Lecture 11: Syntax, Part 1

Key Takeaways

foreign so morphology remember morphology we were talking when we talked about morphology about the fact that a word like unlockable is ambiguous uh it can mean either it's possible to unlock it uh or it is not possible to lock it can be a desirable property of a lock uh or not um and we talked I think about the fact that at least I want to pronounce it a little differently depending on which of those things I say so uh the door is unlockable means it can be unlocked um but the door is broken it's unlockable means it cannot be locked I have this desire to put an extra sort of oomph on on an extra little Demi stress beat on on if I mean the thing on the right yeah yeah uh and what we said when we were talking about this was we can account for this kind of ambiguity in the following way we'll say some things which are clearly true first uh bubble combines with verbs to make adjectives uh they're a bunch of verbs that you can make into adjectives this way so you can take verb like saying or a verb like understand and get adjectives like singable or understandable right and to say that something is singable is to say that it's possible to sing it right that's that's what that means yeah understandable means it's possible to understand it um so there's another suffix that changes verbs into adjectives and then we said there are two UNS there's an un that combines with verbs and makes verbs um that's an un that means something like undo the effects of or you know change something so that it is no longer in the state that it would have been if the verb had applied to it or something like that so untie means take something and do things to it such that it is no longer in the state that it is standardly in after you have tied it or to put that a little more briefly take something that was tied and make it so it is not tied right that's what untie means uh similarly for undo and a bunch of other UNS yeah so there's none that applies to verbs and has sometimes called reversative meaning you know change it so that it's back from the state it would have been in yeah and then there's another un let us call it UN number two on number two combines with adjectives and makes adjectives that mean more or less not adjective yeah so unkind or unfamiliar or unfortunate yeah these all mean not the adjective whatever it is and so what we said was oh hey Raquel okay oh no it's no longer tied but like leave it in a similar State than it was at the beginning like chronologically because you could like chop and see like in like lots of little pieces oh oh that's a nice Point yeah so if I if I take let's see if I untie a shoelace first of all it has to start off tied is that right so if I have a shoelace which is not tied I can't untie it yeah um but if it's tied and then I take scissors and I cut it into many small pieces have I untied it no surely not right um uh when Alexander cut the gordian knot he wasn't untying the knot right he was being more direct than that a good point so you have to put it so what you just said I like the way you just said it you have to put it back in the state that it was in before it was tied is that the way to say it yeah yeah so uh yeah that's a nice point undo right I mean because what we said we talked about this in class that there are um it's there are lots of things that it's hard to do this on this on is kind of picky about what it can combined with so the um that attaches to adjectives can detect a touch lots of adjectives but like you can't if I if I take some shoes I can't unwash shoes or unwash socks that doesn't mean take the socks and make them dirty again right uh you could imagine that it would but that's not what it means and maybe that's related to your observation yeah it's interesting to think about yeah uh Joseph did you have a they can't be tied again um well let's see if you undo an operation on a computer does it have to be possible to do the operation again I don't know maybe yeah there is a redo isn't there yeah um yeah I wonder maybe that is what it means maybe it means uh yeah and this is as you say this is related to Raquel's point you know you have to put it in a state such that the verb could apply to it again maybe maybe yeah yeah so there's a lot you know what I actually did on the slide was just to say I'm number one combines with verbs to make verbs and then my mental notes to myself say you know Vamp something about what it means uh you guys are doing some sophisticated thinking about what it means uh it's a little complicated figuring out what it means yeah see nice point uh still what I've said on the slide apart from the vamping I think it's true there's an elbow that changes verbs and adjectives and there are two UNS one that combines with verbs another that combines with adjectives that sound right so far and what all of this means is uh the ambiguity of unlockable we get to attribute it to basically the fact that there are two UNS so uh you can you could have attached the UN before you attached the oval or you could have attached the UN after you attached the elbow because the elbow is going to change a verb into an adjective an un can combine with either a verb or an adjective so that was the way we were talking so the idea was uh you can start by touching on on number one so lock giving you you know this new verb unlock which is related to the meaning of luck in mysterious and complicated ways that we've now been talking about uh and then you can attach able to that and give you an adjective unlockable and uh I drew trees like this before and said yeah these trees are kind of a representation of the order in which you did things that's all they're for right just to say you started by uh putting together those two things at the bottom of the tree the verb and that prefix and you created a verb that's what that prefix does it takes verbs and returns verbs and then that verb gets to attached the second thing you do that verb attaches to the suffix and now the suffix changes that verb into an adjective or you can do things in the other order right you can attach able to lock giving you an adjective and you can take on number two and attach on number two