Thinking Syntactically (for non-linguists)

What does it mean to be a syntactician? 

The vast majority of people are not even aware that being a syntactician is an actual profession. The purpose of this blog post, and a few others that I have planned, is to familiarize the general public with the work that a syntactician does.

Without going into any specific theoretical concepts or principles, I sketch here for a general non-linguist audience the broad outlines of how a syntactician thinks about natural language.

1. Through the eyes of a child

Above all, when looking at human language, the syntactician does not take anything for granted. They try to approach every single issue with the eyes of a child, who has never before been indoctrinated into any dogmas about language.

I have had many cocktail party discussions with ordinary non-linguists who tell me that we speak the way we do because we have learned it from other speakers. For example, the question “Is John happy?” is formed by switching the order of the subject and the copula of the declarative sentence “John is happy.” The reason why we form questions this way is because we have heard other people doing it in the same way. And with that, there is no more to discuss. There are no mysteries to solve or secrets to reveal. Usually, my (non-linguist) interlocutor has a perplexed look on their face, as if nothing could be more obvious.

But as a syntactician, we ask all kinds of questions about forming questions. Why do we form questions in that way, instead of in countless other ways. For example, why not put the copula at the end of the sentence to say: “John happy is?” Or why not invert the order of the sentence, “Happy is John?” If that hypothetical process does not work for English, then does it work for any other language? If it does not work for any other language, then why not? 

These questions form the tip of the iceberg. The syntactician acts just like the child asking an endless series of why-questions, reflecting a genuine lack of understanding, and an unwillingness to take anything for granted.

2. Meaning and Form

Another important question for a syntactician is how the meaning of the sentence is related to the form of the sentence. For this very reason, syntacticians love ambiguous sentences. 

For example, the sentence “Old dogs and cats like to sleep all day.” is ambiguous. Pause for a moment to mull it over before continuing to read. 

On one interpretation, old dogs and old cats like to sleep all day. On the other interpretation, old dogs like to sleep all day, and so do cats in general, young and old. The issue is whether the adjective “old” modifies both “dogs and cats”, or only “dogs”. Such an ambiguity naturally corresponds to different groupings between the words: [old [dogs and cats]] versus [[old dogs] and cats]. We call these groupings “constituent structure”. 

One of the main factors determining meaning is constituent structure, part of the form of the sentence. The job of the syntactician from this perspective is to discover this hidden structure which underlies the meaning of the sentence, by developing and applying tests that reveal how a string of words is put together.

3. Silence is Golden.

Another kind of hidden structure has to do with silent elements.

For example, in the sentence “John asked to leave.”, there is a string of four words. Syntacticians have discovered that there is a silent element between the two verbs: “John asked PRO to leave.” PRO here stands for ‘silent pronoun’, and it refers back to the subject “John”. The presence of the silent pronoun represents the fact that “John” is the intended leaver. In effect, the meaning of the sentence is transparently reflected in the syntactic structure.

Being on the lookout for such silent elements, which are present in almost every sentence that we speak or hear, and developing tools to diagnose them, is an important part of thinking syntactically.

As in other sciences, much of what determines the structure of nature is invisible to the human eye, and inaudible to the human ear. We all know that the world is formed from combinations electrons, protons and neutrons into atoms, and from combinations of atoms into molecules, but we have never seen these things with the naked eye. The situation is entirely parallel in linguistics. There is a vast hidden world of structure and invisible elements that excites the curiosity of the syntactician.

4. If it quacks like a duck,

Syntax concerns the distribution of words and phrases in sentences. 

Consider for example the word “there”. What is its exact nature? Is it a noun, a verb, an adjective or an adverb? The interesting fact about “there” is that it patterns in the same way as a prepositional phrase, defined as a phrase whose first element is a preposition, such as “at the store” or “to the store”. In the sentence “He is at the store.”, the phrase “at the store” can be replaced by “there”: “He is there.” In general, wherever you can use a prepositional phrase such as “at the store”, you can replace it with the word “there”. This fact shows that “there” has the distribution of a prepositional phrase, and so should be analyzed as a prepositional phrase, even though there is no audible preposition. 

The question for the syntactician is which phrases pattern together in building a sentence, and which phrases have different distributions. The syntactician aims to develop theory of phrase types (e.g., prepositional phrases versus noun phrases), and how they combine with each other.

5. The grass is always greener on the other side.

Syntacticians are always comparing what happens in their native language to what happens in other languages. We are constantly making cross-linguistic comparisons. For example, consider the English sentence “John ran to the store.” In Ewe (an African language spoken in Ghana, Togo and Benin), this thought would have to be expressed as a serial verb construction. A word-by-word translation would be “John ran go the store.” In the English sentence, there is just one verb “to run”, but in Ewe there are two verbs “to run” and “to go”. There is only one thought, but it is expressed differently in the two languages. 

This difference between English and Ewe is pervasive, affecting everything people say. The question for the syntactician is what accounts for this difference? Why are Ewe and English different in this way? 

In effect, we cannot even begin to understand ourselves without traveling to the furthest shores to discover how we are similar and different from those living there.

6. Shake it up!

In encountering a new sentence, the natural inclination of the syntactician is to play around with it, and to see what kinds of changes can be made.

For example, for the words in the sentence “John walked into the store.” there are 120 other possible word orders, some of which are acceptable and some of which are unacceptable. For example, “Walked into the store John.” is an unacceptable word order in English (but it is OK in Italian). Also unacceptable is “John the into walked store.” But the sentence “Into the store walked John.” can be used in certain contexts. The syntactician asks which orders are acceptable and which ones are not. What accounts for the possible word orders? Finally, which of those word orders exist in other languages?  

For syntacticians, language is a huge sandbox filled with interesting toys. We like to get our hands dirty by permuting the elements of a sentence and seeing what pops out.