LING 200 Study Guide - Final Guide: Specific Language Impairment, Syntactic Category, Adjective Phrase

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 200
• Professor: Liz Smeets

Document Summary

Universal grammar: characterization of innate principles of the language faculty; speaker knows the set of principles that apply to all languages and the possible parameter settings; principles that characterize all languages. (e. g. the formation of wh- questions cross-linguistically) I-language (aka mental grammar or linguistic competence): an internalized linguistic system that contains the specific parameters set in the natural language; our i- Languages are constantly changing as we change the way we speak. Tacit knowledge: the unconscious rules we have about what is grammatical. Prescriptive rules: must be told/taught, speakers may disobey them (e. g. using a preposition at the end of a sentence) Descriptive rules: rules that speakers do not disobey naturally. The rules are written by linguists to describe how a language is constructed, not to regulate it. Phonology: the study of sound patterns in speech. Morphology: the study of the structure of words and their parts. Syntax: the study of the structure of phrases and sentences.