What is the main focus of the course?

The course focuses on the scientific study of human language, analyzing its structure and function.

What materials are required for the course?

Lectures and problem sets are mandatory; a textbook is optional but recommended.

How are grades determined?

Grades are based on problem sets and multiple-choice exams, with the lowest problem set grade being dropped.

What are the components of linguistic analysis?

Linguistic analysis consists of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.

What is the significance of studying linguistics?

Studying linguistics helps in understanding language structure, aiding in various careers like translation, language teaching, and technology.

Does linguistics involve learning multiple languages?

No, linguistics is about scientifically studying the structure of language, not learning multiple languages.

How is language characterized scientifically?

Language is seen as a complex system of symbolic communication that can be broken down into smaller units for analysis.

What kinds of careers can benefit from studying linguistics?

Careers like interpretation, translation, speech pathology, NLP, and clinical psychology can benefit from linguistics.

Can linguistic concepts be applied practically?

Yes, linguistic concepts can be applied in language technology, therapy, education, and more.

How is the course structured?

The course progresses through phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, and then examines language's relationship with culture, thought, and technology.

Introduction to Linguistics: First Lecture

00:42:06

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQx_jZxdCbs

Zusammenfassung

TLDRThis lecture is an introduction to the undergraduate course "Introduction to Linguistics" at UCI, led by host Richard Futrell. The course guides students through the scientific study of human language, emphasizing objective analysis rather than subjective interpretation. Key areas of focus include phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The course aims to equip students with a deep understanding of language structure, preparing them for careers in fields like interpretation, translation, natural language processing, and speech pathology. Problem sets and multiple-choice exams determine the students' grades, with lectures and discussions held online. The course also explores the relationship between language, thought, and culture, highlighting language's complexity and ubiquity in human life.

Mitbringsel

📘 Introduction to linguistics course by Richard Futrell at UCI.
🌐 Course focuses on the scientific study of human language.
📚 Textbook is optional but broadens understanding.
📝 Grading involves problem sets and three exams.
🔍 Linguistics doesn't require learning multiple languages.
🤖 Career applications include translation, NLP, and more.
🧠 The course dissects language into phonetics, syntax, etc.
🌊 Language is compared to a complex system like water to fish.
📈 Linguistics is a frontier science with much to discover.
🔄 The course progresses from basic levels to applied linguistics.

Zeitleiste

00:00:00 - 00:05:00
Richard Futrell introduces the undergraduate course 'Introduction to Linguistics' at UCI, detailing course materials, evaluations, and logistics. Open-book, non-cumulative exams will contribute half of the grade, alongside problem sets and mandatory discussion sections over Zoom. The optional textbook 'Language Files 12th edition' is available to deepen understanding.
00:05:00 - 00:10:00
Futrell outlines linguistics as the scientific study of language, emphasizing that terms underlined in materials are crucial for exams. The course aims to move beyond subjective language analysis, seen in literature, towards a systematic, scientific approach—to examine language structures, processing, and its universal aspects across various languages.
00:10:00 - 00:15:00
The course will explore questions about language structure and processing, such as why some language is easier to understand and if language impacts thoughts. Contrary to popular belief, linguistics is about scientifically studying language principles rather than learning multiple languages. Scientific understanding can ease learning additional languages.
00:15:00 - 00:20:00
Understanding universal language principles aids in learning new languages, akin to knowing card game rules facilitates learning new games. Linguistics involves symbolic systems analysis and has practical applications in careers like translation, natural language processing, and speech pathology, helping scientifically analyze language complexity.
00:20:00 - 00:25:00
Despite language's complexity and its intrinsic nature akin to water for fish, the course will teach how to analyze this complex symbolic system. Linguistics applies to careers like translation and speech pathology and understanding underlying principles aids in rapid language learning. It involves rigorous symbolic systems analysis.
00:25:00 - 00:30:00
Futrell challenges the idea that languages contain untranslatable words and concepts, arguing that any language can express any thought, albeit using different syntactic structures. The course will explore languages' commonalities and their capability to convey universal meanings through linguistics' scientific methods.
00:30:00 - 00:35:00
Linguistics examines language form and meaning, breaking down language into sentences, phrases, words, morphemes, phonemes, and features. This hierarchical analysis, detailing each part's linguistic role, is the scientific study focus, which corresponds to subfields like syntax, morphology, phonology, and phonetics.
00:35:00 - 00:42:06
The course's initial focus is phonetics and phonology—considered challenging but foundational—will lead to understanding more intuitive language aspects like syntax and semantics. Ultimately, students will learn how to scientifically analyze language mechanics before exploring its societal, psychological, and technological applications.

Mind Map

Video-Fragen und Antworten

What is the main focus of the course?
The course focuses on the scientific study of human language, analyzing its structure and function.
What materials are required for the course?
Lectures and problem sets are mandatory; a textbook is optional but recommended.
How are grades determined?
Grades are based on problem sets and multiple-choice exams, with the lowest problem set grade being dropped.
What are the components of linguistic analysis?
Linguistic analysis consists of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.
What is the significance of studying linguistics?
Studying linguistics helps in understanding language structure, aiding in various careers like translation, language teaching, and technology.
Does linguistics involve learning multiple languages?
No, linguistics is about scientifically studying the structure of language, not learning multiple languages.
How is language characterized scientifically?
Language is seen as a complex system of symbolic communication that can be broken down into smaller units for analysis.
What kinds of careers can benefit from studying linguistics?
Careers like interpretation, translation, speech pathology, NLP, and clinical psychology can benefit from linguistics.
Can linguistic concepts be applied practically?
Yes, linguistic concepts can be applied in language technology, therapy, education, and more.
How is the course structured?
The course progresses through phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, and then examines language's relationship with culture, thought, and technology.

Weitere Video-Zusammenfassungen anzeigen

Erhalten Sie sofortigen Zugang zu kostenlosen YouTube-Videozusammenfassungen, die von AI unterstützt werden!

