Interview

Butter and Bread, an Interview with John Taylor*

Nick Ascroft

Nick Ascroft: First o, perhaps a little grandly What is a linguistic theory? What does it attempt to do, to say about language? And to follow: how does Cognitive Grammar dier from other perhaps more well-known theories? Is it simply a matter of privileging structures of meaning over syntactical structures? Can there be a solid distinction between the two? John Taylor: It may seem odd to some people to talk about a theory of language. That, I suppose, is the point of your rst question. Is language the kind of thing that one has to have a theory about? Take another area of experience visual perception. Do we need to have a theory of visual perception? You open your eyes, look at the world, and see it as it is. Wheres the problem? In fact, it has become clear that the brain has to do an awful lot of work in order to interpret the two-dimensional image that is projected onto the retina as a three-dimensional representation of things, distances, edges, textures, and so on. Likewise with language. For a monolingual speaker (and this category comprises, regrettably, the majority of Anglophone Kiwis), your native language is just something that you kinda know and use, without any eort, so whats the issue? Of course, there is an issue, and this is, that abilities (like visual perception, and knowing your native language) which are so natural and seemingly unproblematic, nevertheless turn out to be highly complex, once they are looked at from an enquiring, scientic perspective. Concerning a theory of language, we rst need to ask, what the subject matter of such a theory would be. How, in other words, do we understand language (or languages)? There are many ways of approaching this question, but a view which I think most linguists nowadays would subscribe to, is that language is a mental phenomenon. Knowledge of language is something that resides in the mind/brain, and speaking and listening (writing and reading) are activities in the mind/brain. It was Chomskys great achievement, back in the 1960s, to put the cognitive into the study of language. To study language is to study a mental phenomenon. Linguistics is a part of the wider eld of cognitive science.
Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 4 (2006), 269284. issn 15720268 / e-issn 15720276 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Now, the way Chomsky pursued his linguistics led to some rather strange speculations about the mind. Essentially, Chomsky saw the essence of language as residing in the syntax, and syntax was seen as a computational device for combining meaningless symbols. The rules, and the categories of symbols over which the rules operated, turned out to be so abstract, and so far removed from primary linguistic experience, that they could not plausibly be learned by a child acquiring his or her native language. Hence, the whole apparatus had to be genetically inherited. This is the notion of Universal Grammar. Chomskys programme attracted an enormous number of adherents around the world, and people who are into this kind of stu seem to nd it quite addictive. But there were many sceptics. Cognitive Linguistics, so called, emerged in the 1980s largely as a reaction to the abstraction of the Chomskyan programme. It was in many ways a return to basics that language is essentially a symbolic system for relating sounds to meanings, that grammatical patterns are inherently meaningful, that language is based on general cognitive processes, such as perception, generalisation, categorisation, metaphor, and so on, and that language is an instrument both for ones own thought processes and for social interaction. A leading gure in this movement was George Lako. Cognitive Grammar is a particular theory within this broader trend, associated specically with the work of Ronald Langacker. Not surprisingly perhaps, the focus of Cognitive Linguistics (and Cognitive Grammar) has been on matters semantic. But I would like to correct what seems to be one of your presuppositions, namely, that cognitive = conceptual = semantic. The sounds of ones language are just as much cognitive entities as the meanings which they symbolise. The word cat has a meaning, to be sure. But your knowledge of what the word sounds like (in your and in other peoples accents) is no less of a cognitive entity than its meaning. So Cognitive Linguistics is not just about meaning as such. NA: Do you nd the ideas of Cognitive Grammar convincing? JT: Well, yes. But convincing is perhaps not the appropriate term to use here. Of course, one is attracted to a particular approach for various, no doubt personal and subjective and perhaps even ideological reasons. But ultimately it is not a question of whether a particular approach is convincing or not, but rather whether it oers a framework within which to pursue, to ask, and to nd answers to, interesting questions. You may nd the creation story in Genesis convincing, but it doesnt provide much basis for the further study of cosmology. NA: Well-quoted in the world of literary criticism (though perhaps over-distilled, misrepresented of its intentions) is an idea springing from the philosopher

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Derrida, one which seems to encapsulate a kind of theory of meaning: specically, meanings endless deferral. That is to say, the meaning of any one thing relies on the meaning of some other, and so on in an innite inward spiral into the navel of meaning. Derridas preamble to this notion is the following:
Classical thought concerning structure could say that the centre is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The centre is at the centre of the totality, and yet, since the centre does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its centre elsewhere. The centre is not the centre. (Derrida, 1978, p. 279)

