Julian does not feel better after a good night's sleep. The absolute last thing in the world he wants is to wake up at 6:30 in the morning and work out while simultaneously trying to explain himself to a bunch of people whose opinion of him has major implications for his continued survival.
He's gonna get so much mana from this.
"Okay.
" - is everyone clear on the idea that subjects and verbs can be multiple words, because I was not, but that's what it says here, that they're both - kinds of phrases."
"Hm. I'm having trouble thinking of examples for verbs but subjects it makes sense? Like in English you can say 'The man in the hat fell over dead' and that's - Oh, that's an example of both, the subject is 'The man in the hat' and the verb is 'fell over dead' or maybe just 'fell over' because if you say just 'fell' it's not the same thing, exactly?"
"Yeah, I think that's what it's saying? I just would have thought of 'man' as the subject there and the rest of it as describing the man, but this is saying that it's all the subject and that the rest of it is all the verb, I think. Here, it's dividing the sentences into trees like this, I don't know how to read that aloud. The example is in French but I think you see the same thing in English, here, I'll write up another example - "
She hands the book to Annisa and starts working on an English sentence and a tree for it.
Annisa is definitely competent to learn English syntax, her English is genuinely perfectly solid even if there are some words she doesn't know and even if it took eight years and shouldn't have.
She stares at the book and tries to only think about how things work in English. The French can come once she understands the concept.
The rule S-> NP VP reflects the fact that subjects and verbs are the only obligatory parts of a sentence. You can see in the sentence above that the verb vouloir agrees with the singular Noun monsieur, and this demonstrates that the main subject Noun is monsieur while the phrase qui porte des lunettes is simply part of the overall subject NP. At the same time, the NP un café is the object of the verb. Since some verbs do not require an object at all (as in Il arrive, Elle travaille), object NPs do not need to be represented in the rule S -> NP VP. It is for this reason that in tree diagrams, the NP directly below S is always conventionally understood as the ‘subject’, while the NP below VP is conventionally the ‘object’.
Our first rule of syntax reflects the fact that phrases combine to form sentences. A phrase is a sequence of words which belong together and function as a unit. All phrases orbit around one central element. For example, in Noun Phrases (NP), the noun represents the single most essential piece of information in the phrase. But NPs may also contain other information.
Naima hands her a couple English sentence trees that represent what she thinks the book is getting at, hopefully before Annisa can get too tripped up by the French.
" - hey, would it actually help more if we got Annisa book about English syntax and started with that, if we're gonna need to do English before French the whole time anyway?"
"Maybe? I'm slightly worried that this is, uh, an entire semester to master all by itself and I'll be pretty behind in French by the time I fully understand syntax - I guess that's fine since I might need to learn other languages after French and being pretty behind in French was the default outcome anyway -
She is examining the English sentence trees and trying to write her own. "Did I do this right?"
[Annisa] (dislikes French.)
[Annisa and her classmates] (are studying in the library.)
[Everyone] (dies horribly.)
"Yeah, I think those are all right. Probably you don't need to entirely understand all of syntax? I dunno, I guess we can keep going until we get stuck, it did say that there were only a few rules and the book isn't actually very long, as books go."
"All right, I think I can take a look at the French examples -"
You can see in the sentence above that the verb vouloir agrees with the singular Noun monsieur, and this demonstrates that the main subject Noun is monsieur while the phrase qui porte des lunettes is simply part of the overall subject NP.
"...so if, hypothetically, I could not see that, how would I be able to figure that sentence out..."
"Um - I think if you're learning the language and not learning how syntax works it's the opposite, right? If you already know that the main subject and the verb have to agree, then you should be able to look at a sentence and see which nouns the verb agrees with, which narrows down which nouns can be the subject of the sentence. But to use that knowledge you're going to have to learn which verb forms do what, in this case which ones are plural and which are singular."
Annisa is no good at remembering how verbs change around but she does not say this. "I guess I can at least pull out the possible nouns and then look up in the textbook whether the verb is singular or plural every time."
"Yeah, I think so. You can make a chart of the transformations and consult it, for most words, and maybe also have a list of common exceptions."
"Can you help me make one, I'm pretty sure I'll make it wrong and then confuse myself further - you can just check once I think I've got it -"
"Sure thing."
In the meantime, Naima is going to take out her History of Alchemy textbook and start reading the next section. She reads... really fast, if she is in fact reading the whole thing and not skimming.
(Annisa knows her friends will glare at her but she raps her knuckles sharply against each other so she can concentrate on her verb charts.)
Oh good. She does get the verbs down on the paper, even if they're only on the paper and not in her head because her head was full of suffering. She rereads the first few pages of the syntax book, the part that's just an introduction about Noam Chomsky and principles of language and then the part with the sentence diagrams.
"Okay, I think I might be ready to try to make sentence diagrams of my homework? Do you think I'm ready to do that?"
Annisa's homework wants her to translate to English:
un homme et un garçon
un chat et un homme
une femme et un homme
un garçon et une fille
un cheval et un chien
Je suis Marie
Je parle anglais
C'est un chat
Tu es un chat?
Un chat et une pizza
Tu manges une pizza
Comment tu t'appelles?
Je m'appelle Paul
Marc est anglais
Il s'appelle Marc?
Non, il s'appelle Pierre.
Annisa tries VERY HARD not to panic about the fact many of these DON'T SEEM LIKE THEY FOLLOW THE RULES IN THE SYNTAX BOOK but they DON'T.
Some of them do, so she tries going through her verb chart and finding all the verbs and finding the nouns they could plausibly match to and finding the sentence structures this could plausibly imply. By lunchtime she's about halfway through the ones this approach works at ALL on.
Nah, the three more hours until lunchtime are way too long to work on this. Naima is going to look over when she's halfway through her alch homework and casually point out that some of these aren't sentences.
Oh.
Well, that seems concerning for the prospects of using syntax to understand French.
"I'm sure it'll move on to full sentences later, it just wants you to focus on vocab right now. These phrases at the top are totally structurally the same as English phrases, the reason you don't need to use syntax is that there isn't actually any unfamiliar grammar there at all. It's just, like, a word-substitution code."
"You got it. I'll probably do yours before Julian's because you're more of a hardass than him."
Julian looks up from his math homework. ...Yeah, that just seems accurate. "Okay. Take the sentences you've diagrammed and translate them for me."
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