Academia.eduAcademia.edu

Outline

Title
Abstract
Conclusions
References

Natural Constraints on Language 2

Profile image of Edoardo Lombardi VallauriEdoardo Lombardi VallauriProfile image of Raffaele SimoneRaffaele Simone

Abstract

LibrAirie Droz 11, rue Firmin Massot |1206 Genève-Ge|0041 (0)22 346 66 66 (t)|0041(0)22 347 23 91(f)| droz@droz.org -Abstract: This article starts from the claims of Simone-Lombardi Vallauri , and further develops them. The list of natural constrainst imposed to language by the structure of the world, the human body and communication situations is completed by proposing constraints imposed by the need for representation of reality and events, the ergonomics of any system devoted to the functions of meaning and referring, the structure and potentialities of the brain itself, conceived (crucially) as a set of general-purpose abilities. Such constraints are grouped into a smaller number of macro-constraints and analyzed in some detail, so leading to general conclusions about the desirable targets of further research.

Related papers

Language: A Typological, Functional, Cognitive, Biological and Evolutionary Approach
Pablo Kirtchuk

2009

View PDFchevron_right
Editors' introduction: some concepts and issues in linguistic theory
ADRIANA BELLETTI

On Nature and Language, 2002

Editors' introduction: some concepts and issues in linguistic theory 1 The study of language in a biological setting Dominant linguistics paradigms in the first half of the twentieth century had centered their attention on Saussurean "Langue," a social object of which individual speakers have only a partial mastery. Ever since the 1950s, generative grammar shifted the focus of linguistic research onto the systems of linguistic knowledge possessed by individual speakers, and onto the "Language Faculty," the species-specific capacity to master and use a natural language (Chomsky 1959). In this perspective, language is a natural object, a component of the human mind, physically represented in the brain and part of the biological endowment of the species. Within such guidelines, linguistics is part of individual psychology and of the cognitive sciences; its ultimate aim is to characterize a central component of human nature, defined in a biological setting. The idea of focusing on the Language Faculty was not new; it had its roots in the classical rationalist perspective of studying language as a "mirror of the mind," as a domain offering a privileged access to the study of human cognition. In order to stress such roots, Chomsky

View PDFchevron_right
Language as shaped by the brain
Morten H. Christiansen
View PDFchevron_right
Three-Dimensional Constraints on Human Cognition as Expressed in Human Language
Christopher Adam

2015

Those advocating the existence of a distinct language instinct generally claim that human language is not reliant on general human cognition. However, limitations on recursive patterns in human language are universally attested, from the micro-level elements of phonology, throughout the mid-level elements of morphology and syntax, and up to the macro-level elements of reference in discourse. What these limitations appear to reveal is a pattern seen in other areas of human cognition, namely the human inability to actively recall and balance more than three interdependent variables at a time. Building upon these data patterns and an array of typological postulates, the theory developed in this work offers an alternative lens through which to view language as a landscape of three-dimensional cube patterns which routinely simplify to the twodimensional square level but never venture up to the four-dimensional tesseract level. Since a better understanding of how the human mind processes ...

View PDFchevron_right
Biolinguistics and the human language faculty
Anna Maria Di Sciullo

Language, 2016

The study of the biological basis for human language capacities may prove to be one of the most exciting frontiers of science in coming years.'' (Chomsky 1976) * We wish to thank the participants of the Biolinguistic Conference organized by Anna Maria Di Sciullo at UQAM ,in 2010 on The Language Design and in 2011 on New Perspectives on Language Creativity, the participants of conferences delivered at MIT and at Harvard in 2012, as well as Noam Chomsky, Robert Berwick, Richard Palmer, Boris Steipe and two anonymous referees for valuable comments on an earlier version of this discussion note. This work has been supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research council of Canada to the Major Collaborative Research Initiative on Interface Asymmetries and the Fonds Québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture for the research on Dynamic Interfaces. www.interface asymmetry.uqam.ca, www.biolinguistics.uqam.ca.

View PDFchevron_right
The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar; Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution
Leonardo da Vinci

Artificial Life, 2003

View PDFchevron_right
Linguistic structure
Sydney Lamb

2016

This paper is concerned with discovering the system that lies behind linguistic productions and is responsible for them. To be considered realistic, a theory of this system has to meet certain requirements of plausibility: (1) It must be able to be put into operation, for (i) speaking and otherwise producing linguistic texts and (ii) comprehending (to a greater or lesser extent) the linguistic productions of others; (2) it must be able to develop during childhood and to continue changing in later years; (3) it has to be compatible with what is known about brain structure, since that system resides in the brains of humans. Such a theory, while based on linguistic evidence, turns out to be not only compatible with what is known from neuroscience about the brain, it also contributes new understanding about how the brain operates in processing information.

View PDFchevron_right
Ewa Dabrowska, Review of Language, Mind and Brain: Some Psychological and Neurological Constraints on Theories of Grammar
Pritha Chandra

Cognitive Systems Research, 2007

View PDFchevron_right
THE CONSTRAINTS OF EMBODIMENT AND LANGUAGE-THOUGHT RELATIONS
Prakash Mondal

Studia UBB Philosophia, 2021

This paper aims to impugn the magnified role of specific natural languages in structuring and shaping cognition in the context of languagethought relations. Since language-thought interactions are being increasingly explored in different kinds of empirical studies showing or attempting to show context-specific or general influences of language over thought and thinking, there is reason to tame the excesses of language-specific influences over thought, thinking and cognition. In this regard, any context-specific influences of languages over thought and thinking in being grounded in certain modes/modalities of cognition must be governed by the constraints of body-world interactions that operate on modes/modalities of cognition. Thus, this paper will argue that language-specific influences over thought, thinking and cognition are possible to the extent that they are permitted by the constraints of embodiment.

View PDFchevron_right
Linguistic embodiment and verbal constraints: human cognition and the scales of time
Stephen J. Cowley

Frontiers in psychology doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01085, 2014

Using radical embodied cognitive science, the paper offers the hypothesis that language is symbiotic :its agent-environment dynamics arise as linguistic embodiment is managed under verbal constraints. As a result, co-action grants human agents the ability to use a unique form of phenomenal experience. In defense of the hypothesis, I stress how linguistic embodiment enacts thinking: accordingly, I present auditory and acoustic evidence from 750ms of mother-daughter talk, first, in fine detail and, then, in narrative mode. As the parties attune, they use a dynamic field to co-embody speech with experience of wordings. The latter arise in making and tracking phonetic gestures that, crucially, mesh use of artifice, cultural products and impersonal experience. As observers, living human beings gain dispositions to display and use social subjectivity. Far from using brains to “process” verbal content, linguistic symbiosis grants access to diachronic resources. On this distributed-ecological view, language can thus be redefined as: “activity in which wordings play a part.”

View PDFchevron_right

References (59)

