The diversity class this week on cognitive linguistics is ok. I was exceedingly fond of the Levinson's 'language as nature and language as art' article (so beautifully written), though really bored by the old bunch of psychology tricks.
There was a funny debate about the notion of 'universal' in the class. To me, it is clearly the case that the basic bifurcation between Generative and Functional linguists is not on if language universality actually exists or not, but on what is universal - forms or functions. And it's not about the same old nature/nurture story either, both of which are fundamentally essentialist and should be somehow discarded. Generativists just occupied the words of 'universal' and ‘nature’ as assumptions which they've never really looked into, concerning the universal facts they try to posit. After all these years, LAD, with a cognitive appearance, is still a priori. So apparently, the school is not inherently linked to ‘universal’, or ‘nature’ comparing to the other.
Even when I was doing formal syntax, I always mixed up some functional flavored explanations in my analysis - and would always prefer Lexical Functional Grammer to MP. At least the former one has a very natural form to combine semantic and pragmatic issues, and is quite adaptive to more languages.
My idea for universality is, everything recognized as universal in language, has a functional basis, and is always open to be compensated by other forms if the current one becomes impossible or inconvenient. Though, when the functional basis has been transformed into forms, it is quite likely for the forms to turn into a relatively independent system (where the generative theories would apply), but not strong enough, to contend against another functional drive. I wish I could find some evidence for the second idea.
For the first idea, though I’ve never really know the details of NSM, the talk by professor Wierzbicka on cross-linguistically idea of ‘sex’ gave me some fresh understanding about linguistic relativity. Her idea was, even though the language itself does not have a specific form for ‘sex’ (like in Russian, before the English one was borrowed), does not mean that the speakers do not have the concept in their mind. Then I remembered my cousin, who has been overseas for most of his life, once asked me how would we say ‘I want to make love with you’ in China. I pondered for a long time and still couldn’t think of any – but people still do it. So there must be other ways to fulfill the quest. How about call that a drive. But for other less important function of human life, the case might be different, and more fluid.
Still, I'm more of a functionalist, but not in all sense. I always try to leave a bit metaphysical space for myself.
PS: I somehow solved the funny classifier problem today, at least came to a very plausible explanation. Though it is probably hard to be tested and written up into a paper, it could always be a nice joke.
I've been reading some neuroscientific papers for Ameka's class, about laterality of the brain, and more thinking and reflection considering methodologies came to my mind again. Well, since some neuropsychologists I met before were lack of intelligence and basic logical capability (I still don’t dare say that), I did have some negative thoughts about the field. But now I would look at it more positively, though still, the two papers I read today do not make as much sense as the authors thought them would be.
My new point is: for these studies, the results are useful for further reference and development, while the theoretical analysis and discussions are usually, not satisfactorily useful, and sometimes misleading.
I do believe there are plenty of researchers with sufficient intelligence and thoughts who can design their experiments and interpret their results reasonably enough. But for me, still, I pay far less trust to these than to linguistic papers. If a linguist said something wrong, it is possibly because the stance he took, but usually not because of a lack of detailed understanding of the topic in question.
Well in another sense, the reductionist idea disgusts me a lot, especially when I was reading some studies on fMRI applying to hetero vs. homosexual people. For me that was merely crazy. Probably, the field just needs more time to develop and get understanding and critics from other domains, and build some healthy ethnical criteria.
At least, I'm becoming more and more easily attracted to the kind of knowledge that can constantly create self-doubt, rather than self assertion. Golden spades don't guarantee the treasure of truth. No wise man ever submit himself to tools.
Anyway I'll still be taking the neuroscience of language class next semester... otherwise I'll have nothing else to do.. I'll probably sit in philosophy courses: free will and determinism, or philosophy of linguistics. Hopefully after the surgery I'll get my life back, work harder, and achieve something.. Now I still have to survive the pain. :~(
I recently find that my English has been decaying rapidly ... seems that the process started right after I finished an essay on standard language ideology for my sociolinguistic class XD Well why always so easily attracted to any kind of critical theories and willing to apply them to my own life...
Probably should start to take linguistics seriously as a potential future career rather than something to play around with.
And life as well.
I enjoy almost all the courses I'm taking now, except 'approaches to diversity', and find 'language, culture and cognition' class particularly fascinating. I don't knw from when I started to become more and more laid-back about methodology issues - though still cannot stop talking about them. My loathe towards psychology finally decreases to a reasonable level.. which is nice. But still, the fact that some psychologists rely too much on tools and technics is inherently dangerous, especially when ppl think they can apply the tools to anything without limits. Well in a sense there would be no such things as limitation in scientific research, but the limits actually lie in the researchers themselves rather than in the utilities because:
1. If no operationalization is presented, all kinds of psychological studies would become more or less invalid
2. Inappropriate operationalization can induce circular argumentation
Well the teacher would always say, as long as you get significant result, you do not need to bother about the way you operate the factors. How can this not be suspicious. Without a full understanding of descriptive aspects of the subject in question, the fanciness of the technics will not help in reducing the chance of generating misleading results.
