LING 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously, Cream Cheese, Binoculars

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13 Feb 2023
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Speakers know the meaning of sentences they have never heard before. Compositionality meaning of larger expressions depends on the meanings of their parts and the way they are put together. Syntax studies how larger expressions are built out of smaller expressions. Consider the following pair of utterances: colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Doesn"t make sense: john morning up get, eat with cream cheese bagel, coffee too hot drink now therefore thermos put, and riding bus on to school. Sentence (1) doesn"t make sense, but otherwise is a well-formed sentence of english . Sentence (2) makes perfect sense, but is not a well-formed sentence of english. This illustrates that syntax is separate from semantics compare also pairs of verbs with similar meanings but different syntax: fear vs. frighten; eat vs. devour. Words in sentences are not beads on a string (just like morphemes in words)! The two structures have different sub-parts, or constituents: it"s either unlock+able, or un+lockable.

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