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