Structural Analysis

Structures in Other Domains The methodology of structural analysis discussed in this article has been applied beyond the narrow realm of natural language syntax that we have discussed in this article. Within the study of language, similar methods of analysis have been pervasively applied to the study of sounds (phonology), words (morphology), and meanings (semantics), yielding a range of of abstract structural representations whose properties bear considerable explanatory burden. There are a wealth of cases in each of these domains analogous to those discussed here, though space prevents us from going in these (see Akmajian, Demers, Farmer and Harnish 1995 for a traditional overview, and Jackendo 1994 for one more focused on connections with cognitive science). Additionally, these representations have shed substantial light on the processes of language acquisition and language change. It has been found that variation in the types of sentences that are used, whether during the course of children's acquisition of their native languages or in the centuries-long periods of linguistic change, are best characterized not as super cial and haphazard alterations, but rather in terms of parametric modi cations to the fundamental underlying grammatical rules and constraints. Moving outside the domain of language, one application of these same methods has been in the study of music cognition. Just as the representations of linguistic theory arise out of an attempt to model speakers' intuitions about well-formedness and possible meanings of the sentences of their