I. Find the meanings of the following terms: phoneme, morpheme, phonetics, phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax, semantics, prosody, pragmatics, discourse.
II. What do you understand by the distinction between competence and performance? How is this distinction significant for the study of language and of cognition?
III. Consider the sentence: HBCSE students attend cognitive science lectures regularly.
a. Show the syntactic surface structure of this sentence using a tree diagram (consider HBCSE to be a single word).
b. Translate this sentence into Hindi and show the syntactic surface tree structure of the translated sentence. Do the same in your native language.
c. Refer to Figure 2.4 on page 67 of reference 1 below, which gives some simple examples of Chomsky's phrase structure rules. Cite those rules which you have used to construct your tree structures in a. and b.. In each case add other rules that you had to use which are not listed in this Figure.
d. Rewrite this sentence in a form that has a different surface syntactic structure but which leaves the deep structure unchanged. Draw a tree diagram of the new surface structure.
e. Re-write the sentence so that its meaning is altered but the syntactic surface structure is unchanged.
f. Modify this sentence so as to include several embedded clauses.
Suggested sources:
1. Greene, Judith (1986) Representations and Processes Part II in Language Understanding: A Cognitive Approach, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, UK., pp. 51-97.
2. David Crystal: Encyclopedia of Language/ Encyclopedia of Linguistics
Linguistics Tutorial (Fri 13-12-02)