Seminar 1. Grammar: General Notions

 

 

1) Be ready to define the following terms:

 

1. grammatical system

2. naming means

3. prescriptive approach

4. language usage/lingual reality

5. ungrammatical forms

6. the plane of content

7. the plane of expression.

8. grammatical polysemy

9. grammatical homonymy

10. grammatical synonymy

11. syntagmatic relations

12. paradigmatic relations

13. string

14. predicative syntagma

15. objective syntagma

16. attributive syntagma

17. adverbial syntagma

18. semantic PRs

19. formal PRs

20. functional PRs

21. grammatical paradigm

22. segmental unit

23. suprasegmental unit

24. phonemic/phonological/ level

25. phoneme

25. differential function

26. signemes

27. morphemic/morphological level

28. the morpheme

29. the lexemic level

30. mononomination

31. phrasemic level

32. notional phrases

33. polynomination

34. stable word-groups

35. free word-groups

36. smaller syntax

37. larger syntax

38. proposemic level

39. proposeme

40. predication

41. supra-proposemic level

42. dicteme

43. supra-sentential constructions

44. cumulation

45. nomination

46. topicalization

47. morphology

48. syntax

 

2) Be ready to discuss the following questions:

1. The meanings of the term ‘grammar’.

2. Grammar as a branch of linguistics.

3. The relations between grammar and lingual reality.

4. The notion of corpus-based and communicative grammars.

5. The plane of content and the plane of expression. Polysemy, homonymy, synonymy in grammar.

6. Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. Types of notional syntagms.

7. Hierarchic structure of the language. Language levels in the language system.

8. Segmental and supra-segmental units and the difference between them. The functions of the language units.

 

3) Analyze the following texts:

 

Text l

 

derek bickerton: Language and Species. University of Chicago Press 1990, pages 122, 126, 128

The thought experiment in Chapter1 implies that language may have evolved in two steps, with a hypothesized grammar-free 'protolanguage' leading on to full human language. Versions of this scenario are common among writers on language evolution. Here, Bickerton argues that present-day analogues of protolanguage contain clues to the origins of language.

The evidence just surveyed gives grounds for supposing that there is a mode of linguistic expression that is quite separate from normal human language and is shared by four classes of speakers: trained apes, children under two, adults who have been deprived of language in their early years, and speakers of pidgin. Since this mode emerged spontaneously in the three human classes; since the second class includes all members of our species in their earliest years; and since the fourth class potentially includes any person at any time, we may regard the mode as a species characteristic. It is a species characteristic just as much as language is, although, unlike language, it may be within the reach of other species given appropriate training . ....

As we have seen, [grammatical items] need not be entirely absent from protolanguage, although they are very seldom found in the speech of children under two and will be present in ape utterances only if the apes are explicitly taught to use them – perhaps not even then. However, even where grammatical items are found in protolanguage, their incidence will be quite low as compared with language, and their distribution will be skewed in a particular way.

Protolanguage will seldom if ever have any kind of inflection – any - igs, -‘ss, -eds, any number- or person-agreement, and so on. It will seldom if ever have any auxiliary verbs whose function is to express tense, aspect, equation or class membership, although it may have expressions for possibility or obligation. It will lack complementizers, markers of the finite/nonfinite distinction, and conjunctions, and it will show few prepositions, articles, or demonstrative adjectives, although it may have negators, question-words, and quantifiers. In other words, the stronger the meaning element in a grammatical item, the more likely it is to appear in protolanguage. Conversely, the stronger its structural role, the less likely it is to appear. … If there indeed exists a more primitive variety of language alongside fully developed human language, then the task of accounting for the origins of language is made much easier.

 

­ Why should the existence of a more primitive protolanguage make 'the task of accounting for the origins of language ... much easier'?

­ ‘... the stronger the meaning element in a grammatical item, the more likely it is to appear in protolanguage.’ Why?

Text 2

keith brown and jim miller (eds.): Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories. Pergamon 1996, pages xiv-xv

This text looks at the nature of grammars, and deals with the ways in which grammatical models vary in their focus and choice of fundamental units.

