States, Processes and Actions by Wallace Chafe

Syntactic description has usually taken the sentence to be its basic unit of organization.

The total human conceptual universe is dichotomized initially into two major areas. The area of the verb, embraces the states and events, and the area of the noun, embraces things. The verb will be assumed to be central and the noun peripheral.

In every language a verb is present systematically in all but a few marginal utterances, accompanied by one or more nouns. Utterances which semantically have no verb, like ‘oh’ or ‘ouch’ perhaps, seem best regarded as relics of the prehuman kind of communication in which the direct symbolization of unitary messages was the rule.

The nature of the verb determines what the rest of the sentence will be like, it determines nouns will accompany it, what the relation of these nouns to it will be and how these nouns will be semantically specified

‘The men laughed’

The verb dictates it must be accompanied by a noun, related to it as ‘agent’ specified as animate, and also as human.

‘The chair laughed’

What we do is to interpret chair as if it were abnormally animate, what we do not do is to interpret laugh in an abnormal way as if it were a different kind of activity, performed by inanimate objects. Any unit like past which is added semantically to a verb is added simultaneously to the entire sentence which is built around that verb. A noun is like a planet whose internal modifications affect it alone and not the solar system as whole.

States

1)       

a.    The wood is dry

b.    The rope is tight

c.    The dish is broken

d.    The elephant is dead

2)     

a.    The wood dried

b.    The rope tightened

c.    The dish broke

d.    The elephant died

3)     

a.    Michael run

b.    The men laughed

c.    Harriet sang

d.    The tiger pounced

4)     

a.    Michael dried the wood

b.    The men tightened the rope

c.    Harriet broke the dish

d.    The tiger killed the elephant

In set 1) a certain noun is said to be in a certain state or condition, the verb is specified as a state. The remaining sentences contain verbs which are not specified as states. As a rule, nonstates can be distinguished from states by the fact that they answer the question ‘What happened?’ ‘What’s happening?’ and so on. A nonstate is a ‘happening’ an event.

What happened?

The wood dried

The men laughed

Harriet broke the dish

But not (for example)

The wood was dry

A nonstate can occur in the progressive form which is not available to a state:

            The wood is drying

            The men are laughing

Harriet is breaking the dish

But not

            The wood is being dry.

To indicate that a verb may or may not be specified as a state, a rule of the following form can be used:

            V - →>state

The arrow has a broken shaft means that its application is optional, it has a double head means that it must be read is further specified as, and not is rewritten as, is replaced by, or the like.

Processes and actions

            Nonstates are not all of the same kind; in 2) the sentences seem to be dealing with processes, where the noun is said to have changed its state or condition, the verb has been specified as process. In 3) sentences express an action sentence to distinguish an action form a process is that an action sentence will answer the question ‘What did N do?’ where N is some noun.

            What did Harriet do?

                        She sang

But not (for example)

                        She died

In 4) the verb is a process and an action, as a process it involves a change in the condition of the noun, its patient; as an action it expresses what someone, its agent, does. The agent is still someone who does something, but the agent does it to something, the patient of a process:

What did Harriet do?

            She broke the dish

What happened to the dish?

Harriet broke it

Ambient

a.    It’s hot

b.    It’s late

c.    It’s Tuesday

The verb in each of these sentences is specified as a state. These sentences do not answer the question ‘What’s happening?’, nor can they be made progressive, they cover the total environment.

____________     l                           l l                       pat   V                        N    state	The wood is dry	____________     l                           l l                       pat   V                  N  process	The wood dried
____________     l                           l l                       agt   V                         N action	Harriet sang	________              l                  l          l              agt  ____l____       N     l                  l     l               Pat V                  N Process action	Michael dried the wood
V State ambient	It’s hot	V Action ambient	It’s rainig

Charles Fillmore's theories: Case Grammar and Frame Semantics.

Charles J. Fillmore

Charles J. Fillmore was born on 1929. He is an American linguist and professor at the University of California. He has been a great influence in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics, and was one of the founders of cognitive linguistics. He developed the theories of Case Grammar and Frame Semantics. 

Case grammar is a system of linguistic analysis, focusing on the link between the valence (number of subjects, objects, etc.) of a verb and the grammatical context it requires.  This theory analyzes the surface syntactic structure of sentences by studying the combination of deep cases (Agent, Object, Benefactor, Location or Instrument) which are required by a specific verb. Fillmore explains that each verb selects a certain number of deep cases which form its case frame. Thus, a case frame describes important aspects of semantic valency, of verbs, adjectives and nouns. A fundamental hypothesis of case grammar is that grammatical functions, such as subject or object, are determined by the deep, semantic valence of the verb, which finds its syntactic correlate in such grammatical categories as Subject and Object.

Frame semantics is a theory that links linguistic semantics and encyclopedic knowledge. It’s a further development of case grammar. The basic idea is that one cannot understand the meaning of a single word without access to all the essential knowledge that relates to that word. Another often cited example of Fillmore clearly demonstrating the above thesis is the difference in meaning between the following two sentences:

(1) I spent three hours on land this afternoon.

(2) I spent three hours on the ground this afternoon.