Untertitel

Automatisches Blättern:

00:00:00
hello and welcome to introduction to
00:00:02
linguistics
00:00:04
i'm your host richard futrell and i hope
00:00:07
you'll enjoy this journey with me
00:00:08
through the science of human language
00:00:11
so let's get right to it this is
00:00:14
uci language science 3 an undergraduate
00:00:17
class
00:00:18
introduction to linguistics part of the
00:00:20
language science major
00:00:22
here at uci so for those of you who are
00:00:25
taking the class for credit at uci
00:00:27
i'm going to go into some course
00:00:29
logistics for those watching at home you
00:00:31
can skip this stuff
00:00:34
here we go the important information
00:00:36
you're going to need to know about the
00:00:38
class
00:00:38
is online on canvas and also at this
00:00:41
url here we have an authoritative online
00:00:45
syllabus
00:00:46
we're going to have lectures posted
00:00:48
online you're watching the first one
00:00:50
right now
00:00:51
we're going to have problem sets we're
00:00:52
going to have seven problem sets which
00:00:54
are going to be graded based on
00:00:55
correctness
00:00:56
the lowest problem set grade will be
00:00:58
dropped you're going to have three
00:01:00
multiple choice exams comprising half of
00:01:03
your grade
00:01:04
these exams are going to be open book
00:01:06
that means you can look in any book you
00:01:08
want you can also look online
00:01:09
at any materials you want you just can't
00:01:11
talk to other people
00:01:12
during the test that would be cheating
00:01:14
these are non-cumulative exams they only
00:01:17
cover the units that
00:01:18
precede them and we're also going to
00:01:21
have weekly
00:01:22
discussion sections you're going to be
00:01:24
attending synchronously
00:01:25
over zoom and participation is mandatory
00:01:28
in these to get a full participation
00:01:30
grade
00:01:31
you need to attend these sections
00:01:34
cool all right so let's get to it
00:01:37
we're gonna have a textbook
00:01:40
the textbook is optional it is language
00:01:44
files 12th edition
00:01:46
now this textbook being optional you
00:01:48
don't have to get it
00:01:50
but if you do get it you will find that
00:01:53
it vastly improves your understanding of
00:01:54
the material it's going to both deepen
00:01:56
and broaden your understanding of the
00:01:58
stuff that we're going to be teaching
00:02:01
it's available online and on the
00:02:04
syllabus
00:02:05
at that url you can see that each
00:02:07
lecture comes with a
00:02:08
recommended reading going along with it
00:02:10
from this book
00:02:13
again this is optional you don't need to
00:02:15
buy this book but if you do
00:02:17
it will greatly enhance your
00:02:18
understanding of the material
00:02:22
so what is linguistics what are we about
00:02:25
to learn
00:02:26
what are you here for linguistics
00:02:29
which we also call language science is
00:02:32
the scientific study of
00:02:34
language now let's stop take a look at
00:02:37
the slide for a moment here
00:02:39
i've underlined the terms linguistics
00:02:41
and language science
00:02:43
i'm going to underline in my slides any
00:02:46
term
00:02:47
whose definition you need to know in the
00:02:50
exams
00:02:51
and in the problem sets the underlying
00:02:54
terms
00:02:54
are scientific terms they're technical
00:02:57
jargon from the field of linguistics
00:02:59
you need to both know the definitions of
00:03:01
these terms and how to undo
00:03:04
and you need to understand them and you
00:03:06
need to know how to apply them
00:03:08
so linguistics is the scientific study
00:03:10
of language and it's also called
00:03:12
language science
00:03:13
what do we mean by scientific study of
00:03:14
language that's what we're about to get
00:03:16
into
00:03:18
this course in teaching you linguistics
00:03:21
is going to teach you how to analyze
00:03:23
language scientifically
00:03:25
and objectively this is going to be
00:03:27
maybe different than how you've thought
00:03:28
about
00:03:29
language before so you've all had a lot
00:03:32
of experience
00:03:32
in analyzing language in a way which is
00:03:35
kind of intuitive
00:03:36
maybe kind of subjective this could
00:03:38
happen in like a literature class when
00:03:40
you read a story
00:03:41
and you think about how the different
00:03:42
words evoke feelings in you
00:03:45
or when you're doing something like
00:03:46
analyzing a text message to help your
00:03:48
friend decipher what someone else meant
00:03:50
these are sort of intuitive subjective
00:03:53
analyses of language
00:03:54
what we're going to be doing in this
00:03:55
class is adding a big dose of science
00:03:58
and objectivity to that
00:04:00
kind of stuff we're going to be doing a
00:04:01
rigorous scientific analysis
00:04:03
of language we're going to be asking
00:04:07
questions like
00:04:08
how do words and sentences break into
00:04:10
parts
00:04:11
language consists of units things like
00:04:13
sentences or words or sounds
00:04:15
and we're going to be asking how those
00:04:17
things break into parts how the parts
00:04:18
fit together to form the whole
00:04:22
we're going to be looking at different
00:04:24
languages we're going to be seeing how
00:04:26
the languages of the world
00:04:27
differ from one another and how they're
00:04:29
the same languages of the world things
00:04:31
like english
00:04:32
french spanish mandarin chinese japanese
00:04:36
mosa these are languages that differ
00:04:39
from each other
00:04:40
very widely there's lots and lots of
00:04:43
differences lots of diversity
00:04:44
among languages but there's also a core
00:04:47
of things that are the same there are
00:04:49
many things that are the same across
00:04:51
languages
00:04:52
and that's the really interesting thing
00:04:54
languages have a lot of commonalities
00:04:55
they
00:04:56
have a lot of variance but not without
00:04:59
bound and we're going to be talking
00:05:00
about that kind of stuff at great
00:05:02
detail we're going to be looking at
00:05:05
how it is that words combine together
00:05:08
in something like a sentence to evoke a
00:05:10
meaning how is it that
00:05:12
a sentence which consists of a string of
00:05:14
words somehow those words
00:05:16
combine together in a way that evokes a
00:05:19
structured kind of a meaning
00:05:21
in your mind when you hear the sentence
00:05:25
what is it that makes language easy or
00:05:27
hard to understand
00:05:28
you've almost surely noticed that
00:05:31
when you read certain authors or when
00:05:34
you listen to certain people
00:05:35
some people are easy to understand other
00:05:37
people are hard to understand
00:05:39
some sentences are easy to understand
00:05:42
they're just straightforward some are
00:05:44
hard to understand they have a really
00:05:46
sort of complex structure and you have
00:05:47
