since there's no way in hell I'll finish this book in time...

[tsukikage]

Chapter 1: Generative Grammar
i) syntax - The level of linguistic organization that mediates between sounds and meaning, where wrds are organized into phrases and sentences.
ii) Language (capital L) - The psychological ability of humans to produce and understand a particular language. Also called the "human language capacity". This is the object of study in this book.
iii) language (lower-case l) - A language like English or French. These are the particular instances of the human Language. The data source we use to examine Language is language.
iv) generative grammer - A theory of linguistics in which grammar is viewed as a cognitive faculty. Language is generated by a set of rules or procedures. The version of generative grammar we are loking at here is primarily the "principles and parameters approach" (P&P) touching occasionally on "minimalism".
v) the scientific method - Observe some data, make generalizations about that data, draw a hypothesis, test the hypothesis against more data.
vi) grammar - Not what you learned in school. This is the set of rules that generate a language.
vii) prescriptive grammar - The grammar rules as taught by so called "language experts". These rules, often inaccurate descriptively, prescibehow people should talk/write, rather than describe what they actually do.
viii) descriptive grammar - A scientific grammar that describes , rather than prescribes, how people talk/write.
ix)anaphor - A word that ends in "-self" or "-selves" (a better definition will be given in chapter 4).
x) gender (grammatical) - Masculine vs. Feminine vs. Neuter. Does not have to be identical to the actual sex of the referent. For example, a dog might be female, but we can rfer to it with the neuter prounoun "it". Similaryly, boats don't have a sex, but are grammatically feminine.
xi) antecedent - The noun an anaphor refers to.
xii) asterisk - * used to mark synactically ill-formed (unacceptable or ungrammatical) sentences. The hash mark, ound, or number sign (#) is used to mark semantically strange, but syntactically well-formed, sentences.
xiii) number - The quantity of individuals or tings described by a noun. English distinguishes singular (e.g., "a cat") from plural (e.g. "the cats"). Other languages have more or less complicated number systems.
xiv) person - The perspective of the participants in the conversation. The speaker or speakers ("I", "me", "we", "us") are called first person. The listener(s) ("you"), are called second person. Anyone else (those not involved in the conversation) ("he", "him", "she", "her", "it", "they", "them"), are called third person.
xv) case - The form a noun takes depending upon its position in the sentence. We discuss this more in chapter 9.
xvi) nominative - The form of a noun in subjecct position ("I", "you", "he", "she", "it", "we", "they").
xvii) accusative - The form of a noun in object position ("me", "you", "him", "her", "it", "us", "them").
xviii) corpus (pl. corpora) - A collection of real-world language data.
xix)native speaker judgements (intuitions) - Information about the subconscious knowledge of a language. This information is tapped by means of the grammaticality judgement task.
xx) semantic judgement - A judgement about the meaning of asentence, often relying on our knowledge of the real world.
xxi) syntactic judgement - A judgement about the form or structure of a sentence.
xxii) learning - The gathering of conscious knowledge (like linguistics or chemistry).
xxiii) acquisition - The gathering of subconscious information (like language).
xxiv) recursion - The ability to embed structures iteratively inside one another. Allows us to produce sentences we've never heard before.
xxv) observationally adequate grammar - A grammar that accounts for observed real-world data (like corpora).
xxvi) descriptively adequate grammar - A grammar that accounts for observed real-world data and native speaker judgements.
xxvii) explanatorily adequate grammar - A grammar that accounts for obseved real-world data and native speaker intuitions and offers an explanation for the facts of language acquisition.
xxviii) innate - Hard-wired or built in, an instint.
xxix) universal grammar (UG) - The innate (or instinctual) part of each language's grammar.
xxx) the logical problem of language acquisition - The proof that an infinite system like human language cannot be learned on the basis of observed data - an argument for UG.
xxxi) underdetermination of data - The idea that we know things about our language that we could not have possibly learned - an argument for UG.
xxxii) universal - A property found in all the languages of the world.

