David Adger - Language Unlimited: The Science Behind Our Most Creative Power

I want to begin this book by asking you to make up a sentence. It should be more than a few words long. Make one up that, say, spans at least one line on the page. Now go to your favourite search engine and put in the sentence youve made up, in inverted commas, so that the search engine looks for an exact match. Now hit return.

Question: does your sentence exist anywhere else on the internet? Ive tried this many times and each time, the answer is no. Im guessing that that was your experience too. This isnt just a side effect of using the internet either. The British National Corpus is an online collection of texts, some from newspapers, some that have been transcribed from real conversations between people speaking English. There are over 100 million words in this collection. I took the following sentence from the corpus at random, and searched for it again, to see if it appeared elsewhere in the millions of sentences in the corpus. I then did the same on Google.

Its amazing how many people leave out one or more of those essential details.

There are no other examples. It seems crazy, but sentences almost never reoccur.

Think about your sense of familiarity with the sentences you hear or say. None of the sentences Ive written so far feel new or strange. You arent surprised when you read them. You just accept them and get on with it.

This is, if you think about it, quite remarkable. These sentences are new to you, in fact perhaps new to the human race. But they dont seem new.

The fact that sentences hardly reoccur shows us that we use our language in an incredibly rich, flexible, and creative way, while barely noticing that we are doing this. Virtually every sentence we utter is novel. New to ourselves, and, quite often, new to humanity. We come up with phrases and sentences as we need to, and we make them express what we need to express. We do this with incredible ease. We dont think about it, we just do it. We create language throughout our lives, and respond creatively to the language of others.

How can we do this? How can humans, who are finite creatures, with finite experiences, use language over such an apparently limitless range?

This book is an answer to that question. It is an explanation of what it is about human language that allows us to create sentences as we need them, and understand sentences weve never heard before.

The answer has three parts.

The first is that human languages are organized in a special way. This organization is unique, as far as we know, to humans. Sentences look as though they consist of words in a sequence, but that is not how the human mind understands them. We sense, instead, a structure in every sentence of every language. We cannot consciously perceive this structure, but it contours and limits everything we say, and much of what we think. Our sense of linguistic structure, like our other senses, channels particular aspects of our linguistic experience into our minds.