LING 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: October 9
Document Summary
Study of language faculty as a window into human cognition. Optional further readings will be posted on ccle. Homework #7 due in ta"s mailbox in campbell hall 3125 by wednesday 2pm. Recursion law - an object can contain a copy of itself inside it. We can form infinitely many new sentences, and yet we are finite creatures. The possibility of which in language has been argued to distinguish humans from all other animals. (one language spoken in am azonia called pirah , which claims to have no grammatical recursion) Konrad lorenz - discovered that imprinting is instinctual; nothing in the environment that could trigger such an immediate, specific response. Olga feh r"s study of zebra finches - if you don"t hear language as a growing child, you won"t develop language. You are going to infer rules based on what you hear (induction - any process by which one infers from some observed data a rule that applies beyond these data)
