This is a person's use of what they know to produce an utterance.
What is linguistic performance?
100
This theory suggests that all humans have an innate ability to learn languages due to properties that all human languages share.
What is universal grammar?
100
This approach to syntax is based on building a set of rules to define what combinations of words will create a grammatical sentence in a given language.
What is generative grammar?
100
This feature of language refers to the ability for completely new utterances to be formed.
What is productivity?
100
This approach states that grammatical sentences are formed with a set of learned rules.
What is the mechanistic approach?
200
This is the primarily subconscious rules, lexicon, and other knowledge that a person needs to create messages in a language.
What is linguistic competence?
200
This approach is based on the belief that a speaker's subconscious knowledge of a language is to be emphasized in order to understand linguistics.
What is the mentalist approach?
200
This theory suggested that the surface structures in different languages are controlled by a set of specific limitations.
What is the Principles and Parameters theory?
200
This property allows for infinitely long sentences to be formed by repeatedly calling the same rule or rules.
What is recursion?
200
This branch of linguistics studies language as it relates to conceptual structures.
What is cognitive linguistics?
300
This is the mental form of a sentence that represents its basic meaning.
What is deep structure?
300
This type of grammar suggests that a certain deep structure can be manipulated into a language-specific surface structure by use of rules that are named similarly to the grammar.
What is transformational grammar?
300
This is the theory that served as the basis for the original forms of transformational and generative grammars.
What is standard theory?
300
This phenomena is the ability for a child to learn the grammar of a language despite not having access to much of the knowledge that would appear to be needed. This specifically includes the lack of negative input to children and supports the idea that children have some sort of innate capacity for learning language.
What is poverty of stimulus?
300
This branch of linguistics deals with language as a set of interrelated structures.
What is structural linguistics?
400
This is the sentence that is actually uttered and can be syntactically analyzed.
What is surface structure?
400
This early hypothetical concept represented an innate system that allowed the learning of a language and was later discarded as a theory in favor of universal grammar.
What is the language acquisition device?
400
This idea, which Chomsky actually identifies as a program rather than a theory, aims to show that a universal grammar contains no more than is necessary to facilitate language.
What is minimalism?
400
This gene has been shown to be linked to language, as a mutated gene causes disorders for speech and language.
What is the FOXP2 gene?
400
This line of thought was an offshoot of generative grammar that states there is only one system of rules to connect surface structure to meaning.
What is generative semantics?
500
These are a set of rules that define how words, phrases, or other constituents in a sentence can be arranged relative to the sentence and other constituents.
What are phrase structure rules?
500
This is a system that classifies grammars by certain properties that determine what conditions each grammar can be used under.
What is the Chomsky hierarchy?
500
This is a theory that sets forth that there is a series of rules shared by all languages, particularly one that is not included in the original set of phrase structure rules.
What is x-bar theory?
500
This well-known (in linguistics) meaningless, yet grammatical, sentence was used by Chomsky to illustrate the divide between semantics and syntax.
What is "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"?
500
This branch of psychology states that behaviors can be experimentally measured and changed, which influenced the mechanistic approach.