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21505 results in English language and linguistics: general interest

Page 302 of 1076

  • 2 - Syntactic Rules and Lexical Valence

  • Robert D. Levine, Ohio State University
  • Book:
    Syntactic Analysis
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    06 February 2017, pp 37-101

  • Summary

    The Setting

    In the previous chapter, we reviewed some of the evidence for a specific kind of structural relationship as the basis for the form of English sentences. The fact that neither meaning nor simple linear order can account for certain well-attested syntactic patterns led us to consider a more abstract relationship – structural constituency – as a possible source for these patterns. Displacement and replacement emerged as ‘gold standard’ probes for what turns out to be a hierarchical structure, in which words combine into syntactic units and such units in turn combine into still larger units, corresponding ultimately to the whole sentence. Phrase structure trees were introduced as a convenient graphic representation of this hierarchical mode of organization, and a systematic and workmanlike procedure was demonstrated to guide the reader in constructing arguments for structural analyses of any given sentence.

    Having argued for the existence of phrase structure, we now turn to the question of its origins. What determines the class of trees that correspond in English (or in any other human language) to exactly the set of sentences constituting that language? One often sees arguments to the effect that the familiar fact of speakers being able to distinguish sentences of their languages, regardless of length, from nonsentences using the same set of vocabulary, means that whatever it is that corresponds to that knowledge must be finite (since it models a cognitive ability which is itself necessarily finite) but with no specified upper limit on the number of separate structures, and therefore word strings, that it can define as well-formed. Putting it quite roughly, our knowledge of language points to some kind of formal system with a finite set of components but no inherent limit on the size of its output. But this line of reasoning asserts an identity between a theory of the sentences of a language and our knowledge of those sentences, which is quite problematic (after all, a theory of the integers is going to look quite different from a psychologically plausible theory of our ability to count and carry out arithmetic operations).

  • 1 - Syntactic Data, Patterns, and Structure

  • Robert D. Levine, Ohio State University
  • Book:
    Syntactic Analysis
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    06 February 2017, pp 1-36

  • Summary

    Introduction: The Problem, and a Possible Solution

    Natural Language Data

    Linguists appear to be in an enviable position among scientific disciplines. The lifeblood of science is data, and unlike, say, glaciologists, who can only collect primary material for their research in remote and generally rather inhospitable parts of the planet, or particle physicists, who require access to massive, extremely expensive, and sometimes erratic machines – with demand for access to such machines far exceeding supply – linguists are literally surrounded by the kind of data that make up the target of their investigations. It's true that field linguists need informants at a considerable distance from where they themselves live, and experimental linguists often need laboratories with elaborate and sophisticated equipment. But for syntacticians – linguists who investigate the structure of sentences, a large fraction of whom (possibly a majority) study sentences in their own respective languages – matters are as convenient as they could possibly be. Syntacticians have intuitive access to all of the sentences made available by their own knowledge of their language, as well as the speech (and reactions) of their fellows in constant use around them, and ready-made corpora in the form of written materials and electronic records, many of which are available for searches based on word sequences (Google, for example, is a valuable source of data for both syntacticians and morphologists). Learning how to take advantage of this vast pool of readily available data is a major component of syntacticians’ training.

    In a sense, of course, the true data of syntax are not strings of words themselves, but judgments about the status of those strings of words. The syntactician's primary responsibility is to give an account of how it is that certain strings of words have the status of sentences, while other do not, and still others have a kind of shadowy intermediate status – not bad enough to be outright rubbish, but not good enough to pass completely unnoticed in conversation as utterly and tediously normal. For example, consider the status of the three word strings in (1):

  • (1) a. I asked Robin to leave the room.

  • b. I requested Robin to leave the room.

  • c. I inquired (of) Robin to leave the room.

  • Suggestions for Further Reading

  • Robert D. Levine, Ohio State University
  • Book:
    Syntactic Analysis
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    06 February 2017, pp 324-328

  • Summary

    There is a vast literature on all of the topics discussed in the past seven chapters, much of it demanding a deeper technical background than I'm assuming for people using this textbook. The following sources should, however, be largely accessible to readers who've worked their way through all of the preceding material. The bibliographies of these sources will then offer further routes to still more advanced material. Full bibliographic details on all of these suggested readings are included in the list of references at the end of this volume.

