Introduction to Cognitive Science
Linguistics Component
Syntax and Semantics
Date: 19th October 2000
Lecturer: Dr Bodomo
Department of Linguistics
Keywords
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Syntax
the mental lexicon
phrase
noun phrase (NP)
verb phrase (VP)
phrase structure
sentence structure
tree diagram
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constituent structure
functional structure
semantics
pragmatics
morphosyntax
syntax-semantics
interface
• ambiguity
Introduction: theme and objective
• Theme
– A survey of how linguistic knowledge at the level of
syntax and semantics is represented in the minds of
speakers of a language.
• Objective
– an understanding of the basic terms and issues in syntax
and semantics/pragmatics
– an interface approach: rather than rigidly discussing
these issues from phonology, morphology, syntax and
semantics, we will look at how syntax interfaces with
semantics.
Syntax
• deals with the combination of words to form phrases.
• What are the principles that determine ways we can or
cannot combine some words to form sentences?
• For example, why are some of these sentences correct and
others wrong?
– Who did you see Mary with?
– *Who did you see Mary and ?
– Ngo5 heoi3 Hoeng1 gong2 zai2 ‘I’m going to
Aberdeen’
– Heoi3 Hoeng1 gong2 zai2
– * Hoeng1gong2zai2 heoi3 ngo5
• It seems that speakers of a language have an internalized
knowledge, in the form of rules and constraints, on the
basis of which they decide whether or not a particular
string of words in their language constitutes a well-formed
string.
• Syntacticians, or cognitive scientists working on syntax,
attempt to capture this knowledge by positing rules.
• Consider the situation whereby a speaker of English,
Cantonese or Dagaare wants to express the conceptual
notion of drinking water in English, Cantonese or Dagaare.
• The first step is presumably to search in a database of
words in their respective languages for the appropriate
words to express the situation.
Let us call this the mental lexicon.
The mental lexicon of a language
• a database containing a list of all the words
in the language, along with information
about their grammatical category, how they
combine with other words and of course
their meaning.
Simplified lexicons of
English, Cantonese, and Dagaare
(each containing words that would express the conceptual
notion of a man having drunk water )
English: ‘The man drank water.’
drank, verb, trans. ‘having ingested water through the mouth’
man, noun, count, ‘an adult male human being’
the, article, DEF.
water, noun, mass ‘a kind of liquid’
Cantonese:
• go3, CL
• naam4 jan2, noun, count ‘man’
• jam2, verb, trans. ‘drank’
• soei2, noun, mass ‘water’
Dagaare:
•a, article, DEF. ‘the’
•d, noun, count ‘man
•ko, noun, mass ‘wate
•la, particle, focus marker
•nyu, verb, trans. ‘drinking
Phrase Structure
• From the database of lexical items that would form the
building blocks of linguistic structure expressing the
conceptual notion, the next step is to group the words
such that they would express the entities that take part in
the action and the action itself.
• We would refer to this group of words as phrases, a
phrase being defined as a structured group of words.
• Phrases have heads, a head of a phrase is the most
important word in the phrase. Phrases take their names
after the name of their heads. So a noun phrase (NP) is
headed by a noun, verb phrase (VP) by a verb, etc.
– ‘The man’ is an NP, ‘drank water’ is a VP. Indeed, a VP can
contain an NP, water, which just has only one item.
Sentence Structure
• words we need to
• we are ready to put
express a situation are these words to form
selected from our
complete strings
mental lexicon.
expressing the
conceptual situation.
• we have successfully
This is the domain of
grouped them into
sentence analysis. We
phrases and units to
begin by positing
express entities and
phrase structure
events.
rules.
Phrase Structure rules
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S  NP + VP
VP  V + NP
NP  Art + N
V  drank
N  man, water
Art  the
• With these phrase structure
rules and the lexicon
attached the native speaker
can form or interpret
grammatical sentences and
reject ungrammatical ones.
• (In groups of two, spend at
most 3 minutes and come up
with phrase rules for
Cantonese and Dagaare to
express the conceptual
situation of a man having
drank water.)
A constituent structure diagram
in the form of a tree structure
S
NP
VP
NP
Art
The
N
V
N
man drank water
The first NP functions as the SUBJECT of the sentence,
the verb as the PREDICATE and the second NP as the OBJECT.
