Subconscious

In high school, my favorite subject was English. I liked exploring how diction, syntax, figurative language, and other literary devices could contribute to possible meanings. However, I disliked whenever I had to actually formalize English into grammatical rules like or terms like “past participle,” “auxiliary verbs,” and “future progressive tense.” I still don’t really know what any of those are (I learned them at some point and then promptly forgot). I felt like I didn’t need to memorize the precise laws and names of English, that it was cumbersome, since all I had to do was look at a sentence, read it in my head, and think, “That sounds about right,” or “That sounds weird.” In fact, the only times I have ever given serious thought about language in terms like “future past perfect” were when I learned other languages like Spanish and Japanese.

One of Carnie's major arguments is that we have a “subconscious language faculty” (14). When I looked at the sentences Carnie provided as examples, such as “Who do you wonder what I bought” and “Toothbrush the is blue,” I immediately knew that these sentences were grammatically incorrect but, as Carnie notes, I couldn’t really explain why. If you asked me to try, I’d probably shrug and mumble something like, “Iunno.”

This subconscious language faculty, or universal grammar, is an intriguing idea. I could never imagine a world without language, as I’ve grown up immersed in it. In what terms did someone like Genie, the “wild child,” think of her outside world? How did she label feelings like hunger or pain or think about her room as “dark” or “cold”? Genie was a victim of severe child abuse; her father forced her to live in silent isolation in a small room for the first thirteen years of her life. When social workers found her, she could not speak and acted more like an animal than a human. Her case fascinated psychologists, linguists, and other researchers who wondered if she could ever learn language. If what Chomsky hypothesized about innate language was true, then Genie should have been able to still “draw out” her inner language. She did eventually learn how to communicate with a limited vocabulary but never fully developed language. Do all humans have a subconscious language faculty, maybe with an expiration date? Was Genie’s universal grammar still there, but since the connections never formed, it became trapped on one side of a cliff whose rope bridge to the other side had been severed?