1. Creativity of Language
“Any speaker of a human language can produce and understand an infinite number of sentences.”
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman & Nina Hyams An Introduction to Language. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, p. 117.

2. Syntax
“The part of the grammar that represents a speaker’s knowledge of sentences and their structures is called syntax.”
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman & Nina Hyams An Introduction to Language. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, p. 118.

3. 魚吃人

4. Word Order 1. Harold hit Ivan. 2. Ivan hit Harold.
3. The student picked up the book.
4. The student picked the book up.

5. Why Native Speaker Grammaticality Judgments are Basically the Same
Because native speakers of a language share the same set of syntactic rules their grammaticality judgments will be the same.

6. How can we judge what is grammatical?
1. Does NOT depend on whether you have
heard it before
2. Does NOT depend on whether it is
meaningful
3. Does NOT depend on whether you can
interpret it
4. Does NOT depend on whether it is true
5. It DOES depend on our “unconscious
knowledge of the syntactic rules of grammar”
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman & Nina Hyams An Introduction to Language. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, pp

7. Grammaticality Judgments of Strange Sentences
 Meaningless
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Giant tomatoes danced at my party
last week.
 Uninterpretable
“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
 Untrue
Today is Wednesday.
My brother had a baby last week.
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman & Nina Hyams An Introduction to Language. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, pp

8. Ambiguity Words (Lexical Ambiguity) He walked by the bank.
He got shot in the back.
Phrases (Structural Ambiguity)
synthetic buffalo hides
small car factory
Sentences (Structural Ambiguity)
The boy saw the man with the telescope.
For sale: an antique desk suitable for lady
with thick legs and large drawers.

9. Tree Diagram of Sentence Structure
The child found the puppy.
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman & Nina Hyams An Introduction to Language. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, p. 124.

10. Grammatical Categories
Content Words
noun N
verb V
adjective Adj
adverb Adv
Function Words
preposition Prep
conjunction Conj
interjection Interj
auxiliary verb Aux
modal verb Modal
determiner Det
quantifier Quant

11. Phrase Structure Tree
Victoria Fromkin & Robert Rodman. An Introduction to Language, sixth edition. Forth Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers: 1998, pp. 114, 115.

12. Syntactic Rules Must Account for the Following
 the grammaticality of sentences
 word order
 structural ambiguity
 grammatical relations
 different structures with the same meaning
 the creative aspect of language.
Fromkin & Rodman (1998), pp

13. Simplified Grammar of “English” Phrase Structure Rules
S  NP Aux VP
NP  Det (Adj) N
VP  V (NP) (PP)
PP  P NP
AP  Adj (PP)
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman & Nina Hyams An Introduction to Language. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, p. 140.

14. Simplified Grammar of “English” Phrase Structure Rules
N  child, boy, man, men, telescope,
puppy, posse, baby, buffalo, hide
V  find, see, flee, sleep
P  with, from, in, on
Adj  small, synthetic
Det  the, a
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman & Nina Hyams An Introduction to Language. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, p. 140.

15. Ambiguous Sentence But Unambiguous Structure
The boy saw the man with the telescope.
The boy saw the man with a stick.
The boy hit the man with a stick.
The boy hit the man with the telescope.
Victoria Fromkin & Robert Rodman. An Introduction to Language, sixth edition. Forth Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers: 1998, p. 117.

16. Grammaticality Judgments
Victoria Fromkin & Robert Rodman. An Introduction to Language, sixth edition. Forth Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers: 1998, p. 107.