CHAPTER ONE

BASIC PROPERTIES OF SYNTAX

A. EXPECTED COMPETENCIES AND INDICATORS

1. Expected competency
The students can describe some basic properties of syntax.

2. Indicators
 To describe some remarks on the Essence of Human Language
 To describe how to discover rules
 To describe the emmergence of syntax and its advantages

B. INTRODUCTION

1. Description of the Chapter

This chapter presents about some basic properties of syntax, beginning
with the overview of human language, how to discover the language rules, and the
emergence of syntax and its advantages. This chapter provides some exercises to
enhance the students’ understanding and knowledge of the topic of the chapter.

2. Relevance
The students will be given the very basic concepts of syntax before
achieving the specific topics in analysing sentences in the following chapters. It
also tries to retract the students’ knowledge about the notion of human language
which the students’ have gained before in Introduction to Linguistcs.

C. MATERIALS ORGANIZATION

1 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

1. Some Remarks on the Essence of Human Language

One of the crucial functions of any human language, such as English or

Korean, is to convey various kinds of information from the everyday to the highly
academic. Language provides a means for us to describe how to cook, how to
remove cherry stains, how to understand English grammar, or how to provide a
convincing argument. We commonly consider certain properties of language to be
key essential features from which the basic study of linguistics starts. The first
well-known property (as emphasized by Saussure 1916) is that there is no
motivated relationship between sounds and meanings. This is simply observed
in the fact that the same meaning is usually expressed by a different sounding-
word in a different language (think of house, maison, casa). For words such as
hotdog, desk, dog, bike, hamburger, cranberry,sweetbread, their meanings have
nothing to do with their shapes. For example, the word hotdog has no relationship
with a dog which is or feels hot. There is just an arbitrary relationship between the
word’s sound and its meaning: this relationship is decided by the convention of
the community the speakers belong to.

The second important feature of language, and one more central to syntax,
is that language makes infinite use of finite set of rules or principles, the
observation of which led the development of generative linguistics in the 20th
century (cf. Chomsky 1965). A language is a system for combining its parts in
infinitely many ways. One piece of evidence of the system can be observed in
word-order restrictions. If a sentence is an arrangement of words and we have 5
words such as man, ball, a, the, and kicked, how many possible combinations can
we have from these five words? More importantly, are all of these combinations
grammatical sentences? Mathematically, the number of possible combinations of
5 words is 5 (factorial), equalling 120 instances. But among these 120 possible
combinations, only 6 form grammatical English sentences:

(1) a. The man kicked a ball.

2 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

 Examples like (1e) and (1f) are called ‘topicalization’ sentences in which
the topic expression (the ball and the man), already mentioned and understood in
the given context, is placed in the sentence initial position. See Lambrecht (1994)
and references therein.

b. A man kicked the ball.

c. The ball kicked a man.
d. A ball kicked the man.
e. The ball, a man kicked.
f. The man, a ball kicked.

All the other 114 combinations, a few of which are given in (2), are
unacceptable to native speakers of English. We use the notation * to indicate that
a hypothesized example is ungrammatical.

(2) a. *Kicked the man the ball.

b. *Man the ball kicked the.
c. *The man a ball kicked.

It is clear that there are certain rules in English for combining words.
These rules constrain which words can be combined together or how they may be
ordered, sometimes in groups, with respect to each other. Such combinatory rules
also play important roles in our understanding of the syntax of an example like
(3a). Whatever these rules are, they should give a different status to (3b), an
example which is judged ungrammatical by native speakers even though the
intended meaning of the speaker is relatively clear and understandable.

(3) a. Kim lives in the house Lee sold to her.

b. *Kim lives in the house Lee sold it to her.

3 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

 The requirement of such combinatory knowledge also provides an
argument for the assumption that we use just a finite set of resources in producing
grammatical sentences, and that we do not just rely on the meaning of words
involved. Consider the examples in (4):

(4) a. *Kim fond of Lee.

b. Kim is fond of Lee.

Even though it is not difficult to understand the meaning of (4a), English

has a structural requirement for the verb is as in (4b). More natural evidence of the
‘finite set of rules and principles’ idea can be found in cognitive, creative
abilities. Speakers are unconscious of the rules which they use all the time, and
have no difficulties in producing or understanding sentences which they have
never heard, seen, or talked about before. For example, even though we may well
not have seen the following sentence before, we can understand its meaning if we
have a linguistic competence in English:

(5) In January 2002, a dull star in an obscure constellation suddenly became

600,000 times more luminous than our Sun, temporarily making it the
brightest star in our galaxy.

