Syntactic Analysis (eBook)

The Basics

Nicholas Sobin (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2010
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-1-4443-9070-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Highly readable and eminently practical, Syntactic Analysis: The Basics focuses on bringing students with little background in linguistics up to speed on how modern syntactic analysis works.

• A succinct and practical introduction to understanding sentence structure, ideal for students who need to get up to speed on key concepts in the field
• Introduces readers to the central terms and concepts in syntax
• Offers a hands-on approach to understanding and performing syntactic analysis and introduces students to linguistic argumentation
• Includes numerous problem sets, helpfully graded for difficulty, with model answers provided at critical points
• Prepares readers for more advanced work with syntactic systems and syntactic analyses

Nicholas Sobin is Professor of Language and Linguistics at The University of Texas at El Paso. He has published numerous articles on various topics in syntax in such journals as Linguistics Inquiry, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, and the Journal of Linguistics, and has held Visiting Scholar appointments at M.I.T. and Harvard University. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock.

Rezensionen

"Ultimately, I would argue that this book succeeds with
its goals by laying a broad, basic, and clear foundation in the
philosophy of generative syntax, thus allowing undergraduates to
learn the nature of scientific inquiry with languages in a
trimester/quarter system or supporting graduate students with
little or distant background to read and respond to primary
literature with more confidence and understanding."
(Linguist, 27 August 2012)

Textauszug

Introductory Notes and References

Introduction

What is going on in the mind of a three-year-old? A young human child, who can't yet learn to add 2 and 2 or to tie its shoe, is putting together in her/his head the grammar of the surrounding language. This is an astounding feat, as evidenced in part by the fact that linguists (scientists who study language) have yet to fully understand how any such grammatical system works or precisely what it contains. By around the age of 5, this child will possess a very sophisticated adult-compatible version of the language. This fact is tacitly recognized in many cultures that only let children begin formal schooling at around that age. The main requirement for such schooling is that the child be able to speak the language well enough to talk to and understand an adult stranger, namely the teacher. So around the age of 3, children are in the midst of developing the grammar of their language (or languages, in multilingual settings).

To make the question above somewhat more specific, what we are asking is this: What does the child learn when (s)he learns a human language? If we define a language as the set of all of the sentences that are possible (i.e. German is all that stuff that sounds like German, etc.), then the fact that there is no “longest” sentence in a human language clearly indicates that the language (the set of possible sentences) is infinitely large and could not be “memorized” or learned directly. So instead, the child must be creating a “grammar” (the traditional term used above), or better, a computational system, a system that lets the speaker “compute” any of the infinitely many possible sentences of the language. In essence, when we study and do research in linguistics, what we are trying to discover are the particulars of this computing system. What are its basic elements, and what are the rules of their combination into the things that we call sentences?

Purpose

This book is intended as a brief introduction to modern generative syntax in the Chomskyan tradition. There are many fine introductions to this subject that are more lengthy and detailed. The purpose of this shorter text is to offer in a highly readable style an amount of information and accompanying work that is significant, but that also can be covered at a reasonable pace in a quarter or trimester format, or in half of a full semester, where the other half might deal with other aspects of linguistic analysis, readings in linguistics, or competing theories. Though brief, this work nonetheless has the goals of (1) introducing the reader to terms and concepts that are core to the field of syntax; (2) teaching the reader to understand and operate various syntactic analyses, an essential aspect of hypothesis formation and testing; (3) offering the reader the reasoning behind the choice of one analysis over another, thus grounding the reader in linguistic argumentation; and (4) preparing the reader for more advanced study of/research into syntactic systems.

No introductory work offers or can offer a complete picture of the field, but the topics dealt with here are central to the study of syntax. They form a coherent set that will serve the purpose of facilitating more in-depth study and research. As many have come to realize, this is one of the most fascinating areas in the study of human cognition.

