1 Foundational issues

• Prescriptive versus descriptive grammar
• Rule formation in language acquisition
  • A thought experiment
  • Rule-based word formation
  • Question formation
• More evidence for syntactic structure
  • Intuitions about words belonging together
  • Structural ambiguity
• Universal Grammar
  • Formal universals
  • Recursion
  • Parameters
• Generative grammar
  • Elementary trees and substitution
  • Grammaticality
  • Grammar versus language
• Notes
• Exercises and problems
• Supplementary material
  • Modals and auxiliary verbs in English

This book is an introduction to generative grammar from a Chomskyan perspective. By the time you finish this chapter, you will have a clearer understanding of what we mean by this sentence, and by the time you finish the entire book, your understanding of it should be clearer and deeper still. But for now, you have probably gained the impression that this book is about grammar of some sort. And right there, we have a problem. The problem is that there is an everyday sense of the term 'grammar' and a quite different sense in which the term is used in linguistics.

(2)	a.		Don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
	b.		Don't use contractions.
	c.		Don't use sentence fragments.
	d.		Don't end a sentence with a linking verb.
	e.		Don't use dangling participles.
	f.		Don't end a sentence with a preposition.
	g.		Don't use an object pronoun for a subject pronoun in a conjoined noun phrase.
	h.		Don't use a plural pronoun to refer back to a singular noun like everyone, no-one, someone, and the like.
	i.		Don't split infinitives.
	j.		Use whom, not who, as the object of a verb or preposition.

Someone who composes sentences in accordance with rules like those in (2) is said to have good grammar, whereas someone said to have bad grammar doesn't apply the rules when they ought to be applied,¹ producing sentences like (3).

(3)	a.		Over there is the guy who I went to the party with.	violates (2f), (2j)
	b.		Bill and me went to the store.	violates (2g)

Now if rules like those in (2) were the only ones that were used to form English sentences, then people who didn't follow them should produce rampantly variable and confusing sentences, leading in extreme cases to a complete breakdown of communication. However, even people who routinely produce sentences like those in (3) do not produce the likes of (4).

(4)	a.		Over there is guy the who I went to party the with.
	b.		Over there is the who I went to the party with guy.
	c.		Bill and me the store to went.

The sentences in (3) may be instances of bad grammar in the everyday sense, but they are still English sentences. By contrast, we don't need to rely on school rules to tell us that the examples in (4) are not English sentences - even though they contain exactly the same English words as the sentences in in (3).

Since native speakers of English do not produce a variable mishmash of words of the sort in (4), there must be some other sort of rules according to which sentences are composed. We can determine what some of them are by taking a closer look at the sequences in (4). What exactly is it that makes them into word salad? In (4a), the article the is in the wrong order with respect to guy and party, the nouns that it belongs with. In (4b), the relative clause (who I went to the party with) is in the wrong order with respect to the noun that it modifies (guy). In (4c), the preposition to is in the wrong order with respect to its object (the store). In other words, the sentences in (4) do not follow the rules in (5).

(5)	a.		Articles precede the nouns they belong with.
	b.		Relative clauses follow the noun that they modify.
	c.		Prepositions precede their objects.

(There's a fourth rule that's not followed in (4), which you are asked to formulate in the Exercises.)

Rules like those in (5) have a quite different intention from those in (2). The rules in (2) are normative or prescriptive, whereas those in (5) are descriptive. Rules of prescriptive grammar have the same status as rules of etiquette (like table manners or dress codes) or the laws of society, which divide the entire spectrum of possible human behavior into socially acceptable or legal behavior, on the one hand, and socially unacceptable or illegal behavior, on the other. Rules of prescriptive grammar make statements about how people ought to use language. In contrast, rules of descriptive grammar have the status of scientific observations, and they are intended as insightful generalizations about the way that human language is used in fact, rather than about how it ought to be used. Descriptive rules are more general and more basic than prescriptive rules in the sense that all sentences of a language are formed in accordance with them, not just the subset of sentences that count as correct or socially acceptable. A useful way to think about prescriptive rules is as filtering out some (relatively minute) portion of the entire output of the descriptive rules of a language.

In syntax, as in linguistics more generally, we adopt a resolutely descriptive perspective concerning language. In particular, when linguists say that a sentence is grammatical, we don't mean that it is correct from a prescriptive point of view, but that it conforms to descriptive rules like those in (5). In order to indicate that a sequence is ungrammatical (in the descriptive sense), we prefix it with an asterisk. Grammatical sentences are usually not specially marked, but they can be prefixed with 'ok' for clarity. These conventions are illustrated in (6) and (7).

(6)	a.	*	Over there is guy the who I went to party the with.	(= (4a))
	b.	*	Over there is the who I went to the party with guy.	(= (4b))
(7)	a.	ok	Over there is the guy who I went to the party with.	(= (3a))
	b.	ok	Over there is the guy with whom I went to the party.

