SYNTAX, SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS
It is conventional to divide up issues of language under the headings syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Syntax is the set of rules or principles that govern word order, and which words can be combined with which. The rules and principles have been determined by scholars but, in a sense, they reflect the way the brain analyses language. An example of a syntax rule, in English, is that a sentence consists of a noun phrase plus a verb phrase. This can be written as: S →NP + VP
So with the sentence ‘John loves Mary’, ‘John’ is the noun phrase (NP) and ‘loves Mary’ is the verb phrase (VP). Other descriptive rules specify what is an NP and a VP. The details are quite complex, but a descriptive grammar is one that allows only those strings of words that people accept as sentences. Psycholinguistics has been especially concerned with how people parse sentences – that is, how they break them down into their correct grammatical structures. This has to be done because, otherwise, it would be impossible to interpret a sentence at all. Consider the following: The horse raced past the barn fell. Is this an acceptable English sentence? What does it mean? In fact, it is a classic illustration of the problem of parsing. People normally find this a hard sentence to understand, because the parsing mechanism treats ‘The horse’ as an NP and ‘raced’ as the main verb, so it then expects more information consistent with the noun phrase. But the sentence actually contains what is called a reduced relative clause. Here it is in its unreduced version:
The horse that was raced past the barn fell.
By missing out the words ‘that was’, the relative clause is reduced. So, in fact, the structure of the sentence is:
NP: The horse (that was) raced past the barn
VP: fell.
The difficulty in understanding such sentences is ascribed to an initial misinterpretation, and is called a ‘garden path’ (see Frazier, 1987).
A large amount of time and effort has gone into studying the human parsing mechanism because it is central to language comprehension and production. By misparsing the sentence above, there is a resultant failure in comprehension at all levels. Another well known example is the sentence, ‘The old man the boats.’ Most people find this sentence ultimately intelligible but find there is a disturbance of understanding, because the string ‘The old man’ is parsed as an NP, and not as an NP + V (‘The old’ being a shortened version of ‘The old people’, and ‘man’ being a verb). Unless the sentence is properly parsed, it is unintelligible. Semantics concerns aspects of meaning. For instance, while ‘Green rain sinks frail grannies’ has good syntax, it is meaningless. The meaning of a sentence is somehow assembled from the meanings of the individual words that make up the sentence. Meaning at the sentence level is vital for comprehension, just like syntax. Compare the following:
Harry cooked dinner with his wife last night.
Harry cooked dinner with a wok last night.
In the first, ‘his wife’ is a co-agent, accompanying Harry, whereas in the second, ‘a wok’ is an instrument for cooking. To assign the wrong role (meaning) to ‘his wife’ would make Harry look like a cannibal!
And pragmatics concerns what we do with language.
At the level of sentence meaning, ‘Can you pass the salt?’ is a simple question, and should be interpreted as a question about competence. But when a child is asked this at the table and replies ‘Yes’, everyone knows this is a game. This is because there is a distinction between semantics, or sentence meaning, and pragmatics, which is sometimes called speaker meaning, and concerns the meaning of an utterance, not just a sentence.
The fact that sentence meaning is not sufficient to guide an interpretation led to a theory of speech acts (Searle, 1969), which treated utterances as actions on the part of a speaker, with the actions requiring their own interpretation. The introduction of pragmatics is essential to any account of language processing, and is especially obvious in cases where semantics (or literal meaning) appear to fall short. There are two principal classes of phenomena that obviously require more than literal meaning. One is indirect speech acts, like the salt example above. The other is metaphor and related phenomena. For instance, if I say ‘Adolf Hitler was a butcher’, I do not mean it literally. Similarly, if I say ‘John is really blue (or low) today’, I do not mean that he is covered in blue dye, or has shrunk in height. I mean that he is depressed. We appear to process many metaphors so readily that it is difficult to see what the problem is, but the processing problem is huge: not only does the processor have to par e sentences, but she has to determine their significance too. The psychology of language understanding is about just these issues. Finally, interpretation proceeds by linking language to our knowledge about people and situations. Consider the following:
A. John was hungry. He went to a restaurant and ordered some nine-inch nails.
B. John was really hungry. At the restaurant, he ate some Crepe Suzette, and then ordered steak, followed by Moules.
C. Harry put the wallpaper on the wall. Then he sat his full coffee cup on that.
D. Harry put the wallpaper on the table. Then he put his coffee cup on that. n In case A, a problem is detected because nine-inch nails are not edible. This information has to be retrieved in order to make use of it. It implies access to an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what one can eat. n In case B, the procedure for determining the order in which things are eaten is accessed. In this case, one would not normally consume a sweet dish (Crepe Suzette) before a savoury dish (Moules). Schank and Abelson (1977) suggested that we have mental scripts for stereotyped sequences, which are accessed under the right conditions, and as a result we can spot anomalies when they occur. Without such stereotyped knowledge, we would not have any knowledge of social norms.
In case C, wallpaper being on a wall puts it in a vertical position, so you cannot put your cup of coffee on it.
Detecting the problem suggests that we set up a mental representation of what putting wallpaper on a wall entails. n Case D is not a problem at all. But it is almost identical in linguistic terms to C; it is just that ‘on the table’ is taken to mean flat on the table, so sentence D is judged not to be problematic.
It is conventional to divide up issues of language under the headings syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Syntax is the set of rules or principles that govern word order, and which words can be combined with which. The rules and principles have been determined by scholars but, in a sense, they reflect the way the brain analyses language. An example of a syntax rule, in English, is that a sentence consists of a noun phrase plus a verb phrase. This can be written as: S →NP + VP
So with the sentence ‘John loves Mary’, ‘John’ is the noun phrase (NP) and ‘loves Mary’ is the verb phrase (VP). Other descriptive rules specify what is an NP and a VP. The details are quite complex, but a descriptive grammar is one that allows only those strings of words that people accept as sentences. Psycholinguistics has been especially concerned with how people parse sentences – that is, how they break them down into their correct grammatical structures. This has to be done because, otherwise, it would be impossible to interpret a sentence at all. Consider the following: The horse raced past the barn fell. Is this an acceptable English sentence? What does it mean? In fact, it is a classic illustration of the problem of parsing. People normally find this a hard sentence to understand, because the parsing mechanism treats ‘The horse’ as an NP and ‘raced’ as the main verb, so it then expects more information consistent with the noun phrase. But the sentence actually contains what is called a reduced relative clause. Here it is in its unreduced version:
The horse that was raced past the barn fell.
By missing out the words ‘that was’, the relative clause is reduced. So, in fact, the structure of the sentence is:
NP: The horse (that was) raced past the barn
VP: fell.
The difficulty in understanding such sentences is ascribed to an initial misinterpretation, and is called a ‘garden path’ (see Frazier, 1987).
A large amount of time and effort has gone into studying the human parsing mechanism because it is central to language comprehension and production. By misparsing the sentence above, there is a resultant failure in comprehension at all levels. Another well known example is the sentence, ‘The old man the boats.’ Most people find this sentence ultimately intelligible but find there is a disturbance of understanding, because the string ‘The old man’ is parsed as an NP, and not as an NP + V (‘The old’ being a shortened version of ‘The old people’, and ‘man’ being a verb). Unless the sentence is properly parsed, it is unintelligible. Semantics concerns aspects of meaning. For instance, while ‘Green rain sinks frail grannies’ has good syntax, it is meaningless. The meaning of a sentence is somehow assembled from the meanings of the individual words that make up the sentence. Meaning at the sentence level is vital for comprehension, just like syntax. Compare the following:
Harry cooked dinner with his wife last night.
Harry cooked dinner with a wok last night.
In the first, ‘his wife’ is a co-agent, accompanying Harry, whereas in the second, ‘a wok’ is an instrument for cooking. To assign the wrong role (meaning) to ‘his wife’ would make Harry look like a cannibal!
And pragmatics concerns what we do with language.
At the level of sentence meaning, ‘Can you pass the salt?’ is a simple question, and should be interpreted as a question about competence. But when a child is asked this at the table and replies ‘Yes’, everyone knows this is a game. This is because there is a distinction between semantics, or sentence meaning, and pragmatics, which is sometimes called speaker meaning, and concerns the meaning of an utterance, not just a sentence.
The fact that sentence meaning is not sufficient to guide an interpretation led to a theory of speech acts (Searle, 1969), which treated utterances as actions on the part of a speaker, with the actions requiring their own interpretation. The introduction of pragmatics is essential to any account of language processing, and is especially obvious in cases where semantics (or literal meaning) appear to fall short. There are two principal classes of phenomena that obviously require more than literal meaning. One is indirect speech acts, like the salt example above. The other is metaphor and related phenomena. For instance, if I say ‘Adolf Hitler was a butcher’, I do not mean it literally. Similarly, if I say ‘John is really blue (or low) today’, I do not mean that he is covered in blue dye, or has shrunk in height. I mean that he is depressed. We appear to process many metaphors so readily that it is difficult to see what the problem is, but the processing problem is huge: not only does the processor have to par e sentences, but she has to determine their significance too. The psychology of language understanding is about just these issues. Finally, interpretation proceeds by linking language to our knowledge about people and situations. Consider the following:
A. John was hungry. He went to a restaurant and ordered some nine-inch nails.
B. John was really hungry. At the restaurant, he ate some Crepe Suzette, and then ordered steak, followed by Moules.
C. Harry put the wallpaper on the wall. Then he sat his full coffee cup on that.
D. Harry put the wallpaper on the table. Then he put his coffee cup on that. n In case A, a problem is detected because nine-inch nails are not edible. This information has to be retrieved in order to make use of it. It implies access to an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what one can eat. n In case B, the procedure for determining the order in which things are eaten is accessed. In this case, one would not normally consume a sweet dish (Crepe Suzette) before a savoury dish (Moules). Schank and Abelson (1977) suggested that we have mental scripts for stereotyped sequences, which are accessed under the right conditions, and as a result we can spot anomalies when they occur. Without such stereotyped knowledge, we would not have any knowledge of social norms.
In case C, wallpaper being on a wall puts it in a vertical position, so you cannot put your cup of coffee on it.
Detecting the problem suggests that we set up a mental representation of what putting wallpaper on a wall entails. n Case D is not a problem at all. But it is almost identical in linguistic terms to C; it is just that ‘on the table’ is taken to mean flat on the table, so sentence D is judged not to be problematic.
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