The background scene for the first sentence is a sea voyage while the second sentence refers to an interruption of an air travel. This leads to understand that a word activates, or evokes, a frame of semantic knowledge relating to the specific concept it refers to.

In Frame semantics, a semantic frame is defined as a coherent structure of concepts that are related such that without knowledge of all of them, one does not have complete knowledge of one of the either. Frames are evoked, among other things, by words as the semantic conceptual content of the word activates the frame of encyclopedic meaning that is needed for the understanding of that word.

While originally only being applied to lexemes, frame semantics has now been expanded to grammatical constructions and other larger and more complex linguistic units and has more or less been integrated into construction grammar as the main semantic principle.

Fillmore is currently working on FrameNet. FrameNet is a project housed at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California which produces an electronic resource based on a theory of meaning called frame semantics. FrameNet reveals for example that the sentence "John sold a car to Mary" essentially describes the same basic situation (semantic frame) as "Mary bought a car from John", just from a different perspective. A semantic frame can be thought of as a conceptual structure describing an event, relation, or object and the participants in it. The FrameNet lexical database contains around 1,200 semantic frames, 13,000 lexical units (a pairing of a word with a meaning; polysemous words are represented by several lexical units) and over 190,000 example sentences.

Activity

Clase de Gramatica Transformacional

Generative Semiotic

THE BASIS OF TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR

GRAMMAR: SYNTACTIC VIEW

Transformational grammar grew out of a linguist’s concern with what he called “deep” structure.

The structuralists’ major contribution to sentence-level analysis was  a cutting  and labeling  procedure called immediate constituent analysis.

Chomsky’s transformational-generative theory has come to be known simply as transformational grammar.

A transformational grammar has three major kinds of rules: syntactic rules, which specify the deep structure and then transform it into a surface structure; semantic rules, which provide an interpretation for the sentence; and phonological rules, which specify information necessary in pronouncing the sentence.

Syntactic rules: Deal primarily with word order, agreement, and word inflection.

The model of syntactic component of grammar; is a model which will produce strings of words very much like English sentences.  It has two major parts: 1) a set of phrase structure rules, plus lexicon; and 2) a set of transformational rules. The phrase structure rules and lexicon provide the deep structure. The transformational rules produce surface structure, a string ready to be pronounced or written as an actual sentence.

Ex.- a + student + paint + PAST + the + picture

THE SYNTICATIC COMPONENT OF A TRASNFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR

PHRASE STRUCTURE RULES AND LEXICON

1) Divide the sentence. Ex.- The astronaut can walk.       The astronaut | can walk.

2) Make a diagram of the constituent parts.

 

3) Represent abstractly as follows:

Phrase structure rules build up sentences by specifying the basic parts in increasingly great detail.

Lexicon is something like a dictionary.

 

TRANSFORMATIONS AND THE STRUCTURES OF THE AUXILIARY

The transformationalists’ contribution: generalizations about the basic structure of the English auxiliary.

1. The first auxiliary word is always in the present or the past tense form.

2. If a form of HAVE occurs in the auxiliary, the next word will be in the present participle form.

3. If a form of BE occurs in the auxiliary, the next word will be in the present participle form.

4. The order of the auxiliary words is invariable: the modal comes first, then the HAVE auxiliary, and last the BE auxiliary.

CURRENT TRENDS IN TRASNFORMATIONAL THEORY

TRANSFORMATIONAL SEMANTICS

KATZ AND FODOR’S SEMANTICS

In 1963, the trasnformationalists Jorrold J. Katz and Jerry Fodor constructed a semantic theory to explain how a speaker of any language assigns semantic interpretation to sentences

According to Katz and Fodor, the semantic component of a grammar would include a dictionary with entries like the following:

(Semantic markers): they indicate broad classes of semantic information.

[Distinguishers]: they convey quite specific information about the word in the entry.

FILLMORE’S CASE GRAMMAR

In 1966 and 1967, Charles Fillmore proposed that “the grammatical notion of case deserves a place in the base component of every language.”

To Fillmore, case means underlying semantic relationship between a nominal and its verbal, or predicator, which may be a verb, adjective or noun.

CASES:

Agent (A): The case of the animate instigator of the action or state identified by the predicator.

Experiencer (E): The case of the animate being affected by the action or stated identified by the predicator.

Intrument (I): The case of the inanimate force, object, or cause involved in the action or state identified by the predicator.

.Object (O): The case limited essentially to things which are contained, which move or undergo change identified by the predicator.

Source (So):  he case of the origin or starting point of the action or state identified by the predicator.

Goal (G): The case of the end point of objective of the action or state identified by the predicator.

Location (L): The case of the spatial orientation of the action or state identified by the predicator.

Time (T): The case that specifies the time of the action or state identified by the predicator.

GENERATIVE SEMANTICS

James D. McCawley concluded that Chomsky’s deep syntactic level was an artificial level between the semantic deep structure and the surface structure. McCawley proposed instead that a single set of transformations connects a semantic representation of a sentence with its surface structures.

McCawley and the neo-transformationalists hold that the generative power of the language resides in its semantic system. This theory is called generative semantics.

