Infinite and Innate

This weeks reading by Carnie moved us up from phonology to morphology and syntax. It starts by introducing the concept of a generative grammar, a set of grammatical rules we use to organize words into sentences, setting the focus on descriptive rules of grammar (rather than prescriptive). In talking about the scientific method and testing of hypotheses he then introduces data sets used for this purpose and discusses a really interesting phenomena.

He gives the example sentence of "Who do you wonder what bought?" What's fascinating about this sentence is that no has ever told us it's an ill formed sentence, we've likely never heard the sentence before, and we likely can't say why it's wrong. Yet, it is very evident to us that it is so.  He refers to the way he come to posses these unconscious understandings as acquiring rather than learning. Acquisition is an amazing phenomena because it is not done so consciously, where as we think of learning as conscious. And as it turns out, when we learn a language most effectively, it is not through the conscious learning of it's grammatical rules, it is through the unconscious absorption of these rules in repeated listening, reading, and immersion. I believe I can relate to this phenomena quite nicely in my college experience of studying Chinese so far. I realize that patterns of speech I am most comfortable with and prepared to use are the ones I've read and listened to repeatedly and thus internalized unconsciously.

But even more interesting is the argument that, as language is gerneratively infinite, it is also impossible to learn, and that therefore there are parts of a Universal Grammar, that are innate to us. When you consider that we have other abilities innately built in, such as our ability to walk, this doesn't seem too far fetched. While this is farely convincing for me already,  there are other more straightforward arguments centered around innate senses for when a sentence is poorly formed as well as an argument from biology that points to how every human, unless differently abled, have language ability.

While this was the most interesting conversation for me, the rest of the paper overviewed different building blocks of syntax including parts of speech and the tree structure, a model of speech that circumvents the memory and size problem of finite state machines and gives a sense of how we may translate meaning into sentences in our head.