22 Application of Various Syntactic Rules

Ms. Suma K.

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Learning Outcome

This module deals with the application of various syntactic rules. Concepts like Innateness hypothesis, universal grammar and principles and parameters will be discussed with examples. Multiple-choice questions with answers and short and long answer questions for self-assessment will be provided at the end of the module for ease of assessment and understanding. In Various examples from English and Hindi are given to explain the concepts in simple language. A list of works for further reading is presented for those who want to read further to advance their understanding.

Introduction

You have learnt in the previous chapters that there are certain rules in grammar. A sentence in language cannot be constructed just by a random grouping of words. There is a systematic order in which words are arranged to form a sentence. Let us look at the examples in (1) and

(2) given below.

(1) *Tree flies Raju thank office

(2) Raju thanked the three fools in his office.

We see that both (1) and (2) contain groups of words. However, we say that (1) is not a sentence while (2) is a sentence. The difference that makes (2) a sentence is the fact that it has a systematic arrangement of words, where each word has a specific function. When we look at our understanding of the explicit rules of the grammar of the sentence in (2), we know that Raju is the subject of the sentence, thank is the verb and the noun phrase, the three fools in his office, is the object of the sentence. We also know from our understanding of argument structure that thank is a two-place predicate, that it takes two arguments; and in (2), Raju and the NP, the three fools in his office, are the arguments of the verb thank. In addition, we know that in English the subject comes before the verb in a statement (while it comes after the verb in a question).

Now the interesting question is to see how such rules of the grammar apply in a phrase, clause or a sentence, and whether these rules apply in the same manner in all the languages of the world. We have already been looking at some syntactic rules within specific structures such as the phrase structure or the argument structure with respect to particular languages in the previous chapters. In this chapter we shall get some understanding about the application of syntactic rules with regard to human language in general.

When we look at a five or six year old child speaking language, what is it that we notice? Have we been in awe of the ability of such a child to speak language so fluently? Do we assume that the child learnt all of that language by imitating the elders around, or by memorizing the language he/she was exposed to? Or do we assume that there is something else within the child that has made it possible for the child to attain such proficiency in its native language?

Children’s learning their mother tongue may not be just an imitation of the language of the adults around them. Very often we notice that very young children produce language that is far more complex than the language they are exposed to. They may coin new words or even show that they can understand, respond and produce complex structures in language. For instance, let us look at the sentences below.

(3) a. This is the book that I kept on the table.

(3) b. This is the book I kept on the table.

(4) a. I think that India will win the match.

(4) b. I think India will win the match.

(5) a. Who do you think that India will defeat?

(5) b. Who do you think India will defeat?

(6) a. *Who do you think that will win?

(6) b. Who do you think will win?

From the examples in (3) to (5) the child might understand that the word that is optional in certain English sentences. But how is it that the child perceives that in a sentence like (6) that is always not present? It cannot be possible that such an understanding comes merely from observing or imitating the sentences other people around the child speak. There is definitely a gap between the structures the child is exposed to and the structures a child is able to perceive and produce. This gap is known as “the poverty of the stimulus”.

It is not enough to say that the child learns to apply the syntactic rules of its language merely by observing and imitating the speech of the adults around him/her. Therefore there must be something more that triggers an understanding and application of the syntactic rules in human language.

Innateness Hypothesis

In the process of understanding how children produce structures that are far more complex

than they are exposed to, Noam Chomsky came up with the idea of “Innateness Hypothesis”. Children can produce and understand complex grammar of their language without any formal training to learn that language. Chomsky says that this is possible because they must have something that is like an innate plan which is common to all languages. This innate plan makes it possible for children to figure out the grammatical rules of the language that their parents or other elders around them speak. And with the help of these rules of the structure of their language, children can produce innumerable phrases, clauses and sentences including those that they may have never heard before.

Innateness Hypothesis stands in contrast to other theories that had earlier assumed that children learn a language by imitating the speech of their parents or others around them.

There are some common examples in support of innateness hypothesis to show that children do not merely imitate to learn language, but rather implicitly acquire and apply the ‘rules’ of grammar instead. One such example is the acquisition of the irregular past tense. Initially children observe and acquire the rule for regular past tense formation in English which tells them to add the suffix “-ed” to the present tense form, as in the following:

climb – climbed

walk – walked

talk – talked

Then, they ‘apply’ this ‘rule’ to get past tense forms of verbs in all contexts and end up with forms such as for irregular verbs:

*run – runned

*cut – cutted

*go – goed

This is only for a short while until they learn that some verbs in English have irregular forms and therefore vary from the past tense rule they have already learnt. So, it is the innate ability that tells the children to acquire the intricacies of these rules of grammar to learn any human language. This is further strengthened by the fact that children acquire any language they are exposed to quite effortlessly, while many people may have notions of some languages of the world as being ‘difficult’ to learn and some others as ‘easy’.

