1.
Dependency grammar
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Dependency grammar is a class of modern syntactic theories that are all based on the dependency relation and that can be traced back primarily to the work of Lucien Tesnière. Dependency is the notion that linguistic units, e. g. words, are connected to other by directed links. The verb is taken to be the center of clause structure. All other syntactic units are directly or indirectly connected to the verb in terms of the directed links. DGs are distinct from phrase structure grammars since DGs lack phrasal nodes although they acknowledge phrases, structure is determined by the relation between a word and its dependents. Ibn Maḍāʾ, a 12th-century linguist from Córdoba, Andalusia, may have been the first grammarian to use the term dependency in the sense that we use it today. Dependency is also present in the works of Sámuel Brassai, a Hungarian linguist, and of Heimann Hariton Tiktin. Modern dependency grammars, however, begin primarily with the work of Lucien Tesnière, Tesnière was a Frenchman, a polyglot, and a professor of linguistics at the universities in Strasbourg and Montpellier. His major work Éléments de syntaxe structurale was published posthumously in 1959 – he died in 1954, DG has generated a lot of interest in Germany in both theoretical syntax and language pedagogy. Dependency-based systems are increasingly being used to parse natural language and generate tree banks, interest in dependency grammar is growing at present, international conferences on dependency linguistics being a relatively recent development. Dependency is a correspondence, for every element in the sentence. The result of this correspondence is that dependency grammars are word grammars. All that exist are the elements and the dependencies that connect the elements into a structure and this situation should be compared with the constituency relation of phrase structure grammars. Constituency is a correspondence, which means that, for every element in a sentence. The result of difference is that dependency structures are minimal compared to their constituency structure counterparts. These two trees illustrate just two ways to render the dependency and constituency relations. This dependency tree is a tree, i. e. it reflects actual word order. Many dependency trees abstract away from linear order and focus just on hierarchical order and this constituency tree follows the conventions of bare phrase structure, whereby the words themselves are employed as the node labels
2.
Branching (linguistics)
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In linguistics, branching refers to the shape of the parse trees that represent the structure of sentences. The direction of branching reflects the position of heads in phrases, English has both right-branching and left-branching structures, although it is more right-branching than left-branching. Some languages such as Japanese and Turkish are almost fully left-branching, some languages are mostly right-branching, for example, Arabic. Languages typically construct phrases with a word and zero or more dependents. The following phrases show the heads in bold. On a DP-analsyis, the phrase the house would be right-branching instead of left-branching, left- and right-branching structures are illustrated with the trees that follow. The first group of trees illustrate left-branching, The upper row shows the structures. In the constituency-based structures, left-branching is present in so far as the daughter is to the left of the head. In the corresponding dependency-based structures in the row, the left-branching is clear, the dependent appears to the left of its head. The following structures demonstrate right-branching, The upper row shows the constituency-based structures. The constituency-based structures are right-branching insofar as the daughter is to the right of the head. This right-branching is completely visible in the row of dependency-based structures. The -examples contain one instance of right-branching and one instance of left-branching, the head appears in a medial position, which means that the phrase combines both types of branching. Note that the -trees also contain a PP phrase that is an instance of pure right-branching, the nature of branching is most visible with full trees. The following trees have been chosen to best illustrate the extent to which a structure can be entirely left- or entirely right-branching. The following sentence is completely left-branching, the constituency-based trees are on the left, and the dependency-based trees are on the right, The category Po is used to label possessive s. The following sentence is completely right-branching, Most structures in English are, however, not completely left- or completely right-branching, in the big picture, right-branching structures tend to outnumber the left-branching structures in English, which means that trees usually grow down to the right. The X-bar schema combines left- and right-branching, the standard X-bar schema has the following structure, This structure is both left- and right branching
3.
Franz Kafka
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Franz Kafka was a Prague German-language novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His best known works include Die Verwandlung, Der Process, the term Kafkaesque has entered the English language to describe situations like those in his writing. Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague and he trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education he was employed with an insurance company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and he became engaged to several women but never married. He died in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis and his work went on to influence a vast range of writers, critics, artists, and philosophers during the 20th century. Kafka was born near the Old Town Square in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his family were middle-class Ashkenazi Jews. His father, Hermann Kafka, was the child of Jakob Kafka, a shochet or ritual slaughterer in Osek. Hermann brought the Kafka family to Prague, after working as a travelling sales representative, he eventually became a fancy goods and clothing retailer who employed up to 15 people and used the image of a jackdaw as his business logo. Kafkas mother, Julie, was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a retail merchant in Poděbrady. Hermann and Julie had six children, of whom Franz was the eldest, franzs two brothers, Georg and Heinrich, died in infancy before Franz was seven, his three sisters were Gabriele, Valerie and Ottilie. They all died during the Holocaust of World War II, Valli was deported to the Łódź Ghetto in Poland in 1942, but that is the last documentation of her. On business days, both parents were absent from the home, with Julie Kafka working as many as 12 hours each day helping to manage the family business, consequently, Kafkas childhood was somewhat lonely, and the children were reared largely by a series of governesses and servants. The dominating figure of Kafkas father had a significant influence on Kafkas writing, the Kafka family had a servant girl living with them in a cramped apartment. In November 1913 the family moved into an apartment, although Ellie. In early August 1914, just after World War I began, both Ellie and Valli also had children. Franz at age 31 moved into Vallis former apartment, quiet by contrast, from 1889 to 1893, Kafka attended the Deutsche Knabenschule German boys elementary school at the Masný trh/Fleischmarkt, now known as Masná Street. His Jewish education ended with his Bar Mitzvah celebration at the age of 13, Kafka never enjoyed attending the synagogue and went with his father only on four high holidays a year. German was the language of instruction, but Kafka also spoke and he studied the latter at the gymnasium for eight years, achieving good grades
4.
