From twood at UWC.AC.ZA Mon Dec 2 07:36:59 2002 From: twood at UWC.AC.ZA (Tahir Wood) Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 09:36:59 +0200 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: >>> Bill Croft 11/29/02 06:56PM >>> One must distinguish between the evolution of language and the evolution of languages. The former is the evolution of human cognition and social behavior that permitted the rise of modern human language. This is of course an instance of biological evolution, of human beings. The latter is the process by which linguistic elements change over time. This is an evolutionary process, that is it involves change by replication; but it is not the same evolutionary process as biological evolution. I prefer to refer to the former as evolution and the latter as history. Less confusing, and less likely to give the impression that the social aspect of language change is absent in favour of some kind of biological determinism: e.g. Africans have 'less developed languages' because they are racially/biologically 'less developed'. Tahir -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: TEXT.htm URL: From li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU Mon Dec 2 17:30:46 2002 From: li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU (Charles Li) Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 09:30:46 -0800 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Using the expression, "the evolution of language", to refer to the evolution of hominid communicative behavior prior to the crystallization of language implies that language was the communicative tool of all hominids. Yet no one would assume that Orrorin tugenensis, Kenyanthropus, the various species of Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and Paranthropus had language. Indeed, most of the species in the genus of Homo probably did not have language if 'language' designates the casual, spoken language of anatomically modern humans. The investigation of the origin of language is an enterprise concerned with the evolution of the communicative behavior of our hominid ancestors, NOT the evolution of language. Chronologically the study of the evolution of language begins from the time when language crystallized, whereas the study of the origin of language ends at the crystallization of language. This distinction does not belittle the significance of the research probing into older and older layers of human language. Nor does it dismiss the importance of the proto-human language if and when its features can be inferred. One of the most important reasons for making this distinction is the fundamental difference between the ways language changes and the ways hominid communicative behavior changes. The latter, like animal communicative behavior, is subject to the constraint of Darwinian evolution. The evolution of our hominid ancestors' communicative behavior involves natural selection and genetic mutation. A change of their communicative behavior in the direction toward the emergence of language was adaptive in the sense that it enhanced their life expectancy and reproductive success. Those hominids who made the change achieved a higher level of fitness than those hominids who failed to make the change. A change moving the hominids' communicative behavior one step closer to human language would imply greater communicative efficiency. Greater communicative efficiency would, in turn, entail greater ease with which valuable knowledge and experience could be passed from one individual to another and from one generation to another. Rapid and efficient transmission of knowledge conferred an immense competitive advantage to the hominids for securing resources and possibly vanquishing others, including other species of hominids whose communicative behavior was less developed in the direction toward language crystallization. Given that hominids within the genus of Homo and possibly some gracile species of the Australopithecine are generalists who did not specialize in any specific ecological niche, the competitive advantage conferred by a more effective communicative behavior may explain why there is only one surviving species within the taxonomic family of hominids. When two hominid species happened to co-exist as generalists and the communicative behavior of one species was more effective than that of the other, there would be a good possibility that the communicatively more advanced species would eliminate the other through competition, especially when natural resources dwindled as they did periodically in a dramatic fashion during the past three million years because of global temperature fluctuations. The evolution of language, i.e. language change after its crystallization, is by an large driven by social and cultural factors. It has nothing to do with genetic mutation, natural selection, life expectancy or reproductive success. Confusing the evolution of language with the origin of language may result in attributing features of language to the communicative behavior of early hominids before the emergence of language. For details, see attached paper. Charles Li At 09:36 AM 12/2/2002 +0200, Tahir Wood wrote: > >>> Bill Croft 11/29/02 06:56PM >>> > One must distinguish between the evolution of language >and the evolution of languages. The former is the evolution >of human cognition and social behavior that permitted the >rise of modern human language. This is of course an >instance of biological evolution, of human beings. The >latter is the process by which linguistic elements change >over time. This is an evolutionary process, that is it >involves change by replication; but it is not the same >evolutionary process as biological evolution. > >I prefer to refer to the former as evolution and the latter as history. >Less confusing, and less likely to give the impression that the social >aspect of language change is absent in favour of some kind of biological >determinism: e.g. Africans have 'less developed languages' because they >are racially/biologically 'less developed'. >Tahir ___________________________________________________ Charles Li Professor of Linguistics, Dean of Graduate Division University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106 Tel: 805-893-2013 Fax: 805-893-8259 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: oregonpaper.doc Type: application/msword Size: 142848 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Mon Dec 2 19:57:19 2002 From: tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Tom Givon) Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 11:57:19 -0800 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: Dear FUNKnetters (and Charles Li), I have held off from responding to the various notes on the subject of language, culture, biology and evolution, hoping against all hope to hear from others what I thought needed to be said. But the more I hear, the more I am inclined to tear my hairs--the few still remaining--in utter despair. So, in the interest of refocusing the discussion more explicitly towards the interface between biology, I would like to interject the following: The anthropocentric impulse to draw an absolute boundary between biological evolution ('the animal') and cultural evolution ('history', 'the human') goes back to antiquity, and has been the subject of repeated (and repetitious) bitter skirmishes ever since. Both Plato and Aristotle posited this absolute boundary, the latter in terms of the exclusively-human spirit of rationality (as distinct from the metabolic and perceptual spirits, which were conceded to all animate beings). The bitter Darwin-Wallace debate about evolution was about whether to draw that self-same rigid line between the evolution of the body and that of the mind/brain/soul. Wallace wanted to draw the line right where Plato, Aristotle, the Church, Descartes, and all traditional humanist had drawn it. Darwin insisted on a unitary system--what's good for the body is good for the soul. Chomsky's and Bickerton's insistence that the 'rise' of language is not governed by the same adaptive constraints that govern the evolution of all other biological sub-systems (including 'mere cognition') follows in the very same dualist tradition. And likewise, the idea that somehow cullture and history are wholly liberated from adaptive ('functional') constrants, that they are--to paraphrase Charles Li (and, for that matter, Bill Labov)--matters of only society and culture, falls squarely on the Plato-Aristotle-Descartes-Wallace-Chomsky side of the debate. The funny thing is, in biology itself there have been strong recent trends to obliterate this rigid --artificial, ideological--boundary between mind/language/culture/behavior and 'plain' structural biology. Thus, a great evolutionary-biology theorist, Ernst Mayr, as noted that (loosely paraphrased) 'soft' adaptive behavior is the pacemaker, of 'hard' genetic evolution. And the work of great figures in etology (von Frisch, Marler, J.T. Bonner, E.O. Wilson, D. Griffin, F. deWaal, to mention only a few) has been predicated on the interpermeability of biology and culture. It therefore boggles my (admittedly simple) mind to see self-declared functionalists, who believe that language is adapted to its main tasks of representation and communication of information, come up with the idea that the main process that shapes both phonology and grammar--diachronic development--is somehow only 'culturally' and 'socially' constrained (and pray, what does it mean exactly? Total lack of constraints?) This certainly flies in the face of all detailed, fine-grained studies of the process of diachronic change in both phonology and grammar. "But", the defenders of the strict boundary retort, "what about cross-language typological variation and the great freedom from adaptive constraints that it entails?" In response, I would like to remind everybody of a few things about variation and how it comes about: First, typological variation is highly constrained. Relatively few 'types' of any linguistic structure are actually attested in languages--as compared with the plethora of mathematically (or biologically) possible structures. The fact that more than one type of structure can perform the same communicative funtion is not unique to language and culture. It is a cardinal fact in biology, and of the main process of functional extension (homoplasy), by which a structure takes over the coding of similar but not-wholely-identical functions (and may eventually diverge beyond recognition). Evolutionary biology, while adaptively guided (via selection) is hardly 100% deterministic, or we would have had only one extant species. Second, the diachronic pathways that give rise to variable synchronic structure are just as constrained and largely uni-directional. In both, they closely resemble biological evolution. And the most common explanation to such constrained evolution are adaptive. Third, in language diachrony as in biological evolution, the universal constrains that govern synchronic structure--the eplanatory principles, the theory--operate largely through the developmental process. They are to be found in the mechanisms of emergence (be they ontogenetic, phylogenetic of behavioral-historial, not in the catalogue of extant synchronic ('typological') structures. Fourth, variation is the very soul of both synchronic biology and evolution, where species are defined by their variability curves (of both 'hard' genotype and 'soft', 'behavioral' phenotype); where today's intra-species population variation is simply the current inventory of tomorrow's potential evolutionary changes--and thus cross-species variation. This is exactly what one finds in the relation between synchronic variation and diachronic change, an observation often attributed to Bill Labove (tho I cannot find an exact citation...). Lastly, variation is not only a methodological phenomenon (cf. Labov again); it is a highly theoretical entity in both biology and language, and has highly adaptive ('funtional') motivations. The reservoir of synchronic variants within a population is guarantor of survival, just in case the context should require alternative adaptive solutions. True enough, diachrony ('history') in both language and culture is 'soft' and presumably reversible. But so is animal behavior, which is never 100% constrained by genetics (cf. Mayr's "open program"). Still, this neither exempts language and cultrure from adaptive constraints, nor sets them apart from 'plain' biological evolution. It is perhaps time that we quit erecting and re-erecting those artificial barriers--human vs. animal, body vs. soul/mind, biology vs. culture, language vs. cognition--and instead re-group to take care of the urgent task at hand: Investigating and explaining language as and integral part of this incredibly complex miracle of striving, behaving, adaptive, evolving life. There is no shame but only strength in being part of the grand coalition of 'plain' biology. Have a happy holliday season, TG ================================= Charles Li wrote: > Using the expression, "the evolution of language", to refer to the > evolution of hominid communicative behavior prior to the > crystallization of language implies that language was the > communicative tool of all hominids. Yet no one would assume that > Orrorin tugenensis, Kenyanthropus, the various species of > Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and Paranthropus had language. Indeed, > most of the species in the genus of Homo probably did not have > language if 'language' designates the casual, spoken language of > anatomically modern humans. The investigation of the origin of > language is an enterprise concerned with the evolution of the > communicative behavior of our hominid ancestors, NOT the evolution of > language. Chronologically the study of the evolution of language > begins from the time when language crystallized, whereas the study of > the origin of language ends at the crystallization of language. This > distinction does not belittle the significance of the research probing > into older and older layers of human language. Nor does it dismiss the > importance of the proto-human language if and when its features can be > inferred. One of the most important reasons for making this > distinction is the fundamental difference between the ways language > changes and the ways hominid communicative behavior changes. The > latter, like animal communicative behavior, is subject to the > constraint of Darwinian evolution. The evolution of our hominid > ancestors' communicative behavior involves natural selection and > genetic mutation. A change of their communicative behavior in the > direction toward the emergence of language was adaptive in the sense > that it enhanced their life expectancy and reproductive success. Those > hominids who made the change achieved a higher level of fitness than > those hominids who failed to make the change. A change moving the > hominids' communicative behavior one step closer to human language > would imply greater communicative efficiency. Greater communicative > efficiency would, in turn, entail greater ease with which valuable > knowledge and experience could be passed from one individual to > another and from one generation to another. Rapid and efficient > transmission of knowledge conferred an immense competitive advantage > to the hominids for securing resources and possibly vanquishing > others, including other species of hominids whose communicative > behavior was less developed in the direction toward language > crystallization. > > Given that hominids within the genus of Homo and possibly some gracile > species of the Australopithecine are generalists who did not > specialize in any specific ecological niche, the competitive advantage > conferred by a more effective communicative behavior may explain why > there is only one surviving species within the taxonomic family of > hominids. When two hominid species happened to co-exist as generalists > and the communicative behavior of one species was more effective than > that of the other, there would be a good possibility that the > communicatively more advanced species would eliminate the other > through competition, especially when natural resources dwindled as > they did periodically in a dramatic fashion during the past three > million years because of global temperature fluctuations. > > The evolution of language, i.e. language change after its > crystallization, is by an large driven by social and cultural factors. > It has nothing to do with genetic mutation, natural selection, life > expectancy or reproductive success. Confusing the evolution of > language with the origin of language may result in attributing > features of language to the communicative behavior of early hominids > before the emergence of language. > > For details, see attached paper. > > Charles Li > > > > At 09:36 AM 12/2/2002 +0200, Tahir Wood wrote: > > > >> >>> Bill Croft 11/29/02 06:56PM >>> >> One must distinguish between the evolution of language >> and the evolution of languages. The former is the evolution >> of human cognition and social behavior that permitted the >> rise of modern human language. This is of course an >> instance of biological evolution, of human beings. The >> latter is the process by which linguistic elements change >> over time. This is an evolutionary process, that is it >> involves change by replication; but it is not the same >> evolutionary process as biological evolution. >> >> I prefer to refer to the former as evolution and the latter as >> history. Less confusing, and less likely to give the impression that >> the social aspect of language change is absent in favour of some >> kind of biological determinism: e.g. Africans have 'less developed >> languages' because they are racially/biologically 'less developed'. >> Tahir > > ___________________________________________________ > Charles Li > Professor of Linguistics, Dean of Graduate Division > University of California, Santa Barbara > Santa Barbara, CA 93106 > Tel: 805-893-2013Fax: 805-893-8259 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Mon Dec 2 20:01:20 2002 From: tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Tom Givon) Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 12:01:20 -0800 Subject: [Fwd: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'] Message-ID: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Tom Givon Subject: Re: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 11:57:19 -0800 Size: 24701 URL: From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Tue Dec 3 02:33:43 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 21:33:43 EST Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: In a message dated 12/2/02 12:33:31 PM, li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU writes: << Using the expression, "the evolution of language", to refer to the evolution of hominid communicative behavior prior to the crystallization of language implies that language was the communicative tool of all hominids. Yet no one would assume that Orrorin tugenensis, Kenyanthropus, the variou species of Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and Paranthropus had language. Indeed, most of the species in the genus of Homo probably did not have language if 'language' designates the casual, spoken language of anatomically modern humans.>> There are several problems here. One of them is that the "crystalization" of language suggests that some observable threshold was crossed between non-language-using and language using humans (or pre-humans). But this simply does not match evolutionary processes. There is little possibility that a single mutated trait suddenly appeared -- like some mammal with superior camoflage -- and quickly in a few generations turned a formerly non-language-using population into a language-using population. The obvious reason is this first "speaker" would have no one else to talk to and no reason to be favored in selection by the mating population of some early non-language-using group. Why would the mere ability to use language gain any reproductive advantage, if the trait only had future utility? There is no reason to postulate a "crystalization" of language. Like the giraffe's neck, the evolution of modern language capability must have been a slow process where the adaptive advantage of culture, interpersonal communication and cooperation shaped the biology over a very, very long period of time. It is difficult to see what other purpose the physiological organs of language would have served in the mean time, so its logical to conclude that they evolved as part and parcel of what Charles Li calls "hominid communicative behavior." The basic mistake here I think is to forget the critical role of human (or pre-human) culture in the evolution of language capabilities. The selection for modern language that must have gone on would not have been the raw environment or enemies or other such Spencerian nonsense, but rather the environment of human culture. Over long periods of time, the complex physiological attributes of modern language were being favored not by climate or food sources or conflict, but by the human (or pre-human) cultural preference for interpersonal communication. Other advantages who have been incidental. The gap in evidence between human non-language and language is huge. We really have no examples of the intermediate stages. This leads us, wrongly I think, to act as if language capability emerged full-blown one extraordinary paleolithic moment. But this matches no naturalistic observation anywhere else in evolution. Rather, it makes sense that basic language was in use among humans (or pre-humans) long before complex modern language capabilities developed. Unless one can suggest another intermediate value for the organs used in modern language -- particularly complex vocal cords and whatever syntax and grammar processing we have in our brain, none of which could have happened at the drop of a hat -- we should look to human (or pre-human) culture and the pre-existing need for interactive communication as the prime mover of human language capability. In this sense cultural evolution would have shaped biological (Darwinian) evolution in favoring language. But to do that culture must have been present from before the process began. And something very much like language must have been present from early on. <> First of all, how can the evolution of "communicative behavior" be separated from the evolution of "language"? When exactly is "language" not "communicative behavior"? As far as hominid communicative behavior being contrained by Darwinian processes -- what does that mean? Are we to think that hominids could not learn to communicate in new ways or to communicate new information before language suddenly appeared? Are we to think that pre-humans could not learn to behave "communitatively" in new ways or to communicate new ideas or to increase the complexity of their communications? All this seems highly improbable. They may not have used modern language, but modern language is not a prerequisite to complex or innovative communication. However, complex and innovative communication may have been a prerequisite to language. <> Please, are we to think that some pre-human who suddenly started using adjectives had a prayer in a survival test against pre-humans with the communal fighting or hunting capabilities of, say, a non-language-using wolf pack? Survival value in those days was not equivalent to taking an entrance exam. There are plenty of ways non-human animals communicate and cooperate that are in no way inferior to human language in a given situation. There is nothing "advanced" about language in many natural situations where language gives no distinctly observable advantage to an individual - or even necessarily to the group. You can talk all you want but the big fast guy with the club is still going to catch you and hit you on the head. All advantages are local and whether language is an advantage -- in almost all cases -- is very much a matter of a local, temporary situation. There is, however, one less ephemeral advantage to a language-using culture, if not a specific individual. And that is that language allows for the accumulation of information that lasts beyond the lifetime of an individual. Evolution theory says you can pass on a biological trait to the next generation, but you cannot pass on an acquired trait -- e.g., what you've learned in your lifetime. That is, UNLESS of course you can somehow communicate it to the next generation. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, cultural evolution is Lamarckian -- it allows the passing on of acquired traits from one generation to the next. Culture and language break that Darwinian rule about acquired traits. Language is the ideal medium by which such information can transfer and accumulate, so that it can represent many generations of individual learning. This seems to be an advantage over biological inheritance, which would relegate humans and other species to starting all over again from scratch every generation. And it would mean obviously that human cultures would favor those who could use language to preserve and transfer such information - the very information that human culture is made out of. The passing on of "acquired traits" is occasionally observed in other animals. But human accumulation of learning -- of acquired traits -- is obviously quantitatively much greater. And that brings us back to pre-human or proto-human "communicative behavior." Whatever its form or structure might have been, its adaptive value would be the same as modern language. The functional forces which favored the development of complex communication between pre-human individuals would have been the same that favored the development of modern human language. And, in my book, are the same forces that continue to affect modern languages. There is a continuum here and no unnatural "emergence" of some trait of long-term dormant value. No crystalization. If I were looking for a moment when modern language became probable, the latest I would look would be when human tools started being produced in a way that required the passing on of technique from one generation to another. Although such information could have been passed on by demonstration only, I doubt it would have been remembered without some kind of language - without use of rudimentary syntax, grammar and a language's other means of coveying and preserving information with particularity from one individual to another. And whether we talk about change in a language or the changes that made language possible, fundamental outcomes should dictate structure. Birds are born with wings. We put wings on our airplanes. Even when we reach beyond our Darwinian bodies, we shape our solutions the way Darwinian processes would. The environmental opportunities and constraints that originally produced language should be basically the same that produce persistent changes in modern languages. Form follows function, whether we create it or evolution does. And because these structures will often look a lot a like, we can't always be sure who did what. (With the possible exception of the wheel. It seems that biological evolution up to this point has made very little use of the wheel.) Steve Long From language at SPRYNET.COM Tue Dec 3 06:28:51 2002 From: language at SPRYNET.COM (Alexander Gross) Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 22:28:51 -0800 Subject: [Fwd: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'] Message-ID: I have so far written two accounts dealing with language and evolution. One of them follows. Unlike most of what I have seen here and elsewhere, it uses very few high-powered and/or allegedly technical words. It also makes no pretence to be scientific. But I wonder if it may not come closer to the truth than many of the pieces sporting high-powered vocabularies and claiming allegiance to scientific method. Here's a question for you. Given the sheer immensity of the period being studied and the absence of any "time machine" or other conveyance to transport us to specific points within that period, what reason is there to suppose that any allegedly scientific procedures or allegedly complete and precise technical vocabularies (which inevitably turn out to be based on one specific age and/or fashion) can ever bring back to us a sufficiently detailed account of how language evolved for the game to even be worth playing? The account that follows comprises part of the author's program "Truth About Translation," which can be downloaded at the URL shown in the very last line. Very best to all! Alex Gross ____________________ SPRAY IT AGAIN, SAM The Real Story of Language And Translation A Semi-Humorous Account By Alexander Gross Once upon a time there were only animals. No men. No women. Not even persons. They needed to tell each other things. At least about their own lives. They needed to talk about territory. About food and mating. About mutual status and danger. BUT HOW COULD THEY DO THIS? By spraying everything around them with a special scent. "This is my turf." "My store of food." "My mate." It was messy. It wasn't always clear. And it could cause trouble. So just to clear things up, some of the animals started barking at each other too. Others tried howling. Or hissing. Or grunting, moaning, and groaning. And that's how they managed things. Either by spraying, or by barking, grunting, hissing, etc. But there were problems. At one point a whole bunch of creatures got together at an Evolutionary Progress Conference and had an argument. It was a waste of energy, said some. Why should we have two ways of communicating, why should we both spray and make sounds, they asked. Why not combine them both INTO ONE FUNCTION? [Achtung Funktoid Alert!] But others objected. They enjoyed spraying and didn't want to give it up. So very little changed. After a few billion years, a whole new bunch of apes came along. Some decided they could say things better by combining barks, howls and hisses in very specific ways. But this idea had a few problems. The old way of doing things--spray, growls, and hisses--didn't say much. BUT IT WAS PRETTY UNMISTAKABLE. Combining all these sounds made it harder to tell one meaning from another. This meant you could sometimes get the wrong message. Besides, where did this leave spraying? It also meant a few things had to happen before such a system could work. First, these apes needed a way to make these sounds PLUS a special kind of hearing to tell them apart. Not to mention greater intelligence, so they could be sure what the sounds meant. Some say this is still a problem. It also meant limiting the number of sounds permitted in any spray-growl-hiss system. That way there would be less confusion. After several million years, a few apes finally got this right. At the next Evolutionary Progress Conference, they told the other creatures that they were moving their spray apparatus upstairs and combining it with their biting system. This was not a hit with the other creatures, and these apes had no choice but to go off on their own. But the apes didn't mind this at all. They were proud, because they were sure they had solved all the world's communication problems for all time. First, they set up a system for making sure all their "spray-sounds" were always spoken correctly. They would enclose each moan in a little capsule with a distinctive shape. Call these little capsules "consonants" and the moan sounds they contain "vowels," and it all makes fairly good sense. There were rules for placing capsules together so they could be spoken correctly. This also helped you to tell members of your own clan from dangerous outsiders. But many problems remained. You could only tell these new sounds apart if a single clan kept living closely together in the same area. If families and clans drifted apart, their sounds and meanings started drifting too. In some places they are still drifting even today. But these apes started migrating in every direction, their sound systems constantly changing as they went. And this whole process may have started twice or more in different places. There's no way we can know for sure. Apes don't write histories. As they wandered, all their sound-spray systems scattered to the winds. And so did the capsules containing their moans. Even the systems for making capsules changed. Apes living in new climes started inventing new spray-sounds to describe things. They launched new technologies, world outlooks, religions, all requiring new spray-sounds. After a few million years, these apes had another idea. They were tired of repeating themselves, and they also needed some system for recording the growing number of their possessions. This is important, said some, so let's carve it in stone. It's easier stamping it in clay, said others. Still others longed for a brush or quill, if only they could find some paper. And so after a while Science Marched On... finally. But not without a multitude of languages and dialects to deal with. And here it is that Translators enter the scene! Consider all these different sound-spray systems, each with its own way of encapsulating sound and meaning. What do they most resemble? Are they not in some ways similar to highly sophisticated hydraulic networks? Or perhaps more homespun plumbing systems, each one built from different materials according to different rules? Could this be what translators and interpreters really are--hydraulic engineers of the mind and/or pioneering plumbers of meaning, in the several senses of "to plumb?" Whatever system of pipes or hydraulic devices are used in Language A, translators must build a comparable system in Language B, even though the two systems can never be the same. The watery element is unavoidable, since language is still largely based on spray. Animals spray everything around them--people talk at or about everything around them. And we become quite upset when our spray marks prove mistaken or are violated by others. If you doubt this, consider how we still use language today: To defend turf or property. To proclaim our rights. To proclaim our love for--and property rights in--our mate. To assert our status. Perhaps these categories are now enlarged by political disputes, intellectual pursuits, and academic feuding. But this is debatable. These spray-sounds can also cause trouble... Many creatures assume the spray-sound they assign to something IS the thing itself. Sometimes other creatures don't agree and insist that another spray-sound IS that very same thing. Once this happens, matters often deteriorate... Or perhaps two creatures agree on the spray-sound but don't agree on what it means. This rarely works out much better. Using language as a form of spray could also explain many forms of fundamentalism, literalness, and congealed ideologies seen around us. Such behaviors spring from those still clinging to the spray-using stage of producing language. Moreover, spray is still so much a part of language that we would still prefer to stand at a distance when some people speak. Human language is quite literally "glorified" animal spray. And animal spray is primal language. IMPORTANT: Author's Apology!!! But all this must be mistaken! It is only a joke and could not possibly be true. We humans have gone _FAR BEYOND_ primitive spraying of our surroundings! After all, we have invented the Arts, Literature, Literary Criticism, Linguistics, Transformational Syntax, Universal Grammar, Deep Structure, Computational Semantics, Translation Studies, and many other sublime and elevated sciences. Obviously, if such a primitive theory were true, these advanced sciences would _CERTAINLY_ have long ago confirmed its validity. But they have not done so... they have never remotely suggested such a theory. So there is no need for you to believe any of this, if you find it the slightest bit objectionable. On the other hand, you just might want to make up your own mind... NOTE: The preceding theory has appeared in print in two scholarly publications: the Sci-Tech Translation Journal (Oct, 1993) and Vol. VI of the ATA Scholarly Series (1993). ----------------------- If you are wondering whether the author is truly serious about this theory, you might want to read the file SPRAY.TXT for further information. It is also contained in his program "Truth About Translation." You can select this section from the "Related Articles" sub-menu. This program can be obtained free of charge from the Downloads section of the author's web site, as shown below. visit the language home... http://language.home.sprynet.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Tom Givon To: Sent: Monday, December 02, 2002 12:01 PM Subject: [Fwd: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'] > > From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Tue Dec 3 05:41:38 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 00:41:38 EST Subject: [Fwd: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'] Message-ID: In a message dated 12/2/02 10:26:15 PM, language at SPRYNET.COM writes: << Human language is quite literally "glorified" animal spray. >> Well, at least some is. Sort of depends on the humans. SL From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Tue Dec 3 08:00:51 2002 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel Everett) Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 08:00:51 +0000 Subject: [Fwd: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'] In-Reply-To: <3DEBBC10.20BF2A4A@oregon.uoregon.edu> Message-ID: Folks, Tom's contribution to this discussion was, as usual, thought-provoking, interesting, and enjoyable to read. I do not understand all of it, because I am not quite sure how Tom is using some of his terms, but I won't bother to go into that here. If Tom means, however, that biological evolution is responsible largely for language, both phylogentically and ontogenetically, and that biology constrains cultural development, he is of course in good company. Chomsky, Bickerton, and Pinker would all in fact agree and would further accept that to draw a strong dividing line between the two is a form of dualism. I am convinced that biology does indeed constrain cultural development and that Tom is right to recommend the writings of major evolutionary theorists such as Mayr as appropriate to discussions on language evolution. On the other hand, I think that it is pretty clear that both language and culture are severely underdetermined by biology. It is an interesting research question to consider how we might (or if we might) tease apart the different contributions from biology and culture to human language development. For example, the Piraha people of the Brazilian Amazon lack grammatical number and counting or numerals of any kind, yet they have what appears to be a mass vs. count noun distinction. How might this be explained? Is one (mass vs. count) the result of biology and the other (no number) the result of culture (perhaps some Whorfian-style difference)? Or is there some biological account of even the lack of number? If biological, which genetic parameters does it fit? I have heard some suggest, seriously, that DNA samples should be taken of the Pirahas. This sounds strange, but it certainly is compatible with an extreme biological viewpoint of language. (Arguably, the same could be said for the fact that the Pirahas lack any basic color terms - all of their four or so 'basic' color terms are morphologically complex or have other, apparently more basic, meanings.) The issues here are complex. I agree with Tom that there is unlikely to be a simple, single dividing line between culture and biology in the development of language. Yet rather than conflate the distinction, I think instead that there are multiple lines of division and that we are unlikely to ever be able to reduce talk of one side of a line to talk about the other side. And we can expect new lines to form and old lines to disappear as our own interests shift. (The same goes for the brain vs. the mind.) There will always be some explanations that are better stated in cultural terms, some in purely linguistic terms, and others in biological terms, and yet others in terms we have not thought of yet. The reason the debate is so old is similar to the reasons for many old debates - a single choice is perceived where there are many choices. *Ultimately, the nature of your explanation will be based on what is most useful to you and your interlocutors, not to the Truth of your dichotomy.* There is no one way to go about thinking. So choose what you want to describe and do it in the terms you like best. If others find it useful, you are on to something. If those others are 'scientists', then it is science. (Other boundary lines arise...) -- Dan -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 3279 bytes Desc: not available URL: From amnfn at WELL.COM Tue Dec 3 09:18:24 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 01:18:24 -0800 Subject: Language as communication device Message-ID: >Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 16:56:04 +0000 >From: Bill Croft > One must distinguish between the evolution of language >and the evolution of languages. The former is the evolution >of human cognition and social behavior that permitted the >rise of modern human language. This is of course an >instance of biological evolution, of human beings. A major problem with this analysis is that Language is not biological. The capacity to acquire and use a language -- any language -- is entirely separate from the invention of Language. Language is a communication device, much like a cellphone. While a better understanding of the evolution of human beings may tell us when we became biologically capable of exploiting languages for communication, it tells us nothing about when Language arose or how. Our prehistoric ancestors could have used a cellphone, if someone had given it to them and shown them how. Humans have not biologically evolved as a species to the point that we are now capable of "cellphone use". Early man and present day man had about the same endowments. Most modern humans couldn't personally produce cellphones or tell you what makes them work. The only advantage they have over early man is that they happen to live in a society where cellphones are available. There is no evidence that Language among humans arose more than once. (We don't know for sure that it didn't, either.) Just as modern day cellphones, in all their varieties, were not developed independently of each other, there's a very good possibility that neither are human languages independent inventions. If you grow up where a language is spoken, and you have the biology of a normal human, you will pick it up. But this does not imply that humans have a biological language device. Neither does it imply that one necessarily has to be human in order to use Language. --Aya Katz +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.well.com/user/amnfn +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From twood at UWC.AC.ZA Tue Dec 3 13:59:16 2002 From: twood at UWC.AC.ZA (Tahir Wood) Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 15:59:16 +0200 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: >>> Tom Givon 12/02/02 09:57PM >>> The anthropocentric impulse to draw an absolute boundary between biological evolution ('the animal') and cultural evolution ('history', 'the human') goes back to antiquity Tahir: I'm not sure if I am one of the people who supposedly drew an absolute boundary, but I confess imediately to not having the faintest idea what an absolute boundary is. I did however draw a conceptual distinction between evolution and history, on which see more below. likewise, the idea that somehow cullture and history are wholly liberated from adaptive ('functional') constrants, that they are--to paraphrase Charles Li (and, for that matter, Bill Labov)--matters of only society and culture, falls squarely on the Plato-Aristotle-Descartes-Wallace-Chomsky side of the debate. Tahir: "They are matters of only society and culture" looks like it might be one of those "absolute boundaries" you spoke of, except that I doubt whether anyone was foolish enought to say something like that. The funny thing is, in biology itself there have been strong recent trends to obliterate this rigid --artificial, ideological--boundary between mind/language/culture/behavior and 'plain' structural biology. Tahir: Well they might do that in the same way that the chemists at my university say that "chemistry is the science of everything". And no doubt someone who had plenty of time to waste could dream up a chemical or biological theory of why the French revolution happened or why a particular metaphor is more common in one language than another. But I doubt whether such theories would attract much attention. Most of us would find a historical or linguistic theory more satisfying. It therefore boggles my (admittedly simple) mind to see self-declared functionalists, who believe that language is adapted to its main tasks of representation and communication of information, come up with the idea that the main process that shapes both phonology and grammar--diachronic development--is somehow only 'culturally' and 'socially' constrained (and pray, what does it mean exactly? Total lack of constraints?) This certainly flies in the face of all detailed, fine-grained studies of the process of diachronic change in both phonology and grammar. Tahir: The argument is rather that given the biological constraints, a wide variety of linguistic forms are possible, but the constraints themselves can tell us nothing about which of those possibilities are actualised or why they are. There we have to look at the history of the users of the language, the environment they live in, etc. Thus it would be nonsense to try to explain the difference between, say, old English and modern English, which are mutually unintelligible, in terms of a biological change in the users of English over the last thousand years. I say that it is a historical change that has occured; I say furthermore that I don't think anyone would say that it is a biological change; you apparently say there is no difference between the two. I also pointed out that differences in the languages of different peoples cannot be attributed to biological differences between those peoples. I don't think that you or anyone really argues this outside of maybe the most demented of sociobiologists or racists. To say that language changes historically is to say that it changes in correspondence with the functional requirements of its users in the changing context. Why is that not a functionalist kind of explanation? -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: TEXT.htm URL: From paul at BENJAMINS.COM Tue Dec 3 14:47:39 2002 From: paul at BENJAMINS.COM (Paul Peranteau) Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 09:47:39 -0500 Subject: NEW BOOK: Givon: Bio-Linguistics Message-ID: John Benjamins Publishing Co. is pleased to announce the impending publication of T. Givón's BIO-LINGUISTICS: THE SANTA BARBARA LECTURES (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2002, 377pp . including bibliography and index) . The book presents an adaptive--evolutionary, variationist, diachronic-- account of human language, an account fully consonant with modern evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology. In the process, the book challenges rigid traditional--Platonic/Cartesian--dichotomies such as mind vs. body, nature vs. nurture, biology vs. culture/history, innate vs. emergent, or language vs. cognition. In placing the core human phenomena of mind, language and culture within their rightful adaptive context, one neither detracts from their staggering complexity and apparent uniqueness, nor does one do violence to the 'hard' constraints of evolutionary biology. Rather, biology and culture turn out to inter-penetrate and illuminate each other along a graded continuum. The main chapters of the book are: 1. Language as a biological adaptation (overview) 2. The bounds of generativity and the adaptive basis of variation (the functional basis of categories and prototypes) 3. The demise of competence (an empirical study of so-called 'configurationality' in oral texts from English and Ute) 4. Human language as an evolutionary product (on the co-evolution of language, mind and brain) 5. An evolutionary account of language processing rates (an experimental study of visual processing of objects and events) 6. The diachronic foundations of language universal (the Greenbergial program of functionality, diachrony, typology and universals) 7. Anticipating othere minds: The neuro-cognitive interpretation of 'context' (re-casting the pragmatics of 'context in terms of mental models) 8. The grammar of narrator's perspective in narrative fiction (text-based study of speaker's 'voice' and grammaticalized modality) 9. The society of intimates (the cultural context for inter-personal cooperation and communication) 10. On the ontology of academic negativity (the pitfalls of doing science in an institutional context) 11. Epilogue: Joseph Greenberg as a theorist The book is dedicated to the memory of the late Joseph Greenberg, a self-certified lumper of functionalism, diachrony, universals, variation and evolution. US & Canada: Hardcover ISBN 1 58811 225 X USD 110.00 Paperback ISBN 1 58811 226 8 USD 43.95 Everywhere Else: Hardcover ISBN 90 272 2590 7 EUR 110.00 Paperback ISBN 90 272 2591 5 EUR 44.00 Paul Peranteau (paul at benjamins.com) P O Box 27519 Ph: 215 836-1200 Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 Fax: 215 836-1204 John Benjamins Publishing Co. website: http://www.benjamins.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lamb at RICE.EDU Tue Dec 3 17:05:37 2002 From: lamb at RICE.EDU (Sydney Lamb) Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 11:05:37 -0600 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Just a comment on one small point in Steve Long's interesting message: On Mon, 2 Dec 2002, Steve Long wrote: > ... > The gap in evidence between human non-language and language is huge. We > really have no examples of the intermediate stages. This leads us, wrongly I > ... We do have intermediate stages in the developing communicative systems of young children. It is possible that these intermediate stages are somewhat like those of the evolution of human communicative ability. 2nd comment: Steve's (well-expressed) argument, with which I basically agree, has been presented in a somewhat different form and with complementary emphases, in my Pathways of the Brain, pp. 285-291. Syd Lamb Sydney M. Lamb http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lamb/ Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences Rice University, Houston, TX From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Wed Dec 4 17:03:11 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 12:03:11 EST Subject: The Culture vs Biology Experiment Message-ID: In a message dated 12/3/02 3:00:34 AM, dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK writes: << It is an interesting research question to consider how we might (or if we might) tease apart the different contributions from biology and culture to human language development. >> Well, the most obvious place to start such research would be by removing one of the variables. Since the cultural contribution would be far easier (not necessarily ethically) to remove, the experiment is simple to conceptualize. Take a normal new born human and raise him in as complete absence from any contact with language as is possible, to some variable age x. Then find out a) what language he uses and b) what language learning capability he has, at age x. (I.e, under controlled conditions, create the laboratory equivalent of a "wolf boy.") Of course, a new born is dependent upon other humans to a certain age or it will not survive, so we cannot totally remove the "cultural" contribution. If we mechanically nuture the baby without human contact, we run the risk of "wire-mother" induced autism, I suppose. This of course would indicate that "human culture" might be mandatory to development of language in the sense at least that it is mandatory to the new born's survival. A second experiment admits that rudimentary language cannot be observed without the presence of a speaker and a listener. It assumes a social function for language. That's something interesting about the very early "experiments" that isolated infants. The purpose of those experiments was to ascertain things like what the oldest language was, what the first word spoken would be or whether the sacred language (normally Hebrew) was innate. But the starting point had two subjects included. Herodotus describes the pharoah Psammetichus isolating TWO infants, not one. The objective was to see what developed between two "culturally deprived" infants. When the infants spoke their first common word, however, the experiment was over -- because it was ascertained based on that word that the infants were speaking Phrygian. More prolonged observation was done in the middle ages. Apparently, James IV of Scotland ordered two boys confined to the Hebrides island of Inchkeith. The children apparently ended up speaking a language and it was Hebrew. Other reports of such experiments were not as positive, and it seems hard to understand their results because the objective was never to ascertain whether a "natural language" was spoken. Even nomimalistic commentators who expected "animal noises" were not looking for structure in those noises. Functionalism would suggest that there are biological constraints on language. But it suggests this primarily because biological evolution is just as molded by the dictates of the environment as learning and culture are. A functional biological-based language should look like a functional cultural-based language. They both solve the same problems. We live in a world with objects (nouns), processes (verbs) and attributes (adjectives and adverbs). Any language -- innate or cultural -- that does not make these distinctions would not reflect the world we live in and should be dysfunctional. So, even if these human infants were not exactly born with such language structure in their brains, they might have the "ingenuity" to invent a language that functioned precisely the same way. They would still however be indebted to biology for brain complexity and vocal cords or hand dexterity to make signs that allows complex language. But in no way would we expect these subjects to use language to refer to a wheel, a boat, Tuesdays, beer, marriage, cell phones, hamburgers or a demonstrably neolithic concepts like bread or pottery. They should have no sense of abstracts. No abstract names for colors. The great mass of what language carries for us would not be theirs. Eons of human culture would be absent. And all this accumulated knowledge -- this enormous common cache of tranferable information -- is what I think we are mainly doing when we use "language". Steve Long PS - Here's Herodotus' account. What is a little ironic here is that "bread" may be a neolithic (within the last 10,000 years) invention. So, even this "first word" reflects a piece of late coming human technology: "1] Now before Psammetichus became king of Egypt, the Egyptians believed that they were the oldest people on earth. But ever since Psammetichus became king and wished to find out which people were the oldest,... [2] Psammetichus, when he was in no way able to learn by inquiry which people had first come into being, devised a plan by which he took two newborn children of the common people and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his flocks. He gave instructions that no one was to speak a word in their hearing; they were to stay by themselves in a lonely hut, and in due time the shepherd was to bring goats and give the children their milk and do everything else necessary. [3] Psammetichus did this, and gave these instructions, because he wanted to hear what speech would first come from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct babbling. And he had his wish; for one day, when the shepherd had done as he was told for two years, both children ran to him stretching out their hands and calling "Bekos!" as he opened the door and entered. [4] When he first heard this, he kept quiet about it; but when, coming often and paying careful attention, he kept hearing this same word, he told his master at last and brought the children into the king's presence as required. Psammetichus then heard them himself, and asked to what language the word "Bekos" belonged; he found it to be a Phrygian word, signifying bread. ....This is the story which I heard from the priests of Hephaestus' temple at Memphis; the Greeks say among many foolish things that Psammetichus had the children reared by women whose tongues he had cut out. "[Hmmm, a concern over evidence contamination?!] From li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU Wed Dec 4 18:03:14 2002 From: li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU (Charles Li) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 10:03:14 -0800 Subject: [Fwd: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'] In-Reply-To: <3DEBBC10.20BF2A4A@oregon.uoregon.edu> Message-ID: The issue of "boundary" between human (cognition, culture, language) and animal (cognition, culture, communication), like any other issues and concepts in biology, is not subject to water-tight generalization. This lack of theorem-like generalities in biological science marks its fundamental difference from physics/mathematics. The difference has profound implications on research methodologies and ways of thinking in these two branches of science. Francis Crick has written an elegant book (The Mad Pursuit of Knowledge) on this issue based on his own experience starting as a physicist and then becoming a biologist. Talmy assumes a continuum between animal cognition, culture, communication and human cognition, culture and language - a sweeping generalization resplendent with Givonian speed and epistemology. For sure, there is a lot of commonality as well as finely graded differences or continuum within a Linnean order, say, mammals. For example, the body design, the cytoarchitecture of the brain, the basic emotions (as opposed to cognitive emotions). Within the confines of communication, facial expressions are finely graded from lower mammals to higher mammals. The central issue here, however, concerns language: Is there a clear and distinct boundary between human language and animal communication? Conversely, is the difference between human language and higher primate communication a finely graded continuum like facial expressions? There are several unbridgeable and distinct boundaries between animal communicative behavior and the evolutionary development of hominid communicative behavior leading toward language. The first one is the emergence of symbolic signals. At the most elemental cognitive level, a symbolic signal must possess two properties: (a) It refers to a concrete object (b) The reference is context-independent This is the beginning of 'meaning' and vocabulary. The emergence of the first symbolic signal referring to a concrete object represents the crossing of the first 'missing link' in hominid evolution. Animal communicative signals are not symbolic according to our definition of elemental symbolic signals, and animal communicative signals do not have 'meaning'. What they have is 'function' such as threat, distress, begging, appeasement/submission, courtship/copulation, warning/alarm, recruitment, assembly, dispersion, identification, territoriality, feeding, etc. Functions