Re: [xmca] Re: Word Meaning and Action

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

David,

Your discussion of Saussurian phonemes is helpful. But I need more help! I'm reading Sapir's 1925 paper, "The Sound Patterns in Language" (I can send a copy if you don't have it), for, as you've pointed out, LSV quoted Sapir approvingly at the start of T&S. Sapir is writing here about the sounds of language as "a “system of symbolically utilizable counters” which has an “inner configuration”; he emphasizes that "a speech sound is not merely an articulation or an acoustic image, but material for symbolic expression in an appropriate linguistic context." He insists that "phonetic phenomena are not physical phenomena per se, however necessary in the preliminary stages of inductive linguistic research it may be to get at the phonetic facts by way of their physical embodiment. The present discussion is really a special illustration of the necessity of getting behind the sense data of any type of expression in order to grasp the intuitively felt and communicated forms which alone give significance to such expression."

However! He also notes that "These relationships [among the sounds]  may, or may not, involve morphological processes." And his discussion of the relationships makes no reference to meaning. 

So although this is, as far as I can follow it, a critique of the distinctive-feature kind of analysis of Chomsky and Halle as lacking a grasp of the overall organization of the sounds of a given language, it does not seem to amount to a claim that the sounds - or even the system - carries or conveys meaning.

Eh?

Martin
 
On Jun 19, 2011, at 10:20 PM, David Kellogg wrote:

> Well, I think that just as we tend to UNDERestimate the originality of Vygotsky's thinking (e.g. we assume we know what a ZPD is, and ignore Vygotsky's key distinction between development and learning), we also tend to OVERestimate the originality of Chomsky's ideas about language. Chomsky himself, who is quite free of this fault, traces most of them back to Descartes, and his idea of analyzing phonemes into distinctive features is certainly Cartesian.
>  
> It is not Saussurean. The evidence is that Chomsky didn't actually read Saussure until he was already famous; there is no trace of Saussreanism in his earliest book "Syntactic Structures".
>  
> Saussure's book ("Cours de linguistique generale") is a kind of extended thought experiment he tried out on his students: "Let's pretend that language is like logic or mathematics, timeless, unchanging and a system of mutually defining units." So here's what he's got on phonemes (this is section 146 of Part Two, Section II, "Concrete Entities of a Language":
>  
> "A segement of sound which is, as distinct from what precedes and follows in the spoken sequence, the signal of a certain concept. (...) Anyone famliar with a language can determine teh units by a very simple method--at least in theory. The method takes speech as its linguistic evidence and envisages it as representing two parallel sequences, one of concepts (a) and one of sound batterns (b). Correct delimitation of signs requres that the divisions established in the sound sequence (alpha prime, beta prime, gamma prime...) match the divisions in the sequence of concepts (alpha, beta, gamma)."
>  
> Saussure then gives his famous example of "si je la prends" vs. "si je l'apprends". The correct delimitation of the sounds requires an understanding of whether the speaker means "if I take her" or "if I learn it". 
>  
> It is easy to see that this method does NOT yield our modern concept of phonemes, or Chomsky and Halle's idea of distinctive features. They would say that the two phonemic strings are perfectly identical and they only differ at the level of understanding (rather as Martin says that the ontogenetic development of word meaning is, at least for the benighted psychologist and the even more muddled linguist, is only at the level of understanding--but this is an open door through which I shall charge in closing).
>  
> Jorge is right when he says that the Chomskyan analysis is not completely divorced from meaning, but it isolates that meaning on a different level of organization, far above the level of the distinctive feature derived from it. The distinctive feature, and even the Chomsky-Halle phoneme is simply an artificially isolable "element" of the unit Vygotsky calls a phoneme, a unit which only exists in the presence of concrete word meaning. Vygotsky would not agree to any such isolating analysis into elements, because the actual phenomenon of language would evaporate.  
>  
> The distinction between phonetics and phonology is, I think, not germane here. I think that a phonetic analysis (the sort of thing I offered in my attachment, particularly the formant chart) would in fact show slight but consistent differences between "je l'apprends" and "je la prends" (for example in the stress placed on the second syllable). However, the phonological analysis, into abstract phonemes with distinctive features like voiced/unvoiced, aspirated/unaspirated, etc., would not show any difference at all.
>  
> So where does the modern phoneme come from? Well, interestingly enough (for a linguist who insisted on the primacy of oral speech over writing), the section on physiological phonetics in Saussure's unfortunately unburnt manuscript comes AFTER the section on "representation of a language by writing". Although Saussure strongly resists ANY historical understanding of ANYTHING, I think this is a telling historical explanation of the true origins of the phoneme.
>  
> By the late nineteenth century, it was clear to linguists that speech and not writing was the "truth" of language: the vast majority of languages being discovered by Humboldt and others had no writing at all. Quantitatively, the amount of language being written down at any one moment was miniscule. But...how is a language to be STANDARDIZED and REGULATED unless we can write it down?
>  
> The obvious answer was to create a "written speech"--not written speech in the sense Vygotsky uses it, that is, a functionally different form of language designed for abstract thinking and generalized communication across time and space, but written speech in the sense that Henry Sweet uses it: a system of recording, and then standardizing and then TRAINING pronunciation without the use of a phonograph.
>  
> Sweet himself was a terrific idealist. He believed that if everybody could be taught received pronunciation, and the King's English (for it HAD to be English) then every distinction between class and class, and between nation and nation, would evaporate. He died just before World War I, but he lives on in this youtube video clip from "My Fair Lady" (the musical version of Shaw's "Pygmalion"), in the persona of Professor Henry Higgins, who uses Sweet's visible pronunciation to record poor Eliza's exclamations from behind a column of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.
>  
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAYUuspQ6BY&feature=related
>  
> George Bernard Shaw, author of Pygmalion, knew (and feared) Sweet personally, and based Higgins upon him.
>  
> In closing, I want to offer another tidbit of real evidence from first language acquisition (at the end of this month, I will have to give up research on infants for good, and I find that some of this data really brings tears to my eyes). 
>  
> Most of the data consists of the child using intonation to carry out simple functions that an English speaking parent would hear and obey in exactly the same way: UP intonation for requests, DOWN intonation for commands, sudden exclamations for statements and pointing gestures for indication and denomination.
>  
> But Mommy is being proleptic. She offers Subin a book, and as Subin decides whether to eat it or drop it or to try to peel the pictures off the pages, Mommy ventriloquates the as-yet nonexistent inner speech plane thus:
>  
> M: Ddo mo isseo? Ddiddi bbangbbang issgo inhyang inne....  
> "What else is there? Oh...a didi bangbang (a "chittychitty bangbang") and that's a dollie!"
