Replicated Typo

Five pre-doctoral and two post-doctoral fellowships in the evolution of shared semantics in computational environments

Some readers may find the following of interest:

The ESSENCE (Evolution of Shared SEmaNtics in Computational Environments, www.essence-network.eu) Marie Curie Initial Training Network is offering five Early-Stage Researcher (pre-doctoral) and two Experienced Researcher (post-doctoral) positions, to start in February 2014. The application deadline for these posts is 15th December 2013.

This is a rare opportunity to be involved in a highly prestigious European training network for outstanding applicants in an emergent and important research area, led by internationally leading groups in their fields!

ESSENCE conducts research and provides research training in various aspects of translating human capabilities for negotiating meaning to open computational environments such as the web, multi-robot systems, and sensor networks. The network will support 15 pre- and post-doctoral fellows who will work toward a set of different research projects within this overall theme, ranging from symbol grounding and ontological reasoning to game-theoretic models of communication and crowdsourcing.

ESSENCE involves a top-quality consortium of internationally leading research
institutions which will act as hosts for the following projects in the current
recruitment round:

Early-Stage Researchers (36 months):
– Communication Planning (CISA, Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, UK)
– Concept Convergence: Argumentation and Agreement over Meaning (IIIA-CSIC, Barcelona, Spain)
– The Social Construction of Conceptual Space (ILLC, Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
– Sociolinguistics and Network Games (ILLC, Universiteit van Amsterdam, The
Netherlands)
– Open-ended Robot Interaction (AI Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)

Early-Stage Researchers must, at the time of recruitment by the host organisation be in the first 4 years (full-time equivalent research experience) of their research careers, and not yet have a doctoral degree.

Experienced Researchers (24 months):
– The ESSENCE Platform: Architecture (CISA, Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, UK)
– The ESSENCE Challenge (Information Engineering and Computer Science, Universit‡ degli Studi di Trento, Italy)

Experienced Researchers must (at the time of recruitment by the host organisation) be in possession of a doctoral degree, or have at least four years of full-time equivalent research experience, and have less than five years of full-time equivalent research experience (including time spent on doctoral research).

For both categories, research experience is measured from the date when they obtained the degree which formally entitled them to embark on a doctorate.

All positions are very competitively remunerated (significantly above the respective average national salaries/studentships for pre- and post-doctoral positions) and aimed at outstanding candidates. Please consult the individual descriptions of projects at http://www.essence-network.eu/hiring for detailed salary information.

Researchers can be of any nationality, though at the time of recruitment by the host organisation, researchers must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc) in the country of their host organisation for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to the reference date. (Short stays such as holidays and/or compulsory national service are not taken into account.)

The ESSENCE network aims to attract 40% females among the recruited researchers. Female applicants are explicitly encouraged to apply and treated preferentially whenever they are equally qualified as other male candidates. The ESSENCE network will encourage flexible working hours at each host institution and/or the opportunity to work part-time from home if necessary. ESSENCE will provide specific support for female researchers in terms of targeted training events and dedicated mentoring.

All applicants are asked to pre-apply at http://www.essence-network.eu/hiring. Please contact Dr Michael Rovatsos (mrovatso@inf.ed.ac.uk) for informal enquiries.

Description Redux, Again: On the Methodological Centrality of Diagrams

Broadly considered, description is how phenomena are brought into intellectual discourse. Such discourse is thereby bounded by the scope of the descriptive powers at its disposal. What descriptive techniques are at the disposal of the literary critic?

The question is a real one, and has real answers, but I ask it rhetorically. Whatever those techniques are, diagrams do not figure prominently in them. One can read pages and pages and pages of first class literary criticism and never encounter a diagram.

The argument of this essay is that we’ve gone as far as we can go down those various paths. If we are to create a new literary criticism for this new millennium, then we must have some new conceptual tools, and some of those must be visual. The diagrams I imagine, not to mention the diagrams I have been doing for the last four decades, are tools to think with. They are not mere aids to thought, they are the substance of thought itself. Not all thought, of course, but some thought.

These diagrams are descriptive tools. Some describe texts and textual phenomena, while others describe the mental machinery underlying texts. The distinction is critical, and will occupy much of this essay.

