Transcript

My name is Steve Pinker, and Im Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. And today Im going to
speak to you about language. Im actually not a linguist, but a cognitive scientist. Im not so much interested
as language as an object in its own right, but as a window to the human mind.
Language is one of the fundamental topics in the human sciences. Its the trait that most conspicuously
distinguishes humans from other species, its essential to human cooperation; we accomplish amazing
things by sharing our knowledge or coordinating our actions by means of words. It poses profound scientific
mysteries such as, how did language evolve in this particular species? How does the brain compute
language? But also, language has many practical applications not surprisingly given how central it is to
human life.
Language comes so naturally to us that were apt to forget what a strange and miraculous gift it is. But think
about what youre doing for the next hour. Youre going to be listening patiently as a guy makes noise as he
exhales. Now, why would you do something like that? Its not that I can claim that the sounds Im going to
make are particularly mellifluous, but rather Ive coded information into the exact sequences of hisses and
hums and squeaks and pops that Ill be making. You have the ability to recover the information from that
stream of noises allowing us to share ideas.
Now, the ideas we are going to share are about this talent, language, but with a slightly different sequence of
hisses and squeaks, I could cause you to be thinking thoughts about a vast array of topics, anything from the
latest developments in your favorite reality show to theories of the origin of the universe. This is what I think
of as the miracle of language, its vast expressive power, and its a phenomenon that still fills me with wonder,
even after having studied language for 35 years. And it is the prime phenomenon that the science of
language aims to explain.
The Science of Language
Not surprisingly, language is central to human life. The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel reminds us that
humans accomplish great things because they can exchange information about their knowledge and
intentions via the medium of language. Language, moreover, is not a peculiarity of one culture, but it has
been found in every society ever studied by anthropologists.
Theres some 6,000 languages spoken on Earth, all of them complex, and no one has ever discovered a
human society that lacks complex language. For this and other reasons, Charles Darwin wrote, Man has an
instinctive tendency to speak as we see in the babble of our young children while no child has an instinctive
tendency to bake, brew or write.
Components of Linguistics
Language is an intricate talent and its not surprising that the science of language should be a complex
discipline.
It includes the study of how language itself works including: grammar, the assembly of words, phrases and
sentences; phonology, the study of sound; semantics, the study of meaning; and pragmatics, the study of the
use of language in conversation.
Scientists interested in language also study how it is processed in real time, a field called psycholinguistics;
how is it acquired by children, the study of language acquisition. And how it is computed in the brain, the
discipline called neurolinguistics.

What is Language?
Now, before we begin, its important to not to confuse language with three other things that are closely
related to language. One of them is written language. Unlike spoken language, which is found in all human
cultures throughout history, writing was invented a very small number of times in human history, about 5,000
years ago.
And alphabetic writing where each mark on the page stands for a vowel or a consonant, appears to have
been invented only once in all of human history by the Canaanites about 3,700 years ago. And as Darwin
pointed out, children have no instinctive tendency to write, but have to learn it through construction and
schooling.
A second thing not to confuse language with is proper grammar. Linguists distinguish between descriptive
grammar - the rules, that characterize how people to speak - and prescriptive grammar - rules that
characterize how people ought to speak if they are writing careful written prose.
A dirty secret from linguistics is that not only are these not the same kinds of rules, but many of the
prescriptive rules of language make no sense whatsoever. Take one of the most famous of these rules, the
rule not to split infinitives.
According to this rule, Captain Kirk made a grievous grammatical error when he said that the mission of the
Enterprise was to boldly go where no man has gone before. He should have said, according to these
editors, to go boldly where no man has gone before, which immediately clashes with the rhythm and
structure of ordinary English. In fact, this prescriptive rule was based on a clumsy analogy with Latin where
you cant splint an infinitive because its a single word, as in facary[ph] to do. Julius Caesar couldnt have
split an infinitive if he wanted to. That rule was translated literally over into English where it really should not
apply.
Another famous prescriptive rule is that, one should never use a so-called double negative. Mick Jagger
should not have sung, I cant get no satisfaction, he really should have sung, I cant get any satisfaction.
Now, this is often promoted as a rule of logical speaking, but cant and any is just as much of a double
negative as cant and no. The only reason that cant get any satisfaction is deemed correct and cant
get no satisfaction is deemed ungrammatical is that the dialect of English spoken in the south of England in
the 17 th century used cant any rather than cant no.
If the capital of England had been in the north of the country instead of the south of the country, then cant
get no, would have been correct and cant get any, would have been deemed incorrect.
Theres nothing special about a language that happens to be chosen as the standard for a given country. In
fact, if you compare the rules of languages and so-called dialects, each one is complex in different ways.
Take for example, African-American vernacular English, also called Black English or Ebonics. There is a
construction in African-American where you can say, He be workin, which is not an error or bastardization
or a corruption of Standard English, but in fact conveys a subtle distinction, one thats different than simply,
He workin. He be workin, means that he is employed; he has a job, He workin, means that he happens
to be working at the moment that you and I are speaking.
Now, this is a tense difference that can be made in African-American English that is not made in Standard
English, one of many examples in which the dialects have their own set of rules that is just as sophisticated
and complex as the one in the standard language.

