Overview
I started reading the [Cha2018] book by looking at the Table of Contents, glancing through the Prolog and first couple of sections. I noticed some similarities with my [Հայ2022] book in the selection of topics (judging by sections titles) and the overall structure. The phrase “The human brain has justifiably been called the most complicated object in the known universe” [Cha2018::7] almost literally appears in my book [Հայ2022::153]. This coincidence is remarkable (and silly) not because of the content – we can hardly find people who would not say that, but because the sentiment has nothing to do with the topic of either book.
Other silly similarities are the format of source quotations and mentioning Hitchcock.
Another similarity is the acknowledgment that thought comes first, while the language generated speech comes afterwards.
After acknowledging that, my intent was to separate thinking from language as much as possible. There is twofold association between thinking and language: 1) thought forms conceptual representation of the world in mind, which is externalized by language, and 2) it controls language at producing speech. In other words, thinking provides input to language functions and also underlines the linguistic process. In both cases language unequivocally depends on thinking: 1) implicitly - by taking semantic structure generated independently by thinking, and 2) explicitly – the linguistic process is either a special type of thinking or a process controlled by thinking.
The purpose for addressing these topics in either book is different. I was trying to describe the relationship between thinking and speaking, cognition and language, etc. to clarify the place and role of grammar or syntax, which I was going to analyze and to model, and justify its independent and autonomous value.
The intent of [Cha2018] is opposite: “to recognize the extent to which language is inseparable from the thought”.
To ensure understanding of my review I decided to clarify major concepts: the relationships between language, speech, thought, semantic component, etc. and their determinism and relativity in the What is language? blog. Clarifying the use of the terms by different authors allowed me to decipher important statements and retrieve their meanings.
Thought-Based Linguistics
In the subsequent sections, which are the Chapter titles of [Cha2018] (references are in the What is language?), I put my comments relevant to each Chapter considering the terms that I clarified in the What is language?. In majority of cases I consider that sound is equivalent to sign (see the Language and Speech section in the What is language?). I put down the titles of all Chapters including the ones that I did not comment upon.
Prolog
“The goal of this work is to encourage linguists and other interested parties to recognize the extent to which language is inseparable from the thought. Language begins with the thoughts in the mind of speaker and ends by affecting thoughts in the mind of listener. Although this observation might seem obvious, it is seldom incorporated in the model of language for at least two major reasons. First, the role of thought is usually usurped by the semantic component of language. But semantic structures are imposed on thought by languages, they differ from one language to another, and while they are closely related to thoughts they are not equivalent to thought themselves. Second, thoughts are not structured in a way that leads itself to familiar techniques of linguistic analysis. Linguists, if they ever consider the question at all, might well ask whether thoughts are something their training and experience has prepared them to deal with” [Cha2018::1].
This quote has two interesting aspects: 1) the second sentence almost literally expresses the idea of the second pathway of communicating concepts [Հայ2022::179] – see quote in the Linguistic determinism and relativity..Analysis section of the What is language?, 2) usage of the word language for speech – the first 4 uses should be speech.
It is very hard to understand the message – I read the paragraph several times – since in the beginning language means speech, but to the end it is language.
After substituting the correct meaning of the word language into the paragraph we can decipher the message as “the thoughts of speaker carried or transmitted by speech affect the thoughts of listener”.
There are other terms in the passage that I do not understand: semantic component, semantic structure. I could not afford buying [Jac1992] at the moment, but from the annotations and reviews I figured that it is a version of Semantic Network (SN) [Hof1979]. The SN has nothing to do with language. It is produced by thought process. The SN of one person can be updated by the speech from another person as well as with directly perceiving the surrounding reality. That is why the statement "semantic structures are imposed on thought by languages" does not sound too convincing.
I will stick with the equivalence of these notions through the review, but it is possible that the semantic structure might mean the content (sense) structure or Agent, Patient, Instrument, etc. relations.
I think that linguists should not consider thoughts: cognitive psychologists should. This is the whole point of generally misunderstood hypothesis of the autonomy of syntax.
Preliminaries
Background
The main theme of the this Chapter is that with the cognitive revolution in 50-s “forgot” that the goal of language is to convey meaning".
This is not true. The cognitive revolution separated the areas of concerns. Language allows to generate speech that is understandable, makes [Frege’s] sense. Meaning is assigned after parsing the speech according to the listener’s context (in broader sense: listener’s background and geotemporal location).
