1.1 Language, Grammar and Linguistic Theory

1.2.1 The Lexicon

The first assumption we will make is that one of the things that a speaker of a language knows is facts about words. We know, for instance, how a given word is pronounced, what it means and where we can put it in a sentence with respect to other words. To take an example, the English word cat is known to be pronounced [k?t], is known to mean ‘a small, domesticated animal of meagre intelligence that says meow’ and is known to be able to fit into the marked slots in sentences (2), but not in those marked in (3):

1.2.1 The Lexicon

It is obvious that this knowledge is not predictable from anything. There is no reason why the object that we call a cat should be called a cat, as witnessed by the fact that other languages do not use this word to refer to the same object (e.g. macska (Hungarian), chat (French), Katze (German), gato (Spanish), quatus (Maltese) kot (Russian), kissa (Finnish), neko (Japanese), mao (Chinese), paka (Swahili)). Moreover, there is nothing about the pronunciation [k?t] that means that it must refer to this object: one can imagine a language in which the word pronounced [k?t] is used for almost anything else. This kind of linguistic knowledge is not ‘rule governed’, but is just arbitrary facts about particular languages.

1.2.1 The Lexicon

Part of linguistic knowledge, therefore, is a matter of knowing brute fact. For each and every word of the language we speak it must be the case that we know how they are pronounced and what they mean. But this is different from our knowledge of sentences. For one thing, there are only a finite number of words in any given language and each speaker will normally operate with only a proportion of the total set of words that may be considered to belong to the language. Therefore, it is not problematic to assume that knowledge of words is just simply stored in our heads. Moreover, although it is possible, indeed it is fairly common, for new words to enter a language, it is usually impossible to know what a new word might mean without explicitly being told. For example, unless you had been told, it is not possible to know that the word wuthering found in the title of the novel by Emily Brontë is a Yorkshire word referring to the noise that a strong wind makes. With sentences, on the other hand, we know what they mean on first hearing without prior explanation. Thus, knowledge of words and knowledge of sentences seem to be two different things: knowledge of words is brute knowledge while knowledge of sentences involves knowing a system that enables us to produce and understand an infinite number of them (an I-language). Clearly, part of knowing what a sentence means involves knowing what the words that constitute it mean, but this is not everything: the meanings of the words three, two, dogs, cats, and bit simply do not add up to the meaning of the sentence three dogs bit two cats (if you think about it this sentence might mean that anything between two and six cats got bitten, which is not predictable from the meaning of the words).

1.2.2 Categories

There is something odd about both these set of sentences, but note that they do not have the same status. The sentences in (5), while it is difficult to envisage how they could be used, are not as weird as those in (6). Given that neither sets of sentences make much sense, this does not seem to be a fact about the meanings of the words involved. There is something else involved. It seems that some words have something in common with each other and that they differ from other words in the same way. Hence, the set of words in a language is not one big homogenous set, but consists of groupings of words that cluster together. We call these groups word categories. Some well known categories are listed below:

1.2.4 Distribution

Let us turn now to the observations made in (2) and (3). There we observed that there are certain positions in a sentence that some words can occupy and other words cannot. Clearly, this is determined by category. This is perhaps the most basic point of word categories as far as syntax is concerned. The grammar of a language determines how we construct the expressions of the language. The grammar, however, does not refer to the individual words of the lexicon, telling us, for example, that the word cat goes in position X in expression Y. Such a system would not be able to produce an indefinite number of sentences as there would have to be such a rule for every expression of the language. Instead, the grammar defines the set of possible positions for word categories, hence allowing the construction of numerous expressions from a small number of grammatical principles. The question of how these positions are defined is mostly what this book is about, but for now, for illustrative purposes only, let us pretend that English has a rule that says that a sentence can be formed by putting a noun in front of a verb. This rule then tells us that the expressions in (15) are grammatical and those in (16) are not:

1.3 A Typology of Word Categories

Having introduced some of the basic concepts, let us now turn to look at what categories we need to refer to in the description of a language like English. In generative linguistics it is often seen as a positive aim to keep basic theoretical equipment to a bare minimum and not to expand these unnecessarily. This can be seen in the standard approach to word categories in terms of the attempt to keep these to as small a number as possible. In the present book we will mainly be concerned with eight basic categories. These come in two general types: thematic categories and functional categories. In the thematic categories we have verbs (V), nouns (N), adjectives (A) and prepositions (P) and in the functional categories there are inflections (I), determiners (D), degree adverbs (Deg) and complementisers (C). Thus we have the following classification system:

