LING444 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Part Of Speech, Affix

• School: University of Delaware
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING444
• Professor: Vainikka

Document Summary

Set of rules for the structure of your language, located in the (subconscious) grammar in the brain. How to generate all the sentences in your language (and non that are no part of your language) Constituent: a phrase that acts as a single unit (often np or dp) Ex: (my friend sally) (is fixing) (her walkway) (right now) One cannot directly observe the structure, or the constituents -- just the words (well, even words have to be first isolated from the speech stream) Bye age 1, the infant has probably figured out the phonemes of her language (at least in terms of perception) Three types of words: simple word= one morpheme cake (needed!, complex word = (not needed for basic syntax, derivational affix bake+(e)r, compound birthday cake, a word with inflectional morphemes (he bakes) (crucial for syntax) The child will need to classify content words into the lexical categories v, n, and a.