We next went to the school of languages, where three professors sat in consultation upon improving that of their own country.
The first project was to shorten discourse by cutting polysyllables into one, and leaving out verbs and participles; because in reality all things imaginable are but nouns.
The other was a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health as wall as brevity. For it is plain, that every word we speak is in some degree a diminution od our lungs by corrison
Jonathan Swift
The learned professors of languages in Laputa proposed a scheme for abolishing all words, thinking itr would be more convenient if 'Men [were] to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on'. We doubt that this svheme could ever come to fruition, even in laputa, not only because it would be difficult to carry around an unobservable atom or an abstract loyalty, but because our thoughts are expressed by sentences that have structure and cannot be representred by things pulled from a sack.
Speaker of any language know thousands of words. They know how to pronounce them in all conexts, they know their meaning, and they know how to combine them in phrases or sentences, which means that they know their syntactic category. All of this knowledge is contained in the component of the grammar called lexicon.
Together with the phrase structure rules, the lexicon provides the information needed for complete, well-formed phrase structure trees. The phrase structure rules account for the entire except for the words at the bottom. The words in the tree belong to the samy syntactic categories that appear immediately above them. Through lexical insertion, words of the specified as verbs in the lexicon are inserted under a note labelled verb, and so on. Words such as fish, which belong to two or more categories, have seperate entries in the lexicon, or are marked for both categories in their single listing.
