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Universal Grammar
Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be. When linguistic stimuli are received in the course of language acquisition, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG. The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established, as some linguists have argued languages are so diverse that such universality is rare. It is a matter of empirical investigation to determine precisely what properties are universal and what linguistic capacities are innate. Argument The theory of universal grammar proposes that if human beings are brought up under normal conditions (not those of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Noam Chomsky Portrait 2015
Noam ( he, נועם) is a Hebrew name which means "pleasantness", and although it started as the male version of the female ''Na'omi'' (English: "Naomi" or " Noémie"), today, it is a very common Hebrew name for both males and females alike. The common name day for both genders is often 7 December. People with the given name Noam Political activism * Noam Chomsky, American political activist, linguist, and philosopher. * Noam Federman, Israeli right-wing political activist. * Noam Bramson (born 1969), Mayor of New Rochelle. Television and film * Noam Steinerman, American Film director and visual artist. * Noam Murro, Israeli American director. * Noam Gonick, Canadian film director. * Noam Pitlik, American television director and character actor. * Noam Zylberman, Israeli-born voice actor, best known for the voice of Split Kit from the ''Garbage Pail Kids''. *Noam Jenkins, Canadian actor. Music * Noam Pikelny, American banjoist. * Noam Kaniel, Israel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Montague
Richard Merritt Montague (September 20, 1930 – March 7, 1971) was an American mathematician and philosopher who made contributions to mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. He is known for proposing Montague grammar to formalize the semantics of natural language. As a student of Alfred Tarski, he also contributed early developments to axiomatic set theory ( ZFC). For the latter half of his life, he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles until his early death, believed to be a homicide, at age 40. Career At the University of California, Berkeley, Montague earned a BA in Philosophy in 1950, an MA in Mathematics in 1953, and a PhD in Philosophy in 1957, the latter under the direction of the mathematician and logician Alfred Tarski. Montague spent his entire career teaching in the UCLA Department of Philosophy, where he supervised the dissertations of Nino Cocchiarella and Hans Kamp. Montague wrote on the foundations of logic and set ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammaire Générale Et Raisonnée
The ''Port-Royal Grammar'' (originally ''Grammaire générale et raisonnée contenant les fondemens de l'art de parler, expliqués d'une manière claire et naturelle'', "General and Rational Grammar, containing the fundamentals of the art of speaking, explained in a clear and natural manner") was a milestone in the analysis and philosophy of language. Published in 1660 by Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, it was the linguistic counterpart to the '' Port-Royal Logic'' (1662), both named after the Jansenist monastery of Port-Royal-des-Champs where their authors worked. The Port-Royal Grammar became used as a standard textbook in the study of language until the early nineteenth century, and it has been reproduced in several editions and translations. In the twentieth century, scholars including Edmund Husserl and Noam Chomsky maintained academic interest in the book. Arnauld and Lancelot's approach to language is historical, comparative, and philosophical. Discussing the essence ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philosophical Language
A philosophical language is any constructed language that is constructed from first principles. It is considered a type of engineered language. Philosophical languages were popular in Early Modern times, partly motivated by the goal of revising normal language for philosophical (i.e. scientific) purposes. The term ideal language is sometimes used near-synonymously, though more modern philosophical languages such as Toki Pona are less likely to involve such an exalted claim of perfection. The axioms and grammars of the languages together differ from commonly spoken languages. Overview In most philosophical languages, words are constructed from a limited set of morphemes that are treated as "elemental" or fundamental. "Philosophical language" is sometimes used synonymously with "taxonomic language". Vocabularies of oligosynthetic languages are made of compound words, which are coined from a small (theoretically minimal) set of morphemes. Languages like Toki Pona similarly use a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Speculative Grammar
The Modistae ( Latin for Modists), also known as the speculative grammarians, were the members of a school of grammarian philosophy known as Modism or speculative grammar, active in northern France, Germany, England, and Denmark in the 13th and 14th centuries. Their influence was felt much less in the southern part of Europe, where the somewhat opposing tradition of the so-called "pedagogical grammar" never lost its preponderance. History William of Conches, Peter Helias, and Ralph of Beauvais, also referred to as speculative grammarians predate the Modist movement proper. The Modist philosophy was first developed by Martin of Dacia (died 1304) and his colleagues in the mid-13th century, though it would rise to prominence only after its systematization by Thomas of Erfurt decades later, in his treatise , probably written in the first decade of the 14th century. Until the early twentieth-century this work was assumed to have been authored by John Duns Scotus. Widely repro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Overview Of Grammar