to really think to understand that
00:05:49
sentence what is it that makes something
00:05:52
like a sentence
00:05:53
easy or hard to understand this touches
00:05:56
on the question of language processing
00:05:58
language is a system that maps form and
00:06:01
meaning as we're going to see
00:06:03
and your brain has to actually implement
00:06:07
that mapping it your brain has to take
00:06:09
in the sounds that i'm producing
00:06:11
or maybe the words on a page that you're
00:06:13
reading and it has to
00:06:15
somehow compute the meaning that you get
00:06:17
out of those words that's language
00:06:19
processing
00:06:20
and that computation might be difficult
00:06:22
sometimes that's what makes something
00:06:24
easier hard to understand we're going to
00:06:26
be looking at
00:06:27
language processing as it relates to the
00:06:29
structure of language
00:06:33
we can ask questions like does the
00:06:35
language you speak
00:06:37
affect the thoughts you think this is a
00:06:40
deep question
00:06:41
you might think about this as a question
00:06:43
which is maybe so deep and philosophical
00:06:45
that it would be silly to try to answer
00:06:46
it
00:06:47
scientifically with an experiment but in
00:06:50
fact you can
00:06:51
in fact we do have a pretty good
00:06:53
scientific literature
00:06:54
on the relationship between language and
00:06:56
thought it's not just a philosophical
00:06:59
question
00:06:59
we do have reasonable answers to this
00:07:02
and we're going to be covering that
00:07:04
towards the end of the course this is
00:07:05
just a sampler of the kinds of questions
00:07:08
that you can ask and partially answer
00:07:10
using linguistics and that we'll be
00:07:12
covering in this course
00:07:16
so why why would you study linguistics
00:07:19
why would you be here well the first
00:07:22
thing you might think is
00:07:23
well linguistics means learning a lot of
00:07:25
languages i'm going to come here and
00:07:26
learn a lot of languages and be a
00:07:28
linguist and speak like 20 languages
00:07:30
unfortunately linguistics does not
00:07:34
mean learning lots of languages remember
00:07:37
linguistics
00:07:37
is the science of language linguistics
00:07:40
is not just
00:07:41
learning a lot of languages you could
00:07:43
learn a lot of languages without getting
00:07:44
any scientific insight
00:07:46
and you can also get a lot of scientific
00:07:48
insight into language by only looking at
00:07:50
one
00:07:50
language so linguistics doesn't mean
00:07:53
learning a lot of languages it means
00:07:54
scientifically studying
00:07:56
language if you want to learn a lot of
00:07:58
languages though linguistics will help
00:08:00
you
00:08:01
because when you understand the
00:08:03
underlying principles and structures
00:08:05
that are common
00:08:06
across all languages and when you
00:08:08
understand the limits of the variation
00:08:10
across different languages
00:08:12
then you're going to pick things up a
00:08:14
lot more rapidly
00:08:15
because language to you is not just
00:08:17
going to be some arbitrary system
00:08:19
it's going to be something whose
00:08:21
structure you can really understand
00:08:25
you can think about this as something
00:08:27
like
00:08:28
learning card games learning a language
00:08:30
is kind of like learning a card game
00:08:32
now if you understand the principles
00:08:35
that underlie
00:08:36
all the different card games like the
00:08:38
fact that usually a king is worth more
00:08:40
than a three
00:08:42
and you know that there are the
00:08:43
different suits and the different colors
00:08:45
once you understand these underlying
00:08:46
principles of all card games
00:08:48
it becomes a lot easier to learn any new
00:08:51
card game
00:08:52
similarly once you understand the
00:08:54
underlying principles
00:08:55
of all languages through the science of
00:08:57
linguistics
00:08:59
then you're going to find that learning
00:09:01
new languages
00:09:02
is going to be easier because you're
00:09:04
going to see
00:09:05
how the language works and you're going
00:09:06
to say oh yeah i remember that i know
00:09:08
what's going on here
00:09:09
and everyone else in the class who
00:09:10
hasn't taken linguistics is going to be
00:09:12
confused but you're going to get it
00:09:16
linguistics is also going to train you
00:09:19
in the rigorous analysis of symbolic
00:09:22
systems and we're going to cover later
00:09:23
on what exactly is meant by
00:09:25
symbolic symbolic systems but the key
00:09:28
thing here is that
00:09:30
language is enormously complex you
00:09:33
probably don't realize this
00:09:35
because we you let use language so
00:09:38
intuitively
00:09:39
so fluently and so automatically we
00:09:42
don't realize how complex it is
00:09:45
uh we're like fish and water so
00:09:48
fish swim in water the water is the
00:09:50
environment they're in
00:09:51
to some extent we think they don't even
00:09:53
notice the water
00:09:54
similarly language is an enormously
00:09:57
complex formal symbolic system
00:09:59
that we all use and deploy every day but
00:10:02
it is so easy to us we're so immersed in
00:10:05
it that we don't even notice
00:10:06
its complexity so language is an
00:10:09
enormously complex system and what we're
00:10:10
going to be learning
00:10:11
in this class is how to analyze
00:10:15
that enormously complex system how to
00:10:18
take this complex system that you
00:10:19
currently know how to use
00:10:21
intuitively and unconsciously how to
00:10:23
sort of use science to
00:10:25
drag that up to the level of something
00:10:27
you can consciously analyze
00:10:29
in the same way that you would analyze
00:10:30
something like a geometry problem
00:10:33
so linguistics is going to train you in
00:10:36
a sort of
00:10:37
symbolic analysis that is going to be
00:10:39
applicable in just about anything you do
00:10:43
it's also going to be directly
00:10:44
applicable in a number of different
00:10:46
careers you might have in mind so one of
00:10:49
them is interpretation
00:10:51
and translation remember linguistics
00:10:53
doesn't mean
00:10:54
learning a lot of languages but if you
00:10:57
know linguistics and you know how
00:10:58
languages work it's going to help you a
00:11:00
lot
00:11:01
if you want to do something like learn a
00:11:03
language to be an interpreter
00:11:04
or a translator it's going to be
00:11:06
enormously helpful
00:11:08
speech pathology is a career
00:11:11
an excellent career where you would
00:11:13
directly apply
00:11:15
all the stuff that we're going to be
00:11:16
learning in this class speech pathology
00:11:18
is when you apply the principles of
00:11:20
linguistics
00:11:21
to help people primarily young people
00:11:24
who are experiencing speech
00:11:25
deficits to train them in various ways
00:11:28
to overcome those deficits
