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welcome to a new series on Linguistics
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syntax uh this won't necessarily assume
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any knowledge of syntax in my first
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course but it would be good to know a
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little bit of syntax so maybe checking
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out the syntax sections in introduction
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to Linguistics would be a good start but
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hopefully this series will start from a
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base where um even if you're new to
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syntax you'll be able to understand this
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so let's just jump right into it with an
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introductory lecture and some
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information about glossing okay so what
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is syntax well syntax is the study of
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how words group together in language uh
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some people would say syntax is just the
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study of sentence structure that's also
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important but really one of the key
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Parts is that we deal with words so if
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you do morphology you'll break up words
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into their part like simply is simple
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plus this ly suffix we don't deal with
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that we just treat it as a word and we
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see how it moves together uh the second
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big important part about syntax and
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really Linguistics in general is that we
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are descriptive
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not prescriptivists and this means that
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we observe language and we study how
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people use it we don't impose our
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grammar on people like prescriptivist do
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we don't say there is um certain ways
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you should talk we just take a look at a
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population we say hey look if everyone
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in this English-speaking population
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speaks like this then it's going to be
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okay and what do I mean by this well
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let's take a look at some sentences and
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ask whether or not they're grammatical
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and these are descriptivist grammatical
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not prescriptivist grammatical so the
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first sentence we ain't the ones who did
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that now this is a perfectly fine
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sentence we ain't the ones who did that
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uh the person speaking wants to say we
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aren't the people who did that uh a't
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isn't really traditional English but
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when we hear a native English speaker
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say it it doesn't sound terrible it
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sounds okay and for this it's
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grammatical so we just don't put
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anything beside the sentence I'll put a
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check mark here to say oh it's
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grammatical but usually when we write
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sentences if there isn't anything it's
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grammatical uh what about the second
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sentence crumple this milk or the lazy
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potato will fire the camera okay so this
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doesn't make any sense but it is
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grammatical so uh the meaning is weird
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so we put a hashtag by it but it follows
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regular sentence patterns crumple this
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milk well that's like saying verb this
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noun or some noun will verb some other
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noun so the sentence structure is good
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the grammatical structure is good it
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just doesn't make any sense now let's
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compare this to sentence three where I
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do go this is bad we put an asterisk by
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it to signal that it's bad it's
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grammatically bad because this I should
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actually be in this position between do
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and go so it should be where do I go not
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where I do go so this is a word order
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difference and this is
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ungrammatical okay we'll see more
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examples of ungrammatical sentences as
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we go on uh but what I really want you
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to know about whether or not it's
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grammatical um first of all only native
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speakers of some language are really
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okay to give grammatical judgments this
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is kind of controversial when we say
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native English we mean you've been using
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it regularly since about the age of six
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uh and if a native English speaker says
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hey yeah that sounds okay then we'll
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usually say it's okay there is some
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cases where people argue about whether a
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sentence is grammatical or not and for
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those sentences we put a question mark
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and that's when some people say it's
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okay some people say it's bad if we
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cover some uh material with Korean
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reflexives later maybe we'll see some of
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that because those can be kind of
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interesting um but for now let's take a
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look at how we do syntax in other
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languages okay so it's not all just
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English every language has its own
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syntax and anyone can study any
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language's syntax so to do this we have
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three lines in our syntax at all of our
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syntactic examples so for instance we
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can call this one one and there are
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three lines to example one first is the
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literal sentence so this is French I
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cannot pronounce French so I won't
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bother uh the second line is the gloss
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and this is the important part
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so in a gloss the words are always lined
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up to their meaning so J is I ne well is
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just a negative marker
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okay is eat and then as we go on we can
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see that um J I think it's j is never
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the of and then we have meat so uh the
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question is well what does the sentence
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mean well the third line is the
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translation so this means I never eat
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meat but if we take a look at French
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word order the sentence would say I
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negative marker eat never of meat so we
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can see there's a bit of a word order
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difference for example eat comes before
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never okay um we say of meat instead of
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just meat so we had this of marker okay
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uh so these are some differences we can
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see in French and in order to study
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uh these other um syntactic structures
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in other languages we really at this
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stage hope that somebody else has
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translated them for us um but if you do
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speak that other language then uh you're
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very useful because you can translate
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some of these sentences and give them
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glosses so other syntacticians can work
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on these things uh in this course and
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all Linguistics courses you take at
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University you'll always be given the
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gloss for some other
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language okay uh but it's also useful if
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you're just looking at a language you
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know so here's the students asked for
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these
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books okay so why would we need a glass
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for
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English well we can break it up into
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more FES and be more specific so the the
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is a definite
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article other languages have definite
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articles and if we use def. art for all
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definite articles across all language
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then we have this common language that
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we can understand so don't think of the
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as the think of the as being a definite
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article we'll get we'll get into these
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terms a little bit more later um but for
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now definite article would be the an
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indefinite article would be something