>  
> Now, you can easily see that "dididbangbang" ("chittychitty bangbang") is a different WORD from "car" just as "dollie" and "teddy" is different from "figurine". 
>  
> I want to argue that this kind of change in OUTER FORM is the rule and not the exception, and that in fact changes in inner form stem from changes in outer form rather than vice versa.
>  
> In a year or so, Subin will already have an immensely complex system of speech, but it will be almost entirely DIALOGIC, that is, complex discourse rather than complex grammar. Subin will be able to argue for HOURS with Mommy--but only in very short turns. 
>  
> In ten years, this will be "reconstrued" as complex grammar, but the actual words will be mostly pure Korean rather than Sino-Korean, just as the actual vocabulary of English speaking elementary school children is more Anglo-saxon than Greco-Latin. 
>  
> In twenty years, the child will reconstrue this grammar as written speech, which will be exactly the opposite: it will consist mostly of Sino-Korean "scientific" vocabulary rather than homely, rustic, Korean expressions, just as the written language of college students and university professors often shows a preference for words of Greco-Latin origin rather than homely expressions from Anglo-Saxon. 
>  
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education 
> 
> --- On Sun, 6/19/11, Jorge Fernando Larreamendy Joerns <jlarream@uniandes.edu.co> wrote:
> 
> 
> From: Jorge Fernando Larreamendy Joerns <jlarream@uniandes.edu.co>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: Word Meaning and Action
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Sunday, June 19, 2011, 3:51 PM
> 
> 
> I'm not sure, Martin, that with Chomsky and Halle phonemes carry no meaning. The whole issue with distinctive analysis is precisely to attach sound differences to meaningful differences in the linguistic system. Hence, the difference between phonetic and phonemic. Useful references are Roman Jackobson's analyses and Tuvretskoy's. 
> 
> Jorge
> 
> Jorge Larreamendy-Joerns, Ph.D.
> Profesor Asociado y Director
> Departamento de Psicología
> Universidad de los Andes
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Jun 19, 2011, at 10:02 AM, Martin Packer wrote:
> 
>> David,
>> 
>> Right, LSV emphasizes that the child has to differentiate sound and meaning. Vocal communication comes first, and verbal communication differentiates out of this. It would be a mistake to think that sound and meaning are the same (that a word is meaningful simply by virtue of its sounds), but it would also be a mistake to think that sound and meaning are completely independent, linked only 'externally' and conventionally. 
>> 
>> I used to find it confusing that LSV writes of word-meaning "developing" ontogenetically. Most of us, I think, would be more inclined to consider it to be the child's *understanding* of word-meaning that develops. Let me go back to the money analogy for a moment. A neonate obviously has no understanding of currency. An adult recognizes the value of a 1000 bill. Apparently there are studies of the ontogenesis of grasping cash-value (can anyone give me references?), but one imagines the young child comes to differentiate between the material paper and the (dare I say) 'inner form' of cash-value. But we wouldn't ordinarily say that the cash-value develops as the child gets older, would we? We psychologists would usually say that the child's 'concept' of money develops.
>> 
>> But I think LSV is sticking close to his focus on consciousness, and I think the way he writes is accurate. When I began learning Spanish I started listening to the songs of Shakira. At first, I heard only strings of sounds, with pitch, intensity and the other characteristics that David mentions, but no meaning (no denotation, no assertion, etc.). With time, Shakira's singing started to divide into separate units - words, except that most of them still had no meaning, only vocal qualities. Finally, I started to understand what she was singing about - though still at first with what were from the viewpoint of a native speaker many errors (it was a while before I realized she was keening about torture, not turtles (torturas, not tortugas). In short, word-meaning developed for me. The objects I was able to recognize in the world changed. 
>> 
>> It is for this reason that I would not want to say that the language system that Saussure saw one way and LSV say another way is a "system that each of us carries in our heads." Obviously, each of us develops a competence to recognize, understand and produce grammatical and pragmatically appropriate utterances in the language we grow up in. I think we don't yet know what that competence consists in. I would not want to equate it with the language system. Any more than I think that, to understand cash-value, each us has to carry in our heads the economic system.
>> 
>> Martin
>> 
>> P.S. David, can you tell us a bit more of the history of the phoneme? I had not realized that for Saussure phonemic contrasts carried meaning. Was it with the introduction of the distinctive features analysis of Chomsky and Halle (sp?) that the level of phonemes became considered as involving no meaning? 
>> 
>> On Jun 18, 2011, at 12:25 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
>> 
>>> I want to say a developmental word in defense of Joseph Gilbert, and then make a point about Vygotsky's relationship to Saussure, which I think is also valid for his relationship to German structuralists, including Lewin.
>>> 
>>> Take a look at the attached word file. It's a Korean mother talking to Hayeon, her ten month old. If I translate what she says into English, it would go roughly like this:
>>> 
>>> "Hayeon, let's try shaking our head and see: shakeyshakeyshakeyshakeyshakey....."
>>> 
>>> In other words, Mommy starts out speaking TO the child and continues speaking FOR the child, as a kind of accompaniment of the child's action.
>>> 
>>> The first graph is simply a pitch graph, showing her voice. Now, probably, without ANY knowledge of Korean, you can find the point where Mommy switches from suggesting an action to ventriloquating the action. The pitch stops varying, and it is also higher on the average. Viewed this way, the child's way, we can say that it is a vocal sound, and not a word.
>>> 
