lecture 1: introduction august 6, 2012 - byron...

Lecture 1: Introduction

August 6, 2012

Lecture 1: Introduction “Language”?

Language as a Computational Machine

Language is a means of computing the connectionbetween form & meaning

“ A language is necessary in order

that speech should be intelligible

and produce all its effects. ”– Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics

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Language as distinctly human

Language is a purely human ability:

“ There is no mode of action, no form

of emotion, that we do not share

with the lower animals. It is only

by Language that we rise above

them... ”– Oscar Wilde, The Critic as the Artist

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Another opinion?

“ I personally think we developed

Language because of our deep

need to complain. ”– Lily Tomlin, comedian

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Clip from Speaking in Tongues, Episode 1

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Define “Language”‚ Linguistic Sign: a single unit of a language (e.g. a

word) that has a form (e.g. sounds/sign) and ameaning

§ The relationship between form & meaning is arbitrary

§ Sometimes the connection is less arbitrary

‚ For example, onomatopoeias like buzz are an attemptat mimicking the sound they describes

‚ But the actual form is still (in a certain sense) arbitrary(why not bizz? Or muzz?)

‚ Language: a systematic, rule-based way of combiningdiscrete linguistic units

§ The form/meaning connection of meaningful linguistic

units (i.e. linguistic signs) is arbitrary, but how those signs

combine is NOT arbitrary

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Other defining properties of Language‚ Language can have arbitrarily long sentences

§ I can always add some word/phrase to a sentence tomake it longer

‚ “I saw the poster”

‚ “I saw the big poster”

‚ “I saw the big poster and laughed”

‚ “I saw the big poster and laughed quietly.”

‚ Language is recursive

§ Things that are X can contain X; e.g. sentences cancontain other sentences

‚ “Fry likes Leela”

‚ “Everyone knows [Fry likes Leela]”

‚ “Amy says [everyone knows [Fry likes Leela]]”

‚ “Bender heard [Amy says [everyone knows [Fry likesLeela]]]”

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“Body language” ‰ Language‚ Maybe it will help to look at something that is not a

language: body language

‚ There is no generalized abstract structure acrossindividuals

§ Language is an abstract computational system that

creates structure based on principles that govern how

linguistic units (e.g. sounds, words, phrases, etc.)

combine

§ All languages have the same core abstract structural

properties, and those properties are absent from “body

language”

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“Body language” ‰ Language‚ There are no individuals that use body language as

their sole method of communication

§ Note, sign language is a language, and is not “body

language”

§ In fact, “body language” can be used alongside sign

languages in the same way as it can alongside spoken

languages

‚ “Body language” cannot be used to express thingsarbitrarily removed in place and time

§ True Language can be used to discuss things that never

have and never will exist

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Animal communication ‰ Language‚ Non-human animal behaviors exhibit a wide range of

intelligence, some of which almost seem human

§ Apes, dolphins, octopuses, and birds use tools; Monkeys

practice charity; Elephants mourn the dead; Elephants,

apes, dolphins can recognize their reflection;

‚ But just because they’re smart doesn’t mean theyhave language

§ (And as we’ll see later on, intelligence and language

abilities in humans are doubly dissociated)

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Animal communication ‰ Language‚ In fact, no animal has been proven to use a

communication system like (human) language

§ Rules that govern how discrete (linguistic) gesturescombine are difficult to find in animal communication

‚ Gorrillas that have been exposed to sign langauge from(near) birth learn some signs, but produce sequences ofsigns that would be deemed non-language by nativesigners

‚ Studies on birdsong seem to indicate there aregrammatical rules on how notes in birdsong can beorganized (http://news.discovery.com/animals/finches-songs-grammar-110627.html;

original research: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn.2869)

§ To the extent that we find them, those combinatory

systems do not communicate about things outside of

here-and-now

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So that’s Language?‚ Short answer: yes

‚ Long answer: The things we’ve discussed representonly some of the story

‚ We’ll see more throughout this course (obviously)

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Lecture 1: Introduction “Linguistics”?

