Hi Ed and all.
A quote from Whorf's _Science and Linguistics_ (not the usual one) ...
:)
j
Let us consider a few examples. In English we divide most of our words into two
classes,
which have different grammatical and logical properties. Class 1 we call nouns,
e.g.,
‘house, man’; class 2, verbs, e.g., ‘hit, run.’ Many words of one class can act
secondarily
as of the other class, e.g., ‘a hit, a run,’ or ‘to man (the boat),’ but, on
the primary level,
the division between the classes is absolute. Our language thus gives us a
bipolar division
of nature. But nature herself is not thus polarized. If it be said that
‘strike, turn, run,’ are
verbs because they denote temporary or short-lasting events, i.e., actions, why
then is
‘fist’ a noun? It also is a temporary event. Why are ‘lightning, spark, wave,
eddy,
pulsation, flame, storm, phase, cycle, spasm, noise, emotion’ nouns? They are
temporary
events. If ‘man’ and ‘house’ are nouns because they are longlasting and stable
events,
i.e., things, what then are ‘keep, adhere, extend, project, continue, persist,
grow, dwell,’ and so on doing among the verbs? If it be objected that ‘possess,
adhere’ are verbs
because they are stable relationships rather than stable percepts, why then
should
‘equilibrium, pressure, current, peace, group, nation, society, tribe, sister,’
or any kinship
term be among the nouns? It will be found that an “event” to us means “what our
language classes as a verb” or something analogized therefrom. And it will be
found that
it is not possible to define ‘event, thing, object, relationship,’ and so on,
from nature, but
that to define them always involves a circuitous return to the grammatical
categories of
the definer’s language.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.mit.edu/~allanmc/whorf.scienceandlinguistics.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjb3ry7q7L2AhUlsFYBHW6GD-MQFnoECAQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2hg-8UwHUfwoG1YQgnV2rW
pp.7-8
________________________________
From: sys-func-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <sys-func-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf
of Edward McDonald <laomaa63@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, 7 March 2022, 12:24 am
To: sys-func@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [sys-func] Re: The Natural Relation Between Semantics And Lexicogrammar
Dear David and all:
I'm sure this time I'm definitely way beyond the statute of limitations, but
I'm squeezing in a little more reflection partly in the context of Chris's
posting of the week almost gone on theoretical vs descriptive categories, and
also because of the recent discussion around Wendy's transitivity question,
which seemed to me - even factoring in my well-known lack of interest in the
grammar of my mother tongue - to be largely going round in circles.
I find your arguments for the posited "naturalness between semantics and
lexicogrammar" - from "nature", phylogeny, and ontogeny - interesting, but they
still seem to me more in the way of axiomatic postulates - "this is what a
natural relationship should look like" - than evidence, let alone, as I said
before, a research program. My scepticism stems from my impression that as soon
as people start getting into the detail of "shared commonalities", the kinds of
things that they identify tend to look suspiciously like the semantics of a
particular language or set of languages.
Anna Wierzsbicka's "natural semantic metalanguage" - which she defends as
almost non-theoretical, as simply "empirical evidence" based on, as it were,
scouring a great range of data - is for me fundamentally undercut by its
insistence on a componential style of semantics, which my "empirical
experience" - as language learner, language teacher, and translator (not to
mention language describer) tells me is a totally simplistic and distorting
model of how linguistic meaning operates.
I recently came across a great quote from the Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao -
one of the very greats of modern linguistics in my book - about an earlier
attempt at a "universal semantics". He starts with the arresting claim - "There
is no true co-ordinate conjunction “and” in Chinese" - and then quietly adds a
deadly little footnote:
Morrish Swadesh once compiled a “culture-free vocabulary” of two hundred words,
intended for use in eliciting native equivalents when recording the languages
of all cultures. In alphabetic (and, therefore, semantically quite arbitrary)
order, the first group of five words were “all,” “and,” “animal,” “ashes,” and
“at.” Except for “animal” and “ashes” it would be very difficult to find
word-for-word Chinese equivalents for these words. That is, three of the first
five words were not at all culture-free, but were features of the English
language, or at least of the Indo-European languages.