Is this just amateur linguistics? Does Cognitive Grammar propose certain primary entities where the buck of meaning must stop its deferral? How can we ground meaning? Can the structuralism of Linguistics ever compete with the nay-sayers of post-structuralism? JT: First of all, concerning that quote from Derrida. To be honest, it strikes me as just so much gobbledy-gook. What is the totality and what is the centre? The totality, and centre, of what? And what is classical thought, which could say (note: could say, not did say) that the centre is outside the totality, because it doesnt belong to it? How does structure come into it? Its just vacuous nonsense, and you cant argue with nonsense. Thats my contribution to critical textual analysis. That done, I think there may be something in the notion of deferral, as you have explained it. It becomes clear if you try to give denitions of words. You dene a word by using other words, you explain the meaning of a sentence by paraphrasing it, again, using words. But the words you use also need to be dened, and so on, indenitely. One way out of this innite regress would be to insist that a denition must be couched in words which are somehow simpler than the word being dened. There would be little point, for example, in dening the concept of balance by reference to equilibrium. If you dont know what balance is, youre not likely to know what equilibrium is. The Polish-born Australian linguist, Anna Wierzbicka, has been systematically pursuing this programme of denitional reduction for over three decades, and she has arrived at a bedrock of about 60 words/concepts which she claims cannot be further dened, and which enter, often via intervening concepts of increasing complexity, into the denition, so she claims, of all words in all languages. These atoms of human thought include such concepts as I, you, some, one, think, kind of , happen, and so on. One of the more successful aspects of her research programme has been to oer easily accessible denitions of highly culturespecic concepts, such as Japanese amae, German Heimat, Russian dua (as well as Australian mate). The point being that German Heimat doesnt exactly correspond to English homeland, nor does Russian dua exactly correspond to English

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soul, these words have all sorts of cultural and emotional components which are dierent from those of the English terms. And these can be quite eectively spelled out, in a way accessible to a non-German or non-Russian speaker, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (or NSM, as it has come to be known). Another way of breaking the circle of words is to recognise that quite a few concepts are grounded in bodily experience. I mentioned the case of balance. Personally, I doubt whether the notion of balance could ever be fully explained in words (and this would be one of my reservations about Wierzbickas programme). Balancing is something you experience with your body, as when you try to stand on one leg in a strong side-wind, or when you rst learn to ride a bicycle. It has to do with the feel of weights and forces distributed around a central axis. Once acquired, this embodied concept then becomes available for metaphorical applications to other domains of experience, as when you talk about the balance in a photograph, or a balanced diet. This notion of embodiment has been pursued, within Cognitive Linguistics, most notably by George Lako and Mark Johnson. To put the matter somewhat fancifully if we humans had evolved dierently, and had been, for example, gelatinous creatures oating around in the stratosphere (and supposing we also communicated in a language), its doubtful whether we would have a word for balance, or whether we could ever understand the concept. Theres another point I would like to make with respect to the Derridean notion of deferral. Having observed that dening words is fraught with all kinds of diculties, its very easy to throw up ones hands and to say that denition is impossible. Its but a short step, then, to attributing to the impossibility of denition the status of a profound mystical truth. And that may be what the readers of Derrida have done. As a linguist, I would rather try to tackle the dicult issues on their own terms. This links up to my response to your last question. Its not a matter of whether a particular approach, or theory, is convincing or not, its a matter of whether it oers the basis for a coherent research programme. To declare the endless deferral of meaning as a fact about language would eectively put paid to any systematic enquiry into meaning. NA: Semiotics, also long-popular in the gardens of literary criticism, is based on the linguistics of Saussure. Do his ideas still hold water in linguistic circles? JT: Actually, I am a great admirer of Saussure. The Course was one of the rst linguistics texts I had to read as an undergraduate, many years ago, and I must have read it half a dozen times since then, and each time I discover new things in it. One of the fascinating things about it is that it contains germs of ideas which people in many dierent disciplines have been able to develop (possibly in ways which Saussure himself might not have sanctioned). For example, Saussure insisted on the status of a language as a symbolic system, relating sounds and meanings. He also

