Syntactic Structures Quotes

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

The first is that students have become increasingly less patient with the time it takes to understand the syntactically demanding sentence structures in denser texts and increasingly averse to the effort needed to go deeper into their analysis. The second is that student writing is deteriorating. I have, to be sure, heard this criticism of undergraduates as long as I have been teaching. The question is nevertheless important for every age to confront. In our epoch, we must ask whether current students’ diminishing familiarity with conceptually demanding prose and the daily truncating of their writing on social media is affecting their writing in more negative ways than in the past.

I would have liked to have warned Tony not to come around here," Bravo said. He uses the pluperfect of the subjunctive, Renzi thought. He was so tired these were the kind of thoughts that popped into his head, thoughts once typical for him, when he was in college and he used to spend his time analyzing grammatical forms and verbal conjugations. Sometimes he wouldn't understand what people were telling him because he'd get distracted analyzing syntactical structures as if he were a philologist enraged by the distorted uses of contemporary language. Recently it has been happening less frequently to him. But sometimes, when he was with a women and he liked her way of speaking, he'd suddenly want to sleep with her because he was so excited by her use of the perfect preterit indicative. As if the presence of the past in the present justified just about any passion.

With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume. Between the puzzlement and its summary abandonment, between the folds of waking consciousness and their subsequent limitation, is a possible city. Solitude, hotels, aging, love, hormones, alcohol, illness – these drifting experiences open it a little. Sometimes prolonged reading holds it ajar. Another’s style of consciousness inflects one’s own; an odd syntactic manner, a texture of embellishment, pause. A new mode of rest. I can feel physiologically haunted by a style. It’s why I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal, yet the impersonal inflection can persist outside the text, beyond the passion of readerly empathy, a most satisfying transgression that arrives only inadvertently, never by force of intention. As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all the odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself. This description tends towards a psychological interpretation of linguistics, but the experience is also spatial. I used to drive home from my lover’s apartment at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. This was Vancouver in 1995. A zone of light-industrial neglect separated our two neighbourhoods. Between them the stretched-out city felt abandoned. My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise studios, the pools of sulphur light, towards a low-key dereliction. I would feel pretty much free. I was a driver, not a pronoun, not a being with breasts and anguish. I was neither with the lover nor alone. I was suspended in a nonchalance. My cells were at ease. I doted on nothing.

Music psychology has been busy looking at the ways in which music might be similar to language, but Richman, Tannen, and others might be understood to be asking the inverse question, when is language processed musically? This question has been examined in terms of beat structure and intonation, but it might also be considered in terms of repetition structure: highly repetitive forms of language, such as chants and nursery rhymes, veer away from the typical syntactic and semantic modes of understanding speech, and toward modes of comprehension that are more characteristically musical—emotive, social, and holistic.

Reason, when understood ontologically, takes on an entirely different meaning from the one conventionally assigned to it. It takes on the extra “dimensions” of emotion, perception, intuition, desire and will. All of these are involved in the intricate nexus for providing sufficient reasons for actions. People who don’t understand our work keep reducing reason to one dimension, which means that our central point that reason is ontological and explains everything – including love, human error, insanity, and everything else that, according to the conventional treatment of reason, has nothing to do with reason – has completely escaped them. Reason, in our system, is both syntactic (structural) and semantic (meaningful). Its semantic aspect is what gives it the capacity to generate all the weird and wonderful things that average people do not associate with reason. They regard reason in strictly syntactic, machinelike terms. That is only one aspect of reason. It has many others.

Syntactic Structures and LSLT.

Noam Chomsky pointed out, the number of possible sentences is infinite in any language; there is no limit to the grammatical combination of words. Behaviorism cannot explain how, after relatively limited exposure to a mother tongue, young children acquire complex syntactic structures and begin to produce “correct” utterances never heard before, by themselves or by others. What’s more, they accomplish these amazing intellectual feats without being explicitly taught.

