But professor, syntax is hard!

Every few weeks I get an email from a student complaining that syntax is too hard or that they simply can't understand it. Occasionally I even get requests to rewrite my textbook to make it simpler! (For the record, I'm happy to receive feedback on ways I might make the material more accessible, but these student emails rarely contain specifics). So what's going on? Why is syntax such a barrier to many people studying linguistics? Why has my sub-discipline got this terrible reputation?

I have some thoughts on why people are intimidated by syntax. Many people come to linguistics from a humanities and arts backgrounds and the minute anything formal is presented to them, especially if they suffer from math-phobia, it scares them. But at the core, compared to other fields, the math behind syntax is actually fairly elementary, it just looks intimidating and unfamiliar.

I think syntax also doesn't look like other kinds of science they've been taught. In North American schools at least, science is taught exclusively as exercises in statistical inference. Theoretical syntax is by definition a science: We run experiments with controls and draw conclusions based on those experiments. But it's not a science like most people are used to. Most syntacticians don't run large scale multi-subject experiments where you investigate trends and patterns across multiple utterances from multiple people and then run a stats program on the data looking for p-values and means and the like. This is because of the nature of the data and explanations that we look for are about cognition and are introspective. This means that syntax is a double whammy of unfamiliarity to people. It's both scarily mathy and it uses unfamiliar methodologies. It doesn't look like the chemistry or physics experiments that popularly define science. 

There are reasons to believe that many people who find syntax hard are simply not approaching the study of it right. If you are used to a discipline where the bulk of the work is "book-learnin'", i.e., you read about the concepts, memorize some definitions, and then you've got it, then you aren't going to be successful in syntax. One thing I often see in these emails from students are statements like "I've read the chapter multiple times and I've watched your videos and I attended lecture and I still don't understand it". I think those statements are revelatory. I suspect these students think that they should be able to do syntax simply by reading about the underlying concepts. This approach to syntax is just never going to work. For two reasons: 

First I don't think you can understand syntactic concepts until you apply them to data. Just memorizing a definition and being able to regurgitate it on a test is a recipe for failure in my field. It's only by actually getting your hands dirty with some data that you're going to be able to make sense of why the theory is constructed the way it is. You need to get into the details of the clear cases and probe the edges where the theory doesn't work so well- you're not going to be able to master the more abstract ideas of theory just by reading a textbook. 

Second, doing syntactic analysis is a skill like playing a sport or music. You won't get it the first time. You have to practice. You're most likely going to get it wrong the first few times you try and that's expected. But if you don't keep practicing you're never going to get it. I sort of wonder if students who struggle with syntax get frustrated (and sometimes give up) because they don't get it right on the first few tries. There are very few people who can draw syntactic trees for a complicated sentence perfectly the first time, just as there are very few people who can play a Mendelssohn piano piece the very first time they sit down at a keyboard. So stop beating yourself up if you make mistakes, keep at it and the analyses will eventually become natural.

So what is my recommendation for students who find syntax too difficult. (I recently had one tell me it was unfair that their program even required them to take it): Practice, Practice, Practice. Do the exercises at the end of each chapter. If you need instantaneous gratification on the answers, then buy the workbook and do the exercises there. The answers are at the end of each chapter in the workbook so you can check your work. Start small with phrase structure rules and simple sentences. Then do more complicated sentences. Then add in X-bar theory. Then add in subcategorization and movement operations. This is why my textbook is structured the way it is, i.e., as an incremental exercise in hypothesis testing and revision*. You need to really understand and master one set of tools before building on them with more complicated tools. But it also means that you get the experience to do syntax that you're not going to get by just memorizing concepts. 

I don't think Syntax is intrinsically harder than any other discipline to master and that's not just because I'm a syntactician by profession. But I do think you need to approach it from the perspective of mastering a skill and that can be hard work!

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*I'm going to do another whole blog post sometime about people who say they just want the final answer and they don't understand why they have to go through all this hypothesis testing and revision, but that's a topic for another day.