Traditionally grammars of languages describe the structure of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences, employing concepts relating to morphology (e.g., stem, root, affix) and syntax (e.g., phrase, head, modifier, construction, word order). ... Experienced users of a language probably consult dictionaries more than grammars. They have come to terms with the tense, aspect, mood, case, and transitivity systems of the language and can use word order, highlighting devices, and sentence connectives to construct longer texts out of sentences.

... Formal grammars are constructed to handle the various types of information mentioned above, although as yet no grammar handles all the types. Some grammars are designed to generate (give exact specifications of) syntactic constructions, especially the arrangements and dependency relations of constituents. With a given construction some grammars associate a semantic structure, expressed in logical formalism, and a phonological/phonetic structure. With respect to syntax, some grammars specify the structure of words, phrases, and clauses while others focus on words and treat phrases as secondary items. Most grammars recognize syntactic constructions. At the limits, Government and Binding and Principles and Parameters [two approaches to generative grammar] see individual constructions as secondary and give primacy to general constraints each applying to a range of different constructions… Construction Grammar ... takes constructions as central and fundamental. Some models of grammar neglect basic syntactic structure, attending instead to the functions of different constructions in text. These models concentrate on the linguistic representation of situations focusing on questions such as: Does a given situation involve an action or a state? What roles are there? Is the agent expressed or not? If it is, is it expressed by a central clause constituent such as a subject noun phrase or by a peripheral constituent such as a prepositional phrase? Is the patient expressed or not? Do the answers to these questions affect the shape of the verb in a given clause?

­ Linguists have a vast amount of highly visible language data to examine; and yet they disagree massively about what they are looking at – about the grammatical organization of languages, and of language in general. This seems strange. What might the reasons be?

Text 3

john mcwhorter: The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. Heinemann 2001, pages 188-9

Chapter 3 looks at different ways in which languages (a) exploit the formal resources of grammar and (b) express meanings through grammar. This text comprises a part of McWhorter's description of an extreme case of formal complexity.

For my money, there are few better examples than Fula of West Africa of how astoundingly baroque, arbitrary, and utterly useless to communication a language’s grammar can become over the millennia and yet still be passed on intact to innocent children. Fula has as many as sixteen ‘genders’ in the sense that we parse the concept in Indo-European languages, and which gender a noun belongs to is only roughly predictable beyond the one gender that contains humans. Moreover, within each gender, the marker varies arbitrarily according to the noun: leemuu-re ‘orange’ but in the same gender class is loo-nde ‘jar’. Adjectives, instead of taking a ‘copy’ of the marker variant its noun takes, take their own particular marker variant, which must be learned with the adjective. Thus a big orange is not leemuu-re mau-re, but leemuu-re mau-nde.

Fula is even more elaborated than this. There are often not just two, or even three, but four variants of the gender marker. Thus in our ‘gender’ that contains oranges and jars, the marker turns up as -re in leemuu-re ‘orange’, as -nde in loo-nde ‘jar’, but as -de in tummu-de ‘calabash’; in another gender, a strip is lepp-ol, a feather is lilli-wol, a belt is taador-gol, whereas a leather armlet is boor-ngol. Besides this, like any language, Fula has its irregulars: in one gender, you have to know not only that a noun will take either -u -wu, -gu or -ngu as its marker, but also that the occasional noun will go its own way and take -ku instead.

... [F]or most Fula nouns, when we tack a new diminutive or augmentative gender marker onto the end of the word, simultaneously the consonant at the beginning of the word changes in some way – and as often as not there are two different consonants that it might become, depending on which of the genders we are switching to. A man is gor-ko. The article for the augmentative ‘gender’ is -ga (this is actually one of four variants for this gender plus an additional one that pops up irregularly!), but one says not gor-ga but ngor-ga. There is another consonant change to make gor plural: the plural article ... is –be, but one says not gor-be but wor-be.

 

­ Can you think of examples in other languages of formal complexity that seems to have little or no functional value?

­ What do you think are the most formally difficult things in your own language for foreigners to learn correctly?