ATCS: Seminar for `Language' lecture

Objectives

The first objective of this week's work is to make students aware of the structuredness of language, to get them to understand the nature of linguistic rules, and perhaps to make preliminary efforts to construct some. The second is to make a connection between the linguistic concepts of _lexicon_ and _grammar_ and to relate them to the more general concepts of _storage_ and _computation_. The third is to get them thinking about how language gets into the mind, which will probably be the part they relate to best.

Discussion

The students should centre on the debate about whether - or what element(s) of - language are innate (hard-wired) and which are due to the learner's experience of the world. What is the evidence for innateness, and what is the evidence for acquisition post-birth? What does it mean to say that a child acquires words and acquires rules?

Some key ideas are:

some linguistic elements are universal (i.e. occur in all languages)
some linguistic elements are implied by others (if a language has one, it'll have some other one too)
some linguistic elements are not universal, and must inferred by learners from data they hear around them
some linguistic elements have structure (can be broken down, analysed)
some linguistic elements seem to be processed as if they didn't have structure even if they appear to be analysable (stock phrases like _don't know_, _see you later_, _good on you, mate_); they behave as lexical items
rules of language can be viewed as processes or procedures, and lexical entries as places where (unpredictable) information is stored
rules of grammar allow you to construct and understand sentences which you haven't come across before, so languages are larger than the sum of their speakers' experiences
languages are open-ended and need special kinds of rules to describe them

Students might be asked to consider:

(1) What is a linguistic rule? How do prescriptive and descriptive rules differ?

(2) How is the lexical entry for certain words structured; e.g. SIGH, THINK, COW, SHEEP?

(3) What is the evidence that human beings operate with linguistic rules in acquiring and processing language?

(4) How can you show that human beings, when speaking, sometimes pull stored items out of their lexicon directly, and sometimes construct what they say in systematic ways, using these stored units to build bigger units?

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