Is "Universal Grammar" really as wrong as it sounds?
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- Опубліковано 4 бер 2024
- language learning youtube loves to hate on Noam Chomsky's "universal grammar" but is it really as wrong as it sounds?
Edited with Gling AI: bit.ly/46bGeYv
Patreon: www.patreon.com/languagejones
#languagelearning #linguistics #grammar #polyglot
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I'm interested in the intro to linguistics
Me too
Me too!@@DoughBrain
Me three!
I'd lovee to see this too!
Me too!
As a card-carrying, bona fide Regular People, I'm very interested in the Intro to Linguistic for Mes
"What's the singular for people?"
I need to remember to use this comment in the intro!
We used Chomsky’s sentence tree around 25 years ago in a company that developed machine translation software. The source language was parsed (analysed) based on its Chomsky-tree structure from the top sentence level down to its smallest entities - the individual words by monolingual rules. This structure was than transformed by rules into the grammatically correct tree structure of the target language. We only used English French, German, Italien, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, and French German, so no language with completely different language systems. German, due to its very different word order, was acctually the most difficult lanugage because it required a 100% correct analysis of the source language and made use of preposition attachment and other interesting things to make sure semantic units were not ripped apart when creating the correct word order for the target side. It was a brilliant system for its time, but also proof how complex languages are and how difficult it is to capture all of it with a rule-based system.
Obviously, no serious language translation company today allows Chomsky-like ideas into their computers.
I don’t know any German but I would expect a machine to look at a long German word and occasionally divide it into sub words incorrectly with results that are hilarious nonsense to a human. In fairness, I have done this with Hebrew many times, such as wondering why Betzalel was named “the onion of G-d” instead of realizing it was “in the shadow of G-d”
@@wafelsen The old MT systems used dictionaries. If a word was not in these dictionaries, the systems could not translate it and definitely would not attempt to break it up into meaningful snippets. This would have slowed down the translation process. Our system ( and I assume most if not all of the systems of other companies) used an embedded complex morphology analyzer that recognized all possible inflected word forms on the source side and created the corresponding forms on the target side as final step. The dictionaries contained only the uninflected base forms such as singular forms, infinitives and uncontracted forms - plus codes (morphology) and lots of tags (grammatical, semantic and syntactic information) used by the engine and the rule system.
@@wafelsenflashbacks to me thinking that the "Gamali-" part of "Gamaliel" meant "my camel"...
I wonder why you didn't stick to languages within ONE language family. You went for two. I think because they are European?
Intro to Linguistics for regular people, please
As a computer science student and language enthusiast I thoroughly enjoyed this video. You timed this great for me as I'm taking Discrete mathematics where I've learned about Regular Languages from a math perspective AND I'm taking a class on compilers where I'm learning about syntax trees and writing code to generate them based on grammar I've defined. I'm loving the content that dives a little into linguistic academia in concise interesting videos. I'm definitely interested in hearing more about generative language theory as I don't have a firm grasp on it or why it exists.
Regarding the answering the phone bit at the end of the video, it reminded me of this joke: A brilliant Black student from New York was awarded a scholarship to Harvard. On his first day on campus at Harvard, he approached a white student and asked "Can you tell me where the library is at?" and the white student replied, "At Harvard, we don't end a sentence with a preposition." The Black student then asked, "Can tell me where the library is at, asshole?"
I'm glad you mentioned the branding problem at the end. That explains a lot. So let's just say that my entire grad school experience was three years of back-to-back branding debacles regarding anything related to Chomsky.
Oh man more computer science content please, I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants to see how you modeled words in Python. Plus there are probably a lot of computer science nerds in your audience :D
Computer science! Or at least computer pay the bills.
Yes, this is me. I like languages. I love computers. I love math.
If I hadn't luckily discovered my incompatibility with academia as an undergrad, I might've ended up somewhere in the confluence of those studying generative linguistics and/or NLP right around the time that LLMs began blowing up...
Eh. For the best.
yay for the computer science and linguistic theoretical crossovers
I was surprised, too. Language enthusiast, but also programmer and math nerd.
This channel feels so relevant to any grammar thing I'm currently thinking about. I feel like my mind is being read or something. I was thinking about this yesterday. Great video
I am also super interested in the intro to Linguistics!! Great video btw, thanks for clearing up a lot of the confusion I had around UG!
I read the the Chomsky book that was mentioned in this video in an upper division linguistics class. The first time I read it was really confusing, as is the case with many academic writings, especially ones from philosophers. I'm glad people like you are here to read through it fully and share your understanding with us because it provides more discussion on the topics these academics talk about. To me, the more we discuss these ideas, the more minds we can get working on them and the faster it will be to realize a solution. I think it's really beautiful that you make these kinds of videos and share this on the internet. Thank you for the great work!
So great to see this video. I had a similar experience with Chomsky in linguistics and cognitive science (misunderstanding and dismissing the straw man definitions of UG or LAD, working through the topic myself, realizing what he was actually positing, finding his work invaluable and awesome), and I’ve been butting heads with social scientists (my native field is anthropology) about it for 15 years. Love your channel!
That was interesting! I’d love an intro to linguistics course that provides a structured explanation. Thanks for the great content!
Great stuff! Pauses are immensely important for your viewers, especially when the content has any level of complexity. More often than not I feel the need to speed up a video, but you're the first person I've ever felt I needed to slow down or have to rewatch. Would love to hear your reasoning against the naysayers, perhaps another video idea or so.
I loved that BC joke. Please keep these videos coming. I love these.
