2. Goals
• Be able to determine the category of each
word in a text.
• Be able to find the major phrases in a
sentence and their functions (again in any
text).
• Be able to comment on a text (including
your own writing): Are there many
embeddings, many PPs and AdvPs, etc.
• Be able to justify your answers in a
grammatically sophisticated way.
3. Note
This course is unlike many other English
classes. You don't have to read a lot but
you need to practice! For that reason,
you need to come to class as well and
there will be lots of assessment.
4. Possible Honors’ Projects
History of Tree diagramming
Order of adjectives (more next time)
Comparing the syntax of English and ??
by looking at a translation
Measuring function words:
forensic linguistics
Create a Grammar Game
11. Chapter 1
What do we know?
Linguistic:
Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Semantics/Pragmatics
12. Phonology
(1) a nice person, a treasure
(2) an object, an artist
(3) ovrite, cham
(4) a union, a university
(5) a house, a hospital
(6) an uncle
(7) an hour
(8) The – the …
14. Syntax
(9) Drunk Gets Ten Months In Cello Case.
(10) Eye drops off shelf.
(11) British left waffles on Falkland Islands.
(12) Teacher strikes idle kids.
(13) Speaker A: I just saw someone carrying a
monkey and an elephant go into the circus.
Speaker B: Wow, that someone must be pretty
strong.
(14) Flying planes can be dangerous.
15. Chomsky’s questions
What is the knowledge of language?
How do we acquire it (as kids)?
How did the species get to have it?
17. Our innate language faculty (or Universal
Grammar) enables us to create a set of
rules, or grammar, by being exposed to
(rather chaotic) language around us.
The set of rules that we acquire enables
us to produce sentences that we have
never heard before. These sentences can
also be infinitely long (if we have the time
and energy).
18. • Language acquisition, in this framework, is not
imitation but an interaction between Universal
Grammar and exposure to a particular language.
"Learning is primarily a matter of filling in detail
within a structure that is innate" (Chomsky 1975:
39). "A physical organ, say the heart, may vary
from one person to the next in size or strength,
but its basic structure and its function within
human physiology are common to the species.
• Individuals in the same speech community may
acquire grammars that differ somewhat in scale
and subtlety. … These variations in structure are
limited ..." (1975: 38).
20. Descriptive-Prescriptive
What people do – what books say
Examples of prescriptive rules
split infinitives
negative concord
real as adverb; like as conjunct, etc
OTHERS??
21. Chapter 1
What is grammar?
What do we know?
How come?
Non-linguistic knowledge.
Now a little more on hierarchies, p. 4
