What is a theory of grammar? 2. Background: why syntax?Neurological agrammatismSo how does the syntax of human languages actually work?5.2 Constituent structure5.5 Phrase-structure rulesIntroduction to LinguisticsSyntax 1.1. The theory of grammarIn the first week: • prescriptive grammar: sets down guidelines for how people should speak or write• descriptive grammar: attempts to describe how people actually speakRules of descriptive grammar: a list of certain properties of the language in question e.g., English: subject usually comes before the verb and the object usually comes after. most present tense verbs have an -s ending with 3rd person singular subjects.John eats scrapple. Loretta walks to school. Descriptive grammars of unfamiliar languages - indispensable for serious linguistic work. • explanatory grammar: attempts to describe the system of knowledge that underlies how people speak.E.g., to explain why the object sometimes comes before or the subject after the verb in English: That guy I don't like .Down goes Frazier! (Howard Cosell's call of George Foreman knocking out Joe Frazier in 1973) What is a theory of grammar? A grammar is the complete system that underlies a language, not just a few facts about it• grammar = (subconscious) knowledge that a speaker has of their own language a grammar • grammar = our theory of what that knowledge might be likeGoal: get our theory of grammar to approximate the grammar in the speaker's mind. Analogy: car specs for customers vs diagrams for mechanics. Last several weeks: some fragments of a theory of English grammar (sound and word structure). E.g., Phonological rules for flapping and raising, and the interaction of these rulesthe kind of description that tells us how language-sound is put together out of a series of smaller parts. Morphological rules for affixation tell us how words are put together out of morphemesThe syntax: how to generate an infinite number of new sentences from a finite set of words (lexical items)2. Background: why syntax? Language is not just a jumble of words thrown together, but involves rigid structures and rules of combination. Why?  Several words together provide more information than one word alone, e.g. top 10 words: "College: the Undergraduate Experience:" undergraduate faculty campus student college academic curriculum freshman classroom professor. "Earth and other Ethics:" moral considerateness bison whale governance utilitarianism ethic entity preference utilitarian. "When Your Parents Grow Old:" diabetes elderly appendix geriatric directory hospice arthritis parent dental rehabilitation "Madhur Jaffrey's Cookbook:" peel teaspoon tablespoon fry finely salt pepper cumin freshly ginger To understand a recipe, we need more exact information about how the words (and ingredients!) combine.1Syntax rule? - Semantically-related words will be closer together than unrelated ones. • Francine, pizza, eat ok • Pat, Chris, glass, break, saw – two interpretations possible:"Pat saw Chris break the glass." "Chris saw Pat break the glass." We need principles for the combination of these words to distinguish these meanings.Similar: word-for-word gloss of a passage in a language we don't know: • Kashaya, an American Indian language of northern California:tíiqa mito taqhma c'ishkan shaqac'qashI wish you dress pretty might wear"I wish you might wear a pretty dress"• But in other cases, knowledge of the syntax is essential.muukín' tito 'ama dút'a' dihqa'khe' dúucic'iphi t'o daqaac'i'bahe him job will give if know would likeA speaker of English might be inclined to interpret this as:"He will give him a job if he knows that he'd like it."o In fact it is:"He would like it if he knew someone was going to give him a job"o The only way to be sure about this is to know Kashaya syntax.Syntax:  a set of procedures and rules for putting words together in consistent ways to represent ideas in predictable ways.  Both the speaker and the hearer have access to the same rules, so understanding is assured. Rules can vary from language to language, e.g. a language could put a verb in front of its arguments (English) or behind them (Kashaya), as long as it systematic.  English examples of what syntax does for us: grammatical nonsenseColorless green ideas sleep furiously. (Chomsky 1965) Also: ungrammatical sense: This child seems sleeping. Harris dined the steak. Neurological agrammatismBroca's aphasia: • cannot speak fluently, tend to omit e.g. articles and verbal auxiliaries, and sometimes can hardly speak at all. Comprehension, by comparison, seems relatively intact.• But: their ability to understand sentences turns out to be deficient in systematic ways. o They always do well when only one sense is plausible:It was the mice that the cat chasedThe postman was bitten by the dog2o However, if more than one semantic arrangement is equally plausible:It was the baker that the butcher insultedor if a syntactically wrong arrangement is more plausible:The dog was bitten by the policementhen they do not do so well. Clearly Broca's aphasia has a negative impact on the processing of syntactic structure.So how does the syntax of human languages actually work?Main characteristics of syntax: A discrete combinatory system3. Parts of syntax.Very roughly speaking,(Chomsky 1967) the syntax of a language consists of• A lexicon – set of words; • a set of phrase structure rules that tell us how to put lexical items together; • a set transformation operations – movement rules – that tell us, e.g., how to arrive from a declarative sentence to the corresponding question(john arrive  who arrived?; john is here  is john here?); movement rules also tells us to get a passive sentence from an active one – (john hit bill  bill was hit by john)• much of the above has changed as syntactic theory progresses. The three broad parts of syntax – the lexicon, rules for putting words together, and movement – have remained 4. The lexicon• simply put, the lexicon is a bunch of words which are the building blocks of sentences • the lexicon is divided into two broad categories: 1. lexical words and 2. function words.• Lexical words are an open class – nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. We can always add new ones to this set of words simply by making them up. John blicked the ball.• Function words are a closed set – articles and other determiners, pronouns, negation,