Part of UG is the idea that there are a certain set of universials which are all either debunked (like all languages can form subclauses which isn't true, some don't do that) or so vague that they can mean anything (like every sentence has a subject and each time you find one without, they will say something like "well, it's not expressed" or point to random shit to be the subject. One language was analyzed by 2 guys and they came to different conclutions what the subject is).
I beliefe that the ability for language is innate, that doesn't make the Chomskian generative grammar true. It's a model and as a smart guy once said "All models are wrong but some models are usefull". Take that from a computer scientist who worked on my master's thesis on a very not Chomsky syntax theory (called Role and Reference Grammar).
The problem with UG is that it's totally unfalsifiable. It's not a scientific theory. Also Chomsky is a hack, but that's not strictly related.
There is no evidence in any field that the universal elements of human language are distinct from the definitional elements of language as a concept.
I find your criticism of null subjects to be very weak. UG never needed to have mandatory subjects; in fact the EPP was only proposed in the 1980s, as I assume you know. Even if every sentence in all languages we know of only had overt subjects, the EPP/obligatory subjects wouldn't HAVE to be part of UG. More recently, Chomsky (2013, 2015) even did away with the Extended Projection Principle.
Besides, I don't see how misidentifying the subject of a language has any bearing on UG. It doesn't even mean the language doesn't have subjects (whether overt or not).
@@amazingcaio4803 I did not know that EPP was a later development. I never even heard the term but I guess it's the same as obligatory subjects.
My point is that all the universals Chomsky proposed are refuted or irrefutable. And my broader point being that UG has a lot more baggage than the simple statement "Language is innate".
That said, I wasn't referring to pro drop (like Spanish "te quiero") or dummy subjects (like English "it is raining"). Here I see that the subject is not expressed or semantically empty. But what about German impersonal passive ("Hier wird nicht spielt", word for word: "Here is not played").
And let me rephrase my other point: If two Western linguists analyze a very not Western language and come to different conclusions what the subject is, maybe "subject" is a Western concept that doesn't fit with foreign languages.
The syntax theory I worked with tried very hard not to be Western centered and here is an article why it is so cool: www.computerworld.com/article/2929085/blame-chomsky-for-non-speaking-ai.html
The article didn't age too well and the wikipedia article isn't too long but it has some links.
@@twipameyer1210 I do get some of your points. I also dislike that some claims people make are so wild they're essentially unfalsifiable. Not only would this be unscientific, but it would also go against one of the central goals of UG - to restrict language so that it explains language acquisition.
There is indeed a lot more to UG than innateness. I don't even think innateness itself is controversial; language acquisition must ultimately be encoded in our genes. What's controversial is whether there is a domain-specific language faculty. While hypothesing its existence can easily lead to speculation, I do believe it is a worthy line of inquiry.
I don't think that nowadays 'subject' has a formal definition in Chomskyan generative grammar. At most it's generally used as a synonym for the 'specifier of T(ense)', which is a theory-internal concept. This is hardly a Western concept (the obligatoriness of subjects, OTOH, could be) and people doing generative grammar actually like studying other languages so that they can gather enough data to refine the theory of UG. Hungarian was partially used to support the DP (determiner phrase) hypothesis and data from Chinese, Japanese, and Serbo-Croatian helped refine proper government and the Empty Category Principle. Chomsky also once proposed the configurational parameter based on data from Japanese. Even if the concepy of subjects (and/or the idea that subjects are obligatory) were Western-specific and didn't apply to other languages, this would mean that our analysis is biased, but I still wouldn't think we should abandon the idea of a universal grammar, especially because that's incidental to UG (there's no a priori reason for our account of UG to include subjects).
Regarding subjects specifically, the general idea is that T must have a specifier, so the focus of inquiry isn't on the subject (read, the specifier of T), but on T itself (why does it need a specifier?). Most accounts don't really restrict the subject to a specific kind of element (any restriction is usually derivable from other principles or is lexically determined), so the subject could be a null pronoun, an expletive, or any other type of constituent (e.g. a locative, as in your example in German). Sure, looks can be deceiving and one could argue 'hier' isn't even the subject of your example sentence, based on empirical evidence or theory-internal reasons. That's why syntactitians may have different analyses. In fact, isn't that expected or even desired?
In the end, it doesn't mean UG is refuted or irrefutable. Many universals still seem to be true. One example is Lasnik and Saito's (1984) restrictions on syntactic Wh-movement. (Their account may be outdated, but the empirical phenomenon still holds true, as far as I know.)
Edit: BTW I personally have nothing against other theories of grammar and I don't deny their usefulness.
@@amazingcaio4803 Let me first thank you for this conversion! I enjoy it very much and think it's very fruitful, especially compared to other conversations on the internet.
Let me now reiterate my claim: All models are wrong but some models are useful. UG is good at explaining some things, other theories explain or visualize other things better. Some Chomskyans will claim that UG is literally objectively what happens in our brains and strawmaning non-UG-linguists in saying they don't believe language is innate. That's what I felt the video did and that was what I was attacking. I don't think you think so, so we are good.
And to lay my biases open: I'm more a computer scientist than a linguist. I did some basic linguistic lectures with Chomskyan professors and wrote my master thesis in the computer linguistics department with a professor who hated Chomsky so much that he unironically claimed that language is just a cognitive ability like any other. My (Chomskyan) syntax professor was so fond of the idea that the subject is universal that I had the impression that it's central to UG. I'm glad that isn't the case apparently. I find myself somewhere between these 2 worlds.
Would you consider doing a video on the Pirahã language and associated academic controversies?
