LINA01H3 Midterm: LINA01- Midterm Review
Document Summary
Rule-governed creativity: important characteristics of human language. Creativity (=productivity): the ability to create the new sentence. Linguistic competence: speaker"s knowledge of their language, which allows them to produce and understand an unlimited number of utterances, including many that are novel, mental grammar, the knowledge is subconscious. Descriptive rule: describes how people actually speak/characterizes actual usage, trick: linguists would not judge a sentence as correct or incorrect but only consider if it is grammatical or acceptable . Prescriptive rule: how the people should speak. Performance error: mistakes people made when talking. Phonology: the study of the mental representation of speech sounds (how words are stored in the mental lexicon) Phonetics: the study of the physical properties of speech sounds. Phoneme: words stored in mental lexicon, only exist in mind, represented by / / Phone: phonetic units which represent the actual pronunciation, represented by [ ]
