Context-free grammar

The formalism of context-free grammars was developed in the mid-1950s by Noam Chomsky, and also their classification as a special type of formal grammar (which he called phrase-structure grammars).

A context-free grammar provides a simple and mathematically precise mechanism for describing the methods by which phrases in some natural language are built from smaller blocks, capturing the "block structure" of sentences in a natural way. Its simplicity makes the formalism amenable to rigorous mathematical study. Important features of natural language syntax such as agreement and reference are not part of the context-free grammar, but the basic recursive structure of sentences, the way in which clauses nest inside other clauses, and the way in which lists of adjectives and adverbs are swallowed by nouns and verbs, is described exactly.

In Chomsky's generative grammar framework, the syntax of natural language was described by a context-free rules combined with transformation rules. In later work (e.g. Chomsky 1981), the idea of formulating a grammar consisting of explicit rewrite rules was abandoned. In other generative frameworks, e.g. Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (Gazdar et al. 1985), context-free grammars were taken to be the mechanism for the entire syntax, eliminating transformations.

ACTIVITY:

Where is Chomsky?

Generative Linguistics

Generative linguistics includes a set of explanatory theories developed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s. It opposes the behaviourist theory and structuralism. It is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar.

Generative theory is distinguished from other traditions by distinguishing competence and performance, which distinguishes in the act of speech its linguistic capacity. Thus, under this approach, each speaker has a linguistic organ specialized in the analysis and production of complex structures forming the speech.

In other words, every language form an observable structure, result of an innate system (read "genetic"), and universally shared. It is therefore necessary, according to this school of thought, to understand the structure of this system and its behavior

The term "generative grammar" is used in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics" therefore has a range of different, though overlapping, and meanings.

Formally, a generative grammar is defined as one that is fully explicit. It is a finite set of rules that can be applied to generate all those and only those sentences that are grammatical in a given language.

Generative Grammar

The term generative grammar is also used to label the approach to linguistics taken by Chomsky and his followers.

Chomsky's approach is characterised by the use of transformational grammar – a theory that has changed greatly since it was first promulgated by Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures – and by the assertion of a strong linguistic nativism (and therefore an assertion that some set of fundamental characteristics of all human languages must be the same).

Generative Semantics

Is a description of a language emphasizing a semantic deep structure that is logical in form, that provides syntactic structure, and that is related to surface structure by transformations.

Generative semantics is the name of a research program within linguistics, initiated by the work of various early students of Noam Chomsky:

John R. Ross

Paul Postal

and later James McCawley.

George Lakoff was also instrumental in developing and advocating the theory

The approach developed out of transformational generative grammar in the mid 1960s, but stood largely in opposition to work by Noam Chomsky and his later students.

Generative semanticists took Chomsky's concept of Deep Structure and ran with it, assuming that deep structures were the sole input to semantic interpretation. This assumption, combined with a tendency to consider a wider range of empirical evidence than Chomskian linguists, led generative semanticists to develop considerably more abstract and complex theories of deep structure than those advocated by Chomsky and his students — and indeed to abandon altogether the notion of “deep structure” as a locus of lexical insertion.

Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, there were heated debates between generative semanticists and more orthodox Chomskians. The generative semanticists lost the debate, insofar as their research program ground to a halt by the 1980s. However, this was in part because the interests of key generative semanticists such as George Lakoff had gradually shifted away from the narrow study of syntax and semantics.

A number of ideas from later work in generative semantics have been incorporated into:

Transformational grammar

Or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition. Additionally, transformational grammar is the Chomskyan tradition that gives rise to specific transformational grammars.

In the 1960s, Chomsky introduced two central ideas relevant to the construction and evaluation of grammatical theories.

The first was the distinction between competence and performance. Chomsky noted the obvious fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic errors. He argued that these errors in linguistic performance were irrelevant to the study of linguistic competence (the knowledge that allows people to construct and understand grammatical sentences).

