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MSC Introduction To Syntax: Lecture 1: What Syntax Is About What Is This Module About?

This document provides an overview of syntactic theory and what it means to have syntactic knowledge of a language. It discusses: - Syntactic theory studies the rules that determine how words combine into larger units in a language. Native speakers intuitively know these rules without explicit instruction. - Descriptive grammarians note that native speakers can distinguish possible sentences from impossible ones in their language. Prescriptive grammarians focus more on conscious rules. - The goal is to describe people's internal linguistic knowledge (I-language), not just utterances produced (the corpus). Children acquire syntactic rules unconsciously from the language they hear. - Sentences have internal structure, not just linear word order. Children are sensitive to constituents

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نور عبدالله
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26 views

MSC Introduction To Syntax: Lecture 1: What Syntax Is About What Is This Module About?

This document provides an overview of syntactic theory and what it means to have syntactic knowledge of a language. It discusses: - Syntactic theory studies the rules that determine how words combine into larger units in a language. Native speakers intuitively know these rules without explicit instruction. - Descriptive grammarians note that native speakers can distinguish possible sentences from impossible ones in their language. Prescriptive grammarians focus more on conscious rules. - The goal is to describe people's internal linguistic knowledge (I-language), not just utterances produced (the corpus). Children acquire syntactic rules unconsciously from the language they hear. - Sentences have internal structure, not just linear word order. Children are sensitive to constituents

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نور عبدالله
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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MSc Introduction to Syntax

Lecture 1: What syntax is about


What is this module about?
This module is about syntactic theory. Syntactic theory is about the rules and
principles that determine how people speaking a particular language know
how to combine words in that language into larger units, and what
combinations are not possible. But what exactly do people know when they
‘know the syntax of English’?
A prescriptivist grammarian will answer that such a person knows how to
properly apply rules like “don’t split your infinitives”, “don’t end a sentence
with a preposition” or “use whom rather than who as the object of a verb or
preposition”.

1. a. to boldly go where no man has gone before


a’. to go boldly where no man has gone before
2. a. This is the kind of bank which you cannot rely on
a’. This is the kind of bank on which you cannot rely
3 a. Who did you see?
a’. Whom did you see?
MSc Syntax: 1 2

Such rules are learned consciously, via explicit instruction, and are largely
arbitrary (or sometimes they reflect older stages of the language, such as the
morphological case distinction in (3)). In this respect they resemble rules for
table etiquette or traffic rules.
A descriptivist grammarian will answer the above question by pointing out
that people who have learned English as a first language can tell for any
string of words, such as those in (4)-(10), whether it is a possible English
sentence or not, without having had explicit instruction for this or being
conscious of the rule system that he or she uses to decide on this.
4. a. Mary read a book
b. Mary read which book? (possible, but interpreted as an ‘echo
question’)
c. Which book did Mary read?
d. Mary read a book and the newspaper
e. * Which book did Mary read and the newspaper?
5. a. Who did Mary say that the university gave an Honorary Degree
to yesterday?
c. * Who did Mary day what kind of degree they gave to yesterday?
6. a. John does not like those novels
b. Those novels, John does not like
c. John does not like those novels by Jones
d. * Those novels, John does not like by Jones
7. a. Jane likes reading novels.
b. What does Jane like reading?
c. Reading novels upsets Jane
c. * What does reading upset Jane?
8. a. John is eager to please
a’. What is John eager to do?
b. John is easy to please
b’. * What is John easy to do?
9. a. John wants to shave himself/him (himself = John, him ≠ John)
b. John wants Bill to shave himself/him (himself ≠ John, him = John)
10. etc etc
Note that it is unlikely that a child learns how to distinguish possible from
impossible sentences by instruction, because:
(i) how many children will ever be instructed about facts such as those
in (4)-(9), or even hear such sentences? Yet all English speakers will
agree on their relative grammaticality.
(ii) all children show a similar developmental path in first-language
acquisition, irrespective of the instruction they might get (in fact,
they seem to ignore explicit instruction).
(iii) it is not possible to give a child a list of all possible sentences in a
language, since the number of possible sentences is literally infinite
(see below).
Apparently, every child unconsciously learns a set of rules/principles, with
which it can distinguish the possible sentences in the language it hears
around him/her from the impossible ones. This is a faculty with which all
humans are endowed. (Apparently, there is a critical period for this faculty to
MSc Syntax: 1 3

be active—after a certain age, this spontaneous language learning ability


disappears). It is the properties of this unconsciously learned syntactic rule
system that we are going to investigate in this module. (Note, by the way, that
for most if not all varieties of present-day English, this rule system will deem
the sentences in (1a), (2a) and (3a) possible. Henceforth, when we talk about
‘grammatical’ or ‘ungrammatical’ sentences, we mean this in the descriptivist
sense, not the prescriptivist one.)

