COGS 2160 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Noam Chomsky, Language Acquisition Device, Lookup Table
18 Feb 2018
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Fact #2: speech & comprehension are productive: we can produce and understand infinitely many sentences, there is no limit to the length of sentences. First demonstration: let l be the longest sentence ever written. "who cares if jones wonders if beck said that l?" Second demonstration: consider a 20-word sentence, assume 10 choices per word (conservative, 1020 20-word sentences, by contrast, there are 1011 neurons in the brain, 1017 seconds in the history of the universe. It tells us that the language faculty has to be compositional. It has to be based on a finite number of rules and elements for how you put those elements together: there are too many possible sentences for production of language to be a type of look-up table. Fact #3: cross-linguistic similarities: all languages have a five-tiered structure. Fact #4: sentences have syntax, not just semantics: e. g. "colourless green ideas sleep furiously: doesn"t mean anything but it is a well put-together sentence, e. g.