The second idea related directly to the evaluation of theories of grammar. Chomsky distinguished between grammars that achieve descriptive adequacy and those that go further and achieved explanatory adequacy. A descriptively adequate grammar for a particular language defines the (infinite) set of grammatical sentences in that language; that is, it describes the language in its entirety. A grammar that achieves explanatory adequacy has the additional property that it gives an insight into the underlying linguistic structures in the human mind; that is; it does not merely describe the grammar of a language, but makes predictions about how linguistic knowledge is mentally represented.

A transformational grammar has 3 major kinds of rules:

Syntactic rules: which specify the deep structure into a surface structure of the sentence and then transform that deep structure into a surface structure.

Semantic rules: which provide an interpretation for the sentence.

Phonological rules: which specify information necessary in pronouncing the sentence.

.

Phrase structure rules and lexicon

If we wanted to divide the sentence the sentence the astronaut can walk into its constituent parts, it would be:

Transformations and the structure of the auxiliary

The structure of the auxiliary: (someone has eaten the garlic toast) the auxiliary word is a form of the verb to have.

Universal grammar

Universal grammar is a theory in linguistics that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have. The theory suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest themselves without being taught. There is still much argument whether there is such a thing and what it would be.

The argument: The human brain contains a limited set of rules for organizing language. In turn, there is an assumption that all languages have a common structural basis. This set of rules is known as universal grammar.

Speakers proficient in a language know what expressions are acceptable in their language and what expressions are unacceptable. The key puzzle is how speakers should come to know the restrictions of their language, since expressions which violate those restrictions are not present in the input, indicated as such.

ACTIVITY

Generative Linguistics

Grammatical Case

Charles J. Fillmore

He was a proponent of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar during its earliest transformational grammar phase. He was one of the founders of cognitive linguistics, and developed the theories of Case Grammar (Fillmore 1968), and Frame Semantics (1976).

He was one of the first linguists to introduce a representation of linguistic knowledge that blurred this strong distinction between syntactic and semantic knowledge of a language. He introduced what was termed case structure grammar and this representation subsequently had considerable influence on psychologists as well as computational linguists.

Grammar Case is a system of linguistic analysis, focusing on the link between the valence, or number of subjects, objects, etc., of a verb and the grammatical context it requires.

The system was created by the American linguist Charles J. Fillmore in (1968), in the context of Transformational Grammar. This theory analyzes the surface syntactic structure of sentences by studying the combination of deep cases (i.e. semantic roles) -- Agent, Object, Benefactor, Location or Instrument -- which are required by a specific verb.

For instance, the verb "give" in English requires an Agent (A) and Object (O), and a Beneficiary (B); e.g. "Jones (A) gave money (O) to the school (B).

According to Fillmore, each verb selects a certain number of deep cases which form its case frame. Thus, a case frame describes important aspects of semantic valency, of verbs, adjectives and nouns. Case frames are subject to certain constraints, such as that a deep case can occur only once per sentence. Some of the cases are obligatory and others are optional. Obligatory cases may not be deleted, at the risk of producing ungrammatical sentences. For example, Mary gave the apples is ungrammatical in this sense.

Fundamental hypothesis of case grammar is that grammatical functions, such as subject or object, are determined by the deep, semantic valence of the verb, which finds its syntactic correlate in such grammatical categories as Subject and Object, and in grammatical cases such as Nominative, Accusative, etc.

Fillmore puts forwards the following hierarchy for a universal subject selection rule:

Agent < Instrumental < Objective

That means that if the case frame of a verb contains an agent, this one is realized as the subject of an active sentence.

Case grammar is an attempt to establish a semantic grammar. (Most grammars by linguists take syntax as the starting-point).

Using a modified form of valency theory Fillmore suggests that the verb establishes a set of cases in a sentence: these are like slots, which usually need not all be filled. For example, consider these sentences:

1. Mary opened the door with a key.

2. Mary opened the door.

3. A key opened the door.

4. The door opened.

In (1) the semantic cases are: Mary - agent; the door - object; a key - instrument.

In (2) they are as in (1), except that there is no instrument.

In (3) the cases are: a key - instrument; the door - object.

In (4) the only case is the door - object.

In other words, to open requires at the minimum that the object be specified in a sentence.

