Principle of structure dependency

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• Principle of structure dependency
• Bibhuti Bhusan Mahapatra

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Structure Dependency A Case Study

• Interrogative Inversion
• (1) John will solve the problem.
• Will John solve the problem?
• Declarative Interrogative
• (2) a. Susan must leave. Must Susan leave?
• b. Harry can swim. Can Harry swim?
• c. Mary has read the book. Has Mary read the
  book?
• Bill is sleeping. Is Bill sleeping?
• .
• The section, Structure dependency a case study
  here is adopted from a talk given by Howard
  Lasnik (2003) in Delhi university.

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Interrogative inversionStructure Independent
(1st attempt)

• (3)Interrogative inversion process
• Beginning with a declarative, invert the first
  and second words to construct an interrogative.
• Declarative Interrogative
• (4) a. The woman must leave. Woman the must
  leave?
• b. A sailor can swim. Sailor a can swim?
• c. No boy has read the book. Boy no has read
  the book?
• d. My friend is sleeping. Friend my is
  sleeping?

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Interrogative inversion correct pairings

• Compare the incorrect pairings in (4) with the
  correct pairings in (5)
• Declarative Interrogative
• (5) a. The woman must leave. Must the woman
  leave?
• b. A sailor can swim. Can a sailor swim?
• c. No boy has read the book. Has no boy read
  the book?
• d. My friend is sleeping. Is my friend sleeping?

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Interrogative inversionStructure Independent
(2nd attempt)

• (6) Interrogative inversion process
• Beginning with a declarative, move the auxiliary
  verb to the front to construct an interrogative.
• Declarative Interrogative
• (7) a. Bill could be sleeping. Be Bill could
  sleeping?
• 
  Could Bill be sleeping?
• b. Mary has been reading. Been Mary has
  reading?
• Has Mary been reading?
• c. Susan should have left. Have Susan should
  left?
• 
  Should Susan have left?

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Structure independent (3rd attempt)

• Interrogative inversion process
• Beginning with a declarative, move the first
  auxiliary verb to the front to construct an
  interrogative.
• Declarative Interrogative
• (9) a. The man who is here can swim. Is the man
  who here can swim?
• b. The boy who will play has left. Will the
  boy who play has left?

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Structure Dependent Correct Pairings

• For the above examples, fronting the second
  auxiliary verb gives the correct form
• Declarative Interrogative
• (10) a.The man who is here can swim. Can the man
  who is here swim?
• b.The boy who will play has left. Has the
  boy who will play left?

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Natural transformationsarestructure dependent

• Does the child acquiring English learn these
  properties?
• (12) We are not dealing with a peculiarity of
  English. No known human language has a
  transformational process that would produce
  pairings like those in (4), (7) and (9), repeated
  below
• (4) a. The woman must leave. Woman the must
  leave?
• (7) a. Bill could be sleeping. Be Bill could
  sleeping?
• (9) a. The man who is here can swim. Is the man
  who here can swim?

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Crain and Nakayamas Study

• (13) Such incorrect forms as given in (4), (7)
  and (9) are not attested in any of the voluminous
  literature documenting the errors young children
  make in learning their language.
• (14) In fact, experiments were specifically
  designed to determine whether such incorrect
  forms are possible for children. Even 3-year old
  children have invariably shown that they are not.
  (Crain and Nakayama 1987)
• (15) The seemingly structure independent
  computational operations in (4), (7) and (9) are
  evidently not available to the human language
  faculty.

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Interrogative inversion process (Structure
dependent)

• The right generalization is a priori much more
  complicated, relying on structured hierarchical
  organization.
• (17) Beginning with a declarative, move the first
  auxiliary verb following the subject to the front
  to construct an interrogative.

