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0:00
ADAM CROOM: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Introduction to Cognitive Science. I'm Adam. And the focus of our lecture today is on syntax and syntactic tree diagrams.
0:12
So today, let's have fun drawing syntactic tree diagrams for sentences. The value of this is at least twofold. It will help us appreciate the hierarchical structure of sentences. It will also help us appreciate discussions about rules and rule following more generally in linguistics philosophy and cognitive science. So I've provided you with a variety of different types of sentences, so we can practice drawing tree diagrams for different sentence types. At your own pace, practice working
0:46
through these examples with me on paper or on your computer.
0:52
Over here on the right side, you see that I've provided some different sample sentences drawing upon a general Batman theme, okay. And the purpose of these different sentence types is, by practicing different sentences-- some of them have adverbs; some of them have adjectives; some of them have recursion under the NP; some of them have recursion under the VP. We'll get better insight into the systematic and productive nature of human cognition, okay?
1:27
Although, we could spend a whole semester focusing on syntax, investigating the rules, all the phrase structure rules also assessing right? We can ask more fine-grained questions, such as, what is a noun? What is a verb? We often think of nouns as person, places, or things. But nouns also include abstract ideas, all right? So we can really get into it and ask questions about what nouns are, what verbs are. We can ask questions, like, how do we treat degree words? Are they adverbs?
2:06
Or are they slightly unique, right? And there's many interesting questions of this. How do we treat conjunctions and "that" clauses, many fascinating questions, right? But rather than focusing on those specific questions in syntax, which would be more suitable for a course on syntax, our focus for today is to work through these sentences and get-- use these sample sentences to help us gain insight on the systematic and productive nature of human cognition, okay?
2:40
So we're going to use syntax as a vehicle to understand cognition more generally today, okay? Recall that, in the last previous lectures when we were talking about spoken language acquisition and sign language acquisition, we saw that, oftentimes, children are in environments in which their linguistic input is impoverished right? So we've seen that children, they have this ability to impose systematicity onto that impoverished linguistic input right?
3:16
So there's something like rules or universal grammar, something like that in their mind, that helps to systematize that impoverished linguistic input. And so, we often make use of this notion of rules and principles in linguistics and cognitive science okay? And one of the main things I want you to get a hold on today or get a grasp on today is how we apply rules in a systematic and productive way to account for grammatical structure, okay? It's not so important that we memorize
3:49
the specific list of rules that I've provided for you. They-- the list of rules that I provided for you serve mostly a pedagogical purpose. I don't want to suggest that these rules are UG, right? This is what UG consists of, okay? There's some really interesting debates within linguistics on which-- do all-- are all these rules-- should all these rules be included as acceptable rules? Or should we only accept a subset of these rules, right? Maybe there's a rule that's missing.
4:23
Maybe there's more rules that we need to include. Maybe there's a more abstract way to characterize these rules so we can have a more economic list, right? And you see that there's often trade-offs in theory between having the capacity to be very explicit about many different example types, right? So I might have a system in which, no matter what sentence you give me, I can be super explicit and provide step-by-step tree diagrams for any sentence you give me.
4:55
But to do that, I might require more rules to have that explanatory power, right? On the other hand, if I value economy, like Occam's razor, if what I want is a economical, theoretical framework, then, what I may have to-- the trade-off on that is, I may not be able to be as explicit. And we'll see in the examples today. I actually provide you an example of this trade-off in that, in one area where I want to be very explicit, I use an extra step, right? But that step can be removed, right?
5:34
Providing a more economical diagram but it assumes a little-- just a little bit more knowledge, okay? So for the introductory course, I just want to be very explicit and show the steps. But as you feel comfortable with the material, I encourage you to explore-- use Google Scholar search for more focused research in this area. And you'll see that there's some really interesting debates between different systems, different ways to account for different linguistic phenomena, okay?
