Syntax - Morphosyntax: Crash Course Linguistics #3
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- čas přidán 24. 09. 2020
- Grammar sometimes gets a bad reputation, but we're actually doing grammar all the time! And we're pretty good at it! In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we'll begin our discussion of syntax by learning how we can take words and morphemes and turn them into sentences, questions, stories, and even videos like this!
Want even more linguistics? Check out the Lingthusiasm podcast, hosted by the writers of Crash Course Linguistics: lingthusiasm.com/
Acknowledgements: Ian Woolford, Jill Vaughan, Gabrielle Hodge
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As a linguist, I'm amazed at the clarity you manage to use for these concepts. Kudos to your writers!
Reading these comments is as informative as the video itself. Isn't it wonderful that we're all experts in our own languages?
dis sarcasm
THANK YOU for saying Irish and not gaelic. For anyone that doesn't know, there's several gaelic languages - so it's like saying 'romance language.'
Also if anyone's interested, "Taylor sees the rabbit" in Irish is "feiceann Taylor an coinín".
In Russian, my mother tongue, you can also make INCREDIBLE poems by changing word order (thanks to the grammatical cases)! You can do so in Ukrainian too!
This would have been the episode to talk about Yoda's syntax.
MakeMeThinkAgain: right you are
I wouldn't say "The employee hired the employer" is ungrammatical, it's just strange. I could see contexts where it makes sense.
EDIT: I would put it in the same category as the "colorless green ideas" sentence. There's nothing wrong with "[noun] hired [noun]" grammatically.
Also, I'm kinda uncomfortable with "It's see the rabbit that Taylor does"
Agreed, making sense of a sentence is all about context, even if the sentence is grammatically incorrect, we can still determine the meaning with the context it delivers (that is if it delivers any, or else the sentence will indeed won’t make any sense)
Let's say Beth works at Jeff's pizza shop. So Jeff is the employer and Beth is the employee. One day, Beth discovers her sink is broken, and her boss Jeff offers to fix it, for a price. So the employee hires the employer.
columbus8myhw Grammaticality isn’t really as black and white as sources make it out to be, there’s a lot of cases we’re unfamiliar with which don’t feel comfortable, and my syntax courses were filled with students contradicting the consensus when constructions didn’t make sense to them.
-er and -ee are suffixes for who performs and receives an action - to employ in this case: the hunter hunts, the addressee is addressed and so on. If the employee hires the employer it becomes the employer: that's why it's quasi-ungrammatical. Quasi because the semantics of these morphemes are very weak in modern English, and that's why you aren't as uncomfortable with them being used in ways that contradict their function.
1:50 Interestingly, Polish (my first language) uses morphemes but word order still has kind of an important role. (Long comment ahead)
Take "Taylor sees the rabbit": adding -a to królik, meaning rabbit, shows that it's the object, so "Taylor widzi królika", which has SVO order, is the normal way to say it - but other ways also work.
"Taylor królika widzi" and "królika widzi Taylor" are also grammatical ways to say it, but they do sound unusual, and that kind of helps show which part of the sentence is most important. "Królika widzi Taylor" places importance on the fact that the thing being seen is a rabbit, rather than who's doing the seeing, and "Taylor królika widzi" puts importance on both
And arranging the words so that the verb comes first (sometimes, not always) makes it a question: "widzi Taylor królika?" means "does Taylor see the rabbit?".
We could also ask "czy Taylor widzi królika?" - in this case "czy" means "does?" but more generally it's a word that indicates that we're asking a question. "Królik jest fioletowy" means "the rabbit is purple" and "czy królik jest fioletowy?" means "is the rabbit purple?" In that case you'd say "fioletowy jest królik".
You *wouldn't* say "jest królik fioletowy?" because then you'd be saying "there's a purple rabbit?" - add "czy" to the beginning and you get "is there a purple rabbit?" I just realized how complicated Polish grammar must be if you're learning the language
> how complicated Polish grammar must be if you're learning the language
Not if you're already a Slavic language speaker 😎
But yeah, it's probably not fun. Imagine surviving learning Polish phonology only to discover its grammar. Scary stuff
I'm stretching my knowledge thin here, so forgive me for any mistakes, but I believe Latin, especially towards the later parts of its life, was very similar. Even though you could order words in basically any way you like (with exceptions for possessive nouns needing to be adjacent to the thing they're possessing and stuff), there was a usual way to order sentences. Deviating from this usual order would place emphasis on different words. I'm just glad I didn't need to learn to recognize it. Learning iambic pentameter and stuff was more than enough for me.
