While reading the first three chapters of Carnie’s book, I was struck by the challenging but critical distinction between innate capacities and learned skills. Carnie proves in chapter one that language is, to some extent, pre-programmed or embedded in brain structures. It follows from this that, with the exception of cases involving under-developed or damaged brains, humans are born with an equal and unlimited ability to understand and produce language. This is well summed-up by Noam Chomsky’s claim that “language is an instinct” even if specific languages are not (15). This hypothesis made me consider how languages and dialects develop to be distinct. If we’re all born with equal capacity for language development, when did spoken languages diverge and why was it culturally beneficial, if at all? In other words, I’m curious about the external factors — geographical and beyond — that contributed to the wide array of languages and sounds that exist in the modern world. Furthermore, did language evolve to be more variant that non-verbal communication forms like facial expressions and body language?
Additionally, Carnie stressed that the ability to know parts of speech is independent of the ability to derive meaning from sound (39). This notion, combined with a new understanding of the difference between semantically ill-formed sentences (“the toothbrush is pregnant”) and syntactically ill-formed sentences (“toothbrush the is blue”), made me consider the origins and popularization of slang. Before this reading, I would’ve guessed that slang is a product of the cross of cultural references and shared group experience, and is more global in an internet-age than before. While this likely still holds to some extent, I now realize that slang — or even new words that become part of the common vernacular, if there’s a true distinction — is able to emerge because we innately have a base level of understanding about what part of speech a new word fills.
Lastly, this reading further informed the way in which I conceive of the connection between language and gender. The author noted in the section about anaphora (himself/herself/themselves etc.) that we understand a sentence to be ill-formed if the anaphor doesn’t agree with the antecedent in gender. This natural connection (or disconnect) made me wonder how, in languages like Italian where every noun is gendered and must agree with its article, gender and its tie to language and communication is perceived differently.
Annabel, you bring up an interesting point about knowing the part of speech of slang, but I must bring up an argument about it. Two words that quickly come to mind are "dope" and "lit." I hear these words every single day at Stanford. They're used as adjectives in colloquial speech, but "dope" originally was a noun and "lit" was a verb—the past participle of "to light." I don't think we have an innate understanding of what part of speech a word is in the context of slang, since if that were the case, dope would still be used as a noun and lit would be a verb. It's interesting to think about nonetheless, but I don't think we have an innate ability to recognize what part of speech new slang is without hearing the word in context.
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