The principle of autonomy of syntax means that the responsibility of syntax is to ensure construction of grammatical sentences. Grammatical sentence is complete. “Complete, correctly formed sentence always has an understandable content. That content can be nonsensical, magical, right or wrong, ambiguous and of other quality. It can be disambiguated by additional, optional information, but its message is clear. By virtue of this, we can determine its meaning, accuracy, mystery, etc.” [Հայ2022::25-26].
Syntax ensures Fregean sense, the Fregean binding dynamically links reference, meaning – see Sense and Reference section (What is language?). On contrary, the revolution of 50-s “reminded” everyone that the grammatical, syntactically correct sentence (utterance) makes sense. It is understandable. The constraints imposed by syntactic structure has autonomous, stand-alone value of ensuring the sense.
Why “reminded”? Because Stoics some 2200 years ago has already “discovered” the facets of meaning, context and expression planes, completeness of grammatical sentences [Bob2006, Ch.5]. The revolutionaries of 50-s “forgot” to outline that the autonomy of syntax has intrinsic value of creating complete, understandable sentences, which make [Fregean] sense.
Ground Rules
Chafe argues that theories with the historical dimensions are important for linguistics. That is why Popperian demarcation is not applicable.
Popperian demarcation is not applicable probably to bullet-items 1.c, 2.b, 4, and 5 in the Language Studies and Linguistics in the What is language?.
People are storytellers. Story is a myth generated by human imagination. The myths that are testable are scientific theories. They can be refuted at any time in the future. That is why no natural science theory is right or wrong. It is tentative, temporary – until refuted, overridden by a better theory. Since linguistics is a natural science then Popperian demarcation is perfectly applicable to it.
Thoughts and Their Properties
The Priority of Thoughts
“If the function of language is to associate thoughts with sounds, the bulk of linguistics research has tilted towards the sounds” [Cha2018::25].
Spoken language is definitely different from the written. It has omissions, phrase end cuts, garbage words, stops at one spot and continuations from another. But the pieces of it are still grammatical, regulated by syntactic rules.
Sounds of speech are signs, similar to written or gestural, even though they are basic signs.
That is why linguistics is a study of the composition of signs. For written language the signs are morphemes and their compositions - words. A word or a words group is a lexeme - a meaning carrying unit.
The function of language is to generate combinations of morphemes that can be associated with thoughts.
The Path from a Thought to a Sound
The sequence: thought ⇒ semantic structure ⇒ syntactic structure ⇒ symbolization ⇒ abstract phonology ⇒ overt phonology ⇒ sound is a more detailed version of the one quoted in the Linguistic determinism and relativity section (What is language?), if we consider that semantic structure corresponds to concept. Semantic structure is a better term for concept. It brings the notion into realm of linguistics. We can now view the context plane as semantic structure that is converted by syntactic structure into expression plane that can be vocalized (written or signed).
“A syntactic structure, for example, assumes a basis in a semantic structure, while it is itself a necessary basis for a phonological representation. But latter stages may feed back into earlier ones, and in actual performance all these stages may be activated simultaneously” [Cha2018::31]. I take this as “Grammatical rules take into consideration not only the types of words, but often also their meaning” [Հայ2022::160]. [AH: this is not a very clear statement and the examples – the time duration denoting lexemes – that follow can be considered as subclass of substantive names [Ջահ1974::208], [Հայ2022::46]. Need to find better (correct) examples of grammatical rules that depend on meaning. Maybe section 5.5.1 The complexity of meaning formation of the On Syntactic Structure Representation gives a better example.]
This might be an important clarification to the autonomy of syntax (see the Preliminaries.. Background section above). The syntax definitely is not responsible for producing meaningful sentences, but in order to produce grammatical ones it might need to select right grammatical rule based on the meaning of signs that are combined into speech.
The sequence: semantic structure ⇒ syntactic structure ⇒ phonological structure is considered as an alternative to the above. This is confusing, because it is the same with less details. I have exactly this sequence in mind, when commented above on content and expression planes.
The same feedback mechanism works at parsing (understanding) too. The syntax identifies speech units: noun phrase, verb phrase, subject, object, etc. and at doing so it recursively parses considering the meaning along with the structure – the form.
