Mango Languages

The What and Who of Headedness

Hello again! My last syntax blog left off in the middle of a discussion of how some words draw other words to them in order to form a more complete thought. Recall the verb ate.  Ate has to draw to it “the someone” who did the eating and “the something” that was eaten, in order to be a complete thought. You may wonder why ate is the element that draws the others to it.  Well, ate, as we discussed before, describes a relationship between something and someone, that is, something was eaten by someone.  Apple, on the other hand, does not describe a relationship or anything for that matter.  Apple is a just a noun.  We could say, “The apple is red” or “I ate the apple.” The same logic applies to any other noun.

We also briefly discussed the definite article the and how it also draws other elements to it in order to be complete. The begs the question, “The what?” Similar to how ate begs the question, “Who/What ate what?”  I hope this better clarifies why certain types of words do the drawing, or assigning of thematic roles, while others do not.  Remember, thematic roles are simple: the jobs that need to be filled by some word in order for the predicate, or word/phrase doing the assigning, to be a more complete thought.

In these syntax blogs, we have determined that some groups of words belong together, and we call these groups constituents. We have explored that within constituents there are even smaller groups referred to as phrases.  I mentioned the names of some phrases–determiner phrases, verb phrases, etc.–and I also briefly mentioned that phrases are given different titles depending on the “head” of the group. So, we now return to this question: How do we determine the head of a phrase?  The head of a phrase is the element that assigns thematic roles, or selects other words to complete it, and consequently causes movement of these words to merge with it. This is why in the phrase “ate the apple,” ate is the head.  Ate selected the argument “the apple.” Or, said in a different way, ate assigned a thematic role to “the apple.” Additionally, the is the head of the phrase “the apple” because it selected its argument,  apple.

Can you figure out which is the head of the following phrases: Cindy’s mother; blue house; small annoying child?

“Syntax – It’s not another tax on beer?” Continued…

In my last blog I began to delve in to the wonderful world of Syntax. I looked at the linguist definition of a sentence and more importantly the abstract idea of the proposition. I also briefly touched on word order as it is involved in sentence grammaticality. So from my previous blog we can now make two statements: 1) Sentences are abstract mental objects and, 2) word order is somehow involved in the “grammaticality” of sentences. However, we have not yet determined what role word-order plays in grammar. We will begin to look at that in this blog entry.

In her entry, Did you know languages have constituents?, my colleague briefly touched on an important component of Syntax: constituents. Constituents are a group of words which have an internal coherence. That is, they belong together. For example, the words in the phrase ‘that glass of milk‘ seem to belong to each other, as do, ‘the black wooden chair‘, ‘the big red odd shaped container’, etc. We know this because in a complete sentence all of these phrases can be replaced with one little word: it. However, compare those “constituents” to these segments: ‘the table over’, ‘wooden chair by’, and ‘big red odd‘. In contrast these segments don’t seem to belong together. They most certainly cannot be replaced in the sentences with any one word.

So now we have determined that some groups of words belong together and we call these groups constituents. Within constituents there are even smaller groups. These groups are given different titles depending on the “head” of the group. (I will explain headedness in a later blog). Some of these are: determiner phrases (DP) (sometimes referred to as noun phrases, NP), prepositional phrases (PP), adjective phrases (AdjP), adverb phrases (AP) and, verb phrases (VP). An example of a determiner phrase (DP) is ‘the container’. However, ‘the big red oddly shaped container‘ is also a DP, only a larger one also containing an adjective phrases (AdjP): big red oddly shaped container. Additionally, ‘the apple‘ is also a determiner phrase. However, ‘ate the apple‘, is a verb phrase (VP) that also contains a determiner phrase, ‘the apple‘.

Can you get creative and come up with a large phrase that contains more than one other additional phrase? What are the constituents in the phrase?

Syntax – It’s not another tax on beer?