to that adjective giving you a new adjective meaning not lockable yeah and so unlockable is ambiguous yeah and the ambiguity we said comes from the fact that well there are two UNS which is something we can observe you know there's none that goes on verbs and none that goes on adjectives and there's a novel that changes verbs adjectives right yes uh and uh that means that there's an un that can go before the a bowl and there's none that can go after the apple and so we get this ambiguity and the ambiguity is what we would expect it to be yeah this is all review having said all this I guess what we expect is that you could have two UNS I didn't put this on the slide anywhere that you it would be possible to say it is UN unlockable which I think is true actually this this uh this door is broken it is UN unlockable that would mean it cannot be unlocked um I think that's true go ask some people whose Minds have not been contaminated by Linguistics go her ask your uh harass your your roommates or whoever um you'll make yourself popular that way and if you are going to try to learn from me how to make yourself popular then boy are you in the wrong class uh okay okay is this all clear so you know important part of the story is to say yeah unlockable uh it's a word it's got three morphemes in it a prefix and a ruse and a suffix uh but it isn't just three morphemes in a row those morphemes were assembled in an order you assembled them sort of pairwise you first put two of them together and then you added another one to the result of that first footing together and that order has consequences for interpretation so uh it's it's not false to say that unlockable consists of three morphemes a prefix a stem and a suffix but it's not a complete description of what's happened either it is that but it is also those trees or those trees represent something namely the order in which you did things that make sense now what we're going to do now is start talking about syntax which is the study of how words are assembled to make sentences um words sometimes things smaller than words as we'll see and we're going to see that it's useful to think of sentences as being put together in a bunch of operations more or less the way unlockable is that is that we take uh pairs of words and put them together to form larger objects um the way I just did for unlockable yeah just to give you a an example of the kind of thing we're going to talk about I think I talked with you about this on the first day uh just as with unlockable you know it is true but it is not a complete description to say that that is three morphemes a prefix and stem and a suffix that's true but it's not a complete description a complete description involves those trees or some equivalent explanation of the order in which you did things similarly these two sentences John walked up the stairs and Mary looked up the reference it's true but it is not a complete description to say that those are two sentences that consist of a noun a verb a preposition a determiner and a noun did I say anything that alarmed anybody just now so that's those are two sentences that consist of five words um that's true and we can say things about what kinds of words they are there are nouns up there and verbs and prepositions like up and I'll call I just called it a determiner the people sometimes call it the definite article you'll hear me call it the determiner a lot in this class yeah um it's true to say that those two sentences consist of those five words but just as with the two versions of unlockable we can convince ourselves that it's not a complete description that it's helpful to think about the order in which you assembled these things um so what I told you last time was effectively what we're going to want to say is there was an operation that created the substring up the stairs um in that first sentence that's what we call a constituent and there is no similar operation creating a substring up the reference in the second one and again this is review but it's reviewed from the first day what I convinced you I think I hope I tried uh was that there are various syntactic phenomena various things you get to do with sentences that treat up the stairs as a single object that syntax gets to manipulate in various ways we're gonna be talking about that about what that means exactly uh and uh the same syntactic operations don't get to treat up the reference as a single thing so you know we said it's possible to ask questions like up which stairs did John walk so it's a fairly stuffy questions a strange way to ask the question but you can say it as opposed to up which reference did Mary look which is gibberish so we're going to draw a distinction this is maybe the first time that I've shown you a case where syntacticians have to care passionately about the difference between one sentence which is complete gibberish and another sentence which is not great yeah there's a fair amount of great syntax that's built on those kinds of distinctions or similarly if I say John walked up the stairs and you're surprised for some reason you can say up the stairs that's not a weird thing for you to say whereas if I say Mary looked up the reference and you're surprised no matter how surprised you are you're not going to say up the reference that's a weird response yeah yeah so um point is just as with unlockable yeah it's three morphemes prefix stem suffix but having said that we haven't said everything we have to know uh which parts of unlockable are single Parts you know is it unattached to lockable or is it unlocked with a bull attached to it those are different for different uh adjectives with different meanings similarly here it's not enough to say yeah we've got these five words of these kind of these types we've got to know which of these things are go together which things are are Parts single parts and there is a part up the stairs what we call a constituent but various kinds of syntactic phenomena care about like the synthetic phenomena phenomenon uh can I repeat this if I'm astonished yeah that's a test kind of test for this property of constituenthood yeah so there's more to a sentence than it's parts we got to know in what order