Even linguists have questions about language! See below for questions posed by some of them:
“What is the relationship between life, love, and language? This question fuels my work as a philologist and a poet.”
—Professor Cynthia Hallen, Brigham Young University
“I can think of several questions specific to individual sub-areas of study within Linguistics, and I can also think of several questions that are larger and more fundamental to things like language evolution, the origin of human language(s), and the relations between language and other aspects of cognition.”
—Professor Armik Mirzayan, University of South Dakota
“People regularly and unconsciously manage to interpret words and phrases in places other than just those in which they are produced. A relevant example is found in the sentence: ‘Sam won’t read that book but Kim will’. Although produced only once, we manage to interpret the phrase ‘read the book’ both in the position where it is produced and in the empty position following ‘will’. I’m interested in understanding how this is achieved and what the limits are on these disconnects between the form of a sentence and what it means. Answering these questions can provide insights into the rules and representations we use to relate structure and meaning in language.”
—Professor Jason Overfelt, University of Minnesota
“Do people who speak different languages think differently?”
—Professor Wallace Chafe, University of CA – Santa Barbara
“I wonder if there will be a new world “prestige” language soon. Greek was that in ancient times, even among the Romans, Latin was that for a long time in Europe and even in the Americas, English is now the “international” language. What will come next?”
—Professor Angela Helmer, University of South Dakota
“I find the interpretation of non-overt syntactic categories fascinating. How do we know that “Leave now!” means “You have to leave now” and not “They have to leave now”? There’s no visible subject. When you say “The door was opened,” you know that somebody did it (even though that person isn’t mentioned), but when you say “The door openend,” there is no such implication. How do we all agree on interpreting what’s not expressed overtly?”
—Professor Anja Wanner, University of Wisconsin – Madison
“I want to know what’s true of all human languages. To understand language is to understand the very core of our humanity.”
—Professor Natasha Abner, University of Michigan
“…what is the structure of the faculty of language, those features of the mind brain that allow humans to acquire language in the way that they do? Humans appear to be uniquely linguistically capable. Nothing does language like humans do. This must rest on some biological features endemic to humans. Generative Grammar over the last 60 years has gone some way towards addressing the question of what makes us tick linguistically. Given that our linguistic facility almost certainly underlies our capacity for cultural transmission and given that culture is also one of our more distinctive features as a species, understanding how language functions promises to produce a window on the mind that explains our most distinctive and profound features. This seems like a good reason to be interested in this question and the answers that linguists have proposed.”
—Professor Norbert Hornstein, University of Maryland
“…how does social meaning fit into a broader theory of semantics and pragmatics—e.g., if I pick a word that cool people tend to use in order to signal to you that I’m a cool person, is that an implicature just like the implicatures we normally consider or are there differences? I tend to think there are differences, but we don’t yet have a good typology of social meanings or a deep understanding of how they interact with the kinds of meaning we know more about.”
—Professor Robert Henderson, University of Arizona
“It has always fascinated me to think about how people can comprehend and produce language so fluently and effortlessly– and a majority of people around the world can do this in multiple languages! When you think about all of the complex language forms we encounter every day, this is a pretty amazing feat. So I guess my burning question, and the one I investigate in my own research, is what are the cognitive, neural, and linguistic mechanisms we all possess that allow us to comprehend and use language to communicate as successfully and effortlessly as we do.”
—Professor Carrie Neal Jackson, Pennsylvania State University
“How language change happens, especially the “hidden hand” of change, in terms of directionality. To give just one example, the “end up V-ing” construction (e.g. we’ll end up paying too much for that) has been increasing over the last 80 years, and even almost year by year.”
—Professor Mark Davies, Brigham Young University
“I would like to understand what factors drive individual differences in language development, especially individual differences that are extreme enough that we call them impairments or disorders.”
—Professor Carol Miller, Penn State University
“One burning question I have (right now) is: How can we best study language without resorting to rendering the embodied flow of contextualized language into static, discrete, decontextualized, reified written forms?”
—Professor John Hellerman, Portland State University
“…the one that comes to mind… is how grammar and folk grammar are revealed in poetic form. What the form of poetry and song tells us about language.”
—Professor Michael Hammond, University of Arizona
“Was there ever one macro-family? How does the LAD (Language Acquisition Device) really work?”
—Professor Ian Hancock, University of Texas
“I’d really like to know how language/grammar is represented in human cognitive – we develop all sorts of representational models (or better yet, cultural models) of grammar without any knowledge of the representational apparatus in the brain”
—Professor Jeffrey Williams (Texas Tech)
“What is the evolutionary basis for language? This is a question I believe that will never be definitively answered (though I could be wrong, maybe there is a single gene lurking out there). The reason to search for it, or to enfold it into a larger possibly answerable question, is to arrive at an increasingly comprehensive understanding of humanity.”
—Professor Thomas Bever, University of Arizona
“Right now I’m working on analyzing the vowels and person marking in a language that is under-documented. This is a burning question, because I want to know what the language actually does instead of what has been reported as being done in previous descriptions. A broader question about Language though, is about the reality of markedness in the contrasts used by a language. Is markedness an apriori condition or a piece of theoretical machinery? Are there cognitive or psychological motivations for it generally? If so, what does that mean for human experience, do we build our worldviews on markedness contrasts?”
