Session Notes Understanding Syntax April 26, 2019

Here are a few notes on our first seminar session on Friday, April 26, 2019. Session notes will
be made by myself or students after each of our sessions.

1. Intro & Basic Game Plan

First, I introduced myself to the class and each of the students did the same. In the course of
the session, a few basic questions concerning this seminar were addressed, which I will list
here in the form of bullet points:

• Teaching material: This seminar will mainly be based on two books, namely, Maggie
Tallerman, Understanding Syntax, 4th edition, Routledge 2014, and Nicholas Sobin,
Syntactic Analysis. The Basics, Wiley-Blackwell 2011. I have already sent around a
PDF of the first book to all participants. PDFs of both books are available in a folder
named “Understanding Syntax” on the desktop of the computers in Rooms 108 and
112. You don’t need as password to get access.

• The second book deals a lot with syntactic trees as a means of syntactic analysis.
There is a very simple program called TreeForm that allows you to draw trees your-
self. See https://sourceforge.net/projects/treeform/. All students are expected to down-
load this program and experiment with it. You need Java on your computer to run it.

• The question arose whether I am a professor & I took the opportunity to clarify that
I’m not; I am a doctor (PhD), but I would suggest that students forget about all this
crap and call me just Michael. I will call them by their first name in turn. In German
communication, please simply use du, as I intend to do when addressing you.

• Another pertinent question is, of course, what the requirements are to get a Schein for
the seminar. There are three: 1. Regular participation. That doesn’t mean anything like
a three-strikes-and you’re-out-rule, but simply that you show your interest by actually
participating in the seminar. 2. Presentation in class in teams of two or three people,
where material from both books is presented for 30, maximally 45 minutes. 3. Term
paper with at least 15 pages of text. The grade will be based primarily on the term pa-
per, but I will also take the other two aspects into account when I grade that paper.

2. In Medias Res 1: Constituent Order

We also started right away with looking into syntactic questions a little bit. This discussion
was centered on two questions, namely, the core constituent order of languages in terms of the
constituents of subject (S), verb (V), and object (O), and the analysis of sentences in terms of
syntactic trees. Looking at the first question first, concerning the order of S, V, and O, there
are six possibilities: SVO, SOV, VSO, and the mirror images of these (OVS, VOS, and OSV).
Because they are so rare, we did not deal with the latter three, but in the course of the seminar,
we will. We then managed to classify a few of the better-known languages according to their
constituent order:

• SVO: English, French, Italian…

• SOV: Japanese, Turkish, Old Greek, Latin…

• VSO: Arabic, Welsh…

Actually, these make up from 90 to 95 percent of all languages where such a classification is
meaningful (there is a fair amount of languages that have a very free constituent order, that is,
they can use many or all of the six possibilities given above).
Then the question arose which constituent order German has. A very normal sentence such as

• Tim sah John (SVO) / Das Mädchen sah den Jungen

clearly seems to show that German is SVO, just as English is. But things get more complicat-
ed once we look at sentences with an auxiliary. Here, German and English part company:

• Tim hat John gesehen (SAuxOV) / Das Mädchen hat den Jungen gesehen

• Tim has seen John (SAuxVO) / The girl has seen the boy
The subject still comes first in both German and English, but now, in German we have OV (as
in Japanese and Turkish), while in English, we still have VO.

3. In Medias Res 2: Tree Analysis

When analyzing the question of constituent order, it quickly becomes helpful to turn to de-
composing (the technical term is “parsing”) a sentence into its parts in order to understand
what’s going on. This is often done in Linguistics 101.
There, you are told that sentences actually consist, not simply of words, but of a number of
“phrases”: noun phrases (NP), verb phrases (VP), adjectival phrases (AP), prepositional
phrases (PP) and so on. These phrases are actually extensions of their most important words,
the so-called heads, into larger entities:

• The noun (N) student is extended into this clever student of linguistics (NP); head:
man; full phrase: this clever student of linguistics

• The verb (V) kiss is extended into eagerly kiss this stupid man (VP); head: kiss; full
phrase: eagerly kiss this stupid man

• The adjective (A) proud is extended into very proud of Tim (AP); head: bright; full
phrase: very proud of Tim

• The preposition (P) into is extended into right into disaster (PP); head: into; full
phrase: right into disaster
Partitioning a simple sentence such as

• The boy saw the girl

into phrases grouped around their respective most important words
gives us a tree such as the one seen to the right:
This also fits neatly with what we were told at school, namely, that
a sentence can be divided into a subject and a predicate. In this analysis, the subject is what
the sentence is about, in this case, the NP the boy, and the predicate, in this case the VP saw
the girl, is what is being said about the subject.
In this particular sense of “aboutness,” the subject is the most important part of the sentence.
But as we will see in a moment, it is not the head of the sentence.
For that, we return to the sentences in Part 2 above in
that we add the auxiliary have, yielding sentences
such as The boy has seen the girl, or for some varia-
tion, The girl has kissed the boy.
In the previous tree, the sentence S consisted of
phrases, but was not itself a phrase. We have now
changed that. We say that the auxiliary has is the head
of the sentence because it determines

• the perfective form of the following verb V

(which is the head of the verb phrase VP), and

• the number and person of the subject noun N (the head of the noun phrase NP).
Aux now forms a unit – the technical term in sentence analysis is constituent – with the VP to
its right. This unit is called Aux’ – or intermediate Aux – because we still have to add another
element, namely, the subject NP. NP + Aux’ then yield the full auxiliary phrase AuxP.
This is a neat result. Sentences consist of phrases, each of which has a head, and they are
themselves phrases that also have a head, namely, Aux.
Let us also, in a last tree, get back to German.
Once again, we see how the presence of a form
of haben determines the form of the head of the
VP. It must be the perfect form geküsst. More-
over, the person and number features on haben
determine a) that it must be pronounced as
habt, and crucially, b) that the subject must
also have the features 2nd person and plural.
We also see that verb and object have apparent-
ly swapped positions, with the NP object coming before the verb V.
As we go along, we will get an even more comprehensive grasp of German sentence structure.

4. Tasks for Friday, May 3

• Read the “Note to the Student” and Chapter 1 of Tallerman’s Understanding Syntax &
note any comments and questions you may have.

• Read the “Introductory Notes and References” and Chapter 1 of Sobin’s Syntactic
Analysis & note any comments and questions you may have.

• Download TreeForm and experiment with building your own trees. If you’re success-
ful, send me one or more exemplars of your trees (to mikschiff@t-online.de with cc to
mikschiff@gmx.de). You can do so by simply clicking on the little camera symbol in
the midst of the top row of symbols above the working space of TreeForm and pasting
the tree into your email. If you don’t manage, don’t worry – we’ll talk about it in class.

• If possible, bring your laptops or other devices to the session.

All best & a wonderful Primo del Mayo – Michael (April 30, 2019)