CAS LX 522 Syntax I FALL 2005 Overview notes What we’re trying to accomplish There are lots of things that we as native speakers know about our native language. We can make very fine-grained judgments on the acceptability and interpretation of sentences in our native language that indicates a relatively complex system of knowledge. We in essence compute in some way whether a sentence is grammatical or not, and what interpretation is has. Even given a sentence we’ve never heard before, we know how it can and can’t be arranged and what it would mean. The theory we’ve been developing over the semester is an attempt to model and understand the system that underlies these judgments of grammaticality and interpretation. It is an attempt to answer questions like Why isn’t “Students the books read” English? Why can’t “she” refer to Mary in “Which book of Mary’s did she read?”? How is it that English speakers all know this? The basic model we’re working with is one in which a set of component parts (words, at least in a certain sense) are provided to a system (a computational procedure of some kind) that assembles them into a structure. Sometimes it will succeed, sometimes (for example, if it is given a set of incompatible words) it will fail. When it succeed, the structure will come out in a certain (deterministic) way. Our goal is to define a system that is capable of assembling all—and only—structures for the sentences that we intuitively judge to be grammatical. If the system achieves this, then we have gained a certain degree of understanding of the sort of thing our language knowledge is—that is, we are discovering what it is to know a (native) language. A second consideration is a sort of philosophical one: Children exposed to language data will rapidly come to have the same language system as the adults in their environment. They have reliable success in reaching this point, and many aspects of the system appear to be too complicated to have been deducible from the data the children receive. Given that children seem to “go beyond their input” in this way, we assume that the children must also bring to the task of language acquisition something that constrains or guides the process of language acquisition, some kind of “language instinct” that children have simply by virtue of being human. In addition to being able to describe, say, the system that underlies a native English speaker’s judgments about English sentences, we would like also to understand the nature of this “language instinct.” What constraints does it place on the kinds of languages a child can learn, how is it possible that kids can learn so quickly and succeed so reliably? The hypothesis we have been exploring is that the language instinct, or Universal Grammar, consists of the building blocks of a language system—essentially already in place at the point where children are acquiring language—with a narrow range of options that can differ from language to language. The child acquiring a language then has only the task of determining which options are appropriate for the language spoken in their environment. This model of language acquisition (and of syntax) is often referred to as a Principles and Parameters model, the idea being that there are a set of basic principles ofsyntax that are shared by all humans—by virtue of being human—and languages differ on a relatively small number of “settings” or parameters. We have taken English as our model language for the purpose of exploration and we have looked at it in some depth, but under the Principles and Parameters hypothesis, most of what we learn by looking at English in such detail is equally applicable to other languages as well. Yet, it is still important to consider how things work in other languages too, because this helps us understand what the options are. The minimalist program is a more specific approach to the Principles and Parameters model of language, which takes as its basic hypothesis that syntax is nothing really more than a means of mediating between sound and meaning. Under this view, the mind is understood as segregated into different “modules” responsible for different things. One (at least) module is responsible for understanding, thinking, reasoning, and so forth—the conceptual-intensional system. Another module is responsible for running our articulation and perception systems. Each module is separate from syntax, but syntax serves as a point of contact between the modules, generating structures that each module can interpret. Syntax’s job is to assemble representations that are in a form that these other systems (the conceptual-intensional and articulatory-perceptual systems) can use. We assume that there is a certain class of things (structures, properties) that these modules are capable of interpreting—those are “interpretable” and everything else is “uninterpretable.” So, the design of our computational system for syntax is one where the building blocks (lexical items, vocabulary items from the language) are assembled in such a way that they are interpretable—nothing that is uninterpretable is left over. If something uninterpretable is left over, the structure cannot be interpreted—we have an ungrammatical structure. The goal of this model of syntax is to explain the (apparent) complexity we find within and across languages in terms of the procedure for rendering assemblies of lexical items interpretable. The properties of words When we think about the words from which sentences are formed, we quickly see that they come in different classes. There are major classes of words, those we call nouns and verbs, adjectives and prepositions. Within those classes, there are also subclasses of words, such as the transitive verbs or the intransitive verbs. So, individual words have properties, like being a verb, or being a transitive verb. This is something we know about the words individually—not necessarily as part of the system, but as part of what we learned when we learned the vocabulary of the language. As a way for us to indicate the properties of words, we list them as features—where “features” is really just a technical term for “property.” A noun is said to have the feature [N] or perhaps [category:N] by virtue of being a noun, a verb is said to have the feature [V] or [category:V]. To distinguish transitive verbs from intransitive
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