—Professor Chris Rogers, Brigham Young University
“Why is there so much variation in linguistic diversity around the world? This question has much to do with the relationship between languages, multilingualism, and population histories, and each of those angles can inform the others”
—Professor Patience Epps, University of Texas
“I’m interested in the answer to the fundamental questions that my framework derives from, things like “Is there a domain-specific language capacity?”, “Is human language unique?”, and “What gave rise to human language as we know it/was it merge?” These questions are important because they drive everything else I do”
—Professor Jeanne Heil, University of Southern Maine
“How does accommodation of unstated information take place? Does it involve multiple different kinds of mechanisms?”
—Professor Lyn Frazier, University of Massachusetts
“I want to better understand social editing and feedback that occurs online, especially in social networks. For example, when someone corrects the language of another in a social network, what are the implications? What motivates the correction? How does the original poster feel? How does the original poster’s future writing change? Social editing is interesting to me because I believe we can learn from others’ feedback and because I want to learn how to improve directive feedback to facilitate higher-quality texts.”
—Professor Matt Baker, Brigham Young University
“I am currently trying to figure out if “look up about” is a new prepositional-phrasal verb in English. I believe it is based on some initial data collection and analysis. What I really want to know is how it arose. I argue for a source construction that may have allowed for the emergence of a new verb (largely synonymous with “google”), but some experimental data will be needed before I can further advance the argument. I’m also interested in how speakers of different age brackets respond to this usage and how they evaluate it.”
—Professor Dawn Nordquist, University of New Mexico
“How is language represented in the brain of bilinguals (both lexicon and morphosyntax) and what are the mechanisms that allow for production and processing of spontaneously mixed (code-switched) language? Why is this important: because the majority of the world’s inhabitants know and routinely speak more than one language, often in the same conversations with the same interlocutors, and most mix and process languages apparently effortlessly. And despite decades of research, now including the most sophisticated technology, we still don’t really know how this is accomplished.”
—Professor John Lipski, Penn State University
“My burning question about language is “How can endangered language communities turn the tide on language endangerment and increase the number of fluent speakers, if they want to?” We are losing a huge percentage of the world’s languages. We know a lot more about language revitalization and what makes a method succeed or fail in a given situation than we used to. The field of linguistics is now much more on board with working on this for communities’ purposes and goals than it used to be. Many endangered and dormant language communities in North America are at a point where they are working on this, or want to work on this, and are more able to than they were several generations ago. The U.S. government is more on board than it used to be (and elsewhere, the Irish government for example is very much on board). We’ve made a lot of progress on how to teach endangered and dormant languages, but less on how to get usage of them in daily life to increase”
—Professor Natasha Warner, University of Arizona
“I would like to better understand the factors that govern word order in the Karuk language of northern California. This question is interesting to me because many word orders are attested in language use and syntax, prosody, and information structure all seem to play a role. If we can figure out what those roles are and how it all fits together, it would be useful for both the language revitalization work done in the Karuk community and for linguistic theory.”
—Professor Line Mikkelsen, University of CA- Berkeley
“The main big question in linguistics for me would be how it is, electrically, chemically, and genetically, that the human brain allows the conversion of thoughts into language. My husband is a neurologist, so I know enough of the complexity of this question to know that it is too complex and too broad to be answerable at present… My big-picture question in my line of research has to do with the connection between language and identity, specifically how particular writers portray characters’ identities through the characters’ language.”
—Professor Mary Jane Hurst, Texas Tech
“I’m a computational linguist, so I’m interested in practical models of how language works. One question I’m very interested in is ‘how do we know what we’re talking about?’. This touches on several questions, such as pronoun resolution (what do you mean by ‘it’? How can I tell?) and discourse relations (why are you telling me this?). The question of discourse relations is tricky. If you say “Putin is totalitarian. He closed down a newspaper!” can I understand that you utter sentence 2 to give evidence that your claim in sentence 1 was correct? Is that in fact what you meant? How many such ‘functions’ are there? These are all essential questions for modeling how we understand each other, and whether we’re talking about the same thing.”
—Professor Amir Zeldes, Georgetown University
“Why it is that we are so good at learning and processing language? This question is interesting in and of itself, but also interesting in terms of the different answers that have been proposed over time (nativist approaches, exposure-based approaches, …) These answers give insight into what we think is human and how this view is changing.”
—Professor Edith Kaan, University of Florida
“When one forms a passive, as in demonstrators were arrested, there is a sense in which the grammatical subject is also the logical object. This has vast consequences in the domain that some linguists have called “movement”. It has been argued that the distributed presence of an element like demonstrators in my sentence involves two separate occurrences of the item in question. I would like to understand how it is that multiple occurrences of elements as just described “collapse” into a single token representation in the phonetics and (one can also argue) the semantics. Why, if something is distributed, does it end up in a single configuration? What does that follow from? The reason this question is interesting to me is because this sort of correlation in language (between separate occurrences that collapse into a single interpreted configuration) can be arbitrarily long distance: demonstrators appear to have been arrested, demonstrators seem to appear to have been arrested, etc. Whenever a correlation is long-range it immediately has my attention, since we know it is not easy to capture this sort of thing with simple computational models. Thus this sort of transformation in syntactic representations poses a challenge for what kind of computational machinery underlies language.”
—Professor Juan Uriagereka, University of Maryland
—Professor Colin Phillips, University of Maryland
“What is the nature of the technology that could advance our understanding of Language, as a product of the human mind, on a par with how the Hubble telescope has advanced our understanding of the universe by collecting data unfiltered by the earth’s atmosphere. We will be able to get an unfiltered look at the mind and Language in a parallel way?”
— Professor Jonathan E. MacDonald, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Grammar Badgers 