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A comprehensive overview of key concepts in linguistics, including the innateness hypothesis, empiricism, rationalism, and cognitive science. It explores the debate surrounding the nature of language acquisition, the role of innate knowledge, and the relationship between mind and body. The document also delves into the concept of modules in the mind and the influence of evolutionary psychology on understanding human behavior. It includes a series of questions and answers, providing insights into these complex topics.
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Innateness Hypothesis for language - ANSWER follows with Plato's belief that humans have innate knowledge at birth and gain further knowledge not from environment, but from awakened intuition
Plato's Problem - ANSWER "How do people come to know so much on the basis of so little experience"
Chomsky's idea about how children acquire language - ANSWER • Claimed that there is a considerable innate aspect to our linguistic knowledge
oChildren instinctively know how to combine a noun (e.g. a boy) and a verb (to eat) into a meaningful, correct phrase (A boy eats).
Why Chomsky's Innateness Hypothesis is controversial - ANSWER • The idea that humans are born with 'instincts'
Empiricism - ANSWER the mind at birth does not come with pre-wired knowledge and is thus a 'blank slate' (tabula rasa), on which experience will 'write' learned knowledge
Famous Empiricists - ANSWER Aristotle, Hume, Locke, Berkeley, Sampson
AHLBS (Way to remember Empiricsits)
Aristotle Hume Locke Berkley Sampson - ANSWER All Homies Love Big Swizzle
Rationalism - ANSWER theory that opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response, idea that major aspects of our knowledge system are present without the need for sensory input from the (prenatal and postnatal) environment.
Famous Rationalists - ANSWER Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, James, Chomsky, Pinker
Empirical Science - ANSWER • View point that knowledge derives from the senses
Mind-Body Dualism - ANSWER o World contains two essentially different kinds of 'substances': the material world (matter, stuff that we can touch, measure, and weigh) and conscious experience (the mind, which we cannot access with our sensory organs).
Body - ANSWER res extensa
Mind - ANSWER res cogitans
Functional Level - ANSWER state and analyze the problem that we wish to focus on, we make a problem analysis
Implementation level - ANSWER A specification of the algorithms in the form of a computer program or: •A neurological model of how the actual brain processes
Algorithmic level - ANSWER An actual specification of the units/structures that make up the input and output and of the rule system ('the program') that maps the input onto the output
Module - ANSWER • is a component of the mind that is specialized for a certain function such as language or vision
The idea that the mind consists of cognitive functions (rather than being a single multipurpose program)
Phrenology - ANSWER • The idea that the brain has specialized areas that are the same for all people
Fodor's criteria for modules - ANSWER • A module has a specific task for which it is specialized
Structural Analogy - ANSWER • proposes that the organization of different modules is expected to be analogous (parallel)
Standard Social Science Model - ANSWER • This is essentially the 'blank slate' view which has dominated the social sciences for long)
o Because the mechanisms that govern reasoning, learning, and memory are assumed to operate uniformly
Sociobiology - ANSWER social behavior of other animal species, including humans, is also rooted in social instincts, suggested that human behavior is seriously based on genetic inheritance
Evolutionary Psychology - ANSWER renamed from sociobiology, idea that the mind (just like the body) has developed in the course of evolution, specifically when (early) humans were facing the challenges of life as hunters and gatherers
Heritability - ANSWER the extent to which variation in a trait can be attributed to genes
Monozygotic Twins - ANSWER identical twins (1 egg split)
Phonology, Syntax, Semantics - ANSWER Three dimensions of a word?
Morpheme - ANSWER minimal package of form, meaning and category
Free Morpheme - ANSWER morphemes that can occur on their own as a word (cat, dog, table, father, crocodile)
Bound Morpheme - ANSWER "Word pieces" (re-, un-, -able, -hood)
Also called AFFIX (prefix, suffix)
Morphology - ANSWER The grammatical module that is responsible for building complex words; Builds words from morphemes
Syntax (Proper) - ANSWER Builds sentences from words
Answer: if we distinguish words from sentences, then for each of those two units we have three modules (phonology, semantics and 'syntax') - ANSWER Why do we say that there are 6 grammatical modules (plus the lexicon)?
Complex words - ANSWER consist of more than one meaningful part: read-able, un-fair, un-read-able- ity, arm chair factory, etc,
Simplex Words - ANSWER words with one meaningful part
Phonetics - ANSWER studies how sounds are produced, their acoustic properties and how they are perceived
Phonology - ANSWER studies how sounds function in the language, i.e. how specific sound properties are used to distinguish morphemes from each other
Allophone - ANSWER A "speech variety" of a phoneme
Epistemology - ANSWER A branch of philosophy concerned with the notion knowledge
The law of contiguity - ANSWER Things/events that occur together in time or space are linked in the mind.
The law of similarity - ANSWER Things/events that are similar tend to be linked.
The law of contrast - ANSWER Things/events that are opposites tend to be linked
The law of frequency - ANSWER The linkage will be strong if things/events occur together very often.
Trialism (John Cottingham) - ANSWER keeps the two substances of mind and body, but introduces a third attribute, sensation, belonging to the union of mind and bod
Enactivism - ANSWER emphasizes the interactions between mind, body and the environment, seeing them all as inseparably intertwined in mental processes
Functionalism (Jerry Fodor) - ANSWER We need to focus on the function of the various parts of the mind and worry less about studying the actual brain
Allomorphy - ANSWER •The phenomenon that a morpheme has several manifestations as a result of phonological repair rules; Rule that changes /in/ to /im/ in front of /possible/
Inflection - ANSWER must be attached because the syntactic context of a word requires their presence, don't make new words, make words suitable for the context they're in
EX: The Boy Play(s)
Transformation - ANSWER Move phrases out of a position where "they are not
allowed (to stay)"
Buikhuisen - ANSWER He studied criminology and said that genes could influence criminology.
Cesare Lomroso - ANSWER A person's mind can be judged by their physicality
Francis Galton - ANSWER Developed Eugenics
Onomatopoeic - ANSWER if the word is partially motivated by meaning
Well Formedness - ANSWER a word or sentence that is grammatical
Phonology, Morphemes, Morphology, Syntax - ANSWER What is needed to make a language
International Phonetic alphabet - ANSWER set of symbols that linguists have agreed upon, special notation system for phonemes and allophones
Phonotactics - ANSWER a system of statements, constraints, that specifies the set of phonemes and which combinations are well formed
Grammatical intuitions - ANSWER what the phonetic rules of a language are
Theory of Universal Grammar - ANSWER an idea of innate, biological grammatical categories, such as a noun category and a verb category that facilitate the entire language development in children and overall language processing in adults.
Possible Words - ANSWER Any word that obeys the phonotactic rules of a language
Trialism
Monism
Enactivism
Functionalism - ANSWER All responses to Dualism?
Meaning - ANSWER whatever the form 'stands for' or 'refers to'
Form - ANSWER what can be produced and perceived
Phoneme - ANSWER any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another
Information Encapsulation - ANSWER The property of modules that modules have no information about what happens in other modules