I’ve been wary of it, but I think I should
@@languagejones6784 Address Everett's claim that recursion is not the base on which language is constructed, including his claim that Piraha has no past tense
Would watch. I have had to explain UG too many times because of this controversy.@@languagejones6784
@@gordonbgrahamDon’t get me wrong, Everett might still be proved one day to be a hack or a bigot, but at this point no one can prove him wrong. And unlike Chomsky, he is making claims that can be refuted, meanwhile Chomsky just argues that UG is about biology, makes no predictions and is not a theory but a field of study, all which can’t be proven wrong.
@@impendio The lack of a concept of the past and number (other than a little or a lot) no words for colour and the apparent absence of recursion in Piraha (something that would counter Chomsky's claim vis a vis recursion) seems to suggest language is not fixed in its conceptual properties. That language is biological can't be refuted is certain, but that doesn't address the issue of recursive grammar which Chomsky is a proponent of.
I really like your approach. Please do make that course.
That.. Sure helped me to clarify some stuff about Chomsky's work that were hard to wrap my head around while I was doing my bachelor's. Thanks
Great video! In linguistics at Cambridge, we studied principles and parameters in intro to syntax in first year, and later years it got compretely overhauled by minimalism and other approaches. Coming from a biological science background (I studied neurology and neuroanatomy) I’ve always been super sceptical of UG and only managed to reconcile what I know about cognitive science with what linguists from largely humanities and philosophical backgrounds refer to as “the language faculty” by describing UG as our innate bias for language acquisition in the vaguest way possible. The fundamental principle underlying syntax is recursion, which is what leads to hierarchical structures. I was taught that human language is recursive and that is what distinguishes it from other animal sounds. It’s only after i graduated that I learned humans think and process things recursively, which begs the question of whether it’s because of our recursive perception that we developed recursive language or if recursive language helped up perceive other things recursively. Super interesting stuff!
Also a cantab, had the same experience here (though I came to these conclusions during undergrad). I've ended up working on paradigmatic morphology which doesn't really fit such a compositional theory of language easily (contra Distributed Morphology and morphemic theory more generally), so I don't even really interact with Chomsky's work much these days, but my view is that Chomsky's work features 1 a confusion between description and explanation and 2 successive rounds of having less substantial things to say (e.g. minimalism has a much-reduced language facultt relative to P&P and G&B).
As a linguistics enthusiast and conlanger, the concept of universal grammar is interesting to me because I like thinking about the earliest limits of language development in prehistory: how did people go from single word utterances to tell each other about food, predators, or danger, to complete sentences? Is the process of stringing words together in a way that creates meaning something that evolved within our brains, or is it a social construct? How much of language is instinct, and how much is learned?
As a conlanger, I'm often amazed and delighted when my made-up words that I put together in a made-up sentence structure can still produce meaning, in some very interesting ways. If there wasn't some kind of basal syntax deep within our brains, conlanging would be very different, if not impossible.
One could also start to study Language/languages, not only as they developed during millions of years amonge primates, but also as how a mother tongue develops from the bond between mother and child, from the baby's perspective. The last months in the womb the unborn child hears both music and speach and other sounds, thus it is familiarized with the world of sound surrounding it. I have heard babies use sentence melodies, cadences, both declamatory and questions mode, when they could not talk and walk yet. They also recognize music and imitate melodies and entertain themselves . And I have heard babies take turns in interaction with their mother, using syllables of sounds and minimal pauses, as if they were words. Babies were in such situations very pleased with their sounds and the interaction they could bring about, ready to repeat the situation again and again. Patient mothers gently mold these sounds into (let's call it) a prelanguage, and then into the baby's mother tongue. Dads can do this, too, if they are around enough. Often parents understand the baby, and later the toddler, when nobody else does. Many cute situations come up, of entertaining value for the adult, too, but also misunderstandings - which are *meaningful* experiences, as part of learning how rules regulate language use. These foundations could contribute to explaining how come our languages are not so logical as binary sequences, instead there is a haphazardness to words and their forms within the sound system of the mother tongue (and the anatomy of toddlers).
But Chomskian grammar (assuming we're talking about generative grammar, which is a grammatical theory, and not the pseudoscientific innate syntax hypothesis which is frequently referred to as "universal grammar") has nothing to do either with how languages work in our brains nor with how they historically developed. Syntax is mainly a pathway to linearizing expressions that initially mirror our thinking that is primarily associative in nature: thoughts don't have hierarchy, they don't have constituents, they don't even have any linear order (even though they are experienced linearly due to the nature of time); they only have concepts and relations between them, relations between sets of related concepts - those can be active, patientive, causative, instrumentative, spatial, temporal, etc., - i.e. meaningful relations, not abstract-structural. Generative grammar is an abstract model that is supposed to be able to predict, mostly based on the structure of linguistic expressions, whether those linguistic expressions would be considered structurally possible within a given language - i.e. it is supposed to predict whether a person *perceiving* the text would consider it *structurally* inappropriate, and if they would, it is supposed to tell us the structural principle that was violated. Generative grammar does not and was never meant to predict nor explain the way syntactic structure is arrived at either in use or in historical development.
Some structural patterns are obviously there, just like, for example, every walking animal moves its feet the same way as the other animals of the same species and the same age, even though they are free to move any other way they are physically capable of - they just won't be doing that most of the time, as long as the one of the millions of biomechanical alternatives is noticeably more comfortable in the long run; animals just have places they are aiming to get to, and all they do is step, step, step, etc., without having any "overall way of moving feet" in mind. With languages it also seems that this structure of speech isn't something that is ever the goal, but something that emerges on its own, out of the systematicity characteristic to the expressive means of a language - to the lexical units and their various counterparts within the lexicon, to the means for expressing predicative relations, semantic modification, communicative relations, rhetorical relations an so on - the systematicity that is quite necessary to ensure the possibility of unambiguously reconstructing the initial conceptual content that had led to this very structure that is observed (i.e. the systematicity, loss of which would lead to the impossibility to consistently "interpret" the resulting linguistic expressions).
