2 – 21.10.11

Noam Chomsky

Competence and performance, I-language and E-language

Competence – speaker linguistic knowledge

Performance – actual use of that knowledge (the act of speaking/acting) = speech production, imperfect reflection of our knowledge (we make mistakes etc)

Creative aspect of language – our ability to create (from a finite/limited number of words (which a man knows, and finite the number of rules) an infinite number of sentences

Generativism & transformationalism

A generative grammar of language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences.

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously OK ← grammatical sentence

Fearless red foxes attack furiously OK ← Acceptable

Furiously sleep ideas green colourless NOT OK

Grammaticality & acceptability

Grammatical sentence - is a sentence which a linguist thinks it should be generated by rules of a given language

Acceptable sentence - If a native speaker thinks it is correct

Deep structure & surface structure

Deep structure - everything that takes place in your head before you say a sentence

Surface structure - What you say then – production of speech

John wrote book – deep structure

John wrote a book / John has written a book / A book was written by John – Surface structure

There is an underlying order of elements created by phrase structure rule.

Language as a mental 'organ'

• Except in pathological cases it is universally present in humans

• Faults in the language may be inherited

• It is present only in humans

• Langugage is learned extraoridinally quickly and probably with critical periods

We require language so easily and so fast that there must be some mental structure allowing it

The poverty of stimulants – children are exposed to very incomplete language because ppl around do not speak perfectly

Universal Grammar

Humans have facility to acquire language, rather than the facility to acquire a particular language. Children must have at birth, certain specifically linguistic expectations in order for them to develop a language from the impoverished data they will actually be provided with. This set of expectations or pre-programmed knowledge is universal grammar (UG)

Language universals – grammatical rules that apply to all the languages (e.g. every language has consonants and vowels, verbs and nouns)

Human & animal languages

1. Duality of pattering – the feature in which we have a limited number of phonemes like 10 vowels and 30 consonants – this seems to be absent in animal speech

2. Open endedness – ability to use language to say anything at all, including lots of things we've never said or heard before

3. property of stimulus – freedom ; ability to say anything you like in a given context

4. Displacement – the use of language to talk about things other than here and now

Lacking duality, lacking displacement, lacking open-endedness, lacking property of stimulus-freedom animal signalling systems are...

Morphology – 2nd chapter

Morphology - The study of the internal structure of words

A word –

in|differ|ent ← 3 parts

Properties that can be associated with words

• sound

• meaning

• form

• grammatical category

• orthography

• spelling

Lexicography – writing a dictionary

Classes of words

• Lexical content words / open class words:

  • Nouns

  • Verbs

  • Adjectives

  • Adverbs

• Function words / grammatical words / closed class words:

  • prepositions

  • conjunctions

  • articles

  • pronouns

You can easily add new words to open class words. It's very difficult to add new words to closed class words

My stupid dog has eaten a mouse

My, has, a – grammatical words

you're left with: stupid dog eaten mouse – you still get the message