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Language as a System of Replicable Constraints

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LAWS, LANGUAGE and LIFE

Part of the book series: Biosemiotics ((BSEM,volume 7))

Abstract

For a psychologist interested in language processing, working in the beginning of the 1990s was not at all easy. On one hand, we had at our disposal methods of traditional psycholinguistics, with its information-processing models consisting of symbols, rules, parsers, and mental lexicons. Most of the body of knowledge about language processing gathered since mid-twentieth century was due to research motivated by this approach and its methodology. On the other hand, we were very much aware that the use of language involves time-dependent dynamical processes taking place both within and between individuals and involving physical stimuli, the nature of which, on the first sight, was not obviously symbolic.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    However, the value of a constraint in a system may be linked to the reliability of copying (i.e., copying of particularly important constraints may be additionally warranted by error-correcting mechanisms).

  2. 2.

    By this I mean inconsequential within the system. The dynamics that makes transformations within such a system meaningful is, artificially, pushed out into the larger system—i.e., that of a person using the formal system.

  3. 3.

    A good example is the attempt to express dynamics present in the external world as a set of discrete stimuli in the early theories of perception (e.g. feature detection theory). Gibson’s theory of perception was a reaction to such attempts and a way to let dynamics back in (e.g., Gibson 1960, 1966).

  4. 4.

    The term “languaging” recently has appeared in the language sciences, adopted from the works of Maturana (1978), see also Cowley (2012). Its increasingly frequent use may testify to the pressures for including dynamics in our explanations of the human language system.

  5. 5.

    The semiotic shift which is based on recognizing that the relations between a sign and its referent is a 3-element relation, i.e., one that includes the interpretant that contextualizes the reference, seems to do part of the job in “uncodifying” the meaning relations.

  6. 6.

    Pattee calls these constraints ‘referents’: “The referent of a symbol is an action or constraint that actually functions in the dynamical, real-time sense. Here is where any formal language theory loses contact with real languages.” (Pattee 1980, p. 263). However, I will refrain from using the notion of referent, in order to avoid the reification of a symbol’s action.

  7. 7.

    It remains to be seen if both can be subsumed by some more general concept—i.e., of a relation that may hold both for mapping between forms and being a potential constraint. Perhaps the constraining relations could be treated as a more general concept. Coding would then be seen as a special case of ‘superconstraining’, to the point of becoming mapping. On the other hand, a very general definition for ‘coding’—such as, e.g., used by Barbieri, that coding is setting “the rules of correspondence between two independent worlds” (Barbieri 2003, p. 94), might, somehow, encompass the flexible relations of constraining, making it just another type of code. The latter possibility seems implausible though, given the dynamic and historical nature of the constraining effects. For now, let me set this discussion aside and, for convenience, distinguish between the two types of relations.

  8. 8.

    Similarly the Braille code: Although numerous petitions arrive at the Braille Authority of North America (mainly from students who would like to count a Braille course towards their second language requirement), the Position Statement of BANA issued in 2008 is: “Braille is not a language but a code.” And further: “To call Braille a language would be comparable to calling ‘print’ a language.”

  9. 9.

    A good introduction to the issue of arbitrariness in language can be found in Chandler (1995).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

    Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi

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  1. Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi
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© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. (2012). Language as a System of Replicable Constraints. In: LAWS, LANGUAGE and LIFE. Biosemiotics, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5161-3_19

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