Chomsky´s conceptions

8/13/2019 Chomskys conceptions

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CHOMSKYS CONCEPTIONS

INTRODUCTION

Chomskys system of transformational grammar was developed in order to give a

mathematical precise description of some of the most striking features of language. Of

particular importance is the ability that children have to derive the structural regularities of

their native Language its grammatical rules from the utterances of their parents and

others around them, and then to make use of the same regularities in the construction of

utterances they have never heard before.

Chomsky believes that the structure of language is determined by the structure of

the human mind and that universality of certain properties characteristic of language is

evidence that at least this part of human nature is common to all members of species,

regardless of their race or class and their undoubted differences in intellect, personality and

physical attributes.

MODERN LINGUISTICS: AIMS AND ATTITUDES

Linguistics is commonly defined as the science of language. It is a scientific

description carried out systematically on the basis of objectively verifiable observations and

within the framework of some general theory appropriate to the data.The earliest Western grammarians were mainly concerned with the preservation and

interpretation of the texts of the classical Greek writers. Scholars tended to concentrate

upon the written language and to ignore the difference between speech and writing.

Although it was not entirely neglected by traditional grammarians, the spoken language

was only too often regarded as an imperfect copy of the written language. By contrast, most

linguists today take it as axiomatic, that is, speech is primary, and that the written language

is secondary and derived from it: in other words that sound is the medium in which

language is embodied and that written languages result from the transference of speech to

a secondary, visual medium. Every known language existed first as spoken language, and

thousands of languages have never, or only very recently, been committed to writing.

Furthermore, children acquire a command of the spoken language before they learn to read

and write, and they do so spontaneously, without any training; whereas reading and writing

are special skills, in which the child is normally given special instruction based upon his

prior knowledge of the corresponding spoken language.

The conditions in which the written language is used are different from the

conditions in which the spoken language is employed: since there is no direct face-to-face

confrontation of speaker and writer, information that is normally carried by the gestures and

facial expressions accompanying speech and by a complex of other features that one may

subsume under the term tone of voice must be conveyed in writing. The conventions of

punctuation and the practice of italicizing words for emphasis are incapable of representing

all the significant variations of pitch and stress that are present in spoken utterances. There

will always be some degree of independence, therefore, in the written language. In many

instances, as in the case of English, the difference between the spoken and the written


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forms of the same language has been increased by the conservatism of the orthographic

conventions, established some centuries ago and maintained to this day despite the changes

that have since taken place in the pronunciation of the language in different parts of the

world.

Traditional grammarians were concerned more or less exclusively with the standard,

literary language; and they tended to disregard, or to condemn as incorrect, more

informal or colloquial usage both in speech and writing. Also, they often failed to realize

that the standard language is, from a historical point of view, merely that regional or social

dialect which has acquired prestige and become the instrument of administration, education

and literature. Because of its more widespread use, the standard language may have a richer

vocabulary than any of the co-existent substandard dialects, but it is not intrinsically

more correct. The distinction between language and dialect is commonly drawn on

political grounds. The important point is that the regional or social dialects of a language

are no less systematic than the standard language and should not be described as imperfect

approximations of it. From a purely linguistic point of view all dialects of English are

worthy of equal consideration.

The vocabulary of a language will reflect the characteristics pursuits and interests of

the society which uses it. One of the major world languages, like English, will have a large

number of words relating to modern sciences and technology which will have no equivalent

in the language of some underdeveloped people. Conversely, there will be many words in

the language of some remote tribe in New Guinea or South America which cannot be

translated into English because there are no words which refer to objects, flora, fauna or

customs unfamiliar in Western culture. The vocabulary of one language cannot be

described as richer or poorer than the vocabulary of some other language. We cannot

therefore say that one language is more primitive or more advanced than other. All

human societies of which we have knowledge speak languages of roughly equal

complexity; and the differences of grammatical structure that are found between languages

throughout the world are such that they cannot be correlated with the cultural development

of the people speaking them and cannot be used as evidence for the construction of an

evolutionary theory of human language.

Every language so far investigated has two levels of grammatical structure. There is,

first of all, what may be called the primary or SYNTACTIC level of analysis, at which

sentences can be represented as combinations of meaningful units: we will call these

WORDS. And there is also a secondary, or PHONOLOGICAL level at whichsentences can be represented as combinations of units which are themselves without

meaning and serve for the identification of the primary units. The secondary units of

language are sounds, or PHONEMES.

Every language manifests the property of duality of structure. Grammar will consist

of three interrelated parts. The part which accounts for the regularities governing the

combination of words is SYNTAX. It is by means of syntactic rules, for example, that we

specify that he went to London, by contrast with *Went to he London, is a grammatical

sentence. That part of grammar which describes the meaning of words and sentences is


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SEMANTICS. And the part of grammar that deals with sounds and their permissible

combinations is PHONOLOGY.

The second general property of human language to be mentioned is its

CREATIVITY (or open-endedness). This means the capacity that all native speakers of a

language have to produce and understand an indefinitely large number of sentences that

they have never heard or even uttered before. The native speakers creative command of

his language is in normal circumstances unconscious and unreflecting. He is generally

unaware of applying any grammatical rules or systemic principles of formation when he

constructs either new sentences or sentences he has previously encountered. And yet the

sentences that he utters will generally be accepted by other native speakers of the language

as correct and will be understood by them. This creative command of language is unique to

human beings: it is SPECIES SPECIFIC. Systems of communication employed by other

species than man are not open-ended in the same way. Most of them are closed, in the

sense that they admit the transmission of only a finite and relatively small set of distinct

messages, the meaning of which is fixed and it is not possible for the animal to vary these

and construct new "sentences" (For example, the signaling "code" that is used by bees to

indicate the direction and distance of a source of honey).

Modern linguistics claims that the "natural" medium for the expression or language

is sound (as produced by the speech organs) and that the written languages are derived from

speech. The grammar of any language will comprise at least the following three interrelated

parts:syntax, semantics and phonology; and it should account for the ability native speakers

have to produce and understand an indefinitely large number of "new" sentences.

THE GOALS OF LINGUISTIC LANGUAGE

Chomsky would say that the grammar GENERATES all the sentences of the

language and does not distinguish between those that have been attested and those that have

not.

The distinction that Chomsky draws in "Syntactic Structurebetween the sentences

generated by the grammar (the LANGUAGUE) and a sample of the utterances produced by

native speakers (the CORPUS) has termed in his later writings, as COMPETENCE and

PERFORMANCE respectively. He stresses the fact that many of the utterances produced

by native speakers (samples of their "performance") will, for various reasons, be

ungrammatical. These reasons have to do with such linguistically irrelevant factors as

lapses of memory or attention and malfunctions of psychological mechanisms underlyingspeech. Given that this is so, it follows that the linguist cannot take the corpus of attested

utterances at its face value, as part of the language to be generated by the grammar. Ile must

idealize the "raw data" to some degree and eliminate from the corpus all the utterances

which the native speaker would recognize, by virtue of his COMPETENCE, as

ungrammatical.

