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21505 results in English language and linguistics: general interest

Page 293 of 1076

  • Foreword

  • Olaf Koeneman, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Hedde Zeijlstra, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
  • Book:
    Introducing Syntax
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    13 April 2017, pp xi-xi

  • Summary

    This book is based on the syntactic approach known as minimalism and follows the generative paradigm as devised by Noam Chomsky. The literature on minimalist syntax is enormous and it is impossible to present a complete overview of all the relevant literature. In the main text we have spelled out what the major sources are for each chapter, as well as options for further reading. Please realise, though, that often we have simplified particular analyses for didactic or presentational purposes or represented them from another angle. Also realise that many of the references may not be easy to read (Chomsky's writings in particular can sometimes be very hard). For more accessible texts, we refer you to certain syntactic handbooks (e.g. Den Dikken 2013, Everaert et al. 2013 and Alexiadou & Kiss 2015) or the introductory works of our fellow syntax textbook writers, most notably Adger (2003), Haegeman (2006), Radford (2009), Tallerman (2011) and Carnie (2013).

  • 2 - Merge

  • Olaf Koeneman, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Hedde Zeijlstra, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
  • Book:
    Introducing Syntax
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    13 April 2017, pp 30-53

  • Summary

    CHAPTER OUTLINE

    We have seen that words in a language are not an arbitrary set of items, but that every word belongs to a particular syntactic category, such as ‘noun’, ‘verb’, or ‘complementiser’. In this chapter, we are going to look at combinations of categories, for instance the combination of an adjective and a noun. We can make a very simple observation here about such a combination: an adjective and a noun together behave just like a noun without an adjective. In other words, the noun is more important than the adjective. Although this observation is simple, the consequences will turn out to be enormous: the most important is that phrases and sentences should be analysed as structures or, to be even more precise, hierarchies. This insight is perhaps the most fundamental in syntactic theory. This chapter will develop this idea and present the most important predictions that it makes. These predictions turn out to be correct and therefore provide strong evidence in favour of this idea.

    Insight: Constituents Are Headed

    As established before, nouns can be preceded by one or more adjectives. We can, for instance, say sausages and delicious sausages. In the latter case we have combined one unit, delicious, with another unit, sausages, thereby creating a third, bigger, unit: delicious sausages. The word linguists use for such units is constituent, so we will use this term from now on.

    What can we say about the behaviour of the constituent containing a noun and an adjective? Would it behave like a noun, like an adjective, or like something different? In order to investigate this, let's take the constituent delicious sausages and see what grammatical properties it has. In other words, let's see in what kind of syntactic environments this constituent of two words can stand.

    First, delicious sausages can be combined with another adjective, like expensive, giving us expensive delicious sausages. Second, we can put the article the in front of it: the delicious sausages. Third, we can change delicious sausages (which is plural) into a singular expression: delicious sausage. Fourth, we can have it followed by some prepositional expression, such as from Italy, as in delicious sausages from Italy.

Introducing Syntax
  • Olaf Koeneman, Hedde Zeijlstra
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    13 April 2017
  • Syntax is the system of rules that we subconsciously follow when we build sentences. Whereas the grammar of English (or other languages) might look like a rather chaotic set of arbitrary patterns, linguistic science has revealed that these patterns can actually be understood as the result of a small number of grammatical principles. This lively introductory textbook is designed for undergraduate students in linguistics, English and modern languages with relatively little background in the subject, offering the necessary tools for the analysis of phrases and sentences while at the same time introducing state-of-the-art syntactic theory in an accessible and engaging way. Guiding students through a variety of intriguing puzzles, striking facts and novel ideas, Introducing Syntax presents contemporary insights into syntactic theory in one clear and coherent narrative, avoiding unnecessary detail and enabling readers to understand the rationale behind technicalities. Aids to learning include highlighted key terms, suggestions for further reading and numerous exercises, placing syntax in a broader grammatical perspective.

  • About this Book

  • Olaf Koeneman, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Hedde Zeijlstra, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
  • Book:
    Introducing Syntax
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    13 April 2017, pp vii-x

  • Summary

    Introducing Syntax

    Whereas the grammar of English (or other languages) might look like a rather chaotic set of different patterns, syntactic theory has revealed that these patterns can actually be understood as the result of a small number of grammatical operations. Unravelling these is the science of syntax. This textbook describes state-of-the-art syntactic theory by addressing how and why certain combinations of words are ‘proper’ English sentences whereas other combinations are not. What is the mechanism behind that? What grammatical rules does English have and why? How is grammar related to meaning and to how sentences are expressed?

