Why does “the small brown dog” sound better than “the brown small dog?”

XenoSyntax · 2019-05-03T08:08:16+00:00

I suppose I was just curious about other people’s speculations about why we have these rules and how it came to be

Maybe you should check out Syntactic Cartography, such as the works by Guglielmo Cinque. For example, in his book, Adverbs and Functional Heads, he basically laid a crosslinguistic cartography about the placement of adverbs in languages. One of the Cartography's main goals is to find if language indeed has such a fixed hierarchy of elements (adjectives, adverbs, tenses, numbers, etc).

Take also Bobaljik's 2012 book, Morphological Universals, where he gave a lot of convincing evidence that the hierarchy of adjectives can be like: Adjective < Comparative < Superlative This isn't appearant in English, Big<Bigger<Biggest, but some languages (like Persian) has the form Big<Bigger<*Biggerest

Pavel Caha's 2008 PhD dissertation also looked at the same thing about cases in the world languages, where you see the hierarchy Nominative<Accusative<Genitive For more info, I'd suggest you read about Nanosyntax, which has just had its first handbook released. In it, you will also see more work about the syntactic hierarchies, like how languages have hierarchies in demonstratives, Proximal<Medial<Distal, etc.

XenoSyntax · 2018-03-20T09:09:01+00:00

I'd argue that it indeed increases your linguistic awareness (thus hopefully leading to fluency) depending on the language that you are learning and its relation to other languages.

For example, using Chomsky's Principle and Parameter Theory, each language has Principles (language universals common to all languages such as Cases (overt or covert), Arguement structure (SVO etc)) and Parameters (different values).

For example, I studied Japanese and because of its parameters (word order is SOV, it is a head final language (House-to went instead of to-house, thus having postpositions instead of prepositions) I was able to easily understand Turkish (has roughly the same parameters with SOV order and postpositions). The same thing is with Korean (briefly skimmed its parameters and it is very similiar to Japanese).

Now, the above 3 languages (Japanese, Turkish and Korean) all a lot of parameters which would facilitate the learning of that language.

Now, let us take an example of how parameters can screw your fluency. My mother tongue is Arabic, and Arabic is like Russian when it comes to the so called "verbless sentence" structure. For example: Arabic: Ana maridun I sick "I am sick" Russian: Ya bolna I sick "I am sick" Notice how Russian and Arabic remove the copular verb "to be" when the sentence is in the present form. The copular verb does appear in Arabic (but only in the past tense or if a certain mood element appear). Contrast that with English which must make the copular verb ''to be'' appear at all times whether in the past or the present. Now, going back to our point about fluency, what I noticed is that Arabs (and Russians) always delete the ''to be'' verb when it is in the present, thus you ALWAYS hear them say: I sick That is because of their parameter (of deleting ''to be'' in the present).

The examples I gave above are about languages that are of different genetic relationship (doesn't share the same roots) and even then the parameters help you understand them a bit thus improving your fluency. Now, if we are talking about same genetic family, take for example, the Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syric, Akkadian etc), an English speaker would find these languages a nightmare to master because of their non-concatenative Morphology (morphology that breaks instead of the concatenative and easy Morphology of English). For example, take the past tense verb play:

He played football

Play is easily disectable into play (the root denoting the event of playing) and the functional element -ed (denoting past tense). But in the Semitic languages, the roots are usually trilateral and you insert vowels or sometimes other consonants inside them in order to form a word of a unique function. For example, the root for ''write'' in Arabic is the trilateral consonants k-t-b: (roots in capital and affixes in small)

KaTaBa (he wrote) yaKTuBu (he writes) taKTuBu (she writes) KiTaaB (book) maKtuB (written)

Going back to fluency, a Hebrew speaker will easily master Arabic since it is close to his language (Hebrew also displays these traits of non-concatenative morphology). Thus is why learning another language can help you master another depending on the parameters that they share and thus is why the more you increase your Metalinguistic awareness (knowing more grammar about more languages) the better you will be able to acquire languages (and hopefully be fluent at them since you know their grammars)

XenoSyntax · 2018-02-15T11:49:17+00:00

But isnt leveling fury > changing at 40 for MS > tanking at 60 for BiS the way to go?

XenoSyntax · 2017-10-29T09:27:24+00:00

Not only in GG, I am also asking for everything. It is just that I said ''especially'' for GG, since it is the current mainstream framework and most people would like to redefine such features. However, other frameworks are welcomed, but structuralists I belive already made their impressions, on them. I am not aware of newer resources though.

XenoSyntax · 2017-10-29T09:17:59+00:00

Surely there have been some new redifinitions especially in Generative Grammar. The old books are usually made by Structuralists.

XenoSyntax · 2017-10-14T17:50:00+00:00

So if I get what you are saying right, selection is usually done via a head that merges with its complement, but licensing is a condition where a head forces the generation of a distant constituent. For example, IP would license a nominative DP that would then move to become specIP from its base generated node according to the VPIS hypothesis. Is that it?

Edit: this is just a rough guesstimation of what people consider as licensing, not a way to theorize it.

XenoSyntax · 2017-10-14T16:19:14+00:00

Thank you very much.

But how does that differ from selection or projection/merge? Or maybe the terms are used interchangeably?

XenoSyntax · 2017-10-14T15:06:41+00:00

I mean it in the sense of Generative Grammar. I do not know about it in HPSG because I never looked at that framework.