A GENERATIVE grammar is one that projectsany given set of sentences upon the

larger and possibly infinite set of sentences that constitute the language being described,

and that it is this property of the grammar that reflects the creative aspect of human


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language. But the term GENERATIVE has a second and equally important sense for

Chomsky. This second sense implies that the rules of the grammar and the conditions under

which they operate must be precisely specified. Mathematical analogy: consider the

following algebraic expression or function: 2x + 3y z. Given that the variables x, y and z

can each take as their values one of the integer, the expression will generate an infinite set

of resultant values. For example, with x=3, y=2 and z=5, the result is 7; with x=1, y=3 and

z=21, the result is -10; and so on. One can say therefore that 7, -10, etc. are in the set of

values generated by the function in question. Chomskys conception of the rules of

grammar is similar. They should be specified - formalized is the technical term - as the

rules of arithmetic are. If one goes on to identify the rules of the grammar with the native

speaker's linguistic COMPETENCE, one can account for the occurrence of ungrammatical

sentences, in much the same way as one can account for differences obtained in the

evaluation of a mathematical function. We say that they are due to errors of

PERFORMANCE - errors made in the application of the rules.

According to Chomsky, the grammar of a language should generate "all and only

the sentences of the language. The generation of all and only the sentences of English or

any other language, might seem to be impossibly ambitious. It must be remembered,

however, that this represents an ideal. For Chomsky, a generative grammar is a scientific

theory. To take a simple example: there are many speakers of English who would reject the

sentence The house will have been being builtand others would accept it as quite normal.

Since the judgments of native speakers do not seem to vary systematically with the dialects

they speak, for English as a whole, the status of sentences like this is indeterminate (by

contrast with the definitely The house will have been built, The house is being built, They

will have been building the house, etc.)and the definitely unacceptable *The house can will

be built, etc.). Since one does not know in advance whether The house will have been being

built is a grammatical sentence or not, one can formulate the rules of the grammar to

include all the definitely acceptable sequences and to exclude all the definitely

unacceptable sequences and then see whether these rules exclude or include such sentences

as The house will have been being built. (Sentences of this kind are in fact generated, and

thereby defined as grammatical, by the rules given for English in Syntactic Structures).

GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

A generative grammar is a mathematically precise (formalized) set or system of

rules which, operating upon (or in association with) a vocabulary, generates the sentencesof a language and assigns to each a structural analysis.

If the grammar is to consist of a finite set of rules operating upon a finite vocabulary

and is to be capable of generating an infinite set of sentences, it follows that at least some

of the rules must be applicable more than once in the generation of the same sentence. Such

rules, and the structures they generate, are called RECURSIVE.

Sentences can be represented at two levels: at the syntactic level as sequences of

words and at the phonological level as sequences of phonemes.


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TERMINAL ELEMENTS are those which actually occur in sentences: words at the

syntactic level and phonemes at the phonological level. All other terms or symbols that are

employed in the formulation of grammatical rules may be described as AUXILIARY

ELEMENTS.

The simplest grammars discussed by Chomsky that are capable of generating an

infinite set of sentences by means of a finite number of recursive rules operating upon a

finite vocabulary are what he calls FINITE STATE GRAMMARS. These are based on the

view that sentences are generated by means of a series of choices made from left to right":

after the first or leftmost element has been selected, every subsequent choice is determined

by the immediately preceding elements. A sentence like This Man has brought some

bread might be generated as follows: The word this would be selected for the first

position from a list of all the words capable of occurring at the beginning of English

sentences. Then manwould be selected as one of the words possible after this; hasas one

of the words that can occur after thisand man; and so on. If one had selected that, instead

of this, for the first position, the subsequent choices would have been unaffected: That

man has brought some breadis an equally acceptable sentence. On the other hand, if one

had first selected those or these, one should then have to select words like men for the

second position, followed by words like havefor the third position - the possibilities for the

fourth and subsequent positions being as before. And if we had selected theinitially, one

could continue with either manand hasor menand have.

The diagram may be interpreted as follows: One can think of the grammar as a

machine, or device which moves through a finite number of internal "states" as it passes

from the INITIAL STATE ("start") to the FINAL STATE ("stop") in the generation of

sentences. When it has produced a word (from the set of words given as possible for that

"state") the grammar then "switches" to a new state as determined by the arrows. The

grammar could also be extended in an obvious way to allow for the generation of

compound sentences like That man has brought us some breadand this beautiful girl

has eaten the cheese.

This

That

The

Some

A

man

bread

book

has

broughteaten

seen

these

those

the

some

man

bread

book

have

this

that

the

some

a

men

books

men

books

These

Those

The

Some

START STOP


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Chomsky demonstrated the inadequacy of finite state grammar by pointing out that

there are certain regular processes of sentence formation in English that cannot be

accounted for at all. Chomsky's proof of the inadequacy of finite state grammar rests upon

the fact that there may be dependencies holding between non-adjacent words and that the

interdependent words may themselves be separated by a phrase or clause containing

another pair of non-adjancent interdependent words. For example, in a sentence like

Anyone who says that is lying there is a dependency between the words anyoneand is

lying. They are separated by the simple clause who says that (in which there is a

dependency between who and says). One can easily construct more complex examples: e.g.

Anyone who says that people who deny that are wrong is foolish. Here one has

dependencies between anyoneand is foolish, betweenpeopleand are wrong. The result is a

sentence with "mirror image properties" that is to say a sentence of the form a + b + c x

+ y + z; where there is a relationship of compatibility or dependency between the outermost

constituents (a and z), between the next outermost (b and y) and so on. Any language that

contains an indefinitely large number of sentences with "mirror image properties" like this

is beyond the scope of finite state grammar. The reason why Chomsky paid attention at all

to finite state grammar is that language had been considered front this point of view in

connection with the design of efficient channels of communication during the Second

World War.

PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR

Any set of sentences that can be generated by a finite state grammar can be

generated by a phrase structure grammar. But the converse does not hold: there are sets of

sentences that can be generated by a phrase structure grammar, but not a finite state

grammar. Consider the following English sentence: The man hit the hall. It is made up of

five words arranged in a particular order. We shall refer to the words out of which the

sentence is composed as its ULTIMATE CONSTITUENTS (implying that these elements

are not further analysable at the syntactic level). The order in which the ultimate

constituents occur relative to one another may be described as the LINEAR STRUCTURE

of the sentence. Linguists have generally claimed that sentences have another kind of

syntactic structure in addition to, or independent of, their linear structure. A traditionally

minded-grammarian might say, of our simple model sentence, that it has a subject and a

predicate: that the subject is a noun phrase(NP), which consists of the definite article(T)

and a noun(N); and that the predicate is a verb phrase(VP), which consists of a verb(V)with its object, which, like the subject, is a noun phrase consisting of the definite article and

a noun.

The notion of PHRASE STRUCTURE is comparable with the notion of

"bracketing" in mathematics or symbolic logic. If one has the expression of the form Xx(Y

+ Z) one knows that the operation of addition must be carried out first and the operation of

multiplication afterwards. By contrast, X .Y + Z is interpreted (by means of the general

convention that, in the absence of brackets, multiplication takes precedence over addition)

as being equivalent to (X .Y) + Z. Generally speaking, the order in which the operations


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are carried out will make a difference to the result. For instance, with X=2, Y=3 and Z=5:

X .(Y + Z) = 16 whereas (X .Y) + Z = 11. There are many sequences of words in English

and other languages that are ambiguous in much the same way that X . Y+Z would be

ambiguous if it were not for the prior adoption by mathematicians of the general convention

that multiplication takes precedence over addition. A classic example is the phrase old men

and women(and more generally A + N and N) which may be interpreted either as (old men)

and women cf. (XY) + Z - or old (men and women) - cf. X(Y + Z): Under the first

interpretation the adjective old applies only to men; under the second interpretation it

applies both to men and to women. With the phrase structure indicated, by means of

brackets as old (men and women) the string of words being discussed is semantically

equivalent to (old men) and (old women) - cf. X (Y + Z) = (XY) + (XZ). Note that two

strings of elements may have the same linear structure, but differ with respect to their

phrase structure; and that the difference in their phrase structure may be semantically

relevant.