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insisted that both sounds and meanings are mental entities, not things out there in the world. These notions are axiomatic in the kind of cognitive linguistics that I pursue. Another crucially important concept in Saussure concerns motivation. As we all know, Saussure proclaimed that the sign (the association of a sound and a meaning) was arbitrary, also that the status of sounds and meanings as units within a given language was also arbitrary. For example, it would be an arbitrary fact about English that the concept red is lexicalised at all. But the notion of arbitrariness has to be tempered by the notion of motivation. I would say perhaps over-interpreting Saussure (something we all do) that everything in a language is motivated to some degree, that is, it gets its status as part of the language through many kinds of links and relations to many other things in the language. Even the word-form [red] is motivated, in that it conforms with the consonant-vowel-consonant structure that is sanctioned by countless other words in English. The wordform would be unpronounceable in Mandarin, and therefore could not be part of the Mandarin language system. The notion of a language as a vast calculus of relations is what is at the core, I suppose, of what is known as structuralism. If pursued, structuralism would lead inexorably to a position of radical relativism (poststructuralism?) the idea that each system is unique to itself and incommensurate with any other system. Any word, sentence, text in one language could not, in principle, be translated into any other language, neither could we have any criteria for judging the adequacy of a translation. Saussure, however, cautions that sounds and meanings do bear relations to external reality. In the case of meanings, these concern (and here I am going beyond the few hints in the Course) the embodiment of our concepts, as well as our general perceptual and concept-forming abilities. The sound system of a language is also anchored in facts of human anatomy (what kinds of sounds we can produce) and auditory perception (what kinds of sounds the human ear can discriminate). Often overlooked by commentators, by the way, are the sections in the Course which Saussure devoted to phonetics, and which are still worth a read. So what we have in Saussure is a fascinating dialectic. On the one hand on the other hand. On the one hand, the linguistic sign is arbitrary. On the other hand, the sign is motivated. On the one hand, a language is a self-contained system, on the other hand, it is grounded in external reality and our perception of it. NA: I notice you were just at an International conference featuring a whos-who of Cognitive Linguistics. Did anything really catch your ear there? What are the hot new ideas as you see them? JT: Its dicult to pinpoint hot new ideas. But some trends are evident in the kinds of topics that people were addressing. One example is the growing interest in sign languages. Even laypeople, I think, are aware that the sign languages of the deaf

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are not just wild gesticulations which somehow stand for the words of English (or another language), but are independent systems with their own organisational principles. What makes sign languages especially interesting, as Len Talmy pointed out in his plenary lecture, is that they can overcome the channel constraints of spoken languages. Spoken languages are constrained by the simple fact that you cant say two things at the same time, you are forced to speak words one after the other, and this fact severely limits the ways in which languages are structured. It could even be argued that many of the universal characteristics of (spoken) languages emerged as common solutions to this problem. So, in a sense, languages are as they are, because of the constraints of the acoustic medium which humans have adopted as their principal channel of communication. Sign languages are different, since you can actually sign more than one thing at the same time, and this is one reason why their structure is so dierent. But even spoken languages are not restricted to the acoustic medium. Parallel to the interest in sign languages is an interest in the gestures that accompany spoken languages. This is also a fascinating topic. Try saying an echo question, of the kind He did WHAT!? Not only does your voice go up on what, you might make a rising gesture with your eyebrows, you might even toss your head back a little. Or have you noticed that when you talk about the future, you tend to make hand gestures towards the space in front of you, and that when you discuss the past, you tend to gesture backwards, through your body, so to speak? The gestures have a clear metaphorical base. Try discussing your future plans while gesturing backwards. It doesnt work. Another interesting development its not really a hot new idea, just a new perspective on what linguists should be doing is the growing realisation that linguistic theories have got to be supported by experimental data, which try to tap into what people actually do when they process language, as well as by corpus data, concerning what people actually say. This might seem rather obvious to an outsider, yet it is remarkable how much of linguistic theory has been built on the intuitions of individual linguists about what is, or is not, grammatical in a given language. The whole Chomskyan edice was constructed on intuitions. It also has to be said that the foundational texts of Cognitive Linguistics were also heavily reliant on intuitions and personal judgements. Of course, experimental psycholinguistics (where people press buttons when they see a word and their response time is measured in milliseconds) and corpus linguistics (where all sorts of sophisticated statistics are brought to bear on an assembly of texts) are well-established elds of enquiry. However, these two elds psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics have tended to be somewhat peripheral to mainstream academic linguistics. One trend that I observed at the conference was the desire to more closely integrate theory and data, using experimental and corpus data to support the theory, developing the theory in response to the data.

