As a Whole: The Paragraph
Chapter 1: The Infinite Library
In the preface… “This book tries to illuminate the nature of language and mind by choosing a single phenomenon and examining it from every angle imaginable. That phenomenon is regular and irregular verbs, the bane of every language student.”
“Language comes so naturally to us that it is easy to forget what a strange and miraculous gift it is.”
“We humans are fitted with a means of sharing our ideas, in all their unfathomable vastness. When we listen to speech, we can be led to think thoughts that have never been thought before and that never would have occurred to us on our own.”
This book will consist of two tricks as Pinker says, that is, words and rules. Words are memorized arbitrary pairing between a sound and a meaning, and rules are these codes or protocol inside everyone’s mind about how words can be arranged into meaningful combinations.
Rules also have three characteristics:
1. Rules are productive,
2. Symbols contained by the rules are symbolic and abstract, and
3. Rules are combinatorial.
The capacity of combinations in language is practically infinite. For example, we can make an approximation of possible 6.4 trillion five-word sentences. So, language is a combinatorial system, acquired by a special rule-forming mechanism consisting of regular (predictable) and irregular verbs (memorized and unpredictable).
*Wug Test
Chapter 2: Dissection by Linguistics
Long story short…
“The point of this chapter is to show that this view is mistaken (one that thinks of language as the fulfillment of the need to communicate). I will put regular verbs under a microscope to reveal the delicate anatomy that makes them work. Language does express meaning as sound, of course, but not in a single step. Sentences are put together on an assembly line composed of mental modules. One is the storehouse of memorized words, the mental lexicon. Another is a team of rules that combine words and parts of words into bigger words, a component called morphology. A third is a team of rules that combine words into phrases and sentences, a component called syntax. The three components pass messages about meaning back and forth with the rest of the mind so that the words correspond to what the speaker wants to say. This interface between language and mind is called semantics. Finally, the assembled words, phrases, and sentences are massaged by a set of rules into a sound pattern that we can pronounce when speaking or extract form the stream of noise when listening. This interface between language and the mouth and ear is called phonology.” (page 22)
Chapter 3: Broken Telephone
“All languages change through centures…As the changes take place, people feel the ground eroding under their feet and in every era have predicted the imminent demise of the language…language change is a game of Broken Telephone.” (page 47)
It’s interesting to see the evolution and change in language as a game of Broken Telephone. It’s a process of adaptation in order to fit best what a generation at some time, find more useful than the previous generation. It’s a very good example of how progress and knowledge can change through time, and maybe what we think is getting better or worse can only be said after some other period of time.
Chapter 4: In Single Combat
“According to the theory (words-and-rules theory), the ingredients of language are a list of memorized words, each an arbitrary pairing between a sound and a meaning, and a set of productive rules that assemble words into combinations. Regular and irregular forms exemplify the two ingredients: Regular forms are generated by rule, irregular forms are memorized by rote.” (page 83)
Combat of Theories
Generative phonology (Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle): rules rule. Every drop of patterning in past-tense forms, regular or irregular, is squeezed out into rules, and only the compressed, desiccated residue is stored in the mental lexicon. (it’s rules all the way down.)
Parallel Distributed Processing or Connectionism (David Rumelhart and James McClelland): there are no rules: People store associations between the sounds of stems and the sounds of past-tense forms, and generalize the associations to new words if they are similar to old words. (it’s memory all the way up.)
Words-and-Rules (Steven Pinker and Prince): Regular verbs are computed by a rule that combines a symbol for a verb stem with a symbol for the suffix. Irregular verbs are pairs of words retrieved from the mental dictionary, a part of memory. Twist: Memory is not a list of unrelated slots, but is associative. Not only are words linked to words, but bits of words are linked to bits of words.
“If the modified words-and-rules theory is correct, it would have a pleasing implication for the centuries-old debate between associationism and rationalism: Both theories are right, but they are right about different parts of the mind.” (page 119)
Chapter 5: Word Nerds
“When we use our native language, a torrent of words flows into and out of the brain. The occasional frustration of having a word stuck on the tip of the tongue, the slow ordeal of composing a passage in a foreign language, and the agony of a stroke victim struggling to answer a question remind us that our ordinary fluency with language is a precious gift.
This chapter looks at how words and rules pop into mind as we use language in real time.”
Blocking Principle: the irregular form blocks the rule (add-ed) to state a past tense irregular.
Lexical Decision: in order to try to tell the moment at which people are willing to say that a word is a word and not just something that looks like a word (repetition/priming).
“Perhaps the most important lesson of the chapter is that the mind, like any complex device, is a system of mechanisms optimized for different jobs. Any theory that has one mechanism doing all the work is proposing a kind of crippleware that the human brain is bout to outperform.” (page 146)
Chapter 6: Of Mice and Men
“In this chapter we examine cases where memory is useless not for quantitative reasons (as when a word is relatively rare or strange) but for qualitative reasons. The forms that surprise us, such as flied out and lowlifes, either violate the standard format of a word stored in memory or skirt the mechanism that funnels information from memory to the rules that compute the word’s form. The regular suffix rises to the occasion, just as it does when a word is rare or strange. That underscores the power of a rule: It can apply whenever memory fails, regardless of the reason for the failure.”
