LING 360 Chapter Notes - Chapter 11: Formation Rule, Mantra, Pocket Cube

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 360
• Professor: Brendan S.Gillon

Document Summary

When we turned to predicate logic and simple sentences in english just using clauses and verbs and proper names, we saw a mismatch: You can combine is+is+rs with ad(2) => formula. It was made rab and all these things come together at once: But in natural language , it works different from this: The logic of this would be : saw bill alice (sba). But that"s not the way english syntax works. English works by: (1) compute [saw alice] first to get a vp , and then combine that with [bill] to get the clause (2) we get a structure that looks like that diagram above. This is quite different from predicate logic (rab) or propositional logic (b->a). Suppose we are interested in an expression like: This again, notice the parallels among these three things. This is the flipped tree of [bill saw alice] above (flipped structure).