The Parts of Speech

Word

composed of form and meaning

• meaning of word can be broken up into units called morphemes

Morphemes

Smallest unit of meaning

ie: dogs = 2 morphemes (‘dog’ + ‘s’)

Free morpheme

can be a word by itself or can be attached to other morphemes

Bound Morpheme

canNOT be a word by itself, has to be attached to other morphemes

• can be genitive case

  • gives context rather than plurality

Allomorphs

Same meaningful unit can have different forms/production/presentation based on context/environment

• they are variations of morphemes

• ie suffix -s can be [s] following unvoiced consonants, [z] after voiced segments, and [ez] after sibilants (another ‘s’)

Morphology of languages

consists of isolating, agglutinative, fusional, polysynthetic

• No language is completely isolated and confided in one single category, however categorizations are based on dominant rules/presentation of language

morphology : Isolating languages

meaningful units do NOT get attached together

• ie: mandarin - each character is a morpheme

• Advantage = provides durability to the language because the characters might vary slightly over time but meaning is maintained because each one is isolated, meaning everyone can understand the writing even if they do not speak or the dialect differs between regions

• “analytic languages”

• due to the stability of the form of the morphemes in these languages plurality information is provided through context

morphology : Agglutinative

Attaches morphemes together but form of morphemes is maintained (don’t meld)

• form is consistent and stable in the language

• can individually identify each morpheme as a meaningful unit after word is combined

• ie: turkish, finnish, japanese, etc.

• have very long words like Polysynthetic however their morphemes are decipherable

morphology : Fusional

morphemes are combined together to modify meaning and their form is altered within the language

• ie: spanish, english, etc.

morphology : Polysynthetic

a large number of morphemes fuse together and completely change their form making it difficult to decipher individual morphemes

• Advantage = can convey a lot of meaning in one word

Inflectional Morphology

adds grammatical information while maintaining core meaning AND original grammatical category

• ie: altering the tense of a verb

Derivational Morphology

Modification of original word through derivation and it frequently changes its word category

• Can happen vis initial-stress-derived noun

  • can differ between dialects within one language

  • particularly in stress-timed languages this change can cause an alteration of the timing/position of the stressed syllable and cause its change in grammatical word category

• often leads to the creation of new words

Derivation

the set of stages that link the abstract underlying structure of an expression to its surface form

Nonconcatenative Morphology

Makes modifications to words via discontinuation

• changes/additions in middle of word rather than beginning or end

Syntax

set of rules and process that govern sentence structure in a language

• the sequence of words can have an influence on meaning of sentence

Generative Grammar

grammar employs a finite set of rules that guide the generation of infinite variety of output in a language

• language is a rule-based system that consists of a finite set of syntactic rules that are known via nature and native intuition

• Languages have Phrase-structure rules

Phrase-structure rules

ways to describe how words can be combined into different structures

• S → Noun Phrase (NP) + Verbe Phrase (VP)

• has terminal and non-terminal elements

Terminal elements

elements that make up individual units of a sentence

• cannot be replaced/swapped

non-terminal elements

elements that can be swapped regardless of sentence order

Word Classes : Nouns

names, objects

Word Classes : verbs

actions

Word Classes : adjectives

describe nouns

Word Classes : adverbs

qualify actions

Word Classes : determiners

determine the number (the, a, some)

Word Classes : conjunctions

join constituents (and, because)

Word Classes : pronouns

substitute for a noun or noun phrase

Word Classes : prepositions

express spatial or temporal relations (on, on)

Phases

types of words combine to create phrases

• ie: noun and verb phrases

  • these combine to form clauses that contain a subject and a predicate

predicate

information about the subject in its clause

The mind and syntax

syntax produces a level of processing that is independent from the meaning this is conveyed by the entire sentence

• the mind naturally knows weather or not a sentence is grammatically correct regardless of presence of semantic context

Psycholinguistics and electroencephalography

If next word violates violates expectations you would see N400 on EEG

If next word violates expectations and belongs to an unexpected word category you would see P600

• these results give evidence that the processing of semantics and syntactic structure are independent of each other