LING 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Williams Syndrome, Universal Grammar, Preposition And Postposition
Document Summary
*narrow goal: to construct theoretical models of linguistic computation and try to discover what is general about them. Categorizes certain language uses as acceptable or unacceptable according to standard form. Has goal to describe what native speakers of language do when they speak their language do when they speak their language. Prescriptive rules are not the same for all languages. Example: double negation is incorrect in english but correct in french (i) every naturally spoken language governed by rules (ii)linguist is interested in descriptive, not prescriptive rules. Most linguistic experience is with new sentence (a) we can form infinitely many new sentences and yet (b) we are finite creatures. If s is a sentence and s", then s" is a sentence. This possibility of language has been argued to distinguish humans. How do we infer the rules from all of the possible answers.
