LINGUIS 5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously, Linguistic Prescription, Noam Chomsky
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The importance of language: (almost) everything we do involves language. Language is extremely complex, involving sounds, grammar, meaning, and usage. Referent sociolinguistics some usages depend on dialect or group, e. g. the. Re the syntax, recall that the can occur before: (i) a noun ( the boy ); (ii) an adjective ( the bad boy ), an adverb ( the very bad boy ), or a numeral ( the two boys ). You know a lot about your language without having been explicitly taught. For example, you know how to form a wh question . From the sentence john ate the apple, you can ask: who ate the apple, what did john eat? (note the change in the syntax!) Now assume that there are two people, john and mary, and two fruit, an apple and an orange. When i return i ask what happened to the fruit (which are nowhere to be seen).