did you put those parts together just just like with unlockable yeah makes sense okay so we're going to do syntax we want a theory that's going to divide sentences into three kinds there are on the one hand sentences that you've heard a zillion times before like we're going to class and on the other hand sentences that you have possibly never heard anyone say but that are fine so if I say my anteater is hula dancing you may never in your life have heard anyone say that maybe you have some of you may have had more exciting lives than I have yeah um but uh uh it's an okay sentence uh as opposed to we're class going to which I've given a star there were called the star is what syntacticians give to things that are bad yeah so syntacticians are the opposite of normal people when we see things we don't like we give them a gold star usually it's not gold it's black I guess that makes a little more sense yeah um this three-way distinction is worth kind of highlighting because if I had only given you the first sentence in the second sentence we're going to class and we're class going to yeah the first sentence is good and the second and the last sentence is bad some of you might be thinking well you know that first sentence it's a sentence I Heard lots of times before maybe when I was a small child I heard my parents say that you know and I I heard them say it and I remember it now and maybe that's all maybe that's what syntax is it's the ability to remember things you've heard people say yeah but instance of the second class of sentences shows that that's hopeless so you're not just remembering things you've heard people say when you're deciding which things deserve the Black Star and which things don't yeah you're not just categorizing sentences into sentences you've heard before in sentences you haven't you've got this intuition about which sentences are acceptable and it's not just about which sentences are in your input which sentences you've heard people say it's something else we're going to try to figure out what that is yeah yeah but I'm I'm giving you these three sentences to slay a hypothesis that you might be entertaining stop entertaining that hypothesis yeah you know make it go home it's not a good hypothesis you won't do any good is that clear are people clear on the hypothesis that I'm attempting to slay yeah yeah yeah so um if we pursued that that's much more sophisticated than the hypothesis I was trying to slay right so uh this is day one of syntax yeah so uh so no you're raising a good point what if um all you're doing is remembering chunks of sentences so maybe you've never heard anybody say my Andy Drew is hula dancing but maybe you've heard people say anteater maybe you've heard people say my anteater maybe not yeah but at least you've heard people say my noun right and you've heard people say you know anteater and uh is hula dancing well yeah maybe you've heard somebody say something like that right so maybe there are some parts of this that uh that you could be acquiring that way we're gonna have to be we're going to have to pursue that hypothesis long enough to find out exactly what it says right because what I just said uh which wasn't really the hypothesis it was an attempt to represent it uh we're gonna have to figure out how to rule out we're class going to right because you probably have heard people say we're and class and you've heard people say going to right so imagine where are you going to we've heard people say that and so we're going to have to be careful about that hypothesis to try to figure out how we could use it to rule any to draw the distinctions that are on the on the board yeah yeah but you're right so so just to summarize uh this conversation you and I have just had I said there's a fairly stupid hypothesis which says which and I'm I'm raising it partly because it's been seriously entertained in the literature before which says uh all you're doing is remembering things people have said and that's what distinguishes grammatical sentences from uninterpretable sentences that's false so we have this distinction between sentences that are grammatical in sentences but are ungrammatical that isn't just a list of all the sentences you've ever heard before you can take a sentence you've never heard before and uh accept it yeah you're raising the point there could be a better version of the stupid hypothesis one that said well maybe there are some parts of the sentence that you've heard before which is true we're going to have to be explicit about which subparts count right and what what exactly we mean when we say that but you're right there could be a better version of that hypothesis good point are there other questions did I successfully answer your question yeah okay all right so let's talk about what's wrong with we're class going to um they have several hypotheses about what's wrong with it one could be that it doesn't mean anything it's a thing people sometimes say when I'm trying to explain to people so when I'm on airplane flights and people ask me you know what do you do for a living uh uh how I answer sort of depends on whether I feel like talking to the person or not um so if I if I feel like talking to them then then I will tell them that they work on endangered languages which is something I do I work with languages that are down to their last few speakers and try to work with them and then you know sometimes they're interested in that and they talk to me if I would like to get them to leave me alone and so that I can read a book or whatever I tell them I'm a theoretical syntactician that usually ends the conversation fairly fairly quickly um but when it doesn't you know when they say oh what's that mean what do you work on then I will I will say you know uh well I'm trying to figure out why some sentences are grammatical and others aren't and I'll give examples and sometimes they will say oh but what does that mean right we're class going to you know maybe maybe that's what's wrong with it it doesn't mean anything but the problem is we're capable of distinguishing grammaticality even in sentences that don't mean anything so this is a famous example of Noam chomsky's I think if you look him