Week 6 - Describing Languages

Question 1

Whats in the Grammar?

Answer 1

• The sounds of the language (PHONETICS).
• How sounds are combined to form words (PHONOLOGY).
• How words are built up of their parts (MORPHOLOGY).
• How sentences are put together (SYNTAX).

Question 2

what do grammatical descriptions look like?

Answer 2

• PRECISE STATEMENTS about ELEMENTS of phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax
• RULES for combining these

ultimately to understan: WHAt is a POSSIBLE human language?

Question 3

Language is rule-governed

Answer 3

ENG: 40 distinct speech sounds. av person = 40,000 words
from this, INFINITE NUMBER OF SENTENCES

rules generate structures and (appear to) modify these structures in particular contexts

Proof !
This is cow with the crumpled horn that worried the dog that chased the cat that ate the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is [the THING [that [did something]]]

Question 4

RECURSIVE STRUCTURE

Answer 4

This is [the THING [that [did something]]]

“nesting” a clause within a clause

S → NP + VP
VP → V + NP
NP → Det + Ν + compS
compS → complementiser + S

Question 5

Linguistics is an empirical science of language

Answer 5

• Look at a corpus + make generalisations
  - make EMPIRICAL OBSERVATIONS ABOUT LANGUAGE AND FROM THIS BUILD THEORIES ABOUT THE WAY LANGUAGE WORKS
• Can make hypotheses and test w native speakers (what CAN and CANT occur)
  • CONDUCT ‘CONTROLLED EXPERIMENTS’ to GATHER emprical DATA; REFINE THEORIES, BUILD NEW ONES

Question 6

corpus

Answer 6

large amounts of a natural language data

Question 7

descriptive rules

Answer 7

descriptive grammar models rules speakers use (unconciously), in constructing utterances in a language.
- model of (structural) linguistic competence