Ch. 1 Generative Grammar Flashcards
Syntax
The level of linguistic organization that mediates between sounds and meaning, where words are organized into phrases and sentences
Language (capital L)
The psychological ability of humans to produce and understand a particular language. Can also be called Human Language Capacity, or i-Language.
language (lowercase l)
A language like English or French. These are the particular instances of the human language. Also be called e-langauge
Generative Grammar
A theory of linguistics in which grammar is viewed as a cognitive faculty. Language is generated by a set of rules or procedures. We will be looking at the Principles and Parameters approach
The Scientific Method
Observe some data, make generalizations about that data, draw a hypothesis, test the hypothesis against more data
Falsifiable Prediction
To prove that a hypothesis correct you have to look for the data that would prove it wrong. The prediction that might prove a hypothesis wrong is said to be falsifiable.
Grammar
Not what you learned in school. This is the set of rules that generate a language.
Prescriptive Grammar
The grammar rules as taught by so called “language experts.” These rules, often inaccurate descriptively, prescribe how people should talk/write, rather than describe what they actually do.
Descriptive Grammar
A scientific grammar that describes, rather than prescribes, how people talk/write.
Anaphor
A word that ends in -self or -selves
Antecedent
The noun an anaphor refers to
Asterisk
use to mark syntactically ill-formed sentences.
Gender (Grammatical)
Masculine vs. Feminine vs. Neuter. Does not have to identical to the actual sex of the referent
Number
The quantity of individuals or things described by a noun.
Person
The perspective of the participants in the conversation. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd
Case
The form a noun takes depending upon its position in the sentence.
Nominative
The form of a noun is subject position
Accusative
The form of a noun in object position
Corpus
A collection of real-world language data.
Native Speaker Judgements
Information about the subconscious knowledge of a language. This info is tapped by means of the grammaticality judgement task.
Semantic Judgement
A judgement about the meaning of a sentence, often relying on our knowledge of the context in which the sentence was uttered.
Syntactic Judgement
A judgement about the form or structure of a s sentence.
Learning
The gathering of conscious knowledge (like linguistics or chemistry).
Acquisition
The gathering of subconscious information (like language).
Innate
Hard-wired or built in, an instinct
Recursion
The ability to embed structures iteratively inside one another. Allows us to produced sentences we’ve never heard before.
Universal Grammar (UG)
The innate (or Instinctual) part of each language’s grammar.
The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition
The 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
The idea that we know things about our language that we could not have possibly learned- an argument for UG
Universal
A property found in all the languages of the world
Observationally Adequate Grammar
A grammar that accounts for observed real-world data (think books)
Descriptively Adequate Grammar
A grammar that accounts for observed real-world data and native speaker judgements
Explanatorily Adequate Grammar
A grammar that accounts for observed real-world data and native speaker judgements and offers an explanation for the facts of language acquisition.
