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LNGT 0250
Morphology and Syntax Chilly peppers!
Lecture #13
April 5th, 2015
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Wow, you’re a linguist? So, how many languages do you speak?
Compounding ambiguity 4
Announcements Small group activity
• Midterm was posted yesterday and is due on Monday April 11 by 8pm via email. • I will hold a 60‐minute additional session this Thursday April 7 at 4:30‐5:30 in LaForce 121, to answer any questions related to the midterm. • HW2 score average: 26.8
Median: 28
• HW3 score average: 26.8
Median: 27.5
• In small groups, list some phenomena of sentence structure in English or any another language that strike you as ‘unusual’‐‐‐
‘unusual’ loosely defined. 5
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What is syntax?
Problems with prescriptive rules • Syntax is the study of sentence structure in human language. • Sentence structures are rule‐governed. • There are rules that syntacticians are interested in, and there are others that are not really relevant to linguistic theory. What are the two types you discussed on Assignment #1? – I expect to more than double my profits. – *I expect more than to double my profits. – *I expect to double my profits more than . – *I expect to double more than my profits. – But still, the policy of the army at the time was not to send – was specifically to not send – women into combat roles. 7
Prescriptive rules
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Dialectal variation • I aren’t going with you. • Gas prices are cheap anymore. • Example pair 1:
a. A good author needs to develop a clear sense of who she is writing for. b. A good author needs to develop a clear sense of for whom she is writing. 
• Example pair 2:
a. He ordered me to move the car quickly. b. He ordered me to quickly move the car. • I didn’t do nothing wrong. • French: Je ne mange jamais
NEG eat never I ‘I never eat meat.’
viande
meat
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Descriptive rules are what we care about
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Syntactic vs. semantic unacceptability
• Linguists are interested only in descriptive rules, and never in prescriptive rules. • But that then raises another question: How do we get to figure out what these descriptive rules are? • Well, we collect grammaticality judgements from native speakers on data from their language, and then work our way backwards to figure out the rules. • Example 1: GPS3 from the textbook, pp. 34‐35.
• Example 2: Challenge problem set 5 from the textbook: Judgements (pp. 38‐9).
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Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
*Furiously sleep ideas green colorless. The laptop got into a fight with the spoon. *Got the into laptop with fight a spoon the. • Two types of unacceptability: semantic and syntactic. As you should expect, in syntax we are mainly concerned with syntactic grammaticality. 12
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Competence vs. performance
Garden path sentences • Our subconscious syntactic knowledge can be sometimes compromised by external factors, thereby affecting our performance. But our competence remains intact. • Speech errors. • Another example is the so‐called garden‐path
effect. 13
Garden path sentences 14
Competence vs. performance
• In syntax, we therefore focus on competence, not on performance. Doing so helps us tap into speakers’ subconscious knowledge, i.e., their I‐language.
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Syntax as a formal science • To tap into speakers’ competence, we rely on two sources: corpora and grammaticality judgement tasks, each of which has limitations. • The methodology is the familiar one from science: we collect data, formulate a hypothesis, then test the hypothesis against further data, and so on and so forth. • A hypothesis has to be falsifiable: We have to be able to test it and prove it wrong. 16
Syntax as a formal science Collect data
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Identify patterns in the data
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Develop hypotheses to explain the patterns
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Test our hypotheses by going back to step 1
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Next class agenda
• Syntactic categories. Finish reading Chapter 2 if you haven’t done so already. • Constituency, trees, and rules. Read Carnie’s Chapter 3. 19
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