shifts in language use

We are undergoing profound shifts in language use and I am using this post to get my thoughts clear before going back to writing my book, Vowels in an Elevator.

It doesn't work to write the book comparing outdated theories of language with mine, when mine will soon be outdated by the rapid changes we are in the middle of. I do feel, however, that I can integrate some of the changes and even make them work for me, if I am able to describe them carefully and review the implications.

The first is the biggest, most profound, and hardest to imagine, in terms of its consequences. In brief, a huge percentage of communication is being done by AI now; it has no real person behind it until you get to the person who designed the program. When you do business with a company over a phone or computer, you have motives and the AI bot has motives, and its motives are probably more easily tracked than yours. Much of what it does is based on what a person would have done in a similar situation. But it's not entirely the same. It's a different kind of communication. I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

The single biggest consequence is that new slang is no longer likely to spring up. These bots don't just make up new words; they can't. If you use new words with them, they might pick them up or might not. Might turn them around and use them, might not. But most likely their patterns will be based on what they've heard or read by volume. It could affect the rate of change of a language: slowing it down considerably.

Second, the relationship between writing and talking has changed dramatically. We now say things that started in the writing realm (in my household such things as OMG, LOL etc. are routinely spoken); all assumptions that writing is inherently based on speaking are just patently false now. Informal writing in the form of texting is more and more common; writing used to be considered the formalized variant of the language, but is much more than that these days.

There are several generalizations I'd like to free the world of linguistics of, as they don't hold up under the scrutiny of a modern view of language and communication. One is that humans are uniquely equipped to make language, given a working mouth and the brain power to manage complex symbols and grammatical systems. That therefore, animals can never have languages as complex or well-made as ours, because they are missing the mechanisms required to parse them. That humans are therefore superior to animals, being better equipped to. manage these things. That cultures who put their languages into writing systems are inherently more and better evolved than those who didn't, who kept their languages oral, for whatever reason, or simply didn't use whatever alphabet was developed to express them.

To open up this picture would be to say that systems of symbols and commuunication can be used or developed by any animal or any people; that brain power may cause a limit to the complexity or size of a language but that brain power is changeable, evolvable, not restricted to humans; and finally, that there are no inherent restrictions, grammatical or otherwise, that are just programmed into the users of a language such that you must use a language a certain way. Why would nature create restrictions? If it builds a fence, or a place you can't walk, it does it entirely by accident, but if you see a barbed-wire fence in a field, it is undoubtedly made by people and therefore can be removed by people. Nature doesn't make restrictions; it has better things to do.

more later...

the self-organizing community

I've kept my computer on the linguist list all these years, dumping maybe seven or eight messages a day, trying to keep general tabs on the field and find out when the topic of language as a self-organizing system comes up. Now that I am writing my book (finally) this has become more urgent.

There is no movement of linguists working to show that language is a self-organizing system. There were a few people in years gone by who said it, and a few more who did something about it, but they never really made a movement out of it, or built a groundswell of support for the idea.

There are two possible reasons for this, maybe more. The first is that linguistics is an incredibly complex field, and people go off in these little corners of it, like computational linguistics, and what good is language theory to them? They look at work on natural approaches as, what will this do to me? And since Universal Linguistics didn't run them into the ground, they figure that there's no trashing it out, even if they feel it's wrong. Why bother? Let the Universalists run a cover, write the introductory chapter of the textbook, and they'll keep working their little corner of the field. Don't slam Chomsky, at least not until he dies.

Linguists always had another reason not to slam Chomsky: the left, who partly agreed with him and totally agreed with him on the Vietnam War, relied on his academic authority to give him political authority, i.e. good crisp leftist analysis of government forces doing the wrong thing. To undermine his linguistics would be to undermine his politics, and nobody wanted to do that, even me. I agreed with him on the war, just not on genetic underpinnings of language.