Instructions in the structure of L1 compound words which share Morphological Translation Equivalence with their counterparts in the target language would assist pre intermediate L2 learners in transferring knowledge of L1 compound types to comparable types in the target language (Zhang. et. al., 2010). Similar instructions in L1 derivational morphology would also give similar results, although derivational morphology is more complex and more difficult to be transferred. Teachers should also present the counterparts L2 affixes have in pupils’ L1 (e. g., suffix –able has suffixes baar, -lijk as its counterparts in Deutch language). Presenting the counterpart L2 affixes have in pupils’ L1 makes L2 affixes more detectable in the eyes of L2 learners and assists L2 learners in acquiring L2 affixes. Most importantly, providing the counterpart L2 suffixes have in pupils’ L1 assists L2 learners in transferring Knowledge of Syntactic Properties of their L1 Suffixes to their counterparts in the target language. In the third chapter we argued that L2 learners own high Knowledge of Syntactic Properties for L2 Suffixes, and, such high Knowledge of Syntactic Properties of L2 Suffixes has been enhanced by Morphological Translation Equivalence L2 suffixes share with their counterparts in pupils’ L1.

Where the Port-Royal Grammars of the seventeenth century (see below) proposed universal linguistic categories on the basis of those found in the Classical languages, the North American Descriptivists of the twentieth century celebrated linguistic relativity, i.e. the view that each language conceptualizes the world in its own way. The pendulum was to swing back in favour of universalism with the publication of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures in 1957 (see Chapter 8), heralding the emergence of the generative paradigm, which started from the belief that human beings are innately equipped to learn language, and that therefore at an underlying level all languages must be structurally similar.

LINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES Phonological: BASL signers are more likely to produce two-handed signs, use an overall larger signing space, and tend to produce more signs on the lower half of the face. Syntactical: A higher incidence of syntactic repetition appears in multiple studies of BASL signers. A study documented in 2011 also showed more frequent use of constructed dialogue and constructed action among Black signers. Lexical Variation: Some signs developed at Black Deaf schools diverge completely from standard ASL signs, mostly for everyday objects and activities discussed frequently by students. Linguists have also noticed an increase in lexical borrowing of words and idioms from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) among younger Black signers. Due to the prevalence of the oral method in white deaf education after the Milan Conference, many white deaf children were denied access to American Sign Language, and ASL was subjugated by spoken English. However, significantly fewer resources were dedicated to Black deaf education, leaving many Black Deaf schools to pursue manual language. As such, scholars note that some variations common in BASL, like a higher incidence of two-handed signs, are actually a preservation of the linguistic qualities of early ASL. (Jump to “ASL, origins of.”) NOTABLE PEOPLE Platt H. Skinner, abolitionist and founder of The School for Colored Deaf Dumb and Blind Children, circa 1858. (Jump to “Directory of U.S. Black Deaf Schools.”) Carl Croneberg, a Swedish-American Deaf linguist, was the first person to note differences between ASL and BASL in writing, as coauthor of the 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language on its Linguistic Principles (see also: William Stokoe). Dr. Carolyn McCaskill’s 2011 book, The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure, features data from a series of studies performed by McCaskill and her team, and is considered a foundational work in the field.

Even the Gospel of John, perhaps the most structurally and symbolically sophisticated religious text to have come down to us from late antiquity, is written in a Greek that is grammatically correct but syntactically almost childish (or perhaps I should say, “remarkably limpid”), and—unless its author was some late first-century precursor of Gertrude Stein—its stylistic limitations suggest an author whose command of the language did not exceed mere functional competence.

Research has shown that second-language readers rely heavily on vocabulary knowledge, and that a lack of vocabulary knowledge is the largest obstacle for second-language readers to overcome” (p. 154). Likewise, Haynes and Baker (1993) found that the main obstacle for L2 readers is not lack of reading strategies but rather insufficient vocabulary knowledge in English. Laufer and Sim (1985) list these areas in order of decreasing importance in reading ability in L2: knowledge of vocabulary, subject matter, discourse markers, and syntactic structure. In sum, Laufer and Sim find that vocabulary is most important, syntax least important.

