Syntax I

Question 1

What is syntax

Answer 1

Languages syntax = grammar for arranging words into sentences

Question 2

are tehse just linear strings of words or is there internal organization to tehse sentences?

Answer 2

Words that sound same belong to diff categories
Words that sound same can be grouped differently in diff sentences
Words that are grouped into units and those units into larger units - until get sentence

Question 3

is word order language universal

Answer 3

Noooooooooo
Varies cross linguistically

Question 4

can word order be altered Willy Nilly

Answer 4

No

Question 5

grammaticality

Answer 5

Speakers of most varieties of English can agree on if sentence sounds good
- native speakers of every language have intuitions about the goodness or badness of sentences in their language
- if judge to be good by native speakers = sentence is grammatical or acceptable
- if judge to be bad by native speakers = sentence is ungrammatical or unacceptable

Question 6

what do linguists not do

Answer 6

Don’t confuse with prescriptive notions of ungrammatically or unacceptability
Linguists dont make normative claims

Question 7

2 primary camps of means of observing behavioural or physical phenomena

Answer 7

Grammar is mental phenomenon - primary means of observation is through behaviour
Can divide means of observing behavioural or physical phenomena into = attention and elicitation

Question 8

What is attestation

Answer 8

Historical record of a phenomenon

Question 9

Describe attestation

Answer 9

Usually corpora
Corpus = record of a large body of language data, usually semi naturally occurring
Corpus might be a collection of books or other written materials or transcript and audio recordings

Question 10

problems with attestation - specificity

Answer 10

Record may not include all the info you want - doesn’t occur frequently enough in corpus

Question 11

problems with attestation -no negative data

Answer 11

If something doesn’t appear - what does that mean

Question 12

Attestation - conclusions

Answer 12

• If a corpus has 10 million words (the size of a corpus of one season of the reality show Big Brother), it probably has something like 40 million phonetic segments.
• So if out of 20 million syllable onsets, the phonologist never observes bt, it may be pretty reasonable to conclude that unattested nature of bt is systematic.
• There are about 500 possible 1- or 2-consonant onsets given the consonant inventory of English; if onsets were randomly distributed we should observe every possible combination of 1 or 2 consonants in an onset 40,000 times

Question 13

but syntax is diff

Answer 13

So many ways to combine words
If dont attest a possibility = doesn’t mean much, many reason for gap
Lack of attestation does not entail ungrammaticality

Question 14

does positive attestation entail grammaticality

Answer 14

Noooo

Question 15

native speaker judgements

Answer 15

historical records rarely have all info we need
Interested in native speaker judgments about forms and not natural occurrence of forms bc of huge number of possible sentences
Linguist must generally elicit these = ask for them

Question 16

judgements

Answer 16

Basic data comes in forms of judgements about degreee of grammaticality of a sentence and about meaning of Sentence

Question 17

syntax = structure

Answer 17

Syntax is not just about order of words, but rather about structure

Question 18

structure

Answer 18

Relationship of the word stands in with regard to other words
More complicated than just to the left of and to the right of - structures are nested

Question 19

what does syntax study

Answer 19

How words are put together to form sentences

Question 20

syntactic categories

Answer 20

Which positions a word can appear in is determined by Syntactic category (part of speech)
Morphosyntactic categories = can be lexical or functional

Question 21

name lexical categories

Answer 21

Noun, verb, adjective, adverb
Treat as diff categories

Question 22

name functional categories

Answer 22

Determiner, complementizer, coordinator, degree modifier, modals, auxiliary, pronoun, preposition
Bc diff syntax, not interchangeable

Question 23

lexical categories = properties

Answer 23

• open categories = new words in those categories are easy to make up, like iPod, google, unfriend
• lexical words usually have concrete, graspable meaning, denote basic concepts, easily explained

Question 24

Functional categories = properties

Answer 24

• closed categories = new words are hard to make up
• functional words have abstract meaning that cannot be easily paraphrase, do not denote concepts, denote ways of relating concepts

Question 25

defining lexical categories

Answer 25

- hard to define based on meaning

Question 26

defining lexical categories - ex = nouns and verbs

Answer 26

- ex = nouns can be anything -verbs - not universal, has diff distribution than other categories - what makes a noun a noun = the distribution

Question 27

why do we divide words into categories, based on what type fo criteria?

Answer 27

Know category based on distribution

Question 28

morphological evidence = nouns

Answer 28

nouns: book-books BUT: furniture, milk, goose, ox this-these; one-ones - doesn’t hold for all verbs - moose, child

Question 29

morphological evidence = verbs

Answer 29

verbs: show, shown, showed, shows, showing BUT: irregular verbs; *She is knowing the answer.; ?He is liking her a lot. Not every verb can take ing

Question 30

morphological evidence = adjectives

Answer 30

adjectives: taller, tallest BUT: longer adjectives

Question 31

morphological evidence = adverbs

Answer 31

adverbs: sadly, luckily BUT: irregular adverbs (fast(*ly))

Question 32

experimental failure

Answer 32

Morphological evidence diff for every language Isolated neg result is usually uninformative by itself

Question 33

lexical categories as equivalence classes

Answer 33

define terms as equivalence classes based on their syntactic behaviour If bunch of words in category X = they all share some kind of behaviour or distribution in common Slots

Question 34

intersubstitutability

Answer 34

Elements of given category are intersubstitutable = can be interchanged and not affect grammatically- can affect meaning tho Ex= nouns can all appear after determiner =distribution frame for nouns

Question 35

distribution frames

Answer 35

each distribution frame = test Can find for each word level category in English Multiple As long as other categories dont fit

Question 36

Lexical categories = noun

Answer 36

dog, party, book, Fred, happiness

Question 37

Lexical categories = verb

Answer 37

go run see give rain blacken

Question 38

Lexical categories = adjective

Answer 38

narrow black happy bookish rainy

Question 39

Lexical categories = adverb

Answer 39

happily narrowly well

Question 40

Functional categories = determiner

Answer 40

the a some any that this

Question 41

Functional categories = complementizer

Answer 41

that if whether

Question 42

Functional categories = coordinator

Answer 42

and but or nor

Question 43

Functional categories = degree modifier

Answer 43

very really too so that more less as

Question 44

Functional categories = modals

Answer 44

must may will might can would could

Question 45

Functional categories = auxiliary

Answer 45

have be

Question 46

Functional categories = pronoun

Answer 46

we him I they us her its

Question 47

Functional categories = preposition

Answer 47

in at of by Some prepositions seem more like lexical category - between, around