LING 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Code Talker, Phrase Structure Rules, Noam Chomsky

• School: UConn
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 1010
• Professor: Akihiko Arano( T A)

Document Summary

Properties of language that are open to variation must be learned. But many aspects of language are universal. During wwii, the japanese easily broke us military codes. So in 1942 marines started using navajo, which the japanese could not break. On one hand, navajo code talkers were able to accurately, and rapidly, translate from english to navajo and back to english without losing any information. This suggests that the two languages are similar enough to directly translate from one to another. On the other hand, very skilled japanese cryptographers were not able to decipher. Principles and parameters theory- a solution to the paradox of linguistic variation. Principles - general principles that govern the way languages work. They properties are shared by all human languages (innate) Parameters - a finite set of options or settings that determine how languages can vary (you can think of parameters as settings that can be turned on or off)