CAS LX 522 Syntax I

1. CAS LX 522Syntax I Week 3a. Categories, features, natural classes, and morphology.

2. Previously, in LX522… • So, here’s where we were. • We’re trying to characterize our knowledge of syntax, using English speaker’s knowledge of English as a window to the kinds of things we need to describe language. • Words seem to come in categories (N, V, A, P, C, I, PRN, D, …). English treats these differently, so to describe English, our theory needs to treat them differently.

3. Previously, in LX522… • We’ve collected a number of features that seem to make a difference in various ways. • We have the category, e.g., [+N], [+V]. • But we seem to have subcategories too, e.g., [+Pl], [+Common], [+Count]. • These features matter to how we can combine words. Language cares, and so, therefore, do we.

4. The surface • Before going on, let’s take a detour, because if we don’t, things are just going to get confusing. • So far, we have looked at a word, and tried to determine what its relevant features are. • Books [+N, +Count, +Common +Pl]. • Written [+V, +Participle, +Perfect]

5. Where’s the feature? • This is useful in that we get a hint as to what features are required. But consider: • Bill ate lunch. • Bill will eat lunch. • Bill did not eat lunch. • Bill does not eat lunch. • You do not eat lunch. • We do not eat lunch. • What are the features of ate? eat? did? does? do?

6. Why is this so confusing? • So, do seems to be: • [+Pres], and • not [+3, +Sg], and • only shows up in the negative. • Ouch. • That’s rather inelegant. • Here’s the problem: I sat on the bank. I saw the candidate with the binoculars. Visiting relatives can be tedious. • See?

7. We’re going the wrong way • There are two different intents underlying Visiting relatives can be tedious (so I do it as little as possible), and Visiting relatives can be tedious (so I avoid them as often as possible). • They happen to sound the same, but they have a different underlying structure. • In general, what’s unique is the underlying intent/structure, not the pronounced form.

8. Generative grammar • The syntactic system we are going to build is a generative grammar. • It builds up an underlying structure, which is then pronounced. • The two versions of Visiting relatives can be tedious are different sentences. • …But wasn’t our goal to explain how people could tell if sentences they hear are part of their language or not?

9. Judging sentences • The view of sentence judgment we’ll adopt here is basically one of asking oneself: Could I say that sentence? • When listening to somebody, you of course need to decode what that person meant, but it is a process of recovering the underlying form of their utterance.

10. A very, very little bit of French • If you’ve tried to learn any French at all, you’ve come across this phenomenon: • de ‘of’ le ‘the (masculine)’ • à ‘at’ la ‘the (feminine)’ • à la biblioteque ‘to the library (fem)’ • *à le cinéma ‘to the movies (masc)’ • au cinema ‘to the movies (masc)’ • de la mayonnaise ‘of mayonnaise (fem)’ • de le lait of milk (masc) • du lait ‘of milk’ (masc)

11. A very, very little bit of French • This is usually taught as: • au = à + le • du = de + le • If your underlying intent is à ‘at’ + le ‘the’, you pronounce it like au. • So is au a preposition or an article?

12. What does this have to do with eating lunch? • And now we can return to the point: • Bill ate lunch. • Bill eats lunch. • Bill does not eat lunch. • Bill will (not) eat lunch. • What generalizations can we come up with here? How are the features organized in these simple sentences? • Why did I juxtapose à+le=au from French with Bill ate lunch? Where is tense? Where is the verb? What is ate? What does do mean?

13. Falling into place • If we suppose that these sentences all have the same form… Subject Tense/Agreement (Not) Verb Object…things start to look a lot more regular, describable. This is the structure of a sentence. • That Tense+Verb comes out as “Tensed Verb” is a matter of pronunciation. If you separate Tense from the Verb with not, they no longer can combine. In order to pronounce Tense, you insert do.

14. Falling into place • Moving one step closer to syntactic structure: [NP Subject] I (not) V [NP Object] • So [±Past, ±1, ±2, ±Pl] are features of I. • [±1, ±2, ±Pl, ±Common, ±Count, …] are features of N. • [+V] is a feature of V.

