Linguistics Midterm Review 1 CHAPTER 1 ⢠Creative aspect of ...
Linguistics Midterm Review
CHAPTER 1
Creative aspect of linguistic knowledge: Speakers’ ability to combine finite number of linguistic units of their language to produce and understand an infinite range of novel sentences Linguistic competence: what you know Linguistic performance: how you use the knowledge
What is Grammar? Grammar: The sounds and sound patterns, the basic units of meaning, such as words, and the rules to combine them to form new sentences Descriptive Grammar- a linguist’s description or model of the mental grammar, including the units, structures, and rules. And explicit statements of what speakers know about their language. Prescriptive grammars- rules of grammar brought by grammarian’s attempt to legislate what speakers’ grammatical rules should be, rather than what they are. Prestige dialect: the dialect usually spoken by people in positions of power, and the one deemed correct by prescriptive grammarians. Teaching Grammars and Reference Grammars Teaching Grammar: a set of language rules written to help speakers learn a second or foreign language or a different dialect of their language. Gloss: a word in one language given to express the meaning of a word in another language. Reference grammar: a description of a language that attempts to be as thorough and comprehensive as possible; it can serve as a reference for those interested in establishing grammatical facts. Language Universals Phonology: The sound system of a language; the component of a grammar that includes the inventory of sounds (phonetic and phonemic units) and rules for their combination and pronunciation; the study of the sound systems if all languages Semantics: The study of the linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases and sentences. Morphology: The study of the structure of words; the component of the grammar that includes the rules of word formation. Syntax: The rules of sentence formation; the component of the mental grammar that represents speakers’ knowledge of the structure of phrases and sentences Lexicon: The component if the grammar containing speakers’ knowledge about morphemes and words; a speaker’s mental dictionary.
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Universal grammar: The innate principles and properties and properties that pertain to the grammars of all human languages. Language Faculty: That part of human biological and genetic makeup specifically designed for language acquisition and use. Linguistic Theory: A theory of the principles that characterize all human languages; the “laws of human language. ”
Sign languages: Evidence for language universals. Finger spelling: In signing, hand gestures that represent letters of the alphabet used to spell words for which there is no sign. The First Language: Mono-genetic theory of language origin: The belief that all languages originated from a sign language. Arbitrariness of linguistic sign Examples of non arbitrary communications: o Octagon Stop o Arrow pointed in a direction One way street CHAPTER 2: MORPHOLOGY
Word: A free sound-meaning lexical unit, which may be simple or complex. Lexicon: The component of the grammar containing speakers’ knowledge about morphemes and words; a speaker’s mental dictionary. Homophones: different words with the same sounds but different meanings o Ex: She can’t bear (tolerate) children. She can’t bear (give birth to) children. He stood there—bare and beautiful. Synonyms: Words with the same or nearly the same meaning Orthography: the written form of a language; spelling. Grammatical category: Traditionally called “Part of speech.” Also called syntactic categories. Expressions of the same grammatical category can generally substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality, ex: noun phrase, verb phrase.
The first dictionary, by Robert Cawdrey, appeared in 1604, with the title A Table Alphabetical, Containing and Teaching the True Writing, and Understanding of Hard Usuall English Words, etc. o It listed some 2,500 “hard words” with their explanations in ordinary language. Content Words and Function Words Content words: The nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that constitute the major part of the vocabulary
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Open class: The class of lexical content words; a category of words that commonly adds new words ex: nouns, verbs. Function Words: A word that does not have clear lexical meaning but has a grammatical function; function words include conjunctions, prepositions, articles, auxiliaries, complementizers and pronouns. Closed Class: A category, generally a functional category that rarely has new words added to it. Ex: Prepositions, conjunctions Generic Term: A word that applies to a whole class, such as dog in the dog is found throughout the world. A word that ordinarily has the semantic feature (+male) when used to refer to both sexes, ex: mankind meaning the human race. The brain treats content and function words differently.
Morphemes: The Minimal Units of Meaning Morphemes: Smallest unit of linguistic meaning or function. Ex: sheepdogs contains 3 morphemes Discreteness: A fundamental property of human language in which larger linguistic units are perceived to be composed of smaller linguistic units. Ex: cat is perceived as the phonemes /k/, /ae/, /t/; the cat is perceived as the and cat. Bound and Free Morphemes Prefixes and Suffixes Free morphemes: A single morpheme that constitutes a word Affixes: Bound morpheme attaches to a stem or root. Bound Morphemes: Morpheme that must be attached to other morphemes. Bound morphemes are prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes, and some roots, such as cran- in cranberry. Prefixes: An affix that is attached to the beginning of a morpheme or stem Suffixes: An affix that is attached to the end of a morpheme or stem. Ex: -er in Lew is Taller than Bill. Infixes Infixes: A bound morpheme that is inserted in the idle of a word or stem. Circumfixes Circumfixes: Bound morpheme, parts of which occur in a word both before and after the root. Discontinuous morphemes: A morpheme with multiple parts that occur in more than one place in a word or sentence. Roots and Stems Roots: The morpheme that remains when all affixes are stripped down from a complex word. Stem: The base to which one or more affixes are attached to create a more complex that may be another stem or a word.
