Complexity – from the language user’s point of view

LCIS ConferenceNTNU Trondheim

16.10.2015Frans Gregersen, The LANCHART Centre

Overview

• Part I A bit of History• Part II Some consequences• Part III The Chomskyan formula reversed• Part IV Complexity• Part V: Integrating Macro and Micro

perspectives

A HISTORICAL VIEWONE

THEORY

• Languaging and the consequences of adopting a post-Herderian view of language

• When did the Herderian view become the basis for the investigation of languages

• What did we inherit from the comparative historical studies?

• I hope to demonstrate that complexity to a large extent is a construction of the specific linguistic theory we subscribe to

Before the nation state

The first 99 % of our existence as humans we lived as hunter gatherers• Hunter gatherer subsistence and languagingAgricultural Europe and its linguistic history:• The spread of linguae francae before the nation

state:• Greek koine• Latin and substratum languages• What did this mean for the identification af specific

linguistic resources?

The advent of the nation state

Herderian linguistics:• The ascent of the comparative method with

Rask, Bopp and Grimm, Greek as an example• Old Icelandic as an example• Ideological consequences of the nexus

between nation states and ‘their’ language• Language and nationalism in the European

space

Language history

• What kind of (a) language is Indo-European?Danish under the influence of Middle Low German:forstå, forestå from vor- / vore- and a host of others like this pair, e.g. forstille (sig), forestille etc.the pattern of be- verbs (making an intransitive stem transitive): belejre, besejre, beligge, bebyrde, bekymreconclusion: The grammatical core of a language may be borrowed from another one. With time the knowledge that this was originally ‘foreign’ has completely disappeared

Structuralism and the Herderian heritage

• the wholistic view of la langue• la langue as the same in all individuals: • Cours, p.30: ”la somme des images verbales

emmagasinées chez tous les individus… un trésor déposé par la pratique de la parole dans les sujets appartenant à une même communauté” (a fund accumulated by the members of the community through the practices of speech) and yet: the language is never complete in any single individual but exists perfectly only in the collectivity (Harris’s translation: 13, French original ‘ la masse’)

Note the intertextual exists perfectly…

Valeur linguistique

Structuralism’s langue is dependent on the conception of the relative value of a sign as given by its participation in a structureThe easiest and most obvious examples stem from the lexicon:• Wood as in ‘the woods’, ‘woodwinds’ and ‘made of wood’

has a different value than its cognate in Danish ‘træ’, since ‘træ’ cannot mean ‘forest’ but only ‘træ’ and the material

Building such structures for a language system noone - to the best of my knowledge - takes loans into account, maybe because they would then be forced to investigate which loans belong to which brains

Loanwords27. marts 2015Professor Søren Brunak hovedkraft i ny satsning på big data medicine på SUND og RigshospitaletFORSKNINGEfter mere end 25 år på DTU skifter bioinformatikeren, professor Søren Brunak til en ny hovedansættelse på The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research på det sundhedsvidenskabelige fakultet på Københavns Universitet. Efter mere end 25 år på DTU skifter bioinformatikeren, professor Søren Brunak til en ny hovedansættelse på The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research på det sundhedsvidenskabelige fakultet på Københavns Universitet. Han vil samtidig være tilknyttet Rigshospitalet, hvor han skal være med til at udvikle nye strategier for udnyttelsen af danske sundhedsdata i en tid hvor disse i langt højere grad kan integreres med molekylære screeningsdata. - Vi er meget glade for, at vi sammen med Søren Brunak kan styrke forskningen i og brugen af big data på sundhedsområdet, siger dekan for KU-SUND Ulla Wewer.- Søren Brunak har været en pioner indenfor bioinformatikken, og har i de senere år udviklet nye tilgange til analysen af sundheds- og sygdomsdata, med fokus på at forstå millioner af individuelle livslange sygdomsforløb. I en tid hvor befolkningens levealder vokser, vil denne type forskning pege på nye muligheder både indenfor forebyggelse, diagnostik, behandling og rehabilitering, siger Ulla Wewer.Store perspektiver- Der er store perspektiver i at udvikle samarbejdet på tværs af regioner, hospitaler og universiteter. Vi skal håndtere og udnytte data på nye måder og søge at omsætte dataanalyserne til nye mere præcise behandlingstiltag med færre bivirkninger, siger Jannik Hilsted, lægelig direktør på Rigshospitalet.Søren Brunak fortsætter ledelsen af den danske node i den nye europæiske infrastruktur for bioinformatik, ELIXIR, der omfatter alle danske universiteter. Dette arbejde involverer i stigende grad supercomputerressourcer og vil fortsat blive koordineret fra DTU.

