Syntax. Andrew Carnie

communication, philosophy, and computer science.

      6 6. http://www.wiley.com/go/carnie.

      7 7. The working memory hypothesis is suspicious because speakers of languages like Japanese and German can understand the similar sentences in their languages without problem.

      8 8. For an accessible discussion of the notions of i-language/e-language, competence/performance and langue/parole, see Duffield (2018).

      9 9. The task is actually several magnitudes more difficult than this, as the child has to work out the phonology, etc., too, but for argument’s sake, let’s stick with this simplified example.

      10 10. Note that this is the job of the child who is using Universal Grammar, not the job of UG itself.

      11 11. The phenomenon in (28) is sometimes called the that-trace effect. There is no disputing the fact that this phenomenon is not learnable. However, it is also a fact that it is not a universal property of all languages. For example, French and Irish don’t seem to have the that-trace effect. Here is a challenge for those of you who like to do logic puzzles: If the that-trace effect is not learnable and thus must be biologically built in, how is it possible for a speaker of French or Irish to violate it? Think carefully about what kind of input a child might have to have in order to learn an “exception” to a built-in principle. This is a hard problem, but there is a solution. It may become clearer below when we discuss parameters.

      12 12. Creole languages are new languages that are formed when a generation of speakers starts using a trade language or pidgin as their first language and speak it natively in the home.

      13 13. This is a matter of some debate. Derbyshire (1985) has claimed that the language Hixkaryana has object-initial order.

      14 14. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000901.html.

      15 15. To be entirely accurate, (d) and (e) aren’t wholly ill-formed; they just can’t mean what (g) does. (d) can mean “I expect something else too, not just to double my profits” and (e) can mean “I expect to double something else too, not just my profits.” The * marks of ungrammaticality are for the intended reading identical to that of (g).

      16 16. Many thanks to my Facebook posse for very helpful feedback on this problem set, including Emily Bender, Claire Bowern, Elizabeth Cowper, Joe Dupris, Megan Figueroa, Andrew Garrett, Jason Merchant, Tel Monks, and Dana Sussman.

      17 17. There are of course people who have the physical characteristics of both sexes. This can be either by choice or due to their genetics. There are also people who were assigned an inaccurate or arbitrary sex at birth.

      18 18. The Wikipedia page on gender (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender; accessed Jan 12, 2018) has a fairly nuanced description of these distinctions as well as links to major academic sources on the distinction.

      19 19. There are other related identities – including gender non-conforming, gender-queer, and gender- fluid. This isn’t a book about gender, so I’m going to pretend that these all fit neatly under the term “non-binary”, with the recognition that this is a gross oversimplification that doesn’t recognize the complexity and nuance that many people have about their gender identity. Please forgive the simplification.

      20 20. For more on the phenomena discussed here, see Bjorkman (2017) and Konnelly and Cowper (2016).

      21 21. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002180.html.

      22 22. Thanks to Ahmad Lotfi for suggesting this part of the question.

      23 23. This problem set was inspired by a discussion on a Facebook post by Gary Thoms.

      24 24. This problem set is thanks to Matt Pearson.

      25 25. The intended meaning for (iii) and (iv) is “Who is the person such that it is obvious that Tasha likes that person?” or “It’s obvious that Tasha likes somebody. Who is that somebody?”.

      Chapter 2

      Parts of Speech

      Learning Objectives

After reading chapter 2, you should walk away having mastered the following ideas and skills:

      1 Distinguish between distributional and semantic definitions of parts of speech.

      2 Identify a part of speech by its distribution.

      3 Identify cases of complementary distribution.

      4 Know the difference between an open-class and a closed-class part of speech.

      5 Explain the difference between lexical and functional categories.

      6 Identify different subcategories using feature notations.

      7 Identify plural nouns, mass nouns, and count nouns and distinguish them with features.

      8 Explain the difference between predicates and arguments.

      9 Categorize verbs according to their argument structure (intransitive, transitive, ditransitive) and represent this using features.

      0. WORDS AND WHY THEY MATTER TO SYNTAX

      It goes without saying that sentences are made up of words, so before we get into the syntactic meat of this book, it’s worth looking carefully at different kinds of words.

What is most important to us here is the word’s part of speech (also known as syntactic category or word class). The most common parts of speech are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions (we will also look at some other, less familiar parts of speech below). Parts of speech tell us how a word is going to function in the sentence. Consider the sentences in (1). Notice that we can substitute various words that are of the type noun for the second word in the sentence:

      1)

      1 The woman loved peanut butter cookies.

      2 The puppy loved peanut butter cookies.

      3 The queen loved peanut butter cookies.

      However, we cannot substitute words that aren’t nouns:¹

      2)

      1 *The green loved peanut butter cookies.

      2 *The in loved peanut butter cookies.

      3 *The sing loved peanut butter cookies.

      The same holds true for larger groups of words (the square brackets […] mark off the relevant groups of words).

      3)

      1 [Moises] went to the store.

      2 [The man] went to the store.

      3 *[Quickly walks] went to the store.

      4)

      1 [Norvel] kissed the Blarney stone.

      2 *[To the washroom] kissed the Blarney stone.

      If we have categories for words that can appear in certain positions and categories for those that don’t, we can make generalizations (scientific ones) about the behavior of different word types. This is why we need parts of speech in syntactic theory.

      1. DETERMINING PART OF SPEECH

       1.1 The Problem of Traditional Definitions

      If you were taught any grammar in school, you may have been told that a noun is a “person, place, or thing”, or that a verb is “an action, state, or state