MAJOR CONCERNS OF THE SYNTAX OF ENGLISH

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1.0 INTRODUCTION

All of us have a grammar. The fact that we use and understand English in daily affairs means that we use and understand, for the most part consciously, the major grammatical patterns of English language. Many linguists claim that the goal of a linguistic description is to make explicit what the native speaker – listener knows about his language. This knowledge (his 'linguistic competence') may be defined as the set of rules that enable him to produce and to understand grammatically correct sentences. Others insist that linguistics should also account for 'communicative competence', that is for the fact that speakers know how to use sentences that are socially appropriate. These goals help us to gain a better understanding of the nature and complexity of language.

When linguistics examines a language they are presented with a complex mass of material which they try to reduce to some kind order. It is obvious that there are many ways of proceeding in this task of making what appears to be chaos into a comprehensible arrangement, and that some people will prefer one way and some another. The grammatical description of any language is made scientifically possible by isolating certain recurrent units of expression and examining their distribution in contexts as we shall see in subsequent units.

3.1 Grammar and Syntax

The word 'grammar' in present-day linguistic studies has at least two important meanings. On the one hand, we say that a speaker knows the grammar of his language. He usually does not know it consciously – unless he has special training in linguistics, he cannot talk confidently about the nature of his grammar. A grammar in this first sense comprises the linguistic knowledge speakers possess which enables them to communicate in their language. 'Grammar' here is a psychological, mentalistic concept. The second sense relates to the linguist, not to the speaker: the linguist is said to write a grammar of the language. This grammar is a formal, explicit description of the language.

Now these two usages must be kept apart. One look at a grammar is enough to convince us that it is extremely unlikely that the speaker knows his grammar as an object of the shape the linguist provides when he writes his grammar. The speaker does not store his linguistic knowledge in the format which the linguist adopts for explanatory purposes; nor, when he produces sentences, does he follow step-by-step the processes which the linguist spells out as he constructs derivations for sentences. This latter point is most important: a linguist’s grammar generates sentences; a speaker produces (and understands) sentences – the two processes are quite independent.

The study of syntax is concerned with the structural representation of sentences in human languages. It constitutes a part of the study of grammar, which also includes the study of sound (phonology) and meaning (semantics). The syntactic component of a grammar consists of mechanisms and principles that govern the construction of sentences and that provide a set of syntactic structures that are subject to interpretation by the semantic and phonological components. (We shall explain this more in Unit 13).

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1

1. What do you understand by the word grammar?

2. What does the syntactic component of a language consist of?

3.2 Speaker-Hearer’s Knowledge

Although the two senses of 'grammar' discussed above must be kept apart, we can learn a lot about how to do English syntax, and what to put in it, by speculating on the nature of the grammatical properties. We can profitably ask: what must a speaker-hearer of English know in order to communicate in his language? If we observe linguistic behaviour from a number of angles, we can begin to make observations which encourage us to predict certain necessary components of syntactic knowledge. An example should serve to make more concrete the notion of the syntactic component.

English speakers know that they are not restricted to uttering sentences that they have heard before, but can make up and understand sentences of the language. First, they know that, of the following four sentences, (1) is not a sentence of English, (2) is an ungrammatical sentence of English, (3) is a grammatical sentence of English, although (4) is a grammatical sentence of English, it is highly unlikely that any native speaker of English has even heard it since there are no speakers of classical Latin alive today:

1. Ije akwukwo mara mma (i.e. 'To go to School is good.') - Igbo

2. Three tons are weighed by truck this.

3. This truck weighs three tons.

4. My brother married a native speaker of classical Latin

The ability of English speakers to make these interpretations must be explained on the basis of the properties of the words in these examples and the order in which they are strung together. This is evidence that the speaker has knowledge of the structure of sentences, and it is knowledge that the linguist seeks to describe in formulating an account of the syntactic component of a language.

To go into more detail, they know more about ungrammatical sentences; for example, that (5), (6) (7), and (8) are progressively more deviant:

5. This circle is square

6. John alarmed an apple

7. John alarmed a the

8. Alarmed a the John

More relevantly, perhaps, they know an enormous amount about grammatical sentences of English. For example, they know that (9) and (10) are similar in meaning, as are (11), (12) and (13) and, in a different way, (14) and (15):

9. Her frankness astonished him.

10. He was astonished by her frankness.

11. The carpet is brown.

12. The brown carpet …

13. The carpet which is brown …

14. He mounted his proud horse.

15. He mounted his proud steed.

It goes without saying, that speakers know which sentences are different, as well as which ones are alike. That is, they can tell sentences apart.

Another area of linguistic knowledge concerns ambiguous sentences. Consider the following two examples:

16. The chicken is ready to eat.

17. I saw her in the street.

We can associate (16) with either 'X eats the chicken' or 'the chicken eats X'; (17) means either 'I saw her when I was in the street' or 'I saw her when she was in the street'. A native speaker of English knows enough about the structure of (16) and (17) to retrieve either (or, as alternatives, both) of the meanings for each of these sentences.