  1. Asher, Nicolas & Pustejovsky, James (2006). "A type composition logic for gener- ative lexicon". Journal of Cognitive Science 7, 1 : 1-38.
  2. Benveniste, Emile (1966). Problèmes de linguistique générale. Vol. I. Paris : Galli- mard.
  3. Black, Max (1952). Language and Philosophy. Ithaca (NY) : Cornell University Press.
  4. Bybee, Joan & Paul Hopper (eds.) (2001). Frequency and the Emergence of Language Structure. Amsterdam & Philadelphia : John Benjamins.
  5. Bybee, Joan (2006). "From usage to grammar : the mind's response to repetition." Language 82: 711-733.
  6. Chafe, Wallace (1979). "The Flow of Thought and the Flow of Language." In Givón, Talmy (ed.). Discourse and Syntax (Syntax and Semantics, vol. 12). 159-181. New York: Academic Press.
  7. -(1987). Cognitive Constraints on Information Flow, in R.S. Tomlin (ed.). Coherence and Grounding in Di scourse. 21-51. Amsterdam & Philadelphia : John Benjamins.
  8. Chomsky, Noam (2005). "Three factors in language design." Linguistic Inquiry 36: 1-22.
  9. Croft, William (2001). Radical Construction Grammar. Syntactic Theory in Typo- logical Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  10. Culioli, Antoine (1999). Pour une linguistique de l'énonciation, Vols. 2/3. Paris : Ophrys.
  11. Deacon, Terrence W. (1997). The Symbolic Species : The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W. W. Norton.
  12. -(2003), "Universal grammar and semiotic constraints". In Christiansen, M. & S. Kirby (eds.). Language Evolution. 111-139, Oxford : Oxford University Press.
  13. Dressler, Ulrich Wolfgang (1990). "The cognitive perspective of 'naturalist' linguistic models". Cognitive Linguistics 1 : 75-98.
  14. Evans, Nicholas & Stephen Levinson (2009). "The myth of language universal : language diversity and its importance for cognitive science". Behavioural and Brain Sciences 32(5): 429-492.
  15. Fauconnier, Gilles (1994). Mental Spaces. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
  16. Fauconnier, Gilles & Turner, Mark (2002). The Way We Think : Conceptual Blend- ing and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. New York : Basic Books.
  17. Fodor Jerry A. & Lepore Ernest (1999). "Impossible Words ?" Linguistic Inquiry 30: 445-453.
  18. Frei, Henri (1929). La grammaire des fautes. Paris : Paul Genthner. Goldberg, Adele E. (2005). Constructions at Work. The Nature of Generalizations in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press
  19. Gross, Gaston (1996). Les expressions figées en français : noms composés et autres locutions. Ophrys: Paris.
  20. Guillaume, Gustave (1988). Leçons de Linguistique 1947-1948. Lille : Presses Universitaires de Lille.
  21. Hanks, William (2005). "Explorations in the deictic field". Current Anthropology 46: 191-220.
  22. Haiman, John (1985). Natural Syntax: Iconicity and Erosion. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
  23. Halliday, Michael A.K. (1969). "Categories of the Theory of Grammar." Word 17 : 241-292.
  24. Hawkins, John A. (ed.) (1988). Explaining Language Universals. Oxford : Black- well.
  25. Heid Ulrich (1994), "On ways words work together. Topics in lexical combina- torics." In Martin, Willy et al. (eds), Euralex 94. Proceedings of the Fourth Euralex International Congress. 226-257. Amsterdam : Vrije Universiteit.
  26. Hirstein, William (2005). Brain Fiction. Self-Deception and the Riddle of Con - fabulation. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
  27. Hjelmslev, Louis (1963). Sproget. En introduktion. Charlottenlund : The Nature Method Center.
  28. Hopper, Paul & Sandra Thompson (1984). "The discourse basis for lexical cate- gories in universal grammar". Language 60 : 703-752.
  29. Jackendoff, Ray (1996). The Architecture of the Language Faculty. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
  30. Jespersen, Otto (1924). The Philosophy of Grammar. London : Allen & Unwin.
  31. Lehmann, Christian (1990). "Towards lexical typology." In Croft William et al. (eds.). Studies in Typology and Diachrony. Papers presented to J. H. Greenberg on his 75 th Birthday. 161-186. Amsterdam & Philadelphia : John Benjamins.
  32. -(2006a) "Arbitraire du signe, iconicité et cercle onomatopéique." In Saussure, Louis de (ed.). Nouveaux regards sur Saussure. Mélanges offerts à René Amacker. 107-123. Geneva: Droz.
