Abstract
Consider the following object, where, depending on how you are viewing this paper, the object may be a series of ink markings, a portion of a matrix of pixels through or from which light is emitted, etc.,
auge
Let’s call the object ‘Shape’. Is Shape a word token? If so, what word type is it a token of? Given how words are traditionally individuated (at least lexicographically), the Spanish, “auge”—meaning, apogee or peak—the French, “auge”—meaning, basin or bowl—and the German, “auge”—meaning, eye, are different words. So, if Shape is a word token (which we’ve yet to establish), is it a token of the Spanish, “auge”, the French, “auge”, the German, “auge”, or some combination of the three? Generalizing beyond Shape and ink markings/matrices of pixels as a potential medium for word tokens, (Central Question) when does something, f—e.g., some utterance, inscription, manual gesture, etc.—constitute a token of a word type, w, as opposed to some other word type, w * , or no word at all? In this paper, I motivate and place Central Question in the nascent and burgeoning subfield of the metaphysics of words. I argue that what makes something, f, a token of a word type, w, is that the process of generating f is explained and guided by one’s (tacit) knowledge of w (or the morphologic structure of w), e.g., one’s semantic, syntactic, morphophonological/orthographic, knowledge of w stored in one’s mental lexicon.
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05 January 2023
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-04024-y
Notes
As is customary, I use type/token vocabulary to talk about words. In doing so, I make minimal assumptions about the nature of word types and tokens, e.g., I don’t assume a realist or nominalist theory of types, nor do I assume that tokens are objects that instantiate properties (despite my talk of Shape as an object), as opposed to bundles of properties (Miller, 2021) or events (e.g., word performances Mallory, 2020).
Wetzel, by ‘word’ I intend to pick out the sense of the term that means, very roughly, entity worthy of a dictionary entry (2002, 2009). Given this sense of the term, ‘word’, (which I take to be the sense discussed in the literature on the metaphysics of words) words are not typed purely on the basis of formal features, e.g., acoustic, shape, or gestural properties, as homonyms and false friends are different word types.
My example of “auge” is borrowed from a discussion of chance false friends in (Domı́nguez & Nerlich, 2002).
I don’t assume that, at a given time and context, an object can only be an instance of one word. There are several compelling examples in the literature of objects that simultaneously constitute several word tokens (e.g., Dilworth, 2003; Kaplan, 1990). In uttering certain puns (Kaplan, 1990), for example, it’s plausible that one generates several word tokens in a single acoustic event. For instance, when George Carlin said, “atheism is a non-[prä-fət][prophet/profit] organization,” it’s plausible that he produced both the words “prophet” and “profit” in his utterance, [prä-fət].
For example, Kaplan (1990, 2011) suggests that a theory of word types may assist in generating a solution to puzzles involving substitution in propositional attitude contexts (e.g., Kripke's puzzle about belief; Kripke 1979) that is compatible with a direct reference theory of proper names. (Although, see (Hawthorne & Lepore, 2011) for skepticism about the usefulness of a theory of words in generating solutions to these types of puzzles.) Alward (2005) argues that reflection on the metaphysics of words can disabuse an illicit semantic essentialist assumption (the assumption that words have their meanings essentially) in the literature on the deflationary theory of truth. Miller (2019) argues that our metaphysics of words has implications for our theory of quotation.
I explain what I mean by ‘tacit’ in Sect. 2.2.
Of course, one could deny that there is any further fact and claim that the instantiation/exemplification or representation relation is brute. I have no knock down argument against this position; however, brute instantiation/exemplification or representation relations seem dubious. Also, I know of no one in the literature on the metaphysics of words who posits these brute relations. At times, Wetzel appears to be committed to the view; however, she clarifies in her (2009, pp. 70–71),
I am not saying that it is just a brute fact that word token t is a token of word T…Spelling and pronunciation are factors that help determine, for each word token t, what word type T it is a token of and why. Other factors include: the linguistic context (phrase, sentence, paragraph,... the linguistic community) in which t occurs, and, as Kaplan (1990) rightly emphasizes, the intentions of the producer of t and perhaps of the producer’s audience, if there is one…
As I demonstrate, pace Wetzel, speaker intention is irrelevant in answering Central Question.
Other examples in the literature abound, e.g., pebbles washed ashore that just so happen to resemble the word “help” (Irmak, 2019).
See (Cappelen, 1999) for further citations of those who adopt an intentional answer to Central Question.
Thank you to an anonymous referee for helpful discussion with regards to this section.
