Basic Skills in Syntax (Part 1): Working with Syntactic Data

There are many different concrete skills that students learn in an undergraduate syntax course. We can divide them into (at least) four groups.

a. Skills involving working with syntactic data. 

b. Skills involving tree drawing. 

c. Skills involving formulating and testing hypotheses.

d. Skills involving applying theoretical principles to data (e.g., the Binding Theory). 

Of course, there is not always a clear line between these categories, but they are a good starting point for the discussion. In this blog post, I take up the first category, skills involving working with syntactic data. In future blog posts, I will take up the other categories.

Skill 1: Recognizing the difference between prescriptive rules and descriptive rules when looking at data. 

Being aware of the most common examples of prescriptive rules (e.g., A sentence should not end with a preposition!). Concretely, you should put aside prescriptive feelings towards a sentence when giving an acceptability judgment.

Skill 2: Recognizing the difference between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. 

Your knowledge of syntax is for the most part tacit, that is unconscious knowledge. It is accessible only by scientific investigation. It is not learned in schools or from books, and so is different from arithmetic, traffic safety and history. 

Skill 3: Changing your perspective from a user of language to a scientist studying language. 

Be prepared to be perplexed by simple and obvious facts. Be willing to admit that you do not have an explanation for those facts. When you hear an unacceptable sentence, don’t just brush it off as something people do not say. Rather, ask yourself the simple question: why is that sentence unacceptable?

Skill 4: Being able to give an acceptability judgment. Is a particular sentence unacceptable?

Skill 5: Understanding the range of acceptability judgments (e.g., OK, ?, *).

Skill 6: Recognizing and accepting variation between individuals (idiolects) for acceptability judgments. 

Never dismiss somebody's acceptability judgments. You might be missing something really interesting. 

Skill 7: Doing an informal acceptability judgment survey with a small group of people.

Skill 8: Distinguishing between grammatically unacceptable and semantically anomalous sentences (e.g., Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.) 

Skill 9: Identifying factors that make a sentence difficult to process (e.g., length, vocabulary choice, register clashes, word frequency).

Skill 10: Recognizing garden-path sentences, and understanding what makes them hard to process.

Skill 11: Learning how to come up with interesting example sentences.

Have fun with data. Learn how to explore your knowledge of English (or your native language, if it is not English). Don’t be afraid to rip a sentence apart to see what happens.

Skill 12: Creating contexts when asking for acceptability judgments.

Acceptability judgments should be given in context. A sentence judged as marginal or ungrammatical out of context (out of the blue) might seem better in context. A skill that syntacticians develop is to find contexts that render a sentence more natural.

Skill 13: Judging whether a sentence is true or false in a particular linguistic context. 

This methodology is used a lot when discussing syntactic ambiguities (see 17 below).

Skill 14: Being able to construct a minimal pair of sentences.

Constructing minimal pairs is one of the most important skills in learning how to do syntax. Minimal pairs differ in one syntactic property. One member of the pair is acceptable and the other unacceptable. Understanding the role of minimal pairs in syntactic argumentation.

Skill 15: Recognizing syntactic ambiguity. 

Being familiar with classical cases from generative grammar (e.g., Flying planes can be dangerous.). 

Skill 16: Being able to give paraphrases for a sentence that is syntactically ambiguous. 

Skill 17: Creating contexts that distinguish the paraphrases. 

Skill 18: Paying attention to syntax wherever you go. 

When people speak, listen carefully to the way they form their sentences. I guarantee that you will find interesting constructions to think about.

Skill 19: Being aware of the various sources available for syntactic data. 

Unstructured/unelicited: Google, Twitter/X, e-mail, Facebook, texting, electronic corpora, books (fiction, poetry, non-fiction, children’s books), newspaper headlines, advertisements, conversations, debates, academic lectures, television, movies, recorded oral texts. 

Structured/elicited: acceptability judgments, Amazon Mechanical Turk, child language studies, neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic experiments, translation task (asking a consultant to translate a sentence from one language to another). 

Skill 20: Using the internet and Google to find example sentences in syntactic research.

Google can be used in various ways as a tool for syntactic research. For example, suppose you are investigating a construction. You can search the internet using Google to get spontaneous (unelicited) examples of that construction. Then for each example, verify it with a native speaker. You should understand the various issues that arise when using such data (e.g., different varieties of English, non-native speakers, AI-generated text).

Further Reading:

Collins, Chris. 2020. When Grammaticality Judgments Differ. Ordinary Working Grammarian, March 17.

(https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2020/03/when-judgments-differ.html)

Collins, Chris. 2023. Internet Searches as a Tool in Syntactic Research (Third Version). Ordinary Working Grammarian, March 7.

(https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2023/03/internet-searches-as-tool-in-syntactic.html)