MA Liguistic Theory Topic One Introduction I call my part of this lecture 'methodology' since I have not been able to cook up a better title. The topics I wish to discuss will be about the shape and making of grammar, ie. how to make grammars, what are the ingredients of a grammar and what approaches there are to language and, finally, how we argue in grammar to defend a particular analysis. A) What is the object of linguistic analysis In t.he first part we will distinguish between (1) linguistic phenomena, (2) linguistic data and (3) linguistic facts 1) linguistic phenomena a) results of speaking/writing b) speech situations c) speech/writing activity and its perception/understanding - utterance ('megnyilatkozás'): the basic unit of linguistic phenomena, the result of speaking/writing activity -utterances are observable: the result/the situation/the understanding � empirical method 2) linguistic data -are only a set of the linguistic phenomena -what counts as data depends on the purposes of the research, and this restricts the phenom- ena since it is impossible to examine all linguistic utterances from all possible aspects at the same time. The aspects of linguistic research that forces the grammarian to choose the rele- vant aspect from the linguistic phenomena are the following: i) phonology researches the sounds of a particular language or dialect; it may also study speech sounds in general of many languages to find regularities between them ii) morphology studies the structure of words that are built up of speech sound segments or phonemes iii) syntax concentrates on how words are organised into a linear sequence to create mean- ingful elements iv) semantics attempts to find meaning relations between different structures of various complexity v) pragmatics examines how language is used in actual situations, how use determines/ modifies grammar, in other words, the interaction between grammar in the abstract sense and the situations in which language is used These are large fields and each can and must be further restricted. For instance, if we want to describe the Hungarian word order, we will only examine the phenomena that are relevant for this research, ie. we will not be concerned with the phonological makeup of the utterances we are examining. What has been said presupposes that we have hypotheses about what there is in language, we have a theory about language, we have concepts that we use when we change the phenomena into data and leave the rest in peace. In other words, before we set out to study any aspect of linguistic phenomena, we have to have firm ideas about language. 1
3) linguistic facts A linguistic fact is a general statement about a linguistic phenomenon/group of phenomena, ie. it is an empirical (= based on observation) generalisation. A linguistic fact is a rule of grammar. (Example 1)For example, it is a rule of English grammar that in clauses where there is a verb which shows present or past tense there should be an explicit subject even if it is meaningless. Put differently, finite clauses have subjects irrespective of their meaningfulness. For example, The dog/He bit the new postman . Both clauses have an explicit, meaningful subject: the dog and the personal pronoun he . However, in the clause It was raining heavily the explicit subject, the personal pronoun it does not refer to anything/anybody, and from a semantic point of view it is a superfluous element. But the clause *Was raining heavily is obviously ungrammatical, even if it contains all the necessary semantic elements. (The same applies to what is widely known as existential sentences: There were three spiders on the wall vs * Were three spiders on the wall .) To arrive at the above analysis we need to have concepts of subject, meaning, personal pronoun, clause structure etc., that is, the linguistic phenomena do not explicitly show these grammatical concepts, they only offer some acoustic phenomena. (Example 2) Adjectives referring to size can be paired off: tall-short, big-small... -an obser- vation which is a fact of language. Further, it is also observable that one member of each such pair is 'unmarked' (the positive) while the other is 'marked' (the negative). Consider the fol- lowing sentence: John's house is as big as Mark's . This clause does not inform us about the absolute size of either house: both can be big and small. However, the clause John's house is as small as Mark's implies that both houses are small. Markedness, a notion that can be ap- plied to various linguistic phenomena, induces a presupposition. That is, the negative adject- ives presuppose some absolute degree of the characteristic they describe. Also related to the markedness of negative adjectives is their use with measure expressions. It is quite natural to say that John's house is two metres high but not that John's house is two metres small . To summarise the examples: the use of the marked forms always requires some specific circum- stance, either linguistic or situational. As is also shown by the above discussion above, lingu- istics facts are more abstract than linguistic data and require a more sophisticated theoretical background. If we wish to study the semantics of the English modal auxiliaries, we will need logical concepts, such as 'epistemic' and 'deontic'. Consider the following clause. Heavy win- ters can cause serious problems on the main roads . This sentence implies that we have some 'knowledge' (Classical Greek � ðéóôçìç ( epistémé) ) about heavy winters and their consequen- ces. So, a clause with the modal auxiliary 'can' expresses what logicians traditionally call 'e- pistemic statement', a statement whose truth depends on our knowledge of the world. Con- sider another clause with the same modal auxiliary. We can use the bathroom on the fourth floor. This clause illustrates a different meaning type of the modal auxiliary 'can', which is referred to as 'deontic'. The second 'can'-sentence means that we are allowed to use the bath- room because the regulations make it possible for us. The expression 'deontic' is related to obligation, what must and can be done. (It comes from the Classical Greek verb äÝù ( deó ) 'I must/have to'.) Linguistic facts, that is, grammatical rules or generalised statements concerning various linguistic phenomena can be falsified, ie. can be found incorrect or inadequate or not true. Three cases may happen: either (i) we made the wrong generalisation or we (ii) were not careful enough and did not examine all the data that are relevant. Also, it might be the case that (iii) we used grammatically incorrect data. As to the first problem. (i) We would like to e- xamine the English tense system and we find that there is only present and past tenses in Eng- lish. Therefore, we conclude that there is no expression of futurity in English -an obviously 2
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