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by TeMPOraL
3696 days ago
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Thanks for your answers. You've raised a lot of good points, and I need to think them through. > the claim is that when you see an invalid (cannot be parsed into a proper tree) sentence, you have a gut feeling that it "sounds off", and if you're a native speaker you would never accidentally produce such ill-formed sentences. You can still understand the meaning of a sentence like "I this morning fish eat" but you also immediately notice that it's "off" - and that's the phenomena that syntax tries to explain. I see. Yeah, most of the way I think about how mind processes language comes from focusing on that "gut feeling", that on one hand tells you that this perfectly understandable sentence is somehow "off", and on the other hand lets you form perfect sentences without ever explicitly thinking about grammar. > First, modern linguistics is very far from prescriptive. In fact the first thing they teach you (at around the same time they make the claim that "humans parse sentences into tree structure") is that linguistics is a descriptive field It seems to me that I've been operating under invalid assumption that linguistics is mostly prescriptive. Thanks for that. Any recommendation for an intro book I could grab to read in my spare time? |
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Unfortunately I think the field suffers from a lack of such books.
1. You could try Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct", although it's a general-audience book that doesn't really try to teach you linguistics proper
2. The first textbook I used was https://linguistics.osu.edu/research/pubs/lang-files and it's pretty good. However, it's quite hard to obtain.
Edit:
3. If you just want to look at syntax http://web.mit.edu/norvin/www/24.902/24902.html is advanced but good