Syntax
Syntax seeks to characterize grammars of particular languages and how they differ, to describe the universal properties that human grammars have as a matter of biological design, and to explain why the universal properties we discover have the particular character they do.
Birds fly, fish swim, humans speak. We have a capacity to combine expressions into unboundedly large linguistic structures (sentences and phrases) that carry a specific form and a specific meaning. As the number of such structures is in principle infinite, there must be recursive procedures that define these complex objects. Syntax studies these rule systems — grammars — and does so in three ways. It seeks to characterize grammars of particular languages and how they differ (e.g. how questions are formed in English versus Chinese); to describe the universal properties that human grammars have as a matter of biological design (e.g. why no human grammars have mirror image rules); and, most recently, to explain why the universal properties we discover have the particular character they do.
The syntax group engages in all three kinds of research, with special emphasis on the third, typically minimalist question. Empirically, the syntax group has done extensive work on case, agreement, ellipsis, movement and islands, control, anaphoric binding, applicative constructions, morphosyntax, linearization, binding and quantifier scope, among others. Furthermore, while we aim to be at the forefront of syntactic theory (particularly within the minimalist program), we constantly aim, in our classes and in our research, to find insight from earlier generative models developed over the past 60 years.
The Syntax/Semantics Lab meets once or twice a month, bringing together students, faculty, postdocs and visitors to discuss works in progress.
Primary Faculty
Tonia Bleam
Senior Lecturer, Director of Undergrad. Studies , Linguistics
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
1401 E Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Juan Uriagereka
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Professor, Linguistics
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
4225 Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Secondary Faculty
Valentine Hacquard
Professor, Linguistics
Affliliate Professor, Philosophy
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
1401 F Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Jeffrey Lidz
Professor and Chair, Linguistics
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
1413 Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Kate Mooney
Assistant Professor, Linguistics
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Colin Phillips
Professor, Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, Linguistics
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
1413 F Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Alexander Williams
Associate Professor, Linguistics
Associate Professor, Philosophy
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
1401 D Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Emeritus Faculty
Norbert Hornstein
Professor Emeritus, Linguistics
3416 G Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Maria Polinsky
Professor Emerita, Linguistics
Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
1417 A Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
ActivitiesExplore more of our research
Minding the Gap: Learning the surface forms of movement dependencies
Inferring the morphosyntactic footprint of violated distributional expectations.
Contributor(s): Naomi Feldman, Jeffrey LidzNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Laurel Perkins *19 (UCLA)
In acquiring a syntax, children must detect evidence for abstract structural dependencies that can be realized in variable ways in the surface forms of sentences. In What did David fix?, learners must identify a nonlocal relation between a fronted object of the verb (what) and the phonologically null ‘gap’ in canonical direct object position after the verb, where it is thematically interpreted. How do learners identify a nonadjacent dependency between an expression and something that has no overt phonological form? We propose that identifying abstract syntactic dependencies requires statistical inference over both overt linguistic material and unsatisfied grammatical expectations: noticing when a predicted argument for a verb is unexpectedly missing may serve as evidence for the gap of an argument movement dependency. We provide computational support for this hypothesis. We develop a learner that uses predicted but unexpectedly missing objects of verbs to identify possible gaps of object movement, and identifies which surface morphosyntactic properties of sentences are correlated with these possible movement gaps. We find that it is in principle possible for a learner using this mechanism to identify the majority of sentences with object movement in child-directed English, and that prior knowledge of which verbs require objects provides an important guide for identifying which surface distributions characterize object movement. This provides a computational account for why verb argument-structure knowledge developmentally precedes the acquisition of movement in a language like English. More broadly, these findings illustrate how statistical learning and learning from violated expectations can be combined to novel effect in the domain of language acquisition.
Read More about Minding the Gap: Learning the surface forms of movement dependencies
Syntactic Bootstrapping
A review of evidence for syntactic bootstrapping in the acquisition of verb meanings.
Author/Lead: Jeffrey Lidz, Elizabeth SwansonIn syntactic bootstrapping, children draw on syntactic information to constrain their hypotheses about word meanings. We review evidence for syntactic bootstrapping, focusing primarily on the acquisition of verb meanings. For verbs describing physical actions, children can use the argument structure from event descriptions to zero in on the verb meaning. For attitude verbs, which refer to mental states, the syntactic distribution is informative about their semantics. By making use of systematic syntax-semantics correspondences, syntactic bootstrapping provides a foothold for word learning when cues from the physical world are underinformative.
Choose me! Optionality in wh-fronting and copy deletion: Evidence for overt-covert movement in Valdôtain Patois
Silent high copies in Alpine Arpitan.
Author/Lead: Luisa SeguinIn this paper, I discuss new data on wh-movement in the Francoprovençal language Valdôtain Patois (ValPa) in support of overt-covert movement: overt movement with deletion of higher copies. wh-phrases in ValPa can either be fronted or occur clause-internally. Based on empirical evidence, I argue that ValPa clause-internal wh-phrases do not appear in-situ, but rather are displaced to the Low Left Periphery at the edge of vP. Furthermore, using evidence from intervention effects, binding, inverse scope, and parasitic gaps, I argue that clause internal wh-phrases do not remain in the Low Left Periphery, but overtly move to the position they take scope in. The different word-orders are then derived via a copy deletion mechanism, meaning that the optionality is not accounted for in narrow syntax.