Thinking Syntactically

What does it mean to be a syntactician? 

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 told what to think 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. There is nothing more discuss. There are no mysteries. Usually, my 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

An important question for a syntactician is how the meaning of the sentence is related to the form of the sentence. That is the reason why syntacticians love ambiguous sentences. 

For example, the sentence “Old dogs and cats like to sleep all day.” is ambiguous. Think about it for a few minutes 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. Not just old cats, but cats in general.  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, 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 five words. Syntacticians have discovered that there is a silent element in the between the two verbs: “John asked PRO to leave.” PRO here stands for ‘silent pronoun’, and it refers back to the subject the clause “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, and developing tools to diagnose them, is an important part of thinking syntactically.

4. If it quacks like a duck,

Syntax concerns the distribution of words and phrases in sentences. 

Consider for example the word “there”. Is it a noun, a verb, an adverb or an adjective? What is it exactly? 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 overt preposition. 

The general question for the syntactician is which phrases pattern together in building a sentence, and which phrases have different distributions. 

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”. This difference between English and Ewe is pervasive, affecting every thing people say. 

Now, the question for the syntactician is what accounts for this difference? Why are Ewe and English different in this way? 

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, “Walk into the store John.” is an unacceptable word order in English (but it is OK in Italian). So 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.