Professor Paul Bloom: This class today is about language. And language is, to a large extent, where the action is. The study of human language has been the battleground over different theories of human nature. So, every philosopher or psychologist or humanist or neuroscientist who has ever thought about people has had to make some claim about the nature of language and how it works. I'm including here people like Aristotle and Plato, Hume, Locke, Freud and Skinner. I'm also including modern-day approaches to computational theory, cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. If you hope to make it with a theory of what people are and how people work, you have to explain and talk about language. In fact, language is sufficiently interesting that, unlike most other things I'll talk about in this class, there is an entire field devoted to its study, the field of linguistics that is entirely devoted to studying the nuances and structures of different languages.心理学空间*qVd w kh
*Dz;~iL0Now, I'll first, before getting into details, make a definitional point. When I'm talking about language I'm meaning systems like English and Dutch and Warlpiri and Italian and Turkish and Urdu and what we've seen and heard right now in class in the demonstration that preceded the formal lecture. [Before class started, Professor Bloom had several bilingual students give demonstrations of non-English speech.] Now, you could use language in a different sense. You could use the term "language" to describe what dogs do, or what chimpanzees do, or birds. You could use language to describe music, talk about the--a musical language or art, or any communicative system, and there's actually nothing wrong with that. There's no rule about how you're supposed to use the word "language." But the problem is if you use the word "language" impossibly, incredibly broadly, then from a scientific point of view it becomes useless to ask interesting questions about it. If language can refer to just about everything from English to traffic signals, then we're not going to be able to find interesting generalizations or do good science about it.
So, what I want to do is, I want to discuss the scientific notion of language, at first restricting myself to systems like English and Dutch and American sign language and Navajo and so on. Once we've made some generalizations about language in this narrow sense, we could then ask, and we will ask, to what extent do other systems such as animal communication systems relate to this narrower definition. So we could ask, in this narrow sense, what properties do languages have and then go on to ask, in a broader sense, what other communicative systems also possess those properties.
0H$CB%\g0Well, some things are obvious about language so here are some; here are the questions we will ask. This will frame our discussion today. We'll first go over some basic facts about language. We'll talk about what languages share, we'll talk about how language develops, and we'll talk about language and communication in nonhumans.心理学空间F,KwtX
V{'o [p V0I began this class with a demonstration of--that illustrates two very important facts about language. One is that languages all share some deep and intricate universals. In particular, all languages, at minimum, are powerful enough to convey an abstract notion like this; abstract in the sense that it talks about thoughts and it talks about a proposition and spatial relations in objects. There's no language in the world that you just cannot talk about abstract things with. Every language can do this. But the demonstration [before class] also illustrated another fact about language, which is how different languages are. They sound different. If you know one language, you don't necessarily know another. It's not merely that you can't understand it. It could sound strange or look unusual in the case of a sign language. And so, any adequate theory of language has to allow for both the commonalities and the differences across languages. And this is the puzzle faced by the psychology and cognitive science of language.