However, in spite of the overload of philosophy, the new material in this book is, as far as I know, original and very convincing. The title encapsulates the metaphor used for constructing this theory. Astro-physicists tell us that the universe is made up largely of “dark matter” which is (at present at least) inaccessible to human senses and gadgetry. (Presumably, mathematics leads them to believe in its physical presence.) Everett argues that the human mind is similarly largely made up of patterns of behaviour and ideas which we have acquired from the people we live amongst and of which we are normally unaware. Some of this can be accessed through introspection and therapy, and some is forever ineffable. For instance, when we can ride a bike, we forget the sequence of skills which we learned when we started and take it for granted. Basic attitudes on such matters as religion, gender roles, race and political allegiance also drop into the cavern of the unconscious but they make us what we are.

Very telling is the description of his experience as a Christian missionary among various remote tribes of Amerindians in the Amazon particularly the Piraha. Everett flushes out the largely unconscious beliefs of the would-be converters and the convertees and it is all too clear that the incompatibility between the two world views makes it impossible to reconcile them. My life has been full of arguments which, I now comprehend, got nowhere because of basically incompatible “dark matter” (e.g. Marxism and Catholicism, or people who know something of the former Soviet Union and those who know nothing.) In the chapter Dark Matter and Hermeneutics Everett flushes out the implicit knowledge which underlies all human speech and writing through the close examination of texts.

What I found surprising is that Everett’s list of the differences between the Piraha and Portuguese languages includes an absence of phatic communication in the former. I hope he will write more about this at some point. It seems that mothers do not talk baby talk to their infants, which is amazing to us. However, they do use “hum speech” in communicating with babies, so this may be an equivalent. Fascinating is his detailed description of the way grammar and phonology are used for different purposes in the two languages. I met this myself when I was living in Bulgaria and trying to learn the language. There is in Bulgarian a whole group of verb forms which look like the perfect tense in English. Many years after I ran down a grammar of Bulgarian which explained that they in fact indicate that the authenticity of the information is not guaranteed. This is also an important feature of Piraha grammar.

This book for me opens a new chapter in the expansion of understanding about language. I just wish I were a young linguist starting on a career of research!

Where Chomsky’s exploration of language is psycholinguistic, examining and attempting to describe the emergence of language in the individual human brain, Everett’s is a more generous sociolinguistic approach. He attributes the structure of language to the demands of culture and the need of the members of all societies to communicate. It is, he argues, an evolutionary process not one that is biologically programmed into all human brains (Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device). Everett is drawing, of course, on a knowledge of more than European languages. The Pirahas of the Amazon jungle, whose language Everett described, do not have tense markers because life is so precarious that they live in the present.

Most cogent (and difficult) is a large section on new knowledge about the human brain produced by the use of recent technology such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging. This indicates that, when people speak, many areas of the brain are shown to be active. Language, he argues, is intimately connected to other cognitive functions, including gesture. There is in the brain no one place, as was supposed in the last century, for language. Chomsky’s hypothesis is simply wrong.

It is disappointing that Everett not only does not refer to alternative sociolinguistic descriptions of language like that associated with MAK Halliday and the Australian school of linguistics, but does not seem to know about the fascinating work of Guy Deutscher, who has put forth exciting hypotheses about the emergence of grammatical features based on his study of ancient Akkadian documents. (See earlier blog.)

I see Everett has already (2016) published another book, which sounds pretty challenging – Dark Matter of the Mind: the Culturally Articulated Unconscious. I look forward to moving on to that.

On looking up the author’s background, it is clear that he has come to the study of language after a successful academic career in Mathematics, which is notoriously exigent in demanding evidence for any statement. He finds Linguistics lacking in academic rigour in this respect.

For example, it has been axiomatic in Linguistic studies that “all languages are equally complex”. When I learned this, I realised that the reason for this statement was to counter the popular opinion that technologically primitive people are cognitively and linguistically primitive.

However, it has been left to Deutscher to challenge this statement as a matter of fact. He shows in this book that, not only is there no evidence from real languages for this statement, but there is no measure of complexity in language. Some languages are more complex than others at the morphological level – German, with its case and gender endings is more complex that English in this respect, for example. Which language is more complex at the level of the clause? No-one has done this research or attempted to produce a measure of complexity.

It seems that isolated languages spoken by few people are less complex phonologically than more widely used languages, clearly because people who know one another well cut down on the sounds for communication (by the force of linguistic destruction described in Deutscher’s previous book i.e. laziness). Otherwise the field is wide open for research.