Although Kaplan does not give us an analysis of this link, he claims that it does not have to be strictly causal.
The phrase ‘suitably similar intention’ is included to acknowledge a worry raised by Herman Cappelen (1999) that IPC is viciously circular. According to IPC, what makes u an utterance of a word is an intention to utter that very word. As Cappelen points out, if we are going to characterize someone as uttering a word, w, in terms of having the intention to produce w, we must supply a non-intentional description of w as the object of the speaker’s intention. I agree with Alward (2005) that this was most likely a simple oversight on Kaplan’s part. A plausible amendment to IPC is to have s intend u to be a phonetic token of a type associated with w and for u to play the semantic and syntactic roles associated with w. However, the details of how to amend the content of the intention in IPC aren’t important for our concerns.
Requiring that slips be unintentional and non-habitual differentiates slips from malapropisms—errors in speech that are due to a speaker’s ignorance of canonical features of a word, e.g., its spelling, pronunciation, etc. We will further discuss malapropisms later in the paper.
I will refer to slips-of-the-tongue and complex phonic tics by the abbreviated “slips” and “tics”, respectively.
This is a rough average, as men tend to speak faster than women, younger individuals tend to speak faster than older, and more familiar topics engender quicker speech. See (Liberman et al., 1967) for discussion.
Estimates of average vocabulary size vary as a function of experimental method (usage or sampling-based methods) and, of course, how words are typed (e.g., whether inflections or derivations are considered different words or different forms of the same word) (cf. Segbers and Schroeder 2017).
We can gain access to the output of our speech planning systems prior to overt articulation through generating an utterance in inner speech. We can then consciously ratify this inner speech utterance prior to overt articulation. But this is not the norm. We typically do not consciously ratify each and every word we speak prior to speaking.
Denying that we intend to say the words we do in normal fluid speech doesn’t commit me to the claim that we unintentionally utter those words. Jennifer Hornsby (2005), for example, argues that uttering a series of words in a sentence is not something that one does intentionally but is not unintentional either. The speaking of words in normal fluid discourse may occupy a third category (non-intentional) between intentional and unintentional action. However, slips and complex phonic tics are examples of fully unintentional word production.
D1–D3 do place minimal constraints on how words are typed (e.g., homonyms and false friends are different words); however, I take it that nearly all of those working on the metaphysics of words will accept D1–D3.
Although I’ve presented speech planning as a purely discrete and feedforward process, competing models of speech planning offer various accounts of how these levels of speech planning interact (Rapp & Goldrick, 2000). For example, there may be feedback processes in which the representations at the morphophonological level activate lemmas at ‘higher’ levels of processing. The details of level interaction aren’t relevant for present purposes.
Various models conceive of the relation between activation level and selection of a linguistic unit differently. For instance, some take the probability of selecting a linguistic unit to be directly related to activation levels whereas others require that a (represented) linguistic unit needs to reach a ‘critical difference’ to be selected, where a critical difference requires that the linguistic unit is activated at a relatively higher degree than all competitors.
Ought we extend the honorific “knowledge” to the inaccessible and modularized information active in speech planning and production, information that is not ‘inferentially integrated’ (Stich 1978) with the full-fledge person-level beliefs of speaking agents? It’s well beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the nature of tacit knowledge. However, I take myself to be following common practice in my use of the term (cf. Rattan 2002).
This example is discussed in (Baars, 1992, p. 12).
Given the relevant constraints, there may be multiple, optimal ways to encode the preverbal message one intends to convey in language; and, as we will discuss in the context of blend errors, speech planning may pursue multiple representations in parallel. In addition, we may want our model of speech planning to assign weights to the constraint dimensions that represent the relative importance to the cognitive system of satisfying the dimensions in speech planning. A linguistic representation may also satisfy a given active constraint dimension to a greater or lesser degree. Thus, we could imagine a weighted rank ordering of possible linguistic representations along the constraint dimensions that represents how well a given representation satisfies the weighted constraints. However, the details of this rank ordering don’t matter for our concerns.
See (Amaya 2016) for similar remarks.
Not all slips are the result of external noise. Perseveration errors, like Slip 2, may occur because the activation level of a chosen segment, s, takes time to decay. Thus, speech planning may accidentally reselect s for a later position in a metrical structure because s retains a high activation level from being selected for a previous position in the structure (cf. Dell & Reich, 1980).
Complex phonic tics are always of expressions with which one is competent.
