01:615:305 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Falsifiability, Universal Grammar, Scientific Method
13 Sep 2016
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News of today: dolphins have been recorded to have a conversation like two people meeting for the first time. Lecture began with a review of the material from last class, led into a discussion about the scientific method and ended with the carrie exercises in the handout. The logical problem within ug basically explains that it is impossible for children to learn all the necessary components of a language so they must instead understand the foundational structure/system for the generation of grammatical sentences. The poverty of stimulus within ug shows that children immersed in sufficient data (exclusive of the negative counterparts of positive/grammatical sentences) can learn what is acceptable and unacceptable within a language. Universal grammar is a property of human beings. Prescriptive rules are set by society to standardize writing. Descriptive rules are how people actually speak to each other. In fact, most sentences which are descriptively unacceptable are also prescriptively unacceptable.
