Lecture 3

Question 1

Native speaker

Answer 1

Someone who speaks a language from birth; the language is “mother tongue”

Language is through unconscious thinking (you’re not thinking about where the word begins and ends, you just know)

Learning a new language (you’re very conscious of sentence structures spoken verbally)

Question 2

Grammar

Answer 2

Small system of rules and categories can generate an infinite # of possible sentences

Noah Chomspey = linguistic guy
- killed behaviourist theory
- Extract for certain rules that you apply to your everyday sentences (unconscious process)
- By 5, you are fluent in your mother tongue (and possibly more)

Question 3

Language death

Answer 3

When children stop learning a language, language death occurs

What is lost? History, culture, and stories

When people die

If you’re told not to speak, then you don’t (which leads to them slowly forget it)

Lose the emotion without a given story if not told in its original language

Losing the possibility to examine human brain functions for that particular language (loss of data)

Question 4

What is a SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES

Answer 4

All words can be described by Syntactic categories (another term for syntactic categories is “part of speech”

e.g noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc

Question 5

Noun

Answer 5

A word that names a person, place, idea, or thing (includes objects, activities, qualities, and conditions)

If you can put the article “the” in front of the word? If yes, then it’s a noun

Question 6

Verb

Answer 6

Verbs are words that express action, condition, or state

e.g sing, exist, become, is, run, seem

Question 7

Adjective

Answer 7

Adjectives are words that modify nouns. These words:
1. Give a characteristic or quality of a noun

2. Provide additional information about the noun

e.g blue, sad, busy, intelligent, beautiful

Question 8

.Adverb

Answer 8

Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs

ly = suxfix
- adverbs will tell you how
- adjectives will tell you where

Question 9

Whats the difference between open class vs. closed class

Answer 9

Open class: N, V, Adj, Adv
- new vocabulary items join this class
- Open to change

Closed class: pronouns, determiners, case markers, affixes, auxiliaries
- Sensitive to grammar
- Highly frequent

When a patient has difficultly, they drop the close class words in neuropsychology

Question 10

Preposition

Answer 10

Prepositions show a relation between its object and another word in the sentence (involves time, space, direction, association, etc)

e.g after, at, towards, with, in, of, behind

Question 11

Determiners

Answer 11

Determiners are words which specify nouns

Catch all terms

Definite and indefinite

Question 12

Auxiliaries

Answer 12

Auxiliaries are words that indicate mood and tense

e.g should, would, will, can, must, has, etc

Question 13

Pronouns

Answer 13

A pronoun stands in for a previously mentioned noun or noun phrase. That noun is called the Antecedent of the pronoun. We talk about pronouns and their ability to co-refer to their antecedents

Question 14

Grammatical roles

Answer 14

The grammatical role of an element in the sentence: FUNCTION in the sentence

e.g subject, direct object, indirect object

Question 15

how are grammatical roles in a english sentence

Answer 15

Grammatical roles in English are not overtly marked. Rely on Order of element in a sentence

Question 16

Case marking

Answer 16

Refers to the way in which a language marks grammatical roles

English: only see in the pronoun system
e.g John hit Bill
He hit him

not… him hit he

Question 17

What is the subject role?

Answer 17

Subject role is called Nominative

Question 18

What is the object role?

Answer 18

Object role is called Accusative

Question 19

What is an indirect object?

Answer 19

An indirect object role is called Dative

Question 20

What happens in other languages for case markers

Answer 20

In Hindi, the case marker that tells us the role of the item, not the order of the sentence

Question 21

Word order

Answer 21

The order in which an element occurs in the sentence

e.g English always has the subject first, then the verb, then the object

Every sentence has a subject, in English we always say the subject out loud

Question 22

Grammatical roles

Answer 22

Are assigned to (the syntactic category of) N only

i.e subject, direct object, and indirect object are all nouns

Question 23

Subject

Answer 23

Every sentence has a subject; the “doer” of the action

Question 24

Direct object

Answer 24

Not every sentence has a direct object. The sentences below are ‘complete’ in terms of their meaning

Direct objects no do follow a preposition

Question 25

Indirect object

Answer 25

As a result, just like with direct objects, not every sentence will have an indirect object

1. Meaning - the receivers of the direct object
2. Location in the sentence