[From: Bruce Nevin ()]
Bill Powers (920305) --
There are so many hypotheticals in this post, it was a bit difficult to
digest. Also, it was unclear whether you were offering a game of "let's
you and him fight" or conciliating "Boys! Boys! Don't fight!" Setting
all that aside I will focus on the conceptual variables that seem to
matter most to you. Please correct my aim if I miss.
anything common to all languages will be found at the level of
nonverbal experience, not in language conventions (except as these
conventions are inherited from other languages).
If we can trace certain structural constraints to the world of
nonverbal perception, then they will no longer have to be explained in
terms of rules relating words as words.
I think any linguist would agree with this, though there is much
controvesy about where the boundaries lie, how to determine such
boundaries, how to characterize the different kinds of orderliness on
either side of such boundaries, and so on--mutually interdependent
questions.
There are contributors other than HPCT to linguistic universals, but it
seems to me that they are necessarily all mediated by perceptual
control. An example is the set of acoustic properties of the vocal
tract that results in favoring certain places of articulation for
consonants, which I have sketched a couple of times. In part, the
infant encounters utterances in which consonantal bursts, transients,
etc. are mimicable only by configuring the tongue so as to constrict the
vocal tract in these favored regions; in part, the exploratory
self-unfoldment of the control hierarchy finds experientially that in
these regions articulatory error makes less acoustic difference than
does a similar difference of configuration and effort at other regions
of the vocal tract. It is doubtful whether the infant would make this
sort of discovery without the prior existence of language (conforming to
these constraints) as a conventional social artifact in the environment.
Even with an environment providing many experiences of language use,
evidence is that infants do not develop requisite control without the
motivation of being able to use language to engage others in
interpersonal communication and to accomplish personal goals through
cooperative social means. Children brought up to age 4 with little
human interaction but with their cribs next to a TV that was constantly
on were severely impaired in their linguistic and social skills, though
presumably exposed to a great deal of very sophisticated use of such
skills that happened not to engage them in interpersonal ways.
(Of course, Bruner's LASS has a much more active role than I imply here.)
If you accomplish the aim of accounting for what all languages have in
common, and you show that it all comes down to characteristics of the
world of nonverbal perception plus fundamentals of physics and chemistry
in the environment, like the acoustics of the vocal tract--having
reached the state where linguistic universals are trivially deduced from
first principles, what would remain? In your hopeful estimation, the
conventional aspects of language would be simple and uncontroversial,
and the different systems for describing it would converge. I believe
that it would remain quite complex. And I believe that using some
existing systems for describing language (both aspects together) makes
an approach to the derivation of linguistic universals from first
principles unlikely.
In particular, I believe that operator grammar shows a simple structure
for language--a structure of word dependencies--that is universal and
that accords well with perceptual control, plus a more or less complex
and arbitrary, institutionalized system of conventions whereby words and
word dependencies may be given different shapes in utterances. The
principles and some of the patterns of the reduction system are
universal, but the detailed reductions and the particular word shapes
are not.
You object to what you call the "expansions" of operator grammar as
being unnatural and not corresponding to your introspective "feel" for
what you are doing when you use language. Part of the problem is some
confusion about the status of these changes of form. In the example of
analyzing a sentence I quoted from your prior post, I hinted at part of
the resolution when I said that a particular expansion need not be
carried out, it only had to be available, and that the expanded and
reduced forms were alternative forms for the same words and word
dependencies. Another part of the problem concerns the difficulty of
introspection and what is available to awareness, compounded by the fact
that you are using the thing you are analyzing and analyzing it even as
you use it.
I'll try to address both aspects.
Martin Taylor (920304 17:00) --
Rick Marken (920305) --
consciousness of means vs ends depending on level
of disturbance
This is relevant to the discussion of how "natural" a model of language
control appears to us as we use language.
if the actions that allow high-
level control are easy, then what subjects see themselves as doing is what
we would call satisfying the high-level reference. But if the lower level
control structure is disturbed or not well structured (the actions are more
difficult), then people see themselves as "doing" the low-level things.
