Language and Communication

Once we have engaged in some cognitive activity -- perceived an object or remembered an event, induced a concept, deduced category membership, rendered a judgment, made an inference, solved a problem -- we may use our capacity for language to communicate what we have done to someone else. But language is not just a tool for communication. It is also a tool for thought.

Communication Between Nonhuman Animals

Many animal species have the ability to communicate with other members of the same species.

The pheromones discussed in the lectures on Sensation also count as vehicles for communication between nonhuman animals -- and, perhaps, between humans as well. Pheromones appear to communicate aggression, sexual interest, and the like. Of course the odor "landscape" for humans, especially, is complicated by the existence of "exogenous" odors, such as cigarette smoke and other air pollutants, soap, deodorants, and perfumes, which can obscure the messages from relatively weak "endogenous" odors.

But nonverbal communication goes beyond pheromones, and includes a wide variety of "instinctual"behaviors discussed in the lectures on Learning.

These are all social displays: instinct-like innate expressive movements, that do not have to be learned, and that are performed in narrowly defined situations. Other species have more complicated communication systems, that seem to be acquired through learning.

The classic case here is bird song. Male birds sing, but females do not. Each species has a characteristic song, which is used to identify potential mates. Within each species, there are also territorial "dialects", variations on the basic song that seem to help preserve the gene pool in a particular area.

Studies of sparrows indicate that bird songs seem to be learned through exposure to other males, but this is not the usual form of learning. In the natural setting, all young males acquire the dialect sung by their parents. In the laboratory, where the young from one territory are exposed to the dialect from another territory, they will learn whatever dialect they are exposed to. However, sparrows cannot learn the songs of other species. There appears to be a critical period for song-learning, similar to that seen in imprinting in ducks and geese (remember?), between about 1 and 7 weeks of age. If a young sparrow is exposed to its song before it is seven days old, or after it is 50 days old, it will sing only a crude approximation of its song. Interestingly, practice is not important. After exposure, the young male will remain silent for several months. Then, it will sing its song perfectly, the very first time.

There are analogous effects in the female sparrow. As noted, females don't sing; but they do respond to the song of their parents. Exposure of young females under the same conditions as described above, yield effects on response to songs analogous to those seen in males. Moreover, females show the effects of administration of male hormones. If given a dose of testosterone, the female will sing the song to which she was exposed when young.

Apparently, the bird inherits, as part of its innate biological endowment, a crude template of its species' song. This template is then refined through experience -- through exposure to whatever dialect of the song is sung by its parents. By virtue of this exposure the bird then produces a detailed version of its own song. This is an instance of learning: a relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs as a result of experience. But notice that this learning does not occur through reinforcement: there is no practice, and no regime of rewards and punishments.

Bird-song learning is innate, but that doesn't mean that the songs themselves are invariant.  A study led by Elizabeth Derryberry at the University of Tennessee, compared the songs of white-crowned sparrows before and after the "lockdown" imposed in California in 2020 as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic.  One of the results of the lockdown was a significant diminution in ambient noise in the environment -- not least because there were fewer cars on the road, fewer planes flying overhead, fewer people talking and fewer dogs barking.  For a little while, urban environments sounded more like rural environments (some of the data for this study was collected along the Bay Trail in Richmond, a city just north of UCB).  As a result, Derryberry and her colleagues were able to show that the birds sang at lower volume levels -- apparently because they no longer had to compete with the noise around them.  Derryberry et al. conclude that "These findings illustrate that behavioral traits can change rapidly in response to newly favorable conditions, indicating an inherent resilience to long-standing anthropogenic pressures such as noise pollution".  True, but we shouldn't push it: remember those baby sea turtles threatened by evolutionary traps caused by man-made lighting, as discussed in the lectures on Learning.

Whale song has some of the same qualities as bird song, but we know very little about the conditions under which it is learned, and performed.

Linguistic Communication Between Humans

Bird song shows some parallels to human speech. Every normal child learns to speak his or her native language. This learning occurs naturally, without reinforcement, even if the child is raised in an extremely impoverished linguistic environment. There is also a critical period for development.

Language is qualitatively different from even the most complex communication system of nonhuman species.  Human language is differentiated from other communication systems by five properties.

• Meaning: Language expresses ideas. This is sometimes called semanticity, referring to abstract, symbolic representations -- words -- that mean the same thing to all speakers of a language.
• Reference: Language refers to the real or imagined world of objects and events. Related to this is the property of displacement, meaning that language can refer to events in the past or the future as well as in the immediate present.
• Interpersonal: Language is used not just as a tool for thought, but also to communicate one's ideas to someone else -- to change their opinions, or to accomplish one's goals.
• Structure: Linguistic utterances are organized according to the rules of grammar. Prescriptive grammar is a set of authoritative recipes: how language ought to be. Descriptive grammar is a set of descriptions of natural speech: how language is used. The rules of grammar are finite in number. But they permit the generation of an infinite number of different, meaningful sentences.
• Creativity: People can generate and understand novel utterances, that have never been heard or spoken by them (or anyone else) ever before. This is also known as productivity. For example, it's been estimated that there are 1 nonillion (or 1 trillion quintillion) meaningful 20-word sentences in English.

That's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 10³⁰ sentences.

Each of us can understand each of these effortlessly (provided we know what the words mean). But there are only 3 billion seconds in a century. Therefore, there is simply not enough time for us to have learned the meaning of each of these sentences by exposure, even at the rate of 1/sec for an entire lifetime.

These properties combine to make human language unique in nature. Social displays are stereotyped and obligatory; speech is creative and optional. Birds are known to improvise on their songs, but the basic song remains unchanged.

Some primates can be trained to perform some linguistic tasks. The chimpanzees Washoe (who was trained first by Allen and Beatrix Gardner at the University of Nevada, Reno -- located in Washoe County, Nevada -- and later by Deborah and Roger Fouts at Central Washington University, and who died in 2007 at the age of 42, having been trained and Nim Chimsky (a pun by her trainer, Herbert Terrace of Columbia University, on the name of Noam Chomsky, the godfather of modern linguistics), and the gorillas Koko and Michael (trained by Penny Patterson, a former graduate student at Stanford), have learned some aspects of American Sign Language (chimpanzees lack the proper vocal apparatus for anything resembling human speech); and the chimpanzee Sarah (trained by David Premack, at the University of Pennsylvania) has learned to string tokens together in order to form elementary "sentences".  Kanzi, a bonobo studied by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (originally at Georgia State University and later at the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary), learned to communicate with humans using a keyboard of 300 "lexigrams" representing various concepts in "Yerkish", an artificial symbol system named after the Yerkes Primate Research Center, where he was born (he also learned to comprehend some spoken English). 

And not just primates.  Alex, an African grey parrot trained by Irene Pepperberg acquired over 100 words in the course of his 30-year lifespan.  Like a preschooler, he learned is colors, and basic shapes, to count a little, and to categorize objects.  Alex, whose name was derived from Pepperberg's "Avian Learning Experiment", actually got an obituary in the New York Times ("Alex, a Parrot Who Had a Way with Words, Dies" by Benedict Carey, 09/10-2007, from which the picture is drawn; see also "The Communicators" by Charles Siebert, an appreciation of Alex and Washoe, who died the same year as Alex, New York Times Magazine, 12/30/2007).

However, the training of these animals is very arduous, requiring lots of time, effort and reinforcement. And there are big individual differences among chimps and gorillas in their ability to learn language. No primate, even under ideal conditions, has shown the language ability that a normal two-year-old human child acquires effortlessly under the most impoverished conditions. The general consensus is that chimpanzees can acquire some aspects of language semantics, learning the meanings of symbolic "words", but have little or no capacity for linguistic syntax, or the ability to string words together into meaningful utterances. This suggests that human language is indeed a unique ability in nature.

Nim Chimpsky was raised like a human infant in an apartment near Columbia University, and when Terrace's program of research ended, Nim retired to a primate field station at the University of Kansas. He is the subject of a biography by Stephanie Hess, Nim Chimpsky, the Chimp Who Would Be Human (2008), and a documentary film, Project Nim, directed by Peter Marsh (2010), based on Hess's book.  For Terrace's own take on Nim, see his book, Why Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can (2019; see review by David P. Barash in "Aping Our Behavior", Wall Street Journal, 12/14/2019).  Terrace argues that while chimps and other animals can use "words" (and other symbols) imperatively (so, for example, the word food means something like Give me food), they don't use them declaratively (i.e., to name things in conversation, as when we say to someone, I think this food is too spicy).  Animals might be able to learn the correspondence between words (and other symbols) -- semantics, in other words -- they don't have syntax, so they don't have the ability to combine symbols to express new ideas.  He also argues that while they might be able to acquire concrete concepts, such as food, they don't have the ability to acquire abstract concepts such as justice.  Barash, an evolutionary psychologist, isn't sure that chimps and other creatures are utterly lacking in linguistic ability -- he thinks that there might well be some chimp(s), out there somewhere, who might have it.  We just may not have encountered them yet. 

Koko was born in the San Francisco Zoo on July 4, 1971, and died at the Gorilla Foundation, the home established for her in the Bay Area by her trainer, Penny Patterson, on June 19, 2018 (see her obituary in the New York Times, 06/21/2018).  There's no doubt that Koko was able to use signs to communicate with Patterson and others, though a fierce debate raged over the precise extent of her linguistic abilities.  Koko had semantics, to a degree, using arbitrary signs to convey meaning, but it's not clear that she had syntax, which is what allows language to express an infinite variety of meanings, and which distinguishes language from other forms of communication.

Sarah was also retired from research, and spent her last 13 years in the company of other chimpanzees at Chimp Haven.  She died in 2019, and got a great obituary in the New York Times ("The World's Smartest Chimpanzee Has Died", by Lori Gruen, 08/10/2019).  I have more to say about Sarah in my lectures on the origins of consciousness and the development of social cognition.

Kanzi is, in some respects, a sadder story.  Savage-Rumbaugh raised Kanzi in an intact family unit consisting of his mother, Matata, and his sister, Panbanisha, and eventually other relatives.  Exposed to the keyboard as an infant, he quickly learned to use it to communicate with the human researchers by matching Yerkish lexigrams to spoken English words directed at various objects and actions.  Savage-Rumbaugh claimed that, in one test, he demonstrated understanding of 72% of 660 novel sentences such as "Go get the ball that's outside".  Panbanisha also learned to communicate via the lexigrams.  Interestingly, Matata, who started the project as an adult, was much less successful in learning Yerkish.  Savage-Rumbaugh also suggested that the bonobos' acquired a form of speech, with distinct vocalizations specific to certain Yerkish words.  Eventually, conflict developed among the staff: Savage-Rumbaugh and some other staff began to consider the lab environment as a kind of "Pan/Homo" hybrid culture ("Pan" being the label for the species containing chimpanzees and bonobos), and wanted to continue to explore issues pertaining to language and culture; others wanted to "put the bonobo back in the bonobos", as it were -- instead of forcing them to live in something like human culture.  There were management and funding problems as well, and cross-complaints alleging mistreatment of the animals.  But the overriding issue has to do with the ethics of treating bonobos as if they were human -- as opposed to letting them live something like their normal lives.  The research center still operates, and Kanzi and his family still live there, but Savage-Rumbaugh effectively lost her position (as of July 2020 she was still trying to regain it).  Instead of her work on Pan/Homo "hybrid culture", most research involves more traditional procedures for the study of primate cognition -- although there's still considerable use of the Yerkish keyboards.  For more detail, see "The Divide" by Lindsay Stern, Smithsonian magazine, 07-08/2020, from which these illustrations are taken.

For an interesting perspective on animal language and human-animal communication, see "Buzz Buzz Buzz" by Michelle Nijhuis (New York Review of Books,08/20/2020), reviewing books on interspecies communication by the Dutch philosopher Eva Meijer.  In books such as Animal Languages and When Animals Speak: Toward an Interspecies Democracy, Meijer argues that instead of trying to teach animals English (or ASL, or whatever), we should try to learn their languages -- ho they "speak" to us through the sounds and gestures they make.  She further argues that, because animals are able to communicate their desires to us, they are "political actors" who deserve to be recognized by our political system -- as individuals with both "negative rights" (e.g., not to be confined, tortured, or killed) and "positive rights (e.g., to preserved and protected habitats).

Hierarchical Organization of Language

Language is organized hierarchically, into a number of different levels of analysis.

At the lowest level, the phoneme is the smallest unit of speech. Similarly, written language has an elementary graphemic level consisting of the letters of the alphabet.

At the next level, the morpheme is the smallest unit of speech that carries meaning. In English, there are about 50,000 of these: roots, stems, prefixes, and suffixes. There are two classes of morphemes: open-class morphemes consist of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs (so called because new members can be added to the class just by inventing new words, like "radar" and "snarf"); closed-class morphemes consist of articles, connectives, prepositions, prefixes, and suffixes. Phonemes are combined into morphemes by phonological rules that specify which combinations are "legal" in a particular language.

At the next level, the word consists of one or more morphemes -- a root or stem, plus (perhaps) a prefix or suffix. In English, there are about 200,000 of these. Morphemes are combined into words according to the same phonological rules. Knowledge of the meanings of individual words is stored in the mental lexicon.

At the next level, phrases and sentences consist of strings of one or more words that express a meaningful proposition. In English, or any other language, the number of possible phrases and sentences is essentially infinite. Again, there are two classes of these.

At each level of the hierarchy, combinations of lower-level elements are governed by rules. Grammatical rules govern how words can be strung together. Just a finite number of phonetic elements (phonemes) can be combined into a larger but finite number of morphemes and words, which in turn can be combined by a finite set of grammatical rules into an infinite number of propositions. These grammatical rules, known as syntax, make possible the creativity of human language. But the rules of syntax aren't the only rules of language:

Phonology

Each language has its own set of phonemes -- in English, there are about 40.

Other languages have other sets of phonemes.

Ranjit Bhatnagar, a sound artist, has invented the Speak-and-Play, an electronic keyboard that produces digitized samples of his voice producing the 40 English phonemes (in principle, it could be programmed to use other voices, and other sets of phonemes).  It was introduced by Margaret Leng Tan, an avant-grade virtuoso of the toy piano, at the UnCaged Toy Piano Festival (New York Times, 12/14/2013). Link to a video demonstrating the Speak-and-Play system.

The infant's speech apparatus can produce all the phonemes in all known natural language -- this is what comes out when babies babble. However, during the babbling period the infant gradually narrows its repertoire of phonemes to those of its native language -- that is, the language(s) to which the infant is exposed. This results in an accent when the person learns to speak a new language as an older child or an adult.

Long before they can produce any words, even very young infants can detect speech sounds in the auditory stream. Studies employing EEG showed that monolingual infants -- that is, infants raised in a household in which only one language is spoken -- respond differentially to speech sounds, compared to other kinds of sounds, as early as 6 months of age -- regardless of whether these phonemes are from their "home" language or another language, to which they haven't been exposed. By the age of 12 months, however, these monolingual infants clearly distinguish between their "native" phonemes and the "foreign" ones -- a phenomenon known as perceptual narrowing. The story was different, however, for infants raised in "bilingual" homes, in which they were exposed to two different languages. Like their monolingual counterparts, these infants did not discriminate between the two languages at 6 months of age; but by 12 months, they were clearly discriminating between the two sets of phonemes.

Somewhat in the manner of imprinting in geese (described in the lectures on Learning) there is a critical period for the learning of phonology, beginning about 6 months of age.  However, this does not occur in a vacuum.  It must seem obvious that the child has to hear people speaking.  But, in fact, exposure to speech, lots of speech, is critical for language development. The more the merrier.  There may be an innate Language Acquisition Device, as Chomsky has proposed; but language acquisition also depends on exposure to language, and the social interaction that comes with it.  Nature and nurture, as always, work together.

This perceptual learning of speech sounds occurs even in the womb. Infants prefer speech sounds and rhythms drawn from the language to which they were exposed during infant development -- and this is true of bilingual as well as monolingual infants.

The perceptual learning of speech sounds is a form of statistical learning, as discussed in the lectures on Learning. That is, as they are exposed to language, infants naturally pick up, without benefit of reinforcement, the statistical regularities in what they hear. From this experience they acquire knowledge about the regularities of speech sounds, how phonemes are assembled into morphemes, how morphemes are assembled into words, and how words are assembled into phrases and sentences.

To take a classic example, consider the findings of a study by Patricia Kuhl: 

• At the age of 6-8 months, American, Taiwanese, and Japanese infants do not reliably differentiate between the syllables ra and la and qi and xi.
• The syllables ra and la are common in English, but not in Japanese or Cantonese.
• The Japanese syllable ra sounds to English ears like a blend of ra and la).
• However, at the age of 10-12 months, American and Taiwanese infants clearly distinguish between ra and la, while the Japanese do not.
• And the Taiwanese infants clearly distinguish between qi and xi, while the American infants do not.
  

Does this mean that Skinner was right and Chomsky wrong -- that language is not special after all, and that language acquisition is simply a variant on classical conditioning - -albeit without reinforcement? Not exactly. In the first place, Skinner was completely wrong about the necessity of reinforcement. As we have known since the time of Tolman and Harlow, learning -- acquiring knowledge of the world through experience --just happens, whether we're trying to learn or not, and whether we're rewarded for learning or not. Statistical learning is a powerful learning mechanism, and it is the process by which children acquire most of their knowledge of language -- just as it is the process by which they acquire most of their knowledge about the world, through simple observation. But there's also a role for something like an innate Language Acquisition Device. It turns out that all of the natural languages of the world share a relatively small number of universal patterns. Artificial languages that do not share these patterns are difficult to learn, whereas those that share the "universals" of natural languages are learned readily by both children and adults. So, it seems as if we come prepared -- remember preparedness, from the Learning lectures? -- to learn some kinds of patterns and rules easily. That element of preparedness, wired into the human genome and brain by evolution, is the Language Acquisition Device. 

The classic example of observational rule-learning in language is the past tense of verbs in English, discussed at length by the psychologist Steven Pinker (Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, 2000 -- a truly wonderful book that should be read by everyone interested in language; but first read Pinker's earlier and more accessible book, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, 1994). 

What's interesting about all this is that the child has never heard an adult say "holded".  Never.  Nor has the child ever been reinforced for saying "holded".  Never.  If anything, she's been corrected.  The child gets "holded" not by imitating adults, much less by virtue of being reinforced.  The child gets "holded" because she has abstracted a rule from hearing adults, and then generalized it to new words.

Sound and Meaning

Words are made of phonemes, which indicate how the word is to be pronounced.  But what's the relationship between the sounds of words and their meanings?  The debate goes back at least as far as Plato's Cratylus.  In that dialog, Hermogenes argues that there is an arbitrary relationship between a word and its meaning; Cratylus disagrees, and Socrates came down somewhere in the middle.  And 2500 years later, modern linguistics stands with Socrates.  Words are symbolic representations of objects, events, and ideas, which don't typically resemble -- in appearance or pronunciation -- the things they represent.  But there are exceptions:

• Wolfgang Kohler, one of the founders of the Gestalt movement in psychology, showed subjects a pointed, star-like shape and a rounded, cloud-like shape, and asked them which would be called takete and which baluba, both nonsense words in the subjects' native Spanish.  They overwhelmingly associated the pointed object with takete, and the rounded one with baluba. 
  
• Ramachandran and Hubbard (2001) repeated the experiment with native English speakers, using the nonsense words bouba and kiki, and got the same results. 
  

R&H argued that this bouba/kiki effect, as they dubbed it, represents a kind of linguistic synesthesia, in which the sound of a word, or perhaps its physical appearance is associated with its meaning.  A word like bouba, with its soft vowels an consonants, is associated with soft things, while a word like tiki, with its hard vowels and consonants, is associated with sharp things. 

Whistle While You Speak We ordinarily think of spoken language in terms of words strung into phrases and sentences, but that's not necessarily the case.  In the sign languages used by deaf people, for example, meaning is conveyed by gestures instead of spoken words. Another example is whistling language, such as Silbo Gomero used on La Gomera, an island of about 22,000 people in the Canary Islands archipelago (see "'Special and Beautiful': Whistled Language Echoes Around This Island" by Raphael Minder, New York Times, 02/19/2021).  Accounts of the language go back as far as 15th-century Spanish explorers, and after conquest by Spain the language was adapted to Spanish.  According to Milner, "Silbo Gomero... substitutes whistled sounds that vary by pitch and length for written letters [by which he really means phonemes or words].  Unfortunately there are fewer whistles than there are letters in the Spanish alphabet, so a sound can have multiple meanings, causing misunderstandings" which have to be resolved by reference to context [not unlike more familiar spoken languages, as discussed below].  In 2009, Silbo Gomero was added to UNESCO's list of "Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity", which noted that it is "the only whistled language in the world that is fully developed and practiced by a large community" (other islands in the archipelago, such as El Hierro, have their own whistled languages).  It is now taught as an obligatory part of the school curriculum on La Gomero.  Milner suggests that whistling languages evolved because of the unique geography of the Canary Islands, whose mountains, plateaus, and ravines make traveling by foot difficult.  Whistles carry much farther than speech, facilitating communication across long distances.

Syntax

Phonology has to do with the sound of speech. Syntax has to do with the grammatical rules by which words and phrases are strung together to create meaningful utterances. These grammatical rules should not be confused with the ones you learned in elementary school.  Normal children have all the grammar they need long before they enter into formal schooling -- they pick it up from hearing other people speak, and especially from being spoken to.  Moreover, much of this grammatical knowledge is itself unconscious, in the sense that children (and adults) are not consciously aware of the rules they're following when they speak and listen, write and read.  They gain explicit knowledge of some of these rules later, during formal instruction.  It's in school that you learn the rules for sentence agreement: that the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in a sentence must agree in number: we say The horse is strong, but The horses are strong.  When you make a mistake, your teacher corrects you until you get it right. 

But there are other grammatical rules which you're not expressly taught, and which you just know intuitively.  A classic example, adapted from Joseph Danks and Sam Glucksberg (1971) are the rules for ordering adjectives: every native speaker of English agrees that it is correct to say big red Swiss tables but not to say Swiss red big tables -- it just sounds wrong.  But no schoolchild is ever taught this rule, and if you asked people to tell you what the rule is, they couldn't say.  And, in fact, professional linguists have debated over the precise nature of the rule for years. One proposal, from the British linguist Mark Forsyth (in The Elements of Eloquence, 2013), is that adjectives should be ordered as follows: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose, as in This a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife.  For present purposes, the actual rule doesn't matter: what matters is that there is such a rule, everyone follows it intuitively, but nobody (except maybe professional linguists) can tell you what the rule is. 

(There are other rules, governing phonology and morphology as well).  For example, the suffix -s that marks plural English words is pronounced differently like zzz or ess, depending on the previous consonant.  But nobody ever taught anybody that rule, either; native speakers of English employ it reliably by age 3 -- that is, before any elementary school teacher has taught them anything about English.  And if I asked you why you say fades with the -zzz sound but gaffes with the -s sound, you couldn't tell me, because it depends on whether the preceding consonant is "voiced" or "unvoiced", and you probably don't know what that means (unless you've taken a linguistics class!).

Phrase (Surface) Structure

Phrase structure rules govern the surface structure of language -- the utterance as it is expressed by the speaker, and heard by the listener. Phrase structure grammar is represented by rewrite rules of the following form:

Noun ==> man, woman, horse, dog, etc.
Verb ==> saw, heard, hit, etc.
Article ==> a, an, the
Adjective ==> happy, sad, fat, timid, etc.
Noun Phrase ==> Art + Adj + N
Verb Phrase ==> V + NP
Sentence ==> NP + VP

These last three rules can generate 4800 different legal sentences just from the 13 words specified in the first four words (try it out!). All these sentences have the following form:

The 1st noun phrase verbed the 2nd noun phrase.

Now if you recall that there are roughly 200,000 words in English, and more being invented every day, you will understand what we mean when we say that an infinite number of sentences can be generated from a finite number of words.

Phrase structure rules look like those you learned in 7th-grade English. But they also have psychological reality. Consider the famous poem by Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky, from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), the sequel to Alice in Wonderland (1865):

We don't know what the poem means, exactly, because so many of the "words" are unfamiliar. But we do know something of the meaning, simply because the structure of the poem follows the rules of English grammar. For example, we know that the toves, whatever they are, were slithy, whatever that is; and that they were gyring and gimbling, whatever those actions are, in the wabe, whatever that is; that the borogroves were mimsy; and the mome raths were outgrabe.

Actually, it's perfectly clear what Jabberwocky means, at least to Humpty-Dumpty "You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir", said Alice. "Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem 'Jabberwocky'?" "Let's hear it", said Humpty Dumpty. "I can explain all the poems that ever were invented--and a good many that haven't been invented just yet." This sounded very hopeful, so Alice repeated the first verse: 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. "That's enough to begin with", Humpty Dumpty interrupted: "there are plenty of hard words there. 'Brillig' means four o'clock in the afternoon--the time when you begin broiling things for dinner." "That'll do very well", said Alice: "and 'slithy'?" "Well, 'slithy' means 'lithe and slimy'. 'Lithe' is the same as 'active'. You see it's like a portmanteau--there are two meanings packed up into one word." I see it now", Alice remarked thoughtfully: "and what are 'toves'?" "Well, 'toves' are something like badgers--they're something like lizards--and they're something like corkscrews." "They must be very curious creatures." "They are that", said Humpty Dumpty: "also they make their nests under sun-dials--also they live on cheese." "And what's to 'gyre' and to 'gimble'?" "To 'gyre' is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To 'gimble' is to make holes like a gimlet." "And 'the wabe' is the grass plot round a sun-dial, I suppose?" said Alice, surprised at her own ingenuity. "Of course it is. It's called 'wabe', you know, because it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it--" "And a long way beyond it on each side", Alice added. "Exactly so. Well then, 'mimsy' is 'flimsy and miserable' (there's another portmanteau for you). And a 'borogove' is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round--something like a live mop." "And then 'mome raths'?" said Alice. "If I'm not giving you too much trouble." "Well a 'rath' is a sort of green pig, but 'mome' I'm not certain about. I think it's sort for 'from home'--meaning that they'd lost their way, you know." "And what does 'outgrabe' mean?" "Well, 'outgribing' is something between bellowing an whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle: however, you'll hear it done, maybe--down in the wood yonder--and when you've once heard it, you'll be quite content. Who's been repeating all that hard stuff to you?" "I read it in a book", said Alice. "Jabberwocky" had been subjected to endless exegeses by linguists.  See, also The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner, which contains references to much of this scholarly material.  You can read a summary in "The Frabjous Delights of Seriously Silly Poetry" by Willard Spiegelman (Wall Street Journal, 04/04/2020).  Spiegelman reminds us that some of the "nonsense" words coined by Carroll, such as galumphing and chortled, have entered the standard English dictionary. As for the Jabberwock itself, it's a creature of Carroll's imagination, and probably best left to the reader's imagination, as well.  Conjure up your own image, and then check out the classic illustration by John Tenniel.  Or, better yet, buy a copy of the book, with all of Tenniel's delightful illustrations, to share with a child (or adult) you know.  And while you're at it, get a copy of Gardiner's Annotated Alice for your coffee table.

In fact, over subsequent years some of Carroll's neologisms actually made it into the English dictionary. Christopher Myers (2007) has produced an illustrated version of Jabberwocky intended to introduce the poem to children. But in his book, the Jabberwock is turned into a kind of monstrous basketball player. That may be fine for getting kids to read the book, but the real beauty of the poem is in its parody of classic English poetry, and in its demonstration of just how much meaning is contained in the syntax alone.