Now, a third thing, not to confuse language with is thought. Many people report that they think in language,
but commune of psychologists have shown that there are many kinds of thought that dont actually take
place in the form of sentences.
Evidence Language is Not Thought
(1.) Babies (and other mammals) communicate without speech
For example, we know from ingenious experiments that non-linguistic creatures, such as babies before
theyve learned to speak, or other kinds of animals, have sophisticated kinds of cognition, they register
cause and effect and objects and the intentions of other people, all without the benefit of speech.
(2.) Types of thinking go on without language--visual thinking
We also know that even in creatures that do have language, namely adults, a lot of thinking goes on in forms
other than language, for example, visual imagery. If you look at the top two three-dimensional figures in this
display, and I would ask you, do they have the same shape or a different shape? People dont solve that
problem by describing those strings of cubes in words, but rather by taking an image of one and mentally
rotating it into the orientation of the other, a form of non-linguistic thinking.
(3.) We use tacit knowledge to understand language and remember the gist
For that matter, even when you understand language, what you come away with is not in itself the actual
language that you hear. Another important finding in cognitive psychology is that long-term memory for
verbal material records the gist or the meaning or the content of the words rather than the exact form of the
words.
For example, I like to think that you retain some memory of what I have been saying for the last 10 minutes.
But I suspect that if I were to ask you to reproduce any sentence that I have uttered, you would be incapable
of doing so. What sticks in memory is far more abstract than the actual sentences, something that we can
call meaning or content or semantics.
In fact, when it even comes to understanding a sentence, the actual words are the tip of a vast iceberg of a
very rapid, unconscious, non-linguistic processing thats necessary even to make sense of the language
itself. And Ill illustrate this with a classic bit of poetry, the lines from the shampoo bottle. Wet hair, lather,
rinse, repeat.
Now, in understanding that very simple snatch of language, you have to know, for example, that when you
repeat, you dont wet your hair a second time because its already wet, and when you get to the end of it and
you see repeat, you dont keep repeating over and over in infinite loop, repeat here means, repeat just
once. Now this tacit knowledge of what the writers **** of language had in mind is necessary to understand
language, but it, itself, is not language.
(4.) If language is thinking, then where did it come from?
Finally, if language were really thought, it would raise the question of where language would come from if it
were incapable of thinking without language. After all, the English language was not designed by some
committee of Martians who came down to Earth and gave it to us. Rather, language is a grassroots
phenomenon. Its the original wiki, which aggregates the contributions of hundreds of thousands of people

who invent jargon and slang and new constructions, some of them get accumulated into the language as
people seek out new ways of expressing their thoughts, and thats how we get a language in the first place.
Now, this not to deny that language can affect thought and linguistics has long been interested in what has
sometimes been called, the linguistic relativity hypothesis or the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (note correct
spelling, named after the two linguists who first formulated it, namely that language can affect thought.
Theres a lot of controversy over the status of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, but no one believes that
language is the same thing as thought and that all of our mental life consists of reciting sentences.
Now that we have set aside what language is not, lets turn to what language is beginning with the question
of how language works.
How Does Language Work?
In a nutshell, you can divide language into three topics.
There are the words that are the basic components of sentences that are stored in a part of long-term
memory that we can call the mental lexicon or the mental dictionary. There are rules, the recipes or
algorithms that we use to assemble bits of language into more complex stretches of language including
syntax, the rules that allow us to assemble words into phrases and sentences; Morphology, the rules that
allow us to assemble bits of words, like prefixes and suffixes into complex words; Phonology, the rules that
allow us to combine vowels and consonants into the smallest words. And then all of this knowledge of
language has to connect to the world through interfaces that allow us to understand language coming from
others to produce language that others can understand us, the language interfaces.
Words
Lets start with words.
The basic principle of a word was identified by the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, more than 100
years ago when he called attention to the arbitrariness of the sign. Take for example the word, duck. The
word, duck doesnt look like a duck or walk like a duck or quack like a duck, but I can use it to get you to
think the thought of a duck because all of us at some point in our lives have memorized that brute force
association between that sound and that meaning, which means that it has to be stored in memory in some
format, in a very simplified form and an entry in the mental lexicon might look something like this. There is a
symbol for the word itself, there is some kind of specification of its sound and theres some kind of
specification of its meaning.
Now, one of the remarkable facts about the mental lexicon is how capacious it is. Using dictionary sampling
techniques where you say, take the top left-hand word on every 20th page of the dictionary, give it to people
in a multiple choice test, correct for guessing, and multiply by the size of the dictionary, you can estimate that
a typical high school graduate has a vocabulary of around 60,000 words, which works out to a rate of
learning of about one new word every two hours starting from the age of one. When you think that every
one of these words is arbitrary as a telephone number of a date in history, youre reminded about the
remarkable capacity of human long-term memory to store the meanings and sounds of words.
But of course, we dont just blurt out individual words, we combine them into phrases and sentences. And
that brings up the second major component of language; namely, grammar.
Rules
Grammar