up in like Bartlett's familiar quotations you'll find this first sentence colorless green ideas sleep furiously he actually offered that sentence as a part of a pair of sentences he wanted people to con to contrast that sentence with the same sentence backwards yeah seriously sleep ideas green colorless so consider those two sentences the point is neither of them means anything right so the the first one doesn't mean anything and then if you turn your attention to the second one it also doesn't mean anything but they have a different status so the second one doesn't mean anything and it's ungrammatical whereas the first one it doesn't mean anything but you feel as though and this is what I'm slowing down right about here where I say it doesn't mean anything because the reaction people sometimes have right about here does anyone want to hear sometimes people say oh but look suppose suppose colorless meant you know boring right and suppose green meant environmentalists and and suppose sleep and furiously meant different suppose these words meant something other than what they mean then the sentence would mean something which is true um but it's sort of uh it's another way of saying the same point yeah that um the first sentence colorless green ideas sleep furiously is meaningless if you don't mess with the meanings of the sentences but it obeys the rules for how words can be combined if the words meant something else the sentence would be fine right we can have English sentences that consist of two adjectives modifying a noun and then there's a verb and then there's an adverb right not that one yeah but you know uh uh big green monsters snore loudly right that would be fine yeah um uh so you know when the person on the airplane flight next to me says oh what's wrong with um we're class going to is that it's a meaningless sentence if I'm really really desperately trying to end the conversation I bring out these kinds of pairs right so uh um it's not about meaning yeah you we have this this intuition that there are sentences that are okay in sentences that are bad which is separable for from our intuition about what means something and what doesn't I've just been asserting things about our feelings about these sentences do people have this feeling about these sentences first that they're meaningless and second that the first one is okay and the second one is bad okay yeah Rico I can't remember the word for this but you were saying that certain types of words are like categories that you can add more words to even if you don't know what they mean like it like modifiers and things like that and like but this house is very you know Globe you're like like this that's grammatical even if you don't know what it means but like you can't make it oh oh yes yes uh as we were talking about um open class and closed class uh uh morphemes right so so Jabberwocky is a poem that you can write changing uh changing all the lexical items to to you know nonsense words but you couldn't do that with functional items yeah that's right maybe the institutions like where something doesn't really make any sense your brain still knows that okay like maybe it treats it almost like that kind of class where you're like well I mean I you can fit like an adjective like this yep even if it means something ridiculous like right here and it's like it sounds okay even if it's like yeah that's a nice way to to put it I guess this is similar to what I was trying to say about a reaction I sometimes get to this sentence which is I you know you say colorless green idea sleep furiously doesn't mean anything and people will sometimes say well but if these words meant something else then it would be okay yeah which is true yeah I think I may not have heard all of that but the idea was the first sentence it's clear what colorless and green are trying to do they're both trying to modify ideas is that right uh and it's clear what furiously is trying to do it's an adverb and it's trying to modify sleep when I say it's meaningless what I mean is you can't sleep furiously right and things can't be both colorless and green and if they could well ideas couldn't have those things they're abstract right that's the that's the the sense in which this is a meaningless sentence I think you're raising the point which is a good point yeah it's meaningless but the words in it are fitting together the way they should the adjectives are going where adjectives go they go before the noun that's what they're supposed to do right and uh in the second sentence they're not doing that is that the related to the point that you're making yeah yeah so that's that's the intuition that we have that that um that it's possible to have feelings about sentences uh of the form well I don't know what this is supposed to mean but the parts are all in the right place yeah we are in the syntax part of this class it's all about Parts being in the right places yeah we will eventually do the semantics part which is about meaning but the point is that it's possible to study these things independently of each other so uh completely independently so you know when I was showing you unlockable uh we were really doing was morphology but we were also talking about meaning we were interested in the fact that uh that word had two different meanings we talked about the fact that it meant different things so we get to use semantics as kind of a probe into what's happening in morphology we'll do things like that in syntax yeah but our feelings about whether sentences are grammatical or not or acceptable or not are separable from our feelings about what they mean if anything okay uh reverse there are sentences that are ungrammatical but that are meaningless but grammatical like colorless screen ideas sleep furiously on the flip side there are uh sentences that are meaningful but ungrammatical the sentences where it's very clear what they should mean but you just can't say it that way yeah here's a quadruple of examples that's meant to show you that you know so you can say put the sweater on you can say I put on the sweater you can say I put it on you cannot say I put on it yeah the meaning is not the problem here it's clear what I put on it