The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (82 page)

natural kind.
A category of objects as found in nature, like robins, animals, crabgrass, carbon, and mountains; as opposed to artifacts (man-made objects) and nominal kinds (categories specified by a precise definition, like senators, bachelors, brothers, and provinces).

natural language.
A human language like English or Japanese, as opposed to a computer language, musical notation, formulas in logic, and so on.

neural network.
A kind of computer program or model, loosely inspired by the brain, consisting of interconnected processing units that send signals to one another and turn on or off depending on the sum of their incoming signals.

neurons.
The information-processing cells of the nervous system, including brain cells and the cells whose fibers make up the nerves and spinal cord.

nominative.
The case of the subject of the sentence:
SHE
loves you
(not
HER
loves you
).

noun.
One of the major syntactic categories, comprising words that typically refer to a thing or person:
dog, cabbage, John, country, hour
.

number.
Singular versus plural:
duck
versus
ducks
.

object.
The argument adjacent to the verb, typically referring to the entity that defines or is affected by the action:
break
THE GLASS
, draw
A CIRCLE
, honor
YOUR MOTHER
. Also, the argument of a preposition:
in
THE HOUSE
, with
A MOUSE
.

parameter.
One of the ways in which something can vary; in linguistics, one of the ways in which languages can vary from one another (for example, verb-object versus object-verb ordering).

parsing.
One of the mental processes involved in sentence comprehension, in which the listener determines the syntactic categories of words, joins them up in a tree, and identifies the subject, object, and predicate; a prerequisite to determining who did what to whom from the information in the sentence.

part of speech.
The syntactic category of a word: noun, verb, adjective, preposition, adverb, conjunction.

participle.
A form of the verb that cannot stand by itself in a sentence but needs to be with an auxiliary or other verb:
He has
EATEN
; It was
SHOWN
; She is
RUNNING
; They kept
OPENING
the door
.

passive.
A construction in which the usual object appears as the subject, and the usual subject is the object of the preposition
by
or absent altogether:
He was eaten by wolverines; I was robbed
.

perisylvian.
Regions of the brain lining both sides and the end of the Sylvian fissure, the cleft between the temporal lobe and the rest of the brain. Language circuitry is thought to be concentrated in the left perisylvian areas.

person.
The difference between
I
or
we
(first person),
you
(second person), and
he/she/they/it
(third person).

philosopher.
A scholar who attempts to clarify difficult logical and conceptual questions, especially questions about the mind and about scientific knowledge. Does not refer here to a person who ruminates about the meaning of life.

phoneme.
One of the units of sound that are strung together to form a morpheme, roughly corresponding to the letters of the alphabet:
b-a-t; b-ea-t; s-t-ou-t
.

phonetics.
How the sounds of language are articulated and perceived.

phonology.
The component of grammar that determines the sound pattern of a language, including its inventory of phonemes, how they may be combined to form natural-sounding words, how the phonemes must be adjusted depending on their neighbors, and patterns of intonation, timing, and stress.

phrase.
A group of words that behaves as a unit in a sentence and which typically has some coherent meaning:
in the dark; the man in the gray suit; dancing in the dark; afraid of the wolf
.

phrase structure.
The information about the syntactic categories of the words in a sentence, how the words are grouped into phrases, and how the phrases are grouped into larger phrases; usually diagrammed as a tree.

phrase structure grammar.
A generative grammar consisting only of rules that define phrase structures.

polysynthetic language.
An inflecting language in which a word may be composed of a long string of prefixes, roots, and suffixes.

pragmatics.
How language is used in a social context, including how sentences are made to fit in with the flow of a conversation, how unspoken premises are inferred, and how degrees of formality and politeness are signaled.

predicate.
A state, event, or relationship, usually involving one or more participants (arguments). Sometimes the predicate is identified with the verb phrase of a sentence (
The baby
ATE THE SLUG
), and the subject is considered its sole argument; at other times it is identified with the verb alone, and the subject, object, and other complements are all considered to be its arguments. The contradiction can be resolved by saying that the verb is a simple predicate, which combines with its complements to form a complex predicate.

preposition.
One of the major syntactic categories, comprising words that typically refer to a spatial or temporal relationship:
in, on, at, near, by, for, under, before, after
.

pronoun.
A word that stands for a whole noun phrase:
I, me, my, you, your, he, him, his, she, her, it, its, we, us, our, they, them, their, who, whom, whose
.

proposition.
A statement or assertion, consisting of a predicate and a set of arguments.

prosody.
The overall sound contour with which a word or sentence is pronounced: its melody (intonation) and rhythm (stress and timing).

psycholinguist.
A scientist, usually a psychologist by training, who studies how people understand, produce, or learn language.

psychologist.
A scientist who studies how the mind works, usually via the analysis of experimental or observational data on people’s behavior. Does not refer here to psychotherapist or to a clinician who treats mental disorders.

recursion.
A procedure that invokes an instance of itself, and thus can be applied repeatedly to create or analyze entities of any size: “How to put words
in alphabetical order
: sort the words so their first letters are in the same order as in the alphabet; then for each group of words beginning with the same letter, ignore that first letter and put the remaining parts
in alphabetical order
.” “
A verb phrase
can consist of a verb followed by a noun phrase followed by a
verb phrase
.”

regular.
See
irregular.

relative clause.
A clause modifying a noun, usually containing a trace corresponding to that noun:
the spy
WHO LOVED ME
; the land
THAT TIME FORGOT
; violet eyes
TO DIE FOR
.

role-player.
See
argument.

root.
The most basic morpheme in a word or family of related words, consisting of an irreducible, arbitrary sound-meaning pairing:
ELECTR
icity,
ELECTR
ical,
ELECTR
ic,
ELECTR
ify,
ELECTR
on
.

semantics.
The parts of rules and lexical entries that specify the meaning of a morpheme, word, phrase, or sentence. Does not refer here to haggling over exact definitions.

sexual recombination.
The process that makes organisms capable of generating an immense number of distinct possible offspring. When a sperm or egg is formed, the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes ordinarily found in a human cell (one chromosome in each pair from the mother, one from the father) have to be cut down to twenty-three single chromosomes. This is done in two steps. First, within each pair, a few random cuts are made in identical positions in each chromosome, pieces are exchanged, and the new chromosomes are glued back together. Then, one member of each pair is chosen at random, and put into the egg or sperm. During fertilization, each chromosome from the egg is paired up with its counterpart from the sperm, restoring the genome to twenty-three pairs.

SLI.
Specific Language Impairment, any syndrome in which a person fails to develop language properly and the blame cannot be pinned on hearing deficits, low intelligence, social problems, or difficulty controlling the speech muscles.

specifier.
A specific position at the periphery of a phrase, generally where one finds the subject. For many years the specifier position of a noun phrase was thought to contain the determiner (article), but the current consensus in Chomskyan theory puts the determiner in a phrase of its own (a determiner phrase).

stem.
The main portion of a word, the one that prefixes and suffixes are stuck onto:
WALK
s,
BREAK
able, en
SLAVE
.

stop consonant.
A consonant in which the airflow is completely blocked for a moment:
p, t, k, b, d, g
.

strong verb.
The verbs in Germanic languages (including English), now all irregular, that form the past tense by changing the vowel:
break-broke, sing-sang, fly-flew, bind-bound, bear-bore
.

subject.
One of the arguments of a verb, typically used for the agent or actor when the verb refers to an action:
BELIVEAU
scores;
THE HIPPIE
touched the debutante
.

surface structure
(now
s-structure
). The phrase structure tree formed when movement transformations are applied to a deep structure. Thanks to traces, it contains all the information necessary to determine the meaning of the sentence. Aside from certain minor adjustments (executed by “stylistic” and phonological rules), it corresponds to the actual order of words that a person utters.

syllable.
A vowel or other continuous voiced sound, together with one or more consonants preceding or following it, that are pronounced as a unit:
sim-ple, a-lone, en-cy-clo-pe-di-a
.

syntactic atom.
One of the senses of “word,” defined as an entity that the rules of syntax cannot separate or rearrange.

syntactic category.
See
part of speech.

syntax.
The component of grammar that arranges words into phrases and sentences.

tense.
Relative time of occurrence of the event described by the sentence, the moment at which the speaker utters the sentence, and, often, some third reference point: present (
he eats
), past (
he ate
), future (
he will eat
). Other so-called tenses such as the perfect (
He has eaten
) involve a combination of tense and aspect.

top-down.
See
bottom-up.

trace.
A silent or “understood” element in a sentence, corresponding to the deep-structure position of a moved phrase:
What did he put (
TRACE
) in the garage?
(the trace corresponds to
what); Boggs was grazed (
TRACE
) by a fastball
(the trace corresponds to
Boggs
).

transformational grammar.
A grammar composed of a set of phrase structure rules, which build a deep-structure tree, and one or more transformational rules, which move the phrases in the deep structure to yield a surface-structure tree.

transitive.
See
intransitive.

Turing machine.
A design for a simple computer consisting of a potentially infinite strip of paper, and a processor that can move along the paper and print or erase symbols on it in a sequence that depends on which symbol the processor is currently reading and which of several states it is in. Though too clumsy for practical use, a Turing machine is thought to be capable of computing anything that any digital computer, past, present, or future, can compute.