International Day of Sign Languages

  One of the fundamental properties of human language is that it can be used to create an unlimited number of utterances given a limited number of pieces. At the syntactic level, this property follows directly from a mathematical property of language called recursiveness. We’re all familiar with recursiveness (even if not with the term). It is found in language , and computer programs, and even in children’s stories, as in (1). In (1), the process or rule that creates a relative clause (here, the clauses beginning with that) has applied repeatedly to the noun phrases inside other relative clauses. This repeated application of the same rule to create more and more complex sentences is an example of recursiveness. The children’s story is amusing precisely because we all know that there is no theoretical limit to the application of this rule. Any speaker of English can add to the story by generating another relative clause at the beginning, as in (2). The only limitations on th...

  Most languages have both simple words, such as teach, and complex words, such as teach+er. Knowing English entails understanding the internal structure of its complex words , as well as the ability to create and understand new complex words that exploit those same kinds of internal structures. The study of the internal structure of words is called morphology . For example, given a new verb scaff, as in The purpose of this machine is to scaff computers against viruses, we can also create or analyze the internal structure of the word scaffer and can deduce something about its meaning in the sentence, The company purchased several expensive scaffers last year. We would also immediately judge the nonce word *er+scaff to be impossible in English. Speakers of English know the form and function of the meaningful word component-er, and they know that it is a suffix rather than a prefix. Although users of a language are usually not conscious of their linguistic knowledge , their use of ...