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Where Is English? CAS LX 522 • When We Speak of “English,” What Are We Syntax I Referring To? Every Native Speaker Has a Complete Week 1B

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Where Is English? CAS LX 522 • When We Speak of “English,” What Are We Syntax I Referring To? Every Native Speaker Has a Complete Week 1B Where is English? CAS LX 522 • When we speak of “English,” what are we Syntax I referring to? Every native speaker has a complete Week 1b. • Morphosyntactic features knowledge system of their language. (2.1-2.4.1) • As far as the grammar is concerned, it’s all part of a native speaker’s cognitive makeup. (Vocabulary is a different thing...) In search of the I-language, E-language atoms of the system The notion of “English” is really an external notion. • Syntax is—at least in large part—the study It’s kind of an “average” of the properties of the • of the principles of sentence formation. (nearly identical) knowledge systems that the individual speakers in the community have. • There are principles that govern which combinations of words are sentences of What we’re interested in here, in a sense, are the • English. What is the “vocabulary” of these properties of a single speaker’s knowledge of principles? What are they stated in terms language. We might call it “English” if that speaker is of? part of the “English” speech community. But it’s really an individual’s knowledge. It’s just that the • “Words” might be a good starting point. community by and large has the same knowledge. The atoms of the Properties... features... system • However, it seems that it isn’t exactly the words—it is the properties each word has • Words have properties. Like being a verb, or that seems to be basic. Verb or not a verb, being plural. plural or not plural... • “Plural” is an abstract concept—there is no 1) Three dogs are here. One dog is here. direct map to morphology (deer, geese, mice, feet, dogs, children, data), but they all 2) Three geese are here. One goose is here. make the same demands of the verb. 3) Three deer are here. One deer is here. Properties... features... Agreement • Same “agreement” requirement, regardless • In English, the subject and the verb of a of the actual morphological shape. sentence need to agree in number and (for be) person. • The abstract property of “plural” (or “singular”) seems to be what the grammar 1) The dog wants food. The dogs want food. is sensitive to. That’s smaller than a word. 2) The dog is hungry. The dogs are hungry. • (Morphosyntactic) features 3) I am hungry. We are hungry. Agreement & Data from other interpretability languages • If the subject is plural (has a plural feature) then the verb must take on a “plural” form. 1) Il a dit qu’elle était malade he have said that she was ill It is crosslinguistically common to have this kind of [3.sg] [3.sg] • ‘He said that she was ill.’ agreement relation between subject and verb. 2) Ils ont dit qu’elle était malade Intuitively, the plural feature is interpretable on the • they have said that she was ill subject, contributes to the meaning, “belongs there” [3.pl] [3.pl] ‘They said that she was ill.’ in some sense. On the verb, the (agreeing) plural feature is just a “reflection”, uninterpretable—much • Why does it matter what other languages do? more on that later. What are the What are the features? features? • Some features—that is, some properties—seem • No language says that subject and verb must agree in to matter for the purposes of syntax, some the feature [invented in early September], although don’t. So, the identity of the features need to be there are things that have this property. part of our theory—features are just • For the purpose of describing the grammar and “properties”—but, the features that syntax explaining the syntactic principles, we don’t care relies on are the relevant properties. about [invented in early September]. • We’re looking for the minimal (least • We have evidence, though, that [plural] matters to complicated) set of features that suffices to syntax (at least in some way...) explain the grammar. [plural] Science • That thing we just did? It was science. • We know number matters. In English, things can be singular or plural. So, a first guess is • We had some observations, the existence of that nouns have either a [singular] feature singular and plural forms—and they matter for or a [plural] feature. the grammar. • Hypothesis: • We formulated a hypothesis. [sg] and [pl] are features a word can have. • We identified other facts that we expect to hold • Prediction: —the predictions—if the hypothesis is correct. Four classes of words: [sg], [pl], [sg,pl], [] • Now, we’ll go back to the data to see if the predictions are borne out. Overgeneration [plural] However—it turns out that the prediction is • So, we have a new set of observations, now not met in the data. • including the fact that there are just two • The prediction