language acquisition

As annoyed as I am getting with all of these papers I have to read about children's performance on verb raising of finite main clause verbs in German and negation movement in French etc etc, I really do appreciate that one of the largest miracles of human existence, almost as baffling as life itself, is language acquisition. It's such a miracle that a baby with only the rudimentary congenital genetic capacity for language manages to take sounds and through some elusive devices including calculation of distributional frequencies, prosodic word boundaries, and phonotactic constraints, determine what a word is and somehow learn the representational content of that word. I mean, first of all obtaining a lexicon is so amazing... I think the first time a child says "ma ma" or whatever his first utterance is, is perhaps the greatest miracle of all cognition. How has this little child with such an underdeveloped cognitive faculty manage to do something so mathematically amazing, something we can't even get computers to do, just by listening to disorganized input?

And then later, for children to go on and somehow learn to set their languages parameters (for example the horrid papers about German and French acquisition show that toddlers have an awareness of syntactical functional categories (inflection, complementizers), head movement (like with finite V2 verbs or negation), and the difference between finite verbs and infinitives (apparent even within the optional infinite stage as the child manages to place the verb correctly in the V2 languages, even if he is conjugating incorrectly by using an infinitive in a main clause). I mean, most of us learn how to talk without really ever understanding linguistics. It's so amazing how naturally it comes, how children have this unspoken awareness of complicated conventions that I can't even seem to learn now for my linguistics midterm.

I honestly don't even like linguistics that much (although I do enjoy syntax and I like thinking about acquisition), but one cannot deny how amazing it is that we have a language at all, that it somehow erupted from our genetic nature. No other animal is anywhere near having the language complexity that we have (the closest is like those monkeys with different calls that I rambled on about a year ago in this blog, and they can't really talk to each other, just scream "jaguar" and the like).

Amazing. Life continues to amaze me. Maybe that's why, despite all of my attempts at becoming a physicist, I ended up right back in biology.