ACTIVITY

Grammatical Cases

Grammatical Forms

            Descriptive Structuralism is frequently referred to as Binarist. This orientation is its strength and weakness. The strength resides in elementary calculability, an impersonal, objective, exhausting of possibilities: given any A, B pair, however defined, the presence or absence of a value for each, however defined, can be calculated. With values of + or -  :

                        A:        +          -           +          -

                        B:        +          +          -           -

            Its weakness is identical with that of Plato’s technique of the Division: in the conceptual world, we rarely know enough about any pair to establish exclusive values beyond the most generic; in the empirical world, factual relations are just as complex.

Stable States

            Synchronic linguistic description proceeds on the counter-factual assumption of constant and stable forms paired with meanings within an unchanging speech-community, some forms are never observable in isolated utterance. This justifies the distinction of free and bound forms, when both are established as linguistic forms. Constructed linguistic forms have at least two, so A’ linguistic form which bears a partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to some other linguistic form is a complex form and the common parts are constituents or components, while A’ linguistic form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form is a simple form or morpheme.

Basic and Modified Meaning

The meaning of a morpheme is a sememe  ( the meaning of a morpheme) constant,  definite, discrete from all other sememes:  the linguist can only analyze the signals,  not the signalled, so that is why linguistics  must start from the phonetics, not the  semantics, of a language. The total stocks  of morphemes is a language’s lexicon.

Sentence Types

            Order can imply (but is not exhausted by) position, which can be functional; a form alone is in absolute position, with another, in included position. Sentences relate through order, position, and, within a sentence, are distinguished by modulation, paratactic arrangement, and features of selection.

Words

            Since the word is a free form, freedom of occurrence largely determines our attitude towards parts of a language. But even with our typographic conventions, we are inconsistent in distinguishing words and  phrases, and in other languages, it is  difficult to keep them apart.

Syntax

            Grammar deals with constructions under morphology and syntax, syntax takes as its construction those in which no one of the immediate constituents is a bound form. The free forms (words and phrases) of a language appear in larger free forms (phrases), arranged by taxemes of modulation, phonetic modification, selection and order.

Forms resultant from Free Forms

            Free forms combining can be said to produce a resultant phrase, of which the form-class of one member may be determinative of the phrase’s grammatical behavior: in such a case, the construction is called endocentric, otherwise, it is exocentric when the phrase or construction does not follow the grammatical behavior of either constituent.

Parts of Speech

            Most languages show a smaller number, and in such languages, syntactic form classes tend to appear in phrases rather  than words.

 

ACTIVITY

Grammatical Forms

Anthropological Linguistics

Anthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture and the relations between human biology, cognition and language.

This strongly overlaps the field of linguistic anthropology, which is the branch of anthropology that studies humans through the languages that they use.

Anthropological linguistics is concerned with:

Descriptive (synchronic) linguistics:

Describing dialects (forms of a language used by a specific speech community).

·         Historical (diachronic) linguistics:

Describing changes in dialects and languages over time.

·         Ethnolinguistics:

Analyzing the relationship between culture, thought, and language.

·         Sociolinguistics:

Analyzing the social functions of language and the social, political, and economic relationships among and between members of speech communities.

Franz Boas was one of the principal founders of modern American Anthropology and Ethnology. Anthropology was conceived as comprising four subfields: archaeology, physical (now `biological') anthropology, linguistics (now `linguistic anthropology'), and ethnology (now `sociocultural anthropology'). Boas contributed to all four of his named branches of anthropology.

His personal research contributions gave him an important place in the history of anthropology.  Even Boas has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology.” Although Boas published descriptive studies of Native American languages, and wrote on theoretical difficulties in classifying languages, he left it to colleagues and students such as Edward Sapir to research the relationship between culture and language.

Edward Sapir was a German-born American anthropologist-linguist and a leader in American structural linguistics. His name is borrowed in what is now called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. He was a highly influential figure in American linguistics, influencing several generations of linguists across several schools of the discipline.

Classification of Languages

During his lifetime Sapir was highly regarded for his work on language—his groundbreaking studies of Native American languages broke the myriad of languages down into six categories—and for his insistence that discussion of a wider culture was necessarily connected to discussion of the individual within that culture.