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Etymemes: A bound base that has etymological relevance. (Ex: -ceive in receive) Monomorphemic: A word that consists of one morpheme. All morphemes are bound or free. Affixes are bound morphemes. Root Morphemes can be bound or free.
Rules of Word Formation. Morphological rules: Rules for combining morphemes to form stems and words. Derivational Morphology Derivational morphemes: Morpheme added to a stem or root to form a new stem or word, [possibly, but not necessarily, resulting in a change in syntactic category. Ex: -er added to a verb like kick to give the noun kicker. Derived word: The form that results from the addition of a derivational morpheme. Ex: firm + ly- firmly is a derived word. The Hierarchical Structure of Words Hierarchal structure: The groupings and subgrouping of the parts of a sentence into syntactic categories, ex: in glossary. Tree diagrams: A graphical representation of the linear and hierarchical structure of a phrase or sentence. A phrase structure tree. Lexical Gaps Accidental gaps: Phonological or morphological form that constitutes possible but non-occurring lexical items. Ex: blick, unsad. Lexical gaps: Possible but non-occurring words; forms that over the phonotactic rules of a language yet have no meaning. Ex: blick in English Possible word: A string of sounds that overs the phonotactic constraints of the language but has no meaning. Ex: gumble. Rule Productivity Productive: Refers to morphological rules that can be used freely and apply to all form to create new words. Ex: the addition to an adjective of –ish meaning “having somewhat of the quality,” such as newish, tallish, incredibleish. Antonyms: Words that are opposite with respect to one of their semantic properties. Conversion: Process in which an existing word becomes assigned to another syntactic category. EX on Pg 59 Blends: similar to compounds, but parts of the words combined are deleted, so they are “less than” compounds. Back-formations: Creation of a new word by removing an affix from an old word. Ex: donate from donation
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Abbreviations: Shortened form of a word Clipping: The deletion of some part of a longer word to give a shorter word with the same meaning. Ex: phone from telephone Coined: The construction and/or invention of new words that then become part of the lexicon. Ex: e-commerce Eponyms: A word taken from a proper name Ex: such as john for “toilet” Acronyms: Word composed of the initials of several words, Ex: PET scan from positron emission tomography scans.
Inflectional Morphemes Grammatical morphemes: Function word or bound morpheme required by the syntactic rules. Ex: to and s in he wants to go. Inflectional morphemes: Bound grammatical morpheme that is affixed to a word according to rules of syntax. Ex: third-person singular verbal suffix –s Suppletive forms: A term used to refer to inflected morphemes in which the regular rules do not apply. Ex: went as the past tense of go.
Case: A characteristic of nouns and pronouns, and in some languages articles and adjectives, determined by the function in the sentence, and generally indicated by the morphological form of the word.
Morphological Analysis: Identifying Morphemes. Paradigms: A set of forms derived from a single root morpheme. Ex: give, gives, given, gave, giving. CHAPTER 3: SYNTAX
Syntax: The part of the grammar that represents a speaker’s knowledge of sentences and their structures. Rules of Syntax: Principles of grammar that account for the grammaticality of sentences, their hierarchical structure, their word order, whether there is structural ambiguity. Ex: system from the word un + system + atic + ally.
Grammatical or Ungrammatical: Well formed: Sequences of words that conform to the rules of syntax. (grammatical) Ill formed: Sequence of words that violate the syntactic rules. (ungrammatical) What else do you know about Syntax? Ambiguity: The term used to describe a word, phrase or sentence with multiple meanings. Hierarchical structure: The groupings or subgroupings of the parts of a sentence into syntactic categories. Ex: the bird sang [[[the] [bird]] [sang]]; The groupings and subgroupings of morphemes in a word
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Structural ambiguity: The phenomenon in which the same sequence of words has two or more meanings based on different phrase structure analyses. Ex: He saw a boy with a telescope. Grammatical relations: Any of several structural positions that a noun phrase may assume in a sentence. Subject: Direct Object: The grammatical relation of a noun phrase when it appears immediately below the verb phrase (VP) and next to the verb in deep structure; the noun phrase complement of a transitive verb. Ex: the puppy in the boy found the puppy.
Sentence Structure Tree diagram: A graphical representation of the linear and hierarchical structure of a phrase or sentence. Constituents: A syntactic unit in a phrase structure tree. Ex: the girl in a noun phrase constituent in the sentence the boy loves the girl. Constituent structure: The hierarchically arranged syntactic units such as noun phrase and verb phrase that underlie every sentence If the sentence has more than one constituent structure, it is ambiguous, and each tree will correspond to one of the possible meanings. Identifying consitituents She drove the car to the store. Does it answer a question? ✔Where did she drive the car? to the store Can we replace it with a pronoun? ✔She drove the car there Can*we*relocate*the*phrase?* ✔To the store is where she drove it to. ✔It was to the store that she drove to Syntactic Categories. Syntactic Category: Traditionally called “parts of speech”; also called grammatical categories; expressions of the same grammatical category can generally substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality. Ex:noun phrase, verb phrase. Noun phrase (NP): category of expressions containing some form of a noun or pronoun as its head, and which functions as the subject or as various objects in a sentence. Verb phrase (VP): The syntactic category of expressions that contains a verb as its head along with its complements such as noun phrases and prepositional phrases. Ex: gave the book to the child. Verb: The syntactic category, also lexical category, of words that can be the head of a verb phrase. Verbs denote actions, sensations, and states. Ex: climb, hear, and understand.
