Constituent

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  Sentence structure and the reading process

  • I. M. Schlesinger(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  For instance, in the sentence. The woman teacher, who had taught him Latin, was very pleased. the words teacher, Latin, and pleased are boundaries of syntactic Constituents. (The fact that there are others, according to the level of analysis, need not concern us here). Now, a reader who takes in at a glance the first two words, The woman, may well believe that these are a Constituent of the sentence he is going to read; the actual structure of the sentence becomes clear to him only by continuing reading. Likewise, when he has perused the sentence as far as the word him, he may, in the absence of any knowledge of the following word, construe him as being the last word of a Constituent. In the following, such a would-be Constituent will be called a chain, and a real syntactical Constituent will also be called a chain. A more formal definition of this term, as contrasted with the term Constituent might be as follows (using Chomsky's (1961) terminology) : A section of a terminal string of sentence Si is a Constituent, if it is dominated by any symbol in the P-marker of S i; and is a chain if (a) it is dominated by any symbol in the P-marker of any sentence Sj, and (b) the part of the terminal string 30 THE SYNTACTIC Constituent AS UNIT OF DECODING to the left of it (i.e., preceding it) is made up of consecutive Constituents of Sj. It will be seen that a chain which is not a Constituent comprises the first words of a Constituent. The hypothesis to be tested is, then, as follows: The last word in the EVS tends to be the last word in a chain. To measure the EVS, ten subjects were each asked to read aloud passages from sociological and educational articles of a non-technical nature in Hebrew. The experimenter switched off the light at predetermined places in the text, between two words, and asked the subject which words he had seen, when the light was still on, in addition to those he had read aloud.

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  Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing

  100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax

  • Emily M. Bender(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Springer

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 7 Heads, arguments and adjuncts #51 Words within sentences form intermediate groupings called Constituents. 61 The words in a sentence are not simply related to each other as elements in a list. Rather, they are organized into groupings, called Constituents, which then relate to other words in the sentence as a unit. Such structure is made explicit in Constituent structure representations such as that of the Penn Treebank [Marcus et al., 1993], but is also implicit in dependency representations, such as that used in the Prague Dependency Treebank [Hajic et al, 2000 J. This is illustrated in Figure 7.1, which shows three different structures for the same example. Figure 7. la gives the Penn Treebank representation, Figure 7.lb the Constituent structure assigned by the English Resource Grammar [ERG; Flickinger 2000, 2011], and Figure 7.lc the 'analytical layer' of the Prague Dependency Treebank annotation. 1 While the two Constituent structures (Figure 7.la and b) are not the same, they do agree that Dick and Darmin form a Constituent, as do your and office and call and your office. The dependency structure in Figure 7.lc reflects two of these three Constituents: Dick is shown as a dependent of Darmin, which then relates to the rest of the structure (as the subject of the verb); similarly, your is a dependent of office. In the dependency structure, however, there is no equivalent of the VP Constituent call your office, seen in the other two representations. Constituent structures can be validated by constituency tests. These include coordination (each coordinand being assumed to be a Constituent), specific positions within sentences, such as pre-subject position in English, and substitutability of a phrase by a single word. These are illustrated in (57a-c) respectively, where the Constituents in question are set offby square brackets: 2 (57) a. Kim [read a book], [gave it to Sandy], and [left]. b. You said I should read the book and [read it] I did.

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  Linguistics

  • Anne E. Baker, Kees Hengeveld, Anne E. Baker, Kees Hengeveld(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Constituent Order. Chapters 6 through 9 cover the domain of what is known as syntax.

  The last chapter in this part of the book is also concerned with sentences. But instead of looking at their formal properties and syntax, it will be concerned with their meaning. The crucial point about language use is that a certain form is used to express a certain meaning. Chapter 10, Sentence Meaning, will take us into the field of semantics.

  Passage contains an image

  Chapter 6 Constituents and Word Classes

  6.1 INTRODUCTION

  As we discussed in Section 2.4.3, the example in (1) can conjure up two different situations.

  1. (1) The Prime Minister has decided on the high-speed train.

  In the first situation the high-speed train is the thing the Prime Minister decides on buying or travelling in, while in the second situation he takes a decision while being on the train. In the first case the word on combines with the verb decided to form decided on, while in the second case it combines with the high-speed train, to form on the high-speed train. It all depends on how we analyse the sentence into units. Sentence units such as these are called Constituents. Constituents are thus the meaningful parts that make up a sentence. We will discuss their properties in this chapter.

