language or "Language"

It's no question that language is what separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. Our ability to communicate verbally or through writing imparts knowledge and transcends the multitude of time throughout history. But as soon as I feel myself getting a feel for what linguistics is, I lose it. In the 100 pages I read by Carnie, I realize that I know much less than I originally thought. Language can be broken up into so many different subcomponents, such as phonology (i.e. the system of sounds), morphology, the study of morphemes, the study of meaningful subunits of words, syntax and semantics. I found it fascinating that Carnie likens the study of linguistics, then, as a science, with a hypothesis (or hypotheses) that are constantly be re-evaluated and tested.

I also found the word trees and diagrams to be fascinating in terms of breaking down language into its syntactical subcomponents. One, this breaks down the problem of language into bite size chunks that I think is important. Two, it has the potential to be used in applied research such as natural language processing etc.

One thing I remember reading a lot in the Carnie chapters is the constant reminder of the rules of language. Even though there are so many languages that people can speak, Language (with the capital "l") seems to follow a few basic, but fundamental rules. One question I have is how did these rules evolve to be the way they are today? Are they a result of the way human brains process thought? Or is there something more superficial and random about these rules that govern speech and comprehension. Regarding linguistics specifically, how do sentence structures (in the form of trees or subject/verb/object relationships) relate to the emphasis in sentences? I know from taking latin and chinese that word order matters a lot and in the past, used to signify points of emphasis or other inexplicit points. However, growing up in a english-centered society, my point of view for discussing language and specifically how word ordering in language is biased, although I do still notice there are substantial differences in how certain languages differ from others in ordering. I wonder if and how that is significant in the context of linguistics.

Here is a video I think is super relevant.