The Boundary between Syntax and Semantics - Prof. Fredreck J. Newmeyer

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FREDERICK J. NEWMEYER

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA,

AND SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

Class 3:The Boundary between Syntax and Semantics

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THE NATURE OF MEANING

This class will deal with meaning/semantics and its treatment within generative grammar.

Many debates both within generative grammar and between generativists and those in other frameworks have centred around questions of semantics.

To make things more complicated, there has always been debate about what meaning ‘means’.

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Three approaches to meaning, each of which is at root incompatible with the other two.

Nevertheless, each has found its place in current theoretical work:

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FIRST: Meanings are ‘ideas’ or in current terminology, ‘cognitive representations’.

This has its roots in continental philosophy and was developed by European structuralism.

For Saussure the basic unit of linguistics was the ‘sign’: the relationship between a ‘mental image’ and an ‘acoustic image’.

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Ray Jackendoff’s Conceptual Semantics is a variant of this idea.

In Cognitive Linguistics, this is the approach to meaning taken.

Today in generative grammar, we see it in such notions as ‘thematic roles’, ‘interpretable features’, and so on.

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SECOND: Meanings are ‘uses’.

This has its roots in behaviourism, ordinary language philosophy, and British structuralism.

“If you want to know what a word/sentence, etc. means, then see how it is used.”

The use-theory of meaning manifests itself today in pragmatic theory (based on work by such philosophers as Grice, Austin, and Searle).

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THIRD: Meanings are conditions for establishing the truth of propositions.

This has its roots in the logical tradition, in particular in logical positivist philosophy.

Today we see it in mainstream semantic theory.

Interestingly, Chomsky has always rejected this approach.

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THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN FORM AND MEANING

Most of the debates in the past 50 years have focused on the boundary between form and meaning.

That is, questions like ‘Is it productive to study form independently of meaning?’

‘To what extent does syntax have its own patterning that does not reflect meaning?’

One can go a long way to answering these questions without knowing a lot about the nature of meaning.

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Chomsky in Syntactic Structures took a very clear position on the form-meaning relationship:

“I think that we are forced to conclude that grammar is autonomous and independent of meaning.” (Chomsky 1957: 17)

In other words, you can and should study form without studying meaning at the same time.

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Chomsky gave empirical arguments for the independence of form and meaning:

Something can be formally grammatical, but have no meaning: Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

Two sentences can be related by a transformational rule, yet differ in meaning:

Everyone in the room speaks two languages.Two languages are spoken by everyone in the room.

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Chomsky also argued that we can use form to get at meaning:

‘In general, as syntactic description becomes deeper, what appear to be semantic questions fall increasingly within its scope...’ (Chomsky 1964: 936).

For example, Chomsky motivated the passive transformation purely on its formal properties (the occurrence of the morpheme be+en, its limitation to transitive verbs, and so on).

The rough paraphrase relation between actives and passives was not one of Chomsky’s motivations.

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There was no semantic component in Syntactic Structures.

Incorporating semantics into the model was the work of the next decade.

It was carried out by Jerrold Katz, Jerry Fodor, and Paul Postal.

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Katz and Postal (1964): An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions.

The Katz-Postal Hypothesis: Transformations do not change meaning.

Another way to put that is to say that everything that you need for semantic interpretation is at the level of Deep Structure.

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But what about?:

Everyone in the room speaks two languages.

Two languages are spoken by everyone in the room.

Isn’t this an example of Passive changing meaning?

Katz and Postal argued that both sentences are ambiguous!

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In the earliest work, John saw Mary, John did not see Mary, and Did John see Mary? were all derived from the same underlying structure.

So transformations were certainly changing meaning!

Katz and Postal agued that negatives and questions had abstract NEG and Q morphemes in Deep Structure.

So meaning was not changed under transformation.

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All of these changes laid the basis for Chomsky’s 1965 book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.

This book proposed what came to be called the ‘Standard Theory’.

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THE 1965 ASPECTS OF THE THEORY OF SYNTAX MODEL, THE ‘STANDARD

THEORY’

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TOWARDS GENERATIVE SEMANTICS

But in the late 1960s, generative syntacticians split off in two directions:

GENERATIVE SEMANTICS

INTERPRETIVE SEMANTICS

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For almost 10 years, the battles between the two were so vitriolic, the period has been called the time of the ‘linguistic wars’.

