May 17 Class

Abbas’ link to YouTube Interview with Noam Chomsky

Phrase Structure Trees (also called constituent structure trees)

  • Syntactic categories
    • phrasal categories (NP & VP)
    • lexical categories (Noun & Verb)
    • functional categories (Det, Aux & Comp)
  • Head & Complements – internal structure of each syntactic
    category
  • Order of elements within the phrase is determined by the phrase structure rules for each language

Deep structure: basic phrase structure trees of a language

Some categories appear on both the right and the left side of the rule – this
accounts for infinite number of possible sentences

 Lexicon

  • knowledge speakers have about the vocabulary of their language
  • syntactic category of words & elements that may occur together
  • selectional restrictions

Selection:

  • transitive verb selects for a NP direct object complement

Phrase structure Rules:

  • Speaker’s set of rules that generate language
  • Example: An NP can contain a determiner followed by a noun.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.