The ' ( Latin for "Overview of Grammar"; . or ). was one of the earlier works on Latin grammar and Aristotelian logic by the medieval English philosopher Roger Bacon. It is primarily noteworthy for its exposition of a kind of universal grammar. __NOTOC__ History The work is apparently a series of lectures given by Bacon for the mandatory classes on Priscian's work ''On Construction'' (Books XVII & XVIII of his '' Institutes of Grammar'') at the University of Paris, where he taught in the 1230s and '40s. Much more than Bacon's later linguistic works, the ' lies in the mainstream of 13th-century analysis. The first part borrows directly from Robert Kilwardby's commentary on Priscian. More generally, the work reflects the speculative grammar taught at Oxford in such 13th-century works as the '. It is probable that the final draft of the work which Bacon mentions in his ' was never completed.. His '' Greek'' and '' Hebrew Grammars'' and '' Compendium of Philosophy'' may have ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon (; la, Rogerus or ', also '' Rogerus''; ), also known by the scholastic accolade ''Doctor Mirabilis'', was a medieval English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism. In the early modern era, he was regarded as a wizard and particularly famed for the story of his mechanical or necromantic brazen head. He is sometimes credited (mainly since the 19th century) as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method, along with his teacher Robert Grosseteste. Bacon applied the empirical method of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) to observations in texts attributed to Aristotle. Bacon discovered the importance of empirical testing when the results he obtained were different from those that would have been predicted by Aristotle. His linguistic work has been heralded for its early exposition of a universal grammar, and 21st-century re-evaluations emphasise that Bacon was essentially a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greenberg's Linguistic Universals
The American linguist Joseph Greenberg (1915–2001) proposed a set of linguistic universals based primarily on a set of 30 languages. The following list is verbatim from the list printed in the appendix of Greenberg's ''Universals of Language'' and "Universals Restated",Greenberg "Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements," ''Universals of Language'', London: MIT Press, pp. 110-113. sorted by context. The numbering is fixed to keep Greenberg's number associations, as these are commonly referenced by number, for example "Greenberg's linguistic universal number 12." Typology # "In declarative sentences with nominal subject and object, the dominant order is almost always one in which the subject precedes the object." # "In languages with prepositions, the genitive almost always follows the governing noun, while in languages with postpositions it almost always precedes." # "Languages with dominant VSO order are always preposit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Innateness Hypothesis
In linguistics, the innateness hypothesis is a hypothesis which holds that humans are born with at least some knowledge of linguistic structure. On this hypothesis, language acquisition involves filling in the details of an innate blueprint rather than being an entirely inductive process. The hypothesis is one of the cornerstones of generative grammar and related approaches in linguistics. Arguments in favour include the poverty of the stimulus, the universality of language acquisition, as well as experimental studies on learning and learnability. However, these arguments have been criticized, and the hypothesis is widely rejected in other traditions such as usage-based linguistics. The term was coined by Hilary Putnam in reference to the views of Noam Chomsky. Linguistic nativism Linguistic nativism is the hypothesis that humans are born with some knowledge of language. It is intended as an explanation for the fact that children are reliably able to accurately acquire enormous ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Systemic Functional Linguistics
# * Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is an approach to linguistics, among functional linguistics, that considers language as a social semiotic system. It was devised by Michael Halliday, who took the notion of system from J. R. Firth, his teacher (Halliday, 1961). Firth proposed that systems refer to possibilities subordinated to structure; Halliday "liberated" choice from structure and made it the central organising dimension of SFL. In more technical terms, while many approaches to linguistic description place structure and the syntagmatic axis foremost, SFL adopts the paradigmatic axis as its point of departure. ''Systemic'' foregrounds Saussure's "paradigmatic axis" in understanding how language works.Halliday, M.A.K. 2004. Introduction: How Big is a Language? On the Power of Language. In The Language of Science: Volume 5 in the Collected Works of M.A.K. Edited by J.J.Webster. London and New York: Continuum. p. xi. For Halliday, a central theoretical principle is th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GPSG
Generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG) is a framework for describing the syntax and semantics of natural languages. It is a type of constraint-based phrase structure grammar. Constraint based grammars are based around defining certain syntactic processes as ungrammatical for a given language and assuming everything not thus dismissed is grammatical within that language. Phrase structure grammars base their framework on constituency relationships, seeing the words in a sentence as ranked, with some words dominating the others. For example, in the sentence "The dog runs", "runs" is seen as dominating "dog" since it is the main focus of the sentence. This view stands in contrast to dependency grammars, which base their assumed structure on the relationship between a single word in a sentence (the sentence head) and its dependents. Origins GPSG was initially developed in the late 1970s by Gerald Gazdar. Other contributors include Ewan Klein, Ivan Sag, and Geoffrey Pul ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logical Consequence
Logical consequence (also entailment) is a fundamental concept in logic, which describes the relationship between statements that hold true when one statement logically ''follows from'' one or more statements. A valid logical argument is one in which the conclusion is entailed by the premises, because the conclusion is the consequence of the premises. The philosophical analysis of logical consequence involves the questions: In what sense does a conclusion follow from its premises? and What does it mean for a conclusion to be a consequence of premises?Beall, JC and Restall, Greg, Logical Consequence' The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). All of philosophical logic is meant to provide accounts of the nature of logical consequence and the nature of logical truth. Logical consequence is necessary and formal, by way of examples that explain with formal proof and models of interpretation. A sentence is said to be a logical co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