  The second subject we will discuss in this chapter is that of word classes. The clause in (1) consists of nine different words. In the written language these are separated by spaces. These nine words serve different functions in the clause, not all of them equally important, as we can see when we turn (1) into a newspaper heading (2).

  1. (2) Prime Minister decides on high-speed train.

  Example (2) consists of words with a clear, concrete meaning, such as decides and train, which are indispensable for understanding the content of the clause. Words with an abstract meaning such as the and has have been omitted, but, interestingly, this does not make the clause harder to understand. Still, words like the and has

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  Language Acquisition and the Functional Category System

  • Peter Jordens(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  2 Lexical vs. functional elements 2.1 Structure in language Communication among human beings occurs by means of spoken or written lan-guage, sign language or pictures, gesture or body language. Communication is mutual understanding. It can only be achieved if the means of communication within a community are the same for all its members. The means of communica-tion within a linguistic community are the utterances of a particular language. Both the production of an utterance and its perception are processes of creative construction that are based on a shared knowledge system of linguistic compe-tence. It is this knowledge system of linguistic competence that enables speakers of a particular language to understand and create utterances that have neither been heard nor produced before. The knowledge system that the processes of language perception and pro-duction are based on is a system of entities and rules which serves the purpose of linguistic structure building. Linguistic structure building leads to an utter-ance structure that is hierarchically organized. That is, utterances are organized in terms of phrasal Constituents (phrases), phrasal Constituents are organized in terms of word forms, word forms are organized in terms of meaningful entities (morphemes), and, finally, meaningful entities are organized in terms of units of sound (phonemes) that are used to produce meaningful contrasts. For example, an utterance such as de koek is op (the cake is all gone) is a linguistic entity that consists of two phrases de koek (the cake) and is op (is all gone). Both phrases are related by the fact that one Constituent ( is op ) qualifies the other ( de koek ). At this highest level of syntactic structure, utterances can be analysed in terms of Constituents with either of these functions. The Constituent that serves the function of a qualification is termed the ‘predicate’, the constitu-ent that is qualified is termed the ‘external argument’ or ‘the subject’.

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  A Concise Introduction to Linguistics

  • Bruce M. Rowe, Diane P. Levine(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This is because at a very has no meaning in itself and is not a proper “assembly” relevant to the sentence under examination. Another way of saying this is that a very beautiful painting could be given a label as to its function in the sentence and at a very could not. The manner in which Constituents of a sentence are arranged is related to the meaning of the sentence. However, Constituents can be arranged ungrammatically, and the sentence might still have the same meaning as it would have had if the Constituents had been arranged grammatically. A native speaker of English will recognize that the following sentence is ungrammatical, but might still understand what it means: Will look the student at paintings very beautiful. Also, a sentence might be well-formed (grammatical) but not have any meaning, as exemplified by the “Jabberwocky” example on page 128. Labeling the Constituents of a sentence The words The smallest Constituents of a sentence are the morphemes that make it up. Morphemes make up words. Each word can be labeled as to its part of speech or the subtype of its part of speech (lexical category; see Table 4.1, Lexical Categories). For an example, examine the sentence we have been considering: The lexicon A lexicon for a specific language is a list of all the morphemes that are used in that language to form words. A dictionary often lists only the words. Each morpheme in a lexicon is accompanied by a set of specifications. These specifications include information on the meaning, pronunciation, and various other grammatical features of each morpheme. The lexicon specifies whether each lexical entry (each morpheme in the lexicon) is a prefix, suffix, or root. If it is a root, then the lexical category is also included. Any co-occurrence restrictions are also mentioned by labeling each root as to the subtype of the category, such as whether a verb is transitive or intransitive. A co-occurrence restriction is a limitation on the use of a morpheme

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  A Modern Course in English Syntax

  • Liliane Haegeman, Herman Wekker(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Harvard can be seen to be tightly connected: they form a Constituent. They are in fact only rarely separated, and the resulting sentence is then not very good.

  (22)	?Harvard George allegedly cheated at.

  Here follows a list of some of the tests which can be used to identify strings like at Harvard as Constituents:

  (a)	The string at Harvard can be replaced by one word (there):

  (b)	One can ask a question of the following form:

  Where did George allegedly cheat?

  and the answer will be at Harvard. Where corresponds to (or ‘questions’) at Harvard.