The understanding of natural language evolution must incorporate also the fact that language is a cultural tool for community building. More intricate syntactic structures of the kind found in many modern languages, such as subordinate clauses, complex noun phrases, word-compounding and others, are not crucial for language and are later additions made for cultural reasons.

The feature of programs, that they are defined purely formally or syntactically, is fatal to the view that mental processes and program processes are identical. And the reason can be stated quite simply. There is more to having a mind then having formal or syntactical processes. Our internal mental states, by definition, have certain sorts of contents. If I am thinking about Kansas City or wishing that I had a cold beer to drink, in both cases my mental state has certain mental content in addition to whatever formal features it might have. That is, even if my thoughts occur to me in strings of symbols, there must be more to the thoughts then the abstract strings, because strings by themselves can't have any meaning. If my thoughts are to be about anything, then the strings must have a meaning which makes the thoughts about those things. In a word, the mind has more than syntax, it has semantics. The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is simply syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content. To illustrate this point, I have designed a thought experiment. Imagine a bunch of computer programmers have written a program that will enable a computer to simulate the understanding of Chinese. So for example, if the computer is given a question in chinese, it will match the question against its memory or data base, and produce appropriate answers to the questions in chinese. Suppose for the sake of argument that the computer's answers are as good as those of a native Chinese speaker. Now then, does the computer on the basis of this literally understand Chinese, in the way that Chinese speakers understand Chinese? Imagine you are locked in a room, and this room has several baskets full of chinese symbols. imagine that you don't understand a word of chinese, but that you are given a rule book in english for manipulating these chinese symbols. The rules specify the manipulations of the symbols purely formally, in terms of syntax, not semantics. So the rule might say: take a squiggle out of basket 1 and put it next to a squoggle from basket 2. Suppose that some other chinese symbols are passed into the room, and you are given futhter rules for passing chinese symbols out the room. Suppose, unknown to you, the symbols passed into the room are called 'questions' and your responses are called answers, by people outside the room. Soon, your responses are indistinguishable from native chinese speakers. there you are locked in your room shuffling symbols and giving answers. On the basis of the situation as it parallels computers, there is no way you could learn chinese simply by manipulating these formal symbols. Now the point of the story is simply this: by virtue of implementing a formal computer from the point of view of an outside observer, you behave exactly as if you understood chinese, but you understand nothing in reality. But if going through the appropriate computer program for understanding CHinese is not enough, then it is not enough to give any other computer an understanding of chinese. Again, the reason for this can be stated simply: a computer has a syntax, but no semantics.

1. brains cause mind Now of course, that proposition is really too crudely put. What we mean by that is that mental processes we consider to constitute a mind are caused by processes going on inside the brain. But let's say it in three words: brains cause minds. And this is just a fact about how brains work. 2. Syntax is not sufficient for semantics That proposition is a conceptual truth. It just articulates our distinction between the notion of what is purely formal and what has content. Now, to these two propositions, lets add two more: 3. Computer programs are entirely defined by their formal, or syntactical structure That proposition, I take it, is true by definition - it is part of what we mean by the notion of computer programs. 4. Minds have mental contents - specifically, they have semantic contents. And that, I take it, is just an obvious fact about how our minds work. My thoughts and beliefs and desires are about something, or they reference something, or they concern states of affairs in the world; and they do that because their contents direct them at these states of affairs naturally. Now, from these four premises, we can draw our first conclusion; it follows obviously from premises 2, 3, and 4. Conclusion 1. No computer program by itself is sufficient to give a system a mind; programs in short are not minds, and they are not by themselves sufficient for having minds. (See original paper for elaboration) Conclusion 2. The way that brain functions cause minds cannot be solely in virtue of running a computer program. (See original article) Conclusion 3. Anything else that caused minds would have to have causal powers at least equivalent to those of the brain. Conclusion 4. For any artefact that we may build which had mental states equivalent to human mental states, the implimentation of a computer program would not by itself be sufficient, but rather, the artefact would have to have the powers equivalent to the powers of the human brain.