must not be confused with 'meaning". Each of the following linguistic expressions has the function of 'threat': I'm going to bite your ears. I'll kill you. I'll knock you over. I'm going to beat you up. But they all have different meanings, and they have different meanings because they are linguistic expressions. In animal communicative behavior, threat signals are just threat signals, no more and no less. Different species have different threat signals. Some signals are graded according to the intensity of the signaler's emotional state, and some, discrete. Some are structurally more complex involving various components and several channels of communication, and some are simple. All members of the same species use the same threat signals, and all threat signals are emitted by signalers to threaten intended receivers. They have no meaning. We can make similar statements about any other functional category of animal communicative signals. A particular set of animal communicative signals that have received a great deal of attention is the frequently cited warning signals of vervet monkeys. (Many other animals have different warning calls for different approaching predators. Suricates, a burrowing viverrid related to the mongoose is a good example.) These warning calls are not symbolic signals because they do not possess property (b). Nevertheless, the warning calls of the vervet monkeys represent a step toward a symbolic signal, because they differentiate, for example, reptilian, avian, mammalian and other predators. The differentiation, however, holds only in the context of warning. It is not context-free. In other words, a vervet monkey warning signal has no referential property outside of the context of warning. Seyfarth & Cheney (1999) note that vocal production, i.e. delivery of acoustically defined calls, among apes and monkeys appears fully formed shortly after birth, suggesting that vocal production may be largely innate. In addition, Aitken (1981) and Pandya et al (1988) conducted experiments on capuchin monkeys showing that their vocal production was mediated primarily by the central (periaqueductal) gray area of the mid-brain, a phylogenetically very old set of neurons responsible for arousal and motivational states in all vertebrates. In the case of vervet monkey's warning calls, the only role of the neocortex involves associating a particular involuntary vocalization with a specific situation. The vocalization is involuntary because it is probably associated with fear aroused by the situation. Hence an infant vervet possesses the adult repertoire of vocalization. The learning during ontological development involves the correct coupling of one involuntary vocalization with one specific dangerous situation. Each vocalization can be graded according to intensity. But it is only the coupling process that is mediated by the neocortex, and this coupling process, according to Seyfarth & Cheney, requires learning. The neural mechanism we have just sketched for non-human primate communication contrasts sharply with the neural mechanism of the production of causal, spoken language. The production of casual, spoken language is primarily, though not exclusively, mediated by the neocortex. The emotional/motivational state of the speaker can be viewed as a coterminous but neurologically separate dimension of speech expressed primarily in prosody. It is, therefore, not surprising that participants in casual spoken conversation can talk about things that are remote in time and space from the occurrence of the conversation. This is the "displacement" feature of human language that Charles Hockett (1960) pointed out. It does not exist in non-human primate communication because a non-human primate communicative signal tends to be associated with the emotional or motivational reaction to a particular situation including the animal's own internal hormonal state. (The interesting exception here is the waggle dance of homey bees. That is another story.) Another set of animal communicative signals that might be construed as symbolic are the signals that have the function of individual identification. For example, the whistle of the bottlenose dolphin and the vocalization of social mammals is acoustically unique for each individual. Consequently members of a social group can identify an individual upon detecting its vocalization. The identification function of such animal communication signals parallels the identification function of the voice of a human. Every human voice is acoustically unique. Within a social group, members can identify each other by the voice of a person. The unique quality of the voice, however, does not constitute a symbolic signal. It does not have the referential property of the expression "It's me!" or the referential property of a first person singular pronoun. Recognition of the voice depends on past interaction and social familiarity. We cannot identify a stranger's voice, although we recognize that it does not belong to someone we know. The same can be said about the set of animal communicative signals that have the function of identification. The whistle of the bottle-nosed dolphin, the coo of a vervet monkey, the bark of a wolf, the grunt of a warthog and the various other communicative signals used by animals for maintaining contact within a social group are not symbolic signals. They are neither words nor names. In short, animal communicative signals in nature do not contain symbolic signals. Without symbolic signals, there is no meaning. Meaning and symbolic signals are at the heart of human language. Only symbolic signals can be concatenated to form larger units of communicative signals, i.e. morpho-syntactic and discourse units, and only symbolic signals can lead to metaphors. Talmy's point on the nature of language change is partly correct and partly an attack of a straw-man by lambasting the "extreme functionalist position" of attributing ALL language change to social and cultural factors. I don't know of anyone holding such a point of view. My belief that language change tends to be driven by social and cultural factors is based on the hypothesis that the default situation of any language, prehistoric as well as contemporary, is contact. Contact-induced changes are cultural and socially driven. Unfortunately a great deal of contact-induced changes in a specific language beyond a certain time depth cannot be reconstructed. One piece of evidence in support of my hypothesis is areal features among genetically unrelated languages. Now we are entering a different domain of linguistics. Suffice to say that my main point is to clarify that language change has nothing to do with life expectancy, genetic mutation and reproductive success. The mainstay of evolution of animal communicative signals is ritualization. Ritualization typically involves evolutionary development making a signal more conspicuous, i.e. more strongly stimulating, and ways of making a signal more stable, i.e. having a typical form, and typically such evolutionary development occurs on an evolutionary time scale, i.e. thousands of generations at a minimum, e.g. exaggeration of movements, addition of brightly colored anatomical components, creation of new exocrine glands, enlargement of anatomical components involved in display, etc. In short, ritualization may involve anatomical, physiological as well as behavioral changes that enhance the efficiency of the signal. Hence, the addition of properties that are the consequence of direct selection of increased effectiveness of the signal. Many of these evolutionary changes of animal communicative signals involve genetic mutations. It is true one may couch human cultural development in Darwinian evolutionary terms. Dawkins tried and proposed "emes" as the unit of "selection" in cultural evolution, a homology of "genes" in biological evolution, although genes are not the only entity on which natural selection operates. Natural selection also operates on "organism" and "species". But that is another topic. The relevant point here is that even though one may wish to couch cultural development in Darwinian's evolutionary theory, it does not follow that there isn't a quantum leap from animal communicative behavior to human language. Steve Long erroneously assumed that discontinuity between animal communicative behavior and human language implied that human language originated through mutation. Bickerton, Pinker, Richard Klien, and those who subscribe to the hypothesis of hardwired universal grammar may believe that human language originated through genetic mutation. I have argued that the evolutionary process leading to the crystallization of language took approximately one to one-and-half million years. There is no such thing as a linguistic gene. A gene merely specifies the structure of a protein. Language, however, is a behavior at the highest cognitive level. It permeates all facets of human cognition. It is not and cannot be brought about by a single or a few genes! Even a simple biological trait such as the color of the eye requires a cascade of interactions among seven different genes. Any defective protein that severely impairs a person's ability to acquire a language is bound to have dramatic consequences on the ontological development of that person's central nervous system. This is not to say that the evolutionary process leading to the crystallization of language does not involve genetic mutations. On the contrary, increased encephalization, lengthening of ontological maturation, enlargement of the vertebral canal and the concomitant expansion of the thoracic nerves, shrinkage of the gastrointestinal tract, the decent of the larynx, all of which are directly related to the emergence of language in hominid evolution, certainly involve mutations of both structural and regulatory genes. The kind of genetic mutation that is implausible is the kind that is directly and exclusively responsible for the origin or the structure of language! Talmy mentioned in passing names of great scholars in evolution such as Ernst Mayr. One of Mayr's seminal contributions in evolution is to point out how behavior kicks off or initiates a long and elaborate evolutionary process affecting complex animals such as vertebrates and mammals. For example, the penetration of a new ecological niche by a population of animals, which is typically initiated by behavior, often leads to dramatic evolutionary development. (For example, cetaceans and the Darwinian finches of the Galapagoes.) The main reason is that a new ecological niche unleashes a new set of selectional forces. The evolutionary development initiated by an exceptional or out-of-norm behavior such as the pentration of a new ecological niche may involve genetic mutations favored by the new ecological conditions. But the point is that it is often behavior, not mutation that initiates the evolutionary development. The obvious advantage of behaviorally initiated, as opposed to genetically-initiated, evolutionary development is that behavior can be transmitted among social cohorts and passed on from one generation to another. For genetic mutation to work in the same way, it would have to occur simultaneously in at least one male and one female of a population. Even then, the genetic mutation, in spite of its adaptive value, may not endure because of genetic drift. If the genetic mutation entails behavioral change among highly social animals such as hominids, the very survival of the beneficiaries of the mutation will be severely jeopardized. Imagine what could happen to an animal in a group of highly social mammals if it perchance acquired a different mode of communication through mutation! I have postulated that the emergence of the first symbolic signal is a behavioral innovation. That behavioral innovation is what started the ball rolling in hominid evolution that ultimately led to the crystallization of language, which, according to a variety of evidence, occurred several tens of thousands of years after the emergence of anatomically modern humans in Africa, probably during 80,000 - 60,000 before present. I apologize for the length of this response to Talmy's repartee. As it stands, the response contains many statements that are oversimplifications. There are probably also many mistakes as I pecked them out at my computer with two fingers in great haste. Talmy can rightfully snicker at my admission of being in haste since I mentioned Givonian speed at the beginning - "Every criticism is a piece of autobiography' (Oscar Wilde)! In light of my heavy work load during the current California budget crisis, I will desist from sending further replies. I will refer any reader who is interested in my discussion to two of my recent papers both of which will appear in print any day: "On the evolutionary origin of language" In Mirror neurons and the evolution of brain and language , edited by M Stamenov and V. Gallese, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (Co-author Jean-Marie Hombert). "Missing links, issues and hypotheses in the evolutionary origin of language" In The evolution of language and pre-language, edited by T. Givon , Amsterdam: John Benjamins. I might mention an in-progress article that is relevant: "The evolutionary of basic emotions and their manifestations in communicative behavior: Human language vs. animal communication" In Dialogic expressions of basic emotions, edited by Edda Weigand, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. When I finish writing the in-progress article, I will be happy to send it to those who request it. Charles >Dear FUNKnetters (and Charles Li), > >I have held off from responding to the various notes on the subject of >language, culture, biology and evolution, hoping against all hope to hear >from others what I thought needed to be said. But the more I hear, the >more I am inclined to tear my hairs--the few still remaining--in utter >despair. So, in the interest of refocusing the discussion more explicitly >towards the interface between biology, I would like to interject the >following: > >The anthropocentric impulse to draw an absolute boundary between >biological evolution ('the animal') and cultural evolution ('history', >'the human') goes back to antiquity, and has been the subject of >repeated (and repetitious) bitter skirmishes ever since. Both Plato and >Aristotle posited this absolute boundary, the latter in terms of the >exclusively-human spirit of rationality (as distinct from the metabolic >and perceptual spirits, which were conceded to all animate beings). > >The bitter Darwin-Wallace debate about evolution was about whether to draw >that self-same rigid line between the evolution of the body and that of >the mind/brain/soul. Wallace wanted to draw the line right where Plato, >Aristotle, the Church, Descartes, and all traditional humanist had drawn >it. Darwin insisted on a unitary system--what's good for the body is good >for the soul. Chomsky's and Bickerton's insistence that the 'rise' of >language is not governed by the same adaptive constraints that govern the >evolution of all other biological sub-systems (including 'mere cognition') >follows in the very same dualist tradition. And likewise, the idea that >somehow cullture and history are wholly liberated from adaptive >('functional') constrants, that they are--to paraphrase Charles Li (and, >for that matter, Bill Labov)--matters of only society and culture, falls >squarely on the Plato-Aristotle-Descartes-Wallace-Chomsky side of the debate. > >The funny thing is, in biology itself there have been strong recent trends >to obliterate this rigid --artificial, ideological--boundary between >mind/language/culture/behavior and 'plain' structural biology. Thus, a >great evolutionary-biology theorist, Ernst Mayr, as noted that (loosely >paraphrased) 'soft' adaptive behavior is the pacemaker, of 'hard' genetic >evolution. And the work of great figures in etology (von Frisch, Marler, >J.T. Bonner, E.O. Wilson, D. Griffin, F. deWaal, to mention only a few) >has been predicated on the interpermeability of biology and culture. > >It therefore boggles my (admittedly simple) mind to see self-declared >functionalists, who believe that language is adapted to its main tasks of >representation and communication of information, come up with the idea >that the main process that shapes both phonology and grammar--diachronic >development--is somehow only 'culturally' and 'socially' constrained (and >pray, what does it mean exactly? Total lack of constraints?) This >certainly flies in the face of all detailed, fine-grained studies of the >process of diachronic change in both phonology and grammar. > >"But", the defenders of the strict boundary retort, "what about >cross-language typological variation and the great freedom from adaptive >constraints that it entails?" In response, I would like to remind >everybody of a few things about variation and how it comes about: > >First, typological variation is highly constrained. Relatively few 'types' >of any linguistic structure are actually attested in languages--as >compared with the plethora of mathematically (or biologically) possible >structures. The fact that more than one type of structure can perform the >same communicative funtion is not unique to language and culture. It is a >cardinal fact in biology, and of the main process of functional extension >(homoplasy), by which a structure takes over the coding of similar but >not-wholely-identical functions (and may eventually diverge beyond >recognition). Evolutionary biology, while adaptively guided (via >selection) is hardly 100% deterministic, or we would have had only one >extant species. > >Second, the diachronic pathways that give rise to variable synchronic >structure are just as constrained and largely uni-directional. In both, >they closely resemble biological evolution. And the most common >explanation to such constrained evolution are adaptive. > >Third, in language diachrony as in biological evolution, the universal >constrains that govern synchronic structure--the eplanatory principles, >the theory--operate largely through the developmental process. They are to >be found in the mechanisms of emergence (be they ontogenetic, phylogenetic >of behavioral-historial, not in the catalogue of extant synchronic >('typological') structures. > >Fourth, variation is the very soul of both synchronic biology and >evolution, where species are defined by their variability curves (of both >'hard' genotype and 'soft', 'behavioral' phenotype); where today's >intra-species population variation is simply the current inventory of >tomorrow's potential evolutionary changes--and thus cross-species >variation. This is exactly what one finds in the relation between >synchronic variation and diachronic change, an observation often >attributed to Bill Labove (tho I cannot find an exact citation...). > >Lastly, variation is not only a methodological phenomenon (cf. Labov >again); it is a highly theoretical entity in both biology and language, >and has highly adaptive ('funtional') motivations. The reservoir of >synchronic variants within a population is guarantor of survival, just in >case the context should require alternative adaptive solutions. > >True enough, diachrony ('history') in both language and culture is 'soft' >and presumably reversible. But so is animal behavior, which is never 100% >constrained by genetics (cf. Mayr's "open program"). Still, this neither >exempts language and cultrure from adaptive constraints, nor sets them >apart from 'plain' biological evolution. > >It is perhaps time that we quit erecting and re-erecting those artificial >barriers--human vs. animal, body vs. soul/mind, biology vs. culture, >language vs. cognition--and instead re-group to take care of the urgent >task at hand: Investigating and explaining language as and integral part >of this incredibly complex miracle of striving, behaving, adaptive, >evolving life. There is no shame but only strength in being part of the >grand coalition of 'plain' biology. > >Have a happy holliday season, TG > >================================= > >Charles Li wrote: >> Using the expression, "the evolution of language", to refer to the >> evolution of hominid communicative behavior prior to the crystallization >> of language implies that language was the communicative tool of all >> hominids. Yet no one would assume that Orrorin tugenensis, >> Kenyanthropus, the various species of Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and >> Paranthropus had language. Indeed, most of the species in the genus of >> Homo probably did not have language if 'language' designates the casual, >> spoken language of anatomically modern humans. The investigation of the >> origin of language is an enterprise concerned with the evolution of the >> communicative behavior of our hominid ancestors, NOT the evolution of >> language. Chronologically the study of the evolution of language begins >> from the time when language crystallized, whereas the study of the >> origin of language ends at the crystallization of language. This >> distinction does not belittle the significance of the research probing >> into older and older layers of human language. Nor does it dismiss the >> importance of the proto-human language if and when its features can be >> inferred. One of the most important reasons for making this distinction >> is the fundamental difference between the ways language changes and the >> ways hominid communicative behavior changes. The latter, like animal >> communicative behavior, is subject to the constraint of Darwinian >> evolution. The evolution of our hominid ancestors' communicative >> behavior involves natural selection and genetic mutation. A change of >> their communicative behavior in the direction toward the emergence of >> language was adaptive in the sense that it enhanced their life >> expectancy and reproductive success. Those hominids who made the change >> achieved a higher level of fitness than those hominids who failed to >> make the change. A change moving the hominids' communicative behavior >> one step closer to human language would imply greater communicative >> efficiency. Greater communicative efficiency would, in turn, entail >> greater ease with which valuable knowledge and experience could be >> passed from one individual to another and from one generation to >> another. Rapid and efficient transmission of knowledge conferred an >> immense competitive advantage to the hominids for securing resources and >> possibly vanquishing others, including other species of hominids whose >> communicative behavior was less developed in the direction toward >> language crystallization. >> >>Given that hominids within the genus of Homo and possibly some gracile >>species of the Australopithecine are generalists who did not specialize >>in any specific ecological niche, the competitive advantage conferred by >>a more effective communicative behavior may explain why there is only one >>surviving species within the taxonomic family of hominids. When two >>hominid species happened to co-exist as generalists and the communicative >>behavior of one species was more effective than that of the other, there >>would be a good possibility that the communicatively more advanced >>species would eliminate the other through competition, especially when >>natural resources dwindled as they did periodically in a dramatic fashion >>during the past three million years because of global temperature >>fluctuations. >> >>The evolution of language, i.e. language change after its >>crystallization, is by an large driven by social and cultural factors. It >>has nothing to do with genetic mutation, natural selection, life >>expectancy or reproductive success. Confusing the evolution of language >>with the origin of language may result in attributing features of >>language to the communicative behavior of early hominids before the >>emergence of language. >> >>For details, see attached paper. >> >>Charles Li >> >> >> >>At 09:36 AM 12/2/2002 +0200, Tahir Wood wrote: >> >> >>> >>> Bill Croft 11/29/02 06:56PM >>> >>> One must distinguish between the evolution of language >>>and the evolution of languages. The former is the evolution >>>of human cognition and social behavior that permitted the >>>rise of modern human language. This is of course an >>>instance of biological evolution, of human beings. The >>>latter is the process by which linguistic elements change >>>over time. This is an evolutionary process, that is it >>>involves change by replication; but it is not the same >>>evolutionary process as biological evolution. >>> >>>I prefer to refer to the former as evolution and the latter as history. >>>Less confusing, and less likely to give the impression that the social >>>aspect of language change is absent in favour of some kind of biological >>>determinism: e.g. Africans have 'less developed languages' because they >>>are racially/biologically 'less developed'. >>>Tahir >> >>___________________________________________________ >>Charles Li >>Professor of Linguistics, Dean of Graduate Division >>University of California, Santa Barbara >>Santa Barbara, CA 93106 >>Tel: 805-893-2013 Fax: 805-893-8259 > >___________________________________________________ >Charles Li >Professor of Linguistics, Dean of Graduate Division >University of California, Santa Barbara >Santa Barbara, CA 93106 >Tel: 805-893-2013 Fax: 805-893-8259 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From amnfn at WELL.COM Wed Dec 4 19:44:43 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 11:44:43 -0800 Subject: Feral children and enculturated apes Message-ID: >Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 12:03:11 EST >From: Steve Long >To: FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu >Subject: The Culture vs Biology Experiment > >In a message dated 12/3/02 3:00:34 AM, dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK writes: ><< It is an interesting research question to consider how we might (or if we >might) tease apart the different contributions from biology and culture to >human language development. >> > > Since the cultural contribution would be far easier (not >necessarily ethically) to remove, the experiment is simple to conceptualize. >Take a normal new born human and raise him in as complete absence from any >contact with language as is possible, to some variable age x. Then find out >a) what language he uses and b) what language learning capability he has, at >age x. (I.e, under controlled conditions, create the laboratory equivalent of >a "wolf boy.") Haven't the actual feral children whose case histories we know already established that children do not come up with language unless they're brought up within a language speaking environment? If we want a controlled experiment (without regard to ethics) then cutting the caretakers' tongues out is not enough. Humans who have been exposed to Language can transmit it as a means of communication without using normal articulatory apparatus. The homesigns devised in deaf homes are Language, too. And they are not Language independently arrived at, despite their originality, since the big hurdle is internalizing the concept of Language, not its technical implementation. A controlled experiment would best be undertaken by allowing non-enculturated apes to raise a human child in their own community. Nobody would actually do this, but as a thought experiment, isn't the outcome pretty obvious? Conversely, there currently are ongoing experiments in the other direction. Savage-Rumbaugh has successfully transmitted symbolic language to her subjects. I am in the beginning stages of a similar experiment, using conventional symbols. --Aya Katz +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.well.com/user/amnfn +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Wed Dec 4 20:35:08 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 15:35:08 EST Subject: Animal versus Human Language Message-ID: In a message dated 12/4/02 1:07:13 PM, li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU writes: <> I'm sorry to say that this differentiation seems completely artificial. Each of those "meanings" has a different function. What you are doing here is making function mean something broad ("threat") and then saying that what is just a more specific function becomes "meaning". Obviously I would have a different intent in saying "I'll knock you over" versus "I'm going to beat you up" (or otherwise the difference is irrelevant.) If I intend a different meaning or the listener perceives I'm promising a different outcome, then the two statements have different functions. The terminology here seems to be the only thing that makes the difference between meaning and function. What you are demonstrating is a quantitative difference between the level of discrimination that is available in animal "language", not that it is qualitatively different. li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU also writes: <> How exactly does one determine that an animal communication is not a reference to a concrete object? And when ever -- even in the most abstract human speech -- is a reference "context-independent." li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU also writes: <<(Many other animals have different warning calls for different approaching predators. Suricates, a burrowing viverrid related to the mongoose is a good example.) These warning calls are not symbolic signals because they do not possess property (b). Nevertheless, the warning calls of the vervet monkeys represent a step toward a symbolic signal, because they differentiate, for example, reptilian, avian, mammalian and other predators. The differentiation, however, holds only in the context of warning. It is not context-free.>> This is clearly incorrect in terms of the listener. The predator is not present for the listener or the communication is functionless. So, for the vervet monkey being warned, when there is no predator present, the sound is a) a reference to a concrete object and b) independent of the presence of that object. That is a symbol. And the information that it carries has consequences and therefore meaning in any human sense. Since we cannot read a vervet monkey's mind, that is the best we can say about the situation. li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU also writes: <> The real question is what animals use the neocortex for and whether their "communications" can be made to be mediated by the neocortex. Many domesticated animals, birds and primates can all be taught to vocalize or gesture in new ways with new "meanings" -- new functions in new contexts with new results. The limitations are as much dependent on the limited outcomes they are interested in as the limitations of their ability to vocalize or gesture or even their patience. (Cats, particularly cats, lack "emotional" patience.) Functionalism says that outcome (intended or actual) should be the defining factor. When you manipulate the outcome or create new effects for communicative behavior, and the animal learns the causal connection, communication will occur and go beyond the primal scream and make as much use of the neocortex as animals make in non-communicative behavior. And though I'm reluctant to mention it here, there is a mass of good old Skinnerian research that amply documents that animal "communicative behavior" can go beyond functions found in natural settings (threats, warnings, etc.) li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU also writes: <> All communications to be communications must supply some informational change in state -- some change in future effect or outcome. It's not functioning otherwise. A threat or a warning implicity deals with the future. We are being fooled here by the fact that someone somewhere invented the future tense in human language. The fact that the abstraction of time is marked in human language does not mean it is not at the core of all communication. Human language embodies a much more complex map of time and space, not a different one. Physics works the same way for animals and humans. As far as place: I was walking a dog in a nearby field when he yelped and got some yelps back from the two dogs he lives with. Soon they joined us despite their master's assurance that they always "listen" to him and stay home in those circumstances. For those two listeners, the conversation was certainly about a place remote from where they were. li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU also writes: <> Or perhaps -- to be Freudian about it -- we are just better at channeling our emotions. The idea of "emotionless" human communication is akin to what brocolli would talk like if brocolli could talk. The level of excitation is not a qualitative difference. I'd suggest that Talmy Givons is right about this. We just can't seem to shake a non-naturalistic view of human language. Of course, there is a difference. As one of the old dialectical philosphers (Hegel or Marx) observed, the quantitative becomes the qualitative. Animal language stores very little information compared to human language. So it looks as though it might be doing something different. But that may be as much the ingenuity in the design of the software as it is in the basic hardware. Steve Long From Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK Wed Dec 4 20:45:56 2002 From: Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK (Dan Everett) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 20:45:56 +0000 Subject: Feral children and enculturated apes In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The issues involved in teasing apart the different contributions from culture and biology are not as easy as the thought experiments proposed by Long and Katz. The problem is that biology needs environment to emerge. Walking, seeing, speaking, and various other skills we take for granted as biological need environment, like a plant needs water and sunlight for photosynthesis - chlorophyll is not enough. Therefore, to show instances of retarded development due to lack of environmental stimuli does not distinguish between culture and biology. Biology requires environment. So does culture. So environment itself will not distinguish them. To take a Chomskyan example, though this works for any theory, what does the theory assume/claim/predict to be part of our genetic heritage, whether in a special language module or as part of our general cognitive capabilities? Let's say, to take an example from Chomsky's 50s research, that embedding is claimed to be a very important part of human language and that we find, subsequently, a language without embedding. Does this tell us anything about biology? How does it? How could it? It could tell us about biology, about processing requirements, about culture, many other things. No simple thought experiment is likely to be of help. These are extremely complex issues conceptually. In fact, they are unlikely to have a solution for the most part. Standard pragmatist (Jamesian in particular) approaches to scientific research offer some guidelines, but they are (rightfully) very subjective. The dichotomy, once again, is to some degree spurious. Hence the problem. Dan ************************************************************** Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics and Phonology University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL dan.everett at man.ac.uk Office Phone: 44-161-275-3158 Department Phone & Fax: 44-161-275-3187 From dgolumbi at PANIX.COM Wed Dec 4 21:07:02 2002 From: dgolumbi at PANIX.COM (David Golumbia) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 16:07:02 -0500 Subject: Feral children and enculturated apes In-Reply-To: <20021204203339.D96244-100000@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> from "Dan Everett" at Dec 04, 2002 08:45:56 PM Message-ID: I think Dan Everett's recent message is very on-target. I am always confused by Chomsky's failure to look for close biological analogues for the supposedly "mysterious" language organ, and the individualist bias of so many thought experiments seem to fall into a similar pattern. Take a skill that is 90% biological, like walking. A child who is raised without sufficient environmental stimuli will not learn to walk, or will not learn to use the bipedal "endowment" as it can be fully used. Training by adults is required at several steps. Experiments that isolate the infant from this training seem to me to demonstrate very little about the walking endowment. Many animals hunt as a critical part of their biocultural endowment. Although their bodies are tuned to hunting skills, these will not develop without significant social coaching. Let's ask the question a different way: if homo sapiens were to re-emerge in evolution, with exactly the same biology, would their language be "the same" as what we know of human language? The truth is that we don't even know enough about all the languages spoken today to make this question make any sense at all. If Martians came to Earth (in one of Chomsky's famous but poorly considered examples), would their language be "human" or "inhuman"? Who in the world knows? What if it was hard for humans to learn, but after a few years of study some humans learned Martian and some Martians learned Creek? What if the Martians have 15000 languages like humans do, and the Martians we meet speak only 1 of these 15000 languages? What if Hindi speakers could speak Martian-3001, but Martian-3002 gave them pause? Thought experiments are great, but it seems to me we remain in a state of knowledge about human language and human cultures and what they are capable of that makes generalizations about "human language itself" highly problematic. It is my bet that no attempt to look "outside" what we have as empirical matter will provide a better view: because it is only on initial glance that the "outside" (Martian, thought experiment, feral children) seems to offer an analytic purchase. Another variation: put a group of infants into a world that somehow provides them everything they need *except language.* Leave them alone for 50 years. I guarantee you, something will have developed, and whatever it is will be human language, and it will be just as hard to cleave analytically between what-they-speak and what-humans-as-we-know-them-speak. -- dgolumbi at panix.com David Golumbia From amnfn at WELL.COM Wed Dec 4 21:36:17 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 13:36:17 -0800 Subject: Conceptually separating language from biology Message-ID: >Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 20:45:56 +0000 >From: Dan Everett >To: FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu > >The problem is that biology needs environment to emerge. Walking, >seeing, speaking, and various other skills we take for granted as >biological need environment, like a plant needs water and sunlight for >photosynthesis - chlorophyll is not enough. Therefore, to show >instances of retarded development due to lack of environmental stimuli >does not distinguish between culture and biology. Biology requires >environment. So does culture. So environment itself will not >distinguish them. That's a valid point. Biological entities cannot function without a hospitable environment. But we can still tease language apart from biology by trying the thought experiment the other way: not by depriving humans of their natural environment, but by allowing non-humans to demonstrate language ability. Suppose it turned out that one of our Funknet posters was not a biological entity at all, but rather an AI program implemented on a computer and connected to the net. Let's say none of us were able to tell the difference. The poster not only wrote grammatically and comprehensibly, but was also able to maintain topic continuity and discourse coherence and to interact productively with other posters. If this were the case, would you not concede that the AI entity was using language? Would it matter that it didn't share our DNA or our brain structures? --Aya Katz +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.well.com/user/amnfn +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From amnfn at WELL.COM Wed Dec 4 22:24:08 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 14:24:08 -0800 Subject: Need based language development Message-ID: >Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 16:07:02 -0500 >From: David Golumbia >Subject: Re: Feral children and enculturated apes > >Let's ask the question a different way: if homo sapiens were to re-emerge >in evolution, with exactly the same biology, would their language be "the >same" as what we know of human language? > That's a good question. >Another variation: put a group of infants into a world that somehow >provides them everything they need *except language.* Leave them alone for >50 years. I guarantee you, something will have developed, and whatever it >is will be human language, and it will be just as hard to cleave >analytically between what-they-speak and >what-humans-as-we-know-them-speak. I don't think that we can guarantee that anything like language would develop under those circumstances. Life emerged on this planet only once. All living entities on earth are related. We have no reason to believe that if we duplicated the environment, life would necessarily emerge again. Experiments in that direction have failed. By the same token, there is no evidence that Language emerged more than once on earth. How can we be sure that the rise of language is something we could duplicate? Also, if all their needs were met automatically, would these subjects have any reason to come up with language? --Aya Katz +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.well.com/user/amnfn +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From amnfn at WELL.COM Wed Dec 4 22:40:00 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 14:40:00 -0800 Subject: Conceptually separating language from biology In-Reply-To: <001601c29be1$4b68c720$6c09a8c0@lang01> Message-ID: On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Noel Rude wrote: > > What would matter (re your question below) is whether the machine > understood what it was saying. So far we have no coherent materialistic > theory whatever of mind. >I work with indigenous lgs. and it occurred to me a while back to ask, >"What is a person?" I was told -- and the answer jived perfectly with tribal >metaphor and clarified various old legends -- that the person is all >these inextricable things: 1) w�wnakshash 'body', which is "legislated" first, > and is associated with the color yellow; 2) t#mn� 'heart', appointed >next, and which is associated with the color red and with intention, >purpose, etc.; 3) waq'�shwit 'life', which is associated with the color >blue and with speaking, words, language. If we define language as that which is spoken by people, and people as entities whose bodies are like ours, then we've defined away the question. Under this definition, of course, language is biological. I just think we'd miss out on some fairly useful generalizations if we chose this path. --Aya Katz +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://wwww.well.com/user/amnfn +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Wed Dec 4 23:20:24 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 18:20:24 EST Subject: Feral children and enculturated apes Message-ID: In a message dated 12/4/02 4:07:52 PM, dgolumbi at PANIX.COM writes: << Take a skill that is 90% biological, like walking. A child who is raised without sufficient environmental stimuli will not learn to walk, or will not learn to use the bipedal "endowment" as it can be fully used. Training by adults is required at several steps. Experiments that isolate the infant from this training seem to me to demonstrate very little about the walking endowment. >> I don't think this is true. Aside from the survival needs of the infant, I suspect there is no nuturing involved. Walking among "normal" children will come whether it is taught or not. If walking truly needed to be taught (like writing), it would hardly be 90% biological. That would be like saying piano playing is 90% biological. It was just dormant for a million years waiting for Chopin to show up. Obviously, we couldn't play the piano if evolution gave us the physical attributes of a carrot. But we did not evolve to play the piano. We did evolve to walk -- and the shape of our bodies prove it. <> See Derek Bickerton (Roots of Language, Language and Species), particularly as to the distinction between the non-structure of pidgins and structure of creoles. Bickerton -- a Chomskyian -- seems confident in identifying the development of structure among the feral children of (if remember right) Curacao. However Martians speak, it is not that difficult to identify structure in human speech, in all its variations. But again if we were all born with a hand shaped like an axe to chop wood or we if make axes to chop wood, physics demands that an axe be shaped like an axe and not a feather duster if it is to be functional. The same environmental rules of survival and adaptation shape both genetic and acquired axes. There's no reason we should not expect the same with languages. (Of course, chainsaws will solve many of the same wood-chopping problems, but as I mentioned evolution has not been a big user of the free-moving wheel. With chainsaws, we are on our own.) But I want to point out again that you have set up a prerequisite to language -- "put a group of infants into a world that somehow provides them everything they need *except language.* Leave them alone for 50 years." -- note that you did not say "one infant". And note that you give them 50 years. 50 years of what? Being with one another? Trying to communicate with one another? I don't think any of us would expect this pot to boil without a good dose of human culture. Culture is integral to human language. And there really is good reason to think that culture gave rise to modern language capabilities, especially many of the more complex biological parts. (BTW, Einstein used thought experiments to come up with relativity. We may not be that good -- but that's no reason to fault the method.) Steve Long From Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK Thu Dec 5 06:48:53 2002 From: Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK (Dan Everett) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 06:48:53 +0000 Subject: Conceptually separating language from biology In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, A. Katz wrote: > > Suppose it turned out that one of our Funknet posters was not a > biological entity at all, but rather an AI program implemented on a > computer and connected to the net. Let's say none of us were able to > tell the difference. The poster not only wrote grammatically and > comprehensibly, but was also able to maintain topic continuity and > discourse coherence and to interact productively with other posters. > If this were the case, would you not concede that the AI entity was > using language? Would it matter that it didn't share our DNA or our > brain structures? > > Yes, it would still matter. What you have just described is the Turing Test. Searle effectively showed the inadequacy of this kind of test with his Chinese room scenario. Ultimately, we have to understand something of the presence or no of the intentionality of the entity communicating, in order to tell whether it has semantics or just syntax. Using language alone is not enough, because, for example, AI programs can use syntax alone, bypassing intentionality, semantics, and consciousness. And these, I believe, and Searle convincingly argues, are so far as we know only found in biological entities. Dan From w.croft at MAN.AC.UK Thu Dec 5 13:29:59 2002 From: w.croft at MAN.AC.UK (Bill Croft) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 13:29:59 +0000 Subject: Evolution, functionalism and sociolinguistics Message-ID: I am sorry I used the terms "evolution of language" vs "evolution of languages". I should have said "origin of language" (which is part of biological evolution) and "evolutionary model of language change". I won't say anything about the former; others have thought longer and harder about these questions, as is clear from earlier posts. But I wish to add some things about the latter, which is central to the relationship between functionalism and sociolinguistics. In sum, I don't see any incompatibility between the two. One can be a good functionalist and embrace sociolinguistics as well. Why an evolutionary model for language change? Evolution is a theory of change by replication. It is applicable to any phenomenon that changes by replication. The theory just happened to have originated in biology, where replication occurs through reproduction by organisms. But it also applies to language. We replicate linguistic structures every time we converse with one another; through altered replication of structures, and selection of variant structures, language changes. This is as usage-based a model of language change as one can get - a model which most functionalists advocate, and is opposed to the child-based model of language change assumed by many structuralists and virtually all Chomskyans. It is also in harmony with the sociolinguistic approach, which is based entirely on language use. David Hull has developed the evolutionary model in his "Science as a process" (U Chicago Press, 1988). Evolutionary change is fundamentally based on variation, as Talmy Givon notes - also a central tenet of sociolinguistics. Another central feature of evolution is that it is a two-step process, as Ernst Mayr has stated many times (e.g. in "Evolution", Scientific American, 1978). The two processes are altered replication (innovation), which produces variation, and selection (differential replication, propagation), where some variants are favored over others in replication. In biology, altered replication occurs through mutation and recombination, and selection through adaptation (among other mechanisms). But these mechanisms are domain- specific. Other mechanisms operate in other domains, such as language. In language change, I hypothesized that altered replication is functional, in a sense that most functionalists would find familiar, and selection is social, in the sense familiar to sociolinguists. This does NOT mean that language change is "only 'culturally' and 'socially' constrained", as Talmy puts it. It simply means that propagation is socially constrained. But evolutionary change is a two-step process. Altered replication is the other step. It is functionally constrained. It is directed, leading to the functionally motivated unidirectional processes so familiar to us. That is, altered replication is more likely to occur in a functionally motivated direction. Even if the selection process is functionally neutral, as I hypothesize, the net result will be the functionally motivated historical changes and crosslinguistic variation that we find. There is no incompatibility here. In fact, the two together make for a powerful theory of language as a whole, a comprehensive alternative to Chomsky's theory. Finally, there is both continuity and discontinuity between biological evolution and language change. The discontinuity is that the replicators in biological evolution are genes, while the replicators in language change are linguistic structures (what I call 'linguemes'). Two different evolving populations, with two different sets of mechanisms. The continuity is found in what Hull calls the interactor, the entity whose behavior causes variation and selection of replicators. The interactor in language change is the speaker, that is, a human being; and a human being - an organism - is also the interactor in biological evolution. In both cases, as Talmy says, human behavior drives evolutionary change, that is, change by replication. Bill Croft From iadimly at usc.es Thu Dec 5 15:51:41 2002 From: iadimly at usc.es (Maria Angeles Gomez) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 16:51:41 +0100 Subject: THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS CONFERENCE, COMPOSTELA 2003 Message-ID: SORRY FOR DUPLICATE SUBMISSIONS!! WE'D APPRECIATE IT IF YOU COULD CIRCULATE THIS CALL The Third International Contrastive Linguistics Conference Santiago de Compostela ( I C L C - 3 ) 23rd-26th September 2003 FIRST CIRCULAR: CALL FOR PAPERS - We are pleased to announce that the Third International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC-3) will be held from Tues. 23rd to Fri. 26th September 2003, in the Philology Faculty of Santiago University, Spain. - As in our previous conferences, papers of a contrastive nature are welcome, particularly in the following subject areas: Linguistic Description (grammar, lexico-semantics, phonetics, phonology, etc), Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Rhetoric, Translation Studies, Cross-Cultural Studies, Second Language Acquisition, and Languages for Specific Purposes. - Papers will have a maximum duration of 20 minutes (2500 words). To ensure maximum intelligibility among the audience, they should be presented preferably in either English or Spanish (Castilian), but they may if necessary be presented in French, German or Galician. - If you wish to take part, please send us an abstract before 1st February 2003. The following should be noted: - A participant can only present one paper, except that a maximum of two may be presented, provided both are co-authored. - The maximum number of named authors/participants per paper will be three. - Please let us emphasize the following: In order to be accepted, abstracts MUST be written, presented and sent EXACTLY as indicated below. Section 1: Full name (including academic title or other style of address) of author or authors (Some correspondence might be addressed only to the first named) Section 2: E-mail address , followed by postal address(es) * Please make quite sure that both of these items are given fully and correctly! Section 3: University or other institution, and affiliation(s) (state whether professor, lecturer, other researcher, or doctoral student) Section 4: Research Area: please indicate which one (or more) of the above subject- area labels best applies to your paper Section 5: Title of paper Section 6: Abstract. This must be single-spaced, not more than 10 lines long, and in the language in which the paper will be presented. (Do not include bibliography.) - Each ‘section’ will begin a new line. - Abstracts MUST be sent by e-mail, as Word attachments, to: iaarolli at usc.es - Under “subject”, only write “abstract”. - Please name the attachment as follows: ICLC-3 plus your full name. - Please use, if possible, the form included at the end of this Circular. This circular, including the form, will soon be available on-line (see below). - The Conference fee will be 90 euros, to be paid before 31st March 2003. - If paid between 1st April and the week of the Conference, it will be 115 euros. - The fee is due from each named author. - For undergraduate students, the fee will be 30 euros, to be paid any time before the Conference. - After a blind refereeing processs, those papers that fulfil the requirements of presentation, originality and scientific rigour will be selected for publication by the Selection Committee. - We regret that a further fee of 30 euros will have to be charged for each paper accepted for publication (whether co-authored or not), as a contribution towards publication and postage costs. We look forward to your participation. Kind regards from The Organising Committee. Contact details: University tel. no.: +34 981 57 53 40 (or: +34 981 59 44 88 for direct dialling of extensions) Faculty fax no.: +34 981 57 46 46 Contact details of individual Committee members: Co-ordinators: tel. extension: e-mail: Dr. Luís Iglesias-Rábade 118 97 iarabade at usc.es Dr. Andrew Rollings 118 39 iaarolli at usc.es Dr. Susana Doval-Suárez 118 91 iasdoval at usc.es Secretaries: Dr. Mª de los Ángeles Gómez-González 118 56 iadimly at usc.es, http://web.usc.es/~iadimly Elsa Mª González-Alvarez 120 09 iaelsa at usc.es Other committee members: Dr. Mª Teresa Sánchez-Roura 118 89 iatroura at usc.es Dr. Cristina Mourón-Figueroa 118 32 iacrismf at usc.es Dr. Teresa Moralejo-Gárate 24714 iamora at usc.es Antonio Álvarez-Rodríguez 244 46 aalvarez at lugo.usc.es Other collaborators: Dr. Laura Pino-Serrano 118 77 filaura at usc.es Mª José Domínguez-Vázquez 118 34 majodomi at usc.es Postal address: Dr. Luís Iglesias-Rábade ICLC-3 Facultad de Filología Universidad de Santiago Avda. de Castelao, s/n E - 15782 Santiago de Compostela. SPAIN. Website of English Department (with link, in due course, for ICLC-3): ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ICLC-3 Abstract Proposal Form 1. Name: ________ __________________________ _______________________ Prof. Dr Mr First name(s) Surname(s) Miss Ms Mrs 2. E-mail: Postal address(es): 3. Institution: Affiliation: 4. Research area (please write X where appropriate): - Linguistic Description: grammar _____ lexico-semantics _____ phonetics _____ phonology _____ other (specify) ____________________ - Discourse Analysis _____ Pragmatics _____ Rhetoric _____ Translation Studies _____ Cross-Cultural Studies _____ Second Language Acquisition _____ Languages for Specific Purposes _____ Other (if none of the above apply)_________________________________________ 5. Title of Paper: 6. Abstract: (max. 10 lines) ******************************* Dr María de los Ángeles GÓMEZ-GONZÁLEZ Tenured Lecturer in English Department of English Philology Faculty of Philology UNIVERSITY OF SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA Avda. de Castelao, s/n E-15782 Santiago de Compostela Fax.: + 00 34 981-574646 Tel: + 00 34 981-563100 Ext. 11856 email: iadimly at usc.es http://web.usc.es/~iadimly -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ICLC3MAILING1.doc Type: application/msword Size: 1826816 bytes Desc: not available URL: From amnfn at WELL.COM Thu Dec 5 16:32:50 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 08:32:50 -0800 Subject: Separating language from biology Message-ID: >Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 06:48:53 +0000 >From: Dan Everett >Subject: Re: Conceptually separating language from biology > >What you have just described is the Turing >Test. Yes, it is. >Searle effectively showed the inadequacy of this kind of test with >his Chinese room scenario. Our purpose here is not to explore consciousness, but just to determine whether language is necessarily biological. >Ultimately, we have to understand something of >the presence or no of the intentionality of the entity communicating, in >order to tell whether it has semantics or just syntax. At present, we are not able to objectively determine intentionality for human beings, either. The only intentions that any individual has direct access to are his own -- by introspection. Anyone else's intentions must be deduced from actions or words. When we talk to our parents, spouses, children, friends, we have no idea of whether they possess "intentionality" or are well contructed biological automatons. When we converse with strangers over the net, we don't even know for sure that they are biological. > Using language >alone is not enough, because, for example, AI programs can use syntax >alone, bypassing intentionality, semantics, and consciousness. "Using language is not enough" for what? You've just conceded the point. Language is separate from consciousness and hence biology. Even if the use of the word "language" above was a slip of the keyboard, let's argue it this way: if there's another test the AI