Syntax - handout 1

Language

a system that enables people to produce and understand linguistic expressions.

Lexicon

what is stored in our minds.

Grammar

a finite set of rules which allows us to produce and understand an infinite set of linguistic expressions.

Competence (I-language)

internal to the mind; a finite system; this is what generativists try to model with grammars.

Performance (E-language)

an infinite set of expressions defined by the I-language; the actual production, the utterances.

Mental lexicon

1. semantic information, 2. phonological info, 3. morphological info, 4. category info.

Generative grammar

a set of rules that can accurately predict which combinations of words form grammatically correct sentences, allowing for unlimited sentence creation.

Linguistics

the scientific and systematic study of language or of particular languages.

Phonetics

the study of the physical sounds of human speech.

Morphology

the study of the structure of words.

Syntax

the study of sentence structure, including rules for combining words into phrases and sentences.

Semantics

the study of meaning in language.

Pragmatics

the study of context-dependent aspects of meaning.

Phonology

the study of sound systems in a language.

Syntax

deals with word order (S-V-O) and topics like language change, sentence building, language teaching, and child language acquisition.