Interview Questions for Descriptive Grammar

Descriptive grammar is the objective study of how language is actually used. It focuses on describing the grammatical structures and patterns found in real-world language use, without making judgments about correctness or prescribing rules. Think of it as a scientist observing and documenting the behavior of language, much like a biologist studying animals in their natural habitat.

Prescriptive grammar, conversely, dictates how language *should* be used. It’s a set of rules and guidelines about what is considered ‘correct’ or ‘proper’ grammar, often based on tradition or the preferences of a particular group. Think of it as a teacher setting standards for students to adhere to.

The key difference lies in their goals: descriptive grammar aims to understand language as it is, while prescriptive grammar aims to regulate how language should be.

For example, a descriptive grammarian might note that many English speakers use ‘double negatives’ (e.g., “I ain’t got none”), while a prescriptive grammarian would likely condemn this construction as incorrect.

Grammaticality in descriptive grammar refers to whether a sentence or phrase conforms to the patterns and rules of a specific language as it’s actually used. It’s not about whether a sentence is considered ‘correct’ according to prescriptive rules but rather whether native speakers would judge it as acceptable or understandable within a given context. A sentence can be perfectly grammatical in a descriptive sense even if a prescriptive grammar would deem it incorrect.

For instance, the sentence “Me and him went to the store” might be considered ungrammatical by prescriptive standards (correct form being “He and I”), but a descriptive grammarian would acknowledge its frequent occurrence in spoken English and analyze its structural pattern within the context of colloquial speech.

Determining grammaticality often involves analyzing large corpora of language data to identify recurring patterns and variations.

A comprehensive descriptive grammar analysis typically encompasses several major components:

• Phonetics and Phonology: The study of the sounds of a language (phonetics) and how those sounds are organized into a system (phonology). This includes examining things like vowels, consonants, stress patterns, and intonation.
• Morphology: The study of word formation, including how words are built from smaller units (morphemes) such as prefixes, suffixes, and roots. This helps us understand how words change in form to express different grammatical functions (e.g., tense, number, gender).
• Syntax: The study of how words are combined to form phrases and sentences. This examines sentence structure, word order, and the relationships between different parts of a sentence.
• Semantics: The study of meaning in language. This encompasses lexical semantics (the meaning of individual words), compositional semantics (how meanings of words combine to create sentence meanings), and pragmatic semantics (how context affects meaning).
• Lexicon: A detailed inventory of a language’s vocabulary, including information about word meanings, usage, and frequency.

These components are interconnected; understanding one aspect often requires insights from the others. For example, understanding the morphology of a verb helps us interpret its syntactic function in a sentence, and analyzing the syntax of a sentence is crucial for understanding its semantics.

While all three – syntax, morphology, and semantics – are crucial for understanding language structure and meaning, they focus on different levels:

• Syntax deals with the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences. It’s about the grammatical relationships between words and how they combine to convey meaning. Think of it as the ‘sentence structure’ aspect of language.
• Morphology focuses on the internal structure of words. It examines how morphemes combine to form complex words, reflecting grammatical categories like tense or plurality. This is the ‘word structure’ aspect.
• Semantics concerns the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences. It investigates how words relate to the concepts they represent and how sentences convey meaning based on the relationships between words. This is the ‘meaning’ aspect.

Example: Consider the sentence “The cats are sleeping.”

• Syntax: Analyzes the word order (Subject-Verb-Object), the relationship between “cats” (subject) and “sleeping” (predicate).
• Morphology: Examines the morphemes in “cats” (-s indicating plurality) and “sleeping” (-ing indicating present participle).
• Semantics: Focuses on the meaning of the words and the overall proposition that multiple cats are in a state of sleep.

Word classes, also known as parts of speech, are categories of words based on their grammatical function and meaning. They provide a framework for analyzing sentence structure and understanding how words interact.

Major word classes include:

• Nouns: Words representing people, places, things, or ideas (e.g., cat, house, freedom).
• Verbs: Words indicating actions or states of being (e.g., run, sleep, is).
• Adjectives: Words describing nouns (e.g., big, red, happy).
• Adverbs: Words modifying verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs (e.g., quickly, very, loudly).
• Pronouns: Words replacing nouns (e.g., he, she, it, they).
• Prepositions: Words showing the relationship between a noun or pronoun and another word in the sentence (e.g., on, in, to, with).
• Conjunctions: Words connecting words, phrases, or clauses (e.g., and, but, or).
• Determiners: Words that specify a noun (e.g., the, a, an, this, those).