The psychological reality of phrase-structure grammar is also indicated by experiments on memory for strings of pseudowords. For example, in an experiment by Epstein subjects were asked to memorize letter strings of letters such as the following:

THE YIG WUR VUM RIX HUM IN JAG MIV.

Another group was asked to memorize versions of the strings that had been altered with prefixes and suffixes, so that they mapped onto phrase structure grammar:

THE YIGS WUR VUMLY RIXING HUM IN JAGEST MIV.

Strings of the second type were easier to memorize compared to those of the first type, even though they contained more letters. The reason is that our knowledge of phrase structure grammar provides a scheme for organizing the strings into chunks resembling the parts of speech. This organization supports better memory (remember the organization principle?).

As a further demonstration, consider an experiment by Fodor and Bever (1965) on signal detection. In this study, subjects heard a click superimposed on a spoken sentence, and they are asked to indicate where, in the sentence, the click occurred. If the click was located at the boundary between a noun phrase and a verb phrase, it was accurately located. But if the click were presented within a noun phrase or a verb phrase, it was usually displaced to the boundary between them. This indicates that noun phrases and verb phrases are perceived as units.

Deep Structure

Phrase structure grammar is important, but it is not all there is to syntax. For example, at first glance, sentences with similar surface structures seem similar in meaning:

JOHN SAW SALLY.
JOHN HEARD SALLY.

However, similar surface structures don't guarantee similarity of meaning. Consider the following sentences:

JOHN IS EASY TO PLEASE.
JOHN IS EAGER TO PLEASE.

The differences in meaning can be demonstrated by rephrasing them in passive voice:

IT IS EASY TO PLEASE JOHN.
IT IS EAGER TO PLEASE JOHN.

Moreover, sentences with different surface structures may have similar meaning:

JOHN SAW SALLY.
SALLY WAS SEEN BY JOHN.
IT WAS JOHN WHO SAW SALLY.
IT WAS SALLY WHO WAS SEEN BY JOHN, WASN'T IT?

So clearly something else is needed besides surface structure grammar.

This "something else", according to the linguist Noam Chomsky, is transformational grammar, a set of rules that can generate many equivalent surface structures, and also uncover kernel of meaning common to many different surface structures. This "kernel of meaning" is what is known as the deep structure of the sentence. We get from deep structure to surface structure by means of transformational rules. These rules can produce many equivalent surface structures from a single deep structure.

The deep structure of a sentence can be represented by its basic propositional meaning representing the basic thought underlying the utterance:

Prop ==> NP + VP

The surface structure of a sentence consists of a proposition and an attitude:

Att --> assertion, denial, question, focus on object, etc.
S --> Att + Prop

Thus:

Proposition: THE BOY HIT THE BALL.
Assertion: THE BOY HIT THE BALL.
Denial: THE BOY DID NOT HIT THE BALL.
Question: DID THE BOY HIT THE BALL?
Focus on Object: THE BALL WAS HIT BY THE BOY.
Combination: THE BALL WAS NOT HIT BY THE BOY, WAS IT?

Something like Deep Structure, and transformational grammar, is logically necessary in order to understand language. But, as empirical scientists, we also need evidence of its psychological reality. In this regard, some evidence is provided by the utterances of novices in a language, such as infants and immigrants. These utterances tend to mimic the hypothesized deep structure:

I NO GO SLEEP.
WHY MOMMY HIT BILLY?

Further evidence is provided by studies of memory for paraphrase. In such experiments, subjects study a sentence, and then are asked to recognize studied sentences from a set of targets and lures.

HE SENT A LETTER TO GALILEO.

Interest in the experiment comes from recognition errors (false alarms) made in response to alternative phrasings. Phrasings that represent a different proposition, but the same attitude, are correctly rejected:

GALILEO SENT A LETTER ABOUT IT TO HIM.

But phrasings that represent the same proposition, albeit with a different attitude, tend to be falsely recognized:

A LETTER ABOUT IT WAS SENT TO GALILEO BY HIM.

This kind of evidence indicates that memory encodes the "gist" of a sentence, its kernel of meaning, rather than the details of its surface structure.

Further evidence is provided by a study of meaning verification. Subjects study a standard sentence:

THE BOY HIT THE BALL.

Then they are presented with test sentences, and asked to indicate which have the same meaning as the standard. Sentences that involve only a single transformation are correctly verified very quickly:

HAS THE BOY HIT THE BALL?

However, sentences that involve two transformations take more time:

WAS THE BALL HIT BY THE BOY?

This indicates that, in understanding the sentence, the language processor strips away the surface structure to unpack the deeper kernel of meaning below -- and this unpacking takes time.

In an early, now-classic experiment, Savin & Perchonock (1965) presented subjects with sentences followed by a string of eight unrelated words (that is, words that were unrelated to the sentence. They were then asked to repeat the sentence verbatim, and to recall as many of the words as possible. The sentences represented either a kernel of meaning, such as

The boy hit the ball

or one or more transformations, such as

The finding was that subjects remembered the most words when presented with the simple sentence representing the kernel of meaning. When they had to process a single transformation, they remembered fewer words. And when they had to process two or more transformations, they remembered even fewer words. Apparently, processing the transformations took up space in what we would now call working memory, leaving less capacity left over to hold the words.

Universal Grammar

Chomsky has proposed that, the human ability to acquire and understand any natural language is based on the fact that some grammatical knowledge is part of our innate biological equipment. Not that we are born knowing English or Chinese, obviously. A child born of English-speaking parents, but raised from birth in a Chinese-speaking household, will speak fluent Chinese, without even an English accent. And a child born of Chinese-speaking parents, but raised from birth in an English-speaking household, will speak fluent English without any trace of Chinese accent. For Chomsky, language acquisition occurs as effortlessly as it does because humans are born with a special brain module or system -- he sometimes calls it a "Language Acquisition Device" or LAD -- that permits us to learn any language to which we are exposed. At the core of the LAD is a body of linguistic knowledge that Chomsky calls 'Universal Grammar" or UG -- a set of linguistic rules or principles that apply to all languages, spoken by anyone, anywhere. UG and the LAD come with us into the world as our basic mental equipment, just like we are born with lungs and hearts and eyes and ears. They are part of the biological stuff that makes us human, and which separates us from other species, such as chimpanzees, which for all intents and purposes lack the human capacity for language.

According to Chomsky, all natural languages, whether English or Chinese or Hindi-Urdu or Swahili or whatever -- have the principles of UG in common. What makes them different is due to the fact that each language has a different package of parameters. It's a little like buying a car: every car has four wheels and an internal-combustion engine, but some cars have leather seats and other cars are convertibles. You get the basic equipment whatever car you buy; it's only the options that are different. But the options are linked together: if you buy a standard-shift car, it comes with a clutch and a different kind of gearshift, as well as a gauge to indicate the engine's RPMs. So it seems to be with language: if, for example, a language has the rule that verbs must precede objects (John shoveled the snow) will also place relative clauses after the nouns that they modify (John shoveled the snow, which was three feet deep). Not all languages have either feature (there are languages that say, in essence, John the three-foot deep snow did shovel), but a language like English, which has one feature, apparently also must have the other.

Of course, the words are different, too. In English we say "man" where the Spanish say "hombre". But Chomsky is not talking about words. He's talking about syntax: the fundamental structure of the grammatical knowledge that allows us to put words together into meaningful sentences.

Chomsky's theory is widely accepted, though mostly on grounds of plausibility: there has to be something like UG, and an innate LAD, to enable people to learn their native language as easily and as well as they do. But gathering empirical evidence for the theory has proved difficult, because it requires investigators to have an intimate knowledge of several languages that are very different from each other. Still, there has been some interesting progress toward empirical tests of Chomsky's theory.

For example, Mark Baker, a linguist who studied under Chomsky at MIT, has shown that the world's languages differ from each other in one or more of a relatively small set of 14 parameters. Baker claims to have identified more than a dozen of these already, and he thinks there may be as many as 30.

Welsh, spoken in the British Isles, and Khmer, spoken in Cambodia, also put modifiers in the front of phrases. By contrast, Lakota, another Native American language, Japanese, Turkish, and Greenlandic (an "Eskimo" language) put the modifiers at the end. In Lakota, you would say something like

"I table the on book the put will".

Different languages make different "choices" among these parameters. Presumably, when a child learns his or her native language, he or she starts out with UG, and then fits what he or she hears into the scheme. It's as if an infant raised in an English-speaking household says, "OK! I got it! This is not a polysynthetic language, and it's got forward head-direction. None of this goes on consciously, of course, and you don't actually learn about these parameters unless you take a college course in comparative linguistics. But there does seem to be a universal grammar underlying all languages, and we seem to know it innately. And whatever differences there are between languages, somehow we have to grasp them very quickly in order for us to become fluent speakers as early as we do. So, it makes sense that, in addition to UG, the various parametric "options" are also laid out in our brains, ready to categorize the language we're exposed to from birth.

Critique of Universal Grammar

On the other hand, work by Michael Dunn suggests that linkage between various aspects of language grammar isn't as tight as Chomsky assumes it is. His survey indicates that the world's languages contain a lot more random linkages among these features, suggesting that flipping the switch for verb-object order, for example, doesn't also control noun-relative clause order.

Moreover, Daniel Everett, a linguist who did Christian missionary work in the Amazon (his memoir of that time is entitled Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, has claimed that one particular tribe, the Piraha, speak a language whose structure is inconsistent with Chomsky's theory of UG. Chomsky (and others) has claimed that recursion is the essential property of human language, distinguishing it from all other modes of communication (like birdsong), and the key to its creativity. That is, we can embed clauses within sentences to make infinitely long sentences -- and, more important, sentences which have never been uttered before.  What nonhuman animals lack, even chimpanzees, is the ability to combine meaningful sounds (what would be our phonemes and words) into new sounds that have a different meaning.

So, beginning with

John gave a book to Lucy

we can simply keep adding clause:

And so on: you get the idea.

Anyway, Everett claims that the Piraha language doesn't have the property of recursion -- nor, for that matter, does it have number terms or color words. Far from being a unique human faculty, Everett concludes that language is a product of general intelligence. It is an invention, not unlike the bow and arrow, which can arise independently in lots of different cultures, but whose particulars are shaped by the culture that produced it. So far from being universal, particular languages are shaped by particular cultural needs. Far from being dependent on a uniquely human faculty, like Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device, language is a product of general intelligence, like the bow and arrow. The Piraha, whose culture is focused completely on the concrete here-and-now, just don't need recursion, so their language doesn't have it. But if language is shaped by culture, then it isn't universal in the way Chomsky says it is. You can't imagine how controversial this claim is -- so much so that no fewer than three independent research teams have visited the Piraha to figure out how their language works. It doesn't help that Everett has been reluctant to release the data he collected in the field. However, an independent corpus of 1,000 Piraha sentences, collected by another missionary linguist, appears to show no evidence of recursion. But even it that's true, it doesn't show that the Piraha can't generate or understand recursive sentences. It would just show that they don't routinely do it.

Everett has expanded his argument in Language: The Cultural Tool (2012).  Far from depending on the existence of a separate Language Acquisition Device, Everett and other Chomsky critics argue that language learning is just a special instance of learning in general.  To be sure, spoken language (as opposed to sign language) depends on a distinctly human vocal apparatus, but language itself is "just" a complex function mediated by a very complex brain.  In Everett's formula:

Language = Cognition + Culture + Communication.

Language isn't an innate human faculty, in this point of view.  Rather, it's a tool that can be used by a culture or not.  And when it's used by a culture, it's shaped by the culture in which it's used.  We'll see this idea crop up again later, when we consider the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language determines thought.  What people talk about it (semantics), and how they talk about it (syntax), are both determined by culture, including cultural values.

Everett expanded his argument with Chomsky in How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention (2018).  The subtitle tells it all: Language isn't something that evolved through the accidents of natural selection; language is something that humans invented for purposes of exchanging information.  For that reason, there will be cultural differences among languages -- like the language of the Piraha, which doesn't involve recursion, and doesn't have color or number terms, because the Piraha don't see the need for them.  But beyond this debate, there lies a basic difference about the function of language: Chomsky think that language is primarily a tool for thinking, while Everett thinks that language is primarily a tool for communication.  As Everett puts it:

Language did not fully begin when the first hominid uttered the first word or sentence.  It began in earnest only with the first conversation, which is both the source and the goal of language.

A variant on Everett's critique has been promoted by Michael Tomasello (2003) in his usage-based theory of language acquisition (for a a brief summary, see "Language in a New Key" by Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello, Scientific American, 11/2016).  Essentially, Tomasello denies any need to postulate anything like LAD or UG, and instead argues that language is a product of a general-purpose learning system, coupled with other general-purpose cognitive abilities, such as the ability to classify objects and make judgments of similarity.  

Tomasello begins by outlining some empirical problems with Chomsky's theory (which, as I've noted, has changed considerably since he first announced it in the 1950s).

• Some aboriginal Australian languages don't package words neatly into separate noun phrases and verb phrases, "outliers" which suggested that UG was not universal after all.
• Some "ergative" languages, such as Basque, have grammatical features that are not found in "accusative" languages, such as Spanish, French, or Portuguese.  For example, where an "accusative" language would say The boy kicked the ball, an "ergative" language would say something like The ball the boy kicked.
• To be fair, though, it was findings such as this that led Chomsky and his colleagues to the develop the "Principles and Parameters" version of the theory described above.
  
• And of course, there are languages such as Piraha which don't seem to make use of recursion, which Chomsky believes lies at the heart of language.

