In addition to my research at USC, I’m auditing Second Language Acquisition class by John Schumann over at UCLA. The class is a refreshing break from the Chomsky-loving Theorists that comprise the Linguistics department over at USC. Not that Generative Linguistics is as horrible as some people might say, but it’s great to get diversity of opinion. And, it’s great to hear language addressed from a real-world perspective, instead of language from the perspective theoretical prose, thought up by highly educated academians. But I digress…
About a week ago, Schumann brought up the concept of language as an emergent cultural artifact–that, just like arrowheads, or canoes, or the subway system or the Queen Mary, language emerged in human society because it made society function better. While I disagree with this (partly on religious grounds), it does give us an interesting way to look at language that takes away one Chomsky’s biggest arguments for Universal Grammar: that we need some sort of specialized principles-and-parameters area in our brain in order for us to learn language so quickly. But if we look at language as a socially evolved artifact, then this means that instead of the brain being specialized for language, language is specialized for the brain. Language, if it’s evolved, has evolved in such a way as to be easily acquirable by the infant mind.
The concept of language-as-system-of-emergent-order is intriguing.
Imagine another emergent-order system, that of a semi-public library of the order of 50-200 books. If just one person is using the library, they can organize it however they want, or they can not organize it, and rely on memory to find books where they’d put them before. If a few more people start using the library, an organizational system starts to emerge, regardless of if it was specifically discussed or not. People start putting books back in alphabetical order, or by subject, or by author–the only way a library is able to function productively is if people can find the books.
Emergent systems occur when the benefit of contributing becomes greater than the cost of contributing. One can imagine language emerging in the same way.
if (benefit of contributing > cost of contributing) then emerge.
Of course, continuing with our library analogy, there are going to be some free-loaders whose laziness wins out over the desire to classify, so they ignore the System for the sake of a few saved steps. One can imagine, if free-loaders get out of hand after a while, codified laws/rules emerge in the library-society. This modifies our boundary equation to be
if (benefit of contributing > cost of contributing - penalty of not contributing) then emerge.
This is Language as Game Theory.
Anyways, that’s just a taste of my thoughts. It’s interesting stuff.
It makes me wonder if any other parts of society that we take for granted as being innate is actually cultural artifact. Mathematics–is that something basic to nature or is it created? Do prime numbers exist without a number system to house them? Number systems surely seem a product of society. Was the Mandelbrot set, therefore, invented instead of discovered (well, discovered by Mandelbrot, but invented a long while back as an inadvertent byproduct of imaginary numbers)? What about the scientific method?
And, it makes me look at the emergent language of folksonomies in a different way too. Definitely their power-law distribution is patterned like the power-law distribution of langauge at large. I wonder what insights we can glean from language as a whole by looking at this evolution of folksonomy that’s going on now as we speak…