Chapter 2: Fundamentals
i) constituent - A group of words that functions together as a unit.
ii) hierarchical structure - Constituents in a sentence are embedded inside of other constituents.
iii) parts of speech (a.k.a. "word class", "syntactic categories") - The labels given to constituents (N, V, A, P, NP, VP, etc.). Assigned distributionally.
iv) syntactic trees and bracked diagrams - These are means of expressing constituency. They are generated by rules.
v) phrase structure rules
a) S' -> (C) S
b) S -> {NP/S'} (T) VP
c) VP -> (AP+) V (AP+) ({NP/S'}) (AP+) (PP+) (AP+)
d) NP -> (D) (AP+) N (PP+)
e) PP -> P (NP)
f) AP -> (AP) A
g) XP -> XP conj XP
h) Z -> X conj X
vi) recursivity - The property of loops in the phrase structure rules that allow infinitely long sentences, and explain the creativity of languages.
vii) the golden rule of tree structure (the principle of modification) - Modifiers are always attached within the phrase they modify.
viii) constituency tests - Tests that show that a group of words function as a unit. There are four major constituency tests: "movement", "coordination", "stand alone", and "replacement".
ix) open class - Parts of speech that are open class can take new members or coinages: N, V, A.
x) closed class 0 Parts of speech that are closed class don't allow new coinages: D, P, Conj, C, etc.

Chapter 3: Structural Relations
i) branch - A line connecting two parts of a tree.
ii) node - The end of a branch.
iii) label - The name giben to anode (e.g., N, NP, S, etc.).
iv) rootnode (revised) - The node that dominates everything, but is dominated by nothing. (The node that is no node's daughter.)
v) terminal node (revised) - The node that dominates nothing. (A node that is a not a mother)
vi) non-terminal node (revised) - A node tha dominates something. (A node that is a mother.)
vii) dominance) Node A dominates node B if and only if A is higher up in the tree than B and if you can trace a branch from A to B going only downwards.
viii) mother - A is the mother of B if A immediately dominates B.
ix) daughter - B is the daughter of A if B is immediately dominated by A.
x) sisters - Two nodes that share the same mother.
xi) immediately dominate - Node A immediately dominates B if there is no intervening node G that is dominated by A, but dominates B. (In other words, A is the first node that dominates B.)
xii) exhaustive domination - Node A exhaustively dominates a SET of nodes {B, C, ..., D}, provided it immediately dominates all the members of the set (so that there is no member of the set that is not immediately dominated by A) AND there is no node G immediately dominated by A that is not a member of the set.
xiii) CONSTITUENT - A set of nodes exhaustively dominated by a single node.
xiv) CONSTITUENT OF - A is a constituent of B if and only if B dominates A.
xv) IMMEDIATE CONSTITUENT OF - A is an immediate constituent of B if and only if B immediately dominates A.
xvi) PRECEDENCE - Node A precedes node B if and only if A is to the left of B and neither A dominates B nor B dominates A AND every node dominating A either appears to the left of B or dominates B.
xvii) NO CROSSING BRANCHES CONSTRAINT - IF node X precedes another node Y then X and all nodes dominated by X must precede Y and all nodes dominated by Y.
xviii) IMMEDIEATE PRECEDENCE - A immediately preceds B if there is no node G that follows A but preceds B.
xix) C-COMMAND (informal) - A node c-commands its sisters and all the daughters (and granddaughters, great-granddaughters, etc.) of its sisters
xx) C-COMMAND (formal) - Node A c-commands node B if every branching node dominating A also dominates B AND neither A nor B dominates the other.
xxi) SYMMETRIC C-COMMAND - A symmetrically c-commands B if A c-commands B AND B c-commands A.
xxii) ASYMMETRIC C-COMMAND - A asymmetrically c-commands B if A c-commands B but B does NOT c-command A.
xxiii) SUBJECT (preliminary) - NP daughter of S.
xxiv) (DIRECT) OBJECT (preliminary) - NP daughter of VP.
xxv) OBJECT OF PREPOSITION (preliminary) - NP daughter of PP.


Hopefully when I'm done with all 11 chapters, I'll be able to DO MY HOMEWORK!