PSYC3311 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Phrase Structure Rules, Chops, Noam Chomsky
Week 8 lec 1 SYNTAX
Syntactic processing: how we analyse grammar when we read sentences
Linguistic background helps u understand the grammatical principles
Grammar competence
In English, you can say:
CYRIL IS A HAPPY PERSON, but not CYRIL IS A PERSON HAPPY.
A theory of grammar must explain why.
Perhaps just label each word as its "part of speech" (grammatical class- noun, verb, adjective etc.)
and have rules specifying their ordering. e.g., ADJ NOUN, not NOUN ADJ. can have N V ART
Not good enough because sentences have internal structure.
Some parts of the sentence go together more closely than other parts
To demonstrate this, consider:
THE MOTHER OF THE BOY AND THE GIRL WILL ARRIVE SOON
- The mother of the boy- one constituent
- The girl – another constituent
- OR ‘the mother’ ‘the boy’ ‘the girl’
Ambiguous even though the individual lexical items are not. The ambiguity comes about because
the sentence can have two types of internal structure:
((THE MOTHER OF THE BOY) AND (THE GIRL)) WILL ARRIVE SOON and ((THE
MOTHER) OF (THE BOY AND THE GIRL)) WILL ARRIVE SOON.
The words can be grouped together into different constituents.
They (are frightening) women OR They are (frightening women)
So any theory of grammatical competence must include an account of the constituent structure of
sentences whereby some words go together more closely than others.
The fact that some words go together more closely than others is captured in traditional theories
of grammar capture by representing a sentence as a hierarchical tree diagram:
e.g.,
S: sentence, NP: noun phrase, V: verb phrase
NP→ article and noun
V→ V and NP (→article and noun)
The wood goes together, and then ‘chops the wood’, and then ‘girl chops the wood’, and then
‘the girl chops the wood’ so hierarchical and diff constituents
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