style="font-size:15px;"> 3 I’m lecturing to my introductory syntax class about phrase structure and distracted by cat sitting on the windowsill of the classroom. So, I stop mid-sentence and I go off on a tangent about my cats and how they’re fantastic. I never really come back to what I was saying before and my students are confused and uncertain about the topic I was lecturing about.4 It’s been a terrible flu season, and Raini has lost her voice to laryngitis. Mike is over bringing her some soup. Raini is trying to tell him that she wants him to go to the pharmacy to get some medicine. But he can’t really hear her, and all he hears is “Go”. He’s terribly insulted because he was just trying to help, so he leaves and refuses to talk to her for a month.
5 Anita is doing field work on Basque word order. She’s collected a bunch of stories and recorded some Basque language TV, but now she’s working with a local native speaker. She’s written down a bunch of sentences that she thinks might be okay and asks the speaker “Do these sentences sound ok to you?”
GPS6. LEARNING VS. ACQUISITION
[Creative and Critical Thinking; Basic]
We have distinguished between learning and acquiring knowledge. Learning is conscious; acquisition is automatic and subconscious. (Note that acquired things are notnecessarily innate. They are just subconsciously obtained.) Other than language, are there other things we acquire? What other things do we learn? What about walking? Or reading? Or sexual identity? An important point in answering this question is to talk about what kind of evidence is necessary to distinguish between learning and acquisition.
GPS7. UNIVERSALS
[Creative and Critical Thinking; Intermediate]
Pretend for a moment that you don’t believe Chomsky and that you don’t believe in the innateness of syntax (but only pretend!). How might you account for the existence of universals (see definition above) across languages?
GPS8. INNATENESS
[Creative and Critical Thinking; Intermediate]
We argued that some amount of syntax is innate (inborn). Can you think of an argument that might be raised against innateness? (It doesn’t have to be an argument that works, just a plausible one.) Alternately, could you come up with a hypothetical experiment that could disprove innateness? What would such an experiment have to show? Remember that cross-linguistic variation (differences between languages) is not an argument against innateness or UG, because UG contains parameters that allow variation within the set of possibilities allowed for in UG.
GPS9. LEVELS OF ADEQUACY
[Application of Skills; Basic]
Below, you’ll find the description of several different linguists’ work. Attribute a level of adequacy to them (state whether the grammars they developed are observationally adequate, descriptively adequate, or explanatorily adequate). Explain why you assigned the level of adequacy that you did.
1 Juan Martínez has been working with speakers of Chicano English in Los Angeles. He has been looking both at corpora (rap music, recorded snatches of speech) and working with adult native speakers.
2 Fredrike Schwarz has been looking at the structure of sentences in eleventh- century Welsh poems. She has been working at the national archives of Wales in Cardiff.
3 Boris Dimitrov has been working with adults and corpora on the formation of questions in Rhodopian Bulgarian. He is also conducting a longitudinal study of some two-year-old children learning the language to test his hypotheses.
CHALLENGE PROBLEM SETS
Challenge Problem Sets are special exercises that either challenge the presentation of the main text or offer significant enrichment. Students are encouraged to complete the other problem sets before trying the Challenge Sets. Challenge Sets can vary in level from interesting puzzles to downright impossible conundrums. Try your best!
CPS1. PRESCRIPTIVISM
[Creative and Critical Thinking; Challenge]
The linguist Geoff Pullum reports21 that he heard Alex Chadwick say the sentence below on the National Public Radio Show “Day to Day”. This sentence has an interesting example of a split infinitive in it:
But still, the policy of the Army at that time was not to send – was specifically to not send – women into combat roles.
Here, Mr. Chadwick corrects himself from not splitting an infinitive (was not to send) to a form where the word not appears between to and send, thus creating a classic violation of this prescriptive rule. One might wonder why he would correct the sentence in the wrong direction. Pullum observes that the two versions mean quite different things. The policy was not to send women into combat means that it was not the policy to send women into combat (i.e. negating the existence of such a policy). The sentence with the split infinitive by contrast, means that there was a policy and it was that they didn’t send women into combat. It’s a subtle but important distinction in the discussion. Note that putting the not after send would have rendered the sentence utterly unintelligible. With this background in mind, provide an argument that linguists should probably ignore prescriptive rules if they’re trying to model real human language.
CPS2. ANAPHORA
[Creative and Critical Thinking, Data Analysis; Challenge]
In this chapter, as an example of the scientific method, we looked at the distribution of anaphora (nouns like himself, herself, etc.). We came to the following conclusion about their distribution:
An anaphor must agree in person, gender, and number with its antecedent.
However, there is much more to say about the distribution of these nouns (in fact, chapter 5 of this book is entirely devoted to the question).
Part 1: Consider the data below. Can you make an addition to the above statement that explains the distribution of anaphors and antecedents in the very limited data below?
1 Geordi sang to himself.
2 *Himself sang to Geordi.
3 Betsy loves herself in blue leather.
4 *Blue leather shows herself that Betsy is pretty.
Part 2: Now consider the following sentences:22
e) Everyone should be able to defend himself/herself/themselves.
f) I hope nobody will hurt themselves/himself/herself.
Do these sentences obey your revised generalization? Why or why not? Is there something special about the antecedents that forces an exception here, or can you modify your generalization to fit these cases?
CPS3. YOURSELF
