PSYC 3290 Chapter Notes -Phrase Structure Rules, American Sign Language, French Sign Language
8 Feb 2013
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Main points: linguists have attempted to identify those grammatical features that appear in all languages. Four pervasive properties are duality of patterning, morphology, phrase structure, and linguistic productivity: american sign language shares these linguistic properties with spoken languages. Sign language differs from spoken languages in its iconicity and simultaneous structure: a language consists of an infinite set of sentences. A person who knows a language knows its grammar, which consists of a finite set of rules: transformational grammar distinguishes between two levels of sentence structure: deep structure and surface structure. Introduction: to understand how we comprehend and produce spoken and written language-- and how these skills are acquired-- we must understand the major properties of language as well as the processing characteristics of the individuals who use it. Fluently speaking a language does not guarantee that one has any explicit knowledge of the language: when we learn how languages are organized, we realize how truly complex they are.
