Grammar and lexicon Formal grammar Gender and number Person and deixis Transitivity and causitivity

Semantics and Grammar

distinction made by Henry Sweet in terms of full words and form words

full words – those that contain lexical

meaning (e.g. table, man, go, hear, good)

form (function) words – a word whose role

is largely grammatical (e.g. articles,

pronouns, conjunction, prepositions)

Grammar and lexicon

distinction is between lexicon and grammar [modern linguists]

distinction between four parts pf speech (verb, noun, adjective, adverb) and fifteen sets of function words (the, may, not, very, and, at, do, there, why, although, oh, yes, listen!, please, let’s) [C.C. Fries]

Grammar and lexicon

Grammar is not restricted to the study of form or function words

It is concerned with categories such as ‘tense, gender, number’ and syntactic functions such as subject and object

They are marked by form words, or by morphemes, or by the order of the words

Grammar and lexicon

problem what are the relevant grammatical

categories in any language whether a grammatical category is indicated by a form word, a morpheme or the order of the words

e.g. English marks past tense with the past tense morpheme indicated as ‘-ed’

Grammar and lexicon

problem

e.g. English marks past tense with the past tense morpheme indicated as ‘-ed’

no similar morpheme for the future (shall, will, going to, or other verb forms with appropriate adverb)

I’m flying / fly to Cairo tomorrow.

Grammar and lexicon

problem

English conjunction words: after, before, when, while, if are translated into Bilin (a Cushitic language of Ethiopia) by endings of the verb

Grammar and lexicon

In modern linguistics, problem of distinction between grammar and lexicon is posed in terms of distinction between sentences that are deviant for grammatical reasons and those that are deviant on lexical groundse.g. The boys is in the garden.

The water is fragile.The flower walked away.

Grammar and lexicon

There have been opposing views on the question whether these two kinds of restriction are different

colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

(grammatically correct)

(lexically deviant)

Grammar and lexicon

If a grammatical rule is broken, we can correct the sentence

The boys are in the garden. If the sentence conforms to no

grammatical rules, we rule it out as gibberish.

e.g. Been a when I tomato.

Grammar and lexicon

Where the deviance lies in the collocational / lexical restrictions, we try to ‘make sense’ of the sentence by looking for a context in which it is used

e.g. John drinks fish.

John drinks fish soup.

The water is fragile. (to find a poetic interpretation for this sentence)

Grammar and lexicon

Even Chomsky”s Colourless green ideas sleep furiously can be given interpretation.

Grammar and lexicon

Lexical restrictions are not a matter of rules but of tendencies, not of Yes/no, but of More/less when judged in terms of deviance

When is a rule a rule?

Grammar and lexicon

There is no clear line between grammatical and lexical deviance.

If some sentences are ungrammatical and can be ruled out/ corrected.

If some sentences are deviant in terms of lexicon, they can be contextualized

Grammar and lexicon

There are others that are half-way and we

are not really sure whether deviance is

lexical or grammatical

e.g The dog scattered. (deviant because of the

collocation of dog with scatter)

Grammar and lexicon

The verb ‘scatter’ is normally used only with plural nouns.

the dogs scattered. The verb ‘scatter’ is normally used with

collective nouns.

The herd scattered.

Grammar and lexicon

Can we imagine a dog with magical powers whose way of avoiding its enemies was to break into many pieces and ‘scatter’ over a wide area?

The dog scattered. The deviance would seem to be lexical

rather than grammatical.

Grammar and lexicon

Can we say “The dog scattered” in such a context OR would “The dog scattered itself” be more appropriate?

We are on the borderline of grammar and lexicon.

Grammar and lexicon

For most traditional grammarians, grammatical categories were essentially semantic

Many linguists have argued that grammar must be kept distinct from semantics and that grammatical categories must be wholly defined in terms of the form of the language

Formal Grammar

Two arguments for excluding meaning from

grammar

Meaning is often vague

Meaning categories are not easily delineated

Semantic categories are often definable only in

terms of the formal features of a language

If the grammatical categories are given semantic

definitions, the definitions are circular

Formal Grammar

e.g. noun = a word used for naming anythingWhat are the things?thing = fire, speed, place, intelligence,

suffering & objects such as tables, chairs & redness, blackness

How do we know that redness and blackness are names of things while red and black are not?

Formal Grammar

rain = noun (thing)It’s raining = thingriver, spring, etc. = verbHow do we recognize things?things = what are designated by nouns Definition of noun in terms of ‘naming

things’ is completely circular. There is no non-linguistic way of defining

things

Formal Grammar

Two arguments for excluding meaning from grammar

Even when we can establish semantic and grammatical categories independently, they often do not coincide

The fact that these (e.g. wheat and oats) are singular and plural respectively is shown in the agreement with the verb

Formal Grammar

In terms of ‘one’ and ‘more than one’ ‘wheat’ and ‘oats’ cannot be distinguished

‘wheat’ = a single mass

‘Oats’ = a collection of individual grains

e.g.

The wheat is in the barn.

The oats are in the barn.

Formal Grammar

Hair = singular in English

= plural in French and Italian Gender and sex are distinct in German

and French

German words for ‘young woman’ = neuter

strapping young male in French = feminine

Formal Grammar

In English, tense is not directly related to ‘time’

The past tense is used for the future time in “If he came tomorrow ….”

The basic grammatical categories of a language must be established independently of their meaning

Formal Grammar

Some correlation between e.g. gender and sex, tense and time, grammatical number and enumeration though the correlation will never be exact

nouns referring specifically to females males and sometimes males

Formal Grammar

The correlation between grammar and semantics becomes closer and closer and it is difficult to declare whether the categories are formal or semantic

e.g. 1. John slept coming every day.2. John kept coming every day.3. John hoped to come every day.

