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SUMMARY:Language and the Flow of Information - Professor Torben Thrane (Aa
 rhus School of Business)
DTSTART:20061017T150000Z
DTEND:20061017T163000Z
UID:TALK5579@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Teresa Parodi
DESCRIPTION:Language\, by near-universal consensus\, is a computational sy
 stem that combines sound and meaning.This is the ‘Double Interface Prope
 rty’ (DIP) of the language faculty (Chomsky\, 1995:2). Since at least Sa
 ussure\, and strictly adhered to by Hjelmslev\, this basic axiom has had a
  pervasive methodological consequence\, expressed succinctly by Chomsky (2
 000:175) ‘It’s a useful heuristic\, I think\, to pursue analogies betw
 een the sound and the meaning sides as far as they plausibly go’. This i
 s the Railway Doctrine. Whatever the language faculty does\, it does on pa
 rallel tracks. \n\nI don’t intend to query the idea behind the DIP – t
 hat the language faculty somehow ‘combines’ sound and meaning – but 
 I want to question the Railway Doctrine. In fact\, I’ll claim that it ha
 s been a hindrance to the understanding of the function of the language fa
 culty\, in particular with respect to language use. I’m basing my argume
 nt on the Extended Representational Thesis\, which has three clauses: \n\n
 The Extended Representational Thesis (ERT)\n\n# All linguistic facts are m
 ental facts\n# All mental facts are representational facts\n# All represen
 tational facts are facts about informational functions \n\nThe ERT is an e
 xtension of Fred Dretske’s (1995:xiii) Representational Thesis\, which c
 ontains only clauses 2 and 3. This\, in turn\, is a codification of Dretsk
 e’s main work\, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981)\, which my 
 title replicates\, perhaps to the point of plagiarism. \n\nI consider the 
 language faculty to be a representational system in Dretske’s sense – 
 i.e. a system which has as its dedicated functionality\, by design or evol
 ution\, to carry information about something distinct from itself. \n\nI t
 herefore propose to replace the Railway Doctrine with the notion of Flow o
 f Information as the guiding heuristic for the exploration of the function
  of the language faculty. The basic consequence of this replacement is the
  adoption of a process-oriented rather than derivational approach – in p
 articular an approach by which language understanding is taken to be a mat
 ter of information processing\, where ‘information processing’ is take
 n more seriously than it usually is. \n\nAlthough this shift in viewpoint 
 has pervasive consequences for the study of all aspects of language and la
 nguage structure\, I’ll delimit my talk to the consequences it has for o
 ur understanding of the role of the lexicon in comprehension. Among other 
 things\, it has led to the discovery of a ‘design feature’ of language
  so far unrecognized\, I believe – the Design Feature of Double Digitali
 zation. \n \n\n*References*\n\nChomsky\, Noam. 1995. _The Minimalist Progr
 am_. Cambridge\, Mass.: MIT Press.\n\nChomsky\, Noam. 2000. _New Horizons 
 in the Study of Language and Mind_. Cambridge: CUP.\n\nDretske\, Fred I. 1
 981. _Knowledge and the Flow of Information_. Oxford: Blackwell.\n\nDretsk
 e\, Fred I. 1995. _Naturalizing the Mind_. Cambridge\, Mass.: MIT Press.
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
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