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Chapter 1. "An instinct to acquire an art ”. "Language is not a cultural artifact .” Instead it is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic.
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Chapter 1. "An instinct to acquire an art” • "Language is not a cultural artifact .” • Instead it is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic. • It is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.
For these reasons, some cognitive scientists have described language as a psychological faculty, a mental organ, a neural system, and a computational module. But I prefer the admittedly quaint term "instinct.” SP, p.18
Some history • Pinker’s phrase “an instinct to acquire an art” is from Charles Darwin. • Pinker acknowledges his debt to Noam Chomsky, though they do not always agree-- esp on evolution of L. • Pinker is reacting strongly -- maybe too strongly -- to the ideas of language that he and I were exposed to as students BC. • (Before Chomsky)
the "standard social science model" 23 • This is SP's target--the idea that "the human psyche is molded by the surrounding culture.” He published a book on this -- • The Blank Slate: The modern denial of human nature • See interview at • http://www.edge.org/ • See reviews of his recent 2007 book.
Noam Chomsky - “two fundamental facts about language” • 1. Most sentences are novel or original • 2. There is rapid, uniform, and untutored acquisition of human language.
Fact one 1) virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is an brand new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe...therefore language cannot be a repertoire of responses...the brain must contain a recipe or program ... That recipe will generate new appropriate sentences and will enable comprehension as well.
Fact two • 2) that children develop these complex grammars rapidly and without formal instruction ... therefor..must be equipped with a plan common to the grammars of all languages, a Universal "Grammar (UG), that tells them how to distill the syntactic patterns out of the speech of their parents..p.22
(Fact three) • OK there is no three in the book. I want to add another. • Every word we know was invented by someone. • A language is more than words but it can’t be a language without them. • We learn each word through our personal experience with that word -- very unlike sentences. • People who focus on words often have a different view of language than those that focus on other aspects of language.
more on NC “Three goals for linguistics” 1957 • 1. describe languages (the traditional goal) • 2. explain how that vocabulary is used by fluent speakers (production and perception) • 3. how is that description acquired? (language acquisition) • (No "goal" toward evolution of language) • (most of NC’s “new” ideas are now taken for granted.)
Implications of those goals • linguistics is part of psychology • psychology part of biology • traditional disciplines must work together
description of language • What do you know when you know English? French? Chinese? • How do we talk about what we know? • What's in common to all human languages? • Each language is a “dialect of human language"? (Pinker)
Describe “Stop!” • Tell me what I’m doing when I do this!
The vocabulary of anatomy A body movement
PLACE where flow is modified: Front to back (lips, teeth.. velum) MANNER (open, constrict, friction, stop the airflow) VOICED (yes or no) All speech movement segments can be described in this framework. Three parameters of articulation
A waveform --the vocabulary of physics Time-pressure wave created by uttering “stop!” Variation in fundamental frequency (Hz.) over time
The physics of sound - description of speech in terms of • Frequency components (cycles/second, Hertz, Hz)) • Timing and duration of components (milliseconds) • Intensity of those components (decibels, etc.) • Now these dynamic events are described as linguistic objects
A linguistic object • A stream of speech • Sequence of syllables • Sequence of phonological segments (phonemes) • Sequence of words (morphemes) • Hierarchically organized phrase • Hierarchically organized clause(s) • Meaningful linguistic expression
Voicing a vowel “eee” 60ms of “eeee” 10 open and close cycles Spoken with a fundamental frequency is about 165 Hertz (Hz.)
Human speech frequency range • 100Hz to 5000Hz • Only a portion of our hearing range • But where our ears are most sensitive
Intensity • DeciBel scale 0-100dB
Time • Speech movements timed in milliseconds
Noise or non-periodic speech • Fricative sounds unvoiced [sh, f, s] • Fricative sounds voiced [j, v, z] • shoe
Silence as information • Slit • split
Syntactic structure Language is more than sounds and words It conveys meaning systematically The system involves phrases organized in hierarchical structures Meaning derives from the arrangement of words in these phrases. Grammatical relationships like subject and object of sentences are defined in each language by the arrangement of phrases.
What about meaning? • Typically listeners’ immediately experience the meaning of the speaker’s movements. • How does combinatorial or compositional semantics work? What does the vocabulary of meaning -- semantics -- look like?
Synonym Homonym antonym Presupposition Entailment Paraphrase Are there “atoms” of meaning? Vocabulary of meaning
What about pragmatics? • How do we use language? • Reference- referring • Other functions
The brain and language Relevant structures Organization Methodology Findings problems
Other topics Evolution of language (functions of L?) Language change Language acquisition Bilingualism - are two better than one? Language and cognition Role of words & lexicalization Literacy - uses and effects on cognition
