Few of you have ever read this sentence before.

This may seem like a singularly uninteresting observation. However, what you did with that sentence is quite remarkable. By looking at a pattern of ink you'd never seen before, you let an idea that was in my head suddenly enter yours. What's more, you did it so quickly that you didn't even notice most of what happened.

Learning More Than You Were Taught

There are many things that native speakers of a language do without realizing--things they know that no one ever taught them. Go back and reread the first sentence of this article out loud. Go on, do it. If you're like me, you didn't pronounce the [t] in “sentence”; what you said sounded more like “sen-ns” than “sentens.” In most dialects of English, the sound [t] turns into what is known as a glottal stop immediately before an [n]. (Glottal stops are commonly described as the consonant sound between the vowels in the word “uh-oh.”) Similarly, you pronounce “kitten” as “kih-n” and “Clinton” as “clin-n.”

The opening sentence of this article also provides an example of a rule of syntax you've never been taught: You know that you can use the word “ever” in the sentence “Few of you have ever read this sentence before” but not in “Many of you have ever read this sentence before.” No one ever told you this, and if you asked your English teacher why you can use “ever” in the first sentence but not in the second, he or she probably won't be able to tell you.

The Search for Patterns

You may ask, “So how do I know this stuff?” This is one of the basic questions that linguistics, the study of language, tries to answer. Linguisticss tries to discover how languages work, how people use language, and what the structure of language can tell us about the human brain.

By many accounts, there have been at least 8,000 different languages over the course of human history. They incorporate hundreds of different sounds (and movements, in the case of sign languages,) have wildly different word orders and grammatical constructs, and teem with idiosyncrasies. One of linguists' daunting tasks is to figure out what these languages have in common.

They have found a lot of similarities so far. Phonologists, who study the sounds used in language, have noticed that when two sounds need to be produced consecutively in the same area of the mouth (say, for example, [t] and [n]), people will often change one of them to make the word easier to pronounce. Although languages differ in what sounds cannot appear consecutively, speakers of different languages change sounds in similar ways to avoid forbidden combinations. Syntacticians, who study sentence structure, have noticed similarities in the way sentences are created in different languages. In all languages, words are built into phrases that are then built into larger phrases until a sentence is formed. Words may be positioned differently, but the way the phrases are combined is similar.

Some of the most interesting similarities occur in psycholinguistics, which examines how people acquire language and how the human brain processes language. People who study language acquisition have noticed that all babies babble when they're first learning language, even babies learning a sign language. Babies learning sign make random gestures resembling sign language just like babies learning speech make random sounds resembling spoken language. In fact, people learning any language go through similar stages. Linguistics provides constant reminders that the differences among people aren't as vast as they seem, which is one of the reasons I like studying it.

Psycholinguists also search for patterns in the way we process language. For example, most people can understand “After running a mile John was tired,” but they will have difficulty with “After running a mile seemed like a long distance.” It takes us a few rereadings to figure out that there's a pause between “running” and “a mile.” (Note that this is not a punctuation error. This sentence does not need a comma any more than the sentence “After dinner John went dancing” needs one.) To learn more about language processing, psycholinguists equip test subjects with eye trackers and give them sentences such as these to pinpoint exactly where they get confused and start rereading the sentence.

Linguistics and Natural Language Processing

I first became interested in linguistics while taking a class in natural language processing during my junior year at the University of Maryland. Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that attempts to get computers to understand human languages. (It's called “natural language processing” to show that it isn't concerned with man-made programming languages such as C and Java.) NLP draws heavily on both computer science and linguistics; my class, which turned out to be one of my favorite classes at Maryland, focused on linguistics.

Natural language processing does have a lot in common with linguistics, but while linguistics focuses on how speakers create an utterance, NLP focuses on how to interpret the utterance that the speaker created. NLP is commonly used in natural-language interfaces, which allow people to interact with computers using their native language. Another application of NLP that I find interesting is machine translation, the subfield of NLP that explores how to automatically translate documents from one language to another. Machine translation has received much more attention now that the World Wide Web has made information in many languages widely accessible.

Both linguistics and natural language processing have an ambitious goal-–to analyze human language in all of its complexity. The variety in human language can seem bewildering, as any of you studying a second language have probably noticed. Linguists are doing their best to find the universal patterns, and while it won't necessarily help you do better on your French exam, it's nice knowing there's at least some order in the chaos.

Further Reading

If you're interested in the science of language, I strongly recommend the book The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. Pinker does a wonderful job of showing that linguistics is more than syntax trees and vowel charts. He spends a chapter covering each of the major subfields of linguistics, such as phonology, syntax, and psycholinguistics. He then uses the information presented in these chapters to argue that language is as much an instinct in humans as web building is in spiders. The book is a comprehensive and amazing work. The fact that it is sprinkled with quotes from such renowned experts as Woody Allen and Dave Barry helps. After all, linguists aren't the only ones who have discovered that language is fun to play with.