The Human Language Series 1
The Human Language Series 1
The Human Language Series 1
• What specific biological endowment could we have that allows us to do this? (Fodor)
• Is there some core of properties true of all human languages? (Gleitman)
• How do people interact with language—how do people do what I am now doing? (Chomsky)
• People don’t think when they speak, they just speak. (Aronoff)
• Why are languages filled with rules we all follow without knowing why? (film narrator)
(An asterisk * indicates an utterance that is not found in normal, or “grammatical” speech.)
• “The big red balloon.” but not “*The red big balloon.” [people are asked why]
• [French] “Un gros balon rouge.” but not “*Un gros rouge balon.” (French woman in film)
• “Three big round red plastic balls.” but not other orderings of the adjectives (Pinker)
• “Stop and go traffic.” but not “*Go and stop traffic.” (Carlin)
• “reclimb, reinstitutionalize” but not “*refall down” (Aronoff)
• “Don’t rouse up the natives.” but not “*Don’t rouse up them.” (Slobin)
• “That John left surprised me” but not “*John left surprised me.” (Fodor)
• “It’s the same old story.” but not “*It’s the old same story.” (Tannen)
Language is the most human thing about being human, yet most people don’t think much about it. Traditionally linguists
have studied the history, vocabulary, and grammar of the world’s languages. Within our generation, new theories have
revolutionized our thinking. Today linguists ask questions about how we use language and how language functions inside
the human mind. (film narrator)
“The language faculty is a subsystem of the human brain. … That organ of the brain yields language under the right set of
conditions. … it is determined by our biological endowment and is invariant across the species.” (Chomsky)
The most elementary property of language is that we can produce new sentences never said before (Chomsky);
the point of language is to produce and understand things you never heard said before (Gleitman); each
language has about 40 sounds and a limited number of words, but it can produce an unlimited number of
sentences and sentences never heard before (Miller); with a small number of words, we can make an infinite
number of sentences (Aronoff).
Example: Senator Joseph McCarthy—“That’s the most unheard of thing ever heard of.”(Baker)
P. Schlenker - Ling 1 - Introduction to the Study of Language, UCLA 3
Klavans—People can’t say what a word is. (Film shows a number of people who are unable to provide a
definition.)
One possible definition: “The smallest separate piece of a language that all by itself will have a meaning.”
(Elgin)
BUT—There are words which themselves are composed of smaller parts that have a meaning, e.g. “kick-ed”. -
ed certainly is not a word (Lasnik)
Another possible definition: “A word is the sequence of letters between two blanks.” (Byrd)
MAYBE THE HARDEST THING THAT THE MIND HAS TO DO TO BREAK SPOKEN LANGUAGE INTO WORDS; MILLIONS
HAVE BEEN SPENT TRYING TO GET MACHINES TO DO THIS, BUT A CHILD BY AGE ONE CAN DO IT WITHOUT
TRAINING. (Aronoff)
Concepts are slippery objects; words stand for things, but “tree” doesn’t stand for one tree but the concept of
tree. (Aronoff)
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“Are there concepts that we need not invent because we are born already knowing them?”
Given two marbles, one in box, one outside, which is “near the box”? How does a child know that a marble
that is in a box cannot be near the box? (Chomsky)
(Film shows small children and adults, all independently agreeing that the marble must be outside the box to
be “near” it.
The concept of box that we develop is an obscure one. It includes the interior, but it does not matter what is in
the interior. This is an abstract concept—there is no evidence that the child has available that the “box” is not
just its surface (indeed, an invented concept, such as a “cube” in geometry, does refer only to the surface).
(Chomsky)
SENTENCES
• In everyday conversation we are enormously creative. It is virtually certain that any 20 word sentence has
never been uttered or heard before. (Miller)
• “Boy, one more minute of those hatlice and I’d be fried shish kebab.” (little boy)
• “I’m going over the softball game and beat up Hitler’s widow.” (Carlin)
• General Alexander Haig—“There is a conscious castration of America’s eyes and ears around the
world.”—Nobody could have spoken that sentence before Haig. (Baker)
• Calculating number of word combinations: if there were, say, 10 possibilities for each consecutive word of a
sentence, after 10 words, there would be 10 to the 10th power word combinations. (Miller)
One of the basic formal properties that allows for infinite creativity is the ability to put a sentence into yet a
larger sentence. (Lasnik)
But short sentences can be improbable too, e.g. “Short sentences can be improbable, too.”
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“We have a system that is very strict in many ways but allows a great deal of freedom as long as you stay
within the bounds of the system.” We have a very small number of rules and between them you can make up
an infinite number of sentences. (Aronoff)
The beginnings of Science are the capacity to be amazed by simple things. By allowing oneself to be puzzled
by a simple question, such as why things fall down rather than flying into space, science begins. (Chomsky)
“How did sound and meaning ever get linked together?” These are two unlike things. What biological event
could link these? Answer: The creation of grammar—grammar is the system which allows the mismatched
elements, sound and meaning, to be linked to each other. (Newmeyer)
The independence of the grammatical structure of a sentence and the events that it portrays
• “The first task of grammar is to organize words in a line one after another.”