00:11:30
it's really an amazing field because it
00:11:32
works very well you really can help
00:11:34
people
00:11:35
applying the kinds of things we're about
00:11:36
to learn in this class
00:11:39
natural language processing this is the
00:11:42
field
00:11:42
of software engineering and computer
00:11:44
science that has to do with building
00:11:47
systems that can use human language
00:11:49
in the same way that we do think about
00:11:51
things like siri
00:11:52
and alexa these are systems that you can
00:11:55
kind of have a conversation with you can
00:11:57
kind of
00:11:58
communicate with them in human language
00:12:01
but i think if any of you have really
00:12:03
used these systems you've noticed
00:12:05
there's a lot of room for improvement
00:12:06
right there so there's a lot of work to
00:12:08
be done so the idea here is that
00:12:11
once you have a complete scientific
00:12:13
understanding of how language works
00:12:15
then that enables you to sort of change
00:12:17
hats from being a scientist to being an
00:12:20
engineer
00:12:20
to now design a system that implements
00:12:23
those principles of how language works
00:12:25
in order to build something that can use
00:12:27
language just like humans do something
00:12:29
like a better version of siri or alexa
00:12:32
these kinds of systems that you can
00:12:34
communicate with in a human language
00:12:36
like english
00:12:37
instead of some computer language that's
00:12:39
natural language processing
00:12:41
clinical psychology is another area
00:12:43
where linguistics is applied a lot
00:12:45
analyzing the language that people use
00:12:47
in order to diagnose and treat various
00:12:49
issues
00:12:51
language teaching if you want to teach a
00:12:52
language it would help to understand the
00:12:54
structure of how the language works
00:12:59
so that's enough about linguistics i've
00:13:01
talked about
00:13:03
linguistics the scientific field what i
00:13:06
want to do now is to talk about
00:13:08
language i want to actually talk about
00:13:10
this thing that we're going to study
00:13:12
and what i want to talk about is an
00:13:14
objection that some people have
00:13:17
some people hear this idea that you
00:13:19
could have a
00:13:21
science of language and they think no
00:13:23
that's not possible
00:13:25
language is not the kind of thing that
00:13:28
you could analyze
00:13:29
objectively or scientifically or
00:13:32
rigorously because language is so
00:13:34
maybe so intricate or so subtle think
00:13:37
about something like the
00:13:40
hugely impactful and subtle emotional
00:13:43
and social consequences of a phrase like
00:13:45
i love you
00:13:47
think about how what a
00:13:50
interesting and fascinating effect
00:13:54
that has and how difficult it would be
00:13:56
to reduce
00:13:58
something as multi-faceted as that
00:14:00
effect to something that you would study
00:14:02
scientifically
00:14:03
in the same way that you study something
00:14:04
like chemistry
00:14:06
so it does seem that there's there's
00:14:08
this enormous complexity in language and
00:14:10
that would make it hard to analyze it
00:14:12
scientifically
00:14:14
a big example of this idea this idea
00:14:16
that language is somehow mysterious
00:14:17
somehow ineffable somehow beyond
00:14:19
scientific
00:14:20
analysis is this idea that
00:14:24
there are words that are untranslatable
00:14:28
that there might be a word
00:14:29
say in check which has no equivalent in
00:14:31
another language
00:14:33
which would mean that there's a thought
00:14:34
or a concept
00:14:36
that say czech speakers can have that
00:14:39
maybe english speakers just cannot have
00:14:42
so is this true let's look at some
00:14:44
examples so in spanish
00:14:47
it's been claimed that this word duende
00:14:50
cannot be translated it means
00:14:52
the mysterious power of an artwork to
00:14:55
move someone this is like
00:14:57
you go to a art museum and you see
00:15:01
some painting and you're transfixed by
00:15:03
it there's something about it which is
00:15:04
mysterious
00:15:05
and powerful and you run out of the
00:15:08
museum and you devote your life to
00:15:09
becoming a painter or something like
00:15:10
that that's
00:15:11
duente in spanish this is an example of
00:15:14
a word which allegedly
00:15:16
has a meaning which somehow cannot be
00:15:18
translated there's something about this
00:15:19
word that
00:15:20
is ineffable if so how could we have a
00:15:23
science of language right
00:15:24
if there really are these untranslatable
00:15:26
words that seems like a problem
00:15:28
because a science of language would mean
00:15:31
an objective analysis of language an
00:15:33
objective analysis means something that
00:15:35
everyone can agree on
00:15:36
well if there are words that a spanish
00:15:40
speaker can understand
00:15:41
that an english speaker cannot ever
00:15:43
understand
00:15:44
then how could they ever reach an
00:15:45
objective agreement so
00:15:47
if there are these untranslatable words
00:15:50
then that that
00:15:51
does seem like an example of a way in
00:15:53
which language is
00:15:54
mysterious another example is this czech
00:15:57
word
00:15:58
litost which is the agony and torment
00:16:01
sparked by the sudden apperception
00:16:04
of one's own misery that seems like a
00:16:06
very unfortunate state
00:16:08
of mind which apparently text speakers
00:16:10
understand very well
00:16:11
and maybe other speakers of other
00:16:13
languages don't or so it's claimed
00:16:15
and here's a cool link which has an
00:16:17
example of 20 awesomely untranslatable
00:16:19
words examples and you can think about
00:16:21
them
00:16:22
but i'd like to just maybe throw a
00:16:24
wrench into this
00:16:25
machine and ask you to consider are
00:16:27
these words really untranslatable
00:16:31
notice that i translated them i said
00:16:33
duende in spanish it corresponds to in
00:16:36
english the mysterious power of an
00:16:37
artwork to move someone
00:16:39
so it's true that that single word in
00:16:41
spanish turned into a whole phrase
00:16:43
in english but i still translated it
00:16:46
i can still have the thought in english
00:16:49
the same thought
00:16:50
as in spanish it's just i have to use it
00:16:52
make it i have to sort of cobble it
00:16:53
together
00:16:54
using different words instead of using a
00:16:57
single word
00:16:58
so is this really untranslatable is this
00:17:00
really a problem i'd like you to think
00:17:02
critically about that
00:17:04
you should think about if this really is
00:17:05
a translation and if you are fortunate
00:17:07
enough to be bilingual or multilingual
00:17:09
even
00:17:10
you can think about this subjectively
00:17:12
there might be a certain flavor that
00:17:14
comes along with a word in one language
00:17:15
that doesn't seem to carry over
00:17:17
