0 TALKING PARROTS

        Most who acquire language use speech sounds to express meanings, but such sounds are not a necessary aspect of language, as avidenced by the sign language. The use of speech sounds is therefore not a basic part of what we have been calling language. The chirping of birds, the squeaking of dolphins, and the dancing of bees may potentially represent systems similar to human languages. If animal communication systems are not like human language, it will not be due to a lack of speech.

       Conversely, when animals vocally imitate human utterances, it doesn't mean they posses language. Language is a system that relates sounds or gestures to meanings. Talking birds such as parrots and mynah birds are capable of faithfully reproducing words and phrases of human language that they have heard, but their utterances carry no meaning. They are speaking neither English nor their own languages when they sound like us. Talking birds do not dissect the sounds of their initations into discrete units. Polly and Molly do not rhyme for a parrot. They are as different as hello and good bye. One property of all human languages (which will be discussed further in chapter 6) is the discretencess of speech or gestural units, which are ordered and reordered, combined and split apart. Generally, a parrot says what it is taught, or what it hears, and no more. If Polly learns "Polly wants a cracker" and "Polly wants a doughnut" and also learns to imitate the single words whiskey and beg el, she will not spontaneously produce, as children do, "Polly wants whiskey" or "Polly wants whiskey and a begel." If she learns cat and cats, and dog and dogs , and then learns the words parrot the word parrot, she will be unable to form the plural parrots as children do by the age of three; nor can parrot form an unlimited set of utterances from a finite set of units, nor understand utterances nevr heard before. Recent reports of an African gray parrot named Alex studied by Dr. Irene M. Pepperberg suggest that new methods of training animals may result in more learning than was previously believed possible. When the trainer uses words in context , Alex seems to relate some sounds with their meanings. This is more than simple imitation, but it is not how children acquire the complexities of the grammar of any language. It is more like a dog learning to associate certain sounds with meaning, such as heel, sit, fetch, and so on. Alex's ability may go somewhat beyond that.  However, the ability to produce sounds similar to those used in human language, even if meanings are related to these sounds, can not be equated with the ability to acquire the complex grammar of a human language.

0 ANIMAL LANGUAGE

'"No matter how eloquently a dog may bark. he can not tell you that his parents were poor but honest" (Bertrand Russel)


Is a language the exclusive property of the human species?The idea of talking animals is as widespread among human societies as language itself. All  cultures have legends in which some animals play a speaking role, like a story of a crocodileand a mouse deer. All over West Africa, children listen to folktales in which a "spider-man" is the hero. "Coyote" is a favourite figure in many Native American tales, and many an animal takes the stage in Aesop's famous fables. The fictional Doctor Doolittle's forte was communicating with all manner of animals, from giants snailsto a tiny sparrow.


   


If language is viewed only as system of communication, then many species communicate. Human also use system other than language to relate each other and to send and receive "message", like so-called body language. "The question is whether the communication systems used by other species are at all like human linguistic knowledge, which is acquired by children with no external instruction, and which is used creatively rather than in response to internal or external stimuli.

0 LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE AND PERFORMANCE

"What's one and one and one and one and one and one and one? ""I don't know." Said Alice.. "I lost count." "I can not do addition, "The Red Queen interrupted.

Speaker's linguistic knowledge permits them to form longer and longer sentences by koining sentences and phrases together or adding modifiers to a noun. Whether you stop at three, five pr eighteen adjectives, it is inpossible, but they are highly improbable. Evidently, there is a differnce between having the knowledge necessary to produce sentences of a language, and apllying this knowledge. There is a difference between what you know, which is linguistic competence, and the way this knowledge is used in actual speech production and comprehension, which is your linguistic performance.

Speakers of all language have the knowledge to understand or produce sentences of any length. When they attempt to use that knowledge, though - when they perform linguistically - there are physiological and psychological reasons that limit the number of adjectives, adverb, clauses and so on. They may run out of breath, their audience may leave, they may lose track of what they have said, and of course, no one lives forever.

When we speak, we usually wish to convey some message. At some stage in the act of producing speech, we must organize our thoughts into strings of words. Sometimes the message is garbled. We may stammer, or pause, or produce slips of the tongue. We may even sounds like Tarzan in the cartoon, who illustrate the difference between linguistic knowledge and the way we use tht knowledge in performance.

For the most part, linguistic knowledge is not conscious knowledge. The linguistic system - the sounds d structures,meaning,words and rules for putting them all together - is learned subconsciously with no awarness that rules are being learned. Just as may not be conscious of the principles that allow us to stand or walk, we are unware of the rules of language. Our ability to speak and understand, and to make a judgements about grammaticality of sentences, reveals our knowledge of the rules of our language. This knowledge represents a complex cognitive system. The nature of this system is what this book is all about.

0 KNOWLEDGE OF SENTENCES AND NON-SENTENCES

         To memorize and store an infinite set of sentences would require an infinite storage capacity. However, the brain is finite and even if it were not - your vocabulary is finite (however large it may be) - and that can be stored. If putting one word after another in any order always formed sentences, then language could simply be a set of words. You can see that words are not enough by examining the following strings of words :

  

 (1) a. John kissed the little old lady who owned a shaggy dog.

       

         b. Who owned the shaggy dog john kissed the little old lady.

       

         c. John is difficult to love.

