Universal Grammar and Parametric Variation Thursday, November 15, 2018 2:35 PM The Big Picture: Our model of linguistic competence · Humans are prewired to acquire a language, language acquisition begins from the mo we are born or possibly earlier. · The kind of knowledge that our cognition manipulated when you produce and unders language uses a lot of different several different kinds of knowledge. · You have access to the output of your linguistic cognition. Some people call it, your "language factory." . Linguistic competence is the knowledge that enable speakers to produce and underst number of novel phrases and sentences in their languages ? Lexicon, a list of linguistic items in the language, ever growing. o Phonetics and phonology ? Morphology ? Syntax ? Semantics Syntactic Competence . The syntactic knowledge that speakers employ to produce and understand phrases an sentences in their language. ? Knowledge of: Lexicon; words and morphemes. Generalized X' Schema; how phrases and sentences are structured. · Syntactic Operations; how phrases and sentences are built. Syntactic Operations · How phrases and sentences are built. We distinguish between two kinds of syntactic operations. Merge; a structure building operation o Move; a structure changing operation. Merge . Merge combines words to build syntactic structures in accordance with the X' schema
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· The process, a. Words enter the derivation (eat, the, pizza) b. Merge (the, pizza) if we merge the and pizza we get a NP. c. But we still have a word there that needs to be merged into the derivation, so we merge again (ear, {the, pizza}), so we merge eat with the already existing combina to get a VP. · The output of Merge is called Deep Structure (d-structure) o Example, "has Alice eaten the pizza?" D-Structure: the output of merge. It is standard structure, and all of the word appear in their regular position in the structure. . The output of MOVE is called Surface Structure (S-Structure). ? S-Structure: shows the moving, like in Wh questions. Move is an operation that m the tensed auxiliary in the head of CP (in this example specifically ^). Language Acquisition and Parameter Setting . We are hardwired with a capacity to acquire any language spoken (or signed) in the worl . When you acquire a language, besides acquiring only morphemes and words. You are als acquiring the parameter settings of the language. · Children do not approach the task of acquiring their first language with a blank state. · They have an innate knowledge of Universal Grammar (U.G) o Universal Grammar · Categories Phrase structure " Principles of Grammar. Parameter Setting · When children acquire their first language, they require the parameter settings in their language, Parameter Setting and the Merge Component · Children have an innate knowledge of what constitutes a possible phrase and sentence. · This knowledge is modelled as a generalized (universal) X' Schema. Adjuncts . An adjunct is the daughter of X' and sister of another X'. Only the order