into some other word very interesting
00:17:20
question are there untranslatable words
00:17:22
but this is not an entirely subjective
00:17:25
question this is the kind of question we
00:17:27
can ask
00:17:28
in linguistics are there really
00:17:29
untranslatable words and concepts
00:17:34
are there really thoughts that some
00:17:37
speaker of some language can think
00:17:38
that speakers of another language cannot
00:17:40
think or are all languages equally
00:17:43
capable
00:17:44
of expressing all the meanings we're
00:17:45
going to get to this kind of thing later
00:17:47
when we get to the section on language
00:17:49
and thought
00:17:53
so what does the science of language
00:17:56
look like
00:17:57
something to keep in mind here is
00:17:59
something like the history of the
00:18:01
development of science
00:18:03
often sciences start off
00:18:06
in a sort of more subjective sort of
00:18:09
quasi-systematic state and then they
00:18:11
develop
00:18:12
over centuries into a more rigorous form
00:18:14
of analysis
00:18:16
in the case of linguistics we're taking
00:18:19
the sort of subjective analysis of
00:18:21
language
00:18:21
the kind of thing you do informally the
00:18:23
kind of thing you do in a literature
00:18:25
class
00:18:26
and we want to run it through some kind
00:18:28
of process that will enable us to
00:18:30
develop a real scientific
00:18:32
analysis of language a rigorous
00:18:34
objective
00:18:35
science rather than a more subjective
00:18:37
kind of system
00:18:39
you can think about this as analogous to
00:18:41
the way in which alchemy
00:18:44
which was a sort of mystical system for
00:18:46
understanding
00:18:47
the substances and elements that make up
00:18:49
the world
00:18:50
alchemy over centuries developed into
00:18:53
the scientific field of chemistry
00:18:56
and when that happened it changed a lot
00:18:58
it went from having
00:19:00
from being a more sort of opaque hard to
00:19:03
understand system
00:19:05
kind of like how language might be to
00:19:06
you now to
00:19:08
something which is very systematic
00:19:09
involves a lot of diagrams and involves
00:19:11
a lot of problems that look a lot like
00:19:13
math problems and enables you to make
00:19:15
specific quantitative predictions
00:19:17
so once you have chemistry
00:19:21
then you can do a lot more than you
00:19:22
could do when you only had alchemy
00:19:25
similarly we're going to be sort of
00:19:26
transmuting your subjective
00:19:28
understanding of language in this class
00:19:30
into a scientific understanding that
00:19:31
looks a lot more like chemistry
00:19:33
than like alchemy
00:19:37
so what does linguistic analysis
00:19:38
actually look like we know what that
00:19:40
sort of chemical analysis looks like
00:19:41
what does the analogous thing
00:19:43
for language look like the first thing
00:19:46
we need to note is that human language
00:19:48
can be analyzed
00:19:49
on multiple levels what do i mean by
00:19:52
that
00:19:54
by analyze i mean we break something
00:19:57
into parts
00:19:58
we analyze language by breaking it into
00:20:00
parts the word analyze
00:20:02
is a greek word that means simply break
00:20:05
apart
00:20:06
so we're going to take language we're
00:20:09
going to break it into parts we're going
00:20:10
to see what those parts are and how they
00:20:12
fit together to form the whole
00:20:16
at its most basic level language
00:20:20
is a pairing or a set of pairings
00:20:23
of what's called form and what's called
00:20:25
meaning
00:20:26
so what are these two things form and
00:20:29
meaning
00:20:30
form is the
00:20:33
actual language it's the
00:20:36
um it's the utterance it's the letters
00:20:39
on the page it's the sound
00:20:41
going through the air going from my
00:20:43
mouth into your ear
00:20:44
it's the bumps that you feel on a
00:20:47
braille paper form
00:20:48
is the signal the linguistic signal the
00:20:52
physically observable
00:20:53
linguistic signal produced by a person
00:20:55
and received by another person
00:20:57
the meaning is the particular
00:21:00
maybe the mental image or the intent
00:21:04
which is evoked once you hear or
00:21:07
read the form so here
00:21:10
the form is the cat sits on the mat and
00:21:14
you can consider that to be letters on a
00:21:16
page you could consider it to be a wave
00:21:18
form of sound the cat sits on the mat
00:21:20
those are both
00:21:21
examples of linguistic form and the
00:21:24
meaning
00:21:24
which is evoked once you hear that
00:21:26
sentence is maybe something like this
00:21:27
it's maybe something like this picture
00:21:28
of a cat
00:21:30
on a mat maybe you don't visualize it
00:21:33
but you receive a meaning which looks
00:21:35
something like this
00:21:36
and in some other language other than
00:21:38
english this meaning might be expressed
00:21:41
by a different
00:21:42
form so a language is a pairing of form
00:21:45
and meaning something like english
00:21:47
is a particular way of pairing forms
00:21:49
with meanings
00:21:50
other languages like french and chinese
00:21:53
are
00:21:54
different pairings of form and meaning
00:21:56
the forms are different
00:21:58
and so that's what language is at the
00:22:01
most basic level the first
00:22:02
step in our breaking apart of language
00:22:05
is that we've separated these concepts
00:22:07
of
00:22:07
form and meaning
00:22:11
now let's just look at the form and
00:22:13
let's see if we can break it into parts
00:22:15
let's see if we can analyze it
00:22:16
well this thing is something we call a
00:22:19
sentence
00:22:20
and we're going to see that the word
00:22:22
sentence has a technical meaning in
00:22:23
linguistics which is different from what
00:22:25
you might have learned previously
00:22:27
in language classes but for now you can
00:22:30
just think about it as the
00:22:31
sentence in it's a sentence in the sense
00:22:33
you're already familiar with
00:22:35
so the cat sits on the mat is a sentence
00:22:37
can we break it into parts
00:22:40
well the first thing we note is that
00:22:44
we have two sort of parts in the
00:22:47
sentence that
00:22:47
are similar to each other the cat and
00:22:50
the mat
00:22:51
these are two phrases that have a
00:22:54
similar structure they're what we call
00:22:55
noun phrases and this sequence of words
00:22:59
on the mat
00:23:00
is what we call a prepositional phrase
00:23:02
on as a preposition
00:23:04
on the mat is a prepositional phrase
00:23:07
we can identify even further the
00:23:09
sequence of words sits on the mat
00:23:11
as a verb phrase it's a sequence of
00:23:13
words headed
00:23:14
by a verb we're going to talk about this
00:23:16
in great detail once we get to the
00:23:18
syntax part of the class
00:23:21
so we have a sentence which contains
00:23:24
inside of it a noun phrase and a verb
00:23:26
phrase
00:23:27
