Concerning WALS - Bees, Bats, Butterflies

[timo.honkela at tkk.fi]

Thank you for initiating a very interesting discussion. The complexity 
of the study of language as a socio-cultural and cognitive phenomenon 
by far exceeds, for instance, the complexity of the basic principles 
of physics and astronomy. 

In general, it seems clear that linguistic categories cannot be 
claimed to have any objective ontological status. They are social 
constructions and there are multiple ways to construct the theories in 
a meaningful way.

A formalization of the subjectivity/intersubjectivity of language use 
is presented in our recent article "Simulating processes of concept 
formation and communication" (J of Econ Methodology, vol. 15, no. 3, 
Sept 2008, pp. 245-259):

1 Introduction
1.1 Multi-agent systems
1.2 Language learning and game theory
1.3 Grounding
1.4 Learning paradigms
2 Basic theoretical framework
3 Communication between agents
3.1 Language games
3.2 Single-agent model
3.3 Two-agent model
4 Learning of conceptual models
4.1 Unsupervised learning of conceptual systems
5 Practical implications
5.1 Meaning negotiations
5.2 Costs associated with harmonization of conceptual systems
6 Discussion

The article aims to provide a principled alternative to the formal 
approaches in which language is viewed as an autonomous system without 
careful consideration of the subjective element. Constructive comments 
on the paper (available on request) are welcome! 

Best regards,
Timo

P.S. I will be in UC Berkeley from 17th to 19th, in Stanford from 20th 
to 21st and in UC San Diego from 25th to 27th of November. If you are 
working there and would be interested in discussing these issues, 
please contact.




On Mon, 10 Nov 2008, Martin Haspelmath wrote:

> If you want to compare Chomsky with someone, I think the best analogy is
> Socrates -- he asked a number of new questions in a very serious way, without
> providing answers (Socrates also had clashes with authority, rather fatal
> ones).
> 
> Comparative biology became an empirically-based science long before Darwin,
> but it was extremely difficult to make sense of the variation until a new way
> of thinking became possible. Maybe that is the case with comparative
> linguistics, too. It seems that we are still very far from the Keplerian,
> Galilean or Darwinian stage.
> 
> The World Atlas of Language Structures is primarily an attempt to put
> comparative linguistics on an empirical foundation. Until recently, it was
> often based on Platonic or Aristotelian speculation, like medieval biology.
> 
> Martin
> > At 10:48 PM -0500 9/11/08, Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
> > snip..
> > 
> > > we need a Copernicus, not a Chomsky or a Greenberg.
> > 
> > A reminder that it was Kepler who formulated the planetary laws, and a
> > comment that Chomsky has in common with Galileo a discipline-changing
> > body of work (subsequently elevated into a theory of everything). Both
> > also had clashes with authority although of a rather different kind.
> > Maybe we haven't yet had our Darwin or Einstein but to be a Galileo is
> > not to be sniffed at.
> -- 
> Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
> Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher Platz 6
> D-04103 Leipzig      Tel. (MPI) +49-341-3550 307, (priv.) +49-341-980 1616
> 
> Glottopedia - the free encyclopedia of linguistics
> (http://www.glottopedia.org)


--
Timo Honkela, Chief Research Scientist, PhD, Docent
Adaptive Informatics Research Center
Helsinki University of Technology
P.O.Box 5400, FI-02015 TKK

timo.honkela at tkk.fi,  http://www.cis.hut.fi/tho/