3. Los objetivos y recursos de la empresa
4.1 Diagnóstico externo
4.1.3 Mercado de joyería en México
question: An ultimately what was unleashed upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast?!
Answer: *Unsuccessful weight-loss program.
Movement
*It was unsuccessful weight-loss program that an ultimately was unleashed upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast.
Co-ordination
An ultimately unsuccessful weight-loss program and disastrous food-rejection therapy was unleashed upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast.
In the last test, if the co-ordination here really is of only unsuccessful weight-loss program, the ultimately must apply also to disastrous food-rejection
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therapy. Whether or not this is the case is quite a subtle judgement. We may just interpret this as a co-ordination of ultimately unsuccessful weight-loss program and disastrous food-rejection therapy, in which case we have not said anything about the constituent structure of unsuccessful weight-loss program without ultimately.
As you can see, the tests won’t always work as straightforwardly as they did for the structure of an ultimately unsuccessful weight-loss program. In this case the first three – substitution with a pronoun, sentence fragment and movement – yielded ungrammatical structures and suggested our grouping was incorrect. The fourth test suggested our string may be a natural unit of the sentence. Before we weigh up the evidence, let’s apply the last three tests we looked at.
Reduction
*An ultimately unsuccessful was unleashed upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast.
*An ultimately weight-loss was unleashed upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast.
*An ultimately program was unleashed upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast.
Again, when the test gives only ungrammatical sentences we can’t really tell whether this truly is because the string doesn’t form a constituent.
Omission
*An ultimately was unleashed upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast.
What we’ve got is another ungrammatical sentence. But remember, just as with reduction, we need to tread cautiously here; if the string can’t be omitted, it could be because one or more parts of the string is obligatory. It doesn’t necessarily signal that it’s not a constituent.
Intrusion
*An ultimately, almost certainly, unsuccessful weight-loss program was unleashed upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast.
Like movement, this test isn’t terribly useful here since the ungrammati-cality could be either because it isn’t a constituent or because the constitu-ent is too far down in the structure for this test to be useful.
If we now sum up our results for the constituent status of unsuccessful weight-loss program, we get the following. We use a star * here to indicate that an ungrammatical sentence results and a √ to show that we got a gram-matical sentence.
An ultimately unsuccessful weight-loss program was unleashed upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast.
Substitution An ultimately what was unleashed upon a
shell-shocked Mr Toast *
Sentence fragment Unsuccessful weight-loss program *
37 Movement It was unsuccessful weight-loss program that an
ultimately was unleashed upon a shell-shocked
Mr Toast *
Coordination An ultimately unsuccessful weight-loss program and disastrous food-rejection therapy was unleashed
upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast √
Intrusion An ultimately, almost certainly, unsuccessful weight-loss program was unleashed upon a
shell-shocked Mr Toast *
Reduction An ultimately unsuccessful was unleashed upon a
shell-shocked Mr Toast *
Omission An ultimately was unleashed upon a shell-shocked
Mr Toast *
Looking now at unsuccessful weight-loss program, it would appear that this string is not a constituent of An ultimately unsuccessful weight-loss program was unleashed upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast. The only test to yield a positive result was co-ordination.
It is, in fact, quite common to find that one test (or more) gives a dif-ferent result from the other ones. As we mentioned earlier, when this hap-pens, it is important to think about why this may be the case. For both reduction and omission, we saw that problems could arise if obligatory parts were involved. We have also seen that there are certain constituents to which movement does not apply – for example, constituents which are deeply nested within the kind of phrase that is built around a noun.
Intrusion is also unhelpful when we are testing for intermediate structure.
Another way of dealing with a string for which the tests give a mixed result is to try an alternative constituent structure. Let’s again use unsuc-cessful weight-loss program as an example here; since it is clearly not a con-stituent, at least one of its parts must belong to a different constituent. The obvious alternative is that unsuccessful forms a constituent with ultimately at this level. We can then try the alternative, and we get the following result:
An ultimately unsuccessful weight-loss program was unleashed upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast.
