Rudimentary Mental Physics
Language cannot be understood solely in terms of words and letters. The brain is too complex; every piece seems to be connected to every other piece. If the mind really is a complex mesh of connections, it is hopeless to think of a “language subsystem” as an isolated group of neurons.
Even the very young brain seems to have some rudimentary understanding of the physical world. Infants expect objects to behave in a certain way. If they see a ball roll along a table and pass behind a screen, they expect the ball to keep rolling and come out unchanged on the other side; they have an understanding of inertia. Whether this comes from an innate ability or early inductive reasoning is uncertain.
As Steven Pinker demonstrates in The Language Instinct, children also have an elementary understanding of biology. They can see similarities among types of animals, they don’t expect dead animals to start moving again, and so on. Again, it is not entirely certain whether this ability is learned or inherited.
The brain uses its knowledge about biology and physics to help decide how to construct language. Nouns can be classified very generally based on their spatial and physical properties.
Artists can see the basic shapes that make up the world – spheres, planes, rectangles, etc. To some degree, all of our brains see the world in this way. We see a pencil as a long slender rod, as we do a flag pole. This may seem like a trivial example until you consider that the brain knows what verbs can be used with objects of a certain spatial quality. Pencils and flagpoles can be stood on end and tipped over, but we would never think of using tipped with a spherical shaped object. Nobody ever tipped over a soccer ball.
We will never make progress in understanding linguistics without considering other cognative abilities. Sure Brocca’s area is important in deciding which words should be put together in what ways but so are the areas of the brain involved in purely logical reasoning.
