LING 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Cleft Sentence
12 Nov 2015
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Document Summary
Sentences aren"t formed just by stringing words together. Instead they have a hierarchal design in which certain words are grouped together. These groups of words can be called syntactic constituents. If we can identify which groupings of words are constituents, this will help us understand the hierarchal nature of language. 4 tests: substitution (not in book, answers to questions, clefting, coordination. The children will stop at the corner: if we replace the children w/ they , we get a grammatical sentence: they will stop there, yes, the children = constituent. If expression = constituent, you can often replace it by an element such as they , it , The children will stop at the corner: if we replace stop at the corner w/ do so , we get a grammatical sentence: the children will do so, yes, stop at the corner = constituent.
