1、Summary of Chapter FourIn this chapter, we mainly focus on the syntax, which is a branch of linguistics that studies the rules that govern the formation of sentences.And the category refers to a group of linguistic items which fulfill the same or similar functions in a particular language such as a
2、sentence, a noun phrase or a verb. A fundamental fact about words in all human languages is that they can be grouped together into a relatively small number of classes called syntactic categories. The most central categories to the syntactic study are the word-level categories. It can be divided int
3、o two kinds, major lexical categories and minor lexical categories. Major lexical categories play a very important role in sentence formation. They differ from minor lexical categories in that they are often assumed to be the heads around which phrases are built. To determine a words category, three
4、 criteria are usually employed, namely, meaning, inflection and distribution. A words distributional facts together with information about its meaning and inflectional capabilities help identify its syntactic category.In the following part is talking about the phrase categories and their structures,
5、 the most commonly recognized and discussed phrasal categories are noun phrase (NP), verb phrase (VP), adjective phrase (AP) and prepositional phrase (PP). Phrases usually contain the following elements: head, specifier, and complement.Next part is the phrase structure rule, which regulates the arra
6、ngement of elements that make up a phrase.The XP rule: XP (specifier) X (complement)Next part is coordination rule, which means some structures are formed by joining two or more elements of the same type with the help of a conjunction such as and or. And coordination exhibits the following four impo
7、rtant properties: first, there is no limit on the number of coordinated categories that can appear prior to the conjunction. Second, a category at any level (a head or an entire XP) can be coordinated. Third, coordinated categories must be of the same type. Fourth, the category type of the coordinat
8、e phrase is identical to the category type of the elements being conjoined. So it can be formulated as this: X X * con XIn the next part, it is talking about the specifiers, which have both special semantic and syntactic roles.Furthermore, it comes to be the complements. Words which introduce the se
9、ntence complement are termed complementizers. Besides, the sentence introduced by the complementizer is called a complement clause. Thus the whole underlined part in the above sentence is called a complement phrase and the construction in which the complement phrase is embedded is called matrix clau
10、seAnd modifiers specify optionally expressible properties of heads.The S rule: S NP VPAnd then it is the transformations. Inversion means move Infl to the left of the subject NP. Inversion means move Infl to C. the movement of a word from the head position in one phrase into the head position in ano
11、ther is also known as head movement. Do insertion means insert interrogative do into an empty Infl position.And deep structure is formed by the XP rule in accordance with the heads subcategorization properties. And surface structure is corresponding to the final syntactic form of the sentence which
12、results from appropriate transformations. Wh Movement means move the wh phrase to the beginning of the sentence. Wh Movement means move a th phrase to the specifier position under CP.Inversion can move an auxiliary from the Infl to the nearest C position. No element may be removed from coordinate structure.于野09301089