6:06
So this is not the last lecture on syntax but the first. Finally, another point that I want to make here-- well, a few points that I want to make here is that, remember that a sentence is not just a string of words, right? But rather, a sentence is a structural arrangement. So a sentence has a hierarchical organizational structure and not just a linear order, okay? And the reason why I emphasize that at the outset is so that way we are very clear in that,
6:48
what forms a sentence are going to be phrases, like noun phrases and verb phrases, because these represent structural components and not just words, words, words, okay? So how not to draw a tree diagram is like, noun, verb and that's a sentence, because a sentence is not just words but, rather, noun, phrase, for a phrase and the beauty and power of the phrase part is that that is what allows for replacements, substitutions, right? So a noun phrase, for example, could be "Batman."
7:30
But another noun phrase is "Bruce Wayne," or "the King of France," right? All those different varieties, all those different word sequences, they are noun phrases, right? And what we can do to make sure that we've drawn our trees correctly is we can practice substituting one for another. And our tree diagram or the sentence should still be intelligible, although the tree diagram may require a little bit more work, right? So "the King of France is bald." And "Joe is bald," right?
8:07
I can "replace the King of France" with "Joe," because they're both noun phrases at the noun phrase level okay? And so, we see, that's why we want to use the NP and not just an N, because the NP will allow us to substitute structures, things that are also NPs, okay? So you see that we have systematicity at both the lexical item level, like, what kind of word is "Batman?" Is that a verb or a noun? But also at the phrase level, is this a noun phrase or a verb phrase, okay?
8:42
So cool, all right, now we're going to start with our first sample sentence, which is, "Catwoman escaped." So you should have question at this point is, how do we proceed? How do we begin to provide a tree diagram for this sample sentence okay? So the first thing I want you to do is think about the sentence, the linguistic items that are included in the sentence, right? And we see that there's "Catwoman" and "escaped," right? So now what we need to do is identify
9:16
each of those items, what kind of items they are. "Catwoman" is a noun. "Escaped" is a verb. So if we want to draw a tree for that, we're going to have to make "Catwoman" not just a noun but an NP, noun phrase. And then, "escaped" not just the verb but that will also be the verb phrase. And then, boom, now we have the NP and the VP. And that can form the sentence, right? And we see that we have the rules for that on the right. And we can use the rules to justify the moves
9:53
that we make in our tree diagram, just like we would use the rules of chess to justify the rule-- the moves that we make when we play chess, okay? All right, so after we've identified our linguistic items, then we want to look at the rules that are provided for us and build the tree structure in accord with these rules, okay? The phrase structure rules guide you on how to build legal or well-formed sentences.
10:31
All right, so I've given you a hint or the solution for this one already. But this will be the structure of the lecture for today is, I'm going to give you a sample sentence like "Catwoman escaped." I'll give you a moment to reflect on this example and provide the category labels for each linguistic item. And then go ahead and try to draw on your scratch paper or on your computer. Try your best to provide a structure for this. And then, once you've given this a good shot
11:01
or a honest attempt, move on to the next slide. And you'll see the solution for you, okay? And here, I just put this picture of a skeleton, the human skeletal system, because I think it's useful to think about tree diagrams in that way, right? Just like the human skeletal system provides a general structure in which we can understand different humans, tree diagrams are similar in that they provide us a structure in which we can understand different types of sentences, right?
11:30
And some skeletons look like-- are in the form of humans. And others are on the form of dogs, right? And, similarly, we have different linguistic structures that take different forms, okay? All right, so go ahead and draw the tree diagram for "Catwoman escaped." I already told you how to do it. So you shouldn't need too long to solve this. Let's move on. And here is our solution, okay? So the way that you can start this is, on the right over here, you see that. We have the tree.
12:03
Starting at the bottom, you can start at the bottom of your page. You can write "Catwoman" and then "escaped." Ask yourself, what kind of linguistic item is "Catwoman?" And you can draw a little line. And then write, ah, it's a noun. So you can write N, okay? Over by "escaped," you can draw a line. What kind of linguistic item is that? It's a verb. So you can draw a V, right? But remember, sentences do not consist of nouns and verbs but of noun phrases and verb phrases.
