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Lecture 18

Three Key Linguistic Principles
  1. Principle of the Category: Every word has a category
  2. Principle of Phrase Structure: Words combine with each other to form phrases.
  3. Principle of Head Direction: Each phrase that has a head can have an order relation between head and the non-head.

Principle of the Category

  • Noun Phrases (NP): dog, cat, bottle, state
  • Verb (V): eat, drink, think, travel, went, slept
  • Adjective (Adj): bright, high, sick, green
  • Adverb (Adv): slowly, well, nicely, brightly
  • Preposition (P): to, from, in, on, below
  • Determiner (D): a, the, my, her, their, this, that (they determine an aspect of an NP, e.g., the dog vs. a dog, my cat vs. their cat)
  • Complementizer (C): that, if (they introduce an entire sentence, e.g. I think that the door closed, I don’t know if the door closed).
  • Determiner Phrase (DP): Sally, Hanako, he, they, them, Paris, himself, Chile (they refer to complete entities)

Principle of Phrase Structure

  • phrase = words that go together
  • for instance, DP (this movie) → D (this) NP (movie)
    • a determiner phrase consists of a determiner and a noun phrase
  • PP (to the park) → P (to) DP (the park)
    • a preposition phrase consists of a preposition and a determiner phrase
    • hence, phrases can contain other phrases
  • VP (liked the movie) → V (liked) DP (the movie)
    • a verb phrase consists of a verb and a determiner phrase
    • sometimes, VP (went to the park) → V (went) PP (to the park)
    • or, other times, VP (slept) → V (slept)
  • a complete thought is expressed via a sentence (S)

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  • we can represent each rule as a tree to reveal the structure of a sentence!

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Principle of Head Direction

  • head of a phrase is the "important" word of the phrase
  • V is the head of VP. C is the head of CP. D is the head of DP. P is the head of PP.
  • In English, the Head comes before the non-head; In Japanese, the head comes after the non-head.
    • English: DP → D NP; Japanese: DP → NP D
    • English: VP → V CP; Japanese: VP → CP V

Recap
  • words go together to form phrases
    • words build together to build phrases, which build into other phrases, etc
    • up to a whole sentence
  • our intuition for English tells us which words go together
    • phrase represents a hidden hierarchical structure
  • Is there evidence that your mental representation of English includes this hidden structure?
    • Yes! To assign meaning to sentences, you combine the words into phrases!