and that verb phrase contains inside of
00:23:28
it a prepositional phrase
00:23:30
and that prepositional phrase contains
00:23:32
inside of it another noun phrase
00:23:35
so we see that the structure of a
00:23:37
sentence has this sort of
00:23:38
nested recursive structure it's like
00:23:41
russian dolls you have phrases inside
00:23:44
phrases you have
00:23:45
a verb phrase that has inside of it a
00:23:47
prepositional phrase
00:23:48
it has inside of it a noun phrase nested
00:23:50
recursively like these russian dolls
00:23:53
and the very smallest level at the
00:23:54
center of the russian dolls
00:23:56
the very smallest level of analysis you
00:23:58
get to here is the individual words
00:24:00
the and cat and sits and on and mad
00:24:04
so a sentence is composed of phrases
00:24:07
that are nested recursively in this way
00:24:09
and those phrases are composed
00:24:11
ultimately of words
00:24:14
okay so we've analyzed a sentence
00:24:17
let's think about if we can go further
00:24:19
can we keep breaking this
00:24:20
into ever smaller and smaller parts
00:24:23
let's look at the word sit
00:24:25
can we break that into parts
00:24:29
or is this just an indivisible unit
00:24:32
well it's not an indivisible unit you
00:24:34
can split it into two parts
00:24:36
there's the root sit the which indicates
00:24:39
the sitting action and there's the
00:24:40
s at the end which is attached to the
00:24:43
end
00:24:44
which indicates the tense and the number
00:24:46
of the verb
00:24:48
so we have here one morpheme sit
00:24:52
attached to another morpheme the word
00:24:54
sits
00:24:55
consists of two morphemes sit and s
00:24:59
where sit indicates the type of action
00:25:02
indicates the
00:25:03
present tense singular so words are
00:25:06
composed of these things called
00:25:08
morphemes
00:25:12
and now we'll ask can it go further can
00:25:15
we break the morpheme into parts
00:25:17
ever smaller parts let's take a look
00:25:20
so we have here sit well that consists
00:25:24
of three sounds
00:25:26
in a row s
00:25:29
these are units of sound called phonemes
00:25:33
this doesn't refer to the letters of the
00:25:35
word as written this refers to the
00:25:36
individual units of
00:25:38
sound which may or may not correspond to
00:25:40
letters in the english writing
00:25:42
system how about those units of sound
00:25:46
which are called
00:25:47
phonemes can you analyze a phoneme into
00:25:50
parts
00:25:50
you might think i sound like well that's
00:25:53
just so
00:25:54
such a small thing how could that
00:25:56
possibly be analyzed into parts and
00:25:59
you can a phoneme consists
00:26:02
of a set of what are called phonetic
00:26:05
features
00:26:07
features are these little bits these
00:26:09
little descriptions
00:26:11
that determine how the sound is
00:26:13
pronounced
00:26:15
so this is our hierarchy of linguistic
00:26:17
analysis we see that we can go from a
00:26:19
big unit like a sentence
00:26:21
and chop it up piece by piece into
00:26:23
smaller and smaller and smaller units
00:26:24
until we're down to the phonetic
00:26:26
features
00:26:27
and the actual sounds the actual
00:26:29
waveform
00:26:30
that corresponds to these words
00:26:35
so the hierarchy of linguistic analysis
00:26:37
goes like that
00:26:38
you have sentences which are composed of
00:26:40
phrases
00:26:41
which are composed of words which are
00:26:44
composed of morphemes
00:26:46
now that's more theme that's probably
00:26:47
the first word you might not have been
00:26:48
aware of before you took this class but
00:26:51
don't worry when we get to the section
00:26:52
on morphology you'll learn all about
00:26:54
morphemes
00:26:55
morphemes are composed of phonemes which
00:26:58
are units of sound
00:27:00
and phonemes are composed of features
00:27:02
which determine pronunciation
00:27:05
this is the hierarchy of linguistic
00:27:06
analysis this is how you break something
00:27:08
like a sentence
00:27:09
into ever more fine-grained parts
00:27:13
it's also the structure of the
00:27:15
scientific field of linguistics
00:27:17
so each level of analysis here
00:27:19
corresponds to a subfield
00:27:21
for each level of analysis here there
00:27:23
are teams
00:27:25
of researchers who are studying how
00:27:27
exactly these things work
00:27:31
so when you're studying pronunciation
00:27:33
then you're studying
00:27:34
what's called phonetics how sounds are
00:27:36
articulated
00:27:38
and how they are their acoustic
00:27:40
properties
00:27:42
when you are studying phonemes and their
00:27:44
features then you're studying phonology
00:27:46
which is the structure of sounds and
00:27:47
languages
00:27:49
when you're studying words and morphemes
00:27:51
you're studying morphology
00:27:53
when you're studying sentences and
00:27:54
phrases you're studying syntax
00:27:58
so these are the levels of linguistic
00:27:59
analysis
00:28:01
and they are the sub fields of
00:28:04
linguistics
00:28:05
and this also provides us with the
00:28:07
structure for the first
00:28:08
part of this class the first maybe two
00:28:11
thirds of this class
00:28:12
are going to be spent going up these
00:28:15
levels of analysis we'll start with the
00:28:17
smallest level of analysis
00:28:19
with phonetics and we'll work our way up
00:28:21
to syntax and then to semantics
00:28:24
you can think about this as climbing a
00:28:26
ladder each rung of the ladder that
00:28:28
we're climbing
00:28:29
is some level of linguistic analysis the
00:28:32
first one
00:28:34
would here be phonetics and we'll work
00:28:36
our way up until we understand the
00:28:38
largest levels when we get to syntax and
00:28:42
semantics
00:28:48
so here's the organization of the course
00:28:51
our goals are one we want to learn how
00:28:53
to analyze language scientifically
00:28:55
we want to think about language as if it
00:28:58
is a machine
00:28:59
that somehow links form and meaning it's
00:29:02
a machine
00:29:03
that enables you to take a form and
00:29:05
figure out a meaning
00:29:06
for that form and which enables you to
00:29:09
take a meaning
00:29:10
and express that meaning in a linguistic
00:29:12
form
00:29:13
when we view language as a machine we
00:29:15
want to ask how does that machine work
00:29:16
what are the nuts and bolts of that
00:29:18
machine
00:29:19
this is the technical content of the
00:29:20
class we're going to look at the sort of
00:29:22
nuts and bolts
00:29:24
of how language works that's analyzing
00:29:26
language scientifically
00:29:28
that's linguistic analysis so
00:29:31
you can think about this as if you're
00:29:34
starting off in a pit
00:29:35
you're starting off in a pit of
00:29:37
ignorance about linguistics
00:29:39
and you're going to climb your way out
00:29:40
of that pit run by rung
00:29:43
by studying phonetics phonology
00:29:45
morphology syntax
00:29:46
