00:00:00
welcome to a new series on Linguistics
00:00:02
syntax uh this won't necessarily assume
00:00:05
any knowledge of syntax in my first
00:00:07
course but it would be good to know a
00:00:09
little bit of syntax so maybe checking
00:00:10
out the syntax sections in introduction
00:00:12
to Linguistics would be a good start but
00:00:14
hopefully this series will start from a
00:00:16
base where um even if you're new to
00:00:18
syntax you'll be able to understand this
00:00:20
so let's just jump right into it with an
00:00:22
introductory lecture and some
00:00:24
information about glossing okay so what
00:00:26
is syntax well syntax is the study of
00:00:30
how words group together in language uh
00:00:32
some people would say syntax is just the
00:00:34
study of sentence structure that's also
00:00:37
important but really one of the key
00:00:39
Parts is that we deal with words so if
00:00:41
you do morphology you'll break up words
00:00:44
into their part like simply is simple
00:00:47
plus this ly suffix we don't deal with
00:00:49
that we just treat it as a word and we
00:00:51
see how it moves together uh the second
00:00:54
big important part about syntax and
00:00:56
really Linguistics in general is that we
00:00:58
are descriptive
00:01:00
not prescriptivists and this means that
00:01:03
we observe language and we study how
00:01:07
people use it we don't impose our
00:01:09
grammar on people like prescriptivist do
00:01:11
we don't say there is um certain ways
00:01:14
you should talk we just take a look at a
00:01:16
population we say hey look if everyone
00:01:18
in this English-speaking population
00:01:20
speaks like this then it's going to be
00:01:24
okay and what do I mean by this well
00:01:26
let's take a look at some sentences and
00:01:28
ask whether or not they're grammatical
00:01:31
and these are descriptivist grammatical
00:01:33
not prescriptivist grammatical so the
00:01:35
first sentence we ain't the ones who did
00:01:37
that now this is a perfectly fine
00:01:40
sentence we ain't the ones who did that
00:01:43
uh the person speaking wants to say we
00:01:45
aren't the people who did that uh a't
00:01:48
isn't really traditional English but
00:01:50
when we hear a native English speaker
00:01:52
say it it doesn't sound terrible it
00:01:55
sounds okay and for this it's
00:01:57
grammatical so we just don't put
00:01:59
anything beside the sentence I'll put a
00:02:01
check mark here to say oh it's
00:02:02
grammatical but usually when we write
00:02:03
sentences if there isn't anything it's
00:02:06
grammatical uh what about the second
00:02:08
sentence crumple this milk or the lazy
00:02:11
potato will fire the camera okay so this
00:02:14
doesn't make any sense but it is
00:02:18
grammatical so uh the meaning is weird
00:02:21
so we put a hashtag by it but it follows
00:02:26
regular sentence patterns crumple this
00:02:28
milk well that's like saying verb this
00:02:32
noun or some noun will verb some other
00:02:37
noun so the sentence structure is good
00:02:40
the grammatical structure is good it
00:02:42
just doesn't make any sense now let's
00:02:45
compare this to sentence three where I
00:02:47
do go this is bad we put an asterisk by
00:02:50
it to signal that it's bad it's
00:02:52
grammatically bad because this I should
00:02:56
actually be in this position between do
00:02:59
and go so it should be where do I go not
00:03:02
where I do go so this is a word order
00:03:04
difference and this is
00:03:06
ungrammatical okay we'll see more
00:03:08
examples of ungrammatical sentences as
00:03:10
we go on uh but what I really want you
00:03:13
to know about whether or not it's
00:03:15
grammatical um first of all only native
00:03:19
speakers of some language are really
00:03:21
okay to give grammatical judgments this
00:03:23
is kind of controversial when we say
00:03:24
native English we mean you've been using
00:03:26
it regularly since about the age of six
00:03:30
uh and if a native English speaker says
00:03:33
hey yeah that sounds okay then we'll
00:03:34
usually say it's okay there is some
00:03:37
cases where people argue about whether a
00:03:39
sentence is grammatical or not and for
00:03:41
those sentences we put a question mark
00:03:43
and that's when some people say it's
00:03:45
okay some people say it's bad if we
00:03:47
cover some uh material with Korean
00:03:50
reflexives later maybe we'll see some of
00:03:52
that because those can be kind of
00:03:53
interesting um but for now let's take a
00:03:56
look at how we do syntax in other
00:03:58
languages okay so it's not all just
00:04:01
English every language has its own
00:04:03
syntax and anyone can study any
00:04:06
language's syntax so to do this we have
00:04:09
three lines in our syntax at all of our
00:04:13
syntactic examples so for instance we
