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ling 115 examExplain what makes it possible for humans to produce and understand
infinitely many sentences, even though we have finite memories and can't
memorize them all. - correct answer ✔✔Words and grammar are used to make different sentences. We
combine words into
phrases and sentences. Grammar rules allow for production of vast numbers of
combinations. Phrase structure can account for our ability to produce so many
sentences, and is necessary for us to understand what they mean. It is essential in
figuring out who did what to whom.
2) In "An Instinct to Acquire an art", Steven Pinker says that when a child says
don't giggle me! Or we holded the baby rabbit it cannot be an act of imitations.
Why not? If it's not imitation, how can we explain what the child is doing? - correct answer ✔✔Pinker
explains that language is an instinct, not just imitation. Many sentences are new combinations of words,
appearing for the first time. A language cannot be a repertoire of responses; the brain must contain a
recipe or program that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words. That program
may be called a mental grammar. Secondly, children develop these complex grammars rapidly without
formal instruction and grow up to give consistent interpretation to novel sentence constructions that
they have never before encountered. Therefore,
children must innately be equipped with a plan common to the grammars of all languages, that tells hem
how to distill the syntactic patterns out of the speech of their parents.
On the list of things Pinker says most educated people "know" (but which
he says are false) is the statement that there has been "a frightening decline in
the ability of the average person to construct a grammatical sentence" (p. 4).
Why does Pinker disagree with this statement? - correct answer ✔✔This statement is wrong because
language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the
way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a
distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex,
specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious
, effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is
qualitatively the same in every individual and is distinct from more general abilities
to process information or behave intelligently. Instinct conveys the idea that people
know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs. It
does not depend on the right education or having an aptitude for architecture, but
they spin because they have spider brains, which urge them to spin webs and the
competence to succeed. Once you begin to look at language as a biological
adaptation to communicate information, it is no longer tempting to see language as
an insidious shaper of thought. The complexity of language is not something that
parent's teach their children. A preschooler's tacit knowledge of grammar is more
sophisticated than the thickest style manual.
How is learning to speak one's first language different from learning to play
chess? - correct answer ✔✔Learning by making mistakes in chess is much faster type of learning than
making mistakes in English. It's a slow and long process to master the
language because you can speak incorrectly and others still understand you,
but don't necessarily correct you.
- Learning language is innate, and there is a critical period for learning it. Chess can
be taught at any point in time.
What is supposed to have happened at the Tower of Babel, according to
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