CAS LX 522
Syntax I
Some things we know
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Is this English?
Pat the book lifted.
Pat lifted the book.
n Lifted Pat the book.
n Pat book the lifted.
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Week 1. Introduction
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It’s surprisingly complicated
It’s surprisingly complicated
1)
2)
Tony threw out the couch.
Tony threw the couch out.
F Prepositions can go on
either side of the object?
3)
4)
Tony stormed out the door.
* Tony stormed the door out.
6)
What did Mary say Pat bought?
What did Mary say that Pat bought?
F
Ok, that is optional?
7)
Who did Mary say bought coffee?
*Who did Mary say that bought coffee?
5)
8)
It’s surprisingly complicated
9)
10)
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15)
16)
Bill thinks Mary is a genius.
Her mother thinks Mary is a genius.
She thinks Mary is a genius.
I asked Mary to buy coffee.
What did you ask Mary to buy?
Who did you say bought coffee?
I borrowed the book Bill bought in DC.
*Who did you borrow the book bought in DC?
Why?
How do people know this?
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All native speakers of English know this.
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Little kids weren’t told these rules (or
punished for violating them)…
“You can’t question a subject in a
complement embedded with that”
n “You can’t use a proper name as an object if
the subject is co-referential.”
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1
Two questions
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What do people know about their
language?
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Systematicity
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What people eventually end up with is a
system with which they can produce (and rate)
sentences. A grammar.
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18)
Even if you’ve never heard these before, you
know which one is “English” and which one
isn’t:
Eight very lazy elephants drank brandy.
Eight elephants very lazy brandy drank.
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Kids say wugs.
Including things we know “unconsciously”
How do people come to know it?
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Tricky question for things that we don’t know
we know.
Positive and negative evidence
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Adults know if a given sentence S is
grammatical or ungrammatical. This is
part of the knowledge kids gain through
language acquisition.
Kids hear grammatical sentences
(positive evidence)
Kids are not generally told which
sentences are ungrammatical
(no negative evidence)
17)
Positive and negative evidence
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One of the striking things about child language
is how few errors they actually make.
For negative feedback to work, the kids have to
make the errors (so that it can get the negative
response).
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But they don’t make the errors.
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But languages differ
The “Language instinct”
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The linguistic capacity is part of being
human.
Like having two arms, ten fingers, a vision
system, humans have a language faculty.
The language faculty (tightly) constrains
what kinds of languages a child can learn.
=“Universal Grammar” (UG).
(Kids do make errors, but not of the kind that one
might expect if they were just trying to extract
patterns from the language data they hear)
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English, French: Subject Verb Object (SVO)
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Japanese, Korean: Subject Object Verb (SOV)
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John ate an apple.
Pierre a mangé une pomme.
Taroo-wa ringo-o tabeta.
Chelswu-ka sakwa-lul mekessta.
Irish, Arabic (VSO), Malagasy (VOS), …
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But languages differ
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English: Adverbs before verbs
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Mary quickly eats an apple.
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*Mary eats quickly an apple.
n (also:
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Parameters
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Mary ate an apple quickly)
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French: Adverbs after verbs
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Geneviève mange rapidement une pomme.
*Geneviève rapidement mange une pomme.
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We can categorize languages in terms of their
word order: SVO, SOV, VSO.
This is a parameter by which languages differ.
The dominant formal theory of first language
acquisition holds that children have access to a set
of parameters by which languages can differ;
acquisition is the process of setting those
parameters.
What are the parameters?
What are the “universal” principles of grammar?
The enterprise
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The data we will primarily be concerned with are
native speaker intuitions.
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Native speakers, faced with a sentence S, know
whether the sentence S is part of their language
or isn’t. These intuitions are highly systematic.
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We want to uncover the system (which is
unconscious knowledge) behind the intuitions of
native speakers—their knowledge of language.
I-language
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We are studying the system behind one person’s
pattern of intuitions.
Speakers growing up in the same community have
very similar knowledge, but language is an
individual thing (“I-language”).
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I-languages of a community is can be characterized,
but it is external to the speaker (“E-language”), not
any one person’s knowledge, a generalization over
many people’s I-languages.
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Competence
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We are also concerned with what a person
knows. What characterizes a person’s
language competence. We are in general not
concerned here with how a person ends
up using this knowledge (performance).
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You still have your language competence
when you are sleeping, in the absence of any
performance. Being drunk doesn’t make you
think “bought some John coffee” is English,
though perhaps one might say it.
One doesn’t need to ask the Académie française whether
Geneviève rapidement mange une pomme is a sentence of
French. One knows.
For example, Parisian French.
Prescriptive rules
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Another thing we need to be cautious of
are prescriptive rules. Often prescriptive
rules of “good grammar” turn out to be
impositions on our native grammar which
run counter to our native competence.
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After all, why did they need to be rules in
the first place?
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Prescriptive rules
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Prepositions are things you don’t end a
sentence with.
It is important to religiously avoid splitting
infinitives.
Remember: Capitalize the first word after a
colon.
Don’t be so immodest as to say I and John left;
say John and I left instead.
Impact is not a verb.
The book which you just bought is offensive.
Prescriptive rules
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When making grammaticality judgments (or
when asking others to make grammaticality
judgments), we must do our best to factor out
prescriptive rules (learned explicitly, e.g., in
school).
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Judgments
We’re not interested in studying the prescriptive rules;
we could just look them up, and it isn’t likely to tell
us anything deep about the makeup of the human
mind. They’re really just a “secret handshake,”
allowing educated people to detect one another.
Syntax as science
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Another complicating fact is that a sentence can
be bad for any number of reasons, only some of
which we are interested in at a given point.
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Syntax, as practiced here, is a scientific enterprise.
This means, in particular, approaching syntax
using the scientific method.
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*Student the meditated happily.
The pebble meditated happily.
A Sun rose in the East.
John wondered who to go with.
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Step 1: Gather observations (data)
Step 2: Make generalizations
Step 3: Form hypotheses
Step 4: Test predictions made by these
hypotheses, returning to step 1.
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A simple introductory example
1)
2)
3)
4)
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A simple introductory example
Bill kissed himself.
Bill kissed herself.
Sally kissed himself.
Sally kissed herself.
1)
Try these out. Which ones sound good,
which ones don’t?
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2)
3)
4)
Bill kissed himself.
*Bill kissed herself.
*Sally kissed himself.
Sally kissed herself.
Hypothesis: An anaphor must have an
antecedent which agrees with it in
gender.
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Hypothesis: An anaphor must have an
antecedent which agrees in gender.
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Hypothesis: An anaphor must have an
antecedent which agrees in gender.
Let’s test the hypothesis against more data.
5)
5)
6)
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The robot saw itself in the mirror.
*John and Bill saw himself in the mirror.
*The boys saw himself in the mirror.
*Mary and Jane saw herself in the mirror.
John and Bill saw themselves in the mirror.
Mary and Jane saw themselves in the mirror.
The boys saw themselves in the mirror.
6)
7)
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9)
10)
11)
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Our hypothesis only explains (5). What is the
generalization?
Hypothesis: An anaphor must agree in
gender and number with its antecedent
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18)
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The executives gave themselves a raise.
*I gave himself a cookie.
I gave myself a cookie.
You gave myself a cookie.
*You gave herself a cookie.
*You gave himself a cookie.
You gave yourself a cookie.
The robot saw itself in the mirror.
*John and Bill saw himself in the mirror.
*The boys saw himself in the mirror.
*Mary and Jane saw herself in the mirror.
John and Bill saw themselves in the mirror.
Mary and Jane saw themselves in the mirror.
The boys saw themselves in the mirror.
Person
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I is “first person singular”
You is “second person singular” (you left) or “second
person plural” (you left = y’all left)
He, She is “third person”
We is “first person plural”
They is “third person plural”
Again, our hypothesis doesn’t successfully
predict which of these are grammatical and
which aren’t. What’s the generalization?
Anaphors seem to agree with person. Myself for
first person singular, ourselves for first person
plural, yourself for second person, himself, herself,
or itself for third person singular, themselves for
third person plural.
Hypothesis about anaphors
Levels of adequacy
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An anaphor must agree in gender, number,
and person with its antecedent.
