What is explanatory adequacy?
EXPLANATORY ADEQUACY: • A higher level of adequacy that considers a set of universal conditions which all grammars of possible human languages must obey; Chomsky assumes that the child possesses an innate mechanism for deducing the full structure of the language he/she has to learn from the data presented to him/her.
What is an example of generative grammar?
Examples of Generative Grammar This involves presenting a native speaker with a series of sentences and having them decide whether the sentences are grammatical (acceptable) or ungrammatical (unacceptable). For example: The man is happy. Happy man is the.
What is language adequacy?
The notion of linguistic adequacy (the adequacy of sentences to express or describe) is explicated in terms of a set theoretical model of the communication situation. Roughly: a message is adequate to the degree it answers the receiver’s questions.
What is Innateness theory of language acquisition?
The innateness hypothesis is an expression coined by Hilary Putnam to refer to a linguistic theory of language acquisition which holds that at least some knowledge about language exists in humans at birth. Empiricists advocate that language is entirely learned.
What are the criteria for assessing adequacy of linguistic grammatical theory?
The three levels of adequacy a grammar can attain are observational adequacy, descriptive adequacy, and explanatory adequacy.
What are the criteria of adequacy of a theory?
The criteria of adequacy are testability (whether there is some way to determine if a theory is true), fruitfulness (the number of novel predictions made), scope (the amount of diverse phenomena explained), simplicity (the number of assumptions made), and conservatism (how well a theory fits with existing knowledge).
What are the types of generative grammar?
The term generative grammar has been associated with at least the following schools of linguistics:
- Transformational grammar (TG) Standard theory (ST) Extended standard theory (EST)
- Monostratal (or non-transformational) grammars. Relational grammar (RG) Lexical-functional grammar (LFG)
What are the characteristics of transformational generative grammar?
transformational grammar, also called Transformational-generative Grammar, a system of language analysis that recognizes the relationship among the various elements of a sentence and among the possible sentences of a language and uses processes or rules (some of which are called transformations) to express these …
What is Chomsky theory?
Chomsky based his theory on the idea that all languages contain similar structures and rules (a universal grammar), and the fact that children everywhere acquire language the same way, and without much effort, seems to indicate that we’re born wired with the basics already present in our brains.
What is the connection between innateness hypothesis and universal grammar?
In linguistics, the Innateness Hypothesis is the claim that all children have, by virtue of a common biology, a ‘Universal Grammar’ that defines a space of possible human languages.
What is adequacy in psychology?
The adequacy of “meaning” as an explanation for the superiority of learning by independent discovery.
What is Extended Standard Theory?
…in the “standard theory” of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and the subsequent “extended standard theory,” which was developed and revised through the late 1970s. These theories proposed that the mind of the human infant is endowed with a “format” of a possible grammar (a theory of linguistic data),…
What is the difference between descriptive adequacy and observational adequacy?
The levels Observational adequacy The theory achieves an exhaustive and discrete enumeration of the data points. There is a pigeonhole for each observation. Descriptive adequacy The theory formally specifies rules accounting for all observed arrangements of the data.
What is explanatory adequacy in linguistics?
A linguistic theory that aims for explanatory adequacy is concerned with the internal structure of the device [i.e. grammar]; that is, it aims to provide a principled basis, independent of any particular language, for the selection of the descriptively adequate grammar of each language.
What is the purpose of grammar theory?
…the grammar gives a correct account of the linguistic intuition of the native speaker, and specifies the observed data (in particular) in terms of significant generalizations that express underlying regularities in the language. The theory provides a principled choice between competing descriptions.