In the first chapter of Carnie’s book, he explains the basic approach of generative grammar, which is scientific and descriptive. This approach assumes that some amount of grammar is innate and that some is acquired. Because syntax is subconscious, it cannot be learned, and it is rather acquired. The second chapter deals with the specifics of parts of speech and distributional evidence for subcategories. The third chapter explains hierarchical structures and how syntactic trees and bracketed diagrams can be used to represent constituency. The chapter also explains the recursive structure of language and that loops in phrase structure allow infinitely long sentences.
When reading the first section on anaphors, I was suddenly curious as to how changing social norms will change newer generations’ judgements about what is grammatical. Going through grammatical and ungrammatical uses of “himself,” “herself,” “itself,” and “themselves,” Carnie reveals that the anaphor must match the antecedent subject of the sentence in both gender and number. I was reminded of an exercise in my Health Promotion and the Campus Culture. We practiced using gender neutral pronouns “they” and “them” in conversation because some students prefer to be referred to with nonbinary pronouns. At least for me, using “they” and “them” wasn’t too much of a challenge, but I thought it so strange to use “themselves” when referring to a single individual. Somehow, “themself” felt more grammatical. I think the “s” at the end of “themselves” made the mismatch in number very obvious, whereas “they” and “them” didn’t sound as incorrect to me.
Personally, I find semantics and syntax quite interesting, especially in nested sentences where phrases occurring earlier in the sentence require resolutions later in the sentence. For instance, the following was contained in a letter to TV guide: “How Ann Salisbury can claim that Pam Dawber’s anger at not receiving her fair share of acclaim for Mork and Mindy’s success derives from a fragile ego escapes me.” These types of sentence structures show that hierarchical and recursive structures described by Carnie best describe language.
Finally, I think it’s fun that correct syntax and semantics can exist separately from each other, as shown by Carnie’s “pregnant toothbrush” example. Chomsky’s more famous sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” demonstrates the same point.
Hi Sonia,
ReplyDeleteI'm also a fan of Chomsky's nonsense sentence. It's interesting to ponder the reason why the (simplified Chomsky) sentence "ideas sleep" is nonsensical.
We could of course say that the only reason it's nonsense is because we have not instituted an arbitrary linguistic convention; we could for instance adopt a convention whereby we use the words 'ideas' and 'cats' interchangeably, in which case "ideas sleep" would make perfect sense. On this view, to say that "'ideas sleep' is nonsense" is merely to state an empirical triviality about our use of English.
But of course we'd like to say that the above explanation can't be ALL there is to the sentence's nonsensicality. There's a strong temptation to say that it is nonsense due to either what the sentence means or to what the words in the sentence mean, but both of these avenues of explanation prove problematic. It's incoherent to say "ideas sleep" is nonsense because what it means is nonsense, because if it is indeed nonsense it doesn't mean anything. Similarly, if one says "ideas sleep" is nonsense because the predicate '...sleeps' only takes animals as arguments and ideas are not animals, then we can instantly scrutinize the second part of this conjunct ("ideas are not animals"). If the negation of nonsense is itself nonsense, then since "ideas are animals" is nonsense, then "ideas are not animals" is nonsense too, thereby rendering our explanation of the nonsensicality of "ideas sleep" itself nonsensical.