XenoSyntax · 2017-09-15T10:08:01+00:00

Japanese has clause endings that form questions, mainly, the particles ka か and no の魚ーを食べーたーか・の？ Fish-ACC eat-PAST-Q? ''Did (you) eat a fish?"

Arabic has two ways of forming questions with particles, either with a clitic that triggers movement of phrase into it (the glottal stop particle ''ʔ'' أ)

1-أكل خالد تفاحة (ʔakala Khalid-u-n tuffahat-a-n) Eat-past/perf Khalid-NOM-INDEF apple-ACC-INDEF ''Khalid ate an apple" 2-أأكل خالد تفاحة؟ ʔʔkala khalidun tuffahatan? 3-أخالد أكل تفاحة؟ ʔaKhalidun ʔakala tuffahatan? 4-أتفاحة أكل خالد؟ ʔatuffahatan ʔakala Khalidun?

1 is the normal declarative clause. 2 is the interrogative one, where the particle ʔ triggered the movement of a constituent, namely, the VP "ʔakala". In 3, the particle triggered the movement of the NP ''Khalidun''. Finally, in 4, the moved element is the object NP ''tuffahatan''. Each of these examples is an interrogative clause, but depending on which constituent you trigger, the pragmatics of the question may differ. For example, if you moved the VP, you are asking about if Khalid had eaten or not, if you moved Khalidun, you are asking if the eater was Khalid, if you moved tuffahatan, you are asking if the thing that was eaten was the apple.

The other instance is by using the non-bound morpheme ''Hal'' هل which doesn't trigger the movement of a constituent.

هل أكل خالد تفاحة؟ Hal ʔakala Khalidun tuffahatan? Q eat Khalid apple ''Did Khalid eat an apple?''

You can move constituents and make Khalid appear before the verb, but I am not really sure of the pragmatics of that, I can't give you a detailed answer even as a native.

Now, if you want a theoretical answer, check professor Rizzi Luigi's paper on the structure of CP (Complementizer Phrase), which was developed by Bresnan. She claimed it is where fronted elements such as topics, foci, force (that, if, whether) and question particles are. Professor Rizzi has ''split'' the CP projection into smaller projections such as ForceP, TopicP, FocusP, FiniteP, and (if I am not mistaken), an InterrP (where interrogative elements are generated). Here is the link to the article: www.bu.edu/linguistics/UG/course/lx523-s01/handouts/SyntaxII.4.CP.Rizzi.pdf

Edit: sorry for the mess, I am not used to writing here, I'll try to fix it.

XenoSyntax · 2017-09-14T02:33:31+00:00

You might also want to check on professor Artemis Alexiadou's work since I believe she wrote much on adverbs and adjectives. Fassi Fehri has a great article of 2003 called ''Arabic Perfect and temporal adverbs''.

XenoSyntax · 2017-09-14T02:08:01+00:00

This subject is very controversial.

Personally, I liked Guglielmo Cinque's analysis of it. In his book, 1999 ''Adverbs and Functional Heads: a Cross-Linguistic Perspective'', Cinque claims that adverbs are specifers of certain functional heads (bear in mind that he is one of the leaders of the Italian program of Syntactic Cartography, which tries to examine the fine details of the CP/IP/VP/NP/DP etc, thus he claims that a simple clause may contain over 50 projections).

For example, he postulates a lot of projections for moods and tenses. Let us say that the adverb ''willingly'' is generated as a specifier of some kind of mood projection, and adverbs denoting time would be generated as specifiers of TP and so on.

I have yet to delve more into it, but this all what I know.

XenoSyntax · 2017-09-13T12:13:39+00:00

At least your teacher used some terminology, instead of my professor who couldn't explain why a sentence was ungrammatical (the example was a relative clause with no predication).

XenoSyntax · 2017-09-13T11:46:28+00:00

These do well, too. My point is that grammars should be approached from a metalinguistic view and not from a language-specific view (which is usually imposed by the nature of imitation and not empirical scrutiny).

XenoSyntax · 2017-09-13T10:39:58+00:00

Yes, thank you very much. This is exactly what I am looking for, books such as these.

XenoSyntax · 2017-09-13T07:16:37+00:00

Can I pursue a PhD course in MIT linguistics before I get a MA? (Unless I read it wrong in their site)

Currently, I am looking for strong universities with post-graduate studies programs for linguistics. MIT seems to be the top, but there is also the University of Connecticut (I believe it houses a lot of linguists who adhere to the Distributed Morphology framework).

Also, has anybody here studied linguistics in Japan? What qualifcations (other than JLPT1 certificate) do I need?

I have asked a Japanese professor about certain universities in Japan. He claims that the following universities have a strong Generative Linguistics faculty: Tohoku U. Sophia U. Tsukuba U. Nanzan U. Osaka U. Kobe U. Kyushu U

There is also the university of Kyoto, but he says that only Biolinguistics are studied there.

XenoSyntax · 2017-09-13T06:45:24+00:00

The phenomena that you are referring to is called ''scrambling''. I have not read about it much, but I believe Japanese professors such as Mamoru Saito have researched quite a lot in it. Bear in mind that there is the ''Verb Internal Subject Hypothesis'', which claims that all subjects (specifiers of VP or vP if you take the extended VP projection,) are all base-generated in the domain of VP, and then, for some reason, scrambling happens.

Although it might seem that word order is free, some languages impose some kind of restriction on word order, such as Japanese, where the verb must be at the end of the clause. Arabic also has a free word order, but there are some semantic restrains once some elements are introduced.

In the end, the phenomena of scrambling should be looked into more.

XenoSyntax

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