As soon as she started talking about Latin I started thinking “now is the time to use my years of training”
That "Vee" on V makes me cry
Itaaaa!
I cried when she said videt though lol
In Ecclesiastical Latin the V sounds like the modern V. In Classical or Vulgar Latin it has a W sound. But she made a small error so it’s all good lol
1:32 Czech isn't that big on SOV, I don't think so. Slavic languages do have free word order (*adds question intonation while rising a brow at Bulgarian*), but it is mostly SVO if you don't need to emphasise anything. If you guys have an errata section, maybe add that.
Also, I could've sworn that I've heard something about how Mikhail Lomonosov tried to prescribe using SOV in formal Russian back in 18 century or whatever, but I so didn't find any proof of that on the internet, that I actually think my brain might have made that up.
Bulgarian certainly has a freer word order than English - if I had to appraise it, it is more or less free, as long as each set phrase is in the right order.
Whew, this is quite the information dump. As John Locke would say: "I'm going to need to watch this again"
well, it is precisely for the reason your explained right after the example that you cannot really say that "the employee hired the employer" is ungrammatical - it might be weird semantically, but it is perfectly grammatical
To correctly use split infinitives after having countless teachers say it is wrong makes me very happy.
(Not a native here) Is your sentence an example for what would be wrong? Because in my ears that sounds like good English, but maybe just because it would be good in my native language.
Some of the examples of basic word order are wrong:
- Malagasy is not an SVO language, it's actually a famous example of a VOS language.
- Depending on which variety of Nahuatl the "Nahuatl" in this video refers to, this could also be wrong. Huasteca Nahuatl (the most spoken modern Nahuatl language) is generally VSO and although Classical Nahuatl (which, in my experience, is usually what people mean when they say "Nahuatl" without a qualifier) had an extremely flexible word order, it was VSO by default (SVO was generally used to focus the subject). That said, there are modern varieties of Nahuatl that are SVO by default, e.g. Tetelcingo Nahuatl and Michoacán Nahual.
- Czech also has a flexible word order but its default word order is definitely SVO and not SOV.
Yeah, I was kind of caught off guard by that. Like, Czech can force sentences into SOV (which is actually called inversion, I believe), but by default the word order is SVO in Czech.
"Czech also has a flexible word order but its default word is *definitely SVO* and *not SVO* "
Thanks for clearing that up ;)
@@QemeH Ha! Oops... thanks for that, corrected it :)
I feel like the example about náhuatl is even worse if you consider it a language family (like many people do) rather than a single language. Kind of like how people treat chinese languages as a single one rather than a family like it is.
@@pepsdeps This happens a lot with indigenous languages, sadly. I did some research on the Quechua family during my undergrad and it was crazy how many linguists and grammarians referred to "the Quechuan language". I hoped Crash Course would be more representative, but considering they're all-in on the sign-language representation, I can excuse them a little.
Czech is not SOV. Well, it can use this word order to emphasize the verb. Czech word order in general is very flexible, mostly depending on which part of the sentence you want to emphasize. Most used word order (when you're not putting emphasis on any particular part of the sentence) is SVO.
Czech works basically the same as Latin does in this regard.
This is awesome!
As a linguist, I'm really liking this crash course. Even though I work with a different approach (systemic functional linguistics, to be precise), I wouldn't change a thing.
Nice job!
Whoo, diving right into constituency testing! It's like I'm back in undergrad all over again...
Also, I may be wrong, but I think classical Nahuatl has verb-initial word order. There's some disagreement over whether it is VSO or VOS, and I've even seen arguments suggesting it has totally free word order, but definitely not SVO. It's tricky to tell for sure though since Nahuatl is agglutinative and polysynthetic.
I'd also agree with other comments that say "It's see the rabbit that Taylor does" is ungrammatical. You'd have to use a gerund to make that grammatical: "It's seeing the rabbit that Taylor does". But do-constructions in English are super weird anyway.
To me, using "see" is more of a habitual aspect than an imperfective aspect, which I assume you are substituting when you put in "seeing"
Hey, it's the third episode and I only now noticed that there's a bubble with one of my native languages in the intro animation. I feel validated now 😁
Which language?
