Generative Grammar: A Meaning First Approach

Abstract

The theory of language must predict the possible thought—signal (or meaning—sound or sign) pairings of a language. We argue for a Meaning First architecture of language where a thought structure is generated first. The thought structure is then realized using language to communicate the thought, to memorize it, or perhaps with another purpose. Our view contrasts with the T-model architecture of mainstream generative grammar, according to which distinct phrase-structural representations—Phonetic Form (PF) for articulation, Logical Form (LF) for interpretation—are generated within the grammar. At the same time, our view differs from early transformational grammar and generative semantics: We view the relationship between the thought structure and the corresponding signal as one of compression. We specify a formal sketch of compression as a choice between multiple possible pronounciations balancing the desire to transmit information against the effort of pronounciation. The Meaning First architecture allows a greater degree of independence between thought structures and the linguistic signal. We present three arguments favoring this type of independence. First we argue that scopal properties can be better explained if we only compare thought structures independent of the their realization as a sentence. Secondly, we argue that Meaning First architecture allows contentful late insertion, an idea that has been argued for in Distributed Morphology already, but as we argue is also motivated by the division of the logical and socio-emotive meaning content of language. Finally, we show that only the Meaning First architecture provides a satisfying account of the mixing of multiple languages by multilingual speakers, especially for cases of simultaneous articulation across two modalities in bimodal speakers. Our view of the structure of grammar leads to a reassessment of priorities in linguistic analyses: while current mainstream work is often focused on establishing one-to-one relationships between concepts and morphemes, our view makes it plausible that primitive concepts are frequently marked indirectly or unpronounced entirely. Our view therefore assigns great value to the understanding of logical primitives and of compression.

Undercompression errors as evidence for conceptual primitives

“…A theory of the acquisition process must therefore make assumptions about the child’s human biological endowment, including the child’s sensitivity to aspects of its environment. In this paper, we approach this topic from the point of view of the Meaning First Approach (MFA), as presented in Sauerland and Alexiadou (2020) , (in print). Our goal is, on the one hand, to show that certain errors uncovered in the literature on child language can be offered a unified account with the assumptions of the MFA and, on the other, to present a research agenda for using child data in the development of a new perspective on the relation of thought and language.…”

“…As a first step, in this section we briefly summarize the main features of the MFA, pointing out similarities and divergencies with respect to other approaches. In doing this, we will avoid the technical jargon and we refer the reader to Sauerland and Alexiadou (2020) , (in print) for more formal details. Although we build on previous research on model theoretic semantics and generative syntax-morphology, the assumptions and predictions of the MFA differ from that of these other approaches to language, including mainstream generative grammar and the minimalist program.…”

“…CRs are generated out of universal and innate primitives (core primitives) and primitives derived from experience (non-core primitives) through algebraic operations. Sauerland and Alexiadou (2020) essentially adopt the operation Merge of the minimalist program ( Chomsky, 1995 ) as the algebraic operation and if this is correct, CRs are unordered binary branching tree structures. The generator is independent of language, universal within the species and is at least partly shared with other non-human species.…”

“…Otherwise, a manner implicature or ungrammaticality arises. Sauerland and Alexiadou (2020) give the example of present tense expression in English in (1). In this example, we avoid a complex formalization.…”

Negative Concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English Child Language

“…We will show that all approaches suffer from drawbacks, leading us to propose a novel analysis of negative concord and NIs which relies on purely morphological operations instead of syntactic Agree or movement. Adopting a version of the Meaning First model of grammar (Guasti et al 2023;Sauerland and Alexiadou 2020) which provides a direct interface between semantic representations and the morphological component, we semantically decompose NIs into a NEG part, an EXISTS part and a variable part such that NEG and EXISTS are always in a local configuration above the propositional level. We introduce three morphological rules, NEG-duplication, NEG-deletion and bundling, which operate on this structure in different (total or partial) orders of application in distinct languages.…”