Language and Cognition
Colombo, June 2011
Day 2
Introduction to Linguistic Theory, Part 3
Plan
• Lexical and functional categories
• Basic syntax: the structure of phrases
Lexical and functional categories
• Descriptive content
• One way to decide whether a word belongs to a lexical or a
functional category is to see if it has descriptive content
• Lexical categories typically denote something in the world –
– Nouns = entities
– adjectives and adverbs = properties
– Verbs = actions
• The antonym test:
– One way to see if something has descriptive content is to try
thinking of its opposite if it has an opposite, then it has
descriptive content and is therefore a lexical category
– But remember that this is not a 100% reliable test – that’s why
we use morphosyntactic evidence too
Lexical and functional categories
• The closed / open class distinction
• Open classes typically have a large membership
and can easily accept new members (e.g., nouns,
verbs, adjectives….)
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the
wabe
All mimsy were the borogroves, and the momeraths outgrabe
• Closed classes, on the other hand, have a much
smaller membership, and do not readily accept
new members. This distinction tends to correlate
with the lexical vs functional distinction.
Lexical categories
• Nouns (N)
• Adjectives (Adj)
Verbs (V)
Adverbs (Adv)
Functional categories
• Carry information about grammatical properties of
expressions in a sentence (tense, case, number,
gender, person, voice, mood etc)
• No descriptive content (they do not pick out some item
or property in the world)
• Functional categories are usually closed class
• Examples of functional categories:
• determiners (Det)
auxiliaries (Aux, or I)
• pronouns (Prn, or Det)
complementisers (Comp)
Lexical/functional distinctions in
aphasia
• Compare what you can hear of the structural
properties in the speech of these two people.
• Is there a dissociation?
• What might this tell you about the way the brain
handles these different aspects of language?
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2IiMEbMnP
M&feature=related
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVhYN7NTIK
U
Syntactic structure
Syntactic structure
Syntactic structure
Syntactic structure
Syntactic structure
Syntactic structure
• Phrase structure trees represent:
– The linear order of the words / morphemes in a phrase or
sentence
– The groupings of the words into syntactic categories
– The constituent structure of the phrase or sentence
• Constituents are “chunks” of a phrase or sentence that belong
together in the structure
• Psychological reality of constituent boundaries has been
demonstrated experimentally
• Tree diagrams are a way to represent aspects of the
knowledge speakers have of their language – COMPETENCE
• Although we are not aware of it, we are using such structures
all the time when we speak and understand language
Properties of phrases
• Phrases have “heads”
• E.g., every NP contains N, every VP contains
V…
• Heads “project”
• That is, the head of a phrase can be realized
either as a single unit (just a V) or as a phrasal
unit (a VP)
OR
Properties of phrases
• Phrases have complements
• That is, a head can “select” (or “subcategorise”) for the
kind of complement that can go with it inside a phrase
• VP  V (NP)
• NP  D N (PP)
• S  NP VP (NP)
• Phrase structure rules can be recursive
• E.g. NP  D N (PP); PP  P NP
• This allows for the formation of infinite embedded
structures – linguistic creativity
Infiniteness of language
NP  D N (PP)
PP  P NP
Phrase structure rules
• These “rewrite rules” show what can go into
phrases of each type
• PS rules come from an old version of syntactic
theory.. For various reasons, linguists do not
think they give an accurate view of how
language really works
• But we will use them as a kind of shorthand to
help us understand some of the principles of
syntactic structure
Phrase structure rules
•
•
•
•
NP D N (PP)
PP  P NP
VP  V (NP) (PP)
S  NP VP
• Using the PS rules above, draw the following
phrases as tree diagrams:
The cat on the pillow
The cat sleeps
The cat sleeps on the pillow
Phrases and heads
• What’s the head of S?
• Aux, or Infl
• S  NP Infl VP
Empty Infl
• There is not always phonological
content to fill a node in a tree
• That’s why some elements are
thought of as “optional”
• But in the case of Infl (or Aux), it
must always be there –
otherwise no S
• Empty Infl: carries grammatical
properties of the sentence, but
does not need to have a
phonological representation
Minimalist phrase structure
(if we have time)
• Problems with PS rules (a few amongst many)
• When we develop theories of language, we are trying
to build a theory that is:
• UNIVERSAL – can account for ALL human languages
(not just a few, or one)
• LEARNABLE – because very young children learn
language very fast – so the theory should be very
simple
• EXPLANATORILY ADEQUATE – does not just say what
langauges are like (that would be descriptively
adequate), but also says WHY languages are like this
Minimalist phrase structure
• PS rules may be different for different languages, so do not
fulfil the requirement of universality
• PS rules do not fulfil the requirement of learnability: the
child acquiring a language would not only have to learn
how to tell the differences between phrases of different
types, but would also have to learn a different schema for
each one
• where do PS rules come from? Do we learn them, or are
they innate? If innate, why are they not universal? If we
learn them, how do we do so? These questions remain
unanswered, so the requirement of explanatory adequacy
is not met
X-bar theory
• See handout…