LING 1P92 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Childes, Gana, Negative Equity
12 Jan 2016
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Document Summary
Theories of language acquisition: (chomskyan) nativist, cognitive-functional (aka usage based) learned. We"ll consider 3 morphological and syntactic phenomena: question formation (john is happy is john happy?, verb transitivity (john ate. 2 properties of language acquisition to acquire their sentences which they"ve. Are questions that can be answered with a yes or no response never heard before. The input for language learning is not sufficient to explain how children come linguistic knowledge. Children can generalize beyond specific examples and create novel. Some knowledge of grammar (ex. structure independence) is innate. Knowledge of language develops from language use; everything needs to be. Compare wh questions with who what when where and how. The question rule doesn"t seem to depend on linear order. There"s no logical reason why languages should use structure-dependent rather than linear rules. Languages can easily be constructed that use computationally simpler linear rules- Also we have very strong grammatical intuitions about these sentences.
