An introduction to Language for the SMMMASH of April 18, 2013, at Stanford University http://www.scaruffi.com/stanford/tour2012.html

1. lAnGuAgE
for the SMMMASH! of April 18, 2012
www.smmmash.com
piero scaruffi
www.scaruffi.com

2. "Shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi
shi shi"
("the master is fond of licking lion spittle“)
(Chinese tongue-twister)
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3. A Tool to Shape Minds
• Edward Sapir & Benjamin Lee
Whorf: language determines how
one thinks
• Lev Vygotsky: language guides the
child's cognitive growth
• Katherine Nelson: language acts
as the medium through which the
mind becomes part of a culture
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4. A Tool to Shape Minds
• We not only speak, but also listen.
• The listening is no less important than
the speaking: the speaking expresses
our mind, but the listening shapes our
mind.
• Language creates minds.
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5. A Tool to Shape Minds
• “Communication” is about one brain trying to
replicate some kind of neural pattern
(thought, image, story) into another brain
• Language is structured in such a way as to
interact with the neural process of the other
brain and cause it to create a specific neural
pattern: that’s what we call “understanding”
• A “discussion” is two beings that engage in
changing each other’s brain
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6. Redundant and Inefficient
• On average western languages are about
50% redundant: we would not lose any
expressive power if we gave up 50% of our
dictionary. We can guess the meaning of
most sentences from a fragment of them.
• Human communication is wildly inefficient:
two computers can simply exchange in a split
second an image without any loss of
information, whereas a human must describe
to another human the image in a lengthy way
and will certainly miss some details
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7. Redundant and Inefficient
• Alfred Korzybski: Symbolic thinking
constitutes a tremendous advantage
(the ability to generalize experience
and pass them on to other humans,
so they do not need to repeat our
mistakes or rediscover what we
already discovered), but also a
disadvantage, that accounts for many
of our social and personal problems:
there are fewer words (and concepts)
than experiences
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8. Grammar
• “Xgewut is not a meaningful word" is a
correct English sentence. What makes
a sentence correct even when it
contains a word that does not exist?
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9. Grammar
• Ferdinand DeSaussure: "parole" (an actual
utterance in a language) vs "langue" (the
entire body of the language)
• Noam Chomsky: "performance" (all
sentences that an individual will ever use) vs
"competence" (all sentences that an
individual can utter, but will not necessarily
utter)
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10. Grammar
• Noam Chomsky:
– The number of sentences in a language is
potentially infinite, but there is a finite
system of rules that defines which
sentences can potentially be built
– You have never read a sentence with
these exact words before but (hopefully!)
you understand the meaning of what I just
wrote
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11. Grammar
• Noam Chomsky:
– The logical formalism used
to prove mathematical
theorems can be employed
to express the grammar of
a language
– The grammar of a
language “is" the
specification for the entire
language
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12. Grammar
• Chomsky:
– Children do not learn, as they do not make any
effort. Language "happens" to a child.
– We are born with some innate knowledge of what
a grammar is and how it works (a “universal
grammar”)
– Then experience determines which specific
language (i.e., grammar) we will learn.
– We are predisposed to learn a language the same
way we are predisposed to learn to eat
– Language acquisition is not only possible: it is
virtually inevitable
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13. Grammar
• Steven Pinker: the “language instinct”
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14. Give me Ambiguity or
Something Else
• "Prostitutes appeal to Pope"
• "Soviet virgin lands short of goal again"
• “Panda mating fails - veterinarian takes
over”
• “Killer sentenced to die for second time”
• “Miners refuse to mine after death”
(actual newspaper headlines reported by Keith Devlin)
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15. Anaphora
• "He went to bed" (who?)
• "Today I wrote this sentence" (which
day?)
• "Here it is cold“ (where?)
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16. Ambiguity
• In every language one can build a
sentence that is perfectly valid but not
clear at all.
• The context usually solves the
ambiguity.
• Syntax is not enough: one needs
semantics to understand what a
sentence means
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17. What is Language
• Charles Darwin: languages seem to evolve
the same way that species evolve
• Language brings more benefits to the listener
than to the talker
• If communication were the purpose of
language, it would have evolved a race of
listeners, not of gossipers
• Individuals, unless they are relatives, have no
motivation to share key information since they
are supposed to compete
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18. Not a Means to Communicate
• Derek Bickerton: a means to represent the
world that evolved from older
representation systems.
• Robin Dunbar: a means to cement society,
e.g. gossiping is similar to grooming
• Geoffrey Miller: a means for sexual
selection, a way for males and females to
play the game of sex - language is a form
of sexual display
• Richard Gregory: a particular type of tool
• Philip Lieberman: an evolutionary accident
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19. Metaphor
• “Her marriage is a nightmare”
• “My room is a jungle”
• “He is a snake”
• “This job is a piece of cake”
• “Time is money”
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20. Metaphor
• Metaphor is pervasive in our
language
• George Lakoff:
– all language is metaphorical
– all metaphors are ultimately
based on our bodily
experience.
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21. Pragmatics
• A word, or a sentence, has no
meaning per se. It is not the
meaning, it is the "use" of language
that matters.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein: to understand
a word is to understand a language
and to understand a language is to
master the linguistic skills
• Paul Grice: language is based on a
form of cooperation among the
speakers
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22. Pragmatics
• What are the speaker’s motif and goal?
• Semantics can account for the meaning
of the sentence “do you know what time
it is?”, but not for the fact that an
answer is required (the speaker’s
intention is to learn what time it is)
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23. Jokes
• What is a joke?
• Why do we tell jokes?
• What is in a joke?
• I order to understand a joke one must
master the whole power of the
language
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24. A Basic Property of Life
• Language is widespread in nature
• All animals communicate and even
plants have some rudimentary form of
interaction
• Communication (and therefore
language) is one of the most basic
modes of living beings
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25. The oldest language on Earth
• DNA
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26. Further Reading
• Scaruffi, Piero: “The Nature of Consciousness”
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