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THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF TANZANIAFaculty of Arts and Social SciencesP.O. Box 23409Dar Es Salaamhttp://www.out.ac.tzTel: 255-22-2668820/2668992-Ext.2115Fax: 255-22-2668759Direct Line: 022 - 2667255E-Mail: dfass@out.ac.tzOLL 336: ADVANCED ENGLISH SYNTAXACADEMIC YEAR 2014/2015COURSE DESCRIPTIONThe course is termed as advanced English syntax; it assumes that the notion of syntax is not newto students. It begins by revising some syntactic rules and goes on to trace Linguistics before theChomskyan era. Then it moves on to look at the historical background to the course with a focuson the role played by Chomsky in the study of syntax. The logic of using tree diagrams toillustrate the notion of constituent structure, surface structure and some elementarytransformations and the notion of transformational generative grammar are dealt with.Development of phrase structure rules, x bar theory and the bare phrase structures are discussed inthe notes provided. Rules and Filter vs Principles, syntactic derivation and the economy ofprinciples and parameter theory are discussed in the notes presented in this outline. Lastly is thesummary for this courseCOURSE OBJECTUVES:Exposing students to current syntactic notions and processes by revising some syntactic rules andthe conditions that led to the development of linguistics in the 1950s;Sketch the history of Noam Chomsky and his salient aspects of his revolution;Discuss on generative grammar and other scholars who worked on it before ChomskyBreak down sentences into its constituents by drawing tree diagrams representing the variousconstituents and be able to show the nesting capacity of English sentences Examine the notions ofdeep and surface structures, intermediate structure and some elementary transformations;Examine the notion of transformational- generative- grammar and how it worksDiscuss the development of Phrase structure RulesExplain when, why, and how X Bar Theory was introducedDiscuss what is meant by Bare Phrase structureExplain the reasons for proposing Bare Phrase structuresPrepared by Dr. Hanna J.M. Simpassa1

Discuss the role of rules, filters vs principlesArgue for derivational vs representational issuesWork out derivations of sentences and interrogative strings and interpretation of lexical categoriesusing bundles of distinctive features;Account for the economy of principles and parameter theoryReading ListBach, E. (1964). An Introduction o Transformational Generative Grammar. New York:London Hutchison.Brown, E.K. & J.E. Miller (1980). Syntax: a Linguistic Introduction London: Routledge andKegan Paul.Fowler, Roger (1977). An Introduction to Transformational syntax. London: Routledge andKegan PaulFromkin, V.& Robert, Rodman (1978). An Introduction to Language. New York: Holt, Rineand Winston.Jacobs& Rosenbaum (1968) English Transformational Grammar. New York: John Willey &sons Inc.Lyon, John (1981). Semantics. London: Cambridge University Press.Newmayer, Fredrick (1980). Linguistic Theory in America. New York: Academic Press.READING NOTES:I.0 The Rules of Syntax Revision2.0 Linguistics Before the Chomskyan Revolution2.1 Central dichotomies synchronic – diachronic descriptive – prescriptive form – function, language system – language use: language-specific – comparative applied – not applied. empirical – introspective:Prepared by Dr. Hanna J.M. Simpassa2

2.2. Structuralism2.3 Branches of linguistics object of study form function/meaning3.0 CHOMSKY AND HIS REVOLUTION I3.1: Biographical InformationNoam Avram Chomsky was born the son of Russian immigrants on December 7, 1928 inPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania. He learned several linguistic principles from his father, WilliamChomsky, who was a Hebrew scholar. One of his father’s publications was a scholarly edition ofa medieval Hebrew grammar.As a student, Chomsky proofread Zellig Harris’s Methods in Structural Linguistics and developedsympathy for Harris’s ideas on politics. In 1953, he traveled to Europe. During this trip, heresolved that his own attempt to formalize structural linguistics would not work, because languagewas a highly abstract generative phenomenon. He went on to complete his doctoral dissertationentitled, Transformational Analysis. The major theoretical views of the paper appeared inSyntactic Structure, which, when published in 1957, would overturn all previous approaches togrammar and place syntax at the cutting edge of the discipline.Since earning his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1955, Chomsky has taught at MIT, where he now holdsthe Ferrari P. Ward Chair of Modern Language and Linguistics. Chomsky was married to CarolSchatz on December 24, 1949, and has two children.4.0 CHOMSKY & THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION IIDuring the 1950’s, Noam Chomsky wrote his first major work, The Logical Structure ofLinguistic Theory, which would not to be published for another 20 years. However, a Europeanpublisher, who was excited about Chomsky’s ideas, published a set of his lecture notes under thetitle Syntactic Structures in 1957. The book, after having received a positive review by RobertLees in Language, was read by several influential people, including George A. Miller, whosework on information theory and short-term memory of the 1950’s are legend, and also key to theCognitive Revolution.In 1958, Bernard Bloch, editor of Language, asked Chomsky to write a review of B.F. Skinner’snew book, Verbal Behavior, which had been published in 1957. Chomsky’s review, published in1959, was highly critical. He argued that there is more to language learning than imitation andreinforcement. Important observations he offered were:Prepared by Dr. Hanna J.M. Simpassa3