We have “finished” this book at last. That is, two of us have read and discussed it, chapter by chapter. The third has been visiting her eighteen-month-old grandson and bringing back to us fresh data on language acquisition. We have been highly satisfied with our reading of the book and even more delighted by Isaac’s miraculous move into language.

In this book Guy Deutscher has made a convincing case for using the processes of language change which we can see at work now to propose a theory as to how these same processes have shaped language over the four thousand years or so for which we have evidence in the form of written records. He makes the parallel with Geology, which also uses evidence from the present day to understand the historical processes which have formed the earth. He firmly leaves on one side questions, such as the relation between animal language and human language, for which we have no evidence.

Unlike the last two books we have read, Deutscher spends little time rubbishing Chomsky’s answer to the question of where grammar comes from, the theory which has dominated academic linguistics for the last fifty years. Instead, he proposes an alternative answer, meticulously showing (with evidence from written texts) how grammar emerged little by little from a hypothesized primitive state which he calls “Me Tarzan, you Jane”.

This “unfolding of language” happens because of the complementary processes of destruction and creation. Destruction is the way in which language changes because of the way in which human beings cut out fine distinctions and simplify in order to expedite communication. For example, the Latin month from the name of the Emperor Augustus is reduced in Old French to “aout”. Pedants in the nineteenth century lamented the deterioration of the Indo-European case and gender system by this human carelessness into the modern languages, such as French and particularly English, which have lost most of their case and gender endings and have developed other simpler markers to convey the many subtleties of time, reliability, role in the sentence, tracking etc. which both types of grammar encode.

One of the creative processes which lead to language change is the need for more expressiveness, which enters language through metaphor. This book explicitly taps into the huge reservoir of metaphor which makes abstract thought possible. For example, the abstract word “structure” is derived from the Latin word for a building. (I was delighted to find this vital part of Breakthrough to Learning in an academic book.)

The second creative process is “the craving for order” which, for instance, imposes regular tense endings on verbs by analogy with the majority. We see this in language acquisition where children automatically try out “comed” and “thinked” on analogy with “used” and “wanted”.

This summary does not do justice to the immensely detailed scholarship which traces the origin of prepositions to metaphoric extension from nouns (e.g. “behind”) and verbs (e.g. “help” to “with”).

I will leave to my next blog my praises of the author’s own rich and subtle use of language to convey these complex ideas to readers like ourselves. We have so enjoyed working through the book that our next one is Deutscher’s more recent book: Through the Language Glass.

Tomasello’s book was difficult because it was, as the author notes, intended as a textbook which he could not manage to write. The ideas were not particularly difficult but readers like us needed more examples to understand what he was referring to. The main purpose of the book was to join the growing chorus of linguists putting forward a sociological approach to language learning in opposition to the psycholinguistic approach of Chomsky and his followers, which has dominated academic linguistics for half a century. To people like us, used to systemic linguistics, this is hardly a new idea. It still astonishes me that Tomasello (and now Everett) make no reference to Halliday’s pioneering work in the field.

Everett’s book we found difficult for the opposite reason that, although it was full of lively anecdotes and examples, we could not find any coherent argument running through it. Each chapter found an opportunity to kick Chomsky but the book as a whole did not add up to a clear programme for future research. We concluded that it was perhaps derived from a popular lecture series for American students doing foundation courses. Everett drew on his own experience as a missionary in the Amazon jungle describing the languages of the technologically primitive tribes surviving there. We should perhaps have read his first book which, it appears, describes these experiences directly.

We learned a lot of interesting things about the Piraha people and their language – for instance, it has no words for number. Everett argues that human language is not constructed according to an innate programme in the human genome, but is constantly changing in response to the social demands made on it. If the Piraha have a need for number then their language will develop an appropriate system.

The last chapter romantically laments the loss of languages of groups of people who have died out or merged with other dominant groups. The loss of any human language is a loss for the whole of humanity, he argues. Maybe this is the theme of the book, not clearly spelt out until the end.

We are hoping for an easier read from our next book: Guy Deutscher: The Unfolding of Language.

The new paradigm argues that the structure of language is determined by the social demands made on it and is learned by children from interacting with older members of the tribe. It is based on two capacities of the human being: one, looking for patterns and, two, communicating with another human being by pointing at something in the world. No other ape does this – Tomasello is Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and he should know!

Tomasello convincingly draws attention to the fact that the TG approach makes many ex cathedra statements which are not backed by any evidence. Particularly interesting is the fact that the TG research is almost entirely based on the acquisition of English and the study of other languages, especially non-Indo European ones, throws much of the TG propositions into question. There are fascinating comparisons between English and, for instance, Korean.

