Essentials of linguistics

Question 1

What is linguistics?

Answer 1

Is the scientific study of language, and in particular the relationship between language form and language meaning.

Question 2

Phonology and morphology

Answer 2

• Phonology studies the rules that organize patterns of sounds in human languages
• Morphology studies morphemes that are the smallest meaningful units of language (a word consists of one root morpheme and zero or more affixes)

Question 3

Morphologically rich languages (MRLs) vs Poor ones

Answer 3

• MRLs: refer to languages in which substantial grammatical information is expressed at word level (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Russian, etc.)
• Morphologically poor languages: have fewer inflections and rely more heavily on word order and auxiliary words to convey grammatical relationships (e.g. English)

Question 4

Syntax

Answer 4

Syntax studies the rules and constraints that govern how words can be organized into sentences.

There are several representations for syntactic structure. Most common are:

• phrase structure
• dependency tree

Question 5

Part of Speech (distributionally, functionally)

Answer 5

A part of speech (PoS) is a category of words that play similar roles within the syntactic structure of a sentence.

A PoS can be defined:

• distributionally: Kim saw the {elephant, movie, mountain, error} before we did.
• functionally: verbs = predicates; nouns = arguments; adverbs = modify verbs, etc.

Question 6

Syntactic structure: dependency tree, labels, “dependencies”

Answer 6

Is a tree-like representation where:

• nodes represent words in the sentence
• arcs represent grammatical relations between a head and a dependent

Dependency trees use labels at arcs: SBJ, OBJ, COMP, etc.

Arcs in a dependency tree are often called dependencies.

Question 7

Syntactic ambiguity

Answer 7

A sentence can be assigned more than 1 syntactic structure

Question 8

Semantics

Answer 8

Semantics is the study of the meaning of linguistic expressions such as words, phrases, and sentences.

Question 9

Lexical semantics and semantic structure (internal, external)

Answer 9

Is the linguistic study of word meaning.

• The internal semantic structure of a word refers to the similarity with other words.
• The external semantic structure of a word refers to the allowability to combine with other words.

Question 10

Lexical ambiguity

Answer 10

Lexical ambiguity arises because a word can have different meanings, called word senses (or synsets).

(e.g. “plant”, “fans”)

Question 11

Pragmatics

Answer 11

Studies the way linguistic expressions with their semantic meanings are used for specific communicative goals.

What an expression means in a given context?

Question 12

Discourse

Answer 12

Discourse refers to a piece of text with multiple sub-topics and coherence relations between them.

E.g. explanation, elaboration, contrast, etc.

Question 13

Corpus vs vocabulary

Answer 13

• corpus: is a collection of text data that is used for NLP tasks
• vocabulary: is a set of unique words or tokens that appear in a given corpus