Congrats! Minority languages are one of the most underrepresented things in modern society and that's tragic.
@@TheGuywithaChannel It wasn't about a minority language in my case, but you still got a point
@@littleolliebenjy Ukrainian. It's at 0:44, the one that looks like Russian :D It says that sign languages not only use hand signs, but also face, mouth, and brows expressions, as well as head and body movements.
Great as always! A different language is a different vision of life.
Brilliantly put!
That theory has been disproven years ago.
@@IkeOkerekeNews I'm sure they weren't talking about Sapir-Whorf, but rather just how different languages express the same idea.
English: I am hungry
Spanish: Tengo hambre (I have hunger)
Japanese: お腹が空いた (stomach is empty)
Hindi: मुझे भूख लग रही है (hunger is felt to me)
Morpheme is the word I didn't know I needed but have been continually reaching for.
I grew up speaking English and my native language but I’ve only noticed that they have different word order when I started getting into linguistics, English is SVO but my native language is VSO and I never noticed that growing up
I almost flunked this subjet at university , I was luckily saved by my friends but i didn't get a single thing the whole semester xD you are explaining everyhting so well
I tried the cleft test with the same sentences in Irish and there is definitely a few constructions that break down and become really ungrammatical but Irish does have ways of shifting word order to apply focus to particular parts of a sentence. We do this with a construction such as "Is (é) ___ a ____ _____", which is equivalent to the "it's ____ that ___ ___".
So to shift focus in the sentences "Feiceann Taylor an coinín" (Taylor sees the rabbit), we can do the following:
Is é Taylor a fheiceann an coinín (It's Taylor that sees the rabbit)*
Is ag feiceáil an choinín atá Taylor (It's seeing the rabbit is Taylor)
Is á fheiceáil ag Taylor atá an coinín (It's being seen by Taylor is the rabbit)
Is é an coinín atá Taylor a fheiceáil (It's the rabbit is Taylor seeing)
Is é an coinín atá á fheiceáil ag Taylor (It's the rabbit is being seen by Taylor)
*This phrase is actually ambiguous and can mean "It's Taylor that sees the rabbit" or "It's Taylor that the rabbit sees". We can clarify this with additional pronouns in the clause: Is é Taylor a bhfeiceann sé an coinín (It's Taylor that sees he the rabbit) and Is é Taylor a bhfeiceann an coinín é (It's Taylor that sees the rabbit him). Although that first sample feels ungrammatical to me.
There's particular ways to shift focus in Irish. We sometimes have to make use of forms of Bí (to be) as an auxiliary verb (saw this with atá) and we sometimes have to use the progressive phrase, the equivalent to 'ing', rather than the present tense construction (saw this with ag feiceáil / a fheiceáil / á fheiceáil) in the main sentence but we don't have to stick to a simply VSO word order. But VSO is obviously the best so no need to mess with it too much. Hah!
Very fun exercise, I'm really enjoying this series. Go raibh míle maith agat (Thank you).
That sentence can have meaning: Boring, environmentally friendly ideas go unimplemented while they are argued about.
CGISF was invented to rebut linguists of the age who asserted that statistical models could predict grammaticality, especially by looking at the relationship between adjacent words. Whether or not you can come up with a plausible meaning for it, when Chomsky wrote it, it is fairly safe to say that no such combination of words had ever been used in concert in English before, likely because at face value each contradicts its neighbors, yet humans could immediately identify it as grammatical in contrast with its jumbled counterpart.
I like this series very much. Thank you for making it.
In Hindi, Marathi and other Indian languages, word order is generally SOV, but words can be moved around and still retain the meaning of the original sentence due to particles being attached to words that "assign roles" to them. This is often done in poems a lot. And sometimes while speaking , simple sentences can go SVO
Source: I'm a native Hindi and Marathi speaker
Can't wait for the phonetics & phonology videos!
I am doing a research proposal about syntax for my major, Thank you so much! This helped me understand syntax more clearly 🥺💕
The sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” is a grammatically correct sentence, the thing that makes it sound nonsensical is the lack of context, context is key to make sense out of a sentence.
