The foremost property of mental grammar is that it is generative: it allows each speaker to create new words and sentences that have never been spoken before. The mental grammar generates these new words and sentences according to systematic principles that every speaker knows unconsciously.
Check Yourself
1. What does it mean to say that mental grammar is generative?
The science, that is, the general and universal properties, of language. The middle of the twentieth century saw a shift in the principal direction of linguistic inquiry from one of data collection and classification to the formulation of a theory of generative grammar, which focuses on the biological basis for the acquisition and use of human language and the universal principles.
2. The systematic principles of English phonology generate some word forms but not others. Which of the following words could be a possible word in English?
Linguist 1 9 Words List
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3. The systematic principles of English syntax generate some sentences but not others. Which of the following sentences is not possible in English?
Linguist 1 9 Words Speech Therapy
Video Script
Probably the most fundamental property of human language is creativity. When we say that human languages are creative, we don’t just mean that you can use them to write beautiful poems and great works of literature.
When we say that human language is creative, we mean a couple of different things:
First, every language can express any possible concept.
That notion might surprise you at first. I often see magazine articles or blog posts that talk about supposedly untranslatable words that exist in other languages but that don’t exist in English. A quick search online leads me to these gems:
Kummerspeck is the German word for excess weight gained from emotional overeating.
In Inuktitut, iktsuarpok is that feeling of anticipation when you’re waiting for someone to show up at your house and you keep going outside to see if they’re there yet.
And in Tagalog,gigilis the word for the urge to squeeze something that is irresistibly cute.
So if you believe that kind of article, it might seem like some concepts are restricted to certain languages. But think about it: Just because English doesn’t have one single word that means “the urge to squeeze something cute” doesn’t mean that English-speakers can’t understand the concept of wanting to squeeze something cute. As soon as I described it using the English phrase “the urge to squeeze something cute” you understood the concept! It just takes more than one word to express it! The same is true of every language: all of the world’s languages can express all concepts.
Linguist 1 9 Words Worksheets
The other side of the creativity of language is even more interesting. Every language can generate an infinite number of possible new words and sentences.
Every language has a finite set of words in it. A language’s vocabulary might be quite large, but it’s still finite. And every language has a small and finite set of principles for combining those words.
But every language can use that finite vocabulary and that finite set of principles to generate an infinite number of sentences, new sentences every single day.
Likewise, every language has a finite set of sounds and a finite set of principles for combining those sounds. Every language can use those finite resources to generate an infinite number of possible new words in that language.
Because human languages are all capable of generating new words and generating new sentences, we say that human grammar is generative.
Linguist 1 9 Words Unscramble
Remember that when we use the word “grammar” in linguistics, we’re talking not about the prescriptive rules that your Grade 6 teacher tried to make you follow, but about mental grammar, the things in our minds that all speakers of a language have in common that allow us to understand each other. Mental grammar is generative.
The final, and possibly the most important thing to know about the creativity of language is that it is governed by systematic principles. Every fluent speaker of a language uses systematic principles to combine sounds to form words and to combine words to form sentences. In Essentials of Linguistics, we’ll use the tools of systematic observation to discover what these systematic principles are.
There are two kinds of classification of languages practiced in linguistics: genetic (or genealogical) and typological. The purpose of genetic classification is to group languages into families according to their degree of diachronic relatedness. For example, within the Indo-European family, such subfamilies as Germanic or Celtic are recognized; these subfamilies comprise German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and others, on the one hand, and Irish, Welsh, Breton, and others, on the other. So far, most of the languages of the world have been grouped only tentatively into families, and many of the classificatory schemes that have been proposed will no doubt be radically revised as further progress is made.
A typological classification groups languages into types according to their structural characteristics. The most famous typological classification is probably that of isolating, agglutinating, and inflecting (or fusional) languages, which was frequently invoked in the 19th century in support of an evolutionary theory of language development. Roughly speaking, an isolating language is one in which all the words are morphologically unanalyzable (i.e., in which each word is composed of a single morph); Chinese and, even more strikingly, Vietnamese are highly isolating. An agglutinating language (e.g., Turkish) is one in which the word forms can be segmented into morphs, each of which represents a single grammatical category. An inflecting language is one in which there is no one-to-one correspondence between particular word segments and particular grammatical categories. The older Indo-European languages tend to be inflecting in this sense. For example, the Latin suffix -is represents the combination of categories “singular” and “genitive” in the word form hominis “of the man,” but one part of the suffix cannot be assigned to “singular” and another to “genitive,” and -is is only one of many suffixes that in different classes (or declensions) of words represent the combination of “singular” and “genitive.”
There is, in principle, no limit to the variety of ways in which languages can be grouped typologically. One can distinguish languages with a relatively rich phonemic inventory from languages with a relatively poor phonemic inventory, languages with a high ratio of consonants to vowels from languages with a low ratio of consonants to vowels, languages with a fixed word order from languages with a free word order, prefixing languages from suffixing languages, and so on. The problem lies in deciding what significance should be attached to particular typological characteristics. Although there is, not surprisingly, a tendency for genetically related languages to be typologically similar in many ways, typological similarity of itself is no proof of genetic relationship. Nor does it appear true that languages of a particular type will be associated with cultures of a particular type or at a certain stage of development. From work in typology in the second half of the 20th century, it emerged that certain logically unconnected features tend to occur together, so the presence of feature A in a given language will tend to imply the presence of feature B. The discovery of unexpected implications of this kind calls for an explanation and gives a stimulus to research in many branches of linguistics.
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