Riona (
rionaleonhart) wrote2010-09-24 01:46 pm
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I Am Using This Icon Because David Mitchell Looks A Bit Like A Teacher.
I recently looked up 'oh dear' in Wiktionary, hoping to find information about the phrase's origin. Whilst it was not terribly informative, I was amused by the example sentence: Oh dear, you seem to have forgotten to wear clothes.
This is an entry about language! Here are some facts about language that I enjoy.
- Children just beginning to learn to speak will often correctly use irregular verbs: for example, I went. However, when they are slightly older, they will begin to say I goed before returning to I went.
The theory is that at first the children are simply repeating what they hear. However, at some point they realise that adding -ed onto the end of a verb puts it into the past tense, and so they apply that rule universally, saying not only I looked and I wanted but I goed. Later, they realise that some verbs are exceptions to this rule and begin to say I went again.
This is interesting because it shows that children aren't simply parroting back what they hear; they are actually learning and applying grammatical rules. Awesome.
- In a verb string, the form of each verb is determined by the verb preceding it. For example:
I ride the unicorn
I am riding the unicorn - the use of am, a form of the progressive auxiliary to be, puts ride into the progressive form, riding.
I have ridden the unicorn - to have puts ride into the past/perfect* participle, ridden. (The past participle is not necessarily the same as the simple past (I rode the unicorn), but in regular verbs the two forms are the same (I licked the unicorn; I have licked the unicorn.))
I have been riding the unicorn - to have puts to be into the past participle, been, and that in turn puts to ride into the progressive participle, riding.
* This is also called the passive participle, because it is used with to be to form the passive voice: The unicorn was ridden by me.
What fascinates me about this is the fact that it all seems so complicated, and yet people follow all these convoluted grammatical rules without really thinking about it. Does it occur to you, when you ask 'Does Riona realise how boring this is?', that what you're essentially doing is taking the sentence 'Riona realises how boring this is', adding the optional auxiliary to do to make 'Riona does realise how boring this is', and then switching the subject and auxiliary around to form a question? (German can do this without the auxiliary verb: 'liebst du mich?' is essentially 'love you me?', but because in English we can only switch auxiliary or modal verbs with the subject we have to add a 'do'.)
...well, I think it's interesting. I love grammar! I can't help it!
- I imagine many of you will already know about pidgins and creoles, but they're so fascinating that I want to mention them anyway. A pidgin is a simplified language, developed as a means of communication between groups of people who don't share a common tongue. It doesn't really have grammatical rules; the idea is just to convey meaning. However, if the speakers of a pidgin have children, and if those children grow up hearing the pidgin, they will spontaneously give the pidgin grammatical rules. It will become a full-blown language, called a creole. Without consciously knowing what they're doing, these children will give the pidgin a whole new level of consistency and complexity, just in the process of learning it. THAT'S CRAZY.
(I should note that my knowledge of the pidgin-creole relationship came from Stephen Pinker, rather than my course, and as Pinker is an advocate of Chomsky's theory that language is innate he may have an interpretive bias.)
This is an entry about language! Here are some facts about language that I enjoy.
- Children just beginning to learn to speak will often correctly use irregular verbs: for example, I went. However, when they are slightly older, they will begin to say I goed before returning to I went.
The theory is that at first the children are simply repeating what they hear. However, at some point they realise that adding -ed onto the end of a verb puts it into the past tense, and so they apply that rule universally, saying not only I looked and I wanted but I goed. Later, they realise that some verbs are exceptions to this rule and begin to say I went again.
This is interesting because it shows that children aren't simply parroting back what they hear; they are actually learning and applying grammatical rules. Awesome.
- In a verb string, the form of each verb is determined by the verb preceding it. For example:
I ride the unicorn
I am riding the unicorn - the use of am, a form of the progressive auxiliary to be, puts ride into the progressive form, riding.
I have ridden the unicorn - to have puts ride into the past/perfect* participle, ridden. (The past participle is not necessarily the same as the simple past (I rode the unicorn), but in regular verbs the two forms are the same (I licked the unicorn; I have licked the unicorn.))
I have been riding the unicorn - to have puts to be into the past participle, been, and that in turn puts to ride into the progressive participle, riding.
* This is also called the passive participle, because it is used with to be to form the passive voice: The unicorn was ridden by me.