The other thing I wanted to mention, that those endings of the words in Latin, those are called grammatical cases (Latin has six of them), they determine the role of a word in a sentence, so even if you shuffle the word order, it would still mean the same thing, and the sentence would be grammatically correct. English on the other hand doesn’t have a case system (although because it is a Germanic language it used to have a case system, but later it faded out by the time, now it’s only reminiscent mostly in the pronouns (the following word is the same word in different cases: He, His, Him, etc.)), so consequently English relies heavily on word order compared to Latin or Greek which do use the case system.
Noup, those endings are morphemes, not cases. The case is indicated by these morphemes. I think you know Latin, so you must know well that a single case have many indicative morphemes, depending on its declension.
The whole point of the "colourless green ideas" sentence is to show that (contextual) "meaning" and "grammaticality" are completely independend concepts: You can tell if any given sentence is grammatical or not without any context or meaning at all. Or, to put more bluntly: meaning is completely irrelevant to a (generative) syntactician.
True, Latin can have ending morphemes that are not cases like gender or number, but in the case at 8:48 those are cases, because the endings indicate the role of the nouns and adjectives in the sentence. And yes, a single case can represent multiple roles in a sentence which can make it confusing for beginners.
Thanks Crash Course for making a great series. I already recommended it to my students which aren't linguists!
Thank you so much for the hard work on this very interesting topic. I wish I can support you more. ❤
I am so excited for MOAR!!!!
I still get a little chuckle out of words like constituents having linguistic meaning. It's perfectly fine, but it's just such a rare case for me to hear it vs the political meaning that I still imagine all these particles of speech gathering up in a town hall or a rally or a protest. And then "Grammaticality" just sounds like the best kind of way to finish your opponent in a new Mortal Kombat game.
I feel we'll need more than 16 episodes.
Aww yiss, time for another CC: Linguistics!!
I am still confused about cleft constructions and how they show grammaticality and constituency. Can I see a few more examples please? But also I love you all and am really enjoying all of these videos!
So by establishing constituency, we are attempting to show that words or phrases clump together in specific patterns. These clumps (constituents) can be replaced (hence the substitution test) or often moved around a sentence without altering the meaning or grammaticality, and when we presumably diagram sentences next week, they will be our building blocks. While substitution is usually pretty easy to implement, it proves tricky or even falls apart for larger constituents, and many sentences make straightforward moving tests quite difficult, but the cleft test gives us a one-size-fits-all-environment for moving groups to see if they are constituents.
For example: is “the white dog” a constituent in the sentence “Michael spotted the white dog”? This one seems obvious, because we could substitute easily (“Michael spotted it”), but we could also cleft (“It was the white dog that Michael spotted”).
That was an easy example, but how about this: is “from the department store by her house” a constituent in the sentence “Shanae bought a coat from the department store by her house”? Maybe, but what would we substitute? After some consideration, “there” seems to work, but that surely took longer than before, and “Shanae bought a coat there” miiiight be ungrammatical (should it be “Shanae bought a coat *from* there”?). This is where the cleft shines. “It was from the department store by her house that Shanae bought a coat” is a grammatical sentence, hence the entirety of the phrase in question is a constituent.
How is it's see the rabbit that taylor does??
Meris bless!!! 🙏
@@finnberuldsen4798
Should have been "seeing" because see here will become noun thus a gerund - isn't it?
Which puzzles me, why must it become a gerund....
Take "Mary loves the brave man" for example. We want to figure out the constituents in this sentence, so we do the cleft test; the things we assume to be a constituent, we put after "It is", and the rest after "that". However, there are some rules that need to be followed when we are doing the cleft-test:
1st, the meaning of the overall construction must be kept.
2nd, the word order within the phases we move must be kept.
3rd, if the phrase you move contains the verb, a form of "do" must be inserted in the end (in English).
4th, the test works only in one direction: if it passes, we know for sure that the phrase we moved after "It is" is a constituent. If it fails, however, that doesn't necessarily mean that the phrase is *not* a constituent.
"It is the brave man that Mary loves"
works, so "the brave man" is a constituent.
"It is (to) love the brave man, that Mary does."
also (kinda) works, so "love the brave man" is a constituent.
*"It is man that Mary loves the brave"
this test fails, however, "man" would be considered a constitutent, nonetheless. But, we would need different tests to be sure about that.
Another example of a "false negative" would be if we test for the whole sentence:
*"It is Mary loves the brave man that does."
Although every grammatical sentence is also a constituency, this test fails.