Now, in response to such findings, one might simply make adjustments to the theory, and in fact that's what Chomsky has done.  But Tomasello believes that enough challenging evidence has accumulated that Chomsky's theory should be thrown out entirely, and something new substituted -- or, in Tomasello's case, something old: statistical learning, of the sort discussed earlier in the context of phonology.  The general idea is that through this general learning mechanism children pick up on the regularities of whatever language they're exposed to.  Although this sounds a bit like B.F. Skinner's approach to language -- well, it is, except that it depends on observational learning rather than reinforcement.  In that sense, the usage-based theory is more "cognitive" and less "behavioristic".  This general statistical-learning process is augmented by other general processes, such as attention, memory, categorization, and the ability to understand other people's intentions (which is discussed in the Lectures on "Psychological Development".. 

The point of this is not that Chomsky is right and Everett wrong, or vice-versa (though, frankly, I'm rooting for Chomsky). Chomsky's theories about human language have dominated linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science for more than 50 years (since his earliest publications, in the 1950s), and he attracts allies and foes in equal number. For my money, Chomsky's basic view of language as a unique human component of our cognitive apparatus is probably more right than wrong, but I'm not enough of a linguist -- I'm not any linguist at all -- to engage in a detailed critique of his theoretical views. Nor is there any need for such a critique at this level of the course. All I ask is that you appreciate Chomsky's approach to language. If you get really interested in language, you'll have plenty of opportunity to delve deeper into its mysteries in more advanced courses.

Semantics

For Chomsky, syntax is the key to human language: Human communication wouldn't be creative otherwise.  But syntax isn't the only thing we need to understand utterances.  Syntax provides structure, but it doesn't provide specific meaning.  It only says that the first noun phrase verbed the second noun phrase.  That's just the framework for a meaningful utterance.  The frame has to be filled out with specific words and phrases.  Semantics has to do with the specific meanings conveyed by words in a proposition, what the various words refer to.  And unless we know what the specific words refer to, we can't understand the meaning of what's being said to us.  -- what the various words refer to. The problem of reference has two aspects: denotative, concerning the object, or event, or attribute that the word labels; and connotative, or the emotional meaning of the word. This question of meaning, or reference, returns us to problem of semantic (as opposed to episodic) memory; and also to categorization. Both semantic memory and categorization link language to thought.

Twas brilling, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.  All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe."

We can get some sense of that just from the syntax, but we have no idea what brillig is, and what toves are, and in what respect they're slithy, and what a borogrove is, and what it means to be mimsy.

The problem of reference has two general aspects, denotative and connotative.  Denotative reference or denotative meaning concerns the object or event or attribute that a particular word labels.  What does it mean to gyre?  What are borogroves, and what does it mean to be mimzy?  Connotative meaning has to do with the emotional meaning of the word, whether it's a good thing or a bad thing to be mimsy or brillig.

This question of meaning or reference returns us to the problem of semantic as opposed to episodic memory, and how we can represent semantic memory in a network where nodes represent concepts, and links represent the associative or propositional relationships among various concepts.  And we've actually talked about meaning a lot when we talked about categorization, and how concepts are held together by prototypes, or exemplars, or whatever.  Both semantic memory and categorization link language to thinking.

A Taxonomy of Words In grade school we learned to classify words according to their grammatical or syntactic properties -- the parts of speech.  Different languages hvae different parts of speech, and linguists have fist fights over the exact number at their conventions).  But in English, this is a more-or-less consenual classification: noun (the name of a person, place, or thing; can be concrete, like dog or abstract, like justice); verb (referring to an activity or process, such as hit or think); adjective (which modifies a noun or noun phrase, such as pretty or handsome); adverb (whch modifies a verb or verb phrase, such as quickly or slowly); pronoun (substituting for a noun or noun phrase, such as he, she, and it); preposition (which mark spatial, temporal, or other relations, such as in, before, and for); conjunction (which connect words, phrases, or clauses, such as and and or); interjection (which express emotion, such as Damn! or Ouch!); article or determiner (which mark the referents of nounsor noun phrases, such as a and the). And that's fine.  But there is another classification of words, which is what Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) produced in his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Exression of Ideas and Assist in iterary Composition, originally published in 1853, and revised in many editions (some by Roget's son, John Lewis Roget, right up to the present day.  We usually think of "Roget's Thesaurus" as a kind of dictionary in which we can look up synonyms, to prevent our writing from being repetitive and boring.  And it is that.  But it's so much more.  Inspired by Linnaeus's system of biological classification, discussed in the lectures on Thinking, Roget, who originally trained as a physician, invented the "log-log" slide rule, and comprehensively surveyed animal and vegetable physiology (more inspiration from Linnaeus), asspired to nothing less than a comprehensive classification of all the words in English, not alphabetically, as in a standard dictionary (which doesn't classify words anyway, except as parts of speech), but, in Roget's words, "according to the deas which they express". Here are the top two levels of Roget's hierarchy, with the category of "Abstract Relations" unpacked completely: Abstract Relations Existence Abstract Existence vs. Inexistence Concrete Substantiality vs. Unsubstantiality Formal Intrinsicality vs. Extrinsicality Modal State Circumstance Relation Absolute Relation vs. Irrelation Consanguinity Correlation Identity vs. Contrariety vs. Difference Continuous Uniiformity vs. nNon-uniformity Similarity vs. Dissimilarity Imitation vs. Non-imitation vs. Variation Partial Copy vs. Prototype General Agreement vs. Disagreement Quantity Simple Quantity vs. Degree Comparative Equality vs. Inequality Mean Compensation Greatness vs. Smallness Superiority vs. Inferiority Increase vs. Decrease Conjunctive Addition vs. Non-addition, Subduction Adjunct vs. Remainder, Decrement Mixture vs. Simpleness Junction vs. Disjunction Vinculum Coherence vs. Incoherence Combination vs. Decomposition Concrete Whole vs. Part Completeness vs. Incompleteness Composition vs. Exclusion Component vs. Extraneous Order General Order vs. Disorder Arrangement vs. Derangement Consecutive Precedence vs. Sequence Precursor vs. Sequel Beginning vs. End vs. Mddle Continuity vs. Discontinuity Term Collective Assemblage vs. Non-assemblage, dispersion Focus Distributive Class Inclusion vs. Exclusion Generality vs. Speciality Categorical Rule vs. Multiformity Conformity vs. Unconformity Number Abstract Number Numeration List Determinate Unity vs. Accompaniment Duality Duplication vs. isection Triality Triplication vs. Trisection Quaternity Quadruplication vs. Quadrisection Five, &c vs. Quinquesection, &c [Here Roget seems to have gotten tired!] Indeterminate Multitude vs. Fewness Repetition Infinity Time Absolute Time vs. Neverness Period, contingent Duration vs. Course Disuturnity vs. Transientness Perpetuity vs. Instantaneity Chronometry vs. Anachronism Relative Priority vs. Posteriority Present Time vs. Different Time Synchronism Futurity vs. Preterition Newness vs. Oldness Morning vs. Evening Youth vs. Age Infant vs. Veteran vs. Adolescence Earliness vs. Lateness Occasion vs. Intempestivity Frequency vs. Infrequency Periodicity vs Irregularity Change Simple Change vs. Permanence Cessation vs. Continuance Conversion vs. Reversion Revolution Substitution vs. Interchange Complex Changeableness vs. Stability Eventuality vs. Destiny Causation Constancy of Sequence Cause vs. Effect Attribution vs. Chance Connection Between Cause and Effect Power vs. Impotence Strength vs. Weakness Power in Operation Production vs. Destruction Reproduction Producer vs. Destroyer Paternity vs. Posterity Productiveness vs. Unproductiveness Agency Energy vs. Inertness Violence vs. Moderation Indirect Power Influence vs. Absence of Influence Tendency Liability Combination of Causes Concurrence vs. Counteraction Space Generally Dimensions Form Motion Matter Generally Inorganic Organic Intellect Formation of Ideas Communication of Ideas Volition Individual Intersocial Affections Generally Personal Sympathetic Moral Religious Note that fully half of Roget's categories refer to mental or behavioral terms: intellect, volition, and affection.  This triad wll be discussed further in the lecture on The Trilogy of Mind. For a short article on Roget and his Thesaurus see "Roget Gets the Last Word" by Claudia Kalb, Smithsonian Magazine, May 2021. For a stunning interactive display of the conceptual relationships among words in English, link to the WordNet page created by George Miller (he of "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" fame) of Princeton University.  WordNet is a super-duper online, interactive thesaurus, linking words (like cat) not only to their synonyms (kitty) but to their antonyms (dog), hypernyms (feline, carnivore, animal), and meronyms (paw, pad, tail), and more, as well.

Pragmatics

But even syntax and semantics together not enough to decode the meaning of an utterance, because many sentences inherently ambiguous. Consider the following examples:

Utterances such as these can't be disambiguated by analysis of phonology, syntax, and semantics alone. We understand ambiguous sentences -- and lots of the sentences that we have to deal with are ambiguous -- by making use of a fourth aspect of language, beyond phonology, syntax, and semantics, known as pragmatics.  That is to say, we must consider the pragmatics of language as well: the context in which utterance takes place. This context can be linguistic: the other sentences that surround the ambiguous one, and clarify its meaning. It can also be non-linguistic, composed of the speaker's body movements, and other aspects of the physical context in which the utterance is spoken and heard.

The environmental context is important.  If we're at a zoo, and I say, "someone stepped on his trunk", you're likely to look around for an elephant.  If we're at an aquarium and I say, "Harvey saw a man eating fish", you're going to look around for a shark.

Also important is prosody, or the pattern of emphasis given to the various words in a sentence: How you say something may be as important, or even more important, than what you say.  As an exercise, repeat the simple phrase, "What am I doing here?" five times, each time placing the emphasis on a different word.  In each instance the words are the same: same phonology, same syntax, same semantics.  But nevertheless, each utterance conveys a different meaning.  The meanings are given by the way the words are spoken, not by the way they are strung together.

A 1951 satirical record by the comedian Stan Freberg -- actually, a spoof on radio and television soap operas -- vividly illustrates the importance of prosody.  In the sketch, known as "John and Marsha, the two characters, both voiced by Freberg, simply repeat each other's names over and over, each instance with a different intonation clearly changing the mood and meaning.  Link to the classic recording of the John-Masha sketch (YouTube).

A Matter of Emphasis on January 6, 2021 This is not just the stuff of jokes.  Sometimes, a great deal of importance hinges on emphasis.  Consider this episode from the hearings held by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.  As the crowd assembled on the Capitol Mall to hear his  speech, the soon-to-be-twice-impeached-and soon-to-be-former President Donald J. Trump instructed security officials to take down the magnetometers used to detect weapons in the crowd: "They're not here to hurt me".  Here is an excerpt from "This Is What Happened When the Authorities Put Trump Under a Microscope" by Carlos Lozada, (New York Times, 02/12/2023): The challenges of interpreting and describing what another person was thinking, doing or intending at a particular moment — even a person as overanalyzed as Donald J. Trump — come alive in one passage, or rather, one word, of the Jan. 6 report. The issue is not even the word itself, but the form in which it is rendered. The report [of the Select Committee]cites the testimony of a White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, who explained how, on the morning of Jan. 6, the president was incensed that the presence of magnetometers (used to detect weapons) was inhibiting some armed supporters from entering the Ellipse, where the president was to deliver his speech. As always, Trump wanted a bigger crowd. Hutchinson said she heard him say something like, “I don’t F’ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the F’ing mags away. Let my people in.” They’re not here to hurt me. Which word should one emphasize when uttering that sentence aloud? If it is the verb “hurt,” the sentiment would be somewhat benign. They are not here to hurt me, the president might have meant, but to praise or cheer or support me. If the emphasis falls on “me,” however, the meaning is more sinister. They’re not here to hurt me, the implication would be, but to hurt someone else. That someone else could be Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, an officer of the Capitol Police or any of the lawmakers gathering to fulfill their duty and certify Joe Biden as president. So, which was it? The Jan. 6 report confuses matters by italicizing “me” in the document’s final chapter but leaving it unitalicized in the executive summary. The video of Hutchinson’s testimony shows her reciting the line quickly and neutrally, with perhaps a slight emphasis on “hurt” rather than “me.” (You can watch and listen for yourself.) Of course, the less ambiguous interpretation of Trump’s words is that either inflection — whether “hurt” or “me” — still means the president was unconcerned about anyone’s safety but his own. Perhaps “I don’t F’ing care” is the most relevant phrase. With a document surpassing 800 pages, it may seem too much to linger on the typeface of a single two-letter pronoun. But for accounts that can serve as both historical records and briefs for the prosecution, every word and every quote — every framing and every implication — is a choice that deserves scrutiny. The studious restraint of the Mueller report came in for much criticism once the special counsel failed to deliver a dagger to the heart of the Trump presidency and once the document was so easily miscast by interested parties. Even its copious redactions, justified by the opaque phrase “Harm to Ongoing Matter” appearing over a sea of blotted-out text, seemed designed to frustrate. Yet, for all its diffidence, there is power in the document’s understated prose, in its methodical collection of evidence, in its unwillingness to overstep its bounds while investigating a president who knew few bounds himself.

Gesture, the way we move our hands when we speak, can also be important in helping a listener to clarify our meaning.  A simple example: if you're talking about a girl, and there are two girls in the room, you can clarify your meaning by gesturing towards one of them.  And, in fact, a very popular theory of the evolution of language says that spoken language began as gesture.  The first language, way back when, may very well have been gestural rather than vocal, involving the hands and the face, perhaps with some grunts and cries to convey emotion.  This proposal gains plausibility from studies revealing the communicative power of sign languages used in various deaf communities.  But even among those with normal hearing, speech is accompanied by a tremendous amount of manual activity in the form of hand-waving and other gestures.  This is true even when people speak over the telephone, and can't even see each other's gestures.  Language is connected to the hands, not just to the mouth. If you don't believe this, the next time you're engaged in a conversation, try not to use your hands (stick them in your pockets, perhaps), and see how much more difficult it is.