(Yuen Ren Chao, Notes on Chinese Grammar and Logic, 1955, p. 34)
I suppose what I'm looking for would be a kind of cross-linguistic methodology
that would be both empirically rich enough to take in a typologically
representative spread of languages, and theoretically sophisticated enough to
frame its generalisations in robust ways. This may well be the kind of model
Sapir and Whorf were working towards before their tragically premature deaths -
and before their supporters rashly trapped them in a "hypothesis" which was
never how they framed the issue and which should never have been framed that
way.
But I also think - and this may be rash of me to utter on an SFL list - that no
one theory of language is going to have everything that's needed for the task.
I would love to see a really solid cognitive theory of language - with the
cognitive based squarely on what we know of cognitive processes in general, and
linguistic cognition in particular, and not just a semantics in disguise -
matched up against a really solid social theory of language - ok I'm happy to
let SFL stand in for that one ha ha - and see what generalisations actually
held from both points of view, and where were the deep points of disagreement.
Where theories disagree is often the most interesting place to look, in my
experience. People like David Butt would no doubt have some ideas in this area
- and I'm sure there's useful and instructive work being done out there.
But the final question must still be: are the language sciences - and the
social sciences and the cognitive sciences and of course philosophy - ready for
such an attempt - to really take seriously the claim that each language, in a
carefully defined sense, "creates its own world". Are we mature enough to move
past "the almost religious alarm and disgust that greeted the ideas of Sapir
and Whorf" (to quote myself) and convincingly dethrone "Standard Average
European" from its still almost unchallenged position as the "default model"?
best to all
Ed
On Wed, Feb 16, 2022 at 4:19 PM 데이브드켈로그_교수_영어교육과
<dkellogg60@xxxxxxxxx<mailto:dkellogg60@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Ed:
If I understand you correctly, you worried that the claim that there is a
natural relationship between meaning and wording is circular, because it rests
on evidence such as the fact that nouns (which tend to take number and gender
rather than tense or aspect) realize entities (which tend to be countable and
classifiable) while verbs realize actions (which unfold over time). Number
seems to have a natural relationship with entities and tense with time.
Similarly, there are common nouns to represent universals and proper nouns to
represent individuals, but there do not appear to be proper verbs to represent
unrepeatable acts. This appeared circular to you because it says that nouns
have these properties, and of course anything having these properties are nouns.
That this is NOT a circular argument should become clear if you apply it to the
relationship between wording and sounding. It is not true that the word "loud"
has be be spoken loudly and only marginally true that words that begin with
nasals have something to do with your nose. So the relationship between meaning
and wording is at the very least MORE natural than that between wording and
sounding (or rather--between wording and articulation, because the relationship
between wording and prosody is actually natural).
But I also deny that the fit between word classes and semantic categories (or,
for that matter, the "context-metafunction hook-up" that Hasan always talked
about) really is the crucial evidence. First of all, the philosophical argument
for a natural relationship is unanswerable: we're part of nature, not some
supernatural force. Secondly, there is the phylogenetic argument: I can't think
of any element of semantics or phonology that doesn't have some obvious
counterpart in the animal world (this is why Halliday insists on
"consciousness" rather than "mind"). Thirdly, there is the ontogenetic
argument: until roughly two or three, children have a "natural" semantics and a
"natural phonology" and their first attempts at putting the two together (e.g.
Nigel's "intonational" grammar) appear to be natural (i.e. prosodic and not
articulatory) as well. For the very young child, it is actually true that the
word "loud" has to be spoken loudly, and that words that begin with nasals have
something to do with sneezles, sniffles, snot, snogging and snoutishness.
dk
David Kellogg
Sangmyung University
New article in Mind, Culture, and Activity:
Vygotsky’s pedology of the adolescent: the discovery of sex and the invention
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New article with Irina Leopoldoff-Martin and Bernard Schneuwly.: "Developing
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New book of translations from L.S. Vygotsky's pedological work with Nikolai
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