"Because language is the single most complicated thing we do, and it's unique to us, I think it's our best source of detailed evidence on human cognition," said Gillian Ramchand, professor of linguistics at the University of Tromsø, in a College of Arts and Sciences' Humanities Lecture titled "Language and the Form-Meaning Connection," delivered April 14 in Goldwin Smith Hall.

Ramchand pointed out that while philosophers like David Hume tend to use introspection to tackle the question of how human beings interpret events, linguists can use language as an empirical source of information on how humans categorize the world.

Verbs, for example, communicate causality, as in the two sentences: "John loaded the hay in the truck" and "John loaded the truck with hay." The choice of object -- truck or hay -- indicates a judgment about when the speaker considers the event to be completed. "If John loads the hay in the truck, the event is over once the hay has been loaded," explained Ramchand. "But if he loads the truck with hay, the event is over once the truck is full."

Verbs can also indicate which dimensions of the world should be paid attention to. English does not distinguish verbs by the gender of the subject, for example -- nor by whether it's raining. "But we do code our verbs for certain abstract concepts that you see in language after language. That's why I say it's clearly a window on our human cognition," said Ramchand.

"A lot of what we do with language is based on extremely complicated and completely implicit subconscious knowledge. What the linguist does is try to figure that out," said Ramchand in an interview. "We interact with lots of other disciplines, such as psychology, that are figuring out things about brain structure."

In her lecture, Ramchand drew a syntactic tree on the board and took the audience through each step of her cutting-edge First Phase Syntax proposal, a hierarchical order for how verbal form corresponds with meaning. She explained that because language functions in such a way that whatever causes something else is going to be higher up in the tree structure than any entity that is undergoing or being caused, it's possible to determine causality simply from the sentence structure. Her mapping demonstrates that when something has the same structure, it has the same meaning.

John Hale, associate professor of linguistics, said that Ramchand's talk "reminded us that we share something as a human species: our capacity for language. She pointed at what specifically that capacity might be, and that's really exciting for anyone who reflects on the ability to speak and reason."

The Arts and Sciences Humanities Lectures are presented with support from the Office of the President and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Linda B. Glaser is a staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.