A related part of this competence is that a language speaker can produce

an infinite number of grammatical sentences. For example, given the simple
sentence (6a), we can make a more complex one like (6b) by adding the adjective
tall. To this sentence, we can again add another adjective handsome as in (6c). We
could continue adding adjectives, theoretically enabling us to generate an
infinitive number of sentences:

(6) a. The man kicked the ball.

b. The tall man kicked the ball.
c. The handsome, tall man kicked the ball.

4 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

 d. The handsome, tall, nice man kicked the ball.
e. . . .

One might argue that since the number of English adjectives could be
limited, there would be a dead-end to this process. However, no one would find
themselves lost for another way to keep the process going (cf. Sag et al. 2003):

(7) a. Some sentences can go on.

b. Some sentences can go on and on.
c. Some sentences can go on and on and on.
d. Some sentences can go on and on and on and on.
e. . . .

To (7a), we add the string and on, producing a longer one (7b). To this
resulting sentence (7c), we once again add and on. We could in principle go on
adding without stopping: this is enough to prove that we could make an infinite
number of well-formed English sentences. Given these observations, how then
can we explain the fact that we can produce or understand an infinite number of
grammatical sentences that we have never heard or seen before? It seems
implausible to consider that we somehow memorize every example, and in fact we
do not (Pullum and Scholz 2002). We know that this could not be true, in
particular when we consider that native speakers can generate an infinite number
of infinitely long sentences, in principle. In addition, there is limit to the amount
of information our brain can keep track of, and it would be implausible to think
that we store an infinite number of sentences and retrieve whenever we need to do
so.

These considerations imply that a more appropriate hypothesis would be

something like (8):

(8) All native speakers have a grammatical competence which can generate

5 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

 an infinite set of grammatical sentences from a finite set of resources.

This hypothesis has been generally accepted by most linguists, and has
been taken as the subject matter of syntactic theory. In terms of grammar, this
grammatical competence is hypothesized to characterize a generative grammar,
which we then can define as follows (for English, in this instance):

(9) Generative Grammar:

An English generative grammar is the one that can generate an infinite set
of wellformed English sentences from a finite set of rules or principles.
The job of syntax is thus to discover and formulate these rules or
principles. These rules tell us how words are put together to form
grammatical phrases and sentences. Generative grammar, or generative
syntax, thus aims to define these rules which will characterize all of the
sentences which native speakers will accept as well-formed and
grammatical.

2. How We Discover Rules

How can we then find out what the generative rules of English syntax are?
These rules are present in the speakers’ minds, but are not consciously accessible;
speakers cannot articulate their content, if asked to do so. Hence we discover the
rules indirectly, and of the several methods for inferring these hidden rules,
hypotheses based on the observed data of the given language are perhaps the most
reliable. These data can come from speakers’ judgments – known as intuitions –
or from collected data sets – often called corpora. Linguistics is in one sense an
empirical science as it places a strong emphasis on investigating the data
underlying a phenomenon of study.

The canonical steps for doing empirical research can be summarized as

follows: .

6 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

 Step I: Data collection and observation. .
Step II: Make a hypothesis to cover the first set of data.
Step III: Check the hypothesis with more data.
Step IV: Revise the hypothesis, if necessary.

Let us see how these steps work for discovering one of the grammar rules
in English, in particular, the rule for distinguishing count and non-count nouns:

[Step I: Observing Data]

To discover a grammar rule, the first thing we need to do is to check out

grammatical and ungrammatical variants of the expression in question. For
example, let us look at the usage of the word evidence:

(10) Data Set 1: evidence

a. *The professor found some strong evidences of water on Mars.
b. *The professor was hoping for a strong evidence.
c. *The evidence that John found was more helpful than the one that Smith
found.

What can you tell from these examples? We can make the following
observations:

(11) Observation 1:
a. evidence cannot be used in the plural.
b. evidence cannot be used with the indefinite article a(n).
c. evidence cannot be referred to by the pronoun one.

In any scientific research one example is not enough to draw any

conclusion. However, we can easily find more words that behave like evidence:

7 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

 (12) Data Set 2: equipment

a. *We had hoped to get three new equipments every month, but we only
had enough money to get an equipment every two weeks.
b. *The equipment we bought last year was more expensive than the one
we bought this year.