Setting aside the hands, our facial expressions and other aspects of body language convey a great deal about our intended meaning.  And they can convey it even unintentionally.  You can tell someone you love them, but if you're not smiling, if you're shuffling your feet, if you're not looking them in the eye when you say it, they'll never believe you.

The intersection between verbal and nonverbal pragmatics is illustrated by scare quotes and air quotes.  In March 2017, President Donald Trump accused his predecessor, President Barack Obama, of having his "wires tapped" him in Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential election.  Congressional and press inquires to the FBI and the National Security Agency failed to produce any evidence of wiretapping.  In discussing the charge, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, used two fingers of each hand to put "air quotes" around the word wiretapping to indicate that Trump didn't mean the phrase literally, but was referring to any form of surveillance (photo at right from "Trump Ruins Irony, Too" by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, New York Times, 03/20/2017; see also "The Scare Quote: 2016 in a Punctuation Mark" by Megan Garber, the Atlantic, 12/23/2016.).  Technically, quotation marks should be used to indicate a direct quotation, but often, in written communications, they take on an ironic connotation of epistemic uncertainty -- they indicate that the writer doesn't mean what s/he says, or doesn't mean to be taken literally, or that the word enclosed in the quotation marks is a sort of metaphor.  In spoken discourse, the same purpose is accomplished by the use of air quotes.  The use of air quotes and scare quotes reminds us that language isn't just a matter of syntax and semantics.  The words we speak and write can take on multiple meanings, meanings that often have to be deciphered by the reader or listener.  And the use of air quotes and scare quotes is an indication that some deciphering is necessary. 

Common Ground

Could you pass the salt?

Apparently this sentence first appeared in papers by Gordon and Lakoff (1971/1975), Searle (1975/1979), and Clark (1979; Clark & Lucy, 1975). According to Herbert Clark (personal communication, June 26, 1995), there also exists a satirical paper entitled "Can you pass the salt?" or some-such. See also Groefsema (1992).

Children who reply to this question with a yes get dirty looks from their parents, and are immediately branded smart-alecks by their teachers, because this is not a question about the listener's physical abilities.Rather, it is an indirect request to pass the salt.It harkens back to Bartlett's effort after meaning, as the listener tries to resolve the inherent ambiguity in the sentence.Chomskian syntax and semantics are not enough for that purpose, it turns out. We also need a set of pragmatic principles which go beyond the information given by syntax and semantics, and which govern how people communicate with each other.In the final analysis, a sentence like this reminds us that language is not just a tool for individual thought; it is also a tool for interpersonal communication -- or, as the psycholinguist Herbert Clark has put it, language doesn't have so much to do with words and what they mean as it does with people and what they mean. So, in addition to investigating the cognitive bases of language, we have to understand its social foundations as well; once again, social psychology addresses the use to which cognitive structures and processes are put (for reviews of the social psychology of language use(Brown, 1965, 1986).

So, for example, from analyzing how sentences like Can you pass the salt? are understood, we learn that in order for the speaker and listener to communicate they have to establish common ground -- which Clark(Clark, 1979) defines as the knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions that speaker and listener share in common.Each must have some sense of what the other person knows, believes, and supposes to be true, and each must use this knowledge in structuring his or her communication. If speaker and listener are not on common ground, they will not understand each other and their interactions cannot go very far.

Conversational Rules

In order to achieve this mutual understanding, people have to manage their conversations according to what the linguist Paul Grice has called the cooperative principle (Grice, 1975, 1979):

Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

This principle, in turn, is unpacked in terms of four conversational maxims, and their sub-maxims:

The maxim of quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required (for current purposes), and do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

The maxim of quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true; do not say what you believe to be false, and do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

The maxim of relevance: Be relevant.

The maxim of manner: Be brief, and orderly, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity of expression.

Grice and others interested in sociolinguistics, including some psychologists(e.g., Clark, 1996; Higgins, 1981; Schwarz, 1994, have shown how listeners assume that speakers are following these maxims, and how lots of mischief can result when this assumption proves false.

Speech Acts

The function of language is not just to represent objects and events symbolically, nor just to communicate these thoughts to others. As the American philosopher John Searle (1970) has noted, speaking is also acting. When a clergyman or judge presides over a wedding and says, "I now pronounce you man and wife", he's not just expressing the thought that the couple is now married. His speech act makes them married, in a way that they weren't before. Just as with any other form of action, the the interpretation of speech acts depends on context. So, for example, saying "Have a nice day" to a salesclerk who has just treated you rudely is quite a different act from saying exactly the same words to your spouse as she goes out the door to work in the morning. 

Code-Switching

Another aspect of pragmatics, especially among bilingual and bicultural individuals, is code-switching -- in which individuals switch back and forth between languages, or between dialects of a language, depending on the context.  The most familiar example is probably observed in African-Americans, including politicians and other public figures, who may switch from Standard English when addressing or conversing with whites to African American Vernacular English (AAVE, also known as Black English or Ebonics, and related to dialects spoken in rural parts of the American south, and largely derived from dialects spoken in the British Isles -- not, as often assumed, from the West Indies) when addressing or conversing with fellow blacks -- e.g., He my brother instead of He's my brother, aks rather than ask.  Code-switching frequently occurs in discourse about particular topics of interest to the community in which the conversation takes place, or in expressions of solidarity with the community, or as an expression of group identity -- in which case it can be viewed as a means of establishing common ground.

AAVE is sometimes derided as mere street slang or at best "standard English with mistakes" (a phrase taken from the title of a 1999 essay by the linguist Geoffrey Pullam -- who doesn't agree with this position), and became controversial in 1996, when the public schools in Oakland, California (and other municipalities) decided to permit classroom instruction in AAVE as an alternative to Standard English (SE).  Language purists howled, but John McWhorter, another linguist (then a UC Berkeley professor) was asked to weigh in on the dispute, he produced a definitive defense of AAVE as a genuine dialect of English, with its own rules governing phonology, morphology, semantics, and syntax (The Word on the Street, 1998).  The general view now is that children need to be taught SE, so that they can get along in the classroom and the workplace, but there is no need to discourage AAVE (and other ethnic dialects) at home or in the neighborhood.  Children learn to code-switch, and (thanks to what is called contrastive analysis) can learn to translate from AAVE to SE for those (including many African-Americans!) who don't know the former.

The difference between a language and a dialect is a little like the difference between a species and a subspecies.  Individuals of different species can't make with each other (not successfully, anyway!).  Within a species, individuals of different subspecies can mate successfully.  Individuals who speak different languages cannot understand each other.  Individuals who speak different dialects of the same language can.  This applies to oral language.  Written language can muddy the waters a bit.  Serbo-Croatian is the common language of Serbs and Croats, but Serbs write in Cyrillic, while Croats use a Latin alphabet.  Hindi-Urdu is one language, but Urdu is written in something like Arabic, while Hindi is written in something like Sanskrit. 

You don't have to be bilingual to engage in code-switching, either.  Millennials, and other heavy users of text-messaging and social media, do it as well.  The quality of writing on social media is, apparently, terrible (I don't know much about this personally: I don't blog and I don't tweet, I'm not on Facebook and I'm not Linked In).  But the same writers who misuse grammar (who and whom) and punctuation (the apostrophe), fail to capitalize, misuse words (literally and virtually), and rely on acronyms (lol) and emojis on the internet don't do the same thing when they write papers in their college courses, or thank-you notes to their grandparents.  They write one with with their peers, and another way in other contexts.  The internet is even developing its own classic style with its own logical integrity, as evidenced by the Internet's own style manual, A World Without "Whom': The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age (2017) by Emmy J. Favilla, who is the chief copy editor at BuzzFeed, the online news service (reviewed by John Simpson, former chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, in "Language Rules for the Digital Age", New York Times Book Review, 12/10/2017).  But again, when these same individuals write for non-peers, they shift easily to something closer to the Chicago Manual of Style.

Something similar happens when Americans emigrate to England.  For example, most Americans say to-MAY-to, while most Brits say to-MAH-to.  For an American to say "to-MAH-to" in America sounds pretentious, while for an American to say "to-MAY-to" in England sounds like something an ugly American would do.  This problem is discussed at length by Lynne Murphy, an American linguist who teaches in a British university (Sussex, to be precise), in the Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship between American and British English (2018; see also her popular blog, "Separated by a Common Language", echoing a famous quote from Oscar Wilde -- yes, George Bernard Shaw said it to, but about 50 years later).  Summing up the essential pragmatics of code-switching, Murphy writes:

"A complex calculation has to be made weighing up the relative advantages of being understood, fitting in, and avoiding mockery versus the definite costs of losing one's linguistic identity and saying things that sound plainly ridiculous to you."

Code-switching is a popular vehicle for comedy, especially comedy that pointedly critiques race relations.  In "Sorry to Both You", a 2018 film directed by Boots Riley, a black employee of a telemarketing company has little success until a black fellow employee exhorts him to "Use your white voice". Reviewing the film and other examples of "white voice" in popular culture, Aisha Harris writes:

As long ago as the New World, enslaved and free blacks participated in dramatized communal appropriation of "white-identified gestures, vocabulary, dialects, dress, or social entitlements", as Marvin McAllistere writes in his book Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African-American Performance....  In an episode of the '90s sitcom "Martin", Martin's attempt to sound white [while dealing with a 911 operator] and the operator's reaction shrewdly emphasize how the perception of whiteness grants a measure of access often closed to people of color.  The episode also slyly suggests that while cultural differences do exist, black people, by virtue of being a minority group in America, should understand white people as much as possible; their comfort and livelihood depend on it ("When Black Performers Use Their 'White Voice'", New York Times, 07/12/2018).

Code-switching makes an important point about the social functions of language.  Language is obviously a tool for communication.  As Chomsky points out, language is also a tool for thinking.  But language, the language we use and how we speak it, is also an expression of identity.

Back to Nonverbal Communication

Nonverbal communication isn't just for birds and bees.  It's also for humans, including humans who communicate with each other through language.    The nonverbal aspects of language include cues in a variety of modalities: visual (kinesics, or body language; proxemics, or distance; eye contact and other aspects of oculesics); auditory (prosody, vocal quality, volume, and pitch); even written language has its nonverbal aspects, such as the style of handwriting (e.g., email messages consisting of lots of upper-case letters).  It's widely believed that spoken language had its origins in hand-gestures and other nonverbal modes.  But the importance of pragmatics indicates that there's more to language and communication, than words and rules.

The Evolution of Language

While other animals have remarkable communicative abilities, and individuals of some species have displayed some capacity to learn language, human language -- language in all its glory -- is a uniquely human capacity. It has no analog anywhere else in the animal kingdom. Given the fact of the uniqueness of language, at least one puzzling fact remains: Why are there so many different languages? Why doesn't everyone speak English, or Spanish, or Swahili, or Tewa? The parallels between the diversity of species, all with their origins in a single common ancestor, and the diversity of languages, have led some linguists to seek evidence for a single, ancient "protolanguage", and to trace the evolution of modern languages from this ancestral source. In this work, they examine commonalities in speech sounds, grammar, and vocabulary among known languages, living and dead, written and oral -- much the way biologists trace the evolution of species by comparing features of morphology or the molecular structure of DNA to determine the relations among animals.

It's been said (by someone, I think David Premack), that "language is an embarrassment to the theory of evolution".  The reasoning is that the uniqueness of human language appears to defy the basic Darwinian principle of continuity across species.  Human language must have evolved, and if it evolved it should have left traces in our evolutionary forebears -- just as our two arms and two legs reflect that we evolved from fish who had four fins.  But it doesn't.  No nonhuman species has anything like human language.  They might have phonology (birds), they might have semantics (lots of chimpanzees), but none of them have syntax (some theorists dispute this, but I think the evidence is pretty clear).

So how did language evolve, and why didn't it leave any evolutionary traces in other species?  There are, basically, two views.

• Steven Pinker & Paul Bloom (1990) argue that language evolved in the usual Darwinian manner, as a result of a random genetic mutation affecting brain structure and/or function.  The ability to communicate linguistically gave humans a huge adaptive advantage, because it permitted social learning by precept rather than example.  Instead of each individual having to learn through trial and error, one individual could convey its knowledge to a large number of others by teaching.  For Pinker and Bloom, then, the evolutionary advantage affected communication between individuals.
  
• Chomsky himself has a slightly different vie.  He has always thought that language was primarily a tool for thought rather than for communication, because it gives us a powerful means of representing knowledge, and for creative thinking -- for thinking thoughts that have never been thought before.  He calls this new trait "Merge", by which he means the ability for recursion -- to combine simple thoughts (e.g., The fox jumped over the dog; The fox was quick; The fox was brown; The dog was lazy) into ever-more-complicated ones (e.g., The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog).  Chomsky proposes that this single mutation occurred in a single human.  He or she had nobody to talk to, of course, because none of his or her contemporaries had the gene.  But the gene was transmitted through successive generations, so that eventually enough humans had enough other humans to share their thoughts with.

Either way, as a powerful tool for representing knowledge, or as a powerful medium for transmitting it -- and, of course, it is both -- language gave the humans who had it such a powerful adaptive advantage that they quickly outpaced all their evolutionary cousins - -not just chimpanzees, but other hominids as well.  That's why language has left no evolutionary trace of itself.

The Emergence of Language

Language is a product of evolution, but languages also evolve.  The English of Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote the Canterbury Tales in the 14th century, is barely readable today without extensive footnotes.  Even Shakespeare can be a struggle.  But although language changes, linguists hardly ever get a chance to observe when a language emerges for the very first time.

