LING 371 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Cleft Sentence, Unita, Leva Bates
10 Jan 2017
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Sentences have internal structure: the children will eat candy. All of the words are equally related to one another but not the right representations: bracketing [the] [children] [will] [eat] [candy, the tree. This tree is flat there is no intermediate structure. It could be that natural language works like this. Have an intuition that there are units between the sentence and the word. The children is a group of words that points to one entity. The and children seem to be related more closely than children and will. More importantly, these intuitions can be confirmed by constituency tests. Constituent: a group of words that function together as a unit. These phenomena are used as constituency tests in english. Constituency tests: substitution (replacement in ac, fragment (in ac, movement (some in ac, coordination (in ac, deletion. Pronouns: np: the child in the blue pants will buy the big red book, she will buy the big red book.
