The rise of the rest

After reading the synopsis, I read Fareed Zakaria’s book, The Post-American World.  It’s good, but it’s typical of a certain modern type of book that read like forced expansions of the original magazine article.  He goes into more depth, but not that much more; the major chapters are on China, India, America, and America.  I wish he’d gone into more depth on South Africa, Brazil, and other rising powers.

He’s obviously well connected, but this isn’t always a virtue, especially when it comes to history.  It’s nice that he can get an interview with Lee Kwan Yew, but sometimes the argument seems to be based on a few brisk interviews and visits to burgeoning cities rather than on broader academic research.  (This can be felt especially in his discussion of Chinese and Indian mentality.  It sounds reasonable enough, but no nation can really be reduced to its mentality.  E.g. is Japan an isolated despotism as in 1830, a rising power as in 1910, a grandiose empire as in 1940, or a pacifist economic powerhouse as in 1980?  Even if all of these could be related to some theory of the Japanese soul, they can hardly predict what Japan will be in 2050.)

Still, he has a good story to tell.  He makes a good case that the rise of China and India means a lot for the world, and is essentially a Good Thing for most everyone.  Neither power is likely to repeat the trouble caused by (say) the rise of Germany or Japan– so long as the US doesn’t act like an imperial hegemon.  Our own economic power isn’t going to go away anytime soon.  He makes some illuminating comparisons with imperial Britain, which enjoyed a long period of political dominance (say 1815 to 1945) but only a short period of economic dominance (from about 1845, when its industrial output surpassed France’s, to the 1880s, when it was surpassed by the US).  The US has been much spottier as a political leader, only rarely finding a good balance between isolation and arrogance.  In some ways we do best when we shut up and let our values (democracy and economic opportunity) do their magic.

Zakaria has a strange relationship to the Bush administration and the Republicans in general.  Most of what he has to say is highly critical, but he bows in their direction a few times, as if they’re, you know, just a little misinformed and could be set straight by some pointed reminders.  He was also a supporter of the Iraq war.  The book was written before the election, but more recent columns show that he’s hugely relieved that we now have a president who acts much more in accordance with his views.

Perhaps because of his own experience as an immigrant who’s made good, he’s essentially an optimist– a rare thing these days.  He’s excited by the huge reduction in the world’s poverty, by the vibrancy of newly energized economies, by the fact that the prevailing models are essentially variations of Anglo-American liberal capitalism.  He mentions the many ways we could fall off the rails (global warming, Taiwan, nuclear weapons), but his mind just doesn’t dwell on them.

I tend to be an optimist too; I think we can solve our problems if we want to.  But that’s a huge if.  The next century could look like the 19th– a time of generally rising prosperity and globalism– or like the 20th, when that global order collapsed into war and brutality.  Zakaria himself points out that perhaps the US’s worst failing is our political quagmire.  Britain seemed to do OK whether Liberals or Conservatives were in charge.  We have to fear the disasters that another Republican interlude could bring.

 

Imperial China

I just finished Imperial China: 900-1800, by F.W. Mote, which not only comprehensively covers a tasty swath of Chinese history but could stun a small mammal.  One thousand pages to cover a period that a general history of China would cover in a tenth of that.

Not surprisingly, its chief virtue is its inclusiveness.  Mote considers not just the dynasties but covers each emperor in depth, plus sketches of the chief intellectual and economic currents. 

Mote believes that China’s relationship with Inner Asia was key, and accordingly devotes quite a lot of attention to the Khitans, Jurchens, Mongols, and Manchus.  Much of this was new to me, and fascinating.  On the nomads’ side, the problem was how to govern an ancient and obstinate sedentary civilization while retaining steppe cred: the ruler must appear as a proper Son of Heaven in Beijing and as an able riding warrior up north.  Curiously it was the first of these, the Khitans, that managed the balance the best.  The Mongols did about the worst– Khubilai Khan was a competent ruler but his successors were all puppets of various factions, and the dynasty didn’t long survive his death.  The Chinese dilemma was, ideally, how to keep the nomads divided and keep their own military strong but not too strong (both emperors and officials had a justified horror of generals becoming rebels).