1.) There are an infinite number of sentences in any language; all possible sentences would beimpossible to learn through imitation and reinforcement.2.) Children acquire language quickly and effortlessly, and at identical stages across cultures.3.) Words like goed, thinked, and eated are not spoken by parents; instead, children say thesethings because they over-generalize rules, such as this one for past tense.Chomsky asserted that children learn the rules of language, not just specific responses, as Skinnerhad proposed. He asserted that human beings are born biologically equipped to learn a language,and proposed his theory of a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) – an inborn mechanism orprocess that facilitates the learning of a language. According to the theory, the LAD consists ofbrain structures and neural wiring that are unique to human beings. In this nativist theory, humansare born with the ability todiscriminate among phonemes, to fast-map morphemes, and to acquire the rules of syntax, andmore.Chomsky’s assertion that important aspects of language learning can only be explainedadequately by innate mental processes forever shattered the empirical stronghold of behaviorism,which had dominated psychology for nearly 50 years. Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s VerbalBehavior, and pivotal work by George Miller, Jerome Bruner, Ulric Neisser, and others broughtmind and thought back into the study of psychology.References/Further reading:Baars, Bernard J. The cognitive revolution in psychology. New York: The Guilford Press.Johnson, David M. & Erneling, Christina E. (Eds). (1997). The future of the cognitive revolution.NewYork:OxfordUniversityPress.5.0 CONSTITUENT STRUCTURE AND THE LOGIC TREE DIAGRAMSChomsky’s earliest work developed in reaction to the structuralist work mentioned in theintroduction. As a student of Zellig Harris, Chomsky was very familiar with Harris’s program andhe developed his own work in reaction to Harris (1951). Harris had one sentence transform intoanother. This approach was therefore not able to give any systematic explanation for the moreabstract kind of phenomena Chomsky started to deal with in The Logical Structure of LinguisticTheory (LSLT, 1955) and Syntactic Structures.Prepared by Dr. Hanna J.M. Simpassa4

Infinity and structure are the fundamental characteristics of human language, and they can both becaptured, in part, by way of a context-free phrase structure (PS) grammar.A derivation consists of a series of lines such that the first line is one of the designated initialsymbols, and to proceed from one line to the next we replace one symbol by the sequence ofsymbols it can be rewritten as, until there are no more symbols that can be rewritten. For instancegiven:(4) a. Designated initial symbol (Σ): Sb. Rewrite Rules (F):S a NP VPNP a NVP a VN a JohnV a laughsWe can obtain a derivation as in (5):(5) Line 1: SLine 2: NP VPLine 3: N VPLine 4: N VLine 5: John VLine 6: John laughsChomsky (1965) called rules like the last two in (4), which rewrite a particular nonterminalsymbol as a single terminal symbol, lexical insertion rules – a distinction not made in the theoriesof Chomsky (1955, 1957).PS grammars capture constituent structure by introducing non-terminal (unpronounced) symbols.Given (5), we can connect each symbol with the symbol(s) it rewrites as. In this way we can traceback units of structure. After joining the symbols we can represent the derivation in the standardform of a tree as in (6a). Getting rid of symbols that are mere repetitions, we end up with thecollapsed tree in (6b):(6) a. S b. Sei eiNP VP NP VP N VP N V N V John laughs John V John laughsMore technically, a phrase marker for a terminal string is the set of all strings occurring in any ofPrepared by Dr. Hanna J.M. Simpassa5

