Hierarchical structure + CS = expl for why drawing trees from the bottom is good *at first*

            Interestingly, while I was reading Carnie’s excerpt I often confused it to be a reading required for Minds and Machines rather than for Intro to Linguistics. As a result, the parts of the reading I found most interesting were the bits explaining how minds know and use Language (before getting into the details of tree structures, etc.). For example, I find it fascinating to think about how much of Language is innate. The proof for it mentioned on page 16, specifically premise (i), sits well with me because in Minds and Machines we discussed how a “word-chain” device (finite state machine) is not a good model to produce and understand language. Part of the reason is because you can embed a sentence inside a larger one infinitely many times. Additionally, there are structures like “if…,then” and “either,…or” that you can embed in a sentence infinitely many times. Humans have a subconscious blueprint to deal with the  “long distance dependencies” that these structures create in a sentence, whereas a word chain device would only remember the word it’s outputting in the moment (e.g. wouldn’t remember if “if” or “either” was used at the beginning of the sentence, and thus couldn’t determine whether to use “then” or “or” in the middle).

            A part of the reading that surprised me was the sentence “The yinkish dripner blorked quastofically into the nindin with the pidibs.” It never occurred to me that the part of speech of a word is determined by its place in the sentence and by its morphology, not by its meaning. Again, this speaks to language being innate and humans having a subconscious “blueprint” of language. I’m sure at some point the mind has to learn what place and what morphology is associated with a certain part of speech, but then it can be used again and again without relearning those specifics. I believe this is related to the hierchical structure of language that is similar to the hierarchical structure of abstractions that computers are built up of. Computers start with basic functions like logic blocks that connect to other functions to form even more complex functions, and so on. Once a function is created, it can be called to again and again and talked about in the abstract without worrying about its inner workings. Perhaps this is why when drawing trees, at first its easier to starts at the bottom with the words (the basic blocks) but with more practice starting at the top is quicker.