12:30
So we can't stop at just the N and the V. We're going to draw another line up and connect the N to an NP, right? And draw another line up from the V and connect that to a VP, because "Catwoman" is not just the noun in the sentence. But it's also the noun phrase in the sentence. And "escaped" is not just the verb in the sentence. It's also the verb phrase in this sentence, right? And now we can combine the noun phrase and the verb phrase to form the sentence, okay?
12:59
The reason-- again, just to be super clear here-- we want this to be an NP is because I might substitute "Catwoman" with another NP. And we see over here, NP allows me to do different things, right? Like, this could be "the Joker escaped" instead of "Catwoman escaped," because an NP can take a determiner and a noun, as we see right here, okay? So that's the beauty of having these category labels at the phrase and item level. All right, let's go ahead and move on to our next example.
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This example is, "the Joker laughed." First thing we want to do, identify these lexical items, right? What kind of word is "the?" What kind of word is "Joker?" What kind of word or item is "laughed?"
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If you forget, you can always look it up in the dictionary. And by each word, they'll provide you with what sort of part of speech or what category it is, right? Just be careful, because, for some items, there may be more than one possible category that it can belong to, okay? "The," it's-- I'll just tell you right now. It's a determiner. And there's different types of determiners, right? There's-- "the" picks out something uniquely.
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Like, "the King of France" picks out one unique King of France. Where "a," like "a dog" picks out one out of multiple or possibly many instances, okay? So "I bought one-- I bought a dog" just means that I got one of potentially many dogs. But if I got the dog, I seem to be suggesting like there's only one such dog, okay? All right, and then, "Joker laughed." you should be able to provide labels for those. And let's go ahead and move on now, okay? Try to draw the tree diagram for this.
15:03
And let's go ahead and move on. So "the" is a determiner, right? So under "the," we can write DET, an abbreviation for determiner, okay? "Joker" is an N, so we can write N on top of that. Laughed is a V, so we can write-- a verb so we can write a V on top of that, okay?
15:29
Now we can go ahead and use our rules to put the parts together, okay? So an NP consists of a determiner and a noun, or a determiner and a noun phrase. Here, I left this an NP, because we'll see, in a subsequent example in a few slides down, that we-- by having an NP, we could be productive underneath this NP, okay? If I just-- although, for this particular example, it's perfectly suitable to just have-- to connect the N right there, right?
16:06
So this is what I meant in the beginning of the lecture. This is an optional step that I included, just to be very explicit in the lecture today, right? I might-- my-- the snow in winter in Gotham, if I'm going to be using those extra prepositional phrases, I'm going to need more structure underneath this NP. So then, if-- in that case, I couldn't just have the end there. I would need to allow for more structure. So in this example, I just wanted
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this to be an NP to show that I could ditch it later, right? I can pluck-- pull it out and throw it away and put something else underneath there that's more complex and that allows for more productivity underneath the NP, okay? So again, we always want to think about trade-offs between explicitness, like, hey, look what I can do here, versus economy, okay? All right, so-- and just so that way we know that we haven't violated any rules, we can just chuck our rules, right? S takes an NP and a VP.
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We see that, both in the tree diagram and the rule here. We can check in our phrase structure rules that that's a legitimate rule. So S takes NP and VP, great. Next is NP takes the determiner in and out, right? So a noun phrase is not just something like "Catwoman," right? But also, it can be something like "the Joker," okay? And so, to draw that, we have a determiner and a noun. And it's "the Joker." And then, our VP takes a V, and V is "laughed."
17:58
All right, let's keep it going. Our next example is, "the Joker laughed hysterically." So take a moment to identify each of these lexical items, "The Joker laughed" and "hysterically," okay? We've already identified "the Joker" and "laughed." So now you have to ask yourself, what's going on with "hysterically," right? Is that an adverb or an adjective? Now, can you remember from when you studied English grammar what kind of item that is, right? And if you have a hard time remembering,
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just remember, it's baked into the word, right? An adverb is going to modify or qualify a verb. And an adjective is going to modify or qualify the noun, okay? So using that, let's move on to the solution here. So we know that "the" is a determiner. "Joker" is a noun. And "laughed" is a verb. We saw that from the last example. The thing that I wanted to add here, for this example, was "hysterically." And we see that that is an adverb, right? It qualifies or modifies the verb.