the equivalent derivations of that string, where two PS derivations are equivalent if and only ifthey involve the same rules the same number of times (not necessarily in the same order). This isa result that Chomsky (1955) proved by showing that for two PS derivations to be equivalent,they have to collapse down to the same PS tree. See section 4.1 for further discussion.6.0. CONSTITUENT STRUCTURE AND LOGIC OF TREE DIAGRAMS IIFinite-state machines can easily capture infinity, one of the two fundamental characteristics ofhuman language (see Lasnik 2000 for much discussion), and if we move one level up on theChomsky Hierarchy (Chomsky 1956), we can avail ourselves of PS grammars. These grammarsare more powerful devices that capture both infinity and structure.Interestingly, the theory in both Syntactic Structures and The Logical Structure of LinguisticTheory (Chomsky 1955, henceforth LSLT) did not have recursion in the base, that is, PS rules, orsequences of them, that allow self embedding. Instead, complicated structures, hence infinity,were created by special operations, called generalized transformations, which put together thesimple structures generated by the PS rules. For example, to derive John knew that Maryunderstood the theory, first the separate structures underlying John knew it and Mary understoodthe theory were generated by the method described above; then a generalized transformationinserted the second of these structures into the first. Metaphorically, a generalized transformationgrafts one tree onto another. Put differently, in this theory recursion was in the “transformationalcomponent”.1 In more recent times, Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) developed this approachfurther (Joshi, Levy and Takahashi 1975, Joshi 1985; see chapter 8) by arguing for a system oftree rewriting. In this theory, a derivation works on a set of predefined pieces of tree structure.These pieces are called elementary trees and they are expanded and combined with one another sothat structures are built through generalized transformations. Still more recently, Frank (2002)suggested a way to integrate the minimalist approach to grammar suggested by Chomsky withTAG. The structures created by phrase structure rules and generalized transformations could bealtered by singulary transformations.2 Singulary transformations apply to single P-markers andderived P-markers, which is to say that they apply to one tree. Chomsky showed how singularytransformations can explain the relatedness between, for example, statements and correspondingquestions:(7) a. Susan will solve the problem. a Will Susan solve the problem?b. John is visiting Rome. a Is John visiting Rome?The members of each pair come from the same initial P-marker, with singulary transformationsproducing the divergent surface shapes. One of the great triumphs of the analysis of such pairs inLSLT is that it was able to use the same singulary transformation for the interrogative sentences in(7) and the superficially very different one in (8).(8) Susan solved the problem. aDid Susan solve the problem?Prepared by Dr. Hanna J.M. Simpassa6

This was a significant achievement since the relations are felt by native speakers to be parallel, anotherwise mysterious fact. Chomsky also showed how in numerous situations, even properties ofindividual sentences cannot be adequately characterized without recourse to the descriptive powerof singulary transformations. One major example involved the sequences of English auxiliaryverbs, and the inflectional suffixes associated with them. The revolutionary insight here (and alsoin the analysis of (7)-(8)) was that these bound morphemes, especially the one carrying tense andagreement, are autonomous items as far as the syntax is concerned, capable of undergoingsyntactic operations independently until eventually uniting with a verbal element (a process thatcame to be called Affix Hopping). The Affix Hopping transformation rises above the limitationsof phrase structure (which at best can simply list the possible sequences) and simultaneouslycaptures the generalizations about linear ordering of the elements, their morphologicaldependencies, the location of finite tense, the form of inversion and sentence negation, and thedistribution of auxiliary do.3 There was, thus, considerable motivation for this new device relatingmore abstract underlying structures to more superficial surface representations. In fact, one of themajor conceptual innovations in the entire theory is the proposal that a sentence has not just onestructure, closely related to the way it is pronounced, but an additional abstract structure(potentially very different from the superficial one), and intermediate structures between thesetwo. This is fundamental to all the analyses in the Chomskyan system.The organization of the syntactic portion of the grammar is as follows:Application of the phrase structure rules creates a P-marker, or, in the case of a complex sentence,a set of P-markers. Then successive application of transformations (singulary and generalized)creates successive phrase structure representations (derived P-markers), culminating in a finalsurface representation. The syntactic levels in this theory are that of phrase structure and that oftransformations, the latter giving a history of the transformational derivation (the successivetransformational steps creating and affecting the structure). The representations at these levels arethe P-marker and the T-marker respectively. The final derived P-marker is the input tophonological interpretation, and the T-marker is the input to semantic interpretation.4Let us consider some of the formal properties of transformations as they are stated in SyntacticStructures. Each transformation has a structural analysis (SA) and a structural change (SC). TheSA characterizes the class of structures to which the transformation applies. The SC specifies thealterations that the process carries out.A SA is a sequence of terms or a set of sequences of terms. Elements that can constitute a termare listed in a general fashion in (9).(9) a. any sequence of symbols (terminals, nonterminals, and variables) orb. a set of sequences of symbols orc. a Boolean combination of theseSCs are able to carry out the following elementary operations:Prepared by Dr. Hanna J.M. Simpassa7