entity has to meet, before we can call what it does "language", why don't we just assume that it passed? If tomorrow we discovered a valid test for "intentionality" and our AI construct passed that test, would you then concede that it possessed language? >And these, >I believe, and Searle convincingly argues, are so far as we know only >found in biological entities. "As far as we know" is the key point here. I don't claim to know different. But we ought to define our terms so that the claim that only biological entities can possess language can be proved or disproved. The question should not be defined away. --Aya Katz ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK Thu Dec 5 16:44:48 2002 From: Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK (Dan Everett) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 16:44:48 +0000 Subject: Separating language from biology In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > >Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 06:48:53 +0000 > >From: Dan Everett > >Subject: Re: Conceptually separating language from biology > > > >What you have just described is the Turing > >Test. > > Yes, it is. > > >Searle effectively showed the inadequacy of this kind of test with > >his Chinese room scenario. > > Our purpose here is not to explore consciousness, but just to > determine whether language is necessarily biological. > Right. Fine. But your test ignores semantics. And, moreover, there are many people, myself included, who find the evidence strong that language and consciousness cannot be separated. But ignore that. Just focus on the semantics. -- Dan From amnfn at WELL.COM Thu Dec 5 17:15:29 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 09:15:29 -0800 Subject: Separating language from biology In-Reply-To: <20021205164330.G75181-100000@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Dan Everett wrote: > > > >Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 06:48:53 +0000 > > >From: Dan Everett > > >Subject: Re: Conceptually separating language from biology > > Right. Fine. But your test ignores semantics. And, moreover, there are > many people, myself included, who find the evidence strong that language > and consciousness cannot be separated. But ignore that. Just focus on the > semantics. > I, too, suspect that consciousness has something to do with it, but that's not useful as long as none of us has a working definition of consciousness or any tests for its presence or absence. Insofar as my test ignores semantics, so do all the tests conducted on human beings. If by semantics you mean what the speaker "really" meant, or whether he really meant anything at all, our best clue is language use in context. The AI entity I postulated passed that test. Do you have a better one to suggest? The reason reanalysis is a tool for language change is that people don't always understand utterances the same way. And the reason language is useful despite these misunderstandings is that language used in context transmits information despite the differences between and among individuals. If someone seems to understand us, and we never find out different, then for all intents and purposes, he really does. That's the Turing test in action in everyday life. If a child says: "I want a banana" we all assume that he knows what he's talking about. If a chimpanzee says the same thing, people ask: "Yes, but does he have a theory of mind?" I think we should have a level playing field. Whether it's a human, a computer program or a chimpanzee, the test for language should be the same. --Aya ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK Thu Dec 5 17:55:26 2002 From: Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK (Dan Everett) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 17:55:26 +0000 Subject: Separating language from biology In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > The reason reanalysis is a tool for language change is that people don't > always understand utterances the same way. And the reason language is > useful despite these misunderstandings is that language used in context > transmits information despite the differences between and among > individuals. If someone seems to understand us, and we never find out > different, then for all intents and purposes, he really does. That's the > Turing test in action in everyday life. > > If a child says: "I want a banana" we all assume that he knows what he's > talking about. If a chimpanzee says the same thing, people ask: "Yes, but > does he have a theory of mind?" Why would anyone want a 'level playing field'? I am not democratic with respect to chimps. I know that children have a semantics, even if I cannot follow or misinterpret in specific cases. The child has earned its right to a charitable interpretation. The chimp has not. Nor has any other species. A test simpler than a Turing Test is just this: do the members of the species talk to one another with anything remotely showing properties of the type that Hockett argued for? And do they do this 'in the wild'. I like to read of Jane Goodall as much as the next guy, but the answer to my question is no. I agree with Chomsky (quoted in Time many years ago) that the idea that other primates can talk, but need some help from us, is roughly equivalent to the idea that there is an island of birds somewhere needing humans to help them fly. Absurd from the outset. That is not to say that they do not communicate. All species, even paramecia (apparently even by ingesting one another, if my High School biology teacher is to be believed), do. But they don't have a syntax and a semantics. So the Turing Test is not a useful test because it throws semantics out of the discussion. And semantics cannot be thrown out. Try yet another test. The fieldworker test. I do monolingual fieldwork, frequently encountering people with whom I share no language in common. I assume that they can talk, though, that they have a semantics and a syntax, and they assume that of me (perhaps with less justification). Eventually these assumptions are confirmed by hard work on both our parts. That doesn't work with computers or chimps. Who would do fieldwork with either, aside from someone needing a jacket with arms that buckle in back? There is no reason for assuming a level playing field and many reasons for not doing so. Dan From amnfn at WELL.COM Thu Dec 5 19:09:02 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 11:09:02 -0800 Subject: Eliminating bias in experiments Message-ID: >Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 17:55:26 +0000 (GMT) >From: Dan Everett > >Subject: Re: Separating language from biology > >> If a child says: "I want a banana" we all assume that he knows what he's >> talking about. If a chimpanzee says the same thing, people ask: "Yes, but >> does he have a theory of mind?" > >Why would anyone want a 'level playing field'? I am not >democratic with respect to chimps. I'm sorry if my metaphor evoked images of democracy. Democracy is about voting, and I am not suggesting that we vote on this. In a scientific invesitigation, the outcome is not open to voting. It is determined by adhering to careful testing procedures. Bias must be eliminated in order for the result of the test to be valid. (It's kind of a shame that the idea of bias has been so politicized.) You don't need to have any feelings about chimpanzees one way or another to wish to minimize bias. If you were studying lunar dust, the same rules would apply. You don't want a circular definition, because it will not help you to investigate the facts. > I know that children have a >semantics, even if I cannot follow or misinterpret in specific >cases. How do you know this? Could you prove it? What test for the presence of semantics is applicable that would give the correct result regardless of what entity it was applied to? > The child has earned its right to a charitable >interpretation. The chimp has not. Nor has any other species. How has the child earned this right? Are you talking about a specific child or all children? Are you aware that some anatomically normal, uninjured children can't speak or think? Does this include them? >A test simpler than a Turing Test is just this: do the members of the >species talk to one another with anything remotely showing properties of >the type that Hockett argued for? And do they do this 'in the wild'. What do humans do when placed in the wild from infancy? Do they come up with language? We can't give credit to individual members of the species for achievements of the species as a whole. Mozart may have achieved a great deal as a composer, and he was a human being, but you can't assume that a human chosen at random has any musical ability. You have to test them individually. >There is no reason for assuming a level playing field and many reasons for >not doing so. We shouldn't assume anything. We should find out. --Aya From dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Dec 5 20:18:02 2002 From: dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 13:18:02 -0700 Subject: Eliminating bias in experiments In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Thankyou A Katz, Species-centrism strikes me as a counterproductive (but widely accepted) bias in linguistics. It is not clear to me how bias helps linguistics as a science...and it seems to make it difficult for many biologists, psychologists and neurologists to value the other claims, observations and techniques of linguistics...sad, really. Many of the techniques of linguistics are very clever and many observations very telling... Language: Language is very special...and what humans manage to do is quite incredible. But, demonstrating that language shares some features with other communication systems should not surprise us...we are animals too. Vervet monkeys have different cries for eagles and jaguars. Birds and whales produce complex sequences composed of recombinable parts. Many animals can learn to identify and respond appropriately to a small vocabulary of human words. Parrots can learn to produce words, identify objects and follow commands...and they spontaneously recombine parts of words in what appears to be a sort of play behavior....so reference, in and of itself, doesn't seem unique to language. And recombination, in and of itself, is not unique to language. But, the language ability displayed by a typical adult human being is greater than the some of such parts....call it an "emergent" phenomenon...something spectacular that happens when you have the right confluence of capabilities. I have studied linguistics and animal communication systems (I got my PhD studying Alex the parrot)...I've never met an animal that has a hope of understanding this email...but I've met a lot of biased people on both sides of the animal "language" issue that did not understand the people on the other side. Theory of Mind: It is interesting that when Chomsky dismissed Skinner's explanation of language, that somehow, (some) linguists decided that the claims of behaviorism...the dismissal of an internal life...continued to apply to all non-human animals. Read Donald R Griffin for a radically different view on the notion of animal minds. That's my 2-cents...time to go back to work...but have a great debate. Dianne Patterson Cognition and NeuroImaging Labs University of Arizona >-- Original Message -- >Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 11:09:02 -0800 >Reply-To: "A. Katz" >From: "A. Katz" >Subject: Eliminating bias in experiments >To: FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU > > >>Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 17:55:26 +0000 (GMT) >>From: Dan Everett >> >>Subject: Re: Separating language from biology >> >>> If a child says: "I want a banana" we all assume that he knows what he's >>> talking about. If a chimpanzee says the same thing, people ask: "Yes, >but >>> does he have a theory of mind?" >> >>Why would anyone want a 'level playing field'? I am not >>democratic with respect to chimps. > >I'm sorry if my metaphor evoked images of democracy. Democracy is >about voting, and I am not suggesting that we vote on this. >In a scientific invesitigation, the outcome is not open to >voting. It is determined by adhering to careful testing >procedures. Bias must be eliminated in order for the result of >the test to be valid. (It's kind of a shame that the idea of bias >has been so politicized.) > >You don't need to have any feelings about chimpanzees one way or >another to wish to minimize bias. If you were studying lunar >dust, the same rules would apply. You don't want a circular >definition, because it will not help you to investigate the >facts. > >> I know that children have a >>semantics, even if I cannot follow or misinterpret in specific >>cases. > >How do you know this? Could you prove it? What test for the >presence of semantics is applicable that would give the correct >result regardless of what entity it was applied to? > >> The child has earned its right to a charitable >>interpretation. The chimp has not. Nor has any other species. > >How has the child earned this right? Are you talking about a >specific child or all children? Are you aware that some >anatomically normal, uninjured children can't speak or think? >Does this include them? > >>A test simpler than a Turing Test is just this: do the members of the >>species talk to one another with anything remotely showing properties of >>the type that Hockett argued for? And do they do this 'in the wild'. > >What do humans do when placed in the wild from infancy? Do they >come up with language? > >We can't give credit to individual members of the species for >achievements of the species as a whole. Mozart may have achieved >a great deal as a composer, and he was a human being, >but you can't assume that a human chosen at random has any >musical ability. You have to test them individually. > >>There is no reason for assuming a level playing field and many reasons for >>not doing so. > >We shouldn't assume anything. We should find out. > > > --Aya From shamilot at SUFFOLK.LIB.NY.US Thu Dec 5 23:05:30 2002 From: shamilot at SUFFOLK.LIB.NY.US (Spiro Hamilothoris) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 18:05:30 -0500 Subject: archive Message-ID: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Fri Dec 6 06:17:49 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 01:17:49 EST Subject: Answer to Spectacular Message-ID: In a message dated 12/5/02 3:18:42 PM, dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU writes: <> This is the core of the illusion. That the bulk of the language capability of a typical human arises from that individual. And there's something of "manifest destiny" about the notion. As if we could drop our hypothetical experimental culture-free infant in a cave somewhere and have him come out as an adult having built his own television set, domesticated a variety of food-producing plants and, of course -- speak a language. I'd have to ask Dianne Patterson whether she finds a working television set, going to the moon or advanced calculus any less spectacular than typical human language ability. No animal I know ever carved anything close to Michaelangelo's David or even built a reasonably profitable shopping mall. The point is that Diane sees the difference between human and animal communication as an individual matter, but it may be the part that impresses her does not originate in "individual humans." If we did find an individual who could go off and build, say, a television set from scratch all by himself, should we conclude that its an "emergent phenomena" -- an ability that was inside him all along and just happened to pop out under the "right confluences." Or should we conclude that his "ability" to make a television set was dependent on the accumulated knowledge of hundreds of thousands of other people over thousands of years for the circuit boards, the capacitors and resistors, the chips, the vacuum tube, the very concept of a vacuum, the electron gun, the very concept of electrons, wave theory, the electrical cord, the very concept of electricity, glass-making, plastics, wood-working (if in a wood cabinet), coaxial cable (where available) and of course something to watch. We've so internalized human culture that we are almost totally blind to its ominpresence. And it seems very much what is present when a "typical" human speaks. A individual human armed with only syntax and grammar in his brain doesn't have the survival tools of a dodo "in the wild." What gives language effectiveness and survival value is the accumulated information it carries. The speech of an individual human independent of culture should be about as "spectacular" as dog barking. <> Again, we're forgetting that no human on earth for most of human existence on this planet could understand that e-mail. Writing is not more than 6000 years old. In all the early literature of humankind, there is not a single reference to the fact, for example, that cattle were domesticated by humans through selective breeding from wild species. (And this happened only extremely recently in the overall time humans have been around.) Most of that literature acts as if domesticated animals were placed here by the Diety, up until Darwin et al. We just didn't believe we did it ourselves. What really brought about language and what it is really about seems just as inconcievable to us. So we reach for deus ex. An "emergence." (I personally find it inconceiveable that 120 tons of steel, electronics and overused seat cushions can go up 10 miles in the air and get from here to LA in 4 hours. Now HOW is it possible that humans thought that up? It is about as believeable that a "crude, primitive people" built the pyramids!) It may be that syntax and grammar are to some degree "pre-wired." But that is not language anymore than the beer glass is beer. Beer glasses are wonderful things, but they are pointless without beer. The main function of language appears to be to carry the accumulated information that we may call "culture." Without it humans would be forgetting and re-learning the same things every generation. If it were not for cultural content (the beer), there would be nothing particularly spectacular about human (versus) animal communication -- (the beer glass). <> I'm not sure what inner or outer life had to do with Skinner's explanation of language. (I know he had as a problem with how an "internal life" could be observed.) My problem is picturing what an animal's inner life would be like, given that it is without language. Whenever we portary "internal life" (e.g, Hamlet's or Molly Bloom's soliloquy, or in a movie like "Look who's talking"), we humans are always talking to ourselves in a language we also speak out loud. It is a real trick picturing what an "internal life" would be like without being able to "talk" to oneself. Steve Long From dparvaz at UNM.EDU Fri Dec 6 06:43:40 2002 From: dparvaz at UNM.EDU (Dan Parvaz) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 23:43:40 -0700 Subject: Answer to Spectacular In-Reply-To: <120.1a7465b7.2b219b0d@aol.com> Message-ID: > If we did find an individual who could go off and build, say, a > television set from scratch all by himself, should we conclude that > its an "emergent phenomena" -- an ability that was inside him all > along and just happened to pop out under the "right confluences." I guess I work with a different definition of "emergent" -- one which necessitates complex dynamical systems. To me that means some sort of critical mass of humanity (so far?), PLUS some overlapping set of faculties, PLUS the need to communicate. And perhaps PLUS is multiplication! The recent emergence (or effervescence) of Nicaraguan Sign Language is one indication of the kind of emergence I'm talking about (as opposed to what Pinker said it proved). > Or should we conclude that his "ability" to make a television set was > dependent on[...] something to watch. This isn't helping your case any :-) > A individual human armed with only syntax and grammar in his brain > doesn't have the survival tools of a dodo "in the wild." I've been asked by students in syntax class what use any of this stuff is. They're probably reading this message right now. Thanks a lot. -Dan. From wilcox at UNM.EDU Fri Dec 6 07:13:38 2002 From: wilcox at UNM.EDU (Sherman Wilcox) Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 00:13:38 -0700 Subject: Answer to Spectacular In-Reply-To: <120.1a7465b7.2b219b0d@aol.com> Message-ID: On 12/6/02, Steve Long said: >It is a real trick picturing what an "internal life" would be like >without being able to "talk" to oneself. I have two, admittedly anecdotal, and perhaps not even trustworthy pieces of data about what such an internal life might be like. They both come from people I know, deaf people who, in their early years, were not exposed to language (couldn't hear, no one around them signed). The first was a man I knew who grew up in a very small village in Mexico on the ocean. He told me that as a child he used to watch boats sail out of the harbor and wondered what happened to them when they went out of sight, if they disappeared forever. The second is from a young woman (now an outstanding college student). She was born in another country, deaf from birth, had several different foster parents, who didn't sign, for the first years of her life . Then she was adopted by friends of mine. She arrived in this country by plane at around the age of four, knowing only a few (~10) rudimentary homesigns. Later, when she learned ASL, she told her parents that she remembered flying on the plane, taking off, watching the clouds, getting ged by some nice woman, being afraid, meeting them at the airport, not knowing what was happening, and so forth. Yes, it's messy data -- maybe their "internal life" stories were filled in with these detail only later, after they could talk/sign (I doubt it for the second story). But their stories suggest that at least some sort of internal life is possible without being able to talk or sign to oneself, that it is possible to have an inner life of thoughts and fears and curiosities without language. -- Sherman From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Fri Dec 6 15:34:57 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 10:34:57 EST Subject: Evolution and Language "Emergence" Message-ID: I wrote: > If we did find an individual who could go off and build, say, a > television set from scratch all by himself, should we conclude that > its an "emergent phenomena" -- an ability that was inside him all > along and just happened to pop out under the "right confluences." In a message dated 12/6/02 1:40:07 AM, dparvaz at UNM.EDU writes: <> It's important to distinguish between emergent traits in the development of an individual versus emergent traits in evolution. (The famous old dictum that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" can and has been misleading, though -- as Syd Lamb pointed out in an earlier post -- language development in a child should give us clues about the evolutionary gap in primate language.) The traditional 19th century scientific definition of "emergent" (see eg the original OED) was "an effect produced by a combination of several causes, but not capable of being regarded as the sum of their individual effects. Opposed to resultant." It was early, if not first, used by the George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) (in the series "Problems in Life and Mind" which included "The Physical Basis of Mind" ) who used it to explain the non-"automatonistic" but "biological" operation of the mind. The mind having a "a twofold root, man being not only an animal organism but an unit in the social organism; and hence the complete theory of its functions and faculties must be sought in this twofold direction.” So the word "emergent" did not first attempt to explain how mind or language evolved, but how it worked -- an important difference. In fact, I don't think Lewes idea of mind (if not language) qualitatively differentiated between animal and human. And that's because of his holistic view of "mind". (“It is the man, and not the brain, that thinks: it is the organism as a whole, and not one organ, that feels and acts.”) When "emergent" starts being used to describe the evolution of a trait (not a gene, a trait), we run into a problem. A non-functional trait sitting around with nothing to do for eons, waiting for a function does not make evolutionary sense. New accidental functions for old structures that developed for old functions (e.g., feathers and wings) do happen. But a talent for playing piano had to be doing something else while it waited for Chopin show up. The complex vocal cords of humans, for example, had to have had a function while they were developing. If other primates do not have or lost that complexity, somewhere along the line between that lack of complexity and human complexity, complexity itself was being favored in humans. What would favor the development of complex vocal production? Did our "cave people" ancestors vocalize their wooly mammoth prey to death? And so the strong indication is that the biological basis of language developed naturalistically out of the animal communicative function. Unless we can figure out what those organs were doing in the mean time, we are on safe ground concluding they were always functioning to communicate throughout their development. And that makes language the RESULT of earlier animal communications. There is nothing to indicate language EMERGED in evolutionary history. I wrote: > A individual human armed with only syntax and grammar in his brain > doesn't have the survival tools of a dodo "in the wild." Dan wrote: <> An internal combustion engine alone will not get you on the freeway or, on a grander scale, tell you where you are or should be going. I guess if you just want to be a driver, you really don't have to know how an internal combustion engine works. But if you ever have to look under the hood, there's a lot of reasons to be prepared for what you will be seeing. Steve Long From l.lagerwerf at scw.vu.nl Fri Dec 6 16:01:48 2002 From: l.lagerwerf at scw.vu.nl (Luuk Lagerwerf) Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 17:01:48 +0100 Subject: First Call for papers: MAD03 Message-ID: Please find below the first call for papers for MAD03 Luuk Lagerwerf 5th International Workshop on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse October 22th-25th, 2003 Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse 2003 (MAD'03) is the fifth in a series of small-scale, high-quality workshops that have been organised every second year since 1995 (Egmond-aan-zee (NL), 1995; Utrecht (NL), 1997; Edinburgh (GB), 1999; Ittre (BE), 2001). Its aim is to bring together researchers from different disciplines, in particular theoretical and applied linguists, computational linguists, and psycholinguists, to exchange information and learn from each other on a common topic of investigation: text and discourse. Workshop Theme In this edition of the workshop, MAD’03 aims at bringing together social scientists and linguists by pursuing the following theme: Determination of Information and Tenor in Texts. Topics of the workshop are exemplified by, but not limited to, questions like: * How is content (or information) extracted from text? * How does one systematically infer stances from texts? * What determines differences in interpretation between readers? * How do (automated) discourse representations come about? * How can linguistic properties be put to use for analysis of large text collections? * What do co-occurrences of words tell about discourses? * How does text type or genre change the interpretation of text variables? * How do new media change the use of text variables and genres? Keynote speakers Klaus Schönbach, Universiteit van Amsterdam (NL) Peter Foltz, New Mexico State University (NM) Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh (UK) Paul Deane, Educational Testing Service (NJ) Workshop Location The workshop and lodging will be in conference centre De Bergse Bossen, located in the forests of Driebergen, a village near Utrecht. Travelling by train to Schiphol Airport or the city of Amsterdam takes less than an hour. Workshop Design In the workshop, about 20 people will be presenting an accepted paper in plenary sessions. The total number of participants will be limited to 40. Anonymous review of full papers will be carried out in order to guarantee high quality of papers. The organisers also strive to publish all accepted papers in workshop proceedings at the start of the workshop. After the workshop, a selection of papers are likely to be published in a special issue of an appropriate journal (see the references). Call for papers Deadline for submission of full papers addressing one of the questions of the workshop is May 1st, 2003. On the website of MAD03, http://home.scw.vu.nl/~lagerwerf/Mad03Web/index.htm, specific guidelines for submission are given. Workshop Organisers Luuk Lagerwerf, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL) Wilbert Spooren, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL) Liesbeth Degand, Université catholique de Louvain (BE) MAD’03 is hosted by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Netherlands School of Communication Research (NESCoR; in the persons of Prof. Dr. J. Kleinnijenhuis, Vrije Universiteit; Prof. Dr. P.J. Schellens, Universiteit Twente). Workshop Theme Description In many approaches to discourse analysis in linguistics, and content or media analysis in social sciences, methods have been developed to extract information from texts systematically. Apart from extracting information, many different approaches have also been aiming to determine the tenor of texts. In this small-scale intensive workshop, we want to encourage discussion between researchers from different backgrounds. The workshop will have significance for document design as well as content analysis. In both cases, it is important to analyse processes of recognition and evaluation of information in text. Also, linguistic properties of texts may serve as cues for systematising these processes. Other related areas are the fields of persuasion and argumentation, and discourse psychology, discourse analysis, and computational modelling of discourse processes. By using statistical approaches based on co-occurrences, judgments of diverse aspects of texts may be delivered automatically. Together, these approaches make it possible to build information structures of texts, make abstracts automatically, or disclose tendencies in the content of multiple texts. In each of these approaches, it is important to realize that text type (or genre) is perhaps one of the most determining factors in extracting information, evaluating information or examining linguistic aspects of text. Regarding the workshop topics, this factor will be controlled by either taking news texts as the default text type, or taking text type itself as a topic to determine its influence on information, tenor or linguistic aspects. The application of any of these approaches to the design or analysis of new media provides a very interesting extension of the topics of the workshop. Schedule Announcement of the workshop: December 6th, 2002 Call for papers: February 3rd, 2003 Deadline (full papers): May 1st, 2003 Notice of acceptance: July 1st, 2003 Deliverance final papers: August 1st, 2003 References A short impression of the previous workshop MAD’01 can be obtained at: http://www.fltr.ucl.ac.be/FLTR/GERM/lingne/Degand/MAD/mad-presentation.htm Previous workshops resulted in the following publications: - Degand, L., Y. Bestgen & W. Spooren & L. v. Waes (eds.; 2001). Multidisciplinary approaches to discourse (pp. 183-194). Münster: Nodus Publikationen. - Knott, A., J. Oberlander & T. Sanders (eds.; 2001). Special Issue: Levels of Representation in Discourse Relations, Cognitive Linguistics 12 (3). - Risselada, R. & W. Spooren (eds.; 1998). Special issue: Discourse markers and coherence relations. Journal of Pragmatics 30 (2). - Sanders, T., J. Schilperoord & W. Spooren (eds.; 2001). Text Representation: Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects. Amsterdam: Benjamins. - Spooren, W. & R. Risselada (eds.; 1997). Special issue: Discourse markers. Discourse Processes 24 (1). From dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Dec 6 17:30:43 2002 From: dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU) Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 10:30:43 -0700 Subject: Answer to Spectacular In-Reply-To: <120.1a7465b7.2b219b0d@aol.com> Message-ID: Dianne getting sucked in.... ....... ..... ... .. . . >In a message dated 12/5/02 3:18:42 PM, dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU writes: ><recombination, in and of itself, is not unique to language. But, the language >ability displayed by a typical adult human being is greater than the some >of such parts....call it an "emergent" phenomenon...something spectacular that >happens when you have the right confluence of capabilities.>> >This is the core of the illusion. That the bulk of the language capability >of a typical human arises from that individual. And there's something of >"manifest destiny" about the notion. I am astounded by the interpretation...why, if a phenomemnon seems to emerge from complex interaction of factors is it individual? Why is it manifest destiny? Obviously environment is a BIG part of it....Am I in trouble now for shooting my mouth off? >As if we could drop our hypothetical experimental culture-free infant in a >cave somewhere and have him come out as an adult having built his own >television set, domesticated a variety of food-producing plants and, of >course -- speak a language. I, of course, agree that this is ridiculous....darned if I know how you got here from what I said...perhaps my own language capabilities are severely stunted in some way which prevents me from communicating well? >I'd have to ask Dianne Patterson whether she finds a working television set, >going to the moon or advanced calculus any less spectacular than typical >human language ability. I didn't intend to get into the business of ranking things as more or less spectacular....how did we get here? > No animal I know ever carved anything close to >Michaelangelo's David or even built a reasonably profitable shopping mall. I have polled my animal friends and they all agree that they have not created any great sculptures or shopping malls lately...(neither have I for that matter, but I did make a pretty cool clay whistle recently). >The point is that Diane sees the difference between human and animal >communication as an individual matter, but it may be the part that impresses >her does not originate in "individual humans." Whoa....stunned again...what is all this individual stuff I apparently have my foot stuck in? help! help! Let me out. >If we did find an individual who could go off and build, say, a television >set from scratch all by himself, should we conclude that its an "emergent >phenomena" -- an ability that was inside him all along and just happened >to pop out under the "right confluences." > >Steve Long Aha, I see, I failed to mention culture...Steve, I'm afraid I jumped into the conversation without reading the whole long back and forth (just read the letter I actually responded to)...you are, apparently concerned that I didn't mention culture as a crucial force in developing our abilities. I guess you've placed me squarely in the counter-culture camp ;) ...you are absolutely right to point out the importance of culture (IMHO)...I could not have made that whistle without a lot of support....I could not have learned language either. I think the end result of CULTURAL influences and our built in stuff is pretty amazing. I'm sure I can't imagine all the complex ways in which culture supports language and vice versa. I'm sure there are other things I've left out...and that I'll hear about them. Have a great holiday season...I need to go make some graphs. Dianne From sylvester.osu at WANADOO.FR Sun Dec 8 08:17:19 2002 From: sylvester.osu at WANADOO.FR (sylvester.osu) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 09:17:19 +0100 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: While replying to Bill Croft's posting (see below), T. Wood wrote: >>I prefer to refer to the former as evolution and the latter as history. Less confusing, and less likely to give the impression that the social aspect of language change is absent in favour of some kind of biological determinism: e.g. Africans have 'less developed languages' because they are racially/biologically 'less developed'. Tahir Wood's "African" example doesn't sound quite in order to me here. Who has ever decided that Africans have 'less developed languages'? Less developed than which other languages? Tahir Wood might not mean any bad in citing this example. However, I think that in the year 2002/3, i.e. very many decades after von Humboldt and his predecessors, statements like his should be abandoned even when they don't mean anything bad. I think that though we still have a lot to learn about Language and languages, linguistics has acquired enough knowledge concerning the rapport between language and culture, and language and society as to know that it makes no sense talking of more developed or less developed languages. Such phrases offer no good illustration of any question treated in linguistics at all. Rather, they tend to instill in some weak minds the contrary of what we mean. So let's beware of the examples we give. Thank you all, and have a nice Xmas holiday. Sylvester ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tahir Wood" To: Sent: Monday, December 02, 2002 8:36 AM Subject: Re: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' >>> Bill Croft 11/29/02 06:56PM >>> One must distinguish between the evolution of language and the evolution of languages. The former is the evolution of human cognition and social behavior that permitted the rise of modern human language. This is of course an instance of biological evolution, of human beings. The latter is the process by which linguistic elements change over time. This is an evolutionary process, that is it involves change by replication; but it is not the same evolutionary process as biological evolution. I prefer to refer to the former as evolution and the latter as history. Less confusing, and less likely to give the impression that the social aspect of language change is absent in favour of some kind of biological determinism: e.g. Africans have 'less developed languages' because they are racially/biologically 'less developed'. Tahir From degraff at MIT.EDU Sun Dec 8 19:00:26 2002 From: degraff at MIT.EDU (Michel DeGraff) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 14:00:26 -0500 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 08 Dec 2002 09:17:19 +0100." <00da01c29ea0$5c1c26e0$599bfac1@SylvesterOsu> Message-ID: Sylvester Osu wrote: > I think that though we still have a lot to learn about Language and > languages, linguistics has acquired enough knowledge concerning the > rapport between language and culture, and language and society as to > know that it makes no sense talking of more developed or less > developed languages. Such phrases offer no good illustration of any > question treated in linguistics at all. Actually the question whether some languages are less developed than others is unfortunately still very much at the forefront of contemporary creolistics. Please see a commentary I wrote on this question in Linguistic Typology 5.2/3, 2001. This entire issue of the journal was about the claim that "the world's simplest grammars are Creole grammars". My article is available on my web page at: http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/degraff/darwin/anti-simplest.html -michel. ___________________________________________________________________________ MIT Linguistics & Philosophy, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA 02139-4307 degraff at MIT.EDU http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/degraff.home.html ___________________________________________________________________________ From parkvall at LING.SU.SE Sun Dec 8 21:12:00 2002 From: parkvall at LING.SU.SE (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 22:12:00 +0100 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <200212081900.OAA09875@titilayo.mit.edu> Message-ID: Michel DeGraff wrote: >Actually the question whether some languages are less developed than >others is unfortunately still very much at the forefront of >contemporary creolistics. For those who did not follow the debate out of which DeGraff's article was born, a clarification is in place. The ideas that DeGraff takes issue with do _not_ claim that certain languages are more developed in the sense of being "more expressive", but rather that some languages contain a larger number of features not motivated by communicative needs (such as grammatical gender or irregular verbs). Although DeGraff makes his best to miss this point, there is no one in contemporary creolistics who believes that creoles are inferior means of communication. Mikael Parkvall From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Sun Dec 8 21:39:25 2002 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 16:39:25 EST Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 08 Dec 2002 22:12:00 +0100." <5.1.0.14.0.20021208220500.00a9d8a0@130.237.171.193> Message-ID: Mikael Parkvall wrote: >Michel DeGraff wrote: > >>Actually the question whether some languages are less developed than >>others is unfortunately still very much at the forefront of >>contemporary creolistics. > >For those who did not follow the debate out of which DeGraff's article was >born, a clarification is in place. The ideas that DeGraff takes issue with >do _not_ claim that certain languages are more developed in the sense of >being "more expressive", but rather that some languages contain a larger >number of features not motivated by communicative needs (such as >grammatical gender or irregular verbs). Although DeGraff makes his best to >miss this point, there is no one in contemporary creolistics who believes >that creoles are inferior means of communication. Excuse me but you have just given the clearest evidence imaginable that the attitude of which De Graff speaks is alive and well! Hint: It's the syntax -- i.e. those pesky things that 'are not motivated by communicative needs' -- that are at issue here. From parkvall at LING.SU.SE Sun Dec 8 22:39:57 2002 From: parkvall at LING.SU.SE (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 23:39:57 +0100 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <200212082139.gB8LdP06026910@central.cis.upenn.edu> Message-ID: Ellen Prince wrote: >Hint: It's the syntax -- i.e. those pesky things that 'are not >motivated by communicative needs' -- that are at issue here. I'm not sure I understood Ellen's objection, but I am of course not suggesting that syntax per se is communicatively unmotivated. All languages contain stuff, some of it in syntax, some of it in other areas, which are difficult to regard as communicatively motivated. I cannot see how this would illustrate that "the attitude of which De Graff speaks is alive and well!" -- after all, it is pretty clear from the article he refers to that the attitude he is talking about is the once-common view (usually based on sheer racism) that creoles are linguistic cripples. Mikael Parkvall From Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK Sun Dec 8 22:41:21 2002 From: Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK (Dan Everett) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 22:41:21 +0000 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <200212082139.gB8LdP06026910@central.cis.upenn.edu> Message-ID: If functional linguistics is right to believe that (most of) syntax is motivated by communicative needs, then Ellen's quote below should be underscored cannot be ignored by people seriously concerned with the relationship between syntax and communicative function (I interpret Ellen's quote as ironic), e.g. the readership of this list. That is, saying that Creole languages are equally communicative as nonCreoles, while simultaneously being syntactically simpler, is likely oxymoronic. To say it is both is trying to have your cake and eat it too, at least if you believe that communicative function accounts for much of syntax. Of course, to compare languages' relative syntactic complexity is not merely a matter of adding up morphemes. Such a comparison is very hard. Though I haven't yet read DeGraff's contribution, it sounds more plausible on the surface of things than Parkvall's remarks, though, because it seems to take syntax more seriously than what I could gather from Parkvall's quote. I suppose that, if one could show that there is a lot of syntax which is nothing more than diachronic detritus, with no contribution to communication, then one might maintain that Creoles, being newer, are 'simpler' in having less 'trash'. But I suspect that no one is going to find this a very useful way of understanding the residue of historical change, i.e. that any significant portion of it has no communicative value. (Moreover, Bill Croft's theory of historical change, via the evolutionary model it employs, is in a particularly good position to say why this is.) So is Creole syntax (not the number of inflectional or derivational morphemes it has, which is a non-useful metric) as complex as non-Creole syntax? That seems to be part of DeGraff's research results and programme and a worthwhile, complex endeavor. -- Dan Everett > Ellen Prince said: ******** > Hint: It's the syntax -- i.e. those pesky things that 'are not > motivated by communicative needs' -- that are at issue here. > From bresnan at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Sun Dec 8 23:02:51 2002 From: bresnan at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Joan Bresnan) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 15:02:51 -0800 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Your message of Sun, 08 Dec 2002 22:41:21 GMT. <20021208221448.Y68765-100000@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Message-ID: > Though I haven't yet read DeGraff's contribution, it sounds more plausible > on the surface of things than Parkvall's remarks, though, because it > seems to take syntax more seriously than what I could gather from > Parkvall's quote. > Dan, you really ought to read the references before you comment on them. I don't wish to make personal remarks about others on this list, but a neutral observer might find DeGraff's Linguistic Typology commentary to be an intemperate rant that crosses the boundaries of academic civility. "Trying hard to miss the point"--paraphrasing Parkvall--is a very kind way to describe it. Joan From parkvall at LING.SU.SE Sun Dec 8 23:11:26 2002 From: parkvall at LING.SU.SE (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 00:11:26 +0100 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <20021208221448.Y68765-100000@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Message-ID: Dan Everett wrote: >I suppose that, if one could show that there is a lot of syntax which is >nothing more than diachronic detritus, with no contribution to >communication, then one might maintain that Creoles, being newer, are >'simpler' in having less 'trash'. Yes, that's exactly it. Although Dan clearly doesn't agree with me, I glad to see that he does get my point. The most crucial difference between DeGraff and me is that he doesn't believe that creoles are "young" languages, but rather that they are daugters of their languages in the same way as French is a daughter of Latin. A problem, of course, is how much is "much"? Again, I would never claim that most of a languages structure is communicatively useless. But I do maintain that significant parts of it are indeed "diachronic detritus". All languages have their quirks, be it in the form of irregularities, suppletion, portmanteau morphs, articulatorily unmotivated allomorphy, semantically unfounded (from a synchronic point of view) noun classification, and so on. The fact that much of this is tossed over board in pidginisation and is not reinvented in creolisation is, I think, a good indication that it doesn't serve much of a purpose. As for the expressiveness of human languages, no one has of course been able to prove thet they are all equally expressive. Until this is done (which is most likely "never"), I have no problem with the axiomatic assumption that they are indeed all equally expressive. My experience, however, is that most linguists have not reflected much on the relationship between "complex" and "expressive", and therefore tend to believe that it automatically follows that all languages are equally complex. I can't see any motivation for this second assumption. A simple example to show that the two don't go hand in hand: Pig latin is more complex than English, in having an extra rule. But it is not more expressive, since the sum of possible sentences in Pig Latin equals the sum of possible sentences in English. Mikael Parkvall From dgolumbi at PANIX.COM Sun Dec 8 23:45:24 2002 From: dgolumbi at PANIX.COM (David Golumbia) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 18:45:24 -0500 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <20021208221448.Y68765-100000@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> from "Dan Everett" at Dec 08, 2002 10:41:21 PM Message-ID: I had already meant to suggest Professor DeGraff's tremendous essay on this subject as a corrective to Bickerton's views, and I note he did not also mention this recent publication of his which is an important read for anyone interested in many related topics: Michael DeGraff, "Morphology in Creole Genesis: Linguistics and Ideology," 53-122, in Michael J. Kenstowicz (ed.), _Ken Hale: A Life in Language_ (MIT Press, 2001). "simple" indeed. > Though I haven't yet read DeGraff's contribution, it sounds more plausible > on the surface of things than Parkvall's remarks, though, because it > seems to take syntax more seriously than what I could gather from > -- dgolumbi at panix.com David Golumbia From degraff at MIT.EDU Mon Dec 9 00:12:13 2002 From: degraff at MIT.EDU (Michel DeGraff) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 19:12:13 -0500 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 08 Dec 2002 15:02:51 PST." <200212082302.gB8N2qm28966@hypatia.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: Joan Bresnan wrote: > Dan, you really ought to read the references before you comment on > them. I don't wish to make personal remarks about others on this > list, but a neutral observer might find DeGraff's Linguistic > Typology commentary to be an intemperate rant that crosses the > boundaries of academic civility. I second Joan Bresnan's point that one should read my article at http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/degraff/darwin/anti-simplest.html before commenting on it. For one thing, "academic civility", like beauty, is often in the eyes of the beholder. -michel. ___________________________________________________________________________ MIT Linguistics & Philosophy, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA 02139-4307 degraff at MIT.EDU http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/degraff.home.html ___________________________________________________________________________ From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Mon Dec 9 08:00:21 2002 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel Everett) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 08:00:21 +0000 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <200212082302.gB8N2qm28966@hypatia.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: Joan, Point well-taken. I was not endorsing Michel's article per se and if it seemed that I was, that was a mistake on my part. Of course, I need to read it before I endorse it. I was saying that in comparing his description of it in his letter with Parkvall's comments on it. My main point is that we should be careful of saying what is in the grammar for communicative power and what is merely syntax, e.g. gender, perfect tense, etc. because there is a lot of work to do to tell these two conceptually distinct issues apart in practice. Dan On Sunday, December 8, 2002, at 11:02 PM, Joan Bresnan wrote: >> Though I haven't yet read DeGraff's contribution, it sounds more >> plausible >> on the surface of things than Parkvall's remarks, though, because it >> seems to take syntax more seriously than what I could gather from >> Parkvall's quote. >> > > Dan, you really ought to read the references before you comment on > them. I don't wish to make personal remarks about others on this > list, but a neutral observer might find DeGraff's Linguistic Typology > commentary to be an intemperate rant that crosses the boundaries of > academic civility. "Trying hard to miss the point"--paraphrasing > Parkvall--is a very kind way to describe it. > > Joan > > ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Chair of Phonetics and Phonology Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/ FAX & Department phone: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Mon Dec 9 15:27:20 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 10:27:20 EST Subject: Underestimating Language Message-ID: In a message dated 12/8/02 6:10:47 PM, parkvall at LING.SU.SE writes: << Again, I would never claim that most of a languages structure is communicatively useless. But I do maintain that significant parts of it are indeed "diachronic detritus". All languages have their quirks, be it in the form of irregularities, suppletion, portmanteau morphs, articulatorily unmotivated allomorphy, semantically unfounded (from a synchronic point of view) noun classification, and so on. The fact that much of this is tossed over board in pidginisation and is not reinvented in creolisation is, I think, a good indication that it doesn't serve much of a purpose. >> The irony of Latin ("diachronic detritus") being used above points to the fact that one man's flotsom and jetsam is another man's raft. Recognizing "communication" out of context can be a difficult thing. But we might still admit as good evolutionary scientists that there are "vestigal organs" that persist despite having lost their functionality. A more correct analysis of such a situation is that it would be more disruptive to overall function or simply energy inefficient to drop such out-of-date features than it is to just retain them. It would be more detrimental to reorganize an organism to remove a vestigal organ than to just let it persist. If we evaluate languages as if creating an abstractly efficient language was more important than "synchronic" communication, we might think that there is some luxury available to speakers and listeners in these matters. But irregular verbs are what is expected in a language that uses irregular verbs. And using irregular verbs in such a language is a way to make sure that improvements in language don't get in the way of communication. We keep forgetting the listener in this equation and his convenience. The use of "I be" versus "I am" (aside from its secondary social status implications) is a distraction from the message itself to certain listeners, one that a speaker might try to avoid for basic communicative purposes. A good understanding of the "simplicity" of creole can be found in Stephen Jay Gould's comments on the subject (e.g., in Speaking of Snails and Scales in Dinosaur in a Haystack). In the context where creoles arise, the simplicity of creole may be the superior communicative solution. Whether Creole is a new language or a comparatively derived descendent of French, neither a pidgin nor French served the specific types of information IN CONTEXT that were being exchanged as well as Creole. If we assume communication value first, then we can also understand that the excess baggage that Creole "dropped" has its own uses in other contexts. I know that pointing to context is inconvenient when one is trying to generalize phenomena. But I'd suggest it is the methodology here that is creating the impression that communication is not the overpowering objective in these languages. In all the examples given by Mikael Parkvall, can it seriously be suggested that primary motivation of the speaker is not communication? Are we to think that "articulatorily unmotivated allomorphy" or "semantically unfounded (from a synchronic point of view) noun classification" are meant to reduce information between speaker and listener? Even a speaker whose purpose is obfuscation aims to appear to be communicating. A far better interpretation is that a "simple" language arises because its users do not have the luxury of embroidery or time-honored idiosyncracies. Its speakers and listeners are synchronically using the best structure available in context. Steve Long From parkvall at LING.SU.SE Mon Dec 9 16:26:12 2002 From: parkvall at LING.SU.SE (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 17:26:12 +0100 Subject: Underestimating Language In-Reply-To: <14.4138145.2b261058@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: >Are we to think that "articulatorily unmotivated allomorphy" or "semantically >unfounded (from a synchronic point of view) noun classification" are meant to >reduce information between speaker and listener? No, what I am suggesting is that the same message can be conveyed in a difficult way and an easy way (not to mention all the possible shades in between). The "junk" features I mentioned, and which Steve cites, do not reduce the information value, but they add unnecessary complexity insofar as they require one more rule in the ideal grammatical description of the language (whether or not this corresponds to an additional burden in acquisition or processing is another, albeit related, matter). In other words, the "simple" language can be said to doe its job more efficiently than the "complex" language, provided that they both convey the same information. Otherwise, I pretty much agree with Steve's comments. /MP * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Mikael Parkvall Institutionen för lingvistik Stockholms Universitet SE-10691 STOCKHOLM (rum 276) +46 (0)8 16 14 41, +46 (0)8 656 68 24 (hem) Fax: +46 (0)8 15 53 89 parkvall at ling.su.se From wilcox at UNM.EDU Mon Dec 9 17:05:06 2002 From: wilcox at UNM.EDU (Sherman Wilcox) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 10:05:06 -0700 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <20021208221448.Y68765-100000@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Message-ID: On 12/8/02, Dan Everett said: >If functional linguistics is right to believe that (most of) syntax is >motivated by communicative needs I would hope that functional linguists don't believe this. I would no more claim that "syntax is motivated by communicative needs" than an evolutionary biologist would claim that structure is motivated by functional needs. -- Sherman Wilcox Department of Linguistics University of New Mexico From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Mon Dec 9 17:39:15 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 12:39:15 EST Subject: The Necessity of Syntax Message-ID: In a message dated 12/9/02 12:05:31 PM, wilcox at UNM.EDU writes: << I would hope that functional linguists don't believe this. I would no more claim that "syntax is motivated by communicative needs" than an evolutionary biologist would claim that structure is motivated by functional needs. >> An evolutionary biologist would not claim structure is "motivated" by "functional needs." But I don't know of any remotely conventional biologist who would NOT claim that biological structure is shaped by function, i.e., by the success or lack of success the structure has in terms of survival. If syntax is not shaped by a communicative function, if it is not there to contribute to the functionality of interhuman information exchange, then what is it shaped by? Is it decorative or random? Is the concept of syntax unnecessary to a anything resembling a functioning human language? Can we think of a similarly effective form of language totally without the equivalent of syntax? One where we are sure that syntax's function can be totally dropped without impairing information flow? Just as a biological organism must conform to the laws of physics and chemistry, we might assume that syntax represents an essential solution in language. These rules being dictated by what must pass between speaker and listener in order for a certain amount or quality of information to be conveyed. We might assume, without syntax, information would be lost. And that we did not make these rules, the rules made us. If there is a way of creating a language totally without the function served by syntax, this assumption is wrong. But, otherwise, it makes sense to conclude that syntax is mandated by the way the world works and the way complex information must flow. Just as biological forms are shaped by functionality in the environment. And that any human language -- prewired or invented by humans -- will have syntax if it is to function as well as human languages do. Steve Long From oesten at LING.SU.SE Mon Dec 9 18:21:11 2002 From: oesten at LING.SU.SE (=?iso-8859-1?Q?