LIGN 130 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Linguistic Competence, Natural Language, Noam Chomsky
12 Apr 2017
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Goal: provide theoretical descriptions and explanations of linguistic meaning phenomena. One of the words in the clause. An object undergoes change of some kind (location, posession, properties) Relationship between language and the world (external) References: relation between expressions and extralinguistic objects. Falsity/truth depends on the sentence meaning and how thing are in the extralinguistic world. Natural language is informative about the work and its speakers. Meaning allows us to reason from facts about language to facts about the world and vice versa. Mental lives of speaker: saying, believing, asking, ordering, doubting. We use native speakers" judgements to verify the above semantic facts. Semantics can be the theory of the knowledge that underlies our ability to make semantic judgements. Cognitivist perspective: knowledge of language is a knowledge of a body of (largely) unconscious rules and principles that assign [representations and meanings to the physical forms of signs. Compositional: give the semantic context of a sentence through syntactic combination.