Now the modern study of grammar is inseparable to the contributions of one linguist, the famous scholar,
Noam Chomsky, who set the agenda for the field of linguistics for the last 60 years.
To begin with, Chomsky noted that the main puzzle that we have to explain in understanding language is
creativity or as linguists often call it productivity, the ability to produce and understand new sentences.
Except for a small number of clichd formulas, just about any sentence that you produce or understand is a
brand new combination produced for the first time perhaps in your life, perhaps even in the history of the
species. We have to explain how people are capable of doing it. It shows that when we know a language,
we havent just memorized a very long list of sentences, but rather have internalized a grammar or algorithm
or recipe for combining elements into brand new assemblies. For that reason, Chomsky has insisted that
linguistics is really properly a branch of psychology and is a window into the human mind.
A second insight is that languages have a syntax which cant be identified with their meaning. Now, the only
quotation that I know of, of a linguist that has actually made it into Bartletts Familiar Quotations, is the
following sentence from Chomsky, from 1956, Colorless, green ideas sleep furiously. Well, whats the point
of that sentence? The point is that it is very close to meaningless. On the other hand, any English speaker
can instantly recognize that it conforms to the patterns of English syntax. Compare, for example, furiously
sleep ideas dream colorless, which is also meaningless, but we perceive as a word salad.
A third insight is that syntax doesnt consist of a string of word by word associations as in stimulus response
theories in psychology where producing a word is a response which you then hear and it becomes a
stimulus to producing the next word, and so on. Again, the sentence, colorless green ideas sleep furiously,
can help make this point. Because if you look at the word by word transition probabilities in that sentence,
for example, colorless and then green; how often have you heard colorless and green in succession.
Probably zero times. Green and ideas, those two words never occur together, ideas and sleep, sleep and
furiously. Every one of the transition probabilities is very close to zero, nonetheless, the sentence as a
whole can be perceived as a well-formed English sentence.
Language in general has long distance dependencies. The word in one position in a sentence can dictate
the choice of the word several positions downstream. For example, if you begin a sentence with either,
somewhere down the line, there has to be an or. If you have an if, generally, you expect somewhere
down the line there to be a then. Theres a story about a child who says to his father, Daddy, why did you
bring that book that I dont want to be read to out of, up for? Where you have a set of nested or embedded
long distance dependencies.
Indeed, one of the applications of linguistics to the study of good prose style is that sentences can be
rendered difficult to understand if they have too many long distance dependencies because that could put a
strain on the short-term memory of the reader or listener while trying to understand them.
Rather than a set of word by word associations, sentences are assembled in a hierarchical structure that
looks like an upside down tree. Let me give you an example of how that works in the case of English. One
of the basic rules of English is that a sentence consists of a noun phrase, the subject, followed by a verb
phrase, the predicate.
A second rule in turn expands the verb phrase. A very phrase consists of a verb followed by a noun phrase,
the object, followed by a sentence, the complement as, I told him that it was sunny outside.
The Contributions of Chomsky

The Essence of Language is Phrase Structure Rules

Now, why do linguists insist that language must be composed out of phrase structural rules?
(1.) Rules allow for open-ended creativity
Well for one thing, that helps explain the main phenomenon that we want to explain, mainly the open-ended
creativity of language.
(2.) Rules allow for expression of unfamiliar meaning
It allows us to express unfamiliar meanings. Theres a clich in journalism for example, that when a dog
bites a man, that isnt news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news. The beauty of grammar is that it
allows us to convey news by assembling into familiar word in brand new combinations. Also, because of the
way phrase structure rules work, they produce a vast number of possible combinations.
(3.) Rules allow for production of vast numbers of combinations
Moreover, the number of different thoughts that we can express through the combinatorial power of grammar
is not just humongous, but in a technical sense, its infinite. Now of course, no one lives an infinite number
of years, and therefore can shell off their ability to understand an infinite number of sentences, but you can
make the point in the same way that a mathematician can say that someone who understands the rules of
arithmetic knows that there are an infinite number of numbers, namely if anyone ever claimed to have found
the longest one, you can always come up with one thats even bigger by adding a one to it. And you can do
the same thing with language.
Let me illustrate it in the following way. As a matter of fact, there has been a claim that there is a worlds
longest sentence.
Who would make such a claim? Well, who else? The Guinness Book of World Records . You can look it
up. There is an entry for the Worlds Longest Sentence. It is 1,300 words long. And it comes from a novel
by William Faulkner. Now I wont read all 1,300 words, but Ill just tell you how it begins.
They both bore it as though in deliberate flatulent exaltation and it runs on from there.
But Im here to tell you that in fact, this is not the worlds longest sentence. And Ive been tempted to obtain
immortality in Guinness by submitting the following record breaker. "Faulkner wrote, they both bore it as
though in deliberate flatulent exaltation. But sadly, this would not be immortality after all but only the
proverbial 15 minutes of fame because based on what you now know, you could submit a record breaker for
the record breaker namely, "Guinness noted that Faulkner wrote" or "Pinker mentioned that Guinness noted
that Faulkner wrote", or "who cares that Pinker mentioned that Guinness noted that Faulkner wrote"
Take for example, the following wonderfully ambiguous sentence that appeared in TV Guide . On tonights
program, Conan will discuss sex with Dr. Ruth.
Now this has a perfectly innocent meaning in which the verb, discuss involves two things, namely the topic
of discussion, sex and the person with who its being discussed, in this case, with Dr. Ruth. But is has a
somewhat naughtier meaning if you rearrange the words into phrases according to a different structure in
which case sex with Dr. Ruth is the topic of conversation, and thats whats being discussed.

