LING 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Noam Chomsky

• School: UConn
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 1010
• Professor: Jon Gajewski

Document Summary

The problem with this is that there is no guarantee that the relevant evidence will be. The benefit is that you can eliminate potential infinite sets from consideration. Fact 2: the input that children receive when learning their language is finite. Has to be true because humans learn language in a finite amount of time. Fact 1: all human languages can be characterized as an infinite set of sentences. The subsets of an infinite set can be infinite too. You can also have a finite subset of an infinite set. Positive evidence: evidence about which items are present in the infinite set given, might happen, might not. Negative evidence: evidence about which items are absent from the infinite set test hypotheses until you find the right one. Language learning is the generalization from a finite subset to an infinite set. Negative evidence in language would be some sort of response by the parent after a child produces an ungrammatical sentence.