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CAS LX 522
Syntax I
Week 3a. Categories, features,
natural classes, and morphology.
Previously, in LX522…
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So, here’s where we were.
We’re trying to characterize our knowledge of
syntax, using English speaker’s knowledge of
English as a window to the kinds of things we
need to describe language.
Words seem to come in categories (N, V, A, P,
C, I, PRN, D, …). English treats these differently,
so to describe English, our theory needs to treat
them differently.
Previously, in LX522…
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We’ve collected a number of features that
seem to make a difference in various
ways.
We have the category, e.g., [+N], [+V].
But we seem to have subcategories too,
e.g., [+Pl], [+Common], [+Count].
These features matter to how we can
combine words. Language cares, and so,
therefore, do we.
The surface
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Before going on, let’s take a detour,
because if we don’t, things are just going
to get confusing.
So far, we have looked at a word, and tried
to determine what its relevant features are.
Books [+N, +Count, +Common +Pl].
Written [+V, +Participle, +Perfect]
Where’s the feature?
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This is useful in that we get a hint as to what
features are required. But consider:
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Bill ate lunch.
Bill will eat lunch.
Bill did not eat lunch.
Bill does not eat lunch.
You do not eat lunch.
We do not eat lunch.
What are the features of ate? eat? did? does?
do?
Why is this so confusing?
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So, do seems to be:
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[+Pres], and
not [+3, +Sg], and
only shows up in the negative.
Ouch.
That’s rather inelegant.
Here’s the problem: I sat on the bank. I saw the
candidate with the binoculars. Visiting relatives
can be tedious.
See?
We’re going the wrong way
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There are two different intents underlying
Visiting relatives can be tedious (so I do it
as little as possible), and Visiting relatives
can be tedious (so I avoid them as often
as possible).
They happen to sound the same, but they
have a different underlying structure.
In general, what’s unique is the underlying
intent/structure, not the pronounced form.
Generative grammar
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The syntactic system we are going to build is a
generative grammar.
It builds up an underlying structure, which is then
pronounced.
The two versions of Visiting relatives can be
tedious are different sentences.
…But wasn’t our goal to explain how people
could tell if sentences they hear are part of their
language or not?
Judging sentences
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The view of sentence judgment we’ll adopt
here is basically one of asking oneself:
Could I say that sentence?
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When listening to somebody, you of
course need to decode what that person
meant, but it is a process of recovering the
underlying form of their utterance.
A very, very little bit of French
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If you’ve tried to learn any French at all, you’ve
come across this phenomenon:
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de ‘of’
le ‘the (masculine)’
à ‘at’
la ‘the (feminine)’
à la biblioteque
‘to the library (fem)’
*à le cinéma
‘to the movies (masc)’
au cinema
‘to the movies (masc)’
de la mayonnaise
‘of mayonnaise (fem)’
de le lait
of milk (masc)
du lait
‘of milk’ (masc)
A very, very little bit of French
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This is usually taught as:
au = à + le
 du = de + le
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If your underlying intent is à ‘at’ + le ‘the’,
you pronounce it like au.
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So is au a preposition or an article?
What does this have to do
with eating lunch?
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And now we can return to the point:
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Bill ate lunch.
Bill eats lunch.
Bill does not eat lunch.
Bill will (not) eat lunch.
What generalizations can we come up with
here? How are the features organized in these
simple sentences?
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Why did I juxtapose à+le=au from French with Bill ate
lunch? Where is tense? Where is the verb? What is
ate? What does do mean?
Falling into place
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If we suppose that these sentences all have the
same form…
Subject Tense/Agreement (Not) Verb Object
…things start to look a lot more regular,
describable. This is the structure of a sentence.
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That Tense+Verb comes out as “Tensed Verb” is a
matter of pronunciation. If you separate Tense from
the Verb with not, they no longer can combine. In
order to pronounce Tense, you insert do.
Falling into place
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Moving one step closer to syntactic
structure:
[NP Subject] I (not) V [NP Object]
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So [±Past, ±1, ±2, ±Pl] are features of I.
[±1, ±2, ±Pl, ±Common, ±Count, …] are
features of N.
[+V] is a feature of V.
Those pesky participles
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Bill will have been eating lunch
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[NP Bill] [I will] [V have] [V been] [V eating] [NP
lunch]
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will [+Fut]
have [+Vaux]
been [+Vaux, +Participle +Perf]
eating [+V, +Participle, -Perf]
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Crosscategorial features
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Consider what un can attach to.
untie, unfold, unwrap, unpack
 unhappy, unfriendly, undead
 *uncity, *uncola, *unconvention
 *unupon, *unalongside, *unat
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Basically, it applies to reversible verbs and
adjectives, but not to nouns or
prepositions. How can we state that?
