The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (80 page)

Smith, G. W. 1991.
Computers and human language
. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sokal, R. R., Oden, N. L., & Wilson, C. 1991. Genetic evidence for the spread of agriculture in Europe by demic diffusion.
Nature, 351
, 143–144.

Solan, L. M. 1993.
The language of judges
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Spelke, E. S., Breinlinger, K., Macomber, J., & Jacobson, K. 1992. Origins of knowledge.
Psychological Review, 99
, 605–632.

Sperber, D. 1982.
On anthropological knowledge
. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sperber, D. 1985. Anthropology and psychology: Toward an epidemiology of representations.
Man, 20
, 73–89.

Sperber, D. In press. The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations. In Hirschfeld & Gelman, in press.

Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. 1986.
Relevance: Communication and cognition
. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Sproat, R. 1992.
Morphology and computation
. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Staten, V. 1992.
Ol’ Diz
. New York: HarperCollins.

Steele, S. (with Akmajian, A., Demers, R., Jelinek, E., Kitagawa, C., Oehrle, R., and Wasow, T.) 1981.
An Encyclopedia of AUX: A Study of Cross-Linguistic Equivalence
. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Stringer, C. B. 1990. The emergence of modern humans.
Scientific American
, December.

Stringer, C. B., & Andrews, P. 1988. Genetic and fossil evidence for the origin of modern humans.
Science, 239
, 1263–1268.

Stromswold, K. J. 1990. Learnability and the acquisition of auxiliaries. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT.

Stromswold, K. J. 1994. Language comprehension without language production. Presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development.

Stromswold, K. J. 1994. The cognitive and neural bases of language acquisition. In M. S. Gazzaniga (Ed.),
The cognitive neurosciences
. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Stromswold, K. J., Caplan, D., & Alpert, N. 1993. Functional imaging of sentence comprehension. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Psychology, Rutgers University.

Studdert-Kennedy, M. 1990. This view of language. In Pinker & Bloom, 1990.

Supalla, S. 1986. Manually coded English: The modality question in signed language development. Master’s thesis, University of Illinois.

Swinney, D. 1979. Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)consideration of context effects.
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 5
, 219–227.

Symons, D. 1979.
The evolution of human sexuality
. New York: Oxford University Press.

Symons, D., & commentators. 1980. Précis and multiple book review of “The Evolution of Human Sexuality.”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3
, 171–214.

Symons, D. 1992. On the use and misuse of Darwinism and the study of human behavior. In Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992.

Tartter, V. C. 1986.
Language processes
. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.

Terrace, H. S. 1979.
Nim
. New York: Knopf.

Terrace, H. S., Petitto, L. A., Sanders, R. J., & Bever, T. G. 1979. Can an ape create a sentence?
Science, 206
, 891–902.

Thomas L. 1990.
Et cetera, et cetera: Notes of a wordwatcher
. Boston: Little, Brown.

Thomason, S. G. 1984. Do you remember your previous life’s language in your present incarnation?
American Speech, 59
, 340–350.

Tiersma, P. 1993. Linguistic issues in the law.
Language, 69
, 113–137.

Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. 1989. Adaptation versus phylogeny: The role of animal psychology in the study of human behavior.
International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2
, 105–118.

Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. 1990a. On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: The role of genetics and adaptation.
Journal of Personality, 58
, 17–67.

Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. 1990b. The past explains the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments.
Ethology and sociobiology, 11
, 375–424.

Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. 1992. Psychological foundations of culture. In Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992.

Trueswell, J. C., Tanenhaus, M., & Garnsey, S. M. In press. Semantic influences on parsing: Use of thematic role information in syntactic ambiguity resolution.
Journal of Memory and Language
.

Trueswell, J. C., Tanenhaus, M., & Kello, C. In press. Verb-specific constraints in sentence processing: Separating effects of lexical preference from garden-paths.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
.

Turing, A. M. 1950. Computing machinery and intelligence.
Mind, 59
, 433–460.

Voegelin, C. F., & Voegelin, F. M. 1977.
Classification and index of the world’s languages
. New York: Elsevier.

von der Malsburg, C., & Singer, W. 1988. Principles of cortical network organization. In P. Rakic & W. Singer (Eds.),
Neurobiology of neocortex
. New York: Wiley.

Wald, B. 1990. Swahili and the Bantu languages. In B. Comrie (Ed.),
The world’s major langauges
. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wallace, R. A. 1980.
How they do it
. New York: Morrow.

Wallesch, C.-W., Henriksen, L., Kornhuber, H.-H., & Paulson, O. B. 1985. Observations on regional cerebral blood flow in cortical and subcortical structures during language production in normal man.
Brain and Language, 25
, 224–233.

Wallich, P. 1991. Silicon babies.
Scientific American
, December 124–134.

