August 23, 2010
Grammars and Lexicons
11-721
How do linguists study
grammar?
Discussion
• Would we be better off with fewer
languages?
• What is likely to happen in your lifetime?
• Why study languages with few speakers
and no economic power?
Outline
• Views of language:
– Prescriptive
– Artistic
– Descriptive
• Claims about knowledge of a language:
–
–
–
–
Unconscious
Complex
Systematic
Can be studied scientifically
• Analyzing a language you don’t know
Prescriptive and Descriptive
Linguistics
• Natural phenomena cannot be legislated,
just described.
– You can’t declare the value of π to be 3.
• Sag, Wasow, and Bender, page 1
• Social phenomena can be legislated.
• Language use can be legislated as a social
phenomenon, but it can also be studied as
a natural phenomenon.
Prescriptive view of language
• Rules about how language should be used
– Don’t say Me and him went to the movies.
– It doesn’t make sense because you can’t say Me
went to the movies.
• Focus on isolated phenomena that are thought
to be corruptions of the language.
– Everybody should do their homework.
• Some people speak correctly and others don’t.
• Rules are something that you are aware of.
Artistic View of Language
• Language can be used creatively to make
literature and poetry.
• Some people are better at it than others.
• Language is not systematic and rule
governed.
Descriptive view of language
• Study language as a natural phenomenon
– People say Me and him went to the movies.
– That’s interesting because they don’t say Me went to
the movies.
• Focus on all aspects of language, even very
normal sentences.
• Every native speaker of a language speaks
equally well.
– Unless there is an injury or an illness that affects
certain parts of the brain or speech producing organs.
• Language consists of systematic knowledge that
the speakers are not aware of.
Outline
• Views of language:
– Prescriptive
– Artistic
– Descriptive
• Claims about knowledge of a language:
–
–
–
–
Unconscious
Complex
Systematic
Can be studied scientifically
• Discovery in a language you don’t know
Knowledge of Language
• “Every normal speaker of any natural
language has acquired an immensely rich
and systematic body of unconscious
Claim 1
knowledge, which can be investigated by
consulting speakers’ intuitive judgments.”
Claim 2
• “Languages are objects of considerable
Claim 3
complexity, which can be studied
scientifically. That is, we can formulate
Claim 4
hypotheses about linguistic structure and test
them against the facts of particular
languages.”
Sag et al., page 2
Chomsky, 1957 on testable
hypotheses
The search for rigorous formulation in linguistics has a much more
serious motivation than mere concern for logical niceties or the
desire to purify well-established methods of linguistic analysis.
Precisely constructed models for linguistic structure can play an
important role, both negative and positive, in the process of
discovery itself. By pushing a precise but inadequate formulation to
an unacceptable conclusion, we can often expose the exact source
of the inadequacy and, consequently, gain a deeper understanding
of the linguistic data. More positively a formalized theory may
automatically provide solutions for many problems other than those
for which it was explicitly designed. Obscure and intuition-bound
notions can neither lead to absurd conclusions nor provide new and
correct ones, and hence they fail to be useful in two important
respects.
(Noam Chomsky has been the most influential linguist in many parts of
the world since 1957. You may have also heard his name
associated with politics. )
Outline
• Approaches to human language
– Descriptive
– Prescriptive
– Artistic
• Discovering rules that you aren’t aware of
in English
• Discovering rules of another language
Rules that you know and rules that
you aren’t aware of
• Rules that you know:
– Me and him went to the movies.
– Everyone did their homework.
– Don’t use no double negatives.
– To boldly go where no one has gone before.
– Prepositions are bad to end sentences with.
In Class Exercise
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
*We like us.
We like ourselves.
She likes her. (She ≠ her)
She likes herself.
Nobody likes us.
*Leslie likes ourselves.
*Ourselves like us.
*Ourselves like ourselves.
What is that asterisk for?
• Ungrammatical
– Not an English sentence.
• We’ll get back to this
Testable hypotheses
• Use a reflexive pronoun only when:
• Use a regular pronoun only when:
More examples
• We think that Leslie likes us.
• *We think that Leslie likes ourselves.
• *We think that ourselves like Leslie.
New Hypothesis
• Use a reflexive pronoun only when:
• Use a regular pronoun only when:
• (This is an English rule. Many languages
do not follow it.)
Support for the new hypothesis
• We think that she voted for her. (she ≠
her)
• We think that she voted for herself.
• *We think that herself voted for her.
• *We think that herself voted for herself.
Are these consistent with the
current hypothesis?
•
•
•
•
Our friends like us.
*Our friends like ourselves.
Those pictures of us offended us.
*Those pictures of us offended ourselves.
New Hypothesis
• Use a reflexive pronoun only when:
• Use a regular pronoun only when:
Are these examples consistent with
the current hypothesis?
•
•
•
•
Vote for us.
*Vote for ourselves.
*Vote for you.
Vote for yourselves.
How about these?
• We appealed to them to
vote for themselves.
• We appealed to them to
vote for them.
– Them ≠ them
• We appealed to them to
vote for us.
• *We appealed to them to
vote for ourselves.
• *We appeared to them to
vote for themselves.
• We appeared to them to
vote for them.
– Them = them
• *We appeared to them to
vote for us.
• We appeared to them to
vote for ourselves.
Concepts that have emerged
• Clausemates:
– subject and object of the same verb.
• Phrases:
– e.g., those pictures of us
• Embedded clauses:
– We think that she voted for herself.
• Understood arguments
– Vote for yourself! (understood “you”)
• “Appeal” and “appear” have different understood
arguments in their embedded clauses
– We appealed to them to vote for themselves.
– We appeared to them to vote for ourselves.
This allows us to understand
something else:
• This sentence is ambiguous.
– Who do you want to visit?
• What are its two meanings?
• What does this sentence mean?
– Who do you wanna visit?
Knowledge of Language
• “Every normal speaker of any natural
language has acquired an immensely rich
and systematic body of unconscious
Claim 1
knowledge, which can be investigated by
consulting speakers’ intuitive judgments.”
Claim 2
• “Languages are objects of considerable
Claim 3
complexity, which can be studied
scientifically. That is, we can formulate
Claim 4
hypotheses about linguistic structure and test
them against the facts of particular
languages.”
Sag et al., page 2
One more claim:
• It is also possible to make testable
hypotheses about how languages differ
and what they have in common.
Applying the discovery methods to a
language that you don’t know
(Chickasaw)
Approaches to syntax
• Structuralist
– Languages consist of structures
– Smaller structures build up into larger
structures
• phones, phonemes, morphemes, phrases, etc.
• Generative
– Same structures, but add a formal production
system (e.g., context free grammar) that
generates only sentences that are in the
language, and fails on sentences that are not
in the language.
Approaches to Syntax
• Functionalist
– Focus on how forms reflect their communicative function.
• Iconicity, economy
– Prototypes rather than discrete categories
• Typological
– Categorizing languages into types
• Corpus linguistics
– Lots of counting and statistics
• Cognitive Grammar
– Prototypes and radial categories
– Embodiment
– Weekly reading group lead by Nathan Schneider (LTI Ph.D.
student)