The things that are difficult in language control, and which therefore
obtrude themself on conscious awareness, are mostly larger discourse
structures across series of sentences. Even when a single sentence must
be recast, it is typically due to relations in a larger discourse
context, and involves reduction to one complex sentence constructions
that could also be articulated as two or more sentences. This is the
problem of parcelling global, nonlinear word/percept dependencies out
into a linear sequence of linearized dependencies constituting
sentences. In my master's thesis in 1969 I called this periphrasis as
distinct from a paraphrase process within the scope of a sentence.
These paraphrase processes seldom rise to awareness.
Lower-level changes of word shape within these paraphrase processes--
what linguists call morphophonemic alternations--arise to consciousness
for the average language user only when they become socially marked as
shibboleths of region, community, or social class. Things like "ain't"
and "She don't know no better." These constitute the tiniest, though
most visible, fraction of what is going on.
The reductions of operator grammar account for sentence-paraphrase
processes. They account at present only for those aspects of discourse
periphrasis that are closest to sentence paraphrase, by reductions of
conjoined sentences and reductions to pronouns and other referentials.
It is important to understand that the reductions include and are no
different from morphophonemic alternations of word shape. Let's look at
that.
We feel that geese is the same meaning/word as goose plus the same
plural meaning/element as the -s of picnics, the -es (that is, -iz) of
foxes, the -en of children, and the zero of fish (alongside fishes) or
of series. We say that went is the same meaning/word as go plus the
same -t that is found in swept, which is none other than the past-tense
meaning/suffix that also takes the shape of -ed in braided, the -t of
swept, the vowel difference of break/broke, the zero of . . . well you
get the picture.
Some changes of form are optional.
John came with Alice, but Alice didn't leave with John, Alice
left with Frank.
John came with Alice, but Alice didn't leave with John, she
left with Frank.
John came with Alice, but she didn't leave with John, Alice
left with Frank.
John came with Alice, but she didn't leave with John, she
left with Frank.
John came with Alice, but Alice didn't leave with him, Alice
left with Frank.
(etc.)
The differences here are differences of emphasis, not of meaning.
The words in a sentence may be given different forms when combined in
specifiable ways with particular other words. That is what the
reductions of operator grammar are about.
You, Bill, want to say that it is the *meanings* that are given
different word-forms under different conditions. But the conditions
("environments" as linguists say) are not specifiable in terms of other
meanings, but only in terms of other words representing meanings.
Its worse than that. You may recall that I asked some time back how an
elementary control system (ECS) could control for two input signals
being repetitious or redundant with respect to each other ("the same").
You can say she instead of Alice in the above examples only if both
words refer to the same individual. Hearing she amounts to hearing an
assertion that the individual who arrived is the same as the individual
who left. The reduction to she is one form in which that metalinguistic
assertion can be uttered. Since I don't know how an ECS can control for
sameness (same reference) of its own inputs or outputs, I think some
other ECS controls for an *assertion* of sameness. In other words,
absent an answer to my question (above) it appears to me that perception
of sameness requires metalanguage (as part of language) or a precursor
very much like it in prelinguistic control of "metasymbol" perceptions
about symbol perceptions (control of one sort of perception as a symbol
for another).
What could that be? Possibly the first step toward language is the
ability to perceive repetition (one instance or token of a category and
another instance or token of that category). Some imagined perception
is taken as a symbol for any instance of the category. Pictographs,
hieroglyphics, and ideograms work like this. Rebuses do also, but in an
ad hoc way that has not be institutionalized. Withal, we must be
careful to avoid identifying the evolution of writing systems too
closely with the evolution of language. However suggestive the
parallels may be, they are still separated by a great span of
evolutionary time.
A next step toward language must be the perception that two symbols
(category perceptions) refer to the same individual instance or token.
This "sameness" perception relative to the category perceptions is not a
category perception, but rather is about the category perceptions in
precisely the same way that a linguistic utterance is about the
perceptions to which it refers. (And indeed, by that relation it may
appear to create the act of reference, and the relation of reference
between a category perception and the perception of individual token of
the category, but that is rugged epistemological terrain that I can only
look at for now, not enter upon.) With these two evolutionary steps,
category and metacategory, you have the first requisites for language.
(Metacategory has nothing to do with the question of categories of
categories we have discussed in the past.)
This metalanguage referring to the words of language is itself a part of
the language, using a subset of its words and a limited portion of its
syntax. Metalanguage assertions are almost always reduced to morphemes
like pronouns and articles. They are thereby made especially difficult
to notice.