Leder: English 4206: Outline for a General Theory of Grammar S20

I. Logical demands given communicative demands of human language

A) Must be able to communicate an unlimited range of meanings

1. must do this orally1 in relatively short time
2. must be learnable by all normal children
3. must be able to incorporate new concepts

II) Logical necessities given demands and limitations of human learning and processsing

A) Must use a rule system capable of generating an infinite set of strings

1. Must have a finite set of symbols and a finite set of rules

2. Strings must be processed in a linear order
a. However, strings could be re-organized mentally

III. Universal properties, within parameters, of languages given these logical necessities

A) All languages must be (and are) composed of a lexicon and a grammar

B) The lexicon of all languages is built up from a morphological system (MS)

1. Languages always have a smallest unit of meaning or grammar
a. these smallest units are called "morphemes."
b. morphemes are abstract units, by definition
2. Morphemes are attached to morphs (can be more than one per morph)
a. Morphs have phonological structure (or written)
b. Morphs are structurally indivisible (but can be divided
phonologically
4. MS determines how the elementary meaningful units of the language
can be combined into words.

C) Morphological Parameters:
1) Words can be simple or complex
2) if simple, then every morph is a morpheme and every word has
one an only one morpheme.

3) if complex, range of morphological complexity can include any or all

of the following:
a. compounding (Mandarin, English, Spanish, ...)
b. affixation of non-argument morphemes (English, Spanish....)

1
With the exception of rare cases such as deaf or dumb people. We assume, however,
that the language system has developed toward oral communication primarily.
 Leder: Outline for a general theory of Grammar (p. 2 of 3)

1) prefixes, suffixes, (infixes, circumfixes)

c. affixation ("incorporation") of argument morphemes (Turkish,
Mohawk)
d. fusion of morphemes (Spanish)

D) General properties of grammar

1) since morphological rules are "grammatical" in the sense that they
operate by concatenating or transforming elementary units, morphology forms a bridge
between the lexicon and the grammar.

2) In general there is a trade-off between morphology and syntax such that

the richer the morphology of a language, the freer the syntax will be. Presumably, this is
because a rich morphology marks arguments for grammatical function and gives other
important information (such as gender, number, etc.), thereby releasing syntax from that
obligation.

E) Syntax
1) Syntax concerns the rules for the order of words in a language
a) in morphologically complex languages, it is difficult to tell where
morphology ends and syntax begins. For that reason, many linguists prefer to consider
morphology and syntax one level called "morpho-syntax."

2) However, in languages that are relatively simple morphologically (i.e., toward

the analytical end of the morphological continuum), it seems possible and useful to divide
morphology and syntax.

a) English is considered an analytic language, so its morphology and

syntax are divisible.

3) Syntactic rules are always constituent based

a) syntactic constituents are hierarchically structured

b) syntactic constituents are organized according to syntactic category
c) syntactic categories fall into two types

1. Lexical
Noun, Verb, Adjective/Adverb, (Prep/Post position)

2. Grammatical:

complementizers, determiners, conjunctions, particles, etc.

Leder: Outline for a general theory of Grammar (p. 3of 3)

4) Major topics/problems in syntax

A) how are constituents related to each other?
1) how are adjacent constituents related?
2) what governs long-distance dependencies?
3) what limits interaction of constituents?
B) What is the best way to explain structures that seem related?
C) How general are syntactic rules?
D) To what extent can syntactic rules be recast as lexical properties?