CONTENTS

Title page

Introduction

The Chomsky hierarchy

Syntactic Structures

Movement

Constituents

X-bar syntax

Topics in Syntax

Relatives and other problems

Minimalism

Production

Relational grammars

A syntactic bestiary

Bibliography

Index

by Mark Rosenfelder

Yonagu • Chicago • 2018

© 2018 by Mark Rosenfelder.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, except for review purposes.

Kindle edition 1.0

Contents

Introduction

The Chomsky hierarchy

Syntactic Structures

Movement

Constituents

X-bar syntax

Topics in Syntax

Relatives and other problems

Minimalism

Production

Relational grammars

Conlang syntax

A syntactic bestiary

Bibliography

Introduction

This book is about syntax, the forgotten one-fourth of your grammar.

You’re not alone. William Dwight Whitney’s magisterial Sanskrit Grammar (1879) devotes 32 pages to phonology and orthography, 47 pages to sandhi, and 377 to morphology. And that’s it: there is no syntax section.

Of course, syntax wasn’t entirely ignored; that’s why it has a nice Greek name, from σύνταξις, ‘with-ordering’. With the classical languages, ordering was what seemed to be left once you’d mastered those hundreds of pages of morphology.

And the ordering rules seemed to be pretty simple! In Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), M. Jourdain gives the sentence

Belle marquise, vos beaux yeux me font mourir d’amour.

Beautiful marquise, your beautiful eyes me make die of love.

and his maître de philosophie informs him that this can equally be written

D’amour mourir me font, belle marquise, vos beaux yeux.

Vos beaux yeux me font, belle marquise, mourir d’amour.

Mourir vos beaux yeux, belle marquise, d’amour me font.

Me font vos beaux yeux mourir, belle marquise, d’amour.

M. Jourdain is perplexed: “But of all those ways of saying it, which is the best?”

“The one you said: Belle marquise, vos beaux yeux me font mourir d’amour.”

His client is tickled: “I’ve never studied, and yet I did that on the first try.”

Molière’s satire captures the feeling that syntax was faintly irrelevant, a matter of polish. If he could read this book, I’m convinced that he’d see that it’s far more than that.

There’s a lot more we could say about M. Jourdain’s sentence. For now, just one thought: the maître’s rearrangements are by no means lawless; he only rearranges five sub-parts of the sentence, not its ten words. Why do you think that is?

What you know and what you ‘know’

M. Jourdain can produce prose, even though he doesn’t know what prose is. This is one facet of a big surprising thing that we’ll run into over and over in this book: as an English speaker, you have a very detailed and sophisticated analysis of syntax— and for the most part you can’t consciously access it.

I’ll talk a lot about the English verbal complex, because it’s a hard but not intractable puzzle. Let’s take a quiz. Here are some variants of a sentence:

The fish were caught by her.

She has caught fish.

She can catch fish.

She’s catching fish.

That’s passive, perfect, modal, and progressive. You can combine them— e.g. She has been catching fish. In fact, all four can occur in one sentence. In that case, without trying out alternatives in your head, what order do they appear in?

Or, when precisely do we use he and him? If you’re a conlanger or you know a highly inflected language, you’ll quickly reply “He is nominative,” or “He is for the subject.” But what about:

Sarah wants him to move out.

Isn’t him the subject of to move out? (It’s not the object of want. What does Sarah want? “Him”? No, she wants “for him to move out.”)

These examples are intended to show that you don’t consciously know the precise rules of syntax, but your brain does: it effortlessly creates sentences that follow those rules.

In my other books, the emphasis was on things you probably didn’t know— e.g. how ergativity or logographic writing works. There’s some of that here (how Malagasy relative clauses or Mandarin pivot clauses work), but a lot of syntax is getting that hidden part of the brain to cough up its secrets.

How this book fits into my œuvre and yours

If you want to start creating conlangs (or learning basic linguistics), The Language Construction Kit is for you. It covers phonology (the sounds of language), both morphology and syntax, and more areas that traditional grammars skipped: semantics and pragmatics. It also introduces writing systems and historical linguistics.

Advanced Language Construction covers additional topics such as logic, pidgins, language development, logographic writing, and Sign. Then there’s a leisurely look at morphosyntax, a nice word that emphasizes that a particular linguistic concept might be addressed as morphology in one language, as syntax in another.

And then The Conlanger’s Lexipedia tackles the lexicon, the biggest part of any language or conlang, and one aspect of language that can’t be neatly separated from real-world knowledge.

Then we get to conworlding— see The Planet Construction Kit. And specific areas of the world to use for inspiration or general knowledge: China Construction Kit, India Construction Kit.

Do I need to have read any of these to use this book?

No, but I’m not going to spend time explaining “morphemes” or “aspects” here, much less go over basic English grammar. Reading the LCK first won’t hurt, and you’ll get more out of this book if you’ve read ALC.

So I’ve written a lot, and perhaps you’ve read a lot, about language. I’ve felt for a long time that something was missing, and that something was generative grammar (GG).

Now, I’ve said in other books that you can write a good grammar without generative syntax at all. And it’s true! You don’t need to create a single syntax tree or transformation.

On the other hand, this is one of the most fun parts of linguistics. It’s a relatively new part of the field, so it’s the part most likely to teach you things you hadn’t ever thought of before. And for the same reason, it’s one area of language where you can quite easily find facts about language nobody has thought of before.

Plus, it gives you a toolkit that deepens your understanding of language and what you can do with your conlangs. Studying syntax is like going from “making up alphabets” to “making up phonological systems”. You can fill your syntax section with far more than sentence and noun phrase order.

If you’re a certain type of person, generative grammar will also open some unexpected doors— to neurolinguistics, to psychology, to computer science, to logic.

Cocktail party pitch

So, syntax is about the order of words. What else?

One answer: it’s about structure. Sentences are made of pieces bigger than words, and languages have a whole toolkit for acting on those pieces. We’ll look at what those pieces and those tools are, and how they work.

Another way to look at it: Suppose you’d like to make a machine that spits out English sentences all day long. Each one should be different, and each one should be good English. How would you make that machine in the simplest way possible?

That is, we’re not interested (right now) in a Manhattan-sized computer that knows everything. We also, of course, don’t want a machine that can’t do it— one that misses some sentences, or spits out bad ones. We want the dumbest machine that works.

And one more stipulation: we don’t insist that they be meaningful utterances. We’re not conducting a conversation with the machine. We’ll be happy if it outputs John is a ten foot tall bear— that’s a valid sentence, we don’t care if someone named John is nearby, if he’s a bear or not, or if he’s bigger or smaller than ten feet.

That machine is a generative grammar.

Besides the amusement value, linguists believe such a grammar would be useful.

- It’s part of the overall goal of describing language.

- It puts some interesting lower bounds on any machine that handles language.

- Creating it will uncover a huge swath of data about syntax, including quite a lot of things never known before. Sometimes the best thing about a scientific theory is that it tells you where to look!

- It might help you with computer processing of language.

- It might tell you something about how the brain handles language.

- Though we said we didn’t need to deal with meaning, we will find out a lot that’s relevant to semantics.

A field in flux

One warning: if you like fixed answers to questions, syntax will frustrate you. It’s a field that notoriously eludes consensus, where the years bring not a standard final grammar but a dismaying proliferation of theories, many of them with a single proponent. But that just means that science is being done right here, and you can participate! It’s a lot harder to come up with a brilliant new observation about Sanskrit verbal morphology.

That isn’t to say everything is in flux; the facts of syntax are still interesting, and you can incorporate (say) clefting into your conlang without choosing a particular syntactic framework. And there is more consensus on the methods of syntax than on the final theory. Whatever theory you end up in, knowing how to argue about syntax is a valuable skill.

Why your syntax prof might not like this book

When theories are unsettled, you can take two approaches. You can try to prepare for all the theories, or you can teach just one.

Most syntax classes and textbooks will take the second approach, for laudable reasons. If your goal in a few years’ time is to write a thesis, you need to fully understand one theory, preferably the ones your professors use. There’s a lot to learn, and they may well feel that you have to know a lot more than you do now to even contest the weak points in the theory.

If you want to create a conlang, or just understand what syntax teaches us about language, those motivations are unhelpful and just a bit dishonest. I don’t want to hide the fact that much of Chomskyan syntax is criticized, not by cranks, but by rigorous and well-esteemed linguists. I ask, and I want you to ask, why. Why do we draw trees at all? Why is it important that they match X' theory or Minimalism? Why does anyone worry about the power of a grammar? Why should all the branches be binary?

At the same time, you can’t demolish a theory with snark alone. If evidence has been provided, make sure you understand it, and can explain why it doesn’t hold up (if it doesn’t). Think about what you would do instead, and what evidence you have for your idea.

Besides, it’s foolish to restrict yourself to one syntactic school; you never know where new facts or insights might appear. As James McCawley warns:

When you hear a linguist use the word ‘theory’, you should put your hand on your wallet. Linguists generally follow the deplorable practice of offering their ‘theories’ as package deals and presenting arguments that have a bearing on certain points of the ‘theory’ as if they were arguments for the entire package, which they never are.[1]

What’s coming up

I’ll start with an optional chapter on the Chomsky hierarchy, applied to toy grammars, computer languages, and human languages.

Next is Syntactic Structures, the book that got linguists interested in generative grammar, and especially its clever analysis of the English verbal complex. Though no one including Chomsky follows its specific rules any more, it’s still an accessible starting point. Plus it’s not hard to model with a computer program.

After this I’ll talk about movement and why we use that concept; then about constituents and how you can tell if you have one on your hands. This will give us some basic tools we’ll use in the rest of the book.

Next I’ll look closer at the later and greater version of Chomsky’s GG: X' theory (pronounced X-bar). We’ll look closer at noun phrases and verb phrases, and the X' version of transformations.

After that I’ll look at some specific topics that deepen our analysis of syntax: reflexivization, pronouns, quantifiers, the cycle, nominalization, relative clauses, comparatives, and conjunctions. We’ll take a brief look at processes that cross sentence boundaries.

Next is Minimalism, the latest version of Chomskyan syntax, which corrects some of the excesses of earlier models and adds some new ones.

Generative grammar has always inspired theories of production. Is it a theory of language understanding and generation? The answer has always been “yes and no.” This chapter will explore why.

A lot of syntax is about constituent structure, but many linguists are more concerned with relations between components— things like verbs and their arguments, agreement, subjects, semantic roles, and universals. This will also be a good time to take stock of alternatives to Chomsky, which can be grouped together as cognitive grammar.

Next there’s a chapter on syntax in conlangs: how to use all this in your conlang.

Finally there’s a bestiary of transformations. Modern syntax has discovered a lot of interesting facts, so much of this should be new to you. It’s also a reference for both conlanging and linguistics.

Toybox

One thing I’ve provided that you won’t find in most syntax textbooks: web toys. The whole idea of generative grammar becomes clearer when you can see a program generating texts. I’ve provided four:

- A Markov text generator

- ggg, which models phrase structure rules with or without transformations, as a linear sequence

- gtg, which does the same but knows about syntactic trees

- mg, which builds up sentences using Minimalism

You can find them on my website by name, e.g.

http://www.zompist.com/ggg.html

On difficulty

I’ll be honest: GG can be difficult, because language is difficult. But I don’t think it’s more difficult than the rest of linguistics.

It’s fine to read quickly, trying to find the bits you can use. But then re-read the chapter later to see what you missed.

Above all, try it out. Answer some of the questions in the text. If you disagree with an analysis, work out an alternative. Use ggg to write some rules and see how they work. Go through the heavier chunks of syntax, deciding how things go in your language.

What’s not here?

Syntax doesn’t have clear borders— or if it does, syntacticians are constantly violating them, edging into phonology, semantics, and pragmatics. For the most part I’ll stick with syntax— not least because I’ve covered the other areas in other books.

I’ll also leave out most of what we could call morphosyntax. Modern syntax does attempt to cover this— e.g. how to assign inflections to nouns and verbs. It complicates the theory quite a bit without, to my mind, solving any problems better than traditional approaches. If you need to know what case to put your Latin nouns in, your Latin grammar probably has the right answer.

I have complicated feelings about examples from languages besides English. GG has been accused of being too closely based on English, and though syntacticians have worked on many other languages in the last fifty years, Minimalism still looks awfully anglocentric.

However, I don’t believe in simply learning syntactic dogma; I want you to do syntax. And you have to know a language at the native speaker level to do syntax on it. If we’re discussing a major aspect of GG, or how to represent English sentences, I don’t think anything is gained by presenting a few lines from another language, where neither you nor I can run it through a set of transformations to test how things really go.

On the other hand, it’s useful to see that other languages do things differently! So I’ve freely used non-English examples to show some of the diversity that’s available to you.

Some conventions

If an expression is in small caps, it’s a technical term; usually it’s defined right there.

Words or sentences that are being talked about are in italics.[2]

An author plus date— e.g. Chomsky 1965— is a reference to a work listed in the bibliography.

►Sans-serif paragraphs point to additional resources.

Transformations are capitalized, e.g. Right Node Raising. See the index for where a particular transformation is discussed.

I use underlines in an example to draw attention to something, not to represent stress. When I do represent stress, I use boldface.

Stigmata

An asterisk * marks ungrammatical sentences: *Him goed to store.

An initial question mark indicates questionable sentences: ?She became friendlier and more friendly.

These stigmata, as McCawley calls them, do not mean that we’re prescribing how languages should be! The aim is to describe language as it’s really used— but this will require paying attention to how it’s not used.

You will disagree with some of my grammaticality judgments. That’s fine; it happens in every syntax class.

This could be because you speak another dialect. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I can’t analyze your dialect, only mine.

Or, even if you speak the same general dialect, maybe your internal grammar is just slightly different from mine— it could be a regional thing, or a matter of when we were born, or just individual variety.

Now, ideally, I’d restrict my asterisks to sentences all American English speakers believe are wrong. But that’s not very practical; plus, it’s rarely a major issue. But it’s one reason syntacticians are so fond of giving multiple arguments for their positions!

It’s been long noticed that a particular bad sentence may turn out to be OK if we can think of the right context for it. In fact, its not a bad habit to try to think of such contexts. Maybe you’ll find something we weren’t aware of about syntax.

Notational differences

One of the banes of syntax is that terms and ways of drawing trees change over the years and between linguists. If you’ve kept up with the field, you can make minor adjustments on the fly— “Oh, his TP is simply S, and this V" is simply a VP.” But if you’re learning, it’s a hassle and perhaps a turnoff.

It’s a bit like learning new computer languages. It’s easier when you know a bunch of them— you can see at a glance that all these are just notational variants:

ADD B TO A.

LET A = A + B

a := a + b;

a += b;

But if you only know one language, the others look much more obscure.

(Which isn’t to say nothing is new; a C expression like a = test ? b : c is a novelty which would have required a few lines in the other languages. Different theories aren’t just differences in notation.)

I’ve preferred to use terms that have been widely used in syntax over the last half century (thus NP or noun phrase rather than N"), and those which are more mnemonic (thus Det rather than D, deep structure rather than D-structure).

Acknowledgements

First, effusive thanks to Judith N. Levi, who not only introduced me to all this stuff, but taught how to approach modern syntax: you must work to understand the ideas, but also to how to find and address their weak points.

Thanks to Vijay John, Rory Turnbull, and Jim Baker on the ZBB for suggesting modern syntax books. Thanks to Shan Millan for permission to quote from her novel Damien Loch.

I’m grateful to Lotta Danielsson for help with Swedish, and to Raphael Landeck and Jan Strasser for help with German. The Hebrew sentences were provided by Yosi. Ugo Lachapelle checked over some of the French and Japanese. Peter Guekguezian provided data from Armenian and Yokuts.

I greatly appreciate the readers who provided feedback on earlier drafts: Gram Brinson, John Cowan, Daniele Morelli, Albert Gallego i Saballs, Peter Guekguezian, and Benjamin Buckley.

As ever, my wife Lida was supportive in everything, and invaluable for the Spanish.

Mark Rosenfelder

Oak Park, November 2018

Abbreviations

N

noun

V

verb

Adj

adjective

P

preposition

Conj

conjunction

Det

determiner

Comp

complementizer

Q

quantifier; question

S

sentence

NP

noun phrase

VP

verb phrase

PP

prepositional phrase

Aux

auxiliary

T

tense node

Neg

negative

Spec

specifier

nom

nominative

acc

accusative

abl

ablative

gen

genitive

dat

dative

obl

oblique

obj

object

evid

evidential

s/p

Singular, plural

m/f

masculine, feminine

1/2/3

1st/2nd/3rd person

pt

particle

pres

present

part

participle

fut

future

refl

reflexive

indic

indicative

subj

subjunctive

sub

subordinator

imp

imperative

perf

perfect

applic

applicative

benef

benefactive

inf

infinitive

ø

empty node; a place where something was deleted

SS

Syntactic Structures

X'

X-bar; e.g. N' = node between N and NP

GG

generative grammar

GS

generative semantics

LCK

Language Construction Kit

ALC

Advanced Language Construction

The Chomsky hierarchy

I’m going to begin with a chapter that it’s OK to skip. It gives the basis for generative grammar and also computer languages, and explains a lot about why GG looks the way it does (such as its reliance on syntactic trees). But it may be difficult if math scares you, and you can use GG without it, so feel free to move on to Chapter 2.

Languages as strings

Let’s begin with some observations about human languages:

•          They’re composed of strings— that is, a linear sequence of words, and ultimately phonemes.

•          There’s an enormous variety of these strings. By comparison, vervet monkeys have about three dozen meaningful calls total; you could describe their entire communication with a simple list.

•          They follow rules: there are repeated, meaningful patterns, and most possible strings are not acceptable.

•          They contain chunks: sentences, noun phrases, other substrings. These chunks (or constituents) can be moved around, like M. Jourdain’s belle marquise or vos beaux yeux.

This suggests that we could come up with a set of rules that generate all the valid strings of a language. This set of rules is called a grammar.

This term is not quite what linguists call a grammar— in fact, it’s pretty much what linguists call syntax! The lexicon is included as a list of possible words, but without definitions. Semantics and pragmatics are mostly left out. Morphology can be included in the rules, but as we’re often just talking about English, GG often ignores it or delegates it to a process (assumed to be quite simple) after sentence generation.

We’d also like the grammar to exclude invalid strings. That is, we should be able to tell, using the grammar, whether a string is valid or not. Take ungrammatical as a shorthand for “can’t be produced using the grammar’s set of rules.”

Don’t confuse validity with meaning. Chomsky offered the now-famous sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously as an example of a grammatically valid but meaningless statement. You can equally have sentences that are meaningful but ungrammatical: Trees green are?

This constraint is not as compelling as the first. We notice ungrammaticality, but we aren’t that bothered by it. And worrying too much about it may lead us into dead ends: edge cases can be confusing to humans too, so perhaps we shouldn’t insist that the grammar handle them correctly.

However, when defining a formal system, you do have to exclude the invalid cases. Think of defining a computer language: it’s not helpful to say that 5 + (j * 4) is a valid mathematical expression but so is trees green are.

Chomsky would also like you to bear in mind that grammars are not a theory of production. They are simply a formalization of a what a language is. Conceivably the actual rules the brain uses to produce a sentence might be completely different.

Of course, this tenet was almost immediately tossed aside. Even Chomsky suggested that the grammar might be part of a theory of production, and he went on to posit that quite a few of his rules were really part of the brain. We’ll get back to this later.

Stringmaking

You could generate the strings of a language in many ways. Some ways are possible but uninteresting.

For instance, there could be a humongous lookup table of every possible sentence. The speaker then (randomly?) picks one. This is how pull-a-string talking dolls work (with limited choices, of course).

We can’t really prove that our brains don’t contain a humongous lookup table of every possible sentence. This gets in Chomsky’s way, because he’d like to prove that certain features are necessary to describe a grammar. His solution is to state that human languages are infinite— that is, there is no grammatical rule that puts an upper bound on sentence length. (A humongous lookup for an infinite language would itself be infinite, therefore not physically possible.)

This is a somewhat questionable move, as it makes an arbitrary and untestable claim. It might make more sense to simply declare that the humongous lookup table is, well, off the table. We can’t prove it abstractly, but we can observe that human utterances are appropriate to the speakers’ circumstances. A lookup table doesn't provide any way to do that.

It’s worth noting that some languages don’t allow infinite recursion. E.g. Kayardild only allows subordination one level deep (see p. 147).

Before leaving the humongous lookup table, let’s put a lower bound on its size. Suppose we have 10,000 words, of which 20% are adjectives, 20% verbs, and the rest mostly nouns. Take just this sentence structure:

The dumb little hunter failed to catch the wily rabbit.

How many sentences fit this structure? About 2000 (A) * 2000 (A) * 6000 (N) * 2000 (V) * 2000 (V) * 2000 (A) * 6000 (N) = 1.152 x 10^24. If you could recite one sentence a second, you could finish the list in about a million times the age of the universe.

Another dumb alternative: random choice among all the words in the dictionary. Of course, most strings would be a meaningless mess. But a very small change makes random choice look a lot better.

My man Markov

For a Markov text generator, we have a database of every possible word, and counts for each possible continuation. E.g., for this sentence

I am the egg man, they are the egg men, I am the walrus.

an order-one generator, based on two-word sequences, would look like this:

Iam 2

amthe 2

theegg 2, walrus 1

eggman 1, men 1

manthey 1

theyare 1

arethe 1

menI 1

walrus. 1

To generate text, start with a random word— say the. Pick one of the attested two-word combos at random, but respecting the probabilities— in this case, we should pick the egg 2/3 of the time, the walrus 1/3 of the time.

Keep going— note that many words only admit one continuation. In this database there’s nowhere to go after walrus, but larger corpora let you keep going indefinitely.

Generated texts from this one-line corpus are apt to be boring:

i am the egg men i am the egg men i am the egg man they are the egg man they are the egg men i am the egg man they are the egg man they are the walrus

Here’s some sentences from a Markov generator trained on The Wind in the Willows.

the dismal mole was nervous and appearing suddenly the water, reviled, 'now that's as the copses, had planted itself, but very glad to the outer world all the water from the glass, while we don't exactly what seemed to the call of a neat ears, ' the mole tripped over, ' asked the red (toad's favourite colour), yet!

' he took the sort of running away, or trip is a spurt of ham, only the rat, and aunts, 'that was a jolly life for the flowery track lies over your life and the pigeon-house, as for a loud splash a saucepan.

the river runs by earnest and its messengers to move into the toad was a swirl, who ought to escape from room to find him, and more than ever heard the whole length of 'em nerves if i suppose?

It’s surprising how many of the patterns of English this simple procedure captures. The sentences hover strangely on the edge of comprehensibility: the pieces mean something, but don’t cohere into a whole.

We can get better results by looking at three-word sequences. I leave it as an exercise for you to rework the sample database above, but the idea is of course that we pick two words, and then choose among all possible continuations based on their frequencies.

Here are some sentences output by an order-two generator (i.e. using three-word sequences) trained on Alice in Wonderland:

she caught the baby, it was so much surprised that for the moment she appeared, but it was looking for eggs, i wish you were me?"

" it's generally a frog or a watch out of their wits!"

" consider your verdict," he said was" why," said the king and the mallets live flamingos and the baby, it was so small as this before, never!"

" cheshire-puss," began alice, flinging the baby, it was all dark overhead; before her was another long passage and the caterpillar seemed to quiver all over with fright.

just at this moment and fetch me a pair of white kid-gloves in one hand and a large blue caterpillar, sternly.

You can get entertaining results by combining corpora. For instance, adding an H.P. Lovecraft story to Alice:

that child, a book,” thought alice; “the queen to play croquet with the time she went on," and what was dream and flung me to brood a persistent evil beyond anything in nature as i could shut up like a writing-desk?”

the dust and cobwebs added their touch of the whole cause, and abigail and ruth, born in 1755, abigail, born in 1759, and a frenzied sputtering, and that these uncomfortable visions could be wished, and a bright brass plate with the words “drink me” beautifully printed on it alone and guarded, complained wildly of a large mushroom growing near her, that the house.

he returned unharmed, married in 1814, and people began running when they saw alice coming.

it was labeled “orange marmalade,” but that is unutterably hideous.

You can see more results, and play with two levels of Markov generator based on several texts, at my site:

http://www.zompist.com/markov.html

Would we get even better results if we moved on to four-word sequences? In fact no— the choices are fewer, so we mostly end up with sentences from the original text.

There’s something a little worrying about Markov generators. If something this stupid can almost generate valid English, are our brains simpler than we feel they are?

Neural networks

A neural network also operates on a set of training models— in linguistic terms, a corpus of correct utterances. The network recognizes a set of features, and has a set of responses to identified features. The features and responses are predetermined by the programmer.

But the association of inputs to features, and features to responses, is learned by the system, by massive repetition. Correct feature analysis and correct responses are rewarded by making them more likely; incorrect ones by making them less likely.

The end result is similar to the Markov chain. For instance, Dan Hon trained a network on questions submitted to the Ask Metafilter website.[3]

Are there any vegetarian foods in bed?

How do I stop being dead for my dog?

Can I replace a bad man’s song?

How do I get rid of my job at my social networking site?

Where can I get rid of a 5?

How can I make my email socialist?

How do I stop this male?

How to kill odors in my friend

How do I stop a creative situation with my laptop?

Hon notes that this is a very simple system (512 neurons, two layers), and was trained in half a day of computer time.

Why do dumb rules work so well?

As we'll see, English syntax is really complex; why can we approximate it with methods that know nothing of the real world and don’t understand syntactic, much less semantic rules?

Some reassurances: the computer systems don’t understand what they’re talking about. Modeling complex systems, like languages or liquid dynamics or economies or galaxies, we often find that simple rules account for a large fraction of behavior, and explaining the rest takes more and more effort.

Still, as you consider the rules we find later in the book, it’s worth considering the question: does the brain need to know this rule? It’s perfectly possible that linguists can discover rules that are true of our language, but which are not needed for generation.

The usual culprit is historical change. This is a no-brainer in phonology: we have divergences like mouse, mice for historical reasons.

•          Old Germanic had the regular mūs, mūsiz.

•          Germanic languages had a process of umlaut, where a vowel preceding -i was rounded. Thus ū > ȳ only in the plural of ‘mouse’.

•          The suffix was lost in Old English. This left the words as mūs, mȳs.

•          By regular sound change these became /maus/ and /mais/ in modern English.

I don’t think anyone believes that umlaut is still part of English speakers’ internal grammar. Rather, we have reanalyzed mice as a quirky irregular plural.

In syntax, it’s not so clear. E.g. English has a pattern where a declarative sentence She is brilliant corresponds to a question Is she brilliant? where subject and verb are inverted. This looks like a transformation (and we’ll analyze it as such below). But it’s perfectly possible, even likely, that the transformation is historical. As Michael Tomasello points out, children learn questions first, so they are not likely to be transforming declarative sentences they don’t understand yet.

The construction bank

Another approach would be to collect a list, not of words, but of constructions— little syntactic frames that allow filling in parts. For instance, we might have the following sentence forms:

<verb>!

<subject> is a <name of a class>.

Is <subject> a <name of a class>?

There’s a <subject> <prepositional phrase>.

How <adjective> is <subject>!

<subject> <intransitive verb>.

<greeting>, <animate>!

I think <sentence>.

<subject> <form of ‘has’> had it up to here!

It’s <subject> that <verb> <object>.

<kinship term>, <verb of motion> here.

<animate> wants to <infinitive phrase>.

In <time period>, <subject> <verb>.

<subject> <verb> <one object> as well as <another object>.

What fools are <animate>, who <verb> <object>.

After <verbing> comes <NP naming a calamity>.

The more <situation>, the more <situation>.

The items in <brackets> are filled in as appropriate.

I’ve purposely included some very general constructions, as well as some rather specific ones.

Obviously, a complete grammar of English would require very many more constructions. But this number might not be excessive— surely a thousand would do.

Now, syntax has generally avoided such a grammar, because it seems inelegant and unmotivated. Many of these structures seem like special cases of a general rule, and shouldn’t we make our rules as general as possible?

On the other hand, we can easily picture a child building up a construction bank like this over time. She may well learn to say “How strange!” long before learning that interrogatives may generally be used in exclamations. She may learn to say “I think I’m thirsty” before mastering think + <sentence> in all its persons and tenses. In fact Michael Tomasello has suggested that this is precisely what children do.

One theory of grammar, Construction Grammar, is built out of constructions. For now, this is just something to keep in mind as we create more and more elaborate syntactic rules: are these ‘really present’ for speakers, or are they historical? (And even in standard syntax, we do have at least some quirky constructions; we call them idioms.)

I’ve started with these possible approaches precisely because Chomsky doesn’t. Sometimes Chomsky rushes a little too quickly to the methods he’s interested in.

Phrase structure rules

What Chomsky does start with are phrase structure rules or production rules. These are rules for replacing one string with another.

To keep things simple, let’s keep our grammars in this form:

•          We have two types of elements: terminal and nonterminal.

•          The only elements that can occur in an actual attested string of the language are terminals. In a natlang, these are words. In toy grammars we’ll often use lower-case letters.

•          A nonterminal is an element which is subject to replacement by another string. That string can itself be composed of terminal and/or nonterminal symbols. By convention we label nonterminals in ALL CAPS.

•          We always start with the nonterminal S.

Think of these grammars are defining a computer program which will produce all the sentences of the language. It always starts with S, finds all the rules which replace S, and randomly selects one. It keeps replacing nonterminals (the only one possible here is S) until there are none left. Then it starts over.

Here’s a toy grammar:

S → a

S → S a

Clearly, this grammar produces the sentences a, aa, aaa, aaaa, aaaaa, and so on, forever. (Our program might generate them in any order, and would take infinite time to generate the infinite number of possibilities, but that’s a fact about the program, not the grammar.)

I’ve provided such a program, ggg (for Generative Grammar Gadget), on my website:

http://www.zompist.com/ggg.html

You can use ggg to enter the phrase structure grammars in this chapter and take them for a spin.

Here’s a slightly more interesting toy grammar:

S → AB

S → ASB

A → a

B → b

The possible sentences of this grammar are ab, aabb, aaabbb, etc.

Can you make grammars for the following languages?

a, ab, ac, aa, aab, aac, aaa, aaab, aaac, …

any number of a followed by any number of b

up to five a followed by up to five b

cats, the cats, big cats, the friendly cats, the big friendly cats, five cats, the five cats, the five big cats, …
(how far can you extend this without reading further?)

i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi, vii, viii, ix, x
(can you do this with less than ten rules?)

It’s bad form to provide nonterminals that never evaluate, or terminals that can never be generated.

The power of grammar!

Chomsky was very interested in the power of a grammar: how many possible languages a class of grammar could produce. For a given language, his preference was to find the least powerful grammar which could generate it.

Wouldn’t we always want to use the most powerful grammar? Not necessarily. Additional power might take a more powerful machine, more computing time, more parsing time, more complex rules. Think of Chomsky’s preference as an instance of the general principle that we should prefer the simplest possible explanation that covers the facts.

He arranged grammars into what’s now called the Chomsky Hierarchy, with the most powerful at the top:

Type 0

Unrestricted

Type 1

Context-sensitive

A → ω / φ_1_φ_2

Type 2

Context-free

A → ω

Type 3

Regular

A → a | aB

The sample rules at the right are mnemonics— it will take a section each to explain them.

Context-sensitive grammars

The first possible restriction is that all rules are of the form

A → ω /φ_1_φ_2

If you’ve used my Sound Change Applier (SCA^2), or looked at linguists’ phonological rules, you’ll know exactly what this means: A changes to ω in the context φ_1_ φ2. We could also write

φ_1 A φ_2 → φ_1 ω φ_2

ω stands for any sequence of terminal and/or nonterminal elements.

A rule doesn’t have to have a context, and the context need not have elements on both sides of the _.

A specific example:

S → AB

A → Aa

A → a

B → Bb

B → b

B → p / A_

The first six rules alone would give us the language ab, aab, aaab, … abb, aabb, aaabb, … abbb, aabbb, aaabbb… Or to put it another way, anbm.

The last rule is context-sensitive: it changes B to p only after an A. So this also gives us the strings ap, aapb, aaapb, …

(We still get aabb etc. because we haven’t required the last rule to trigger.[4] And we don’t get aapp etc. because only the first b can be reached by the rule.)

Try modifying the rules to prevent aabb… strings. That is, make sure a is followed only by p.

To simplify these grammars, I will use two new conventions:

•          Multiple expansions of a symbol can be given on one line, separated by |. So S → W | WP is shorthand for S → W and S → WP.

•          ø is the null symbol. You can think of this as deleting the nonterminal.

Here’s an example:

S → W | WP

W → W1 | W2

P → as / W1 _

P → I / W2 _

W2 → W3 / _ I

I → ø

W1 → stān | hund

W2 → mūs | lūs

W3 → mȳs | lȳs

This grammar produces some Old English words and their plurals: stān, stānas, hund, hundas, mūs, mȳs, lūs, lȳs. It somewhat clumsily divides the words into two declension classes (with -as and null plurals, respectively), then applies an umlaut rule to change the vowel in the second class.

Context-free grammars

Let’s add another restriction: all rules must be of the form

A → ω

As before, ω stands for any sequence of terminal and/or nonterminal elements, but you can’t specify a context— these rules are context-free.

Can we produce the same aabb/aapb language we produced using context-sensitive rules? Sure:

S → AB | BA

S → ap | AapB

A → a | Aa

B → b | Bb

(This looks simpler than the context-sensitive version, but that’s because I’m using the | convention. Without it, it’s eight rules to seven.)

Here’s a context-free grammar which generates mathematical expressions:

S → A

A → (A)

A → +A | -A

A → A O A

O → + - * / ^ %

A → A[A]

A → A[A]

A → L

L → LL | LD | a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | m | n | o | p | q | r | s | t | u | v | w | x | y | z | _

D → DD | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

You can try this in ggg by pressing the Math expressions button. The grammar there is a bit simpler to avoid long nonsensical variable names.

Can you extend the rules to support real numbers (such as 7.45e23) and hexadecimals (such as 0xFF12)?

Regular grammars

One more restriction: all rules must be one of:

A → a

A → aB

That is, a nonterminal symbol can only be replaced by a single terminal symbol, or by a single terminal followed by a single nonterminal.

Strictly speaking this is a right-regular grammar. You can also have a left-regular grammar which allows only A → a | Ba.

If you’re thinking that regular languages (those defined by a regular grammar) are awfully simple, you’re right. Still, it’s always worth seeing what you can do.

For instance, here’s a regular grammar to produce any number of a followed by any number of b:

S → a | aS | bA

A → b | bA

Can we make sure the number of a’s matches the number of b’s (i.e. anbn)? Nope, here we run into a limitation on this class of grammar— exactly the sort of limitation Chomsky was interested in.

Here’s a right-regular grammar that defines real number constants— that is, numbers of the form <sign> <digits> . <digits> .

S → +A | -A | A

A → 0A | 1A | 2A | 3A | 4A | 5A | 6A | 7A | 8A | 9A | .B

B → 0B | 1B | 2B | 3B | 4B | 5B | 6B | 7B | 8B | 9B

B → 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

You’re probably thinking that this would be far more elegant if we could write something like S → GD | GD.D where G represents the sign, D any sequence of digits. But these rules have more than one nonterminal, which is not allowed in a regular grammar.

Can you rewrite this as a left-regular grammar?

Machines

So far we’ve talked about generating sentences, but we can also parse them: inspect a sentence and see if it’s part of the grammar or not.

It can be shown that regular languages can be parsed by a particular type of program: a finite-state algorithm (FSA). These contain a finite number of states. You can define any number of events (e.g. based on the inputs), which will send the machine to the same or a different state. A FSA cannot have internal variables or any sort of memory; the only persistent information it has is what state it’s in.

For instance, here’s a FSA which will recognize the anbm language above.

State

Input

Result

START

A

ALL-A

ø

ERROR

Else

ERROR

ALL-A

A

ALL-A

B

AB

else

ERROR

AB

B

AB

ø

SUCCESS

else

ERROR

Here’s how to be an FSA. Try it with, say, the string aabb.

- You always begin in START state.

- Look in the table, finding the rows for the state you’re in.

- Look at the next letter in the string; that’s the Input. If there’s nothing left in the string, your Input is ø.

- Find the row with that Input. Change your state to the one named under Result.

- If you end up in SUCCCESS, you’re done— your string belongs to the language.

- If you end up in ERROR, you’re also done— your string doesn’t match the grammar.

- Otherwise, go on to the next letter in the string.

If you think in terms of FSAs, you can see why we can’t handle anbn languages: the FSA has no way of counting to n.

What if you allow both right-branching and left-branching rules— both A → aB and A → Ba? Well, technically this is no longer a regular grammar; it’s a slightly more powerful grammar and can’t be handled by a FSA. But, good news, now you can generate anbn:

S → ø

S → aA

A → Sb

The minimal machine to parse a context-free grammar is a pushdown automaton. All we need to add to our FSA is a stack: a set of values where we can access only the topmost value. We can read the stack, delete the top member, or add a new member. That’s it!

For an unrestricted grammar, we need a Turing machine. This is a state machine with an infinite tape, divided into single symbols. The machine is always pointing at a single symbol on the tape. Actions are limited to one or more of these steps:

•          Rewrite the current symbol (possibly with a blank).

•          Move the tape left or right.

•          Change to a particular state.

Outside a class in programming theory, no one will ever make you write a Turing machine program. That’s because every one of your friendly digital computers is equivalent to a Turing machine. So you can think of the unrestricted grammar as just “requiring a computer program.”

A context-sensitive grammar requires a linear bounded automaton— which is a Turing machine with limited tape space, as opposed to an infinite tape. Again, in practical terms this means you need a computer program.

Should you worry about not having infinite storage? No; we talk about infinite storage because we usually want to know whether something is computable at all, and it’s not very interesting to say that an algorithm failed because it ran out of memory. If it still fails with infinite memory, that’s an interesting result!

The standard example of an incomputable problem is asking one Turing Machine to determine whether another Turing Machine will halt, based simply on reading its program and tape.

Syntactic trees

Let’s go back to this grammar, which also generates anbn:

S → AB

S → ASB

A → a

B → b

We can draw a little tree to show how a particular string was derived:

If that reminds you of a syntactic tree diagram… well, that’s exactly what it is.

Here’s a more complicated grammar and a sample tree. Here I’ve used nonterminal symbols of more than one letter; these allow much more clarity but must be separated by a space rather than concatenated.

S → NP VP

NP → Det N

Det → a | an | the

N → cat | dog | mouse | louse | animal

VP → V NP

V → loves | hates | eats | fears | is

You can directly see the production rules in the tree: e.g. NP → Det N directly corresponds to a tree fragment

You can also condense the tree as

S[ NP[Det[the] N[cat]]NP VP[ V[loves] NP[Det[the] N[mouse]]NP ]VP ]S

though you can probably also see why you wouldn’t want to.

Now, in the earliest generative grammar there were rules like N → cat, and this is reflected in the diagram. But the little unbranching straight lines don’t actually add any information, so for the remaining trees in this book I will eliminate them, like this:

OK, this is great! You can see what production rules someone is using by looking at their tree. Only, does this work with all grammars?

No, the tree gives the full derivation only if the grammar is regular or context-free. Suppose we add one more rule, making the above grammar context-sensitive:

NP V → V NP / _ NP

If we apply this rule, we can no longer draw a single tree; we have to draw two:

When you change the whole syntactic tree, you’ve got a transformation, and the grammar is a transformational grammar.

Did you notice that I pulled a fast one, changing the verb? That’s because only be and auxiliary verbs actually form questions this simply. The other verbs are more complicated; we’ll get into that below.

►Given a sentence, parsing it means finding its syntactic tree (and reversing the transformations, if any). I discuss how this can be done on p. 215.

What’s needed for a programming language?

If you’ve studied a programming language, you’ve probably seen something very much like a context-free grammar, used to define the language: Backus-Naur Form (BNF).

Pascal User Manual and Report, by Kathleen Jensen and Niklaus Wirth (1974) takes six pages to define Pascal syntax in BNF. Here’s just a portion of the definition:

<structured statement> → <compound statement> | <conditional statement> | <repetitive statement> | <with statement>

<compound statement> → begin <statement> {; <statement>} end

<conditional statement> → <if statement> | <case statement>

<if statement> → if <expression> then <statement> { else <statement> }

Nonterminals are enclosed in <brackets>; terminals are underlined. {Braces} are a convention to indicate optional elements.

Pascal syntax can in fact be defined and parsed using a context-free grammar.

But a real Pascal compiler will implement other rules that are not context-free. For instance, you have to declare variables before you use them; to catch declaration errors the compiler keeps a record of what variables you’ve defined. That’s more than our FSA is allowed to do.

Besides this problem, most modern languages are non-context-free for various reasons— e.g. C’s preprocessor allows redefining syntax on the fly, which is extremely non-context-free. If you want to check your favorite language, Google it, and someone will kindly explain why it’s not context-free.

Compilers are conceptually divided into lexers (which read character by character and produce tokens) and parsers (which read token by token). And the lexer isn’t context-free; for instance, it will privilege keywords over identifiers, require whitespace in certain places, and so on.

Nonetheless, looking from 20,000 feet, and throwing variable declarations and other problems into a separate bucket, we can say that computer languages are mostly context-free. You may need extra information to see if a program is valid, but you won’t be doing things resembling transformations.

What’s needed for a natural language?

Ah, that’s the interesting question.

The general answer: we don’t know for sure. In this book we’re going to be exploring transformations, which means we’re using context-sensitive grammars. But that’s because transformations allow far simpler grammars, not because they’re the only possible approach.

Agreement is sometimes claimed to require context-sensitive rules. But this mini-grammar handles French number and gender agreement just fine. Extending it would be tedious, but not impossible.

S=Dms ( Ams ) Nms Vs

S=Dfs ( Afs ) Nfs Vs

S=Dp ( Afp ) Nfp Vp

S=Dp ( Afp ) Nfp Vp

Dms=le|un

Dfs=la|un

Dp=les|des

Ams=bon|mauvais|laid|beau|grand

Afs=bonne|mauvause|laide|belle|grande

Amp=bons|mauvais|laids|beaux|grands

Afp=bonnes|mauvaises|laides|belles|grandes

Nms=chien|homme|garçon|chat

Nfs=souris|femme|fille|grenouille

Nmp=chiens|hommes|garçons|chats

Nfp=souris|femmes|filles|grenouilles

Vs=danse|connaît|vient|va|pue|gêne

Vp=dansent|connaisent|viennent|vont|puent|gênent

But agreement between even more constituents would be difficult or impossible in a context-free grammar:

La femme est partie quand elle était prête.

the.s.f woman be.3s left.s.f when 3s.s.f be-imperf.3s ready.s.f

The woman left when she was ready.

Apparently it’s been shown that Swiss German is context-sensitive.[5] That’s not very satisfying, as it’s just one language.

Martin Kleppmann offers a sentence which he says can’t be parsed context-free:

The square roots of 16, 9 and 4 are 4, 3 and 2, respectively.

It can be shown that the language anbncn can’t be generated by a context-free grammar. (The proof is tedious; I leave you to Google it.) Perhaps we can turn Kleppman’s statement into a form of this, making English non-context-free:

The square roots of 16, 9 and 4 are 4, 3 and 2, and the squares are 256, 81, and 16, respectively.

No one has shown that an unrestricted grammar is necessary, for merely syntactic operations. This pleases Chomsky, who would really hate to have to use those over-powerful Type 0 grammars.

When it comes to semantics or pragmatics, of course, we do have to switch to an unrestricted grammar, because we’ll need real world knowledge: meanings of words, circumstances of the utterance, even cultural knowledge about the speaker, listener, and referents. This shouldn’t bother anyone; it amounts to saying that you use syntactic methods only for syntax.

Well, as we’ll see, we might check how far we get if we do try to incorporate semantics.

Syntactic Structures

Overview

Syntactic Structures, published by Noam Chomsky in 1957 at the firebrand age of 29, is the book that ignited the generative grammar revolution. It’s well worth looking at, not least because it requires no previous reading, and it’s short. And it contains the basic and most thought-provoking ideas of GG:

- Syntax should be approached by its own rules alone; semantic rules (“a noun names a place, person, or thing”) are unhelpful and generally wrong.

- Certain possible grammars are simply wrong; they are too simple to explain known grammatical patterns.

- The surface structure of sentences is a poor guide to their meaning. You can’t write a good grammar paying attention to surface structure alone.

- The deep structure of sentences is more informative, and can be discovered by easy procedures.

- Merely putting things in order is one part of syntax, but equally important are rearrangements— transformations.

- Ambiguity is a syntactic test. If sentences are ambiguous, something about the rules that produced them should be ambiguous (e.g. two separate derivations).

- Linguists need not argue about how to find grammatical rules, which is a creative, intuitive process. Rather, we can evaluate whether one system of rules is better than another.

Now, a lot was revised later, so you may ask, why study this now?

- It’s digestible. You can grasp it as a whole and see how the pieces work.

- It’s programmable. You can load the rules in ggg and generate sentences all day long.

- It introduces the problems and methods of GG, even if we have to modify the solutions later.

At this point, Chomsky’s overall picture of a grammar consisted of three types of rules:

- First, phrase structure rules define the deep structure.

- Then, transformations apply to make quick, deep changes, producing the surface structure.

- Finally morphophonemic rules turn the surface structure into a sequence of phonemes.

The PSR portion of the grammar is quite simple.[6]

1) S → NP VP

2) VP → Verb NP

3) NP → NPs | NPpl

4) NPs → Det N

5) NPpl → Det N pl

6) Det → the

7) N → man | ball | …

8) Verb → Aux V

9) V → hit | take | walk | read | …

10) Aux → Tense (Mod)(have en)(be ing)

11) Mod → will | can | may | shall | must

If you skipped the previous chapter, these give derivations or, equivalently, structures. Each rule means “replace the symbol on the left with those on the right.” However, | separates choices, and ( ) gives optional elements.

You generate a sentence by starting with S and applying whatever rules you can, until there are no more nonterminal symbols to replace. E.g.:

Production

Rule

S

NP VP

1

NPpl VP

3

NPpl Verb NP

2

NPpl Verb NPpl

3

NPpl Aux V NPpl

8

NPpl Tense have en V NPpl

10

Det N pl Tense have en V Det N pl

5 (twice)

the man pl Tense have en hit the ball pl

6, 7, 9

This string-replacement idea is valuable if (say) you want to model the process with a computer program, but it’s also a bit tedious and hard to read. Normally we present the derivation as a syntactic tree:

If you know that this is the pre-transformation deep structure, you can read the rule applications right off the tree. Plus, transformations apply to entire trees, so this becomes the usual way of talking about structures in GG.

It’s worth pointing out that Chomsky intended this set of rules as a proof of concept— e.g. he doesn’t include demonstratives, numbers, or adjectives. If anything this added to the appeal, as readers could work on adding such details.

If it’s not clear, NPs and NPpl denote singular and plural noun phrases. This is probably not the most elegant solution to verbal agreement.

Let’s skip transformations for a moment, and go directly to the morphophonemic rules. The relevant ones look like this:

the → /ðə/

pl Tense have → /hæv/

man pl → /mɛn/

en hit → /hɪt/

ball pl → /bɔlz/

This allows us to create the phonemic representation

ðə mɛn hæv hɪt ðə bɔlz

You might have expected some rule to convert man pl to men, which is then converted to /mɛn/. However, that would create a fourth, unnecessary level of the grammar. Allowing the rules access to morphemes rather than just words makes the rules simpler, and easily handles irregularities like ‘men’.

We can also apply one or more transformations. For instance, the question transformation switches the first NP node with the following Tense + X nodes, giving us this tree:[7]

This evaluates as

hæv ðə mɛn hɪt ðə bɔlz?

There is really no stage where the written sentence Have the men hit the balls? appears. But even in SS, Chomsky rarely gives phonetic notation, and in subsequent work almost everyone just uses the written words.

The phrase structure rules above— what Chomsky calls the kernel—are detailed for verbs (more on that just below), but everything else is pretty simple: only VSO sentences are produced; the noun phrases are just nouns with an optional the; there’s no subordination. That, Chomsky would argue, is a feature: the heavy lifting is done by transformations.

English verbs

As noted, one of the most eye-catching bits of the book is Chomsky’s analysis of the English verbal complex.

Here’s his initial statement of the rules.[8]

Verb → Aux V

V → hit | take | walk | read | …

Aux → Tense (Modal) (have en) (be ing) (be en)

Modal → will | can | may | shall | must

Tense → VS / NPs _ | ø / NPpl | past

These rules are built into my ggg program. Click the SS Verb Complex button to load the rules, and try them out! Here’s some sample output:

the women were being hit by the dog[9]

the dog will eat the book

the women should have been taking the books

the dog may be being eaten by the dog

the man shall have taken by the book

the men would have hit by the women

the dogs may have eaten by the woman

the dogs are read by the book

the dog shall be taking the dogs

the woman has been being read by the dog

the books might read the dog

the dogs have been hitting the man

the dogs were taking the books

the books hit the book

the men are hitting the women

the dogs may be eaten by the books

the books must be being hit by the women

the women had hit by the women

the books would hit the dog

Yes, the semantics can be weird, but the syntax is good!

