Contents

Preface page ix

1 Studying the human language faculty 1

1.1 Linguistics and the mind/brain 3
1.2 Linguistics as history 5
1.3 Linguistics as the study of E-language 12
1.4 Linguistics as the study of I-language 14

2 Language as a mental organ 18

2.1 We know more than we learn 18
2.2 The nature of grammars 23
2.3 Back to the puzzles 25
2.4 The acquisition problem 34
2.5 Conclusion 40

3 Syntax 41
3.1 The emergence of syntax within linguistics 41
3.2 Successive merger and deletion 43
3.3 Case 61
3.4 Conclusion 66

4 Sound patterns in language 67

4.1 Phonetics as theory 68
4.2 Phonology: language-particular structure 73
4.3 Morphophonemics and I-language 83

5 Describing linguistic knowledge 92

5.1 Phonological knowledge as it appears in borrowing 93
5.2 Can rules express phonological knowledge? 96
5.3 Constraint-based theories of phonological knowledge 99
5.4 The extension of constraint-based description 109

6 Phonetics and the I-linguistics of speech 111

6.1 Representations and the study of sound structure 111
6.2 A linguistic basis for phonetic representation 114
6.3 Speech microprosody: a research program 127
6.4 Conclusion 129

vii
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viii Contents

7 Morphology 131
7.1 The lexicon 132
7.2 Words and “morphemes” 134
7.3 Productivity 152
7.4 Conclusions about lexical organization 155

8 Language change 157

8.1 Long-term directionality in the twentieth century 157
8.2 Grammars and time 161
8.3 English auxiliary verbs 162
8.4 Syntactic effects of the loss of case 175
8.5 Chaos 183

9 “Growing” a language 186

9.1 Principles of Universal Grammar: active early 186
9.2 New phenomena 191
9.3 Experimental technique 194
9.4 Nature of the trigger 198
9.5 Acquiring sound patterns 206
9.6 Conclusion 214

10 The organic basis of language 216

10.1 Only humans have language organs 219
10.2 Language is a function of the brain 221
10.3 Language is a particular faculty 236
10.4 Conclusions 238

References 244
Index 257

Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2010

Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 157.181.88.58 on Sun Mar 13 19:08:00 GMT 2016.
http://ebooks.cambridge.org/ebook.jsf?bid=CBO9780511613869
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016