Movie Clip: “What is Linguistics?”

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Lecture 1: Introduction “Linguistics”?

What do we do in linguistics?‚ Linguists explore Language with a scientific eye to find

the properties of grammar

‚ We don’t (necessarily):

§ Know how to speak a lot of languages

§ Do literary criticism

§ Tell people how (not) to use their language

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Lecture 1: Introduction Defining Grammar

What do you mean, ‘grammar’?‚ So if linguists explore grammar, what is grammar?

§ It’s not what you learn in school – that use of ‘grammar’

refers to social conventions of written communication

§ While school-grammar is very important for yourreal-world success... that is not what linguists study.

‚ We won’t study conventions on writing: many of the„6,900 languages in the world are not written, but arejust as interesting to us, and employ equally complexsystems and can convey equally complex meaning.

‚ When we say “grammar” we are talking about theabstract system in the mind that enables us tocombine units of Language (thus forming larger units)

§ putting together sounds ñ words

§ putting together words ñ phrases

§ putting together phrases ñ sentences 17


Defining ‘Grammar’‚ If Language is the result of having grammar, what

defines a grammar?

§ “Grammar” as we use it does not refer to rules for

punctuation, spelling, or making your language sound

more formal or “correct”

§ That is a Prescriptive Grammar – it prescribes how you

should use your language – we’ll talk more abut this in a

second

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Descriptive Grammar‚ Grammar, as we will discuss it, exclusively is descriptive

grammar

§ A descriptive grammar is the set of rules that would be

necessary to produce and understand everything we

produce and understand

‚ The goal of linguistics is to discover the properties ofgrammar, by observing linguistic patterns acrosslanguages

§ We’ll look at some of these rules/patterns in this class

§ We’ve made a lot of progress on this front in the past 60

years!

§ ...but we are definitely no closer to a full understanding

of this than physicists are to a full understanding of the

universe?19


Compentence and Performance‚ Descriptive grammars encapsulate what

language-users know about their language(s) (i.e.

linguistic competence) and allow us to engage incommunication (i.e. linguistic performances)

‚ A theoretical linguist tries to uncover the rules ofgrammar by observing performances

§ Performance errors are not always relevant, because

they do not always reflect our competence

§ Analogy: I know how to walk, but I sometimes trip andfall – this doesn’t mean I don’t know how to walk.

‚ If we were studying the physiology of walking, we wouldbe observing walking "performances", and we wouldprobably want to ignore mistakes until we understandthe basics

‚ How do we discover facts about grammar? 20


Getting at tacit knowledge

“ ...every speaker of a language has

mastered and internalized a gen-

erative grammar that expresses his

knowledge of his language. This is

not to say that he is aware of the

rules of the grammar or even that

he can become aware of them. ”– Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965)

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Getting at tacit knowledge‚ Just because we don’t consciously know the rules,

doesn’t mean they don’t exist

§ You subconsciously know how to stand on one foot, but

that doesn’t mean you understand the physics of

balance

‚ Even so, linguists (esp. Chomsky himself) try to do justthat: find the rules of grammar by testing hypotheses

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Despite being on north campus,

Linguistics is a science!‚ Wait, did you just say “hypotheses”?

§ Why yes I did.

‚ In Linguistics, as in any science,

§ the object of study (the language) is governed by a

principled system of rules/principles (the grammar)

§ and the scientists explore the principles by analyzing

data

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Despite being on north campus,

Linguistics is a science!‚ Also like any science, we use the scientific method:

Have aQuestion

Observe data / Discover facts

Make generalizationsCheck the theory’s

predictions

Condense into a theory

Have anUnderstanding

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What about Prescriptive Grammar?‚ Prescriptive Grammar is not a science

§ It does not aim to discover facts through observation

and hypotheses; it aims to give a certain types of

language performances a prestige status

§ These ‘grammars’ (which are also made up of rules; just

of a different type) do not have any special insight on

how Language actually works

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Prescriptive Grammar‚ In fact, many of English’s prescriptive grammar rules

that are discussed today originate in the tastes of oneman (a guy from the 18th c. named Robert Lowth)

§ Lowth thought that proper English should be more like

Latin, as much of the scholarly work at the time was in

Latin (and therefore maybe re-organizing English to be

like Latin, would help us be more scholarly)

§ He was in the right place at the right time – Industrial

Revolution and class-mobility (recall that

school-grammars are a social convention)

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Prescriptive Grammar‚ Rules of like the ones Lowth promoted include “don’t

end a sentence with a preposition”

§ As Winston Churchill with his great sense of British irony

so wonderfully put it, “This is the sort of nonsense up with

which I shall not put.”