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Prepositional phrase (PP): The syntactic category, also phrasal category, consisting of a preposition and a noun phrase. Sentence: A syntactic category of expression consisting minimally of a noun phrase, followed by an auxiliary, followed by a verb phrase in deep structure. Adjective phrase (AP): A syntactic category, also phrasal category, whose head is an adjective possibly accompanied by modifiers that occurs inside noun phrases and as complements of the verb to be, ex: worthy of praise, several miles high, green, more difficult. Determiner (Det): The syntactic category, also functional category, of words and expressions that when combined with a noun forms a noun phrase. Includes the articles the and a Adjective (Adj): The syntactic category, also lexical category, of words that function as the head of an adjective phrase, and that have the semantic effect of qualifying or describing the referents of nouns. Ex: tall, bright, intelligent. Noun: The syntactic category of words that can functions the head of a noun phrase, such as book, jean, and sincerity. Preposition: The syntactic category, also lexical category that heads a prepositional phrase. Ex: at, in, on, up. Adverb: The syntactic category, also lexical category, of words that qualify the verb such as many adverbs like quickly and time adverbs like soon. The position of the adverb in the sentence depends on its semantic type. Ex: John will soon eat lunch, john eats lunch quickly. Auxiliary verb: Verbal elements, traditionally called “helping verbs,” that cooccur with, and qualify, the main verb in a verb phrase with regard to such properties as tense, ex: have, be, will.
Phrase Structure Trees. Phrase structure tree: A tree diagram with syntactic category information. AKA constituent structure tree. Articles: One of several subclasses of determiners. Ex: the, a. Node: A labelled branch point in a phrase structure tree; part of the graphical depiction of a transition network represented as a circle, pairs of which are connected by arcs. Sisters: Categories that are immediately dominated by the same node. Heads and Complements Head (of a compound): The rightmost word. Ex: house in doghouse. It generally indicated the category and general meaning of the compound. Head (of a phrase): The central word of a phrase whose lexical category defines the type of phrase. Ex: the noun man is the head of the noun phrase the man who came to dinner; Complements: The constituent(s) in a phrase other than the head that complete(s) the meaning of the phrase. In the verb phrase found a puppy, the noun phrase a puppy is a complement of the head verb found.
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Linguistics Midterm Review o Complements: are phrases which provide information about entities and locations whose existence is implied in the meaning of the head. The meaning of eat implies something that is eaten. Selection Transitive verb: A verb that selects an obligatory noun phrase complement. Ex: find. Selection: A specification in the lexical entry of a word that determines the constituents required or permitted as complements when that word is the head of a phrase. Ex: in a verb phrase, a transitive verb such as find requires a direct object complement, whereas a verb such as eat permits a direct object complement. Intransitive verb: A verb that must not have a direct object complement. Ex: sleep. What Heads a Sentence? Modals: The auxiliaries other than be and have. Auxiliary verbs specify a time frame for the sentence, whether the situation described by the sentence will take place, already took place, or is taking place now. Phrase Structure Rules Prepositional Object: The grammatical relation of the noun phrase that occurs immediately below a prepositional phrase in deep structure. Phrase Structure Rules: Principles of grammar that specify the constituency of syntactic categories. Ex: NP (Det) (AP) N (PP). (more on Page 102)
Phrasal categories: categories such as NP, VP, AP, IP (=S). Lexical Categories: N, V, P, ADJ, and ADV. Functional Categories: The categories such as Det and Aux that house function words.
More Phrase Structure Rules Coordinate Structure: results when two constituents of the same category (in this case, two NPs) are joined with a conjunction such as and or or. Complementizers: An element that turns a sentence into a complement. Infinitive: An uninflected form of a verb ex: swim. An infinitive sentence does not have a tense. Transformational Rules Transformational rules: A way to capture the relationship between a declarative (statements) and a interrogative (question) is to allow the phrase structure rules to generate the structure corresponding to the declarative sentence and have another formal device.
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Deep structures: Basic structures of sentences. Surface structures: The structures that result from the application of transformational rules.
Structure-Dependent Rules Structure dependent: (1) a Principle of Universal grammar that states that the application of transformational rules is determined by phrase structure properties, as opposed to structure-less sequences of words or specific sentences; (2) The way children construct rules using their knowledge of syntactic structure irrespective of the specific words in the structure or their meaning. X-bar Syntax In the approach, “X-bar theory,” a binary branching pattern is adopted to account for the fact that phrases systematically contains heads (X) and may also contain complements and specifiers in the configuration for all categories, lexical and functional. UG Principles and Parameters Parameters: The small set of alternatives for a particular phenomenon made available by Universal Grammar. For example, Universal grammar specifies that a phrase must have a head and possibly complements; a parameter states whether the complement(s) precedes or follows the head.
Topicalization: A transformation that moves a syntactic element to the front of a sentence, ex: deriving Dogs I love very much from I love dogs very much.
