What is Syntax?

Question 1

syntax

Answer 1

the combination of words into phrases and phrases into sentences

Question 2

do we study syntax from a cognitive perspective?

Answer 2

yes

Question 3

cognitive perspective

Answer 3

the goal of studying syntax is to explore and model the human cognitive faculty responsible for building and manipulating complex syntactic structures in the mind

Question 4

phonology

Answer 4

the study of sounds

Question 5

semantics

Answer 5

the study of meaning

Question 6

what do syntacticians study?

Answer 6

how sentences are structured

Question 7

the scientific method

Answer 7

1. gather and observe data
2. make generalizations
3. develop a hypothesis
4. test the hypothesis with empirical data
5. revise the hypothesis to account for data

Question 8

hypotheses need to make … and be …

Answer 8

predictions; falsifiable

Question 9

proposition

Answer 9

the aspect of the meaning of a sentence which allows us to say that something is true or false

Question 10

proposition example: “It’s sunny today.”

Answer 10

could be rainy on sunday or sunny on monday

Question 11

sentences

Answer 11

abstractions of utterances with the same form

Question 12

utterance

Answer 12

the actual use of a sentence

Question 13

what makes a sentence unacceptable?

Answer 13

• incorrect order of words
• wrong conjugations
• strange context

Question 14

parsing explanation

Answer 14

the problem with the sentence is not concerned with the structure but the capacity of human beings processing it

Question 15

parsing

Answer 15

mentally processing

Question 16

syntactic structure

Answer 16

the relationship between the words of the sentence

Question 17

tacit knowledge

Answer 17

knowledge of language

Question 18

arguments in favor of tacit knowledge

Answer 18

• poverty of stimulus argument
• plato’s problem

Question 19

competence

Answer 19

• what we know about our language
• what tells us if a language is ungrammatical

Question 20

competence synonym

Answer 20

I(nternal)-language

Question 21

performance

Answer 21

the way we use tacit knowledge

Question 22

performance synonym

Answer 22

E(xternal)-language

Question 23

are syntactic theories about competence or performance?

Answer 23

competence

Question 24

theory

Answer 24

a set of general principles or laws that can be used to explain a phenomena

Question 25

formal

Answer 25

a characteristic of theories that says they are developed as well-defined, explicit, and contained concepts

Question 26

generative approach to syntax

Answer 26

assumes that certain aspects of human psychology are similar to phenomena in the natural world

Question 27

3 levels of adequacy that syntactic theories aim for

Answer 27

• descriptive adequacy
• observational adequacy
• explanatory adequacy

Question 28

descriptive adequacy

Answer 28

the theory should contain sufficient means to adequately describe all of the different structures found in the language being investigated

Question 29

observational adequacy

Answer 29

the theory should assign the right structures to the sentences of a given language

Question 30

explanatory adequacy

Answer 30

the theory should capture the commonalities that all languages share but allow only those languages which are actually possible human languages

Question 31

principles

Answer 31

commonalities that hold across all possible languages

Question 32

principles example

Answer 32

all languages have a subject in a sentence

Question 33

parameters

Answer 33

the way individual languages may diverge from principles

Question 34

parameters example

Answer 34

in romance languages subjects are not compulsory since they are implied (Yo quiero estudiar v. Quiero estudiar)

Question 35

main goal of modern syntactic theory

Answer 35

trying to postulate a statement that will help us explain language variation

Question 36

language variation

Answer 36

there is more than one way of saying the same thing