“Can we catch children in the act of learning a rule as they master their mother tongue? Do rules work in all the world’s languages the way they do in English? And can we distinguish words and rules in the human brain?”
As the first quote says, this chapter goes into the situation where memory fails and how we react and change words when this happens. It talks about the semantic stretch theory, grammatical rules, many examples of these cases, and Kiparky’s explanation of irregular and regular verbs.
Chapter 7: Kids Say the Darnedest Things
“The errors are acts of creation, in which children lift a pattern from their brief experience and apply it with impeccable logic to new words, unaware that the adult world treats them as arbitrary exceptions…
Nothing is more important to the theory of words and rules than an explanation of how children acquire rules and apply them – indeed overapply them – to words. The simplicity of these errors is deceptive. As we shall see, it is not easy to explain why children start making them, and it’s even harder to explain why they stop.”
So, kids don’t have as much experience as adults, and that affects their memory performance in the sense that they are most prone to say irregular verbs as regular verbs. They don’t remember some forms of irregular verbs, thus they transform them into regular ones by applying the same rules.
Language instinct: deducing that words are not correct.
Chapter 8: The Horrors of the German Language
A few facts: English is not the only language spoken in the world, there are some six thousand languages in the world, no one is biologically disposed to speak a particular language, no one supposes that language evolved six thousand times, it is a process of people moving apart and losing touch.
“A language is the product of generations of learners and could reflect, rather than shape, their tastes and propensities.”
“All languages have a stock of morphemes (word parts) and set of conventions for assembling them into meaningful combinations such as complex words, phrases, and sentences. When words are assembled, they also may accept suffixes, prefixes, and infixes (insertions).”
“But many foreigners, he noted (Twain), “would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.”
In German language, verbs have three forms: an infinitive, a preterite or simple past, and a participle. Irregular verbs have higher frequencies of use.
“I don’t mean to suggest that all languages work just like English or that they all can be explained in a simple way by the words-and-rules theory. Every construction in every language throws up a welter of complications and counterexamples and deserves a book of its own. It is striking, howver, to sight rules living in the same sets of habitats – rare words, unusual words, headless constructions, converted words, children’s errors – in so many historically unrelated languages. To see these deep parallels in the languages of the French and the Germans, the Arabs and the Israelis, the East and the West, people living in the Age of the Internet and people living in the Stone Age, is to catch a glimpse of the psychic unity of humankind.”
Chapter 9: The Black Box
“If words and rules are the ingredients of language, we should be able to tell them apart in the brain. Parts of the brain that handle memory for words should be implicated in the use of irregular forms, and parts that handle rules should be implicated in the use of regular forms. This gives us another way to test the theory that rules step in when memory fails.”
“This chapter offers a tour of the techniques and what they show about the neural seats of words and rules.”
Important parts of the brain: it has two hemispheres, the central sulcus (fissure), the Sylvian fissure (divides the temporal lobe form the rest; Broca’s are and Wernicke’s area), frontal lobe (motorstrip), and rear bank (somatosensory strip; parietal lobe, occipital lobe, temporal lobe).
“Without an understanding of the contents of the mind from psychology, linguistics, and all the other disciplines they touch, neuroscientists would not know where to begin in studying the human brain, and their technologies would be expensive toys. Ultimately all knowledge is connected, and insight into a phenomenon can come from any direction, from the outcome of the Battle of Hastings to the sequence of a kinase gene.”
Chapter 10: A Digital Mind in an Analog world
“The ingredients of language are words and rules. Words in the sense of memorized links between sound and meaning; rules in the sense of operations that assemble the words into combinations whose meaning can be computed from the meanings of the words and the way they are arranged.” (page 269)
“I want to leave you with a remarkable parallel between regular and irregular inflection and something completely different. The parallel cannot be a coincidence, and it hints that the distinction between regular and irregular forms may expose even deeper principles about the nature of the mind and how it reflects the world.” (page 270)
The two main principles of language are; first, a memory system that stores and retrieves words (arbitrary system); and second, a system of symbolic computation that generates grammatical combinations of words (infinite use of a finite media).
“We have digital minds in an analog world. More accurately, a part of our minds is digital. We remember familiar entities and their graded, crisscrossing traits, but we also generate novel mental products by reckoning with rules. It is surely no coincidence that the species that invented numbers, ranks, kinship, terms, life stages, legal and illegal acts, and scientific theories also invented grammatical sentences and regular past-tense forms. Words and rules give rise to the vast expressive power of language, allowing us to share the fruits of the vast creative power of thought.”