Psychology 2134A/B Lecture Notes - Noam Chomsky, Infinitive, Psych

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2134A/B
• Professor: Marc Joanisse

Document Summary

In theory because we all carry knowledge about the correct structure of a sentence (mental grammar; distinguishes it from the kind of grammar you might get in a big) Mental grammar: we carry this understanding around in our head to produce language and understand language. Noam chomsky what do we know when we know language? : that all humans know a language. The idea of a mental grammar, everyone has a mental grammar no matter the language, there is a lot more in common among languages than meets the eye. All languages are processed in our minds the same way (parts of the brain, processes of recognization) Mental error vs. prescriptive grammatical rules (ie, never split an infinitive, don"t end a sentence in a proposition) prescriptive; telling people what to do, not reflective of our actual knowledge of language. Speakers violate these rules because they"re rules of style .