Where are we ?

 HSL747: Language Computations and Mental Architecture

 Week 6: Syntax (Lecture-1)
 Tuesday, Aug 29
Hierarchy in words
o Words are hierarchical structured

o Unlockable is ambiguous!
 ‘can’t be locked’ or ‘can be unlocked’

o Two different valid structures (i.e. mental representations)

unlockable unlockable

un- lockable unlock -able

V -able un- V
lock lock 2
Hierarchy in sentences: Ambiguity

o We shouldn’t think of sentences as flat sequences of words. Why?

o ‘The boy saw the man with the telescope.’ Ambiguous!

1. the telescope belongs to the boy

2. the telescope belongs to the man

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 Hierarchy in sentences
o Ambiguity can be easily captured if sentences are hierarchical structured.

o The same words, in the same order with different structures: PP are
attached to VP or N
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Ambiguity

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Ambiguity

o Stop for pedestrians in crosswalk

o Stop for pedestrian in crosswalk

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Ambiguity

o Don’t worry about the tree yet. Don’t take it as official either (They’re
for illustration). This is where we are headed. 7
Syntax: study of (syntactic structure of) phrases
and sentences
o There are many ways to study the syntactic structure in a human
language.

• The central one in theoretical linguistics

 well-formedness (or ‘grammaticality’) judgments
Roughly: can you say X in your language?
How do you say X in your language?

• Other options:
 Psycholinguistic experiments (e.g., eye-tracking, brain
scanning, self-paced reading, . . . )
 Corpus research etc. 8
Syntax

o ill-formedness: also help to study the syntactic structure

1. a. *Toothbrush the is blue.

b. *Three students the are studying.
c. *Three the students are studying.
d. The three students are studying.

o (1a-c) are ungrammatical because of ?

 The syntactic position of the definite article the ?

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Two types of ill-formedness: Syntactic vs. Semantic

o Syntactic ill-formedness: ungrammaticality due to the structure

1. *Toothbrush the is blue.

o Semantic ill-formedness: ungrammaticality due to meaning

2. #The toothbrush is pregnant.

o In Syntax, we care about the former.

‘The colorless green ideas sleep furiously.’ (Chomsky 1957)
 Grammatically correct, but semantically does not make any sense.

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Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Grammar

o Linguistics is descriptive not prescriptive in nature (as traditional

grammar).

o That is, linguists are not interested in telling people how to use
language. Rather, linguists are interested in understanding how people
actually do use language.

o For example, English grammar asks you not to split infinitives, (a) is
preferred over (b)

(1) a. ‘I told him not to talk’

b. ‘I told him to not talk’.
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Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Grammar
oHow does it fare with examples like (2)?

(2) I expect to more than double my profits.

o Linguists are interested in understanding how people actually do

exercise language: (1) and (2) are equally important.

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Competence and Performance

o Competence : the speaker-hearer ‘s knowledge of his/her language

o Performance: the actual use of language in concrete situations

Internal knowledge (system) of Set of sentences in a particular setting

speakers’ mind
What speakers of a language could Sentences that speakers of a language
produce have actually produced

o Generative/theoretical linguists are interested to study competence.

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Competence and Performance
o (1) is primarily used as a question but it can also used to make a request.

(1) Can you lift that box?

o Grammatical competence – A system (computation and lexicon) of

human mind that relates the representation of form and meaning (Chomsky
1980)

o Pragmatics competence – knowledge of how language is related to the

situation in which it is used (Chomsky 1980).

o Possible to have grammatical competence without pragmatic competence.

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Properties of languages

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 Properties of languages

Language is infinite Recursion

o We are able to produce and comprehend infinite number of

sentences, including countless ones you’ve never heard before (like
this one! right!).

o We can also produce sentences of infinite length.

o How does that work? We’re finite beings, after all.

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Infinite length: Recursion

o A phrase can be embedded inside another phrase of the same

kind.
 A clause inside a clause: John thinks cheese is great.
 A noun inside a noun: the man who ate the cheese.

o Whenever you have recursion, you have (in principle) infinity:

 John thinks Mary said cheese is great.
 Bill thinks that John thinks Mary said cheese is great.
 ….

o Recursion is an unique property of human language.

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Finite set of rules

o Phrase structural rules to generate English sentences

S → NP VP
NP → (D) (AdjP+) N (PP+)/(CP)
VP → (AdvP+) V (NP) ({NP/CP}) (AdvP+) (PP+) (AdvP+)
PP → PNP
AdjP → (AdvP) Adj
AdvP → (AdvP) Adv
CP → (C) S

o The phrase structure rules are recursive in nature. How?

