Basic English Syntax with Exercises

E-language

1.1 Language, Grammar and Linguistic Theory

So, presumably, what we have in our heads is a (finite) set of rules which tell us how to recognise the infinite number of expressions that constitute the language that we speak. We might refer to this set of rules as a grammar, though there are some linguists who would like to separate the actual set of rules existing inside a speaker’s head from the linguist’s guess of what these rules are. To these linguists a grammar is a linguistic hypothesis (to use a more impressive term than ‘guess’) and what is inside the speaker’s head IS language, i.e. the object of study for linguistics. We can distinguish two notions of language from this perspective: the language which is internal to the mind, call it I-language, which consists of a finite system and is what linguists try to model with grammars; and the language which is external to the speaker, E-language, which is the infinite set of expressions defined by the I-language that linguists take data from when formulating their grammars. We can envisage this as the following:

2.1.1 The building blocks of sentences

Potentially, this rhyme might go on forever, limited only by the parent’s imagination and the fact that their children will one day grow up and want to listen to pop music instead. One might argue that no one could ever produce an infinitely long sentence as they would forget what they were saying after a relatively short time, and for the same reason no one would be able to understand it. Furthermore, they would die before they got to the end of it. Admittedly it would be a fairly pointless thing to do, but that is not the issue. Facts about people’s imagination, their likes and dislikes, their attention spans and even their mortality have nothing to do with the language system. This is, as we have pointed out, a set of rules that enables us to produce and understand the linguistic expressions that make up an E-language.

2.1.1 The building blocks of sentences

This rule defines sentences in terms of sentences and so the definition refers to what is being defined. A rule that does this is known as recursive, and recursive rules have exactly the property that we want to be able to define human languages. Recall from the discussion in Chapter 1, human languages are limitless and yet they must be defined by a finite set of rules as the human head can only store a finite amount of information. If I-languages are made up of recursive rules, then a finite set of these will be capable of defining an infinite number of expressions that make up an E-language.

3.1.2 Endocentricity

Therefore it would appear that clauses are exocentric constructions, having no heads, and as such stand outside of the X-bar system. Later in this book, we will challenge this traditional conclusion and claim that clauses do indeed have heads, though the head is neither the subject nor the VP. From this perspective, X-bar theory is a completely general theory applying to all constructions of the language and given that X-bar theory consists of just three rules it does indeed seem that I-language principles are a lot simpler than observation of E-language phenomena would tend to suggest.