Transcription
Hello and welcome to Introduction to Linguistics. I'm your host, Richard Futrell, and I hope you'll enjoy this journey with me through the science of human language. So, let's get right to it.
This is UCI Language Science 3, an undergraduate class, Introduction to Linguistics, part of the Language Science major here at UCI. So, for those of you who are taking the class for credit at UCI, I'm going to go into some course logistics. For those watching at home, you can skip this stuff.
Here we go. The important information you're going to need to know about the class is online on Canvas and also at this URL. Here we have an authoritative online syllabus. We're going to have lectures posted online. You're watching the first one right now. We're going to have problem sets. We're going to have seven problem sets, which are going to be graded based on correctness. The lowest problem set grade will be dropped. You're going to have three multiple-choice exams comprising half of your grade. These exams are going to be open book. That means you can look in any book you want. You can also look online at any materials you want. You just can't talk to other people during the test. That would be cheating. These are non-cumulative exams. They only cover the units that precede them. And we're also going to have weekly discussion sections. You're going to be attending synchronously over Zoom, and participation is mandatory in these to get a full participation grade. You need to attend these sections. Cool.
All right, so let's get to it. We're gonna have a textbook. The textbook is optional. It is Language Files, 12th Edition. Now, this textbook being optional, you don't have to get it. But if you do get it, you will find that it vastly improves your understanding of the material. It's going to both deepen and broaden your understanding of the stuff that we're going to be teaching. It's available online and on the syllabus at that URL. You can see that each lecture comes with a recommended reading going along with it from this book. Again, this is optional. You don't need to buy this book, but if you do, it will greatly enhance your understanding of the material.
So, what is linguistics? What are we about to learn? What are you here for? Linguistics, which we also call language science, is the scientific study of language. Now, let's stop, take a look at the slide for a moment here. I've underlined the terms linguistics and language science. I'm going to underline in my slides any term whose definition you need to know in the exams and in the problem sets. The underlined terms are scientific terms. They're technical jargon from the field of linguistics. You need to both know the definitions of these terms and how to undo and you need to understand them, and you need to know how to apply them.
So, linguistics is the scientific study of language, and it's also called language science. What do we mean by scientific study of language? That's what we're about to get into. This course in teaching you linguistics is going to teach you how to analyze language scientifically and objectively. This is going to be maybe different than how you've thought about language before. So, you've all had a lot of experience in analyzing language in a way which is kind of intuitive, maybe kind of subjective. This could happen in like a literature class when you read a story and you think about how the different words evoke feelings in you, or when you're doing something like analyzing a text message to help your friend decipher what someone else meant. These are sort of intuitive, subjective analyses of language. What we're going to be doing in this class is adding a big dose of science and objectivity to that kind of stuff. We're going to be doing a rigorous scientific analysis of language. We're going to be asking questions like, how do words and sentences break into parts? Language consists of units, things like sentences or words or sounds, and we're going to be asking how those things break into parts, how the parts fit together to form the whole.
We're going to be looking at different languages. We're going to be seeing how the languages of the world differ from one another and how they're the same. Languages of the world, things like English, French, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Mòsā, these are languages that differ from each other very widely. There's lots and lots of differences, lots of diversity among languages, but there's also a core of things that are the same. There are many things that are the same across languages, and that's the really interesting thing. Languages have a lot of commonalities. They have a lot of variance, but not without bound, and we're going to be talking about that kind of stuff in great detail. We're going to be looking at how it is that words combine together in something like a sentence to evoke a meaning. How is it that a sentence, which consists of a string of words, somehow those words combine together in a way that evokes a structured kind of a meaning in your mind when you hear the sentence?
