The first chapter of Carnie’s ‘Syntax: A Generative Introduction’ provides a clear explanation of the study of syntax, its motivations, and methods. He introduces Chomsky’s Generative Grammar theory, which states that sentences are generated by rules that are part of our cognitive abilities. Carnie clarifies the crucial difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammar, the latter of which is the primary object of study among syntacticians. We see a first pass at identifying syntactic rules, learn about the process of forming/evaluating such rules, and about the supposed ‘innateness’ of certain aspects of grammar.

In ‘Parts of Speech’, we learn that parts of speech (nouns, verbs, etc.) are determined not by their semantic content, but by their morphological (derivational and inflectional) and syntactic distributions. Carnie explains the notion of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ classes, parts of speech that do and do not allow new members. We also learn about subcategories of parts of speech and how to notate these subcategories. The last chapter of the reading is on constituency trees and the rules of phrase structures, including tests for whether a group of words is a unit.

Overall, the research agenda of syntacticians is extremely interesting to me, because, as it mentions in the chapter, it is the study of rules that we don’t think about but nonetheless follow strictly. Particularly interesting to me is the idea that there are ‘innate’ rules of syntax in humans that are found in all languages. In the language lecture of Robert Sapolsky’s ‘Human Behavioral Biology’ class, we learned that ‘pidgin’ languages from different, isolated areas of the world are often found to have the same syntactic structure, which seems to support this idea.