Parts of Language
The smallest unit of sound that have meaning
morphemes
People display knowledge of grammar greater than the amount of linguistic input received
the poverty of stimulus
Children develop cognitive systems that characterize the structure underlying their linguistic capacity
Grammars
Once a phrase has found its compliment, the grammar must have a mechanism that combines phrases.
merger
What constituents of a phrase makes up the core meaning of a sentence
heads, compliments, and specifiers
The smallest unit of sound which have a difference in meaning
phonemes
All languages share the same grammatical principles
Universal Grammar
Sentences are made of clauses and phrases, which in turn are made up of smaller clauses and phrases or words.
Compositionality
is responsible for the tense of a sentence ( among other duties)
inflection
we can insert words of the same kind repeatedly with no principled limit. For example, using adjectives is known as
multiple adjunction
The transmission, reception and production of speech sounds
phonetics
the same grammatical process can apply more than once in their grammars that make it possible for them to produce sentences of indefinite length
recursion
can begin with: Noun, Verb, Preposition, Adjective and Determiner
Heads of phrases
Inflection Phrases are unusual because they also require a
Specifier Position
Linking sentences together with coordinating conjunctions is known as
Coordination
Sounds in combination with other sounds which change the meaning of a word
bound morphemes
Which type of recursion allows a sentence to be placed within another sentence
embedding
all the word in our mental dictionary
Lexicon
functional categories that allow clauses to be embedded in other clauses
complimentizer phrase
Fill in the blanks
Complimentizer phrases are necessary to understand the structure of __________ and________________
questions and relative clauses
The way in which a language is used in various social contexts
pragmatics
the idea that a certain set of structural rules of language are innate within the mental organ for language.
Universal Grammar
words that provide the primary meaning of a sentence
adds modifiers to a phrase
Adjunction
The idea that a Sentence is composed of phrases and the phrases are composed of words (even though some phrases are composed of only one word) is known as
Projection