ABSTRACT
Modern linguistics has succeeded in decomposing the complexity of grammars in the interaction of independent modules. More specifically, for any given sentence in any language three abstract levels of representation converge to give the associated structure: the phonological level (where the possible sequences of sounds are checked), the syntactic level (where words are combined yielding the proper hierarchical structures), and the semantic level (where the meaning of the whole sentence is computed on the basis of the meaning of each lexical item). Thus, for example, an English native speaker knows that such expressions as “remnantzry,” “dog a barks,” and “happiness broke his arm” are not acceptable at the phonological, syntactic, and semantic level, respectively.