An example for the cleft test done wrong would be:
#"It is the man that brave Mary loves"
although this construction is completely grammatical in English, it violates the 1st and 2nd rule we established earlier: The word-order of our "test phrase" is scrambled, and the overall meaning of the sentence is different from the original: the man is supposed to be brave, not Mary.
As a writing tutor, it's not easy to explain to an English language learner why some of their sentences just "sound wrong."
Maybe you could study a bit more linguistics, or a different language, so you have a better understanding of how language works and be able to explain it better to other people.
Thaaank you!
We need
Crash Course Geometry
Could you explain in one episode the difference between Linguistics and semiology?
My favorite series outside of the history courses. Keep it up!
This seem like an interesting subject to me
Spanish-speaker here. Trying to learn linguistics in English, interesting way to learn English linguistics.
Hindi also doesn't have fixed word order as there are case markings( like latin)...hence word orders can be flexible according to emphasis and context ( though SOV is the dominant word order)...
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously? Maybe that's because I'm no linguist, but that make 100% sense for me! I mean, bipartisan _[colorless]_ climate policies _[green ideas]_ are totally absent _[sleep]_ which is pretty upsetting _[furiously]._ Or in another context the sentence could also mean that ideas that are advertised as green, but are actually colorless doesn't sleep well. Actually they sleep furiously.
...maybe that's the reason I was so bad at school. cause while other students were listening I was busy thinking about why the teachers are claiming things that for me obvious weren't true at all.
I tried learning Irish, but I couldn't wrap my head around it. Because of how Duolingo teaches it, it didn't click that it was VSO. I thinks that's part of why I had difficulty with it. I'm used to English & Spanish, which are usually SVO
Please make a course on comic book making and development... please
Cleft Constructions: Can't you also make legit sentences with the subject and verb together. Like "It's the rabbit that Taylor sees."
I would argue that too is grammatical, og perhaps a bit clunky.
O.O I can use this!
Another amazing video. I'm a huge fan!
... do other people find the second sentence with the cleft test ungrammatical? Or is it just me?
Please do a podcast
VSO is the third most common order among six possible orders of sentences.
In the part about cleft construction, couldn't a grammatical statement also be "It's the rabbit that Taylor sees"? In that case, the verb and the subject are grouped together while the object is by itself. Is there a name for the grouping of a subject and verb?
They mentioned Chomsky in the least Chomskyan way possible!
And idolect is a less common way of say I-language. Dunno why there's two words for it
Plz ma'am, make a video on "word order transformation," in linguistics
Correction: the word order for Malagasy is verb-object-subject.
I think Malagasy is a verb-initial language (VOS)
"I've been poisoned by my constituents"
-Charlie Kelly
Thank you for this video.
Would you make video for analysis sentence with diagram.
Chomsky’s the man!
im watching this channel so i can figure out why english organizes adjetives in the order of quantity, quality, size, age, shape, color etc
I mean, depends on what you really want to know here, but there isn't a particular reason to do anything in a language, other than that's how the language developed, more or less by coincidence and some things stuck around.
Well this blew my dyslexic mind.
One of my favourite grammatical features of my dialect is the order in which subject pronouns are said in. The rule is you say the second person pronoun first, then third person, then first person. So an example sentence would be “how about you, him, and I go to the movies later?”. “How about me, you, and him” sounds not too weird to me as I’ve gotten used to others saying it, but it is still a little awkward to say.
Efforts to make 'colourless green ideas sleep furiously' make sense are legion.
I'm really confused over it's [it is] sees the rabbit Taylor does. Can someone explain this to me.
Okay so I might get it now if anyone reads this let me know if I'm right. "It's" is referring to an action, which is seeing the rabbit. Meaning it's sees the rabbit that Taylor does, is say what taylor is doing. Though this sentence still feels wrong to me.
I know that even if it should come to pass that it will be many years from now but... I would really love for Crash Course to be able to have series for individual languages. Crash Course Japanese. Crash Course Spanish. Crash Course Latin. Crash Course...
BTW: if learning another language, HiNative is a great free app
I don't speak Malagasy at all, but according to wikipedia, it is a VOS language
"colorless green ideas sleep furiously" i didnt quite get this one, cn someone help me? that sentence doesnt make sense but uts grammatically correct, is that it?
The sentence is an example used by Chomsky to demonstrate how a sentence can be grammatically correct, i.e., acceptable by proficient/native speakers, without making any sense. A proficient speaker of English would accept "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" as grammatically perfectly fine. However, if you were to say "furiously sleep colorless green ideas," essentially having the same/no meaning, the same speaker would most likely not accept it as grammatical. Ultimately, the example is about how speakers have a strong intuition about grammatical patterns in their/a language.
Educational!
I love this topic so much
7:28 how about “it’s the rabbit that taylor sees”?
As I this video watch, my rabbit I with snuggle.
Well...technically an employee can hire an employer lol
so basically next episode is about syntax tree?
You forgot the 3rd type of role-marking: verb agreement.
Some languages add morphemes to the verb in a sentence to show what role each part has.
Let's say we have a language where "nga" is the word for "I, me", "ku" is the word for "to see", and "kapo" is the word for "rabbit". I'll use SVO word order in this example, and no articles.
So, without any role-marking, the sentence "I see the rabbit" would be "Nga ku kapo".
Now, let's say we have a verb agreement system, where "ng" or "nga" means that the role that we're talking about is filled in by the speaker, and "ts" or "tsi" means that the role that we're talking about is filled in by a single thing or person. Let's also say that the order of these morphemes are [morpheme for subject]-[morpheme for object]-[verb].
So, now our sentence would be "Nga ngatsiku kapo".
We could drop the separate word "nga" now, as there is no need for it. So, the sentence could become "Ngatsiku kapo".
With enough context, we could also drop "kapo". So, the sentence could ultimately become "Ngatsiku".
huh. i didnt find that one cleft construction to be grammatical. i would probably accept "It's seeing the rabbit that Taylor does." tho. Didnt think i would have much to say on this one! syntax isnt my strong suit lmao
Why is 'Taylor the rabbit sees' not a valid sentence?
People keep saying "It's see the rabbit that taylor does" Is ungrammatical, I dont see how it is tho. To better understand the context, in progressive form it's " It's seeing the rabbit that taylor is doing" basicaly what Taylor is doing is Seeing the rabbit. In the simple tense form what Taylor "does" is She "sees that rabbit".
In a later episode can you talk about common sayings such as "I couldn't care less" or "Eat your cake and have it too" vs the way they are often said such as "I could care less", which should mean you care some amount, or "Have your cake and eat it too"?, which is the way everyone eats cake. While i admit the changes bug me i find it interesting that they have changed and few people notice or care.
I am also interested in written language and its rules, people may notice i dont capitalize "i" while i write most of the time, nor do i use apostrophes in my contractions unless i am trying to be proper. there doesnt seem to be any reason for capitalizing the letter i but apostrophes do at least seem to have some use in plural and possessive information.
All of my constituents are rabbits 🐰
I blame Taylor for making this too interesting
🐇
Does "grammaticality" mean "grammatically correct"? And if not, what's the difference?
I'm not actually sure whether those are synonymous or not, but I feel like "grammatically correct" usually gets used in the sense of being correct according to textbook standard English. So, for example "I ain't know nothing." or "I can't get no satisfaction." might not be considered grammatically correct (i.e. you'll get it corrected in a school essay), but they are grammatical (i.e. everyone understands what it means, it doesn't confuse native speakers).
Grammaticality is the instinctual understanding of syntax by native speakers of a given language. Hence, as that implies, it is not simply a binary grammatical/ungrammatical tickbox. “Grammatically correct” means “in keeping with educational standards regarding grammar.” It is a distinction given out by some authority which prescribes an action (do not split infinitives) in contrast with Linguistics’ mission to describe actions (speakers of English choose to regularly split infinitives and find the resulting phrases grammatical, even if schools deem them grammatically incorrect).
I know there's lots of tests that would show that "sees the rabbit" is a constituent, but I have to admit that "It's see the rabbit that Taylor does" is pretty ungrammatical for me.
Interesting. It’s perfectly grammatical to me, but I wouldn’t normally use it. I’d associate it with older/formal books
show us youtube diamond play button 😁
A free drink you have won.☕
Syntax error
Command not recognized
Crash course Asian history
Hey everyone! Not a native English speaker here, please help: how is "Don't nobody know nothing" grammatical? Is "nobody" not the subject? Shouldn't it be "doesn't" then? And what does the sentence mean?
