Introduction to Linguistics: Syntax 1

Lecture 13. Prof. Futrell introduces syntax: the idea of grammaticality, syntactic categories, and syntactic constraints.

[@alyd449]

This whole course is brilliant! Thanks a lot!

[@w.a.smadhusanka7681]

This is magic, comprehensible input ❤

[@ramzy-6566]

Thank you so much.

[@dougelerath7364]

I am an English speaker learning Turkish. As you point out, we all have a 'mental grammar' which allows us to form proper sentences. It makes me crazy that essentially ALL Turkish teaching material fails miserably in assisting the student in the development of 'mental Turkish grammar' by failing to focus on syntactic transliteration. For example, at the simplest level, the sentence 'kediyi gördüm' is translated as 'I saw the cat', whereas the mental grammar is 'the cat saw I. Or, e.g. ' Evim var' is translated as 'I have a house' rather than the more appropriate 'my house exists'. The most egregious situations are ones in which a Turkish grammatical construction is replaced by an English word which doesn't exist in Turkish. For example, Turkish has no word for 'that' as used in forming relative clauses in English, but rather uses a grammatical construction. It would be wonderfully helpful if the syntacticians of the world could work with the foreign language educators!

[@xaryop7950]

i'm a native turkish speaker, "var" is a polysemic word, so it has multiple meanings. If someone sad "Evim var" i would assume they said "I have a house" rather than "my house exists" considering the semantic of the language as well. You would say "Evim var olur" which means "My house exists". In addition, "Evim var" can also mean "I have my house" as well as "I have a house", but you would say "Benim evim var" if you wanted to say "I have my house", even though "evim" consists of "ev", "house", and "-im" meaning "my" or "mine. It is complicated as you noted. Also, there "o" exists for that. The language is just very versatile so it is very hard to comprehensively categorize it.

[@dougelerath7364]

@@xaryop7950 wrt Evim var, my guess is that you don't think in the English translation of that sentence, but rather strictly in your native tongue. Although 'I have a house' is the "proper" translation, it helps me construct grammatically correct Turkish sentences if I think of var as existence. Similarly with relative clauses which are usually positioned more like adjectival clauses. e.g. 'The I built house' rather than 'The house that I built.' Etc.

[@pugsnhogz]

"I love my job" vs. "I love the job" "No one compares to my girl" vs. "No one compares to the girl" You just need any sentence where the possessive creates a strong sense of distinctiveness ("I love lamp" lol). Using some kind of evaluative word (love / compare / etc.) helps.

[@haiyingjiang5566]

i just recently translated a blog from English to Chinese. It is on the "genetive" case in English academic writing. This is a diminishing phenomenon, but it might illustrate the different part of speech between "my" and "the" . 1.I am worried of my loosing money. Archaic but grammatically correct. 2. I am worried of me loosing money. This sounds more like what people will say. 3. *I am worried of the loosing good academic standing. I don't think anyone says this ever.

[@jackjohnson2309]

“Get out of my face!” - “Get out of the face!” This, to me, seems like the second sentence is incomplete.

[@user-ne6lu2of5v]

This is my chair . And this is the chair

[@pethuchathu]

❤

[@wahabkhan100]

What about "all day fell the rain"? Does it violates the word order? The subject is at the end but the sentence is grammatical

[@soufianeelberrad2578]

Who’s Sally anyway ? 🤔 JK. That was so helpful

[@paray0708]

In my crazy opinion, the statement of the sentence: "unconsciously, our brain has the grammartical rules of any languages" -> I rather say: people learn new language by imitation and by situation when applying it in actual situation from others whom they interact with. That's why sometimes learners might use words inappropriately...and they have to rely on their family, their friends to help explain the meaning in context, in social level ....ect (easily observe a child to learn language by mimictation) 😅😅😅

[@user-xe5yg5yl9d]

One example i got： The sick should be taken care of. *My sick should be taken care of. So "the "+Adj can form a collective noun, but it's not the case in "my" Does that make sense?

[@devonashwa7977]

nope

[@JL-uj5ms]

I don't think so, because "my sick should be taken care of" evokes an image in my mind of say, 2 separate groups of sick people with an advocate asserting that *their* specific group of sick should be taken care of in place of the other group.

[@pugsnhogz]

@@JL-uj5ms sure you can go there if you want but I still think it's a good counterexample. It would be quite the specific (even contrived, perhaps) situation for someone to say "my sick" in this sense.

[@thomasvanderlugt]

The counter example I came up with was: "This person was my first love." When substituting 'my' for 'the' we get: "This person was the first love." But that doesn't make sense. Whose first love? Someone can't be "a love", but has to be "[subject]'s love" right?

[@thomasvanderlugt]

I think I got it. Some sentences are only grammatical if you use a possessive pronoun: It was my fault. *It was the fault.

[@romo2170]

Thanks a lot! A question pls: "I think a dog is cute!" : Is not this a violation? I thought it wasn't grammatical!

[@nitishgautam5728]

1:19 logically not all phonemes are meaningless example /s/ is bound morpheme and phoneme

[@aidanb2615]

You can't say "the own" e.g. "I want run the own business". It has to be "my own".

[@Next_Trip_Canada]

We can say "Give it to me." But, we can not say "Give it to the ! " Should we still say me and the are in the same syntactic category ?

[@soufianeelberrad2578]

That’s against freedom of speech. You can say whatever you want mate

[@vegansarebad9744]

Obviously, they aren't!

[@zasharan2]

They are not, but the example shown in the video were the two words "my" and "the", not "me" and "the".

[@gabor6259]

The closest thing to a counter-example could be this: The cat ate the mouse. Change 'mouse' to 'cat'. The cat ate the cat. But I guess if there's a script writer who came up with "I used the stones to destroy the stones.", then "The cat ate the cat." is perfectly fine.

[@Parannamore]

how is this a counter example? it is both grammatical and makes sense.

[@rachidaitmohand6588]

You may be misunderstanding his point. The point he tried to make is, substituting "cat" with "mouse" in a grammatical sentence, the sentence will remain grammatical. In other words, as long as form and linear order are respected, problems of meaning can still be served by making context.