is not a valid answer to the first question, because "was" is also in the question. The question would have to be "Who eating under the tree?" in order for "He was" to be a valid constituent in a response.
"John was eating the broccoli." "John was [eating the broccoli] and [setting the table]" shows that [eating the broccoli] is a constituent on its own. Which means that [was eating] couldn't be a constituent, since "eating" definitely already combines with [eating the broccoli].
Thanks, that helps a lot!
Very talented
do we always have to replace the whole unit in constituency test or we can replace single words as well like play can be replaced like other verbs like laugh or eat...
All "single words" are technically a constituent, so it'd be pointless to look for constituents consisting of single words.
i think every atom in the last constituency example can be made into a constituent. is this standard? is the point to start from these atomic elements and group larger and larger elements?
Every atom is a constituent. Atoms form together to make bigger constituents.
Awesome video! But why is "opens" (example sentence for constituency) not a constituent?
All individual words on their own are constituents. We use constituency mainly for phrases or groups of 2 or more words, since it's a given that you can substitute a verb with another verb, or a noun with another noun.
The dog ran.
The cat ran.
The dog cleaned.
These examples aren't that interesting as far as structure goes compared to something like:
It cleaned.
Because we can substitute "The dog" with "It", we can see that "the dog" is a constituent, etc.
What if i used 'Sent' in 'I sent the Letter' Doesn't it become Transitive then? that makes it contextual, doesn't it?
+Nina Sud It's more commonly used as a ditransitive, but I suppose it could also be transitive, yes.
It's hard to say definitely whether the English in my videos are 100% accurate, since other parts of the world/country may use phrases that I don't. "I sent the letter" on its own is grammatical to me too, but it hardly ever appears in speech where I live without "to ___" or "last week" or some third argument, so it's easy to forget about its transitive use.
I might should consider more examples. (Fun fact, that's completely grammatical in Philadelphia)
"The blue key and red key OPEN the door to the patio" works, but I don't see how it works with the word "opens" instead. Can someone explain?
Probably just a dialect difference. I find "opens" weirder than "open" in that construction.
Hello - you are helping to clarify this, so thank you. My question is - if you don't find a constituency in one test (for instance, when you performed the movement test you found that [to the patio] and [the patio] both didn't work, if they DO work in another test then they are constituents anyway? If this is true, then you are just looking to find as many constituents, in as many tests, as possible? So you must run all four tests in every sentence to find the most constituents? Because if I only ran three tests I might not have found all the constituents...
+Michael Youmans Yes, that would be the case. Some tests can't capture certain constituents, so you might have to run other tests. Fortunately, you only have to do this for the first 30-40 sentences you analyze in your life, and then you'll get a good intuition about what does and doesn't work. You'll see patterns in sentences and won't have to worry about asking "is ______ a constituent" since you'll already have an understanding that it is or isn't.
Awesome - thank you. I might have some more questions if you don't mind - my adjunct (not linguistically :) is trying to get her PhD and for an intro class she is really kicking our a**es. Thanks again.
Michael
Hi there sir! Great video! So I was discussing with a psychologist friend of mine what we would consider emotional words. Take this idea. "Feelings that are beyond words." So in this case... a word that is indescribable about someone. Would that word still be an adjective to describe the person (noun) or something else entirely? We are talking a word that is emotionally driven. Thanks!
An emotionally driven word? If you can't make it a word, then it wouldn't have a category. if it's an emotion like "love", then it would be a noun. If you could describe the word as "the feeling of ____", then it's a noun.
Answers my question. Thank you!
I'm not totally convinced that "blue key" counts as a constituent in that example. At least, it's not proven to be one by the coordination test. Adding a parallel phrase would violate subject-verb agreement -- but then again, if SVA is considered prescriptivist, I suppose it doesn't matter.
Substitution shows that it's a constituent as well.
"The [blue key]" -> "The [thing]". The thing opens the door to the patio.
In non-intro linguistics, "blue key" is also an NP, not an AdjP, so substitution can be shown more directly.
I see. That raises another question for me.
Is the determiner "the" not part of a constituent? I think of this question-answer: [What] opens the door to the patio? [The blue key] opens the door to the patio.
Would that suggest that "blue key" is its own constituent nested inside of "the blue key"?
Yes.
[The [blue key]]
is intransitive and mono-transitive verbs are same thing?
No, mono-transitive is just "transitive" as presented in the video.
what abou "the car is modified" is it intranstitive?
Yes.
do i understand this correctly ,are constituents like quantum in phyics. where its the smallest reducible ,yet meaningful "piece" .
What about the sentence: John ate the dog's dinner, would that be Ditransitive?
No. "The dog's dinner" is the object noun phrase. It's still transitive and of the form "x ate y".
Thank you! Kinda figured this out after posting it as the dogs dinner is one thing.
I'm sorry but I'm not sure whether I can agree with your constituents. "The blue key and rusted knife...", to me, should rather be "the blue key and the rusted knife...", same with "...the door to the patio and hatch to the cellar", which should be "the door to the patio and the hatch to the cellar". But maybe that is because English is not my native language...
Both are fine, but I think "The small cat and angry dog" would be more common than "the small cat and the angry dog". Dialectal differences might be there too.