LING 355 Lecture Notes - Lecture 28: Generative Grammar, Language Acquisition, Null-Subject Language
Document Summary
Those things have to be learned from your encounters with the inout. They assume that when you start as a child acquiring language, there is no built-in linguistic knowledge (categories, etc. ) No linguistic categories or features in the initial state. General cognitive principles are present, such as the ability to make associations. Universal grammar gives the child a number of different things. Categories (syntactic) and features (building blocks tense, agreement, definiteness) and combinatorial rules. Languages vary according to certain parameters, with either a + or - setting. A range of syntactic consequences is associated with each parameter setting. So, there is quite a difference in opinion about the initial state. There is no evidence of a presyntactic category. Syntactic categories must be induced from the input. You then develop what are sometimes called sentence schemas (sentence slots into which you can insert different words to make.
