1、Syntax,Lecture 1,Welcome,Welcome to the field of linguistics and the class of syntax!,Basic requirements,Regular attendance Active participation in classroom activities Compulsory reading and homework Term Paper,Bibliography,Crystal, D. 1980, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, Basil Blackwel

2、l Napoli, D. J. 1993, Syntax: Theory and Problems, Oxford University Press Haegeman, L. 1991, Introduction to Government setting out together Matthews (1982): the branch of grammar dealing with the ways in which words, with or without appropriate inflections, are arranged to show connections of mean

3、ing within a sentence. Wordsphrasesclausessentencestext,Definite and infinite,Words are formed to be sentences in accordance with rules and patterns. Words are definite in number. Sentences are infinite in number Syntax deals with the relationship between definite and infinite.,Syntax and grammar,Gr

4、ammar= syntax + morphology Syntax語法 TG Grammar Case Grammar Lexical functional Grammar,Why Syntax Is Important? (1),Sound like a dry and boring area, however. At the heart of modern linguistics A good example: Chomskys (1957) Syntactic Structure A new era of linguistics Influential in almost every a

5、rea of linguistics It aims to solve the central problems of linguistics The most important branch in which the most important achievements have been made,Why Syntax Is Important? (2),Interested in language acquisition? Me doing it. (I am doing it.) Interested in sociolinguistics? The boy done well.

6、Interested in psycholinguistics? Without her contributions to the fund would be inadequate. Language teaching? Computer science?,Topic 2,Goals of syntactic study,The Goals of Linguistics,Describing linguistic phenomena Explaining linguistic phenomena Understanding the cognitive basis of language,Des

7、cribing linguistic phenomena,Before 1950s, discovering and refining the basic tools of linguistic description Phoneme Morpheme Why important To preserve the dying languages To prepare for the explanation,Explaining linguistic phenomena,Origins in Noam Chomskys book 1957, Syntactic Structure What to

8、be explained? How speakers use language in different social situations; Why human languages have the structure that they do; What is common to all human languages; Why human languages vary structurally the way they do; How human languages change over time; How speakers produce and understand languag

9、e in real time; The nature of native speakers knowledge of their language; How children learn language,Understanding the cognitive basis of language,The cognitive issues are the most important issues to be explained Processing What cognitive processes are involved when human beings produce and under

10、stand language on line in real time? How specialized to languages are these processes? Knowledge What constitutes knowledge of language? How is it organized? How does knowledge of language relate to knowledge in other cognitive domains? Acquisition How human beings come to have the knowledge of lang

11、uage? What is the nature of the acquisition process? Does it involve knowledge from other cognitive domains?,The goals of syntax,To develop a precise description of the various aspects of various languages (how a language combine words to form sentences) To develop a general theory of syntax (specif

12、ying what languages have in common and how they are different, universal grammar),Can we separate the two goals easily?,No. Description of individual languagesa theory of universal grammar? Syntacticians are always concerned both with individual languages and with languages in general. Investigation

13、 of individual languages are always guided by ideas about what languages are like and how they should be described.,How the goals relate to the goals of linguistics,Goal 1: description Goal 2: universal grammar Description Explanation understanding,Languages can vary without limit?,Joos, M. (1957),

14、Readings in Linguistics A basic philosophy: languages do not vary without limit in their syntax All sorts of situations that do not occur in languages An example: There are no languages in which an interrogative is formed from a declarative by turning the declarative back to front. The boy ate the b

15、eefburger. Beefburger the ate boy the? (*),One more evidence,There are no languages where an interrogative is formed from a declarative by moving the second word of the declarative to the front. The boy will be here. Boy the will be here? (*) 他讀了兩本書。 讀他了兩本書? (*),Sometimes, things that were thought i

16、mpossible do occur.,In the 1970s Objectverbsubject or objectsubject-verb The beefburger ate the boy. (*) The beefburger the boy ate. (*) 飯吃我。 飯, 我吃。(?) In the late 1970s, Amazon basin,Topic 3,How to study syntax?,Two basic types of theories,Inductive and Deductive Inductive: datahypothesis Deductive

17、: hypothesisdata Bloomfield (1933:21): “the only valid linguistic generalizations are inductive generalizations” Chomsky (1957): linguistics should be considered a deductive, rather than inductive, enterprise. Datahypothesismore datarevised hypothesis,Languages?,There is no sharp break between one l

18、anguage and another. Middle-Modern English ChineseEnglish Sociopolitical criteria technical concept,The main focus of linguistics,I (internalized)-language: a set of rules and principles in the mind of a speaker. Linguistic competence; knowledge of language Mental lexicon: a set of words in the mind

