Syntax - Trees: Crash Course Linguistics #4
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- čas přidán 1. 10. 2020
- There are many theories of syntax and different ways to represent grammatical structures, but one of the simplest is tree structure diagrams! In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll use tree structure diagrams to keep track of words and groups of words within sentences, and we’ll break down what roles different types of words and phrases play within a sentence.
Want even more linguistics? Check out the Lingthusiasm podcast, hosted by the writers of Crash Course Linguistics: lingthusiasm.com/
Acknowledgements: Elizabeth Allyn Smith (Categorical Grammar/Logical Notation), Emily M. Bender (Dependency Grammar), Ellen Jovin (Reed-Kellogg Diagrams), Peter Hurst (LFG), Jamie Findlay (LFG), Francis Bond (Dependency Grammar)
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Gavagai has a fascinating life
As a programmer, I'm really fascinated by the parallels linguistics has with various concepts in computer science. It makes sense since programming languages are indeed languages with their own syntax and semantics rules, but also other concepts like recursion exist in both.
the way this series is coming out perfectly timed with my intro ling class... ty crash course gods
Same for me 😂👀
So the funny thing is, kids in India are taught a lot of this stuff as part of their regular primary school education in English grammar, but when I studied English as a primary school student in Australia, we didn't even cover half of it. The point being, I guess, that understanding the nuts and bolts and technicalities can be a useful substitute for the intuitive understanding that you pick up from learning a language as a native speaker... So these concepts could be useful for anybody trying to learn a second language.
Yup we were taught English by breaking it down linguistically into noun phrases, verb phrases, prepositions, adverbs, adjectives, figures of speech etc. This naturally made me more interested in how language works
I didn't learn this in American public schools, however, my friend learned a lot more about English structure in an American private Episcopal school...
You explained in 10 minutes what my linguistics professor explained in a 2 hour lecture.
And your explanation made more sense and was better structured!
This episode was *really* well-written, even though that only becomes self-evident when contrasted with a university class.
Great job!!
It's "thought bubbles" all the way down
the "one-eyed one-horned giant purple people eater" problem has bothered me since I was a kid! Great video.
This reminds me a lot of garden path sentences! You basically think they have one syntactic structure until the very end of the sentence, before the rug gets pulled out from under you and you have to go back and reparse everything. It's interesting, because it shows that the structure contributes just as much to the meaning as the words themselves do, maybe more. I have a couple favourites:
"The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi."
"The horse raced past the barn fell."
"Fat people eat accumulates."
"The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families."
You may be interested in checking out Tom Scott’s “Language Files” series, written by Gretchen McCulloch who also writes Crash Course Linguistics, if you haven’t seen those videos already.
Or languages like German where you have to wait for the entire sentence to find out what the verb really was, due to the separable verbs
Thanks! I've definitely seen them. I think it was his video on colours back in 2013 that first got me really interested in linguistics.
there were even garden path sentences in some of the scripts! Lots of takes of me reading halfway through a sentence, and then having to start over because i'd emphasized the wrong words for what the sentence was *actually* trying to say.
I swear, I've had more conversations about what the heck a "barn fell" is... XD
Another one of my favorites: "The old man the boat."
I like how the rabbit from the first episode became a recurring character in this series.
Little things like this really MAKE a crash course. Like the center of the world opening during crash course history, those were fun.
I AM THE SYNTAX
YOU SPEAK WITH MY TREES
+
It's great that you mentioned other grammars by the end of the video but I think it should be underlined that constituent-based syntax (with the trees and movements) comes from one theory of language, that is Universal Grammar (UG). A component of UG is Generative Grammar, which postulates that grammatical sentences are generated in the brain (in a designated region of the brain) according to specific rules. This is the theory which sees a human brain as a computer with a pre-programmed software.
Usage-based language theories take different positions to Chomskyan UG/GG. Usage-based linguistics looks at such things as frequency or entrenchment and does not postulate 'rules' generating sentences. It is interested in the whole human cognition and treats language as interconnected with the general knowledge in the mind. That means that grammar will be bound with the meaning (UG separates syntax and semantics), and also with non-linguistics perceps, like visual or motosensor ones (see also: embodied cognition).
There is no tangible evidence for Generative Grammar postulates and many languages, also many grammatical instances in English do not 'fit' the theory (linguistics is generally extremely English-centred, btw). Psycholinguistics, for example, does not follow their postulates, as experimental evidence is not in line with UG. They still use GG terminology, though, unfortunately (probably from the lack of the alternative), which leads many linguistic students into thinking that Chomskyan theories are the only ones that we have.
Other grammars might not be so neat and mathematically pleasing (the horror of Word Grammar dependencies!) and they do not claim to have a ready-to-go formulas (like the omnipotent movement in GG) to explain syntactic 'structures'/syntax. But they offer a great insight into the complexity of cognition.
I hope your Semantics class will not be only about logic. Context matters! Plus, it would be good to mentioned Lakoff & Johnson's 'Metaphors We Live By', which is a milestone in cognitive linguistics and really makes you think about meaning construction.
Thanks for taking the time to write all of this. Now I have a ton of things to google and read about.
I'm really learning a lot from reading this comment section.
"Some of these beasts are a lot more dangerous than others" hehe tooooo cute
Whichever beast it is, it sure looks strange to me.
I have a fun recursive story
It was night, midnight specifically. There were many bandits in the forest. While they were sitting around the campfire they asked their amazing leader Peter to tell them a story. And so Peter began:
It was night, midnight specifically. There were many bandits in the forest. While they were sitting around the campfire they asked their amazing leader Peter to tell them a story. And so Peter began:
It was night, midnight specifically. There were many bandits in the forest. While they were sitting around the campfire they asked their amazing leader Peter to tell them a story. And so Peter began:
It was night, midnight specifically. There were many bandits in the forest. While they were sitting around the campfire they asked their amazing leader Peter to tell them a story. And so Peter began:
...
Thanks, CrashCourse. Linguistics is very interesting ❤
Shouldn't it be: "linguistics are very interesting"?
@@oleksandrbyelyenko435 Yes but whatever, man.
@@oleksandrbyelyenko435 No. Even though the word ends with the letter s, it denotes a single meaning - The study of languages. So "Linguistics is very interesting" is the correct one. The same goes for the word "Mathematics".
@@twoface3636 all subjects in another words
8:58 That drawing is clearly of a chom-chom not a 'banana'.
It's interesting that with all the ambiguity over the "one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater" there is still such thing as a "correct" order of adjectives in english. Most native speakers do this without even knowing the rule or noticing, but I had to learn it and it's still a dead giveaway when I mess up the order. But for adjectives referring to the same noun, the order absolutely positively has to be:
*Opinion > size > physical quality > shape > age > colour > origin > material > type > purpose*
That's why "She was a beautiful, tall, thin, young, black-haired, Scottish woman." sounds like a good sentence to native speakers, but as age comes before origin no "Scottish young woman" can exist...
Fully confirmed my membership in the science nerd club when I got super excited at seeing a dichotomous key in your video on linguistics.
Your series is awesome!
Especially the fact that you use my native tongue hindi in so many examples......
This gave me a smile.
Sameee
I have a syntax midterm next week so thank you for summarizing these basic concepts this so clearly! As a 3rd year Linguistics major, this series could not have come at a better time 🙌🏼
Returning to school after the creation of CZcams has been a huge advantage...
You may have wanted to specify that tree diagrams *initially* struck a nice balance between being understandable and taking up a reasonable amount of space. Later developments in syntax ended up creating tree diagrams that would take multiple full size sheets of paper to display all the elements the syntacticians felt were necessary, at least, if done by hand. I would know, I've had to draw some of those. X-bar theory was the worst part of intro syntax...
Yeah! I didn't know what physicists meant when talking about theories being so ugly that you know they're wrong until I met X-bar theory.
Xbar sucked😒
As someone coming from the computer science branch tipping toes into computational linguistics, I though the trees were pleasing xD
lmao i hate the million-sheet hand-drawn trees, but love x-bar theory though.
Love the word "syntacticians"...
Trees, recursion and grammar? Love it! Thanks.
Great video! Seeing Context-Free Grammars always makes me miss my days writing syntax trees in undergrad. I'm glad you mentioned that syntactic grammars are descriptive tools, and that they don't necessarily represent what goes on in our heads. I've spent a lot of time in grad school doing work in computational psycholinguistics, and most of that was about trying to tease apart the order of operations for how we parse syntax.
I am about to start my linguistics education but, due to lock down it will be online (for now, i hope so). So any book recommendation will be much appreciated. And kudos to you and HR of crash course, you are amazing
Always remember, a bunch of rules do not a language make. Linguistics is descriptive. If a sentence seems grammatical but does not follow the rules, the rules are wrong or incomplete.
love seeing a split in the comments between those ling folks who dread syntax fully and those who love it. I remember in undergrad I described my relationship with syntax with that scene in Harry Potter where Ron reads Harry's tea leaves; "You're going to suffer. But you're going to be happy about it?"
All these videos on Linguistics have been so useful and interesting to watch!!!!!! 😇💙💟
Though I completely understand this course is not a supplement to taking classes on Linguistics, and I will NEVER be able to learn all of what Taylor is teaching in one go through (very slow learner). But this course is absolutely FASCINATING!!!!
I am so enjoying these!
I’m loving these videos!
Always wondered how you draw a tree diagram for a VSO language like Irish or Welsh. Are the verb and object still considered a phrase even when they're separated by the sentence structure?
I just got WAY too excited about syntax trees. Syntax is my favorite subset of linguistics.
Just got my results for my CxCs (the caribbean version of SATs but just a lil harder) I passes BIO and history with straight A s thanks yo this channel!!!❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ THANKYOUUUUU SOO MUCH😭😭✨👏
this will. help me pass the class lol tysm crash course!
Loved it, thanks!
Knowing the term determiner has been the most eye-opening part of the series
love this
As a learner of French, I can confirm Noun + Verb already makes so much sense
This is where ive reach my limit in following along easily lol
excellent video!! tiny correction: at 4:00 while it is true that it's still up for debate exactly what is going on in people's heads it would be more accurate to say that each variant of a language has its own grammar-the grammar of black american english (aka ebonics or aave) is different from that of white american english-even though they are both in theory the same language.
That’s quite helpful!!
Is it weird that I was kinda of taught this stuff is my 5th grade english class. I remember breaking down sentences in Reed-Kellogg diagrams. Didn't know what they were though
Trees? Ah yes, you're speaking the Lorax's language
...
Thankz
Prepositions can be words to end sentences with
Cool video!
Isn't "Taylorが兎を見ている" (Taylor ga usagi o miteiru) translated to "Taylor is seeing the rabbit"?? I guess in this context it doesn't matter whether it's "sees" or "is seeing" but I always thought the -ている ending translated to the -ing ending 😂😭 or maybe I'm just really really rusty,,,
Youre right. But sees can also be a fine translation depending on the situation.
I spy an AST! (Abstract Syntax Tree, a structure very well known to programming language writers and compiler developers.) Unfortunately, English is ambiguous and one sentence gets multiple parse trees, which is why we don't program in English.
Nice
My favorite syntax joke!
A Minister, a Pastor and a Rabbi walk into a bar. It hurts.
The flying purple people eater is too cute. I want one.
i was taught the theory that uses determiner phrases; but uhhh dont expect me to know how to tell the theoretical differences. i think my syntax 1 professor was using something called the Minimalist Program and i think that might be why i prefer not to bother with syntax now.
In the Japanese example (Taylor ga usagi o mite iru*), shouldn't "Taylor ga" and "usagi o" be phrases themselves?
*テイラーがウサギを見ている。
It's literally "Taylor [subject particle] rabbit [object particle] seeing". ("Mite iru" is the present continuous conjugation of "miru", "see".)
I went back into the video, and both "Taylor-ga" and "usagi-o" are immediately marked as nouns and then as noun phrases one line up. I've seen different treatments of "ga," "o," and the like in learing materials and translations ("usagi o," "usagi-o," and "usagio").
Edit: grammar
Yes, you could argue that, but the logic here is that the particles don't have meanings on their own, a little bit like prefixes or suffixes in English. Writing the particle as a separate word is often the convention, but you can't split it from the verb/noun.
I wonder why they use Romaji instead of genuine Japanese characters. Although technically romanticized Japanese can be used for writing, in actual practice it's a pronunciation labelling method used for translation of proper nouns and as an input method. No one writes Japanese in that way. It's like writing Chinese in Pinyin, which is very weird and confusing since many Chinese words share either pronunciations or Pinyin with different pronunciations due to tones (Chinese is a tonal language).
Simone Wilcock The same is true for the word "the" in English. It doesn't have a meaning on its own. You can't separate it from the word it's attached to.
if you throw a banana, it does ineed 'fly' like any other fruit
so yeah, fruit does indeed fly like a banana ;P
In the japanese example what part of speech is the を in ウサギを
oh flashback to grade school and high school sentence diagramming. (private school gen x kid here) 😀
Ahem, excuse me, the song makes it VERY CLEAR that it is a one-eyed, one-horned, flying creature that eats purple people. also you depicted him with the wrong kind of horn - his horn is brass and plays music.
Are these tree diagrams the same as graph theory?
what tv show is the theme from ????
What happened to the linguist who was having trouble with small parts of a language?
