Data: dijous 10 de juny del 2021

Hora: 12.00 h

Accés: en línia, amb Collaborate (enllaç: eu.bbcollab.com/guest/cbd918ec0de7403f94ba44b0a67b7a2d)

Resum:

The question regarding the origins and nature of human language has long occupied scholars in various fields. A common view within the generative enterprise is that human language is comprised of “recursive mechanisms for discrete infinity along with mappings to the interfaces with the conceptual-intentional and sensory-motor systems” (Hauser et al. 2014). While modern in its cognitive outlook, this view still follows traditional views of grammar in its conceptualization of language: the unit of analysis of a generative syntactician is typically the sentence. Sentences appear to have a particular form (however language-specific) and a particular function (e.g., to express a thought). The task of a syntactician is to explore how sentences are generated and how their form relates to their meaning, and how language variation comes about and is restricted. This roughly defines the sub-disciplines of linguistics (phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics), which have for a long time defined the field.

In this talk I wish to make the case for exploring the question regarding the nature of language from a different angle, namely from the point of view of talking. That is, when people talk to each other language takes on a specific form and function: on the one hand speakers do not always communicate with full sentences, and on the other hand, utterances are enriched with elements that do not contribute to expressing thought, but instead are used to regulate the interaction itself. Moreover, the forms used to communicate do not only consist of sound-meaning bundles of the Saussurian type (morphemes or words) but instead, in face-to face interaction, language is enriched with embodied forms such as eye-gaze, facial expressions, gestures, and posture. And language is not only used to communicate what we think and know about the world, but also to convey our attitudes and emotions, for example. These aspects of language have traditionally been ignored within the generative enterprise; they have been relegated to performance phenomena and hence not to be considered in our exploration of language competence. This is despite the fact that within scholarly traditions that explore language in interaction, it has long been shown that there is systematicity in the language of interaction. For example, eye-gaze is systematically correlated with particular aspects of the human language faculty such as turn-taking and deixis. Similarly, gestures have been recently argued to be integrated into utterances and that syntax and semantics are modality blind. Thus, forms beyond words and functions beyond expressing thoughts are no less part of our human-specific competence for communication as is language in the narrow sense.

Given these facts about talking the traditional model according to which the computational system interfaces with the cognitive-intentional system (roughly thought) and the articulatory-perceptual system (roughly sound) should be revised. Rather, I conclude that the computational system which derives sentences also has to interface with systems that regulate embodied forms of language as well as non-epistemic functions of language. This leaves us with a practical question: how do we explore these non-traditional form-function pairings in order to draw conclusions about the computational system and its place in human cognition?.

In this talk, I show how the interactional spine hypothesis in the sense of Wiltschko 2021 can serve as a heuristic for discovery and comparison of the forms and functions of talking. I present two case studies: one relating to the form and function of eye-gaze and the other relating to the expression of emotions in language in interaction.