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SOME LEADING GENERATIVE SEMANTICISTS

GEORGE LAKOFF

HAJ ROSS

JAMES MCCAWLEY 1938-1999

PAUL POSTAL

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By 1965-1967, Postal, Ross, and Lakoff were arguing that deep structure was much more ‘abstract’ than in the standard theory.

In this sense, ‘abstract’ means farther from surface structure and closer to semantic representation.

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‘Floyd broke the glass’ in the Standard Theory

Now look at the same sentence in a generative semantics treatment.

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Notice the lexical decomposition in the tree:

The verb break is derived from (roughly) 'cause + come about + be + broken'.

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By 1970 Generative Semantics was born.

Deep Structure had been ‘pushed back’ so closely to semantic representation that Lakoff, Ross, Postal, and McCawley came to the conclusion that there was no independent level of Deep Structure at all.

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Generative Semantics did not at first seem like a big departure from the standard theory.

Their arguments were arrived at almost entirely by recourse to the assumptions of Katz and Postal's Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions and Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.

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The Katz-Postal Hypothesis:

Transformations do not change meaning = everything you need for meaning is at the level of Deep Structure.

That hypothesis invited a syntactic solution to every semantic problem.

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James McCawley pointed out that words can have the same meaning as phrases:

kill = cause to die

McCawley reasoned that if they have the same meaning, they should have the same syntactic structure. So:

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LATE GENERATIVE SEMANTICS

By 1970 Generative Semantics was at its peak.

If it had stabilized there, it might exist today.

But it did not stabilize. It kept adding more and more new types of data to account for and more complex devices to handle them.

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LATE GENERATIVE SEMANTICS

Needless to say, generative semanticists gave up on formalism very quickly.

By the mid 1970s, the program of Generative Semantics held very little appeal for most linguists.

The great majority went over to a more ‘Chomskyan’ way of looking at grammar.

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FORM-MEANING MISMATCHES

• During the interpretive-generative semantics debate more and more evidence was put forward for the autonomy of syntax.

• Let’s look at some of this and then turn to mainstream developments.

• Virtually every linguist in the world agrees that the relationship between form and meaning is highly systematic.

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Almost all linguists agree that the match up between form and meaning is far from one-to-one.

Ambiguity (The chickens are ready to eat).

Paraphrase (Mary looked up the answer / Mary looked the answer up)

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Lexical peculiarities: a. He is likely to be late.

b. *He is probable to be late. (likely, but not probable, allows raising)

a. He allowed the rope to go slack.b. *He let the rope to go slack. (let doesn’t take infinitive

marker)

a. He isn’t sufficiently tall.b. *He isn’t enough tall. / He isn’t tall enough. (enough is only

degree modifier that occurs post-adjectivally)

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One grammatical relation encoding more than one semantic role:

a. Mary threw the ball [‘Mary’ is the Agent of the action]b. Mary saw the play [‘Mary’ is the Experiencer of an event]c. Mary received a letter [‘Mary’ is the goal/recipient of

transfer]d. Mary went from Vancouver to Montréal [‘Mary’ is an

object undergoing transfer of position]

In each case Mary is the grammatical subject.

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Categorial mismatches — where the same concept is encoded by different grammatical categories:

Quantificational nouns and quantifiers:Bill has [a lot of] friends.Bill has [many] friends.

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Displacements — frontings and extrapositions — that break up what are clearly semantic units:

a. [Many objections to the new work rules] were raised.

b. [Many objections] were raised [to the new work rules].

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WHY DO FORM AND MEANING DIVERGE?

Pure historical accident: Most disyllabic adjectives in English beginning with unstressed a- do not occur prenominally:*the asleep baby, *the aslant window, *the ajar door, *the atilt picture, etc.

There is no semantic generalization at work:the sleeping baby, the slanted window, the open door, the titled picture

The generalization is not phonological either:the abrupt remark, the acerb comment, the astute recommendation

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The story: Most of the adjectives that don’t occur prenominally are historically grammaticalizations of PPs:asleep < on sleep; awake < on wake; ajar < at jar

They don’t occur prenominally because PPs don’t occur prenominally.

Abrupt, acerb, and astute, on the other hand, have different histories:abrupt (< Lat. abruptus); acerb (< acerbity < Fr. acerbité); astute (< Lat. astutus)

Given their history, there was never an impediment to abrupt, acerb, and astute occurring prenominally.

