LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.10 (11) [E]

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   L O W L A N D S - L * 11 December 2005 * Volume 01
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.09 (03) [E]

> From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
> Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.09 (01) [E]

> But this whole thread was based on you wanting to throw away syntax
> because syntax proposed having empty or deleted elements in sentences!

That wasn't me!

I think it might be a good idea to recap the discussion at this point
and then explain my actual thoughts on modern grammatical theories..

The discussion started when someone mentioned Chomsky's universal
grammar on the list and I posted suggesting that this idea was no longer
considered valid. A number of contributors subsequently voiced their
suspicions with regard to the idea of a universal grammar.

Another aspect of the discussion was the question of whether "would of"
and its ilk were acceptable English grammar. This was where the
discussion became more polarised.

After some digressions, the discussion became a question of whether
syntax was a central feature of linguistic analysis or whether language
can better be seen as working via "templates", this term not being
clearly defined and the terms "patterns" and "examplars" also being used.

Paul Tatum was the main proponent of the idea of syntax (or rather,
syntactic theory) as central, and when I raised an example of templates
in action, Paul raised the question of how utterances can be created
from the given templates: unlike with syntactic theories, there seem to
be no rules for templates.

I suggested that the only rules were a matter of how neural nets work,
but Paul already understood this concept and maintained that we still
need syntax (or rather, syntactic theory) to describe and compare languages.

I have, on the whole, defended my viewpoint by saying that you can't
effectively learn languages through pure grammar, and that semantics is
more important; while Paul has emphasised the necessity of syntactical
theories in speaking about and comparing languages. Paul has indicated
that he's not trying to say that anyone should learn languages purely
through grammar, and he agrees that there's a lot more to languages than
their syntax.

Ian Pollock argued for a dismissal of syntax in general, though he then
said that he had been taking too hard a line. Paul seems to have thought
that Ian's original hard line was mine because after I said that
syntactic theories were clever, he thought I was contradicting myself!

That's a summary.

I think at this point I should, while admiring the cleverness of some
aspects of syntactic theories, explain why I don't think they're as good
a description of language as they seem. While this may seem to be
getting more into pure linguistics than Lowlands languages, I do think
that it has a bearing on the relationship between language and dialect
in the sense that grammarians seem to talk about an imaginary "standard"
language and have more difficulty accepting the validity of dialects,
even small dialectical variations, because they don't fit in with their
theories.

Firstly, consider the nature of scientific theories in general, by going
back to our example of Newtonian vs Einsteinian theories in physics.

When Kepler discovered that Mars had an elliptical orbit, it was a bit
of a nail in the coffin of the then-favoured theory of epicycles. On the
other hand, when Newton figured out a simple explanation of why the
planets' orbits were elliptical, physicists were jumping for joy not
only at how simple his theory was, but also how they were now able to
calculate everything about the planets' orbits correctly, not only the
shapes, but also such subtleties as the rate of precession.

The only problem was that Mercury's orbit seemed to be precessing at the
wrong rate. They tried to find all sorts of explanations and failed.

Physicists actually stuck by Newton's theory and hoped that one day
they'd find something to explain the anomaly in the rate of precession
of Mercury's orbit. In the end they discovered that Newton's theory was
only an approximation to reality and that General Relativity gives a
better approximation. But imagine if they'd taken another tack. Imagine
if they'd said, "Precession of Mercury's orbit, no problem, just add a
constant and call it Precessional Augmentation so we still sound like
scientists."

Then they discover that light only bends by half as much in a
gravitational field as Newton's theory predicts, but still, no problem,
call it Photic Reduction and nobody's any the wiser.

This is what you might call a patched theory. You can add as many
patches as you like and call them as scientific names as you like but if
it's a symptom of a flaw in the original theory, you'll never be done.
Eventually people start building particle accelerators and in their own
little world it begins to seem as if Newton's theory doesn't even come
near to working, so the staunch Newtonians say, "No! Accelerating stuff
to such high velocities is wrong!" and start an educational programme to
make sure children never grow up with such disgusting behaviours as
accelerating things.

Of course, physicists don't behave like this. They can see all too
plainly that they're up against hard reality and it's not to be argued
with. But it's not so obvious to some that languages are hard reality
and if you really want to understand them then trying to control them
isn't the way to go about it.

If you look at modern transformational grammar, I'd say that this
started off from promising beginnings and then quickly grew into a prime
example of a patched theory.

One root of the problem might have been the importance of languages like
Latin and Greek earlier in the educational system. I order to work with
the morphology of these languages, people got used to thinking in terms
of parts of speech and their paradigms. There was a feeling that words
could somehow be wholly characterised in terms of whether they were
nouns or verbs and suchlike. These ideas were inherited by modern
grammarians who eventually managed to explain the whole of the grammar
of a language in terms of a few simple structures - or in fact a single
simple structure, the XP rule.

Impressive, except that as soon as you pull back from the simple
examples (or "lab samples") that the theory works with, you run into the
fact that it doesn't work with many real sentences.

For example:

"The girl will eat the cake."

breaks down nicely according to the XP rule but as soon as we ask:

"Will the girl eat the cake?"