So the self-organizing people came along, and people who paid attention wanted to know how this might change things. Well, it might not at all. The basic building blocks of language are still there, and we haven't decided whether they have genetic origin or just got there by random arbitrary chance. That's what my book is about. But what I'm saying is that the evidence I can find points to a self-organizing system, one in which the smallest actors, human perceptual models, interact with each other. I will lay this out in the book. I don't expect the field to change overnight.

I'm somewhat surprised nobody's done this. In fact maybe they have, and I just haven't found it. But no matter, even if they have, I'm going my own way anyway.

book on the horizon

I just ran my book through the printer - 130 pages - and it wore out the printer, which stopped at about 62, only having printed the last 68 pages or so. I don't know why it would start at the end and work forward, but that's what happened, and the ink was a little spare, and the print too small.

But my book, as it is, is now right here in my hands. I will start using this blog again to talk about its development and my progress on it. I have a critical situation which I will explain briefly.

The book is my life work. If there's nothing else I do in life, what I want to do is explain how language should be viewed as a self-organizing system. Many of my thoughts and resources are on this blog somewhere and you can find them by perusing the template and seeing what I dug up. In my better days I was much more careful about resources and documenting what I found. I also have a paper file in front of me that I'm using.

Here's my problem: now that I'm seventy, I'm less inclined to stretch those academic muscles to do the thinking required to lay this all out carefully, though I know I can still do it with what time I have left. I'm impatient with things that remind me of work and of the rigorous discipline of academia that I inhabited for many years. On the other hand, since this is my life work, I have to get going on it and produce something. And, the urgency is increased by the fact that I'm getting cochlear implants, having health issues, etc., so with each blow to my general well-being I find myself saying, "you have to finish this now!"

I got stuck on the literature review section. Briefly, how do I put all this stuff into the book such that people who want to dig more into various aspects of what I'm saying, have resources to pursue it? In many cases I haven't read the books. I know they are there but I am running out of time. I say to myself, I really need to read up on perception, or on Cooley, but at the same time I'm not doing it. I'm door-dashing. I'm taking care of a 19-year-old dependent and a 16-year-old very-dependent. I'm struggling to keep body and soul together. I'm recovering from cochlear implant surgery.

Two big problems have been a stumbling block. First, language is incredibly complex. I feel the urge to explain how writing is related to the whole thing, and at the same time explain how traditional linguistics has always considered it an offshoot of the "real thing," which would be oral language. My theory puts them all on equal footing. Humans use whatever symbols they deem easiest to use, and most of the time this is the sounds we can make in our mouth. In the case of the deaf it is the hands. In the case of people who don't have access to either hand or mouth communication it could be writing. All symbols are arbitrary. All are equal. Humans use the ones that are easiest to establish a communication system with. And that could be writing or chat.

Second, perceptual theory is an entire field of psychology. The moving parts in our system, which we will watch change in a regular, scientifically beautiful pattern which looks so fine and mathematical that it must be magic or exceedingly good design, are actually human perceptions. You perceive the vowels of our language to be like this. Therefore you make them like this, or as close to it as you can. Your production is based on your perception. Your perception is based on your observation of what you have actually heard or seen. To get at that last part, we have to break perception down into two parts: what you actually heard, and what you interpreted it as. A third part is how you created your average. For example, you heard a thousand /a/'s. One of them was an outlier, created by your uncle who came from the old country. You decided not to average him in because you decided he was an outlier. You decided that you wanted to speak like the people you go to school with rather than like your uncle, because there would be a price connected to speaking like your uncle and you didn't want to pay it. Uncle can pay the price; he's from the old country anyway. You want to be seen as coming from here. So you calculate the average out of the other 999 /a/'s that you heard and try to replicate the norm that you perceive. You may in fact calculate wrongly or be influenced unduly by something you saw on television or something else. Your perception may not be the same as what we might calculate as the actual norm if we were to simply measure every /a/ in the world and do the math for the entire system. What I'm saying is that the norm "English /a/ sounds like this" may not be exactly the same as your perceived norm "I believe English /a/ sounds like this" but the perceived norm is what you are using to create your own language. And the norms cover not only the sounds, the vowels and consonants, but also ways of creating sentences, ways of interpreting words, choice of words to use in situations, formal/informal distinctions, etc.

