ABSTRACT

Language is primarily a system for communication: its main purpose is to transfer information from one person to another. Languages clearly differ in many ways: the words they use, the preferred order of words, the syntactic rules they use, the extent to and way in which they inflect words to mark grammatical role, the way grammatical units are combined, the sounds they use, and the ways in which they write words down. Linguists estimate that there are 5,000-6,000 languages in the world, but some languages with small numbers of speakers are dying out. With proper language, humans could move beyond the here and now, and could talk about things and ideas other than objects immediately in front of them. People who think that language processing makes use of statistical regularities and constraints tend to believe that it's interactive and learned through general-purpose mechanisms.