Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Reed-Kellogg diagrams: Dog The chased brown continuosly cat the yellow
An unswerving loyalty to simplistic rules sometimes led traditional grammarians to startling conclusion. The following is taken from a traditional grammar: The subject of an infinitive is in the objective case: We asked him to go. (Him is the subject of to go) In an infinitive clause, a predicate noun . . . used after to be is in the objective case to agree with the subject of the infinitive: They took me to be her. If the infinitive to be has no subject, the predicate noun. . . following it is in the nominative case: He was thought to be I. [Walsh and Walsh 1972, pp. 53-54]
The Structuralist Approach In their through revision of syntactic theory, the structuralists replaced grammatical rules with sentence patterns and the Reed-Kellogg diagrams with immediateconstituent diagrams. A sentence pattern was a sequence of word classes and groups. One of the most common types of sentence patterns was the pattern: Group A --- Class I --- Class II --- Group A --- Class I Immediate-constituent analysis, too, was no improvement in the art of understanding organization within sentences. Generally speaking, immediate constituents were successive words that formed a unit.
in
the
eye
The
girl
kicked
her
younger
brothe r
ferosiously
The Transformational-Generative Approach The stucturalists were primarily concerned with describing the sentence patterns in observed utterances. In contrast, Noam Chomsky and the transformational-generative grammarians are concerned with what a speaker knows about the sentences of his or her language; that is, the unconscious ability to interpret and produce sentences that the person may have never before heard. Performance and Competence Performance means the actual saying of something, or the act of speech itself. Ideally, we would like to be able to account for the speakers performance, but there are formidable obstacles. In the act of speech, a speaker is responding to the environment, which is usually of extreme complexity and for which we have few descriptive tools. The speaker is responding also to a mental state. Competence is an essential part of performance. It is the speakers knowledge of his or her language; that is, of its sound structure, its words, and its grammatical rules. Competence is, in a way, an encyclopedia of the language. If competence is an encyclopedia of the language, the speaker must also know the rules governing us of the encyclopedia. Such rules are performance strategies called heuristics, and linguists as yet do little more than guess at the forms they might take.
heuristics COMPETENCE
A Model of Competence The transformational-generative linguists have taken it upon themselves to give an account of competence; that is to determine what the rules are that underline a language and how they work together to create the sentences of the language. An alternative view originated by such linguists as George Lakoff, james McCawley, Paul Postal, John Ros is called generative semantics. COMPETENCE
Semantic rules
Syntactic rules
Phonological rules
SYNTAX
Base omponent Phrase structural rules Lexicon
Deep structures
Transformational component
Transformational rules
Lexical Insertion Lexical insertion is an extremely important part of the grammar, for no sentences can make sense without word. In the lexicon all relevant information is incoporated in features. Lexicon will contain a phonological representation, given distinctive features, for each word. It will also contain two kinds of features that are important: syntactic features and semantic features.