CHAPTER 4: SEMANTICS Semantics: The meanings of Language
Semantics: The study of the linguistic meanings of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. Lexical semantics: Subfields of semantics, which is concerned with the meanings of words and the meaning relationships among words, and phrasal or sentential semantics, which is concerned with the meanings of syntactic units larger than the word. Pragmatics- The study of how context affects meaning –for example, how the sentence it’s cold in here comes to be interpreted as “close the windows” in certain situations.
Semantic Properties Semantic properties: The components of meaning of a word, Ex: “young” Is a semantic property of “baby, colt, puppy”
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Linguistics Midterm Review Semantic Properties and the Lexicon The lexicon is the part of the grammar that contains the knowledge speakers have about individual words and morphemes, including semantic properties. Semantic features: a formal or notational device for expressing the presence or absence of semantic properties by pluses and minuses. Example on pg 147. Redundancy rule: Principles in the lexicon stating generalizations between semantic features. Ex: a word that is [+human] is [+animate]. Count nouns: Nouns that can be enumerated—Ex: one potato, 2 potatoes Mass nouns: Nouns such as rice, water, and milk, which cannot be enumerated or preceded by a or many but can by much or by nothing at all. More Semantic Relationships Classifiers: grammatical morphemes that mark their semantic class. Homonyms and Ambiguity Homonyms: different words that are pronounced the same, but may or may not be spelled the same. Example: The twobats or tale and tail. Homographs: Different words that are spelled the same, whether or not they are pronounced the same. Partial homonymy (called heteronyms) occurs where words are spelled the same but are pronounced differently. Polysemous: When a word has multiple meanings that are related conceptually or historically. Ambiguous: The terms used to describe a word, phrase, or sentence with multiple meanings. Synonyms: Words that sound different but have the same or nearly the same meaning. Paraphrases: When synonyms occur in otherwise identical sentences, the sentences, the sentences will be paraphrases. Lexical paraphrase: Sentences that have the same meaning due to synonyms, Ex: She lost her purse and She lost her handbag. Antonyms Antonyms: Words that are opposite in meaning. Complementary pairs: Two antonym related in such a way that the negation of one is the meaning of the other. Ex: alive means not dead. Gradable pairs: Two antonyms related in such a way that more of one is less of the other, Ex: warm and cool; more warm is less cool, and vice versa. Another characteristic of many pairs of gradable antonyms is that one is marked and the other unmarked. o The unmarked member is the one used in questions of degree.
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Relational opposites: pair of antonyms in which one descrives a relation between two objects and the other describes the same relationship when the 2 objects are reversed. Ex: John is the parent of Susie describes the same relationship as Susie is the child of John.
Hyponyms: Words whose meanings are specific instances of a more general word. Ex: red, green and blue are hyponyms of the world colour. Metonym: A word substituted for another word or expression with which it is closely associated. Ex: Ottawa indicates federal governments. Meronym: A part to whole relationship in which the meronym is part os a larger entity. Retonyms: An expression that would once have been redundant, but which societal or technological changes have made no redundant ex: silent movie, which was redundant before the advent of the “talkies”
Proper Names Proper names: A word that refers to a person, place or other entity with a unique reference known to th speaker and listener. Usually capitalized in Writing. Ex: Nelson Mandela, Montreal, Atlantic Ocean. Proper names are definite: which means they refer to a unique object insofar as the speaker and the listener are concerned. Phrase and Sentence Meaning Principle of compositionality: states that the meaning of a phrase or sentence depends on both the meaning of its words and how those words are combined structurally. The sentence Visiting relatives can be boring can have two meanings because it has 2 structures. Sentential semantics: The study of how word meanings combine into phrase and sentence meanings, and the meaning relationships among these larger units. Sense and Reference Referent: The entity designated by an expression, ex: the referent of john in john knows sue is the actual person named john; the referent of Toronto is the capital of Canada is the truth value false Reference: That part of the meaning of a noun phrase that associates it with some entity. That part of the meaning of a declarative sentence that associates it with a truth value, either true or false. Coreferential: Describes noun phrases (including pronouns) that refer to the same entity. Sense: The inherent part of an expressions meaning that, together with context, determines its referent. Also called intension. For example: knowing the sense or intension of a noun phrase such as the prime minister of Canada in 2009 allows one to determine that Stephen Harper is the referent.
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Extension: The referential part of the meaning of an expression; the referent perceives something, ex: Helen in Helen heard Robert playing the piano. Intension: The inherent, non-referential part of the meaning of an expression, also called sense.
Thematic roles Agent: The thematic role of the noun phrase whose referent does the action described by the verb. EX: George in George hugged Martha. Theme: Thematic role of the noun phrase whose referent undergoes the action of the verb. Ex: Martha in George hugged Martha Goal: The thematic role of the noun phrase toward whose referent the action of the verb is directed. Ex: the theatre in the kids went to the theatre Thematic roles: o Location: Where the action occurs o Source: where the action originates o Instrument: and object used to accomplish the action o Experiencer: one receiving sensory input o Causative: a natural force that brings about a change o Possessor: one who owns or has something. Thematic Roles in Other languages Grammatical case: Case theory: The Theta-Criterion Theta assignment: The process of assigning thematic roles to the subject and complements of a verb Theta- Criterian: A proposed universal principle stating that a particular thematic role (ex: agent) may occur only once in a sentence.