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Take, for example, the Whoran hypothesis the idea that the language that you speak inuences the way you perceive and conceptualise the world. This has acquired a kind of mythical status for many people (witness the cohort of words for snow which the Eskimos are supposed to have total nonsense, of course, the lexical elaboration of the snow concept in the Inuit languages is not particularly remarkable, nor all that dierent from what we have in English). How could one test the Whoran hypothesis? Well, it turns out to be very dicult to nd knock-me-down evidence. Nevertheless, Whoran eects have been reported, for example, in the ways people of dierent language backgrounds conceptualise and remember (and gesture!) motion events. But very carefully controlled experiments are needed in order to document these eects. I tried to address some of the implications of corpus data in my plenary lecture. One of the points I made was that many expressions, idioms, and so on, that English speakers know, in fact occur very infrequently, perhaps only once, or not at all, even in a 100 million word corpus. Now, 100 million words is a lot of words. It has been estimated that it would take you more than four years of uninterrupted listening before you had been exposed to 100 million words. It is likely, therefore, that many of the things you know about English, you have encountered only a handful of times, during your entire lifetime. You have nevertheless registered them, and remembered them. This suggests to me that the relation between a corpus and a persons knowledge of their language might actually be rather direct. Its as if people are recording the usages that they hear, that they are tallying the frequency of words and word combinations, that they are remembering the precise circumstances in which expressions were used, that they have a kind of taperecorder in the head, which registers the precise way in which dierent speakers pronounce their words. This might sound implausible, but there is quite a lot of evidence in the psychology literature concerning such topics as implicit learning (your present behaviour is inuenced by past events, even though you cannot explicitly recall those events), incidental learning (you think you are listening for content, but you are also making note of incidental aspects, such as the speakers accent and voice quality), and exemplar learning (much of our knowledge about the world might actually be quite low-level, concerning memories of specic incidents). Whats interesting, is when these notions are applied to the study of language behaviour, and the system of knowledge that makes it possible. Theres another side to your question, of course the topics that were not addressed. From my perspective, I nd it regrettable that there was so little attention devoted to such topics as text and narrative, the aesthetic aspects of language use, and the cultural embeddedness of language. But linguists, on the whole, do tend to have a rather narrow view of what the subject matter of their eld should be.

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NA: Conceptual Blending as I have desultorily researched it, seems a fascinating take on cognition and metaphorical structure. How does it dier (or improve on) previous linguistic accounts of metaphor? And because metaphor pervades language (prices are down, completely in the dark, hit the jackpot), even to the roots of its grammatical structure, how essential is this notion of cognition to our understanding of language? And does it provide any insight into linguistic creativity? JT: You are correct that metaphor has become a major theme in Cognitive Linguistics, in some circles. Metaphor is, indeed, everywhere, and this topic was well represented at the conference, for example, in theme sessions devoted to metaphors of the heart in languages around the world, and to the metaphors which are conventionalised in the Chinese language. Metaphor has, of course, been studied for thousands of years, but it was Lako and Johnsons slim volume, Metaphors We Live By (1980), which gave the impetus to more recent studies. Note the title of the volume. It suggests that metaphor is not just a way of talking, it also inuences the way we live, for example, how we solve problems. Theres some fascinating research by Lera Boroditsky which supports this idea. Suppose you learn that a meeting, scheduled for next Wednesday, has been moved forward two days. When will the meeting take place? Some people answer, on Friday, others answer, on Monday. The dierent answers reect two dierent metaphors of time. On the one metaphor, you are stationary, and future events come towards you, as when you say that Christmas is approaching. On the other metaphor, you are moving forwards into the future, as when you say that we are coming up to Christmas. On the rst metaphor, it is the meeting which moves forward, that is, it takes place earlier. On the second metaphor, forward is further into the future. Boroditsky wondered, whether priming people to adopt one or the other of the metaphors (both are well represented in English) would have an eect on how they answered the question about the day of the meeting. So she asked the question of people waiting in a queue (it was a very long queue) at the university cafeteria. Those at the front of the queue would have the awareness of moving forward to get their lunch, those at the back were just hanging around waiting. And, whaddya know, those at the front of the queue, those who had the bodily experience of moving forward, answered on Friday more often than those standing towards the end of the queue. This is a nice illustration, by the way, of the role of embodied experience in language understanding, which we touched on earlier. To a certain extent, the study of conceptual metaphor has been overtaken by the notion of conceptual blending. The idea is due to Gilles Fauconnier (who has a background in Linguistics and Logic) and Mark Turner (who is a literature scholar). Their ideas, which had been gestating for some time, were presented in a book with the unassuming title The Way We Think. Conceptual blending covers much

