LING 360 Lecture Notes - Lecture 38: Syntactic Ambiguity, Subcategorization, Grammaticality

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 360
• Professor: Brendan S.Gillon

Document Summary

Either the judgement is given to us, or analysis of the sentences is based on our judgement of the grammaticality of the sentence. Even if we have the (cid:498)wrong(cid:499) answer, we could have a correct explanation for it. With connectives, logic asks for two truth-values simultaneously. With connectives (coordinators/subordinators/conjuncts) in natural language, we can go one truth-value at a time. E. g. , alice greeted bill in natural language, you could find the value of greeted in bill separately from alice, but in logic, you could only get the value of the whole clause at once, namely, gab. Only two subordinators in natural language are truth-functional (if and unless) Just looking at constituency grammars and the syntax of natural language, we found three problems. Another is that with standard notation, we cannot make a connection between x and xp (constituents and their heads) It turns out this is not too difficult to solve.