Concepts About Language - University of West ia.ppt

Concepts About Language & Grammar StudyConcept #1?Modern biolinguists pelling evidence to suggest that language acquisition is strongly intuitive; from birth, we are “wired” language. Noam Chomsky: we are all born with a “universal grammar”– a capacity to learn language, a learning that takes place instinctually and largely without instruction. TriviaEX: By the time a young person enters this grade, she already “knows” in the unconscious sense just about all of the linguistic structures she will need to make sense in her native language(s).a) Kindergartenb) First gradec) Fourth graded) Middle School, usually by the Seventh grade“The average child acquires petence necessary to produce adult colloquial speech by the time he or she is four or five. So, all of us enter school already ‘knowing’ the grammar of our native language”(Calderonello and Klein, “Eradicating AWK or Grammar on the Firing Line: Its Relationship position,”68).For Example...?If she is a native speaker of English, she has learned (without learning any of the grammatical terms for these things) that articles and adjectives precede the nouns they modify: cat sat on a mat. cats sit on small mats. ?She learns too that prepositions precede the nouns (or noun phrases) they govern: the mat ?She would also recognize structures like these as “not English” even though they are possible in some of the world's languages: the sat mat a on. big sit mats small on. Concept #2?Hence, linguistic structures—and the rules that form them—are not only unconscious; they are also systematic, rule–governed. Systematic rules are part of a tacit, early–internalized, at times unconscious understanding that allows speakers of a language is highly conventionalized?The rules of language govern sound (ics), words (lexicon and semantics), the arrangement of strings of words (morphemes and syntax), and social aspects of meaning making (semiotics).?These rules are arbitrary. There is noth