A lot of the time the kind of sentences that syntacticians like me look at are long and
complex. But today I want to talk a little bit about some sentences that look very short
and simple, and argue that nevertheless they show some surprising properties that can help
us, we hope, understand a bit more about how linguistic systems work. If we want to express
a proposition, that is, basically something that can be either true or false, the typical
way to do this is in a clause, which corresponds roughly to a sentence. So something like
Amanda sleeps well. or
Bruno loves sushi.
And a classic way of thinking about these clauses is that you can divide them into a
subject, so that would be Amanda or Bruno, and a predicate, so that would be sleeps well
or loves sushi. And the typical word class that's associated with being a predicate is
a verb. So loves and sleeps.
But it's not only verbs that can be predicates. Another word class that can very frequently
appear as a predicate is that of adjectives. So alongside a sentence like
Carmen lies.
you can also have a sentence like
Carmen is dishonest.
Or you could have a sentence like
Some fish luminesce.
but you could also have
Some fish are luminous. or
Some fish are luminescent.
So 'lie' is a verb, but 'dishonest' is an adjective. Luminesce is a verb, but luminous
and luminescent are adjectives.
Now, you could perfectly well object that, yeah those are adjectives, but alongside the
adjectives there's always some form of 'be', and 'be' is a verb. And that's certainly true.
Be is a kind of verb in English, and you can tell because it exhibits some typical behaviours
of English verbs.
So one typical behaviour of English verbs is that they can express tense. Seo you can
say Carmen lies
or Carmen lied.
So present tense vs past tense and that's signalled by the morphology on the verb. And
in the same way you can say Carmen is dishonest or Carmen was dishonest.
So be changes its form depending on the tense. It's an irregular change because 'be' is a
very irregular verb, but the same thing is basically going on.
So that's typical verb behaviour that you're seeing for 'be'.
Another typical verb behaviour is that the verb agrees with the subject. And you see
that for 'be' as well. So you can say something like
Donald sleeps.
but
These children sleep.
In the same way, you would say
Donald is asleep.
but
These children are asleep.
So again the verb 'be' is changing its form. It's agreeing with the subject of the sentence.
So 'be' is certainly a verb. Nevertheless, if we look at the meanings of these sentences,
like
Some fish are luminous.
versus
Some fish luminesce.
from the point of view of the meaning, it seems that pretty much all of the meaning
apart from the tense that's expressed by the verb where that occurs is expressed by the
adjective where that occurs. 'Be' is contributing nothing to the meaning. So in that sense it
seems like what corresponds to the verb is really the adjective, that the adjective is
the head of the predicate.
And that impression is supported by the fact that in certain circumstances, we can express
the same meaning, the same proposition, with an adjective as the predicate, without 'be'
occurring at all.
Now in English, that possibility is really only possible in embedded clauses. If we look
at slightly more complex sentences than we've been considering so far, we can get things
like
They consider that Elena is exciting.
So there's a more complex sentence that's got two clauses, one embedded inside the other.
The clause that Elena is exciting is embedded inside the clause headed by consider.
So now we've got the proposition that Elena is exciting. It's got an adjective and it's
got the verb 'be'. But we could also say
They consider Elena exciting
and that seems to express just the same meaning. So there we've got a much more reduced clause
that just has the subject Elena and the predicate, the adjective exciting, and that seems to
be enough. These clauses that don't have any verbal element in them at all are typically
called small clauses. In English, they're only possible when they're somehow embedded.
But in many other languages, that's how you express a proposition containing an adjective,
in the present tense at least, even when it's not embedded. So if you want to say the equivalent
of "Elena is exciting" in a number of languages including Hebrew and Arabic, you would have
just the noun phrase Elena and then the adjective. You wouldn't need to use the verb 'be' at
all.
Those are adjectives, then, acting as predicates. It's not only adjectives.
