The Logical Problem

          In Andrew Carnie’s Introducing Linguistics, he thoroughly discusses syntax from a broad and in-depth perspective. In Chapter 1 we learn the general facts of syntax— for example, grammar is a set of rules (or hypotheses) that inform our syntax. He also discusses corpora, or sets of data, that help linguists learn more about languages and syntax, similarly to what we have done in class. Chapter 2 dives specifically into parts of speech, also known as syntactic categories. We look at the morphological distribution, the affixes, of a word and the syntactic distribution, the words surrounding it. For example, in adverbs, we can see they almost always end in -ly and they “can’t appear between a determiner and a noun” (44)— clarifying that, “the sadly man” would not be syntactically correct. Chapter 3 explores the ideas of constituents and how linguists can use trees to show their hierarchal structure. For example, “the man” is one constituent because they are almost one item together. Carnie also explains several ways one can test constituency— the stand alone test (can the fragment alone answer a question?) and the movement test (can the fragment be moved around in the sentence?).

          I found Carnie’s discussion of “the logical problem of language acquisition” intriguing. He detailed the possibility of an operation that seemed to follow a consistent pattern— input: 1→ output: 1; 2→2; 3→3; 4→4; 5→5; 6→?. One would assume the output of the input 6 would be 6; however, Carnie explains that there is the possibility of a much more complicated operation happening that would actually make the output for 6 equal to 126. In an “infinite system” (19), as Carnie puts it, we can never fully know the next sentence we say is the correct output— that is the logical problem of language acquisition. 

          Carnie also explains that there are ways native speakers get around this logical problem with “the indetermination of data”. He explains that “we are born with the knowledge that [some sentences] are ungrammatical” (20). This made me wonder about the full difficulty of acquiring new languages. My father, almost unbelievably, speaks 10 languages— but only 2 fluently (English and Spanish). He told me that for many of those other 8 languages, he feels he can be almost considered fluent, but there is a lasting feeling that he is always forgetting a set of rules that will come up in day-to-day conversation. This worry immediately came to mind when I read about the logical problem of language acquisition. Carnie explains that there are “universals of Language” (21)— the idea that there are a set of properties that are consistent across languages. This may very well be true, but it can never fully account for the fundamental loss of not growing up as a native speaker, as we have read in other works in this class. Kenstowicz and Gussenhoven helped clarify the advantage native speakers have in the pronunciation of phonemes, and Carnie explains this also extends to our everyday syntax.