LING 1010: Language and Mind - Creativity in Human Language
Linguistic Competence: This refers to the unconscious, internalized knowledge that speakers possess about the grammar of their language. It encompasses all the rules and principles that allow a speaker to produce and understand an infinite number of grammatical sentences. This competence is distinct from linguistic performance, which is the actual use of language in concrete situations, often influenced by cognitive factors like memory limitations, distractions, and speech errors, and thus does not perfectly reflect competence.
Creativity in Human Language: A hallmark of human language is its innovative and unpredictable nature. Language use is not merely a set of conditioned responses to external stimuli, but rather a capacity to produce and comprehend utterances that are entirely novel and appropriate to new situations. This inherent creativity allows speakers to generate an infinite number of grammatical expressions using a finite set of mental grammar rules and a finite lexicon, enabling the production and understanding of sentences never before encountered.
Recursion: This is a fundamental property of mental grammars where linguistic rules can generate structures that contain units of the same kind, or phrases nested within similar phrases. This embedding capability is what enables the generation of an infinite number of grammatical expressions from a finite set of resources. For example, a noun phrase can contain another noun phrase (e.g., "the owner of the car park"), or a sentence can contain another sentence (e.g., "She said that he believes that she will win."). The universality of recursion, while widely observed, is still debated among linguists, with some proposing exceptions in certain languages.
Nominal Compounds: These are terms formed by combining two or more nouns to create a new noun. Examples include "shark week," "coffee cup," "birdhouse," and "software engineer." While primarily involving nouns, more complex compounds can incorporate other parts of speech.
Right Hand Head Rule (English): In English, for a nominal compound of the form N1N2, N2 is consistently the head. The head determines the overall category and often the core meaning of the compound, indicating that the entire compound N1N2 is a kind of N2. For instance, in "birdhouse," "house" is the head, meaning a "birdhouse" is a type of house (for birds), not a type of bird.
Recursive Rule for Nominal Compounds:
The lexicon provides basic, unanalyzable nouns (e.g., "shark," "week," "program," "editor").
A compounding rule operates as: N \rightarrow N \text{ } N
This rule is recursive because its output is a noun, allowing the rule to apply to its own output. This enables the creation of complex compounds with multiple levels of nesting, such as "shark week program editor":
[[shark \text{ } week] \text{ } program] \text{ } editor (an editor of programs about shark week)
Alternatively, [shark \text{ } [week \text{ } [program \text{ } editor]]] (a shark who is a week's program editor, less plausible but structurally possible). The rule effectively allows for the combination of any noun with another noun, creating a new noun that can then combine with yet another noun, theoretically infinitely.
Hierarchical Structures: Linguistic rules do not merely arrange words linearly but create complex hierarchical structures. These structures, often visualized using tree diagrams, represent how words group together into phrases (constituency) and the grammatical relationships between these constituents. The root represents the entire phrase or sentence, while branches and nodes show the embedded components and their respective categories (e.g., Noun Phrase, Verb Phrase).
Structural Ambiguity: This phenomenon occurs when a single sequence of words can be interpreted in two or more distinct ways, each corresponding to a different hierarchical structure. The difference in structure leads to a difference in meaning. For example, "student film series" can be analyzed in two ways:
\text{[[student film] series]}: A series composed of films made by students (where "student film" acts as a compound noun modifying "series").
\text{[student [film series]]}: A film series organized or run by a student (where "student" modifies the compound noun "film series").