LIN 3010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously, Principle Of Compositionality

• School: University of Florida
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LIN 3010
• Professor: Wulff Steffi

Document Summary

Basic ideas of syntax: syntax is the component of grammar that deals with how words and phrases are combined into larger phrases, words and phrases alike are linguistic expressions. All linguistic expressions have: a certain form, a certain meaning/function, syntactic properties, the syntactic properties determine how the linguistic expression can combine with other linguistic expressions, 1. A. wall-e likes eva- whe(cid:374) a stri(cid:374)g of words for(cid:373)s a se(cid:374)te(cid:374)ce, it"s called grammatical: b. *likes wall-e eva (star * marks sentence as ungrammatical) In linguistics, we are less concerned with prescriptive grammar rules (rules that reflect how some people believe the language should be used correctly) and much more with descriptive grammar rules (rules that reflect how language is actually used). In another sense, syntax and semantics are quite independent. Syntactic properties: syntax is the study of how linguistic expressions combine. Syntactic properties: word order: even in english, we sometimes find osv order-in topicalized sentences, oh, apples i like.