[zodiac]

No, the academic consensus is pretty much the opposite. For example by trying to rigorously state the way we form yes/no sentences in english - the process that converts "the man who has written the book will be followed" to "will the man who has written the book be followed?" instead of the incorrect "has the man who written the book will be followed?" - you will find that the rules must involve imposing some sort of tree structure on the original sentence. The fact that we do it correctly all of the time on sentences we've never seen before means that we must have parsed the original sentence.

(Example sentences taken from https://he.palgrave.com/page/detail/syntactic-theory-geoffre..., although any introductory linguistics/syntax textbooks will spend a few pages making the case that humans understand language by first parsing it into some kind of tree structure).

[TeMPOraL]

> the process that converts "the man who has written the book will be followed" to "will the man who has written the book be followed?" instead of the incorrect "has the man who written the book will be followed?"

And yet the following is also correct - in terms of real-world usage, not some prescriptive definitions:

"The man who has written the book will be followed, right mate?"

> you will find that the rules must involve imposing some sort of tree structure on the original sentence.

The rules are, and the brain may be, but I feel those are different tree structures. Moreover, I wonder if the "tree structures" of our brains aren't just artifacts of recursive pattern matching - we also know that when reading, humans process whole groups of words at a time, and only if there's some mismatch they process pieces in more detail. Any recursive process like this will generate a tree structure as its side effect.

Anyway, thanks for the examples. I might pick a linguistic book at some point. Right now the idea of understanding natural language by parsing it into "NOUN PHRASES" and "VERB PHRASES" and stuff seems completely backwards, given how humans have no trouble parsing "invalid" sentences, or using them - especially in spoken language.

(Not to mention our ability to evolve the language, and how the grammatically invalid constructs tend to be introduced, used, understood with no trouble and at some point they become grammatically accepted - see e.g. recent acceptance of "because <noun>").

[zodiac]

Yes, of course your "right mate" example is also grammatically correct. The point is that people routinely and naturally do the complicated transformation to "will the man who has written the book be followed?", and that transformation can't be done by simple pattern matching. Hence, humans who are able to do the complicated transformation must be mentally parsing the sentence. The fact that there is an alternative simple transformation to form the yes-no question is irrelevant because the ability to use the complicated transformation still exists.

> given how humans have no trouble parsing "invalid" sentences

I think you misunderstand slightly - the claim linguists make is not "humans are unable to understand invalid sentences because they can't parse them", the claim is that when you see an invalid (cannot be parsed into a proper tree) sentence, you have a gut feeling that it "sounds off", and if you're a native speaker you would never accidentally produce such ill-formed sentences. You can still understand the meaning of a sentence like "I this morning fish eat" but you also immediately notice that it's "off" - and that's the phenomena that syntax tries to explain.

Furthermore, the way you understand sentences like "I this morning fish eat" is different from the way you understand "I ate fish this morning", in the former it feels like you're guessing. It could work for communicating simple thoughts, but I doubt an english non-speaker who has an english dictionary could convey a complicated thought requiring many words by that same guessing process. In fact the reason why language evolved tree syntax is probably because it is needed to convey long, complicated thoughts.

> because <noun>

I'm glad you mentioned that! First, modern linguistics is very far from prescriptive. In fact the first thing they teach you (at around the same time they make the claim that "humans parse sentences into tree structure") is that linguistics is a descriptive field - language changes over time, the study of the rules of language and how these rules change is interesting and important, but it's pointless to "enforce" the rules. Even new constructions like "because X" have rules that govern them, eg see http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/72252671648/why-the-new-... - constructions like "because want" and "because need" exist, but no one says "because adore", and something interesting explains why. (to be fair, I haven't really internalized the "because X" construction so I can't claim that I find "because adore" unnatural, but the article says it's the same reason why "omg want" and omg need" are currently grammatical but "omg adore" is not, and even if you're not familiar with the "omg X" construction, it gives independent evidence in that "omg adore" has no tumblr tags; of course, it may become grammatical in the future, but that would be because the rules have changed over time, not because there are no rules). To that point,

> or using [ill-formed sentences] - especially in spoken language.

actually, if a sentence is used in spoken language routinely and non-accidentally, linguists take it as evidence that it's grammatical and then work backwards to find the rules that explain why it is so. How else could they do it?

[TeMPOraL]

Thanks for your answers. You've raised a lot of good points, and I need to think them through.

> the claim is that when you see an invalid (cannot be parsed into a proper tree) sentence, you have a gut feeling that it "sounds off", and if you're a native speaker you would never accidentally produce such ill-formed sentences. You can still understand the meaning of a sentence like "I this morning fish eat" but you also immediately notice that it's "off" - and that's the phenomena that syntax tries to explain.

I see. Yeah, most of the way I think about how mind processes language comes from focusing on that "gut feeling", that on one hand tells you that this perfectly understandable sentence is somehow "off", and on the other hand lets you form perfect sentences without ever explicitly thinking about grammar.

> First, modern linguistics is very far from prescriptive. In fact the first thing they teach you (at around the same time they make the claim that "humans parse sentences into tree structure") is that linguistics is a descriptive field

It seems to me that I've been operating under invalid assumption that linguistics is mostly prescriptive. Thanks for that. Any recommendation for an intro book I could grab to read in my spare time?

[zodiac]

> Any recommendation for an intro book I could grab to read in my spare time?

Unfortunately I think the field suffers from a lack of such books.

1. You could try Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct", although it's a general-audience book that doesn't really try to teach you linguistics proper

2. The first textbook I used was https://linguistics.osu.edu/research/pubs/lang-files and it's pretty good. However, it's quite hard to obtain.

Edit:

3. If you just want to look at syntax http://web.mit.edu/norvin/www/24.902/24902.html is advanced but good