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Steven Pinker’s Lecture:
Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the human brain
- How does Pinker define spoken language?
It is the one that it is found in all human cultures throughout history.
- Which arguments does he bring up to show that language is an instinct?
Charles Darwin wrote, “Man has an instinctive tendency to speak as we see in the babble of our young children while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew or write.”
Scientists interested in language also study how it is processed in real time, a field called psycholinguistics; how is it acquired by children, the study of language acquisition
- Why does he bring up the Split Infinitive and the Double Negative rules?
Linguists distinguish between descriptive grammar - the rules, that characterize how people to speak - and prescriptive grammar - rules that characterize how people ought to speak if they are writing careful written prose. Many of the prescriptive rules of language make no sense whatsoever. The Split Infinitive and the Double Negative are prescriptive rules.
- What does he explain about the complexity and sophistication of Standard English and Afro-American English and how does he explain it?
There’s nothing special about a language that happens to be chosen as the standard for a given country. In fact, if you compare the rules of languages and so-called dialects, each one is complex in different ways. Take for example, African-American vernacular English, also called Black English or Ebonics. There is a construction in African- American where you can say, “He be workin,” which is not an error or bastardization or a corruption of Standard English, but in fact conveys a subtle distinction, one that’s different than simply, “He workin.” “He be workin,” means that he is employed; he has a job, “He workin,” means that he happens to be working at the moment that you and I are speaking.
Now, this is a tense difference that can be made in African-American English that is not made in Standard English, one of many examples in which the dialects have their own set of rules that is just as sophisticated and complex as the one in the standard language.
- What evidence does he bring up to explain that Language is Not Thought
Many people report that they think in language, but commune of psychologists have shown that there are many kinds of thought that don’t actually take place in the form of sentences. Evidence:
(1.) Babies (and other mammals) communicate without speech (2.) Types of thinking go on without language--visual thinking (3.) We use tacit knowledge to understand language and remember the “gist” rather than the exact form of the words. (4.) If language is thinking, then where did it come from?
- What are the three main areas he distinguishes in language?
Words: basic components of sentences, stored in memory Rules: recipes or algorithms that we use to assemble pieces of language into more complex structures. Include: syntax, morphology, phonology. Interfaces: allow us to understand language coming from others and produce it too to others.
- What might a lexical entry in the mental dictionary look like and why?
There are the words that are the basic components of sentences that are stored in a part of long-term memory that we can call the mental lexicon or the mental dictionary. There would be a symbol for the word itself, some kind of specification of its sound and some kind of specification of its meaning.
- What does he mean by productivity in language and how does it differ from pattern memorization?
Chomsky noted that the main puzzle that we have to explain in understanding language is creativity or as linguists often call it productivity, the ability to produce and understand new sentences. We have to explain how people are capable of doing it. It shows that when we know a language, we haven’t just memorized a very long list of sentences, but rather have internalized a grammar or algorithm or recipe for combining elements into brand new assemblies.
- What are the different things that a sentence such as Colorless green ideas sleep furiously teach us?
Languages have a syntax, which can’t be identified with their meaning. What’s the point of the following sentence from Chomsky, from 1956, “Colorless, green ideas sleep furiously?” Well, the point is that it is very close to meaningless. Any English speaker can instantly recognize that it conforms to the patterns of English syntax. Compare, for example, “furiously sleep ideas dream colorless,” which is also meaningless, but we perceive as a word salad.
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Chomsky claimed that children solved the problem of language acquisition by having the general design of language already wired into them in the form of a universal grammar.
- How does he explain universal grammar, the poverty of the stimulus argument and the structure dependence rule?
If you look at what goes into the ears of a child and look at the talent they end up with as adults, there is a big chasm between them that can only be filled in by assuming that the child has a lot of knowledge of the way that language works already built in. Here’s how the argument works. One of the things that children have to learn when they learn English is how to form a question. Now, children will get evidence from parent’s speech to how the question rule works, such as sentences like, “The man is here,” and the corresponding question, “Is the man here?”
Now, logically speaking, a child getting that kind of input could posit two different kinds of rules. There’s a simple word-by-word linear rule. In this case, find the first “is” in the sentence and move it to the front. “The man is here,” “Is the man here?” Now there’s a more complex rule that the child could posit called a structure dependent rule, one that looks at the geometry of the phrase structure tree. In this case, the rule would be: find the first “is” after the subject noun phrase and move that to the front of the sentence. Well, you can see the difference when it comes to performing the question from a slightly more complex sentence like, “The man who is tall is in the room.”
“Well,” Chomsky argues, “if you were actually to look at the kind of language that all of us hear, it’s actually quite rare to hear a sentence like, “Is the man who is tall in the room? The kind of input that would logically inform you that the word-by-word rule is wrong and the structure dependent rule is right. Moreover, children don’t make errors like, “is the man who tall is in the room,” as soon as they begin to form complex questions, they use the structure dependent rule. And that,” Chomsky argues, “is evidence that structure dependent rules are part of the definition of universal grammar that children are born with.”
- How does he compare the words bluk and crachts and how is it related to the concept of phonology?
Phonology consists of formation rules that capture what is a possible word in a language according to the way that it sounds.
Bluk , is not an English word, but you get a sense that it could be an English word that someone could coin a new term of English that we pronounce “bluk.” But when you hear the sound crachts , you instantly know that that not only isn’t it an English word, but it really couldn’t be an English word. Crachts , by the way, comes from Yiddish and it means kind of to sigh or to moan. The reason that we recognize that it’s not English is
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because it has sounds and sequences which aren’t part of the formation rules of English phonology.
But together with the rules that define the basic words of a language, there are also phonological rules that make adjustments to the sounds, depending on what the other words the word appears with.
- What are phonological rules and how do they affect the learning of a foreign language?
When someone acquires English as a foreign language or acquires a foreign language in general, they carry over the rules of phonology of their first language and apply it to their second language. We have a word for it; we call it an “accent.” When a language user deliberately manipulates the rules of phonology, that is, when they don’t just speak in order to convey content, they pay attention as to what phonological structures are being used; we call it poetry and rhetoric.
- What is the difference of the first sound in the words cape and cod and what does he bring it up for?
The place called Cape Cod has two “c” sounds. Each of them symbolized by the letter “C,” the hard “C.” Nonetheless, when you pay attention to the way you pronounce them, you notice that in fact, you pronounce them in very different parts of the mouth. In one case, the “c” is produced way back in the mouth; the other it’s produced much farther forward. We don’t notice that we pronounce “c” in two different ways depending whether it comes before an “a” or an “ah,” but that difference forms a difference in the shape of the resonant cavity in our mouth which produces a very different wave form.
- How is the dialogue Martha says, “I’m leaving you.” John says, “Who is he? related to the concept of pragmatics?
Understanding language requires finding the antecedents pronouns, in this case who the “he” refers to, and any competent English speaker knows exactly who the “he” is, presumably John’s romantic rival even though it was never stated explicitly in any part of the dialogue. This shows how we bring to bear on language understanding a vast store of knowledge about human behaviour, human interactions, human relationships. And we often have to use that background knowledge even to solve mechanical problems like who does a pronoun like “he” refers to.
