Syntax, an introduction:

Form, Meaning and Use

I Wayan Arka
Yana Qomariana

Week 1
7 February 2019
 Assessments

• 2 short Problem sets: 30%

• Essay:30%
• Mid Test: 20%
• Final test: 20%
 Outline
1. Arrangement, Meaning & Syntax
2. Domain of Syntax
3. Typology of Syntax
4. Methods
5. Applications
 Outline
1. Arrangement, Meaning & Syntax
2. Domain of syntax
3. Typology of Syntax
4. Methods
5. Applications
 ‘syntax’
• < Latin syntaxis
• < Greek σύνταξις meaning ‘arrangement’
especially with reference to troops; or words
• not of bits of words (phonology)
• not of individual words (morphology)
• words with other words in ‘sentences’
 Meaning & Arrangement
(1) a. The dog chased the b. The cat chased the dog.
cat.

Different arrangement = different meaning

 Meaning & Syntax
Indonesian:

Different arrangement = different structure

= different meaning
 Meaning & Syntax

a. ‘the dog is white’

b. ‘the white dog’

Different
Different syntax = different meaning
structure
 Also English:
• The son of Pharaoh’s daughter.
• [ The son of Pharaoh NP]’s daughter.
– The son of Pharaoh has a daughter
– i.e. Pharaoh has a granddaughter

• The son of [ Pharaoh’s daughter NP].

– The son belongs to Pharaoh’s daughter
– i.e. Pharaoh has a grandson

Different syntax = different meaning

 Arrangement and meaning
• different arrangement entails:
• different structure entails:
• different meaning
 Two kinds of meaning.
• Hey mate, a wasp just crawled into your beer.

• Contextual meaning, (what the sentences implies

about the situation it’s produced in, incl.
relationships)
 Two kinds of meaning.
• Hey mate, a wasp just crawled into your beer.

• Contextual meaning, (what the sentences implies

about the situation it’s produced in, incl.
relationships)
• Declarative meaning (what the sentence says about
the situation it’s meant to be about)
Declarative meaning - hearing as seeing
 Function of syntax
• We mainly focus on declarative meaning
i. More complex meaning is composed of simpler
meaning
ii. We tend to have limited knowledge about the
situation which is being discussed.
iii. More concrete
iv. Has greater influence on syntax
v. Easier – requires a lot less data
• Syntax lets us depict complex situations to each
other
-serves the evolutionary goals of cooperating and
communicating
 Form and Function/Meaning:
nonsense poem
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
(Jabberwocky, Alice’s adventures in Wonderland – Lewis
Carroll)
 Form and Function
The dog bit the cat
The dogs bit the cats

Form Function
• Noun • person, place, thing
• Subject • ‘doer’, AGENT, A
• Object • ‘done to, PATIENT, P
• Verb • ‘doing word’
• Plural, PL • Plural
• Past tense • Past time reference

What we care about

 Form and Meaning
“Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”
Noam Chomsky (1957)
 Outline
1. Arrangement, Meaning & Syntax
2. Domain of Syntax
3. Typology of Syntax
4. Methods
5. Applications
 Domain of Syntax

• Syntax is both autonomous yet interfaces with

semantics

• Syntax is complex, easy and productive

 Complexity

• Complex:
i. No complete grammars have ever been
written
ii. For English, the world’s most studied
language, nearest is The Cambridge
Grammar of the English Language (1,859
pages)
iii. Easy enough to find gaps in this
 Ease of acquisition

• Children learn it fast:

• Kids have most of it by about 6
• Even 3 or 4 year olds can say
things like: “I want to push John
while being carried”
• Some of the fine points not
reliably learnt til about age 9
(Carol Chomsky 1969)
 Masses of Data
• American kids get 3.3–10 million words/year
(Hart & Risley 1994).
• So a 6 year old is sitting on a corpus of 20–60
million words.
• By the time they’re out of school the range will
be roughly 60–200 million (what about
reading?)
• Major literary figures might be looking at 300
million or more by their first top grade works.
• Much more than can be comprehensively
organized and controlled.
 Not that hard to get started
• Many major patterns can be picked up quickly
(even from 12 examples)
• A few years of uni’ study will be sufficient to
read most text and communicate about certain
things in the foreign language.
• You probably won’t win the Nobel Prize for
poetry. (unless you’re Joseph Brodsky)
• ‘Hey you, wasp crawl into beer’ does the job.
complex but ‘easy’
 Productivity
• Speakers are creative: People can
produce and understand vast
numbers of sentences they’ve never
used or heard before.