Substitution A disastrous weight-loss program was unleashed
upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast √
Sentence fragment Ultimately unsuccessful √
Movement It was ultimately unsuccessful that a weight-loss program was unleashed upon a shell-shocked
Mr Toast *
Co-ordination An ultimately unsuccessful and extremely
unwelcome weight-loss program was unleashed
upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast √
Intrusion An ultimately unsuccessful, between you and me, weight-loss program was unleashed upon a
shell-shocked Mr Toast ?
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Reduction An unsuccessful weight-loss program was unleashed
upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast √
Omission A weight-loss program was unleashed upon a
shell-shocked Mr Toast √
The judgements here make it quite clear that ultimately unsuccessful is a constituent of the sentence. The only tests here that didn’t yield gram-matical strings were movement and possibly intrusion; in other words, tests that we know do not always work for constituents nested deep within the sentence. This means that unsuccessful weight-loss program cannot be a constituent. This is because the string ultimately unsuccessful does form a constituent. On the other hand, ultimately unsuccessful can and does form a constituent with weight-loss program. We return to the internal structure of larger constituents in later chapters, in particular Chapters 3 and 6.
2.7 Representing structure
As long as we’re dealing with small constituents like an ultimately unsuc-cessful weight-loss program, it’s quite easy to describe the structure in words. If, however, we are wanting to discuss the constituent structure of the whole sentence above, then we need a neater way than ordi-nary language: weight-loss and program go together to form a constitu-ent weight-loss program, ultimately unsuccessful go together and in turn form a constituent with weight-loss program which in turn … This way of describing the constituent structure of a whole sentence quickly becomes cumbersome and non-transparent. Instead, there are a number of more formal ways of expressing constituent structure. One that you may have come across at school is underlining. Since it becomes very cumbersome when more complex structures are involved, underlining is not really used in linguistics.
The two common ways of indicating constituent structures are BRACKETS
and TREES. One of the structures we have discussed above looks like this when brackets are used to indicate its structure:
[An [ [ultimately unsuccessful] [weight-loss program] ] ] was unleashed upon a shell-shocked Mr Toast.
Brackets become pretty unwieldy when we deal with more complex struc-tures and the main reason they are still used is that when you use a word processor it is more of an effort to draw a tree than to add brackets.
The trees used to show constituent structure are also known as PHRASE MARKERS. When you start out, trees may also look a bit unfamiliar and frightening. However, once you get used to them, they really do give a good overview of the structure. The trees for the sub-structures we have established here looks like this:
39 Since trees will be the normal way of indicating structure in this book, we will have a little more to say about them here. First of all some terminol-ogy: we use the term BRANCH in an obvious way to refer to the lines. The point at which two or more lines come together is called a NODE. In the following example, we have circled and numbered all the nodes:
A node represents a constituent. In order for a string to be a constituent in a tree, there must be one node which is associated with that string and with no other words. In this example, the whole string an ultimately unsuccessful weight-loss program is a constituent because there is a node, node 1, which represents that string and nothing else. On the other hand, unsuccessful weight-loss program is not a constituent, since the only node that covers this whole string, i.e. node 3, also covers ultimately. Ultimately unsuccessful is a constituent since node 4 covers this string and nothing else.
Two nodes which are separated by just one branch are said to have a spe-cial relationship, where the higher node is the MOTHER and the lower one is the DAUGHTER. In this little tree, node 1 is the mother of nodes 2 and 3, nodes 4 and 5 are the daughters of node 3, etc. There are five nodes which do not have any daughters, namely 2, 6, 7, 8 and 9. These are called TERMI-NAL NODES. The node which is at the top of a tree with no mother above it, like 1, is usually called the ROOT NODE.
1
ultimately an
6 7 8 9
5
2 3
1
4
unsuccessful weight-loss program 2
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In the chapters to follow, when we will also want to assign each constitu-ent to a particular category and indicate the category of each constituconstitu-ent in the representation, we will see further advantages of using tree structures.
