LINA01H3 Lecture Notes - Linguistic Competence
Document Summary
3. linguist"s goal: build a model of mental grammar that allows speakers to speak and understand their native language. 4. the nature of the rules (mental grammar rules: the underlying patterns (rules) of language are not obvious, we have unconscious knowledge of the patterns,and,rules,of our own language. The sentence conforms to the hypothesized rules of the mental grammar. 5. descriptive grammar: mental grammar is in our (individual) heads - shared by speakers of a language (with some variation) = linguistic competence, a model of this grammar is called descriptive grammar, mental grammar contains a system of rules. System of rules that is stored in the mind of a speaker that generates the words and sentences of that speaker"s language. Sentences are not simply memorized by human brains(each neuron would have to store 1 million sentences) It"s not just that the possible number of sentences is enormous. It"s infinite (we can produce (and understand) potentially infinitely long sentences.
