Basic facts about language
- Every human society has language: fits with Darwin’s idea that language is instinctive and natural, it shows up everywhere.
- This doesn’t show that languages is instinctive or that is built into the brain. Because language might have even been invented once and spread through history. But there’s good reason to believe that it’s not and that Darwin is right.
- Creolization [ˌkriːələˈzeɪʃn]: it involves people who are involved in the slave trade, the production of tobacco, cotton, coffee, sugar who would bring together and mix slaves and laborers from different language backgrounds. So these people would work together but they didn’t have a common language. What often happens is they develop a makeshift jargon which is called a pidgin, P-I-D-G-I-N which involve strings of words borrowed from the language of the plantation owners, often from people’s own native tongues. But there’s no word or no grammar, imagine yourself locked in a room working with a bunch of people with no common language, but you had to work together so you’d make a sort of common communication system. Now, the question which arises is, the children in these societies, the children of the slaves were often brought up independently from their parents in a collective setting and what they heard was mostly a pidgin, and so the question is what would they come to know? And you might imagine well, you’re exposed to a pidgin, you’ll learn a pidgin. But this isn’t actually what happens. What’s interesting is children are built so that they take this non-linguistic system as rudimentary system and transform it into a real language with syntax and morphology and phonology. But a real language, which is known as creole (a language that has developed from a mixture of different languages and has become the main language in a particular place). So when you hear about a creole now of which many people speak, that remarks in this historical origin of creole was once a pidgin and has been transformed into a language and that tells us something about the human mind. There are actually some modern cases of creolization that had been studied. So imagine a child who is born deaf to hearing parents, so the parents understandably enough want to communicate with the child so they quickly learn a sign language through which to communicate with the child. Because it’s a second language learning which is difficult. The language that the parents use is more of a pidgin and children are exposed to a pidgin. But what often happens particularly if children are raised in a community of other children in the same situation? Is that they creolize, they take this simple communication system that they’re exposed to and they transform it into a full-blown language. This tells us something about our capacity and our expectations with regard to language.
- Every normal human has language. This is true by definition if a child reaches the age of three or four and doesn’t speak, there’s a serious problem going on which requires serious attention and that’s different from other things. Not everybody knows chess or rides a bicycle, but language seems to be the sort of thing that everybody comes to possess. It’s no surprise that there are specific areas in the brain that are devoted to language. We’ll talk a little bit more about these later on in the course. What’s a little more controversial is what these brain areas do and these genes cause. There’s no doubt that humans have a special capacity for language, but the precise nature of this capacity whether it’s something specific and designed for language or whether it’s a more general set of capacities that allow people to learn language that’s a matter of controversy.
- what else can we say about language? Well, when linguists talk about language, they say that language has the property of creativity and this can mean different things, it creative, is often used to describe special abilities and that’s not what we’re talking about here. For normal use of language, people can say what they choose to say and can produce a virtually infinite number of sentences by one estimate, the number of sentences under 20 words long is 1 with 30 zeros after it. So if it took you five seconds to say a sentence, in order to say all of them you’d have to spend about 100 trillion years. This suggests that language understanding, language comprehension, language production, can’t just be a matter of rote memory. If you understood what I said and understand I’m saying now, it can’t be because at some point you’ve memorized the meanings of these sentences, you have to have some way of taking strings of words that are put together in order you’ve never heard before and making sense out of them. So how do we do this? Well, we do this through rules and principles.
- We have these abstract and unconscious rules in our heads that let us take strings of words and make sense of them. When I’m talking about rules of language, I’m not talking about things like don’t say ain’t or don’t end a sentence with a preposition, these are not rules that you’re forced to comply within school, they’re not what linguists call prescriptive rules which is how you should use language, rather these are abstract and unconscious rules that you have. You don’t even know you have them that allow you to figure out the virtually infinite strings of sentences you could be exposed to. These are what the things that linguists study. So for instance, you hear a sentence, “The pig is eager to eat,” and instinctively you understand that the eating here is to be done by the pig. But if you hear a sentence, “The pig is easy to eat,” in the same fraction of a second you realize this means that the eating is of the pig not by the pig.
- Or take a sentence, “Bill knew John liked him.” Any speaker of English realizes that this could mean that Bill knew John liked Bill, it could have other meanings but it could mean that Bill knew John like Bill. But if you hear the sentence, “Bill knew that John liked himself.” This can’t mean that Bill knew that John liked Bill, it has to mean that Bill knew that John liked John.
- we characterize languages in terms of these rules and principles and it turns out that language can be characterized at different levels.
- sound system: phonology
- words and how words are composed: morphology
- how words are combined to make phrases and sentences: syntax