What is it that makes language easy or hard to understand? You've almost surely noticed that when you read certain authors or when you listen to certain people, some people are easy to understand, other people are hard to understand. Some sentences are easy to understand, they're just straightforward. Some are hard to understand. They have a really sort of complex structure, and you have to really think to understand that sentence. What is it that makes something like a sentence easy or hard to understand? This touches on the question of language processing. Language is a system that maps form and meaning, as we're going to see, and your brain has to actually implement that mapping. It, your brain has to take in the sounds that I'm producing, or maybe the words on a page that you're reading, and it has to somehow compute the meaning that you get out of those words. That's language processing, and that computation might be difficult sometimes. That's what makes something easier or hard to understand. We're going to be looking at language processing as it relates to the structure of language.
We can ask questions like, does the language you speak affect the thoughts you think? This is a deep question. You might think about this as a question which is maybe so deep and philosophical that it would be silly to try to answer it scientifically with an experiment. But in fact, you can. In fact, we do have a pretty good scientific literature on the relationship between language and thought. It's not just a philosophical question. We do have reasonable answers to this, and we're going to be covering that towards the end of the course. This is just a sampler of the kinds of questions that you can ask and partially answer using linguistics, and that we'll be covering in this course.
So, why? Why would you study linguistics? Why would you be here? Well, the first thing you might think is, well, linguistics means learning a lot of languages. I'm going to come here and learn a lot of languages and be a linguist and speak like 20 languages. Unfortunately, linguistics does not mean learning lots of languages. Remember, linguistics is the science of language. Linguistics is not just learning a lot of languages. You could learn a lot of languages without getting any scientific insight, and you can also get a lot of scientific insight into language by only looking at one language. So, linguistics doesn't mean learning a lot of languages. It means scientifically studying language.
If you want to learn a lot of languages, though, linguistics will help you. Because when you understand the underlying principles and structures that are common across all languages, and when you understand the limits of the variation across different languages, then you're going to pick things up a lot more rapidly. Because language to you is not just going to be some arbitrary system. It's going to be something whose structure you can really understand. You can think about this as something like learning card games. Learning a language is kind of like learning a card game. Now, if you understand the principles that underlie all the different card games, like the fact that usually a king is worth more than a three, and you know that there are the different suits and the different colors, once you understand these underlying principles of all card games, it becomes a lot easier to learn any new card game. Similarly, once you understand the underlying principles of all languages through the science of linguistics, then you're going to find that learning new languages is going to be easier. Because you're going to see how the language works, and you're going to say, "Oh yeah, I remember that. I know what's going on here." And everyone else in the class who hasn't taken linguistics is going to be confused, but you're going to get it.
Linguistics is also going to train you in the rigorous analysis of symbolic systems. And we're going to cover later on what exactly is meant by symbolic. Symbolic systems, but the key thing here is that language is enormously complex. You probably don't realize this because we, you let use language so intuitively, so fluently, and so automatically. We don't realize how complex it is. Uh, we're like fish in water. So, fish swim in water. The water is the environment they're in. To some extent, they don't even notice the water. Similarly, language is an enormously complex formal symbolic system that we all use and deploy every day, but it is so easy to us. We're so immersed in it that we don't even notice its complexity. So, language is an enormously complex system, and what we're going to be learning in this class is how to analyze that enormously complex system. How to take this complex system that you currently know how to use intuitively and unconsciously, how to sort of use science to drag that up to the level of something you can consciously analyze, in the same way that you would analyze something like a geometry problem. So, linguistics is going to train you in a sort of symbolic analysis that is going to be applicable in just about anything you do.
