Grammatical Cases of Charles Fillmore & Structural Semantics of William Chafe

Grammatical Cases of Charles Fillmore

Charles J. Fillmore (born 1929) is an American linguist, and an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

He was one of the first linguists to introduce a representation of linguistic knowledge that blurred this strong distinction between syntactic and semantic knowledge of a language. He introduced what was termed case structure grammar and this representation subsequently had considerable influence on psychologists as well as computational linguists.

Grammar Case is a system of linguistic analysis, focusing on the link between the valence, or number of subjects, objects, etc., of a verb and the grammatical context it requires. 

The system was created by the American linguist Charles J. Fillmore in (1968), in the context of Transformational Grammar. This theory analyzes the surface syntactic structure of sentences by studying the combination of deep cases (i.e. semantic roles) Agent, Object, Benefactor, Location or Instrument which are required by a specific verb.

According to Fillmore, each verb selects a certain number of deep cases which form its case frame. Thus, a case frame describes important aspects of semantic valency, of verbs, adjectives and nouns. 

Case frames are subject to certain constraints, such as that a deep case can occur only once per sentence. Some of the cases are obligatory and others are optional. Obligatory cases may not be deleted, at the risk of producing ungrammatical sentences.

The case structure representation served to inspire the development of what was termed a frame-based representation in AI research. Within a frame-base architecture it is quite natural to have these type of inferences triggered by the representation of the sentence. (For those familiar with certain types of Object Oriented programming language; the frame-based architecture in AI was a somewhat more complicated and elaborated programming environment.)

One of the consistent findings in human sentence understanding is that we seem to draw these inferences automatically. And, we rarely remember whether or not such information was explicitly stated in the sentence. This observation is consistent with some of the features of a frame-based representation as suggested by case structure grammar

Another aspect of the case grammar representation is that it can be effectively used to parse incomplete or noisy sentences. For example, while John gave book is not grammatical; it is still possible to create an appropriate case grammar parse of this string of words. However, case grammar is not a particularly good representation for use in parsing sentences that involve complex syntactic constructions. The web page on representing textual information will give you some appreciation of this difficulty.

Structural Semantics according to William Chafe´s perspective

Structural Semantics is the study of relationships between the meanings of terms within a sentence, and how meaning can be composed from smaller elements. However, some critical theorists suggest that meaning is only divided into smaller structural units via its regulation in concrete social interactions; outside of these interactions language may become meaningless.

In the approaches labelled "Structural semantics" by cognitive linguists, word meanings, or lexical meanings can be broken down into atomic semantic features, which are in a way the distinctive properties of the meaning of a word.

In accordance with the objectivist bias of structural semantics, semantic features are believed to refer to actual properties, objects or relations in the exterior world.

Syntactic description has usually taken the sentence to be its basic unit of organization, although probably no one would deny that systematic constraints exist across sentence boundaries as well.

From time to time some attention has been given to “discourse” structure, but the structure of the sentences has seemed to exhibit a kind of closure which allows it to be investigated in relative, if not complete, independence.

Language seen from a semantic perspective, intersentential constraints play a role that is probably more important than under other views of language, for a number of the limitations which cross sentence boundaries are clearly semantic in nature.

The term sentence provides a convenient way of referring to a verb and its accompanying nouns, the status of sentence as an independent structural entity is doubtful. There seems no need for some independent symbol as the starting point for generation of sentences, the verb is all the starting point needed.

A sentence is either a verb alone, a verb accompanied by one or more nouns, or a configuration of this kind to which one ore more coordinate or subordinate verbs have been added.

