CALL - Article by T.Ravichandran
COMPUTER ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING (CALL)
IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF INTERACTIVE APPROACH:
ADVANTAGES AND APPREHENSIONS
T. Ravichandran
Assistant Professor of English, IIT Kanpur
(Paper presented and published in the Proceedings: National Seminar on CALL,
Anna University, Chennai, 10-12 Feb. 2000, pp. 82-89.)
INTRODUCTION
To begin with the question whether computers really assist second language learning, many teachers
who have never touched a computer tend to respond with an emphatic no; whereas, the overwhelming
number of teachers who give computers a try find that they are indeed useful in second language
learning. No doubt, computers make excellent teaching tools, especially in teaching languages in any
aspect, be it vocabulary, grammar, composition, pronunciation, or other linguistic and pragmaticcommunicative
skills. And the major benefits offered by computer in enhancing language acquisition
apparently outweigh its limitations.
ADVANTAGES
Interest and Motivation
It is often necessary, in a language learning classroom, to provide repeated practice to meet important
objectives. Because this can be boring, painful, and frustrating, many students lose interest and
motivation to learn foreign languages. CALL programmes present the learner with a novelty. They
teach the language in different and more interesting, attractive ways and present language through
games, animated graphics and problem-solving techniques. As a result even tedious drills become more
interesting. In fact, CALL motivates the students to go beyond the point of initial mastery and practice
activity until they become automatic.
Individualisation
Many students need additional time and individualised practice to meet learning objectives. The
computer offers students self-instructional tasks that let them master prerequisite skills and course
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CALL - Article by T.Ravichandran
objectives at a speed and level dictated by their own needs. Besides, additional programmes can be made
available for students who master objectives quickly. These additional programmes can provide more
intense study of the same objectives, proceed to higher objectives, or integrate the objectives covered in
the unit with other objectives. In this manner, a computer gives individual attention to the learner and
replies immediately to questions or commands. It acts as a tutor and guides the learner towards the
correct answer while adapting the material to his performance.
A Compatible Learning Style
Students differ in their preferred styles of learning. Many students seem to learn much more effectively
when they are able to use a compatible learning style than when they are forced to employ an
incompatible one. Serious conflicts may arise when a teacher employs a style that is incompatible with
a student's. In this regard, the computer can be used for adapting instruction to the unique styles of
individual students. To cite an instance, the computer can provide an exciting rapid-fire drill for one
student and a calm, slow-paced mode of presentation for another.
Optimal Use of Learning Time
By using the computer, students are often able to use their Academic Learning Time (ALT) more
fruitfully. Academic Learning Time (ALT) is the amount of time a student spends attending to relevant
academic tasks while performing those tasks with a high rate of success. For example, not all the time
officially scheduled for studying a foreign language is likely to be allocated to it. If an hour is assigned
to working on a topic, but the teacher devotes five minutes at the beginning of the session to returning
papers and five minutes at the end to reading announcements, then only fifty minutes have been
allocated to working on the topic. Scheduled time merely sets an upper limit on allocated time.
Likewise, allocated time merely sets the upper limit to engaged time, which refers to the amount of time
students actively attend to the subject matter under consideration. Even though fifty minutes may be
allocated to studying a topic in French class, students may stare out the window or talk to their
neighbours instead of pursuing the assigned activity. Therefore, even when they are actively engaged in
studying the foreign language, students learn effectively only when they are performing at a high rate of
success. This smaller amount of time is the factor that is most strongly related to the amount of learning
that takes place (Lareau 1985:65-67). Computers enhance second/foreign language academic learning
time by permitting learners to acquire specific information and practice specific skills and by helping
students develop basic tools of learning which they can apply in a wide variety of settings. This also
subverts the relationship between time and traditional instruction. Traditional instruction holds time
constant and allows achievement to vary within a group. Computer-assisted learning reverses this
relationship by holding achievement constant and letting the time students spend in pursuit of the
objectives vary.
Immediate Feedback
Learners receive maximum benefit from feedback only when it is supplied immediately. Their interest
and receptivity declines when the information on their performance is delayed. Yet, for various reasons,
classroom feedback is often delayed and at times denied. A deferment of positive feedback, though
important to act as encouragement and reinforcement, may not harm the progress of the learners.
Nonetheless, any delay in offering negative feedback, the knowledge that one is wrong, will become
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CALL - Article by T.Ravichandran
crucial. A blissfully ignorant student may continue mispronouncing a word or applying a misconception
before discovering the nature of this error. In such case, the computer can give instantaneous feedback
and help the learner ward off his misconception at the initial stage itself. In addition to this, the
computer can look for certain types of errors and give specific feedback, such as, "It looks as if you
forgot the article."
Error Analysis
Computer database can be used by the instructor to classify and differentiate the type of general errors as
well as errors committed by learners on account of the influence of the first language. And thus
determine the most common errors cross-linguistically and more specifically, the particular form of a
particular error type within a particular language group. One such study conducted reveals interesting
findings, for example, that in subject-verb agreement errors the base form of verb was over generalised
incorrectly more often than the -s form by all speakers. Also, Chinese writers typically omitted the
articles a/an more often than the (Dalgish 1987:81-82). A computer can thus analyse the specific
mistakes the student has made and can react in a different way from the usual teacher--this leads the
student not only to self-correction, but also to understanding the principles behind the correct solution.
Guided and Free Writing
A word-processor in the computer can be very effective in teaching guided/free writing activities. The
ability to create and manipulate text easily is the principle on which the word-processor programmes are
founded. In this manner, the word-processor encourages practice in guided or free writing activities
together with a number of sub-skills which comprise the writing process. Aspects of paragraphing,
register, style, cohesion, rhetorical structure, lexical choice and expression can all receive attention
without requiring the user to learn different programmes. The advantage is that the teacher can direct
the student's writing without exerting total and rigid control, allowing for freedom of expression within
certain bounds. Insights into grammar, vocabulary, punctuation, can also be developed.
Pre-determined to Process Syllabus
One major advantage in using a microprocessor is that it can enhance the learning process from a predetermined
syllabus to an emerging/process syllabus. Even the ordinary 'fill-in-the-blanks' type of
monotonous exercise on paper can be made an exciting task on the screen in the self-access mode, where
the students themselves choose their own material. CALL thus facilitates the synthesis of the preplanned
syllabus and learner syllabuses "through a decision making process undertaken by teacher and
learners together" (Breen 1986:51).
Other Prospects
As students and teachers become more sophisticated in their use of such CALL software, more
complicated use of these packages become possible. For instance, the ability of the computer to handle
data, and allow the students to become computational linguists, is very powerful (Hardistry 1988:42-
43). The experiential use of Wide Area Network (WAN) and Local Area Network (LAN) can reveal
unexplored teaching materials and untouched learning methods. By effective use of linking computer
with internet, authentic material can be brought directly into the classroom. A reading text can be done
using that day's news item or weather forecast than using a news clipping of the previous year. The
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CALL - Article by T.Ravichandran
topicality of the issue can generate lot of interest and create authenticity of purpose. Correspondingly,
the facility of LAN can be very useful for the practising of writing pithy telegraphic and telex messages.
Of course, the joy and the excitement involved in the online communication process, both local and
international, is an additional increment one gets from screen-based learning!
APPREHENSIONS
Man versus Machine
In spite of its glaring merits, the prospect of computer-assisted language learning has troubled teachers
more. Perhaps, the major cause of their worry might have developed from the basic problem of
accessibility. Often the computers have been kept in Science or Maths department causing a real and
psychological distance in the minds of the Arts faculty. Nevertheless, many see computer as a threat not
only in terms of its power to replace the traditional skills, which the language teachers promote, but also
its eventual replacement of the teacher himself. Furthermore, shifting the control centre from the
authoritarian teacher to the need-based learner and accepting the humble role of a facilitator/moderator
instead of being a veritable dictator does not come easy for the traditionally clad chalk-talk teacher. In
addition, the computer-student interactive learning not only allows the possibility of role changes, but
also the potential for role-reversal, endangered by physical reversal by students. That is, the students
literally turn their back to the teachers, and silence is now on the part of the teacher until called for
assistance. Yet this role reversal can be exploited, since, it allows the classroom to become far more
"learning centred" (Hardistry 1988:39). This term rather than learner-centred, has been used, to indicate
that the central aim of the language lesson is to enable students to learn.
The Language Lab versus Computer
Another reason why teachers and sanctioning authorities alike are uncertain about the use of computers
in language learning is that computers too, like language lab and other technological innovations, despite
large investments, may remain unused and stored in some dark and abandoned room. After all, language
laboratories in many countries fell into disuse, as they were too tied to one particular form of
methodology, which limited the awareness of the potential. One real danger is that the computer could
be used, like the language lab, as an instrument of Skinnerian behaviourism to facilitate the structuralist
approach with an emphasis on "correctness," negating its flexibility and potential as a teaching aid to
liberate the imaginations of the learners (Moore 1986:18-19). In this perspective, often CALL
courseware has been restricted to drill and practice, with the screen equivalent to the textbook. Much
software, like a textbook, is static both in presentation and in content. Another major criticism of CALL
software is the lock-step design of the lessons. This, in turn, means that CALL software is missing a
chance to exploit the computer's potential, with the result that computer power is not released to the
student adequately.
CALL versus TALL
Computer-Assisted Language Learning(CALL) contrasted with Textbook-Assisted Language Learning
(TALL), demands certain extra-skills such as typography, graphic design, or paper making and the lack
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CALL - Article by T.Ravichandran
of which panics the teacher and the taught alike. For instance, an inadvertent typographical error on the
part of the student input may be classified wrong although the grammar of the student's answer is
correct. Further, in terms of communication of ideas, a book is a means of communication between the
author and the reader. In the same way, the computer is a means of communication between the
programmer and the user. However, in this analogy, the author and the programmer do not mostly share
similar concerns. While the author is bound to be a subject expert, the programmer is mostly a
technician combined with the likely motives of a businessman. This gap between the author and the
programmer is responsible for inappropriate lesson content, poor documentation, errors in format and
content, improper feedback, etc. Likewise, in most software, there is little chance for the teacher to add
to or modify the existing programmes, even if he wishes too, since most of it is locked to prevent
pirating. And for the few of those who develop their own material, the time spent on programming and
typing in the lessons can be quite lengthy.
PROBLEMS OR CHALLENGES?
Yet, these apprehensions should be seen in the backdrop of a developmental stage of computerisation of
individuals and institutions and as a temporary phenomenon. The next generation of teachers and
learners will be part of a computer generation. They will take for granted the skills demanded by
computer technology and handle it as coolly as switching on a taperecorder or watching a television.
Similarly, the pupils will need no readjustment of attitude when faced with a computer in a classroom
and their familiarity and frequent association with the machine would replace the sense of awe and
alienation felt by older people. Then planning pre-, actual and post-computer activities would be easily
possible. The teachers would ensure that they are the ones in control of educational software by
becoming involved in the development process and rejecting those programmes which do not serve their
needs. For that reason, the onus is on the present CALL-disposed teachers that in order to convince the
CALL-deposed teachers about the potentiality of CALL courseware, they must prove that it is not only
perfect in every way, but that it is far better than any other existing teaching aid.
CONCLUSION
An ideal CALL courseware remains not an alternative but a complementary tool in reinforcing
classroom activities. Apart from relying on the ability of educators to create suitable CALL courseware,
the effectiveness of CALL depends on the teacher's readiness to adopt new attitudes and approaches
toward language teaching. The teacher should avoid being skeptical about the use of computer in
language teaching and begin to re-evaluate his methods in the light of computer's tremendous teaching
potential and boldly address to the challenges offered. The computer can best assist teachers if it is seen
not as a replacement for their work but as a supplement to it. By the way, the computer, will not replace
the language teachers, but, used creatively, it will relieve them of tedious tasks and will enable students
to receive individualised attention from both teachers and machines to a degree that has hitherto been
impossible.
Senin, 04 Januari 2010
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:
• to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;
• to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics);
• to develop general theories about how and why language changes;
• to describe the history of speech communities;
• to study the history of words, i.e. etymology.
History and development
Modern historical linguistics dates from the late 18th century and grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents, which goes back to antiquity.
At first historical linguistics was comparative linguistics and mainly concerned with establishing language families and the reconstruction of prehistoric proto-languages, using the comparative method and internal reconstruction. The focus was on the well-known Indo-European languages, many of which had long written histories. But since then, significant comparative linguistic work has been done on the Uralic languages, Austronesian languages and various families of Native American languages, among many others. Comparative linguistics is now, however, only a part of a more broadly conceived discipline of historical linguistics. For the Indo-European languages, comparative study is now a highly specialised field, and most research is being carried out on the subsequent development of these languages, particularly the development of the modern standard varieties.
Some scholars have undertaken studies attempting to establish super-families, linking for example Indo-European, Uralic and other families into Nostratic. These attempts have not been accepted widely because the information necessary to establish relatedness becomes less available as the time depth is increased. The time-depth of linguistic methods is limited because of chance word resemblances and variations between language groups, but a limit of around 10,000 years is often assumed. The dating of the various proto-languages is also difficult. Several methods are available for this but only approximate results can be obtained.
Evolution into other fields
Initially, all modern linguistics was historical in orientation - even the study of modern dialects involved looking at their origins. But Saussure drew a distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics, which is fundamental to the present day organization of the discipline. Primacy is accorded to synchronic linguistics, and diachronic linguistics is defined as the study of successive synchronic stages. Saussure's clear demarcation, however, is now seen to be idealised. In practice, a purely synchronic linguistics is not possible for any period before the invention of the gramophone: written records always lag behind speech in reflecting linguistic developments, and in any case are difficult to date accurately before the development of the modern title page. Also, the work of sociolinguists on linguistic variation has shown synchronic states are not uniform: the speech habits of older and younger speakers differ in ways which point to language change. Synchronic variation is linguistic change in progress.
The biological origin of language is in principle a concern of historical linguistics, but most linguists regard it as too remote to be reliably established by standard techniques of historical linguistics such as the comparative method. Less standard techniques, such as mass lexical comparison, are used by some linguists to overcome the limitations of the comparative method, but most linguists regard them as unreliable.
The findings of historical linguistics are often used as a basis for hypotheses about the groupings and movements of peoples, particularly in the prehistoric period. In practice, however, it is often unclear how to integrate the linguistic evidence with the archaeological or genetic evidence. For example, there are a large number of theories concerning the homeland and early movements of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, each with their own interpretation of the archaeological record.
Sub-fields of study
Comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics (originally comparative philology) is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages in order to establish their historical relatedness. Languages may be related by convergence through borrowing or by genetic descent, thus languages can evolve and are also able to cross-relate.
Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language, and comparative linguistics aims to construct language families, to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages. In order to maintain a clear distinction between attested and reconstructed forms, comparative linguists prefix an asterisk to any form that is not found in surviving texts.
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words—when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. A word may enter a language as a loanword (i.e., as a word from one language adopted by speakers of another language), through derivational morphology by combining pre-existing elements in the language, by a hybrid of these two processes called phono-semantic matching, or in several other minor ways.
In languages with a long and detailed history, etymology makes use of philology, the study of how words change from culture to culture over time. However, etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about languages that are too old for any direct information (such as writing) to be known. By analyzing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make inferences, about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word roots have been found which can be traced all the way back to the origin of, for instance, the Indo-European language family.
Even though etymological research originally grew from the philological tradition, nowadays much etymological research is done in language families where little or no early documentation is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian.
Dialectology
Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, the varieties of a language that are characteristic of particular groups, based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features (as opposed to variations based on social factors, which are studied in sociolinguistics, or variations based on time, which are studied in historical linguistics. Dialectology treats such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic variation.
Dialectologists are ultimately concerned with grammatical features which correspond to regional areas. Thus they are usually dealing with populations living in their areas for generations without moving, but also with immigrant groups bringing their languages to new settlements.
Phonology
Phonology is a sub-field of historical linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language or set of languages change over time. Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages.
An important part of phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units within a language. For example, the "p" in "pin" is aspirated while the same phoneme in "spin" is not. In some other languages, for example Thai and Quechua, this same difference of aspiration or non-aspiration does differentiate phonemes.
In addition to the minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, such as the /p/ in English, and topics such as syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation.
The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign languages, even though the phonological units do not consist of sounds. The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality because they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones.
Morphology
Morphology - the study of the formal means of expression in a language; in the context of historical linguistics, how the formal means of expression change over time; for instance, languages with complex inflectional systems tend to be subject to a simplification process
is the field of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words as a formal means of expression.[1] Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology. While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word-formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages, in the context of historical linguistics, how the means of expression change over time. See grammaticalisation.