=D6sten_Dahl?=) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 19:21:11 +0100 Subject: The Necessity of Syntax Message-ID: Exactly what does "syntax is motivated by communicative needs" mean? Does it mean that individual syntactic rules are motivated by communicative needs? This is what Dan Everett's formulation "(most of) syntax is motivated by communicative needs" implies. But if one language puts adjectives before nouns, another puts nouns first, and a third language allows for both possibilities, are all these choices motivated by communicative needs? Or is it the existence of syntax as such that is motivated by communicative needs? That is what Steve Long seems to mean when he says "any human language -- prewired or invented by humans -- will have syntax if it is to function as well as human languages do". But that will hardly help us in comparing different languages as to complexity, since presumably all languages have some kind of syntax. And the postings seem to be talking past each other. - Östen Dahl From tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Mon Dec 9 18:31:55 2002 From: tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Tom Givon) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 10:31:55 -0800 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: I think maybe something can be said about the relation between adaptively-motivated syntax and diachronic change. Adaptive (functional, communicative) motivation is not simple; it most often involves multiple factors and competing motivations. The well-known grammaticalization cycle is just one general case in point: The later stages of 'de-grammaticalization' (see several articles in A. Giacalone-Ramat and P. Hopper, eds, TSL #37, 1998) reveal the intervention of phonological erosion which creates irregular, hard-to-learn ('counter-iconic') grammatical constructions (and morphologies). But there are a gadzillion more-specific instances in the life cycle of individual syntactic constructions. During the early phase of functional-extension via functional similarity and thus 'dual use' (say, re-interpreting the purely stative adjectival construction "The window was broken" as a result-of-action/event, "The window has been broken (by someone)"), a structure long adapted for one function is now used to code another, for which it is much less well-adapted (indeed, communicatively msleading; in this case signalling 'state' but coding 'event-with-de-topicalized-agent'). Only after some subsequent structural changes do the two functions differentiate structurally ("The window was broken (by someone)". But other functional innovations (in addition to phonological erosion) may intervene, with their own unimpeachable--but different & often conflicting--adaptive motivation. Thus, for example, the later rise of the GET-passive in English yielded a structure that came from a totally different diachronic source (reflexive-of-causative) and initial functional motivation, but eventually became both functionally and structurally rather similar to the BE-passive, resulting in considerable usage variation & confusion. In all this, diachronic change is very much like biological evolution. In both, the intial impetus for changes is adaptive but profoundly local. In both, multiple local factors often conflict (the left hand seldom tells the right what it is up to). This gives both evolution & diachrony the unmistakable "tinkered" (as opposed to "engineered") flavor. And the resulting synchronic sytructures in both reveal, paradoxical, many counted-adaptive features (a la Rube Goldberg...). But still, the processes that leads to the rise of such 'counter-iconic' end products--decrepit conjugation, insane declentions, wild portmanteaux, decptive morphophonemics, dead relics that retain clear structural presence (the appendix)--were nevertheless adaptively motivated. The upshot of all this is that an adaptive approach to language (or biology) cannot be practiced as a simplistic creed with the mantra "At all time all synchronic structures must be, transparently, 100% motivated--or else functionalism is falsified". Rather, it is a long-term and oft-frustrating research program that strives to understand the incredible complexity of the process that gives rise to both iconic and counter-iconic features of the communicative code. This may be fiendishly difficult, but in attempting to cope with our predicament, we are traveling in excellent company. Cheers, TG =========================== Daniel Everett wrote: > Joan, > > Point well-taken. I was not endorsing Michel's article per se and if it > seemed that I was, that was a mistake on my part. Of course, I need to > read it before I endorse it. I was saying that in comparing his > description of it in his letter with Parkvall's comments on it. > > My main point is that we should be careful of saying what is in the > grammar for communicative power and what is merely syntax, e.g. gender, > perfect tense, etc. because there is a lot of work to do to tell these > two conceptually distinct issues apart in practice. > > Dan > > On Sunday, December 8, 2002, at 11:02 PM, Joan Bresnan wrote: > > >> Though I haven't yet read DeGraff's contribution, it sounds more > >> plausible > >> on the surface of things than Parkvall's remarks, though, because it > >> seems to take syntax more seriously than what I could gather from > >> Parkvall's quote. > >> > > > > Dan, you really ought to read the references before you comment on > > them. I don't wish to make personal remarks about others on this > > list, but a neutral observer might find DeGraff's Linguistic Typology > > commentary to be an intemperate rant that crosses the boundaries of > > academic civility. "Trying hard to miss the point"--paraphrasing > > Parkvall--is a very kind way to describe it. > > > > Joan > > > > > > ------------------------------------------ > > Daniel L. Everett > Chair of Phonetics and Phonology > Department of Linguistics > The University of Manchester > Oxford Road > Manchester, UK M13 9PL > http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/ > FAX & Department phone: 44-161-275-3187 > Office: 44-161-275-3158 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kjohnson at LING.OHIO-STATE.EDU Mon Dec 9 19:15:59 2002 From: kjohnson at LING.OHIO-STATE.EDU (keith johnson) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 14:15:59 -0500 Subject: Underestimating Language In-Reply-To: <14.4138145.2b261058@aol.com> Message-ID: This discussion of communication and diachronic detrius is interesting. As I've been reading the posts I've been thinking about how communication using the forms of language may convey quite a lot more than simply logical form or propositional content. For instance, language functions as a marker of group identity. You know how some forms of music are filled with flourishes - grace notes and the like - while other forms make striking use of silence (the positions and durations of the rests)? The style of the music (like group identity) is conveyed by conforming to the conventions of that style, and in a sense the silence is just as "communicative" as the grace notes. Keith Johnson From ceford at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Mon Dec 9 21:45:47 2002 From: ceford at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (Cecilia E. Ford) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 13:45:47 -0800 Subject: Underestimating Language In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There's also all the fundamental functions that allow us to coordinate our talk with one another in real time. I.e., projection of turn trajectories and points of possible completion.... -Ceci At 02:15 PM 12/9/02 -0500, you wrote: >This discussion of communication and diachronic detrius is interesting. > >As I've been reading the posts I've been thinking about how >communication using the forms of language may convey quite a lot more >than simply logical form or propositional content. For instance, >language functions as a marker of group identity. > >You know how some forms of music are filled with flourishes - grace >notes and the like - while other forms make striking use of silence (the >positions and durations of the rests)? The style of the music (like >group identity) is conveyed by conforming to the conventions of that >style, and in a sense the silence is just as "communicative" as the >grace notes. > >Keith Johnson Cecilia E. Ford Professor Department of English 600 N. Park St. University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison WI 53706 USA ceford at facstaff.wisc.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dick at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK Mon Dec 9 20:17:11 2002 From: dick at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK (Dick Hudson) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 20:17:11 +0000 Subject: The necessity of syntax Message-ID: Dear Oesten and Funknet, Are we in danger of confusing syntax and grammar? It seems pretty obvious to me at least that even if languages have similar amounts of complexity it may be distributed differently between syntax and morphology. Marianne Mithun gave a wonderful tutorial on Mohawk to the LAGB some years ago which left some of us wondering whether Mohawk has any syntax at all - lots of morphology, lots of coreference etc handled by pragmatics, but nothing that could obviously be called syntax. Of course the boundary between morphology and syntax is a matter of debate and no doubt it's possible to write a GB/MP grammar of a language such as Mohawk which puts all the morphology into the syntax. But we should at least recognise morphology as an area of complexity and expressivity. Dick Hudson >Or is it the existence of syntax as such that is >motivated by communicative needs? That is what Steve Long seems to mean >when he says "any human language -- prewired or invented by humans -- >will have syntax if it is to function as well as human languages do". >But that will hardly help us in comparing different languages as to >complexity, since presumably all languages have some kind of syntax. And >the postings seem to be talking past each other. > >- Vsten Dahl > > Richard (= Dick) Hudson Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. +44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108; http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Mon Dec 9 21:31:21 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 16:31:21 EST Subject: The Necessity of Syntax Message-ID: In a message dated 12/9/02 1:19:05 PM, oesten at LING.SU.SE writes: << But if one language puts adjectives before nouns, another puts nouns first, and a third language allows for both possibilities, are all these choices motivated by communicative needs? >> There is fur and feathers and scales. Do the contingencies of environmental survival "motivate" all of them? Yes. Are there different local environments that might give rise to different solutions? Yes. Can two different solutions arise to satisfy the same function? Yes. Do all function to acheive the same ultimate outcome? Yes? Are the differences more important than the basic underlying function of all three? The idea is that syntax or its equivalent fundamentally arose because it enhanced communication. The particular shape it takes does not take away from that fundamental function. The particular shape is a matter of local time and place. Time and place may change how language might be shaped to serve that function. It does not change the function of syntax. <> When the difference is fur or feathers or scales, it hardly helps us ever to forget that local environments dictate different answers for the same function. Communication is as multifaceted as the physical environment. So if the basic communicative function "hardly helps us" understand syntax, I'd suggest nothing will. Again, structure cannot be correctly explained without context, because the same function dictates different structures in different contexts. So only by looking for the communicative function of a structure in a context can the structure make sense. And also speaking of "need" here may be inaccurate. Since neither survival and communication "need" language, any more than the ancestors of elephants needed to get big to survive (some relatives didn't get bigger and survived well enough as much smaller species). Neither life nor language "needs" to go where it goes. But where they go, they are constrained by parallel functional demands, if they are going to continue to keep going. Steve Long From jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES Mon Dec 9 23:59:46 2002 From: jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES (Jose-Luis Mendivil Giro) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 00:59:46 +0100 Subject: Underestimating Language In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.5.2.20021209172009.018b9c40@bamse.ling.su.se> Message-ID: At 17:26 +0100 9/12/02, Mikael Parkvall wrote: >No, what I am suggesting is that the same message can be conveyed in a >difficult way and an easy way (not to mention all the possible shades in >between). The "junk" features I mentioned, and which Steve cites, do not >reduce the information value, but they add unnecessary complexity insofar >as they require one more rule in the ideal grammatical description of the >language (whether or not this corresponds to an additional burden in >acquisition or processing is another, albeit related, matter). > >In other words, the "simple" language can be said to doe its job more >efficiently than the "complex" language, provided that they both convey the >same information. It seems as if you were not speaking about natural languages, but about some kind of formal or artificial language (which would have an 'ideal grammatical description'). Can you offer some empirical evidence showing, for example, that German children master their language later and/or worse than Jamaican ones? Regards, Jose-Luis Mendivil From parkvall at LING.SU.SE Tue Dec 10 00:15:16 2002 From: parkvall at LING.SU.SE (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 01:15:16 +0100 Subject: Underestimating Language In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jose-Luis Mendivil Giro wrote: >Can you offer some empirical evidence showing, for example, that German >children master their language later and/or worse than Jamaican ones? No, I cannot, and it was for that very reason I wrote "whether or not this corresponds to an additional burden in acquisition or processing is another, albeit related, matter" in the part of my message you cited. Not only am I unable to come up with such data, but I would also suspect that German children in fact do not have more difficulties than Jamaican children in acquiring their mother tongue. Children seem to be able to absorb even the silliest features of human language. If complexity in my sense (i.e. the addition of yet another rule to a system) at all corresponds to increased difficulties in acquisition, I would expect that to be in SLA rather than in first language acquisition. Mikael Parkvall From wilcox at UNM.EDU Tue Dec 10 00:25:30 2002 From: wilcox at UNM.EDU (Sherman Wilcox) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 17:25:30 -0700 Subject: The Necessity of Syntax In-Reply-To: <29.32f92d15.2b262f43@aol.com> Message-ID: On 12/9/02, Steve Long said: >An evolutionary biologist would not claim structure is "motivated" by >"functional needs." But I don't know of any remotely conventional biologist >who would NOT claim that biological structure is shaped by function, i.e., by >the success or lack of success the structure has in terms of survival. I think it's important to be careful how we talk about this: "motivated by" and "shaped by" are ambiguous, as Östen has pointed out. Not to mention that function itself is pretty slippery. The ribbing pattern on mollusk shells is probably a result of interference patterns in the growing shell, but a secondary effect is that the ribs can become functional (emergent function) when they act as anchors when mollusks burrow in the mud. The ribs are not motivated by functional need. They may or may not be shaped by function. But they certainly are functional. I agree with Talmy in rejecting the "100% motivated or else functionalism is falsified" mantra. Random drift/variation surely occurs, and can persist, without being selected. To me, what we need to talk about is selectionist as opposed to instructionist models. Darwinian evolution is selectionist. But selectionist models don't have to rely on natural selection. Neural Darwinisn (Gerald Edelman) is a somatic selection account of brain development and function; Edelman won the Nobel Prize for his selectionist model of the immune system. William James even hinted at a selectionist model of cognitive function: "... conceptions, emotions, and active tendencies ... are originally produced in the shape of random images, fancies, accidental outbursts of spontaneous variation in the functional activity of the excessively unstable human brain, which the outer environment simply confirms or refutes, adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys -- selects, in short." I take it that linguists could propose a selectionist account of language origins/evolution, as many of the current proposals do, and a selectionist account of language change -- as, if I understand correctly, Bill Croft is doing. -- Sherman Wilcox Department of Linguistics University of New Mexico From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Tue Dec 10 08:15:32 2002 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel Everett) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 08:15:32 +0000 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Sherman, I didn't mean to imply by 'motivated' that functional considerations shaped form in a teleological sense. I recognize the difference between form-selection and form-structuring, a distinction that I expend some energy defending in a article of a few years back (1994. 'The Sentential Divide in Language and Cognition: Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility and Related Issues', The Journal of Pragmatics & Cognition, 2:1, pp 131-166.). In that article I argued largely against the position I now hold, which is that function does motivate form in some important ways, in the sense that function is causally implicated in syntactic form. And obvious example of a form-based vs. function-based approach can be given from 'WH-movement'. In the Minimalist Program, WH-words are found in the sentence-initial position to satisfy strictly formal constraints, mainly the demands of morphological features. In Lambrecht's or an RRG approach to information structure, the structure of a WH-question is motivated by Illocutionary Force (IF) and Focus, among other things. Direct reference to the communicative functions of IF-marking and information-structure more generally is not possible in, say, the MP, however. This is a large part of what the Generative Semantics vs. Interpretative Semantics debate was about, the very debate that in important ways led to the development of functional linguistics. -- Dan On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 05:05 pm, Sherman Wilcox wrote: > On 12/8/02, Dan Everett said: > >> If functional linguistics is right to believe that (most of) syntax is >> motivated by communicative needs > > I would hope that functional linguists don't believe this. I would no > more claim that "syntax is motivated by communicative needs" than an > evolutionary biologist would claim that structure is motivated by > functional needs. > > -- > Sherman Wilcox > Department of Linguistics > University of New Mexico > > ******************** Dan Everett Professor of Phonetics and Phonology Department of Linguistics University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL Phone: 44-161-275-3158 Department Fax: 44-161-275-3187 http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 3053 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Tue Dec 10 08:29:33 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 03:29:33 EST Subject: The Necessity of Syntax Message-ID: In a message dated 12/9/02 7:31:00 PM, wilcox at UNM.EDU writes: << Not to mention that function itself is pretty slippery. The ribbing pattern on mollusk shells is probably a result of interference patterns in the growing shell, but a secondary effect is that the ribs can become functional (emergent function) when they act as anchors when mollusks burrow in the mud. The ribs are not motivated by functional need. They may or may not be shaped by function. But they certainly are functional. >> Not all mollusks have ribbed patterns but those that do would continue to do so if such patterns have a function. If there is survival value in burrowing in the mud, then we know some structural feature that promotes such behavior becomes more likely to persist. The function of many paleo-forms must be guessed at because we really do not understand their environment. But the assumption is that a particular structure had a particular function. There may be shifts in function. But functionless structure does not arise in anticipation of any kind of destiny. In human language, many biological features give no appearance of having served any other function than communication. Biological mutations are random, but the selection process is not. The environment will favor those variations whose outcome is the survival. That is basic functionality. In language, accidental structure or conscious divergence from the norm may be the raw material of change, but such things would become part of the language system only if they spread and persist. Since the spread of change can only happen in the course of communication (i.e., must involve both speakers and listeners), and since the spread logically cannot occur if communication does not occur, communicative value would presumably be the basic test of whether a change will spread or not. Any change that defeats communication should not occur -- it is dysfunctional. <> Natural selection is a term applied to the general process that gives rise to biological traits. Edelman's model uses Darwinian principles to describe how the brain selects "functional" ideas from non-functional ones. My point was that whether a language feature is naturally selected or culturally selected, what will be selected is the structure that promotes the function of communication. Some special language structures (e.g., complex vocal cords) are biological, others are cultural. In both cases, the overriding function being served which shaped the structure would be communication. Steve Long From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Tue Dec 10 08:37:39 2002 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel Everett) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 08:37:39 +0000 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <3DF4E19B.C5DD130@oregon.uoregon.edu> Message-ID: On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 06:31 pm, Tom Givon wrote: >   > > > The upshot of all this is that an adaptive approach to language (or > biology) cannot be practiced as a simplistic creed with the mantra "At > all time all synchronic structures must be, transparently, 100% > motivated--or else functionalism is falsified". Rather, it is a > long-term and oft-frustrating research program that strives to > understand the incredible complexity of the process that gives rise to > both iconic and counter-iconic features of the communicative code. > This may be fiendishly difficult, but in attempting to cope with our > predicament, we are traveling in excellent company. Cheers, TG > > Yes, Tom, I agree completely. The point is not that a functional motivation must be found for all forms, but that a functional motivation may constrain any particular form *in principle*. That is, unlike the rules which emanate from Deans' offices, not all syntax (sentence-level is the focus here) is *necessarily* arbitrary, i.e. independent of semantics and pragmatics. The reason that the MP analyses, say, WH-movement in terms of morphological features is because its view of innatism prohibits it from referring to semantics or pragmatics in such cases. Years ago, when Chomsky (based partially on suggestions by Ken Hale) was developing the ideas of CP and IP, it was pointed out to him in classes (I remember talking to him about it one Thursday afternoon after class on the way back to Building 20) that languages that have dislocated WH-words almost always place them at the beginning of the sentence/clause rather than the at the end, regardless of their underlying constituent order, violating the predictions of CP as it was then formulated (now too in my opinion). He said at the time that perhaps this has to do with processing constraints (the WH word at the beginning signals that a gap is coming and tells you how to interpret it). But this insight was never and in fact could never be built into Chomskyan theory or the latter would cease to be driven by form alone. And that is a non-negotiable (a large part of the impetus for developing the MP was to get rid of some of the baroque additions people were starting to make to structures in Principles and Parameters, e.g. indexes on structures, which, not being structural, were incongruous with the research program, much to the consternation of the Thursday afternoon audiences along the Charles River). Interestingly, though, Pinker's attempts to provide an evolutionary underpinning for Chomskyan syntax in his articles on evolutionary psychology and in his debates with Gould in the NYR, rest explicitly on functional motivations for formal constraints. Small wonder that this aspect of Pinker's work has had negligible impact in Chomsky's writings. One reason (this is ALL my interpretation of things, of course) that Chomsky has claimed that Darwinian evolution cannot account for language is that most interpretations of that model would attribute function as an active constraint on the development (and use) of form. -- Dan -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 9822 bytes Desc: not available URL: From jaakko.leino at HELSINKI.FI Tue Dec 10 09:17:16 2002 From: jaakko.leino at HELSINKI.FI (Jaakko Leino) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 11:17:16 +0200 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: Sherman Wilcox wrote: > > On 12/8/02, Dan Everett said: > > >If functional linguistics is right to believe that (most of) syntax is > >motivated by communicative needs > > I would hope that functional linguists don't believe this. I would > no more claim that "syntax is motivated by communicative needs" than > an evolutionary biologist would claim that structure is motivated by > functional needs. But then, language--including, but not limited to, syntax--has a user, one with intellect, needs, intentions, creativity, and the like. Evolution may not (although this, apparently, remains a matter of a certain religious debate, taken broadly enough). Therefore, it just might not be as straightforward as the comparison with evolutionary biology implies. Furthermore, I don't suppose "motivated by communicative needs" means "motivated by communicative needs alone". Surely there are other factors which shape and re-shape syntax and distort the "100% motivated" picture. But that need not falsify the claim that there is motivation, and by looking closely enough, it can be found all over syntax. -- Jaakko Leino University of Helsinki Department of Finnish From W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Tue Dec 10 12:02:47 2002 From: W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE (W. Schulze) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 13:02:47 +0100 Subject: The Necessity of Syntax Message-ID: Östen Dahl wrote: > ... But if one language puts > adjectives before nouns, another puts nouns first, and a third language > allows for both possibilities, are all these choices motivated by > communicative needs? Or is it the existence of syntax as such that is > motivated by communicative needs? I guess the problem is to tell *what* is meant by 'syntax (as such)' at all. The debate on the nature of 'parts of speech' has demonstrated that it is difficult (if not impossible) to use these terms as categorial elements in order to define 'syntax'. Syntax (in my eyes) is an emergent property of utterances that reflects the cognitive- communicative need to assimilate complex 'gestalt' experience (Outer World stimuli) to the conditions of articulation (and connected with this, to the conditions of linguistic conceptualization). In other words: The only thing we can tell for sure is that 'syntax' encompasses the linearization of gestalt information. This process can be termed 'diairesis' which means that an Outer World gestalt experience is reduced to a number of more or less salient segments that are linearized as articulated sequences via language in accordance with the linguistic knowledge of a speaker. Naturally, linearization does not take place randomly but in accordance with socio-communicative conventions (acquired 'syntactic' blueprints) and with cognitive 'patterns' of gestalt experience (in perception). The structural coupling of 'perception and action' conditions that the 'action of linearization' is interpreted in terms of secondary 'autonomy hypotheses' about the functional (and even semantic) 'value' of the linearization patterns (e.g. in terms of 'constructions'). Such hypotheses may (and do) have again recursive effects on the 'perception domain', and - in consequence - on the 'values' of diairetic actions. If these assumptions are correct, syntax is neither necessary (in terms of a pre-condition) nor an option taken by 'languages' to a different degree. Rather, syntax is a more or less conventionalized way of how to communicate one's own diairetic processes. -- Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut für Allgemeine und Typologische Sprachwissenschaft - General Linguistics and Language Typology - Dept. II - Kommunikation und Sprachen F 13/14 - Universitaet München Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 Muenchen Tel.: ++49-(0)89-2180-2486 / -5343 Fax: ++49-(0)89-2180-5345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Web: http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ From jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES Tue Dec 10 12:49:57 2002 From: jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES (Jose-Luis Mendivil) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 13:49:57 +0100 Subject: The Necessity of Syntax In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 17:25 -0700 9/12/02, Sherman Wilcox wrote: > >To me, what we need to talk about is selectionist as opposed to >instructionist models. Darwinian evolution is selectionist. But >selectionist models don't have to rely on natural selection. Neural >Darwinisn (Gerald Edelman) is a somatic selection account of brain >development and function; Edelman won the Nobel Prize for his >selectionist model of the immune system. I think it was N. Jerne who won the Nobel Prize for a selectionist model of the immune system. His reception lecture was significantly published as: Jerne, N.K. (1985): "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System", Science, 229: 1057-1059. And, in a relevant paper, Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini described a connection between selectionist theories in biology and in generative linguistics: Piatelli-Palmarini, M. (1989): "Evolution, Selection and Cognition: from 'learning' to Parameter Setting in Biology and in the Study of Language". Cognition, 31: 1-44. For a more explicit connection between selectionist theories and generative models of language acquisition see also the first chapter of Lightfoot's (1991) How to Set Parameters. Best regards, Jose-Luis Mendivil. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wilcox at UNM.EDU Tue Dec 10 14:34:57 2002 From: wilcox at UNM.EDU (Sherman Wilcox) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 07:34:57 -0700 Subject: The Necessity of Syntax In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On 12/10/02, Jose-Luis Mendivil said: >I think it was N. Jerne who won the Nobel Prize for a selectionist >model of the immune system. Edelman shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in medicine with Rodney Porter for their discoveries concerning the chemical structure of antibodies. -- Sherman Wilcox Department of Linguistics University of New Mexico From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Tue Dec 10 16:18:29 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 11:18:29 EST Subject: The Necessity of Syntax Message-ID: In a message dated 12/10/02 7:50:55 AM, jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES writes: << I think it was N. Jerne who won the Nobel Prize for a selectionist model of the immune system. His reception lecture was significantly published as: Jerne, N.K. (1985): "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System", Science, 229: 1057-1059. >> In that lecture, NIELS JERNE stated: "When we place a population of lymphocytes from such an animal in appropriate tissue culture fluid, and when we add an antigen, the lymphocytes will produce specific antibody molecules, in the absence of any nerve cells.... I find it astonishing that the immune system embodies a degree of complexity which suggests some more or less superficial though striking analogies with human language, and that this cognitive system has evolved and functions without assistance of the brain." What Jerne was analogizing here was the immune systems ability to generate and store specific information that was not within its prior experience. His use of "cognitive system" to describe immune response here doesn't correspond to the notion of cognitive as much as it does intelligent. It should be obvious however that there is nothing here that contradicts the notion that the immune system is totally functional in origin or operation. That is, the immune system clearly developed to protect the body from the environamental causes of infection and its structure is totally dictated by that function -- to the extent that it is not dysfunctional. In that lecture, Jerne also stated: "It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar, pioneered by Chomsky..., argues that this is only explicable if certain deep, universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then linguistics would become a branch of biology." Just a note on the logic of this proposition as Jerne understood it. If we were to find or design a language that a young children could NOT learn (as a natural language), would that disprove the hypothesis as stated? Or would it mean that this unlearnable language was NOT a natural language? Is the statement "young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born" falsifiable? Or would contrary evidence simply mean that a child cannot learn a natural language if it is not a natural language? I'd suggest that the circularity is the result of the omission of functionality in defining the terms. Steve Long From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Thu Dec 12 19:10:44 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 14:10:44 EST Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: In a message dated 12/10/02 3:45:55 AM, dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK writes: << Interestingly, though, Pinker's attempts to provide an evolutionary underpinning for Chomskyan syntax in his articles on evolutionary psychology and in his debates with Gould in the NYR, rest explicitly on functional motivations for formal constraints. Small wonder that this aspect of Pinker's work has had negligible impact in Chomsky's writings.>> The Pinker-Gould exchange is also interesting for how Gould managed to paint Pinker into the "Ultra-Darwinist" corner, the more extreme position that every aspect of language is not just functionally shaped but biologically adaptively shaped. Gould maintained that other forces were at work beside the strict natural selection>survival "algorithm" -- e.g., the concept of "spandrels", architectural adjuncts that would eventually become adaptive. For some reason, Pinker chose to argue with Gould on that point, which didn't work out too good and also probably put him about as far from the Chomskyian position as he could get. The difference between the broader concept of functionalism versus strict biological "Ultra-Darwinian" adaptation is very important to the application of evolution theory to language, I'd suggest. Obviously, one can get into a pretty pickle trying to find Spencerian biological adaption in the specific intricacies of human language. And I'd suggest one reason is that language does not really function with regard to strict biological adaptation. The main function of language is communication, not survival of an individual or a species. In fact, at any particular time and place, the culture that is nested in language might produce a very non-adaptive result. (A striking example of culture overruling the values of the biological survival of the individual or the species is described by Borges in chronicling the history of the idea that the end of the world is a good thing, because it will usher in what-comes-after, and that this mass suicide should be rushed to completion as quickly as possible. These kinds of ideas mark the points where strict biological adaptation no longer constrain what humans do as individuals or as a species -- and apparently without regard to "superior" survival traits being passed along with particular genes. Belief in an after-life may be unique to humans, so other animals apparently never had to worry about any supposed "belief-in-an-after-life gene" conflicting with their raw survival instincts. So, what would the function of such a gene be?) Now, one might argue that communication is biologically adaptive, which is locally true and no doubt shaped language organs like our vocal cords. But it seems that at some point, communication disjointed itself from the biological adaptive values it had among primates and birds, and started to be a value of its own. And I think this value -- communication -- has a life of its own when it comes to both language and the culture nested in language. Awhile ago I caught a glimpse of the Westminster Dog Show (a short glimpse admittedly) on tv and viewing this example of the human effect on the evolution of the dog, I'd have to say that biological adaptation ("in the wild") took a real black-eye that day. If this sort of thing is parallel to what happens to language in certain elite quarters, we might expect the work of adaptation to be not a "constraint", but rather something to be actively avoided, worked-around and just plain penalized in the final voting. Also T Givon recently wrote: "This gives both evolution & diachrony the unmistakable "tinkered" (as opposed to "engineered") flavor. And the resulting synchronic structures in both reveal, paradoxical, many counter-adaptive features (a la Rube Goldberg...)." What's interesting is the phylogenic tree a friend did of automobiles. An individual car might look very "engineered", but a tree that traces the "directed" history of car engineering is as haywired as any biological evolution tree. There is an apparent gap -- in accidental evolution and directed evolution -- between what might work and what eventually does turn out to work. Synchronic structure often gives us a snapshot of a process, not a state. And the process is always in the process of taking wrong turns and proceeding a long way before the driver asks for directions. For example, the new name we come up with for something we never saw before may not be as communicative as we thought. Yet we are stuck with it (just as we are with inefficient grammar) because of listener conservatism. Columbus couldn't stop the ball he sent rolling when he called Native Americans, "Indians". Steve Long From ont at CPHLING.DK Fri Dec 13 08:30:13 2002 From: ont at CPHLING.DK (Ole Nedergaard Thomsen) Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 09:30:13 +0100 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <8D575D91-0C17-11D7-827E-000393D73F38@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: Dear Dan, A correction concerning the Minimalist Program, cf. e.g. Noam Chomsky's New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, CUP, 2000, p. 12 f.: "The displacement property of human language is expressed in terms of grammatical transformations or by some other device, but it is always expressed somehow. Why language should have this property is an interesting question, which has been discussed since the 1960s without resolution. My suspicion is that part of the reason has to do with phenomena that have been described in terms of surface structure interpretation; many of these are familiar from traditional grammar: topic-comment, specificity, new and old information, the agentive force that we find even in displaced position, and so on. If that is correct, then the displacement property is, indeed, forced by legibility conditions: it is motivated by interpretive requirements that are externally imposed by our systems of thought, which have these special properties (so the study of language use indicates). (...)" That is, the formal features are where they are to satisfy language use! Ole ---------------------------------------- Ole Nedergaard Thomsen Dept. of General and Applied Linguistics University of Copenhagen Njalsgade 80 DK-2300 Copenhagen S Denmark ---------------------------------------- On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Daniel Everett wrote: > Dear Sherman, > > I didn't mean to imply by 'motivated' that functional considerations > shaped form in a teleological sense. I recognize the difference between > form-selection and form-structuring, a distinction that I expend some > energy defending in a article of a few years back (1994. 'The > Sentential Divide in Language and Cognition: Pragmatics of Word Order > Flexibility and Related Issues', The Journal of Pragmatics & Cognition, > 2:1, pp 131-166.). In that article I argued largely against the > position I now hold, which is that function does motivate form in some > important ways, in the sense that function is causally implicated in > syntactic form. And obvious example of a form-based vs. function-based > approach can be given from 'WH-movement'. In the Minimalist Program, > WH-words are found in the sentence-initial position to satisfy strictly > formal constraints, mainly the demands of morphological features. In > Lambrecht's or an RRG approach to information structure, the structure > of a WH-question is motivated by Illocutionary Force (IF) and Focus, > among other things. Direct reference to the communicative functions of > IF-marking and information-structure more generally is not possible in, > say, the MP, however. This is a large part of what the Generative > Semantics vs. Interpretative Semantics debate was about, the very > debate that in important ways led to the development of functional > linguistics. > > > > -- Dan > > > > On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 05:05 pm, Sherman Wilcox wrote: > > > On 12/8/02, Dan Everett said: > > > >> If functional linguistics is right to believe that (most of) syntax is > >> motivated by communicative needs > > > > I would hope that functional linguists don't believe this. I would no > > more claim that "syntax is motivated by communicative needs" than an > > evolutionary biologist would claim that structure is motivated by > > functional needs. > > > > -- > > Sherman Wilcox > > Department of Linguistics > > University of New Mexico > > > > > ******************** > Dan Everett > Professor of Phonetics and Phonology > Department of Linguistics > University of Manchester > Oxford Road > Manchester, UK > M13 9PL > Phone: 44-161-275-3158 > Department Fax: 44-161-275-3187 > http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/ > > From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Fri Dec 13 08:49:13 2002 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel Everett) Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 08:49:13 +0000 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ole, Nope. No correction. This quote shows the same point I raised in my earlier posting. Recall that I said that Chomsky explicitly claimed exactly this kind of thing. However, neither he nor anyone else in the theory would ever allow these functional considerations to be causally implicated (and that phrase, which I have repeated frequently, is key) in the statement of any constraint, rule, principle, or parameter. There could never be, for example, a 'Topic first parameter' (unless it was stated in terms of morphosyntactic, nonfunctional features, in which case 'topic' would be a mnemonic label, nothing more). So it can in fact be irritating to read Chomsky say exactly what people seriously interested in functional constraints on syntactic form already know, while otherwise denying (in word and deed) that it could have anything whatsoever to do with the theory. As George Lakoff and others pointed out years ago, the exclusion of function from syntax (a concept Chomsky denies ever having made use of, namely, 'autonomous syntax') is *forced* on Chomskyan theory by its view of innatism. If, for example, function (semantics, pragmatics, processing, etc.) could be causally implicated in the rules that linguists write, it could be causally implicated in L1 acquistion. But that latter implication must never be drawn, because it would effectively eliminate the need for a Language Acquisition Device (or, in the extremely unfortunate phrasing underscored by a recent book of the same name, a "language organ"). And that is ultimate nonnegotiable of the theory. Let me repeat then: Chomsky will often in informal exchanges allow that function, semantics, etc. (all apple-pie and motherhood sounding) is perhaps behind what we see today. But he will never allow it in the theory at all. Current Minimalism supposedly has done away with movement, with distinct levels of structure, transformations (in some sense), etc. But it must always maintain that which Chomsky says it has never included, namely, *autonomous* syntax. That is the sine qua non of the research programme. It is interesting of course, to see how far one can go writing rules, constraints, etc, in terms of morphological features. But doing this and claiming that function may play a role (in some mysterious past) is having your apple pie and eating it too. No, the New York Review of Books cover reference to John Searle's articles on Chomsky got it right - in 'Chomsky's Thermidor' (and I ain't talking lobster - think French Revolution) Searle correctly pointed out that Chomskyan theory was a good idea, it just didn't pan out. Frankly, I expect future generations to compare Chomsky and Freud as two pioneers in the study of mind who got us all to think about things that were exciting, challenging, and important, just bizarrely wrong. But I cannot think of many things I have been long-term right about either, so that is probably not a serious indictment (and I don't think up things as grand as 'Oedipal complex' or 'Covert movement'. I am lucky to figure out what a single morpheme means in a language I am studying). Dan On Friday, December 13, 2002, at 08:30 am, Ole Nedergaard Thomsen wrote: > Dear Dan, > > A correction concerning the Minimalist Program, cf. e.g. Noam > Chomsky's New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, CUP, 2000, > p. 12 > f.: > "The displacement property of human language is expressed in terms > of grammatical transformations or by some other device, but it is > always > expressed somehow. Why language should have this property is an > interesting question, which has been discussed since the 1960s without > resolution. My suspicion is that part of the reason has to do with > phenomena that have been described in terms of surface structure > interpretation; many of these are familiar from traditional grammar: > topic-comment, specificity, new and old information, the agentive force > that we find even in displaced position, and so on. If that is correct, > then the displacement property is, indeed, forced by legibility > conditions: it is motivated by interpretive requirements that are > externally imposed by our systems of thought, which have these special > properties (so the study of language use indicates). (...)" > > That is, the formal features are where they are to satisfy language > use! > > > Ole > ---------------------------------------- > Ole Nedergaard Thomsen > Dept. of General and Applied Linguistics > University of Copenhagen > Njalsgade 80 > DK-2300 Copenhagen S > Denmark > ---------------------------------------- > On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Daniel Everett wrote: ******************** Dan Everett Professor of Phonetics and Phonology Department of Linguistics University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL Phone: 44-161-275-3158 Department Fax: 44-161-275-3187 http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 5660 bytes Desc: not available URL: From v.ferreira at GMX.DE Fri Dec 13 22:45:47 2002 From: v.ferreira at GMX.DE (Vera Fereira) Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 23:45:47 +0100 Subject: PhDweblogs.net Message-ID: Here's a message that might interest this mailing list. Sorry for any cross posting. Hello,You are receiving this message because we think you might be interested to know that we’ve recently created http://www.phdweblogs.net , a non-profit initiative to bring together PhD students’ weblogs from all around the world. If you are preparing a PhD, or have a blog about your research interests, you can register it there. Thanks, PhDweblogs.net team From nuyts at UIA.UA.AC.BE Tue Dec 17 07:53:55 2002 From: nuyts at UIA.UA.AC.BE (nuyts at UIA.UA.AC.BE) Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2002 08:53:55 +0100 Subject: ESSLLI 2003 workshop on modality (fwd) Message-ID: CALL FOR PAPERS: Workshop on Conditional and Unconditional Modality August 25-29, 2003, Vienna This workshop will be held as part of the 15th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI), August 18-29, 2003, Vienna, Austria. Deadline for submissions: March 7, 2003. We invite presentations that address any of the following topics: * Semantic analyses of modal expressions and conditionals. * Logical tools to extend, refine or reconstruct the traditional apparatus of possible worlds, times and events. * Empirical studies on the morphosyntactic and semantic interaction of modal and temporal expressions cross-linguistically. * Relation between illocutionary operators underlying evidential systems across a variety of languages and epistemic modalities. * Context dependence and dynamic effects of modal and evidential assertions. For details, consult the following webpages: Workshop page: http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/sigmod/ESSLLI03/ ESSLLI 2003: http://www.logic.at/esslli03/ The workshop aims to facilitate the exchange of ideas between researchers working in different linguistic schools and to bridge the gap between l'art pour l'art logic and empirically grounded linguistic analysis. Frank Veltman (veltman at hum.uva.nl) From robert at VJF.CNRS.FR Thu Dec 19 06:40:40 2002 From: robert at VJF.CNRS.FR (Stephane Robert) Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 07:40:40 +0100 Subject: conference on SPACE in languages Message-ID: We apologize for multiple mailing of this message Space in languages : linguistic systems and cognitive categories Paris, 7-8 February 2003 Ecole Normale Supérieure (salle Dussane, to be confirmed) 45 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris International conference organized by the research group Linguistic diversity and change: cognitive implications with financial support from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Entrance is free, no registration As illustrated by the Kantian tradition and by a number of cognitive theories, space has been often viewed as a universal cognitive primitive, an ‘a priori form of intuition’ that conditions all of our experience. From this point of view, it is of particular interest to study the linguistic expression of space, since languages seem to capture and to make explicit the constraints of experience on the construction of spatial reference. At the same time, language confers to spatial representations the property of referential ‘detachability’, that distinguishes these representations from those that are produced by the perceptual experience of space. This fundamental property of language allows speakers to dissociate and to choose among different components of spatial reference, as well as to use spatial morphemes to express other and/or more abstract meanings, such as temporal, causal or argumentative relations. A question then arises concerning the primitive and generative nature of the category of space in languages. To what extent does space, as it is linguistically encoded, reflect forms of perceptual experience and which aspects of this experience do languages encode? Does space constitute a pure and primitive category from which other linguistic meanings are then derived? This question has been raised by cognitive grammars in general and by metaphor theory in particular. It is also particularly relevant in the light of numerous derivations that can be observed in the history of languages, often indicating that a given term evolves from a concrete spatial meaning to an abstract discourse one. What are then the cognitive mechanisms that allow these transitions? Inversely, some recent linguistic analyses argue that spatial values are neither basic nor even purely spatial, but rather that spatial terms always carry other values, for example related to the functional properties of objects, their force or resistance, or the goals towards which speakers construct spatial relations in their utterances. According to this conception, space in language is therefore not a primitive category, but already the result of some construction. What types of evidence can be brought to bear on these different conceptions? Furthermore, in the last twenty years, many studies in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cultural anthropology have revealed the existence of rather varied spatial systems across languages and cultures. These variations concern, for example, the nature of the linguistic devices expressing spatial information (e.g. verbs, affixes, classifiers, particles), the particular distinctions they encode, and the reference systems that are used by speakers (absolute, egocentric, relative). In addition, various studies show that linguistic and cultural systems determine - at least partially - the nature and cognitive accessibility of the information selected by speakers, thereby casting some doubts on the supposedly universal properties of the category of space. This evidence then raises questions concerning the impact of linguistic categorization on perception, as well as the existence of a single (a-modal) system or of two distinct (linguistic vs. perceptual and motor) systems of spatial representations. The study of space can then be reframed in terms of several fundamental questions, that will be addressed during this conference from the point of view of linguistics (typology, diachrony, sign-language), cognitive anthropology, the philosophy of language, psycholinguistics, and neurosciences. List of participants and papers to be presented The precise program will be announced in January Melissa Bowerman (Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen) Constructing language-specific spatial categories in first language acquisition Pierre Cadiot (Université de Paris 8, Laboratoire LATTICE) Franck Lebas (Université Clermont-Ferrand 2) The French movement verb MONTER as a challenge to the status of spatial reference Denis Creissels (Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, Université Lyon 2) Encoding the distinction between localization, source of a movement and direction of a movement: a typological study Michel Denis (LIMSI, Orsay) Deficits in spatial discourse: the case of Alzheimer patients Jérôme Dokic & Elisabeth Pacherie (Institut Jean Nicod, EHESS Paris) Molyneux’s question and frames of reference Colette Grinevald (Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, Université Lyon 2) The expression of static location in a typological perspective Maya Hickmann (Laboratoire Cognition et Développement, Université de Paris 5) The relativity of motion in first language acquisition Anetta Kopecka (Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, Université Lyon 2) The semantic structure of prefixed motion verbs in French: typological perspectives Barbara Landau (Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore) (De)Coupling of spatial language and spatial cognition Alain Peyraube (Centre de Recherche sur les Langues d’Asie Orientale, Paris) On the history of place words and localizers in Chinese : a cognitive approach Marie-Anne Sallandre (Université Paris 8) Iconicity in discourse, the role of space in French sign language Chris Sinha (Institute of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark) Mapping and construal in spatial language and conceptualization: language variation and acquisition. Dan Slobin (Department of Psychology University of California, Berkeley) What makes manner of motion salient ? Leonard Talmy (State University of New York at Buffalo) to be confirmed Claude Vandeloise (State University of Louisiana, Bâton Rouge) Are there spatial prepositions ? Yves-Marie Visetti (Laboratoire LATTICE, ENS Paris) Semantics and its models of perception and action Organizing committee Maya Hickmann Stéphane Robert Yves-Marie Visetti Contact: secretariat.tul at ivry.cnrs.fr -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From