Bibliography

• http://www-rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/305_html/Understanding/CaseGram1.html
• http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_Charles_Fillmore's_theory_of_case_grammar
• http://cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/cauce/pdf/cauce05/cauce_05_011.pdf
• http://www.scribd.com/doc/38162791/Gramatica-de-Casos-Charles-Fillmore
• http://dspace.uah.es/jspui/bitstream/10017/7408/1/gramatica_montaner_REALE_1997.pdf
• http://my.ilstu.edu/~jrbaldw/370/Meaning.htm
• http://cogling.wikia.com/wiki/Structural_semantics
• http://www.facebook.com/pages/Structural-semantics/111039678946352
• Chafe, W. Meaning and the structure of language. University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 1970, capítulo IX

Generative Semantics word search game

Generative Semantics word search game » word search puzzle maker

Generative Semantics

Quiz! American Structuralism Glossary

Check out this quiz! 
It is about the glossary of American Structuralism



American Structuralism - QuizRevolution.com

Glossary : American Structuralism

Glossary

B: inside speakers

A: outisde speakers

C: speech

Mere: Is a syntcategorematic expression: it lacks both sense and reference; is not quantifiable, and does not function as subject or predicate in falsifiable assertions. It is used to inform about attitudes, not facts.

Objectivity: It refers to the connection between the outside speakers, inside speakers and the speech.

Subjective: The connection is only between inside speakers and speech, excluding the outside speakers.

Mentalism: It assumes that there are factors in mental operations inside speakers exempt from physical laws in the empirical realm outside speakers. However inside speaker was affected by outside speaker, this precluded physical determination of inherited language conventions speech by the physical constitution of outside speakers. It opposes: wholes or parts to material and formal principles, mind to brain, functions of the mind to triggering of the nervous system, understanding to experiencing, deciding to reacting, preferring to being reinforced, speaking to uttering, heroism or insanity to environmental conditioning.

It is being as dualistic because it recognizes two kinds (mental and material) of data, experience, perception, insight, causality, evidence, explanation, study goals and methods of study.

 Mechanism: Takes it for granted that there is a casual continuity from outside speakers, through inside speakers to speech.

Behaviorism: It offered and objective approach. It assumed the fundamental identity of physically determined speech-behavior with any other kind of nonlinguistic outside speakers-behavior. But it was conceded that while all inside speakers-behavior is the immediate consequence of outside speakers´ factors, speech-behavior is mediate.

Behaviorism is monistic because it admits only a single kind of data, erroneously distinguished by mentalists into experience, insight, perception, causality, evidence, explanation, study goal and method of study.

Language: The totality of mutually effective substitute responses.

Utterance: An act of speech.

Speech-Community: It refers to any community which speaks the same language

Language: The total of utterances that can be made in a speech- community.

Same: It refers to what is alike.

Forms: The vocal features common to same or partly same utterances.

Meanings: The corresponding stimulus-reaction- features.

Morpheme: The minimum form.

Sememe: The meaning of the morpheme.

Free: A form which may be an utterance.

Bound: A form which is not free.

Word: A form which has more than one morpheme.

Phrase:  A non-minimum free form.

Formative: A bound form which is part of a word.

Phoneme: A minimum same of vocal feature.

Homonyms: Different forms which are alike as to phonemes.

Constructional meaning: the corresponding stimulus- reaction features.

Morphologic construction: The construction of formatives in a word.

Syntactic construction: The construction of free forms in a phase.

Sentence: a maximum construction in any utterance.

Functional meaning: the meaning of a position.

Functions: positions in which a form occurs.

Form-class: All forms having the same functions.

Class- meaning: the functional meaning in which the forms of a form-class appear.

Categories: the functional meanings and class-meanings of a language.

Word-class: a form-class of words.

BEHAVIORAL CORRELATES FOR DETERMINING TRADITIONAL CONCERNS ABOUT LANGUAGE:

Literary standard: Is accessible though general or personal educational effort transcends geographic and social barriers, and is used on occasions described as formal.

Colloquial standard: Is observed in situations lacking formal behaviors among observably privileged classes within a larger speck community.

Provincial standard:  Is observed among those remote geographically from the formative environments of cultural centers.

