9. Language

Question 1

Wilhelm Wundt’s Tree Diagram

Answer 1

A jarring, artificial concept describing how we reverse-engineer language to get to the underlying idea?

Question 2

Noam Chomsky

Answer 2

The star of our show!! He’s amongst the ten most cited writers in all of the humanities.

Question 3

Transformational Grammar

Answer 3

An idea that arises out of the fact that language is infinite, while speech is not. Individuals need a speech-generating machine to communicate; we call this grammar.

Question 4

Grammar vs Semantics

Answer 4

Noam Chomsky noted that a sentence can be grammatical, yet meaningless. And the other way around.

Question 5

Phrase Structure Rules

Answer 5

Noam Chomsky’s take on the railroad diagram. You have an idea, which expands and explodes into everything else, one level at a time.

Question 6

Grammatical Transformations

Kernel sentences

Answer 6

A transformation that can operate on a phrase structure to change it grammatically.
Kernel sentences have no grammatical transformations applied; Chomsky initially thought that these would be easier to understand, but interest declined in the idea.

Question 7

Competence vs Performance

Answer 7

What does it mean to have command over a language?

Chomsky recognized that understanding a language does not necessarily mean you can speak it intelligibly.

Question 8

Deep vs surface structure

Answer 8

The transformation that goes into language. When we interpret, we take the surface structure and convert it into the deep; we don’t take things at face value.

When we make a sentence, we take the deep and convert it into a surface.

Question 9

Poverty of the stimulus argument

Answer 9

The argument that the child is meeting the parent halfway; there’s not enough data available to the child for language acquisition; how does the child do it?

Question 10

Innateness hypothesis

LAD

Answer 10

The hypothesis that we as children possess a language acquisition device. This LAD would be equipped with universal grammar.
B.F. Skinner has a study that supports this; they found that mothers correct children’s sentences based on truthfulness, not on grammar. How is the child learning grammar???

Question 11

Chomsky’s Minimalism

Answer 11

The belief that linguistic competence contains only the bare minimum. That by evolutionary processes, the system we have now is the perfect language system.

Question 12

Parameter setting

Answer 12

The idea that a child’s LAD has several switches - things like Subject-verb order - and they’re switched certain ways as the child learns a language.

Question 13

Parental reformulations

Answer 13

The theory that children learn grammar by paying attention to how their parents correct them.

e.g. “I want butter mine”
“Give it here, I’ll put butter on it”

Question 14

Syntactic development

Answer 14

Development of the ability to organize words into grammatical sentences.

Huttenlocher measured this using a comprehension test.

Huttenlocher et al found that growth in development was directly related to the teacher’s speaking complexity.

Question 15

MIDWAY SUMMARY

Answer 15

First we saw Chomsky. Then we saw more Chomsky. Phase structure diagrams, grammatical transformations, a couple distinctions he made.

Then we went on to the Poverty of the Stimulus argument, and various studies on how children are learning grammar exactly, as well as things that affect it.

Question 16

COMMUNICATION AND COMPREHENSION

Answer 16

A section in the Language chapter where we look at various unspoken contracts people hold when they talk to each other.

Question 17

Given-new contract

Answer 17

An unspoken agreement that the speaker will tie new information with information the listener already knows.

Question 18

Code model

Answer 18

Code model is the basic one. Speaker says words, and the listener needs a shared understanding of the situation in order to interpret the speaker.

Question 19

Grice’s Inferential model

Answer 19

The new exciting version! Based on Grice’s inferential theory. He thinks communication is based on intention and inferences. The speaker intends for something, and he expects the listener to inference it out.

Question 20

Four conversational maxims

Answer 20

Born out of Grice!

Maxim of quantity (say no more than necessary)
Maxim of quality (be truthful)
Maxim of relation (be relevant)
Maxim of manner (don’t ramble)

Question 21

Cooperative principle!

Answer 21

The assumption that speakers will attempt to be truthful, relevant, concise, and clear. Basically the assumption that speakers will follow the four conversational maxims.

Question 22

How do the code model and the inferential model blend?

Answer 22

Pretty well! In day-to-day life, people often switch between the two. What’s important is relevance.

Question 23

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

Answer 23

The study of metaphor, irony, and various figures of speech! Because these kinda contradict our code/inferential model up above.

Question 24

Pretense theory of irony

Answer 24

The theory that people are only pretending to mean what they say.

Question 25

SPEECH DISFLUENCIES

Answer 25

Studies done by Schachter et al showed that professors in the humanities and arts have more speech disfluencies than professors in the sciences! Cuz science vocab is simple, while humanities and arts have a myriad of words to choose from.

Clark and Fox-Tree noticed that “um”s and “uh”s actually serve a communicative role. We as speakers have an incredible capability to first notice that we’re having trouble accessing information in our head, and then estimate how long it’ll take to resolve the problem. “um” is used for longer pauses, while “uh” is used for short ones.

Question 26

Vygotsky

Answer 26

The pioneer of egocentric speech!

He noticed that children don’t take the listener’s viewpoint into account.

As people get older and more socialized, this becomes inner speech.

Question 27

Delving Into Inner Speech

Answer 27

Vygotsky also notices that inner speech is sometimes vocalized. Adults sometimes use inner speech

Question 28

The Zone of Proximal Development

Answer 28

A learning sweet spot! Vygotsky thinks that as a child is guided by the mentor, the child internalizes the mentor’s speech. Eventually it becomes inner speech.

Question 29

Literacy

Answer 29

A cognitive steroid that allows us to THINK DEEPLY. Lots of meta-concepts. Remember the man who refused to accept the hypothetical.

Stanovich and Cunningham did a study on magazine readers vs book readers. The book readers turned out to be smarter, perhaps because it elicits deeper processing.

Hay. Facebook is the epitome of shallow processing, no?

Question 30

TWO THIRDS SUMMARY

Answer 30

Almost there! Phew

Okay, first you poor Wundt and his pathetic thing. Compared to Noam Chomsky…

Chomsky’s phrase structure and transformational grammar, as well as deep vs shallow and competence vs performance.

And then we moved onto communication, with Grice’s four maxims, as well as the code/inferential models.

And then we began studying language, figures of speech, Vygotsky’s egocentric speech, our use of which, and then literacy. We fallin’ down the rabbit hole nao!

Question 31

Sapir-whorf hypothesis:

Answer 31

The hypothesis that a native speaker’s language will affect their experience of the world qualitatively.

Question 32

Linguistic relativity

Answer 32

Related to sapir-whorf’s hypothesis - the notion that two languages might be so different from each other that the experiences that each native speaker feels is so different.