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Therefore, children typically cannot use explicit negative evidence to learn that an aspect of grammar, such as using double negatives in English, is ungrammatical. This example also shows that children can make incorrect generalizations about which grammatical principle a parent corrects, suggesting that there must be something other than ...
The central idea of the poverty of the stimulus argument is that children could have multiple hypotheses about aspects of their grammar which are distinguishable only by direct negative evidence (or by hearing ungrammatical sentences and recognizing those sentences as ungrammatical).
According to Chomsky, a speaker's grammaticality judgement is based on two factors: . A native speaker's linguistic competence, which is the knowledge that they have of their language, allows them to easily judge whether a sentence is grammatical or ungrammatical based on intuitive introspection.
Demonstrations of sentences which are unlikely to have ever been said, although the combinatorial complexity of the linguistic system makes them possible. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Noam Chomsky): example that is grammatically correct but based on semantic combinations that are contradictory and therefore would not normally occur.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously was composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical. The sentence was originally used in his 1955 thesis The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory and in his 1956 paper "Three Models for the ...
In linguistics, a comparative illusion (CI) or Escher sentence [a] is a comparative sentence which initially seems to be acceptable but upon closer reflection has no well-formed, sensical meaning. The typical example sentence used to typify this phenomenon is More people have been to Russia than I have .
When read, the sentence seems ungrammatical, makes almost no sense, and often requires rereading so that its meaning may be fully understood after careful parsing. Though these sentences are grammatically correct, such sentences are syntactically non-standard (or incorrect) as evidenced by the need for re-reading and careful parsing.
A aggravate – Some have argued that this word should not be used in the sense of "to annoy" or "to oppress", but only to mean "to make worse". According to AHDI, the use of "aggravate" as "annoy" occurs in English as far back as the 17th century. In Latin, from which the word was borrowed, both meanings were used. Sixty-eight percent of AHD4's usage panel approves of its use in "It's the ...