Syntax
Syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages. The term syntax is used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the syntax of Modern Irish". Modern researchers in syntax attempt to describe languages in terms of such rules. Many professionals in this discipline attempt to find general rules that apply to all natural languages in the context of historical linguistics, how characteristics of sentence structure in related languages changed over time. See grammaticalisation.
Comparison of traditional and modern historical linguistics
There are several differences that occur dealing with the objects of research of traditional and modern historical linguistics. The focus of traditional historical linguistics lies in keeping records of language change in past times of a language or language family. Modern historical linguistics, however, focuses on the progress of language change. They try to analyze the cause or motivation, the spread and the modality of language change. Traditional historical linguistics concentrates on language and its changes regarding internal factors. Modern historical linguistics puts its focal point on external factors e.g. the social surroundings. That synchrony variates is seen as a key to a variation in diachrony. The conclusion is that the beginning of a language change is variation. For traditional historical linguistics the language structure and the language system are very important, whereas in modern historical linguistics the language use and the user are centered. They claim that grammar is shaped by discourse and language is changed by the speakers. Traditional historical linguistics is mainly interested in phonology and morphology and not so much in syntax and semantics. In modern historical linguistics the main interest lies in syntax, semantics and pragmatics and no more in phonology. Furthermore traditional historical linguistics is based on quality while modern historical linguistics are both qualitative and quantitative. Traditional historical linguistics deals only with written language but modern historical linguistics are also concerned with spoken language.
Historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:
• to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;
• to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics);
• to develop general theories about how and why language changes;
• to describe the history of speech communities;
• to study the history of words, i.e. etymology.
History and development
Modern historical linguistics dates from the late 18th century and grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents, which goes back to antiquity.
At first historical linguistics was comparative linguistics and mainly concerned with establishing language families and the reconstruction of prehistoric proto-languages, using the comparative method and internal reconstruction. The focus was on the well-known Indo-European languages, many of which had long written histories. But since then, significant comparative linguistic work has been done on the Uralic languages, Austronesian languages and various families of Native American languages, among many others. Comparative linguistics is now, however, only a part of a more broadly conceived discipline of historical linguistics. For the Indo-European languages, comparative study is now a highly specialised field, and most research is being carried out on the subsequent development of these languages, particularly the development of the modern standard varieties.
Some scholars have undertaken studies attempting to establish super-families, linking for example Indo-European, Uralic and other families into Nostratic. These attempts have not been accepted widely because the information necessary to establish relatedness becomes less available as the time depth is increased. The time-depth of linguistic methods is limited because of chance word resemblances and variations between language groups, but a limit of around 10,000 years is often assumed. The dating of the various proto-languages is also difficult. Several methods are available for this but only approximate results can be obtained.
Evolution into other fields
Initially, all modern linguistics was historical in orientation - even the study of modern dialects involved looking at their origins. But Saussure drew a distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics, which is fundamental to the present day organization of the discipline. Primacy is accorded to synchronic linguistics, and diachronic linguistics is defined as the study of successive synchronic stages. Saussure's clear demarcation, however, is now seen to be idealised. In practice, a purely synchronic linguistics is not possible for any period before the invention of the gramophone: written records always lag behind speech in reflecting linguistic developments, and in any case are difficult to date accurately before the development of the modern title page. Also, the work of sociolinguists on linguistic variation has shown synchronic states are not uniform: the speech habits of older and younger speakers differ in ways which point to language change. Synchronic variation is linguistic change in progress.
The biological origin of language is in principle a concern of historical linguistics, but most linguists regard it as too remote to be reliably established by standard techniques of historical linguistics such as the comparative method. Less standard techniques, such as mass lexical comparison, are used by some linguists to overcome the limitations of the comparative method, but most linguists regard them as unreliable.
The findings of historical linguistics are often used as a basis for hypotheses about the groupings and movements of peoples, particularly in the prehistoric period. In practice, however, it is often unclear how to integrate the linguistic evidence with the archaeological or genetic evidence. For example, there are a large number of theories concerning the homeland and early movements of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, each with their own interpretation of the archaeological record.
Sub-fields of study
Comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics (originally comparative philology) is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages in order to establish their historical relatedness. Languages may be related by convergence through borrowing or by genetic descent, thus languages can evolve and are also able to cross-relate.
Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language, and comparative linguistics aims to construct language families, to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages. In order to maintain a clear distinction between attested and reconstructed forms, comparative linguists prefix an asterisk to any form that is not found in surviving texts.
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words—when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. A word may enter a language as a loanword (i.e., as a word from one language adopted by speakers of another language), through derivational morphology by combining pre-existing elements in the language, by a hybrid of these two processes called phono-semantic matching, or in several other minor ways.
In languages with a long and detailed history, etymology makes use of philology, the study of how words change from culture to culture over time. However, etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about languages that are too old for any direct information (such as writing) to be known. By analyzing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make inferences, about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word roots have been found which can be traced all the way back to the origin of, for instance, the Indo-European language family.
Even though etymological research originally grew from the philological tradition, nowadays much etymological research is done in language families where little or no early documentation is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian.
Dialectology
Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, the varieties of a language that are characteristic of particular groups, based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features (as opposed to variations based on social factors, which are studied in sociolinguistics, or variations based on time, which are studied in historical linguistics. Dialectology treats such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic variation.
Dialectologists are ultimately concerned with grammatical features which correspond to regional areas. Thus they are usually dealing with populations living in their areas for generations without moving, but also with immigrant groups bringing their languages to new settlements.
Phonology
Phonology is a sub-field of historical linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language or set of languages change over time. Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages.
An important part of phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units within a language. For example, the "p" in "pin" is aspirated while the same phoneme in "spin" is not. In some other languages, for example Thai and Quechua, this same difference of aspiration or non-aspiration does differentiate phonemes.
In addition to the minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, such as the /p/ in English, and topics such as syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation.
The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign languages, even though the phonological units do not consist of sounds. The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality because they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones.
Morphology
Morphology - the study of the formal means of expression in a language; in the context of historical linguistics, how the formal means of expression change over time; for instance, languages with complex inflectional systems tend to be subject to a simplification process
is the field of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words as a formal means of expression.[1] Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology. While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word-formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages, in the context of historical linguistics, how the means of expression change over time. See grammaticalisation.
Syntax
Syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages. The term syntax is used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the syntax of Modern Irish". Modern researchers in syntax attempt to describe languages in terms of such rules. Many professionals in this discipline attempt to find general rules that apply to all natural languages in the context of historical linguistics, how characteristics of sentence structure in related languages changed over time. See grammaticalisation.
Comparison of traditional and modern historical linguistics
There are several differences that occur dealing with the objects of research of traditional and modern historical linguistics. The focus of traditional historical linguistics lies in keeping records of language change in past times of a language or language family. Modern historical linguistics, however, focuses on the progress of language change. They try to analyze the cause or motivation, the spread and the modality of language change. Traditional historical linguistics concentrates on language and its changes regarding internal factors. Modern historical linguistics puts its focal point on external factors e.g. the social surroundings. That synchrony variates is seen as a key to a variation in diachrony. The conclusion is that the beginning of a language change is variation. For traditional historical linguistics the language structure and the language system are very important, whereas in modern historical linguistics the language use and the user are centered. They claim that grammar is shaped by discourse and language is changed by the speakers. Traditional historical linguistics is mainly interested in phonology and morphology and not so much in syntax and semantics. In modern historical linguistics the main interest lies in syntax, semantics and pragmatics and no more in phonology. Furthermore traditional historical linguistics is based on quality while modern historical linguistics are both qualitative and quantitative. Traditional historical linguistics deals only with written language but modern historical linguistics are also concerned with spoken language.
Linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Its primary goal is to learn about the 'natural' language that humans use every day and how it works. Linguists ask such fundamental questions as: What aspects of language are universal for all humans? How can we account for the remarkable grammatical similarities between languages as apparently diverse as English, Japanese and Arabic? What are the rules of grammar that we language users employ, and how do we come to 'know' them? To what extent is the structure of language related to how we think about the world around us? A linguist, then, here refers to a linguistics expert who seeks to answer such questions, rather than someone who is multilingual.
Theoretical linguists are concerned with questions about the apparent human 'instinct' to communicate,[1] rather than authorising 'rules' of style or 'correctness' as found in grammar textbooks or popular guides.[2] For example, *dog the[3] is unacceptable in English, but children recognise as much long before they receive any formal grammatical instruction. It is such recognitions, and the implicit rules they imply, that are of primary concern in linguistics, as opposed to rules as prescribed by an authority.
Although interesting in its own right as one of the directions we follow to learn more about ourselves and the world around us, the study of linguistics is also highly relevant to solving real-life problems. Applied linguists may bring their insights to such fields as foreign language teaching, speech therapy and translation.[4] While in universities and research institutions worldwide, scholars are studying the facts of individual languages or the system of language itself to find evidence for theories or test hypotheses, applied linguists are at work in classrooms, clinics, courts and the highest levels of government. They use their knowledge to bridge linguistic divides, coax speech from the mouths of the disabled or abused, supply forensic evidence in courtroom trials, find out how language comes to children - in fact, they are everywhere people in need or in conflict over language are to be found.
The study of linguistics
Core areas
Some linguists, such as theoretical syntacticians, focus on one 'core' area. Research may involve developing a model to describe and predict the workings of the system of language itself, rather than explaining how people happen to use language. These 'core' fields together constitute the grammar of a language - not a list of rules in a book, but components the system requires for communication.
PD ImageLevels of linguistic knowledge involved in producing the utterance 'the cats'.
PD Image
Levels of linguistic knowledge involved in producing the utterance 'the cats'.
Syntax
For more information, see: Syntax.
Syntax is the study of how units including words and phrases combine into sentences. For example, why is Bill ate the fish acceptable but Ate the Bill fish not? Syntacticians investigate what orders of words make legitimate sentences, how to succinctly account for patterns found across sentences, such as correspondences between active sentences (John threw the ball) and passive sentences (The ball was thrown by John), and some types of ambiguity, as in Visiting relatives can be boring (which has two readings!).
(CC) Photo: Nick Thompson A lecture in American Sign Language. Phonology and linguistics generally involve the study not just of speech but also sign language; the same system used to represent language, whether by sound or sign, is widely viewed as underlying both. Research into sign language also benefits from the insights of linguists who are themselves native signers.
(CC) Photo: Nick Thompson
A lecture in American Sign Language. Phonology and linguistics generally involve the study not just of speech but also sign language; the same system used to represent language, whether by sound or sign, is widely viewed as underlying both. Research into sign language also benefits from the insights of linguists who are themselves native signers.
Phonology
For more information, see: Phonology.
Phonology is the study of the grammatical system speakers use to represent language in the real world, which organises syllable structure, intonation, tone, and - in sign languages - hand movements. A phonologist divides an example of language into its phonological components: for example, English cat appears as a single syllable arranging the segments [k], [æ][5] and [t].[6] Although there are potentially infinitely many ways of producing a sound, shaping a letter or moving a hand, phonologists are interested only in how these group into abstract categories: for example, how and why [k] is often perceived as different from [t], whereas in many languages, other sounds as different as those are not.
Phonetics
For more information, see: Phonetics.
Phonetics focuses on the physical sounds of speech. Phonetics covers speech perception (how the brain discerns sounds), acoustics (the physical qualities of sounds as movement through air), and articulation (voice production through the movements of the lungs, tongue, lips, and other articulators). This area investigates, for instance, the physical realization of speech and how individual sounds differ across languages and dialects. This research plays a large part in computer speech recognition and synthesis.
Morphology
For more information, see: Morphology.
Morphology examines how linguistic units such as words and their subparts (such as prefixes and suffixes) combine. One example of this is the observation that while walk+ed is acceptable, *ed+walk is not, in Engish, while in other languages such affixes can be found wholly inside the stems they attach to.
Semantics
For more information, see: Semantics (linguistics).
Semantics within linguistics refers to the study of how language conveys meaning.[7] For example, English speakers typically realise that Chomsky's famous sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is well-formed in terms of word order, but incomprehensible in terms of meaning.[8] Other aspects of meaning studied here include how speakers understand certain types of ambiguous sentences such as A student met every professor (a different student, or the same student?), and the extent to which sentences which are superficially very different, such as The wine flowed freely and Much wine was consumed, mean similar things.[9]
Pragmatics
For more information, see: Pragmatics.
Pragmatics is the study of how utterances relate to the context they are spoken in. For instance, the sentence I have two pencils can mean two very different things, depending on whether the speaker has been asked how many pencils he has, in which case the speaker means he has exactly two, or is just confirming that he has at least two (such as in response to Can me and my friend borrow two pencils from you?), leaving open the possibility that he has more. This sort of understanding is not predictable just by knowledge of language; speakers must also know something about the intentions and assumptions of others to co-operate in communication.
Other fields of linguistics
To factor out circumstances that may obscure fundamental insights, many linguists may choose to focus on language as presumed to occur in an idealised, adult, monolingual native speaker - prerequisites often found in mainstream generative linguistics.[10] In contrast, linguists whose research moves away from any of these four criteria may concentrate on fields arranged around the study of language use and learning:
* Language acquisition, theoretical or applied study of how linguistic knowledge emerges in children and adults as first or subsequent languages, whether naturalistically (without instruction) or in the classroom;[11]
* Cognitive linguistics, the study of language as part of general cognition;
* Psycholinguistics, the study of language to find out about how the mind works;[12]
* Sociolinguistics, the study of how language varies according to cultural context, the speaker's background, and the situation in which it is used;
* Stylistics, the study of how language differs according to use and context, e.g. advertising versus speechmaking;
* Linguistic variation, the study of the differences among the languages of the world. This has implications for linguistics in general: if human linguistic ability is narrowly constrained, then languages must be very similar. If human linguistic ability is unconstrained, then languages might vary greatly.
* Historical linguistics (or diachronic linguistics), the study of how languages are historically related (e.g. English, French and German are thought to be descended from a single Indo-European tongue). This involves finding universal properties of language and accounting for a language's development and origins (see also below and comparative linguistics).
* Contextual linguistics may include the study of linguistics in interaction with other academic disciplines.
* Anthropological linguistics considers the interactions between linguistics and culture.
* Critical discourse analysis is where rhetoric and philosophy interact with linguistics.
* Computational linguistics has had a great influence on theories of syntax and semantics, as modelling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constrains the theories to computable operations and provides a more rigorous mathematical basis.
Other cross-disciplinary areas of linguistics include neurolinguistics, evolutionary linguistics and cognitive science.
Applied linguistics
Main article: Applied linguistics
Whereas theoretical linguistics is concerned with finding and describing generalities both within particular languages and among all languages, applied linguistics takes these results and applies them to other areas. Often applied linguistics refers to the use of linguistic research in language teaching, but this is just one sub-discipline:
* Research in language teaching: today, 'applied linguistics' is sometimes used to refer to 'second language acquisition', but these are distinct fields, in that SLA involves more theoretical study of the system of language, whereas applied linguistics concerns itself more with teaching and learning. In their approach to the study of learning, applied linguists have increasingly devised their own theories and methodologies, such as the shift towards studying the learner rather than the system of language itself, in contrast to the emphasis within SLA.[13][14]
* Applied computational linguistics: two computer applications are speech synthesis and speech recognition, which use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are fruitful areas which have also come to the forefront in recent years.
* Clinical linguistics entails the application of linguistics to speech-language pathology. This involves treating individuals whose linguistic development is atypical or impaired.[15] This branch of applied linguistics may also involve treatment of specific language impairment, where one aspect of language develops exceptionally.[16] The field has also adopted existing ideas which have have not become 'mainstream' in theoretical linguistics. For example, both behaviourism[17] and natural phonology[18] have appeared in the literature.
Approach to studying language
Modern linguists' methodologies, assumptions and practices differ significantly from those of past generations. One of the most fundamental principles of modern linguistics is that it is descriptive rather than prescriptive: it describes language without judging how people use it. Also, as no language is known to have been written before being spoken, linguists consider spoken rather than written language to be the primary focus. In language acquisition, most researchers agree that language cannot be acquired through imitation; some aspects must be innate. Finally, most modern linguistics focuses on language as used today; however, historical linguistics remains an important sub-field.
Prescription and description
Main article: Linguistic prescriptivism
Linguists seek to clarify the nature of language, to describe how people use it, and to find the underlying grammar that speakers unconsciously adhere to. Linguists do not judge what speech is better or worse syntactically, correct or incorrect grammatically, and do not try to prescribe future language directions. Nonetheless, some professionals and many amateurs do try to prescribe rules of language, holding a particular standard for all to follow.