Is misleading studies necessary for the prosperity of a certain field? I would say no. Hopefully not a bad consequence of having lived in totalitarianism for so long.
I probably need a better pillow in order for my neurons to get effectively reorganized during sleep.
Please note: I do not blog here. I only created this account so I can comment on blogs that are hosted by Vox. For my irregular blogging on languages, politics and other stuff, please visit: http://saiminu.blogspot.com/
Or alternatively, please visit my creative writing website at http://www.damonlord.info
Thanks.
It's a given that technology will radically alter life in the twenty-first century.
But some of the changes coming our way will be - for lack of a better word - weird.
Every wave of technology over the last 500 years has created haves and have-nots. The immunized and the sickly. The literate and the illiterate. The wired and the non-wired.
But we're not just building better machines and medicines now. We're altering reality.
We're going into realms fundamentally at odds with the lumbering, sticks-and-bones understanding that brought us through the last 100,000 years or so.
Some of the changes coming our way will be so counter-intuitive to so many people that they will leave hundreds of millions in a state of blank incomprehension.
If knowledge is power, then power is about to get much, much harder to spread around.
We're
apes. Our ability to think and talk the way we do is so recent that if
you held it up against a million years of our history, you could be
forgiven for overlooking it entirely.
We have the instincts of predators and foragers. We're wired to calculate cause and effect, expenditure and gain. We fear scarcity, loss, the unknown. We get shivers when we think unseen forces are at work
Our social instincts are for smallish bands whose souls number in the dozens, maybe the low hundreds. We crave clarity, hierarchy, certainty.
Some of us need it like we need air.
Not a good match for where we find ourselves. Ten billion of us by mid-century, most living in megacities. Multiple identities, allegiances, ideologies. Economies stretching across continents and realities, churning waves of demography.
We're stuck making the same mistakes over and over ... unless we can wrap our heads around the complexity we live in.
Simple cause and effect? Goodbye. Cut-and-dry choices? Maybe, maybe not.
Enter probability, adaptive logic, and the emergent behavior of self-organizing communities. All have been in front of our noses since the beginning of time, but we were blind to them, boxed in by common sense and connect-the-dots reasoning.
This is the realm of macro-economists, computational modeling specialists, neuro-psychologists and their ilk. Conversation killers, in short.
For how many people is this kind of understanding out of reach? For how many is it out of bounds? Who will lead us?
Have been away from Vox for almost a year, making a half-hearted go at starting a presence on Blogspot and realizing that, for all the customization and code-level access they have there, my reach was never going to be broader than it is here.
Vox.com, in short, is perfect for the casual blogger -- 'casual' being a nice cover word for 'scattered.' And the easy connection to other bloggers via the Neighborhood feature is hard to beat. Little Odd Me and Geology Byotch still draw me in, along with the rest of my neighbors, and it's good to be back among them.
A lot has changed, inside and out.The world has many shortages these days, but game-changing events are not one of them. A year of mourning has come and gone. A new job on the staff side of academia, half a head of new grey hairs. A once-in-a-lifetime trip to Sweden.
More to follow.
"As dogma disintegrates, hope appears."
Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train.
I really don't like the changes Vox has undergone since I started blogging here, so I've up an moved. I will miss the pink robots, but alas. Catch you over at www.leahclarke.wordpress.com , bitches.
Today I will be talking about compound words and how they are formed with eidea.
Let’s recall: meta-eidea are just a definition to call a group of very similar eidea among people the same. In addition you may have seen me writing about an interlinked group of meta-eidea. This can mean they copy compound words, but this does not have to be the case necessarily.
Let me make this more concrete with an example.
[cart]
For most people this will be a single eidos and it will look something like the image I used. For some people its will take more and could form something like: [two][wheel][transport][vehicle]
I could also give you an example which shows the opposite.
[peanut butter]
Noticed me not writing [peanut][butter]? For some people it might really be something like [peanut][paste], but for most people it is in fact one single eidos.
Ok, but how do you tell when something is a single eidos, or a group of eidea? Well, you can not really tell, because it differs among people(1). That’s where meta-eidea roughly come in.
I will predict where to put the boundaries. Sometimes you will see me write a compound word as a single meta-eidos, sometimes you will see me write one word as a group of meta-eidea; English does not always follow what really happens in my mind but then again it might work different in your own mind too.
This also is makes making languages such a difficult task, It has to work for everybody, or at least give them enough pointers to reproduce the intended meaning.
There are a few cases where the break is very obvious. Witness this example.