Chapter Notes

This text deals with various areas of syntactic analysis that are fundamental to formulating modern theories of syntax. Rather than giving many elaborated references to current work, I will focus here on citing works that were foundational to the analyses discussed in this book, or that offer broad insight into them. The discussion of language acquisition in Chapter 1 is based on observations noted in Slobin (1979), and those of Chomsky (1999). In Chapter 2, some of the traditional grammar characterizations are those of Fowler (1983). The initial linguistic criteria for establishing lexical class membership is elaborated in Stageberg (1981). Katamba (1993) offers a detailed account of the generative approach to morphology. Finally, Vendler (1967) is a foundational work on compositional semantics. In Chapters 3 and 4, the full import of tests of phrase structure as implying the possible existence of rules of phrase structure was first established in Chomsky (1957) and extended in Chomsky (1965). The core notions in Chapter 5 that grammatical functions may be structure-based and are key to assigning theta roles are due to Chomsky (1981). These evolve into the theory of argument structure, developed in Grimshaw (1990). Coordination, as discussed in Chapter 6, was cited by Chomsky (1957 : 35) as possibly “one of the most productive processes for forming new sentences…” suggesting its category-neutral character. In Chapter 7, the notions of c-command relation and Binding Theory were pioneered in the works of Reinhart (1976, 1981, 1983), in Chomsky (1981), and more recently in Grodzinsky and Reinhart (1993). The “phrasal Aux” hypothesis in Chapter 8 is from Chomsky (1957), and the “recursive VP” analysis of auxiliary verbs is based on Ross (1969). Affix Hopping is originally due to Chomsky (1957). The notions of transformation, deep structure, and surface structure were pioneered in Chomsky (1957). In Chapter 9, the analysis of tense affixes as independent syntactic elements originated in Chomsky (1957). The foundational work on “head movement” (movement of a head to another head position such as “V-to-T”, and later “T-to-C”) is that of Travis (1984). In Chapters 10 and 11, the foundational work leading to the general theory of category-neutral X-bar syntax was that of Chomsky (1970) and Jackendoff (1977). The Principles & Parameters approach to language acquisition and syntactic analysis was pioneered by Chomsky (1981) and Chomsky and Lasnik (1993), with key data contributed by Greenberg (1966). In Chapters 12 and 13, the transformational analysis of interrogative and passive sentences was first broached by Chomsky (1957), and has evolved through nearly all of his works (and of course those of many others) since. Most influential in recent times has been the “constructionless” view of transformation, as articulated in Chomsky (1981) onward. Bresnan's (1970) analysis of complementizers in interrogatives also provided some crucial analytic keys to the analysis of interrogatives. Emonds' structure-preserving hypothesis (1970, 1976) also represents a milestone in the analysis of NP movement. The work on syntactic “islands” was pioneered by Ross (1967). The VP-internal subject hypothesis originated in Koopman and Sportiche (1991). In Chapter 14, Perlmutter (1978) formulated the unaccusative hypothesis, Larson (1988) advanced the VP shell hypothesis, and Abney (1987) and Longobardi (1994) evolved the DP hypothesis.

References

Abney, Steve. 1987. The English noun phrase and its sentential aspect. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA.

Bresnan, Joan. 1970. On complementizers: towards a syntactic theory of complement types. Foundations of Language 6: 297–321.

Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.

Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 1970. Remarks on Nominalization. In R. Jacobs and P. Rosenbaum (eds.), Readings in English Transformational Grammar. Waltham, MA: Ginn, 184–221.

Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris.

Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Barriers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 1999. An interview on Minimalism. Ms., University of Siena, Italy.

Chomsky, Noam, and Howard Lasnik. 1993. Principles and parameters theory. In J. Jacobs, A. van Stechow, W. Sternfeld, and T. Vennemann (eds.), Syntax: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, Berlin: de Gruyter, 505–69.

Emonds, Joseph. 1970. Root- and structure-preserving transformations. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA.

Emonds, Joseph. 1976. A Transformational Approach to English Syntax: Root, Structure-Preserving and Local Transformations. New York: Academic Press.

Fowler, H. Ramsey. 1983. The Little, Brown Handbook. 2nd edn. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.

Greenberg, Joseph (ed.). 1966. Universals of Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Grimshaw, Jane. 1990. Argument Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Grodzinsky, Yosef and Tanya Reinhart. 1993. The innateness of binding and co-reference. Linguistic Inquiry 24: 69–101.

Jackendoff, Ray S. 1977. X-Bar Syntax: A Study of Phrase Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Katamba, Francis, 1993. Morphology. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Koopman, Hilda and Dominique Sportiche. 1991. The position of subjects. Lingua 85: 211–58.

Larson, Richard. 1988. On the double object construction. Linguistic Inquiry 19: 335–91.

Longobardi, Giuseppe. 1994. Reference and proper names: A theory of N-movement in syntax and logical form. Linguistic Inquiry 25: 609–665.

Perlmutter, D. 1978. Impersonal passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.12.2010
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Schulbuch / Wörterbuch ► Wörterbuch / Fremdsprachen
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Sprachwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: Linguistics • Sprachwissenschaften • Syntax • syntax, grammar, sentence structure, minimalism, linguistic argumentation, introduction to linguistics
• ISBN-10: 1-4443-9070-8 / 1444390708
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4443-9070-4 / 9781444390704