       

         d. It is difficult to love john.

         e. John is anxious to go john.

          f. It is anxious to go john

          g. John, who was a student, flunked his exam.

     

          h.  Exam his flunked student a was who john.

           If you were asked to put an asterisk or star before the examples that seemed "funny" or no good" to you, which ones would you mark? our intuitive knowledge about what is or is not an allowable sentence in english convinces us to star b,f, and h. Which ones did you star?

would you agree with the following judgements?

 (2) a. What he did was climb a tree.

       

      b. *what he thought was want a sports car.

      c. Drink you beer and go home!

      d. *What are drinking and go home?

      e. I expect them to arrive a week from next Thursday.

      f. *I expect a week from next Thursday to arrive them.

     g. Linus lost his security blanket

     h. *Lost Linus security blanket his.

                If you find the starred sentences are unacceptable, as we do, you see that every string words does not constitute a well-formed sentences in a language. Our knowledge of a language determines which stings f words are an d which are not sentences. Therefore, in addition to knowing the word of the language, linguistic knowledge includes rules for forming sentences and making the kinds of judgements you made about the examples in(1) and (2). These rules must be finitein length and infinite in number so that they can be stored in our finite brains. Yet, they must permit us to form and understand an infinite of new sentences. They are not rules determined by a judge or a legislature, or even rules taught in a grammar clas. They are unconcious constraint on sentence fromation that are learned when language is acquired in childhood. 

A language then, consists of all the sounds, words, and infinitely many possible sentences. When you know a language, you know the sounds the words, and the rules for their combination.

0 NON - LITERAL MEANING

IDIOMS, METAPHOR, METONYMY

            In this chapter, figurative or non-literal meaning will be discussed. In particular, idiomatic or fixed expressions, metaphor,  metonymy. The study of this kind of meaning has not traditoionally been the focus of linguistic semantics, partially because it is often diffiuclt to distinguish it precisely from literal meaning, and also because non-literal meaning has sometimes  been regarded as largerly idisncratic and therefore,as less principled and ruled govern than literal meaning. But the study of non-literal meaning, especially methapor, has become much more important in recent  years, partly because semantics have begun to discover that much, if not all, all of its use is not totally haphazard or idiosyncratic, but subject to certain rules and principles that can be discovered and described.

A. Idioms

    Definition :

         IDIOMATIC EXPRESSION (IDIOMS) are multi-word phrases whose overall meanings are idiosyncratic and largerly unpredictable, reflecting speaker meanings that are not derivable by combining phrase the literal sense of the individual words since each phrase according to the regular semantic rules typically of the language.

Example :

                  Expression such as let the cat out of the bag and take the bull by the horns commonly used idioms whose usual meanings are not fully compositional, but have to be learned as a whole. Any speaker of English knows, for example, that let the cat out of the bag is usually used to mean something like "reveal secret", though it also has possible, though rarely intende, literal compositional meaning meaning something like 'release a small feline animal from a sack.' Similarly, take the bull by horns typically evokes the idea that someone takes charge of a situation', though it could also have the moriteral compositional meaning 'grab a (real) bull by its horns. 

2 CREATIVITY OF LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge of a language enable you to combine words to form phrases, and phrases to form sentences. You can not buy a dictionary of any language with all its sentences, because no dictionary can list all the possible sentences. Knowing a language means being able to produce new sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before.

The linguist Noam Chomsky refers to ability as part of a language can create great literature, but you, and all persons who know a language, can and do create new sentences when you speak, and understand new sentencesbcreated by others.

To say that we are creative in our use of language means that language use is not limited to stimulus - response behaviour. It's true that if someone steps on our toes we may automatically respond with a scream or a grunt, but these sounds are not part of language. They are involuntary reactions to stimuli. After we reflexively cry out,  we can say "Thank you very much for stepping on my toe, because i was afraid like  i had elephantiasis and how that I feel it hurt I know I dont, or anyone of an infinite number of sentences that produce is not controlled by any stimulus.

Even some involuntary cries like "ouch" are constrained by our own language system , as are filled pauses that are sprinkled through conversational speech, such as er, uh , and you know, for example, often fill their pauses with the vowel sound that starts with their word for egg - oeuf - a sound that doesn't occur in english.

knowing a language include knowing what sentences are appropiate in various situstions. To say "Hamburger costs $ 4.00 pound" after someone has just stepped on your toenwould hardly been an appropiate response, altough it would be possible.

Our creative ability not only is reflected in what we say but also includes our understanding of our new novel sentences. Consider the following sentence: "Daniel Boone decided to become a pioneer because he dreamed of pigeon-toed giraffes and cross-eyed elephants dancing in pink skirts and green berets on the wind-swept plains of the the Mid-west." You nay believe in the sentences ; you may question its logic; but you can understand it, altough you probably nevr heard or read it before now.
or matched with some sentences that you hear. Novel sentences that never spoken or heard before cannot be stored in your memory.

simple memorization of all the possible sentences in a language is impossible in principle. If for every sentences in the language a longer sentences can be formed, then there is no limit to the length of any sentences and therefore no limit of sentences. In english you can say :

      "This is the house"

        or

      "This is the malt that lay in the house that jack built"

       or

       "This is the dog that lay in the house that Jack built"

         or

      "This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house  that Jack built"

And you need not stop there. How long, then