Linguistic anthropology Pinker a cognitive developmental psychologist with a research emphasis on language and a theoretical emphasis on evolutionary psychology The Luxuriant and Flowing Hair Club for Scientists member Project Steve member http en wikipedia org wiki Project Steve On Colbert http www colbertnation com the colbert report videos 218577 february 11 2009 steven pinker Serious interview 7 mins http bigthink com ideas 24067 Language is an Instinct e evolved inna abili acquire language e adapta on ature xposure language bein sed by o ers e environment urture 0alking an1 nderstandino ers talk 2 3ombo e stu4 5e see organism6 being and doing Language Development is Based on Instincts Children are born with an ability to acquire the language s to which they were exposed at a critical time during development birth to 7 years this is why it is easy automatic to learn a new language prior to 7 and much more difficult after 7 Children are born with an ability to hear and produce sounds present in any of the world s languages when exposed to only the sounds present in one s immediate environment listening to others talk on a daily basis children retain the ability to hear and produce the local sounds and lose the ability to produce and even hear i e discern nonlocal sounds example from the Kung speech includes several click sounds outsiders are often unable to distinguish multiple kinds of clicks as if there were only one click letter These sounds are phonemes and morphemes Sound parts Phoneme one of the units of sound that gets strung together to form a morpheme roughly corresponding to the alphabet b f a z Also combinations ou sh Also nonEnglish alphabets or oe in German like push Also versions of the clicks even though the Hadza do not have an alphabet Morphemes combinations of phonemes in to meaningful word parts like un micro wave abil ity or very short words he Language Structure Parts of Speech A noun is NOT just a person place or thing e g an abstraction like square root is a noun Other parts of speech are not so simple either Parts of speech are tokens that obey particular formal rules nouns follow noun y rules our brains pay attention to these rules and parse words into categories that follow these rules words can be in multiple categories e g They sleep sleep verb and Last night s sleep was unrestful sleep noun modified by other words Universal Grammar Grammar the way sentences are structured Not a word chain device but a word tree device Roughly a sentence S includes a noun phrase NP a verb phrase VP and various modifiers This fundamental sentence structure appears in all languages i e it is universal but there are many variations This is UG Universal Grammar Ethnocentrism Jabbering as described by Leahy in First Contact film implies they were speaking in an inferior way Their jabbering is actually a very sophisticated language Less technologically advanced peoples do NOT have more simplistic languages Example Cherokee vs English English we Cherokee 4 different kinds of we you and I another person and I several other people and I you one or more other persons and I Cherokee is both more complex and more precise the extra pronouns have real meanings Black English Vernacular BEV vs Standard American English SAE 1960s educational psychologists thought that American black children had been so deprived culturally that they lacked true language and were confined to a non logical mode of expressive behavior Linguistic anthropologist Labov studied BEV he analyzed the grammar of BEV and found very sophisticated structure a grammar common to all who speak BEV the grammar is simply different than that of SAE Example He working Labov and BEV He working in BEV means that right now he is at work working He be working in BEV means that he generally works he is currently employed What about SAE He is working means BOTH of those things and you cannot distinguish between the two meanings without having to say additional things NOW which language seems more accurate and precise BEV and Ethnocentrism BEV s grammar rules are not absent deprived or nonlogical Until Labov most people thought that grammar rules were absent from BEV or wrong Further saying BEV and its rules are wrong is ethnocentric It is a myth that nonstandard dialects of English are grammatically deficient Pidgins Often related to colonialism and slavery When owners wanted workers slaves to work in a new region he would sometimes intentionally get people from varied regions who could not talk to each other they still had to cooperate for some tasks however and when they did they did so in the language of the colonizers Example the Papua New Guinean carriers in the film First Contact e g could you make out Masta Mike a pidgin term borrowed from English but that clearly had aspects of a Papua New Guinean language A pidgin is a choppy string of words borrowed from the colonizer s language which has very little grammar Pidgins Pidgins Lack consistent word order Lack prefixes and suffixes Use separate words to indicate tense Lack structure more complex than a simple clause e g no clauses embedded within clauses Use repetition to indicate plurality and no way to tell who did what to whom e g subjects and objects Pidgins can slowly become more complex over decades but sometimes something else happens Creoles When the laborers have children the children during the 0 7 critical period of development are exposed to the pidgin Exposure is to the pidgin of a caretaker who collectively took care of them away from their parents thus the children use common words and are surrounded by many children Bickerton A creole is a pidgin that filtered though the brains of children becomes a real language with consistent grammar this is because the children s minds are unadulterated by the language input of their parents and seeking grammar in development the children spontaneously impose it on the vocabulary of the pidgin Creoles There is an uncanny resemblance of the grammars of unrelated creoles around the world perhaps children in these circumstances impose an innate universal grammar on the pidgin s vocabulary With most people the universal grammar gets remolded by the specific preexisting grammar peculiar to those individuals in the immediate environment who are constantly speaking it Pidgins Creoles and Sign Language Bickerton s work was based on his reconstructions in the past can we see this in action Yes American Sign Language ASL does