Syntax_notatki.doc

Syntax

Romuald Gozdawa-Gołębiowski

Office Hours:

Monday 1:00 – 2:00

What is language?

What does it mean to know language?

What do we know when we know a language?

Where do we get all this knowledge from?

Sound -> morpheme -> words -> sentences/phrases

You know the sound system of your language

This the essence of your

Phonological competence.

1)      You know how to produce the sounds of your language. 

2)      You can tell which sounds belong to your native repertoire and which don’t

3)      You recognize and unerringly produce all phonologically conditioned variants of the same sound.
E: pit / spit
P: ser / sieć

4)      You know the rules for putting sounds together.
Things, hanged, hunger, stronger, king, bingo. 

Phonological competence depends on the early maturing macroneural circuits and must acquired in the early childhood. 

Put are put together to build morphemes.

You have the ability to identify morphemes and to assign meaning / function to them

This is your morphological competence

Morphological transparency (teacher, pomidorek, selerek) vs morphological idiosyncrasy (cooker, balon-balonik)

Morphemes are arranged hierarchically within words

Teach                            er              s

Teacher  (er is connected to the root)

Teachers

Goes

Inflexible morphemes

·         -s

·         -ed

·         -ing

·         -er

·         -est

·         -‘s

·         -en

Resharpened

Sharp En -> re

Re Sharp En -> Ed

The ambiguity of the prefix UN

Uninteresting, unfriendly, undeniable, uncertain, unknown

Uncover, unpack, unload, undo

UN can be added to both verbs and adjectives.

·         Un + adjective: NOT

·         Un + verb: do the opposite

Ambiguous Unlockable

Un^^lock^ able <- one that cannot be locked

Un^lock^^ able <- One that cannot be opened

Semantic competence – Knowing the dictionary meaning of words In your language.

You’re able to perceive semantic ambiguity.

You accept and actively propagate changes of meaning of individual lexical items.

This  relates to the concept of a lexical error

You intuitively distinguish between homonymy and polysemy

Folk semantic

A crucial semantic skill we demonstrate is the recognition and use of metonymy.

The conceptual relation of metonymy              X stands for Y

Typical conventional metonymies involve

->Producer for product

->Place for event

->Place for institution

->part for whole

There are two more major aspects of semantic competence

The use of metaphors

The use of formulaic language

So far, we have seen that the sequence of words

Her -> rat -> poison

Is meaningful it arranged (=interpreted) in one of two ways:

[her]-[rat poison]

Syntax is about the hierarchical organization of words within bigger units (i.e top bottom arrangement rather than merely the linear (left to right) sequencing.

You know the rules for putting words together to produce bigger chunks (units/phrases)

This the essence of your syntactic competence.

This involves the ability to assign structure to sentences. If the same sting of words can assigned (=can have) to different structures. The sentence is syntactically ambiguous.

You perceive links holding between non-adjacent sentence elements.

You recover missing words from certain grammatical strings.

Your very special gift, a mysterious link between syntax and semantics/lexicon:
                            Formulaic competence

Word strings which appear to be processed without recourse to their lowest level composition are termed formulaic.

              It is a measure of your native competence that you feel which word combinations are right.

Hence, foreigners are often perceived as unidiomatic since they avoid formulaic language or use it incorrectly. Sometimes the intuition involved may be very subtle.

However, formulas also depend on syntax (more precisely: morphosyntax) for their ultimate well-formedness.

The psychological advantages of using formulaic language:

-buys time for content planning (helps  speaker)

-buys time for sentence processing (helps hearer)

Formulas frequently undergo semantic contaminantion (esp. When the speaker lacks the time or attention resources to self-monitor) 

The psychological advantages of using formulaic language.

Pragmatic competence

The system of beliefs each of us holds about the world, expectations about  other people, cultural patterns shared by our speech community, all the non-linguistic factors that may have a bearing on utterance interpretation.

A: would you like a cup of coffee

B:coffee keeps me awake.

It’s getting late

Hearer: She intends me to realize that she intends me to believe that we should leave now.

We have a uniquely human capacity of attributing intentions to others.

Handling a conversation

·         What I say =/= what I mean.

·         We always say things for a reason.

·         An utterance is relevant if we think we see why it was uttered.

·         It is human nature to maximize relevance while minimizing the effort involved.

Garden path sentences – zdania ślepej uliczki

Pragmatics – semantics

Metaphors involve a transfer of meaning from one domain (source) to another domain (target)

The attributes of one domain are mapped onto (=taken over by) the target domain. In other words, inferences which hold in the source are applied to the target.

Structure of conceptual metaphors

X is Y

Phonological competence: correct pronunciation guide

Morphological competence: inflection/derivation

Semantic competence: establishing sentence meaning (there’s something we’d like to eat because we are hungry)

Pragmatic competence: speaker meaning (victory is not something we can eat, so relevance must be sought at a more abstract level)

We need to eat = we need victory

Everyone needs to eat = it’s only natural that we want to win.

We cannot live without eating = Victory is very important to us and we’ll go to extreme lengths to achieve it.

In short

                                          Desire is hunger

NB: in polish “desire is thirst” (spragniony zwycięstwa, zaspokoić chuć, ugasić żądzę)

Ta budowa to wrzód na zielonych płucach Polski.

