Language and Linguistics:
By Howard Moskowitz
Have you ever wondered how you find the words with which to communicate
with the people around you? Or for that matter, what mechanisms enable you to use and
create language? Occasionally you may have marveled at your capacity to speak smoothly,
form sentence structures, or simply say what is on your mind. Still, you probably never
gave much thought to why you have these abilities.
Whether you are watching TV, reading a book, or chatting on the phone, you use language to communicate with other people. Language is so tightly woven into human experience that it is virtually impossible to imagine life without it. How else could you convey your wants, needs, ideas, and desires to others? The fact that language is so instrumental in our lives—a genuine hallmark of human nature—makes linguistics, the science of word systems, so easy to overlook and almost as equally difficult to understand and investigate.
The Beginnings
The study of language is far from novel. In fact, language has been a
topic of heated debate and intense scrutinization for thousands of years. Evidence has
shown that Indians did groundbreaking work in language syntax and structure over 3000
years ago, according to John Bowers, head of Cornell's linguistics department. From
antiquity on, questions regarding the origin and structure of language perplexed European
philosophers.
In the nineteenth century, language researchers attempted to create a systematic reconstruction of language—a historical linguistics—to consider rules of linguistic chains in language to explain the “genetic” relationship between languages. Shortly afterward, the twentieth century brought on a flurry of activity regarding the description of language structure. Linguists in the early portion of the century primarily investigated sound structure and morphology (word formation patterns) and largely examined language from a structuralist point of view.
Language acquisition theory of the early twentieth century highly reflected the contemporary thought about human action. During the time, John Watson and B.F. Skinner popularized the school of thought known as behaviorism, which denies the idea of free will and describes human and animal actions through simple response to environmental stimuli. With evidence seeming to indicate that picking up language skills was little more than a habit system, people came to accept language acquisition as the result of repeated instruction until the concepts stuck.
The Revolution
In the 1950s, improvements in technology and the introduction of a new
viewpoint evoked a dramatic shift in language theory. Noam Chomsky, the linguist most
responsible for the modern revolution in language and cognitive science, believed there
was something more to the prevailing theories regarding language as nothing more than a
series of learned behaviors. Chomsky's perception of the human brain as a complex entity
having the power to construct sentences from learned words led him to adopt a mentalistic
view of language—something unlike his predecessors' theories.
Chomsky centered his argument around two simple observations about language. First, he noted, every time you utter a sentence, you are, in a sense, creating a combination of words that is appearing for the first time in the history of the universe. Believing that language is nothing more than a series of programmed responses is incompatible with this idea; Chomsky's idea implies that the brain must have the capacity to use a broad vocabulary in order to make unlimited sentences.
Secondly, Chomsky observed, not only do children learn language very quickly, but they also acquire language skills despite teaching that is insufficient to give them the ability to learn the exact, complex grammatical rules they ultimately come to possess and use. Somehow children are able to understand sentences and sentence constructions without being briefed on their meanings. Chomsky thus concluded that from birth children must be equipped with a “Universal Grammar,” a mechanism providing basic so-called “principles” that make language acquisition possible. “The human brain is a machine that takes in data; the principles attack and order the data and what comes out are specific rules of language,” Bowers explained.
While post-World War II language theorists hesitated to accept Chomsky's idea, linguists today tend to altogether reject the “habit system” view of language acquisition. Without a functioning mental organ doing the work, Chomsky's advocates contend, how else could we create richness and complexity in our spoken and written thoughts? Picking up language skills by way of a habit system seems rather unlikely when we consider how quickly children learn to speak.
“[Stimulus-response] theories indicated that language capabilities would show a slow and steady developmental increase,” Bowers said. Actually, language acquisition happens very differently than how stimulus-response theories predicted it. In reality, a child progresses from simply babbling to uttering single words to speaking fragmented thoughts until—boom!—the use of language just takes off. Suddenly whole sentences roll off children's tongues rather effortlessly. There is simply no evidence that language could be learned so quickly from external sources. Accordingly, something inside each of us must have facilitated our learning of language.
Finding Meaning in our Words
In 1957 Noam Chomsky and his teacher, Zellig Harris, synthesized their
observations of human language learning, packaging impressions of the process into a new
linguistic theory. Presented in Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, the new theory—called
generative grammar—attempted to define rules from which one could generate all of the
well-formed sentences possible in a given language. The introduction of generative grammar
ultimately shifted the focus of the approach to questions about language from behavior (or
the products of behavior) to the actual states of the brain that influence behavior.
The uniqueness and specialized nature of the human brain became central to the new concept of human cognitive abilities and knowledge acquisition. Generative grammar dictated that a component exclusive to the human mind—a language faculty—must somehow provide the framework of principles and elements common and attainable in human language, determining the form and meaning of expressions in language. The new theory thus explained that although other animals have cognitive abilities, they do not possess language skills simply because they are not graced as humans are with the generative capacity to learn languages.
Generative grammar also roots itself in an assumption that a genuine structure underlies all languages. In his 1968 book Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, John Lyons backed the tenets of the theory, noting that the world's languages resemble one another in one degree or another.
