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ENG 406: NEW TRENDS IN SYNTAX - DRAFT LECTURE NOTES 1

DEFINING /SYNTAX The term syntax is derived from the late 16th century French “syntaxe”, or via late Latin from Greek “suntaxis”, from sun- ‘together’ + tassein ‘arrange’. The (from the Greek term grammatikē technē, which means "art of letters") is sometimes used for syntax in these senses:  the logical and structural rules that govern the composition of sentences, and in any given natural .  the study of rules that govern the composition of sentences, phrases and words in any given . Note that whereas the first definition sees grammar as the elements of language, the second considers grammar as a field of study that is not limited to rules of language but that includes and syntax. We can find other definitions like:  Syntax is the branch of that studies or explains the interrelationships or words in sentences of a given language.  A syntactic theory purports to describe or explain the rules governing the combination of words, phrases and to form sentences in a language  Syntax can refer to the theoretical descriptions of the elements involved in the composition of sentences and their permutations in the production of different sentences in a language. Note that in linguistics, there is a distinction between morphology (the rules for combining to form words) and syntax (the rules for combining words to form sentences). The two are not the same but are related because we use the products of morphology as building blocks in syntax. In addition, you have to understand that every language has its own grammar in the sense of sets of logical rules that govern the combination of words to create phrases, clause or sentences. In modern usage, the term syntax is used with the same meaning as grammar in both the senses of rules in a language and the study of those rules.

EVOLUTION OF THE STUDY OF GRAMMAR The study of the grammar of has ancient roots as it developed out of a long tradition of describing the structures of language which began in different regions of the world. We will only give brief accounts of some of these traditions here.

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Sanskrit Grammar Sanskrit is an Indo-European language, an ancient language of South Asia that is believed to be the ancestor of languages such as Hindi, , Gujarati, Sinhalese, Punjabi, Bangla (formerly called Bengali) and Romany. Though Sanskrit was the official language of ancient India, it eventually ceased to be a widely spoken language in India and only survived as the language of Hindu classical literary and religious texts and, nowadays, it is used only by a tiny minority for religious or scholarly purposes, by those learned their Sanskrit from , dictionaries and teachers akin to those who might learn Latin or Greek today. Sanskrit survives as the language of the Vedas and other Hindu scriptures, Hindu classical literature and a vast body of ancient Hindu scientific, philosophical and religious scholarship. Sanskrit’s cultural influence is much more prominent compared to its small number of modern speakers. It is noteworthy that developments in comparative and in the 19th century led to a passionate interest in Sanskrit. This fact can be attributed to the position of Sanskrit as the religious language of ancient northern India. Hindu religious scriptures were written in Sanskrit and likewise religious rituals were done in it. It thus attained the position of a sacred language. Of great interest to linguistic study is the fact that the Hindu religion paid great attention to retaining ritual purity such that to the Hindu, it was absolutely essential that Sanskrit language be pronounced and inflected correctly to the last detail. As such, inspiration for Sanskrit studies in ancient India originated from the desire to preserve religious ritual and the orally transmitted texts of the earlier Vedic period (1200–1000) from phonetic, grammatical and semantic erosion (Booij, 2005:220). Grammar In the case of Arabic, the description of Arabic by Sibawayhi (who died in late eighth century AD), remains unsurpassed for its completeness and scientific adequacy (Carter 2010). Arabic grammatical theory can be summarized as involving three descriptive/analytical categories: (1) systematic description/ (2) categorical (3) functional Systematic description/analysis focuses on correctness whereby each item in an utterance has a given ‘status’ (manzila) and a related ‘place’ (mawdu‘i). Using words in a given place appropriate to their status creates correct usages. Furthermore, the principle of ‘amal (effect) applies such that every element operates on the next element according to its status. This operation is syntagmatic and involves sequentially showing the effect of an ‘operator’ (‘a mil) on another element that is ‘operated on’ (ma‘mul fihi). Morphological categories are few, limited to three classes of words: , (ism), (fi’l) and Particle (harf). The functional categories reveal the ultimate preoccupation of Arabic linguistics with as behaviour. There are more than 70 terms for the various ways in which words can be used, ranging from the decisions of the speaker at the highest level.

