Name: スティーブン・ピンカー脳を理解するための窓としての言語学 (Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T04:50:00.000Z
Duration: 50 min 1 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

My name is Steve Pinker, and I’m Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.  And

様態の副詞

today I’m going to speak to you about language.  ﻿I’m actually not a linguist, but a

程度の副詞

cognitive scientist.  I’m not so much interested as language as an object in its own right,

but as a window to the human mind.﻿ Language is one of the fundamental topics

in the human sciences.  It’s the trait that most conspicuously distinguishes humans

from other species, it’s essential to human cooperation; we accomplish amazing things

by sharing our knowledge or coordinating our actions by means of words.  It poses profound

scientific mysteries such as, how did language evolve in this particular species?  How does

the brain compute language? But also, language has many practical applications not surprisingly

given how central it is to human life. ﻿ Language comes so naturally to us that we’re

apt to forget what a strange and miraculous gift it is.  But think about what you’re

doing for the next hour.   You’re going to be listening patiently as a guy makes noise

as he exhales.  Now, why would you do something like that?  It’s not that I can claim that

the sounds I’m going to make are particularly mellifluous, but rather I’ve coded information

into the exact sequences of hisses and hums and squeaks and pops that I’ll be making.

 You have the ability to recover the information from that stream of noises allowing us to

share ideas. Now, the ideas we are going to share are about

this talent, language, but with a slightly different sequence of hisses and squeaks,

I could cause you to be thinking thoughts about a vast array of topics, anything from

the latest developments in your favorite reality show to theories of the origin of the universe.

 This is what I think of as the miracle of language, its vast expressive power, and it’s

a phenomenon that still fills me with wonder, even after having studied language for 35

years.  And it is the prime phenomenon that the science of language aims to explain.  ﻿

Not surprisingly, language is central to human life.  The Biblical story of the Tower of

Babel reminds us that humans accomplish great things because they can exchange information

about their knowledge and intentions via the medium of language.  Language, moreover,

is not a peculiarity of one culture, but it has been found in every society ever studied

by anthropologists.﻿ There’s some 6,000 languages spoken on Earth,

all of them complex, and no one has ever discovered a human society that lacks complex language.

 For this and other reasons, Charles Darwin wrote, “Man has an instinctive tendency

to speak as we see in the babble of our young children while no child has an instinctive

Language is an intricate talent and it’s not surprising that the science of language

should be a complex discipline. ﻿It includes the study of how language itself

works including:  grammar, the assembly of words, phrases and sentences; phonology, the

study of sound; semantics, the study of meaning; and pragmatics, the study of the use of language

in conversation. ﻿ ﻿Scientists interested in language also

study how it is processed in real time, a field called psycholinguistics; how is it

acquired by children, the study of language acquisition.  And how it is computed in the

brain, the discipline called neurolinguistics. ﻿ 

Now, before we begin, it’s important to not to confuse language with three other things

that are closely related to language.  One of them is written language.  Unlike spoken

language, which is found in all human cultures throughout history, writing was invented a

very small number of times in human history, about 5,000 years ago.  ﻿

And alphabetic writing where each mark on the page stands for a vowel or a consonant,

appears to have been invented only once in all of human history by the Canaanites about

3,700 years ago.  And as Darwin pointed out, children have no instinctive tendency to write,

but have to learn it through construction and schooling.﻿

A second thing not to confuse language with is proper grammar.  Linguists distinguish

between descriptive grammar - the rules, that characterize how people to speak - and prescriptive

grammar - rules that characterize how people ought to speak if they are writing careful

written prose.  ﻿ A dirty secret from linguistics is that not

only are these not the same kinds of rules, but many of the prescriptive rules of language

make no sense whatsoever.  Take one of the most famous of these rules, the rule not to

split infinitives.  ﻿ According to this rule, Captain Kirk made

a grievous grammatical error when he said that the mission of the Enterprise was “to

boldly go where no man has gone before.”  He should have said, according to these

editors, “to go boldly where no man has gone before,” which immediately clashes

with the rhythm and structure of ordinary English.  In fact, this prescriptive rule

was based on a clumsy analogy with Latin where you can’t splint an infinitive because it’s

a single word, as in facary[ph] to do.  Julius Caesar couldn’t have split an infinitive

if he wanted to.  That rule was translated literally over into English where it really

should not apply.  ﻿ Another famous prescriptive rule is that,

one should never use a so-called double negative.  Mick Jagger should not have sung, “I can’t

get no satisfaction,” he really should have sung, “I can’t get any satisfaction.”

 Now, this is often promoted as a rule of logical speaking, but “can’t” and “any”

is just as much of a double negative as “can’t” and “no.”  The only reason that “can’t

get any satisfaction” is deemed correct and “can’t get no satisfaction” is deemed

ungrammatical is that the dialect of English spoken in the south of England in the 17th

century used “can’t” “any” rather than “can’t” “no.”  ﻿

If the capital of England had been in the north of the country instead of the south

of the country, then “can’t get no,” would have been correct and “can’t get

any,” would have been deemed incorrect. ﻿

There’s nothing special about a language that happens to be chosen as the standard

for a given country.  In fact, if you compare the rules of languages and so-called dialects,

each one is complex in different ways.  Take for example, African-American vernacular English,

also called Black English or Ebonics.  There is a construction in African-American where

you can say, “He be workin,” which is not an error or bastardization or a corruption

of Standard English, but in fact conveys a subtle distinction, one that’s different

than simply, “He workin.”  “He be workin,” means that he is employed; he has a job, “He

workin,” means that he happens to be working at the moment that you and I are speaking.

 ﻿ Now, this is a tense difference that can be

made in African-American English that is not made in Standard English, one of many examples

in which the dialects have their own set of rules that is just as sophisticated and complex

as the one in the standard language.  ﻿ Now, a third thing, not to confuse language

with is thought.  Many people report that they think in language, but commune of psychologists

have shown that there are many kinds of thought that don’t actually take place in the form

(1.) Babies (and other mammals) communicate without speech

﻿For example, we know from ingenious experiments that non-linguistic creatures, such as babies

before they’ve learned to speak, or other kinds of animals, have sophisticated kinds

of cognition, they register cause and effect and objects and the intentions of other people,

all without the benefit of speech.  ﻿ (2.) Types of thinking go on without language--visual

thinking﻿ We also know that even in creatures that do

have language, namely adults, a lot of thinking goes on in forms other than language, for

example, visual imagery.  If you look at the top two three-dimensional figures in this

display, and I would ask you, do they have the same shape or a different shape?  People

don’t solve that problem by describing those strings of cubes in words, but rather by taking

an image of one and mentally rotating it into the orientation of the other, a form of non-linguistic

thinking.  ﻿ (3.) We use tacit knowledge to understand