>>> The second graph is an intensity graph, showing the loudness of the voice. Again, it's quite easy to find the point where Mommy switches from talking to the child to talking for the child; we don't need any Korean to find this.
>>> 
>>> The third graph shows the formants; that is, the resonance of the voice that produces vowel qualities--again, you can see wild variation in the "word" part of the data and regular repetition in the non-speech phenomenon.
>>> 
>>> Three points:
>>> 
>>> a) To SOME extent, Joseph Gilbert is right. Not words, but VOICES are vocal sounds. Pitch, intensity, and even formant quality are material artefacts, and these things DO have ideal correlates in intonation, stress, and vowel sounds, which in turn are psychologically construed as grammar, lexis, and phonology. There is SOME meaning in these sounds, but it is not word meaning.
>>> 
>>> b) It IS however, the source of word meaning; it is word meaning as becoming if not as being. For if pitch, intensity and formant quality could not be reconstrued as ideal phenomena, then words as we know them could not develop. As far as I know, ALL languages have semi-linguistic children's speech (e.g. "Humpty Dumpty", "higgledy-piggledy") which function as set-up wizards for the ideal system (for example, our own children's rhymes help children sort out difficult vowel-like consonants like /h/).
>>> 
>>> c) This source of word meaning is indeed social, that is, interpersonal (since that is the level at which the social operates in this mother-child interaction). But it's not JUST social; it's a social exaptation of an entirely physical phenomenon (else I would not be able to give it to you as a spectrograph). 
>>> 
>>> This (ever developing) distinction between the source of word meaning (word meaning BECOMING) and word meaning itself (word meaning BEING) is exactly why I think Saussure is wrong to insist on the duality of sounding and wording, and Joseph Gilbert is equally wrong to insist on their complete identity (and also why I think it's not very helpful to dissolve everything into the category of artefact mediated action).
>>> 
>>> Saussure did, as Martin says, distinguish between parole, langue and langage. Parole is the individual utterance; it's what I'm sending you as an attachment. Langue is linguistic structure: it is a kind of dictionary of all the meaning potentials enabled by the system that each of us carries in our heads. And language is a completely imaginary freeze-frame snapshot of all of the different langue made possible in a language community at any given instance; it's all of the performance data taken at a single imaginary instant in time (Saussure's image was of a chess board between actual moves). It is a completely ahistorical (and thus utterly anti-Vygotskyan) construct.
>>> 
>>> In many places in Thinking and Speech, Vygotsky uses terms that sound Saussurean: "sense" and "signification" for example, are kinds of value, and value is a Saussurean term (I assumed it was Saussurean until a friend of mine pointed out the real, Marxian derivation). The distinction between the phasal and the semantic looks a lot like Saussure's syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic, except that of course the former is profoundly historical in Vygotsky, and the latter is just as deeply psychological. Vygotsky's use of "phoneme" is identical with Saussure's; it is any contrast that produces meaning (and therefore has almost nothing in common with the modern use of the term, which refers to meaningless particles that Vygotsky would call "elements" of phonemes). 
>>> 
>>> But I think the editors of the Collected Works who attributed Vygotsky's enthusiasm for phonemes to Saussure are thinking a little like the early readers of Vygotsky in the West who saw his critique of Piaget as behaviorist. Vygotsky was as completely historicist as Saussure was structuralist.
>>> 
>>> A lot of the shift I was talking about, the shift in 1931-1932, is a shift AWAY from German structuralism (that is, Gestaltism) in the direction of explaining structure through function and explaining function through history. The WHOLE of Saussurean linguistics can be summed up as a revolt against history in all of its forms, including the form we see it in the attached graphs of pitch, intensity, and formant quality.
>>> 
>>> David Kellogg
>>> Seoul National University of Education 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> This is a ROUGH translation, because "Let's try" in Korean means something like "try it and see" and "duriduriduri" is 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>   I think that when we discuss meaning DEVELOPMENTALLY, we are g
>>> 
>>> --- On Fri, 6/17/11, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
>>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: Word Meaning and Action: What' Plausible branch?
>>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>>> Date: Friday, June 17, 2011, 6:37 PM
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Martin, I say that *meaning *is an *action*, therefore it is *BOTH subjective AND objective,    BOTH individual AND universal*.
>>> Vera, yes, I have been waiting to get to the developmental part of this discussion, too, because ultimately we can't make sense of any of it without development.
>>> I have been struggling to just put one foot on firm, mutually agreed ground, before taking the next step. But perhaps that can't be done.
>>> The relation between word and meaning is only comprehensible as parts of a joint development.
>>> Andy
>>> Martin Packer wrote:
>>>> Andy, let me take just the first part of your message. Yes, I understand that your position is that a word is just sound, physical form, and that meaning is something attributed to it by the listener, created by the listener, based on their previous experience. This is a very common view of verbal communication. Meaning is subjective, in the consciousness or the mind of the individual. My point, in contrast, is that this view is incorrect and, furthermore, it is nothing like the view LSV presents in T&S. 
>>>> First, it's contradictory. You refer to meaning as both "in the word" and as "created by listening to the word." Which is it? What kind of thing is a word such that meaning can be "vested" in it? If it's just a sound, a physical pattern of sound waves, where does the meaning go? To be consistent, you'll need to keep meaning in the attributions of the individual.   
>>> 
>>> 
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