twood at UWC.AC.ZA Mon Dec 2 07:36:59 2002 From: twood at UWC.AC.ZA (Tahir Wood) Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 09:36:59 +0200 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: >>> Bill Croft 11/29/02 06:56PM >>> One must distinguish between the evolution of language and the evolution of languages. The former is the evolution of human cognition and social behavior that permitted the rise of modern human language. This is of course an instance of biological evolution, of human beings. The latter is the process by which linguistic elements change over time. This is an evolutionary process, that is it involves change by replication; but it is not the same evolutionary process as biological evolution. I prefer to refer to the former as evolution and the latter as history. Less confusing, and less likely to give the impression that the social aspect of language change is absent in favour of some kind of biological determinism: e.g. Africans have 'less developed languages' because they are racially/biologically 'less developed'. Tahir -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: TEXT.htm URL: From li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU Mon Dec 2 17:30:46 2002 From: li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU (Charles Li) Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 09:30:46 -0800 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Using the expression, "the evolution of language", to refer to the evolution of hominid communicative behavior prior to the crystallization of language implies that language was the communicative tool of all hominids. Yet no one would assume that Orrorin tugenensis, Kenyanthropus, the various species of Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and Paranthropus had language. Indeed, most of the species in the genus of Homo probably did not have language if 'language' designates the casual, spoken language of anatomically modern humans. The investigation of the origin of language is an enterprise concerned with the evolution of the communicative behavior of our hominid ancestors, NOT the evolution of language. Chronologically the study of the evolution of language begins from the time when language crystallized, whereas the study of the origin of language ends at the crystallization of language. This distinction does not belittle the significance of the research probing into older and older layers of human language. Nor does it dismiss the importance of the proto-human language if and when its features can be inferred. One of the most important reasons for making this distinction is the fundamental difference between the ways language changes and the ways hominid communicative behavior changes. The latter, like animal communicative behavior, is subject to the constraint of Darwinian evolution. The evolution of our hominid ancestors' communicative behavior involves natural selection and genetic mutation. A change of their communicative behavior in the direction toward the emergence of language was adaptive in the sense that it enhanced their life expectancy and reproductive success. Those hominids who made the change achieved a higher level of fitness than those hominids who failed to make the change. A change moving the hominids' communicative behavior one step closer to human language would imply greater communicative efficiency. Greater communicative efficiency would, in turn, entail greater ease with which valuable knowledge and experience could be passed from one individual to another and from one generation to another. Rapid and efficient transmission of knowledge conferred an immense competitive advantage to the hominids for securing resources and possibly vanquishing others, including other species of hominids whose communicative behavior was less developed in the direction toward language crystallization. Given that hominids within the genus of Homo and possibly some gracile species of the Australopithecine are generalists who did not specialize in any specific ecological niche, the competitive advantage conferred by a more effective communicative behavior may explain why there is only one surviving species within the taxonomic family of hominids. When two hominid species happened to co-exist as generalists and the communicative behavior of one species was more effective than that of the other, there would be a good possibility that the communicatively more advanced species would eliminate the other through competition, especially when natural resources dwindled as they did periodically in a dramatic fashion during the past three million years because of global temperature fluctuations. The evolution of language, i.e. language change after its crystallization, is by an large driven by social and cultural factors. It has nothing to do with genetic mutation, natural selection, life expectancy or reproductive success. Confusing the evolution of language with the origin of language may result in attributing features of language to the communicative behavior of early hominids before the emergence of language. For details, see attached paper. Charles Li At 09:36 AM 12/2/2002 +0200, Tahir Wood wrote: > >>> Bill Croft 11/29/02 06:56PM >>> > One must distinguish between the evolution of language >and the evolution of languages. The former is the evolution >of human cognition and social behavior that permitted the >rise of modern human language. This is of course an >instance of biological evolution, of human beings. The >latter is the process by which linguistic elements change >over time. This is an evolutionary process, that is it >involves change by replication; but it is not the same >evolutionary process as biological evolution. > >I prefer to refer to the former as evolution and the latter as history. >Less confusing, and less likely to give the impression that the social >aspect of language change is absent in favour of some kind of biological >determinism: e.g. Africans have 'less developed languages' because they >are racially/biologically 'less developed'. >Tahir ___________________________________________________ Charles Li Professor of Linguistics, Dean of Graduate Division University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106 Tel: 805-893-2013 Fax: 805-893-8259 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: oregonpaper.doc Type: application/msword Size: 142848 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Mon Dec 2 19:57:19 2002 From: tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Tom Givon) Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 11:57:19 -0800 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: Dear FUNKnetters (and Charles Li), I have held off from responding to the various notes on the subject of language, culture, biology and evolution, hoping against all hope to hear from others what I thought needed to be said. But the more I hear, the more I am inclined to tear my hairs--the few still remaining--in utter despair. So, in the interest of refocusing the discussion more explicitly towards the interface between biology, I would like to interject the following: The anthropocentric impulse to draw an absolute boundary between biological evolution ('the animal') and cultural evolution ('history', 'the human') goes back to antiquity, and has been the subject of repeated (and repetitious) bitter skirmishes ever since. Both Plato and Aristotle posited this absolute boundary, the latter in terms of the exclusively-human spirit of rationality (as distinct from the metabolic and perceptual spirits, which were conceded to all animate beings). The bitter Darwin-Wallace debate about evolution was about whether to draw that self-same rigid line between the evolution of the body and that of the mind/brain/soul. Wallace wanted to draw the line right where Plato, Aristotle, the Church, Descartes, and all traditional humanist had drawn it. Darwin insisted on a unitary system--what's good for the body is good for the soul. Chomsky's and Bickerton's insistence that the 'rise' of language is not governed by the same adaptive constraints that govern the evolution of all other biological sub-systems (including 'mere cognition') follows in the very same dualist tradition. And likewise, the idea that somehow cullture and history are wholly liberated from adaptive ('functional') constrants, that they are--to paraphrase Charles Li (and, for that matter, Bill Labov)--matters of only society and culture, falls squarely on the Plato-Aristotle-Descartes-Wallace-Chomsky side of the debate. The funny thing is, in biology itself there have been strong recent trends to obliterate this rigid --artificial, ideological--boundary between mind/language/culture/behavior and 'plain' structural biology. Thus, a great evolutionary-biology theorist, Ernst Mayr, as noted that (loosely paraphrased) 'soft' adaptive behavior is the pacemaker, of 'hard' genetic evolution. And the work of great figures in etology (von Frisch, Marler, J.T. Bonner, E.O. Wilson, D. Griffin, F. deWaal, to mention only a few) has been predicated on the interpermeability of biology and culture. It therefore boggles my (admittedly simple) mind to see self-declared functionalists, who believe that language is adapted to its main tasks of representation and communication of information, come up with the idea that the main process that shapes both phonology and grammar--diachronic development--is somehow only 'culturally' and 'socially' constrained (and pray, what does it mean exactly? Total lack of constraints?) This certainly flies in the face of all detailed, fine-grained studies of the process of diachronic change in both phonology and grammar. "But", the defenders of the strict boundary retort, "what about cross-language typological variation and the great freedom from adaptive constraints that it entails?" In response, I would like to remind everybody of a few things about variation and how it comes about: First, typological variation is highly constrained. Relatively few 'types' of any linguistic structure are actually attested in languages--as compared with the plethora of mathematically (or biologically) possible structures. The fact that more than one type of structure can perform the same communicative funtion is not unique to language and culture. It is a cardinal fact in biology, and of the main process of functional extension (homoplasy), by which a structure takes over the coding of similar but not-wholely-identical functions (and may eventually diverge beyond recognition). Evolutionary biology, while adaptively guided (via selection) is hardly 100% deterministic, or we would have had only one extant species. Second, the diachronic pathways that give rise to variable synchronic structure are just as constrained and largely uni-directional. In both, they closely resemble biological evolution. And the most common explanation to such constrained evolution are adaptive. Third, in language diachrony as in biological evolution, the universal constrains that govern synchronic structure--the eplanatory principles, the theory--operate largely through the developmental process. They are to be found in the mechanisms of emergence (be they ontogenetic, phylogenetic of behavioral-historial, not in the catalogue of extant synchronic ('typological') structures. Fourth, variation is the very soul of both synchronic biology and evolution, where species are defined by their variability curves (of both 'hard' genotype and 'soft', 'behavioral' phenotype); where today's intra-species population variation is simply the current inventory of tomorrow's potential evolutionary changes--and thus cross-species variation. This is exactly what one finds in the relation between synchronic variation and diachronic change, an observation often attributed to Bill Labove (tho I cannot find an exact citation...). Lastly, variation is not only a methodological phenomenon (cf. Labov again); it is a highly theoretical entity in both biology and language, and has highly adaptive ('funtional') motivations. The reservoir of synchronic variants within a population is guarantor of survival, just in case the context should require alternative adaptive solutions. True enough, diachrony ('history') in both language and culture is 'soft' and presumably reversible. But so is animal behavior, which is never 100% constrained by genetics (cf. Mayr's "open program"). Still, this neither exempts language and cultrure from adaptive constraints, nor sets them apart from 'plain' biological evolution. It is perhaps time that we quit erecting and re-erecting those artificial barriers--human vs. animal, body vs. soul/mind, biology vs. culture, language vs. cognition--and instead re-group to take care of the urgent task at hand: Investigating and explaining language as and integral part of this incredibly complex miracle of striving, behaving, adaptive, evolving life. There is no shame but only strength in being part of the grand coalition of 'plain' biology. Have a happy holliday season, TG ================================= Charles Li wrote: > Using the expression, "the evolution of language", to refer to the > evolution of hominid communicative behavior prior to the > crystallization of language implies that language was the > communicative tool of all hominids. Yet no one would assume that > Orrorin tugenensis, Kenyanthropus, the various species of > Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and Paranthropus had language. Indeed, > most of the species in the genus of Homo probably did not have > language if 'language' designates the casual, spoken language of > anatomically modern humans. The investigation of the origin of > language is an enterprise concerned with the evolution of the > communicative behavior of our hominid ancestors, NOT the evolution of > language. Chronologically the study of the evolution of language > begins from the time when language crystallized, whereas the study of > the origin of language ends at the crystallization of language. This > distinction does not belittle the significance of the research probing > into older and older layers of human language. Nor does it dismiss the > importance of the proto-human language if and when its features can be > inferred. One of the most important reasons for making this > distinction is the fundamental difference between the ways language > changes and the ways hominid communicative behavior changes. The > latter, like animal communicative behavior, is subject to the > constraint of Darwinian evolution. The evolution of our hominid > ancestors' communicative behavior involves natural selection and > genetic mutation. A change of their communicative behavior in the > direction toward the emergence of language was adaptive in the sense > that it enhanced their life expectancy and reproductive success. Those > hominids who made the change achieved a higher level of fitness than > those hominids who failed to make the change. A change moving the > hominids' communicative behavior one step closer to human language > would imply greater communicative efficiency. Greater communicative > efficiency would, in turn, entail greater ease with which valuable > knowledge and experience could be passed from one individual to > another and from one generation to another. Rapid and efficient > transmission of knowledge conferred an immense competitive advantage > to the hominids for securing resources and possibly vanquishing > others, including other species of hominids whose communicative > behavior was less developed in the direction toward language > crystallization. > > Given that hominids within the genus of Homo and possibly some gracile > species of the Australopithecine are generalists who did not > specialize in any specific ecological niche, the competitive advantage > conferred by a more effective communicative behavior may explain why > there is only one surviving species within the taxonomic family of > hominids. When two hominid species happened to co-exist as generalists > and the communicative behavior of one species was more effective than > that of the other, there would be a good possibility that the > communicatively more advanced species would eliminate the other > through competition, especially when natural resources dwindled as > they did periodically in a dramatic fashion during the past three > million years because of global temperature fluctuations. > > The evolution of language, i.e. language change after its > crystallization, is by an large driven by social and cultural factors. > It has nothing to do with genetic mutation, natural selection, life > expectancy or reproductive success. Confusing the evolution of > language with the origin of language may result in attributing > features of language to the communicative behavior of early hominids > before the emergence of language. > > For details, see attached paper. > > Charles Li > > > > At 09:36 AM 12/2/2002 +0200, Tahir Wood wrote: > > > >> >>> Bill Croft 11/29/02 06:56PM >>> >> One must distinguish between the evolution of language >> and the evolution of languages. The former is the evolution >> of human cognition and social behavior that permitted the >> rise of modern human language. This is of course an >> instance of biological evolution, of human beings. The >> latter is the process by which linguistic elements change >> over time. This is an evolutionary process, that is it >> involves change by replication; but it is not the same >> evolutionary process as biological evolution. >> >> I prefer to refer to the former as evolution and the latter as >> history. Less confusing, and less likely to give the impression that >> the social aspect of language change is absent in favour of some >> kind of biological determinism: e.g. Africans have 'less developed >> languages' because they are racially/biologically 'less developed'. >> Tahir > > ___________________________________________________ > Charles Li > Professor of Linguistics, Dean of Graduate Division > University of California, Santa Barbara > Santa Barbara, CA 93106 > Tel: 805-893-2013Fax: 805-893-8259 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Mon Dec 2 20:01:20 2002 From: tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Tom Givon) Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 12:01:20 -0800 Subject: [Fwd: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'] Message-ID: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Tom Givon Subject: Re: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 11:57:19 -0800 Size: 24701 URL: From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Tue Dec 3 02:33:43 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 21:33:43 EST Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: In a message dated 12/2/02 12:33:31 PM, li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU writes: << Using the expression, "the evolution of language", to refer to the evolution of hominid communicative behavior prior to the crystallization of language implies that language was the communicative tool of all hominids. Yet no one would assume that Orrorin tugenensis, Kenyanthropus, the variou species of Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and Paranthropus had language. Indeed, most of the species in the genus of Homo probably did not have language if 'language' designates the casual, spoken language of anatomically modern humans.>> There are several problems here. One of them is that the "crystalization" of language suggests that some observable threshold was crossed between non-language-using and language using humans (or pre-humans). But this simply does not match evolutionary processes. There is little possibility that a single mutated trait suddenly appeared -- like some mammal with superior camoflage -- and quickly in a few generations turned a formerly non-language-using population into a language-using population. The obvious reason is this first "speaker" would have no one else to talk to and no reason to be favored in selection by the mating population of some early non-language-using group. Why would the mere ability to use language gain any reproductive advantage, if the trait only had future utility? There is no reason to postulate a "crystalization" of language. Like the giraffe's neck, the evolution of modern language capability must have been a slow process where the adaptive advantage of culture, interpersonal communication and cooperation shaped the biology over a very, very long period of time. It is difficult to see what other purpose the physiological organs of language would have served in the mean time, so its logical to conclude that they evolved as part and parcel of what Charles Li calls "hominid communicative behavior." The basic mistake here I think is to forget the critical role of human (or pre-human) culture in the evolution of language capabilities. The selection for modern language that must have gone on would not have been the raw environment or enemies or other such Spencerian nonsense, but rather the environment of human culture. Over long periods of time, the complex physiological attributes of modern language were being favored not by climate or food sources or conflict, but by the human (or pre-human) cultural preference for interpersonal communication. Other advantages who have been incidental. The gap in evidence between human non-language and language is huge. We really have no examples of the intermediate stages. This leads us, wrongly I think, to act as if language capability emerged full-blown one extraordinary paleolithic moment. But this matches no naturalistic observation anywhere else in evolution. Rather, it makes sense that basic language was in use among humans (or pre-humans) long before complex modern language capabilities developed. Unless one can suggest another intermediate value for the organs used in modern language -- particularly complex vocal cords and whatever syntax and grammar processing we have in our brain, none of which could have happened at the drop of a hat -- we should look to human (or pre-human) culture and the pre-existing need for interactive communication as the prime mover of human language capability. In this sense cultural evolution would have shaped biological (Darwinian) evolution in favoring language. But to do that culture must have been present from before the process began. And something very much like language must have been present from early on. <> First of all, how can the evolution of "communicative behavior" be separated from the evolution of "language"? When exactly is "language" not "communicative behavior"? As far as hominid communicative behavior being contrained by Darwinian processes -- what does that mean? Are we to think that hominids could not learn to communicate in new ways or to communicate new information before language suddenly appeared? Are we to think that pre-humans could not learn to behave "communitatively" in new ways or to communicate new ideas or to increase the complexity of their communications? All this seems highly improbable. They may not have used modern language, but modern language is not a prerequisite to complex or innovative communication. However, complex and innovative communication may have been a prerequisite to language. <> Please, are we to think that some pre-human who suddenly started using adjectives had a prayer in a survival test against pre-humans with the communal fighting or hunting capabilities of, say, a non-language-using wolf pack? Survival value in those days was not equivalent to taking an entrance exam. There are plenty of ways non-human animals communicate and cooperate that are in no way inferior to human language in a given situation. There is nothing "advanced" about language in many natural situations where language gives no distinctly observable advantage to an individual - or even necessarily to the group. You can talk all you want but the big fast guy with the club is still going to catch you and hit you on the head. All advantages are local and whether language is an advantage -- in almost all cases -- is very much a matter of a local, temporary situation. There is, however, one less ephemeral advantage to a language-using culture, if not a specific individual. And that is that language allows for the accumulation of information that lasts beyond the lifetime of an individual. Evolution theory says you can pass on a biological trait to the next generation, but you cannot pass on an acquired trait -- e.g., what you've learned in your lifetime. That is, UNLESS of course you can somehow communicate it to the next generation. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, cultural evolution is Lamarckian -- it allows the passing on of acquired traits from one generation to the next. Culture and language break that Darwinian rule about acquired traits. Language is the ideal medium by which such information can transfer and accumulate, so that it can represent many generations of individual learning. This seems to be an advantage over biological inheritance, which would relegate humans and other species to starting all over again from scratch every generation. And it would mean obviously that human cultures would favor those who could use language to preserve and transfer such information - the very information that human culture is made out of. The passing on of "acquired traits" is occasionally observed in other animals. But human accumulation of learning -- of acquired traits -- is obviously quantitatively much greater. And that brings us back to pre-human or proto-human "communicative behavior." Whatever its form or structure might have been, its adaptive value would be the same as modern language. The functional forces which favored the development of complex communication between pre-human individuals would have been the same that favored the development of modern human language. And, in my book, are the same forces that continue to affect modern languages. There is a continuum here and no unnatural "emergence" of some trait of long-term dormant value. No crystalization. If I were looking for a moment when modern language became probable, the latest I would look would be when human tools started being produced in a way that required the passing on of technique from one generation to another. Although such information could have been passed on by demonstration only, I doubt it would have been remembered without some kind of language - without use of rudimentary syntax, grammar and a language's other means of coveying and preserving information with particularity from one individual to another. And whether we talk about change in a language or the changes that made language possible, fundamental outcomes should dictate structure. Birds are born with wings. We put wings on our airplanes. Even when we reach beyond our Darwinian bodies, we shape our solutions the way Darwinian processes would. The environmental opportunities and constraints that originally produced language should be basically the same that produce persistent changes in modern languages. Form follows function, whether we create it or evolution does. And because these structures will often look a lot a like, we can't always be sure who did what. (With the possible exception of the wheel. It seems that biological evolution up to this point has made very little use of the wheel.) Steve Long From language at SPRYNET.COM Tue Dec 3 06:28:51 2002 From: language at SPRYNET.COM (Alexander Gross) Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 22:28:51 -0800 Subject: [Fwd: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'] Message-ID: I have so far written two accounts dealing with language and evolution. One of them follows. Unlike most of what I have seen here and elsewhere, it uses very few high-powered and/or allegedly technical words. It also makes no pretence to be scientific. But I wonder if it may not come closer to the truth than many of the pieces sporting high-powered vocabularies and claiming allegiance to scientific method. Here's a question for you. Given the sheer immensity of the period being studied and the absence of any "time machine" or other conveyance to transport us to specific points within that period, what reason is there to suppose that any allegedly scientific procedures or allegedly complete and precise technical vocabularies (which inevitably turn out to be based on one specific age and/or fashion) can ever bring back to us a sufficiently detailed account of how language evolved for the game to even be worth playing? The account that follows comprises part of the author's program "Truth About Translation," which can be downloaded at the URL shown in the very last line. Very best to all! Alex Gross ____________________ SPRAY IT AGAIN, SAM The Real Story of Language And Translation A Semi-Humorous Account By Alexander Gross Once upon a time there were only animals. No men. No women. Not even persons. They needed to tell each other things. At least about their own lives. They needed to talk about territory. About food and mating. About mutual status and danger. BUT HOW COULD THEY DO THIS? By spraying everything around them with a special scent. "This is my turf." "My store of food." "My mate." It was messy. It wasn't always clear. And it could cause trouble. So just to clear things up, some of the animals started barking at each other too. Others tried howling. Or hissing. Or grunting, moaning, and groaning. And that's how they managed things. Either by spraying, or by barking, grunting, hissing, etc. But there were problems. At one point a whole bunch of creatures got together at an Evolutionary Progress Conference and had an argument. It was a waste of energy, said some. Why should we have two ways of communicating, why should we both spray and make sounds, they asked. Why not combine them both INTO ONE FUNCTION? [Achtung Funktoid Alert!] But others objected. They enjoyed spraying and didn't want to give it up. So very little changed. After a few billion years, a whole new bunch of apes came along. Some decided they could say things better by combining barks, howls and hisses in very specific ways. But this idea had a few problems. The old way of doing things--spray, growls, and hisses--didn't say much. BUT IT WAS PRETTY UNMISTAKABLE. Combining all these sounds made it harder to tell one meaning from another. This meant you could sometimes get the wrong message. Besides, where did this leave spraying? It also meant a few things had to happen before such a system could work. First, these apes needed a way to make these sounds PLUS a special kind of hearing to tell them apart. Not to mention greater intelligence, so they could be sure what the sounds meant. Some say this is still a problem. It also meant limiting the number of sounds permitted in any spray-growl-hiss system. That way there would be less confusion. After several million years, a few apes finally got this right. At the next Evolutionary Progress Conference, they told the other creatures that they were moving their spray apparatus upstairs and combining it with their biting system. This was not a hit with the other creatures, and these apes had no choice but to go off on their own. But the apes didn't mind this at all. They were proud, because they were sure they had solved all the world's communication problems for all time. First, they set up a system for making sure all their "spray-sounds" were always spoken correctly. They would enclose each moan in a little capsule with a distinctive shape. Call these little capsules "consonants" and the moan sounds they contain "vowels," and it all makes fairly good sense. There were rules for placing capsules together so they could be spoken correctly. This also helped you to tell members of your own clan from dangerous outsiders. But many problems remained. You could only tell these new sounds apart if a single clan kept living closely together in the same area. If families and clans drifted apart, their sounds and meanings started drifting too. In some places they are still drifting even today. But these apes started migrating in every direction, their sound systems constantly changing as they went. And this whole process may have started twice or more in different places. There's no way we can know for sure. Apes don't write histories. As they wandered, all their sound-spray systems scattered to the winds. And so did the capsules containing their moans. Even the systems for making capsules changed. Apes living in new climes started inventing new spray-sounds to describe things. They launched new technologies, world outlooks, religions, all requiring new spray-sounds. After a few million years, these apes had another idea. They were tired of repeating themselves, and they also needed some system for recording the growing number of their possessions. This is important, said some, so let's carve it in stone. It's easier stamping it in clay, said others. Still others longed for a brush or quill, if only they could find some paper. And so after a while Science Marched On... finally. But not without a multitude of languages and dialects to deal with. And here it is that Translators enter the scene! Consider all these different sound-spray systems, each with its own way of encapsulating sound and meaning. What do they most resemble? Are they not in some ways similar to highly sophisticated hydraulic networks? Or perhaps more homespun plumbing systems, each one built from different materials according to different rules? Could this be what translators and interpreters really are--hydraulic engineers of the mind and/or pioneering plumbers of meaning, in the several senses of "to plumb?" Whatever system of pipes or hydraulic devices are used in Language A, translators must build a comparable system in Language B, even though the two systems can never be the same. The watery element is unavoidable, since language is still largely based on spray. Animals spray everything around them--people talk at or about everything around them. And we become quite upset when our spray marks prove mistaken or are violated by others. If you doubt this, consider how we still use language today: To defend turf or property. To proclaim our rights. To proclaim our love for--and property rights in--our mate. To assert our status. Perhaps these categories are now enlarged by political disputes, intellectual pursuits, and academic feuding. But this is debatable. These spray-sounds can also cause trouble... Many creatures assume the spray-sound they assign to something IS the thing itself. Sometimes other creatures don't agree and insist that another spray-sound IS that very same thing. Once this happens, matters often deteriorate... Or perhaps two creatures agree on the spray-sound but don't agree on what it means. This rarely works out much better. Using language as a form of spray could also explain many forms of fundamentalism, literalness, and congealed ideologies seen around us. Such behaviors spring from those still clinging to the spray-using stage of producing language. Moreover, spray is still so much a part of language that we would still prefer to stand at a distance when some people speak. Human language is quite literally "glorified" animal spray. And animal spray is primal language. IMPORTANT: Author's Apology!!! But all this must be mistaken! It is only a joke and could not possibly be true. We humans have gone _FAR BEYOND_ primitive spraying of our surroundings! After all, we have invented the Arts, Literature, Literary Criticism, Linguistics, Transformational Syntax, Universal Grammar, Deep Structure, Computational Semantics, Translation Studies, and many other sublime and elevated sciences. Obviously, if such a primitive theory were true, these advanced sciences would _CERTAINLY_ have long ago confirmed its validity. But they have not done so... they have never remotely suggested such a theory. So there is no need for you to believe any of this, if you find it the slightest bit objectionable. On the other hand, you just might want to make up your own mind... NOTE: The preceding theory has appeared in print in two scholarly publications: the Sci-Tech Translation Journal (Oct, 1993) and Vol. VI of the ATA Scholarly Series (1993). ----------------------- If you are wondering whether the author is truly serious about this theory, you might want to read the file SPRAY.TXT for further information. It is also contained in his program "Truth About Translation." You can select this section from the "Related Articles" sub-menu. This program can be obtained free of charge from the Downloads section of the author's web site, as shown below. visit the language home... http://language.home.sprynet.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Tom Givon To: Sent: Monday, December 02, 2002 12:01 PM Subject: [Fwd: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'] > > From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Tue Dec 3 05:41:38 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 00:41:38 EST Subject: [Fwd: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'] Message-ID: In a message dated 12/2/02 10:26:15 PM, language at SPRYNET.COM writes: << Human language is quite literally "glorified" animal spray. >> Well, at least some is. Sort of depends on the humans. SL From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Tue Dec 3 08:00:51 2002 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel Everett) Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 08:00:51 +0000 Subject: [Fwd: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'] In-Reply-To: <3DEBBC10.20BF2A4A@oregon.uoregon.edu> Message-ID: Folks, Tom's contribution to this discussion was, as usual, thought-provoking, interesting, and enjoyable to read. I do not understand all of it, because I am not quite sure how Tom is using some of his terms, but I won't bother to go into that here. If Tom means, however, that biological evolution is responsible largely for language, both phylogentically and ontogenetically, and that biology constrains cultural development, he is of course in good company. Chomsky, Bickerton, and Pinker would all in fact agree and would further accept that to draw a strong dividing line between the two is a form of dualism. I am convinced that biology does indeed constrain cultural development and that Tom is right to recommend the writings of major evolutionary theorists such as Mayr as appropriate to discussions on language evolution. On the other hand, I think that it is pretty clear that both language and culture are severely underdetermined by biology. It is an interesting research question to consider how we might (or if we might) tease apart the different contributions from biology and culture to human language development. For example, the Piraha people of the Brazilian Amazon lack grammatical number and counting or numerals of any kind, yet they have what appears to be a mass vs. count noun distinction. How might this be explained? Is one (mass vs. count) the result of biology and the other (no number) the result of culture (perhaps some Whorfian-style difference)? Or is there some biological account of even the lack of number? If biological, which genetic parameters does it fit? I have heard some suggest, seriously, that DNA samples should be taken of the Pirahas. This sounds strange, but it certainly is compatible with an extreme biological viewpoint of language. (Arguably, the same could be said for the fact that the Pirahas lack any basic color terms - all of their four or so 'basic' color terms are morphologically complex or have other, apparently more basic, meanings.) The issues here are complex. I agree with Tom that there is unlikely to be a simple, single dividing line between culture and biology in the development of language. Yet rather than conflate the distinction, I think instead that there are multiple lines of division and that we are unlikely to ever be able to reduce talk of one side of a line to talk about the other side. And we can expect new lines to form and old lines to disappear as our own interests shift. (The same goes for the brain vs. the mind.) There will always be some explanations that are better stated in cultural terms, some in purely linguistic terms, and others in biological terms, and yet others in terms we have not thought of yet. The reason the debate is so old is similar to the reasons for many old debates - a single choice is perceived where there are many choices. *Ultimately, the nature of your explanation will be based on what is most useful to you and your interlocutors, not to the Truth of your dichotomy.* There is no one way to go about thinking. So choose what you want to describe and do it in the terms you like best. If others find it useful, you are on to something. If those others are 'scientists', then it is science. (Other boundary lines arise...) -- Dan -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 3279 bytes Desc: not available URL: From amnfn at WELL.COM Tue Dec 3 09:18:24 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 01:18:24 -0800 Subject: Language as communication device Message-ID: >Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 16:56:04 +0000 >From: Bill Croft > One must distinguish between the evolution of language >and the evolution of languages. The former is the evolution >of human cognition and social behavior that permitted the >rise of modern human language. This is of course an >instance of biological evolution, of human beings. A major problem with this analysis is that Language is not biological. The capacity to acquire and use a language -- any language -- is entirely separate from the invention of Language. Language is a communication device, much like a cellphone. While a better understanding of the evolution of human beings may tell us when we became biologically capable of exploiting languages for communication, it tells us nothing about when Language arose or how. Our prehistoric ancestors could have used a cellphone, if someone had given it to them and shown them how. Humans have not biologically evolved as a species to the point that we are now capable of "cellphone use". Early man and present day man had about the same endowments. Most modern humans couldn't personally produce cellphones or tell you what makes them work. The only advantage they have over early man is that they happen to live in a society where cellphones are available. There is no evidence that Language among humans arose more than once. (We don't know for sure that it didn't, either.) Just as modern day cellphones, in all their varieties, were not developed independently of each other, there's a very good possibility that neither are human languages independent inventions. If you grow up where a language is spoken, and you have the biology of a normal human, you will pick it up. But this does not imply that humans have a biological language device. Neither does it imply that one necessarily has to be human in order to use Language. --Aya Katz +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.well.com/user/amnfn +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From twood at UWC.AC.ZA Tue Dec 3 13:59:16 2002 From: twood at UWC.AC.ZA (Tahir Wood) Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 15:59:16 +0200 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: >>> Tom Givon 12/02/02 09:57PM >>> The anthropocentric impulse to draw an absolute boundary between biological evolution ('the animal') and cultural evolution ('history', 'the human') goes back to antiquity Tahir: I'm not sure if I am one of the people who supposedly drew an absolute boundary, but I confess imediately to not having the faintest idea what an absolute boundary is. I did however draw a conceptual distinction between evolution and history, on which see more below. likewise, the idea that somehow cullture and history are wholly liberated from adaptive ('functional') constrants, that they are--to paraphrase Charles Li (and, for that matter, Bill Labov)--matters of only society and culture, falls squarely on the Plato-Aristotle-Descartes-Wallace-Chomsky side of the debate. Tahir: "They are matters of only society and culture" looks like it might be one of those "absolute boundaries" you spoke of, except that I doubt whether anyone was foolish enought to say something like that. The funny thing is, in biology itself there have been strong recent trends to obliterate this rigid --artificial, ideological--boundary between mind/language/culture/behavior and 'plain' structural biology. Tahir: Well they might do that in the same way that the chemists at my university say that "chemistry is the science of everything". And no doubt someone who had plenty of time to waste could dream up a chemical or biological theory of why the French revolution happened or why a particular metaphor is more common in one language than another. But I doubt whether such theories would attract much attention. Most of us would find a historical or linguistic theory more satisfying. It therefore boggles my (admittedly simple) mind to see self-declared functionalists, who believe that language is adapted to its main tasks of representation and communication of information, come up with the idea that the main process that shapes both phonology and grammar--diachronic development--is somehow only 'culturally' and 'socially' constrained (and pray, what does it mean exactly? Total lack of constraints?) This certainly flies in the face of all detailed, fine-grained studies of the process of diachronic change in both phonology and grammar. Tahir: The argument is rather that given the biological constraints, a wide variety of linguistic forms are possible, but the constraints themselves can tell us nothing about which of those possibilities are actualised or why they are. There we have to look at the history of the users of the language, the environment they live in, etc. Thus it would be nonsense to try to explain the difference between, say, old English and modern English, which are mutually unintelligible, in terms of a biological change in the users of English over the last thousand years. I say that it is a historical change that has occured; I say furthermore that I don't think anyone would say that it is a biological change; you apparently say there is no difference between the two. I also pointed out that differences in the languages of different peoples cannot be attributed to biological differences between those peoples. I don't think that you or anyone really argues this outside of maybe the most demented of sociobiologists or racists. To say that language changes historically is to say that it changes in correspondence with the functional requirements of its users in the changing context. Why is that not a functionalist kind of explanation? -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: TEXT.htm URL: From paul at BENJAMINS.COM Tue Dec 3 14:47:39 2002 From: paul at BENJAMINS.COM (Paul Peranteau) Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 09:47:39 -0500 Subject: NEW BOOK: Givon: Bio-Linguistics Message-ID: John Benjamins Publishing Co. is pleased to announce the impending publication of T. Giv?n's BIO-LINGUISTICS: THE SANTA BARBARA LECTURES (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2002, 377pp . including bibliography and index) . The book presents an adaptive--evolutionary, variationist, diachronic-- account of human language, an account fully consonant with modern evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology. In the process, the book challenges rigid traditional--Platonic/Cartesian--dichotomies such as mind vs. body, nature vs. nurture, biology vs. culture/history, innate vs. emergent, or language vs. cognition. In placing the core human phenomena of mind, language and culture within their rightful adaptive context, one neither detracts from their staggering complexity and apparent uniqueness, nor does one do violence to the 'hard' constraints of evolutionary biology. Rather, biology and culture turn out to inter-penetrate and illuminate each other along a graded continuum. The main chapters of the book are: 1. Language as a biological adaptation (overview) 2. The bounds of generativity and the adaptive basis of variation (the functional basis of categories and prototypes) 3. The demise of competence (an empirical study of so-called 'configurationality' in oral texts from English and Ute) 4. Human language as an evolutionary product (on the co-evolution of language, mind and brain) 5. An evolutionary account of language processing rates (an experimental study of visual processing of objects and events) 6. The diachronic foundations of language universal (the Greenbergial program of functionality, diachrony, typology and universals) 7. Anticipating othere minds: The neuro-cognitive interpretation of 'context' (re-casting the pragmatics of 'context in terms of mental models) 8. The grammar of narrator's perspective in narrative fiction (text-based study of speaker's 'voice' and grammaticalized modality) 9. The society of intimates (the cultural context for inter-personal cooperation and communication) 10. On the ontology of academic negativity (the pitfalls of doing science in an institutional context) 11. Epilogue: Joseph Greenberg as a theorist The book is dedicated to the memory of the late Joseph Greenberg, a self-certified lumper of functionalism, diachrony, universals, variation and evolution. US & Canada: Hardcover ISBN 1 58811 225 X USD 110.00 Paperback ISBN 1 58811 226 8 USD 43.95 Everywhere Else: Hardcover ISBN 90 272 2590 7 EUR 110.00 Paperback ISBN 90 272 2591 5 EUR 44.00 Paul Peranteau (paul at benjamins.com) P O Box 27519 Ph: 215 836-1200 Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 Fax: 215 836-1204 John Benjamins Publishing Co. website: http://www.benjamins.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lamb at RICE.EDU Tue Dec 3 17:05:37 2002 From: lamb at RICE.EDU (Sydney Lamb) Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 11:05:37 -0600 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Just a comment on one small point in Steve Long's interesting message: On Mon, 2 Dec 2002, Steve Long wrote: > ... > The gap in evidence between human non-language and language is huge. We > really have no examples of the intermediate stages. This leads us, wrongly I > ... We do have intermediate stages in the developing communicative systems of young children. It is possible that these intermediate stages are somewhat like those of the evolution of human communicative ability. 2nd comment: Steve's (well-expressed) argument, with which I basically agree, has been presented in a somewhat different form and with complementary emphases, in my Pathways of the Brain, pp. 285-291. Syd Lamb Sydney M. Lamb http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lamb/ Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences Rice University, Houston, TX From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Wed Dec 4 17:03:11 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 12:03:11 EST Subject: The Culture vs Biology Experiment Message-ID: In a message dated 12/3/02 3:00:34 AM, dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK writes: << It is an interesting research question to consider how we might (or if we might) tease apart the different contributions from biology and culture to human language development. >> Well, the most obvious place to start such research would be by removing one of the variables. Since the cultural contribution would be far easier (not necessarily ethically) to remove, the experiment is simple to conceptualize. Take a normal new born human and raise him in as complete absence from any contact with language as is possible, to some variable age x. Then find out a) what language he uses and b) what language learning capability he has, at age x. (I.e, under controlled conditions, create the laboratory equivalent of a "wolf boy.") Of course, a new born is dependent upon other humans to a certain age or it will not survive, so we cannot totally remove the "cultural" contribution. If we mechanically nuture the baby without human contact, we run the risk of "wire-mother" induced autism, I suppose. This of course would indicate that "human culture" might be mandatory to development of language in the sense at least that it is mandatory to the new born's survival. A second experiment admits that rudimentary language cannot be observed without the presence of a speaker and a listener. It assumes a social function for language. That's something interesting about the very early "experiments" that isolated infants. The purpose of those experiments was to ascertain things like what the oldest language was, what the first word spoken would be or whether the sacred language (normally Hebrew) was innate. But the starting point had two subjects included. Herodotus describes the pharoah Psammetichus isolating TWO infants, not one. The objective was to see what developed between two "culturally deprived" infants. When the infants spoke their first common word, however, the experiment was over -- because it was ascertained based on that word that the infants were speaking Phrygian. More prolonged observation was done in the middle ages. Apparently, James IV of Scotland ordered two boys confined to the Hebrides island of Inchkeith. The children apparently ended up speaking a language and it was Hebrew. Other reports of such experiments were not as positive, and it seems hard to understand their results because the objective was never to ascertain whether a "natural language" was spoken. Even nomimalistic commentators who expected "animal noises" were not looking for structure in those noises. Functionalism would suggest that there are biological constraints on language. But it suggests this primarily because biological evolution is just as molded by the dictates of the environment as learning and culture are. A functional biological-based language should look like a functional cultural-based language. They both solve the same problems. We live in a world with objects (nouns), processes (verbs) and attributes (adjectives and adverbs). Any language -- innate or cultural -- that does not make these distinctions would not reflect the world we live in and should be dysfunctional. So, even if these human infants were not exactly born with such language structure in their brains, they might have the "ingenuity" to invent a language that functioned precisely the same way. They would still however be indebted to biology for brain complexity and vocal cords or hand dexterity to make signs that allows complex language. But in no way would we expect these subjects to use language to refer to a wheel, a boat, Tuesdays, beer, marriage, cell phones, hamburgers or a demonstrably neolithic concepts like bread or pottery. They should have no sense of abstracts. No abstract names for colors. The great mass of what language carries for us would not be theirs. Eons of human culture would be absent. And all this accumulated knowledge -- this enormous common cache of tranferable information -- is what I think we are mainly doing when we use "language". Steve Long PS - Here's Herodotus' account. What is a little ironic here is that "bread" may be a neolithic (within the last 10,000 years) invention. So, even this "first word" reflects a piece of late coming human technology: "1] Now before Psammetichus became king of Egypt, the Egyptians believed that they were the oldest people on earth. But ever since Psammetichus became king and wished to find out which people were the oldest,... [2] Psammetichus, when he was in no way able to learn by inquiry which people had first come into being, devised a plan by which he took two newborn children of the common people and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his flocks. He gave instructions that no one was to speak a word in their hearing; they were to stay by themselves in a lonely hut, and in due time the shepherd was to bring goats and give the children their milk and do everything else necessary. [3] Psammetichus did this, and gave these instructions, because he wanted to hear what speech would first come from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct babbling. And he had his wish; for one day, when the shepherd had done as he was told for two years, both children ran to him stretching out their hands and calling "Bekos!" as he opened the door and entered. [4] When he first heard this, he kept quiet about it; but when, coming often and paying careful attention, he kept hearing this same word, he told his master at last and brought the children into the king's presence as required. Psammetichus then heard them himself, and asked to what language the word "Bekos" belonged; he found it to be a Phrygian word, signifying bread. ....This is the story which I heard from the priests of Hephaestus' temple at Memphis; the Greeks say among many foolish things that Psammetichus had the children reared by women whose tongues he had cut out. "[Hmmm, a concern over evidence contamination?!] From li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU Wed Dec 4 18:03:14 2002 From: li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU (Charles Li) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 10:03:14 -0800 Subject: [Fwd: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'] In-Reply-To: <3DEBBC10.20BF2A4A@oregon.uoregon.edu> Message-ID: The issue of "boundary" between human (cognition, culture, language) and animal (cognition, culture, communication), like any other issues and concepts in biology, is not subject to water-tight generalization. This lack of theorem-like generalities in biological science marks its fundamental difference from physics/mathematics. The difference has profound implications on research methodologies and ways of thinking in these two branches of science. Francis Crick has written an elegant book (The Mad Pursuit of Knowledge) on this issue based on his own experience starting as a physicist and then becoming a biologist. Talmy assumes a continuum between animal cognition, culture, communication and human cognition, culture and language - a sweeping generalization resplendent with Givonian speed and epistemology. For sure, there is a lot of commonality as well as finely graded differences or continuum within a Linnean order, say, mammals. For example, the body design, the cytoarchitecture of the brain, the basic emotions (as opposed to cognitive emotions). Within the confines of communication, facial expressions are finely graded from lower mammals to higher mammals. The central issue here, however, concerns language: Is there a clear and distinct boundary between human language and animal communication? Conversely, is the difference between human language and higher primate communication a finely graded continuum like facial expressions? There are several unbridgeable and distinct boundaries between animal communicative behavior and the evolutionary development of hominid communicative behavior leading toward language. The first one is the emergence of symbolic signals. At the most elemental cognitive level, a symbolic signal must possess two properties: (a) It refers to a concrete object (b) The reference is context-independent This is the beginning of 'meaning' and vocabulary. The emergence of the first symbolic signal referring to a concrete object represents the crossing of the first 'missing link' in hominid evolution. Animal communicative signals are not symbolic according to our definition of elemental symbolic signals, and animal communicative signals do not have 'meaning'. What they have is 'function' such as threat, distress, begging, appeasement/submission, courtship/copulation, warning/alarm, recruitment, assembly, dispersion, identification, territoriality, feeding, etc. Functions