Grammar and semantics are closely related but also distinct. Grammar is concerned with the formal properties of language, focusing on categories such as tense, gender, number, and syntactic functions. These categories are indicated through form words, morphemes, or word order. However, the relationship between grammatical and semantic categories is complex, as grammatical categories do not always correspond directly to semantic distinctions. For example, notions like gender, number, and person vary across languages and do not always map neatly to concepts like biological sex or quantity. This demonstrates the intertwined but separate nature of grammar and semantics.

1. Semantics and Grammar
 Grammar and lexicon
 Formal grammar
 Gender and number
 Person and deixis
 Transitivity and causitivity

2. Grammar and lexicon
 distinction made by Henry Sweet in terms
of full words and form words
full words – those that contain lexical
meaning (e.g. table, man, go, hear, good)
form (function) words – a word whose role
is largely grammatical (e.g. articles,
pronouns, conjunction, prepositions)

3. Grammar and lexicon
 distinction is between lexicon and
grammar [modern linguists]
 distinction between four parts pf speech
(verb, noun, adjective, adverb) and fifteen
sets of function words (the, may, not, very,
and, at, do, there, why, although, oh, yes,
listen!, please, let’s) [C.C. Fries]

4. Grammar and lexicon
 Grammar is not restricted to the study of
form or function words
 It is concerned with categories such as
‘tense, gender, number’ and syntactic
functions such as subject and object
 They are marked by form words, or by
morphemes, or by the order of the words

5. Grammar and lexicon
problem
 what are the relevant grammatical
categories in any language whether a
grammatical category is indicated by a
form word, a morpheme or the order of the
words
e.g. English marks past tense with the
past tense morpheme indicated as ‘-ed’

6. Grammar and lexicon
problem
e.g. English marks past tense with the past
tense morpheme indicated as ‘-ed’
no similar morpheme for the future
(shall, will, going to, or other verb forms
with appropriate adverb)
I’m flying / fly to Cairo tomorrow.

7. Grammar and lexicon
problem
English conjunction words: after, before,
when, while, if are translated into Bilin
(a Cushitic language of Ethiopia) by
endings of the verb

8. Grammar and lexicon
 In modern linguistics, problem of
distinction between grammar and lexicon
is posed in terms of distinction between
sentences that are deviant for
grammatical reasons and those that are
deviant on lexical grounds
e.g. The boys is in the garden.
The water is fragile.
The flower walked away.

9. Grammar and lexicon
 There have been opposing views on the
question whether these two kinds of
restriction are different
colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
(grammatically correct)
(lexically deviant)

10. Grammar and lexicon
 If a grammatical rule is broken, we can
correct the sentence
The boys are in the garden.
 If the sentence conforms to no
grammatical rules, we rule it out as
gibberish.
e.g. Been a when I tomato.

11. Grammar and lexicon
 Where the deviance lies in the
collocational / lexical restrictions, we try to
‘make sense’ of the sentence by looking
for a context in which it is used
e.g. John drinks fish.
John drinks fish soup.
The water is fragile.
(to find a poetic interpretation for this sentence)

12. Grammar and lexicon
 Even Chomsky”s Colourless green ideas
sleep furiously can be given
interpretation.

13. Grammar and lexicon
 Lexical restrictions are not a matter of
rules but of tendencies, not of Yes/no, but
of More/less when judged in terms of
deviance
 When is a rule a rule?

14. Grammar and lexicon
 There is no clear line between
grammatical and lexical deviance.
 If some sentences are ungrammatical and
can be ruled out/ corrected.
 If some sentences are deviant in terms of
lexicon, they can be contextualized

15. Grammar and lexicon
 There are others that are half-way and we
are not really sure whether deviance is
lexical or grammatical
e.g The dog scattered. (deviant because of the
collocation of dog with scatter)

16. Grammar and lexicon
 The verb ‘scatter’ is normally used only
with plural nouns.
the dogs scattered.
 The verb ‘scatter’ is normally used with
collective nouns.
The herd scattered.

17. Grammar and lexicon
 Can we imagine a dog with magical
powers whose way of avoiding its enemies
was to break into many pieces and
‘scatter’ over a wide area?
The dog scattered.
 The deviance would seem to be lexical
rather than grammatical.

