The survey of grammar teaching in foreign language (FL) teaching starts in 1920 with some important government reports on the teaching of language, and ends in 2016 with another report on pedagogy in FL teaching. In between these points,... more
The survey of grammar teaching in foreign language (FL) teaching starts in 1920 with some important government reports on the teaching of language, and ends in 2016 with another report on pedagogy in FL teaching. In between these points, we find two significant dates: 1951, when O-level and A-level were introduced as the official school-leaving qualification for 16-year olds; and 1988, when O-level and CSE were merged into the present GCSE exam. Grammar instruction was important in the 1920s, contested in the 1950s, almost dead in the 1980s, and reviving in the 2010s. These changes are linked to English teaching, undergraduate FL syllabuses, and the target population for FL teaching.
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We probably all share an interest in syntax, so we would dearly love a clear and certain answer to the question: what is syntactic structure like? Is it based on dependencies between words, or on phrases? What kinds of relation are there?... more
We probably all share an interest in syntax, so we would dearly love a clear and certain answer to the question: what is syntactic structure like? Is it based on dependencies between words, or on phrases? What kinds of relation are there? And so on. But before we can answer relatively spe cific questions like these, we must first answer a much more general question: What kind of thing do we think language is? Or maybe: Where do we think language is – nowhere, in society, in our minds? Our answer will decide what basic assumptions we make, and how our discipline, linguistics, relates to other disciplines. Is language a set of abstract patterns like those of mathematics, without any particular location? This is a popular answer, and makes a good deal of sense. After all, what is language if not ab stract patterning? The patterns made by words in a sentence, or by segments in a syllable, are cer tainly abstract and regular, and can be studied as a branch of mathematics – as indeed t...
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Grammar teaching has a long and distinguished history, but in the English-speaking world it has recently fallen out of favor, though this trend has now been reversed in England. Grammar teaching always includes the word classes but can... more
Grammar teaching has a long and distinguished history, but in the English-speaking world it has recently fallen out of favor, though this trend has now been reversed in England. Grammar teaching always includes the word classes but can include the whole of language structure. It can apply to the teaching of writing and reading, L2 learning, liberal self-knowledge, or scientific method. When the target is writing, the aim can be either error-reduction or growth, and the method may be independent, reactive, or proactive (anticipating specific writing needs). Research evidence suggests that proactive teaching works.
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Clitics are a challenge for any view of the architecture of grammar because they straddle the boundaries between words and morphemes and between syntax and morphology. The paper shows that clitics are syntactic words which also serve as... more
Clitics are a challenge for any view of the architecture of grammar because they straddle the boundaries between words and morphemes and between syntax and morphology. The paper shows that clitics are syntactic words which also serve as word-parts, so their presence is explained in terms of syntactic dependencies, but their position follows morphological rules. The general analytical framework which is proposed builds on the theory of Word Grammar. As expected, clitics do demand a collection of special analytical categories - the word-classes Clitic and Hostword, and the relationships 'host', 'clitic', 'finite verb' and 'extension' - but (unlike other current theories of cliticization) they do not need any extra theoretical apparatus. The paper considers simple clitics in English and special clitics in French and Serbo-Croat.
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This paper argues against the notion 'functional category' (a kind of word-class) while accepting that individual words may be described as 'function' words or 'content' words. It focuses on the two least... more
This paper argues against the notion 'functional category' (a kind of word-class) while accepting that individual words may be described as 'function' words or 'content' words. It focuses on the two least controversial examples of functional categories — 'determiner' and 'complementiser' — and argues that neither of these categories is needed; and if this conclusion is correct, there is even less independent support for the more abstract functional categories like 'Inflection' and its subtypes. There is no word-class of 'determiners', because determiners are simply 'transitive' pronouns; nor do 'complementisers' comprise a word-class because the standard complementisers are all different from each other.
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Abstract In some languages a predicative complement or adjunct agrees in case with the subject of its clause, which provides a reliable clue for identifying the subject of non-finite clauses. This is important in deciding whether cases of... more
Abstract In some languages a predicative complement or adjunct agrees in case with the subject of its clause, which provides a reliable clue for identifying the subject of non-finite clauses. This is important in deciding whether cases of ‘functional control’ need a syntactic analysis in terms of PRO or of ‘structure sharing’ (including NP-movement). The paper looks in detail at Russian, Icelandic and Ancient Greek, and concludes that in all these languages the choice between PRO and structure sharing is determined primarily by whether the overt nominal is subject or object of the governing verb, rather than by whether or not the latter assigns it a theta-role. In all these languages, a subject almost always demands structure sharing, regardless of theta-role status, but an object usually allows PRO, though it may also allow sharing and this option may depend on whether or not it bears a theta-role.
