Mark Rosenfelder - The Syntax Construction Kit

CONTENTS

by Mark Rosenfelder

Yonagu Chicago 2018

2018 by Mark Rosenfelder.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, except for review purposes.

Kindle edition 1.0

Contents

Introduction

The Chomsky hierarchy

Syntactic Structures

Movement

Constituents

X-bar syntax

Topics in Syntax

Relatives and other problems

Minimalism

Production

Relational grammars

Conlang syntax

A syntactic bestiary

Bibliography

Introduction

This book is about syntax, the forgotten one-fourth of your grammar.

Youre not alone. William Dwight Whitneys magisterial Sanskrit Grammar (1879) devotes 32 pages to phonology and orthography, 47 pages to sandhi, and 377 to morphology. And thats it: there is no syntax section.

Of course, syntax wasnt entirely ignored; thats why it has a nice Greek name, from , with-ordering. With the classical languages, ordering was what seemed to be left once youd mastered those hundreds of pages of morphology.

And the ordering rules seemed to be pretty simple! In Molires Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), M. Jourdain gives the sentence

Belle marquise, vos beaux yeux me font mourir damour.

Beautiful marquise, your beautiful eyes me make die of love.

and his matre de philosophie informs him that this can equally be written

Damour mourir me font, belle marquise, vos beaux yeux.

Vos beaux yeux me font, belle marquise, mourir damour.

Mourir vos beaux yeux, belle marquise, damour me font.

Me font vos beaux yeux mourir, belle marquise, damour.

M. Jourdain is perplexed: But of all those ways of saying it, which is the best?

The one you said: Belle marquise, vos beaux yeux me font mourir damour.

His client is tickled: Ive never studied, and yet I did that on the first try.

Molires satire captures the feeling that syntax was faintly irrelevant, a matter of polish. If he could read this book, Im convinced that hed see that its far more than that.

Theres a lot more we could say about M. Jourdains sentence. For now, just one thought: the matre s rearrangements are by no means lawless; he only rearranges five sub-parts of the sentence, not its ten words. Why do you think that is?

What you know and what you know

M. Jourdain can produce prose, even though he doesnt know what prose is. This is one facet of a big surprising thing that well run into over and over in this book: as an English speaker, you have a very detailed and sophisticated analysis of syntax and for the most part you cant consciously access it.

Ill talk a lot about the English verbal complex, because its a hard but not intractable puzzle. Lets take a quiz. Here are some variants of a sentence:

The fish were caught by her.

She has caught fish.

She can catch fish.

Shes catching fish.

Thats passive, perfect, modal, and progressive. You can combine them e.g. She has been catching fish. In fact, all four can occur in one sentence. In that case, without trying out alternatives in your head, what order do they appear in?

Or, when precisely do we use he and him? If youre a conlanger or you know a highly inflected language, youll quickly reply He is nominative, or He is for the subject. But what about:

Sarah wants him to move out.

Isnt him the subject of to move out? (Its not the object of want. What does Sarah want? Him? No, she wants for him to move out.)

These examples are intended to show that you dont consciously know the precise rules of syntax, but your brain does: it effortlessly creates sentences that follow those rules.

In my other books, the emphasis was on things you probably didnt know e.g. how ergativity or logographic writing works. Theres some of that here (how Malagasy relative clauses or Mandarin pivot clauses work), but a lot of syntax is getting that hidden part of the brain to cough up its secrets.

How this book fits into my uvre and yours

If you want to start creating conlangs (or learning basic linguistics), The Language Construction Kit is for you. It covers phonology (the sounds of language), both morphology and syntax, and more areas that traditional grammars skipped: semantics and pragmatics. It also introduces writing systems and historical linguistics.

Advanced Language Construction covers additional topics such as logic, pidgins, language development, logographic writing, and Sign. Then theres a leisurely look at morphosyntax , a nice word that emphasizes that a particular linguistic concept might be addressed as morphology in one language, as syntax in another.

And then The Conlangers Lexipedia tackles the lexicon, the biggest part of any language or conlang, and one aspect of language that cant be neatly separated from real-world knowledge.

Then we get to conworlding see The Planet Construction Kit . And specific areas of the world to use for inspiration or general knowledge: China Construction Kit, India Construction Kit .

Do I need to have read any of these to use this book?

No, but Im not going to spend time explaining morphemes or aspects here, much less go over basic English grammar. Reading the LCK first wont hurt, and youll get more out of this book if youve read ALC.

So Ive written a lot, and perhaps youve read a lot, about language. Ive felt for a long time that something was missing, and that something was generative grammar (GG).

Now, Ive said in other books that you can write a good grammar without generative syntax at all. And its true! You dont need to create a single syntax tree or transformation.

On the other hand, this is one of the most fun parts of linguistics. Its a relatively new part of the field, so its the part most likely to teach you things you hadnt ever thought of before. And for the same reason, its one area of language where you can quite easily find facts about language nobody has thought of before.

Plus, it gives you a toolkit that deepens your understanding of language and what you can do with your conlangs. Studying syntax is like going from making up alphabets to making up phonological systems. You can fill your syntax section with far more than sentence and noun phrase order.

If youre a certain type of person, generative grammar will also open some unexpected doors to neurolinguistics, to psychology, to computer science, to logic.

Cocktail party pitch

So, syntax is about the order of words. What else?

One answer: its about structure . Sentences are made of pieces bigger than words, and languages have a whole toolkit for acting on those pieces. Well look at what those pieces and those tools are, and how they work.

Another way to look at it: Suppose youd like to make a machine that spits out English sentences all day long. Each one should be different, and each one should be good English. How would you make that machine in the simplest way possible ?

That is, were not interested (right now) in a Manhattan-sized computer that knows everything. We also, of course, dont want a machine that cant do it one that misses some sentences, or spits out bad ones. We want the dumbest machine that works.

And one more stipulation: we dont insist that they be meaningful utterances. Were not conducting a conversation with the machine. Well be happy if it outputs John is a ten foot tall bear thats a valid sentence, we dont care if someone named John is nearby, if hes a bear or not, or if hes bigger or smaller than ten feet.