Phrase Structure Essay

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Given the widely differing interpretations of Universal Grammar, it is necessary to specify that the present article considers Universal Grammar (UG) within the current Chomskyan model, described for instance in Chomsky (1988) and Cook (1988); this is different not only from the type of Universal Grammar studied by those concerned within the implicational universals tradition, such as Hawkins (1983, 1987), but also from much of the L2 discussion of Universal Grammar, which has looked at earlier models of language acquisition with different emphases or has looked at syntactic issues that are not directly relevant to this model. Current UG theory describes the speaker’s knowledge of language in terms of principles and parameters, as captured in the Government/Binding theory of syntax (Chomsky, 1981, 1988; Cook, 1988), not in terms of rules; hence it is sometimes called the “principles and parameters” model. To take an English example sentence “Max played the drums with Charlie Parker”, principles of phrase structure require every phrase in it to have a head of a related syntactic category and permit it to have complements of various types; A Verb Phrase such as “played the drums” must have a head that is a verb, “play”, and may have a complement “the drums”; a Prepositional Phrase such as “with Charlie Parker” must have a head that is a preposition, “with”, and a complement “Charlie Parker”; Noun Phrases such as “Max”, “the drums”, and “Charlie Parker” must have noun heads and may, but in this case do not, have complements. This is not true only of English; the phrases of all languages consist of heads and possible complements - Japanese, Catalan, Gboudi, and so on. The difference between the phrase structures of different languages lies in the order in which head and complement occur within the phrase; in English the head verb comes before the complement, the head
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