(10) a. adjunction of one term to another (to the right or the left)b. deletion of a term or sequence of termsc. adjunction of new material that was not in the structure before to a termd. permutationA SC for Chomsky was a set of elementary operations.Other properties of transformations are that they are ordered, and that they are specified as beingoptional or obligatory. For some transformations it is crucial that we be allowed but not requiredto apply them; for others it is necessary that we be required to apply them. Lastly, thetransformations in Syntactic Structures also occasionally had a global dependency: They can referback to any other stage of a derivation.We will not go through an example of an early generative syntactic analysis here but instead referto Lasnik (2000: 53ff.) for a thorough illustration of several early transformations.7.0 DEEP STRUCTURE, SURFACE STRUCTURE AND TRANSFORMATIONSChomsky (1965), henceforth Aspects, presented a revised conception of the grammar,based on an alternative way of constructing complex sentences, one that Chomsky argued was anadvance in terms of simplicity and explanatory adequacy over the one in LSLT. In the LSLTframework, as discussed above, the phrase structure rules produce simple monoclausal structures,which can then be merged together by generalized transformations. Generalized transformationswere thus the recursive component of the grammar, the one responsible for the infinitude oflanguage. In the alternative view, the phrase structure rule component itself has a recursivecharacter. Consider the complex sentences in (11).(11) a. Mary reads books.b. John thinks that Mary reads books.c. Susan said John thinks Mary reads books.By adding a recursive “loop” to a standard set of phrase structure rules, we can directly create thepossibility of ever longer sentences. Such a rule is given in (12).(12) VP a V SUnder this approach to sentence embedding, unlike that in LSLT, there is one unified structureunderlying a sentence prior to the operation of any syntactic transformations. This structure is theresult of application of the phrase structure rules and lexical insertion transformations whichinsert items from the lexicon into the skeletal structure.5 Chomsky argued in Aspects that thisunderlying structure, which he there named deep structure, is the locus of importantgeneralizations and constitutes a coherent level of representation. Let us say a bit more about thelatter concept before we move on.Levels of representation were introduced into the theory in the following way in LSLT:Prepared by Dr. Hanna J.M. Simpassa8

We define, in general linguistic theory, a system of levels of representation. A level ofrepresentation consists of elementary units (primes), an operation of concatenation by whichstrings of primes can be constructed, and various relations defined on primes, strings of primes,and sets and sequences of these strings.Among the abstract objects constructed on the level L are L-markers that are associated withsentences. The L-marker of a sentence S is the representation of S on the level L. A grammar of alanguage, then, will characterize the set of Lmarkers for each level L and will determine theassignment of L-markers tosentences (Chomsky 1975: 6).The child learning a language is assumed to bring knowledge of the levels to bear on the task oflearning. That is, the child must learn properties of the language at each level, but knows thelevels in advance, hence, knows what to look for. The levels are part of Universal Grammar. Ofcourse, the linguist does not know in advance of research what the levels are. Determining them isa scientific question, one of biological psychology.Throughout the years, Chomsky and others have devoted considerable attention to determiningjust what the levels of representation are in the human language faculty. In LSLT, the levels wereconsidered to be phonetics, phonemics, word, syntactic category, morphemics,morphophonemics, phrase structure and transformations. Throughout the years, the levels havechanged in important and interesting ways.Chomsky's major arguments for the new level, deep structure, in Aspects were tha

The course is termed as advanced English syntax; it assumes that the notion of syntax is not new to students. It begins by revising some syntactic rules and goes on to trace Linguistics before the Chomskyan era. Then it moves on to loo

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