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BU CAS LX 522 - Episode 5b. Agree and movement 5.3-5.4

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CAS LX 522 Syntax I Episode 5b Agree and movement 5 3 5 4 The Big Picture Now that we ve gotten some idea of how the system works let s back up a bit to remind ourselves a bit about why we re doing what we re doing People have unconscious knowledge of the grammar of their native language at least They can judge whether sentences are good examples of the language or not Two questions What is that we know How is it that we came to know what we know History In trying to model what we know since it isn t conscious knowledge some of the first attempts looked like this Chomsky 1957 Phrase Structure Rules S NP Aux VP VP V NP PP NP Det Adj N PP P NP Aux Tns Modal Perf Prog N Pat lunch P at in to Tns Past Present Modal can should Perf have en Prog be ing An S can be rewritten as an NP optionally an Aux and a VP An NP can be rewritten as optionally a determiner optionally one or more adjectives and a noun What we know is that an S has an NP a VP and sometimes an Aux between them and that NPs can have a determiner some number of adjectives and a noun Phrase Structure Rules S NP Aux VP VP V NP PP NP Det Adj N PP P NP Aux Tns Modal Perf Prog N Pat lunch P at in to Tns Past Present Modal can should Perf have en Prog be ing S NP Aux N Modal VP V Pat might eat NP N lunch History In this way many sentences can be derived starting from S The tree style structure is a way to record the history of the derivation from S to the words in the sentence We model our knowledge of English as a machine that ideally when it s finished will generate all of the sentences of English and no others Pat might have been eating lunch If you can say Pat ate you can say Pat had eaten or Pat was eating or Pat had been eating It looks like the verb can be past or present alone but with have it takes on an en past participle form and with be it takes on an ing present participle form The first verb or auxiliary takes on tense forms So Chomsky proposed Affix Hopping Aux Tns Modal Perf Prog Tns Past Present Modal can should Perf have en Prog be ing Past ed Yielding something like this If you build a sentence this way things aren t in the right order but there s a simple transformation that can be done to the structure to get it right Empirically tense perfect have and progressive be each control the form of the verbal element to their right S NP Aux N Tns Perf VP Prog V Past Pat ed have en be ing eat NP N lunch So Chomsky proposed Affix Hopping Aux Tns Modal Perf Prog Tns Past Present Modal can should Perf have en Prog be ing Past ed Yielding something like this S NP Aux N Tns Perf Past Pat VP Prog V NP N have ed be en eat ing lunch Affix Hopping SD afx verb SC verb afx The affixes all hop to the right and attach to the following word An ancestor to the kinds of movement rules we ve been exploring and this phenomenon specifically is closely related to the Agree operation we ll be talking about History continues Through the 60s there were good people working hard figuring out what kinds of phrase structure rules and transformations are needed for a comprehensive description on English As things developed two things became clear A lot of the PSRs look pretty similar There s no way a kid acquiring language can be learning these rules Chomsky 1970 proposed that there actually is only a limited set of phrase structure rule types For any categories X Y Z W there are only rules like XP YP X X X WP X X ZP X bar theory If drawn out as a tree you may recognize the kind of structures this proposal entails These are structures based on the X bar schema XP YP X X X WP X X ZP YP being the specifier WP being an adjunct ZP being the complement Adjuncts were considered to have a slightly different configuration then XP YP X X X WP ZP GB First a deep structure DS tree is built however you like but Around 1981 the view shifted from thinking of the system as constructing all and only structures with PSRs and transformations to a view in which structures and transformations could apply freely but the grammatical structures were those that satisfied constraints on various stages of the representation Then adjustments are made to get the surface structure SS Selectional restrictions must be satisfied roles must be assigned Etc Things more or less like Affix Hopping or moving V to v or moving the subject to SpecTP Further constraints are verified here Is there a subject in SpecTP Etc Finally the result is assigned a pronunciation PF and possibly after some further adjustments an interpretation LF Which brings us to 1993 The most recent change in viewpoint was to the system we re working with now arising from the Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory The goal of MPLT was to start over in a sense to try to make the constraints follow from some more natural assumptions that we would need to make anyway The constraints that applied to the structures in GB were getting to be rather esoteric and numerous to the extent that it seemed we were missing generalizations This new view has the computational system working at a very basic level forcing structures to obey the constraints of GB by enforcing them locally as we assemble the structure from the bottom up Features and technology The use of features to drive the system uninterpretable features force Merge because if they are not checked the resulting structure will be itself uninterpretable is a way to encode the notion that lexical items need other lexical items What the system is designed to do is assemble grammatical structures where possible given a set of lexical items to start with A comment about the technology here The operations of Merge Adjoin Agree and feature checking the idea that features can be interpretable or not or as we will see strong or weak are all formalizations of an underlying system used so that we can describe the system precisely enough to understand its predictions about our language knowledge Features and the moon We can think of this initially as the same kind of model as this m1m 2 f G 2 r The Earth and the Moon don t compute this But if we write it this way we can predict where the Moon will be Saying lexical items have uninterpretable features that need to be checked and hypothesizing mechanisms matching valuing by which they might be checked is similarly a way …


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BU CAS LX 522 - Episode 5b. Agree and movement 5.3-5.4

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