Syntax

LING 315
Handout 1
Introduction

1 Linguistics and grammar

(1) Linguistics has been defined as the science of language

• Like any science, it attempts to systematize and explain a domain of the

empirical world
• What domain of the empirical world constitute the object of linguistics?

(2) The object of Linguistics is I-language

(3) I-language vs E-language

• E-language—outside of conscience, a construct understood independently of the

properties of the mind/ brain; (language as ‘the totality of utterances that can
be made in a speech community’ (Bloomfield, 1933))
• I-language—a system of knowledge attained and internally represented in the
mind/brain. The state S, attained by the language faculty in an adult speaker,
through a process of maturation.

(4) Competence vs performance

• Competence—a dispositional property, the speaker’s internalized grammar which

enables the speaker to use language
• Performance—the actual use of language

(5) Sentences vs utterances (vs propositions)

• Sentence—an abstraction over utterances which have the same form. Sentences
are internal, mental entities.
• Utterance—an actual use of a sentence
• Proposition—the message conveyed by a sentence.

Uttered by two different speakers, the following sentence conveys two different
messages, i.e. is mapped to two different propositions
(6) Meet me here at noon with a stick about this big.
 conversely, there could be several sentences corresponding to the same
proposition
(7) a. John saw Stephan (English)
b. Jean a vu Stephan (French)
c. Chunnaic Iain Stephan (Scottish Gaelic)

(8) Sum up:

• linguistics studies the speaker’s competence, the speaker’s tacit knowledge of his
grammar.
• The linguist’s grammar is a hypothesis on the structure of the speaker’s
internalized grammar
• More technically, a linguists grammar is a model of the speakers competence, a
model of the speakers internalized grammar
– A model is an object or phenomenon A, which is subject to investigation as
a substitute of some object or phenomenon B, with which A is in a relation
of correspondence. Through the study of the model A, and through the
established correspondence B-A, one obtains information about the (less
accessible) object B
The linguists grammar is a model of competence in the sense that it attempts to
outline the kind of knowledge the speaker possesses, which enables him to use
language creatively

2 Writing a grammar
(9) So how do linguists go about it? How do they come up with their hypotheses, with
their model of the speaker’s competence? How do they write a grammar?

• I-language cannot be observed directly

• E-language can
• The goal is to come up with answers about I-language, though

(10) Writing a grammar:

• Observation of the data

• Description of the data
• Abstracting away from the data and coming up with generalizations/ rules
• Make a hypothesis about the set of rules that could generate such data
(Proposing a theory of the grammar/ an explanation)

2
(11) Constraints on the theory the linguist comes up with.

• The hypotheses must have testable consequences, i.e. consequences which can be
tested by experimentation.
• The experiment may confirm or falsify the hypotheses. The hypotheses are
susceptible of revision, can be criticized and suspended by better ones.
• In addition, for a collection of conjectures/hypotheses to count as a theory, they
must be structured into a coherent system, so that changing one has an effect on
the predictions of the others.

If a particular conjecture in a theory cannot be proved wrong, then it is

unfalsifiable and has no place in a good theory. If a hypothesis doesn’t relate to
any of the others in the theory, then it isn’t really part of the theory at all. Such
hypotheses are often termed ad hoc stipulations.

(12) Example: Observation: dropping a vase out of the window. It falls to the ground.

There are lots of potential theories which might explain this observation.

a. Newton’s theory of gravity;

– general (it applies everywhere, not just on the Earth),
– explicit (the system predicts that the vase will fall with a certain
acceleration), and
– it forms a cohesive system (if we change one of Newton’s conjectures a little,
then that change has knock-on effects for all the other ones).
– testable/ falsifiable (we can test this theory by dropping vases out of
windows elsewhere in the universe (on the moon, say).
b. invisible dragons catch the vase and then bear it to the ground. In the absence
of a theory of invisible dragons, we’ve made an unfalsifiable conjecture, and we
don’t have a theory which has predictive power—i.e. it doesn’t make different
predictions in different circumstances.

2.1 Acceptability, grammaticality and stars

in order to write the grammar of a language, the linguist considers both grammatical and
ungrammatical examples

(13) Ungrammaticality (violation of some rule of the grammar)

• word order
(14) *By is eaten monkey banana that the being.

3
 • violation of selectional properties of the words involved
(15) *That monkey is ate the banana
• agreement
(16) *The monkeys is eating the banana

“star (*) under the intended meaning/ interpretation”

(17) How did Julie ask if/whether Jenny left?

• when a question about the way that Julie asked something (loudly, rudely, etc.),
grammatical
• when a question about the way that Jenny left (angrily, jauntily etc.),
ungrammatical

compare with:

(18) How did Julie say that Jenny left?

(19) acceptability

• context dependency
(20) i. The amoeba coughed and then it fainted.
ii. That banana is eating the monkey.
• parsing
(21) i. I looked the number which you picked out at random by using a needle
and a phonebook up.
ii. I looked up the number which you picked out at random by using a
needle and a phonebook.