Unit 2: Linguistic Principles

Dr. Ark Verma

 Outline

• Identify elementary properties of language.

• Visiting Basic Linguistic Concepts
• Overview important theoretical positions about
syntax/grammar.
• Develop an understanding about how these concepts
might relate to psychological variables.
“I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady
in a flower shop.”-Eliza Doolittle/Bernard Shaw.
 Why Is grammar important?

• Grammar consists of the rules of a language.

• Grammar lets one understand the properties of

language.

• It is matter of controversy whether rules of grammar

are psychological real or they just serve as descriptive
properties of languages.
Basic Grammatical Concepts: Word Order

Is “I see what I eat” the same as “I eat what I see”???

 Word order

• Order of words in the sentences of the language

might have an impact on word meaning.
• Syntactic rules of the language determine the word
order. For e.g. word order is:
– Subject-verb-object (SVO) in English.
• The boy chased the girl.
• The girl chased the boy.
– Subject-object-verb (SOV) in Japanese/Hindi.
• Taro to hanako that book gave.
• Ram ne Sita ko kitaab di.
• However, not all languages are strict about word
order.
– For e.g.: Russian permits a variety of possibilities.
• Viktor celeut Lenu.
• Viktor Lenu celeut.
• celeut Viktor Lenu.
• Lenu celeut Viktor.
• These languages may make use of affixes for
conveying specific meanings (suffixes & prefixes).
– Trip, tripped, tripping etc.
– In Turkish:
• gel: come, gelemedim: I could’nt come etc.
 Basic Properties: Duality of Patterning

• Unique to human languages.

• Why dual?:
– At one level, a large number of meaningful elements,
or words.
– At another, a relatively small number of meaningless
elements (like phones) that combine to form words.
– In spoken languages these meaningless elements are
individual speech sounds.
• Universal property of languages.
– All languages have duality: a basic level of
meaningless elements and a level where these combine
to form meaningful elements.
– All languages have a defined set of rules which govern
the combination of these basic elements to more
sophisticated elements.

• For e.g. port, plort & pbort.

• Which means:
– /p/ cannot be followed by /b/ at the beginning of the
word. Or
– A word cannot begin with two stop consonants.
 Basic Properties: Phonology

• Acoustics: study of physical properties of sounds.

– For e.g. using a sound spectrogram.

• Phonetics: the physical properties of speech sounds,

manner & place of articulation.

• Phonology: the sound categories each language uses

to divide up the space of possible sounds.
– E.g. pin (aspirated) vs. spin (unaspirated).
• Phoneme: basic unit of sound in a particular language.
– Changing phonemes might affect the meaning of the word:
• In Thai, “paa” (unaspirated) = “forest” while “paa”
(aspirated) = “to split”.
• Hence they are different phonemes.

• Aspirated: sound produced with an audible breath.

• Unaspirated: sound produced without… .

• Allophones: different forms of the same phoneme.

– Pin & spin.
• Minimal pairs: two sounds in a word differing by just
one sound.
– For e.g.: “dog”, “log”, “cog” etc.

• Sound is produced by moving parts of the vocal tract,

i.e. lips, teeth, tongue, mouth and larynx.

• They are categorized on the basis of their source.

• Larynx modifies the flow of air from the lungs and

produces a range of higher frequencies.
• Vowels: sounds made with a relatively free flow of
air, the vocal tract remains more or less open. E.g. a,
e, i, o, u.

• Dipthongs: a type of vowel which is a combination of

two vowel sounds. E.g. boy, wow, cow, my etc.

• Consonants: sounds made by closing or restricting

some part of the vocal tract as the air flows through it.
E.g. p, b, t, d, k, g.
• Place of articulation: part of the vocal tract that is
closed or constricted during articulation.

– E.g.
• dentals: sounds formed by putting the tongue tip behind
the upper front teeth. As Ɵ (theta).

• labiodentals: sounds formed by putting the lower lip to

the upper teeth.
• Manner of articulation: Way of modifying airflow in
turn affecting the sound produced.

– E.g.

• stops: when the airflow is completely restricted, as in

/p/, /b/, /t/ etc.

• fricatives: formed by constricting airstream making

hissing sound, as in /f/, /v/, /s/ etc.
• Syllables: rythmic units that form words. Smallest
note in a word.
– Syl-la-ble (3 syllables), matter (2 syllables), Cat (1
syllable).

• Syllables are formed from:

– Onset + Rime;
• onset: initial consonant or cluster. E.g. /c/ in cat or /cl/ in
cloud.
• rime: nucleus + coda
– nucleus: central vowel. /ou/ in “cloud”.
– coda: final consonant or cluster. /d/ in “cloud”.
 Basic Properties: Morphology

– Morphology: governs system of rules for word

formation. describes smallest grammatical units which
form words, i.e. morphemes. e.g. Simplest example of
morphemes is:
• Play + er = Player, where Play is a free morpheme (that can
stand alone) and ‘er’ is a bound morpheme that cannot stand
alone.
• Free morphemes can also be called lexical morphemes, i.e.
units that can stand alone as nouns, verbs etc. they do no alter
the meaning of words.
• Bound morphemes are also called grammatical morphemes,
they are tiny markers as (er, ed, ness) which can be added to
words and affect their meaning.
 Basic Properties: Phrase Structure

• Sentences can be divided into smaller constituents

called ‘phrases’.

• Phrases can be understood as combination of a

critical word (noun or verb) with other words,
expressing a single idea.
– The young swimmer accepted the silver medal.
– (the young swimmer) (accepted the silver medal)
– (the young swimmer) (accepted [the silver medal])
• Phrase-structure rules: syntactic rules that specify the
permissible sequences of constituents in a language.

• The central idea is that sentences are built up

hierarchically from smaller units using rewrite rules.