Prescription comes in two flavors, those that are linguistically founded and those that are not. For instance, the rule of English that subjects and verbs must agree (i.e. that when the subject is third-person singular, the verb takes an "s" ending, like "I/you/they run" but "he runs") can be the basis of linguistically founded prescription, so long as the speaker is intending to speak standard American English. Speakers of standard American English do follow subject-verb agreement, and thus if the intention is to teach that language, this rule should be taught.
However, prescriptivists often stray from this type of linguistically founded recommendation. These prescriptivists tend to be found among the ranks of language educators and journalists, and not in the academic discipline of linguistics. Often considering themselves speakers of the standard form of a particular language, they may hold clear notions of what is right and wrong and what variety of language is most likely to lead the next generation of speakers to 'success'. For example, they may believe that all speakers of what they would call English should follow the same rule of subject-verb agreement, while in fact some varieties of English, which are in a sense distinct languages in their own right, do not do subject-verb agreement the same way. The reasons for their intolerance of non-standard dialects, treating them as "incorrect" , may include distrust of neologisms, connections to socially-disapproved dialects, or simple conflicts with pet theories.
Prescriptivists often also make linguistically unfounded recommendations that seem plausibly true, but which have little linguistic evidence to support them. For instance, the rule against leaving a preposition at the end of a clause or sentence (such as in I met the professor I wrote to) is commonly believed to be 'correct' English.[19] However, speakers of English not only use final prepositions frequently, indicating that it is perfectly natural English to do so, but bringing the preposition to the front may result in a sentence that could well sound ridiculous to any native speaker of English.[20]
Descriptive linguists, on the other hand, do not accept the prescriptivists' notion of 'incorrect usage' in a general sense. They aim to describe the usages the prescriptivist has in mind, either as common or deviant from some linguistic norm, as an idiosyncratic variation, or as regularity (a rule) followed by speakers of some other dialect (in contrast to the common prescriptive assumption that "bad" usage is unsystematic). Within the context of fieldwork, descriptive linguistics refers to the study of language using a descriptivist approach. Descriptivist methodology more closely resembles scientific methodology in other disciplines.
Speech versus writing
(CC) Photo: Nick Thompson Linguistics examines all forms of language, but the written word is considered at best an incomplete representation of a linguistic system. Linguists generally consider that more fundamental insights can be gleaned into the nature of language by analysing natural, spontaneous speech, rather than assuming the primacy of writing.
(CC) Photo: Nick Thompson
Linguistics examines all forms of language, but the written word is considered at best an incomplete representation of a linguistic system. Linguists generally consider that more fundamental insights can be gleaned into the nature of language by analysing natural, spontaneous speech, rather than assuming the primacy of writing.
Languages have only been written for a few thousand years, but have been spoken (or signed) for much longer. The written word may therefore provide less of a window onto how language works than the study of speech, even assuming that the culture which the language forms part of has a writing system - the majority of the world's languages remain unwritten. Furthermore, the study of written language can play no part in investigating first language acquisition, since infants are obviously yet to become literate. Overall, language is held to be an evolutionary adaptation, whereas writing is a comparatively recent invention. Spoken and signed language, then, may tell us much about human evolution and the structure of the mind.
Of course, linguists also agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For linguistic research that uses the methods of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. Additionally, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry. Writing, however, brings with it a number of problems; for example, it often acts as a historical record, preserving words, phrases, styles and spellings of a previous era. This may be of limited use for studying how language is used at the present time.
Innatism
One of the most interesting aspects of language is that normally, young children acquire whatever language is spoken (or signed, in the case of sign language) around them when they are growing up, without apparently being 'taught' the language. By contrast, other animals, even highly intelligent primates that are closely related to humans, need very intensive training to produce even minimally language-like behaviour.[21] Additionally, since children understand and produce utterances which they have never previously experienced, and since they appear to reject ill-formed sentences even at an early age,[22] it has been widely concluded that the infant brain must in some way be ready to acquire any language. 'Nativist' linguists argue that such a system, presumably specified in our genes,[23] must also account for why all languages are fundamentally similar.[24][25]
Historical linguistics
Whereas the core of theoretical linguistics is concerned with studying languages at a particular point in time (usually the present), historical linguistics (or diachronic linguistics) examines how language changes through time, sometimes over centuries. Historical linguistics enjoys both a rich history (the study of linguistics grew out of historical linguistics) and a strong theoretical foundation for the study of language change.
In universities in the USA, the non-historic perspective seems to have the upper hand. Many introductory linguistics classes, for example, cover historical linguistics only cursorily. The shift in focus to a non-historic perspective started with Saussure and became predominant with Noam Chomsky.
In popular culture, one aspect of linguistics which is particularly popular is etymology, the study of word origins. This is related to historical linguistics, in that a word's history is traced over time, but does not form a central component of modern language study; linguistics is more concerned with patterns of change over time and what this has to contribute to an understanding of the nature of language itself.
History of linguistics
Main article: History of linguistics
Questions about language, its origins and nature have been a centre of interest in many civilizations. [26] From ancient times until the 18th century, insights into language mainly involved explaining the grammar of particular languages, such as Sanskrit, or describing changes over time. Such work laid the foundations for an extension of linguistic inquiry into language universals - the features common to all languages, which presumably tell us something about the system that underlies them.
Modern linguistics can be traced to the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure 's Course in General Linguistics. He was the first to actually define language and therefore define what linguistics is. He also introduced the idea of language being a system or structure, which heavily influenced the field during the following years. Since the publication of Saussure's work, the primary purpose of linguistics has been to explain how languages work at one given moment of time and establish how languages work through empirical evidence. To this end, many subfields of linguistics have now been established.
From the 1950s, Noam Chomsky and his contemporaries initiated new methods in linguistics, producing explicit theories of grammar [27][28] - namely, systems that required no reference to other kinds of knowledge. Parallel to this 'Chomskyian' focus on the nature of the linguistic system, concerns about how language was used in society began to mature. In this way, from the 1960s William Labov was a pioneer in studies of sociolinguistics, a field which attempts to describe the relationship between language and society.
Footnotes
1. ↑ The view that language is an 'instinct' comparable to walking or bird song is most famously articulated in Pinker (1994).
2. ↑ A popular recent example is Truss (2003).
3. ↑ An asterisk (*) indicates that what follows is unacceptable to speakers of that language.
4. ↑ Increasingly, however, applied linguists have been developing their own views of language, which often focus on the language learner rather than the system itself: see for example Cook (2002) and the same author's website.
5. ↑ Pronounced 'ash'.
6. ↑ Symbols in square brackets represent speech sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet; slanting brackets, as in /kæt/ 'cat', are used to represent phonemes - distinct, abstract units that may represent several sounds or written letters.
7. ↑ The term elsewhere has a rather wider application, referring to the study of meaning itself, in fields such as philosophy.
8. ↑ Chomsky, 1957: 15.
9. ↑ Aitchison (2003: 87-99).
10. ↑ 'Generative' linguistics' is most strongly associated with Chomsky (1957) and subsequent works.
11. ↑ 'Acquisition' is a highly diverse field; as well as theoretical linguists studying the linguistic system itself through first language development and second language acquisition (SLA), applied linguists may examine mainly classroom learning and learners' experiences. Also, language teaching practice is the concern of education specialists outside linguistics. In any one study linguists' backgrounds and research orientations may overlap considerably, and there is little consensus even on fundamentals, such as the extent to which explicit instruction in presumed 'rules' of grammar can truly promote learning.
12. ↑ e.g. Pinker, 1997; Scovel, 1997.
13. ↑ The applied linguist Vivian Cook has, for example, introduced the term L2 user as distinct from L2 learner (see Cook's page: Background to the L2 User Perspective). The former are active users of the language; the latter those who learn for later use. Cook's view also severs a link to SLA, in that a user's language ability is seen not as an approximation towards native speakers' competence, but as a system in its own right.
14. ↑ See also Wei (2007) for an appeal to focus on the learner rather than the system.
15. ↑ The most famous case is Genie, an individual who was deprived of language throughout much of her childhood.
16. ↑ Bishop (2006).
17. ↑ Castagnaro (2006), for review.
18. ↑ Grunwell (1997).
19. ↑ Linguists sometimes refer to this rule as preposition stranding, since in I met the professor I wrote to the preposition's object (the professor in I wrote to the professor) has been left behind once the object has been moved. When a preposition is also moved to a non-final position, as in I met the professor to whom I wrote, this is called pied-piping or wh-movement, since words that can move can typically be replaced by words beginning with wh- (who, what, etc.).
20. ↑ This rule is famously criticised in a quotation attributed to former British prime minister Winston Churchill: "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put."
21. ↑ Furthermore, the anthropological linguist Charles Hockett advanced the theory that a collection of design features, such as 'creativity' (speakers can produce novel utterances) collectively made language unique to humans. Some other species may make use of one or two of these (such as 'use of sound signals'), but never enough to use language (Hockett (1960); Aitchison (2003: 13-20). See also the phonetician John Coleman's webpage comparing different species according to design features.
22. ↑ Chomsky (1957) strongly emphasised that this 'creative' aspect of language entailed that language could not simply be a product of a child's responses to their environment - a view usually associated with behaviourism and applied to language in Skinner (1957). Chomsky (1959) is a highly critical review of that work that was instrumental in moving linguistics away from such 'behaviourist' analyses of language use.
23. ↑ e.g. Pinker (1994) makes an analogy between language and spiders' webs: spiders spin webs because their genes compel them to, though without the right environment no webs will appear. To that can be added that each web would be different, though following the same basic, innately guided webspinning template.
24. ↑ The linguist Joseph H. Greenberg famously identified a series of universals of language (Greenberg, 1966); namely, 'laws' that seem to apply to all linguistic communication. One example is that all languages appear to have nouns and verbs, even though a language without verbs would be communicatively adequate (e.g. nominalized English).
25. ↑ Ironically, neither Greenberg nor Hockett, whose work provided such important evidence for the 'nativist' position, themselves supported such a view. Greenberg was a typologist and empirical linguist interested in historical linguistics and what the similarities between languages suggested about the nature of language itself; his work has been seen as functionalist in its principles. Hockett was firmly in the pre-Chomskyan structuralist camp, and vigourously attacked the emerging school of generativism throughout his career. See William Croft's obituary for Joseph H. Greenberg and a copy of the New York Times obituary for Charles F. Hockett at linguistlist.org.
26. ↑ For example, the early Indian grammarian Pāṇini's (ca 520–460 BCE) examined Sanskrit and produced several insights into the nature of grammar, such as the morpheme, which remain highly relevant in modern research and Plato in Cratyluswonders whether language has a natural or conventional origin.
27. ↑ Chomsky N (1957).
28. ↑ Chomsky N, Halle M (1968).
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Its primary goal is to learn about the 'natural' language that humans use every day and how it works. Linguists ask such fundamental questions as: What aspects of language are universal for all humans? How can we account for the remarkable grammatical similarities between languages as apparently diverse as English, Japanese and Arabic? What are the rules of grammar that we language users employ, and how do we come to 'know' them? To what extent is the structure of language related to how we think about the world around us? A linguist, then, here refers to a linguistics expert who seeks to answer such questions, rather than someone who is multilingual.
Theoretical linguists are concerned with questions about the apparent human 'instinct' to communicate,[1] rather than authorising 'rules' of style or 'correctness' as found in grammar textbooks or popular guides.[2] For example, *dog the[3] is unacceptable in English, but children recognise as much long before they receive any formal grammatical instruction. It is such recognitions, and the implicit rules they imply, that are of primary concern in linguistics, as opposed to rules as prescribed by an authority.
Although interesting in its own right as one of the directions we follow to learn more about ourselves and the world around us, the study of linguistics is also highly relevant to solving real-life problems. Applied linguists may bring their insights to such fields as foreign language teaching, speech therapy and translation.[4] While in universities and research institutions worldwide, scholars are studying the facts of individual languages or the system of language itself to find evidence for theories or test hypotheses, applied linguists are at work in classrooms, clinics, courts and the highest levels of government. They use their knowledge to bridge linguistic divides, coax speech from the mouths of the disabled or abused, supply forensic evidence in courtroom trials, find out how language comes to children - in fact, they are everywhere people in need or in conflict over language are to be found.
The study of linguistics
Core areas
Some linguists, such as theoretical syntacticians, focus on one 'core' area. Research may involve developing a model to describe and predict the workings of the system of language itself, rather than explaining how people happen to use language. These 'core' fields together constitute the grammar of a language - not a list of rules in a book, but components the system requires for communication.
PD ImageLevels of linguistic knowledge involved in producing the utterance 'the cats'.
PD Image
Levels of linguistic knowledge involved in producing the utterance 'the cats'.
Syntax
For more information, see: Syntax.
Syntax is the study of how units including words and phrases combine into sentences. For example, why is Bill ate the fish acceptable but Ate the Bill fish not? Syntacticians investigate what orders of words make legitimate sentences, how to succinctly account for patterns found across sentences, such as correspondences between active sentences (John threw the ball) and passive sentences (The ball was thrown by John), and some types of ambiguity, as in Visiting relatives can be boring (which has two readings!).
(CC) Photo: Nick Thompson A lecture in American Sign Language. Phonology and linguistics generally involve the study not just of speech but also sign language; the same system used to represent language, whether by sound or sign, is widely viewed as underlying both. Research into sign language also benefits from the insights of linguists who are themselves native signers.
(CC) Photo: Nick Thompson
A lecture in American Sign Language. Phonology and linguistics generally involve the study not just of speech but also sign language; the same system used to represent language, whether by sound or sign, is widely viewed as underlying both. Research into sign language also benefits from the insights of linguists who are themselves native signers.
Phonology
For more information, see: Phonology.
Phonology is the study of the grammatical system speakers use to represent language in the real world, which organises syllable structure, intonation, tone, and - in sign languages - hand movements. A phonologist divides an example of language into its phonological components: for example, English cat appears as a single syllable arranging the segments [k], [æ][5] and [t].[6] Although there are potentially infinitely many ways of producing a sound, shaping a letter or moving a hand, phonologists are interested only in how these group into abstract categories: for example, how and why [k] is often perceived as different from [t], whereas in many languages, other sounds as different as those are not.
Phonetics
For more information, see: Phonetics.
Phonetics focuses on the physical sounds of speech. Phonetics covers speech perception (how the brain discerns sounds), acoustics (the physical qualities of sounds as movement through air), and articulation (voice production through the movements of the lungs, tongue, lips, and other articulators). This area investigates, for instance, the physical realization of speech and how individual sounds differ across languages and dialects. This research plays a large part in computer speech recognition and synthesis.
Morphology
For more information, see: Morphology.
Morphology examines how linguistic units such as words and their subparts (such as prefixes and suffixes) combine. One example of this is the observation that while walk+ed is acceptable, *ed+walk is not, in Engish, while in other languages such affixes can be found wholly inside the stems they attach to.
Semantics
For more information, see: Semantics (linguistics).
Semantics within linguistics refers to the study of how language conveys meaning.[7] For example, English speakers typically realise that Chomsky's famous sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is well-formed in terms of word order, but incomprehensible in terms of meaning.[8] Other aspects of meaning studied here include how speakers understand certain types of ambiguous sentences such as A student met every professor (a different student, or the same student?), and the extent to which sentences which are superficially very different, such as The wine flowed freely and Much wine was consumed, mean similar things.[9]
Pragmatics
For more information, see: Pragmatics.
Pragmatics is the study of how utterances relate to the context they are spoken in. For instance, the sentence I have two pencils can mean two very different things, depending on whether the speaker has been asked how many pencils he has, in which case the speaker means he has exactly two, or is just confirming that he has at least two (such as in response to Can me and my friend borrow two pencils from you?), leaving open the possibility that he has more. This sort of understanding is not predictable just by knowledge of language; speakers must also know something about the intentions and assumptions of others to co-operate in communication.
Other fields of linguistics
To factor out circumstances that may obscure fundamental insights, many linguists may choose to focus on language as presumed to occur in an idealised, adult, monolingual native speaker - prerequisites often found in mainstream generative linguistics.[10] In contrast, linguists whose research moves away from any of these four criteria may concentrate on fields arranged around the study of language use and learning:
* Language acquisition, theoretical or applied study of how linguistic knowledge emerges in children and adults as first or subsequent languages, whether naturalistically (without instruction) or in the classroom;[11]
* Cognitive linguistics, the study of language as part of general cognition;
* Psycholinguistics, the study of language to find out about how the mind works;[12]
* Sociolinguistics, the study of how language varies according to cultural context, the speaker's background, and the situation in which it is used;
* Stylistics, the study of how language differs according to use and context, e.g. advertising versus speechmaking;
* Linguistic variation, the study of the differences among the languages of the world. This has implications for linguistics in general: if human linguistic ability is narrowly constrained, then languages must be very similar. If human linguistic ability is unconstrained, then languages might vary greatly.
