History of grammatical theory 1
• Greeks: Socrates (c. 469 BC–399 BC) Plato (427-348 BC) ónoma – rhēma Aristotle (384-322 BC) ónoma – rhēma – sýndesmoi Dionysius Thrax (100 BC) The Art of Grammar
• Develop a principled approach based on argument & evidence → Descriptively accurate account.
(Word classes distinguished by possible word forms/morphology.) Platon & Aristoteles
Dionysius Thrax
• Διονύσιος ὁ Θρᾷξ (170 BC-90 BC)
• Τέχνη Γραμματική (Tékhnē grammatiké) ‘The Art of Grammar’ about 100 BC Dionysius Thrax’s word classes
1. Noun boy, house, honesty 2. Pronoun you, your, yourself 3. Verb go, eat, think 4. Participle gone, eaten, going, eating 5. Article the 6. Adverb soon, here, suddenly 7. Preposition in, on, at, with, of 8. Conjunction and, but, because, when Romans 1: Varro
Marcus Terentius Varro (116 BC – 27 BC)
• De Lingua Latina (25 volumes; only volumes 5-10 survive)
• 1st known Roman writer on grammar
• Original thinking, not just copying Greek notions
• Greatly admired by contemporaries
• Not influential into Medieval times
Varro 1797
Romans 2: Priscian
Priscianus Caesariensis (~ 500 AD)
• Institutiones grammaticae (Books 1-16: sounds, word-formation and inflexions; Books 17-18 [30% of the work]: syntax)
• Complete text at http://kaali.linguist.jussieu.fr/CGL/text.jsp.
• Hugely influential: over 1,000 copies exist.
• Foundation for medieval understanding of language structure.
• Synthesizing earlier Roman and Greek models.
• Taking Greek grammar as utmost authority.
• Does not understand that inflectional categories have syntactic functions. History of grammatical theory 2
• Medieval Europe:
Latin/Greek seen as embodying “universal logic” → European languages described in terms of Greek/Latin categories.
• Modern Prescriptivists:
Bishop Robert Lowth 1710-1787
English must fit the categories of Latin → Invents Latin-based “rules” for English → Rails against offending grammar of others, e.g., Shakespeare, Milton, Swift et al.
Bishop Robert Lowth (1710-1787)
http://research.leiden.edu/news/bishop-lowth-was-not-a-fool.html Concepts of traditional grammar 1
• Parts of speech
Deference to Latin grammar → 8 word classes Defined by meaning, form, and use:
e.g., Nouns - names - case marking (English: common ↔ possessive) - number (singular vs. plural) - gender - used as subject, object, predicate nominal, or after preposition - nouns, pronouns & gerunds as “substantives”
Parts of speech in traditional grammar
1. Noun John, school, commerce, commercial 2. Verb go, hit, suffer, think, like, commercialize 3. Adjective big, blue, beautiful, friendly, commercial 4. Adverb hardly, soon, there, commercially 5. Preposition in, on, with, of, through, since, for 6. Conjunction and, or, when, although, since, for 7. Pronouns I, me, my, myself 8. Interjection oh, ah, well, like, you know
Intensifiers very, rather, quite Articles etc. the, a Auxiliaries can, could, must, should, be, have, do
Concepts of traditional grammar 2
• Sentence analysis
- Phrase: Words functioning as a group - Clause: Sentence incorporated into a bigger sentence - Sentences can be “simple”, “compound” or “complex” depending on their clausal composition. - Sentences can be classified by their purpose into “declaratives”, “interrogatives”, “imperatives”, and “exclamatory sentences”.