Identifying word classes is fundamental to parsing sentences and understanding their grammatical structure.

Phrase structures are the hierarchical arrangements of words and phrases within a sentence. They reveal the grammatical relationships between the elements and how they combine to form larger units. Phrase structures are often represented using tree diagrams or bracket notation.

For example, consider the sentence “The big red ball rolled quickly.”

A tree diagram would show the hierarchical relationships:

(S (NP (Det The) (Adj big) (Adj red) (N ball)) (VP (V rolled) (Adv quickly)))

In this representation, ‘S’ stands for sentence, ‘NP’ for noun phrase, ‘VP’ for verb phrase, ‘Det’ for determiner, ‘Adj’ for adjective, ‘N’ for noun, ‘V’ for verb, and ‘Adv’ for adverb. The bracketing shows how smaller phrases (like the noun phrase “The big red ball”) are combined to form larger phrases (the sentence).

These representations help linguists visualize the grammatical structure and underlying relationships within a sentence, providing a clear and organized way to analyze the components and their functions.

In generative syntax, the concepts of surface structure and deep structure are crucial for understanding the relationship between a sentence’s outward form and its underlying meaning. They’re linked through transformations.

Surface structure is the actual form of a sentence as it’s spoken or written. It’s what we see or hear. It represents the final output after any syntactic transformations have taken place.

Deep structure represents the underlying, abstract representation of a sentence’s meaning. It’s a more fundamental level that captures the core semantic relationships between the words, regardless of how the sentence is ultimately expressed. This is the level where semantic interpretation begins.

Consider the sentences:

• “The dog chased the cat.”
• “The cat was chased by the dog.”

These sentences have different surface structures. However, they share a similar deep structure representing the same core meaning: a dog performed the action of chasing on a cat. Transformations (such as passive voice) alter the surface structure without changing the deep structure.

Understanding the difference helps linguists analyze how sentences with different surface structures can convey the same meaning (or subtly different meanings) and how grammatical transformations work.

Grammatical relations describe the syntactic functions words play within a sentence. They define how words relate to each other to create meaning. Key relations include:

• Subject: The entity performing the action (or being described) in a sentence. Example: The cat sat on the mat. (Cat is the subject).
• Object: The entity receiving the action of the verb. Example: The dog chased the ball. (Ball is the direct object).
• Predicate: The part of the sentence that contains the verb and describes the action or state of being of the subject. In The cat is sleeping, ‘is sleeping’ is the predicate.
• Object of Preposition: A noun or pronoun governed by a preposition. Example: The book is on the table. (‘table’ is the object of the preposition ‘on’).
• Indirect Object: Receives the effect of the verb indirectly. Example: She gave him the book. (‘him’ is the indirect object receiving the book).

Understanding grammatical relations is crucial for parsing sentences and understanding their structure. Consider how different sentence structures can change these relationships. For example, in the passive voice, the object becomes the subject: The ball was chased by the dog.

Grammatical functions are the roles words play in a sentence’s structure, often determined by their position and relationship to other words. These functions are fundamental to syntactic structure – the way words are arranged to create phrases and clauses. Think of it like the parts of a machine; each part (grammatical function) contributes to the overall operation (syntactic structure).

For instance, a noun phrase can function as a subject, object, or complement, changing the sentence’s meaning and structure. Consider these examples:

• The bird sang. (Subject: ‘The bird’)
• The cat saw the bird. (Subject: ‘The cat’, Object: ‘the bird’)
• She is a teacher. (Subject: ‘She’, Subject Complement: ‘a teacher’)

The relationship between grammatical function and syntactic structure is hierarchical. Phrases are built from words, clauses from phrases, and sentences from clauses, with each element contributing its grammatical function to the overall syntactic structure. Analyzing this structure helps us understand the meaning and relationships within a sentence, facilitating tasks like machine translation or natural language processing.

