Validating the SymSys Major

The first sentence that caught my attention was, "The discipline of linguistics, along with psychology, philosophy, and computer science, thus forms an important subdiscipline within cognitive science." This sentence validates everything that the symbolic systems strives to accomplish, and makes me more excited to pursue SymSys as a major. The interaction of these four seemingly different disciplines has an array of new, growing possibilities, and the similarities between the English language and coding languages are increasingly similar.

The textbook challenges much of what we learned about grammar in grade school. The rules of grammar no longer focus on the placement of a comma but instead on the order of words in English sentences. The generative grammar rules are compared to the command lines of a computer program as they let the user know how to build the end product step-by-step. Another computer science term that I found was "parameters." In CS, parameters are passed into different methods and manipulated, and in linguistics, parameters cause differences in grammars and steer towards particular variants.

Carnie also touches on the importance of universals in Language. Speakers of the human languages are all born with the tools to develop the grammar of their language. Research is also beginning to show that children learn languages in the same ways across the world. The psychological aspects of language acquisition continue to be uncovered and continue to fascinate me.

The author goes on to challenge my perception of parts of speech. While I thought that parts of speech were determined by meaning, they are actually determined by their placement in the sentence and their morphological structure. Carnie also distinguishes the differences between lexical parts of speech and functional parts of speech and between the predicate and its arguments. I found myself looking at grammar and sentence structure in a completely different way.