#sorryNotSorry

As a millennial, countless are the times that I have heard someone from an earlier  generation complain about the way technology and “today’s children” are ruining the significance and beauty of life. One of the biggest arguments to support this claim is the way that millennials communicate with each other, using shortcuts and slang. “You are ruining the language!”, they would say. Well, to all this people I would now have a follow-up questions that would make Carnie proud and many adults confused. “Language or language?” If they are smart to say the second, I would then apologize for opting to not text in the simple instance of language they would want me to communicate. If they say the first, oh poor thing. If they only would have read Carnie’s definition of Language as the part of the mind that allows us to speak. For under set definition, their whole argument makes no case, for using any sort of meaningful vocal communication, there is no way that Language is affected, as the same part of the mind is allowing us to speak.

This week’s readings made me think about the definition of language as a whole. Carnie explains that was is truly remarkable about language is not how to properly punctuate the word but rather the question of how we get from sound to meaning. He emphasizes the study of syntax, the ability for humans to speak any particular language, over correct use of grammar as he made the argument that “Universal Grammar” is essentially innate, whereas meaning is taught by experience. This made me think about all the times that people use grammatically incorrect abbreviations when they text such as lol, ikr, brb. There is no argument that based on english language, such make no meaning. However, for the person sending and receiving the letters, the letters do mean a lot. Perhaps even more than writing the complete phrase. So, has technology invented a new instance of Language? It would be interesting to learn the process and validation each language has to go through to be approved as one.

Carnie also makes the argument that parents don’t teach grammar to their children, for is innate. Although I would agree that a sense of grammar comes through intuition, I believe that he highly underestimates the effect parents have on their children’s grammar. Having a diverse group of friends from different parts in the United States, it has catched my attention how some people are used to using more contractions when they speak, meanwhile others speak without any. I believe this not to be a comparison between correct and incorrect grammar, but a matter of how they were raised and affected by their environment. So although perhaps neither would say “He loved herself” is correct grammar, I believe their use of grammar and expression of the language is highly impacted by the way they were raised. 

Carnie also talked about how language is constructed through trees that define the structure of the sentence through how the parts of speech work. I found this interesting because it made me think about how an actual sentence is therefore infinite by writing a sentence that starts with "I see ..." and then move on to list all nouns that exist with millions of adjectives each, and it would still be a grammatically correct sentence. Good Guinness Record, I guess, to actually commit to writing the longest sentence ever.

Finally, I would like to bring up Carnie’s point that parts of speech are difficult to define semantically, as verbs, prepositions, and adjectives are often used as nouns. I particularly had not noticed how syntactic distributions, distributing the kinds of words around a word, help one determine its part of speech. I found his examples very convincing, and found interesting the way the definition of a noun allows any word to become a noun. Now I look forward to inventing a new name for my future husky, make the name really popular to the point it becomes mainstream, and then have world consider it a noun. It is going to be lit, sorry, legit for all those still angry baby boomers.