It's not the structural principles that lead the development of speech complexity - those principles aren't there yet, when speech never reaches any complexity: the language stays incapable of expressing that as long as the society that generates that language stays culturally incapable of the necessary verbal coherence - there are human languages that don't have any means of precisely expressing most kinds of relations between concepts, not even the predicate-subject-object relations. It is the cognitive development and cultural "fossilization" (roughly speaking, concept → myth → habit → tradition) that gradually lead to the development of this structure that we observe and that we can describe using the notion of generative grammar.
The linguist Guy Deutscher wrote a popular linguistics book all about how language development could have happened in prehistory: it is titled _The Unfolding of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s Greatest Invention_
As a computer scientist myself (although not doing any computational linguistics), I too am interested in the intro to linguistics course. I am fairly good at English grammar and have a lot of professional writing experience (not just technical writing, but communicative/persuasive writing and creative writing as well), and love what you do here. I too see the overlap with Comp Sci, and with my love of computer language theory, I often talk about similarities and differences between computer languages and spoken languages with programming students. Thanks for what you do, and I look forward to more.
Came for the linguistics, stayed for the academic in-fighting stories.
I have LOADS of those
The story about how you started to reinvent computational context-free grammars sounds like exactly the sort of rabbit hole I'd fall into 😆. I could totally see myself doing something like that. This video is right up my alley and honestly, so is this whole channel
Thank you!! I saw a grad student doing parse trees at the LGBT Center and learned more in a 5 min discussion than I had understood from 8 years of Spanish education! I was only able to comprehend and fully parse foreign language when I was given some basic operators for structuring how the modules worked together. After taking a syntax class with Beatrice Santorini, I picked up Japanese quite easily and the sensei even commented on how rapidly I understood grammatical distinctions such as the は/が topic vs subject marker or how adjectives seemed to be either fundamental noun-ish or were akin to a verb for having that quality. They appeared to either be noun-ish + the copula word that conjugated tense, mood, aspect, negation, and conjunction or they were almost quasi verbs which then conjugated normally. That structure paralleled a similar verbifiying structure that was "to do" + a noun: rugby → play rugby, study → to study, marriage → to marry/(get) married. Once we were shown adjectives as they conjugated for the past, the pattern jumped out at me there at some level were nouns you were like and nouns you do or verbs. Which opened a whole backdoor to the philsophy and all these meditations on what is red and are qualities of the object and if not what "are" they. I never understood why we discussed before then... Syntax changed my life (as I've mentioned before 😳)
Awesome discussion! Many thanks, from a guy who majored in Computer Science and German.
Definitely interested in that intro course duder.
Very interested in the Intro to Linguistics class. I'm a computer software programmer, with a ton of Python experience, and when I was in school in the 80s, took Intro to Linguistics, and Computers and Linguistics...and when I dropped out, my Linguistics prof called me on the telephone (!) to ask if I was ok. I was to take her Transformational Grammar class, and sorely miss not having done that.
Thanks for your work Dr Jones. I tried to read Chomsky when I was a teenager in the 1970's. I got a bit lost, but I like your programming analogy. I have always been a language fan.
Most people know Chomsky as a political writer. His talks are so hard to get into, that once when he gave separate "politics" and "linguistics" talks at the University of Maryland in the 1990s, I joined a bunch of people for the linguistics talk, where the Q&A was all politics questions.
Chomsky's theories about universal grammar have stood up very well over the decades, but within linguistics there are camps that favor his theories and those who are critical. When I worked for AAAS and Science magazine in the late 1990s, I helped plan the annual conference. We always had to make sure that programs in the linguistics track represented both camps.
I would definitely watch an introduction to linguistics. Keep us posted!
As an English speaker I think I learned more about English grammar while learning French grammar than anywhere else. I may have forgotten what English grammar was actually covered in what our schools called the language arts class, but when the French teacher was talking about using the subjunctive with the past perfect in French, I know it was a revelation for my understanding of English. English grammar was always "that does not sound right" or "that sounds right" or even "that sounds better".
Per Goethe: “Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen” - "Those who don't know a foreign language know nothing of their own."
When I studied Russian in school one of the best books I had was called English Grammar for Students of Russian. I think there are versions for several other languages as well.
@@joshrotenberg5872--- YES!!! I recommend that series for everyone who wants to learn a language covered by that series. There's even 'Spanish Grammar for Students of English' written in Spanish.
As someone old enough to have learned to read through phonics and had English grammar explicitly taught in grade school and later got a master's in teaching ESL, I can tell you that 2/3 to 3/4 of English/ESL teachers actually have a very poor grasp of both English grammar and English spelling.
I think that a nuanced approach to language learning is important. An overwhelming majority of languages are observed and not constructed. Therefore, the so-called "rules" are just someone's observations, and giving their opinions on those observations. For example, as far as I know, the first academic mention of a "modal verb" was by Leonard Bloomfield in the 1933 book Languages (thus making the idea of a "modal verb" itself less than 100 years old). However, what is "deemed" a modal verb was basically established by Quirk and Greenbaum in 1973. Since then, many have questioned whether there should be a finite list of modals, like Quirk and Greenbaum propose, or if the broad definition of what a modal verb is leaves room for interpretation. Is "have to" considered a model verb, since it sets out to do what other clearly defined modal verbs (like 'must') already do? Does "need to" fall into that same category?
