Syntax and Grammar

John Goldsmith
Cognitive Neuroscience
May 1999
Two views of language to avoid
like the plague:
Thought is like language, and
language thought.
Thoughts If your thoughts are clear enough,
they will naturally coalesce
into words (and in the right order).

It’s not so much that these

ideas are wrong as they are
pernicious. They lead to
fuzzy and uncontrollably
bad thinking.
 Language is a Markov process
Given the last three words, we should be able
to predict the next word with very high
accuracy.
As I turned ... round the corner I came upon

What’s the first word on the next slide?

 Syntax
• The study of how words are assembled in
meaningful, grammatical utterances…
• in particular languages….
• And generalizations across languages
 First, it’s lexical categories we
care about, not words.
• The bigger a pattern is, the more important
it is to our study.
• Subjects precede their verbs in English is
more important than
• the word after President Bill is Clinton.
 Categories?
• First, lexical categories:
• What is the best set of categories we can
find to specify what sentences are
grammatical in English (…)
If we know that
• the cat is on the mat
is grammatical in English, how does this
extend as a generalization? Can we replace
cat by other words and still get a good
sentence? Of course. By what words? Is it,
say, by any word starting with c? No.
 The cat is on the mat
We have a category (we call them nouns) in
English; our best approximation to how one
sentence can be matched to an indefinitely
large pattern is by replacing a word by any
other word in the same category.
• The fish is on the platter.
• A bird is over a tree.
 How many such categories are
there?
The most honest answer would be:
that’s a matter of analytical convenience.
The more categories, the better we can make
our “predictions”.
If we allow ourselves just “nouns”, then we’ll
“predict” such monstrosities as
• The Robert is on the phone.
• The crying is up the hill.
• A inkling is through the milk.
 If we have more categories, we
can make finer distinctions and
better predictions
• Proper nouns (Bill, Clinton, Monday),
common nouns (bill, sound, trophy),
pronouns (me, I, she, it, we).
They share some properties, but differ in a lot
of ways at the same time.
Let’s focus on common nouns for
a while….
What makes a “common noun” in English?
• Often preceded by the or a.
• Often preceded by a possessive (my, your,
his, her, our) or a demonstrative (this, that,
these, those…).
• An adjective may intervene, though:
this old house, my first car, *first my car
(but: At first my car ran well…)
 Summarizing…
• By and large (almost always), if a word may
be preceded by the, it may be preceded by
a/an, or by my, your, his, her.
• We want a compact manner of representing
this.
 A compact manner? Why?
1. Compact manner of remembering your
experience = that’s the best your memory
can do: it extracts what is hopefully
significant, because it can’t memorize all.
2. Compact manner of describing is the test of
scientific success (Minimal Description
Length/ Jorma Rissanen; Ray Solomonoff).
3...
• Lasnik: (283) Given the creative use of
languages…it could not be true that the
syntax of a language consisted merely of a
list of sentences that are memorized in the
course of language acquisition. Something
more complex, hence, more interesting,
must be involved.
 Categories and
phrase-structure rules
• Writing all generalizations in terms of
categories (not lexical items = words) is a
way of compressing descriptions. Notice
that it always makes wrong predictions!
(Why? examples?)
• There is thus a trade-off between compact
description = prediction and accuracy.
 Categories and
Phrase-structure rules
Phrase structure rules are excellent means of
expressing the idea that two categories often
appear in adjacent positions:
• C -> A + B
• NP->article + noun
They’re also good for saying that something
may optionally appear in between:
• C-> A + (X) + B
 Phrase-structure rules in English
• S  NP VP
• NP  det (Adj) Noun
• VP  Verb (NP) (PP) (S)
• PP  Prep Noun
 Phrase-structure rules
• Express generalizations about the fine
internal structure around phrasal heads
(nouns, verbs, adjectives)
• Head-argument structures: verbs take NP (=
Noun Phrase) complements (which can be
large chunks)
• But...
 S

What did Linda say S

Monica had told her D

 Coreference properties
Pronouns almost always follow the noun they
refer to:
• John is going to California, and he’s very
excited about that. (try it the other way
around)
• Before John studied linguistics, he said a
lot of stupid things about language.
• Before he studied linguistics, John said a lot
of stupid things about language.
So both orders are OK there. Worse yet:
• In front of him, John saw a snake.

• *In front of John, he saw a snake.

 Main claim that appears to
come from looking at language as
phrase structure:
• The big picture, the main facts about the
syntax of a language are expressed by
phrase-structure rules, which use categories.
• To know where a certain phrase may
appear, you only need to know its category,
not what’s “inside” it.
 You don’t need to know what’s
inside it?
• That is true in mathematical and logical
formulas:
x
(3  7)(e  )  15
0

2x
1
(10)(1  )  15
2
 But it’s not true in language.
It’s only a useful first approximation.
Q: Are there self-standing “sentences” that
can’t be embedded?
A: You bet.
Like father, like son.
Fathers who like, like son get along well with
their kids.
• Can nouns select certain kinds of
determiners? Certainly
• A vast expanse of linguistics is devoted to
exploring and accounting for the
complexities that transcend phrase-structure
rules.
 Syntactic Structure
• Sign on the highway in Oklahoma (really):

So…? Pick them up? Don’t

pick them up?
 Sentence= Aux phrase

Aux’
Aux verb phrase
Verb Noun phrase
Noun
Adjective Noun

Copula: semantically main verb

 Sentence= Aux phrase

Aux’
Aux verb phrase
Verb verb phrase
Noun
Verb Noun

Main verb
 Syntactic structure
What did the Buddha say to the hot-dog
vendor?

Make me one with everything.

 BE

Make me rich and famous and in tune with the universe

Make me one with everything.

Make a hot-dog with everything on it for me, please

have
• What did the vendor say when the Buddha
asked him for his change from the $20?

Change must come

from within.