Universal Grammar

Human beings are capable of producing an infinite set of structures by using a finite set of rules. That is, we can create innumerable sentences based on just a few rules of grammar. These rules of grammar are common to all languages in the human world, including languages that are as different as English, Hindi, Italian, Tamil or Japanese. The innate plan that gives the child the ability to perceive and produce language comes from this grammar. This is what Chomskian tradition of generative grammarians call Universal Grammar, with the short form UG. Chomsky says, “Universal grammar may be thought of as some system of principles, common to the species and available to each individual prior to experience”

(Haegeman, 1994). So, UG, we see, is unique to humans and sets us apart from other species of life by giving us the capability of language. And the language we usually and actually use is just a small part of this ability and what it could help us produce.

Universal Grammar can be understood further in terms of Principles and Parameters. Principles refer to those rules of grammar that are common to all human languages. If rules are common, does that seem to suggest that all the human languages are the same? We see for instance, that all human languages have a subject and a verb in a sentence. Let us look at English in (7) and Hindi in (8) for example:

(7) Raju sings

Raju-Nom sing-present-3pm

(8) Raju gata hai

Raju-Nom sing-present-3pm

However, in real usage of language we notice that all the languages in the human world are not the same. English is different from Hindi which is different from Italian or Tamil. For instance, let us consider the order of the subject, the verb and the object in English in (9) and Hindi in (10) below.

(9) Raju sings a song

Raju-Nom sing-present-3pm song- Acc

(10) Raju gaana gata hai

Raju-Nom song- Acc sing-present-3pm

We see that in the English (9) sentence, the subject is followed by the verb which is followed by the object. But in the Hindi (10) sentence, the subject is followed by the object which is followed by the verb. The rules that account for these kinds of differences are called parameters. What we see in (9) and (10) is an instance of word-order parameter. Parameters are the language specific rules that bring about variation among different languages of the world.

The principles in UG give the option of two word-orders – VO and OV, that is, verb followed by the object (VO) and the object followed by the verb (OV). Of the two, English chooses the first option of VO as in (9) and Hindi chooses OV as in (10).

To sum up, UG has two properties:

i) UG contains principles that are absolutely universal to all human languages. These do not vary from language to language.

ii) Parameters that are specific to each language that are selected from a vast range of principles that are available in human language. Differences between languages of the worlds are made possible by these parameters.

When a generative linguist studies a particular language he/she looks at which characteristics of that language are universal and therefore are part of the principles; and which other characteristics are specific to that language and are therefore part of parameters.

Principles

We shall look at two more examples of principles in this section in order to understand further. These are rules that are common to all languages, and apply alike to all human languages.

First we shall look at the principle that sentences in all human languages have a subject and a verb which “agree” with each other. We know already from the previous chapter that the verb has arguments depending upon the kind of verb it is. Some verbs are one-place predicates that take one argument; while some others could be two-place predicates that take two arguments and still others could be three-place predicates that take three arguments. Let us look at the examples given below.

(11) Dogs bark.

(12) The cat caught the rat.

(13) Raju bought Meera a ring.

In (11), the verb bark takes one argument, dogs; in (12) the verb catch takes two arguments, the cat and the rat; and in (13) the verb buy takes three arguments, Raju, Meera and a ring. However we see that in all three the subject of the sentence is an argument of the verb. There may or may not be an object in a sentence, but a subject is always present along with the verb.

Similarly, if we consider another language, Hindi, we will find that there is always a subject and also a verb in a sentence. Look at the examples given below.

(14) Raju khelta hai.

Raju-Nom play – present -3sm

Raju plays

(15) Raju ne Neha ko maara.

Raju-Nom Neha-Acc hit-past-3sm

Raju hit Neha

(16) Raju ne Meera ko kitab di.

Raju-Nom Meera-Dat book-Acc give-past-3sm

Raju gave Meera a book

Even in hindi we see that there is a subject and a verb in a sentence while an object may or may not be present always in the structure of the sentence. Also, the lexical categories like nouns and verbs are part of all the languages. The subject in a sentence is generally a noun.

Let us now look at another principle of languages that is referred to as an “Embedding Principle”. An embedding principle specifies that any grammatical sentence can become a subordinate clause in a complex sentence. Let us look at the following examples to understand this.

(17) John had resigned. It was clear.

(18) [That John had resigned] was clear.

(19) It was clear [that John had resigned].

(17) has two independent sentences.

(18) is a complex sentence, as it has a subordinate clause, John had resigned, used as the subject. This clause is introduced by a subordinating conjunction, that. Similarly, in

(19) that John had resigned is a subordinate clause. The above examples are from English. However, embedding is not language-specific or a principle that is exclusive to English. Let us look at some examples from Hindi.

(20) June 21st antar jaateey yoga diwas   hei.  June 21st international   yoga day pres.aux June  21st is International Day of Yoga.

(21) Pradhaan mantri ne ghoshith kiye he͂ ki June 21st antar jaateey yoga diwas hei.  Prime Minister-Nom announce do aux that June 21st intrnl yogaday pres.aux.  PM has announced that June 21st is International Day of Yoga. (20) is an independent sentence that is subordinated in (21) by using a subordinating conjunction ki, ‘that’.

Parameters

In this section we shall look at three examples of parameters, especially with regard to the principle regarding the subject and the verb that we saw in the previous section. Here we shall consider the null-subject parameter and the word-order parameter in more detail.