The meat of the analysis lives in this rule:

Aux → Tense (Modal) (have en) (be ing) (be en)

The optional elements are a modal verb; the perfect; the progressive; and the passive. Some examples of the combinations, using Past for Tense and take for the following verb:

T

took

T can

could take

T will

will take

T have en

had taken

T be ing

was taking

T be en

was taken

T can have en

could have taken

T must be ing

must be taking

T have en be ing

had been taking

T have en be en

had been taken

T will have en be ing

would have been taking

T can have en be ing be en

could have been being taken

En is one allomorph of the perfect suffix, as in been, taken, stolen, frozen, broken; it was presumably chosen because the more common -ed is shared with the past tense.

If you’re an English speaker, you can produce verbal complexes like this without thinking about it, but I’d wager you couldn’t come up with Chomsky’s elegant formulation: that each optional bit includes a verb and an affix, but the affixes affect the following verb.

You can confirm this from the above table, but here’s one derivation in slow motion:

To be precise, Chomsky suggests a transformation which reverses Verb+Affix (e.g. en+be) to Affix+Verb (be+en). But this strikes me as a notational issue: the morphophonemic rules can be written to handle either order. This isn’t the last such issue we’ll meet.

The arbitrariness of the English verbal complex can also be shown by looking at some of the strings it doesn't permit:

*I will can read it one modal only

*I could took the moneyone Tense only

*I was having taken it-ing must follow perfect

*I was mayen takepassive comes last

*I am had taking itwrong affixes

On the other hand, the rule doesn’t describe all dialects of English. E.g. in Southern American English, and in Scottish English, you can stack modals: I might could do it this weekend. This is neither an error in Chomsky nor in those dialects; a grammar need only describe one dialect.

By the way, what are the elements have en be ing be en? The SS rules don’t say— they’re simply members of Aux. Informally Chomsky calls them auxiliaries.[10]

The corollary is that they are not Vs. This will be important as we look at the transformational rules.

Negatives and Do-support

To handle negatives, we add a simple transformation:

Tense * → Tense * not

where * is either a verb, a modal, or one of the auxiliaries have or be.

This works fine with most of our test cases above:

T can not

couldn’t take

T will not

won’t take

T have not en

hadn’t taken

T be not ing

wasn’t taking

T be not en

wasn’t taken

T can not have en

couldn’t have taken

T must not be ing

mustn’t be taking

T have not en be ing

hadn’t been taking

T have not en be en

hadn’t been taken

T will not have en be ing

wouldn’t have been taking

T can not have en be ing be en

couldn’t have been being taken

Here, in slow motion, is the transformation applying to the first example (couldn’t take).

I past can take the bookgenerated sentence

I past can take the bookthis is Tense *

I past can not take the bookchanges to Tense * not

I couldn’t take the bookby morphophonemic rules

Let’s see what happens if we had Tense → VS (that is, present tense, 3s subject).

NP Aux V NP

→ NP Tense V NP

→ NP Tense V not NP

→ NP VS V not NP

→ NP VS V not NP

→ the man takes not the money

That works… for Shakespearean English. Chomsky fixes this in a way that at first seems wrong. He complicates the negation rule:

- If we have any auxiliaries, it’s as before:

Tense * → Tense * not

- Otherwise (it’s still Tense V), you put not right after Tense:

Tense → Tense not

Now the derivation looks like this:

NP Aux V NP

→ NP Tense V NP

→ NP Tense not V NP

→ NP VS not V NP

→ the man VS not take NP

VS doesn’t have a verb to apply to, so we’re not done yet.

We apply another transformation, Do-support: insert do before a stranded affix (one with no verb or auxiliary after it). Now we can finish the derivation:

→ the man do VS not take the money

→ the man doesn’t take the money

This also works with the other possible values of Tense:

the men do ø not take the money

→ the men don’t take the money

the man do Past not take the money

→ the man didn’t take the money

Questions

Since we have a special rule for Tense V, we could have inserted do right into the negative transformation. But it turns out Do-support solves a number of other problems, such as questions.

If there are auxiliaries, the question transformation looks like this:

NP Tense * → Tense * NP

All the complex sentences work fine:

T can he

could he take

T will he

would he take

T have he en

had he taken

T be he ing

was he taking

T be he en

was he taken

T can he have en

could he have taken

T must he be ing

must he be taking

T have he en be ing

had he been taking

T have he en be en

had he been taken

T will he have en be ing

would he have been taking

T can he have en be ing be en

could he have been being taken

If there are no auxiliaries, the rule is

NP Tense → Tense NP

Again, we’ll get a stranded Tense, which will trigger Do-support:

NP Tense V NP

→ Tense NP V NP

→ VS NP V NP

→ do VS NP V NP

→ does the man take the money?

Negative questions will work too, so long as we’re careful about the order. (Which transformation comes first?)

As an exercise, consider one more phenomenon: contrastive stress, as in

I can see it.

He could have been taking the bus.

He must have taken the bus.

He was taking the bus.

What rule(s) do you need to add to produce these? What happens to sentences without auxiliaries?

Passive

The verb complex rule in the first list I have (p. 42) doesn’t include (be en). This isn’t a typo; it’s because Chomsky moved Passive to the transformations section of the grammar.

The rule is

NP_1 Aux V NP_2

→ NP_2 Aux be en V by NP_1

The subscripts don’t indicate different types of NP (like NPs/NPpl); they simply distinguish the first and second NP.

A simple example:

John Past take (the money)

→ (The money) Past be en take by John

→ The money was taken by John

And a more complex one:

John (VPL have en) take the money

→ The money (VPL have en) be en take by John

→ The money (VPL have) (en be) (en take) by John

→ The money (VPL have) not (en be) (en take) by John

→ The money hasn’t been taken by John

Why do we want to move the passive out of the kernel? Because there are some restrictions on passives that don’t apply to the rest of the sentences generated by the verb complex rule. E.g. we can use the whole Aux V complex in the frame NP _ NP, except for passives:

John took the money

John could take the money

John would have been taking the money

…

*John was taken the money

*John had been taken the money

Two problems here require special handling:

- We need to invert the two NPs

- The original subject NP must be turned into a prepositional phrase with by

There’s also a semantic problem: many verbs require their subject to be animate:

Laura admires frankness.

*Frankness admires Laura.

The cleric drinks stout.

*Stout drinks the cleric.

We will want some rules— Chomsky calls them selectional restrictions— to rule out the starred sentences. But note that whatever mechanism we use, it must be inverted to handle passives:

Frankness is admired by Laura.

*Laura is admired by frankness.

Stout is drunk by the cleric.

*The cleric is drunk by stout.

That is, the simplest rule says something like “The subject of admire, drink, … must be animate.”  This rule fails if we throw (be en) into the verb complex rule, but it works fine if passive is a transformation that applies after the kernel sentence is generated.

There are more transformations in SS, but they’ll be covered in later chapters in a more modern framework.

Try it out!

I’ve implemented most of the Syntactic Structures rules in ggg. You can load them up by pressing the button labeled SS Sentences.

As an exercise, I suggest writing rules that handle the basics of your conlang, or a natlang you know well. See how far you can get!

A nice test of the rules is the French verbal complex. You don’t need to know French to do this; press the French data button on the ggg page and you’ll get all the information you need.

You might expect the verbal morphology to be tough, but it’s merely tedious. The tricky bits will be verbal agreement, and negation. For hints, look at the SS Sentences rules and see how Chomsky handles agreement in English.

Then you can check my own version of the French rules by pressing French verbs.

Movement

The core of GG

The two great insights of GG are that sentences have structure, and that things move around.

This chapter is going to focus on movement (and related processes like deletion and insertion), as this is the idea most likely to strike you as new and unintuitive. It’s a quick tour, not an exhaustive list; for that see the Syntactic Bestiary.

The structure is analyzed with syntactic trees, which in turn are generated by phrase structure rules. The next chapter will talk about constituents and how to recognize them in the world, and about syntactic structure.

The diagrams in this chapter are not what syntacticians usually use; they’re designed to focus on what changed rather than on the mechanics of what happened to the syntactic tree.

Moving day

Topicalization moves an object to the front of the sentence:

Neg-Hopping allows a negative word to hop over the items in the verb phrase. To put it another way, English likes to place the negative after the first verb or auxiliary, even if semantically something else is negated.

If you’re an Engish speaker, this may be so natural that you don’t even think of it as a thing th at happens. But in other languages you can’t move the negative so freely— in Mandarin, for instance, it stays strictly with the thing directly negated.

Extraposition from NP moves part of an NP to the end of the sentence:

The NP is highlighted in a lighter shade. It looks like it ends up discontiguous. (Is it really? In most theories, no, but that’s a question to revisit when we know more about syntactic trees.)

Quotation inversion moves the quotation itself (which is semantically the direct object) to the front:

As shown, we usually (but not always) also move the speech verb before its subject.

The sort of movement that Molière’s maître de philosophie noticed is called Scrambling:

In French, we can generally move only high-level constituents— vos beaux yeux, but not yeux. This constraint is not universal; below (p. 259) I’ll talk about some truly mind-blowing Scrambling in Latin.

Fixups

The transformations above are pure movements. But often something else is needed to fix up the sentence. An example is Clefting, which focuses attention on one argument of the sentence by lifting it out of place:

The boldfaced words are the fixups: French drama doesn’t stand alone, but requires a copula and dummy it; and the remainder of the original sentence becomes a relative clause.

In French, Constituent Dislocation fronts or backs an argument, but leaves a pronoun behind:

You can even move all the constituents:

There are pronouns for each dislocated constituent: elle = Lynn, la = l’histoire, lui = à Damien.

The meaning is unaffected by these movements, but they have a pragmatic effect— e.g. a fronted constituent is topicalized, and in the last example the position of à Damien is slightly marked.

Wh- Movement fronts the interrogative word:

We see one fixup here: the subject and verb are inverted (unless the interrogative itself is the subject: Who is eating muesli?)

The interrogative can be dragged up from pretty deep down:

This sentence requires another fixup: there’s no auxiliary, so Do-support kicks in.

Deletions

Many transformations involve deleting material. E.g. Imperative You Deletion removes the subject you from an imperative.

The verbal anaphor so do can be seen as removing duplicated material from a sentence:

(We’re used to nominal anaphors; we call them pronouns. So do replaces a VP rather than an NP. It’s convenient to have a term for the general phenomenon.)

To anticipate the conlanging chapter… do you have any rules that involve movements and deletions like this? It’s kind of a noob move to assume that every element of a sentence stays nicely in its place!

Thinking with transforms

With the above examples, I hope you can see why an account involving movement or deletion makes sense. Other cases may not be so obvious. E.g. Passivization:

You don’t have to use movement to handle passives, even within GG. As noted above, SS first handles passives using the phrase structure rules, and then changes to a transformational analysis.

Since Chomsky, if syntacticians see two constructions which mean roughly the same thing, they are strongly tempted to derive one from the other by a transformation.

One reason is that often, one of the two constructions is quirkier, containing what I’ve called fixups: e.g. the extra auxiliary and preposition for Passivization, or the dummy it and subordinator for Clefting. Transformations allow us to keep all the fixups out of the phrase structure rules.

Another is that it keeps the semantics simpler, as I discussed above for passives (p. 52).

Another example of quirky semantics:

It’s regrettable that I couldn’t get away with it.

Semantically, this is a mess. What’s “regrettable”? It, but it doesn’t refer to any actual thing. But this variant has just the right structure:

[That I couldn’t get away with it] is regrettable.

This correctly suggests what’s regrettable, namely the entire sentence (that) I couldn’t get away with it. So, GG proposes the transformation Extraposition:

[That I couldn’t get away with it] is regrettable.

→ It’s regrettable that I couldn’t get away with it.

Appealing once again to simplicity, we can extend this to contructions where the deep structure doesn't correspond to a spoken sentence:

[That I couldn’t get away with it] seems.

→ It seems that I couldn’t get away with it.

In this chapter I’ve emphasized transformations where one variant is already a valid sentence. But this needn’t be the case. Look at the discussion of the verbal complex in the last chapter: deep structure can be quite unlike surface structure.

Ambiguity

Another plus for the transformational approach: it handles ambiguities in surface syntax. A classic example:

The bear is eager to eat.

The bear is easy to eat.

The surface structure is identical, but the meanings are almost opposite: in the first sentence the bear is eating, in the second it’s eaten:

[the bear eats X]

[X eats the bear]

Let’s look at the full derivation of the second sentence:

First, we use Extraposition to move the subclause for X to eat the bear to the end. Then we fix up the main clause by adding dummy it. Finally we delete the vacuous for X.

Why put in for X at all? It’s compatible with non-finite clauses where the subject is overt: It’s easy for Fred to eat bears. And it expresses the semantics, namely that eat requires a subject.[11]

See if you can derive the other sentence yourself. It’s an example of Tough-movement— few adjectives allow this construction, and tough was one of the first to be studied.

For syntacticians, ambiguity is often the result of contrasting deep structures. One of Chomsky’s examples in SS:

John was frightened by the new methods.

This has two interpretations, deriving from two underlying structures:

- The new methods frightened John

The surface structure is a simple passive and the by phrase is the underlying subject.

- X frightened John using the new methods

The by phrase is an instrumental, as in They arrived by taxi.

Another example:

Brick’s hobby is frightening animals.

- If it’s the animals who are frightened, the underlying structure is Brick’s hobby is [he frightens animals].

- If it's the animals who are scary, the underlying structure is Brick’s hobby is animals [the animals are frightening].

If you have a structural ambiguity, it should disappear if one of the possible structures is ruled out for any reason. For instance, people aren’t readily interpreted as instrumentals, so this sentence can only be taken as a passive:

John was frightened by Laura.

An exercise: propose (informal) structures that explain the ambiguities in these sentences:

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

I can’t eat things like dogs.

You can explain syntax to conlangers using cartoons.

Constituents

Syntacticians spend an amazing amount of time considering what is or isn’t a constituent. Many syntactic rules are sensitive to constituent structure. So it’s worth understanding what they are and what tools we have for detecting them.

What is it?

If you already have a syntactic tree, a constituent is easy to identify: it’s a single node with all of its children.

In this tree, every node defines a constituent:

- The NPs the reader, this book, the reader of this book, everyone

- The PP of this book

- The V' has impressed

- The VP has impressed everyone

- The S as a whole

By convention we don’t call the terminal symbols (the individual words of the sentence) constituents. But note that we can have a one-word constituent, like the NP everyone.

More importantly, we can see what things aren’t constituents. For instance, none of these strings are constituents:

the reader of
reader of this book
the reader of this book has
this book has
of this
impressed everyone

These are all facts about this diagram, but note that we can have other analyses of the same sentence!

In this analysis, some of the constituents are the same (e.g. of this book, this book, everyone), but some things are defined as constituents that previously weren’t (reader of this book, impressed everyone) and some things aren’t constituents that were before (the reader, has impressed, has impressed everyone).

How do we tell what the constituents of a sentence really are?

If you already have a grammar, the answer is “what the grammar says they are.” The first tree is the result of rules that amount to

S → NP VP

VP → V' NP

V’ →  Aux V

while the second has

S → NP Aux VP

VP → V NP

To put it another way, you can’t draw trees that conflict with your production rules.

Now, syntacticians have been known to choose an analysis based on its elegance, or to conform to some meta-theoretic priorities, or because it’s the first one that they came up with which explains the data.

At the same time, they believe that constituents, like phonemes, are real at some level. That is, there is a correct analysis of a sentence. How do we know what it is?

Constituent tools

Fortunately, there are syntactic tests for constituency.

First, there’s coordination. You can conjoin constituents of the same type:

Suet pudding and toad in the hole are both desserts.

There are elves in the forest and in the mountains.

We used our ults and got a team kill.

and you can’t conjoin things that aren’t constituents:

*Most and the pants on these dudes are ugly.

*The king of England hates flattery and of France is dead.

or constituents of different types:

*I married my sweetheart and on Tuesday.

*The gray goo is mostly and has been cooked.

Another test is movement. Many transformations allow a constituent as a whole to be moved:

My friend Karen left → Did my friend Karen leave?

Critics savaged his book → His book was savaged by critics

The whole team did it → It was the whole team that did it

We came back on Thursday → On Thursday we came back

I said you were alive → You were alive, I said.

This test improves the more transformations you know: one reason to get familiar with the bestiary of transformations.

We can use constituents to answer a question:

Who’s responsible for this?
—The whole team.

When did the murder occur?
—On Thursday afternoon.

What did you do today?
—Studied my syntax book and took some notes.

In general, non-constituents can’t be used to answer a question. E.g., from the diagrams above, the reader of, of this, book has.[12]

Have you noticed, like, how people will insert like into their sentences, even though it’s not, like, meaningful? This insertion isn’t random, though; it seems to occur between high-level constituents.

The elves are, like, our friends.

*The, like, elves are our friends.

Suet pudding is, like, as tasty as it sounds.

*Suet, like, pudding is as tasty as it sounds.

John Ross calls the slots where things can be inserted niches. Other things you can put in niches: perhaps; if you please; crazy as it sounds; —he said—…

Italian has a similar insertion, with tipo ‘type, kind’:

Ho fatto un sogno in cui ero, tipo, piccolo e veloce, e ho cercato di ucciderlo, e poi ho fatto un altro sogno in cui tipo uccidevo l'insegnante di scienze.

I had a dream where I was, like, little and fast, and I tried to kill him, and then I had another dream where, like, I was killing the science teacher.

By contrast um is acceptable between any words. Not between certain morphemes, though:

The um elves are unbelievable.

*The elves are unbelieve-um-able.

The um king’s castle is over there.

*The king um ’s castle is over there.

It seems harder to break up an Adj+N combo if it’s lexicalized:

I’ve always wanted to um live in a white um house.

?I’ve always wanted to live in the White um House.

Clefting is a transformation that moves major constituents:

The orcs are selling their dungeon this summer.

→ It’s the orcs that are selling their dungeon this summer.

→ It’s their dungeon that the orcs are selling this summer.

→ It’s this summer that the orcs are selling their dungeon.

→ *It’s their dungeon this summer that the orcs are selling.

I loosely say “major constituent” because parts of a constituent can’t always be clefted:

The goblins want to sell their huts near Borridge.

→ *It’s their huts that the goblins want to sell near Borridge.

→ *It’s goblins that the want to sell their huts near Borridge.

→ ?It’s Borridge that the goblins want to sell their huts near.

Anaphors usually replace or stand for constituents. That is, if you have a grammatical sentence, you can generally get another one by replacing a constituent with an anaphor of the right type.

Noun phrases, of course, are replaced with pronouns:

The newly crowned queen dreamed of empire.

→ She dreamed of empire.

But there are other anaphors. Such, for instance, is an adjective anaphor:

We need rare and magical books— where can we find such things?

There is an anaphor for a PP:

You have a cabin in the woods, but I have a mansion there.

Above we met the verbal anaphor so:

I have finished my syntax homework, and so has Laura.

We can take this as evidence that finished my syntax homework is a constituent. The SS rules don’t agree— which is a sign that they’re not quite right.

For some reason, Chomsky and his followers use anaphor only for reflexives. I prefer the broader usage, because we already have a perfectly good word for reflexives, and without anaphor we don’t have a good word for the whole range of “things like pronouns but not restricted to NPs.”

The verbal complex

The rules from SS analyze a sentence like this:[13]

In this tree, below the S level, the only non-NP constituents are might have been, might have been taking, and might have been taking the jewels.

But the conjunction test identifies other constituents:

Laura might have been taking the jewels and hiding the gold.

Laura might have been taking the jewels and gone to Borneo.

I’m not sure this works—

?Laura might have been taking the jewels and be going to Sydney tomorrow.

But simpler sentences do have everything after the modal as a constituent:

Faith might do some parkour and order a pizza.

You can kill or be killed.

The constituent structure must be something like this:

The new nodes need labels. The V' and T' nodes will be explained in the next chapter. The labels for might, have, been are at least defensible, but other labeling schemes have been used.

- Modals like might are fairly distinct from verbs:

- they lack most of the inflected forms

- they participate directly in Question Inversion and other processes where ordinary verbs require Do-support

- they never appear as the only verb in a sentence[14]

- Have and been are somewhere in between.

- they inflect like other verbs.

- They don’t require Do-support

- They can appear as the main verb, but not in their auxiliary sense

We can cross-check the analysis using the anaphor (V) too:

Laura is taking the jewels and I am too.

Laura has been taking the jewels and Han has too.

Faith might try out some parkour and Celeste might too.

A difference from the SS analysis is that might have been is no longer a constituent. Try to see if that’s correct.

Verb phrases

Our tests agree that a VP is a constituent:

Greg moved to London and married a cab driver.

What did Greg do? Move to London.

Greg moved to London and so did Hailey.

Are we quite sure that the subject NP plus the verb isn’t a constituent?

John wrote and Aditya directed the movie.

We watched the movie that John wrote.

It’s tempting to assume a structure [NP V' NP] and allow the V' to group with either NP. If it doesn’t follow Chomsky’s rules, so much the worse for them!

Still, some of the tests don’t allow [NP V]. It’s hard to think of a question based on John wrote the movie which would be answered John wrote, and there aren’t any focusing or clefting rules that move this as a constituent:

*John wrote is what the movie.

So we might stick with [V NP] as a constituent, and find other explanations for the apparent counterexamples. For instance, the first one can be analyzed as a transformation, Right Node Raising; compare

John is eager to please and Biff is willing to please.

→ John is eager, and Biff is willing, to please.

Thus, English has multiple mechanisms for deleting duplicate material, and the first sentence looks like one of them. This might also explain why might have been can appear in conjunctions:

Laura might have been, and should be, taking the jewels.

As for the relative clause (…that John wrote), a more general explanation is that the movie was moved out of the subclause, not that John wrote was moved into it. This is supported by the fact that we can move quite a few things out of a subclause, leaving odd syntactic residue behind:

Do you remember the eclipse that we saw that summer?

We met Mary, who Irving sold a refrigerator to.

You should visit Rohan, which Éomer is king of.

Noun phrases

SS has very little about NP structure. To handle a sentence like

the big red button on the wall

you might be tempted to add everything in at once:[15]

NP → Det (Adj+) N (PP+)

This will result in a tree like this:

But we can see that there’s more internal structure, using the anaphor (not the number) one. In the following sentences, one implies all the underlined material.

You have a big red button on the wall, and I have a big blue one.

You have a big red button on the wall, and I have one on the floor.

I know about that big red button, but what does this little one do?

You can get similar results with the coordination test.

As with the verb complex, the end result is a much more vertical tree:

What are these N' nodes? We’ll get to that in the next chapter, but for now, they’re constituents that can be replaced by one but don’t have a determiner. (So one is not a pro-NP but a pro-N'.)

We’ll need to update the production rules:

NP → Det N'

N' → N | Adj N' | N' PP

A collection of heads

A terminal node, the one right above an actual word, belongs to a part of speech. In X' theory we call them heads, because each one will turn out to be the head of a particular type of phrase.

Traditional grammar defined parts of speech in semantic terms— e.g. verbs are events or states, nouns are things. This isn’t very satisfactory, not only because it mixes syntax and semantics but because exceptions are common as dirt. Fear, destruction, energy, color, love, shooting, arrival don’t exactly name “persons, places, or things”. Does in Does he lift? is not a state or event.

In Nuuchahnulth, a distinction between noun and verb is hard to maintain— a root is a verb if it’s used verbally, a noun if it’s used nominally.

Waɬa:k-ma qo:ʔas-ʔi.

Go-3s.pres man-the

The man is going.

Qo:ʔas-ma waɬa:k -ʔi.

Go-3s.pres man-the

The one going is a man.

How do you define parts of speech? With syntactic rules, of course.

Inflection is a good test, though particular words may fail it. English nouns can be pluralized; verbs can be inflected for tense, and sometimes person and number. Adjectives can take comparative -er and superlative -est.

Derivational inflections can change the part of speech, and thus tell you what the new one is. If you see -ness, -tion, -ity, -ology you have a noun on your hands. Verbs may contain -ize, -ify, re-. Adjectives may end in -al, -ish, -ian, -able. Final -ly is typical of adverbs.

A surer test is what syntactic frames a word can appear in:

the _

noun

two _s

noun

with _

noun

I will _

verb

has _ed

verb

is _ing

verb

the two _ birds

adjective or noun

the birds are _

adjective or noun

very _

adjective or adverb

I’ve gone through these quickly because you probably know it already, especially if you’ve read my other books. But now it gets more difficult.

A conjunction separates two constituents of the same type: Sam and Max; lost or discarded; poor but happy.

A preposition (P) is easy to identify when it’s the head of a constituent, right before an NP: on the water, without feathers, to Max.

Uh oh, did you notice that those definitions overlap? What’s the part of speech of minus in this sentence?

Seven minus three is four.

Let’s do some syntax. There are some standard though fallible tests for prepositions. For instance, they can usually be modified by right:

He fell right in the river.
She lives right down the street.
He disappeared right before the explosion.
*Seven right minus three is four.

A PP can often be fronted:

Up the hill she walked.
*Minus three seven is four.

You can front a PP and replace the NP with an interrogative, or front just the questioned element:

Sam is the king of England.
Of what is Sam the king?
What is Sam king of?

Four is seven minus three.
*Minus what is four seven?
*What is four seven minus?

PPs allow Gapping:

Sam is king of England, and Joe, of France.
*Four is seven minus three, and two, minus five.

These tests aren’t definitive, but minus is failing every one of them. Conjunction might be a better bet… but note that you can say minus two, where minus is a unary operator. And that it only conjoins mathematical expressions:

*John is punctual, minus polite.

(So what is minus? I don’t know if syntacticians have asked the question, but my answer is: none of the above, it’s an operator. Mathematical expressions really don’t follow the rules of English syntax; they follow the rules of mathematics. And the difficulties above are one reason I come to that conclusion!)

Prepositions also cause trouble when they appear without an NP, or when they double up:

It fell off.

Are you coming with?

I got it up over the gate.

The usual dodge is to call them particles, but notice that these sentences have close variants with ‘real’ prepositions: Are you coming with me? It fell off the table. I got it up the road. So maybe we should just call the above prepositions lacking their NP.

Still, there are particles (often formally identical to prepositions) which never take an object:

Do you give up?

I called in sick.

He was called out on Twitter.

Some but not all prepositions can have a subclause as their object:

After he met the snake, Harry spoke another language.

By destroying the Ring, you have defeated Sauron.

*With writing a check, Scrooge funded the orphanage.

There are noun-noun compounds: cement truck; error management specialist; noun phrase; Chomsky hierarchy; brain damage, fiction editor. How do we label these in a syntactic tree? Note that they lose some of the usual characteristics of nouns: they usually can’t be inflected (*nouns phrase); they resist some modifiers (*fiction of Japan editor; ?unreadable fiction editor).

Adverb is the traditional wastebin for modifiers that aren’t adjectives or nouns. They can modify both adjectives and verbs, so we’re stuck with that, but we might want to distinguish between adverbs based on what they modify:

- Ad-S: You will probably die in there. What’s probable is the entire proposition You will die in there.

- Ad-VP: I really read your manuscript. What I really did was read your manuscript.

- Ad-V: She hit the targets accurately. The accuracy directly describes her hitting.

An ad-V can’t be fronted, and an ad-S can’t be backed:

*Accurately she hit the targets.

*You will die in there probably.

More precisely, you can back an ad-S if you pause before it, but an ad-VP doesn’t need the pause:

You will die in there, probably.

You will die in there brutally.

Exercise for the reader: Call an adverb that modifies an adjective an Ad-Adj. What’s the overlap with the above three categories? Are there any Ad-Adjs that only modify adjectives?

If you look at languages besides English, and especially those outside Europe, you have to be prepared to recognize new or different syntactic categories.

- In Mandarin, you will need measure words (e.g. běn ‘volume’), coverbs (yòng ‘using’), and verb-object compounds (kàn-shū ‘read’). And its ‘adjectives’ are a type of verb— e.g., they can take aspect particles.

- Many languages have ideophones, single words which express a sensory event, e.g. Gbaya loɓoto-loɓoto ‘large animals plodding through mud’, or Mundari rawa-dawa ‘the sensation of realizing you can do something reprehensible without any witness’. They’re usually only loosely tied to the structure of the sentence.

- Positionals describe the form and position of objects, e.g. Tzeltal chepel ‘be located in a bulging bag’. They’re a distinctive category both morphologically and syntactically.

A phrase is a constituent whose function is inherited (or projected) from its head: e.g. NP, VP, PP. This definition is more intuitive than rigorous, but note that where an NP or VP occurs, a very similar sentence with an N or V can also occur:

I met some men with very fuzzy beards.

I met some bearded men.

I met men.

You may have been writing books about aliens.

You were writing books.

You wrote.

The same can be said of PPs, though this doesn’t work with all prepositions, or all languages:

Ernesto is in his office.

Ernesto is in.

*Ernesto is office.

It’s possible that syntactic categories are fuzzy. For instance, consider the “verbishness” of these constructs:

I am a baker of cookies.

The baking of cookies is a fine art.

Baking is a fine art.

I love to bake.

His baking these cookies was a rare treat.

I am baking from four to seven.

I baked all day.

We have some standard answers on which of these are nouns and which are verbs, but things get less nouny and more verby as you go down the list. (And even the conventions differ. We generally consider the infinitive a verb, but in Sanskrit it’s morphologically a noun.)

Another example is numerals in Russian. The number один ‘1’ acts entirely like an adjective (it agrees in gender and case with a following noun), while миллион ‘million’ is a noun (the numeral has its own gender, and the following noun is in the plural genitive). The numbers in between form a gradient, acquiring more nouny features as they get larger.

Personal pronouns are distinctive in English— they can occur where an NP does; unlike nouns, they have accusatives and reflexives. They usually can’t be modified.[16]

Other anaphors are structurally something of a mixed bag. We’ve met one, do so, such, (V) too. These have various etymologies, but have evidently picked up a new function.

The conventional wisdom about anaphors is that they require antecedents— that is, they are abbreviations you can use after you’ve introduced some referent. Strictly speaking this is only true of third person pronouns and verbal anaphors; I, you, and indefinite pronouns like everyone don’t need antecedents.

Even this isn’t quite accurate. Here’s the beginning of a science fiction story (“The Cold Equations”, by Tom Godwin).

He was not alone. There was nothing to indicate the fact but the white hand of the tiny gauge on the board before him. The control room was empty but for himself….

It goes on for six pages without naming the guy!

We’ll look more at pronoun behavior later, but I’d point out that pronouns don’t really belong to syntax or even semantics, but to pragmatics, the study of utterances in context. I and you obviously take their meaning only in a specific context, referring to the speaker and listener(s). The most general rule for other anaphors is not so much that they need an antecedent, but that the listener can identify who they refer to. (In Godwin’s story, the answer is obviously “the protagonist”! We expect that a story is about someone; it can get going without telling us their name.)

Constraints

Since I was talking about conjunctions above, let me bring up an interesting fact: you can’t use a transformation to move just one conjoint, or a piece of one, out of a conjunction:

Topicalization:

I’ve met Mary. → Mary, I’ve met.

I’ve met Mary and Sue. → *Mary, I’ve met and Sue.

Wh- movement:

We fixed [what] → What did we fix?

We fixed [what] and the syntax level.

→ *What did we fix and the syntax level?

Relativization:

I finished off the Zarya [Sombra hacked Zarya]

→ I finished off the Zarya that Sombra hacked.

I finished off the Zarya [Sombra hacked Genji and Zarya]

→ *I finished off the Zarya that Sombra hacked Genji and.

Now, we could perhaps handle this by carefully modifying these three transformations, and perhaps many more. John Ross proposed instead that we impose a Coordinate Structure Constraint which prohibits such sentences.

So if you picture the phrase structure rules as a machine that bubbles up possible sentences, which are then modified by transformations, constraints are like a quality control inspector that throws out certain derivations.

This mechanism wasn’t present in SS, but it proved irresistible later on, and constraints multiplied. If you are not sure if something should be handled as a transformation or as a constraint, try for whatever makes the grammar simpler.

X-bar syntax

Starting with “On Nominalization” in 1970, Chomsky attempted to unify the behavior of all constituents, a stage known as X' (X-bar) theory. [17]

In  the last chapter we saw some commonalities between noun phrases and verb phrases:

- Several N' or V' layers above the noun or verb, each of which is a constituent which can be targeted by conjunction or pronominalization

- The highest layer (NP or VP) is a unit that can play a role in an entirely different constituent

Complements and adjuncts

We  can add another one:  the sister of  the bare N or V acts differently from the sister of an N' or V'. It’s useful to give them separate names: the sister of an N or V is a complement; that of an N' or V' is an adjunct.

For nouns, both are likely to be prepositional phrases. Complements tend to take of. E.g.

the house of stone on the river near Porridgeton

a book of proverbs by Rumi

this clone of Ormant with greasy skin

I’ve bolded the complements and underlined the adjuncts.

What are the differences? First, the complement is by definition next to the noun, and can’t be moved away from it:

?the house near Porridgeton of stone

*a book by Rumi of proverbs

*a clone with greasy skin of Ormant

For some speakers, only an N' plus adjunct can be replaced by one: they would accept only the first of these sentences:

I read the book by Rumi, but not the one by Saki.

I read the book of poems, but not the one of proverbs.

(They both sound fine to me.)

Finally, because the N can only have one parent, we can only have one complement, but many adjuncts:

the book of diatribes by Chomsky from OUP with a red cover

*the book of diatribes of prose by Chomsky

A complement isn’t necessary, of course— we can say a house near Porridgeton, a book by Rumi, etc. But to capture the syntactic behavior, we will create an N' node for the complement anyway:

By convention we label both the house of stone and the house near Porridgeton an N', but arguably they’re different constituent types, as they can’t be conjoined:

*the house of stone and near Porridgeton

*the book of diatribes and from OUP

What about verbs? Here the complement is the direct object; the adjuncts are adverbials or prepositional phrases.

I wrote the book in a single session, with a quill pen.

I wrote that tweet angrily, without much thought.

They require different anaphors: a direct object can be replaced by a personal pronoun, verbal adjuncts by adverbials (thus, that way, so).

Note also that VPs and nominalizations (i.e. some NPs) look very similar indeed: Attila conquered the city / Attila’s conquest of the city; Bill gave a statue to the school / Bill’s gift of a statue to the school. The complement of the VP (the object) becomes a complement of the noun. More on this below, p. 138.

X-bars

X-bar theory moves on to make a bold claim: all the major constituents have the same structure. That is, for any single-word category X,

- It can have a complement, forming an X' node

- It can have multiple adjuncts, each comprising another X'

- The top level is an XP, and has some sort of specifier

As Andrew Carnie notes, the evidence for a complement/adjunct distinction is “considerably weaker” for adjectives and prepositions. With adjectives, we can say that post-adjective phrases are complements (sick of computers, happy to be here, eager for cake), while adverbs (which can stack: really extremely mad) are adjuncts.

Notationally, you are supposed to respect the X - X' - XP hierarchy in all your trees— even if only one word is involved. This leads to structures like:

It seems to be a rule that the longer a generative grammar tradition goes on, the deeper its trees become. The generative semanticists were just as bad.

It’s bad graphical practice, however, to clutter diagrams with things that add no information. (Edward Tufte calls this chartjunk.) I will draw the above tree as

That is, I will leave out X' nodes with a single daughter, and  I won’t break down one-word XPs low in the tree.

This practice also anticipates Minimalism, which also collapses nodes with single daughters.

I must note, however, that if you include all the nodes demanded by X' theory, you get a neat generalization:

- The object of a construction is dominated by an X'. So the object of a VP is right under a V'; the object of a PP is right under an N'.

- The subject of a construction is the sister of an XP. So the subject of a sentence is an NP adjoined to the VP.

The later Chomsky likes defining things in terms of position in a structure. In the Relational Grammars chapter we’ll see a very different approach.

Are they really the same?

How much you like X' theory probably depends on how much you like abstraction or elegance, as opposed to strict evidence.

Some commonalities have been recognized for a long time, in the form of the terms noun phrase, verb phrase, prepositional phrase. It’s undeniable that sentences are made up of constituents rather than single words.

Still, we may be disregarding important differences. E.g. complements are far more differentiated from adjuncts for verbs than they are for nouns. There’s lots of special behavior for direct objects: they resist deletion; they may involve morphological case or verb agreement ; they can be the subject of further transformations like Passive or Raising. Plus, it appears that ditransitives contradict the rule that there  can only be one complement:

Shaundi gave her pursuers the slip.

They call the wind Maria.

In English, it makes sense to say that a verb clings very closely to its complement. It’s awkward or wrong to insert anything between a verb and its direct object:

I ate (?quickly, ?recently, *for dinner, *in the evening) an entire pig.

But in French or Spanish, you normally place your adverbs right after the verb:

Je bois parfois du vin.

I sometimes drink wine.

J’aime passionément cette femme.

I passionately love that woman.

(X' theory suggests that they’re moved there; I’d counter-suggest that this is awfully Anglocentric.)

Now let’s see what happens when we apply X' theory to sentences and determiners.

Sentence level(CP, TP)

At the sentence level, we get a structure compatible with X' theory simply by relabeling might as a T:

Well, except that the parent of an T' should be a TP. And you can call it that! But I’ll continue to use the traditional S.

It’s useful to also look at a simpler sentence with no auxiliaries:

We didn’t throw out the T node; we kept it and placed the marker Past in it. In fact, the reason for the name is now evident: it stands for Tense. (But since modals live here too, T is a little less confusing.)

What about tense on modals? When we put a modal sentence into the past, we do see that there are tensed modals:

He says he can go. → He said he could go.

She says she may drink. → She said she might drink.

On the other hand, we also use the ‘past’ modals in the present tense:

I could go if you drive.

She says she might drink tonight.

(This is just a historical fact about English, but it’s not at all uncommon for past tenses to be used as a form of irrealis. E.g. French Si on allait?, literally “If we went”, used for “Shall we go?”)

In X' theory tense is really a feature; we could also write Past as ø[+Past] and might in the last sentence as may[+Past]. That seems a little fussy, but it at least shows that modals and tense can live in the same T node.

One reason to keep T separate from the VP is that transformations can extract just the VP. For instance, VP Deletion:

Laura didn’t take the jewels, but Selina took the jewels.

→ Laura didn’t take the jewels, but Selina did.

The transformation didn’t affect everything past the subject NP, because then we’d have a different sentence:

→ Laura didn’t take the jewels, but Selina.[18]

So VP Deletion removed the VP take the jewels, but not Past:

The naked T triggers Do-support, giving us the surface sentence. (I’ll get back to that Neg element, but for now, note that it blocks the first T from affecting take, so it requires Do-support too.)

Embedded sentences

The simplest form of subordination just prepends a sentence with that:

Elvis has left → I believe that Elvis has left.

We can diagram the subclause itself as:

(As we’re not presently interested in the substructure of the S, I’ve given its top-level constituents only.)

We can show with the coordination test that Elvis has left remains a constituent:

I believe that Elvis has left and Elvis will come again.

To match the other X' structures, we need a CompP above Comp'. So we boldly add one, with a blank daughter (marked ø):

Although we can hardly give evidence that there’s a blank node in this sentence, it will be useful later when we examine transformations within X' theory.

There are other forms of subordination: for Elvis to have left; Elvis’s leaving; Elvis leaving; whether Elvis left. We can place the subordinators (for/to, ing, whether…) in Comp as well.

Determiner level

SS didn’t put anything but the into the Det slot, but quite a few things can fit here:

the big bad wolf

a fine mess

her lovely eyes

that shade of purple

those superhero movies

Chomsky’s dissertation

many long nights

which witch

You might wonder if some of these are modifiers rather than determiners; but notice that choosing one rules out the others, which is good evidence that they’re the same category.[19]

Curiously, articles are one of the few things that can’t be conjoined: *the or a wolf. You also can’t conjoin different types of Det: *the or those sunflowers; *Chomsky’s or many garden gnomes. But you can have this or that wolf; most or all linguists; Chomsky’s or my theory.

Determiners don't stack… with some very quirky exceptions.

- We can say all the wolves, both her husbands, all those velociraptors, but not *all a wolf, *some Chomsky’s books, *all many nights.

- We can’t have *some the wolves, *many her people, *no a boy, although we can say many a night and the queen’s every desire was fulfilled.

McCawley suggests (SPE p. 373) that the underlying structure is all of the wolves, and a transformation sometimes deletes the of.

What are numerals? Syntacticians have debated whether they’re determiners, adjectives, or nouns. They freely combine with the determiners (the two ships, those five monkeys…). On the other hand they have to precede adjectives (*the red five houses) and can’t be conjoined with them (*the friendly and six bosses).

But then adjectives prefer to appear in a certain order— something like valuation, size, shape/quality, age, color, origin, material, purpose:

the big old house

a beautiful square metal bracket

a thin German man

?the old big house

?a Dutch fat beautiful painter

(Well, this is weak as grammatical rules go. Add a pause after the ‘out of order’ adjectives, or add contrastive stress, and they sound much better.)

And conjunctions of very different types of adjectives are at least a little strange:

?We own a big and Japanese home.

?This book is electronic and Chomskyan.

So maybe numerals are just a quirky subcategory of adjectives, one that doesn’t like the other subcategories much.

►Below (p. 123) we’ll return to whether quantifiers and numerals are really Dets.

GG got by for years placing determiners in a single Det node, but this does violate a proposed rule— that the only head in an NP is the N. But there’s a rectification: make the Det into a DetP!

That gives that dinosaur the following alarming structure:

A massive corollary: the arguments of sentences are no longer NPs but DetPs.[20]

I don’t see a compelling reason for this analysis, but there’s one phenomenon where a DetP does make sense: possessive phrases with ’s. A word like John’s looks like a case form— and that’s exactly what it was in Old English— but today ’s attaches to an NP, not an N:

the queen of England’s corgi

the lady in white’s coat

The Stars My Destination’s sales

the guy I met yesterday’s job

Andrew Carnie diagrams possessives like this:

But this has ’s corgi as a constituent, which seems absurd. Plus we can say The president’s and the queen’s advisors, which means that the possessor-plus-’s is a constituent. So I prefer McCawley’s analysis:

(Well, he’d make the queen of England’s a Det, but in general he uses XP or X' for nonterminals, so I think we could talk him into DetP.)

Another instance of a DetP is modified quantifiers, as in

much too much bread

all too many problems

Theta roles

As we’ve seen, in SS Chomsky supplied actual words with production rules, like V → take. Morphological rules changed words and affixes directly into phonetic representations: ing take → [tekɪŋ].

Chomsky worked on phonology as well, writing The Sound Pattern of English with Morris Halle in 1968. This was a transformational theory, but its most enduring contribution was binary features. E.g. you could represent the velar consonants as [+velar +stop], or high front vowels as [+high +front]. If you’ve used my Sound Change Applier, you’ve probably used features in the form of special categories, such as G=kgɣ for velars.

Unsurprisingly, Chomsky applied features to syntax as well, as far back as Aspects. He used them to deal with case and agreement, and this persists in X' theory, under a new name: theta roles. You can take the θ as short for thematic.

In Aspects he suggests that the production rules apply features such as [+animate], [+plural], [+masculine], [+accusative], and so on. More boldly, he suggested that verbs be marked with features like this:

leave, wait, sleep

[+NP_]

eat, shoot, cook

[+NP_NP]

ask, think

[+NP_{NP,CompP}]

put

[+NP_NP PP]

name, spare

[+NP_NP NP]

In X' theory, this information is stored in the lexicon not as features but as a theta grid. For put it looks like this:

Agent

Patient

Goal

NP

NP

PP

i

j

k

The top row gives the theta role— the semantic role; more on this below (p. 222). We underline one of the theta roles to indicate that it’s the subject (p. 230).

The second row gives the type of constituent to look for. (Substitute DetP if you agree that arguments are of this category.)

Finally, the indices in the last row simply give the order of the arguments, which we can indicate in a sample sentence:

Murgatroydi put the laserj on the bridgek.

The general idea of theta grids is to act as a constraint— a rule that prevents certain derivations (p. 80).

- In this case: you can’t use put in a sentences that doesn’t have the required argument structure NP _ NP PP.

- Another example: the Past and Present markers we’ve placed in the T node. These require that the verb below them be in the appropriate tense.

- Yet another: the various complementizers. E.g. that has a feature requiring a finite clause; for…to a non-finite clause.

Theta grids in X' theory seem a bit grafted on, and the idea of a constraint— that is, of generating sentences and throwing some of them out— seems to have bothered Chomsky. Minimalism can be said to be all theta grids, much more tightly integrated into production. But more on that later.

The verbal complex redux

Theta grids are used to explain the order of the auxiliaries in the English verbal complex. Let’s see how it’s done, then contrast it to an alternative view.

In X' theory, we use theta grids. These can be summarized as follows. The second column sets the constraints on the first V below.

modals

root

have (perfect)

-perfect past.participle

be (progressive)

-perfect -progressive present.participle

be (passive)

-perfect -progressive -passive past.participle

The ordering is not given by this table, but by the constraints themselves. For instance, suppose we have this structure:

The theta grid for must (a modal) says that the V can only be a bare root, so this structure is rejected. If it was go, it would be OK.

This structure is also rejected:

Here must is happy, because it all it wants is a verb in root form below it, and it has one (have). But have requires a past participle below it, and what it has is a present participle (going).

(It also requires that there’s not another perfect have below it, since that would produce bad things like *must have had gone.)

If you work it out, the order is correctly accounted for. However, the feature list is highly unmotivated; it just produces the linear order in a weird way, and doesn’t give any reason for the order.

McCawley tries to do so. First, he suggests that a major constraint is not lexical, but morphological: many of the auxiliaries lack certain forms, and derivations that require them are excluded. E.g.:

Sam Past (be ing) (have en) must go to Mordor.

→ *Sam was having musten go to Mordor.

This is rejected because must doesn’t have a past participle.

In fact, the modals only have present and past forms, and the only ordering which allows this is to put the modals first.

To reinforce this, note that French, which does have infinitives of modals, can place them after the passé composé:

J'ai voulu pouvoir passer le prendre à 18h.

I have-1s want-past.part can-inf pass-inf him take-inf at 18 h(ours)

I wanted to be able to come pick him up at 6 p.m.

For the perfect, he proposes multiple Tense nodes. An example:

→ Sarah had played Hamlet.

A single T node acts as we expect by now: it affects the verb or auxiliary below it. A second Past node, however, turns into perfect have. (If you had such a thing as a second Present node, it wouldn’t do anything.)

(Why are the T nodes paired with extra S nodes? Briefly, because he wants to use Raising to move the subject out of deep structure. See his book for details, §8a. For Raising, see p. 106 below.)

This makes sense if you think of the pluperfect: e.g. we can say

Sarah took the role of Hamlet because she had played it before.

There are two past events here, with “Sarah playing Hamlet” occurring before “Sarah taking the role [again]”, so a double Past works out.

However, it doesn’t really make sense with other types of perfect (see ALC p. 136), such as the experiential perfect: Sarah has been to Stratford. This does not mean that she was there in the “past before the past”, it means that she was there at least once.

McCawley suggests that the progressive occurs after (subordinated to) the perfect for semantic reasons. In predicate calculus terms, the idea is that

relevant( continuing( drinks(Jim) ))
= Jim had been drinking

is meaningful while

continuing( relevant ( drinks(Jim) ))
= Jim is having drunk

is not, perhaps because it’s redundant— “continues to be relevant” is more or less equivalent to “is relevant.”

(Relevant is meant to summarize the perfect of results, which asserts that an event has happened and that this is currently relevant or important. Imagine the continuation …so he fell down the stairs.)

This isn’t a very strong argument, but McCawley does provide an interesting context where progressive + perfect is acceptable:

Whenever I see you, you’re always just having returned from a vacation.

Finally— and I’m oversimplifying here— Passive occurs last because it’s a transformation that applies to the lowest S in the sentence. If we have a structure like

[[[[Sarah read the play] be+ing] Past] Past]

then Passive operates on Sarah read the play— it can’t operate on any higher level because there’s no direct object to extract.

We’ve now accounted for the English verbal complex in three different ways! (SS, X', McCawley.) This may be confusing, but I think it would be misleading to present just one way of analyzing syntax as the correct or best-accepted one. For almost everything in this book, strikingly different alternatives have been proposed!

Negation

In SS, not was placed only after the first modal or auxiliary; or if there was none, after an inserted do. But this is insufficient: not can apply to each V' in the verbal complex:

I mustn’t see you tonight. [not + modal]

I might have been not dancing. [not + progressive]

I might have not made myself clear. [not + perfect]

You could go but not stay. [not + V]

In X' theory we’d have this tree:

Adding three nodes for not seems like overkill. Is there really a NegP?[21] Plus, we’ve placed this NegP precisely where we’d expect a VP, which at the least would require changing the generation rules for T'. Also, the theta grid for the auxiliaries would have to peer past the NegP to the lower VP.

