C_S_D 1060 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Subcategorization, Linguistic Performance, Syntactic Category
17 May 2016
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What is syntax: syntax = the rules of sentence formation, a speaker of any human language can produce and understand an infinite number of possible sentences (creativity or productivity) We mentally represent rules for forming sentences. This enables us to produce and comprehend an unlimited number of phrases and sentences. What do syntactic rules do: syntactic structure is necessary to know what a sentence means, syntactic rules provide structure. Another way to see this is through syntactic ambiguity. Some strings appear to have more than one meaning. How do syntactic rules provide structure: to describe sentence structure, we need to specify: The linear order of words: these groupings are called phrases. Hangs together as single unit, cannot be interrupted, can be replaced with a singe pronoun. Complementizer = that, whether, if, etc: we specify the possible orderings of words through phase structure.
