Linguistics An Essential Introduction (Version 1.5)

When linguists study syntax, their first and foremost goal is to figure out how words can and cannot be combined in a particular language — which combinations are possible sentences in the language and which are not. For example, (1a) is a possible sentence of English, while (1b), (1c) and (1d) are not, even though they all consist of the same words:

Why is (1a) possible, but the others are not? (1b) lists the words in alphabetical order, and (1c) simply reverses the word order of (1a). Now, we would probably not expect an alphabetical list of words to result in a possible sentence, but there is no reason why the reversed word order should not do so. After all, there are languages where articles are attached to the end of a noun rather than preceding them (like Swedish, where cafeteria is kafeteria, and the cafeteria is kafeterian), there are languages that have postpositons instead of prepositions (like Japanese, where cafeteria is /kaɸeteɾia/ カフェテリア, and in (the) cafeteria is /kaɸeteɾia ɲi/ カフェテリアに), and there are languages where the entity performing an action is placed after the verb (for example, in Uraria, an isolate language of Peru, Zoe saw the tree is translated as enuga kwara-a Zoe ‘tree saw Zoe’). As for (1d), it has one of the word orders that the sentence could have in German, a language closely related to English. Clearly, every language has its own set of rules as to how words are combined into sentences.

In order to figure out these rules for a particular language, like English, it is important to realize that sentences are not just strings of individual words, but that words are first combined into larger units, and these units are then combined into sentences. The following sentences illustrate this:

If we had to describe where in an English sentence the verb occurs, we would not be able to do so in terms of words. In (2a), the verb is the second word, in (2b) it is the third word, in (2c) it is the fifth word, and we could easily find sentences where it is the fourth, sixth or seventeenth word. But if we assume that the sentences consist of units that are larger than a word, we can come up with a simple description. Note that Zoe, a student and a student with green hair all describe the person watching the documentary. If we could show that they are all units, we could say that in English sentences, the verb is in second position, following a unit that itself can consist of one or more words. Section 8.2. will explore the idea of such units, referred to as constituents, in more detail and discuss how we could identify them. Section 8.3 and Section 8.4 will discuss different types of such units and their structure.

In describing this, it is not enough to talk about word order. Consider the following sentences:

Both of them have the same structure, they differ only in the verbs that are used, and those verbs have a very similar meaning. In fact, a fluent speaker of English would be perfectly capable of understanding (3b), but they would still know that it is not a possible sentence of English. The reason is that with the verb watch, we can simply add the thing that is watched, but with look, we have to add the preposition at to the unit that describes the thing that is watched: Zoe looked at the screen. Studying syntax also includes the study of individual words (in particular, verbs) and the specific types of units that they can and cannot be combined with. The specific combinatorial preferences of words are referred to as their valence (or valency), we will discuss them in Section 8.5.

You may wonder why languages have syntax at all. Is it just to make life difficult for children (or adults) learning that language? Of course not! Language exists to communicate meanings, and syntax helps language users to do so. For example, it helps us to figure out who did what to whom. Consider the sentence Zoe watched a documentary again. How do we know who is doing the watching and who was being watched? You may think that it is obvious from the meaning of the constituents Zoe and a documentary. Since you need eyes and a brain to watch something, it is clearly Zoe who is doing the watching, a guess that is confirmed by the fact that documentaries are made in order to be watched. However, what about the following sentences:

Who is watching whom here? Both women and dogs have eyes and a brain, so we cannot guess the answer based on the meaning of the constituents. Yet we know that in (4a), the woman is doing the watching, and in (4b), the dog is doing the watching. We know this because the two constituents have different functions — the one preceding the verb is called the subject, the one after the verb is called the object. With action verbs, the subject names the entity performing the action. In English, subject and object can be identified based on word order (although matters are more complex than presented here), but in other languages, other strategies are used instead or in addition. Consider the following sentences from German:

Although (5a) and (5b) have the same word order, (5a) means the same as (4a) and (5b) means the same as (4b). Speakers of German know this because there are special forms of the article that tell them so: den is the article that signals that a masculine noun functions as the object (it is in the accusative case), der is the article that signals that a masculine noun functions as the subject (it is in the nominative case), and die is the article that signals that a feminine noun functions as subject or object (it is ambiguuous between nominative or accusative case). Section 8.6 will look more closely at subjects, objects, and their relation to meaning.

When we said that “with action verbs, the subject names the entity performing the action” just now, we implicitly assumed that we were talking about a sentence like the one in (4a) or (4b). But there are other types of sentences. Consider (6a-c):

In (6a), things work more or less like we claimed — the constituent that precedes the verb watch is the subject and it names the watcher, but it is preceded by an auxiliary, so things are a little more complex already. In (6b), the constituent that precedes the verb is the subject, but it names the entity that is being watched, so things are a lot more complex. Finally, (6c) does not have a subject at all. In Section 8.7, we will talk about different types of sentences, why they exist, and how we can relate them to each other in a systematic way.

We said that syntax helps us to communicate by helping us to identify, for example, who did what to whom. However, there are limits to this idea. Consider the following examples:

The sentence in (7a) describes an event where someone spilled something, and the syntactic structure of the sentence tells us that Aylin did the spilling and the soup was the entity that got spilled. The meaning of the whole sentence can be determined from the meaning of its parts and the syntactic structure — this is called compositionality. In (7b), matters are not just more complex, they are completely different: the sentence does not describe an event where someone spilled something, and its meaning does not involve beans at all. Instead, it describes an event where someone revealed a secret, although neither a secret nor the act of revealing it are mentioned. Spill the beans is an idiom, which means that the meaning of a sentence that contains it cannot be determined from the individual constituents involved — it is non-compositional.

CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. Written by Anatol Stefanowitsch