Context plays a pivotal role in interpreting meaning. Words and sentences rarely exist in isolation; their meaning is heavily influenced by the surrounding words, phrases, and even the broader situation. Think of how the same word can have different meanings depending on its context.

For example, ‘bank’ can refer to a financial institution or the side of a river. The surrounding words and the overall situation clarify the intended meaning. Similarly, sarcasm or irony relies heavily on context to convey the intended message, which is often the opposite of the literal meaning.

Different types of context include:

• Linguistic Context: The words and sentences surrounding a particular word or phrase.
• Situational Context: The physical environment and circumstances in which the language is used.
• Social Context: The social relationships and roles of the speakers.

Ambiguity is frequently resolved through context. For instance, the sentence ‘I saw the man with the telescope’ can have two interpretations depending on the context: did ‘I’ use a telescope to see the man, or did the man have a telescope? Analyzing context is vital for accurate interpretation in areas like machine translation, legal interpretation, and even daily communication.

Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language. They are the building blocks of words. Understanding morphemes is key to understanding word formation, which involves combining morphemes to create new words or modify existing ones.

For instance, the word ‘unbreakable’ is made up of three morphemes: ‘un-‘ (meaning ‘not’), ‘break’ (meaning ‘to fracture’), and ‘-able’ (meaning ‘capable of’). Each morpheme contributes to the overall meaning of the word. This process is called morphological analysis. Through the combination of morphemes, we can create complex words with nuanced meanings, expanding the vocabulary of a language.

Word formation processes, like affixation (adding prefixes and suffixes), compounding (combining two words), and conversion (changing a word’s grammatical category), all rely on the manipulation of morphemes to create new lexical items.

Morphemes are categorized into various types based on their properties:

• Free Morphemes: Stand alone as words and carry meaning. Examples: cat, dog, run.
• Bound Morphemes: Cannot stand alone as words; they must be attached to a free morpheme. These are often prefixes or suffixes. Examples: un-, -ing, -ed.
• Derivational Morphemes: Change the meaning or grammatical category of a word. Example: Adding ‘-ness’ to ‘happy’ creates ‘happiness’, changing it from an adjective to a noun.
• Inflectional Morphemes: Change the grammatical function of a word without changing its core meaning. Examples: -s (plural), -ed (past tense), -ing (present participle).

Understanding these types of morphemes is fundamental to morphological analysis, which involves breaking down words into their constituent morphemes to understand their meaning and structure. This knowledge is crucial for lexicographers, linguists, and anyone working with language data.

Let’s analyze the morphological structure of the word “unintentionally”.

We can break it down as follows:

• un-: A prefix meaning ‘not’.
• intention: A free morpheme, the root word, meaning ‘a plan or purpose’.
• -al: A derivational suffix turning the noun ‘intention’ into the adjective ‘intentional’.
• -ly: An inflectional suffix turning the adjective ‘intentional’ into the adverb ‘intentionally’.

Therefore, “unintentionally” means ‘not in a planned or purposeful way’. This step-by-step decomposition reveals how morphemes combine to create a word with a specific meaning and grammatical function. This kind of analysis is vital in computational linguistics, for example, to build better dictionaries or language models.

Semantic roles describe the roles that participants play in an event or state described by a sentence. They focus on the meaning contribution of phrases rather than their grammatical function. Key semantic roles include:

• Agent: The entity that performs the action. Example: The boy kicked the ball. (Boy is the agent).
• Patient: The entity that undergoes the action. Example: The ball was kicked by the boy. (Ball is the patient).
• Instrument: The entity used by the agent to perform the action. Example: He cut the bread with a knife. (Knife is the instrument).
• Beneficiary: The entity that benefits from the action. Example: She baked a cake for her friend. (Friend is the beneficiary).
• Location: The place where the event takes place. Example: The meeting was held in the office. (Office is the location).

Understanding semantic roles helps us understand the meaning of sentences at a deeper level, going beyond simple grammatical relationships. This is crucial for applications like semantic parsing and question answering systems, where the underlying meaning of sentences needs to be understood to provide accurate responses.

