FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness

[Chris Butler]

I sympathise with Tom's view that the question 'How does language work?' may not be meaningful, or may at least not be an appropriate question to ask, independently of the question 'How do language users work?' The complex human activity that we call language exists only through the capabilities and activities of its users, pace Aya's comment that "we do not embody it". Furthermore, there is a considerable body of opinion nowadays, not only among linguists interested in sociosemiotic aspects of language but also in the work of many cognitive linguists and of psycholinguists such as Ray Gibbs, which agrees with Mark's suspicion of "any proposal to study something as complex as language separately from its embodiment". 

One problem with a strict separation between language and humans, such as Aya would like us to accept, is that if we do this we deny ourselves natural explanations of many phenomena in human language which are otherwise somewhat mysterious. As Tom astutely observed more than 30 years ago, many structural properties of language are most insightfully accounted for in terms of a set of explanatory parameters many of which are concerned with the properties of the human language-processing organism, including general cognitive and perceptual structure, the specific structure of the neurological, acoustic, articulatory and other mechanisms, the ontogenetic development of the young child, etc. 

Aya is also concerned about the need to distinguish language processing from language data. But those of us who want to ask the question 'How does the language user work?' do make this distinction. The data are the input to language understanding and the output from language production, so the two are distinct.

I understand Aya's point that we need some way of evaluating what computers and non-humans can do. But I think it is dangerous to put this in terms of "artifical language-using devices" and "to what extent a non-human has acquired language", as if there were some monolithic entity out there called language, which humans have and computers and non-humans may have to some extent. A more fruitful way to approach the situation, in my view, would be to study how and why what can be produced (and also understood) by a non-human animal or a computer is similar to and different from what a human being can produce and understand, looking at the systems in the round, including analyses not only of structures but also of the range of communicative and social functions they perform, but without assuming that what we are looking at is a single entity 'language', present to variable extents. Sorry if I haven't put this last bit clearly enough - I found it quite hard to formulate without making too many unwarranted assumptions!

Chris