Of course, there are various constructed languages, such as Esperanto and even Klingon, of Star Trek fame, essentially invented by a single person:

• Esperanto by L.L. Zamenhoff in the late 19th century; (himself a distinguished linguist) for the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
  
• Quenya, Gnomish, and Sindarin, threes forms of Elvish devised by J.R.R. Tolkien.
• Actually, Tolkien, a philologist at Oxford, constructed a whole family of Elvish languages by simulating the changes in form that occur naturally as languages evolve.  For an account of Tolkein's work, seethe essay by Carl F. Hostetter in Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth, ed. by Catherine McIlwaine.
  
• Klingon by Mark Okrand (a UCB-trained linguist!) in the late 20th century.
• The various "languages" used in the Star Wars films, however, aren't really constructed languages.  Instead, the sound designer merely co-opted sounds from various unfamiliar languages, like Quechua. 
  
• Na'vi, for the film Avatar, by Paul Frommer, a linguist at USC, in the early 21st century.
• Another UCB graduate, David Peterson, devised Dothroki and Valyrian, languages featured in the TV adaptation of George R.R. Martin's fantasy series, Game of Thrones).  Peterson tells the whole story in his book, The Art of Language Invention (2015).
• Imaginary Languages by Marina Yaguello (2022; trans. Erik Butler) traces the history of constructed languages (like Esperanto), imaginary languages, and the search for the original language (before the Tower of Babel).
  

The Language Creation Society is a group of amateur and professional scholars who create, and study, constructed languages (one of its founders, who goes by the name of Sai", is a UC Berkeley Cognitive Science graduate.

For more details on constructed languages, see In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent traces Okrand's invention of Klingon, and introduces the reader to the subculture of Trekkies who actually learn to speak Klingon to each other.  Also the Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages by Ursula K. LeGuin, herself a famous science-fiction author.

In some respects Modern Hebrew is a reconstructed language.  Even in Roman times, Jews in Palestine spoke mostly Aramaic (the language of Jesus) o Greek (the language of St. Paul).  Josephus, the Jewish historian of the 1st century CE, wrote in Latin.  From the time of the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, in 70 CE, and well into the 19th century, Jews spoke the language of whatever country they happened to live in.  Most Ashkenazi (European) Jews spoke Yiddish, not Biblical Hebrew, while Sephardic (North African) Jews spoke Ladino.  Hebrew was the language of the synagogue, and of Jewish scholarship, much like Latin was used mostly in Roman Catholic church services.  It was read, silently and out loud, but it wasn't used for social interactions.  Modern Hebrew was deliberately formulated in the late 19th century as part of the Zionist movement -- largely at the instigation of a scholar named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who emigrated from Lithuania to what was then Palestine in 1881.  In order to become a living language, however, Hebrew had to have names for concepts that weren't mentioned in the Hebrew Bible or Talmud (a recent count of words used in an Israeli newspaper, for example, found that only 5% were in the Hebrew Bible.  Along with Modern Arabic, Modern Hebrew is the official language of the State of Israel.    (For a fuller story, see "Flowers Have No Names" by Benjamin Harshav, Natural History, 02/2009.)

Irish, Welsh, and Breton (a Celtic language spoken in Brittany and some other parts of France)  are other examples of "dead" languages that were revived as part of a nationalist project.

In the Genesis story, God punished humankind for trying to build the Tower of Babel, which would have reached to the heavens, by creating different languages, so that people would no longer understand each other.  Esperanto was conceived explicitly as a vehicle for promoting world peace, by making it possible for everyone, everywhere, to understand each other once again.  For an engaging history of Esperanto, see Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language (2016) by Esther Shor, reviewed by Joan Acocella in the New Yorker ("Return to Babel: The Rise and Fall of Esperanto", 10/31/2016).

Cultural contact can also lead to the development of new languages -- or, at least, something like a language.

Pidgins and Creoles emerged relatively recently, but there were still no linguists around to observe the process.  Recently, however, linguists have had two opportunities to watch full-blown native languages emerge, almost literally,  from nothing.

Linguists hardly ever get a chance to observe the formation of an alphabet, either.  But in the early 19th century, Sequoyah, a leader of the Cherokee tribe of Native Americans, in Tennessee, became convinced that writing was the source of white settlers' power and success in the New World.  In order to grab a share of those benefits for his own people, devised an alphabet (technically, a syllabary) in which each letter represented one of the 85 phonemes in the Cherokee language.  The symbols themselves are often derived from other alphabets, such as English, Greek, and Cyrillic, but that doesn't make the Cherokee alphabet any less of an invention.  And although there weren't many linguists around at the time to observe the invention, we know that, within five years of its introduction, there were more Cherokees than whites who were literate in Tennessee, and the Cherokee were publishing their own newspaper (see "Carvings from Cherokee Script's Dawn" by John Noble Wilford, New York Times, 06/23/2009).

Spoken languages arise naturally, but written languages are invented to represent them visually.  Language reform in Kazakhstan provides an interesting case in point ("Kazakhstan Cheers New Alphabet, Except for All Those Apostrophes" by Andrew Higgins, New York Times, 01/16/2018).  The native language is Kazakh (of course), a Turkic language A Muslim-majority former "republic" of the Soviet Union, and it was originally written employing Arabic script.  In the 19th century, the written form switched to Latin, but after the incorporation of Kazakhstan into the Soviet Union, the written form shifted to Cyrillic as part of Stalin's effort to forge a common identity across the entire USSR (actually, there were different versions of Cyrillic for each of about 20 Turkic languages, to prevent the Turkic people of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and other Muslim-majority "republics" from developing a common, non-Soviet identity.   The situation changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.  Kazakhstan gained independence in 1991, and the country's authoritarian president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, instigated a shift from Cyrillic to Latin scripts to distance the new country from Russia, and bring it closer to the West.  The problem is that spoken Kazakh has phonemes that are not easily represented in the letters of the Latin script.  One solution is to employ diacritical marks, such as umlauts and tildes, like Turkish (obviously, another Turkic language) does; but that risks substituting Turkish influence for Russian influence; and besides, diacritical marks are hard to use on computer keyboards.  Another solution is to employ digraphs and other letter combinations, like the English ch or th.  This was apparently the solution favored by a committee of linguists and philologists convened by Nazarbayev to address the problem.  But Nazarbayev objected that the use of digraphs to represent Kazakh phonemes would cause confusion when Kazakhs, learning English (which is something he favors, to foster the integration of Kazakhstan with the West), had to map the same digraphs onto different phonemes.  Not an autocrat for nothing, Nazarbayev decided, all on his own, that the specifically Kazakh phonemes will be represented by apostrophes.  So for example, the Republic of Kazakhstan will be written as Qazaqstan Respy'bli'kasy.  The linguists and philologists objected that the result was both imprecise linguistically and aesthetically ugly.  At the same time, the minority Russian community, and the Russian Orthodox Church, continues to object to the abandonment of Cyrillic.  All of which goes to show that language is critical to fostering a sense of national identity.

Was the First Language a Sign Language?

Where did human language come from, in phylogenetic terms? Charles Darwin speculated that human speech had its evolutionary origins in the cries of nonhuman animals -- what has come to be known as the "bow-wow" theory. More recently, Robin Dunbar (1996) suggested that language evolved as a substitute for grooming behaviors and forms of physical contact that promote the development of hierarchies and alliances in nonhuman primates. And Peter MacNeilage and Barbara Davis have proposed an "ingestive theory" that speech has its origins in the opening and closing of the mouth during chewing.

However, in discussing the origins of language, it is important to remember not only that written language is a relatively recent cultural invention, but also that speech might well not have been the first form taken by language. We already know from studies of deaf individuals that sign language has all the properties of spoken language, including syntax and semantics, as well as gestural equivalents of phonology and morphology. Because humans share common ancestors with chimpanzees and other great apes, and because chimpanzees lack the vocal apparatus necessary for spoken language (actually, this is disputed) but seem to have the (limited) ability to learn and use some aspects of sign language, it has been frequently suggested that the first language was gestural rather than vocal, involving the hands and the face, perhaps with some grunts and cries to express emotion.

The proposal gains plausibility from studies revealing the communicative power of the sign languages used in various deaf communities. Even among those with normal hearing, speech is accompanied by a tremendous of manual activity in the form of hand-waving and other gestures (just watch your instructor's lectures!). This is true even when people speak over the telephone, and therefore cannot see each others' gestures. Language is connected to the hands, not just to the mouth.

For more information, see M.C. Corballis, From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language (Princeton University Press, 2002). A precis of the book, along with peer commentary, appeared in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (2003).  Corballis argues that right-handedness, which is a uniquely human characteristic, arose because oral language evolved out of earlier manual gestures.

For more on sign languages, see "Ten Things You Should Know About Sign Languages by Karen Emmorey, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2023.  From the Abstract:

The 10 things you should know about sign languages are the following: (1) Sign languages have phonology and poetry. (2) Sign languages vary in their linguistic structure and family history but share some typological features due to their shared biology (manual production). (3) Although there are many similarities between perceiving and producing speech and sign, the biology of language can impact aspects of processing. (4) Iconicity is pervasive in sign language lexicons and can play a role in language acquisition and processing. (5) Deaf and hard-of-hearing children are at risk for language deprivation. (6) Signers gesture when signing. (7) Sign language experience enhances some visual-spatial skills. (8) The same left-hemisphere brain regions support both spoken and sign languages, but some neural regions are specific to sign language. (9) Bimodal bilinguals can code-blend, rather code-switch, which alters the nature of language control. (10) The emergence of new sign languages reveals patterns of language creation and evolution. These discoveries reveal how language modality does and does not affect language structure, acquisition, processing, use, and representation in the brain. Sign languages provide unique insights into human language that cannot be obtained by studying spoken languages alone.

Indo-European Languages

One such evolutionary scheme has been proposed for the "Indo-European" languages -- a linguistic super-family that includes German, English, Spanish and the other romance languages, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and Greek. According to a popular theory, the evolution of the Indo-European languages began about 6000 years ago (i.e., 4000 BCE), as nomads from the Great Eurasian Steppes domesticated the horse, invented the wheel, and rode their chariots all over Europe, the Fertile Crescent, and South Asia, spreading variants of their language.  Linguistically speaking, the "family tree" of Indo-European languages has more than a dozen major branches, comprising more than 100 "daughter languages":

The Anatolian and Greek branches are closest to this proto-language; the Romance, Germanic, and Slavonic languages are relatively recent.

A recent study by Mark Pagel found that numbers, pronouns, and nouns change most slowly over time; adjectives and verbs, relatively rapidly.

Note that there is no argument that Greek is more "primitive" than Danish -- just as dogs are not more "primitive" than humans. Each language is perfectly well formed and suited for human use. In formal terms, all languages are equivalent in terms of complexity, etc.

Other language groups show a similar pattern.  Apparently, with the invention of agriculture (including the domestication of animals), about 10,000 years ago, isolated populations began to spread.  They carried their languages with their food, and the hunter-gatherers they encountered adopted the farmers' languages as well as their sedentary ways.  The graphic shows in yellow the "homelands" in which agriculture emerged, independently, after the Pleistocene, between c. 8500-2500 BCE (from "Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions" by Jared Diamond and Peter Bellwood, Science, 2003). As noted by Diamond, a geographer, and Bellwood, an anthropologist, agriculture had three major consequences for the societies that originally developed it:

• An increase in population density supported by the higher food yields.
• A sedentary as opposed to mobile lifestyle, permitting the development of technology, social stratification, and the emergence of centralized states.
• The transmission of diseases such as measles and smallpox from domestic animals to humans, to which the farmers acquired a degree of immunity that their hunter-gatherer forebears lacked.

There was yet another profound consequence: The farmers' original languages began to evolve, and differentiate, as they dispersed.  Diamond and Bellwood have found that many of the world's "language families" (like Indo-European) are "centered", in a sense, on these agricultural homelands.  D&B make a convincing case, not least because of the convergence of five additional types of evidence: archeology, plant and animal domestication, human skeletal remains, modern and ancient DNA, and the histories of extinct languages.  However, the story worldwide is a little more complicated, because the various types of evidence do not always converge.  With respect to the Indo-European languages, D&B's findings support an origin among farming peoples in Anatolia, a region in modern eastern Turkey, whence it spread to the Eurasian Steppes and beyond.  But D&B have differing interpretations of their own findings!

Another study employed a computer simulation to "walk back" the evolution of Indo-European (Bouckaert et al., Science 2012).  These investigators have dated the origin of this language group to a Anatolia in modern eastern Turkey, but even earlier, to about 9,000 years ago.  Bouckaert et al. agree that Indo-European spread from Anatolia with the expansion of farming, not by chariot-driving nomads, but their data also indicates that the Indo-European languages began to diversify after the agricultural expansion had finished.  Therefore, agricultural expansion can't be the only reason for the expansion of languages.  It's complicated. 

Fortunately, this is a course in psychology, not linguistics, and we don't have to resolve this issue.  It's enough, for present purposes, to have some idea of where these different languages came from, and how they dispersed and changed.

The Proto-Proto-Language?

Nor is there any implication that "Proto-Indo-European" is the ancestor of all languages. It certainly isn't. Our best guess is that the Indo-European languages go back only about 9,000 years -- and language is certainly older than that, perhaps 50-100,000 years old. Other language groups in Asia, Africa, and the Americas have different evolutionary histories, and different ancestors. All these proto-languages, of course, have their single common ancestor in whatever "proto-proto-language" was spoken by our common hominid ancestors in eastern and southern Africa. An analysis of the phonemes in 504 languages worldwide by Quentin Atkinson, a computational biologist, found that the further a language group was from southwestern Africa, the fewer phonemes that language has (see his article in Science, April 2011). On this basis, Atkinson has suggested that traces of the proto-proto-language can be found in the "click" languages of the Khoisan family of languages spoken by the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, in southwestern Africa, which have as many as 100 phonemes (including lots of different kinds of clicks). For more on this aspect of evolution, see the material on "Psychological Development", below.

A Language Gene?

