Introduction to Cognitive ScienceLinguistics Component

Syntax and SemanticsDate: 19th October 2000

Lecturer: Dr Bodomo

Department of Linguistics

Keywords• Syntax• the mental lexicon• phrase• noun phrase (NP)• verb phrase (VP)• phrase structure• sentence structure• tree diagram

• constituent structure• functional structure• semantics• pragmatics• morphosyntax• syntax-semantics

interface• ambiguity

Introduction: theme and objective• Theme

– A survey of how linguistic knowledge at the level of syntax and semantics is represented in the minds of speakers of a language.

• Objective– an understanding of the basic terms and issues in syntax and

semantics/pragmatics – an interface approach: rather than rigidly discussing these

issues from phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, we will look at how syntax interfaces with semantics.

Syntax• deals with the combination of words to form phrases.

• What are the principles that determine ways we can or cannot combine some words to form sentences?

• For example, why are some of these sentences correct and others wrong?

– Who did you see Mary with?

– *Who did you see Mary and ?

– Ngo5 heoi3 Hoeng1 gong2 zai2 ‘I’m going to Aberdeen’

– Heoi3 Hoeng1 gong2 zai2

– * Hoeng1gong2zai2 heoi3 ngo5

• It seems that speakers of a language have an internalized knowledge, in the form of rules and constraints, on the basis of which they decide whether or not a particular string of words in their language constitutes a well-formed string.

• Syntacticians, or cognitive scientists working on syntax, attempt to capture this knowledge by positing rules.

• Consider the situation whereby a speaker of English, Cantonese or Dagaare wants to express the conceptual notion of drinking water in English, Cantonese or Dagaare.

• The first step is presumably to search in a database of words in their respective languages for the appropriate words to express the situation.

Let us call this the mental lexiconmental lexicon.

The mental lexicon of a language

• a database containing a list of all the words in the language, along with information about their grammatical category, how they combine with other words and of course their meaning.

Simplified lexicons of English, Cantonese, and Dagaare

(each containing words that would express the conceptual notion of a man having drunk water )

EnglishEnglish: ‘The man drank water.’drank, verb, trans. ‘having ingested water through the mouth’man, noun, count, ‘an adult male human being’the, article, DEF.water, noun, mass ‘a kind of liquid’

DagaareDagaare:•a, article, DEF. ‘the’•d, noun, count ‘man’•ko, noun, mass ‘water’ •la, particle, focus marker•nyu, verb, trans. ‘drinking’

CantoneseCantonese: • go3, CL• naam4 jan2, noun, count ‘man’• jam2, verb, trans. ‘drank’ • soei2, noun, mass ‘water’

Phrase Structure• From the database of lexical items that would form the building blocks

of linguistic structure expressing the conceptual notion, the next step is to group the words such that they would express the entities that take part in the action and the action itself.

• We would refer to this group of words as phrases, a phrasephrase being defined as a structured group of words.

• Phrases have heads, a headhead of a phrase is the most important word in the phrase. Phrases take their names after the name of their heads. So a noun phrase (NP) is headed by a noun, verb phrase (VP) by a verb, etc.– ‘The man’ is an NP, ‘drank water’ is a VP. Indeed, a VP can contain an NP,

water, which just has only one item.

Sentence Structure

• words we need to express a situation are selected from our mental lexicon.

• we have successfully grouped them into phrases and units to express entities and events.

• we are ready to put these words to form complete strings expressing the conceptual situation. This is the domain of sentence analysis. We begin by positing phrase structure rules.

Phrase Structure rules

– S NP + VP

– VP V + NP

– NP Art + N

– V drank

– N man, water

– Art the

• With these phrase structure rules and the lexicon attached the native speaker can form or interpret grammatical sentences and reject ungrammatical ones.

• (In groups of two, spend at most 3 minutes and come up with phrase rules for Cantonese and Dagaare to express the conceptual situation of a man having drank water.)

