Why does Semantics Need Syntax?Questions1. What is syntax?2. What is a formal model of syntax?3. Why should linguists pursue a formal model of syntax?4. What does formal syntax enable us to explain?5. What kinds of categories can be used in formal syntax?6. What phenomena should a formal model represent?I. Syntax.II. What is a formal model of syntax?III. Why formalize?IV. Does formalism explain anything?A. Givon points out that a formalism is not an explanation, but a prelude to explanation. Formalism is a methodological commitment, not a theoretical one.B. What do we want to explain?C. Givon argues that the explanation must cast in terms distinct from those employed in the formalism. In P&P, hardwiring is the response to the learnability question and the ontology question. Givon holds that this type of ‘explanation’ is circular. Suppose a biologist says, “The human digestive system is built the way it is because its structure is in the genetic code”. Has the speaker explained anything?D. Innateness as explanation.E. The problem of plasticity. Evidence from brain injury causes problems for a linguistic theory which presupposes innate localization of linguistic knowledge. E.g., children with pre- or perinatal brain injury are below controls on language performance but within normal limits. Aphasia studies point to differential effects of identical brain lesions on language performance.F. Explanation outside the system. These would include reference to cognitive representations (Talmy) or reference to functional constraints (e.g., the principle of separation of role and reference and avoidance of lexical subjects).G. Is learning your first language the same thing as learning its parameters?V. What kinds of categories count in formal syntax?A. Syntactic generalizations are syntactic: the autonomy of syntax.B. Jackendoff 1997 (31-38). There is no one-to-one relationship between principles of syntactic and semantic combination.VI. What should a formal model represent?Appendix: George Lakoff on the meaning of formal1. Pertaining to form.2. Formal systems, in the technical mathematical sense. This is the sense intended in the Chomskyan tradition and more recent variants on that tradition.3. A new sense coming out of work on the Neural Theory of Language, referring to neural parameterizations that can be given a symbolic notation useful in linguistic descriptions and natural language processing.4. Autonomy: Within a mathematical formal system, generative rules or other algorithmic mechanisms can only refer to the abstract symbols inside the system. This eliminates many things from the content of syntactic rules: the meaning of the symbols (all of semantics and conceptual systems), the use of the symbols in context (all of pragmatics), communicative function (old and new information, topicality, etc.), degrees of conventionality (and hence, grammaticalization in process), anything from the sensory-motor system, cognitive mechanisms, memory, anything at the neural level, and so on. 5. Data restrictions: Any real linguistic phenomena having to do with the causal effect of any of the above on the distribution of surface forms cannot be characterized within a formal system proper, unless the information is somehow coded in appropriate symbolic terms. An example of such a coding was the coding of minuscule aspects of semantics and pragmatics in terms of logical forms introduced by myself and Jim McCawley back in Generative Semantics days and since adopted by Chomsky and others. 6. Disembodied theoretical constraints: Ideas like "generative power" only make sense within Chomsky's Metaphor. Thus, arguments like "such and such a form of rule is too powerful" only makes sense using Chomsky's Metaphor. I gave up on Chomsky's Metaphor back in the 60's, because I saw language as a product of embodied human minds, not disembodied formal systems in the mathematical sense. However, before then, I and many of my close friends learned a lot about language using that metaphor, as limiting and distorting as I now think it is. Smart people with good linguistic intuitions can do interesting research despite that metaphor.Why does Semantics Need Syntax?Linguistics 7430Spring 2004Questions1. What is syntax?2. What is a formal model of syntax? 3. Why should linguists pursue a formal model of syntax? 4. What does formal syntax enable us to explain?5. What kinds of categories can be used in formal syntax?6. What phenomena should a formal model represent?I. Syntax. A. Meaningful word order. Is it something more than that?B. Infinity. What is the difference between RECURSION and ITERATION?II. What is a formal model of syntax?A. Formal models are GENERATIVE. Prior to Chomsky (1957, 1962),linguists were primarily concerned with accounting for the data withina given corpus. Chomsky proposed that analysts must expand theenterprise beyond the corpus. - A generative grammar is one which defines the possible syntactic structures in a language. - Such a grammar seeks to describe competence and the creative capacity which is intrinsic to competence.- The difference between competence and performance.When you consider the greatest good, it’s better off to let them do stuff.One of the sleaziest thing I think I did...She became seriously ill as well as her assistant did too.She complains too much that I can’t ignore her.in a promptly manner- The generative grammar is a model of the competence of thenative speaker. - We are attempting to model what it is that people act like they know.B. A formal model is based on SYMBOLS and RULES OF COMBINATION. C. Formal models tend assume that LICENSING RELATIONSHIPS ARELOCAL.I was so upset that I really yelled at them. D. Formal models tend to focus on CONSTITUENTS and HIERARCHICALSTRUCTURE rather than DEPENDENCIES.The history of syntactic investigation is marked by a smallnumber of central discoveries which created the syntactician’sresearch agenda. One can divide these discoveries into twogroups: the discovery of hierarchical constituent structure, andthe discovery that elements may occupy more than one positionwithin this hierarchy, which the literature calls movement. —David Pesetsky, “OT and Syntax: Movement and Pronunciation inOptimality Theory”- ‘Discontinuous constituency’- English ‘particle movement’She ate up the pizzaShe ate the pizza up-