Prescriptive grammar is based on the view that there is a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. When there is more than one way of saying something, prescriptive grammar is often concerned with declaring one (and only one) of the variants to be correct, and the favored variant is usually justified as being better (whether more logical, more euphonious, or more desirable on some other grounds) than the deprecated variant. In the same situation of linguistic variability, the basic aim of descriptive grammar is simply to document the variants without passing judgment on them. For instance, consider the variable subject-verb agreement pattern in (8). In (8a), the singular verb is (contracted to 's) agrees in number with the preverbal expletive subject there (in red), whereas in (8b), the plural verb are agrees with the postverbal logical subject some boxes (in blue). The color of the verb indicates which of the two subjects it agrees with.

(8)	a.		There	's	some boxes left on the porch.
	b.		There	are	some boxes left on the porch.

The prescriptive and descriptive rules concerning this pattern are given in (9). The differences between the two rules are emphasized by underlining.

(9)		In a sentence containing both the singular expletive subject there and a plural logical subject ...
	a.	Prescriptive rule:		... the verb should agree in number with the logical subject.
	b.	Descriptive rule:		... the verb can agree in number with either the expletive subject or with the logical subject.

To take another example, let's consider the prescriptive rule that says, "Don't end a sentence with a preposition."² A prescriptivist might argue that keeping the preposition (in italics) together with its object (in boldface), as in (10a), makes sentences easier to understand, than does separating the two, as in (10b).

(10)	a.		With which friend did you go to the party?
	b.		Which friend did you go to the party with?

But by that token, (11a), where the verb and its object are kept together, ought to be preferable over (11b), where they are separated. In fact, however, (11a) is completely ungrammatical.

(11)	a.	*	Adopt which cat did your friend?
	b.	ok	Which cat did your friend adopt?

It is important to understand that there is no conceptual or semantic reason that prepositions can be separated from their objects in English, but that verbs can't. From a descriptive perspective, the grammaticality contrast between (10a) and (11a) is simply a matter of fact, irreducible to more basic considerations given our present state of knowledge. (12) highlights the difference between the relevant prescriptive and descriptive rules.

(12)		When the object of a preposition appears in a position that isn't its ordinary one (as in a question), ...
	a.	Prescriptive rule:		... it should be preceded by the preposition.
	b.	Descriptive rule:		... it can either be preceded by the preposition, or it may stand alone, with the preposition remaining in its ordinary position.

The contrasting attitude of prescriptive and descriptive grammar towards linguistic variation has a quasi-paradoxical consequence: namely, that prescriptive rules are never descriptive rules. The reason for this has to do with the way that social systems (not just language) work. If everyone in a community consistently behaves in a way that is socially acceptable in some respect, then there is no need for explicit prescriptive rules to ensure the behavior in question. It is only when behavior that is perceived as socially unacceptable becomes common that prescriptive rules come to be formulated to check the unacceptable behavior. For example, if every customer entering a store invariably wears both a shirt and shoes, there is no need for the store owner to put up the sign that says "No shirt, no shoes, no service." Conversely, it is precisely at illegal dump sites that "No dumping" signs are posted. In an analogous way, in the domain of language use, rules of prescriptive grammar are only ever formulated in situations where linguistic variation is common. But because they are prescriptive, they cannot treat all of the occurring variants as equal, with the result that they can't ever be descriptive.

Rule formation in language acquisition

As you consider the descriptive rules in (5), you might not find it all that surprising that a child raised in an English-speaking community would acquire the rule, say, that articles precede nouns. After all, you might say, all the child ever hears are articles and nouns in that order.⁴ So why would it ever occur to an English-speaking child to put the article and the noun in the other order? Isn't it just common sense that children learn their native language by imitating older speakers around them?

Well, yes and no. It is true that children learn some aspects of their native language by imitation and memorization. Children in English-speaking communities learn English words, children in Navajo-speaking communities learn Navajo words, children in Swahili-speaking communities learn Swahili words, and so on. But language acquisition isn't purely a process of memorization. In fact, given current human life spans, it couldn't possibly be!

A thought experiment

In addition to this thought experiment with its comically absurd consequences, there is another reason to think that language acquisition isn't entirely based on rote memorization---namely, that children use what they hear of language as raw material to construct linguistic rules. How do we know this? We know because children sometimes produce rule-based forms that they have never heard before.

Rule-based word formation

One of the earliest demonstrations that children acquire linguistic rules, rather than simply imitating the forms of adult language, was the well-known wug experiment (Berko 1958). In it, the psycholinguist Jean Berko used invented words to examine (among other things) how children between the ages of 4 and 7 form plurals in English. She showed the children cards with simple line drawings of objects and animals and elicited plurals from them by reading them accompanying texts like the one in (17).

(17)

This is a wug. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ___.

More than 75% of the children pluralized the invented words cra, lun, tor, and wug in exactly the same way that adults did in a control group: they added the sound -z to the word (Berko 1958:159-162).⁵ Since none of the children had encountered the invented words before the experiment, their response clearly indicates that they had acquired a plural rule and were using it to produce the novel forms.

In the wug experiment, both the children being studied and the adults in the control group produced novel rule-based forms. Children are also observed to produce novel rule-based forms like comed or goed instead of existing irregular adult forms, like came for went. This process is known as overregularization. Some further instances are given in (18) (Marcus et al. 1992:148-149, based on Brown 1973).

