Thanks for all of the videos I am totally lost in my linguistics class and all of the videos have helped me get caught up with what the textbook is reffering to.
Thank you so much for jotting down these complex topics into easy bits. it has helped us a lot as non-native English speaker we do not normally learn these things in schools.
No English teacher can be a good teacher unless or until he/ she is with a good sense of linguistics. I'm getting a great help from this. Thanks to all.
Youssef Osse could you not interpret it as saying that you ran to a location-- that location being "away"? Away wouldn't not be a specific location but it would be similar to saying that the boy ran "there". There is more specific but I think it can be argued that away and there are the same grammatically, correct? Though I can see the argument can go both ways.
The issue of "ending sentences with a preposition", I understand, is due to teachers in times gone by would try and impose foreign grammar on English, particularly Latin. This resulted in rules such as "no double negatives", despite the fact that the double negative in Old English was perfectly legitimate, Latin be damned. It didn't negate itself, in fact it emphasised the negativity. People need to give up on prescriptive grammar once and for all. As long as we understand each other, that's all that matters, and when we don't, we'll work it out together.
Just because it is a common misconception, the verb in "Boku wa niku ga suki desu" is actually "desu". "To like" in Japanese is an adjective so more like the whole phrase "suki desu" is the verb.
Hello, sir! I have questions to ask - The former question - During the course of the video, you said that the dog ran away, and away is a preposition; but also, can we refer to an adverb? The latter question - what is the meaning of the abbreviation of Ss at the top of the tree diagram? *Thank you for your great lesson!* :D
Sir, I think your sentence "I left the ball on the counter" can have more than one meaning. It' means this sentence hold ambiguous internal structure. In the last of the video, I saw you put "PP" connecting with "VP". This mans you put something on the counter. But if you move the "PP" to connect with the "NP", the meaning can be changed. It means you ignored something which in on the counter. This is my opinion about your tree diagram. :)
By the way, I think your video is very useful since it can brief my time to read the whole for the 3rd time on my textbook. Love it! Thank you so much! :)
Yep! Syntactic ambiguity appears everywhere.I think my favorite recent example would be "I have a craving for sushi that is so bad." Maybe the craving is bad, or maybe I'm just craving bad sushi.
Just an observation: SUKI in Japanese isn't a verb, actually is an adjective. It's a little complicated. So if you want to change you're example, you could use: Boku wa niku wo taberu - I eat meat. (Boku wa will be the Subject, niku wo will be the direct object and taberu will be the verb).
I think people are probbaly afraid to leave comments, man. LOL And, I am enjoying the instruction immensely. Thank you so much for the teaching of this subject which is so very important for those who wish to be correct.
I always find it confusing about how concepts like subject and object are taken as a given. I find them some of the hardest concepts to nail down. We always introduce people to syntax with stuff like SVO. However, it completely presupposes an understanding of things like word class. It also leads lots of people to assume that subject means the same thing as agent, and it all goes fine until they hit passive constructions. Personally I think the subject-predicate distinction is the best starting point. It gives a better entry level understanding of syntax and doesn't get bogged down by being conflated with squishy semantic notions.
Thanks for the video.can you tell me the reason why you didn't abide by the binary system(branching) in the last example,kuz iw was expecting the recursion of the NP
regarding the homework example: can VP := (V , NP) to allow for transitivity, then combine with PP := (P , NP) (using a hypothetical VP := (VP , PP) rule) to establish a first-order and second-order verb phrase hierarchy wherein VP1:=(V , NP) and VP2:=(VP , PP) ???
At this point, it would be fine just to have a rule like VP -> V NP PP until you move into X-Bar Theory. It just may have issues dealing with ambiguities and constituency. I'd recommend the [syntax] series on my channel for more info that may help out.
what about how to explain how a sentence is ungrammatical? ex. The instructor suggested the students to study. The verb phrase to study seems off, how do I explain that in linguistics terms?
Maybe I am 2 years late. English is not my first language but according to my knowledge in English language this is a particular case where you cannot use an infinitive (to play) after the verb “suggest” there’s a grammar rule that says that you can only use gerunds with certain verbs (admit, advice, avoid, deny, etc) remembering that infinitives and gerunds are used as nouns and not verbs. I think that there we are talking about syntactic rules. What is and what is not possible in language.
It is actually only in formal writing that teachers teach not to end sentences with a preposition, and it has more to do with convention than grammar. and we teach 'you and me' because you write as though the 'you and' were not there. Never taught 'you and I' in position of object. Good vid. though.
Suki is not a verb though. Suki(na) is an adjective, so the literal translation in English would be "Meat is likable." Japanese verbs end with U and have conjugations that change the last U or RU sound, and Suki(na) is classified as a NA adjective.
Wa is not the right article... If you mean "I like you" the correct article is ga. If you intend to use wa, there is some information missing. Something like "Anata wa suki na hito desu" makes grammatical sense. Although I wouldn't use "suki" in this case..."yasashii"/"ii" (kind/good) sound better...Even then I'd probably use "kata" instead of "hito" in this case too...
hi, your videos are very explicit! But I was just wondering, why is tree diagram you draw in this video not reflecting the X-bar structure, which is often used in other textbooks? Are there any preconditions that require using one type rather than the other? thank you!
There is no need at an introduction level to jump straight into X-Bar. Students tend to find it confusing and spend more time trying to figure out how X' trees work, rather than learning about word categories, phrases, constituents, and how sentences are built. It's a much smoother transition to teach X-Bar after they've mastered the current system, since then they can focus entirely on the structure since the foundation for the rest of syntax is solid. This is just my experience though.
Thank you very much for your reply! Actually I am preparing an entry exam for a master program in linguistics. So, my further question would be, do you think it is acceptable to draw this kind of tree diagram instead of that with X-Bar in this regard? Thanks again for your videos, these are very helpful!
Hi, I have a question... why is "away" (In a sentence "The dog ran away.") a preposition? I always though it's an adverb, and that "away" is a preposition only in cases such as "away from". Maybe I'm just missing a point here, but this really bothers me :) Thanks
"away" is the preposition here, because it "shows where the dog ran" - not "how the dog did it" - you can usually ask "how" when you would describe a verb: I ran quickly or He spoke fast - here you could ask "how did you run?" - Quickly. "how did he speak?" Fast.
Kristina Rasmussen not entirely accurate... your examples of 'fast' and 'quickly' are adverbs of manner, which aren't the only kinds of adverbs in the language. 'Away' happens to be an adverb of location/place. I know I'm going all traditional grammar on this here, but that's the deal. 'Away' could mean 'away from (P) the house (NP)', a leftward expansion of an implied or deleted PP.
Why was VP broken up into V and PP instead of just V and P at 11:00 in the video? How do you know when to make something NP or PP rather than just N or P?
An N must be part of an NP. A P must be part of a PP. A V must be part of a VP. All lexical categories (N, V, P, Adj, Adv) must be part of their own respective phrases (NP, VP, PP, AdjP, AdvP), while functional categories (Deg, Aux, Conj, Det) do not (in this theory).
In Greek it's all the forms: Ο Γιάννης αγαπάει τη Μαρία SVO Αγαπάει, Ο Γιάννης τη Μαρία VSO Αγαπάει την μαρία, Ο Γιάννης VOS Τη Μαρία αγαπάει Ο Γιάννης OVS Τη Μαρία Ο Γιάννης αγαπάει OSV Ο Γιάννης τη Μαρία αγαπάει SOV
Depends on whatever the linguists default definition of "predicate" is. Some linguists treat "predicate" to mean the VP. (TP excluding SPEC later in linguistics) Other linguists treat "predicate" to mean "Fregean predicate", which is just the V.
Was I the only one that heard "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" in this lesson? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Ij1pZvv9m0g.html (@2:05) "Hold the newsreaders nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers."
Any thoughts on the criminal act by use of ‘fraudulent conveyance of language’? [i.e. Parse Syntax Grammar per the use of a Mathematical Interface; curtesy of :David-Wynn: Miller. -RIP D: ]
Well, lets just look at the Syntax part, not all the other claims lol. I believe it kinda makes sense when your looking at it from a law prospective (or contracts, trust etc). It has to be precise or at least with the intent of only one possible interpretation, and from a etymological comprehension of the meaning of words. Can you substantiate your statement at the least? Give a little more weight being your opinion?
When you say that the high school teacher was wrong, you can't mean that in any absolute sense. If you were to write a textbook or submit a paper for academic publication, I'm sure you would write it under the burden of prescriptive grammar. Perhaps I should send you one of those T-shirts that says "GRAMMAR POLICE: TO CORRECT AND TO SERVE."
There is an academic style that you should adapt for writing. But, academic styles are not independent grammars. So yeah, you should probably use specific parts of "prescribed grammar" when publishing a paper. But I still stand by the fact that the definition of "grammar" in an English course is not the same as the definition of grammar in language. If someone were to write "I can't understand all ya'lls statements" in a paper, it wouldn't be labeled "ungrammatical", instead it would be labeled "y'all not acceptable in formal writing."
The first Japanese example wasn't the best because suki is technically a NA adjective. If you want people to see this comment, LIKE it!!! A better example would be: 僕は肉を食べます。 Boku wa(ha) niku wo tabemasu. SOV I eat meat.
"I got lotsa love for Iggy Azaelia's phat-ass ass!" Now, there's an intuitively grammatical sentence for ya, which happens to be true for me. Question: isn't Halliday's SFL easier enough to understand than, say, GPSG... especially coming from an L2-acquisition standpoint?
I'm not familiar with Halliday's SFL at all, but there are dozens of linguistic theories that all take varying approaches. It looks like SFL is significantly more complex to incorporate cognitively though.
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