Chapter 3 of "Language Instinct"

I have always heard of "Language Instinct". I briefly browsed a few pages in the library before, but the translation of the previous edition was so awkward that I had no choice but to give up. I heard that there was a new translator some time ago, so I quickly started working on it. I have to say that the translator seems to be young but his translation is still very accurate.

When I started this blog, I had already reached the fourth chapter of the book. I was too lazy to summarize all the previous chapters, so I just started from the third chapter (the first two chapters) which officially enters the "dry stuff" of linguistics. Chapter 2 is to prove the instinctive nature of language, and Chapter 2 involves general linguistics categories such as language characteristics, language ability and language performance).

After introducing how humans use the mechanism of "mental language" (similar to Chomsky's "universal grammar" theory) to learn and use new languages, Pinker took the opportunity to move into syntax. ) field, further analyzing how the mind forms language.

Two concepts are mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, which explain why humans can assemble thousands of sentences in language. The first is the "arbitrariness of signs" proposed by Saussure, that is, the sound and meaning in language are completely arbitrarily matched; the second is the "infinite application of finite fields" proposed by William Humboldt, which refers to the fact that we have a set of A compilation system that can transform words and ideas into each other is called "generative grammar". The relationship between generative grammar here and several similar concepts mentioned above: psychological grammar and universal grammar is that generative grammar is approximately equal to psychological grammar, or it is a kind of psychological grammar with specific functions, and it is aimed at individuals. Universal Grammar is aimed at groups.

The concept of "finite field" was mentioned earlier. For the "finite field" of grammar, it is a "discrete combination system": the grammar system contains limited "parts" that are randomly arranged and combined Larger systems can be formed. This behavior is the so-called "infinite application", and this process relies on the "symbolic arbitrariness" of language.

Unfortunately, our minds belong to another kind of system - the mixed system. In the mixed system, various elements are mixed, scattered, and mixed evenly, losing their individual characteristics (such as a bowl of beaten egg paste). The reason why the mind is such a system involves the concept of "categorization" in cognitive linguistics. I think I will mention it later in this book, but I won't go into it here.

So after talking for a long time, what Pinker wants to talk about next is what kind of mechanism exists in our language that can connect the two systems.

Of course, Pinker still has a lot of nonsense to say before officially entering into the discussion of syntax. He mentioned one of the most primitive and basic discrete combination systems - the "string machine", and simulated the process of the string machine combining words into sentences. A joke on Weibo reads, "Wang Feng's lyrics creation process is to randomly select and arrange combinations of words such as 'wandering', 'life', 'ideal' and 'anger'." It is a kind of "string machine" working mode. So simply speaking, the string machine relies on its own logic to extract words from word lists of different categories to form sentences.

Pinker spent a lot of time talking about such a bunch of seemingly unrelated things just to prove one point: the human language mechanism is much more powerful than the artificial language mechanism. For example, according to the logic of the string machine, you can never create a completely ungrammatical sentence like "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" as an example in the book. And faced with complex sentence patterns, the string machine is at a loss.

This difference is due to the characteristics of language and is also a reflection of language characteristics.

In this chapter, Pinker's explanation of the theory is gradually in-depth. Let’s start with traditional syntax.

When humans assemble sentences, they use phrases as units. In traditional syntax, a sentence (S) consists of a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP). It sounds very subversive, "Don't lie to me because I haven't read much. How could a sentence be so complicated? It only consists of two things." But if you think about it carefully, you will find that it is indeed the case. Even complex sentences can be simplified to This form is why a sentence can have no object but must have a subject and predicate, such as "I overslept", "日ご饭を食べました", "I fuck".

So the sentence expression is:

S→NP VP (→ means "composed of")

The noun phrase consists of an optional It consists of determiners, an unlimited number of adjectives and a noun, that is:

NP→ (det) A* N

The verb phrase is similar, consisting of a verb plus a noun phrase Composition:

VP→V NP

These few principles are enough to create tons of simple sentences. But the problem is that language cannot only have simple sentences, so this phrase system stipulates where and what can be inserted, so that sentences can be continuously extended. In the process of continuous extension, ambiguity will be caused because a word can be attributed to multiple phrases, or a phrase can be attributed to multiple sentences.

In order to discuss NP, VP must first understand what is a noun and what is a verb. The nouns and verbs discussed here are not about word meaning categories, not parts of speech. Word meaning categories correspond to the concepts represented by words. Just like a fish is still a fish after being boiled, stewed or fried, and the squirrel is fried. The same concept can be expressed as different parts of speech, but its meaning category is still the same. So what the noun expresses can actually be an action (His dying made her very sad.); and what the verb expresses is not always an action (I engaged myself with this goddamn blog-writing stint. Engage is not an actual action issued by I ).

After this point is clarified, we can start to discuss the composition of the phrase

The meaning of the phrase depends on the meaning of the central word. A phrase has its center of gravity, and the center of gravity is the central word. When the central phrase changes, the meaning of the phrase also changes. "This is an uncensored GV" and "This is a coded GV" both talk about GV, while "You are filming a coded GV" talks about the action of "shooting".

Having a central phrase can point to a single concept, but this is not enough. Therefore, "arguments" give phrases the ability to describe the relationship between a series of objects and the central language. For example, the argument in "A GV you shot" is "you", and the relationship between you and the central language is the relationship between shooting and being photographed.

The central phrase and the argument are grouped together to form a secondary phrase under a phrase, which is called "X-bar", and X is the name of the phrase.

There is something similar to an argument called a modifier. For example, in the phrase "As a straight man, you took a GV", "As a straight man" is a modifier, but the core of the phrase still lies in you and the GV you took. Whether you are a straight man is just a question. Just no information. In addition to guessing based on feeling, you can also guess scientifically to distinguish between the two. As mentioned earlier, the central phrase and the argument will stick together for warmth and no interference is allowed. Therefore, if the insertion of elements between two components of a phrase will cause the meaning of the phrase to change, it means that they are secondary phrases, and the component of the secondary phrase that is not the central language is the argument. The reason why this judgment method is scientific is that the relationship between the central language and the argument is that one is an actor and the other is a role. They form the "what", while modifiers describe the "how". How about an actor playing a role first, and then the role. So Pinker also calls arguments "role-players"

The last component of the phrase is a deictic (SPEC, short for "Specifier"). It corresponds to the subject in traditional grammar, and the subject is also regarded as a special role in syntax, because in many cases the subject is the initiator of the action in the phrase. But noun phrases can also have subjects.

The above four phrase components are 1) center, 2) argument, 3) modifier, and 4) subject. Although the examples are all noun phrases, they are also applicable to verb phrases. Because of this similarity, syntacticians have further simplified phrase expressions, combining verbs and noun phrases into "X phrases":

XP→(SPEC) X-bar YP*

A phrase consists of an optional subject, plus an X-bar and any number of modifiers YP.

X-bar→X ZP*

An X-bar phrase consists of a central word X, plus any number of arguments.

The research object of linguistics is, after all, all languages. The arrangement of words in different languages ??may be completely opposite, for example, in English a verb comes before its object, while in Japanese the verb comes after its object. So linguists modified these two rules and added a pair of curly brackets {} on the right side of the expression, indicating that the elements within the brackets can be swapped arbitrarily. In specific applications, just add specific applicable conditions, which are called parameters. This theory is Chomsky’s latest research result and is called “principle-parameter theory”.

I am almost dying as I write this. I will talk about the rest next time.

Just sauce.