Ted Talk - Steven Pinker | Appunti di Lingua Inglese

Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain

According to Pinker, the so called ‘Miracle of language’ is that language the trait

that most distinguishes humans from other species, it’s essential to human

cooperation and has many practical applications that make it central for human life.

He also says that language comes so naturally to us that forget what a strange and

miraculous gift it is → ability to code information from the stream of noise that we

produce and share ideas. I could cause you to be thinking thoughts about a lot of

topics, from your favourite reality show to theories of the origin of the universe (this

is for the author the miracle).

Language is a miracle of the natural world because it allows us to exchange

an unlimited number of ideas using a finite set of mental tools, like a large

lexicon of words and a powerful mental grammar that can combine them.

Captain Kirk made a grievous grammatical error when he said that the mission of

the Enterprise was “to boldly go… (where no man has gone before).” He should

have said, “to go boldly… (where no man has gone before),” which immediately

clashes with the rhythm and structure of ordinary English. In fact, for the

prescriptive rule you can’t split an infinitive because it’s a single word.

➢ A second thing not to confuse language with his proper grammar. Linguists

distinguish between descriptive grammar – the set of rules that characterize

how people to speak - and prescriptive grammar – the set of rules that

characterize how people ought to speak if they are writing a correct prose.

Another famous prescriptive rule is that, one should never use a so-called double

negative. Mick Jagger should not have sung, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” he really

should have sung, “I can’t get any satisfaction.” Both “can’t” and “any” and “can’t”

and “no” are a double negative: the only reason that “can’t get any satisfaction” is

correct and “can’t get no satisfaction” is ungrammatical is that the dialect of English

spoken in the south of England in the 17th century used “can’t” “any” rather than

“can’t” “no.”

So this examples demonstrate that if you compare the rules of languages and so-

called dialects, each one is complex in different ways and there’s nothing special

about a language that happens to be chosen as the standard for a country (→ if the

capital of England had been in the north of the country instead of the south of the

country, then “can’t get no,” would have been correct and “can’t get any,” would

have been deemed incorrect).

- Example of African-American vernacular English, also called Black English or

Ebonics: there is a construction in African-American where you can say, “He

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Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain

According to Pinker, the so called ‘Miracle of language’ is that language the trait that most distinguishes humans from other species, it’s essential to human cooperation and has many practical applications that make it central for human life. He also says that language comes so naturally to us that forget what a strange and miraculous gift it is → ability to code information from the stream of noise that we produce and share ideas. I could cause you to be thinking thoughts about a lot of topics, from your favourite reality show to theories of the origin of the universe ( this is for the author the miracle ). Language is a miracle of the natural world because it allows us to exchange an unlimited number of ideas using a finite set of mental tools, like a large lexicon of words and a powerful mental grammar that can combine them. Captain Kirk made a grievous grammatical error when he said that the mission of the Enterprise was “to boldly go… (where no man has gone before).” He should have said, “to go boldly… (where no man has gone before),” which immediately clashes with the rhythm and structure of ordinary English. In fact, for the prescriptive rule you can’t split an infinitive because it’s a single word. ➢ A second thing not to confuse language with his proper grammar. Linguists distinguish between descriptive grammar – the set of rules that characterize how people to speak - and prescriptive grammar – the set of rules that characterize how people ought to speak if they are writing a correct prose. Another famous prescriptive rule is that, one should never use a so-called double negative. Mick Jagger should not have sung, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” he really should have sung, “I can’t get any satisfaction.” Both “can’t” and “any” and “can’t” and “no” are a double negative: the only reason that “can’t get any satisfaction” is correct and “can’t get no satisfaction” is ungrammatical is that the dialect of English spoken in the south of England in the 17th century used “can’t” “any” rather than “can’t” “no.” So this examples demonstrate that if you compare the rules of languages and so- called dialects, each one is complex in different ways and there’s nothing special about a language that happens to be chosen as the standard for a country (→ if the capital of England had been in the north of the country instead of the south of the country, then “can’t get no,” would have been correct and “can’t get any,” would have been deemed incorrect).

