Untitled Flashcard Set
Syntax
Definitions
• Syntax: the study of how different languages put their words together to form sentences and
other phrases.
• Grammaticality Judgements: how native speakers judge a sentence in whether they feel
good (grammatical) or bad (ungrammatical)
• Principle of Compositionality: the meaning of a linguistic expression is a function of the
meanings of its parts (the words) and how they are put together
• Syntactic Property: properties which dictate how a well-formed expression is able to com-
bine with other well-formed expressions in order for the result to be another well-formed
expression
• Syntactic Category: a collection of expressions in a language which share certain syntactic
properties, such as their syntactic distribution
• Syntactic Constituent: a grouping of words that form natural “clumps” that native speak-
ers have internalized
Syntactic Properties
1. Word Order: SVO, SOV, etc.
2. Co-occurence Conditions: what an expression can/must appear with
• Arguments: expressions which must co-occur with a given expression
• Adjuncts: expressions which can co-occur with a given expression
• Agreement: the morphological form of words to indicate some shared grammatical information
Distinguishing Arguments from Adjuncts
1. Obligatory vs Optional Test
• Argument: *Sally persuaded Bob to go on vacation.
• Adjunct: Sally left early to go on vacation.
2. Movement Test
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• Arguments: Sally put the book on the table. vs *Sally put on the table the book.
• Adjuncts: Sally left yesterday around noon. vs Sally left around noon yesterday.
3. Add More Test
• Argument: *Sally likes dogs cats.
• Adjuncts: Sally likes small fluffy brown dogs.
Syntactic Categories
Category Abbreviation Example/Test Environments
Sentence S Sally thinks that .
Noun Phrase NP the dog, some cats, Jupiter, she
Noun N I am talking about the .
Determiner Det dog(s) barked.
Adjective Adj happy, fluffy, carnivorous
Verb Phrase VP slept, believed she liked that man,
stands ten feet tall
Transitive Verb TV likes, devoured
Ditransitive Verb DTV gave, sent
Sentential Complement Verb SV believed, said
Adverb Adv quickly, nonchalantly, tomorrow
Preposition P the plane flew the clouds.
Prepositional Phrase PP at the table, for Sally, among the de-
feated hellbeasts
Constituency Tests
1. Short Answers: Q: What was the cat doing? A: Sleeping on the desk.
2. Clefting: It was the fluffy cat who was sleeping on the desk.
3. Pro-form Substitution: The fluffy cat was sleeping there.
Phrase Structure Rules
• Rules generally take the shape X → Y
– X is always a syntactic category
– Y is either a single word (a lexical entry) or a sequence of syntactic categories
∗ N → dog
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∗ NP → Det N
∗ Note that the order of the categories on the right matters: the dog is an NP, but
dog the is not!
• Example: Draw a tree using the following rules:
– N → dog
– Det → the
– NP → Det N
• As a quick shortcut for understanding how to convert these rules into a tree, remember that
the left side of the arrow is higher up in the tree, and as the arrow is pointing right in the
rule, it is going further down in the tree.
• You will get the following tree: NP
N
dog
Det
the
• If you use the shortcut, you will see that NP is the highest in the tree because it “points
down” to Det and N, in which they point down to the and apple respectively.
• Combine rules to get even bigger trees: see the slides from “Phrase Structure Rules 10-29”
for a sentence example with a more thorough breakdown
Semantics
Definitions
• Semantics: the study of the meaning of linguistic expressions
• Lexical Semantics: meanings of and meaning relationships between individual words
• Compositional Semantics: how the meanings of individual words combine to form the
meanings of larger expressions
• Sense: a mental representation of what an expression means
• Reference: connects the Sense of the expression to the outside world (what thing(s) does
the Sense describe?)
