LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Complementizer, Finite Verb, Transitive Verb
17 Apr 2016
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Structural ambiguity: one surface string is associated with two different urs. Different structure gives rise to different interpretations. Un tie able: able to be untied [[un tie] able, not able to be tied [un [tie-able]] It matters how structurally close morphemes are to each other. Hierarchical information is crucial to interpretation it must be part of the ur. Head: morpheme that determines the label of node (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) Principle that underlies trees like slide 5. Merge: can combine two objects to form a complex one: this combination creates a node. Can apply to smaller or larger elements (morphs, words, phrase) It is important to combine only two objects to each step: binary branching (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) Can be reduced to the syntactic component of grammar. Similar to syntax, they combine small elements into larger ones. But descriptively, morphology can still be called word syntax .