My section on perception will sound much like what you have just read. My time is running out and I can't do even a chapter on the entire story. I no longer believe I can support all this with the appropriate research and make it sound like I read everything there was to be read on the topic. Therefore I can't make a standard lit review as such and shouldn't even try. In brief, the same thing goes for Cooley (looking-glass self) and the field of self-organization physics. I have gotten a little removed from that and will have to fly over it in the book. No matter. Let people look into it in their own time and framework. I will do what I can do.

Stay tuned and I will keep you posted. The book, Vowels in an Elevator, will be out hopefully before the end of the year.

Vowels in an Elevator

Thank God I've finally got to the point where I can finish this work. I've held it out, psychologically, as the only book on my bucket list, a culmination of working teaching language for thirty years and raising ten children, watching some or most of them learn language themselves. It is my work's answer to my training and what I feel was wrong with it. It is my theoretical explanation of language.

As I look at the manuscript that I'd started (I'd written about fifty pages), I feel like it's crap. I have to start over again. No problem, though, what's fifty pages once you get going? And I can already tell, I'll probably start several more times before I get the one I need. But it's written in my head; that's the most important part.

The title can be explained very simply; in fact if you are a follower of this blog you have already read it. This blog is a collection of sources related to the idea that language is a self-organizing system. A self-organizing system is one that can be described as similar to an elevator where a number of people shift around to make themselves more comfortable, and end up in a perfect pattern whereby there is maximum distance between each of them. The fact that vowels do this in a language - preserve maximum distance between them - makes a lot of sense, yet is hard to explain. That is my goal. A self organizing system, in brief, is one in which the players all make an organization by doing what their own little job is; they may be unaware of the grand organization, and they certainly aren't being told to organize in a pattern. Looked at from above, one might conclude that the whole organization is perfect, like a mandala. But it is simply a product of individual small actors doing their part.

So right now I'm practicing so I can make a better blurb, when the time comes. It will be self-published. I'll show some pictures soon.

sources

 

1. G. K. Zipf, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology, Addison-Wesley, Boston, Mass, USA, 1949

   
   

   P. Bak, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality, Copernicus Publications, Göttingen, Germany, 1996. View at: Publisher Site | MathSciNet

   
   

   G. Pruessner, Self-Organized Criticality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2012. View at: Publisher Site

   
   

   Vasilii A. Gromov, Anastasia M. Migrina, "A Language as a Self-Organized Critical System", Complexity, vol. 2017, Article ID 9212538, 7 pages, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/9212538

Jensen, Henrik. J. (2012, Sept. Foreword to Self-Organized Critcality.  Cambridge Univ. Press. 

When Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) was first introduced in 1987 by Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld, it was suggested to be the explanation of the fractal structures surrounding us everywhere in space and time. The very poetic intuitive appeal of the combination of terms self-organisation and criticality, meant that the field gained immediate attention. The excitement was not lowered much by the fact that the claimed 1/f and fractal behaviour were soon realised in reality not to be present in the sandpile model used by the authors to introduce their research agenda. Nor did the lack of power laws in experiments on real piles of sand deter investigators from interpreting pieces of power laws observed in various theoretical models and physical systems as evidence of SOC being essentially everywhere. This led rapidly to a strong polarisation between two camps. On the one side there was the group of researchers who did not worry about the lack of a reasonably precise exclusive definition of the SOC concept and therefore tended to use SOC as synonymous with snippets of power laws, rendering the term fairly meaningless. The other camp maintained that SOC was not to be taken seriously. They arrived at this conclusion through a mixture of factors including the observation that SOC was ill defined, not demonstrated convincingly in models, and absent from experiments on sandpiles. The debate sometimes reflected a reaction in response to bruises received during fierce exchanges at meetings as much as a reaction to scientific evidence.