LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.09 (03) [E]

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09 December 2005 * Volume 03
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From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.09 (01) [E]

Hello

> You've experienced it for yourself, as anyone who has ever been a child
> has. When you say it "seems obvious" and "you know the language" what
> this means is that, in your childhood, you accomplished this feat. You
> can't deny that it happens.
Yes I experienced it myself. I heard people talking English, my brain
slowly over a few years recognised and learnt the rules that it operated
by, and now I can produce sentences all on my own. You give me a list of
exammples like so:
V: "George sat on a chair."
X: "Little Miss Muffet is a wimp."
Y: "She sat criying her eyes out."
Z: "Show me the box and wrappiing."

then you tell me you can say:
A: Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey."

Tell me how you get to A from V, X, Y and Z. To do so, I think you have
to appeal to the internal structure of V, X, Y and Z. And the internal
structure of V, X, Y, Z is syntax.

  You say that we should ditch syntax and you tell me that you can give
me a list of exemplars which show the English language,. You are saying
that these sentences have no structure that we need to know about, you
just learn them as an indivisible whole, and that if you want to produce
a new sentence, you just substitute in the correct words into an
exemplar. If you are not, and you do thnk the exemplars have an internal
structure, then you have syntax, but under another name. I claim there
is more to it than that. I claim the sentence ;'the king runs' has a
structure. For example 'the' and 'king' belong together because I can
say 'he runs' where the two words 'the king' have been replaced by the
pronoun 'he' (pronoun does literally mean 'pro noun'). 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'.

>> It would be a lot less obvious if the
>> examples were in an unknown language. "She sat crying her eyes out"
>> employs a construction that does not exist in German, and mechanical
>> translation would not be right. (Witness the famous manuals 'translated'
>> from Japanese).
>
> But it's completely obvious to Germans and Japanese respectively.
>
Yes because they have learned the rules of German and Japanese.

> When you take a grammatical approach, you do assign a generalised
> meaning to words by marking some as nouns, some as verbs and so on. But
> I wouldn't be terribly enlightened if the teacher tried to explain to me
> that "a maiden all forlorn" was a noun phrase followed by an adjective
> phrase and so on.
>
No and I wouldn't teach you to drive by explaining the workings of the
infernal combustion engine or how to make toast by explaining the
chemistry of the caramelisation of carbohydrates. But that doesn't mean
that the engine isn't fundamental to the working of the car. Just as
syntax is to the working of language.

> Relating grammar to the real world is very difficult - yes it can be
> done through semantic theory, but that's difficult. But humans do it all
> very easily without either.
>
We use both syntax and semantics all the time, from the greatest speaker
to the least, but unconciously and still very easily. We use syntax and
semantics, it's graamarians that make issues and theories out of our use.

> Yes, an understanding of syntax structure and more generally grammar
> allows us to do things with languages that you can't otherwise. But you
> can't use grammar to really generate language in normal usage. A person
> may speak a language to a very high degree of proficiency, and generally
> does, without generating it by (to choose one syntactic theory) creating
> a deep structure and then applying surface transformations.

I'm saying that we all follow the rules of English all the time we are
speaking English, if you don't follow the rules its not English. We just
do it _subconciously_, without explicit knowledge, like when we see, we
unconciously analyse a scene into cups and chairs, etc. I don't know
whether we form a deep structure and process it to form a surface
structure. I just want to study how sentences are put together and how
they work internally and if I want to do that then I have to use syntax.
I know nothing about the teaching of a language aspect, except you've
got to teach grammar _and_ examples and provide plenty of practice., I
want to talk about whether Papuan Pidgin English could be described as
being close to a universal grammar or how Dutch, Frisian, Afrikaans,
English and Saxon resemble each other or differ.

 >> Sorry this is a really bad example for you :-) Programming languages are
>> defined syntactically, using context-free phrase-structure grammars.
>
>
> Au contraire, the example becomes more pertinent! The reason for having
> context-free phrase structure grammars in programming languages is a
> concession to the fact that it has to be read by a machine. It holds no
> advantages for the end-users (ie programmers programming in the language).
>
and a concession that it has to be written by a human, so it is of
advantage to humans in that they know the rules of the language and the
semantics attached to those rules. If they held no advantages, we'd
still be using machine or assembly languages. and would never have
developed something of no use to us

>> Both programmers must obey the syntax otherwise the compiler will not
>> understand the program.
>
> Which means that syntax isn't of any great concern. Well, it was in the
> old days when to compile a program we actually had to post it off to
> Bracknell on paper tape by overnight express and get it back the next
> day with a long list of our syntax errors as spotted by the compiler!
> But these days the compiler will tell you about your syntax errors in
> two seconds flat, so it doesn't really matter to get it right the first
> time.

Syntax is central. OK it might be 2 seconds now before you find you've
got a syntax error, but syntax error equals no program, whenther it
takes two seconds or two days to find out that fact.

Programming these days is all about semantics and structure and so
> called "patterns". I think most programmers now learn syntax by example
> rather than railroad diagrams and suchlike.

Yes, my point is that there is syntax, but just because programmers dont
learn it explicitly, and i certainly dont think they should, it doesn't
mean the syntax has disappeared, the language is still defined
syntactically, and if the programmers don't obey the syntax, the program
doesn't work. It might be an absolutely brilliant program, but it won't
get to stage 1.

> I don't think modern syntactic theory is that complicated, at least not
> any given theory, as opposed to studying and comparing different
> syntactic theories.
>
> I would say that modern grammarians have done an amazing job of imposing
> simplicity on complexity, and that's what's clever about it.
>
But this whole thread was based on you wanting to throw away syntax
because syntax proposed having empty or deleted elements in sentences!

Paul Tatum

----------

From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.09 (01) [E]

> From: heather rendall <HeatherRendall at compuserve.com>
> Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.08 (01) [E]
>
> A large, red, expensive .................................(sorry I died
> before I got to the end of the sentence . What did you end up with as a
> mental picture?
>
> A car, large, red ............................. ( I died before I got to
> the end of the sentence but at least you knew what I was talking about
> even
> if you had a cheap run-about in mind rather than a Porsche or Ferrari!

Yes, I always think Welsh is an even better language to die in the
middle of, because of the way all qualifiers, including genitives and
adverbs, come after the thing they're qualifying:

"Car Tom coch mawr iawn"

"*Car Tom red big very"

"Tom's very big red car"

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/ 

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