15. Those pesky participles • Bill will have been eating lunch • [NP Bill] [I will] [V have] [V been] [V eating] [NP lunch] • will [+Fut] • have [+Vaux] • been [+Vaux, +Participle +Perf] • eating [+V, +Participle, -Perf]

16. Crosscategorial features • Consider what un can attach to. • untie, unfold, unwrap, unpack • unhappy, unfriendly, undead • *uncity, *uncola, *unconvention • *unupon, *unalongside, *unat • Basically, it applies to reversible verbs and adjectives, but not to nouns or prepositions. How can we state that?

17. Crosscategorial features • Suppose that nouns and verbs are the most basic categories. A noun is a noun and not a verb, and verb is a verb and not a noun. • Noun: [+N, -V]. • Verb: [-N, +V]. • A possible conceptual reason to separate nouns and verbs is that verbs are basically predicates— they attribute some property to the noun. Nouns are basically arguments, to be assigned properties by verbs.

18. Crosscategorial features • Looked at this way, adjectives are kind of “verby” in that they are also attributing properties. • It’s hard to make that really precise, but we have a more concrete syntactic similarity between verbs and adjectives too: both can take un-, while nouns and prepositions cannot.

19. Supercategories • Chomsky (1970) proposed that we explain this by supposing that [±N] and [±V] are the two basic features that determine the four lexical categories (N, V, A, P). • N: [+N, -V] V: [-N, +V] • P: [-N, -V] A: [+N, +V] • Given that, what does un attach to?

20. Supercategories • So, un attaches to a [+V] category. It doesn’t care about [±N]. [+V] defines a natural class that language refers to. • Why is A [+V, +N] and P [-V, -N]? • Suppose we had a morpheme that attaches just to V and P, how could we state that? • Do V and P form a natural class too?

21. Russian Case • Other languages can give us evidence of natural classes as well. E.g., Russian nouns (all nouns) are marked for Case (like English pronouns are: me vs. I), but when they are modified by an adjective, the adjective is also marked for case. • What gets marked for Case in Russian?

22. Functional and lexical • That takes care of N, V, A, P, but what about our functional categories? • In fact, the functional categories (C, I, D, PRN) each seem a little like a lexical category. • Auxiliaries seem a lot like verbs (have, be, do), and inflect like verbs do. Could and can, Would and will might be supposed to differ in tense. • Complementizers and infinitival to seem a bit like prepositions (e.g., for, to). • Pronouns are kind of nouny. • Determiners are a bit adjectivey.

23. Auxiliary verbs and verbs • Verbs and auxiliary verbs are subject to some of the same processes. • They inflect for tense, they inflect for subject agreement. • Suggests: They form a natural class. • Suppose there’s a feature (say [+F] for “functional”) that differentiates them. • Both are [+V, -N], but be is [+F], and eat is [-F]. • Thus: [+V, -N] inflects for tense and subject agreement.

24. Auxiliary verbs and I • On the other hand, auxiliary verbs act like elements of category I, appearing in that spot between the Subject and (Not) V. • Auxiliary verbs are [+V, -N, +F]. • Other elements of category I might be like prepositions, e.g., to. If these are “functional prepositions”, then they are [-V, -N, +F]. • Do Auxiliary verbs and to form a natural class?

25. “Grammatical category” • So what, then is a grammatical category? • A grammatical category is a set of elements which have the same value(s) for a given set of grammatical features. It’s really a natural class. • Category labels like “N”, or “Aux” are really just shorthand for feature matrices like [+N, -V, -F], or [-N, +V, +F]. Notationally convenient, but only respected as such by some parts of the grammar.

26. Sentences are made of words? • Bill kicked the pail. • Bill mailed the letter. • Bill did not kick the pail. • Bill did not mail the letter. • Remembering that à+le=au in French, we said that underlyingly, these are: Bill Tense (Not) Verb Object • Is Tense a word?

