Linguistic Views of Grammar, Syntax, and Diagramming

You will by now have noticed that linguists' views of grammar differ from that of, say, your typical language teacher. We can describe this difference concisely by saying that linguists try to describe how people actually use language, while language teachers typically try to prescribe how people should use language according to arbitrarily determined "standards". To be a savvy language user, a person must understand both kinds of rules. Beginning next week, we will talk about prescriptive rules in detail. This week, we'll look at linguistic attempts to describe English grammar.

How do you describe grammar? We'll try to create a set of "directions" for generating all and only well-formed sentences of English.

What is grammaticality or well-formedness? Grammatical strings of words are "grammatical" or "acceptable" to native speakers of a language; "ungrammatical" strings are unacceptable. Your book says that a string of words is "grammatical" if it obeys the rules of syntax shared by speakers of a language, and this is certainly true. However, we will use grammaticality judgements as evidence for the rules that we propose.

Think about it like this: Buried in the minds of English speakers is ENGLISHGRAMMAR, a secret program which produces ENGLISH. We are trying to crack the code or recipe for ENGLISHGRAMMAR. We look at ENGLISH and propose some rules that account for sentences. Then we check to see if our rules work all of the time. If they don't, we revise and recheck. When they work, we try to describe other ENGLISH forms via the same method.

Grammaticality has nothing to do with semantics (word meanings), having heard a sentence before, the meaningfulness of the sentence, truth of the sentence, realness of the sentence, possible-ness of the sentence, etc.
 
 

What concepts do we need to understand in order to describe English (or any language)?

linear order

hierarchical structure

It's true that language looks like words in linear order, but we need to use hierarchical structures in order to show the relationship between different word orders which native speakers feel are "related" (e.g. active and passive forms of a sentence).

syntactic category/ phrasal category/ constituent

constituency tests

A constituent is a "natural grouping of words" within a sentence. We can test to see if a group of words forms a constituent by considering:

Can it stand alone?

Can the group be substituted with ONE other word (a pro-form)?

Can the entire group move together (usually to the beginning or end of sentence)?
 
 
 
 

subcategories

Our grammar has to take into account the fact that not all verbs (for example) behave alike. Some verbs require an object, some require two objects, and some don't take objects at all. (Subcategorization will have consequences in the phrase structure rules.)

infinity

recursion

Although each sentence uttered by a native speaker is finite in length, every language has some component which makes a sentence have the potential to be infinitely long. We call this "recursion" or a "recursive rule". People can never use such rules to their full potential since listeners (and readers!) are limited by what their brains can process.
 
 

phrase structure--the structure of syntactic categories, from the small to large (i.e. from Noun Phrase to Sentence)

phrase structure rules--rules which list all possible grammatical structures for each phrase type. For example: Sà NP VP means that a 'sentence' is composed of a noun phrase and a verb phrase. Next we ask, 'What can a NP consist of?' In English, NP à (Det) (Adj.) N. A noun phrase consists of an optional Determiner, and optional Adjective, and a noun. This is not the only possible structure for NPs in English, however. See Brinton for a longer (though not exhaustive) list.

phrase structure trees--trees represent phase structure rules in a two dimensional manner so that the hierarchical structure of language can be easily seen:

Transformations let us MOVE constituents around for various purposes, such as making passive voice sentences, asking questions, etc. We cannot generate all possible English sentences with phrase structure rules alone. Even if we could, we would lose some important observations about language. For example, native speakers sense the relationship between the active and passive forms of a sentence, or between the statement and question forms of a sentence. With transformations, we can capture this sense of relatedness by saying that the syntax generates the active sentence at deep structure, then transforms the sentence to passive through operation PASSIVE.