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It goes with "laughed," like, what kind of laugh, a hysterical laugh, right? So we label, provide a label for each of these, okay? Now, in order to provide the tree structure, the new thing that's going on here is, we see up here, the VP was just "laughed," right? So the VP just took a V. And the v took "laughed." Here, we're just showing you that we-- the VP doesn't have to just take a V. It can also take something different. So we can throw that out, and now we have a VP taking the V
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in an adverb phrase, okay? And we see that that rule is provided here under VP. It takes a V and a adverb phrase, right? So right here, we see that that's allowed, okay? Great and then, we know we have a rule that says that an adverb phrase can take an adverb, okay? And that's provided right here. So excellent, we know that all the moves that we want to make to provide this tree diagram are allowed and legal, okay? And that gives us the tree structure for the sentence,
20:28
"the Joker laughed hysterically." Next sentence, "Catwoman is very quiet." Let's go ahead and identify each of the lexical items or each of these linguistic items, okay? "Catwoman," what that? "Is," "very," and "quiet," take one moment. And let's move on.
20:54
Okay, so we know that "Catwoman" is a noun. "Is" is a verb. "Very is a degree word. And "quiet" is an adjective, okay? Who's quiet? Catwoman is quiet, right? So we know that it's the noun that's being modified or qualified here with "quiet," okay? All right, this is the rules that allow or license each of these moves, okay? We see that the sentence takes an NP and a VP, a noun phrase and a verb phrase. The noun phrase takes the noun, which is "Catwoman."
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The verb phrase takes a verb and an adjective phrase, okay? And we see that the rule for that is right here. The VP takes a V and an adjective phrase. Okay, great and the verb in this case is "is." And then, the adjective phrase takes a degree word and an adjective. And we see that that rule is provided right here. An adjective phrase takes a degree word and an adjective, okay? The degree word, in this case, is "very." And the adjective is "quiet," okay? And boom, now we have the tree structure
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for "Catwoman is very quiet." And now that we've acquired this skeletal structure, we can understand and cognize other similar structures, all right? "Batman is very loud" or what have you, right? "Dogs are very loud" or whatnot. You see that, even just by following the same types, we can generate lots of unique thoughts, which is really awesome.
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The next sentence, "Batman is always prepared," okay? So take a moment. Go ahead and identify each of those items, those linguistic items, okay? And I'm not going to pause too much in between. I'm running tight on battery life. So just pause the video if you need to, to work through the exercise. And then unpause and join me so we can keep it going, okay? Ready and let's move on to the solution. All right, so "Batman" is a noun, so we write an N on top of it.
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"Is" is a verb, so we write a V on top of that, all right? "Always" is an adverb, so we write ADV on top of that. And "prepared" is an adjective, so we write ADJ on top of that. Now we need to put these things together, okay?
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"Always prepared" is the adjective phrase, right? So we label the head here, adjective phrase, okay? "Is always prepared" is the verb phrase, so this is labeled VP, okay? "Batman is always prepared" is the sentence, okay? And just to be clear, that's how you read these structures, right? "Very quiet," adjective phrase, "is very quiet" is the verb phrase. "Catwoman is very quiet" is a sentence, okay? For this example three, "laughed hysterically" is the verb phrase, all right?
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"The Joker" is the noun phrase. "The Joker laughed hysterically" is a sentence, okay? And then, "the Joker" is the noun phrase. "Laughed" is the verb phrase. "The Joker laughed" is the sentence.
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And then, "Catwoman" is a noun phrase. And "escaped" is a verb phrase. And "Catwoman escaped" is the sentence, okay? So what I'm trying to-- the point I'm just trying to say here is, as we get more complicated structures, you might start losing track of, what kind of structure do we have hanging out down here, right? And I just want to remind you that, when the label right here, adjective phrase is classifying this, that it holds together, okay? So if I'm ADJP the adjective phrase,
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I'm holding on to adjective-- what is an adjective phrase right there, okay? And it's just important to know that so that way, you can substitute like for like elements. So "Batman is always prepared." This is how we diagram that sentence. And the rules are provided for you right here. And for all my students in the course, go ahead and look in the file section I've provided the slides for you, so you can take your time and work through these as slowly as you like.
