V o F teoria contrastiva Flashcards
The “arbitrariness of the sign” refers to the conventional, but not necessarily logical, pairing of a word with a meaning.
VERDADERO
According to Saussure, the word dog means “dog” because every single English speaker has undergone the same act of rote learning that links the sound “dog” to a meaning but there’s nothing in the word that resembles a dog
Language works by making use of the lexicon of words and the concepts they stand for (a mental dictionary) in each person’s brain.
FALSO
Language works by combining a mental dictionary and a set of rules that combine words to convey relations among concepts.
According to Chomsky, the word chain is the suitable and most basic structure to think about the working of a language.
FALSO
According to Chomsky, a word-chain device is the simplest example of a discrete combinatorial system but it is the wrong way to think about human language. Why?
1. A sentence is not simply a string of words chained together (be it either an ill-formed “give the book me” or perfectly well-formed but devoid of sense “colourless green ideas sleep furiously”) but needs to make sense/have meaning.
2. A sentence is not a chain as there is an innate invisible superstructure (super-rules=principles) that holds the words together. There are hierarchical/dependency-relations holding between the words even if they are not immediately next to one another (See example on page 95) that cannot be properly accounted for by a word-chain model.
When we learn grammar, we learn how to put words in order by recording which word follows which other word.
FALSO
When learning a language, we do not learn which word follows which other word, but how to order word categories. So we recognize “colorless green ideas” because we know the order adjective-noun from a familiar sequence such as “strapless black dresses”.
Principles and parameters are something that children must acquire through exposure to the language they are born into.
FALSO
Both are innate; syntax is conceived of as hard-wired into our brain as human species. What children are postulated to learn through exposure is to set/tune the parameters in the correct way.
English is a non-pro-drop language and Spanish is a pro-drop language. Thus, there is a differing syntactic principle involved.
FALSO
They share the same syntactic principle, the extended projection principle which includes subject-retention/omission or the so-called pro-drop parameter, but they differ in the specific setting of the parameter.
In Spanish, the construction of a question depends on the structure of the sentence itself rather than on the sequence of the words in it.
VERDADERO
Any Spanish speaker will be able to identify a sentence like “da el libro me” as ungrammatical thanks to the principle of structure-dependency.
VERDADERO
Knowledge of syntax has no incidence on knowledge of vocabulary use.
FALSO
It is a fact that both Spanish and English kids start with a neutral setting for the pro-drop parameter.
FALSO
The notion of present, past and future time is a language universal.
VERDADERO
According to Cook (1994), UG is concerned with core and peripheral areas of language knowledge.
FALSO
According to Cook (1994), parameters are built-in the minds so there is no need for their values to be set.
FALSO
Language universals differ in that some of them are absolute while some others are statistical and others involve implications. However, all of them have evolved and survived from a unique proto-language.
FALSO
Pinker claims that Universal Grammar underlies all languages and that some linguistic properties vary as parameters. To explain this, Pinker compares UG with an archetypal body plan found in animals.
TRUE
