Musings

I found Carnie’s opening point of differentiating between Language and language (the former being the overall ability to speak a language, and the latter being an instance of being able to do so i.e. Mandarin Chinese) fascinating. It had never occurred to me that there are distinctly different meanings associated with the one word, and I now appreciate its nuances and will probably overthink about exactly what I mean each time I use it. When considering the differences between different languages that are polar opposites, such as Mandarin and English, it is crazy to consider speaking the both of them in the same vein (referring to them as Language), and even harder to compare them.

Carnie’s discussion of language acquisition and learning language is absolutely fascinating to me. My cousin Gertrude started speaking at a really young age, and almost immediately could tell when a sentence didn’t make sense. It was kind of freakish when she’d shout “No Daddy! That’s not right!” when we’d deliberately make grammatical mistakes on purpose to test her. Similarly, I feel like there is an intuition as to whether a sentence is well formed grammatically or not, as reflected in the grammatical judgment test where native speakers are able to judge whether a sentence is well, marginally well or badly formed. I believe that there is also evidence for Universal Grammar all around us. Art forms like poetry, for example, particularly in the spoken word variety, rely on language that sounds pleasing to the ear to be validated in its artistry. Or even in just the way that we as humans praise others for being “eloquent”.

It is interesting to think about specific grammatical rules, as although they may not be exclusively innate (indeed, Carnie distinguishes between conscious and subconscious knowledge), these rules originated from somewhere. Universal grammar would have impacted the creation of rules related to grammar and syntax that we now follow.

When linking this week’s reading to last week’s readings (particularly that by Kenstowicz), I again find myself linking what I read to the case of my Chinese parents. Kenstowicz talked about the inherent advantage that native speakers have to learning a language due to a distinction in phonology and phonetics. And when this is linked to the principles of universal grammar, it is again interesting to note why it may be much more difficult for speakers of one language to learn another. It’s wonderful to link these readings together and piece together the puzzle of linguistics!