LING 390 Lecture Notes - Phrase, Complementizer, Part Of Speech
5 Dec 2012
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Document Summary
Focus on class (up until thursday, but more from before) What did they manipulate? what did they measure? (independent and dependent variables) Hierarchical structure (can"t just look at the linear ordering of words) Lexical categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) vs. functional categories (determiner, preposition, auxiliary, conjunctions) Lexical categories are productive. (they"re open class: we continually generate new words) Functional categories are not productive (they"re closed class, there"s about 300 of them in english) They also differ in terms of meaning. it"s much easier to express the meanings of words in lexical categories. Within these two categories, there are more specific categories (n, v, adj, adv, det, p, aux, con) Meanings of words combine with affix usage to make it easier to define which category they"re in. however, this is not always reliable. Their structural position is much more helpful (the dog exists vs. Nouns often appear with determiners, and adverbs before verbs.