    Chapter 1

    The material covered in the first chapter, which is intended to assist the reader in developing a sense of the critical patterns in data from the point of view of syntacticians, is more or less standard in syntax textbooks; a particularly nice example is Robert Borsley's Syntactic Theory (1993). But probably the most comprehensive explanation of what syntacticians are really after, and how they structure their inquiries to lead to the kind of elegant, far-reaching generalizations that constitute the Holy Grail of linguistics, is to be found in Andrew Radford's Transformational Grammar: A First Course (1988).

    Chapter 2

    The primary technical tools in this chapter are the decomposition of category labels into highly structured complex symbols utilizing feature names and values supplied for those names, and statements of constraints, using the format of context-free phrase structure rules, on the form of possible two-generation trees in terms of feature identities which must be satisfied in order for a given tree to be legal.

    The treatment of categories as complex symbols was first introduced into theoretical discourse very early in an important but generally neglected paper by Gilbert Harman (1963), which provoked a rather hostile response by Chomsky (1964), who subsequently reintroduced the use of features without reference to Harman's prior work, first at the level of lexical categories (1965) and subsequently at the phrasal level (Chomsky 1970: 207–208), where the resistance to such treatment is attributed to the American structuralists of the 1940s and 1950s – despite the fact that the decomposition of phrasal categories into a category type and level of phrasal complexity, which anticipated Chomsky's own use of complex symbols in his 1970 paper, was first proposed by just such an American structuralist, Zelig Harris, in work published in the 1940s and early 1950s.

  • Preface

  • Robert D. Levine, Ohio State University
  • Book:
    Syntactic Analysis
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    06 February 2017, pp xi-xvi

  • Summary

    There is a long tradition in syntax textbooks whereby the early sections (or chapters) present a particular ‘take’ on the key properties of human language (e.g., its unboundedness, the fact that speakers can pass intuitive and more or less definitive judgments on the well-formedness as stand-alone sentences of arbitrary strings of words, and so on), followed by an overview of fundamental data structure that are said to best capture these properties, followed by a series of chapters applying those data structures to a range of natural language data. Along the way, technical refinements are introduced, attempts are made to formalize the often informal statements of descriptive machinery given at the outset to jump-start the discussion, and the discussion increasingly becomes focused on the content of the theoretical framework, with natural language data used as points of departure for exploring that content. Every such framework seems to have its own ‘set piece’ examples which demonstrate its explanatory reach, its ability to capture apparently profound generalizations with a minimal number of additional assumptions. The virtues of this narrative organization are obvious: the point of any science is to capture the behavior of its objects of interest as parsimoniously as possible, which in turn requires an analytic toolkit to capture the generalizations that represent that science's discoveries about its domain of inquiry. In order to say anything useful about that domain, students must first acquire a basic working familiarity with those conceptual tools by applying them to simpler phenomena (typically using optimally simple or idealized data sets) and progressively refine and expand their mastery of the framework by tackling increasingly challenging or even open-ended problems. So far, so good.

    But this kind of storyline faces a certain kind of risk: the text becomes in effect a kind of recipe book of stock analyses, with large chunks of the thinking that went into these analyses presented as faits accomplis, which students are expected to internalize and extend to new data. The result is a heavily ‘top-down’ presentation of syntax, making it a matter of mastering a typically complex set of technical tools, specialized notations, and axioms.

  • 7 - Epilogue: Unbounded Dependencies and the Limits of Syntax

  • Robert D. Levine, Ohio State University
  • Book:
    Syntactic Analysis
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    06 February 2017, pp 279-323

  • Summary

    The topicalization construction discussed in some detail in the previous chapter is only one of a wide variety of unbounded dependency phenomena in which a filler must be linked to a gap site. One can cluster these phenomena into two major groups, on grounds we discuss below, with a third group falling somewhere between the two, showing certain properties of both. For several decades all of these constructions linking fillers to gap site have been regarded as embodiments of a single connectivity mechanism – a view allowing a considerable simplification in syntacticians’ picture of the licensing conditions on natural language grammars. But what is the basis for this assumption?

