FINAL Flashcards
transitive verb
needs an object (bought)
intransitive verb
cannot have an object (smiled)
the infinity problem
there is an infinite number of possible grammatical sentences in any given language, we cannot write an infinite list of rules, we want a generative grammar that can apply to all languages
tacit knowledge
knowledge which we have and use to do often
very important things, but which we have no conscious access to.
a grammar
a set of rules that describe and generate a set of
sentences, typically the set of grammatical sentences in a language.
With natural languages, a grammar is also a model of a language
user’s knowledge.
occam’s razor
the rule of thumb that you should not add any
more assumptions to a theory than are necessary to account for the
facts. In other words, all else being equal, prefer a simpler theory.
universal grammar
the specification of the grammatical things that all human languages
have in common, including some notion of the points on which they
can vary.
syntactic category
the label we give to a collection of (groups
of) words that have the same syntactic distribution, i.e. that can substitute for each other without affecting grammaticality.
constituent
a group of words in a sentence that behave as a unit
for various syntactic purposes. It is everything described by a single
PS rule, and everything below a single node in a tree.
an unacceptable sentence
a blanket term we use when a native speaker rejects a sentence for any reason. a sentence may be considered
unacceptable because it is ungrammatical, or deviant, or inconsistent with prescriptive norms, or myriad other reasons.
recursion
when something like a rule, a definition or a structure is built up in a way that involves a copy or further instance of itself. lays
an important role in explaining the infinity of possible sentences and
is used to account for instances where some bit of structure can be
repeated indefinitely. We can recognize recursion in individual phrase
structure rules when the same syntactic category shows up on both the
left and the right side of the arrow
black box problem
A situation where we can’t directly observe the internal work-
ings of a system we want to understand. We can only see the inputs
to and outputs from the system, so our theories have to be based on those. (the internal workings of the human mind)
ungrammaticality vs deviance
types of unacceptability. Ungrammaticality is when
a string does not correspond to a structure that could be generated by
the speaker’s grammar of the language. Deviance is when it yields a
nonsensical or incoherent interpretation, strings can be grammatical and deviant
strongly equivalent vs weakly equivalent grammars
Two grammars are weakly equivalent if they generate all of
the same strings as grammatical sentences. They are also strongly
equivalent if they assign the same hierarchical structures to all of the
grammatical sentences. If two grammars are strongly equivalent, then they
are also weakly equivalent, but not necessarily the other way around.
the scientific method
a systematic procedure for understanding phenomena in
the world. It involves a cycle of developing hypotheses, testing their
predictions against new data, revising them based on failed predictions,
and repeating indefinitely, yielding steady incremental improvement but
never reaching complete understanding. pplying the
scientific method in syntax involves proposing hypotheses about the
mental grammars that native speakers have for their languages and
testing them against native speaker intuitions about specific possible
sentences.