    In this book we guide students through a variety of intriguing puzzles, striking facts and novel ideas, and let them discover the beauty of syntactic theory in both a bottom-up (data-driven) and a top-down (theory-driven) fashion. This book is primarily intended for students for whom this is a first (and hopefully not last) encounter with syntax and/or linguistic theory. We will primarily focus on the important insights that have been achieved in contemporary syntax. Introducing Syntax will offer students all the necessary tools to do this, without going into unnecessary technical detail.

    Introducing Syntax is not the only available textbook on this topic. Why, then, the need for a new one? Introductory courses to (English) syntactic theory generally face three key challenges:

  • • First, syntax (and especially its level of formalisation and abstraction) can quite often be a surprise for students, especially those enrolled in an (English) language and literature/culture programme. The challenge is to make this formal theory accessible and interesting without oversimplifying.

  • • Second, since syntactic theory is formal, students have to learn a number of technical notions. A potential danger is that they learn the technicalities without understanding the insights behind them.

  • • Third, (English) syntactic theory deals with a number of phenomena that have shaped it. Many of these phenomena are part of the canon, and students have to know about them. However, they could be perceived as an arbitrary set of topics. It is a challenge to introduce all of these topics without losing the overall narrative that connects them in a coherent way.

  • 10 - Syntax and Semantics

  • Olaf Koeneman, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Hedde Zeijlstra, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
  • Book:
    Introducing Syntax
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    13 April 2017, pp 244-267

  • Summary

    CHAPTER OUTLINE

    In the previous chapters, we focused on the relation between syntax and the way syntactic structures are expressed: how do concrete morpho-phonological forms get inserted into the syntactic representation, and how do these forms get linearised in the order we hear them in? But sentences are not only expressed; they also have a meaning. Semantics is the grammatical component that assigns an interpretation (i.e. a meaning) to a sentence. How does it do that? Crucially, like morphology and phonology, semantics is also based on the output of the syntax: the way words and morphemes with their interpretable features are merged determines the meaning of a sentence. This sounds like a pretty straightforward procedure, but we will see that the relation between syntax and semantics is not always transparent, as was also the case for syntax and morphology. In order to get to the right interpretations of sentences we sometimes need more syntax than syntax seems to give us.

    Insight: Compositionality

    How does a sentence get the meaning it has? This is a question that has interested philosophers and linguists for centuries. And even though there are many complex issues at stake, at least on two points consensus has arisen. These two points may sound obvious at first sight, but appear to be very powerful in explaining all kinds of semantic effects.

    The first point is that the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of the words or morphemes it consists of. If you have the sentence John love-d Mary, the meaning of the entire sentence follows from the meaning of components like John, love, -d and Mary. This sentence cannot all of a sudden mean that some guy hated Bill. No meaningful elements are removed or added when we interpret this sentence. In that sense, sentence meaning is like a linguistic fruit salad. If you mix bananas, strawberries and apples, the salad is not going to taste like oranges. Now, you may wonder, though, what exactly we mean when we say that semantics is interested in the meaning of words and morphemes. Wasn't it the case that words are sometimes formed after the syntax, for instance by morphologically merging the features in Fin with V+v?

  • 8 - Syntax and Morphology

  • Olaf Koeneman, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Hedde Zeijlstra, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
  • Book:
    Introducing Syntax
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    13 April 2017, pp 194-219

  • Summary

    CHAPTER OUTLINE

    In this chapter, we will look at the interaction between syntax and morphology. You may wonder why this is of interest, because this is not immediately obvious. Syntax gives us a syntactic tree with words dangling from it. These have to be expressed in a particular order, but that is the job for phonology (to be explored in chapter 9), not morphology. So is there anything intriguing about the relationship between the tree and the dangling words that requires our attention? Morphology would be of little interest to a syntactician if the rules of morphology (the science of word structure) operated fully independently from the rules of syntax (the science of sentence structure). One could say that morphology produces words, syntax subsequently uses these words, and that is all there is to it. Reality, however, turns out to be much more complex. Instead of saying that morphology provides the elements that syntax uses, some observations force us to say the exact opposite: syntax provides the input that morphology uses to create words. This in turn suggests that morphology is not a mere delivery service for syntax but that it becomes active after the syntactic representation has been built. Since the relationship between syntax and morphology is more complex than initially envisaged, it makes sense to study the processes that take place at the interface between these two components of grammar. This is exactly what this chapter will do.

    Insight: Morphology and Syntax are Different Grammatical Modules

    The relationship between syntax and morphology is not always transparent; this justifies its study. This may sound like a completely new concept, but in fact you have already seen concrete cases of mismatches between syntax and morphology. Let us look at three of these.

    The first involves the syntactic location of the tense and agreement properties that are part and parcel of finite clauses. Remember that we had reasons to think that these properties reside in a syntactic position that we called Fin, the head of the FinP.

Page 293 of 1076