Crosscategorial features
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Suppose that nouns and verbs are the most
basic categories. A noun is a noun and not a
verb, and verb is a verb and not a noun.
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Noun: [+N, -V].
Verb: [-N, +V].
A possible conceptual reason to separate nouns
and verbs is that verbs are basically
predicates— they attribute some property to the
noun. Nouns are basically arguments, to be
assigned properties by verbs.
Crosscategorial features
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Looked at this way, adjectives are kind of
“verby” in that they are also attributing
properties.
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It’s hard to make that really precise, but we
have a more concrete syntactic similarity
between verbs and adjectives too: both can
take un-, while nouns and prepositions
cannot.
Supercategories
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Chomsky (1970) proposed that we explain
this by supposing that [±N] and [±V] are
the two basic features that determine the
four lexical categories (N, V, A, P).
N: [+N, -V]
 P: [-N, -V]
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V: [-N, +V]
A: [+N, +V]
Given that, what does un attach to?
Supercategories
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So, un attaches to a [+V] category. It
doesn’t care about [±N]. [+V] defines a
natural class that language refers to.
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Why is A [+V, +N] and P [-V, -N]?
Suppose we had a morpheme that attaches
just to V and P, how could we state that?
 Do V and P form a natural class too?
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Russian Case
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Other languages can give us evidence of natural
classes as well. E.g., Russian nouns (all nouns)
are marked for Case (like English pronouns are:
me vs. I), but when they are modified by an
adjective, the adjective is also marked for case.
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What gets marked for Case in Russian?
Krasivaya dyevushka vsunula
chornuyu
koshku v
pustuyu korobku
beautiful
black
cat
empty
girl
put
‘The beautiful girl put the black cat in the empty box’
in
box
Functional and lexical
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That takes care of N, V, A, P, but what about our
functional categories?
In fact, the functional categories (C, I, D, PRN)
each seem a little like a lexical category.
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Auxiliaries seem a lot like verbs (have, be, do), and
inflect like verbs do. Could and can, Would and will
might be supposed to differ in tense.
Complementizers and infinitival to seem a bit like
prepositions (e.g., for, to).
Pronouns are kind of nouny.
Determiners are a bit adjectivey.
Auxiliary verbs and verbs
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Verbs and auxiliary verbs are subject to some of
the same processes.
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They inflect for tense, they inflect for subject
agreement.
Suggests: They form a natural class.
Suppose there’s a feature (say [+F] for
“functional”) that differentiates them.
Both are [+V, -N], but be is [+F], and eat is [-F].
Thus: [+V, -N] inflects for tense and subject
agreement.
Auxiliary verbs and I
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On the other hand, auxiliary verbs act like
elements of category I, appearing in that spot
between the Subject and (Not) V.
Auxiliary verbs are [+V, -N, +F].
Other elements of category I might be like
prepositions, e.g., to. If these are “functional
prepositions”, then they are [-V, -N, +F].
Do Auxiliary verbs and to form a natural class?
“Grammatical category”
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So what, then is a grammatical category?
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A grammatical category is a set of elements
which have the same value(s) for a given set of
grammatical features. It’s really a natural class.
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Category labels like “N”, or “Aux” are really just
shorthand for feature matrices like [+N, -V, -F],
or [-N, +V, +F]. Notationally convenient, but only
respected as such by some parts of the
grammar.
Sentences are made of
words?
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Bill kicked the pail.
Bill mailed the letter.
Bill did not kick the pail.
Bill did not mail the letter.
Remembering that à+le=au in French, we said
that underlyingly, these are:
Bill Tense (Not) Verb Object
Is Tense a word?
Tense is not a word
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In English, past tense is not really a word.
It’s a morpheme. It’s a suffix. Regularly, -ed.
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Of course there are lots of special cases (wrote, fed,
drew), but these at least all seem to be modifications
of the end of the word.
Suppose then, that we have:
Bill -ed (not) kick the pail.
Of course, you can’t pronounce an affix. An
definitional property of an affix is that it attaches
to a word (of a particular category: past tense ed is a verbal affix). If forced to pronounce -ed,
you insert a meaningless verb to attach it to (do).
Bill will kick the pail
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Actually, tense can be a word, if it’s the future
tense will.
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Note: If would is the past tense of will, then it is
probably not correct to think of will as being
simply a future marker. Rather, it’s one of the
modals, an “unrealized” marker, which makes
sense as long as time goes invariably forward,
as it seems to. Many people nevertheless
consider will to be the same category of thing as
-ed, so we will for now ignore this complication,
since it matters little to what we’re going to do.
Sentences are made of
morphemes
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We will have more success if we assume
that sentences are made of things that can
be smaller than words.
