So now we get the syntax. Just as morphology has a neat trick of the arbitrariness of the sign, syntax has its own neat trick described by the scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt as infinite use of finite media. What we have in language is a set of distinct symbols, say words or phrases or categories that words and phrases belong to, and rules that order these symbols, and then other rules that call upon these rules giving rise to the possibility of infinite production of symbol strings, what's called a recursion. This isn't special to a human language. So, other systems that exist have symbols and rules that act upon them such as music and a DNA works that way. But our focus here is on language. So, in case this all sounds a little bit abstract and confusing, I want to give a concrete example. Imagine a simple language. This simple language has five words. It has three nouns: Fred, Barney, and Wilma; and it has two verbs: thinks and likes; and it has a rule. The rule is, a sentence can expand into a noun and a verb and a noun, in that order. So, what can this rule create? Well, you could pick any noun, say, Fred, follow it by any verb, say, likes, and follow that by any noun, say, Wilma, and now you've produced a sentence, Fred likes Wilma. How many sentences can this rule produce? Well, think about it. You got three nouns and two verbs. So, any noun, then any verb, then any noun is three times two times three, which is 18. This is actually fairly impressive. You had to learn six things, five words in one rule. But you got to generate a series of novel sentences. If you have a lot of nouns, lot of verbs, you could generate a lot of sentences. Imagine how many sentences you could create with a 1,000 nouns and 100 verbs. But still, while it's powerful, it's not infinite and we're not getting at the core of language. So now, imagine a more complicated language. This language has the same vocabulary, but it has one more rule. It has a second rule saying, a sentence can lead to a noun followed by a verb, followed by a sentence. So, for instance, you could say, you could evoke rule two; Fred thinks Barney likes Wilma. But you could also use rule two repeatedly. So, you can say Fred thinks Barney thinks Fred likes Wilma. Because there's no limit to how often you can use this rule repeatedly, there's an infinite number of sentences. So, I'll use it with more regular English examples. So, a simple rule of English creates the sentence, John hates cheese. But we can say something like, my roommate heard a rumor that John hates cheese, where the sentence, John eats cheese, is embedded into another sentence. We could say, it disturbed Mary when I told her that my roommate heard a rumor that John hates cheese, or I was amazed that it disturbed Mary when I told her that my roommate heard a rumor that John hates cheese, or Professor Bloom devoted way too much of his lecture talking about how I was amazed at the disturbed Mary when I told her that my roommate heard a rumor that John hates cheese. Now I can guarantee you, you have never heard that sentence before, but you can understand it. It's unwieldy we could understand it because you could apply rules to it. So, there's no stopping you. It really bothered me that Professor Bloom and I won't continue. The generativity of language, these rules, these recursive rules give rise to the capacity to produce and understand a lot of sentences. We talked earlier about how many sentences are 20 words long? But take us another example of the tweet. So the tweet, as I'm saying this right now, is 140 characters long. Let's forget about numbers and the like. There are 26 characters in English, 27 if you include the space. So, the number of possible sentences you have is 27 to the power of 140, which is a lot. But that's too much because I would include gibberish. So, when you narrow it down to possible English sentences, and the calculations are done in a cartoon xkcd. I have the link up here, if you want to look at it. You'll see that the answer is about two times 10 to the 46. We will never run out of tweets. The fact that our language is governed by rules that generate different possibilities leads to all sorts of things leads to ambiguity. So, take this old joke by Groucho Marx, where he says, "I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. How it got into my pajamas I'll never know." It plays on to grammatical readings. It turns out that people collect headlines, newspaper headlines, where there's an unintended ambiguity. Here's some of my favorite examples: "Complaints about NBA Referees Growing Ugly", "Kids Make Nutritious Snacks", "No one was injured in a blast, which is attributed to the buildup of gas by one town official", and "General Arrested for Fondling Privates." For each of these, you can understand what the intended meaning was, but then you could also realize there's sort of another humorous meaning. But sometimes this isn't entirely funny, the ambiguity of language. So, take the phrase, "Let him have it." It turns out that a lot of linguists are interested in the legal implications of language and interpretation of language as in the interpretations of legislation, but also in criminal cases to interpretation of speech, and "Let them have it" turned out to be a very important phrase. Quite a while ago, there were two brothers in a robbery. One of them was intellectually disabled. They were stopped in the middle of the robbery, and one of the brothers pointed the gun at the cop, and then the cop shouted for him to drop the gun. The brother with intellectual problem said, "Let him have it." The first brother then shot and killed the police officer, and they were both charged with murder. Now, the guy who shot the police officer explained the murder. But the question is, what about the other brother who said, "Let them have it"? It turns out, whether or not you think he's guilty depends on what you think the proper interpretation of the phrase is. "Let him have it" could mean give him the gun, let him have the gun, or it could mean attack him. People thought he meant the second thing, and he was found guilty of murder. There's a lot of legal work again, looking at these sort of ambiguities and the role that they play. I'll also mention on a lighter note that the ambiguity of language can lead to humor as in Groucho Marx and as in one of my favorite authors, Richard Russo, who writes books with titles like, Straight Man and Nobody's Fool. These titles are, I think, deeply clever. Straight Man for instance refers to a heterosexual man. You refers to a man who is straight and honest, but it also refers to a man, who plays a certain role in a joke. Nobody's Fool is great because it has two meanings which are almost opposite. Nobody's Fool, meaning the man you can never fool, he's nobody's fool, or Nobody's Fool, being a fool that nobody wishes take possession of.
