VLC001 - Demo Course

The utterance "I'll be there!" may realize any of the following illocutionary acts (besides many others), given an appropriate context:

promising	predicting	threatening

The autosegments are associated vertically across the tiers. Thus, this representation is similar to music where we the tune is given on one level and the text on another.

Structural Ambiguity is basically a question of "what goes with what" in a sentence: it occurs when the constituents (i.e. the elements of sentence structure) can relate to each other in different ways, even though none of the individual words in the sentence may be ambiguous.

Here are two interpretations of the Noun Phrase [very old men and women] (pictured above, as 'interpretation 0') which can be represented using simplified constituent analysis:

NP[very old [men and women]] >> Both men and women are old.

NP[[very old men] and [women]] >> The men are old, the women can be of any age.