Transcript: Video Lecture 2, Part 2   

Part 2 

Professor Kenji Hakuta: There is a person who has had a very important role in defining language and what ... and the way in which we see it.

Highlight 1: Understanding Noam Chomsky's influence on the study of linguistics 

Professor Hakuta: Noam Chomsky, I've got a picture of him right here and you'll see it on the slide, is a linguist at MIT, who in the nineteen ... late 1950s to the 1960s revolutionized the study of language and linguistics, and pointed out some of the things about properties of language that have important implications for the way in which we think about how children learn it, how adults or learners of a second language might approach the task. 

Highlight 2: Examining the properties of language identified by Chomsky 

Professor Hakuta: His contribution has been mostly in terms of understanding the properties of language, such that it causes you to ask, "Well, if language has this kind of property, and all people seem to learn it, then there must be something special about human beings which allows us to learn it." And he really pointed out the properties of it that are abstract, complex. And you'll be seeing lots of good examples of it in the videos for our problem. But I made a list. One of the highlights is its species-specific characteristic—that language, communication, is a property that is a ... is a behavior that you can see in nonhuman species. But that human language with its set of levels of analysis, like phonology, syntax, semantics, and so forth, that we just looked at, those aspects seem to be quite specific to humans, so one is that, you know, having language is a defining property, one of the important defining characteristics of being human. The other is what he called task specificity, or task ... that language is task-specific. There are many properties of language that are unique to language as compared to other things that humans are able to do. You know, we have a visual system. We have various systems for organizing symbols and meanings. But linguistic organization, in particular in his case, Chomsky spent a lot of time showing that phonological and grammatical syntactic aspects of language seemed to be quite specific and, and really be a ... it's a real property of human language that you cannot find in other aspects of human function. And so he characterized it as something more like, you ought to think of language as a mental organ, as being something like the liver, or whatever your favorite organ is. And that it is ... to understand language, you have to understand it for its own sake, very much like you're interested in studying the liver, you ought to study the liver and not the heart. Another characteristic that he highlighted was this abstractness, that in order to characterize the properties of human language, that the level of description is much more than saying, "There are nouns and here are the particular sounds," but that the way in which they get combined, and the constraints that work on how they can and cannot be combined, is abstract. And that it is, and by virtue of the abstractist argument for learning is that because it's so abstract, many of the properties of it cannot, or are very difficult to learn; that they must be something that children, when they acquire it, already have formed in their minds in some, in some form.  

Hierarchical and integrated, that is a property of language that we talked about, the levels of language, but I have a picture that shows us what is meant by hierarchical organization. And it is ... I took this from a famous book by Eric Lenneberg, called Biological Foundations of Language. And it shows that when you look at different aspects of language, and this just orders it from, from the order of muscles that are required in terms of your articulatory mechanisms for making the sounds of language, to the orders of phoneme sounds, order of morphemes, the particular units of meaning like words, orders of constituents like phrases up to the plan of a sentence. And presumably, it even goes higher up than that, that they are hierarchically integrated, so that you can see crisscrossing in that hierarchy, such that you really need to plan out the entire sentence before you can really execute the whole sentence. So in order to start even the first word of the sentence, you need to kind of know what the second, third, and fourth word down the line is. And you pretty much need to have a plan for the whole sentence as you start speaking. And so that's really what's meant by hierarchical and integrated.  

And, robust is another word that is, that would characterize language. Robust meaning that it seems to be acquired by children learning, or being exposed to language under a wide range of conditions. So robust is kind of a technical word in the study of learning, which basically means that even a small amount of exposure to it will lead to a fairly complete acquisition of it. And so that, that's a property of language that you'll see ample examples of this in the video that you'll be seeing.  

And finally, the condition of that it's biologically conditioned, that there seem to be certain biological aspects of it that, I guess, the best example of it would be localization in the brain. So there is a specific part of your brain, usually located in the left hemisphere for most great, most people, in which, if that area is damaged, for unfortunate ... various unfortunate reasons, you have difficulty in acquiring language. And so there are biological constraints on the learning of language. So those are properties of language that linguists, such as Noam Chomsky, have pointed out. 

Highlight 3: A revolution in linguistics: from an inductive study to a more deductive, hypothesis-driven study of language 

Professor Hakuta: And I guess in the, before Chomsky came along, linguistics consisted of the study of language in a very, I would call it a very inductive way. It's a way in which you, a linguist studying language, would get a large sample of speech from an informant. Let's say you were trying to study a language that has never been described before, you take a large sample and then you sift through the words and try to come up with the patterns observed in the words and to try to make sense of it. That form of linguistics was replaced by a much more deductive, hypothetical, hypothesis testing form of linguistics, replaced by the kinds of characteristics that I just described. Chomsky basically said that linguistics, the goal of linguistics is not just to account for all the language that can be observed, but to account for all possible uses of the language. So as a linguist, you might sit around and try to account for not just the corpus, but for your intuitions about what makes a sentence grammatical or not grammatical. And it basically had huge implications for the study of children acquiring language, the study of linguistics for its own sake.  

So in the problem set that you'll be asked to do, you'll be looking at a couple of videos that talk about this revolution in linguistics, which is more or less persisted through the last 40 years or so, and to extend from that to the study of second-language acquisition. We'll ask you to read a few prominent articles in second-language acquisition. And then once you've had a chance to read that and come back, we'll discuss more aspects of second-language acquisition and how they, many of the ideas there come and are derived most immediately from the study of first-language acquisition. But then that in turn was heavily influenced by the way in which Noam Chomsky and the linguists that he worked with have influenced the study of language acquisition. 

Highlight 4: Language universals: languages are similar by varying in predictable ways 

Professor Hakuta: I guess if I were to try to characterize the way in which Chomsky described and characterized human language, I would characterize it by the following sentence: "Languages are similar by varying in predictable ways." That, let me just read that again: "Languages are similar by varying in predictable ways." And so what I really meant by that, Chomsky says there are language universals. But what he means by that is not that all languages fit a mold that puts ... gives them the same pattern, for example, of constituents, subject, verb, object, but rather that languages differ from each other. But the ways in which they differ are constrained by universal properties of language. So they vary, but are predictable, and this theory predicts the ways in which languages vary. So, and I think that's, I happen to personally agree with that characterization of language. I think that those ... a language that does not conform to this particular model would not be considered a natural language, and that humans would have a hard time acquiring such languages. But that also tells you that in the case of second-language acquisition, it's very possible that while we may not realize it, languages that seem very, very different from each other may actually be, feel quite similar to learners, because of these universal constraints.