Example of African-American vernacular English, also called Black English or Ebonics: there is a construction in African-American where you can say, “He

be workin,” that means that he is employed; he has a job, while “He workin,” means that he happens to be working at the moment that you and I are speaking → 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. LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT ARE NOT THE SAME THING: 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 →

Babies (and other mammals) communicate without speech : they have sophisticated kinds of cognition, they register cause and effect and objects and the intentions of other people, all without the benefit of speech.
Types of thinking go on without language-- visual thinking (a form of non-linguistic thinking).
Tacit knowledge to understand language and remember the gist : long-term memory for verbal material records the gist or the meaning or the content of the words, instead of the exact form of the words.
If language were really thought, it would raise the question of where language would come from if it were incapable of thinking without language. How Does Language Work? There are the words that are the basic components of sentences, they are stored in a part of long-term memory that we can call the mental lexicon or the mental dictionary. There are also rules, the recipes or algorithms that we use to assemble bits of language into more complex stretches of language including syntax, the rules that allow us to assemble words into phrases and sentences; Morphology, the rules that allow us to assemble bits of words, like prefixes and suffixes into complex words; Phonology, as this branch of linguistics is called, consists of formation rules that capture what is a possible word in a language according to the way that it sounds. And then all of this knowledge of language has to connect to the world through interfaces that allow us to understand language coming from others to produce language that others can understand us, the language interfaces. 1. Words: The basic principle of a word was identified by the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, more than 100 years ago when he called attention to the arbitrariness of the sign. Take for example the word, “duck.” The word, “duck” doesn’t look like a duck or walk like a duck or quack like a duck, but I can use it to get you to think the thought of a duck because all of us at some point in our lives have memorized the

At the two-words stage, which you typically see in children who are 18 months or a bit older, kids are producing the smallest sentences. But already it’s clear that they are putting them together using rules in their own mind → example: a child might say “more outside,” meaning “take them outside or let them stay outside”. Now, adults don’t say, “more outside.” So it’s not a phrase that the child simply memorized because copied from parents, but it shows that children are already using rules to put together new combinations.
An easy way of showing that children assimilate rules of grammar unconsciously from the moment they begin to speak is the use of the past tense rule. Chomsky claimed that children solved the problem of language acquisition by having already into them - in the form of a universal grammar - the general design of language. What is the evidence that children are born with a universal grammar? Chomsky propose an abstract argument called, “The poverty of the input.” 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 [ abisso] between them, that can only be filled by assuming that the child has a lot of knowledge of the way that language works already built in him.
There is a difference between the simple word-by-word rule and the more complex structured dependent rule, but how is the child supposed to learn that? How did all of us end up with the correct structured dependent of the rule rather than the far simpler word-by-word version of the rule? Chomsky argues, “[…] we all grow up into adults who unconsciously use the structure dependent rule rather than the word-by-word rule. Moreover, children 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.” Critiques of Chomsky Even if Chomsky has been influential in the science of language, not all language scientists agree with him:

According to the first critique, Chomsky hasn’t really shown principles of universal grammar that are specific to language itself - as opposed to general ways in which the human mind works across multiple domains.
Secondly, Chomsky and the linguists working with him have not examined all 6,000 of the world’s languages and shown that the principles of universal grammar apply to all 6,000. They’ve create the principles based on a small number of languages, but haven’t really proved that universal grammar is really universal.

Chomsky has not proved that there has to be specific knowledge of how grammar works in order for the child to learn grammar because more general purpose learning models, such as neuro network models, are incapable of learning language together with all the other things that children learn. 3. Language Interfaces: LANGUAGE PRODUCTION: An interesting peculiarity of the human vocal track is that the structures that allows it evolved for different purposes, like breathing and for swallowing and so on. This was first noted by Darwin: the larynx over the course of evolution has descended in the throat so that every particle of food going from the mouth to the stomach has to pass over the opening into the larynx with some danger of death by choking. Why did we evolve a mouth and throat that leaves us vulnerable to choking? Well, a plausible hypothesis is that it’s a compromise that was made in the course of evolution to allow us to speak. SPEECH COMPRENSION: is the complex computational process in which the flow of information goes from the world into the brain. The process of speech understanding is very easy for a human, but so hard for a computer, because of two main contributors:

One of them is the fact that each sound, each vowel or consonant comes out very differently, depending on what comes before and what comes after, a phenomenon sometimes called co-articulation.
The other reason that speech recognition can be a difficult problem is because of the absence of segmentation: the wave form of a sentence don’t have silences between the words: It’s a continuous flux in which the end of one word leads to the beginning of the next [In our own language, we detect the word boundaries simply because we have mental lexicon that tell us where the words end]. In conclusion, Pinker affirms the study of language has many practical applications including computers that understand and speak, the diagnosis and treatment of language disorders, the teaching of reading, writing, and foreign languages, law, politics, and literature. But language is fascinating also because it puts the attention to fundamental questions of the human condition: thought, social relationships, human biology, human evolution. Language is the most distinctively human talent, is a window into human nature, and most significantly with its power is one of the wonders of the natural world.

Ted Talk - Steven Pinker, Appunti di Lingua Inglese

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Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain