Re: THEORY: What IS language anyway?

On 6/28/06, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:

> We each construct a mental model of the world. When we
> "remember" an event we do so by simulating a recurance
> of that event within our mental world model.
>
> When we wish to tell another about an event our hope
> is that the listener will be able to construct a
> simulation of that event in her own mental model of
> the world. Language, therefore, consists of a sequence
> of instructions for how to carry out a mental
> simulation of an event.
Sounds fairly plausible so far, with the adjustments
Kalle Bergman made -- i.e. we don't automatically
adjust every sentence we hear into our primary
mental model of the world.  It also may need some
adjustments to account for non-declarative sentences
(questions, conditional statements, commands
and requests, wishes, etc.) and for non-propositional
utterances (what prescriptive grammarians would call "sentence
fragments"... to take a recent example
from the Kalusa corpus, "Nnn... yeba kia kuva."
[Mmm... fish.]).


> Using computer terminology, then, a "sentence" is a
> high-level command which is "compiled" (in the
> computer language sense) into a sequence of low-level
> commands which, when executed, cause the simulation to
> take place.
I don't have a major problem with this -- but I am
a little suspicious of scientific analogies
that lean so heavily on what is currently in
vogue or what the theorizer is professionally
concerned with.  In the 17th-18th centuries
bodies and minds/brains were explained by
analogy with clockwork.  In the last 20-30
years, analogies with computers and software
are all the rage.  I think there was a brief
vogue for analogies with telegraphy and
telephone switching networks, too.  There's
nothing wrong with this if we recognize their
analogicality (analogicity?) and limitations;
maybe a good exercise is to try to imagine
how you would analogize this theory if you
had lived before the development of computer
programming languages.  (Maybe Eldin's
post about index cards is a hint about how
a fairly similar theory was analogized
thus...)

In the physical sciences analogies are used
for explaining theories in popular form, but the
real theories as real scientists think about
and discuss them are expressed in the form
of mathematics.  For a while this was popular
in linguistics too, with some linguists objecting
to a excess or misguided application of math...
I am not sure what the most current notions
are.  Of course computer science is in some
sense a branch of math, but a particularly
pragmatic one, maybe more than half
engineering.

(Math has obvious application in acoustic
phonology, and in grammar (generation
and parsing rule systems, etc.); if I
understand correctly it was mainly in
the realm of semantics that the objections
to mathematical linguistics were raised.)

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry