LING 355 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Minimal Pair, Abstract Theory, Syllabification
17 Dec 2016
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We looked at specific things - passives, relative clauses, etc. We are going through this transition now, three lectures on a more theoretical side of things. Last time we talked about ot, which is a theory in linguistics, though is more phonology-centered. Today we will look at government and phonology, to give us a sense of how theories deal with language acquisition. Up til now, the only theory we"ve discussed was principles and parameters, which is almost strictly syntactic. This brings us to bigger questions in terms of what is actually going on. Last time, we did the first half of snyder"s chapter; today we do the second. The second half is confusing, because you don"t know where he is going. The idea today is to compare ot and government phonology each predict for language acquisition. The crucial thing about ot is that you don"t have rules anymore, you have constraints. The basic difference is that constraints can be violated.