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What’s wrong here?

o Recursion is property of a human language, however, interestingly,

not all recursion goes down so smoothly, an example from ‘center-
embedding’

1. A woman that a man loves

2. A woman that a man that a child knows loves ??
3. A woman that a man that a child that a movie watched knows loves
??? (almost impossible)

o Too many center embeddings is crushingly bad, as opposed to ‘right-

embedding’ that can go on indefinitely (c.f. slide 17). But center
embedding looks in principle to be ok. So what goes wrong?
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Competence vs. Performance

o We have difficulty with center embeddings because they place

too-high demands on working memory.

o The basic idea: there is a distinction between our grammatical

knowledge (competence) and how that knowledge is deployed
with limited working memory (performance).

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 Another example of performance impinging on competence
 The cotton shirts are made from comes from India.

o This sentence is so hard to process, it almost seems ungrammatical.

But once you find the parse, it’s not too bad (unlike the multiple center
embeddings, which never get any easier).

o What’s going on here?

When you’re trying to understand a sentence, you’re biased in certain ways.
More often than not, those biases are good ones.
But sometimes they lead you astray.
Here, you’re expecting the thing after from to be a noun phrase. When you hit
comes instead, it’s a shock. You go back and re-analyze the cotton shirts are made
from as a noun phrase.
o Such sentences are called garden-path sentences (they lead you down the garden
path). 21
What is Syntax: the richness of syntactic knowledge

(1) John loves Mary.

(2) Mary loves John.

 Same words but different meanings.

o One can say that word order might be sufficient to determine both
meaning and pronunciation.

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What is Syntax: the richness of syntactic knowledge

o But word order will not be suffice. Compare (1) with (2)

(1) John loves Mary.

(2) Mary is loved (by John) .

 In (2), Mary precedes not follow the verb love but it has the same
meaning with respect to love

o Meaning (i.e., semantic role) is divorced from word order.

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What is Syntax: the richness of syntactic knowledge

(1) John believes her to be intelligent.

(2) John believes that she is intelligent.

o The words her and she refer to the same individual and have the same
meaning.

o However, they differ in pronunciation. Why?

o They are in a different structural relationship.

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What is Syntax: the richness of syntactic knowledge

(1) India is beautiful.

(2) The girls from India are singing.

o The form of the verb is not determined by the adjacent words. Why?

o India is in a different structural relationship to the verb in (1) & (2).

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What is Syntax: the richness of syntactic knowledge

o Who can them refer to in (1) ?

(1) The men expected to see them.

o Does them have the same interpretation in (2)?

(2) I wonder who the men expected to see them

o In (1), them cannot be the men. In (2), it can (indeed, this is the
most natural interpretation. )

o However, in both cases, we have the men expected to see them.

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What is Syntax: the richness of syntactic knowledge
1. Who do you think that John will question ___ first?
2. Who do you think John will question ___ first?
3. Who do you think ___ will question John first?
4. *Who do you think that ___ will question John first?

o that-trace effect: that has to be omitted when followed by a “trace” of

a moved who.

o As a native speaker, you have fine-grained knowledge about English

grammar (without being taught)

o How did you come to learn it ?

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What is Syntax: the richness of syntactic knowledge
(1) You think John bought what?
 Who do you think ___ bought what?

(2) You wonder what John bought.

 *Who do you wonder what ___ bought?

o So who can move across think, but not wonder.

o Again, more complex yet very clear facts, ones which native speakers
are never explicitly taught.

o How did you come to learn it ?

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Universal Grammar
o Taken together, linguists consider these points highly suggestive (if
perhaps not totally conclusive) evidence that there is an innate aspect to
human language.

o Something gets us to learn (and agree on!) all these deep, complex
facts, without explicit instruction.

o That innate linguistic capability is known as Universal

Grammar.

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What is Syntax: the richness of syntactic knowledge
It would be absurd to try to teach such facts as these to
people learning English as a second language, just as no
one taught them to us or even presented us with evidence
that could yield this knowledge by any generally reliable
procedure. This is knowledge without grounds, without
good reasons or support by reliable procedures in any
general or otherwise useful sense of these notions.

Chomsky, Knowledge of Language (1986: 12)

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Next class

 Problem with traditional definition of Parts of speech

 Syntactic view of parts of speech

Reading: Carnie, Ch. 2 “Parts of speech”

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