LING 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Part Of Speech, Linguistic Competence, Grammatical Relation

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 100
• Professor: Charlotte Reinholtz

Document Summary

Generative syntax addresses these questions from a cognitive viewpoint. Fo(cid:272)us: li(cid:374)guisti(cid:272) (cid:272)o(cid:373)pete(cid:374)(cid:272)e, the li(cid:374)guisti(cid:272) k(cid:374)owledge that e(cid:374)a(cid:271)les speakers to . Produce/understand an infinite number of novel sentences; Judge whether any given combination of words and morphemes is a possible sentence. Universal grammar theory (ug theory) shares the cognitive focus of generative syntax but also holds that a valid theory of linguistic competence must be true of all natural languages (past, present and future). The mental dictionary of words and morphemes from which phrases and sentences are built. This knowledge includes a list of words and morphemes along with information about their pronunciation, their category and their denotation (= semantic content). The mental knowledge of possible grammatical functions and relations among the constituents from which sentence are built. These functions and relations are modeled (=depicted) as operations (merge and move) that relate functions to constituents and constituents to one another.