LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 31: Universal Grammar, Information Processing

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 200
• Professor: Alan Clinton Bale

Document Summary

I-language: a computational system that is encoded in an individual"s brain, the system of grammatical rules that is internalized by speakers of a language. Competence: the concept of i-language is equivalent to chomsky"s concept of competence, competence models what fluent speakers know when they know a language. Performance: performance models how speakers actually use their linguistic competence, takes extralinguistic influences into account, memory, speaker"s purpose, physical limitations. Things that all languages have: sentences built from smaller phrasal units, phrases that are made up words, words that are made up of sequences of sounds. Example 2: should eagles that can fly swim, *can eagles that fly should swim, syntactic rules are always hierarchal, human language does not make use of syntactic rules that refer to linear order. Discovering the nature of the blueprint (universal grammar: understand the particular properties of individual i-languages, find the properties that all i-languages share. Cognitive science: study of the mind and its processes.