* Historical linguistics (or diachronic linguistics), the study of how languages are historically related (e.g. English, French and German are thought to be descended from a single Indo-European tongue). This involves finding universal properties of language and accounting for a language's development and origins (see also below and comparative linguistics).
* Contextual linguistics may include the study of linguistics in interaction with other academic disciplines.
* Anthropological linguistics considers the interactions between linguistics and culture.
* Critical discourse analysis is where rhetoric and philosophy interact with linguistics.
* Computational linguistics has had a great influence on theories of syntax and semantics, as modelling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constrains the theories to computable operations and provides a more rigorous mathematical basis.
Other cross-disciplinary areas of linguistics include neurolinguistics, evolutionary linguistics and cognitive science.
Applied linguistics
Main article: Applied linguistics
Whereas theoretical linguistics is concerned with finding and describing generalities both within particular languages and among all languages, applied linguistics takes these results and applies them to other areas. Often applied linguistics refers to the use of linguistic research in language teaching, but this is just one sub-discipline:
* Research in language teaching: today, 'applied linguistics' is sometimes used to refer to 'second language acquisition', but these are distinct fields, in that SLA involves more theoretical study of the system of language, whereas applied linguistics concerns itself more with teaching and learning. In their approach to the study of learning, applied linguists have increasingly devised their own theories and methodologies, such as the shift towards studying the learner rather than the system of language itself, in contrast to the emphasis within SLA.[13][14]
* Applied computational linguistics: two computer applications are speech synthesis and speech recognition, which use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are fruitful areas which have also come to the forefront in recent years.
* Clinical linguistics entails the application of linguistics to speech-language pathology. This involves treating individuals whose linguistic development is atypical or impaired.[15] This branch of applied linguistics may also involve treatment of specific language impairment, where one aspect of language develops exceptionally.[16] The field has also adopted existing ideas which have have not become 'mainstream' in theoretical linguistics. For example, both behaviourism[17] and natural phonology[18] have appeared in the literature.
Approach to studying language
Modern linguists' methodologies, assumptions and practices differ significantly from those of past generations. One of the most fundamental principles of modern linguistics is that it is descriptive rather than prescriptive: it describes language without judging how people use it. Also, as no language is known to have been written before being spoken, linguists consider spoken rather than written language to be the primary focus. In language acquisition, most researchers agree that language cannot be acquired through imitation; some aspects must be innate. Finally, most modern linguistics focuses on language as used today; however, historical linguistics remains an important sub-field.
Prescription and description
Main article: Linguistic prescriptivism
Linguists seek to clarify the nature of language, to describe how people use it, and to find the underlying grammar that speakers unconsciously adhere to. Linguists do not judge what speech is better or worse syntactically, correct or incorrect grammatically, and do not try to prescribe future language directions. Nonetheless, some professionals and many amateurs do try to prescribe rules of language, holding a particular standard for all to follow.
Prescription comes in two flavors, those that are linguistically founded and those that are not. For instance, the rule of English that subjects and verbs must agree (i.e. that when the subject is third-person singular, the verb takes an "s" ending, like "I/you/they run" but "he runs") can be the basis of linguistically founded prescription, so long as the speaker is intending to speak standard American English. Speakers of standard American English do follow subject-verb agreement, and thus if the intention is to teach that language, this rule should be taught.
However, prescriptivists often stray from this type of linguistically founded recommendation. These prescriptivists tend to be found among the ranks of language educators and journalists, and not in the academic discipline of linguistics. Often considering themselves speakers of the standard form of a particular language, they may hold clear notions of what is right and wrong and what variety of language is most likely to lead the next generation of speakers to 'success'. For example, they may believe that all speakers of what they would call English should follow the same rule of subject-verb agreement, while in fact some varieties of English, which are in a sense distinct languages in their own right, do not do subject-verb agreement the same way. The reasons for their intolerance of non-standard dialects, treating them as "incorrect" , may include distrust of neologisms, connections to socially-disapproved dialects, or simple conflicts with pet theories.
Prescriptivists often also make linguistically unfounded recommendations that seem plausibly true, but which have little linguistic evidence to support them. For instance, the rule against leaving a preposition at the end of a clause or sentence (such as in I met the professor I wrote to) is commonly believed to be 'correct' English.[19] However, speakers of English not only use final prepositions frequently, indicating that it is perfectly natural English to do so, but bringing the preposition to the front may result in a sentence that could well sound ridiculous to any native speaker of English.[20]
Descriptive linguists, on the other hand, do not accept the prescriptivists' notion of 'incorrect usage' in a general sense. They aim to describe the usages the prescriptivist has in mind, either as common or deviant from some linguistic norm, as an idiosyncratic variation, or as regularity (a rule) followed by speakers of some other dialect (in contrast to the common prescriptive assumption that "bad" usage is unsystematic). Within the context of fieldwork, descriptive linguistics refers to the study of language using a descriptivist approach. Descriptivist methodology more closely resembles scientific methodology in other disciplines.
Speech versus writing
(CC) Photo: Nick Thompson Linguistics examines all forms of language, but the written word is considered at best an incomplete representation of a linguistic system. Linguists generally consider that more fundamental insights can be gleaned into the nature of language by analysing natural, spontaneous speech, rather than assuming the primacy of writing.
(CC) Photo: Nick Thompson
Linguistics examines all forms of language, but the written word is considered at best an incomplete representation of a linguistic system. Linguists generally consider that more fundamental insights can be gleaned into the nature of language by analysing natural, spontaneous speech, rather than assuming the primacy of writing.
Languages have only been written for a few thousand years, but have been spoken (or signed) for much longer. The written word may therefore provide less of a window onto how language works than the study of speech, even assuming that the culture which the language forms part of has a writing system - the majority of the world's languages remain unwritten. Furthermore, the study of written language can play no part in investigating first language acquisition, since infants are obviously yet to become literate. Overall, language is held to be an evolutionary adaptation, whereas writing is a comparatively recent invention. Spoken and signed language, then, may tell us much about human evolution and the structure of the mind.
Of course, linguists also agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For linguistic research that uses the methods of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. Additionally, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry. Writing, however, brings with it a number of problems; for example, it often acts as a historical record, preserving words, phrases, styles and spellings of a previous era. This may be of limited use for studying how language is used at the present time.
Innatism
One of the most interesting aspects of language is that normally, young children acquire whatever language is spoken (or signed, in the case of sign language) around them when they are growing up, without apparently being 'taught' the language. By contrast, other animals, even highly intelligent primates that are closely related to humans, need very intensive training to produce even minimally language-like behaviour.[21] Additionally, since children understand and produce utterances which they have never previously experienced, and since they appear to reject ill-formed sentences even at an early age,[22] it has been widely concluded that the infant brain must in some way be ready to acquire any language. 'Nativist' linguists argue that such a system, presumably specified in our genes,[23] must also account for why all languages are fundamentally similar.[24][25]
Historical linguistics
Whereas the core of theoretical linguistics is concerned with studying languages at a particular point in time (usually the present), historical linguistics (or diachronic linguistics) examines how language changes through time, sometimes over centuries. Historical linguistics enjoys both a rich history (the study of linguistics grew out of historical linguistics) and a strong theoretical foundation for the study of language change.
In universities in the USA, the non-historic perspective seems to have the upper hand. Many introductory linguistics classes, for example, cover historical linguistics only cursorily. The shift in focus to a non-historic perspective started with Saussure and became predominant with Noam Chomsky.
In popular culture, one aspect of linguistics which is particularly popular is etymology, the study of word origins. This is related to historical linguistics, in that a word's history is traced over time, but does not form a central component of modern language study; linguistics is more concerned with patterns of change over time and what this has to contribute to an understanding of the nature of language itself.
History of linguistics
Main article: History of linguistics
Questions about language, its origins and nature have been a centre of interest in many civilizations. [26] From ancient times until the 18th century, insights into language mainly involved explaining the grammar of particular languages, such as Sanskrit, or describing changes over time. Such work laid the foundations for an extension of linguistic inquiry into language universals - the features common to all languages, which presumably tell us something about the system that underlies them.
Modern linguistics can be traced to the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure 's Course in General Linguistics. He was the first to actually define language and therefore define what linguistics is. He also introduced the idea of language being a system or structure, which heavily influenced the field during the following years. Since the publication of Saussure's work, the primary purpose of linguistics has been to explain how languages work at one given moment of time and establish how languages work through empirical evidence. To this end, many subfields of linguistics have now been established.
From the 1950s, Noam Chomsky and his contemporaries initiated new methods in linguistics, producing explicit theories of grammar [27][28] - namely, systems that required no reference to other kinds of knowledge. Parallel to this 'Chomskyian' focus on the nature of the linguistic system, concerns about how language was used in society began to mature. In this way, from the 1960s William Labov was a pioneer in studies of sociolinguistics, a field which attempts to describe the relationship between language and society.
Footnotes
1. ↑ The view that language is an 'instinct' comparable to walking or bird song is most famously articulated in Pinker (1994).
2. ↑ A popular recent example is Truss (2003).
3. ↑ An asterisk (*) indicates that what follows is unacceptable to speakers of that language.
4. ↑ Increasingly, however, applied linguists have been developing their own views of language, which often focus on the language learner rather than the system itself: see for example Cook (2002) and the same author's website.
5. ↑ Pronounced 'ash'.
6. ↑ Symbols in square brackets represent speech sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet; slanting brackets, as in /kæt/ 'cat', are used to represent phonemes - distinct, abstract units that may represent several sounds or written letters.
7. ↑ The term elsewhere has a rather wider application, referring to the study of meaning itself, in fields such as philosophy.
8. ↑ Chomsky, 1957: 15.
9. ↑ Aitchison (2003: 87-99).
10. ↑ 'Generative' linguistics' is most strongly associated with Chomsky (1957) and subsequent works.
11. ↑ 'Acquisition' is a highly diverse field; as well as theoretical linguists studying the linguistic system itself through first language development and second language acquisition (SLA), applied linguists may examine mainly classroom learning and learners' experiences. Also, language teaching practice is the concern of education specialists outside linguistics. In any one study linguists' backgrounds and research orientations may overlap considerably, and there is little consensus even on fundamentals, such as the extent to which explicit instruction in presumed 'rules' of grammar can truly promote learning.
12. ↑ e.g. Pinker, 1997; Scovel, 1997.
13. ↑ The applied linguist Vivian Cook has, for example, introduced the term L2 user as distinct from L2 learner (see Cook's page: Background to the L2 User Perspective). The former are active users of the language; the latter those who learn for later use. Cook's view also severs a link to SLA, in that a user's language ability is seen not as an approximation towards native speakers' competence, but as a system in its own right.
14. ↑ See also Wei (2007) for an appeal to focus on the learner rather than the system.
15. ↑ The most famous case is Genie, an individual who was deprived of language throughout much of her childhood.
16. ↑ Bishop (2006).
17. ↑ Castagnaro (2006), for review.
18. ↑ Grunwell (1997).
19. ↑ Linguists sometimes refer to this rule as preposition stranding, since in I met the professor I wrote to the preposition's object (the professor in I wrote to the professor) has been left behind once the object has been moved. When a preposition is also moved to a non-final position, as in I met the professor to whom I wrote, this is called pied-piping or wh-movement, since words that can move can typically be replaced by words beginning with wh- (who, what, etc.).
20. ↑ This rule is famously criticised in a quotation attributed to former British prime minister Winston Churchill: "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put."
21. ↑ Furthermore, the anthropological linguist Charles Hockett advanced the theory that a collection of design features, such as 'creativity' (speakers can produce novel utterances) collectively made language unique to humans. Some other species may make use of one or two of these (such as 'use of sound signals'), but never enough to use language (Hockett (1960); Aitchison (2003: 13-20). See also the phonetician John Coleman's webpage comparing different species according to design features.
22. ↑ Chomsky (1957) strongly emphasised that this 'creative' aspect of language entailed that language could not simply be a product of a child's responses to their environment - a view usually associated with behaviourism and applied to language in Skinner (1957). Chomsky (1959) is a highly critical review of that work that was instrumental in moving linguistics away from such 'behaviourist' analyses of language use.
23. ↑ e.g. Pinker (1994) makes an analogy between language and spiders' webs: spiders spin webs because their genes compel them to, though without the right environment no webs will appear. To that can be added that each web would be different, though following the same basic, innately guided webspinning template.
24. ↑ The linguist Joseph H. Greenberg famously identified a series of universals of language (Greenberg, 1966); namely, 'laws' that seem to apply to all linguistic communication. One example is that all languages appear to have nouns and verbs, even though a language without verbs would be communicatively adequate (e.g. nominalized English).
25. ↑ Ironically, neither Greenberg nor Hockett, whose work provided such important evidence for the 'nativist' position, themselves supported such a view. Greenberg was a typologist and empirical linguist interested in historical linguistics and what the similarities between languages suggested about the nature of language itself; his work has been seen as functionalist in its principles. Hockett was firmly in the pre-Chomskyan structuralist camp, and vigourously attacked the emerging school of generativism throughout his career. See William Croft's obituary for Joseph H. Greenberg and a copy of the New York Times obituary for Charles F. Hockett at linguistlist.org.
26. ↑ For example, the early Indian grammarian Pāṇini's (ca 520–460 BCE) examined Sanskrit and produced several insights into the nature of grammar, such as the morpheme, which remain highly relevant in modern research and Plato in Cratyluswonders whether language has a natural or conventional origin.
27. ↑ Chomsky N (1957).
28. ↑ Chomsky N, Halle M (1968).
Literature
Literature
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Unlike scholars in certain fields of learning, such as biology, where the boundaries are fairly well defined, those in the field of literature still debate exactly what the term means. When the celebrated 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica defined literature as “the best expression of the best thought reduced to writing,” few dared question it. Now, though, a century of such questioning has broadened the definition so that it can include nearly any text in any human language, even works in other media. Practically speaking, literature’s present-day definition is shaped by the perspective from which one regards it: scholars of a theoretical bent see it as embedded in questions of race, class, and gender, and highly variable over historical time, while those more aesthetically inclined tend to emphasize its continuity within traditions of arts and humane letters. One perspective typically mistrusts the other.
Contents
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* 1 The study of literature
* 2 Scope of literature
* 3 Literary media
* 4 Formal categories
* 5 Genres
* 6 National literatures
* 7 The future of literature
* 8 References
The study of literature
In its modern descriptive sense, literature denotes written texts; by extension scholars have also applied the term to spoken or sung texts ("oral literature"), writings in particular subject areas ("medical literature"), other collections of material in a given language or national tradition ("English literature"), visual texts such as video and illustration, and published ephemera (“campaign literature”). It is often divided into historical periods ("Victorian literature") as well as into formal categories (prose, poetry, or drama) and genres (such as the epic, the novel, or the folktale).
In its more traditional prescriptive sense (that of the 1911 Britannica), literature connotes a particular quality found in the written culture of humane learning, the profession of “letters” (from Latin litteras), and written texts considered as aesthetic and expressive objects. In that sense, the art of “literature” differs from the science of “language,” as studied by theoretical linguists and cognitive psychologists such as Steven Pinker.
Literature as a subject worthy of academic study was first identified in the nineteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the English word itself back to the 1200s (when it described familiarity with classical learning); not until the early 1800s was it used in the more modern sense. Classical authors of ancient Greece and Rome generally never recognized the study of “literature” as a discipline per se; rather, they looked at forms such as drama, history, poetry, philosophy, and mythology on their own terms, or in terms of various schools of philosophical or religious thought. With the revival of advanced learning in late medieval and Renaissance Europe, though, the focus of study became classical literature itself—the sense first recorded by the OED; a person of “letters” was one who knew the classical traditions, and could read the classics. Only after literature in modern vernaculars became too significant to ignore did the current sense of the word develop.
European universities long resisted according writers working in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and other vernacular languages the same status in their curricula as that given to writers of classical Latin and Greek. Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries were always conscious of the perceived inferiority of their native language, even as they rivaled and surpassed the literary achievements of their classical precursors. As scientific learning began to supplant classical learning in the early nineteenth century, universities added philology (the predecessor of modern linguistics) as a discipline, but that field focused more on the historical relationships between languages than on their literature.
