CANCELED: Why Everyone Should Study Linguistics
In this talk, Maya Honda, visiting lecturer in linguistics at MIT, will expand on what linguistics is by describing some of the many things about language that linguists investigate. She will also discuss why everyone should have the opportunity to study linguistics, based on her experiences engaging fifth graders up to adult learners in linguistic inquiry.
Language is essential to who we are as human beings and to our understanding of ourselves. It is all around us and it is in us, in our minds. Language is so much a part of us and our everyday lives that we may not think much about it. But closely observing language reveals interesting surprises.
For example, consider the question, "Who do you want to visit?". What does it mean? To speakers of English, this is an ambiguous question. Who can be either the visitor or the person to be visited, but not both. This is curious. One string of words can have two quite different interpretations. How do speakers of English know this? What is it that they know? In linguistics, the scientific study of language, we apply the methods of science to investigate and explain what a person knows when they know a language. This is a challenging endeavor with many facets, for our knowledge of language is rich and complex—amazingly so, given that we implicitly know things that no one has taught us, such as how to interpret ambiguous sentences.