It's also going to be directly applicable in a number of different careers you might have in mind. So, one of them is interpretation and translation. Remember, linguistics doesn't mean learning a lot of languages, but if you know linguistics and you know how languages work, it's going to help you a lot if you want to do something like learn a language to be an interpreter or a translator. It's going to be enormously helpful. Speech pathology is a career, an excellent career, where you would directly apply all the stuff that we're going to be learning in this class. Speech pathology is when you apply the principles of linguistics to help people, primarily young people, who are experiencing speech deficits, to train them in various ways to overcome those deficits. It's really an amazing field because it works very well. You really can help people applying the kinds of things we're about to learn in this class. Natural language processing. This is the field of software engineering and computer science that has to do with building systems that can use human language in the same way that we do. Think about things like Siri and Alexa. These are systems that you can kind of have a conversation with. You can kind of communicate with them in human language. But I think if any of you have really used these systems, you've noticed there's a lot of room for improvement, right? So, there's a lot of work to be done. So, the idea here is that once you have a complete scientific understanding of how language works, then that enables you to sort of change hats from being a scientist to being an engineer, to now design a system that implements those principles of how language works in order to build something that can use language just like humans do. Something like a better version of Siri or Alexa. These kinds of systems that you can communicate with in a human language like English, instead of some computer language. That's natural language processing. Clinical psychology is another area where linguistics is applied a lot. Analyzing the language that people use in order to diagnose and treat various issues. Language teaching. If you want to teach a language, it would help to understand the structure of how the language works.
So, that's enough about linguistics. I've talked about linguistics, the scientific field. What I want to do now is to talk about language. I want to actually talk about this thing that we're going to study. And what I want to talk about is an objection that some people have. Some people hear this idea that you could have a science of language, and they think, "No, that's not possible. Language is not the kind of thing that you could analyze objectively or scientifically or rigorously." Because language is so, maybe, so intricate or so subtle. Think about something like the hugely impactful and subtle emotional and social consequences of a phrase like "I love you." Think about what an interesting and fascinating effect that has, and how difficult it would be to reduce something as multi-faceted as that effect to something that you would study scientifically in the same way that you study something like chemistry. So, it does seem that there's, there's this enormous complexity in language, and that would make it hard to analyze it scientifically.
A big example of this idea, this idea that language is somehow mysterious, somehow ineffable, somehow beyond scientific analysis, is this idea that there are words that are untranslatable. That there might be a word, say, in Czech, which has no equivalent in another language, which would mean that there's a thought or a concept that, say, Czech speakers can have that maybe English speakers just cannot have. So, is this true? Let's look at some examples. So, in Spanish, it's been claimed that this word "duende" cannot be translated. It means the mysterious power of an artwork to move someone. This is like, you go to an art museum and you see some painting and you're transfixed by it. There's something about it which is mysterious and powerful, and you run out of the museum and you devote your life to becoming a painter or something like that. That's duende in Spanish. This is an example of a word which allegedly has a meaning which somehow cannot be translated. There's something about this word that is ineffable. If so, how could we have a science of language, right? If there really are these untranslatable words, that seems like a problem. Because a science of language would mean an objective analysis of language. An objective analysis means something that everyone can agree on. Well, if there are words that a Spanish speaker can understand that an English speaker cannot ever understand, then how could they ever reach an objective agreement? So, if there are these untranslatable words, then that, that does seem like an example of a way in which language is mysterious.
Another example is this Czech word "litost," which is the agony and torment sparked by the sudden apperception of one's own misery. That seems like a very unfortunate state of mind, which apparently Czech speakers understand very well, and maybe other speakers of other languages don't, or so it's claimed. And here's a cool link which has an example of 20 awesomely untranslatable words, examples, and you can think about them. But I'd like to just maybe throw a wrench into this machine and ask you to consider: are these words really untranslatable? Notice that I translated them. I said duende in Spanish, it corresponds to in English, "the mysterious power of an artwork to move someone." So, it's true that that single word in Spanish turned into a whole phrase in English, but I still translated it. I can still have the thought in English, the same thought as in Spanish. It's just I have to use it, make it, I have to sort of cobble it together using different words instead of using a single word. So, is this really untranslatable? Is this really a problem? I'd like you to think critically about that. You should think about if this really is a translation. And if you are fortunate enough to be bilingual or multilingual, even, you can think about this subjectively. There might be a certain flavor that comes along with a word in one language that doesn't seem to carry over into some other word. Very interesting question. Are there untranslatable words? But this is not an entirely subjective question. This is the kind of question we can ask in linguistics. Are there really untranslatable words and concepts? Are there really thoughts that some speaker of some language can think that speakers of another language cannot think? Or are all languages equally capable of expressing all the meanings? We're going to get to this kind of thing later when we get to the section on language and thought.
