Author: Laura Bowen
Last Tuesday, November 27, the Linguistics Club held their first event, when Dr. Elizabeth Barber, a professor of archeology and linguistics at Occidental, spoke about language structure and its key elements. Her main study focuses on how linguistics and archaeology have enlightened each other; she is also the founder of Occidental’s Folk and Historic Dance Troupe (est. 1971).
Barber began by asking the audience what they considered the key elements of language to be, although she warned that it was, “something that’s very hard to agree on.” Eventually, a list was compiled that she wrote on the board: “communication,” “relation to thought,” “it can be recorded,” “structure/system,” “cultural,” “symbols,” “needs a medium.” Barber put extra emphasis on the communication aspect of language. “Communication is where the restrictions on language design came from,” she said.
Barber stressed that language “is not instinctive. It’s something we learn through our culture.” Barber used the example of a baby of Chinese ethnicity raised in the United States, who would speak English, not Chinese.
The system of language is something that Barber said must be “agreed upon.” What humans want to accomplish with the system, though, is “we want to be able to talk about anything we can conceive of,” Barber said. She then posed the question, “How can something stand for something that doesn’t exist?”
To combat this problem, Barber said a language system needs to have “productivity,” and be “infinitely expansible.” However, Barber distinguished between an infinite system that was trivial and one that was non-trivial. For example, bees use a system to locate a source of nectar that can be used to describe an infinite number of nectar sources, but they can do this only for nectar sources, making it a trivial task. The human system of language is completely arbitrary, Barber said, and explained this is because it is based on symbols. It “frees us to talk about things that don’t exist,” she said.
Barber distinguished the evolution of human language, as opposed to primates, as our ability to speak is housed in a different area of our brains. Primates make sounds for wanting food or being angry that are uncontrollable. Humans however, have “voluntary motor centers . . . we cannot talk if we care to,” Barber said.
This evolution, she explained, could have happened because when humans began to walk upright, the birth canal got smaller, and babies therefore had to be born younger and smaller to compensate. Although humans are helpless for a long time after birth, “it allows us all that time to apprentice to language” from those who take care of us, she said.
Barber concluded with a general definition of language drawing from all of the aspects she had explained. “Language is a productive system of arbitrary symbols by which the members of a social group communicate and interact,” she said.
A handout was given that mapped out the overall linguistic structure of any human language. Barber said that there is “no primitive language,” because all languages incorporate these characteristics.
In response to her presentation, Conor Anderson (first-year) said, “I was very interested by her talk. I’m fascinated by language, and what she was saying . . . intrigued me even more.”
Barber proved a compelling speaker for others as well. “I never knew language could be so complex . . . I learned a lot,” Madeline Rose (first-year) said.
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