Syntax 1Introduction

Lecture Summary

Linguistics, what is it?

o Description and Explanation

o Descriptive versus Prescriptive

o Knowledge of language: explicit versus tacit

o Some areas of linguistic inquiry

What is linguistics?

Linguistics is the study of human language

Looks at what is common to all human languages and also how they differ

What must a speaker know to speak (or sign) a language?

Why are languages the way they are?

Description and explanation

These are two facets to the study of human language

Linguistics must describe how a language behaves. What rules or conventions do speakers follow to produce meaningful utterances.

Example: contraction of is :

(1) a. Ronaldo is good at football. Ronaldo’s good at football.

b. I’m amazed how good Ronaldo is at football. -/-> *I’m amazed how good Ronaldo’s at football.

Linguists describe speakers’ grammaticality judgments: what they say and what they don’t say, and more importantly, what they accept and what they don’t accept.

Description and explanation

As well as being able to describe a language, linguists also try to explain why languages are the way they are.

There are different types of explanation.

External explanations – factors that are outside the language system itself and which relate to the broader culture of the speakers or the way humans experience the world, or how human beings are.

Examples:o Many human languages have words like up and down o English king and queen

Description and explanation

How the human body is formed.The sorts of sounds that are found in human languages

must obviously fall in the range of sounds that humans are capable of making and hearing.

How the human brain worksThis has an effect on the languages we speak.

Description and explanation

Internal explanations: factors internal to a language may determine what is acceptable and what is not.

(1) a. Ronaldo is good at football. Ronaldo’s good at football. b. *I’m amazed how good Ronaldo’s at football.

(2) a. Joe will be there. Joe’ll be there. b. Joe’ll be there, but I doubt that Sue will. (*’ll)

(3) a. Sandra says she’s (has) worked hard, but whether she has (*’s) or not...

Description and Explanation

Descriptive Generalization

(1) - (3) show us that the distribution of ‘full’ and ‘contracted’ forms of these words follows a consistent pattern.

The linguist aims to describe this pattern on the basis of data observed AND to explain why the language patterns this way.

To recap:

There are two things that linguistics does:

describes the phenomena found in specific human languages and in human language in general, and

attempts to explain why things are the way they are.

Descriptive vs Prescriptive approaches

Linguistics: describes utterances describes languages takes a descriptive approach to language is not about what people ‘ought to say’

Example:I didn’t see nobody and I didn’t do nothing.

A linguist wants to: describe the utterance work out the words and the forms of the words that the speaker

used what they mean what rules the speaker used to combine these words to make this

utterance.

Descriptive vs Prescriptive approaches

What do you think of when I say “grammar”?The rules that tell you what is right and what is wrong?

What sort of rules? Prescriptive rules?

Examples: ‘you must not use double negatives’

I didn’t see nobody

‘you must not end a sentence with a preposition’Who did you give the book to? (To whom did you give it?)

‘you must not split infinitives’ to boldly go ...

Descriptive vs Prescriptive approaches

In linguistics:

we take a descriptive approach, not a prescriptive one;

we’re interested in what people do say

(descriptive) not what they should say (prescriptive).

Descriptive versus prescriptive approachesLinguists are interested in describing language variation:

(4) I didn’t see nobody, and I didn’t do nothing.

(5) I didn’t see anybody, and I didn’t do anything.

Which speakers say (4) and which speakers say (5) to express the same meaning?

What does this distribution correlate with?

Age? Social class? Education level? Region?….

Knowledge of language

Linguistics is primarily interested in describing the knowledge that speakers have about their language.

What form does speakers’ knowledge take?

Explicit vs Tacit knowledge

Any speaker of a language must somehow “know” the rulesof their language but this knowledge usually isn’t explicit.

Example: Pete’s an awesome drummer is an acceptable English sentence but *What an awesome drummer Pete’s is not an acceptable

English sentence.

Any native English speaker will agree with these

judgments, but probably won’t be able to tell you when

they can and can’t reduce is to ’s.

Explicit vs Tacit knowledge

Linguistics distinguishes between explicit

and tacit knowledge.

It is the linguist’s job: to make explicit the rules that govern language, to say precisely what it is that the native

speaker tacitly knows.

We want to discover the principles that govern language use.

Some areas of linguistic knowledge explored by linguists

Knowledge of the sound system of languageSpeakers of a spoken language must know about thesounds which make up their language.

what sounds where are they used

(Signers of sign languages have similar knowledge about the components of their signs.)

The branches of linguistics which deal with the sound system are phonetics and phonology.

Knowledge of the sound system of language

Phonetics and Phonology are

covered in the other introductory linguistics

subject, LING1005 / LING6105.

Knowledge of word forms: Morphology

Morphemes are the ‘smallest meaningful units’ oflanguage.

Example:A word like unbelievable consists of three meaningful

parts – or morphemes: a prefix un‑ the root believ(e) the suffix able

The branch of linguistics which studies how words are formed is morphology

Knowledge of how words combine to form sentences: Syntax

To put words together to form sentences,

a speaker must know the rules which govern which words can combine with which other words

This area of linguistics is called syntax, and

with morphology is the focus of the first half of this course.

Other areas of language

Semantics – the area of linguistics that deals with how meaning is encoded in language

Pragmatics – deals with the use of language in context. Historical linguistics – studies languages changing over time Dialectology – regional variation Sociolinguistics – studies language and social context First and second language acquisition - looks at how children

or second-language learners come to know language Differences between spoken, signed and written language

We will discuss some aspects of these different branchesof linguistics in this course.

Further reading:

Fromkin et al (2005) Chapter 1.