Hi. Waiter Rant is my latest blog find. Read and laugh! (And then forever feel an obligation to tip well!)

Lately, I've been thinking some summarizing thoughts about my degree in Linguistics. A month and a half from now it will all be done. I will not be learning anything more about linguistics in an academic setting (barring the possibility of grad school). So, what do I know about linguistics and language?

I know it's really complicated. I know that for almost every detail that I know about it, there is a competing theory. I know some really good questions to ask about it. Here are a few:

1. Language Acquisition: How do we learn our first language? How do we listen to a sound wave and distinguish between the babbling idiots (parents) who are freaking out about how impossibly perfect their new baby (you) is and going "coochie coochie coo!" from actual words? Why are there some mistakes that ALL kids make (e.g. "I falled down" instead of "I fell down") and some mistakes that NO kids make (e.g. "That's the way it's." instead of "That's the way it is.")? Why do we sometimes have slightly different grammars? For instance, I can say "Are you coming with?", but my best friend cannot. She has to say "Are you coming with me?" or it sounds wrong. We grew up in the same area. Our parents are native speakers of English, from the same area. What gives? What was different?

2. Processing: How does our brain do all that language stuff so fast? Your brain has to parse a sound wave into consonants and vowels, put that into morphemes, put that into words, build a sentence, pay attention to intonation, figure out if the person talking to you is being sarcastic, figure out if they're alluding to something, think about your relationship with the person talking to you, think about the setting, EVERYTHING, all in about 300 milliseconds. And it does, everytime. Most of the time, it does it perfectly, and seemingly without effort. And that's not even half of what's involved in comprehension!

That's way too fast. We're having trouble just teaching a computer to do voice recognition to convert speech to text. We're barely even trying for comprehension. We're certainly not touching discourse-level comprehension yet. We talk about our brains like they are sophisticated computers, but they do things that we can't even fathom reproducing. They don't seem to work like computers at all, so what are we doing when we build these models that compare them to computers? (Well, okay, sort of like computers. But there's a lot more to it, and we're missing those parts.)

3. Syntax/Semantics Interface: We have this idea in Minimalism (current leading theory about linguistic syntax) that syntax has to be finished before semantics comes into play. This idea bothers me. I don't know where it came from, and I can see plenty of reasons for throwing it out. (Reasons against throwing it out? We would have to re-work a lot of stuff.) I mean, when I compose a sentence, I have an IDEA, and then I compose a SENTENCE STRUCTURE, and then I convert it to SOUND (or text, clearly). So wouldn't semantics come first? I would be happy with saying that these are parallel processes (syntax and semantics), but I don't like the idea of saying that we build a sentence structure, and then plug an idea into that structure. That seems really counter-intuitive, and there are a lot of cases which show that syntax is sensitive to certain semantic issues.

For instance, the sentence "The shit seems to have hit the fan" is grammatical. The sentence "The shit tried to hit the fan" is not, for purely semantic reasons. "The shit" in this instance is an idiom. That's a semantic thing. Yet these sentences (yes, these precise ones) come up in my Grammatical Theories class as a syntactic issue. Tell me once again how syntax is not aware of semantics? Clearly it must be. So where does this idea come from? Why is it a foundational assumption? What are we doing here?


Anyways, it's this type of stuff that we think about in Linguistics. Half the time I tell people what I'm studying, their first question is, "How many languages do you know?" It's not about languages. It's about language.

Okay, I'm off to read a billion articles about spelling. And I'm going to grumble about it because it is my birthday week and I'm allowed to grumble if I want to! HMPH!

(I secretly like grumbling. Don't tell anyone!)