LING 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Cultural Artifact, Body Plan, Universal Grammar
Document Summary
Diversity is crucial to our lives, but diversity hides substantial uniformity underlying human beings. Languages like human faces reflect a system of a shared body plan, a blueprint underlying our physical structure. Languages are fundamentally uniform, they all look very similar. Because they reflect some basic biological constraints that we have because of our varying nature. The language that i speak is a manifestation of a system in my head. Mentalism the object of studying a mental capacity. Naturalism the structure of this object can be inferred from an analysis of the linguistic behavior of speakers. Naturalism and mentalism were controversial in the 19th century when they were proposed. We make explicit hypotheses about what goes on inside the black box. Formalism hypotheses about the structure of this object are explicit formal models of . Grammar is the structure of the mental system that speakers possess that allows them to speak and understand their language.