Now, what I mentioned might be a uniquely English problem, since we don't have an "English Academy" regulator. Still, even those regulators such as the l 'Académie française, while regulating the language, are still doing it through the interpretation of it's members.
So a good description of UG is that when it comes to languages, they are all basically the same on some deep grammatical level?
Just like mammals are all basically the same on some deep biological level? Just set a few parameters (fly/no fly) (lay eggs/no lay eggs)
Of course, the analogy fails somewhat, because mammals came from a common ancestor, so we expect mammals to have lots in common.
as a biologist and linguist, i have difficulties accepting UG (although your python-related input is quite interesting). instead of language capacity (or language organ or else), there is rather something like language readiness, a synergy of different older neural networks, which took over the processing of language, but it has not evolved to be language-specific (although it may later evolve to be more efficient). the statistical learning approach seems to me to be a more plausible way the language works, as advocated by morten h. christiansen et al. it would be interesting to know where you stand on this approach 😁
Your research sounds promising. But I'm sure I'm not alone wondering what kind of PhD program trained biologists AND linguists.
Not my field. Just curious.
But Chomsky doesn't claim it evolved to be language specific. His claim is actually very similar to yours. There was some specific evolutionary change at some point that allowed other neural functions to click together and express this latent capacity as language. As more and more people spoke and languages evolved and changed, statistically, more and more and more different possibile arrangements of the computationally restricted possibilities of language emerged. Since language is a layer cake of different computacional systems of various constraints-pragmatics on top of semantics on top of syntax on top of morphology on top of phonology (itself constrained by the physical limits of phonetics)-you have an almost infite possibility of configutions. It's quite an elegant and simple solution to the problem of the vaaaast diversity of languages that exists.
@@RobespierreThePoofyou have to study them separately :-) although, i think it would be quite beneficial for linguists to combine their training with the biological one, especially in evolutionary biology, as there are plenty of shared fields of interest - e.g. population genetics. i started with biochemistry through molecular and system biology, and after some time, in fact, almost 20 yrs later, i went for general linguistics. my major interests in lingo are cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics.
@@Eruntano42 from the biological point of view, the evolution of the language and the respective neural structures has to be more stepwise. e.g., arbib et al. hypothesise that there were at least seven distinguished steps (synergies of new neural networks) and, gradually, certain forms of language communication appeared, which were much simpler than contemporary human language but still helped to survive in more and more complicated human societies. the thesis of "pragmatics on top of semantics on top of syntax on top of morphology on top of phonology" is, according to this kind of study, not necessarily valid, e.g., pragmatics does not require syntax or morphology in the earliest assumed forms of language. it is still in the early development stage in all these directions, but what seems to be a sign of good science is that they can explain more than previous hypotheses.
The language acquisition literature is very much based on specific universal grammar mechanisms, and they are more productive than statistical learning.
These videos are so, so good. Your channel is a breath of fresh air in the sea of bold claims which is language youtube.
absolutely interested in the intro to linguistics for regular people class!
thank you so much I needed this video! please, do the intro!
"Tin foil hat crazy" that about sums up everything Chomsky has said since his highly imaginative naming of grammar types (concepts well known in the programming world to many before him, albeit unpublished) as type 0, type I, type 2, type 3.
Chomsky on Cambodia
Great video thanks! What would you recommend for someone who dabbles in linguistics, but needs a nice overview of the main ideas and concepts in language learning and acquisition? A nice, readable book for example? Asking for a friend.
Needless to say: yes to the intro in linguistics
Finally an entertaining and concise linguistics video that delves into the various aspects of theory. I'd appreciate more of the sort
Definitely interested in the intro linguistics course.
what are your thoughts on the work done by Adele E. Goldberg, Michael Tomasello and others into usage-based / construction-based theory of language?
UG is very interesting, but I disagree with Chomsky on many of his other opinions outside of linguistics haha. Super interested in the course you're putting together here on UA-cam. Really looking forward to watching it!
Salve D. Jones, sono uno studente di filosofia italiano che ha intenzione di fare uno scambio Erasmus in Germania tra un anno. Questo vuol dire che seguirò lezioni di filosofia in tedesco e vivrò in germania per alcuni mesi. Per poterlo fare, però devo aver prima raggiunto il livello B2 di tedesco (una volta arrivato lì si frequentano dei corsi intensivi per mettersi a pari con la lingua). Io ho appena iniziato a studiare tedesco, quindi volevo chiedere secondo lei come posso fare, visti gli obiettivi che ho, per raggiungere il livello B2 in un anno. Grazie dell'aiuto.
I was a ling major at Maryland in the mid-80s. The first course after baby-Ling (this is a phoneme) was basically a semester on the evidence and motivation for UG. It was a VERY Chompskian school. My professors always pronounced Noam to rhyme with Rome :-) I have no idea if that was right, since they had pretty strong accents of their own! And then in my computer science classes (dual major). there was Chomsky again, of course.
You can’t escape!
'Gnome Chomsky' made me laugh, but familiarity does tend to make names sound more like plausible native words. Not a lot of native English vocab with an o-a transition :)
@@rasmusn.e.m1064--- I don't think I've heard his name pronounced any other way than 'gnome'. Then again we're talking grad school linguistics in the early '90's.
@@ak5659 I'm not a native English speaker, but I typically pronounce his first name in English something like [ˈnɔ͡ʊ̆ˌəm], which I perceive as my realisation of /ˈnɔ͡ʊ̆ˌæm/ but I can see why the final schwa might easily get reduced in this particular constellation of //First name_Surname//, where the surname tends to get a lot of stress.
