INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - WH- Movement

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - WH- Movement

In linguistic there are various types of movement which affects either heads or maximal projections. Wh-movement is an important phenomenon in a language. It is based on government and binding theory. This is a transformational approach of the theory of universal grammar which was developed by Noam Chomsky in 1980s. It is also called as Principles and Parameters theory as it accepts that all languages have universal structural principles together with various parameters on a language-specific basis. According to this theory Universal grammar has two components that are levels of representation and system of constrains. A language can be represented by different levels. First one is mental lexicon which stores different words then predicates which encode their semantic relationship by assigning theta-roles. The lexical items are arranged at D-structure. X-bar theory regulates the position of specifiers adjuncts and complements around a head X within a phrase XP.

The term Wh-movement originates from early Generative Grammar of 1960s and 1970s and used as reference to the transformational analysis. The Wh-expression appeared in its canonical position at deep structure and then moved leftward out of that position to land its derived position at the front of the sentence/clause at surface structure.

 
INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - WH- Movement

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - APPLICATION OF VARIOUS SYNTACTIC RULES

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - APPLICATION OF VARIOUS
SYNTACTIC RULES

Thus we see that syntactic rules do not apply alike to all languages. While the principles may be at the core and apply as a common feature in all language; parameters are more language-specific and apply differently to different languages of the world. Therefore when the child learns to speak, the core principles are already innately encoded. These principles are absolute and form the common basis of the human language. And depending on the parameters of the languages that the child is exposed to, the child acquires the variations in the structures of those particular languages. When the linguist attempts to understand the syntactic rules, he tries to draw the structural similarities to derive the principles and analyses the variations across different languages to describe the parameters. All in all the application of these syntactic rules helps the child acquire the implicit knowledge of the grammar and also aid the linguist in extracting the explicit knowledge of the grammar of the human language.

 

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - APPLICATION OF VARIOUS SYNTACTIC RULES

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - PREDICATE AND ARGUMENT STRUCTURES

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - PREDICATE AND ARGUMENT STRUCTURES

To sum up, the concept of the theta theory answered several question remained unanswered in earlier grammars. The notion of θ-criterion provides us a base to generate well formed sentences. The number of underlying theta role is the same in all languages but as languages differ in regard to their capacity of theta absorption, the surface manifestation of NPs with theta role may differ from language to language. Thus the theta theory/theta criterion accounts for all types of verbs and their possible arguments more adequately than the traditional division of verbs into intransitive and transitive does. Theta absorption states that an argument may not be in the surface structure of a sentence and still it is grammatical. It suggests that the omitted argument has been θ-absorbed. Such θ-absorbed argument can be recovered by analyzing the predicate itself.

 
INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - PREDICATE AND ARGUMENT STRUCTURES

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - X-BAR THEORY

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - X-BAR THEORY

X-Bar theory represented by X-Bar Schema does exactly that. It allows formulation of several levels of complex relationships between any category and the lexical item contained in it by avoiding redundancy, improving representational adequacy for all constituents and allowing for the appropriate accommodation of all kinds of complex relationships between catch constituent of a phrase, clause or a sentence. In addition, the implementation of X-Bar theory also allows proper solutions for a lot of computational needs that demands the representation of the structural complexity of human language for the purpose of dealing with Natural Language Processing and automation of sentence generation, parsing and several significant breakthroughs.

 
INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - X-BAR THEORY

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - TREE DIAGRAMS

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - TREE DIAGRAMS

In this chapter, we have learnt that tree diagrams are essential tools for linguists working in the area of syntax. Tree diagrams capture the sentence structure and help us understand the relationship amongst the constituents of the phrase. We have also discussed that in building up the tree diagrams, we have the head of a phrase and it branches out to take either a specifier or a complement. All phrases are characterized by an obligatory head and derive their name from this head. While working out the tree representation, one could work it down to the level of words or to the level of an unspecified complement, in which case it can be left as a triangle. In the Generative framework, branching of nodes is always binary. The phrase structure rules provide an essential structure of all the sentences in a language by spelling out the specifier and the complements for each phrasal head. The trees will conform to the phrase structure rules.

 
INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS - TREE DIAGRAMS