Concise summary the second edition of "An Introduction to Language and Linguistics" - Ralph W. Fashold | Jeff Connor-Linton.
This summary has very straightforward and clear in structure. Key words are printed in bold and the summary follows the same structure as the text in the chapters does. It ...
Chapter 3
The structure of sentences
Human language is built on a foundation of grammatical principles which interact to
form a complex system that is wielded with ease by every speaker of the language.
These principles don’t have to be taught.
Poverty of the stimulus
People are pre-programmed with principles of grammar. Children undergo extensive
cognitive development, the resulting cognitive language system = grammars =
biological language organ.
A grammar in this sense must contain: a) a list of words and b) a set of rules for
grouping words into phrases. The study of these rules, and of sentence structure in
general, = syntax.
Lexicon and syntactc categories
The words of a language are stored in a lexicon = mental dictionary in people’s brains.
Each word has a lexical entry about pronunciation, meaning and syntactic category
(gives information about where it can appear in a sentence). Syntactic categories will be
defined henceforward according to where they can appear in a sentence or phrase:
NOUNS - Appear after preposition (on, under etc.) , after articles (the) and after
adjectives (small, big etc.). Nouns can be made plural with (-s) as suffix.
VERBS - Follow modals (may/must/will/should) and can be negated by not.
Verbs can take past-tense suffix (-ed)
ADJECTIVES – Between articles and nouns (the … clouds)
ADVERBS – Has a distribution that is difficult to define, often end in –ly.
The distributional descriptions above are intended as guidelines. Nouns, verbs,
adjectives and adverbs together are called lexical categories.
Lexical categories = semantically contentful and contribute directly to meaning of a
sentence.
Functional categories = semantically weak and contribute more to the structure of a
sentence than to the meaning. Include determiners and prepositions.
The best way to determine the category of a word is to look at the kinds of morphemes it
co-occurs with.
The rules: a startng point
Fundamental property of grammar of every language is that it is compositional =
sentences are made of clauses and phrases, which in turn are made up of smaller clauses
and phrases/words. A phrase structure rule is a descriptive tool to express pattern and
how phrases and clauses are combined. It is not prescriptive (what the speaker should).
The adorable puppy licked a grumpy cat
Both underlined are Noun Phrases (NP) – NP verb NP
NP > (Determiner) + (Adjective) + Noun (only the noun is obligatory in a NP, the
noun is therefore the head of the phrase.
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