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Every time we speak, we're improvising:
"Humans possess a remarkable ability to talk about almost anything, sometimes putting words together into never-before-spoken or -written sentences," said Morten H. Christiansen, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
We can improvise new sentences so readily, language scientists believe, because we have acquired mental representations of the patterns of language that allow us to combine words into sentences. The nature of those patterns and how they work, however, remains a puzzle in cognitive science, Christiansen said.
[...] For decades, scientists have believed we rely on a complex mental grammar to build sentences that have hierarchically organized structure – like a branching tree. But Christiansen and Nielsen suggest that our mental representations might be more like snapping together pre-assembled LEGO pieces (such as a door frame or a wheel set) into a complete model. Instead of intricate hierarchies, they propose, we use small, linear chunks of word classes like nouns and verbs – including short sequences that can't be formed by way of grammar, such as "in the middle of the" or "wondered if you."
[...] The prevailing theory since at least the 1950s is based on hierarchical, tree-like mental representations, setting humans apart from other animals, Christiansen said. In this view, words and phrases combine according to the principles of grammar into larger units called constituents. For example, in the sentence "She ate the cake," "the" and "cake" combine into a noun phrase "the cake", which then combines with "ate" into the verb phrase "ate the cake," and finally with "she" to make the sentence.
"But not all sequences of words form constituents," Christiansen and Nielsen wrote in a summary of their paper. "In fact, the most common three- or four-word sequences in language are often nonconstituents, such as 'can I have a' or 'it was in the.'"
Because they don't conform to grammar, nonconstituent sequences have been overlooked. But they do play a role in a speaker's knowledge of their language, the researchers found.
In experiments, an eye-tracking study and an analysis of phone conversations, they discovered that linear sequences of word classes can be "primed," meaning when we hear or read them once, we process them faster the next time. That's compelling evidence they're part of our mental representation of language, Christiansen said. In other words, they're a key part of our mental representation of language that goes beyond the rules of grammar.
"I think the main contribution is showing that traditional rules of grammar cannot capture all of the mental representations of language structure," Nielsen said.
"It might even be possible to account for how we use language in general with flatter structure," Christiansen said. "Importantly, if you don't need the more complex machinery of hierarchical syntax, then this could mean that the gulf between human language and other animal communication systems is much smaller than previously thought."
Journal Reference: Nielsen, Y.A., Christiansen, M.H. Evidence for the representation of non-hierarchical structures in language. Nat Hum Behav (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02387-z
(Score: 3, Touché) by hendrikboom on Wednesday February 04, @04:15AM (2 children)
Prepositions can be at end in English.
What's more, in that last example, 'up' is not a preposition. "... with which I shall not put up" would be better.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday February 04, @07:24AM (1 child)
I will guess that you are Dutch (the name is a clue), and in my experience, many Dutch people speak and write grammatically better English than the average British person.
The position of prepositions in sentences is much like the admonition against splitting infinitives - grammarians wanting to impose rules rather than describing how people actually use language to communicate. If you ask a native speaker about sentence structure, a common answer is that the word order they use just 'feels right', and many would not know what a preposition is, even though they use them all the time.
Learning Classical Greek has been described to me as first learning all the rules, and subsequently, maddeningly, spending a great deal more effort in learning all the exceptions to the rules. Exceptions demonstrate that rules are approximations, slavish adherence to which will lead one astray. The same is true for English, a language full of exceptions to trip up the unwary adult foreign learner. Informal English follows the 'rules' of English grammar less rigidly than formal English, and in many social situations speaking grammatically correct English would mark you as being slightly strange.
I try to write more formally than the average bear, and try to appreciate it when faults in my writing are pointed out. Improvement is a worthy goal.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday February 06, @04:20AM
The venerable Fowler's dictionary of modern English usage considers the restriction about preposition at end to be a superstition.