What fascinates me about this is the fact that it all seems so complicated, and yet people follow all these convoluted grammatical rules without really thinking about it. Does it occur to you, when you ask 'Does Riona realise how boring this is?', that what you're essentially doing is taking the sentence 'Riona realises how boring this is', adding the optional auxiliary to do to make 'Riona does realise how boring this is', and then switching the subject and auxiliary around to form a question? (German can do this without the auxiliary verb: 'liebst du mich?' is essentially 'love you me?', but because in English we can only switch auxiliary or modal verbs with the subject we have to add a 'do'.)
...well, I think it's interesting. I love grammar! I can't help it!
- I imagine many of you will already know about pidgins and creoles, but they're so fascinating that I want to mention them anyway. A pidgin is a simplified language, developed as a means of communication between groups of people who don't share a common tongue. It doesn't really have grammatical rules; the idea is just to convey meaning. However, if the speakers of a pidgin have children, and if those children grow up hearing the pidgin, they will spontaneously give the pidgin grammatical rules. It will become a full-blown language, called a creole. Without consciously knowing what they're doing, these children will give the pidgin a whole new level of consistency and complexity, just in the process of learning it. THAT'S CRAZY.
(I should note that my knowledge of the pidgin-creole relationship came from Stephen Pinker, rather than my course, and as Pinker is an advocate of Chomsky's theory that language is innate he may have an interpretive bias.)
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I have been learning bits of "young kid" language from the kids at nursery. It's just little things, like: "I'm four in five sleeps!" or the kids all have a tendency to chorus in response to a sentence another one of them says: "And me!" Apparently kids around here just don't use 'me too', just 'and me', lol!
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I think you're onto something there. It is very much about including them. So, a kid'll say something like, "My dad has a really cool car", then like three kids in unison will practically shout "and me!" and tell me about said cool cars, and I wish I understood more about cars from watching Top Gear...
It is interesting to hear language development though - there's a kid who seems to parrot back what's been said to her at various points which fascinates me (stuff like "I'm a clever girl" or "what colour is that?" in a way that isn't so much curious so much as she's been asked it before and is repeating it to interact the other way) for instance!
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Obv I don't find this boring at all. I'd love to learn English grammar properly.
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Fellow Student: We found that people used to pronounce 'super' and 'suit' with a yod! So they'd say 'syooper' and 'syoot'!
Riona: ...I say 'syoot'.
(I'm not quite old-fashioned enough to use it in 'super', though.)
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Does your Pinker-based knowledge come from The Language Instinct? I read that a few months ago and wriggled with glee throughout. I definitely lean towards the Chomskyan theory of innate grammar/language, from an evo-bio perspective.
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In the next few years I'm planning on taking a functional grammar course.
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There's an awesome joke in Mystery Science Theater 3000 where one of the movie's actors says "Well, maybe then it's too late!" and Mike says "Wow, the future conditional pluperfect subjunctive." Which, looking at it now, I don't actually think it is, but still, grammar jokes are rare.
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Also, oh man, Steven Pinker. Was the one you read "The Language Instinct"?
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It's an adventurelogue of pidgin and creole studies.
Very. Enjoyable.
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(Although my inner literature-preferrer frowns upon you focusing more on your lecturers' way of speaking than what they were actually saying. Then again, with some books, I can't blame you)
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Isn't there something about a sign language creole? They tried to enforce lip-reading in...some school or other, I forget. Instead, the children spontaneously developed a grammatical sign language. (I've probably got some of that wrong, but it's a fascinating story.)
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So on the sly, they'd get together and teach each other Sign that they'd made up, which would quickly spread throughout the school and become a uniform language that all the children used, eventually developing its own grammatical structures for things like story-telling. Each school would spawn it's own mini-language that would then continue to grow and evolve once the Deaf students left and met other students who had been boarded at other places.
I think it's pretty fascinating too, if I do say so.
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That's very interesting! Do you know why that might be? (...and it occurred to me after posting this comment that I'd used a rather bored-looking icon, but I assure you that my icon choice was because the character in it is a doctor.)
Probably the most famous example of a sign language creole is Nicuraguan Sign Language, which is absolutely fascinating.
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But there are different explanations. Pinker favours the rule-based ones. You can also build clever neural models of the brain, which also show that U-shaped pattern as they learn, without being told rules. It's all rather fascinating.