The theoretical importance of this phenomenon referred to as structural ambiguity,

lies in the fact that the ambiguity of such strings as old men and women cannot be

accounted for by appealing to a difference in the meaning of any of the ultimate

constituents or to a difference of linear structure. . Chomsky's major contribution with

respect to this model of syntactic structure was first of all to show how it could be

formalized by means of a system of generative rules and then to demonstrate that, although

phrase structure grammar was more powerful and more satisfactory for the description of

natural languages than finite state grammar, it had certain limitations. Chomsky's

formalization of phrase structure grammar may be illustrated by means of the following

rules:

1) Sentences NP + VP2) NP T + N

3) VP Verb + NP

4) T the

5) N (man, ball, ...)

6) Verb (hit, took, ...)

Each of these rules is of the form X Y, where X is a single element and Y is a string

consisting of one or more elements. The arrow is to be interpreted as an instruction to

replace the element that occurs to its left with the string of elements that occur to its right("rewrite X as Y'). Rules 5) and 6) employ brace brackets to list a set of elements any one

of which, but only one of which, may be selected. The rules are to be applied as follows:

We start with the element Sentenceand apply rule 1): this yields the string NP + VP, We

inspect this string and see whether any of the elements occurring in it can be rewritten by

means of the rules 1) - 6). It will be seen that either 2) or 3) can be applied at this point: it

does not matter which one we select. Applying 3), we get the string NP + Verb + NP. We

can now apply 2) twice, followed by 4) and 5) twice, and 6) once (in any order except that

2) must precede 4) and 5), as 3) must precede 6) and one of the application of 2). The


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terminal string generated by the rules (assuming that man, hitand ball are selected at the

appropriate points) is the + man + hit + the + ball; and it takes nine steps to generate this

string of words. The set of nine strings, including the initial string, the terminal string and

seven intermediary strings constitutes a derivationof the sentence The manhit the ball

in terms of this particular phrase structure grammar.

But how does this system assign to sentences the appropriate phrase structure? The

answer to this question is given by a convention associated with the operation of

"rewriting". Whenever one applies a rule one puts brackets, as it were, around the string of

elements that is introduced by the rule and one labels the string within the brackets as an

instance of the element that has been rewritten by the rule. For example, the string NP + VP

derived by the rule 1) is bracketed and labelled as Sentence (NP + VP). The labelled

bracketing assigned to NP + Verb + NP is Sentence (NP + VP (Verb + NP) ); and so on. An

alternative, and equivalent, means of representing the labelled bracketing assigned to

strings of elements generated by a phrase structure grammar is a tree diagram.

Sentence

NP VP

T N Verb NP

The man hit T N

the ball

Tree diagrams are visually clearer than sequences of symbols and brackets. The

labeled bracketing associated with a terminal string generated by a phrase structure is called

phrase marker.

It will be obvious that the phrase marker given conveys directly the following

information: the string of terminal elements the + man + hit + the + ballis a Sentence

which consists of two constituents NP (the man) and VP. The NP consists of two

constituents T (the) and N (man); VP consists of two constituents Verb (hit) and NP (the

ball); and the NP that occurs to the right of Verb consists of two constituents T (the) and N

(ball). It thus represents all that was said earlier might have been considered relevant in animmediate constituent analysis of the sentence, except for the fact that the man is the

subject, hit the ball is the predicate, and the ball is the object. But these notions, and in

particular the distinction between the subject and the object, can also be defined in terms of

the associated phrase marker. The subject is that NP, which is directly dominated by

Sentenceand the object is that NP which is directly dominated by VP. What is meant by

"domination"should be clear, without formal definition, from the tree diagrams.

In his later publications, Chomsky attaches more weight to the argument that

transformational grammar reflects better the "intuitions" of the native speaker and is


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semantically more "revealing" than phrase structure grammar. One can illustrate the

deficiencies of phrase structure grammar from this point of view with reference to the

generation of corresponding active and passive sentences in English: e.g. The man hit the

balland The ball was hit by the man. It has already been seen how active sentences might

be generated in a phrase structure grammar and one could easily add further rules to the

system in order to generate passive sentences. What one cannot represent within the

framework of a phrase structure grammar, however, is the fact that pairs of sentences like

The man hit the hall and The ball was hit by the manare "felt" by native speakers to be

related, or to "belong" together in some way and have the same, or a very similar meaning.

This relationship between corresponding active and passive sentences, as well as many

other intuitive and semantic relationships, can be accounted for in transformational

grammar.

All the phrase structure rules introduced so far have been context-free: that is to

say, they have all been of the form X Y where X is a single element and Y is a string

of one or more elements, no reference being made to the context in which X is to be

rewritten as Y. Consider, by contrast, a rule of the following form: X Y/W - V (to be

read as "X is to be rewritten as Y in the context of W to the left and V to the right" - There

are various ways in which the contextual restrictions may be indicated). It is by means of a

context-sensitive rule, cast in this form, that one might wish to account for the "agreement",

or concord, that holds between the subject and the verb in English sentences (cf. The boy

runs, but The boys run) and for similar phenomena in other languages.

TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR

The first point that must be made is terminological. Whereas a phrase structure

grammar is one which consists solely of phrase structure rules, a transformational grammar

(as originally conceived by Chomsky) does not consist only of transformational rules. It

includes a set of phrase structure rules as well. The transformational rules depend upon the

previous application of the phrase structure rules and have the effect not only of converting

one string of elements into another, but, in principle, of changing the associated phrase-

marker. Furthermore, they are formally more heterogeneous and more complex than phrase

structure rules.

Phrase structure rules:

1) Sentence NP + VP2) VP Verb + NP

3) NP NPsing

NPpl

4) NPsing T + N

5) NPpl T+ N+ s

6) T the

7) N (man, ball, door, dog, book, ...)

8) Verb Aux + V


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9) V (hit, take, bite, eat, walk, open. ...)

10) Aux Tense (+ M) (+ have + en) (+ be + ing)

11) Tense Present

Past

12) M (will, can. may, shall, must)

It will be observed that this set of rules allows for a wider range of choices. Both

singular and plural noun phrases are accounted for, by rule 3); and a large number of tenses

and moods are introduced by means of the element Auxand its subsequent development.

Rule 10) implies that every string generated by it must contain the element Tenseand may

contain in addition, one or more of the other strings of elements in brackets. (Elements like

sin rule 5) and enor ing in rule 10) are morphemes rather than words. In fact, have, be, the

and all the elements listed on the right hand side of rules 7), 9) and 12) may also be

regarded as morphemes).

This system of phrase structure rules will generate a large (but finite) number of

what may be called underlying strings. It should be emphasized that an underlying string

(as indeed will be evident from the above rules) is not a sentence. One of the strings,

generated by these rules is The + man + Present + may + have + en + open + the + door

(which, given the transformational rules of Syntactic Structures, underlies both the active

sentence The man may have opened the doorand the corresponding passive The door may

have been opened by the man).

Chomsky derived passive sentences from underlying strings in Syntactic

Structures by means of an optional rule:

13) NP1 + Aux + V + NP2 NP2 + Aux + be + en + V + by + NP1

This rule differs in various respects from the phrase structure rules. Not just one

element, but a string of four elements, appears to the left of the arrow; and the operation

that is carried out by the rule is quite complex - involving the permutation of the two Nps

and the insertion of the elements be, enand byat particular points.