27. Tense is not a word • In English, past tense is not really a word. • It’s a morpheme. It’s a suffix. Regularly, -ed. • Of course there are lots of special cases (wrote, fed, drew), but these at least all seem to be modifications of the end of the word. • Suppose then, that we have: Bill -ed (not) kick the pail. • Of course, you can’t pronounce an affix. An definitional property of an affix is that it attaches to a word (of a particular category: past tense -ed is a verbalaffix). If forced to pronounce -ed, you insert a meaningless verb to attach it to (do).

28. Bill will kick the pail • Actually, tense can be a word, if it’s the future tense will. • Note: If would is the past tense of will, then it is probably not correct to think of will as being simply a future marker. Rather, it’s one of the modals, an “unrealized” marker, which makes sense as long as time goes invariably forward, as it seems to. Many people nevertheless consider will to be the same category of thing as -ed, so we will for now ignore this complication, since it matters little to what we’re going to do.

29. Sentences are made of morphemes • We will have more success if we assume that sentences are made of things that can be smaller than words. • Here’s another example: Bill’s pail. • What is that ‘s there? What does it mean?

30. Possessive ’s • Is ’s a suffix? • The man from Australia’s hat. • The man who left’s hat. • What does ’s attach to? • The possessive ’s is not really an affix, but it’s not really a word either. • These things usually go by the name clitic. They’re like a little word that leans on a nearby word.

31. Clitics • Plenty of languages have clitics. English has a few. • Isn’t that Bill’s hat? • Yes, that’s Bill’s hat. • Wouldn’t you like a hat like Bill’s? • French (again) has them: je pars, *je, moi. • Essentially, we want to treat clitics, affixes, and words on a par in the underlying structure— they differ in pronunciation.

32. Moral: Underlying ≠ Surface • The larger point here is that sentences have two forms: the underlying form (which is our primary concern) and the surface form (which is really where our data comes from). • We can deduce things about the structure of the underlying form from the surface form, and by positing abstract elements like affixes, clitics, features, we can describe in a concise (and predictive) manner what things Language allows.

33. The morphology of be • I was sleepy. • You are sleepy. • We are sleepy. • What features does the auxiliary be have (among [±1, ±2, ±Pl, ±Past])? • If be has [-1, -2, -Pl, -Past], how is it pronounced? And [-1, -2, +Pl, +Past]?

34. The morphology of be • Consider the whole set. There are only five different pronunciations: am, are, is, was, were. How can we write a set of feature-based pronunciation rules to describe this?

35. The morphology of be • Try it in words first. When is the [-Past] pronounced Is? Am? Are?

36. The morphology of be • [-Past, -1, -2, -Pl] = is. • [-Past, +1, -Pl] = am. • [-Past] = are.

37. The morphology of be Morphology often has thischaracter, where the pronunciationrules have a “specific case” and a“general case” if the specific casedoes not apply. • [-Past, -1, -2, -Pl] = is. • [-Past, +1, -Pl] = am. • [-Past] = are.

38. The morphology of be • [-Past, -1, -2, -Pl] = is. • [-Past, +1, -Pl] = am. • [-Past] = are. Ok, your turn.What’s the rest?

39. The morphology of be • [-Past, -1, -2, -Pl] = is. [+Past] = were • [-Past, +1, -Pl] = am. [ ] = are • [+Past, -2, -Pl] = was.

40. The morphology of be • Ok, let’s test it out. • [-Past, -1, -2, -Pl] = is. [+Past] = were • [-Past, +1, -Pl] = am. [ ] = are • [+Past, -2, -Pl] = was. • I [+1, -2, -Pl, -Past, -N, +V, +F] ecstatic. • They [-1, -2, +Pl, +Past, -N, +V, +F] leaving. • Y’all [-1, +2, +Pl, -Past, -N, +V, +F] late.

41. Separating the underlying from the pronounced • This is a worthwhile point to remember. There is an underlying feature bundle, the auxiliary is an auxiliary be, with a tense, and some agreement features. We know the rules about pronouncing those features. Sometimes two feature bundles end up being pronounced in the same way. • In a real sense, the are in You are happy and the are in We are happy are different words, that just happen to be pronounced the same way. But they could have been pronounced distinctly.

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