Language and Mind: Creativity in Human Language

Flashcards covering key vocabulary related to creativity in human language, focusing on concepts like linguistic competence, recursion, nominal compounds, and structural ambiguity.

Linguistic competence

The tacit knowledge that lets speakers generate grammatical expressions, which is not directly observable but is the focus of linguists.

Linguistic performance

A speaker's actual use of language in concrete situations, which can be influenced by non-linguistic factors like memory or fatigue.

Noam Chomsky

One of the founders of modern linguistics who emphasized the fundamental creativity of human language use.

Creativity in Human Language

The property of human language that makes it innovative, free from stimulus control, and appropriate to new and ever-changing situations.

Novel Sentences

Sentences that a speaker produces or understands for the first time, having never encountered them in prior experience.

Infinite Number of Grammatical Expressions

The capacity of native speakers to construct an unlimited number of grammatical sentences due to the rules of their mental grammars.

Recursion

A property of mental grammar rules that generates linguistic units containing units of the same kind, such as sentences within sentences or phrases within phrases.

Nominal Compound

A noun that is composed of two other nouns, serving as an example of recursion in words (e.g., 'shark week', 'oil spill').

Noun (grammatical category)

A word category identified by its distribution in sentences (e.g., 'my ****', 'the ****\_', forming plurals with -s) and typically referring to people, places, things, or events.

Head of a Compound

The noun within a compound that determines its basic meaning (e.g., 'dog' in 'house dog' signifies a type of dog, not a type of house).

Right Hand Head Rule

In English, the rule stating that the head of a nominal compound (N1N2) is always the noun on the right (N2), indicating that N1N2 is a kind of N2.

Mental Lexicon

The stored collection of basic building blocks (words) in a speaker's mind, each with its pronunciation, meaning, and grammatical category.

Lexical Rule (for nouns)

A rule stating that a noun may be composed of any of the pre-stored nouns in the mental lexicon (e.g., N → shark \| week \| book).

Nominal Compounding Rule

A recursive rule stating that a noun may be composed of one noun followed by another noun (\text{N} \rightarrow \text{N N}). This rule's recursive nature allows for the creation of compounds of arbitrary length and complexity, such as 'shark week' or 'oil spill cleanup program', demonstrating how new words can be formed from existing ones in an iterative manner.

Hierarchical Structures

Complex linguistic objects whose parts are organized into groups rather than a simple linear sequence, often visualized using tree diagrams.

Tree Diagrams

Visual representations used to illustrate the hierarchical organization of linguistic structures, depicting the application of grammatical rules.

Root (of a tree diagram)

The starting symbol or top node of a tree diagram, representing the entire linguistic unit being built.

Branches (of a tree diagram)

The lines connecting different nodes in a tree diagram, showing the decomposition of a linguistic unit into its constituent parts.

Node (in a tree diagram)

Any point in a tree diagram that is connected to another point, representing a linguistic unit or a category.

Structural Ambiguity

Occurs when a single string of words can be analyzed as having two or more distinct hierarchical structures, each corresponding to a different meaning (e.g., 'student film series').