Hello everyone, welcome back from the fall break! And what better way could there be to celebrate the first weekiversary of Thanksgiving than to join BULA for the last of the Fall Semester Movie Nights? THE HUMAN LANGUAGE SERIES Part 1: Discovering the Human Language Thu, Dec 4, 7pm Geddes Language Center CAS 538 You can RSVP on Facebook. Or not. But come anyway..! http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=35217092947 THE HUMAN LANGUAGE SERIES http://equinoxfilms.home.mindspring.com/series.html Our species alone has the miracle of syntax. Program One is about words, sentences, and Universal Grammar - the system claimed to be common to all the world's languages. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is gibberish, but grammatically correct. Does this show that structure can be separate from meaning? We learn that the "Chomskyan revolution" changed language study into a search for what goes on inside the brain. (How does a child just know that the marble "inside" the box isn't "near" the box?) We find out that the human language has two great ground plans. (Warlpiri, an Australian language, works the same way as Latin.) There are no "primitive" languages anywhere. How good is the human language at what it does? Language is poor at describing faces, but there is no other way to declare, "There is not a giraffe standing next to me." The great achievement of language is that we can think in abstractions; that we can say anything we can think; that only we can say new things.