LING121 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Falsies, Retina, Universal Grammar
3 Jun 2018
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LING121 Week 2, Lecture 2: Generative Grammar !
-An approach to studying human language - more than one way to study human language -
divide it into separable approaches - sometimes these approaches conflict!
-Grammar is a theory of language - not a perspective approach, its a descriptive approach !
-The Generative Grammar has to do with a particular mathematical and rule approach - asks a
series of questions, which get a little broader as we go along!
1. What constitutes knowledge of language?
-what kind go knowledge do you have when you speak or have a certain language - knowledge
of language in the sense that you can know Japanese but you may not necessarily know the
rules of that language - you may be able to ride a bike but be unaware of the physiological rules!
-Everyone has a body of knowledge of language, looking for the bodies of knowledge people
have and that’s what Linguists do - we do that with an impressive amount of precision !
!
2. How is this knowledge acquired?
-when you acquire a language as a native speaker you do this when you’re a young child, you
achieve this huge amount of language, figuring out the rules for the language = what process
does the child do? Does the kid memories sentences, mimic users!
3. How is this knowledge put to use?
-pragmatic competence - how can use your language to do all sorts of speech and constitutes
and particular type of structure, and then we use our language to do many different things -
some do it better than others - we can gain insights into how people use their language !
4. What are the brain mechanisms that realise this knowledge?
-how is that knowledge of language realised in our brain mechanism - we know next to nothing
about how the brain computes language !
-Any history of science, independent parts of science can sometimes not be reconciled together !
5. How did this knowledge evolve in the species? #
- all sorts of species communicate, but none like human beings - when, how, what happened to
allow humans to evolve and use the languages we use today!
What constitutes knowledge of language?
$ •$ This question is of crucial importance because in order to answer questions (2) – (5)
we need to have some idea about what language is. !
- we need to know something about the nature of the system to then ask from how we move from
not knowing that system to knowing it!
$ •$ For example, in order to understand how language is acquired we need to know
something about the linguistic knowledge that an adult has acquired. That is, we need to know
what the nature of the mature system is, and only then can we ask how that system is acquired. !
• A sentence is a hierarchically organised structure of words that maps sound to meaning
and vice versa: !
•The hierarchically organised structure is the primary object of study: !
•How do we study this object? !
$1.$John loves himself #
$2.$Mary loves herself #
$3.$John and Mary love themselves #
•Himself, herself, themselves are nouns that are called anaphors. An anaphor is a noun that
refers back to a previously mentioned noun: ‘self’ nouns. !
•Himself refers to John, themselves refer to John and Mary!
•Hypothesis: Anaphors must agree with the noun they refer to in gender and number !
•Need to have the same gender and number that they refer to !
•Rule that generates sentences 1-3, and stops use from making ungrammatical sentences !
$4.$The girl loves herself #
$5.$*The girl loves himself - don’t match in gender, our hypothesis says this is wrong#
$6.$*The girl loves themselves #
•$ We will encode our hypotheses about sentence structure using rules. - not prescriptive
rules but descriptive rules!
•$ A group of rules is called a grammar!
•$ A grammar is a theory of our knowledge of language. Thus, a grammar is a theory of a
particular cognitive structure: language. A grammar is a psychological theory of our
knowledge of language. - grammar attempts to explain the language inside our minds, there are
individual languages inside each of our heads !
•$ The rules that constitute a grammar are a theory of the hierarchically organised
structure that links sound and meaning. Consequently, it is the rules of the grammar that
represent our knowledge of language. !
• The rules of a grammar generate the sentences of language. - rules of grammar generate the
rules and structures of language
• Thus, the kind of grammar we are looking at is called Generative Grammar (=group of rules that
generate the sentences of a language). !
•Warning: when we say the grammar ‘generates’, we are not talking about actual production of
sentences as we are speaking. Rather, we’re talking about the property of the grammar that
allows it to function as (part of) an explanatory theory of our linguistic abilities. A generative
grammar is a model of a specific psychological ability, namely language. !
• This rule-based approach to explaining cognition occurs in other modalities too. Vision, for
example. Consider the following picture: !
•This picture is quite hard to see as a cube! • It’s called a Kopfermann cube !
• We can explain why the Kopfermann cube is so hard to see as a cube by appealing to two
abstract rules: !
Rule 1 !
Always interpret a straight line in an image as a straight line in 3D. !
Rule 2 !
If the tips of two lines coincide in an image, then always interpret them as coinciding in 3D !
•$ We can use these two rules to explain why it’s hard to see the Kopfermann cube as a !
cube. #
Rule 1: Always interpret a straight line in an image as a straight line in 3D. #
•$ The Kopfermann cube has three lines running through the centre. According to Rule 1,
each of these lines running through the centre must be interpreted as a straight line (that is,
without any corners) in space! #
• If we change the view of the cube, Rule 1 no longer prevents you from constructing the cube: !
Thus, Rule 1 and Rule 2 constitute part of the theory of vision, they are two of the rules that
constitute a grammar of vision. #
The rules of vision provide us with the ability to interpret the image on the retina. These rules will
explain why we interpret the visual world the way that we do; they also explain why some
interpretations of the world are difficult or impossible to construct from the image on the retina. #
• Similarly, the rules of our language should explain why particular meanings are available or
unavailable: !
7. When did Mary say she hurt herself?#
Meaning 1: ‘When’ relates to the time of saying. Meaning 2: ‘When’ relates to the time of hurting. !
The sentence in (7) is ambiguous - there are two possible structures here #
However, if I form the following question out of (7): !
8. When did Mary say how she hurt herself? !
Sentence (8) is unambiguous. In sentence (8), ‘when’ cannot relate to the time of hurting. !
One of the interpretations has disappeared! !
•$ Our grammar needs to generate all the grammatical sentences, the association of sound
and meaning, the fact that some sentences are ambiguous, the fact that some sentences are not
ambiguous, and so on. #
•The rules and principles that constitute our grammar are a theory of the knowledge
of language that each person has. #