‚ Other such rules tried to convince people that it wasimpossible to put adverbs between “to” and the verbin infinitives

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Prescriptive Grammar‚ Prescriptive rules do not describe Language as an

object, but rather they try to define the object

§ So they are incompatible with linguistics as a science

§ The grammatical rules linguists care about describe the

things that are possible in a language

‚ Much like the rules that physicists care about describethe things that are possible in the universe

§ You wouldn’t expect a physicists to try to tell atoms how

they should organize their subatomic structure

‚ We won’t devote any serious amount of time to

studying prescriptivism, though the sociologicalaspects of it are no doubt interesting

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Lecture 1: Introduction Linguistic Knowledge

What kinds of things do we know? (1)‚ We have knowledge on the sound system of our

language – what sounds are part of it, and whatcombinations are possible – Phonetics and Phonology

§ The Japanese word ofuroo (‘bath’) does not sound like

English because (for one thing) the “f” sound of

Japanese is not in English

§ The word tlacatl (‘man’) doesn’t sound like English,

because a combination of “t” and “l” is impossible at

the beginning or end of an English word (unlike in

Nahuatl, an Aztecan language)

§ (Phonetics and phonology also apply to signed

languages – manual/facial/spacial gestures in signed

languages vary from language to language, and how

they can combine also varies.)

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What kinds of things do we know? (2)‚ We know how to create words from pieces of words –

Morphology

§ We know that "sinking" is an English word but "ingsink" is

not.

‚ We know how to take apart (new) words and create(other) new ones

§ If we know the word "joomper" is noun meaning “one

who does an action called joomp”, then we know

"joomping", "joomper" and "re-joomp" are words, etc.

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What kinds of things do we know? (3)‚ We have knowledge about what are possible

combinations of words in our language – Syntax

§ For example, English does not allow sentences to beginwithout a subject

‚ It is snowing.

‚˚ Is snowing.

§ But Spanish does:

‚ Nieva.

§ (The asterisk indicates that the sentence is malformed)

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What kinds of things do we know? (4)‚ We have knowledge on the interpretation of

words/phrases/sentences – Semantics and Pragmatics

§ We know that the meaning of “big” depends on whatit modifies:

‚ “the big cell phone” probably refers to somethingsmaller than “the big house”

‚ ...but the meaning of “translucent” is constant, nomatter what it describes.

§ We know that some verbs require certain kinds ofobjects/subjects

‚ He wrote stories.

‚# He wrote plants.

§ (The pound sign indicates that the sentence is

non-sensical)

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What kinds of things do we know? (5)‚ We have knowledge of the words of our language

§ We know what words mean

§ But we had to memorize what words mean, becausetheir meanings are entirely arbitrary

‚ There is no sense in which “blue” means what it meansbecause the word is “blue”

‚ “What’s in a name? ...”

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Components of Language‚ These things that we know comprise Language

§ The first four areas (phonetics/phonology, morphology,

syntax, semantics/pragmatics) are the systems that

make up grammar

§ The last, the lexicon, is the place where speakers store

all the information they’ve had to memorize

‚ a grammar + a lexicon = a language

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What’s so great about grammar?‚ Notice with the knowledge of sound systems and of

sentences, we know what is impossible as well

‚ You can’t learn this kind of thing just by memorizingwhat you hear

§ You could never hear enough English to know that

there are no complete sentences like “is snowing,” or

that no words begin with a “tl”