    The very earliest form taken by the argument for a unitary filler/gap mechanism shared by all unbounded dependencies was based on a particular set of constraints, or restrictions, to which all constructions embodying that mechanism were sensitive. In a very influential paper, Chomsky (1977) argued along these lines for an approach in which a single movement operation underlay all types of extraction phenomena. In the previous chapter, we've seen some instances of these constructions and noted that in certain languages they all display the same grammatical behavior in marking the intermediate substructures between fillers and gap sites in some special manner. We now look more systematically at the form of these various constructions, prior to a survey of the supposed syntactic constraints that they were thought to obey. The theoretical development of this set of constraints, and the attempt to derive them as effects from ever more abstract and general principles, is arguably the driving force behind most of the developments in syntactic theory from the mid-1970s on. We conclude with a review of the empirical status of the constraints themselves, and consequences of more recent research in this domain for syntax as a field of inquiry and as a component of the grammars of human languages.

    Extraction Constructions in English

    Fillers in Topic Position

    The constructions we consider in this section are similar to topicalization in a crucial respect: they display a constituent at the left edge of the clause which is linked to an arbitrarily distant gap site.

  • 4 - Local Dependencies and Lexical Rules

  • Robert D. Levine, Ohio State University
  • Book:
    Syntactic Analysis
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    06 February 2017, pp 143-193

  • Summary

    The auxiliary dependency analyzed in the preceding chapter takes the form of a complex network of distributional facts emerging as the consequence of a simple set of purely lexical properties. Both (i) the relative order of auxiliaries and so-called ‘main verbs’ (a notable misnomer, in our terms, since ‘main verbs’ in sentences with auxiliaries are actually deeply buried), and (ii) the morphology of clauses containing auxiliaries are due to the selectional properties of individual words, and the characteristic existence of gaps in the lexicon, along with a requirement that the top hierarchical level of English sentences be finite. Given these properties of individual words, the independently motivated featurematching requirements of the grammar, as laid out in the preceding chapters, automatically yield the correct morphosyntactic dependencies with no more effort than is required to specify that talk requires a PP complement and discuss an NP. This demonstration offers strong support for the general approach taken so far, but it would be reassuring to find that there are other, unrelated phenomena which can be satisfactorily described using the same machinery. In this chapter, we briefly survey several grammatical patterns in English and a range of other languages which can be captured rather simply using the same technology already implemented in the auxiliary analysis presented in the preceding chapter.

    Case and Agreement

    Case

    The first of these patterns, referred to as case, identifies a generally systematic marking of the dependents of a head which often correlates with what would be called grammatical relations (subject/object/indirect object/adjunct), but which typically have additional semantic content; thus we talk about ‘dative’ case, associated with a beneficiary role, corresponding to Robin in I gave Robin a book (although this case is not realized in the form of English words) in which the transfer of some benefit to the individual marked with dative morphology is conveyed (though dative case may show up in nonbenefactive contexts as well, as we'll see below), or the possessive, as in Where is my book?, where possession is conveyed by my. In some languages, such as English, case is vestigial; although its distant ancestor Anglo-Saxon had a rich case system, reflecting the grammar of its own pan-Germanic ancestor and, ultimately, the ancestral Indo-European proto-language, English has lost almost all vestiges of this system.

Syntactic Analysis
  • An HPSG-based Approach
  • Robert D. Levine
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    06 February 2017
  • In syntactic analysis, as in linguistics generally, the skills required to first identify, and then make sense of, complex patterns in linguistic data involve a certain specific kind of reasoning, where various alternatives are entertained and modified in light of progressively broader empirical coverage. Rather than focus on transmitting the details of complex theoretical superstructures, this textbook takes a practical, analytical approach, starting from a small set of powerful analytic tools, applied first to simple phenomena and then to the passive, complement and raising/control constructions. The analytic tools are then applied to unbounded dependencies, via detailed argumentation. What emerges is that syntactic structure, and intricate networks of dependencies linking different parts of those structures, are straightforward projections of lexical valence, in tandem with very general rules regulating the sharing of feature values. Featuring integrated exercises and problems throughout each chapter, this book equips students with the analytical tools for recognizing and assessing linguistic patterns.

