CHAPTER 1: GRAMMAR

Traditional Grammar

Within Traditional Grammar, the syntax of a language is described in terms of a taxonomy (a

classificatory list) of the range of different types of syntactic structures found in the language.
Phrases and sentences are built up of a series of constituents (syntactic units), each of which
belongs to a specific grammatical category and serves a specific grammatical function. The task of
the linguist is to identify each of the constituents in the sentence, and (for each constituent) to say
which category it belongs to and what function it serves. In TG, words are assigned to grammatical
categories on the basis of their semantic properties (meaning), morphological properties (the range
of different forms they have), and syntactic properties (word-order properties relating to the
positions they can occupy within a sentence)

Universal Grammar

For Chomsky, the goal of the linguist is to determine what it is native speakers know about their
native language which enables them to speak and understand the language. The study of language is
part of the wider study of cognition.
Native speakers know how to combine words together to form expressions in their language and
they also know how to interpret expressions. However, it is important to emphasize that this
grammatical knowledge of how to form and interpret expressions in your native language is tacit
(subconscious) rather than explicit. Human beings have no conscious awareness of the process
involved in speaking and understanding their native language. Native speakers have grammatical
competence in their native language.

Competence: it is the native speaker’s tacit knowledge of his/her language.

Performance: the actual use of language in concrete situations. Performance is an imperfect
reflection of competence.
Misproductions and misinterpretations are performance errors, attributable to a variety of
performance factors like tiredness, boredom, drunkenness, drugs, external distractions and so forth.

Grammar is concerned with competence rather than performance.

When we study the grammatical competence of a native speaker of a language like English we are
studying a cognitive system internalised within the brain/mind of native speakers of English; our
ultimate goal in studying competence is to characterize the nature of the internalised linguistic
system or I-language.
Chomsky’s ultimate goal is to devise a theory of Universal Grammar/ UG which generalises from the
grammar of particular I-languages to the grammar of all possible natural (human) languages. He
defines UG as “the theory of human I-languages...that identifies the I-languages that are humanly
accessible under normal conditions”.
Defining characteristics of the grammars of human I-languages

There are a number of criteria of adequacy which a theory of Universal Grammar must satisfy.

Universality: a theory of UG must supply us with the tools needed to provide a descriptively
adequate grammar for any and every human I-language

Explanatory Adequacy: Since the ultimate goal of any theory is explanation, it is not enough for a
theory of Universal Grammar simply to list sets of universal properties of natural language
grammars; on the contrary, a theory of UG must seek to explain the relevant properties.

Constrained: The descriptive apparatus which our theory of Universal Grammar allows us to make
use of in devising natural language grammars must not be so powerful that it can be used to
describe not only natural languages, but also computer languages or animal communication
systems.

Minimalism: Linguistic theory should provide grammars which make use of the minimal theoretical
apparatus required: in other words, grammars should be as simple as possible.

Learnability: A theory must provide grammars which are learnable by young children in a short
period of time.

The Language Faculty

A theory of language acquisition is concerned with the question of how children acquire grammars
of their native languages. Children generally produce their first recognisable word by the age of 12
months. For the next 6 months or so, there is little apparent evidence of grammatical development
in their speech production, although the child’s productive vocabulary typically increases by about 5
words a month until it reaches around 30 words at age 18 months. During the single-word stage, it is
difficult to find any clear evidence of the acquisition of grammar.
At around the age of 18 months we find the first visible signs of the acquisition of grammar: children
start to make productive use of inflections (e.g. plurals and inflected verb forms), and similarly start
to produce elementary two- and three- word utterances.
By the age of around 30 months they have typically acquired most of the inflections and core
grammatical constructions used in English.
The uniformity and rapidity in the pattern of children’s linguistic development can be accounted for
if we posit that the course of acquisition is determined by a biologically endowed innate Language
Faculty within the brain, which provides children with a genetically transmitted algorithm (a set of
procedures) for developing a grammar, on the basis of their linguistic experience. This is known as
the Innateness Hypothesis.

 Language Acquisition is an ability which all humans possess, entirely independently of their
general intelligence.
 The apparent uniformity in the types of grammar developed by different speakers of the
same language suggests that children have genetic guidance in the task of constructing a
grammar of their native language.
 The rapidity of acquisition (once the grammar spurt has started) also points to genetic
guidance in grammar construction.
  What makes the uniformity and rapidity of acquisition even more remarkable is the fact that
the child’s linguistic experience is often degenerate, since it is based on the linguistic
performance of adult speakers, and this may be a poor reflection of their competence.
 Language acquisition is an entirely subconscious and involuntary activity (in the sense that
you cannot consciously choose whether or not to acquire your native language); it is also an
activity which is largely unguided.
 The ability to acquire a native language is part of our genetic endowment – just like the
ability to learn to walk.
 Research has suggested that there is a critical period for the acquisition of syntax. The
language acquisition programme is switched off at the onset of puberty.

