Grammar Of Words Flashcards
Descriptive grammar
A systematic account of the structure of a language.
What does the zero from the course title mean?
Level of syntactic analysis: the head-level.
What were the 3 main findings of Rivas 2005?
1) Chimpanzees used mainly object and action signs.
2) No evidence for semantic or syntactic structure.
3) Longer combinations of signs showed repetition and stringing.
What is the first research question of Rivas 2005?
What are the communicative intentions of the chimpanzees when they use signs?
What is the second research question of Rivas 2005?
What signs do the chimpanzees use and what possible semantic categories do these signs belong to?
What is the third research question of Rivas 2005?
What combinations of signs do the chimpanzees use and what possible semantic categories do these signs belong to?
Speech error (Fromkin)
An unintentional linguistic innovation.
Slip of the tongue (Fromkin)
An involuntary deviation in performance from the speaker’s current phonological, grammatical or lexical intention.
What was Fromkin trying to establish in his paper?
How particular errors shed light on the underlying units of linguistic performance and on the production of speech.
Anticipation speech error
When a sound is substituted by a sound that occurs later in the utterance.
Perseverance speech error
When a speaker produces a segment or feature later in an utterance than necessary/appropriate.
Why do we assume that individual segments of consonant clusters are also units in speech performance? (Fromkin)
Because only one segment of the consonant cluster is involved in speech errors where the intended uttrrance contained a consonant cluster.
Why are affricates treated as one segment in speech errors? (Fromkin)
Because they are not splitted in stop+fricative, instead they are moved as a complete affricative.
What determines the productivity of a morpheme?
The amount of words it can connect with to form new words.
What are the four constraints by which morphological productivity is limited?
1) phonological
2) morphological
3) syntactic
4) semantic
Metathesis
An exchange in the positions of two segments in a word.
What observation does Fromkin make about speech errors and stress?
The origin and target syllable are metrically similar.
Describe the four steps of the model of linguistic performance that Fromkin proposes:
1) Meaning is generated.
2) Meaning is structured syntactically.
3) Intonation contour.
4) Lexical look-up
5) Phonological shapes
Online collection method (Ferber)
Jotting slips down immediately after hearing.
Off-line collection method (Ferber)
Recording speech on tape and listening to the speech errors from the tape.
What are possible classification methods for speech errors (Ferber) ?
1) type of error (substition, emission etc)
2) contextual vs noncontextual (source found or not)
Quality of data (Ferber)
The degree of correspondence with the reality the data is intended to describe. May be expressed as reliability or validity.
Reliability (Ferber)
indicates random deviation
Validity (Ferber)
indicates systematic deviation.
In what ways may the quality of speech error data be questioned? (Ferber)
1) Quality of the slip record (distinction between slip and context)
2) Quality of the classification scheme for the slip data
3) Quality of the frequency estimates obtained from the corpus.
What is the main problem with the online collection method (Ferber)?
The perceptual bias.
Gavagai problem
The problem of determining the exact meaning of a new word.
The reverse gavagai problem (Hochman 2013)
How to identify the part of a label that is referential when the label has been acquired.
Item-based theory of language acquisition
Initially fixed sentence templates ae stored, not productive.
What is a counterexample for the item-based theor of lanuage acquisition?
Overgeneralisation.
What is the main conclusion of Hochman 2013?
Infants spontaneously infer that very frequent syllables are not referential.
What does Markman 1990 say about lexical acquisition?
It is a problem of induction.
Object assumption (Markman 1990)
Novel terms are interpreted as labels for objects (not parts or properties)
Taxonomic assumption (Markman 1990)
Labels are considered as referring to objects of like kind (not thematically related)
Mutual exclusivity assumption
Each object is expected to have only one label
What does the traditional view of concept learning assume? (Markman 1990)
A general inductive mechanism:
Many implicit assumptions are made and chidlren reformulate their hypothesis about a word’s meaning when they encounter a negative example.
Clark’s principle of lexical contrast
Every two word forms contrast in meaning.
How does the mutual exclusivity test work?
Present 2 objects, one of which has a known label and one of which does not. If new term is mentioned, child should assume the other object is referred to by the new term since whole object bias & mutual exclusivity bias
Lexicalist position
Roots carry features in lexicon for their category
Non-lexicalist position
Roots are category-neutral in the mental lexicons and the category is determined by the context.
Prototype theory (Armstrong 1983)
A theory of categorization where there is a graded degree of belonging to a conceptual category, and some members are more central than others.
What two feature theories of mental categories does Armstrong mention?
1) Classical definitional view
2) Prototype or cluster concept view
Classical definitional view (Armstrong 1983)
(Feature theory of mental categories)
A small set of simple properties is necessary and sufficient to pick out all and only the right things from everything in the world. Membership is categorical.
What does Armstrong 1983 conclude about graded responses?
They are achieved regardless of the structure of the concepts. Responses to well-defined and non-gradable concepts are also graded.
Conceptual core (Armstrong 1983)
A pair of well-developed mental descriptions that are readily accessed depending on the task requirements.
Morphology
Form and structure of words
Morphemes
Minimal units of meaning
Derivation
The formation of a new word from another word or stem, often from a different word class than the original.
