| instinct, the language P18 | people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs; language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture |
| "Standard Social Science Model" P 23 | the human psyche is molded by the surrounding culture |
| foreigner talk, the demeaning thereof F140, P26 | barbarians=those who stammer "barbar," said the Greeks; Tatars=those whose speech sounded like "ta-ta" to the Chinese; Nonotli=stammering of foreigners to the Aztecs; the "jabbering" of New Guinea Highlanders reported by Michael Leahy |
| genders P27 | different kinds of nouns in a language, according to how they pattern grammatically: English and many other European languages have three (masculine, feminine, neuter), whereas Bantu languages may have as many as 16 (humans, animals, extended objects, clusters of objects, body parts, etc.) |
| language and the state, quotations F138, P28 | the Bishop of Avila to Queen Isabella, "Your majesty, language is the perfect instrument of empire." Max Weinreich, "A language is a dialect with an army and navy." |
| pidgin F147, P33 | a language that belong to no one—a new language that is not the mother tongue of any of its speakers; choppy strings of words borrowed from the language of the colonizers, highly variable, with little in the way of grammar |
| creolization by children observed in real time P36 | the ISN developed by deaf children in Nicaragua today is superior to the LSN developed there in the 1970s by older people |
| Motherese (a.k.a. Mamanaise) P39 | unnatural and stilted form of speech used by parents with young children in the belief that they are teaching them language |
| Broca’s aphasia P46 | characterized by a struggle to get speech out, even though the rest of intelligence seems more or less intact |
| chatterboxes P50 | linguistic idiot savants—that is, people with good language and bad cognition |
| "Hoax, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary" P64 | the assertion, repeated from textbook to textbook, and inflated over time, that the Eskimo have several hundred words for snow |
| deictic pronouns | their referent shifts with the speaker: you, me, . . . |
| language
and thinking, Pinker’s position P81 |
People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought ("mentalese"). |
| arbitrariness of the sign, the, of Ferdinand de Saussure P83 | the wholly conventional pairing of a sound with a meaning |
| generative
grammar P84 |
a discrete combinatorial system; a code for translating between orders of words and combinations of thoughts |
| infinite use of finite media, language makes, Wilhelm Von Humboldt P84 | a generative grammar, a discrete combinatorial system |
| blending
systems P85 |
the properties of the combination lie between the properties of its elements; the only way to differentiate large numbers of combinations is to discriminate tinier and tinier differences |
| discrete
combinatorial system, consequences of P85 |
one: the
sheer vastness of language two: a code that is autonomous from cognition |
| autonomy of code: consequences of the autonomy of code from cognition P87 | one:
sentences can be ungrammatical but interpretable two: sentences can make no sense but still be recognized as grammatical |
| Jabberwocky F267, 275, P89 | poem by Lewis Carroll that filled Alice’s head with ideas she didn’t understand but whose sounds conformed to Whorf’s formula |
| word-chain
devices P91 |
the simplest example of a discrete combinatorial system (a finite state or Markov model) |
| word-chain devices, problems with such grammars P93 | one: points
in the string have low transition probability two: they are amnesiacs, but language has long-distance dependencies three: they cannot handle multiple embeddings |
| trees: sentences are not chains, but trees P97 | words are grouped into phrases with names, and little phrases can be joined into bigger ones; words are linked to branches on an inverted tree |
| phrase
structure P101 |
one solution to the engineering problem of taking an interconnected web of thoughts in the mind and encoding them as a string of words that must be uttered, one at a time, by the mouth |
| recursion P101 |
a symbol inside another instance of the same symbol, as for example, a sentence within a sentence |
| ambiguity as evidence for independence of language and mentalese P102 | a particular stretch of language can correspond to two distinct thoughts |
| parts of
speech P106 |
a kind of token that obeys certain formal rules: for example, a noun is simply a word that does nouny things |
| X-bar theory P106 |
one of the most intriguing discoveries of modern linguistics, that there appears to be a common anatomy in all phrases in all the world’s languages |
| head: the main component of a phrase P107 | what the entire phrase is "about" is what its head word is about |
| modifiers (or "adjuncts"): the third component of a phrase P107 | if a phrase contains both a role-player and a modifier, the role-player has to be closer to the head than the modifier—there’s no way the modifier could get between the head and the role-player |
| role-players
(or "arguments"): the second component of a
phrase P107 |
