Lecture 6: Grammars & Syntax
Grammar
rules for combining sounds into words (phonology), rules of word formation (morphology), rules for combining words into phrases and phrases into sentences (syntax) and rules for assigning meaning (semantics)
knowledge about grammar that a language user has about the language, together with a mental dictionary represents his or her linguistic competence (=what we know about language, grammar)
Descriptive grammar – describes sounds, words, phrases and sentences of language
Prescriptive grammar – tells us which language patterns are grammatical and which are ungrammatical
Chomsky’s generative grammar
grammar which tells rules
how to produce, generate language
a precisely formulated set of rules whose output are all sentences of a language
humans have an innate “device” (LAD – language acquisition device) for language acquisition
Chomsky’s universal grammar
attempts to discover the nature of languages in general, it comprises rules which are universal for all languages, they represent the universal properties of all languages
languages are infinite (=there’s no limit; w przeciwieństwie do np. gramatyki, gdzie są limited rules)
Syntax
rules for combining words into phrases and phrases into sentences
modern English belongs to a group of analytic languages which means that it makes extensive use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs, and depend on word order to show the relationships (ważna jest kolejność)
przeciwna kategoria: synthetic np. j. polski
they use a lot of inflection (many different forms of one word in different situations; word order is not very important, np. Jaś kocha Marię=Maria kocha Jaś.
Syntactic categories
lexical categories (individual words)
nouns
verbs
adjectives
adverbs
prepositions
phrasal categories
NP (noun phrase): a big dog, a lovely day
VP (verb phrase): went out for a walk, barked
AP (adjective phrase) truly beautiful, simply impossible
PP (prepositional phrase) after a while, for a walk
AdvP (adverb phrase) absolutely wonderfully
Sentence types
Johnny walked: subject + verb
He went up the hill: subject + verb + adverbial
He felt hungry: subject + verb + complement
He opened a pack of Walkers’ biscuit: subject + verb + object (dopełnienie)
He found the biscuits very nutritious