Constituency Test

Constituency and Constituency Tests

Md. Nazrul Islam

ID: 1142007

M. A in ELT under MAPW, Department of English

Jahangirnagar University, Savar, Dhaka

 

 

 

 

I am grateful to my honorable course instructor Associate Professor and Chair Dr. Sanyat Sattar, Jahangirnagar University, Savar for his incomparable and invaluable guidelines for making this short thesis.

 

 

Abstract

This article discusses structures of syntax. Syntax is one of the basic levels of linguistics. Constituency is the most import part of syntactic structures. Basically syntactic structures depend on this constituency. Without the basic knowledge of constituency test, no one can acquire fundamental skills about syntax. So I have tried to clear the constituency test although I have some bindings to gain appropriate knowledge. Here I would like to discuss a little about constituency other than my target article. Firstly, single words are constituents, but frequently we see some exceptions like certain contractions, certain possessives. For example, You, come here! Secondly, complete sentences are constituents. For instance, Come here! Thirdly, any sequence of words which can be functionally replaced by a single word must be a constituent. For example, The woman with red hair won first prize. She won it. Fourthly, any sequence of words which can stand alone in answer to a question. For instance, Who stole the money? The man. Moreover, any sequence of words conjoined to an independently identifiable constituent is a constituent. i.e. Mary helped the man in the green hat and Michael. Finally, any sequence of words which can be moved as a unit and still produce a grammatical sentence with the same meaning is a constituent. Such as, I worked on the ancient text with great care. With great care I worked on the ancient text.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONSTITUENCY TESTS

a)      The students loved their syntax assignments.

We can notice that on a purely intuitive level there is some notion that certain words are more closely related to one another. For example, the word the seems to be tied more to the meaning of students than it is to loved or syntax. A related intuition can be seen by looking at the sentences below.       b) The students loved their phonology readings.

c) The students hated their morphology professor.

Compare these sentences to the ones in (b) and (c). We will see right away that the relationship between the students and their syntax assignments and the students in the first sentence and their phonology readings in (a) is the same. Similarly, the relation between the students and their morphology professor in (c), while of a different kind (hating instead of loving), is of a similar type: There is one group (the students) who are either hating or loving another entity (their syntax assignments or their morphology professor). In order to capture these intuitions (the intuition that certain words are more closely connected than others, and the intuitions about relationships between words in the sentence), we need a more complex notion. The notions we use to capture these intuitions are constituency and hierarchical structure. The notion that the and students are closely related to one another is captured by the fact that we treat them as part of a bigger unit that contains them, but not other words. We have two different ways to represent this bigger unit. One of them is to put underlines around units:

d) the students

The other is to represent the units with a group of lines called a tree structure:

 

e)  the   students

These bigger units are called constituents. A definition for a constituent is given here:

A string of words that functions together as a unit is called constituent. In other words, a group of expressions within a larger phrase that form a unit is known as constituent. For example,

f) The fluffy cat was sleeping on the desk.

Constituency is the most important and basic notion in syntactic theory. Constituents capture the intuitions mentioned above. The “relatedness” is captured by membership in a constituent. As we will see it also allows us to capture the relationships between constituents alluded to in (c) and (d).

Constituents don’t float out in space. Instead they are imbedded one inside another to form larger and larger constituents. This is hierarchical structure. Foreshadowing the discussion below a bit, here is the structure we’ll develop for a sentence like this:

     S

NP                         VP

 D            N           V                     PP

                                         The            man       eats   

                                                        P                NP

                                                          at     Adj         N

                                                                          fancy    restaurants

When we studied before ‘Syntax as a science’, we learnt that linguistics in general (and syntax specifically) up to the criterion of the scientific method. That is, if we make a hypothesis about something, we must be able to test that hypothesis. Now, we have proposed the hypothesis that sentences are composed of higher level groupings called constituents. Constituents are represented in tree structures and are generated by rules. If the hypothesis of constituency is correct, we should be able to test it in general (as well as test the specific instances of the rules).

In order to figure out what kinds of tests we need, it is helpful to reconsider the specifics of the hypothesis. The definition of constituents states that they are groups of words which function as a unit. If this is the case, then we should find instances where groups of words behave as single units. These instances can serve as tests for the hypothesis. In other words, they are tests for constituency. There are a lot of constituency tests listed in the syntactic literature. We are going to look at only five constituency tests here: answering to question, clefting, coordination, substitution, and deletion.

Firstly, we can identify constituency by answering to question. We may ask as many questions as possible related to the target sentence. The answers will help to find the constituency. For example,

g) The man stole the money.

Who stole the money? The man.

What did the man do? Stole the money.

What did he steal? The money.

Movement is our second test of constituency. If you can move a group of words around in the sentence, then they are a constituent because you can move them as a unit. Some typical examples are shown in (h), (i) and (j). Clefting (h) involves putting a string of words between It was (or It is) and a that at the beginning of the sentence. Preposing (i) (also called pseudoclefting) involves putting the string of words before a is/are what or is/are who at the front of the sentence. Passive forms are shown in (j). Briefly, it involves putting the object in the subject position, the subject in a “by phrase” (after the word by) and changing the verb form (for example from kiss to was kissed).

h) Clefting:      The cat was sleeping on the desk.

It was on the desk that the cat was sleeping.

It was the cat that was sleeping on the desk.

*It was on the that the cat was sleeping.

i) Preposing:    Big bowls of beans are what I like.

(from I like big bowls of beans.)

j) Passive:        The big boy  was kissed by [the slobbering dog].

(from The slobbering dog kissed the big boy.)

Again, the movement test is only reliable when you keep the meaning roughly the same as the original sentence.

Coordination is our third constituency test. This test is when the words strings are joined by a coordinating conjunction “and” and they act like a single unit. This unit also works as an argument.

k) John and the man went to the store.

l) *John and very blue went to the store.

If you can co-ordinate a group of words with a similar group of words, then they form a constituent.

Moreover, the smallest constituent is a single word, so it follows that if you can substitute a group of words with a single word then we know that group forms a constituent. Consider the italicized NP in (m) and (n), it can be replaced with a single word (in this case a pronoun). This is the substitution test. For example,

m) The man from NY flew only ultra-light planes.

n) He flew only ultra-light planes.

There is one important caveat to the test of substitution: There are many cases in our rules of optional items (those things marked in parentheses like the AP in NP → (D) (AP) NP). When we replace a string of words with a single word, how do we know that we aren’t just leaving off the optional items? To avoid this problem, we have to keep the meaning as closely related to the original as possible. This requires some judgment on our part. None of these tests are absolutes.

The final test we will use is the deletion. By this test some parts of the sentences can be deleted. The remaining part is grammatical. For example,

o) We went there to buy snacks. We went there.

* We went buy snacks

We looked at the idea that sentences are hierarchically organized into constituent structures. We represented these constituent structures in trees and underlined diagrams. We also developed a set of rules to generate those structures, and finally we looked at constituency tests that can be sed to test the structures. Parts of speech are the labeling system for constituent structure.

References

Andrew Carnie, Syntax, The University of Arizona (online edition)

Sportiche, Dominique (1988) A Theory of Floating Quantifiers and its Corollaries for

Constituent Structure. Linguistic Inquiry 19.3: 425-449.

Uriagereka, Juan (1998) Rhyme and Reason: An Introduction to Minimalist Syntax.

 Cambridge Mass: MIT press.

Williams, Edwin (1994) Thematic Structure in Syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.