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Real-time constraints imposed by the vocal channel (Chafe 1967)

Conflicting pressures (Martinet 1962)

Fronting an object highlights the fronted element, but breaks up a semantic unit:a. What did you eat?b. Raw potatoes, I would never eat. Pressure from the parser: a. [Many objections to the new work rules] were raised.b. [Many objections] were raised [to the new work rules].

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THE AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX

What kinds of facts bear on whether syntax is autonomous?

An answer from some formalists: ‘Just show a mismatch between form and meaning/function’.

But if that’s all there were to it, then every linguist would believe in autonomous syntax.

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We’ve just seen examples of mismatches.

Some functionalists say that to refute the autonommy of syntax, all that you need to do is to show that there is a rule-governed relationship between form and meaning.

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DORIS PAYNE

“Crucial evidence for choosing a functionalist over a Chomskyan formalist approach would minimally be any language in which there is a rule-governed relationship between discourse/cognitive functions and linear order, where the relationship between form and function is rule-like. Such languages clearly exist.”

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Parts of speech: a. Nouns tend to denote persons, places, things, or concepts.b. Verbs tend to denote actions, processes, etc.c. And so on for other syntactic categories.

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All formal theories posit a rule-governed relation between syntactic and semantic structure.

There would be no ‘autonomous syntacticians’ if, in order to qualify as one, you had to reject regular rules linking form and meaning.

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SUPPORT FOR THE AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX

What does support the autonomy of syntax, then?

Autonomy of Syntax: The rules (principles, constraints, etc.) that determine the combinatorial possibilities of the formal elements of a language make no reference to constructs from meaning, discourse, or language use.

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To establish the correctness of the autonomy of syntax, one must demonstrate that:

a. there exists an extensive set of purely formal generalizations orthogonal to generalizations governing meaning or discourse.

FoG1 FoG2 FoG3 FoG4 FoG5 etc. (FoG = Formal Generalization)

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b. these generalizations ‘interlock’ in a system.

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THE AUTONOMY OF GRAMMATICAL COMPONENTS

The adjective with infinitival complement structure in English Noun – Copula – Adjective -- Infinitive There are six logically possible ways that the NP subject can relate (in terms of understood grammatical relations ) to the Adjective and the Verb. All six occur: Relation of NP subject to A to Va. Mary is eager to please subject subjectb. Mary is easy to please none objectc. Mary is liable to dance none subjectd Guns are cheap to buy subject objecte. It is useless to try none nonef. It is (too) dark to seesubject none

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THE AUTONOMY OF GRAMMATICAL COMPONENTS

Clearly there is something ‘real’ about that pattern itself, whatever meanings or uses it might manifest.

In other words, the formal patterns themselves have an autonomy, not derivable from meaning or use.

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STRUCTURAL-SYSTEMIC PRESSURE ON CHANGE

Preposition-stranding:

a. Who did you talk to?b. Mary was talked to.

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Despite its typological rarity, P-stranding in English has expanded its domain consistently in the last 1000 years.

Chronology of the expansion of P-stranding in English: a. Old English period (all wh-movement type

operations without an overt wh-pronoun; topicalization) b. Early Middle English (overt wh-movement) c. Later Middle English (passives) d. Modern English (over a direct object; e.g.

Who did they take advantage of?; Mary was taken advantage of.)

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What is going on here?

An existing grammatical structure has steadily expanded its domain.

Speakers have the pattern and seem to love it.

They use it in more and more contexts.

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Perhaps the expansion is due to the model of other P-final structures in English:

a. Phrasal verbs with postposed particles:i. I looked the answer up.ii. Let’s check it out.

b. Final P-like directional particles:i. I found this lying around.ii. She’s coming up (e.g. the

stairs)

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In other words — P-stranding has been reinforced by the existence of similar — but analytically independent — structures in the language.

This ‘sensitivity to pure structure’ is predicted by the autonomy of syntax.

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THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX

The autonomy of syntax has become progressive weakened over the years in mainstream ‘Chomskyan’ syntax.

The result is that syntax has been pushed back to semantics — similar to what happened with Generative Semantics!

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The Theta-Criterion from Chomsky’s Lectures on Government and Binding (Chomsky 1981).

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The Theta-Criterion:

Each argument bears one and only one Q-role and each Q-role is assigned to one and only one argument. (Chomsky 1981: 36)

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The Theta-Criterion demands abstract PRO subjects where they do not occur on the surface:

a) Mary yearns [PRO to convince John that she is qualified]. b) John left the room [PRO angry].