For a seminal discussion of parapraxes, see (Freud 1901).
The rough structure of the counterexample involves a person who (i) wants either to or to, (ii) is indifferent between -ing or -ing, (iii) knows that it is impossible to concurrently and, and (iv) knows that her best chance either to or to is to try to and to try to concurrently (despite knowing that she cannot succeed in both tryings). The details of why examples of this form are supposed to be counterexamples to the Simple View aren’t important for our concerns. What matters is that the slips and tics under discussion don’t involve an agent who meets (i)-(iv).
Despite its name, AHS can involve the movements of limbs beyond one’s hands.
This second disjunct is to cover cases in which one competently produces a token of a word that one hasn’t previously encountered by constructing a representation of the word from known morphemes. For example, one may competently utter the word “untrainable” without having ever encountered the word in virtue of constructing the word from the known morphemes un, train, and able in accordance with the rules of English for combining morphemes.
After writing the full paper, I noticed the similarity between 1-3 and the set of questions Noam Chomsky takes to define the scientific study of language,
-
(i)
What constitutes knowledge of language?
-
(ii)
How is knowledge of language acquired?
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(iii)
How is knowledge of language put to use? (Chomsky 1986, 3).
The similarities between the above questions and 1-3 reflect the fact that both Chomsky and I take the study of our (tacit) knowledge of language to be central to the study of language itself. However, I am trying to answer Central Question in a way that can capture the messiness of real-time, online language production; that is, unlike Chomsky, I am concerned with performance (Chomsky 2014), e.g., speech production as affected by memory limits, attention span, external and internal sources of noise, etc. For example, I am after an account of Central Question that can respect our considered judgment that in Slip 1 the speaker says “tomatoes”, despite the utterance failing to be optimally constrained by the speaker’s intentions and background lexical knowledge that “banana” means banana. Hence, my account draws heavily from work in psycholinguistics as opposed to generative linguistics. This is not to suggest that psycholinguistics and generative linguistics are studying separate cognitive systems with distinct rules and representations (cf. Lewis and Phillips 2015; Mancini 2018), but a full discussion of the relation between generative linguistics and psycholinguistics, their objects of study, and their methodologies is beyond the scope of this paper. Thank you to an anonymous referee for helpful discussion.
-
(i)
It’s beyond the scope of this paper to analyze just what rote copying or mimicry consists in; however, an intentional analysis will surely fail. Automatic mimicry is common in infancy and important in the normal course of cognitive development and language acquisition (Jones 2009), but I take it to be clear that infants aren’t yet the types of creatures that possess full-fledged intentions. In addition, some patients with Tourette’s syndrome or certain forms of aphasia may engage in compulsive echolalia (a type of tic) in which they automatically and unintentionally repeat sounds or words heard in their environment (Ganos et al., 2012). Similarly, patients with certain neurological conditions may engage in echopraxia—the non-linguistic behavioral equivalent of echolalia (Bien et al., 2009). Observing linguistic and non-linguistic behavior can cause the generation of a representation of the act in the premotor cortex that would normally be involved in the execution of that very act. If one can’t automatically inhibit this activation (as neurotypical individuals can) then one may compulsively mimic or mirror observed linguistic or non-linguistic behavior (Lhermitte et al., 1986).
Some theorists, e.g., Kaplan, take entries in the mental lexicon to be themselves word tokens. If this is the case, it might be objected that I can’t help myself to the notion of tacit knowledge of a word. If tacit knowledge of a word, w, is itself a token w then our answer to Central Question needs to give us an account of when some entry in the mental lexicon constitutes a token w, as opposed to a token of some further word, w*, or no word at all. However, I find it odd to claim that the stored information in the mental lexicon regarding a word, w, is itself a token w. Instead, I take this information to be something more akin to a guide regarding how to construct and use that word. Just as a guide to constructing and using a hammer is not itself a hammer, a guide to constructing and using a word, w, is not itself a token w. Inner speech utterances are a much more plausible candidate for mental word tokens, as they constitute words uses. If one still insists that entries in the mental lexicon are themselves word tokens, then mental lexicon entries ought to be seen as special and thus falling outside of the scope of my answer to Central Question. So, stipulatively, my answer to Central Question is meant to cover all word tokens outside of mental lexicon entries.