They couldn't see the morphemes for the trees.
Is it just me or is whatever sound setup they're using making a lot of the "AA" and "AH" sounds in her words spike the recording volume REALLY loud over the rest of the words? (like whenever a word like "HOP" or "ALready" is used).
Not to be dramatic, but I would die for Gavagai.
how does this work with languages with free word order?
I will preface this with saying that I didn't study any non-english syntax specifically (though we had a few lectures on other languages during my undergrad syntax classes) but in this model of syntax, movement is a thing, where, in the shortest possible explanation of this, phrases get moved to somewhere other than their "original" placement. It's my impression that even languages with free word order tend to have a most-common order, that syntacticians would consider the "deep structure", and things can move around according to varying rules depending on the language.
I'm wondering about the NP/VP grouping. I never learned about this at all in my high school. Maybe it is an english thing? In my language it makes less sense to do this. But even in English it may already give issues: How to do NP/VP with the following sentences?: "the rabbit (for emphasis) I see, but not the cat". or "to the house I go". Or are these not proper English?
The order is different, but the concept of NP and VP remains. The trees aren't really too concerned with word order. Regardless of which way the words are ordered, the parts of the sentence retain their grammatical function, so the tree would be a valid representation of the sentence structure
Taylor: Language is recursive.
Pirahã: Hold my beer.
The gavagai class
Thanks
Time flies like an arrow. But it can only cover half the remaining distance at a time.
When are we gonna meet Gavagai?
In the universe on Friday? Ack! Where was the galaxy on Thursday?!
BTW, the monster in the song flies, has one eye, and one horn. Somehow, it manages to look like an eater of purple people without the speaker knowing what such a thing might look like.
I wonder - what are those structures that cannot be represented?
Am I technically being a good student if I procrastinate doing my linguistics homework by watching this video ?
It's a good hedge
I am procrastinating regarding studying for my French exam while watching this...I am validating it by saying that it applies to language which, indirectly, includes French...
I LOVE TREES
Love you too🥰
He said that that that that that boy used in the sentence was wrong.
Certain fruits like a banana do in fact fly like a banana
This is an aside/continuation of Nikanike0905's below.
Recursive syntax has no basis; what is a real thing is recursive thinking. Syntax is the realization of the semantics-pragmatics of a state of affairs. For a deeper discussion, search for Daniel Everett and the Pirahã (e.g., /watch?v=ylHUeW8iEio). Although there is no evidence that the Pirahã have recursion, there is also no evidence of the contrary. So Chomky et al.'s claim about recursion as a distinct feature of (human) language is controversial, at least; at most, it is groundless.
Besides, tree diagrams are not useful cross-linguistically, so there may be a better way of representing the syntax-semantics-pragmatics of a language and, therefore, how the last two are not derived from syntax, as Chomsky et al. have claimed over the years. Lastly, universal grammar (thence, generative grammar) is as unfalsifiable as astrology, so it should not be considered science.
Languages use recursion
Pirahã: *allow me to introduce myself*
Actually this one should go like that:
Languages use recursion
Pirahã: ...
Dan Everett: allow me to introduce Pirahã
Pirahã: wait, what?!?
And, btw, nice punch line. Since the bare concept of "myself" would be impossible in a language without recursion...
That claim is extremely contested, as is almost everything someone has claimed about that language.
What does the Ukrainian speech bubble at the beginning say?
It says something in Ukrainian.
“Sign language includes not only hand movements, but also facial expressions, mouth, eyebrows, head, and body movements.” Or, to be more precise, “Sign language includes not only hand movements, but also expressions of the face, mouth, and eyebrows, as well as head and body movements.”
"Sign language includes not only hand movements, but also facial expression, mouth, eyebrows, head and body movements."
I actually didn't translate that, just used Google Translate app that can read from photos :P
Bubbleception
The one-eyed monster.
Please do a video on onomastics someday!
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomastics
What about pirahã? Supposedly it doesn't exhibit recursion
that claim is very contested. idk much about since i never studied it myself it but i've never seen anyone in ling circles claim that without getting jumped on.
* sighs in traditional syntax *
Olny watched cause my name is in the title 🤣
The camera is so shaky today :0
chingalA tree linguinstics
Screw it, I'm making gavagai my conlang word for rabbit.
Hi
A dad joke in a linguistics video? Hahahaha.
How can three people be first?
First comment..🤘
First
My first first
Nah lad, sorry, you ain’t first
I know you are not watching the video, besides you are reading this comment
How DID U KNOW
U are the impostor
First