Good day:
There is a lot covered in this
week’s video lecture (see below for video), and I think it’s hard to boil it all down to three big
points. Before I start, I want to share
that I think we will all have many different synopses, or versions of what we
felt were the three biggest points. You
see … I never read what others have posted before I write my own, as the desire
to have and share original thoughts is powerful, and so I have not yet looked,
but I think it’s going to be interesting to see what others have said.
This was a great video/
lecture. I love what I do, and even
though I don’t have a Bachelor’s in linguistics, I feel like an expert in
language acquisition, having taught in the ELL classroom for ten years now. I love this field, and feel so lucky to be
able to help my students acquire language.
Did you notice I didn’t say “learn,” as in to “learn a language?” Yes, well, at the end of the lecture, he
shares Chomsky’s idea that language is not learned; that we should more
accurately refer to it as growth, just as how others parts of the body grow and
develop over time.
Ok, so three big points that I
think helped to frame this lecture are:
1 – That humans naturally have
language processes or structures in their brains … as Darwin suggested.
2 – That language is creative,
and that there are an infinite number of possible ideas/ sentences/ phrases.
3 – That there are three main subjects
that help us to explain language; those being Phonology – the sounds; Morphology
– the words, parts of words, and what they mean (semantics); and Syntax – the
rules, or the grammar.
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It was shared that humans
naturally have language processes or structures in our brains, and so we are
ready to start acquiring language from the start. I think this point is very interesting, but
is even more so, if one considers language processes and the development of
them, over the millions of years of human evolution. The lecturer didn’t bring this up, but I
think it’s worth noting. I read some
years back about our collective human capacity, and how languages developed
over millennia. If you look into the
study of the origins of human language, you will learn about the languages that
came before our modern languages. There
is Proto-Indo-European and several other ones with interesting names, which
predate our modern languages. One very
interesting this about the development of our human language processes, is that
human language has become more complex and more creative over millennia. This might seem like common sense now, if you
simply try to think about the very first humans, like those possibly related to
Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal. Over time,
early humans needed to communicate with each other, and so languages happened. What is cool is that over time, there was
more and more added to “our” collective understanding and knowledge
foundation. I share this with you now to
add a little history to our lecturer’s point about how Darwin thought that
humans naturally have language processes in their minds. I would like to point out that even though
this may be true, it wasn’t as complex 50 million years ago; and thus we have
developed more complex language processes over time.
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The second big point that I am
sharing is that language is creative, and that there are supposedly an infinite
number of possible sentences/ phrases/ ideas.
It should be noted that the lecturer did share how there are a finite
number of words, but an infinite number of possible sentences. One way to understand this point is to think
about how we don’t walk around and speak sentences that we have memorized,
rather we just say what we need to say, or want to say; and it just makes
sense. On the other side of that
phenomenon, is that humans naturally understand these brand-new,
never-before-uttered sentences, which have just been spoken. Yes, we understand each other instantly,
without problems or hesitation. The fact
that language is creative, and that we have this ability is astonishing. He cited some numbers, and I believe he said
that any average human (adult) has about 60,000 or perhaps 80,000 different
words in his/her mind. Putting them
together in meaningful ways, without much thought, and always in new ways is
just amazing.
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The subjects of Phonology, Morphology
and Syntax are the topic of my third paragraph.
Phonology is the study of sounds and the sounds associated with certain
words, word parts or strings of words. I
was delighted to be reminded of “Top Down Processing.” This is about how we hear things; which
usually helps us to understand. I also
was reminded about how it is very often arbitrary as to how many sounds connect
to words. Some connections, of course
make sense, like how a bee buzzes but most phonological connections are
arbitrary, and just developed over time, for a variety of reasons. Morphology is the study of morphemes, which
are the smallest meaningful units in a language. These are often words, but can also be parts
of words that carry meaning. I think
it’s important to note that it is not just merely the study of the smallest
units in a language, but rather the smallest meaningful units in a
language. That means the semantics or
meaning of the words or word parts. This
is of course important, and connects to the reasons of why we speak, and what
we are trying to accomplish, such as conveying ideas, teaching, sharing,
asking, influencing, admonishing, aggravating, teasing, complimenting,
expressing love/ appreciation, etc. Syntax
are the rules of a language; thus the grammar.
I think grammar is very interesting because of the limits or constraints
in grammar, such as the lecturer noted near the end of his lecture. We cannot just simply move words from the end
of the sentence to the beginning and have it be grammatically correct, or even
make sense. No, the rules of grammar
dictate how we are to correctly use it.
I was reminded of Chomsky’s work and the ideas in Recursion; which is
when one rule invokes another rule. It
is connected to the idea of the combinatorial system, and how we have a finite
number of words; but an infinite number of possible ideas/ sentences/ phrases. I’m a bit rusty on that, but I believe that’s
how I remember it.
Finally, it was good to hear
about Noam Chomsky’s work again, and how he said that we don’t learn
English. The capacity grows in your
brain, through hearing it, and learning how to read; but it’s just like any
other structure in the brain; even like how our organs grow, etc. He said it’s basically like growth; thus not
learning.
Thanks for reading.
Adam
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