Syntax. Andrew Carnie

get at what we know about our languages we have to know what sentences are not well-formed. That is, in order to know the range of acceptable sentences of English, Italian or Igbo, we first have to know what are not acceptable sentences in English, Italian or Igbo. This kind of negative information is very rarely available in corpora, which mostly provide grammatical, or well-formed, sentences.

      Consider the following sentence:

      11) *Who do you wonder what bought?

      For most speakers of English, this sentence borders on word salad – it is not a good sentence of English. How do you know that? Were you ever taught in school that you can’t say sentences like (11)? Has anyone ever uttered this sentence in your presence before? I seriously doubt it. The fact that a sentence like (11) sounds strange, but similar sentences like (12a and b) do sound OK is not reflected anywhere in a corpus:

      12) a) Who do you think bought the bread machine?

      b) I wonder what Fiona bought.

      Instead we have to rely on our knowledge of our native language (or on the knowledge of a native speaker consultant for languages that we don’t speak natively). Notice that this is not conscious knowledge. I doubt there are many native speakers of English that could tell you why sentence (11) is terrible, but most can tell you that it is. This is subconscious knowledge. The trick is to get at and describe this subconscious knowledge. The psychological experiment used to get this subconscious kind of knowledge is called the acceptability judgment task. The judgment task involves asking a native speaker to read a sentence, and judge whether it is well-formed (i.e., grammatical), marginally well-formed, or ill-formed (ungrammatical).

      There are actually several different kinds of acceptability judgments. Both of the following sentences are ill-formed, but for different reasons:

      13) a) #The toothbrush is pregnant.

      b) *Toothbrush the is blue.

Sentence (13a) sounds bizarre (cf. the toothbrush is blue) because we know that toothbrushes (except in the world of fantasy/science fiction or poetry or a dream) cannot be pregnant. The meaning of the sentence is strange, but the form of the sentence is okay. We call this semantic ill-formedness and mark the sentence with a #. By contrast, we can glean the meaning of sentence (13b); it seems semantically reasonable (toothbrushes can be blue), but it is ill-formed from a structural point of view. That is, the determiner the is in the wrong place in the sentence. This is a syntactically ill-formed sentence, which is marked with an *. A native speaker of English will judge both these sentences as ill- formed, but for very different reasons. In this text, we will be concerned primarily with syntactic well-formedness, but both kinds of judgment can help guide our analyses.

      You now have enough information to do WBE3 & 4, GPS3 & 4, and CPS4–6.

      Judgments as Science?

      Many linguists refer to the acceptability judgment task as “drawing upon our native speaker intuitions”. The word “intuition” here is slightly misleading. The last thing that pops into our heads when we hear the term “intuition” is science. Generative grammar has been severely criticized by many for relying on “unscientific” intuitions. But this is based primarily on a misunderstanding of the term. To the layperson, the term “intuition” brings to mind guesses and luck. This usage of the term is certainly standard. When a generative grammarian refers to “intuition”, however, she is using the term to mean “tapping into our subconscious knowledge”. The term “intuition” may have been badly chosen, but in this circumstance, it refers to a real psychological effect. Intuition (as an acceptability judgment) has an entirely scientific basis. It is replicable under strictly controlled experimental conditions (these conditions are rarely applied, but the validity of the task is well established). Other disciplines also use intuitions or judgment tasks. For example, within the study of vision, it has been determined that people can accurately judge differences in light intensity, drawing upon their subconscious knowledge (Bard et al. 1996). To avoid the negative associations with the term intuition, we will use the less loaded term judgment instead.

      2. SYNTAX AS A COGNITIVE SCIENCE

      Cognitive science is a cover term for a group of disciplines that all have the same goal: describing and explaining human beings’ ability to think (or more particularly, to think about abstract notions like subatomic particles, the possibility of life on other planets or even how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, etc.). One thing that distinguishes us from other animals, even relatively smart ones like chimps and elephants, is our ability to use productive, combinatory syntax. Language plays an important role in how we think about abstract notions, or, at the very least, it appears to be structured in such a way that it allows us to express abstract notions.⁴ The discipline of linguistics is thus one of the important subdisciplines of cognitive science.⁵ Sentences are how we get at expressing abstract thought processes, so the study of syntax is an important foundation stone for understanding how we communicate and interact with each other as humans.

      3. MODELS OF SYNTAX

One dominant theory of syntax that fits into the cognitive science mold is due to Noam Chomsky and his colleagues, starting in the mid 1950s and continuing to this day. This theory, which has had many different names through its development (Transformational Grammar (TG), Transformational Generative Grammar, Standard Theory, Extended Standard Theory, Government and Binding Theory (GB), Principles and Parameters approach (P&P) and Minimalism (MP)), is often given the blanket name generative grammar. A number of alternate approaches to syntax have also branched off of this research program. These include Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). These approaches are also considered part of generative grammar; but we won’t cover them extensively in this book. But I have included two additional chapters on these theories in the web resources for this book.⁶ The particular version of generative grammar that we will mostly look at here is roughly the Principles and Parameters approach, although we will occasionally stray from this into the more recent version called Minimalism.

      The underlying thesis of generative grammar is that sentences are generated by a subconscious set of procedures (like computer programs). These procedures are part of our minds (or of our cognitive abilities if you prefer). The goal of syntactic theory is to model these procedures. In other words, we are trying to figure out what we subconsciously know about the syntax of our language.

      4. COMPETENCE VS. PERFORMANCE

      Consider sentences such as (14). Native speakers will have to read this sentence a couple of times to figure out what it means.

      14) # Cotton shirts are made from comes from India.

This kind of sentence (called a garden path sentence) is very hard to understand and process. In this example, the problem is that the intended reading has a noun, cotton, that is modified by a reduced relative clause: (that) shirts are made from. The linear sequence of cotton followed by shirt is ambiguous with the noun phrase cotton shirts. Note that this kind of relative structure is okay in other contexts; compare: That material is the cotton shirts are made from. Sentences like (14) get much easier to understand with really clear pauses (where … is meant to indicate a pause): Cotton … shirts are made from … comes from India. Or by insertion of a that which breaks up the potentially ambiguous cotton shirts sequence: The cotton that shirts are made from comes from India. What is critical about these garden path sentences is that, once one figures out what the intended meaning is, native speakers can identify them as acceptable sentences or at the very least as sentences that have structures that would otherwise be acceptable in them. The problem for us as linguists is that native speakers have a really hard time figuring out what the intended meaning for these sentences is on those first few passes!

      A