Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Graduate School of English
Introduction to Linguistics Fall 2003
Identifying Units in Grammar - Constituents and Structural Dependancy
There are several simple ways for you do a little of your own grammar investigations to identify structural dependancy in a wide range of sentences. This is generally quite simple and allows you to play around with sentence structure. It is also good because it will help you develop those elusive native speaker intuitions that are so important in linguistics.
What we are essentially doing here is trying to find out how we can place and use units (phrases) in English. In doing so we are able to determine what rules apply in the creation of units and how those units function, which can give us a lot of insight into the structural dependancy which is inherent in all languages.
These are the tests we can use:
1. Replacement
2. Movement
3. Sentence Fragment
4. Coordination
5. Internal Positioning
6. Ellipsis
Now lets try it.
In the sentence, `The rich guy made the decision on the boat.`, let`s focus our attention on the phrase `on the boat`.
In actuality the sentence has two meanings. The first one is that the rich guy made a decision and happened to be on a boat when he made it. The second meaning is that the man made a decision about whether to buy the boat or not. Do you have a feel for both of those? OK Good. Let`s jump into the tests to see what we can do with them.
1. Replacement
Let`s see if we can replace the phrase `on the boat` with another phrase. Since on the boat is a prepositional phrase, it is logical to try to replace it with another prepositional phrase.
The rich guy made the decision in the boat.
The rich guy made the decision on what he would have for dinner.
OK, So both of them can be replaced, but they have been replaced at different levels. In , we have replaced the entire prepositional phrase and the sentence still seems to be grammatical. In , we have replaced just the noun phrase and the sentence still seems to be grammatical. What does this tell you about the structure of each of the sentences? Do they have the same structure?
How about if we do this?
The rich guy made the decision on it.
Does this correspond to the structure in or more? Do you get any feelings?
Let`s move on to the next test.
2. Movement
Let`s try to move the chunks around within the sentence and see what happens.
It was on the boat that the rich guy made the decision.
The boat was the thing the rich guy had to decide on.
Here we can also back up our claim of structural differences because we can move different parts around and get sentences which show the meaning difference more distinctly.
Here we have more structural evidence to back up the meaning evidence we had previously.
On to the next test.
3. Sentence fragment
Here we want to see if the chunk can function as sentence fragment. This is usually done by having it work as the answer to a question.
A: What did the rich guy decide on?
B: The boat
A: Where did the rich guy make the decision?
B: On the boat
Here we have effectively split the preposition from the noun phrase. Just out of interest, let`s see what would happen if we tried to separate the article and adjective from the noun in the noun phrase.
A: Which guy made the decision on the boat?
B: The rich*
How about this?
A: What the guy made the decision on the boat?
B: Rich*
I think you get the idea of how effective this kind of test can be in showing how structures fit together. On to the next test.
4. Coordination
The idea here is that only like categories can be coordinated.
The rich guy made the decision on the boat and on the color.
The rich guy made the decision on the boat and the color
* The rich guy made the decision on the boat and in his car.
What`s wrong with ? How about this?
The rich guy often makes decisions on his boat and in his car.
Can you explain why is ungrammatical here and is grammatical?
5. Internal positioning
Here we want to see if we can insert an adverb in the groups of words.
Slowly the rich guy made a decision on the boat.
The rich guy slowly made a decision on the boat.
The rich guy made a decision slowly on the boat.
*The rich guy made a decision on slowly the boat.
The rich guy made a decision on the boat slowly.
This does not help us much in the quest to find a difference between the two structures, but it does point clearly to the fact that `on the boat` is a phrase unto it self because it can be modified by the adverb.
6. Ellipsis
Here we are trying to leave out the phrase in a sentence. We want to see if we can find a way to delete it and keep the sentence grammatical.
The rich guy made the decision on the boat and John did so on the train.
OK, we have successfully managed to ellipse the verb `made the decision` in this sentence thus proving that `on the boat` is a prepositional phrase (a single unit).
The rich guy made the decision on the boat because he can do it anywhere.
This is a bit dodgy but it does work to show us that `made a decision on` is a unit and that `the boat` is also a unit.
By conducting all these tests wheat we have found out is that we can use the idea of structural dependancy to help us figure out the difference between the two possible meanings of the utterance, `The rich guy made the decision on the boat.` In one meaning the PP `on the boat` shows structural dependancy. For the other meaning the preposition `on` is not in a structurally dependant relationship with the NP `the boat`.