We thus extend Observation 1 a little bit further:

(13) Observation 2:
a. evidence/equipment cannot be used in the plural.
b. evidence/equipment cannot be used with the indefinite article a(n).
c. evidence/equipment cannot be referred to by the pronoun one.

It is usually necessary to find contrastive examples to understand the range

of a given observation. For instance, words like clue and tool act differently:

(14) Data Set 3: clue

a. The professor gave John some good clues for the question.
b. The student was hoping for a good clue.
c. The clue that John got was more helpful than the one that Smith got.

(15) Data Set 4: tool

a. The teacher gave John some good tools for the purpose.
b. The student was hoping for a tool.
c. The tool that Jones got was more helpful than the one that Smith got.

Unlike equipment and evidence, the nouns clue and tool can be used in the
test linguistic contexts we set up. We thus can add Observation 3, different from
Observation 2:

8 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

 (16) Observation 3:

a. clue/tool can be used in the plural.

b. clue/tool can be used with the indefinite article a(n).
c. clue/tool can be referred to by the pronoun one.

[Step II: Forming a Hypothesis]

From the data and observations we have made so far, can we make any
hypothesis about the English grammar rule in question? One hypothesis that we
can make is something like the following:

(17) First Hypothesis:

English has at least two groups of nouns, Group I (count nouns) and Group
II (non-count nouns), diagnosed by tests of plurality, the indefinite article,
and the pronoun one.

[Step III: Checking the Hypothesis]

Once we have formed such a hypothesis, we need to check out if it is true

of other data, and also see if it can bring other analytical consequences. A little
further thought allows us to find support for the two-way distinction for nouns.
For example, consider the usage of much and many:

(18) a. much evidence, much equipment, information, much furniture, much

advice
b. *much clue, *much tool, *much armchair, *much bags

(19) a. *many evidence, *many equipment, *many information, *many

furniture, *many advice
b. many clues, many tools, many suggestions, many armchairs

9 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

 As observed here, count nouns can occur only with many, whereas non-
count nouns can combine with much. Similar support can be found from the usage
of little and few:

(20) a. little evidence, little equipment, little advice, little information

b. *little clue, *little tool, *little suggestion, *little armchair

(21) a. *few evidence, *few equipment, *few furniture, *few advice, *few
information
b. few clues, few tools, suggestions, few armchairs

The word little can occur with non-count nouns like evidence, yet few
cannot. Meanwhile, few occurs only with count nouns. Given these data, it
appears that the two-way distinction is quite plausible and persuasive. We can
now ask if this distinction into just two groups is really enough for the
classification of nouns. Consider the following examples with cake:
(22) a. The mayor gave John some good cakes.
b. The president was hoping for a good cake.
c. The cake that Jones got was more delicious than the one that Smith got.

Similar behavior can be observed with a noun like beer, too:

(23) a. The bartender gave John some good beers.

b. No one knows how to tell from a good beer to a bad one.

These data show us that cake and beer may be classified as count nouns.
However, observe the following:

(24) a. My pastor says I ate too much cake.

b. The students drank too much beer last night.

10 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

 (25) a. We recommend to eat less cake and pastry.
b. People now drink less beer.

The data mean that cake and beer can also be used as non-count nouns
since that can be used with less or much.

[Step IV: Revising the Hypothesis]

The examples in (24) and (25) imply that there is another group of nouns
that can be used as both count and non-count nouns. This leads us to revise the
hypothesis in (17) as following:

(26) Revised Hypothesis:

There are at least three groups of nouns: Group 1 (count nouns), Group 2
(non-count nouns), and Group 3 (count and non-count). We can expect that
context will determine whether a Group 3 noun is used as count or as noncount.
As we have observed so far, the process of finding finite grammar rules crucially
hinges on finding data, drawing generalizations, making a hypothesis, and
revising this hypothesis with more data.

3. Why Do We Study Syntax and What Is It Good for?

There are many reasons for studying syntax, from general humanistic or
behavioral motivations to much more specific goals such as those in the
following:

 To help us to illustrate the patterns of English more effectively and

clearly.

 To enable us to analyze the structure of English sentences in a systematic

and explicit way.

11 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

 For example, let us consider how we could use the syntactic notion of
head, which refers to the essential element within a phrase. The following is a
short and informal rule for English subject-verb agreement.

