Careful! Don't be wasteful! Words don't grow on trees...

Carnie distinguishes between Language - our ability to speak - and particular languages. I found his discussion of learning vs acquisition to be particularly fascinating. We learn conscious knowledge, yet we acquire subconscious knowledge. He argues that there is an innate Universal Grammar across the world's languages, and that syntax cannot be learned because it is an infinite system. It's impossible to imagine every sentence that could ever be created, so we can never fully have all the data to prove or disprove a rule. This logical problem of language acquisition means we have to rely on an innate Universal Grammar. I want to learn more about whether or not this innateness is just specific to Language, or if it results from general innate cognition that holds true among different behaviors. I find it super interesting that kids all use the same basic methods to acquire Language, despite their cultural background. As someone who grew up speaking German, I can testify that I acquired the basic knowledge of both German and English in the same way. Even though German may have different formal grammatical rules, I didn't have an entirely separate process in my brain to build that language's grammar apart from the process to acquire English's rules.

Carnie refutes the grammar-school idea that parts of speech have semantic definitions. Instead, words can change parts of speech depending on where they occur in a sentence - syntactic distribution - and what affixes they have - morphological distribution; we can also know the part of speech of a word without knowing its meaning. I found it interesting that adjectives and adverbs can be thought of as in complementary distribution. This ties back to our readings and class discussions about phonology. When two sounds are in complementary distribution, they are allophones of the same phoneme and can't be found within the same phonological environment. Similarly, adjectives and adverbs are part of a single category, but each appear within a separate environment or phrase. I also thought that open vs closed parts of speech was interesting because it affects how new words come into existence. For example, nouns are a lexical and open part of speech, which allows for the creation of new vocabulary that addresses technologies developed within the 21st century. We need this ability to form new words that refer to items or ideas never seen before in history.

His discussion of constituency and trees excited me because I discussed this idea that Language has a hierarchical, recursive structure in my SymSys class last week. Our reading "How Language Works" by David Crystal talked about the infinitude of Language and introduced me to the notion of using trees to depict sentences. Crystal and Carnie both demonstrate that sentences are clearly not formed in a 'word-chain' style by stringing words together, each only influenced by the prior word - or group of N prior words. Sentences are much more complex because of the recursion of constituents.