LING 1 Study Guide - Final Guide: The Language Instinct, Markov Model, Syntactic Category
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Corresponding to the two hypotheses that were considered in the preceding lecture notes, we discuss two possibilities. "word chain device" (formally called a "finite state model" or a "markov model), yields sentences that have a flat structure. We already found an argument against such a hypothesis in the preceding lecture notes- the sentences of english do not have a flat structure. We show that this hypothesis has other defects as well. The second hypothesis, by contrast, generates (=produces) sentences that do not have a flat structure. Phrase structure rules, which yield trees with labels added to indicate the syntactic category of each constituent (e. g. noun phrase, verb phrase, etc. ). 1. 1 summary: trees (i) in every sentence, certain groups of words form "natural units" [=constituents] and may: 1. 2 a puzzle explained: question formation q the puzzle (repeated from earlier lecture notes) Pinker discusses in chapter 2 of the language instinct (p. 29) the example of question formation.