Sub-standard speech behavior:  Is found among those who must interact daily as peers with each other, but only occasionally, and as subordinates to the privileged: their goals, satisfactions, reinforcement and opportunities differ markedly from those of standards speakers.

Local dialect:  Is that of an interacting group with which others have so little contact that dialect speakers are incomprehensible without considerable attention.

Phonetics: Is the branch of science that deals with the sound-production. It provides an objective record of gross acoustic features, only part of which are distinctive for particular languages, while phonology or practical phonetics, determines which features are the distinctive ones.

Acting as though:  An empirical procedure called the minimal pair test.

Modification: Presumes some standard from which a departure is made, and the criteria for establishing the base can vary, legitimately or inconsistently.

Duration: The relative length of time through which the vocal organs are kept in a position.

Stress: It consists in greater amplitude of sound waves and is produce by means of more energetic movements, which can vary in the manner of application, or where increase of loudness sets in.

Pitch: Frequency of vibration in the musical sound of the voice.

Palatalization: During the production of a consonant, the tongue and lips take up, as far as compatible with the main features of the phoneme, the position of a front vowel.

Velarization: Refers to the process in which the tongue is retracted as far a back vowel-

Labialized: When the lips are rounded during the production of the consonants.

Labiovelarized: The manner in which the vocal organs pass from inactivity to the formation of a phoneme, or from the formation of one phoneme to that of the next, or from the formation of a phoneme to inactivity.

Reference: Is the static relation, dynamic process or action linking speech to outside speakers, mediated by inside speakers.

Sense: The state, process or action within inside speakers, by which speech is related to outside speakers.

Referent: Is the thing. A bit of objective outside speakers or subjective inside speakers now regarded as part of speech.

Denotation Is reference.

Connotation: Is a subjective or socialized relation of the referent for speaker to other referents and properties.

Meaning of a linguistic form: The situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer.

Displaced speech: A speaks of absent apples to inside speaker who relay´s outside speaker´s message to speech.

Apple: Lying, irony, jesting, poetry, narrative fiction and the like.

Language: Is the expression of ideas, feelings, or volitions.

Hypostasis: Is closely related to quotation, the repetition of a speech, and like onomatopoeia, consists in deviations from the ordinary tie-up of phonetic form with dictionary meaning, which still shows considerable complexity.

Synchronic linguistic description: Proceeds on the counter-factual assumption of constant and stable forms paired with meanings within an unchanging speech-community, signaled through linguistic forms containing a discrete number of combinable phonemic contrasts.

Taxeme: A simple feature of grammatical arrangement.

Tagmemes: Meaningful units of grammatical form.

Episemes: The meaning of tagmemes.

Sandhi: Is the label for features of modulation and phonetic modification important to many syntactic structures.

Endocentric: When free forms combining can be said to produce a resultant phrase, of which the form-class of one member may be determinative of the phrase´s grammatical behavior.

Exocentric:  When the phrase pr construction does not follow the grammatical behavior of either constituent.

American Structuralism

AMERICAN STRUCTURALISM

 

American and European structuralism shared a number of features. In insisting upon the necessity of treating each language as a more or less coherent and integrated system, both European and American linguists of this period tended to emphasize, if not to exaggerate, the structural uniqueness of individual languages.

There was especially good reason to take this point of view given the conditions in which American linguistics developed from the end of the 19th century. There were hundreds of indigenous American Indian languages that had never been previously described. Many of these were spoken by only a handful of speakers and, if they were not recorded before they became extinct, would be permanently inaccessible.

Under these circumstances, such linguists as Franz Boas (died 1942) were less concerned with the construction of a general theory of the structure of human language than they were with prescribing sound methodological principles for the analysis of unfamiliar languages. They were also fearful that the description of these languages would be distorted by analyzing them in terms of categories derived from the analysis of the more familiar Indo-European languages. 