(27) In English, the main verb agrees with the head element of the subject.

This informal rule can pinpoint what is wrong with the following two
examples:

(28) a. *The recent strike by pilots have cost the country a great deal of money
from tourism and so on.
b. *The average age at which people begin to need eyeglasses vary
considerably.

Once we have structural knowledge of such sentences, it is easy to see that

the essential element of the subject in (28a) is not pilots but strike. This is why the
main verb should be has but not have to observe the basic agreement rule in (27).
Meanwhile, in (28b), the head is the noun age, and thus the main verb vary needs
to agree with this singular noun. It would not do to simply talk about ‘the noun’ in
the subject in the examples in (28), as there is more than one. We need to be able
to talk about the one which gives its character to the phrase, and this is the head. If
the head is singular, so is the whole phrase, and similarly for plural. The head of
the subject and the verb (in the incorrect form) are indicated in (29):

(29) a. *[The recent strike by pilots] have cost the country a great deal of
money from tourism and so on.

b. *[The average age at which people begin to need eyeglasses] vary

considerably.

12 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

 Either example can be made into a grammatical version by pluralizing the
head noun of the subject. Now let us look at some slightly different cases. Can
you explain why the following examples are unacceptable?

(30) a. *Despite of his limited educational opportunities, Abraham Lincoln

became one of the greatest intellectuals in the world.
b. *A pastor was executed, notwithstanding on many applications in
favor of him.

To understand these examples, we first need to recognize that the words

despite and notwithstanding are prepositions, and further that canonical English
prepositions combine only with noun phrases. In (30), these prepositions combine
with prepositional phrases again (headed by of and on respectively), violating this
rule. A more subtle instance can be found in the following:

(31) a. Visiting relatives can be boring.

b. I saw that gas can explode.

These examples each have more than one interpretation. The first one can
mean either that the event of seeing our relatives is a boring activity, or that the
relatives visiting us are themselves boring. The second example can either mean
that a specific can containing gas exploded, which I saw, or it can mean that I
observed that gas has a possibility of exploding. If one knows English syntax, that
is, if one understands the syntactic structure of these English sentences, it is easy
to identify these different meanings. Here is another example which requires
certain syntactic knowledge:

(32) He said that that ‘that’ that that man used was wrong.

This is the kind of sentence one can play with when starting to learn
English grammar. Can you analyze it? What are the differences among these five

13 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

thats? Structural (or syntactic) knowledge can be used to diagnose the differences.
Part of our study of syntax involves making clear exactly how each word is
categorized, and how it contributes to a whole sentence. When it comes to
understanding a rather complex sentence, knowledge of English syntax can be a
great help. Syntactic or structural knowledge helps us to understand simple as
well as complex English sentences in a systematic way. There is no difference in
principle between the kinds of examples we have presented above and (33):

(33) The government’s plan, which was elaborated in a document released by

the reasury yesterday, is the formal outcome of the Government
commitment at the Madrid summit last year to put forward its ideas about
integration.

Apart from having more words than the examples we have introduced
above, nothing in this example is particularly complex.

4. Summary

The first well-known property of language is that there is no motivated

relationship between sounds and meanings. This is simply observed in the fact
that the same meaning is usually expressed by a different sounding-word in a
different language (think of house, maison, casa). For words such as hotdog, desk,
dog, bike, hamburger, cranberry,sweetbread, their meanings have nothing to do
with their shapes. For example, the word hotdog has no relationship with a dog
which is or feels hot. There is just an arbitrary relationship between the word’s
sound and its meaning: this relationship is decided by the convention of the
community the speakers belong to.

The second important feature of language, and one more central to syntax,
is that language makes infinite use of finite set of rules or principles, the
observation of which led the development of generative linguistics in the 20th
century (cf. Chomsky 1965). A language is a system for combining its parts in

14 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

infinitely many ways. One piece of evidence of the system can be observed in
word-order restrictions. If a sentence is an arrangement of words and we have 5
[words such as man, ball, a, the, and kicked, how many possible combinations can
we have from these five words? The requirement of such combinatory knowledge
also provides an argument for the assumption that we use just a finite set of
resources in producing grammatical sentences, and that we do not just rely on the
meaning of words involved.