* * * * *

Diagrams of various kinds are central to objectification, which we can consider a particular mode of description. The aim of objectification is to make a sharp distinction – as sharp as possible – between the things we are talking about, aka the objects under discussion, and our means of talking about them.

As my principal concern is with naturalist literary criticism, I have to consider the difficulties of talking about language. On the one hand, we do it all the time. Recall that in Jakobson’s well-known characterization of the speech situation metalingually is one of the functions of language. But such usage is casual and does not aim at understanding of language itself.

Nor, for that matter, does literary analysis aim at understanding language itself. Yes, it aims at the understanding of language, as literature is in part constructed of language. That is the most ‘visible’ aspect of the literary work, it’s ‘skin’ so to speak. But works of literary art are also constructed of feelings, perceptions, ideas, emotions, desires, dreams, and so forth, none completely assimilable by language. We must be as clear as possible in our descriptions so that we may be in a position better to keep track of what we’re talking about.

I begin by outlining the ambiguous states the concept of the “text” has within literary criticism, though I don’t come anywhere near the idea that all the world is a text, which is slipped in under the far reaches of the ambiguity I look at. From there I offer a few words about scientific description, ending with the characterization of the shape of the DNA molecule. From there I go to literary description, the text proper, and the description of conceptual structures, mental machinery behind the text.

The Ambiguity of “Text”

What do literary critics mean when we refer to “the text”? there are times, of course, when we mean the physical thing, whether written or spoken, e.g. when analyzing the a poem’s rhyme scheme. But generally we mean to indicate something more diffuse, something anchored in that physical text, those marks on paper or waves in the air, but going beyond them. Just what that “something more” is, that’s not so clear.

Thus, as used in literary critical discourse, the concept of the text is ambiguous as between the physical signifiers and the signifieds, the concepts linked to those signifiers via linguistic convention. When we talk about the text, we generally mean to include the ordinary process of reading exclusive of any secondary exegesis or explication.

Within computational linguistics, however, there is a sharp distinction between the physical sign, whether written or oral, and the literary critic’s text, as I’ve defined it above. Optical character recognition (OCR) takes a written text as input and produces a machine-readable text as output. OCR software works very well for typed and typeset text; errors will be made, but they are relatively few. OCR software works poorly for text written in cursive script. Whatever the source text, OCR software makes no attempt to “understand” the text, but text understanding – in some sense of the word – is of enormous interest and practical value. It is also very difficult to do, and I’m talking about text understanding merely at the literal level. Feed the computer a news story about, say, the recent typhoon in the Philippines and ask it simple questions: What city was hit hardest? How many people have died so far? That’s simple basic stuff, for a human. Not so simple for a computer, though still basic.

When I get to talking about ways of describing literary texts I will be interested in techniques that are sensitive to the distinction between the physical texts, the signifiers, and the process of understanding the meaning of those signifiers at the most basic level, the level without which more sophisticated understanding – if such is called for – is not possible. Continue reading “Description Redux, Again: On the Methodological Centrality of Diagrams”

What is combinatorial structure?

Languages have structure on two levels. The level on which small meaningless building blocks (phonemes) make up bigger meaningful building blocks (morphemes), and the level of structure at which these meaningful building blocks make up even bigger meaningful structures (words, sentences, utterances). This was identified way back in the 1960s as one of Hockett’s design features for language know as “duality of patterning”, and in most of linguistics people refer to these different levels of structure as “phonology” and “(morpho)syntax”.

However, in recent years these contrasting levels of structure have started to be talked about in the context of language evolution, either in reference to artificial language learning experiments or experimental semiotics, where a proxy for language is used so it doesn’t make sense to talk about phonological or morphosyntactic structure, or when talking about animal communication where it also doesn’t make sense to talk about terms which pertain to human language. Instead, terms such as “combinatorial” and “compositional” structure are used, occasionally contrastively, or sometimes they get conflated to mean the same thing.

In the introduction to a recent special issue in Language and Cognition on new perspectives on duality of patterning, Bart de Boer, Wendy Sandler and Simon Kirby helpfully outline their preferred use of terminology:

Duality of patterning (Hockett, 1960) is the property of human language that enables combinatorial structure on two distinct levels: meaningless sounds can be combined into meaningful morphemes and words, which themselves could be combined further. We will refer to recombination at the first level as combinatorial structure, while recombination at the second level will be called compositional structure.