would mean yeah yeah but there are facts about how English pronouns work and how English particles work that mean that you don't get to say that right it's not a meaning thing it's something about syntax it's something about how these parts get to combine you want to try to understand that okay so the only point of these few slides has been it's possible to study syntax independently of meaning whereby independently I just mean the facts of syntax don't just reduce the facts about meaning they also don't just reduce to facts about what you've heard before what I've been trying to show you okay here's another thing you might think about what's wrong with class going to it ends in a preposition were any of you taught in school you must not end sentences with prepositions some of your work yeah some of you were not that's kind of interesting I was I was beaten by English teachers for ending sentence that's not true I was not beaten I was spoken too harshly by by English teachers for ending sentences with prepositions do you know why we were told not to end sentences to prepositions because I guess uh yeah because like where are we going to uh -huh so there are some cases like that but look there are also cases like who are you talking to right where uh sorry where who am I apologizing do the chalk I guess um uh who are you talking to where you know without the two uh it's you know it doesn't have to be about redundancy I don't think is this a sentence that you've ever heard anyone say is this okay yeah this is I think pretty good English yeah um so you know when our English teachers were telling us not to end sentences with prepositions uh we should have asked them you know what are you talking about uh because the fact is that English English speakers in sentences with prepositions every day do you know why your teacher told you not to do that yes maybe it's because the object isn't clear well but is it I mean it's kind of uh if I ask you who are you talking to there's a sense in which the object isn't clear uh I'm asking you who the object is right shouldn't be any harder than uh who are you who are you um describing yeah so yeah your your um what your English teacher wanted you to say was to whom are you talking which um many English speakers are capable of saying possibly because they're English teachers threatened them into it yeah but it's not my go-to way to say this I don't know about you guys um so yeah here who the question word is up here at the beginning by itself here to whom is part of this phrase that's at the beginning um but uh question you know why does two have to come along according to your English teacher yes yes your English teacher told you to do that because uh Latin actually among many other languages doesn't allow you to do this you have to do this English is quite rare in being able to do this most of the languages of the world can't and sometime in the 15th 16th century a number of grammarians decided that English would be way cooler if it were more like Latin and so they began declaring that it was and that's why your English teacher told you that you can't say this which is ridiculous um English we should be proud of the fact that we can say this because as I say it's rare not most languages can't do this we should have this on our like on our flag or something like that there should be a stranded preposition a preposition at the end of the sentence um so yeah um no reason English has to be like Latin or like I say you know a zillion other languages most of the languages of Europe you know French or German or Italian or whatever uh you can't leave prepositions at the ends of sentences but those teachers don't have to tell their children not to say things like who are you talking to uh because they they literally can't and none of those kids would ever do that but in English we can we should be proud of that yep so that's not the problem with we're class going to uh it does end in a preposition but many perfectly fine English sentences end in prepositions um there's a distinction uh yeah there's the example who are you talking to the distinction that's worth drawing between what's called prescriptive and descriptive um uh studies of grammar so what we are doing in this class is trying to figure out what people actually say uh what the rules are for for uh putting sentences together in English uh there are other kinds of things that people say about how English should be spoken um we're not going to talk about that stuff except to mock it the way I did just now yeah so prescriptive grammar is the study of rules that your teachers might have taught you in school about how to speak some of which just to stop mocking it for a second um your your teachers might have tried to tell you things that would genuinely like improve the quality of your writing like get rid of ambiguities to various kinds so you're if you're now mentally composing nasty messages to your English teachers you know don't send them they they had your best interests at heart and they probably taught you a lot of things things that were valuable but they also taught you some things that became popular around the 15th 16th century because people thought that English would be better if it were more like Latin yeah and uh so we're not going to try to improve your writing in this class except in in so far as the writing advisors can do that we're not going to be talking about uh prescriptive studies of English grammar we're not going to talk about how you should speak or how you should write we're just going to talk about how you do yeah so this is going to be a study a descriptive grammar and not prescriptive yeah yeah oh this one yeah about what are you talking just I can't do that in English about what are you talking about yeah yeah whereas to whom are you talking sounds yeah yeah yeah no you're raising an interesting distinction um so in many languages most languages including Latin you have to say about what are you talking and you have to say to whom are you talking so these are languages in which you always you never leave a preposition at the end of a sentence you always bring it along with the question word to the beginning of the sentence but