Of Knives and Men

The first three chapters of Andrew Carnie’s Syntax: A Generative Introduction lay the foundations for understanding language not just as geocultural phenomena, but as Language, the psychological ability of humans to produce and understand particular languages. He explains the importance of Generative Grammar as a cognitive concept, and proceeds to describe the different ways we can view grammar as a Language construct.

What I found most interesting in this reading and therefore want to focus on, however, is the idea of syntactic trees for representing constituency. I find this is a really cool concept because with it we can more accurately define the meaning of a sentence given its language’s syntactic structure. This relates directly to the contents of Chapter 2, in which Carnie explains the parts of speech that make up a sentence. I find parts of speech fascinating because of their value to a sentence as positional elements. With morphological and syntactic distribution in mind, it is understandable how extraordinarily complex putting a sensical sentence together is.

Consider the example sentence, “The man killed the king with the knife.” Without drawing tree diagrams, it is still possible to see how this sentence could be read in at least two ways: the man uses the knife to kill the king, or the king is holding the knife when he is killed. This room for ambiguity is fascinating, and the ability to dispel this ambiguity with a syntactic tree is even more interesting. This leads to my thought: with so many syntactic possibilities, do any AIs such as Siri or Google use syntactic trees to better “comprehend” inputs? If they do not, it would be very interesting to whip up a low-level AI that is capable of rapidly determining all possible trees for a given well-formed input sentence. Which interpretation would it choose as the best one? With this in mind, I turn to us mere mortals. Given a sentence such as “The man killed the king with the knife,” what interpretation do we think of immediately? Does current mental state affect the initial “tree” that we form in our minds when we interpret a sentence? When you think of a royal murder, do you immediately consider the murder weapon (the knife), or a probably cause for the man to kill the king (the king was threatening with a knife)?

It is this element of the psyche that I wonder most about – since there can be so many interpretations of sentences, to what degree does our own personality play into making that choice? As mentioned before, Siri and Google must in some way make educated guesses as to what sentences mean, and that guess is generally driven by hard-coded logic. Humans are much more malleable, so they have the freedom to choose and defend a less logical sentence meaning. From this, I query whether our comprehension of Language and the innate pieces that Carnie suggests we have is rooted just as much in psychological status as syntactic phenomena.