LING 200 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Syntactic Category, Rodent, Thematic Relation

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 200
• Professor: Maire Noonan

Document Summary

Syntactic phenomena of all language: structural account was necessary; rely on the notion that a contracted form and the following word have to be in a certain structural relationship to be grammatical. These syntactic phenomena refers to syntax which are rules that never merely rely on a linear order (structure independent] (this also applies to other linguistic rules in general. A non-linear order is a fundamental property of the human language faculty = fundamental property of a human mind. : structure dependence is not a logical necessity. English plural: /s/, /z/, or / z: turkish vowel harmony, underspecification hypothesis. Sometimes, the pronunciation of a morpheme varies according to the phonetic environment. E. g. in english, the precise pronunciation of the plural suffix depends on the environment: If the variation is predictable by the phonology of the language, only one of the variants is listed. At times, a morpheme may have an abstract, underspecified, mental representation.