you're raising a really interesting point in English there's this distinction between the examples where leaving a preposition behind is you know what you prefer who are you talking to but you can kind of say to whom are you talking and others where like about what are you talking do other people have this intuition that about what are you talking is worse than to whom are you talking I have that feeling too I think um there are other examples there are examples that are really quite bad um uh and other examples which get better so um things like uh we left despite her warnings you know um and then consider two kinds of questions you could ask about that what did you leave despite and despite what did you leave is either of those acceptable at all what did you leave despite and despite what did you leave who prefers what did you leave despite who prefers despite what did you leave who would do anything to avoid saying either of these things yes yeah yeah so here's another example of you know uh one sentence that's quite bad and another sentence that's you know only bad ish you might want to try to understand what's going on yeah so there's a there's a fruitful area of research here like okay English doesn't English is happy to leave prepositions at the ends of sentences but in which cases is it happy to do the Latin thing and in some cases it's happier than others it's interesting to try to study okay um another distinction to make so we've drawn this distinction now between um meaningless on the one hand and ungrammatical on the other so since can be both meaningless and ungrammatical but it can also be meaningless and grammatical like uh colorless green ideas sleep seriously um we've drawn that distinction we've drawn a distinction between uh uh prescriptive and descriptive statements so prescriptive statements are things like don't Den sentences with prepositions which are uh how shall I say this false right not a good description of what English speakers actually do their sort of aspirations um we're not going to do that we're just going to study what English speakers do yeah uh right so here's another useful distinction it's sometimes called competence versus performance um imagine that I am standing up here talking to you so far this should be easy to imagine and except I'm not standing imagine that I'm standing up here talking to you and um I say this is the and then I inhale a fly so imagine that oh I don't have to wear a mask I keep forgetting that um uh imagine that I take off my mask and I inhale a fly right so I say this is the and then I stop I'm like right up right there and then imagine that this experience is so traumatizing for me and also for the fly uh that that I I just I I never complete that sentence so you know I say this is the and then I stop um there are two attitudes that we could have to me having uttered that sentence that's a sentence I uttered this is the cough right that's something I said and I'm a native speaker of English right uh so there are two kinds of things we could say one would be to say well we're developing a theory of all of the kinds of sentences that native English speakers can say and that was one this is the cough hack splutter yeah and and so we want a theory that allows that to be a sentence of English that's one kind of thing we could say this is one of those moments that happens a lot in classes where the professor says here's one thing we could say and and then describe something completely ridiculous right so you could do that but here's another thing we could say we could say no look if we're developing a theory of all of the things that native English speakers can say native speakers of any language at all but we're going to start with English um what we want is not a theory that covers this is the hex splitter that's not going to be one of the sentences we're going to try to get we're going to try to get sentences like you know this is the answer or whatever right that's going to be a sentence whatever it is I meant to say yeah and then there are going to be other things flies you know uh um you know sudden heart attacks uh uh you know and then other kinds of things that are maybe it's less clear to think what to say about them you know flies sure sudden heart attacks yeah uh what about if I forget what I was going to say in the middle of a sentence I know that's hard to imagine but imagine that I did something like that right I'm in the middle of a sentence and I'm talking and then I just forget where I was going and where was I going with that who knows yeah uh that could happen so what we're going to have so this is a different approach and it's the one that you might imagine I'm kind of recommending what we're going to have is the idea that we're going to develop a theory of what English speakers say but we're going to imagine the kind of English speaker who never inhales flies and never forgets what they were going to say never has a fatal heart attack it only speaks in complete completely grammatical sentences yeah there might not be any speakers like that right if you have ever looked at a transcript of somebody talking there aren't any sentences in there unless the person is like reading a text yeah or unless the person is Noam Chomsky I have to say if you you know weird reading transcripts of Noam Chomsky talking or listening to Noam Chomsky talk because in fact he talks in complete sentences paragraphs uh it's kind of astonishing um normally if you look at the transcript of somebody talking uh uh speaking of Noam Chomsky I've often heard him say this you know journalists know that the best way to make someone look like a complete idiot is to quote them accurately you know just to write down exactly what they said because they'll say um and uh and they'll stop and they'll pause and they'll change what they said and they'll inhale flies you know things will happen um such that their sentences are not you know fully grammatical sentences um what journalists in fact do is to clean up all that stuff so that people sounded like they were talking in complete sentences so we're going to develop a theory of what English speakers say but it's going to be a theory that sort of