For these reasons, I prefer McCawley’s analysis, which simply treats not as creating a new V' node, exactly like an auxiliary. That suggests the following tree:

(Well, this is his surface structure. See p. 127.)

X-bar movement

The transformations in SS look rather arbitrary, as if any sequence of strings could change into any other. Passive, for instance:

NP_1 Aux V NP_2

→ NP_2 Aux be en V by NP_1

In 1970 Joseph Emonds pointed out that Passive consists of three operations that put things in very expectable locations:

- NP_2 is moved into subject position, a logical place for NPs

- be en is inserted before a V, again a place where verbs can go

- by NP_1 is inserted after the V, where a PP can be found

You could view this as a constraint on writing transformations. But I mention it to sweeten the exposition of X' theory, because it rigidly constrains transformations. Very roughly:

- We can move one head to a blank head in a higher node; this is head-to-head movement.

- We can move an NP into a blank head in a higher node. Note that movements are only upward, never downward.[22]

- We can (in some cases) insert something into a blank node.

As we’ll see, this simplicity is achieved partly by moving some of the mechanisms of SS-style transformations into theta grids; we’ll see this especially with Passive.

Question Inversion

Let’s generate the sentence Has Elvis left the building? The deep structure will look like this:

See p. 87 for the overall structure, but note one novelty: the Comp node is Q, which marks yes/no questions. To put it another way, we mark deep structures as questions rather than having Question Inversion be optional.

Both Present and Q are phonetically null. In fact Q may be written øQ or ø[+Q]. Since there aren't many of these markers, I think it’s clearer to just write Q. As they’re silent, they count as blank nodes.

When we have a tensed auxiliary and a blank T node, we must apply V → T movement, which moves the V to the T node:

We leave a trace behind, marked t. It’s sometimes claimed that t, though unspoken, has a phonetic effect. E.g. compare

Who do you want to see t in the movie?

Who do you want t to write the script?

Want to can be pronounced wanna in the first sentence but not the second, precisely where there’s a trace in the middle:

Who do you wanna see in the movie?

?Who do you wanna write the script?

Or so it’s claimed. I don’t have much problem with wanna in the second sentence myself.

The Q node triggers T → Comp Movement, which moves the contents of the T node (which is now has) into the Comp node (which counts as blank because Q is silent):

And that’s it: we now have the sentence Has Elvis left the building?

Though I’ve retained the name Question Inversion, a cool feature of this analysis is that we’re not really inverting anything in the tree. We moved an item up the tree, twice, into nodes that were conveniently empty.

What if they’re not empty? Well, consider

I wonder whether Elvis has left the building.

→ *I wonder whether has Elvis left the building.

Whether is a subordinator, so it goes in the Comp node. (Indeed, you can consider it the spoken version of Q.) But since it isn’t blank, T → Comp movement is blocked. So this is why we don’t have Question Inversion in this sentence.

Do-support

As ever, we’d better look at the simplest sentences too.

There’s no tensed auxiliary, so we start with T → Comp movement. This leaves Past in the Comp node.

Carnie states Do-support thus:

When there is no other option for supporting inflectional affixes, insert the dummy verb do into T.

The ordering here becomes tricky. Theta rules are supposed to apply before transformations. But that means hid was already selected in the VP, as it was immediately dominated by Past. That incorrectly predicts the question will be *Did Laura hid the jewels?

Or perhaps we apply the theta rules after the movement? That’s fine, but I note that Past now lives in the Comp node, not an T node, so the Do-support rule has to be modified. Or else the Comp node becomes a T node, but then it doesn’t match X' rules since its parent is Comp'.

One more idea for you: logically, rather than inserting do when needed, we could generate it for all sentences without a modal of their own, and delete it when it’s not needed. Keyser & Postal 1976 adopt this approach. I’m not aware of evidence either way, but it’s a good reminder that a “deletion” rule may really be an “insertion” rule and vice versa.

Raising

It’s long been assumed that sentences like

Beatrix is likely to win.

are not generated as such in deep structure. One reason is that there are parallel sentences like

It’s likely that Beatrix will win.

This seems to match the semantics better: we’re saying that Beatrix will win is probable, rather than describing an attribute of Beatrix. The deep structure for the latter sentence looks something like this:

English requires a subject, so we also posit a rule (It-Insertion) to insert a dummy it in the top NP.

We can take (almost) the same structure and move Beatrix to the main clause. This particular case is called Subject-to-subject Raising, and the movement is NP-Movement.

I don’t have a good explanation for why we have to use a non-finite subclause— i.e. change the Comp/T to ø/to— or why yet another variant uses for/to:

For Beatrix to win is likely.

But it’s probably lexical. Compare semantically similar verbs:

It’s possible (that Beatrix will win, for Beatrix to win).

That Beatrix will win is possible.

*Beatrix is possible to win.

It’s sure (that Beatrix will win, *for Beatrix to win).

?That Beatrix will win is sure.

Beatrix is sure to win.

Passives

As we’ve seen, X' theory generates the be + participle part of passive as part of the verbal complex. This leaves the actual movement for a transformation— another instance of NP Movement.

After the NP-movement, the sentence becomes The gnolls were beaten.

How did the number on were get set correctly? Because theta grids (p. 95) indicate the subject, and passive be tells us the subject is the gnolls. (Though the idea that theta rules apply after movement would also work: the gnolls would now be the main clause subject and force were.)

X' theory does not make the active sentence (Conan beat the gnolls) share the deep structure with the passive. If you want an Agent anyway, you have to add a PP by Conan as an adjunct to the VP.

(This strikes me as a step backwards— relating actives to passives was one of the attractions of GG. But if you haven’t noticed by now, X' deep structures are a lot closer to surface structure than they were in SS, or in analyses like McCawley’s.)

Topics in Syntax

This chapter is somewhat miscellaneous, but delves into some of the meatier and more interesting bits of syntax.

I’m mostly going to focus on the facts rather than on particular analyses. Though you should insist that your favorite syntactic theory properly handle the facts!

Often I will give very informal representations of deep structure. E.g. I might indicate the structure underlying I want him to go as

I want [he go]

Of course, a ‘real’ deep structure should have separate T and Comp nodes and other details. If those things are important for the discussion, I’ll draw a tree and put them in. But they’re generally not, and I assume you can fill in the details if you want to.

Reflexives

Reflexives (in English) are pronouns ending in -self. A website for learning English offers a very simple rule:

We use a reflexive pronoun after a transitive verb when the direct object is the same as the subject of the verb.

So we have usages like this:

I like you.

I like myself.

You like me.

You like yourself.

He understands her.

She understands herself.

OK so far, though the website forgot that we use reflexives for indirect objects and objects of prepositions too:

I gave myself a serious reprimand.

He looked at himself in the mirror and grinned.

Maria played two games of chess against herself.

The CEO only likes news articles about himself.

We can also use reflexives as adverbs, either emphasizing that someone did something, or that they did it personally: I think you yourself are the problem; My brother built his house himself. Though these are interesting syntactically, this section isn’t about them.

Occasionally myself is a genteel alternative to me: The boss spoke privately to Ms. Finch and myself. We can take this too as a special usage and set it aside.

In subclauses, the rule works, but in reference to the local verb.

I want an assistant [who understands me/*myself].

I told you [I/*myself would do it].

Melissa promised Bob [to help him/*himself].

In passives, which rearrange the verb’s arguments, we must follow the surface structure, not the deep structure. E.g., if we passivize You disappointed yourself, we don’t leave the pronouns as they were:

→ *Yourself was disappointed by you.

Rather, we redo the reflexives based on what is now the subject:

→ You were disappointed by yourself.

To put it another way: Reflexivization applies after Passive.

We can’t use the reflexive if the referent is only an adjunct or complement of the subject NP:

This website about me doesn’t flatter me/*myself.

Johni’s mother really can’t stand himi/*himselfi.

This clone of Ormanti doesn’t resemble himi/*himselfi.

The subscripts are a convention to indicate identity of reference. (That is, himself in the last sentence is bad if it refers to Ormant, but not if it refers to the clone.)

Here’s a difficulty for the website’s dictum. Reflexives may be allowed though the antecedent is the direct or indirect object, not the subject:

You really played Charliei against himselfi/*himi.

This book saved me from myself.

Miriam asked Billi about *himi/himselfi.

I’m giving you this book for yourself/*you.

So can any verb argument be the antecedent for any other? No, the subject still can’t be a reflexive:

*Himselfi praised Johni.

The original rule for reflexives can be more accurately stated:

Use the reflexive form for an object NP when an NP of identical reference is the subject, or a previous object, in the same subclause.

A more technical restatement of “in the same subclause”: if you can trace an NP up to its parent S, and down to another NP without encountering another S node, they’re in the same subclause— they are clausemates.

In the tree on the next page for I want an assistant who understands me, note how who / me are clausemates, but I / me aren’t.

Another apparent violation is imperatives, which allow a naked reflexive: Wash yourself!

The obvious solution is to posit a subject you in deep structure which is deleted by a transformation. Then we can leave the reflexivization rule unchanged.

This analysis is supported by the fact that we can add tag questions to imperatives:

Wash yourself, would you?

Tag questions copy the subject, so this reveals the deleted original you.

For that matter, the deletion isn’t mandatory— we can also say You wash yourself!

One more complication: nominalizations. For purposes of reflexivization, these act like sentences:

her understanding of herself

my betrayal by myself

your playing Charliei against himselfi

the CEOi’s gift to himselfi

A nominalization usually acts like a subclause: reflexives can’t refer to something in a higher clause:

Noami didn’t respond when Paul denounced himi/*himselfi.

Noami didn’t respond to Paul’s denunciation of himi/*himselfi.

The Popei appreciates everyone’s votes for himi/*himselfi.

However, there’s a class of nouns, called picture nouns[23], that allow reflexivization when other nouns don’t:

Johni hates this picture/biography/description of himselfi/?himi.

But only if no other subject is specified:

Johni hates Hockney’s picture of *himselfi/himi.

Here’s a sentence that may or may not be a problem:

The prisoneri believed himselfi to be innocent.

This is anomalous or not depending on how you bracket it:

The prisoneri believed [himselfi to be innocent]

The prisoneri believed himselfi [to be innocent]

The first bracketing does correspond to

The prisoneri believed [hei was innocent].

But the second is correct if Subject-to-Object Raising has intervened, placing the pronoun in the main clause. Compare

The prisoner wants [they suffer]

→ The prisoner wants them to suffer.

One more problem, found by John Ross. By our rule, the following sentences should have reflexives:

I saw two men behind me/*myself.

Julie brought her laptop with her/*herself.

This book has my name in it/*itself.

The early-GG solution was to posit that the PP derived from a deep structure sentence (behind me ← who were behind me). This seems a bit labored when other prepositions can govern the reflexive, as we saw above. Peter Culicover and Ray Jackendoff suggest that reflexivization is only possible for verbal arguments, which certainly includes things like give the book to her and put the book on the table, and presumably play chess against herself. But this may not explain The CEO only likes news articles about himself.

They also invent a cute scenario that raises questions about the identity that triggers reflexivization. Suppose you and Ringo Starr are visiting the wax museum, and it has a tableau of the Beatles. Naturally…

Ringo looked among the statues for himself.

This is a common metonymy (LCK, p. 139): That bastard hit me in the fender. We don’t blink at Ringo referring to a statue of Ringo. But it’s interesting that this identity is enough for reflexivization, though we certainly do not think that Ringo and the statue of him are the same thing.[24]

Here’s another example that suggests that identity of reference is a can of worms.

a)      Selina knows Bruce Waynei, and knows that Batmani is himi.

b)   Selina knows Bruce Waynei, and knows that Batmani is himselfi.

Shouldn't the reflexivization rule turn a) into b), since the two NPs have identical reference? Perhaps we can fix up the idea of identity to distinguish different personas, while also handling sloppy identities like Ringo and the statue of Ringo, but it will be tricky.

If you know another language very well, see if the rules for using the reflexive work like English or not. (In Romance languages, there will be a semantic difference: reflexives are very frequently used to reduce valence, as in se habla castellano, “Spanish is spoken here”.)

Pronouns

Now that we’ve warmed up with reflexives, we can tackle the other forms of personal pronouns.

You may have been taught that pronouns stand for nouns, but syntacticians agree that they are NPs. They take NP slots in sentences, and pronominalization replaces an entire NP:

I examined the ragged old king with the badly faded tattoo.

I examined him.

If the pronoun replaced king, we would expect him could replace any instance of king in the sentence, and it can’t:

The French king roundly insulted the English king.

*The French king roundly insulted the English him.

Besides reflexives, English pronouns have subject (I, he, we) and object forms (me, him, us). When do we use these?

As a good start, we can piggyback off the reflexive rule:

If you don’t use a reflexive, use subject pronouns in subject position, and object pronouns everywhere else.

This rule covers the examples in the last section, and even oddities like this one:

Me, I’m going to spend the week watching Frasier.

on the reasonable assumption that whatever exactly the inserted me is, it’s not a subject.[25]

The rule covers It’s me, Mario, since me isn’t the subject. However, we can also say It is I. This seems to be a quirk of be, a verb that is something of a quirk magnet. In other languages, note Spanish Soy yo (subject pronoun) vs. French C’est moi (non-clitic object pronoun).

The rule fails in some but not all subclauses:

Him being out of the country will be a problem when the story breaks.

His secretary says that he will be in Albuquerque.

The difference seems to be that subject pronouns only occur in finite clauses (that is, ones with tensed verbs).

The rule does run into trouble with conjunctions, mostly because English speakers seem to be following multiple rules at once:

- Follow Latin rules: He and I talked. She confused him and me.

- Use object pronouns for all conjoints: Him and me talked. She confused him and me.

- Talk like you got an education and heard that you should say and I sometimes, so to be safe, always say it: He and I talked. She confused him and I.

A more interesting question is, when do you use the pronoun and when do you use the antecedent? Antecedent is etymologically ‘before-goer’, and yes, mostly the antecedent goes first:

Kylei read the syntax book and then hei forgot everything.

?Hei read the syntax book and then Kylei forgot everything.

Susani said shei wasn’t queen of Narnia any more.

*Shei said Susani wasn’t queen of Narnia any more.

After Napoleoni, it hasn’t seemed cool to conquer Europe as hei did.

*After himi, it hasn’t seemed cool to conquer Europe as Napoleoni did.

The first rule in a syntax book is always wrong, so you won’t be surprised that there are counterexamples:

That hei would be king was always evident to Rowlfi.

After shei met the shoggoth, Maryi was never the same again.

Right next to himi, Billi placed his margarita.

So you can do iti right, I’m going to have Max demonstrate firing a riflei.

Many years later, as hei faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendíai was to remember that distant afternoon when hisi father took himi to discover ice.

These are still fine if the antecedent comes first:

That Rowlfi would be king was always evident to himi.

In all these sentences, the antecedent is in the main clause, the pronoun in a subclause. We also find that the subclause must have a pronoun if it follows the antecedent:

Maryi was never the same again after shei met the shoggoth.

*Shei was never the same again after Maryi met the shoggoth.

So we might revise the pronoun rule as

- If a pronoun and its antecedent are clausemates, the antecedent must come first.

- If not, we can optionally put the pronoun first, if it precedes the antecedent and if it’s in a clause lower than the antecedent.

We can express this with the concept of c-command. A node c-commands its sisters and all of their daughters. (Two nodes can c-command each other, if they’re clausemates.) So we can revise the second line:

- …and if it’s c-commanded by the antecedent.

Even this isn’t quite enough. In this sentence, the second rule is mandatory rather than optional:

Knowing that hei was a failure didn’t bother Wilmeri.

*Knowing that Wilmeri was a failure didn’t bother himi.

John Ross explained this in much the same way as we explained the reflexive in Wash yourself, pointing to an omitted argument.

[Wilmer knowing [that Wilmer was a failure]] didn’t bother Wilmer.

He assumed that Pronominalization applies clause by clause, from the bottom up.

- Lowest-clause, that Wilmer was a failure: there’s nothing to pronominalize.

- Next clause, Wilmer knowing that Wilmer was a failure. Pronominalization applies, so now we have

[Wilmer knowing [that he was a failure]] ….

- Now we apply Equi-NP Deletion to get rid of the first Wilmer.

[Knowing [that he was a failure]] ….

- Main clause: The antecedent Wilmer is in the main clause, and he in a subclause; this matches Pronominalization, so we’re done.

[Knowing [that he was a failure]] didn’t bother Wilmer.

So we don’t have to modify the rule after all. Whew!

The idea that transformations apply bottom-up is known as the cycle; more on that below.

X’s own

The construction X’s own may not seem difficult. It seems to follow the rules for pronouns: the antecedent must come first, unless it’s in a subclause:

Melissa has been promoting her own book.

With her own mother protecting her, Pharah felt safe.

However, you can’t use X’s own everywhere you can use X’s:

If 007 ends up dead, can I have his (*own) desk?

The spy who loved me also loved my (*own) sister.

Here the antecedent is in a subclause, so this looks like the same restriction as for reflexives— compare

If 007 ends up dead, MI6 will disavow (*himself, him).

The spy who loved me also tried to kill (*myself, me).

Except that the rules for X’s own are looser; you can use it in the subject of a subclause. Ordinary reflexives can’t be subjects.

He was outraged when his own mother opposed him.

*I’m outraged that myself is presented in a bad light here.

PRO

In general, when we see a subclause with no subject, it’s been deleted as identical to the main clause subject:

I want [I eat a salt bagel] → I want to eat a salt bagel.

Or it’s still there, but Raising moved it to the main clause:

Herman believes [he be ready for canonization]

→ Herman believes himself to be ready for canonization.

But Chomsky noted that sometimes the invisible pronoun can’t be identified with anything in the sentence:

Is it time [ø to bring out the guillotines]?

Does anyone know [how ø to tango]?

He calls it PRO; in such sentences it seems to be an indefinite pronoun, like someone or, better yet, French on.

Anaphor copying

In early GG, it was suggested that pronouns were inserted by a transformation; deep structure would include copies of all the NPs:

Napoleon looked at Napoleon’s map and said to Napoleon, “Napoleon is going to conquer all this for Napoleon.”

→ Napoleon looked at his map and said to himself, “I am going to conquer all this for myself.”

This seemed tolerable when so many syntactic examples referred to John; it’s more of a stretch if the NP is that old man with his hand tucked in his coat.

From a production point of view, it’d be nice if there was just one expansion of the NP, and the deep structure was ambivalent about which it was:

X looked at X’s map and said to X, “X is going to conquer all this for X.”

X = that old man with his hand tucked in his coat

However, the real blow to the copying idea was the discovery of Bach-Peters sentences (named for Emmon Bach and Stanley Peters):

The girl who most wanted it got the job she deserved.

That is, the girl who most wanted it is coreferential with she, while it is coreferential with the job she deserved. There’s no way to expand she or it into full copies; we’d need an infinite deep structure!

Another sentence that leads to copying problems:

Biff slapped a man who had dared him to ø.

If pronouns derive from copies, this must derive from

Biff slapped a man [who had dared him [to slap a man [who had dared him to ø]]]

And then we have to expand that ø, and so on. But that’s not even the meaning of the sentence! The meaning is more like:

Biffj slapped a mani [who had dared himj to slap himi]

Note that the man is indefinite in the main clause, and definite in the subclause! That is, the meaning is not that the man wanted Biff to slap “a man”. This isn’t how VP Deletion normally works; in

Biff cooked a quiche and Ted did ø too.

the implication is that Ted cooked “a quiche”, but not the same quiche that Biff cooked.

Another reason to doubt that pronouns are copied is when verbs of belief are involved.

My two-left-feet cousini believes that hei can dance.

The cousin does not believe that My two-left-feet cousin can dance; he believes I can dance. Similarly,

My neighbori is eccentric, and Leela thinks hei’s insane.

doesn’t imply that Leela thinks “My neighbor is insane”— she may not even know that the person in question is my neighbor.

Or consider statements with quantifiers:

Everyone wants their conlang to be the best.

Their can’t be a copy of everyone’s— the statement doesn’t say that everyone wants everyone’s conlang to be the best. Quantifiers set up a kind of loop: for each conlanger x, x wants x’s conlang to be the best.

Now that I’ve perhaps convinced you that pronouns don’t involve full copies of their antecedents, I’ll offer evidence that for some other anaphors, they are!

I have a big boat dock, and you have a small one.

We can’t solve this one with subscripts, since these are different boat docks. All that’s the same are the words; the deep structure must be

I have a big boat dock, and you have a small boat dock.

Here’s something even weirder. What’s the antecedent of she here?

June doesn’t have a girlfriend, but Mo does ø; she’s a professor.

It can’t be a girlfriend, because a) that refers to June’s girlfriend, not Mo’s, and b) June’s girlfriend doesn’t exist. But we can find the proper antecedent if we assume that ø is a full copy:

June doesn’t have a girlfriend, but Mo does have a girlfriendi; shei’s a professor.

Is pronominalization ever required? Howard Lasnik argued that if one NP c-commands a coreferential NP, the latter must appear as a pronoun:

?Calvini thinks that Calvini’s a genius.

Calvini thinks that hei’s a genius.

I’ve only marked this ?, because this strikes me not so much a syntactic as a stylistic problem. We wouldn’t normally talk that way, but if you get the tone right, it sounds fine:

Lord Veturio was sure of one thing, that future generations would acclaim the genius of Lord Veturio.

Quantifiers

Some would say quantifiers make everything else more complicated.

A simple example:

Every boyi loves hisi mother.

The indices are meant only to rule out the case where their refers to some known person, as in

That’s Bobi. Everyone loves hisi mother.

In logic, the intended meaning is

∀x: boy(x) → loves(x, mother(x))

The pronoun is acting exactly like the variable x: it ranges over the set of boys, and in effect repeats the proposition x loves x’s mother for each one.

Here’s a sentence that should make you worry about scope:

Some people have read two books.

It’s ambiguous between people reading two particular books, or any old books. Logically, it’s a choice between

There are two books ij such that there are people x where x read ij

There are people x such that there are two books ij where x read ij

The ambiguity may disappear, apparently for semantic reasons.

Everyone has eaten two tacos.

Everyone has worn two socks.

To suggest that they were all the same tacos or socks sounds like a joke. Can you find a characterization of which verbs preserve the ambiguity?

Negation shows that quantifiers are not simply modifiers. For instance, normally a proposition and its negation contradict:[26]

Whales are mammals and whales are not mammals.

But statements with some don’t contradict their negations:

Some cheeses are smelly and some cheeses are not smelly.

The key to this paradox is examining what not is modifying. In Whales are not mammals, syntactically not is attached to the VP, but semantically it’s attached to the entire sentence: not(whales are mammals).

But Some cheeses are not smelly can’t be analyzed as not(some cheeses are smelly).[27] In logic:

∃x: cheese(x) ∧ ¬smelly(x)

We could have syntax wash its hands of all this, and leave it to semantics to work out. The GS approach was to create a deep structure closer to the predicate logic version, such as:

X' syntax does the same (Carnie p. 402). More on this below.

Are some and any the same word? Edward Klima suggested they were, and that any was generated by a transformation within the scope of a negative word:

I have some cash → I don’t have any cash.

Yetis live somewhere → Yetis don’t live anywhere.

The quantifier can be far down the tree:

We can’t believe that the government knows that any aliens are threatening Earth.

I never know if anyone is listening.

But the negative doesn't affect a quantifier above it:

Someone will get a phone call if I never return.

→ *Anyone will get a phone call if I never return.

One nice bit of evidence for this comes from VP Deletion:

Rahesh didn’t eat any of the steamed hams, but Layla did ø.

What we’re saying of Layla is that she ate some of the steamed hams; we can say that VP Deletion applied before the some → any transformation, or that it treats some/any as identical.

For me, the change to any (if that’s what it is) is mostly optional. That is, these are fine:

Yetis don’t live somewhere.

I never know if someone is listening.

The first is perhaps marginal, but it could be used as a direct contradiction to Yetis live somewhere.

Also note that any has a positive, but different meaning: Anyone would love this book does not mean the same as Someone would love this book; it asserts that everyone who reads it will love it.

What syntactic category are quantifiers? Syntacticians working with English tend to place them in Det, along with the, this, John’s.

This is a lot harder to maintain for Russian. E.g.:

много мяса

much meat-s.gen

much meat

Note that meat is in the genitive; the obvious analysis is that много is a noun, not a determiner.

Then there’s весь ‘all’, which agrees with a following noun in number, gender, and case:

со всех сторон

from all-pl.gen side-pl.gen

from all sides

In form it’s an adjective, though its declension resembles the pronouns more than the adjectives.

Similarly, in Spanish, quantifiers act like adjectives— unos/muchos/ ningunos toros ‘some/many/no bulls’. Except for cada ‘each’ which is invariable: cada toro.

Given all this, we might look back at English and note the differences between every human, all (of) the humans, a lot of humans, the majority of humans. We might still maintain that quantifiers all look the same in deep structure, but it seems that they are often ordinary nouns or adjectives in surface structure.

One more oddity: vicarious quantification.

Most cars are stolen by teenagers.[28]

This is not, as it might first appear, a statement about most cars. Most cars aren’t stolen at all. We understand the statement as being about actual thefts; that is, it’s equivalent to Most car stealing is done by teenagers, or Cars are mostly stolen by teenagers. Perhaps most migrates to the noun because it’s the commonest location for quantifiers.

Quantifier and negative placement

Where exactly do we place quantifiers and negatives? Here are some options. (Tense is left off of these trees, to keep them simple.)

A/B are the structures that McCawley argues for. A triggers the some → no change, B does not, thus:

A: No cheeses are smelly.

B: Some cheeses are not smelly.

His reasons for moving both quantifier and negative out of the sentence are, unusually for him, fairly weak:

- Raising can be used to move the the subject out of the S— cf. It’s likely that John will leave → John is likely to leave. But that’s not a proof that this is the best analysis here.

- It facilitates the some → any/no rule. But this rule doesn’t seem to be universal.

- Nonfinite clauses begin with not.

For the third point, he cites sentences such as

Erwin convinced Mary not to drive to Connecticut.

But this is placement before a VP, not an S. Compare:

For Mary not to drive to Connecticut, he had to provide airfare.

What is it with Twitter not saving my tweets today?

Yet another alternative is tree C— which simply puts the quantifier and negative in their surface position. I’m inclined to favor this alternative.

We may well feel that trees ought to reflect the semantic structure— doesn’t not “negate the whole sentence”? But we don’t really know what the semantic structure is— we certainly can’t assume that it’s like predicate calculus. (After all, “logically” the main thing in the sentence is the verb, and everything else is arguments. Yet SVO languages happily exist.)

Another reason I’m cautious about McCawley’s proposal is that negatives, in his own account, sometimes appear elsewhere. E.g., this sentence is ambiguous:

Max doesn’t eat the wafers because he likes the priest.

- Max likes the priest, so he doesn't eat the wafers.

- Max eats the wafers, but it’s not because he likes the priest.

He suggests the following deep structures for these two meanings:

To me, the second tree suggests a third interpretation: it’s not the case that [Max eats the wafers because he likes the priest]. We can in fact deny an entire implication just this way:

No, aliens don’t come to Earth because they like our TV shows!

Surely meaning two is more like

Of course this directly corresponds to Max eats the wafers not because he likes the priest, but we get the original sentence with Neg-Hopping.[29]

McCawley wants to derive all negatives from a single not (per S, and attached to the top of the S):

Frodo killed no one = Frodo didn’t kill anyone.

There’s nowhere we didn’t go = There isn’t anywhere we didn’t go.

Mary has never had a cat = Mary hasn’t ever had a cat.

But there are a few places where the position of a negative is important. One is verb phrases:

Justin couldn’t have helped Juan.

Justin could have not helped Juan.

These could mean the same thing, thanks to Neg-Hopping— but they can also have quite different implications, as these continuations show:

Justin couldn’t have helped Juan, because he wasn’t on duty.

Justin could have not helped Juan— he could have just left.

Negative placement is also important with quantifiers:

Not many candidates could have passed that test.

Many candidates couldn’t have passed that test.

The first statement is far stronger— it says that the number who passed is small. The second merely says that the number who failed was large.

Plus, of course, you can’t really reduce no or un- in these sentences to a sentential not:

Bring me ice cream with no whip cream.

Damien greeted Lynn, not kindly.[30]

That’s one large, slavering, unfriendly dog.

Since it seems that we have to accept negatives in some places in the sentence, I don’t see the point of removing them from others (e.g. treating nowhere as somewhere + sentential not). A feature of language is that we can pretty precisely indicate what we want to negate. We’d might as well allow this in deep structure.

Thanks to Neg-Hopping, English does allow most negatives to migrate to the first auxiliary/verb. But not all languages allow this freedom; see the Mandarin examples on p. 297.

Quantifiers can also appear just about anywhere:

All the girls wanted to date Frankie.

Frankie wanted to date all the boys.

Neil is always worth reading.

I want a hot dog with all the trimmings.

Is there a difference between the sentences below? Not for me, but you may disagree.

Bill and Don both must have committed murder.

Bill and Don must both have committed murder.

Bill and Don must have both committed murder.

Quantifiers and negation share the problem of scope: what part of the tree is subject to them?

Molly thinks that some men are dateable.

This sentence is ambiguous between these meanings:

∃x: thinks( Molly, datable(x))

= There are some men that Molly thinks are dateable.

thinks(Molly, ∃x: datable(x)

= Molly’s opinion is that dateable men exist.

Syntacticians have differed on whether this must be reflected in deep structure or not.

- The GS approach, as we’ve seen, is to place the quantified NP outside the S.

- Or we could leave the quantifiers where they are, and provide rules for the different semantic interpretations. Tree structures are not the solution to every problem, as we’ll see in the Relational Grammar chapter.

- Or we could indicate scope with some other mechanism— color-coding, maybe.

Culicover & Jackendoff suggest that linear order is enough: the modifier to the left takes precedence. Thus:

Not all the arrows hit the target.

¬∀x: arrow(x) → hit(x, target)

All the arrows didn’t hit the target.

∀x: arrow(x) → ¬hit(x, target)

Can you think of any counterexamples?

Hopped quantifiers apply to the subject, however far they’ve hopped:

The doctors your website lists seem to us to all be shady.

There’s no temptation to apply all to your website or to us.

Here are some sentences that may convince you not to allow Neg-Hopping and Quantifier-Hopping in your language!

We don’t believe in the existence of many gods.

This has at least three meanings, depending on what not modifies:

= we are not polytheists (¬believe)

= the number of gods we believe in isn’t high (¬many)

= the number of gods we don’t believe in is high (¬exist)

Or:

In hell, Satan only allows conlangers to write auxlangs.

= (only conlangers) can write auxlangs

= conlangers can write (only auxlangs)

= conlangers can (only write auxlangs)

= only (conlangers can write auxlangs)

In Hebrew, at least, there’s no Quantifier Hopping; rak ‘only’ modifies the following word.[31]

Bagehenom noten hasatan [rak limtakhneney-safot] lekhaber sfot-ézer.

in=def-hell active.participle\give def-satan [only to= active.participle \plan-mp.cons language-fp] to=inf\author language.cons-fp auxiliary

In hell, Satan lets [only conlangers] write auxlangs.

Bagehenom noten hasatan limtakhneney-safot [rak lekhaber sfot-ézer], velo likro sfarim.

In hell, Satan lets conlangers [only write auxlangs].

Bagehenom noten hasatan limtakhneney-safot [rak lekhaber] sfot-ézer, velo lelamdan.

In hell, Satan lets conlangers [only write] auxlangs.

Bagehenom noten hasatan limtakhneney-safot lekhaber [rak sfot-ézer], velo safot omanutiyot.

In hell, Satan lets conlangers write [only auxlangs].

In standard English, double negatives aren’t allowed:

*I don’t know nobody in this town.

*There hadn’t never been no scandal like that.

These are of course completely normal in many dialects, and in many languages, e.g. Spanish:

No conozco a nadie en este pueblo.

No hubo nunca ningún escándalo como éste.

But let’s see what the exact behavior is in standard English. Subclauses can have their own negatives:

I don’t know anyone [who doesn’t like pizza].

Selina didn’t panic [when the lasers didn’t turn off].

[After nobody came], Mitt didn’t feel like having a party after all.

It isn’t likely [that Dr. Teeth never smoked weed].

With some verbs, however, the exclusion does extend to the subclause:

I don’t want [nobody to come]

→ *I don’t want nobody to come.

I don’t think [my drumming will bother nobody]

→ *I don’t think my drumming will bother nobody.

We do have the option of using tempo and stress to allow two logical negations. Or you can make sure both negatives are in subclauses of the main clause.

I don’t want nobody to come.

[What I don’t want] is [for nobody to come].

The same strategies are available in Spanish:

No quiero que nadie venga.

Lo que no quiero es que nadie venga.

We might expect that clauses where a second negative is disallowed are also those which have some → any, but this doesn’t seem to be the case:

We can’t believe that the government knows that any aliens are threatening Earth.

We can’t believe that the government knows that no aliens are threatening Earth.

I never know if anyone is listening.

I never know if no one is listening.

So far as I can see, quantifier no (that is, no + NP) can coexist with another negative in subject but not object position.

In this state, no governor hasn’t spent time in prison.

No man isn’t connected to the world.

*The neighboring state hasn’t imprisoned no governor.

*She didn’t hide the cake on no shelf.

Finally, note that not + in-/un- is perfectly grammatical: Time is not unlimited. Though stylists may mock it, as George Orwell did:

A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.

This is one area where grammar books, by being imprecise in terminology and not checking edge cases, get things wrong. You can easily find textbooks or websites that say that double negatives are not allowed in a sentence, or in a clause, or that they are always OK in separate clauses, or you can’t combine no + not; as we’ve seen, all these claims are untrue.

Quantifiers and mass nouns

The set of quantifiers used with mass nouns is not quite the same as those used with count nouns. You can’t use every, each, many, several with mass nouns, nor numerals:

I ate all/some/most of the tapioca.

There’s some/*every/*many/*three blood on the floor.

Much and (a) little occur only with mass nouns:

Much syntax is hubristic.

A little of Max’s poetry goes a long way.

Most/*much/*little magic spells are ineffective.

Mass nouns are difficult for logic to deal with— you can’t really say that I ate all of the tapioca is

∀x: tapioca(x) → ate(I, x)

since it’s not clear what x is ranging over. Informally, we could imagine dividing the tapioca into very small regions, which can then be treated as units[32]. It’s like we’re saying I ate every drop of tapioca. Though this is presumably not a syntactic process, as it would be puzzling why we can’t say *I ate every tapioca.

The “small units” interpretation also doesn’t quite work semantically. E.g. if you say This cheese is rotten, it does not necessarily mean that every single cubic millimeter of the cheese is rotten.

The cycle

When we have embedded clauses, the order of transformations gets trickier. For instance:

I want [Max to bite Max]

If we apply Reflexivization, then Subject Raising, we get

→ I want [Max to bite himself]

→ I want Max [ø to bite himself].

If we apply Subject Raising first, then Reflexivization, we get

→ I want Max [ø to bite Max]

→ *I want Maxi to bite himi.

because Reflexivization is local, and there’s no longer a subject in the subclause to trigger it.

We can even get ordering problems with a single rule. E.g., take

Melissai wants [shei arrange [shei win]

If we apply Equi to she win, we get

Melissai wants [shei arrange to win]

Now we apply Equi again to get

Melissa wants to arrange to win.

That’s fine, but suppose we took the original and applied Equi to [she arrange S]. We’d get:

*Melissai wants to arrange shei to win.

Such problems are avoided by a general principle: apply transformations to subclauses first. More precisely: start with the bottommost clauses and work your way up. This is the idea of the cycle. [33]

Our problem with I want [Max to bite Max] is solved, because Reflexivization must apply first, on the embedded sentence. And the problem with Melissa wants [she arrange [she win]] is solved because we can’t apply Equi to the top S till it’s applied to the middle one.

An unexpected corollary of the cycle is that some rules are post-cyclic. E.g., let’s look at this sentence again:

Laura didn’t take the jewels, but Selina did ø.

Before VP Deletion, the structure looks like this:

When the cycle gets to the S nodes, it will apply Tense Hopping (the transformation that applies the tense in the Aux node to the verb), and also Negation, which takes care of the Neg node:

But now we’ve spoiled the tree for VP Deletion. There’s no more parallel VP to delete, and there’s no naked T node in Selina’s sentence that can become did.

The solution is to make Tense Hopping, Negation, and Do-Support post-cyclic. Then VP Deletion will apply first, and everything goes right.

(In X' theory, Tense Hopping is supposed to be handled by theta grids before transformations apply. This same example shows the problem with that. We can hardly use theta grids to select the right tense in a sentence when we don’t know if VP-Deletion will apply or not.)

It might help to give a step by step example. To simplify things, I will leave out the treatment of auxiliaries and tense.

Selinai couldn’t persuade heri [shei want [shei steal less jewels [than Laura steal jewels]]]

Lowest level (than Laura stole jewels): apply Comparative Deletion.

Selinai couldn’t persuade heri [shei want [shei steal less jewels [than Laura steal jewels]]]

Middle level (she want…): apply Equi.

Selinai couldn’t persuade heri [shei want to steal less jewels than Laura]

Top level: apply Subject and Object Control.

Selinai couldn’t persuade heri to want to steal less jewels than Laura

Top level: apply Reflexivization.

Selina couldn’t persuade herself to want to steal less jewels than Laura.

In Minimalism, rather than the cycle, people tend to talk about phases, which are cyclic domains (part of the tree) and by extension the steps devoted to deriving each one.

Nominalization

In early GG it was widely assumed that nominalization was a transformation, based on parallels such as

St. Filbert destroyed the statue of Zeus.

→ St. Filbert’s destruction of the statue of Zeus

Beretos is eager to please Lady Caumēliye.

→ Beretos’s eagerness to please Lady Caumēliye

Otto is the one who wrote this book.

→ Otto is the writer of this book.

Chomsky 1970 takes a closer look at these, pointing out a number of things that complicate the idea of a transformation.

You might think that the biggest problem is the unpredictability of the nominalization— consider the variety of demand, warning, approval, destruction, package, laughter, criticism, management, success, existence, proof, prayer. But all this means is that the noun has to be listed in the lexicon.

Similarly, the lexicon will have to indicate what preposition to use with the underlying object: destruction of, resemblance to, trust in, attack on, hatred for, etc.

It’s also clear that a nominalization is an ordinary noun, with all the accoutrements— determiners, modifiers, plurals:

the attempted proofs of Fermat’s conjecture by Prof. Farnsworth

There is no place to put these on a bare S— but of course we can create an NP node in deep structure that contains the S:

Here Action is an unpronounced marker that can be taken as forcing nominalization, as Q forces the formation of a question.

(Where do we indicate the plural? On Action, of course. When Nominalization applies, the plural will be applied to the resulting noun.)

Now, if we maintained that all these sentences have the same deep structure—

St. Filbert’s destruction of the statue of Zeus pleased the bishop.

St. Filbert destroying the statue of Zeus pleased the bishop.

That St. Filbert destroyed the statue of Zeus pleased the bishop.

then we’d be in trouble, as the deep structures are marked as nominalizations and thus cannot produce the other sentences. If this were a serious concern, we might posit a transformation that produced the NP structure from the underlying S.

I write Action because there are other types of nominalization:

Agentinterview → interviewer

Patientinterview → interviewee

Productinterview → interview

With these, it’s clear that there cannot only be an S in the deep structure; e.g. if you say

The CEO fired the manager of the Schenectady office.

The deep structure is certainly not a), but something more like b):

a) The CEO fired [X manages the Schenectady office]

b) The CEO fired [the person [who manages the Schenectady office]]

A curious gap: Agent nominalizations cannot, in fact, state the agent:

Steve founded Apple.

→ *Steve’s founder of Apple

→ *Apple’s founder by Steve

And Product nominalizations can’t state the object:

Mme Castafiore sang the operetta.

→ *Mme Castafiore’s song of the operetta

Cf. the Action nominalizations foundation, singing. However, if the Product nominalization is the same as the Action, as it often is, the object can be stated: Sokolov’s painting of the Empress.

Some transformations can be reflected in the nominalization:

Cindy is eager to please

→ Cindy’s eagerness to please

Emily discovers herself.

→ Emily’s discovery of herself.

And some cannot:

Cindy is easy to please

→ ?Cindy’s easiness to please

Spinal Tap amazed Britain with their album.

→ *Spinal Tap’s amazement of Britain with their album

We believe Elvis to be the Savior.

→ *our belief of Elvis to be the Savior

Chomsky notes that nominalizations often resist adverbial complements:

*His criticism of the book before he read it can be found on page 15.

On the other hand, Chomsky’s own preface to Aspects contains such a nominalization:

I am indebted… to many students whose reactions and ideas when this material has been presented have led to quite substantial modifications.

None of these phenomena are strong arguments against a Nominalization transformation. Nonetheless Chomsky 1970 takes them to be, apparently on the misapprehension that the transformational approach had a bare S without an enclosing NP.

Instead, he offered an approach he called lexicalist— that nominalizations appeared as such in deep structure.

Doesn’t this require a good deal of duplication of structure and transformations that will have to apply, now, to both VPs and NPs? Yes, but Chomsky handles these by introducing X' theory, which dates to this 1970 paper. That is, the reason for the parallelism of

We performed the chorale for the whole school

our performance of the chorale for the whole school

is that rather than there being a rules like VP → T V NP (PP), there are rules like XP → [Spec X] X NP (PP). Further rules tell us that [Spec N] is a Det, [Spec V] is a T, and [Spec A] is an adverb like very.

The fact that some transformations apply to nominalizations and some don’t is explained by the former applying to XPs (that is, any type of phrase), and the latter applying to VPs only.

In short: nominalizations are idiosyncratic, and offer us something of a difficult choice:

- derive them from transformations (but explain why they don’t always behave like Ss)

- or put them in deep structure as is (but explain why they share a lot of behavior with Ss)

Relatives and other problems

This is really a continuation of the previous chapter, but I think you’ll appreciate a short break. Stretch, and go get some water or coffee.

Relative clauses

Relative clauses are close to the heart of GG. They’re full of complexities and they’re one construction I can’t imagine handling without GG.

Relativization

First, let’s look at how (restrictive) relative clauses are made. In these examples I’ve underlined the elements which are different in the deep structure (i.e. an ordinary sentence) and the relative clause.

Start with the easiest case: an NP that’s a subject in both clauses.

the king [the king loves the gods] cannot fail

→ The king [who loves the gods] cannot fail.

In English, not much has changed— the subject in the subclause was replaced by a subordinator, who.

German shows a few interesting differences:

der König [der König liebt die Götter] kann nicht scheitern

→ Der König, [der die Götter liebt], kann nicht scheitern.

the.m king / the.m the.pl.acc god-pl love-3s / can-3s not fail

- The subordinator is not interrogative who. it’s a separate word— normally the same as the definite article.[34]

- Subclauses get a different ordering, with the verb last.

Mandarin differs from both:

尊敬神的王不能失败。

[wáng zūnjìng shén] wáng bùnéng shībài.

→ [Zūnjìng shén de] wáng bùnéng shībài.

revere god sub / king not-can fail

- The subclause appears before the noun, like other modifiers.

- Rather neatly, the same subordinator de is used with adjectives, nouns, possessives, and subclauses. It forms modifying clauses, not just relative clauses.

- You leave out the parts of the subclause that would be repeated— in this case wáng.

Now let’s have the NP be an object in the subclause:

the minister [the king didn’t choose the minister] must tread carefully

→ The minister [whom the king didn’t choose] must tread carefully.

Of course we could use that or nothing at all as the subordinator. I’ve used whom to show the choice of case, which is determined by the subclause, not the main clause.

The subordinator comes first in the subclause; when it’s whom note that the accusative has been fronted from its normal position after the verb.

In German:

der Minister [der König hat sich den Minister nicht ausgesucht] muss vorsichtig vorgehen

Der Minister, [den der König sich nicht ausgesucht hat], muss vorsichtig sein.

the.m minister / the.m.acc the.pl.nom king refl not past.part-choose has-3s / must-3s careful be

Again, German makes it easy to see that the accusative den Minister has become the accusative subordinator den. It’s tempting to suggest that the entire phrase was simply fronted, and Minister deleted, but note that den also appears for a pronoun:

Ich, den sich der König nicht ausgesucht hat, muss vorsichtig sein.

I, whom the king did not choose, must tread carefully.

Mandarin sticks to its standard procedure: the subclause precedes the noun; the repeated element bùzhǎng is removed.

王不选择的部长必须谨慎行事。

[wáng bù xuǎnzé bùzhǎng] bùzhǎng bìxū jǐnshèn xíngshì.

[Wáng bù xuǎnzé de] bùzhǎng bìxū jǐnshèn xíngshì.

King not choose sub / minister must careful step

Now let’s take an NP that’s the object in the main clause, but subject in the subclause.

the people respect the king [the king loves the gods]

→ The people respect the king [who loves the gods].

das Volk respektieren den König [der König liebt die Götter]

→ Das Volk respektieren den König, [der die Götter liebt].

the.n people respect-3p the.m.acc king / the.m.nom the.pl.acc god-pl love-3s

人们尊重尊敬神的国王。

Rénmen zūnzhòng [wáng zūnjìng shén] wáng.

Rénmen zūnzhòng [zūnjìng shén de] wáng.

People-pl respect / revere god sub / king

Smooth sailing here: the subclauses look exactly like our first example. Just note that it’s the subclause that determines the case of the subordinator— check the cases in German.

In Mandarin, there’s nothing marking the left bracket— that is, nothing tells us that we’re entering a subclause. In this example, the fact that two verbs occur in a row is a clue, of course; plus it doesn’t take long to get to the de.

The remaining logical possibility is an NP which is an object in both clauses.

We don’t like the minister [the king didn’t choose the minister]

→ We don’t like the minister [(whom) the king didn’t choose].

Wir mögen den Minister nicht [der König sich hat den Minister nicht ausgesucht].

→ Wir mögen den Minister nicht, [den der König sich nicht gewählt hat].

we like-1p the.m.acc minister nothing / the.m.acc the.pl.nom king refl not past.part-choose has-3s

我们不喜欢王不选择的部长。

wǒmen bù xǐhuān [wáng bù xuǎnzé bùzhǎng] bùzhǎng

→ Wǒmen bù xǐhuān [wáng bù xuǎnzé de] bùzhǎng.

we not like / king not choose sub / minister

No case problems here— in German, note the accusative for both the object and the subordinator.

In Mandarin, there might be a garden path effect— you could read wǒmen bù xǐhuān wáng as we don’t like the king. You have to listen or read a bit further to find out that the king is subordinated to the actual person we don’t like.

In all these subclauses, one argument has been left behind. If there’s nothing but a verb, in English it has to be the subject: the mouse that roared, the boy who lived, the flavor that lasts.

Mandarin tends to be looser with valence, so you can have one-verb relative clauses that are ambiguous. Compare:

Jīntiān yíng de qián fù fángzū.

today win sub money pay rent

The money that was won today will pay the rent.

Jīntiān yíng de rén yùnqì hǎo.

today win sub people luck good

The people who won today had good luck.

The underlined phrase is the same in both sentences, though we have to translate the first as passive that was won, the second as who won. It’s quite possible to have ambiguous expressions: jīntiān pīping de rén could mean either “people who criticized (others) today” or “people who were criticized today.”

You can get ambiguities in Hindī too, for a different reason: the relative clause is not attached to the noun, but can be fronted or backed.

Kyā gāyak us ādmī ko jānatā hai, jo nāc rahā hai?

Q singer that.s.obl man to know-imperf.m be-3s / sub dance live-perf.s.m be-3s

Does the singer know that man who is dancing?

The relative clause who is dancing could grammatically apply to either the singer or the man. This is normally clarified by context, or you assume it’s the nearer NP (here the man).

In Russian, there’s a special subordinator который for relative clauses, unlike English where we re-use the interrogatives.

Я знаю девушку, которая пишет книгу.

I know-1s girl-s.acc / sub-f.s.nom write-3s book-acc

I know the girl who is writing a book.

The subordinator agrees with the head noun in number and gender (here feminine and singular), but takes the case appropriate for its role in the subclause (here, nominative).

Kayardild offers a very different way of forming relative clauses:

Ngada kurri-ju dangka-wu raa-n-ku banga-wuu-nth.

I watch-fut man-obj spear-nomn-obj turtle-obj-obl

I will watch the man spearing the turtle.

