Hypercorrection, schemata and UG

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, June 28, 2007 

A student asks why “she and I” sounds so much better than “I and she.” A simple, but resonant question — the bias for the former has the strength of a grammatical intuition, the stuff syntactic theories are made of. So it’s not a trivial question. Evidently the schemata that we learn, especially, I imagine, those we learn at an early age, embed themselves deeply — and inflexibly — alongside our original and much more flexible, productive grammar.

Corrections, including hypercorrections like just for you and I, fall into the category of memorized forms along with formulaic and schematic utterances. Their relation to the grammar of the language is incidental, but they are strongly imprinted on memory, in some ways more inflexibly than grammatically generated forms. They show up in places where the standard forms no longer carry any grammatical function. Along with formulae and schemata, they are a part of language deeply embedded, but agrammatical. They show some instructive contrasts with forms grammatically generated.

Maybe a word first about the “original” grammar. Such structures as “Me and my mom went to Disneyland” are frequent in many “non standard” dialects of English. Yet the same speakers who naturally utter them would never say “Me went to Disneyland.” That’s Tarzan-talk to them. Concluding that these speakers are speaking ungrammatically or failing to be consistent in their speech would miss the point utterly and entirely.

The point not to be missed is this: oblique case — or whatever you want to call the me form — is not really the accusative or dative grammarians claim it to be. The me form seems to be a reflex of distance. Conjunction (and), though it seems pretty simple, actually introduces significant distance between subject and verb, assuming the basic structure of the language to be a context-free grammar with some modifications (see below, “Syntax for the uncertain”). If the “me” form is induced by such distance, we have an explanation for the “me and her went” dialect, which seems to be the default mode for English, since it turns up untaught in so many dialectal varieties, whereas the “she and I” variety seems to turn up only in the taught versions of English.

In other words, “me and her went to Disneyland” reflects the natural grammar of English; “she and I went” reflects a crude human intervention, entirely ignorant of the underlying complexities — and power and beauty — of the grammatical machine structure.

Note an important contrast: in the untaught variety, “Her and me went to Disneyland” is also possible, though less likely; in standard, “I and she went to Disneyland” just doesn’t sound right. Sounds awful. Yet “I and she” is easy to understand. That’s one mark of memorized form as distinct from grammatical form: violations of grammar are usually uninterpretable gibberish, while violations of memorized forms may sound odd but still be comprehensible.

The difference between a grammatical reflex and a memorized scheme

There’s no question that we use formulae and schemata all the time in our speech. We repeat the same structures over and again with different words, sometimes with the same words. A lot of speech shows, disappointingly, little productivity. My friend Diana Sidtis is compiling a list of English schemata, and the list is getting long.

The prevalence of formulae and schemata has been used to diminish the importance of the generative program — quite wrongly, since the generative program is as much justified by the sentences that cannot be processed in a language as by the unbounded number it predicts can be processed (once again, see below, “Syntax for the uncertain”).

Hypercorrections fall into the category of memorized forms. They show up in places where the uncorrected forms no longer carry any grammatical function. The difference between “I” and “me” was strongy grammatical in Old English, but today it mostly marks a difference in style, not comprehension. There’s a wonderful sentence in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle telling the story of the fate of St. Columba’s island after he died [here in modified transliteration]

There stowe habbeth yiet his ierfenumman.

The place still have his followers.

If I ask students what’s grammatically wrong with this sentence, they reply, 99% of the time, “have” is wrong; it should be “has”:

The place still has his followers.

Only once has someone suggested the subject and object need to be reversed:

His followers still have the place.

That’s, of course, the meaning of the chronicler. In Old English, “habbath” indicates a plural subject (“his followers,” not “the place”). Word order indicates nothing.

Today, word order (really order of syntactic category) provides all the grammatical relations. If “the place” comes first followed by the verb, “the place” must be the subject, regardless what form the verb takes. The difference between “have” and “has” indicates nothing grammatical at all. It typically indicates personal facts about the speaker like level of education or dialectal variety or style: “I has one/I have one,” “She have it in her room/she has it in her room.” These are not functions of grammar. Grammar is the brain’s means of processing and communicating content, not social status. With the exception of plural, progressive, past, comparative and superlative markers, inflections have lost grammatical function in English. Even possessive has been replaced with word order in ICE (inner city English):

They covered with they blood.

Pronoun+noun= possessive+noun

Into this space where the standard insists on retaining non functional forms, creep the hypercorrections: between you and I, which has spread recently among reasonably well-educated folks to for you and I. I hear both of these in film and TV, always scripted for the educated characters. Only working-class characters use the standard form from twenty years ago between you and me, for you and me.

