Good syntax books

Discussion of natural languages, or language in general.
zompist
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Re: Good syntax books

Post by zompist »

Ooh, I wish I'd had that resource on Old Chinese before. Oh well, there are always 2nd editions.

It's tricky... one thing I don't like about some of the syntax textbooks I've read is the foreign language examples! The thing is... I believe in doing syntax, not just learning a particular formalism. That means not taking things for granted, checking the evidence, learning to make and evaluate syntactic arguments. And it's very hard to do syntax on a language you don't speak natively.

So, not to pick on Carnie, but he tries to motivate some X-bar movements using data from Irish and French. But, a) how do you evaluate those if you don't know both languages well, and b) how does that prove that his analysis is correct for English?

But I hear you, and I am providing non-English examples (hopefully some really interesting ones) to show non-English syntactic data.

I have plenty of neat facts generative grammarians have found, but I can't say I have a lot of things only generative grammar can explain. I'd be happy to hear suggestions. The one area I've found GG essential for in my own conlangs is in explaining subordination (of all sorts). (In natlangs, it's hard to explain English do-support, or Mandarin pivot sentences, without it.)

Vijay
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Re: Good syntax books

Post by Vijay »

zompist wrote:one thing I don't like about some of the syntax textbooks I've read is the foreign language examples!
This is actually something I don't like about a lot of linguistic data sets in general, even in homework assignments. There's no verification of the data; you're just expected to take its veracity for granted.

jmcd
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Re: Good syntax books

Post by jmcd »

That's an interesting perspective and it is a worthwhile argument. I prefer to have them though, for the exposure to details of other languages.
Maybe a way to get both would be to add information about potential further reading on the topic?

Vijay
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Re: Good syntax books

Post by Vijay »

Unfortunately, making sure to have reliable data is tricky, just in general. This reminds me that my dad often takes issues with Malayalam syntax examples. It's also just...lol why does one of the most popular syntax examples for Malayalam seem to be 'the kid pinched the elephant'? (Not to mention the elephant tickling the kid and the kid selling the elephant to his mom [apparently mistranslated as "Mother"]).

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Re: Good syntax books

Post by jmcd »

Is his issue with the mistranslation or the choice of sentence or both or something else?

What does he think about 'Dog bites man?'

Mistranslating 'mother' instead of 'mom' isn't that bad, but it does change the tone, like it does in the English translation of Albert Camus' L'étranger (The Outsider), where 'maman est morte' is translated as' mother died', when it would more accurately be 'mum died'.

Vijay
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Re: Good syntax books

Post by Vijay »

His issue isn't really with that specific sentence. I just think it's weird that people use that sentence so much for some odd reason. He usually disagrees with Mohanan's grammaticality judgments.

Regarding "Mother": the issue here isn't translating it as 'Mother' vs. 'mom'; the issue was that the translation given for the sentence is 'the child sold the elephant to Mother', which is odd since what it actually means, at least according to my dad, is 'the childi sold the elephant to hisi own mother'.

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Re: Good syntax books

Post by jmcd »

Ah so the translation makes it appear to be a character called 'Mother' rather than an actual mother? I hypothesise that this example comes from a nineteenth century grammar. Could you confirm or deny or otherwise give information relating to said hypothesis?

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Re: Good syntax books

Post by Vijay »

I think it's from the seventies.

EDIT: Nope, either 1982 or 1983.
EDIT2: The issue is more with the fact that it's not specified in the translation that the "mother" in the sentence has to be the kid's own mother. If it was someone else's mother (even the speaker's mother), the phrasing in Malayalam would have to be different.

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