• “Correctness”: Standard lg (*It was me.) History of grammatical theory 3
Modern Linguistics:
• Scientific (systematic, data-driven analysis) • Origin: 19th c. Indo-European linguistics • Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913): Do the same for present-day languages (synchronic vs. diachronic) • “Schools” of linguistics: - European structuralism (Prague School) - American structuralism - Formal linguistics (Generative grammar) - Functional-typological approaches Great American Linguists
Edward Sapir (1884-1939) Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) Structuralism
• Dominant “school” of linguistics 1930s-1950s - Leonard Bloomfield. 1933. Language. - B.F. Skinner. 1957. Verbal Behavior.
• Wants to be scientific: - “Start with observables.” - Describe each language on its own terms (word classes!)
• Association with behaviorism: - Language as conditioned responses to outside stimuli and reinforcement - Extreme variationism / rejecting language universals Concepts of American Structuralism
• Phonetics → Phonemics → Morphology → Syntax • “Discovery procedures” for phonemes, morphemes, etc. • Word classes: - Defined by paradigms (test frames) - Must be identified for each language based on distribution of the words in that language - Rejection of traditional labels such as “noun” - Recognizing additional word classes (determiner)
• Immediate Constituent (IC) Analysis • “Syntax is what you hope the other guy is doing.” • Text: Harris, Zellig S. (1951). Methods in Structural Linguistics. Immediate Constituent (IC) Analysis The generative revolution
Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
• Studied under Zellig Harris (1909-1992) • Adapts Zellig’s idea of “transformations” • Process terminology instead of paradigms • Milestone publications:
1955 The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. (MA thesis) 1957 Syntactic Structures. Mouton. 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press. 1981 Lectures on Government and Binding. Foris. 1992 A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory. MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics 1. Noam Chomsky in pictures Syntactic Structures (1957)
1. “A formalized linguistic theory … can play an important role in the process of discovery itself.” 2. “Intuition-bound notions … fail” since they “can neither lead to absurd conclusions nor provide new and correct ones.” 3. IC-analysis → Phrase structure (PS) grammar 4. Tree diagrams for representing PS-structure 5. PS-structure is insufficient to account for systematic relations between sentences, such as active & passive. 6. Example (1), p. 15: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” [“grammatical” → independence of grammar from meaning] Syntactic Structures, part 2
• 1-6: conventional structuralism • The hidden revolution: Mentalism - Argues that speakers produce language using separate syntactic and semantic components inside the mind. - Presents TGG as a valid abstract description of this phenomenon. • Much more explicit in LSLT (1955) • → Psycholinguistic research - “Derivational theory of complexity” Tenets of Generative Grammar
• Rationalism (à la Descartes) vs. Bloomfield’s empiricism - Looking at language from inside (competence) - Creative use of language - Infinite set of sentences - Logical problem of language acquisition • Evaluating grammars - Observational adequacy - Descriptive adequacy - Explanatory adequacy Language Typology
► Like GG, a reaction to the restrictions of Am. Structuralism ► Joseph Greenberg (1915-2001) - Interested in the history & diversity of the world’s languages. - If we follow the Structuralist method, we’d end up with hundreds of grammars but little sense of what language(s) are like. - Genetic classification of African languages. - Introducing syntactic typology (1963) ► Typology: - Compare many languages! (“The more you look at, the more you know.”) - Look for correlations among structural characteristics. Typology: Precursors
► Johann Gottfried Herder (1772) - Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache [Treatise on the origin of language] ► Friedrich von Schlegel (1808) - Morphological typology (Affixal, inflectional & no structure lgs) ► Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836) - Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus [On the diversity of the structure of human languages] ► Georg von der Gabelentz (1901) - coined the term typology N. Chomsky vs. J. Greenberg
► Both white Jewish-American 20th century males ► Both dissatisfied with Bloomfield’s structuralism ► NC’s answer: - Study language as a property of the human mind - Start with one language (English) → Make big claims about UG - Later: compare a few languages → Make big claims about UG - Critique: If they only looked at the very next language, they’d know their claims are wrong. ► JG’s answer: - Look at many languages → Make big claims about universals of lg - Critique: Only superficial features/reliability of descriptions.