4. Linguistic data in morphosyntax
4.4. What is grammaticality?
The aim of a generative grammar is to generate all and only the grammatical sentences of a language. Since the notion of grammaticality is basic to syntactic theory, it is important to distinguish it from notions with which it is easily confused.
If you are collecting data on a language, and a speaker tells you that a sentence seems odd, they don’t usually know why. It is up to the linguist to figure out why!
Grammaticality vs. making sense
First and foremost, ‘is grammatical’ is not the same thing as ‘makes sense.’ The sentences in (1) all ‘make sense’ in the sense that it is easy to interpret them. Nevertheless, as indicated by the asterisks, they are not grammatical.
| (1) | a. | *Is our children learning? |
| b. | *Me wants fabric. | |
| c. | *To where are we be taking thou, sir? | |
| d. | *The introduction explained that “the Genoese people, besides of hard worker, are good eater too, and even ‘gourmand,’ of that honest gourmandise which will not drive a man to hell but which is, after all, one of the few pleasures that mankind can enjoy in this often sorrowful world.” |
Conversely, sentences can be grammatical, but not ‘make sense.’ Two examples are given in (2). Since the sentences are grammatical, they aren’t preceded by an asterisk. Their semantic anomaly can be indicated, if desired, by a prefixed pound sign (hash mark).
| (2) | a. | #Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. (Chomsky 1965: 149) | – cf. Revolutionary new ideas appear infrequently. |
| b. | #I plan to travel there last year. | – cf. I plan to travel there next year. |
Grammaticality vs. difficulty of processing
Second, ‘grammatical’ must be distinguished from ‘easily processable by human beings.’ This is because it turns out that certain well-motivated simple grammatical operations can be applied in ways that result in sentences that are virtually impossible for human beings to process. For instance, it is possible in English to modify a noun with a relative clause, and sentences containing nouns that are modified in this way, like those in (3), are ordinarily perfectly acceptable and easily understood. (Here and in the following examples, the relative clauses are bracketed and the modified noun is underlined.)
| (3) | a. | The mouse [that the cat chased] escaped. |
| b. | The cat [that the dog scared] jumped out the window. |
But now notice what happens when we modify the noun within the relative clause in (3a) with a relative clause of its own.
| (4) | The mouse [that the cat [that the dog scared] chased] escaped. |
Even though (4) differs from (3a) by only four additional words and a single additional level of embedding, the result is virtually uninterpretable without pencil and paper. The reason is not that relative clause modification can’t apply more than once, since the variant of (3a) in (5), which contains exactly the same words and is exactly as long, is perfectly fine (or at any rate much more acceptable than (4)).
| (5) | The mouse escaped [that the cat chased] [that the dog scared]. |
The reason that (4) is virtually uninterpretable is also not that it contains recursive structure (the relative clause that modifies mouse contains the relative clause that modifies cat). After all, the structures in (6) are recursive, with up to 5 levels of embedding, yet they don’t throw us for a loop the way that (4) does.
| (6) | a. | She won. |
| b. | The Times reported that [she won]. | |
| c. | John told me that [the Times reported that [she won]]. | |
| d. | I remember distinctly that [John told me that [the Times reported that [she won]]]. | |
| e. | They don’t believe that [I remember distinctly that [John told me that [the Times reported that [she won]]]]. | |
| f. | I suspect that [they don’t believe that [I remember distinctly that [John told me that [the Times reported that [she won]]]]]. |
Example (4) is unacceptable not because it is ungrammatical, but because of certain limitations on human short-term memory (Chomsky and Miller 1963: 286, Miller and Chomsky 1963: 471). Specifically, notice that in the (relatively) acceptable (5), the subject of the main clause the mouse doesn’t have to “wait” (that is, be kept active in short-term memory) for its verb escaped since the verb is immediately adjacent to the subject. The same is true for the subjects and verbs of each of the relative clauses (the cat and chased, and the dog and scared). In (4), on the other hand, the mouse must be kept active in memory, waiting for its verb escaped, for the length of the entire sentence. What is even worse, however, is that the period during which the mouse is waiting for its verb escaped overlaps the period during which the cat must be kept active, waiting for its verb chased. What makes (4) so difficult, then, is not the mere fact of recursion, but that two relations of exactly the same sort (the subject-verb relation) must be kept active in memory at the same time. In none of the other relative clause sentences is such double activation necessary. For instance, in (3a), the mouse must be kept active for the length of the relative clause, but the subject of the relative clause (the cat) needn’t be kept active since it immediately precedes its verb chased.
Sentences like (3) and (4) are often referred to as centre-embedding structures, and the dependencies between the subjects and their verbs are said to be nested.
The mouse that the cat chased escaped.
| |_____| |
|____________________________|
The mouse that the cat that the dog scared chased escaped.
| | |_____| | |
| |_________________________| |
|________________________________________________|
By contrast, the corresponding dependencies in (5) are not nested.
The mouse escaped that the cat chased.
|________| |______|
The mouse escaped that the cat chased that the dog scared.
|________| |______| |_____|
Grammaticality across contexts
A final important point to bear in mind is that any sentence is an expression that is paired with a particular interpretation. Grammaticality is always determined with respect to a pairing of form and meaning. This means that a particular string can be grammatical under one interpretation, but not under another. For instance, (7) is ungrammatical under an subject-object-verb (SOV) interpretation (that is, when the sentence is interpreted as Sue hired Tom).
| (7) | Sue Tom hired. |
Example (7) is grammatical, however, under an object-subject-verb (OSV) interpretation (that is, when it is interpreted as Tom hired Sue). On this interpretation, Sue receives a special intonation marking contrast, which would ordinarily be indicated in writing by setting off Sue from the rest of the sentence by a comma. In other words, the grammaticality of (7) depends on whether its interpretation is analogous to (8a) or (8b).
| (8) | a. | *She him hired. |
| b. | ✓Her, he hired. (The other job candidates, he didn’t even call back.) |
Related to this idea is that context matters. For example, sentence (7), even though it has a grammatical interpretation, is a fairly odd way to word that sentence. However, in some contexts, it sounds more natural than in other contexts. Sometimes it is fairly easy to think of a context where a sentence is grammatical, but other times it can be quite tricky.
Check yourself!
References and further resources
Attribution
This section is adapted from the following CC BY NC source:
↪️ Santorini, Beatrice, and Anthony Kroch. 2007. The syntax of natural language: An online introduction. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook
Comedy and satirical linguistics
🎉 Bakery, Yreka. 2006. New speech disorder linguists contracted discovered! Speculative Grammarian CLI(2). https://specgram.com/CLI.2/03.bakery.disorder.html
Academic sources
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam, and George A. Miller. 1963. Introduction to the formal analysis of natural languages. In R. Duncan Luce, Robert R. Bush, and Eugene Galanter, eds., Handbook of mathematical psychology, vol. 2, 269–321. New York: Wiley.
Miller, George A., and Noam Chomsky. 1963. Finitary models of language users. In R. Duncan Luce, Robert R. Bush, and Eugene Galanter, eds., Handbook of mathematical psychology, vol. 2, 419–491. New York: Wiley.