Endocentric and exocentric
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In theoretical linguistics, a distinction is made between endocentric and exocentric constructions. A grammatical construction is said to be if it fulfils the same linguistic function as one of its parts. The distinction reaches back at least to Bloomfields work of the 1930s, such a distinction is possible only in phrase structure grammars, since in dependency grammars all constructions are necessarily endocentric. An endocentric construction consists of a head and one or more dependents. For example, big house - Noun phrase sing songs - Verb phrase very long - Adjective phrase These phrases are indisputably endocentric. They are endocentric because the one word in each case carries the bulk of the semantic content, the phrase big house is a noun phrase in line with its part house, which is a noun. Similarly, sing songs is a phrase in line with its part sing. The same is true of very long, it is a phrase in line with its part long. In more formal terms, the distribution of a construction is functionally equivalent, or approaching equivalence, to one of its parts. An endocentric construction is known as a headed construction, where the head is contained inside the construction. An exocentric construction consists of two or more parts, whereby the one or the other of the parts cannot be viewed as providing the bulk of the content of the whole. Further, the distribution of the whole cannot be viewed as being determined by the one or the other of the parts. The classic instance of a construction is the sentence. The traditional binary division of the sentence into a noun phrase. - Sentence Since the whole is unlike either of its parts, in other words, since the whole is neither a noun like Hannibal nor a verb phrase like destroyed Rome but rather a sentence, it is exocentric. In theories of morphology however, the remains, since certain compounds seem to require an exocentric analysis. For a class of compounds described as exocentric, see bahuvrihi, the endo- vs. exocentric distinction is possible in phrase structure grammars, since they are constituency-based. The distinction is present in dependency grammars, since they are dependency-based
5.
The Metamorphosis
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The Metamorphosis is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It has been called one of the works of fiction of the 20th century and is studied in colleges and universities across the Western world. The story begins with a salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into a large. The cause of Gregors transformation is never revealed, and Kafka himself never gave an explanation, one day, Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect. He reflects on how life as a traveling salesman is. As he looks at the clock, he notices that he has overslept. He ponders the consequences of this delay, Gregor becomes annoyed at how his boss never accepts excuses or explanations from any of his employees no matter how hard-working they are, displaying an apparent lack of trusting abilities. Gregors mother knocks on the door, and he answers her and she is concerned for Gregor because he is late for work, which is unorthodox for him. Gregor answers his mother and realizes that his voice has changed and his sister, Grete, to whom he is very close, then whispers through the door and begs him to open it. He tries to get out of bed but is incapable of moving his body, while trying to move, he finds that his office manager, the chief clerk, has shown up to check on him. He finally rocks his body to the floor and calls out that he open the door shortly. Offended by Gregors delayed response in opening the door, the clerk warns him of the consequences of missing work and he adds that Gregors recent performance has been unsatisfactory. Gregor disagrees and tells him that he open the door shortly. Nobody on the side of the door has understood a single word he had uttered as Gregors voice has also transformed. Finally, Gregor manages to unlock and open the door with his mouth and he apologizes to the office manager for the delay. Horrified by Gregors appearance, his mother faints, and the manager out of the apartment. Gregor tries to catch up with him, but his father drives him back into the bedroom with a cane, Gregor injures himself squeezing back through the doorway, and his father slams the door shut. Gregor awakens and sees that someone has put milk and bread in his room, initially excited, he quickly discovers that he has no taste for milk, once one of his favorites
6.