The linguist attempts to find a way of explaining these facts about speaker-hearer’s linguistic capacities. He has to account for the structure of English sentences in a way which takes cognizance of speakers’ intuitions of deviance, similarity, distinctness and ambiguity in their experience of English sentences. For instance, no analysis of (16) is adequate unless it assigns two alternative structural descriptions to that sentence, in recognition of the fact that speakers attach two different meanings to it. In his case, the grammarian will probably say that the chicken is the object of the verb in one interpretation ('X eats the chicken') and the subject of the sentence in the other ('The chicken eats X'). 'Subjects' and 'objects' are descriptive concepts which the linguist proposes as a way of explaining certain structural facts about English

                                                                         

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2

(a) Explain briefly what a speaker-hearer must know in order to communicate effectively in his language.

(b) Is this knowledge conscious or unconscious?

3.3 The Syntactic Component

The notion that we will attempt to characterize precisely in the case of English is that of grammatical sentences of English. Intuitively, the grammatical sentences are the sentences that sound good to the native speaker; formally, they are the strings of words that can be formed by the rules of the syntactic component. Ideally, the two sets should be identical, so that the syntactic component produces all and only sentences that the native speaker judges to be grammatical.

Notice that the grammaticality of a string of words is quite independent of whether it makes sense or not. For example:

18. My brother married a native speaker of classical Latin.

19. Married my brother a native speaker of classical Latin.

(18) is odd to the extent that it asserts something that cannot be true at the present time. The reason for this has nothing to do with English, of course, since it is not a property of English that there are no living native speakers of classical Latin. On the other hand, (19) is ungrammatical, and this is independent of whatever we might understand by this string of words. Sentence (18) is made somewhat less odd if we substitute Spanish for Classical Latin, while (19) is not improved at all by the same substitution.

The syntactic component of a language, then, is the set of rules by which words and groups of words may be strung together to form grammatical sentences of the language. The question of whether a string of words is a grammatical sentence of a particular language is completely independent of whether or not that string of words makes a true assertion, or makes much sense at all. The distinction between the form of a linguistic expression and its content is a fundamental one and will be maintained quite strictly in this course.

The existence of this distinction does not preclude the existence of a relationship between the syntactic structure of a linguistic expression and its semantic content. It is obvious, for example, that when the order of words in a sentence is changed the result may be a non-synonymous sentence:

2. (a) John hit Mary

(b) Mary hit John

As we proceed to construct precise syntactic descriptions, the question of which aspects of the syntactic structure contribute to the semantic content of an expression will become clearer than it will appear to be at this point.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3

1. What do you understand by ‘grammatical sentences’?

2. Must grammatical sentences of the language be meaningful? Give reasons.

3.4 Syntactic Rules

The learning of a first language is for the most part an unconscious process. While it is necessary for the native speaker to acquire rules of the language in order to speak it correctly, the rules are not explicitly made available to the learner, but are simply exemplified for him by other native speakers. The end result of this is that while it is clear that the native speaker employs rules for forming sentences, it is impossible to ask the native speaker what the rules are. Rather, it is necessary for the linguist to figure out what the rules must be on the basis of what the native speaker judges as grammatical and ungrammatical sentences of the language. The linguist seeks patterns of grammaticality and ungrammaticality and infers from these what the organizing principles behind these patterns must be. For example, a simple organizing principle that distinguishes between (18) and (19) is that the verb must follow the subject in English. Such a principle is incorporated into a tentative grammatical description of the language, and is subsequently tested against an increasingly wider range of relevant examples. It is important to note that the grammar that the linguist proposes is a hypothesis. That is, it is a guess as to what is really the case. The hypothesis must be formulated on the basis of good evidence; it must be tested whenever possible.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 4

How do native speakers learn the rules of their language?

3.5 What the Linguist does: Writing a Grammar of English

A linguist writes a grammar in an attempt to expose the structure of the sentences of a language. His structural analysis is well motivated to the extent that he bears in mind that this set of sentences relates to a shared linguistic competence among the speakers of the language under description. The problem: what do speakers know? has an immense bearing on our more directly relevant question: How shall I present the structure of the sentences by which speakers communicate?

Briefly, a language, L, is a set of sentences. The linguist must account for all and only the grammatical sentences of L ('L' is an abbreviation for 'any natural language'). This obligation follows from our comments on sentences (1)-(4) above: the mature speaker-hearer can distinguish between grammatical sentences of L, ungrammatical sentences of L, and sentences which are not of L. If the set described did not have limits, the grammar produced would be utterly unprincipled: it would fail to divide off English from, say, French sentences, and, since it would omit to separate off ungrammatical and grammatical sentences of L, it would be structurally anarchic. I will assume that we have procedures for discounting sentences which are not of L and sentences which are not grammatical, and grammatical sentences of L. If we can thus recognize grammatical sentences of L, we must go on to ask: How many of them are there? The answer to this question is known: the set L contains an infinite number of grammatical sentences. Almost every sentence we hear, or produce, is new to us. One might object that this observation is either unprovable, or, if provable, irrelevant since, because of human mortality, we cannot actually experience an infinite set of sentences. However, we need this assumption because we must account for the creativity of language – we are interested in the newness of sentences, even if we cannot be concerned with their infiniteness. What we can show is that there is no longest sentences in a language, and therefore by implication that there are an infinite number of sentences. (This is not to say that there can be a sentence of infinite length, as has sometimes been claimed, quite erroneously). For every sentence of the type (21), a longer sentence (22) is possible:

