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The semantics of syntactic structures.

E Kako¹, L Wagner

¹Department of Psychology, Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, 19081-1390, Swarthmore, PA, USA

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

|March 10, 2001

Summary

Syntactic structures convey meaning independently of words, aiding efficient language acquisition. This linguistic insight bridges generative grammar and psycholinguistic findings, highlighting language learnability.

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Area of Science:

Linguistics
Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Science

Background:

Growing interest in abstract meaning conveyed by syntax.
Traditional compositionality in generative grammar.
Exploration of syntactic structures carrying independent meaning.

Purpose of the Study:

Relate syntactic meaning to traditional compositionality.
Examine modern theories allowing independent syntactic meaning.
Investigate psycholinguistic evidence for syntactic semantics in word learning.

Main Methods:

Literature review of linguistic theories.
Analysis of psycholinguistic experimental findings.
Theoretical integration of syntax and semantics.

Main Results:

Two modern theories readily allow syntactic structures to bear independent meaning.
Observational learning of word meanings is often insufficient.
Syntactic semantics compensates for observational gaps in word learning.

Conclusions:

Convergence of linguistic theory and psycholinguistics supports learnability.
Syntactic structures play a crucial role in efficient language acquisition.
Language learnability is facilitated by the semantic contribution of syntax.

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