LING 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Internal Set, Genetic Programming, Word Formation
Document Summary
Human babies have brains that are still developing, just as their bodies are still developing. The brain is programmed (genetically) to grow in certain ways, to form certain structures. When babies are exposed to language, their genetic programming triggers the development of an internal set of guidelines based on the data. The grammar: set of rules that dictates how a person uses a language. We adults don"t know consciously what the grammar contains, or how it is organized or why it is the way it is, we just know that it works. How do we study this knowledge: knowledge about language. Implicit knowledge a: the grammar, grammatical intuitions: how we feel when we hear something wrong, we use grammatical intuitions are data. A grammar can be thought of a building code, guidelines for constructing a well-formed sentence. When we hear input like: *who did jay see kim and? , we know that it is ungrammatical.
