ASPECTS OF LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE 5 SEPT 11, 2013 – DAY 7 Brain & Language LING NSCI Harry Howard Tulane University

Course organization The syllabus, these slides and my recordings are available at If you want to learn more about EEG and neurolinguistics, you are welcome to participate in my lab. This is also a good way to get started on an honor's thesis. 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 2

Review Last time, we discussed: Thematic roles Indefiniteness & specificity (Pronominal) reference Tense, aspect & modality We left out the following, which you can read about on your own: Deixis Assertion & presupposition 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 3

ASPECTS OF LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE Ingram §2: mainly syntax 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 4

What are the parts of speech/syntactic categories? Major/content categories noun verb adjective adverb preposition/postposition? Minor/functional categories determiner: article, quantifier, demonstrative pronoun negation conjunction: coordinating, subordinating auxiliary verb? Interjection 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 5

Words group to together to form phrases What are the thematic roles of "Mary" and "John" in "Mary kissed John"? Mary is Agent (and subject) John is Patient (and direct object) What goes before, or can be the Agent of, "kissed John"? Mary kissed John. She kissed John. That girl kissed John. The tall girl kissed John. The girl over there kissed John. A girl that you don’t know kissed John. 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 6

Restatement of subject data as NP Answer A word that is ‘nouny’, or a group of words that contain a noun; it does not matter which one. We want a way to generalize over all of these possibilities, and the infinite number of alternatives that we can think up. Let’s do this by calling it a noun phrase or NP. An NP goes before, or can be the Agent of, "kissed John" [ NP Mary] kissed John. [ NP She] kissed John. [ NP That girl] kissed John. [ NP The tall girl] kissed John. [ NP The girl over there] kissed John. [ NP A girl that you don’t know] kissed John. 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 7

Words to phrases 2 What goes after, or is the Patient of, "John kissed"? John kissed Mary. John kissed her. John kissed that girl. John kissed the tall girl. John kissed the girl over there. John kissed a girl that you don’t know. Answer The same ‘nouny’ thing as before. So let’s also call it a NP. 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 8

Restatement of object data as NP An NP goes after, or is the Patient of, "John kissed": John kissed [ NP Mary]. John kissed [ NP her]. John kissed [ NP that girl]. John kissed [ NP the tall girl]. John kissed [ NP the girl over there]. John kissed [ NP a girl that you don’t know]. The structure of our sentence now looks like this: NP kissed NP. 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 9

NPs get around English treats NPs as units, in the sense that they can appear in different parts of a sentence: a. Which girl kissed John? ~ Which girl did John kiss __? b. THAT girl kissed John. ~ THAT girl, John kissed __. c. Not even Mary kissed John. ~ Not even Mary did John kiss __. d. That girl is who kissed John. ~ That girl is who John kissed __. e. Who kissed John is that girl. ~ Who John kissed __ is that girl. 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 10

More phrases But it seems to be that ‘kissed NP’ is a unit, too: 1. Kiss Mary, I would never do. 2. *Kiss, I would never do Mary. 3. What John did was kiss Mary. 4. *What John did Mary was kiss. 5. What did John do? –– Kiss Mary. 6. *What did John do Mary? –– Kiss. 7. John said he would kiss Mary, and he did so. 8. #John said he would kiss, and he did Mary. Let’s call this new unit VP, so our sentence looks like this: NP [ VP kissed NP] By the way, how do you know which ones are bad? Because you are an expert in the grammar of your native language. 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 11

A bigger unit The structure that we just saw covers a whole sentence, and it would be convenient to point this out in some way. So let us just make up a new unit, say ‘S’ for sentence: [ S NP [ VP kissed NP]] Many people find it hard to keep up with all the labels and brackets, though, so linguists came up with an alternative, the tree structure: 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 12 S NPVP kissedNP

Compositionality Compare these next two sentences: 1. Mary kicked the mule. 2. Mary kicked the bucket. #2 has two readings a. Mary applied force to the bucket with her foot. b. Mary died. In the (a) reading, the sentence means what the sum of its words mean; in the (b) reading, it means something special, not predictable from the individual words. This happens in morphology, too: a. the past tense of depart: departed b. the past tense of go: *goed, went We call the (a) readings compositional, while the (b) readings are non-compositional or lexical. 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 13

More on kicking the bucket Almost any change, no matter how minor, makes "kick the bucket" lose its non-compositional meaning: 1. Mary kicked the buckets. 2. Mary kicked a bucket. 3. Mary kicked that bucket. 4. Mary kicked the pail. 5. Mary kicked the big bucket. 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 14

ASPECTS OF LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE Ingram §2: left-overs 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 15

Linguistic model, Fig. 2.1 p. 37 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 16 Discourse model Syntax Sentence prosody Morphology Word prosody Segmental phonology perception Segmental phonology perception Acoustic phonetics Feature extraction Segmental phonology production Segmental phonology production Articulatory phonetics Speech motor control INPUT Sentence level Word level

Linguistic model, Fig. 2.1 p. 37 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 17 Discourse model [ S [ NP mε ɹ i] [ VP k ɪ st] [ NP ʤ an]] [mε ɹ i] [k ɪ st] [ ʤ an] /mε ɹ ik ɪ st ʤ an/ bilabial - mid - alveolar nasal - front - flap bilabial - mid - alveolar nasal - front - flap Segmental phonology production Segmental phonology production Articulatory phonetics Speech motor control [mε ɹ ik ʰɪ st ʤ an] Sentence level Word level

I-language vs E-language In 1986, Noam Chomsky proposed a distinction between I-Language and E- Language. I-language mean ‘internal language’ and is the mentally represented linguistic knowledge that a native speaker of a language has, and is therefore a mental object — from this perspective, most of theoretical linguistics is a branch of psychology. E-Language or ‘external language’ encompasses all other notions of what language is, for example that it is a body of knowledge or behavioral habits shared by a community. Thus, E- language is not itself a coherent concept, and Chomsky argues that such notions of language are not useful in the study of innate linguistic knowledge. 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 18

NEXT TIME Ingram §3: Neuroanatomy of language ☞ Go over questions at end of chapter. 9/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 19