The Endowment of Syntax by Alex Tamulis

Brief Preface The goal of this [abstract] short story is to practice syntactic writing and to put abstract expressionism into words. I want to reflect on the notion of syntactic mapping, f-morphemes and l-morphemes and abstract thinking. I will particularly focus on the concept of “shared syntax between two semantically different texts”. The syntactic structure here comes from “The Gift of The Magi”, by O. Henry. This is one of the most famous short stories of all time; hence I used its syntactic structure to devise linguistic entities and convey ideas to other people. By doing so, I intend to emulate abstract expressionism in literature.

The Endowment of Syntax

One hundred and eighty-seven morphemes. That was all. And sixty morphemes were in verbs. Verbs saved one and two at a time by talking with the linguist and the language man and the morphologist until one’s consonants burned with the silent guilt of being voiceless. Three times VP uttered it. One hundred and eighty-seven morphemes. And the next sentence could be subordinate. There was clearly nothing to say but utter hisses and puffs to the little device and scream. So VP did it, which makes syntacticians believe that language is made up of features, diagrams, and constituents, with DPs the most common. While the head of the phrase is gradually going from X0 to X’, take a look at the sentence. An elegant sentence at 8 lexical items per node. In the node below was an argument into which no transitive verb would go, and an adjunct which no node could cause to c-command. Also there was a node on it with the name “Mr. Noun Phrase.” The “NP” had been added during a former period of derivation when its parent was being granted 1 word per node. Now, when the merge was shrunk to one, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting it to a modest “N0”. But whenever Mr. Noun Phrase joined functional morphemes and reached its status above he was called “DP” and greatly hugged by Mrs. Verb Phrase, already introduced to you as VP. Which is all very syntactic. VP finished her inflection and attended to her nodes with some c-command. She merged by List 1 and spelled out out dully at a lexical item acquiring a given sound in a random meaning. Tomorrow would be Sentence Day, and she had only 187 morphemes with which to give NP a grammatical structure. She had been saving every morpheme she could for months, with this result. Twenty morphemes a month doesn’t go far. Vocabulary had been more expensive than she had calculated. They always are. Only 187 morphemes to create a sentence for NP. Her NP. Many a true argument she had attached to planning for something meaningful for him. Something fine and rare and wordy-something worthy of the honor of being c-commanded by IP. There were anomalous interpretations between the nodes of the sentence. Perhaps you have seen such interpretations in an ambiguous sentence. A very simple sentence may, by observing its diagram in a rapid sequence of these long terminal nodes, get a fairly accurate understanding of its meaning. VP, being primal, had mastered the art. Suddenly she acquired inflection and stood before the IP. Her morphology was shining brilliantly, but her root had lost its abstraction upon spell out. Suddenly she denoted the event and let it become its own encyclopedic entry. Now, there were two possessions of the Noun Phrase in which they both took great pride. One was NPs [+N] that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s nodes. The other was VPs c-command. Had the Queen of Syntax lived in the sentence across from theirs, VP would have let her root hang out the phrase some day to merge just to make the Queen’s features and bundles less valuable. Had King Language been the architect, with all his treasures piled up in his mind, NP would have pulled out his [+N] every time he passed, just to see him pull at his universal grammar from envy.

So now VPs beautiful aspect fell about her flowing and shining like a cascade of lexical items. It reached below her node and was almost like a constituent. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she derived for a minute and adjuncted while a word or two splashed on the worn diagram tree. She put on her old functional head; she put on her old morphological feature. With structure of syntax but not the brilliant prosody still in her features, she spelled out and down List 2 to the vocabulary items she went. When she finished, the sentence read: “Madame Merge. Constituent Moves of All Kinds.” One node up VP moved, and collected herself, parsing. Merge, primal, too abstract, uninterpretable, hardly understood the output was. “Will you be my argument?” asked VP. “I need verbs,” said Merge. “Take your root off and let’s have a look at it.” The insertion of vocabulary items rippled down. “Twenty morphemes,” said Merge, with a skilled move. “Give it to me quick,” said VP. Oh, and the next two sentences flew by on rosy wings. Pardon the fancy metaphor. Roots were ransacking List 2 for phonological features. VP found it at last. It surely had been made for NP and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the items, and she had parsed all of them inside out. It was a platinum Determiner Phrase simple and pure in design, showing its value by item alone and not by ornate insertion--as all grammatical sentences should do. It was even worthy of grammaticalness. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be NP’s. It was like him. Elegance and purity--the description applied to both. They took twenty morphemes for it, and she merged with the remaining 87 of them. With that item on his node, NP would be eager to check the grammaticality in any company. As wonderful as the item was, he sometimes looked at it secretly because of the old root that he used in place of an item. When VP gained inflection her excitement changed a little to reason. She got out her surrounding nodes and went to work trying to fix her constituent, which was now a mess made by grammaticality added to semantic interpretation. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends--a gigantic task. Within forty reads her node was covered with tiny features that made her look wonderfully like a phrase. She looked at her reflection in the diagram tree, carefully, and critically. “If NP doesn’t take DP,” she said to herself, “before he takes an intermediary node, he’ll say I look like an anomalous node. But what could I do--oh! what could I do with 187 morphemes?” At spellout the sentence was output and the interpreter was ready to add the pragmatics. NP was never late. VP held the DP in her branch and moved to the top of the sentence near the CP that he always branched from. Then she saw NP on the nodes down on the intermediary level, and she went intransitive for just a moment. She had a habit of outputting a little silent event about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: “Please Syntax, make him think I am still grammatical.” The sentence was read and NP stepped in and attached to it. He looked legit and very grammatical. Poor fellow, he was only [+N] - and to be burdened with an argument! He needed a new DP and he had no hierarchy. NP stopped inside the phrase, as still as a consonant at the sight of a vowel. He stared at VP, and there was an item in them that she could not understand, and it scared her. It was not action, nor name, nor quality, nor aspect, nor any of the modalities that she had been prepared for. He simply

stared at her with that peculiar structure on his node. VP wriggled off the branch and went for him. “NP, darling,” she cried, “don’t look at me that way. I had my node cut off and sold because I couldn’t have lived through semantics without giving you a form. It’ll happen again--you won’t mind, will you? I just had to do it. My node grows awfully fast. Say ‘Fair Sentence!’ NP, and let’s be happy. You don’t know what a syntactic--what a beautiful, syntactic endowment I’ve got for you.” “You’ve cut off your modifier?” asked NP, slowly, as if he had not understood, even though he had thought hard about it. “Cut it off and sold it,” said VP. “Don’t you like me just as well, anyhow? I’m me without my argument, ain’t I?” NP observed the sentence curiously. “You say your verbness is gone?” he said, seeming almost stupid. “Don’t look for it,” said VP. “It’s sold, I tell you--sold and gone, too. It’s a grammatical sentence, boy. Be good to me, for I sold it for you. Maybe the features of my argument structure were numbered,” she went on with sudden serious sweetness, “but nobody could ever think my longing for you. Shall I merge, NP?” NP seemed quickly to wake out of his node. He merged with his VP. For ten sentences let’s not watch them. Eight morphemes a week or a million a year--what is the difference? A syntactician or a morphologist would give you the wrong answer. List 1 brought valuable features, but that was not among them. This dark statement will be illuminated later on. NP rid a modifier from his node and threw it upon the sentence. “Don’t make any mistake, VP” he said, “about me. I don’t think there’s a transitivity that could make me like my verb partner any less. But if you’ll unwrap that phrase you may see why I acted like I did.” Syntactic features burst at the strings branches. And then a happy output of meaning; and then, alas! A quick change to ungrammaticality, requiring the immediate comfort of her companion. For there lay The Predicate--the set of ideas that VP had admired in a grammatical sentence. Wellput predicate, completely meaningful, with illocutional force--just the right predicate for her beautiful vanished transitivity. They were expensive words, she knew, and her head had yearned for them without believing she would ever have them. And now, they were hers, but the verb that should have held the beautiful predicate was gone. But she interpreted it wisely, and she looked up and said: “My events merge fast, DP!” And then VP thought like a little semanticist and cried, “Oh, oh!” NP had not yet seen his beautiful present. She wrote it out to him eagerly with her open phrase. The dull precious item seemed to flash with a reflection of her precious constituency. “Isn’t it wonderful, NP? I hunted all over universal grammar to find it. You’ll have to parse at the nodes a hundred times a day now. Give me your phrase. I want to see how it looks on it.” Instead of acquiescing, NP sat down on the diagram, merged, and spelled out. “VP,” said he, “let’s put our grammatical sentences away and keep ‘em a while. They’re too correct to use right now. I sold the modifier to get the morphemes to output your sentence. And now suppose you output the vocabulary items.” The syntax, as you know, was wise abstraction—wonderfully wise abstraction--which brought fea-

tures to the phrase. It invented the art of giving wordy features. Being wise, their features were wise ones, perhaps ones you could exchange if you got two. And here I have parsed the dull phrases of two foolish nodes in a sentence which most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their tree diagrams. But in a last word to the wise of these languages let it be said that of all who receive features, these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive abstract features, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the syntax.

Biodata Alex Tamulis was born in 1982 in São Paulo, Brazil. He’s a linguistics major at the University of São Paulo. He’s the author of several essays and satirical novellas, such as “Elliot Atop The Landfill Mound”, “Dimwit in the Land of Bad Grammar” and “Vampiric Beings”. His main interests are theoretical linguistics and the origins of language. You can check his work www.alextamulis.com and on websites such as Research Gate and Academia.