As a linguistics student who struggled with syntax in every seminar without having a clue what was going on, this was very helpful! Amazing how an explanation in such a short time can be the key to understand the topic and not be lost anymore. Great preparation for an upcoming test!
Why do you only need eight minutes to make me understand tree structures whilst my teacher gives tons of lectures on this topic to an audience that has no clue what's going on?
Haha, well, some explanations work better for some people than others. We're really glad we were able to help! We love getting this kind of comment - I've passed it onto the rest of the team. Thanks so much! ^_^
i just started to take a linguistics course at my university because it was the only thing that could fit my schedule. tossed myself head first into a world of confusion. I'm supremely happy that I was able to find this channel. And now im thinking about just how big and complicated looking syntactic tree could get..... and im afraid
Watching these videos as a Linguistics student this year, and as a fan of the Buffyverse, I had to pause the video on my phone, log in to youtube on my work computer, find this video and thank you for the Angel references. This totally just made my whole semester!
new to your channel, and IT IS AMAZNING. (I am a LING student). THIS IS THE RUclips SERIES I NEED IN MY LIFE. Maybe linguistics resources are far and few between, but your videos help explain so much Thank you, thank you so, so much sir
This video was very useful! I was struggling, trying to understand what trees are and you just saved me. Your way of explaining these complex structures is so easy to understand. You're a great teacher! Thank you! ^^
Omg thanks so much.... I was struggling with my syntax course so freaking much and came across your video. It helped a bunch!!! You made complicated concepts very easy to swallow. Bravo!!!
I sort of get why we'd go from NP---N---Cordelia, but I really don't get why we need the intermediate steps of N' (NP--N'--N'-N-Cordelia). It just seems like it unnecessarily complicates the process.
Well, it's because that's the area that we place adjuncts (adjectives and adverbs). Adjuncts are daughters to (below) bar levels and sisters to (beside) bar levels. They are as optional as adjuncts themselves are but vital in housing them. In other words adjuncts can't exist anywhere else. The reason there's a bar level beside N is because technically N can take a complement phrase, be it prepositional or clausal.
At the moment Iḿ writing my bachelor thesis about clitics in czech sentences. Nearly every author uses the government-binding-theory and I was so confused by all these C' and CP and Topicalization....and they nowhere explained those shortcuts. Thx for explaining and simplifying! So now I can try to understand Topicalization, because the X'- Theory I know ^^
+Megan B Glad to be able to help! It can take a bit to work out, but once you get the basic idea for it, the rest of it is pretty straightforward, hopefully. ^_^
Links to your videos are in our lecture slides. It's been very helpful and interesting. I like the way you format your videos as well. -speech pathology student
Great! We really like it when people refer their classes to our work - we want to help people learn as much as we can, and we're here to help. Thanks for the comment! ^_^
Hi - First of all thank you for your helpful video lectures on syntax Can we disambiguate the following ambiguous sentence by using a tree? "You do not dance" It can be a declarative sentence or an imperative sentence having an overt subject.
+Jerry and Malia Yep! I'm a pretty big fan. Lindsey was sort of my favourite character. We actually have another Angel-themed episode coming up! Not quite there yet, but in a month or so, I think. ^_^
k roninson Sure! I like Cook and Newsom's book, Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction. If you want ones more directly towards Minimalism, I'd say try Andrew Carnie's Syntax: a Minimalist Introduction. If you get through those and have other questions, I'd be glad to help! ^_^
Does this take into account languages like Latin and ancient Greek, that could pretty much use any word order? Apparently some Australian languages have that same feature but I know absolutely nothing about those, so I am not willing to risk an argument :D Since there probably is an unmarked order still, and part of the sentence should be grammatically determined I could understand how a tree might still work, but I wouldn't be so sure that it could be standardized. I miss linguistics😩
+The Ling Space Hello there. I am a bit confused about the two concepts of the syntactic tree and the elementary tree, would you help me clarify those two?
Your video makes a lot of sense and I definitely understand the way you do it but every single one of the examples in my textbook is entirely different. Not every word has a ' and I am very confused ._.