A factoid for fantasy writers out there: nomadic peoples are likely to be less sexist, not more so than agriculturalists.  Khitan women were very strong; Yingtian, the widow of the first Khitan emperor Abaoji, led her own forces in war and imposed her choice of heir over Abaoji’s wishes.  Queens were expected to sacrifice themselves when their husbands died; when she was reminded of this she pointed out that her children were too young and the nation was leaderless; still, she insisted that her right hand be cut off to be placed in her husband’s grave.  This silenced her critics, did nothing to reduce her powers– and ended the custom of sacrificing queens.

The Manchus, by the way, turn out to be the Jurchens renamed.  They were able to come out from under the shadow of the Mongols and co-opt them, and indeed co-opted many Chinese leaders as well. 

Mote emphasizes many times that the Chinese empire was the most populous in the world, the most prosperous, and for much of his period the most technologically advanced.  It had no aristocracy; it was an open society in which talent could and did move upward; it had a fairly efficient bureaucracy, and it was little affected by religious zealotry.  During times of crisis it could devolve into bandiry or warlordism, but it’s always had a remarkable ability to regain its unity, and at most times it was stable and safe enough that cities didn’t need to build walls. 

So why did it fall behind the West?  In a sense, it was too blessed.  Though it was conquered several times, there was a certain protocol to this– Chinese civilization was never threatened.  Its focus was always on the nomadic threat, to the point that the central government was uninterested in or actively hostile to maritime trade.  It didn’t have many early encounters with the West, and it didn’t find a single Western product it needed– rather, it exported manufactures (e.g. porcelain) in return for silver.

It’s hard not to look at the examination system and the scholar elite without comparing them favorably to European aristocrats.  Yet their scholarship was always based on the study of ancient literary classics; it didn’t prepare them for modern science nor give them a good framework for political analysis.  The system was constantly degraded by lazy monarchs, corruption, or dictatorial factions.  Both emperors and scholars tended to first appeal to morality or ancient writings, then resort to violence.  Only a few rare figures attempted what we’d call political reform. 

The last imperial dynasty was also hobbled by the fact that it was run by foreigners– the Manchus– who were obsessed with rooting out anti-Manchu sentiment.  (One of their projects was to re-publish all earlier literature with all offensive statements about the nomads removed.)  It led the rulers to a great conservativism that was also ill preparation for encountering the raucous Westerners.

Mote, whose name is after all an anagram for tome, can be dry, and he doesn’t always know how to bring a political movement to life, much less everyday life.  (For a more lively approach, jumping with visual details, try John King Fairbank’s The Great Chinese Revolution 1800-1985.)  But much of the dryness isn’t his fault, but ours.  Most of us are so ignorant of Asian history that it’s a mass of odd names and unfamiliar figures.  If you want to get well beyond that and tell your Ming from your Qing, this book’s for you.

 

Down these mean streets smelling of borsht

Best book I’ve read lately: Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.  There can’t be many detective stories that have also won the Hugo, to say nothing of passing as high literature, whatever that is.

It falls in the sf category by virtue of being set in an alternate history.  Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s secretary of the Interior, actually proposed in 1938 to resettle European Jews in Alaska.  Chabon imagines what would have happened if the proposal had passed and two or three million Jews had taken up Ickes’s offer (and Israel failed).  The story also comes out of an essay in which Chabon confronted a Yiddish phrasebook– the same one I quoted here– boggling at the idea of a nation or region somewhere in which touristic life could be conducted entirely in Yiddish.

Perhaps this should have been done by writing in Yiddish; Chabon settles for the next best thing– English slightly flavored by Yiddish:

“Look at the head on that sheygets, the thing has its own atmosphere,” Landsman says.  “Thing has ice caps.”

“Indeed the man has a very big head.”

The setting is itself, perhaps, the hero of the book, and Chabon lavishes considerable attention on making it real– a strange mix of Eastern European Jewry, Alaskan pines, Tlingits, and American noir.  (For exploring a milieu, you can hardly do better than a mystery, which gives you a chance to show off everything from the slums to the honchos.)  The only sf book I know that has as convincing an alternate history, in fact, is Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration.

There are moments of depth and poignancy, but also a quirky humor– very Jewish, you could say; few people are better at using humor just when things are darkest.

My one quibble would be with a part of the resolution… some very nasty villains are set up, and (avoiding spoilers here) they just don’t treat detective Landsman plausibly… these are not men who’d leave a loose end dangling.

 

Empirical linguistics

I recently picked up Geoffrey Sampson’s Empirical Linguistics. Sampson has a bone to pick with Chomsky– he wrote an earlier book called Educating Eve: The ‘Language Instinct’ Debate where he engages with Steven Pinker’s version of Chomskyanism, without apparently ever getting a response. But he’s actually a pretty good bone-picker. He thinks Chomsky carried some very unlikely propositions by sheer force of personality rather than argument, and he makes a good case.

Speaker intuitions

The target here is the idea that models of language should be based on speakers’ intuitions of grammaticality. Historically, probably Chomsky insisted on this as part of his reaction against Skinnerian behaviorism, which had little role for the mind; Chomsky asserted that speakers do have a model of language.  Indeed he reified this out of all proportion into a mini-organ precisely specified by genetics– though he never says how.

For decades, syntax was conducted by linguists consulting speaker intuitions– meaning their own. In effect they were making up their own data, which is an invitation to trouble. Sampson mentions William Labov scathingly documenting how Chomsky treated his own intuitions as scientific fact, those of others when they disagreed with his as fallible opinions.

More seriously, speaker intuitions can be demonstrably wrong. People can be quite sure that they never say something– one example is a speaker who convincingly insisted that he never used any more positively, as in John is smoking a lot anymore; but then he was caught spontaneously saying Do you know what’s a lousy show anymore? Johnny Carson.

Intuitions are all right for basic matters; the problem is that syntax today is so sophisticated that the sort of sample sentences people are asked to judge are so complicated and unlikely that it’s unlikely a pre-existing rule covers them. Only nativists like Chomsky can really maintain that the grammar covers all possible situations in advance. It’s simpler to maintain that as in other cultural domains like law or fashion, people creatively approach new situations when they’re confronted with them.

These delusions are especially dangerous when theoretical edifices have been built on top of them. Sampson recalls giving a seminar which covered center embedding; he referred to the conventional wisdom that multiple center embedding was impossible. Anne de Roeck asked, “But don’t you find that sentences that people you know produce are easier to understand?” Sampson was well into an extended answer to the question before he realized that de Roeck’s question was in fact a counter-example.

The experience spurred a new interest in empirical investigation of linguistic claims. He started to work with linguistic corpora, using computers for searching and analysis; much of the book is a set of reports on how such work is done and what sort of things come up. Not surprisingly, what people actually say and write is more varied and interesting than the somewhat artificial constructs linguists make up.

This is heresy from a Chomskyan point of view– isn’t a grammar supposed to generate all possible sentences and divide them into acceptable and unacceptable? Well, no, that’s just Chomsky’s pet idea. All a grammar has to do is tell us what people say and write– their positive performance. We don’t need to posit a mechanism to deal with the sentences people don’t actually utter or encounter. (It can be a convenient shorthand, of course, to say “We don’t say XXX”. It can eliminate pontes asinorum– or just contrast the dialect being described to others where XXX does occur.)

One chapter of the book departs from the overall topic to consider The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, a huge work Chomsky wrote in 1955 and didn’t publish till 1975, but frequently referred to.  It had semi-mythical status when it could only be consulted by the priestly elite of Chomskyanism; once he could finally read it, he found it extremely disappointing.