Note: From now on I will group meta-eidea with a distinct role (objects) with round brackets.
(Pete and John) threw (me) (a yellow ball).
Adjectives
First notice [yellow][ball]. Yellow is an adjective, and in almost every case an adjective is a separate eidos. Exceptions are: ‘fast ball’, big bang, often derived adjectives.
Conjunction
(Pete and John) is one object but it may be very obvious Pete but also John are separate eidea. Also for conjunctions we can say for almost every case it is made up out of separate eidea. There are on the other hand a few obvious exceptions: ‘lean and mean’, ‘bed and breakfast’, something you can see as one thing.
Before closing I’d like to state a final thing. Foregoing I spoke about ‘interlinked eidea’, by this I mean that A links to B but B also links to A. In fact, there are different ways eidea can be linked and this makes room for precedence.
For instance:
apple pie versus pie apple
(a pie filled with apples) (an apple designated for use in pie)
In English sequence tells us the precedence, but when you want to draw this on paper you need to know how it is linked. I will tell you more on this subject in a later stadium.
That will be all for today. 'Next week' I will be discussing one of my most ockward theories, it will be mind bobbeling but very enlighting I dare to say.
Have a nice day!
Ferry Timmers
Footnotes:
(1) I once ran an experiment where people could choose from a single word or a compound when seeing various pictures. The results varied, even among people who speak the same language.
They now go here.
As you might know by know I have a bit of a creative definition of the phrase ‘next week’ Well this is not likely to alter so apologies on for hand for this. Last time I updated has been ages ago so let me regroup everything into this special interim article.
Language (my definition) is a way to decipher code in a way it can be understood by different receivers.
To start off, the goal of this blog is to let me show the world my theories, what I think what languages makes tick, and the development of my very own language: O-lingua.
With O-linuga I try to make a language using concepts that are new to everybody. It is all based on my theory of eidea.
Note: singular: eidos, plural: eidea.
Eidea are what I like to call the codes of thought. They are little pieces of information that float in our mind. I like to make it a bit more specific by only calling a code we can put our finger on an eidos. Still it is e very broad definition. Eidea can be about: a thing, a feeling, a memory, a figment of imagination, and a definition, something very concrete, something abstract. I could go on like this for a while, but I hope you get the picture.
Because eidea can have so many forms, they are also very personal. And therefore I define meta-eidea.
Meta-eidos is an eidos that not really exists, but made to be able to speak generally about eidea. An eidos itself is personally, but we may notice from person to person eidea that are very similar, or have a similar meaning. Then we can make a prototype of these eidea, and give it a name that everybody understands. The easiest meta-eidea to call are concrete things like [chair], [table] or [spoon]. But still, did I mean a diner table, or a coffee table? What color?
It is practically impossible to make a meta-eidos that works for everybody, keep that in mind.
Note: From now on I will use square brackets to indicate meta-eidea.
Context. When I speak about context than I mean the environment in with eidea are being build or parsed. You could easily describe it as ‘the state of mind’ that exist at the moment a person is practicing language. Because there are infinite parameters to a context, I will not try to map it. It is only important to state it has a large effect on how language or eidea are formed. Furthermore I’d like to state that chaos theory applies on context.
Object is a definition used to be even more general about eidea. An object can either be a meta-eidos or a group of meta-eidea interlinked. I like to use it when the exact definition of the eidos does not really matter for my example.
Roles. When reading or forming a sentence you will have a number of objects, and an action. You need to know what the relation of a specific object to the action is in order to know where the sentence is about. This relation I call a role (the role of an object).
Particles (my definition) are small eidea that tell something about other eidea or the relation between eidea. I also tend to call them semi-eidea, because they have single not really a definition. Particles are used very often to specify a role, and it might actually provide a link between objects.
Links are relations between eidea. The link can be strong, weak or something in between. I will discuss the effect of this in a future article.
The buffer is the area of the mind where eidea are stored. Eidea need to be stored temporarily before they can be deciphered and the meaning of a sentence or subsequent a story can be understood. The role of an object actually influences at what position in the buffer it will be stored. This helps to understand a sentence more quickly. Different languages have different buffer usage; that is why I distinguish 3 dimensions:
Buffer width: the number of distinguishable roles a specified language uses.
Buffer height: the average size or complexity of the objects a specified language has.
Buffer depth: the number of objects that a specified language can hold at a time.
Note: The buffer is an element of context.
To return to my definition of language and to include the eidea theory I’d like to state: What a language is and O-lingua has to be is a way to decipher eidea so that different receivers still get (more or less) the same message. In addition for O-lingua I want it to be as easy and unambiguous as possible for a sender to decipher the eidea (s)he wants to transmit.
I will introduce a few more shocking theories ‘next week’.
Have a nice day!
Ferry Timmers