(18)	a.		beated, blowed, catched, cutted, doed, drawed, drived, falled, feeled, growed, holded, maked, sleeped, standed, sticked, taked, teached, throwed, waked, winned (Adam, between the ages of 2 and 5)
	b.		drinked, seed, weared (Eve, between the ages of 1 1/2 and 2)

Overregularizations don't amount to a large fraction of the forms that children produce overall (less than 5% in the case of past tense forms, according to Marcus et al. 1992:35), but they clearly show that even the acquisition of words doesn't boil down to rote memorization.

Question formation

To see this, let's consider how young children form yes-no questions (as the name implies, yes-no questions are ones to which the expected answer is either 'yes' or 'no'). Some 3- to 5-year-olds form such questions from declarative sentences by copying the auxiliary element to the beginning of the sentence, as in (19) (Crain and Nakayama 1987:536). (We use the term 'auxiliary element' as a convenient way of referring to be, can and other similar elements which invert with the subject in (adult) English questions. See Modals and auxiliary verbs in English for more details.)

(19)	a.		The girl is tall.	--->	Is the girl is tall?
	b.		The red pig can stand on the house.	--->	Can the red pig can stand on the house?

In the course of language acquisition, the questions in (19) give way to those in (20), where we can think of the auxiliary element as having been moved rather than copied.

(20)	a.		Is the girl ___ tall?
	b.		Can the red pig ___ stand on the house?

But now notice a striking indeterminacy, first pointed out by Chomsky 1971:26-27. When children produce questions like those in (20), there is no way of telling whether they are using the adult rule for question formation in (21a) or the logically possible alternative rule in (21b).

(21)	a.		Adult question formation rule:	To form a question from a declarative sentence containing an auxiliary element, find the subject of the sentence, and invert the subject and the auxiliary.
	b.		Logically possible alternative:	To form a question from a declarative sentence containing an auxiliary element, find the first auxiliary element, and move it to the beginning of the sentence.

Don't confuse 'subject' with 'simple subject.' Subjects, in contrast to simple subjects, are possible responses to questions like Who is tall? and Who can stand on the house? So the subjects in (20) are the noun phrases the girl and the red pig. If the subject consists of a single word or of a clause, then the simple subject is identical to the subject; otherwise, the simple subject of a sentence is obtained by stripping the subject of any modifiers (yielding girl and pig as the simple subjects of (20)). The notion of subject is basic to syntactic theory, but we will have no further use for the notion of simple subject.

Both rules in (21) give the same result for simple sentences, which are likely to form most of the data that young children attend to. Both rules also require children to identify auxiliary elements. However, the adult rule additionally requires children to identify the subject of the sentence by grouping together sequences of words such as the girl or the red pig into a single abstract structural unit. Because of this grouping requirement, the adult rule is called structure-dependent. By contrast, the rule in (21b) is not structure-dependent, since it requires the child only to classify words according to their syntactic category, but not to group them into structural units. The rule in (21b) is simpler in the sense that it relies on fewer cognitive operations as well as computationally less complex ones, and children might reasonably be expected to experiment with it in the course of acquiring question formation. Nevertheless, Chomsky 1971 predicted that children would use only structure-dependent rules in the course of acquisition.

As we mentioned, both rules give the same result for simple sentences. So how could we possibly tell which of the two rules a child was actually using? Well, forming yes-no questions is not restricted to simple sentences. So although we can't tell which rule a child is using in the case of simple sentences, the rules in (21) give different results for complex sentences like (22), where the entire sentence contains a relative clause. For the question at hand, what is relevant is that the entire sentence contains the auxiliary is, and that, in addition, there is a relative clause (who was holding the plate), which contains a second auxiliary was.

(22)

The boy who was holding the plate is crying.

A child applying the structure-dependent question formation rule to (22) would first identify the subject of the entire sentence (the boy who was holding the plate) and then invert the entire subject---including the relative clause and the auxiliary contained within it (was)---with the auxiliary of the entire sentence (is). On the other hand, a child applying the structure-independent rule would identify the first auxiliary (was) and move it to the beginning of the sentence. In this case, the two rules have very different results, as shown in (23).

(23)	a.		Structure-dependent rule:	[ The boy who was holding the plate ] is crying.	--->	Is [the boy who was holding the plate] ___ crying?
	b.		Structure-independent rule:	The boy who was holding the plate is crying.	--->	Was the boy who ___ holding the plate is crying?

Recall that Chomsky predicted that children would not use structure-independent rules, even though they are simpler than structure-dependent ones. This prediction was tested in an experiment with 3- to 5-year-old children by Crain and Nakayama 1987. In the experiment, the experimenter had the children pose yes-no questions to a doll (Jabba the Hut from Star Wars). For instance, the experimenter would say to each child Ask Jabba if the boy who was holding the plate is crying. This task elicited various responses. Some children produced the adult question in (23a), whereas others produced the copy question in (24a) or the restart question in (24b).

(24)	a.		Is [the boy who was holding the plate] is crying?
	b.		Is [the boy who was holding the plate], is he crying?