You will notice that they initially call both levels of structure “combinatorial”, and they both arguably are, and my point in this blog post isn’t necessarily that only structure on the first level should be called combinatorial, but that work talking about combinatorial structure should establish what their terminology means.

A recent paper by Scott-Philips and Blythe (2013), which is entitled “Why is combinatorial communication rare in the natural world, and why is language an exception to this trend?” presents an agent based model to show how limited the conditions are from which combinatorial communication can emerge. Obviously, in order to do this they need to define what they mean by combinatorial communication and present this figure by way of explanation:

They explain:

In a combinatorial communication system, two (or more) holistic signals (A and B in this figure) are combined to form a third, composite signal (A + B), which has a different effect (Z) to the sum of the two individual signals (X + Y). This figure illustrates the simplest combinatorial communication system possible. Applied to the putty-nosed monkey system, the symbols in this figure are: a, presence of eagles; b, presence of leopards; c, absence of food; A, ‘pyow’; B, ‘hack’ call; C = A + B ‘pyow–hack’; X, climb down; Y, climb up; Z ≠ X + Y, move to a new location. Combinatorial communication is rare in nature: many systems have a signal C = A + B with an effect Z = X + Y; very few have a signal C = A + B with an effect Z ≠ X + Y.

In this example, the building blocks which make C , A and B, are arguably meaningful because they act as signals in their own right, therefore, if C had a meaning which was a combination of the meanings of A and B, this system (using de Boer, Sandler and Kirby’s definition) would be compositional (this isn’t represented in the figure above). However, if the meaning of C is not a combination of the meanings of A and B, then A and B are arguably meaningless building blocks (and their individual expressions just happen to have meaning, for example the individual phoneme /a/ being an indefinite determiner in English, but not having this meaning when it is used in the word “cat”). In this case, the system would be combinatorial (as defined by the figure above, as well as under the definition of de Boer, Sadler and Kirby). So far so good, it looks like we are in agreement.

However, later in their paper Scott-Philips and Blythe go on to argue:

Coded ‘combinatorial’ signals are in a sense not really combinatorial at all. After all, there is no ‘combining’ going on. There is really just a third holistic signal, which happens to be comprised of the same pieces as other existing holistic signals. Indeed, the most recent experimental results suggest that the putty-nosed monkeys interpret the ‘combinatorial’ pyow–hack calls in exactly this idiomatic way, rather than as the product of two component parts of meaning. By contrast, the ostensive creation of new composite signals is clearly combinatorial: the meaning of the new, composite signal is in part (but only in part) a function of the meanings of the component pieces.

The argument they are giving here is that unless the meaning of C is a combination of A and B (or compositional as defined above), then it is not really a combinatorial signal.

Scott-Philips and Blythe definitely know and demonstrate that there is a difference between the two levels of structure, but they conflate them both under one term, “combinatorial”, which makes it harder to understand that there is a very clear difference. Also, changing the definition of what they mean by “combinatorial” between the introduction of their paper and their discussion confuses their argument.

Perhaps we should all agree to adopt the terminology proposed by de Boer, Sandler and Kirby, but given the absence of a consensus on the matter, at the very least I think outlining exactly what is meant by combinatorial (or compositional) needs to be established at the beginning of every paper using these terms.

References

de Boer, B., Sandler, W., & Kirby, S. (2012). New perspectives on duality of patterning: Introduction to the special issue. Language and Cognition, 4(4).

Hockett, C. 1960. The origin of speech. Scientific American 203. 88–111.

Scott-Phillips, T. C., & Blythe, R. A. (2013). Why is combinatorial communication rare in the natural world, and why is language an exception to this trend?. Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 10(88), 20130520.

Is “Huh?” a universal word?

A paper in PLOS ONE this week argues that “Huh?”, as in “What did you say?”, is a universal word with the same form and function in many languages (see here for a brief overview).

