Basic Theory, Technical analysis and research methods of Syntax

From September 9 to September 20, 2019, USTB held a series of lectures on the basic theory, technical analysis and research methods of Syntax. These lectures were divided into ten subjects, namely language cycle and thematic structure, generative grammar, syntactic composition and lexical categories, grammatical categories and hierarchical structures, verbal phrases, verbs and thematic roles, copula and verb classification, tense, voice and posture, mood and pragmatic role, syntactic displacement in Wh-questions, topic and focus, determiners, number and noun displacement, syntactic features, transition from universal grammar to third-factor verbal phrases. They were given by Elisabeth Van Gelderen, Ph. D. in Linguistics of McGill University and senior professor of English, Arizona State University. These lectures were attended by a number of young teachers as well as all graduate and doctoral students in foreign linguistics and applied linguistics.

Lecture 1: Language Cycle and Thematic Structure

September 9, 2019, 1:30 p.m., the first lecture was held at Classroom 111 of the teaching building. Before the presentation, Professor Qin Xiaohui, associate professor of the Department of College English of the SFS, introduced Professor Gelderen’s research field and her fruitful research results. Professor Gelderen serves on the editorial board of more than a dozen international academic journals, including Linguistics Today, Studies in Language Companion Series, Current Issues in Linguistic Theorys, with research interests including historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, forensic linguistics, typology, English history, syntax, and grammar. She has published 20 academic monographs and over 120 articles, attended academic conferences and presented nearly 200 papers.

At the beginning of the lecture, the professor took students and teachers to the topic of the generative linguistics in a relaxed and friendly way, introducing the basic grammatical concepts of syntax, taking real-life sentences as examples. Starting with the traditional grammar that the students were familiar with, she made a detailed analysis of the syntactic structure of the language represented by English and provided approach to distinguish the grammatical words and the content words with examples of real-life sentences, so that students had a basic understanding of syntax, an important branch of linguistics.

Lecture 2: Generative Grammar, Universal Grammar and Minimalist Program

At 3:20 p.m. on September 10, Professor Gelderen gave an academic lecture entitled “Generative Grammar, Universal Grammar and Minimalist Program”. Following the first lecture on syntax on 9 September, Professor Gelderen introduced Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar and Generative Grammar, its background and different phases, and newly revised theory of minimalist program proposed by Chomsky. The core of Chomsky’s theory is structure and rules. By observing and studying children’s language characteristics, he put forward the concepts of language acquisition mechanism and universal grammar. After hearing the lecture, students more deeply understood Chomsky’s universal grammar and generative grammar, and realized that no theory is perfect. Not a single theory can be absolutely right at the beginning, and it must be studied, demonstrated and analyzed by scholars over and over again. The lecture also brought students the latest information on Chomsky’s generative grammar, universal grammar, and syntax in international academia.

Lecture 3: Syntactic Composition and Lexical Categories

At 1:30 p.m. on September 11th, following the grammar lecture of September 10th, Professor Gelderen went on to explain syntax. She focused on the components of sentences, lexical categories, lexical category phrases, the use of pronouns, functional grammar category phrases, testing and X-Bar Theory. In the lecture, students carefully learned how to draw breakdown structures of long sentences, including VP, NP, TP, CP and other structural patterns, and fully carried out practice. Professor contrasted English with Chinese language, enumerated a number of language examples so that the audience understood the sentence structure more thoroughly.

At the end of the lecture, students asked many questions and actively discussed with each other, and professor patiently answered them in the cordial atmosphere.

Lecture 4: Grammatical Categories and Structural Hierarchies

At 3:20 p.m. on September 11, Professor Gelderen continued her lecture by giving students an in-depth explanation of the grammatical categories and structural hierarchy of syntax. The lecture focused on sentence structure and hierarchy, grammatical categories, syntactic displacement in Yes/No questions and Wh-questions, structural hierarchy and c-command, and grammatical functions. In the concrete analysis, she adopted the VPISH pattern to exactly divide the CP, TP and VP structure into three parts. As a very important pattern in syntax, it is not only to make the sentence structure clearly visible, but also to show the source of each verb, so that the audience can have a better understanding of the organization of English syntactic structure. The attended teachers and students have learned a lot.

Lecture 5: Verbal Phrase, Verbs and Thematic Roles

At 15:20 p.m. on September 12, Professor Gelderen gave the fifth lecture of the whole series to the teachers and students of the SFS, to discuss the verbal phrases, verbs and thematic roles, subject and empty elements. 

First of all, professor Gelderen reviewed VPISH (Verb Phrase Internal Subject Hypothesis) in response to the questions raised by the students after the last lecture, and introduced them the structure and division of sentence components through three examples. Second, she explained the six types of thematic roles of verbs (agent/accuser/experiencer/theme/goal/result). Among them, “agent” refers to the life-form that triggers something on its own initiative, “causer” to the non-life-form that causes something, “experiencer” to the life-form that experiences something, “theme” to a person or thing that bears something, “goal” to the target of something, and “result” to the resulting state of something. Through the division of six types of thematic roles, the students expounded the origin, change and meaning of synonyms in English. 

Lecture 6: Copula, Thematic Structure and Verbs Classification

At 1:30 p.m. on September 16, Professor Gelderen gave a lecture on copula, thematic structure and classification of verbs for teachers and students of the SFS in Room 111 of the teaching building. The lecture focused on her own research areas, including syntax and grammar, as well as a detailed introduction to her new book on copula, thematic structure and classification of verbs. The copula here refers to the copula in a broad sense, including the real verbs such as “become”, “turn”, not just the traditional grammar of “am”, “is”, and “are”. The classification of verbs is also different from the traditional grammar, including continuous verbs, non-continuous verbs and static verbs. Through the professor’s explanation, the students broadened their horizons, opened the door to a new world of linguistics, and learned to view language and grammar from a new perspective.

At the end of the lecture, a student asked how to start and deepen the study of linguistics. With her own research experience, the professor told the students how to find a researchdirection. First of all, we must find our interest by observing the language phenomena around us, even a small linguistic phenomenon may reflect an essential feature. In the lecture, students discovered the professor’s rigor for science and academic, understand that researchers should always maintain a serious attitude to scientific research.

Lecture 7: Tenses, Voice and Posture

At 15:20 p.m. on September 17, the seventh lecture in Room 305 of the SFS was held in a lively atmosphere. which attracted many graduates and doctoral students and even freshmen after military training . First of all, Professor Gelderen explained the different ways of grammar classification of Chinese teaching style from tense, mood and aspect, introduced terms such as referent point, speech tense, event, past, future and so on, and illustrated expressions and locations of different tenses in time axis by plot. Secondly, she explained the mark of three kinds of voice: model verb (e.g. May), modal adverbs (e.g., probably), and semi-modal. In the tree diagram of sentence analysis, adverbs such as probably/certainly should be categorized in modal phrase. Because this part is different from what students learn about language, it is the focus of the lecture .

Lecture 8: Mood and Pragmatic Role, Syntactic Displacement and Topic and Focus of Wh-questions

September 18, 15:20 p.m., the eighth lecture was held as scheduled. More and more teachers and students came to listen to the lecture, and discuss the tone and pragmatic role, syntactic displacement, topic and focus of Wh-questions.

First of all, Professor Gelderen responded to mood/modal questions raised by students in last lecture. Mood includes imperative, declarative, and interrogative, but it usually refers to modal verb meaning uncertainty/necessity and so on. Secondly, starting from the angle of Wh-questions, she analyzed the sentence components and their positions through the tree diagram. Unlike declarative sentences, interrogative sentences are more often expressed by the syntactic displacement of complements and tenses. Finally, she explained two important concepts in syntax: topic and focus. Topic refers to the information already mentioned in a sentence, and focus refers to new information. With the three obvious characteristics of topic, commas, auxiliary verbs and pronouns, professor helped students understand the differences between topic and focus.

Lecture 9: Finite Words, Numeral and Noun Displacement.

On September 19, 15:20 p.m., the ninth lecture was held in Room 305 of the SFS. Many new faces in the lecture made the atmosphere more active.

At 12:30, the professor and students of linguistics participated in the lecture of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Since systemic functional linguistics and syntax belong to different fields of Linguistics, the professor began the lecture with the explanation of their differences in the afternoon. For example, “theme”, “goal”, “rheme”, and “actor” in SFL are named as “topic”, “theme”, “focus” and “agent” in syntax respectively. Hence, students’ confusion was cleared up. Secondly, from the perspective of topic and focus, professor presented another way to analyze the tree diagram, in which the appearance of the blank led the students to review the difficulties of the fourth lecture. In the end, from the perspective of DP structures and numeral phrases, she illustrated more complicated analysis method of modifiers, attracting the attention of the students and triggering discussions after the lecture for half an hour.

Lecture 10: Syntactic Features, from Universal Grammar to the Third Factor

On September 20, 15:20 p.m., the tenth lecture was held in Room 305 of the SFS. First, professor Gelderen reviewed the main contents of the ten lectures, focusing on the review of syntactic terms such as lexical category phrases, syntactic displacement, thematic roles, tense displacement, topic and focus, noun displacement, affix hopping, etc., and looked back on the analysis method of tree diagrams, such as VPISH and VP-Shell. Second, the students were divided into five groups, with each provided a sentence with the most complex composition. Then the whole class would analyze these with their knowledge. When professor Gelderen began drawing tree of a sentence, it could cover the whole blackboard which amazed all students. Facing a lot of unfamiliar structures and methods, students still studied hard and dare to try with a strong interest in the exploration of syntax under the encouragement of the professor.