“An event is about to take place [lady falls off cable car]. Will we report in the order that it occurred? Is there
a natural order to events?”
• “A woman fell from the cable car.” but What came first, the woman or the cable car?
• “The boy kicked the ball.” but The boy, the kicking, and the ball form a unitary event.
• It seems that when we speak we report them in the order they occurred, but in reality events do not occur bit
by bit. (Slobin, Lasnik)
• “This is one of the puzzles of syntax, that the form of a sentence is often independent of its meaning.”
(Lasnik)
• “Boy, ball, and kick can occur in any order in language. In reality they occur simultaneously.” (Slobin)
• “One of the major tasks of language is to take a meaning which is essentially atemporal and non-linear and
arrange it in linear order to make different kinds of points.” (Slobin)
The independence of form and meaning: a sentence can be grammatical but meaningless
(A small industry has been spawned around this sentence—poems, songs, etc. Chomsky)
If you try this sentence on a child, the child will giggle but accept it. If you try, “Furiously sleep ideas green
colorless,” the child would stare blankly instead. It doesn’t matter what the words are for a sentence to be a
sentence of English. (Lasnik, Chomsky)
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UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
• “Syntax—no other animal seems to have it.” We have to assume that something that is so much at the basis
of human achievement is an evolved capacity. (Gould)
• You inherit many of the principles and processes in your language. The 5000 or so languages are very
similar. (Lasnik)
• From the human point of view we are all very different, but from the point of view of some Martian, we
would all look alike, just as from the human point of view, all frogs look alike. From the frog point of view,
frogs look very different from each other. (Chomsky)
• The differences between human languages is trivial compared to the differences between human languages
and other animal communication systems. (Gleitman)
How many use (1) vs. (2)? Most languages use a little of each; it may change over time back and forth.
(Miller) English is more like (1) but may be moving toward (2)—’ve (would’ve, could’ve). (Slobin)
“However different languages may seem on the surface, underneath they seem to be cut out of the same
pattern.”—Compare faces—each has eyes, a nose, a mouth, yet every human face is uniquely identifiable.
(Slobin)
SOME THINGS LANGUAGE IS NOT GOOD FOR: THE INDEPENDENCE OF LANGUAGE AND
THOUGHT
“Just how good is language at doing the job it was designed to do? If it is just a biological adaptation, then
you would expect as for other biological adaptations that there would be limits on fit between the job that it
does and the job that it was designed to do.” (Fodor)
• giving directions—a map is much better: Jonathan Winters—“You go on down a good hundred miles
and take a right—or is it a left?” (Carlin)
“There are fine thoughts which are not expressible with language. Language has structure, and anything with
structure and design has intrinsic limits. If it had no structure and design, it would be useless for anything. A
hammer has structure which makes it good for some things but not others.” (Chomsky)
NONETHELESS—Though a map is good for giving directions and “a picture is worth a thousand words”, there
are many subtle things that we can do with language that we cannot do any other way. (Fodor)
Subtlety in language comes from the words themselves, which can be associated with anything. (Miller)
• Language is abstract, you can talk about things that aren't really there, e.g. form, truth, love, gump.
(Aronoff)
• “That’s not a ‘light’, that’s a ‘lulu’—‘Turn the lulu on.’” (Sid Cesar);
• Kids know this—“gump is cereal!” (Aronoff’s son)
• “tree” if you speak English, “Baum” if you speak German (Chomsky)
• dinosaur, pancakes, infrastructure
• Arabic: many words for camel (several examples)
• boat terminology (Aronoff and sailor)
• terms for armor
• lunch, elliptical, pumpkin
Language has given us an ability to think abstractly, which no other animal can do. Because we can think abstractly, we
don’t have to talk about what is in our immediate environment. We can plan for the future, we can create art, we can create
complex social organizations. All these things are possible because we can think abstractly. (Newmeyer)
[Again, is this true—do we need language for abstract thought?—RGS]
• Language can be studied from many points of view: linguistic specialties—structure of words, structure of
sentences, structure of connected discourse. (Slobin)
• Linguistics provides the most accessible window on the human brain given that we cannot cut open brains to
investigate vision, perception, etc. (Newmeyer)
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• Is language simple or is it complex? Answer: It is simple for those creatures who have evolved to use it.
(Gleitman)
• A child in a language environment will develop language in the same way as other aspects of human growth.
(Chomsky)
• “I take it as the current task of linguistics to ask the question about language, ‘How much of it is built in and
in what way, and how much of it must be learned by exposure to the environment of speaking people?’”
(Gleitman)