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CHAPTER 1
Creative aspect of linguistic knowledge: Speakers’ ability to combine finite number of linguistic units of their language to produce and understand an infinite range of novel sentences Linguistic competence: what you know Linguistic performance: how you use the knowledge
What is Grammar? Grammar: The sounds and sound patterns, the basic units of meaning, such as words, and the rules to combine them to form new sentences Descriptive Grammar- a linguist’s description or model of the mental grammar, including the units, structures, and rules. And explicit statements of what speakers know about their language. Prescriptive grammars- rules of grammar brought by grammarian’s attempt to legislate what speakers’ grammatical rules should be, rather than what they are. Prestige dialect: the dialect usually spoken by people in positions of power, and the one deemed correct by prescriptive grammarians. Teaching Grammars and Reference Grammars Teaching Grammar: a set of language rules written to help speakers learn a second or foreign language or a different dialect of their language. Gloss: a word in one language given to express the meaning of a word in another language. Reference grammar: a description of a language that attempts to be as thorough and comprehensive as possible; it can serve as a reference for those interested in establishing grammatical facts. Language Universals Phonology: The sound system of a language; the component of a grammar that includes the inventory of sounds (phonetic and phonemic units) and rules for their combination and pronunciation; the study of the sound systems if all languages Semantics: The study of the linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases and sentences. Morphology: The study of the structure of words; the component of the grammar that includes the rules of word formation. Syntax: The rules of sentence formation; the component of the mental grammar that represents speakers’ knowledge of the structure of phrases and sentences Lexicon: The component if the grammar containing speakers’ knowledge about morphemes and words; a speaker’s mental dictionary.
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Universal grammar: The innate principles and properties and properties that pertain to the grammars of all human languages. Language Faculty: That part of human biological and genetic makeup specifically designed for language acquisition and use. Linguistic Theory: A theory of the principles that characterize all human languages; the “laws of human language. ”
Sign languages: Evidence for language universals. Finger spelling: In signing, hand gestures that represent letters of the alphabet used to spell words for which there is no sign. The First Language: Mono-genetic theory of language origin: The belief that all languages originated from a sign language. Arbitrariness of linguistic sign Examples of non arbitrary communications: o Octagon Stop o Arrow pointed in a direction One way street CHAPTER 2: MORPHOLOGY
Word: A free sound-meaning lexical unit, which may be simple or complex. Lexicon: The component of the grammar containing speakers’ knowledge about morphemes and words; a speaker’s mental dictionary. Homophones: different words with the same sounds but different meanings o Ex: She can’t bear (tolerate) children. She can’t bear (give birth to) children. He stood there—bare and beautiful. Synonyms: Words with the same or nearly the same meaning Orthography: the written form of a language; spelling. Grammatical category: Traditionally called “Part of speech.” Also called syntactic categories. Expressions of the same grammatical category can generally substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality, ex: noun phrase, verb phrase.
The first dictionary, by Robert Cawdrey, appeared in 1604, with the title A Table Alphabetical, Containing and Teaching the True Writing, and Understanding of Hard Usuall English Words, etc. o It listed some 2,500 “hard words” with their explanations in ordinary language. Content Words and Function Words Content words: The nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that constitute the major part of the vocabulary
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Open class: The class of lexical content words; a category of words that commonly adds new words ex: nouns, verbs. Function Words: A word that does not have clear lexical meaning but has a grammatical function; function words include conjunctions, prepositions, articles, auxiliaries, complementizers and pronouns. Closed Class: A category, generally a functional category that rarely has new words added to it. Ex: Prepositions, conjunctions Generic Term: A word that applies to a whole class, such as dog in the dog is found throughout the world. A word that ordinarily has the semantic feature (+male) when used to refer to both sexes, ex: mankind meaning the human race. The brain treats content and function words differently.
Morphemes: The Minimal Units of Meaning Morphemes: Smallest unit of linguistic meaning or function. Ex: sheepdogs contains 3 morphemes Discreteness: A fundamental property of human language in which larger linguistic units are perceived to be composed of smaller linguistic units. Ex: cat is perceived as the phonemes /k/, /ae/, /t/; the cat is perceived as the and cat. Bound and Free Morphemes Prefixes and Suffixes Free morphemes: A single morpheme that constitutes a word Affixes: Bound morpheme attaches to a stem or root. Bound Morphemes: Morpheme that must be attached to other morphemes. Bound morphemes are prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes, and some roots, such as cran- in cranberry. Prefixes: An affix that is attached to the beginning of a morpheme or stem Suffixes: An affix that is attached to the end of a morpheme or stem. Ex: -er in Lew is Taller than Bill. Infixes Infixes: A bound morpheme that is inserted in the idle of a word or stem. Circumfixes Circumfixes: Bound morpheme, parts of which occur in a word both before and after the root. Discontinuous morphemes: A morpheme with multiple parts that occur in more than one place in a word or sentence. Roots and Stems Roots: The morpheme that remains when all affixes are stripped down from a complex word. Stem: The base to which one or more affixes are attached to create a more complex that may be another stem or a word.