  33. -(2006b). "Participant roles, thematic roles and syntactic relations." In Tsunoda, Tasaku & Kageyama, Taro (eds.). Voice and grammatical relations. Festschrift for Masayoshi Shibatani. 167-190. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  34. Levinson, Stephen C. (2000). Presumptive Meanings. The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge (MA) : The Mit Press.
  35. Lombardi Vallauri, Edoardo (2009). La struttura informativa. Forma e funzione negli enunciati linguistici. Rome: Carocci.
  36. -(2004). "The relation between mind and language : The Innateness Hypothesis and the Poverty of the Stimulus." The Linguistic Review 21 : 345-387.
  37. -(2008). "Alguns argumentos contra o inatismo lingüístico." Revista de Estudos da Linguagem 16, 1: 9-47.
  38. Martinet, André (1960). Eléments de linguistique générale. Paris : Armand Colin. Moro, Andrea (2006). I confini di Babele. Milan : Longanesi.
  39. Nunberg, Geoffrey (1995). "Transfers on meaning." Journal of Semantics 12: 109-132.
  40. Pietrandrea, Paola & Raffaele Simone (eds.) (2007). Verbal and Signed Languages. Comparing Structures, Constructs, and Methodologies. Berlin-New York : Mouton-De Gruyter.
  41. Pike, Kenneth (1967). Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behaviour. The Hague: Mouton.
  42. Pustejovsky, James (1995). The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge (MA) : The MIT Press. -(2000). Language, Meaning and the Logic of Concepts. Cambridge (MA) : The MIT Press.
  43. Sapir, Edward (1921). Language. An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York : Harcourt Brace.
  44. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1916). Cours de linguistique générale, ed. by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Lausanne-Paris : Payot. (Later edition : Cours de linguistique générale, ed. by Tullio De Mauro. Paris : Payot 1972.)
  45. Searle, John (1972). "Chomsky's revolution in linguistics." New York Review of Books, June 29, 1972: 16-24.
  46. Simone, Raffaele (1990). "The body of language. The paradigm of arbitrariness and the paradigm of substance." In Amacker, René & Rudolf Engler (eds.). Présence de Saussure. 121-141. Geneva : Droz.
  47. -(1995a). "Iconic aspects of syntax". In Simone, Raffaele (ed.). Iconicity in Language. 153-170. Amsterdam & Philadelphia : John Benjamins.
  48. -(1995b). "The language user in Saussure and after." In Formigari, Lia & D. Gambarara (eds.). The Historical Roots of Linguistic Theories. 233-248. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  49. -(1995c). "The Search for Similarity in the Linguist's Cognition." In Cacciari, Cristina (ed.), Similarity in Language, Thought and Perception. 150-157. Brux- elles: Brepols.
  50. -(1996). "Linguaggio." In Enciclopedia delle Scienze Sociali. Vol. V. 330-344. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana.
  51. -(2003). "Masdar, "ismu al-marrati et la frontière verbe/nom." In Girón Alconchel, José M. (ed.), Estudios ofrecidos al profesor J. Bustos de Tovar. 901-918. Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
  52. -(2006), "Constructions: types, niveaux, force pragmatique," in C. Guillot et al. (ed.), A la quête du sens. Etudes littéraires, historiques et linguistiques en hommage à Christiane Marchello-Nizia. 137-159. Lyon : ENS.
  53. -(2007a), "Constructions and Categories in Verbal and Signed Languages". In Pietrandrea & Simone (2007: 198-252).
  54. -(2007b). Fondamenti di linguistica. 17 th edition. Bari & Rome : Laterza. -(2009), "Ex narratione grammatica". Allegoria 59 : 9-26.
  55. -(to appear). "Discourse Operations and their Impact on Language".
  56. Simone, Raffaele & Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri (2010). "Natural constraints on language : methodological remarks and the physical determinism ». Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 63: 205-224.
  57. Tomasello, Michael (2003). Constructing a Language : a Usage-based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge (MA) : Harvard University Press.
  58. Victorri, Bernard (2002), "Homo Narrans. Le rôle de la narration dans l'émer- gence du langage." Langages 146: 112-12.
  59. -(2006). L'origine du langage. In Dessalles, Jean-Louis, Pascal Picq & Bernard Victorri (eds). Les origines de la culture, les origines du langage. Paris : Collège de la Cité.

