LINA01H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Grammaticality, Principle Of Compositionality, Railways Act 1921
Document Summary
Syntax: is the study of the structure of phrases and sentences. It also determines how words combine to form phrases, and in turn phrases combine to form sentences. The goal of syntax is to find a model which can represent which sentences are grammatical in various languages. Phrase: single word or group of words that acts as a constituent. (*) means not grammatical. Grammaticality judgement: is the judgement of a native speaker on situations in which a string of words is syntactically well formed (grammatical) or ill-formed (ungrammatical). Native speakers of a specific language will have similar mental grammar. Thus, their judgements about sentences should be uniform. Content words: nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs. Function words: prepositions, determiners (the, this, that, a, auxiliary verbs (can, us, will) To identify lexical categories: identify nouns: usually it follows a determiner (the or a). However, some nouns cannot follow a determiner (names, pronouns, etc): identify verbs: comes after an auxiliary verb (can, has, is).
