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On many places I may read that syntax is about structure, and semantics is about meaning, and this makes sense. But, lets think of the canonical example

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

said to be syntactically correct but semantically meaningless.

We can analyse this sentence as

adjective + adjective + noun + verb + adverb

and yes, is syntacticaly correct. But what if we syntactically analyse it as

adjective + adjective-for-chromatic-things + abstract-noun + passive-verb-for-concrete-things + active-adverb

or something along those lines. We could divide the set of parts of speech into more specific ones, so that the sentence is syntactically only if it is semantically meaningful.

Is there a strict difference between the two? What could be the flaw in this example?

Draconis
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Ian Fieldhouse
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2 Answers2

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To answer the main question in the title: No, there is no strict wall between syntax and semantics. I think anyone who has worked at all in syntax will know that syntax, semantic and pragmatics are intricately linked, and you cannot study one without the rest. For example, consider the Manipuri case marker nǝ (Bhat, 2002) (this is entirely a random example that's only chosen because it's something I've been reading about and it's a clear-cut example):

(1) ma-nǝ   ǝy-bu  kawwi
    he-nom me-acc kicked
    ‘He kicked me’

(2) ma ǝybu   uy
    he me-acc saw
    ‘He saw me’

The reason we add the marker in (1) and not (2) is because (1) is about an activity and (2) is about a state. It is obvious from these and other examples that there is no strict separation between syntax and semantics.

However, the example that you give isn't such a great example. In principle, linguists only put words into parts of speech because of morphosyntactic criteria, i.e. criteria that are realised in the form of language, not semantic criteria, criteria that a purely based on meaning. (Examples of morphosyntactic criteria would be whether a word can modify a word of another type, whether a word can be inflected in a certain way, etc.) So we would not advocate for a category 'adjective for chromatic things' in English unless there is a specific syntactic reason for it, say if English colour adjectives were the only ones that can occur postnominally (which of course isn't true). Ditto for abstract nouns, concrete things, etc. Passive is a syntactic notion and not a semantic one, so it doesn't help your case (and I'm not sure what 'active adverb' means - 'furious' doesn't seem to involve action to me, and I'm not sure how it's related to active in the sense of active vs passive either).

Bhat, D. S. (2002). Grammatical relations: the evidence against their necessity and universality. Routledge.

WavesWashSands
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    Right. After all, syntax is mindless; its purpose is to make semantics and pragmatics some room to maneuver, and it's not surprising that it seems to have adapted itself to necessities. 3-place predicates have their own syntax; or, put another way, verbs involving Dative movement resemble one another semantically. Levin's book English Verb Classes and Alternations lists the verbs that undergo many syntactic rules, and each group is semantically unified. – jlawler Oct 05 '19 at 22:53
  • The idea of active/passive wasn’t about the linguistic terms, but about how «sleeping furiously» is semantically nonsense. «to sleep» and «furiously» dont make sense together as one is a passive, calm concept, whereas the other an active, energetic concept. The other idea is interesting: to put words into morphosyntactic criteria (form, not meaning) is the closest to my problem. Seems to me that this is the arbitrary distinction between the two that linguists make. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like we talk about syntactic things because we say they are syntactic. – Ian Fieldhouse Oct 05 '19 at 23:10
  • @IanFieldhouse: About the first point: yeah, that's something I figured too, since the verb is not syntactically passive. About the second point: I don't think it's arbitrary but rather obvious. It's morphosyntactic if you can actually 'see' the properties of that category (e.g. the distinction between nouns and verbs in English is morphosyntactic because only verbs take past tense, only nouns get modified by adjectives, etc.), – WavesWashSands Oct 05 '19 at 23:41
  • and it's purely semantic if it's about meaning rather than form (there is no difference, as far as I'm aware, in the way English colour terms behave that sets them aside from all other adjectives). This seems like a pretty motivated distinction to me. – WavesWashSands Oct 05 '19 at 23:41
  • Oh, see your point. It’s about how they make the structure in a more abstract way. The sets I created in my example would all collapse into their original ones, as they structurally behave the same. So in your example, nǝ would fall into the particles/postpositions category? At the moment it feels like sentences are synthesised following syntactical rules, and analysed following semantic reasoning. If we compose ma-nǝ ǝybu uy, it would be sound, but when we decompose its parts and look at how its pieces relate, its meaning would be corrupted. Could that be correct? – Ian Fieldhouse Oct 06 '19 at 00:54
  • Re: 'The sets I created in my example would all collapse into their original ones, as they structurally behave the same' - note my original phrasing: 'there is no difference [...] in the way English colour terms behave that sets them aside from all other adjectives'. English adjectives do not all behave in the same way; there are adjectives that take more and adjectives that take -er, for example. You may establish two subcategories 'more-adjectives' and '-er-adjectives' if you want and you wouldn't be wrong, though most linguists probably will not adopt this because the terms – WavesWashSands Oct 06 '19 at 03:38
  • don't tell us anything beyond how the comparatives are formed. // Re: 'So in your example, nǝ would fall into the particles/postpositions category?' I'm no expert on Manipuri so I don't know whether nǝ is best treated as a particle, postposition, clitic or affix in the language. If you're asking because you want to make sure that nǝ is a 'full' word rather than an affix, my response is that even if -nǝ is best treated as a suffix, the phenomenon described above is still syntactic since the use of -nǝ is governed by the words that are co-occurring with the noun. – WavesWashSands Oct 06 '19 at 03:42
  • Re: the rest of your post, I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to say. Could you clarify? – WavesWashSands Oct 06 '19 at 03:42
  • This might be going a bit off topic, but I’ll try to explain what I think/theorize. Imagine forming a sentence using a syntax tree. From the root, it would decompose into multiple leaves following the syntactic rules of the given language. ma ǝybu uy would be correct, as from a root node it decomposed into a noun phrase, a verb phrase, and into further elements. When you hear that sentence, you hear separate elements, and start seeing how they relate to each other (oh, this is the noun phrase, this is the verb, etc), and begin composing the meaning following semantic reasoning. – Ian Fieldhouse Oct 06 '19 at 16:03
  • It might be incorrect, or it might be unknown still. So, could I ask whats the name of this linguistic area? I might need to research. – Ian Fieldhouse Oct 06 '19 at 16:06
  • Let us continue this discussion in chat. – WavesWashSands Oct 06 '19 at 17:53
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I think syntax and semantics are related but operate at different levels.

I will not go very deep in to the subject but try to say how syntax and semantics differ.

Could you please tell me where the post office is ?

The above is a question syntactically but it is a polite request semantically.

Jvlnarasimharao
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