Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Chatterboxes
- "Language is not just any cultural invention but the
product of a special human instinct."
- Language does not have to
do with social progress.
- There are Stone Age societies,
but there is no such thing as a
Stone Age language.
- A language is a dialect with an
army and a navy
- Speaking:
- Grammatical
- Well-formed according to
consistent rules in the dialect
of the speakers.
- Ungrammatical
- Sentences include randomly
broken-off sentence fragments
- Language is invaluable for all the
activities of daily living
- Necessity being the mother of
invention, language could have been
invented by resourceful people a
number of times long ago.
- Universal grammar can simply reflect the
basic exigencies of human experience
- All languages have words for "water"
and "foot" because all people need to
refer to water and feet.
- No language has a word a million syllables
long because no person would have time
to say it.
- Complex language is
universal because
children actually
reinvent it,
generation after
generation because
they just can't help it.
- Pidgin
- A makeshift jargon developed when
speakers of different languages have to
communicate to carry out practical tasks
but do not have the opportunity to learn
one another's languages
- Becomes a more
complex language:
- A group of children exposed to
the pidgin at the age when they
acquire their mother tongue:
- It becomes their
- native tounge
- Creole
- The language
that results
when children
make a pidgin
their native
tongue
- Provides a
particularly
clear window
on the innate
grammatical
machinery of
the brain
- Sign languages
- They are not pantomimes
and gestures: each one is
a distinct, full language,
using the same kinds of
grammatical machinery
found worldwide in
spoken languages
- Our mental algorithms for
grammar do not pick out words
by their linear positions,
- Rather, group words into phrases, and
phrases into even bigger phrases, and
give each one a mental label
- If language is an instinct >
it is an identifiable seat in
the brain,
- (Grammar could fail, but not
grammar-dependent
understanding).
- There are instances where
language is independent
from intelligence
- All the cases
constitute a field
guide to language
users. They show
that complex
grammar is displayed
across the full range
of human habitats
- "You don’t need extremely specific conditions to develop language. Indeed, you can possess all sort of advantages
and still not be a competent language user, if you lack just the right genes or just the right bits of brain."
- Poverty of the input
- -The basic design of language is innate
- "Mastery is part of children's
grammar explosion, a period of
several months in the third year of life
during which children suddenly begin
to speak in fluent sentences".
- language acquisition cannot be
explained as a kind of imitation