Last night, SC went to see the new Transformers movie, which he had been waiting for nervously ever since the trailers first came out last year. The nervous part came mostly from the involvement of Michael Bay, who has somewhat less than a stellar reputation for story and character development, albeit a great reputation for explosions. He lived up (or down) to many of these expectations, but in a surprisingly pleasant way, and your host has no patience for all of the "he's ruined my childhood" laments to come out of some of the more obssessive fans of the original series (although SC confesses to having feared such things going iin). If you doubt the obsessive nature of the fans involved, have a look at the Wikipedia entry for the movie, and ask yourself, "Why does this article have so many more references than Wikipedia's entries on quantum mechanics, the Protestant Reformation, and the Battle of Hastings? Combined? Times 10?"
Rather than providing a spoiler-laden review, though -- which is not to say that spoilers don't follow, and you've been warned -- SC wishes to focus on a language acquisition issue which is never properly addressed in the movie -- and the movie does address language acquisition, as Optimus Prime is asked how the Autobots (incidentally, given a retconned etymology) learned English. His reply, "From the World Wide Web". While no explicit learning mechanism is provided, it's fair to assume that robots that have already mastered interstellar flight and the ability to reconfigure their bodies to imitate any object they happen to scan have long since figured out grammar induction from unlabeled data (and maybe they happened across the Penn Treebank during their studies).
No, the real problem comes with the question of specifically how Megatron learned English. It's no great spoiler to mention that unlike all of the other Transformers, he's been kept on ice -- literally -- all the way up until he is freed to take place in a climactic battle near the end of the film. And yet, moments after being thawed out, he is able to announce "I am Megatron!", which requires at least some knowledge of English (shortly afterward, he utters something less corny, and considerably more classic to fans of the original series, which SC will only note demonstrates that he's aware of time expressions as well).
Here's what we know:
1) The movie subscribes to the modularity of mind, as demonstrated by the fact that Megatron's navigation systems are able to be woken up without activating the rest of him.
2) He has been around humans speaking language (they've been studying him daily for 70 years), but this does not preclude arguments about poverty of the stimulus, because the humans were all grown adults, who presumably rarely if ever critiqued each others' language use. (SC does not buy into POTS himself, but it's unarguable that Megatron has been receiving only a very specialized sort of linguistic input.)
3) He has almost certainly not been plugged into any sort of network connection (no definitive statement is offered, but great measures are taken to keep him frozen and unpowered), and so even if his language module was adequately powered and functioning, he did not have access to a text corpus like the Autobots did.
All of this would seem to indicate that it is impossible for Megatron to speak English, at least immediately on waking up. And yet he does. There is one remaining possibility that explains this. The other Decepticons are shown communicating in a language we are given to understand is Cybertronian (although not explicitly labeled as such), and they are also clearly able to communicate with each other by radio (such a discussion is shown in the movie). It is entirely possible that one of them, after establishing the needed radio connection to Megatron, simply uploaded the needed configuration parameters (thanks, Chomsky, now look what you're responsible for) for his language module to him, although why they would expect him to care about communicating with humans is a mystery with no obvious answer of its own.
Of course, thinking about such things loses what makes the movie so much fun: giant robots beating the crap out of each other and destroying much of downtown Los Angeles in the process. SC is eternally grateful to Michael Bay for that glorious sequence, which was far more plausible (and desirable) than the similar (but thoroughly ludicrous and unfortunate) destruction of downtown San Diego by dinosaurs in the second Jurassic Park movie. Now, let's get started on the really important details, Mr. Bay. Where's Laserbeak? And Frenzy isn't a boombox. And Devastator isn't a tank...
What? San Diego wasn't destroyed by dinosaurs, it was turned into an uninhabitable wasteland some time before 2258! Everybody knows that.
Posted by: Lance | July 06, 2007 at 12:42 AM