Defining a sentence
What is the traditional definition of a sentence?
A complete thought
According to structuralists, how was a sentence defined?
A complete thought
What traditional definition of a sentence did the structuralist approach reject when revising syntactic theory?
That a sentence is a "complete thought.
Who developed the Transformational-Generative Grammar approach?
Noam Chomsky
What is the basic form of phrase-structure rules?
X → Y + Z
Why do some grammarians say “Because it is there” is not a proper sentence?
Because it doesn’t represent a complete thought (according to prescriptive rules)
According to structuralists, how was a sentence defined?
As speech occurring between major pauses
What two key tools or concepts did structuralists replace the traditional grammatical rules and Reed-Kellogg diagrams with?
Sentence patterns and immediate-constituent diagrams.
What is the main difference between structuralists and Chomsky’s approach?
Structuralists describe patterns in speech; Chomsky focuses on the speaker’s knowledge and ability to generate new sentences.
Which of the following is a correct phrase-structure rule for sentences in Crane’s model?
S → NP + Aux + VP
How did structural linguists define a sentence, despite knowing it was a weak definition?
A stretch of speech between major pauses
What diagramming method was widely used in U.S. schools to represent sentences?
Reed-Kellogg diagrams
What is the primary purpose of Immediate Constituent Analysis (IC Analysis) in structuralist syntax?
To reveal which words group together naturally.
What is the main goal of Transformational-Generative Grammar?
To find a limited set of rules that can generate an unlimited number of sentences.
In the example sentence A girl has seen the man, what does “has” represent in phrase-structure grammar?
A perfect auxiliary
How did transformational-generative grammarians define a sentence?
As whatever native speakers recognized as a sentence.
What was the main weakness of the Reed-Kellogg system?
It was too simple to capture complex grammatical structures
In the phrase "In the eye," how does IC Analysis prove that "the" groups more closely with "eye" than with "in"?
By showing that the closer unit is "the eye" (the Noun Phrase), which is formed before the preposition "in" attaches to it.
What are the two key concepts introduced to distinguish knowledge of language from its actual use?
Competence (knowledge) and Performance (use).
Which aspect of a word is explicitly cited as the "most important" factor governed by its Syntactic features?
The part of speech
What is the main problem with the transformationalist definition of a sentence?
It lacked precision because native speakers often disagree on what counts as a sentence
Why did traditional grammar invent the category of “retained object”?
To preserve rules about passive verbs that still take objects
The structuralist task of exhaustively listing sentence patterns was criticized because the resulting patterns ultimately expressed what limited conclusion?
That nothing more was revealed than the already known fact that a variety of sentence types existed.
In this framework, what are heuristics, and why are they important?
Heuristics are mental strategies or performance rules that help speakers transform thoughts into sentences; they explain how competence becomes performance.
What is the primary reason the Lexicon is considered an "extremely important part of the grammar"?
No sentence can make sense without words