The verb in the relative clause is nominalized; because of this, its object (the turtle) takes a special oblique case. Interestingly, you can’t stack oblique cases— which means you can only relativize one level deep in this language.[35]

Case attraction

In all the examples we’ve seen so far, the subclause itself isn’t affected by the case of its antecedent. But sometimes the subordinator takes the same case as the head noun, a phenomenon called case attraction. An example from Ancient Greek:

ἄνδρες ἄξιος τῆς ἐλευθερίας ἡς κέκτησθε

men-pl.nom worthy-pl.nom the.gen freedom-gen which.gen possess-2p

men worthy of the freedom you possess

Occasionally we find reverse attraction, where the case proper to the subclause migrates to the main clause, as in this Latin sentence:

Urbem quam statuō vestra est.

City-s.acc which-s.f.acc put-1s your.f.s.nom is

The city which I am founding is yours.

Case attraction in either direction is optional, and always moves up the markedness hierarchy nom → acc → dat → gen. (The first example above is acc → gen, the second is nom → acc.)

Another and more general form of attraction is that the main clause’s tense and mood may migrate to the subclause. This is common, though optional, in Latin:

Aeduī questum veniēbant, quod Harūdēs, quī nūper in Galliam trānsportātī essent, finēs eōrum populārentur.

The Aeduī came to complain, because the Harūdēs, who had recently been transported into Gaul, were ravaging their borders.

That is, essent doesn’t really need to be in the subjunctive, if the migration of the Harūdēs isn’t disputed. But it’s placed in the subjunctive because its main clause is.

In modern European languages, you use the subjunctive in subclauses for not-quite-real events— e.g. hypothetical or doubtful ones. E.g. Spanish:

Quiero que ames a un hombre que te ame.

want-1s sub love-2s.subj to a man that 2s.acc love-3s.subj

I want you to love a man who loves you.

Here ames is used because we’re talking about a desire, and ame because the man described is hypothetical. Indicative que te ama is also correct, but implies that the speaker has a specific man in mind.

Curiously, my informant finds that only the indicative es is acceptable in the following sentence, though we’re also speaking of a hypothetical. Other speakers do use the subjunctive.

Aceptaremos a cualquiera con quien te cases, excepto si es metodista.

accept-1p to anyone-f with sub 2s.acc marry-2s.subj / unless if be.3s.indic Methodist

We will acccept anyone you marry, unless they’re Methodist.

As for tense, probably you’ll barely notice when it’s copied from the main clause:

We headed for Olympus Mons, which was southeast of Alba Mons.

Past tense isn’t necessary, since Olympus Mons is always southeast of Alba Mons, but we’re used to everything in a past narrative being in the past tense.

What can be relativized?

So far we’ve looked only at subjects and objects, but relativization can affect other things… and can’t affect certain other things:

object in subordinate clause

The queen gave a present to the minister the king dislikes ø.

possessive in subordinate clause

We’re fund-raising for the woman whose agent stole her money.

time locative in subordinate clause

The king was frolicking with his mistress the summer that the conspirators prepared their coup ø.

object in clause two levels down

I know the boy that the media says the duck bit ø.

object in clause four levels down

I pity the linguist that Perlmutter claims that Pullum recalls how Chomsky, in a footnote, chided Everett for responding to ø.

object in relative clause within sentential object

*These are the only books which I don’t know anyone who read ø.

adjective complement within subordinate clause

I fixed the puka pikanti that Pedro was eager to eat ø.

Complex NP (p. 317)

?I know the boy that we all heard the report that a duck bit ø.

locative in sentential subject

*Rome is where the meeting will be held ø is likely.

locative in sentential object

Rome is where it’s likely that the meeting will be held ø.

embedded locative within comparative

?My neighbor owns that barn that more people have gotten drunk down in back of ø than any other one in the county.[36]

conjoint

*I know a six-foot dog who ø and his rabbit friend are cops.

Note that English is pretty generous in this area. Tagalog, by contrast, allows only subjects to be relativized. (On the other hand, it’s also rich in ways to turn arguments into subjects.)

Sometimes you can relativize something only by bringing some of its nearby structure with it— a process Robin Lakoff named pied piping.

?What time did you meet the Pope at?

→ At what time did you meet the Pope ø?

A novel the last page of which turns the story upside down isn’t worth reading.

My neighbor owns that barn down in back of which more people have gotten drunk ø than any other one in the county.

Nonrestrictive clauses

A syntactic puzzle: what is the underlying structural difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses?

It can be easy to miss the difference, because in English, their form is essentially the same:

The prophecies speak of the man who will end this evil.

The prophecies speak of this man, who will end a bunch of evil.

In writing, at least if you have a good editor, there will be a comma before a nonrestrictive clause. In speech, there may be a pause at that location, and the intonation pattern will be different.

Semantically, restrictive relative clauses narrow down a range of referents– the man who will end this evil isn’t just any kind of man, it’s the single man described by the subclause. Nonrestrictive clauses are informational or parenthetical— the sentence is complete without them.

Bernard Comrie points out that adjectives have the same difference in semantics. E.g. the stylish Parisians may refer to either that subset of Parisians who are stylish, or to all Parisians, who all happen to be stylish.

But there are also syntactic differences. E.g., if the head noun is not the subject of the subclause, the subordinator can be deleted or replaced with that, but only for restrictive clauses:

Can we get a look at the ring which/that/ø Bilbo stole?

We should really get rid of that ring, which/*that/*ø Bilbo stole.

Only restrictive clauses can follow an indefinite pronoun:

Everyone who drank Fred’s beer ended up snoring.

*Everyone, who drank Fred’s beer, ended up snoring.

Only nonrestrictive clauses can follow a bare proper noun:

Bruce Wayne, who is my friend, would never be a vigilante.

*Bruce Wayne who is my friend would never be a vigilante.

Now, you can use a restrictive clause if you add the… but then you can’t use the nonrestrictive clause:

The Bruce Wayne I know would never be a vigilante.

*The Bruce Wayne, whom I know, would never be a vigilante.

You can extrapose freely from restrictive clauses. From nonrestrictive clauses, it’s wrong or at least awkward.

A woman who resembles the suspect just walked by.

A woman just walked by who resembles the suspect.

Bill, who I know from grade school, was just arrested.

?Bill was just arrested, who I know from grade school.

The possessive clitic ’s can be moved after a restrictive clause, but not a nonrestrictive one:

The girl I like’s house is right here.

*The girl, who I like, ’s house is right here.

In German, both restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses are written the same way, offset by commas. But most of the differences noted above also apply to German. E.g. this sentence can only be read as a restrictive clause:

Bruce Wayne, der mein Freund ist, würde nie zur Selbstjustiz greifen.

Bruce Wayne, who is my friend, would never be a vigilante.

Another difference is specific to German: you can replace the initial definite article with derjenige ‘the one who…’, but only for restrictive clauses:

Derjenige Mann, der in diesem Haus lebt, ist seit Tagen nicht gesehen worden.

The man who lives in this house has not been seen for days.

On the other hand, übrigens ‘by the way’ can only be added to a nonrestrictive clause:

Julia, die übrigens in Köln aufgewachsen ist, wohnt jetzt in Berlin.

Julia, who by the way grew up in Cologne, is now living in Berlin.

Rather than a strong semantic difference and subtle syntactic ones, why not just explicitly mark restrictive clauses? Farsi does, by adding -i to the head noun:

Mardhā-i [ke ketābhārā be ānhā dāde budid] raftand.

men-restr [sub books to them given had-2s] went-3s

The men you had given the books to left.

Mo’allef [ke nevisandeye xubi-st] in sabkrā exteyār karde ast.

author [sub writer good is] this style chosen has

The author, who is a good writer, has chosen this style.

Surface structure

We’d better make sure we understand the surface structure. By our usual tests, unsurprisingly, the subclause itself is a constituent:

The prophecies speak of the man who will end this evil and who will bring peace to the Commonwealth.

So is the Det + head + subclause:

The man who wrote the dictionary and the woman who wrote the thesaurus had words together.

It’s the man who will end this evil that the prophecies spoke of.

We can also show that the head + subclause is a constituent:

Several people who have returned from the grave have been claimed to exist, but I haven’t been able to interview any ø.

Given all this, the structure of a restrictive clause is something like:

Relativization

Now what’s the deep structure? Rather than review proposals, I will focus on how they differ.

Everyone assumes that the underlying S is a regular sentence X wrote the thesaurus. The main point of disagreement is what X is.

- Aspects suggests that it’s a copy of the head NP— here, the woman. This must be deleted by transformation.

the woman [the woman wrote the thesaurus]

- Jean Roger Vergnaud agrees that it’s the head NP— but proposes that it’s moved to the main clause, not deleted.

ø [the woman wrote the thesaurus]

→ the woman [ø wrote the thesaurus]

- McCawley suggests that it’s a personal pronoun:

the womani [that shei wrote the thesaurus]

- In X' theory and Minimalism, it’s the wh-word— here, who.

the womani [whoi wrote the thesaurus]

This is an echo of the discussion of anaphor copying (p. 119), and isn’t very consequential. I’ll note that using who is a little misleading, because at the least we need to copy whatever features are needed to handle verb agreement, as in Spanish:

el hombre que escribó el diccionario

the man who wrote the dictionary

los hombres que escribieron el diccionario

the men who wrote the dictionary

Vergnaud’s argument for his position is interesting. He starts with the idiom prendre part, which has the same meaning as English played a part. (You can make similar arguments with make headway.)

Amélie dit qu’elle n’a pris aucune part au meutre de Gérard.

Amélie says that she played no part in the murder of Gérard.

Part cannot (in this meaning) be separated from its verb:

*La part d’Amélie nous a surpris.

*Amélie’s part surprised us.

*Sa part dans ce meurtre a été décisive.

*Her part in this murder was decisive.

But part can occur in a sentence which doesn't contain the verb, so long as it’s the head noun of a relative clause with prendre:

Nous sommes surpris de la part qu’elle a prise au complot.

We are surprised by the part she played in the plot.

Jean a décrit la part qu’il pense que ses agents croient que Marie a prise au complot.

Jean described the part that he thinks his agents believe Marie played in the plot.

The problem is that the deep structure

nous sommes surpris de la part i [que elle a prise part i au complot]

contains an ungrammatical main clause: you can’t use part that way. So Vergnaud’s idea is that the deep structure is

nous sommes surpris de la øi  [que elle a prise part i au complot]

and Relativization moves part to the empty head position.

The idea of a restrictive relative clause is that you’re narrowing down the possible referents. That sounds like a determiner; indeed, we could say that these sentences are precisely parallel:

Orcs who write poetry are valuable.

Some orcs are valuable.

That suggests a very different deep structure:

Hey, I think it’s at least as defensible as the ones given above.

Nonrestrictive clauses

At first glance, an NP with a nonrestrictive relative clause looks like a constituent:

The forum has now banned Bill, who is a troll, and Eunice, who is a spammer.

But note that anaphors don’t target the head + subclause:

I own a Fabergé egg, which my grandmother once tried to cook, and Sue has one too.

One must mean just a Fabergé egg here; the sentence doesn’t imply that my grandmother tried to cook Sue’s egg.

The subclause also seems to be invisible to VP-deletion.

Wu sold Cat, who had shared his stash with him a week before, an ounce of weed for $60, and Karen did ø too.

What Karen did was sell Cat an ounce of weed for $60— there is no statement that Cat shared his stash with Karen.

Given this, it seems unwise to attach the clause (in deep structure) to anything below the S.

Bill, who is a troll, has left his bridge.

Note the subscripts which link the subclause to Bill.

McCawley suggests, boldly, that to get the surface structure, we simply twist the subclause into place.

This would give Minimalists a case of the shivers, but these crossed-line diagrams are well motivated elsewhere; see p. 324.

If it bothers you, however, we could just attach the S to the NP as we do relative clauses, but only in surface structure.

For purposes of reflexivization, nonrestrictive clauses act as if they were part of the NP:

Billi, whoi has come to hate himselfi, has left his bridge.

Bill doesn’t c-command himself— but who does, so that’s probably enough.

Comparatives

Comparatives have a few tricks up their sleeves. For one thing, they seem to be hiding another sentence, which must contain a copula (or a close variant):

Alan is hairier than Neil (is).

He’s hairier than he used to be.

He’s hairier than Neil became.

We can’t quite say ?Alan is hairier than Neil is hairy, but the full sentence can come out:

The Eiffel Tower is taller than the Pentagon is wide.

The transformation that deletes material from this S is called Comparative Deletion.

For adjectives, we use A + -er for short words, more A for longer ones. But the more…than construction is far broader than the use of -er; it can be used for NPs, PPs, and adverbs as well:

Marlowe appears in more books than Spade (does).

I put more sugar than coffee in my coffee.

My guitar is more in tune than yours.

The Great Romberto is more of a fraud than The Marvelous Meldrake.

Team A fleeced the customers more efficiently than Team B.

When it is used of adjectives, it allows direct comparison to other As, which -er does not:

The man is more nasty than stupid.

*The man is nastier than stupid(er).

What’s the constituent structure of a typical comparative?

Neil is more scared of blood than Alan is.

It seems clear that more + AP is a constituent:

Neil is more scared of blood and less worried about creditors than Alan is.

Though some constraint or another prevents it from being moved:

*More scared of blood is what Neil is than Alan (is).

The than + S part is also a constituent. It’s also hard to move, so it’s hard to add more evidence.

Neil is more scared of blood than Alan or than Warren.

*Than Alan, Neil is more scared of blood.

*It’s than Alan that Neil is more scared of blood.

The entire comparative more X than Y is also a constituent:

Alan is hairier than Neil and scarier than Warren.

Hairier than Neil is what Alan is.

Putting all this together, the structure of more hairy than Neil is might be represented thus:

We haven’t seen a quantifier modifying an adjective before, but it fits in with so hairy, somewhat hairy, too hairy, and hairy enough. Since hairier and more hairy than Neil (is) can be placed where an adjective can[37], I’m comfortable labeling them AdjPs. (In X' theory, they’re QPs.)

NP comparisons can be handled in a similar way:

I put more sugar than (I put) coffee in my coffee.

Note that the embedded S is not a copula, as it is with adjectives, but a parallel to the main S. Comparative Deletion has more work to do here; it can basically delete anything identical to the main clause.

Tony has written more tweets about fanfic than you have about conlangs.

I’ve wrestled more wildcats than you’ve crushed spiders.

Bacskai-Atkari 2014 has hairy than Neil is as a constituent— a DegP— but I’m not sure about that:

*Alan is more hairy than Neil and scary than Warren.

For some reason comparatives inspire syntacticians to heights of creativity— see that paper, or McCawley, or Bresnan 1973. There are a lot of chained assumptions.

Some of these come up due to an alternative construction, where the object of comparison is a measurement. Note that in this construction, it’s impossible to use the copula.

Hailey is taller than six feet (*is).

It’s warmer than 78° out (*is).

If we use more tall instead of taller, we don’t get

*Hailey is more tall than six feet.

but rather

Hailey is more than six feet tall.

I leave it to the reader to figure out what’s happening here:

Thirty is more than twenty.

It’s a little strange that we can compare a height to either a measurement or a sentence. In fact, it’s strange that we can compare a height to a sentence at all. Joan Bresnan posits that there’s a hidden number in the sentence, e.g.

Alan is hairier than Neil.

← Alan is hairier than [Neil is x amount hairy].

Yet no amount of syntactic manipulation can expose that x, say by allowing it to be modified:

*Alan is hairier than Neil is extremely.

*Alan is hairier than Neil is that much.

I’m tempted by a simpler alternative:

← Alan is hairier than [how Neil is hairy]

This is just as logical— how hairy Neil is is an amount rather than a proposition. It also fits in with the associated question, i.e.

How hairy is Neil?

Recall that normally sentential arguments are questioned with what, as in He believes what? What did you say is likely?

Another puzzle: somehow only the second of these sentences implies that Daniel is a scholar:

Anthony is a scholar more handsome than Daniel.

Anthony is a more handsome scholar than Daniel.

The first of these can be said to derive from a relative clause, which makes it clear that Daniel being a scholar is not an issue:

Anthony is a scholar [who is more handsome than Daniel (is)]

In the second case, we can suppose that the deleted material in the subclause must include scholar:

Anthony is a more handsome scholar than [how Daniel is a handsome scholar]

A related construction McCawley calls the Comparative Conditional:

The more syntax you read, the less you understand.

The underlying structure for these isn’t very clear. Still, there’s evidence that the first clause is subordinate to the second. E.g., tag questions use the verb from the second clause:

The more I talk, the angrier you get, don’t you/*I?

One more variant is worth mentioning: metalinguistic comparatives.

Alfred is more a victim than an agent.

Johnny Gat is more about murder than dialog.

I’m more sad than angry.

These are not measurements at all; they’re comments on what wording best applies to a situation. You can imagine quotes around the pieces.

This is another instance where more X isn’t the same as X + -er:

*I’m sadder than angry.

Meanwhile, outside Europe

The construction X is <comparative> than Y is common in European languages, but there are alternatives. E.g., constructions based on a verb meaning exceed, as in Duala:

Nin ndabo e kolo buka nine.

this house it big exceed that

This house is bigger than that one.

In Mandarin, you use the coverb bǐ ‘compare’:

Zhèi tái diànnǎo bǐ nèi tái hǎo.

This MW computer compare that MW good

This computer is better than that one.

The underlined phrase is equivalent to a PP; the verb of the sentence is hǎo ‘(be) good’. To change the comparison to ‘less than’, you must change the verb to huài ‘bad’.

Or you can use a locative— X is big from Y, as in Uzbek. (In other languages, equivalents of to or at can replace from.)

Ɔtam u ɔdam-dan yɔš.

father.my that man-from young

My father is younger than that man.

Quechua uses a locative, but also the adverb aswan ‘more’:

Maryamanta aswan sumaqmi Hulyaqa.

Maria-abl-acc more beautiful-personal.knowledge Julia-topic

Julia is more beautiful than María.

Or  you can use two sentences, each with an explicit predicate— X is big, Y is small, as in Amele.

Jo i ben, jo eu nag.

house this big / house that small

This house is bigger than that house.

Conjunctions

You might not think conjunctions have any mysteries, but oh, they do.

One: which words are conjunctions? They fit into the frame X _ X (where X represents any constituent), but so do prepositions.

Are the underlined words conjunctions?

Peake wrote his books before fantasy became mainstream.

We enjoyed the time machine until the dinosaurs escaped.

The planet suffered because Kumari was in charge.

It’s suggestive, though not definitive, that the first two allow nouns as objects: before dinner; until 2045.

Because generally requires an of: because of the tyranny.[38] This is a puzzle in itself. It might be parallel to out of the house. It certainly doesn't parallel any conjunctions.

By the Coordinate Structure Constraint (p. 317), transformations must apply to both conjoints. This is clear with the prototypes, and / or:

McCay drew comics and then he moved into animation.

*What did McCay draw and then he moved into animation?

*Did McCay draw comics and then he moved into animation?

Hill played the piccolo or he directed the band.

*Did Hill play the piccolo or he directed the band?

But these operations are fine with before/until/because:

What did Peake write before fantasy became mainstream?

Didn’t we enjoy the time machine until the dinosaurs escaped?

What suffered because/until Kumari was in charge?

They can also be fronted or clefted, while and/or cannot:

Before fantasy became mainstream, Peake wrote his books.

It was before fantasy became mainstream that Peake wrote his books.

*And then he moved into animation, McCay drew comics.

*It was and then he moved into animation that McCay drew comics.

It was because Kumari was in charge that the planet suffered.

Right can modify many prepositions. We can say She arrived right before the bomb exploded; but until, because fail this test.

We can conclude that before, until, because are prepositions. Though we’ll have to subcategorize prepositions by what subclauses they allow: finite clauses (like before), gerundives (like without), or only nominalizations (like most pure locatives):

*Kumari took over without he consulted his colleagues.

Kumari took over without consulting his colleagues.

?The king was complicit in their losing the city.

The king was complicit in the loss of the city.

Another weird fact about English conjunctions: and / or allow more than two conjoints, but but doesn’t:

For lunch he had gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Lucy is lying, or mad, or telling the truth.

*A crackpot is hard-working, unpopular, but undaunted.[39]

Some syntacticians are bothered by ternary trees, or those of higher level yet. You could perhaps derive gold, frankincense, and myrrh from

[gold and frankincense] and myrrh

or even

gold [[with frankincense] with myrrh]

But it’s not hard to find sentences where, semantically, all the conjoints are completely equal:

The countries that border Peru are Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile.

Saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal make gunpowder.

Pamela, Selina, and Harley formed a conspiracy to break into Arkham Asylum.

And if you can deal with that, you don’t need to worry that Terry and Chris got married is really Terry got married and Chris got married, or Terry got married with Chris. Verbal arguments are not restricted to solitary referents!

Indeed, some verbs semantically require plural subjects, e.g. collided:

The proton and the anti-proton collided.

The two protons collided.

*The proton collided.

This requirement is met if there’s a comitative, i.e. a with PP:

The proton collided with a neutron.

Exercise: do any verbs semantically require singular subjects?

What’s the internal structure of a conjunction? There are two main hypotheses:

Syntacticians seem to prefer tree (b).[40] The main evidence is prosodic: it’s easy to pause before the and. But it’s not hard to think of cases where you’d pause after it:

The nations with the most prisoners are China, Russia, and… the US.

Another argument is that the first conjoint can be the antecedent for a pronoun within the second, but not vice versa:

Sami and hisi gun will solve the problem.

*Hisi gun and Sami will solve the problem.

But this is handled by the pronominalization rules already given, simply because Sam comes first, so this isn’t a strong argument for making and X a constituent.

Other meanings

Though it’s more semantics than syntax, it’s worth pointing out that and is more than logical ∧. Often it implies temporal sequence: if you say

Sam dashed toward Mack Salmon and bit him in the nose.

it’s clear that the dashing preceded the biting.

More unusually, a conjunction may have a conditional meaning:

Say that one more time and you’re toast.

Which is reminiscent of the Mandarin construction where if two sentences are concatenated, the first is interpreted as conditional:

Xiǎng fācái, kàn zhèi běn shū!

Want become-rich / read this measure-word book

If you want to make money, read this book!

Adjectives

It’s a long, long tradition in linguistics to want to make adjectives into something else.

The ancient grammarians called them nōmina adjectīva ‘additional nouns’. The case for grouping Latin and Greek adjectives with the nouns is pretty good: they inflect like nouns; they don’t encode tense and aspect like verbs; they can be used as nouns.

Early GG tended to group adjectives with verbs. The main motivation was semantic: they are supposedly logical predicates, like verbs. Keyser and Postal offer these sentences as semantic equivalents:

Tarantulas disgust me.

Tarantulas are disgusting to me.

But this is stacking the deck— disgusting is a deverbal, so of course it’s similar in meaning to disgust. This pair is far less convincing:

Tarantulas are big.

Tarantulas eat other insects.

In predicate calculus, big would be a predicate… but so would tarantula; arguments are single referents, not word classes.

They also offer a syntactic argument: quantifiers hop from subject position to just before the verb or adjective:

All kobolds are likely to (know gnolls, be fragile).

→ Kobolds are likely to all know gnolls.

→ Kobolds are likely to be all fragile.

But, well, that’s true of nouns too:

Kobolds are likely to be all lawyers.

Finally, they point out that adjectives, like verbs, can take objects: She is fond of Melissa. But again, so can nouns: the destruction of the city; his fondness for oysters. One of the motivations for X' theory, as noted, is to capture the similarities of nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the sort of frames they accept.

Comparing languages, it seems clear that adjectives are sometimes more like nouns, sometimes more like verbs. Latin and Greek are definitely on the noun side of the continuum.

Mandarin is on the other side— it’s best to think of its ‘adjectives’ as verbs. An ordinary predicate takes no copula, and is modified by aspect particles like verbs:

Lǎo Wáng hěn páng.

old Wáng very fat

Wáng is fat.

Lǎo Wáng páng le.

old Wáng fat perf

Wáng got fat.

In fact, attributive adjectives are often formed exactly like relative clauses: páng de rén ‘fat people’ has exactly the same form as ài de rén ‘people who love’.

Japanese adjectives are slightly defective verbs. They inflect like verbs:

yasui is cheap

yasukattawas cheap

yasukunaiisn’t cheap

yasukunakattawasn’t cheap

yasukute(gerundive)

yasukereba(conditional)

However, their polite forms are formed with the copula desu rather than with the suffix -masu; thus yasukatta desu ‘was cheap (polite)’.

It’s also worth pointing out that in many languages, it’s the verbs that become more adjective-like. In Hindī, large parts of the verbal paradigm are formed from participles plus a copula, e.g.

Rām Sītā ko dekhtā hai.

Rāma Sītā to see-imperf-m be.3s

Rāma sees Sītā.

As a participle, dekhtā is inflected by gender and number like an adjective; the copula continues to be inflected by tense and aspect.

Russian has gone one step further: past tense verbs inflect by gender and number, with no copula:

Он читалhe read

Она читалаshe read

Они читалиthey read

In many Indo-European languages, adjectives have distinct comparative and superlative forms: e.g. Sanskrit puṇyatara- ‘purer’. But Sanskrit muddies the waters by applying these to nouns as well: vīratara- ‘more manly’.

Collaborative sentences

Almost all of the examples provided so far are isolated sentences generated by a single speaker.

However, there are some intriguing phenomena where sentences from multiple speakers affect each other, or even act like part of a single S.

Pronoun assignments can persist for other speakers:

Judith: Have you met Ross? He’s a hoot.

Roger: No, I never met him.

Responses to questions may supply an argument missing from the question:

Ann: What are you so engrossed in?

Vyju: Reading syntax.

Judy: Has Jaime been drinking again?

Jerry: Yeah, bourbon.

It’s curious that answering a question is one time when sentence fragments are positively encouraged. Is there a deep structure to these answers (Yeah, he’s been drinking bourbon), or is it possible to generate the fragments directly?

In many languages, such as Portuguese, you answer a question by repeating the verb:

Ana: Você viu o chefe?

you see-past.3s the.s.m boss

Did you see the boss?

José:Vi (sim).

see-past.1s (yes)

Yes, I did.

One speaker can add to another’s sentence. The resulting construction can be seen as a single S, which can include transformations as if it were generated all at once. E.g., Gapping:

Zach: Shaundi has won a new car!

Bobby: And Pierce, a set of steak knives!

This is easiest when the new material is at the end of the surface structure. But another speaker can in effect change a constituent to a conjunction, wherever it appeared:

Mitt: Chomsky wrote that book on phonology.

Barb: And Halle.

or repair any constituent:

Sam: My linguistics professor taught us a lot about entomology.

Geoff: About etymology.

Sam: No, the classroom was infested with bugs.

but can’t (say) add a relative clause except at the end of the S:

Mitt: Ross replied to a fan letter of mine.

Barb: *Who started out as a student of Chomsky.
(cf. ) Which you wrote in high school.

The scope of a negation or a quantifier can be accepted by the other speaker:

Morris: I’m afraid I didn’t have time to tidy up.

Georgia (looking around): Or do the dishes.

Layla: Every boy loves his mother.

Ernesto: And his dog.

Of course, in all of these collaborations, pronouns are ‘corrected’ to be from the viewpoints of the new speaker.

In languages with case, such as German, elliptical answers must appear in the right case:

Wem folgt Hans? Who is Hans following?

Dem Lehrer.The teacher (dative).

Wen sucht Hans? Who is Hans looking for?

Den Lehrer.The teacher (accusative).

Most of these elliptical replies can be understood as a redaction of the speaker’s statement, but some can’t:

Ray: Let’s get a pizza.

Peter: What kind?

Peter’s response is hard to cast as a modification of Ray’s remark (*Let’s get what kind of pizza?); it relates to something like What kind of pizza should we get?

A reply can be elliptical and not be any form of the previous sentence:

Charlie Brown: My stomach hurts.

Linus: Lucy again?

►In general, for analyzing discourse, I like conversation analysis, where the components are (roughly) speech acts, not syntactic categories. See the LCK, p. 125.

gtg – Generative Tree Gadget

I have another web toy for you, gtg.

http://www.zompist.com/gtg.html

ggg only knew about strings of symbols. That’s enough for a SS style grammar, but as you should know by this point in the book, transformations affect (parts of) trees, not just symbols. gtg maintains the tree structure of the sentence and can query or rearrange it.

If you press the Generate button you can generate sentences and see what rules were used to produce them. If you want to create your own rules, see the help page.

The form of the rules deserves some comment. When I started writing the program, I had rules like this:

:Q=[NP T=1+Aux 0

Prog:+:V:ing

Perf:+:V|Aux:en

T:≠:V|Aux:^do

T:+:Neg≠Aux:^do

These are almost unreadable, but the deeper problem is that they’re little more than keywords for a ‘real’ rule that’s buried in the code.

To avoid that, I ended up writing a tiny programming language. This forced me to come up with the smallest steps possible, and to encode as little grammatical information as possible within the program itself.

Here’s an example, the rules for Question Inversion:

if word Q transform [NP T into 1 0

if word Q find Aux cut find T paste

The bolded words are commands. The if command tests for something in the sentence. Both lines begin with if word Q, which tests for the (unspoken) word Q. This only appears in questions, so the remaining commands only affect questions.

The first line is the inversion itself: it turns NP T into T NP. The bracket identifies NP as an entire constituent rather than a single node.

Transform looks for a list of constituents, then rearranges them. The 1 0 business is borrowed from SS and early transformational work: the numbers refer to the elements in the input list. I could have written T [NP, but then Dative Movement, which operates on two NPs, would require special handling.

The second line copies the first auxiliary into the T node (which at this point only contains Past or Pres). It’s broken down into four commands:

1. find finds an auxiliary verb. If there is none, the rest of the rule doesn’t apply.

2. cut copies the Aux to the clipboard. The mini-language has only two variables, the clipboard and the last node found. ‘Cut’ replaces the Aux with ø (i.e. that node won’t be spoken). You could delete it, but this is easier.

3. find T looks for the T node.

4. Paste copies the contents of the clipboard (here, the Aux) into the last node found (here, the T).

So, these rules have this effect:

Q he T:pres can care

→ Q T:pres+can he care

If there’s no auxiliary (as in he cares), these rules will move the T but not paste anything into it:

Q he T:pres care

→ Q T:pres he care

A later rule implements Do-support:

if no Aux lex do if Neg find T paste

if no Aux lex do if no Neg if word Q find T paste

The novelties here:

- Lex do looks up do in the lexicon, and leaves it on the clipboard.

- If no tests that something doesn’t exist in the sentence.

Thus, both rules apply only to sentences with no Aux. The first applies if the sentence is negative, the second if it’s affirmative.

So this rule changes the last example to

→ Q T:do+pres he care

Verbal inflection is handled by this frightening rule:

if no word inf if T cuttense numclip find V|Aux inflect clip

You can check the help page to see exactly how this works, but here’s a paraphrase:

If this sentence isn’t marked inf(initive): Find the T node. Cut its tense. After it add the number from the subject. Find the first verb or auxiliary and inflect it— the type of affix is the tense + number we just put on the clipboard.

I suspect linguists won’t much like this mini-programming language, and programmers will like it. But there’s a larger point here: notations don’t matter that much.

Linguists have spent fifty years arguing about notation. This matters a lot if there’s one true theory of syntax— something that was widely assumed in the 1960s. But as any programmer could tell you, there are many ways to solve a particular problem.

I won’t make any grand claims for my approach with gtg, but I’ll defend the computation approach: it keeps the syntactician honest. These rules needed a lot of refining and cursing. But writing and testing these programs avoids two great pitfalls of syntax: leaving things vague, and assuming your rules work just because you want them to. When you can see your program generating bad sentences, you know that you’re not done.

Programming is also helpful in making sure your rules apply to a wide variety of situations. It’s easy to focus on just a few favorite sentences, but the random element of gtg brings up interactions you might not have thought of.

Minimalism

Minimalism (see Chomsky 1995, Adger 2003) is the latest version of Chomskyan GG. It’s something of a reboot, discarding quite a bit of the previous apparatus of GG, and seeking to explain as much as possible with simple rules.

The most startling change: no more phrase structure rules. Syntactic trees are no longer built top-down; they’re built bottom-up, word by word.

In X' theory, theta grids were constraints that threw out ungrammatical sentences. In Minimalism, they’re used to guide the building process so that the structure is grammatical when they’re done. Movement rules can be applied on the unfinished structure.

At its core, Minimalism is a fascinating little system. Let’s see how it works.

Merge

The basic action in derivation is Merge, which takes two things and makes a node out of them. E.g. we take drinks and beer and make the constituent drinks beer.

We can then take Connie and merge it with this node. Yay, our first Minimalist sentence!

Two important constraints on the theory:

- Because Merge (and the very similar Adjoin) are the only building operations, and only add one item at a time, every branch is binary.

- We can only attach things at the top of the tree. We can’t go back and add things below the VP node, once we’ve created it.

We can’t just add any nodes together— the theory isn’t that minimal. Merge is in fact tightly constrained, and it’s constrained by features.

Features and checking

We met features back in the discussion of theta grids, but they are now much more important— it can be said that they do most of the work of the theory.

Technically, syntactic categories are now features of lexemes— e.g. beer is marked [N] or [+N].[41]

Lexemes can also specify what comes next— i.e., what they expect to merge to. E.g. drinks expects two [N] arguments.

If a lexeme expects certain features, it can only be Merged with something that satisfies them. Thus we can Merge drinks and beer, which is an N. We then mark that feature satisfied.

This is important enough that we now mark these features in the syntactic tree.

Drinks is shown with the feature N N, meaning it expects two N arguments. Merge checks expected features— in this case, that means that it will only allow an N (like beer) to Merge with drinks.

Once a feature is checked, we cross it out. (In Minimalist terminology it’s deleted, but it’s useful to show it on the tree so we can see what happened.)

The first N isn’t checked, so it’s projected to the VP. This allows us to Merge the VP with Connie, which is an N. Now we can cross out that second N.

This is by no means the final analysis of this sentence, but it illustrates the basic methods. We can go quite far with just these mechanisms.

Modifiers

What about adjectives? Like verbs, these are things that want an N, and can therefore Merge with an N:

The new node is an N. So adding adjectives is, in a sense, invisible to the rest of the tree. The V drinks, which wants an N, is happy to accept this subtree:

Determiners also want an N. Most Minimalists accept DetP, so they’d say that the Merged node (the beer) is a DetP, and verbs want DetPs rather than Ns.

But this doesn’t affect the rest of the chapter, so I’ll continue to use N for arguments.

Tense

Tense is added to a T node that Merges with the VP.

The first line of each node gives the features, including the syntactic category; the second line represents the phonological word. In earlier versions of GG we’d say that Past is a T (just as beer is an N); here both T and Past are features of a silent word.

Note that verbs can be marked Past (etc.), and these must check with the T mode when it’s Merged. But it’s down a level. We can handle this in three ways.

- As a constraint: i.e., throw out the derivation if the tenses don’t match.

- Require that the T look down at the V and use its tense.

- Leave the tense on the V unspecified, and set it from T once it appears.

For our purposes it doesn’t really matter which alternative is chosen. In any case, the operation of making sure a node matches features with one down the tree is called Agree.[42]

As before, modals live in the T node. Modals can be seen as satisfying the tense requirement of the T immediately, so Agree is not triggered. That means, depending on which alternative we picked for its behavior, that we exclude Vs with a tense inflection, or force them to untensed (infinitive) form.

I’ve written Pres as an ad hoc way to represent that the T is marked for present tense, but has no expectations on other nodes.

The astute will note that this sentence reads Can Connie drink beer. Patience; we’ll move Connie in a moment.

There is a lot of emphasis on crossing out features. Are any kept? Yes; these are the features Chomsky calls interpretable; examples are the syntactic category of heads, 1st/2nd/3rd person, number, and semantic gender. Features only used to build the tree are uninterpretable. They get deleted in a proper derivation, and are unavailable to the shadowy semantic component of the grammar.

Auxiliaries

We’ve been through the verbal complex several times already, so I’ll just give the full Minimalist analysis.

Look closely at the features: each node has expectations on what comes below it.

- T, as before, wants the next verb down to be Past. (Which it is: had.)

- Perf wants the next verb to be Perf(ect); thus been.

- Prog wants the next verb to be Prog(ressive); thus drinking.

Again, you can picture the Minimalist machine either generating subtrees like Connie drunk beer and rejecting them when they can’t Merge properly, or the nodes forcing settings below them. In either case, picture this happening as we add each node.

Negatives are handled the same way: merge a Neg node to any of the VPs.

(Adger actually has the parents of Perf, Prog, Neg be PerfP, ProgP, NegP respectively. I don’t think that really adds any information, so I’ve labeled them all as VP.)

Connie is still in the wrong place. We handle this by adding another feature to T, N*. This is called strong N, but you can take it as meaning “Move the first N below to be a sister of this node.”

Connie had been drinking beer.

I’ve shown Connie in her original location, grayed out. This is the equivalent of the trace t in X' theory. Adger writes it like this: <Connie>. When you’re used to this, you can leave out the big arrow, as it’s clear what moved and where.

You may well ask, why was the subject, Connie, placed in the VP to begin with? One reason is that it provides a unit for semantic analysis. This is actually similar to McCawley’s generative semantics analysis, which had an entire S subordinate to the auxiliary verbs.

There’s also a syntactic justification. Quantifiers normally take the Det slot adjacent to their noun:

All the orcs have harassed gnolls today.

But all can also appear later in the sentence:

The orcs have all harassed gnolls today.

The traditional explanation is that all is moved by a transformation, Quantifier Hopping. But Minimalism suggests that the location of all is a remnant of the original location of the NP. Instead of moving the entire NP all the orcs, we moved the orcs (which happens to be a well-formed NP), stranding all down below.

That’s pretty neat, except that quantifiers also appear in the middle of the verb complex:

The orcs have all been harassing gnolls.

The orcs might all have been suffering from migraines.

More possible evidence comes from There-insertion:

Orcs have been harassing gnolls.

→ There have been orcs harassing gnolls.

The subject slot is occupied by there, as can be confirmed with tag questions:

There have been orcs harassing gnolls, haven’t there?

Yet orcs seems to live down in the sentence just before the verb, where Minimalism first puts it.

The non-Minimalist alternative is just the reverse: there is inserted in subject position, and orcs is moved before the main verb. At least Minimalism provides a reason we can find an NP in this position!

Case and number

Case is also handled by features and agreement checking. Subject case is handled by a feature nom on T, and acc on V.

Again, this can be handled in various ways. I think the most intuitive is that nom is copied from the T to the noun (because case is determined by position in the sentence, not by the choice of noun), but singular number sg is copied from the noun to the T (because it comes from the noun, or the referent).

Similarly, placing acc on the V makes sense, because this will get checked when it merges with a noun, ensuring that the object of the verb gets accusative case. It wouldn’t make much sense for the NP to pick its own case, since it doesn’t inherently know its role in the sentence.

Once sg is set on the T, we use Agree to force agreement on the verb.

Couldn’t we have the noun directly force agreement on the verb? Probably, but we already have T determining the tense, and we’d might as well have it handle other aspects of agreement as well.

There’s one more agreement feature needed for English— person agreement. I haven’t shown this in the diagram, but it can work exactly like sg.

For clarity, I’ve shown the surface lexical items for each node. But you should probably think of them as pronoun, worship, pronoun. It’s assumed that when the syntactic tree is fully built, a copy is sent to be interpreted by the semantic component, and to the phonetic system to be turned into a phonetic form. As in SS, phonological rules will supply the proper forms for each word.[43]

You might wonder, what happens to semantic restrictions? E.g., do we force the subject and object of worship to be sentient, or the object of drink to be a drinkable object? No, Minimalism wisely leaves these issues to the semantic component.

How does Do-support work in Minimalism? Adger makes a startling confession: we don’t exactly know! He reviews a number of proposals, but they all require adding some mechanisms to the theory. We’d might as well keep the old rule that do is added as a last resort to a T node that we can’t connect to a verb or auxiliary.

Adjuncts

The naming of nodes is almost the same as in X' theory, but there’s an important difference.

Only the first node above an X is labeled X'. This is good; as I noted before, a N + complement doesn’t conjoin well with a N' + adjunct: *books of poems and from Penguin.

But there’s a reason within Minimalist theory: you reach the XP level when you’ve run out of features that expect a particular component. In the diagram above:

- fix expects N N. One of these is checked by Merging cars, but the other is not, so the new node is labeled V', not VP.

- Merging orcs checks the other N. As there are no more unchecked features, the new node is a VP.

- Adding an adjunct doesn't affect features at all— no feature checking is done, so the resulting node just remains a VP.

Because adding an adjunct doesn’t check features, we give it a different operation: Adjoin rather than Merge.

Ditransitives

How do we handle ditransitive verbs, which take three arguments?

Beretos gave a sword to Oluon.

Where does the indirect object attach? Here’s a few possibilities:

The first option is traditional— it’s what McCawley proposes. Minimalism prefers binary branching, but maybe it just has to adapt.

The second is straightforward, though purists might complain that it has two levels of V'.

The third introduces an extra node— if we happen to adopt it, we’ll probably want to decide what that ? means.

Each option make predictions about constituent structure, which we can test. These come down to whether gave a sword is a constituent, or a sword to Oluon, or neither.

Verbal anaphors don’t really support a constituent gave a sword (at least when an indirect object is present):

*Beretos gave a sword to Oluon and Zeilisio did to Eressos.

*Beretos said he would give a sword to Oluon, and give a sword he did (to Oluon).

A sword to Oluon fares better, though the second test is debatable:

Beretos gave a sword to Oluon and a sandwich to Eressos.

?Beretos said he’d give a sword to Oluon, and a sword to Oluon he gave.

Richard Larson (1988) gives an argument against option 1 based on scope. There’s an asymmetry in these sentences:

I showed Doriani himselfi.

*I showed himselfi Doriani.

We gave every linguisti theiri award.

*We gave itsi recipient every awardi.

In structure 1, the two objects are sisters, so they c-command each other— you can’t explain the differing reflexivization/quantifier scope behavior with c-command. You can explain it with linear order: if the NPs are clausemates, the antecedent or the quantifier must come first.

Larson wishes to use c-command only, so he (and the Chomskyan tradition) prefers structure 3.

The structure gets a little bizarre here, so let’s start with something easier to swallow: causatives. Like ditransitives, causatives have three arguments; unlike them, they have separate verbs, at least in English. Their structure can be represented easily enough:

Rather than use the same category for make and drink, Minimalism creates a new category, v, pronounced “little v” (or light verb). This may make more sense if we consider inflectional causatives, such as Quechua -chi-:

Qawachisaq wasiyta payman.

see-caus-1s.fut house-my-acc he-dat

I’ll have him see my house.

The idea is that qawa- ‘see’ is a V, causative -chi- is a v.

If you look back at option 3, you can see that the structure is exactly the same as the above diagram. So Minimalism suggests that ditransitives are ‘really’ two-part verbs. (You could even analyze give as cause to have.)

The order is wrong, so we say there’s a movement rule that moves the V into the v slot. (We can force this by giving v a V* feature— that is, a feature that forces movement of a V.)

I haven’t shown the features here, but gave has the expected features N P, and the v has N.

- P is checked when gave Merges with the PP to Oluon.

- N is checked when gave Merges with the NP the sword.

- The v’s N is checked when it merges with the NP Beretos.

Now, you might accept the same structure for causatives and ditransitives. But Minimalism goes one step further: it uses the same structure for transitives. So the structure for Connie drinks beer is really:

Why oh why? The justification is that Agents should always be handled the same way. If the Agent of gave is placed in the specifier of a vP, then the Agent of drink should be placed in the specifier of a vP.

If that’s not enough, Minimalism also adds a little-n node to nouns! I won’t pursue this here, but you can find the explanation in Adger.

Mirrored arguments

Heidi Harley argues that yet another node is necessary in Hiaki (Yaqui), a Uto-Aztecan language.

If nothing else, this is worth looking at as an example of doing Minimalism on a language very unlike English.

We start with a simple sentence:

Uu avion ne’e-k.

the plane fly-perf

The plane flew.

Then we turn it into a causative.

→ Nee uka avion-ta ni’i-tua-k.

I child-acc plane-acc fly-caus-benef-perf

I made the plane fly for the child.

The structure is something like this. The causative adds an argument (nee) and a suffix (-tua) around the existing vP, which is typical for transformations that add arguments.

Note the differences in order, but not in structure, from the previous page.

Now let’s apply a benefactive:

Nee usi-ta avion-ta ni’i-tua-ria-k.

I child-acc plane-acc fly-caus-benef-perf

I made the plane fly for the child.

Suppose we cheerfully assume that the new argument and suffix are added around the previous structure, as before:

The problem is that the causer (nee ‘I’) is in the wrong place. We can move it to Spec position within the TP— but there is no good reason why usi-ta ‘child’ shouldn’t move there instead, or if nee does move, why usi-ta shouldn't be promoted to nominative.

Harley therefore proposes that the causative doesn’t add nee after all; instead it’s added by a Voice operation.

This solves the movement problem, at the cost of divorcing the causative affix from its argument.

The war on transformations

Minimalism, in theory, has just one transformation, Move. This is a far cry from the two dozen listed in SS, or the two hundred or so in Ross 2012.

This makes the transformational component of the grammar far simpler, but the complexity has simply moved to the lexicon. Certain lexical items, including unspoken ones like Past, have the ability to a force movement as they’re added to the developing structure. Plus, there’s quite a superstructure of hidden nodes in the syntactic tree.

Is this an improvement or not? Mostly it’s a matter of emphasis. Minimalism is in some ways the end of the trip begun in the struggle over nominalization (p. 138): Chomsky recoiled from the burgeoning messiness of transformations and the insertion of semantic concerns into syntax. He would rather have the complexity in the lexicon, and reduce the semantics to a very formalized minimum.

For (say) conlanging, I think a much less abstract analysis is more useful, where we think about the transformations as possible constructions, as near as possible to surface level.

Ups and downs

It’s hard to go from X' theory to Minimalism without noticing how much of GG is arbitrary and changeable. One feels sometimes that syntacticians should be given an electric shock whenever they appeal to “theoretical elegance.” In the ’90s, your syntax prof would cover your paper with red marks if you didn’t properly respect the X - X' - XP hierarchy with every component; in the ’00s this was quietly thrown out and instead we have this business of v and V, n and N.

As a programmer, I’d suggest another way to look at this: there are multiple ways to solve a problem. Look up ways to prove the Pythagorean theorem, for instance. Or ask a dozen programmers to implement the same API; you’ll get a dozen different approaches, some dramatically so. An annoying habit of syntacticians is to claim or assume that their method is the theory of syntax. Even if you’ve managed to solve all the syntactic problems, that doesn’t mean another method can’t do the same.

At the same time, especially if you’re new to this, I want to emphasize that if you cull out the most baroque parts of the theories, you often end up with a fairly solid and meaty consensus.

Minimalism in particular has some ideas worth looking at. To me its thoroughgoing incorporation of features guiding construction of the tree is more convincing than X' theory’s application of theta grids as constraints. Plus the way it builds trees, without production rules, is an interesting change from earlier GG.

However, Minimalism expends a lot of energy explaining things like tense, case, and number. But were these great puzzles, and does GG have better methods for solving them?

The old ways of diagramming sentences pretty adequately handled finding the subject, object, and indirect object. If GG wants to invent new methods to do the same, it should at least find edge cases where it correctly handles sentences the old rules do not!

(Have you ever wondered where that method comes from? It was pioneered by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg in Higher Lessons in English, 1877. This book can be read on gutenberg.org; it’s interesting to see what was and wasn’t known at that point. There’s quite a lot there, and it would make a respectable syntax section for a conlang; but almost all the syntactic behavior discussed in this book is missing.)

Try it out!

I’ve created a web app, mg, that generates sentences following Minimalism:

http://www.zompist.com/mg.html

It builds up trees as described above— randomly choosing a noun to begin with, then going through a repeated process:

- look for words that can Merge with the current tree

- randomly select one

- Merge it, forming a new tree

- Occasionally, where possible, add an adjunct

It’s not quite explicit in Minimalism that you have to start with an N, but it’s the only way you can actually follow the method of working bottom-up and only modifying the top node.

Similarly, the program sometimes has to step aside and built another subtree. Most notably, this happens when you need to Merge in a second argument. Once you’re at the V' node you can’t just find a word to Merge with it— you need an NP subtree.

The app will handle copying tense, number, and person to verbs, and correctly handles the verb complex and Do-support. I’ve also included a lexicon and rules for French.

The bulk of the program itself is in these special rules. But the basics of putting a VP together— phrases like the big round cat hates the little brown dog— relies almost entirely on the very simple rule that each lexical item is marked for the single item it can Merge with. This is probably, in fact, why Markov generators (p. 19) work so well. Those lexical preferences account for a huge portion of the patterns we see in language.

You can try extending mg’s vocabulary. Or you can rewrite the lexicon to handle a different language. Press the Help button for tips on how to do this.

After programming mg, I have some advice for Minimalists: start with the verb! Going bottom-up is a great principle, but it leads to a lot of rigmarole to get verbal arguments and agreement right. Of course, this insight is already captured in various relational grammars— which we’ll get to soon.