Principles of Universal Grammar

The Language Faculty must incorporate a theory of UG which enables the child to develop a
grammar of any natural language on the basis of suitable linguistic experience of the language (i.e.
sufficient speech input).
If the acquisition of grammatical competence is indeed controlled by a genetically endowed
language faculty incorporating a theory of UG, then it follows that certain aspects of child (and adult)
competence are known without experience, and hence must be part of the genetic information
about language with which we are biologically endowed at birth. Such aspects of language would not
have to be learned, precisely because they form part of the child’s genetic inheritance (principles). A
theory of grammar which posits that grammatical operations are constrained by innate principles of
UG offers the important advantage that it minimises the burden of grammatical learning imposed on
the child.

Parameters

Although there are universal principles which determine the broad outlines of the grammar of
natural languages, there also seem to be language-particular aspects of grammar which children
have to learn as part of the task of acquiring their native language. Grammatical learning is not going
to involve those aspects of grammar which are determined by universal (hence innate) grammatical
operations and principles. Rather, grammatical learning will be limited to those parameters
(dimensions or aspects) of grammar which are subject to language-particular variation (e.g. null-
subject parameter, wh-parameter, head-position parameter). All parameters are binary in choice.
The acquisition of grammar involves the twin tasks of lexical learning and parameter-setting.

Evidence used to set parameters

Positive Evidence: It comprises a set of observed expressions illustrating a particular phenomenon.

Negative Evidence: It may be of two kinds – direct and indirect

Direct Negative Evidence: It might come from the correction of children’s errors by other
speakers of the language. However, correction plays a fairly insignificant role in language
acquisition, for two reasons. First, correction is relatively infrequent: adults simply don’t
correct all the errors children make. Secondly, children are notoriously unresponsive to
correction.
Direct negative Evidence might also take the form of self-correction by other speakers.
However, self-correction is arguably too infrequent a phenomenon to play a major role in
the acquisition process.
Indirect Negative Evidence: It refers to the evidence relating to the non-occurrence of
certain types of structure. Although it may seem natural to suppose that indirect negative
evidence plays some role in the acquisition process, there are potential Learnability
problems posed by any such claims. After all, the fact that a given construction does not
occur in a given chunk of the child’s experience does not provide conclusive evidence that
the structure is ungrammatical. Given the assumption that parameters are binary and single-
valued, negative evidence becomes entirely unnecessary. Once the child has positive
evidence of a certain structure, he/she can set that parameter (No-Negative-Evidence
Hypothesis)
 CHAPTER 2: WORDS

Morphological evidence may sometimes be inconclusive, and has to be checked against syntactic
evidence. A useful syntactic test is substitution: for example, if a morphologically indeterminate
word can be substituted by a regular noun wherever it occurs, then the relevant word has the same
categorical status as the substitute word which can replace it, and so is a noun.

Determiners and Quantifiers vs. Adjectives

One reason for not subsuming determiners/quantifiers within the category of adjectives is that they
are syntactically distinct from adjectives in a variety of ways
 Adjectives can be iteratively stacked in front of a noun they modify, in the sense that you
can go on putting more and more adjectives in front of a given noun (handsome strangers,
dark handsome strangers, tall dark handsome strangers, sensitive tall dark handsome
strangers, etc). By contrast, neither determiners nor quantifiers can be stacked in this way
(so that although we can have a quantifier + determiner + noun expression like both the
twins, we cannot have a multiple determiner or quantifier expression.
 Determiners, quantifiers and adjectives can be used together to modify a noun, but when
they do so, any determiner or quantifier modifying the noun has to precede any adjective(s)
modifying the noun.
 A further difference between det/quantifiers and adjectives can be illustrated in relation to
what speaker B can – and cannot – reply in the following dialogue:
o What are you looking for?
o *chair/*comfortable chair/ A chair/ Another Chair / The chair / That Chair.
 A more general property which differentiates determiners/quantifiers from adjectives is that
determiners/quantifiers tend to be restricted to modifying nouns which have specific
number (or countability) properties. For example, a modifies a singular count noun, much
modifies a (singular) mass noun, several modifies a plural count noun, more modifies either
a plural count or a (singular) mass noun. By contrast, typical adjectives can generally be used
to modify all three types of noun

Pronouns

Traditional grammars posit a category pronoun to denote a class of words which are said to stand in
the place of or refer back to noun expressions. However, there are reasons to think that there are a
number of different types of pronouns.