• Phrase structure grammar: a set of rewrite rules.

• E.g.:

– (1), S-> NP + VP
– (2), NP-> DET + N
– (3), NP-> N
– (4), VP-> V + NP
– (5), VP-> V
– (6), N-> vlad, boris, vampire, ghost…
– (7), V-> loves, hates, likes, bites…
– (8), DET-> a, an, the..
• Phrase-structure ambiguity: p-s rules might also lead
to a degree of ambiguity. E.g. :

– They are eating apples.

– S: (NP)They (VP)are eating apples.

(NP) They (VP) are eating (NP) apples.

– S: (NP) They (V) are (NP) eating apples.

(NP) They (V) are (adj) eating (N) apples.
 Basic Properties: Linguistic Productivity

• Our ability to create and comprehend novel

utterances.

• Given the infinite amount of possible utterances, we

must be storing rules (finite) for creating sentences.
E.g. by embedding one sentence into other.
– VP-> V + S
– (V) The child thinks (S) the man left.
• Another possibility:
– S-> NP + V + S

• Such a rule, which refers to itself is called a recursive

rule.

• It is resilient property of human language, even used

by children.

• We can coin new words when needed, also use

existing ones in new combinations.

• However, not all aspects of language are productive.

BREAK!!!
 Linguistic approaches to syntax.

• We will visit a few theories pertaining to

syntax/grammar.

• Special focus on the work of Noam Chomsky.

• Revisit the relevance of syntax to psychological

variables.
• American linguist, had a profound Noam Chomsky
impact on linguistic thought.
(1928-present)
• Two ideas:
– Relation between language & brain
and child language acquisition.
– Technical description of the structure
of language.

• Acc to him:
– Language is innate, biologically
programmed, species specific.
– Independent of other cognitive
structures.
 Chomsky…

• Distinguished between:
– Linguistic competence: our abstract knowledge of the
language. E.g. intuitions about grammatically
acceptable samples.

– Linguistic performance: our actual language

production, limited by our cognitive capacity. E.g.
simple grammatical utterances, speech errors etc.
 Chomsky…

• Also specified:
– Externalized Language (E-Language): the language
we use. Samples & properties of real utterances.
Linguistics should be concerned with describing the
regularities of real language via grammar.

– Internalized Language (I-Language): the knowledge

of language. The mental phenomena that precede &
follow performance.
 Relation between Language & Grammar.

• Language: infinite set of well-formed sentences.

• Grammar: formal device with a finite set of rules, that

can generate all possible sentences in a language &
no bad sentences. Hence, generative grammar.

• Theories of language, composed of more specific

hypotheses about the structure or organization of
language.
 Evaluating Grammars…Chomsky!

• Observational adequacy: a grammar must be able to

generate all the acceptable but none of the
unacceptable sentences.
• Descriptive adequacy: must be able to describe the
relationships between utterances that are similar or
not similar. E.g. syntactic differences.
• Explanatory adequacy: involve s the ability to
explain the role of linguistic universals in language
acquisition. E.g. how children choose from samples
& deduce correct rules.
 Transformational grammar

• Acc to Chomsky, phrase-structure rules do not

capture linguistic competence fully.

• These relations can be captured by a set of rewrite

rules, called transformational rules.

• Transformational rule: a grammatical rule for

converting one syntactic structure to another.

• Transformational grammar: based on transformations.

• Examples:

– Particle movement transformation:

• John phoned up the woman. (VP-> V + part + NP)
• John phoned the woman up. (VP-> V + NP + part)

– Passivization transformation:
• The vampire chases the ghost.
• The ghost was chased by the vampire.
 Some more from Chomsky…

• Distinguished between:

– Surface structure: refers to the superficial

arrangement of constituents, and reflects the order in
which the words are pronounced.

– Deep structure: refers to the underlying structure of a

sentence that conveys the meaning.
• Lets elaborate:
– Flying planes can be dangerous.
– (deep structure ambiguity: single surface structure,
two possible deep structures).

– (a) John is easy to please.

– (b) John is eager to please.
– John is object in (a) while subject in (b).

– Arlene played the tuba.

– The tuba was played by Arlene.
– Same deep structure, different surface structure.
 Much ado about gramamar…

• There might still be problems:

– Most grammars still cannot fully account for all the

linguistic utterances.

– They also do not take into account cognitive

processing considerations.

– Also they lack the details as far as smaller constituents

may be concerned.
 Two alternatives…
• Lexical-functional grammar/psychologically
realistic grammar (Bresnan, 1978, 2001): takes into
account properties of individual lexical items, i.e.
words.
• Lexical entries include the various forms of the word
(e.g. kiss, kissed, kissing) and the types of compatible
sentences.
– Mary kissed John.
– John was kissed by Mary.
– kiss: (agent= subject, patient = object) &
– (be) kiss: (agent= object, patient = subject).
• Advantages:

– Helps simplify the explanatory burden to lexicon.

– Seems a more economical/plausible way of explaining

effortless comprehension of sentences.

– Take into account the consideration that working

through syntactic rules might be more difficult than
retrieving from the mental lexicon.
• Views of Ray Jackendoff (2002):
– Rejects the view that syntax is the core of our
linguistic knowledge.
– Rejects that linguistic productivity is solely due to
syntactic rules.
– Suggests that grammars have multiple formation rules
(syntax, semantics, phonology) which operate in
parallel to facilitate simplified language processing.
– Grammars must study these interfaces.
• E.g.
– It’s only a parent, not a teacher.
– It’s only apparent, not real.
 Conclusions…

• It is important to know the linguistic rules to have a

deep understanding of any language.

• Deep understanding of properties of languages may

help in studying language processing.

• However, linguistic rules/syntax are not paramount

and alternative views must also be considered.
Thank You!!!