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more than metaphor and its eects extend well beyond language. The mechanism can be illustrated on one of Fauconniers examples. How do you understand the statement: In France, Bill Clinton wouldnt have been harmed by the Monika Lewinsky aair? Note the occurrence of wouldnt. If the sentence had been In France, Bill Clinton wasnt harmed , it would have been a statement open to conrmation or otherwise of the basis of the historical facts. The use of wouldnt, however, radically changes the interpretation. What is happening here, essentially, is that the expression invites us to set up two mental spaces. In one mental space we have Bill Clinton, Monika Lewinsky, and all the sordid details. In the other mental space, we have France and its institutions. Correspondences can be established between the two spaces. In both spaces there is an elected President, there is the voting public, there is the media and public opinion, there are the sexual foibles of individuals, on so on. We interpret the expression by blending the two spaces into a hypothetical space. We then run the blend and draw certain inferences, for example, that in France, the public doesnt care too much about the sexual activities of their President, or that in France the media would never report on such matters. No doubt there are other ways of interpreting the sentence, but the point should be clear. Understanding an expression involves a lot of background cognition. Blending, according to Fauconnier and Turner, is a unique hallmark of human thought, and its eects are everywhere. NA: Earlier you mentioned the term motion events and how their conceptualisation in various languages amounted to a Whoran eect. Could you expand on this? And what by the way is a motion event? JT: By motion event, I mean quite simply an event in which an entity goes from one place to another. An example would be I ran out of the house. This is a pretty banal sort of sentence, you might think. It becomes interesting, however, once you realise that, for many languages, you cannot translate the sentence word-for-word. In French, you could not say Jai couru hors de la maison. If that meant anything at all, it would mean that I ran around at a place which was outside of the house. To express the idea of running out of the house, you have to package the event in a dierent way. You would have to say something like I exited the house, running: Je suis sorti de la maison en courant. The dierence is that in English the verb expresses the manner of motion (running), while the path of the motion is expressed by the prepositional phrase out of the house. In French, the verb (sortir i.e. exit) only expresses the path; if you want to express the manner of motion you do so in an adjunct phrase: en courant i.e. running. In the Bantu languages of Africa, you package the motion event dierently yet again, by saying something like I ran and left the house.

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These dierences are quite general, in that they apply more or less across the board to the description of motion events, such as I rolled out of bed, I swam across the river, I limped down the street, I shued across the room. Moreover, it would seem that languages of the world generally express motion events on one of three patterns. For example, Chinese expresses motion events rather like English and the Germanic languages, while Japanese and Turkish are like French and the Romance languages. Now, whats this got to do with the Whoran hypothesis? Notice that in French, etc., the expression of manner of motion is optional the verb merely expresses the path (where to, where from, etc.). Dan Slobin, following up earlier work by Len Talmy, did a fascinating study on this, by comparing motion events in English novels and in their Spanish translations. What he found was that the Spanish translators would quite often not bother to express the manner of motion. It would seem that English writers tend to focus quite a lot on selecting their manner of motion verbs (stride, strut, swagger, lope, shue, saunter, drift, prance, mince, amble, and so on there are dozens of them). In Spanish, manner of motion is expressed optionally, and the translators apparently thought that to persistently insert the manner adjuncts (shuing, striding, etc.) would somehow go against the spirit of the language, so they quite often just left them out. There are indications that these dierences might also inuence the ways in which people gesture motion events. Suppose you wished to make a gesture conveying that something rolled down a slope. You might perform a circular movement from your wrist, simultaneously lowering your forearm, thereby conating path and manner. But you could also imagine separating out the two components. For example, you could hold your forearm steady and make the rotating movement, indicating rolling, then make a downward thrust with the forearm, without the rotating movement. There are reports that the second way of gesturing the event occurs with speakers of some French-type languages. So here you have some indications of a kind of Whoran eect. The null hypothesis, of course, would be that this is just a matter of language, everybody the world over sees motion events in the same way. To conrm the Whoran eects, you would need to show that speakers of the dierent kinds of languages process motion events dierently, even on non-linguistic tasks. For example, you might show people a cartoon clip of an object rolling up an incline. You then show them two further clips, involving the same object bouncing up the incline, and rolling down the incline, and ask which of the two clips are most similar. The prediction would be that speakers of English-type languages would tend to group the two rolling events together, while speakers of French-type languages would group the two upward-moving events. Or you might show people a silent lm and some time later (an hour, a day, a week) ask them to retell some episodes, or ask them