This can be represented in a functional structure diagram
Functional structure diagram
PRED ‘drink <SUBJECT, OBJECT>’
TENSE PAST
SUBJECT [The man]
OBJECT [water]
• This is how we represent the syntactic knowledge of
speakers of a language for basic sentences. There are
however more complex cases.
A account of the syntax alone is not enough for an adequate
interpretation of sentences that encode concepts, situations
and attitudes. We need a level of meaning to achieve this.
Meaning: level of semantics/
pragmatics
• What does the sign, brown dog, mean?
Signifier and signified
– Reality, mind, etc
• This will be taken care of by semantics and
pragmatics
Semantics
• Trask (1999: 249) • Crystal (1997: 343)
– ‘the branch of
linguistics dealing
with meanings of
words and
sentences’.
– ‘a major branch of
linguistics devoted
to the study of
MEANING in
language’.
Meaning:
Level of Semantics
• English:
a. Chan loves you more
than Yan.
could mean:
b. Chan loves you more
than Yan loves you.
c. Chan loves you more
than Chan loves Yan.
• Cantonese:
a. me1 waa2 ?
could mean:
b. What did you say ?
c. What language ?
Meaning:
Level of Pragmatics
• Crystal (1997: 301)
– ‘the
study of language from the point of view of the
users, especially of the choices they make, the
constraints they encounter in using language in social
interaction, and the effects their use of language has
on the other participants in an act of communication’.
What would brown dog mean in some specialised
contexts, cultures, etc.?
•What about a white dove?
Syntax and how it interfaces with
other components
• Morphosyntax
• The syntax-semantics interface
Morphosyntax
• There is a close relationship between the structure of words and
the structure of sentences.
• In some languages it is even difficult to tell whether a particular
word formation is a word or a sentence:
Swahili (a language of East Africa):
Nakupenda
is a word that is made up of:
Na-
ku-
Tense/SM you
penda
love
(The item na in this language
marks tense and also the subject
of a sentence.)
In this language,
this word structure
can also stand
as a sentence, thus:
Nakupenda
'I love you'
Morphosyntax (cont.)
In the data above, it is better to analyse this linguistic item
both in terms of its morphology and syntax, hence morphosyntax.
• Trask (1999:176)
– ‘the area of interface between morphology and syntax’.
• Crystal (1997:250-251)
– grammatical categories or properties for whose definition criteria of
morphology and syntax both apply, as in describing the
characteristics of words’
– . E.g. NUMBER in nouns constitute a morphosyntactic category:
• number contrasts affect syntax (e.g. singular subject requiring a
singular verb)
• they require morphological definition (e.g. add -s for plural)
The Syntax-semantics Interface
• Besides studying the formal structure of sentences it
is also important to study how parts of the sentence
contribute to an interpretation of the whole sentence.
• Such is especially the case with syntactically
ambiguous sentences:
– Chan loves you more than Yan .
• Could mean:
i. Chan loves you more than Yan loves you .
ii. Chan loves you more than Chan loves Yan.
• [Class should look for more syntactic ambiguities in
English, Cantonese, and any other language]
Conclusion
• We have briefly shown how tacit linguistic
knowledge can be represented at various levels of
phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics,
pragmatics, and their interfaces, including
morphophonology, morphosyntax, and the
syntax-semantics interrelationships.
• In the next lecture/topic, we shall look closely at
how this linguistic knowledge representation can
be formalised into an algorithm, a computational
procedure for processing this linguistic
knowledge.
References
• Crystal, David. 1997. A Dictionary of Linguistics and
Phonetics. Blackwell Publishers.
• Lepore, Ernest and Zenon Pylyshyn (eds). 1999. What Is
Cognitive Science. Blackwell Publishers. (especially
chapters 10, 11, 12, and 13).
• Stillings, Neil and others. 1995. Cognitive Science: An
Introduction. MIT Press. (especially chapters 6).
• Trask, R. L. 1993. A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in
Linguistics. Routledge.
• Wilson, R. and Frank C. Neil (eds) 1999. The MIT
Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. MIT Press