Semantic features are the basic elements of meaning that contribute to a word’s overall sense. Think of them as the building blocks of meaning. Each word can be analyzed as a bundle of these features, which are often binary (present or absent). For example, the word ‘woman’ might have the semantic features [+human], [+female], [+adult]. The absence of these features would define other words. ‘Man’, for instance, would be [+human], [-female], [+adult]. These features allow us to understand how words relate to each other semantically. Words sharing many features will be closely related in meaning (e.g., ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ share [+human], [+female]), while words with few shared features will be more distant (e.g., ‘woman’ and ‘tree’). The combination of these features creates the unique meaning of each word, and their interaction within a sentence creates the overall meaning of the utterance.

Consider the sentence: “The cat sat on the mat.” ‘Cat’ possesses features like [+animal], [+feline], [+mammal]. ‘Sat’ implies [+action], [+static], [+past tense]. The combination of these features contributes to our understanding of the scene described.

Lexical ambiguity arises when a single word or phrase has multiple meanings. This can lead to confusion or even humor. For example, the word ‘bank’ can refer to a financial institution or the side of a river. The sentence “I went to the bank” is lexically ambiguous because its meaning depends on context. Resolving lexical ambiguity involves relying on the surrounding words, the context of the situation, and our world knowledge.

Consider these examples:

• Ambiguous: “The bat flew away.” (Is it a mammal or a piece of sporting equipment?)
• Resolved (context): “The furry bat flew away.” (Clearly, a mammal)
• Resolved (context): “The baseball bat flew away.” (Clearly, sporting equipment)

Context plays a crucial role. In a sports commentary, ‘bat’ will likely refer to the sporting equipment; in a nature documentary, it would most likely mean the flying mammal. Our understanding of the world, combined with linguistic context, helps us disambiguate such instances.

Pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. It goes beyond the literal meaning of words to consider factors like the speaker’s intention, the listener’s knowledge, the social setting, and the overall communicative goal. We often communicate implicitly, relying on shared understanding rather than explicitly stating everything.

For example, the utterance “It’s cold in here” might not just be a statement of fact, but a request to close a window or turn up the heating. The intended meaning isn’t directly stated but is inferred from the context. This inference depends on factors such as the temperature, the location, the relationship between the speaker and listener, and the overall conversational flow.

Pragmatics is essential for effective communication. Without it, we would struggle to understand many subtle nuances and implied meanings in conversations. It’s what allows us to interpret sarcasm, irony, and indirect speech acts.

Speech acts are actions performed through language. Rather than just conveying information, we use language to request, promise, apologize, threaten, etc. John Austin’s theory of speech acts categorizes these acts into three parts: the locutionary act (the act of uttering words), the illocutionary act (the intended meaning and effect), and the perlocutionary act (the actual effect on the listener). Classifying speech acts can be done in many ways, but some common categories include:

• Assertives/Representatives: Stating facts (e.g., “The earth is round.”)
• Directives: Giving commands or requests (e.g., “Close the door.”)
• Commissives: Making promises or commitments (e.g., “I’ll help you.”)
• Expressives: Expressing emotions or attitudes (e.g., “I’m sorry.”)
• Declaratives: Performing actions through declarations (e.g., “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”)

Understanding speech acts is crucial in interpreting communication accurately. Misinterpreting the illocutionary force of an utterance can lead to misunderstandings and conflict.

Analyzing the phonological structure of a language involves investigating its sound system. This includes identifying the inventory of sounds (phonemes), their organization into syllables and words, and the rules governing sound combinations. The analysis involves several steps:

1. Phonetic inventory: Creating a list of all the distinct sounds in the language using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
2. Phoneme identification: Determining which sounds are contrastive (meaning their substitution changes the meaning of a word) and therefore are phonemes.
3. Syllable structure analysis: Determining the typical syllable structure of the language (e.g., CV, CVC, etc.).
4. Phonotactics: Investigating the permissible sound sequences in the language (which sounds can appear together in syllables and words).
5. Stress patterns: Analyzing the stress patterns in words and phrases.
6. Intonation patterns: Investigating how pitch changes affect meaning (e.g., distinguishing questions from statements).

This detailed analysis gives a comprehensive understanding of a language’s sound system and its contribution to the language’s overall structure and meaning.

