SymSys is indeed a major.

Carnie’s textbook focuses on Syntax—the study of the organization of words in sentences so that the sentences have meaning. Immediately, Carnie jumps into framing the study of syntax within cognitive science, and continues to write about syntax from a very scientific, analytical view. He notes that “the discipline of linguistics, along with psychology, philosophy, and computer science” form cognitive science, and I think this sentence provided me with so much clarity as to what I am studying—Symbolic Systems. He then goes on to discuss the words that make up sentences, focusing on the different types of building blocks we use to create strings of coherent sentences, and then moves onto sentence structure as a whole, and using the (ever familiar with CS students) tree diagram.

What I find particularly interesting about the study of syntactic linguistics, is that it was born out of a desire to study our subconscious organization of words and meaning. We aren’t taught syntax explicitly, but this field attempts to model the computer program-like procedures of Language in our brain that allow us to communicate strings of words. The rules that make up our generative grammar for English are like the command lines of a program—algorithmically ordering the steps or words.

A point that Carnie makes that I found particularly stimulating was the difference between semantic ill-formedness and syntactic ill-formedness. An example of the former is “My face is pregnant,” and an example of the latter is “The face mine is pregnant.” From a computational point-of-view, it seems like the syntactic issues would be much easier to create rules for, since the context surrounding semantics feels much more vague and broad. For instance, saying “My face is on fire” is well-formed for both accounts, but as a native English speaker, we know this to mean that the face is not actually on fire, but merely experiencing a burning sensation. As Carnie explains, creating a set of rules that govern our generative grammar is very, very difficult.

The basis for our generative grammar is acquired, rather than learned, as I noted before. Noam Chomsky posited that capacity for Language may be innate, but the specific languages we speak are acquired/learned. There is a proof that demonstrates that because syntax is countably infinite, it cannot be learned, and that parts of understanding syntax are innate. I am skeptical, especially because different languages can have such differing syntactic structure, such as verb + subject order, the placement of modifiers, etc. It seems that from a computational standpoint, creating a model of syntax would be impossible by mapping each word to a set of rules that govern its use, but that building some sort of “learnable” program would be the only way, much like the way we correct young children’s speech mishaps.

Carnie’s linguistic work seems to be so deeply intertwined with these many other fields that come together to form cognitive science, and I now understand where the basis for the Symbolic Systems major came from.