00:04:15
can call this one one and there are
00:04:17
three lines to example one first is the
00:04:20
literal sentence so this is French I
00:04:23
cannot pronounce French so I won't
00:04:24
bother uh the second line is the gloss
00:04:28
and this is the important part
00:04:30
so in a gloss the words are always lined
00:04:34
up to their meaning so J is I ne well is
00:04:40
just a negative marker
00:04:43
okay is eat and then as we go on we can
00:04:47
see that um J I think it's j is never
00:04:50
the of and then we have meat so uh the
00:04:54
question is well what does the sentence
00:04:56
mean well the third line is the
00:04:58
translation so this means I never eat
00:05:00
meat but if we take a look at French
00:05:03
word order the sentence would say I
00:05:05
negative marker eat never of meat so we
00:05:08
can see there's a bit of a word order
00:05:10
difference for example eat comes before
00:05:15
never okay um we say of meat instead of
00:05:20
just meat so we had this of marker okay
00:05:24
uh so these are some differences we can
00:05:26
see in French and in order to study
00:05:30
uh these other um syntactic structures
00:05:34
in other languages we really at this
00:05:36
stage hope that somebody else has
00:05:37
translated them for us um but if you do
00:05:40
speak that other language then uh you're
00:05:42
very useful because you can translate
00:05:43
some of these sentences and give them
00:05:45
glosses so other syntacticians can work
00:05:47
on these things uh in this course and
00:05:50
all Linguistics courses you take at
00:05:52
University you'll always be given the
00:05:53
gloss for some other
00:05:55
language okay uh but it's also useful if
00:05:59
you're just looking at a language you
00:06:01
know so here's the students asked for
00:06:04
these
00:06:05
books okay so why would we need a glass
00:06:08
for
00:06:09
English well we can break it up into
00:06:11
more FES and be more specific so the the
00:06:16
is a definite
00:06:17
article other languages have definite
00:06:19
articles and if we use def. art for all
00:06:24
definite articles across all language
00:06:25
then we have this common language that
00:06:27
we can understand so don't think of the
00:06:29
as the think of the as being a definite
00:06:31
article we'll get we'll get into these
00:06:33
terms a little bit more later um but for
00:06:36
now definite article would be the an
00:06:38
indefinite article would be something
00:06:39
like uh or an so those are
00:06:43
indefinite okay take a look at the
00:06:46
second word students well student is a
00:06:49
word on its own and what is this s well
00:06:51
students that s morphine is really just
00:06:55
a plural marker so we can denote that by
00:06:58
saying student Das plural and this Dash
00:07:01
plural means that the morphine is a
00:07:03
plural morphine okay compare this to the
00:07:07
dot in the definite article now this
00:07:11
means that the that the article is you
00:07:13
know part of the word um maybe looking
00:07:17
at these as well for Dem plural so a
00:07:21
demonstrative a plural demonstrative
00:07:24
it's not a morphine that is a
00:07:26
demonstrative and then a morphine that
00:07:27
is a plural coming together it's just
00:07:29
one
00:07:30
word uh so let's go back to asked well
00:07:34
this Ed this is the past suffix so again
00:07:37
we have this Dash here to indicate it's
00:07:39
a morphine and then in books I did not
00:07:42
put the morphine marker there but this
00:07:44
would be book with a-h s because this s
00:07:46
is also the plural marker and the
00:07:49
sentence is just the students asked for
00:07:51
these books but it's a nice way that we
00:07:53
can kind of break things up and we can
00:07:56
see uh the different morum structure in
00:07:58
different language
00:08:00
the different properties attached to
00:08:02
words in languages such as agreement
00:08:05
which we'll cover in future videos uh
00:08:07
plurality maybe in some languages
00:08:09
plurality is built into the words and
00:08:11
it's not a
00:08:12
morphine okay so that's grammatical
00:08:14
information in
00:08:16
gloss so let's take a look at some of
00:08:18
the basic variations we can get and
00:08:20
these are really basic
00:08:22
variations enough that I think even
00:08:23
without any syntactic background you can
00:08:26
get something out of this okay so in
00:08:28
English we could say something like the
00:08:29
beautiful
00:08:31
waterfall where we have an adjective
00:08:34
coming right before the noun and the
00:08:37
adjective here modifies the noun so the
00:08:39
waterfall is beautiful now in Spanish we
00:08:43
they don't say the beautiful waterfall
00:08:45
instead they say the waterfall
00:08:47
beautiful and it has the same meaning so
00:08:51
