LING 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Linguistic Competence, Universal Grammar, Grammatical Relation

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 100
• Professor: Jaime Dube

Document Summary

Focus: linguistic competence, the linguistic produce/understand an infinite number of novel sentences: knowledge that enables speakers to , produce/understand an infinite number of novel sentences; judge whether any given combination of words and morphemes is a possible sentence. Universal grammar theory (ug theory) shares the cognitive focus of generative. Syntax but also holds that a valid theory of linguistic competence must be true of all natural languages (past, present and future): focus: linguistic competence across languages. Linguistic competence: lexicon, the mental dictionary of words and morphemes from which phrases and sentences are built. These functions and relations are modeled (= depicted) as operations (merge and move) that relate functions to constituents and constituents to one another. Categories: words of all languages belong one or the other of a small number of categories, each defined by a particular meaning and pattern of behaviour, we distinguish between two major kinds of categories, 1.