Abstract
In this chapter, I search for the mechanism correlating linguistic form with content in order to explain (in the sense of the word ‘explain’ used in empirical, i.e., natural and modern social sciences) how sentence meaning contributes to the utterance meaning. I do that against the background of two currently dominating positions on that issue: minimalism and contextualism. Minimalists regard language as a self-standing abstract system and claim that only weak pragmatic effects are involved in interpreting sentences. Contextualists believe that language can be described adequately only within a theory of language understanding and that strong pragmatic effects are also involved in interpreting sentences. The resultant controversy, presented in Sect. 1, has been pronounced by Michel Seymour the most important one in the 20th century. I begin Sect. 2 with Mario Bunge’s argument that since abstract systems cannot change by themselves and only speakers of language do, an explanatory theory of language (one looking at language from the perspective of empirical (socionatural) sciences) must concern language understanding, i.e., view language as a bio-psycho-social phenomenon. However, language understanding needs to be incorporated in the theory of language in a more fundamental way than current contextualist models do. These models assume the existence of language as self-standing, abstract structure with a list of symbol-reference pairings (Such assumption is legitimate as long as one regards such an abstraction as only a methodological device.) and model language understanding disregarding its psycho-social development process. Such assumptions, however, lead to a number of insurmountable problems. I conclude Sect. 2 by arguing that to solve these problems, as well as to be consistent with the evidence attesting to the fact that language self-organizes and self-regulates, (also reviewed in this section,), we need a model of language understanding and production to be coined within a developmental bio-psycho-social perspective. In Sect. 3, I propose a specific model of the form-meaning correlation process, based on a novel mechanism of a linguistic categorization, which is compatible with a bio-psycho-social developmental perspective advocated in Sect. 2. On this view, the utterance meaning is dependent both on the approximate conventional meaning of the construction components conveying it, and on the specific social function of the whole construction (a relevant pragmeme), which identifies feasible situation specific contents. The given construct selects one out of these options. I finish the chapter, Sect. 4, by preliminarily testing the mechanism of the form-content correlation process introduced in Sect. 3 both qualitatively and quantitatively to meet the methodological standards of empirical sciences.
Languages thrive in the hospitable environment of human brains and communities
Hurfort
Words do not suffice to express my gratitude to Professor Alessandro Capone for his continuous intellectual stimulation, constructive criticism, and help of all sorts in fostering my intellectual efforts. I would also like to thank deeply Professor Jacob Mey for helping me communicate my thoughts in the form publishable in the Journal of Pragmatics as well as for directing my attention to the social dimension of language via his concept of pragmeme. My special appreciation goes also to prof. Gabriel Altmann for the attention he has been giving to my research, to whom I owe the idea of the role of natural-like selection in language self-organization and self-regulation, as well as gratitude for his immense kindness and encouragement. Last, but not least, I would like to thank especially deeply Professor Hélène Włodarczyk and Professor André Włodarczyk for stimulating my thoughts with their MIC theory, as well as inviting me to participate as an invited speaker in the 3rd MIC workshop on the methodology of language studies at CELTA, Sorbonne, 2012.
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Notes
- 1.
after Altmann (1978).
- 2.
of which we know very little, as recently acknowledged by Recanati (2011).
- 3.
Consequently Recanati (2011) rightly questions the sense of the very division into descriptive adjectives and adjectives requiring “filling in”.
- 4.
- 5.
The sentence was overheard on a TV show.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
approximately speaking.
- 9.
The theory of Universal Grammar requires the existence of an organ in the brain hosting UG that had evolved before language did. This, however, is evolutionary implausible.
- 10.
The artificial and natural assemblies can also combine. The process of book production starting form farming trees can serve as an example.
- 11.
I use the term ‘functional sentence’ to refer to a sentence with a specific illocutionary force.
- 12.
This argument is no longer valid if we transfer the burden of making economic choices from an individual to a natural selection process taking place in a community.
- 13.
Strictly speaking, Zipfian distribution could also be the result of a relatively simple, statistical processes. Yet, along with the information about the hierarchical structure of the object of study and the processes involved, establishing power laws relating some characteristics of that object is enough to indicate its self-organizing origin.
- 14.
Ants when walking, leave scent on the trail. The group of ants in search of food that has found the shortest route will cover the distance between their anthill and that source of food the largest number of times, making that trail most smelly. A new group of ants which has just left the anthill to search for food, will chose the most smelly path, which is the shortest one.
- 15.
I use the term “conventional” here in the sense of some sort of representation which is an average of the individual representations of the same functional category in a given linguistic society. .
- 16.
Bunge (2003) opposes an integral structure, such as the one present in a cardiovascular system, to a combinatory structure, such as that present in a car. While the latter one was put together from parts, the former one evolved by subsequent evolutionary steps and cannot be substituted fully by plastic elements. It is integrally related to all other elements in a human body and specific history of evolution. .
- 17.
This view may remind of 19th century concepts in linguistics, but here, language is not viewed as an independent organism. The “organism” considered here is not the semiotic system per se, but a linguistic community with the semiotic system (language) being an aspect of its behavior.
- 18.
For instance, the Polish for guinea pig is “swinka morska” (literally: a sea piglet), which animal, of course, is neither a pig, nor has anything to do with marine life.
- 19.
The core meaning can be defined as the part which is statistically “significant”. This is done in elementary particle physics, when identifying short living particles (it is possible to give statistically an approximate cut off point and state what is ‘core’).
- 20.
- 21.
Another interesting proposal crossing the boundary of semantics in the process of interpreting language in a novel way is Distributive Grammar proposed by Andre and Helene Włodarczyk, cf. www.celta.paris-sorbonne.fr/anasem/indexASMIC.html.
- 22.
- 23.
The members of the Fife Graces Group, the proponents of the thesis that language is a Complex Adaptive System view, are, among others, Clay Beckner of the University of New Mexico, Richard Blythe, Edinburgh University, Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico, Morten, H Christensen, University of Cornell, William Croft, Universityu of New Mexico, John Holland Santa Fe Institute, Nick N. Ellis, University of Michigan, and others.
- 24.
in Bunge’s (2003) understanding of the concept ‘system’.
- 25.
- 26.
Linguistic research employing analogical modeling introduced by Skousen, puts me in that second camp.
- 27.
Until the precision arrived at is sufficiently good and further increase in the precision of encoded lexemes (or their intended content) does not increase the functionality of language.
- 28.
Encoded value is understood as a statistical average of past values.
- 29.
What needs to be made clear here is the definition of the terms “categorizing” and “relative”. By a categorizing adjective I mean one which when applied to the noun results in the selection of a distinct subcategory. For instance ‘a blue crayon’ differences from ‘a red crayons’ in colour only thus the adjectives red and blue as used in the examples above are not categorizing. On the contrary, the adjective high when modifying the noun chair selects ‘a high chair’, which item has a number of characteristics (including its novel function) singling out the subcategory of ‘high chairs’ from among all chairs, therefore the adjective high in the phrase high chair can be termed ‘categorizing’. By ‘a relative adjective’, in turn I mean one whose actual value depends on the range of the given property in the items modified with it. For instance, the value of an adjective big changes depending whether it modifies a star or a mouse.
- 30.
One more, intuitively better way to try when CLO-ing ‘semantic closeness’ would be to consider the actual frequency of the occurrence of specific collocates, and not the number of types, as Wulf did.
- 31.
At the same time when I published my results, Tabakowska (2007) also published a study concerning the ordering the adjectives in Polish. Tabakowska, however does not consider any hard frequency based evidence, but carries out a purely intuition based (cognitive) analysis of meaning of selected AAO phrases. She concludes “that there is a preferred order of adjectives in Polish AAN phrases, which, however, can be overridden by stylistic reasons” thus, her study is unrelated to the empirical paradigm.
- 32.
In many statistical models, cf. Skousen’s (1989) analogical modeling, after the system has reached a certain level of preference of a given type, self-organization takes place. Speakers are predicted not to chose between options at random any more, but to select one of them. Such regularizations have been long described in language –e.g. the regularization of past tense in Finnish modeled by Skousen (ibid.).
- 33.
to use the title of Surowiecki’s book.
- 34.
This independence is crucial for the wisdom of the crowd to be efficient.
- 35.
Originally, Zip inferred the power laws in language from the principle of minimal effort. Later on this principle was expressed as the optimalization of the effort involved in information transfer between the speaker and the addressee. It must be acknowledged, however, that the possibility of there being also some other sources of power laws, which would not imply the self-organizational character of language, has also been considered. Yet, these other models, cf, an overview in Kwapień (2010), require making a number of assumptions contradictory to what we know about language.
- 36.
Additionally, the community members are motivated to remember the successful idiolect better due to prestige involved.
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Zielińska, D. (2013). The Mechanism of the Form-Content Correlation Process in the Paradigm of Socio-Natural Sciences. In: Capone, A., Lo Piparo, F., Carapezza, M. (eds) Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01014-4_19
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