LIN101H1 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Nonconcatenative Morphology, Affix, Noam Chomsky
Document Summary
Language - the system of sounds, words and sentence patterns used by humans to communicate thoughts and feelings. Linguists tend to work on spoken language because: everyone learns spoken language but there are illiterate people; It does not require explicit teaching, as opposed to writing: there are human languages with no writing system. Knowledge of the rules of word formation morphology. Knowledge of the rules of sentence formation syntax. Knowledge of the system of meanings semantics. Knowledge of the sound system, its inventory and rules phonetics & phonology. Linguistic competence- enables speakers to use a finite set of rules to produce or comprehend an infinite number of sentences they have generally never heard before, no limit on the length of the sentence. Linguistic performance- the use of linguistic competence in the production and comprehension of language; behavior as distinguished from linguistic knowledge.