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Etymemes: A bound base that has etymological relevance. (Ex: -ceive in receive) Monomorphemic: A word that consists of one morpheme. All morphemes are bound or free. Affixes are bound morphemes. Root Morphemes can be bound or free.
Rules of Word Formation. Morphological rules: Rules for combining morphemes to form stems and words. Derivational Morphology Derivational morphemes: Morpheme added to a stem or root to form a new stem or word, [possibly, but not necessarily, resulting in a change in syntactic category. Ex: -er added to a verb like kick to give the noun kicker. Derived word: The form that results from the addition of a derivational morpheme. Ex: firm + ly- firmly is a derived word. The Hierarchical Structure of Words Hierarchal structure: The groupings and subgrouping of the parts of a sentence into syntactic categories, ex: in glossary. Tree diagrams: A graphical representation of the linear and hierarchical structure of a phrase or sentence. A phrase structure tree. Lexical Gaps Accidental gaps: Phonological or morphological form that constitutes possible but non-occurring lexical items. Ex: blick, unsad. Lexical gaps: Possible but non-occurring words; forms that over the phonotactic rules of a language yet have no meaning. Ex: blick in English Possible word: A string of sounds that overs the phonotactic constraints of the language but has no meaning. Ex: gumble. Rule Productivity Productive: Refers to morphological rules that can be used freely and apply to all form to create new words. Ex: the addition to an adjective of –ish meaning “having somewhat of the quality,” such as newish, tallish, incredibleish. Antonyms: Words that are opposite with respect to one of their semantic properties. Conversion: Process in which an existing word becomes assigned to another syntactic category. EX on Pg 59 Blends: similar to compounds, but parts of the words combined are deleted, so they are “less than” compounds. Back-formations: Creation of a new word by removing an affix from an old word. Ex: donate from donation
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Abbreviations: Shortened form of a word Clipping: The deletion of some part of a longer word to give a shorter word with the same meaning. Ex: phone from telephone Coined: The construction and/or invention of new words that then become part of the lexicon. Ex: e-commerce Eponyms: A word taken from a proper name Ex: such as john for “toilet” Acronyms: Word composed of the initials of several words, Ex: PET scan from positron emission tomography scans.
Inflectional Morphemes Grammatical morphemes: Function word or bound morpheme required by the syntactic rules. Ex: to and s in he wants to go. Inflectional morphemes: Bound grammatical morpheme that is affixed to a word according to rules of syntax. Ex: third-person singular verbal suffix –s Suppletive forms: A term used to refer to inflected morphemes in which the regular rules do not apply. Ex: went as the past tense of go.
Case: A characteristic of nouns and pronouns, and in some languages articles and adjectives, determined by the function in the sentence, and generally indicated by the morphological form of the word.
Morphological Analysis: Identifying Morphemes. Paradigms: A set of forms derived from a single root morpheme. Ex: give, gives, given, gave, giving. CHAPTER 3: SYNTAX
Syntax: The part of the grammar that represents a speaker’s knowledge of sentences and their structures. Rules of Syntax: Principles of grammar that account for the grammaticality of sentences, their hierarchical structure, their word order, whether there is structural ambiguity. Ex: system from the word un + system + atic + ally.
Grammatical or Ungrammatical: Well formed: Sequences of words that conform to the rules of syntax. (grammatical) Ill formed: Sequence of words that violate the syntactic rules. (ungrammatical) What else do you know about Syntax? Ambiguity: The term used to describe a word, phrase or sentence with multiple meanings. Hierarchical structure: The groupings or subgroupings of the parts of a sentence into syntactic categories. Ex: the bird sang [[[the] [bird]] [sang]]; The groupings and subgroupings of morphemes in a word
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Structural ambiguity: The phenomenon in which the same sequence of words has two or more meanings based on different phrase structure analyses. Ex: He saw a boy with a telescope. Grammatical relations: Any of several structural positions that a noun phrase may assume in a sentence. Subject: Direct Object: The grammatical relation of a noun phrase when it appears immediately below the verb phrase (VP) and next to the verb in deep structure; the noun phrase complement of a transitive verb. Ex: the puppy in the boy found the puppy.
Sentence Structure Tree diagram: A graphical representation of the linear and hierarchical structure of a phrase or sentence. Constituents: A syntactic unit in a phrase structure tree. Ex: the girl in a noun phrase constituent in the sentence the boy loves the girl. Constituent structure: The hierarchically arranged syntactic units such as noun phrase and verb phrase that underlie every sentence If the sentence has more than one constituent structure, it is ambiguous, and each tree will correspond to one of the possible meanings. Identifying consitituents She drove the car to the store. Does it answer a question? ✔Where did she drive the car? to the store Can we replace it with a pronoun? ✔She drove the car there Can*we*relocate*the*phrase?* ✔To the store is where she drove it to. ✔It was to the store that she drove to Syntactic Categories. Syntactic Category: Traditionally called “parts of speech”; also called grammatical categories; expressions of the same grammatical category can generally substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality. Ex:noun phrase, verb phrase. Noun phrase (NP): category of expressions containing some form of a noun or pronoun as its head, and which functions as the subject or as various objects in a sentence. Verb phrase (VP): The syntactic category of expressions that contains a verb as its head along with its complements such as noun phrases and prepositional phrases. Ex: gave the book to the child. Verb: The syntactic category, also lexical category, of words that can be the head of a verb phrase. Verbs denote actions, sensations, and states. Ex: climb, hear, and understand.
