This circuitry task is both much simpler and much more complicated than getting a sound out of a loudspeaker. Once we have such a circuit, however, well before we get to any “logic,” “syntax,” or “semantic” circuits, we are more than halfway to having a language circuit.
Consider:
We now want to modify this circuit so that it will perform the following task as welclass="underline"
Presented with a human utterance, part of which is blurred — either by other sounds or because the utterer said it unclearly — our circuit must now be able to give back the utterance correctly, using phonic overdeterminism to make the correction: Letting X stand for the blurred phoneme, if the utterance is
The pillow lay at the foot of the Xed
or
She stood at the head of the Xairs
our circuitry should be able to reproduce the most likely phoneme in place of the blur, X.
I think most of us will agree, if we had the first circuit, getting to the second circuit would be basically a matter of adding a much greater storage capacity, connected up in a fairly simple (i.e., regular) manner with the circuit as it already existed.
Let us modify our circuit still more:
We present an utterance with a blurred phoneme that can resolve in two (or more) ways:
“Listen to the Xerds.” (Though I am not writing this out in phonetic notation, nevertheless, it is assumed that the phonic component of the written utterance is what is being dealt with.)
Now in this situation, our very sensitive microphone is still receiving other sounds as well. The circuitry should be such that, if it is receiving, at the same time as the utterance, or has received fairly recently, some sound such as cheeping or twittering (or the sounds of pencils and rattling paper) it will resolve the blurred statement into “listen to the birds” (or, respectively, “listen to the words”) — and if the accompanying sound is a dank, gentle plashing… Again, this is still just a matter of more storage space to allow wider recognition/association patterns.[41]
The next circuitry recomplication we want is to have our circuit such that, when presented with a human utterance, ambiguous or not, it can come back with a recognizable paraphrase. To do this, we might well have to have not only a sensitive microphone, but a sensitive camera and a sensitive micro-olfact and micro-tact as well, as well as ways of sorting, storing, and associating the material they collect. Basically, however, it is still, as far as the specific language circuitry is concerned, a matter of greater storage capacity, needed to allow greater associational range.
I think that most people would agree, at this point, that if we had a circuit that could do all these tasks, even within a fairly limited vocabulary, though we might not have a circuit that could be said to know the language, we would certainly have one that could be said to know a lot about it.
One reason to favor the above as a model of language is that, given the initial circuit, the more complicated versions could, conceivably, evolve by ordinary, natural-selection and mutation processes. Each new step is still basically just a matter of adding lots of very similar or identical components, connected up in very similar ways. Consider also: Complex as it is, that initial circuitry must exist, in some form or another, in every animal that recognizes and utters a mating call (or warning) to or from its own species, among the welter, confusion, and variety of wild forest sounds.
The usual cybernetic model for language interpretation:
where each box must be a different kind of circuit, the first four (and, arguably, all six) probably different for each language strikes me as a pretty hard thing to “grow” by ordinary evolutionary means, or to program on a tabula rasa neural net.
The circuitry I suggest would all be a matter of phonic recognition, phonic storage, and phonic association (short of the storage and associational employment of other sensory information). A great deal of recognition/storage/association would have to be done by the circuitry to achieve language. But nothing else would have to be done, other than what was covered in our original utterance-reproduction circuit.
Not only would the linguistic bugaboo “semantics” disappear (as experiments indicate that it may have already) but so would morphology; and syntax and phonic analysis would simply absorb one another, so to speak.
Would this really be so confusing?
I think not. It is only a rather limited view of grammar that initially causes it to appear so.
Think of grammar solely as the phonic redundancies that serve to transform a heard utterance from the interpretive field, through the range of associations in the hearer/speaker’s memory that includes “his language,” into the hearer/speaker’s generative field as an utterance.
In the qui, quae, quo of Latin, for instance, I’m sure the Roman brain (if not the Roman grammarian) considered the redundancy of the initial “qu” sound as grammatically significant (in my sense of “grammar”), as it considered significant, say, the phonic redundancy between the “ae” at the end of “quae” and the “ae” at the end of “pullae.” (We must get rid of the notion of grammar as something that applies only to the ends of the words!) In English, the initial sound of the, this, that, these, those, and there are all grammatically redundant in a similar way. (The “th” sound indicates, as it were, “indication”; the initial “qu” sound, in Latin, indicates “relation,” just as the terminal “ae” sound indicates, in that language, “more than one female.”[42]) What one can finally say of this “grammar” is: When a phonic redundancy does relate to the way that a sound is employed in conjunction with other sounds/meanings, then that phonic element of the grammar is regular. When a phonic redundancy does not so relate, that element is irregular. (The terminal “s” sound on “these” and “those” is redundant with the terminal “s” of loaves, horses, sleighs — it indicates plurality, and is therefore regular with those words. The terminal “s” on “this” is irregular with them. The terminal “s” at the end of “is,” “wants,” “has,” and “loves” all imply singularity. Should the terminal “s” on “this” be considered regular with these others? I suspect in many people’s version of English it is.) For all we know, in the ordinary English hearer/speaker’s brain, “cream,” “loam,” “foam,” and “spume” are all associated, by that final “m” sound, with the concept of “matter difficult to individuate”—in other words, the “m” is a grammatically regular structure of that particular word group. Such associations with this particular terminal “m” may explain why most people seldom use “ham” in the plural — though nothing empirically or traditionally grammatical prevents it. They may also explain why “cream,” when pluralized, in most people’s minds immediately assumes a different viscosity (i.e., referentially, becomes a different word; what the dictionary indicates by a “second meaning”). I suspect that, in a very real sense, poets are most in touch with the true “deep grammar” of the language. Etymology explains some of the sound-redundancy/meaning-associations that are historical. Others that are accidental, however, may be no less meaningful.
41
The important point here, of course, is that nonverbal material must already be considered
42
This is another invocation of the idea, out of favor for so long, of “morphophonemes.” The theoretical question of course is do they differ (or how do they differ) from “sememes.”