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ling 115 exam(questions and answers)graded A+

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ling 115 exam(questions and answers)graded A+

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  • September 28, 2024
  • 11
  • 2024/2025
  • Exam (elaborations)
  • Questions & answers
  • Ling 115
  • Ling 115
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BravelRadon
ling 115 exam

Explain 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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