In the United Kingdom, for example, the first institutions to offer instruction in literature were not the elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, but those geared toward students seeking to move up in the world, such as the London Working Men's College (founded in 1854). There, much to their surprise, sons of London bricklayers and artisans encountered teachers such as F.J. Furnivall, an early editor of the OED, who opened his classes with the dramatic announcement that he was about to return a national literature to its citizens, and then commenced reading aloud in Middle English from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching, J.C. Collins stressed the influence of classics on English literature, shifting studies of the language away from philology and toward the present-day discipline of comparative literature[1]. In the United States, the study of literature was introduced at normal schools (schools for the preparation of teachers, mostly women at that time), and subsequently at land grant universities, where English literature was given the place assigned at older universities to reading in Latin and Greek.
First Edition of Quiller-Couch
First Edition of Quiller-Couch
Early professors of English literature, among them Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Henry Morley, devoted much of their attention to establishing a canon of suitable texts for study. In the twentieth century, this led to standardized anthologies, such as the Oxford and Norton anthologies of English literature. With the rise of the New Critics in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, scholars began looking at the literary text as a cultural object—a living repository of tradition extending across ages and civilizations. This movement coincided with expanding post-World War II college populations and helped elevate literature’s place and prestige in university curricula. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, proponents of poststructuralist theory began questioning the traditional literary canon and accepted hierarchies: Why, for instance, should lyric poetry be regarded as worthy of literary study, when comic books weren’t? Couldn’t we learn important things about contemporary culture from native American storytelling traditions as well as Italian opera? Practically speaking, this has meant that while college English departments still teach courses in Shakespeare and James Joyce, the sense of a highly exclusive canon of “great writers” is much diminished, and more kinds of literature are fair game for scholarly inquiry.
Scope of literature
In its broadest sense, literature came into being with the first use of pictographs, hieroglyphs, cuneiform, or alphabetic scripts, although it is more common to designate as "literature" only those texts which contain a degree of imaginative, emotive, allegoric, didactic, or descriptive content. Thus, business records, tallies, or lists are not generally included, even though such texts, which can be found in the earliest civilizations, are significant from a historical and archaeological perspective. The earliest literature evolved from the transcription of pre-existing oral traditional narratives, and progressed gradually to a point where such materials were first composed in written form.
Religious texts, while they have of course an entirely different significance to the adherents of the faiths to which they pertain, may also be considered literature when their narrative, figurative, or compositional qualities are foregrounded. The earliest instances of literature, therefore, those termed "ancient", include a variety of texts ranging from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh to the Hebrew Torah, and onward to the Hellenistic Odyssey of Homer. These texts, though clearly recognized as literature, share an origin in pre-literate cultures, and thus predate, in some sense, the modern use of the term. Later in human history, the deliberate writing of imaginary or fanciful texts, disseminated in written form to a literate audience, marks the first fully self-conscious literary traditions. In this context, although still considered ancient, might be placed such compositions as the Latin Aeneid of Virgil, the Chinese Songs of Chu, or the Greek lyrical poetry of Sappho. With improvements in the production and dissemination of written texts, from Roman copyhouses to the invention of the printing press, along with the increase of a literate reading public, a third sense of "literature," and the one most commonly used today, came into being. Specifically, literature encompasses all imaginative writing in any language, as well as essays, criticism, travel writing, biographies, memoirs, diaries, and collections of letters.
Literary media
Literature was first recorded in pictographic and alphabetic systems of writing, which were either incised on clay tablets or stone, or written with inks or dyes on various flat organic media such as papyrus or parchment. The development of alphabetic systems, in which characters stood for sounds instead of things, by the Phoenecian and Greek cultures, enabled a rapid advancement in the variety and dissemination of written literature. In earliest times, such documents were generally prepared and stored on long sheets rolled into scrolls, but beginning in the second century CE, the codex, a bound set of trimmed sheets with a cover, began to predominate; this is the ancestor of the modern book.
The introduction of paper to Western Europe in the later Middle Ages greatly reduced the cost of written manuscripts, and the invention of movable type in 1450 led to to the printing of books in large numbers, and still further reduction in cost. Further refinements to the printing process, such as machines which could cast whole blocks of type at once, led to the emergence of print as a mass medium in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with new formats such as magazines and newspapers printed in thousands of copies, both for subscribers and for sale at booksellers and newsstands. Genres such as the novel gained tremendous new audiences through appearances in periodical and serial forms, bringing writers such as Poe, Dickens, Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to a mass audience, and establishing literature as a popular medium.
In the later twentieth century, the field of popular literature continued to expand, both through the introduction of mass-market genres such as the dime novel and the illustrated press, and via the new commitment to public education and developing a literary curriculum of standard school texts. Established genres, such as detective fiction and science fiction, gained new audiences through the introduction of the paperback book, printed on inexpensive paper with a thin cardboard wrapper, and sold for a small fraction of the cost of a hardcover book. The large number of young readers led to a great expansion of children's literature and adolescent literature, as well as to new popular forms such as the comic book, which in recent years has emerged as a medium for adult fiction in the form of graphic novels.
With the advent of new media and technologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, texts are often stored and transmitted electronically, magnetically, or digitally, without ever being printed on paper; they also often include, or are linked to audio, video, or multimedia content. Speech can now also be recorded, stored, and transmitted, so that some literary historians, such as Walter J. Ong, regard this as an age of "secondary orality". Such changes will doubtlessly expand and alter the definition of literature, just as did earlier technological developments.
Formal categories
A formal distinction common to many literary traditions is that between poetry and prose. Although the precise distinction between these two categories varies somewhat among world literatures, and though the boundaries between them have grown more blurred according to certain modern literary theories, it may generally be observed that poetry depends upon a relatively fixed array of metrical and phonological patterns used as repetitive devices, and involves a more densely interconnected arrangement of imagery and metaphor. In Old English poetry, as in the earliest Latin verse, a fixed pattern of stressed syllables, with the alliteration of their initial sounds, provides the basic structure, whereas in ancient Greek poetry, the length of the syllables was the primary principle. Rhyme, the assonance of the final sounds of words or lines, is one of the most common and recognizable options of poetic structure. Prose, of course, especially prose described as "poetic", may partake of all these qualities as well, though generally not in such a dense and closely patterned manner. Modern poetry also includes forms such as free verse and concrete poetry, which depart from the strict poetic meter or earlier forms, or attempt to abandon formal constraints altogether.
Prose is a far more inclusive category, and indeed envelops a wide variety of texts, such as business letters, instruction manuals, newpapers, memos, lists, contracts, speeches, and legal documents, which may not be considered literature at all. The earliest epic narratives were poetic in form, and prose was more generally reserved for the writing of history, religious instruction, or descriptive accounts of events or travels. The modern western tradition of literary prose emerged in the later Middle Ages, in texts such as Boccaccio's Decameron, or the prose segments of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales such as the Tale of Melibee, which Chaucer himself describes as "a litel thing in prose". By the time of the Renaissance, literary prose tended to take the form of extended essays, such as Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, or in narratives now regarded as early antecedents of the novel such as Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller. From the eighteenth century onward, literary prose has largely comprised either narrative fiction or essays, along with collections of personal letters, biography, and autobiography.
Genres
The evolution of various genres of literature has varied considerably in different languages and cultures, although some very general categories can be outlined. Much early imaginative literature can be classed as epic; within this category one would find texts as various as the Odyssey, the Mahabharata, the Finnish Kalevala, the Elder Edda, or the Táin Bó Cúailnge. Epic literature is marked by a strong, central narrative, often focused on the deeds of a single heroic figure, and featuring elaborately detailed accounts of battle. The Greek term "lyric" also has close equivalents in many world literatures; lyric poetry is generally written in short stanzas or strophes, with an emphasis on image and affective emotion. Significant lyric poets in world traditions have included Sappho, Li Po, Kabir, Keats, and Dickinson.
Another early and continuing form, dramatic literature, consists of words and actions to be spoken and performed upon a stage by actors; while it has often been recorded in writing and print, the primary venue for this form of literature is theatrical performance. In ancient Greece, where plays evolved out of the religious observances of Dionysus, the works of Aristophanes, Sophocles, and others retain their force after two millenia. Significant world playwrights include Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, Chekhov, and Beckett. Some of the paradigms of the stage extend to those of cinema film, and today film studies are often conjoined academically with the study of literature.
In the past few centuries, the novel has emerged as one of the dominant literary forms of modern literature, combining some features of the epic (such as a strong, central protagonist) with elements of historical narrative, travel writing, and the naturalistic dialogue of plays. Many claim Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615) as the first novel, though some assign it instead to the category of mock epic. Among the great practitioners of the novel over the centuries since have been Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner. Novels themselves, from their first appearance, have been categorized in a variety of topical or formal sub-genres, such as the picaresque novel or the epistolary novel, as well as broader thematic categories such as science fiction, detective fiction, or fantasy.
National literatures
De Vulgari Eloquentia
De Vulgari Eloquentia
Although their names imply otherwise, national literatures often emerged before the emergence of modern nation-states. Dante, famously, in De Vulgari Eloquentia, his defense of writing in Italian, declared that literary Italian must be "curial", or "of the manner of the Italian court"" - even though, at the time he wrote there was no such singular Italian state. Like Chaucer and other medieval poets, he wrote before the language of his compositions reached its modern form. The writers of the Renaissance were a vital part of the emergence of their respective national literatures, though some, like Sir Thomas More, eschewed their own vernacular in favor of Latin. Even writers whose works now seem essential to their national literature, such as Goethe or Shakespeare, only became legitimate subjects of serious academic consideration very late in the nineteenth century, when national vernacular literatures became subjects for schools and universities. Today, at a point when literary works are frequently translated into other languages soon after their publication, and literacy rates around the world are at historic highs, there is a growing sense of an international audience for literature.
Not all the study of literature takes place along national lines; comparative literature is one academic discipline that engages in the study of literature in an interdisciplinary and transnational context. The relationships between the national literatures of former colonial powers has also led to postcolonial literature's emergence as a significent area of study. Other interdisciplinary fields with close ties to literature, such as film studies and cultural studies, also move readily across the old boundaries of national and ethnic literatures.
The future of literature
In 2003, poet Dana Gioia, chairman of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, noted that the average American spent a mere twenty-four minutes per day reading, compared to more than four hours spent watching television. "The decline of print as our culture's primary means of codifying, presenting, and preserving information isn't merely a methodological change," he observed, "it is an epistemological transformation."[2] This trend, combined with the proliferation of new media for literary expression—such as e-books, "blogs" and other online vehicles, audiobooks, "podcasts," text messaging, and other technologies—could be seen as cause for alarm about the future of letters, especially on the part of devotees of traditional written literature. Yet Gioia and other literary futurists suggest that the likely outcome is not the end of literature, but new ways in which the literary impulse expresses itself through new media. In other words, the future of literature may have less to do with traditional literacy and letters than anyone can predict.
References
* The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-1921). http://www.bartleby.com/cambridge/
* CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu
* Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge, 2002.
* Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
* Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven, Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.
* Ashcroft, Bill, et. al., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York Routledge, 2002 (ISBN 0415280206)
* Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature. 10th ed. New York: Prentice-Hall, 2005. (ISBN 0131344420)
Notes
1. ↑ Kearny, Anthony. "John Churton Collins and the Attempt to Link English and Classics." British Journal of Educational Studies 29:3 (1981), 258-267
2. ↑ Gioia, Dana. "Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture." Hudson Review 56.1 (Spring 2003). http://www.hudsonreview.com/gioiaSp03.pdf
Retrieved from "http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Literature"
Categories: Approved Articles | CZ Live | Literature Approved | Literature Workgroup
From Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium
Jump to: navigation, search
Unlike scholars in certain fields of learning, such as biology, where the boundaries are fairly well defined, those in the field of literature still debate exactly what the term means. When the celebrated 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica defined literature as “the best expression of the best thought reduced to writing,” few dared question it. Now, though, a century of such questioning has broadened the definition so that it can include nearly any text in any human language, even works in other media. Practically speaking, literature’s present-day definition is shaped by the perspective from which one regards it: scholars of a theoretical bent see it as embedded in questions of race, class, and gender, and highly variable over historical time, while those more aesthetically inclined tend to emphasize its continuity within traditions of arts and humane letters. One perspective typically mistrusts the other.
Contents
[hide] [hide]
* 1 The study of literature
* 2 Scope of literature
* 3 Literary media
* 4 Formal categories
* 5 Genres
* 6 National literatures
* 7 The future of literature
* 8 References
The study of literature
In its modern descriptive sense, literature denotes written texts; by extension scholars have also applied the term to spoken or sung texts ("oral literature"), writings in particular subject areas ("medical literature"), other collections of material in a given language or national tradition ("English literature"), visual texts such as video and illustration, and published ephemera (“campaign literature”). It is often divided into historical periods ("Victorian literature") as well as into formal categories (prose, poetry, or drama) and genres (such as the epic, the novel, or the folktale).
In its more traditional prescriptive sense (that of the 1911 Britannica), literature connotes a particular quality found in the written culture of humane learning, the profession of “letters” (from Latin litteras), and written texts considered as aesthetic and expressive objects. In that sense, the art of “literature” differs from the science of “language,” as studied by theoretical linguists and cognitive psychologists such as Steven Pinker.
Literature as a subject worthy of academic study was first identified in the nineteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the English word itself back to the 1200s (when it described familiarity with classical learning); not until the early 1800s was it used in the more modern sense. Classical authors of ancient Greece and Rome generally never recognized the study of “literature” as a discipline per se; rather, they looked at forms such as drama, history, poetry, philosophy, and mythology on their own terms, or in terms of various schools of philosophical or religious thought. With the revival of advanced learning in late medieval and Renaissance Europe, though, the focus of study became classical literature itself—the sense first recorded by the OED; a person of “letters” was one who knew the classical traditions, and could read the classics. Only after literature in modern vernaculars became too significant to ignore did the current sense of the word develop.
European universities long resisted according writers working in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and other vernacular languages the same status in their curricula as that given to writers of classical Latin and Greek. Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries were always conscious of the perceived inferiority of their native language, even as they rivaled and surpassed the literary achievements of their classical precursors. As scientific learning began to supplant classical learning in the early nineteenth century, universities added philology (the predecessor of modern linguistics) as a discipline, but that field focused more on the historical relationships between languages than on their literature.
In the United Kingdom, for example, the first institutions to offer instruction in literature were not the elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, but those geared toward students seeking to move up in the world, such as the London Working Men's College (founded in 1854). There, much to their surprise, sons of London bricklayers and artisans encountered teachers such as F.J. Furnivall, an early editor of the OED, who opened his classes with the dramatic announcement that he was about to return a national literature to its citizens, and then commenced reading aloud in Middle English from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching, J.C. Collins stressed the influence of classics on English literature, shifting studies of the language away from philology and toward the present-day discipline of comparative literature[1]. In the United States, the study of literature was introduced at normal schools (schools for the preparation of teachers, mostly women at that time), and subsequently at land grant universities, where English literature was given the place assigned at older universities to reading in Latin and Greek.
First Edition of Quiller-Couch
First Edition of Quiller-Couch
Early professors of English literature, among them Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Henry Morley, devoted much of their attention to establishing a canon of suitable texts for study. In the twentieth century, this led to standardized anthologies, such as the Oxford and Norton anthologies of English literature. With the rise of the New Critics in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, scholars began looking at the literary text as a cultural object—a living repository of tradition extending across ages and civilizations. This movement coincided with expanding post-World War II college populations and helped elevate literature’s place and prestige in university curricula. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, proponents of poststructuralist theory began questioning the traditional literary canon and accepted hierarchies: Why, for instance, should lyric poetry be regarded as worthy of literary study, when comic books weren’t? Couldn’t we learn important things about contemporary culture from native American storytelling traditions as well as Italian opera? Practically speaking, this has meant that while college English departments still teach courses in Shakespeare and James Joyce, the sense of a highly exclusive canon of “great writers” is much diminished, and more kinds of literature are fair game for scholarly inquiry.
Scope of literature
In its broadest sense, literature came into being with the first use of pictographs, hieroglyphs, cuneiform, or alphabetic scripts, although it is more common to designate as "literature" only those texts which contain a degree of imaginative, emotive, allegoric, didactic, or descriptive content. Thus, business records, tallies, or lists are not generally included, even though such texts, which can be found in the earliest civilizations, are significant from a historical and archaeological perspective. The earliest literature evolved from the transcription of pre-existing oral traditional narratives, and progressed gradually to a point where such materials were first composed in written form.