semantics all the levels of linguistic
00:29:48
analysis
00:29:50
once we're done with that once we've
00:29:51
learned how to analyze language
00:29:53
scientifically
00:29:55
then we can learn how language relates
00:29:58
to things like culture
00:29:59
things like thought things like language
00:30:01
technologies
00:30:02
so once we understand how language works
00:30:05
at a scientific level
00:30:06
we'll be able to coherently
00:30:10
think about how language relates to
00:30:11
these other things
00:30:13
so once we're done with core linguistics
00:30:15
and linguistic analysis
00:30:17
then we'll look at these sort of more
00:30:18
applied areas we'll be applying
00:30:20
what we learned in core linguistics to
00:30:23
things like the psychology of language
00:30:25
how language works in your mind and
00:30:26
brain the sociology of language how the
00:30:29
structure of language
00:30:30
relates to society language technology
00:30:33
pragmatics which is how we use language
00:30:39
so we're going to start off not actually
00:30:43
with phonetics our next lecture is going
00:30:44
to be some more basics we're going to
00:30:46
talk about some of the more
00:30:48
basic questions involved in defining
00:30:50
what a language is
00:30:51
how it relates to other kinds of
00:30:54
communication systems that you see in
00:30:56
nature
00:30:56
and so on that'll be the basics
00:31:00
then we'll proceed into phonetics and
00:31:02
then we'll proceed into
00:31:04
phonology now just a bit of warning
00:31:07
these two sections
00:31:08
phonetics and phonology these are going
00:31:10
to be the most challenging parts of the
00:31:11
class
00:31:13
and you might ask why why are these
00:31:15
going to be the most challenging parts
00:31:16
it's because phonology and phonetics
00:31:20
operate at a level which is below your
00:31:22
conscious awareness
00:31:23
so when we're looking at phonology and
00:31:25
phonetics we're going to be thinking
00:31:26
about the very
00:31:27
fine-grained details of what's going on
00:31:29
like in your mouth
00:31:31
when you are talking this is something
00:31:34
that you
00:31:34
you do every day you talk every day but
00:31:37
you're not consciously aware of
00:31:38
everything that's going on
00:31:39
as you're talking you're not consciously
00:31:41
aware of every little tongue movement
00:31:43
for example
00:31:44
so in phonetics and phonology we are
00:31:46
going to be studying that stuff
00:31:47
and it's going to be a lot of new
00:31:49
material for you
00:31:51
and this is just to prepare you it's
00:31:52
going to be a bit challenging because
00:31:54
this is going to
00:31:55
this is going to be really where you are
00:31:57
taking things that operate below your
00:31:59
level of conscious awareness
00:32:00
and dragging them up to the level of
00:32:02
consciousness
00:32:03
and analyzing them it's pretty fun
00:32:05
actually it's going to really change the
00:32:07
way you think
00:32:07
about how you talk once we have
00:32:11
finished with phonetics and phonology
00:32:13
when we get to morphology and syntax and
00:32:15
semantics
00:32:16
things are going to be a bit more
00:32:17
intuitive
00:32:21
because morphology and the levels above
00:32:23
morphology are more like
00:32:24
things that you're consciously aware of
00:32:27
but we're going to be
00:32:28
applying the analytical tools that we
00:32:31
developed when we were down studying the
00:32:33
tiny unconscious
00:32:35
details in phonetics and phonology the
00:32:37
analytical techniques we developed there
00:32:39
where we're going to apply them as we go
00:32:41
up the ladder into the stuff
00:32:43
which you are more consciously aware of
00:32:47
all right
00:32:50
so i've talked about why you would want
00:32:53
to take this course i've talked about
00:32:54
what the course is about
00:32:56
what i want to talk about now to wrap
00:32:59
up this first lecture is
00:33:03
why why do we as scientists want to
00:33:06
analyze language
00:33:07
not why do you as a uci undergraduate
00:33:09
want to
00:33:10
take this course i mean why as
00:33:12
scientists is it a worthwhile
00:33:14
endeavor to scientifically analyze human
00:33:17
language
00:33:20
so the first thing to note is that
00:33:23
language surrounds us
00:33:24
language is everywhere i said that we
00:33:27
are like fish in water
00:33:29
where the water is language and we're
00:33:31
not really aware of the water
00:33:33
language is an enormously complex system
00:33:35
that influences us
00:33:37
in ways that we don't always understand
00:33:42
and its impact
00:33:45
really cannot be understated so think
00:33:48
about how much
00:33:49
of your life has been affected and
00:33:53
influenced and even determined by
00:33:56
language by things that you have
00:33:59
expressed to other people
00:34:00
or which other people have expressed to
00:34:02
you in language
00:34:04
how did you end up here you read about
00:34:06
this university or you heard about it
00:34:08
through language think about how much of
00:34:10
your relationships with your friends and
00:34:12
your family
00:34:13
and your partners is mediated by
00:34:16
language where would you be without
00:34:18
language what would we as humans be like
00:34:21
if we didn't have language so
00:34:24
in a very real sense language is like
00:34:27
the water that we swim in when we live
00:34:29
as social creatures in a society
00:34:32
language is
00:34:32
integral to us as humans it's everywhere
00:34:35
it's extraordinarily important
00:34:37
and yet our scientific understanding of
00:34:39
language
00:34:41
is vastly incomplete
00:34:46
we currently understand some of how
00:34:48
language works
00:34:49
linguistics is a new science linguistics
00:34:52
didn't really get started as a science
00:34:54
until the 19th century
00:34:56
there were attempts before that by
00:34:58
philosophers and philologers
00:35:00
and writers and so on to start to
00:35:03
develop a science of language
00:35:05
but it didn't really get going as a
00:35:07
full-blown academic discipline
00:35:09
until something like the 19th century
00:35:11
it's a new science and that means that
00:35:13
there's still a lot of stuff that hasn't
00:35:15
been discovered yet
00:35:17
we've understood a lot we're going to be
00:35:18
covering a lot in this class we've made
00:35:20
a lot of real progress but there's a lot
00:35:21
of stuff
00:35:22
that we still don't understand about
00:35:24
this enormously complex object
00:35:27
called language
00:35:30
so we can say language is a frontier
00:35:32
science that means there's a lot of
00:35:33
stuff that still has yet to be
00:35:35
explored there's a lot of territory that
00:35:38
a lot of parts of the map
00:35:40
that haven't been filled in yet if you
00:35:42
want to sort of
00:35:44
be close to the ground floor of a new
00:35:46
science a science where there are still