Phonological processes are rules that change the pronunciation of sounds in specific contexts. Here are some examples:

• Assimilation: A sound becomes more like a neighboring sound. For instance, in English, the /n/ in ‘incompatible’ often becomes /m/ because it precedes the bilabial /p/.
• Deletion: A sound is omitted. A common example is the deletion of /t/ or /d/ in English between other consonants, such as ‘handbag’ becoming ‘hanbag’.
• Insertion: A sound is added. For example, the insertion of a schwa vowel sound in words like ‘athlete’ is becoming more prevalent in certain dialects.
• Metathesis: Sounds are reordered. While less common in English, examples can be found in casual speech, such as ‘ask’ becoming ‘aks’.
• Lenition: Sounds become weaker or less constricted. For example, the voicing of /p/ to /b/ in some contexts.

These processes demonstrate how pronunciation varies in context, and understanding them helps explain different dialectal variations and historical sound changes within a language.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of symbols that represents all the sounds found in human languages. It provides a consistent and universally understood way to transcribe speech, unlike orthographic systems (spelling), which may vary greatly and not accurately reflect sounds. Each symbol represents a unique sound, regardless of the writing system of the language.

The IPA chart is organized based on the articulatory features of sounds (how they are produced), showing the manner and place of articulation. This allows linguists, speech-language pathologists, and others to accurately document and analyze speech sounds. Its use is essential for linguistic research, language teaching, speech therapy, and creating dictionaries that represent pronunciation accurately.

For example, the sound represented by /θ/ in English (as in ‘thin’) is easily recognizable to anyone familiar with the IPA, unlike spelling, where the same sound is represented by different letters ( ‘th’, ‘t’ in ‘Thomas’).

Phonemes and allophones are fundamental concepts in phonology, the study of sound systems in language. A phoneme is a minimal unit of sound that can distinguish meaning. Think of it as a mental category representing a sound. Different phonemes create different words. For example, in English, /p/ and /b/ are distinct phonemes because replacing one with the other changes the meaning of a word (e.g., ‘pat’ vs. ‘bat’). An allophone, on the other hand, is a phonetic variation of a phoneme. These variations don’t change the meaning of a word. For instance, the /p/ sound in ‘pin’ is aspirated (a puff of air follows the sound), while the /p/ in ‘spin’ is unaspirated. Both are allophones of the same phoneme /p/.

To illustrate further, imagine a coin. The phoneme is the concept of ‘heads’ – it’s an abstract idea. Allophones are the different versions of that ‘heads’ – a slightly worn heads, a shiny new heads, etc. They’re all still ‘heads,’ they just look a little different.

Linguistic analysis involves examining language at different levels. These levels are interconnected but distinct.

• Phonetics: The physical properties of speech sounds – how they are produced, transmitted, and perceived. Phoneticians use tools like spectrograms to analyze sounds objectively.
• Phonology: The systematic organization of sounds in a language, focusing on how sounds pattern and interact. This level deals with phonemes, allophones, and syllable structure.
• Morphology: The study of word formation. It examines morphemes, the smallest units of meaning (e.g., prefixes, suffixes, roots). For example, ‘unbreakable’ contains three morphemes: ‘un-‘, ‘break’, and ‘-able’.
• Syntax: The study of sentence structure and the rules governing how words combine to form phrases and clauses. It focuses on word order and grammatical relations.
• Semantics: The study of meaning. It examines the meaning of words, phrases, sentences, and texts. This includes looking at literal and figurative meaning.
• Pragmatics: The study of how context influences meaning. It considers factors such as speaker intent, social context, and shared knowledge.

These levels work together. For example, understanding the phonology of a language is crucial for accurate morphological analysis, and a strong understanding of semantics and pragmatics is essential for accurate syntactic interpretation.

Construction Grammar is a prominent theory relevant to descriptive grammar. Unlike theories that posit abstract underlying structures, Construction Grammar posits that grammar consists of pairings of form and meaning. These pairings, called ‘constructions,’ range from simple words and idioms to complex sentence patterns. Each construction is a learned unit stored in the speaker’s mental lexicon. A construction encodes both its syntactic form and semantic contribution. For example, the ‘ditransitive’ construction, as in ‘She gave him the book,’ is not merely a result of applying general rules, but a learned construction with its own unique syntactic and semantic properties.