Meaning

Curiously, when it comes to meaning, Sampson takes the opposite tack. He thinks meaning can’t be investigated scientifically (that is, empirically, subject to falsification) at all. That doesn’t mean it can’t be handled at all, but the approach will be that of the humanities: essentially narrative documentation of human creativity.

He blisteringly attacks Fodor and Katz’s semantic primitives– the analysis of “bachelor” as [+HUMAN] [-MARRIED] [+MALE], for instance. As a minor point, he shows that the idea only works for nouns and adjectives anyway– it’s useless for verbs. For verbs you’d might as well just use inferences: e.g if John buys trout from Sally, then Sally sells trout to John. This can be extended to nouns: If John is a bachelor, John is human, unmarried, and male.

But worse yet, the primitives don’t hold up under analysis. Meanings are too fluid. Does a cup have to have a handle or not? Does it have width or height requirements? Labov tried to approach this by showing people specially constructed objects which were designed to test aspects of the definition of ‘cup’; he found that people’s responses weren’t atomistic, but probabilistic. A certain width-height ratio might produce a given probability that people would judge the object a cup. And he didn’t even get into (say) the usage of the objects. Other researchers concluded that far from coming to a consensus, people could come up with “a myriad” of possible common features.

Adam Kilgarriff, working on computational linguistics, concluded that “I don’t believe in word senses”.  Actual usage is so fluid and vague that it makes no sense to ask in the abstract how many meanings a word has; you can only ask what meanings it could be convenient to distinguish for a given task.

Barbara Partee apparently once found young children asking her whether she had a father. This confused her till she realized that they were asking if she had a husband. They didn’t understand the adult notion that fathers were related to conception; they understood them as male heads of household. Presumably once we understand the facts of life, we adapt our definitions. In other words, faced with new information, we either follow the social consensus or create a new one.

As an example of the latter process, Sampson notes the new reality that people can change sex. If a man fathers a child, then becomes a woman, is he now the child’s mother? Until society faces the question, there is no answer, except in terms of individual creativity. This can’t just be handled by fiddling with the [+MALE] node.

Sampson chides linguists for ignoring the philosophical debates on meaning… linguists’ books on semantics often barely consider Wittgenstein, White, or Quine.  (The sources I’ve read do mention them, but I think I should probably check them out directly.)

On the whole I think Sampson is mostly right about empirical verification of syntactic claims, and probably right about semantics. He obviously dislikes Chomsky’s work very personally, but he’s not a crank– he gives good arguments for his skepticism.

 

Of Plymouth

I just finished Of Plymouth Plantation, the memoirs of the colony’s first governor, William Bradford.  I expected it to be dry, but it’s highly readable… Bradford himself might have meant to be dry, but his curse was to live in interesting times.  Lots was happening: persecution in England, exile in Holland, starting a new colony, meeting the Indians, getting screwed by capitalists, hotheads, and Frenchmen.  There’s even a hurricane and a visit by pirates.

Garrison Keillor talked about his ancestors coming over from England “in hopes of discovering greater restrictions than were permissible under English law”.  This is a great joke but not at all fair; the Puritans came over because King James, he of the Version, felt threatened by their rejection of the Church of England and actively persecuted them.  The Salem Witch Trials permanently darkened their reputation, but, hey, that was a different colony and two generations later.  Bradford himself seems quite level-headed and must have been an exemplary public servant– he was re-elected governor thirty times.

Curiously, he describes the Indians as cruel savages, but also valued peace with them and complains hotly of dissolute Englishmen who stole from the Indians.  There was no need to steal their land– he mentions pestilences which decimated the Indian population and left their land up for grabs.  Very likely these pestilences were spread by European fishermen and others who had visited the coast before settlement began.