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to evaluate some statements about the lm as true or false. Again, the prediction would be that speakers of English-type languages would have paid more attention to manner of motion, and would therefore remember this aspect better, because that is what their language has trained them to do. There were a couple of presentations at the conference on just these topics. The results did lend some (albeit very slight) credence to the Whoran hypothesis. Whoran eects, then, do seem to exist, but they are rather subtle, and need carefully controlled experiments in order to emerge. They are not at all the dramatic people of dierent languages see the world dierently of popular imagination. Notice, for example, that it is not claimed that every speaker of language X will perform dierently from every speaker of language Y on some specic task. This brings in the question of within-group vs. between-group variance. Think, for example, of quite a dierent eld of enquiry intelligence testing. The IQ testers can point to small dierences in average scores on the standardised tests by dierent groups of people males vs. females, Europeans vs. Asians vs. Africans. Much used to be made of these dierences, in support of various political agendas. However, as anyone who has studied statistics will tell you, the signicance of a dierence in average scores declines as the within-group variance increases. If individuals within each group dier widely in their performance on a test, a small dierence between the average performance of the groups means virtually nothing at all. That is to say, your individual score is barely inuenced at all by the group you belong to. I suspect it could be much the same with Whoran eects. Speakers of English, I daresay, dier enormously in how they perceive, process, and remember events they witness. Likewise speakers of French and Turkish and Zulu. So to demonstrate eects of language on conceptualisation you have to factor out these individual dierences. And that, as I said, needs a lot of carefully controlled experimentation and what is left over may not be very dramatic. NA: The issue of Landfall this interview nds itself in is preoccupied with animals, and particularly our place among the clamour of animal noises. We are not alone in communicating through the constrictions and resonances of expelled wind, but how, substantially, are we distinct? That our squeaks and yaups have fancy syntax? There is some element of a continuum obviously; it seems chimps for instance are capable of novel and specic communication. Is communication the bogey here? JT: There are obviously continuities between human and animal communication, just as there are continuities in many other areas between humans and animals. Certainly, the cognitive skills of at least the higher animals, in problem-solving, for example, are not in doubt. But I would want to insist on the uniqueness of human languages vis--vis animal communication systems. It has to do with the point I made at the beginning of our discussion, namely, the symbolic nature of

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language. Animal communication is not symbolic, it is indexical. That is to say, there is a direct, causal relation between the sign and the meaning that it communicates. Of course, some of our vocalisations our squeaks and yaups, as you put it are also indexical. You are in pain, so you yelp; you hear a yelp, and you know someone is in pain. You are drunk, so you slur your speech, and your slurred speech would be interpreted as a sign that you are drunk. But the essence of human language is that you use signs typically, conventionalised arbitrary signs with the intention of referring to conceptualisations which need not be caused by your present environment. You can talk about the past, a hypothetical future, or a counterfactual present. Wasnt it Bertrand Russell who quipped that your dog would never be able to convey to you that my parents were poor, but honest. And a dog could never wag its tail in the past conditional. As you suggest, the bogey here may be the notion of communication. The concept is so vague that it can be applied loosely to just about every aspect of human or animal behaviour. But if we restrict the notion of communication to the transfer of propositional content (i.e. thoughts) from one brain to another, then I would be inclined to side with Chomsky, who insisted on many occasions that human language is not about communication, it is about the representation of thought. If language is for anything, it is to enable us to represent our thoughts, in the rst instance, to ourselves, and only derivatively, and by happenstance, to others. Syntax enters into the equation, because our thoughts are so complex. You wouldnt get very far with one sign per thought. NA: As a corollary, you mention sign language being, in one sense, superior to spoken language. Some fanciful theorists posit that spoken language evolved out of sign language (our laughter, weeping, and victory hoots being the only true descendents of the vocalisations of our chimpy ancestors), perhaps then has language de-evolved? How might it be better still? JT: I think you are referring to the Auckland psychologist, Michael Corballis, and his eminently readable monograph From Hand to Mouth. Corballis speculates that the evolutionary precursors to spoken languages were gestural in nature. Well, who knows? Thats what makes language evolution such a fascinating topic. Talk of evolution, of course, brings up the old controversy between Darwin and Lamarck, concerning the role of acquired traits. Strict Darwinianism denies that acquired traits can be inherited by future generations. If you learn to speak Welsh, and then beget a child, that childs genetic makeup is not going to predispose her to speak Welsh. That much is certain. But cultural evolution is a dierent matter. And in the past couple of thousand years, there have been two cultural innovations which have profoundly aected our conception of language, and perhaps even the nature of language itself. The rst is the invention of writing, and the gradual