Production

So how real is generative grammar? Does the brain actually use phrase structure rules and transformations? Does it really have NP, N', and N nodes above a bare noun?

We don’t know, and Chomsky’s own answer can be summarized as “yes and no.” Yet all along people have been really tempted to take GG as a theory of production.

This is in itself a little remarkable. No one looked at Whitney’s grammar of Sanskrit, or Jesperson’s grammar of English, and asked if their rules lived in the brain. Syntactic Structures interested not only linguists but computer programmers. It looked like a machine for making sentences.

(This is how I got into linguistics, in fact: transformational grammar was offered as an elective in my computer science department.)

It’s only a model

Early on, Chomsky maintained that he was merely providing a way to write grammatical rules.

A grammar does not tell us how to synthesize a specific utterance; it does not tell us how to analyze a particular given utterance. In fact, these two tasks which the speaker and hearer must perform are essentially the same, and are both outside the scope of grammars of [this form]. Each such grammar is simply a description of a certain set of utterances. (SS, p. 48)

When he describes the passive, he is careful not to get near a theory of production: he says merely that if an active sentence is grammatical, then the corresponding passive is also grammatical (SS, p. 43). This is still a good way to think about transformations if you doubt, or don’t care, if they’re “in the brain.”

He repeats the point in Aspects (p. 9):

When we say that a sentence has a certain derivation with respect to a particular generative grammar, we say nothing about how the speaker or hearer might proceed, in some practical or efficient way, to construct such a derivation. These questions belong to the theory of language use— the theory of performance.

Nonetheless, he goes further than before in stating that the speaker and hearer know the grammar (p. 4):

The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system he puts to use in actual performance. Hence… linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior.

Chomsky distinguished competence (people’s knowledge of how language behaves) from performance (how they actually produce and understand utterances), and insisted that syntax was the study of competence only.

We can ask, if language obeys a rule as strangely specific as the Coordinate Structure Constraint (p. 80), how exactly would this not be part of a performance theory? Is there another mechanism which has the exact same results but whose internal (‘neural’?) workings make no use of constituents, coordination, and movement?

Well, it could be. Maybe it’s like learning to pitch: the brain almost certainly doesn’t have a rule “throw the ball at 100 mph”; it’s more likely to be a matter of certain memorized movements modified by feedback mechanisms. But I think everyone who worked on GG would have been surprised if the neurologists proved that nothing like constituent structure exists in the brain.

Pre-Chomskyan views

It’s worth putting Chomsky’s views on language in historical context. Let’s look at two opposing but influential pre-Chomsky views of what language is.

First, here’s Edward Sapir:

The process of acquiring speech is, in sober fact, an utterly different sort of thing from the process of learning to walk. …The child is individually equipped, by the complex set of factors that we term biological heredity, to make all the needed muscular and nervous adjustments that result in walking. ...In a very real sense the normal human being is predestined to walk…

Not so language. …Eliminate society and there is every reason to believe that he will learn to walk, if, indeed, he survives at all. But it is just as certain that he will never learn to talk.[44]

That is, Sapir’s view is that language is 100% culture. There is no language instinct, no language organ; he doesn’t even view the organs of speech as biologically adapted to produce sounds, but only co-opted.

The extreme position along these lines is Benjamin Lee Whorf’s linguistic relativity, expressed in Language, Thought, and Reality (1956). This is the idea that language and culture determine each other: not only is language a product of the culture, but it influences the way people think. Both Sapir and Whorf were influenced by modern anthropology, which emphasized the validity of all cultures, and how different they were from European norms.

In 1957 came a salvo from the psychology department: B.F. Skinner published Verbal Behavior. Skinner is most famous for his work with rats and pigeons. He would put a rat in a box with a bar that could be pressed. He would (say) flash a light, and if the bar was pressed, release a food pellet. The rat quickly associated the stimulus (the light) with food, and executed its response (pressing the bar). A response would be reinforced if it worked— i.e. it did something useful for the rat.

This is an astonishingly reductive view even of animal behavior, as ethologists Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz pointed out at the time. But without further experiments, or even consideration of (say) primates, Skinner applied his ideas to language.

Chomsky’s review of this book in Language (1959) is one of the great demolitions in academic history.[45] With relentless logic and barbed wit, Chomsky shows that if Skinner is using his terms literally, they simply do not apply to most human behavior, and if he’s using them metaphorically, they are so vague as to be pointless.

E.g. Skinner gives the example of someone seeing a painting and responding Dutch. This is supposedly a response to “extremely subtle properties” of the painting. As Chomsky points out, other responses might include Clashes with the wallpaper, I thought you liked abstract work, Never saw it before, Tilted, Hanging too low, Beautiful, Hideous, or Remember our camping trip last summer?

In Daniel Dennett’s terms, Skinner has invented an intuition pump; we can (just barely) picture a man trained to press a bar whenever a Dutch painting is shown. Chomsky reminds us that the human has so many more responses available, and the world is so less organized than a Skinnerian laboratory, that the stimulus/response view tells us less than nothing— he calls it “play-acting at science.”

Besides his refutation, Chomsky takes some time to offer a positive alternative:

As far as acquisition of language is concerned, it seems clear that reinforcement, casual observation, and natural inquisitiveness (coupled with a strong tendency to imitate) are important factors, as is the remarkable capacity of the child to generalize, hypothesize, and ‘process information’ in a variety of very special and apparently highly complex ways…. Which may be largely innate, or may develop through some sort of learning or through maturation of the nervous system.[46]

To put it more directly, Chomsky sees himself as making an almost self-evident rebuttal to Skinner’s reductionism: language is an extremely rich system which is internal to the mind. Its wide range and creativity mean that it can never be explained as a set of automatic responses.

(Especially if we insist, as Skinner seems to, on immediate sensory stimuli— e.g. he pictures a man hearing fox and looking around, raising a rifle, or otherwise expecting a fox to appear. Think for a few minutes how many references in ordinary language are not present at the time of utterance. This is true even for toddlers: children are constantly asked questions like What does a cow say? when no cow is present, or Did you wash your hands? about a possible past event.)

Chomsky is also reacting to Sapir’s view that language is all culture. Where Sapir is convinced that the obvious and scientific view is that language is utterly unlike walking, Chomsky is convinced that the obvious and scientific view is the opposite.

He dismissed the view (apparently repeated by Skinner) that parents teach children language with “meticulous care”. He points out, as any linguist would, that language need not be acquired from parents at all: immigrant children will learn the national language from other children, far better than their parents will. If they discover that their parents understand the national language too, they may never master the parents’ own language.

Study of the actual observed ability of a speaker to distinguish sentences from nonsentences, detect ambiguities, etc., apparently forces us to the conclusion that this grammar is of an extremely complex and abstract character, and that the young child has succeeded in carrying out what from the formal point of view, at least, seems to be a remarkable type of theory construction. Furthermore, this task is accomplished in an astonishingly short time, to a large extent independently of intelligence, and in a comparable way by all children. Any theory of learning must cope with these facts. [47]

Before leaving the Skinner review, one of Chomsky’s footnotes is worth a look:

The study of hesitation pauses has shown that these tend to occur before the large categories— noun, verb, adjective; this finding is usually described by the statement that the pauses occur where there is maximum uncertainty of information. …It would appear that the ‘key responses’ are chosen only after the ‘grammatical frame’.[48]

Whether this pause data holds up or is very important I can’t say, but it’s notable that the brain process described— syntactic frame selected first, content words filled in later— is precisely how the SS grammar is constructed.

The language organ

Later Chomsky took the position that the brain includes a dedicated module— a language organ— which not only processes language, but comes preprogrammed, so to speak, with something very much resembling his grammars.

Certain aspects of our knowledge and understanding are innate, part of our biological endowment, genetically determined, on a par with the elements of our common nature that cause us to grow arms and legs rather than wings. [49]

Indeed, by the 1980s he was maintaining that not only syntax but the concepts in the lexicon were innate:

Try to define a word like “table” or “book” or whatever, and you’ll find it’s extremely difficult. ...[A journal] has a long detailed article trying to give the meaning of the world “climb.” …But every child learns it perfectly right away. Now that can only mean one thing. Namely, human nature gives us the concept “climb” for free. That is, the concept “climb” is just part of the way in which we are able to interpret experience available to us before we even have the experience. …That is the way we learn language. We simply learn the label which goes with the preexisting concept.[50]

In Lectures on Government and Binding (1981), Chomsky committed even more firmly to linking his theories with actual brains. He proposed a model called principles and parameters to explain how a universal grammar could handle the diversity of natural language grammars. Parameters were binary settings like

- Pro-drop: are pronouns required (I think) or omitted (pienso)?

- Do heads come last or first? (See p. 276).

- Is alignment accusative (as in English) or ergative (Basque)?

- Is order SVO (English), SOV (Latin), VSO (Irish), or what?

- Are question words fronted (as in English) or left in place (as in Hindī)?

- For yes-no questions, are subject and verb inverted (as in English), or is a particle placed somewhere (as in Polish)?

Learning the language, a child doesn’t need to learn its rules, since all rules are built into the language organ. She only has to learn which parameters the language uses. Andrew Carnie errs on the side of boldness:

The child only has to hear a small amount of data (perhaps even as little as one sentence) to know what side of the head complements go in their language.[51]

The idea of the language organ is quite orthogonal to the usefulness of generative grammar. That is, you can find its analysis of syntax worthwhile while rejecting Chomsky’s innatism. This is fortunate, because these are the weakest part of his theories, and the arguments usually advanced to support them are flimsy and conflict with the data of language acquisition.

The ‘suspiciously quick’ argument

Steven Pinker titled his survey of linguistics The Language Instinct. This appeals to the observation that animals perform many behaviors without having to learn them. For instance:

- Foals can stand up within an hour of birth, and can walk within two hours.

- Honeybees perform a ‘dance’ (wiggling movements of the abdomen) to point to honey sources. The direction of the source is indicated by the angle of the body, and its distance by the strength of the movements.

- Chaffinches raised in isolation have only primitive songs. To learn the species’ full song, they must be exposed to other chaffinches during their first year.

Is this really like language? Chomsky emphasizes that children learn a language in an “astonishingly short time”, but it’s not two hours. A child can speak quite well after six years, but some complex phenomena— pronoun scope, morphological gender rules, the distinction between the duck is easy to bite and the duck is anxious to bite— are not mastered for a few more years. Teenagers are still learning language rules and vocabulary, and really, there is no age cutoff where we can say that language learning stops.

Many of the innatist arguments are addressed to a straw man: that language is learned by explicit instruction, like violin playing or quantum mechanics. But this isn’t the only kind of learning! You can also learn by messing around. You play with things, see what they can do, solve little puzzles, and in a pinch imitate other people. A child doesn’t need explicit instruction to figure out how to eat an ice cream cone, and as an adult you can learn to play a video game, or how to dance to rock ’n roll, just by intelligent exploration.

(Another similarity between children and gamers: both are terrible at accepting corrections. Children seem to ignore explicit corrections, and as for gamers— just try offering some corrective advice in your next team game with strangers.)

But don’t children learn languages with amazing speed, and far better than adults? Mostly, yes, but that’s because they have to— and they have all day long, every day, to do it. As David Singleton has documented, it’s surprisingly difficult to prove that children do learn languages quicker than adults; and as François Grosjean points out, children do struggle to learn languages, and strongly resist learning ones that they really don’t need to.

► For these authors, see the bibliography. For more on language acquisition, see the “Life Cycles” chapter of ALC.

It’s sometimes argued that there is a critical period for language learning. This is a term borrowed from animal ethology; e.g. baby goslings imprint on the first animal they see, normally their mother; Konrad Lorenz found that they would readily imprint on him instead, but also that imprinting was only possible for a few hours after birth.

Applying this to language is pretty much impossible, because the few cases we have of humans not learning to speak are cases of horrific abuse. These cases don’t prove that there’s a critical period for language, only that abuse prevents normal development.

Poverty of stimulus

Chomsky argues that the inputs available to a child are too minimal to work out the grammar.

His favorite example is Question Inversion. To form a question in English, you have to invert subject NP and the first V in the main clause:

The dog who ran away is Tommy’s.

→ Is the dog who ran away Tommy’s?

→ *Ran the dog who away is Tommy’s?

That is, a child has to come up with the inversion, and also be careful to apply it only to the main verb, not to the first verb in the sentence.

To sell the idea that it’s too complex to be worked out from the inputs, two claims are made about this transformation:

- That children almost never hear sentences that require the more complex rule.

- That wrong but easy alternatives are available.

The first claim is empirical, but isn’t based on empirical evidence. Geoffrey Sampson quickly found a counter-example in a children’s book (If a man flew above the air would he be able to hear?), while Geoffrey Pullum checked a corpus and found that 12% of questions were counter-examples.

As Michael Tomasello points out, some children produce multi-word questions before statements, which makes it hard to maintain that they’re inverting the order they hear in statements. Careful studies show that children learn questions construction by construction— e.g. they may start just with the formulas What NP [doing]? and Where NP [going]?

It’s sometimes suggested that the child might try “simpler” rules, e.g.

Invert the first and second words in the sentence:

→ Dog the who ran away is Tommy’s?

Reverse all the words:

→ Tommy’s is away ran who dog the?

One response is to point out that even the thickest child is presented with ample evidence that adults don’t talk like this.

Another is that constituent structure is not an arcane, difficult bit of magic! Grouping things together is a very basic cognitive operation; if anything, it’s harder to see things as ungrouped individual elements.

For instance, looking at this scene, I think you’ll find it almost impossible not to group items together:

It takes more mental effort to concentrate on the individual shapes— I have to ‘create an ungrammatical picture’ for you to easily do so:

Instructions about the groups, such as Color in the house, are easier than ones about the individual shapes— we give puzzles like Find all the squares in this picture as a brain-teaser.

It’s also worth pointing out that children do get Question Inversion wrong, especially in wh- questions: Why they’re not going? What she will do? Children constantly make mistakes, which has probably amused adults since the Paleolithic. They apply rules, but these are refined in stages, only slowly converging on the adult norm.

This is not incompatible with generative grammar, but it’s hard to explain if you believe that the rules and concepts are all encoded in the genome.

To be clear, I’m not advocating a return to Sapir’s 100% culture view. We have a robust cognitive toolkit, partly innate, partly derived by own exploration as toddlers (this is how you really learn “climb”), partly learned from other people. We don’t know enough about language in the brain to divide out functions among these possibilities.

►Sampson 1997 is a thorough critique of innatism. See also Comrie 1989, p. 5, which makes the point that Chomsky does not refer to any actual research on learnability.

Jackendoff 1994 is one of the better expositions of the innatist view. Everett 2012 is an equally clear argument against it. Both tend to argue against straw man versions of their opponents.

Parameters

The root problem with the principles and parameters approach is that it makes the theory unfalsifiable. If you find a new linguistic behavior, you just add a new parameter. There is no way to find real-world data that would refute the whole approach.

Still, the parameters theory would seem to make one testable prediction: that children abruptly change their behavior when they learn the setting of a parameter. If a toddler doesn’t know that English NPs are head-final, she can equally say blue doggie or doggie blue. As soon as she realizes what the setting is— perhaps given Carnie’s “one sentence”— she should henceforth get it right in all NPs.

In short: no, there’s no evidence that parameters snap into place in this way. Indeed, in acquisition studies, we see children learning grammar item by item and construction by construction. E.g., as noted above, at one stage a child used What (NP)? in the sense What is NP doing? She couldn’t yet ask What did you say? or What’s an animal? or What’s missing?

We have to be very careful, in fact, not to interpret child utterances with adult grammar. A child may say I think (something) without being able to say I thought (something), What are you thinking?, or You think (something). That is, at this stage she doesn’t ‘really know’ the word think; she’s using I-think in roughly the sense maybe.

►Tomasello 2003 is my favorite book on language acquisition; check it out if the process interests you.

Language disorders

The innatist position would also seem to entail that we should find defects in language acquisition which correlate to Chomskyan parameters, or lexical items. E.g. if the concept climb is encoded in our genes, we’d expect to find some people who are unable to use this word, while using all others. The same can be said for any given movement rule, or constraint on structure.

Language disorders do exist, and sometimes they are suggestive for linguistics, e.g.:

- Damage to Broca’s area in the brain tends to produce motor aphasia— that is, difficulty in getting speech out: slowness, hesitancy, difficulty in articulation, short utterances. They can understand other people pretty well, but may not get nuances that depend on function words.

- Damage to Wernicke’s area produces receptive aphasia: difficulty in comprehension, as well as production of repeated or meaningless phrases. They tend to speak in a rush and not notice that they’re not making much sense.[52]

An sample sentence produced by a Broca’s aphasic:

Me… building… chairs, no, no cabinets. One, saw… then, cutting wood… working…

And one from a Wernicke’s aphasic:

We, the kids, all of us, and I, we were working for a long time in the.. you know.. it’s the kind of space, I mean place rear to the spedwan…

It should also be noted that both areas have other uses— e.g. Broca’s area is used in motor coordination, Wernicke’s area with auditory processing. And some people have lost Broca’s area entirely without developing aphasia.

Even if these areas are key to language, no disorders correspond precisely to Chomsky’s innatist rules, rather than any other kind of language theory.[53]

The strongest argument for the innatist position is that where language disorders do exist, general intelligence doesn’t seem to be able to fill in. And though the difference has been exaggerated, it does seem that two-year-olds are good at learning language and bad at learning most everything else, while for adults it’s the reverse.

What toddlers know

For a look at how language acquisition actually works, the papers in Bowerman and Levinson 2001 are a good start. Two relatively recent developments are relevant:

- Children understand things far earlier than was once supposed. Jean Piaget thought that children don’t acquire the notion of object permanence till about 2 years old; we now know they have it at 5 months. He also thought that children don’t understand the concept of time till about 8, but in fact they clearly refer to past and future events at not much more than 1 year of age.

- At the same time, universal basic concepts are more elusive than ever. Languages really do divide up conceptual space differently, and this is evident in children’s speech from the beginning.

The object permanence result is due to better, cleverer technique: rather than relying on the baby’s actions, we only check what they’re looking at. Babies can be surprised, and look longer at unexpected outcomes. So you show them a doll being placed behind a screen, then remove the screen. They’re surprised if they see no doll there, or two dolls.

Many of the authors refer to Quine’s problem. Willard Quine envisioned a linguist eliciting words from a native. A rabbit goes by, and the native says gavagai. Does this mean “rabbit”, or “hop”, or “fluffy tail”, or “unspecified set of rabbit parts”?

There’s several answers to this:

- We aren’t blank slates; we’re animals with a hundred-million-year evolutionary history of perceiving objects, especially moving ones. We focus on rabbits, not tails or rabbit parts.

- Children may use some all-purpose constraints: e.g. they assume words are likely to refer to the most salient entities, and are normally not synonymous.

- People generally, and those speaking to children in particular, are cooperative. They are not trying to confuse you with talk of bags of rabbit parts.

- As Tomasello points out, speech is often presented as a commentary on a situation the child already understands, such as moving toys around with her mother.

- The child doesn’t have to learn everything at once. Once you understand a few frames (“Give me the___.” “Did you __ it?”), the new material is easier to learn.

As for universal concepts, it’s worth looking in detail at an example provided by Stephen Levinson. The language is Tzeltal, of the Mayan family.

Pach-an-a bojch ta y-anil te karton-e.

bowl.put-cause.imp gourd at its-down cardboard-that

Put the bowl behind the box.

The translation is informally right, but just about every detail in the actual Tzeltal is different.

- The shape and spatial information is largely encoded in the verb, not in nouns. Pach means “place a bowl-shaped vessel upright on a surface.”

- The two NPs refer mostly to material. Bojch is really a word for a gourd; karton can refer to anything made of cardboard. Learning new words, English toddlers tend to assume they refer to a shape; Tzeltal ones assume it refers to a material.

- Our ‘behind’ is a relative term, which doesn’t exist in Tzeltal. Instead, an absolute frame of reference is used. Anil ‘downward’ can refer to absolute height, but here it refers to horizontal location, because of a geographical particularity: Tzeltal territory is on a slope, so ‘downhill’ also means ‘northward’.

Do children really master this system? Of course; they have a pretty good grasp of the slope system by age three. They also master a wide range of very specific verb forms rather than relying heavily, as English-speaking toddlers do, on up/down.

Another neat example, from Melissa Bowerman and Soonja Choi: English toddlers quickly learn to distinguish put ON from put IN. Korean children divide up this semantic space quite differently, using at least seven verbs.

- kkita means “fasten tightly”– this includes putting the top on a pen, placing Lego bricks together, putting a piece in a puzzle, placing a cassette in its box, or buttoning a button.

- nehta means “place loosely”– e.g. put a book in a bag, or a toy in a box.

- pwuchita is used for juxtaposing surfaces– e.g. placing a magnet on the fridge.

- nohta is used for placing things on a horizontal surface.

- For clothes, you have ssuta for hats, ipta for the body, sinta for the feet.

All this is important because philosophers and linguists are apt to take English categories and assume they are universal concepts: UP, DOWN, IN, ON. Nope, they’re just projecting English words onto Mentalese. There is no stage where children use “universal” concepts before using language-specific ones. (Indeed, there’s evidence that children understand the language-specific concepts well before they can say the words.)

Does all this “affect how you think”? Of course. Levinson tells an amusing anecdote: he almost got his truck stuck in quicksand when his Australian Aborigine companion told him to “swerve north quick”. Levinson just couldn’t calculate where north was fast enough.

Generative semantics

In Aspects (p. 16), Chomsky marked off some boundaries:

The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.

He later described this position as interpretivist. He could appeal to semantics now and then, but the underlying model was syntax in control, bubbling up sentences which would be handed off to other components, and never accepting inputs from them.

As Chomsky himself had pointed out, deep structures were usually simpler than surface structures. The deep structures of a wide variety of surface structures were identical, and this was justified because they had the same meaning. For some, this suggested that the deep structure was the meaning, or could be moved closer to it.

This was the generative semantics school, most active in the 1970s; the most prominent names were John Ross, Paul Postal, James McCawley, and George Lakoff.

►If for some reason you want an overview of the split, see Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars (1993). The title is a bit overblown; GS and Chomskyan analyses shared ideas and analyses, and Minimalism is even a partial reconciliation.

GS can boast perhaps the best syntax textbook ever: McCawley’s The Syntactic Phenomena of English. It’s highly readable and takes the time to explain how syntax is done, and what the points of contention are. But its greatest virtue is that it’s twice as long as its competitors. A 400-page book can cover a lot, but not as much as SPE.

McCawley also wrote an excellent introduction to logic—Everything Linguists have Always Wanted to Know about Logic— and it wouldn’t be entirely unfair to say that GS noticed the similarity of deep structure to predicate calculus and tried to increase it.

E.g. all of these surface structures

The boys broke the window.

The window was broken by the boys.

Did the boys break the window?

It’s the window that was broken by the boys.

The window, the boys broke it.

have a deep structure like

the boys past break the window

It’s tempting to compare this to predicate calculus:

BREAK( boys, window )

McCawley even proposed that the underlying word order in English was VSO— the verb was moved to the right by a transformation.[54]

But why stop there? Break can be transitive or intransitive; we can capture that as well:

CAUSE( boys, BREAK(window))

And then why not look at a sentence like Someone broke the window and analyze it as

∃x: CAUSE( x, BREAK( window ))

This was only the start; GS also proposed derivations like

musical clock ← clock that makes music

readable ← able to be read

John is self-educated ← John is [John educated John]

Phil grows manioc ← Phil causes [manioc grows]

the owner of the bank ← the one who owns the bank

John’s leg ← the leg that John has

John’s deeds ← the things that John did

It pleases me ← I like it

girlfriend ← the friend is a girl

arrowhead ← the arrow has a head

peel ← remove-peel

It’s true that these are synonymous;[55] but the specific claim is that they are derivations, repeated in every sentence using these constructions.[56]

Though the Chomskyan side ‘won’, it’s notable that ideas like treating quantifiers as predicates, and turning transitives into CAUSE + V, are also found in Minimalism. (And it has a universal argument order— though sadly it’s SVO rather than VSO.)

At some point you might ask if all the variants on the boys broke the window really have the same meaning. Are transformations meaning-preserving? In SS Chomsky cheerfully posited a Negative transformation, but obviously a negated sentence doesn’t mean the same as its positive equivalent.

We can address this with something of a kludge: we insert not in the deep structure and let it trigger Negation. Similarly, we can insert Q and let it trigger Question. (We can feel better about this knowing that in some languages, adding a particle is all we need to do.)

There are problems with the idea that Passive doesn’t change meanings. Compare:

All the arrows didn’t hit the target.

The target wasn’t hit by all the arrows.

In the first sentence, no arrows hit; in the second, some did. But quantifiers are difficult in general.

More subtly, things like Topicalization may not change meaning, but they change how the sentence is used. Transformations, after all, aren’t simply random mutations; we apply them with some purpose. Some of these purposes are captured by pragmatics; some are a matter of style or rhetoric— subjects still a little too sidelined in linguistics.

Tempting as it is to mix deep structure and logic, there are problems as well:

- Logic is good for handling assertions, but these are only a small part of language.

- Language is far better than logic at handling fuzzy truth values and contradictions.

- Predicate logic doesn't offer much for handling tense, modality, and aspect.

- Even in the areas of language logic covers, like negation and quantifiers, there are pesky details that logic doesn’t cover.

►See McCawley 1981, or the Logic chapter of ALC.

More than this, you can’t do much semantics without running into pragmatics— the study of utterances in context. And neither logic nor syntax handles these well. (I remember seeing a paper which proposed to handle presupposition by adding a node to deep structure which attached the presupposition as a subclause. When all you have is transformations, everything looks like a syntactic tree…)

The biggest problem with adding semantic (or pragmatic) issues to syntax is that attempts to do so seem reductionistic.

- You can create an [+Animacy] feature in your lexicon, but it’s unlikely to handle (say) all the complexities of what items are animate in Algonquian languages— or if it does, it won’t properly handle when to use it in English, or how the neuter works in Tamil.

- You can decompose the meaning of bachelor to [+Male +Adult -Married], but that skips over a huge amount of cultural information about marriage, adulthood, and sex. As just one complication, is a priest a bachelor? Part of the meaning of bachelor is that the person is in the market for marriage. Maybe you add another parameter, but it’s not easy to be sure you've captured everything that might matter.

Perhaps because of these issues, some of the GS theorists became increasingly interested in general cognitive issues. Lakoff, in particular, investigated categories, metaphor, and children’s conceptions of the world.

►See the LCK for more on semantics and pragmatics— also the entirety of The Conlanger’s Lexipedia.

For cognitive linguistics, see Lakoff 1987 or Geeraerts 2006. We’ll also touch on this in the chapter on Relational Grammars.

Case study: Want to have

In the 1970s, it was proposed that want was derived from desire to have.

There were syntactic arguments for this. First, modifiers could target one meaning or the other, or be ambiguous.

Melanie wanted Bill’s car for a week.

This could mean Melanie’s desire lasted for a week, or that her desire was to have the car for a week.

Melanie desired [to have Bill’s car] for a week

Melanie desired [to have Bill’s car for a week]

What does the it refer to in this sentence?

Anita wants a lover, but her husband won’t allow it.

What he won’t allow isn’t her desiring a lover, but her having one. This is easily explained if the deep structure is

Anita wants [Anita has a lover]i, but her husband won’t allow iti.

Now, my reaction is more or less: isn’t this semantics? Wanting is a little dance of preoccupations, as is suggested by its etymology in various languages:

- you lack it— Norse vanta

- you seek it— Spanish querer

- you long for it— Latin dēsīderāre

- you’re pained (because you don’t have it)— Romanian dori

- you’ve set your heart on it— Greek ἐπιθῡμέω

I think we could find sentences that probe some of these components or aspects of wanting:

You say you want a lover, but have you checked Tinder?

That is, if you want it, you’re seeking it.

You can get to the Olympics, but you have to really want it.

This dictum is completely trivial if all we mean is that you must desire it; what we mean is that you have to be pained about it, to feel the lack arduously.

As for wanting to have, of course that’s the usual expectation with physical things, but having isn’t the goal in these sentences:

I want to travel to Mars.

I want to get rid of that painting you got from Aunt Pearl.

I want a kiss right here.

So, rather than derive want from want to have in our deep structures (and then posit a transformation to delete the have), I’d suggest that semantics leaks. Pragmatics, too. A word invokes a cloud of possibilities, presuppositions, and implications, and sometimes we can directly refer to those.

Curiously, this old GS idea has reappeared in Minimalism. E.g. clean is analyzed as having a complex syntactic structure:

(The small v’s are not typos; they’re seen as a different head type.)

How do you parse?

GG looks a lot like a production system, and if you use my ggg program, you can in fact make it one. But how do you make an interpretation system? That is, how do you parse?

Let’s start with context-free grammars. We use the same grammar for parsing as for generation.

We can simplify the problem by doing a quick pass to find syntactic categories. E.g. the cat in the hat sat on the mat can be turned into

Det
The

N
cat

P
in

Det
the

N
hat

V
sat

P
on

Det
the

N
mat

What if a word is found in multiple categories? Then we generate multiple outputs, and try to parse each one. E.g.:

Det
The

N
bear

V
doesn’t

V
run

Det
a

N
lot

Det
The

V
bear

V
doesn’t

V
run

Det
a

N
lot

Det
The

N
bear

V
doesn’t

N
run

Det
a

N
lot

Det
The

V
bear

V
doesn’t

N
run

Det
a

N
lot

All but the first of these will fail in the next steps. (If you get multiple successful parses— congrats, you’ve found an ambiguity.)

One approach is top-down parsing. You start with S and generate every possible structure, till you find one that matches our sentence. This is about as hopeless as it sounds, and if your grammar contains a lot of recursion it may be quite impossible.

Bottom-up parsing starts with the data we have and attempts to build the structure on top of it, using the rewrite rules.

Suppose we have this simple grammar:

S → NP VP

VP → V NP

VP → V PP

NP → Det N

NP → NP PP

P → P NP

We have the input

Det
The

N
cat

P
in

Det
the

N
hat

V
sat

P
on

Det
the

N
mat

We will read one word at a time, and use a top-down stack as short-term memory. (A stack works like dish dispensers in old-fashioned cafeterias: it’s a storage area where you can add things and take them out only at the top.)

Det (the): no rules produce just Det, so place it on the stack.

N (cat): With the Det from the stack, we have a match with the rule NP → Det N. (Ordering is important: to match a rule, the item on the stack must come first in the rule, as it does here.) Remove Det from the stack and place NP∆ there. I use NP∆ as an ad hoc representation of the NP and its subtree, that is:

(If you’re not familiar with programming: yes, you can put syntactic trees on a stack. Programs are not limited to numbers and letters!)

P (in): no rules apply; put it on the stack.

Det (the): no rules apply; put it on the stack, which presently holds (top to bottom):

Det, P, NP∆

N (hat): Take the Det from the stack to match NP → Det N.

Before placing the NP∆ (the hat) on the stack, we should see what’s there. It’s a P. Checking our rules, this matches PP → P NP, so we now have a PP∆ in hand.

The stack now contains an NP (the cat). Check the rules again: we find NP → NP PP. That gives us a new NP∆:

V (sat), then P (on), then Det (the): nothing to do; put them on the stack, which now contains

Det, P, V, NP∆

N (mat): Take Det from the stack; we can match NP → Det N, giving us an NP∆ (the mat).

Check the stack: we can take P from the stack, matching the rule PP → P NP, giving us a PP∆ (on the mat).

Check the stack: we can take V from the stack, matching VP → V PP, giving us VP∆ (sat on the mat).

The stack now only contains our big NP∆, and we’re holding a VP∆. Checking the rules, this matches S → NP VP. That gives us an S∆:

We now have a tree for the entire S, and we’ve processed all the input. That’s the success condition, so we’ve successfully parsed the sentence.

An exercise: try a couple versions of The bear doesn’t run a lot, verifying that only the readings with N bear and V run can be parsed.

What if more than one rule had matched? We take both paths. Possibly only one analysis will work, and we’re done. Or if both paths produce an S, we have an ambiguous sentence.

You can imagine various ways to make the process easier, faster, or more robust:

- Recall the current context. If we’ve been talking about bears, then make the default interpretation of bear a noun.

- If you need to take multiple paths, rather than running the whole analysis again, you can keep a copy of your current state, then keep going. When you finish the sentence, go back and use the copy. This re-uses parsing you’ve already done.

- Some categories give you information about what’s coming up: e.g. a Det means you’re starting a NP; a P means you’re working on a PP. That might help you in selecting the likeliest rules.

- Rather than taking all paths, maybe we take just one, and see if we get into trouble. This would explain why we often don’t notice ambiguities till they’re pointed out!

- The failure state is generally reaching the end of a sentence and not having an S. On the other hand, if you have a constituent, that's not bad. If no other route produces an S, you’d might as well consider it a success. (E.g., an NP might be a valid answer to a question, or might be a sentence fragment in a story.)

There are other algorithms for parsing; but if you had no idea how to use a generative grammar for language understanding, this should reduce the mystery!

What if your rules are transformational? You start with the parsing process above— you need to have a valid surface structure. Then you check your list of transformations, seeing if you can apply them in reverse. For instance, if you have

[Being found by a cat] changed Jeff.

This matches the output of Equi NP Deletion. (If we have specified the rule clearly enough that we can use it for generation, it will also be clear enough for parsing.) If we reverse that, we have

[Jeff was found by a cat] changed Jeff.

The subclause matches the output of Passive. Reversing that:

[a cat found Jeff] changed Jeff.

Again, if we find that multiple transformations could have applied, we try them all. E.g. by a cat could also be a locative, in which case the deep structure will be more like

[someone found Jeff by a cat] changed Jeff.

If the transformations are ordered, we check them in the opposite order we used for generation. We can also use the cyclic principle, this time working from the top down.

Failure conditions are harder to identify here. But in general, we’ve messed up if we’ve checked for all possible transformations, and the current results are semantically nonsense, or not valid according to the base rules.

As an example of the first: we are processing The book will be written by November. This matches the output of Passive, so we produce:

November will write the book.

That doesn't make sense, so the alternative parsing of by November as a time expression should be preferred.

As an example of the second:

Go get me a hot dog to go.

If we take this as Comp Placement , we might reverse it to

Go get me [a hot dog goes]

We’ll also reverse Dative Movement and Imperative You Deletion:

You get [a hot dog goes] to me.

And here we’d be stuck, as get does not have any syntactic frame where it takes a sentence as direct object and a person as indirect object.[57]

Naturally, a parser can only come up with the analysis (or analyses) allowed by its grammar. It’s not a language-learner; it cannot come up with new rules on the fly or learn flaws in old rules.

Relational grammars

Early GG, as we’ve seen, focused on constituent structure and how it was rearranged by transformations.

However, there is also a strong current of interest in relations and roles— such issues as

- What semantic roles exist (Agent, Patient, etc.)

- How they relate to morphological case

- Valence, and what happens when it’s changed

- How all this is represented in the lexicon

- How, or whether, sentence meaning is related to the meaning of words, constructions, and their relations

- How all these things vary across languages

As we’ve seen, these questions are key to Minimalism, which goes so far as to throw out phrase structure rules in an attempt to model how case and agreement work.

However, it’s also possible to focus on relations, with far less interest in constituent structure. Many alternatives to Chomskyan syntax do so, and also mix semantics and syntax to a far greater degree than Chomsky is comfortable with.

Semantic roles

The grandfather of relational grammars is probably Charles Fillmore, who wrote “The case for case” in 1968.[58]

As context, Aspects (1965) treated case as a feature, assigned in two ways:

- By the position of the noun in surface structure (p. 221, fn. 35)— this determines nominative and accusative.

- By features drawn from the lexicon (p. 171)— this drives adjective agreement, along with similar features like number and person.

It’s evident that Chomsky did not consider the problem very interesting. Fillmore turns this on its head: he wants every NP in deep structure to be assigned a semantic role.[59] He proposed the following:

- Agentive— animate instigator of an action

- Instrumental— inanimate direct cause

- Dative— animate being affected

- Factitive— object resulting or created

- Locative— location or orientation

- Objective— default or neutral role: object affected

- Benefactive— animate, receiving or benefiting from action

These sound like the names for arguments (next section), but they’re not quite the same. Think of the semantic roles as specific to each verb, and remaining the same no matter what transformations apply. For instance:

Chell Agt opened the portal Obj.

The portal Obj was opened by Chell Agt.

Morgan Agt opened the file Obj with a password Ins.

The password Ins opened the file Obj.

He Agt persuaded the general Dat to rebel.

The general Dat was persuaded to rebel.

Okura Loc is sunny.

It’s sunny in Okur Loc a.

Big Jim Agt is baking a cake Obj.

Big Jim Agt is baking.

The cake Obj is baking.

Anticipating generative semantics, he proposes that pairs of lexical verbs may differ not in meaning but in what semantic roles they expect:

Marie Dat saw the painting Obj.

Gertrude Agt showed Marie Dat the painting Obj.

Homer Dat likes donuts Obj.

Donuts Obj please Homer Dat.

Bill Dat died.

Beatrix Agt killed Bill Dat.

She Dat could hear the radio Obj.

The music Obj reached her Dat.

In “Case” Fillmore wrote as if he were merely expanding or correcting the treatment of case in Aspects, but he also drops a more radical idea:

Our discussion so far has suggested that the deep structure of (the propositional component of) every simple sentence is an array consisting of a V plus a number of NPs holding special labeled relations (cases) to the sentence.

So the deep structure of Gertrude gave Marie the painting is not a syntactic tree, but the data

Vgive

NPAgtGertrude

NPDatMarie

NPObjthe painting

It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that many non-Chomskyan approaches to syntax are basically this array, reformatted and often supplemented with more relations.

Fillmore suggests, or hopes, that the semantic roles are linguistic universals. E.g. if we’re doing Latin, we use the obvious role-to-case rules to produce

Gertrudis Marīan pictūra dedit.

Gertrude-nom Maria-dat painting-acc give-3s.perf

For English, semantic roles have a default preposition:

Agt by

Ins with if there’s an Agt, otherwise by

Ben for

Dat to

Obj ø

These rules are modified, of course, in particular constructions— e.g. in active sentences the Agt loses its by, while if Dative Movement applies, the Dat loses its to.

Are there directional semantic roles? E.g. in Russian we distinguish

Маша танцует на площади.

Masha-nom dance-3s on square-s.prep

Masha is dancing in the square.

Маша идет на площадь.

Masha-nom go.by.foot-3s on square-s.acc

Masha is going to the square.

That is, the prepositional case is used for location, the accusative for movement into. This parallels the difference between English in/into:

Mary swam in the ocean.

Mary swam into the ocean.

Fillmore suggests that these are all Locatives; the difference is whether the Loc modifies the V or the S:

Mary [swam] [in the ocean].

Mary [swam into the ocean].

However, you could also simply add semantic roles Source and Destination. (Though as Bernard Comrie notes, once you start subdividing semantic roles, it’s hard to know when to stop.)

Neat fact: Dutch handles the source/destination difference through syntax:

Kuifje loopt in het bos.

Kuifje walks in the woods

Tintin is walking in the woods.

Kuifje loopt het bos in.

Kuifje walks the woods in

Tintin walks into the woods.

The mention of Russian is a reminder that semantic role is not case. The roles belong to semantics, not morphology, and are intended to be universal. E.g. in the square is always a Locative, but how it’s expressed differs by language:

Russianprepositional case
Latinablative case
Germandative case
Quechualocative case
Englishpreposition in

Valence and alignment

Valence is simply the number of arguments on a verb. We can classify verbs by the number: 1 = intransitive, 2 = transitive, 3 = ditransitive. The term was introduced by Lucien Tesnières in the 1950s.

Some verbs, notably those of weather, semantically require no arguments; they are avalent, like Spanish llover:

Llueve.

It’s raining.

English and French make these intransitive, adding a dummy subject.

We have special terms for the arguments of intransitive and transitive verbs:

- The sole argument of an intransitive verb is the Experiencer (E).

- The ‘doer’ of a transitive verb is the Agent (A).

- The ‘do-ee’ of a transitive verb is the Patient (P).

This allows an easy explanation of the morphosyntactic alignment. The two commonest alignments group two of these argument types together as one case, leaving a special case for the other:

►See ALC, p. 116, for more alternatives, and for how languages are rarely purely ergative.

I purposely avoided using the terms subject and object in these definitions, because they’re misleading if you’re only used to nominative-accusative systems. We’ll get back to subjects below.

Intransitives can really be divided into (at least) two classes, based on the semantic role of their argument:

- Agentive, or unergative (Melissa cooked/walked/danced/ lunched/grimaced)

- Objective, or unaccusative (the window broke; things began/ lasted/happened; the book is long; Melissa fell/appeared/floated/existed/vanished)

The un- terms may be hard to grasp, but you can think of unaccusative as “something that sure looks like a Patient, but isn’t in accusative case”, and unergative as “looks like an Agent, but isn’t ergative”.[60]

In split-S languages, Agents and agentive Experiencers take one case, while Patients and objective Experiencers take another. But the difference can also be seen in less exotic languages:

- In Dutch, unergatives can be passivized, but unaccusatives cannot be:

Er wordt hier veel geskied.

it become-3s here much ski-past.part

A lot of skiing is done here. (Lit., it’s skied here a lot.)

*In de zomer wordt er hier vaak verdronken.

in the summer become-3s it here often drown-past.part

In the summer there’s a lot of drowning here.

- In English, (some) unaccusatives can take a resultative: it broke into pieces; he drowned to death; it froze solid. Unergatives never can: *she lunched full, *she danced to death.[61]

It’s sometimes claimed that you use ‘be’ as the auxiliary only for unaccusatives in German and French. But this doesn’t quite hold up.

- In German, it may be more accurate to say that you use haben with ongoing states (Der Bär hat den ganzen Winter geschlafen / The bear slept all winter), sein with completed ones (Ich bin eingeschlafen / I fell asleep).

- French verbs used with être include active movement verbs like entrer ‘enter’ and aller ‘go’, and do not include prototypical unaccusatives like finir ‘end’, exister, périr ‘perish’.

In English, unaccusatives can be passivized; this doesn’t change the valence but it does imply that there was an agent. E.g. The machine stopped doesn’t mean that someone stopped it— maybe it was just internal decay. The machine was stopped normally implies that someone stopped it. Note that the first sentence sounds wrong if a purpose is given:

*The machine stopped so the droids could fix it.

The machine was stopped so the droids could fix it.

In English, the prototypical ditransitive is give, but of course this is strictly speaking transitive in many languages, e.g. Latin:

Cæsar matellam auream Belgīs dedit.

Cæsar chamberpot-acc gold-f.acc Belgian-pl.dat give-perf.3s

Caesar gave the Belgians a golden chamberpot.

That is, the indirect object is indicated by a special case, the dative. In modern Romance languages it’s a prepositional phrase (for nouns— the pronouns still have a dative). But Latin did have double accusatives:

Verres Mīlēsiōs nāvem poposcit.

Verres Milesian-p.acc ship-s.acc demand-perf.3s

Verres demanded a ship from the Milesians.

There may be required non-NP arguments. David Allerton suggests elaborator for any required argument, as opposed to a free modifier (e.g. most time, place, or manner adverbials).

A verb may require a PP: e.g. put, rely on. Elaborators can also be adjectives (He became moody/*ø), particles (break down, give up), or entire clauses (want to travel around the world).

Complicating valence is the fact that some things that look like direct objects perhaps aren’t:

- Cognate objects, as in take a walk, heave a sigh, dream a dream, take a look. These are weirdly vacuous in semantics; it’s like speakers feel a need to just make the VP longer.

- Idioms like she sang her heart out; he talked a blue streak. These are not vacuous— they’re intensives.

- Predicatives, as in he remained a showman.

- Applicatives, as in he walked a mile. (See ALC, p. 145.) In many languages these are formed with a verb affix, as in Ainu:

Poro cise e-horari.

big house applic-live

He lives in a big house.

All of these resist passivization and clefting, except perhaps applicatives:

*A look was taken by him.

*Her heart was sung out by her.

*A showman was remained by him.

?A mile was walked by him.

*It was a look he took.

*It was a blue streak he talked.

*It was a showman he remained.

It was a mile he walked.

There’s a wide variety of verbs which allow, not exactly a change in valence, but one of focus. Compare:

Sap is oozing from the plant / The plant is oozing sap.

Fat clogged the drain / The drain clogged with fat.

The sun warmed the stones / The stones warmed in the sun.

Neil writes with this pen / This pen writes well.

I cut the wire with clippers / The clippers cut the wire.

Five people can sleep in this bed / This bed sleeps five.

We made cookies with lard / Lard makes great cookies.

You can buy this game for $5 / $5 will buy you this game.

An egg grew into a chicken / A chicken grew from an egg.

In at least some of these, it’s not obvious which expression is deeper, or that another language might not make a different choice. What’s clear, though, is that English has a lot of ways of making almost whatever argument you want into a subject.

Subjects and Objects

As Fillmore notes, traditional grammar analyzed the oblique cases in great detail, but not the nominative; its role was considered obvious. Syntacticians have more than made up for this neglect.

Here’s some random wrong statements from online grammars about subjects:

The subject is the person or thing doing something, and the object is having something done to it.

Le sujet réalise l’action (à la voix active) exprimée par le verbe. [The subject carries out the action (in the active voice) expressed by the verb.]

Im Nominativ steht das Subjekt, von dem der Satz etwas aussagt. [In the nominative stands the subject, what the sentence says something about.]

By trying too hard to avoid complications, these writers cause only confusion. Even a children’s story will contain sentences where the subject is not “doing something”:

Once there were four children…

They were sent to the house of an old Professor…

He had no wife and he lived in a very large house…

They won’t hear us.

It opened quite easily.

She found that she was standing in the middle of a wood…

Lucy felt a little frightened.[62]

Sentences, of course, often express states rather than actions, or perceptions. Or the ‘action’ is a remote dead metaphor. Or a transformation has promoted an object to subject (they were sent). Or the actor is quite different from the subject of the sentence. (It opened could refer to a door opening by itself, but in context it refers to Lucy opening a door.)

The root observation behind all this talk about “doing things” is that the subject is normally the most active or agentive of the arguments. This is truer if we focus on deep structure subjects (avoiding things like promoted subjects in passives), but still doesn't cover sentences like he resented her.

The idea of the subject as “what the sentence is about” is a little better, but this is properly the topic, as opposed to the comment or new information, and it needn’t be the subject of the sentence.

There’s a wireless and lots of books.

(no real topic)

My old father now, that’s his picture above the fireplace.

(topic is fronted; subject is that)

You are the child.

(in context, topic is the child; new information is you)

In European languages, the subject is a constellation of features, which may or may not exist or coincide in other languages:

- The argument that triggers agreement on the verb

- The argument placed in the nominative case

- The topic (old information)

- The most active or agentive of the arguments

- The first argument

- If the VP is conjoined with an intransitive VP, the argument that will be taken as the second sentence’s Experiencer

In ergative languages, the subject is best equated to the absolutive. E.g., the equivalent of The woman fed her daughter and she left implies that the daughter left. (Think about which case each argument is placed in.)

An old syntactic puzzle in English: existential there acts like a subject (by position, and agreeing with the verb)…

There is no reason to panic.

There seems to be a little problem with the oxygen supply.

There’s no monster at the door, is there?

…except when it doesn't:

There are two ominous forms looming over the ship.

And in many languages, the topic is explicitly and separately indicated. E.g. in Japanese:

Zō wa hana ga nagai.

Elephant topic nose nom long

Elephants— their nose is long.

As the translation shows, we can do this in colloquial English. It’s hard to fit in many theories of syntax, though, which only allow one ‘subject’!

In Quechua, the topic clitic -qa can be added to any constituent— say, the direct object:

Papamantam puka pikantitaqa ruwanku.

Potato-from-evid red spicy-acc-topic make-3-pl

They are making puka pikanti from potatoes.

This would be an appropriate sentence in a discussion of puka pikanti, but not in a discussion of potatoes.[63]

Transformations often preferentially affect subjects… but this tendency always has exceptions.

1. Imperatives are almost always addressed to the subject, even if they’re third person (Latin caveat lector, ‘let the reader beware’). However, Malagasy allows passive imperatives like

Sasao ny lamba!

Be.washed the clothes

The clothes be washed!

where the person commanded is not the subject.

2. Reflexives may be limited to subjects. E.g. Swedish sig själv can only refer to the subject:

Ingmar pratade med mig om sig själv.

Ingmar speak-past with me about 3.refl self

Ingmari talked to me about himselfi.

*Vi pratade med Ingmar om sig själv.

Ingmar speak-past with Ingmar about 3.refl self

We talked to Ingmari about himselfi.

A separate reflexive, han själv, is needed to fix the last example— han själv can refer to anyone except the subject.

3. English allows almost anything to be clefted (It was Moira that Reyes was more gothy than), but in Malagasy, you can only cleft the subject.

