Part 1
Preliminaries
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Chapter 1
Generative Grammar
Learning Objectives
After reading chapter 1, you should walk away having mastered the following ideas and skills:
1 Explain why language is a psychological property of humans.
2 Distinguish between prescriptive and descriptive rules.
3 Explain the scientific method as it applies to syntax.
4 Explain the differences between the kinds of data gathering, including corpora and linguistic judgments.
5 Explain the difference between competence and performance.
6 Explain the difference between i-language and e-language
7 Provide at least three arguments for Universal Grammar.
8 Explain the logical problem of language acquisition.
9 Distinguish between learning and acquisition.
10 Distinguish among observational, descriptive, and explanatory adequacy.
0. PRELIMINARIES
Although we use it every day, and although we all have strong opinions about its proper form and appropriate use, we rarely stop to think about the wonder of language. So- called language “experts” tell us about the misuse of hopefully or lecture us about the origins of the word boondoggle, but surprisingly, they never get at the true wonder of language: how it actually works as a complex machine. Think about it for a minute. You are reading this and understanding it, but you have no conscious knowledge of how you are doing it. The study of this mystery is the science of linguistics. This book is about one aspect of how language works: how sentences are structured, or the study of syntax and the people who study syntax are called syntacticians.
There are many perspectives on studying linguistics. One could study language looking at languages across time, or one could study how language is used as a social too. But syntacticians typically take a different view. They look at language as a psychological or cognitive property of humans. That is, my mind contains certain principles that allow me to sit here and produce this set of letters, words and sentences, and you use similar principles that allow you to translate these squiggles back into coherent ideas and thoughts. At least I hope you can translate them back into coherent ideas!
There are several subsystems at work in when we use language. If you were listening to me speak, I would be producing sound waves with my vocal cords and articulating particular speech sounds with my tongue, lips, and vocal cords. On the other end of things, you’d be hearing those sound waves and translating them into speech sounds using your auditory apparatus. The study of the acoustics and articulation of speech is called phonetics. Once you’ve translated the waves of sound into mental representations of speech sounds, you analyze them into syllables and pattern them appropriately. For example, speakers of English know that the made-up word bluve is a possible word of English, but the word bnuck is not. This is part of the science called phonology. Then you take these groups of sounds and organize them into meaningful units (called morphemes) and words. For example, the word dancer is made up of two meaningful bits: dance and the suffix -er. The study of this level of language is called morphology. Next you organize the words into phrases and sentences. One usage of the term syntax is the cover term for studies at this level of language. Finally, you take the sentences and phrases you hear and translate them into thoughts and ideas. This last step is what we refer to as the semantic level of language.
Syntax as a discipline studies the part of language knowledge that lies between words and the meaning of utterances: sentences. It is the level that mediates between sounds that someone produces (organized into words) and what they intend to say.
Perhaps one of the truly amazing aspects of the study of language is not the origins of the word demerit, or how to properly punctuate a quote inside parentheses, or how kids have, like, destroyed the English language, eh? Instead it’s the question of how we subconsciously get from sounds and words to the meaning of sentences. This is the study of syntax.
1. SYNTAX AS SCIENCE – THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
For many people, the study of language properly belongs in the humanities. That is, the study of language is all about the beauty of its usage in fine (and not so fine) literature and its impact on human culture. However, there is no particular reason, other than tradition, that the study of language should be confined to a humanistic approach. It is also possible to approach the study of language from a scientific perspective; this is the domain of linguistics. People who study literature often accuse linguists of abstracting away from the richness of good prose and obscuring the beauty of language. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most linguists, including the present author, enjoy nothing more than reading a finely crafted piece of fiction, and many linguists often study, as a sideline, the more humanistic aspects of language. This doesn’t mean, however, that one can’t appreciate and study the formal properties (or rules) of language and do it from a scientific perspective. The two approaches to language study are both valid; they complement each other; and neither takes away from the other.1
Science is perhaps one of the most poorly defined words of the English language. We regularly talk of scientists as people who study bacteria, particle physics, and the formation of chemical compounds, but ask your average Joe or Jill on the street what science means, and you’ll be hard pressed to get a decent definition. But among scientists themselves, science typically refers to a particular methodology for study: the deductive scientific method. The scientific method dates back to the ancient Greeks, such as Aristotle, Euclid, and Archimedes. The method involves observing some data, making some generalizations about patterns in the data, developing hypotheses that account for these generalizations, and testing the hypotheses against more data. Finally, the hypotheses are revised to account for any new data and then tested again. A flow chart showing the method is given in (1):
(1)
In syntax, we apply this methodology to sentence structure. Syntacticians start2 by observing data about the language they are studying, then they make generalizations about patterns in the data (e.g., in simple English declarative sentences, the subject precedes the verb). They then generate a hypothesis about these patterns and test the hypothesis against more syntactic data, and if necessary, go back and re-evaluate their hypotheses.
Hypotheses are only useful to the extent that they make predictions. A hypothesis that makes no predictions (or worse yet, predicts everything) is useless from a scientific perspective. In particular, the hypothesis must be falsifiable. That is, we must in principle be able to look for some data, which, if true, show that the hypothesis is wrong. This means that we are often looking for the cases where our hypotheses predict that a sentence will be grammatical (and it is not), or the cases where they predict that the sentence will be ungrammatical (contra to fact).
In syntax, hypotheses are called rules, and the group of hypotheses that describe a language’s syntax is called a grammar. The term grammar can strike terror into the hearts of people. But you should note that there are two ways to go about writing grammatical rules. One is to tell people how they should speak (this is of course the domain of English teachers and copy-editors); we call these kinds of rules prescriptive rules (as they prescribe how people should speak according to some standard). Some examples of prescriptive