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What’s so great about grammar?‚ As we saw, onomatopoeias are attempts to mimic

sounds that occur naturally

§ But how we mime a sound depends on the sound

system of the language

§ They generally don’t use sounds that aren’t in the

language (French roarr wouldn’t use a Spanish or

English-type “r”)

§ The equivalent of English Tick-Tock often ends in a

consonant across languages; but in Japanese that

would be impossible, and so it is Kachi-Kachi

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What’s so great about grammar?‚ Moreover, as scholars have noticed for several

hundred years, speakers of a language can produce

sentences that have never been spoken before

‚ On top of that, you’d never be able to memorizeenough to create unique and infinitely long sentences

§ Though we do need memorization to account for

learning words.

‚ In order to understand/produce infinitely manysentences with a finite amount of knowledge in ourfinite brains, we need grammar

§ The rules in a grammar are finite in length and number,

which allows us to learn and store all of them, giving us

infinite power from a finite amount of information

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Grammar is Independent‚ Why not just say grammar is part of some independent

brain mechanisms like logic?

§ There are certain types of sentences that seem logicallypossible, but which are simply impossible

‚ You like what?

‚ What do you like ?

‚ You like books and what?

‚˚ What do you like books and ?

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Grammar is Independent‚ Furthermore, as we will see later on, grammar can be

shown to be independent of other brain processes

§ Language processing experiments

§ Brain imaging

§ Language-specific disorders

§ Language acquisition

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Grammaticality‚ Now that we have an idea of what grammar is – let us

define another concept: grammaticality

§ A grammatical string follows all rules of the grammar

‚ Conversely, a string is ungrammatical when it breaksany rule of the grammar

§ We mark ungrammatical strings by having asterisks (˚)precede them

‚ sinkable

‚˚ ablesink

‚ He put his trust in her.

‚˚ He in her his trust put.

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Grammaticality‚ Note that “doesn’t make sense” is NOT the same thing

as “ungrammatical”

§ Only semantically ungrammatical strings can be said to

be nonsensical (also ‘semantically anomalous’ or

‘infelicitous’)

§ We use the pound sign (#) to mark strings that arenonsensical (but otherwise grammatical)

‚# He put my trust in her.

‚ He put his trust in her.

‚˚ He his trust in her put.

§ The most famous nonsensical sentence (=grammaticalexcept for its lacking meaning) in linguistics appears inChomsky’s 1957 book, Syntactic Structures:

‚# Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

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Lecture 1: Introduction Universals & Innateness

Linguistic Universals‚ Since at least the 13th century, scholars have noticed

that some aspects of Language are universal

§ All languages (i) organize discrete units into structures,

(ii) have different categories of words (nouns, verbs,

etc.), (iii) exhibit ambiguity, (iv) can be learned by any

child, regardless of his/her parents’ languages

‚ These linguistic properties (among many others) areshared across languages as the result of UniversalGrammar (UG)

§ These shared properties can be described in the form

of rules that govern what Language can/cannot do

§ But more basically, UG is what defines the boundaries of

Language

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Universal Grammar‚ The original hypothesis (from Noam Chomsky in the

50s): UG is encoded in the human genome

§ Language is an instinct

‚ It is a distinctly human instinct,

‚ Humans are only human because of our genetics,

‚ Therefore Language is a result of some aspect of theshared human genetic makeup – we call this UG

§ It is the part of Language that has remained constantsince the dawn of humanity

‚ Specific languages change/die, but what Languagedoes/can do has not changed in 50,000+ years

‚ All human populations (no matter how long they havebeen isolated) possess Language, and all of thosepopulations’ languages are fundamentally the same asEnglish or Swahili

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“The Ideas of Chomsky” (BBC 1977)

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What UG Isn’t‚ UG is not a set of all language-specific grammatical

rules

§ UG doesn’t provide you with rules like ”In language X,

subjects follow the verb”

§ In other words, it’s not just a list of all grammatical rules

that are used in any language

‚ Nor is it a set of rules that explicitly say what is(im)possible for languages (in general)