If you follow my blog you will know that I briefly touched on syntax once before. The Linguistic Elephant in the Room: Syntax (contrary to what it sounds like, it is not an increase in the price of beer or gambling) is a subfield of linguistics which focuses mainly on the grammar of language.  This blog is just a brief introduction to some syntactic concepts.  I will follow up with additional blogs to build and expand on the concepts presented here and /or introduce additional ones.

An important concept to understand in the beginning of a look at syntax is the idea of “the sentence.”  You may think that a complete uttered or written thought is a sentence.  In part you are correct.  However, in the field of syntax the complete thought is given the term proposition, the written or spoken sentence is referred to as “the utterance.”  The actual sentence is a bit more abstract.  The “sentence” is the linguistic form of the utterance.   For example, I can say on Tuesday, “It’s a nice day today.”  And, you may use the same utterance on Wednesday.  Therefore, these two utterances have different propositional meanings; one being that Tuesday is a nice day, and the other, that Wednesday is a nice day.  However, both propositions used the same sentence or linguistic form.  However, what if we both utter the same propositional meaning, i.e., “Today is a nice day” (today being Tuesday), but you utter this in English and I utter the same proposition but in Spanish? Clearly, the form of these utterances will be different.  Therefore, we are using different sentences to express the same propositional meaning.

So the form we give to propositions is important, but what about the form?  What makes one form acceptable and another not in a given language? You may think of word order.  And, again this is partly correct. See the examples below:

(1) I picked up the mess Erik made with the cookies and juice you put out.
(2) I picked the mess Erik made with the cookies and juice you put out up.
Example (2) sounds awkward.  This may lead you to say, that the words ‘pick’ and ‘up’ seem to belong together.  However, now look at the following example:
(3) I picked the mess up.

And what about the following:
(4) I picked up the mess.
(5) I picked it up.
(6) *I picked up it.

So, it’s more than just whether ‘pick’ and ‘up’ come together in the sentence. Can you think of any other examples similar to the ones above?

The Linguistic Elephant in the Room

There is a famous parable of six blind men and an elephant that originated from India. In one version of the story the six blind men were brought together and asked to determine what an elephant looked like by feeling different parts of the elephant’s body. The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a snake; the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a fan; the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a spear.

The field of Linguistics has its own elephant- human language. Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Similar to the blind men, linguists examine different areas of language and therefore describe language in different ways.
1. Syntax (contrary to what it sounds like, it is not an increase in the price of beer or gambling) is a subfield of linguistics which focuses mainly on the grammar of language. Syntacticians study the structure of sentences and try to answer the question, “What are the underlying rules and principles that govern the construction of sentences?”
2. While syntax studies the structure of sentences, morphology focuses on the structure of words.
3. Phonology is another subfield of linguistics. Phonology analyses the way sounds function in languages.
4. Related to phonology is another subfield of linguistics, phonetics. However, phonetics does not concentrate on the combination or function of sounds but rather on the actual production or articulation and physical properties of all possible human speech sounds.
5. Another perspective of language is the relationship between words and meaning. This is the focus of semantics, another branch of linguistics. Yet other linguists examine language as it affects and is affected by social relations. This perspective is referred to as sociolinguistics. There are still even more branches of linguistics, i.e., psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, neurolinguistics, etc.

So you see, there are many different perspectives and ways to describe language. Many times we think of human language as simple and easy – pretty much everyone speaks their native tongue by around age three without having ever been read a grammar book or been explicitly taught the rules of sound production and function, or of word and sentence structure. However, the reality is that human language is a huge complex “elephant” and viewing its different parts and from different perspectives has been the direction taken in the field of linguistics. But, this does not mean that these branches are in complete disagreement about what language is or the principles that govern its creation, acquisition or usage. Rather, each subfield gives a different description because it focuses on a different part of the “elephant”. In order to best describe human language linguists analyze its different parts but must not forget the whole – that language isn’t just the long tusk, flat ear, or coiled trunk. It’s the whole elephant.