1 – Goals
universal grammar – universal, common properties of languages abstracted from particular grammars, linguistic universals
particular grammar – grammar of a particular language– a set of rules or principles which specify how to form, pronounce, and interpret phrases and sentences in a language; grammar is a model (=systematic description) of the linguistic abilities of native speakers of a language which enable them to speak and understand the language fluently; a model of linguistic competence of the fluent native speaker of the language
- morphology
- syntax
- phonology
- semantics
competence – linguistic abilities of a native speaker
- grammatical competence (language structure)
- pragmatic competence (language use)
grammatical competence – a system of rules of sentence-formation, -interpretation, -pronunciation, etc.
performance – the actual use of language un concrete situations, often an imperfect reflection of competence
performance errors – slips of the tongue, mistakes etc.
intuition – the ability of native speaker to make judgments about whether a sentence is well-formed/has a particular structure or not
- about sentence well-formedness
- about sentence structure
idiolect – the individual way of speaking of a particular person
dialect – the way of speaking of people with a common geographical background
sociolect – the way of speaking of people who share a common social background
informant – a person who provides a linguist with information about some aspects of his/her native language
novel utterance – a sentence that we have never heard before
creativity of language – the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no resemblance to sentences which are familiar
The language is rule-governed, there are syntactic, morphological, phonological, semantic rules that specify how to use the language.
generative grammar – a grammar incorporating an explicitly formulated set of syntactic, semantic, morphological, and phonological rules which specify how to form, interpret, and pronounce a given set of sentences (generate sentences); for grammar to be adequate, it must generate all and only the well-formed sentences of a language
infinite number of well-formed sentences (with performance limitations), finite set of rules (and finite experience of a child-learner)
corpus of utterances – a recorded sample of speech or text
elicitation – eliciting well-formedness judgments from a native speaker (informant)
criteria of adequacy
- observational adequacy – specifying which sentences are syntactically, semantically etc. well-formed
- descriptive adequacy – correctly specifying which sentences are well-formed and also properly describes syntactic, semantic etc. structure of the sentences to provide a principled account of the native speaker’s intuitions about this structure
- explanatory adequacy – explaining why grammars contain certain types of technical devices and not others, what exactly are the defining characteristics of human languages that differentiate them from other communication systems; explaining how humans acquire their native languages. To attain explanatory adequacy, a theory must be universally valid, psychologically real, and maximally constrained.
theory of language – a set of hypotheses about the nature of possible and impossible grammars of natural languages, is universal, but maximally constrained, i.e. describes human languages only; must meet the condition of psychological reality (the language is an internalized system I-language, i.e. internalized language). To attain explanatory adequacy, a theory must be universally valid, psychologically real, and maximally constrained.
Autonomous Syntax Principle: No syntactic rule can make reference to pragmatic, phonological, or semantic information.
Structure-Dependence Principle: All grammatical rules are structure-dependent. (You can’t apply the rule to a given sentence unless you know what the syntactic structure of the sentence is, and what grammatical categories the words and phrases in the sentence belong to (pp. 32-33).
Universal Grammar – innate knowledge of the universals
- absolute universals (nonstatistical) – a property which all languages share without any exception
- relative universals (statistical) – general tendency in language, but one which has some exceptions (Consistent Serialization Principle – language tend to place modifying elements either consistently before or consistently after modified elements) (serialization – ordering of words and phrases)
Theory of Markedness – within which we distinguish between marked and unmarked phenomena
- unmarked – accords with universal principles (absolute or relative) in a language (=regular)
- marked – goes against some relative universal, is exceptional in some way (e.g. stylistically marked – have, for example, a literary or archaic flavour; court martial, postmaster general)
Theory of Core Grammar – common, universal, core of linguistic principles which characterise the full range of unmarked phenomena found in natural language
- rule of Core Grammar – any rule which conforms to these principles
- peripheral rule (non-core rule) – a rule that does not obey the principles concerned
Languages vary within fixed limits, the task is to define the set of possible parameters of variations across languages.
2 – Phrasal Categories
categorial constituent structure – all sentences are hierarchically structured out of words into phrases, each of the component words and phrases in a sentence belongs to a specific category
constituents – structural units that consist of sound-sequences that belong to various categories
phrases
head – the key constituent of a phrase
intuitions about syntactic structure
- about the existence of constituents
- about their belonging to categories
(labelled) tree diagrams = phrase markers (P-markers) – represent sentence structure (S-structure), mark the hierarchical grouping of words into and phrases into sentences (another way is labelled bracketing)
- nodes – each represent a constituent
- branches
word-level category – a set of words which share a common set of linguistic (especially morphological and syntactic) properties (individual words can belong to more than one category, need is a verb and a modal)
word-level categories, evidence
-
lexical ambiguity: words have different meanings (e.g. ball – a round object/a dance)
structural ambiguity: mistrust wounds (N+V or V+N)
- phonological: different stress patterns for some similarly looking words that are of different categories (increase, torment, transfer)
- semantic: structural ambiguity
- morphological: certain type of inflection can attach only to specific categories (verbs -s, -ed, -n, -ing; modals do not have such inflection)
- syntactic: distribution (categories are distributional classes) – set of sentence-positions in which a word of a category can occur in
phrasal categories, non-syntactic evidence
- morphological: phrasal inflection of the morpheme ‘s (the crown is the king of England’s), genitive ‘s is a Noun Phrase inflection, not a Noun inflection
- semantic: the phenomenon of structural ambiguity
Mary looked very hard (‘very severely’ AP or ‘very intensely’ ADVP)
The President could not ratify the treaty. (It would not be possible for him to do it/It would not be possible for him not to do it – which constituent is modified by ‘not’: could or VP?) – scope ambiguity
- phonological: negative contraction is possible when not modifies a modal and not a following VP (The President couldn’t ratify the treaty)
syntactic evidence
1. preposing – under appropriate stylistic conditions, certain parts of a sentence may be preposed for emphasis.