First let us look at the null-subject parameter. We have already seen the principle that a subject and a verb have to be present in a sentence. This is evident in English in most contexts of usage. However, in some languages of the world, it has been noticed that the

subject may not be present in the sentence that is uttered by the speaker. That is, the subject is dropped. For instance we see this happening in Hindi. Let us look at an example. In a context where someone asks where is Ram? The response need not have a subject in it, but may contain just the verb as in (22) and (23).

(22) Ram kaha hai?

Ram-Nom where be-present-3sm

Where is Ram?

(23) Khel raha hai.

Play –prog- be-present-3sm

Is palying?

We see that the sentence in (23) does not have the subject, but only has the verb. However, it does not go against the principle that the subject and the verb have to be present in a sentence. This is because, the sentence in (23) has a “null” subject. That is, the subject of the sentence is still present in the structure and is understood to be Ram from the context of the speech, but is “null” because it is not pronounced. So we see that the null-subject parameter suggests that the subject which is required by the sentence is null, but is still present in the structure and may be articulated if required by the speaker, if not in all context.

The same sentence as in (23) when spoken in English cannot occur with a null subject, as shown below.

(24) Where is Ram?

(25) Ram is palying.

(26) He is palying.

(27) *is palying.

As shown in the examples above, there could be an alternative of using the pronoun instead of the noun in the subject position as in (26); but the sentence is unacceptable as shown in (27), if the subject is dropped.

Let us consider another example. When someone asks the question in (28), the possible answers in English and Hindi are given below.

(28) Where are you going?

(29) I am going home.

(30) *Am going home

(31) Ghar jaa raha hoon. Home go – prog – be-1sm Am going home.

Here again we see that the subject in Hindi can be dropped, or null; while in English the sentence without the subject is unacceptable.

Null subject parameter, as shown in the above examples from Hindi and English, marks a difference in the structure of these two languages. Nevertheless, at the core, both languages are the same in their structure for both have a subject and the verb in their sentences; the subject may be overtly pronounced or may not be pronounced.

Now let us look at the word-order parameter. We have seen in the previous section that the word-order parameter determines the order in which the subject, verb, object or other functional constituents occur in a sentence. We have already seen that there is a difference within English – the subject comes before the verb in a statement as in (32), while there is an inversion of the subject and the verb in questions as in (33).

(32) The chef cooked the broth.

(33) Did the chef cook the broth?

However, in Hindi there may not be such inversion and the subject and the verb may remain in the same position in both a statement and a question as shown in (34) and (35) below.

(34) Bawarchi ne bhath banayi

Chef – Nom broth make-past-3sm

The chef made the broth

(35) Kya bawarchi ne bhath banayi

Wh-comp  chef-Nom broth  make-past-3sm

Did the chef make the broth?

We see that though the principle requires that all sentences must have a subject and a verb, the order of the subject and the word differs from language to language.

Now let us consider the head-parameter. We know that every phrase has a Head. In a sentence like (36), the object of the verb phrase occurs to the right of the verb. We also know that the verb is called the Head.

(36) Ram ate an apple.

Here, we know that the verb head eat occurs to the left of the object apple.

Similarly in a prepositional phrase in English, the preposition occurs to the left of the phrase, as in (37) where the preposition in comes to the left end of the prepositional phrase in the classroom. So we say that English is a head-left language.

(37) Ram is in the classroom.

But not all languages are head-left languages. We know that the principle is that a phrase has to have a head which applies alike to all languages. But the head parameter allows each language to determine where the head occurs in the phrase. So, some languages like hindi, Japanese, Telugu, Kannada etc are head right languages. In these languages the head occurs to the right of the phrase. Let us look at examples from Hindi in (38) and (39).

(38) Ram ne apple khaya Ram-Nom Apple-acc eat-past- 3sm Ram ate an apple

(39) Ram kaksha me hai Ram-Nom classroom in be-present-3sm Ram is in the classroom.

 

In (38) we see that the verb head eat occurs after the object apple. Similarly the preposition in occurs after the NP classroom which is a constituent in the PP.

 

Therefore, when a child is exposed to a language the principles apply commonly to all the languages while the child has to choose between applying the head-left or head-right parameter. Sometimes we notice that when a child or any other speaker learns or uses more than one language there could be errors caused due to faulty application of rules in parameters. For instance, a child from a head-left language may initially make mistakes while learning a head-right language by applying the head-left rule to the head-right language.

Summary

 

Thus we see that syntactic rules do not apply alike to all languages. While the principles may be at the core and apply as a common feature in all language; parameters are more language-specific and apply differently to different languages of the world. Therefore when the child learns to speak, the core principles are already innately encoded. These principles are absolute and form the common basis of the human language. And depending on the parameters of the languages that the child is exposed to, the child acquires the variations in the structures of those particular languages. When the linguist attempts to understand the syntactic rules, he tries to draw the structural similarities to derive the principles and analyses the variations across different languages to describe the parameters. All in all the application of these syntactic rules helps the child acquire the implicit knowledge of the grammar and also aid the linguist in extracting the explicit knowledge of the grammar of the human language.

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Reference

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