College 6 Flashcards
What is a syntax
rules and constraints governing how linguistic units are combined to form meaningful sentences
What is semantics?
the meaning of a sentence is based on its structure
What does linguistic knowledgde allow?
the recognition and generation of new sentences
There is a debate on whether children are genetically predisposed with specific assumptions about language structure that aid in learning syntax, what do some researchers think and what do their opponents think
- they propose the existence of innate universal grmamar an dlearning baises that align with the structure of human languages
- opponents argue that children rely on geral-purpose learning machanisms and data to acquire syntactic knowledge
What do children neet to do to account for flexible and systematic syntactic knowlegde?
They need to internalize abstract categories and general patterns for combining them
What is language comprehension?
It relies on decoding linguistic data based on stored knowledge and thought
Waht is language production?
it involves encoding thought into language based on stored knowledge
Wat is the rules based account?
it involves abstract rules, universal grammar
What is the constructionist account?
they focus on specific, lexical knowledge. usage based approach
What does syntactic bootstrapping involve?
syntactic properties to identify and narrow down the meanings of words based on their likely grammatical categories
What are constituents?
group of words that clump together and function a s a single unit within a sentence
Distributional evidence
the tendency of words or types of words to appear in a certain syntactic context
What is the semantic bootstrapping hypteses
the idea that children’s learning of syntactic strucure relies on word meaning
what is compositionality?
the concept that there are fixed rules for combining units of language in terms of their form that results in fixed meaning relatinships between the words that are joined together.
what is the difference between object relative clause and subject relative clause?
the distinction is based on whether the shared referent functions as the object or subject within the embedded clause.
