LINA01H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Linguistic Prescription, Grammaticality, Double Negative
Document Summary
Grammar as used by linguists: competence: mental grammar: in our heads shared by speakers of a language = linguistic, a model of this grammar: descriptive grammar, question: if a linguist identifies a sentence as grammatical, this means, the sentence conforms to the hypothesized rules of the mental grammar, the sentence conforms to the prescriptive rules of proper grammar, the sentence conforms to the rules of the most prestigious dialect. How do we know that speakers can produce and understand an infinite # of sentences: we can do this, ex, beth is a genius, grammatical, bill thinks that [beth is a genius], sue suspects that [bill thinks that [beth is a genius], charlie said that [sue suspects that [bill thinks that [ beth is a genius]]] Summary of the first part of lecture: goal: model mental grammar (rules, method, describe data, model competence by examining performance (judgments, modulo performance errors, grammaticality = what a native speaker would say, ruled governed productivity/creativity.
