LING 132 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Universal Property, Universal Grammar, Spoonerism
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Others: language acquisition in children, signed languages, dialects, neurolinguistics (brain basis for language) There is an alphabet with all the sounds of all languages. Lexical = related to words/vocab of a language. Word = arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning. Sentences can have multiple meanings and can be ambiguous. We are able to produce and understand an infinite set of novel utterances: b/c we know a finite # of rules that can be applied repeatedly. Also, no such thing as longest sentence. Everyone has their own mental grammar of rules of his language that he follows to produce, understand, and make judgments of well-formedness of his language. Universal grammar (ug): set of universal properties possessed by all languages i. e. all languages have nouns and verbs; have recursive rules (rules to add to/embed one sentence inside another) to produce an infinite number of sentences. Competence: speaker"s knowledge of rules of his language.