18. Grammar and lexicon
 Can we say “The dog scattered” in such a
context OR would “The dog scattered
itself” be more appropriate?
 We are on the borderline of grammar and
lexicon.

19. Formal Grammar
 For most traditional grammarians,
grammatical categories were essentially
semantic
 Many linguists have argued that grammar
must be kept distinct from semantics and
that grammatical categories must be
wholly defined in terms of the form of the
language

20. Formal Grammar
Two arguments for excluding meaning from
grammar
 Meaning is often vague
 Meaning categories are not easily delineated
 Semantic categories are often definable only in
terms of the formal features of a language
 If the grammatical categories are given semantic
definitions, the definitions are circular

21. Formal Grammar
e.g.
noun = a word used for naming anything
What are the things?
thing = fire, speed, place, intelligence,
suffering & objects such as tables,
chairs & redness, blackness
How do we know that redness and
blackness are names of things while red
and black are not?

22. Formal Grammar
rain = noun (thing)
It’s raining = thing
river, spring, etc. = verb
How do we recognize things?
things = what are designated by nouns
 Definition of noun in terms of ‘naming
things’ is completely circular.
 There is no non-linguistic way of defining
things

23. Formal Grammar
Two arguments for excluding meaning from
grammar
 Even when we can establish semantic and
grammatical categories independently,
they often do not coincide
 The fact that these (e.g. wheat and oats)
are singular and plural respectively is
shown in the agreement with the verb

24. Formal Grammar
 In terms of ‘one’ and ‘more than one’
‘wheat’ and ‘oats’ cannot be distinguished
‘wheat’ = a single mass
‘Oats’ = a collection of individual grains
e.g.
The wheat is in the barn.
The oats are in the barn.

25. Formal Grammar
 Hair = singular in English
= plural in French and Italian
 Gender and sex are distinct in German
and French
German words for ‘young woman’ =
neuter
strapping young male in French =
feminine

26. Formal Grammar
 In English, tense is not directly related to
‘time’
 The past tense is used for the future time
in “If he came tomorrow ….”
 The basic grammatical categories of a
language must be established
independently of their meaning

27. Formal Grammar
 Some correlation between e.g. gender
and sex, tense and time, grammatical
number and enumeration though the
correlation will never be exact
 nouns referring specifically to females
males and sometimes males

28. Formal Grammar
 The correlation between grammar and
semantics becomes closer and closer and it is
difficult to declare whether the categories are
formal or semantic
e.g. 1. John slept coming every day.
2. John kept coming every day.
3. John hoped to come every day.
 ‘sleep’ does not occur with an –ing form, ‘keep’
is followed by the ‘-ing’ form (if it is a
grammatical error)

29. Formal Grammar
 The sentence is impossible for semantic
reasons, it doesn’t make sense
e.g. 4. John ran coming every day.
Does this sentence make sense?
If it does not, the restriction is semantic.
If it does, the restriction is grammatical.
e.g. 5. John is seeming happy.
This sentence is ungrammatical.

30. Formal Grammar
 The verb seem does not occur in the
continuous form.
 Is this a grammatical rule or is the case
that for semantic reasons ‘John cannot be
in a continuous state of seeming’?
 The line between grammar and semantics
is not a clear one

31. Gender and number
1. No exact correlation between gender
and sex
In some cases, gender is wholly
idiosyncratic
e.g. The German words are neuter
French occupational names are all feminine.

32. Gender and number
2. English has no grammatical gender
 Pronouns ‘he, she, it’ are essentially
markers of sex
 If the sex is specially known, ‘he’ and
‘she’ are used; otherwise, ‘it’ is used.
 There is a difference between the use of
pronouns for animals and for humans.
 e.g. ‘It’ may be used for animals and ‘he’
or ‘she’ is used if the sex is known

33. Gender and number
 With ‘human’, it cannot be used even if the
sex is unknown.
 For the indefinite unknown human, ‘they,
them, their’ are used in colloquial English
 For reference to a specific human whose
sex is unknown ‘it’ is sometimes used as
in:
e.g. Is it a boy or a girl?

34. Gender and number
3.Semantically, enumeration does not seem
to be very important
 Many languages have grammatical
number systems but others do not.
 It is difficult to see why the semantic
distinction should be between singular
(one) and plural (more than one)
 Many languages make this distinction but
not all.