Noam Chomsky, Life and Work

Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist political critic and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) at MIT. In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books, and one of the eight most cited source.

Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.  Also he has become well known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy, state capitalism and the mainstream news media.

Some days ago, April 16, 2013 according to News sources Noam Chomsky criticized Germany of creating a state of economic slave and psychological stress to Greece.

Linguistics

He challenges the Structural Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure with the introduction of Transformational grammar or generative grammar, in which transformation may be understood as relations between sentences, and these may not just manipulate the surface strings, but the concrete syntax tree or parse tree related to them, making of it a tree system.

The two main basic concepts once were deep structure and surface structure in his first work, in more recent Chomsky’s work he introduce two additional levels of representation: Logical form and Phonetic Form, and finally in the 90’s the first two disappear in a work called “Minimalism” and the last two remained as the only levels of representation.

Perhaps his most influential contribution is the claim that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" or "creativity" of language.

Chomsky also introduced two central ideas to the grammatical theories:

1.    Competence and performance

2.    A descriptively adequate grammar for a particular language defines the infinite set of grammatical sentences in that language. Explanatory adequacy has the additional property that it gives an insight into the underlying linguistic structures in the human mind.

The Chomsky hierarchy

It consists of four levels:

1.    Type-0 grammars, unrestricted grammars, include all grammars.

2.    Type-1 grammars, generate context-sensitive languages

3.    Type-2 grammars, generate context-free languages

4.    Type-3 grammars, generate the regular languages

Each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before, some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar than modeling others.

Politics

Chomsky has stated that his "personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism", and he has praised libertarian socialism. His political views are often characterized in news accounts as "leftist" or "left-wing," and he has described himself as an anarcho-syndicalist. He is a member of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and the Industrial Workers of the World international union.

Chomsky has strongly criticized the foreign policy of the United States. He claims double standards in a foreign policy preaching democracy and freedom for all while allying itself with non-democratic and repressive organizations and states.

Chomsky opposes the U.S. global "war on drugs", claiming its language is misleading, and refers to it as "the war on certain drugs." He favors drug policy reform, in education and prevention rather than military or police action as a means of reducing drug use.

Media

Another focus of Chomsky's political work has been an analysis of mainstream mass media, its structures and constraints, and its perceived role in supporting big business and government interests. Edward S. Herman and Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) explores this topic in depth, presenting their "propaganda model" of the news media. According to this propaganda model, more democratic societies like the U.S. use subtle, non-violent means of control, unlike totalitarian systems, where physical force can readily be used to coerce the general population.

Psychology

For Chomsky, linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology; genuine insights in linguistics imply understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how children learn language and what, exactly, the ability to use language is.

Noam Chomsky Style aka MIT Gangnam Style

Chomsky Style word search game » online word search

Leonard Bloomfield

·         Mentalism and behaviourism  (thinking/acting)
a: outside speakers  (person speaking)
b: inside speakers (inner speech)
c: speech (speaking in public)

·         Linguistics is Talk about language
a, b and c are different but related

·         Old and new language about language
since we use a in c to describe a, b and c it is very difficult to know which information should be taken into consideration, taking b to c using a means we are only using a in c.

·         Subjective talk about language
b is expressed in ac but b was a reaction to ac

·         Objective talk about language
a expresses a by meanings of c:   a-c->a
b is an isolated factor that is only affected by c:  c->b

·         Language as response
diversity of speech means diversity of conditioning-histories

Mentalism is dualistic, recognizes mental and material data behaviorism only recognizes material data.

·         Leonard Bloomfield
presented his ideas in front of the linguistic society of America in his book 1933 Language.

·         The study, use and spread of language
Bloomfield said that the empirical science of language should study a real rather than a fancied object

·         The phoneme
can be described empirically (Phonetics deal with that)

·         Presuppositions
In every speech community some utterances are alike in form or meaning and we must act as though science had established the situations (causes) and responses (effects) that make up these meanings.

·         Phonetic Basis
kind of basis which may be modified
modifications presumes some standard
duration, stress, pitch, verbalization, labioverbalization and transition

·         Contrasts
it is differencess that matter

·         Meaning
reference:  c -> a (mediated by b):   c-b->a
sense: is a +- match among society-sense, speaker-sense and hearer-sense

·         Bloomfield on meanings
we can define names, most of this names are variations of scientific classifications

·         Basic and Modified Meaning
the meaning of a morpheme is a sememe, the meaning of an entire sentence can be changed by order, modulation, phonetic modification and selection of form combinations. A simple feature of grammatical arrangement is a taxeme; meaningful units of grammatical form are tagmemes and their meanings are called episememes (none of this words survived though).

·         Order
is the most important in languages

·         Parts of speech
some languages show a smaller number, seaming not parts but just sentences (like in Chinese)

·         Valid
logical representation of some familiar structure in language

·         Correct
truth is not popularly distinguished from validity, but validity can be viewed as subsuming true and correct

·         Suggestive symbols
formulations using parentheses and various kind of brackets

·         Dialects geography
speech-communities: both dialect and genetic relationship become clearer on a stimulus-response view of geographic and social contiguity

·         Borrowing
cultural contact, influence and evaluation

Actividad