5.6: Grammaticality

Grammaticality, from Sarah Harmon

Video Script

The last thing to talk about with respect to syntax or structure is grammaticality. This is to be a fascinating area, I find, because it really underlies this element of language that no one piece stands alone. We have already talked about how morphology and syntax will blend, and we have talked about how morphology and phonology blend. Grammaticality is how syntax and semantics blend, and that's an important aspect with respect to linguistics, especially given what Noam Chomsky has said in the past.

Let me explain. When Noam Chomsky first came up with what we now call to formative syntax or generative theory, there's a few names for it. When he first came up with that, his initial goal was to show that syntax and semantics are completely different things. In doing that, he established what grammaticality is. Grammaticality focuses on only the syntax and not the semantics. Grammaticality is how we know a sentence to work with respect to structure. Going back to that construction metaphor, if something is grammatical, then the beams are straight and true, everything is plumb, and the structure will stand. It doesn't tell you anything about the colors being used or the shape of the little spout that's coming off of some random wall. It is only talking about the internal structure: the studs, the roof, you get the point.

Chomsky’s example sentence was this: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Now, when I say that sentence, you probably have a massive question mark on your face, and rightly so, because that sentence does not make sense. But it is a grammatical sentence, and that was Chomsky's point: that grammaticality is different than meaning. Meaning is a different aspect; certainly, there's nothing about that statement that makes sense semantically.

· If something is colorless it can't be green, that's just an oxymoron.

· Ideas can't have color anyway; they're abstract, they're not concrete.

· Ideas also cannot sleep; it's just impossible.

· Even if they could, they cannot sleep furiously, because it is impossible to sleep furiously. Furiously would imply emotion, where sleep is usually devoid of it.

So, it does not make sense semantically. But it does grammatically. It follows the phrase structure rules perfectly. Not only that, this is what helps to explain, in some ways, why we can get various combinations but they don't make sense. They make sense structurally, but they don't necessarily make sense semantically.

All of you have had experience learning a second language in some way, shape or form. One of the frustrating pieces of learning a new language is learning how the structure and the meaning combine. When we start to learn grammaticality, it starts to make some sense. But until we're fluent, we will always produce sentences that maybe resemble a little bit of our colorless green ideas asleep furiously, in that they make sense structurally, you just wouldn't put those concepts together.

So then, what makes a sentence ungrammatical? It means that you have not followed the phrase structure rules. We always mark that in syntax with an asterisk. So, for example, those same words, the same lexicon, if I mess up the order and say Furious sleep ideas green colorless. That isn't ungrammatical sentence. How do we know? It breaks a whole bunch of phrase structure rules.

· The first one is that it has the verb phrase before the subject noun phrase; that's not going to work in English.

· There is an adverb out of place, although we have talked before about where that could happen so that one maybe is a little questionable, but certainly.

· It has the adjective after the noun not before it, which in English is not possible.

Grammaticality helps us in a number of ways, specifically with respect to understanding how the brain processes language. We're going to come back to that towards the end of the course. Suffice it to say that it helps us to understand the subconscious knowledge of a native speaker. You can add to that somebody who becomes a near-native speaker, somebody who has learned a language with such fluency that they may not say everything 100% perfectly, but they're very close. It tells us that this structure is part universal grammar and part acquisition. As children or adults, when we learn a language, we are creating these phrase structure rules, as it were. This is not a conscious thought; this is subconscious. We start kind of puzzling things together. But there has to be some sort of blueprint, if you were, to kind of explain what's going on.

With that, we will leave the world of syntax, and the next chapter enter the world of semantics, pragmatics, meaning.