Now, phrase structure not only can account for our ability to produce so many sentences, but its also
necessary for us to understand what they mean. The geometry of branches in a phrase structure is
essential to figuring out who did what to whom.
Children are Hard-Wired with Universal Grammar
Another important contribution of Chomsky to the science of language is the focus on language acquisition
by children. Now, children cant memorize sentences because knowledge of language isnt just one long list
of memorized sentences, but somehow they must distill out or abstract out the rules that goes into
assembling sentences based on what they hear coming out of their parents mouths when they were little.
And the talent of using rules to produce combinations is in evidence from the moment that kids begin to
speak.
Children create sentences unheard from adults
At the two-word stage, which you typically see in children who are 18 months or a bit older, kids are
producing the smallest sentences that deserve to be counted as sentences, namely two words long. But
already its clear that they are putting them together using rules in their own mind. To take an example, a
child might say, more outside, meaning, take them outside or let them stay outside. Now, adults dont say,
more outside. So its not a phrase that the child simply memorized by rote, but it shows that already
children are using these rules to put together new combinations.
Another example, a child having jam washed from his fingers said to his mother 'all gone sticky'. Again, not a
phrase that you could ever have copied from a parent, but one that shows the child producing new
combinations.
Past tense rule
An easy way of showing that children assimilate rules of grammar unconsciously from the moment they
begin to speak, is the use of the past tense rule.
For example, children go through a long stage in which they make errors like, We holded the baby rabbits
or He teared the paper and then he sticked it. Cases in which they over generalize the regular rule of
forming the past tense, add ed to irregular verbs like hold, stick or tear. And its easy to show its
easy to get children to flaunt this ability to apply rules productively in a laboratory demonstration called the
Wug Test. You bring a kid into a lab. You show them a picture of a little bird and you say, This is a wug.
And you show them another picture and you say, Well, now there are two of them. There are two and
children will fill in the gap by saying wugs. Again, a form they could not have memorize because its
invented for the experiment, but it shows that they have productive mastery of the regular plural rule in
English.
And famously, Chomsky claimed that children solved the problem of language acquisition by having the
general design of language already wired into them in the form of a universal grammar.
A spec sheet for what the rules of any language have to look like.
Poverty of input--children use structure dependent rules
What is the evidence that children are born with a universal grammar? Well, surprisingly, Chomsky didnt
propose this by actually studying kids in the lab or kids in the home, but through a more abstract argument
called, The poverty of the input. Namely, if you look at what goes into the ears of a child and look at the
talent they end up with as adults, there is a big chasm between them that can only be filled in by assuming
that the child has a lot of knowledge of the way that language works already built in.

Heres how the argument works. One of the things that children have to learn when they learn English is
how to form a question. Now, children will get evidence from parents speech to how the question rule
works, such as sentences like, The man is here, and the corresponding question, Is the man here?
Now, logically speaking, a child getting that kind of input could posit two different kinds of rules. Theres a
simple word by word linear rule. In this case, find the first is in the sentence and move it to the front. The
man is here, Is the man here? Now theres a more complex rule that the child could posit called a structure
dependent rule, one that looks at the geometry of the phrase structure tree. In this case, the rule would be:
find the first is after the subject noun phrase and move that to the front of the sentence. A diagram of what
that rule would look like is as follows: you look for the is that occurs after the subject noun phrase and
thats what gets moved to the front of the sentence.
Now, whats the difference between the simple word-by-word rule and the more complex structured
dependent rule? Well, you can see the difference when it comes to performing the question from a slightly
more complex sentence like, The man who is tall is in the room.
But how is the child supposed to learn that? How did all of us end up with the correct structured dependent
of the rule rather than the far simpler word-by-word version of the rule?
Well, Chomsky argues, if you were actually to look at the kind of language that all of us hear, its actually
quite rare to hear a sentence like, Is the man who is tall in the room? The kind of input that would logically
inform you that the word-by-word rule is wrong and the structure dependent rule is right. Nonetheless, we all
grow up into adults who unconsciously use the structure dependent rule rather than the word-by-word rule.
Moreover, children dont make errors like, is the man who tall is in the room, as soon as they begin to form
complex questions, they use the structure dependent rule. And that, Chomsky argues, is evidence that
structure dependent rules are part of the definition of universal grammar that children are born with.
Critiques of Chomsky
Now, though Chomsky has been fantastically influential in the science of language that does not mean that
all language scientists agree with him. And there have been a number of critiques of Chomsky over the
years. For one thing, the critics point out, Chomsky hasnt really shown principles of universal grammar that
are specific to language itself as opposed to general ways in which the human mind works across multiple
domains, language and vision and control of motion and memory and so on. We dont really know that
universal grammar is specific to language, according to this critique.
Secondly, Chomsky and the linguists working with him have not examined all 6,000 of the worlds languages
and shown that the principles of universal grammar apply to all 6,000. Theyve posited it based on a small
number of languages and the logic of the poverty of the input, but havent actually come through with the
data that would be necessary to prove that universal grammar is really universal.
Finally, the critics argue, Chomsky has not shown that more general purpose learning models, such as neuro
network models, are incapable of learning language together with all the other things that children learn, and
therefore has not proven that there has to be specific knowledge how grammar works in order for the child to
learn grammar.
Phonology
Another component of language governs the sound pattern of language, the ways that the vowels and
consonants can be assembled into the minimal units that go into words. Phonology, as this branch of
linguistics is called, consists of formation rules that capture what is a possible word in a language according