25:59
All right, this next example, "Bruce Wayne is intelligent." This-- the novel thing with this example is, how do we treat this over here, "Bruce Wayne," right? We haven't dealt with that just yet. So we'll figure out how to deal with that in this example, okay? So ask yourself, what is "Bruce?" What is "Wayne?" What is "is?" And what is "intelligent?" What kind of linguistic items are those? Let's provide some categorical labels for that. Okay, ready, let's move on to the solution.
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So "Bruce" is a noun, but so is "Wayne." So those are both nouns, okay? And there's a rule that allows us to combine two nouns to form a noun phrase, okay? And that rule is right here. An NP can take an N and an N, okay? So that's what we use over here. An NP can take an N and an N. The N and the N, in this case, is the "Bruce" and the "Wayne," okay? So boom, that's our noun phrase in this case, okay? And just remember that we could have switched this NP for any of the other NPs at the NP level,
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right? It could have been "Catwoman is intelligent," or "the Joker is intelligent," or what not, right? And at the NP level, it's perfectly substitutable, okay? All right, and then, over here under the VP, we know that the VP takes a V and an adjective phrase. The V, in this case, this is "is." The adjective phrase, in this case, is the adjective "intelligent," okay? So "Bruce Wayne is intelligent."
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The next sentence-- and these are kind of fun, because we're going to see some recursion or embedding underneath the NP, okay? The first one, though, is just the sentence, "Snow falls in winter." So ask yourself what kind of linguistic items-- for "snow," "falls," "in," and "winter," ask yourself what kind of linguistic items those are. And I'm going to move on to the next slide, ready?
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And here we go, okay? So the fun thing about this example is that we have a preposition. And we get to work with a prepositional phrase. We've been working with NPs and VPs, adjective phrases. And I think we did adverb phrase too. Now we get to work with the prepositional phrase, okay? So we're just expanding our phrasal types, okay? So the cool thing about prepositional phrases is one of-- it's one of the tools, linguistic tools that allows for recursion and embedding, okay?
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Another one will be the conjunction for "that" clauses. But we'll get to that in a few more examples, okay? Here, we know that "snow" is a noun, so we label an N we know that "falls" is a verb, so we label it a V. We know that "in" is a preposition, so we label it a P. We know that "winter" is a noun, so we label it an N, okay? We know that "in winter" is a prepositional phrase, right? So that's why this is packed under the PP over here, okay? And we see that there's a rule, right?
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The PP can take a P and an NP, all right? "Falls in winter" is the verb phrase, okay? And so, that's why we have "falls in winter" here, right? And we know that the VP can take a V and a PP. And that's provided here. VP can take a V and a PP, okay? And this should be embedded in your knowledge now, how we treat the NP okay? Snow, so "Snow falls in winter" is the tree diagram for this sentence, okay? Now that we feel comfortable with this, we're going to make it a little bit more complex
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by using another prepositional phrase in the next example, or not just yet okay? In-- soon, we'll get to it, okay? As you can tell, I get excited about the "snow falls" examples. I think these are really fun. But this one, this one is "Snow falls slowly in winter," okay? So we're not adding another preposition just yet. But we're working with the word "slowly." And we'll see how that changes the tree structure just a little bit, okay? So go ahead and identify these linguistic items for me,
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"snow," "falls," "slowly," "in," and "winter." And let's move on to the next slide, ready?
30:39
All right, so we know that it's not snow that's slowly, right? That sounds really funny. But it's falls slowly, right? It's the verb that's being modified or qualified by "slowly." So we know that slowly is an adverb, okay? And that was the only new item in this sentence. We know what "snow," "falls," and "in" and "winter" are, okay? So we just label those appropriately, right? "Snow" is a noun. "Falls" is a verb. "Slowly" is an adverb. "In" is a preposition. And "winter" is a noun, okay?
