LING 1010: Language and Mind - Creativity in Human Language

Linguistic Competence: Speakers' tacit knowledge for generating grammatical expressions, distinct from performance. - Creativity in Human Language: - Human language use is innovative, free from stimulus control, and appropriate to new situations. - Allows production and understanding of novel sentences. - Speakers can construct an infinite number of grammatical expressions through mental grammar rules. - Recursion: - Rules of a mental grammar generate linguistic units containing units of the same kind (e.g., [S ext{Esmerelda thinks } [S ext{it snowed } ] ] or phrases within phrases, words within words). - This property enables the generation of an infinite number of grammatical expressions. - The universality of recursion in all human languages is debated. - Nominal Compounds: - Defined as a noun composed of two nouns (e.g., "shark week"). - Right Hand Head Rule (English): In a compound of the form N1N2, N2 is the head, indicating N1N2 is a kind of N2. - Recursive Rule for Nominal Compounds: - Lexicon provides basic nouns: N → ext{shark } ext{ | } ext{week } ext{ | } ext{book } ext{ | } ext{house } ext{…} - Compounding rule: N → N ext{ } N - This rule is recursive because it produces nouns containing nouns, allowing it to apply to its own output infinitely (e.g., "shark week program editor"). - Hierarchical Structures: - Linguistic rules create hierarchical structures, visualized with tree diagrams (root, branches, nodes). - Structural Ambiguity: - Occurs when a single string of words can be analyzed with two distinct hierarchical structures, leading to different meanings (e.g., "student film series" can mean a series of student films or a film series run by students).