LING 1 Study Guide - Final Guide: Phrase Structure Rules, Pronoun
Document Summary
Ling 1 (fall 2015) supplementary reading for week 4. Syntax the study of how sentences are made up from words. It is a fact that i will visit my parents tomorrow is a good english sentence. It is also a fact that *i visit my parents tomorrow will is not a good english sentence. It is, then, also a fact that native speakers of english can make this kind of judgements, telling apart descriptively grammatical english sentences from utterances that are descriptively ungrammatical. Native speakers of english can make this kind of judgement on any sequence of words that they have never heard before. Therefore their brain must have some sort of computational system that allows them to make such judgements. Linguists want to know exactly what this system is, so we build hypothetical models (set of hypothetical rules) that can imitate what native speakers have in their brain.
