LIN102H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Preposition And Postposition, Adjective Phrase, Cleft Sentence
6 Mar 2018
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Document Summary
Syntax is the study of the structures of phrases and sentences in human language. The syntactic component consists of two subcomponents: a lexicon (mental dictionary) and a computational system which combines and arranged words in particular ways. The computational system employs two principal operations: merge and move, to be elaborated in the following lectures. Functional categories: determiner (det), auxiliary verb (aux), conjunction(con) and. Speakers distinguished strings of words as grammatical or ungrammatical based on their intuition. You do not need to have heard a sentence before to determine whether its grammatical. Grammaticality judgments do not depend on whether the sentence is meaningful. The book found john" (sounds funny but is still grammatical. Famous chomsky example: colorless green ideas sleep furiously. It is grammatical but sense needs to make sense of it. Structural ambiguity: a string of words (with no lexical ambiguity) can have two possible meanings. E. g. a phrase with structural ambiguity: old men and women.