  • 3 - The Auxiliary Dependency

  • Robert D. Levine, Ohio State University
  • Book:
    Syntactic Analysis
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    06 February 2017, pp 102-142

  • Summary

    A little history, to begin with: the phenomena that come under the heading ‘English auxiliaries’ were instrumental in bringing about the contemporary era in syntax, and, beyond syntax, in linguistics as a field. In Chomsky's watershed 1957 monograph Syntactic Structures, these phenomena were perhaps the key setpiece for the pivotal argument in the book that context-free phrase structure rules, of the sort that we first formulated to capture basic phrasal constituency in English, get crucial facts about the language wrong. Chomsky's point was not that such rules cannot summarize our observations about what we find in English, but rather that, implicitly, they deny the existence of a certain kind of pattern that can in fact be shown to exist, and therefore are wrong, not about the data, but about recurrent patterns in the data. The new kind of rule that Chomsky proposed to deal with this difficulty (a more user-friendly version of a kind of mechanism that certain logicians and linguists of the preceding generation (in particular Emil Post and Zelig Harris) had devised and experimented with) had the apparent virtue of being able to express these patterns easily. A good deal of the development syntax has experienced in the last quarter of a century reflects a somewhat belated counting of the costs incurred by Chomsky's innovation, and a gradual realization that there were far simpler, more economical solutions to the problem he pointed out with empirical coverage considerably better than what he had proposed in 1957.

    The particular virtue of Chomsky's approach, then, is not the particular solution he advanced, which has become progressively less attractive as time has passed (even independently of framework-internal changes in the specific theory he inaugurated), but rather the enhanced scope of the linguist's intellectual responsibilities that it assumed. Recording the facts correctly no longer had the status of a sufficient activity, even with a convenient classification and organization of those facts; what was now essential was motivating those facts, by showing how they were manifestations of underlying patterns and their interaction. One could characterize most previous work in linguistics as at best proto-scientific, in the sense that recording and classification are crucial to the actual business of science, but are not themselves that business, which is to identify a domain of phenomena and discover the general principles governing the behavior of the phenomena in that domain.

  • ELL volume 21 issue 1 Cover and Front matter

  • Journal:
    English Language & Linguistics / Volume 21 / Issue 1 / March 2017
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    03 February 2017, pp. f1-f2
    • Article
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  • ELL volume 21 issue 1 Cover and Back matter

  • Journal:
    English Language & Linguistics / Volume 21 / Issue 1 / March 2017
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    03 February 2017, pp. b1-b2
    • Article
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  • The changing future: competition, specialization and reorganization in the contemporary English future temporal reference system

  • DEREK DENIS, SALI A. TAGLIAMONTE
  • Journal:
    English Language & Linguistics / Volume 22 / Issue 3 / November 2018
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    31 January 2017, pp. 403-430

  • The English future temporal reference system has long been recognized as a variable system undergoing change. The main variants in contemporary English (will and be going to) have both been argued to have gone through (and to potentially still be undergoing) grammaticalization. At the same time, be going to has been gradually increasing in frequency relative to will over the last 500 years. However, investigation of the ongoing development of this system has been sparse. This article makes use of a large contemporary sociolinguistic corpus of a mainstream variety of North American English and the apparent-time construct. Several factors that have been implicated in the development of this system (Sentence Type, Clause Type, Proximity, Verb Type, and the Animacy and Grammatical Person of the Subject) are considered and a multiplex series of changes are uncovered. Underlying an overall, albeit slow, change in frequency towards be going to, we find evidence for specialization of one or the other variant in different linguistic contexts, neutralization of a constraint consistent with ongoing loss of variant nuances through semantic bleaching, and the persistence of constraints consistent with morphological doublet competition.

Page 302 of 1076