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Next step: The idea that ‘c-selection (essentially subcategorization) is derivable from ‘s-selection’ (essentially, the thematic properties of the items involved) (Chomsky 1986).

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C-selection (subcategorization): the categories that an verb takes at the level of D(eep)-structure:

persuade ___ NP CP

S-selection: the semantic roles that a verb takes:

persuade Agent ___ Patient Proposition

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Getting rid of subcategorization is tantamount to removing one piece of motivation for an independent level of D(eep)-Structure.

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It is not obviously correct to try to derive c-selection from s-selection:

Eat ___ (NP)Dine ___ (on NP)Devour ___ NP

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The next step: Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH) (Baker 1988).

Identical thematic relationships between items are represented by identical structural relationships between those items at the level of D-structure. MARK

BAKER

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UTAH is another step in the direction of Generative Semantics. Notice how the subjects of each of these sentences have different thematic roles:

Mary threw the ball [‘Mary’ is the Agent of the action]Mary saw the play [‘Mary’is the Experiencer of an event]Mary received a letter [‘Mary’is the recipient of an object]Mary went from Chicago to Detroit [‘Mary’ is an object undergoing

transfer of position]Mary underwent torture [‘Mary’ is a Patient]

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Under one interpretation of UTAH, in each of these sentences Mary would have to be in a different structural position.

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Next: Lexical decomposition, which derives semantically complex predicates via syntactic movement operations.

KEN HALE, 1934-2001 JAY KEYSER HAGIT BORER

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Next: The cartography program (Rizzi 1997; Cinque 1999), which appeals in part to semantic motivation for syntactic projections:

LUIGI RIZZI GUGLIELMO CINQUE

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“In fact, a restrictive theory should force a one-to-one relation between position and interpretation (p. 20) … each projection has a specific semantic interpretation.” (p. 132) (Cinque 1999)

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Next: The triggering of movement (and/or the licensing of configurations) by semantic properties of heads (Rizzi 1991/1996; Haegeman 1995):

LUIGI RIZZI LILIANE HAEGEMAN

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“Syntactic movement … must be triggered by the satisfaction of certain quasi-morphological requirements of heads. … [S]uch features have an interpretive import (Wh, Neg, Top, Foc, …): they determine the interpretation of the category bearing them and of its immediate constituents …, function as scope markers for phrases with the relevant quantificational force in a local configuration, etc.” (Rizzi 1997: 282; emphasis added)

“[The Negative Criterion appeals to] the semantic-syntactic feature NEG.” (Haegeman 1997: 116)

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g. The principle of Full Interpretation: Every element of Phonological Form and Logical Form must receive an appropriate interpretation.

h. Phases, which are defined as full propositional structures.

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These do not illustrate syntax becoming deeper and incorporating semantics.

They illustrate grafting semantic notions directly into the syntax.

There are negative consequences — I’ll just give one example.

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NEGATION AND AUTONOMY

Crosslinguistically we also find the positing of semantically-based projections that render purely formal generalization all but impossible to capture.

Take the Neg Phrase projection. The default assumption now is that where we have semantic negation we have NegP.

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Two possibilities:

Negative markers cross-linguistically have their own distinct syntax, i. e., as part of Neg Phrase.

Negative markers cross-linguistically pattern with elements that have nothing to do with negation.

It’s the second possibility — the one supporting autonomy — that is correct.

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Negation is almost never overtly phrasal.

Even worse, NegP obscures the formal similarities between negatives in a particular language and other categories with the same formal properties (different for different languages).

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1. Complement-taking verbTongan

a. Na’e ‘alu ‘a SialeASP go ABSOLUTE Charlie‘Charlie went’

b. Na’e ‘ikai [S ke ‘alu ‘a Siale]

ASP NEG ASP go ABSOLUTE Charlie‘Charlie did not go’

‘ikai behaves like a verb in the seem class (we know there is a complement because ke occurs only in embedded clauses)

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2. AuxiliaryEstonian Negative forms pattern with perfects, which are based on a form of the copula OLEMA

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3. Derivational affixTurkish V + Refl + Recip + Cause + Pass + Neg + Possible + Tense/Mood + Person/Number

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4. NounEvenki (Tungus)

a. nuan a:cin ‘he is not here’b. nuartin a:cir ‘they are not here’

(a:cin has a plural form and takes case endings like ordinary nouns)

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5. Adverb

EnglishNot is an adverb in the same class as never, always, just, barely.

