Robert Wall: Natural Language

Linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas Robert Wall joins Plutopians as we examine his long career and contributions to the study of language, mathematics, and computer science. Robert Wall: Language is deeply psychological. It goes on in people’s brains by processes that are somewhat mysterious. We don’t know how people acquire language so rapidly as children from just mere exposure to it. We don’t know how people use and understand language, we don’t know what goes on in their brains when sentences come in, and there is reasoning or whatever going on, and then sentences come out. We have only a dim idea about what that’s all about. But anyway, language, grammars, including semantics, are all psychological entities.