What is the gene that has been recently found to play a key role in language development and also supports Chomsky's theory that language development is an innate ability?
100
Poverty of Stimulus
What is the approach/argument that preceded Chomsky's Universal grammar theory and actually contributed to its formation? It proposes that the input received by young children is in itself insufficient to explain children's detailed knowledge of their first language.
100
innateness hypothesis
What the hypothesis that proposes that children are born with the capacity to differentiate phonemes, extract words from the stream of language, and process grammar?
100
recursion
What is a property of language that allows for productivity by permitting the repeated application of a rule, so that people can embed one syntactic category endlessly within another, creating potentially an infinite amount of syntactic structures?
100
@ 7,000
It is estimated that this is the number of languages spoken around the world is _________?
200
Leonard Bloomfield
Who is the well-known American linguist that pioneered the structural approach to which conflicted Chomsky's theory?
200
Empiricism
What is the school of thought called that had dominated thinking about language since the Enlightenment held that when children came into the world, their minds were like a blank slate?
200
Syntax
What is the set of rules a person uses to form units of language larger than words?
200
Behaviorism
What is the name of one of the earliest scientific explanations of language acquisition which proposed that language development occurred by means of environmental influence?
200
innateness hypothesis
What is the linguistic theory, first proposed by Noam Chomsky, that promotes that humans have at least some knowledge about language at birth?
300
The Minimalist Program
What is the name of the program that Chomsky developed in 1995 as a book consisting of four essays that linguist Morris Halle, Chomsky's longtime colleague at MIT said, "is the most radical thing I've ever heard anybody say in linguistics."?
300
Generative Semantics
What is the theory that George Lakoff coined when he brought formal logic (in 1963) and model theory (in 1968) together?
300
Generative Grammar
What is the term used to describe the set of rules that enables us to understand sentences but of which we are usually totally unaware?
300
Mechanistic Approach
What did the "Bloomfieldian" school call the linguistic approach that is based on the principle that a rigid set of learned rules are used to form grammatical utterances?
300
imitation hypothesis
What is the theory that proposes that children learn languages by imitating those around them?
400
Syntactic Structures
What is the name of the book Normal Chomsky wrote in 1957 that revolutionized the study of language?
400
Evolutionary Linguistics
What is the theory that adopts the approach of evolutionary psychology and promotes the belief that language has been shaped by natural selection? In this view, certain random genetic mutations were selected over many thousands of years to provide certain individuals with a decisive adaptive advantage.
400
deep structure
What is the phrase that describes the underlying syntactic structure (or level) of a sentence?
400
Noam Chomsky
Who is often considered the most cited living author?
400
productivity
What is the capacity to produce an infinite number of grammatical phrases and sentences using only finite means (e.g., a finite number of principles and parameters and a finite vocabulary)?
500
Principles and Parameters Theory
What is the theory developed by Chomsky in the 1980's that proposes that even though languages are different, they are still governed by similar principles and limitations?
500
Theoretical Linguistics
What is the branch of linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge?
500
Surface Structure
What is a phrase for the structure of a well-formed phrase or sentence in a language, as opposed to its underlying abstract representation?
500
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
What is the hypothetical area of the brain that some linguistic theorists believe holds the human functionality needed to acquire language?
500
UG
What is the common abbreviation for the phrase Universal Grammar?