Because human beings have language, but chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relatives, do not, it has been suggested (by Chomsky and others) that the capacity for language -- in Chomsky's terms, the capacity for Universal Grammar -- is somehow encoded in our genes as part of our phylogenetic heritage. Although many geneticists argue that there aren't really genes "for" particular traits, most work in behavioral genetics is predicated on the view that there are, in fact, particular genes (or sets of genes) that control various behavioral and mental characteristics, just as they control various physical characteristics -- hence, there has been considerable interest in the search for the "language gene".

Such a gene may well exist after all. In 2001, Dr Anthony P. Monaco, a molecular biologist at Oxford University, and his colleagues reported an analysis of a large English family almost half of whom are cannot produce articulate speech. Of course, speech isn't the same as language, but the affected family members also have difficulty with written language, suggesting that the problem is more with language than with speech itself. The Monaco group reported that defects in a single gene, known as FOXP2, causes this speech/language defect. This gene turns on other genes during the development of the brain, and it (or the genes it controls) plays a particularly important role in engineering the brain for rapid motor articulation, such as is necessary for speech.

FOXP2 is present in mice, chimpanzees, and other primates, as well as in universal in humans, but humans have a very different version of the gene from that found in chimpanzees (who also, it should be noted, and perhaps not coincidentally, lack the motor apparatus needed for articulate speech). In 2002, an analysis by Svante Paapo, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, showed that the human version of FOXP2 emerged no more than about 120,000 years ago. According to Paapo's theory, the new gene tied the cognitive capacity for language with the motor capacity for articulate speech, essentially "perfecting" the language capacity of modern humans. In turn, Dr. Richard Klein, an archeologist at Stanford University, has proposed that the resulting ability for linguistic communication led to the emergence of modern human social behaviors, such as art, ornamentation, and long-distance trade, about 50,000 years ago. It's been said that we share about 98.5% of our genes with chimpanzees. That 1.5% makes a big difference, and perhaps our particular version of FOXP2 is a big part of that difference.

Language and Thought

Language is a powerful tool for communication -- the most efficient and effective means we have for communicating our experiences and thoughts to other people. But language is also a powerful tool for thinking itself. Our ability to represent our thoughts in words, and to manipulate those thoughts through grammatical syntax, gives us an unparalleled ability to combine and recombine our thoughts -- to reflect on them and explore their implications.

Language is such a powerful tool for thought that it has been suggested that, in addition to being a "container" for our thoughts, language shapes our thoughts, constraining what we can and cannot think about. Actually, there are several different views that we can take on the relation between language and thought.

Perspectives from Development

According to the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, language depends on thought. As we'll discuss later in the lectures on Psychological Development, Piaget argued that the child's mind develops through a series of stages, and that the child's language will reflect the stage of cognitive development that the child is in. At first, children are focused on the concrete present, the here and now, and lack any capacity for symbolic representation. And because they lack any capacity for symbolic representation, they can't use language. Children can use a word like dog only when they understand that the word dog refers to, and symbolically represents, that four-footed, furry, barking, tail-wagging creature over there. And not just to that particular creature, but to all sorts of other creatures that look and sound and behave like that. And children can talk about that dog, or any dog, or dogs in general, only when they have the cognitive capacity to hold in mind both the concept of dog and the other words that relate to the dog -- like barking, or happy, or hungry.

Piaget believed that children can think before they can speak, and that their ability to think constrains their ability to use language. One problem with this idea is that children obviously understand a lot of what is said to them, before they can ever speak. This is part of what is known as the competence-performance distinction, and it means that children have a lot more linguistic knowledge than they display in their speech.

According to the Russian (and Soviet) developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, thought and language emerge independently, but then merge into a symbiotic relationship. Like Piaget, Vygotsky asserted that thought does not depend on language, and that children can think before they can speak.

For more on inner speech, see "Talking to Ourselves" by Charles Ferneyhough, Scientific American, 08/2017)

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Language is a powerful medium for communicating our thoughts to each other – for conveying thoughts from one mind, the speaker's, to another, the listener's.  And language is also a powerful tool for thinking.  Many of our concepts are labeled by single words, and linguistic syntax allows us to combine familiar concepts in novel ways.  Language is creative, in that it allows us to think, and express, thoughts that have never been thought before.

But some theorists have gone beyond this idea, to argue that the language we use constrains the thoughts we can think about objects and events.  The origin of this idea lies with Edward Sapir, a linguist who was a student of Franz Boas, himself generally regarded as the "father" of American anthropology; and especially Benjamin Lee Whorf, a chemical engineer who took up an interest in language and studied with Sapir.  In one of his papers, Boas had noted that the "Eskimo" language contained four quite different words for snow.  Whorf and Sapir cited this example to suggest that these words encoded quite different concepts, and that if the language were lost, these concepts would be lost as well.  In other words, the language we use constrains the kinds of thoughts we can have.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has a distinguished intellectual pedigree, but it's been controversial right from the start.  The example of "Eskimo words for snow" has been particularly problematic.   Over the years, the number of Eskimo snow-words has been inflated to 50 or even 100.  More important, Boas actually cited those four words to make another linguistic point entirely.  And neither Sapir nor Whorf ever showed that Eskimos actually thought about snow any differently from, say, English-speaking cross-country and downhill skiers.  (Cartoon by Joe Dator, New Yorker, 09/29/2014.)

Nevertheless, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has captured the attention of many social scientists.  Its strong form is known as linguistic determinism: that basic cognitive processes differ depending on the language one uses.  A weaker form says merely that there are parallels between the structure of a language and the way that speakers of that language think.    

Here's a famous example of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, studied by Lera Boroditsky and Alice Gaby.  There's an aboriginal group called the Pormpuraaw, who live in the Cape York region in North-Eastern Australia and speak a language called Kuuk Thaayore. These people have an unusual way of referring to direction.  In English, we would use such terms as "left" and "right" "front" and "back".  But in Kuuk Thaayorre, the Pormpuraaw refer to the cardinal directions of "north", "south", "east", and "west".  Where an English speaker would say "Put the fork to the left of the plate", the Pormpuraaw would say 'Put the fork to the west of the plate" – but only if they were actually facing north.  This feature of language obviously affects how the Pormpuraaw locate themselves and others in space, but it also affects their conception of time.  English speakers, given a series of cartoon panels depicting a story, will typically arrange them in temporal sequence going from left to right – which is how we write.  Hebrew is written from right to left though, and Hebrew speakers will arrange the panels from right to left as well.  But the Pormpuraaw arrange the panels from east to west: that is, from left to right, if they happen to be facing south, but from right to left if they happen to be facing north.  Apparently, how they speak about space affects how they think about time. 

Boroditsky and other proponents of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis have collected many examples like this, and they conclude that Sapir and Whorf had it right.  The diversity of environments in which humans live has created the diversity of language, and this diversity of language has in turn created diversity of thought.  "Each [language] provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over thousands of years within a culture.  Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing, and making meaning in the world…".

Still, there are lots of counterexamples.  One famous set of studies focused on color terms.  Cross-cultural research by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay had revealed a consistent pattern of color terms across the diversity of languages.  If a language had only two color terms, they corresponded to black and white – or, perhaps, light and dark, or warm and cool.  If it had three color terms, the third term was red.  If it had a fourth term, that was either green or yellow; if it had a fifth term, it was the other one, yellow or green.  Then blue was added, then brown, and so on.  Eleanor Rosch and David Olivier worked with the Dani, a tribe in New Guinea whose language has only two color terms – mili for "dark" and "cold" colors and mola for "light" and "warm" colors.  When asked to name color patches, the Dani obviously performed differently from English-speaking college students.  But when asked match color patches from memory, the Dani performed the same way the English speakers did, yielding highly similar "color spaces".  In other words, the Dani perceived and remembered colors the same way that English speakers did.  .

Boroditsky and others continue to find examples where language seems to influence thought, but the first thing to be said is that thinking doesn't require language at all.  Language makes thinking easier, perhaps, and more powerful, but there are lots of examples of thinking in animals, who don't have anything like human language. 

The strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, linguistic determinism, is certainly wrong.  Thought isn't a mirror of language, but language is a mirror of thought.  All human languages have certain basic principles in common, and these similarities outweigh any differences.  And the weaker form, linguistic relativity, probably isn't quite right either.  There are parallels between thought and language, but it could easily be that cultural patterns of thinking lead people to use language the way they do.  What there is evidence for, is what Daniel Slobin and others have called "thinking for speaking".  You can think any thought, and express that thought in any language, but the structure of the language you use forces you to express your thoughts in a particular way.  So you have to think about certain things before you speak; and what you say will nudge listeners toward a particular interpretation of what you mean.

One example is grammatical gender.  Many languages, though not English, classify nouns by grammatical gender – masculine or feminine, and sometimes neuter.  If I want to talk to someone about my friend Pat, I can just refer to "my friend Pat", leaving it ambiguous whether Pat is male or female.  But if I want to express the same thought in Spanish, I have to say what Pat's gender is: Mi amigo Pat clearly communicates that Pat is a man; in German, Meine Freundin Pat clearly communicates that she is a woman.  I can't leave it ambiguous.  The syntax of Spanish and German forces me to think about gender in a way that English does not.

English lacks an "epicene" or gender-neutral pronoun that applies generically to everyone, regardless of gender.  In the past, the practice was to employ a generic he, him, his to refer to people in general, not just males.  But, of course, referring to people in general as if they were masculine may lead people to think of the masculine case as the default option, effectively relegating females to a sort of second-class linguistic citizenship.  And it doesn't really work anyway.  Consider Steve, Sally, Mary, and Jane each had his hair cut today (this example from "Everybody Has Their Opinion" by Johnson, the nom de plume of the language columnist in The Economist, 04/01/2017).

The common fix, referring to "he or she", "him or her", "his or hers" is more balanced, but also makes for clumsy writing.  Consider: Whenever someone goes out in the rain, he or she should carry his or her umbrella in case he or she wants to cover his or her head. 

Various solutions have been proposed, perhaps the best of which is simply to reword the offending sentence in the plural: Whenever people go out in the rain, they should carry their umbrellas in case they want to cover their heads.  However, everyday usage often leads to a grammatically incorrect mixing of singular and plural: Whenever someone goes out in the rain, they should carry an umbrella in case they want to cover their head.  This is, as I say, strictly illegal.  But in a demonstration of how language evolves, what has been descriptively true -- that, in ordinary usage, people who want to speak in gender-neutral terms often substitute they for he or she -- has now begun to become prescriptively proper.  In 2017, as "Johnson" reported, the editors of both the Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press Stylebook changed their rules to allow the plural pronoun they to be used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun when to stick with the rules would produce awkward or clumsy writing.

French has a similar problem (see "Gender Bender", also by Johnson, in The Economist, 04/15/2017).  Although "gender" in French has more to do with "genre" (kind) than sex, as it happens, many titles of powerful people -- General, Senator, Minister, Head of State" all "happen" (ahem) to be masculine.  That includes le president, which would become a problem if a leading candidate in 2017, Marine Le Pen, won the presidential election.  You can't just change the word a little, because historically la presidente has meant something like "First Lady"; never mind that the French Academy, the official guardian of the language for about the last 500 years, frowns on creating grammatically feminine versions of words that are grammatically masculine.  Nevertheless, the French National Assembly has come out in favor of la presidente.

Here's another example: different cultures have different kinship categories.  I have two siblings, and in English I simply refer to them as "my brother" or "my sister" – or, if I want to keep things ambiguous, I'll just refer to "my siblings".  But if I'm speaking Hopi, the language of a Native American tribe indigenous to the southwestern United States, I have to identify Jean as my older sister and Don as my older brother; but Don and Jean could use the same word to refer to me, their younger brother.!  But if I had a younger sister, they would each use different words to refer to her. 

If I want to talk about my friend Pat, I have to do so differently in Spanish than I would in English.  But that doesn't necessarily mean that I have to think about Pat any differently.  I only have to think about how I'm going to talk about Pat in Spanish.  Any thought can be expressed in any language.  Language doesn't constrain thought.  As a powerful tool for thinking, language makes thinking easier.  And it's an equally powerful tool for communication, providing us with a more powerful and flexible vehicle for communicating our ideas and experiences than any other animal has.  Across cultures, languages are more alike than they are different, and so are human patterns of thinking.    

Most famously, the American linguist Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, argued on the basis of cross-cultural studies that language affects the way we think. In a famous -- actually notorious -- example, the Eskimos have 4 different words for snow. As Franz Boas, Sapir's teacher, put it in 1911:

...just as English uses derived terms for a variety of forms of water (liquid, lake, river, brook, rain, dew, wave, foam) that might be formed by derivational morphology from a single root meaning 'water' in some other language, so Eskimo uses the apparently distinct roots aput 'snow on the ground', gana 'falling snow', piqsirpoq 'drifting snow', and qimuqsuq 'a snow drift'

For Sapir and Whorf , the implication was that Eskimos have 4 different ways of thinking about snow -- more ways of thinking about snow than you'd have with another language, with fewer such words.

As Whorf put it:

We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way -- an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, BUT ITS TERMS ARE ABSOLUTELY OBLIGATORY; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees (Whorf (1940/1956), pp. 213-214).

The important distinction between HABITUAL and POTENTIAL behavior enters here. The potential range of perception and thought is probably pretty much the same for all men. However, we would be immobilized if we tried to notice, report, and think of all possible discriminations in experience at each moment of our lives. Most of the time we rely on the discriminations to which our language is geared, on what Sapir termed "grooves of habitual expression" (Whorf, 1956, p. 117).

Why is this example notorious?

If Eskimos had more words for snow, this might reflect nothing more than expertise -- in which case, if you think about it, thought is determining language.

For more on Eskimo words for snow, see:

• Martin, L. (1986). "Eskimo words for snow": A case study in the genesis and decay of an anthropological example.American Anthropologist, 88, 418-423.
• Murray, S.O. (1987). Snowing canonical texts.American Anthropologist, 89, 443-444.
• Pullum, G. K. (1989). The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax.Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 7, 275-281.

