Language Acquisition Device or shared common reality?

There are three claims that Chomsky makes about the existence of Language Acquisition Device (LAD).

The first claim is that children can understand all kinds of sentences without having to have heard or learn them before. To this we can say the same thing about adults as well. In fact, every time I open a book (or any other piece of new writing) I haven’t read before I am comprehending it as well. This act is so common and normal that we should be thinking so much about as being something special.

The second claim is that all language seems to have universal elements. To this, one can also argue that it is not the elements of language that is universal but the rather it is the shared reality that is universal.

The third claim is that some grammatical principles are acquired regardless of culture or intelligence. To this, I will argue in a similar to the second claim that the medium of language is universal so that any language only have a limited number of possible choices available to it. Furthermore, for what purpose or reason would their be a develop of a language away from general principles. If such a principle does exist surely it would have been developed and supersede the other languages as being inadequate.

While we probably do have more of a capacity for language it is probably more generalised than Chomsky would like to believe.

Constituent, adverbial, and the prepositional phrase

Consider the following sentence:

(1) He is at the station.

We could ask

(2) Where is he?

and we may also ask:

(3) He is at what?

or

(4) What is he at?

However (3) and (4) are marked in the linguistic sense. (2) seems the more natural question form. Consider (5):

(5) He is there.

We are no longer able to ask (3) or (4). This shows that at the station in (1) is equivalent to there in (5). It is a constituent, an adverbial to be exact, and in (1) a prepositional phrase more precisely.

How to pronounce “Reiwa”?

The first recorded instance of “Reiwa” used was at the announcement of the new era name on April 1st (no joke).

Cabinet minister Suga Yoshihide pronounced it as REI-wa. People working in the television industry have said they also pronounce it as REI-wa because that was the way it was announced, but the pronunciation will probably gradually change to rei-WA as it is used more and more in sentences where the stress with the year number following the era name is more efficient.

The same kind of pronunciation shift was observed with the Showa era (1926-1989) name.

Using Leio app for research

There re many a times when I know I read something somewhere but forget where I had read it. Searching through all the books or articles that I think it might be consumes a lot of time and energy, that is, until I found the app, Leio.

While Leio is not designed for research but reading, the quote function is quite useful for research purposes. For this reason, some of the one has to work around certain things (search for a book once you move onto another one), or ignore certain features (don’t use the reading timer feature). Being able to find related research quotes across several sources has not been easier now that I can do this through Leio.

These are the steps I use Leio:

  1. scan the ISBN barcode
  2. scan the quote
  3. enter page number
  4. search the quotes and notes

Now this means I will have source quotes from books with pages in a kind of database. Searching keywords then means I no longer have to work by notes from a particular book, but from relevant quotes across several sources. No other app can do this without becoming over-bloated with data.

Relevant links twitter; iTunes.

Motivation for learning a language

Did you know that in Japan English is a compulsory subject from Junior high school, from around the age of twelve. And soon this will be lowered to from ten years of age, starting at elementary fifth grade. And they continue until high school. Plus they do two years at university, giving students a total of more than six years of English language education.

Yet, without exaggeration, the majority will finish without being able to speak English with any level of proficiency.

But this problem is not unique to the Japanese. Language learners in other countries or even learners of other languages in Japan face the same conundrum.

For a while now I have been trying to learn Norwegian. The motivation for it comes from online friends from Norway that I have made and the desire to learn about their language and culture.

Yet I have no use for Norwegian apart from this one reason. My daily use of it is low – from no use to a handful of greetings at best. There is no real need for Norwegian for me apart from it being a limited-opportunity social connector. So the motivation to spend time learning it is also low.

In some ways this is also the same for the Japanese and their motivation for learning English. The opportunities to use the language are simply not there. Either learners have to make their own opportunities, or the entire society has to change. And the former seems the (much) more feasible.

As I had said if making connections with people is the only motivation then my drive for learning it will not last very long. One reason is I can just go to a translation service like Google Translate or a good old-fashion dictionary, electronic or paper. But if I was interested in one or more aspects of the culture of the target language then I am forced to study it like an ordinary subject, like mathematics, geography, film studies. No longer does this exclusively require only people of the target language/culture but other sources can be relied upon – places, literature, artefacts.

Coming back to my Norwegian, I have yet to discover something of its culture that will motivate me to want to learn the language more. I have more motivation to learn French and German because of interests in its philosophical tradition (Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze for French and Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Hegel, Heidegger for German).

So now I must sit and think – what will motivate me to learn Norwegian?