Sort each statement by whether it belongs to the COMPARATIVE method or to GENERATIVE grammar.
Groups: Comparative method · Generative grammar
- A finite rule system generates infinitely many sentences
- Apparent exceptions demand a further law or analogy
- Latin p corresponds regularly to English f
- Linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology
- Reconstruct an unattested ancestor from regular correspondences
Hints
- One method looks backwards in time; the other looks inwards at a speaker.
- Anything about acquisition or mind belongs to the second.
Show the answer
Comparative method: Reconstruct an unattested ancestor from regular correspondences, Apparent exceptions demand a further law or analogy, Latin p corresponds regularly to English f
Generative grammar: A finite rule system generates infinitely many sentences, Linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology
The two are not rivals, they answer different questions and coexist in most departments. Setting them side by side is useful because their standards of evidence differ so sharply: one is answerable to attested forms in related languages, the other to judgements and to what a child could plausibly have learned.
Practise A History of Linguistics
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Languages I is free to start.
More questions on A History of Linguistics
- Why is a systematic sound correspondence better evidence of relatedness than a set of similar-looking words?
- The Neogrammarians claimed sound change is strictly exceptionless, yet Grimm's Law showed apparent…
- Arrange these milestones in the history of linguistics in chronological order.
- Pāṇini's grammar of Sanskrit uses a formal metalanguage with ordered rules and abbreviation conventions.
- Match each figure or school to the position they are known for.
- Approximately how many rules does Pāṇini's grammar contain, to the nearest thousand?
- Which are true of Grimm's Law?
- Complete the account of the comparative method.
- The behaviourist framework Chomsky attacked in 1959 held that language is acquired through association and…