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  • From: "JAMES CHRISTIAN READ" <JCR128 AT student.anglia.ac.uk>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Hebrew and the Elements of Language
  • Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 20:44:17 +0100

Hi Stephen,

thanks for challenging my views on the elements of
language. It made me realise where my arguments could
come across as weak and where they need further
explanations. I will try to deal with your objections as
concisely as I can in the order in which you raised them.

SS: This could equally be rewritten: "Languages are INTERACTION oriented in
the
sense that they exist to communicate the interactions between objects".
Prototypical verbs are, essentially, (inter)actions.

JCR: This is a fair comment but your rephrasal, and, on
thinking about it, my summarial statement, both fall
short of describing language because they do not cover
utterances such as:

i) The book is on the table.
ii) Isn't he a big boy?
iii) My! What a lovely building.

These sentences merely describe the state of the
objects in question. Perhaps I should rephrase and say
that languages exist to "Describe objects AND their
interactions with each other". At this point your
version of my summary could be something like
"Languages are INTERACTION and STATE oriented". But
such a summary begs the question "The interactions and
states of what?"

Please allow me to rephrase the whole thing to put my
claims in a clearer context.

i) Language is an expression of cognition
ii) Understanding is based on cognition
iii) Cognition is object oriented

SS: And in the subsequent paragraph in your 1st email, I'm not that keen on
your
use of the word "merely" - that adjectives are "merely" direct extensions of
the noun, etc. It seems to beg the question, in a subtle way. What if a
particular extension/attribute is precisely what matters, in a particular
communicative event? "No, I said get the BLUE book!" It may be a "mere"
extension of the book, but it's more than "merely" a secondary-importance
word. In this case it's the whole point.

JCR: Another fair point. I'm not suggesting for a
minute that adjectives cannot be meaningful or that in
contrived contexts they can take the focus of the
sentence, as in your very excellent example. Perhaps
'merely' was too strong a word to use. I didn't mean
to relegate them into non existence. But please
consider this. What is the adjective, blue's,
significance in this example if we take away the
contextual reference to an object? The noun 'book' can
live without the adjective but the adjective cannot
survive linguistically without its function of
describing some kind of concrete noun. Also consider
this. The adjective 'blue' could annihilated completely
out of linguistic existence by inventing versions of
nouns which have words for 'bluebook', 'bluecoat' etc.
But the linguistic need for the word 'book' could not
be annihilated by the invention of any number of new
colour terms.

SS: That brings me to my big question: What exactly do you mean by words like
"fundamental", "basic elements", "important", etc.? These words are very
slippery and ambiguous. You might mean (a) that "nouns" (a typological
generalisation for "object word") are necessary for the meaningfulness of
other types of words, or (b) that nouns carry the greater part of the sense
of language utterances, or (c) that nouns are most intimately connected to
our general cognitive natures and abilities, or (d) that nouns are the key
if you want to understand a given literary corpus or worldview - or maybe
something else, or a combination of these. (You implied several in different
parts of your emails.)

JCR: Thanks for asking this question. It brought the
discussion to exactly where it needs to be in order for
me to clarify my model. I guess the main point is as
described earlier, that understanding is based on
cognition which is in turn centred around objects and
the linguistic consequence of which is that objects
have such a heavy linguistic responsibility.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that
languages could be as rich without verbs. All I'm
saying is that the function of verbs is to express
interactions between objects. The reverse, however,
"the function of nouns is to express the subject,
objects and locations of interactions" while true does
not capture their essence to the same degree. The true
function of nouns is to "provide audible labels which
we can associate with a cognitive database of
experiences with objects".

We could quite easily invent a theoretical language
where nouns have varying forms which express their
actions:

i) 'theplaneislanding'
ii) 'theplaneistakingoff'
iii) 'theplaneisparking'

And this is why, in my linguistic model, I am able to
model just about everything as an extension of the
noun. In the three examples above the noun is the
centre of the action and all other words just modify
its behaviour and give temporal markers. In fact,
there is psychological research (Barrett, 1989) that
shows that children's earliest words are very much
context bound. One example is of the child only
produced the word 'duck' when hitting the toy duck off
the edge of the bath. The child was saying one word
'duck' which we adults associate with objects of type
'duck'. The child was associating that one word with
not only the object but the event of the duck flying
off the edge of the bath.

SS: And on your nouns vs. verbs example: It's fairly contrived, and equally
easy
to contrive a counter-example like the following (with its context):

- "What kind of relationship did you have with your father?"
- "I _____ him intensely."

Vs.

- "What kind of relationship did you have with your father?"
- "I loved __ intensely."

JCR: It's a fair comment that my example was contrived
and even as I was writing it I was aware of the kind
of criticism my example could provoke. However, I
would like you to notice a large difference between my
contrived example and your contrived example. Your
contrived example is asking for a specific question
searching for specific answers. My contrived example
asks no specific questions. It just considers how much
general understanding can be drawn from the two
incomplete fragments.

Applying the same to your two contrived fragments I
offer the following analysis.

- "I _____ him intensely."

i) an English speaker understands that there is an
interaction between to objects
ii) he understands clearly who these two objects are
iii) he understands that the interaction is a natural
collocate of 'intensely'
iv) he quickly concludes that the missing verb is either 'loves' or 'hates'

- "I loved __ intensely."

i) an English speaker understands that there may or may not be an interaction
between objects
ii) he understands clearly the subject of the loving
iii) he understands that the object of love could
either be a person, an object or doing something but no clues indicate which
iv) using statistical methods of reasoning he concludes
that 'intensely' is more often a collocate of 'loves'
in the context of loving a person than in the context
of loving a thing or a dog or an activity
v) he concludes that this is therefore probably talking
about a person rather than a thing or an activity but
nonetheless remains unsure

My analysis is subjective but all in all I would say
that the first fragment is more meaningful than the
second.

In any case, I'm not saying that languages can do
without verbs. I'm just saying that our fundamental
understanding is built around cognition of objects. A
very significant part of that cognition is the
observation of what objects do and so it is natural
that languages words which express actions.

So perhaps I should reword my analysis and say that
"languages are object oriented and interaction
oriented". A refined look at the elements of language
could therefore be that the two most fundamental
elements are:

1) names of objects (aka nouns) - adjectives just make
these nouns more specific
2) descriptions of interactions (aka verbs) - adverbs
just make these verbs more specific

In any case, the more 'fundamental' of the two remains
the noun because without the noun there would be
nothing we could cognitively understand to be
interacting. I hope this has better clarified my model
and my reasons for holding it. I do of course welcome
further queries criticisms of it.

James Christian Read - BSc Computer Science
http://www.lamie.org/hebrew - thesis1: concept driven machine translation
using the Aleppo codex
http://www.lamie.org/lad-sim.doc - thesis2: language acquisition simulation
































































t make these verbs more specific

In any case, the more 'fundamental' of the two remains
the noun because without the noun there would be
nothing we could cognitively understand to be
interacting. I hope this has better clarified my model
and my reasons for holding it. I do of course welcome
further queries criticisms of it.

James Christian Read - BSc Computer Science
http://www.lamie.org/hebrew - thesis1: concept driven machine translation
using the Aleppo codex
http://www.lamie.org/lad-sim.doc - thesis2: language acquisition simulation


































































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