Syntactic Theory Jeopardy Template

The scientific study of language	The competence/performance distinction	simple approaches to grammaticality judgements	Language acquisition and universal grammar	structure-dependent
100 To study the methods of the natural sciences. What is Noam Chomsky’s proposal?	100 Competence What do we call the mental knowledge that a person has about their language?	100 Parrot theory What is the theory called that says language has unlimited capacity and should not be judged only because we have heard it before?	100 The logical problem of language acquisition What is the observation that adults know much more about their language than they could have learned only from experience or the data they heard as children?	100 Structure-dependent What is a grammatical rule that is not based only on the linear order of words (like counting “the third word”) called?
200 Zellig Harris Who believed that the study of language was more similar to the study of literature?	200 Performance What do we call the real use of language in specific situations?	200 It is an example of a grammatically correct sentence that seems strange or meaningless. How is this sentence categorized: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously?	200 Noam Chomsky Who proposed that humans are born with an innate mechanism called Universal Grammar (UG)?	200 Universal Grammar What predicts that no human language uses structure-independent rules (like reversing word order or moving words based only on their number position)?
300 Fact of the matter What do philosophers call the idea that there is one correct answer and one incorrect answer?	300 the study of linguistic behaviorism What was the process of recording speakers in a natural conversation and then analyzing their linguistic behavior called?	300 It cannot explain systematic exceptions and it does not predict invisible structural restrictions. Why does the theory of analogy fail?	300 Universal Grammar What is the name of the innate system that children are born with to acquire language?	300 Berber Which language did Christopher master that was very complicated?
400 It means studying the input and the output of the brain to understand how it works inside. What does it mean to treat the linguistic system as a black box?	400 Grammaticality If a sentence is generated by the speaker’s mental grammar, what is it called?	400 It is a garden-path sentence How is this sentence classified: The horse raced past the barn fell?	400 Principles What are the rules or features that are the same in all human languages called?	400 A conceptual argument What is based on a hypothesis about UG and predicts how languages should behave called?
500 The brain Which part of the body do we need to study to analyze language?	500 Acceptability If a sentence sounds natural or easy to process, what is it called?	500 It is a processing (performance) problem. The sentence is grammatically correct, but the brain gets confused when it analyzes it in real time. What is a Garden Path problem?	500 Parameters What are the specific ways in which languages can vary, like “switches,” called?	500 An empirical argument What is based on observed facts in particular languages and integrates them into a theory about UG called?

Syntactic Theory

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