• “I want to push John while being

carried” produces no Google hits
complex, easy, productive
 Outline
1. Arrangement, Meaning & Syntax
2. Domain of Syntax
3. Typology of Syntax
4. Methods
5. Applications
 Cross linguistic variations
• If we want to understand what ‘Language’ is
about we need to look different languages
from all over the world
• There are two goals for this:
– We want to find out what is the same about
languages UNIVERSALITY
– We want to find out what is different about
languages DIVERSITY
• These two parameters are always both at play
when we study syntax
 Syntax differs across languages:
word order
• The dog bit the cat

• ‘doer’ = A (most agent like participant)

• ‘done to’ = P (most patient like participant
• verb

• English is AVP (or SVO)

 Syntax differs across languages

AVP
APV
PAV
VPA
PVA
VAP
See WALS (World Atlas of Language Structures) for more info’:
http://wals.info/chapter/81 and http://wals.info/feature/81A#2/18.0/152.8
Syntax differs within languages

VAP/VPA
(VAP is more common in Greek)
English-like AVP is also possible:
 Outline
1. Arrangement, Meaning & Syntax
2. Domain of syntax
3. Methods
i. Observation
ii. Elicitation
4. Applications
5. Course
 Observation
• Build a ‘corpus’ of sentences produced by
native speakers
• Problems:
i. Need to know what they mean
ii. Some are erroneous:
All your base are belong to us.
iii. Complex patterns may fail to appear
iv. Integration problem: ‘Enough’ absence
indicates ungrammaticality. But how much is
enough?
 An English Corpus:
searchable big
Building your own corpus…
 Outline
1. Arrangement, Meaning & Syntax
2. Domain of Syntax
3. Typology of syntax
4. Methods
i. Observation
ii. Elicitation
5. Applications
 Elicitation
• Can you say “Lots of people were at the party,
weren’t there”?
• Problems
– Fraught
– Not always possible (David Gil Working on Riau
Indonesian)
http://wwwstaff.eva.mpg.de/~gil/riau/working.html
– Or speakers might defer to investigator and accept
anything.
 Elicitation
“One of my most helpful language teachers insisted
that I could say a certain sentence and that when I said
it, it was indeed ‘pretty’. However, I asked him to say it
himself... [and] he replied ‘I cannot.’ ‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Pirahã do not talk like that’ was the puzzling reply. ‘But
you said I could say it!’ ‘Yes’, he said, ‘you can say
anything you like. You are paying me” (Dan Everett,
Language the Cultural Tool, p. 93-4)
 Combinations of Methods
• Good syntacticians studying
languages: they don’t speak
natively and study observed
sentences
• A certain amount of asking (to
different degrees, depending on
personal philosophy)
 Outline
1. Arrangement, Meaning & Syntax
2. General Features
3. Syntax & Learning
4. Methods
5. Applications
6. Course
 Applications
• Technological:
i. Information assistants
a) IBM’s Watson
b) Apple’s Siri
ii. Web-searches
iii. Machine translation
iv. Communication with
household robots,
entertainment
systems, cars etc.
 Applications
• Humanistic
i. More efficient language
teaching
ii. Viable grammar instruction in
schools (No obviously false
doctrines propagated, students
not dying of boredom)
iii. More information about
Rationalism/prescriptive vs.
Empiricism/descriptive
 Summary
1. Arrangement, Meaning & Syntax
2. Domain of Syntax
– Complex, ‘easy’, productive
3. Typology of Syntax
4. Methods
– Observation & elicitation
5. Applications
– Technological, humanistic
 ‘A jaguar ate a pig.’

(1.3) Abrandi JuanseP kafé aPbe wžin

Abran.t opical izer Juan.l ocat iv e coffee deliver auxiliary
‘Abran delivered coffee t o Juan.’

K annada synt ax

(A) naavu pustaka oodtiivi ‘We are reading the book.’

(B) aval.u pust aka oodt aal.e ‘She is reading t he book.’
(C) naanu bande ‘I arrived.’
(D) naanu pustaka oodde ‘I read the book.’ (past tense)
(E) naanu pustaka hud.ukut tiddeene ‘I am looking for a book.’

Draw the phrase structure tree for the Kannada sentence in (A). [2 point s]

Write the phrase structure rules necessary to generate t he Kannada dat a in

[3 point s]