Carnie writes at length about language production, from word semantics
to syntax as a science. What I found most intriguing was the manner in which he
presented the abstract concept of a ‘Universal Grammar’ (UG) and showed how mathematical
rigour may be applied to language in order to challenge pre-existing opinions
about it.
I would like to draw greater attention to the notion of a UG and how we may apply this idea to a language that is not English. Carnie states that English speakers are more than capable of drawing distinctions between well-formed and ill-formed sentences, even if they might not be naturally aware of whether a sentence appears ungainly because of semantic or syntactic reasons.
This brings us to the topic of language acquisition. The prospect that Carnie raises – that of the ‘logical problem of language acquisition’ – is a terrifying one for it exposes the cracks of uncertainty in what is humankind’s only means of meaningful communication. From this sprouts the UG argument that language formation lies innate and dormant in all human beings. I would not disagree with this proposition, although I feel that it would be helpful to examine a non-English language to further examine Carnie’s claim.
He elaborates upon the idea of word order and clause completeness – subject-verb-object (SVO) in the case of English, and ranks other possible orders (SOV, VSO, etc.) by frequency of occurrence in foreign languages. Carnie seems to imply that the presence of all three parts of speech are a condition for completeness in any language. At this juncture, I would like to propose taking a look at the Russian language. Strangely enough, the verb ‘to be’ is always omitted in present-tense Russian speech. In fact, there is no way to conjugate the infinitive ‘to be’ (быть) in the present tense. It does, however, exist in the past and future tenses. It thus seems that there might be exceptions to Carnie’s idea of ‘innateness’, a notion which in itself feels almost paradoxical.
Additionally, word order in the Russian language is in fact of little consequence. Russian eschews strict word order in favour of emphasis placement (although certain orders of words would of course feel more ‘natural’ than others). ‘I go there’, ‘I there go’, ‘There go I’, ‘Go I there’, and so on and so forth would all in fact be syntactically correct in Russian. The noun/verb/prepositional/adjectival phrase at the end of the sentence receives the most emphasis which detracts from the importance of word order.
Having said this, my professor of Russian said the following to us at the beginning of the quarter: ‘Just plagiarise. Imitate native speakers and don’t be too creative. That’s what all children do when learning their native tongue anyway, no? Follow the textbook examples. I’m teaching a language class, not a creative writing class’. Language acquisition thus seems like a game of monkey-see-monkey-do, and the notion of an innate UG seems weakened when considering the Russian language.
I would like to draw greater attention to the notion of a UG and how we may apply this idea to a language that is not English. Carnie states that English speakers are more than capable of drawing distinctions between well-formed and ill-formed sentences, even if they might not be naturally aware of whether a sentence appears ungainly because of semantic or syntactic reasons.
This brings us to the topic of language acquisition. The prospect that Carnie raises – that of the ‘logical problem of language acquisition’ – is a terrifying one for it exposes the cracks of uncertainty in what is humankind’s only means of meaningful communication. From this sprouts the UG argument that language formation lies innate and dormant in all human beings. I would not disagree with this proposition, although I feel that it would be helpful to examine a non-English language to further examine Carnie’s claim.
He elaborates upon the idea of word order and clause completeness – subject-verb-object (SVO) in the case of English, and ranks other possible orders (SOV, VSO, etc.) by frequency of occurrence in foreign languages. Carnie seems to imply that the presence of all three parts of speech are a condition for completeness in any language. At this juncture, I would like to propose taking a look at the Russian language. Strangely enough, the verb ‘to be’ is always omitted in present-tense Russian speech. In fact, there is no way to conjugate the infinitive ‘to be’ (быть) in the present tense. It does, however, exist in the past and future tenses. It thus seems that there might be exceptions to Carnie’s idea of ‘innateness’, a notion which in itself feels almost paradoxical.
Additionally, word order in the Russian language is in fact of little consequence. Russian eschews strict word order in favour of emphasis placement (although certain orders of words would of course feel more ‘natural’ than others). ‘I go there’, ‘I there go’, ‘There go I’, ‘Go I there’, and so on and so forth would all in fact be syntactically correct in Russian. The noun/verb/prepositional/adjectival phrase at the end of the sentence receives the most emphasis which detracts from the importance of word order.
Having said this, my professor of Russian said the following to us at the beginning of the quarter: ‘Just plagiarise. Imitate native speakers and don’t be too creative. That’s what all children do when learning their native tongue anyway, no? Follow the textbook examples. I’m teaching a language class, not a creative writing class’. Language acquisition thus seems like a game of monkey-see-monkey-do, and the notion of an innate UG seems weakened when considering the Russian language.
It's very interesting that you brought up the point about the Russian language as a counterexample to Carnie's argument that language is innate. I think that although it is true that when learning another language it does not feel innate, I think that Carnie for the most part was making his argument about one's native language and stating that once acquired, this native language feels innate and the rules feel ingrained in your mind. It is still interesting to consider other languages though and question whether Language in it's capitalized sense is innate and the ability to communicate and understand is innate.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with you on your point about Carnie's possible overlooking of many foreign languages. For example, many Indian languages follow the patterns that Carnie considers to be almost non-occurent, the Object-Subject-Verb and Object-Verb-Subject, even though in terms of number of speakers these languages will be very high in the rankings.
ReplyDeleteBut I think Carnie's point about the fact that Language acquisition cannot be learned on the basis of observed data is more about the fact that one cannot look at examples and then attempt to categorize a new instance, one must understand the rules innately for that to be possible.