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spread of literacy within language communities. The second, which is very recent, is the invention of sound-recording devices. Both inventions make it possible to x an utterance, the rst in its written form, the second in its acoustic form, and make it available for study and contemplation outside the context in which it was produced, and by individuals who were not within earshot of the speaker. Both inventions, in other words, make it possible to decontextualise language. One product of decontextualisation is the dictionary, and the belief that each word in the language can be paired o with one or more denitive meanings. Another product is the notion of the sentence. People do not speak in sentences, as you quickly discover when you try to transcribe an audio recording of unscripted spontaneous speech the sentence is a product of literacy. Linguistics, as a discipline, is also based on the possibility of studying permanent language samples. Current work on gesture would have been inconceivable before the advent of video recordings. Likewise to take up a previous topic advances in corpus linguistics would have been impossible without the availability of electronic data processing. Currently, it may be that electronic media internet chat-rooms, texting, and so on are impacting on the nature of language and our views of it. But I would hesitate to speak of evolution, in the sense of getting better. Evolution is simply a matter of adaptation to the environment. Languages or, rather, their speakers have adapted to technological change, such as the invention of writing, and will presumably continue to do so. NA: You mention aesthetics. This issue of Landfall consisting mostly of poetry, what insights into the joy of language, arguably the genres crux, might the world of linguistics oer? Or, for that matter, what other perspectives might the eld bring to the appreciation of poetry? JT: One of the reasons that people use language is because its fun. We like the sound of our own voices, and it starts very early. Young infants love to babble to themselves, not to communicate anything, but for the evident pleasure it gives them to repeat strings of meaningless syllables. For adults, this love for language will of course develop into the practice of literature and poetry. And everyone, in all societies, admires a good public speaker, a good debater, a good storyteller. Linguists, in general, have devoted relatively little attention to the aesthetic aspects of language. I guess I am no exception. Several years ago, though, I did do a study which might be relevant to the topic. I was interested in the factors which inuence the order of conjoined words in expressions such as bread and butter, sons and daughters, up and down. Semantic factors are clearly at work male before female, more salient before less salient, and such like. What struck me, though, was that if you reversed the order, the resulting expressions somehow didnt sound so good. So I decided to investigate this. In order to eliminate semantic factors, I used

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nonsense syllables, formed by inserting all the English vowels in a [p__p] frame. The nonsense words were paired in all possible ways and conjoined by and. I then asked people which order they preferred. Some very clear patterns emerged, and these seemed to be determined by three factors. First, the relative duration of the vowels: the preferred pattern was short before long. Second, inherent pitch. By this is meant that certain vowels, all other things being held constant, are likely to be spoken on a slightly higher pitch than others. The pattern was higher before lower. The third factor was the second formant the resonance frequency which roughly correlates with the front-back dimension of the vowels, and which gives an ee vowel a more ringing timbre than an oo vowel. The pattern was higher second formant before lower second formant. Putting it all together, it appeared that what people were doing on the preference test was slotting the nonsense syllables into a kind of prosodic template, and the best-sounding phrases were those where the inherent qualities of the vowels best matched the requirements of the template. Now, here is the intriguing bit. This is that conventionalised pairings, such as sons and daughters, or bread and butter, expressions for which a semantic explanation would seem to be at hand, more often than not also obey the phonetic constraints. This is weird, if you think about it. Its almost as if both the sound and the meaning of the words had evolved in tandem, in order that they can take their place in a binomial expression! So, here was a demonstration that the factors which contribute to a subjective impression of euphony can be systematically studied. To be sure, it was a very small-scale investigation, and it hardly tackled the big issues of language and poetry. But it does raise some interesting questions. For example, one might suppose that writers select their words according to the meanings which they wish to convey. But it is also likely, indeed, very probable, that you select your words, and order them in a certain way, not solely because of their meaning, but also because of their sound. NA: Is the science of psychology continuing to kickstart ideas in linguistics? For instance has Evolutionary Psychology made any headway into theories of linguistic phenomena? JT: As I mentioned in connection with Corballiss book, the evolution of language in prehistoric times is a fascinating topic, and open to all kinds of speculations and theorisings. It must be quite a fun area to work in, precisely because its impossible to be proved wrong! On a more serious note, though, one way to approach the issue is to ask, what are the minimum cognitive prerequisites for language? What cognitive abilities does a creature have to have, in order for it to acquire, and to develop, something like a human language? One such ability Ive already mentioned, namely, the ability for symbolic thought. Symbolic thought can be manifested in other activities apart from language, such as art and religious ritual. So, creatures