How Thoughts Are Structured
“This chapter identifies aspects of thought structure that are shared by all languages regardless of whatever structure may be imposed by semantic resources of particular language” [Cha2018::33]. This statement (the very first in the chapter) is hard to understand. What does “languages share thought structure” phrase mean? Languages might (and do) have ability to reflect or mirror thought structure. What are the semantic resources of particular language that affect thinking? Is Whorf hypothesis promoted into axiom? For a short while it did not look so.
The reality is represented with three types: event, entity, and state. They “can be imagined as situated within a multidimensional matrix of orientations in space, time, epistemology, emotions, social interactions, and the ever changing context. Every language has its own ways of verbalizing ideas and their orientations: ideas from an inventory of verbs, nouns, and perhaps adjectives, orientations with inflections of verbs and nouns or with separate particles. Language specific ways of verbalizing ideas and their orientations constitute the semantic resources of each language” [Cha2018::34].
Despite the title of the chapter, the linguistic representation of ideas is discussed instead of the thought structure (which no one really knows). For one of non-linguistic descriptions of the image of reality and concept formation in human mind see [Հայ2022::14-17, 153-155].
Besides, entities, events, and states seem the same. Reality, can be represented by 3 types of notions: processes - qualified durations (verbs), things (nominals), and attributes (adjectives, adverbs). The last 2, typically, are hard to discern.
How Thoughts Are Experienced
How Thoughts Are Shared
“This chapter began with natural speaking and listening, features of humanness that are fundamental to the way thoughts are shared” [Cha2018::56]. They are fundamental for linguistic sharing, but there are other types of sharing thoughts: painting, drawing, sculpturing, modeling, non-linguistic signing (mimicking and body language; pantomime), dancing, touching, programming (sharing ideas with a computer), etc. These are fundamentally different types of thought sharing. A picture is worth a thousand words.
How Thoughts Flow through Time
“’Prosody’ covers four ways in which speech sounds may vary: in pitch, loudness, timing, and voice quality. Pitch is the way we perceive variations in the fundamental frequency of periodic sounds. Loudness, or volume, is the way we perceive acoustic intensity. Timing covers two phenomena: the duration of units like vowels, consonants, words, and phrases, but also the rapidity with which sequences of those are produced. Voice quality includes properties such as whispering, laughing, ‘creaky voice,’ and harshness [Lav2009].
These prosodic qualities occur simultaneously with qualities that have been called ‘segmental’ because they divide sound into segments like vowels, consonants, syllables, words, and phrases. Prosodic and segmental qualities combine to create the totality of a speech sounds, just as color and form constitute to the totality of a painting” [Cha2018::57].
This segment of the Chapter talks about prosodic qualities of speech and has nothing to do with flow of thoughts. Later in the Chapter – as far as I understand – the flow of thoughts is mapped into intonation units, which, I assume, are tonemes. Again it is not clear why is this related to the thoughts flow in the time. Tonemes, like phonemes, graphemes, and gestemes are different medium for sign (lexeme) encoding for transmission.
There is another prosodic attribute of speech – syntagmatic structure, which is not necessarily aligned with the semantic structure of sentence.
“The part of a sentence that consist of one word, word group, or phrase, and separated by pauses and tone units is called syntagma. Syntagmas are two-plane units: sound units (as single-plane units) correspond to the expression (phonetic) plane” [Ջահ1974::354].
All of these do not explain much about the relation of prosody to the flow of thoughts in time. To me the Chapter does not address thoughts flow in time.
Verbalization Illustrated
From a Thought to a Sound in English
I was hoping to understand why the term sound, rather than sign or symbol is used. However, I could not find anything special in encoding thought into sound, prosody, pitch, loudness. Any combination of these is important as a sign for a thought.
It is not clear what is abstract or overt phonology? Why using literary phase is abstract while slang or colloquial use (slang, jargon, vernacular) phrase is overt and they go one after another? You speak either literary language or slang or both. This is not different from talking any other languages or dialects.
I like the metaphor of US Navy sailor suite parts for grammaticalization.
From a Thought to a Sound in a Polysynthetic language
This is also puzzling. The difference between pathway from though to sound is different for polysynthetic language: the syntactic structure is replaced by morphosyntactic structure. The notion of word is vague and it is probably introduced to shorten texts. It is purely an orthographic choice. If we write English morphemes separately like: necess ity, necess ary or with dash, nothing will dramatically change and English will become pure analytical language. After some time we will adjust to writing and reading like this. Gradually we will feel comfortable with the new orthography.
