LD: The genius of grammar Flashcards
Different languages vary on what parts of speech they have and there is no fully agreed-upon classification scheme, although there are some basic similarities
Open class: (adj, adv, n, v): easy to add new members; carry much of the content; produced earlier; easier for 2nd language learners
Closed class: (pronoun, Auxiliary verb, conjunction, preposition, determiner): hard to add new members; carry much of the grammar; produced later; harder for 2nd language learners
What is the characteristic of Word orders in most language
Most languages have a default word order;
Word orders vary across languages
How verbs are “in charge”
They determine what the arguments are;
They determine if arguments are optional or not;
Why there are logical problem of language acquisition
People generalize beyond the input, but not arbitrarily.
There are patterns for which verbs occur with which kind of argument structures — but there are exceptions to these patterns too.
Possible solutions to the logical problem of language acquisition
Maybe children are told when they get things wrong (this does not really work);
Maybe they are sensitive to more subtle kinds of negative evidence, like rephrasings that statistically occur more often;
Maybe they use implicit negative evidence about which argument structures don’t appear.
It is about statistical learning.
What are morphological rules
Morphological rules are rules governing how morphemes can be used and combined in a language
What are morphemes
Morphemes are the smallest units that convey meaning.
Includes tense (i.e., when the action took place), which overlaps somewhat with mood (i.e., whether it is certain to happen) and aspect (i.e., whether it is ongoing)
Two verb tenses and their psychological reality
Almost all new verbs are regular, which indicates that the past tense rule is productive.
Mostly irregular verbs occur in clusters based on similarity of stem, people are more confused about new verbs that sound like irregulars.
How is irregular verbs related evolutionary story
Irregular verbs are the most frequent. Only the frequent verbs will be so well memorized that they are impervious to regularization over time.
How is verb morphology learned?
Follows a general U-Sharped curve
Early: few verbs are used, but most of them have correct tense morphology.
Middle: past-tense rules often overgeneralized (e.g., goed instead of went).
End: eventually these mistakes are corrected
How do we think about sentences? If verbs are in charge, what does this mean about the structure of sentences? How do we know verbs are in charge?
An alternate possibility: learning the rules of a language = learning words immediately follow other words (e.g., bi-grams, n-grams)
There are also long-distance dependencies between words in sentences, which suggests there is some deep or hidden structure (probably related to the verb) linking them. And it is impossible to track all those for human memory.
Most linguists agree that it has phrase structure: phrases nested in with one another in our underlying mental representation. The underlying depiction of a sentence’s phrase structure is called its parse tree.
Where does Syntactic ambiguity arise from?
What is its psychological reality
Syntactic ambiguity arises from sentences with the same words but different meanings. This is because they have different parse trees. Syntactic ambiguity (poorly resolved) can often lead to unintentional humor, which suggests that parse trees are psychologically real, and tells us something about how we process language.
What is garden path sentences
What does it imply
People thy their best to figure the phrase structure out as they are hearing the sentence
Sometimes this results in us getting misled into choosing the wrong parse tree, and then having to go back and reanalyse it from the beginning.
This implies that sentences with larger long-distance dependencies tend to be more difficult
How does processing sentences develop
Even children are remarkably good at figuring out language “as it comes”
A skill distinct from but correlated with knowledge of vocabulary
Why word order matters
Language is compositional: the meaning of a phrase or sentence is not just a mixture of the meaning of its words