When a conversation breaks down, maybe because something wasn’t heard properly, an interlocutor can initiate conversational repair by using a range of strategies. For instance, by questioning a particular word (“whose car?”) or by using a formal response such as “Pardon?”. While the forms of these types varies across language, the strategy of signalling complete lack of understanding is accomplished in 30 languages by a word like “huh?”. The precise phonetic properties of these words in 10 languages are analysed in the paper. Here’s a video of how they all sound:

The research follows from a large-scale project at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics that collected conversational data from 10 languages, transcribed them and analysed how turn-taking and repair works in each in a Conversation Analysis framework.

The authors argue that this is a lexical word (which is not innately constrained, like laughter), which has emerged by convergent evolution. “Huh?” is ideal for initiating repair because it’s a short, question-like word that requires minimal effort to produce and is effective at signalling a problem. The phonetic analysis shows that the word has adapted to the phonologies of the particular languages (e.g. the vowel being closer to canonical vowels in that language), but the overall similarity of the words is striking.

They don’t rule out the possibility that the word was inherited into languages from an ancestral form, but they also point out that conversational interaction is one of the primary ecologies for language evolution:

“our study points to a factor that may constrain divergence or diachronic drift: the selective pressures of specific conversational environments, which may cause convergent cultural evolution. The possibility should not be surprising. After all, words evolve in utterances in conversation, so conversational infrastructure is part of the evolutionary landscape for words. We are referring here to the sequential infrastructure that serves as the common vehicle for language use – an infrastructure that may well pre-date more complex forms of language and that seems largely independent of sometimes radical differences between individual languages’ grammars and [lexicons].”

The authors are currently extending this work to see if there are cross-cultural similarities in how the whole system of repair works.

You can read more about the project at ideophone.

Dingemanse M, Torreira F, Enfield NJ (2013) Is “Huh?” a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent Evolution of Linguistic Items. PLoS ONE 8(11): e78273. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078273 Read the paper online (open access).

The Ring-Form Challenge

The challenge is simple: for any given text – poem, drama, novel, film, what have you – is it a ring or not? That is, does it have the form:

A, B, … C … B’, A’

OR

A, B, … C, C’, … B’, A’

The question seems fairly straightforward, and, yes, the QUESTION is. But answering it may not be. I speak from experience.

Note that the question is about form, not meaning, and that answering the question requires that you describe the text, not that you figure out what it means. You will, however, have to pay attention to meaning to determine, say, whether or not two elements function in parallel. But comparing the meanings of elements within a text is quite different from translating meanings into some theoretical discourse.

I think we need to know, for any text we wish to study, whether or not it has a ring form. And if not a ring, then what? Why should we know this? Because form is important, it guides our apprehension of the text.

What I REALLY think is that if enough people set out in search of ring forms, by the time, say, that a 100 new ring form texts have been identified, a new mode of literary study will be emerging, one that can be commensurate with the new psychologies, but which is not subordinate to any other discipline or body of knowledge.

Mary Douglas on Rings

The study of ring forms is not new. I first learned about ring forms in a 1976 article in PMLA: R. G. Peterson, Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature (PMLA 91, 3: 367-375). He was reporting on a literature that was two decades old by that time, though it was mostly about classical and biblical texts. Beyond verifying the chiasmus in Dylan Thomas’ “Author’s Prologue”, however, I did nothing with the article. I simply filed the topic away in my mind.

I didn’t begin to think about rings until Mary Douglas brought them to my attention earlier in the decade. She had been kind enough to blurb my book – Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture – and my editor put me in touch with her after the book came out. She’d been working on the topic for some time and had published books on two Old Testment texts: Leviticus As Literature (Oxford 1999), In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (Oxford 2001). She believed that rings are fundamental to human thought. Continue reading “The Ring-Form Challenge”

The Jasmine Papers: Notes on the Study of Poetry in the Age of Cognitive Science

I have now collected a series of posts on William Carlos Williams’ poem, “To a Solitary Disciple”, and associated discussions into a single working paper having the above title. You may download it from my SSRN page.

The abstract is immediately below, followed by the introduction and then the table of contents.

