LING 201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Kevin Spacey, Grammaticality, Universal Grammar
25 Jan 2015
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Building up: morphology was all about combining morphemes to make new words, syntax is the combination of words into sentences. Grammaticality: the data for syntax are grammaticality judgements, essentially, the question is can the speaker"s grammar generate this sentence, we assume that anything a speaker says is grammatical. They said it, therefore their grammar must have been able to generate it. Another recent example: to prove this point that we must be able to make and interpret any possible sentence of the language. Describing ungrammaticality: our system must not only generate the grammatical. Merge: the basic operation of the computational system is called merge, this is the combination of two elements to create a larger element, x + y = z. Just like words, we will use tree structures to represent sentences: this has been linked to the human ability to understand mathematics, specifically addition: two combine to make a larger thing, 1+1=2.
