Generative grammar E-Book

El Mouatamid Ben Rochd

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

This book is a summary of major works done on generative grammar (Standard Model). It further develops a minimalist view of linguistic interface between (universal) Logical Form and (language specific) Phonetic Form as suggested in the works of famous linguists, logicians and philosophers of the present and the past, such as Noam Chomsky, Richard Kayne, Boole, Gazdar, McCarthy, Montague, Gottlob Frege and Aristotle to mention but a few.

Leseprobe

GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

Generative GrammarCopyright

EL MOUATAMID BEN ROCHD

Generative GrammarGenerative Grammar

(SYNTAX-LF-PF)

BOD

Acknowledgments

Many thanks are due to Khalid Chaouch, Reitha Ben Rochd, Peter Gilbert, Jeanette Meyer, Abderrahim Fatmi, Diana Shcherbovskaya, Hanin Alawi, Ahmed Haggach, Mohamed Touhami, Katarina Hartmann and Keiko Hattori for their help and kindness.

All shortcomings are mine.

Epigraph

“There can hardly be a more significant topic for investigation for us than the human mind.” “There are many aspects to the way the human mind works but certainly language is one very central aspect.”

(NoamChomsky)

Contents

PREFACE

1. SYNTAX

1.1. X-BAR

1.1.1. X-bar vs. PS rules

1.1.2. Souali’s X-bar treatment of Arabic

1.2. CLITICIZATION

1.2.1. The Returning Clitic in Classical Arabic

1.2.2. Kayne’s “Null Subject and Clitic Climbing

1.2.3. Ouhalla’s “Clitic Movement and the ECP

1.2.4. Two Alternatives to Cliticization

2. LOGICAL FORM

2.1. CHOMSKY VS. ARISTOTLE

2.1.1. FORMAL LOGIC

2.1.2. LOGICAL FORM (LF)

2.2. TRUTH AND CONCEPT

2.3. FORMAL SEMANTICS

2.3.1. Sommers

2.3.2. Montague

2.3.3. Robert May

3. PHONETIC FORM

3.1. GENERATIVE PHONOLOGY

3.2. MCCARTHYISM

3.3. MORPHOLOGY/SYNTAX – THE INTERFACE

GLOSSARY

REFERENCES

PREFACE

FRAMEWORK

Generative grammarians argue for a strong link between linguistics and psychology. In his bookLanguage and Mind, Chomsky puts a particular emphasis on this issue. The ultimate goal of linguistics is to shed light on the nature of the human mind. Therefore, linguistics is best seen as part of cognitive psychology (psychology of knowledge).

Knowledge of language (called competence) is a very wide and complex subject. To suggest a few solutions to it we may try and show the type of problem it poses by studying the structure of language – within the generative framework. Among the foundations of Generativism we find the philosophical and psychological traditions (in the West) which tried to fix the essence of man and the human mind essentially.

Language study was central to those philosophical and psychological questions. There are indeed good reasons to choose language investigation in any attempt to answer questions about man and the human mind. One of the major reasons behind this is the fact that language is a major biological endowment which is common to all human beings. It is human specific. Add to this that language is strongly embedded in man’s thinking and social interaction.

Descartes (d. 1650) had already noticed the productive and non-finite properties of language. The goal of modern language studies is to explain the problems of language production and language perception. Generativism concentrates on the former mainly.

APPROACH

The problem we are facing concerns the mind/brain which is a complex system of interrelated components. One of these is what is called the linguistic competence, which seems to be restricted to man. It is significantly productive. As soon as the data is presented to the child, his mind determines the particular language he has to acquire and it rapidly becomes part of his mind.

Language is part of the various systems of knowledge that the child is capable of acquiring. This particular knowledge will state that a word such as seseseku, for instance, is not Arabic (but possible is some African language). It will also determine the sense of another word as either concrete or abstract, etc.