Notice that although neither of the questions in (24) uses the adult rule in (21a), the rules that the children used to produce them are structure-dependent in the same way that the adult rule is. This is because children who produced (24a) or (24b) must have identified the subject of the sentence, just like the children who produced (23a). What is also noteworthy is that out of the 155 questions that the children produced, none were of the structure-independent type in (23b). Moreover, no child produced the structure-independent counterpart of (24a), shown in (25), which results from copying (rather than moving) the first auxiliary element in the sentence.

(25)

Was the boy who was holding the plate is crying?

In other words, regardless of whether a child succeeded in producing the adult question in (23a), every child in the experiment treated the sequence the boy who was holding the plate as a unit, thus confirming Chomsky's prediction.

Syntactic structure

We have seen that young children are capable of forming and applying both morphological and syntactic rules. Moreover, as we have seen in connection with question formation, children do not all immediately adopt the rules that adults use. Nevertheless, the syntactic rules that children postulate in the course of acquisition are a subset of the logically possible rules that they might experiment with in principle. In particular, children's syntactic rules are constrained, as we have just seen, by structure dependence. Another way of putting this is that the objects that syntactic rules operate on (declarative sentences in the case of the question formation rule) are not just simple strings of words, but rather groups of words that belong together, so-called constituents.

Intuitions about words belonging together

(27)

Did the dog the children like chase the cat?

Words that belong together can sometimes be replaced by placeholder elements such as pronouns. This is illustrated in (28).

The term 'pronoun' is misleading since it suggests that pronouns substitute for nouns regardless of syntactic context. In fact, what pronouns substitute for is entire noun phrases (as will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2). A less confusing term for them would be 'pro-noun phrase,' but we'll continue to use the traditional term.

(28)	a.		Did the dog chase the cat?	--->		Did she chase him?
	b.		Did the dog the children like chase the cat?	--->		Did the dog they like chase him?

It's important to recognize that pronouns don't simply replace strings of words regardless of context. Just because a string like the dog is a constituent in (28a) doesn't mean that it's always a constituent. We can see this by replacing the dog by a pronoun in (28b), which leads to the ungrammatical result in (29).

(29)

Did the dog the children like chase the cat?

--->

*

Did she the children like chase the cat?

The ungrammaticality in (29) tells us that the and dog belong together less closely in (28b) than in (28a). What the pronoun replacement evidence tells us is that the and dog combine directly in (28a), whereas in (28b), dog combines first with the relative clause, and the combines with the result of this combination, not with dog directly.

In some sentences, we have the intuition that words belong together even when they are not adjacent. For instance, see and who in (30a) belong together in much the same way as see and Bill do in (30b).

(30)	a.		Who will they see?
	b.		They will see Bill.

Finally, we can observe that there are various sorts of ways that words can belong together. For instance, in a phrase like the big dog, big belongs with dog, and we have the intuition that big modifies dog. On the other hand, the relation between saw and Bill in (30b) isn't one of modification. Rather, we have the intuition that Bill is a participant in a seeing event.

In the course of this book, we will introduce more precise ways of expressing and representing intuitions like the ones just discussed. For the moment, however, what is important is that we have strong intuitions that words belong together in ways that go beyond adjacency.

Structural ambiguity

Examples like (32) are called instances of lexical ambiguity, because their ambiguity comes from their containing a lexeme (= vocabulary item) with two distinct meanings. In (31), on the other hand, the words themselves have the same meanings in each of the two interpretations, and the ambiguity comes from the possibility of grouping the words in distinct ways. In the intended interpretation, the relative clause that does not smoke or drink modifies man; in the unintended interpretation, it modifies cow.

To avoid any confusion, we should emphasize that we are here considering structural ambiguity from a purely descriptive perspective, focusing on what it tells us about the design features of human language and disregarding the practical aim of effective communication. As writers of advertisements ourselves, of course, we would be careful not to use (31), but to disambiguate it by means of an appropriate paraphrase. For the ordinary interpretation of (31), where the relative clause modifies man, we would place the relative clause next to the intended modifiee, as in (33a). The comical interpretation of (31), on the other hand, cannot be expressed unambiguously by moving the relative clause. If it were the desired interpretation, we would have to resort to a more drastic reformulation, such as (33b).

(33)	a.		Wanted: Man that does not smoke or drink to take care of cow.
	b.		Wanted: Man to take care of nonsmoking, nondrinking cow.

Universal Grammar

(34)	a.		To form a question, switch the order of the first and second words in the corresponding declarative sentence.	The girl is tall.	--->	Girl the is tall?
				The blond girl is tall.	--->	Blond the girl is tall?
	b.		To form a question, reverse the order of the words in the corresponding declarative sentence.	The girl is tall.	--->	Tall is girl the?
				The blond girl is tall.	--->	Tall is girl blond the?

The structure dependence of linguistic rules is what is known as a formal universal of human language---a principle shared by all human languages that is independent of the meanings of words. Formal universals are distinguished from substantive universals, which concern the substance, or meaning, of linguistic elements. An example of a substantive universal is the fact that all languages have indexical elements such as I, here, and now. These words have the special property that their meanings are predictable in the sense that they denote the speaker, the speaker's location, and the time of speaking, but that what they refer to varies depending on who the speaker is.

Recursion

(35)	a.		She won.
	b.		The Times reported that       [she won].
	c.		John told me that       [the Times reported that             [she won]].
	d.		I remember distinctly that       [John told me that             [the Times reported that                   [she won]]].
	e.		They don't believe that       [I remember distinctly that             [John told me that                   [the Times reported that                         [she won]]]].
	f.		I suspect that       [they don't believe that             [I remember distinctly that                   [John told me that                         [the Times reported that                               [she won]]]]].

Parameters

(36)	a.	English		Peter read the book.
	b.	French		Pierre lisait le livre. Pierre was.reading the book 'Pierre was reading the book.'
(37)	a.	Hindi		Peter-ne kitaab parh-ii.
	b.	Japanese		Peter-ga hon-o yon-da.
	c.	Korean		Peter-ka chayk-ul il-ess-ta. Peter book read 'Peter read the book.'

Another parameter of Universal Grammar concerns the possibility, mentioned earlier, of separating a preposition from its object, or preposition stranding. (The idea behind the metaphor is that the movement of the object of the preposition away from its ordinary position leaves the preposition stranded high and dry.) The alternative to preposition stranding goes by the name of pied piping, by analogy to the Pied Piper of Hameln, who took revenge on the citizens of Hameln for mistreating him by luring the town's children away with him.⁶ In pied piping of the syntactic sort, the object of the preposition moves away from its usual position, just as in preposition stranding, but it lures the preposition along with it. An example of each parametric option is given in (38).

(38)	a.	Preposition stranding:	ok	Which house does your friend live in?
	b.	Pied piping:	ok	In which house does your friend live?

Just as in English, preposition stranding and pied piping are both grammatical in Swedish. In fact, in Swedish, preposition stranding counts as prescriptively correct, and it is pied piping that is frowned upon, on the grounds that it sounds stiff and artificial.

(39)	a.	Swedish	ok	Vilket hus bor din kompis i? which house lives your friend in 'Which house does your friend live in?'
	b.		ok	I vilket hus bor din kompis?

On the other hand, preposition stranding is completely ungrammatical in French and Italian. Speakers of these languages reject examples like (40) as word salad, and accept only pied-piping examples, as in (41).

(40)	a.	French	*	Quelle maison est-ce que ton ami habite dans? which house is it that your friend lives in Intended meaning: 'Which house does your friend live in?'
	b.	Italian	*	Quale casa abita il tuo amico in? which house lives the your friend in Intended meaning: 'Which house does your friend live in?'
(41)	a.	French	ok	Dans quelle maison est-ce que ton ami habite?
	b.	Italian	ok	In quale casa abita il tuo amico?

Generative grammar

Just like a cooking recipe, a generative grammar needs to specify the ingredients and procedures that are necessary for generating grammatical sentences. We won't introduce all of these in this first chapter, but in the remainder of the section, we'll introduce enough ingredients and procedures to give a flavor of what's to come.

Elementary trees and substitution

(47)	a.	*	slowly the letter
	b.	*	the this letter

As constituent structure grows more complex, labeled bracketings very quickly grow difficult for humans to process. Because of this, it's often more convenient to use an alternative mode of representing constituent structure called tree diagrams, or trees for short. Trees convey exactly the same information as labeled bracketings, but the information is presented differently. Instead of enclosing an element in brackets that are labeled with a syntactic category, the category is placed immediately above the element and connected to it with a line or branch. The labeled bracketings that we have seen so far translate into the trees in (48) and (49).⁷

(48)

a.

b.

c.

(49)

a.

b.

c.

Trees like those in (48) and (49) resemble dishes that are ready to serve; they don't provide a record of exactly how they were brought into being. We can provide such a record, however, by representing vocabulary items themselves in the form of trees that include combinatorial information. For example, prepositions and transitive verbs can be represented as trees with empty slots for noun phrases to fit into, as shown in (50).

(50)

a.

b.

We'll refer to trees for vocabulary items like those in (50) as elementary trees. The purpose of elementary trees is to represent the combinatorial possibilities of a vocabulary item, and so they ordinarily contain unfilled nodes. Such nodes are called substitution nodes, and they are filled by a substitution operation, defined in (51).

(51)	a.				b.				c.
			Tree No. 1 has a substitution node of some syntactic category.				The root (= topmost) node in Tree No. 2 has the same syntactic category as the substitution node in Tree No. 1.				The root node of Tree No. 2 is identified with the substitution node in Tree No. 1.

Elementary trees don't necessarily contain substitution nodes, though; ones that invariably play the role of Tree No. 2 in the substitution operation don't. The elementary tree for the noun in (52b) is an example.

Notice that there are two conceivable ways to arrive at trees for noun phrases like those cats, depending on whether it is the noun that is taken as the substitution node, as in (52), or the determiner, as in (53). At this point, there is no reason to prefer one way over the other, but in Chapter 5, we will argue for a variant of (52).

(52)	a.				b.
(53)	a.				b.

