During the spring vacation, GP had some lectures which were given by professors from universities abroad. The first one was given by Dr. Thomas Hun-tak Lee, who is an acquisition researcher teaching at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. In this lecture, he mentioned three points: a discussion on why some logical structures have special significance from the perspective of language learning, a sketch of the ways in which children understand the logical structures, and some hypotheses about children's acquisition of logical structures based on his work. It gave me a great chance to know more about linguistics and its exciting features. According to him, logical structures in human language are more complex than the ones studied in standard logic, because the logical connectives may be 'hidden' or embedded in other semantic structures. He illustrated it with some English, Mandarin and Cantonese sentences which include the words that mean 'also' or 'only' in English, which means 'universal quantifications' are hidden. Although how humans acquire these logical connectives has not been proved yet, many experiments have explained the theory that children might be competent in them. That is to say, their understanding of logical connectives is not mistaken but just that they are used differently from the way adults use them. I listened to him with surprise as I discovered just how profound the world of linguistics is. If the topic is the language we are always using without thinking anything difficult, there are a number of mysteries that have never been solved or even discovered yet. Dr. Lee showed me it might be interesting to work on and solve these endless mysteries. I am happy to have participated in this lecture and to have a opportunity to expand my knowledge and interest.

by Sayuri M