This brings back memories of the "language wars" at MIT in the late 60s and early 70s. I had taken classes in AI from Marvin Minsky and Seymour Paper. My problem with format linguistics was that it didn't make sense from a computational point of view, and it didn't deal with intrinsic ambiguity. I was very interesting to see how effective syntax emerged so took psycholinguistics. One interesting example was using a click test (clicks in ear, language in the other). For example, it showed that the subjunctive was in decline. Also, the meaning is not in the sound waves but in the context. Generating language doesn't teach much. Understanding and acting in ongoing contexts is more interesting. Just language mixed still sense maketh.
We called it “generative grammar” when I was in grad school.
As a linguist, my quippy answer to the title would be: It's a lot less wrong than it sounds, but it is wrong.
Zing!
Conversation with a child language acquisition lecturer, paraphrased: "young children are bombarded with language 24/7 and are sensitively attuned to it because their attention is always focused on their parents" "so why is UG premised on the paucity of the stimulus?" "my guess is that Chomsky never spent much time raising children". 😵🔥
@@johnnye87 Of course there is poverty of input.
Universal Grammar (UG) approach claims that there is a universal set of principles and parameters that control the shape of human language.
But the entire corpus of studied language is so small that it is impossible to derive what this universal set of principles and parameters actually is from using the entirety of human language as input.
If the entirety of human language does not contain enough input to enable the principles and parameters of UG to be extracted, then how could a child receive enough input to work them out, unless they are already built in?
@@stevencarr4002 My issue isn't so much with the hypothesis that the evolved human language faculty preferences certain patterns over others, so that you can get a "complete" language without having to expose the child to enough data to unambiguously derive every rule. That seems pretty obvious and unremarkable.
My issue is that they tend to treat the formulae they come up with as though they represent actual mental processes, when they bear no resemblance at all to how any other part of the human mind works. We don't operate on strict mathematical rules. A neural network like the human brain runs on weights and fuzzy logic, and the languagey bits of our brain aren't isolated from the non-languagey bits. Chomskyans produce formalised descriptions of a phenomenon and then mistake the map they drew for the territory.
@@stevencarr4002The argument question beggingly assumes there are principles of UG to be worked out. The usual anti-UG line is that language evolved to be learnable by human brains not the other way around. Cognitive biases were around long before before language, so any language that arose would of course be shaped by those biases. We don’t work out the laws of physics to learn to walk either, so is the correct formalization of physics innate also?
Aaaaa, intersectional disciplines uniting their fields to produce new forms of understanding, its modern day magics. It is really cool to see theres room for programmers to work in the field too!
Thanks for these videos, and Chag Pesach Sameach to you and yours!
I'd be interested in the course!
Btw definetly interested in the intro to linguistics!
Extremely interested in the linguistics class!
I am most definitely interested in that intro to linguistics class
I’d be interested to know what you think about Daniel Everett’s work on the Pirahã language and his assertion that it does not have recursion (Chomsky’s essential property of language)
Another great video. Keep it up!
Very interested in the Intro to Linguistics!
about 5:20-6:24 we have an analysis of how words are put together to make syntactical structures.
Does it matter that when learning a language, children parse phonemes, not words? The sound 'ed' indicates past in English, so children often say the ungrammatical sentence 'I wented'
Obviously this does not falsify Chomsky's theory (nothing can), but can UG account for how children can learn language when they don't hear separate words, but hear a string of continuous sound?
Are there any books you'd recommend to someone who wants to learn some basic linguistics?
Or perhaps other resources for self-study
I’m going to go into that a little later this year, with some links for *affordable* intro texts
I should probably stop wondering why I, a computer scientist, like linguistics
Thank you very much for this video.
LLMs demonstrate conclusively and unambiguously that Chomsky was totally wrong about there being any kind of brain structure for grammar. What they show is that pattern recognition, if good enough, provides grammar as a side effect.
Or reduce Chomsky to the trivial conclusion that human beings can speak languages because they have brains. That is quite uncontroversial.
LLMs dont have the same language acquisition or generation as humans even at all. When was the last time you practiced backpropagation?
@@Finnnicus No wonder LLMs don't work and can't process human language. They don't use UG, which is a fundamental feature of human language.
I did an undergraduate degree in linguistics at a school that required all students to study a semester's worth of Minimalism. Got absolutely clobbered by it, failed it, had to take it twice. Years later, I went back to school to do an undergraduate computer science degree at a school that required all students to do a semester of computability theory. Imagine my surprise when good ol' Noam pops up with his binary trees and context free grammars! Never before in my life had I wanted to write my old Syntax professor a Christmas card.
I was just thinking that if you bleep curses at different tones it would be cool because you could identify the curse thru what tone you heard
"downloaded nasals in a sleep cycle" 😂
Most anti-chomskians I have met have no problem with the idea of UG as an abstract feature of languages. It’s his views on language evolution (implausible saltation not for communication) and development (baby doing hypothesis testing on innate UG parameters) that they (we, I guess) have a problem with. Many anti-chomskians see UG patterns as a consequence of rather than precondition for the mechanisms of language development and processing, which is perfectly compatible with the fruitfulness of generative linguistics. (Or that’s how I remember the views of past me who was more immersed in this stuff as a grad student in a linguistics-adjacent field, anyway, haha)
I'd really like to see how you explain (?) Chomsky's stubborn and repeated assertions that Esperanto isn't really a language.
I am not sure, but I think it is because Esperanto is only spoken as a first language by people who grew up bilingual, speaking Esperanto and , for example, Russian.
Modern Hebrew is an example of a language that went from no native speakers to several million (according to Wikipedia).
I wonder if the same might happen to Esperanto.
@@stevencarr4002It already has to some degree, there are thousands of native Esperanto speakers with different degrees of fluency and actual use of the language. Modern colloquial Esperanto is quite different to Zamenhof's Esperanto or modern formal Esperanto, with things like dropping the accusative marker -n being common.
I remember two textbooks that I used to learn Japanese: Tae Kim and Gakushudo. Both of them teach you set "sentence patterns" with "variables" that that you can substitute with other words, e.g. [Thing]NI[Action] where you can simply substitute [Thing] with other nouns and [Action] with other verbs to say that you did some activity there. But they never give you a tree diagram that splits a sentence into SubjectPhrase and VerbPhrase. Instead they teach you that the Verb is the core of the sentence while all other things like Topic/Subject/Object/Location/Origin/Destination etc. are just additional information that are optional.
Is Tae Kim's approach the same as Chomsky's universal grammar? generative grammar? dependency grammar?
yes would love to see the intro to linguistics
I'm trying to build every sentence structure with minimal vocab... didn't know where to start...
A good idea for a video, but the central part was incomprehensible to the non-specialist. Perhaps you could do one about generative grammar using a different angle. For example, you could take Dan Everett's critique and say why it is wrong (or right, whichever you think correct).
Its not wrong, just trivial.
As a complement to this very interesting video, why not tackle the absent elephant in the chomskyan room : the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or theory (which by the way I don't share , at least under its most radical form). I think it still is a hot topic among linguists, and I believe it definitely deserves a specific discussion. And a new video !
That’s coming! It’s tricky because the strong form is used for prejudice, the weak form was thrown out with it, before research on unconscious bias, and that’s also bad. But also some of the research justifying the weak form of it is actually a bit shaky too. I’m definitely making a video on it but it’s gonna take some more thinking and writing!
I'd love to watch the intro to linguistics!
Funny coincidence. I just started learning German, and am in the middle of a coding spurt to generate very simple sentences. Using Python, too, to start, although I plan on transitioning to Javascript soon enough and present everything with nice colour clues in a browser.
I've written all the classes you said you started out with, and have parsed and wrangled a lot of case tables from Wiktionary to have some data. There's flexibility in all the categories across which nouns inflect, and the ability to toggle their representations into pronouns. I haven't read any syntax books though, and don't plan on expanding on what I have beyond very simple sentences that can get off the ground my feel for noun genders and cases. It feels like overkill to make a complete representation of German grammar just for this. So I won't. I know I should soon give up if I tried.
I appreciate this exposition of the issue of UG, and agree with most of it. Here are two points, where I have some reservervations.
I don't think it's simply misunderstanding or proliferation of straw men . There's a deeper philosophical aspect of the dispute between (some) anti-Chomskians and UG types. The issue, which Chomsky explicitly takes a position on in I think Knowledge of Language is the old nature vs. nurture dispute, aka Plato vs. Aristotle. Generative(TM) Linguistics isn't only about the insight about something like rules generating output. It's a specific stance that some that capacity is hard wired in a language module or language modules as opposed to simply the outgrowth of general intelligence understood as an overall learning capacity. The idea of innate knowledge is deeply offensive to some people who connect it to the worst excesses of evolutionary psychology and even social darwinism. That seems like a stretch to me, but the whole issue gets interfered with by the sociology of the field, branding (as you point out), and toxic personalities.
Another thing I would want to modulate a bit is your colorful characterizations of sociolinguists, a tribe I'm a member of. Essentially, since Tony Kroch's arrival at U Penn (a place I think you're familiar with) Labov, G. Sankoff et al. have been much more sympathetic to a UG-type approach (although without the term) than a lot of others. In fact, the field seems split on the subject of an innate/modular cognition approach and the functionalist/connectionist strand. There are a number of researchers who do variationist analyses along with generative syntactic ones.
8:34 i'm interested!
I'm a computer scientist halfway through an introductory university course on linguistics as well as a language philosophy class.
There is a person for every niche youtube video. I guess I am the one for this video. 😂
As a non-linguist, I wondered about this when I was in high school and later. I always thought this would be the approach to Artificial Intelligence. So, color me surprised when I learned that ChatGPT et al. are not using it but are instead merely predicting text. Of course, I also thought this could and should be the approach for Institutional Intelligence, such as for writing laws for a legislature. Somehow I am unsurprised that this is not the case, and my color remains unchanged. After all, everyone benefits from litigative make-work, right... almost as much as from broken windows.
I think the most important deep theoretical split is between people who believe natural languages are the way they are primarily because of quickly degenerating *competencies* of very young humans (LAD), or because of cognitive *weaknesses* in those same young brains, which languages evolved to more effectively colonize (the coevolution theory prominently associated with Terence Deacon).
LAD
Referring to the LAD, do you mean that the older a kid is when first exposed to language the less likely he is to acquire native speaker fluency? If yes, I taught people in that situation years before Language Deprivation Syndrome became a thing.
Plehse excuse the awkward wording. Grad school was a looooong time ago.
I think often of a time in my first year of undergrad I told someone I was a linguistics major and she said "tell me everything about linguistics" and, in an attempt to perform this impossible task, I mentioned something about UG and Chomsky, and she said "hasn't Chomsky actually been widely disproven and nobody believes him anymore?". Several months later I found out both her parents are linguistics professors.
I always thought grammar is like a programming language. And I wished there was a Full Documentation of every Language. (or is there something like that ?)
Most Language learning Books aren't really precise with there explanation of Grammar. Like in Japanese, most of the Books tell you that there are Na Adjectives (But Technically this are special Nouns). Or that the Partikel wa is indicating the Subject (this is also not really true).
And then the Teacher are confused why i make strange sentences.