The similarities are of two general kinds: those dealing with vocabulary and those relating to grammatical structure, generally defined in traditional and structural manners. Traditional grammar provides a full list of exceptions and models of regular constructions and observations about the form and meaning of expressions. Structural grammar is concerned with procedures for deriving aspects of grammar from data, most notably in the areas of phonology—the way sounds are put together to form words—and morphology. Indeed, Chomsky's efforts to shed light on the origins of human language in the 1950s triggered new interest in the study of language structure, thus reviving questions that people put forth many centuries ago.
The Present and the Future
The revolutionizing language insights and theories of the 1950s spurred
a tremendous increase in research within the field of linguistics and related areas.
Chomsky's work laid the foundations of cognitive science, an interdisciplinary field which
is essentially becoming an independent branch of science. Bringing together many other
areas of thought, cognitive science combines tools from cognitive psychology, computer
science, and neuroscience. It also receives input from linguistics, philosophy, cultural
anthropology, and other areas, seeking to explain classic questions of thought, such as
what knowledge is, and how it is represented in the mind.
Linguistics studies also have benefitted from the ideas about language generated 40 years ago. For example, researchers of semantics, the study of meanings, are attempting to gain a better understanding of how we interpret sentences and how we assign meaning to them. Likewise, investigators in the field of comparative syntax are testing hypotheses about the universal principles of languages: how these principles show systematic differences and similarities and how they apply across languages.
Advancements in language study also have stimulated research activity in a wide variety of related areas. Realizing the central role language plays in all aspects of our lives has provided the impetus for exciting new developments in the areas of artificial intelligence, human brain mapping, and psychosis treatment.
Artficial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence research focuses on the processing of natural
language through the use of computer systems. Language is a powerful instrument for
modeling many areas of knowledge and activity that determine human intellectual discourse
abilities. Although it presents a tremendous challenge to scientists in the field, the
feasibility of modeling natural languages for processing with computer systems has
substantial benefits because the role of language is perhaps the most important instrument
for creating, handling, and transferring human knowledge. The future of this area of
investigation will build upon research which has led to the development of partial models
of discourse—such as the study of scripts—as a tool for describing stereotyped
processes of specific actions, and speech act theory, a sophisticated modeling of the
discourse process.
Human Brain Mapping
Also of current interest is how the language system integrates with
other systems in the brain. With the explosive growth of cognitive science and the rapid
improvements in technological capabilities, scientists anticipate learning soon how
language interfaces with physical thought, emotions, and speech. Identifying the nature of
this interface will allow us to understand how it cooperates with other functions of the
brain.
A central issue in cognitive neuroscience is the relationship between the functional components of language and their anatomic foci within neural systems. The development and use of positron emission tomography (PET) has led to significant increases in our knowledge of the specific neuroanatomic sites which process language. PET measures changes in cerebral blood flow or in the regional utilization of glucose or oxygen. In particular, PET has recently helped to show that activity in the frontal lobes of the brain reflect the cognitive operations involved in particular components of language generation such as memory search and/or response generation. The insights provided by PET have led to the development of additional technological tools to investigate the intricate processing of language within the human mind. A new tool in this area, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), can sense metabolic changes associated with the performance of cognitive tasks. The new technology can also detect regions of brain activation under a number of different sensory stimuli.
Psychosis Treatment
Since language results from the participation of the biological,
psychological, and social aspects of human behavior, a major area of recent research
relates to the idea that the origins of psychoses may be related to the development and
complex processes of language. Language also plays a central role in this line of research
because it is humanity's primary investigative and therapeutic tool.
For many years, most studies of psychoses have assumed that disorganized communication is the result of an attention disorder. These studies have generally ignored the possibility that language breakdowns may in fact cause mental disorders. Until recently, most research on thought disorder neglected the possibility that there such mental illnesses might stem from disturbances of linguistics systems. New studies indicate, however, that the abnormalities of schizophrenic language might actually result from irregularities in mental processes associated with language.
Speaking requires information processing. Complex cognitive functions operate to continually update and retrieve the information one desires to convey from short term memory. The language deficits that schizophrenic speakers display might actually result from errors encoding and retrieving information from short term memory. A developing procedure for schizophrenic patients with thought disorder utilizes an attention-focusing task to improve their pragmatic skills. Nonetheless, the study of linguistics still plays a relatively minor part in the education of today's psychiatrists.
“Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works,” claims Steven Pinker in his 1994 book The Language Instinct. Language is an actual portion of the biological makeup of our brains. Although we are not aware of how or why it works, it is a complex commodity which somehow develops spontaneously and without conscious effort or formal instruction.
For centuries people have sensed that language is a unique ability delegated exclusively to the human race. Language is the foremost example of the human capacity to use symbols, an endowment separating us from other living creatures. Only members of our species have the privilege to tailor and convey thoughts to others using such an extraordinary range of words and patterns. Indeed, time and again the enigmatic quality of language has mystified us, but above all has amazed us in its potential to help define what it means to be human.
Howard Moskowitz is a junior in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences studying neurobiology and behavior.