There is, however, an even more important difference between the phrase structure

rules1) - 12) and the transformational rule 13); and this has to do with the way in which one

interprets the symbols which occur in the rules. In a phrase structure rule a single symbol

designates one and only one element in the string to which the rule applies. But in atransformational rule a single symbol may refer to a string of more than one element,

provided that the string in question is dominated by this symbol in the associated phrase

marker.

If we look at our illustrative underlying string (the + man + Present + may +

have + en + open + the + door) and at the associated phrase marker, we shall see that the

+ manis wholly dominated byNP,Present + may + have + enbyAux, the single element

open by V and the + door by NP. This means that the transformational rule 13) is


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applicable and, if applied (for it is an optional rule), will convert the underlying string into

13a) with the appropriate derived phrase marker:

13a) the + door + Present + may + have + en + be + en + open + by + the + man

But what is the appropriate derived phrase marker? This is a difficult question.

Granted that NP2 becomes the subject of the passive sentence, that be + enbecomes part of

Aux in the same way that have + enor may is (this, as we shall see, is necessary for the

operation of subsequent rules) and that byis attached to NP1 to form a phrase, there are still

a number of points about the structure of the derived phrase marker that remains unclear.

Two possible phrase markers are given in the tree diagrams below. It will be observed that

they differ in that one takes by + NP1 to be a part of the verb phrase whereas the other

treats it as an immediate constituent of the sentence, equivalent in status, as if were, to

NP2and VP(It will also be noticed that a question mark was put where the label for the

bracketed phrase by + NP1should be).

Sentence

NP VP

T N Verb ?

the door Aux V by NP

open T N

Present may have en be en the man


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Sentence

NP VP ?

T N Verb by NP

the door Aux V T N

open the man

Present may have en be en

Two further transformational rules: the first is the obligatory "number

transformation".

14) Present s/ NPsing

O/ elsewhere

This is a context-sensitive rule, which says thatPresentis to be rewritten assif it is

immediately preceded in the underlying string by a sequence of one or more elements

dominated byNPsingin the associated phrase marker, but it is to be rewritten in all other

contexts as "zero" (i.e. as the absence of a suffix). It is this rule which accounts for the

"agreement" between subject and verb manifested in such sentences as The man goesvs.

*The man goor The man is... vs. *The man are.... If it is applied to 13a) it yields:

I4a) the + door + s + may + have + en + be + en + open + by + the + man.

It will be observed that what we might call the "abstract" verbal suffix s is here

introduced in front ofthe element to which it is subsequently attached (in the same way that

enand ingare introduced by the phrase structure rule 10) in front of the element to whichthey are later attached). We have called these "abstract" suffixes because they assume a

variety of forms, including "zeroin various contexts.

The rule by which these "abstract" suffixes are placed after the appropriate stems

(the auxiliary transformation") may be given as follows:


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15) Tense M M Tense

en + have have + en

ing be be ing

V V

This rule says that any pair of elements the first of which is Tense, enor ingand the

second of which is have, be orVare to be (obligatorily) permuted, the rest of the string to

the right remaining unchanged. If the rule is applied to 14a) it will permute s + may(i.e.

Tense + M), en + be and en + open(en + V), successively from left to right, yielding:

15a) the + door + may + s + have + be +en + open + en + by + the + man.

One more transformational rule has yet to be applied, which puts a word-boundary

symbol (we shall use a space) between every pair of elements the second of which is not

Tense, enor ingand the first of which is notM,have, be or VApplied to 15a), this yields:

16a) the door may + s have be + en open + en by the man.

And this is the form that our illustrative string would have after all the relevant

transformational rules have operated.

Finally, in a grammar of the kind outlined by Chomsky in Syntactic Structures,

there is a set of "morphemic" rules, which will convert the string of words and morphemes

into a string of phonemes. These would re-write may + sas the phonemic representation of

what is spelled may, open + enas what is spelled opened (be + sas what is spelled is, run

+ en as what is spelled run and so on). We end up therefore with the phonemic

representation of The door may have been opened by the man.

At this stage it may be helpful to introduce a diagram showing how the grammar

outlined in Syntactic Structureswas organized.

The input to the grammar is the initial element which generates a set of underlying

strings by means of the first "box" of the diagram. The second "box" comprises the

transformational rules, of which some are optional and others are obligatory. These rules

take, as their "input", single underlying strings, and by successively modifying these strings

and their associated phrase markers, generate as their "output" all and only the sentences of

the language, represented as strings of words and morphemes, and assign to each sentence

its derived constituent structure. The third "box" or rules then converts each of these

Phrase

Structure

Component

Transformational

Component

Morpho

phonemic

Component

Phonemic

Representations

of sentences

Initial

Element


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14

sentences from its syntactic representation as a string of words and morphemes to its

phonological representation as a string of phonemes. According to this model of generative

grammar, different types of simple sentences are accounted for by means of optional

transformational rules. For example, all the following sentences are related in that they

derive from the same underlying string: I) The man opened the door, II) The man did not

open the door, III) Did the man open .the door?, IV)Didn 't the man open the door?, V)

The door was opened by the man, VI) The door was not opened by the man, VII) Was the

door opened by the man?,VIII) Wasn't the door opened by the man?They differ in that: 1)

has had no optional transformation applied to the underlying string; II) has had the

Negative transformation applied, III) the Interrogative; IV) the Negative and Interrogative;

V) the Passive; VI) the Passive and Negative; VII) the Passive and Interrogative; and VIII)

the Passive, Negative and Interrogative. Of these eight sentences, the first (a simple, active,

declarative sentence) is defined by Chomsky in Syntactic Structures, as aKernel sentence.

It should be emphasized (and this is clear from our detailed consideration or the derivation

of a passive sentence above) that non-kernel sentences such as II) -VIII), are not derived

from kernel sentences, such as I), but from a common underlying string. That is to say,

there are no sentences generated without the application of at least a small number of

obligatory transformations.

Compound sentences, in which two clauses are coordinated (e.g. The man opened

the door and switched on the light) and complex sentences, in which one clause is

subordinated to another (e.g. The man who opened the door switched on the light), are

generated by means of conjoining and embedding transformations, respectively, which take

as "input" a pair of underlying strings (e.g. the + man + Past + open + the + door and the

+ man+ Past + switch + on + the + light) and combine them in various ways. Conjoining

and embedding transformations constitute the class or generalized transformations in

Syntactic Structures; and it is the repeated application of these rules which accounts for the

existence of such recursive structures as This is the... that lived in the housethat Jack built

or a big, black, three-foot long, ... , wooden box. All the generalized transformations are

of course optional.

Chomsky claimed that one of the advantages of this system, the third and the most

powerful of his "models for the description of language", was that it could account more

satisfactorily than phrase structure grammar for certain types of structural ambiguity. To

take one of Chomsky's famous examples: a sentence likeFlying planes can be dangerousis

ambiguous (cf. To fly planes can be dangerous and Planes which are flying can bedangerous); and yet, under both interpretations, the immediate constituent analysis is,

presumably, (((flying) (planes)) (((can) (be) (dangerous))). This is a different, kind of

structural ambiguity from that manifest in a phrase like old men and women discussed

previously. It would be possible to generate a sentence likeFlying planes can be dangerous

within a phrase structure grammar and to assign to it two different phrase markers -

differing with respect to the labels assigned to the node dominating flying. But this would

not be an intuitively satisfying account of the ambiguity; and it would fail to relate the

phrase flying planes, on the one hand, to planes which are flying, and, on the other, to


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15

someone flies planes. The transformational analysis accounts for the ambiguity by relating

two different underlying strings (let us sayplane + s + be + ing+ flyandsomeone + fly +

plane + s) to the same derived string.

