LING 240 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Transformational Grammar, Noam Chomsky, Sarcasm

• School: University of Maryland
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 240
• Professor: Margaret Antonisse

Document Summary

Linguistics is the study of human language as a cognitive science. 1: distinguishing feature that separates humans from other animals. Noam chomsky-syntactic structures(1957)-introduced the idea of transformational generative grammar. Think of languages as the product of human brains. Questions: what is it that we know when we know a language, how do children get language (nature vs nurture) Creativity (or expressive variety) of language use implies a set of unconscious grammatical principles or rules. Children may have genetic disposition for language. Nouns are not the most important parts of a sentence. Unconscious knowledge that a speaker has about their language. Sentences have a wide variety of expressive power: descriptions, expressions, conditional/hypothetical, metaphor, lies, negation, sarcasm. System of rules stored in the mind that generates the words and sentences of that speaker"s language. Ex: a x" is not a y". Number of sentences is too large to store them all.