KPC* should also be understood to cover acts of appropriation like the following. Imagine that a chance spill of ink on a piece of foam board just so happens to resemble a canonical inscription of the expression, “car wash.” Despite the formal similarity, the ink markings (like our examples of the wind and ants) do not constitute word tokens. However, let’s further imagine that an industrious individual, Levi, appropriates the foam board to advertise a car wash, e.g., he parades in front of his carwash, sign in the air, with the goal of attracting customers. In appropriating the ink markings as the concatenation of words, “car,” and, “wash,” against the backdrop of a linguistic community and its practices, it seems that Levi has successfully elevated the ink markings to the status of words. Similarly, Marcel Duchamp’s Ready-mades were objects, e.g., urinals, coatracks, chimney ventilators, that the artist had no hand in making but that were “elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist" (Breton and Éluard 1991), where this choice was made against the backdrop of an artistic community and its practices.
Herman Capellen discusses a similar case of word appropriation but comes to a different conclusion.Capellen argues that, “[t]he identity conditions for sign tokens were developed by us for a reason. We should expect the distinction between things that are sign tokens and things that are not, to be a distinction that says something about how those entities can be used (something about the function they can perform for us)” (1999, 95-96). Although Cappelen doesn’t provide an analysis of when something constitutes a sign token, it appears he is committed to the following sufficiency claim,
Function: A sufficient condition on something,, being a token of a word, w, is that can function as or be used as a token w.
However, there are countless other artifact types the tokens of which have functions that are important to the type of thing they are. For example, weapons, paper weights, door stops, and pestles are functional kinds, where our account of weapons, paper weights, door stops, and pestles ought to (borrowing from Capellen) say “something about how those entities can be used (something about the function they can perform for us).” A rock about the size of my fist could function as a weapon, a paper weight, a doorstop, and a pestle in the right (different) contexts. Does this make any rock the size of my fist a weapon, a paper weight, a doorstop, and a pestle even if no one ever uses the rock as such? Clearly, no. I have no knock down argument against someone who insists otherwise outside of the fact that I doubt many would find the following claims felicitous,
All fist-sized rocks are literally weapons, paper weights, doorstops, and pestles. I don’t merely mean that all fist-sized rocks could be used as such; I mean the stronger claim that all fist-sized rocks are, at this very moment, literally weapons, paper weights, doorstops, and pestles, regardless of how they are used or whether any intentional agent will ever encounter them or use them for any purposes.
So, the mere fact that an errant ink spill that looks like the expression, “car wash,” could be used to advertise a car wash doesn’t make it the case that it currently is a token of the expression. Similarly, not every urinal is a sculpture just because Duchamp could have appropriated it as such.
Of course, processes of generation needn’t resemble the computational processes that subserve human speech in order to result in word tokens. We can certainly imagine artificial systems that ‘speak’ (although, not like we do) and are competent word users but that don’t generate speech computationally in the manner that we do, exhibit the slipping patterns that we do, etc. For instance, insofar as an artificial system doesn’t have, e.g., a tongue, vocal cords, velum, nasal cavities, etc., the system wouldn’t be computing series of articulatory gestures, like we do, needed to produce the sounds of a canonical utterance of a word.
As previously stated, my analysis focuses on human language users, and discussions of artificial systems are beyond the scope of this paper. For instance, (thanks to an anonymous referee for the example) take the Postmodernism Generator (PG) programmed by Andrew C. Buhlak using the Dada Engine, which is a system for generating random ‘text’ from recursive grammars (‘text’ here is being used in a formal sense to mean a string of characters). The outputs of PG seem like (mostly meaningless) strings of English words, but it’s not clear that the system is the right type of thing to ‘know’, even tacitly, anything about English. What we say about PG may depend on how liberally we understand the fundamental notions of representation and intentionality. Nonetheless, PG is clearly unlike the wind or ant trail, as the outputs of PG are explained by the computations it performs over the strings of text on which it operates in virtue of being programmed by Buhlak (a competence speaker of English). Insofar as we want to claim that the outputs of PG are strings of words—and insofar as we don’t want to extend to the system talk of computations over linguistic representations in a manner constrained by tacit linguistic knowledge—we might claim that PG is a ‘derivative word producer’ in the sense that its outputs non-accidentally resemble the linguistic outputs of competent word users in virtue of it being designed to do so. Of course, my notion of ‘derivative word producer’ is schematic and merely suggestive, but, for the sake of space, I will leave further development for future work.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Emily Atkinson, Maegan Fairchild, Brian Weatherson, Emmalon Davis, the MMP group at the University of Michigan, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for helpful comments.
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Munroe, W. What it takes to make a word (token). Synthese 200, 287 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03751-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03751-6