We should begin by saying what this course is about.
What we'll be looking at is syntactic theory. That is to say, we’ll be looking
at the kinds of rules that determine how words and language are put together to form larger
units that have meaning and how speakers of a language are able to determine what are
possible and what are impossible orders of words in their language.
So the first thing we might want to ask ourselves then is what is it that people know when they
know the syntax of their language. One possible answer, the kind of answer that a prescriptive
grammarian would give, is that what speakers know when they know the syntax of their language
is that they know what rules they should follow
in order to produce good sentences. That is to say, they know the rules of “good grammar”.
There are various different examples that one could give in English for what are considered
rules of this kind. A famous one is the rule that says that you shouldn’t split infinitives.
That is to say, you shouldn’t say “He decided to quickly leave the room”; you
should rather say “He decided quickly to leave the room.” So that rule that says
you shouldn’t split infinitives would be one kind of prescriptive rule, and a prescriptive
grammarian would say that that’s what you know when you know the syntax of English.
That’s one of the rules that you know. There are other rules of that type. Uhm, one
example would be that you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. Or there are
complex rules surrounding when you should use “I” or “me” in coordinations.
So, uhm, “My sister and I went to the shops. She gave it to my sister and I. Or she gave
it to me and my sister. Or she gave it to my sister and me.”
There are various prescriptive rules about which of those is correct and which of them
is incorrect. Rules like this, which are often called prescriptive rules because they prescribe
what you should do (they tell you what you should do) are often learned consciously and
taught consciously, even to native speakers of the language. And that’s very different
from the way language is generally acquired. The vast bulk of what native speakers know
about their language they don’t know explicitly and it wasn’t taught to them explicitly.
So this would make these rules an exception rather than the general case of the kind of
knowledge that speakers have of their language. But there is a very different understanding
of what rules of the language are, what syntactic rules are. And to understand this, we could
think, perhaps, of a more common contrast, and that is the two different ways that we
understand the concept of law. Law and rule are intrinsically related concepts. And we
can talk about laws of the country, laws of a region, but on the other hand we also talk
about laws of nature. And it’s pretty clear that those two things are rather different
concepts. In every country there are thousands of laws
proscribing certain types of behaviour. In the UK, as in many other countries, there
is clearly a law that says you are not allowed to kill a human being. There are many other
laws covering all sorts of kinds of behaviour. On the other hand, we know that such laws
are regularly disobeyed. As a result of that, we also have to include punishments for people
who violate these laws. So this is the way that the normal… a normal understanding
of laws of society. And we can think of linguistic prescriptive rules as being of the same type.
Unlike with other laws, there is often no particular body that has authority to decide
what is or is not “good” in the language. But we may nevertheless recognise informal
authorities. And in fact in some countries there are specific formal authorities who
get to codify what is considered correct or incorrect in linguistic behaviour.
It’s worth noticing that one way in which these kinds of prescriptive rules of language
are similar to laws of society is that indeed they’re disobeyed all of the time. That
is to say, people don’t respect these prescriptive rules and indeed they have in common, these
prescriptive rules of the language have in common with societal laws that knowing what
they are is actually a very guide to what people actually do.
So, in a society, we don’t generally pass laws to outlaw behaviour that doesn’t exist.
Nobody bothers writing laws to rule out behaviours that people don’t actually indulge in. So
if you study another society, it’s actually quite instructive to look at the laws that
they have to find out what people were doing as well as what people didn’t want them
to be doing. In the same way, when you find a prescriptive
rule of language, it’s usually a very good guide to the fact that speakers of that language
do produce that behaviour. They use that structure,
which we’re told is not “good”. These prescriptive rules of language often in fact
arise when in a given language there’s more than one way to express a certain thought,
when there’s variation in how something can be said. And then there’s a tendency
for one of those ways of saying things to be viewed as more “correct” than the other,
and this can become codified as a rule of the language, as a prescriptive norm.
Quite often, but not always, that prescriptive norm is an older form of the language, that
is, it’s been in the language longer, and there is a tendency to want to keep language
in its original form, although that’s not what ever actually happens.
But that’s not the only possibility, but it’s certainly one of them. So, there’s
the view that whenever you have variation, that one form is correct and the others are
incorrect. So that’s a typical pattern for a prescriptive rule of language.
On the other hand, there’s a very different take on law and rule, so there’s this different
understanding of what a law means. As we said, there are laws of society, but we also talk
about laws of nature, laws of physics. These laws are not rules about how nature should
behave, how the universe should behave. They’re observations about regularities in the universe,
so in some aspect of the universe. And, when we think about language too, we can think
about rules of that kind. That is, rules that are not ways in which people should behave,
but observations about patterns of behaviour.
A descriptive grammarian looks at language in exactly this way. And a descriptive grammarian
is interested in observing the regularities in a particular aspect of the world around
them, in this case the regularities in the linguistic behaviour of a group of people.
What such a descriptive grammarian (but for now let us call them a linguist) does is to
observe the behaviour of an individual or a group of individuals,
and to try to observe and to derive from
these observations generalisations about the way these people are behaving and
to induce from those observations the most succinct statements of these regularities.
One way of doing this is to look at collections of behaviour, that is to say, to look at corpora
of speech or of written language, and to look within these corpora for regularities. And
that is certainly a very valid way of doing linguistics, and a lot of useful work is being
done in that way and continues to be done in that way.
But it’s also important to realise that we need to know about language not only what
speakers do, but what they don’t do. And not only that, but there are other kinds of
linguistic behaviour apart from producing speech and producing writing.