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Chinese Grammar In the case of , it has been recorded that Xun Zi (said to have lived between the years 313 – 238 BCE) is regarded as China’s first major philosopher of language, contributed to this debate in a work titled Zheng Ming (Rectification of ), which addresses the origin of names (Hansen, 1983; Malmqvist, 1994). The Chinese grammatical on the idea of ‘rectification of names’ is said to have originated in the work Analects by the Chinese philosopher Confucius. The perspective of grammar taken there is functional – as the work says that use of words or language should reflect reality. From many studies of Asian linguistics, it has been agreed that in Japanese grammar, the focus is mainly on the analysis of words and the rules of their arrangement – that is, morphology and syntax. In Japanese grammar, such a study is done by examining the combinatorial features as well as the functions of two structures. These are:  various verbal and adjectival  postpositions or particles The Japanese grammarian, Fujitani Nariakira (1738 –1779), has been credited with developing the first comprehensive grammatical framework using the metaphor of clothing. He is said to have categorised as ‘names’, and as ‘clothes’, as ‘hairpins’ and postpositions and suffixes as ‘ cords’. His best known works are the Kazashishô [On hairpins] (1767) and the Ayuishô [On binding cords] (1773). (Furuta and Tsukishima, 1972) Other important milestones in the development of grammar include:  said to began around the first century BC with the Tolkāppiyam.  Grammar of Irish which originated in the seventh century with the Auraicept na n-Éces.  that emerged from the eight century with the work of Ibn Abi Ishaq and his students.

 Hebrew grammar which appeared in the Middle Ages in the context of exegesis of the Hebrew Bible. In the Western grammatical tradition, grammar was studied as a core of the trivium of the seven liberal arts throughout the Middle Ages. Towards the end of the 18th century, grammar came to be understood as a subfield of modern linguistics. Some of the grammars that emerged during that period include: a. The Serbian grammar by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić in 1814 b. The Deutsche Grammatik of the Brothers Grimm in 1818 c. The Comparative Grammar of in 1833

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THE EVOLUTION OF It began with the grammars written by scholars, though initially their concerns were more with philosophical speculations about the nature of language rather than with descriptions of language structure. At much the same time as Panini the Greeks embarked on the codification of their language in a long series of works culminating in the Techne grammatike of Dionysius Thrax (c. 100 BC). Thereafter emerged Roman grammars which are largely derived from the Grecian grammatical works. A prominent example is the work of Priscian in the sixth century which adapted Greek grammar to Latin. Priscian Grammar Priscian’s work is divided into eighteen books of which the first sixteen, called Priscianus major in medieval times, deal with morphology, and the last two, called Priscianus minor, deal with syntax. In Priscianus minor, Priscian defined eight parts of speech: 1. The noun is a that assigns to each of its subjects, bodies, or things a common or proper quality. 2. The verb is a part of speech with tenses and moods, but without case [the noun is inflected for case], that signifies acting or being acted upon . . . 3. The participles are not explicitly defined, but it is stated that they should come in third place rightfully, since they share case with the noun and and tense with the verbs. 4. The is a part of speech that can substitute for the proper of anyone and that indicates a definite person. 5. A preposition is an indeclinable part of speech that is put before others, either next to them or forming a composite with them. (This would include what we would distinguish as ‘prepositions’ and ‘prefixes.’) 6. The is an indeclinable part of speech whose meaning is added to the verb. 7. The interjection is not explicitly defined, but is distinguished from an adverb, with which the Greeks identified it, by reason of the syntactic independence it shows and because of its emotive meaning. 8. The is an indeclinable part of speech that links other parts of speech, in company with which it has significance, by clarifying their meaning or relations. Grammatical works of like the one by Priscian that formed the bedrock of what is termed traditional grammar. Medieval and Renaissance Grammars Priscian’s works influence grammarians of the medieval period. The best known of the medieval grammarians was Peter Helias (b. ca. 1100; d. after 1166), a twelfth century teacher at the University of Paris who taught in Paris for many years in the school of Thierry of Chartres. His work took account of changes which the Latin language had

