Transcript Knowledge of Language, part 2 - The Bases Produced Home Page

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
electroenchephol
ography (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….