LECTURE 1
1. Descriptive grammar:
it's about language description,
it doesn't tell us how we should speak but it describes our basic linguistic knowledge,
it explains how it is possible for us to speak, understand and make judgements about well-formedness,
it tells what we know about the sounds, words, phrases and sentences of the language we speak.
2. Prescriptive grammar: it tells us what rules we should follow - it refers to a way of speaking or writing that is to be either preferred or avoided.
3. Universal grammar: rules representing the universal properties of all languages.
4. The grammar includes the knowledge speakers have about the units and rules of language:
PHONOLOGY - rules for combining sounds into words,
MORPHOLOGY - rules for word-formation,
SYNTAX - rules for combining words into phrases and into sentences,
SEMANTICS - rules for assigning meaning.
5. Varieties of English:
regional variation (dialects),
social variation (educated or uneducated polarity),
national standards of English: British, American and other,
varieties according to the field of discourse (law, medicine, football, etc.),
stylistic variation (formal, neutral, casual, friendly, etc.).
6. Sentence structure: constituent:
SENTENCE - starting point of our analysis,
SENTENCE STRUCTURE - something fundamental to the study of syntax,
to say that something has structures is to say that:
it is divisible into parts/constituents,
there are different kinds/categories of parts,
the constituents are arranged in a specifiable way,
each constituent has a certain specifiable function in the structure,
HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE - the constituents of a complex structure are often complex themselves, e.g.: parts of structure consist themselves of further parts - so there is a hierarchy of parts.
7. What does a sentence consist of: It contains words but doesn't consist of words.
8. Sentence: establishing constituents:
PHRASES - sequences of words that can function as CONSTITUENTS in the structure of sentences, e.g.:
Something tells me that Descriptive Grammar will be my favourite subject this year.
PHRASES-MARKERS - tree diagrams (they are intended to represent structure by marking which sequences of words in a sentence are its constituent part).
9. Recognizing phrases:
if a sequence of words can be omitted from a sequence leaving another good sequence, this is a good indication that the sequence is a PHRASE functioning as a constituent in the structure of the sentence (not all phrases are ommissible),
if you can replace a sequence of words in a sentence with a single word without checking the overall structure of the sentence - it can be a PHRASE, e.g.:
Elderly women walked through the park. = They walked there.
answers to -wh questions (e.g.: where, who, which, what, etc.) are PHRASES,
the movement of a sequence of words in forming a construction indicates that the sequence is a PHRASE.
10. Recognizing phrases:
Phrases aren't only SYNTACTIC UNITS (e.g.: constituents in the structural form of the sentences) but also SEMANTIC UNITS (as they form identifiable parts of the meaning of sentences, e.g.: they form coherent units of sense).
11. Representing phrases by phrase-markers/tree diagrams:
NODE - any point in a phrase-marker that could branch and bear a label,
a sequence of elements is represented as a constituent in a phrase-marker if there is a node that dominates all those elements and no others (e.g.: when you can trace just the elements under consideration back to a single node, then those elements are represented as a constituent).