Some further examples

from Argentine Danish: • funktionere (function) – fungere• alkilere (rent) – lejefrom a linguist’s Danish:• licensere (license) – tillade/muliggørefrom a journalist’s Danish:• udkomme, subst. (outcome) – resultatLoan words are ubiquitous in present day Danish

Danish singer Medina on migration policyStemningen var både højspændt og grådkvalt, da Danmarks måske største popstjerne, Medina, fredag gæstede Pressen på P3.Efter hjemkomsten fra en rejse til den græske ferieø Kos har Medina nemlig kastet sig ind i debatten om flygtningesituationen i Europa, og hun lancerer i programmet et frontalangreb på udlændinge- og integrationsminister Inger Støjberg (V).- Det er så forfærdeligt, at medierne i verden samler op på historier som hende idioten, der har lavet de der artikler i en libanesisk avis, lyder skudsmålet fra Medina med henvisning til ministerens annoncer, som er blevet indrykket i fire libanesiske aviser.LÆS OGSÅ: Ombudsmanden rejser sag om Støjbergs flygtningeannoncer”Hun får alle i Danmark til at se grimme ud”Og svadaen fortsætter.- Hende kan jeg bare ikke stå inde for.MEDINA, SANGERINDE, I PRESSEN PÅ P3- Hun sætter et helt lands sikkerhed i jeopardy, når hun skal ytre sine smålige måder at få flygtninge til at holde sig væk på. Det er forfærdeligt, at hun får alle i Danmark til at se så grimme ud. Hende kan jeg bare ikke stå inde for, lyder det fra Medina.

Set phrases• as if - so be it - objection, your honour• be my guest - go on, make my day• Danish proverbial phrases: gå for lud og koldt vand (to be

without a caring wife), cf skarp lud til skurvede hoveder; otherwise ‘lud’ is a technical word (in the soap industry)

• LATIN: Unus quidem, sed leo est• THE unus sed leo-effect (or the aesthetic principle) : If you

perceive that what you want to say can be expressed elegantly (i.e. compressed) using only linguistic resources that your interlocutor knows (how to understand, s/he does not necessarily use them productively herself/himself), then: feel free to do so!

Some consequences

• loan words and their possible integration• loan constructions, set phrases from ‘another language’• mixed languages

• All three phenomena become exceptions and thus peripheral to the real effort, be it the (re)construction of an ancient precursor language or the analysis of contemporary structures; they seem in all cases to lead to more complexity but this – I would argue – is precisely because of the Herderian view of the language user

THE CHOMSKYAN FORMULA REVERSED

three

The Chomsky formula

”Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (radom or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.” (Chomsky: ATS: 3)

The Chomsky formula reversed

• ideal speaker > actual speakers• speaker-listener > difference between

production and perception• homogeneous > heterogeneous/multilingual• competence as the sole object of description >

performance and competence as two sides of the same coin

Actual speakers

• The empirical study of language use and the inference to what is – general - instead of situationally specific– systematic - instead of erratic– systematically variable – instead of constant

• The study of intra-individual variation in all relevant dimensions

Intra-individual variation

• Style as a Labovian concept: intra-individual variation determined by discourse contexts (DCs)

Developments:• Eckert and Rickford 2001• Coupland 2007

DIMENSION CATEGORIES

ENUNCIATION Utterance(s) not the total responsibility of utterer (QILIR)

Utterance the responsibility of utterer (Other)

MACRO SPEECH ACT

Exchange of Information (Inf)

Exchange of Emotion (Emo)

Exchange of Attitudes (Att)

