Quiz 1 Flashcards
categories, subcategories, universal grammar, catergorical grammar, languages in data of we learned
Universal Grammar
Chomsky proposed that a structure - building mechanism is somehow innate to humans
What is Universal Grammar?
The basic programming languae that children use to encode linguistic structure
All human beings are born with the ability to ‘write’ in what programming language?
Universal Grammar
A theory of syntax must start with what?
A theory of categories
Syntactic categories =?
“part of speech”
What are the four ‘traditional’ lexical categories?
nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs
What are the three kinds of evidence for distributional categories?
derivational morphology, inflectional morphology, and syntactic distribution
derivational morphology
morphology that creates new words (typically from other words)
Certain types of derivational morphology are what to certain syntactic categories?
reliable indicator
What connection does derivational morphology have with syntactic categories?
it provides evidence that morphology and syntax care about the same categories
Infectional morphology
is restricted to words of a certain category
What are some inflections?
nouns, verbs, adjectives
Nouns
mark a gender and plural distinction
Verbs
tense and subject agreement
Adjectives
mark gender and numbers
Syntactic distribution
co-occurence and orderly restrictions between words of different categories
Synatctic distribution nouns may occur:
- immediately following a nunmber
- immediately following a determiner (the)
- immediately before an adjective
- immediately before an auxiliary
Syntactic distribution verbs may occur:
- immediately following negation (no)
- immediately following auxiliary
- immediately preceding a noun phrase
Semantic theory for categories
nouns + adjectives: tend to describe people and objects
verbs + adverbs: tend to describe state and events
Categories are what to syntactic theory?
a basic component
Functional category=
determiner
lexical categories are open..
new additons are possibe and constantly occurring
functional categories are closed
new additions are rare
What are functional categories?
determiners, tense, prepostion, conjunction, and complementizer