Komorowski stanowi kość niezgody w rozmowach koalicyjnych. Czy warto było stawiać rozmowy koalicyjne na szali tej kości?

Semantic ill-formedness vs pragmatic unacceptability

A sentence is semantically ill-formed (ungrammatical on semantic grounds) if its interpretation leads to a contradiction in terms.

A sentence is pragmatically unacceptable if its interpretation calls for the suspension of our beliefs about the world

A sentence which violates semantic criteria may still be pragmatically interpretable.

A sentence may be pragmatically unacceptable even if it is well-formed syntactically and semantically.

I-language vs E-language

I-language is the set of rules and principles in the mind of a speaker specifying the set of sentences which s/he could use if no non-linguistic factors were operative.

E –language is an infinite set of all potential sentences of any natural languages (all and only grammatical ones)
                                          or

E-language is the set of sentences that some speaker could use if no non-linguistic factors were operative.

I-language is a finite set of rules operating on a finite set of word to produce an infinite number of sentences.

The number of sentences is infinite if it can be shown that there is no limit to the number of words in a sentence ( = the longest sentence doesn’t exist)

Every sentence can be made longer by:

·         a lexical meaning

·         Syntactic means

·         Conjoining (compounding)

·         Revitalization

·         Embedding

No longest sentence = the number of potential sentences infinite (E-language)

We cannot have memorised an infinite set, so it must all  start with the concept of rules (I-language)

How did we learn the rules of our native language?

·         Language acquisition is species-specific

·         It is independent of general intelligence

·         Rapid

·         Subconscious

·         Involuntary

·         Equidistant (every child will learn any natural language with equal ease)

·         Acquisition is complete before the child gains the ability to reason in abstract terms

Innateness hypothesis

Language acquisition is driven forward by an innate language faculty, providing genetic guidance on how to subconsciously analyse the language experience and devise a mental grammar of the language being acquired.

We are all equipped at birth with a set of rules which will ensure rapid, subconscious, involuntary L1A

That set of innate mechanisms responsible for acquisition has come to be called:

UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR

How did we learn the rules of our native language?

UG-definitions

-The essence of human language, the system of rules governing all human languages.

-a genetic blueprint for language.

-knowledge in advance of input (expectations that the child has about linguistic...

-If we are indeed genetically aided in L1A, then it must necessarily be the case that UG-free acquisition is impossible.

=

There must be things that we know about (our) language which cannot possibly have been deduced from the input, learned by analogy, etc.

è    This is known as Plato’s problem or

è    Poverty – of – the – stimulus argument (for the existence of UG)

Most persons with savant syndrome have impoverished language skills as part of their basic disability while musical, artistic, or mathematical skills flourish

·         EPUN

·         The girl – loves – me

·         Past Tense: me – the girl – loves

·         Negative: loves – the girl – me

Language is not a manifestation of and does not depend on intelligence. Christopher’s case shows how a person with an IQ in the mild to moderate range of disability can be a language genius.

The converse is also possible: the language faculty is impaired in the presence of normal intelligence.

Stroke victims (who lose language ability but retain other intellectual functions)

Aphasia

SLI (Specific Language Impairment  )

SLI children are unable to learn specific linguistic processes, although they understand their conceptual feelings.

Normal understanding of time and temporal relations but say things like:
What did fell off the chair?
What cat Mrs White stroked?
Which coat was he weared?

UG involvement in L1A – evidence from normal language growth.

English children do make mistakes in the process of question formation

Is Daddy should stay? Has the “Polish-French” structure: it uses IS as an invariant question word, i.e. it uses a question formation strategy that is attested in some world languages.

Dolly my/mine can cry? Book the is over there? Does not illustrate a question formation mechanism known to us.

Somehow the child knows what is possible and what is not...

The child doesn’t learn to form questions merely by listening to his parents. If he had, he would never produce questions like IS Daddy should stay

On the other hand, his choice of question formation mechanisms must be restricted because there are some hypotheses that he never considers, e.g. children never attempt the move word-two hypothesis.

Sentences involving two occurrences of BE constitute less 0.5% in all caretaker speech corpora. In all likelihood, therefore, most children, don’t ever get to hear them. Yet by the age of 4 they are able to ask well-formed questions with one or two BE-forms in them.

We need a rule that explain:
 

Is Daddy _____ home?

Is the book ____ on the table?

Is Sam____ the cat that is black?
Is the cat that is black____ Sam?

Anna Wiechecka – oddanie assignment

“We are all native speakers of human”

THE UG model of L1A

Experience of language X -> UG >< grammar of X (I-language)

Two senses of grammar

Grammar of X = I-language = NS competence of his/her language

Grammar is also the study of that competence = model of the competence (linguistic knowledge) of a fluent NS

Features of grammar as a competence model

Levels of adequacy
              Adequacy – match between a sentence and its representation

Observational adequacy

The strings generated by the grammar match all the actual sentences and only actual sentences. A grammar is observationally adequate if it can handle the PLD (=primary linguistic data), the input that UG works upon, adult speech as heard of by the child.

Descriptive adequacy

1)satisfies observational adequacy

2)The structural representations (e.g. tree diagrams) correctly represent the speakers intuitions about sentences. A grammar is descriptively adequate if it can handle the facts of language.

In other words, a descriptively adequate grammar handles the linguistic competence that comes out of ...