In
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
, the syntax–semantics interface is the interaction between
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...
and
semantics
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy
Philosophy (f ...
. Its study encompasses phenomena that pertain to both syntax and semantics, with the goal of explaining correlations between form and meaning.
[Chierchia (1999)] Specific topics include
scope
Scope or scopes may refer to:
People with the surname
* Jamie Scope (born 1986), English footballer
* John T. Scopes (1900–1970), central figure in the Scopes Trial regarding the teaching of evolution
Arts, media, and entertainment
* Cinem ...
,
[Partee (2014)],
and
lexical semantic properties such as
verbal aspect
In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, as denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to ...
and
nominal individuation,
[Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995)][Van Valin & LaPolla (1997)][Van Valin (2005) p.67] semantic macroroles,
[Van Valin (2005) p.67] and
unaccusativity.
[Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995)]
The interface is conceived of very differently in
formalist and
functionalist approaches. While functionalists tend to look into semantics and pragmatics for explanations of syntactic phenomena, formalists try to limit such explanations within syntax itself. It is sometimes referred to as the ''morphosyntax–semantics interface'' or the ''syntax-lexical semantics interface''.
[Hackl (2013)]
Functionalist approaches
Within
functionalist approaches, research on the syntax–semantics interface has been aimed at disproving the formalist argument of the
autonomy of syntax
In linguistics, the autonomy of syntax is the assumption that syntax is arbitrary and self-contained with respect to meaning, semantics, pragmatics, discourse function, and other factors external to language.Croft (1995) Autonomy and Functionalis ...
, by finding instances of semantically determined syntactic structures.
and Rappaport Hovav, in their 1995 monograph, reiterated that there are some aspects of verb meaning that are relevant to syntax, and others that are not, as previously noted by
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
P ...
.
[Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995) ch.1 p. 9] Levin and Rappaport Hovav isolated such aspects focusing on the phenomenon of
unaccusativity that is "semantically determined and syntactivally encoded".
[Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995) ch.5 p.179, Afterword p.279]
Van Valin and
LaPolla, in their 1997 monographic study, found that the more semantically motivated or driven a syntactic phenomena is, the more it tends to be typologically universal, that is, to show less cross-linguistic variation.
Formal approaches
In
formal semantics,
semantic interpretation is viewed as a
mapping from syntactic structures to
denotation
In linguistics and philosophy, the denotation of an expression is its literal meaning. For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of being warm. Denotation is contrasted with other aspects of meaning including connotation. For inst ...
s. There are several formal views of the syntax-semantics interface which differ in what they take to be the inputs and outputs of this mapping. In the ''Heim and Kratzer'' model commonly adopted within
generative linguistics
Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistic ...
, the input is taken to be a special level of syntactic representation called
logical form
In logic, logical form of a statement is a precisely-specified semantic version of that statement in a formal system. Informally, the logical form attempts to formalize a possibly ambiguous statement into a statement with a precise, unambiguo ...
. At logical form, semantic relationships such as
scope
Scope or scopes may refer to:
People with the surname
* Jamie Scope (born 1986), English footballer
* John T. Scopes (1900–1970), central figure in the Scopes Trial regarding the teaching of evolution
Arts, media, and entertainment
* Cinem ...
and
binding are represented unambiguously, having been determined by syntactic operations such as
quantifier raising In generative grammar, the technical term operator denotes a type of expression that enters into an a-bar movement dependency.Chomsky, Noam. (1981) Lectures on Government and Binding, Foris, Dordrecht.Haegeman, Liliane (1994)
Introduction to Govern ...
. Other formal frameworks take the opposite approach, assuming that such relationships are established by the rules of semantic interpretation themselves. In such systems, the rules include mechanisms such as
type shifting and
dynamic binding
Dynamic binding may refer to:
* Dynamic binding (computing), also known as late binding
*Dynamic scoping in programming languages
* Dynamic binding (chemistry)
See also
*Dynamic dispatch
*Dynamic linking
In computing, a dynamic linker is the par ...