must not be confused with 'meaning". Each of the following linguistic expressions has the function of 'threat': I'm going to bite your ears. I'll kill you. I'll knock you over. I'm going to beat you up. But they all have different meanings, and they have different meanings because they are linguistic expressions. In animal communicative behavior, threat signals are just threat signals, no more and no less. Different species have different threat signals. Some signals are graded according to the intensity of the signaler's emotional state, and some, discrete. Some are structurally more complex involving various components and several channels of communication, and some are simple. All members of the same species use the same threat signals, and all threat signals are emitted by signalers to threaten intended receivers. They have no meaning. We can make similar statements about any other functional category of animal communicative signals. A particular set of animal communicative signals that have received a great deal of attention is the frequently cited warning signals of vervet monkeys. (Many other animals have different warning calls for different approaching predators. Suricates, a burrowing viverrid related to the mongoose is a good example.) These warning calls are not symbolic signals because they do not possess property (b). Nevertheless, the warning calls of the vervet monkeys represent a step toward a symbolic signal, because they differentiate, for example, reptilian, avian, mammalian and other predators. The differentiation, however, holds only in the context of warning. It is not context-free. In other words, a vervet monkey warning signal has no referential property outside of the context of warning. Seyfarth & Cheney (1999) note that vocal production, i.e. delivery of acoustically defined calls, among apes and monkeys appears fully formed shortly after birth, suggesting that vocal production may be largely innate. In addition, Aitken (1981) and Pandya et al (1988) conducted experiments on capuchin monkeys showing that their vocal production was mediated primarily by the central (periaqueductal) gray area of the mid-brain, a phylogenetically very old set of neurons responsible for arousal and motivational states in all vertebrates. In the case of vervet monkey's warning calls, the only role of the neocortex involves associating a particular involuntary vocalization with a specific situation. The vocalization is involuntary because it is probably associated with fear aroused by the situation. Hence an infant vervet possesses the adult repertoire of vocalization. The learning during ontological development involves the correct coupling of one involuntary vocalization with one specific dangerous situation. Each vocalization can be graded according to intensity. But it is only the coupling process that is mediated by the neocortex, and this coupling process, according to Seyfarth & Cheney, requires learning. The neural mechanism we have just sketched for non-human primate communication contrasts sharply with the neural mechanism of the production of causal, spoken language. The production of casual, spoken language is primarily, though not exclusively, mediated by the neocortex. The emotional/motivational state of the speaker can be viewed as a coterminous but neurologically separate dimension of speech expressed primarily in prosody. It is, therefore, not surprising that participants in casual spoken conversation can talk about things that are remote in time and space from the occurrence of the conversation. This is the "displacement" feature of human language that Charles Hockett (1960) pointed out. It does not exist in non-human primate communication because a non-human primate communicative signal tends to be associated with the emotional or motivational reaction to a particular situation including the animal's own internal hormonal state. (The interesting exception here is the waggle dance of homey bees. That is another story.) Another set of animal communicative signals that might be construed as symbolic are the signals that have the function of individual identification. For example, the whistle of the bottlenose dolphin and the vocalization of social mammals is acoustically unique for each individual. Consequently members of a social group can identify an individual upon detecting its vocalization. The identification function of such animal communication signals parallels the identification function of the voice of a human. Every human voice is acoustically unique. Within a social group, members can identify each other by the voice of a person. The unique quality of the voice, however, does not constitute a symbolic signal. It does not have the referential property of the expression "It's me!" or the referential property of a first person singular pronoun. Recognition of the voice depends on past interaction and social familiarity. We cannot identify a stranger's voice, although we recognize that it does not belong to someone we know. The same can be said about the set of animal communicative signals that have the function of identification. The whistle of the bottle-nosed dolphin, the coo of a vervet monkey, the bark of a wolf, the grunt of a warthog and the various other communicative signals used by animals for maintaining contact within a social group are not symbolic signals. They are neither words nor names. In short, animal communicative signals in nature do not contain symbolic signals. Without symbolic signals, there is no meaning. Meaning and symbolic signals are at the heart of human language. Only symbolic signals can be concatenated to form larger units of communicative signals, i.e. morpho-syntactic and discourse units, and only symbolic signals can lead to metaphors. Talmy's point on the nature of language change is partly correct and partly an attack of a straw-man by lambasting the "extreme functionalist position" of attributing ALL language change to social and cultural factors. I don't know of anyone holding such a point of view. My belief that language change tends to be driven by social and cultural factors is based on the hypothesis that the default situation of any language, prehistoric as well as contemporary, is contact. Contact-induced changes are cultural and socially driven. Unfortunately a great deal of contact-induced changes in a specific language beyond a certain time depth cannot be reconstructed. One piece of evidence in support of my hypothesis is areal features among genetically unrelated languages. Now we are entering a different domain of linguistics. Suffice to say that my main point is to clarify that language change has nothing to do with life expectancy, genetic mutation and reproductive success. The mainstay of evolution of animal communicative signals is ritualization. Ritualization typically involves evolutionary development making a signal more conspicuous, i.e. more strongly stimulating, and ways of making a signal more stable, i.e. having a typical form, and typically such evolutionary development occurs on an evolutionary time scale, i.e. thousands of generations at a minimum, e.g. exaggeration of movements, addition of brightly colored anatomical components, creation of new exocrine glands, enlargement of anatomical components involved in display, etc. In short, ritualization may involve anatomical, physiological as well as behavioral changes that enhance the efficiency of the signal. Hence, the addition of properties that are the consequence of direct selection of increased effectiveness of the signal. Many of these evolutionary changes of animal communicative signals involve genetic mutations. It is true one may couch human cultural development in Darwinian evolutionary terms. Dawkins tried and proposed "emes" as the unit of "selection" in cultural evolution, a homology of "genes" in biological evolution, although genes are not the only entity on which natural selection operates. Natural selection also operates on "organism" and "species". But that is another topic. The relevant point here is that even though one may wish to couch cultural development in Darwinian's evolutionary theory, it does not follow that there isn't a quantum leap from animal communicative behavior to human language. Steve Long erroneously assumed that discontinuity between animal communicative behavior and human language implied that human language originated through mutation. Bickerton, Pinker, Richard Klien, and those who subscribe to the hypothesis of hardwired universal grammar may believe that human language originated through genetic mutation. I have argued that the evolutionary process leading to the crystallization of language took approximately one to one-and-half million years. There is no such thing as a linguistic gene. A gene merely specifies the structure of a protein. Language, however, is a behavior at the highest cognitive level. It permeates all facets of human cognition. It is not and cannot be brought about by a single or a few genes! Even a simple biological trait such as the color of the eye requires a cascade of interactions among seven different genes. Any defective protein that severely impairs a person's ability to acquire a language is bound to have dramatic consequences on the ontological development of that person's central nervous system. This is not to say that the evolutionary process leading to the crystallization of language does not involve genetic mutations. On the contrary, increased encephalization, lengthening of ontological maturation, enlargement of the vertebral canal and the concomitant expansion of the thoracic nerves, shrinkage of the gastrointestinal tract, the decent of the larynx, all of which are directly related to the emergence of language in hominid evolution, certainly involve mutations of both structural and regulatory genes. The kind of genetic mutation that is implausible is the kind that is directly and exclusively responsible for the origin or the structure of language! Talmy mentioned in passing names of great scholars in evolution such as Ernst Mayr. One of Mayr's seminal contributions in evolution is to point out how behavior kicks off or initiates a long and elaborate evolutionary process affecting complex animals such as vertebrates and mammals. For example, the penetration of a new ecological niche by a population of animals, which is typically initiated by behavior, often leads to dramatic evolutionary development. (For example, cetaceans and the Darwinian finches of the Galapagoes.) The main reason is that a new ecological niche unleashes a new set of selectional forces. The evolutionary development initiated by an exceptional or out-of-norm behavior such as the pentration of a new ecological niche may involve genetic mutations favored by the new ecological conditions. But the point is that it is often behavior, not mutation that initiates the evolutionary development. The obvious advantage of behaviorally initiated, as opposed to genetically-initiated, evolutionary development is that behavior can be transmitted among social cohorts and passed on from one generation to another. For genetic mutation to work in the same way, it would have to occur simultaneously in at least one male and one female of a population. Even then, the genetic mutation, in spite of its adaptive value, may not endure because of genetic drift. If the genetic mutation entails behavioral change among highly social animals such as hominids, the very survival of the beneficiaries of the mutation will be severely jeopardized. Imagine what could happen to an animal in a group of highly social mammals if it perchance acquired a different mode of communication through mutation! I have postulated that the emergence of the first symbolic signal is a behavioral innovation. That behavioral innovation is what started the ball rolling in hominid evolution that ultimately led to the crystallization of language, which, according to a variety of evidence, occurred several tens of thousands of years after the emergence of anatomically modern humans in Africa, probably during 80,000 - 60,000 before present. I apologize for the length of this response to Talmy's repartee. As it stands, the response contains many statements that are oversimplifications. There are probably also many mistakes as I pecked them out at my computer with two fingers in great haste. Talmy can rightfully snicker at my admission of being in haste since I mentioned Givonian speed at the beginning - "Every criticism is a piece of autobiography' (Oscar Wilde)! In light of my heavy work load during the current California budget crisis, I will desist from sending further replies. I will refer any reader who is interested in my discussion to two of my recent papers both of which will appear in print any day: "On the evolutionary origin of language" In Mirror neurons and the evolution of brain and language , edited by M Stamenov and V. Gallese, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (Co-author Jean-Marie Hombert). "Missing links, issues and hypotheses in the evolutionary origin of language" In The evolution of language and pre-language, edited by T. Givon , Amsterdam: John Benjamins. I might mention an in-progress article that is relevant: "The evolutionary of basic emotions and their manifestations in communicative behavior: Human language vs. animal communication" In Dialogic expressions of basic emotions, edited by Edda Weigand, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. When I finish writing the in-progress article, I will be happy to send it to those who request it. Charles >Dear FUNKnetters (and Charles Li), > >I have held off from responding to the various notes on the subject of >language, culture, biology and evolution, hoping against all hope to hear >from others what I thought needed to be said. But the more I hear, the >more I am inclined to tear my hairs--the few still remaining--in utter >despair. So, in the interest of refocusing the discussion more explicitly >towards the interface between biology, I would like to interject the >following: > >The anthropocentric impulse to draw an absolute boundary between >biological evolution ('the animal') and cultural evolution ('history', >'the human') goes back to antiquity, and has been the subject of >repeated (and repetitious) bitter skirmishes ever since. Both Plato and >Aristotle posited this absolute boundary, the latter in terms of the >exclusively-human spirit of rationality (as distinct from the metabolic >and perceptual spirits, which were conceded to all animate beings). > >The bitter Darwin-Wallace debate about evolution was about whether to draw >that self-same rigid line between the evolution of the body and that of >the mind/brain/soul. Wallace wanted to draw the line right where Plato, >Aristotle, the Church, Descartes, and all traditional humanist had drawn >it. Darwin insisted on a unitary system--what's good for the body is good >for the soul. Chomsky's and Bickerton's insistence that the 'rise' of >language is not governed by the same adaptive constraints that govern the >evolution of all other biological sub-systems (including 'mere cognition') >follows in the very same dualist tradition. And likewise, the idea that >somehow cullture and history are wholly liberated from adaptive >('functional') constrants, that they are--to paraphrase Charles Li (and, >for that matter, Bill Labov)--matters of only society and culture, falls >squarely on the Plato-Aristotle-Descartes-Wallace-Chomsky side of the debate. > >The funny thing is, in biology itself there have been strong recent trends >to obliterate this rigid --artificial, ideological--boundary between >mind/language/culture/behavior and 'plain' structural biology. Thus, a >great evolutionary-biology theorist, Ernst Mayr, as noted that (loosely >paraphrased) 'soft' adaptive behavior is the pacemaker, of 'hard' genetic >evolution. And the work of great figures in etology (von Frisch, Marler, >J.T. Bonner, E.O. Wilson, D. Griffin, F. deWaal, to mention only a few) >has been predicated on the interpermeability of biology and culture. > >It therefore boggles my (admittedly simple) mind to see self-declared >functionalists, who believe that language is adapted to its main tasks of >representation and communication of information, come up with the idea >that the main process that shapes both phonology and grammar--diachronic >development--is somehow only 'culturally' and 'socially' constrained (and >pray, what does it mean exactly? Total lack of constraints?) This >certainly flies in the face of all detailed, fine-grained studies of the >process of diachronic change in both phonology and grammar. > >"But", the defenders of the strict boundary retort, "what about >cross-language typological variation and the great freedom from adaptive >constraints that it entails?" In response, I would like to remind >everybody of a few things about variation and how it comes about: > >First, typological variation is highly constrained. Relatively few 'types' >of any linguistic structure are actually attested in languages--as >compared with the plethora of mathematically (or biologically) possible >structures. The fact that more than one type of structure can perform the >same communicative funtion is not unique to language and culture. It is a >cardinal fact in biology, and of the main process of functional extension >(homoplasy), by which a structure takes over the coding of similar but >not-wholely-identical functions (and may eventually diverge beyond >recognition). Evolutionary biology, while adaptively guided (via >selection) is hardly 100% deterministic, or we would have had only one >extant species. > >Second, the diachronic pathways that give rise to variable synchronic >structure are just as constrained and largely uni-directional. In both, >they closely resemble biological evolution. And the most common >explanation to such constrained evolution are adaptive. > >Third, in language diachrony as in biological evolution, the universal >constrains that govern synchronic structure--the eplanatory principles, >the theory--operate largely through the developmental process. They are to >be found in the mechanisms of emergence (be they ontogenetic, phylogenetic >of behavioral-historial, not in the catalogue of extant synchronic >('typological') structures. > >Fourth, variation is the very soul of both synchronic biology and >evolution, where species are defined by their variability curves (of both >'hard' genotype and 'soft', 'behavioral' phenotype); where today's >intra-species population variation is simply the current inventory of >tomorrow's potential evolutionary changes--and thus cross-species >variation. This is exactly what one finds in the relation between >synchronic variation and diachronic change, an observation often >attributed to Bill Labove (tho I cannot find an exact citation...). > >Lastly, variation is not only a methodological phenomenon (cf. Labov >again); it is a highly theoretical entity in both biology and language, >and has highly adaptive ('funtional') motivations. The reservoir of >synchronic variants within a population is guarantor of survival, just in >case the context should require alternative adaptive solutions. > >True enough, diachrony ('history') in both language and culture is 'soft' >and presumably reversible. But so is animal behavior, which is never 100% >constrained by genetics (cf. Mayr's "open program"). Still, this neither >exempts language and cultrure from adaptive constraints, nor sets them >apart from 'plain' biological evolution. > >It is perhaps time that we quit erecting and re-erecting those artificial >barriers--human vs. animal, body vs. soul/mind, biology vs. culture, >language vs. cognition--and instead re-group to take care of the urgent >task at hand: Investigating and explaining language as and integral part >of this incredibly complex miracle of striving, behaving, adaptive, >evolving life. There is no shame but only strength in being part of the >grand coalition of 'plain' biology. > >Have a happy holliday season, TG > >================================= > >Charles Li wrote: >> Using the expression, "the evolution of language", to refer to the >> evolution of hominid communicative behavior prior to the crystallization >> of language implies that language was the communicative tool of all >> hominids. Yet no one would assume that Orrorin tugenensis, >> Kenyanthropus, the various species of Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and >> Paranthropus had language. Indeed, most of the species in the genus of >> Homo probably did not have language if 'language' designates the casual, >> spoken language of anatomically modern humans. The investigation of the >> origin of language is an enterprise concerned with the evolution of the >> communicative behavior of our hominid ancestors, NOT the evolution of >> language. Chronologically the study of the evolution of language begins >> from the time when language crystallized, whereas the study of the >> origin of language ends at the crystallization of language. This >> distinction does not belittle the significance of the research probing >> into older and older layers of human language. Nor does it dismiss the >> importance of the proto-human language if and when its features can be >> inferred. One of the most important reasons for making this distinction >> is the fundamental difference between the ways language changes and the >> ways hominid communicative behavior changes. The latter, like animal >> communicative behavior, is subject to the constraint of Darwinian >> evolution. The evolution of our hominid ancestors' communicative >> behavior involves natural selection and genetic mutation. A change of >> their communicative behavior in the direction toward the emergence of >> language was adaptive in the sense that it enhanced their life >> expectancy and reproductive success. Those hominids who made the change >> achieved a higher level of fitness than those hominids who failed to >> make the change. A change moving the hominids' communicative behavior >> one step closer to human language would imply greater communicative >> efficiency. Greater communicative efficiency would, in turn, entail >> greater ease with which valuable knowledge and experience could be >> passed from one individual to another and from one generation to >> another. Rapid and efficient transmission of knowledge conferred an >> immense competitive advantage to the hominids for securing resources and >> possibly vanquishing others, including other species of hominids whose >> communicative behavior was less developed in the direction toward >> language crystallization. >> >>Given that hominids within the genus of Homo and possibly some gracile >>species of the Australopithecine are generalists who did not specialize >>in any specific ecological niche, the competitive advantage conferred by >>a more effective communicative behavior may explain why there is only one >>surviving species within the taxonomic family of hominids. When two >>hominid species happened to co-exist as generalists and the communicative >>behavior of one species was more effective than that of the other, there >>would be a good possibility that the communicatively more advanced >>species would eliminate the other through competition, especially when >>natural resources dwindled as they did periodically in a dramatic fashion >>during the past three million years because of global temperature >>fluctuations. >> >>The evolution of language, i.e. language change after its >>crystallization, is by an large driven by social and cultural factors. It >>has nothing to do with genetic mutation, natural selection, life >>expectancy or reproductive success. Confusing the evolution of language >>with the origin of language may result in attributing features of >>language to the communicative behavior of early hominids before the >>emergence of language. >> >>For details, see attached paper. >> >>Charles Li >> >> >> >>At 09:36 AM 12/2/2002 +0200, Tahir Wood wrote: >> >> >>> >>> Bill Croft 11/29/02 06:56PM >>> >>> One must distinguish between the evolution of language >>>and the evolution of languages. The former is the evolution >>>of human cognition and social behavior that permitted the >>>rise of modern human language. This is of course an >>>instance of biological evolution, of human beings. The >>>latter is the process by which linguistic elements change >>>over time. This is an evolutionary process, that is it >>>involves change by replication; but it is not the same >>>evolutionary process as biological evolution. >>> >>>I prefer to refer to the former as evolution and the latter as history. >>>Less confusing, and less likely to give the impression that the social >>>aspect of language change is absent in favour of some kind of biological >>>determinism: e.g. Africans have 'less developed languages' because they >>>are racially/biologically 'less developed'. >>>Tahir >> >>___________________________________________________ >>Charles Li >>Professor of Linguistics, Dean of Graduate Division >>University of California, Santa Barbara >>Santa Barbara, CA 93106 >>Tel: 805-893-2013 Fax: 805-893-8259 > >___________________________________________________ >Charles Li >Professor of Linguistics, Dean of Graduate Division >University of California, Santa Barbara >Santa Barbara, CA 93106 >Tel: 805-893-2013 Fax: 805-893-8259 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From amnfn at WELL.COM Wed Dec 4 19:44:43 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 11:44:43 -0800 Subject: Feral children and enculturated apes Message-ID: >Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 12:03:11 EST >From: Steve Long >To: FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu >Subject: The Culture vs Biology Experiment > >In a message dated 12/3/02 3:00:34 AM, dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK writes: ><< It is an interesting research question to consider how we might (or if we >might) tease apart the different contributions from biology and culture to >human language development. >> > > Since the cultural contribution would be far easier (not >necessarily ethically) to remove, the experiment is simple to conceptualize. >Take a normal new born human and raise him in as complete absence from any >contact with language as is possible, to some variable age x. Then find out >a) what language he uses and b) what language learning capability he has, at >age x. (I.e, under controlled conditions, create the laboratory equivalent of >a "wolf boy.") Haven't the actual feral children whose case histories we know already established that children do not come up with language unless they're brought up within a language speaking environment? If we want a controlled experiment (without regard to ethics) then cutting the caretakers' tongues out is not enough. Humans who have been exposed to Language can transmit it as a means of communication without using normal articulatory apparatus. The homesigns devised in deaf homes are Language, too. And they are not Language independently arrived at, despite their originality, since the big hurdle is internalizing the concept of Language, not its technical implementation. A controlled experiment would best be undertaken by allowing non-enculturated apes to raise a human child in their own community. Nobody would actually do this, but as a thought experiment, isn't the outcome pretty obvious? Conversely, there currently are ongoing experiments in the other direction. Savage-Rumbaugh has successfully transmitted symbolic language to her subjects. I am in the beginning stages of a similar experiment, using conventional symbols. --Aya Katz +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.well.com/user/amnfn +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Wed Dec 4 20:35:08 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 15:35:08 EST Subject: Animal versus Human Language Message-ID: In a message dated 12/4/02 1:07:13 PM, li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU writes: <> I'm sorry to say that this differentiation seems completely artificial. Each of those "meanings" has a different function. What you are doing here is making function mean something broad ("threat") and then saying that what is just a more specific function becomes "meaning". Obviously I would have a different intent in saying "I'll knock you over" versus "I'm going to beat you up" (or otherwise the difference is irrelevant.) If I intend a different meaning or the listener perceives I'm promising a different outcome, then the two statements have different functions. The terminology here seems to be the only thing that makes the difference between meaning and function. What you are demonstrating is a quantitative difference between the level of discrimination that is available in animal "language", not that it is qualitatively different. li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU also writes: <> How exactly does one determine that an animal communication is not a reference to a concrete object? And when ever -- even in the most abstract human speech -- is a reference "context-independent." li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU also writes: <<(Many other animals have different warning calls for different approaching predators. Suricates, a burrowing viverrid related to the mongoose is a good example.) These warning calls are not symbolic signals because they do not possess property (b). Nevertheless, the warning calls of the vervet monkeys represent a step toward a symbolic signal, because they differentiate, for example, reptilian, avian, mammalian and other predators. The differentiation, however, holds only in the context of warning. It is not context-free.>> This is clearly incorrect in terms of the listener. The predator is not present for the listener or the communication is functionless. So, for the vervet monkey being warned, when there is no predator present, the sound is a) a reference to a concrete object and b) independent of the presence of that object. That is a symbol. And the information that it carries has consequences and therefore meaning in any human sense. Since we cannot read a vervet monkey's mind, that is the best we can say about the situation. li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU also writes: <> The real question is what animals use the neocortex for and whether their "communications" can be made to be mediated by the neocortex. Many domesticated animals, birds and primates can all be taught to vocalize or gesture in new ways with new "meanings" -- new functions in new contexts with new results. The limitations are as much dependent on the limited outcomes they are interested in as the limitations of their ability to vocalize or gesture or even their patience. (Cats, particularly cats, lack "emotional" patience.) Functionalism says that outcome (intended or actual) should be the defining factor. When you manipulate the outcome or create new effects for communicative behavior, and the animal learns the causal connection, communication will occur and go beyond the primal scream and make as much use of the neocortex as animals make in non-communicative behavior. And though I'm reluctant to mention it here, there is a mass of good old Skinnerian research that amply documents that animal "communicative behavior" can go beyond functions found in natural settings (threats, warnings, etc.) li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU also writes: <> All communications to be communications must supply some informational change in state -- some change in future effect or outcome. It's not functioning otherwise. A threat or a warning implicity deals with the future. We are being fooled here by the fact that someone somewhere invented the future tense in human language. The fact that the abstraction of time is marked in human language does not mean it is not at the core of all communication. Human language embodies a much more complex map of time and space, not a different one. Physics works the same way for animals and humans. As far as place: I was walking a dog in a nearby field when he yelped and got some yelps back from the two dogs he lives with. Soon they joined us despite their master's assurance that they always "listen" to him and stay home in those circumstances. For those two listeners, the conversation was certainly about a place remote from where they were. li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU also writes: <> Or perhaps -- to be Freudian about it -- we are just better at channeling our emotions. The idea of "emotionless" human communication is akin to what brocolli would talk like if brocolli could talk. The level of excitation is not a qualitative difference. I'd suggest that Talmy Givons is right about this. We just can't seem to shake a non-naturalistic view of human language. Of course, there is a difference. As one of the old dialectical philosphers (Hegel or Marx) observed, the quantitative becomes the qualitative. Animal language stores very little information compared to human language. So it looks as though it might be doing something different. But that may be as much the ingenuity in the design of the software as it is in the basic hardware. Steve Long From Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK Wed Dec 4 20:45:56 2002 From: Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK (Dan Everett) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 20:45:56 +0000 Subject: Feral children and enculturated apes In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The issues involved in teasing apart the different contributions from culture and biology are not as easy as the thought experiments proposed by Long and Katz. The problem is that biology needs environment to emerge. Walking, seeing, speaking, and various other skills we take for granted as biological need environment, like a plant needs water and sunlight for photosynthesis - chlorophyll is not enough. Therefore, to show instances of retarded development due to lack of environmental stimuli does not distinguish between culture and biology. Biology requires environment. So does culture. So environment itself will not distinguish them. To take a Chomskyan example, though this works for any theory, what does the theory assume/claim/predict to be part of our genetic heritage, whether in a special language module or as part of our general cognitive capabilities? Let's say, to take an example from Chomsky's 50s research, that embedding is claimed to be a very important part of human language and that we find, subsequently, a language without embedding. Does this tell us anything about biology? How does it? How could it? It could tell us about biology, about processing requirements, about culture, many other things. No simple thought experiment is likely to be of help. These are extremely complex issues conceptually. In fact, they are unlikely to have a solution for the most part. Standard pragmatist (Jamesian in particular) approaches to scientific research offer some guidelines, but they are (rightfully) very subjective. The dichotomy, once again, is to some degree spurious. Hence the problem. Dan ************************************************************** Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics and Phonology University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL dan.everett at man.ac.uk Office Phone: 44-161-275-3158 Department Phone & Fax: 44-161-275-3187 From dgolumbi at PANIX.COM Wed Dec 4 21:07:02 2002 From: dgolumbi at PANIX.COM (David Golumbia) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 16:07:02 -0500 Subject: Feral children and enculturated apes In-Reply-To: <20021204203339.D96244-100000@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> from "Dan Everett" at Dec 04, 2002 08:45:56 PM Message-ID: I think Dan Everett's recent message is very on-target. I am always confused by Chomsky's failure to look for close biological analogues for the supposedly "mysterious" language organ, and the individualist bias of so many thought experiments seem to fall into a similar pattern. Take a skill that is 90% biological, like walking. A child who is raised without sufficient environmental stimuli will not learn to walk, or will not learn to use the bipedal "endowment" as it can be fully used. Training by adults is required at several steps. Experiments that isolate the infant from this training seem to me to demonstrate very little about the walking endowment. Many animals hunt as a critical part of their biocultural endowment. Although their bodies are tuned to hunting skills, these will not develop without significant social coaching. Let's ask the question a different way: if homo sapiens were to re-emerge in evolution, with exactly the same biology, would their language be "the same" as what we know of human language? The truth is that we don't even know enough about all the languages spoken today to make this question make any sense at all. If Martians came to Earth (in one of Chomsky's famous but poorly considered examples), would their language be "human" or "inhuman"? Who in the world knows? What if it was hard for humans to learn, but after a few years of study some humans learned Martian and some Martians learned Creek? What if the Martians have 15000 languages like humans do, and the Martians we meet speak only 1 of these 15000 languages? What if Hindi speakers could speak Martian-3001, but Martian-3002 gave them pause? Thought experiments are great, but it seems to me we remain in a state of knowledge about human language and human cultures and what they are capable of that makes generalizations about "human language itself" highly problematic. It is my bet that no attempt to look "outside" what we have as empirical matter will provide a better view: because it is only on initial glance that the "outside" (Martian, thought experiment, feral children) seems to offer an analytic purchase. Another variation: put a group of infants into a world that somehow provides them everything they need *except language.* Leave them alone for 50 years. I guarantee you, something will have developed, and whatever it is will be human language, and it will be just as hard to cleave analytically between what-they-speak and what-humans-as-we-know-them-speak. -- dgolumbi at panix.com David Golumbia From amnfn at WELL.COM Wed Dec 4 21:36:17 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 13:36:17 -0800 Subject: Conceptually separating language from biology Message-ID: >Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 20:45:56 +0000 >From: Dan Everett >To: FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu > >The problem is that biology needs environment to emerge. Walking, >seeing, speaking, and various other skills we take for granted as >biological need environment, like a plant needs water and sunlight for >photosynthesis - chlorophyll is not enough. Therefore, to show >instances of retarded development due to lack of environmental stimuli >does not distinguish between culture and biology. Biology requires >environment. So does culture. So environment itself will not >distinguish them. That's a valid point. Biological entities cannot function without a hospitable environment. But we can still tease language apart from biology by trying the thought experiment the other way: not by depriving humans of their natural environment, but by allowing non-humans to demonstrate language ability. Suppose it turned out that one of our Funknet posters was not a biological entity at all, but rather an AI program implemented on a computer and connected to the net. Let's say none of us were able to tell the difference. The poster not only wrote grammatically and comprehensibly, but was also able to maintain topic continuity and discourse coherence and to interact productively with other posters. If this were the case, would you not concede that the AI entity was using language? Would it matter that it didn't share our DNA or our brain structures? --Aya Katz +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.well.com/user/amnfn +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From amnfn at WELL.COM Wed Dec 4 22:24:08 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 14:24:08 -0800 Subject: Need based language development Message-ID: >Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 16:07:02 -0500 >From: David Golumbia >Subject: Re: Feral children and enculturated apes > >Let's ask the question a different way: if homo sapiens were to re-emerge >in evolution, with exactly the same biology, would their language be "the >same" as what we know of human language? > That's a good question. >Another variation: put a group of infants into a world that somehow >provides them everything they need *except language.* Leave them alone for >50 years. I guarantee you, something will have developed, and whatever it >is will be human language, and it will be just as hard to cleave >analytically between what-they-speak and >what-humans-as-we-know-them-speak. I don't think that we can guarantee that anything like language would develop under those circumstances. Life emerged on this planet only once. All living entities on earth are related. We have no reason to believe that if we duplicated the environment, life would necessarily emerge again. Experiments in that direction have failed. By the same token, there is no evidence that Language emerged more than once on earth. How can we be sure that the rise of language is something we could duplicate? Also, if all their needs were met automatically, would these subjects have any reason to come up with language? --Aya Katz +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.well.com/user/amnfn +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From amnfn at WELL.COM Wed Dec 4 22:40:00 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 14:40:00 -0800 Subject: Conceptually separating language from biology In-Reply-To: <001601c29be1$4b68c720$6c09a8c0@lang01> Message-ID: On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Noel Rude wrote: > > What would matter (re your question below) is whether the machine > understood what it was saying. So far we have no coherent materialistic > theory whatever of mind. >I work with indigenous lgs. and it occurred to me a while back to ask, >"What is a person?" I was told -- and the answer jived perfectly with tribal >metaphor and clarified various old legends -- that the person is all >these inextricable things: 1) w?wnakshash 'body', which is "legislated" first, > and is associated with the color yellow; 2) t#mn? 'heart', appointed >next, and which is associated with the color red and with intention, >purpose, etc.; 3) waq'?shwit 'life', which is associated with the color >blue and with speaking, words, language. If we define language as that which is spoken by people, and people as entities whose bodies are like ours, then we've defined away the question. Under this definition, of course, language is biological. I just think we'd miss out on some fairly useful generalizations if we chose this path. --Aya Katz +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://wwww.well.com/user/amnfn +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Wed Dec 4 23:20:24 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 18:20:24 EST Subject: Feral children and enculturated apes Message-ID: In a message dated 12/4/02 4:07:52 PM, dgolumbi at PANIX.COM writes: << Take a skill that is 90% biological, like walking. A child who is raised without sufficient environmental stimuli will not learn to walk, or will not learn to use the bipedal "endowment" as it can be fully used. Training by adults is required at several steps. Experiments that isolate the infant from this training seem to me to demonstrate very little about the walking endowment. >> I don't think this is true. Aside from the survival needs of the infant, I suspect there is no nuturing involved. Walking among "normal" children will come whether it is taught or not. If walking truly needed to be taught (like writing), it would hardly be 90% biological. That would be like saying piano playing is 90% biological. It was just dormant for a million years waiting for Chopin to show up. Obviously, we couldn't play the piano if evolution gave us the physical attributes of a carrot. But we did not evolve to play the piano. We did evolve to walk -- and the shape of our bodies prove it. <> See Derek Bickerton (Roots of Language, Language and Species), particularly as to the distinction between the non-structure of pidgins and structure of creoles. Bickerton -- a Chomskyian -- seems confident in identifying the development of structure among the feral children of (if remember right) Curacao. However Martians speak, it is not that difficult to identify structure in human speech, in all its variations. But again if we were all born with a hand shaped like an axe to chop wood or we if make axes to chop wood, physics demands that an axe be shaped like an axe and not a feather duster if it is to be functional. The same environmental rules of survival and adaptation shape both genetic and acquired axes. There's no reason we should not expect the same with languages. (Of course, chainsaws will solve many of the same wood-chopping problems, but as I mentioned evolution has not been a big user of the free-moving wheel. With chainsaws, we are on our own.) But I want to point out again that you have set up a prerequisite to language -- "put a group of infants into a world that somehow provides them everything they need *except language.* Leave them alone for 50 years." -- note that you did not say "one infant". And note that you give them 50 years. 50 years of what? Being with one another? Trying to communicate with one another? I don't think any of us would expect this pot to boil without a good dose of human culture. Culture is integral to human language. And there really is good reason to think that culture gave rise to modern language capabilities, especially many of the more complex biological parts. (BTW, Einstein used thought experiments to come up with relativity. We may not be that good -- but that's no reason to fault the method.) Steve Long From Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK Thu Dec 5 06:48:53 2002 From: Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK (Dan Everett) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 06:48:53 +0000 Subject: Conceptually separating language from biology In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, A. Katz wrote: > > Suppose it turned out that one of our Funknet posters was not a > biological entity at all, but rather an AI program implemented on a > computer and connected to the net. Let's say none of us were able to > tell the difference. The poster not only wrote grammatically and > comprehensibly, but was also able to maintain topic continuity and > discourse coherence and to interact productively with other posters. > If this were the case, would you not concede that the AI entity was > using language? Would it matter that it didn't share our DNA or our > brain structures? > > Yes, it would still matter. What you have just described is the Turing Test. Searle effectively showed the inadequacy of this kind of test with his Chinese room scenario. Ultimately, we have to understand something of the presence or no of the intentionality of the entity communicating, in order to tell whether it has semantics or just syntax. Using language alone is not enough, because, for example, AI programs can use syntax alone, bypassing intentionality, semantics, and consciousness. And these, I believe, and Searle convincingly argues, are so far as we know only found in biological entities. Dan From w.croft at MAN.AC.UK Thu Dec 5 13:29:59 2002 From: w.croft at MAN.AC.UK (Bill Croft) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 13:29:59 +0000 Subject: Evolution, functionalism and sociolinguistics Message-ID: I am sorry I used the terms "evolution of language" vs "evolution of languages". I should have said "origin of language" (which is part of biological evolution) and "evolutionary model of language change". I won't say anything about the former; others have thought longer and harder about these questions, as is clear from earlier posts. But I wish to add some things about the latter, which is central to the relationship between functionalism and sociolinguistics. In sum, I don't see any incompatibility between the two. One can be a good functionalist and embrace sociolinguistics as well. Why an evolutionary model for language change? Evolution is a theory of change by replication. It is applicable to any phenomenon that changes by replication. The theory just happened to have originated in biology, where replication occurs through reproduction by organisms. But it also applies to language. We replicate linguistic structures every time we converse with one another; through altered replication of structures, and selection of variant structures, language changes. This is as usage-based a model of language change as one can get - a model which most functionalists advocate, and is opposed to the child-based model of language change assumed by many structuralists and virtually all Chomskyans. It is also in harmony with the sociolinguistic approach, which is based entirely on language use. David Hull has developed the evolutionary model in his "Science as a process" (U Chicago Press, 1988). Evolutionary change is fundamentally based on variation, as Talmy Givon notes - also a central tenet of sociolinguistics. Another central feature of evolution is that it is a two-step process, as Ernst Mayr has stated many times (e.g. in "Evolution", Scientific American, 1978). The two processes are altered replication (innovation), which produces variation, and selection (differential replication, propagation), where some variants are favored over others in replication. In biology, altered replication occurs through mutation and recombination, and selection through adaptation (among other mechanisms). But these mechanisms are domain- specific. Other mechanisms operate in other domains, such as language. In language change, I hypothesized that altered replication is functional, in a sense that most functionalists would find familiar, and selection is social, in the sense familiar to sociolinguists. This does NOT mean that language change is "only 'culturally' and 'socially' constrained", as Talmy puts it. It simply means that propagation is socially constrained. But evolutionary change is a two-step process. Altered replication is the other step. It is functionally constrained. It is directed, leading to the functionally motivated unidirectional processes so familiar to us. That is, altered replication is more likely to occur in a functionally motivated direction. Even if the selection process is functionally neutral, as I hypothesize, the net result will be the functionally motivated historical changes and crosslinguistic variation that we find. There is no incompatibility here. In fact, the two together make for a powerful theory of language as a whole, a comprehensive alternative to Chomsky's theory. Finally, there is both continuity and discontinuity between biological evolution and language change. The discontinuity is that the replicators in biological evolution are genes, while the replicators in language change are linguistic structures (what I call 'linguemes'). Two different evolving populations, with two different sets of mechanisms. The continuity is found in what Hull calls the interactor, the entity whose behavior causes variation and selection of replicators. The interactor in language change is the speaker, that is, a human being; and a human being - an organism - is also the interactor in biological evolution. In both cases, as Talmy says, human behavior drives evolutionary change, that is, change by replication. Bill Croft From iadimly at usc.es Thu Dec 5 15:51:41 2002 From: iadimly at usc.es (Maria Angeles Gomez) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 16:51:41 +0100 Subject: THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS CONFERENCE, COMPOSTELA 2003 Message-ID: SORRY FOR DUPLICATE SUBMISSIONS!! WE'D APPRECIATE IT IF YOU COULD CIRCULATE THIS CALL The Third International Contrastive Linguistics Conference Santiago de Compostela ( I C L C - 3 ) 23rd-26th September 2003 FIRST CIRCULAR: CALL FOR PAPERS - We are pleased to announce that the Third International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC-3) will be held from Tues. 23rd to Fri. 26th September 2003, in the Philology Faculty of Santiago University, Spain. - As in our previous conferences, papers of a contrastive nature are welcome, particularly in the following subject areas: Linguistic Description (grammar, lexico-semantics, phonetics, phonology, etc), Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Rhetoric, Translation Studies, Cross-Cultural Studies, Second Language Acquisition, and Languages for Specific Purposes. - Papers will have a maximum duration of 20 minutes (2500 words). To ensure maximum intelligibility among the audience, they should be presented preferably in either English or Spanish (Castilian), but they may if necessary be presented in French, German or Galician. - If you wish to take part, please send us an abstract before 1st February 2003. The following should be noted: - A participant can only present one paper, except that a maximum of two may be presented, provided both are co-authored. - The maximum number of named authors/participants per paper will be three. - Please let us emphasize the following: In order to be accepted, abstracts MUST be written, presented and sent EXACTLY as indicated below. Section 1: Full name (including academic title or other style of address) of author or authors (Some correspondence might be addressed only to the first named) Section 2: E-mail address , followed by postal address(es) * Please make quite sure that both of these items are given fully and correctly! Section 3: University or other institution, and affiliation(s) (state whether professor, lecturer, other researcher, or doctoral student) Section 4: Research Area: please indicate which one (or more) of the above subject- area labels best applies to your paper Section 5: Title of paper Section 6: Abstract. This must be single-spaced, not more than 10 lines long, and in the language in which the paper will be presented. (Do not include bibliography.) - Each ?section? will begin a new line. - Abstracts MUST be sent by e-mail, as Word attachments, to: iaarolli at usc.es - Under ?subject?, only write ?abstract?. - Please name the attachment as follows: ICLC-3 plus your full name. - Please use, if possible, the form included at the end of this Circular. This circular, including the form, will soon be available on-line (see below). - The Conference fee will be 90 euros, to be paid before 31st March 2003. - If paid between 1st April and the week of the Conference, it will be 115 euros. - The fee is due from each named author. - For undergraduate students, the fee will be 30 euros, to be paid any time before the Conference. - After a blind refereeing processs, those papers that fulfil the requirements of presentation, originality and scientific rigour will be selected for publication by the Selection Committee. - We regret that a further fee of 30 euros will have to be charged for each paper accepted for publication (whether co-authored or not), as a contribution towards publication and postage costs. We look forward to your participation. Kind regards from The Organising Committee. Contact details: University tel. no.: +34 981 57 53 40 (or: +34 981 59 44 88 for direct dialling of extensions) Faculty fax no.: +34 981 57 46 46 Contact details of individual Committee members: Co-ordinators: tel. extension: e-mail: Dr. Lu?s Iglesias-R?bade 118 97 iarabade at usc.es Dr. Andrew Rollings 118 39 iaarolli at usc.es Dr. Susana Doval-Su?rez 118 91 iasdoval at usc.es Secretaries: Dr. M? de los ?ngeles G?mez-Gonz?lez 118 56 iadimly at usc.es, http://web.usc.es/~iadimly Elsa M? Gonz?lez-Alvarez 120 09 iaelsa at usc.es Other committee members: Dr. M? Teresa S?nchez-Roura 118 89 iatroura at usc.es Dr. Cristina Mour?n-Figueroa 118 32 iacrismf at usc.es Dr. Teresa Moralejo-G?rate 24714 iamora at usc.es Antonio ?lvarez-Rodr?guez 244 46 aalvarez at lugo.usc.es Other collaborators: Dr. Laura Pino-Serrano 118 77 filaura at usc.es M? Jos? Dom?nguez-V?zquez 118 34 majodomi at usc.es Postal address: Dr. Lu?s Iglesias-R?bade ICLC-3 Facultad de Filolog?a Universidad de Santiago Avda. de Castelao, s/n E - 15782 Santiago de Compostela. SPAIN. Website of English Department (with link, in due course, for ICLC-3): ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ICLC-3 Abstract Proposal Form 1. Name: ________ __________________________ _______________________ Prof. Dr Mr First name(s) Surname(s) Miss Ms Mrs 2. E-mail: Postal address(es): 3. Institution: Affiliation: 4. Research area (please write X where appropriate): - Linguistic Description: grammar _____ lexico-semantics _____ phonetics _____ phonology _____ other (specify) ____________________ - Discourse Analysis _____ Pragmatics _____ Rhetoric _____ Translation Studies _____ Cross-Cultural Studies _____ Second Language Acquisition _____ Languages for Specific Purposes _____ Other (if none of the above apply)_________________________________________ 5. Title of Paper: 6. Abstract: (max. 10 lines) ******************************* Dr Mar?a de los ?ngeles G?MEZ-GONZ?LEZ Tenured Lecturer in English Department of English Philology Faculty of Philology UNIVERSITY OF SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA Avda. de Castelao, s/n E-15782 Santiago de Compostela Fax.: + 00 34 981-574646 Tel: + 00 34 981-563100 Ext. 11856 email: iadimly at usc.es http://web.usc.es/~iadimly -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ICLC3MAILING1.doc Type: application/msword Size: 1826816 bytes Desc: not available URL: From amnfn at WELL.COM Thu Dec 5 16:32:50 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 08:32:50 -0800 Subject: Separating language from biology Message-ID: >Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 06:48:53 +0000 >From: Dan Everett >Subject: Re: Conceptually separating language from biology > >What you have just described is the Turing >Test. Yes, it is. >Searle effectively showed the inadequacy of this kind of test with >his Chinese room scenario. Our purpose here is not to explore consciousness, but just to determine whether language is necessarily biological. >Ultimately, we have to understand something of >the presence or no of the intentionality of the entity communicating, in >order to tell whether it has semantics or just syntax. At present, we are not able to objectively determine intentionality for human beings, either. The only intentions that any individual has direct access to are his own -- by introspection. Anyone else's intentions must be deduced from actions or words. When we talk to our parents, spouses, children, friends, we have no idea of whether they possess "intentionality" or are well contructed biological automatons. When we converse with strangers over the net, we don't even know for sure that they are biological. > Using language >alone is not enough, because, for example, AI programs can use syntax >alone, bypassing intentionality, semantics, and consciousness. "Using language is not enough" for what? You've just conceded the point. Language is separate from consciousness and hence biology. Even if the use of the word "language" above was a slip of the keyboard, let's argue it this way: if there's another