LING 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Zebra Finch, Universal Grammar, Sentence Clause Structure
Document Summary
We instead master recursion: john left, nobody claimed that john left, nobody claimed that john left nobody claimed that nobody claimed that john left. If s is a sentence (a statement like : s=john left) and s" = nobody claimed s. S" is also a sentence: a sentence can contain a sentence. Property of recursion: no other animal can do what humans do (this hasn"t been proved yet) implicit rules governing how we speak (no explicit prescriptive rules) Human language= in nite use of nite means how do we learn the rules? example of ducks following the rst thing they see when they are born this isn"t learned, its the duck"s instinct. The problem of induction analogy of shapes to rules. 18? its a multiple of three so it can belong. 17? it belongs because they are all odd numbers same thing with linguistic rules.
