This week’s reading departed from
the world of phonetics and phonology and moved to syntax. It took the
individual sounds of phonetics and the phonemes of phonology and moved to the
specific words and their combinations. Carnie provided an overview of the
assumptions underneath the study of linguistics and then moved into the
techniques of the field. The reading piqued my interest because I realized how
little we, as native English speakers, think about why we put certain words where
we do. Why do we adopt the SVO sentence form and start with subjects? How do we
develop these speaking skills as children? Why do traditional language classes
often fail at teaching people these underlying syntactical rules?
Carnie began by outlining important
concepts in syntax. The operating premise in the study of syntax is that of
generative grammar. Generative grammar claims that sentences are generated by a
subconscious set of procedures. I also found it intriguing that people
traditionally associate the study of linguistics with humanities, but Carnie
takes a more scientific approach. The rules in linguistics are the hypotheses
and grammar is the group of hypotheses.
Carnie also posits that syntax is
really about what sentences are not well-formed. For instance, if I craft the
sentence He kissed herself, I
understand intuitively that this is not correct. But in order to uncover these
subconscious syntactical rules, linguists need to have access to these
incorrect forms in the first place. Just relying on the corpus, or the written
body of language, is insufficient because it does not include grammatically
incorrect sentences. This segues directly into grammaticality judgment. This
refers to judging if a sentence is well-formed. Most native speakers have an
innate knowledge of syntax, meaning that the knowledge necessary to understand
the rules cannot be learned like organic chemistry or calculus, but can only be
acquired subconsciously.
This statement, for me, raised the question
of the effectiveness of language classes. I took French for five years and
never felt that I had a great grasp of the language. I could read and write with
limited proficiency but speaking and listening I always struggled with. No
matter how much effort I would put in to studying the verbs and grammar
structure, it never came naturally to me the way English, my native tongue,
does. Then, I went to France and was immersed in French at all points,
surrounded by actual speakers who did not know English. Even though I only
spent 10 days there, my listening and speaking improved dramatically. Thus, I
wonder if there is a better way that we can structure language classes so people
who want to learn can develop the subconscious and innate knowledge necessary
to truly speak the language.
Finally, Carnie devoted much of the
final chapter to describing trees and constituents. A constituent is a group of
words that function together as a unit. When constructing these trees, one can
more easily delineate the structure of the sentence, the parts of speech, and
how they are working together. The constituency trees can help test the rules
through such methods as replacement, stand alone, movement, and coordination.
I also found it interesting that he mentions linguistics is more scientific than just studying literature for example! We can learn to better appreciate well-written works of literature if we first understand the science behind Language as a grammar that has formal rules- both prescriptive and descriptive. I completely understand your complaint about language classes! I formally studied Spanish all through grade school and high school, but just trying to learn the rules of a language is not constitutive of acquiring the ability to speak and understand that language. Despite many years of studying, my Spanish never got great. In contrast, I only took German language classes for one year at Stanford and was introduced to the formal syntactical rules. Then, I did Sophomore College and fully immersed myself in the language for two and a half weeks. I noticed a dramatic difference; I even started to think and dream in German! Acquisition is better than learning because then the knowledge of that language becomes subconscious and you don't actively think about if your sentence is formally "correct" or not every time you try to construct a sentence to say.
ReplyDeleteReally interesting post! I was thinking along similar lines while reading Carnie, especially with respect to your second-to-final paragraph. I was in a similar boat when learning French a decade ago and didn't have the opportunity to reach your standard of the language, but I could speak for the German case (as Sophia did). I took ab initio IB German in my final year of high school in Singapore and found it to be one of the most challenging languages to learn due to its utterly rigid word order and the presence of cases, three genders, and insane declensions. It just all felt rather hopeless. My family then moved to Germany after my graduation and learning the language became immensely easier. Being immersed in the language on a daily basis, both in colloquial speech with friends and professional speech while doing a summer internship has pushed me to a level of near fluency which a class could simply not accomplish. I, too, wonder if there is any way to achieve such results of foreign language fluency without the need for intensive immersion in a foreign country in which that language is spoken.
ReplyDeleteInteresting discussion! I was a Chinese lecturer of Princeton University. We have a summer intensive Chinese program called "Princeton in Beijing". At the very beginning of the program, students must sign a language pledge that they promise they will speak Chinese only during the following eight weeks. Just like what you did, our students significantly improve their Chinese in this program. But I have one question: do our students improve their foreign language learning through learning or acquisition? According to linguistics, subconscious knowledge, like how to speak, is acquired. But based on my observation, our students need to spend much time in memorizing words and grammar. In other words, they learn the foreign language consciously. Learning a foreign language and acquiring the native language, are they the same? If not, how can we motivate the acquisition?
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