Dec 2, 2022 07:59 PM
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/findi...the-brain/
EXCERPTS: What exactly is language? [...] if we pause for a moment, we find that behind this rich experiential display is something different: the smaller and larger building blocks of a Lego-like game of construction, with parts of words, words, phrases, sentences, and larger structures still.
We can choose the pieces and put them together with some freedom, but not anything goes. There are rules, constraints. And no half measures. [...] But unlike Lego, language is abstract: Eventually, one runs out of Lego bricks, whereas there could be no shortage of the sound b, and no cap on reusing the word “beautiful” in as many utterances as there are beautiful things to talk about.
Language is a calculus. ["(2) A particular method or system of calculation or reasoning."]
It’s tempting to see languages as mathematical systems of some kind. Indeed, languages are calculi [...] But while all these aspects of language strike us almost immediately, as they have philosophers for centuries, the connection between language and computation is not immediately apparent — nor do all scholars agree that it is even right to make it.
It took all the ingenuity of linguists, like Noam Chomsky, and logicians, like Richard Montague, starting in the 1950s, to build mathematical systems that could capture language. Chomsky-style calculi tell us what words can go where in a sentence’s structure (syntax); Montague-style calculi tell us how language expresses relations between sets (semantics). They also remind us that no language could function without operations that put together words and ideas in the right ways...
[...] At this point, most linguists would probably be content with saying that calculi are handy constructs, tools we need in order to make rational sense of the jumble that is language. But if pressed, they would admit that the brain has to be doing some of that stuff, too....
[...] Linguists, logicians, and philosophers, for at least the first half of the 20th century, resisted the idea that language is in the brain. If it is anywhere at all, they estimated, it is out there, in the community of speakers. For neurologists such as Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke, active in the second half of the 19th century, the answer was different. They had shown that lesions to certain parts of the cerebral cortex could lead to specific disorders of spoken language, known as “aphasias.” It took an entire century — from around 1860 to 1960 — for the ideas that language is in the brain and that language is a calculus to meet, for neurology and linguistics to blend into neurolinguistics.
If we look at what the brain does while people perform a language task, we find some of the signatures of a computational system at work... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: What exactly is language? [...] if we pause for a moment, we find that behind this rich experiential display is something different: the smaller and larger building blocks of a Lego-like game of construction, with parts of words, words, phrases, sentences, and larger structures still.
We can choose the pieces and put them together with some freedom, but not anything goes. There are rules, constraints. And no half measures. [...] But unlike Lego, language is abstract: Eventually, one runs out of Lego bricks, whereas there could be no shortage of the sound b, and no cap on reusing the word “beautiful” in as many utterances as there are beautiful things to talk about.
Language is a calculus. ["(2) A particular method or system of calculation or reasoning."]
It’s tempting to see languages as mathematical systems of some kind. Indeed, languages are calculi [...] But while all these aspects of language strike us almost immediately, as they have philosophers for centuries, the connection between language and computation is not immediately apparent — nor do all scholars agree that it is even right to make it.
It took all the ingenuity of linguists, like Noam Chomsky, and logicians, like Richard Montague, starting in the 1950s, to build mathematical systems that could capture language. Chomsky-style calculi tell us what words can go where in a sentence’s structure (syntax); Montague-style calculi tell us how language expresses relations between sets (semantics). They also remind us that no language could function without operations that put together words and ideas in the right ways...
[...] At this point, most linguists would probably be content with saying that calculi are handy constructs, tools we need in order to make rational sense of the jumble that is language. But if pressed, they would admit that the brain has to be doing some of that stuff, too....
[...] Linguists, logicians, and philosophers, for at least the first half of the 20th century, resisted the idea that language is in the brain. If it is anywhere at all, they estimated, it is out there, in the community of speakers. For neurologists such as Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke, active in the second half of the 19th century, the answer was different. They had shown that lesions to certain parts of the cerebral cortex could lead to specific disorders of spoken language, known as “aphasias.” It took an entire century — from around 1860 to 1960 — for the ideas that language is in the brain and that language is a calculus to meet, for neurology and linguistics to blend into neurolinguistics.
If we look at what the brain does while people perform a language task, we find some of the signatures of a computational system at work... (MORE - missing details)