This transformational explanation of structural ambiguity depends upon the

application of optional rules: and is in accord with the more general principle that meaning

implies choice. This principle, it should be observed, states that the possibility of selecting

one alternative rather than another is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the

expression of a difference of meaning. The most obvious application of the principle is

when one word rather than another is selected from the set of words that could occur in a

given position (cf. The man opened the windowvs. The man opened the door).

Chomsky and his collaborators came to the conclusion that the meaning of

sentences could, and should, be submitted to the same kind of precise, formal analysis as

their syntactic structure, and that semantics should be included as an integral part of the

grammatical analysis of languages. The grammar of language is now seen by Chomsky as a

system of rules relating the meaning (or meanings) of each sentence it generates to the

physical manifestation of the sentence in the medium of sound.

The base component of the grammar rather than the transformational component

accounts for the semantically relevant options. The difference between a declarative and an

interrogative sentence, or between an active and a passive sentence, is no longer described

in terms of optional transformations but in terms of a choice made in the base rules. Forexample, there might be a base rule of the following form:

2a) VP Verb + NP + (+ Agentive)

and the selection of the element Agentive would distinguish the strings underlying passive

sentences from the strings underlying the corresponding active sentences. There would then

be an obligatory transformational rule, corresponding to rule 13) above, operating if and

only if the "input" string contained the elementAgentive.

Base

Component

Transformational

Component

Semantic

Component

Meanin

Initial

Element

Phonological

Component

Sound


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16

The base rules generate an indefinitely large set of underlying phrase markers

(which represent the deep structureof all the sentences characterized by the system); and

these are converted into derived phrase markers (which represent the surface structureof

the sentences) by the transformational rules, most of which (apart from "stylistic" rules )

are now obligatory. The meaning of each sentence is derived, mainly if not wholly, from its

deep structure, by means of the rules or semantic interpretation; and the phonetic

interpretation of each sentence - its physical description as an acoustic "signal" - is derived

from its surface structure by means of the phonological rules.

Note the distinction between the "logical" (deep structure) and the "grammatical"

(surface structure) subject of a sentence. The "logical" subject is that NP which is

immediately dominated by S (= Sentence) in deep structure; the "grammatical" subject is

the leftmost NP which is immediately dominated by (the topmost) S in the surface

structure. For example, in a sentence likeJohn was persuaded by Harry to take up golf, the

grammatical subject isJohn(it is this notion of "subject" which is relevant to the statement

of the agreement holding between the subject and the verb in English; John was persuaded

vs. They were persuaded, etc.). But the deep structure of this sentence consists of one

sentence (S2) embedded within another (S1); and each sentence has its own logical subject.

This sentence can be represented in deep structure as follows:

S1

NP VP

Harry Verb

persuade

NP S2

John NP VP

John Verb NP

take up golf

It will be seen that the logical subject of S1 (the matrixsentence) isHarry, and that of S2

(the embedded sentence) it is John. Furthermore, the deep structure subject of S2 is

identical with the deep structure object of S1 (that NP which is immediately dominated by


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VP). As Chomsky points out, it is these deep structure relations that are essential for the

correct semantic interpretation of the sentence.

THE NATURE OF UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR

The goals of the theory are to describe language as a property of the human mind

and to explain its source. The central concept is Universal Grammar(UG): "the system or

principles, conditions, and rules that are elements or properties of all human languages

the essence of human language" (Chomsky, 1976)1. All human beings share part of their

knowledge or language; regardless of which language they speak, UG is their common

inheritance.

UG is a theory of knowledge, not of behaviour; its concern is with the internal

structure of the human mind. The nature of this knowledge is inseparable from the problem

of how it is acquired; a proposal for language knowledge necessitates an explanation of

how it came into being. UG theory holds that the speaker knows a set of principles that

apply to all languages, and parameters that vary within clearly defined limits from one

language to another. Acquiring language means learning how these principles apply to a

particular language and which value is appropriate for each parameter. The importance of

UG is its attempt to integrate grammar, mind, and acquisition at every moment.

STRUCTURE DEPENDENCY

The principle of structure-dependency asserts that knowledge of language relies on

the sentence rather than on the sequence of items.

e.g. Will the letter arrive tomorrow?

A common way of describing questions is to see them as inverting the subject and

auxiliary: willhas moved to the beginning of the sentence:

Questions are formed by moving the word that occurs in a particular place in the sentence,

say the third word.

1 2 3 4 5

e.g. The letter will arrive tomorrow.

But moving only the third word does not work for other questions:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

e.g. This is a dagger which I see before me.

The result would be:

e.g. *A this dagger which I see before me?

1Chomsky, N. (1976) Reflection on Language, London, Temple Smith.


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18

The crucial factor is the type of word involved: it must be an auxiliary such as will,

or can. The form of English questions does not depend on the linear order of words in the

sentence so much as on the syntactic category of the words involved. An English speaker's

knowledge of yes/no questions depends on knowing which word belongs to the syntactic

category of auxiliary.

e.g. The man who is tall is John.

A related question can be formed by moving the auxiliary to the beginning. But the

problem is which of the two auxiliaries is the one to move.

e.g. the man who is tall is John.

auxiliary auxiliary

Moving the first yields:

e.g. *Is the man who tall is John?

Moving the second gives:

e.g. Is the man who is tall John?

A hasty conclusion would be that questions involve moving the second auxiliary.

However this does not work if the relative clause comes later in the sentence.

e.g. John is the man who is John.

auxiliary1 auxiliary 2

and moving the first auxiliary, one gets the question: e.g. Is John the man who is tall?

not: e.g.*Is John is the man who tall?

English questions involve movement of the auxiliary from the main sentence rather

than from the relative clause, regardless of whether it comes first or second. It is the

position of the auxiliary within the syntactic structure of the sentence that is crucial. To

form questions it is necessary to know not only the syntactic categories of the words butalso their structural relationships within the sentence, not only which word is an auxiliary

but also whether it is in a main sentence or a subordinate clause. All sentences in English

depend upon the speaker's knowledge of structure, not just questions. The formation of

passive sentences such as:

e.g. The President was assassinated.


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has often been taken to be movement of the Presidentto the front of the sentence from a

later position; it is the complete Noun Phrase the Presidentthat is moved, not the fourth or

nth word, and only an appropriate Noun Phrase can be moved; knowledge of syntactic

category and of structural relationships is again required. Questions with question-words

such as who or what also move the question-word from an original position. To move

where to the beginning of:

e.g. Where did you go?

it is necessary to identify the question-word and to know its role in the structure of the

sentence. UG theory prefers general statements that cover many instances rather than

particular statements that cover only one. These separate pieces of information yes/no

questions, question-word questions, and passives can be summed up in a single overall

statement: English is structure-dependent. All movement in English requires knowledge of

syntactic categories and of the structure of the sentence. The same applies to the grammar

of other languages. "All known formal, operations in the grammar of English, or of any

other language, are structure-dependent" (Chomsky. 1972)2. The principle of structure-

dependency is used in all human languages.

Structure-dependency is a discovery about the nature of human language; it is a

property of human language in general, a principle of Universal Grammar. The important

aspects of language knowledge are not those that are true of one individual language but

those that are true of all languages.

THE HEAD PARAMETER

If knowledge of language consisted simply of unvarying principles, all human

languages would be identical. Head parameter specifies the order of elements in a language.

Sentences may be broken up into constituent phrases, structural grouping or words: thus the

sentence:

2Chomsky, N. (2006), Language and Mind, 3rdeditionCambridge - Cambridge University Press

STRUCTURE-DEPENDENCY

Nature: a principle common to the syntax of all languages.