Abstract: In More Than Cool Reason Lakoff and Turner offer a global reading of “To a Solitary Disciple” (by William Carlos Williams) in terms of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). The reading itself is independent of CMT; any competent literary critic could have done it. Their attempt to explain the relationship between that reading and the poem using CMT is at best problematic and does not seem to be metaphoric as specified by the terms of CMT. Rather, their reading takes the form of little narrative that has the same form as one they attribute to the poem. Beyond the critique of Lakoff and Turner, this paper makes some observations about the poem and suggests that it has a ring form: A, B, C, D, C’, B’, A’. Two sentences by Hemingway and a poem by Dylan Thomas are discussed in counterpoint with “To a Solitary Disciple.” Two appendices discuss ontological cognition in relation to Williams’ Paterson, Book V and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

Introduction: The Poverty of Cognitivism for Literary Criticism

This working paper consists of things and stuff. I drafted some drafted over a decade ago and wrote others on the day or on the day before I posted them.

Several things are going on, but the central thread is an examination of the third chapter of George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason, which is an analysis of “To a Solitary Disciple” by William Carlos Williams. That book is certainly one of the founding texts of cognitive poetics, which is a major school of thought within a broader engagement between literary criticism and cognitive science. As such, that Lakoff and Turner on Williams is a paradigmatic example in this engagement: If you want to use cognitive metaphor theory in the analysis of literary texts, this is how you do it.

It may very well be a good example of the application of cognitive metaphor theory, but it’s an inadequate example of literary analysis. While I have quite a bit to say about their analysis – in A Leak in Cool Reason, Beyond Metaphor: Pattern Matching, and What’s a Global Reading for Anyhow? – my major argument on this point – that it’s inadequate as literary analysis – is presented in The Disciple Revisited and Revived. There I comment on the poem in some detail, but without bringing any particular body of theoretical material to bear on the text, not their theory, not mine, not anyone else’s. To this I would add my discussions of two sentences from Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and of the chiasmus governing Dylan Thomas’ “Author’s Prologue”.

Alas, I do not know how to explain what I found in “To a Solitary Disciple”. Nor do I know of any body of theory that can do so. That is to say, I am unaware of any set of principles of mental functioning that explain why poems are LIKE THAT. They just are. Some of them. This one appears to have ring-form – A, B, C, D, C’, B’, A’. No one knows how to explain them. Maybe one day cognitive science will be up to that task. But it isn’t now. Continue reading “The Jasmine Papers: Notes on the Study of Poetry in the Age of Cognitive Science”

EHBEA 2014 Bristol Conference: Abstract Submission Now Open

Abstract submission is now open for the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association 2014 Conference (University of Bristol, 6 – 9 April 2014).

Further information about the conference, and a link to the abstract submission page, can be found here:

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/expsych/events/ehbea2014

Abstract submission is open until 31st December.

Language Evolution or Language Change?

You sometimes hear people complaining about the use of the term “language evolution” when what people really mean is historical linguistics, language change or the cultural evolution of language. So what’s the difference?

Some people argue that evolution is a strictly biological phenomenon; how the brain evolved the structures which acquire and create language, and any linguistic change is anything outside of this.

Sometimes this debate gets reduced to the matter of whether there are enough parallels between the cultural evolution of language and biological evolution to justify them both having the “evolution” label. George Walkden recently did a presentation in Manchester on why language change is not language evolution and dedicated quite a large chunk of a presentation to where the analogy between languages and species fall down. It is true that there are a lot of differences between languages and species, and how these things replicate and interact, and of course it is difficult to find them perfectly analogous.

However, focussing on the differences between biological and cultural evolution in language causes one to overlook why a lot of evolutionary linguistics work looks at cultural evolution. Work on cultural evolution is trying to address the same question as studies looking directly at physiology, why is language structured the way it is? Obviously how structure evolved is the main question here, but how much of this was biological, and how much is cultural is still a very open question. And any work which looks at how structure comes about, either through biological or cultural evolution can, in my opinion, legitimately be called evolutionary linguistics.

Additionally, in the absence of direct empirical evidence in language evolution, the indirect evidence that we can gather, either through observing the structure of the world’s languages, or by using artificial learning experiments, can help us answer questions about our cognitive abilities.

Furthermore, Kirby (2002) outlined 3 timescales of language evolution on the levels of biological evolution (phylogenetic), cultural evolution (glossogentic) and individual development (ontogentic). All of these timescales interact and influence each other, so it’s necessary to consider all of these levels in language evolution research, and to say work on any of these timescales is not language evolution research is not respecting the big picture.