I can’t stand your elder sister. – Your elder sister, I can’t stand (though you brother is OK).
2. postposing – especially phrases that are felt heavy or long
He explained all the terrible problems that he had encountered to her. – He explained to her all the terrible problems that he had encountered.
Only phrasal constituents can undergo movement (preposing or postposing).
3. sentence-fragments
- Where did he go? - Up the hill. (=He went up the hill.)
Only phrasal constituents can serve as sentence fragments.
4. distribution of adverbial expressions – two kinds:
- S-adverbs (like certainly), attached to an S-node
- VP-adverbs (like completely), attached to a VP-node
5. ordinary coordination (CONJ: and, or, but)
He is a very shy and rather inarticulate man.
Only constituents of identical categories can be conjoined.
6. shared constituent coordination (right node raising)
John will, and Mary may, go to the party. John walked (and Mary ran) up the hill.
Shared constituent coordination is only possible where the shared string is a possible constituent of each of the conjuncts.
7. pronominalisation – there is a general property of natural languages that they possess devices for referring to entities mentioned elsewhere in the same sentence or discourse
proforms, pro-constituents (‘him’ is pro-NP, there is pro-PP)
- What do you think of [the man who wrote that unbelievably boring book]? - I can’t stand him.
8. ellipsis
- John won’t wash the dishes. - I bet he will wash the dishes if you’re nice to him.
Only VPs can undergo ellipsis (under appropriate discourse conditions).
phrase – a set of elements which form a constituent
noun phrase – an expression containing a head noun
Testing the structure
1. If it has the same distribution as an appropriate phrase of a given type, it is a phrase of this type.
[NP Drunks] would get off the bus. [NP People who get drunk] would get off the bus.
2. If it can undergo movement, this is a phrase.
Would [NP drunks] get off the bus?
Every afternoon, the big red bus would stop in front of the village clock, and [PP off the bus] would get a dear old lady.
If the driver told the drunks that they had to get off the bus, then [VP get off the bus] they would.
3. If it can serve as a sentence fragment, it is a phrase.
- Who would get off the bus? - [Drunks].
- What would drunks do? - [VP Get off the bus].
- Did he get off the train? – No, [PP off the bus].
4. If it permits positioning of S- or VP-adverbials, it is an S or a VP.
Drunks [S-adverbial certainly] would get off the bus. Drunks would [S-adverbial certainly] get off the bus.
Drunks would get [VP-adverbial slowly] off the bus.
5. If it can undergo ordinary coordination with a phrase of a given type, it is a phrase of this type.
[NP Drunks] and [NP other undesirable elements] would get off the bus.
6. If it serves as a shared constituent in the shared constituent coordination, it is a phrase. (Works only with the leftmost branch of the S.)
7. If it can be replaced by a proform, it is a phrase of the same type as the proform.
[They] would get off the bus.
If, whenever they needed to heed the call of nature, drunks [VP would get off the bus] – [pro-VP which] they obviously would…
8. If it can undergo ellipsis, it is a VP.
gapping – an ellipsis that leaves a gap in the middle of a phrase or clause; when a verb is gapped, a modal preceding it is also gapped
John bought an apple and Mary bought a pear.
Could John close the door and could Mary close the window?
Drunks would get off the bus and junkies would get off the train.
selection restrictions – the range of different expressions which can be used after a particular constituent. The difference between phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs – ‘get off’ and ‘get on’ take the same complement, whereas ‘put off’ and ‘put on’ do not. Therefore, there are of different nature.
strict adjacency principle – An NP complement of a verb must be positioned strictly adjacent to its verb
3 – Phrase Markers
terminal nodes – the nodes at the end of each complete tree structure, labelled with an appropriate lexical item
nonterminal nodes – other nodes
dominance – X dominates Y if X occurs higher up the tree than Y and they are connected by an unbroken set of branches
immediate dominance – a node immediately dominates another if it is the next highest node up in the tree and they are connected by a single branch
precedence – a node precedes another if it occurs to the left of the other node on the printed page
immediate precedence – a node immediately precedes another if it occurs immediately to the left of the other node
constituent – a set of nodes form a constituent iff they are exhaustively dominated by a common node, X is a constituent of Y iff X is dominated by Y
immediate constituent – X is an immediate constituent of Y iff X is immediately dominated by Y
c-commanding (constituent command) – X c-commands Y iff the first branching node dominating X dominates Y, and X does not dominate Y, nor Y dominate X; a node c-commands its sisters and their descendants
c-command condition on anaphors – an anaphor must have an appropriate c-commanding antecedent
no crossing branches – there cannot be discontinuous constituents
PS rules (phrase structure rules) – specify how sentences are structured out of phrases, and phrases out of words
recursion of structures – property to be reapplied indefinitely many times
complementary distribution – the relationship between two different elements, where one element is found in a particular environment and the other element is found in the opposite environment; elements which occur in complementary distribution should be analysed as belonging to the same distributional class
positional variants – the choice between them is determined by the position they occur in
adjective = [+V, +N] noun = [-V, +N]
verb = [+V, -N] preposition = [-V, -N]
supercategorial generalisations – that extend across more than one category
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