  (c)	At and Harvard can be moved around together, as the sentences (11)–(16) illustrate.
  (d)	At Harvard can be the focus element X in a cleft sentence:

  It was at Harvard that George allegedly cheated.

  These tests are used to determine the Constituent-hood of at Harvard. Their applicability may be summed up as follows:

  	At+Harvard
  (a)	Substitution by one word	: yes
  (b)	Questioned by one word	: yes
  (c)	Move together	: yes
  (d)	Can be the focus element X in a cleft sentence	: yes

  It is the purpose of this chapter to break down sentences into their components: their Constituent structure will be analysed. We shall be looking at the Constituents in hierarchical order, starting with the largest unit of our analysis, the sentence, going down to the level of the clause, the next unit down on the scale, and then down to the phrase and to the word. The structure of words will only be discussed where relevant.

  Throughout this book the Constituent structure of sentences, clauses, phrases, etc. will be indicated by means of labelled bracketing (see 1.2.2 ) or by means of tree diagrams (see 1.2.3

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  Psychology of Language (PLE: Psycholinguistics)

  An Introduction to Sentence and Discourse Processes

  • Murray Singer(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  The dragon ate Chicago. Recursive rules account for the infinity of possible sentences in any natural language. Fourth, transformational rules (Chomsky, 1957, 1965) transform the sentences generated by rules such as (3a)–(3c) into closely related forms, including passives, questions, and negatives.

  Psychological Reality of Sentence Constituents

  Numerous studies have addressed the question of whether the sentence Constituent, a linguistic concept, functions as a psychological unit. This section considers the nature of the linguistic units that are retained in working memory, and the role of the sentence Constituent in the perception of sentences. Then, the contribution of sentence Constituents to the construction of propositions is examined.

  Retention of Sentence Constituents in Working Memory. If sentence Constituents function as psychological units, then sentence information ought to be accumulated in working memory in sets corresponding to Constituents. Consider, for example, the sentence, Tom was upset because he lost his job. On the basis of this sentence, people should store words in groups such as because he lost his job rather than was upset because he. If the Constituent indeed forms the unit of working memory analysis, it is also necessary to ask whether this analysis examines Constituent units corresponding to words, phrases, clauses, or entire sentences.

  Several studies of people’s memory for sentence form, examined in chapter 2 , bear on this issue. Recall, for example, the experiment of Caplan (1972). The participants read or heard sentences, and had to make a recognition judgment about a test word after each one. For example, the test word freezing followed both (4) and (5).

  (4)	Unless the temperature drops below freezing, rain will fall.
  (5)	Unless the storm center moves farther north, freezing rain will fall.

  Recognition time was longer for freezing

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  Analysing Sentences

  An Introduction to English Syntax

  • Noel Burton-Roberts(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Sentence structure

  Constituents

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003118916-2

  Structure

  This book is about English syntax . As explained in the Introduction, the syntax of a language is a matter of the form, the positioning and the grouping of the elements that figure in the sentences of that language. In a word, it’s about their STRUCTURE . But structure is a very general concept that applies to any complex thing, whether it’s a bicycle, a commercial company, or a carbon molecule. When we say something is ‘complex’ we mean, not that it’s complicated (though of course it may be), but that

  a it’s divisible into parts (its Constituents ),

  b there are different kinds of parts (different categories of Constituents),

  c the Constituents are arranged in a certain way, and

  d each Constituent has a specific function in the structure.

  When anything can be analysed in this way, it has structure . And it’s crucial that, more often than not, the Constituents of a complex thing are themselves complex. In other words, the parts themselves have parts and these may in turn have further parts. When this is so, we’re dealing with a hierarchy of parts and with hierarchical structure .

  It’s obvious, for example, that a complex thing like a bicycle isn’t just a random collection of bits and pieces. Suppose you gathered together all the components of a bicycle: metal tubes, hubs, spokes, chain, cable and so on. Try to imagine the range of objects you could construct by fixing them together. Some of these objects might be bicycles, but others wouldn’t remotely resemble a bicycle – though they might make interesting sculptures. And there would probably be intermediate cases – things we’d probably want to say were bicycles, if only because they resembled bicycles more than anything else. So, only some of the possible ways of fitting bicycle components together produce a bicycle. A bicycle consists not just of its components but – more importantly – in the structure

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