20. Sam eats meat and vegetables.

21. Sam eats meat, vegetables and fruit

And for every sentence (22), a longer sentence can be constructed by adding one more item. I will give two more examples of constructions with this property; there are in fact several syntactic devices available for extending sentences indefinitely:

23. John believed that Mary claimed that Peter maintained that Felix said that…

24. This hot, sunny, lazy, predictable… climate suits me very well.

As the sentences of a language are infinite in number, the set which the linguist must describe cannot be co-extensive with any finite corpus of sentences which, by observation and recording, he might collect. There is a second reason why the task of writing a grammar cannot be accomplished by merely cataloguing the structure found in an observed corpus of sentences. The fact is that the actual utterances of speakers do not adequately reflect speakers’ real competence in L. Actual speech, as any unprejudiced observation will confirm, is riddled with grammatical mistakes of all kinds: incomplete sentences, false concords, arbitrary changes of structure in mid-sentence, illicit co-joining of constituents which ought not to be linked together – or at least not in the manner that they are – and so on. (I am not appealing to ‘prescriptive’ standards. By ‘ungrammatical here I don’t mean structures which, in the manner of the 18th century purifiers or the edicts of the French Academy, have been decreed to be unacceptable; but structures which native speakers, if they could be reliably consulted, would agree are ill-formed from the standpoint of their grammatical knowledge). These errors stem from various kinds of psychological and situational ‘interference’: distraction, lapses of memory, shifts of attention, hesitation, etc. To describe such deviant sentences as these which occur in a corpus would be to describe linguistically irrelevant psychological factors as well as the linguistically relevant structural knowledge of speakers.

Thus a corpus of utterances is not the true subject-matter of linguistic description: it is only data – a set of observation from which, with caution, the linguist must draw his grammatical statements. In view of what has just been said, it is clear that the linguist’s use of his primary data must involve two adaptations. First, some idealization’ is necessary so that the grammar does not take account of the deviant sentences which occur in the corpus. Second, the linguist must devise rules which project from his finite, observed materials to an infinite set of sentences. That is to say, the grammar must have predictive power.

All this adds up to the fact that a grammar is not a simple reflection of linguistic usage. In fact, linguists until quite recently believed that any sentence which was produced ought to be described by a grammar. But now a major reorientation has taken place: it has been realized that speakers’ actual linguistic performance is not a very accurate indication of their underlying linguistic competence. Many features of linguistic performance, many aspects of texts and utterances, have to be discounted when writing a grammar.

From the above discussion, we see that a lot of things will be taken into account in any treatment of English syntax. As we progress in our study, we shall be taking up these issues.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 5

Briefly describe what the linguist does in trying to write the grammar of a language.

4.0 CONCLUSION

In this unit, we discussed the major concerns of the syntax of English – things that are necessary in the knowledge of English syntax. Native speakers know these things unconsciously and the linguist utilizes this knowledge and describes it in the form of rules in writing a grammar of the language.

5.0 SUMMARY

You have learned in this unit:

• What grammar and syntax are;

• What a speaker-hearer knows when he knows a language;

• What grammatical and ungrammatical sentences are; and

• What the linguist does when he writes a grammar of a language.

ANSWER TO SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1

1. A grammar could refer to the linguistic knowledge speakers possess which enables them to communicate in their language; or to a formal, explicit description of a language.

2. The syntactic component of a grammar consists of mechanisms and principles that govern the construction of sentences and that provide a set of syntactic structures that are subject to interpretation by the semantic and phonological components.

ANSWER TO SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2

(a) The speaker-hearer knows:

(i) the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in his language;

(ii) sentences that are not sentences of his language;

(iii) how words are arranged to form sentences in his language;

(iv) that there are an infinite number of sentences in his language – he is not restricted to uttering only sentences he has heard before; he can make up and utter new sentences in his language; and

(v) understands all grammatical sentences of his language.

(b) The knowledge is unconscious.

TUTOR MARKED ASSIGNMENT

1. What are the components of a grammar, and what is the descriptive function of each?

2. Provide reasons for the ungrammaticality of the following sentences:

(a) The boy danced in the sun.

(b) Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

(c) The famgy dompty crumbled upishly.

(d) Angels the saints intercession with priests.

(e) My brother is an only child.

3. The following sentences are ambiguous. Give the two meanings.

(a) Old men and women witnessed the ceremony

(b) He visited the criminal lawyer.

(c) They are moving sidewalks.

(d) Call me a cab.

(e) He decided on the boat.

7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READINGS

Atkinson, Martin; David Kilby and Iggy Roca. (1982). Foundations of

General Linguistics. London: George Allen and Unwin.

Dinneen, Francis, P. (1967). An Introduction to General Linguistics.

New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Lehmann, Winifred P. (1972). Descriptive Linguistics: An Introduction.

New York: Random House.