LING 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Syntactic Category
Document Summary
When constructing sentences, our brains do a lot of subconscious work. Ex) a horse raced past the barn fell. A horse that was raced past the barn fell is now what the sentence means. Syntactic theories try to discover hidden processes. X-bar schema is one hypothesis about the nature of phrases, and about syntactic generalization. Words can move from one position to another. Not all heads have complements but some do. When trees are drawn, x is replaced for whatever syntactic category the phrase is. Head: the nucleus of any phrase, determined its meaning and category. Complement: an element that complements the head, must appear with the head. Specifier: indicates the phrase boundary, assists in making the meaning of the phrase more precise. Practice drawing an x bar schema for. Inflectional bound suffix on a verb: -s, -ed. The abstract i projection is the head of a sentence and houses the tense/mode.
