Handout from Lecture on Syntax

Colin Phillips

Differences between representations they've already discussed: object
perception involves apprehending features of the 'world out there';
language communication involves transmitting and apprehending other
people's mental representations.

Phrase structures as templates for building sentences out of small
number of symbolic pieces

Comparison of recursion in language with recursion that they've already
seen: agreed that they'd seen a kind of recursion already in their
discussion of object perception, but that this was not the same
as is found in language, where embedding of *identical* elements
inside one another is possible

Language representations are complex, involving information about both
thematic roles/subcategorization and topic/focus/prominence
information.

These multiple kinds of information are represented as a series of
different but related representations (according to transfm. grammar)
e.g. deep structure: repr. of thematic/subcat relations
surface structure: repr. of topic/focus/prominence relations

What is *trasmitted* in language communication is at best a sequence
of words derived from the surface structure of the sentence; the mental
representations involved contain much more: thoughts, which are mapped
onto deep structures, which are mapped onto surface structures ...and then the same again for the comprehender

Constraints on the mapping from deep structures to surface structures
may be one way in which language makes the retrieval of the various
representations involved feasible; such a constraint is the ban on moving
wh-phrases out of relative clauses (complex NP constraint)