David, ...
meaningful-sound is a concrete phenomenon, located in place and
time. And he promises that we will thereby find the unity of
thinking and speech, of generalization and social interaction, of
thinking and communication, of intellect and affect. In short, of
consciousness.
No? Yes?
Martin
On Jul 25, 2009, at 3:25 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
Martin:
Yes, definitely! If you read pp. 49-50 in the Minick translation
of Thinking and Speech, we get Vygotsky's remarks on Saussure's
phonology in pure form. Of course, he rejects (again and again)
the Saussurean view of semantics; it's nothing but associationism.
But since he rejects associationism on the basis of its
arbitrariness, its lack of an intelligent link, and its lack of
system, he has to reject Saussurean phonemes too, no?
No! As you say, there are two points here for Vygotsky to
appropriate. The first is that the phoneme is part of a gestalt,
specifically, a contrast with some other word (e.g. "back" and
"bag"). But the second is that that gestalt is defined by MEANING
and not by sound.
Here is where Vygosky really parts company, not only with Saussure
and structuralism but also with Gestaltism. For Saussure, the
relationship between phoneme and meaning is entirely arbitrary;
but for Vygotsky it is fully determined by the social situation of
development.
For Gestaltism, the structural relationship is not unique to
language; it's shared with perception. But for Vygotsky the
consciousness that is created by thought is never reducible to the
consciousness that is created by perception.
The question I have is what Saussure would have made of all this.
Saussure was actually quite skeptical about his own system; he had
good reason to instruct his wife and students not to publish any
of his work. And as the article Mike sent around (on the
Mandelshtam poem) makes clear, he had big big problems with
precisely the concepts at issue: the arbitrariness and linearity
of language.
Notice that Vygotsky doesn't really use the word "phonetic" very
much. The word which is usually translated as "phonetic" is
actually "phasal". But in the example Vygotsky gives about the
psychological vs. grammatical predicate/subject, where he talks
about psychological/grammatical gender, and number, and even
tense, it is very clear that for Vygotsky ALL the linear aspects
of language, the aspects which (unlike thought) include TIME in
their compositionality, are to be considered "phasal", not just
phonetics.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Fri, 7/24/09, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:
From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Intensions in context and speech complexity ;
From 2-?
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Friday, July 24, 2009, 8:03 AM
On Jul 23, 2009, at 2:46 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
I think Vygotsky actually finds the single kernel of truth in
Saussure's course when he argues that a science of phonetics
needs to be founded on MEANING MAKING and not on the physical
description of noises people make with their mouths. However, his
ability to find this kernel in a mountain of structuralist chaff
should not deceive you; he is no uncritical consumer of
Saussureanism.
David,
Coincidentally I was reading yesterday the section in Problems of
Child Psychology (vol 5 of the Collected Works) where Vygotsky
again makes this point. It is evidently Saussurian linguistics
that V is enthusiastic about: he refers to it as phonology and
contrasts it with an older phonetics which focused solely on
articulatory definitions. Phonology has the advantage of seeing
the sounds of language as a system, and so the child never learns
a single sound in isolation but always one sound against the
background of the others. V points out that this is a basic law of
perception: figure/ground, and also that the ground in the case of
oral language is provided by the speech of adults (so the 'ideal'
endpoint of development is present and available from the start,
as emphasized in the passage that Lois quoted a few days ago).
V is critical once again of analyses that divide a phenomenon into
elements and in doing so lose the properties of the whole.
Phonology, he says, has the advantage that in studying the sounds
of a language as a system it doesn't divide it into separate
elements, nor does it lose the central property of language,
namely that it has meaning. V adds that sounds always have
meaning: "the phoneme," he writes "is not just a sound, it is a
sound that has meaning, a sound that has not lost meaning, a
certain unit that has a primary property to a minimal degree,
which belongs to speech as a whole" (271).
V's analysis makes a good deal of sense to me. But my own limited
knowledge of Saussure - guided in part by Roy Harris' writing -
has indeed included the dogma that the sound level of language
carries no meaning. You are saying, I think, that V has a
reasonable reading of Saussure, if not the canonical one. Can you
say more about this way of reading Saussure? V seems to be
suggesting that the child does not learn first sounds, then words,
but always acquires the sounds of language in the context of the
use of words in communicative settings, and this has the
consequece that the sounds would be aquired as aspects of a
meaningful unit. Am I on the right track here?
Martin_______________________________________________
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Martin Packer, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Psychology Department
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA 15282
(412) 396-4852
www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/
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