‘sleep’ does not occur with an –ing form, ‘keep’ is followed by the ‘-ing’ form (if it is a grammatical error)

Formal Grammar

The sentence is impossible for semantic reasons, it doesn’t make sense

e.g. 4. John ran coming every day.

Does this sentence make sense?

If it does not, the restriction is semantic.

If it does, the restriction is grammatical.

e.g. 5. John is seeming happy.

This sentence is ungrammatical.

Formal Grammar

The verb seem does not occur in the continuous form.

Is this a grammatical rule or is the case that for semantic reasons ‘John cannot be in a continuous state of seeming’?

The line between grammar and semantics is not a clear one

Formal Grammar

1. No exact correlation between gender and sex

In some cases, gender is wholly idiosyncratic

e.g. The German words are neuter

French occupational names are all feminine.

Gender and number

2. English has no grammatical gender Pronouns ‘he, she, it’ are essentially

markers of sex If the sex is specially known, ‘he’ and

‘she’ are used; otherwise, ‘it’ is used. There is a difference between the use of

pronouns for animals and for humans. e.g. ‘It’ may be used for animals and ‘he’

or ‘she’ is used if the sex is known

Gender and number

With ‘human’, it cannot be used even if the sex is unknown.

For the indefinite unknown human, ‘they, them, their’ are used in colloquial English

For reference to a specific human whose sex is unknown ‘it’ is sometimes used as in:e.g. Is it a boy or a girl?

Gender and number

3.Semantically, enumeration does not seem to be very important

Many languages have grammatical number systems but others do not.

It is difficult to see why the semantic distinction should be between singular (one) and plural (more than one)

Many languages make this distinction but not all.

Gender and number

Greek, Sanskrit and Arabic had dual – referring to objects

Fijian and Tigre (Ethiopia) have distinctions of little plurals and big plurals

Gender and number

4. need to distinguish between ‘individual’ and ‘mass’ (countables and uncountables)

Formally they can be distinguished Count nouns may occur in the singular with the

indefinite article (e.g a cat) while mass nouns may occur with no article or with the indefinite quantifier ‘some’ (e.g. some rice)

Semantically, they are different Count nouns individuate while mass nouns are

not individuated

Gender and number

5. But the distinction does not correspond closely to any semantic distinction in the world of experienceLiquids are referred to by mass nouns because they cannot be individuated

e.g. but there is no explanation in semantic terms why ‘butter’ is a mass noun while ‘jelly’ is ‘count’ as well as ‘mass’Cake is count as well as ‘mass’ (because individual cakes can be recognized) but bread is only ‘mass’

Gender and number

6. Mass nouns can function as count nouns

e.g. a butter - a kind of butter

a petrol - a kind of petrol

a coffee – a cup of coffee

a beer – a glass of beer

function as types of individuation

Count nouns that refer to creatures may function as mass nouns (to indicate the meat)

e.g. The Chinese eat dog. (the meat of dog)

Gender and number

7. Semantically mass nouns are nearer to plurals than singular forms of count nouns

e.g. oats and wheatcount mass

8. Most count nouns can be counted. But there are two reservations

(1) English has the words ‘scissors, trousers, shears, tongs’ which are formally plural but cannot be enumerated except by using another noun ‘a pair of …’

Gender and number

(2) English uses the plural forms with numbers above one, but not all languages do.

e.g. one dog, two dogs, three dogs

In Myanmar, we use numbers above ‘one’ but no plural markers

Gender and number

Grammatical categories do not coincide exactly with semantic categories

Gender and number

‘Person’ is often closely associated with number and person

Only person and number are marked in Western Indo-European languages

Gender is marked in Semitic languages and Eastern Indo-European language

Person and deixis

‘persons’ has clear semantic function but does not refer to any general semantic features such as quantity or sex, but to an identifiable item in the context.

Person and deixis

First person and second person (I and you) have changing reference depending on who is present in the conversation but cannot be interpreted in terms of any generalisable semantic qualities

‘person’ represented by pronouns and endings of verbs in some languages

Person and deixis

‘person’ interpreted in terms of the speaker, hearer, non-participants in conversation or written correspondence

speaker – I, We

hearer – you

non-participant – he, she, it, they

Person and deixis

e.g.

‘We want another’ by crowd in a football match

‘Why are we waiting?’ By impatient group singing

We …> (S, H), (S, N-P), (S, H, N-P)

Person and deixis

‘they’ is used to refer to hearer(s) and non-participant(s)

A simple rule with the plural: pronoun is determined by the ‘highest’ ranking person included

‘I’ is included ….> I ‘you’ is included …> you ‘they’

Person and deixis

In some languages, more polite and less polite form of address are used

e.g. in Myanmar ‘person’ is a deictic category which refers

to identifiable in the context ‘article’ is used to refer to a single

identifiable item in the context where it is apparent to speaker and hearer precisely

Person and deixis

Book …> any book The book …> a particular book Identification of item is often simply in

terms of the most familiar

e.g. the Government, the moon, the kitchen, the garden

Person and deixis

articles does not occur with names (proper nouns) – Fred, Professor Brown

‘the three Freds, He is not the Fred I knew’ used in a non-unique sense

there are some idiosyncracies e.g. rivers – the Severn, the Thames, etc.cities – the Hague Formal grammatical point, no semantic

significance

Person and deixis

Other deictics Demonstratives – these and those Place adverbs – here, there, etc. Time adverbs – now, soon, etc.

Person and deixis

Deictics are used to refer to items in the context (linguistic & non-linguistic)

e.g ‘he’ to refer to someone actually present

(a little impolite)

‘now’ and ‘here’ does not refer to time and place of speaking but are used for times and places referred to in the discourse

Person and deixis