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who made cave drawings, or who buried their dead in specic ways or in special places, would pass this rst test of a predisposition to language. A second prerequisite, it seems to me, is what the philosophers refer to as a theory of mind. It is sometimes said that one person can never know what goes on inside another persons head. Its a well-known conundrum in linguistic semantics. I know what I mean when I say that I have toothache, but how can I know that you mean something similar when you say that you have toothache? As far as I know, other people may not have a mental life at all. It follows that it would be illegitimate to speak of the meaning of I have toothache as a concept in the head. Thats one side of the argument, one popularised by the later Wittgenstein. The other side says that I know perfectly well what concept you associate with I have toothache. This is because I rmly believe that you have a mind, and a mental and emotional life, which is very much the same as mine. A number of distinctively human characteristics follow. For example, we can intuit what other people are thinking and feeling, we can empathise with other people, we can second-guess their intentions and actions, we can wonder what we would do in their situation, we can imagine how dierent people would view a given state of aairs. These abilities as the child-language researcher and evolutionary anthropologist, Michael Tomasello has argued are absolutely crucial to linguistic development. A mother points to a picture in a book and says cow. The child knows that the mother is naming the picture. Unless the child could mind-read the mother, she would never learn the word cow. This actually gives a new perspective on the language-as-communication issue. To be sure, we use language to convey our thoughts to other people. But, paradoxically, this ability rests on the prior ability to read other peoples minds. And, if you think about it, this has to be true. Unless you had a pretty good idea of other peoples state of knowledge, and how it diered from yours, there would be no rationale for your saying anything at all, or, at least, for saying what you do say. So, where does this leave us on the language evolution question? A reasonable guess would be, that at some time in the past perhaps, not all that long ago a genetic mutation took place, which triggered the ability for symbolic thought, and the ability to empathise and to mind-read. The stage would be set for language to emerge. Once it had emerged, it would confer an enormous survival advantage to its users. NA: And nally, not to mute your own trumpet, what are your own current preoccupations in the worlds of linguistics other than those canvassed? JT: My medium-term project is to work on the idea of the mental corpus as a metaphor for language knowledge. I want to get away from the idea that a language can be represented as a list of words (the dictionary) and a list of rules for combining words (the syntax, or grammar book). Instead, Im exploring the idea that

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knowledge of a language consists in accumulated memory traces of previous encounters with the language. These, together, constitute the said mental corpus. Throwing in a few more components, I would see the mental corpus as being multimedia in nature, comprising not just acoustic but also visual and all sorts of contextual information. It would also have a hypertext format, in that accessing any single entry in the corpus would provide links to many other kinds of entry. It sounds rather outlandish, but this kind of model does actually account for many aspects of linguistic performance that are dicult to square with the dictionary-plus-grammar book model, not the least of which is the ubiquity of the idiomatic in language and our sensitivity to the relative frequency of words and word combinations in the language. Currently, Im sifting through the psychological and cognitive science literature in an attempt to give the whole thing a sound theoretical base.

Note
* This is a slightly shortened version of an interview which rst appeared in the New Zealand literary magazine, Landfall (Issue 210, November 2005). It was conducted by the magazines editor, Nick Ascroft, a Linguistics graduate of Otago University, New Zealand.

References
Boroditsky, L., Ramscar, M. & Frank, M. (2000). The roles of body and mind in abstract thought. Psychological Science, 13, 185188. Corballis, M. (2002). From Hand to Mouth: The origins of language. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and Dierence. Trans by A. Bass. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fauconnier, G. & Turner, M. (2003). The Way We Think. New York: Basic Books. Lako, G. & Johnson. M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Langacker, R. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Slobin, D. (1996). Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and Spanish. In M. Shibatani & S. A. Thompson (Eds.), Grammatical constructions: Their form and meaning (pp. 195219). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, Vol. 3: Grammatical categories and the lexicon (pp. 36149). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, J. (1984). Phonetic factors in word order. Phonetica, 41, 226237. Taylor, J. (2002). Cognitive Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, J. (2003). Linguistic Categorization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3rd edition. (First edition: 1989) Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Harvard University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (1992). Semantics, Culture, and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.