divorced from reality to a certain extent we're going to imagine what people would be like if there were no distractions and no flies and no sudden homicides right no falling asleep in the middle of your sentences all of that stuff um so the distinction here is competence versus performance as we're sort of imagining a speaker who's kind of like a a frictionless uh plane right uh you know that there are various kinds of complications and there's no air resistance or whatever else various kinds of complications don't arise um uh so we're going to be talking about speakers competence what they would do if if there were no distractions and no problems there's also performance that's the study of what people actually do yeah and we want to study that sure but we're going to develop a theory of confidence on the theory that it'll be simpler yeah yeah in the hope that by abstracting away from various kinds of complications we'll get a we'll get a clearer picture of what's going on so that makes sense that's how we're going to do syntax um get that one similarly um it's raining it's a possible sentence of English John thinks that it's raining it's a possible sentence of English Mary thinks that John thinks that it's raining it's a possible sentence of English in fact it's if for any sentence of English it's always possible to create a longer sentence so take any sentence s here's a recipe for another sentence of of English um you can always say she thinks that s where she you know maybe refers to different people in every Clause yeah so you can say it's raining she thinks that it's raining she thinks that she thinks that it's raining she thinks that she thinks that she thinks that it's raining you can keep going arbitrarily long there is no uh bound on the length of English sentences when we say it that way you can tell that I am talking about competence because no matter how many recordings of English speakers you go through you will never find an infinitely long sentence right nobody actually says these things but um the reason nobody says an infinitely long sentence the idea is going to be that isn't a fact about grammar right it's a fact about life and we don't care about life in this class right the fact that you know if I were to start saying she thinks that she thinks that she thinks that she thinks that she thinks that she thinks that she thinks that she thinks that it's raining that eventually people would stop listening to me or I would run out of breath or I would need to take a break to eat or I would die you know there are various reasons that I will eventually stop uttering my infinitely long sentence um but we're not going to have a grammar that says you know we're not going to try to find out what's the longest sentence anybody ever uttered and try to get that fact to be a fact that we want our grammar of English our theory of the possible sentences of English we're not going to try to predict that right what we're going to have is a theory that says English sentences can be arbitrarily long and then yeah eventually people die and so nobody ever says a sentence that's infinitely long but that's that's about death that's not about and we're not going to talk about death in this class except when you do does that make sense yeah right so that's another move we're going to make another uh instance of us caring about the difference between competence and performance nobody ever performs an infinitely long sentence uh but um uh we're competent to produce them okay so enough talking about what we're going to do let's begin doing it questions before I begin doing some syntax okay okay here's the sentence I will find the red book grammatical sentence yeah acceptable it's clear what it means although we've just said doesn't matter whether it means anything um I said early on um we're going to want to have a way of saying which parts of this sentence were put together as units sort of like with unlockable you know we wanted to be able to say unlockable is ambiguous because it can consist of a unit unlock to which you've added double or a unit lockable to which you've added on that's what that ambiguity comes from and we're going to do a similar kind of thing with syntax we're going to look for these units um and what we're going to find is that there are various uh phenomena that care about whether something is a unit in that tree a single blob of structure so in a sentence like I will find the red book for example we'll see that syntax treats that string the red book as a unit there are various sort of phenomena that care about that so one of them is what's sometimes called topicalization um it's possible to say things like the red book I will find um if I for me at least it's easiest to say things like that if I follow it up with with the blue book I will leave right where it is yeah it's okay to say things like the red book I will find yeah um it's okay to take a substring like that the red book and put it together with another similar substring conjoined with the word and you can say things like I will find the red book and the blue pencils it is okay to use the red book as a possible answer to the to a question this is sort of like the the um stuff we were saying before about things you can say if you're astonished so you can say the red book as basically a sentence under the right circumstances for example if somebody's just asked you what will you find yeah these are all ways in which the red book is treated as a single object that syntax gets to refer to I hope I was smart enough to contrast it with something else on the next slide yes I was but let me give you one other test um yeah this is a test um uh I can say things like what I will find is the red book so I can rearrange the words of this sentence in a way such that there is a word is before that string the red book yeah puts a special kind of emphasis on the Red Book it's called clefting contrast that with so this is not just a property of every three word string in the sentence so find the red for example is not a constituent it's not a phrase it's not something we need to make reference to so you cannot say things like find the red I will book yeah the red book I will find