00:35:48
lots of things to be discovered still
00:35:49
lots of new theories
00:35:51
to be developed linguistics is where you
00:35:54
want to be
00:35:57
we need a science of language because
00:36:00
language is a lot more complicated than
00:36:02
it seems
00:36:03
you might say think you know i uh you
00:36:05
know i speak my language
00:36:07
or my languages i i don't have any
00:36:09
trouble understanding anyone why do i
00:36:11
need to go
00:36:12
through the trouble of analyzing this
00:36:13
thing scientifically
00:36:15
well language is a lot more complicated
00:36:17
than you think
00:36:19
and here's an example of how language is
00:36:20
a lot more complicated than you think
00:36:23
here's a book the cambridge grammar of
00:36:25
the english
00:36:26
language i'd like you to guess how long
00:36:30
this book is this book contains a
00:36:33
complete
00:36:33
description of the english language
00:36:37
it um so this book has everything you
00:36:39
would need to know about the english
00:36:40
language if you were say
00:36:42
learning it as a second language this
00:36:44
book has everything in it it's a
00:36:45
complete description of the language
00:36:48
not of even the history of the language
00:36:49
or the literature of the language just
00:36:51
the language as it exists now i'd like
00:36:53
you to think about how
00:36:54
long you think this book is how complex
00:36:57
is the english language is this book
00:36:58
like maybe 100 pages
00:37:01
maybe 200 pages maybe even 500 pages
00:37:05
well this book's almost 2000 pages long
00:37:08
it's almost two thousand pages long and
00:37:09
it's still
00:37:10
incomplete the book is filled with
00:37:12
references to papers
00:37:14
and to other books even if you added
00:37:16
this book
00:37:17
and all those papers together you would
00:37:19
still have only an
00:37:20
incomplete description of the english
00:37:22
language and
00:37:24
english is not an unusually complex
00:37:27
language
00:37:28
as languages go english is sort of in
00:37:30
the middle of the road as far as
00:37:31
complexity
00:37:33
so each human language and there are
00:37:35
about 6 000 different human languages
00:37:37
currently
00:37:38
spoken by anyone each of those human
00:37:40
languages is one of these enormously
00:37:42
complex objects
00:37:43
if you think you understand it just
00:37:45
because you speak it well
00:37:46
what this means is that there's a lot of
00:37:49
sort of mental dark matter here
00:37:51
stuff that is inherent in the system of
00:37:55
language that we use every day but that
00:37:56
we don't really understand
00:37:58
rigorously yet so there's a lot
00:38:01
that still has to be understood a lot
00:38:03
that we don't know about language yet
00:38:07
so that's just one aspect of the
00:38:09
complexity of language
00:38:11
the grammatical complexity of a language
00:38:13
means like how
00:38:14
hard it is to write down the rules that
00:38:16
define a language like english
00:38:19
there are other ways in which language
00:38:20
is complex other ways
00:38:22
in which the sort of feats that we
00:38:25
accomplish
00:38:26
when we use language are impressive in a
00:38:28
way that we don't understand because
00:38:29
it's also easy and automatic to us
00:38:32
one of these is the fact that human
00:38:34
language is extraordinarily ambiguous
00:38:37
there's a great deal of ambiguity in
00:38:39
language so to give you an example of
00:38:41
this
00:38:42
here's a sentence i made her duck and
00:38:45
i'd like for you
00:38:46
to pause the video now and get out some
00:38:48
paper
00:38:49
or whatever and write down just how many
00:38:52
different meanings you can come up with
00:38:54
for this sentence i made her duck so
00:38:57
pause the video now
00:39:05
good so how many did you come up with
00:39:10
uh it's possible to come up with
00:39:11
something like 15 to 20 if you really
00:39:13
try
00:39:14
but here's what i got so i made her duck
00:39:16
that could mean
00:39:18
i cooked duck meat for her
00:39:21
it could mean i carved a wooden duck
00:39:24
and i gave it to her it could mean that
00:39:27
she owns a duck
00:39:29
which i made somehow it could mean
00:39:33
i cooked the duck that she's currently
00:39:35
eating
00:39:36
it could mean i transformed her into
00:39:40
duck meat
00:39:41
i made her duck could mean i made her
00:39:44
crouch down
00:39:45
like this so we see that there are very
00:39:48
very many
00:39:49
possible meanings of this simple english
00:39:51
sentence and again
00:39:53
this is not a typical a typical sentence
00:39:56
in any language
00:39:57
has many many many many different
00:39:59
possible meanings
00:40:00
and yet when you're using language to
00:40:02
communicate you don't notice that
00:40:04
somehow our brains are able to
00:40:06
immediately hone in
00:40:08
on the intended meaning and to throw
00:40:10
away the dozens or maybe even hundreds
00:40:13
of other possible meanings to all the
00:40:15
sentences
00:40:16
that we hear in our lives this is by the
00:40:18
way the number one reason
00:40:20
that language processing for computers
00:40:22
is difficult
00:40:24
because computers don't have this
00:40:25
ability to throw away all the
00:40:27
possible meanings of the sentence which
00:40:30
were not really intended by the speaker
00:40:33
so that's ambiguity it's one of the ways
00:40:34
in which language is
00:40:36
enormously complex we need to understand
00:40:38
how this works if we want to build
00:40:40
technologies that use language if we
00:40:42
want to have a real understanding of how
00:40:45
language
00:40:46
really affects us in our lives
00:40:51
other questions which
00:40:54
sort of form very areas in which
00:40:56
language is enormously complex is how do
00:40:57
we learn language
00:40:59
so children are able to
00:41:02
acquire the languages they're exposed to
00:41:06
and basically in nearly all cases
00:41:10
nearly perfectly without apparent effort
00:41:13
so how is that possible how is it that
00:41:15
we all are able to
00:41:16
learn language how is it that our brains
00:41:20
process language and so on how does
00:41:23
language fit in with the rest of nature
00:41:25
there really isn't anything else in
00:41:26
nature that has the structure
00:41:29
of human language as we're going to see
00:41:32
and how can we build machines to use
00:41:34
language
00:41:37
and so on
00:41:40
so i'll just leave you with this
00:41:41
linguistics is a frontier science in the
00:41:44
sense
00:41:45
that there are lots of parts of the map
00:41:46
that haven't been filled in yet
00:41:48
it's a new science i invite you
00:41:51
through this class to join us in the
00:41:54
scientific enterprise
00:41:56
of understanding how human language
00:41:58
works filling in the blanks on the map
00:42:01
and advancing the progress of science
00:42:04
thanks