LING 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: African American Vernacular English, Noam Chomsky, Word Grammar
Document Summary
Narrow goal of linguistics: construct theoretical models of linguistic computation and try to discover what is general about them. Main data here: linguistic intuitions of native speakers. To boldly go where no man has gone before: don"t use double negation. Say: i didn"t do anything: don"t end a sentence with a prep, don"t use who in place of whom . Descriptive grammar: goal: to describe what the native speakers of a language mean (verbally) when they speak their language (the meaning of the word grammar as used in this course) Prescriptive grammar: categorizes certain language uses as acceptable or unacceptable according to a standard form of the language. All spoken language has rules: fantastic ----> fan-fuckin-tastic, rule: fuckin can be inserted only in place of the stressed syllable, missing be in black english vernacular (bev) Hypothesis 1: be can be freely omitted in bev.
