“The existence of translation divergences makes the straightforward transfer from source structures into target structures difficult” [Dorr, 1994].
Introduction
Introduces the facts for sentence structure and reveals its function, is based on a problem solving move towards language. This chapter teaches how to identify classes of word such as noun, adverb and demonstrative, and it shows how to exercises the structure of an English sentence by portrayal a tree structure. Because this chapter teaches practical skills, you should try to do the exercises. Some exercises get you to practise the structures learned in the chapters. Many exercises introduce concepts and structures which are not mentioned in the chapter text. You should write down
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Structural ambiguity
How does one sequence of words produce two different and alternative meanings? The answer is that the sequencing of words does not by itself produce a meaning; instead there is a hidden organization of the words which gives them their meaning. For the sequence of words in (1) there are two alternative organizations of the words, each of which delivers a different meaning: because the ambiguity is based on two different structures for the same sequence of words this is called a structural ambiguity.
Syntactic structure
The organization of a sentence is its syntactic structure, and in this book you will learn how to draw a diagram of the syntactic structure of a sentence which you unconsciously already know as a central part of your ability to speak and write.
The words in (1) are visibly laid out on the page like beads on a string. To understand how this string of words can produce two different meanings we must say that they are invisibly organized into groups. We might think of the words as put into boxes, all contained within the sentence which is the biggest bracket of all.
(4) I was reading the (letter to John.)
(5) I was reading the (letter to)
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All three are a specific kind of phrase called a noun phrase.
Movement and Phrase Structure
Words stick together when they are in the same phrase they can be picked up and moved together. Again, a phrase is like a box of words within the sentence, which can be picked up and carried somewhere else. We can formulate another test (9) for constituency.
(9) THE MOVEMENT TEST
If a sequence of words can be moved together, then that sequence of words is a phrase. We know that the sentence in (1) contains either the phrase the letter or the phrase the letter to John, and we can move either of these to the beginning of the sentence, at the same time, rewriting the sentence to remove I, the reader.
(10) The letter to John was being read.
(11) The letter was being read to John.
Like replacement, movement forces a choice on us – we have to decide which of the two possible phrase structures (4) or (5) is the right one, and move a phrase/box accordingly. Once have moved the phrase we have removed the source of the ambiguity, which was the fact that a string of words the letter to John could be put into phrases in two different