Speech Accompanying Action (Act)

Exchange of Fiction (Fiction)

SPEECH EVENT Single person interview, interlocutors unknown to each other (SingleUkn)

Single person interview, interlocutors known to each other (SingleKn)

More than one interviewee, interlocutors unknown to each other (GroupUkn)

More than one interviewee, interlocutors known to each other (GroupKn)

GENRE Narratives (Narr)

General Account (GenAcc)

Specific Account (SpAcc)

Reflec-tion (Refl)

Soap Box (SoapB)

Confidences (Conf)

Gossip (Gossip)

Other

INTERACTION Absence of Asymmetry (I4)

Monologue (I8)

Reversal of Roles (I5)

Struggle for the floor (I6)

Informants taking over (I7)

Other

ACTIVITY TYPE Conversation (Conv) Background Interview (SocBackgInt)

Language Attitude Study (LAttStudy)

Consent Form (ConsForm)

Conversation with non-participant (ConvNonP)

The DCA coding system

Some resultsThe variable du/man and the DCs“The analysis shows that all the six DCA variables are statistically significant with respect to explaining the variation in the data. In addition, all the fixed effects and interactions of the best model without the DCA variables are still chosen as significant in the new, more elaborate model. This means that the DCA variables influence the choice of generic pronoun even when taking into account that the use of du is changing during the period studied, that it is distributed unevenly with respect to geographical origin, gender, social class and age of the informant, and that the choice of pronoun is influenced by the syntactic function, the type of reference and whether it occurs in a conditional construction or not. In other words, such pragmatic factors as the type of interaction and the genre used by the interlocutors contribute significantly to determining the use of one variant rather than another.”Jensen and Gregersen forthcoming: 13

DCA and the variable of ENG

Ggr Gna Gsr Gre Gsb Gsl u. for G0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Genres and the variants of the variable (ENG) in the entire corpus S1+S2

A single male MC person in three recordings, the AN variable

Narratives

GeneralAccounts

SpecificAccounts

Outside Genres

OLD recordings

interview 42 8 30 28group interview

26 20 23 26

NEW recording

Interview 30 40 31 28

The asymmetry between production and perception: plus at in Danish

“What this means is that there is no obvious priming effect in the particular case of the plus at construction. If we combine these two types of information we are left with a picture of the plus at construction as being an innovation, and a marginal one, evidenced by its distribution. Only 5 of the persons participating in the recordings either as interviewers or informants produced more than 2 instances and 34 of a total of 49 participants produced only 1 instance. Please remember that the total number of possible producers of the plus at in the LANCHART corpus is 637 representing 2 more sites than the 4 represented and a total of 5 generations. Surely this is not a construction which everybody produces. How can we then talk about the plus at construction as being part of the structure of Danish?”Gregersen 2013

COMPLEXITYFOUR

Complexity• Why would anyone introduce plus at at the cost of more

complexity in the system?• Complexity must be derived from a need, otherwise we

seem to miss the point• I have argued that we use resources at our disposal in

order to communicate most effectively regardless of where the resources stem from (in our own history, in the speech community or even in the world of languages)

• This presupposes that a model of the language user must be rather more complex than what the structuralists and the Chomskyans agreed to picture

Languaging involving multiresources 1

How can we (re)construct the competence of the multilingual language user?First of all, s/he would have access to a pool of resources some of which would have a name tag as ‘belonging to’ a particular ‘foreign’ L (loan words, collocations, patterns) others without any (adopted/adapted loan words, calques) because they are seen as ‘native’. These resources would be shared by at least some of his/her interlocutorsThe important question is: How would our language user be certain that s/he was understood and how would we account for the structure of his/her resources in term of linguistic value?