Phrase
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In everyday speech, a phrase may be any group of words, often carrying a special idiomatic meaning, in this sense it is roughly synonymous with expression. In linguistic analysis, a phrase is a group of words that functions as a constituent in the syntax of a sentence, a phrase typically appears within a clause, but it is possible also for a phrase to be a clause or to contain a clause within it. There is a difference between the use of the term phrase and its technical use in linguistics. In common usage, a phrase is usually a group of words with some special meaning or other significance, such as all rights reserved, economical with the truth, kick the bucket. It may be a euphemism, a saying or proverb, a fixed expression, in grammatical analysis, particularly in theories of syntax, a phrase is any group of words, or sometimes a single word, which plays a particular role within the grammatical structure of a sentence. It does not have to have any meaning or significance, or even exist anywhere outside of the sentence being analyzed. This means that expressions that may be called phrases in everyday language are not phrases in the technical sense. In grammatical analysis, most phrases contain a key word that identifies the type and linguistic features of the phrase, this is known as the head-word, or the head. The syntactic category of the head is used to name the category of the phrase, for example, the remaining words in a phrase are called the dependents of the head. Most theories of syntax view most phrases as having a head, a phrase lacking a head is known as exocentric, and phrases with heads are endocentric. When a noun is used in a sentence without an explicit determiner, for full discussion, see Determiner phrase. See the Generative approaches section of the article for details. Many theories of syntax and grammar illustrate sentence structure using phrase trees, trees show the words, phrases, and, at times, clauses that make up sentences. Any word combination that corresponds to a complete subtree can be seen as a phrase, there are two established and competing principles for constructing trees, they produce constituency and dependency trees and both are illustrated here using an example sentence. The node labels in the two trees mark the syntactic category of the different constituents, or word elements, of the sentence, in the constituency tree each phrase is marked by a phrasal node, and there are eight phrases identified by phrase structure analysis in the example sentence. On the other hand, the tree identifies a phrase by any node that exerts dependency upon, or dominates. And, using dependency analysis, there are six phrases in the sentence, the trees and phrase-counts demonstrate that different theories of syntax differ in the word combinations they qualify as a phrase. Here the constituency tree identifies three phrases that the tree does not, namely, house at the end of the street, end of the street
7.
Noun phrase
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A noun phrase or nominal phrase is a phrase which has a noun as its head word, or which performs the same grammatical function as such a phrase. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently occurring phrase type, Noun phrases often function as verb subjects and objects, as predicative expressions, and as the complements of prepositions. Noun phrases can be embedded inside each other, for instance, in some modern theories of grammar, noun phrases with determiners are analyzed as having the determiner rather than the noun as their head, they are then referred to as determiner phrases. Some examples of noun phrases are underlined in the sentences below, the head noun appears in bold. The election-year politics are annoying for many people, almost every sentence contains at least one noun phrase. Current economic weakness may be a result of energy prices. Noun phrases can be identified by the possibility of pronoun substitution and this sentence contains two noun phrases. The subject noun phrase that is present in this sentence is long, Noun phrases can be embedded in other noun phrases. They can be embedded in them, a string of words that can be replaced by a single pronoun without rendering the sentence grammatically unacceptable is a noun phrase. As to whether the string must contain at least two words, see the following section, traditionally, a phrase is understood to contain two or more words. The traditional progression in the size of units is word < phrase < clause. However, many schools of syntax – especially those that have been influenced by X-bar theory – make no such restriction. Here many single words are judged to be based on a desire for theory-internal consistency. A phrase is deemed to be a word or a combination of words that appears in a set syntactic position, on this understanding of phrases, the nouns and pronouns in bold in the following sentences are noun phrases, He saw someone. The words in bold are called phrases since they appear in the positions where multiple-word phrases can appear. This practice takes the constellation to be rather than the words themselves. The word he, for instance, functions as a pronoun, the phrase structure grammars of the Chomskyan tradition are primary examples of theories that apply this understanding of phrases. Other grammars, for instance dependency grammars, are likely to reject this approach to phrases, for them, phrases must contain two or more words
8.
Compound (linguistics)
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In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of formation that creates compound lexemes. That is, in terms, compounding occurs when two or more words are joined to make one longer word. The meaning of the compound may be similar to or different from the meanings of its components in isolation, with very few exceptions, English compound words are stressed on their first component stem. The process occurs readily in other Germanic languages for different reasons, words can be concatenated both to mean the same as the sum of two words or where an adjective and noun are compounded. The addition of affix morphemes to words should not be confused with nominal composition, compound formation rules vary widely across language types. In a synthetic language, the relationship between the elements of a compound may be marked with a case or other morpheme. This latter pattern is common throughout the Semitic languages, though in some it is combined with a genitive case. Agglutinative languages tend to very long words with derivational morphemes. Compounds may or may not require the use of derivational morphemes also, the longest compounds in the world may be found in the Finnic and Germanic languages. German examples include Farbfernsehgerät, Funkfernbedienung, and the jocular word Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze, in Finnish, although there is theoretically no limit to the length of compound words, words consisting of more than three components are rare. Even those with less than three components can look mysterious to non-Finnish such as hätäuloskäytävä, compounds can be rather long when translating technical documents from English to some other language, since the lengths of the words are theoretically unlimited, especially in chemical terminology. For example, the English compound doghouse, where house is the head, endocentric compounds tend to be of the same part of speech as their head, as in the case of doghouse. For example, the English compound white-collar is neither a kind of collar nor a white thing, in an exocentric compound, the word class is determined lexically, disregarding the class of the constituents. For example, a must-have is not a verb but a noun, the meaning of this type of compound can be glossed as whose B is A, where B is the second element of the compound and A the first. A bahuvrihi compound is one whose nature is expressed by neither of the words, copulative compounds are compounds with two semantic heads. Appositional compounds are lexemes that have two attributes that classify the compound, most natural languages have compound nouns. The positioning of the words according to the language
9.