1.3.4.1 Verbs

Some languages show a good deal more agreement phenomena than English. Consider the Hungarian paradigm:

2.1.1 The building blocks of sentences

So far we have been discussing the properties of words and have said hardly anything about larger units of language such as sentences. A sentence is obviously made up of a number of words, but as we pointed out in the previous chapter, it is not true that sentences are formed simply by putting a row of words together. If this were so then we might expect positions in a sentence to be identifiable numerically, but this is not so:

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.

2.3.2 Movement

There are many instances of movements to be found in language. One of the most obvious is found in certain questions. Many English questions involve a word like which, what, where, why, etc. at the beginning of the sentence. However, these words have a dual function, being associated with some function within the clause as well as indicating the interrogative status of the clause by appearing at its beginning. For example, in the following the word what is interpreted not only as an interrogative but also as the object of the sentence:

2.3.3 Coordination

There are other phenomena besides distribution that can also be used to support structural analyses. One of these involves coordination. This is a device used in language to take two elements and put them together to form a single element. This coordinated element then acts like the two coordinated elements would have individually. For example, we can take two nouns, say Bill and Ben, and we can coordinate them into a single element Bill and Ben. This coordinated element behaves exactly like each of the nouns in that it can appear as subject, object, object of a preposition or topic in a sentence:

3.1.1 Rewrite rules and some terminology

We will start by looking at some general principles that determine the basic structure of phrases and sentences. The perspective we will present claims that these principles are simple because there are a very small number of them that apply to all structures. In fact this theory claims there to be at most three different rules which determine the nature of all structures in a language. These can be stated as follows:

3.1.1 Rewrite rules and some terminology

Again there are several things to note about this structure. Once more, there are two immediate constituents of the phrase. The specifier, a phrase of any category, precedes the X', the constituent just discussed containing the head and the complement. Again the ordering of these two constituents is language dependent: specifiers precede X's in English, but this is not necessarily so in all languages. Specifiers are a little more difficult to exemplify than complements due to complications that we have yet to discuss. However, the following are fairly straightforward cases:

3.1.2 Endocentricity

Moreover, the X-bar rules in (1) rule out another possibility if we assume that these are the only rules determining structure. While it might not make much sense to have a phrase with a head of a different category, the idea of a phrase that simply lacks a head is not so absurd. There is a traditional distinction made between endocentric and exocentric language elements. An endocentric phrase gets its properties from an element that it contains and hence this element can function by itself as the whole phrase. For example:

3.1.2 Endocentricity

There is reason to believe that language makes much use of unpronounced elements that are nonetheless present grammatically and we will see many examples of such things in the following pages. One argument to support the assumption of an unpronounced subject in (13) comes from observations concerning the behaviour of reflexive pronouns such as himself. Unlike other pronouns, reflexives must refer to something else in the same sentence:

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.

3.2.1 Move α

As we saw in the previous section grammatical processes should be stated as simply and generally as possible if we are to provide a theory that can cover the basic fact of language learnability. This would argue against an approach to movement in which we provide many movement rules designed to capture the specific facts about individual movements. Instead we should follow the example of the previous section and provide a small number of general rules which have a wide applicability.

4.2.2 The Specifier of the DP

To answer this question we first have to consider another property of the possessor. Pre-nominally, possessors are marked by the element ‘’s’. What is this morpheme? Some have suggested that it is the marker of genitive Case born by the possessor. However, if this is a Case marker, it is a very strange one for at least two reasons. First it is a Case marker in a language which does not usually mark Case on its nominal elements. English only normally marks Case on its pronouns and noun forms are typically invariant no matter what Case position they occupy. Yet if we take ‘’s’ to be a marker of genitive Case we have to assume that nominals are marked for this Case. The other strange thing about this morpheme seen as a marker of Case is that it does not behave anything like a Case morpheme in any other language. Note that it does not attach itself to the noun, but to the last element in the whole DP:

5.2.3.2 Light verbs and ergatives

The disadvantages of this analysis are: i) there is an empty light verb and ii) the wrong word order is predicted. The supposition of the empty verb is, of course, not a problem in itself. We have seen a number of instances of empty categories that are well justified and enable us to provide accounts for phenomena that would otherwise be mysterious. As long as we can independently justify the assumption of an empty element, given that language apparently makes use of such things, there is no problem in the assumption itself. There is both semantic and syntactic evidence of the existence of the empty light verb. We will return to the latter, but the semantic evidence is fairly obvious: the structure is interpreted as a causative and the presence of this meaning justifies the assumption of a light verb which provides it. Similarly, the presence of a ‘causer’ argument justifies the assumption of a predicate which assigns the relevant Θ-role. As there is no such visible predicate which can do such things in (48b) our conclusion is that this predicate is ‘invisible’.