One other really interesting case is that noun phrases can also act as predicates. Now
nouns are typically thought of as being associated with or referring to objects. Nouns like shoe
or chef. Referring to objects or individuals. And they certainly can do that. But it turns
out they can also head predicates in just the same way as adjectives as we've seen.
So you can say something like
That object over there is a shoe. or
I consider that object over there a shoe.
So 'a shoe' is behaving like a predicate. Or
Elena is a wonderful chef. I consider Elena a wonderful chef.
Chef is a noun, and a wonderful chef is a noun phrase. So there you've got noun phrases
that are behaving just like predicates. That are predicates.
These noun phrases are indefinite; they've got the indefinite article 'a' in them. But
even definite noun phrases can act as predicates. So I can also say
That shoe on the left is the only shoe worth buying
or I consider that shoe on the left the only
shoe worth buying.
Equally
Elena is the best chef in town. or
Everyone considers Elena the best chef in town.
So even definite noun phrases can act as predicates. That then sets up a situation where in these
copular clauses, these clauses where you've got a non-verbal predicate, that both the
predicate and the subject can be definite noun phrases. And indeed we find such cases.
And where we do, what we often find is that the order can vary. So I can say both
Elena is the best chef in town. and
The best chef in town is Elena.
That variation in order that you get, though, seems to depend partly on the presence of
'be'. So if we go back to these small clauses, what you typically can find is that even the
cases where you've got two noun phrases, the subject and the predicate, when you have 'be'
you might be able to get both orders, but in the small clause typically one order is
much better than the other. So it's perfectly natural to say
I consider Elena the best chef in town. but
I consider the best chef in town Elena
is, for most speakers, much less natural. So that fact about small clauses suggests,
then, that some noun phrases, like perhaps names like Elena, are typically the subjects,
and the other noun phrase has to be the predicate. But then when we wind back to these clauses
with 'be' where you can get either order, what are we going to say about sentences like
The best chef in town is Elena.
The noun phrase that looked like it had to be the predicate is the one that's in first
position. That order's perfectly natural for English speakers. And first position is a
typical position for subjects.
So now we've got something that looked like a predicate occuring in the typical subject
position.
And that's actually not the only grammatical signal that English is treating the first
noun phrase as the subject in some way. As I actually said at the beginning, it's a typical
property of subjects that the verb agrees with them. Now in these sentences, you can't
tell what the verb is agreeing with, because in all of the ones we've looked at so far,
the two noun phrases are both singular, and they're both ordinary noun phrases that are
third person. That is, they don't refer to any participant in the exchange.
But it's perfectly possible to set up cases where two noun phrases differ. Either in number,
so one is singular and one is plural, or in person, so one is third person and one is
first or second person, like 'I' or 'you'. And in these cases we can see what the verb
agrees with, which of the noun phrases controls the agreement. What we see in English is that
the typical pattern is that speakers spontaneously make the verb, in this case 'be', agree with
the first noun phrase, the one where the order also suggests it's the subject. So you could
have a sentence like
These three chapters are the best thing in the book.
but The best thing in this book is the first three
chapters.
And that occurs much more frequently than
The best thing in this book are the first three chapters.
Or again, you could have
You are the light of my life. but not
You is the light of my life.
for most speakers. But
The light of my life is you rather than
The light of my life are you.
So here it looks as though we've got a bit of a tension. On the one hand, the meaning,
the semantics, seems to be suggesting that you or the first three chapters, those look
like subjects in some sense, and yet what the verb agrees with and what occurs in the
typical subject position is the other noun phrase, which looks in some ways more like
a predicate. Sentences like this, where there seems to be a conflict between different subsystems
of the language, so between the semantics and the syntax for example, where these things
seem to be in tension, we can get information about how these systems interact, and that
can be quite informative about how language works.
