LIN102 Unit 1

What is pragmatics?

The study of meaning arising from conversation context

What is semantics?

The study of meaning of linguistic expressions

What is syntax?

The study of sentence structure

What is morphology?

The study of “word” structure

What is phonology?

The study of sound patterns or gesture systems

What is phonetics?

The study of the signal, signed gesture or speech sounds

What is a sentence?

A grammatical structure consisting of at least one clause, whose parts stand in syntactic relations to one another

What is a clause?

A grammatical unit consisting of a subject and a predicate

What is a subject?

What the sentence is about (similar to a topic)

What is a predicate?

What is said about the subject

What are syntactic patterns?

sequences of elements in sentences

What are grammaticality judgements?

Judgements speakers make about whether a sentence is possible in their language

What does it mean to be descriptive?

observe language as it actually is used by speakers of a language community

What does it mean to be prescriptive?

established conventions of how language “should be”

What is linguistics as the scientific study of language

The field that uses the scientific method to study the various domains of language

What other groups in gocnitive systems is language associated with?

attention, memory, executive functions

How is language studied?

data, hypothesis formation, testing predictions, model building

What does formal linguistics ask and what are the methods?

asks: possible, impossible patterns

methods: qualitative data, formal models, corpora

What does psycholinguistics ask and what are the methods?

asks: how is language processed in real time

methods: experiments, reaction times, priming

what is developmental linguistics (acquisition)

how children acquire language

what is generative grammar?

language is not “learned” but acquired

what is generative grammar and the capacity for language?

the capacity for language starts with genetically endowed initial cognitive state in infants

What is universal grammar (UG)?

language is universal across human populations and languages differ to the point of mutual intelligibility

What does generative grammar explain?

creativity: WUG

systematicity: rules govern what is possible

tactic knowledge: language has knowledge of rules with no awareness

What are the four questions of generative grammer?

1. what is the nature of linguistic competence?

2. How is the system acquired?

3. How is it used in real time (performance)?

4. What neural mechanisms support it?

What is compotence?

internal knowledge of generative rules

What does competence do?

allows us to produce/understand infinitely many sentences

What is performance?

actual use of language in real time

What does performance do?

includes processing limitations, errors, memory constraints

What are the different grammaticality and acceptability versions?

grammatical and acceptable

grammatical but unacceptable

ungrammatical and unacceptable

what is grammaticaility?

whether the sentence can be generated by the grammar

What is acceptability?

whether it sounds natural or meaningful in context

How do we collect reaction times and priming?

experimental methods

reaction time tasks (ex. lexical decision)

What are some reaction time tasks?

faster responses for frequent words

priming effects