Tagalog has a trigger system which can make it difficult to decide what the subject is. To start with, any NP can be the trigger, marked by the preposition ang; an affix on the verb then tells what semantic role the trigger is. In the examples the trigger is underlined and the trigger affix (TA) is bolded.

Magaalis ang tindero ng bigas sa sako para sa babae.

TA-remove nom shopkeeper obj rice dat sack benef woman

Aalisin ng tindero ang bigas sa sako para sa babae.

remove-TA obj shopkeeper nom rice dat sack benef woman

Aalisan ng tindero ng bigas ang sako para sa babae.

remove-TA obj shopkeeper obj rice nom sack benef woman

Ipagaalis ng tindero ng bigas sa sako ang babae.

TA-remove obj shopkeeper obj rice dat sack nom woman

The shopkeeper will take rice out of the sack for the woman.

This is similar to voice, but there are about a dozen trigger affixes.

The trigger implies definiteness, while lack of a trigger is unmarked. Thus in the last sentence ang babae must be translated ‘the woman’, but shopkeeper, rice, sack could be a or the as appropriate for the context.

The NPs can be placed in any order, though agentives tend to come first.

So, is the trigger or the agentive the ‘subject’? The trigger does have the subject-like property that only triggers can be relativized. That is, if you want to relativize an NP, you make it the trigger first.

Iyon ang babaeng magluluto ng isda.

That nom woman-sub TA-cook obj fish

That’s the woman who will cook fish.

Iyon ang isdang iluluto ng babae.

That nom fish-sub TA-cook obj woman

That’s the fish that the woman will cook.

On the other hand, reflexives are controlled by the actor (capitalized), not the trigger:

Magaalaala ANG LOLO sa kaniyang sarili.

TA-worry nom grandfather dat he-gen self

Aalalanin NG LOLO ang kaniyang sarili.

worry-TA nom grandfather dat 3s-gen self

Grandfather will worry about himself.

And imperatives refer to the addressee, even if another item is the trigger:

Ibigay MO sa kaniya ang kape!

TA-give 2s.obj dat 3s.obj nom coffee

Give him the coffee!

Without theoretical contortions, it’s simplest to conclude that Tagalog has two types of ‘subject’, or divides the notion of subject in two.[64]

Representing relations

Here’s a very brief look at some of the ways linguists have tried to diagram relations (rather than constituent structure).

►For more on these approaches, and more approaches, see Van Valin. Or, of course, look up the linguists named.

Word Grammar

Word Grammar was created by Richard Hudson in the 1980s. It has evolved quite a bit over time; this sketch is based on Van Valin’s overview and is not necessarily in line with Hudson’s later work.

The basic idea is to show dependencies with arrows.

- If two elements require each other (e.g. verb/argument, preposition/NP, the dependency is bilateral. The dependent is marked with a double arrowhead.

- If the dependent is optional, the dependency is unilateral, marked with a single arrowhead.

- Conjoints are joined with a line (without arrows).

In addition, we can label the subject, direct object, and indirect object. Thus:

(Hudson considers English determiners to be heads.)

The neat bit about this type of diagram is that it visually represents the difference between dependent- and head-marked languages, a distinction first made by Johanna Nichols.

- In a dependent-marked language, case is marked on the noun or pronoun (She took the baby), possession on the possessor (my baby).

- In a head-marked language, argument relations are marked on the verb, and possession on the item possessed; cf. Luiseño hengéémal po-na ‘the boy’s father’, where possessive po- is attached to na ‘father’.[65]

Note how different a Swahili sentence looks, although the constituent structure is close to English:

That is, case agreement is marked on the verb in Swahili: both subject and object are represented by verb prefixes, and in fact walikisoma is a valid standalone sentence: they read it.

The numbers in the glosses refer to noun classes, which encode both gender and number. Class 2 watoto is plural; the singular is class 1, mtoto. Class 7 kitabu is singular; the plural is class 8, vitabu. For nouns, the class prefix is, with some complications, the same as the verb prefix. However, there are also special prefixes for pronouns, e.g. Nilikisoma ‘I read it’, walinipenda ‘you loved me.’

We can extend the notation to multiple clauses. Note that Hudson takes to as the head of the subclause, so it’s what the main verb points to.

I’ve drawn the arrows for the subclauses in a lighter color— without this, the diagram looks messy.

Exercise: create a Word Grammar diagram for the Hiaki sentences from p. 190.

Relational Grammar

Relational Grammar was elaborated by David Perlmutter and Paul Postal in the 1980s. Its diagrams focus on the main elements of the sentence: predicate (P), subject (1), direct object (2), and indirect object (3):

Ernesto gave a new whip to Selina.

Transformations which change argument structure are represented as strata in the diagram— multiple horizontal lines. E.g. here’s the same sentence passivized:

A new whip was given to Selina by Ernesto.

The top stratum gives the initial (semantic) argument structure; the second gives the final structure. The effect of Passive is 2 → 1, that is, the initial direct object becomes the subject.

The original 1 becomes a chômeur (from the French ‘unemployed person’), represented by a circumflex over the 1.

Dative movement is represented 3 → 2. The old direct object becomes a 2-chômeur, though in English at least nothing really happens to it.

Ernesto gave Selina a new whip.

Selina could now be passivized, which means that she has advanced from 3 to 2 to 1.

Selina was given a new whip by Ernesto.

This framework can handle multiple Tagalog subjects easily: they are each a 1 on a different stratum!

Binili ng babae ang bigas para sa kaniyang sarili.

obj-bought obj woman nom rice benef 3s-gen self

The woman bought the rice for herself.

Here bigas ‘rice’ has undergone 2 → 1 by being selected as the trigger; but babae still triggers reflexivization as it’s a 1 on a different stratum.

There are rules about certain operations: e.g. the Final 1 Law says that only one argument can be a 1 (a subject) in the last stratum; the Motivated Chômage Law says that you can’t demote a 1 without promoting another argument to that position.

Also worth noting: relational grammar represents unergative verbs (Cthulhu sleeps) on one level as you’d expect, and unaccusative verbs (Cthulhu exists) on two strata, with a 2 → 1 promotion:

Cognitive linguistics

McCawley once wrote a book called Thirty Million Theories of Grammar, as a way of pointing out that differences between GG theorists were based on multiple axes, not one. Nonetheless people tend not to pick and choose from the full menu; they pick one of a small number of packages.

On the whole Chomskyan linguistics takes these positions:

- It prefers to keep syntax well separated from semantics.

- It prefers formalism, preferring rule-based diagrams and definitions that sound like mathematics.

- It prefers to define things like ‘subjects’ based on position in the tree, and to derive things like ‘passivization’ from the application of abstract rules and constraints.

- It prefers binary features with no middle ground. (If a third option is discovered, it’s handled by adding another feature.)

- It thinks of language as a dedicated brain facility.

- It makes a distinction between competence (basic, shared linguistic knowledge) and performance (how specific utterances are generated and interpreted), and sidelines the latter.

- It is prepared to turn on a dime when Chomsky changes his mind, as with publication of The Minimalist Program.

Perhaps the main opposing camp is cognitive linguistics, which takes opposing stances on each point:

- It believes syntax can’t be separated from semantics (and pragmatics).

- It tends to avoid formalism, not least because anything in the brain may be relevant to an aspect of language.

- It prefers to treat things like subjects and passives directly (as in relational grammar, where they are part of the analysis, not derived from other principles).

- It believes in prototypes and fuzzy categories. It emphasizes the flexibility of language and speakers’ ability to take multiple points of view.

- It thinks of language as a general cognitive facility, handled by whatever mental modules are available. Language-specific modules are only a last resort.

- It emphasizes that language is used in the world; that utterances must be taken seriously and studied.

- It resists any leader figure; it’s more of a loose coalition and does not aim at a Theory of Linguistic Everything.

You don’t have to accept either package, of course. For what its worth, I’m much more in sympathy with the cognitive linguistics approach, but it’s also more of a research program than a mature discipline at this point. And on the other hand, I rather like autonomous syntax and syntactic formalism.

►Geeraerts 2006 is an introduction to the whole field, written by the major participants. Lakoff 1987 and Fillmore 1968 are key works. And see The Conlanger’s Lexipedia for semantics in general, including Lakoffian categories and metaphors.

Construction Grammar

In the first chapter, I mentioned an alternative to generative grammar: language is a collection of constructions, ranging from very abstract (<subject> <verb> <object>) to very specific (<negative sentence>, let alone <NP>), to word-level idioms (kick the bucket).

This is essentially Construction Grammar. Its central thesis is that meaning does not just live in the lexicon and possibly a few general rules; constructions have meaning too. Moreover, constructions have prototypes, like words do, and they can extend each other’s meanings.

►Goldberg 1995 is the classic introduction. I’m mostly drawing from her book here.

The way construction

Let’s start by looking at a fairly particular construction, verb a way to something. First, here’s some random examples.

Ovechkin powers his way to a goal

The American skier who scammed her way to the Olympics

How billionaire Masayoshi Son thinks his way to success

Meet the defiant young Iranians hitchhiking their way to freedom

The Mole dug his way out of the prison.

He drank his way to an early grave.

The scoundrel bought his way into high office.

First, we can’t dismiss this construction as an idiom; the only word common to all the examples is way, and the verb and goal are almost unrestricted.

Second, we can’t build the meaning from its parts. The word way has the idea of a path, but does not imply following it to completion, as the way construction does. Compare these sentences:

Lara made her way to the tomb.

Lara found a way to the tomb.

The first sentence, using the way construction, implies that Lara reached the tomb; the second does not.

The verbs are sometimes verbs of motion, but often not (see scam, think, drank above). And even if they are, we can construct sentences not using the construction which do not imply reaching a goal:

The Mole dug a way out of the prison.

Anne sailed a way around the island.

The first sentence doesn’t imply that the Mole used his escape route; the second doesn’t imply that Anne circumnavigated the whole island.

A fairly precise statement of the meaning of the construction:

- the subject creates a path to the goal

- the verb gives the means of doing so

- the action is effortful or repeated

- it’s self-directed (i.e. the subject is not merely carried along)

- there is at least some resistance

- the goal is reached

Here’s some samples showing the strangeness of violating these constraints:

*Laura hopped her way across the room, without hopping.

*Laura shot her way into the temple, with just one shot.

*The snow melted its way off the lawn.

*The soldier shot his way through the empty battlefield.

*Laura made her way to the tomb, but didn’t get there.

There is a variant of the construction which gives the manner rather than the means of creating the path:

They were clanging their way up and down the narrow streets.

She crunched her way across the glass-strewn room.

Adam inched his way past the open window.

Here the idea is that the goal is reached while doing the action of the verb, not by means of it. Goldberg shows that both by historical precedent and by sheer number of examples, the means interpretation is primary.

Of course, some means of moving are also manners of moving— float, wiggle, hop— so the manner interpretation is not a difficult step.

Diagrams can be drawn showing the mapping of semantic to syntactic roles.

Ditransitives

On the other end of the abstraction scale, she considers ditransitive verbs. You might think that the meaning is simply that of the verb. That might work for the prototypical ditransitive verb, give, but there are many variants:

Anthony baked his sister a cake.

Fred poured Wilma a martini.

George quoted me a ton of examples.

She blew him a kiss.

The prototypical meaning of the construction:

- the subjects cause the recipient to receive something (which of course can be metaphorical)

- the subject does so willingly

- the recipient willingly accepts the object

None of the above verbs (bake, pour, quote, blow) inherently involve a transfer of their object. We could add the idea as a secondary sense to each of the hundreds of verbs that can be used ditransitively, but it’s simpler to assign the meaning to the construction.

As an example of the constraints, this sentence

Carlo told the Feds his story.

is only felicitous if Carlo knows he’s talking to the Feds, as opposed to being captured by a microphone he knows nothing about. Similarly,

Dory gave Nemo a present.

requires that Dory didn’t leave the present at  home, failing to get it to Nemo.

As a complication, metaphors license actions where the basic meaning doesn’t apply. E.g. the metaphor CAUSATION IS TRANSFER allows sentences like these, with non-sentient subjects:

The medicine brought Grandma some relief.

Taking that subway ride gave me the flu.

Similarly, the metaphor PERCEPTION IS TRANSFER allows

We showed Adrian the view.

The earlier example She blew him a kiss uses the metaphor ACTION DIRECTED AT A PERSON IS TRANSFER. Another example:

Pauline smiled her thanks to the waiter.

Again, to explain this with features of smile would involve adding ad hoc senses to the verb, and just about every other verb of personal expression.

Problems with transformations

Goldberg doesn’t derive constructions by transformations; indeed, she opposes the whole idea of transformations.

Her basic argument is that transformations depend on synonymy, and that synonymy doesn’t really exist. Different constructions always differ in meaning, in register, or in pragmatics.

E.g. we might want to assign these sentences the same deep structure:

The garden is swarming with bees.

Bees are swarming in the garden.

But the first suggests that there are bees all over the garden; the second does not.

Even such innocuous statements as these differ:

We loaded the donkeys with the sassafras.

We loaded the sassafras onto the donkeys.

The first suggests that the donkeys were fully loaded; the second doesn’t.

A neat example from Chicheŵa:

Mayi anachititsa kuti mtsuko ugwe.

Woman 3s-ps-do-caus-mood that waterpot 3s-fall-mood

The woman made the waterpot fall.

Mayi anagwetsa mtsuko.

Woman 3s-ps-fall-caus-mood waterpot

The woman felled the waterpot.

Under both generative semantics and Minimalism, causatives are held to underlie related lexical transitives— show = cause to see, break (tr.) = cause to break (intr.). But as Goldberg points out, these sentences don't mean the same thing: the second sentence, with a lexical causative, requires that the woman touched the waterpot; the first, with a synthetic causative, is compatible with indirect causation— e.g. the woman was chasing her daughter, who knocked over the waterpot.

Another problem: Michael Tomasello provides evidence that children learn language word by word and construction by construction. E.g., a toddler may have surprising gaps:

- restricted frames for some verbs (only cut __), many frames for others (draw __, draw __ on __, draw __ for __, draw on __)

- inconsistent prepositions (open it with this vs he hit me this)

- I think —no other case of subordination, no other forms of think

As noted above, Chomskyans have worried quite a bit about the difficulty of children learning Question Inversion, without noticing that children may learn questions first, before statements. It’s hard to see that they’re using a transformation at all; it’s easy, however, to posit that they are imitating what they hear.

Should we give up transformations? We should probably be cautious about requiring them; as mentioned in the first chapter (p. 23), a linguist’s rule may not be in speakers’ grammars, if it’s simply a historical fact that speakers are not aware of.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that Goldberg’s case is ironclad. She points out for instance that give X Y and give Y to X are not always interchangeable:

She gave a book to him.

*She gave a kick to him.

The trial gave her a lot of grief.

*The trial gave a lot of grief to her.

Still, it’s hard to maintain that these pairs of sentences have different meanings or uses:

Carlo told the Feds his story.

Carlo told his story to the Feds.

Dory gave Nemo a present.

Dory gave a present to Nemo.

Construction Grammar (and many similar analyses from Fillmore, Lakoff, etc.) are mostly about semantics. And that in itself is great, and useful. We can learn a lot teasing out small differences in meaning or pragmatics.

But people fairly obviously do have syntactic rules. We should keep the possibility in mind that languages may have rules that people don’t notice; but we do have ways of checking for that— for instance, seeing if the rules we notice are productive.

Simpler Syntax

There’s at least one attempt to find common ground between the Chomskyans and the relational/cognitive grammarians: Peter Culicover and Ray Jackendoff’s Simpler Syntax (2005).

In their view, what’s gone wrong in mainstream generative grammar is syntactocentrism. Under both X’ theory and Minimalism, syntax is in control; it generates a structure called logical form which is merely interpreted by the shadowy semantic component. This means that everything relevant to interpretation— reference, quantifier scope, semantic roles, pronoun binding, case agreement— must be handled somewhere in syntax.

The complexity of syntax is increased by the principle of uniformity: that semantically equivalent structures— basically, everything in the syntactic bestiary— must be related by transformations. Trying to work this out, both Chomsky and the generative semanticists ended up with highly abstract trees filled with unspoken nodes.

Culicover and Jackendoff retain phrase structure rules and syntactic trees, but keep them at the level of surface structure. Like most relational theorists, they reject movement and transformations entirely; they have no deep structure at all.

Instead, they pair sentences with two other representations:

- A conceptual structure (CS), more or less using predicate calculus notation

- A grammatical feature (GF) tier, which gives the semantic roles

(In terms of the contrasting programs from p. 239, they follow the cognitive linguistics branch but stick with formalism, and also some form of the language organ.)

Here’s an example, for the sentence Bill desires the sandwich:

There’s a lot going on here, so to summarize: the syntax tree is down at the bottom. The authors prefer flat structures without unspoken nodes, so this is all the nodes there are— there is no Comp level.

The CS is at the top. It’s also a tree structure, though for most purposes they’re happy with a flattened form:

DESIRE( BILL, [SANDWICH; DEF] )

In the middle is the GF tier, which simply gives the verbal arguments. Here they’re just • dots. This is much like Relational Grammar, but the authors purposefully don’t number or label the dots. They’re interpreted by linear order, within the brackets. As we’ll see in a moment, this allows them to change the status of an item by inserting new brackets.

Not everything in the CS tree has an associated dot, only required verb arguments (elaborators). So Bill desired a sandwich on Friday would have an entry FRIDAY in the CS, linked directly to the word Friday, but there would be no dot in the GF tier for it.

The CS tree has some special graphic rules:

- In any sub-tree, the dominant or main item gets a double line.

- Verb arguments get a single line.

- Features get a dotted line.

Finally, the curving lines link everything up. DESIRE is linked to the verb desire. The verbal arguments link first to the GF dots, then to the corresponding NPs. To avoid the diagram looking like spaghetti, I’ve abbreviated the links from DEF to the and from PRESENT to the present tense affix.

Not shown, because as usual it’s assumed to be straightforward, is the phonological level. Here is where -s + desire will be reinterpreted to desires. (Often the authors leave out the T node to keep things simple.)

Now, I’ve changed the authors’ diagram (hopefully for the better): they actually use subscripts instead of curvy lines. That makes it far easier to construct the diagrams but makes them hard to grasp. Of course, notational details do not affect the correctness of a theory at all. But they greatly affect its clarity and impact. E.g. the attractiveness of Word Grammar, above, is precisely that it represents relations in a very visual way.

(I also used big dots • where they repeat the abbreviation GF. Nothing else can be put in this tier, so the actual information present is just “there is something here,” and a dot is a better representation of that.)

In the passive version of the sentence The sandwich is desired by Bill, the CS is exactly the same. The bottom part of the diagram:

The GF tier is changed only by adding brackets around the second dot. A dot immediately after a bracket is a subject, so it’s linked to the subject in the syntax tree.

The syntax tree isn’t a derivation of the first tree; rather, this is the tree licensed by this particular CS and GF.[66]

Note the crossing lines from GF to arguments; this is the sort of visual detail that’s lost with subscripting.

If you’re used to transformations, you may well wonder how Simpler Syntax gets by without them. To their credit, the authors work through a wide range of examples in detail. But the general answer is:

- Keep the syntax tree as close as possible to the actual sentence. This generally means loosening up the production rules, e.g. allowing constituents to occur out of order or be missing.

- Out-of-order constituents are simply handled by making sure they link up to the right spots in CS.

- Missing constituents will be present in CS somewhere.

The semantic layer

Culicover & Jackendoff maintain that semantics is better suited to formalization now than it was in the early days of generative grammar. However, their approach looks a lot like predicate calculus.

To handle the conceptual layer, the authors simply say that e.g. the concept behind desire is DESIRE. Now, I think they’re capturing something, but I’m not sure it’s semantics.

Sometimes they go further: e.g. they link Bill butters the bread to

CAUSE( BILL, GO( BUTTER, ON([BREAD; DEF])))

The problem with decomposing words is that you never really know when to stop.

- Bill didn’t just cause the butter to go onto the bread, as he could have done by having his butler handle it; he did the work himself.

- The decomposition doesn’t address the difference between covering the surface (cf. paint the wall) and placing something on it (cf. stick a poster on the wall).

- Is go really the primitive we want to invoke here? We don’t really care about the butter moving, only about it being where we want it to be. God could butter the bread by creating butter in the proper position.

- Mostly buttering leaves butter on something. But if you butter a roll, doesn’t the butter end up inside?

- Recall the discussion of Korean positional verbs (p. 209): on is by no means a simple universal. It’s simply how English speakers divide up the world.

And that’s to say nothing of information we all know but which (we think) isn’t reflected in syntax: that butter is added to taste good, that only the top of the bread is buttered, that Bill probably used a knife. Or that we can’t really say Bill peanut buttered the bread, or Bill jellied the bread.

Picky, I know, but that’s all part of what it means to understand the meaning of the sentence.

However, I think it’s quite arguable that there is a mental concept we can label BUTTER. It’s the word butter. That is, it can be true at the same time that the word butter involves all sorts of world knowledge and linguistic knowledge, and that the best label for all that information is the word itself.

In other words, I suspect that it’s a false trail to go after Mentalese, some mental level that our thoughts occur in, completely separate from language. Language itself helps us organize and express thoughts. (So do other tools, like drawing or making music. But we rarely worry that drawings or songs must be translated from Mentalese.)

So Culicover & Jackendoff may be quite right in saying that the CS for desire is DESIRE. But rather than representing “meaning”, perhaps this tier is best thought of as representing entities and actions.

Prototypes

I’ve discussed prototypes in the LCK (p. 109) and The Conlanger’s Lexipedia (p. 51). Very briefly: all instances of a class are not equal; some are better examples of the class than others. E.g. a prototypical bird is something like a robin or a sparrow. Researchers have found strong prototype effects with all sorts of words:

- Informants can judge how good an example of a class a particular member is.

- Prototypes come up quicker when people are asked to provide examples.

- Reaction time (e.g. for true/false statements about a member) is fastest for prototypical members.

- People reason asymmetrically about prototypes— e.g. people assume that a disease can spread easily from robins to ducks; they’re not so sure about the opposite.

- Children learn the prototypes before more marginal members.

A word often has a central meaning, and various extensions, forming a radial category. E.g. the preposition in prototypically applies to containment, but is applied to location in time (in July), or application of a state (in love).

In cognitive linguistics, this idea has been applied to linguistic terms. E.g. phonology often treats [voiced] as a binary category, but speakers can easily classify sounds from least to most voiced.[67]

r m nMost voiced

v ð z

w j

b d g

f θ s h ʃ

p t kleast voiced

Taylor 1995 applies the idea to transitivity. Rather than simply defining it as “valence = 2”, he posits a much more robust prototype: an animate agent consciously acts on the patient, causing (ideally very quickly) some important change. Like these:

Lara shot and killed the deer.

The horse ate the apple.

The captain flogged the traitor.

The idea isn’t that all transitives fit this picture; it’s that examples like these are the central members of the category. Other members relax some of the criteria, or extend the model metaphorically.

Another example is the past tense, which turns out to be considerably more complicated than past time. In English, the past tense is also used for:

- Fiction, which by definition never takes place at all; note that most science fiction, which explicitly takes place in the future, is told in the past tense.

- Counterfactuals (I wish I knew; Suppose we went to the moon…)

- Pragmatic softening: rather than the direct Answer this, we soften it to I was wondering if you could tell me…

Prototypes also shed light on the difficult question of defining syntactic categories. As I noted, semantic definitions (“nouns refer to persons, places, or things”) are almost worthless, due to the quantity of exceptions. Yet we feel that there’s something to the old definitions.

We’re on firmer ground if we treat the easy cases as prototypes rather than definitions. Indeed, we can be far more specific: e.g. the prototype for a “noun” is something like an animal, a chair, or a pot: something solid and countable, easily distinguished from its surroundings, and which can act or be acted on.

Even in morphology, prototypical examples may have richer behavior:

- The plural is more useful for count nouns than mass nouns or abstractions.

- Indo-European is famous for distinguishing nominative and accusative only for masculine and feminine gender.

- Verbs tend to lose tense distinctions in irrealis forms, and person/number distinctions in subordinate clauses, which can be considered ‘less verby’ than main clauses.

One important consequence of prototypes: transformations can always be applied to central members; marginal ones may fail. E.g. these sentences don’t passivize well:

This book will sell a million copies.

→ *A million copies will be sold by this book.

Mona smiled a knowing smile.

→ *A knowing smile was smiled by Mona.

Linguistics resembles biology.

→ *Biology is resembled by linguistics.

Language acquisition supports the prototype theory: the prototypical transitives are learned first, before more marginal examples.

Similarly, counterfactuals are learned much later than the simple past. But not all past events are equal: when children first use the past tense, they apply it to very recent, very salient physical events, and to a very restricted set of verbs, such as fall, drop, slip, break. So these are very likely the prototypes for past tense.

Different languages might have similar prototypes for similar concepts, but not share the same radial categories. Taylor shows that this applies to transitivity, by comparing English to German transitives. In short, English has extended the transitive category enthusiastically; German has not. Compare:

?Der Schlüssel öffnete die Tür.

The key opened the door.

*Das Zelt schläft sechs.

The tent sleeps six.

Often where English uses a transitive, German uses a reflexive, or uses different cases:

Ich erinnere mich seines Namens.

I remembered me-acc his name-gen

I remembered his name.

Ich näherte mich der Stadt.

I approached I-acc the city-dat

I approached the city.

Mir gefällt Mary.

me-dat please-3s Mary-nom

I like Mary.

Similarly, some of the English transitives above are intransitive in Italian:

Monna sorrise di un sorriso d’intesa.

Mona smile-3s.past.def of a.m smile of understanding

La linguistica assomiglia alla biologia.

The linguistics resemble-3s to.the.f biology

Universals

Over time, linguistics has made a couple of reversals on the subject of universal grammar.

- Early on, Latin/Greek grammar was applied to everything. This is the view of Arnauld & Lancelot’s Port-Royal Grammar (1660), a brief comparative grammar of French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The authors are fairly free of nationalistic nonsense and they don’t overdo the semantics: they are perfectly aware that gender is mostly arbitrary, and that not all verbs describe actions. But their choice of models did not require stretching classical grammar much; it’s a pity they didn’t take a look at Basque.

- As the world’s languages were investigated, linguists liked to emphasize their huge variation, and how there were many ways of doing things besides that of the major European languages. The apogee of this approach is perhaps Benjamin Lee Whorf’s Language, Thought and Reality (1956), which proposes that grammars are so different that they imply different views of the world.

- From the 1960s, linguists have pursued language universals, tending to believe that the surface diversity of language hides an underlying unity.

Chomsky has increasingly come to see syntax as a theory of universal grammar— a consequence of his belief in a single language organ and in innatism; see p. 199.

Surely to study universals, you should look at a very wide range of languages? Joseph Greenberg certainly thought so, and introduced his methods in Universals of Language (1966). Comrie 1989 is a good introduction to this approach, and it’s been systematized by WALS (the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures).[68]

Absolutes

If you’re interested in absolute universals— things all languages have— the pickings are exceedingly slim. The few proposals are both vague and contested:

- Nouns and verbs— but see p. 74.

- Either linear ordering or case. But Riau Malay has neither.

- Tense and aspect. But Chinese doesn’t mark tense, and spoken German lacks aspect.

- Auxiliaries. But Kayardild doesn’t have any.

- Reflexives. Fijian lacks them entirely.

- Numerals. Pirahã and Yumbri are said to have none.

Don’t forget sign languages, which dispose of possible universals such as vowels, sounds, and even linear ordering. Sign languages often make use of simultaneous signals. (And of course, some phonetic elements are simultaneous with other sounds, like tone and stress.)

Probably all languages have noun-like and verb-like processes— i.e., even if roots aren’t one or the other, in a particular utterance they can be used more like nouns or more like verbs. And pronouns seem to be universal, though we have to give up the notion that all pronouns are, as in English, un-analyzable roots.

How about embedding of subclauses? Nope, Pirahã again.

Still, note that many of these counter-examples amount to a handful of languages. If 4998 out of 5000 languages have numbers… well, that’s pretty close to a universal, isn't it? It means your conlang had better have a very good reason to not have numbers.

Constituent structure?

At least all languages have tree structures! Except for ones like Jiwarli, a Pama-Nyungan language once spoken in Australia. It’s striking enough that it’s worth discussing in more detail.[69]

First, constituents can be broken up, like ‘the woman’s dog’ in the sentence below:

Kupuju-lu kaparla-nha yanga-lkin wartirra-ku-nha.

Child-erg dog-acc chase-pres woman-dat-acc

The child chases the woman’s dog.

Note the accusative suffix nha on the possessive, which links it to the object but allows it to drift in the sentence.

Not only can the words in this sentence be scrambled at will, but speakers do not seem to care what order they’re in. If asked to repeat a sentence, they will more often than not use a different ordering.

You could certainly make a tree structure for this sentence, but the usual implications of tree structures don’t apply— that the ordering is important, that constituents are contiguous, that constituents are treated by transformations as a unit. Word Grammar, however, can directly model the structure of the sentence:

Polysynthetic languages are another challenge. They are strongly head-marking, so the verb usually contains enough information to interpret everything else in the sentence. That’s if anything else is needed; often a sentence is just one word, as in this Mohawk example:

Wa’-ke-tshʌri-’-ø.

Fact-1s-find-punc-3s

I found it.

Some have gamely tried to produce an X' structure for this sentence:

This is pretty embarrassing; the structure obviously lies within the word, and the superstructure of the tree adds nothing to the analysis.

Head-marking allow arguments to move around, but word order may still be important:

- It may simply be conventional, as in Swahili, which is normally SVO.

- It may indicate topic/comment; e.g. in Nishnaabemwin, new information generally comes before the verb, old information after.

Less exotic: Latin not only allows arguments to be moved, but allows constituents to be broken up. Ross cites this astonishing line from Horace:

Quis multā gracilis tē puer in rosā

which.s.m.nom many-s.f.abl slender-s.m.nom you.acc boy-s.m.nom on rose-s.abl

perfūsus liquidīs urget odōribus

wet-s.m.nom liquid-p.m.abl drive-3s perfume-p.gen

grātō, Pyrrha, sub antrō?

pleasing-s.m.abl Pyrrha.s.voc under cave-s.m.abl

What slender boy, wet with perfumes,
is making love to you, Pyrrha,
Amid many roses, in a delightful cave?

As with Jiwarli, the agreement suffixes allow the sentence to be understood. But the implied structure is more complicated:

You could certainly quibble about the higher levels here (does Latin have VPs?), but things still group together, even if they’re not ordered that way. E.g. the preposition sub calls for its object to be in the ablative, even if the component pieces of that object are scattered.

And look at what we need to do to get the surface order!

In English you’re not supposed to cross lines like that— and you never really have to. But if you really wanted to avoid the crossings, you’d have to create some really strange and ad hoc transformations.

I haven’t drawn a Word Grammar diagram for this sentence, but I invite you to; it’s probably a better approach for languages like Latin.

I think it’s also worth pointing out that this is poetry. For comparison, here’s a passage from Caesar’s Dē Bellō Gallicō.

Gallia est omnis dīvīsa in partēs trēs,

Gaul is whole divided in parts three

quārum ūnam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquītānī,

of.which one inhabits Belgae, another Aquitani

tertiam quī ipsōrum linguā Celtae, nostrā Gallī appellantur.

Third which (in) own language Celts, (in) ours Gauls are.called

Hī omnēs linguā, īnstitūtīs, lēgibus inter sē differunt.

These all (in) language, customs, laws between themselves differ

Gallōs ab Aquītānīs Garumna flūmen, ā Belgīs Mātrona et Sēquana dīvidit.

Gauls from Aquitani Garonne river (and) from Belgae Marne and Seine divide

Hōrum omnium fortissimī sunt Belgae,

Of.them all strongest are Belgae

proptereā quod ā cultū atque hūmānitāte prōvinciae longissimē

because that from cultured and gentle (Roman) provinces longest are.absent

minimēque ad eōs mercātōrēs saepe commeant atque ea quae ad effēminandōs animōs pertinent important,

and.minimally to them merchants often travel and to.them what to effeminacy souls continue import

proximīque sunt Germānīs, quī trāns Rhēnum incolunt, quibuscum continenter bellum gerunt.

and.near are Germans who across Rhine inhabit, with.whom constantly war wage

I haven’t provided morphological glosses, nor a free translation— but note that you don’t need either. Caesar’s prose is quite straightforward, and doesn’t indulge in any scrambling at all. This makes it a good deal easier to suppose that Latin does have an underlying constituent structure, though it allows speakers to mess with it much more than English does.

Statistical universals

Rather than absolute universals, Greenberg found implicational universals— e.g., if a language has VO order, it will have prepositions. Even that has turned out to be too strong, as exceptions were found, so we speak of statistical universals.

Some examples from WALS:

Sentence and adposition order (N=1142)

OV and postpositions41%

OV and prepositions1%

VO and postpositions3%

VO and prepositions40%

Other7%

Sentence and relative clause/noun (N=879)

OV and Rel N15%

OV and N Rel13%

VO and Rel N1%

VO and N Rel47%

Other24%

Sentence and adjective/noun (N=1316)

OV and Adj N16%

OV and N Adj25%

VO and Adj N9%

VO and N Adj35%

Other15%

Sentence and demonstrative/noun (N=1168)

OV and Det N27%

OV and N Det12%

VO and Det N13%

VO and N Det32%

Other16%

Genitive/Noun and Adjective/Noun  (N=1133)

Gen N and Adj N20%

Gen N and N Adj30%

N Gen and Adj N6%

N Gen and N Adj30%

Other14%

All these can be summarized as: languages tend to be head-final (boldfaced above) or head-initial.

If you’re a Chomskyan, you’d say that the head of a Det N phrase is the Det— but the above correlations are a reason to think otherwise.

These results are, I think, more interesting than if the head-position correlation had been absolute. There are curious subpatterns— e.g. the VO languages are more consistent than the OV ones.[70] Adpositions almost always fall in line with sentence order; demonstratives are quite likely not to.

Some of the raw data can be useful too:

Sentence order (N=1377)

SOV41%

SVO35%

VSO7%

VOS2%

OVS1%

OSV0.3%

Other14%

Morphosyntactic alignment (N=380)

No marking22%

Accusative56%

Ergative5%

Active7%

Hierarchical3%

Split7%

We don’t really know why these preferences exist, but it’s fascinating that they’re so strong.

Of languages with a clear preference:

- 88% are SOV or SVO

- 97% are one of the SO orders

- but half are OV and half are VO

Bear in mind, though, that languages are something of a worst case for statistical techniques, because they’re not at all independent of each other. They may be related; there are areal effects; they may borrow features. And even the language diversity that remains may not reflect the languages of 10,000 or 100,000 years ago. Not a few of the examples that disprove absolute universals are very few in number and quite obscure.

Conlang syntax

How do you write a syntax section for your conlang? And how can GG help you do it?

Some examples

Some models might help! Most of my conlangs have fairly extensive syntax sections:

http://www.zompist.com/virtuver.htm

- In particular Axunašin and Xurnese were written with transformations in mind.

- For this book, I’ve rewritten the Verdurian grammar to make even more use of modern syntax.

- Uyseʔ and Lé are isolating languages, so they naturally rely more on syntax than (say) an agglutinating language like Wede:i.

- Elkarîl is worth looking at for its attempt at creating a non-human case system (i.e. it’s not based on Agent/Patient/ Experiencer).

- Also see my Incatena conlang Hanying, which originated as a creole. Without much derivational morphology, it relies heavily on syntax to get things done.

Natural language textbooks with readable and meaty syntax sections are perhaps hard to come by, but one worth checking out is Li and Thompson’s Mandarin Chinese (1981). It’s particularly valuable as a model because a) it’s not English, and b) Mandarin has little morphology, so almost everything it does, it does with syntax.

A forest of trees

Here’s what you probably shouldn’t really do: create a syntactic analysis that’s pure X' or Minimalism, and draw a bunch of trees that would make your syntax prof blush with pride.

The reason is the same as why you shouldn’t make tagmemics your primary theory (never heard of it? You see my point), or leave out all the English glosses, or write the only grammar of your conlang in your conlang. Even in a nerdy field like this one, accessibility counts. You probably want someone to read your grammar, and you shouldn’t scare them off. (That someone might be you years later. What’s clear when you were writing your grammar may be quite murky then.)

Grammars are normally written for educated people who aren’t necessarily linguists. So, for instance, if your syntax is partially ergative, you should probably spend the time to explain what that means. Fortunately it doesn’t take long.

But (say) creating a bunch of Minimalist derivations would require explaining most of Minimalism, and that explanation could easily be longer than your grammar.

So, concentrate on the syntactic facts, and introduce the minimum of theory to explain them. (E.g. my Verdurian grammar contains a page explaining the basics of transformations.)

Use the web toys

You might use ggg or gtg to model your syntax. The general method is

- Write the production rules, like S = NP VP. These should handle your basic sentences.

- Write transformations to handle more difficult cases, or movement or deletion rules.

- Make sure they’re in the right order.

This main point of this exercise is to make sure your syntactic rules work the way you expect them to, especially in combination. You can carefully set out rules for (say) relativization, topicalization, negative and question formation, but putting them all together may surprise you.

You can use either program— you can choose based on which way of writing rules appeals to you more.

- In ggg, moving constituents must happen in early rules, before the constituents you move (e.g. NP) are expanded to something else.

- In gtg, the tree is fully generated, then modified using the transformation language.

For inflections, look at how some of my rules work; you can probably do the same. But if this is too much work, skip it; GG’s forte is syntax, not morphology. You can always leave the words in their citation form and inflect them yourself.

Bookmark this list

For any given feature, you can address it in several ways. Let’s take causatives as an example.

- Lexically: you have special words for that feature. E.g. feed ‘cause to eat’.

- By morphology: e.g. Quechua wañuy ‘die’ → wañuchiy ‘kill’.

- By word order alone. E.g. the window breaks / the boys broke the window, where word order and number of arguments change the meaning.

- By a transformation: e.g. French J’ai fait [il s’en aller] → Je l’ai fait s’en aller ‘I made him go’.

- By pragmatics. E.g. a ruler’s boast I built this wall is understood to mean that he simply managed the process— he had it built.

- Not at all. Maybe the feature is simply irrelevant to your grammar. If people really have to express it, they must explicitly state it, or invent something ad hoc.

You can choose more than one option! This is not only more naturalistic, but it gives you ways to characterize different registers: colloquial, hifalutin, literary, etc.

Often methods higher on the list feel stronger, more direct. E.g. E.g. lexical and morphological causatives tend to be seen as a single action; syntactic causatives are more loosely coupled. The English ’s possessive and the pronominal possessive are more likely to be used for prototypical possession: my car, John’s book. We use of for more abstract things: the origin of species, the day of my coronation.

Conlanging, to some extent, consists of learning just how many features there are, and making explicit decisions on each one. When you start out, you may only be aware of the features of English, and how they work there. The more you read about linguistics, the more options you have.

►A lot of those options are discussed in the LCK and ALC. When you look at some bit of morphology there, you might ask, “Could I do it with syntax?” And when you look at some syntax here, you might also ask “Could I do this with morphology instead?”

For just about any feature, some natural language has probably found an unexpected way to do it. E.g. Hindī has double causatives: so ‘sleep’ → sulā ‘put to sleep’ → sulvā ‘cause to put to sleep’.

The bestiary

What you should do: read through the syntactic bestiary (next chapter) and add, well, lots of that stuff.

That is, focus on the syntactic facts. Cover the basics, but also some of the things that are new to you. Do you have things like Gapping, Raising, and Extraposition? How do you form tag questions? Do you have any negative polarity items? Do you have anaphors besides pronouns?

As usual, try to avoid doing everything just like English. If your glosses read as grammatical English, you’re probably messing up. If you do have extraposition, maybe don’t use a dummy it. You shouldn’t necessarily have an infinitival to, or Do-support, or Dative movement, or verb + particle idioms.

You may also find the online database WALS useful:

http://wals.info

Click Chapters in the menu bar. Each chapter contains discussion of a feature, with an emphasis on the diversity of how languages handle it, and with copious examples. If you’re looking for a way to do something you hadn’t thought of, read the appropriate chapter!

You can use WALS to find out how unusual your language is. But don’t worry too much about this! The vast majority of Earth’s languages belong to a few families spread by conquest in the last 5,000 years; the distribution of features would undoubtedly be far different if other families had won the historical lottery.

You can try inventing entirely new transformations, but it’s pretty difficult. It’s fine to have variations of the examples in the book. But you could vary the auxiliary used, or the contexts allowed, or the pronouns or particles that help out.

Things to think about

Some things that seem to produce a lot of interesting syntax, and maybe don’t get enough attention from conlangers:

- Topics (not just the Topicalization transformation). How do people focus information? It’s likely to be an exception or an extension of ordinary syntax.

- Stress. Note how stress brings out Do-support in affirmative sentences (I did do my homework!), and pronouns in pro-drop languages (¡Tu no puedes ir! “You can’t go!”)

- Abbreviation— cf. Truncation and various optional deletion transformations. What can people leave out? What can they never leave out?

- Scope. Do quantifiers, negatives, and pronouns work just like English, or do the details differ?

Especially useful are syntactic variation from older versions of the language, or from neighboring languages. Archaic syntax may be used for stylistic effect— e.g. Asleep they were, from Bored of the Rings. Mandarin doesn’t use its passive much— but uses it much more these days, as a by-product of translation from English.

English has borrowed an enormous number of French words; it’s also borrowed some French syntax, though on a much smaller scale.

- The use of who/what/which in restrictive relative clauses is modeled on French and/or Latin; these were strictly interrogative in Old English (and their cognates still are in German).

- Comparative expressions using more/most rather than -er/-est are parallel to French plus/le plus.[71]

- In the very restricted domain of military titles, Nom + Adj order has been borrowed, though it may be normalized later. E.g. a sergeant major is a higher form of sergeant, not a type of major. An interesting late example is surgeon general, whose plural is still supposed to be surgeons general.

This may be more morphosyntax, but… are your verbs hairy enough? Natural languages seem to reserve their highest degree of complication for verbs. You can always add some synthetic constructions, or idiomatic verb + verb combos, or wreak havoc by transitioning from fusional to synthetic and having both systems still in use.

I’ve sometimes snarked at grammars that provide misleading information (e.g. about reflexives. p. 110, or subjects. p. 230). Try not to repeat such traditional but wrong statements! It’s not just that things are usually more complex, it’s that the complexity exists for a reason— e.g. there are good pragmatic reasons for topicalizing non-agents.

Word order

Though by now it should be clear that syntax is far more than word order, it’s still the case that some things can be accomplished by word order alone:

- case assignment— e.g. English, French, Mandarin

- topicalization (e.g. Clefting, Object Topicalization)

- relative importance (e.g. the first conjoints in a list)

- temporal sequence

- movement vs. location (cf. Dutch example p. 225)

Languages are sometimes described as having free word order. This doesn’t really mean that anything goes; it usually means that arguments can be freely rearranged, either because

- case is marked on the nouns, or

- grammatical relations are marked on the verb

This doesn’t mean that word order is meaningless or random. There’s usually an unmarked order, and deviations have some pragmatic meaning. In general, constituents aren’t broken up— e.g. an adjective will live near its noun, a relative clause will be kept together.

Some languages go much further; see p. 257.

New syntax!

Language innovation is all around you— in your friends’ mouths, overheard in the street, on Twitter. Be alert for things with startling or funny syntax— maybe you can steal it.

Here’s one which I’ve noticed in the last few years: ending a sentence with a conjunction.

Should we just name this guy Lord God or…

I’m back living with my parents so…

(The cool kids don’t write the ellipsis.)

Here’s another one: because is generally followed by an S:

We shouldn’t buy this house, because it’s haunted.

But the kids have started using it with an NP:

They need to steal a helicopter, because reasons.

Now, my feeling as a native speaker is that this is done for jocular effect— the humor precisely lies in the fact that we expect a ‘real reason’ and are given something insufficient. The syntactic ‘wrongness’ reinforces this. The construction sounds wrong if it’s not sarcastic:

*The legal group has not yet approved the revised logo, because lack of time.

But one can easily imagine the jocular construction becoming increasingly common, till such entirely earnest sentences are possible.

Yet another example, from Twitter:

This. So much this. All the this.

Normally you can’t add determiners or quantifiers to pronouns: *So much you. *All the everyone. It’s probably ad hoc, but the tweeter is treating this as a noun (compare so much money, all the money).

Relations

Relational grammarians complain that dictionaries leave out valence information. Don’t disapppoint them! Ideally your lexicon should tell us, for each verb:

- Whether it’s transitive or intransitive (or if it can be used both ways)

- If it’s intransitive, is it Agentive (she danced) or Objective (she fell)?

- Other required arguments (cf. how put requires a locative)

- What cases or prepositions to use, if these are not predictable by a general rule (e.g. you talk to a friend, but argue with him).

How do you reduce or increase valence— that is, are there operations like passive, antipassive (p. 291), or causative?

You might state these things in terms of Fillmore’s semantic roles, especially when this gives more information on what transformations are allowed. E.g., do you allow an Instrumental to be promoted to subject (the key opened the door)?

As ever, don’t always imitate English (or your native language). E.g., verbs of perception (physical or mental) arguably have a Dat for their first argument, and this might be directly reflected in your syntax, as in Spanish:

Me gustan los anticuchos.

1s.dat please-3p the-m.pl skewered.meats-pl

I like anticuchos.

Ambiguities

Can you create any interesting ambiguities in your language?

It seems odd to advocate adding ambiguity— if you’re creating a loglang, you want to work hard to avoid it. But ambiguity means you have enough constructions in the language that they overlap in interesting ways. Besides, they’re fun!

One fruitful source of ambiguity: unclarity on where a modifier is supposed to attach.

Cameron Diaz Encourages Women to Keep Their Pubic Hair in Her New Book

Coming Out as a Member of the Royal Family Wasn't Easy for Him

Boy with clock thought to be bomb held by police

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Suspends Campaign to Seek Help

I welcome President Obama's pledge to help the Iraqi government tackle this crisis and get aid to those fleeing ISIL terrorists.

US mourns Batman shooting victims

There is a great awareness campaign for men abused as boys using guitars

Here’s a neat one: the ambiguity is in whether the PP attaches to the verb or to its habitual aspect:

Grillé à la flamme depuis 1954

Flame-grilled since 1954

Pronouns— who knows who they refer to?

This Guy Has Been Tattooing His Son's Drawings On His Own Arm Since He Was 5

They stalked the earth around a hundred million years ago and scientists are constantly looking for new dinosaur fossils.

We can get tripped up by unusual words, or new senses of words:

Won Holds Slide as Brexit Angst Lingers[72]

The Stag Do Have Arrived in Sunny Bucharest[73]

Uber Eats Driver Allegedly Shoots And Kills Customer In Atlanta

UK fans of @neilhimself, why don't you like our shiny new Ocean at the End of the Lane facebook page?[74]

Surely this is too many meetings:

This was the first in a series of 2014 hearings by the US interior department about whether it should offer a path to federal recognition to the Native Hawaiian community.

Here’s one of my wife’s favorites. Note that Spanish se is used both as a reflexive and as a way to reduce valence. A man read these instructions on a can of evaporated milk

Agitese antes de usar

stir-3s.subj-refl before of use-inf

Stir before using

and did a little dance before opening it.

Can you create a garden path sentence? These are sentences whose structure encourages a reading which turns out to be the wrong one.

England wait too long for Cole[75]

Savile float group issue apology

Bitcoin exchange files for bankruptcy

Students get first hand job experience

I need help getting deeply baked on cooking oil (rather thick) from stainless steel.[76]

Australia lay platform to take control

CRAZY WORLD CUP SEX RULES[77]

Once other cars with similar power but less weight hook up the game starts to change.

(If it’s not clear, these are all jewels plucked from the Web. Thanks to Daniel von Brighoff, Richard Seal, jal, clawgrip, Imralu for finding some of these.)

How would you create such sentences? Well, start by checking how these sentences work. Drawing brackets around constituents will often reveal the ambiguities:

[Bitcoin exchange] files [for bankruptcy]

[Bitcoin] exchange [files] [for bankruptcy]

Many of these examples, including this one, rely on the fact that the same English word may function as noun or verb. But sometimes, as I noted, it’s just a difference in what a modifier is modifying:

[Boy with clock] thought to be bomb

Boy with [clock thought to be bomb]

Dangling modifiers are the bane of English teachers and professors, but many speakers obviously don’t feel bound by their rules.

After reading the original story, the article seems misleading.

Having read your e-mail, the tiger will be changed to a lion in the next edition.

With a quick grimace, the dating site was closed.

There’s one advantage to the traditional rule: it makes dangling modifiers pretty amusing. But you could play with this in a conlang: what sort of modifiers are acceptable?

Mandarin has an extremely free construction in this regard: you can state a topic (underlined below), then an observation which needs no syntactic connection to it:

Yànméi yànjīng hěn dà

Yanmei eye very big

As for Yanmei’s eyes, they’re very big.

