What is Syntax? Flashcards
syntax
the combination of words into phrases and phrases into sentences
do we study syntax from a cognitive perspective?
yes
cognitive perspective
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
phonology
the study of sounds
semantics
the study of meaning
what do syntacticians study?
how sentences are structured
the scientific method
- gather and observe data
- make generalizations
- develop a hypothesis
- test the hypothesis with empirical data
- revise the hypothesis to account for data
hypotheses need to make … and be …
predictions; falsifiable
proposition
the aspect of the meaning of a sentence which allows us to say that something is true or false
proposition example: “It’s sunny today.”
could be rainy on sunday or sunny on monday
sentences
abstractions of utterances with the same form
utterance
the actual use of a sentence
what makes a sentence unacceptable?
- incorrect order of words
- wrong conjugations
- strange context
parsing explanation
the problem with the sentence is not concerned with the structure but the capacity of human beings processing it
parsing
mentally processing
syntactic structure
the relationship between the words of the sentence
tacit knowledge
knowledge of language
arguments in favor of tacit knowledge
- poverty of stimulus argument
- plato’s problem
competence
- what we know about our language
- what tells us if a language is ungrammatical
competence synonym
I(nternal)-language
performance
the way we use tacit knowledge
performance synonym
E(xternal)-language
are syntactic theories about competence or performance?
competence
theory
a set of general principles or laws that can be used to explain a phenomena
formal
a characteristic of theories that says they are developed as well-defined, explicit, and contained concepts
generative approach to syntax
assumes that certain aspects of human psychology are similar to phenomena in the natural world
3 levels of adequacy that syntactic theories aim for
- descriptive adequacy
- observational adequacy
- explanatory adequacy
descriptive adequacy
the theory should contain sufficient means to adequately describe all of the different structures found in the language being investigated
observational adequacy
the theory should assign the right structures to the sentences of a given language
explanatory adequacy
the theory should capture the commonalities that all languages share but allow only those languages which are actually possible human languages
principles
commonalities that hold across all possible languages
principles example
all languages have a subject in a sentence
parameters
the way individual languages may diverge from principles
parameters example
in romance languages subjects are not compulsory since they are implied (Yo quiero estudiar v. Quiero estudiar)
main goal of modern syntactic theory
trying to postulate a statement that will help us explain language variation
language variation
there is more than one way of saying the same thing
