Thought's on Carnie's Article

Carnie's text mainly focused on a singular aspect of how language works: syntax. Syntax is an abstract concept that encompasses how words are ordered and combined in order to create a level of meaning above the individual meaning of words, and it is an important foundation for understanding more complex human behavior. Carnie discussed the idea of a generative grammar that tells one not the punctuation of a sentence, but it tells one the ordering of words in a sentence. I thought the discussion of anaphoras was interesting because I've never tried studying language from such a scientific approach before. I'm interested in why so many languages have gender differences between words and how this affects societal issues or reflects societal issues. In chapter 2, Carnie focused on parts of speech categories including N, V, Adj, and Adv as well as functional categories such as D, P, C, Conj, Neg, and T. Chapter 3 delved deeper into syntax and talked about the idea that sentences are heirarchically organized represented by trees. It's interesting to me that words themselves have meaning but its not the full picture. The full picture comes from the combination of words. This relates to symbolic systems in the idea that meaning comes from the relations between objects as well as the object itself.