the blue book I will leave where it is fine but find the red I will book leave the blue I will pencils no you can't do this with just any random three word string uh similarly there is no question there are questions to which the answer is the red book like what will you find there are no questions to which the answer is find the red apart from what are the third fourth and fifth words of this sentence so put aside sort of metal linguistic games like that yeah you can't you can't and there's no question that will give you that answer yeah what color do I need to find find the red really oh I see you mean um what color book do I need to find find the red find the rate I want to say find the red one [Music] um yes uh is there a faster way to convince you of that or similarly if I switch to my other way of eliciting sort of fragments of sentences if I if I tell you I will find the red book and you're amazed you can say the red book but if I tell you that I will find the red book and you're amazed you're not going to say find the red I think do you think that's true but yeah I take your point about um to the extent that you can use the red as shorthand for the red one yeah yeah yeah I know it's an interesting point um several people have points about that point just acceptable answer questions yeah yeah yeah yeah so this is sort of like your example yeah where we're going to treat red as a noun that you're going to go find kind of the same thing like Land of the Free homework Brave oh yeah so we have some cases where uh we have things that you certainly should be adjectives that either we're getting to use them as nouns or we're getting to modify nouns that you can't hear uh however we want to talk about that yeah good point good point yeah other points about this um so so all this slide is meant to get an into you of is that the red book and find the red don't have the same status the red book we want it to be a substring that has certain privileges can be used for these various types of phenomena as opposed to find the red which you know can't do those things with so it isn't just these are phenomena that pick out three word substrings uh it's these are phenomena that pick out certain substrings and not others of the sentence certain strings of words and not others the sentence and we're going to try to figure out theories about uh why those are the special strings yeah okay um and what we're going to do is we'll say just as with unlockable we were taking pairs of things and uh putting them together to form larger things larger units we'll do the same thing here only with words we had this operation we were calling it merge that takes pairs of things and puts them together into a larger thing and similarly here what we're going to do to create a sentence like I will find the red book we'll start with just at the end of it find the red book is we're going to take pairs of things like red and book and put them together and then we'll take that unit that we've created by putting together red and book and we'll put that together with this uh where the and then we'll take uh you know that thing that we've created by putting together the red book and we'll we'll add find yeah um so just as with unlockable we were taking pairs of things and putting them together uh in in pairs sort of uh to create these larger and larger structures we're going to do the same thing to create sentences out of uh sentences out of words yeah um this way of talking about it has the virtue of giving us a vocabulary for talking about those kinds of observations we were making on the last two slides um so when we say the red book is a unit that various things get to get to apply to things like what I call topicalization where you take a chunk of the sentence and put it at the beginning and it has some kind of emphasis because this is index and not semantics we won't worry too much about what it means um uh when we say that's something you can do to the string the red book but not for example to find the red this tree gives us a way of talking about that there is a unit that we created in the course of putting things together in pairs that is just the red book it's the unit that I've circled there but there is no unit that we've created as we've been putting these pairs together that consists just to find the red yeah do people see that in this tree so there's a a node in the tree if you want it's the one that I circled in red uh uh that consists just of the words of the red book but there is no thing that I could Circle that would consist just of the words find the red yeah there's there are other things I could Circle I could have circled the the largest thing but that corresponds to find the red book yeah or I could have circled uh a thing that consists just of red and book it would just be read book yeah but there's nothing that's just fine the red yeah and that's what we're going to relate to all those observations we made on those two slides yeah yeah okay so yeah said this now a couple of times uh um you know this is meant to remind you of stuff we were doing when we were doing morphology when we were doing morphology we were using this operation we called it merge uh that assembled pairs of things and created new things uh when we were doing morphology we were then saying when you put these two things together you have a new thing and we're giving that thing a label whose properties are determined by the things that you put together so when you put together on number one and lock it's part of the specification of unnumber one that when you combine it with a verb what you get is a verb right so the tree on the left there uh lock is labeled as a verb and unlock is also labeled as a verb people see that yeah and then when you combine that verb unlock with Abel it's a property of bubble that it merges with verbs and the thing that you create as a result is an adjective and so the whole thing is unlockable yeah this is what we were doing with with labels before we're going to want to do something similar for syntax we're going to want to label the parts of these trees yeah what kinds of labels are we going to use well look I just gave you all these Diagnostics to try to