phrases are about not just single things or actions in the world but to sets of players that interact with each other in a particular way: the head and its role-players ("arguments") are joined together in a subphrase (e.g., "N-bar" or "V-bar" |
| subjects or specifiers ("spec’s"): the fourth and final component of a phrase P109 | a special role-player or argument, usually the causal agent if there is one |
| parameters P111 |
the trees become mobiles, removing their left-to-right order, to be reconstituted by pieces of information that make one language different from another, as for example, either "X-bar first" or "X-bar last." |
| verbs’ dictionary entries P113 | within a phrase, then, the verb is a little despot, dictating which of the slots made available by the super-rules are to be filled |
| cases P115 |
grammar puts little tags on the noun phrases that can be matched up with the roles laid out in a verb’s dictionary entry |
| auxiliaries P117 |
words that express layers of meaning having to do with the truth of a proposition as a speaker conceives it |
| function
words P118 |
bits of crystallized grammar; they delineate larger phrases . . ., thereby providing a scaffolding for the sentence |
| traces P122 |
their position serves as a reminder of the role that a moved phrase is playing at the level of ‘who did what to whom’ |
| lexicographers P126 | writers of dictionaries |
| wug-test P127 | experiment that showed that preschoolers already know how to inflect words |
| derivational morphology P128 | where one creates a new word out of an old one, as in learnable and teachable |
| inflectional morphology P128 | where one modifies a word to fit the sentence, like marking a noun for the plural with –s or a verb for the past tense with -ed |
| compounding P129 | glues two words together to form a new one, like toothbrush and mouse-eater |
| promiscuity of affixes | "like inflections, stem affixes are promiscuous, mating with any stem that has the right category label, and so we have crunchable, scrunchable, shmooshable, wuggable, and so on. |
| Astem à Stem Astemaffix P134 | An adjective stem can consist of a stem joined to a suffix |
| heads of words P 134 | "The head of an English word is simply its rightmost morpheme." |
| Stem
affixes: an example: -able P134 |
adjective
stem affix: crunchable means "capable of being X’d": ! attach me to a verb stem: scrunchable, shmooshable, wuggable . . . |
| roots P135 | the smallest part of a word, the part that cannot be cut up into any smaller parts |
| Nstem à Nroot Nrootsuffix P136 | A noun stem can be composed of a noun root and a suffix |
| Root
affixes: an example: -ity P136 |
noun
root suffix: electríss- means "the state of being X": "the state of being electric" attach me to a noun root: academicity, acrobaticity, alcoholicity . . . |
| irregular forms, a family of P138 | drink–drank, sink–sank, shrink–shrank, .etc. |
| Walkmans vs. workmen P143 | headless compounds must be regular; no perculation of irregularities can take place |
| mice-infested vs. rat-infested P146 | compounds can be formed out of irreguar plurals, but not out of regular plurals; irregular plurals must be stored as such and cannot be generated by a rule |
| word1: one definition of a word P147 | a linguistic object that, even if built out of parts by the rules of morphology, behaves as the indivisible, smallest unit with respect to the rules of syntax: a "syntactic atom" |
| word2:
another definition of a word P148 |
a rote-memorized chunk: a string of linguistic stuff that is arbitrarily associated with a particular meaning, one item from the long list we call the mental dictionary: a "listeme" |
| word classes (parts of speech) as they fit into sentence structure P157 | Can
you see any sibbing? Response: points to the hands
kneading Can you see a sib? Response: points to the bowl Can you see any sib? Response: points to the stuff inside the bowl |
See also the following terms in the Pinker Glossary: accusative, active, adjective, adjunct, adverb, affix, agreement, AI, algorithm, aphasia, argument, article, ASL, aspect, auxiliary, case, chain device, clause, complement, compound, concord, conjunction, copula, dative, deep structure, derivational morphology, determiner, finite-state device, gender, gene, gerund, grammar, head, indirect object, infinitive, INFL, inflectional morphology, intransitive, inversion, listeme, main verb, modal, modality, modifier, mood, morphemes, morphology, movement, nominative, noun, number, object, part of speech, participle, passive, person, phrase structure, phrase structure grammar, predicate, preposition, pronoun, proposition, recursion, relative clause, root, semantics, SLI, specifier, stem, subject, surface structure, syntax, tense, trace, transformational grammar, transitive, Universal Grammar, verb, voice, X-bar, X-bar theory.
Further definitions and explanations for many of these are also to be found in the O'Grady text and in the O'Grady glossary.
ablaut, acrolects, acronyms, basilects, blending, Class I affixes, Class II affixes, clipping, complementizers, conversion, coordinate structures, do insertion, embedded clause, clipping, cliticization, coinage, creoles, language bioprogram hypothesis, matrix clause, mesolects, postpositions, reduplication, relexification, subcategorization, suppletion, Wh Movement, umlaut.