5.2.4.4 Multiple light verbs

Multiple light verbs are not unheard of in languages which make more of an overt use of them than English. Consider the following Urdu example:

5.2.5 Intransitive verbs

This is quite mysterious given our previous analysis of the passive. However, it should be noted that the inability to passivise intransitives is a language particular fact and not a universal truth about intransitives. German intransitive verbs, for example, can passivise:

5.2.5 Intransitive verbs

This at least shows that in principle passivisation is not incompatible with intransitives and that the reason why intransitives cannot passivise in English must therefore be due to some other particular property of the language. Note that unaccusatives do not passivise in any language:

6.1 The structure of IP

To see the advantage of this analysis, consider what happens if we do not assume that the inflectional element is the head of the clause. English is often described as an SVO language, based on a way of classifying languages in accordance with the ‘typical’ ordering of the major elements of the sentence (subject, verb and object). Without X-bar theory and the notions of head, complement and specifier, however, this is just a description of the facts which tells us nothing beyond what can already be observed. Assuming X-bar theory we have a way of accounting for word order patterns by using general statements about the relationships between elements in an X-bar structure and so this is a step in the right direction. However, if we do not assume that the inflection is a head, it is not easy to think of how we can use X-bar generalisations to account for the basic word order of English. This is especially so if we take the traditional view that sentences are exocentric and therefore stand outside of the set of facts that X-bar theory can account for. Only if we assume that sentences are endocentric can X-bar generalisations be used to account for word order facts concerning sentences.

6.2.2 Do-insertion

Note that the inability of the negative to support the inflections is a language specific property and there are languages where this is exactly what happens. For example, Finnish negation shows the same agreement morphemes as its verbs do and in the presence of negation the verb does not inflect for agreement:

6.2.2 Do-insertion

Because of its behaviour, the Finnish negative element is often called the negative auxiliary or even a negative verb. Moreover, in other languages the negative element surfaces as a bound morpheme on the verb, a situation very similar to the analysis we have given the aspectual markers in English. This is exemplified by the following Choctaw and Japanese sentences:

6.2.3 Tense and Agreement

Perhaps, then, what ‘inflection’ is, is agreement and this is expressed either as a morpheme dependent on properties of the subject, or a modal. Of course in English the visible tense and agreement morphemes are expressed as a single form, s. But in many languages tense and agreement are expressed as separate morphemes, as they are in Hungarian:

7.3.4 The interaction between wh-movement and inversion

We know that the complementiser is the head of the CP and that this provides the relevant features for the force interpretation of the sentence. Some complementisers are interrogative and some are declarative. Thus, when the clause is interrogative, presumably it has an interrogative complementiser and vice versa if the clause is declarative. In yes–no questions, therefore, we might expect the clause to have an interrogative complementiser. As we can see no complementiser in such sentences, we must assume it to be abstract. The assumption of such an element is supported by the fact that in some languages a morpheme with exactly these properties appears overtly. For example, in Japanese, a yes–no question is marked by the appearance of the morpheme ka at the end of the clause. Thus, the difference between (43a) and (43b) is that the first is declarative and the second interrogative:

7.3.4 The interaction between wh-movement and inversion

Yet Old English did not have main sentences that started with complementisers, indicating that whether never was a complementiser even in former stages of the language.

8.2.2 Control

However, even describing the conditions under which PRO may have arbitrary reference is a complex business, let alone explaining why the language works like this. Thus we will not delve too deeply into this issue. One point of interest is the fact that in those instances where PRO may have arbitrary reference it seems that it has more referential freedom in general in that it is possible for it to have an antecedent, and therefore a more specific reference, and this antecedent may be in positions which are not normally accessible for pronouns to take their reference from. For example, consider the following: