Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: Words2 Word Categories
2.1 The Lexicon
The first assumption we will make is that one of the things that a speaker of a language
knows is facts about words. We know, for instance, how a given word is pronounced,
what it means and where we can put it in a sentence with respect to other words. To
take an example, the English word cat is known to be pronounced [kæt], is known to
mean ‘a small, domesticated animal of meagre intelligence that says meow’ and is
known to be able to fit into the marked slots in sentences (2), but not in those marked
in (3):
(2) a the cat slept
b he fed Pete’s cat
c I tripped over a cat
(3) a the dog cat the mouse
b cat dog howled
c *the dog slept cat a kennel
It is obvious that this knowledge is not predictable from anything. There is no reason
why the object that we call a cat should be called a cat, as witnessed by the fact that
other languages do not use this word to refer to the same object (e.g. macska
(Hungarian), chat (French), Katze (German), gato (Spanish), quatus (Maltese) kot
(Russian), kissa (Finnish), neko (Japanese), mao (Chinese), paka (Swahili)). Moreover,
there is nothing about the pronunciation [kæt] that means that it must refer to this
object: one can imagine a language in which the word pronounced [kæt] is used for
almost anything else. This kind of linguistic knowledge is not ‘rule governed’, but is
just arbitrary facts about particular languages.
Part of linguistic knowledge, therefore, is a matter of knowing brute fact. For each
and every word of the language we speak it must be the case that we know how they
are pronounced and what they mean. But this is different from our knowledge of
sentences. For one thing, there are only a finite number of words in any given language
and each speaker will normally operate with only a proportion of the total set of words
that may be considered to belong to the language. Therefore, it is not problematic to
assume that knowledge of words is just simply stored in our heads. Moreover,
although it is possible, indeed it is fairly common, for new words to enter a language,
it is usually impossible to know what a new word might mean without explicitly being
told. For example, unless you had been told, it is not possible to know that the word
wuthering found in the title of the novel by Emily Brontë is a Yorkshire word referring
to the noise that a strong wind makes. With sentences, on the other hand, we know
what they mean on first hearing without prior explanation. Thus, knowledge of words
and knowledge of sentences seem to be two different things: knowledge of words is
brute knowledge while knowledge of sentences involves knowing a system that
enables us to produce and understand an infinite number of them (an I-language).
Clearly, part of knowing what a sentence means involves knowing what the words that
constitute it mean, but this is not everything: the meanings of the words three, two,
dogs, cats, and bit simply do not add up to the meaning of the sentence three dogs bit
Note!
An asterisk at the beginning of a
sentence indicates that the sentence
is ungrammatical.