So, what does the science of language look like? Something to keep in mind here is something like the history of the development of science. Often, sciences start off in a sort of more subjective, sort of quasi-systematic state, and then they develop over centuries into a more rigorous form of analysis. In the case of linguistics, we're taking the sort of subjective analysis of language, the kind of thing you do informally, the kind of thing you do in a literature class, and we want to run it through some kind of process that will enable us to develop a real scientific analysis of language, a rigorous objective science, rather than a more subjective kind of system. You can think about this as analogous to the way in which alchemy, which was a sort of mystical system for understanding the substances and elements that make up the world, alchemy over centuries developed into the scientific field of chemistry. And when that happened, it changed a lot. It went from having, from being a more sort of opaque, hard-to-understand system, kind of like how language might be to you now, to something which is very systematic, involves a lot of diagrams, and involves a lot of problems that look a lot like math problems, and enables you to make specific quantitative predictions. So, once you have chemistry, then you can do a lot more than you could do when you only had alchemy. Similarly, we're going to be sort of transmuting your subjective understanding of language in this class into a scientific understanding that looks a lot more like chemistry than like alchemy.
So, what does linguistic analysis actually look like? We know what that sort of chemical analysis looks like. What does the analogous thing for language look like? The first thing we need to note is that human language can be analyzed on multiple levels. What do I mean by that? By analyze, I mean we break something into parts. We analyze language by breaking it into parts. The word "analyze" is a Greek word that means simply "break apart." So, we're going to take language, we're going to break it into parts, we're going to see what those parts are and how they fit together to form the whole.
At its most basic level, language is a pairing, or a set of pairings, of what's called form and what's called meaning. So, what are these two things? Form and meaning. Form is the actual language. It's the, um, it's the utterance. It's the letters on the page. It's the sound going through the air, going from my mouth into your ear. It's the bumps that you feel on a braille paper. Form is the signal, the linguistic signal, the physically observable linguistic signal produced by a person and received by another person. The meaning is the particular, maybe the mental image or the intent, which is evoked once you hear or read the form. So, here the form is "the cat sits on the mat." And you can consider that to be letters on a page. You could consider it to be a waveform of sound. "The cat sits on the mat." Those are both examples of linguistic form. And the meaning which is evoked once you hear that sentence is maybe something like this. It's maybe something like this picture of a cat on a mat. Maybe you don't visualize it, but you receive a meaning which looks something like this. And in some other language other than English, this meaning might be expressed by a different form. So, a language is a pairing of form and meaning. Something like English is a particular way of pairing forms with meanings. Other languages like French and Chinese are different pairings of form and meaning. The forms are different. And so that's what language is at the most basic level. The first step in our breaking apart of language is that we've separated these concepts of form and meaning.
Now, let's just look at the form and let's see if we can break it into parts. Let's see if we can analyze it. Well, this thing is something we call a sentence. And we're going to see that the word "sentence" has a technical meaning in linguistics, which is different from what you might have learned previously in language classes. But for now, you can just think about it as the sentence in, it's a sentence in the sense you're already familiar with. So, "the cat sits on the mat" is a sentence. Can we break it into parts? Well, the first thing we note is that we have two sort of parts in the sentence that are similar to each other: "the cat" and "the mat." These are two phrases that have a similar structure. They're what we call noun phrases. And this sequence of words "on the mat" is what we call a prepositional phrase. "On" as a preposition. "On the mat" is a prepositional phrase. We can identify even further. The sequence of words "sits on the mat" as a verb phrase. It's a sequence of words headed by a verb. We're going to talk about this in great detail once we get to the syntax part of the class. So, we have a sentence which contains inside of it a noun phrase and a verb phrase. And that verb phrase contains inside of it a prepositional phrase. And that prepositional phrase contains inside of it another noun phrase. So, we see that the structure of a sentence has this sort of nested, recursive structure. It's like Russian dolls. You have phrases inside phrases. You have a verb phrase that has inside of it a prepositional phrase. It has inside of it a noun phrase, nested recursively like these Russian dolls. And the very smallest level, at the center of the Russian dolls, the very smallest level of analysis you get to here, is the individual words: "the," and "cat," and "sits," and "on," and "mat." So, a sentence is composed of phrases that are nested recursively in this way, and those phrases are composed ultimately of words.
