UNIT 1 – Part 2

Language and linguistics

LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS

1. TWO PERSPECTIVES REGARDING LANGUAGE

 Pinker and Jackendoff: language – not exclusive. There is nothing in language that is
only for linguistics.
 Different parts that come together.

1. The Chonskian Approach

Parts of the brain  just for language. Recursive, emergent (it just happenned) – language
was a mutuation in 1 brain and reproduced.

Differentiate between:

 Narrow language faculty: aspects of language that are special to language (language
has something that nothing more has).
 The ability to create infinite elements  Recursivity
 Broad language faculty: aspects with more functions than just language (language for
everything).  repurposed
 Mostly shared with other animals.

FLN only includes recursion – the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language.

 Recursion: capacity to generate infinite range of expression from a finite set of

elements.

Criticisms:

 Luuk and Luuk  Recursivity not required for natural language, but a process of
iteration is necessary.
 Recursion involves self-reference and invokes another instance of itself.
 Iteration does not involve self-reference  implement structure rules by
iterative.
 Everett  claimed that Piraha did not use recursion and therefore recursion did not
constitute a universal process in the FLN.

Recursion and Beyond:

 Recursion: may not even have evolved for language itself, but for other cognitive
abilities
- Navigation: «from here to here»
- Numbers: «infinite» / Social relationships
 UNIT 1 – Part 2
Language and linguistics

2. Jackendoff and Pinker

Approach based in Conceptual Structures.

 Conceptual Structures establish a relationship between form and meaning.

- They form the basis of language
- Are not unique to humans (chimpanzees hammer, bird´s food for later)

Speech recognition: different from our inherit primate auditory analysers  Actually, we hear
phonemes – Phoneme discrimination.

 But: certain animals can make auditory distinctions based on frequency/rhythm  not
phonemes.

Speech: too complex + many components  can´t compare animals and humans.

Speech production:

 Need descended larynx – essential for human speech, but – some animals do.
 Not only humans – some birds and primates produce formants.

However:

 Nonhuman primates  resistant to training vocalizations.

 Imitation is crude at best (noises, foreign, accents)  children imitate perfectly.

Speech recognition + production  function in non-speech  ex. Music  FLB

PHONOLOGY

the study of sounds systems of languages (including or excluding phonetics), within a language
or between different languages.  not exactly unique to humans. .

 In that any language has an unlimited number of phonological structures, built from a
finite number of discrete units.
 Analysis and classification of phonemes.
 Aspects of language related to the distinctive features of the representation and
reception of sounds of language.

WORDS: appear to be uniquely human, properties:

 They are so many

 Range and precision of concepts that can be expressed
 They have to be learnt
 Certain words (pronouns) are tied to the syntax

and yet:

 Elementary properties of words have only weak analogues or homologs in natural

animal communication.
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Language and linguistics

SYNTAX (characteristics)

 Syntax places words hierarchically where syntactic phrases correspond (in prototypical
cases) to constituents of meaning.
 The ordering of words or phrases within a phrase, for example, requiring that the verb
of a sentence fall in a certain position, such as second, or that the phrase serving as
topic come first.
 Third major syntactic device: agreement (concordancia)
- Verbs or adjectives: marked with inflections that correspond to the number,
person, grammatical gender, or other classificatory features of syntactically
related nouns.
 The fourth is case-making: noun phrases are marked with inflections (nominative,
acusative,etc) depending on the grammatical and/or semantic role

RECURSION: Only reason language needs to be recursive  it´s function is to express recursive
thoughts.

2. LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS

Language Acquisition device  something waiting for language to happens + works before we
are born

 Babies learn complex hierarchical linguistic systems  small input, no instructions

 Genetic evidence  FOXP2 sudderers  deficits in language terms

Cognitive components used by language are part of non-linguistics systems

All languages…

 Grammatical structures needed to give orders, negate a though, and ask a question
 Use verbs in the past, present, or future.
 Possess a finite set of phonemes (sounds)  vowel and consonants: together to form
syllables, and words.
 Share the basic categories of words:
 Nouns, verbs, description words, relative clauses, and a method for counting.
 Use pronouns
 Include any subcategory of the basis five colours: red, blue, yellow, black and white.
 Red, white and black are included in every language.
 Can be concrete or abstract
 We can see millions, but language has small sets of words
 Often come as object or substance labels (organe > fruit / red > blood in
Sanskrit)
 First to be addded are black and white (some languages – only these)
 Not all languages have the same name of colour words:
- Korean (pureu-n) – both grass and sky
- Rusian 2 families of blue: the lighter (goluboy) / darker (siniy)
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Language and linguistics

Basic colour term – satisfy 4 obligatory criteria:

1) Monolexemic and monomorphemic  “light blue” and “blue-green” contain two

lexemes and do not qualify
2) Not possess any colour hypernyms  “lavender” has the hypernym “purple”
3) Not be limited in application to a narrow class of objects  blond(e) may only be
applied to some referents like hair, wood, and beer.
4) Must be psychological salient  recognisable by speakers

2. Features proposed as universals:

1. Major lexical categories  noun, verb, adjective, preposition

2. Major phrasal categories  noun phrase, verb phrase, etc
3. Phrase structure rules
4. Rules of linear order (distinguish object from subject) or case affixes
5. Verb affixes  meaning aspect and tense (+ pluperfects)
6. Auxiliaries
7. Anaphoric elements (+pronouns and reflexives)
8. Wh-movement
9. Verbs for “give” always have 3 arguments
10. No recursion of case
11. No languages have nominal tense
12. No languages have numerals
13. All have syntactic constituents, especially NPs, whose semantic function is to express
generalized quantifiers over the domain of discourse

2.3 Evans and Levinson (critics of language universals)

To understand the place of language in human cognition, we need to acknowledge its diversity

 We are the only species whose communication system varies fundamentally in form
and content
 The diversity of language points to the importance of cultural and technological
adaptation  language is a bio-cultural hybrid due to evolution
 No processing machine can handle all this variation
 Sound inventories  languages don´t have sound systems (sign languages, deaf…)
 Range of phonemic inventories from 11-144  great diversity: languages
 Syllables and the CV universal:
- Sounds alternating less and more sonorant segments
- Create basic rhythmic alternation of vowels and consonants
- A preference for CV syllables  believed to be a universal  no
 Morphology  morphological differences: the most common among languages.
- Isolating languages  NOT inflectional affixes (nº, person, tense, aspect)/word
derivation
- Polysynthetic languages  pack whole English sentences in a single word