Generative linguistics aims at describing the structure of the acquired language and its properties, and eventually answering the philosophical question: why is this possible? To face these problems, the linguist is in a position somewhat similar to that of the child. He proceeds by observations and hypotheses (successive approximations). He has to fix the internalized rules and principles such as move α (found in questions and cliticization… etc.)

(1)

a.man ?ata:

who came-he

“who came”

b.ra?ajtu-hu

saw-I-him

“I saw him”

PRINCIPLES

There are different levels of linguistic description. The computational level that determines the form and interpretation of linguistic expressions is based on a system of principles which is constant in all human languages (UG), besides a system which is language specific. UG allows categories (which are generalizations abstracted from the lexical items) such as V, N, A and P and assigns each one of them to projections (phrases) in which they play the role of head, i.e. NP, VP, AP and PP:

(2)

a.translation of the book

b.speak English

c.full of water

d.to John

Languages would then vary in what concerns their word order (Syntax). There are languages in which the head precedes the complement and others in which it is the other way round (VSO, SVO…) These parameters serve in language acquisition besides the UG parameters (X-bar, move α, etc…)

(3)

?aqdama rrabi:c

came the-srping

Spring has come

UG is also concerned with logical interpretation (LF) and pronunciation (PF). So the complete picture is the combination of three components: Syntax, Logical Form and Phonetic Form:

(4)

SYNTAX

PHONETIC FORMLOGICAL FORM

SYNTAX

X-BAR

1

X-BAR vs. PS GRAMMAR

Generative grammar aims at avoiding the circular definitions of traditional grammar.2 It also aims at achieving explanatory adequacy by assigning each word to a syntactic category.3 It specifies that, under certain conditions, certain categories can be generated in the presence of each other such as:

(1)

NP F0E0 Det + N

the pictures

The paring of open/closed classes such as Det + N attracted generativists’ attention as it seemed universally valid. Every language seems to have a large class of Ns (including those denoting concrete objects) and an associated Det which includes quantifiers (all, many, a few, no…), relatives (which…), demonstratives (this, that…):

(2)

a. all men

b. which men

c. those men

As far as the V category is concerned, it can be paired with a closed class of V modifiers such as modals (is, may, might) as well as adverbials which include: now, always, never:

(3)

a. John will soon go

b. Paul may never have come

Verbs are further subcategorized according to their valency (see Busse (1974)) such as Vo, VI, VIb, VIc, V2a, V2b, V3a exemplified in (4):

(4)

a. Vo: pleuvoir (no real subject, no object)

b. VI: persister (a subject only)

c. V3a: attributer (a subject and two complements)

…

Busse’s classification is done according to verbs’ specifiers, complements and adjuncts.

X-bar theory suggests a binary categorial squish based on the features (αN), (αV).4 (+ N) (- V) give a noun, (- N) (+ V) give a preposition. Each category consists of a head X which projects into X’ (first projection) and X” (maximal projection) following the schemata in (5):

(5)

Chomsky (1986b) suggests to extend this system to include not only lexical categories (N, V Adj, P) but non-lexical (functional) categories as well, namely S and S’. The outcome being as in (6):

(6)

From now on we will assume that C (comp) projects into C’ and C” (previously known as S’) and I (Inflection) also projects into I’ and I” (previously known as S):

(7)

Arabic, as a VSO language, poses the problem of nominal/verbal sentences. To try and solve this dichotomy, Suaieh (1981) suggests the following PS rules:

(8)

S F0E0 (V)NPNP

NP

AP

PP

Adv. P

Exemplified as follows:

(9)

a. ?akal lwaladu ttuffahata

The boy ate the apple

b. ʒaa?a lwaladu

The boy came

c. l?insaanu hajawaan

Man is an animal

d. rraʒulu fi ddaari

The man is at home

e. ∂∂ahaabu Radan

The departure is tomorrow

f. ?aqdama rrabi:c

Spring has come

Fassi – Fehri (1990) suggests different heads for the sentence:

The men came

El Seghayar (1988) suggests I as head of the sentence: