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Linguistic differences and language design.

Mark C. Baker1

  • 1Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University, 18 Seminary Place, 08901, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

Trends in Cognitive Sciences
|August 9, 2003
PubMed
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Language diversity arises from a few parameters within universal principles. Viewing language as a code explains its structure, suggesting a dual purpose of communication and information concealment.

Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Evolutionary Biology
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Superficial differences between languages like English, Japanese, and Mohawk stem from a limited set of discrete choices, termed parameters, within a framework of universal linguistic principles.
  • Current theories on language evolution often overlook these parameters due to a perceived lack of evolutionary rationale.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To propose a novel framework for understanding language evolution by conceptualizing language as a code.
  • To provide a rationale for the existence of language parameters within the human language faculty.

Main Methods:

  • Comparative linguistic analysis to identify universal principles and discrete parameters across diverse languages.
  • Theoretical modeling comparing language structure to cryptographic systems (ciphers/codes).

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Main Results:

  • Demonstrated that a small set of parameters can account for extensive superficial variations observed in unrelated languages.
  • Established a conceptual parallel between the structure of human language and the principles of information concealment inherent in ciphers.

Conclusions:

  • The organization of the human language faculty, characterized by universal principles and discrete parameters, is best understood by analogy to a code.
  • This code-like structure suggests that language may serve a dual function: communicating information to intended recipients while simultaneously concealing it from others.