So what’s the difference between language change and language evolution? As with almost everything, it’s not a black and white issue. I would say though that studies looking at universal trends in language, or cultural evolution experiments in the lab, are very relevant to language evolution. What I’d label historical linguistics, or studies on language change, however, is work which presents data from just one language, as it is hard to make inferences about the evolution of our universal capability for language with just one data point.

Figure 1 from: Kirby, S. (2002b). Natural language from artificial life. Artificial Life, 8(2):185-215.

Strange Tongues: Science Fiction and Language 1

This is a guest post by Joses Ho.

Science fiction has been called “the fiction of ideas”. In this series of blog posts we catalogue a (non-exhaustive) list of works in the genre that explore ideas about language and linguistics.

Science fiction (abbreviated SF amongst devotees) has been called “the fiction of ideas”. And what a pantheon of eye-glazing, heart-palpitating, and brain-melting ideas: time travel, cyborg consciousness, alien invasions. However, does SF go further than mere fictive investigation of cool concepts? Can SF be a fiction of ideas about ideas?

One such idea about ideas, familiar to anyone who paid attention in any introductory undergraduate lecture on linguistics or cognitive science, is linguistic relativity (also popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Briefly, for the benefit of the rest of us who fell asleep in aforementioned lectures, it conjectures that the language you speak determines and shapes the way you think and the way you perceive “the universe around you” (Star Trek fans will instantly think of the Tamarian language, which can only be understood if you know the cultural references). Below I discuss 3 works that play with this idea.

1. Story of Your Life

Our first example of a SF piece that explores linguistic relativity is the novella Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, first published in 1998, and soon to be adapted into a movie.

An alien race of Heptopods has landed on Earth, and our protagonist and narrator, Louise Banks, is a linguist contacted by the US military to learn their language and communicate with them. As the tale unfolds, Louise’s very view of reality is radically altered as she masters the written language of the Heptopods. Louise tells the reader:

…Even though I’m proficient with [written Heptapod], I know I don’t experience reality the way a heptapod does. My mind was cast in the mould of human languages, and no amount of immersion in an alien language can completely reshape it. My world-view is an amalgam of human and heptapod.

Chiang brilliantly employs an unusual narrative structure to reflect this, and we are given a glimpse into how linguistic relativity might actually work in real time.

This novella is also characteristic of Chiang’s SF work, which consists solely of short stories, written with economic prose and crisp exposition fined-tuned to deliver devastatingly satisfying endings.

2. Words and Music

Another shorter example is Words And Music by Ronald D. Ferguson. Describing an alien species known as the Utmano, the narrator tells us:

.., Utmano translation doesn’t compare well to translations among human languages. The Utmano language has a peculiar view of tense, you know, past, present, future, in its sentences — well maybe not sentences, but the complete-thought communication structure. Psychologists claim that the Utmano have a lingering, vivid, recent memory combined with a mild prescience that blends with their perception of the ‘now’. It sounds like gobbledegook, but they claim that the Utmano idea of the present spans from the middle of last week to a couple of hours from now.

The above expository paragraph is more typical of how linguistic relativity is explored in SF. While Words and Music doesn’t quite go as far as Chiang does in using the narrative structure itself to illustrate the alien mode of perception being described, Ferguson uses a novel framing device to pack quite a bit of story and exposition into a short space.

3. Embassytown

Our last selection is novel by celebrated SF writer China Miéville. Embassytown was his ninth novel and features the Ariekei, an alien race whose spoken language involved vocalizing two words simultaneously.

This is not a terribly new idea; Ferguson makes mention of this in Words and Music. In Ferguson’s story, the humans successfully apply the obvious solution (used by real-world linguists in the field as well, and mentioned in Story of Your Life) to the problem of communicating with such an alien race: use pre-recorded or synthetic speech. But Miéville won’t have that.

Synthetic speech is indiscernible to the Ariekei, because they require an actual mind to be uttering each (simultaneous) syllable. And so, the intergalatic human Ambassadors are specially-bred twins whose minds are linked, able to speak with two mouths and one mind. (If that idea doesn’t make your eyes glaze and brain melt, you are probably an Ariekei.)