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This is the hypothesis we will end with,
although there will be more to do with
anaphors.
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Incidentally, gender, number, and person
very often go together.
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If our hypotheses can predict the existence
of the grammatical sentences in a corpus
(a set of grammatical sentences), it is
observationally adequate.
If our hypotheses can predict the nativespeaker intuitions about which sentences
are grammatical and which are
ungrammatical, it is descriptively
adequate.
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Levels of adequacy
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If we can take a descriptively adequate set of
hypotheses one step further and account not
only for the native speaker judgments but also
for how children come to have these judgments,
our hypotheses are explanatorily adequate.
Categories
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Words can be grouped into categories by part of
speech like noun, verb, adjective, preposition, …
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Parts of speech are determined distributionally
(traditional “semantic” definitions don’t work)
It’s this last level that we are hoping to achieve.
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Basic principles
Parameters of variation
How to set the parameters from child’s input
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Constituents
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The words that make up a sentence like…
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Constituents
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Functioning as a unit…
The students did their syntax assignment.
The students did the crossword puzzle.
n John did the crossword puzzle.
n The crossword puzzle is what John did.
n *Crossword puzzle is what John did the.
n John likes the crossword puzzle.
n John likes the jigsaw puzzle.
n John likes the theater.
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The students did their syntax assignment.
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…are grouped together into component
parts, constituents, which function together
as a unit.
Among them, [the students], the do-ers,
and [their syntax assignment], the done.
Phrases
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A phrase is a constituent that has a central core
word (called the head of the phrase); other
words in the phrase generally relate to (or
modify the meaning of) the head.
The category of the head determines the
category of the phrase.
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The happy students is a noun phrase, headed by the
noun students. Happy modifies students, the
specifies which students. Ran swiftly is a verb
phrase, swiftly modifies ran.
The yinkish dripner blorked quastofically.
Yinkish is an adjective, dripner is a noun, to blork is a
verb, quastofically is an adverb.
Sentences
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Complete sentences need to have a subject
and a verb.
John left.
*John.
n *Left.
n The happy students left speedily.
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So sentences are made of noun phrases
and verb phrases.
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Sentences
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John left (speedily).
The happy students left (speedily).
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We could say a sentence is either:
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Trees
a noun and a verb
a noun and a verb phrase
a noun phrase and a verb
a noun phrase and a verb phrase
We might start off by drawing the structure of a
sentence like this, which means: “John left is a
Sentence composed of a Noun Phrase
(composed of John) and a Verb Phrase
(composed of left). Note the heads.
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Or we could say:
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a sentence is a noun phrase and a verb phrase
a phrase always has a head, and sometimes that’s all.
Trees
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NP
VP
N
V
John
left
Of the past and the future
In fact, the trees we will draw will end up looking more
like this (well, sort of), where the “phrase is implied”.
We know that John here is a noun phrase because it is
headed by a noun, John—it just happens not to have
anything else in the phrase. Generally, except for heads
that happen to be also phrases, we’ll see “NP”.
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Serious scientific study of sentence
structure of this kind generally began in
the 50’s, driven to a great extent by the
work of Noam Chomsky.
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It’s now half a century later, and we have
learned a lot about how syntax works.
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V
John
left
Of the past and the future
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Progress was incremental, and often
required revising our assumptions about
how sentences are really put together.
Data was examined, generalizations were
arrived at, hypotheses were formed,
predictions were tested—and often led to
revisions of the generalizations and the
hypotheses, and so forth.
Of the past and the future
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Two goals of the class:
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Think like a syntactician.
Be able to read (relatively recent) books,
articles, etc. about syntax.
It’s not really enough to just know what
people concluded, we need to understand
why they concluded what they did.
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Some milestones
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Until about the mid-70’s, phrase structure rules.
S Æ NP VP
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VP Æ V (NP)
Mid-70’s, X-Bar Theory (a generalization about
what are possible PSRs).
In the 80’s, a fairly significant shift to Government
and Binding Theory (viewing grammar a little less
like a computer program). Very productive.
In the 90’s, another shift to the Minimalist
Program (an attempt at simplification, as well as
a change in philosophy).
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We’ll be somewhere between MP and GB.
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