Constituent (linguistics)
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In syntactic analysis, a constituent is a word or a group of words that function as a single unit within a hierarchical structure. The analysis of constituent structure is associated mainly with phrase structure grammars, the constituent structure of sentences is identified using constituency tests. These tests manipulate some portion of a sentence and based on the result, a phrase is a sequence of one or more words built around a head lexical item and working as a unit within a sentence. A word sequence is shown to be a phrase/constituent if it exhibits one or more of the behaviors discussed below, constituency tests are diagnostics used to identify the constituent structure of sentences. There are numerous constituency tests applied to English sentences, such as,1 and these tests are rough-and-ready tools which grammarians employ to reveal clues about syntactic structure. A word of caution is warranted when employing these tests, since they often deliver contradictory results, some syntacticians even arrange the tests on a scale of reliability, with less-reliable tests treated as useful to confirm constituency though not sufficient on their own. Failing to pass a single test does not mean that the unit is not a constituent and it is best to apply as many tests as possible to a given unit in order to prove or to rule out its status as a constituent. Topicalization involves moving the test sequence to the front of the sentence and it is a simple movement operation, He is going to attend another course to improve his English. To improve his English, he is going to another course. Clefting involves placing a sequence of words X within the beginning with It is/was. She bought a pair of gloves with silk embroidery and it was a pair of gloves with silk embroidery that she bought. Pseudoclefting is similar to clefting in that it puts emphasis on a phrase in a sentence. It involves inserting a sequence of words before is/are what or is/are who, a pair of gloves with silk embroidery is what she bought. Pro-form substitution, or replacement, involves replacing the test constituent with the appropriate pro-form, substitution normally involves using a definite pro-form like it, he, there, here, etc. in place of a phrase or a clause. If such a change yields a grammatical sentence where the structure has not been altered, then the test sequence is a constituent. *I dont know him who is sleeping in the car, the answer ellipsis test refers to the ability of a sequence of words to stand alone as a reply to a question. It is often used to test the constituency of a phrase but can also be applied to other phrases. - Worked on my new project, linguists do not agree whether passing the answer ellipsis test is sufficient, though at a minimum they agree that it can help confirm the results of another constituency test
10.
Government and binding theory
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Government and binding is a theory of syntax and a phrase structure grammar in the tradition of transformational grammar developed principally by Noam Chomsky in the 1980s. This theory is a revision of his earlier theories and was later revised in The Minimalist Program and several subsequent papers. Although there is a literature on government and binding theory which is not written by Chomsky. GB was the first theory to be based on the principles and parameters model of language, the main application of the government relation concerns the assignment of case. Government is defined as follows, A governs B if and only if A is a governor and A m-commands B, governors are heads of the lexical categories and tensed I. A m-commands B if A does not dominate B and B does not dominate A and the first maximal projection of A dominates B, where the maximal projection of a head X is XP. Binding can be defined as follows, An element α binds an element β if and only if α c-commands β, consider the sentence Johni saw hisi mother, which is diagrammed below using simple phrase structure trees. The NP John c-commands his because the first parent of the NP, S, John and his are also coreferential, therefore John binds his. On the other hand, in the ungrammatical sentence *The mother of Johni likes himselfi, John does not c-command himself, the importance of binding is shown in the grammaticality of the following sentences, *Johni saw himi. Binding is used, along with particular binding principles, to explain the ungrammaticality of those statements, the applicable rules are called Binding Principle A, Binding Principle B, and Binding Principle C. Principle A, an anaphor must be bound in its governing category, since himself is not c-commanded by John in sentence, Principle A is violated. Principle B, a pronoun must be free within its governing category, in sentence, him is bound by John, violating Principle B. Principle C, an R-expression must be free, r-expressions are referential expressions, unlike pronouns and anaphora, they independently refer, i. e. pick out entities in the world. In sentence, the first instance of John binds the second, note that Principles A and B refer to governing categories—domains which limit the scope of binding. The definition of a governing category laid out in Lectures on Government and Binding is complex, introduction to Government and Binding Theory. A step-by-step introduction to the Government and Binding theory of syntax
