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Chapter
Check Questions
Q1 Native speakers of a language have at their disposal a system that enables them
to produce and understand an infinite number of utterances in everyday life. They
produce and understand sentences never said or heard before; when they know the
meaning of a word they also know how to pronounce it and what are the combinations
that given word can occur in. In addition, native speakers are capable of explaining
why a sentence is ungrammatical (‘incorrect’) in that particular language without
necessarily being able to refer to specific grammar rules. All this constitutes linguistic
knowledge and to a large part linguistic knowledge is unconscious. Given that there is
no limit on the number of utterances we produce and decode, linguistic knowledge
may seem infinite but more plausibly it is possible to devise a system of rules that will
generate all and only the possible utterances in a language.
Q2 Given a string of sounds associated with a particular meaning (‘roughly’ a
word), its pronunciation, meaning, combinatorial properties (syntactic properties) are
not predictable from its form (arbitrariness). A part of linguistic knowledge is lexical
knowledge which is knowledge about words, their pronunciation, meaning, syntactic
properties. These types of information are stored in what is called ‘the (mental)
lexicon’, a ‘dictionary’ of the words a speaker knows. The words stored / contained in
the lexicon are grouped according to certain general properties they share – based on
these groups a certain limited number of categories may be established.
Q3 Morphological properties, i.e. inflectional endings associated with Ns, Vs, etc.;
irregular forms should be mentioned as well. Distributional criteria, i.e. in what
position in a sentence may a given word appear; verbs which are not interchangeable
should be included. Meaning: in what sense do nouns denote things, verbs actions,
events, etc. Thematic categories have conceptual meaning, they carry semantic
information, while functional categories encode grammatical information.
Q4 The notion ‘predicate’ is easy to grasp: there is something we make a statement
about. That ‘something’ is the subject and the statement about it is the predicate. Apart
from verbs DPs, APs and PPs may also function as predicates, e.g. Mary is a teacher,
Mary is beautiful, Mary is at home or They elected Mary chairperson, They consider
Mary beautiful, They want Mary in the committee. The first three sentences show that
the verb ‘be’ (a so-called linking verb or copular verb) does not constitute much to the
predication expressed in them. This is further illustrated by the second three sentences
where each contains two statements where the second is lacking a verb. Each predicate
has a set of elements that minimally have to be included when it is used say, in a
sentence, we call these participants minimally involved in expressing the meaning of