Religious texts, while they have of course an entirely different significance to the adherents of the faiths to which they pertain, may also be considered literature when their narrative, figurative, or compositional qualities are foregrounded. The earliest instances of literature, therefore, those termed "ancient", include a variety of texts ranging from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh to the Hebrew Torah, and onward to the Hellenistic Odyssey of Homer. These texts, though clearly recognized as literature, share an origin in pre-literate cultures, and thus predate, in some sense, the modern use of the term. Later in human history, the deliberate writing of imaginary or fanciful texts, disseminated in written form to a literate audience, marks the first fully self-conscious literary traditions. In this context, although still considered ancient, might be placed such compositions as the Latin Aeneid of Virgil, the Chinese Songs of Chu, or the Greek lyrical poetry of Sappho. With improvements in the production and dissemination of written texts, from Roman copyhouses to the invention of the printing press, along with the increase of a literate reading public, a third sense of "literature," and the one most commonly used today, came into being. Specifically, literature encompasses all imaginative writing in any language, as well as essays, criticism, travel writing, biographies, memoirs, diaries, and collections of letters.
Literary media
Literature was first recorded in pictographic and alphabetic systems of writing, which were either incised on clay tablets or stone, or written with inks or dyes on various flat organic media such as papyrus or parchment. The development of alphabetic systems, in which characters stood for sounds instead of things, by the Phoenecian and Greek cultures, enabled a rapid advancement in the variety and dissemination of written literature. In earliest times, such documents were generally prepared and stored on long sheets rolled into scrolls, but beginning in the second century CE, the codex, a bound set of trimmed sheets with a cover, began to predominate; this is the ancestor of the modern book.
The introduction of paper to Western Europe in the later Middle Ages greatly reduced the cost of written manuscripts, and the invention of movable type in 1450 led to to the printing of books in large numbers, and still further reduction in cost. Further refinements to the printing process, such as machines which could cast whole blocks of type at once, led to the emergence of print as a mass medium in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with new formats such as magazines and newspapers printed in thousands of copies, both for subscribers and for sale at booksellers and newsstands. Genres such as the novel gained tremendous new audiences through appearances in periodical and serial forms, bringing writers such as Poe, Dickens, Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to a mass audience, and establishing literature as a popular medium.
In the later twentieth century, the field of popular literature continued to expand, both through the introduction of mass-market genres such as the dime novel and the illustrated press, and via the new commitment to public education and developing a literary curriculum of standard school texts. Established genres, such as detective fiction and science fiction, gained new audiences through the introduction of the paperback book, printed on inexpensive paper with a thin cardboard wrapper, and sold for a small fraction of the cost of a hardcover book. The large number of young readers led to a great expansion of children's literature and adolescent literature, as well as to new popular forms such as the comic book, which in recent years has emerged as a medium for adult fiction in the form of graphic novels.
With the advent of new media and technologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, texts are often stored and transmitted electronically, magnetically, or digitally, without ever being printed on paper; they also often include, or are linked to audio, video, or multimedia content. Speech can now also be recorded, stored, and transmitted, so that some literary historians, such as Walter J. Ong, regard this as an age of "secondary orality". Such changes will doubtlessly expand and alter the definition of literature, just as did earlier technological developments.
Formal categories
A formal distinction common to many literary traditions is that between poetry and prose. Although the precise distinction between these two categories varies somewhat among world literatures, and though the boundaries between them have grown more blurred according to certain modern literary theories, it may generally be observed that poetry depends upon a relatively fixed array of metrical and phonological patterns used as repetitive devices, and involves a more densely interconnected arrangement of imagery and metaphor. In Old English poetry, as in the earliest Latin verse, a fixed pattern of stressed syllables, with the alliteration of their initial sounds, provides the basic structure, whereas in ancient Greek poetry, the length of the syllables was the primary principle. Rhyme, the assonance of the final sounds of words or lines, is one of the most common and recognizable options of poetic structure. Prose, of course, especially prose described as "poetic", may partake of all these qualities as well, though generally not in such a dense and closely patterned manner. Modern poetry also includes forms such as free verse and concrete poetry, which depart from the strict poetic meter or earlier forms, or attempt to abandon formal constraints altogether.
Prose is a far more inclusive category, and indeed envelops a wide variety of texts, such as business letters, instruction manuals, newpapers, memos, lists, contracts, speeches, and legal documents, which may not be considered literature at all. The earliest epic narratives were poetic in form, and prose was more generally reserved for the writing of history, religious instruction, or descriptive accounts of events or travels. The modern western tradition of literary prose emerged in the later Middle Ages, in texts such as Boccaccio's Decameron, or the prose segments of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales such as the Tale of Melibee, which Chaucer himself describes as "a litel thing in prose". By the time of the Renaissance, literary prose tended to take the form of extended essays, such as Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, or in narratives now regarded as early antecedents of the novel such as Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller. From the eighteenth century onward, literary prose has largely comprised either narrative fiction or essays, along with collections of personal letters, biography, and autobiography.
Genres
The evolution of various genres of literature has varied considerably in different languages and cultures, although some very general categories can be outlined. Much early imaginative literature can be classed as epic; within this category one would find texts as various as the Odyssey, the Mahabharata, the Finnish Kalevala, the Elder Edda, or the Táin Bó Cúailnge. Epic literature is marked by a strong, central narrative, often focused on the deeds of a single heroic figure, and featuring elaborately detailed accounts of battle. The Greek term "lyric" also has close equivalents in many world literatures; lyric poetry is generally written in short stanzas or strophes, with an emphasis on image and affective emotion. Significant lyric poets in world traditions have included Sappho, Li Po, Kabir, Keats, and Dickinson.
Another early and continuing form, dramatic literature, consists of words and actions to be spoken and performed upon a stage by actors; while it has often been recorded in writing and print, the primary venue for this form of literature is theatrical performance. In ancient Greece, where plays evolved out of the religious observances of Dionysus, the works of Aristophanes, Sophocles, and others retain their force after two millenia. Significant world playwrights include Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, Chekhov, and Beckett. Some of the paradigms of the stage extend to those of cinema film, and today film studies are often conjoined academically with the study of literature.
In the past few centuries, the novel has emerged as one of the dominant literary forms of modern literature, combining some features of the epic (such as a strong, central protagonist) with elements of historical narrative, travel writing, and the naturalistic dialogue of plays. Many claim Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615) as the first novel, though some assign it instead to the category of mock epic. Among the great practitioners of the novel over the centuries since have been Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner. Novels themselves, from their first appearance, have been categorized in a variety of topical or formal sub-genres, such as the picaresque novel or the epistolary novel, as well as broader thematic categories such as science fiction, detective fiction, or fantasy.
National literatures
De Vulgari Eloquentia
De Vulgari Eloquentia
Although their names imply otherwise, national literatures often emerged before the emergence of modern nation-states. Dante, famously, in De Vulgari Eloquentia, his defense of writing in Italian, declared that literary Italian must be "curial", or "of the manner of the Italian court"" - even though, at the time he wrote there was no such singular Italian state. Like Chaucer and other medieval poets, he wrote before the language of his compositions reached its modern form. The writers of the Renaissance were a vital part of the emergence of their respective national literatures, though some, like Sir Thomas More, eschewed their own vernacular in favor of Latin. Even writers whose works now seem essential to their national literature, such as Goethe or Shakespeare, only became legitimate subjects of serious academic consideration very late in the nineteenth century, when national vernacular literatures became subjects for schools and universities. Today, at a point when literary works are frequently translated into other languages soon after their publication, and literacy rates around the world are at historic highs, there is a growing sense of an international audience for literature.
Not all the study of literature takes place along national lines; comparative literature is one academic discipline that engages in the study of literature in an interdisciplinary and transnational context. The relationships between the national literatures of former colonial powers has also led to postcolonial literature's emergence as a significent area of study. Other interdisciplinary fields with close ties to literature, such as film studies and cultural studies, also move readily across the old boundaries of national and ethnic literatures.
The future of literature
In 2003, poet Dana Gioia, chairman of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, noted that the average American spent a mere twenty-four minutes per day reading, compared to more than four hours spent watching television. "The decline of print as our culture's primary means of codifying, presenting, and preserving information isn't merely a methodological change," he observed, "it is an epistemological transformation."[2] This trend, combined with the proliferation of new media for literary expression—such as e-books, "blogs" and other online vehicles, audiobooks, "podcasts," text messaging, and other technologies—could be seen as cause for alarm about the future of letters, especially on the part of devotees of traditional written literature. Yet Gioia and other literary futurists suggest that the likely outcome is not the end of literature, but new ways in which the literary impulse expresses itself through new media. In other words, the future of literature may have less to do with traditional literacy and letters than anyone can predict.
References
* The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-1921). http://www.bartleby.com/cambridge/
* CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu
* Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge, 2002.
* Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
* Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven, Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.
* Ashcroft, Bill, et. al., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York Routledge, 2002 (ISBN 0415280206)
* Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature. 10th ed. New York: Prentice-Hall, 2005. (ISBN 0131344420)
Notes
1. ↑ Kearny, Anthony. "John Churton Collins and the Attempt to Link English and Classics." British Journal of Educational Studies 29:3 (1981), 258-267
2. ↑ Gioia, Dana. "Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture." Hudson Review 56.1 (Spring 2003). http://www.hudsonreview.com/gioiaSp03.pdf
Retrieved from "http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Literature"
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Things Computers Can Never Do
Things Computers Can Never Do
Philip J. Erdelsky
First Published in Dr. Dobb's Journal May 1987
Please e-mail comments, corrections and additions to the webmaster at pje@efgh.com.
Anyone who has witnessed the enormous improvements in computers in the last 40 years may get the impression that computers will eventually be able to solve every well-defined problem. Progress in language understanding and other forms of artificial intelligence has been disappointing, but human language is full of ambiguities, so that's not a well-defined problem. Chess, on the other hand, is very well defined. Although it was once considered the epitome of intelligent activity, computers can now play chess better than all but a few human players.
Some problems, although well defined, are too large to be solved in a reasonable time even on our largest computers. But surely, if a computer could be freed from all limitations on time and memory, couldn't it solve any well-defined problem?
The surprising answer to this question, which was known to mathematicians even before the first real computers were constructed, is no. There are some things no computer can ever do because it can be proved that there are no algorithms to do them -- just as there is no way to square a circle with a compass and straightedge.
These things are not mere mathematical curiosities. They are things that programmers would like to have their computers do for them and things that the suppliers of software development tools would like to incorporate into their debuggers. Computer science curricula usually include the subject of uncomputable functions, but programmers who are not computer science majors sometimes ask for the impossible without realizing it.
Alan Turing in 1935 asked whether there is a method by which a computer program can determine whether any other computer program will halt. This is the famous "halting problem." Turing showed that it has no solution.
A debugger with this ability would certainly be useful. Failure to halt normally is a common form of program failure. Moreover, the debugger could be applied successively to parts of the failed program to isolate the part that is hanging up.
It is not obvious that such a debugger is impossible. Of course, the debugger can't just single-step the program to see if it halts. If the program doesn't halt, the debugger could run forever without determining that this is the case. Or it might give up just as the program is about to terminate, as human programmers sometimes do. At some point, the debugger would have to be able to say, "Aha! This loop is infinite!" It seems as though a cleverly written debugger, having all the tools of modern high-level languages at its disposal, might be able to do that.
The impossibility proof is based on the following argument. If you have a debugger that can solve the halting problem, given unlimited time and memory, then you can use the same code to make the debugger do other things, some of which are self-contradictory and hence impossible.
The particular computer language is not important. If you can solve the halting problem for one language, you can solve it for another. Just use a compiler or other translation program before solving the halting problem. Notice that translating an assembly-language program to a higher level language is quite easy, although the object program is bound to be inefficient. The goal, however, is to show that a solution to the halting problem is impossible, not merely inefficient.
Turing himself proposed a minimal machine that has come to be called the Turing Machine. Its memory was supposed to be infinitely long but only one bit wide, and the machine had only sequential access to it, as with a tape. The programming language was essentially a flowchart with only a few basic commands. Nevertheless, Turing showed that his machine was able to emulate any other machine, given enough time and a suitable program. Such a construction is not necessary for our purposes-you can imagine that the computer is programmed in some familiar high-level language.
Now consider the problem of determining whether a program can print out a specified string S (with or without other output). If you can solve the halting problem, you can solve this problem. Just replace every print statement in the program with a routine that does not send the output to the printer but keeps track of the output and halts when the string S appears. Then, to keep the program from halting for any other reason, replace all the halt statements in the program with endless loops. Then solve the halting problem for the result.
Such a program would be useful in itself because many run-time errors produce distinctive messages, and it would be helpful to predict in advance that such errors will occur.
Because this applies to any string S, you can also determine whether a program prints out a copy of itself. This is not as curious as it appears at first glance. It is easy to write a 1,000-character program that prints out all combinations of 1,000 characters, including itself. In fact, 1,000 characters is probably an overestimate of the number of characters required in most high level languages.
Now you can write a program to do the following things. First, generate, one by one, all possible programs. The easiest way to do this is to generate all strings and check each one to see whether it is a program. Compilers do this when they check syntax. Then check each program to see whether it prints out a copy of itself. Finally, print out a copy of every program that does not print out a copy of itself.
This program, in the process of generating all programs, will eventually generate itself. Does it print out a copy of itself? If it does, it is breaking the rule by printing out a copy of a program that prints out a copy of itself. If it does not, it is breaking the rule by failing to print out a copy of a program that does not print out a copy of itself. This fatal contradiction proves that the halting problem has no solution.
You may recognize this as Russell's paradox (the set of all sets that do not contain themselves) or as the barber paradox (the barber who shaves every man who does not shave himself).
Any problem that a debugger can convert to the halting problem, such as the string-output problem, is equally unsolvable. Some other obvious examples are:
1. determining whether a program will reach a specified point (Ada programmers: this is why PROGRAM_ERROR has to be a run-time error, not a compile-time error)
2. determining whether a variable is initialized before it is used
3. determining whether a given segment of code is inaccessible and will never be executed
4. determining whether two programs do the same thing
Of course, a debugger or compiler can sometimes predict such errors -- for example, inaccessible code can sometimes be identified at compile time. But universal solutions to such problems do not exist.
The impossibility of determining whether two programs do the same thing means that it is always possible to defeat a certain kind of Trojan horse. In a lecture reprinted in the Notices of the ACM (August 1984), Ken Thompson argued that he could put a Trojan horse into a C compiler that would miscompile the login statement to allow him access to any Unix system compiled with it, and it would miscompile the C compiler to insert a copy of itself. The Trojan horse itself would not appear in the source code for the C compiler. In a letter to the editor, Steve Draper noted that such a Trojan horse can be defeated by paraphrasing the C compiler (writing different code that does the same thing) and then recompiling it. No Trojan horse can infallibly recognize paraphrased programs -- hence there is always a paraphrase that will defeat the Trojan horse.
My own opinion in this matter is that, unless the Trojan horse were skillfully written, most paraphrases would defeat it, and in fact it would probably be defeated eventually by normal software maintenance. Any Trojan horse smart enough to recognize most paraphrases would probably be much larger than the rest of the C compiler. You'd never get it through the gates.
The halting problem is intimately related to two other problems, which were posed by the mathematician David Hilbert in 1900. Is there a formal proof or disproof for every mathematical statement? Is there an algorithm to find proofs?
The first question was answered in the negative by Kurt Gödel in 1931. Gödel's proof was complex, but if you accept the unsolvability of the halting problem, it can be proved simply. Whether a particular program halts is a mathematical statement. In fact, many mathematical theorems are already special cases of the halting problem because you can write a program to search for counterexamples and halt when it finds one. The theorem is equivalent to the assertion that the program never halts.
If there were always a formal proof or disproof of the assertion that a program halts, then you could simply generate all proofs (more or less as the program described earlier generated all programs) until you found either a proof or a disproof. That would solve the halting problem. Because the halting problem is in general unsolvable, there must be at least one mathematical statement of this kind that is undecidable -- that is, it cannot be formally proved or disproved.
This shows that it is impossible in general to prove that a program works. Specific programs or limited classes of programs can be proved to do certain things, but there is no way to do this for every program.
Given that some mathematical statements are undecidable, is there a program, the "decidability program," that can tell whether any mathematical statement is decidable, even without deciding whether it is true or false? As you might have guessed from the tone of this article, the answer is again no. If you have a decidability program, you can take any program and ask whether it halts. Then apply the decidability program to this question. If the question is decidable, a search of all proofs will prove it or disprove it. If the question is undecidable, then the program never halts; otherwise, you could prove that it halts by simply running it until it halts.
Therefore, theorem-proving programs, however successful they might be in limited areas, can never prove everything. Some things must always remain beyond their grasp.
These arguments are not rigorous in the mathematical sense because too much has been left out. A major part of Turing's and Gödel's work involved formalization of the concepts of "computation" and "proof" to the point at which their arguments would be accepted by mathematicians.
