The Marvel of Language: Knowns, Unknowns, and Maybes

Abstract

The Marvel of Language: Knowns, Unknowns, and Maybes Susan McKay Amid our delight in the beauties of literature, our satisfaction in our writing (scholarly, technical, or creative), and the gratification and challenge inherent in our teaching, we often end up giving little attention to language, the faculty which makes all of those endeavors possible and which is the very foundation of our work as language professionals. I would like to use the opportunity of this keynote address to share with you what I see as some of the marvels of language, as I have observed them over the decades of my study and teaching of languages and linguistics. What Kinds of Things Are Linguistically Knowable? For centuries and even millennia, many minds–great and ordinary–have observed that man alone speaks, that language is a panhuman feature that both identifies and unites us. Linguists, and before them philologists, grammarians, philosophers, scribes, and translators, have worked both independently and collaboratively to devise rigorous methodologies for the analysis and description of language. Under objective study and analysis, many of language’s elements have been amenable to discovery. A few of the key things that are linguistically knowable are: • Language is an abstract and complex system of rules. • These rules, or operating principles, are organized internally into subsystems, which are themselves made up of smaller and smaller subsystems. • A vast and intricate web of connections links the rules both within and across systems and subsystems. • These rules reside and operate in the minds of the language’s speakers. • The functioning of these rules is in many ways effortless and unconscious. These properties, and many others, are things we know as linguists. [End Page 49] They have emerged from decades of inquiry and constitute what we think of as some of the fundamental properties of language; they are among what I call the design features of human language. Yet the marvel that is language remains a mystery to us in significant ways, due in no small measure to the limits of what is knowable linguistically. For many crucial properties of language, linguists depend on the research of scholars from other disciplines whose conceptions of and about language often do not correlate with what linguists think of as “knowns.” Let us consider three of those complex and deeply important questions that surpass the field of linguistics itself, and let us try to integrate a linguistic perspective into the views and findings of other disciplines. I will mention a few key aspects of each topic, and then conclude each of the three sections with a summary of “knowns,” “unknowns,” and “maybes.” I. Language and the BraIn: Where is language and how does it operate in the brain? Our knowledge of language as seated in the brain began with the study of focal brain damage, that is, injuries to specific areas in the brain, and any concomitant changes in language ability. Wars in the last half of the 19th century–the American Civil War in the 1860s and the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870s–resulted in many head wounds from sabers, cannon shot, and musket balls, accompanied by many forms of language impairment, collectively known as aphasia. In 1861, French surgeon Paul Pierre Broca found that damage in part of the left frontal lobe (specifically, the left inferior frontal gyrus) was accompanied by impaired speech production. That region of the brain came to be called “Broca’s area.” Building on Broca’s published findings, Carl Wernicke, a German neuropathologist and surgeon during the Franco-Prussian War, traced impairment in language comprehension to some of the wounds he treated in another part of the brain—located further back than Broca’s area—a small part of the left temporal lobe (specifically, the left posterior superior temporal gyrus), which became known as “Wernicke’s area.” In the 20th century, the importance of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas for language was confirmed by many studies of strokes and other brain injuries. For instance, detailed aphasia studies conducted [End Page 50] in France in the 1930s greatly expanded our understanding of which aspects of language were involved with the two physiological areas. Electro-encephalograms...