PSY 3136 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Book Of Nature, Generative Grammar, Adpositional Phrase

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 3136
• Professor: Chris Fennell

Document Summary

Some features of adults" knowledge of language structure - the productivity of language. When mature speakers talk, most of the sentences they produce are sentences they have never produced or heard before. When mature speakers understand the sentences others produce, it"s almost always a matter of understanding sentences they have never heard before. This characteristic of language and of language knowledge that speakers and hearers have the capacity to produce and understand an infinite number of novel sentences is referred to as the productivity or generativity of language. Stringing together words and word parts (morphology) into sentences. The study of how the smallest meaningful units (not sounds) of language (morphemes) are combined. Changes add information but don"t change grammatical category. It is easy for english speakers to think of sentences as combinations of words. However, the units that are combined in language include something smaller than words.