Syntax and Grammar

1. Syntax and Grammar John Goldsmith Cognitive Neuroscience May 1999

2. Two views of language to avoid like the plague:Thought is like language, and language thought. Thoughts If your thoughts are clear enough, they will naturally coalesce into words (and in the right order). It’s not so much that these ideas are wrong as they are pernicious. They lead to fuzzy and uncontrollably bad thinking. The cat is on the mat

3. Language is a Markov process Given the last three words, we should be able to predict the next word with very high accuracy. I came upon As I turned ... round the corner What’s the first word on the next slide?

4. Syntax • The study of how words are assembled in meaningful, grammatical utterances… • in particular languages…. • And generalizations across languages

5. First, it’s lexical categories we care about, not words. • The bigger a pattern is, the more important it is to our study. • Subjects precede their verbs in English is more important than • the word after President Bill is Clinton.

6. Categories? • First, lexical categories: • What is the best set of categories we can find to specify what sentences are grammatical in English (…)

7. If we know that • the cat is on the mat is grammatical in English, how does this extend as a generalization? Can we replace cat by other words and still get a good sentence? Of course. By what words? Is it, say, by any word starting with c? No.

8. The cat is on the mat We have a category (we call them nouns) in English; our best approximation to how one sentence can be matched to an indefinitely large pattern is by replacing a word by any other word in the same category. • The fish is on the platter. • A bird is over a tree.

9. How many such categories are there? The most honest answer would be: that’s a matter of analytical convenience. The more categories, the better we can make our “predictions”. If we allow ourselves just “nouns”, then we’ll “predict” such monstrosities as • The Robert is on the phone. • The crying is up the hill. • A inkling is through the milk.

10. If we have more categories, we can make finer distinctions and better predictions • Proper nouns (Bill, Clinton, Monday), common nouns (bill, sound, trophy), pronouns (me, I, she, it, we). They share some properties, but differ in a lot of ways at the same time.

11. Let’s focus on common nouns for a while…. What makes a “common noun” in English? • Often preceded by the or a. • Often preceded by a possessive (my, your, his, her, our) or a demonstrative (this, that, these, those…). • An adjective may intervene, though: this old house, my first car, *first my car (but: At first my car ran well…)

12. Summarizing… • By and large (almost always), if a word may be preceded by the, it may be preceded by a/an, or by my, your, his, her. • We want a compact manner of representing this.

13. A compact manner? Why? 1. Compact manner of remembering your experience = that’s the best your memory can do: it extracts what is hopefully significant, because it can’t memorize all. 2. Compact manner of describing is the test of scientific success (Minimal Description Length/ Jorma Rissanen; Ray Solomonoff). 3...

14. Lasnik: (283) Given the creative use of languages…it could not be true that the syntax of a language consisted merely of a list of sentences that are memorized in the course of language acquisition. Something more complex, hence, more interesting, must be involved.

15. Categories and phrase-structure rules • Writing all generalizations in terms of categories (not lexical items = words) is a way of compressing descriptions. Notice that it always makes wrong predictions! (Why? examples?) • There is thus a trade-off between compact description = prediction and accuracy.

16. Categories and Phrase-structure rules Phrase structure rules are excellent means of expressing the idea that two categories often appear in adjacent positions: • C -> A + B • NP->article + noun They’re also good for saying that something may optionally appear in between: • C-> A + (X) + B

17. Phrase-structure rules in English • S  NP VP • NP  det (Adj) Noun • VP  Verb (NP) (PP) (S) • PP  Prep Noun

18. Phrase-structure rules • Express generalizations about the fine internal structure around phrasal heads (nouns, verbs, adjectives) • Head-argument structures: verbs take NP (= Noun Phrase) complements (which can be large chunks) • But...

19. S What did Linda say S Monica had told her D

20. Coreference properties Pronouns almost always follow the noun they refer to: • John is going to California, and he’s very excited about that. (try it the other way around) • Before John studied linguistics, he said a lot of stupid things about language.

21. Before he studied linguistics, John said a lot of stupid things about language. So both orders are OK there. Worse yet: • In front of him, John saw a snake. • *In front of John, he saw a snake.

22. Main claim that appears to come from looking at language asphrase structure: • The big picture, the main facts about the syntax of a language are expressed by phrase-structure rules, which use categories. • To know where a certain phrase may appear, you only need to know its category, not what’s “inside” it.

23. You don’t need to know what’s inside it? • That is true in mathematical and logical formulas:

24. But it’s not true in language. It’s only a useful first approximation. Q: Are there self-standing “sentences” that can’t be embedded? A: You bet. Like father, like son. Fathers who like, like son get along well with their kids.

25. Can nouns select certain kinds of determiners? Certainly • A vast expanse of linguistics is devoted to exploring and accounting for the complexities that transcend phrase-structure rules.

26. Syntactic Structure • Sign on the highway in Oklahoma (really): Hitchhikers may be escaping convicts. So…? Pick them up? Don’t pick them up?

27. Sentence= Aux phrase Aux’ Aux verb phrase Noun phrase Verb Noun Noun Adjective Hitchhikers may be escaping convicts. Copula: semantically main verb

28. Sentence= Aux phrase Aux’ Aux verb phrase Verb verb phrase Noun Verb Noun Hitchhikers may be escaping convicts. Main verb

29. Syntactic structure What did the Buddha say to the hot-dog vendor? Make me one with everything.

30. BE Make me rich and famous and in tune with the universe Make me one with everything. Make a hot-dog with everything on it for me, please have

31. What did the vendor say when the Buddha asked him for his change from the $20? Change must come from within.