31:18
And now that we've labeled those and we're familiar with the rules, I want to just highlight for you how we bundle these up, all right? "In winter," what is that, right? That's a prepositional phrase, right? So we see that the PP takes the P and the NP; NP takes an N. The N is "winter" and the P is "in," okay? The adverb phrase is "slowly in winter," okay? So that's what we have right here. And we see that the adverb phrase, it can take an adverb and a prepositional phrase, right?
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So that rule is right there. "Falls slowly in winter" is the verb phrase, right? So this whole unit is a verb phrase. We label it VP, okay? And we see that the VP can take a V and an adverb phrase, okay? And then, "Snow falls slowly in winter" is the sentence, okay? And we see that an S can take an NP and the VP right there okay? So that's how we unpack each step via the phrase structure rules okay? All right, we're going to start moving on to more complicated examples.
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So that's why the font got smaller, We're going to have to work with more prepositions and prepositional phrases in these examples, okay? I think that it's fun. And it illustrates the awesome, productive nature of language, okay? So far, with all the replacements, like, ah, we can replace NP with NP, or PP with a PP, or a adjective phrase with an adjective phrase. We can do all these like for like replacements, which is demonstrated systematicity.
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With the PPs, we're going to see the recursive or productive power of language, okay? So go ahead and label these linguistic items for me, "the," "snow," "in," "winter," "in," "Gotham," "falls," "slowly," right? We want to provide a tree structure for the sentence, "The snow in winter in Gotham falls slowly," okay?
33:43
So take a moment to label those. We know, for the most part, what these are now. We've actually dealt with all of these before, in one manner or another. "In," we know what that is, "the." So let's move, keep it going, okay? So "the" is the determiner. "Snow" is a noun. "In" is a preposition. "Winter" is a noun. "In" is a preposition. "Gotham" is a noun. "Falls" is a verb. And "slowly" is an adverb, okay? This is not new. We've discussed this in more detail in all the previous examples, okay?
34:21
The cool thing that we're doing here with this example is, in this example, it shows you how we can reiterate this prepositional phrase underneath the noun phrase, right? And it's one of the things I think it's really awesome about the productive nature of language is this little thing. So I just want to highlight this for you and show you that, in principle, we could keep applying the rule, right? But it's more due to practical limitations, like, that I don't have enough space on this slide,
34:56
that I don't-- that I have a limited working memory capacity, and so on, that I can't generate, in reality, an infinitely long sentence. But the insight here is that, in principle, given the principles and rules that we have for language, there's nothing, in principle, that's preventing us from just, boom, boom, boom, reiterating this prepositional phrase within the-- underneath the NP, okay? And we'll see that in the future examples. I'll then focus on "that" clauses
35:31
underneath the VP, which is also highlights the productive nature of language, okay? So we see that the S takes a NP and a VP, okay? The thing that we want to focus on for this slide is, what's going on underneath the NP, okay? So we see that an NP can take a determiner and an NP, right? So we see right here, NP goes to determiner and NP, right? So remember, now we need that NP here, right? Before, we were considering, do we even need that NP? Why not just connect it straight to an N right?
36:12
And in that very simple example, sure, that would have worked straight away. But what I was trying to show is that we can throw that out and replace it with something way more complex, like this, right? So it doesn't have to be like "the," "uh." But it can be "the" all this complicated stuff, which is really cool that we can do that, okay? So we see that now, under here, we're looking at the NP, the NP takes an N and a PP. In other words, a noun phrase can
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take a noun and the prepositional phrase, okay? And the rule we have is here. NP can take a noun and a prepositional phrase, okay sweet. Now, what about the prepositional phrase? Well, a prepositional phrase can take a preposition and a noun phrase right? So we see that right here. A prepositional phrase can take a preposition and a noun phrase. So that gets us here, right? And what's cool is, now that NP can take a P and a PP again right? So we can keep applying this if we want to, which
37:14
I think is really fun, okay? But just to keep this within sanity level for today, we'll just stop right here, this "snow in winter in Gotham" and then "falls slowly." And remember that I pointed out earlier that this is treated as one unit, right? "The snow in winter in Gotham falls slowly." We could have just said, "snow falls slowly," because "snow" is also an NP. And that's-- what's really cool is at the NP level, we can take it, throw it away, substitute it for another NP.
37:52
Which, "snow" is also an N and then-- "snow" is also an NP and an N, right? We could also just use "snow falls slowly." So we see here, going structure-- phrase structure by phrase structure, we see that "in Gotham" is a prepositional phrase, okay? And that's why it's labeled PP. "Winter in Gotham" is a noun phrase. "In winter in Gotham" is a prepositional phrase. "Snow in winter in Gotham" is a noun phrase. "The snow in winter in Gotham" is a noun phrase, okay?
38:28
Over here, "falls slowly" is the verb phrase. We connect that noun phrase with that verb phrase, and we get this sentence, "The snow in winter in Gotham falls slowly." All right, this next one-- this next sentence that we're going to diagram is "The snow when winter falls slowly from the sky," okay? So we should have an idea. I want you to-- as we see the sentence, try to paint a tree structure in your mind. We know that we've got "the snow in winter" is doing something over here under the NP.
39:04
And then, "falls slowly from the sky" is doing something over here underneath the VP, okay? And we know that, in this case, we have a little bit more going on underneath the VP this time, rather than underneath the NP, okay?
39:21
And go ahead, and take one moment just to provide category labels for each of these linguistic items. And ready, let's move on to the solution. All right, here we go, okay? "The" is a determiner. "Snow" is a noun. "In" is a preposition. "Winter" is a noun, okay? "Falls" is a verb. "Slowly" is an adverb, right? "From" is a preposition. "The" is a determiner. And "sky" is a noun, okay? Now we just need to put these pieces together. "In winter" is a prepositional phrase, okay?
40:00
"Snow in winter" is the noun phrase. "The snow in winter" is the noun phrase at this level right here, okay? Over here, "the sky" is the noun phrase right here. "From the sky" is the prepositional phrase. "Slowly from the sky" is the adverb phrase. "Falls slowly from the sky" is the verb phrase, okay? Then we can connect the noun phrase and the verb phrase to build that sentence, okay? And our rules are all provided right here for us, okay? So please go in feel free to check each step
40:47
with the provided rules.
40:51
All right, we've got-- we have about two more examples left, okay? And the purpose of the next two examples is to appreciate productivity recursive applications underneath the VP this time, okay? Excuse me. So this sentence is "Darkseid knew that Batman survived." For the sake of time, I-- we could have started with a simpler sentence and then built to this one. But we already did such a basic example. I didn't want to waste time going through another basic example, like "Batman
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survived," because we already did "Catwoman escaped," right? But real quick to point out here that "Batman survived" is already an S, right? But we can build another larger S, another larger sentence with a sentence embedded within that larger sentence, right? So "Darkseid knew that Batman survived," okay? So we see that we have a conjunction using "that" clauses here, which is really cool, okay? It's another thing that's going to help
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us purchase productivity with our cognitive abilities, right? All right, cool-- excuse me.
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So go ahead and try to identify each of these linguistic items. And take a moment to-- you might have to reflect on, what's going on with that, okay? And there's-- in the literature, there's going to be some debates, like, how do we treat this, right? But for today, we'll treat it as we'll see in the next slide. Ready, here we go. So "Darkseid" is a noun. "Knew" is a verb. "That" is a conjunction for "that" clauses, right? And here, I just label this as C for a "that" clause, okay?
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"Batman" is a noun. And "survived" is a verb, okay? So we see that we can start over here. And this would just be a basic sentence, like "Batman survived." As you can see, this looks exactly like the structure from our first example, "Catwoman escaped." Now what we're doing is we're building a larger structure on top of that, okay? So we're going to need to use what's called an S-bar here. And the S-bar is going to be a rule that allows us to use that to connect a sentence,
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and embed that sentence within a larger sentence, okay? So we see that the S-bar right here allows us to connect a C with an S, okay? S-bar connects C and S, so S-bar connects C and S, great, okay? The VP, the verb phrase can take a verb and an S-bar, "knew that Batman survived." And we see that rule is provided right here. VP can take a V and an S-bar. And then, nothing new right here, we know that an S takes an NP and a VP. So, in this case, the NP is an N, which "is" Darkseid.
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And the VP is "knew that Batman survived," okay? And that's how we get this very cool structure, "Darkseid new that Batman survived," okay? Awesome, we have one more example. And this one is going to take what we learn-- just like how we took the prepositional phrase. And then we recursively applied it again, just to get the idea that, ah, we can reiterate this multiple times. I want to show you that with this underneath the VP that we
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can similarly, a-ha, reiterate the application of that clause is underneath the VP, okay?
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So this one is going to be a long example. But in principle, we're going to do very similar things, okay? So this sentence, our final sentence for today is "Barbados knew that Darkseid knew that Batman man survived," okay? How do we draw the tree structure for this? We know that Barbados knew something. And there was going to be some complicated structural arrangements going on underneath that VP, okay? So do your best and try to provide that right now, using this list of rules, okay?
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Remember, first thing you want to do is identify each of these linguistic items. And we know what all these are now, right? We know what-- how to classify that. It's a conjunction for "that" causes, right? And the rest is our easy work how to classify those items.
45:50
So "Barbados" is a noun. "Knew" is a verb. "That" is a conjunction for "that" clauses. "Darkseid" is a noun. "Knew" is a verb. "That" is a conjunction for "that" clauses. "Batman" is a noun. "Survived" is a verb, okay? And I hope you got the feeling of how we started repeating structurally similar things, right? And that's the insight here is that, via the linguistic principles or rules, there's nothing preventing us from boom, boom, boom, boom, boom making this even longer, and longer,
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and more complicated. And, in some sense with theory of mind, when we think about what other people are thinking about or thinking about what they think we're thinking about, theory of mind, we see that something like this is useful or helpful for forming thoughts about other people's thoughts okay? So we see that language is very important and central to cognition and cognitive science, okay? And that's why we're looking at systematicity and productivity today.
46:59
Although, I think that this is fun and fascinating in its own right. We're using this for the purpose of thinking about cognition and the mind, okay? So I'm not done with this example just yet. I just want to show you that we'll go step by step, right? So we know that a sentence consists of a noun raising a verb phrase. We know that an S-bar can take a C and an S. We know that the VP takes a V and an S-bar. And we know that the S takes an NP and a VP.
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We know that because we just did that from the last example. And what we did here is we just added this-- we just embedded that within the larger structure, okay? We took the small structure and embedded it in this larger structure. And now, we took this larger structure and embedded it in this even larger structure, okay? And so, we just need to embed Darkseid knew that Batman survived underneath the content of what Barbados knows, right?
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This is like the propositional content of Barbados' thoughts. So we know that an S-bar bar-- because we see from right here, the S-bar was what allowed us to take a C and an S. And since we have an S-bar right here, we know that that can take a C and an S, okay? And then from here, we know that the VP can take a V and an S-bar. So we use that same rule up here. The VP can take a V and an S-bar. And then, we know that a sentence can take an NP and a VP. So boom, all our rules, we didn't actually
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have to do anything new in principle, just new in practice. We already knew the principles for putting these things together from the last example. We just had to do it, in this case, with these additional items, okay? So you can go and check your work. And this is now the tree structure for "Barbados knew that Darkseid knew that Batman survived." And that is our last example for today for how to identify linguistic items in terms of their category labels, and how
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to apply very strict rules to those items, and build hierarchical tree structure diagrams for our sample sentences, okay? We sampled 12 different types of sample sentences today, just to get a feel for the different types of maneuvers that can be done to augment the complexity of our sentences. I hope that you found this lecture very interesting and insightful, and that it helps you think more about the systematic and productive nature of language
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and how the systematic and productive nature of language helps with the systematic and productive nature of our cognitions and thoughts, okay? Thank you so much for your attention today. And I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for our next lecture.
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