to the way that it sounds. To give you an example, the sequence, bluk, is not an English word, but you get a
sense that it could be an English word that someone could coin a new form that someone could coin a
new term of English that we pronounce bluk. But when you hear the sound ****, you instantly know
that that not only isnt it an English word, but it really couldnt be an English word. ****, by the way, comes
from Yiddish and it means kind of to sigh or to moan. Oi. Thats to ****.
The reason that we recognize that its not English is because it has sounds like **** and sequences like ****,
which arent part of the formation rules of English phonology. But together with the rules that define the
basic words of a language, there are also phonological rules that make adjustments to the sounds,
depending on what the other words the word appears with. Very few of us realize, for example, in English,
that the past tense suffix ed is actually pronounced in three different ways. When we say, He walked, we
pronounce the ed like a ta, walked. When we say jogged, we pronounce it as a d, jogged. And when
we say patted, we stick in a vowel, pat-ted, showing that the same suffix, ed can be readjusted in its
pronunciation according to the rules of English phonology.
Now, when someone acquires English as a foreign language or acquires a foreign language in general, they
carry over the rules of phonology of their first language and apply it to their second language. We have a
word for it; we call it an accent. When a language user deliberately manipulates the rules of phonology,
that is, when they dont just speak in order to convey content, they pay attention as to what phonological
structures are being used; we call it poetry and rhetoric.
Language Interfaces
So far, Ive been talking about knowledge of language, the rules that go into defining what are possible
sequences of language. But those sequences have to get into the brain during speech comprehension and
they have to get out during speech production. And that takes us to the topic of language interfaces.
And lets start with production.
Language Production
This diagram here is literally a human cadaver that has been sawn in half. An anatomist took a saw and
[sound] allowing it to see in cross section the human vocal tract. And that can illustrate how we get out
knowledge of language out into the world as a sequence of sounds.
Now, each of us has at the top of our windpipe or trachea, a complex structure called the larynx or voice box;
its behind your Adams Apple. And the air coming out of your lungs have to go passed two cartilaginous
flaps that vibrate and produce a rich, buzzy sound source, full of harmonics. Before that vibrating sound
gets out to the world, it has to pass through a gauntlet or chambers of the vocal tract. The throat behind the
tongue, the cavity above the tongue, the cavity formed by the lips, and when you block off airflow through the
mouth, it can come out through the nose.
Now, each one of those cavities has a shape that, thanks to the laws of physics, will amplify some of the
harmonics in that buzzy sound source and suppress others. We can change the shape of those cavities
when we move our tongue around. When we move our tongue forward and backward, for example, as in
eh, aa, eh, aa, we change the shape of the cavity behind the tongue, change the frequencies that are
amplified or suppressed and the listener hears them as two different vowels.
Likewise, when we raise or lower the tongue, we change the shape of the resonant cavity above the tongue
as in say, eh, ah, eh, ah. Once again, the change in the mixture of harmonics is perceived as a
change in the nature of the vowel.