This is a construction possible in Southern or African American (AAE) varieties of English, and means “nobody knows anything,” (or perhaps more precisely “there isn’t anybody who knows anything”? If you’re a speaker please correct me), but with emphasis. The rules of these varieties are close but not identical to General American (GA) English, and several of the more well known differences are using don’t for doesn’t (dropping all number/person inflection in the case of AAE) and allowing double negation for emphasis (instead of the cancellation found in GA).
It may not meet my variety’s bar for grammaticality, but its use is well documented by other groups, hence it is grammatical when considering all varieties of English.
It definitely sounds ungrammatical to me but I'm not from the part of the country that talks like that.
I think every english speaking culture would go about saying this differently. You definitely wouldn't say this in Australia. I think we'd go for 'no one knows anything'.
'Don't nobody know nothing' is ungrammatical, strictly speaking, just like 'I ain't done nothing', as used in parts of the UK to mean 'I haven't done anything'. 'Don't nobody know nothing' means, presumably, that no-one knows anything, but anyone who uses that sentence clearly doesn't care about their grammar. On the other hand, as Meris said, there are varieties of English where the construction is common. So if you're speaking to an American (I'm sorry) and they're from the South or a certain African American community then they might use that construction, and that would be acceptable in those conversations. But it still couldn't be called grammatical.
@@artstsym "hence it is grammatical when considering all varieties of English". How does that work? Just because a certain construction has been adapted by a certain speech community/variety doesn't mean it can be called grammatical in every other variety of that language. That was a very strange thing to say.
Well, yes, but actually, no. A sentence in Turkish is technically not correct if the word order is wrong, even though you can find borked sentences in poems.
1:43 And Arabic! Linguistically, the subject always comes after the verb, even if it is written before it.
In MSA aka (الفصحى) the word order is VSO, but in the local dialects it usually isn’t, like the Levantine dialect that more frequently uses SVO
If there is no pronoun at the beginning of a sentence like in Italian, Portuguese or Romanian, (Sono bene, Sunt bine) is it still SVO? The subject is an unexisting pronoun or?
Yes, you just kind of pretend it's there 😅 Those languages are called pro-drop languages, which means you have an option of dropping the pronoun (which people usually use, because it's shorter). Being SOV or SVO or something else is a characteristic of the language as a whole, so, when determining it, you think not of some specific sentences, but rather about the overall "formula" of a sentence. And it's not like all of the sentences have to follow it. You might have exceptions for some specific cases too. Like saying "Te amo." (object + verb) in Spanish, or changing word order when asking a question in English.
It would still be SVO because if you WERE to put a subject (pronoun) it would be before the verb. It's just omitted.
Omitted words still affect the sentence at large. Here's an example in Hindi.
Person A: Merī betī āj-kal paṛhāī kar rahī hai (lit. my daughter is studying these days)
Person B: Merī bhī kar rahī hai (lit. my too is doing) - My [daughter] is [studying] doing that [these days] as well.
In the second sentence, the words betī (daughter), āj-kal (these days), paṛhāī (academics/studies) are omitted, yet their effect still remains. In this particular sentence, the fact that betī is a feminine word (ends in -ī) is visible in the verb "rahī"
harry.tallbelt would Spanish be a pro-drop language because you can infer the subject in certain cases like "comen las manzanas" (they eat the apples)?
@@portal6347 yes, Spanish is pro-drop
Portal 634 i think Spanish is pro drop. In Spanish we say we have “sujeto tácito” that is the grammar name we used when the subject is dropped. It means that it can be inferred by the verb, or to put it is optional. In the example given before would be “(yo) te amo”
Is that cleft sentence not simply a main clause with a relative clause, where both need a subject and a verb? All examples of Latin apply to German though, I love Latin but I would have used German to show the word order stuff instead as it is closer related to English and the comparisons easier to make, especially for that 'cleft sentence'. There also simpler ways to explain this system.
Here's 3 AM, and idk why I'm watching this video at 3AM
Ah - structured grammars, takes me back to studying this in my computing degree : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus-Naur_form
I wish English still had noun declension in more than just pronouns.
Different from sin tax
🇮🇪
"That ain't nothing don't nobody know..." is grammatical.
If ever there was a time to get a Grammerly ad *gets political ad instead*
Someone somewhere would get
Ask someone from Louisiana a question with an obvious answer and you might hear them grumble something about nothing don't nobody know.
That's because they're from Louisiana.
I am 15th comment WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I LOVE crash course.
You're about 37th on my comments list, so bad luck.