PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

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PSY 369 Psycholinguistics

• Some basic linguistic theory
• part2

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Levels of analysis

• Phonology
• Morphology
• Syntax
• Semantics
• Pragmatics

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Morphology

• Language differences
• Isolating languages no endings, just word order
  (e.g., Chinese Vietnamese)
• Inflecting lots of inflections (e.g., Latin
  Greek)
• In Classic Greek every verb has 350 forms
• Agglutinating languages (e.g., Turkish, Finnish,
  Eskimo)
• Eskimo
• angyaghllangyugtuq he wants to acquire a big
  boat
• Angya- boat -ghlla- augmentative meaning
  -ng- acquire -yug- expresses desire -tuq-
  third person singular

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Psychological reality of Morphology

• Speech errors
• Stranding errors The free morpheme typically
  moves, but the bound morpheme stays in the same
  location
• they are Turking talkish (talking Turkish)
• you have to square it facely (face it squarely)
• Morpheme substitutions
• a timeful remark    (timely)
• Where's the fire distinguisher?    (Where's the
  fire extinguisher?)
• Morpheme shift
• I haven't satten down and writ__ it    (I haven't
  sat down and written it)
• what that add__ ups to    (adds up to)

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Psychological reality of Morphology

• Wug test (Gleason, 1958)

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Levels of analysis

• Phonology
• Morphology
• Syntax
• Semantics
• Pragmatics

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Syntax the ordering of the words

• A dog bites a man.

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Syntax the ordering of the words

• A dog bites a man.
• A man bites a dog.

• Same words, but different word order leads to a
  radically different interpretation

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Syntax the ordering of the words

• A dog bites a man.
• A man bites a dog.
• A dog was bitten by a man.

• Not just the linear ordering
• It is the underlying set of syntactic rules

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Syntax the ordering of the words

• The underlying structural position, rather than
  surface linear position matters.

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Syntactic Ambiguity

• The same linear order (surface structure) may be
  ambiguous with respect to the underlying structure

• Groucho Marx shot an elephant in his pajamas

Good shot
How he got into my pajamas Ill never know
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Syntactic Ambiguity
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Generative Grammar

• The pieces

• Grammatical features of words
• Dog Noun
• Bite Verb

• Phrase structure rules - these tell us how to
  build legal structures
• S --gt NP VP
• (a sentence consists of a noun phrase followed by
  a verb phrase)
• VP --gt V (NP)
• NP --gt (A) (ADJ) N

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Generative Grammar

• Recursion you can embed structures within
  structures
• NP --gt (A) (ADJ) N (PP)
• PP --gt Prep NP
• So we NPs can be embedded within PPs which in
  turn may be embedded within NPs.
• The dog with the bone of the dinosaur from the
  cave with the paintings of the animals with fur
  bit the man.
• The result is an infinite number of syntactic
  structures from a finite set of pieces

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Chomskys Linguistics

• Chomsky proposed that grammars could be evaluated
  at three levels
• Observational adequacy
• Must be able to predict acceptable and
  unacceptable sentences
• Descriptive adequacy
• Explain how sentences with similar meanings are
  related (e.g., active and passive sentences)
• Explanatory adequacy
• Must be able to explain how languages are
  acquired and the similarities and differences
  across languages (language universals)

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Transformational grammar

• Chomsky (1957, 1965)
• Two stages phrase structures for a sentence
• Build Deep Structure
• One constituent at a time
• Build from phrase structure rules
• Convert to Surface Structure
• Built from transformations that operate on the
  deep structure
• Adding, deleting, moving
• Operate on entire strings of constituents

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Transformational grammar
Phrase structure rules
Lexicon
Lexical insertion rules
Semantic component
Deep structures
Transformational component
Surface structures
Semantic structures
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Transformational grammar

• 2 deep structures, 1 surface structure
• Groucho Marx shot an elephant in pajamas
• 1 deep structure, 2 surface structures
• Active/passive sentences
• The man bit the dog.
• The dog was bitten by the man.

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Transformational grammar
Deep structure
Surface structure
S
S
The car
in the garage
the car
was put

• in the garage

was put
(trace)
Movement transformation
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Psychological reality of syntax

• Derivational theory of complexity
• The more transformations, the more complex
• The boy was bitten by the wolf
• The boy was bitten. (involves deletion)
• No evidence for more processing of the second
  sentence
• Evidence for (trace)
• Some recent evidence or reactivation of moved
  constituent at the trace position
• Evidence for syntax
• Syntactic priming

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semantics

• Word level
• Network models
• Polysemy
• Sentence level
• Propositions

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Pragmatics