Sapir's classifies all the languages in North America into only 6 families:

Eskimo–Aleut

Algonkin–Wakashan

Nadene

Penutian

Hokan–Siouan

Aztec–Tanoan.

Sapir's classification is still commonly used in general languages-of-the-world type surveys.

Sapir suggested that man perceives the world principally through language. He wrote many articles on the relationship of language to culture. A thorough description of a linguistic structure and its function in speech might, he wrote in 1931, provide insight into man’s perceptive and cognitive faculties and help explain the diverse behavior among peoples of different cultural backgrounds.

He also did considerable research in comparative and historical linguistics. A poet, an essayist, and a composer, as well as a brilliant scholar, Sapir wrote in a crisp and lucid fashion that earned him considerable literary repute.

Linguistic relativity (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)

Linguistic relativity is a general term used to refer to various hypotheses or positions about the relationship between language and culture.

For Sapir, linguistic relativity was a way of articulating what he saw as the struggle between the individual and society. In order to communicate their unique experiences, individuals need to rely on a public code over which they have little control.

Sapir and Whorf's ideas about the unconscious aspects of linguistic codes continued to play an important part in the history of linguistic anthropology, and reappeared in the 1980s in the context of a number of research projects, including the study of language ideology.

ACTIVITY

Anthropological Linguistics

Ethnography of Speech

The role of speech in human behavior has always been honored in anthropological principle, if sometimes slighted in practice. The importance of its study has been declaimed, surveyed with insightful detail, and accepted as a principle of field work

Concept of Ethnography

That the study of speech might be crucial to a science of man has been a recurrent anthropological theme. 

Is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group, but revealing more of basic processes because more out of awareness, less subject to overlay by rationalization. Some anthropologists have seen language, and hence linguistics, as basic to a science of man because it provides a link between the biological and sociocultural levels. Some have seen in modern linguistic methodology a model or harbinger of a general methodology for studying the structure of human behavior.

The Ethnography was pioneered in the field of socio-cultural anthropology but has also become a popular method in various other fields of social sciences—particularly in sociology, communication studies, history. —that studies people, ethnic groups and other ethnic formations, their ethnogenesis, composition, resettlement, social welfare characteristics, as well as their material and spiritual culture. 

It is often employed for gathering empirical data on human societies and cultures. Data collection is often done through participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, etc. Ethnography aims to describe the nature of those who are studied (i.e. to describe a people, anethnos) through writing

Ethnography of communication or Speaking

The Ethnography of communication (EOC) is a method of discourse analysis in linguistics, which draws on the anthropological field of ethnography. Unlike ethnography proper, though, it takes both language and culture to be constitutive as well as constructive.

The meaning and understanding of the presence or absence of speech within different communities will vary. Local cultural patterns and norms must be understood for analysis and interpretation of the appropriateness of speech acts situated within specific communities.

Thus, “the statement that talk is not anywhere valued equally in all social contexts suggests a research strategy for discovering and describing cultural or subcultural differences in the value of speaking.

Speaking is one among other symbolic resources which are allocated and distributed in social situations according to distinctive culture patterns

ACTIVITY

Ethnography of Speech

The Prague School

Vilém Mathesius

Prague school, school of linguistic thought and analysis established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilém Mathesius

Linguists of the Prague school stress the function of elements within language, the contrast of language elements to one another, and the total pattern or system formed by these contrasts, and they have distinguished themselves in the study of sound systems. They developed distinctive-feature analysis of sounds; by this analysis, each distinctive sound.

Trubetzkoy

Trubetzkoy was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology.

Trubetzkoy, like other members of the Prague School, was well aware that the functions of speech are not limited to the expression of an explicit message.

In analysing the function of speech Trubetzkoy followed his Viennese philosopher collage Karl Bühler, who distinguish between the representation of function(that stating facts), the expressive function (that of expressing temporary or permanent characteristics of the speaker), and the conative function (that of influencing the hearer).Trubetzkoy shows that Bühler´s analysis can be applied in phonology.

A phonetic opposition which fulfils the representation function will normally be a phonetic contrast; but distinctions between the allophones of a given phoneme, where the choice is not determinated by the phonemic environment, often play an expressive or conative role.        

