No, that's not an observation on what a cracking course A level English Language is (although now you come to mention it...), but instead a comment relating to this report on the development of software that will allow linguists to decode alien language. "What?" I hear you cry, "Aliens? As in little green men?" (Actually the majority of people claiming to have seen aliens concur that they are in fact grey and not green... and not really 'little' at all... and there are probably female aliens too, when you think about it... but I digress). "Since when did alien language become fair game on an English Language course?" you continue, and not without justification. But it's what the article says about language in general that is interesting for us as linguists:[Dr Elliott] believes that even an alien language far removed from any on Earth
is likely to have recognisable patterns that could help reveal how intelligent
the life forms are. "Language has to be structured in a certain way otherwise it
will be inefficient and unwieldy," he told New Scientist magazine.
This idea that all languages have a common basic structure (or 'deep structure' as it is sometimes known) is not a new one - linguist Noam Chomsky is well known for his theories in this area. The report goes on to explain:
All human languages have "functional terms" that bracket phrases - words like
"if" and "but" in English. According to Dr Elliott, such terms in any language,
are separated by up to nine words or characters. This limit on phrase length
seems to correspond to the level of human cognition - how much information we
are able to process at once.
Whether we apply this to alien languages or not (and I suggest that we don't spend too long on that one), this basic principle of (human) languages would seem to point to a definite link between language and cognition (mental agility and ability), which lends weight to at least one of the main theories of language acquisition that we will be debating later on this year.
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