Babel's Dawn

Benjamin Lee Whorf Revisited

The National Science Foundation sent out a press release that forced my attention back to one of the basic mysteries of speech origins: which came first the word or the idea?

Any blog like this one, devoted to the study of origins, is subject to these chicken-and-egg loops in which each thing causes the other. Whenever such a loop appears you know that the direction of causality remains unclear. To solve it, you may need more data, but even with that data what you really need is a new idea, one that will make sense of what is causing what. Today, for example, we know that the egg came before the chicken, not because we know more about chickens or about eggs but because we have a new idea: evolution. It strikes me that this blog has stumbled across an idea that may solve the word-or-idea loop.

Necessary and Sufficient (Part 1)

Yesterday’s post listed three ideas developed on this blog that seem open to investigation. They were:

• Pedomorphosis/Neoteny
• Attention triplet
• Cognitive advances yield syntactic advances

Yesterday’s post looked for evidence that neoteny (delayed maturation) lies behind the evolution of the human capacity for speech. Today’s post looks at the proposed basis for that capacity, the attention triplet, and asks what challenges might be raised against it.

The Metaphor Wars

Yesterday’s post was a response to the charge of incompleteness brought against the position that words are tools for piloting attention. The argument runs that attention cannot be directed toward unknown things; therefore, attention cannot be directed to ideas that are only imagined by the speaker. The listener cannot know what the speaker means.

This blog’s reply looked at metaphors. They direct the listener’s attention to some already-known feature of a new idea. They also provide a way of escaping the tautologies of logical systems; however, there are objections to claims for metaphors as the powerhouses of language.

Into the Unknown

Regular visitors to this blog will know that two weeks ago we devoted a series of posts to exploring the proposition that words are tools for piloting attention. Then last week one of the final posts about presentations at the Stellenbosch conference cited a paper by Peter Gardenfors that rejected as incomplete the thesis ,“that symbolic communication is the process by which one attempts to manipulate the attention of, or to share attention with another individual.”

Dr. Gardenfors said this could not be the whole story because:

One aspect that is missing in his characterization is that depending on the character of the “outside entity” different cognitive demands on the individual whose attention is manipulated will be relevant.

Conference: Music Creates Community

Music co-evolved with language, allowing communication that language itself impedes, says University of Cambridge reader in Music and Science, Ian Cross. Speaking at a session devoted to music and language at the Cradle of Language conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa, Dr. Cross told the assembled scholars that musical interactions typically involve the unite “action and attention” in a “pulse.” (Abstract here)

Showing Without Telling

This week Babel’s Dawn has been discussing the implications of an article by Giorgio Marchetti in the current issue of Cognitive Processing. Marchetti argues that attention is an active process, the sine qua non of consciousness, and that words are tools for piloting attention. Speech thus becomes a means of directing consciousness.

Marchetti’s article also discusses the work of an American professor of rhetoric at Case Western Reserve, Todd Oakley, who writes:

Attention! It's a Revolution.

When I began planning this blog I did not expect to be reporting on a revolution, at least not right off the bat. But a revolution is underway and it turns out that this blog reports on its crossroads, the place where attention meets society. The origins of speech are critical to that junction.

Rebuked by Children

Yesterday the New York Times began a series about families and children with severe mental problems.The deeply mysterious psychological disorders like autism, Williams Syndrome, Asperger Syndrome, and the other conditions that show themselves during early development reveal how little we still understand about bhe basics of being human. These disorders separate their members from the rest of society in unproductive ways, and yet we still have a terrible time putting our finger on what has gone wrong.

Preserving Meaning

Yesterday’s post (here) argued that we need some explanation for the way speech (in at least its surface appearance) changes over time and yet never degenerates into meaningless babble. Something must be constraining its changes the way natural selection constrains biological changes, but it cannot literally be natural selection because the process is too rapid for random processes to work.

Linguistic evolution is commonly spoken of as a form of cultural evolution, but we define culture so broadly that the notion of its evolution means merely historical rather than biological change. Evolution implies something richer. It is change that preserves something. Biological evolution preserves fitness through adaptation; linguistic evolution preserves meaning, also by adapting to changing circumstances. The three processes I described in natural selection have similar processes in the history of language:

Crazy Aunts & Elephants

This blog has begun well, by my humble standards, receiving visitors throughout the day and I see there has been a steady number of subscribers, although the first few mailings have been a day late with the post. (I’m trying to fix that.) There is a bit of a backlog of news right now as I try to bring readers up to date on what has been happening in this broad field, so I have been citing already-published articles rather than just-published ones. I expect that to change as we move along. Sometimes, of course, the news is a little weird because the news sources have their agendas, which may not match the readers’ interests. In particular there is one central topic of language studies that scholars work hard to avoid mentioning.

Which metaphor for the obvious do you prefer: the elephant in the room or the crazy aunt in the basement? In either case, we all know that speech is only useful because utterances mean something, yet meaning is the reality that dare not speak its name, the elephant everyone prefers not to mention.