LING 355 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Syntactic Bootstrapping, Consonant Cluster, Consonant Harmony

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 355
• Professor: John White

Document Summary

Adults know the following properties of a language: sound system, words, sentence structures, word and sentence meaning. Language-specific properties: know what sounds are possible and how they work. Morpho-phonology: 3 different pronunciations of the english plural morpheme: cats /s, dogs /z, glasses, witches, judges /iz/ Inflectional morphology phases: omit certain morphemes altogether (i. e. plural, tense, agreement, overgeneralize, produce errors. Word order is acquired very early without much difficulty in most cases. Different syntactic structures may convey the same meaning (i. e. active and passive) Ambiguity: carol chomsky (1969): blindfolded doll that is easy to see or hard to see. Unconscious linguistic competence of native speakers is mentally represented by means of a grammar. Sounds pf lexicon: phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics + context: discourse/ pragmatics lf meanings. Acquisition of the target" language is not instantaneous; a series of grammars necessary: data g1, g2, gn output1, output2, outputn. Chomsky"s innate principles linguistic knowledge/ universal grammar or ug: data ug g output.