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Language and Literature

Part 1: Literature and Writing

Part 2: The Medium of Language

Part 3: Language Sciences and Science Languages

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Prof. Isabelle de Courtivron Head of Foreign Languages and Literatures

Prof. Steven Pinker Author of The Language Instinct and Words and Rules

Prof. Anita Desai Award-winning novelist and writing instructor

Geoffrey A. Landis '80 NASA scientist and science fiction writer

Jade Wang '01 President of the MIT Science Fiction Society

Kelly Clancy '03 Prize winning short story author

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Language Sciences and Science Languages

Brain and Cognitive Science uses language as a key to understanding human behavior and evolution. In this research, Steven Pinker uses past tense verbs like fruit flies. "This is a small and easy-to-study instance of what makes language so powerful--our ability to combine a finite number of words into an infinite number of bigger words, phrases, and sentences, allowing us to express an unlimited number of creative ideas," said Pinker in an openDOOR interview. Pinker uses such keys in popular books like Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, which explores how children learn language, how new words are made, and more.

Linguistics legend Noam Chomsky revolutionized the scientific study of language with his theory of transformational grammar. Chomsky proposes that a universal grammar--corresponding to innate human brain capacity--underlies all languages in addition to each language's own grammar rules. Transformational linguistics has been pivotal to psycholinguistics, particularly to the study of children's language acquisition.

Science and technology create and use their own native languages. The Media Lab's Gesture and Narrative Language group, headed by Justine Cassell, studies how interface agents and toys, for example, can be designed with social and linguistic competencies. Projects include Embodied Conversational Agents such as Rea, an autonomous real estate agent, and Story Listening Systems, like Storymat, that listen to and respond appropriately to children's stories.

Computers have a burgeoning array of their own languages. John McCarthy developed the Lisp programming language at MIT in 1960. Scheme, a Lisp dialect, is still in use. Today the Artificial Intelligence Lab's Dynamic Languages group works on next generation programming languages to support intelligent, adaptive, complex software systems. The proceedings of a recent Lightweight Languages Workshop offer new research insights. Use the START Natural Language System, developed by AI's InfoLab group, to ask your own natural language question.

Advances in programming languages used to facilitate Web development become accepted protocols through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), based at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. Check out new working draft releases for the APPEL language that describes collections of privacy policy preferences between P3P user agents and for Document Object Model (DOM) that allows programs and scripts to update the content and style of documents dynamically.

Undergraduates Can Major in Language and Mind Students interested in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science have an academic home.

Speech Communication Group Studies Processes This lab works on human and machine speech production and perception.

LCS Spoken Language Systems group The lab works on technology to allow natural language communication with computers.

Explore the MIT Encyclopedia Of Cognitive Science -Language and Culture -Linguistics and Language -Natural Language Generation

Laboratory for Computer Science Milestones Notable steps in LCS's development of computer languages and protocols.