Language and the Mind

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Fish swim, birds fly and humans talk. Just as fish are genetically equipped to move in the way they do, so human beings have the cognitive properties to talk and to understand speech in the way they do. In this class, we will seek to characterize that ability (a "language organ"), which may vary depending on where a person is raised: people have different capacities depending on whether they were raised in Toronto, Tokyo or Tromso. We shall tease apart general properties of the human language capacity, common to the species, from specific capacities that are a function of initial experience. We shall examine how the interplay of nature and nurture results in people coming to know so much more than they experience in childhood. We shall attend to (a) language variation, looking at languages as variants of a kind of basic "periodic table" which is genetically prescribed, (b) the acquisition of language by children in the first few years of life, as the basic periodic table develops into the specific capacity of, say, a speaker of some form of French, and (c) the capacity to understand spoken language. We shall compare what is known about the human language organ with other aspects of our cognitive make-up, considering how human cognition (mind) and the language faculty have been viewed by thinkers like Plato, Descartes, Darwin and others. And we will seek to link this big picture approach to actual analyses, considering how analyses need to be shaped in order to make sense in this broad approach to human cognition, noting how well known analyses in the literature often fail to contribute to our understanding of human cognition.