Language and thought Rozi Ivády McDaniel College.

Language and thought

Rozi Ivády

McDaniel College

Language and communication

• All human cultures speak

• Every human being learns to speak– Not all of us can do integration– Mind you: SLI!

• Do animals speak?– Videos:– Talking animals

Can animals talk?

• It always depends on what you call talking…

• Kepek/evoluciosvideok

• There are two reasons

Faces on Mars?

• There are two reasons– We like to hear animals talk

– Kepek/evolucios/tatogo majom

• There are two reasons– We like to hear animals talk– Animals like to imitate us

Clever Hans – effect (1907)

ELIZA: http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html

http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html

http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html

Irene PepperbergAlex the African grey parrot

..\BME_evolúcióskurzus\evoluc200607BME\nyelvevolúció\ALex\alextheparrot[1].mov

Is it human language?

How many blue blocks?

„Bannery”

200 words

Avian Lanuage teaching EXperiment

Language

• Do animals speak?– Videos:

• Alex• Koko

Conclusion about ape studies

ape• Here and now• No syntax• explicit teaching

• Does not refuse badly formed sentences

• Rarely forms questions• Not using symbols

spontaneuosly• MLU same• Banana me me me eat.

child• timeline• syntax• No explicit teaching –

spontaneous signs with deaf children)

• Refuses badly formed sentences

• Frequent questions• Referential use of symbols• MLU grows and so does

complexity• I am going to eat all the bananas.

Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch

What is language?

• Closed ( 30-40 signs)

• Holistic– sounds, smells,

facial expressions

• Analogue (crying)• Concrete

• inherited

•Open Lexikon•Arbitrarily changeable

•Analytic Steven Pinker: nyelvtan= discrete combinatorial system

•hierarchy•recursivity

•infinite?•Digital•Detached, distanced

•learned

A nyelv szerkezete

language

soundsgrammar

meaning

phonetics

phonology

morphology

syntax

semantics

pragmatics

Sounds

phonemes

e.g. suffixes

phrases

Text, meaning

intention

40 20.000 infinite infinite

• Linguists and psychologists talk about different things… Grammarians are more interested in what could be said than in what people actually say, which irritates psychologists, and psychologists insist on supplementing intuition with objective evidence, which irritates linguists.

(Miller, 1990)

Competence vs. perfomance

What is one language?

• Which one of these are the same laguages?– English – German– American English – British English– Black English – American English– Jamaican Creole – Jamaican English

Mutual intelligibility

Dialect continuum

• Standard language – written language– Chinese – Japanese?

Dialect 1

Dialect 2

Dialect 3

Language typology

• Configurational – nonconfigurational

• Analytic-synthetic– Agglutinating - inflecting

Typology• Configurational and

non-configurational languages

• Arwen• Nazgǔl• chase

Typology

• Arwen• Nazgǔl• chase

The Nazgǔl are chasing Arwen.

A Nazgullok kergetik Arwent.

Arwent kergetik a Nazgullok.

•Free word order

•Null anaphora

•Syntactically discontinuous expressions

Language typology

• Configurational – nonconfigurational

• Analytic-synthetic– Agglutinating - inflecting

• In the box• At the table• You could have done

it

• A dobozban• Az asztalnál• (ti) megcsinálhattátok

(volna)

Linguistic universals

• Joseph Greenberg – 30 languages• Absolute – substantive

– Lexicon and grammar– Nouns, verbs, pronouns (deictics – time, space,

number)– First person– Vowel, consonant– Rules of intonation– No language without /a/ – Antonymy– Roman Jakobson – Linda Waugh: i sound

• What do you call a small cat? (Mackó – maci)

A war that never ends

• Descriptive and prescriptive linguistics

– third-person singular /s/: "she goes," - "she go." – no double negatives: "he didn't see anybody," - "he didn't see

nobody." "who/whom did you see"

– "Winston tastes good like/as a cigarette should" – "the data is/are unreliable" – "I disapprove of him/his doing it" – "get it done as quick/quickly as possible"