Wallman, J. 1992.
Aping language
. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wang, W. S.-Y. 1976. Language change. In Harnad, Steklis, & Lancaster, 1976.

Wanner, E. 1988. The parser’s architecture. In F. Kessel (Ed.),
The development of language and of language researchers: Papers presented to Roger Brown
. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Wanner, E., & Maratsos, M. 1978. An ATN approach to comprehension. In M. Halle, J. Bresnan, & G. A. Miller (Eds.),
Linguistic theory and psychological reality
. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Warren, R. M. 1970. Perceptual restoration of missing speech sounds.
Science, 167
, 392–393.

Warrington, E. K., & McCarthy, R. 1987. Categories of knowledge: Further fractionation and an attempted integration.
Brain, 106
, 1273–1296.

Watson, J. B. 1925.
Behaviorism
. New York: Norton.

Weizenbaum, J. 1976.
Computer power and human reason
. San Francisco: Freeman.

Werker, J. 1991. The ontogeny of speech perception. In Mattingly & Studdert-Kennedy, 1991.

Wexler, K., and Culicover, P. 1980.
Formal principles of language acquisition
. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Wilbur, R. 1979.
American Sign Language and sign systems
. Baltimore: University Park Press.

Williams, E. 1981. On the notions “lexically related” and “head of a word.”
Linguistic Inquiry, 12
, 245–274.

Williams, G. C. 1957. Pleiotropy, natural selection, and the evolution of senescence.
Evolution, 11
, 398–411.

Williams, G. C. 1966.
Adaptation and natural selection: A critique of some current evolutionary thought
. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Williams, G. C. 1992.
Natural selection
. New York: Oxford University Press.

Williams, H. 1989.
Sacred elephant
. New York: Harmony Books.

Williams, J. M. 1990.
Style: Toward clarity and grace
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wilson, E. O. 1972. Animal communication.
Scientific American
, September.

Wilson, M., & Daly, M. 1992. The man who mistook his wife for a chattel. In Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992.

Winston, P. H. 1992.
Artificial Intelligence
(4th ed.). Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Woodward, J. 1978. Historical bases of American Sign Language. In Siple, 1978.

Wright, R. 1991. Quest for the mother tongue.
Atlantic Monthly
, April, 39–68.

Wynn, K. 1992. Addition and subtraction in human infants.
Nature, 358
, 749–750.

Yngve, V. H. 1960. A model and an hypothesis for language structure.
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 104
, 444–466.

Yourcenar, M. 1961.
The memoirs of Hadrian
. New York: Farrar, Straus.

Zatorre, R. J., Evans, A. C., Meyer, E., & Gjedde, A. 1992. Lateralization of phonetic and pitch discrimination in speech processing.
Science, 256
, 846–849.

Zurif, E. 1990. Language and the brain. In Osherson & Lasnik, 1990.

accusative.
The case of the object of a verb:
I saw
HIM
(not
HE
).

active.
See
voice.

adjective.
One of the major syntactic categories, comprising words that typically refer to a property or state:
a
HOT
tin roof; He is
AFRAID
of his mother
.

adjunct.
A phrase that comments on or adds parenthetical information to a concept (as opposed to an argument):
a man
FROM CINCINNATI
; I cut the bread
WITH A KNIFE
, I have used the word
modifier
instead.

adverb.
One of the minor syntactic categories, comprising words that typically refer to the manner or time of an action:
tread
SOFTLY; BOLDLY
go; He will leave
SOON
.

affix.
A prefix or suffix.

agreement.
The process in which a word in a sentence is altered depending on a property of some other word in the sentence; typically, the verb being altered to match the number, person, and gender of its subject or object:
He
SMELLS
(not
SMELL
) versus
They
SMELL
(not
SMELLS
).

AI.
Artificial Intelligence, the attempt to program computers to carry out intelligent, humanlike tasks such as learning, reasoning, recognizing objects, understanding speech and sentences, and moving arms and legs.

algorithm.
An explicit, step-by-step program or set of instructions for getting the solution to some problem: “To calculate a 15% tip, take the sales tax and multiply by three.”

aphasia.
The loss or impairment of language abilities following brain damage.

argument.
One of the participants defining a state, event, or relationship:
president of
THE UNITED STATES; DICK
gave
THE DIAMOND
to
LIZ
; the sum of
THREE
and
FOUR
. I have used the term
role-player
instead.

article.
One of the minor syntactic categories, including the words
a
and
the
. Usually subsumed in the category
determiner
in contemporary theories of grammar.

ASL.
American Sign Language, the primary sign language of the deaf in the United States.

aspect.
The way an event is spread out over time: whether it is instantaneous (
swat a fly
), continuous (
run around all day
), terminating (
draw a circle
), habitual (
mows the grass every Sunday
), or a timeless state (
knows how to swim
). In English, aspect is involved in the inflectional distinction between
He eats
and
He is eating
, and between
He ate, He was eating
, and
He has eaten
.

auxiliary.
A special kind of verb used to express concepts related to the truth of the sentence, such as tense, negation, question/statement, necessary/possible:
He
MIGHT
quibble; He
WILL
quibble; He
HAS
quibbled; He
IS
quibbling; He
DOESN’T
quibble;
DOES
he quibble?

axon.
the long fiber extending from a neuron that carries a signal to other neurons.

behaviorism.
A school of psychology, influential from the 1920s to the 1960s, that rejected the study of the mind as unscientific, and sought to explain the behavior of organisms (including humans) with laws of stimulus-response conditioning.

bottom-up.
Perceptual processing that relies on extracting information directly from the sensory signal (for example, the loudness, pitch, and frequency components of a sound wave), as opposed to
top-down
processing, which uses knowledge and expectancies to guess, predict, or fill in the perceived event or message.

case.
A set of affixes, positions, or word forms that a language uses to distinguish the different roles of the participants in some event or state. Cases typically correspond to the subject, object, indirect object, and the objects of various kinds of prepositions. In English, case is what distinguishes between
I, he, she, we, they
, which are used for subjects, and
me, him, her, us, them
, which are used for objects of verbs, objects of prepositions, and everywhere else.

chain device.
See
finite-state device.

chromosome.
A long strand of DNA, containing thousands of genes, in a protective package. There are twenty-three chromosomes in a human sperm or egg; there are twenty-three pairs of chromosomes (one from the mother, one from the father) in all other human cells.

clause.
A kind of phrase that is generally the same thing as a sentence, except that some kinds of clause can never occur on their own but only inside a bigger sentence:
THE CAT IS ON THE MAT
; John arranged
FOR MARY TO GO
; The spy
WHO LOVED ME
disappeared; He said
THAT SHE LEFT
.

cognitive science.
The study of intelligence (reasoning, perception, language, memory, control of movement), embracing parts of several academic disciplines: experimental psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, neuroscience.

complement.
A phrase that appears together with a verb, completing its meaning:
She ate
AN APPLE
; It darted
UNDER THE COUCH
; I thought
HE WAS DEAD
.

compound.
A word formed by joining together other words:
fruit-eater; superwoman; laser printer
.

concord.
See
agreement.

conjunction.
One of the minor syntactic categories, including
and, or
, and
but
; also, the entire phrase made by conjoining two words or phrases:
Ernie and Bert; the naked and the dead
.

consonant.
A phoneme produced with a blockage or constriction of the vocal tract.

content words.
Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and some prepositions, which typically express concepts particular to a given sentence, as opposed to
function words
(articles, conjunctions, auxiliaries, pronouns, and other prepositions), which are used to specify kinds of information, like tense or case, that are expressed in all or most sentences.

copula.
The verb
to be
when it is used to link a subject and a predicate:
She
WAS
happy; Biff and Joe
ARE
fools; The cat
IS
on the mat
.

cortex.
The thin surface of the cerebral hemispheres of the brain, visible as gray matter, containing the bodies of neurons and their synapses with other neurons; where the neural computation takes place in the cerebral hemispheres. The rest of the cerebral hemispheres consists of
white matter,
bundles of axons that connect one part of the cortex with another.

dative.
A family of constructions typically used for giving or benefiting;
She
BAKED ME A CAKE
; She
BAKED A CAKE FOR ME
; He
GAVE HER A PARTRIDGE
; He
GAVE A PARTRIDGE TO HER
. Also refers to the case of the beneficiary or recipient in this construction.

deep structure
(now
d-structure).
The tree, formed by phrase structure rules, into which words are plugged, in such a way as to satisfy the demands of the words regarding their neighboring phrases. Contrary to popular belief, not the same as Universal Grammar, the meaning of a sentence, or the abstract grammatical relationships underlying a sentence.

derivational morphology.
The component of grammar containing rules that create new words out of old ones:
break + -able
breakable; sing + -er
singer; super + woman
superwoman
.

determiner.
One of the minor syntactic categories, comprising the articles and similar words:
a, the, some, more, much, many
.

diphthong.
A vowel consisting of two vowels pronounced in quick succession:
b
I
te (pronounced “ba-eet”); lo
U
d, m
A
ke
.

discourse.
A succession of related sentences, as in a conversation or text.

dyslexia.
Difficulty in reading or learning to read, which may be caused by brain damage, inherited factors, or unknown causes. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the habit of mirror-reversing letters.

ellipsis.
Omission of a phrase, usually one that was previously mentioned or can be inferred:
Yes, I can (_____); Where are you going? (_____) To the store
.

empiricism.
The approach to studying mind and behavior that emphasizes learning and environmental influence over innate structure; the claim that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. A second sense, not used in this book, is the approach to science that emphasizes experimentation and observation over theory.