LING 2200 Study Guide - Fall 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Noun, Determiner, Adjective
12 Oct 2018
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Department
Course
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LING 2200
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
Tuesday, Sept 11th
- Rule governed behavior
- Linguistic competence
- Universal grammar (UG)
- Standard dialect
- Descriptive vs. prescriptive grammar
- Grammaticality judgments
*Read chapters 1 & 2
Rule governed behavior:
- When we use language we are following a set of rules (phonological rules –sound,
morphological –how words are formed, syntactical –how we form sentences)
o These rules are largely subconscious (we are not aware, but we use them
every time we use language –speak or interpret what people are saying)
o The only time we are aware that there are rules is if someone breaks the
rules
▪ Phonological rule: Ex) Krunchi pronounced [krvntshI] → a word
cannot end in a lax vowel (in English they can only end in a tense
vowel –phonotactic rule)
• Subconsciously we know this rule, and only realize when
someone breaks this rule
▪ Ex) Pho [fv] → this ends in a lax vowel as well
▪ Morphological rule: 3 different allomorphs of the plural suffix
• Ex) Dogs, cats, houses
▪ Syntax: how words are combined together to create larger units (all
languages have syntactic rules to specify how this is done)
▪ Syntactic rule: basic word order → order in relation to the subject,
verb, and object in a sentence (English is an SVO language)
• Ex) someone says: ‘an apple ate he’ (He ate an apple)
• *A star marks an ungrammatical sentence
Linguistic Competence:
- Refers to what we know about language (knowledge of language)
- We have to make a clear distinction between linguistic competence and linguistic
performance
o Performance: what you actually say
▪ Presumably derives from competence
- Most of it is subconscious (we are not aware we know about)
- Sometimes referred to as i-language (i= internal)
o The guy [I saw] → relative clause
- Includes all aspects of structure (phonological, morphological, and syntactic)
- Syntactic component consists of 2 major parts:
1) Lexicon (vocabulary)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
▪ 10’s of thousands of words stored in our brains, along with
information about the words
▪ We have all stored the word apple somewhere in our brains → we
store information about it
1. Pronunciation – we store it in its phonemic form,
2. Meaning –so we can use the word appropriately
3. Syntactic/lexical category
• Noun –common count (to use the word
appropriately)
• Determines how it can combine with other words to
create sentences
• We know: the apple, an apple, but not will apple
2) System of rules
▪ Rules that allow us to combine words together from lexicon to
form larger units
▪ Lexical categories: combine these together in this order to create a
noun phrase
o Determiner (articles, demonstratives – a, the, this, those) –
always comes before the nouns they modify (but there are some
cases where adjectives comes after the noun rather than before)
o Adjective (red, blue, big)
o Noun (apple, car, house)
▪ Ex) the red apple, this red house, a blue car …
▪ They don’t always have this order
▪ Ex) sometimes adjectives follow the noun it modifies (because
English has borrowed the vast majority from other languages –a lot
of French phrases)
o In French adjectives follow the noun
o Ex) governor general, attorney general → noun followed by
an adjective
▪ Pluralized: governors general
Question that is still being debated: how do we acquire all of this knowledge?
- Internalized a rule system (that is abstract and complicated)
- How did we internalize all of this information?
o Virtually all human beings can do this (by the age 4 or 5 → language
acquisition is pretty much complete -basics)
▪ Their language is different, their lexicon is a lot smaller (not
complete)
▪ The rule system is not completely acquired (English has simple
inflection compared to other languages, but it has a lot of
irregularities) → ex) see (an irregular verb of English) they may
say “I seed it yesterday”
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Refers to what we know about language (knowledge of language) We have to make a clear distinction between linguistic competence and linguistic performance: performance: what you actually say, presumably derives from competence. Most of it is subconscious (we are not aware we know about) Sometimes referred to as i-language (i= internal: the guy [i saw] relative clause. Includes all aspects of structure (phonological, morphological, and syntactic) English has borrowed the vast majority from other languages a lot of french phrases: in french adjectives follow the noun, ex) governor general, attorney general noun followed by an adjective, pluralized: governors general. Internalized a rule system (that is abstract and complicated) * lexicon: one part of language that continues to grow along the life time (this: the sound, they will often substitute alveolar stop [dv] slows down, but i continues) Is innate knowledge language particular no, we learn whatever language we are exposed to.