You may have already spotted one tacit assumption that does not correspond to reality. The programs are not constrained by memory limitations. If a program does have a memory limitation, then the halting problem can in theory be solved -- but only by a program with a much larger memory.
This is how it can be done. A program with a memory limitation has only a finite number of states. A debugger can single-step it, keeping track of the states it has occupied. If it occupies the same state twice before halting, it will repeat the same sequence of states indefinitely and will never stop.
To do this, the debugger needs enough memory to keep track of which states the program has occupied. Only one bit is required for each possible state, but the number of possible states for even a simple program is truly mind-boggling. Every combination of bits in the memory is a different state. Hence a program with only 1,024 bytes of memory has at least 2(1024 x 8) states due to memory configuration alone, to say nothing of flags and registers. This number of flip-flops would not fit into the entire known universe. It can therefore be said that the halting problem has no solution even in this case.
It should be clear, then, that there are definitely some limits to what artificial intelligence can accomplish and that mathematicians' and programmers' jobs can never be completely automated. (This is a great comfort to me because I am a mathematician and programmer.
Only perfect solutions are impossible, however. It can still be argued, and it is argued by some, that artificial intelligence programs will eventually be able to solve every problem that the human mind can solve, with at least the same success rate. And if the only requirement is practical solutions, not perfect solutions, then many interesting but theoretically unsolvable problems can be solved.
Philip J. Erdelsky
First Published in Dr. Dobb's Journal May 1987
Please e-mail comments, corrections and additions to the webmaster at pje@efgh.com.
Anyone who has witnessed the enormous improvements in computers in the last 40 years may get the impression that computers will eventually be able to solve every well-defined problem. Progress in language understanding and other forms of artificial intelligence has been disappointing, but human language is full of ambiguities, so that's not a well-defined problem. Chess, on the other hand, is very well defined. Although it was once considered the epitome of intelligent activity, computers can now play chess better than all but a few human players.
Some problems, although well defined, are too large to be solved in a reasonable time even on our largest computers. But surely, if a computer could be freed from all limitations on time and memory, couldn't it solve any well-defined problem?
The surprising answer to this question, which was known to mathematicians even before the first real computers were constructed, is no. There are some things no computer can ever do because it can be proved that there are no algorithms to do them -- just as there is no way to square a circle with a compass and straightedge.
These things are not mere mathematical curiosities. They are things that programmers would like to have their computers do for them and things that the suppliers of software development tools would like to incorporate into their debuggers. Computer science curricula usually include the subject of uncomputable functions, but programmers who are not computer science majors sometimes ask for the impossible without realizing it.
Alan Turing in 1935 asked whether there is a method by which a computer program can determine whether any other computer program will halt. This is the famous "halting problem." Turing showed that it has no solution.
A debugger with this ability would certainly be useful. Failure to halt normally is a common form of program failure. Moreover, the debugger could be applied successively to parts of the failed program to isolate the part that is hanging up.
It is not obvious that such a debugger is impossible. Of course, the debugger can't just single-step the program to see if it halts. If the program doesn't halt, the debugger could run forever without determining that this is the case. Or it might give up just as the program is about to terminate, as human programmers sometimes do. At some point, the debugger would have to be able to say, "Aha! This loop is infinite!" It seems as though a cleverly written debugger, having all the tools of modern high-level languages at its disposal, might be able to do that.
The impossibility proof is based on the following argument. If you have a debugger that can solve the halting problem, given unlimited time and memory, then you can use the same code to make the debugger do other things, some of which are self-contradictory and hence impossible.
The particular computer language is not important. If you can solve the halting problem for one language, you can solve it for another. Just use a compiler or other translation program before solving the halting problem. Notice that translating an assembly-language program to a higher level language is quite easy, although the object program is bound to be inefficient. The goal, however, is to show that a solution to the halting problem is impossible, not merely inefficient.
Turing himself proposed a minimal machine that has come to be called the Turing Machine. Its memory was supposed to be infinitely long but only one bit wide, and the machine had only sequential access to it, as with a tape. The programming language was essentially a flowchart with only a few basic commands. Nevertheless, Turing showed that his machine was able to emulate any other machine, given enough time and a suitable program. Such a construction is not necessary for our purposes-you can imagine that the computer is programmed in some familiar high-level language.
Now consider the problem of determining whether a program can print out a specified string S (with or without other output). If you can solve the halting problem, you can solve this problem. Just replace every print statement in the program with a routine that does not send the output to the printer but keeps track of the output and halts when the string S appears. Then, to keep the program from halting for any other reason, replace all the halt statements in the program with endless loops. Then solve the halting problem for the result.
Such a program would be useful in itself because many run-time errors produce distinctive messages, and it would be helpful to predict in advance that such errors will occur.
Because this applies to any string S, you can also determine whether a program prints out a copy of itself. This is not as curious as it appears at first glance. It is easy to write a 1,000-character program that prints out all combinations of 1,000 characters, including itself. In fact, 1,000 characters is probably an overestimate of the number of characters required in most high level languages.
Now you can write a program to do the following things. First, generate, one by one, all possible programs. The easiest way to do this is to generate all strings and check each one to see whether it is a program. Compilers do this when they check syntax. Then check each program to see whether it prints out a copy of itself. Finally, print out a copy of every program that does not print out a copy of itself.
This program, in the process of generating all programs, will eventually generate itself. Does it print out a copy of itself? If it does, it is breaking the rule by printing out a copy of a program that prints out a copy of itself. If it does not, it is breaking the rule by failing to print out a copy of a program that does not print out a copy of itself. This fatal contradiction proves that the halting problem has no solution.
You may recognize this as Russell's paradox (the set of all sets that do not contain themselves) or as the barber paradox (the barber who shaves every man who does not shave himself).
Any problem that a debugger can convert to the halting problem, such as the string-output problem, is equally unsolvable. Some other obvious examples are:
1. determining whether a program will reach a specified point (Ada programmers: this is why PROGRAM_ERROR has to be a run-time error, not a compile-time error)
2. determining whether a variable is initialized before it is used
3. determining whether a given segment of code is inaccessible and will never be executed
4. determining whether two programs do the same thing
Of course, a debugger or compiler can sometimes predict such errors -- for example, inaccessible code can sometimes be identified at compile time. But universal solutions to such problems do not exist.
The impossibility of determining whether two programs do the same thing means that it is always possible to defeat a certain kind of Trojan horse. In a lecture reprinted in the Notices of the ACM (August 1984), Ken Thompson argued that he could put a Trojan horse into a C compiler that would miscompile the login statement to allow him access to any Unix system compiled with it, and it would miscompile the C compiler to insert a copy of itself. The Trojan horse itself would not appear in the source code for the C compiler. In a letter to the editor, Steve Draper noted that such a Trojan horse can be defeated by paraphrasing the C compiler (writing different code that does the same thing) and then recompiling it. No Trojan horse can infallibly recognize paraphrased programs -- hence there is always a paraphrase that will defeat the Trojan horse.
My own opinion in this matter is that, unless the Trojan horse were skillfully written, most paraphrases would defeat it, and in fact it would probably be defeated eventually by normal software maintenance. Any Trojan horse smart enough to recognize most paraphrases would probably be much larger than the rest of the C compiler. You'd never get it through the gates.
The halting problem is intimately related to two other problems, which were posed by the mathematician David Hilbert in 1900. Is there a formal proof or disproof for every mathematical statement? Is there an algorithm to find proofs?
The first question was answered in the negative by Kurt Gödel in 1931. Gödel's proof was complex, but if you accept the unsolvability of the halting problem, it can be proved simply. Whether a particular program halts is a mathematical statement. In fact, many mathematical theorems are already special cases of the halting problem because you can write a program to search for counterexamples and halt when it finds one. The theorem is equivalent to the assertion that the program never halts.
If there were always a formal proof or disproof of the assertion that a program halts, then you could simply generate all proofs (more or less as the program described earlier generated all programs) until you found either a proof or a disproof. That would solve the halting problem. Because the halting problem is in general unsolvable, there must be at least one mathematical statement of this kind that is undecidable -- that is, it cannot be formally proved or disproved.
This shows that it is impossible in general to prove that a program works. Specific programs or limited classes of programs can be proved to do certain things, but there is no way to do this for every program.
Given that some mathematical statements are undecidable, is there a program, the "decidability program," that can tell whether any mathematical statement is decidable, even without deciding whether it is true or false? As you might have guessed from the tone of this article, the answer is again no. If you have a decidability program, you can take any program and ask whether it halts. Then apply the decidability program to this question. If the question is decidable, a search of all proofs will prove it or disprove it. If the question is undecidable, then the program never halts; otherwise, you could prove that it halts by simply running it until it halts.
Therefore, theorem-proving programs, however successful they might be in limited areas, can never prove everything. Some things must always remain beyond their grasp.
These arguments are not rigorous in the mathematical sense because too much has been left out. A major part of Turing's and Gödel's work involved formalization of the concepts of "computation" and "proof" to the point at which their arguments would be accepted by mathematicians.
You may have already spotted one tacit assumption that does not correspond to reality. The programs are not constrained by memory limitations. If a program does have a memory limitation, then the halting problem can in theory be solved -- but only by a program with a much larger memory.
This is how it can be done. A program with a memory limitation has only a finite number of states. A debugger can single-step it, keeping track of the states it has occupied. If it occupies the same state twice before halting, it will repeat the same sequence of states indefinitely and will never stop.
To do this, the debugger needs enough memory to keep track of which states the program has occupied. Only one bit is required for each possible state, but the number of possible states for even a simple program is truly mind-boggling. Every combination of bits in the memory is a different state. Hence a program with only 1,024 bytes of memory has at least 2(1024 x 8) states due to memory configuration alone, to say nothing of flags and registers. This number of flip-flops would not fit into the entire known universe. It can therefore be said that the halting problem has no solution even in this case.
It should be clear, then, that there are definitely some limits to what artificial intelligence can accomplish and that mathematicians' and programmers' jobs can never be completely automated. (This is a great comfort to me because I am a mathematician and programmer.
Only perfect solutions are impossible, however. It can still be argued, and it is argued by some, that artificial intelligence programs will eventually be able to solve every problem that the human mind can solve, with at least the same success rate. And if the only requirement is practical solutions, not perfect solutions, then many interesting but theoretically unsolvable problems can be solved.
Can Computers See?
Can Computers See?
Gregory Koukl
If they can, does this refute Christianity?
divider
I had an interesting question asked of me last week. It had to do with what philosopher's call the mind/body problem. I answered that question with an illustration and I have gotten a response in the mail to the question that was raised. I want to spend some time responding to this because it really helps us to work through this issue. It helps to make a case, I think, for the existence of the soul, which is very important.
Now the mind/body problem relates to a question: Are we simply a physical body and that's it, or are we a physical body that houses a soul and the soul is what animates the body--it gives the body ultimate life, gives it personhood, gives it identity, the soul is who you are?
The mind/body problem is an important one even for those who are not philosophers because this is not simply an academic issue. What is at stake is the existence of the soul. Some will argue that all that exists is the physical world. Non-physical things like souls simply do not exist. A physicalist would give this assessment of a human being. He would say that all so-called mind activity can be exhaustively explained in physical terms. It can be reduced to physical activity in the brain--C-fibers firing and chemical reactions. I heard one talk show host say not long ago that, after all, an emotion is just a chemical reaction. Well, this plays into this notion that we are only our bodies. Since everything can be explained in physical terms--in terms of the physical activity of the brain--there is no need to posit this eerie, mystical, unscientific, and religious thing called the soul.
Why is this important? It is important because there is something else going on here. What is going on is the argument that if there is no soul then there cannot possibly be any life after death. Think about it. What is life after death? It is when the body dies and the soul goes on. After the physical body dies there is something that remains and continues living. But if the physical body is what you are, then when it dies, you die. And if someone can demonstrate scientifically, without a doubt, that human beings can be exhaustively quantified in physical terms--that there is no mind separate from the brain, that there is no soul separate from the human body, that the soul is just a word we used to use to describe something we thought was there but now have learned that it is not there at all, that there is only the brain--if that can be demonstrated to be true, the game is up for Christians. There is nothing else to discuss, nothing to preach, because why talk about salvation for eternity if once we die we're gone? That is why there is tremendous philosophical currency riding on this particular question. That is why it is very important.
I used an illustration last week to disprove the notion that we are just our bodies and that all soulish activity can actually be explained in strictly physicalistic terms.
By the way, part of this discussion entails the notion that colors are merely physical wave lengths of light. The argument that colors are wave lengths that cause a chemical reaction in your eye that is physical is meant to argue against the notion that colors can exist or be apprehended in some kind of non- physical realm. My illustration that I gave was to make the point that colors are not wave lengths because it is possible to see color when there is no light. If you can see color when there is no light, then colors can't be light. They must be something different than light. They may be associated with light, but they must be different than light.
Here is the illustration I gave. Close your eyes and picture your mother. You are a child. She's in the kitchen washing dishes. Have you got the picture? What color dress is she wearing? What color is there? Some say red. Some say blue. Some say green or white. The point is, there is a color in your imagination. You can conjure up a color with your mind. Note I didn't say brain because your brain isn't conjuring up the color. Your mind is. How do I know it's not the brain? Because you cannot crack your brain open and ever find your mother in there wearing a certain color dress. What you are seeing is not something physical. If is was physical, it would occupy a physical location. You can't find it physically. She's not in there. Nor is the color in there. Not in your brain. It is in your mind. Therefore, it is not physical. It cannot be equated with brain activity. It can't be identified as the same thing as brain activity, and this becomes as argument for the existence of the soul.
I received a letter from a Christian who questioned my illustration. Greg from Redondo Beach offered the counter-example that a computer can supposedly see color, therefore this argument for the mind is compromised.
I'm very glad that he is thinking about this and is responding to this because he is raising questions he might run into. I'm glad to be able to sharpen my point and make the case for the existence of the soul.
I'd like to read the paragraph in which he responds to my illustration. He says this: "I caught a little of your show last weekend and am troubled about the mind/brain question. I'm not sure of the example "If you crack your brain open, you won't find the color blue," is valid since a computer can be programmed [Here's the heart of it] to detect blue with a sensor or camera and verbalize the word blue. The computer is matter which contains in it a representation of the color blue. [He suggests here that a thought is just a complex representation that would be on the physicalist order of things.] So it contains a representation of the color blue, and when you smash the computer there is likewise no blue. But in this case, mere matter and programming, without needing a soul to do it, contain blue. My hunch is there is still a kernel which may require a separate soul, and I can't imagine how any machine or physical brain could achieve self-motivated, independent, free action that was not programmed in by a Designer." Now that's the free moral agency question and I will come to that later in the show. But the earlier challenge is still a good one.
He is saying, You know I don't buy your illustration, Koukl, and here are the reasons. You may still have a point on other grounds and those other grounds are the grounds of free moral agency. But I think that your illustration about color in the mind is flawed because it does seem that computer can recognize color and have a kind of representation of the color blue, even though when you smash a computer you won't find the color blue in there. So that seems to compromise your argument. If we can invent a machine, a computer that can recognize blue and identify it with the name blue, then why do I argue that a soul is necessary to do that in humans? It is an excellent question.
First, let me make a quick observation. To say that it is not necessary to assert the soul's part in this doesn't establish that only physical processes are involved. In other words, just because you could show that a machine could see blue in that way doesn't mean that the brain is seeing blue. It doesn't obviate or make unnecessary the existence of the soul. It's just a way of arguing that it ain't necessarily so. So just because we can show that my point doesn't hold and that a machine can see a color, it doesn't mean that we don't have a soul. It just seems to weaken my argument for the necessity of a soul. Even if a machine could do that, it doesn't mean that in the case of humans a machine is in fact doing that. That is a separate issue. But I am actually going to argue the harder case. I am going to argue that it is not even possible for a machine--and here I mean even biological machines like brains--to do what the soul can do.
Our specific argument is going to focus on the notion of being able to see a color. So our question is, Can a machine see color?
My argument in brief goes something like this: Physical things have physical characteristics. The elements of consciousness--thinking, intending, believing, having sensations and feelings (and that's what we are talking about here when you can see the quality of a color)--these are things that don't have physical properties, therefore they are not physical or material. They are non-physical, they are immaterial. The mind is not the brain. You see my argument?
Let's see how this objection applies to my argument.