This approach is particularly useful for descriptive grammar because it readily accommodates the variability and exceptions found in real-world language use. It provides a framework for cataloging the various constructions a language utilizes, offering a detailed and empirically grounded account of its grammatical system.

Corpus linguistics plays a crucial role in descriptive grammar research. A corpus is a large, structured collection of text and/or speech data. Analyzing a corpus allows researchers to observe actual language use, rather than relying solely on introspection or limited examples.

For example, researchers can use corpora to:

• Identify the frequency and distribution of grammatical constructions: Determining how often specific grammatical structures occur and in what contexts.
• Investigate the variation in grammatical usage: Analyzing how grammatical features vary across different speakers, registers, or genres.
• Test hypotheses about grammatical patterns: Using quantitative data to confirm or refute hypotheses about grammar.
• Document the evolution of grammatical structures: Comparing corpora from different time periods to trace changes in grammar over time.

Corpora offer a valuable resource for empirically grounding descriptive grammar, making it more objective and reliable.

Analyzing a previously undocumented language requires a multi-faceted approach involving fieldwork and linguistic analysis. This is a challenging but rewarding undertaking.

The process involves:

1. Building rapport with speakers: Establishing trust and gaining their cooperation is essential. This often requires learning basic phrases in their language and showing respect for their culture.
2. Elicitation of data: Employing various techniques to collect linguistic data, such as picture-naming tasks, sentence translation, and narrative elicitation. This phase is iterative, requiring revisiting and refining data collection strategies.
3. Phonetic transcription and phonological analysis: Detailed recording and transcription of speech samples. Analyzing the sound system to identify phonemes and allophones.
4. Morphological analysis: Identifying morphemes and analyzing how they combine to form words. Creating a morphological inventory.
5. Syntactic analysis: Investigating sentence structure, word order, and grammatical relations. Determining the basic sentence patterns and the rules governing them.
6. Semantic and pragmatic analysis: Examining the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences in their context of use.
7. Documentation: Preparing a comprehensive grammar documenting the findings. This will usually involve creating a dictionary and a grammatical description.

This process requires patience, linguistic expertise, and cultural sensitivity. The collaboration between linguists and native speakers is paramount.

Let’s analyze the phenomenon of relative clauses in English. A relative clause modifies a noun, providing additional information (e.g., ‘The book that I borrowed is interesting’).

The analysis would involve:

1. Data Collection: Gathering a corpus of sentences containing relative clauses from various sources.
2. Identifying the structural components: Analyzing the relative pronoun (that, which, who, whom, whose), the relative clause itself, and the head noun it modifies.
3. Classifying the types of relative clauses: Differentiating between restrictive (essential) and non-restrictive (non-essential) clauses. Restrictive clauses are crucial to the meaning of the sentence; non-restrictive clauses provide extra information.
4. Analyzing the position of the relative clause: Observing whether it follows or precedes the head noun, and analyzing any implications for meaning or interpretation.
5. Examining the grammatical function of the relative pronoun within the relative clause: Identifying whether it functions as a subject, object, or possessive.
6. Documenting exceptions and variations: Noting any instances where the rules appear to be broken or where the grammar shows flexibility or variation.

This systematic approach would lead to a detailed descriptive analysis of relative clauses in English, pinpointing their structural patterns and variations.

Descriptive grammar, while striving for objectivity, faces several challenges and limitations:

• Subjectivity in data interpretation: Even with rigorous methodologies, there can be some level of subjectivity in how linguists interpret and categorize linguistic data.
• Incomplete data: It’s impossible to gather all instances of language use. Any analysis is based on a sample and may not fully reflect the language’s full complexity.
• Language change: Languages are dynamic. A descriptive grammar offers a snapshot of a language at a particular time; it might not fully capture its evolution.
• Dialectal variation: Languages often have multiple dialects with differing grammatical features. A descriptive grammar might need to account for these variations.
• The challenge of defining grammaticality: The line between grammatical and ungrammatical can be blurry, with some sentences falling into the gray area between acceptability and unacceptability.

Despite these limitations, descriptive grammar remains a vital tool for understanding and documenting human language, constantly evolving and refining its methodology to overcome these challenges.