Okay, so we've analyzed a sentence. Let's think about if we can go further. Can we keep breaking this into ever smaller and smaller parts? Let's look at the word "sits." Can we break that into parts, or is this just an indivisible unit? Well, it's not an indivisible unit. You can split it into two parts. There's the root "sit," the, which indicates the sitting action, and there's the "s" at the end, which is attached to the end, which indicates the tense and the number of the verb. So, we have here one morpheme, "sit," attached to another morpheme. The word "sits" consists of two morphemes: "sit" and "s," where "sit" indicates the type of action, indicates the present tense, singular. So, words are composed of these things called morphemes. And now we'll ask, can it go further? Can we break the morpheme into parts, ever smaller parts? Let's take a look. So, we have here "sit." Well, that consists of three sounds in a row: s, i, t. These are units of sound called phonemes. This doesn't refer to the letters of the word as written. This refers to the individual units of sound, which may or may not correspond to letters in the English writing system. How about those units of sound which are called phonemes? Can you analyze a phoneme into parts? You might think, "I sound like, well, that's just so, such a small thing. How could that possibly be analyzed into parts?" And you can. A phoneme consists of a set of what are called phonetic features. Features are these little bits, these little descriptions that determine how the sound is pronounced.
So, this is our hierarchy of linguistic analysis. We see that we can go from a big unit like a sentence and chop it up piece by piece into smaller and smaller and smaller units until we're down to the phonetic features and the actual sounds, the actual waveform that corresponds to these words. So, the hierarchy of linguistic analysis goes like that. You have sentences, which are composed of phrases, which are composed of words, which are composed of morphemes. Now, that's morpheme. That's probably the first word you might not have been aware of before you took this class. But don't worry, when we get to the section on morphology, you'll learn all about morphemes. Morphemes are composed of phonemes, which are units of sound. And phonemes are composed of features, which determine pronunciation. This is the hierarchy of linguistic analysis. This is how you break something like a sentence into ever more fine-grained parts. It's also the structure of the scientific field of linguistics. So, each level of analysis here corresponds to a subfield. For each level of analysis here, there are teams of researchers who are studying how exactly these things work. So, when you're studying pronunciation, then you're studying what's called phonetics: how sounds are articulated and how they are their acoustic properties. When you are studying phonemes and their features, then you're studying phonology, which is the structure of sounds in languages. When you're studying words and morphemes, you're studying morphology. When you're studying sentences and phrases, you're studying syntax. So, these are the levels of linguistic analysis, and they are the subfields of linguistics. And this also provides us with the structure for the first part of this class. The first, maybe two-thirds of this class are going to be spent going up these levels of analysis. We'll start with the smallest level of analysis with phonetics, and we'll work our way up to syntax and then to semantics. You can think about this as climbing a ladder. Each rung of the ladder that we're climbing is some level of linguistic analysis. The first one would here be phonetics, and we'll work our way up until we understand the largest levels when we get to syntax and semantics.