A constituent structure diagram in the form of a tree structure

SS

NP NP VP VP

NPNP

ArtArt N N V N V N

The man drank waterThe man drank water

The first NP functions as the SUBJECT of the sentence, the verb as the PREDICATE and the second NP as the OBJECT.This can be represented in a functional structure diagram

Functional structure diagram

• This is how we represent the syntactic knowledge of speakers of a language for basic sentences. There are however more complex cases.

A account of the syntax alone is not enough for an adequateinterpretation of sentences that encode concepts, situations and attitudes. We need a level of meaning to achieve this.

PRED ‘drink <SUBJECT, OBJECT>’PRED ‘drink <SUBJECT, OBJECT>’TENSE PASTTENSE PASTSUBJECT [The man]SUBJECT [The man]OBJECT [water] OBJECT [water]

Meaning: level of semantics/ pragmatics

• What does the sign, brown dogbrown dog, mean? Signifier and signified

– Reality, mind, etc

• This will be taken care of by semantics and pragmatics

Semantics

• Trask (1999: 249)– ‘the branch of lingu

istics dealing with meanings of words and sentences’.

• Crystal (1997: 343)– ‘a major branch of

linguistics devoted to the study of MEANING in language’.

Meaning: Level of Semantics

• English:English:

a. Chan loves you more than Yan.

could mean:

b. Chan loves you more than Yan loves you.

c. Chan loves you more than Chan loves Yan.

• Cantonese:Cantonese:

a. me1 waa2 ?

could mean:

b. What did you say ?

c. What language ?

Meaning: Level of Pragmatics

What would brown dog mean in some specialised contexts, cultures, etc.?•What about a white dovewhite dove?

• Crystal (1997: 301)– ‘the study of language from the point of view of the

users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction, and the effects their use of language has on the other participants in an act of communication’.

Syntax and how it interfaces with other components

• Morphosyntax

• The syntax-semantics interface

Morphosyntax• There is a close relationship between the structure of words

and the structure of sentences.

• In some languages it is even difficult to tell whether a particular word formation is a word or a sentence:

Swahili (a language of East Africa): Nakupenda

is a word that is made up of: Na- ku- penda

Tense/SM you love (The item na in this language marks tense and also the subjectof a sentence.)

In this language,this word structure can also stand as a sentence, thus: Nakupenda 'I love you'

Morphosyntax (cont.)

• Trask (1999:176)– ‘the area of interface between morphology and syntax’.

• Crystal (1997:250-251)– grammatical categories or properties for whose definition criteria of

morphology and syntax both apply, as in describing the characteristics of words’

– . E.g. NUMBER in nouns constitute a morphosyntactic category:

• number contrasts affect syntax (e.g. singular subject requiring a singular verb)

• they require morphological definition (e.g. add -s for plural)

In the data above, it is better to analyse this linguistic item both in terms of its morphology and syntax, hence morphosyntax morphosyntax.

The Syntax-semantics Interface• Besides studying the formal structure of sentences it is also

important to study how parts of the sentence contribute to an interpretation of the whole sentence.

• Such is especially the case with syntactically ambiguous sentences: – Chan loves you more than Yan .

• Could mean:

i. Chan loves you more than Yan loves you .

ii. Chan loves you more than Chan loves Yan.

• [Class should look for more syntactic ambiguities in English, Cantonese, and any other language]

Conclusion

• We have briefly shown how tacit linguistic knowledge can be represented at various levels of phonologyphonology, morphologymorphology, syntaxsyntax, semanticssemantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces, including morphophonology, morphosyntaxmorphosyntax, and the syntax-semantics syntax-semantics interrelationshipsinterrelationships.

• In the next lecture/topic, we shall look closely at how this linguistic knowledge representation can be formalised into an algorithm, a computational procedure for processing this linguistic knowledge.

References• Crystal, David. 1997. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Pho

netics. Blackwell Publishers.• Lepore, Ernest and Zenon Pylyshyn (eds). 1999. What Is

Cognitive Science. Blackwell Publishers. (especially chapters 10, 11, 12, and 13).

• Stillings, Neil and others. 1995. Cognitive Science: An Introduction. MIT Press. (especially chapters 6).

• Trask, R. L. 1993. A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics. Routledge.

• Wilson, R. and Frank C. Neil (eds) 1999. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. MIT Press