Chapter 1 Generative Grammar

Chapter 1 Generative Grammar Syntax: how sentences are structured; how we subconsciously get sounds and words to meaning Phonetics: study of the acoustics and articulation of speech Language (i-language): ability of humans to speak any language; part of the mind/brain that allows you to speak language (e-language): instantiation of the ability to speak any language (like English or French) Cognitive science: group of disciplines that describe and explain humans ability to think Generative grammar: sentences are generated by a subconscious set of procedures; rules generate sentences The Scientific method: observe data, make generalizations about it, make a hypothesis, test the hypothesis against more data Falsifiable prediction: to prove that a hypothesis is correct, you have to look for data that would prove it wrong; the prediction that might prove a hypothesis wrong is said to be falsifiable Grammar: set of rules that generate a language (not what you learn in school) -Hypotheses must make predictions and be falsifiable -In syntax, hypotheses are called rules -group of hypotheses are called a grammar Prescriptive rules: prescribe how people should speak; how lang. is taught Descriptive rules: describe how people actually speak Anaphor: pronoun? Antecedent: a noun that an anaphor refers back to Person: the perspective of the participants in the conversation ***KNOW CHART ON PG 12 Nominative: form of a noun in subject position (I, you, he, she, it, we, they) Accusative: form of a noun in object position (me, you, him, her, it, us, them) Case: the form a noun takes depending upon its position in the sentence Rule of anaphors: an anaphor must agree in person, gender and number with its antecedent -there are nominative, accusative and anaphoric pronouns (pg. 12) Corpora: collections of spoken or written texts Grammaticality judgement task: asking a native speaker to judge if a sentence is ill formed (ungrammatical) or well formed (grammatical) Semantic ill-formedness: meaning of a sentence doesn’t make sense but form is okay Ex. #The toothbrush is pregnant. Syntactically ill-formed: word order is out of place Ex. *Toothbrush the is blue. Intuition = judgment: tapping into our subconscious knowledge Semantic judgement: judgement about the meaning of a sentence, often relying on our knowledge of the context in which the sentence was uttered Syntactic judgement: judgement about the form or structure of a sentence Garden path sentence: sentence with strong ambiguity in structure that makes its hard to understand Center embedding: stacking of relative clauses between subjects and verbs Ex. We have some cheese that mice love and it stinks. Parsing: system that breaks down sentences into their bits Performance: the kinds of language that are actually produced and heard Competence: refers to what we know about our language -upon hearing a sentence like “Cheese mice cats catch love stinks”, initially we do not accept this do to a performance problem but once you stare and realize it’s a possible sentence, you access your competence/knowledge in English grammar -Conscious knowledge (like rules) are learned -Subconscious knowledge like how to speak is acquired -Innateness refers to the theory that language is an instinct -the faculty for language is Universal grammar (UG) Premise (i): Syntax is a productive, recursive and infinite system -you can produce an infinite amount of sentences that you’ve never heard before Recursion: ability to embed structures inside one another to create sentences we haven’t heard before Premise (ii): Rule governed infinite systems are unlearnable -you never have enough input to be sure you have all the relevant facts -this is called the logical problem of language acquisition Conclusion: therefore syntax is an unlearnable system; since we have it, parts of syntax must be innate Universal grammar restricts the number of possible functions that map between situations and utterances, thus making language learnable Logical problem of language acquisition: proof that an infinite system like human language cannot be learned on the basis of observed data – an argument for UG Underdetermination of the data: idea that we know things about our language that we could not have possibly learned Universals: property found in all languages of the world Bioprogram hypothesis: idea that creole languages share similar features because of an innate basic setÝng for language Parameters: switches that select among possible variants Levels of adequacy Observationally adequate grammar: accounts for observed real world data such as corpora Descriptively adequate grammar: accounts for observed real world data and native speaker judgements Explanatorily adequate grammar: ^ and also accounts for how children acquire their language