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Here’s another example: Bill’s pail.
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What is that ‘s there? What does it mean?
Possessive ’s
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Is ’s a suffix?
The man from Australia’s hat.
 The man who left’s hat.
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What does ’s attach to?
The possessive ’s is not really an affix, but
it’s not really a word either.
These things usually go by the name
clitic. They’re like a little word that leans
on a nearby word.
Clitics
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Plenty of languages have clitics. English
has a few.
Isn’t that Bill’s hat?
 Yes, that’s Bill’s hat.
 Wouldn’t you like a hat like Bill’s?
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French (again) has them: je pars, *je, moi.
Essentially, we want to treat clitics, affixes,
and words on a par in the underlying
structure— they differ in pronunciation.
Moral: Underlying ≠ Surface
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The larger point here is that sentences have two
forms: the underlying form (which is our primary
concern) and the surface form (which is really
where our data comes from).
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We can deduce things about the structure of the
underlying form from the surface form, and by
positing abstract elements like affixes, clitics,
features, we can describe in a concise (and
predictive) manner what things Language allows.
The morphology of be
I was sleepy.
 You are sleepy.
 We are sleepy.
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What features does the auxiliary be have
(among [±1, ±2, ±Pl, ±Past])?
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If be has [-1, -2, -Pl, -Past], how is it
pronounced? And [-1, -2, +Pl, +Past]?
The morphology of be
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Consider the whole set. There are only five
different pronunciations: am, are, is, was, were.
How can we write a set of feature-based
pronunciation rules to describe this?
[-Past]
[+Past]
[-Pl]
[+Pl]
[-Pl]
[+Pl]
[+1]
1
am
are
was
were
[-1, +2]
2
are
are
were
were
[-1, -2]
3
is
are
was
were
The morphology of be
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Try it in words first. When is the [-Past]
pronounced Is? Am? Are?
[-Past]
[+Past]
[-Pl]
[+Pl]
[-Pl]
[+Pl]
[+1]
1
am
are
was
were
[-1, +2]
2
are
are
were
were
[-1, -2]
3
is
are
was
were
The morphology of be
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[-Past, -1, -2, -Pl] = is.
[-Past, +1, -Pl] = am.
[-Past] = are.
[-Past]
[+Past]
[-Pl]
[+Pl]
[-Pl]
[+Pl]
[+1]
1
am
are
was
were
[-1, +2]
2
are
are
were
were
[-1, -2]
3
is
are
was
were
The morphology of be
Morphology often has this
 [-Past, -1, -2, -Pl] = is. character, where the pronunciation
 [-Past, +1, -Pl] = am. rules have a “specific case” and a
“general case” if the specific case
 [-Past] = are.
does not apply.
[-Past]
[+Past]
[-Pl]
[+Pl]
[-Pl]
[+Pl]
[+1]
1
am
are
was
were
[-1, +2]
2
are
are
were
were
[-1, -2]
3
is
are
was
were
The morphology of be
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[-Past, -1, -2, -Pl] = is.
[-Past, +1, -Pl] = am.
[-Past] = are.
Ok, your turn.
What’s the rest?
[-Past]
[+Past]
[-Pl]
[+Pl]
[-Pl]
[+Pl]
[+1]
1
am
are
was
were
[-1, +2]
2
are
are
were
were
[-1, -2]
3
is
are
was
were
The morphology of be
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[-Past, -1, -2, -Pl] = is.
[-Past, +1, -Pl] = am.
[+Past, -2, -Pl] = was.
[+Past] = were
[ ] = are
[-Past]
[+Past]
[-Pl]
[+Pl]
[-Pl]
[+Pl]
[+1]
1
am
are
was
were
[-1, +2]
2
are
are
were
were
[-1, -2]
3
is
are
was
were
The morphology of be
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Ok, let’s test it out.
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[-Past, -1, -2, -Pl] = is.
[-Past, +1, -Pl] = am.
[+Past, -2, -Pl] = was.
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[+Past] = were
[ ] = are
I [+1, -2, -Pl, -Past, -N, +V, +F] ecstatic.
They [-1, -2, +Pl, +Past, -N, +V, +F] leaving.
Y’all [-1, +2, +Pl, -Past, -N, +V, +F] late.
Separating the underlying
from the pronounced
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This is a worthwhile point to remember. There is
an underlying feature bundle, the auxiliary is an
auxiliary be, with a tense, and some agreement
features. We know the rules about pronouncing
those features. Sometimes two feature bundles
end up being pronounced in the same way.
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In a real sense, the are in You are happy and
the are in We are happy are different words, that
just happen to be pronounced the same way.
But they could have been pronounced distinctly.
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