In summary, a generative grammar as we've constructed it so far consists of a set of elementary trees, which represent the vocabulary items in a language and the range of their combinatorial possibilities, and a substitution operation, by means of which the elementary trees combine into larger constituents and ultimately into grammatical sentences. In Chapter 4, we will introduce two further formal operations. The first, adjunction, will enable the grammar to generate sentences containing modifiers, such as adjectives or relative clauses modifying nouns (the big dog, the dog that the children like). The second, movement, will enable the grammar to represent the similarities as well as the differences between declarative sentences (They will see Bill) and questions corresponding to them (Will they see Bill?, Who(m) will they see?).

Grammaticality

First of all, 'grammatical' needs to be distinguished from 'makes sense.' The sentences in (54) 'make sense' in the sense that they are easily interpreted by speakers of English. Nevertheless, as indicated by the asterisks, they are not grammatical.⁸

(54)	a.	*	Is our children learning?
	b.	*	Me wants fabric.
	c.	*	To where are we be taking thou, sir?
	d.	*	The introduction explained that "the Genoese people, besides of hard worker, are good eater too, and even 'gourmand,' of that honest gourmandise which will not drive a man to hell but which is, after all, one of the few pleasures that mankind can enjoy in this often sorrowful world."

Conversely, there are English sentences that are grammatical, but that don't 'make sense.' The 'fairy tale' or 'science fiction' sentences in (14) are of this type. Two further examples are given in (55). Since such sentences are grammatical, they aren't preceded by an asterisk. However, if necessary, a prefixed pound sign is used to indicate their meaning-related anomaly.

(55)	a.	#	Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. (Chomsky 1965:149)	cf. Revolutionary new ideas appear infrequently.
	b.	#	I plan to travel there last year.	cf. I plan to travel there next year.

Second, 'grammatical' must be distinguished from 'easily processable by human beings.' This is because it turns out that certain well-motivated grammatical operations can be applied in ways that result in sentences that are virtually impossible for human beings to process. For instance, it is possible in English to modify a noun with a relative clause, and sentences containing nouns modified in this way, like those in (56), are normally perfectly acceptable and easily understood. (Here and in the following examples, the relative clauses are bracketed and the modified noun is underlined.)

(56)	a.		The mouse [that the cat chased] escaped.
	b.		The cat [that the dog scared] jumped out the window.

But now notice what happens when we modify the noun within the relative clause in (56a) with a relative clause of its own.

(57)

The mouse [that the cat [that the dog scared] chased] escaped.

Even though (57) differs from (56a) by only four additional words and one additional level of embedding, the result is virtually uninterpretable without pencil and paper. The reason is not that relative clause modification can't be applied more than once, since the variant of (56a) in (58), which contains exactly the same words and is exactly as long, is perfectly fine.

(58)

The mouse escaped [that the cat chased ] [that the dog scared].

Rather, the unacceptability of (57) has to do with limitations on human short-term memory (Chomsky and Miller 1963:286, Miller and Chomsky 1963:471). Specifically, notice that in the acceptable (58), the subject of the main clause the mouse doesn't have to "wait" (that is, be kept active in short-term memory) for its verb escaped since the verb is immediately adjacent to the subject. The same is true for the subjects and verbs of each of the relative clauses (the cat and chased, and the dog and scared). In (57), on the other hand, the mouse must be kept active in memory, waiting for its verb escaped, for the length of the entire sentence. What is even worse, however, is that the period during which the mouse is waiting for escaped overlaps with the period during which the cat must be kept active, waiting for its verb chased. What makes (57) so difficult, then, is not the mere fact of recursion, but that two relations of exactly the same sort (the subject-verb relation) must be kept active in memory at the same time. In none of the other relative clause sentences is such double activation necessary. For instance, in (56a), the mouse must be kept active for the length of the relative clause, but the subject of the relative clause (the cat) needn't be kept active since it immediately precedes its verb chased.

A final point to bear in mind is that any sentence of a language is an expression (specifically, a sequence of words) that is paired with a particular interpretation. Grammaticality is always determined with respect to such pairings of form and meaning. This means that a particular sequence can be grammatical under one interpretation, but not under another. For instance, (59) is ungrammatical under an subject-object-verb (SOV) interpretation (that is, when the sentence is interpreted as Sue hired Tom).

(59)

Sue Tom hired.

(59) is grammatical, however, under an object-subject-verb (OSV) interpretation (that is, when it is interpreted as Tom hired Sue; cf. Sue, Tom hired; Tim, he insulted). On this interpretation, Sue receives a special intonation that marks contrast, which would ordinarily be indicated in writing by setting off Sue from the rest of the sentence by a comma. In other words, the grammaticality of (59) depends on whether its interpretation is analogous to (60a) or (60b).

(60)	a.	ok	Her, he hired. (The other job candidates, he didn't even call back.)
	b.	*	She him hired.

Grammar versus language

Although the most salient differences between dialects are often phonological (that is, speakers of different dialects often have different accents), dialects of a so-called single language can differ syntactically as well. For instance, in standard French, as in the Romance languages more generally, adjectives ordinarily follow the noun that they modify. But that order is reversed in Walloon, a French dialect spoken in Belgium. The two parametric options are illustrated in (61) (Bernstein 1993:25-26).

(61)	a.		Standard French	un chapeau noir a hat black
	b.		Walloon	on neûr tchapê a black hat 'a black hat'

Another example of the same sort, though considerably more cathected for speakers of English, concerns multiple negation in sentences like (62a).