§ Instead, it is just the biological system that ends up

dictating what is (im)possible

§ Just as there nothing in human genetics that explicitly

rules out humans being able to fly – that fact is just

derived from lots of other facts about physics and

human biology47


What UG Isn’t‚ Additionally, the UG hypothesis does not require

Language to be entirely independent from othercognitive functions

§ There is no reason to expect a “UG region” in the brain

§ Even though Language is a cognitive ability that arises

from biological instinct, it doesn’t need to correspond

to a single portion of the brain

§ Though, as was said earlier, we will see evidence in

favor of the cognitive independence of grammar later

in the course

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Linguistic Universals and Variability‚ If Language is encoded in our genes, why aren’t we

born speaking?

§ It should be obvious: because languages are different,

and there are things that can only be learned by

experiencing the specific target language.

§ Sidenote on variability: "Languages differ essentially inwhat they must convey and not in what they mayconvey." (Jakobson 1959)

‚ "In about a quarter of the world’s languages, everystatement must specify the type of source on which it isbased..." (Aikhenvald 2004); in languages like Frenchwhen you say "neighbor" you must indicate if this is awoman or a man; etc

‚ Of course you can do these things in a language likeEnglish too, but they are not required

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Linguistic Universals and Variability‚ UG is only a “common blueprint” shared by every

language, with some of the details missing

§ Those missing details are what distinguish one language

from another

§ So we aren’t born speaking because we need to fill in

those details first

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Innate Linguistic Knowledge‚ Have you ever noticed how fast kids develop

Language?

§ And that they can acquire any language that they’re

put in the middle of?

‚ It would seem that we go from 0 to almost 100% inabout 6 years

§ And this is without anyone is telling them “OK, so this is

what a subject of a sentence is...”

‚ Even when we can’t tie our own shoes, we have (by

ourselves!) mastered phonology, morphology, syntax,& semantics

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Innate Linguistic Knowledge‚ How do we do this?

§ With the help of UG.

‚ So much of the grammar of our own language is givenby UG, which is innate

§ The number of possible languages is constrained by

what would be allowed in a language by the genetic

component that underlies it

‚ Therefore, we only need to figure out what UG hasn’tgiven us; and we can do that just by being exposed toa language

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The Critical Period‚ While a predisposition to Language is innate, exposure

to a language within a certain Critical Period is... critical

§ If a child is exposed to a language regularly starting

from birth, he/she will acquire Language normally

§ If not, the child will have difficulty acquiring Language;

the later, the worse.

‚ One of the most famous (and tragic) examples of achild deprived of language-input beyond the CriticalPeriod is a woman called Genie

§ Genie was shut out from normal human contact from

18 months until 14 years old

§ Despite building a very strong vocabulary throughout

her life after the age of 14, she has never developed a

fully functional language53


A Case of the Language Instinct‚ Additionally, the languages of the deaf, sign

languages, also provide insight to UG

‚ Sign languages are languages like any other, with ruleson phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics

§ They are in no way exceptions to what UG defines as

possible languages

‚ Non-spoken languages have spontaneously

developed in isolated deaf communities – suggestingthat it is an instinct

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Clip from “Evolution: The Mind’s Big Bang”

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Lecture 1: Introduction Today

Language‚ Some properties of Language:

§ Language is unique to humans

§ Language combines discrete units into larger units,

forming abstract structures

§ The connection between form & meaning is arbitrary

§ Language is recursive

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Linguists and Grammar‚ Linguists...

§ attempt to describe grammar so that we can model all

languages

§ explore grammar with the scientific method

‚ Grammar is...

§ the abstract set of rules that define individual

languages

§ made up of sub-systems such as phonology,

morphology, syntax and semantics

§ separate from, but linked to, the lexicon

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Universals‚ Universally speaking...

§ All languages share a wealth of properties, which are

determined by the genetic underpinnings of

Language, Universal Grammar (UG)

§ UG represents is, at its core, the biological instinct to

use/develop linguistic skills

§ In addition to UG, one acquiring a language still needs

“proper nutrition” (language exposure), by the critical

period, to become a native speaker of that language

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