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like uh or an so those are
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indefinite okay take a look at the
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second word students well student is a
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word on its own and what is this s well
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students that s morphine is really just
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a plural marker so we can denote that by
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saying student Das plural and this Dash
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plural means that the morphine is a
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plural morphine okay compare this to the
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dot in the definite article now this
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means that the that the article is you
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know part of the word um maybe looking
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at these as well for Dem plural so a
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demonstrative a plural demonstrative
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it's not a morphine that is a
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demonstrative and then a morphine that
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is a plural coming together it's just
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one
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word uh so let's go back to asked well
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this Ed this is the past suffix so again
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we have this Dash here to indicate it's
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a morphine and then in books I did not
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put the morphine marker there but this
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would be book with a-h s because this s
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is also the plural marker and the
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sentence is just the students asked for
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these books but it's a nice way that we
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can kind of break things up and we can
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see uh the different morum structure in
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different language
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the different properties attached to
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words in languages such as agreement
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which we'll cover in future videos uh
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plurality maybe in some languages
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plurality is built into the words and
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it's not a
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morphine okay so that's grammatical
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information in
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gloss so let's take a look at some of
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the basic variations we can get and
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these are really basic
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variations enough that I think even
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without any syntactic background you can
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get something out of this okay so in
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English we could say something like the
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beautiful
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waterfall where we have an adjective
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coming right before the noun and the
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adjective here modifies the noun so the
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waterfall is beautiful now in Spanish we
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they don't say the beautiful waterfall
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instead they say the waterfall
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beautiful and it has the same meaning so
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we have an adjective modifying a noun
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but the adjective comes after the noun
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so these are one of these differences we
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see across languages that's something as
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simple as having adjectives come before
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nouns instead of after nouns or
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adjectives coming after nouns instead of
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before nouns okay so these are some of
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the things we'll note as we go through
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take a look at different languages take
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a look at different properties of
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languages um and we'll see even more
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extreme
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variations such as the difference
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between English and Japanese so English
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has subject verb object word order so in
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Tim 8 me
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Tim is the subject of the sentence that
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is what or who the sentence is about um
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eight is our verb it's our action word
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here and then meet is the object of the
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sentence so um what is the subject doing
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to something if there is an object we'll
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cover subjects objects in detail in the
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future as well okay but Japanese is not
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SVO it is an s o language which means
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that the verb comes at the end of the
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sentence the subject is first and the
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object is second so instead of Tim 8
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meet it would be Tim meet 8 okay so
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these are one of the variations um there
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is six total different types of
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languages so this is SV s oov there is
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also V vs o osv and
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ovs um you'll encounter these with
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different frequencies so SVO and sov
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languages are definitely the most common
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in the world and then it slowly bleeds
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down into this
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list okay uh so here's an exercise just
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to kind of get you know you you've
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watched the
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introduction um you've learned a little
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bit about glossing so given this
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sentence you've never seen before what
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can we pull out of this sentence or this
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language Icelandic and we can say what's
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different from
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English Okay so there is man in
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garden.the
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okay what's what's the first major thing
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here I say dothe here but really I could
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write dot definite
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article and what does this dot mean well
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this dot means that the definite article
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so this the here is actually built into
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the word
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gum okay so that's different it's not a
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morphous just built into this word so
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this word for garden is the definite
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Garden so that is always the garden if
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we wanted to say a garden it would be a
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completely different word okay uh
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another thing to note here is that we
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have there is man in garden. devart but
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there's no indefinite article here so
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there's no word for uh that comes before
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man so one of the things in Icelandic is
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that if we want to specify an indefinite
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AR article like a man an apple we just
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don't include the article at all we only
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include the article as part of a word if
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it is the definite
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article okay but for the rest of it word
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order seems the same so there is man in
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the garden um you know the language and
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words are different obviously but it
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looks like one of the main differences
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here is that uh articles in Icelandic
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are much different than they are in
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English
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so just with one sentence and 10 minutes
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of a video you can already look at
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another language and you can identify
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some things that are different in
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English and you can be a little bit
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specific about it uh so really the key
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thing here in this video is well how do
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we do syntax in other languages and we
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just use a gloss and we use our
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syntactic knowledge our morphological
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knowledge and then we can come to some
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conclusions but we really want to be
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much more precise about what we're
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talking about uh not everything is easy
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just saying oh there's
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articles uh there's word order
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differences there's differences where
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adjectives or prepositions come in
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sentences um we really want to dive into
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syntactic Theory talk about groupings of
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words talk about properties of nouns
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verbs adjectives so on and so forth so
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we'll get to that in future videos uh so
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you know hang in there they're coming
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soon uh if you have any questions about
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the basics please leave them in the
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comments down below and I'll answer them
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the best that I can