C_S_D 1060 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Neurolinguistics, Language Disorder, Universal Grammar

• School: Mizzou
• Department: Communication Science And Disorders
• Course: C_S_D 1060
• Professor: Goodman

Document Summary

We all know 10s of 1,000s of words. Most words in all languages are arbitrary connections of sound to meaning. Most words in all languages are arbitrary connections of sound to meaning hand (english) (french) (twi) main nsa ruka (russian) We know the sounds of our language and the rules for combining sounds. Obviously, we don"t have a dictionary of sentences stored in our brains the way we do for words (why not?) Any language has an infinite number of sentences. Using a large, but finite, vocabulary and a relatively small set of rules that are part of our syntactic competence, we can generate an infinite set of sentences. We can"t articulate the complete set of rules, but they are part of our linguistic competence. *he did was climb a tree: descriptive grammars: a linguist"s model of the mental grammar, including the units, structures, and rules. We want to describe what humans know about language (our linguistic competence).