Presentations

Abstract

This paper approaches the issues surrounding the relationship between language and music tangentially, by arguing that the language sciences have largely misconstrued the nature of their object of study – when language is correctly repositioned as a quite elaborate cultural superstructure resting on two biological columns as it were, the relationship to music looks rather different.

Abstract

This paper addresses the phenomenon of single turns, even single turn-constructional units, that perform multiple speech acts or social actions. The paper reviews the main approaches - ''indirect speech acts'' as treated in linguistic pragmatics, and the ''vehicle'' approach as in conversation analysis - and argues that both of these are inadequate. Instead a solution is sought in the hierarchical nature of action planning, and it is shown that this approach sheds considerable light on multi-action turns. The simplest cases involve pre-sequences, but more complex cases involving extended ''projects'' by participants are also reviewed. It seems that there is no principled limit to the number of actions that a single turn-construcional unit can perform - certainly cases of up to four such actions can be found. The implications for speech act theory and conversation analysis are spelled out.

Abstract

Recursion has become a lamp for the linguistic moths – it has become an obsession far from the centre of what linguistics should be focused on. It plays a limited role in the structure of many languages, indefinite recursion is of course never actually displayed, and what is exemplified could therefore always be modeled in practice by finite state devices. There are many more central puzzles to focus on, like the diverse specific structures mapped on strings, rather than the mechanisms that generate unstructured string-sets. Embedded clauses have been the main focus of interest, but it is noteworthy that (a) many languages offer very limited embedding possibilities; (b) some which do have embedding effectively cap embedding at one deep; (c) almost any such embeddings can be paraphrased by parataxis (strings of adjoined clauses as in veni, vidi, vici). Parataxis is why many languages can lack embedded clauses of different kinds without any loss of expressive power: the expressive power is always present in the pragmatics whether or not it is there in the syntax. To make the point that expressive power lies in the pragmatics, I’ll examine centre-embedding in interactive discourse. Centre-embedding has the virtue that it is easily distinguished from parataxis – which is not the case for edge-recursion in many languages. Centre-embedding in clauses is effectively capped at two deep in all spoken languages (very occasionally three deep in written), apparently by memory and parsing limitations. But centre-embedding in interactive discourse can break this barrier, and does so routinely. The explanation for this is actually unclear, but the phenomenon would seem to show the advantages of distributed cognition. Rather than thinking of recursion as the performance-limited “externalization” of an individual competence, the discourse phenomena suggest that interactive language usage, where centre-embedding is hyper-trophied, is the natural home base and the ultimate source of complex recursion in the grammatical system.

Abstract

Ken Hale argued forcefully that linguistic diversity provides a crucial resource for linguistics. If we take this lesson seriously, this diversity provides the opportunity to recast the language sciences in a Darwinian mold — for we are the only species whose communication system differs fundamentally across social groups in both form and meaning. Starting from work by myself and colleagues in Island Melanesia, I argue that the patterns of diversity can be understood almost entirely in terms of cultural evolution over deep time. Language universals — understood as constraints specific to the language capacity — do not seem to strongly constrain these patterns: Absolute universals are almost always confronted by counterevidence, and Greenbergian statistical universals also turn out to be less robust than presumed. The puzzle that then arises is what exactly endows humans and humans alone with the language capacity? I argue that humans share an innate infrastructure for language which is largely pragmatic and ethological in character: the capacity for vocal learning, multimodal signaling, turn-taking, and especially intention-recognition. These capacities allow infants to bootstrap themselves into the local language. I suggest that the future for the language sciences involves embracing the diversity, and exploring how on the one hand one species can support such a diverse range of communication systems, and how conversely, within a speech community, internal variation can be damped down to produce relative uniformity.

Abstract

The language sciences are currently non-Darwinian for a range of historical reasons, but the most important is that theory has been dominated by the paradigm inherited from the birth of the Cognitive Sciences in the 1950s. In that paradigm, language is viewed as largely invariant algebraic system running on an innate symbol manipulation machine, whose origin is (more or less) an evolutionary freak. This paradigm ignores a key property of human language: it is the only known animal communication system that varies in form and meaning across social groups. Meanwhile empirical work on the languages of the world has accumulated to a point where a paradigm change is clearly necessary. The recent work points to linguistic diversity at every level, with family resemblances largely accounted for by common cultural descent. Exceptionless universals of language now seem vanishingly rare. If cultural evolution accounts for language diversity, what accounts for the common core and the universal use of language across the species? I'll argue that humans are endowed with an 'interaction engine', a shared foundation for communicative interaction which bootstraps infants into the local language tradition, and which no doubt has deep phylogenetic roots.

Abstract

Why is it that language is good at describing certain states of affairs (e.g., the kinship relation between me and my grandfather), but very limited in others (e.g., describing smells)? Ineffability – the difficulty or impossibility of putting certain experiences into words – is a topic that has been relatively neglected within the cognitive sciences. But limits on the ability to express sensorial experiences in words can tell us important things about how the mind works, how different modalities do or do not talk to one another, and how language does, or does not, interact with other mental faculties. This talk presents the results of a large-scale cross-linguistic investigation of how different perceptual domains are coded across languages and cultures. Speakers from more than a dozen languages – including three sign-languages – were asked to describe a standardized set of stimuli of color patches, geometric shapes, simple sounds, tactile textures, smells and tastes. The languages are typologically, genetically and geographically diverse, representing a wide-range of cultures. We examine how codable the different sensory modalities are by comparing how consistent speakers are in how they describe the materials in each modality. The results suggest that differential codability may be at least partly the result of cultural preoccupation. This shows that the senses are not just physiological phenomena but are constructed through linguistic, cultural and social practices.