When we stop the flow of air and then release it as in, t, ca, ba. Then we hear a consonant rather than
a vowel or even when we restrict the flow of air as in f, ss producing a chaotic noisy sound. Each one of
those sounds that gets sculpted by different articulators is perceived by the brain as a qualitatively different
vowel or consonant.
Now, an interesting peculiarity of the human vocal track is that it obviously co-ops structures that evolved for
different purposes for breathing and for swallowing and so on. And its an And its an interesting fact first
noted by Darwin that the larynx over the course of evolution has descended in the throat so that every
particle of food going from the mouth through the esophagus to the stomach has to pass over the opening
into the larynx with some probability of being inhaled leading to the danger of death by choking. And in fact,
until the invention of the Heimlich Maneuver, several thousand people every year died of choking because of
this maladaptive of the human vocal tract.
Why did we evolve a mouth and throat that leaves us vulnerable to choking? Well, a plausible hypothesis is
that its a compromise that was made in the course of evolution to allow us to speak. By giving range to a
variety of possibilities for alternating the resonant cavities, for moving the tongue back and forth and up and
down, we expanded the range of speech sounds we could make, improve the efficiency of language, but
suffered the compromise of an increased risk of choking showing that language presumably had some
survival advantage that compensated for the disadvantage in choking.
What about the flow of information in the other direction, that is from the world into the brain, the process of
speech comprehension?
Speech Comprehension
Speech comprehension turns out to be an extraordinarily complex computational process, which we're
reminded of every time we interact with a voicemail menu on a telephone or you use a dictation on our
computers. For example, One writer, using the state-of-the-art speech-to-text systems dictated the following
words into his computer. He dictated book tour, and it came out on the screen as back to work. Another
example, he said, I truly couldnt see, and it came out on the screen as, a cruelly good MC. Even more
disconcertingly, he started a letter to his parents by saying, Dear mom and dad, and what came out on the
screen, The man is dead.
Now, dictation systems have gotten better and better, but they still have a way to go before they can
duplicate a human stenographer.
What is it about the problem of speech understanding that makes it so easy for a human, but so hard for a
computer? Well, there are two main contributors. One of them is the fact that each phony, each vowel or
consonant actually comes out very differently, depending on what comes before and what comes after. A
phenomenon sometimes called co-articulation.
Let me give you an example. The place called Cape Cod has two c sounds.

Each of them symbolized by the letter C, the hard C. Nonetheless, when you pay attention to the way
you pronounce them, you notice that in fact, you pronounce them in very different parts of the mouth. Try it.
Cape Cod, Cape Cod c, c. In one case, the c is produced way back in the mouth; the other its
produced much farther forward. We dont notice that we pronounce c in two different ways depending
whether it comes before an a or an ah, but that difference forms a difference in the shape of the resonant
cavity in our mouth which produces a very different wave form. And unless a computer is specifically
programmed to take that variability into account, it will perceive those two different cs, as a different sound

that objectively speaking, they really are: c-eh c-oa. They really are different sounds, but our brain lumps
them together.
The other reason that speech recognition is such a difficult problem is because of the absence of
segmentation. Now we have an illusion when we listen to speech that consists of a sequence to sounds
corresponding to words. But if you actually were to look at the wave form of a sentence on a oscilloscope,
there would not be little silences between the words the way there are little bits of white space in printed
words on a page, but rather a continuous ribbon in which the end of one word leads right to the beginning of
the next.
Its something that were aware of Its something that were aware of when we listen to speech in a foreign
language when we have no idea where one word ends and the other one begins. In our own language, we
detect the word boundaries simply because in our mental lexicon, we have stretches of sound that
correspond to one word that tell us where it ends. But you cant get that information from the wave form
itself.
In fact, theres a whole genre of wordplay that takes advantage of the fact that word boundaries are not
physically present in the speech wave. Novelty songs like Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy
divey
A kiddley divey too, wooden shoe?
Now, it turns out that this is actually a grammatical sequence in words in English Mares eat oats and does
eat oats and little lambs eat ivy, a kid'll eat ivy too, wouldnt you?
When it is spoken or sung normally, the boundaries between words are obliterated and so the same
sequence of sounds can be perceived either as nonsense or if you know what theyre meant to convey, as
sentences.
Another example familiar to most children, Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear, Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair. Fuzzy
Wuzzy wasnt very fuzzy, was he? And the famous dogroll, I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice
cream.
We are generally unaware of how unambiguous language is. In context, we effortlessly and unconsciously
derive the intended meaning of a sentence, but a poor computer not equipped with all of our common sense
and human abilities and just going by the words and the rules is often flabbergasted by all the different
possibilities. Take a sentence as simple as Mary had a little lamb, you might think that thats a perfectly
simple unambiguous sentence. But now imagine that it was continued with with mint sauce. You realize
that have is actually a highly ambiguous word. As a result, the computer translations can often deliver
comically incorrect results.
According to legend, one of the first computer systems that was designed to translate from English to
Russian and back again did the following given the sentence, The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, it
translated it back as The vodka is agreeable, but the meat is rotten.
Pragmatics
So why do people understand language so much better than computers? What is the knowledge that we
have that has been so hard to program into our machines? Well, theres a third interface between language
and the rest of the mind, and that is the subject matter of the branch of linguistics called Pragmatics, namely,
how people understand language in context using their knowledge of the world and their expectation about
how other speakers communicate.