We need the filter *not before a finite verb

to block *Mary not left, etc.

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In other words, negation supports the autonomy of syntax.

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THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM AND THE AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX

Why has the autonomy of syntax come to be so weakened?

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Partly the Minimalist Program is to blame.

Three hypothesis central to the MP have pushed syntax back towards semantics.

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The three hypotheses: a. There is no optionality in grammar; hence

elements move only when they are ‘required to’. (Chomsky 1995)

b. Movement must be triggered by a feature on a functional head. (Chomsky 1995)

c. “In a perfectly designed language, each feature would be semantic or phonetic, not merely a device to create a position or to facilitate computation.” (Chomsky 2000: 109)

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(a) There is no optionality in grammar; hence elements move only when they are ‘required to’. (Chomsky 1995)

This hypothesis requires that seemingly optional variants have different underlying structures.

But few if any structural variants have the same semantic properties.

So structural differences came to be located in projections with direct semantic relevance.

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(b) Movement must be triggered by a feature on a functional head. (Chomsky 1995)

If projections are semantically defined and, as in (b), movement is triggered by features of projections, then we are a step closer to the idea that movement is semantically motivated.

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The quote in (c) is the icing on the cake:

“In a perfectly designed language, each feature would be semantic or phonetic, not merely a device to create a position or to facilitate computation.” (Chomsky 2000: 109)

We can disagree with each other profoundly about what a ‘perfectly designed language’ might look like. But if we do happen to agree with (c) — then we can say good-bye to the autonomy of syntax.

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Well before 1995 mainstream syntax was headed in an anti-autonomist position.

So we can’t ‘blame’ (or ‘thank’) minimalism for that.

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The most popular formal semantic theories haven’t meshed comfortably with mainstream generative syntax.

And the main reason for that is that Chomsky, has never shown any interest in formal semantics.

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So the tendency has been to ‘go with what we know’ — to expand syntax to encompass what is naturally the domain of semantic theory.

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DOES THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM MAKE THE AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX A NON-ISSUE?

“We hypothesize that FLN only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language.” (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002: 1569)

If the quote were correct, then syntax would be autonomous by definition.

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In addition to recursion, at least the following are needed in a minimalist theory:

a. Economy principles such as Last Resort, Relativized Minimality (or Minimize Chain Links), and Anti-Locality. These don’t fall out from recursion per se, but rather represent conditions that need to be imposed on it.

b. The entire set of mechanisms pertaining to phases, including what nodes count for phasehood and the various conditions that need to be imposed on their functioning, like the Phase Impenetrability Condition.

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c. The categorial inventory (lexical and functional) needs to be specified, as well as the formal features they manifest.

d. The set of parameters (there might be hundreds), their possible settings, and the implicational relations among them, need to be specified.

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e. “PF-syntax.” Some syntactic phenomena that have been attributed to PF:

i. extraposition and scrambling ii. object shiftiii. head movements iv. the movement deriving V2 orderv. linearization (i.e. VO vs. OV) vi. Wh-movement

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Economy principles, phases, categories, parameter settings, and PF syntax clearly differ from language to language.

So the MP doesn’t make the question of autonomy irrelevant.

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THE ANTI-AUTONOMIST TREND THREATENS THE FOUNDATIONS OF GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

To stress again: the one feature that has made generative grammar distinctively different from every other contemporary approach is the claim that there is something ‘special’ about syntax.

And furthermore that this ‘specialness’ of syntax is at the root of the theory of Universal Grammar.

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If you give up the Autonomy of Syntax, then the arguments for innate structural principles disappear.

Opponents of generative grammar claim that the arguments for UG fall through because Chomsky and his associates don’t realize how isomorphic syntax is to semantics (see, for example, Van Valin 1998).

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The blurring of the distinction between form and meaning gives a huge opening wedge to opponents of generative grammar.

“In a perfectly designed language, each feature would be semantic or phonetic, not merely a device to create a position or to facilitate computation.” (Chomsky 2000: 109)

“The core similarities across languages have their origin in two sources: physiological constraints on the sound system and conceptual constraints on the semantics.” (Evans and Levinson 2007: np)

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Peace, harmony, and convergence are good things, if you don’t have to give up too much to achieve them.

Giving up the Autonomy of Syntax is giving up too much!

Education

The Boundary between Syntax and Semantics - Prof. Fredreck J. Newmeyer