LING 1010: Language and Mind - Creativity in Human Language

Flashcards covering key concepts from the 'Creativity in Human Language' lecture, including linguistic competence, recursion, and structural ambiguity.

Linguistic competence

The tacit knowledge that lets speakers generate grammatical expressions.

Linguistic performance

The actual use of language in concrete situations, which can be influenced by non-linguistic factors.

Tacit knowledge

Unconscious knowledge that is difficult to describe or explain; linguistic competence is an example of this.

Noam Chomsky

One of the founders of modern linguistics who emphasized the fundamentally creative nature of human language use.

Creativity in Human Language

The property that everyday human language is innovative, free from stimulus control, and appropriate to new and changing situations.

Novel sentences

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

Infinite number of grammatical expressions

The capacity of native speakers to construct an unlimited quantity of grammatical sentences using their mental grammars.

Mental grammar

The internalized system of rules that enables speakers to combine basic linguistic building blocks into ever more complex phrases and sentences.

Recursion

A property of rules in mental grammars where they generate linguistic units that contain linguistic units of the same kind (e.g., sentences within sentences, phrases within phrases, or words within words).

Nominal Compound

A noun that is composed of two other nouns (e.g., 'shark week', 'oil spill').

Head of a compound

The noun within a compound that determines the basic meaning of the entire compound.

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).

Mental lexicon

The mental storage of words, including their pronunciation, meaning, and grammatical category (e.g., noun, adjective, verb).

Hierarchical structures

Complex linguistic objects whose parts are organized into groups, where the parts do not form a simple linear sequence.

Tree diagrams

Visual representations used to illustrate hierarchical linguistic structures and the application of linguistic rules.

Root (of a tree diagram)

The start symbol at the very top of a tree diagram.

Branches (of a tree diagram)

The lines connecting nodes in a tree diagram.

Node (in a tree diagram)

Any point in a tree diagram that is connected to another point.

Structural ambiguity

The phenomenon where a single string of words can be analyzed as having two or more distinct hierarchical structures, leading to multiple interpretations or meanings.