What is language?
- Language is intentional in various senses (goal-driven, not just stimulus-response, amenable to reflection).
- Language is generative/productive.
- Language is recursive.
- Language is the result of collaborative and unintentional processes.
- Language can refer to things and situations that are not present or never were/will be.
- Language is structured at (at least) two levels: phonetics/phonology and grammar.
- Language is learned.
- Language is both produced and comprehended by all normal users.
- Language distinguishes reference and sense
(extension and intension).
What isn't language?
- Other animals' communication systems?
- Sign languages?
- Thought? (Does it have to be linguistic?)
- Artificial languages?
- Music?
How can we study language scientifically?
- What does it mean to study something scientifically?
- We need data that we gather and analyze, attempting to avoid
biases.
- We come up with generalizations that characterize the data
and, if possible, relate it other data.
- What are we trying to describe
or explain about language?
- We could be describing/explaining the product or the process or both.
- We could make reference to form only or to both form and meaning/function.
- We could be explaining (or not) why language is the way it is.
- How does language satisfy constraints on speaking, hearing, learning, memory, and attention?
- How does language fulfill the communicative, cognitive, or social needs of people?
- How did language evolve?
How can we write programs that help people use language?
- We can write software that duplicates what (individual) people do with language.
- Question answering
- Translation
- Summarization
- Sentiment analysis
- We can write software that processes language in ways that people can't.
- Information retrieval and data mining (including opinion mining)
- Learning to translate from millions of bilingual texts
