(Emphasis mine.)<\/p>\n
Take the question of sound structure. Here too the person who has acquired knowledge of a language has quite specific knowledge about the facts that transcend his or her experience<\/strong>, for example, about which nonexistent words are possible words and which are not. Consider the forms\u00a0strid<\/em> and\u00a0bnid<\/em>. Speakers of English have not heard either of these forms, but they know that strid<\/em> is a possible word, perhaps the name of some exotic fruit they have not seen before, but\u00a0bnid<\/em>, though pronounceable, is not a possible word of the language. Speakers of Arabic, in contrast, know that bnid\u00a0<\/em>is a possible word and\u00a0strid<\/em> is not; speakers of Spanish known that neither\u00a0strid<\/em> nor\u00a0bnid<\/em> is a possible word of their language. The facts can be explained in terms of rules of sound structure that the language learner comes to know in the course of acquiring the language.<\/p>\n
Acquisition of the rules of sound structure, in turn, depends on fixed principles governing possible sound systems for human languages, the elemnts of which they are constituted, the manner of their combination and the modifications that they may undergo in various contexts.\u00a0<\/strong>These principles are common to English, Arabic, Spanish, and all other human languages and are used unconsciously by a person acquiring any of these languages…<\/p>\n
Suppose one were to argue that the knowledge of possible words is derived “by analogy.” The explanation is empty until an account is given of this notion.\u00a0<\/strong>If we attempt to develop a concept of “analogy” that will account for these facts, we will discover that we are building into this notion the rules and principles of sound structure. (Chomsky 1988:26)<\/p>\n
<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
References<\/h1>\n
Chomsky, N. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge: the Managua Lectures<\/em>. MIT Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Emphasis mine.) Take the question of sound structure. Here too the person who has acquired knowledge of a language has quite specific knowledge about the facts that transcend his or her experience, for example, about which nonexistent words are possible words and which are not. Consider the forms\u00a0strid and\u00a0bnid. Speakers of English have not heard … Continue reading “Noam on phonotactics”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-acquisition","category-language","category-phonology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1400"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1444,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400\/revisions\/1444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}