Compound
A word that contains a stem that is made up of two or more root words.
Inflection
Variation in the form of a word, does not result in change of word class.
Formatives
Elements contributing to the construction of words whose semantic unity or function is obscure or dubious.
Compositional words
If morphemes carry meaning and the meaning of the whole word is created from the meanings of its morphemes.
Non-compositional words
Words including cran-morphs, formatives and extenders or words made up of morphemes which have their own meanings, but where the meaning of the whole word is not related to the meaning of its parts
Formatives
Extra sound in a word, meaningless and unclear if it is part of the base form, affix or both or neither.
cran-morph (cranberry morpheme)
A type of bound morpheme that can not be asisigned an independent meaning and grammatical function, but does distinguish one word from another.
Declension
Variation of a noun or adjective by which its grammatical case, gender and number are identified.
Conjugation
Variation of a verb by which tense, number and person are identified.
Suppletion
When one or more of the inflected forms of a lexeme is built on a base unrelated to the base of other members of the paradigm
Syncretism
When two or more cells of the paradigm are filled with the same form.
Allomorphs
Different pronunciations of the same morpheme.
What comes first: derivation or inflection?
Derivation
Distributed morphology
Says there is no lexicon, as the lexicon is supposed to be a storehouse for sound-meaning correspondences.
What three lists does distributed morphology have?
1) Abstract morphemes
2) Vocabulary items
3) Encyclopaedia
Vocabulary items
Relation between a phonological string and the abstract morpheme that it corresponds to.
Subset principle
ONly vocabulary items whose specified features are a subset of the features in a given terminal node can be inserted in that node.
Underspecification
The inserted vocabulary item does not match all of the features of the terminal node.
Impoverishment
When one feature is deleted in context of another.
lexeme
A minimal unit of language which has a semantic interpretation and embodies a distinct cultural concept. (Listed in a dictionary as a separate entry). The set of all forms that have the same meaning.
Word
A unit which is a constituent at the phrase level and above.
Lemma
A particular form that is chosen to represent the lexeme.
Lexicon
The knowledge that a native speaker has about a language.
What is the template for words?
[root]
[[root] derivational morph] = base
[[[root] derivational morph] inflectional morph] = word
Simple vs complex words
Simple words consist of a single morpheme, complex words are built up from multiple morphemes.
Lexical morpheme
Carries the primary meaning of the word, represents a concept.
Functional/grammatical morpheme
Have a structural or grammatical role in a sentence.
PET
positron-emission tomography
What do single-system models predict about brain activtity during regular & irregular inflection?
Patterns of brain activity recorded in the PET-scan are similar for all forms.
What do dual-system models predict about brain activtity during regular & irregular inflection?
Patterns of brain activity recorded in the PET scan are different for regular & irregular past tense formations (different processes)
Describe PET-scan recorded brain activity for regular & irregular inflection:
Regular & nonce verbs show faster response times and activation of left frontal lobe.
Irregular verbs show slower response times and activity in posterior temporal / parietal lobe.
Malapropism
Speech error: when a person substitutes a word by another word that sounds similar but has a completely different meaning.
Where is the head in English compounds generally?
in head-final position
What is the difference in compositional meaning between compounds and phrases?
Compounds might not have a compositional meaning, phrases always do.
Where is the stress in compound vs phrases?
Mainly on the first element in compounds, always on the last element in phrases.
Endocentric compounds
Have a head
Exocentric compounds
Lack an interpretive head
Dvanda
Pair
What is the main exception to the principle of compositionality?
Idioms
Idiom
A fixed expression whose meaning is not predictable from the meanings of its part.
Lexical idioms
Expressions containing a word that is not used outside them
Syntactical idioms
When the internal structure of an expression does not follow the regular rules.
Fixed idioms
No modification of their parts is possible
Semi-fixed idioms
Meaningless variation is allowed (inflectional morphology)
Flexible idioms
Allows for more variation; the relevant part of the idiom is meaningful
What are the 3 main proposals for modeling idioms?
1) As fixed units
2) As closer to free combinations
3) Explicit link between idiom’s literal & idiomatic readings
What is the problem of induction in language acquisition? (Markman 1990)
The fact that children do not have a ‘base case’ as is part of an induction proof. When they learn a new word, they cannot relate it to a word already acquired/
Family resemblance (Armstrong et al. 1983)
Occurs when a group of concepts is connected, but do not all share the same feature.
What are the two views on the lexicons of multilinguals?
1) They’re separated.
2) They’re integrated.
Masked priming
When the prime item is presented for approx. 50ms and the participants is unaware of the item.
What is the idea of using activation in studying the lexicon organisation of multilinguals?
If the priming in language A has an effect in language B, then the activation must have spread automatically between the two lexicons, pointing to an integrated account.
Revised hierarchical model
Two separate lexicons access a shared conceptual store.
Bilingual interactive activation model
Says that the bilingual lexicon is integrated at all levels
Disambiguation effect
Children select the unfamiliar objects after hearing unfamiliar or artifical names.
Rejection effect
Children reject new words when used to refer to the referents of familiar words.
Code-switching
The alternate use of two (or more) language within the same utterance.
Separationist view
Sees languages as autonomous entities with clear boundaries.