So, I'm a little confused about how this X bar is a theory and not just a labeling device, like old-fashioned diagramming sentences, which is tool or nomenclature to analyze the sentence. When I hear theory, I think rules with predictive power. How is X bar that? 😄
Diana Kennedy Thanks for the question! I can definitely see why you might see X' Theory this way from just the part we covered in this video. There's a lot more to this approach to syntax that we'll be covering in future episodes (although probably not until mid-December or so). We'll be talking about movement and how we derive one kind of sentence from another, like a question from a declarative, next time out.In its more developed form, like the pretty robust Government and Binding approach to syntax from the 1980s, X' makes a lot of predictions about what elements can be moved around where in a sentence; what pronouns can receive what interpretations; what kind of word orders are possible; when we can leave out particular kinds of nouns or other morphemes in languages that allow that, and when we can't; and a host of other answers regarding how we can structure our sentences. A lot of this is done through saying particular structural configurations are impossible, so we should never see a language that does it. It also can explain why some things that are logically plausible never happen cross-linguistically, like the "I saw the barn red" sort of examples.But none of that is in the video, so it's not easy to see why X' merits the title of theory just from that. I hope this helps for now, even if there's not a lot of detail still, and that when we come back to it later, it'll be clearer. Thanks again!
thanks for the video but i have a question if i have a sentence and it had at the end 'to look after them' how would i draw a tree for it i know that look after is a phrasal verb and them is a pronoun so it would be a complement right? would do i write in its branch and also to what would it class as i would appreciate it if you can help me
I just trumbled over your great channel! Reminds me so much of my study of empirical linguistics. I just wondered why you left S/S'. Or did you get it in another video?
Thanks for the question! It's because S/S' isn't really part of the X' theory; usually, IP is held for standing in sentences. We will definitely do more videos in the future on different syntactic models (in fact, we're definitely going to do one on the Minimalist Programme), but I don't know if we're specifically going to cover that one. If you're curious, though, check out this series of posts from All Things Linguistic on various flavours of syntax trees: allthingslinguistic.com/tagged/how-to-draw-syntax-trees
The Ling Space Ahh, thx for the answer! Makes totally sense, didn't figure it out.^^ Always cool to see how you comprize the best stuff of what I learned once in these nice videos. Sometimes even new to me. And glad to see other people who are 'addicted' to language as well. :D
Yeah, language is pretty awesome. Thanks for watching! We've got a new syntax video coming out later this week, on the VP-internal Subject Hypothesis, so hopefully that'll be fun, too. ^_^
So the reason we make syntax trees is to make a visual note about how languages can say The amazing Cordelia Codelia amazing the The Cordelia amazing But not amazing the Cordelia or Cordelia the amazing. But we can have Cordelia the Amazing in English... I still don't get syntax trees 😅
k roninson That's true, X' isn't currently in use. But we thought it was a good place to start from, for a few reasons. It's a good way to think about why we need structure, and it's fairly easy to introduce. It also helps to understand current theories, if you know about X'. And it also gets taught in classes regularly for how to enter syntax; I took two undergrad classes and a grad course in syntax before we ran into Minimalism. Eventually, we'll talk about Minimalism, but X' is a good entry point. ^_^
The Ling Space O_O It isn't actually used anymore? I took a couple basic linguistics classes where we learned X' a couple years ago. I didn't know this was apparently just a "beginner's theory" to get students used to thinking in this sort of way. I thought it was still used. What DO linguists use?
Changing Storms Well, I don't know if I'd say that it's just a beginner's theory; it was really the ongoing view on syntax for a good solid period of time. But it also hasn't been the real working theory for 20-ish years or so now. Generative syntax people are currently focused more on the Minimalist Programme. There's a good amount of overlap with X', which is part of why it's still useful to start there, too. But it focuses on paring down what's needed in syntax to describe the system. If you're interested in more, I recommended a few books in another comment here: Cook and Newsom's book "Chomsky's Universal Grammar", and Carnie's "Syntax: a Minimalist Introduction". Good luck! ^_^
![[Syntax] X-Bar Theory - Specifiers, Adjuncts, and Complements](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n8TYuq173N0/mqdefault.jpg)
![[Syntax] X-Bar Theory - Specifiers, Adjuncts, and Complements](/img/tr.png)
As a linguistics student who struggled with syntax in every seminar without having a clue what was going on, this was very helpful! Amazing how an explanation in such a short time can be the key to understand the topic and not be lost anymore. Great preparation for an upcoming test!