Our question here is this: Can a machine--whether a computer or a brain--do the same thing that a soul does? I hold that the machine can't see the color blue. Greg from Redondo suggests that maybe it can. So let me make this distinction. It comes from the words that were used here--talking about a computer that can be programmed to detect blue. I must make a very important distinction here between detecting or measuring and seeing . Seeing is a way of measuring. I could have a visual impression of an object lying along side a ruler. I am seeing the object along side the ruler and my sight allows me to measure that ruler at 12 inches, but I could still measure that ruler at 12 inches even if I was blind. I could touch the ends of the object and the ends of the ruler and see that they are the same. I could put them next to each other and correlate the size of the object with the size of the ruler and determine that the object is one foot long. So I can measure it or detect it without seeing.
But my argument goes beyond that with regards to the soul. All I have to do to demonstrate that there is more to man than his brain is demonstrate that activities that we go through cannot be accounted for by a mere physical process. This accounting or inability to account for something is not a limitation of science--but that it can't be accounted for even in principle. Now that point is important because if something cannot be explained by physical processes even in principle, and we can demonstrate that to be the case, then we don't have to worry about somewhere down the line people discovering something in science that refutes our argument as if it is founded just in the contingencies of scientific discovery.
My point is that this has nothing to do with science. I am trying to make the point and prove the point that it doesn't matter how much scientific sophistication we have, we will never be able to do certain kinds of things because they are the kinds of things that do not respond to physical assessment principally because they are not physical things. There is no science that we will ever discover, for example, that will help us to know what is morally right and wrong. Science doesn't measure that kind of thing. Science measures physical things. A moral is not a physical thing, therefore science cannot measure morality. Rather, science is the subject of morality. In other words, morality impinges upon science, not the other way around.
I'm talking, though, about whether a computer can actually see color. The argument has been, A computer can measure color. That seems to be the case. But can it see color? That is what is at stake here. That's why I made the very important distinction between measuring and seeing. My argument is that a machine can measure, but it can't measure in one of the ways that you and I measure. It can't measure by seeing, that is, by having a visual impression. Why not? Machines can't have visual impressions. Minds have visual impressions. That is a characteristic of consciousness, not of machinery. Therefore, if minds have visual impressions and machines can't have visual impressions then the mind and machines--even the machine of the brain--are not the same thing.
Here is my response to the computer illustration--the computer that can be programmed to detect blue with a sensor and then alert us with the sound blue. Notice I didn't say the word blue as was used in the letter. A word is a physical symbol that stands for something else that is not physical. That non-physical thing is the word's meaning. The computer can't use words like that. It doesn't consciously use symbols. It merely makes a noise and the noise means something to us. So the computer can measure a wave length that we see visually as blue. Yes, it can do that. It can alert us with the sound that we know as the word blue, but is this evidence that the computer sees blue? The answer is no. The computer doesn't see color. It can only measure a wave length, and it can't even do that if light is not available and there is no light in my brain when I imagine my mother washing the dishes wearing a colored dress.
Greg writes in his letter: "The computer contains in it a representation of the color blue." Well, you know he is absolutely right about that. It contains a representation of the color blue, but I think he has conceded more than he realizes with this remark. What is the representation? If all of what blue is is captured in the wiring of the computer--or in the wiring of my brain by analogy through some kind of an electro-chemical reaction--then it doesn't make any sense to say that it represents something else. If the physical description is what blue is, then there is nothing to represent. Of course, that is what a physicalist would argue--blue is the chemical reaction in your brain, not that it represents chemical reactions in your brain.
I'm going to prove this very simply to you in case the change hasn't fallen into the meter yet. I realized this can be kind of an obscure concepts.
Picture the color blue. Now, describe the quality of your impression in physical terms. Tell me what blue looks like. You can't do it. It is not possible to tell me what blue looks like, unless of course you compare it to another color that I am familiar with. In other words, you can only describe a sensory impression by using other sensory impressions. You can't describe it in purely physical terms in any way that captures what you are experiencing.
If I asked you to describe blue to me in physical terms, you would say that it has the wave length of .902 milacrons (I just made that up). Does that help me at all to know what it is that you see right now in your mind when you see the color blue? It doesn't help one single bit. And the reason is that the blue is not physical in that sense. It can apply to physical things, but the visual impression--the thing that you see--is not physical. That's why a computer can't see blue.
The point that I am making is that there is a difference between measuring a color and the color itself. If we say that the measurement represents the color, as Greg did, then it is clear that the color is something different from the measurement--in this case a measurement of wave length. And that's why we say the wave length represents the color. The color is what we see. The wave length is simply the wave of light that produces this visual sensation of blue.
Greg also said that the computer contained the color blue, but what does it mean to contain blue? If the programming is the blue, then how doe the programming contain the blue? It doesn't. The blue is something else. Blue is what we see. Our minds don't simply detect a wave length. We see color.
In fact, a blind person could be equipped with a scanner attached to his brain that would enable him to detect colors much like a computer detects color. It would just communicate the wave length of color through the means of maybe a sound or something like that. Different colored wave lengths might have different pitches of sound corresponding to them. And since sound has a continuous gradient scale just like the colors in a rainbow, one could get an exact correlation of certain sound wave lengths to certain color wave lengths. So a blind person, knowing the sound correlations, could identify from sound cues any particular color that was before him. But would it make any sense in that circumstance to say that the blind person was actually seeing the color? It wouldn't at all. Why? Because he's blind. He sees nothing. That is precisely my point. A computer is the same way--even a sophisticated computer like the brain.
Gregory Koukl
If they can, does this refute Christianity?
divider
I had an interesting question asked of me last week. It had to do with what philosopher's call the mind/body problem. I answered that question with an illustration and I have gotten a response in the mail to the question that was raised. I want to spend some time responding to this because it really helps us to work through this issue. It helps to make a case, I think, for the existence of the soul, which is very important.
Now the mind/body problem relates to a question: Are we simply a physical body and that's it, or are we a physical body that houses a soul and the soul is what animates the body--it gives the body ultimate life, gives it personhood, gives it identity, the soul is who you are?
The mind/body problem is an important one even for those who are not philosophers because this is not simply an academic issue. What is at stake is the existence of the soul. Some will argue that all that exists is the physical world. Non-physical things like souls simply do not exist. A physicalist would give this assessment of a human being. He would say that all so-called mind activity can be exhaustively explained in physical terms. It can be reduced to physical activity in the brain--C-fibers firing and chemical reactions. I heard one talk show host say not long ago that, after all, an emotion is just a chemical reaction. Well, this plays into this notion that we are only our bodies. Since everything can be explained in physical terms--in terms of the physical activity of the brain--there is no need to posit this eerie, mystical, unscientific, and religious thing called the soul.
Why is this important? It is important because there is something else going on here. What is going on is the argument that if there is no soul then there cannot possibly be any life after death. Think about it. What is life after death? It is when the body dies and the soul goes on. After the physical body dies there is something that remains and continues living. But if the physical body is what you are, then when it dies, you die. And if someone can demonstrate scientifically, without a doubt, that human beings can be exhaustively quantified in physical terms--that there is no mind separate from the brain, that there is no soul separate from the human body, that the soul is just a word we used to use to describe something we thought was there but now have learned that it is not there at all, that there is only the brain--if that can be demonstrated to be true, the game is up for Christians. There is nothing else to discuss, nothing to preach, because why talk about salvation for eternity if once we die we're gone? That is why there is tremendous philosophical currency riding on this particular question. That is why it is very important.
I used an illustration last week to disprove the notion that we are just our bodies and that all soulish activity can actually be explained in strictly physicalistic terms.
By the way, part of this discussion entails the notion that colors are merely physical wave lengths of light. The argument that colors are wave lengths that cause a chemical reaction in your eye that is physical is meant to argue against the notion that colors can exist or be apprehended in some kind of non- physical realm. My illustration that I gave was to make the point that colors are not wave lengths because it is possible to see color when there is no light. If you can see color when there is no light, then colors can't be light. They must be something different than light. They may be associated with light, but they must be different than light.
Here is the illustration I gave. Close your eyes and picture your mother. You are a child. She's in the kitchen washing dishes. Have you got the picture? What color dress is she wearing? What color is there? Some say red. Some say blue. Some say green or white. The point is, there is a color in your imagination. You can conjure up a color with your mind. Note I didn't say brain because your brain isn't conjuring up the color. Your mind is. How do I know it's not the brain? Because you cannot crack your brain open and ever find your mother in there wearing a certain color dress. What you are seeing is not something physical. If is was physical, it would occupy a physical location. You can't find it physically. She's not in there. Nor is the color in there. Not in your brain. It is in your mind. Therefore, it is not physical. It cannot be equated with brain activity. It can't be identified as the same thing as brain activity, and this becomes as argument for the existence of the soul.
I received a letter from a Christian who questioned my illustration. Greg from Redondo Beach offered the counter-example that a computer can supposedly see color, therefore this argument for the mind is compromised.
I'm very glad that he is thinking about this and is responding to this because he is raising questions he might run into. I'm glad to be able to sharpen my point and make the case for the existence of the soul.
I'd like to read the paragraph in which he responds to my illustration. He says this: "I caught a little of your show last weekend and am troubled about the mind/brain question. I'm not sure of the example "If you crack your brain open, you won't find the color blue," is valid since a computer can be programmed [Here's the heart of it] to detect blue with a sensor or camera and verbalize the word blue. The computer is matter which contains in it a representation of the color blue. [He suggests here that a thought is just a complex representation that would be on the physicalist order of things.] So it contains a representation of the color blue, and when you smash the computer there is likewise no blue. But in this case, mere matter and programming, without needing a soul to do it, contain blue. My hunch is there is still a kernel which may require a separate soul, and I can't imagine how any machine or physical brain could achieve self-motivated, independent, free action that was not programmed in by a Designer." Now that's the free moral agency question and I will come to that later in the show. But the earlier challenge is still a good one.
He is saying, You know I don't buy your illustration, Koukl, and here are the reasons. You may still have a point on other grounds and those other grounds are the grounds of free moral agency. But I think that your illustration about color in the mind is flawed because it does seem that computer can recognize color and have a kind of representation of the color blue, even though when you smash a computer you won't find the color blue in there. So that seems to compromise your argument. If we can invent a machine, a computer that can recognize blue and identify it with the name blue, then why do I argue that a soul is necessary to do that in humans? It is an excellent question.
First, let me make a quick observation. To say that it is not necessary to assert the soul's part in this doesn't establish that only physical processes are involved. In other words, just because you could show that a machine could see blue in that way doesn't mean that the brain is seeing blue. It doesn't obviate or make unnecessary the existence of the soul. It's just a way of arguing that it ain't necessarily so. So just because we can show that my point doesn't hold and that a machine can see a color, it doesn't mean that we don't have a soul. It just seems to weaken my argument for the necessity of a soul. Even if a machine could do that, it doesn't mean that in the case of humans a machine is in fact doing that. That is a separate issue. But I am actually going to argue the harder case. I am going to argue that it is not even possible for a machine--and here I mean even biological machines like brains--to do what the soul can do.
Our specific argument is going to focus on the notion of being able to see a color. So our question is, Can a machine see color?
My argument in brief goes something like this: Physical things have physical characteristics. The elements of consciousness--thinking, intending, believing, having sensations and feelings (and that's what we are talking about here when you can see the quality of a color)--these are things that don't have physical properties, therefore they are not physical or material. They are non-physical, they are immaterial. The mind is not the brain. You see my argument?
Let's see how this objection applies to my argument.
Our question here is this: Can a machine--whether a computer or a brain--do the same thing that a soul does? I hold that the machine can't see the color blue. Greg from Redondo suggests that maybe it can. So let me make this distinction. It comes from the words that were used here--talking about a computer that can be programmed to detect blue. I must make a very important distinction here between detecting or measuring and seeing . Seeing is a way of measuring. I could have a visual impression of an object lying along side a ruler. I am seeing the object along side the ruler and my sight allows me to measure that ruler at 12 inches, but I could still measure that ruler at 12 inches even if I was blind. I could touch the ends of the object and the ends of the ruler and see that they are the same. I could put them next to each other and correlate the size of the object with the size of the ruler and determine that the object is one foot long. So I can measure it or detect it without seeing.
But my argument goes beyond that with regards to the soul. All I have to do to demonstrate that there is more to man than his brain is demonstrate that activities that we go through cannot be accounted for by a mere physical process. This accounting or inability to account for something is not a limitation of science--but that it can't be accounted for even in principle. Now that point is important because if something cannot be explained by physical processes even in principle, and we can demonstrate that to be the case, then we don't have to worry about somewhere down the line people discovering something in science that refutes our argument as if it is founded just in the contingencies of scientific discovery.
My point is that this has nothing to do with science. I am trying to make the point and prove the point that it doesn't matter how much scientific sophistication we have, we will never be able to do certain kinds of things because they are the kinds of things that do not respond to physical assessment principally because they are not physical things. There is no science that we will ever discover, for example, that will help us to know what is morally right and wrong. Science doesn't measure that kind of thing. Science measures physical things. A moral is not a physical thing, therefore science cannot measure morality. Rather, science is the subject of morality. In other words, morality impinges upon science, not the other way around.
I'm talking, though, about whether a computer can actually see color. The argument has been, A computer can measure color. That seems to be the case. But can it see color? That is what is at stake here. That's why I made the very important distinction between measuring and seeing. My argument is that a machine can measure, but it can't measure in one of the ways that you and I measure. It can't measure by seeing, that is, by having a visual impression. Why not? Machines can't have visual impressions. Minds have visual impressions. That is a characteristic of consciousness, not of machinery. Therefore, if minds have visual impressions and machines can't have visual impressions then the mind and machines--even the machine of the brain--are not the same thing.
Here is my response to the computer illustration--the computer that can be programmed to detect blue with a sensor and then alert us with the sound blue. Notice I didn't say the word blue as was used in the letter. A word is a physical symbol that stands for something else that is not physical. That non-physical thing is the word's meaning. The computer can't use words like that. It doesn't consciously use symbols. It merely makes a noise and the noise means something to us. So the computer can measure a wave length that we see visually as blue. Yes, it can do that. It can alert us with the sound that we know as the word blue, but is this evidence that the computer sees blue? The answer is no. The computer doesn't see color. It can only measure a wave length, and it can't even do that if light is not available and there is no light in my brain when I imagine my mother washing the dishes wearing a colored dress.
Greg writes in his letter: "The computer contains in it a representation of the color blue." Well, you know he is absolutely right about that. It contains a representation of the color blue, but I think he has conceded more than he realizes with this remark. What is the representation? If all of what blue is is captured in the wiring of the computer--or in the wiring of my brain by analogy through some kind of an electro-chemical reaction--then it doesn't make any sense to say that it represents something else. If the physical description is what blue is, then there is nothing to represent. Of course, that is what a physicalist would argue--blue is the chemical reaction in your brain, not that it represents chemical reactions in your brain.
I'm going to prove this very simply to you in case the change hasn't fallen into the meter yet. I realized this can be kind of an obscure concepts.
Picture the color blue. Now, describe the quality of your impression in physical terms. Tell me what blue looks like. You can't do it. It is not possible to tell me what blue looks like, unless of course you compare it to another color that I am familiar with. In other words, you can only describe a sensory impression by using other sensory impressions. You can't describe it in purely physical terms in any way that captures what you are experiencing.
If I asked you to describe blue to me in physical terms, you would say that it has the wave length of .902 milacrons (I just made that up). Does that help me at all to know what it is that you see right now in your mind when you see the color blue? It doesn't help one single bit. And the reason is that the blue is not physical in that sense. It can apply to physical things, but the visual impression--the thing that you see--is not physical. That's why a computer can't see blue.
The point that I am making is that there is a difference between measuring a color and the color itself. If we say that the measurement represents the color, as Greg did, then it is clear that the color is something different from the measurement--in this case a measurement of wave length. And that's why we say the wave length represents the color. The color is what we see. The wave length is simply the wave of light that produces this visual sensation of blue.
Greg also said that the computer contained the color blue, but what does it mean to contain blue? If the programming is the blue, then how doe the programming contain the blue? It doesn't. The blue is something else. Blue is what we see. Our minds don't simply detect a wave length. We see color.
In fact, a blind person could be equipped with a scanner attached to his brain that would enable him to detect colors much like a computer detects color. It would just communicate the wave length of color through the means of maybe a sound or something like that. Different colored wave lengths might have different pitches of sound corresponding to them. And since sound has a continuous gradient scale just like the colors in a rainbow, one could get an exact correlation of certain sound wave lengths to certain color wave lengths. So a blind person, knowing the sound correlations, could identify from sound cues any particular color that was before him. But would it make any sense in that circumstance to say that the blind person was actually seeing the color? It wouldn't at all. Why? Because he's blind. He sees nothing. That is precisely my point. A computer is the same way--even a sophisticated computer like the brain.
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