LING 1F94 Lecture 6: LING 1F94 6
12 Jan 2016
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Ling 1f94 lecture: syntax cont: syntactic constituents. Linguistic expressions: any piece of language, including words and phrases that have a cerain form, certain meaning, certain syntactic properties. Today we"ll discuss units: larger than a word, smaller than a sentence. Syntactic constituent: a group of linguistic expressions that function as a syntactic unit within some larger expression. *knowing the constituents of a sentence allow us to understand its structure. 3 classic tests for constituency: answers to questions, clefting, coordination. See if the string of words is a possible answer. Clefts are sentences with the general form above where x is the strong you want to test and y is the rest of the sentence. *it was on the that the cat was sleeping desk. Note: the cleft test doesn"t work for all types of constituents. Coordination: combining 2 constituents with and or or. And requires 2 arugments (called conjuncts : polly invited sally and bob to the party.
