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23 Apr Form and Substance in Communication

Substance and Form

Form vs. Substance If the substance is H2O, the form may be solid ice, liquid water or gaseous steam. What about language? We’ve talked about different language phenomena, including spoken, written and digitally stored language. Is the medium the form and the content the substance of language, or is there more? Saussure, a founder of the European flavor of structural […]

22 Apr Breaking Down Language Structure and Function

Communication Functions

Grammar Acquisition Some experts suggest that a correctly formulated adult grammar is acquired by children on the basis of sentences they hear in their first few years (Pinker, 1984, p. 5). The proponents of this theory assume that a young child perceives sentence structure or is able to detect elements of grammatical structure – a […]

19 Apr Learning by Doing or Active Osmosis

Thinking Before Speaking

Intuition When people use their native language, they don’t usually think about how verbs are supposed to be conjugated. They don’t stop to figure out number agreement, transitivity, or aspect. They just talk. Intuitions about language are probably not based on the grammar rules that govern how parts of speech go together. Instead, these intuitions […]

18 Apr Irrational Language Rules

Chess Horse

Language and Utterances Now let’s narrow the focus from communication to language. To avoid confusion, let it be clear from the outset that this discussion is not concerned with computer-programming languages, but “natural languages.” Computer languages have built-in or “prescriptive” regularity called a formal syntax. They are easy to describe, and they are obedient to […]

17 Apr Learning by Repetition

Aperture and Shutter Speed

Frequency and Exposure For the very young, language learning requires mental gymnastics. Most theories of language learning refer to the fact that the frequency of repetition of a word or structure pattern determines the strength of its acquisition. In this context, there may be some threshold of frequency which, once reached, will result in the […]

16 Apr From Concept to Communication

Yorrick’s First Concepts A conceptually structured model of learning might suggest that Yorrick, or any other human, first acquires concepts, and later, a vehicle for communicating concepts: language. During Yorrick’s early development, his concepts are linked entirely to physical sensations and perceptions: hunger, soreness, the sucking instinct, and the like. One of the first discoveries […]

15 Apr The Myth of Inexpressibility

Dictionary

I have often heard how the the variety of Eskimo words for snow is more linguistically rich than any other language. I learned many words in Japanese for different types rain. I agree that the richness, and the simplicity, and elegance of describing different snow types with different words is remarkable. But I don’t think […]

14 Apr Translation: Inverted Communication

Translation Symmetry

Lately I’ve been concentrating on modeling communicative skills. Whether speaking, signing, gesturing or writing, we begin with intent and wrap symbols around the intent or message to encode it. Translating and encrypting start with a fully encoded message, and unwrap it, before rewrapping it in a different form that is intended to preserve the original intent. Translation is an application […]

12 Apr Making a Pattern of Comprenshion

Speech and Hearing

In A Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander points out that “…no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world only to the extent that it is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller […]

11 Apr Are You My Grammar?

Communication Generation

Quest for a Formalism Many grammar formalisms have been proposed for use with computers. Many existing formalisms have been borrowed for computer applications. Currently, one of the most popular grammar theories among linguists is called Government and Binding (Chomsky, 1986). This theory has been used in some computerized language-analysis programs, but poor outcomes have demonstrated that it is […]