After Boas, the two most influential American linguists were Edward Sapir (died 1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (died 1949). Like his teacher Boas, Sapir was equally at home in anthropology and linguistics, the alliance of which disciplines has endured to the present day in many American universities. Boas and Sapir were both attracted by the Humboldtian view of the relationship between language and thought, but it was left to one of Sapir's pupils, Benjamin Lee Whorf, to present it in a sufficiently challenging form to attract widespread scholarly attention. Since the republication of Whorf's more important papers in 1956, the thesis that language determines perception and thought has come to be known as the Whorfian hypothesis. 

Sapir's work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically inclined American linguists. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the way for the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of American "structuralism." When he published his first book in 1914, Bloomfield was strongly influenced by Wundt's psychology of language. In 1933, however, he published a drastically revised and expanded version with the new title Language; this book dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it Bloomfield explicitly adopted a behaviouristic approach to the study of language, eschewing in the name of scientific objectivity all reference to mental or conceptual categories. Of particular consequence was his adoption of the behaviouristic theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response. Because science was still a long way from being able to give a comprehensive account of most stimuli, no significant or interesting results could be expected from the study of meaning for some considerable time, and it was preferable, as far as possible, to avoid basing the grammatical analysis of a language on semantic considerations. Bloomfield's followers pushed even further the attempt to develop methods of linguistic analysis that were not based on meaning. One of the most characteristic features of "post-Bloomfieldian" American structuralism, then, was its almost complete neglect of semantics. (see also Index: stimulus-response theory) 

Another characteristic feature, one that was to be much criticized by Chomsky, was its attempt to formulate a set of "discovery procedures"--procedures that could be applied more or less mechanically to texts and could be guaranteed to yield an appropriate phonological and grammatical description of the language of the texts. Structuralism, in this narrower sense of the term, is represented, with differences of emphasis or detail, in the major American textbooks published during the 1950s.

NORTH AMERICAN STRUCTURALISM CENTERS IN WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY SAY.

MAIN TENETS

1. Linguistic is a descriptive science.
2. the primary form of the language is the spoken one.
3. Every language is a system on its own right.
4. Language is a system in which smaller units arrange systematically to form larger ones
5. Meaning should not be part of linguistic analysis
6. The procedures to determine the units in language should be objective and rigorous.
7. Language is observable speech, not knowledge.

Structuralism proposes the idea that many phenomena do not occur in isolation, but instead occur in relation to each other, and that all related phenomena are part of a whole with a definite, but not necessarily defined, structure.

1.1 AMERICAN STRUCTURALISM : L. BLOOMFIELD

1.1.1.BEHAVIORISM AND SCIENCE

Behaviorism was a school of psychology. According to this school science can only deal with physical facts. Statements must be based on these physical characteristics. Thus, science must observe, describe physical facts and induce descriptive generalizations.

1.1.2. LANGUAGE : STIMULUS AND RESPONSE

Human behaviour is studied in terms of stimulus and response, consequently linguistic behaviour becomes also a pattern of stimulus and response, where language plays a mediating role.

1.1.3. THE METHOD AND LIMITATIONS

Behaviorist linguists start their studies by recording speech, and these samples will become the only basis for the study of language, in the form of sphich corpus. Speech will be divided into sound segments and they will observe these segments in their linguistic context. Finally, they will classify those segments according to their distribution. However, this method made the study of meaning very complex and probably outside the domain of linguistics, and this is the main behaviorist limitation.

 

1.2. AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN STRUCTURALISM

American and European structuralism had the same objective: describe and classify linguistic units, though they do not share the same perspective. European structuralists deal with Saussure's notion of langue, whereas Americans' perspective derived from the limitations of their behaviorist method.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.slideshare.net/Maliba/estructuralismo-5108107

http://www.slideshare.net/m230314/estructuralismo-americano

http://apunteslinguistica.blogspot.mx/2010/11/leonard-bloomfield.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Bloomfield

http://aportes.educ.ar/lengua/nucleo-teorico/recorrido-historico/-la-lingueistica-del-siglo-xx/el_estructuralismo_norteameric.php?page=2

http://www.soc.hyogo-u.ac.jp/tani/amstructuralsim.htm

http://www.slideshare.net/ipecista/structuralism

Investigation: Prescriptive or Descriptive language?