19、 of a speaker,How can we investigate an I-language?,We can do this by investigating what sentences are grammatical and developing hypothesis about the underlying rules and principles We can do this by eliciting speakers judgments or intuitions about sentences to decide whether a sentence is acceptab

20、le or unacceptable. Acceptability is not always the same thing as grammaticality.,Acceptability and grammaticality,Sentences can be unacceptable for a variety of reasons: Cause problems for the perceptual mechanisms The horse raced past the barn fell. The man the boy the girl knows talked to is here

21、. Involve contradictions or conflict with our views of how the world is Hobbs managed to impress Rhodes but he didnt impress him. 那個寡婦正在和她丈夫聊天。 There are also cases in which a sentence is acceptable when it is ungrammatical A not unintelligent person,Topic 4,How to evaluate a theory?,Two types of cr

22、iteria,Empirical Is the theory in accord with the known facts or experimental results? Theory-internal The factors that exist in the theories themselves,Theory-internal explanatory criteria,Economy All other things being equal, the simplest theory is to be preferred. Motivation An account in which t

23、he explanatory constructs have no other function beyond dealing with the problem at hand is less highly valued than one which they play a role in the explanation of other phenomena. Predictiveness Hypotheses which make empirically testable prediction about other observed phenomena or phenomena not y

24、et observed are more highly valued than those do not.,Levels of adequacy,Chomsky (1965): Aspects of the theory of syntax Observational adequacy correctly predicts which sentences in a language are well formed (grammatical) and which are not; Descriptive adequacy assigns descriptions to the sentences

25、 in the language that capture native speaker intuitions about the structure and meaning of sentences Explanatory adequacy provides an account of “how these facts arise in the mind of the speaker-hearer” (Chomsky, 1994:386, Bare phrase structure. In G. Webelhuth, ed. Government and binding theory and

26、 the minimalist program, Cambridge),Three more levels of adequacy,Dik, 1991, Functional Grammar. In Droste and Joseph, eds. Linguistic theory and grammatical description Psychological adequacy a theory should be “compatible with the results of psycholinguistic research on the acquisition, processing

27、, production, interpretation and memorization of linguistic expressions” (1991:248) Pragmatic adequacy be interpretable within a wider pragmatic theory of verbal communication” (1991: 247) Typological adequacy formulate such rules and principles as can be applied to any type of language without “for

28、cing”, i.e. without adapting the language described to the theory already developed” (248),Topic 5,A brief history of syntax.,A brief history of syntax,Syntax before Chomsky (1957) Early modern linguistics European Functionalism American structuralism Chomskys TG Grammar (1957Mid-1970s) Development

29、of TG and other competitors (after mid-1970s),Early modern linguistics,Ferdinand de Saussure University of Geneva Cours de Linguistique Generale (1916) Central views The arbitrary nature of language Language = a system of sign (signifier (the sound image + signified (idea) Langue (language system) a

30、nd parole (speech acts) Synchronic and diachronic,European Functionalism,Prague Circle (19261950) V. Mathesius, N. S. Trubetzkoy, R. Jakobson, S. Karcevski, etc. Major contributions Synchronic study is fully justified The distinction between phonetics and phonology Functional conception in the analy

31、sis of sentences Mathesius From a point of view of information Two basic parts: theme (主位）and rheme (述位） Functions of language Expressive; Appellative; Referential (Buhler) Referential (指稱）; emotive （表情）; conative（動意）; phatic （交流感情）; metalinguistic （純語言） and poetic （詩歌）(Jakobson),Copenhagen Circle,V

32、. Brondal, L. Hjelmslev and H. J. Uldall Strong logical orientation,American structuralism,In the 1920s and 1930s Large number of aboriginal languages, many of which were dying out Immediate task of recording and describing language Franz Boas Described many American Indian languages and developed a

33、 whole set of procedures and techniques for investigation Edward Sapir Sapir-Whorf hypothesis Language (1921) Sociological, psychological and anthropological Leonard Bloomfield Father of structural linguistics Language (1933) Strongly influenced by behaviorism Z. S.Harris Methods in structural Lingu

34、istics (1951) Discovery procedure,Common Views,Language: a structure of levels and interrelated parts. Linguistic description: objective, dealing with facts that were physically manifested. Techniques of analysis and description: segmentation and classification. IC analysis Influenced by behaviorism

35、,Chomskys TG Grammar,Early 1950sapproaches to syntax subsequently formalized as phrase structure grammar 1957the beginning of modern syntactic theory and especially transformational grammar in Chomskys Syntactic structure 1965Classical Transformational Grammar (the Standard Theory) introduced in Chomskys Aspects of the Theory of Syntax Mid-1970sthe emergence of Relational Grammar