Knowledge of Language, part 2

January 23, 2009

The Politics of Thinking• One note about Noam Chomsky:

• Mild-mannered linguist by day,

• Political superhero by night.

• Similarities between political and linguistic philosophies:

• Freedom, independence, personal responsibility

• Ultimately: Descriptive Linguistics can’t tell you what’s right or wrong.

• You have to rely on your instincts.

• A “personal science”

Up Close and Personal

• One way to verify grammaticality judgments is to measure brain activity using electroenchepholography (EEG)

P600• EEG studies have discovered a brain response known as P600

• Occurs 600 milliseconds after a syntactic mismatch

• The “wtf?” response.

The Politics of Thinking• Note: relying on instinctive grammaticality judgments is crucial when working with endangered languages.

• or langages without a written standard.

• Also: Descriptive Linguistics may be a “personal science”…

• but speakers of the same language tend to come to the same conclusions.

• For instance: a general consensus emerged in the last quick write…

The Last Quick Write• Who does the pronoun refer to in each of the following

sentences?

1. Jen appeared to Mary to like herself.

• Answer: Jen (74-10)

2. Jen appeared to Mary to like her.

• Answer: Mary (74-10)

3. Jen appealed to Mary to like herself.

• Answer: Mary (72-12)

4. Jen appealed to Mary to like her.

• Answer: Jen (71-13)

What’s going on here?• Although most people understood the sentences intuitively…

• The pattern of reference is actually quite complicated.

• A basic observation:

An Explanation (?)

Another Explanation• Pronoun Types:

Subjective Objective Reflexive

She Her Herself

He Him Himself

etc.

• If the subject and object of a sentence both refer to the same person/thing, the object pronoun must be reflexive.

• Ex: I like myself.

• Compare:

• She sees herself (in the mirror).

• vs. She sees her (in the mirror).

Another Explanation• The main verb in each sentence determines the subject of the verb “like”:

• For “appear”, the subject of “like” is the subject of the main clause.

• Jen appeared to Mary to like herself.

• Jen appeared to Mary to like her.

• For “appeal”, the subject of “like” is the object of the main clause.

• Jen appealed to Mary to like herself.

• Jen appealed to Mary to like her.

Native Speaker Advantage?

• % Agreement with the consensus:

Native Speakers Non-Native Speakers

1 91.8% 78.6%

2 89.8% 85.7%

3 93.9% 64.3%

4 91.8% 64.3%

Language Acquisition Device• One argument: some of the rules of language are so complex…

• That we can’t learn them from experience alone.

• Claim: Every human being is born with a “Language Acquisition Device” (LAD)

• = innate knowledge of possible language structures

• this helps us learn language as we grow up…

• This knowledge is fine-tuned by experience.

• Ex: syntax basic.

• Or speech perception.

Predictions• The LAD theory makes some important predictions.

1. Universal Grammar (UG)

• All languages should share certain features in common

• …due to the workings of LAD.

2. Poverty of the Stimulus

• There should be properties of language that people “know” without ever having experienced them.

• A basic example:

• All languages have nouns and verbs.

A More Complicated Example• How do you turn the following sentence into a yes/no question?

• The boy who is sleeping is dreaming of a new car.

• = Is the boy who is sleeping dreaming of a new car?

• Not: *Is the boy who sleeping is dreaming of a new car?

• “The boy” is linked to the second “is”.

• Kids understand this connection without ever being taught about the link.

• They never form the question the wrong way.

• Think: baby turtles crawling towards the ocean.

Recursion• Recursion = another universal property of language?

• which is unique to humans?

• (Noam Chomsky thinks so.)

• Remember, recursion =

• involving a procedure that can refer to itself.

• Ex: an English sentence may consist of:

• [Noun] [verbs] that [sentence].

• With this rule, we can make sentences like:

• Jean knows that Charlie said that Sue suspects that Bill thinks that Beth is a genius.

• Sentences like this could be infinitely long…

Limited Infinities• However: there are limitations on how much we can remember.

• This means that a sentence like: “I don’t know if Ross suspects that Monika thinks that Chandler hopes that Joey supposably believes that Phoebe heard that…”

• couldn’t really go on forever.

• Check out another kind of recursion:

• The boy scared Mary.

• The boy that the dog bit scared Mary.

• How about:

• The boy that the dog that the cat scratched bit scared Mary. (?)

Competence vs. Performance• An important distinction:

• Linguistic Competence:

• What a (native) speaker knows about a language.

• Linguistic Performance:

• How language is actually used in speech production and comprehension.

• Word strings that are ungrammatical violate the rules of linguistic competence.

• Other strings are impossible to say (or understand) because of performance limitations.

Performance Problems• Note: it is not impossible for native speakers of a language to make mistakes.

• Ex.: slips of the tongue.

• You have hissed all my mystery lectures.

• = You have missed all my history lectures.

• My wife made me some banana bed yesterday.

• = My wife made me some banana bread yesterday.

• Stammering, pauses, hesitations. (George Bush-isms, Barack Obama’s Presidential oath, etc.)

• What matters (for grammar) is not what you actually do so much as what you think about what you do.

Back to Recursion• Two different patterns of recursion:

1. Add the same pattern on to the end of a sentence:

• AB, ABAB, ABABAB, ABABABAB…

• Rule = add AB after an AB.

2. Embed the same pattern in the middle of the sentence:

• AB, AABB, AAABBB, AAAABBBB

• Rule = insert an AB into the middle of an AB.

• Human beings can easily differentiate between strings which fit these rules and strings which don’t.

• Because we have recursion.

Is This a Big Deal?• In 2004, a couple of guys (Marc Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch) tried to figure out if tamarin monkeys could do the same thing.

• Two types of “grammatical” strings:

• ABAB, ABABAB, etc.

• AABB, AAABBB, etc.

• Could the monkeys differentiate between those strings and ones that didn’t fit the pattern?

Monkey Methods• Here’s how the monkeys were trained:

1. At night, they listened to 20 minutes of “grammatical” strings.

2. The next morning, they listened to the same sounds for 2 minutes, while being fed.

3. They then “tested” the monkeys by playing:

1. Four grammatical strings

2. Four ungrammatical strings (AAAA, BAAB, etc.)

• The monkeys were supposed to look up when they heard the ungrammatical strings.

Monkey Matters• The monkeys noticed the change when they had been trained on the ABABAB grammar….

• but not when they had been trained on the AAABBB grammar.

• Conclusion: monkeys can’t get recursion.

• What do you think?

• Could the experiment have been done better?

Starling Study• Some other scientists thought that it could.

• They tried to teach starlings (a European songbird) the same pattern.

• Note: starlings learn new songs throughout their lives.

• One difference: they formed patterns from starling calls.

• ABAB, ABABAB:

• AABB, AAABBB:

Starling Methods• The starlings were trained through “operant conditioning”

• Basically: they received food when they recognized grammatical strings of calls.

• and were “punished” when they did not.

• 9 out of 11 starlings learned to differentiate between grammatical and non-grammatical strings.

• After 10,000-50,000 trials!

•Conclusion: the ability to acquire recursive grammars is not unique to humans.

• What do you think?

The End?• It’s proven hard to pin down one property of language which humans have that animals can’t acquire.

• Displacement, linguistic creativity, recursion, etc.

• One possibility:

• the difference between humans and animals is quantitative, not qualitiative.

• (bigger, not better)

• Some think of language as just a unique combination of biological and mental abilities.

• Anyway, on Monday we’ll start learning more about how to analyze the actual rules of language….