Outline of my investigation about the use of language

1. Identifying the phenomenon

2. Objectives

3. Contextual framework

4. Theoretical framework

4.1 What is language?

4.2 Descriptive and prescriptive language.

4.3 Language system and language behavior

4.4 Saussure´s concepts: “langue” and “parole”.

4.5 Pronouns of Address

5. Hypothesis

1. Identifying the phenomenon

Differences between the use of formal (prescriptive) language and informal (descriptive) language by middle class young adults and adults.

One prove of this is the difference in the use of tú and usted to address different people that is related to them.

2. Objectives

The purpose is to find out the reasons for young adults and adults to use formal or informal language and also in which situations they choose to use one of them or both.

 Another objective is to discover if there is any connection between the answers of these groups and if there has been a big change from one generation to another.

3. Contextual framework

The research and observation will be made in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and also with people of my environment such as family, friends which are from the middle class and approximately the same educational level between them.

The young adults are studying their degree and some of them are working, and the adults all of them have finished their degree and are workers or have been involved in that environment; that is really important because the purpose is to find the similarities but also the differences and for these two aspects they must have studied a degree.

Young adults must be between 18 and 24 years old, approximately the ages in which they are studying and the adults between 40 and 50 years old, that is in a certain way the range of ages of their parents.

4. Theoretical framework

First, is necessary to identify which concepts are related to the investigation.

4.1 What is language?

According to Sapir, language is a method used by humans, it is based on oral and written communication. This method was created in order to express humans´ needs.

According to Block and Trager it is a system of vocal symbols that change according to the speech community and people use this system to interact with others.

From Chomsky´s point of view, language consists on a group of sentences but these sentences are not finite, they have length and are compound by a set of infinite elements.

Finally Robins says that language is a system of symbols that a group of people accept and decide to use and that is also arbitrary.

4.2 Descriptive and prescriptive language.

According to Lyons, the prescriptive language is the correct way to speak or to use language; it represents the language that follows all the rules or norms, that is why it is also called normative. Everything in it is defined.

On the other hand, the descriptive language represents the one that is used by the society and follows all the rules that the speech community decided to have in their own language.

4.3 Language system and language behavior

According to Lyons, language behavior is like and activity, it is something that you can see and observe by the people that is involved in this interactions but also by spectators.

This language behavior is interrelated to the concepts of competence and performance. It means that in order to communicate and interact through language, we must know our language and have the cognitive ability to use it. For being able to perform, we must be competent but being competent is not always related to the way in which we perform, there are many other things involved.

4.4 Saussure´s concepts: “langue” and “parole”.

Saussure gave the term “langue” to the language particularly as a system and the term “parole” he used it to refer to the colloquial way of speaking by a specific group of people.

Something that is important to mention is that he realized that the individual behavior has an important role in linguistic changes that come to create the descriptive language or “parole”

4.5 Pronouns of Address

In Spanish language, we use polite (v- usted) and familiar (T- tú) pronouns of address.

The differences started in Latin in the last period of Roman Empire or early Middle Ages. There are some aspects to take on consideration in order to understand the reasons for these differences.

• Power and solidarity
• Non-reciprocal use-difference of status
• A socially superior or more powerful person will address his/her inferiors familiarly but not viceversa
• It is culture dependant.

5. Hypothesis

My hypothesis consists in the assumption of how prescriptive and descriptive languages change in their use and application depending on the age of the people that is using them. And also it hope this research help me to prove that descriptive or informal language is nowadays more used in society by younger people in this case young adults and in many different environments and that prescriptive language is only used in very specific and limited situations in our daily life.