The most important principle of Pragmatics is called the cooperative principle, namely; assume that your
conversational partner is working with you to try to get a meaning across truthfully and clearly. And our
knowledge of Pragmatics, like our knowledge of syntax and phonology and so on, is deployed effortlessly,
but involves many intricate computations. For example, if I were to say, If you could pass the guacamole,
that would be awesome. You understand that as a polite request meaning, give me the guacamole. You
dont interpret it literally as a rumination about a hypothetical affair, you just assume that the person wanted
something and was using that string of words to convey the request politely.
Often comedies will use the absence of pragmatics in robots as a source of humor. As in the old Get
Smart situation comedy, which had a robot named, Hymie, and a recurring joke in the series would be that
Maxwell Smart would say to Hymie, Hymie, can you give me a hand? And then Hymie would go, {sound},
remove his hand and pass it over to Maxwell Smart not understanding that give me a hand, in context
means, help me rather than literally transfer the hand over to me.
Or take the following example of Pragmatics in action. Consider the following dialogue, Martha says, Im
leaving you. John says, Who is he? Now, understanding language requires finding the antecedents
pronouns, in this case who the he refers to, and any competent English speaker knows exactly who the
he is, presumably Johns romantic rival even though it was never stated explicitly in any part of the
dialogue. This shows how we bring to bear on language understanding a vast store of knowledge about
human behavior, human interactions, human relationships. And we often have to use that background
knowledge even to solve mechanical problems like, who does a pronoun like he refer to. Its that
knowledge thats extraordinarily difficult, to say the least to program into a computer.
The Miracle of Language
Language is a miracle of the natural world because it allows us to exchange an unlimited number of ideas
using a finite set of mental tools. Those mental tools comprise a large lexicon of memorized words and a
powerful mental grammar that can combine them. Language thought of in this way should not be confused
with writing, with the prescriptive rules of proper grammar or style or with thought itself.
Modern linguistics is guided by the questions, though not always the answers suggested by the linguist
known as Noam Chomsky, namely how is the unlimited creativity of language possible? What are the
abstract mental structures that relate word to one another? How do children acquire them?
What is universal across languages? And what does that say about the human mind?
Why Study Linguistics?
The study of language has many practical applications including computers that understand and speak, the
diagnosis and treatment of language disorders, the teaching of reading, writing, and foreign languages, the
interpreting of the language of law, politics and literature.
But for someone like me, language is eternally fascinating because it speaks to such fundamental questions
of the human condition. [Language] is really at the center of a number of different concerns of thought, of
social relationships, of human biology, of human evolution, that all speak to whats special about the human
species.
Language is the most distinctively human talent. Language is a window into human nature, and most
significantly, the vast expressive power of language is one of the wonders of the natural world. Thank you.

TRANSCRIPT

Question: Why study language?

Steven Pinker: What I basically try to do is understand human nature, how the mind
works, what makes us tick. What are the patterns of thought, and emotion and motivation
that characterize our species? I focus on language partly because you cant make a living out
of studying human nature. Its just too big a topic. Youve got to pick something tractable to
study. For me it has been language, and indeed for much of my career one little corner of
language, namely regular and irregular verbs. And I have my reasons for focusing on that
particular corner. I think it sheds light on larger questions about what makes the mind work.
But language as a general topic is, I think, a good entre into human nature for a number of
reasons. Its distinctively human. If youre interested in general in what makes humans
unlike mice and birds, language is a pretty good place to start not only because of language
itself the fact that we make noise with our mouths in order to get ideas across, but because
language has to be fine-tuned for the kinds of thoughts and the kinds of social relationships
that humans want to share and negotiate with one another. So its a window into human
nature. Its also figured into debates on human nature, perhaps most famously with Chomsky
in the late 1950s using language as a way to rehabilitate the idea of innate mental structure,
something that was virtually taboo in the 1950s. He said language was a very good candidate
for something that is innately and uniquely human. So its an opening wedge for the idea that
important parts of the mind are innately structured. Its also a prime case of mental
computation. Its very hard to make sense of language, of our ability to string words into new
combinations, sentences that other people have never heard before but can very quickly
understand for the first time without appealing to the idea that we have a mental algorithm, a
set of rules, or a recipe or a formula that picks words out of a memory store and strings them
together in combinations where the order, as well as the choice of words is meaningful. So
language sheds light on the idea that the mind is a computational system.
Question: Why is language veiled?

PINKER: My main preoccupation today is using language as a window into human nature.
Ive studied language in the past as an example of human computation. What are the kinds
of simple operations of look up in combination that the mind is capable of? How is language
structured? What Im turning to now is the interface between language and the rest of the
mind how language can illuminate our social relationships. For example, why is so much of
language use veiled, or indirect, or done via innuendo rather than people blurting out exactly
what they mean? Why do I say, If you could pass the salt that would be great? instead of
Give me the salt. Why does someone make a sexual overture in terms of, Would you like to
come up and see my etchings? rather than, Do you want to have sex? Why are threats so
often veiled you know, Nice store you got there. Would be a real shame if something
happened to it. Given that the listener knows exactly what the speaker had in mind, its not
that anyone is fooled by this charade; but nonetheless some aspect of the social relationship
seems to be preserved if the request is slipped in between the lines. Im interested in what
that says about human relationships, about hypocrisy and taboo. Also what it says about the
kinds of relationships we have like dominance versus intimacy, and communality versus
exchange and reciprocity. Just to be concrete, why do you say, If you could pass the salt that
would be great. Well in issuing an imperative, youre kind of changing the relationship.