test the AI entity has to meet, before we can call what it does "language", why don't we just assume that it passed? If tomorrow we discovered a valid test for "intentionality" and our AI construct passed that test, would you then concede that it possessed language? >And these, >I believe, and Searle convincingly argues, are so far as we know only >found in biological entities. "As far as we know" is the key point here. I don't claim to know different. But we ought to define our terms so that the claim that only biological entities can possess language can be proved or disproved. The question should not be defined away. --Aya Katz ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK Thu Dec 5 16:44:48 2002 From: Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK (Dan Everett) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 16:44:48 +0000 Subject: Separating language from biology In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > >Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 06:48:53 +0000 > >From: Dan Everett > >Subject: Re: Conceptually separating language from biology > > > >What you have just described is the Turing > >Test. > > Yes, it is. > > >Searle effectively showed the inadequacy of this kind of test with > >his Chinese room scenario. > > Our purpose here is not to explore consciousness, but just to > determine whether language is necessarily biological. > Right. Fine. But your test ignores semantics. And, moreover, there are many people, myself included, who find the evidence strong that language and consciousness cannot be separated. But ignore that. Just focus on the semantics. -- Dan From amnfn at WELL.COM Thu Dec 5 17:15:29 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 09:15:29 -0800 Subject: Separating language from biology In-Reply-To: <20021205164330.G75181-100000@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Dan Everett wrote: > > > >Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 06:48:53 +0000 > > >From: Dan Everett > > >Subject: Re: Conceptually separating language from biology > > Right. Fine. But your test ignores semantics. And, moreover, there are > many people, myself included, who find the evidence strong that language > and consciousness cannot be separated. But ignore that. Just focus on the > semantics. > I, too, suspect that consciousness has something to do with it, but that's not useful as long as none of us has a working definition of consciousness or any tests for its presence or absence. Insofar as my test ignores semantics, so do all the tests conducted on human beings. If by semantics you mean what the speaker "really" meant, or whether he really meant anything at all, our best clue is language use in context. The AI entity I postulated passed that test. Do you have a better one to suggest? The reason reanalysis is a tool for language change is that people don't always understand utterances the same way. And the reason language is useful despite these misunderstandings is that language used in context transmits information despite the differences between and among individuals. If someone seems to understand us, and we never find out different, then for all intents and purposes, he really does. That's the Turing test in action in everyday life. If a child says: "I want a banana" we all assume that he knows what he's talking about. If a chimpanzee says the same thing, people ask: "Yes, but does he have a theory of mind?" I think we should have a level playing field. Whether it's a human, a computer program or a chimpanzee, the test for language should be the same. --Aya ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK Thu Dec 5 17:55:26 2002 From: Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK (Dan Everett) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 17:55:26 +0000 Subject: Separating language from biology In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > The reason reanalysis is a tool for language change is that people don't > always understand utterances the same way. And the reason language is > useful despite these misunderstandings is that language used in context > transmits information despite the differences between and among > individuals. If someone seems to understand us, and we never find out > different, then for all intents and purposes, he really does. That's the > Turing test in action in everyday life. > > If a child says: "I want a banana" we all assume that he knows what he's > talking about. If a chimpanzee says the same thing, people ask: "Yes, but > does he have a theory of mind?" Why would anyone want a 'level playing field'? I am not democratic with respect to chimps. I know that children have a semantics, even if I cannot follow or misinterpret in specific cases. The child has earned its right to a charitable interpretation. The chimp has not. Nor has any other species. A test simpler than a Turing Test is just this: do the members of the species talk to one another with anything remotely showing properties of the type that Hockett argued for? And do they do this 'in the wild'. I like to read of Jane Goodall as much as the next guy, but the answer to my question is no. I agree with Chomsky (quoted in Time many years ago) that the idea that other primates can talk, but need some help from us, is roughly equivalent to the idea that there is an island of birds somewhere needing humans to help them fly. Absurd from the outset. That is not to say that they do not communicate. All species, even paramecia (apparently even by ingesting one another, if my High School biology teacher is to be believed), do. But they don't have a syntax and a semantics. So the Turing Test is not a useful test because it throws semantics out of the discussion. And semantics cannot be thrown out. Try yet another test. The fieldworker test. I do monolingual fieldwork, frequently encountering people with whom I share no language in common. I assume that they can talk, though, that they have a semantics and a syntax, and they assume that of me (perhaps with less justification). Eventually these assumptions are confirmed by hard work on both our parts. That doesn't work with computers or chimps. Who would do fieldwork with either, aside from someone needing a jacket with arms that buckle in back? There is no reason for assuming a level playing field and many reasons for not doing so. Dan From amnfn at WELL.COM Thu Dec 5 19:09:02 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 11:09:02 -0800 Subject: Eliminating bias in experiments Message-ID: >Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 17:55:26 +0000 (GMT) >From: Dan Everett > >Subject: Re: Separating language from biology > >> If a child says: "I want a banana" we all assume that he knows what he's >> talking about. If a chimpanzee says the same thing, people ask: "Yes, but >> does he have a theory of mind?" > >Why would anyone want a 'level playing field'? I am not >democratic with respect to chimps. I'm sorry if my metaphor evoked images of democracy. Democracy is about voting, and I am not suggesting that we vote on this. In a scientific invesitigation, the outcome is not open to voting. It is determined by adhering to careful testing procedures. Bias must be eliminated in order for the result of the test to be valid. (It's kind of a shame that the idea of bias has been so politicized.) You don't need to have any feelings about chimpanzees one way or another to wish to minimize bias. If you were studying lunar dust, the same rules would apply. You don't want a circular definition, because it will not help you to investigate the facts. > I know that children have a >semantics, even if I cannot follow or misinterpret in specific >cases. How do you know this? Could you prove it? What test for the presence of semantics is applicable that would give the correct result regardless of what entity it was applied to? > The child has earned its right to a charitable >interpretation. The chimp has not. Nor has any other species. How has the child earned this right? Are you talking about a specific child or all children? Are you aware that some anatomically normal, uninjured children can't speak or think? Does this include them? >A test simpler than a Turing Test is just this: do the members of the >species talk to one another with anything remotely showing properties of >the type that Hockett argued for? And do they do this 'in the wild'. What do humans do when placed in the wild from infancy? Do they come up with language? We can't give credit to individual members of the species for achievements of the species as a whole. Mozart may have achieved a great deal as a composer, and he was a human being, but you can't assume that a human chosen at random has any musical ability. You have to test them individually. >There is no reason for assuming a level playing field and many reasons for >not doing so. We shouldn't assume anything. We should find out. --Aya From dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Dec 5 20:18:02 2002 From: dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 13:18:02 -0700 Subject: Eliminating bias in experiments In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Thankyou A Katz, Species-centrism strikes me as a counterproductive (but widely accepted) bias in linguistics. It is not clear to me how bias helps linguistics as a science...and it seems to make it difficult for many biologists, psychologists and neurologists to value the other claims, observations and techniques of linguistics...sad, really. Many of the techniques of linguistics are very clever and many observations very telling... Language: Language is very special...and what humans manage to do is quite incredible. But, demonstrating that language shares some features with other communication systems should not surprise us...we are animals too. Vervet monkeys have different cries for eagles and jaguars. Birds and whales produce complex sequences composed of recombinable parts. Many animals can learn to identify and respond appropriately to a small vocabulary of human words. Parrots can learn to produce words, identify objects and follow commands...and they spontaneously recombine parts of words in what appears to be a sort of play behavior....so reference, in and of itself, doesn't seem unique to language. And recombination, in and of itself, is not unique to language. But, the language ability displayed by a typical adult human being is greater than the some of such parts....call it an "emergent" phenomenon...something spectacular that happens when you have the right confluence of capabilities. I have studied linguistics and animal communication systems (I got my PhD studying Alex the parrot)...I've never met an animal that has a hope of understanding this email...but I've met a lot of biased people on both sides of the animal "language" issue that did not understand the people on the other side. Theory of Mind: It is interesting that when Chomsky dismissed Skinner's explanation of language, that somehow, (some) linguists decided that the claims of behaviorism...the dismissal of an internal life...continued to apply to all non-human animals. Read Donald R Griffin for a radically different view on the notion of animal minds. That's my 2-cents...time to go back to work...but have a great debate. Dianne Patterson Cognition and NeuroImaging Labs University of Arizona >-- Original Message -- >Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 11:09:02 -0800 >Reply-To: "A. Katz" >From: "A. Katz" >Subject: Eliminating bias in experiments >To: FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU > > >>Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 17:55:26 +0000 (GMT) >>From: Dan Everett >> >>Subject: Re: Separating language from biology >> >>> If a child says: "I want a banana" we all assume that he knows what he's >>> talking about. If a chimpanzee says the same thing, people ask: "Yes, >but >>> does he have a theory of mind?" >> >>Why would anyone want a 'level playing field'? I am not >>democratic with respect to chimps. > >I'm sorry if my metaphor evoked images of democracy. Democracy is >about voting, and I am not suggesting that we vote on this. >In a scientific invesitigation, the outcome is not open to >voting. It is determined by adhering to careful testing >procedures. Bias must be eliminated in order for the result of >the test to be valid. (It's kind of a shame that the idea of bias >has been so politicized.) > >You don't need to have any feelings about chimpanzees one way or >another to wish to minimize bias. If you were studying lunar >dust, the same rules would apply. You don't want a circular >definition, because it will not help you to investigate the >facts. > >> I know that children have a >>semantics, even if I cannot follow or misinterpret in specific >>cases. > >How do you know this? Could you prove it? What test for the >presence of semantics is applicable that would give the correct >result regardless of what entity it was applied to? > >> The child has earned its right to a charitable >>interpretation. The chimp has not. Nor has any other species. > >How has the child earned this right? Are you talking about a >specific child or all children? Are you aware that some >anatomically normal, uninjured children can't speak or think? >Does this include them? > >>A test simpler than a Turing Test is just this: do the members of the >>species talk to one another with anything remotely showing properties of >>the type that Hockett argued for? And do they do this 'in the wild'. > >What do humans do when placed in the wild from infancy? Do they >come up with language? > >We can't give credit to individual members of the species for >achievements of the species as a whole. Mozart may have achieved >a great deal as a composer, and he was a human being, >but you can't assume that a human chosen at random has any >musical ability. You have to test them individually. > >>There is no reason for assuming a level playing field and many reasons for >>not doing so. > >We shouldn't assume anything. We should find out. > > > --Aya From shamilot at SUFFOLK.LIB.NY.US Thu Dec 5 23:05:30 2002 From: shamilot at SUFFOLK.LIB.NY.US (Spiro Hamilothoris) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 18:05:30 -0500 Subject: archive Message-ID: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Fri Dec 6 06:17:49 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 01:17:49 EST Subject: Answer to Spectacular Message-ID: In a message dated 12/5/02 3:18:42 PM, dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU writes: <> This is the core of the illusion. That the bulk of the language capability of a typical human arises from that individual. And there's something of "manifest destiny" about the notion. As if we could drop our hypothetical experimental culture-free infant in a cave somewhere and have him come out as an adult having built his own television set, domesticated a variety of food-producing plants and, of course -- speak a language. I'd have to ask Dianne Patterson whether she finds a working television set, going to the moon or advanced calculus any less spectacular than typical human language ability. No animal I know ever carved anything close to Michaelangelo's David or even built a reasonably profitable shopping mall. The point is that Diane sees the difference between human and animal communication as an individual matter, but it may be the part that impresses her does not originate in "individual humans." If we did find an individual who could go off and build, say, a television set from scratch all by himself, should we conclude that its an "emergent phenomena" -- an ability that was inside him all along and just happened to pop out under the "right confluences." Or should we conclude that his "ability" to make a television set was dependent on the accumulated knowledge of hundreds of thousands of other people over thousands of years for the circuit boards, the capacitors and resistors, the chips, the vacuum tube, the very concept of a vacuum, the electron gun, the very concept of electrons, wave theory, the electrical cord, the very concept of electricity, glass-making, plastics, wood-working (if in a wood cabinet), coaxial cable (where available) and of course something to watch. We've so internalized human culture that we are almost totally blind to its ominpresence. And it seems very much what is present when a "typical" human speaks. A individual human armed with only syntax and grammar in his brain doesn't have the survival tools of a dodo "in the wild." What gives language effectiveness and survival value is the accumulated information it carries. The speech of an individual human independent of culture should be about as "spectacular" as dog barking. <> Again, we're forgetting that no human on earth for most of human existence on this planet could understand that e-mail. Writing is not more than 6000 years old. In all the early literature of humankind, there is not a single reference to the fact, for example, that cattle were domesticated by humans through selective breeding from wild species. (And this happened only extremely recently in the overall time humans have been around.) Most of that literature acts as if domesticated animals were placed here by the Diety, up until Darwin et al. We just didn't believe we did it ourselves. What really brought about language and what it is really about seems just as inconcievable to us. So we reach for deus ex. An "emergence." (I personally find it inconceiveable that 120 tons of steel, electronics and overused seat cushions can go up 10 miles in the air and get from here to LA in 4 hours. Now HOW is it possible that humans thought that up? It is about as believeable that a "crude, primitive people" built the pyramids!) It may be that syntax and grammar are to some degree "pre-wired." But that is not language anymore than the beer glass is beer. Beer glasses are wonderful things, but they are pointless without beer. The main function of language appears to be to carry the accumulated information that we may call "culture." Without it humans would be forgetting and re-learning the same things every generation. If it were not for cultural content (the beer), there would be nothing particularly spectacular about human (versus) animal communication -- (the beer glass). <> I'm not sure what inner or outer life had to do with Skinner's explanation of language. (I know he had as a problem with how an "internal life" could be observed.) My problem is picturing what an animal's inner life would be like, given that it is without language. Whenever we portary "internal life" (e.g, Hamlet's or Molly Bloom's soliloquy, or in a movie like "Look who's talking"), we humans are always talking to ourselves in a language we also speak out loud. It is a real trick picturing what an "internal life" would be like without being able to "talk" to oneself. Steve Long From dparvaz at UNM.EDU Fri Dec 6 06:43:40 2002 From: dparvaz at UNM.EDU (Dan Parvaz) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 23:43:40 -0700 Subject: Answer to Spectacular In-Reply-To: <120.1a7465b7.2b219b0d@aol.com> Message-ID: > If we did find an individual who could go off and build, say, a > television set from scratch all by himself, should we conclude that > its an "emergent phenomena" -- an ability that was inside him all > along and just happened to pop out under the "right confluences." I guess I work with a different definition of "emergent" -- one which necessitates complex dynamical systems. To me that means some sort of critical mass of humanity (so far?), PLUS some overlapping set of faculties, PLUS the need to communicate. And perhaps PLUS is multiplication! The recent emergence (or effervescence) of Nicaraguan Sign Language is one indication of the kind of emergence I'm talking about (as opposed to what Pinker said it proved). > Or should we conclude that his "ability" to make a television set was > dependent on[...] something to watch. This isn't helping your case any :-) > A individual human armed with only syntax and grammar in his brain > doesn't have the survival tools of a dodo "in the wild." I've been asked by students in syntax class what use any of this stuff is. They're probably reading this message right now. Thanks a lot. -Dan. From wilcox at UNM.EDU Fri Dec 6 07:13:38 2002 From: wilcox at UNM.EDU (Sherman Wilcox) Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 00:13:38 -0700 Subject: Answer to Spectacular In-Reply-To: <120.1a7465b7.2b219b0d@aol.com> Message-ID: On 12/6/02, Steve Long said: >It is a real trick picturing what an "internal life" would be like >without being able to "talk" to oneself. I have two, admittedly anecdotal, and perhaps not even trustworthy pieces of data about what such an internal life might be like. They both come from people I know, deaf people who, in their early years, were not exposed to language (couldn't hear, no one around them signed). The first was a man I knew who grew up in a very small village in Mexico on the ocean. He told me that as a child he used to watch boats sail out of the harbor and wondered what happened to them when they went out of sight, if they disappeared forever. The second is from a young woman (now an outstanding college student). She was born in another country, deaf from birth, had several different foster parents, who didn't sign, for the first years of her life . Then she was adopted by friends of mine. She arrived in this country by plane at around the age of four, knowing only a few (~10) rudimentary homesigns. Later, when she learned ASL, she told her parents that she remembered flying on the plane, taking off, watching the clouds, getting ged by some nice woman, being afraid, meeting them at the airport, not knowing what was happening, and so forth. Yes, it's messy data -- maybe their "internal life" stories were filled in with these detail only later, after they could talk/sign (I doubt it for the second story). But their stories suggest that at least some sort of internal life is possible without being able to talk or sign to oneself, that it is possible to have an inner life of thoughts and fears and curiosities without language. -- Sherman From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Fri Dec 6 15:34:57 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 10:34:57 EST Subject: Evolution and Language "Emergence" Message-ID: I wrote: > If we did find an individual who could go off and build, say, a > television set from scratch all by himself, should we conclude that > its an "emergent phenomena" -- an ability that was inside him all > along and just happened to pop out under the "right confluences." In a message dated 12/6/02 1:40:07 AM, dparvaz at UNM.EDU writes: <> It's important to distinguish between emergent traits in the development of an individual versus emergent traits in evolution. (The famous old dictum that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" can and has been misleading, though -- as Syd Lamb pointed out in an earlier post -- language development in a child should give us clues about the evolutionary gap in primate language.) The traditional 19th century scientific definition of "emergent" (see eg the original OED) was "an effect produced by a combination of several causes, but not capable of being regarded as the sum of their individual effects. Opposed to resultant." It was early, if not first, used by the George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) (in the series "Problems in Life and Mind" which included "The Physical Basis of Mind" ) who used it to explain the non-"automatonistic" but "biological" operation of the mind. The mind having a "a twofold root, man being not only an animal organism but an unit in the social organism; and hence the complete theory of its functions and faculties must be sought in this twofold direction.? So the word "emergent" did not first attempt to explain how mind or language evolved, but how it worked -- an important difference. In fact, I don't think Lewes idea of mind (if not language) qualitatively differentiated between animal and human. And that's because of his holistic view of "mind". (?It is the man, and not the brain, that thinks: it is the organism as a whole, and not one organ, that feels and acts.?) When "emergent" starts being used to describe the evolution of a trait (not a gene, a trait), we run into a problem. A non-functional trait sitting around with nothing to do for eons, waiting for a function does not make evolutionary sense. New accidental functions for old structures that developed for old functions (e.g., feathers and wings) do happen. But a talent for playing piano had to be doing something else while it waited for Chopin show up. The complex vocal cords of humans, for example, had to have had a function while they were developing. If other primates do not have or lost that complexity, somewhere along the line between that lack of complexity and human complexity, complexity itself was being favored in humans. What would favor the development of complex vocal production? Did our "cave people" ancestors vocalize their wooly mammoth prey to death? And so the strong indication is that the biological basis of language developed naturalistically out of the animal communicative function. Unless we can figure out what those organs were doing in the mean time, we are on safe ground concluding they were always functioning to communicate throughout their development. And that makes language the RESULT of earlier animal communications. There is nothing to indicate language EMERGED in evolutionary history. I wrote: > A individual human armed with only syntax and grammar in his brain > doesn't have the survival tools of a dodo "in the wild." Dan wrote: <> An internal combustion engine alone will not get you on the freeway or, on a grander scale, tell you where you are or should be going. I guess if you just want to be a driver, you really don't have to know how an internal combustion engine works. But if you ever have to look under the hood, there's a lot of reasons to be prepared for what you will be seeing. Steve Long From l.lagerwerf at scw.vu.nl Fri Dec 6 16:01:48 2002 From: l.lagerwerf at scw.vu.nl (Luuk Lagerwerf) Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 17:01:48 +0100 Subject: First Call for papers: MAD03 Message-ID: Please find below the first call for papers for MAD03 Luuk Lagerwerf 5th International Workshop on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse October 22th-25th, 2003 Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse 2003 (MAD'03) is the fifth in a series of small-scale, high-quality workshops that have been organised every second year since 1995 (Egmond-aan-zee (NL), 1995; Utrecht (NL), 1997; Edinburgh (GB), 1999; Ittre (BE), 2001). Its aim is to bring together researchers from different disciplines, in particular theoretical and applied linguists, computational linguists, and psycholinguists, to exchange information and learn from each other on a common topic of investigation: text and discourse. Workshop Theme In this edition of the workshop, MAD?03 aims at bringing together social scientists and linguists by pursuing the following theme: Determination of Information and Tenor in Texts. Topics of the workshop are exemplified by, but not limited to, questions like: * How is content (or information) extracted from text? * How does one systematically infer stances from texts? * What determines differences in interpretation between readers? * How do (automated) discourse representations come about? * How can linguistic properties be put to use for analysis of large text collections? * What do co-occurrences of words tell about discourses? * How does text type or genre change the interpretation of text variables? * How do new media change the use of text variables and genres? Keynote speakers Klaus Sch?nbach, Universiteit van Amsterdam (NL) Peter Foltz, New Mexico State University (NM) Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh (UK) Paul Deane, Educational Testing Service (NJ) Workshop Location The workshop and lodging will be in conference centre De Bergse Bossen, located in the forests of Driebergen, a village near Utrecht. Travelling by train to Schiphol Airport or the city of Amsterdam takes less than an hour. Workshop Design In the workshop, about 20 people will be presenting an accepted paper in plenary sessions. The total number of participants will be limited to 40. Anonymous review of full papers will be carried out in order to guarantee high quality of papers. The organisers also strive to publish all accepted papers in workshop proceedings at the start of the workshop. After the workshop, a selection of papers are likely to be published in a special issue of an appropriate journal (see the references). Call for papers Deadline for submission of full papers addressing one of the questions of the workshop is May 1st, 2003. On the website of MAD03, http://home.scw.vu.nl/~lagerwerf/Mad03Web/index.htm, specific guidelines for submission are given. Workshop Organisers Luuk Lagerwerf, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL) Wilbert Spooren, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL) Liesbeth Degand, Universit? catholique de Louvain (BE) MAD?03 is hosted by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Netherlands School of Communication Research (NESCoR; in the persons of Prof. Dr. J. Kleinnijenhuis, Vrije Universiteit; Prof. Dr. P.J. Schellens, Universiteit Twente). Workshop Theme Description In many approaches to discourse analysis in linguistics, and content or media analysis in social sciences, methods have been developed to extract information from texts systematically. Apart from extracting information, many different approaches have also been aiming to determine the tenor of texts. In this small-scale intensive workshop, we want to encourage discussion between researchers from different backgrounds. The workshop will have significance for document design as well as content analysis. In both cases, it is important to analyse processes of recognition and evaluation of information in text. Also, linguistic properties of texts may serve as cues for systematising these processes. Other related areas are the fields of persuasion and argumentation, and discourse psychology, discourse analysis, and computational modelling of discourse processes. By using statistical approaches based on co-occurrences, judgments of diverse aspects of texts may be delivered automatically. Together, these approaches make it possible to build information structures of texts, make abstracts automatically, or disclose tendencies in the content of multiple texts. In each of these approaches, it is important to realize that text type (or genre) is perhaps one of the most determining factors in extracting information, evaluating information or examining linguistic aspects of text. Regarding the workshop topics, this factor will be controlled by either taking news texts as the default text type, or taking text type itself as a topic to determine its influence on information, tenor or linguistic aspects. The application of any of these approaches to the design or analysis of new media provides a very interesting extension of the topics of the workshop. Schedule Announcement of the workshop: December 6th, 2002 Call for papers: February 3rd, 2003 Deadline (full papers): May 1st, 2003 Notice of acceptance: July 1st, 2003 Deliverance final papers: August 1st, 2003 References A short impression of the previous workshop MAD?01 can be obtained at: http://www.fltr.ucl.ac.be/FLTR/GERM/lingne/Degand/MAD/mad-presentation.htm Previous workshops resulted in the following publications: - Degand, L., Y. Bestgen & W. Spooren & L. v. Waes (eds.; 2001). Multidisciplinary approaches to discourse (pp. 183-194). M?nster: Nodus Publikationen. - Knott, A., J. Oberlander & T. Sanders (eds.; 2001). Special Issue: Levels of Representation in Discourse Relations, Cognitive Linguistics 12 (3). - Risselada, R. & W. Spooren (eds.; 1998). Special issue: Discourse markers and coherence relations. Journal of Pragmatics 30 (2). - Sanders, T., J. Schilperoord & W. Spooren (eds.; 2001). Text Representation: Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects. Amsterdam: Benjamins. - Spooren, W. & R. Risselada (eds.; 1997). Special issue: Discourse markers. Discourse Processes 24 (1). From dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Dec 6 17:30:43 2002 From: dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU) Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 10:30:43 -0700 Subject: Answer to Spectacular In-Reply-To: <120.1a7465b7.2b219b0d@aol.com> Message-ID: Dianne getting sucked in.... ....... ..... ... .. . . >In a message dated 12/5/02 3:18:42 PM, dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU writes: ><recombination, in and of itself, is not unique to language. But, the language >ability displayed by a typical adult human being is greater than the some >of such parts....call it an "emergent" phenomenon...something spectacular that >happens when you have the right confluence of capabilities.>> >This is the core of the illusion. That the bulk of the language capability >of a typical human arises from that individual. And there's something of >"manifest destiny" about the notion. I am astounded by the interpretation...why, if a phenomemnon seems to emerge from complex interaction of factors is it individual? Why is it manifest destiny? Obviously environment is a BIG part of it....Am I in trouble now for shooting my mouth off? >As if we could drop our hypothetical experimental culture-free infant in a >cave somewhere and have him come out as an adult having built his own >television set, domesticated a variety of food-producing plants and, of >course -- speak a language. I, of course, agree that this is ridiculous....darned if I know how you got here from what I said...perhaps my own language capabilities are severely stunted in some way which prevents me from communicating well? >I'd have to ask Dianne Patterson whether she finds a working television set, >going to the moon or advanced calculus any less spectacular than typical >human language ability. I didn't intend to get into the business of ranking things as more or less spectacular....how did we get here? > No animal I know ever carved anything close to >Michaelangelo's David or even built a reasonably profitable shopping mall. I have polled my animal friends and they all agree that they have not created any great sculptures or shopping malls lately...(neither have I for that matter, but I did make a pretty cool clay whistle recently). >The point is that Diane sees the difference between human and animal >communication as an individual matter, but it may be the part that impresses >her does not originate in "individual humans." Whoa....stunned again...what is all this individual stuff I apparently have my foot stuck in? help! help! Let me out. >If we did find an individual who could go off and build, say, a television >set from scratch all by himself, should we conclude that its an "emergent >phenomena" -- an ability that was inside him all along and just happened >to pop out under the "right confluences." > >Steve Long Aha, I see, I failed to mention culture...Steve, I'm afraid I jumped into the conversation without reading the whole long back and forth (just read the letter I actually responded to)...you are, apparently concerned that I didn't mention culture as a crucial force in developing our abilities. I guess you've placed me squarely in the counter-culture camp ;) ...you are absolutely right to point out the importance of culture (IMHO)...I could not have made that whistle without a lot of support....I could not have learned language either. I think the end result of CULTURAL influences and our built in stuff is pretty amazing. I'm sure I can't imagine all the complex ways in which culture supports language and vice versa. I'm sure there are other things I've left out...and that I'll hear about them. Have a great holiday season...I need to go make some graphs. Dianne From sylvester.osu at WANADOO.FR Sun Dec 8 08:17:19 2002 From: sylvester.osu at WANADOO.FR (sylvester.osu) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 09:17:19 +0100 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: While replying to Bill Croft's posting (see below), T. Wood wrote: >>I prefer to refer to the former as evolution and the latter as history. Less confusing, and less likely to give the impression that the social aspect of language change is absent in favour of some kind of biological determinism: e.g. Africans have 'less developed languages' because they are racially/biologically 'less developed'. Tahir Wood's "African" example doesn't sound quite in order to me here. Who has ever decided that Africans have 'less developed languages'? Less developed than which other languages? Tahir Wood might not mean any bad in citing this example. However, I think that in the year 2002/3, i.e. very many decades after von Humboldt and his predecessors, statements like his should be abandoned even when they don't mean anything bad. I think that though we still have a lot to learn about Language and languages, linguistics has acquired enough knowledge concerning the rapport between language and culture, and language and society as to know that it makes no sense talking of more developed or less developed languages. Such phrases offer no good illustration of any question treated in linguistics at all. Rather, they tend to instill in some weak minds the contrary of what we mean. So let's beware of the examples we give. Thank you all, and have a nice Xmas holiday. Sylvester ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tahir Wood" To: Sent: Monday, December 02, 2002 8:36 AM Subject: Re: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' >>> Bill Croft 11/29/02 06:56PM >>> One must distinguish between the evolution of language and the evolution of languages. The former is the evolution of human cognition and social behavior that permitted the rise of modern human language. This is of course an instance of biological evolution, of human beings. The latter is the process by which linguistic elements change over time. This is an evolutionary process, that is it involves change by replication; but it is not the same evolutionary process as biological evolution. I prefer to refer to the former as evolution and the latter as history. Less confusing, and less likely to give the impression that the social aspect of language change is absent in favour of some kind of biological determinism: e.g. Africans have 'less developed languages' because they are racially/biologically 'less developed'. Tahir From degraff at MIT.EDU Sun Dec 8 19:00:26 2002 From: degraff at MIT.EDU (Michel DeGraff) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 14:00:26 -0500 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 08 Dec 2002 09:17:19 +0100." <00da01c29ea0$5c1c26e0$599bfac1@SylvesterOsu> Message-ID: Sylvester Osu wrote: > I think that though we still have a lot to learn about Language and > languages, linguistics has acquired enough knowledge concerning the > rapport between language and culture, and language and society as to > know that it makes no sense talking of more developed or less > developed languages. Such phrases offer no good illustration of any > question treated in linguistics at all. Actually the question whether some languages are less developed than others is unfortunately still very much at the forefront of contemporary creolistics. Please see a commentary I wrote on this question in Linguistic Typology 5.2/3, 2001. This entire issue of the journal was about the claim that "the world's simplest grammars are Creole grammars". My article is available on my web page at: http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/degraff/darwin/anti-simplest.html -michel. ___________________________________________________________________________ MIT Linguistics & Philosophy, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA 02139-4307 degraff at MIT.EDU http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/degraff.home.html ___________________________________________________________________________ From parkvall at LING.SU.SE Sun Dec 8 21:12:00 2002 From: parkvall at LING.SU.SE (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 22:12:00 +0100 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <200212081900.OAA09875@titilayo.mit.edu> Message-ID: Michel DeGraff wrote: >Actually the question whether some languages are less developed than >others is unfortunately still very much at the forefront of >contemporary creolistics. For those who did not follow the debate out of which DeGraff's article was born, a clarification is in place. The ideas that DeGraff takes issue with do _not_ claim that certain languages are more developed in the sense of being "more expressive", but rather that some languages contain a larger number of features not motivated by communicative needs (such as grammatical gender or irregular verbs). Although DeGraff makes his best to miss this point, there is no one in contemporary creolistics who believes that creoles are inferior means of communication. Mikael Parkvall From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Sun Dec 8 21:39:25 2002 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 16:39:25 EST Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 08 Dec 2002 22:12:00 +0100." <5.1.0.14.0.20021208220500.00a9d8a0@130.237.171.193> Message-ID: Mikael Parkvall wrote: >Michel DeGraff wrote: > >>Actually the question whether some languages are less developed than >>others is unfortunately still very much at the forefront of >>contemporary creolistics. > >For those who did not follow the debate out of which DeGraff's article was >born, a clarification is in place. The ideas that DeGraff takes issue with >do _not_ claim that certain languages are more developed in the sense of >being "more expressive", but rather that some languages contain a larger >number of features not motivated by communicative needs (such as >grammatical gender or irregular verbs). Although DeGraff makes his best to >miss this point, there is no one in contemporary creolistics who believes >that creoles are inferior means of communication. Excuse me but you have just given the clearest evidence imaginable that the attitude of which De Graff speaks is alive and well! Hint: It's the syntax -- i.e. those pesky things that 'are not motivated by communicative needs' -- that are at issue here. From parkvall at LING.SU.SE Sun Dec 8 22:39:57 2002 From: parkvall at LING.SU.SE (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 23:39:57 +0100 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <200212082139.gB8LdP06026910@central.cis.upenn.edu> Message-ID: Ellen Prince wrote: >Hint: It's the syntax -- i.e. those pesky things that 'are not >motivated by communicative needs' -- that are at issue here. I'm not sure I understood Ellen's objection, but I am of course not suggesting that syntax per se is communicatively unmotivated. All languages contain stuff, some of it in syntax, some of it in other areas, which are difficult to regard as communicatively motivated. I cannot see how this would illustrate that "the attitude of which De Graff speaks is alive and well!" -- after all, it is pretty clear from the article he refers to that the attitude he is talking about is the once-common view (usually based on sheer racism) that creoles are linguistic cripples. Mikael Parkvall From Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK Sun Dec 8 22:41:21 2002 From: Dan.Everett at MAN.AC.UK (Dan Everett) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 22:41:21 +0000 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <200212082139.gB8LdP06026910@central.cis.upenn.edu> Message-ID: If functional linguistics is right to believe that (most of) syntax is motivated by communicative needs, then Ellen's quote below should be underscored cannot be ignored by people seriously concerned with the relationship between syntax and communicative function (I interpret Ellen's quote as ironic), e.g. the readership of this list. That is, saying that Creole languages are equally communicative as nonCreoles, while simultaneously being syntactically simpler, is likely oxymoronic. To say it is both is trying to have your cake and eat it too, at least if you believe that communicative function accounts for much of syntax. Of course, to compare languages' relative syntactic complexity is not merely a matter of adding up morphemes. Such a comparison is very hard. Though I haven't yet read DeGraff's contribution, it sounds more plausible on the surface of things than Parkvall's remarks, though, because it seems to take syntax more seriously than what I could gather from Parkvall's quote. I suppose that, if one could show that there is a lot of syntax which is nothing more than diachronic detritus, with no contribution to communication, then one might maintain that Creoles, being newer, are 'simpler' in having less 'trash'. But I suspect that no one is going to find this a very useful way of understanding the residue of historical change, i.e. that any significant portion of it has no communicative value. (Moreover, Bill Croft's theory of historical change, via the evolutionary model it employs, is in a particularly good position to say why this is.) So is Creole syntax (not the number of inflectional or derivational morphemes it has, which is a non-useful metric) as complex as non-Creole syntax? That seems to be part of DeGraff's research results and programme and a worthwhile, complex endeavor. -- Dan Everett > Ellen Prince said: ******** > Hint: It's the syntax -- i.e. those pesky things that 'are not > motivated by communicative needs' -- that are at issue here. > From bresnan at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Sun Dec 8 23:02:51 2002 From: bresnan at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Joan Bresnan) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 15:02:51 -0800 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Your message of Sun, 08 Dec 2002 22:41:21 GMT. <20021208221448.Y68765-100000@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Message-ID: > Though I haven't yet read DeGraff's contribution, it sounds more plausible > on the surface of things than Parkvall's remarks, though, because it > seems to take syntax more seriously than what I could gather from > Parkvall's quote. > Dan, you really ought to read the references before you comment on them. I don't wish to make personal remarks about others on this list, but a neutral observer might find DeGraff's Linguistic Typology commentary to be an intemperate rant that crosses the boundaries of academic civility. "Trying hard to miss the point"--paraphrasing Parkvall--is a very kind way to describe it. Joan From parkvall at LING.SU.SE Sun Dec 8 23:11:26 2002 From: parkvall at LING.SU.SE (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 00:11:26 +0100 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <20021208221448.Y68765-100000@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Message-ID: Dan Everett wrote: >I suppose that, if one could show that there is a lot of syntax which is >nothing more than diachronic detritus, with no contribution to >communication, then one might maintain that Creoles, being newer, are >'simpler' in having less 'trash'. Yes, that's exactly it. Although Dan clearly doesn't agree with me, I glad to see that he does get my point. The most crucial difference between DeGraff and me is that he doesn't believe that creoles are "young" languages, but rather that they are daugters of their languages in the same way as French is a daughter of Latin. A problem, of course, is how much is "much"? Again, I would never claim that most of a languages structure is communicatively useless. But I do maintain that significant parts of it are indeed "diachronic detritus". All languages have their quirks, be it in the form of irregularities, suppletion, portmanteau morphs, articulatorily unmotivated allomorphy, semantically unfounded (from a synchronic point of view) noun classification, and so on. The fact that much of this is tossed over board in pidginisation and is not reinvented in creolisation is, I think, a good indication that it doesn't serve much of a purpose. As for the expressiveness of human languages, no one has of course been able to prove thet they are all equally expressive. Until this is done (which is most likely "never"), I have no problem with the axiomatic assumption that they are indeed all equally expressive. My experience, however, is that most linguists have not reflected much on the relationship between "complex" and "expressive", and therefore tend to believe that it automatically follows that all languages are equally complex. I can't see any motivation for this second assumption. A simple example to show that the two don't go hand in hand: Pig latin is more complex than English, in having an extra rule. But it is not more expressive, since the sum of possible sentences in Pig Latin equals the sum of possible sentences in English. Mikael Parkvall From dgolumbi at PANIX.COM Sun Dec 8 23:45:24 2002 From: dgolumbi at PANIX.COM (David Golumbia) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 18:45:24 -0500 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <20021208221448.Y68765-100000@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> from "Dan Everett" at Dec 08, 2002 10:41:21 PM Message-ID: I had already meant to suggest Professor DeGraff's tremendous essay on this subject as a corrective to Bickerton's views, and I note he did not also mention this recent publication of his which is an important read for anyone interested in many related topics: Michael DeGraff, "Morphology in Creole Genesis: Linguistics and Ideology," 53-122, in Michael J. Kenstowicz (ed.), _Ken Hale: A Life in Language_ (MIT Press, 2001). "simple" indeed. > Though I haven't yet read DeGraff's contribution, it sounds more plausible > on the surface of things than Parkvall's remarks, though, because it > seems to take syntax more seriously than what I could gather from > -- dgolumbi at panix.com David Golumbia From degraff at MIT.EDU Mon Dec 9 00:12:13 2002 From: degraff at MIT.EDU (Michel DeGraff) Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 19:12:13 -0500 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 08 Dec 2002 15:02:51 PST." <200212082302.gB8N2qm28966@hypatia.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: Joan Bresnan wrote: > Dan, you really ought to read the references before you comment on > them. I don't wish to make personal remarks about others on this > list, but a neutral observer might find DeGraff's Linguistic > Typology commentary to be an intemperate rant that crosses the > boundaries of academic civility. I second Joan Bresnan's point that one should read my article at http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/degraff/darwin/anti-simplest.html before commenting on it. For one thing, "academic civility", like beauty, is often in the eyes of the beholder. -michel. ___________________________________________________________________________ MIT Linguistics & Philosophy, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA 02139-4307 degraff at MIT.EDU http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/degraff.home.html ___________________________________________________________________________ From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Mon Dec 9 08:00:21 2002 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel Everett) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 08:00:21 +0000 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <200212082302.gB8N2qm28966@hypatia.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: Joan, Point well-taken. I was not endorsing Michel's article per se and if it seemed that I was, that was a mistake on my part. Of course, I need to read it before I endorse it. I was saying that in comparing his description of it in his letter with Parkvall's comments on it. My main point is that we should be careful of saying what is in the grammar for communicative power and what is merely syntax, e.g. gender, perfect tense, etc. because there is a lot of work to do to tell these two conceptually distinct issues apart in practice. Dan On Sunday, December 8, 2002, at 11:02 PM, Joan Bresnan wrote: >> Though I haven't yet read DeGraff's contribution, it sounds more >> plausible >> on the surface of things than Parkvall's remarks, though, because it >> seems to take syntax more seriously than what I could gather from >> Parkvall's quote. >> > > Dan, you really ought to read the references before you comment on > them. I don't wish to make personal remarks about others on this > list, but a neutral observer might find DeGraff's Linguistic Typology > commentary to be an intemperate rant that crosses the boundaries of > academic civility. "Trying hard to miss the point"--paraphrasing > Parkvall--is a very kind way to describe it. > > Joan > > ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Chair of Phonetics and Phonology Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/ FAX & Department phone: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Mon Dec 9 15:27:20 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 10:27:20 EST Subject: Underestimating Language Message-ID: In a message dated 12/8/02 6:10:47 PM, parkvall at LING.SU.SE writes: << Again, I would never claim that most of a languages structure is communicatively useless. But I do maintain that significant parts of it are indeed "diachronic detritus". All languages have their quirks, be it in the form of irregularities, suppletion, portmanteau morphs, articulatorily unmotivated allomorphy, semantically unfounded (from a synchronic point of view) noun classification, and so on. The fact that much of this is tossed over board in pidginisation and is not reinvented in creolisation is, I think, a good indication that it doesn't serve much of a purpose. >> The irony of Latin ("diachronic detritus") being used above points to the fact that one man's flotsom and jetsam is another man's raft. Recognizing "communication" out of context can be a difficult thing. But we might still admit as good evolutionary scientists that there are "vestigal organs" that persist despite having lost their functionality. A more correct analysis of such a situation is that it would be more disruptive to overall function or simply energy inefficient to drop such out-of-date features than it is to just retain them. It would be more detrimental to reorganize an organism to remove a vestigal organ than to just let it persist. If we evaluate languages as if creating an abstractly efficient language was more important than "synchronic" communication, we might think that there is some luxury available to speakers and listeners in these matters. But irregular verbs are what is expected in a language that uses irregular verbs. And using irregular verbs in such a language is a way to make sure that improvements in language don't get in the way of communication. We keep forgetting the listener in this equation and his convenience. The use of "I be" versus "I am" (aside from its secondary social status implications) is a distraction from the message itself to certain listeners, one that a speaker might try to avoid for basic communicative purposes. A good understanding of the "simplicity" of creole can be found in Stephen Jay Gould's comments on the subject (e.g., in Speaking of Snails and Scales in Dinosaur in a Haystack). In the context where creoles arise, the simplicity of creole may be the superior communicative solution. Whether Creole is a new language or a comparatively derived descendent of French, neither a pidgin nor French served the specific types of information IN CONTEXT that were being exchanged as well as Creole. If we assume communication value first, then we can also understand that the excess baggage that Creole "dropped" has its own uses in other contexts. I know that pointing to context is inconvenient when one is trying to generalize phenomena. But I'd suggest it is the methodology here that is creating the impression that communication is not the overpowering objective in these languages. In all the examples given by Mikael Parkvall, can it seriously be suggested that primary motivation of the speaker is not communication? Are we to think that "articulatorily unmotivated allomorphy" or "semantically unfounded (from a synchronic point of view) noun classification" are meant to reduce information between speaker and listener? Even a speaker whose purpose is obfuscation aims to appear to be communicating. A far better interpretation is that a "simple" language arises because its users do not have the luxury of embroidery or time-honored idiosyncracies. Its speakers and listeners are synchronically using the best structure available in context. Steve Long From parkvall at LING.SU.SE Mon Dec 9 16:26:12 2002 From: parkvall at LING.SU.SE (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 17:26:12 +0100 Subject: Underestimating Language In-Reply-To: <14.4138145.2b261058@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: >Are we to think that "articulatorily unmotivated allomorphy" or "semantically >unfounded (from a synchronic point of view) noun classification" are meant to >reduce information between speaker and listener? No, what I am suggesting is that the same message can be conveyed in a difficult way and an easy way (not to mention all the possible shades in between). The "junk" features I mentioned, and which Steve cites, do not reduce the information value, but they add unnecessary complexity insofar as they require one more rule in the ideal grammatical description of the language (whether or not this corresponds to an additional burden in acquisition or processing is another, albeit related, matter). In other words, the "simple" language can be said to doe its job more efficiently than the "complex" language, provided that they both convey the same information. Otherwise, I pretty much agree with Steve's comments. /MP * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Mikael Parkvall Institutionen f?r lingvistik Stockholms Universitet SE-10691 STOCKHOLM (rum 276) +46 (0)8 16 14 41, +46 (0)8 656 68 24 (hem) Fax: +46 (0)8 15 53 89 parkvall at ling.su.se From wilcox at UNM.EDU Mon Dec 9 17:05:06 2002 From: wilcox at UNM.EDU (Sherman Wilcox) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 10:05:06 -0700 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <20021208221448.Y68765-100000@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Message-ID: On 12/8/02, Dan Everett said: >If functional linguistics is right to believe that (most of) syntax is >motivated by communicative needs I would hope that functional linguists don't believe this. I would no more claim that "syntax is motivated by communicative needs" than an evolutionary biologist would claim that structure is motivated by functional needs. -- Sherman Wilcox Department of Linguistics University of New Mexico From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Mon Dec 9 17:39:15 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 12:39:15 EST Subject: The Necessity of Syntax Message-ID: In a message dated 12/9/02 12:05:31 PM, wilcox at UNM.EDU writes: << I would hope that functional linguists don't believe this. I would no more claim that "syntax is motivated by communicative needs" than an evolutionary biologist would claim that structure is motivated by functional needs. >> An evolutionary biologist would not claim structure is "motivated" by "functional needs." But I don't know of any remotely conventional biologist who would NOT claim that biological structure is shaped by function, i.e., by the success or lack of success the structure has in terms of survival. If syntax is not shaped by a communicative function, if it is not there to contribute to the functionality of interhuman information exchange, then what is it shaped by? Is it decorative or random? Is the concept of syntax unnecessary to a anything resembling a functioning human language? Can we think of a similarly effective form of language totally without the equivalent of syntax? One where we are sure that syntax's function can be totally dropped without impairing information flow? Just as a biological organism must conform to the laws of physics and chemistry, we might assume that syntax represents an essential solution in language. These rules being dictated by what must pass between speaker and listener in order for a certain amount or quality of information to be conveyed. We might assume, without syntax, information would be lost. And that we did not make these rules, the rules made us. If there is a way of creating a language totally without the function served by syntax, this assumption is wrong. But, otherwise, it makes sense to conclude that syntax is mandated by the way the world works and the way complex information must flow. Just as biological forms are shaped by functionality in the environment. And that any human language -- prewired or invented by humans -- will have syntax if it is to function as well as human languages do. Steve Long From oesten at LING.SU.SE Mon Dec 9 18:21:11 2002 From: oesten at LING.SU.SE (=?iso-8859-1?Q?=D6sten_Dahl?=) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 19:21:11 +0100 Subject: The Necessity of Syntax Message-ID: Exactly what does "syntax is motivated by communicative needs" mean? Does it mean that individual syntactic rules are motivated by communicative needs? This is what Dan Everett's formulation "(most of) syntax is motivated by communicative needs" implies. But if one language puts adjectives before nouns, another puts nouns first, and a third language allows for both possibilities, are all these choices motivated by communicative needs? Or is it the existence of syntax as such that is motivated by communicative needs? That is what Steve Long seems to mean when he says "any human language -- prewired or invented by humans -- will have syntax if it is to function as well as human languages do". But that will hardly help us in comparing different languages as to complexity, since presumably all languages have some kind of syntax. And the postings seem to be talking past each other. - ?sten Dahl From tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Mon Dec 9 18:31:55 2002 From: tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Tom Givon) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 10:31:55 -0800 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: I think maybe something can be said about the relation between adaptively-motivated syntax and diachronic change. Adaptive (functional, communicative) motivation is not simple; it most often involves multiple factors and competing motivations. The well-known grammaticalization cycle is just one general case in point: The later stages of 'de-grammaticalization' (see several articles in A. Giacalone-Ramat and P. Hopper, eds, TSL #37, 1998) reveal the intervention of phonological erosion which creates irregular, hard-to-learn ('counter-iconic') grammatical constructions (and morphologies). But there are a gadzillion more-specific instances in the life cycle of individual syntactic constructions. During the early phase of functional-extension via functional similarity and thus 'dual use' (say, re-interpreting the purely stative adjectival construction "The window was broken" as a result-of-action/event, "The window has been broken (by someone)"), a structure long adapted for one function is now used to code another, for which it is much less well-adapted (indeed, communicatively msleading; in this case signalling 'state' but coding 'event-with-de-topicalized-agent'). Only after some subsequent structural changes do the two functions differentiate structurally ("The window was broken (by someone)". But other functional innovations (in addition to phonological erosion) may intervene, with their own unimpeachable--but different & often conflicting--adaptive motivation. Thus, for example, the later rise of the GET-passive in English yielded a structure that came from a totally different diachronic source (reflexive-of-causative) and initial functional motivation, but eventually became both functionally and structurally rather similar to the BE-passive, resulting in considerable usage variation & confusion. In all this, diachronic change is very much like biological evolution. In both, the intial impetus for changes is adaptive but profoundly local. In both, multiple local factors often conflict (the left hand seldom tells the right what it is up to). This gives both evolution & diachrony the unmistakable "tinkered" (as opposed to "engineered") flavor. And the resulting synchronic sytructures in both reveal, paradoxical, many counted-adaptive features (a la Rube Goldberg...). But still, the processes that leads to the rise of such 'counter-iconic' end products--decrepit conjugation, insane declentions, wild portmanteaux, decptive morphophonemics, dead relics that retain clear structural presence (the appendix)--were nevertheless adaptively motivated. The upshot of all this is that an adaptive approach to language (or biology) cannot be practiced as a simplistic creed with the mantra "At all time all synchronic structures must be, transparently, 100% motivated--or else functionalism is falsified". Rather, it is a long-term and oft-frustrating research program that strives to understand the incredible complexity of the process that gives rise to both iconic and counter-iconic features of the communicative code. This may be fiendishly difficult, but in attempting to cope with our predicament, we are traveling in excellent company. Cheers, TG =========================== Daniel Everett wrote: > Joan, > > Point well-taken. I was not endorsing Michel's article per se and if it > seemed that I was, that was a mistake on my part. Of course, I need to > read it before I endorse it. I was saying that in comparing his > description of it in his letter with Parkvall's comments on it. > > My main point is that we should be careful of saying what is in the > grammar for communicative power and what is merely syntax, e.g. gender, > perfect tense, etc. because there is a lot of work to do to tell these > two conceptually distinct issues apart in practice. > > Dan > > On Sunday, December 8, 2002, at 11:02 PM, Joan Bresnan wrote: > > >> Though I haven't yet read DeGraff's contribution, it sounds more > >> plausible > >> on the surface of things than Parkvall's remarks, though, because it > >> seems to take syntax more seriously than what I could gather from > >> Parkvall's quote. > >> > > > > Dan, you really ought to read the references before you comment on > > them. I don't wish to make personal remarks about others on this > > list, but a neutral observer might find DeGraff's Linguistic Typology > > commentary to be an intemperate rant that crosses the boundaries of > > academic civility. "Trying hard to miss the point"--paraphrasing > > Parkvall--is a very kind way to describe it. > > > > Joan > > > > > > ------------------------------------------ > > Daniel L. Everett > Chair of Phonetics and Phonology > Department of Linguistics > The University of Manchester > Oxford Road > Manchester, UK M13 9PL > http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/ > FAX & Department phone: 44-161-275-3187 > Office: 44-161-275-3158 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kjohnson at LING.OHIO-STATE.EDU Mon Dec 9 19:15:59 2002 From: kjohnson at LING.OHIO-STATE.EDU (keith johnson) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 14:15:59 -0500 Subject: Underestimating Language In-Reply-To: <14.4138145.2b261058@aol.com> Message-ID: This discussion of communication and diachronic detrius is interesting. As I've been reading the posts I've been thinking about how communication using the forms of language may convey quite a lot more than simply logical form or propositional content. For instance, language functions as a marker of group identity. You know how some forms of music are filled with flourishes - grace notes and the like - while other forms make striking use of silence (the positions and durations of the rests)? The style of the music (like group identity) is conveyed by conforming to the conventions of that style, and in a sense the silence is just as "communicative" as the grace notes. Keith Johnson From ceford at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Mon Dec 9 21:45:47 2002 From: ceford at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (Cecilia E. Ford) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 13:45:47 -0800 Subject: Underestimating Language In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There's also all the fundamental functions that allow us to coordinate our talk with one another in real time. I.e., projection of turn trajectories and points of possible completion.... -Ceci At 02:15 PM 12/9/02 -0500, you wrote: >This discussion of communication and diachronic detrius is interesting. > >As I've been reading the posts I've been thinking about how >communication using the forms of language may convey quite a lot more >than simply logical form or propositional content. For instance, >language functions as a marker of group identity. > >You know how some forms of music are filled with flourishes - grace >notes and the like - while other forms make striking use of silence (the >positions and durations of the rests)? The style of the music (like >group identity) is conveyed by conforming to the conventions of that >style, and in a sense the silence is just as "communicative" as the >grace notes. > >Keith Johnson Cecilia E. Ford Professor Department of English 600 N. Park St. University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison WI 53706 USA ceford at facstaff.wisc.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dick at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK Mon Dec 9 20:17:11 2002 From: dick at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK (Dick Hudson) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 20:17:11 +0000 Subject: The necessity of syntax Message-ID: Dear Oesten and Funknet, Are we in danger of confusing syntax and grammar? It seems pretty obvious to me at least that even if languages have similar amounts of complexity it may be distributed differently between syntax and morphology. Marianne Mithun gave a wonderful tutorial on Mohawk to the LAGB some years ago which left some of us wondering whether Mohawk has any syntax at all - lots of morphology, lots of coreference etc handled by pragmatics, but nothing that could obviously be called syntax. Of course the boundary between morphology and syntax is a matter of debate and no doubt it's possible to write a GB/MP grammar of a language such as Mohawk which puts all the morphology into the syntax. But we should at least recognise morphology as an area of complexity and expressivity. Dick Hudson >Or is it the existence of syntax as such that is >motivated by communicative needs? That is what Steve Long seems to mean >when he says "any human language -- prewired or invented by humans -- >will have syntax if it is to function as well as human languages do". >But that will hardly help us in comparing different languages as to >complexity, since presumably all languages have some kind of syntax. And >the postings seem to be talking past each other. > >- Vsten Dahl > > Richard (= Dick) Hudson Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. +44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108; http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Mon Dec 9 21:31:21 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 16:31:21 EST Subject: The Necessity of Syntax Message-ID: In a message dated 12/9/02 1:19:05 PM, oesten at LING.SU.SE writes: << But if one language puts adjectives before nouns, another puts nouns first, and a third language allows for both possibilities, are all these choices motivated by communicative needs? >> There is fur and feathers and scales. Do the contingencies of environmental survival "motivate" all of them? Yes. Are there different local environments that might give rise to different solutions? Yes. Can two different solutions arise to satisfy the same function? Yes. Do all function to acheive the same ultimate outcome? Yes? Are the differences more important than the basic underlying function of all three? The idea is that syntax or its equivalent fundamentally arose because it enhanced communication. The particular shape it takes does not take away from that fundamental function. The particular shape is a matter of local time and place. Time and place may change how language might be shaped to serve that function. It does not change the function of syntax. <> When the difference is fur or feathers or scales, it hardly helps us ever to forget that local environments dictate different answers for the same function. Communication is as multifaceted as the physical environment. So if the basic communicative function "hardly helps us" understand syntax, I'd suggest nothing will. Again, structure cannot be correctly explained without context, because the same function dictates different structures in different contexts. So only by looking for the communicative function of a structure in a context can the structure make sense. And also speaking of "need" here may be inaccurate. Since neither survival and communication "need" language, any more than the ancestors of elephants needed to get big to survive (some relatives didn't get bigger and survived well enough as much smaller species). Neither life nor language "needs" to go where it goes. But where they go, they are constrained by parallel functional demands, if they are going to continue to keep going. Steve Long From jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES Mon Dec 9 23:59:46 2002 From: jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES (Jose-Luis Mendivil Giro) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 00:59:46 +0100 Subject: Underestimating Language In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.5.2.20021209172009.018b9c40@bamse.ling.su.se> Message-ID: At 17:26 +0100 9/12/02, Mikael Parkvall wrote: >No, what I am suggesting is that the same message can be conveyed in a >difficult way and an easy way (not to mention all the possible shades in >between). The "junk" features I mentioned, and which Steve cites, do not >reduce the information value, but they add unnecessary complexity insofar >as they require one more rule in the ideal grammatical description of the >language (whether or not this corresponds to an additional burden in >acquisition or processing is another, albeit related, matter). > >In other words, the "simple" language can be said to doe its job more >efficiently than the "complex" language, provided that they both convey the >same information. It seems as if you were not speaking about natural languages, but about some kind of formal or artificial language (which would have an 'ideal grammatical description'). Can you offer some empirical evidence showing, for example, that German children master their language later and/or worse than Jamaican ones? Regards, Jose-Luis Mendivil From parkvall at LING.SU.SE Tue Dec 10 00:15:16 2002 From: parkvall at LING.SU.SE (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 01:15:16 +0100 Subject: Underestimating Language In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jose-Luis Mendivil Giro wrote: >Can you offer some empirical evidence showing, for example, that German >children master their language later and/or worse than Jamaican ones? No, I cannot, and it was for that very reason I wrote "whether or not this corresponds to an additional burden in acquisition or processing is another, albeit related, matter" in the part of my message you cited. Not only am I unable to come up with such data, but I would also suspect that German children in fact do not have more difficulties than Jamaican children in acquiring their mother tongue. Children seem to be able to absorb even the silliest features of human language. If complexity in my sense (i.e. the addition of yet another rule to a system) at all corresponds to increased difficulties in acquisition, I would expect that to be in SLA rather than in first language acquisition. Mikael Parkvall From wilcox at UNM.EDU Tue Dec 10 00:25:30 2002 From: wilcox at UNM.EDU (Sherman Wilcox) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 17:25:30 -0700 Subject: The Necessity of Syntax In-Reply-To: <29.32f92d15.2b262f43@aol.com> Message-ID: On 12/9/02, Steve Long said: >An evolutionary biologist would not claim structure is "motivated" by >"functional needs." But I don't know of any remotely conventional biologist >who would NOT claim that biological structure is shaped by function, i.e., by >the success or lack of success the structure has in terms of survival. I think it's important to be careful how we talk about this: "motivated by" and "shaped by" are ambiguous, as ?sten has pointed out. Not to mention that function itself is pretty slippery. The ribbing pattern on mollusk shells is probably a result of interference patterns in the growing shell, but a secondary effect is that the ribs can become functional (emergent function) when they act as anchors when mollusks burrow in the mud. The ribs are not motivated by functional need. They may or may not be shaped by function. But they certainly are functional. I agree with Talmy in rejecting the "100% motivated or else functionalism is falsified" mantra. Random drift/variation surely occurs, and can persist, without being selected. To me, what we need to talk about is selectionist as opposed to instructionist models. Darwinian evolution is selectionist. But selectionist models don't have to rely on natural selection. Neural Darwinisn (Gerald Edelman) is a somatic selection account of brain development and function; Edelman won the Nobel Prize for his selectionist model of the immune system. William James even hinted at a selectionist model of cognitive function: "... conceptions, emotions, and active tendencies ... are originally produced in the shape of random images, fancies, accidental outbursts of spontaneous variation in the functional activity of the excessively unstable human brain, which the outer environment simply confirms or refutes, adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys -- selects, in short." I take it that linguists could propose a selectionist account of language origins/evolution, as many of the current proposals do, and a selectionist account of language change -- as, if I understand correctly, Bill Croft is doing. -- Sherman Wilcox Department of Linguistics University of New Mexico From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Tue Dec 10 08:15:32 2002 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel Everett) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 08:15:32 +0000 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Sherman, I didn't mean to imply by 'motivated' that functional considerations shaped form in a teleological sense. I recognize the difference between form-selection and form-structuring, a distinction that I expend some energy defending in a article of a few years back (1994. 'The Sentential Divide in Language and Cognition: Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility and Related Issues', The Journal of Pragmatics & Cognition, 2:1, pp 131-166.). In that article I argued largely against the position I now hold, which is that function does motivate form in some important ways, in the sense that function is causally implicated in syntactic form. And obvious example of a form-based vs. function-based approach can be given from 'WH-movement'. In the Minimalist Program, WH-words are found in the sentence-initial position to satisfy strictly formal constraints, mainly the demands of morphological features. In Lambrecht's or an RRG approach to information structure, the structure of a WH-question is motivated by Illocutionary Force (IF) and Focus, among other things. Direct reference to the communicative functions of IF-marking and information-structure more generally is not possible in, say, the MP, however. This is a large part of what the Generative Semantics vs. Interpretative Semantics debate was about, the very debate that in important ways led to the development of functional linguistics. -- Dan On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 05:05 pm, Sherman Wilcox wrote: > On 12/8/02, Dan Everett said: > >> If functional linguistics is right to believe that (most of) syntax is >> motivated by communicative needs > > I would hope that functional linguists don't believe this. I would no > more claim that "syntax is motivated by communicative needs" than an > evolutionary biologist would claim that structure is motivated by > functional needs. > > -- > Sherman Wilcox > Department of Linguistics > University of New Mexico > > ******************** Dan Everett Professor of Phonetics and Phonology Department of Linguistics University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL Phone: 44-161-275-3158 Department Fax: 44-161-275-3187 http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 3053 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Tue Dec 10 08:29:33 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 03:29:33 EST Subject: The Necessity of Syntax Message-ID: In a message dated 12/9/02 7:31:00 PM, wilcox at UNM.EDU writes: << Not to mention that function itself is pretty slippery. The ribbing pattern on mollusk shells is probably a result of interference patterns in the growing shell, but a secondary effect is that the ribs can become functional (emergent function) when they act as anchors when mollusks burrow in the mud. The ribs are not motivated by functional need. They may or may not be shaped by function. But they certainly are functional. >> Not all mollusks have ribbed patterns but those that do would continue to do so if such patterns have a function. If there is survival value in burrowing in the mud, then we know some structural feature that promotes such behavior becomes more likely to persist. The function of many paleo-forms must be guessed at because we really do not understand their environment. But the assumption is that a particular structure had a particular function. There may be shifts in function. But functionless structure does not arise in anticipation of any kind of destiny. In human language, many biological features give no appearance of having served any other function than communication. Biological mutations are random, but the selection process is not. The environment will favor those variations whose outcome is the survival. That is basic functionality. In language, accidental structure or conscious divergence from the norm may be the raw material of change, but such things would become part of the language system only if they spread and persist. Since the spread of change can only happen in the course of communication (i.e., must involve both speakers and listeners), and since the spread logically cannot occur if communication does not occur, communicative value would presumably be the basic test of whether a change will spread or not. Any change that defeats communication should not occur -- it is dysfunctional. <> Natural selection is a term applied to the general process that gives rise to biological traits. Edelman's model uses Darwinian principles to describe how the brain selects "functional" ideas from non-functional ones. My point was that whether a language feature is naturally selected or culturally selected, what will be selected is the structure that promotes the function of communication. Some special language structures (e.g., complex vocal cords) are biological, others are cultural. In both cases, the overriding function being served which shaped the structure would be communication. Steve Long From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Tue Dec 10 08:37:39 2002 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel Everett) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 08:37:39 +0000 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <3DF4E19B.C5DD130@oregon.uoregon.edu> Message-ID: On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 06:31 pm, Tom Givon wrote: > ? > > > The upshot of all this is that an adaptive approach to language (or > biology) cannot be practiced as a simplistic creed with the mantra "At > all time all synchronic structures must be, transparently, 100% > motivated--or else functionalism is falsified". Rather, it is a > long-term and oft-frustrating research program that strives to > understand the incredible complexity of the process that gives rise to > both iconic and counter-iconic features of the communicative code. > This may be fiendishly difficult, but in attempting to cope with our > predicament, we are traveling in excellent company. Cheers, TG > > Yes, Tom, I agree completely. The point is not that a functional motivation must be found for all forms, but that a functional motivation may constrain any particular form *in principle*. That is, unlike the rules which emanate from Deans' offices, not all syntax (sentence-level is the focus here) is *necessarily* arbitrary, i.e. independent of semantics and pragmatics. The reason that the MP analyses, say, WH-movement in terms of morphological features is because its view of innatism prohibits it from referring to semantics or pragmatics in such cases. Years ago, when Chomsky (based partially on suggestions by Ken Hale) was developing the ideas of CP and IP, it was pointed out to him in classes (I remember talking to him about it one Thursday afternoon after class on the way back to Building 20) that languages that have dislocated WH-words almost always place them at the beginning of the sentence/clause rather than the at the end, regardless of their underlying constituent order, violating the predictions of CP as it was then formulated (now too in my opinion). He said at the time that perhaps this has to do with processing constraints (the WH word at the beginning signals that a gap is coming and tells you how to interpret it). But this insight was never and in fact could never be built into Chomskyan theory or the latter would cease to be driven by form alone. And that is a non-negotiable (a large part of the impetus for developing the MP was to get rid of some of the baroque additions people were starting to make to structures in Principles and Parameters, e.g. indexes on structures, which, not being structural, were incongruous with the research program, much to the consternation of the Thursday afternoon audiences along the Charles River). Interestingly, though, Pinker's attempts to provide an evolutionary underpinning for Chomskyan syntax in his articles on evolutionary psychology and in his debates with Gould in the NYR, rest explicitly on functional motivations for formal constraints. Small wonder that this aspect of Pinker's work has had negligible impact in Chomsky's writings. One reason (this is ALL my interpretation of things, of course) that Chomsky has claimed that Darwinian evolution cannot account for language is that most interpretations of that model would attribute function as an active constraint on the development (and use) of form. -- Dan -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 9822 bytes Desc: not available URL: From jaakko.leino at HELSINKI.FI Tue Dec 10 09:17:16 2002 From: jaakko.leino at HELSINKI.FI (Jaakko Leino) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 11:17:16 +0200 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: Sherman Wilcox wrote: > > On 12/8/02, Dan Everett said: > > >If functional linguistics is right to believe that (most of) syntax is > >motivated by communicative needs > > I would hope that functional linguists don't believe this. I would > no more claim that "syntax is motivated by communicative needs" than > an evolutionary biologist would claim that structure is motivated by > functional needs. But then, language--including, but not limited to, syntax--has a user, one with intellect, needs, intentions, creativity, and the like. Evolution may not (although this, apparently, remains a matter of a certain religious debate, taken broadly enough). Therefore, it just might not be as straightforward as the comparison with evolutionary biology implies. Furthermore, I don't suppose "motivated by communicative needs" means "motivated by communicative needs alone". Surely there are other factors which shape and re-shape syntax and distort the "100% motivated" picture. But that need not falsify the claim that there is motivation, and by looking closely enough, it can be found all over syntax. -- Jaakko Leino University of Helsinki Department of Finnish From W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Tue Dec 10 12:02:47 2002 From: W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE (W. Schulze) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 13:02:47 +0100 Subject: The Necessity of Syntax Message-ID: ?sten Dahl wrote: > ... But if one language puts > adjectives before nouns, another puts nouns first, and a third language > allows for both possibilities, are all these choices motivated by > communicative needs? Or is it the existence of syntax as such that is > motivated by communicative needs? I guess the problem is to tell *what* is meant by 'syntax (as such)' at all. The debate on the nature of 'parts of speech' has demonstrated that it is difficult (if not impossible) to use these terms as categorial elements in order to define 'syntax'. Syntax (in my eyes) is an emergent property of utterances that reflects the cognitive- communicative need to assimilate complex 'gestalt' experience (Outer World stimuli) to the conditions of articulation (and connected with this, to the conditions of linguistic conceptualization). In other words: The only thing we can tell for sure is that 'syntax' encompasses the linearization of gestalt information. This process can be termed 'diairesis' which means that an Outer World gestalt experience is reduced to a number of more or less salient segments that are linearized as articulated sequences via language in accordance with the linguistic knowledge of a speaker. Naturally, linearization does not take place randomly but in accordance with socio-communicative conventions (acquired 'syntactic' blueprints) and with cognitive 'patterns' of gestalt experience (in perception). The structural coupling of 'perception and action' conditions that the 'action of linearization' is interpreted in terms of secondary 'autonomy hypotheses' about the functional (and even semantic) 'value' of the linearization patterns (e.g. in terms of 'constructions'). Such hypotheses may (and do) have again recursive effects on the 'perception domain', and - in consequence - on the 'values' of diairetic actions. If these assumptions are correct, syntax is neither necessary (in terms of a pre-condition) nor an option taken by 'languages' to a different degree. Rather, syntax is a more or less conventionalized way of how to communicate one's own diairetic processes. -- Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut f?r Allgemeine und Typologische Sprachwissenschaft - General Linguistics and Language Typology - Dept. II - Kommunikation und Sprachen F 13/14 - Universitaet M?nchen Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 Muenchen Tel.: ++49-(0)89-2180-2486 / -5343 Fax: ++49-(0)89-2180-5345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Web: http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ From jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES Tue Dec 10 12:49:57 2002 From: jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES (Jose-Luis Mendivil) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 13:49:57 +0100 Subject: The Necessity of Syntax In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 17:25 -0700 9/12/02, Sherman Wilcox wrote: > >To me, what we need to talk about is selectionist as opposed to >instructionist models. Darwinian evolution is selectionist. But >selectionist models don't have to rely on natural selection. Neural >Darwinisn (Gerald Edelman) is a somatic selection account of brain >development and function; Edelman won the Nobel Prize for his >selectionist model of the immune system. I think it was N. Jerne who won the Nobel Prize for a selectionist model of the immune system. His reception lecture was significantly published as: Jerne, N.K. (1985): "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System", Science, 229: 1057-1059. And, in a relevant paper, Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini described a connection between selectionist theories in biology and in generative linguistics: Piatelli-Palmarini, M. (1989): "Evolution, Selection and Cognition: from 'learning' to Parameter Setting in Biology and in the Study of Language". Cognition, 31: 1-44. For a more explicit connection between selectionist theories and generative models of language acquisition see also the first chapter of Lightfoot's (1991) How to Set Parameters. Best regards, Jose-Luis Mendivil. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wilcox at UNM.EDU Tue Dec 10 14:34:57 2002 From: wilcox at UNM.EDU (Sherman Wilcox) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 07:34:57 -0700 Subject: The Necessity of Syntax In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On 12/10/02, Jose-Luis Mendivil said: >I think it was N. Jerne who won the Nobel Prize for a selectionist >model of the immune system. Edelman shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in medicine with Rodney Porter for their discoveries concerning the chemical structure of antibodies. -- Sherman Wilcox Department of Linguistics University of New Mexico From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Tue Dec 10 16:18:29 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 11:18:29 EST Subject: The Necessity of Syntax Message-ID: In a message dated 12/10/02 7:50:55 AM, jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES writes: << I think it was N. Jerne who won the Nobel Prize for a selectionist model of the immune system. His reception lecture was significantly published as: Jerne, N.K. (1985): "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System", Science, 229: 1057-1059. >> In that lecture, NIELS JERNE stated: "When we place a population of lymphocytes from such an animal in appropriate tissue culture fluid, and when we add an antigen, the lymphocytes will produce specific antibody molecules, in the absence of any nerve cells.... I find it astonishing that the immune system embodies a degree of complexity which suggests some more or less superficial though striking analogies with human language, and that this cognitive system has evolved and functions without assistance of the brain." What Jerne was analogizing here was the immune systems ability to generate and store specific information that was not within its prior experience. His use of "cognitive system" to describe immune response here doesn't correspond to the notion of cognitive as much as it does intelligent. It should be obvious however that there is nothing here that contradicts the notion that the immune system is totally functional in origin or operation. That is, the immune system clearly developed to protect the body from the environamental causes of infection and its structure is totally dictated by that function -- to the extent that it is not dysfunctional. In that lecture, Jerne also stated: "It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar, pioneered by Chomsky..., argues that this is only explicable if certain deep, universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then linguistics would become a branch of biology." Just a note on the logic of this proposition as Jerne understood it. If we were to find or design a language that a young children could NOT learn (as a natural language), would that disprove the hypothesis as stated? Or would it mean that this unlearnable language was NOT a natural language? Is the statement "young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born" falsifiable? Or would contrary evidence simply mean that a child cannot learn a natural language if it is not a natural language? I'd suggest that the circularity is the result of the omission of functionality in defining the terms. Steve Long From Salinas17 at AOL.COM Thu Dec 12 19:10:44 2002 From: Salinas17 at AOL.COM (Steve Long) Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 14:10:44 EST Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' Message-ID: In a message dated 12/10/02 3:45:55 AM, dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK writes: << Interestingly, though, Pinker's attempts to provide an evolutionary underpinning for Chomskyan syntax in his articles on evolutionary psychology and in his debates with Gould in the NYR, rest explicitly on functional motivations for formal constraints. Small wonder that this aspect of Pinker's work has had negligible impact in Chomsky's writings.>> The Pinker-Gould exchange is also interesting for how Gould managed to paint Pinker into the "Ultra-Darwinist" corner, the more extreme position that every aspect of language is not just functionally shaped but biologically adaptively shaped. Gould maintained that other forces were at work beside the strict natural selection>survival "algorithm" -- e.g., the concept of "spandrels", architectural adjuncts that would eventually become adaptive. For some reason, Pinker chose to argue with Gould on that point, which didn't work out too good and also probably put him about as far from the Chomskyian position as he could get. The difference between the broader concept of functionalism versus strict biological "Ultra-Darwinian" adaptation is very important to the application of evolution theory to language, I'd suggest. Obviously, one can get into a pretty pickle trying to find Spencerian biological adaption in the specific intricacies of human language. And I'd suggest one reason is that language does not really function with regard to strict biological adaptation. The main function of language is communication, not survival of an individual or a species. In fact, at any particular time and place, the culture that is nested in language might produce a very non-adaptive result. (A striking example of culture overruling the values of the biological survival of the individual or the species is described by Borges in chronicling the history of the idea that the end of the world is a good thing, because it will usher in what-comes-after, and that this mass suicide should be rushed to completion as quickly as possible. These kinds of ideas mark the points where strict biological adaptation no longer constrain what humans do as individuals or as a species -- and apparently without regard to "superior" survival traits being passed along with particular genes. Belief in an after-life may be unique to humans, so other animals apparently never had to worry about any supposed "belief-in-an-after-life gene" conflicting with their raw survival instincts. So, what would the function of such a gene be?) Now, one might argue that communication is biologically adaptive, which is locally true and no doubt shaped language organs like our vocal cords. But it seems that at some point, communication disjointed itself from the biological adaptive values it had among primates and birds, and started to be a value of its own. And I think this value -- communication -- has a life of its own when it comes to both language and the culture nested in language. Awhile ago I caught a glimpse of the Westminster Dog Show (a short glimpse admittedly) on tv and viewing this example of the human effect on the evolution of the dog, I'd have to say that biological adaptation ("in the wild") took a real black-eye that day. If this sort of thing is parallel to what happens to language in certain elite quarters, we might expect the work of adaptation to be not a "constraint", but rather something to be actively avoided, worked-around and just plain penalized in the final voting. Also T Givon recently wrote: "This gives both evolution & diachrony the unmistakable "tinkered" (as opposed to "engineered") flavor. And the resulting synchronic structures in both reveal, paradoxical, many counter-adaptive features (a la Rube Goldberg...)." What's interesting is the phylogenic tree a friend did of automobiles. An individual car might look very "engineered", but a tree that traces the "directed" history of car engineering is as haywired as any biological evolution tree. There is an apparent gap -- in accidental evolution and directed evolution -- between what might work and what eventually does turn out to work. Synchronic structure often gives us a snapshot of a process, not a state. And the process is always in the process of taking wrong turns and proceeding a long way before the driver asks for directions. For example, the new name we come up with for something we never saw before may not be as communicative as we thought. Yet we are stuck with it (just as we are with inefficient grammar) because of listener conservatism. Columbus couldn't stop the ball he sent rolling when he called Native Americans, "Indians". Steve Long From ont at CPHLING.DK Fri Dec 13 08:30:13 2002 From: ont at CPHLING.DK (Ole Nedergaard Thomsen) Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 09:30:13 +0100 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: <8D575D91-0C17-11D7-827E-000393D73F38@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: Dear Dan, A correction concerning the Minimalist Program, cf. e.g. Noam Chomsky's New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, CUP, 2000, p. 12 f.: "The displacement property of human language is expressed in terms of grammatical transformations or by some other device, but it is always expressed somehow. Why language should have this property is an interesting question, which has been discussed since the 1960s without resolution. My suspicion is that part of the reason has to do with phenomena that have been described in terms of surface structure interpretation; many of these are familiar from traditional grammar: topic-comment, specificity, new and old information, the agentive force that we find even in displaced position, and so on. If that is correct, then the displacement property is, indeed, forced by legibility conditions: it is motivated by interpretive requirements that are externally imposed by our systems of thought, which have these special properties (so the study of language use indicates). (...)" That is, the formal features are where they are to satisfy language use! Ole ---------------------------------------- Ole Nedergaard Thomsen Dept. of General and Applied Linguistics University of Copenhagen Njalsgade 80 DK-2300 Copenhagen S Denmark ---------------------------------------- On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Daniel Everett wrote: > Dear Sherman, > > I didn't mean to imply by 'motivated' that functional considerations > shaped form in a teleological sense. I recognize the difference between > form-selection and form-structuring, a distinction that I expend some > energy defending in a article of a few years back (1994. 'The > Sentential Divide in Language and Cognition: Pragmatics of Word Order > Flexibility and Related Issues', The Journal of Pragmatics & Cognition, > 2:1, pp 131-166.). In that article I argued largely against the > position I now hold, which is that function does motivate form in some > important ways, in the sense that function is causally implicated in > syntactic form. And obvious example of a form-based vs. function-based > approach can be given from 'WH-movement'. In the Minimalist Program, > WH-words are found in the sentence-initial position to satisfy strictly > formal constraints, mainly the demands of morphological features. In > Lambrecht's or an RRG approach to information structure, the structure > of a WH-question is motivated by Illocutionary Force (IF) and Focus, > among other things. Direct reference to the communicative functions of > IF-marking and information-structure more generally is not possible in, > say, the MP, however. This is a large part of what the Generative > Semantics vs. Interpretative Semantics debate was about, the very > debate that in important ways led to the development of functional > linguistics. > > > > -- Dan > > > > On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 05:05 pm, Sherman Wilcox wrote: > > > On 12/8/02, Dan Everett said: > > > >> If functional linguistics is right to believe that (most of) syntax is > >> motivated by communicative needs > > > > I would hope that functional linguists don't believe this. I would no > > more claim that "syntax is motivated by communicative needs" than an > > evolutionary biologist would claim that structure is motivated by > > functional needs. > > > > -- > > Sherman Wilcox > > Department of Linguistics > > University of New Mexico > > > > > ******************** > Dan Everett > Professor of Phonetics and Phonology > Department of Linguistics > University of Manchester > Oxford Road > Manchester, UK > M13 9PL > Phone: 44-161-275-3158 > Department Fax: 44-161-275-3187 > http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/ > > From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Fri Dec 13 08:49:13 2002 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel Everett) Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 08:49:13 +0000 Subject: Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ole, Nope. No correction. This quote shows the same point I raised in my earlier posting. Recall that I said that Chomsky explicitly claimed exactly this kind of thing. However, neither he nor anyone else in the theory would ever allow these functional considerations to be causally implicated (and that phrase, which I have repeated frequently, is key) in the statement of any constraint, rule, principle, or parameter. There could never be, for example, a 'Topic first parameter' (unless it was stated in terms of morphosyntactic, nonfunctional features, in which case 'topic' would be a mnemonic label, nothing more). So it can in fact be irritating to read Chomsky say exactly what people seriously interested in functional constraints on syntactic form already know, while otherwise denying (in word and deed) that it could have anything whatsoever to do with the theory. As George Lakoff and others pointed out years ago, the exclusion of function from syntax (a concept Chomsky denies ever having made use of, namely, 'autonomous syntax') is *forced* on Chomskyan theory by its view of innatism. If, for example, function (semantics, pragmatics, processing, etc.) could be causally implicated in the rules that linguists write, it could be causally implicated in L1 acquistion. But that latter implication must never be drawn, because it would effectively eliminate the need for a Language Acquisition Device (or, in the extremely unfortunate phrasing underscored by a recent book of the same name, a "language organ"). And that is ultimate nonnegotiable of the theory. Let me repeat then: Chomsky will often in informal exchanges allow that function, semantics, etc. (all apple-pie and motherhood sounding) is perhaps behind what we see today. But he will never allow it in the theory at all. Current Minimalism supposedly has done away with movement, with distinct levels of structure, transformations (in some sense), etc. But it must always maintain that which Chomsky says it has never included, namely, *autonomous* syntax. That is the sine qua non of the research programme. It is interesting of course, to see how far one can go writing rules, constraints, etc, in terms of morphological features. But doing this and claiming that function may play a role (in some mysterious past) is having your apple pie and eating it too. No, the New York Review of Books cover reference to John Searle's articles on Chomsky got it right - in 'Chomsky's Thermidor' (and I ain't talking lobster - think French Revolution) Searle correctly pointed out that Chomskyan theory was a good idea, it just didn't pan out. Frankly, I expect future generations to compare Chomsky and Freud as two pioneers in the study of mind who got us all to think about things that were exciting, challenging, and important, just bizarrely wrong. But I cannot think of many things I have been long-term right about either, so that is probably not a serious indictment (and I don't think up things as grand as 'Oedipal complex' or 'Covert movement'. I am lucky to figure out what a single morpheme means in a language I am studying). Dan On Friday, December 13, 2002, at 08:30 am, Ole Nedergaard Thomsen wrote: > Dear Dan, > > A correction concerning the Minimalist Program, cf. e.g. Noam > Chomsky's New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, CUP, 2000, > p. 12 > f.: > "The displacement property of human language is expressed in terms > of grammatical transformations or by some other device, but it is > always > expressed somehow. Why language should have this property is an > interesting question, which has been discussed since the 1960s without > resolution. My suspicion is that part of the reason has to do with > phenomena that have been described in terms of surface structure > interpretation; many of these are familiar from traditional grammar: > topic-comment, specificity, new and old information, the agentive force > that we find even in displaced position, and so on. If that is correct, > then the displacement property is, indeed, forced by legibility > conditions: it is motivated by interpretive requirements that are > externally imposed by our systems of thought, which have these special > properties (so the study of language use indicates). (...)" > > That is, the formal features are where they are to satisfy language > use! > > > Ole > ---------------------------------------- > Ole Nedergaard Thomsen > Dept. of General and Applied Linguistics > University of Copenhagen > Njalsgade 80 > DK-2300 Copenhagen S > Denmark > ---------------------------------------- > On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Daniel Everett wrote: ******************** Dan Everett Professor of Phonetics and Phonology Department of Linguistics University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL Phone: 44-161-275-3158 Department Fax: 44-161-275-3187 http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 5660 bytes Desc: not available URL: From v.ferreira at GMX.DE Fri Dec 13 22:45:47 2002 From: v.ferreira at GMX.DE (Vera Fereira) Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 23:45:47 +0100 Subject: PhDweblogs.net Message-ID: Here's a message that might interest this mailing list. Sorry for any cross posting. Hello,You are receiving this message because we think you might be interested to know that we?ve recently created http://www.phdweblogs.net , a non-profit initiative to bring together PhD students? weblogs from all around the world. If you are preparing a PhD, or have a blog about your research interests, you can register it there. Thanks, PhDweblogs.net team From nuyts at UIA.UA.AC.BE Tue Dec 17 07:53:55 2002 From: nuyts at UIA.UA.AC.BE (nuyts at UIA.UA.AC.BE) Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2002 08:53:55 +0100 Subject: ESSLLI 2003 workshop on modality (fwd) Message-ID: CALL FOR PAPERS: Workshop on Conditional and Unconditional Modality August 25-29, 2003, Vienna This workshop will be held as part of the 15th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI), August 18-29, 2003, Vienna, Austria. Deadline for submissions: March 7, 2003. We invite presentations that address any of the following topics: * Semantic analyses of modal expressions and conditionals. * Logical tools to extend, refine or reconstruct the traditional apparatus of possible worlds, times and events. * Empirical studies on the morphosyntactic and semantic interaction of modal and temporal expressions cross-linguistically. * Relation between illocutionary operators underlying evidential systems across a variety of languages and epistemic modalities. * Context dependence and dynamic effects of modal and evidential assertions. For details, consult the following webpages: Workshop page: http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/sigmod/ESSLLI03/ ESSLLI 2003: http://www.logic.at/esslli03/ The workshop aims to facilitate the exchange of ideas between researchers working in different linguistic schools and to bridge the gap between l'art pour l'art logic and empirically grounded linguistic analysis. Frank Veltman (veltman at hum.uva.nl) From robert at VJF.CNRS.FR Thu Dec 19 06:40:40 2002 From: robert at VJF.CNRS.FR (Stephane Robert) Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 07:40:40 +0100 Subject: conference on SPACE in languages Message-ID: We apologize for multiple mailing of this message Space in languages : linguistic systems and cognitive categories Paris, 7-8 February 2003 Ecole Normale Sup?rieure (salle Dussane, to be confirmed) 45 rue d?Ulm, 75005 Paris International conference organized by the research group Linguistic diversity and change: cognitive implications with financial support from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Entrance is free, no registration As illustrated by the Kantian tradition and by a number of cognitive theories, space has been often viewed as a universal cognitive primitive, an ?a priori form of intuition? that conditions all of our experience. From this point of view, it is of particular interest to study the linguistic expression of space, since languages seem to capture and to make explicit the constraints of experience on the construction of spatial reference. At the same time, language confers to spatial representations the property of referential ?detachability?, that distinguishes these representations from those that are produced by the perceptual experience of space. This fundamental property of language allows speakers to dissociate and to choose among different components of spatial reference, as well as to use spatial morphemes to express other and/or more abstract meanings, such as temporal, causal or argumentative relations. A question then arises concerning the primitive and generative nature of the category of space in languages. To what extent does space, as it is linguistically encoded, reflect forms of perceptual experience and which aspects of this experience do languages encode? Does space constitute a pure and primitive category from which other linguistic meanings are then derived? This question has been raised by cognitive grammars in general and by metaphor theory in particular. It is also particularly relevant in the light of numerous derivations that can be observed in the history of languages, often indicating that a given term evolves from a concrete spatial meaning to an abstract discourse one. What are then the cognitive mechanisms that allow these transitions? Inversely, some recent linguistic analyses argue that spatial values are neither basic nor even purely spatial, but rather that spatial terms always carry other values, for example related to the functional properties of objects, their force or resistance, or the goals towards which speakers construct spatial relations in their utterances. According to this conception, space in language is therefore not a primitive category, but already the result of some construction. What types of evidence can be brought to bear on these different conceptions? Furthermore, in the last twenty years, many studies in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cultural anthropology have revealed the existence of rather varied spatial systems across languages and cultures. These variations concern, for example, the nature of the linguistic devices expressing spatial information (e.g. verbs, affixes, classifiers, particles), the particular distinctions they encode, and the reference systems that are used by speakers (absolute, egocentric, relative). In addition, various studies show that linguistic and cultural systems determine - at least partially - the nature and cognitive accessibility of the information selected by speakers, thereby casting some doubts on the supposedly universal properties of the category of space. This evidence then raises questions concerning the impact of linguistic categorization on perception, as well as the existence of a single (a-modal) system or of two distinct (linguistic vs. perceptual and motor) systems of spatial representations. The study of space can then be reframed in terms of several fundamental questions, that will be addressed during this conference from the point of view of linguistics (typology, diachrony, sign-language), cognitive anthropology, the philosophy of language, psycholinguistics, and neurosciences. List of participants and papers to be presented The precise program will be announced in January Melissa Bowerman (Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen) Constructing language-specific spatial categories in first language acquisition Pierre Cadiot (Universit? de Paris 8, Laboratoire LATTICE) Franck Lebas (Universit? Clermont-Ferrand 2) The French movement verb MONTER as a challenge to the status of spatial reference Denis Creissels (Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, Universit? Lyon 2) Encoding the distinction between localization, source of a movement and direction of a movement: a typological study Michel Denis (LIMSI, Orsay) Deficits in spatial discourse: the case of Alzheimer patients J?r?me Dokic & Elisabeth Pacherie (Institut Jean Nicod, EHESS Paris) Molyneux?s question and frames of reference Colette Grinevald (Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, Universit? Lyon 2) The expression of static location in a typological perspective Maya Hickmann (Laboratoire Cognition et D?veloppement, Universit? de Paris 5) The relativity of motion in first language acquisition Anetta Kopecka (Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, Universit? Lyon 2) The semantic structure of prefixed motion verbs in French: typological perspectives Barbara Landau (Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore) (De)Coupling of spatial language and spatial cognition Alain Peyraube (Centre de Recherche sur les Langues d?Asie Orientale, Paris) On the history of place words and localizers in Chinese : a cognitive approach Marie-Anne Sallandre (Universit? Paris 8) Iconicity in discourse, the role of space in French sign language Chris Sinha (Institute of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark) Mapping and construal in spatial language and conceptualization: language variation and acquisition. Dan Slobin (Department of Psychology University of California, Berkeley) What makes manner of motion salient ? Leonard Talmy (State University of New York at Buffalo) to be confirmed Claude Vandeloise (State University of Louisiana, B?ton Rouge) Are there spatial prepositions ? Yves-Marie Visetti (Laboratoire LATTICE, ENS Paris) Semantics and its models of perception and action Organizing committee Maya Hickmann St?phane Robert Yves-Marie Visetti Contact: secretariat.tul at ivry.cnrs.fr -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: