linguistics assignment finish in 5 hours
LING111 Week 2 Recap April 8 - April 12, 2019
- We refined our generative grammar this week in several ways. We both added rules for new phrases, but we also added several new formal devices to our rule-writing vocabulary.
- We introduced tree notation as a means of representing the structure our grammar assigns to sentences.
- A tree is legitimate if - all the terminal nodes are drawn from the lexicon and each is dominated by its
lexical category - each subtree consists of a parent node and its children nodes licensed by a
phrase structure rule in the grammar
(Day 5: No lecture due to strike; Practiced testing our grammar in “Quiz 1”)
- (a) We introduced a disjunctive rule: (disjunctive: relating to alternatives)
NP → { } This disjunction was motivated by the fact that (i) Pronouns seem to occur in the same environments as NPs. (ii) But: pronouns cannot generally co-occur with D and/or A.
- (b) We introduced the ability for elements in a rule to repeat, indicated by the n superscript, as in:
NP → (D) (A)n N
- (c) We introduced the coordination schema:
XP → XP Coord XP Coord : and, or, ...
The coordination schema says that any phrase can be joined together with a phrase of the same label, via coordination. Thus, an NP may consist of the sequence ‘NP Coord NP’; a VP may consist of the sequence ‘VP Coord VP’, an S may consist of ‘S Coord S’. Thus the coordination schema, unlike other rules, invokes the idea of a variable. XP means any phrase is eligible for coordination.
- We factored the sequence ‘(NP)(PP)’ out of the S rule, and into its own Pred rule. Key evidence for this revision came from coordination (The cat meowed and drank some milk.)
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(D) (A)n N Pronoun
Day 6
Day 4
Day 5
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GRAMMAR AS OF APRIL 12, 2019
1. S → NP Pred SENTENCE
2. PRED → V (NP) (PP) PREDICATE 3. NP → { (D) (A)n N } NOUN PHRASE { PRONOUN } 4. PP → P NP PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE 5. XP → XP Coord XP COORDINATION SCHEMA
A little more about trees - a tree consists of a network of nodes related asymmetrically by domination - domination— not yet introduced in class; but intuitively, it’s the “parent-of” relation; when a phrase structure rule is represented in a tree, the left-hand side (LHS) dominates the members of the right-hand side (RHS) - the undominated node is the root; for our grammar, the root is always S - the nodes which dominate no others are the terminal nodes; these are lexical
items; all other nodes are non-terminal nodes sS
s
�
uS
u
#
wS
w
+
GAL:RRR avMi�+iB+ ai`m+im`2b Ĝ Ry �T` kyRN R
Non-terminal Node
ZP dominates Z ~ ZP is the parent-of Z
Non-terminal Node
Z dominates c ~ Z is the parent-of c Terminal Node
The tree above implies the following facts about the grammar: PSR LEXICON XP ! X YP X: a, … YP ! Y ZP Y: b, … ZP ! Z Z: c, …