we have an adjective modifying a noun
00:08:55
but the adjective comes after the noun
00:08:57
so these are one of these differences we
00:08:58
see across languages that's something as
00:09:01
simple as having adjectives come before
00:09:04
nouns instead of after nouns or
00:09:05
adjectives coming after nouns instead of
00:09:07
before nouns okay so these are some of
00:09:09
the things we'll note as we go through
00:09:12
take a look at different languages take
00:09:13
a look at different properties of
00:09:15
languages um and we'll see even more
00:09:18
extreme
00:09:19
variations such as the difference
00:09:21
between English and Japanese so English
00:09:24
has subject verb object word order so in
00:09:28
Tim 8 me
00:09:30
Tim is the subject of the sentence that
00:09:32
is what or who the sentence is about um
00:09:35
eight is our verb it's our action word
00:09:38
here and then meet is the object of the
00:09:42
sentence so um what is the subject doing
00:09:46
to something if there is an object we'll
00:09:49
cover subjects objects in detail in the
00:09:51
future as well okay but Japanese is not
00:09:54
SVO it is an s o language which means
00:09:57
that the verb comes at the end of the
00:09:59
sentence the subject is first and the
00:10:03
object is second so instead of Tim 8
00:10:05
meet it would be Tim meet 8 okay so
00:10:09
these are one of the variations um there
00:10:12
is six total different types of
00:10:14
languages so this is SV s oov there is
00:10:18
also V vs o osv and
00:10:24
ovs um you'll encounter these with
00:10:27
different frequencies so SVO and sov
00:10:30
languages are definitely the most common
00:10:33
in the world and then it slowly bleeds
00:10:36
down into this
00:10:38
list okay uh so here's an exercise just
00:10:41
to kind of get you know you you've
00:10:43
watched the
00:10:44
introduction um you've learned a little
00:10:47
bit about glossing so given this
00:10:50
sentence you've never seen before what
00:10:52
can we pull out of this sentence or this
00:10:56
language Icelandic and we can say what's
00:10:58
different from
00:11:00
English Okay so there is man in
00:11:03
garden.the
00:11:06
okay what's what's the first major thing
00:11:08
here I say dothe here but really I could
00:11:12
write dot definite
00:11:16
article and what does this dot mean well
00:11:18
this dot means that the definite article
00:11:21
so this the here is actually built into
00:11:25
the word
00:11:27
gum okay so that's different it's not a
00:11:30
morphous just built into this word so
00:11:32
this word for garden is the definite
00:11:35
Garden so that is always the garden if
00:11:38
we wanted to say a garden it would be a
00:11:40
completely different word okay uh
00:11:43
another thing to note here is that we
00:11:46
have there is man in garden. devart but
00:11:49
there's no indefinite article here so
00:11:52
there's no word for uh that comes before
00:11:54
man so one of the things in Icelandic is
00:11:57
that if we want to specify an indefinite
00:11:59
AR article like a man an apple we just
00:12:02
don't include the article at all we only
00:12:05
include the article as part of a word if
00:12:08
it is the definite
00:12:10
article okay but for the rest of it word
00:12:13
order seems the same so there is man in
00:12:16
the garden um you know the language and
00:12:19
words are different obviously but it
00:12:21
looks like one of the main differences
00:12:23
here is that uh articles in Icelandic
00:12:27
are much different than they are in
00:12:28
English
00:12:30
so just with one sentence and 10 minutes
00:12:32
of a video you can already look at
00:12:34
another language and you can identify
00:12:36
some things that are different in
00:12:37
English and you can be a little bit
00:12:38
specific about it uh so really the key
00:12:41
thing here in this video is well how do
00:12:44
we do syntax in other languages and we
00:12:46
just use a gloss and we use our
00:12:48
syntactic knowledge our morphological
00:12:49
knowledge and then we can come to some
00:12:52
conclusions but we really want to be
00:12:55
much more precise about what we're
00:12:57
talking about uh not everything is easy
00:13:00
just saying oh there's
00:13:01
articles uh there's word order
00:13:04
differences there's differences where
00:13:06
adjectives or prepositions come in
00:13:08
sentences um we really want to dive into
00:13:10
syntactic Theory talk about groupings of
00:13:12
words talk about properties of nouns
00:13:15
verbs adjectives so on and so forth so
00:13:17
we'll get to that in future videos uh so
00:13:20
you know hang in there they're coming
00:13:22
soon uh if you have any questions about
00:13:24
the basics please leave them in the
00:13:25
comments down below and I'll answer them
00:13:27
the best that I can