How can we then find out what the generative rules of English syntax are?
These rules are present in the speakers’ minds, but are not consciously accessible;
speakers cannot articulate their content, if asked to do so. Hence we discover the
rules indirectly, and of the several methods for inferring these hidden rules,
hypotheses based on the observed data of the given language are perhaps the most
reliable. These data can come from speakers’ judgments – known as intuitions –
or from collected data sets – often called corpora. Linguistics is in one sense an
empirical science as it places a strong emphasis on investigating the data
underlying a phenomenon of study. Therefore, the canonical steps for doing
empirical research comprises in four stages; Step I: Data collection and
observation; Step II: Make a hypothesis to cover the first set of data; Step III:
Check the hypothesis with more data; Step IV: Revise the hypothesis, if
necessary.

There are many reasons for studying syntax, from general humanistic or
behavioral motivations to much more specific goals such as those in the
following:

 To help us to illustrate the patterns of English more effectively and

clearly.

 To enable us to analyze the structure of English sentences in a

systematic and explicit way.

Once we have structural knowledge of such sentences, it is easy to see the

essential element of the subject and verb of every sentences. So that, we cand

15 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

easily consider that any particular sentence is unceptable because it does not agree
to each other. It would not do to simply talk about ‘the noun’ in the subject in the
aone sentence if there is more than one. We need to be able to talk about the one
which gives its character to the phrase, and this is the head. If the head is singular,
so is the whole phrase, and similarly for plural.

5. Exercises

Complete the following mind mapping base on your understanding about

the unit.

16 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

D. CLOSING
1. Formative Test

1) For each of the following nouns, decide if it can be used as a count or as a

non-count (mass) noun. In doing so, construct acceptable and unacceptable
examples using the tests (plurality, indefinite article, pronoun one,
few/little, many/much tests) we have discussed in this chapter.
activity, art, cheese, discussion, baggage, luggage, suitcase,
religion, sculpture, paper, difficulty, cheese, water, experience,
progress, research, life

2) Check or find out whether each of the following examples is grammatical

or ungrammatical. For each ungrammatical one, provide at least one
(informal) reason for its ungrammaticality, according to your intuitions or
ideas.

a. Kim and Sandy is looking for a new bicycle.

b. I have never put the book.
c. The boat floated down the river sank.
d. Chris must liking syntax.
e. There is eager to be fifty students in this class.
f. What is John eager to do?
g. What is John easy to do?
h. Is the boy who holding the plate can see the girl?
i. Which chemical did you mix the hydrogen peroxide and?
j. There seem to be a good feeling developing among the students.
k. Strings have been pulled many times to get students into that
university.
3) Consider the following set of data, focusing on the usage of ‘self’ reflexive
pronouns and personal pronouns:

a. He washed himself.
b. *He washed herself.
c. *He washed myself.
d. *He washed ourselves.

a. *He washed him. (‘he’ and ‘him’ referring to the same person)
b. He washed me.
c. He washed her.
d. He washed us.

4) Can you make a generalization about the usage of ‘self’ pronouns and
personal pronouns like he here? In answering this question, pay attention
to what the pronouns can refer to. Also consider the following imperative
examples:

17 Basic Proopeties of Syntax

 a. Wash yourself.
b. Wash yourselves.
c. *Wash myself.
d. *Wash himself.

a. *Wash you!
b. Wash me!
c. Wash him!

5) Can you explain why we can use yourself and yourselves but not you as the
object of the imperatives here? In answering this, try to put pronouns in the
unrealized subject position.

6) Read the following passage and identify all the grammatical errors. If you
can, discuss the relevant grammar rules that you can think of.

a. Grammar is important because it is the language that make it possible

for us to talk about language. Grammar naming the types of words and
word groups that make up sentences not only in English but in any
language. As human beings, we can putting sentences together even as
children–we can all do grammar. People associate grammar for errors
and correctness. But knowing about grammar also helps us understood
what makes sentences and paragraphs clearly and interesting and
precise. Grammar can be part of literature discussions, when we and
our students closely reading the sentences in poetry and stories. And
knowing about grammar means finding out that all language and all
dialect follow grammatical patterns.

2. References

Chomsky, N. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kim, J. B. & Sells, P. 2007. English Syntax: An Introduction. Centre for The
Study of Language and Information.
Lambrecht, K. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Sag, I. A. S. and Thomas Wasow and Emily M. Bender. 2003. Syntactic
Theory: A Formal Introduction. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Saussure, F. de. 1916. Course of General Linguistics.

18 Basic Proopeties of Syntax