So, here's the organization of the course. Our goals are: one, we want to learn how to analyze language scientifically. We want to think about language as if it is a machine that somehow links form and meaning. It's a machine that enables you to take a form and figure out a meaning for that form, and which enables you to take a meaning and express that meaning in a linguistic form. When we view language as a machine, we want to ask, how does that machine work? What are the nuts and bolts of that machine? This is the technical content of the class. We're going to look at the sort of nuts and bolts of how language works. That's analyzing language scientifically. That's linguistic analysis. So, you can think about this as if you're starting off in a pit. You're starting off in a pit of ignorance about linguistics, and you're going to climb your way out of that pit, rung by rung, by studying phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, all the levels of linguistic analysis. Once we're done with that, once we've learned how to analyze language scientifically, then we can learn how language relates to things like culture, things like thought, things like language technologies. So, once we understand how language works at a scientific level, we'll be able to coherently think about how language relates to these other things. So, once we're done with core linguistics and linguistic analysis, then we'll look at these sort of more applied areas. We'll be applying what we learned in core linguistics to things like the psychology of language, how language works in your mind and brain, the sociology of language, how the structure of language relates to society, language technology, pragmatics, which is how we use language.
So, we're going to start off not actually with phonetics. Our next lecture is going to be some more basics. We're going to talk about some of the more basic questions involved in defining what a language is, how it relates to other kinds of communication systems that you see in nature, and so on. That'll be the basics. Then we'll proceed into phonetics, and then we'll proceed into phonology. Now, just a bit of warning. These two sections, phonetics and phonology, these are going to be the most challenging parts of the class. And you might ask, why? Why are these going to be the most challenging parts? It's because phonology and phonetics operate at a level which is below your conscious awareness. So, when we're looking at phonology and phonetics, we're going to be thinking about the very fine-grained details of what's going on, like in your mouth when you are talking. This is something that you, you do every day. You talk every day, but you're not consciously aware of everything that's going on as you're talking. You're not consciously aware of every little tongue movement, for example. So, in phonetics and phonology, we are going to be studying that stuff, and it's going to be a lot of new material for you. And this is just to prepare you. It's going to be a bit challenging because this is going to, this is going to be really where you are taking things that operate below your level of conscious awareness and dragging them up to the level of consciousness and analyzing them. It's pretty fun, actually. It's going to really change the way you think about how you talk.
Once we have finished with phonetics and phonology, when we get to morphology and syntax and semantics, things are going to be a bit more intuitive because morphology and the levels above morphology are more like things that you're consciously aware of. But we're going to be applying the analytical tools that we developed when we were down studying the tiny, unconscious details in phonetics and phonology. The analytical techniques we developed there, where we're going to apply them as we go up the ladder into the stuff which you are more consciously aware of.
All right, so I've talked about why you would want to take this course. I've talked about what the course is about. What I want to talk about now to wrap up this first lecture is why, why do we as scientists want to analyze language? Not why do you as a UCI undergraduate want to take this course. I mean, why as scientists is it a worthwhile endeavor to scientifically analyze human language? So, the first thing to note is that language surrounds us. Language is everywhere. I said that we are like fish in water, where the water is language, and we're not really aware of the water. Language is an enormously complex system that influences us in ways that we don't always understand, and its impact really cannot be understated. So, think about how much of your life has been affected and influenced and even determined by language, by things that you have expressed to other people or which other people have expressed to you in language. How did you end up here? You read about this university, or you heard about it through language. Think about how much of your relationships with your friends and your family and your partners is mediated by language. Where would you be without language? What would we as humans be like if we didn't have language? So, in a very real sense, language is like the water that we swim in when we live as social creatures in a society. Language is integral to us as humans. It's everywhere. It's extraordinarily important. And yet, our scientific understanding of language is vastly incomplete. We currently understand some of how language works. Linguistics is a new science. Linguistics didn't really get started as a science until the 19th century. There were attempts before that by philosophers and philologers and writers and so on to start to develop a science of language, but it didn't really get going as a full-blown academic discipline until something like the 19th century. It's a new science, and that means that there's still a lot of stuff that hasn't been discovered yet. We've understood a lot. We're going to be covering a lot in this class. We've made a lot of real progress, but there's a lot of stuff that we still don't understand about this enormously complex object called language. So, we can say language is a frontier science. That means there's a lot of stuff that still has yet to be explored. There's a lot of territory, a lot of parts of the map that haven't been filled in yet. If you want to sort of be close to the ground floor of a new science, a science where there are still lots of things to be discovered, still lots of new theories to be developed, linguistics is where you want to be.