Table 6.1 Skill Categories Skill Category Description Comment Determining the Meaning of Words (Word Meaning) Student determines the meaning of words in context by recognizing known words and connecting them to prior vocabulary knowledge. Student uses a variety of skills to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words, including pronouncing words to trigger recognition, searching for related words with similar meanings, and analyzing prefixes, roots, and suffixes. This skill category includes more than just lexical access, as word identification and lexical recall are combined with morphological analyses. Understanding the Content, Form, and Function of Sentences (Sentence Meaning) Student builds upon an understanding of words and phrases to determine the meaning of a sentence. Student analyzes sentence structures and draws on an understanding of grammar rules to determine how the parts of speech in a sentence operate together to support the overall meaning. Student confirms that his or her understanding of a sentence makes sense in relationship to previous sentences, personal experience, and general knowledge of the world. This skill category focuses on the syntactical, grammatical, and semantic case analyses that support elementary proposition encoding and integration of propositions across contiguous sentences. Understanding the Situation Implied by a Text (Situation Model) Student develops a mental model (i.e., image, conception) of the people, things, setting, actions, ideas, and events in a text. Student draws on personal experience and world knowledge to infer cause-and-effect relationships between actions and events to fill in additional information needed to understand the situation implied by the text. This skill category is a hybrid of the explicit text model and the elaborated situation model described by Kintsch (1998). As such, category three combines both lower-level explicit text interpretation and higher-level inferential processes that connect the explicit text to existing knowledge structures and schemata. Understanding the Content, Form, and Function of Larger Sections of Text (Global Text Meaning) Student synthesizes the meaning of multiple sentences into an understanding of paragraphs or larger sections of texts. Student recognizes a text’s organizational structure and uses that organization to guide his or her reading. Student can identify the main point of, summarize, characterize, or evaluate the meaning of larger sections of text. Student can identify underlying assumptions in a text, recognize implied consequences, and draw conclusions from a text. This skill category focuses on the integration of local propositions into macro-level text structures (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978) and more global themes (Louwerse & Van Peer, 2003). It also includes elaborative inferencing that supports interpretation and critical comprehension, such as identifying assumptions, causes, and consequence and drawing conclusions at the level of the situation model. Analyzing Authors’ Purposes, Goals, and Strategies (Pragmatic Meaning) Student identifies an author’s intended audience and purposes for writing. Student analyzes an author’s choices regarding content, organization, style, and genre, evaluating how those choices support the author’s purpose and are appropriate for the intended audience and situation. This skill category includes contextual and pragmatic discourse analyses that support interpretation of texts in light of inferred authorial intentions and strategies.

This is, in general, what iconicity in language is: a metaphorical image-mapping in which the structure of the mean- ing is understood in terms of the structure of the form of the language presenting that meaning. Such mappings are possible because of the existence of image- schemas, such as schemas characterizing bounded spaces (with interiors and exte- riors), paths, motions along those paths, forces, parts and wholes, centers and pe- ripheries, and so on. When we speak of the “form of language,” we are under- standing that form in terms of such image-schemas. Thus, for example, one aspect of sentence structure is given in terms of parts and wholes, that is, the parts of speech and the higher-level constituents containing them. Other aspects of a sen- tence’s structure are given in terms of balance, proximity, subordination, sequence, and so on. The schematic images that allow us to understand such syntactic no- tions are also used in conceptual structure. It is for this reason that image- schematic correspondences between form and meaning are possible. The mech- anism that relates them is the same mapping mechanism used in metaphor.