The idea of linguistic determinism led to a heated debate among linguists. For example, Noam Chomsky, who has argued that language is a tool for thought, has nonetheless emphasized the universality of language. All languages possess the same basic properties, of meaning, reference, structure, creativity, and the like, all languages are equally complex, and all languages are equally easy to learn (as a first language, in spoken form). So it would be strange if there were some thoughts that could be expressed in one language but not another. There is actually a geographical divide among language scholars: by and large, East-coast linguists, heavily influenced by Chomsky at MIT, tend to be opposed to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; Bay Area linguists, heavily influenced by Grice, and George Lakoff at UC Berkeley, tend to favor it.

Still, Whorf's 1940 paper popularized the notion that our thought processes are determined, and constrained, by language. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis takes two forms: that language determines thought or that language influences thought.The former is a much stronger view because it states that one is incapable of understanding a concept for which the language has no name (it also implies that there is no thought without language).There is no empirical evidence supporting the strong version and considerable evidence that thought can proceed without benefit of language. However, the weak version plausibly suggests that different languages can 'carve up' the world into different ways -- or, put another way, that conceptual thinking can be shaped and constrained by available linguistic categories.As Whorf put it:

'We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, ascribe significance as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way ' an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language'.

There are actually two aspects to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism.

The Case of Color

Color perception permits a classic test of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, because languages differ in terms of the variety of words they have for colors. English, for example, has 11 basic color terms (not to be confused with the primary colors), while other languages have only two color terms, roughly corresponding to dark and light. Berlin and Kay (1969), two linguists at UCB, have argued that basic color terms evolve according to a definite sequence:

In a classic test of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, UCB's Eleanor Rosch (1972; publishing under the name Eleanor Rosch Heider) investigated color naming by the Dani, a tribe in New Guinea whose language has only two color terms:mili (dark) and mola (light). Rosch then asked the Dani to discriminate between various colors, such as green and blue, or red and orange, that were matched for saturation and brightness. She also asked them to remember which colors they had seen. The Dani could perform both tasks well, showing clearly that the unavailability in their language of words representing blue, green, red, or orange did not prevent their abilities to discriminate and remember colors.

On the other hand, Kay and Kempton (1984) his colleagues compared English speakers with Tarahumara speakers, a Uto-Aztecan language of Mexico that does not have separate color terms for blue and green. In the first experiment, the subjects were presented with a blue color chip, a green, color chip, and another color chip that was intermediate to blue and green. English speakers sharply distinguished the intermediate color chip into either blue or green by using a naming strategy, whereas the Tarahumara speakers chose randomly.In the second experiment, English speakers were first presented with two color chips and shown that one (intermediate) was greener than the other color chip (blue) and then shown that the same intermediate chip was bluer than the other color chip (green).By making the subjects call the intermediate color chip both green and blue, the bias that was demonstrated in the first experiment went away and the English speakers performed similarly to the Tarahumara speakers. This might count as evidence in favor of the weak hypothesis of linguistic relativity.

Odor-Naming on the Malay Peninsula

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is also undermined by more recent cross-cultural work on odor-identification by Asifa Majid and her colleagues at the University of Nijmegen in The Netherlands, who have studied the odor lexicons of various Aslian languages spoken by indigenous tribes on the Malay Peninsula (e.g., Majid & Kruspe, Current Biology, 2018). 

Counterfactuals in Chinese

Another famous case of Whorfianism comes from the work of Alfred Bloom (1981), who was conducting research on political attitudes among Chinese residents of Hong Kong. His interview contained the questions of the following form, posed in Chinese:

"If the government had passed a law requiring that all citizens born outside of Hong Kong make weekly reports of their activities to the police, how would you have reacted?

Bloom reported that his subjects generally declined to answer such questions, replying "It has not done this" (again, in Chinese) instead. Bloom quickly identified what he considered to be the linguistic root of the problem. Such questions entail counterfactual conditionals, of the form If...Then... -- reasoning about states of affairs that are not actually true. Chinese can express counterfactuals of this sort, but such expressions are rarely used, it rarely does Bloom hypothesized that this linguistic convention shaped the ways that Chinese think -- put bluntly, he hypothesized that native speakers of Chinese just can't think counterfactually. He then conducted an extensive formal study that seemed to demonstrate this. Given story problems that required counterfactual thinking, most English speakers (who read them in English) came to the correct conclusion, while most Chinese speakers (who read them in Chinese) did not. Bloom's 1981 book, The Linguistic Shaping of Thought: A Study in the Impact of Language on Thinking in China and the West was hailed as a singular contribution to penetrating "the 'Chinese mind'".

Terry Kit-Fong Au, then an undergraduate at Harvard, heard about this claim in one of Brown's courses, and was having none of it (Au went on to take a PhD in psychology, and is now a professor at the University of Hong Kong). She tested almost 1,000 residents of Hong Kong or Taiwan (mainland China hadn't yet opened up much to Western researchers) who were bilingual in English and Chinese, and who were randomly assigned to English- or Chinese-language conditions. Au's results were completely contrary to Bloom's: the vast majority of her subjects had no trouble understanding counterfactuals, regardless of the language in which they were posed.

It turns out that, while Bloom spoken Chinese fluently, his translations from English into Chinese were rather unidiomatic, so that their responses did not accurately reflect the Chinese subjects' logical competence. In fact, when Au had her Chinese materials rendered into unidiomatic English, it was the English speakers who performed poorly. Speakers of both Chinese and English are able to reason counterfactually, so long as the counterfactuals are posed in idiomatic language. Reasoning is the same, no matter what language we speak.

Au published her research in 1983, just two years after Bloom's book came out. Bloom replied with criticisms of her method in 1984, but Au held her own in a 1984 rejoinder, The whole wonderful story of counterfactuals in Chinese is summarized by Roger Brown in Chapter 13 of Social Psychology: The Second Edition (1986), from which this account is drawn.

Verbal Overshadowing

The influence of language on how we think about the events that happen in our world can be demonstrated in other experiments other than those designed to confirm or disconfirm the Whorf hypothesis.

Classic work by Leonard Carmichael and his colleagues demonstrated that subjects had different systematic distortions in their recall of ambiguous line drawings (e.g, O--O) depending upon which verbal label they were given (e.g. dumbbells or eyeglasses).

Experiments on eyewitness testimony by Elizabeth Loftus and others, such as the post-event misinformation effect discussed in the lectures on Memory, showed that by varying the verb (e.g. crashed or hit) one can manipulate the estimated speed of the traveling car given by the subjects.

Whorf himself became interested in language when he noticed that behavior around gasoline drums changed when the drums were called "empty" though they contained dangerous vapors.Because the word empty connotes "lack of hazard," careless behavior from the workers resulted in fires from the tossing of cigarette stubs or the smoking by the workers.

A Garden of Sapir-Whorf Delights

Beyond the influence of language on categories, the linguist George Lakoff's work on metaphors offer another approach to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis without depending upon the idea that language carves the world into different pieces and, as he has put it, "cultures differ only in the way they have their meat cut up". Though some metaphors are universal (e.g. love is warmth), not all cultures share the same metaphors.

Here are some other examples, mostly culled from the research of Lera Boroditsky:

How to Think about Language and Thought

There's no question that thinking can occur in the absence of language. Nonhuman animals think when they seek to predict and control their environments in experiments on classical and instrumental conditioning. They can learn concepts. And they can learn to solve novel problems. They can even pass some of their thoughts to other animals through observational learning. But they don't have anything like human language.

And the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, of linguistic determinism, is just wrong. Rosch's experiments on color naming showed that pretty clearly. The absence of a color name in language didn't prevent the Dani from perceiving that color.

Roger Brown (1986, p. 493), reviewing the evidence bearing on the Whorfian hypothesis, concludes that "While the many languages of the world today are superficially very different from one another, in certain deep semantic ways, they are all alike".

So there might be something to the weaker form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, of linguistic relativity. Perhaps the most that can be said comes from UCB's Prof. Dan Slobin (1979): languages differ in terms of the features of the environment that they emphasize. To use one of his examples, French distinguishes between the familiar and polite forms of the second-person pronoun, tu and vous; German does the same thing, du and Sie; there's nothing like that in English. Therefore, French and German speakers must think about social hierarchies, and the relationship between a speaker and the person he or she is speaking to, while English speakers don't have to do this. But that doesn't mean that English speakers don't think about social hierarchies.

Of course, English used to make such a distinction: compare you and yours with thee, thou, and thine. Because of the use of the latter terms in places such as the King James Bible, we generally think of thee/thou/thy/thine as somehow elevated, more polite and respectful: think of the phrase, "holier than thou". But in fact, up to the 17th century, you was used in polite address, and thee in familiar address. In the KJB, God is addressed as thou out of a sense of intimacy, not of disrespect. But thereafter, thee and thou pretty much dropped out of ordinary speech, and was replaced by you. After the French Revolution of 1789, the use of vous by one person to defer to another was formally banned; all were equal Citizens, and so everyone addressed each other as tu, so as to express their liberty, equality, and fraternity. Except for the Quakers, members of the Religious Society of Friends, and that was mostly in the confines of their religious meetings: interestingly, in Quaker discourse the connotations of you and thee are reversed: the use of thee/thou was an expression of egalitarianism.

But the basic point remains: language develops to represent the things that people think about. Language may constrain communication, but it doesn't constrain thought. Rather, thought constrains language: we use language to talk about the things we think about.

Does this mean that the specific language one speaks doesn't matter?  That things would be just the same if we all spoke English, or Mandarin -- or, for that matter, Pormpuraaw?  No.  Language matters, but -- as John McWhorter has argued (in "Why Save a Language?", New York Times, 12/07/2014), language matters for other reasons.  In particular, language is an important component of cultural identity.  When a group of people have a language in common, which they speak to each other but not to members of other groups, that fosters a sense of communal identity, strengthening the group itself.  There are other bonds between community members, to be sure, but a shared language is one of them.   And besides, diversity of language may be something to celebrate in and of itself, just as we celebrate diversity in plants and animals.  The world would be a lot more boring if it was just us, and cats, and tulips; and it would be a lot more boring if it was just English, Mandarin, and Pormpuraaw. 

Language, Culture, and Freedom

All in all, human linguistic capacity a real tribute to human intelligence -- i.e., the human intelligence we all share. Human intelligence is not same as individual differences in IQ. Language is an enormous achievement -- one not matched by any other species, or by the most powerful computer. But every normal child, and most retarded ones as well, become expert in his or her native tongue.

Language is an important tool for human thought. It permits the symbolic representation of the world around us, and facilitates creative problem-solving. But it also has another, absolutely crucial, adaptive function: it permits learning through precept rather than simple trial and error. This much more efficient form of learning provides the basis for cultural evolution. It permits passing knowledge on to next generation, so that we can build on past advances, and don't have to constantly reinvent the wheel.

There's also a third function of language, which is to create the social world in which we live.  This process is described by the UC Berkeley philosopher John Searle in the Social Construction of Reality (1995), and its mediated entirely by language.  Mountains and molecules are features of observer-independent reality: they are what Searle calls "brute facts" about the world, and they exist no matter what anyone thinks or does.  But reality also consists of observer-dependent "institutional facts" which are products of what Searle calls collective intentionality.  Put briefly, these features of reality exist because people say they do.  Searle's favorite examples are money and marriage: that dollar bill in our wallet has a certain value only because some institution says it does; you're married (if you're married, that is), because some minister or judge says you are.  Thus, language doesn't just represent reality; in many aspects, it also creates reality.  That, too, is part of cultural evolution.  In my lifetime, homosexual relations were illegal, homosexuality was considered as a mental illness, and homosexuals certainly couldn't marry each other.  In the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III, 1973), the American Psychiatric Association declared that homosexuality, per se, was no longer to be considered to be a form of mental illness.  In a groundbreaking case, Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the US Supreme Court legalized sexual relations between persons of the same sex.  And in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.  All aspects of reality created by language, through argument and decree.

Cultural evolution parallels biological evolution, but proceeds at a much faster pace. Thus, it permits more rapid adaptation to environmental demands. But even better than adaptation, cultural evolution permits mastery of environment. Biological evolution allows us to fit better into the environment; cultural evolution, through technological advance, permits us to make the world more favorable to us.

Without language, we'd be tall, hairless, chimpanzees with thumbs -- and probably extinct as well. Language is the key to successful human adaptation, and to all that makes us human.

Chomsky's approach to language developed in the 1950s, in the heyday of behaviorism, and came to the attention of psychologists through his 1959 review of Verbal Behavior, a book by by B.F. Skinner. In that book, Skinner had offered a behavioristic view of language as verbal behavior, acquired through reinforcement and other principles of operant conditioning. Chomsky showed that Skinner's view of reinforcement was circular, and thus vacuous. He also argued that the human capacity for language was innate, and that language was acquired through something like an innate "Language Acquisition Device" (LAD) in the brain, which permitted infants to learn their native language effortlessly even without deliberate training or reinforcement.

All of this led George Miller (of "the Magical Number 7" fame), himself a strong supporter of Chomsky, to remark that the choice between Skinner and Chomsky was "a choice between an impossible and a miraculous theory of language".

And, indeed, language does appear to be something of a miracle, without precedent in evolutionary history. Language confers an incredible advantage on humans. As Chomsky once remarked concerning chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary ancestor: "There's a reason why there are 4 billion of us and only 10 thousand of them" (there are, of course, even more of us now, and even fewer of them).

Language allows us to represent knowledge very economically, and to share our knowledge with others through an extremely efficient form of social learning -- social learning by precept.

Language serves as the basis for culture, facilitating the intergenerational transmission of knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors.

Language, through its creative property, is the cognitive basis of human freedom, permitting us to think, speak, and hear thoughts that have never been thought before.

This page last revised 09/27/2024.