LBT288-291姵妏

LBT288-291姵妏

A phrase-maker, then, is simply a graphic representation of how a speaker of English understands a sentence. Another way of saying the same thing is this: a person who knows a given language interprets a string of words by fitting a phrase-maker to it; he understands the sentence in terms of a phrase-maker. In the case of certain ambiguities, more than one phrase-maker (or interpretation) may be fitted, the selection of one or the other depending recipe the context of the sentence. Notice that a phrase-maker, or tree diagram, is not a “recipe for how to make a sentence.”It is an explanation of how a string of words is understood or structured in perception.

因此，一個“phrase-maker”不過僅是一個以文字、平面呈現的解釋方式給對於使用英文的人來了解及說明英文。用另一個方式來說就是：一個知道藉由套用phrase-maker來解釋一特定語言的人，他以一個phrase-maker的觀點了解那個句子。至於某些語意不清的含糊語(具有雙重或以上意義的詞)，可能被套用一個以上的phrase-maker(或是翻譯)，選擇一個翻譯的意思抑或其他意思則決定於那個句子的上下文。要注意的是，一個phrase-maker或是一個樹狀圖，並不是“如何製造句子的秘訣”。那是一個用來解釋一串字如何讓人了解和建構的參照。

Although these considerations belong to simple high school grammar, certain implications that are of particular importance for a theory of language acquisition are frequently ignored. The ambiguity of the sentence quoted is in this case directly due to the fact that the word boring is once function as an inflected verb-form and once as an adjective, modifying the noun students. In Indo-European languages (and probably in most others as well), the words that are most critical for the conveyance of meaning of a sentence are not rigidly tagged as either adjectives, or nouns or verbs, but there is considerable freedom of syntactic categorization. In English, most one-syllable nouns may function as verbs; the gerund of most verbs may function as an adjective or noun; most nouns may enter compounds in which they come to function as a modifier of another noun (for example, table-tennis); and there are constructions in which nouns assume adverbial roles (for example, Go Navy).

雖然這些情況不過僅是高中文法，但實際牽連的對於理論是很重要的且常被語言使用者忽略。句子中被引述的多義詞是直接合乎於這種情況，因為事實上boring 這一個詞可因變化字形而作為動詞和形容詞用途，用來修飾student 這個名詞。在印歐語系當中(或者有可能在更多其他的語系)，字詞在傳達一個句子的意思中最受爭議因為並沒有硬性規定附加字尾而同時可以是形容詞、名詞，抑或是動詞。不過這些被視為造句法類別上的自由。在英文中，大部分的單音節名詞都可以作為從使用；大部分動詞的動名詞也可作為形容詞或名詞來使用；而大部分的名詞可以變成複合詞而使得他的功能趨近於另一個當作修飾詞的名詞(如：table-tennis桌球)；另外還有一種用名詞來扮演副詞腳色的造句法結構。(如：Go Navy)

If we go back to Fig.7.4 and move from level of abstraction to level of abstraction, that is, from parts of speech to the constituents of the sentence, we find similar freedom. A pronoun may appear in the subject or in the object, and the same is true of adjectives and nouns; nor is the left to right order constant (although it is regulated by rules) as shown earlier in the chapter. The freedom becomes broader as the syntactic categories become more comprehensive. In highly inflected languages the inflectional morphemes may mark a word unmistakably as belonging to one or the other syntactic category but the problem is basically no different, because even there most word roots may appear in all three syntactic categories (verb, adjective, noun), and the selection and coordination of inflectional morphemes is possible only after the speaker has already assigned the root to a given category.

假如我們回顧圖7.4並且從一抽象面移到另一抽象面，也就是說，從語言部分到句子組成要素，我們找到相似的自由度。一個代名詞有可能代表著一個主題或是一個物體，而事實上就是名詞和形容詞的意思；既不是右到左的不變指令(雖然它已經被規則所規範了)就如同在這個章節中所顯示的。當句法的類型越廣泛，詞性轉換的自由度也跟著越大。在高度使用變換字形的語言中，那些有字尾變化的詞素當附屬於一個或其他語法類型中時可清楚地標示一個字，但問題是本質上還是一樣的，因為連大部分的字根也都全呈現在那三個句法類型中(動詞、形容詞、名詞)，而選擇和調整變換字尾詞素僅可能出現在當說話者決定一個特定類型字根之後。