is that there are four number classes. classes of nouns, but English has only two. • And there’s a simpler story we can tell, one • This hypothesis overgenerates—it predicts the that predicts exactly two classes. existence of the actual distinctions, but it also [plural] for plurals, [] for singulars. predicts other distinctions that don’t exist. • Undergeneration Privative features • There are (at least) two ways we can • An analysis that says “All words are characterize features. singular” undergenerates. • Above, we did it one way—the feature [pl] • All predicted combinations are attested. is there on plurals, and not there on • Some attested combinations are not singulars. This kind of feature—which is predicted. either there or not there—is a privative feature. Which is the right way Binary features to think of features? • We could also view a feature as having • We don’t know from the outset which view values. is the best for describing syntax, we want to choose the one that best captures the • A binary valued feature could have either of generalizations we see. two values. Usually “+” and “–”. • The two views are not indistinguishable. • On this view, plurals have [+plural], and They do make different predictions. singulars have [–plural]. Specifically, about what syntax can “see.” The Hopi dual Hopi morphology 1) Pam taaqa wari In Hopi, the dual is expressed by combining that man ran[sg] • singular and plural. ‘That man ran.’ Unlike what we observed about English— 2) Puma ta!taqt yu!tu • for Hopi, we have kind of an explanation of those man[pl] ran[pl] this if we analyze dual as [+pl, +sg] (or as ‘Those men ran.’ [pl, sg]). 3) Puma taaqat wari So, we seem to need to specify [±sg] for those man[pl] ran[sg] • Hopi, but not for English. ‘Those two men ran.’ Overgeneration? The fourth number? • The Hopi dual can be nicely described as • There doesn’t, however, seem to be a being [+plural, +singular]. fourth number—across languages. There’s really just the three kinds: singular, plural, • So for Hopi we need both [±plural] and and dual. [±singular] (or the privative analog). • Adger tells a story at this point: There is an • Which should predict the existence of a additional constraint that every noun needs fourth number: singular, plural, dual, and to have some number feature. I want to neither singular nor plural. come back to this in a little while. General structure of The lexicon the account • Knowing a language is: • To construct a sentence, we start with the i) knowing the “words” “words” and put them together. ii) knowing how to put them together • We can describe the knowledge of the iii)knowing how to pronounce them words of a language as being a list, a mental lexicon. iv)knowing what they mean in combination Interfaces Interfaces “words” We can view a “word” Lexicon • The assembly process is the grammar proper. as a bundle of features, • The system that interprets sentences is another as defined by its assembly cognitive module (“conceptual-intensional system”) properties. The interfaces concerned with meaning, reasoning, etc. It interprets grammar assembles Grammar the constructed sentence at the interface. words into sentences. The sentences are • The system that determines the pronunciation of interpreted and sentences is yet another cognitive module pronounced. A-P system C-I system (“articulatory-perceptual system”), interpreting the constructed sentence at its interface. sound meaning Points of tension Tension • We need a hypothesis about what is different in languages with no dual (e.g., English). • For English, it seems that independent [sg] and [pl] features is more complicated than • Adger’s suggestion: All languages have singulars, we need—it seems to overgenerate. but in languages without duals, singular is the default, the “number for nouns not specified for In the broader picture, Language needs to • number.” The feature [sg] is not recorded in the allow for independent [sg] and [pl] features English lexicon: book [], books [pl]. in order to accommodate duals in, e.g., Hopi. • So languages can differ in whether they record [sg] in the lexicon. What are the Category features? • Syntax is concerned with distribution. • Hard to say. A universal set, some used in • Words seem to come in distributional classes. some languages, but not others? Learned? • One class of words can appear after the possessive • Some features seem not to exist, why? pronoun my (my book, *my at, *my quickly, *my explode, *my purple). The nouns. • Okham’s razor: keep theories as simple as possible. Here, we want to define the • One class of words is compatible with past tense. simplest set of features we can get away The verbs. with and still explain the data. • One class of words is compatible with comparative (happier). The adjectives. Category Distribution examples • They have no noun. • Words can be separated into classes: noun, • They can verb.
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