PSYC3331 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Affix
We can think about the way the multiple words are processed together as a sentence
Structure and content
Associated with certain rules, so you know what should precede and follow a certain
function words
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Function words:
and, the, in, did
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Any given affix can be attached to words with a given
○
Affixes:
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s,
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ed
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Sources of structure
But are these necessary?
People like sugar
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Dargle flink sparch
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Consider these sentences:
The former has a structure whereas the latter does not. What is the source of this?
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This seems to imply that the lexical representation of each word also contains syntactical
information
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There can be structure in the absence of function words and affixes
From the previous example, we know the part of speech for each word
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Couple with our knowledge that English is a SVO language, we can still assign a structure to
this sentence in absence of function words and affixes
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One way to think about this structure id in terms of a 'sentence tree'
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Syntactical information in lexical representations
I figured out what the story was about
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I figured what the story was about out
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Consider these sentences:
Right
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most attachment: "out" is attached to the right
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most verb to it
This may even extend to more than two words, e.g., idioms such as "it's raining cats and
dogs"…
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Lexicalisation: the idea that some lexical representation may contain more than one word. In other
words, it makes sense to attach some words, but not others
He laughed
He resembled
The wall laughed
The wall resembled
Some verbs may not fall cleanly into one of the two categories e.g., "he speaks" (intransitive)
vs. "he speaks the truth" (transitive), although the transitive usage may just be lexicalisations
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While there are cases where the distinction between syntax and semantics is clear cut, given
that we've seen how both of these are contained within the same representation, there may
actually be a fuzzy boundary between the two…
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Transitivity: whether or not a verb can take an object. This information must be included in the
representations of verbs
the mayor recognised the author
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The mayor recognised that the pocket was worn out
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"Recognise"
Syntactic Processing
Friday, 11 May 2018 11:05 AM
Week 10 Page 1
Document Summary
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