PSYC20008 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Parse Tree, Syntactic Ambiguity, Language Acquisition
22 Aug 2018
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Document Summary
Different languages vary on what parts of speech they have and there is no fully agreed-upon classification scheme, although there are some basic similarities. Open class: easy to add new members carry much of the content easier to learn. Closed class: hard to add new members carry much of the grammar harder to learn. Parts of speech are associated with different roles in the sentence are called arguments. Parts of the structure (arguments) include the subject, the verb and the object. Language is compositional: the meaning of a phrase or sentence is not just a mixture of the meaning of its words. Children learn word order early, despite not producing all of the words. Most linguists agree that, regardless of the word order, verbs in every language are the heads of the sentence. They determine if arguments are optional or not. We probably don"t learn just by mimicry (i. e. , only using verbs with arguments we have seen them used before).