The focus on knowledge


How are we going to define the object of our study?
At least two possibilities
A collection of the utterances produced by native speakers
If we are going to describe a language, we have to decide what it is we are
describing. What is English, for example? One possible way of defining the
object that we want to describe is as a set of utterances produced by native
speakers of English. Such a set is sometimes called a corpus. There are
however problems in viewing language in this way:
• Every day speakers of English say things that no one has ever said before.
It may sometimes be hard to credit, given the tedium and repetition that
surrounds us, but it is nevertheless true. We wouldn’t want to say,
however, that every time this happens the language changes. We seem to
have some idea of language that abstracts away from the corpus.
• On the other hand, in some other respects a corpus is too inclusive. If you
tape-record several hours of interaction between native speakers of a
language you will find that it includes lots of sentences that the speakers
themselves would have no hesitation in describing as errors; the result of
lapses of attention, distraction, memory load, and so on. We wouldn’t
want to include such sentences as part of the language—but that means
that we have some idea of the language that is again independent of the
corpus, something that allows us to reject part of it as not being in the
language.
The knowledge of native speakers
So the Chomskyan view of language is that the aspect of language we are
trying to describe in linguistics, trying to come up with a theory of, is not a
corpus, but the knowledge that a native speaker has that enables him/her to
contribute to that corpus, or to look at it and to say that some utterances in it
actually are errors, are “not English” or “not Norwegian” etc. This knowledge
is what is sometimes called linguistic competence; probably a better term is
the more recent I[nternal]-Language. So a Chomskyan theory of language is a
theory of I-Language.
Now of course there are a number of problems associated with trying to come
up with a description of I-Language:
• What is the evidence for the I-Language of a speaker? What data are
available?
• How do we abstract away from performance effects?
• How do we determine what is syntax and what is not?
a. this book, that book, a book, the book, ...
b. * this that book, that this book, that a book, a the book, ...
MSc Syntax: 1 4

c. this blue book, that nearby book, a long, tedious, dull, French
book, ...
The sequences in (b) are unacceptable, but are they ungrammatical in the
specialized sense of syntactically ill-formed? Or is the problem rather with the
semantics?

More than just strings


The first thing to realize when we start looking at the kind of principles that
distinguish possible word orders from impossible ones is that sentences are
not just linear strings of words. They have an internal structure. Children
acquiring a language are already (subconsciously) aware of this. They only
ever seem to use structure-sensitive rules in trying to account for the language
data they hear around them, even though these might not yet be the same
rules of the target adult language – they make mistakes, but not random ones.
The following example (based on S&K’s (20) to (23)) illustrates this. It
concerns the way so-called yes/no-questions are formed in English. Suppose
a child hears (11b) and (12b) and realizes they are the yes/no-question
counterparts to declarative (11a) and (12a), respectively.
11. a. The girl is tall
b. Is the girl tall?
12. a. The tall girl can see the boy who is holding the plate
b. Can the tall girl see the boy who is holding the plate?
If sentences are just strings of words, an entirely plausible hypothesis for the
child to entertain is that these data indicate that yes/no-questions in English
are formed thus:
13. Rule 1: Find the first auxiliary in the clause and put this up front
This rule would give results like (14b). Such structure-independent errors
never seem to occur in child language, however.
14. a. The boy who is holding the plate can see the tall girl
b. * Is the boy who holding the plate can see the girl?
c. Can the boy who is holding the plate see the girl?
(14c) indicates that the correct rule for adult English is:
15. Yes/no question formation in English:
Find the first auxiliary after a particular group of words belonging
together, namely the subject of the sentence, and put this up front.
The example shows that the rule of yes/no-question formation does not
simply count words (what is the first auxiliary), but is sensitive to the fact that
a sentence is divided into groups of words that belong closer together than
others. Such a group of words that cling together is called a constituent of the
sentence (more on how to distinguish constituents next week).
Constituents can themselves contain smaller constituents. The subject in (14a)
(the boy who is holding the plate), for example, contains a relative clause, which
in turn contains constituents such as its direct object (the plate). Such
containment relationships (i.e. the constituency of a sentence) can be
expressed by a tree structure:
MSc Syntax: 1 5

16. Sentence
3
Constituent Constituent
3 3
Constituent Constituent Constituent Constituent

(16) expresses the claim/fact that there is a sentence that consists of two
constituents, which both happen to consist of two smaller constituents.
A simple sentence like The girl read a book will have the tree structure in (17)
(more on this in lectures 3 and 4):

17 S
qo
Noun Phrase Verb Phrase
2 3
Determiner Noun Verb Noun Phrase
   3
the girl read Determiner Noun
 
the book

Recursion
A fundamental property of all natural (non-artificial) languages is that they
have a property called recursion. This is related to what we noted just now:
constituents can contain smaller constituents. Recursion is the phenomenon in
which a constituent can contain a smaller constituent of the same type as the
bigger constituent itself. It is this property that is responsible for the fact
mentioned earlier that the number of possible sentences in a language is
infinite. Thus, a sentence can contain a smaller sentence as one of its
constituents, for instance as its direct object, as in (18b).
18. a. John regrets [this fact]
b. John regrets [that Mary believes these rumours]
Within the smaller sentence the same is possible, and so on, ad infinitum:
19. John regrets [that Mary believes [that Harry has said [that the paper
reported [that…
There is no principled limit to recursion. Of course, for practical reasons any
sentence will come to an end in actual conversations—but grammatically
speaking there is nothing wrong with endlessly recursive structures. This
means that we are making a distinction between what has been called
competence and performance.
Recursion is possible for other sorts of constituents than full sentences as well.
For example, a word group built around a noun, a noun phrase or NP, can
contain within it a group built around a preposition, a preposition phrase or PP:
20. [The dog [in the car]]
But as this example also shows, the PP in the car in turn contains another NP,
namely the car. Nothing stops this NP from containing a PP again, just like the
bigger NP in which it occurs:
MSc Syntax: 1 6

21. [The dog [in the car [next to the garage]]]


The tree representation of (21) looks as follows:

22. NP
9
Det N PP
3
P NP
9
Det N PP
3
P NP
3
Det N
We see that a noun phrase can contain another noun phrase, and a
preposition phrase another preposition phrase. Again, there is no principled
limit to this:
23. The dog in the car next to the garage in the street of the town on the
river …

Exercises: SK chapter 1, Exercises 1.1, 1.2, 1.5 and Problem 1.2

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