Decades and decades ago, I was equally skeptical of deep grammar & the like, but the Army was sending me to language school. Learning well was the ticket to not ending up in the infantry... So I picked up Bickerton's book _Language & Species_... It ended up being a lifesaver. Possibly literally... I walked into Russian fully understanding and just intuiting case structure, feeling my way through what all my buddies sweated over hours a day. Serendipitous... Not saying it would have helped with any language... Time I went back for Arabic, didn't help a bit. But, if you're learning Russian...
Oh boy, its gonna be a Chomsky video.
I love this topic. If for no other reason than it reminds me once again that Chomsky really is a great scholar.... In linguistics.
His historical and political writing is riddled with issues - most notably, fairly aggregious ideological blind-spots. We all have our biases and our narrarives over in the historical disciplines, but .... Sigh ... He's just been a bit sloppy too often. (Sorry, Chomsky-fans). I find it particularly unforgivable that he engaged in denialism regarding two confirmed genocides (,confirmed, meaning by international courts and rhe consensus of historical research). First he denied the Cambodian genocide. Then, the Bosnian genocide. In both cases it was because he had ideological allegiances to the noninally socialist/communist governments that were behind them.
So ... Yes ... Universal language. A breath of fresh air. Chomsky the scholar for a change. I still remember reading his primer on structuralism as a young graduate student. It was such a help.
Edit: interesting that you didn't go much into the recursion matter. Not saying you should have. It just seems to be the standard thing to do.
I tend to agree that some facets of human cultures do appear to be surprisingly common and even universal. It often strikes me that prehistoric and ancient cultures end up doing effectively very similar things with identical motives - despite not being in contact with each other. One of my favorite "middle school level" example of this would be the architectural innovations happening independently in multiple cultures. Pyramids, for example. Or, religious rites which built around sinilar concepts - ancestor-reverence, totems, votives, anthropomotphic gods, etc etc ...
To my mind, universal grammar fits perfectly into this.
The recursion thing is not super interesting to me! Lots of the discussion about pirahã boils down to whether or not they “disprove” UG because their language, by some accounts, lacks recursion, however plenty of them also speak Portuguese, so they obviously have the mental capacity to use recursion. A single outlier language that does a subset of the possible is not super super interesting, contrary to what the Evanses and Everretts of the world say
@@languagejones6784 I like your perspective. I had figured linguists must have been moving beyond that particular debate by now. I just didn't know what turn it was taking next.
Definitely interested in Intro to Linguistics. I took a class by that name coughcough years ago as a freshman in college but it was badly taught and I was a teenager and I really didn't learn much. Also I suspect some of the modern anti-Chomsky feeling may be due to revulsion at his politics coloring people's opinions of his academic work.
I really want that class
rip laoshu man. He was a good dude
He seemed genuinely kind hearted and interested in talking to everybody
@@languagejones6784 i had to say it because i also remember the arguelles and laoshu times and he was such a chill dude. Nostalgia is a beautiful word
I tried googling barbush and among a hundred irrelevant hits, one came up that implied it was a bukharian kippah. Is that it? I'm familiar with bukharians but apparently not familiar enough to know if their yarmulkas have a specific name
Thanks for this video eloquently laying out the beauty and truth of Chomsky's syntactic theories. He's still very much swimming against the current despite his popularity in his own field of study
Could a linguist please explain me why the Universal Grammar theory is supposed to be so strong ?
Everyone always knew that any baby raised in a completely foreign language will perfectly pick up the language.
What is so revolutionary about that ?
1. I don't believe that there is a universal grammar, but our minds are able to form a grammar. A difference is the subject: mind (whatever it is) vs grammar
2. It is so easy to form a sentence with an unfamiliar world. I wonder if you know the word sepulka, but I bet you already have some idea about sepulling and sepulkaruim.
3. My own attempts to program something that could build sentences ended with the impossibility to teach the machine the notion of I. Except for hard programming, which is not interesting. Ideally, I'd ask the machine who are you and it would reply I am Parrot?and if I ask who am I, it would reply You are the Creator
When I studied this in my Discrete Math class, during my computer science degree, I was pleaseantly surprised to fimd out that this Noam Chomsky is, in fact, tje same one from "Manufacturimg Consent"
Neither here nor there, but Alexander Argüelles pronounces his name /ɑːr'gweɪjəs/ rather than /'ɑːrgə,liːz/. I suck at IPA, but hopefully that makes sense. Basically he approximates how it would sound in Spanish, which I suppose must be where the name comes from.
I will definitely correct that should I ever mention him again!
I am interested in a linguistics course, although I would have to slow the content to 0.5 speed!
(P.s. a bit mean to McKellen at ~4.40!)
I was under the impression Chomsky proposed universal grammar is innate, you are born hard-wired for language. That is why the followers of Skinner started fighting him.
Barbush? I thought you were wearing a kippah. (Pretty nice kippah.)
But where CAN I memorize my common words in randomly generated sentences because now I'm really interested in that
good video!
You remind me of someone. Did you go to DLI in the 00's?
Seems to me it’s not “universal grammar” it’s kind of the opposite, “universal context.” That is, we humans don’t share some fundamental rules about how words work, rather, we share fundamental “rules” (or “ideas” or “models”) about how the world works. We have common sensation, emotions, contraints, and core processors (like movement detection). Languages aren’t the same rules applied to different things (experiences, ideas, contexts) they're different rules applied to the same things. (that’s meant as a hypothesis / suggestion not declaration / assertion)
For example, the reason we see common patterns in how human languages deal with “nouns” is because of commonalities in how our brains model ideas about physical objects. Our shared rules about how we expect physical objects to behave cause common patterns when we describe those objects.