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Adjuncts may occur (by adjunct preposing) before a wh-interrogative clause which is a main clause, but not before one which is subordinate; for example: (i) Tomorrow what shall we do? (ii) I told you (*tomorrow) what we shall do. Why... more
Adjuncts may occur (by adjunct preposing) before a wh-interrogative clause which is a main clause, but not before one which is subordinate; for example: (i) Tomorrow what shall we do? (ii) I told you (*tomorrow) what we shall do. Why should adjunct preposing be different in main and subordinate clauses? The pretheoretical answer is obvious: the wh-word must be initial in the subordinate clause that it introduces. However not all theories allow this insight to be expressed. A number of possible explanations based on standard assumptions are considered and rejected. The proposed solution is based on enriched dependency structure (Word Grammar) which does allow an analysis in which the wh-word must be initial in the subordinate clause but not in the main clause.
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In his study of Japanese phonology, McCawley introduces an interesting typological classification of languages according to the kinds of rules needed for describing the distribution of prosodic features like stress and pitch (1968:... more
In his study of Japanese phonology, McCawley introduces an interesting typological classification of languages according to the kinds of rules needed for describing the distribution of prosodic features like stress and pitch (1968: 58–61). Whereas Trubetzkoy had made a simple distinction between ‘syllablecounting’ languages and ‘mora-counting’ languages, McCawley suggests that we should make two independent distinctions:(a) accordig to the ‘unit of phonological distance’ (the unit in terms of which the location of any accent is calculated) between ‘syllable-counting’ and ‘mora-counting’ languages;(b) according to the ‘prosodic unit’ (the unit the actually bears the accent) between ‘syllable languages’ and ‘mora languages’.
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Why is it impossible to process The rat the cat the dog chased ate died? The standardexplanations all focus on its syntactic structure, but the present paper offers an alternativeexplanation in terms of semantic structure. The syntactic... more
Why is it impossible to process The rat the cat the dog chased ate died? The standardexplanations all focus on its syntactic structure, but the present paper offers an alternativeexplanation in terms of semantic structure. The syntactic account cannot explain why somesentences which are syntactically similar are much easier to process. The difficult sentencesseem to be those in which an embedded clause which modifies a noun has its own subjectmodified by another clause whose subject is a common noun (not a pronoun). ...
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1 Language and cognition We probably all share an interest in syntax, so we would dearly love a clear and certain answer to the question: what is syntactic structure like? Is it based on dependencies between words, or on phrases? What... more
1 Language and cognition We probably all share an interest in syntax, so we would dearly love a clear and certain answer to the question: what is syntactic structure like? Is it based on dependencies between words, or on phrases? What kinds of relation are there? And so on. But before we can answer relatively specific questions like these, we must first answer a much more general question: What kind of thing do we think language is? Or maybe: Where do we think language is – nowhere, in society, in our minds? Our answer will decide what basic assumptions we make, and how our discipline, linguistics, relates to other disciplines. Is language a set of abstract patterns like those
This paper describes the central role played by default inheritance in Word Grammar, a theory of language knowledge and processing. A single formalism is used to represent knowledge at the levels of morphology, syntax, and semantics. A... more
This paper describes the central role played by default inheritance in Word Grammar, a theory of language knowledge and processing. A single formalism is used to represent knowledge at the levels of morphology, syntax, and semantics. A single rule of inference is used to inherit knowledge at all of these levels. This rule is distinctive in that it requires defaults to be explicitly overridden in the case of exceptions. The explicit overriding rule is used in syntax to achieve what other theories achieve by means of transformations, metarules, or lexical rules.
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This comment on Sydney Lamb's article " Language structure: A plausible theory " explores the similarities and differences between Lamb's theory and my own theory called Word Grammar, which was inspired by Lamb's... more
This comment on Sydney Lamb's article " Language structure: A plausible theory " explores the similarities and differences between Lamb's theory and my own theory called Word Grammar, which was inspired by Lamb's work in the 1960s. The two theories share Lamb's view that language is a symbolic network, just like the rest of our knowledge. The note explains this claim, then picks out a number of differences between the theories, all of which centre on the distinction between types and tokens. In Word Grammar, tokens are represented as temporary nodes added to the permanent network, and allow the theory to use dependency structure rather than phrase structure, to include mental referents, to recognise the messiness of spreading activation and to include a monotonic theory of default inheritance.
