Final Study Guide Flashcards
What is Language?
A particular type of communication that has certain peculiar features.
To decide whether something counts as language, we need to compare it to that list of features.
What are Characteristics of Natural Language?
- Generativity (“building block”) Structure
- Phonemes
- Morphemes/Words
- Sentences
- Referentiality
- Displaced Refernce
- Capacity to invent new terms
- Combinatorial Structure (not quite the same as generativity, though related)
- Compatible with the cognitive system (easy, natural, not explicitly taught)
What is Generativity?
Language is generative (or productive). That is, language is flexible and can be used to produce more-or-less infinite meaningful variations from a set of constituent parts.
What are Phonemes?
The most basic building block of language is the phoneme (or the basic units of sound, for example the /d/ /o/ and /g/ sounds in the spoken word “dog”). Phonemes do not have meaning—they are arbitrary sounds. “Dog” and “fog” are separated by only one change in phoneme, but the meanings are entirely different.
What are Morphemes?
Morphemes—units of meaning. These can be whole words (for example “respect”) or pieces of language that have a set meaning but are not technically words because they cannot stand on their own (such as the “ful” in “respectful”).
It is debatable how to accurately count the number of words in a language, but there are a great many—hundreds of thousands or even more. These many pieces were constructed from the few available phonemes.
How does Generativity effect Sentences?
Remarkably we do the generativity trick again, using our vocabulary of words to construct sentences whose variety is virtually infinite. It is not difficult to come up with a sentence that has never before been uttered by humans.
What is Referentiality?
Another feature of natural language is referentiality. That is, language is designed to refer to things in the world. Words like “pickle” or “moose” refer, or point to, something in the world.
What is Displaced Reference?
The extraordinary communicative power of human language derives in no small part from the ability to refer to things that are not currently present in the here-and-now. Displaced reference can include talking about things that are in the past, things that we think might happen in the future, things that are far away, and things that are entirely made up.
What is a Combinatorial Structure?
It’s not just the words we use that matter, but how we put them together. This is how we indicate “who is doing what to whom.”
In English, we do this primarily by word order, using a subject-verb-object system.
What are the Similarities and Differences between Animal Communication and Human communication?
Animal communication shares many of the same limitations as human nonverbal communication, including a lack of combinatorial structure, and a lack of displaced reference.
What are some Characteristics of Nonverbal communication?
it lacks (or is extremely limited in) several of the key features of language, including combinatorial structure and displaced reference. Formal systems like math and computer programming, on the other hand, seem to have the opposite problem. They have great expressive and computational power, but they are most definitely not compatible with the cognitive system! They also have some severe limitations in the ability to invent new terms.
What is the Poverty of Stimulus Argument?
Argument for Nativism:
Language is supported by mechanisms that evolved specifically to support language. This point of view arose out of the field of linguistics, particularly the work of Noam Chomsky on so-called “universal grammar.”
