Contrasting English and German Grammar: An Introduction to Syntax and Semantics

329 Pages·2014·2.533 MB·English

by  Sigrid Beck, Remus Gergel

Sigrid Beck, Remus Gergel
Contrasting English and German Grammar

Sigrid Beck, Remus Gergel
Contrasting English
and German Grammar
An Introduction to Syntax
and Semantics
De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN 978-3-11-030005-5
e-ISBN 978-3-11-034619-0
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Preface
In this book, we offer an introduction to the linguistic analysis of language
structure and meaning. It is important to us to develop these two aspects of
linguistic analysis in tandem, because we believe that syntax and semantics
should always go hand in hand. We try to keep technicalities to a bare min-
imum and concentrate on the application to data. The book is intended for
an audience with no particular formal background, whose motivation for
studying linguistics is empirical rather than theoretical. Our hope is that the
material covered in the book will interest students in syntactic and semantic
analysis by convincing them that it is impossible to understand language,
even fairly simple and obvious facts about a language, without it. We wrote
the book in the hope that it would help other lecturers to accomplish this.
The material covered in this book was developed over the years for the
purpose of teaching undergraduate syntax and semantics classes in the US,
Germany and Austria. The language under investigation is predominantly
English. Students entering our classes did not necessarily have a prior in-
terest in linguistics, nor any particular preparation.
We want to convince students that linguistic analysis is interesting, and
worth the effort of understanding it, by showing them all the facts that can
be explained with it but not without it. The book thus has a clear focus on
discussing interesting data. We chose the simplest forms of syntactic and
semantic analysis that would allow us to do this. The syntax is an unpreten-
tious version of Government & Binding theory (Chomsky 1981, Haegeman
1994, Haegeman and Guéron 1999). The semantics is a set theoretic system
of compositional interpretation. We sacrifice theoretical elegance and so-
phistication in the interest of simplicity. Our framework should be a good
conceptual preparation for a more intense and advanced study of syntax and
semantics.
There are numerous excellent introductions to syntax, as well as to se-
mantics. But there is no basic level textbook that introduces them both to-
gether. We want to provide such a textbook. We think that the purpose of
syntactic analysis is better understood by seeing how it is the input to se-
mantic interpretation. Conversely, compositional semantic analysis is im-
possible without a specification of the input structures. We present the two
as intertwined. The selection of phenomena discussed in this book is partly
guided by the consideration that they have to be interesting both in terms of
syntactic and semantic analysis.
We use contrast between languages as a central fact motivating syntactic
and semantic analysis. Our experience is that it helps students to understand
the purpose of detailed linguistic analysis when they see that things could
very well be different. Sometimes our contrastive perspective is broad, but
we in particular compare English to German. This is because we taught this
vi Preface
material mostly in English departments in German speaking parts of the
world, where this contrast is particularly relevant. Lecturers not especially
interested in the contrast between English and German may skip those sec-
tions, or skip some of them, or replace German with a language that suits
their needs better.
Our goal is to end up with a consistent theory of structure and meaning
covering a set of core phenomena in the English language (as well as Ger-
man and occasionally other languages). In order to implement such a
framework, we practically always draw from sources in the literature, and
hardly ever propose something new. Almost invariably, alternative analyses
to the one we implement are available. We do not wish to get bogged down
in a controversial literature discussion on the way to developing and ex-
plaining a workable analysis. Therefore, references to the literature and a
short review of the discussion in the literature are delegated to their own
short section at the end of each chapter. This should enable readers who
want to pursue a topic further to orient themselves, while not disrupting our
explanation of the issue at hand.
The overall structure of the book is as follows. Its first part is an intro-
duction to syntax and semantics. A system of syntactic analysis (phrase
structure, X' schema and movement rules) is developed and combined with
a compositional semantics (a set of interpretive rules that take syntactic
structures as their input and map them to their meanings). The object lan-
guage is English, but we do highlight points of crosslinguistic variation and
how the theory can capture them. The second part of the book investigates
in more depth a bunch of phenomena interesting in terms of the syntax-
semantics interface: quantifiers, scope, polarity, ellipsis, focus, tense and
aspect. English is contrasted explicitly with German, which differs in inter-
esting ways in these areas. The contrast emphasizes the need for theoretical
analysis since we can't understand the differences without it.
There are several ways the material can be mapped to courses. We have
in the past taught the first part as one course, taught 2-3 hours per week for
one semester. The second part was taught in various versions as a second
such course in a subsequent semester (mostly not all of the second part in
one semester). However, the material we cover should be adaptable to dif-
ferent situations.
It has taken us a long time to write this book. Over the years, our teach-
ers, colleagues and students have supported us. The book could not have
been written without their help. A special thank you to Angelika Kratzer
and Kyle Johnson, whose lecture notes on semantics and syntax, respec-
tively, provided the starting point of the enterprise.
We dedicate this book to Thilo Götz and Conceição Cunha.
Tübingen and Graz, March 2014
Contents
Preface v