35. Gender and number
 Greek, Sanskrit and Arabic had dual – referring
to objects
 Fijian and Tigre (Ethiopia) have distinctions of
little plurals and big plurals

36. Gender and number
4. need to distinguish between ‘individual’ and
‘mass’ (countables and uncountables)
 Formally they can be distinguished
 Count nouns may occur in the singular with the
indefinite article (e.g a cat) while mass nouns
may occur with no article or with the indefinite
quantifier ‘some’ (e.g. some rice)
 Semantically, they are different
 Count nouns individuate while mass nouns are
not individuated

37. Gender and number
5. But the distinction does not correspond closely
to any semantic distinction in the world of
experience
Liquids are referred to by mass nouns because
they cannot be individuated
e.g. but there is no explanation in semantic terms
why ‘butter’ is a mass noun while ‘jelly’ is ‘count’
as well as ‘mass’
Cake is count as well as ‘mass’ (because
individual cakes can be recognized) but bread
is only ‘mass’

38. Gender and number
6. Mass nouns can function as count nouns
e.g. a butter - a kind of butter
a petrol - a kind of petrol
a coffee – a cup of coffee
a beer – a glass of beer
function as types of individuation
Count nouns that refer to creatures may function
as mass nouns (to indicate the meat)
e.g. The Chinese eat dog. (the meat of dog)

39. Gender and number
7. Semantically mass nouns are nearer to plurals
than singular forms of count nouns
e.g. oats and wheat
count mass
8. Most count nouns can be counted. But there are
two reservations
(1) English has the words ‘scissors, trousers,
shears, tongs’ which are formally plural but
cannot be enumerated except by using another
noun ‘a pair of …’

40. Gender and number
(2) English uses the plural forms with
numbers above one, but not all
languages do.
e.g. one dog, two dogs, three dogs
In Myanmar, we use numbers above
‘one’ but no plural markers

41. Gender and number
 Grammatical categories do not coincide
exactly with semantic categories

42. Person and deixis
 ‘Person’ is often closely associated with
number and person
 Only person and number are marked in
Western Indo-European languages
 Gender is marked in Semitic languages
and Eastern Indo-European language

43. Person and deixis
 ‘persons’ has clear semantic function but
does not refer to any general semantic
features such as quantity or sex, but to
an identifiable item in the context.

44. Person and deixis
 First person and second person (I and
you) have changing reference depending
on who is present in the conversation but
cannot be interpreted in terms of any
generalisable semantic qualities
 ‘person’ represented by pronouns and
endings of verbs in some languages

45. Person and deixis
 ‘person’ interpreted in terms of the
speaker, hearer, non-participants in
conversation or written correspondence
speaker – I, We
hearer – you
non-participant – he, she, it, they

46. Person and deixis
e.g.
‘We want another’ by crowd in a football
match
‘Why are we waiting?’ By impatient group
singing
We …> (S, H), (S, N-P), (S, H, N-P)

47. Person and deixis
 ‘they’ is used to refer to hearer(s) and
non-participant(s)
 A simple rule with the plural: pronoun is
determined by the ‘highest’ ranking
person included
 ‘I’ is included ….> I
 ‘you’ is included …> you
 ‘they’

48. Person and deixis
 In some languages, more polite and less
polite form of address are used
e.g. in Myanmar
 ‘person’ is a deictic category which refers
to identifiable in the context
 ‘article’ is used to refer to a single
identifiable item in the context where it is
apparent to speaker and hearer precisely

49. Person and deixis
 Book …> any book
 The book …> a particular book
 Identification of item is often simply in
terms of the most familiar
e.g. the Government, the moon, the kitchen,
the garden

50. Person and deixis
 articles does not occur with names (proper
nouns) – Fred, Professor Brown
 ‘the three Freds, He is not the Fred I knew’
used in a non-unique sense
 there are some idiosyncracies
e.g.
rivers – the Severn, the Thames, etc.
cities – the Hague
 Formal grammatical point, no semantic
significance

51. Person and deixis
Other deictics
 Demonstratives – these and those
 Place adverbs – here, there, etc.
 Time adverbs – now, soon, etc.

52. Person and deixis
 Deictics are used to refer to items in the
context (linguistic & non-linguistic)
e.g ‘he’ to refer to someone actually present
(a little impolite)
‘now’ and ‘here’ does not refer to time
and place of speaking but are used for
times and places referred to in the
discourse