Oct 19 Tuesday, 2021 Week 6.1 Categories & Structure Syntax - How words and morphemes combine into meaningful phrases and sentences. - What do individual words, morphemes, and larger phrases contribute to sentence meaning? - What determines how they do this? Generative Theory of Syntax Generative theory of syntax: Addresses these questions from a cognitive perspective. Concerned with linguistic competence Linguistic competence: The knowledge that enables speakers to ... - Produce and understand an infinite number of new phrases and sentences. - Judge the grammaticality of any phrase or sentence. Grammaticality An utterance is grammatical if speakers of the language judge it to be acceptable. Ex- Alice built a canoe. GRAMMATICAL (WELL-FORMEDfi Built Alice canoe a. UNGRAMMATICAL (ILL-FORMEDfi Universal Grammar (UG) Theory Universal Grammar Theory: Addresses the same questions. Shares the cognitive focus of Generative Theory. Holds that a valid theory of linguistic competence must be true of all natural languages. Focus - Linguistic competence across languages Linguistic Competence - Preview Lexicon: Mental dictionary of words and morphemes from which phrases and sentences are built. Includes a list of words and morphemes along with information about their pronunciation, category, and denotation (semantic contentfi. Cat Phonology: Pronunciation - [kæt] Syntax: Category - Noun Semantics: Denotation -A member of the cat set
Syntax - a computational system - Lexicon feeds into the computational system - Merge: takes 2 items of the language and builds a structure out of them and add another word - Merge is structure building operation - Kinds of structures that merge builds - simple phrases in language - Deep structure (D- structurefi: feeds into 2 streams, where they run together where movement operations apply (move words and phrase from original position into a new onefi - - Spellout: (surface structurefi movement that has been applied, it is the mental structure that feeds into 2 streams phonetic form and logical form. - phonetic form - pronunciation - and logical form - semantic representations Merge Merge (1st versionfi: A structure building operation. Combines words in accordance with the rules of grammar. Ex- tree then add the then add under = under the tree Phrase Structure: rules that govern Merge Kinds of structures that can and cannot build when merging Generalized Phrase Structure (1st version) : Sentences have a hierarchical structure. This follows the same as a generalized phrase structure schema (X' schemafi in all languages. - If we have a phrase of category x, then it can have up to 2 branches, no more than 2 ever. Can have one (specifierfi - then an intermediate one. It can have maximally 2 branches also, a head and a complement (optionalfi - even if u only have one word in a phrase, need a three tier bar for it - Specifier: a phrase (optionalfi it specifies the phrase - Head: a word. Determines the category (obligatedfi - Complement: A phrase (optionalfi - Not all have specifier or complement but has to have the head in it. All phrases have heads All phrases