Languaging involving multiresources 2

• The cline of nativeness: foreign, adopted/adapted, native, is precisely a cline

• The use of a non-native ressource has to be accounted for as le mot juste, i.e. as on a par with poet’s selection of odd phrases to communciate an otherwise impossible sign sequence

• This means that we must (re)construct the language user as having a multilingual structure at his disposal

The Macro perspective

• Until now we have actually looked only at the individual

• But the aim of the project is to integrate the two views, both from the individual and from society

• I have argued that sociolinguistics when taken to its logical conclusion entails a new view of the individual, the language user

• It will come as no surprise that sociolinguistics has something to say on societies as well

Two kinds of sociolinguistics

• Fasold: • The Sociolinguistics of society (1984)• The sociolinguistics of language (1990)• Hudson (2001):• Sociolinguistics and the sociology of language:

The difference is very much one of emphasis (p.4), i.e. on language vs. society

Look it up!

• Swann et al.: A dictionary of sociolinguistics 2004: 196:

• MACROSOCIOLINGUISTICS: Sociolinguistics that studies language in society with a relatively large-scale perspective, concerned with the distribution of languages and their broader functions, rather than a close examination of the details of internal language structure and variation. Macrosociolinguistics covers topics such as LANGUAGE CHOICE, DOMAINS, LANGUAGE PLANNING, educational policy etc.

Integrating Micro and Macro

• When an individual in an interaction within a specific domain uses a specific linguistic item s/he projects an identity which evokes stereotypical attitudes

• The use of ‘English resources’ in a domain such as the university is typically connected to internationalisation and success but it does of course depend on which (kind of) English

Danish for international staff

• What kind of stereotypical identity is connected to the use of ’Danish’ linguistic items in the domain of the university by international staff?

• I suggest that the concept of audience design and integration are both important so that this will depend on the knowledge of the user about the linguistic skills of the auditors as well as his or her wish to signal a wish to ’integrate’

Three possibilities

• ‘Danish’ resources used by international staff to audiences with only bilingual Danes: strong wish to integrate: I am like you guys!

• ‘Danish resources’ used by international staff to mixed audiences with bilingual Danes as well as more monolingual ones: politeness: I try to speak Danish so that everyone may understand

• ‘Danish resources’ used to audiences with only monolingual Danes: necessity: I want to be heard!

Complex communities

• Communities such as the Nordic countries have distributed their resources such that it is now close to mandatory to write Ph.D. theses in English (cf. Hvor parallelt)

• This means that the distribution of language resources across domains of speech and writing are characteristically skewed: The final paper has to be in ‘native-like’ English but for most writers all the negotiations leading up to it are carried out in the local Nordic language

Integration of the two kinds of sxls.

• One way to integrate MACROSOCIOLINGUISTICS and MICROSOCIOLINGUISTICS is to focus on variation and to abolish the notion of a difference between variation between languages and within languages

• A post-Herderian view of linguistic resources as primarily languaging resources and only secondarily being equipped with L-tags would do the trick

Jakobson on Child language

• A very influential take on complexity comes from Roman Jakobson’s 1941 book on Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze:

• IF a structure is acquired late, lost first in aphasia and rarely found in the known languages of the world, THEN we may be authorized to label it complex, at least more complex than structures acquired early in child language, lost late in aphasia and extremely frequently found in the world’s languages

Kinds of complexity

Universal complexity (typological complexity):• Look at the speech communities of the world, and see

whether this feature is widespread in use or locally distributed, irrespective of name tags on resources

Within community complexity (order of acquisition): • Look at the order in which a child acquires his or her

resources. Does the feature come late?• Integration with cognition and affect: What does the

child do faced with the job of communicating this? Which semiotic resources are brought to bear on the job?

Conclusion• Rilke on seeing an archaic torso of Apollon: Du musst dein

Leben ändern• I have attempted to sketch how we must change our view of

the language user and his or her embedding in a multilingual (and by the way multimodal) society which puts pressure on his or her semiotic resources for them to do the job of communicating effectively to various audiences using whatever resources s/he has at his or her command, taking into account the values ascribed to these resources in the surrounding society and in the specific subcultures which he or she belongs to, as well as the perceived mastery of the same resources by the intended audience

Thanks a lot for your attention – if I had it!

Greetings to the important LCIS project from the University of Copenhagen LANCHART Centre

BONUS: Rilke on an archaic Torso of Apollon (1908)

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Abersein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bugder Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehender Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehenzu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurzunter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturzund flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändernaus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.