Youre turning it into one of dominance. Youre saying to a friend or to a stranger, Im going
to act as if I can boss you around and presuppose your compliance. You may not want to
move the relationship in that direction. At the same time you want the damn salt. So if you
say, If you could pass the salt that would be great, its such a non sequitor the intelligence of
the listener can figure out that it really is a request. But both of you know that you havent
actually turned the relationship into a superior-inferior. I think thats the key to
understanding all of these. That the sexual overture, the veiled threat, the veiled bribe and so
on are ways of preserving one of several kinds of relationships at the same time as we transact
the business of life such as requests, such as sexual overtures that might be inconsistent with
the relationship that we have with the person. So its in a way of using language as a way of
doing social psychology.
Im also interested in the effective memory on language. Why is so much language
metaphorical? Not in terms of poetic ornamentation. We dont even realize that theyre
metaphorical. We say something like, He moved the meeting from 3:00 to 4:00, were
using the metaphor of time as a line, as a spacial dimension of a meeting as a thing, and a
rescheduling as causing emotion. If we say, I have to force myself to be polite, without
realizing it using a metaphor of our natural inclination as inertia; a change in inclination as
the application of force; and indeed as conflicting tendencies as different object or people
inside our skull being shoved around. Its almost hard to find an example of language thats
not metaphorical. So what does that say about the human mind? Does it say that we actually
can never think abstractly, but deep down we always have little cartoons in our head of little
pucks being slid around on the ice, or people shoving each other inside the skull? Or does it
mean that we really do think abstractly, but that deep in the midst of history when the first
coiner of expressions like force so and so to be nice or move the meeting came about, they
needed some kind of verbiage. And so they cooked up a metaphor on the spot. Its better
than saying ________ if you can say force, because at least some people might have some
chance of knowing what youre talking about. But ever since wed been repeating the
metaphor dumbly, and we really do think abstractly, thats an interesting question about what
makes us tick inspired by language, and Id like to get some insight into it.
Steven Pinker: My main preoccupation today is using language as a window into human
nature. Ive studied language in the past as an example of human computation. What are the
kinds of simple operations of look up in combination that the mind is capable of? How is
language structured? What Im turning to now is the interface between language and the rest
of the mind how language can illuminate our social relationships. For example, why is so
much of language use veiled, or indirect, or done via innuendo rather than people blurting
out exactly what they mean? Why do I say, If you could pass the salt that would be great?
instead of Give me the salt. Why does someone make a sexual overture in terms of, Would
you like to come up and see my etchings? rather than, Do you want to have sex? Why are
threats so often veiled you know, Nice store you got there. Would be a real shame if
something happened to it. Given that the listener knows exactly what the speaker had in
mind, its not that anyone is fooled by this charade; but nonetheless some aspect of the social
relationship seems to be preserved if the request is slipped in between the lines. Im
interested in what that says about human relationships, about hypocrisy and taboo. Also
what it says about the kinds of relationships we have like dominance versus intimacy, and

communality versus exchange and reciprocity. Just to be concrete, why do you say, If you
could pass the salt that would be great. Well in issuing an imperative, youre kind of
changing the relationship. Youre turning it into one of dominance. Youre saying to a friend
or to a stranger, Im going to act as if I can boss you around and presuppose your
compliance. You may not want to move the relationship in that direction. At the same time
you want the damn salt. So if you say, If you could pass the salt that would be great, its such
a non sequitor the intelligence of the listener can figure out that it really is a request. But
both of you know that you havent actually turned the relationship into a superior-inferior. I
think thats the key to understanding all of these. That the sexual overture, the veiled threat,
the veiled bribe and so on are ways of preserving one of several kinds of relationships at the
same time as we transact the business of life such as requests, such as sexual overtures that
might be inconsistent with the relationship that we have with the person. So its in a way of
using language as a way of doing social psychology.
Question: Why do we use metaphors?
Steven Pinker: Im also interested in the effective memory on language. Why is so much
language metaphorical? Not in terms of poetic ornamentation. We dont even realize that
theyre metaphorical. We say something like, He moved the meeting from 3:00 to 4:00,
were using the metaphor of time as a line, as a spacial dimension of a meeting as a thing, and
a rescheduling as causing emotion. If we say, I have to force myself to be polite, without
realizing it using a metaphor of our natural inclination as inertia; a change in inclination as
the application of force; and indeed as conflicting tendencies as different object or people
inside our skull being shoved around. Its almost hard to find an example of language thats
not metaphorical. So what does that say about the human mind? Does it say that we actually
can never think abstractly, but deep down we always have little cartoons in our head of little
pucks being slid around on the ice, or people shoving each other inside the skull? Or does it
mean that we really do think abstractly, but that deep in the midst of history when the first
coiner of expressions like force so and so to be nice or move the meeting came about, they
needed some kind of verbiage. And so they cooked up a metaphor on the spot. Its better
than saying ________ if you can say force, because at least some people might have some
chance of knowing what youre talking about. But ever since wed been repeating the
metaphor dumbly, and we really do think abstractly, thats an interesting question about what
makes us tick inspired by language, and Id like to get some insight into it.