Syntax of language, or is it Language?

Carnie begins his discussion of syntax by breaking down for us the difference between Language and language (Language is our ability to speak a language, whereas language is an instance of that ability i.e. English), and then differentiating the different parts of linguistics from phonetics to semantics. One part that stuck out to me in the beginning of Carnie was his discussion of anaphors. Anaphors are nouns that end in "-self". Anaphors are particularly interesting to me because in order to correctly use anaphors you must match the anaphor to the gender of the subject. For example: "Bill kissed herself" is incorrect, it should be "Bill kissed himself". This is similar to Spanish where the 'gender' of the noun must match the 'gender' of the adjective describing that noun. Currently in my study of Spanish I often times will either be confused on the 'gender' of a noun or simply pronounce the incorrect ending to an adjective that is supposed to agree with the 'gender' of the noun. For example: "Ella es aburrida" will often times be misspoken (by me) as "Ella es aburrido." which is incorrect. Its funny because I often have to focus pretty hard in order to match the 'gender' of the noun and adjective in Spanish whereas when I have to think about the gender of a noun for another noun i.e. an anaphor it comes very naturally.

Carnie then goes on to talk about the difficulty with determining parts of speech semantically. Often times verbs are used as nouns, adjectives are also used as nouns, and prepositions can be used as nouns which then leaves us with the question, "what is a noun?" Carnie favors a different approach to determining a part of speech, something he calls distribution. He breaks this distribution into two different types, morphological and syntactic. Morphological distribution refers to the types of prefixes, suffixes, etc. that appear on a word to determine its part of speech, and syntactical distribution refers to what kinds of words are around a word, in order to determine its part of speech (i.e. nouns typically occur after determiners 'the').

The last thing Carnie talks about is sentence structure and how we as humans create our sentences. This is very similar to a reading I did in another class I am in (and I'm sure many of my peers are in) called "How language works". Our language is recursive and often times there are lots of long term dependencies (such as if/then or either/or) which make our language structure difficult to define. Carnies states that the easiest way to do so is with constituency and hierarchical structure. We combine these into sentence trees with give us an understanding of how the sentence is supposed to be read, and how it is to be understood. Ambiguous sentences such as "I saw a man on the hill with a telescope" can be understood how they were intended to be understood with the use of a word tree.