Xiàng bízi cháng.

Elephant nose long

Elephants have long noses.

Nèi gè nǚzi wǒ yǐjing kàn-guo le.

That MW girl I already see EXP PERF

As for that girl, I’ve already seen her.

Also perhaps relevant… prescriptivists once railed against the adjective hopefully, on the grounds that it doesn’t describe how the action was performed:

I hopefully won’t see those raccoons any more.

In this case they’re wrong, because they’ve missed the fact that adverbs can also apply, pragmatically, to the speech act itself. Frankly, for instance:

Frankly, that program is garbage.

This doesn’t mean that the program is garbage in a frank way. What’s frank is my statement that it’s garbage.

When we think about parts of speech, it’s easy to just think of the prototypes: nouns are things, adjectives are modifiers, etc. So we can miss complications, such as:

- Nouns can be used as modifiers (tax commission president).

- Noun phrases can take appositives, basically another noun phrase very loosely inserted after it: my father-in-law, that otherworldly old soul. Can you think of any transformations that apply just to the appositive?

- Adjectives can take complements, such as an NP (afraid of dentists) or an entire clause (eager to go fishing, ashamed of having caught nothing).

There are also syntactic subdomains you can easily neglect, such as titles: His Royal Majesty King Ažerey II “The Canny” Abolineron of Verduria. What are all the possible parts? What gets left out on a second reference? Do the same rules apply to organizations (President Obama), clerics (The Most Reverend Pavel Eldaney, Bishop of Vyat)  and families (Uncle Al)?

Stretch your syntax!

It’s all too easy to come up with just one example of a particular construction, stated very directly. E.g. for Passive:

The manuscript was read by the goblins’ lawyer.

Try to go further than this. Think about:

- Other types of arguments. E.g. can you passivize indirect objects, instrumentals, sentential arguments?

- Interactions with other rules. E.g. how do reflexives and passives interact? Note *Himself was seen by Sam in the mirror.

- Test the constituent structure. E.g. is read by the lawyer a constituent, and what can be done with it?

Read by the goblins’ lawyer, that manuscript was.

?Read by the goblins’ lawyer is what the manuscript was.

To put it another way: think of examples that you have to asterisk as invalid. Think of more that are dubious (marked ?). A grammar you can’t stretch isn’t very naturalistic.

Redoing the Verdurian grammar, I can’t say I was tempted to create syntactic trees for everything. What I chiefly updated was rule interactions. As just one example, Verdurian has a construction which expresses a wish with the particle ut:

Ut ešelai so dalu, er řo ce-ctel i Alric!

pt be-irrealis-1s the king / and no that-individual of Alric

If only I were king, and not this Alric person!

In the earlier version, I was content to leave it at that. But now I wondered if ut was really restricted to main clauses. I decided that, at the least, it can be embedded as a sentential argument:

So sefo miže dy ut ešele dalu.

The boy said-past-3s that pt be-irrealis-3s king

The boy said, if only he were king.

The gloss suggests a neat fact about English: our own if only really can’t appear in subclauses except as a near-direct quotation, nor can it be nominalized. Cf.:

*I know you were thinking that if only you were king.

*Your if only being king would be a big improvement.

If you’re thinking, “but howwwww do I do that?” …well, a good start is to look through the bestiary, and see how each thing affects the feature you’re working on. But practice makes the process easier; once you’re familiar with syntax, you can check things in your head.

Consistency

Though I don’t advocate finding a list of Chomsky’s parameters and checking them off one by one… you should in general try to make the same kind of decision for different syntactic situations.

For instance, a language that’s head-last in some phrases will probably be head-last in others— see p. 261.

English is mostly head-first, while Quechua is head-last:

eat the chickenswallpakunata mikuy

chicken-pl-acc eat-inf

from the cityllaqatamanta

city-from

the chicken that atemikusqa wallpa

eat-nomn chicken

But things aren’t always so clear-cut. E.g. Mandarin has both prepositions and postpositions, and has relative clauses before the noun (head-last) but also V + O order (head-first). Hindī’s relative clauses really attach to the sentence, not the NP.

Similarly, you should probably have mostly or all head-marking, or mostly/all dependent-marking— see p. 236.

At the same time, rules in natural languages are often only almost uniform. Just in English:

- we have at least one postposition: ago, as in four years ago.

- some adjectives go after their noun: the parties responsible

- most quantifiers precede their noun, but some follow it: trouble aplenty, books galore

- enough must follow an adjective (big enough) and may follow a noun (time enough)

- Geographical terms can’t seem to decide if they precede or follow the noun: Atlantic Ocean, Mt. Everest, Lake Pontchartrain, Round Lake.

Transformations

There’s a few topics I can’t even describe without at least highlighting clauses, and probably not without informal transformations:

- Subordination, discussed below.

- Don’t forget time and place subordination: when the earth stood still; where I was born.

- Sentential subjects (Beatrix winning is likely) or objects (I believe she will win).

- Valence-changing operations: passive, causative

If statements can be surprisingly complex, not so much for syntactic as for morphosyntactic and semantic reasons.

- If there are irrealis tenses, are they used in the condition? In the consequence?

- Are there weird tense substitutions, as in English? (If I fell in love with you— note that the falling in love is a future event!)

- Does this change if the condition is near-certain? (If it’s Tuesday, it’s time for his massage.)

Reported speech has strange complications too. Does indirect speech ‘correct’ the pronouns and tenses?

He said, “You are a liar and a fool.”

He said I was a liar and a fool.

Does anything require GG?

Many phenomena can be described in traditional terms, or in GG terms. That’s the reason I said at the beginning of the book that you can easily write a grammar of your conlang without GG.

But now that you’ve read it, let me put it this way: is there nothing in your conlang that’s complex enough to need GG?

Some possibilities, because complexities tend to lie in these areas:

Relativization

This is the one area where informal underlying structures can help you understand and explain what’s happening.

► See p. 143 for some of the issues. Especially note the section on what can or can’t be relativized, and note that the subordinator is not always an interrogative pronoun!

One reason I advocate explicitly considering all combinations of subject/object in main clause and subclause is so that you can make sure your examples parse, especially if you don’t have case marking.

E.g., look at the structure of the four basic possibilities. Using SVO:

1. S [ø V O] V O

2. S [S V ø] V O

3. S V O [ø V O]

4. S V O [S V ø]

Since the brackets and the ø aren’t pronounced, some of these are ambiguous (1 and 3 are both S V O V O) and the others could create garden paths. No doubt this is one reason natlangs have subordinators!

Auxiliaries

I’d be a little embarrassed to create a conlang with Do-support; it’d seem like a blatant steal from English. And yet it’s a poster child for GG: a complicated phenomenon, involved in many transformations, that is hard to explain without an underlying deep structure.

What’s far more portable is the idea of Tense Hopping— the introduction of an auxiliary which attracts tense marking away from the main verb. E.g. the passé composé in French:

Je dîne avec la Marquise de Merteuil.

I dine-1s with the marchioness of Merteuil

I’m dining with the Marquise de Merteuil.

J’ai dîné avec la Marquise de Merteuil.

I have-1s dine-past.part with the marchioness of Merteuil

I dined with the Marquise de Merteuil.

The X-bar and Minimalist way to handle these is with a T node which affects the first verb below it. That works fine for French, but the T node still seems mostly motivated by the need for Do-support: it provides an entity which, when it can’t find a verb, can insert do. If we had never heard of English, the passé composé transformation in French would surely be most easily explained as moving a feature:

The diagram is intended to suggest the package of inflections (tense, person, number) is originally attached to dîner and moves to avoir, without being too precise on what that package is— a node, a set of features, or what.

In Hindī, there is a similar division of labor:

- participles give the aspect

- the auxiliary honā ‘be’ gives the tense and person

- the auxiliary appears after the verb, not before

But then it gets messy:

- number is marked on both forms

- …except that number isn’t marked on the past forms of honā

- gender is marked on the participle and on past forms of honā

masculinefeminine

ghumtā hṹghumtī hṹI walk (pres. imperfect)

ghumte haĩghumtī haĩwe walk (pres. Imperfect)

ghumtā thāghumtī thīI walked (past imperfect)

ghumā hṹghumī hṹI’ve walked (pres. perfect)

ghumā thāghumī thīI had walked (past perfect)

You might think that any verb used with another verb is an auxiliary. This may work when the subjects are the same—

I want to live on Europa.

Gollum hates carrying the Ring.

—but almost all of these verbs, unlike auxiliaries, allow other subjects:

I want Peter Thiel to live on Europa.

Gollum hates Frodo carrying the Ring.

So the deep structures for the first set of sentences are really

I want [I live on Europa]

Gollum hates [Gollum carrying the Ring]

Reflexivization

Can you use the equivalent of myself in these sentences?

Prepositional object

He teased me about myself.

in subclause but before antecedent

For myself, that’s who I bought it for.

in subclause

*I said he knows myself.

in subclause two levels deep

*I’m glad the tabloids never allowed the paparazzis to stalk myself.

picture noun

I sold him a picture of myself.

In Verdurian I allow a reflexive in a subclause, but only if it modifies the subject— on the theory that, till the subject is stated, we haven’t, so to speak, thrown out the old antecedent:

Soa medrë vule dy režžina zië zet abilcele ďalaštece.

The-f noble want-3s sub maid refl-gen refl-acc dress-irrealis-3s elegantly

The noblewoman wants her maid to dress elegantly.

(In fact, the subclause here has two reflexives, with different referents! Zië is part of the subject, and so refers back soa medrë; zet comes after the subject režžina zië, and so refers back to it.)

Numbers

You may not think of numbers as having a syntax, but they have quite a bit of it.

In Sanskrit, the numbers 1 to 4 are declined as adjectives, agreeing in case and number with their noun. The noun appears in the singular for eka ‘one’, the dual for dva ‘two’, and the plural otherwise. 5 to 19 decline only by case. 20 and up are nouns, not adjectives. The counted noun may appear in the genitive: viṃśatir aśvānām ’20 horses’.

In English, too, higher numbers eventually become nouns: I have two pigs and a hundred horses.

Don’t forget the process of building larger numbers, e.g. five thousand two hundred (and) thirty-two. In Sanskrit you put the power of ten after each digit (or you leave out all of them).

For mass nouns, we require a measure word between the number and the thing counted: a cup/box/bushel of corn; a piece of dirt; two head of cattle. Mandarin (but not Old Chinese) requires measure words for all nouns: liǎng zhī niǎo ‘two birds’, sān bēi chá ‘three cups of tea’.

In Icelandic, when (say) ordering drinks, the number must agree with the implied measure, not with the counted noun, e.g. tvo viski ‘two whiskeys’, where tvo is masculine, agreeing with masculine sjússar ‘drinks’ rather than neuter viski.

And then there’s the language of arithmetic: how do you say two plus two is four? Basic arithmetic is likely to sound like ordinary sentences— though even here, note the singular is. Try running the sentence through some of the transformations in the bestiary; quite a few won’t work.

More complicated mathematical expressions (eix = cos x + i sin x) don’t really follow the other rules of English grammar; they follow a syntax of their own, based on the (pan-European) written formula.

Syntactic change

It can help deepen your language’s syntax to think about how it’s changed from its ancestor.

Not infrequently old syntax leaves some ghosts behind:

- The older English negative (I saw him not) is still echoed in how we negate auxiliaries, and is still available as an archaic or ironic register (I think not).

- Latin was (mostly) SOV and the Romance languages are SVO. But pronominal clitics still use the old order.

- Spanish conmigo ‘with me’ reflects the freer word order of Latin: it’s mē cum plus, as a bonus, another copy of the preposition prefixed.

Verbal systems can be reinterpreted:

- The perfect may become the normal way of expressing the past tense (as in French).

- Or a participle may replace an old inflected tense, as in Russian or Hindī. A corollary is that the inflections become gender + number rather than person + number.

- The English ‘future tense’ was originally a modal of intention; it’s easy enough to see how a promise (I will pay you back) turns into a general prediction.

The verb have, if you have it, seems particularly prone to developing new paradigms. In Latin, there was a construction which looks like a perfect, but can be interpreted as a special case of possession:

In eā provinciā pecūniās magnās collocātās habent.

In that.s.f.abl province.s.abl money-p.f.acc much-p.f.acc lend-p.part-p.f.acc have-3p

They have a lot of money invested in that province.

You could still paraphrase this as “They have a lot of money, and it’s invested in that province.” But of course such expressions were grammaticalized as perfects.

English has a construction which also seems to be moving from possession to obligation:

I have a book to write.

You have a family to consider.

The dean has a lot to answer for.

These resemble the ordinary have = must expressions such as I have to write a book. We might try to derive the have NP to VP expressions from these, but this doesn’t always work:

I have to learn to trust again.

→ *I have to trust again to learn.

You have to stand up to your mother.

→ You have your mother to stand up to.

(The last sentence doesn’t mean You must confront your mother; if it’s possible at all it means something like You have your mother as someone you could confront.)

The development of Chinese coverbs is instructive. In Old Chinese, over 2000 years ago, bǎ meant ‘seize, grasp’:

Yīyǐn cóng Tāng; Tāng zì bǎ yuè yǐ fá Kūnwú, suì fá Jié.

Yīyǐn follow Tāng / Tāng self grasp halberd in.order.to attack Kūnwú / then attack Jié

Yīyǐn followed Tāng, who seized a halberd and marched against Kūnwú, then attacked Jié.

In modern Mandarin, bǎ is a coverb marking direct objects, with a pragmatic meaning that the object is disposed of or dealt with:

Tā jīntiān bǎ liǎng běn shū dōu mài le.

He/she today acc pair measure.word book all sell perf

He/she sold off both books today.

In Táng times, over a thousand years ago, we see sentences that neatly straddle both meanings:

Zuì bǎ zhūgēnzǐ xì kàn.

Drunk take dogwood careful look

Drunk, I took the dogwood and looked carefully at it.

This could be read simply I looked carefully at the dogwood. There is no longer necessarily an idea of seizing, only of taking or even merely of focusing attention.

The Old Chinese sentence includes another word that’s become a coverb: cóng ‘follow’. As a coverb it means ‘from’.

►See also ALC, p. 105.

The gloss test

A good test of whether your syntax is really done is to do a close translation and see if you get back to your native language.

If you’ve read the LCK and ALC, you should at least not have something like this:

An dlatla-ič atlesi učitlo-ño an ipri dlatlaŋ ur eič briiau.

the king-gen court reject-past the new queen for her faith

The king’s court rejected the new queen for her faith.

That is, your language should differ in morphology and basic word order from English. This wouldn’t be bad:

Učitlo-ño-e atlesi dlatla-ič dlatlaŋ-s ipri-s briiau-ke.

reject-impfv-3s court king-gen queen-acc new-acc faith-abl

The king’s court rejected the new queen for her faith.

A simple indicative sentence like this won’t show off the things we’ve gone over in this book— everything in the bestiary— but I’ll assume you’ve done that too.

But, once you’ve done all that, are the word choices and idioms pretty much those of English? Do your people always use the same syntactic features at the exact same time English speakers would?

Let’s look at a natural language— French, a language genetically and culturally close to English. Here’s a short passage from a novel, Damien Loch by Shan Millan.

Merilla avait dû atteindre la partie non préparée de son discours, car elle s’interrompit brutalement, sans sembler vouloir continuer.

«Jusqu’à ce que vous rencontriez… ?» L’encouragea Lynn.

«Je… je n’ai pas le droit de dire son nom, il me l’a interdit.»

Merilla se fit à nouveau muette. Timidement, Lynn proposa :

«On n’a qu’à l’appeler Bob.»

Merilla grimaça :

«Je ne sais pas si ça va lui plaire...»

«Il n’y a pas de raison qu’il l’apprenne, non ? Et puis, qu’est-ce qui va le moins lui plaire, le fait que vous lui donniez son véritable nom ou le fait que vous l’appeliez Bob ?»

«Je préfère l’appeler Robert dans ce cas...» Annonça Merilla d’un ton révérencieux.

«Allons-y pour Robert alors. Et donc ?»

«Je me rendais chez l’épicier pour racheter des petits gâteaux et un peu de lait. Et je suis tombée sur lui. Je sus tout de suite que je n’avais pas à faire à quelqu’un d’ordinaire. Avec lui, impossible de sentir comme avec les autres ses envies ou peurs, je ne voyais… je ne voyais rien. »

«Mais qu’est-ce qu’il faisait là Robert ?»

«Eh bien, ses courses, comme moi.»

And here’s a painfully literal translation:

Merilla must have attained the non-prepared part of her discourse, because she interrupted herself brutally, without to seem to want to continue.

“Until at that which you met…” encouraged her Lynn.

“I… I don’t have the right to say his name, he forbade it me.”

Merilla made herself at new mute. Timidly, Lynn proposed, “One has only to call him Bob.”

Merilla grimaced: “I don’t know if that goes to please him.”

“It has not there reason that he learn it, no? And then, what is it who will les  to please him, the fact that you would give to him his veritable name or the fact that you would call him Bob?”

“I prefer to call him Robert in that case,” announced Merilla of a reverential tone.

“Go there for Robert then. And so?”

“I rendered myself home the grocer to buy some small cakes and a little of milk. And I am fallen on him. I knew all of following that I didn’t have to do to someone of ordinary. With him, impossible to feel like with the others his desires or fears, I didn’t see… I didn’t see anything.”

“But what is it that he did there Robert?”

“Ah well, his courses, like me.”

As a translation, it’s terrible. What I’d like to suggest to you, however, is that if you translated literally from your conlang and got something like this— then you’re on the right track. It should sound stilted or weird.[78]

Here’s some of the differences from English in the above passage:

- Though the pronoun systems are similar, usage is different. E.g. we would probably say just He forbade it.

- French uses the reflexive much more. All three reflexives here (interrupted herself, made herself, rendered myself) would probably be non-reflexive in English.

- French uses its indefinite pronoun on frequently, even confusingly, where we would use we, you, someone, one, people, etc.

- Though some French clauses look just like English (l’homme que j’ai vu / the man that I saw), some are strangely wordy— Until at that which you met = Until you met.

- Idioms, e.g. go there for Robert → Let’s go with Robert; fell on → ran into.

- Preposition usage is a huge bugbear when learning a new language. All too often the ‘obvious’ preposition isn’t used— e.g. we speak in or with a particular tone, not of it.

- Differences in valence: e.g. in French you say it will please him where we’re likely to say he will like it.

- Argument placement: feel like with the others his desires = feel his desires, like with the others.

- Note the extraposition in What is it that he did there Robert? French can freely move arguments around since the pronoun indicates the syntactic relation.

And then there’s word choice. In my literal translation, I purposely misused cognates— but in each case the word can be used in the same sense in both languages in other contexts. E.g. you can atteindre a goal, a politician can give a discours, you can proposer an idea, you can find the raison why something happened. But we’d use different words in the above passage.

More subtly, what we might call the pragmatic noise of a conversation— little words that signal hesitation, dispreferred responses, turn-taking, and so on— may or may not correspond.

As just one example, French loves an initial Mais (but). In the above dialog, we might use an initial But as well. But compare some other examples from the book:

Mais bien sûr, je vous fais ça…

Of course, I’ll do that for you.

Mais qu’est-ce que tu fous ?

What the fuck are you doing?

Mais Lynn, vous n’allez tout de même pas manger ça ?

Lynn, you’re not really eating that, are you?

Mais non.

No.

Mais alors moi euh…

So then, me, uh…

As the translations suggest, we wouldn’t normally begin any of these sentences with but. Yet the word isn’t meaningless; it has a pragmatic sense of protest or alarm.

Before leaving this passage, we’d might as well note the typographical differences as well: e.g. the quotation marks are different, and spaces are put before colons and question marks.

For comparison, here’s a free translation of the passage.

Merilla must have reached the non-prepared part of her speech, because she stopped abruptly, seemingly unwilling to continue.

Lynn encouraged her: “Until you found…?”

“I.. I’m not allowed to say his name. It’s forbidden.”

Merilla fell silent again. Hesitantly, Lynn suggested, “You can just call him Bob.”

Merilla made a face. “I don’t know if he’d like that…”

“He’s not going to know, is he? And anyway, what would bother him more, that you use his real name or that you call him Bob?”

“In that case, I’d rather call him Robert,” announced Merilla, reverentially.

“Say Robert then. So?”

“I went to the grocery store to buy some cookies and a bit of milk. And I ran into him. I knew immediately it wasn’t anyone ordinary. With him. it was impossible to read his desires or fears. I saw… I saw nothing.”

“But what was this Robert doing there?”

“Oh, shopping, like me.”

A syntactic bestiary

This chapter simply catalogs a wide range of syntactic behavior, with as little theory as possible.

We’ve seen some of these things before; others are new.

- If you’re creating a conlang, it’s an idea book and a checklist. You don’t have to have similar constructions. But it will show you things you can do, including some you weren’t aware were things.

- If you’re interested in syntax in general, you can check your favorite theory against all these phenomena.

Don’t read too much into the names (which are conventional) or into the pre-arrow forms of the sentences: if they’re not grammatical sentences, they are intended to informally suggest the deep structure, not to definitely represent it.

In many cases a deletion could be recast as an insertion, or vice versa. One linguist’s Move X → Y could be another linguist’s Y → X. And a third linguist just records them as different constructions. Your favorite theorist will tell you how it goes in their theory.

The basics

Negative

You ate the last yogurt → You didn’t eat the last yogurt.

I’ve gone to the Casbah → I haven’t gone to the Casbah.

Question Inversion

We have solved the problem → Have we solved the problem?

John ate an apple → Did John eat an apple?

We can use these as exclamations. As such they’re improved by ever:

Have we ever solved the problem!

Wh- Movement

John eat x? → What did John eat?

x ate an apple? → Who ate an apple?

This transformation refers to the fronting of the interrogative. Question Inversion applies except when the interrogative is the subject.

The movement seems to be able to extract components from arbitrarily deep in a sentence:

John said [that his book claims [our ancestors learned time travel from [reading monoliths]]].

→ What did John say that his book claims our ancestors learned time travel from reading?

Except when it can’t:

John knows a man [who can fix theremins].

→ *What does John know a man who can fix ø?

English allows more than one wh- interrogative in a sentence, but only one gets fronted:

Who said what?

What did you claim about which linguist?

Tense Hopping

Mildred Past walk her corgi → Mildred walked her corgi.

I Pres have seen everything → I’ve seen everything.

The T node containing Tense has to apply (hop down) to the verb at some point. If there’s an auxiliary, it gets the tense rather than the main verb.

Do-support

Add a do in positions where we need a tensed verb and don't have one. See p. 49 for a discussion.

In British English, Do-support can be triggered even if there’s a modal, as in this quote from a Neil Gaiman novel:

“But these things do take time.”
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose they must do.”

Passive

Laura has mastered phonology.

→ Phonology has been mastered by Laura.

Passive can be seen in several ways:

- It promotes the direct object (and sometimes other objects) to subject position.

- It turns an accusative (or oblique) into a nominative.

- It reduces the valence of the verb by one.

In ergative languages, the corresponding operation is antipassive, which turns an ergative argument into an absolutive one.

English really has two passives: Martha was robbed; Martha got robbed. The got passive sounds strange with inanimates, perhaps because it often has an antibenefactive meaning:

*Phonology got mastered by Laura.

It doesn’t play well with the progressive:

Martha was/*got being robbed.

Causative

Judith caused [her students love syntactic trees]

→ Judith caused her students to love syntactic trees.

A causative construction increases the valence of a verb by one. Many languages have causatives as an inflection that applies to any verb.

In French, the original subject (the causee) takes the next available syntactic role. Cf.:

Intransitive subject → direct object:

Valérian fait rire Laureline.

Valerian make-3s laugh-inf Laureline

Valerian makes Laureline laugh.

Transitive subject → indirect object:

Laureline fait apprendre le schtroumpfien à Valérian.

Laureline make-3s learn-inf the smurfish to Valerian

Laureline makes Valerian learn Smurfish.

Ditransitive subject → PP:

Valérian fait donner le sac d’or au bandit par Laureline.

Valerian make-3s give-inf the bag of gold to.the.m bandit by Laureline

Valerian makes Laureline give the bag of gold to the bandit.

Conjunction

Where one constituent can go, you can also put two, conjoined with and, or, but. (But see p. 326).

Given this rule, it seems unnecessary to posit a Conjunction Reduction rule:

My brother designed this house and built this house.

→ My brother designed and built this house.

Sometimes it looks like constituents of different types are conjoined:

Joker is a liar and insane.

But these can always be analyzed as the result of applying a deletion transformation— in this case, Stripping:

Joker is a liar and is insane.

Replacement

Pronominalization

A constituent can be replaced with an anaphor. These vary by type of constituent:

NP

I, you she; this, that; someone…

Adj

such

N'

one

do so

VP

it

S

Sentence anaphors:

Max says that he’s carrying a gun, but I don’t believe it.

Samples of verbal anaphors:

I have been working hard and so has Ramesh.

I finished my syntax homework and Hana did too.

Identity in anaphors is just sloppy enough to work: we understand this to mean that Hana did her homework, not mine. Compare:

Jill spent her first paycheck on rent, but Robin spent it on video games.

A curiosity about anaphoric one: it can’t be used for the noun in certain adverbials: in a way, at a time, in a manner, at a place:

Krom died in a horrible way and Kreg died in a horrible way.

→ *Krom died in a horrible way and Kreg died in one too.

They’re fine with the same words used as regular objects, though:

Krom found a way out of the prison and Kreg found one too.

Reflexivization

Sam loves himself.

Zanderi talked to Mary about himselfi.

*Zanderi wants Mary to talk about himselfi.

A plural reflexive can refer to two antecedents if they’re conjoined, but not if they’re separate arguments:

Nancy and Greg love to talk about themselves.

*Nancy talked to Greg about themselves.

Echo questions

You gave the laser to Jean → You gave the laser to who?

These are used not so much to ask what happened, as to verify it— or simply to express surprise or consternation.

In many languages leaving the interrogative in situ like this is the normal way of forming wh- questions— there is no Wh-movement. E.g. Hindī:

Rām ne van mẽ kis ko phūl dī?

Rām erg forest in who to flower give.past.m

Who did Rāma give a flower to in the forest?

Comp-Placement

Non-finite clauses (e.g. ones without tense) can be formed in three ways: with for..to; with the gerund plus possessive; with the gerund alone:

We waited a century for [the Cubs win]

→ We waited a century for the Cubs to win.

[Grandma respond to e-mail scams] disturbs me.

→ Grandma’s responding to e-mail scams disturbs me.

→ Grandma responding to e-mail scams disturbs me.

You can’t use modals in the subclauses:

*Will it take another century for the Cubs to will win again?

*Grandma’s canning responding should worry you too.

McCawley suggests that this is due to a morphological gap: modals don’t have infinitives (to will) or gerunds (canning).

You can form finite clauses with that, if, whether, as though, and interrogatives:

The ring has vanished.

→ I don’t know whether the ring has vanished.

→ Did you know that the ring has vanished?

→ Ringo told me how the ring vanished.

Semantically, whether acts like an embedded form of a question.

With-absolute

[Wakanda was still hidden] T’challa could not join the IMF.

With Wakanda still hidden, T’challa could not join the IMF.

Not Contraction

We have not lost yet. → We haven’t lost yet.

For the most part, this is treated as a meaningless substitution. But there are differences between the contracted and uncontracted sentences. First, Question Inversion drags the negative along, but not the full word:

Q you are done yet

→ Are you not done yet?

→ Aren’t you done yet?

→ *Are not you done yet?

Second, when the modal is stressed, not must generally receive the stress if it’s present:

I shouldn’t stay up till six.

I should not stay up till six.

*I should not stay up till six.

Nominalization

[The aliens destroyed the city] outraged me.

→ The aliens’ destruction of the city outraged me.

[Chomsky visited Urbana] went badly.

→ Chomsky’s visit to Urbana went badly.

Which preposition to use varies lexically, though it’s partially predictable by semantic role.

In SS Chomsky described nominalization as a transformation; in Chomsky 1970 he decided that that were present in deep structure. The GS school disagreed.

Movement

Dative Movement

The king gave the land to Lady Ashley.

→ The king gave Lady Ashley the land.

If the direct object is a pronoun, this is generally disallowed:

The king gave it to Lady Ashley.

→ *The king gave Lady Ashley it.

Particle Movement

The police brought in the criminal.

→ The police brought the criminal in.

Obligatory if the object is a pronoun:

*The police brought in him. → The police brought him in.

Romance Clitic Movement

In French, pronominal objects and indirect objects must move before the verb:

Je donnerai le livre à Jean. → Je le lui donnerai.

I give-fut-1s the book to Jean → I it him.dat give-fut-1s

Je veux donner le livre à Jean. → Je veux le lui donner.

I want-1s give-inf the book to Jean → I want-1s it him.dat give-inf

Spanish is similar, but the clitics don’t move in a non-finite clause:

Daré el libro a Juan. → Se lo daré.

give-fut.1s the book to Juan → 3s.dat 3sm.acc give-fut.1s

Quiero dar el libro a Juan. → Quiero dárselo.

want-1s give-inf the book to Juan → want-1s give-inf-3s.dat-3sm.acc

The appearance of se is due to a constraint against cliticizing both le (3s.dat) and lo (3sm.acc): *le lo → se lo. Compare Le daré el libro ‘I’ll give him the book’.

Object Topicalization

He won’t eat tofu. → Tofu, he won’t eat.

It seems to be dialectal or regional whether you can accept:

About to have a stroke, he is.

Extraposition

[That my plans have gone awry] is clear.

→ It’s clear that my plans have gone awry.

Probably relies on It-Insertion.

Extraposition from NP

Henry sent a file which incriminated himself to his bookie.

→ Henry sent a file to his bookie which incriminated himself.

VP-Preposing

Greg said he would publish a cartoon in Forbes, and publish a cartoon in Forbes he did.

This construction seems to isolate the VP (rather than the T') of a sentence: note that the modal disappears.

Such sentences may be related to the un-preposed variant, with contrastive stress on the T:

Greg said he would publish a cartoon in Forbes, and he did publish a cartoon in Forbes.

Quantifier Hopping

Both boys can obviously be read as gay.

→ The boys can both obviously be read as gay.

→ The boys can obviously both be read as gay.

→ The boys can obviously be both read as gay.

Neg-Hopping

The rites may have been not observed.

→ The rites may have not been observed.

→ The rites may not have been observed.

Sam thinks the invoices didn't arrive.

→ Sam doesn’t think the invoices arrived.

I want to never eat pig’s feet again.

→ I never want to eat pig’s feet again.

In Mandarin, you can’t move your negator; or to put it another way, you negate only the specific word that’s being denied. Note the difference between:

Tāmen dōu bú qù.

they all not go

None of them are going.

Tāmen bú dōu qù.

they not all go

Not all of them are going.

Compare Everyone’s not going, which could take either meaning.

Intensifier climbing

Applies to words like even, also, only.

Surya might not have finished even the comic.

→ Surya might not have even finished the comic.

→ Surya might not even have finished the comic.

Adverbial fronting

Max tried to bite me only once.

→ Only once did Max try to bite me.

Max has tried to bite me many times.

→ Many times has Max tried to bite me.

Charlotte rewarded the pig thus.

→ Thus did Charlotte reward the pig.

The empress acted brazenly.

→ So brazenly did the empress act (that she was deposed).

The six hundred rode into the valley of Death.

→ Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred.

Notice the and Inversion and, except in the last sample, Do-support.

This seems to be highly restricted— e.g. it doesn’t seem to work if only once is replaced with once, in September, at the barn, happily.

Note, adverbials can be fairly freely fronted without bringing along an auxiliary:

By December the activists were organizing the ogres.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Quotation Inversion

“This is the end”, thought the old man.

This sounds a bit archaic with pronouns:

“Viṣṇu is the supreme god,” said I.

German Fronting + Inversion

In German, you can front a constituent, but this triggers subject/verb inversion.

Er sprach gestern mit Birgitte über Rüstung.

3s spoke.past yesterday with Birgitte on armor

Yesterday I spoke to Birgitte about armor.

→ Gestern sprach er mit Birgitte über Rüstung.

→ Mit Birgitte sprach er gestern über Rüstung.

→ Über Rüstung sprach er gestern mit Birgitte.

Exclamatory Wh-

How foolish are those syntacticians!

What a good boy you are!

John Ross points out that this construction only affects expressions of degree:

*Who my cousin you are!

*What a dog dragged in!

It’s not so clear what the deep structure is, since there’s no alternative form of the sentences that still work as an exclamation. But they might be compared to ordinary statements with degree adverbials:

Those syntacticians are extremely foolish.

PP Scrambling

Sentence-level PPs can be fairly freely re-ordered.

We talked (in the basement) (about our problems) (for days) (until dawn) (without stopping).

You can front multiple PPs, but only one verbal argument can be fronted.

*To the counselor about money we talked.

Or so Ross says! I think this one works with sufficient pauses:

To the counselor… about money… we talked.

Heavy-NP backing

A long or complex object NP can be moved to the end of its clause, where a shorter NP must stay where it is.

We consider them blameless.

→ *We consider blameless them.

We consider the linguistics faculty of the University of Verduria, as well as its most prominent alumni, blameless.

→ We consider blameless the linguistics faculty of the University of Verduria, as well as its most prominent alumni.

Presumably related: a heavy-enough PP or a restrictive relative clause can be backed.

The cow that laughed fell over in the field.

→ *The cow fell over in the field that laughed.

A guy that I’ve never seen before in my life ran in and stole it.

→ A guy ran in and stole it that I’ve never seen before in my life.

A book of mine will be published later in the year.

→ *A book will be published later in the year of mine.

A book of Ramacharma’s best poetry will be published later in the year.

→ A book will be published later in the year of Ramacharma’s best poetry.

Negated Constituent Topicalization

You should pet my tarantula under no/some circumstances.

→ Under no/*some circumstances should you pet my tarantula.

As-Preposing

As Noam is smart, Mensa is sure to accept him.

→ Smart as Noam is, Mensa is sure to accept him.

Also works with though.

Wayward though Selina is, she still won’t steal from the poor.

Comparand Preposing

Adam West is the sexiest of all the Batmans.

→ Adam West is, of all the Batmans, the sexiest.

→ Of all the Batmans, Adam West is the sexiest.

This isn’t just a characteristic of of phrases:

I have a compilation of all the Batmans.

→ *Of all the Batmans, I have a compilation.

Adverb → Adjective

I ran a mile slowly. → I ran a slow mile.

Damien occasionally takes a drink.

→ Damien takes an occasional drink.

This works best with relatively vacuous (less nouny) nouns. Compare *I fired a quick gun.

A curiosity of this movement is that it’s downward— from the VP level down into an NP. Minimalism only allows upward movement.

Possessor ascension

Edward kissed Selina’s hand.

→ Edward kissed Selina on the hand.

Ross notes that the possessor must be animate:

Edward kissed the letter’s seal.

→ ?Edward kissed the letter on the seal.

Armenian Wh- Movement

In Western Armenian, the interrogative moves just before the verb:

Armen-ə hats ə g-ud-e.

Armen-det bread-det indic-eat-pres.3s

Armen eats the bread.

→ Hats-ə ov g-ud-e?

Who eats the bread?

→ Armen-ə inʧ g-ud-e?

What does Armen eat?

Armen-ə ayt hats-ə yereg Anahid-i-n dəv-av.

Armen-det this bread-det yesterday Anahid-dat-def give-past-3s

Armen gave that bread to Anahid yesterday.

→ Ayt hats-ə yereg Anahid-i-n ov dəv-av?.

this bread-det yesterday Anahid-dat-def who give-past-3s

Who gave that bread to Anahid yesterday?

Not too exceptional, except that when the subject is replaced, the interrogative moves downward into the VP. Movement downward in the tree, as opposed to upward or outward, is unusual in GG.

Deletion

Object Deletion

Have you started smoking (cigarettes)?

Do capybaras bite (people)?

It’s rude to visit when people are eating (dinner, food).

Veronica is out riding (a horse).

Ms. Howalski settled (the case) out of court.

This may seem obvious, but imagine trying to explain (say) transitive verbs to someone, and they bring up examples like these. If you want to maintain that the object simply doesn’t exist, why are they still transitive?

It would be a study in itself to figure out what objects are understood. Sometimes they’re generic, sometimes quite specific; sometimes they’re singular, other times plural.

Equi NP deletion

I want [I go] → I want to go.

[Jeff appearing on TV] changed Jeff.

→ Appearing on TV changed Jeff.

Subjects can occur in these sentences (I want Sam to go), which isn’t true for auxiliaries (*I expect you to can fight).

Adverbial Equi

[Before Sidney take the part] Sidney read the original manga.

→ Before taking the part, Sidney read the original manga.

She’s studying Chinese [she understand Chinese opera]

→ She’s studying Chinese to understand Chinese opera.

That last sentence has the peculiarity that the meaning is future tense— her purpose is that she will understand Chinese opera.

Wh-is Deletion

We need [hire someone [who is smart]]

→ We need to hire someone smart.

Mort [who is our Zarya] got traded to another team.

→ Mort, our Zarya, got traded to another team.

Is that really the origin of these sentences? Well, if not, you need a special rule to allow a modifier after someone or Mort!

Small clause formation

We found Bilbo to be fascinating.

We need you to be at the door at five.

Conjunction suggests that small clauses are constituents, but other transformations fail:

We need Bill on stage and Mary in the projection booth.

*Bill on stage is what we need.

*It’s Bilbo fascinating that we found.

*You at the door at five, we need.

There’s a variant that doesn’t allow to be. Is this a deletion or not?

I thought about the audience (*to be) naked, and laughed.

Compare resultatives:

We hammered the box (*to be) flat.

Sluicing

Someone ruined syntax, and it’s clear [who ruined syntax].

→ Someone ruined syntax, and it’s clear who.

Mary is mad about something, but I don’t know [Mary is mad about what]

→ Mary is mad about something, but I don’t know what.

Sluice-Stranding

Sam has been drinking with someone again, but I don’t know who he’s been drinking with.

This sounds slightly off to me. Still, some combinations of interrogative + prepositions sound much worse:

*Ellie is writing a book about someone, but I don’t know who she’s writing a book about.

VP Deletion

Laura didn’t take the jewels, but Selina took the jewels.

→ Laura didn’t take the jewels, but Selina did ø.

Laura didn’t take the jewels, and Selina didn’t ø either.

Laura said she’d take the jewels, and she did ø.

If the VP contains another VP, sometimes only that VP gets deleted:

Alice is ready to go back, and Sheldon is ready to ø as well.

But sometimes only the full VP can be deleted:

*Alice is easy to talk to, and Sheldon is easy to ø as well.

Alice is easy to talk to, and Sheldon is ø as well.

A nice sentence from Olivia Judson with two operations of VP Deletion operating on two separate VPs:

Males whose mothers provided lots of food become big. Males whose mothers didn’t, don’t.

Jason Merchant points out that VP Deletion sometimes applies even if one of the VPs is active and the other is passive:

The system can be used by anyone who wants to use the system.

→ The system can be used by anyone who wants to ø.

As + Verb Deletion

Who can write a story as Borges can write a story?

→ Who can write a story as Borges can?

As Ross notes, you can delete the final verb, but then as → like:

→ Who can write a story like Borges?

Gapping

John bought a new car and Mary, a new refrigerator.

Aragorn is king of Gondor and Éomer, of Rohan.

I paid $500 to Bernie and to Sara, $700.

A further step is to conjoin the subjects and add respectively:

→ John and Mary bought a car and a refrigerator, respectively.

Gapping worsens with negation:

John didn’t buy a new car and Mary didn’t buy a new refrigerator.

→ ?John didn’t buy a new car and Mary, a new refrigerator.

The same or a similar transformation applies at the NP level:

Larry’s book on syntax and Harry’s on theology have the same number of pages.

Stripping

Sometimes identical bits of a conjoint can be omitted:

I like to read syntax, but I rarely read syntax by Australian linguists.

→ I like to read syntax, but rarely by Australian linguists.

Paco has spent the whole day playing Overwatch, and Lydia has spent half the day playing Overwatch.

→ Paco has spent the whole day playing Overwatch, and Lydia half the day.

There are strong limitations on this:

John ate some of the leftover hash, and Mary ate some of the leftover tuna.

→ *John ate some of the leftover hash, and Mary tuna.

Perhaps this is an instance, or a separate construction:

Are you coming or not coming?

This is reminiscent of one way to ask questions in Mandarin:

Xiào Lǐ huì bu huì shuō Guàngzhōu huà?

Young Li can not can speak Guǎngzhōu speech

Can Li speak Cantonese?

Right Node Raising

John is eager to please and Biff is willing to please.

→ John is eager, and Biff is willing, to please.

Similar to Stripping, but the material is deleted from the first conjoint.

Comparative Deletion

Judy is smarter than Lena is smart

→ Judy is smarter than Lena is.

→ Judy is smarter than Lena.

Note the ambiguity in:

I hate it almost as much as Jacob Rees-Mogg.

← I hate it almost as much as [I hate] Jacob Rees-Mogg.

← I hate it almost as much as Jacob Rees-Mogg [hates it].

Imperative You Deletion

You wash yourselves → Wash yourselves!

Truncation

I’m coming! → Coming!

Are you eating that? → You eating that?

The cat’s out of the bag → Cat’s out of the bag.

I’ve got to get back to the lab → Got to get back to the lab.

I went to Madrid yesterday → Went to Madrid yesterday.

Note that only the initial material is deleted:

*The cat’s out of bag.

I said I’m coming → *I said coming.

This seems to be restricted to first/second person pronouns, some auxiliaries, and the:

She’s coming → Coming.

For me, at least,

Squirrel’s in the yard.

is best interpreted as referring to the squirrel, though I don’t think a squirrel is actually wrong.

That-deletion

I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.

→ I think I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.

To-Deletion

Infinitive to is deleted after some verbs. Or inserted before all the others.

I made Frodo [to wear the ring] → I made Frodo wear the ring.

I want Frodo [to wear the ring] → *I want Frodo wear the ring.

Subordinating preposition deletion

I’m afraid of [that the colony won’t survive]

→ I’m afraid that the colony won’t survive.

I decided on [I promote Judy]

→ I decided to promote Judy.

Compare I’m afraid of failure; I decided on Nate’s promotion.

Perhaps the preposition only occurs in nominalizations? But compare

What I’m afraid of is that the colony won’t survive.

I decided on promoting Nate.

As-Postposing

Take a moment to think about where this sentence comes from:

He’s playing Hanzo, as I feared.

It may not at first seem to need a derivation at all, but then what did I fear? It’s certainly not I feared that he’s playing Hanzo. Maybe:

← I feared that he would be playing Hanzo, and he is playing Hanzo.

Preposition Zapping

Nell doesn’t want to stay at here

→ Nell doesn’t want to stay here.

Compare Nell doesn’t want to stay at the beach. This is a GS-style argument— locatives always require an underlying preposition— which may strike you as misguided. But then why do we say:

Where’s Nell at?

Possibly related:

Ihano left from Vyat to Irvesi.

→ Ihano left Vyat for Irvesi.

Or is the latter more like Ihano left his wife? But then, if leave is an ordinary transitive, why does this sound odd?

*Vyat was left by Ihano (for Irvesi).

?His wife was left by Ihano.

Some weird deletions

Have relations with just one goat and guess what they call you.

This looks like Truncation, but it’s really a construction of its own: a hypothetical with a deleted general subject, and then a consequence.

Why (not) get involved?

These look like questions, but they’re rhetorical at best, and have an unexplained deletion of the subject.

What, me worry?

Most famous as the motto of Mad, but it’s narrowly productive:

What, him be president?

What, you play Hamlet?

The tricky bit here is figuring out what exactly was deleted:

Damn you!

See Quang 1971 for an extended analysis. These sentences don’t fit any other syntactic frame: they look like imperatives, but don’t have the expected reflexive. You might wonder if they’re short for God damn you! But then you’d expect *God damn himself!

Even more oddly, these sentences don’t allow negation, reported speech, or adverbials:

*Don’t screw you.

*I said to damn you.

*Screw you tomorrow.

Quang says they can’t be combined with other imperatives:

*Fuck you and wash the dishes.

Though maybe this is only pragmatically anomalous— it sounds much better with similarly angry commands:

Fuck you and get out.

Sorry for the profanity, but statements that violate so many English rules (and yet follow others) are too interesting to ignore.

Insertion

Verbal Stress

We had to get married → We had to get married.

We washed the car → We did wash the car.

It-Insertion

Subjects are almost always required in English; when deep structure doesn’t supply one, we insert a dummy it.

It’s raining.

It’s likely that the orcs will win.

It’s a boy!

French has equivalents (Il pleut; C’est possible), but Spanish needs no pronoun (Llueve; Es posible).

There-insertion

An orc is at the portal. → There’s an orc at the portal.

An orc ran out of the castle. → There ran out of the castle an orc.

Presumably similar to It-Insertion, but lexicalized as an existential. Compare It’s an orc (at the portal). The difference is pragmatic: with there, the new information is the existence of someone at the door; with it, it’s the identity of that someone.

The words which allow this seem to be limited to verbs of existence, appearance, and movement; compare:

An orc conquered the castle.

*There conquered the castle an orc.

Unlike dummy it, which requires a singular verb, there triggers plural agreement if the following NP is plural:

There is a specter haunting Europe.

There are two specters haunting Europe.

This suggest that the specters, not there, are the subject.

Curiously, the abbreviation there’s, but not there is, is acceptable (at least to some of us) with a following plural:

There’s two sides to every story.

Clefting

The dog licked the kitten’s face.

→ It was the dog that licked the kitten’s face.

→ It was the kitten’s face that the dog licked.

I saw you yesterday.

→ It was yesterday that I saw you.

Note the It-Insertion.

Some languages have Clefting, but restrict it far more: in Malagasy, only the subject can be clefted.

Pseudo-clefting

Bacteria ended the Martian threat.

→ What ended the Martian threat was bacteria.

What he dreams of is being profiled by both Forbes and Dungeon.

This can feed a movement transformation, Copula Switch:

→ Bacteria are what ended the Martian threat.

I recently found a sentence on Twitter that almost, but doesn’t quite, fit in this category:

Quoted in the NYT is not something I was expecting to get when becoming a socialist.

The V’ is fronted. Other auxiliaries don't allow anything of the sort:

*Brought down three prime ministers is not what Brenda thought she would ever have.

*Eating tripe and onions is not something that I am.

Regular pseudo-clefting almost gets us there, but not quite:

What he never expected was getting quoted in the NYT.

*What he never expected getting was quoted in the NYT.

On the other hand, other uses of get seem to work. My best guess is that the tweet works by analogy from sentences like these:

A case of 200-year old wines is not something I was expecting to get from my grandfather.

Tag questions

Mandarin is hard → Mandarin is hard, isn’t it?

Mandarin isn’t hard, is it?

John ate → John ate, didn’t he?

Oh look, Do-support again.

It’s tempting to assume that the tag is a copy of the first element of the verbal complex. But note:

Come in, won’t you?

Also note the close variant which does not reverse negation:

John drank the last beer, did he?

For me at least, you can’t apply this to negative sentences:

*John didn’t drink the last beer, didn’t he?

Constituent Dislocation

In colloquial French, so long as a constituent is represented in the verbal complex, the expanded NP can be fronted or backed, and placed in any order:

Je la lui donnerai. [I’ll give it to him]

I her.acc him.acc give-fut-1s

Moi, je la lui donnerai.

Je la lui donnerai, la revue. [magazine]

Je la lui donnerai, à Jean. [to Jean]

Moi, je la lui donnerai, la revue, à Jean.

Le revue, je la lui donnerai, à Jean, moi.

Note that moi is an emphatic pronoun— you can’t move je to a slot which requires stress.

These sentences differ from the ‘normal’ sentence

Je donnerai le livre à Jean.

which does not allow free re-ordering of the constituents (and has no way to stress je).

English can do this with subjects, not so much with objects.

Me, I’m going to spend the week watching Frasier.

He’s a pile of contradictions, my father.

*Me, I really think Faye Wong loves me.

This isn’t the same as Topicalization, since the original NP isn’t deleted.

Parentheticals

At certain points you can insert material which is not syntactically part of the sentence:

This guy at work, I told you about him earlier, wants to take me to Paris.

The Tisroc (may he live forever) is not receiving visitors.

Clause mixing

Raising

An underlying subject can be raised to subject or object in the main clause:

[That Beatrix will win] is likely

→ Beatrix is likely to win.

Osho-ren wants [he handle it]

→ Osho-ren wants him to handle it.

At least some non-NP constituents can be Raised:

Under the bed seems like a good place to wait out the storm.

Subject and Object Control

Annie is reluctant [Annie go]

→ Annie is reluctant to go.

I persuaded Annie [Annie go]

→ I persuaded Annie to go.

The surface structure is the same as for Raising, but here the subclause subject also exists in the main clause. Annie is reluctant and I persuaded Annie are both complete, valid sentences (compare *Is likely; *Osho-ren wants).

