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

“Voicing” and the larynx movements

• 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

IPA chart

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

Some examples

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

Frequencies of human speech

High speech frequency -5000 Hz.

Mid speech frequency - 2000 Hz.

low speech frequency - 100 Hz.

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

Voice as chorus

Tone synthesis

Natural speech

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.

Example of hierarchical structure

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?

Vocabulary of meaning

• Synonym

• Homonym

• antonym

• Presupposition

• Entailment

• Paraphrase

• Are there “atoms” 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