• Proposition: the type of meaning sentences express; something which can be either true or
false
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Entailment Relations
• We say a sentence S1 entails another sentence S2 if when we assume S1 is true, we conclude
that S2 must also be true
– All dogs bark entails Sally’s dog barks
• We’re not concerned with whether the sentences are actually true or not; just what would
have to be true if we assume one of them were true
• Two sentences are said to be mutually entailing if each sentence entails the other
– John is a bachelor and John is an unmarried man are mutually entailing
• Two sentences are incompatible if they can’t both be true at the same time
– John is a bachelor and John is married are incompatible
• Two sentences are compatible (have no entailment relation) if they can be true at the
same time (but don’t have to be)
– Hamsters make great pets is compatible with Arthur is a mechanic
Pragmatics
Definitions
• Pragmatics: the study of those parts of meaning which arise from language use
• Utterance: a particular event in which a Linguistic expression (usually a sentence) is actually
spoken
• Linguistic Context: which sentences were uttered before this one
• Situational Context: what’s going on around the speaker/listener while they are talking
• Social Context: what is the relationship between the speaker and the listener
• Felicity: whether native speakers would judge an utterance to be ‘appropriate’ in a given
context
• Cooperative Principle: an implicit assumption among conversants that everyone in the
conversation is trying to contribute meaningfully and truthfully
• Maxim Flouting: an utterance which on the surface appears to violate a Gricean maxim,
but in doing so conveys information relevant to the conversation
• (Conversational) Implicature: an inference a listener makes when the speaker flouts a
maxim
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• Speech Act: things people ‘do’ with their utterances
• Felicity Conditions: the conditions which make a given speech act felicitous
• Performative Speech Act: an utterance in which the Speech Act accomplished is described
by the verb
Gricean Maxims
1. Maxim of Quality: Your contributions should be truthful, to the best of your knowledge
• Do not say what you believe to be false
• Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence
2. Maxim of Relevance: Be relevant
3. Maxim of Quantity: Share as much information as needed; no more, no less
• Make your contribution as informative as is required
• Do not make your contribution more informative than is required
4. Maxim of Manner: Express yourself in a clear and organize manner
• Avoid obscurity of expression
• Avoid ambiguity
• Be brief
• Be orderly
Speech Acts
• Assertion: Convey information (John cleaned the bathroom.)
• Question: Elicit information (Who cleaned the bathroom? )
• Request: Elicit an action or information (Please clean the bathroom.)
• Order: Demand an action (Clean the bathroom! )
• Promise: Commit the speaker to an action (I promise to clean the bathroom.)
• Threat: A Promise the hearer presumably doesn’t want
(If you don’t clean the bathroom, I will scream.)
Direct vs Indirect Speech Acts: Tell me what time it is. vs Do you know what time it is?
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Historical
• Historical Linguistics: the study of how languages change over time
• Synchronic Linguistics: analyzing how a language works at a single moment in time
• Diachronic Linguistics: analyzing how a language has developed and changed across time
• Relatedness Hypothesis: The idea that at some point a two (or more) languages were
once a single language but they split and diverged into separate languages
• Family Tree Theory vs Wave Theory
• Linguistic Reconstruction: the process of inferring an older form of a language using data
about modern forms (often focuses on phonology)
• Internal Reconstruction: using synchronic data of a single language to hypothesize how
an older form might have worked
• Comparative Reconstruction: looking at multiple modern languages which we suspect
are closely related, and trying to reconstruct a common ancestor for all of them
• Cognate: words from different languages which we hypothesize come from a single source
Sociolinguistics
• Sociolinguistics: the study of the relationship between language varieties and social struc-
ture
• Language Variety: any form of Language characterized by systematic features
• Idiolect: a person’s unique way of using their native language(s)
• Dialect: any variety of a language spoken by a group of people (a speech community)
that is characterized by systematic differences from other varieties
• Accent: refers specifically to systematic phonological variation
• Mutual Intelligibility: can speakers of two Language varieties understand each other?
• Speech Styles: the different ways a person uses their language in different context are known
as various
• Register: a speech style associated with a particular degree of (in)formality
• Standard/Prestige Variety: a Language Variety which is often considered to be the ‘cor-
rect’ form of a language, and is thus conferred a high degree of social importance
• Geographic and Socials factors influencing Language Variation
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• Language is one of many features people use to express their identity
• Various ways to use Language to perform identity (direct, semi-direct, and implicit)
Psycholinguistics
• Psycholinguistics: the study of the processes our minds do to perform linguistic tasks
• Neurolinguistics: the study of the parts of the physical brain associated with Language
• Parts of the brain: hemispheres, lobes, gyri (angular gyrus), cortex (motor, auditory, visual),
corpus callosum
• Aphasia: the loss of ability to use Language due to stroke or brain injury
– Broca’s vs Wernicke’s vs conduction: make sure you can name the differences!
• Alexia: a loss in the ability to read
• Agraphia: a loss in the ability to write
• Lexical Access: the process of recognizing a word upon hearing it spoken/seeing it signed/reading
it
• Theories of the mental lexicon— how are words stored?
– Full Listing vs Affix-Stripping
• Activation: the point at which a neuron “fires,” resulting in the successful recognition of a
word
– Resting activation, Spreading activation, Activation threshold, Frequency effects
– Cohort vs Neural Network models
• Sentence Parsing: the task of reconstructing the syntactic structure of an input sentence
• Incrementality: the idea that people start to interpret linguistic input as they receive it,
rather than waiting until the end (eg when the speaker finishes speaking, or the person has
read the entire sentence)
• Global vs Temporary (structural) ambiguities
• Garden Path Sentences: sentences whose structures lead to temporary ambiguities when
parsed incrementally