In Chapter 3, we will put a label on each node and in this way name the constituents represented by that node.
2.8 Points to remember
❑
❑ Morphology can be defined as the study of how words are built up from morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in the struc-ture of a language; together morphemes can build up bigger words.
❑
❑ Some morphemes can function as words on their own. These are called free morphemes. Others can only occur with some other morpheme.
These are called bound morphemes.
❑
❑ Bound morphemes are also referred to as affixes; when they precede the stem they are called prefixes, and when they follow the stem, suffixes.
❑
❑ There are two types of word-building, namely, inflection and derivation.
❑
❑ Inflection involves combining a free form with an inflectional affix, chosen from a small set of affixes (all suffixes in English). These don’t form new words but have a purely grammatical meaning.
❑
❑ Derivation involves creating new meanings, either by adding a deriva-tional affix, or by combining free morphemes, i.e. compounding. The set of derivational affixes is much larger than that of inflectional affixes and they can be either prefixes or suffixes.
❑
❑ Syntax can be defined as the study of the structure of sentences.
❑
❑ There is a definite hierarchy of structural units in a sentence, ranging from the largest unit (which is the sentence) down to the level of the word. These structural units are called constituents.
❑ sentence are linked more closely than others. The arguments we use to translate these intuitions into more formal criteria are known as con-stituency tests. The most important concon-stituency tests are substitution, unit of sense/sentence fragment, movement and co-ordination.
❑
❑ It is not uncommon to get contradictory results when applying the constituency tests and in these cases it is important first of all to think about why a particular test gives a different result. Also, one can test for an alternative arrangement to see if that gives a more unambiguous result.
❑
❑ We can represent constituent structure using brackets to show the groupings of words. However, the more usual way is by using tree diagrams.
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Exercises
1. Identifying morphemes
The following piece is taken from ‘Here Comes the Son’, a review of the film about John Lennon (N#803:48). Divide each word into morphemes and indicate whether each morpheme is free or bound. If bound, state whether derivational or inflectional. Are there any grammatical free morphemes? Discuss any problems which you encountered in your analysis.
But here we have Nowhere Boy, a new biopic of John Lennon, and the surprise is that it’s rather fresh and watchable. Director Sam Taylor Wood avoids the Beatles clichés by focusing on John’s early years, before he left for Hamburg with Paul and George, and long before he became more famous than Jesus.
2. Determining constituents
If, by using the tests for constituency, we can establish that extremely silly is a constituent in the sentence He always tells extremely silly jokes. Does this mean that extremely silly jokes cannot be a constituent of the same sen-tence? How about silly jokes in the same sentence, can that be a constituent of that sentence if extremely silly is?
3. Determining constituents
Decide whether or not the bracketed sequence of words in each of the fol-lowing sentences is a constituent of that sentence. Remember that some tests will work better than others depending on the nature of the string. If the result is ambiguous, test an alternative constituent to see if that gives a clearer result.
(a) The Telegraph called [David Beckham's new beard] the most memora-ble part of England's 3–0 win over Belarus.
(b) Giggs scored a truly [sublime goal].
(c) Alf Ramsey gave [Colin Bell his England debut] against Sweden at Wembley in May 1968.
(d) The objective is to hit [the goal keeper with the ball].
4. Structural ambiguity
Here are some examples of ambiguous headlines from The Year’s Best Actual Headlines (1999). Headlines often give rise to ambiguities because words are left out to make them snappier. Decide whether the ambiguity is structural or lexical (i.e. based on an ambiguous word). If it is structural, then use the constituency tests discussed in this chapter to establish the differences, in some cases you may have to fill in the words that would make it an ordi-nary sentence in order to apply constituency tests.
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(a) British Left Waffles On Falkland Islands.
(b) Clinton Wins on Budget, But More Lies Ahead.
(c) Kids Make Nutritious Snacks.
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