So one ability that users of language have is they are able to look at or consider strings
of words, sequences of words, and they’ll have an opinion as to whether that sequence
of words is possible in their language or not possible. And that kind of judgement,
which is also a kind of linguistic behaviour, is a very good source of data about regularities
in human language, about possible descriptive rules of human language.
So, to give one example, you can take a very simple sentence like “Anna read a book”
and a very slightly more complicated one like “Anna read a book and a newspaper”. If
you want to make a question, we can make a question out of “Anna read a book”: we
want to know, well, what did she read… perhaps you didn’t hear the question properly. The
corresponding question would be “Which book did Anna read?”.
Now you might think that you could do the same thing for the second example, which was
“Anna read a book and a newspaper”. But now if you try it you’ll get “Which book
did Anna read and a newspaper?” That sentence is ungrammatical; speakers of English would
tell you that it’s not a possible sentence of English. So that’s one case of an ungrammatical
sentence, something that is syntactically unacceptable,
but which no speaker of English is ever taught explicitly is unacceptable.
This is… reflects somehow a rule that speakers have in their syntactic knowledge of English,
but one that was never taught to them explicitly. So what we have here is the result of a
descriptive rule.
We still need to work out exactly what this rule, but this is linguistic knowledge that
speakers have of their language which has not been taught to them explicitly, and which
speakers are not typically aware of either. Notice when we represent this in one way of
writing such ungrammatical examples, the typical representation to indicate that something
is syntactically ill-formed is to preface it with an asterisk. So we put an asterisk
at the beginning of a sentence to indicate that this is an impossible sentence within
the language, and impossible for syntactic reasons rather than other reasons.
to take another example, we could say that “Barbara said that she saw Carlo yesterday”
and we could say “Barbara said that Carlo saw her yesterday.” Both of those are possible
sentences. And we can question again in such a sentence, so we can say “Who did Barbara
say that she saw yesterday.”, and that’s fine, but “Who did Barbara say that saw
her yesterday?” is for many speakers of English not possible, or at least it sounds
wrong in some way. So that’s another example of a sentence, which at least for many speakers,
is syntactically ill-formed. But again, this is not on the basis of any explicit rule that
such speakers were taught. This is again the result of a descriptive rule in English. Again,
what you’ve seen or what what you’ve just heard here is an example of the effect of
such a rule. It remains the job of the linguist to work out what is… what is the rule itself.
What is the generalisation that underlies this kind of behaviour? And to give just one
other example, which is a very well-known one in the history of syntax… You can take
a sentence like “Jeff is eager to please” or “Jeff is easy to please.”
As you’d expect, you could say “What is Jeff eager to do?” but you can’t say “What
is Jeff easy to do?” So “What is Jeff easy to do?” is simply ungrammatical. It
is ill-formed according to some descriptive
rule of English, and again, it’s one of the jobs of a syntactician to work out what
is the rule behind that? What is the generalisation?
What is the rule that is violated to make that sentence ungrammatical?
Now, it’s very unlikely that children learn to distinguish all the possible from impossible
sentences in their language by explicit instruction.
If you just think of those examples, and those are typical, it’s extremely unlikely that
children were ever taught these explicitly. Apart from anything else, most adults who’d
be in contact with children are not explicitly aware of these rules themselves. And, on the
second hand, it’s also been observed that children follow a similar developmental path
when they’re learning a language, and this again seems unlikely to be the result of them
having been taught rules in a particular sequence by the people that they’re interacting with.
And finally, it’s worth noting that it has been observed that children frequently ignore
any explicit instruction about their own language that they do in fact receive in the course
of acquisition.
It’s also impossible to give children a list of all the possible sentences of their
language because, as we will see later, there is no finite list of possible sentences. The
number of possible grammatical sentences of any language is in fact infinite. So, no such
list could possibly be supplied. What happens instead is that children exposed
to an actual finite amount of language (it’s large, but finite), all children themselves
appear to be able to deduce from that evidence, from the sentences that they hear, they themselves
deduce what the underlying rules are that are responsible for those data. It’s also
impossible for anyone to give a child a list of all the possible sentences in their language,
because such a list would be infinite. In any language, there is an infinite number
of sentences that are grammatical in that language.
It seems instead that what children do is, on the basis of the language that they hear
about them, they themselves devise rules that they will follow as they speak. They work
out, from the data that they get, what the rules of their language are. The question
of how it is that children arrive at the set of rules they arrive at is a very interesting
one. It’s the whole question of the process of language acquisition. Unfortunately, however,
it’s not something that we’re going to cover in this course. What we’re going to
be looking at instead is the set of rules that speakers in the end do wind up with.
We’re also going to be focusing particularly on English in this course for a source of
data, but naturally the same processes happen in all languages, in the acquisition of all
languages. Notice that if we’re looking at the set
of rules that speakers of varieties of English have arrived at by the time they’re adult
speakers, those initial examples that we saw of sentences which are prescriptively incorrect,
those are, for speakers of English, part of their language, and in describing language,
we are going to want to explain or come up with rules that allow those sentences. At
the same, we want to be able to explain the difference between the possible and ungrammatical
sentences that we saw later. So, to sum up, we need to distinguish between prescriptive
rules and descriptive rules. Studying why it is that in many languages there is a set
of prescriptive rules is an interesting question in itself. It’s not the question we’re
going to be addressing. What we’re looking at is descriptive rules, and in this course
we’re going to be looking at descriptive rules of syntax.
So when we talk about grammatical and ungrammatical
sentences here, that’s the sense that we’re using. That is, sentences that are possible
or impossible in the particular language that we’re looking at according to the descriptive
rules of that language.