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Prepositional phrase (PP): The syntactic category, also phrasal category, consisting of a preposition and a noun phrase. Sentence: A syntactic category of expression consisting minimally of a noun phrase, followed by an auxiliary, followed by a verb phrase in deep structure. Adjective phrase (AP): A syntactic category, also phrasal category, whose head is an adjective possibly accompanied by modifiers that occurs inside noun phrases and as complements of the verb to be, ex: worthy of praise, several miles high, green, more difficult. Determiner (Det): The syntactic category, also functional category, of words and expressions that when combined with a noun forms a noun phrase. Includes the articles the and a Adjective (Adj): The syntactic category, also lexical category, of words that function as the head of an adjective phrase, and that have the semantic effect of qualifying or describing the referents of nouns. Ex: tall, bright, intelligent. Noun: The syntactic category of words that can functions the head of a noun phrase, such as book, jean, and sincerity. Preposition: The syntactic category, also lexical category that heads a prepositional phrase. Ex: at, in, on, up. Adverb: The syntactic category, also lexical category, of words that qualify the verb such as many adverbs like quickly and time adverbs like soon. The position of the adverb in the sentence depends on its semantic type. Ex: John will soon eat lunch, john eats lunch quickly. Auxiliary verb: Verbal elements, traditionally called “helping verbs,” that cooccur with, and qualify, the main verb in a verb phrase with regard to such properties as tense, ex: have, be, will.
Phrase Structure Trees. Phrase structure tree: A tree diagram with syntactic category information. AKA constituent structure tree. Articles: One of several subclasses of determiners. Ex: the, a. Node: A labelled branch point in a phrase structure tree; part of the graphical depiction of a transition network represented as a circle, pairs of which are connected by arcs. Sisters: Categories that are immediately dominated by the same node. Heads and Complements Head (of a compound): The rightmost word. Ex: house in doghouse. It generally indicated the category and general meaning of the compound. Head (of a phrase): The central word of a phrase whose lexical category defines the type of phrase. Ex: the noun man is the head of the noun phrase the man who came to dinner; Complements: The constituent(s) in a phrase other than the head that complete(s) the meaning of the phrase. In the verb phrase found a puppy, the noun phrase a puppy is a complement of the head verb found.
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Linguistics Midterm Review o Complements: are phrases which provide information about entities and locations whose existence is implied in the meaning of the head. The meaning of eat implies something that is eaten. Selection Transitive verb: A verb that selects an obligatory noun phrase complement. Ex: find. Selection: A specification in the lexical entry of a word that determines the constituents required or permitted as complements when that word is the head of a phrase. Ex: in a verb phrase, a transitive verb such as find requires a direct object complement, whereas a verb such as eat permits a direct object complement. Intransitive verb: A verb that must not have a direct object complement. Ex: sleep. What Heads a Sentence? Modals: The auxiliaries other than be and have. Auxiliary verbs specify a time frame for the sentence, whether the situation described by the sentence will take place, already took place, or is taking place now. Phrase Structure Rules Prepositional Object: The grammatical relation of the noun phrase that occurs immediately below a prepositional phrase in deep structure. Phrase Structure Rules: Principles of grammar that specify the constituency of syntactic categories. Ex: NP (Det) (AP) N (PP). (more on Page 102)
Phrasal categories: categories such as NP, VP, AP, IP (=S). Lexical Categories: N, V, P, ADJ, and ADV. Functional Categories: The categories such as Det and Aux that house function words.
More Phrase Structure Rules Coordinate Structure: results when two constituents of the same category (in this case, two NPs) are joined with a conjunction such as and or or. Complementizers: An element that turns a sentence into a complement. Infinitive: An uninflected form of a verb ex: swim. An infinitive sentence does not have a tense. Transformational Rules Transformational rules: A way to capture the relationship between a declarative (statements) and a interrogative (question) is to allow the phrase structure rules to generate the structure corresponding to the declarative sentence and have another formal device.
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Deep structures: Basic structures of sentences. Surface structures: The structures that result from the application of transformational rules.
Structure-Dependent Rules Structure dependent: (1) a Principle of Universal grammar that states that the application of transformational rules is determined by phrase structure properties, as opposed to structure-less sequences of words or specific sentences; (2) The way children construct rules using their knowledge of syntactic structure irrespective of the specific words in the structure or their meaning. X-bar Syntax In the approach, “X-bar theory,” a binary branching pattern is adopted to account for the fact that phrases systematically contains heads (X) and may also contain complements and specifiers in the configuration for all categories, lexical and functional. UG Principles and Parameters Parameters: The small set of alternatives for a particular phenomenon made available by Universal Grammar. For example, Universal grammar specifies that a phrase must have a head and possibly complements; a parameter states whether the complement(s) precedes or follows the head.
Topicalization: A transformation that moves a syntactic element to the front of a sentence, ex: deriving Dogs I love very much from I love dogs very much.
CHAPTER 4: SEMANTICS Semantics: The meanings of Language
Semantics: The study of the linguistic meanings of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. Lexical semantics: Subfields of semantics, which is concerned with the meanings of words and the meaning relationships among words, and phrasal or sentential semantics, which is concerned with the meanings of syntactic units larger than the word. Pragmatics- The study of how context affects meaning –for example, how the sentence it’s cold in here comes to be interpreted as “close the windows” in certain situations.
Semantic Properties Semantic properties: The components of meaning of a word, Ex: “young” Is a semantic property of “baby, colt, puppy”
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Linguistics Midterm Review Semantic Properties and the Lexicon The lexicon is the part of the grammar that contains the knowledge speakers have about individual words and morphemes, including semantic properties. Semantic features: a formal or notational device for expressing the presence or absence of semantic properties by pluses and minuses. Example on pg 147. Redundancy rule: Principles in the lexicon stating generalizations between semantic features. Ex: a word that is [+human] is [+animate]. Count nouns: Nouns that can be enumerated—Ex: one potato, 2 potatoes Mass nouns: Nouns such as rice, water, and milk, which cannot be enumerated or preceded by a or many but can by much or by nothing at all. More Semantic Relationships Classifiers: grammatical morphemes that mark their semantic class. Homonyms and Ambiguity Homonyms: different words that are pronounced the same, but may or may not be spelled the same. Example: The twobats or tale and tail. Homographs: Different words that are spelled the same, whether or not they are pronounced the same. Partial homonymy (called heteronyms) occurs where words are spelled the same but are pronounced differently. Polysemous: When a word has multiple meanings that are related conceptually or historically. Ambiguous: The terms used to describe a word, phrase, or sentence with multiple meanings. Synonyms: Words that sound different but have the same or nearly the same meaning. Paraphrases: When synonyms occur in otherwise identical sentences, the sentences, the sentences will be paraphrases. Lexical paraphrase: Sentences that have the same meaning due to synonyms, Ex: She lost her purse and She lost her handbag. Antonyms Antonyms: Words that are opposite in meaning. Complementary pairs: Two antonym related in such a way that the negation of one is the meaning of the other. Ex: alive means not dead. Gradable pairs: Two antonyms related in such a way that more of one is less of the other, Ex: warm and cool; more warm is less cool, and vice versa. Another characteristic of many pairs of gradable antonyms is that one is marked and the other unmarked. o The unmarked member is the one used in questions of degree.
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Relational opposites: pair of antonyms in which one descrives a relation between two objects and the other describes the same relationship when the 2 objects are reversed. Ex: John is the parent of Susie describes the same relationship as Susie is the child of John.
Hyponyms: Words whose meanings are specific instances of a more general word. Ex: red, green and blue are hyponyms of the world colour. Metonym: A word substituted for another word or expression with which it is closely associated. Ex: Ottawa indicates federal governments. Meronym: A part to whole relationship in which the meronym is part os a larger entity. Retonyms: An expression that would once have been redundant, but which societal or technological changes have made no redundant ex: silent movie, which was redundant before the advent of the “talkies”
Proper Names Proper names: A word that refers to a person, place or other entity with a unique reference known to th speaker and listener. Usually capitalized in Writing. Ex: Nelson Mandela, Montreal, Atlantic Ocean. Proper names are definite: which means they refer to a unique object insofar as the speaker and the listener are concerned. Phrase and Sentence Meaning Principle of compositionality: states that the meaning of a phrase or sentence depends on both the meaning of its words and how those words are combined structurally. The sentence Visiting relatives can be boring can have two meanings because it has 2 structures. Sentential semantics: The study of how word meanings combine into phrase and sentence meanings, and the meaning relationships among these larger units. Sense and Reference Referent: The entity designated by an expression, ex: the referent of john in john knows sue is the actual person named john; the referent of Toronto is the capital of Canada is the truth value false Reference: That part of the meaning of a noun phrase that associates it with some entity. That part of the meaning of a declarative sentence that associates it with a truth value, either true or false. Coreferential: Describes noun phrases (including pronouns) that refer to the same entity. Sense: The inherent part of an expressions meaning that, together with context, determines its referent. Also called intension. For example: knowing the sense or intension of a noun phrase such as the prime minister of Canada in 2009 allows one to determine that Stephen Harper is the referent.
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Linguistics Midterm Review
Extension: The referential part of the meaning of an expression; the referent perceives something, ex: Helen in Helen heard Robert playing the piano. Intension: The inherent, non-referential part of the meaning of an expression, also called sense.
Thematic roles Agent: The thematic role of the noun phrase whose referent does the action described by the verb. EX: George in George hugged Martha. Theme: Thematic role of the noun phrase whose referent undergoes the action of the verb. Ex: Martha in George hugged Martha Goal: The thematic role of the noun phrase toward whose referent the action of the verb is directed. Ex: the theatre in the kids went to the theatre Thematic roles: o Location: Where the action occurs o Source: where the action originates o Instrument: and object used to accomplish the action o Experiencer: one receiving sensory input o Causative: a natural force that brings about a change o Possessor: one who owns or has something. Thematic Roles in Other languages Grammatical case: Case theory: The Theta-Criterion Theta assignment: The process of assigning thematic roles to the subject and complements of a verb Theta- Criterian: A proposed universal principle stating that a particular thematic role (ex: agent) may occur only once in a sentence.
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