For example, Vietnamese write Lê-nin (V.I.Lenin), Viet Nam (Vietnam) and everything works out just fine.
It is strange that a phrase in a language – Onondaga - with no writing system, the lexeme onudoda is not written as o nu do da especially considering the Fundamental frequency, intensity, and length diagram on p. 24.
Even if there are reasons for putting down the lexeme as a word, the morphological and syntactic rules are not different: they both are recursive combinatorial rules for creating syntactic structure out of morphemes.
Related Issues
The Translation Paradox
“If different languages organize thoughts in different ways, how it is possible for thoughts that are expressed in one language to be expressed in another without distorting those thoughts?” [Cha2018::93]. Note the first phrase - back to Lamarckism and Whorfism?
Languages do not organize thoughts – they express thoughts. Languages organize thoughts expression in different ways. For describing a thought you can draw a “sketch of Hitchcock” or tell that you have “the Spellbound, Psycho, etc. movies director” in you mind. Both are "distorted" images of Alfred Hitchcock - the same, single thought.
Distortion of reality happens twice: 1) at creation of image in mind, and 2) at expressing of the image in speech. Translation is yet another – third – distortion, because without having access to original thought you restore it from a distorted by original language description and then distort it by expressing the thoughts in another language.
The quote (Jackendoff 1994: 185) summarizes the current state of affairs: until this moment we have not found a concept - language pair that the concept cannot be explained in that language.
Translation is not paradoxical – it is a craft that skillful people perform well, while others - not so much.
Translator decomposes a chunk of speech – e.g. paragraph - into morphemes, lexemes, and phrases. Calculates the references (meanings) and establishes relationships between them. This constitutes the thought behind the translated paragraph. Then the translator maps these thought into morphemes, lexemes, and phrases that are appropriate for the other language carriers environment (time- and geo- location) and produces speech – a paragraph in another language. Good translators perform these activities precisely and accurately considering the context known to the author of the original and target language speakers [Հայ2022::161, 163-166]. Genius translators without losing precision and accuracy, also convey the style of speech. They try to use idioms, other subtleties of the original speech in the target.
“For thoughts to be verbalized, they must be adjusted to language in four ways, which in Chapter 9 termed selection, categorization, orientation, and combination” [Cha2018::99]. Fair enough, but why it is a paradox.
Repeated Verbalizations of the Same Thought
Rethinking Whorf
Another attempt is made by using circular dependency to “prove” modified, “misunderstood” version of Whorf hypothesis: Whorf meant that semantic rather than syntactic structure influences thinking [Cha2018::107]. The problem is that the majority of linguists and cognitive psychologists by looking at currently available evidence, facts consider semantic structure (semantic network, concepts) relevant to thinking. Thinking creates semantic structure, then it is “passed” to the “language organ” for externalization in form of speech.
Thinking “does not know” any language and that is why cannot use it to adjust semantic structure. See the more detailed analysis in the Linguistic determinism and relativity section in What is language?.
I do not know if there is a psychological theory that explains why certain communities cling to pseudoscience like astrology, alchemy, ancient aliens, UFOs, creation myths, Gods and intelligent designers or incorrect (rather - refuted) theories like geocentric system, flat earth, Lamarckism, Whorfism, etc. My non-scientific explanation is: humans like the myths and the mysteries because, unlike boring rational science, they are exciting, magical.
I can understand people who are frustrated by the need to refute the obvious circular reasoning that has no supporting evidence. But argumentum ad hominem is absolutely unacceptable in the scientific debate. However, it is important to point out that from three examples in the Chapter only the first is definitely argumentum ad hominem. Pinker’s quote is about “Whorf’s proposal”, which is “conventional absurdity”. He does not call names. He qualifies Whorf’s proposals and statements and he explains why: because thought is not the same as language.
One can say that Whorf never said that, but this is a different issue and hard to discuss, because no one defines language and thought.