(62)	a.		The kids didn't eat nothing.
	b.		The kids didn't eat anything.

In present-day standard English, didn't and nothing each contribute their negative force to the sentence, and the overall force of (62a) isn't negative; rather, the sentence means that the kids ate something. In many nonstandard varieties of English, however, (62a) conveys exactly the same meaning as standard English (62b); that is, the sentence as a whole has negative force. In these dialects, we can think of the negation in nothing as agreeing with (and reinforcing) the negation in didn't rather than cancelling it; hence the term negative concord for this phenomenon ('concord' is a variant term for 'agreement'). Negative concord is routinely characterized as "illogical" by prescriptivists,⁹ and it is one of the most heavily stigmatized features in present-day English.¹⁰ However, it was productive in earlier forms of English, and it is attested in renowned masters of the language such as Chaucer and Shakespeare. Moreover, negative concord is part of the standard forms of languages like French, Italian, Spanish, and modern Greek. From a descriptive and generative point of view, negative concord is simply a parametric option just like any other, and negative concord is no more illogical than the noun-adjective order in (61a).

In both of the examples just discussed, we have dialects of the "same language" (English and French, respectively) differing with respect to a parameter. The converse is also possible: two "different languages" that are parametrically (all but) indistinguishable. For example, the same linguistic variety spoken on the Dutch-German border may count as a dialect of Dutch or German depending on which side of the political border it is spoken. An analogous situation holds of many other border dialects. According to Max Weinreich, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." A striking (and sad) confirmation of this aphorism concerns the recent terminological history of Serbo-Croatian. When Yugoslavia was a federal state under Tito, this variety was considered a single language with a number of regional dialects. The breakup of Yugoslavia into several smaller states has brought with it attempts to introduce a distinction between Serbian and Croatian as two separate "languages."

As the previous discussion has shown, the notion of "language" is based more on sociopolitical considerations than on strictly linguistic ones. By contrast, the term "grammar" refers to a particular set of parametric options that a speaker acquires. For this reason, the distinction between language and grammar that we have been drawing has been referred to as the distinction between E-language and I-language (mnemomic for 'external' and 'internal' language) (Chomsky 1986).

As we have seen, the same language label can be associated with more than one grammar (as in the case of English with and without negative concord), and a single grammar can be associated with more than one language label (as in the case of border dialects). It is important to distinguish the concept of shared grammar from mutual intelligibility. To a large extent, standard English and many of its nonstandard varieties are mutually intelligible even where their grammars differ. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible for two or more varieties that are mutually unintelligible to share a single grammar. For instance, in the Indian village of Kupwar (Gumperz and Wilson 1971), the three languages Marathi, Urdu, and Kannada, each spoken by a different ethnic group, have been in contact for about four hundred years, and most of the men in the village are bi- or trilingual. Like the standard varieties of these language, their Kupwar varieties have distinct vocabularies, thus rendering them mutually unintelligible, but in Kupwar, the considerable grammatical differences that exists among the languages as spoken in other parts of India have been virtually eliminated. The difference between standard French and Walloon with respect to prenominal adjectives is a less drastic instance of this same convergence phenomenon. Here, too, the adjective-noun order in Walloon is due to language contact, in this case between French and Flemish, the other language spoken in Belgium; in Flemish, as in the Germanic languages more generally, adjectives precede the nouns that they modify.

Finally, it is worth noting that it is perfectly possible for a single speaker to acquire more than one grammar. This is most strikingly evident in balanced bilinguals. Speakers can also acquire more than one grammar in situations of syntactic change. For instance, late Old English and Middle English went from being object-verb (OV) languages to being verb-object (VO) languages, and individual speakers during the transition period acquired and used both parametric options. Finally, speakers can acquire more than one grammar in situations of stable variation between parametrically distinct varieties of a single "language." For instance, English speakers whose first dialect is a negative concord dialect might acquire the standard non-negative concord dialect in the course of their schooling.

1. It's also possible to overzealously apply rules like those in (2), even in cases where they shouldn't be applied, a phenomenon known as hypercorrection. Two common instances are illustrated in (i).

			Hypercorrect example	Explanation
(i)	a.		Over there is the guy whom I think took her to the party.	Should be: the guy who I think took her to the party; (the relative pronoun who is the subject of the relative clause, not the object; cf. the guy { who, *whom } took her to the party)
	b.		This is strictly between you and I.	Should be: between you and me (the second pronoun is part of the object of the preposition between, not part of a subject)

2. The prescriptive rule is actually better stated as "Don't separate a preposition from its object," since the traditional formulation invites exchanges like (i).

(i)			A:	Who are you going to the party with?
			B:	Didn't they teach you never to end a sentence with a preposition?
			A:	Sorry, let me rephrase that. Who are you going to the party with, Mr. Know-it-all?

3. As William Labov has often pointed out, everyday speech (apart from false starts and other self-editing phenomena) hardly ever violates the rules of descriptive grammar.

4. Actually, that's an oversimplification. Not all the articles and nouns an English-speaking child hears appear in the article-noun order. To see why, carefully consider the underlined sentence in this footnote.

5. When children didn't respond this way, they either repeated the original invented word, or they didn't respond at all. It's not clear what to make of these responses. Either response might indicate that the children were stumped by the experimental task. Alternatively, however, repetition might have been intended as an irregular plural (cf. deer and sheep), and silence might indicate that the children thought that some of the invented words were phonologically strange, as some of them (for instance, cra) indeed are.

6. The terms 'preposition stranding' and 'pied piping' were both invented by John Robert Ross, a syntactician with a penchant for metaphorical terminology. Ross's groundbreaking syntactic work is discussed in Chapter 10.

7. Online corpora that are annotated with syntactic structure, such as the Penn Treebank, the Penn-Helsinki Corpus of Middle English, and others like them, tend to use labeled bracketing because the resulting files consist entirely of ASCII characters and are easy to search. They can also be massaged in more or less drastic ways by using computer languages like PERL. The readability of such corpora for humans can be improved by suitable formatting of the labeled bracketing itself or by translating bracketed structures into tree diagrams.

8. (54a) is from a speech by George W. Bush in Florence, SC on January 11, 2000 (http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushisms2000.htm). (54b) was the subject line of an email message in response to an offer of free fabric; the author was humorously attempting to imitate the language of a child greedy for goodies. (54c) is from "Pardon my French" (Calvin Trillin. 1990. Enough's enough (and other rules of life). 169). (54d) is from "Connoisseurs and patriots" (Joseph Wechsberg. 1948. Blue trout and black truffles: The peregrinations of an epicure. 127).

9. Two important references concerning negative concord and the supposed illogicality of negative concord and of nonstandard English more generally are Labov 1972a, 1972b.

Those who argue that negative concord is illogical often liken the rules of grammar to those of formal logic or arithmetic, where one negation operator or subtraction operation cancels out another; that is, (NOT (NOT A)) is identical to A, and (-(-5)) = +5. But grammar is not identical to logic. If it were, then prescriptivists (by their own logic!) would have to distinguish between sentences containing even and odd numbers of negative expressions. In fact, however, sentences with triple negation, like (i.a), count as prescriptively incorrect on a par with sentences with double negation, like (i.b).

(i)	a.		They never told nobody nothing.
	b.		They never told nobody.

10. Because of the social stigma associated with it, it is essentially impossible to study negative concord in present-day English. This is because even for those speakers of negative concord varieties who don't productively control standard English as a second dialect, the influence of prescriptive grammar is so pervasive that it renders their judgments about negative concord sentences uninterpretable. In other words, when such speakers reject a sentence, we don't know whether they are rejecting it for grammatical or for social reasons.

(1)-(4) illustrate the facts of subject-verb agreement in the nonstandard variety of English spoken in Belfast, Ireland (data from Henry 1995, chapter 2). Formulate a brief description of the data.

In this exercise (as in linguistics more generally), it is helpful to distinguish carefully between form and function (the signifier and signified of Ferdinand de Saussure). In different dialects, one and the same form (say, a singular verb form) can have different functions.

(1)	a.	ok	The girl is late.		(2)	a.	*	The girl are late.
	b.	ok	She is late.			b.	*	She are late.
	c.	ok	Is { the girl, she } late?			c.	*	Are { the girl, she } late?
(3)	a.	ok	The girls are late.		(4)	a.	ok	The girls is late.
	b.	ok	They are late.			b.	*	They is late.
	c.	ok	Are { the girls, they } late?			c.	*	Is { the girls, they } late?

Exercise 1.3

Which of the newspaper headlines in (1) are lexically ambiguous, which are structurally ambiguous, and which are a mixture of both types of ambiguity? Explain.

(1)	a.		Beating Witness Provides Names
	b.		Child teaching expert to speak
	c.		Drunk gets nine months in violin case
	d.		Enraged cow injures farmer with ax
	e.		Prostitutes appeal to Pope
	f.		Teacher Strikes Idle Kids
	g.		Teller Stuns Man with Stolen Check

Exercise 1.4

In the text, we showed that sentences are recursive categories. In other words, one instance of the syntactic category 'sentence' can contain another instance of the same category. Provide evidence that noun phrases and prepositional phrases are recursive categories as well.

Exercise 1.5

Which, if any, of the sentences in (1)-(4) are ungrammatical? Which, if any, are semantically or otherwise anomalous? Briefly explain.

(1)	a.		They decided to go tomorrow yesterday.
	b.		They decided to go yesterday tomorrow.
(2)	a.		They decided yesterday to go tomorrow.
n	b.		They decided tomorrow to go yesterday.
(3)	a.		Yesterday, they decided to go tomorrow.
	b.		Tomorrow, they decided to go yesterday.
(4)			They decided to go yesterday yesterday.
(5)			How long didn't Tom wait?

Exercise 1.6

(1)

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogroves, And the mome raths outgrabe.

B. The grammars of Early Modern English (1500-1710) and present-day English differ enough for certain Early Modern English sentences to be ungrammatical today. Find three such sentences from the King James Bible (1611).

C. As best as you can, briefly describe the source of the ungrammaticality.

Problem 1.1

Are syntactic structure and recursion equally basic properties of human language? Explain in a few sentences.