Part I – Structure and Meaning:
An Introduction to Syntax and Semantics

Chapter I-1
Introduction to the field: Syntax and semantics 3
1. The scientific study of language 3
2. Goals and models in syntax and semantics 8
2.1. Syntax 8
2.2. Semantics 11
3. About this book 14
4. The structure of Part I 15
5. Selected references 16

Chapter I-2
Categories, phrases and phrase structure rules 18
1. Grammar makes reference to syntactic categories 18
1.1. Categories 18
1.2. Major lexical categories in English 19
1.3. Crosslinguistic variation in the properties of categories 20
2. Phrases 22
2.1. Noun phrases 22
2.2. First steps towards a formal model: phrase structure rules 24
2.3. Other phrases 27
3. Phrase Structure Grammar and phrase structures 30
3.1. Phrase Structure Grammar 30
3.2. Phrase structure trees and constituency 31
3.3. Structural ambiguities 33
4. Selected references 36

Chapter I-3
A systematic way of constructing phrases 38
1. NPs revisited: more internal structure 38
1.1. Intermediate levels: N’ 39
1.2. Complements vs. adjuncts 41
1.3. The new set of phrase structure rules 45
2. Evidence for intermediate projections within verb phrases 46
viii Contents
2.1. First evidence for V’ 46
2.2. Complements and adjuncts again 47
3. Generalizing from nouns and verbs: the X' schema 49
3.1. Adjectives and prepositions 49
3.2. The four players: heads, complements, adjuncts, and speci- 52
fiers
4. A loose end: subcategorization 53
5. Universal and variable aspects of syntactic structure 56
6. Selected references 59

Chapter I-4
Clause structure and movement 61
1. Clausal structure 61
1.1. Finding the head of the clause 61
1.2. Excursus: Mood selection in Romance and Balkan lan- 65
guages
2. Head movement 67
2.1. V-to-I movement and affix hopping 67
2.2. I-to-C movement 71
2.3. Differences in head movement: The case of French 74
2.4. An intermediate summary and a note on the model of 75
grammar
3. Wh-movement 77
3.1. Basic wh-questions 78
3.2. Wh-phrases 80
3.3. Embedded wh-questions 81
3.4. Complex wh-questions: an analysis and corroborating evi- 82
dence from German
4. Selected references 87

Chapter I-5
Goals and methods in semantics 89
1. What we have to account for 89
1.1. Elements of reasoning: contradiction and consequence 89
1.2. Several meanings: ambiguity 93
1.3. Method: compositionality 94
1.4. Semantic and pragmatic meaning 95
2. Tutorial on sets 96
2.1. Sets and elements 96
2.2. Relations between sets 97
2.3. Operations on sets 98
3. Selected references 100
Contents ix
Chapter I-6
Composing sentence meanings – first steps 102
1. Sentence meanings - some distinctions and a first composi- 102
tion rule
2. Meanings of parts of sentences: first steps 104
2.1. Referential NPs 105
2.2. Predicates 107
3. Selected references 110

Chapter I-7
Extending the theory 111
1. Step by step composition – some trivial steps 111
2. Modifiers 115
2.1. Intersective modifiers 115
2.2. Adjuncts with non-intersective meanings 117
3. Relations 118
3.1. Transitive verbs 118
3.2. Transfer to prepositions 120
3.3. Three-place relations 120
3.4. Interpretability 121
4. Selected references 122

Chapter I-8
NP Semantics 123
1. Definites: referential NPs with presuppositions 123
2. Quantifiers 130
2.1. Quantifiers: non-referential NPs 130
2.2. No simpler meaning is possible for quantified NPs 133
3. Scope ambiguity ambiguity 135
3.1. Interpreting negation 135
3.2. Negation and quantifiers 139
4. Selected references 142

Appendix
Syntactic and semantic rules from Part I 144
1. Syntax 144
1.1. PS rules 144
1.2. The generalized X' schema 145
1.3. Transformations 145
2. Rules of composition 146