We three have been trained in the English (and Australian) school of Linguistics (Systemic Linguistics), which is based on traditional grammar, and has always been sociological in its approach. We all read Halliday’s contribution to the research on language acquisition – Learning How to Mean – and wonder why Tomasello makes no reference to it. Hallidayan grammar has three components at the clause level – the transitivity system, which refers to events in the world; the mood system, which addresses an interlocutor; and the system of cohesion, which links words in sequence. This would seem to be a perfect system to be used as a framework for Tomasello’s research

Our dry academic study of language acquisition is relieved by the delight of observing video clips of my friend’s fourteen-month-old grandson. The latest shows him joyfully exploring the sound system of English with clearly articulated “Golly-golly-golly-wolly-Ickle-Pickle”, the last two “words” being the name of a character in a BBC children’s programme The Night Garden. I have put inverted commas round “words” because words have meaning and Isaac’s grandmother doubts whether even “Dadada” and “mamama” are as yet any more than practice sounds. They do not seem to her to be refer only to his parents. It will be interesting to see when this changes and how it happens.

Tomasello is not alone in leaping from the TG bandwagon on to a sociological alternative. Two other books we have looked at which have moved in the same direction are:

Vyvyan Evans: The Language Myth

Daniel Everett: Language: The Cultural Tool

We’re now approaching the subject from another angle – that of child language acquisition. The timing could not be better, as one of us has a one-year-old grandson, who is ready to move into speech. His first word is /ka:/ for “cat”. My friend is technologically advanced and has taken some delightful video clips of Isaac for us to relate to the literature. We are all soppy about babies, so it is a huge pleasure to have this data to study. What is wonderful is to see Isaac’s total concentration and awareness as he tunes into the language around him and tries to become part of the speaking community.

We are using Tomasello’s Constructing a Language as our textbook, and we’re hoping to put some of his frameworks over data from Isaac – for example, rate of expansion of vocabulary over time and class of words understood and used.

We’ll keep you posted!

This is a huge brick of a book, necessarily so since it gives entries for the 1739 signs in British Sign Language (BSL). Each sign requires photos and a detailed descriptive entry. The bulk of the book is taken up with the signs of BSL.

About 160 pages of closely printed text at the beginning give a very clear outline of BSL as a language system. It is clear that at the time of making the dictionary (1992) there was still much linguistic analysis of BSL to be done (e.g. on categorising verbs). The book does not appear to have been updated, but there may well have been further work on a satisfactory description of sign language in the last twenty odd years.However, the description in this book tells me what I wanted to know: that is, how does BSL use such visually accessible features as hand position, movement and orientation to create the infinite meanings of languages realised in sound.

Universality of language

What is clear from an examination of even one entry is that BSL is as linguistically complex as any language which is realised in sound. It has nothing to do with miming. It seems that signing systems for the deaf seem to arise wherever in the world there are communities of deaf people. Moreover, although they are mutually incomprehensible, they all have a similar structure. Further, the cognitive structures embodied both in languages realised in sound and also those realised visually are basically the same. This would seem to confirm Chomsky’s hypothesis that the capacity for language is innate and part of the structure of the human brain.

Dual articulation of language

BSL, like all languages, is capable of creating an infinity of meanings because of its dual articulation – that is, separate sounds (or signs) combine to make words by the rules of phonology (or the rules constituted by shape and movement in the case of signs), which then in turn are combined by the rules of grammar into clauses.

The word in BSL and English

The basic unit of both BSL and English is the word. Each word in English is composed of phonemes, that is discrete sounds which speakers recognise as different from one another. There are 44 phonemes in English.

Each phoneme in English (and any other spoken language) can be described with reference to the choices available. For example:

Is it voiced (like /b/ or /g/) or voiceless (like /p/ or /k/)?

Where in the mouth is it produced? By the teeth and lips (like /f/ and /v/) or by the palate (like /k/ and /g/)? (Lots of options here.)

Is it continuous (like /s/ and /m/) or plosive (like /b/ and /k/)?

Is it a vowel (produced without contact between the speech organs) or a consonant (produced by some parts of the speech organs touching – such as the tongue and palate in /k/ and /g/)?

The unit in BSL which is equivalent to the word in English is the handshape. There are 57 of these. The description of the handshape in BSL is equally complex and, like the features of the phoneme, can be described as a set of choices. For example:

Which of the fingers is active?

Is each finger bent or straight?

Is the palm turned towards or away from the signer?

Grammar in BSL and English

The cognitive meanings encoded in grammar are mostly the same in English and BSL. Examples of these meanings are plurality, tense, aspect, negation and gender. Many of the most important meanings encoded in grammar are realised very differently in BSL and English.