Pivoting

This is seen in Mandarin:

Tāmen qǐng wǒ [wǒ chī Fǎguó cài]

they invite I [I eat France food]

→ Tāmen qǐng wǒ chī Fǎguó cài.

they invite me eat France food

They invited me to eat French food.

That is, wǒ is being used simultaneously as object in the main clause and subject in the subclause, with no movement or extra syntactic glue required. It’s acting like a pivot on which both clauses are balanced.

Which clause does wǒ belong to? The first, the second, or both? My Mandarin isn’t good enough to apply syntactic tests, so I don’t know. Chomskyan syntax would recoil in horror at this diagram, but it does seem like the simplest explanation of the structure:

(Compare English’s Object Control, just above.)

Tough-movement

It’s tough [to like Tony] → Tony is tough to like.

It’s impossible [to reason with Al]

→ Al is impossible to reason with.

This is highly lexically restricted— most adjectives with clause complements don’t allow it.

It’s outrageous [to like my grandmother]

→ *My grandmother is outrageous to like.

David Perlmutter points out that the following sentences don’t quite mean the same thing:

We made Tony easy to put up with.

We made it easy to put up with Tony.

The first suggests that we intervened with Tony somehow; the second, that we changed the environment around him. I’d suggest that this is due to use of the transitive construction itself, which normally implies that the subject did something directly to the object.

Relativization

I swiped the kitten [Zhou brought home the kitten]

→ I swiped the kitten (that) Zhou brought home.

I reimbursed Zhou [Zhou brought home the kitten]

→ I reimbursed Zhou, who brought home the kitten.

Sentence Lifting

I believe Viṣṇu is the supreme god.

→ Viṣṇu is the supreme god, I believe.

Once you can handle that, you can worry about:

Viṣṇu is, I think, the supreme god.

Right-Node Raising

If two conjoined sentences have the same right-hand node, it can be moved out of the conjunction:

John wrote the movie and Aditya directed the movie.

→ John wrote and Aditya directed the movie.

We got married yesterday and we had a baby yesterday.

→ We got married and had a baby yesterday.

This was a favorite construction of Edward Gibbon, in a way that sounds a bit strange today:

The unfortunate Licinius was the last rival who opposed the greatness, and the last captive who adorned the triumph, of Constantine.

Constraints

The classic work on constraints is Ross 1967. The following three constraints can be said to form islands— places it’s hard to get on or off.

Coordinate Structure Constraint

A single conjunct can’t be moved out of a conjunction.

I’ve met Mary and Sue. → *Mary, I’ve met and Sue.

I ate hummus and what → *What did I eat hummus and?

You generally can’t apply a transformation to just one conjoint:

It’s easy to offend John and please Murgatroyd.

→ *John is easy to offend and please Murgatroyd.

This clue from Jeopardy seems to at least stretch the grammar:

?An ’80s band who sang “So Alive” was named after the underground comic “Love &” these, which is still published.[79]

This constraint seems to be widely shared— but there’s at least one language that violates it, Chukchansi Yokuts:

Mokeela’ ta’ish-ta’ Nancy’-in ama’ yo’ Jack.

woman see-remote.past Nancy-acc and also Jack

She saw Nancy and Jack.

→ Mokeela’ Nancy’-in ta’ish-ta’ ama’ yo’ Jack.

Complex NP Constraint

You can’t move an element out of an S which is dominated by an NP.

We read a warning about that man.
We read a warning that was about that man.

That man we read a warning about isn’t a problem.
*That man we read a warning that was about isn’t a problem.

Here’s the man we read a warning about.
*Here’s the man we read a warning that was about.

Ross maintained that about that man derived from an underlying relative clause that was about that man. So he had all this going on in the first sentence:

- Relative Clause Reduction deleted that was

- Tree Pruning demoted the S node about that man to PP

- This meant a warning about that man was no longer a Complex NP

- So that man could now be relativized.

Sentential Subject Constraint

Items can’t be moved out of a sentence which is serving as the subject of another sentence.

That no one has ever worn this hat seems unlikely.

→ *Did you buy the hat that no one has ever worn seems unlikely?

→ *It’s this hat that no one has ever worn seems unlikely.

It’s fine if the S serves as the object of a sentence:

I doubt that no one has ever worn this hat.

→ Did you buy the hat that I doubt that no one has ever worn?

→ It’s this hat that I doubt that no one has ever worn.

Note that all three constraints are ignored if a pronoun is left behind. E.g., with Constituent Dislocation:

The king, the wizard can’t find him or his daughter.

That madman, we heard a report that he’s back in town.

My Dad, that he can bore you to death about the tides is well known.

Left Branch Constraint

You can’t move all or part of the Det from an NP.

*Whose did you kiss [ø husband]?

*Who did you kiss [ø’s husband]?

*How many did you buy [ø sausages]?

It’s many that you broke ø hearts.

The superhero’s costume ripped.

*I fixed the costume [which the superhero’s ø ripped].

You can fix these sentences with pied piping:

Whose husband did you kiss?

How many sausages did you buy?

I fixed the superhero’s costume which ripped.

Note that the constraint does not necessarily apply in Russian:

Сколько ты купил сосисок?

How.many 2s.nom buy-past.s.m sausage-p.gen

How many sausages did you buy?

Subjacency Condition

This one is due to Chomsky. A transformation operating at one level in the cycle (an S or an NP) can operate on clausemates of that level, or on its daughters, but not farther down.

A new book of jokes from linguists has been published.

→ A new book has been published of jokes from linguists.

→ *A new book of jokes has been published from linguists.

That it’s possible for black holes to dissipate is sad.

→ *That it’s possible is sad for black holes to dissipate.

An exception: Wh- Movement.

Center embedding limit

There’s a peculiar difficulty with embedded clauses of the form X [S] Y, that is, which divide up the clause they live in. One is fine:

The movie we saw yesterday is six hours long.

Two are understandable:

The movie the kids we know from church saw yesterday is six hours long.

Three start to sound like word salad:

The movie the kids the man we know from church introduced us to saw yesterday is six hours long.

Risto Hiltunen has spotted a 3-embedding example in a British statute:

A person [who, [when riding a cycle, [not being a motor vehicle,] on a road or other public place,] is unfit to ride through drink or drugs,] shall be guilty of an offence.

This is somehow easier than my movie example, and suggests that when Stephen Pinker (The Language Instinct, 1994) tries to make his point with

The rapidity that the motion that the wing that the hummingbird has has has is remarkable.

he’s stacking the deck.

No one knows why center-embedding becomes so difficult. It’s been suggested that it’s some kind of limit the brain puts on parsing. It seems a bit embarrassing for human brains, doesn’t it?

Function word repetition

English, at least, seems not to like having two instances of the same function word next to each other.

?Molly said [that [that the teachers were in on it] was obvious].

*It’s intolerable [for [for us to to smoke weed] to be illegal].

For the second sentence, note that neither for clause is inherently unacceptable, only the combination:

It’s intolerable for smoking weed to be illegal.

It’s intolerable that for us to smoke weed is illegal.

John Ross noted the same could be said of two -ing words in a row:

We began running.

We were beginning to run.

*We were beginning running.

(It’s fine, though, if the -ing is merely lexical: It’s been a depressing morning.)

Sometimes you can get away with it, though there’s a risk of confusion:

What this is is a book on syntax.[80]

What did you put on on Saturday?

These sound best if there’s a tiny pause between the repeated words; note that similar sentences without the repeat don’t need the pause:

What you’re reading is a book on syntax.

What did you put on last Saturday?

Note that colloquial French is quite happy to repeat clitics, at least:

Vous vous amusez pas?

you.subj you.obj amuse-2p not

You’re not having fun?

Non-transformations

Complements vs adjuncts

Complements are direct sisters of an X, forming an X', and generally only one is allowed. Examples: of complements of nouns (book of poetry); direct objects of verbs.

Adjuncts are sisters of an X', and can be stacked. Examples: other PPs following a noun (a book by Chomsky); adverbials and free modifiers of verbs (danced beautifully on her grave).

►For more see p. 82.

Preposition stranding

Whatever the glue we use to stick prepositions to their NPs, it isn’t very good.

Do you have any paper that hasn’t been written on?

What should I clean this off with?

That’s the river you can’t get to from here.

You can’t typically do this in other European languages; it’s presumably facilitated by the fact that our prepositions easily become  adverbs or particles (Bring it on!), so they’re used to being alone.

Negative polarity items

Some words or constructions are only allowed in negative sentences. These are negative polarity items (NPIs), underlined below.

I haven’t been to China yet.[81]

I can’t seem to focus today.

He didn’t lift a finger to help.

Kent hasn’t had a drink in years.

That didn’t work at all.

He couldn't get a word in edgewise.

I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole.

These generally don’t work if they appear before the negative:

*Anyone won’t be fooled by that trick.

?Lifting a finger to help is what Ernest won’t do.

*With a ten-foot pole, I wouldn’t touch that.

The negative can be in a higher clause:

I can’t claim I’ve been to China yet.

She didn’t expect it would work at all.

I didn’t think I could get a word in edgewise.

Some words are negative enough to allow NPIs:

I doubt he’ll lift a finger to help.

Any  is often listed as an NPI, but I’m not sure it is. Anyone can see that; I like any book by Neil Gaiman. For many people anymore is an NPI, but for others it’s fine: That place is too crowded anymore.

At the lexical level, words like unkempt, disheveled, uncouth, unruly, unrivaled, ruthless have no positive counterparts (though they did in earlier stages of the language).

Bach-Peters sentences

The girl who most wanted it got the job she deserved.

►For more see p. 121.

German verb placement

In German main clauses, finite verbs must be in second position (after either the subject, or an adverbial); infinitives and participles occur last:

Ich nehme dann morgen den Ring.

I take-1s then morning the-s.m.acc ring-acc

I’ll take the Ring tomorrow.

Ich werde den Ring nehmen.

I will-1s the-s.m.acc ring-acc take-inf

I will take the Ring.

Ich habe den Ring genommen.

I have-1s the-s.m.acc ring-acc take-past.part

I took the Ring.[82]

I place this here because it’s unclear whether it’s a movement at all, and if so in what direction!

In subclauses, even a finite verb appears at the end:

Wer seine Finanzen im Griff hat, ist einfach entspanner.

Who their-p.f.acc finance-pl.acc in order have-3s / is-3s simple relaxed-more

Whoever has their finances in order is simply more relaxed.

Word-counting Insertion

Movement and placement rules usually operate at the constituent level. In Croatian, however, the preferred location of the copula je is after the first word of the sentence, even if this breaks up a constituent:

Naša je učionica udobna.

our-s.f.nom is classroom-s.nom comfortable-s.f.nom

Our classroom is comfortable.

How do we even diagram this? Arguably the best solution is a very unconventional crossing of lines:

What is the alternative? To add a V node to the NP? Which inserts at various places according to the number of terminals it contains? Note that Naša je učionica is not a constituent— if you try to move it, the je doesn't come with!

Light verbs

Often we have a V-O combination where either the verb or the noun is semantically empty, and the combo can be replaced by a single verb:

He made a suggestion = He suggested

She gave him a pinch = She pinched him

We took a walk = We walked

I dreamed a dream about her = I dreamed about her

He put the blame on his boss = He blamed his boss

Where the O is derivationally related to the V (He died a good death), it’s called a cognate object.

Perhaps the same phenomenon is seen in Mandarin VO compounds, e.g. kàn-shū ‘look at books’ = ‘read’, shuō-huà ‘speak-words’ = ‘speak’.

Adjective complements

Adjectives don’t merely modify nouns; they can have their own object PPs (angry at the world) or even Ss (ready to buy a drink).

In English, we can’t use adjectives with complements as noun modifiers:

We’re looking for a candidate who’s good at math.

*We’re looking for a good at math candidate.

But in German we can:

Der mit seinem Beruf unzufriedene Mitarbeiter ist fast bereit, zu kündigen.

the.s.m.nom with refl.s.m.dat profession unhappy employee-s.nom is almost ready.s.m.nom / to quit

*The unhappy with his profession employee is almost ready to quit.

Die nach Mäusen hungrige Katze läuft im Garten herum.

the.s.f.nom for mouse-pl hungry cat-s.nom run-3s in garden around

*The hungry for mice cat is running around in the garden.

Adverbs normally can’t take complements, even if their adjectives do: angry at the world, *angrily at the world. But there are a few exceptions: fortunately for us.

Failures of conjunction

Though we place articles, demonstratives, quantifiers, and possessives into the same Det category, we mostly can’t conjoin them:

*the and a brontosaurus

*a and some blackbirds

*most or my friends

Fillmore suggests that nouns representing different semantic roles can’t be conjoined:

Morgan hacked the Party offices with a virus.

?Morgan and a virus hacked the Party offices.

John Ross pointed out that analytic or synthetic comparatives of the same word can be conjoined, but not so much a mixture:

She got older and older.

She got more and more old.

?She got older and more old.

He also observes that questions can be conjoined with questions, statements with statements, and imperatives with imperatives, but conjunctions of different sentence types usually doesn’t work:

What did the President know and when did he know it?

Sit in the chair and just push away the dog.

*What are you reading and I read that too.

*Turn down the lights and why is chess so hard?

It does work sometimes, but seems to require very close relevance. Compare:

Take your time and I’ll deal with any phone calls.

*Take your time and the boss still hasn’t weighed in on the lawsuit.

I closed the curtains, so why don’t we get comfortable?

?I closed the curtains, so when is your wife coming home?

Failures of disjunction

A performative sentence is one that actually effects some change in status. The strongest form has large effects in the world: e.g. I sentence you to death or We admit you to the Order of the Illuminati. At a lesser level, a promise is a larger thing than a mere statement— it commits the speaker to doing something.

McCawley has observed that performatives can be conjoined, but not disjoined:

I accept your offer and I promise to send you the funds.

*I accept your offer or I promise to send you the funds.

John Ross points out that this also applies to vocatives:

Beretos and Oluon, your horses are ready.

*Beretos or Oluon, your horses are ready.

Or does it?

Maggie or Hopey, pick up the phone!

Non-standard sentence types

Quite a few utterances don’t fit the NP VP model:

Pt NP

Off with his head!

AdjP Topic

Dumb as a bag of hammers, that boy.

Salutation

Howdy, doc.

NP and S

One more step and I’ll shoot.

Desired state

Pencils down!

Adv PP

Again with the misinformation!

Neg NP

No more games.

See also “Some weird deletions” above, p. 309.

We could call these special types of S, but unlike regular sentences, they can’t be embedded, except in direct quotations:

*The queen ordered that off with his head.

*It’s sad that dumb as a bag of hammers, that boy.

This is true of performatives, too: though you can say Tomorrow I’ll pronounce you man and wife, the performative status is lost.

Can they be derived from regular sentences? You can try, but deletions are harder to justify if you can’t coax out the supposed deleted material in any way. (E.g. it’s easier to believe that Heal yourself! has a hidden you precisely because you can still say You heal yourself!)

Idioms

An idiom is just a construction that contains lexical elements, or isn’t generalizable enough to be a prototypical transformation.

Idioms aren’t simply lawless; in fact they generally have special constraints of their own. For instance, the half the X idiom:

Estelle is(n’t) (half) the musician (that) her mother was.

Like many (but not all) idioms, this one doesn’t stretch normal surface structure— in form, it’s an NP with attached relative clause.

But with normal relative clauses, you can front the whole NP, or pronominalize it, or omit the relative, and these don’t work with this idiom:

Estelle isn’t the musician we are seeking.

→ The musician we are seeking isn’t Estelle.

→ Estelle isn’t the musician.

→ Estelle isn’t who we are seeking.

→ Estelle isn’t the one we are seeking.

Estelle isn’t half the musician her mother was.

→ *Half the musician her mother was isn’t Estelle.

→ *Estelle isn’t half the musician.

→ *Estelle isn’t half who her mother was.

→ ?Estelle isn’t half the one her mother was.

The idiom simply disappears if the subclause uses another verb:

*Estelle isn’t half the musician that smoked all my weed.

But other transformations are fine:

Estelle isn’t half the musician her mother was, is she?

Estelle isn’t half the musician that Yoko is, and neither is Beatrix.

If you’re working on a conlang, the take-away is not that you should have this particular idiom. It’s that

- You should have some idioms

- They shouldn’t all be entirely fixed lexically (cf. kick the bucket)

- You should think about what valid variations it can have

- And what variations it can’t have

Note that some idioms have fixed forms (kick the bucket); others are highly productive and modifiable, like Goldberg’s way construction (p. 241). And many are somewhere in the middle, like thanks a lot. We can modify this one a little (thanks much, thanks a million), but even close imitations of the valid examples fail (*thanks a thousand).

Bibliography

David Adger, Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach (2003). A clear exposition of Minimalism, not afraid to show some of the unsolved problems and paths not taken.

David J Allerton, “Valency Grammar”, in Keith Brown, ed., Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006). Available online. All about valence from Tesnières onwards.

Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, Grammaire générale et raisonnée de Port-Royal (1660). Chomsky has claimed this as an inspiration. It’s not really syntax, and it’s way too Greco-Latin-influenced, but it’s interesting to see how 17th century rationalists approached language.

Julia Bacskai-Atkari, “The syntax of comparative constructions: operators, ellipsis phenomena and functional left peripheries”, Universität Potsdam thesis (2014). A literature review and a Minimalist analysis of comparatives, at researchgate.net.

Joan Bresnan, “Syntax of the Comparative Clause Construction in English”, Linguistic Inquiry IV 3 (1973). An early overview of the comparative.

Andrew Carnie, Syntax: A generative Introduction (3rd ed., 2013). A clear step by step introduction to the X-Bar / Parameters stage of Chomskyan GG.

Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (1957). The book that turned a generation to, um, generation. It’s short, so why not pick it up and get some syntactic history?

, Review of Skinner: Verbal Behavior. In Language, 35:1 (1959). You know how you never hear about Skinner’s theory of language any more? This is why.

, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965). The next major book; introduced features and referential indices; probably not the second book you should read.

, “Remarks on Nominalization” (1970), reprinted in Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972). Introduced X' theory and rejected Nominalization as a transformation.

, Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures (1988). It turns out Chomsky can write in an accessible way! This is perhaps the best intro to his ideas from the man himself. It also draws its examples not from English but from Spanish.

, The Minimalist Program (1995). Chomsky at his most impenetrable.

Bernard Comrie, Language Universals and Linguistic Typology (1981, 1989). One direction you can go in syntax is to investigate morphosyntax around the world, and this is a classic overview.

V.J. Cook, Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (1988). A short overview from the X' era. A little too much emphasis on the worst ideas— the language organ, parameters.

Peter W. Culicover & Ray Jackendoff, Simpler Syntax (2005). A middle ground between Chomskyan and relational grammars. Argues for a pared-down syntax without movement, with a robust semantic component. Like Ross 1986, it’s full of thought-provoking syntactic facts.

Matthew Dryer and Martin Haspelmath, eds., The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (2013). A.k.a. WALS. Enormously useful database of language behaviors for over a thousand languages.

Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson, “The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science”, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (5), 2009. A withering attack on Chomskyan universals, a little less withering for Greenberg’s.

http://www.princeton.edu/~adele/Princeton_Construction_Site/pcs.sites2/Evans-Levinson09_preprint.pdf

Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool (2012). Famous for his description of Pirahã, Everett makes a case against innatism and for a Sapirian idea of language as all culture.

Charles Fillmore, “The case for case” (1968), in Form and Meaning in Language (2003). Foundational to many forms of relational grammar; all forms of GG now include some form of semantic roles.

Dirk Geeraerts, ed., Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings (2006). A good survey of where Lakoff-style cognitive linguistics has ended up.

Adele E. Goldberg, Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure (1995). For more on this approach to syntax/semantics.

Georgia M. Green and Jerry L. Morgan, A Guide to the Study of Syntax (1979). A nice catalog of phenomena, plus notes on how to do syntax.

Scott Grimm, “Case Attraction in Ancient Greek”, from Logic, Language, and Computation (conference volume, 2005). For both case attraction examples and discussion.

François Grosjean, Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism (1982). A fascinating tour of bilingualism, relevant here for its many demonstrations of how hard it is for children to learn languages.

Heidi Harley, “External arguments and the Mirror Principle: On the distinctness of Voice and v”, Linua 125 (2013). Argues for a three-node structure for VP within Minimalism.

Richard Hudson, “Arguments against the universality of D and determiners” (2018), available at http://dickhudson.com.

Ray Jackendoff, Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature (1994). An argument for the language organ, with a good deal of interest in how the brain works. Extra kudos for covering Sign as well as spoken language.

Samuel Jay Keyser and Paul Postal, Beginning English Grammar (1976). Terrible title; good though plodding intro to early GG.

Richard Larson, “On the Double Object Construction”, in Linguistic Inquiry 19:3 (1988). Origin of the double-verb interpretation of ditransitives.

George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (1987). The focus is on categories and words, but there’s syntax done on the way. A classic of cognitive linguistics.

John Lawler, “James D. McCawley”— obituary in Language 79 (Sept 2003). Available at Lawler’s web page. A charming memoir of one of the wisest and most erudite of syntacticians, with some pointed advice on how to practice syntax.

James D. McCawley, Everything that Linguists have Always Wanted to Know about Logic (but were ashamed to ask) (1981). Logicians have done quite a bit of semantic analysis of a subsection of language— mainly conjunctions, negatives, and quantifiers— and McCawley considers what linguists can learn from this and what they can improve on.

, Thirty Million Theories of Grammar (1982). Mostly a defense of generative semantics; contains a detailed rebuttal to Chomsky 1970.

, The Syntactic Phenomena of English (1988). Excellent glimpse into what the generative semanticists were doing, and a corrective to too much Chomsky. Covers rather more syntax than the average intro textbook. Careful to consider alternatives and to argue for its proposals.

Shan Millan, Damien Loch (2013). Poses the question, what if your neighbor had a portal to another world, only he was an asshole? In French; English speakers will have to wait a bit.

Shin Oshima and Katsunori Kotani, “A Minimalist analysis of coordination”, English Linguistics 25:2 (2008).

David M. Perlmutter, “Impersonal Passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis”, in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 38 (1978). Source of the Dutch data on passivized intransitives.

Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and other irreverent essays on the study of language (1991). Once you’ve read a few of the works in this bibliography you’ll be able to understand the jokes in this book. Pullum combines an absurdist sense of humor with serious pedantry in a way that appeals to me and perhaps to you.

Quang Phuc Dong, “English sentences without overt grammatical subject”, in Studies Out in Left Field (1971). A not very hidden excursus from McCawley; points out the considerable syntactic weirdness of sentences like Damn these irregular verbs! Easily found online.

John Robert Ross, Infinite Syntax! (1986). Re-edition of MIT thesis Constraints on variables in syntax (1967). The one book by a GS guy that Chomskyans still find indispensable. Also a treasure trove of Neat Facts.

, “A preliminary, but fattened, list of transformations” (2012) Can be found at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/haj/

Geoffrey Sampson, Educating Eve: The ‘Language Instinct’ Debate (1997). A thorough critique of Chomsky’s claims about innate knowledge (surely the weakest bits of his theory).

, Empirical Linguistics (2001). A critique of GG’s reliance on intuition, and advocacy of an alternative: large corpus-based investigations.

Edward Sapir, Language: An introduction to the study of speech (1921). What’s remarkable about this survey of linguistics is how little would have to be modified almost a century later. In many areas we know more, but little of what Sapir says is wrong.

Paul Schachter, “Tagalog”, in Bernard Comrie, ed., The World’s Major Languages (1990). For the Tagalog examples.

David Singleton, Language Acquisition: The Age Factor (1989). A literature review on how children and adults learn language. It doesn’t look good for the “children learn free and fast” position.

John R. Taylor, Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory (2nd ed., 1995). A shorter intro to prototypes than Lakoff 1987; most valuable for applying prototype theory to syntactic and phonological categories.

Michael Tomasello, Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition (2003). We know quite a lot now about language acquisition, and it’s quietly devastating for some Chomskyan notions on parameters and rule acquisition.

Robert D. Van Valin Jr., An Introduction to Syntax (2001). The intro book to read if you’d like to compare syntactic theories, and also consider examples from around the world.

Jean Roger Vergnaud, French Relative Clauses (1974), PhD thesis, MIT.

Index

A

Adger, David, 176, 177, 180, 181, 182, 185, 189, 331

adjective complements, 85, 326

adjectives, 92, 167, 178

Adjoin, 186

adjunct, 82, 85, 109, 111, 185, 194, 322

Adverb → Adjective, 301

Adverbial fronting, 298

adverbs, 77

Agree, 180

agreement, 10, 38, 44, 55, 87, 96, 154, 183, 184, 194, 222, 232, 236, 247, 259, 311

Algonquian, 213

Allerton, David, 229

ambiguity, 62, 124, 216, 271

Amele, 163

anaphors, 60, 69, 84, 122, 292

Animacy, 213

antecedent, 80, 117

any, 125, 324

applicatives, 229

appositives, 275

arguments, 223

Armenian, 302

As + Verb Deletion, 305

Aspects, 96, 141, 153, 195, 209, 222, 224, 331

As-Postposing, 309

As-Preposing, 301

asterisk, 12

avalent verbs, 226

B

Bach, Emmon, 121

Bach-Peters sentences, 121

Backus-Naur Form, 37

Bacskai-Atkari, Julia, 160, 331

Basque, 255

benefactive, 16, 190

Bowerman, Melissa, 207, 209

Bresnan, Joan, 160, 161, 331

Broca’s area, 206

C

Caesar, Julius, 260

Carnie, Andrew, 85, 94, 106, 125, 201, 205, 331

case attraction, 147

causatives, 187, 190, 245, 266, 291

c-command, 118, 157, 187

center embedding, 320

checking, 177

Chicheŵa, 245

Choi, Soonja, 209

chômeur, 238

Chomsky Hierarchy, 27

Chomsky, Noam. See just about everywhere

Chukchansi Yokuts, 317

clausemates, 112

clefting, 8, 58, 61, 68, 72, 229, 269, 311, 312

cognate object, 229, 325

cognitive linguistics, 239

collaborative sentences, 169

comitative, 166

comment. See topic

Comp, 91

Comparative Conditional, 162

Comparative Deletion, 138, 158, 160, 307

comparatives, 157, 268

competence, 196, 240

complement, 82, 84, 85, 87, 111, 149, 185, 322

Complex NP Constraint, 318

Comp-Placement, 221, 294

Comrie, Bernard, 151, 205, 225, 256, 262, 332, 335

conceptual structure, 247

conjunction, 117, 163, 292

conjunction failures, 326

Conjunction Reduction, 292

constituent, 64

Constituent Dislocation, 58, 117, 313, 318

constraints, 81, 96, 97, 176, 193, 240, 317, 318

Construction Grammar, 25, 241

constructions, 24

context-free grammars, 29, 216

context-sensitive grammars, 27

conversation analysis, 172

Coordinate Structure Constraint, 81, 164, 196, 317

coordination, 66

Copula Switch, 312

coverbs, 78, 163, 284

critical period, 202

Croatian, 325

Culicover, Peter. See Jackendoff

cycle, 10, 119, 136, 137, 319, 321

D

Dative Movement, 173, 221, 225, 238, 295

Dennett, Daniel, 198

dependencies, 235

derivations

defined, 42

determiner, 74, 91, 126, 155, 236, 270

Determiner, 178

DetP, 93, 178

dialects, 12

disjunction, 327

ditransitives, 186, 243

Do-support, 49, 51, 52, 59, 71, 90, 105, 106, 174, 185, 194, 267, 268, 279, 290, 299, 313

downward movement, 103, 302

Duala, 162

dummy it, 58, 61, 62, 107, 226, 311

Dutch, 225, 227

E

Echo questions, 293

elaborator, 229

English verbs, 45, 69, 97, 180

Equi, 119, 136, 137, 138, 220, 303

ergatives, 227, 232

Exclamatory Wh-, 299

Extraposition, 61, 62, 151, 297

Extraposition from NP, 57

F

Farsi, 152

features, 95, 177

Fijian, 256

Fillmore, Charles, 136, 222, 223, 224, 225, 230, 241, 246, 271, 326, 332

finite-state algorithm, 32

focus, 230

free word order, 269

French, 14, 38, 55, 58, 87, 89, 98, 101, 116, 117, 120, 194, 226, 228, 238, 255, 266, 268, 269, 279, 282, 285, 291, 296, 311, 313, 315, 322, 334, 336

function word repetition, 321

fuzzy categories, 79

G

Gapping, 76, 170, 267, 306

garden path sentence, 273

Gbaya, 78

generative semantics, 85, 182, 209, 223, 245, 334

German, 14, 92, 143, 144, 145, 146, 152, 171, 226, 228, 254, 255, 256, 268, 299, 324, 326

ggg, 10, 26, 30, 41, 46, 54, 55, 172, 215, 265

Gibbon, Edward, 317

Godwin, Tom, 80

Goldberg, Adele, 241

grammar

definition, 17

grammatical feature, 247

Greek, 147

Greenberg, Arnold, 256

Grosjean, François, 202, 333

gtg, 10, 172, 174, 175, 265

H

Halle, Morris, 95

Harley, Heidi, 166, 190, 333

head-final, 205, 262

head-initial, 262

head-last, 277

head-marking, 236, 277

heads, 74

Heavy-NP backing, 300

Hebrew, 14, 132, 255

Hiaki, 190

Hiltunen, Risto, 321

Hindī, 147, 169, 200, 267, 277, 280, 283, 293

Hon, Dan, 22

Horace, 259

Hudson, Richard, 235

humongous lookup table, 18

I

Icelandic, 282

ideophones, 78

idiom, 328

idioms, 229

if only, 276

Imperative You Deletion, 59, 221, 307

imperatives, 113, 233

infinity, 18

inflection, 75

innatism, 201

Intensifier climbing, 298

interpretable, 180

interpretivism, 209

intuition pump, 198

Italian, 67, 92, 255

It-Insertion, 107, 297, 311, 312

J

Jackendoff, Ray, 115, 131, 205, 206, 247, 251, 252, 332, 333

Japanese, 14, 93, 169, 232

Jiwarli, 257, 259

Jourdain, M., 4

Judson, Olivia, 305

K

Kayardild, 19, 256

KE family, 207

Kellogg, Brainerd, 193

kernel, 45

Keyser & Postal, 106, 166, 167, 333

Kleppmann, Martin, 39

Klima, Edward, 125

Korean, 209, 251

L

Lakoff, George, 210, 213, 214, 241, 246, 333, 335

Lakoff, Robin, 150

language organ, 199

Larson, Richard, 187

Lasnik, Howard, 123

Latin, 11, 58, 117, 148, 167, 200, 214, 224, 226, 228, 233, 255, 259, 260, 261, 268, 282, 331

Left Branch Constraint, 319

Levi, Judith N., 13

Levinson, Stephen, 147, 207, 208, 209, 257, 332

Light verbs, 325

like, 67

linear bounded automaton, 33

logical form, 247

Lorenz, Konrad, 197, 202

Luiseño, 236

M

Malagasy, 233, 312

Mandarin, 5, 57, 78, 130, 143, 145, 146, 163, 167, 168, 264, 268, 269, 274, 277, 282, 284, 298, 307, 315, 325

markedness hierarchy, 148

Markov text generator, 19

mass nouns, 135, 254, 282

mathematical expressions, 30, 76, 282

McCawley, James, 12, 92, 94, 98, 99, 101, 109, 127, 128, 129, 154, 156, 160, 162, 166, 182, 186, 210, 211, 213, 239, 294, 327, 334, 335

on theory, 9

measure words, 78, 282

Mentalese, 209, 252

Merchant, Jason, 305

Merge, 176

metalinguistic comparatives, 162

metaphors, 244

metonymy, 115

mg, 193

Millan, Shan, 13, 285, 334

Minimalism, 9, 10, 11, 86, 97, 138, 154, 176, 182, 183, 192, 210, 211, 212, 215, 222, 245, 247, 265, 302, 331

Mohawk, 258

Molière, 4, 57

morphophonemic rules, 44

morphosyntactic alignment, 226, 263

morphosyntax, 6

Move, 192

Mundari, 78

N

Negation, 49, 100, 289

Negative polarity items, 323

Neg-Hopping, 56, 129, 130, 132, 297

NegP, 101

neural network, 22

niches, 67

Nichols, Johanna, 236

Nishnaabemwin, 259

nominalization, 84, 113, 138, 140, 165, 295, 308

nonrestrictive, 150, 155

non-standard sentence types, 328

nonterminal, 25, 42

Not Contraction, 294

noun classes, 236

Noun phrases, 73

noun-noun compounds, 77

NP-Movement, 107

numbers, 92, 281

Nuuchahnulth, 74

O

Object Deletion, 303

object permanence, 207

Old Chinese, 284

Old English, 23

Orwell, George, 134

own, 119

P

Pāṇini, 222

parentheticals, 314

parsing, 215

part of speech, 74

Particle Movement, 296

particles, 77

Passive, 52, 60, 100, 109, 111, 212, 220, 229, 237, 291

past tense, 253

perfect, 98, 282

performance, 142, 195, 196, 240

performatives, 328

Perlmutter, David, 149, 237, 316, 334

Peters, Stanley, 121

phases, 138

phrase, 78

phrase structure rules, 25, 42

Piaget, Jean, 207

picture nouns, 114

pied piping, 150

Pinker, Steven, 201, 207, 321

Pirahã, 256, 257, 332

Pivoting, 315

polysynthesis, 258

Portuguese, 170

positionals, 78

possessive phrases, 93

Postal, Paul, 237, See also Keyser & Postal

post-cyclic, 137

postpositions, 277

Poverty of stimulus, 202

power of a grammar, 27

pragmatics, 80, 213

predicate calculus, 99, 210, 247, 251

predicatives, 229

preposition, 75

Preposition stranding, 322

Preposition Zapping, 309

principles and parameters, 200

PRO, 120

Pro-drop, 200

programming language, 37, 173

projection, 178

Pronominalization, 119, 292

pronouns, personal, 80, 116

prototypes, 243, 252

Pseudo-clefting, 312

Pullum, Geoffrey, 149, 203, 227, 334

pushdown automaton, 33

Pythagorean theorem, 192

Q

Q, 103

Quantifier Hopping, 132, 182, 297

Quantifiers, 122, 123, 130, 131, 135, 182

Quechua, 163, 188, 226, 232, 236, 266, 277

Question Inversion, 71, 103, 105, 173, 202, 204, 246, 289, 290, 295

questions, 51

Quine, Willard, 207

Quotation Inversion, 57, 299

R

radial category, 252

Raising, 87, 99, 106, 120, 127, 136, 267, 314, 315

random choice, 19

Reed, Alonzo, 193

reflexives, 110, 136, 138, 233, 281, 293

regular grammars, 30

Relational Grammar, 237

relational grammars (general), 222

Relative clauses. See Relativization

Relativization, 81, 143, 153, 155, 278, 316

repair, 171

reported speech, 278

resultatives, 304

reverse attraction, 148

Riau Malay, 256

Right-Node Raising, 12, 72, 307, 316

Romance Clitic Movement, 296

Ross, John, 12, 67, 81, 115, 119, 166, 170, 171, 192, 210, 259, 299, 300, 302, 305, 317, 318, 321, 326, 327, 332, 335

Russian, 79, 126, 147, 169, 225, 226, 283, 319

S

Sampson, Geoffrey, 203, 205, 207, 335

Sanskrit, 4, 8, 79, 169, 195, 281

Sapir, Edward, 196, 198, 205, 335

scope, 123, 125, 131, 171, 187, 201, 247, 268

Scottish English, 48

Scrambling, 57, 300

selectional restrictions, 54

semantic role, 223, 247

semantic roles, 295

Sentence Lifting, 316

Sentential Subject Constraint, 318

Shieber, Stuart, 39

Simpler Syntax, 247

Singleton, David, 202, 335

Skinner, B.F., 197

sloppy identity, 116, 293

Sluice-Stranding, 304

Sluicing, 304

small clause, 304

Spanish, 87, 116, 117, 126, 133, 134, 148, 154, 214, 226, 255, 271, 272, 282, 296, 311, 332

Spellout, 184

split-S languages, 227

stack, 217

statistical universals, 261

stigmata, 12

strata, 237

stress, 52, 268, 310

strings, 17

Stripping, 306

Subjacency Condition, 319

subject, 230

Subject and Object Control, 138, 314

Subject-to-Object Raising, 114

Subject-to-Subject Raising, 107

Subordinating preposition deletion, 308

subordinator, 15, 61, 105, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 151, 278

subscripts, 53, 111, 122, 156, 249

Swahili, 236, 258

Swedish, 233

Swiss German, 39

syntactic change, 282

Syntactic Structures, 41, 69, 73, 91, 95, 100, 102, 173, 184, 192, 195, 199, 212, 295, 331

syntactic trees, 43, 64

definition, 34

syntactocentrism, 247

T

T, 88, 103, 179, 279, 297

T → Comp Movement, 104

tag questions, 113, 162, 183, 313

Tagalog, 150, 233, 239, 335

tagmemics, 264

Taylor, John, 253, 335

Tense Hopping, 138, 279, 290

terminals, 25, 64

ternary trees, 165

That-deletion, 308

there, 232

There-insertion, 183, 311

theta role, 96, 223

Tinbergen, Niko, 197

To-Deletion, 308

Tomasello, Michael, 23, 25, 203, 205, 208, 246, 335

topic, 231

Topicalization, 56, 80, 212, 268, 269, 296, 301, 314

Tough-movement, 63, 315

trace, 104, 182

transformational grammar, 37

transformations

avoiding, 250

definition, 37

in conlangs, 277

problems, 245

trigger system, 233

Truncation, 268, 307

Tufte, Edward, 85

Turing machine, 33

Tzeltal, 78, 208

U

um, 68

unaccusative, 227

unergative, 227

ungrammatical, 17

uniformity, 247

universals, 255

Uzbek, 163

V

V → T movement, 103

valence, 116, 226, 270

Van Valin, Robert, 335

verb phrases, 72

verbal anaphors, 60, 187, 292

verbal complex. See English verbs

verb-object compounds, 78, 325

Verdurian, 264, 275, 276, 281

Vergnaud, Jean Roger, 153, 154, 155, 336

vicarious quantification, 126

Voice node, 191

VP Deletion, 89, 122, 125, 137, 305

VP-Preposing, 297

W

WALS, 256, 261, 262, 267, 332

Warshawsky, Florence, 114

way construction, 241

web toys, 10, 26, 265

Wernicke’s area, 206

Wh- Movement, 59, 81, 289, 302

What, me worry?, 310

Wh-is Deletion, 303

Whitney, William Dwight, 4

Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 197, 256

With-absolute, 294

Word Grammar, 235, 249, 258, 260

Word-counting Insertion, 325

X

X-bar theory, 82, 142, 247, 258

Y

Yokuts, 317

Yumbri, 256

[1] Quoted in Lawler 2003.

[2] As you’ll see, I like amusing or silly sample sentences. This is actually an old syntactic tradition! John Ross and James McCawley were masters of this art.

[3] https://medium.com/@hondanhon/i-trained-an-a-i-to-ask-questions-baad02a9573f

[4] In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky does allow rules to be marked obligatory or optional, and also allows an ordering to be enforced.

[5] Stuart Shieber, “Evidence against the context-freeness of natural language”, Linguistics and Philosophy 8 (1985). Google it.

[6] I’ve changed some of Chomsky’s symbols to match his later practice. E.g. he used T for Det(erminer), C for Tense. See SS, p. 111.

[7] SS states transformations in terms of raw strings, so it is not always clear how to label the resulting trees. I tried to change as little as possible.

[8] SS, p. 39. This differs from the rules given earlier in that there’s a rule for Tense. In the final rules this is a transformation, though the content is the same.

[9] My ggg rules insert by for passives; we’ll get to that below.

[10] SS even maintains (p. 67) that be is not a V in sentences like John is my friend. These come from a rule VP → be Predicate which he neglects to put in his list of phrase structure rules.

[11] Don’t take the X itself too seriously. Think of it as a pronoun, semantically equivalent to someone.

[12] Unless you’re asking directly about the words of the sentence. E.g. the reader of is a valid answer to What are the second, third, and fourth words of that sample sentence?

[13] This is a surface structure, of course. SS is not clear on how to label nodes affected by transformations, but this keeps close to the production rules.

[14] More precisely, if they do, it’s because the other verb was deleted. Can he dance? —He can.

[15] (Adj+) is shorthand for adding any number of Adj nodes. It’s rarely used in syntax; we’ll see why just below.

[16] We can say Silly me!  Or That’s not the real me. Can you find a good rule for when this works and doesn’t work?

[17] When Chomsky introduced the notation, he wrote X̄, but that’s fiddly to type, and what do you do when you need an Adj-bar?

[18] I’m tempted to mark this sentence ?. But it becomes far more acceptable if Laura and Selina are stressed.

[19] These things do stack in other languages— cf. Italian la mia casa ‘the my house’.

[20] The first linguist to propose a DetP was Richard Hudson; but see Hudson 2018 for arguments that determiners are pronouns, and pronouns are nouns, so that arguments are NPs after all. Chomsky 1995 (p. 322) suggests that arguments are DetPs if they are “definite or specific”, otherwise NPs!

[21] In French we have (ne) …pas du tout, where du tout can only apply to negatives. We do have absolutely not, but we can use absolutely with positive VPs: I absolutely must see Aqua in concert.

[22] If you accept the idea of DetPs, then these movements apply to DetPs, not NPs.

[23] Described by Florence Warshawsky in 1965. Other examples: article, book, claim, letter, report, statement, story, tale.

[24] There are weird limits to the identity— e.g. we might accept Ringo tripped and stumbled into himself (the person hit the statue), but not *Ringo toppled over and crushed himself (the statue hit the person). But perhaps here we’re not so much exploring how English works, as seeing how English speakers play with an unusual situation.

[25] See Constituent Dislocation in the bestiary, p. 259.

[26] For predicates that can only be 100% right or wrong, at least. Compare Sally was sick and Sally wasn’t sick, which is a way of saying Sally was sort of sick.

[27] We can express this thought, but NOT(some) renders as no. Thus No cheeses are smelly. As expected, this produces a contradiction combined with the original sentence: Some cheeses are smelly and no cheeses are smelly.

[28] The example is from Stephen Straight.

[29] See p. 132 for reasons why because is a preposition. I’ve boldly labeled not because he likes the priest as a PP on the principle that not X is the same sort of constituent as X— as unfriendly is an adjective and no limits is an NP.

[30] To me, at least, Damien didn’t greet Lynn kindly implicates but does not imply that Damien greeted her; it can be continued …he simply ignored her.

[31] Rak can also be placed after a stressed element, with the same meaning.

[32] The units can’t be too small, though— there are no atoms or even molecules of tapioca.

[33] The cycle was first described by Charles Fillmore in 1963.

[34] Well, it’s identical except for the genitive, and the pl.dat., which have special forms. If a conlanger did this, it would seem clumsy.

[35] Example from Evans & Levinson 2009.

[36] Example from Leo Connolly.

[37] They’re fine in predicate position. Directly modifying a noun, only the -er form without a comparand is OK: the hairier writers; *the more hairy writers; *the hairier than Neil writers. If there’s no -er form, the second option is OK: the more difficult writers.

[38] But see p. 259.

[39] That is, this fails if we mean X, but Y, but Z. It’s acceptable if we interpret it as X, and Y, but Z.

[40] Cf. Keyser and Postal 1976, McCawley 1988 (p. 287), and Oshima & Kotani 2008, the last being a Minimalist account. Ross 1967 uses the ternary tree.

[41] The idea goes back to Chomsky 1970, but Chomsky and others still put N (etc.) into their diagrams. I’ve continued to do so here, as I think it’s a notational issue. But Adger does draw trees without N, V, etc.

[42] Syntacticians don’t say “down the tree”; they say the T node c-commands the V node. Also note: Agree is Adger’s term, not Chomsky’s.

[43] The point where the tree is sent to the phonetic component is called Spellout. Chomsky suggests that rules can apply to the tree after this, before being sent to the semantic component. This allows for a somewhat barmy idea: changes can be made so that different languages share a universal semantics. The least I can say is that this idea requires a lot of untestable assumptions.

[44] Language (1921), p. 4.

[45] At this time Chomsky was 31, Skinner was 55, so this was a somewhat cheeky takedown of a respected elder.

[46] Chomsky 1959, p. 43. A modern cognitive linguist would find little to disagree with in this remark.

[47] Chomsky 1959, p. 57.

[48] Chomsky 1959, p. 54, fn. 45. He here cites a paper by C.E. Osgood.

[49] Chomsky 1988, p. 4.

[50] Chomsky 1988, p. 190f. Do you think he’d accept, say, “generative semantics” as an innate concept? For that matter, did Stone Age humans have an innate concept “book”? If not, how do we tell which concepts are innate? If you have my Conlanger’s Lexipedia, look through it noting concepts that are divided up differently in different languages. That should cure the lexical innatist in you.

[51] Carnie 2013, p. 188. Cf. my discussion of English complements, p. 72.

[52] Jackendoff 1994 has a useful overview; the examples below are from his book.

[53] Steven Pinker (The Language Instict (1994), p. 48) touts the KE family, of Britain, as such a case; but see Sampson 1997, p. 94, for additional data that casts doubt on the KE family’s problems even being purely linguistic.

[54] To be fair, he didn’t argue for this based on the order in logic; he suggested it made transformations simpler. He retracted the idea later, believing that arguments were unordered in deep structure. Curiously, this idea is echoed in Minimalism: Chomsky 1995 (p. 307) suggests that elements are not ordered in the semantic component.

[55] Well, true-ish. See the chapter on relational grammars.

[56] One problem with deriving these syntactically is that anaphors don’t work with the underlying material. Compare:

Cruella tried to cause the dog to eat, but it had done so already.

*Cruella tried to feed the dog, but it had done so already.
The man playing the guitar bought it in Toledo.

*The guitarist bought it in Toledo.

[57] An exercise: what is the modifier to go? Can you relate it to a normal sentence? Is this a syntactic process, or a historical one?

[58] But the great-grandfather is the Indian grammarian Pāṇini, who had separate terms for cases (e.g. dvitīyā ‘accusative’) and semantic roles (e.g. karman ‘target’) over two thousand years ago.

[59] As the title of the paper indicates, his term at the time was case, but he later used semantic role. The Chomskyan theta role is roughly equivalent.

[60] Both terms are due to Geoffrey Pullum.

[61] You can say She danced herself to death. But reflexives are transitives, and transitives can take resultatives (She shot him dead).

[62] All quotations from C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

[63] Puka pikanti is a dish from Ayacucho, made from potatoes, onions, tomato, peanuts, hot peppers, and pork. For spices: lots of cumin.

[64] The Tagalog sentences are from Van Valin 2001 and Schachter 1990.

[65] Languages can be mixed; e.g. English verbs take plurality and number from the subject, a form of head-marking. Quechua possessives mark both items: maqtapa taytan ‘the boy’s father’ has locative -pa on ‘boy’ and 3s -n on ‘father’.

[66] The category V+pass seems kludgy, with all the work it delegates to the phonological component, but the details could certainly be worked out; after all SS solved this problem half a century ago.

[67] Data from Jeri Jaeger & John Ohala, “On the structure of phonetic categories”, Berkeley Linguistics Society proceedings, 1984.

[68] Greenberg was an indefatigable re-classifier, who organized Indo-Pacific, then the language of Africa, then those of the Americas. The latter has not been well received by other scholars, but his work on language universals has held up much better.

[69] The facts here are taken from Evans & Levinson 2009, a bracing dash of cold water thrown at the idea of linguistic universals.

[70] This is the opposite conclusion from Comrie 1989 (p. 96). But he was looking at Greenberg’s 30 languages, not the 1000-odd from WALS.

[71] These two points are from Sarah Grey Thomason & Terrence Kaufman, Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (1988).

[72] Helpful hint: the won is the currency of South Korea.

[73] If you can’t figure this out: a stag do is British for an all-male party. There’s also metonymy going on— stag do → stag do attendees— plus the British use of plural verbs with nouns referring to a collective of people.

[74] Not as plaintive as it sounds: like is used here for press ‘like’ on.

[75] This and the next sentence are more examples of the British use of plural verbs with collectives. (England here means an English team.)

[76] Maybe you need to be baked on something to find the alternative reading.

[77] It sure does!

[78] I’ve anglicized things like adjective-noun order and question and negative formation, since what I’m trying to point out goes deeper than those things.

[79] The reference is to Love & Rockets, by the incomparable brothers Hernandez.

[80] This might be unacceptable for some. If you’re sure that there are too many is’s, count them in A book on syntax is what this is.

[81] That’s yet in the sense ‘until now’. Other senses of yet are not affected: That’s yet another disproof; He’s curious yet wary.

[82] In form this is a perfect, but the aspectual distinction is mostly lost in German. The ‘past tense’ is only used in telling stories.