Praise for Syntactic Analysis

“An excellent, original introduction, which treats linguistics as a science and language as an object of rigorous inquiry. Sobin succeeds in making the material user-friendly without simplification, and in engaging the reader in formulating and testing hypotheses about linguistic structures. A welcome addition to the growing body of books on the nature of linguistic inquiry and analysis..”

Maria Polinsky, Harvard

“This book is a breath of fresh air. Any reader who wants an accessible introduction to what has been blowing in the wind will do no better than begin here.”

Samuel Jay Keyser, MIT

“Syntactic Analysis is unusual among the introductory syntax texts on offer: it is more concise than most of them, yet covers an astounding number of topics in depth and detail. This should be the perfect introductory syntax text for upper-class linguistics majors and minors, and forMAstudents in linguisticsan audience for whom most existing texts may be too detailed and cumbersome. The exercises make this book particularly valuable

“Jaklin Kornfilt, Syracuse University

This edition first published 2011

©2011 Nicholas Sobin

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sobin, Nicholas.

Syntactic analysis / Nicholas Sobin.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4443-3895-9 (alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4443-3507-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Grammar, Comparative and general–Syntax. 2. Linguistic analysis (Linguistics) I. Title.

P291.S546 2010

415–dc22

2010029414

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to a great many people for quite a variety of contributions which directly or indirectly, short-term or long-term, influenced the creation of this book. Central among these are Jon Amastae, Emmon Bach, C. L. Baker, Bob Borsley, Noam Chomsky, Ellen Courtney, Michel DeGraff, Joyce Fleur, Robert T. Harms, C.-T. James Huang, Sabine Iatridou, Yuki Ike-uchi, Lauri Karttunen, S. Jay Keyser, Jaklin Kornfilt, Susumu Kuno, Howard Lasnik, Marvin Loflin, Howell McCullough, David Pesetsky, Stan Peters, Masha Polinsky, Andy Rogers, Carlota S. Smith, and Arnold Zwicky. I also owe a huge debt of thanks to the many linguistics students at Texas, Pan American, Iowa, UALR, University of Wales-Bangor, and UTEP whom it has been my privilege to work with over the years.

Many thanks also to the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University and the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT each for hosting me as a Visiting Scholar on a number of occasions. My life in linguistics has been much richer for these experiences.

I'd like to offer special thanks to the editors at Wiley-Blackwell Danielle Descoteaux, Julia Kirk, and Anna Oxbury for their consistent encouragement and professional guidance on this project.

To my parents Edith and Ray, and my sisters Sue and Tina, my thanks for all their support in my (and our) academic endeavors. None of us would be where we are without it.

This work is dedicated to AnneMarie Sobin, gardener, fiction writer, and bricklayer, with thanks for the use of her superb copy editing skills, and for encouraging and supporting nearly everything I've wanted to attempt, some of which actually worked.

Abbreviations

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.

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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 Society 4: 157–89.

Reinhart, Tanya. 1976. The syntactic domain of anaphora, Ph.D. dissertation. MIT, Cambridge, MA.

Reinhart, Tanya. 1981. Definite NP-anaphora and c-command domains. Linguistic Inquiry 12: 605–35.

Reinhart, Tanya. 1983. Anaphora and Semantic Interpretation. London: Croom Helm.

Ross, John R. 1967. Constraints on variables in syntax. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA.

Ross, John R. 1969. Auxiliaries as main verbs. In W. Todd (ed.), Studies in Philosophical Linguistics (series 1). Evanston, IL: Great Expectations Press, 77–102.

Slobin, Dan I. 1979. Psycholinguistics. 2nd edn. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman.

Stageberg, Norman. 1981. An Introductory English Grammar. 4th edn. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Travis, L. 1984. Parameters and effects of word order variation. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA.

Vendler, Zeno. 1967. Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.