Definition: operations on sentences such a movement requiring a knowledge of the

structural relationships or the words rather than their linear sequence.

Example: 1) Is the man who is tall John?

2) *Is the man who tall is John?

Gloss: question formation in English involves moving the auxiliary from the main

clause to the front; thus making 1) grammatical and 2) ungrammatical.


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e.g. The London train arrived at platform live.

contains a Verb Phrase (VP) arrived at platform five, a Prepositional Phrase (PP) at

platform five and twoNoun Phrases(NP) the London trainandplatform five. Each phrase

contains one element that is most essential, its head; all phrases are "endocentric". So the

VP arrived at platform fivehas a head Verb arrived, the NP the London trainhas a head

Noun train; thePPat platform fivehas a head Preposition at, and so on.

The Government Binding (GB) theory incorporates a particular theory of the

structure of phrases, called X-bar syntax. Its aim is to express generalizations about the

phrase structure of all human languages rather than features that are idiosyncratic to one

part of language or to a single language. An important way in which languages vary is the

order of the elements within the phrase. The head of a phrase can occur on the left of the

other elements in the phrase or on the right.

So in the NP: e.g. the man with the bow tie

the head NounMan appears on the left of with bow tie.

In the VP: e.g. liked him very much

the head Verb likedappears on the left of him very much, There are two possibilities for

phrases: head-left or head-right. Chomsky suggested a single generalization: "heads are

last in the phrase" or "heads are first in the phrase". If English has heads first in the phrase,

it is unnecessary to specify that Verbs come on the left in Verb Phrases, as in:

e.g. liked him

or Adjectives on the left in Adjectival Phrases, as in: e.g. nice to see

or Prepositions on the left in Prepositional Phrases, as in: e.g. to the bank

Japanese is a "head-last" language

e.g. Watashi wa nihonjin desu. (I Japanese am)

and that it has postpositions: Nihon ni. (Japan in)

Human beings know that phrases can be either head-first or head-last; an English

speaker has learnt that English is head-first; a speaker of Japanese that Japanese is head-last, and so on. The variation between languages can now be expressed in terms of whether

heads occur first or last in the phrase. This is head parameter. Unlike the universal

necessity for structure-dependency, the head parameter admits a limited range of

alternatives: "head-first" or "head-last". UG incorporates "parameters" variations; a

language "sets" or "fixes" the parameters according to the limited choice available. To

acquire English, children need sufficient evidence to discover that the heads of phrases

come on the left.


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21

THE PROJECTION PRINCIPLE

The theory emphasizes the lexicon; speakers know what each word in the language

means, and how it is said; they also know how it behaves syntactically. The theory

integrates the syntactic description of the sentence with the properties of lexical items via

the Projection Principlewhich requires the syntax to accommodate the characteristics of

each lexical item. It has always been recognized that there are restrictions on what words

can occur in what constructions; some Verbs are followed by Noun Phrases; e.g. Helen

likes Scotch whisky.

and some are not: e.g. Peter fainted.

The linguistic description expresses this through the "lexical entry" that each word has in

the dictionary. The lexical entry for each Verb has to show whether or not it is followed by

an NP i.e. is transitive or intransitive. The context for the Verb is given here in square

brackets, with an underlined gap for the location of the item itself as in: e.g. like [ _NP]

Each lexical item in the language has idiosyncratic properties or its own recorded in

its lexical. Such entries reflect the speaker's knowledge of the occurrence restrictions for

large numbers or words. Some sentences have a Verb Phrase consisting of a Verb and a

Noun Phrase: e.g. Jim likes strong beer.

while others have a V without an NV i.e. are intransitive: e.g. Sarah fainted.

This can be put as the syntactic rule: A Verb Phrase consists of a Verb and an optional

Noun Phrase. The rewrite rule convention expressed the same insight in a more formal

way as: VP V (NP).

means "consists of, V stands for Verb, VP for Verb Phrase and NP for Noun

Phrase; round brackets enclose elements that do not necessarily always occur. The

information need not to be stated again in the syntax. The lexical entry is said to "project"

THE HEAD PARAMETER

Nature: a principle of syntax concerning the position of heads within phrases. e.g. Nouns

in NPs, Verbs in VPs, etc.

Definition: a language has the heads on the same side in all its phrases.

Examples: English is head-first

in the bank(Preposition head to the left of NP in a Prepositional phrase)

liked the man(verb to the left of NP in a Verb phrase)

Japanese is head-last

Watashi wa nihonjin desu. (I Japanese am)

Nihon ni. (Japan in).


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onto the syntax; the lexical specifications of the word ensure that the syntax has a particular

form. This is summed up in a central principle of GB, the Projection Principle.

The properties of lexical entries project onto the syntax or the sentence.

The lexicon is not a separate issue, a list of words and meanings; it plays a dynamic and

necessary part in the syntax. The knowledge of how the Verb like behaves is inseparable

from the knowledge of syntax.

The Projection Principle is a further universal of human language; all languages

integrate their syntactic rules with their lexical entries in this fashion. Since, again, there is

no logical necessity for language to be this way and no obvious means by which a 'child

could acquire it, the Projection Principle also seems a built-in feature of the mind.

I AND E APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE

Chomsky distinguishes Externalized (E-) language from Internalized (I-)

language. E-language linguistics aims to collect samples of language and then to describe

their properties. E-language is a collection of sentences "understood independently of the

properties of the mind"; E-language research constructs a grammar to describe the

regularities found in such a sample. The linguist's task is to bring order to the set of external

facts that make up the language. The resulting grammar is described in terms of properties

of such data through "structures" or "patterns. I-language linguistics, however, is

concerned with what the speaker knows about language and where this knowledge comes

from; it treats language as an internal property of the human mind rather than something

external. The grammar consists of principles and parameters.

Chomsky claims that the recent history of linguistics shows a move from an E-

language to an I-language approach, which sees language as "a system represented in the

mind/brain of a particular" (Chomsky 1988: 36-37)3

; I-language research aims to representthis mental state, a grammar describes the speakers knowledge of the language, not the

sentences that have been produced. Chomsky's theories fall within the I-language tradition;

they aim at exploring the mind rather than the environment. The E-language approach

includes not only theories that emphasize the physical manifestations of language but also

those that treat language as a social phenomenon. The study of E-language relates a

sentence to the language that preceded it, to the situation at the moment of speaking, and to

3Chomsky, N. (1988)Language and problems of knowledge. Cambridge. MA: MIT press

THE PROJECTION PRINCIPLE

Definition: the properties of lexical entries project onto the syntax of the sentence.

"lexical structure must be represented categorically at every syntactic level".

Gloss: syntax and the lexicon are integrated by seeing the characteristics of the specification

of lexical items as projecting onto the syntax rather than having to be specified in rules.

Example: Sue likes whisky.

The properties of the lexical entry like[ _ NP] ensure that the Verb is followed by an NP in

the sentence.


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the social relationship between the speaker and the listener. It concentrates on social

behaviour between people rather than the inner psychological world. Much work within the

fields of sociolinguistics, or discourse analysis, comes within an E-language approach in

that it concerns social rather than mental phenomena.

The opposition between these two approaches in linguistics has been long: neither

side concedes the other's reality. It has also affected the other disciplines related to

linguistics. The study of language acquisition is divided between those who look interaction

and communicative function and those who look for rules and principles: language teachers

can be divided into those who advocate E-language methods that stress communication and

behaviour and I-language methods that stress language knowledge, though the former are

more in fashion at present. An E-linguist collects samples of actual speech or actual

behaviour; evidence is concrete physical manifestation. An I-linguist invents possible and

impossible sentences; evidence is whether speakers know if they are grammatical. The E-

linguist despises the I-linguist for not looking at "real" facts; the I-linguist for not looking at

trivia.