“It was seen as more plausible that the shaping of thoughts is initially determined by interactions with the world outside the language [AH: please compare with the bullet-item 1 in the Linguistic determinism and relativity..Analysis section in What is language?]. However, as that outside world is processed, first in thought and then as part of a language’s semantic resources, those resources become a repository of ways in which aspects of the outside world are linguistically interpreted” [Cha2018::111-112]. I am guessing that most people are not patient enough to read, understand (if possible), and refute the second sentence of the quote. They explode. They do not understand why after absolutely rational and fact-based, crisp first sentence one can come up with a convoluted and blurry second one. They cry: “Why, God, why?” (rather then calmly and meticulously rationalizing in 322 pages write-only book or writing the Linguistic determinism and relativity section in a write-only blog What is language?). That cry explains why "hardcore", atheist scientists start praying and then convert to ... Christianity or Islam.
Lessons from Literature
Common Ways of Orienting Thoughts
Small Numbers and Subitizing
Thoughts and Gender
“Gender is a way of classifying entities that is found in some form in many if not all languages” [Cha2018::131]. If gender attributed to pronouns can be explained by reflecting the sex of the persons (animals) they point to, there is no explanation of why in different languages the same noun can be of a different gender. This is a very interesting questions that is bothering me too.
“The rest of this chapter describes the gender system of so-called Lake Iroquoian languages (spoken in the area of the Great Lakes), which include all of the currently spoken Northern Iroquoian languages except Tuscarora, i.e. Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, but also Huron or Wendat, which was once spoken in several dialects in Canada, but recently only in a version called Wyandot that survived in Oklahoma until mid-twentieth century [Cha2018::131].
The Seneca system of pronouns is complex and very interesting: 1) certain girls or women can get neuter pronouns, while 2) dual and plural pronouns become masculine, when one of the members of the group is male.
Feminine pronoun (actually, singular prefix) is used to describe the impression of a small, graceful, or petite female, while the neuter – of a large, awkward, or aggressive [Cha2018::132].
The patriarchal culture or society might have been the reason for inequality displayed in plural pronouns. However, the Iroquois society is extensively characterized as matriarchy and has these specifics:
1. Every task is considered either exclusively for men or exclusively for women (this distinction comes from the Huron culture). Man perform dangerous tasks far from home; women – routine tasks closer to home.
2. Many aspects of village life is decided by Council [of “old men”].
3. Women typically do not participate in Council meetings. They do not speak in the longhouse. They exercise their influence behind the scenes. Only Seneca men perform ceremonial speeches. However, women know the speeches and may prompt the man who has forgotten part of a speech.
4. Historically women in Iroquois society were important because:
a. Decent was traditionally traced through the women,
b. Land belonged to the women,
c. Chiefs were appointed by the women.
Then why pronominal system is skewed in favor of masculine prefixes? “Without question man have played a more conspicuous role than women, and without question the masculine singular category plays a more conspicuous role in the prefix system” [Cha2018::136].
It is interesting to find out if there are languages with a pronominal system skewed in favor of feminine pronouns.
“It is true that many other societies in North America and elsewhere share similar traits of male visibility and yet have not developed analogous morphological traits in their language” [Cha2018::136]. This is a very hard fact that invalidates Whorf hypothesis. It proves that the culture – a product of human intelligence: thoughts and skills, influenced by environment - shapes the language. “It is preferable to speak of a culture pattern as motivating rather than causing a linguistic pattern” [Cha2018::136]. It means that language does not shape culture (at least in some societies in North America).
Time, Tense, Memory, and Imagination
I did not quite understand what is the difference between [Rei1947] schema (see in [Հայ2022::145]) and Table 17.1 [Cha2018::138], however, examples given later [Cha2018::140] show that [Rei1947] approach indeed might have shortcomings.
This is a typical issue: a researcher builds a theory based on limited knowledge of Indo-European (mostly – European) languages.
Relating Ideas to Reality
For another, more structured (theoretical) presentation of Evidentiality and Mirativity see Վկայաբերություն and Զարմացականութուն pages.
The Emotional Component of Thoughts
Emotional Involvement in a Conversation
The Feeling of Nonseriousness
How Language Can Be Beautiful
Epilogue
Summary
The [Cha2018] contains a lot of interesting facts about North American languages. My favorite Chapters are Thoughts and Gender and Time, Tense, Memory, and Imagination.
Based on these facts the sequence thought to semantic structure to sound (speech) is established. However, for unclear reasons despite multiple mentions of primacy of thought the conclusion is made that semantic structure affects thought.
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