In recent work that I've been doing with Jutta Hartmann of the Institute for the German Language
in Mannheim, we've been looking at how these tensions get resolved in sentences like this
in a number of languages related to English. In particular, we've been looking at how speakers
resolve these questions of agreement, where noun phrases might differ in number and in
person. As I've said, in English, speakers are pretty consistent about agreeing with
the first noun phrase, although there are some kinds of cases where people's behaviour
and judgement is more variable. So for example if you have a sentence like
All I could see was two great staring eyes.
people are very frequently also able to say
All I could see were two great staring eyes.
And when they read those sentences, they don't feel the need to correct them or change them.
They seem natural.
But cases like that are pretty exceptional in English. Generally speaking, speakers are
very consistent in agreeing with the first of the noun phrases, even when it's the second
one that seems to have some semantic properties that make it more plausible as the subject.
What we found looking at German is that German speakers are also very consistent. But they're
consistent in the other direction.
So if we have a sentence the equivalent of something like
My biggest problem is my noisy neighbours.
German speakers very consistently will say the equivalent of
My biggest problem are my noisy neighbours.
And they will actually reject the kind of agreement that English speakers produce. We've
established this both by doing tests where we leave a blank in the sentence for the speakers
to produce what they would find natural in that context and also by showing sentences
to speakers with different options and having them tell us if they're natural or not natural,
so giving them some kind of rating.
Even more interestingly, when we looked at some other Germanic languages, so Icelandic
and Faroese and Dutch, we found that there was considerable variation. So speakers were
not consistent. So there was both variation between speakers, some speakers choosing much
more agreement in one direction and some speakers in another, but also within speakers, that
given a number of choices or a number of chances to choose agreement, they would sometimes
do it one way and sometimes another.
So it looks as though in some languages the tension that arises between the, perhaps the
semantics and the syntax gets resolved in different ways. And in some cases this tension
seems unstable. And in fact in English we think that over time English has changed from
having a system more like the German one to the system that we see today. And there's
a bit of a relic in this in the prescriptive norm that you occasionally see where people
think that you ought to say not "It is me" but "It is I". That's going partly towards
the German system, although actually the original system in English we think was more like the
modern German system where really what you get is
"It am I", and noone ever suggests now in Modern English that we should say that.
What we've been looking at in particular in our recent work is not just the effect of
number variation, but where the two noun phrases differ in person. It's been something that's
been observed particularly in the last few years. People have been documenting differences
in syntactic behaviour between first and second person noun phrases. So "I" and "we", those
are first person, and "You", second person Differences in their syntactic behaviour from
other noun phrases, which are third person And one observation of the agreement is that
agreement with the first and second person is typically more fragile than agreement for
number. And we've been investigating this in these cases as well across these different
languages. Even in English we might see a hint of this behaviour. I said before that
there are some exceptional cases of English where you seem to get agreement with the second
noun phrase. So one example of this would be something like "All that mattered to me
was the children" having also an alternative where you could say "All that mattered to
me were the children". For many speakers, that second version is perfectly natural.
But now, what if it's you that mattered to me.
All that mattered to me was you.
Perfect.
All that mattered to me were you.
Is that okay for you? Most speakers that I have asked about this find that case much
worse. And if that's right, that suggests that what you see in English also is just
a shadow of this difference between agreement in number and agreement in person
We can look at this much more systematically in these other languages which have much more
agreement morphology than English does. And we find interesting cases of variation that
relate to person, but not always. So German, for example, shows no trace of this effect
at all. And what we hope is that looking, then, at these contrasts will show us more
about why person works in this way, and why agreement for person works differently from
agreement in number.
So overall, what we're trying to find out in these very simple sentences is a bit more
about how linguistic systems resolve conflicts between different subsystems which generally
give you the same result but sometimes seem to be in conflict with each other. And what
we've also been focusing on more recently is differences between person and number.
These are some of the issues that Jutta Hartmann and I have been investigating in our recent
work on the Germanic languages, and some of our results can now be read in the papers
that we've been writing, which we invite you to read and to send us your responses to.