Some Basic Properties of English Syntax
Some Remarks on the Essence of Human Language
One of the crucial functions of any human language, such as English or Korean, is to
convey various kinds of information from the everyday to the highly academic.
Language provides a means for us to describe how to cook, how to remove cherry
stains, how to understand English grammar, or how to provide a convincing argument
Language property
1. No motivated relationship between sounds and meanings. (as emphasized
by Saussure 1916)
For words such as hotdog, desk, dog, bike, hamburger, cranberry,
sweetbread, their meanings have nothing to do with their shapes
For example, the word hotdog has no relationship with a dog which
is or feels hot {arbitrary relationship}
2. Language makes infinite use of finite set of rules or principles, the
observation of which led the development of generative linguistics in the
20th century (cf. Chomsky 1965)
A language is a system for combining its parts in infinitely many ways. One piece of
evidence of the system can be observed in word-order restrictions. If a sentence is an
arrangement of words and we have 5 words such as man, ball, a, the, and kicked, how
many possible combinations can we have from these five words? More importantly,
are all of these combinations grammatical sentences? Mathematically, the number of
possible combinations of 5 words is 5! (factorial), equalling 120 instances. But
among these 120 possible combinations, only 6 form grammatical English
sentences:1
(1)
a. The man kicked a ball.
b. A man kicked the ball.
c. The ball kicked a man.
d. A ball kicked the man.
e. The ball, a man kicked.
f. The man, a ball kicked.
All the other 114 combinations, a few of which are given in (2), are unacceptable to
native speakers of English. We use the notation * to indicate that a hypothesized
example is ungrammatical.
(2)
a. *Kicked the man the ball.
b. *Man the ball kicked the.
c. *The man a ball kicked.
It is clear that there are certain rules in English for combining words.
a. Kim lives in the house Lee sold to her.
b. *Kim lives in the house Lee sold it to her.
The requirement of such combinatory knowledge also provides an argument for the
assumption that we use just a finite set of resources in producing grammatical
sentences, and that we do not just rely on the meaning of words involved. Consider
the examples in (4):
(4)
a. *Kim fond of Lee.
b. Kim is fond of Lee.
A related part of this competence is that a language speaker can produce an infinite
number of grammatical sentences. For example, given the simple sentence (6a), we
can make a more complex one like (6b) by adding the adjective tall. To this sentence,
we can again add another adjective handsome as in (6c). We could continue adding
adjectives, theoretically enabling us to generate an infinitive number of sentences:
(6) a. The man kicked the ball.
b. The tall man kicked the ball.
c. The handsome, tall man kicked the ball.
d. The handsome, tall, nice man kicked the ball.
e. .
(7) a. Some sentences can go on.
b. Some sentences can go on and on.
c. Some sentences can go on and on and on.
d. Some sentences can go on and on and on and on.
e. . . .
To (7a), we add the string and on, producing a longer one (7b). To this resulting
sentence (7c),
we once again add and on.We could in principle go on adding without stopping: this
is enough to prove that w Given these observations, how then can we explain the fact
that we can produce or understand an infinite number of grammatical sentences that
we have never heard or seen before? It seems implausible to consider that we
somehowmemorize every example, and in fact we do not (Pullum and Scholz
2002).We know that this could not be true, in particular when we consider that native
speakers can generate an infinite number of infinitely long sentences, in principle. In
addition, there is limit to the amount of information our brain can keep track of, and it
would be implausible to think that we store an infinite number of sentences and
retrieve whenever we need to do so. These considerations imply that a more
appropriate hypothesiswould be something like (8):4
(8) All native speakers have a grammatical competence which can generate an
infinite set of grammatical sentences from a finite set of resources.
This hypothesis has been generally accepted by most linguists, and has been taken as
the subject matter of syntactic theory. In terms of grammar, this grammatical
competence is hypothesized to characterize a generative grammar, which we then
can define as follows (for English, in this instance):e could make an infinite number
of well-formed English sentences.
(9)Generative Grammar:
An English generative grammar is the one that can generate an infinite set of well-
formed
English sentences from a finite set of rules or principles.
The job of syntax is thus to discover and formulate these rules or principles.5 These
rules tell us
how words are put together to form grammatical phrases and sentences. Generative
grammar,
or generative syntax, thus aims to define these rules which will characterize all of the
sentences
which native speakers will accept as well-formed and grammatical.
