LING 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Universal Grammar

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 100
• Professor: Clifford Burgess

Document Summary

Early words have a single morpheme root, no affixes, no apparent internal structure. Words with regular verb or noun inflection (e. g. , tense, plural) are mastered more quickly than irregular inflections (ex. Overgeneralization common error where a regular rule is applied to an irregular word. Children were able to pluralize this form although they have never heard of a wug : shows that (1) child language is rule-based (as per chomsky"s argument against skinner"s) (2) when, and in what sequence, rules are acquired. Children acquire feature of the language (any language) in a relatively fixed sequence: bound morphemes: morphemes that cannot exist on it"s own, has to be bound to a noun. Has meaning: (i. e, plural -s , past tense -ed , function words, determiners (i. e. , a , the , auxiliary (i. e. , verb to be , i am eating) The 3 s morphemes in english are acquired at different stages that don"t fully match their frequency of usage.