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undergone since Priscian’s time, and also to take account of the new interest in Aristotelian of the period (Dinneen 1967: 128). Helias composed a commentary on Cicero's De inventione and a Summa super Priscianum, a widely used textbook on Priscian's Institutiones. His Summa super Priscianum, written about 1150 AD, updates the sixth-century grammar of Priscian in about the same length as the original (Reilly, 1993). In his commentary Helias adjusted Priscian’s distinction between substantival nouns and adjectival nouns, which became the now familiar distinction between nouns and adjectives (Dinneen 1967: 132). The Summa super Priscianum treats the grammatical elements against a background of Stoic theory. For example, the Stoics consider all words as ambiguous by nature. They describe language on the basis of an initial impression, phantasia, which is to be made determinate only in a confirmative impression, phantasia kataleptike. Thus, to Peter Helias, a noun is all-embracing (complexivum) for each and all of its applications but that its particular meaning can only be more defined in a wider context. He treats the noun as a kind of grammatical universal that includes and embraces its instances. This position diverges from the view of those logicians who insisted that the universal excludes its instances. Traditional Grammar - Influences These early grammars also form the basis for many grammars in use in schools in both native and foreign language teaching. For example, the Greeks contribution to development of modern grammar include  the notion of parts of speech  most of the grammatical concepts we are familiar with today, such as gender, , voice, case, number, tense and mood Despite this, you need to note that many of the rules of prescriptive grammars derived from Latin are unsuitable to the description of the of English and many other languages (Palmer, 1971). In relation to this, there have been criticisms of traditional based on the observation that it was in fact an insufficient and often incorrect description even of Latin, largely because Priscian underemphasizes formal features while overemphasizing meaning in the process of classification. The Romans translated the Greek names for the parts of speech and grammatical endings into Latin; many of these terms (nominative, accusative, dative) are still found in modern grammars. Attempts to determine how languages are related dominated approaches to linguistic science in the 19th century. You should understand that Latin was a very important language in the medieval period in Europe because it was the language of diplomacy, scholarship and religion (Lyons 1968: 14), Consequently, became a fundamental element of all the educational systems of European nations then. It was from Latin grammar that most later grammars of the different vernacular languages in Europe emerged and they were clearly modelled on Latin grammars.

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The earliest non-Latin grammars a seventh-century grammar of Irish, a twelfth-century grammar of Icelandic and a thirteenth-century grammar of Provençal (Lyons 1968: 17). One of the Grammaire générale et raisonnée published in 1660 by the scholars of Port Royal - described as one of the most famous Renaissance grammars (Lyons 1968: 17). Eighteenth Century English Grammars With regards to the , a number of grammars were written based on Latin grammar. Two of the well-known ones are:  Bishop Robert Lowth’s A Short Introduction to (1762)  Lindlay Murray’s English Grammar (1795)

TRANSFORMATIONAL TO UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR

TRANSFORMATIONAL GENERATIVE GRAMMAR Transformational Generative Grammar - TGG is sometimes either called or Generative Grammar. It was propounded by the American linguist in the 1950s and 60s. At that time, he developed the idea that each in a language has two levels of representation - a deep structure (DS) and a surface structure (SS). Deep structure is seen as a direct representation of the basic semantic relations underlying a sentence. Surface structure follows the phonological form of the sentence very closely) via transformations. Important Features of TGG From the Deep Structure and Surface Structure there emerged a syntactic rule based on a set of syntactic element. These are the following: A BASE – This is the root of all syntactic constructions and consists of two components: a. A SET OF CATEGORIES – which simply means grammatical elements like Subject (S), Noun (NP), Adverb (Adv), (Adj), Preposition (Prep). This aspect of the grammar is called context-free grammar because it is just made up of the various word classes or parts of speech. b. LEXICAL COMPONENT - This is the aspect of the grammar which consists of lexical entries with each having a system of features such as animate, inanimate, abstract, concrete among others. There are three components of grammar in TGG:

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1. A TRANSFORMATIONAL COMPONENT – which consists of rules for changing one structure into another. 2. A SEMANTIC COMPONENT – which gives meaning to deep structures as well as the surface structure. 3. A PHONOLOGICAL COMPONENT - consisting of phonological rules that assign a phonetic representation to a surface structure. Chomsky explains that when the components interact, four things happen sequentially: 1. Context free grammar generates phrase markers. An example of phrase marker is as in Figure 1:

Fig. 1: An Example of a Core Phrase Marker The above phrase marker can be presented in the form of a tree diagram as in Figure 2 below:

Fig. 2: A Diagrammatic Representation of a Phrase Marker 2. Lexical items are inserted to replace the features such as S, NP, V... For example:

Fig. 3: Examples of Lexical Insertions These lexical insertions simply mean replacing the elements of the phrase marker – the context free grammar – with actual words from the language. Note that lexical insertion is not an arbitrary procedure but involves matching nouns to verbs logically. For example, one has to select an animate noun (N) for animate verbs (V) like eat, kill, take and write.

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Fig. 4: Examples of Lexical Insertions in a Tree Diagram 3. The semantic component interprets the deep structure – that is, it gives meaning to the deep structure. 4. The transformational component converts the deep structure to a surface structure. Chomsky proposed the notion that there might be considerable similarities between the deep structures of different languages and he believes that studying these structures would reveal properties common to all languages which were concealed by their surface structures. The basic idea of deep structure and surface structure by Chomsky has placed linguistics at the core of studies of the by claiming that linguistic theory must account for universal similarities between all languages and for the fact that children are able to learn language fluently at an early age in spite of insufficient data that has systematic logic. His other important is that a serious theory of mental processes should replace empiricism, the belief that experience is the source of knowledge, which used to be the dominant model in American science in the first half of the 20th Century (Daniel, 2007).

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