[Xmca-l] Re: Why Voicemail Intonation Sounds Weird

[David Kellogg]

Andy, Henry:

I think the only paleoarchaeological work I would trust whole-heartedly is
Andy's own excavation of Vygotsky. With respect to Vygotsky's most
instrumentalist (and in my view weakest) work, Andy remarks that even here
we can find a key insight--that no matter what single aspect of
anthropogenesis we choose, we are always going to find fore-runners
in lower animals. Development is never a bolt from the blue: it may come
as a thunderclap, but even a thunderclap requires a gathering of clouds.

So if we are looking for a litmus test, we need to look on the human side,
not the animal side. As a systemicist, I don't see intension, or the distal
use of language or even the symbolic function as a whole as in any
way criterial (every conditional response is symbolic at least for the
experimenter). Instead, I see double articulation--the insertion of a layer
of wording between meaning and sounding--the combination of the
interpersonal and the ideational metafunctions into a single
lexicogrammar--as the unique trait of human language. This doesn't really
happen until the child is somewhere between one and two.

I don't think that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis (although I think
this idea had an important heuristic function in Tibetan medicine and also
in Vygotsky, who speaks of "analogues not parallels").  But there are
obvious ways in which child devleopment can falsify hypotheses about
anthropogenesis that cannot be falsified through archaeology. Andy himself
draws attention to one, in his work on Nicaraguan sign language (developed
by deaf children after the fall of Somoza). It is not true that the
beginnings of language (the natural foundations of language) cannot be
spontaneously developed by children, even under the most adverse social,
interpersonal and biological circumstances. it is also not true that these
rudiments of language will give way to a complete language without some
kind of larger linguistic community. This, to me, demonstrates that
language could not have had a single origin, but must be constantly created
and recreated wherever a critical mass of children begins to
interpersonally interact with adults. This falsification of two important
hypotheses about logogenesis (the idea that it is entirely innate and the
"Babel" idea that it it had a single origin and diffused fromk
there) doesn't require any recapitulationism: it only requires us to look
and see what children are always doing right under our noses.

I think that Halliday's "magic gateway" principle--that the interpersonal
function develops before the ideational one, and they are then merged--can
be demonstrated in the same way, without invoking Haeckel, Hall, or
recapitulationism in any form. Tok his credit, McNeill does this: he uses
child development data to make negative arguments about anthropogenesis and
does not assume any positive link. But I think the conclusion he draws,
which is that thinking and speech can NEVER be fully differentiated, is
ultimately ahistorical even at the level of ontogenesis. Actually, people
DO stop gesturing, and intonation really IS replaced by punctuation. Even
as I am writing to you now.


David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New in *Early Years*, co-authored with Fang Li:

When three fives are thirty-five: Vygotsky in a Hallidayan idiom … and
maths in the grandmother tongue

Some free e-prints available at:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7I8zYW3qkEqNBA66XAwS/full




On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 6:19 AM HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote:

> David,
> Relevant to the discussion of gesture and displaced reference is joint
> shared reference (of an object that can be seen by both) in interactions
> between caregivers and children in the early development of language. The
> interaction appears to prefigure full-fledged displaced reference
> termporally and spatially. Interesting also is that the interaction is
> rhythmically entrained turn-taking. I don’t know if David McNeil discusses
> this interaction in his research.
> Henry
>
>
> On Oct 30, 2018, at 10:56 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Andy:
>
> Corballis isn't a linguist, but David McNeill, who taught
> psycholinguistics when I was at University of Chicago, is. He has a rather
> idiosyncratic reading of Vygotsky: instead of a ZPD,  he argues for a
> "Growth Point" ("growth" rather than development) which includes both word
> and gesture, which then co-evolve. He uses this to make the argument you
> want to make: that tool and sign use co-evolve, and there is no genetic
> sequence of tool--sign or sign--tool, and he also argues that Vygotsky is
> wrong to imply that thinking is prior to speech in any way: they must
> co-evolve microgenetically just as they did sociogenetically. McNeill says
> that Thinking and Speech is wrong on two counts. First of all, it predicts
> that gesture will die away because speech can do everything gesture can and
> more; it doesn't. Secondly, it fails to predict the persistence of gesture
> in telephone communication, where it seems to have no function;
> nevertheless, it persists.
>
> About four years ago, I supervised an MA in which we compared how children
> talk in Australia and in Korea with their hands free and with their hands
> clasped behind their back. It made a very big difference: hands free
> resulted in much more prosodic variation (at word level and at phrase
> level), hands clasped intonation was flatter. While we were analyzing the
> data, I noticed that there it also made a big difference in eye contact,
> and I remembered that Professor McNeill pointed out that people use
> hands to beat stresses when they talk on the phone, but not when they talk
> to a tape recorder. Maybe that's why voicemail intonation not only sounds
> weird, it feels weird.
>
> Halliday says that interpersonal meaning is largely prosodic--that is,
> it's spread out over a whole sentence (unlike ideational meaning, which is
> nouns and verbs and adjectives), it is linearized through meter and through
> stress and not through componentiality (as ideational meaning is), and
> it realizes power differentials, like giving and getting information (you
> can say pretty much anything you like in English and still be polite if you
> have the right tone of voice, something that we linguists are always
> exploiting when we want to study taboo language, e.g. what you
> non-linguists have to refer to as the "N-word").
>
> To me, all this hints at a real way of solving the coevolution problem,
> which as the other David K pointed out will never be solved through
> archaeological evidence: the study of child language. Children do seem to
> develop interpersonal meaning before they develop ideational meaning
> (Halliday called interpersonal meaning the "magic gateway" to ideational
> meaning).This to me points up the essential difference between tools and
> signs that McNeill's theory cannot explain: in tools, use value is primary
> and exchange value is derived from it, but in signs things are very much
> the other way around.
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New in *Early Years*, co-authored with Fang Li:
>
> When three fives are thirty-five: Vygotsky in a Hallidayan idiom … and
> maths in the grandmother tongue
>
> Some free e-prints available at:
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7I8zYW3qkEqNBA66XAwS/full
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20181101/d6f80d8b/attachment.html