No subject

[A. Katz]

I don't know about reductionism, but I would tend to agree with Givon
on the issue of abstraction. Those who speak out against grammar with
a capital G seem to be throwing out the benefits of generalization in
favor of isolated examples. Likewise, the rejection of anything that
does not relate directly to brain morphology or neurological facts of
language processing implies a concrete-bound approach. Language would
not work if not for generalization. Abstraction is at the very heart
of the phenomenon whose study our discipline undertakes.


I would prefer to distinguish the concrete language-processing entity
from the `language' that it processes. Wasn't it Chomsky who
introduced the idea that language and the little black box that
supposedly produces it are inseparable? As functionalists, do we buy
into that?

Brain configurations vary. Persons with severe brain damage in early
childhood are often capable of normal language processing and
production, even though the connections in their brains are very
different from the norm.

What if we found that even in normal, undamaged brains, there is an
immense variety of ways in which the same item can be stored and
processed by native speakers of the same language? If we concentrated
on the biological entity that produces it, we'd lose the
generalization involved in the communicative function of language.

Speakers don't know how their interlocutors' brains are configured.
Communication is based on the abstract system of contrasts set up in
the language. We react to electronically programmed simulations of
human speech just as we would to those produced by actual people, if
it's close enough. We read manuscripts written thousands of
years ago, and the information is communicated, even though the brain
that produced it has long ago been consumed by worms.

That's the magic of language. The concretes don't matter.



                 --Aya Katz