Pronominal Nouns (N-pronoun)

John has a red car and Jim has a blue one.
I’ll take the green apples if you haven’t got any red ones.

Prenominal Quantifier Pronominal Quantifiers (Q-Pronouns)

All guests are welcome All are welcome
Many miners died in the accident Many died in the accident
Several protesters were arrested Several were arrested
Each son was envious of the other Each was envious of the other
I don’t have any cigarettes I don’t have any
We have no bananas We have none

Other Q-pronouns:

What have you been doing?

Which did you choose?
Who is she talking to?

Interrogative quantifiers:

Which books?
What idea?

Prenominal Determiners Pronominal Determiners (D-pronouns)

I prefer this tie I prefer this
I haven’t read that book I haven’t read that
I don’t particularly like these hats I don’t particularly like these
Have you already paid for those items? Have you already paid for those?

A further type of pronoun posited in traditional grammar are so-called personal pronouns. These
are called personal pronouns not because they denote people (the pronoun it is not normally used
to denote a person), but rather because they encode the grammatical property of person.
Personal pronouns differ morphologically from nouns and other pronouns in modern English in that
they generally have (partially) distinct nominative, accusative and genitive case forms, whereas
nouns have a common nominative/accusative form and a distinct genitive ‘s form.
Personal pronouns encode the grammatical properties of person, number, gender and case.
What grammatical category do personal pronouns belong to? D-Pronouns

[We republicans] don’t trust [you democrats] → Pre nominal determiners

[We] don’t trust [you] → Pronominal determiners.

Although the D-pronoun analysis has become the standard analysis of personal pronouns over the
past three decades, it is not entirely without positing any problems. For example, a typical D-
pronoun like these/those can be premodified by the universal quantifier all, but a personal pronoun
like they cannot:

All these are broken

All those are broken
*All they are broken.
Auxiliaries

Traditional grammarians use this term to denote a special class of items which once functioned
simply as verbs, but in the course of the evolution of the English language have become sufficiently
distinct from main verbs that they are now regarded as belonging to a different category of
auxiliary.
Auxiliaries differ from main verbs in a number of ways. Whereas a typical main verb like “want” may
take a range of different types of complement, auxiliaries typically allow only a verb expression as
their complement, and have the semantic function of making grammatical properties associated
with the relevant verbs, such as tense, aspect, voice or mood.

There are clear syntactic differences between auxiliaries and verbs:

 Auxiliaries can undergo inversion (and thereby be moved into pre-subject position) in
questions. By contrast, typical verbs do not themselves permit inversion, but rather require
what is traditionally called do-support.
 Auxiliaries can generally be directly negated by a following not (which can usually attach to
the auxiliary in the guise of its contracted form n’t. By contrast, verbs cannot themselves be
negated by not/n’t, but require indirect negation through the use of Do-support.
 Auxiliaries can appear in sentence-final tags. In contrast, verbs can’t themselves be used in
tags, but rather require the use of do-tags.

Infinitival To

A fourth type of functor found in English is the infinitive particle to –so called because the only kind
of complement it allows is one containing a verb in the infinitive form.
Infinitival to is very different in its behaviour from prepositional to in English:
 Whereas prepositional to is a contentive with intrinsic lexical semantic content (it means
something like “as far as”), infinitival to seems to be a functor with no lexical semantic
content.
 Because of its intrinsic lexical content, the preposition to can often be modified by
intensifiers like right/straight (a characteristic property of prepositions):
“He stayed right TO the end of the film”
“He went straight TO the police”
By contrast, infinitival to (because of its lack of lexical content) cannot be intensified by
right/ straight:
“*I wonder whether right/straight to go home”
 Prepositional to (like other prepositions) can have a noun expression as its complement,
whereas infinitival to requires a verbal complement.
 Genuine prepositions in English only permit a following verbal complement when the verb is
in the –ing form (known as the gerund form in this particular use), not when the the verb is
in the uninflected base/infinitive form. By contrast, infinitival to can only take a verbal
complement when the verb is in the infinitive form, never when it is in the gerund form.
 Infinitival to permits ellipsis of its complement, whereas prepositional to does not.

What category does infinitival to belong to?

In the late 70s, Chomsky suggested that there are significant similarities between infinitival to and
typical auxiliary verbs like should. For example, they occupy a similar position within the clause:

It is vital that John should show an interest

It is vital for John to show an interest.

Both infinitival to and auxiliary verbs allow ellipsis of their complement.

The fact that to patterns like the auxiliary should in several respects strengthens the case for
regarding infinitival to and auxiliaries as belonging to the same category. But what category?