Linguistic Theory

This research was originally meant to be presented to an audience with no linguistics background at the 2020 Undergraduate Research Symposium. However, the symposium was cancelled, so my mentor asked me to write about this research for the final paper in our syntax class. The audience then changed to one with a linguistics background.

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Although I changed the presentation of the content to fit the new audience and form, this paper could have benefitted from better rhetorical understanding at the time. I simply worked from a basis of my audience's knowledge, neglecting their possible interests, attention spans, etc. For example, there's nearly two full pages of linguistic data. I included an explanation with each piece of data I created, but I should have separated all of these sets of data and information and interspersed them with less rigid content. Then the data might hold a reader's attention more or be easier to understand. I also could have synthesized the theories more at the end and reiterated the overall picture to my audience. I think this paper would have benefited greatly from inserting visuals, such as syntactic trees with the transformations marked by arrows. Overall, I could have attended to the audience's needs more and used visuals to support my information.

Brief, simplified definitions needed to understand this paper:

Deep structure: the underlying form of anything you say; the core literal meaning of a sentence (in active voice with no stylistic variation), which exists without your knowledge and is not said aloud

Surface structure: whatever version of the sentence you end up saying after subconscious, instantaneous transformation from the deep structure

Grammatical vs ungrammatical: In the field of linguistics, grammatical means able to be understood by a native speaker of the given language. If a sentence is ungrammatical, that does not mean it breaks a rule you learned in composition class, but that it just sounds wrong and would not be naturally produced by the language system.

Auxiliary verb: In the discourse of this subject, auxes are equated with copulas/all forms of "to be."