Occam's Razor

The first chapter we had for reading spent a lot of time talking about the Scientific Method and subsequent passages referred back to it also. I found it interesting how long the author spent talking about how the scientific method worked and how it applied to Linguistics but that's beside the point. A thought that kept coming back to me, both in the reading and in general when talking to people, is how many useless or unnecessary words people include when speaking.

 People use a lot of extra words that aren't at all necessary to convey the information essential to their communication. This is something I feel like the text didn't address. The author listed all the parts of speech, how they appear, and where they can appear but he didn't address the topic of extras. Also, in the discussion of Chomsky and language being innate, I agree that the urge to communicate with people is innate (some people feel more compelled than others) but I think the idea of using a structured language is not so much of a natural thing. If use of a rigorously defined and regulated language were innate to the human condition then there would not be such difference in the way people present. One thing I think we have to factor in to the debate is personality on top of just urge to communicate. But that would complicate things rather heavily.

At this time I'd like to bring in Occam's Razor which was an idea first proposed by a logician who stated that when talking about hypotheses, the one that assumes the least should take precedence. It's for this reason that I think linguists don't take into account the personality effect on language acquisition and use. But then at what point is your model too far from reality that it's moot and requires you to add complexity.

Zooming back out and looking at the text. For something that happens so naturally and so readily in a day they made language seem very unnatural and sterile. The section on sentence structure made forming a sentence a laborious task; it was so hard to digest for something we've been doing for nearly two decades with hardly any thought. Also, the section on parts of speech made these commonplace words seem so far removed from the ones I've used so often up til now. It just seemed like they were throwing around all this lingo and jargon to make the study of language super official and technical when they're trying to have readers think critically about something so normal and, as they put it, innate to the human experience.

To close I guess I'm just thinking from the two perspectives noted above, casual conversation and textbooks, why overcomplicate? Why include more than what's necessary and why present the hardest presentation when it becomes so much less accessible? Why not keep it simple, to the point, and, well, natural?