ENG 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Chocolate Chip Cookie, Preposition And Postposition, Noam Chomsky
Document Summary
Rules and categories that govern how we put together words to form phrases (linguistic expressions) and sentences to express our thoughts. An example: johnny ate my chocolate chip cookie. The fundamental aim is to separate grammatical sequences which are sentences of language from the ungrammatical sequences of which are not sentences of language. (chomsky) Grammatical sentence: curious students take a linguistics course. A sentence is not a random string of words! Word order refers to the order of a subject, order between an adjective noun, between determiner and noun, preposition, etc. If you change the word order, you have a different meaning. What comes after is the patient: goes. What happens is the goal: to the movies. Principle of compositionality: meanings of a sentence depends on the meaning of its expressions and they are syntactically combined. Syntactic properties of sentence organization: co-occurrence requirements: arguments - obligatory expressions, sally devoured an apple, *sally devoured.
