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Competence and Performance
Biology
Language
Noam Chomsky
Linguistics Potpourri
100
The study of the sound system of language, and how sounds are combined into larger units, like words.
What is phonology?
100
Though the meaning of an individual element varies in different languages, Chomsky argued that this system, which organizes the elements, is likely to be biologically programmed.
What is grammar?
100
Chomsky would argue that this notoriously difficult language, which has the most speakers in the world, is still readily accessible to non-native speakers who try to learn it, as it makes sense within the universal grammar framework humans all share.
What is Mandarin Chinese?
100
In 1955, Chomsky was awarded his PhD in linguistics from this university.
What is the University of Pennsylvania?
100
The ability to produce and understand messages even if one has never produced or heard them before.
What is productivity?
200
A hypothetical "device" Chomsky described as a means to explain how children learn the syntactic structures of language.
What is the language acquisition device?
200
This man wrote On the Origin of Species, but his evolutionary theory should not include language, according to Chomsky.
Who is Charles Darwin?
200
Despite a universal grammar, there is more than one language in the world. There are "genetically permitted variations," though they are limited by this, which means "heirship; inheritance" in Latin.
What is heredity?
200
Chomsky is an outspoken critic of many American international operations, but his comments on this Cold-War era conflict are especially well known.
What is the Vietnam War?
200
The ability to communicate about things for which there is no empirical proof.
What is prevarication?
300
A man whose linguistic school of thought was structural, and primarily concerned with linguistic performance.
Who was Leonard Bloomfield?
300
Chomsky's theory of language was antithetical to this man's, a behaviorist who "argued that all human behavior was simply a reflection of training and experience."
Who was B.F. Skinner?
300
Chomsky has argued that learning language is a biological process that is largely unstoppable, and only somewhat altered by environmental factors. His most recurrent metaphor is to this, a maturation process the human body begins in early adolescence.
What is puberty?
300
Chomsky has spent the great majority of his career at this university, where he continues to lecture as a Professor Emeritus.
What is MIT?
300
A property of language that allows for productivity by permitting the repeated application of a rule, leading to embedded sentences.
What is recursion?
400
This type of structure is the subconscious meaning from which surface structure produces a potentially infinite number of utterances.
What is deep structure?
400
The area of the brain that "controls the larynx, lips, tongue, and other areas of the digestive and respiratory systems involved in oral and facial fine motor skills and the production of speech."
What is Broca's area of the brain?
400
All human languages share characteristics that are more apparent than others. They have subjects and verbs, and the ability to make something negative. They also share the ability to do this -- in American Sign Language, it is indicated by lowering the eyebrows. In many spoken languages, it's done with a rising intonation.
What is form a question?
400
Chomsky has compared his contributions to the field of linguistics to the state of physics before the theories of this man, during the Renaissance. (".. people were beginning to formulate problems in physics in the right way. The answers weren't there, but the problems were finally being framed in a way that in retrospect we can see was right.")
Who was Galileo Galilei?
400
Sometimes abbreviated as T-rules, they are the operations that relate deep structure to surface structure.
What are transformational rules?
500
The way in which Bloomfieldian linguistics postulates that children learn language.
What is mimicry?
500
The gene responsible for speech and language development.
What is FOX2P?
500
This famous sentence from Chomsky's Syntactic Structures exemplifies the human ability to make grammaticality judgments, even when the actual meaning is nonsensical.
What is "colorless green ideas sleep furiously?"
500
Chomsky's focus as a student was not only in linguistics, but also in philosophy (logic) and this discipline, a universal language in itself.
What is mathematics?
500
"A finite set of rules that could hypothetically produce (generate) an infinite number of utterances."
What is generative grammar?