Jakobson

Roman Jakobson is a scholar of Russian origin; he took his first degree, in Oriental languages, at Moscow University

Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century.

Influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson developed, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, techniques for the analysis of sound systems in languages, inaugurating the discipline of phonology.

Functions of language determined for 6 factors:

1. REFERENTIAL

-We Use it when we intend to convey information without making judgments about   it or pretend reactions of the addresser.

2. EMOTIVE

-Produce an impression of certain emotion.

- Expressive.

3. CONATIVE

-It finds its purest grammatical expression in the vocative and imperative.

- Appellative, ordering, begging.

4. PHATIC

- Emphasis on contact. Ex/Hello, are you angry?

- A profuse exchange of ritualized formulas, by entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication.

5. METALINGUAL

- Focus on code.

- Whenever the addresser an/or the addressee need to check up whether they use the same code.

6. POETIC

- Focus on the message for its own sake.

- As literature.

ACTIVITY:

Functions of Language

The Copenhagen School

The Copenhagen School, officially the "Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen (Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague)", was a group of scholars dedicated to the study of structural linguistics founded by Louis Hjelmslev and Viggo Brøndal. In the mid twentieth century the Copenhagen school was one of the most important centres of linguistic structuralism together with the Geneva School and thePrague School.

Louis Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics

In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. Together with Hans Jørgen Uldall he developed a structural theory of language which he called glossematics, which developed the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure.

His first major book, Principes de grammaire générale, which he finished in 1928, is an invaluable source for anyone interested in Hjelmslev's work. During the 1930s Hjelmslev wrote another book, La catégorie des cas, which was a major contribution to linguistics. In this book, Hjelmslev analysed the general category of case in detail, providing ample empirical material supporting his hypotheses.

His most well-known book, Omkring sprogteoriens grundlæggelse, or in English translation, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, first published in 1943, critiques the then-prevailing methodologies in linguistics as being descriptive, even anecdotal, and not systematising.

Hjelmslev's famously renamed signifier and signified as respectively expression plane and content plane. The combinations of the four would distinguish between form of content, form of expression, substance of content, and substance of expression.

Also, his most famous work, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, is mostly concerned with the formal definition of a terminology for the analysis of any level of a system of signs, and as such there exists an exclusively Hjelmslevian terminology for that.

In one of his last works, “Some Reflexions on Practice and Theory in Structural Semantics” (1961), Hjelmslev even admits that the entire analysis might end up with indefinable of simple behavior situations such as, “I am here, you are there” elements that constitute language as a process of enunciation and not as an immanent structure.

ACTIVITY
Copenhagen School

The London School

The London School

·         Practical Linguistics

Orthoepy: it is the codification and teaching the correct pronunciation.

Lexicography: it is the invention of shorthand systems, spelling reform, and the creation of artificial ‘philosophical languages.’

·         Phonetics





Henry Sweet based his historical studies on a detailed understanding of the working of the vocal organs.

  

Daniel Jones invented the system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels.

·         Linguistics

Firth said that the phonology of a language consist of a number of system of alternative possibilities which come into play at different points in phonological unit such a syllable, and there is no reason to identify the alternates in one system with those in another.

Trubetzkoy assumes that the range of sounds found in the special neutralizing environment will be related in a regular way to the range found in other environments.

 

A Firthian phonologycal analysis recognizes a number of ‘systems’ of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determine the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment-sized phonematic units.

In Firthian terms the syllable plays an essential role as the domain of a large number of prosodies

For Firth, a phonology was a structure of system of choices were systems of meaning.

For Malinowski, to think of language as a ‘means of transfusing ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener’ was a myth: to speak, particulary in a primitive culture, is not to tell but to do.

“Word are tools, and the ‘meaning’ of a tool is its use”.

Firthian phonology, it is primarily concerned with the nature and import of the various choices which one makes in deciding to utter one particular sentence out of the infinitely numerous sentencesthat one’s language makes available.

A Chomskyan grammar defines the class of well-formed senteces in a language by providing a set of rules for rewriting symbols as other symbols.

ACTIVITY:    

Find Firth!