These Ambassadors are the only ones who can communicate with the Ariekei, and are crucial to human-Ariekei diplomatic and trade relations. The plot gets truly interesting when a new pair of ambassadors arrives to the city of the novel’s title. These two individuals are not genetically identical, but have been selected for linkage based on their high degree of empathy. When they speak the alien language (which Miéville simply christens, a little pompously, “Language”), the effect on the Ariekei is unprecedented: they become addicted to the new Ambassador’s speech.

The rest of the novel runs along on a action-filled plot, and still manages to raise questions about mind, intelligence, and the very nature of language.

However, despite how strange the Ariekei appear, there are cases of human language use that are similar to the way their “Language” functions. Humans actually can speak two things simultaneously, using signed language and spoken language. This is called “code-blending”. Interestingly, the two words they speak and sign simultaneously can refer to different things, or are “semantically non-equivalent.”

An example is given below; the capitalised text on the lower line represents the signs used (taken from Emmorey, Bornstein & Thompson (2005) and Emmorey et al., 2008).

In this picture, a man is describing a scene between the cartoon characters Sylvester the cat and Tweety the bird.

“He” refers to Sylvester who is nonchalantly watching Tweety swinging inside his bird cage on the window sill. Then all of a sudden, Tweety turns around and looks right at Sylvester and screams (“Ack!”). The sign glossed as LOOK-AT-ME is produced at the same time as the English words “all of a sudden.” [The emphasis is mine, and not in the original academic paper.]

The speaker is using both signed language and spoken language to narrate how Tweety suddenly turns to look at Sylvester sneaking up on him. So the simultaneous speech sounds of Miéville’s Ariekei might not be that far off from actual human communication.

This cross-modal flexibility in human communication may suggest that, no matter how intertwined language and thought may be, there may be no language that we truly won’t be able to understand.

Narrative and Abstraction: Some Problems with Cognitive Metaphor

I’ve had problems with cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) since Lakoff and Johnson published Metaphors We Live By (1981) – well, not since then, because I didn’t read the book until a couple of years after original publication. It’s not that I didn’t believe that language and cognition where thick with metaphor, much of it flying below the radar screen of explicit awareness. I had no trouble with that, nor with the idea that metaphor is an important mechanism for abstract thinking.

But it’s not the only mechanism.

During the 1970s I had studied with David Hays in the Linguistics Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo. He had developed a somewhat different account of abstract thought in which abstract ideas are derived from narrative – which I’ll explain below. I was reminded of this yesterday when Per Aage Brandt made the following remark in response to my critique of Lakoff and Turner on “To a Solitary Disciple”:

Instead, the text sketches out a little narrative. The lines run upwards, the ornament tries to stop them, they converge and now guard, contain and protect the flower/moon. This little story can then become a larger story of cult and divinity in the interpretation by a sort of allegorical projection. All narratives can project allegorically in a similar way.

Precisely so, a little narrative. Narratives too support abstraction.

My basic problem with cognitive metaphor theory, then, is that it claims too much. There’s more than one mechanism for constructing abstract concepts. David Hays and I outlined four in The Evolution of Cognition (1990): metaphor, metalingual definition and rationalization, theorization, and model building. There’s no reason to believe that those are the only existing or the only possible mechanisms for constructing abstract concepts.

In the rest of this note I want to sketch out Hays’s old notion of abstraction, point out how it somewhat resembles CMT and then I dig up some old notes that express further reservations about CMT.

Narrative and Metalingual Definition

The fact that various episodes can exhibit highly similar patterns of events and participants is the basis of Hays’s (1973) original approach to abstraction. He called it metalingual definition, after Roman Jakobson’s notion of language’s metalingual function. While Hays’ notion is different from CMT of Lakoff and Johnson, I do not see it as an alternative except in the sense that perhaps some of the cases they handle with conceptual metaphor might better be explicated by Hay’s metalingual account. But that is a secondary matter. Both mechanisms are needed, and, as I’ve indicated above, a few others as well. Continue reading “Narrative and Abstraction: Some Problems with Cognitive Metaphor”

1. Story of Your Life

2. Words and Music

3. Embassytown

Further reading