Great! Glad to be able to help. Hope the exam went well! ^_^
Why do you only need eight minutes to make me understand tree structures whilst my teacher gives tons of lectures on this topic to an audience that has no clue what's going on?
Haha, well, some explanations work better for some people than others. We're really glad we were able to help! We love getting this kind of comment - I've passed it onto the rest of the team. Thanks so much! ^_^
haha that's great!
If I pass the exam of linguistics it will be thanks to you, I swear to god... THANK YOU SO MUCH.
Thank you for creating such high quality free resources!
+Catriona Thomson Glad to be able to help! ^_^
i just started to take a linguistics course at my university because it was the only thing that could fit my schedule. tossed myself head first into a world of confusion. I'm supremely happy that I was able to find this channel.
And now im thinking about just how big and complicated looking syntactic tree could get..... and im afraid
Watching these videos as a Linguistics student this year, and as a fan of the Buffyverse, I had to pause the video on my phone, log in to youtube on my work computer, find this video and thank you for the Angel references. This totally just made my whole semester!
new to your channel, and IT IS AMAZNING. (I am a LING student). THIS IS THE RUclips SERIES I NEED IN MY LIFE. Maybe linguistics resources are far and few between, but your videos help explain so much
Thank you, thank you so, so much sir
Glad to be able to help! Thanks for watching. Please let people know about us, too! ^_^
The Ling Space c
This video was very useful! I was struggling, trying to understand what trees are and you just saved me. Your way of explaining these complex structures is so easy to understand. You're a great teacher! Thank you! ^^
Omg thanks so much.... I was struggling with my syntax course so freaking much and came across your video. It helped a bunch!!! You made complicated concepts very easy to swallow. Bravo!!!
I sort of get why we'd go from NP---N---Cordelia, but I really don't get why we need the intermediate steps of N' (NP--N'--N'-N-Cordelia). It just seems like it unnecessarily complicates the process.
same here. I just don't get it!
Well, it's because that's the area that we place adjuncts (adjectives and adverbs). Adjuncts are daughters to (below) bar levels and sisters to (beside) bar levels. They are as optional as adjuncts themselves are but vital in housing them. In other words adjuncts can't exist anywhere else.
The reason there's a bar level beside N is because technically N can take a complement phrase, be it prepositional or clausal.
I know how it feels. Why they made such difficult theories 😭
Cute yet subtle Buffy the Vampire slayer references!
You make every concept so easy...........can't thank you enough for such fun n informative lessons
At the moment Iḿ writing my bachelor thesis about clitics in czech sentences. Nearly every author uses the government-binding-theory and I was so confused by all these C' and CP and Topicalization....and they nowhere explained those shortcuts. Thx for explaining and simplifying! So now I can try to understand Topicalization, because the X'- Theory I know ^^
Great! Glad to be able to help. That sounds like a very interesting topic - I hope it goes well for you. Let us know if you find anything! ^_^
Wow, now I get the point in all this. The trees, the bars... Thank you so much for this video. You saved me.
+Megan B Glad to be able to help! It can take a bit to work out, but once you get the basic idea for it, the rest of it is pretty straightforward, hopefully. ^_^
Links to your videos are in our lecture slides. It's been very helpful and interesting. I like the way you format your videos as well. -speech pathology student
Great! We really like it when people refer their classes to our work - we want to help people learn as much as we can, and we're here to help. Thanks for the comment! ^_^
so useful but still with a sense of humour! thanks for explaining things so vividly
Hi - First of all thank you for your helpful video lectures on syntax
Can we disambiguate the following ambiguous sentence by using a tree?
"You do not dance"
It can be a declarative sentence or an imperative sentence having an overt subject.
The references to Angel and or Buffy The Vampire Slayer were funny...this video was also very informative
Glad you liked it! ^_^
thank you so much for these videos! you guys really make a difference in the world!
03:24 This may work perfectly fine for Pokemons :)
BTW nice reference to Bob Ross in the title ;)
Ok, now that the video has progressed I can tell we are both Angel fans! I liked Lindsey by the way. Christian Kane is awesome.
+Jerry and Malia Yep! I'm a pretty big fan. Lindsey was sort of my favourite character. We actually have another Angel-themed episode coming up! Not quite there yet, but in a month or so, I think. ^_^
you are what we are looking for!thank you
Could you recommend a couple of books on X-bar and any other approach to analyzing sentences?
k roninson Sure! I like Cook and Newsom's book, Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction. If you want ones more directly towards Minimalism, I'd say try Andrew Carnie's Syntax: a Minimalist Introduction. If you get through those and have other questions, I'd be glad to help! ^_^
I need to get that Tshirt. Much props to you, sir all around! :)
We miss you a lot.
what's happened to your website?
Does this take into account languages like Latin and ancient Greek, that could pretty much use any word order? Apparently some Australian languages have that same feature but I know absolutely nothing about those, so I am not willing to risk an argument :D
Since there probably is an unmarked order still, and part of the sentence should be grammatically determined I could understand how a tree might still work, but I wouldn't be so sure that it could be standardized.
I miss linguistics😩
Amazing Teacher
very very veryyy helpful, insightful and amazing. excellent explanation. (y)
+Abdelilah Jennane Glad to be able to help! Thanks for the kind words. ^_^
PLZ give me the link of the very first lesson of your syntax series !
You've already found it! This is the first episode we did about syntax. We've done a bunch since then, though!
Amazing content 👏 although I kept focusing on Angel's references the whole video 😂
Same
Patricia Schneider-Zioga Thanks! Glad you got them. We really like doing that kind of thing. ^_^
+The Ling Space Hello there. I am a bit confused about the two concepts of the syntactic tree and the elementary tree, would you help me clarify those two?
Your video makes a lot of sense and I definitely understand the way you do it but every single one of the examples in my textbook is entirely different. Not every word has a ' and I am very confused ._.
Is there like a test to find out if sth is a complement or an adjunct?
Hi , how do you know which word is the head
I missed that in university. Thanks you helped me a lot :)
That was really useful and so easy to understand. Thank you!
Anıl Ayhan You're welcome! Glad you liked it. ^_^
So, I'm a little confused about how this X bar is a theory and not just a labeling device, like old-fashioned diagramming sentences, which is tool or nomenclature to analyze the sentence. When I hear theory, I think rules with predictive power. How is X bar that? 😄
Diana Kennedy Thanks for the question! I can definitely see why you might see X' Theory this way from just the part we covered in this video. There's a lot more to this approach to syntax that we'll be covering in future episodes (although probably not until mid-December or so). We'll be talking about movement and how we derive one kind of sentence from another, like a question from a declarative, next time out.In its more developed form, like the pretty robust Government and Binding approach to syntax from the 1980s, X' makes a lot of predictions about what elements can be moved around where in a sentence; what pronouns can receive what interpretations; what kind of word orders are possible; when we can leave out particular kinds of nouns or other morphemes in languages that allow that, and when we can't; and a host of other answers regarding how we can structure our sentences. A lot of this is done through saying particular structural configurations are impossible, so we should never see a language that does it. It also can explain why some things that are logically plausible never happen cross-linguistically, like the "I saw the barn red" sort of examples.But none of that is in the video, so it's not easy to see why X' merits the title of theory just from that. I hope this helps for now, even if there's not a lot of detail still, and that when we come back to it later, it'll be clearer. Thanks again!
The Ling Space Thanks. That does make more sense, and I can be patient!
thank you .. you make it understood
+Blabel Bakr Glad to be able to help!
Thank you so much!! This video really helps me a lot!
thanks for the video but i have a question if i have a sentence and it had at the end 'to look after them'
how would i draw a tree for it i know that look after is a phrasal verb and them is a pronoun so it would be a complement
right? would do i write in its branch and also to what would it class as
i would appreciate it if you can help me
how can I determine which one is the head?
Yep. Excellent again.
James Glogowski, PhD please help me out. I need an xbar analysis of the following sentences
1. I wrote the poem with a pencil.
Thanks! ^_^
I just trumbled over your great channel! Reminds me so much of my study of empirical linguistics. I just wondered why you left S/S'. Or did you get it in another video?
Thanks for the question! It's because S/S' isn't really part of the X' theory; usually, IP is held for standing in sentences. We will definitely do more videos in the future on different syntactic models (in fact, we're definitely going to do one on the Minimalist Programme), but I don't know if we're specifically going to cover that one. If you're curious, though, check out this series of posts from All Things Linguistic on various flavours of syntax trees: allthingslinguistic.com/tagged/how-to-draw-syntax-trees
The Ling Space
Ahh, thx for the answer! Makes totally sense, didn't figure it out.^^
Always cool to see how you comprize the best stuff of what I learned once in these nice videos. Sometimes even new to me. And glad to see other people who are 'addicted' to language as well. :D
Yeah, language is pretty awesome. Thanks for watching! We've got a new syntax video coming out later this week, on the VP-internal Subject Hypothesis, so hopefully that'll be fun, too. ^_^
The Ling Space
I will check it out. Interesting.
can you give examples of x-bar trees for verb-final languages?
Is there any video explaining vp shell ?
Yep! We talk about splitting the verb phrase, VP shells, and little v in this episode: ruclips.net/video/lY1X2BnjmNI/видео.html
Great Bob Ross reference!
More about Sintax!
I'll come back here if I pass my syntax test tomorrow
thank you for this!:) helped me a lot..
Thanks! Glad to be able to help out. ^_^
Came for X'-theory, stayed for Angel
Hope you're doing well
THAT SHIRT!!!
I'm just here for the BtVS/ Ats references.
Always happy for people to get things! ^_^
Is that L, from Death Note on the back? :p
Great explanation btw
+Imad Aouragh Thanks! And yeah, it is. Well spotted! ^_^
So the reason we make syntax trees is to make a visual note about how languages can say
The amazing Cordelia
Codelia amazing the
The Cordelia amazing
But not amazing the Cordelia or Cordelia the amazing. But we can have Cordelia the Amazing in English...
I still don't get syntax trees 😅
Buffy/Angel fan, huh?
This guy's smart, isn't he?
"a good sentence of english"
回頭見 😀
I literally don't understand any of this
a-ha? .. lol.. damn im slow. .. but i hiss to snake n 2000 years...
i got x-phobia. could u rid that letter pls. :P
Sure, we’ll just replace it with KS, just as Turkish and Danish has done: Taxi --> Taski.
Linguist do not use x-bar theory anymore.
k roninson That's true, X' isn't currently in use. But we thought it was a good place to start from, for a few reasons. It's a good way to think about why we need structure, and it's fairly easy to introduce. It also helps to understand current theories, if you know about X'. And it also gets taught in classes regularly for how to enter syntax; I took two undergrad classes and a grad course in syntax before we ran into Minimalism. Eventually, we'll talk about Minimalism, but X' is a good entry point. ^_^
Oh, ok. I will learn a little about minimalism.
The Ling Space O_O It isn't actually used anymore? I took a couple basic linguistics classes where we learned X' a couple years ago. I didn't know this was apparently just a "beginner's theory" to get students used to thinking in this sort of way. I thought it was still used. What DO linguists use?
Changing Storms Well, I don't know if I'd say that it's just a beginner's theory; it was really the ongoing view on syntax for a good solid period of time. But it also hasn't been the real working theory for 20-ish years or so now. Generative syntax people are currently focused more on the Minimalist Programme. There's a good amount of overlap with X', which is part of why it's still useful to start there, too. But it focuses on paring down what's needed in syntax to describe the system. If you're interested in more, I recommended a few books in another comment here: Cook and Newsom's book "Chomsky's Universal Grammar", and Carnie's "Syntax: a Minimalist Introduction". Good luck! ^_^
Yes, I am interested in getting a degree in linguistics and philosophy.
this guy is amazingly awkward
ur "explanation" was more of a bad inspirational speech than an explanation