LING 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Linguistic Prescription, Training Wheels, Universal Grammar
Ambiguous sentences
● Sentences can have multiple meanings
○ “Flying planes can be dangerous”
Noam Chomskky and the Creatvity of Language
● Human linguistic knowledge is ‘creative’; we are able to produce and understand an
infinite set of novel utterances
● From a set of building blocks we can piece them together in infinitely many combinations
to produce completely original phrases
○ Failed password security question answer attempts limit
○ “Minsters mull volcano ash cloud flight chaos measures”
○ Air bag malfunction safety recall follow-up notice
No longest sentences
● Devices to lengthen sentences
○ John bought a car
○ Adding an adjective: John bought a green car.
○ Adding prepositional phrases John bought a gree car yesterday from the man in
the house.
○ Adding conjuctions like ‘and’
○ Adding relative clauses (ex: “The House that Jack Built” poem”
● Creativity is a universial property of human languages
Rules: Infinite Use of Finite Means
● Linguistic creativity exists because we know (a finite number of) rules that can be
applied repeatedly (including rules for coordination, subordination, recursion of
adjectives, prepositional phrases, etc).
● These words combine sounds in to words, words into meaningful sentences and
phrases, and allow us to produce an infinite set of sentences
Grammars
● All spoken language is governed by rules: GRAMMAR!
● Every speaker has mental grammar of the rules of his language that he follows to
produce, understand, and judge the well’formeness (grammaticality) about his language
● The job of a linguist is to uncover and model the mental grammar that all speakers have
in their heads
Knowing a rule vs. Using a rule
Why don’t we usually use sentences that go on and on if we have that capacity?
● Competence: a spearker’s knowledge of the rules of his language
● Performance: How a speaker puts that knowledge to use
○ Performance factors include memory limitations (we can’t remember that much!),
shifts in attention/interest (getting bored/distracted), psychological/physical states
(feeling tired or sick), linguistic/non-linguistic context (different interpretations)
● Our knowledge of the language can be perfect but our performance may be affected by
a variety of factors
Speech (Performance) Errors
● Spoonerism-kind of speech/performance error in which sounds (or other units) are
transposed
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Human linguistic knowledge is creative"; we are able to produce and understand an infinite set of novel utterances. From a set of building blocks we can piece them together in infinitely many combinations to produce completely original phrases. Failed password security question answer attempts limit. Minsters mull volcano ash cloud flight chaos measures . Air bag malfunction safety recall follow-up notice. Adding an adjective: john bought a green car. Adding prepositional phrases john bought a gree car yesterday from the man in the house. Adding relative clauses (ex: the house that jack built poem . Creativity is a universial property of human languages. Linguistic creativity exists because we know (a finite number of) rules that can be applied repeatedly (including rules for coordination, subordination, recursion of adjectives, prepositional phrases, etc). These words combine sounds in to words, words into meaningful sentences and phrases, and allow us to produce an infinite set of sentences.