Related papers

Natural Constraints on Language 2 - The Ergonomics of the Software (with Raffaele Simone)
Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri

LibrAirie Droz 11, rue Firmin Massot |1206 Genève-Ge|0041 (0)22 346 66 66 (t)|0041(0)22 347 23 91(f)| droz@droz.org -Abstract: This article starts from the claims of Simone-Lombardi Vallauri , and further develops them. The list of natural constrainst imposed to language by the structure of the world, the human body and communication situations is completed by proposing constraints imposed by the need for representation of reality and events, the ergonomics of any system devoted to the functions of meaning and referring, the structure and potentialities of the brain itself, conceived (crucially) as a set of general-purpose abilities. Such constraints are grouped into a smaller number of macro-constraints and analyzed in some detail, so leading to general conclusions about the desirable targets of further research.

View PDFchevron_right
Intrinsic constraints on language: Grammar and hermeneutics
Mark Bickhard

Journal of Pragmatics, 1995

Functional and pragmatic approaches to grammar, and to language more broadly, are well known. All of these approaches, however, accept a core aspect of sentences, or utterances, as consisting of encodings of propositions. They proceed on their functional and pragmatic explorations with this much, at least, taken for granted. I wish to argue, to the contrary, that the functional characteristics of utterances penetrate even to the level of the structure -the grammar -of supposed propositional encodings. More specifically, I argue that the structure that is taken as a structure of propositional encodings is not that at all, but is instead a structure of functionally organized action. Constraints on such structures, in turn -constraints on grammars -emerge as intrinsic constraints on that functional organization. My point will of necessity be made programmatically, since to fill it out completely would be to complete a functional version of universal grammar.

View PDFchevron_right
The Limits of Language-Thought Influences Can Be Set by the Constraints of Embodiment
Prakash Mondal

Frontiers in Psychology, 2021

Language and thought are intimately related to one another, but the level or degree of connectedness between language and thought is not clear due to the fact that the influence of language over thought can be more context-specific or general (see Zlatev and Blomberg, 2015). This reflects general assumptions fromthe Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis (Whorf, 1956). If the influence of language over thought, thinking, and reasoning is very context-specific in being applicable to specific modes/modalities of cognition, such as color, space, visual motion, etc., this may suggest that the constraints of embodiment determine how modal linguistic symbols come to be grounded in neurally instantiated modality-specific systems (Barsalou, 2008).

View PDFchevron_right
Ewa Dabrowska, ,Review of Language, Mind and Brain: Some Psychological and Neurological Constraints on Theories of Grammar (2004) Edinburgh University Press,Edinburgh 0-7486-1475-3
Pritha Chandra

2007

This book presents a comprehensive survey of the various subfields of linguistics, as envisaged from a cognitive grammar perspective. It is divided into two parts; the first half is the ''basic specifications'': issues related to psycholinguistics, acquisition, language and the brain, and evolution of language. The second part elaborates on the ''building blocks'' of language, namely words, sentences, meaning, et cetera ending finally with ''a crash course in cognitive grammar''. Broadly, the book provides some critical insights into the existing rationalist trend in linguistics-the generative approach-and suggests alternatives to developing ''psychologically realistic'' grammatical models. One underlying theme of the book is the relevance of interdisciplinary research and its benefits for linguistic theorizing. As the author notes in her introduction, that though linguistics is often defined as 'the branch of cognitive science dealing with language', ''most linguists hasten to add, it is an 'independent branch', by which they mean that language can, and should, be studied in its own terms, without reference to psychological or neurological concepts and theories'' (p. 1). This problem, as the author laments, becomes more telling with generativist linguists' obsession with linguistic competence rather than performance. This lopsidedness begets linguistic theories which are neither psychologically nor biologically real, thus endangering the (apparently) more desirable course of the discipline toward becoming an empirical science-a science whose theories base on actual usage of language, rather than being motivated by formal elegance.

View PDFchevron_right
BIOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS ON LANGUAGE: NEW DATA FROM HUMAN AUDITORY CORTEX
Alessandra Falzone

2011

View PDFchevron_right
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
© 2025 Academia. All rights reserved