Week 11 - Universal Grammar and Parametric Varia Thursday, November 15, 2018 2:32 PM The big picture: Our model of linguistic competence - Modeling like computer science. Linguists model a certain part of human cognition. H language, acquisition begins right from birth. The kind of cognition that decodes lang sorts sounds and patterns and begins to recognize them. Same with morphemes and - Grammar used to be thought of as discrete. It used to be thought that grammar was r learning uses many different types of knowledge and cognitive processes. Linguistic Competence - The knowledge that enables speakers to produce and understand an infinite number sentences in their language - Does not show the process or computation that takes place within the brain - But does allow us to make models that can make strong predictions about many thing children can acquire. - Modules: Lexicon, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Syntactic Competence - The syntactic knowledge that speakers empoly to produce and understand phrases ar language. - Knowledge of lexicon, generalized X' Schema, syntactic operations Syntactic Operations - How phrases and sentences are built. - Two kinds of syntactic operations: Merge(builds structures) and Move(changes struct Merge - Combines words to build syntactic structures in accordance to X' schema. - The process: 0. words enter the derivation. ex eat, the, pizza. 1. Merge. Words join to Ex eat, [the pizza]. 2. Merge again. Ex eat the pizza. - The output of merge is called Deep Structure or D-structure. - This is before movement happens. Move - Changes syntactic structures. Moves constituents. - Output is called Surface Structure or S-structure.
NILLU . - The output of merge is called Deep Structure or D-structure. - This is before movement happens. Move - Changes syntactic structures. Moves constituents. - Output is called Surface Structure or S-structure. Modelling Syntactic Operations Lexicon -> Merge v D-Structure v Move v S-Structure Language Acquisition and Parameter Setting - Language acquisition isn't just learning the lexical words, but also the parameter settings - Children do not approach the task of acquiring their first language with a blank slate. - They have innate knowledge of Universal Grammar (U.G.) - Universal Grammar: Categories, Phrase Structure, Principles of Grammar - This theory has held true and changes whenever it is proven wrong. - The innate knowledge is simple binary choices ex left headed or right headed. Parameter Settings - Children acquire the parameter settings for merge and move. Parameter Settings and Merge - Children have an innate knowledge of what constitutes a possible phrase or sentence. This is modelled as the generalized X' schema. Language Variation and Merge - All languages use X' schema. Variation from heading from language to language (right or left) Adjunct - Is always the daughter of X' and sister of another X'. - Only order of adjunct and X' varies from language to language. - These ordering variations are thought to reflect a series of binary parameters in universal gramma