Sunday, November 13, 2016

Scalar implicature and UG

I believe that the articles proved that language is acquired through experience and real-life conversations. 
In pragmatics, scalar implicature in an implicature that attributes an implicit meaning beyond the explicit or literal meaning of an utterance. This relates to the Barner article because if someone were to say, “I did some of my homework” this implies that not all of the homework was done, meaning that the utterer had a reason for not using a more informative or stronger term on the same scale.
Stiller touches on the same things that Barner talks about but emphasizes ad-hoc scales—scales constructed from contextual, rather than conventional linguistic factors (Stiller, 5). Ad-hoc scales investigates a spectrum of tasks that are logically equivalent to conventional scalar implicature but in which the scale arises (or fails to arise) from the real-world context rather than the lexical items (Stiller, 1).
Looking at these articles, I think this relates back to the idea of UG and refutes the argument that language is innate. The fact that children cannot distinguish the words “some” and “all” proves that language is acquired through listening and learning from others, whether it be from their parents or school teachers. I think that it is interesting to see how we unconsciously pick up small idiomatic grammar rules as we grow up immersed in language filled environments.

1 comment:

  1. I think your argument is very interesting since I am in the Symsys1 class, and I also heard about how Fodor believes that all concepts should be innate. I wonder would Fodor argue that the child already has the concept innately, but haven't associate it the words with the innate concepts?

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