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This article' is intended for non-speciaiists who would like to understand the state of play in syntactic theory. It introduces nine different syntactic theories which count as 'important' in some sense, and explains some... more
This article' is intended for non-speciaiists who would like to understand the state of play in syntactic theory. It introduces nine different syntactic theories which count as 'important' in some sense, and explains some of the assumptions that they make about sentence structure. It aiso discusses the various kinds of solutions that have been offered for one problem, that of discontinuities produced by topicalisation, and introduces a tenth theory which rests on fundamentally different assumptions.
Cushing argues that government policy in the UK is prescriptive and encourages similar policies at school level (as reported in the press), which in turn encourage the ‘policing’ of language by school teachers. I offer an alternative... more
Cushing argues that government policy in the UK is prescriptive and encourages similar policies at school level (as reported in the press), which in turn encourage the ‘policing’ of language by school teachers. I offer an alternative reading of the evidence in which government policy, as stated in official documents, generally avoids prescriptivism, as do an unknown number of schools and school teachers; where prescriptivism persists it reflects a prescriptive culture in society, not government policy. The conclusion is that government policy is only one influence on teachers’ behaviour, so if government wants to eliminate prescriptivism it needs to take a stronger position than simply avoiding prescriptivism in its own documents. (Education, prescriptivism, policy, Britain)
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ABSTRACT k and dogs, between eat and dogs and between eat and cats. The fact that Categorial Grammar has drawn much interest away from CF-PSGs may mean that Hudson's theory now has a more prominent role to play, and this book is... more
ABSTRACT k and dogs, between eat and dogs and between eat and cats. The fact that Categorial Grammar has drawn much interest away from CF-PSGs may mean that Hudson's theory now has a more prominent role to play, and this book is certainly thought-provoking, if at times a little frustrating in the questions it asks without answering. The book is divided into two parts, the first seven chapters defining the theory, and the remaining seven providing an account of certain aspects of English, principally syntax with a little morphology and semantics. The theory has moved on quite substantially from previous versions, not only in its form, but in its coverage. While the original theory was predominantly a theory of syntax, the current version purports to be a theory of knowledge, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. That over half of the book is given over to a (fairly substantial) grammar of English, and is thus very linguistically dominated, is only partially countered by the examples in the theory
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Serbo-Croat Clitics and Word Grammar Serbo-Croat has a complex system of clitics which raise interesting problems for any theory of the interface between syntax and morphology. After summarising the data we review previous analyses... more
Serbo-Croat Clitics and Word Grammar Serbo-Croat has a complex system of clitics which raise interesting problems for any theory of the interface between syntax and morphology. After summarising the data we review previous analyses (mostly within the generative tradition), all of which are unsatisfactory in various ways. We then explain how Word Grammar handles clitics: as words whose form is an affix rather than the usual ‘word-form’. Like other affixes, clitics need a word to accommodate them, but in the case of clitics this is a special kind of word called a ‘hostword’. We present a detailed analysis of Serbo-Croat clitics within this theory, introducing a new distinction between two cases: where the clitics are attached to the verb or auxiliary, and where they are attached to some dependent of the verb.
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The most serious recent work on the theory of coordination has probably been done in terms of three theories of grammatical structure: Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG–see especially Gazdar, 1981; Gazdar et al., 1982; 1985; Sag... more
The most serious recent work on the theory of coordination has probably been done in terms of three theories of grammatical structure: Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG–see especially Gazdar, 1981; Gazdar et al., 1982; 1985; Sag et al., 1985; Schachter & Mordechay, 1983), Categorial Grammar (CG–see especially Steedman, 1985; Dowty, 1985) and Transformational Grammar (TG–notably Williams, 1978, 1981; Neijt, 1979; van Oirsouw, 1985, 1987). Each of these approaches is different in important respects: for instance, according to whether or not they allow deletion rules, and according to the kinds of information which they allow to be encoded in syntactic features. However, behind these differences lies an important similarity: in each case the theory concerned makes two assumptions about grammatical structure in general (i.e. about all structures, including coordinate ones):I The basic syntagmatic relations in sentence-structure are part-whole relations (consituent structure) an...
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This paper will be concerned with the analysis of sentences like those in (1), which I think are all uncontroversial examples of the construction that is generally called ‘gapping’.
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Adger (2006) claims that the Minimalist Program provides a suitable theoretical framework for analysing at least one example of inherent variability: the variation between was and were after you and we in the Scottish town of Buckie.... more
Adger (2006) claims that the Minimalist Program provides a suitable theoretical framework for analysing at least one example of inherent variability: the variation between was and were after you and we in the Scottish town of Buckie. Drawing on the feature analysis of pronouns and the assumption that lexical items normally have equal probabilities, his analysis provides two ‘routes’ to we/you was, but only one to we/you were, thereby explaining why the former is on average twice as common as the latter. This comment points out four serious flaws in his argument: it ignores important interactions among sex, age and subject pronoun; hardly any social groups actually show the predicted average 2:1 ratio; there is no general tendency for lexical items to have equal probability of being used; the effects of the subject may be better stated in terms of the lexemes you and we rather than as semantic features. The conclusion is that inherent variability supports a usage-based theory rather ...
