ASPECTS OF LINGUISTIC
COMPETENCE 5
SEPT 11, 2013 – DAY 7
Brain & Language
LING 4110-4890-5110-7960
NSCI 4110-4891-6110
Harry Howard
Tulane University
9/11/13
Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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Course organization
• The syllabus, these slides and my recordings are
available at http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/LING4110/.
• If you want to learn more about EEG and neurolinguistics,
you are welcome to participate in my lab. This is also a
good way to get started on an honor's thesis.
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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Review
• Last time, we discussed:
• Thematic roles
• Indefiniteness & specificity
• (Pronominal) reference
• Tense, aspect & modality
• We left out the following, which you can read about on
your own:
• Deixis
• Assertion & presupposition
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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ASPECTS OF LINGUISTIC
COMPETENCE
Ingram §2: mainly syntax
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What are the parts of speech/syntactic
categories?
• Major/content categories
• noun
• verb
• adjective
• adverb
• preposition/postposition?
• Minor/functional categories
• determiner: article, quantifier, demonstrative
• pronoun
• negation
• conjunction: coordinating, subordinating
• auxiliary verb?
• Interjection
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Words group to together to form phrases
• What are the thematic roles of "Mary" and "John" in "Mary
kissed John"?
• Mary is Agent (and subject)
• John is Patient (and direct object)
• What goes before, or can be the Agent of, "kissed John"?
• Mary kissed John.
• She kissed John.
• That girl kissed John.
• The tall girl kissed John.
• The girl over there kissed John.
• A girl that you don’t know kissed John.
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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Restatement of subject data as NP
• Answer
• A word that is ‘nouny’, or a group of words that contain a noun; it
does not matter which one.
• We want a way to generalize over all of these possibilities, and the
infinite number of alternatives that we can think up.
• Let’s do this by calling it a noun phrase or NP.
• An NP goes before, or can be the Agent of, "kissed John"
• [NP Mary] kissed John.
• [NP She] kissed John.
• [NP That girl] kissed John.
• [NP The tall girl] kissed John.
• [NP The girl over there] kissed John.
• [NP A girl that you don’t know] kissed John.
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Words to phrases 2
• What goes after, or is the Patient of, "John kissed"?
• John kissed Mary.
• John kissed her.
• John kissed that girl.
• John kissed the tall girl.
• John kissed the girl over there.
• John kissed a girl that you don’t know.
• Answer
• The same ‘nouny’ thing as before.
• So let’s also call it a NP.
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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Restatement of object data as NP
• An NP goes after, or is the Patient of, "John kissed":
• John kissed [NP Mary].
• John kissed [NP her].
• John kissed [NP that girl].
• John kissed [NP the tall girl].
• John kissed [NP the girl over there].
• John kissed [NP a girl that you don’t know].
• The structure of our sentence now looks like this:
• NP kissed NP.
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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NPs get around
• English treats NPs as units, in the sense that they can
appear in different parts of a sentence:
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
Which girl kissed John? ~ Which girl did John kiss __?
THAT girl kissed John. ~ THAT girl, John kissed __.
Not even Mary kissed John. ~ Not even Mary did John kiss __.
That girl is who kissed John. ~ That girl is who John kissed __.
Who kissed John is that girl. ~ Who John kissed __ is that girl.
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More phrases
• But it seems to be that ‘kissed NP’ is a unit, too:
1. Kiss Mary, I would never do.
2. *Kiss, I would never do Mary.
3. What John did was kiss Mary.
4. *What John did Mary was kiss.
5. What did John do? –– Kiss Mary.
6. *What did John do Mary? –– Kiss.
7. John said he would kiss Mary, and he did so.
8. #John said he would kiss, and he did Mary.
• Let’s call this new unit VP, so our sentence looks like this:
• NP [VP kissed NP]
• By the way, how do you know which ones are bad?
• Because you are an expert in the grammar of your native language.
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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A bigger unit
• The structure that we just saw covers a whole sentence,
and it would be convenient to point this out in some way.
• So let us just make up a new unit, say ‘S’ for sentence:
• [S NP [VP kissed NP]]
• Many people find it hard to keep up with all the labels and
brackets, though, so linguists came up with an alternative,
the tree structure:
S
NP
VP
kissed
NP
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Compositionality
• Compare these next two sentences:
1. Mary kicked the mule.
2. Mary kicked the bucket.
• #2 has two readings
a. Mary applied force to the bucket with her foot.
b. Mary died.
• In the (a) reading, the sentence means what the sum of its
words mean; in the (b) reading, it means something special,
not predictable from the individual words.
• This happens in morphology, too:
a.
b.
the past tense of depart: departed
the past tense of go: *goed, went
• We call the (a) readings compositional, while the (b) readings
are non-compositional or lexical.
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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More on kicking the bucket
• Almost any change, no matter how minor, makes "kick the
bucket" lose its non-compositional meaning:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Mary kicked the buckets.
Mary kicked a bucket.
Mary kicked that bucket.
Mary kicked the pail.
Mary kicked the big bucket.
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ASPECTS OF LINGUISTIC
COMPETENCE
Ingram §2: left-overs
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Linguistic model, Fig. 2.1 p. 37
Discourse model
Sentence level
Word level
Syntax
S
E
M
A
N
T
I
C
S
Sentence prosody
Morphology
Word prosody
Segmental phonology
production
Segmental phonology
perception
Articulatory phonetics
Speech motor control
Acoustic phonetics
Feature extraction
INPUT
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Linguistic model, Fig. 2.1 p. 37
Discourse model
Sentence level
Word level
S
E
M
A
N
T
[S [NP mεɹi] [VP kɪst] [NP ʤan]]
I
C
S
[mεɹi] [kɪst] [ʤan]
Segmental phonology
production
/mεɹikɪstʤan/
Articulatory phonetics
Speech motor control
bilabial - mid - alveolar
nasal - front - flap
[mεɹikʰɪstʤan]
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
I-language vs E-language
• In 1986, Noam Chomsky proposed a
distinction between I-Language and ELanguage.
• I-language mean ‘internal language’ and
is the mentally represented linguistic
knowledge that a native speaker of a
language has, and is therefore a mental
object — from this perspective, most of
theoretical linguistics is a branch of
psychology.
• E-Language or ‘external language’
encompasses all other notions of what
language is, for example that it is a body
of knowledge or behavioral habits
shared by a community. Thus, Elanguage is not itself a coherent
concept, and Chomsky argues that such
notions of language are not useful in the
study of innate linguistic knowledge.
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
NEXT TIME
Ingram §3: Neuroanatomy of language
☞ Go over questions at end of chapter.
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