Notice again that it is the conjunction and that allows the form for you and I among educated English speakers who would never dream of saying It’s just for I.

Hypercorrections (for you and I), like standard corrections (she and I left), are memorized forms.

Corrections and grammar

What I find suggestive here is that hypercorrections appear to be schemata: they are most likely memorized forms and they do not have much flexibility in contrast with generative grammar (“me and her went”) which is flexible and therefore not likely to be a memorized form. The suggestive conclusion — to spell it out: formulae and schemata needn’t be part of generative grammar at all. Memorization is as deeply rooted as grammar, but it is not grammatical. And vice versa, grammar is not memorized.

This cuts against both the Chomsky program and the anti-Chomskians. It means that much of the data of speech will contain deeply rooted non grammatical structures unrelated to universal grammar (UG, the innate grammar capacity which makes it possible for us to learn language as children just by hearing it — without having it taught to us), making the project of discovering UG all the more difficult. It also means that schemata don’t tell us anything interesting about grammar, though they do say something important about how the mind processes language: it has to be done with more than just the grammar processor. It’s got to use a simple template archive.

It’s not all bad news for the Chomskians. It leads to a diagnostic: if it’s inflexible, then maybe it’s not grammatical. Pare away all the inflexible structures of speech and you should be left with the original grammar. So the work that Sidtis is doing, collecting the schemata of English, though it is being gathered from the perspective of those who want to diminish the significance of generative grammar in speech, should be taken as an invaluable resource for discovering UG — specifically, what part of English speech must be removed before the grammar remains pure. It’s a tricky task, because no doubt some, probably most, of the schemata follow the grammar of the language. So there’s no guarantee anything will be left. But if flexibility or productivity is the test, pieces can be returned, one by one.

Well, the mind is a big and powerful place. I don’t see why anyone should be surprised that it uses many modes — a grammar fully flexible and productive within its machine limits; memory only minimally flexible: open only to lexical or phrasal substitutions.

In other words, generative grammar doesn’t need to worry about the order “she and I” vs. “I and she.” It can be left out without prejudice to the theory of UG.

Wherever syntacticians gather, they quibble over grammatical intuitions. Maybe we should start looking more carefully at our intuitions and separate the memorized schemes from the generative rules.

Syntax for the uncertain

 Originally published on Language and Philosophy, June 11, 2007

(This entry is for the Chomsky skeptic: the type of long distance relationship prohibited among prepositional phrases provides strong evidence for a generativist view of grammar and a computational view of syntax in the brain.)

Anti-Chomskians have focused their attacks on productivity, claiming that novel syntactic structures are rare. Certainly formulaic utterances are rampant in speech and have justly received much attention recently. Diana Sidtis, who has published widely on formulaic utterances, adds to these schematic utterances — utterance patterns structurally fixed like formulae, but not fixed for content. The claim seems to be that if schemata and formulae dominate speech patterns, the generative element is marginal at best, a mere intuitive capacity largely unused.

Setting aside the question of why humans would have such an unused capacity, this argument ignores the essential duality of the Chomsky program. The goal is not just to generate all the sentences of natural language. It’s to generate all and only the sentences of natural language. It doesn’t just explain novelty and unbounded productivity. The really dramatic, interesting and compelling side of Chomsky’s work from the very outset was the other horn of the bull: discovering one mechanism that will both generate all the sentences yet won’t overgenerate. Generative syntax crucially explains why some extremely simple sentences are unprocessable, even when they contain the same structures as more complex and easy-to-process sentences.

Sometimes I think Chomsky and syntax have garnered so many vitriolic enemies because Chomsky’s original examples were not chosen for pedagogical perspicuousness and the computational origins of generative theory are not consistently taught. So here’s an attempt at pedagogical perspicuity which I hope will convert both agnostics and scoffers-in-good-faith.

Both long distance and local relations are possible for prepositional phrases

You walk into the lobby of the hotel. There are several people sitting at the bar and in the lounge, some in suits. You approach the front desk. The attendant tells you you received a call, using one of these sentences:

1. The guy at the end of the bar in the suit with the stripes on the chair with three legs called.
2. The guy at the end in the suit of the bar called.
3. The guy on the chair with three legs at the bar called.

Notice that sentence (1) is easy to understand even though it is long and complex. I’ve yet to encounter a class of undergrads who didn’t understand it instantly. Yet it contains no less than three pairs of prepositional phrases, each pair holding a local relation within the pair and a long distance relation with the subject of the sentence. So

the chair with three legs

is a noun phrase with a prepositional phrase [with three legs] related directly to [the chair]. It’s the chair that has three legs, not the guy.

On the other hand, the stripes are not on the chair, it’s the guy who is on the chair. So there is no relation in this sentence [the stripes on the chair] even though there is a relation [the chair with three legs].

So these prepositional phrases can relate over long distances to the subject, or they can hold a purely local relationship with the nearest noun phrase. Both long distance and local relations are possible for prepositional phrases.

Some long distance relationships are impossible

But now consider sentence (2). It is a simpler string of words: only three prepositional phrases — yet I have not met any English speaker who can process it to get [of the bar] to relate to [at the end] even though it’s semantically obvious and it’s the only semantic possibility. This sentence is not difficult to process; it is impossible! Even when you know what it’s intended to mean, you still can’t get it to mean that.

And yet, it contains the same prepositional phrases, some with local relationships and some with long distance relationships, in no way different from (1), except (2) is simpler and (1) is a great deal more complex. Why is the more complex sentence easy and the simple sentence strictly impossible?

Is it because a prepositional phrase cannot intervene between two related prepositional phrases? Sentence three shows this cannot be the reason.

Sentence (3) has the most complex relationships of all three sentences, and yet it too is relatively easy to process. Imagine there are two guys sitting on three-legged chairs, one chair at the bar and one in the lounge.

3. The guy on the chair with three legs at the bar left this for you.

means

The guy on [the chair [with three legs] [at the bar]]

where the chair is both at the bar and has three legs.

It’s not hard to understand, even though there is a prepositional phrase intervening between [the chair] and [with three legs].

So prepositional phrases may intervene sometimes but not always. What’s the explanation?

What determines which are possible and which are impossible?

Computational theory early on gave us the answer. A machine that processes language word by word cannot exclude sentences like (2) while including sentences like (1) and (3). But a machine that processes phrases as well as words, can. A finite automaton can produce any and all of the prepositional relationships above, including, unfortunately, (2), which is not possible for native English speakers. A push-down automaton, however, can produce (1) and (3) without any trouble, but is mechanically, physically, structurally, logically unable to produce (2).

The internal structure of a prepositional phrase can be processed by a machine, like a finite automaton, that reads one grammatical category at a time

prep + determiner + noun

in that order. Such a machine consists of a set of states including an initial state and at least one final state and a set of functions that take one state into another depending on input. The initial state here accepts a preposition which takes it into a new state accepting a determiner. Feeding the machine at this point a determiner will take the machine to a noun-accepting state. (When I have a chance, I’ll flesh this out a bit. Meanwhile, if you’re curious, any textbook on computer theory will have a good description of how finite automata work and the push-downs mentioned below.)

To accommodate (1), such a machine could have a structure corresponding to a regular expression like

[PDN[PDN]]*
(P=prep, D=deter, N=noun, *=any number of times including zero)

and to get (2) and (3), it needs simply

[PDN]*
where any relationships among the prepositional phrases are allowed.

Such a grammar will allow any number of pairs of locally related prepositional phrases along with unrelated intervening prepositional phrases. In other words, a machine that processes one word at a time can be constructed to process all three sentences: it overgenerates to produce (2) as well.

But a push-down automaton — the kind of machine the accepts context free grammars — can’t be designed to produce (2) and needs no special complexity to accommodate the long distance and local relations of (1) and (3).

The simplest context free grammar that can be constructed to process (1)is:
(S=sentence, NP=noun phrase, VP=verb phrase, PrP=prepositional phrase)
S=>NP, VP
NP=> D, NP
NP=> N
NP=> NP, PrP
PrP=> Pr, NP
VP=> VP, PrP
VP=> VP, NP
VP=> V

This simplest grammar, exactly as it is, will also generate (3), but no context free grammar can be constructed to generate (2). (This is all much easier to see with trees, but trees are tough to draw on a blog.)

This is very powerful evidence that the brain has a context free grammar represented in it — not necessarily in a specific place, possibly only in a process distributed through a variety of locations in the brain — but represented somehow.

I haven’t touched here on examples that show that a context free grammar cannot handle all the phenomena of language or on examples that suggest that elements can be moved around by the brain. English speakers have more powerful machinery between their ears capable of taking this fundamental push down structure and playing with it, within some limits. Figuring out the limits is the stuff of current linguistic theory. I am interested here only in presenting sentences that demonstrate that the brains of English speakers must have a pushdown structure that prevents the generation of sentences like (2) which are strictly impossible for native English speakers to process. This demonstration is just for the agnostics and scoffers: How else can you explain why (2) is impossible?