The language instinct

6 flashcards · Literature · by lakesare

  1. What do NP and VP stand for?

    NP - noun phrase VP - verb phrase PP - prepositional phrase Take the English noun phrase. A noun phrase (NP) is named after one special word, a noun, that must be inside it. The noun phrase owes most of its properties to that one noun. For example, the NP the cat in the hat refers to a kind of cat, not a kind of hat; the meaning of the word cat is the core of the meaning of the whole phrase.

  2. Water would naturally percolate through the rocks, and this would speed up the cooling of the pluton.

    Filter gradually through a porous surface.

  3. Name the noun phrases (NP) and head nouns in this sentence.

  4. Name 1 idea conceived by Noam Chomsky.

    X-bar theory. X-bar theory is a generative theory of language conceived by Noam A. Chomsky. X-bar theory captures the insight that all phrases share some essential structural properties. Its main tenet is that all phrase structure (hence the X) can be reduced to recursive specifier-head configurations. Chomsky suggests that the unordered super-rules (principles) are universal and innate, and that when children learn a particular language, they do not have to learn a long list of rules, because…

  5. What are transitive VS intransitive verbs?

    transitive verbs - verb that requires a direct object. The kids like pickles. That really annoys me. Have they sold their house yet? The direct object typically answers the question what? or whom?intransitive - do NOT have an object to receive the action. Her car died suddenly last week. Someone was coughing loudly. both also exist :-) They are playing soccer. They've been playing all afternoon

  6. What are these verbs called?

    Auxiliary verbs The word will is an example of an auxiliary, a word that expresses layers of meaning having to do with the truth of a proposition as the speaker conceives it. These layers also include negation (as in won’t and doesn’t), necessity (must), and possibility (might and can). Auxiliaries typically occur at the periphery of sentence trees, mirroring the fact that they assert something about the rest of the sentence taken as a whole. Since the auxiliary is also called INFL (for "inflec…