Phrases PDF

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Mitschrift/Zusammenfassung zum Thema Phrases...

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Phrases

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When we see a sentence written or hear it spoken, we see or hear a string of words Native speakers feel that in English a sentence is not just a plain sequence of words, they can divide sentences into groups which belong more closely together than others “The weight-loss program was unleashed upon 19-stone Timothy Toast at an exclusive Miami health spa” Constituents in the sentence A constituent can form a close group with another constituent 2 constituents can form a new constituent The single words of a sentence are constituents Constituency Tests can be useful to show up sentences that have multiple meanings, i.e. that show STRUCTURAL AMBIGUITY with ambiguity there is always one interpretation that is more natural because of what we know about the world we can use brackets to show the two different ways the words can be grouped

Constituency Tests  

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Constituent: a string of words which functions as a group of some level All constituency tests are designed to check whether the string in question can function as a unit We use 4 tests:  Substitution  Unit of sense/Sentence fragment  Movement  Co-ordination They are applied only to the string we are interested in, not to the surrounding words When we deal with something that is not a constituent, the result of the test is an ungrammatical sentence No one of these tests is sufficient alone to justify constituent structures you have to apply all the tests and then weigh up the evidence to arrive at a decision

Substitution   

If the string we are investigating can be SUBSTITUTED by a single word, this is an indication that the string is a constituent When using this test, the meaning of the new sentence is not so important There are some words which replace other constituents naturally & are easy to use, i.e. PRONOUNS (he, her, they etc., one [as in the old ones] or wh-words)

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Examples: Mr Toast had dabbled with a variety of slimming methods before he booked himself into the $600-a-day spa as a last resort.  He is a pronoun which refers back to Mr Toast The seven days of extensive food-rejection therapy included neardrowning in a soup-filled Jacuzzi.

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 near-drowning in a soup-filled Jacuzzi can be replaced with a single word: The seven days of extensive food-rejection therapy included this. We can substitute that part of a sentence we want repeated with a question word like who, what, which, when why, where etc.: The seven days of extensive food-rejection therapy included what? A bigger constituent including a verb, e.g. included near-drowning in a soup-filled Jacuzzi, can be replaced i.e. by failed (The seven days of extensive food-rejection therapy included failed)

Unit of sense/Sentence fragment    

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Based on semantic judgements String should form a unit of sense & its meaning should be an identifiable part of the meaning of the whole sentence Based on the assumption that something which forms a syntactic unit will also form a semantic unit Example: What did you say the food-rejection therapy included? OR The foodrejection therapy included what? – Near-drowning in a soup-filled Jacuzzi! If the string itself forms the answer in this way, then you have confirmation that it is a constituent the question has to contain all the material except the string itself

Movement 

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We can move constituents around in a sentence, but we cannot move strings that do not form constituents if a string can be taken out of its place and moved to another part of the sentence the string clearly functions as a unit One important movement rule is FRONTING we shunt elements to the first place in the sentence for special emphasis or focus but not all constituents can be fronted in this way, sometimes when you apply this particular movement test you may produce a sequence that sounds a little unnatural or contrived for this reason it may be easier to create a little context, i.e. by adding additional information Example: Near-drowning in a soup-filled Jacuzzi the seven days of extensive food-rejection therapy included – not daily beatings with barbecued chicken legs! acceptable, theatrical-sounding sentence

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Sometimes strings can be moved to the front or the end of a sentence without anything else changing, sometimes the movement of one constituent will involve other changes in the sentence CLEFTING: builds a new structure in the sentence ”cleaves” an original sentence into two clauses

Example: It was near-drowning in a soup-filled Jacuzzi that the seven days of extensive food-rejection therapy included – not daily beatings with barbecued chicken legs. Formula for forming a cleft is straightforward: 1. The first gap is the is the place where the string which we suspect of being a constituent 3. The second gap is for the rest of the sentence (introduced by that/who) Another kind of cleft uses an introductory wh-word followed by either be or do Example: What the seven days of extensive food-rejection therapy included was near-drowning is a soup-filled Jacuzzi – not daily beatings with barbecued chicken legs.

Co-ordination 

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Linking-items like and, but and or are used to co-ordinate (or to conjoin) sequences of words or phrases Examples: The weight-loss program was extreme and unsuccessful. He was called an obese and wobbly hippo. He was ordered to strip naked and to do 100 press-ups. Only those strings that can make up constituents can be conjoined Only constituents of the same category can be conjoined, the resulting string is then also of that category Try to link a string which you suspect is a constituent with one containing different words

Three additional tests 

These tests are not always reliable and need to be applied with caution

Reduction  

Similar to the substitution Try to use one of the words of the string, i.e. we attempt to reduce the string to one of its own words Example: The seven days of extensive food-rejection therapy included neardrowning.

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BUT: there is a danger with this test when an ungrammatical sentence results, this could indeed be because the string is not a constituent, but it could also be because more than one part of the sentence is obligatory

Omission 

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Under special circumstances, material can be omitted, but we cannot just omit any sequence of words if we can delete the whole string from the sentence, leaving behind a complete grammatical sentence, this is evidence that the string does form a constituent We need to proceed with caution here, if the string cannot be omitted, this could be because one or more parts of the string is obligatory

Intrusion 

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English has an abundance of phrases like between you and me, a sort of ‘aside’ which can be added to provide some sort of comment on the sentence but it turns out they cannot just be inserted just anywhere in the sentence, only at the boundaries of constituents tis is a useful test for identifying the major constituents of a sentence; but it is not helpful for identifying the smaller constituents that make up these larger ones Example: The seven days of extensive food-rejection therapy, between you and me, included near-drowning in a soup-filled Jacuzzi.

Representing structure  

as long as we are dealing with small constituents, it is quite easy to describe the structure in words there are two other good ways of describing the constituent structure: 1. Brackets e.g. [An [ [ultimately unsuccessful] [weight-loss program] ] ] was unleashed upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast.  Become pretty unwieldy when we deal with more complex structures, the main reason they are still used is that when you use a word processor it is more of an effort to draw a tree than to add brackets 2. Trees  Are also known as PHRASE MARKERS  Give a good overview  Normal way of indicating structure  Point at which two or more lines come together is called a NODE a node represents a constituent, in order for a string

to be a constituent in a tree, there must be one node which is associated with that string and with no other words  Two nodes which are separated by just one branch are said to have a special relationship higher node is the mother, lower one the daughter, the node which is at the top of a tree with no mother above it , is usually called the ROOT NODE...