Kind: captions
Language: en
what are the most beautiful or
fascinating aspects of language our
ideas and linguistics or cognitive
science that you've seen in a lifetime
of studying language and studying the
human mind well I think the deepest
property of language and puzzling
property that's been discovered is what
are sometimes called structure
dependence we know understand it pretty
well but was puzzling for a long time
I'll give you a concrete example so
suppose you say the guy who fixed the
car carefully packed his tools it's
ambiguous he could fix the car carefully
or carefully pack his tools
I suppose you put carefully in front
carefully the guy who fixed the car
packed his tools then it's carefully
packed not carefully fixed and in fact
you do that even if it makes no sense so
suppose you say carefully the guy who
fixed the car is told you have to
interpret it as carefully he stole even
though that doesn't make any sense and
notice that that's a very puzzling fact
because you're relating carefully not to
the linearly closest for but to the
linear remotely more remote for a linear
approach a easy computation but here
you're doing a much more what looks like
a more complex computation you're doing
something that's taking you essentially
to the more remote thing it's now unjust
if you look at the actual structure of
the sentence you know where the phrases
are and so on turns out you're picking
out the structurally closest thing but
the linearly more remote thing but
notice that what's linear is a hundred
percent of what you hear you never hear
structure and so what you're doing is
and instantly this is universal all
constructions all languages and what
we're compelled to do is carry out
what looks like the more complex
computation on material that we never
hear and we ignore a hundred percent of
what we hear and the simplest
computation but now there's even a
neural basis for this that's somewhat
understood and there's good theories by
now that explain why it's true
that's a deep insight into the
surprising nature of language with many
consequences
you