The distinction between competence and performance partly corresponds to the I-

versus E-language split. Competence is "the speaker/hearer's knowledge of his language".

performance "the actual use of language in concrete situations". By "grammatical

competence I mean the cognitive state that encompasses all those aspects of form and

meaning and their relation, including underlying structures that enter into that relation,

which are properly assigned to the specific subsystem of the human mind that relates

representations of form and meaning" (Chomsky, 1980)4. The grammar of Competence

describes I-language in the mind, distinct from the use of language which depends upon the

situation, the intentions of the participants, and other factors. Competence is independent of

situation.

Chomsky accepts that language is used purposefully: in his later writings he has

introduced the term pragmatic competence - knowledge of how language is related to the

situation in which it is used. Pragmatic competence "places language in the institutional

setting of its use, relating intentions and purposes to the linguistic means at hand"

(Chomsky, 1980)5. It may be possible to have linguistic competence without pragmatic

competence. Knowledge of language use is different from knowledge of language itself,

pragmatic competence differs from linguistic competence. The description of grammatical

competence explains how the speaker knows that:

e.g. Why are you making such a noise? is a possible sentence of English

and that: e.g. *Why you are making such a noise? is not.

It is the province of pragmatic competence to explain whether the speaker who says:

e.g. Why are you making such a noise?

4

Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and representations.Behavioral and Brain Sciences.5Ibid.


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is telling someone to stop, or is asking a genuine question, or is just muttering asotto voce

comment. The sentence has a structure and a form that is known by the native speaker,

independently of the various ways in which the sentence can be used: this is the province of

grammatical competence: Chomsky does, however, insist that the discussion of language

function cannot be limited to the sole purpose of communication.

"Language can be used to transmit information, but it also serves many other purposes: to

establish relations among people, to express or clarify thought, for play, for creative mental

activity, to gain understanding, and so on. In my opinion, there is no reason to accord

privileged status to one or the other of these modes. Forced to choose, I would say

something quite classical and rather empty: language serves essentially for the expression

of thought" (Chomsky, 1979)6

.

In all Chomskyan models a characteristic of competence is its creative aspect; the speaker's

knowledge of language must be able to cope with sentences that he has never heard or

produced before. E-language depends on history - pieces of language that happen to have

been said in the past. I-language competence must deal with the speaker's ability to utter or

comprehend sentences that have never been said before.

One sense of performance corresponds to the E-language collection of sentences;

performance means any data collected from speakers of the language - today's newspaper,

yesterdays diary, the improvisation of a rap singer, the works of William Shakespeare,

everything anybody said in England yesterday.

An I-language grammar does not rely on the regularities in a collection of data: it

reflects the knowledge in the speaker's mind rather than performance.

The term performance contrasts language knowledge with the psychological

processes through which the speaker understands or produces language. Speakers have to

use a variety of psychological and physical processes in actual speaking or understanding

that are not part of grammatical competence, even if they have some link to it; memory

capacity and lung capacity affect the length of sentence that can be uttered but are nothing

to do with the knowledge of language itself.

6Chomsky, N. (1979):Language and Responsibility. New York: Pantheon Books

E-LANGUAGE

Samples of language (performance)

describes features or the sample via"structures", etc.

Social convention

"Behaviour"

The external situation

Pragmatic or communicative

competence

I-LANGUAGE

Single invented sentence

describes aspects of the mind viaprinciples.

Mental reality

"Knowledge"

The internal representation

Grammatical competence


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TYPES OF UNIVERSALS

Can a principle that is not found in all languages still be called a universal and

related to UG? The concept of movementplays an important role. Some languages do not

appear to move elements of the syntactic structure. Questions in Bahasa Malaysia, for

example, can be formed by adding the question element kahto the word that is being asked

about:

e.g. Dia nak pergi ke Kuala Lumpurkah?

(He is going to Kuala Lumpur?) Is he going to Kuala Lumpur?

without moving it to the front.

Some languages do not then require movement. The presence or absence of

syntactic movement is a parameter of variation between languages; English requires

movement, Malay and Japanese do not. A language with movement requires a complex

theory to relate the moved and unmoved forms; it assumes an original level at which the

elements are unmoved. Provided that the universal is found in some human language, it

does not have to be present in all languages. UG does not insist all languages are the same;

the variation introduced through parameters allows universals to be absent in particular

languages. It does not, however, allow them to be broken. UG research often starts from a

property of a single language. If the principle can be ascribed to the language faculty itself

rather than to the experience of learning a particular language, it can be claimed to be

universal on evidence from one language alone. Newton's theory of gravity may have been

triggered by an apple but it did not require examination of all the other apples in the world

to prove it.

PRINCIPLES AND RULES

Knowledge of language does not consist of rules as such but of underlying

principles from which individual rules are derived. Rules are idiosyncratic phenomena that

account for specific aspects of one language. Principles account for properties of all rules

and all languages; UG is concerned with establishing a single principle that applies to all

rules in English, such as the head parameter, rather than with devising large numbers of

rules repeating the small piece of information. This is major conceptual shift of the theory:rules are to be explained as the interaction of principles and lexical properties rather than

existing in their own right. The theory insists on its scientific status as a generative theory

to be tested by concrete evidence about language. It sees the weakness of much linguistic

research as its dependence on a single source of data - observations of actual speech - when

many other sources can be found.

The linguist searches for evidence of structure-dependency and finds that questions

such as:

e.g. Is John the man who is tall? are possible and questions such as:


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26

e.g.*Is John is the man who tall? are impossible.

What matters is not whether the sentence has ever been said but whether a sentence

of that form could be said and how it would be treated if it were.The distinctive feature of Chomsky's I-language approach is that its claims are not

unverifiable assertions but are checkable statements. A principle of language is not a

proposal for a vague abstraction but a specific hypothesis about the facts of human

language, eventually coming down to precise claims about the grammaticality or

ungrammaticality of specific sentences, as with structure dependency. UG is a scientific

theory based on specific evidence about language.

CONCEPTS OF GOVERNMENT / BINDING THEORY

The concept of government/binding theory began with "the insight that language is

a relationship between sounds and meanings. Sounds are the physical forms of the speech,

meaningless in themselves.... Meanings are the abstract mental representations, independent

of the physical form" (Cook, 1988:28)7. If a person wants to describe a sentence, then the

grammar of the sentence must show how the sentence is pronounced; so it needs a way of

describing actual sounds, a phonetic representation. Besides that it also needs a way of

representing meaning, a semantic representation. A syntactic structure is needed to connect

them. This is called a syntactic level of representation. Syntactic structure is very important

to mediate between physical form and abstract meaning. This statement can be drawn as

follows.

Syntax

Government Binding forms a little bit different relationship between phonetic form (PF),

representing sounds and logical form (LF), representing syntactic meaning, mediated

through 'syntax'. The similar diagram can be shown as follows:

Syntax

7Cook, V. J. (1988) Chomskys Universal Grammar: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Inc.

Phonetic

representation

(sounds)

Semantic

representation

(meanings)

Phonetic

Form (PF)

Logical

Form (LF)


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The syntactic level in Government Binding is then elaborated through the concept of

movement, for example, the movement of the wh-word in question: The hospital is where?

In order to form the correct sentence the word `where'has to be moved to the front and the

to be 'is'before 'the hospital':Where is the hospital?.The Government Binding uses two

levels of syntactic representation (1) the d- structure (deep structure), where all the

elements in the sentence are in their original location, and (2) the s-structure (surface

structure), where some elements have been moved. The movement of some words from the

original places to the ordinary places leave traces, symbolized as t.