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Poverty of Stimulus

• (18) Does the child have evidence that would
  determine the correct process and exclude the
  incorrect ones?
• (19) Example dialogues like those in (10) surely
  are not uniformly available to the child learning
  language.
• (20) Even more significantly, even if the child
  is exposed to (10), that alone does not rule out
  the other possibilities as options.
• (21) This line of reasoning is a model of the
  classic poverty of the stimulus argument for
  innateness of some aspect of language ability.

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Interrogative inversion some more complicated
facts

• (22) The man left.
• (23) Mary sleeps.
• Sentences, e.g. (22)-(23), with no auxiliary at
  all do have interrogative counterparts, but ones
  that initially seem to fall under entirely
  different mechanisms.
• Declarative Interrogative
• (24) a. Mary will sleep. a. Will Mary sleep?
• b. Mary sleeps. b. Does Mary sleep?
• Comparing (24a) and (24a), we see just the
  familiar inversion alternation.
• But comparing (24b) and (24b), instead we see a
  change in the form of the main verb (from sleeps
  to sleep), and the addition of a form of the
  auxiliary verb do in the pre-subject position.
  Yet native speakers have a strong intuition that
  the same process is involved. (24a) is to (24a)
  as (24b) is to (24b).

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Hidden causes

• Reconsidering (24b), it is as if the inflectional
  ending (carrying present tense and 3rd person
  singular agreement information) that appears on
  the main verb sleeps in (24b) has moved to the
  front of the sentence, much as the auxiliary verb
  in the other examples (like will in (24a))
  does and in that fronted position, it is
  realized as an inflectional ending on a sort of
  dummy verb do, that is, on a verb that makes no
  semantic contribution of its own to the sentence,
  but rather, is present for some purely structural
  reason.
• Chomskys breakthrough was the insight that the
  tense/ agreement morpheme in English
  syntactically is an autonomous entity, even
  though it is invariably realized as a bound
  morpheme. It is available for transformational
  manipulation just as much as, say a modal
  auxiliary is.

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Need for Abstract underlying structure.

• Implementation of the above insight requires a
  notion of abstract underlying structure.
• Apart from interrogative inversion process there
  are three other phenomena displaying the same
  abstract pattern such as Negation, Emphasis and
  Verb phrase Ellipsis
• NEGATION
• (25) John left John didnt leave.
• John should leave. John shouldnt leave.
• John has left. John hasnt left.
• John is leaving. John isnt leaving.

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Emphasis and Verb Phrase Ellipsis

• EMPHASIS
• (26) John left. John did leave.
• John should leave. John should leave.
• John has left. John has left.
• John is leaving. John is leaving.
• VERB PHRASE ELLIPSIS
• (27) John left. Mary did too.
• John should leave. Mary should too.
• John has left. Mary has too.
• John is leaving. Mary is too.

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An even more hidden cause

• (28) a. She worked.
• b.    She works.
• (29) a. They worked.
• b. They work.
• In the present tense, except for the third person
  singular form, there is no apparent morpheme on
  the verb at all. The verb in (29b) is
  indistinguishable from the uninflected citation
  form.

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The Zero Morpheme and the underlying structure

• An alternative we did not consider was to
  eliminate the zero morpheme and to state simply
  that no affix occurs if the subject is not third
  person singular. (Chomsky 1957, p. 64)
• (30) They work Do they work?
• (31) They dont work.
• (32) They do work.
• (33) We work. They do too.
• The reason for rejecting that alternative out of
  hand was that it would have substantially
  complicated the system with no concomitant
  benefit.

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References

• Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words.
• Chomsky (1957) Syntactic Structures. Mouton
  Co., The Hauge, Netherlands.
• Chomsky (1981) Lectures on Government and
  Binding. Foris Publications. Dordrecht Holland.
• Chomsky (2004) Three factors in language design
  (ms)
• Crain and Nakayama (1987) "Structure Dependence
  in Grammar Formation." Language, 63(3)
• De Saussure, F. (1916) A Course in General
  Linguistics. Philosophical Library New York.

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Thank you