An example is plurality. In written English this is most commonly realised by the addition of –s to the noun. In BSL plurality is realised in a number of ways, one of which is reduplication – that is by reiterating the sign.

One of the most important language universals is that all languages encode Subject Verb Object in varying word orders (SVO like English, VSO like Japanese, OSV more rarely). This seems to be realised in BSL at least in part by directional movement of the hand(s). That it is not a simple matter to describe, however, can be seen from the fact that this Dictionary describes BSL as a SVO language, while another linguist (writing for Wikipedia about BSL) describes it as “fundamentally OSV”. It is also not agreed, according to the Dictionary, as to whether BSL is best described as an SVO language or as a Topic-Comment language.

Iconicity

As anyone who has watched television programmes being signed, it is not only the hands that convey meaning in BSL, but also the face. One would expect the face to express emotion as in everyday life, but in fact the signals sent out by the face are as arbitrary as any other sign. For example, intensification can be expressed by puffed out cheeks.

The fact is that the signs constituting all languages, including BSL, are arbitrary. The part played by attempting to imitate the natural world in all languages (e.g. onomatopoeia in languages realised in sound) is trivial, though there may, it seems, be more direct relation between certain movements and meaning in BSL than any equivalent in English. All human languages, including BSL, are essentially abstract.

Differences between BSL and English

What is fascinating is that although BSL and English have, in most respects, a similar structure, in other respects, BSL has features which have no counterpart in English.

One of these is the use of classifiers. (An example of a classifier in English is the word head in the phrase head of cattle.) Classifiers are an important feature of Chinese, Japanese, some Native American languages and others. It is also a strong feature of BSL – the system takes several closely written pages in the Dictionary to describe even in outline.

BSL an internationally recognised language

The deaf community has had to fight hard to get its language recognised as a language equal to languages realised in sound. Even a cursory description such as this makes it clear that BSL is as complex and subtle as any other language and one capable of expressing the infinity of meanings which make us all – hearing and deaf – human.

Chapter 5 Speech Acts in Context brought us what we have been waiting for – a coherent framework for describing the interface between the language we use and the meaning we intend it to have in a social context. Several attempts at such a system are outlined, but none are an advance on the groundbreaking work of Sinclair and Coulthard in their 1975 book Towards an Analysis of Discourse.

They recorded lessons in primary schools and analysed them at the level of discourse, using a “rank-scale” of a social activity (in this case the lesson), which is made up of exchanges between teacher and pupils, which can be further sub-divided into acts (a single piece of dialogue). I remember how excited we all were in 1975  by this framework of analysis (especially those of us involved in teacher education).

It was disappointing after the pleasure of chapter 5 to find that chapter 6 Pragmatics across languages and cultures reverted to a summary of initial small scale studies in cross-cultural pragmatics. From my own experience I would have loved to have done an analysis of secondary school lessons in England and Bulgaria, which would have thrown up the political and cultural similarities and differences between the two educational systems. A huge potential here that does not seem to have been exploited in the forty years since Sinclair and Coulthard’s book.

*Anne O’Keeffe, Brian Clancy, Svenja Adophs: Introducing Pragmatics in Use (2011)

I’d come from teaching literature to very able fourth year B.Ed. students and we were tackling Dickens’ big books including Little Dorrit. It always makes an interesting class to go back to a novel’s opening paragraphs when one has finished reading the book to see how the themes of the book are adumbrated in the opening section. For two years I had attempted this with my students and we had realised eventually that there was something very odd about the opening of Little Dorrit. For two years we had had to declare ourselves defeated in our attempts to describe what this was.

I had chosen Stylistics as one of my options in my course at Essex and been delighted by the discovery that, at long last, there was a link between Literature and Language studies. The old failure to analyse the peculiarity of the opening of Little Dorrit seemed a perfect opportunity to try out my newly learned knowledge of Linguistics.

One happy afternoon I settled down to read it again and realised that the oddity of the text consisted in its failure to be precise about where and when the entities in the passage were operating. I took my problem to David Kilby, one of my lecturers, and he immediately recognised that what I had no word for was deixis and referred me to John Lyons Theoretical Linguistics. This has only a page and a half on the subject, but it was enough for me to do a word by word analysis of the passage. The precision of this stylistic analysis enabled me to account for the oddness of this opening of the novel and to relate it to the Christian message of the book as a whole.

I wrote it up for my course in Stylistics and shortly after Ron Carter published it in one of the early books of practical Stylistics  in this country.**

*Introducing Pragmatics in Use: Anne O’Keefe, Brian Clancy, Svenja Adolphs, Routledge 2011

**Language and Literature: ed. Ronald Carter, Allen and Unwin, 1982