For example:

You are seeing what at the cinema? (d-structure)

What are you seeing at the cinema? (s-structure)

What: you, seeing at the cinema? (movement `what' and 'are') What are you tseeing tat the

cinema? (traces).

D-structure is related to s-structure by movement and then the s-structure is interpreted by

both PF and LF components.

The term `government' refers to "a particular syntactic relationship of high

abstraction between `governor' and an element that it governs" (Cook, 1988:35)8. The

examples given show the relationship between one element and the other.

A verbgoverns its objectNPas in:

Kate likes me

Verb NP

Where the verblikes governs theNPme.

Aprepositionalso governs itsNP

The traffic warden spoke to her

P NP

The preposition togoverns the NP her. So the fact that the preposition togoverns the

NP means that the pronoun has the form herrather than she.

To her not To she

In more technical terms, the object of the preposition appears in the accusative case (her)

rather than in the nominative case (she).



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Similarly the objects of verbs also appear in the accusative rather than nominative case.

Kate likes me

versus

Kate likes I

The verb likesgoverns the NP object and thus determines that it appears as the accusative

form merather than the nominative for I.

Inflection (INFL)

Tense(associated with time reference such as past and present and mostly concerns the

verb) and number / Agreement(whether the subject is singular or plural) are properties of

the sentence that are not allocated to a single word but are spread across different locations.

Inflection (INFL) represents these properties as a single abstract constituent that does not

itself usually occur in the surface sentence or in the lexicon.

1. You play the piano very well.2. You played the piano very well.

The (1) sentence is present and has no inflection.

The (2) sentence is past and requires an inflection (ed).

3. He plays the piano.4. They play the piano.

In the (3) example, the subject is singular the verb has the inflection. In the (4) example the

subject is plural there is no inflection.

Sentences with tense andAGRare called finite clauses.For example:

Azhar plays the piano very well. It is a finite clause because it contains the ending s to

show both present tense and singular AGR.

Sentences which do not have tense and agreement are called non-finite clauses.For example:

(He considers) Azhar to play the piano very well.

Non finite clauses such as Azhar to play to piano very well appears only inside other

clauses such as he considers.

To sum up, INFL is a separate and independent element in the sentence which comes

between the subjects on NP. It can be either finite or nonfinite.


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The following examples are about the singular and plural sentences.

(1) The student goes to school. // The student INFL (singular present AGR) go to school.

(2) The students go to school. // The students INFL (plural present AGR) go to school

(3) The student went to school. // The student INFL (singular past) go to school.

(4) The students went to school. // The students INFL (plural past) go to school.

In those four sentences the INFL whether singular or plural present AGR, or singular or

plural past governs the verb go.

THE PRO-DROP PARAMETER

The pro-drop parameter which is sometimes called 'the null subject parameter'

determines whether the subject of a clause can be suppressed (Chomsky, 1988:64 in

Cook, 1988)9. This pro-drop parameter deals with a language which has declarative

sentences without apparent subjects, which is known as null subject or subjectless

sentences. English language is categorized as non-pro drop language because this language

does not have null-subject declarative sentences. In English we can say 'He speaks fluently'

but we cannot say just *Speaks. Some languages like Italian, Arabic, and Chinese are pro-

drop languages. They have null-subjects for the declarative sentences.

Government Binding treats languages which are categorized as pro-drop languages

as having an empty subject position. Actually the basic assumption is that all sentences

have subjects but for pro-drop languages the subjects in the declarative sentences are or

may not be 'visible'. Again in the Government Binding it is the INFL which is a proper

governor. So for the Italian pro-drop sentence parla which means 'speak' can be analyzed

'pro INFL parla'.

BINDING THEORY

The binding theory deals with whether the expression in the sentence may refer to

the same entities as other expressions. One of the topics in traditional grammar was how

pronouns related to their antecedents. Binding theory is basically concerned with the same

issue of how pronouns and other types of nouns relate to each other but it extends the

antecedent / pronoun relationship to other categories. Binding theory is concerned with

connections among noun phrases that have to do with such semantic properties as

dependence of reference including the connection between a pronoun and its antecedent.

For example: Peter killed him

This implies that there is some entity to which Peter may be used to refer; the noun Peter

relates a piece of language to a postulated piece of the world, hence it may be called a

referring expression. To know who is being talked about means knowing which person

called Peter is referred to from other information than that contained in the sentence. The

same applies to him known as a pronominal; another person is being talked about who is



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not mentioned; we have to deduce for ourselves who was shot. But one thing is clear that

Peter and him do no refer to the same person. Some structured relationship between Peter

and him prevents them from referring to the same entity.

In the sentence:Peter shot himself

himself refers to the same person as Peter. This information doesnt depend on knowing

who Peter is but on knowing the syntactic relationship between Peter and himself, that is,

on the internal structure of the sentence.

Binding theory accounts for the differences in the interpretations of Peterhim and himself

how the speaker knows when two such expressions may refer to the same person and

when they may not. Binding theory describes when different expressions may be co-

indexed when him or himself may refer to the same person as Peter.

One possibility of explaining Binding is to consider the class of word involved:

Three word-classes are relevant: 1) Referring expressions, 2) Anaphors, 3) Pronominals

Nouns such as Peter are classed as referring expressions in that their reference is

necessarily to something in the discourse outside the sentence rather than to some other

element in the sentence. The word himself refers to the class of anaphors. The word him

belongs to the class of pronominals. Pronominals do not have antecedent that are nouns

within the same clause. The crucial difference between anaphors, pronominals and referring

expressions is the area of the sentence within which they can be bound:

Anaphors are bound within the clause Pronominals may be bound by NPS in other clauses or be free to take their

reference outside the sentence.

Referring expressions are always free.

Binding theory is chiefly concerned with giving more precisions to the area within which

binding may or may not take place. Binding theory in fact uses a slightly different concept

the local domain, of which the clause is one example. "The theory of Binding is concerned

with the relations, if any, of anaphors and pronominals to their antecedents" (Cook,

1988:49)10

. We can now sum up in terms of the actual binding principles:

A: An anaphor is bound in a local domain.

B: A pronominal is free in a local domain.

C: A referring expression is free.

In order to discuss these principles, let us start with the terms anaphor and pronominal. An

anaphor is "a type of Noun Phrase which has no independent reference, but refers to some

other sentence constituent (its antecedent). It includes reflexive pronouns like myself,



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reciprocal pronouns like each other (Crystal, 1991:18-19)11

. In relation to Binding Theory

an anaphor must be bound in its governing category. To check whether principle A applies,

let us take the following examples:

(1) John bought his lunch himself.

(2) His father told John to have lunch himself.

In these two examples the anaphor himself refers to John because John and himself are both

in the same domain (in the same clause).

To check Principle B, lets consider the term pronominal (which) is used for a type

of noun phrase (along with anaphors and r-expression) of particular importance as part of a

theory of binding. Pronominals include the class of personal pronouns. A pronominal NP

must be free in its governing category" (Crystal, 1991:281)12

.

Let us see the following examples:

(1) Her mother told Mary to pick her up.

(2) Mary spoke with her.

The pronominal her in both sentences refers to the antecedent belonging to the NP outside

the local domain. In sentence (1) the pronominal her refers to `her mother' not to `Mary'

because `Mary' is in the same local domain with the pronominal `her'. Likewise, the

pronominal her in sentence (2) refers to someone else outside that sentence, not to `Mary'.

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Chomsky´s conceptions