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Author Topic: X-bar theory  (Read 787 times)

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Offline pooka

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X-bar theory
« on: August 03, 2006, 10:22:31 AM »
So I was having this dream about binary phrase analysis.  I'll outline it here and then go research it some more on the internet.  

My starting point was the crowning revelation of my Syntax section:  That underlying the root Verb Phrase of a well-formed sentence (which commands at least one Noun Phrase and any other susidiary phrases) would be an inflection phrase.  So in my dream, I could see that below the inflection phrase was a morphologic phrase, and below that a phonologic phrase, and finally the semantic phrase.  

Of course, when I woke up I remembered the principle I learned probably too young in my truncated linguistics career:  There is no truth, only better or worse arguments.  And our education was not to obtain knowledge, but critical thinking skills.  

Then I fell back asleep and had a really weird dream.

Okay, wiki has something that will allow me to illustrate what I am talking about.  Instead of the head of the NP and VP being the impenetrable S (for Sentence), the head is IP for inflection phrase, which provides a passage from the lexical level into morphology and its subsequent connection to meaning and phonology.  
I suppose that in an ideal method of expressing this, I could take that IP and rotate the diagram 90 degrees on the z axis to show another tree, with phonological structure on the left branch and inflectional morphology on the right branch.  This phological head would produce a tree running parallel to the syntactic one, with the semantic module governing the parallel trees.  

Though in my dream it was definitely more the case that morphology was deeper than syntax, and phonology deeper than that with pure meaning behind it all.
« Last Edit: August 03, 2006, 10:43:47 AM by pooka »
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Offline Jonathon

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X-bar theory
« Reply #1 on: August 03, 2006, 10:37:56 AM »
Syntax is probably one of my weaker areas, I think. I never had a real course in syntax, and my course in English grammar didn't really get into theory or anything.

In other words, I didn't follow past about the third sentence. :unsure:  
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