What happened to our beautiful the XP rule? The idea in a
transformational grammar is now to say that the XP rule describes the
"deep structure" and to explain the fact that "will" shifted to the
beginning of the sentence we introduce the idea of "surface
transformations". It all sounds very scientific, but it's just a way of
making a patched theory sound organised.

We can now have inversion, wh-movement, "do"-insertion, whatever doesn't
work, we can make it work, as long as real language is sufficiently
organised. Eventually, the attitude of our imaginary anti-accelaration
physicists becomes reality in our non-imaginary grammarians when they
run up against sentences like:

"You do that, gonna leave you without a dime."
"Don't make no sense."
"Could be I ain't."

Strangely, these American English sentences (possibly affected by
Spanish?) are easy to make sense of while the following perfectly
grammatical Scottish English sentences are more confusing (though not
for me, as a Scots speaker!):

"It was nice to meet her, I'm not saying that."
"Don't worry about it, it's a matter."
"Yes, will I." (OK, this one might need a "patch")

This anomaly suggests to me that syntax is not central to language
description, but that semantics might be.

(An aside...

Of course, too many grammarians, or even more so, people who have been
educated with a certain grammatical bias, at some point depending on
where they draw the line, will start declaring aspects of real language
as "ungrammatical" and instead of attempting to understand it will use
"grammar" as an excuse to disparage those who speak differently from
themselves.

This is _not_ in the spirit of scientific enquiry and can't be used as a
basis for language study.

...)

However, to get back to the idea of semantics being central to language
description, perhaps Paul hit on something nearer to the truth when he
said that:

"I can place an adverb between 'king' and 'runs' so: 'the king quickly
runs' but I can't place an adverb between 'the' and 'king': 'the quickly
king runs'. I conclude that I can't do this because 'the king' forms a
discrete structure within the sentence, that the adverb 'quickly'
modifies at a sentence level and that it therefore cannot break up the
unity of the phrase, 'the king'."

Here I think Paul is describing the phrase in terms of the semantics, he
really only falls down when he labels words as "adverb" and so on. In
fact the whole thing falls down on syntax, at least if we're talking
about transformational grammar, because the XP rule is broken over and
over again in the various placements of "quickly", and talking about one
thing being at sentence level isn't part of transformational grammar theory.

For example, we will say:

"Quickly the king runs"
"The king quickly runs"
"The king runs quickly"

But not:

"The quickly king runs"
"The runs king quickly"

In transformational grammar this is done (I hesitate to say "explained")
by categorising words as "nouns", "verbs", "adverbs" etc and in the
"Deep Structure" using the clever XP rule to arrange it as:

(The king)(quickly runs)

And then apply various not-so-clever "Surface Transformations" or
patches, to get the other allowed sentences. The problem here is that if
we _had_ happened to say sentences like:

"The quickly king runs"

Then we could have covered this too by applying a new kind of Surface
Transformation. Surface transformations do nothing for our understanding
of language - you can allow what you like, you can disallow what you like.

You'll notice that we can't generate the sentence:

"Quickly the king runs"

without breaking up the verb phrase. This is why we need patches.

However, look at the sort of sentence some grammarians might disparage:

"Don't make no sense."

We can either say this is ungrammatical and disallow it, or we can
invent a couple of surface transformations (maybe "First Person Pronoun
Deletion" and "Negative Reduplication") to legalise it. Either way,
we're just making up the rules as we go along.

However, ignore syntax and bring in semantics the way Paul suggests (see
how I cleverly make it _your_ idea in the hope that you'll agree with
me? :) and things seem to work a lot better:

"Quickly the king runs"
"The king quickly runs"
"The king runs quickly"

A king is one thing we perceive in real life, running is another. "The
king" is more qualified, but still one thing in real life, and the same
can be said of "running quickly." "A running king" can also be
visualised as a single concept, so why not apply the concept of
"quickly" to that?

So now we can say:

"Quickly the king runs"
"The king quickly runs"
"The king runs quickly"
"*King the quickly runs"
"*King the runs quickly"

Now you'll notice that the adverbial phrase can break the XP rule while
the noun phrase can't.

We can now invent a couple of transformations to shift the "quickly"
about and refrain from allowing these transformations on the noun
phrase, but they _explain nothing_.

I think we need look to something else to explain the many variations
that occur in practice, not just a bunch of patches (which only
generates language _we_ approve of, even though patches could be
invented to generate anything).

One idea is that instead of trying to analyse a sentence as a tree
structure we try to look at it in terms of what we, as humans, can
perceive as a single object or concept in real life. From:

"The king quickly runs"

we could isolate as concepts:

"King"
"The king"
"running"
"running quickly"
"a king running"

but not:

"the quickly" &c.

We might then be able to formulate a theory where sentence structure is
driven by concepts rather than syntax, explaining why some phrases are
syntactically more flexible than others. Ultimately the syntax rule (and
perhaps there would only be one for each language, like the XP rule)
comes into play, but beneath the concept level, not above it.

I don't know the answer but I do feel that transformational and similar
grammars are inherently unscientific and a break from trying to
categorise words as nouns, verbs &c and a move over to semantics as
central to language structure might give us a better understanding and a
more sensible system of values for what's "right" and "wrong" in
language production.
.
Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/ 

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