We need a science of language because language is a lot more complicated than it seems. You might say, think, "I, uh, you know, I speak my language, or my languages. I, I don't have any trouble understanding anyone. Why do I need to go through the trouble of analyzing this thing scientifically?" Well, language is a lot more complicated than you think. And here's an example of how language is a lot more complicated than you think. Here's a book, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. I'd like you to guess how long this book is. This book contains a complete description of the English language. It, um, so this book has everything you would need to know about the English language if you were, say, learning it as a second language. This book has everything in it. It's a complete description of the language, not of even the history of the language or the literature of the language, just the language as it exists now. I'd like you to think about how long you think this book is. How complex is the English language? Is this book like, maybe 100 pages? Maybe 200 pages? Maybe even 500 pages? Well, this book's almost 2,000 pages long. It's almost 2,000 pages long, and it's still incomplete. The book is filled with references to papers and to other books. Even if you added this book and all those papers together, you would still have only an incomplete description of the English language. And English is not an unusually complex language as languages go. English is sort of in the middle of the road as far as complexity. So, each human language, and there are about 6,000 different human languages currently spoken by anyone, each of those human languages is one of these enormously complex objects. If you think you understand it just because you speak it, well, what this means is that there's a lot of sort of mental dark matter here, stuff that is inherent in the system of language that we use every day, but that we don't really understand rigorously yet. So, there's a lot that still has to be understood. A lot that we don't know about language yet.
So, that's just one aspect of the complexity of language. The grammatical complexity of a language means, like, how hard it is to write down the rules that define a language like English. There are other ways in which language is complex. Other ways in which the sort of feats that we accomplish when we use language are impressive in a way that we don't understand because it's also easy and automatic to us. One of these is the fact that human language is extraordinarily ambiguous. There's a great deal of ambiguity in language. So, to give you an example of this, here's a sentence: "I made her duck." And I'd like for you to pause the video now and get out some paper or whatever and write down just how many different meanings you can come up with for this sentence: "I made her duck." So, pause the video now. Good. So, how many did you come up with? Uh, it's possible to come up with something like 15 to 20 if you really try. But here's what I got. So, "I made her duck." That could mean I cooked duck meat for her. It could mean I carved a wooden duck and I gave it to her. It could mean that she owns a duck which I made somehow. It could mean I cooked the duck that she's currently eating. It could mean I transformed her into duck meat. "I made her duck" could mean I made her crouch down like this. So, we see that there are very, very many possible meanings of this simple English sentence. And again, this is not a typical, a typical sentence in any language has many, many, many, many different possible meanings. And yet, when you're using language to communicate, you don't notice that somehow our brains are able to immediately hone in on the intended meaning and to throw away the dozens or maybe even hundreds of other possible meanings to all the sentences that we hear in our lives. This is, by the way, the number one reason that language processing for computers is difficult, because computers don't have this ability to throw away all the possible meanings of the sentence which were not really intended by the speaker. So, that's ambiguity. It's one of the ways in which language is enormously complex. We need to understand how this works if we want to build technologies that use language. If we want to have a real understanding of how language really affects us in our lives.
Other questions which sort of form very areas in which language is enormously complex is, how do we learn language? So, children are able to acquire the languages they're exposed to and basically, in nearly all cases, nearly perfectly without apparent effort. So, how is that possible? How is it that we all are able to learn language? How is it that our brains process language and so on? How does language fit in with the rest of nature? There really isn't anything else in nature that has the structure of human language, as we're going to see. And how can we build machines to use language and so on?
So, I'll just leave you with this. Linguistics is a frontier science in the sense that there are lots of parts of the map that haven't been filled in yet. It's a new science. I invite you, through this class, to join us in the scientific enterprise of understanding how human language works, filling in the blanks on the map, and advancing the progress of science. Thanks.