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Why education needs linguistics (and vice versa) I should like to thank Bob Borsley for first suggesting this note and for comments on two earlier drafts, and Ron Carter, Shirley Reay, Rafael Salkie, Mike Stubbs, Mike Swan, John Walmsley, Catherine Walter and an anonymous JL referee for comments ...more
One of the fundamental questions on which we linguists disagree is whether or not our subject is useful for education. On one side is a long tradition, stretching back to the classical world, in which the practical benefits were clear and... more
One of the fundamental questions on which we linguists disagree is whether or not our subject is useful for education. On one side is a long tradition, stretching back to the classical world, in which the practical benefits were clear and agreed – for example, the early Stoic grammarians aimed to improve literary style (Robins 1967: 16), and the Latin grammarians wrote pedagogical texts for use in school (ibid.: 54). In modern times this tradition is represented by leading linguists such as Tesnière (1959) and Halliday (1964), whose work has been motivated at least in part by the desire to improve language teaching at school. On the other hand is an equally long philosophical tradition of ‘pure’ scholarship for its own sake, in which the only motivation was a desire to understand language better. Recently this tradition is most clearly represented by two linguists who otherwise have little in common, Sampson (1980) and Chomsky (Olson, Faigley & Chomsky 1991), both of whom have denie...
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How do children acquire the syntax of their native language? One popular view is that children are born with some knowledge of syntax and that acquisition consists largely of linking these abstract rules to the particular language that... more
How do children acquire the syntax of their native language? One popular view is that children are born with some knowledge of syntax and that acquisition consists largely of linking these abstract rules to the particular language that the child is learning (eg Pinker, 1989). The opposite view is that children form abstract syntactic constructions by abstracting across utterances in the input that instantiate them (eg Tomasello, 2003). Ninio rejects both these accounts, instead arguing that 'children learn a lexicalist syntax, in which the ...
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... In other words, SPEND and PAY both focus on the money, and differ only in whether they construe this as a resource (SPEND) or ... This seems to be characteristic of other transitive verbs which (apparently arbitrarily) resist... more
... In other words, SPEND and PAY both focus on the money, and differ only in whether they construe this as a resource (SPEND) or ... This seems to be characteristic of other transitive verbs which (apparently arbitrarily) resist passivization, including SUIT, BECOME and STRIKE. ...
This comment on Sydney Lamb’s article “Language structure: A plausible theory” explores the similarities and differences between Lamb’s theory and my own theory called Word Grammar, which was inspired by Lamb’s work in the 1960s. The two... more
This comment on Sydney Lamb’s article “Language structure: A plausible theory” explores the similarities and differences between Lamb’s theory and my own theory called Word Grammar, which was inspired by Lamb’s work in the 1960s. The two theories share Lamb’s view that language is a symbolic network, just like the rest of our knowledge. The note explains this claim, then picks out a number of differences between the theories, all of which centre on the distinction between types and tokens. In Word Grammar, tokens are represented as temporary nodes added to the permanent network, and allow the theory to use dependency structure rather than phrase structure, to include mental referents, to recognise the messiness of spreading activation and to include a monotonic theory of default inheritance.
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I argue that the crucial criterion for evaluating analyses is psychological plausibility, and not parsimony, so the number of nodes isn’t important—and indeed, one version of dependency analysis recognises as many nodes as some... more
I argue that the crucial criterion for evaluating analyses is psychological plausibility, and not parsimony, so the number of nodes isn’t important—and indeed, one version of dependency analysis recognises as many nodes as some phrase-structure analyses do. But in terms of plausibility, dependency grammar is preferable to phrase structure because the latter denies that the human mind is capable of recognising direct links (dependencies) between words.
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As Branigan & Pickering (B&P) argue, structural priming has important implications for the theory of language structure, but these implications go beyond those suggested. Priming implies a network structure, so the grammar must be a... more
As Branigan & Pickering (B&P) argue, structural priming has important implications for the theory of language structure, but these implications go beyond those suggested. Priming implies a network structure, so the grammar must be a network and so must sentence structure. Instead of phrase structure, the most promising model for syntactic structure is enriched dependency structure, as in Word Grammar.