Learning the Structure of Sentences

10 important questions on Learning the Structure of Sentences

What are typical 1-word utterances?

Mommy, mammie, daddy, doggy, banana

The stage after one-word utterances is the two-word utterance stage. How does that sound?

Mama gone, give this, no banana

How do you know that children really can talk with two-word utterances rather than thinking it is one word?

When there are variations: mommy gone, toy gone, daddy gone
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Why can we generate a limitless set of possible sentences?

Because there are patterns in the structure (syntax)

What are the building blocks of sentences?

In order to come up with these compositional generative language.. we first need building blocks. We don’t always move around these simple constructions like “mommy gone” or “daddy gone” but adults have much more complex sentences. And to do that we need to know what the parts of a sentence is, we know that sounds consists of phonemes… words consists of morphemes, and sentences consists of constituents.

How do you recognize constituents?

They move together when you restructure the sentence and can often be replaced (but partial constituents cannot) --> it to replace train
- a break between constituents often sound natural  (more so than within one)

What are the different types of constituents?

- There are noun phrases (the train) --> objects, people, things that do something in sentences, actions
- verb phrases (see)
- prepositional phrases (into the station) -->  take different functions: can be locations, manner of something, instrument… depends on the sentence.

What is the notion that there are fixed rules for combining units of language in terms of their form that result in fixed meaning relationships between the words that are joined together?

It is called compositionality: there is a meaning between words that joined together

A part of learning about the syntax of words, might involve specific knowledge of a given verb's combination properties. You can only learn this until you seen the verb in action in multiple syntactic frames. What is this specific knowledge called?

Subcategorization information

A syntactic marker, often lacking a specific meaning, that accompanies other syntactic elements. What is this syntactic marker called?

A particle

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