EDWARD'S LECTURE NOTES:
More notes at http://tanguay.info/learntracker
C O U R S E
Miracles of Human Language
Marc van Oostendorp, Universiteit Leiden
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C O U R S E L E C T U R E The Nature of Human Language Notes taken on September 15, 2015 by Edward Tanguay |
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language is one of the most important distinguishing characteristics of human beings
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we used language to
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communicate
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think
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show who we are
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which group of human beings we belong to or want to belong to
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hard to imagine any part of human society where language is not used
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languages which we may call languages but are not languages in the linguistic sense
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programming languages
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the language of music
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important for human language
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native speakers
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learn the language as infants
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one can speak about everything in the language
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recognized by a group of human beings who recognize it as theirs
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sign language
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considered languages by linguistics
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not every gesture is meaningful
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basically the same as spoken languages with the difference that they don't use voice
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there are many sign languages
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hundreds of them
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have the same functionality as spoken language
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have native speakers
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groups consider them to be their language
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few people do not speak languages
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wolf children
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children growing up without parents
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where parents didn't want to speak to them
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e.g. deaf children with hearing parents where the hearing parents were ashamed of having deaf children
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physical and psychological abuse
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Genie
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born 1957 in Arcadia, Los Angeles
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father was mentally unstable, barked at her like a dog
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mother was not allowed to say anything to her
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she never learned a human language
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at age 13 she was discovered
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her brain was not able to learn a language normally
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fortunately these are very rare cases
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people who lose their language
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aphasia
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e.g. after a stroke
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may just be the ability to pronounce
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or to understand
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or to make grammatical sentences
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19th century research
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after aphasic patient would die, brain would be studied
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evolutionary origin of language
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all human beings have language
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there must be something exceptionally wrong for a human to not develop language
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no fossil evidence
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it is abstract
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spoken language has no record in the past
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continuity based theories
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human language is based on animal communication, just a more complex form
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Tomasello, Pinker
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discontinuity based theories
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human language is different in kind
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Chomsky