LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Animal Communication, Generative Grammar, Arbitrariness
24 Dec 2018
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Document Summary
Parrots can mimic human vocalizations, but they lack productivity. Boom indicates a non-predation alarm, krak-oo is used for general predator alarm. What characteristics of human language do campbell"s monkey calls exhibit: discreteness, productivity (limited, arbitrariness. Campbell"s monkey calls lack : displacement, interchangeability, full productivity. Linguist"s goal: come up with an analysis of a specific linguistic phenomenon that reflects the mental process that actually occurs in the mind of a speaker of a language. We use performance to get at competence. Example: i"d like to know who hid the cake where, *i"d like to know where who hid the cake. To determine why, we could use this data to start investigating certain types of questions in english. Scientific method: gather data, make a generalization about the patterns in the data, generate a hypothesis that makes predictions, test the hypothesis on more data, if necessary, go back and re-evaluate the hypothesis.
