Syntax 1 - Formal approaches, Categories & Constituents, PS Rules & Constituency Tests Flashcards
Language vs language
The capacity that clearly distinguishes man from other animals / a specific instance of this capacity against the background of a specific culture.
Natural vs artificial language
Spoken as mother tongue, capable of fulfilling all communicative functions, origins obscure / designed for a purpose, restricted in terms of function, invented.
Behaviourist view of language
Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour, largely dismissed
Functionalist view of language
studies language in the way it fulfils functions (informative, affective, directive, topicalisation)
form>function relation
Formal, cognitive view
Language is a form of knowledge
Language capacity is cognitive.
people discuss generativists vs cognitivists: generativists believe there is a language specific cognitive faculty, cognitivists believe it’s just a result of our normal cognitive makeup.
According to the formal cognitive view of language, what 3 sources are behind our ability to use language.
1 - Experience (input - primary linguistic data)
2 - innate set of linguistic abilities (Universal Grammar)
3 - general cognitive capacities
Chomsky: difference between I-Language & E-Language?
I-Language: internal, individual knowledge of language (use to make grammaticality judgements) < this is studied by universal grammarians.
E-language - external manifestations of language (subject to speech errors, social cues etc) - the idea of a social collective language is more Saussure than Chomsky.
These two ideas can be linked to competence and performance.
Dell Hymes:
Hymes formulated a response to Noam Chomsky’s influential distinction between competence (knowledge of grammatical rules necessary to decoding and producing language) and performance (actual language use in context). Hymes objected to the marginalization of performance from the center of linguistic inquiry and proposed the notion of communicative competence, or knowledge necessary to use language in social context, as an object of linguistic inquiry. (pragmatic rules are a part of speaker competence)
What do recursive structures show?
productive - can create and understand totally novel structures
systematic - create certain meaning in certain way
language is compositional rather than adjacent (hierarchies not sequences)
Formal, cognitive view of being an ‘English’ speaker:
Having a specific I-language which generally corresponds to the socio-cultural construct of English shared by other ‘English speakers’.
if NP and VP are grammatical categories what are their functions?
subject & predicate
Traditionally that is! in a sentence such as [ S [NP I ] [VP eat hummus] ]
Relative Clauses also have subject and predicate, how to represent: ‘The mouse the cat chased died.’
[ s [ np the mouse [ cp [ np the cat ] [ vp chased t ] ] [ vp died ] ]
Universal Grammar:
according to principles & parameters approach
Universal Grammar is the idea that some linguistic rules are universal and that humans have an innate species-specific Language Acquisition Device containing universal principles as well as parameters by which languages vary (for example whether languages have null subjects) which are set during FLA.
Generative Grammar:
Generative grammar is a theory in which grammar is thought to consist of a collection of explicit rules for generating meaningful sentences in a language. The system is computational, and generative linguists would suggest a system like this existing in the mental language faculty.
Poverty of the Stimulus:
Poverty of the stimulus refers to the idea that the quantity and content of the PLD children are exposed to is not sufficient for them to learn all the rules of language they eventually know. It is argued that distinctions such as that between the words probable and likely would not be exposed by the limited data, however all native English speakers (without any linguistic impairment) know the structural contexts in which each one should be used. (An argument for UG)
- Degeneracy of the stimulus: People speak ungrammatically
- Variability of the stimulus: ‘motherese’ means that input isn’t what children end up learning. (also imperatives statistics from lang ac).
Constituent Structure:
The way in which words group into intermediate phrases which fall into different syntactic categories.
Categories:
2 types: lexical & functional
lexical: noun, verb, adj, adv, preposition
shows content information (relation to world)
except prepositions, these are open classes
they are near universal
functional: auxiliaries, determiners, complementisers shows grammatical information (units' relation to eachother) closed class vary between langs
Category tests for nouns
- regular count nouns take -s plural (other plurals under pink post-it)
- only NPs can be subjects before aux
- list (pink post it) of derivational suffix
- after determiners and adjectives
- negated with ‘no’
Category tests for adverbs
as distinct from adjectives
- regular adverbs end in -ly (but nouns can take this suffix to become adjectives!)
- CANNOT appear between determiner and noun or after copulas
Category tests for lexical verbs (but lots apply to auxiliaries as well!)
- verbs inflect for past tense, for regular verbs this is -ed
- can’t follow verbs like ‘seem’
- only verbs and vps can appear between an auxiliary and a manner adverb
- words ending in -ate or -ise are usually verbs
- 3rd person singular present tense -s (regular)
- negated with ‘not’
Category tests for prepositions
- prepositions are invariant forms
- can sometimes be intensified by ‘right’ or ‘straight’
Problems with category tests
Generally apply to lexical categories Often not effective Can only categorise if test does work should use lots of tests Phonological (stress based distinctions) and semantic (meaning based distinctions) are only relevant for some words. Can also do substitution tests!!!
Category tests for auxiliaries (as distinct from lexical verbs)
- Auxiliaries but not lexical verbs will invert in yes-no qs