.
[Heim & Kratzer (1998)][Baker (2015)]
History
Before the 1950s, there was no discussion of a syntax–semantics interface in
American linguistics The history of linguistics in the United States began to discover a greater understanding of humans and language. By trying to find a greater ‘parent language’ through similarities in different languages, a number of connections were discovered ...
, since neither syntax nor semantics was an active area of research.
This neglect was due in part to the influence of
logical positivism
Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, is a movement in Western philosophy whose central thesis was the verification principle (also known as the verifiability criterion o ...
and
behaviorism
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent (behavioral psychology), antecedent stimuli in the environment, o ...
in psychology, that viewed hypotheses about linguistic meaning as untestable.
[Partee (2014).pp.2, 6][Taylor (2017)]
By the 1960s, syntax had become a major area of study, and some researchers began examining semantics as well. In this period, the most prominent view of the interface was the ''
Katz Katz or KATZ may refer to:
Fiction
* Katz Kobayashi, a character in Japanese anime
* "Katz", a 1947 Nelson Algren story in '' The Neon Wilderness''
* Katz, a character in ''Courage the Cowardly Dog''
Other uses
* Katz (surname)
* Katz, British C ...
-
Postal Hypothesis'' according to which
deep structure Deep structure and surface structure (also D-structure and S-structure although those abbreviated forms are sometimes used with distinct meanings) are concepts used in linguistics, specifically in the study of syntax in the Chomskyan tradition of t ...
was the level of syntactic representation which underwent semantic interpretation. This assumption was upended by data involving quantifiers, which showed that
syntactic transformations can affect meaning. During the
linguistics wars
The linguistics wars were a protracted academic dispute inside American theoretical linguistics which took place mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, stemming from an intellectual falling-out between Noam Chomsky and some of his early colleagues and doct ...
, a variety of competing notions of the interface were developed, many of which live on in present day work.
See also
*
Active–stative alignment
*
Antecedent-contained deletion Antecedent-contained deletion (ACD), also called antecedent-contained ellipsis, is a phenomenon whereby an elided verb phrase appears to be contained within its own antecedent. For instance, in the sentence "I read every book that you did", the verb ...
*
Coercion (linguistics) In linguistics, coercion is a term applied to a process of reinterpretation triggered by a mismatch between the semantic properties of a selector and the semantic properties of the selected element. As Catalina Ramírez explains it, this phenomen ...
*
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
''Colorless green ideas sleep furiously'' is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book ''Syntactic Structures'' as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical. The sentence was originally ...
*
Compositionality
In semantics, mathematical logic and related disciplines, the principle of compositionality is the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the rules used to combine them. ...
*
David Dowty
David Roach Dowty (born 1945) is a linguist known primarily for his work in semantic and syntactic theory, and especially in Montague grammar and Categorial grammar. Dowty is a professor emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University, and hi ...
*
Form-meaning mismatch
In linguistics, a form-meaning mismatch is a natural mismatch between the grammatical form and its expected meaning. Such form-meaning mismatches happen everywhere in language. Nevertheless, there is often an expectation of a one-to-one relation ...
*
Morphosyntactic alignment
In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between Argument (linguistics), arguments—specifically, between the two arguments (in English, subject and object) of transitive verbs like ''the dog chased the cat'', an ...
*
Role and reference grammar
Role and reference grammar (RRG) is a model of grammar developed by William A. Foley and Robert Van Valin, Jr. in the 1980s, which incorporates many of the points of view of current functional grammar theories.
In RRG, the description of a sente ...
*
Selection (linguistics) In linguistics, selection denotes the ability of predicates to determine the semantic content of their arguments. Predicates select their arguments, which means they limit the semantic content of their arguments. One sometimes draws a distinction be ...
*
Semantic class
A semantic class contains words that share a semantic feature. For example within nouns there are two sub classes, concrete nouns and abstract nouns. The concrete nouns include people, plants, animals, materials and objects while the abstract nou ...
*
Semantic feature A semantic feature is a component of the concept associated with a lexical item ('female' + 'performer' = 'actress'). More generally, it can also be a component of the concept associated with any grammatical unit, whether composed or not ('female' + ...
*
Semantic primes
Semantic primes or semantic primitives are a set of semantic concepts that are argued to be innately understood by all people but impossible to express in simpler terms. They represent words or phrases that are learned through practice but cannot ...
*
Semantic property
Semantic properties or meaning properties are those aspects of a linguistic unit, such as a morpheme, word, or sentence, that contribute to the meaning of that unit. Basic semantic properties include being ''meaningful'' or ''meaningless'' – fo ...
*
Shifting (syntax) In syntax, shifting occurs when two or more constituents appearing on the same side of their common head exchange positions in a sense to obtain non-canonical order. The most widely acknowledged type of shifting is heavy NP shift, but shifting i ...
*
Split intransitivity
*
Thematic relation
In certain theories of linguistics, thematic relations, also known as semantic roles, are the various roles that a noun phrase may play with respect to the action or state described by a governing verb, commonly the sentence's main verb. For exam ...
*
Type shifter
Type may refer to:
Science and technology Computing
* Typing, producing text via a keyboard, typewriter, etc.
* Data type, collection of values used for computations.
* File type
* TYPE (DOS command), a command to display contents of a file.
* ...
Notes
References
*
*
Chierchia, G. (1999)
Syntax-semantics interface', pp. 824-826, in:
The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences', Edited by Keil & Wilson (1999) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
* Hackl, M. (2013)
The syntax–semantics interface'. Lingua, 130, 66-87.
*
*
Levin, B., &
Pinker, S. (1992) Introduction in Beth Levin & Steven Pinker (1992, Eds) Lexical & conceptual semantics. (A Cognition Special Issue) Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Pp. 244.
*
Levin, B., & Rappaport Hovav, M. (1995).
Unaccusativity: At the syntax–lexical semantics interface'. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
*
*
Pinker, S. (1989) ''Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure''. New editoin in 2013: ''Learnability and Cognition, new edition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure''. MIT press.
* Taylor, J. (2017)
Lexical Semantics'. In B. Dancygier (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics, pp. 246-261). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Tenny, C. (1994). Aspectual roles and the syntax-semantics interface (Vol. 52). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
*
Robert Van Valin Jr., Van Valin, R. D. Jr. &
LaPolla, R. J. (1997) ''Syntax: Structure, meaning, and function''. Cambridge University Press.
* Van Valin Jr, R. D. (2003) ''Functional linguistics'', ch. 13 in
The handbook of linguistics', pp. 319-336.
*
Robert Van Valin Jr., Van Valin, R. D. Jr. (2005).
Exploring the syntax-semantics interface', Cambridge University Press.
*
Vendler, Z. (1957) ''Verbs and times'' in ''The Philosophical Review'' 66(2): 143–160. Reprinted as ch. 4 of ''Linguistics and Philosophy'', Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1967, pp.97-121.
Further reading
*
Jackendoff, R., Levin, B., & Pinker, S. (1991). ''Lexical and conceptual semantics''.
* Jackendoff, R. (1997). The architecture of the language faculty (No. 28). MIT Press.
*
*
* Wechsler, S. (2020)
The Role of the Lexicon in the Syntax–Semantics Interface'. Annual Review of Linguistics, 6, 67-87.
* Yi, E., & Koenig, J. P. (2016)
Why verb meaning matters to syntax', in Fleischhauer, J., Latrouite, A., & Osswald, R. (2016) ''Explorations of the syntax-semantics interface'' (pp. 57-76). düsseldorf university press.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Syntax Semantics Interface
Syntax–semantics interface
Semantics
Syntax
Generative syntax
Formal semantics (natural language)