The Pilgrims were supported by English investors, which led to endless squabbles which occupy much of the book.  The best early source of cash was beaver pelts– thousands were shipped to England each year.

It was fun to see names of quite a few places I knew, including the neighborhood I lived in for three years, Wollaston.  There was a settlement there founded by one Capt. Wollaston, but for awhile the main base of a lawless group of men centered on one Morton, whom Bradford singles out for dissolution and licentiousness, and for selling guns to the Indians.

Plymouth helped settle the region, and then declined, largely due to the rise of Boston.  Plymouth wasn’t well situated to be a major agricultural center, and it was an inconvenient port, too far within the Bay and with too shallow water– goods had to be brought ashore by boats, while at Boston they could be unloaded on a wharf.

 

An early look at early man

At a book sale, I picked up Early Civilizations, by A.A. Goldenweiser, an introduction to anthropology dating to 1922.  It’s surprisingly modern in approach, rejecting racial biases and stages of culture, respecting the mentality of all cultures and careful to draw parallels to our own when they exist.  But Goldenweiser was a student of Franz Boas who virtually invented multicultural liberalism.

You’re probably not going to run out to score a copy, but it does have useful sketches of the Eskimo, the Tlingit , the Iroquois, the Baganda, and the Central Australians.  The only really weak part of the book is the discussion of early religion and magic, and that isn’t the author’s fault– the weakness is in the early authors he’s reviewing, from Spencer to Durkheim to Freud.  They all wanted a simple system and they all seem pointlessly naive.  For instance, Spencer posited that bear totems derived from someone named Bear whose ancestors forgot that he was named Bear and thought they were descended from bears.  Freud is even worse; he creates a primeval drama of rebellion against a tyrannical father, which entered a “racial unconscious”.  Goldenweiser can’t help but point out that Freud’s myth is “without any foundation in the known facts of history or biology.”

One F. Graebner opined that cultural and technical elements must always be attributed to diffusion, as independent origin is unproveable.  It strikes me that this is a handy counterexample to Occam’s Razor.  Independent discovery is a more complicated theory, and yet very often it’s quite correct, as we can verify when we can examine the evidence historical times. 

Another tidbit: the author partly dismisses environmental factors as determinative of cultures and techniques.  Environment is obviously a huge factor; it’s just that it doesn’t explain everything. For instance, the Eskimo have lots of snow and build snow houses– fine, but the Chukchi in a similar environment do not.  (On the other hand they domesticated the reindeer and the Eskimo didn’t.)  The Indians of the northwest coast lived in the forest and had an impressive wood industry; those of the California coast didn’t, though they lived in a similar environment.  A warning to conworlders…

 

Progressivism that works

I haven’t been in a posting mood lately; sorry about that.  Worse yet, the most interesting book I’ve read lately, James Galbraith’s The Predator State, had to go back to the library.  Man, and I thought I disliked the Republicans.  There’s a lot in it I’d like to talk about, but I’d really like to re-read the book and review the arguments first.

His basic thesis is that the pet economic policies of the right— monetarism, lowering taxes as an incitement to raise savings, small government, deregulation, free trade— were long ago abandoned by Republicans in power and by economists; the only people who still believe in them, defensively, are liberals.

He’s most interesting when he gets down to specifics— e.g. he says that obscene CEO pay was largely the norm in two industries, Wall Street and the tech sector, and that its unintended effect was to create a new aristocratic class: the CEO has no loyalty even to the firm that pays him, but only to his fellow CEOs.

Perhaps the best take-away idea, however, is that deregulation is not (as progressives might suspect) a sop to the business class.  It’s a sop to the worst of the business class.  Regulation is an alliance between progressives and the top companies. Take gas mileage: can reformers decree that cars get 100 mpg?  Certainly not; we have to set goals that can actually be met.  Regulation thus benefits the companies that can meet the goals and still make a profit; and the companies that resist are those that can’t.  These are the ‘predators’ of the title; it’s their interest that the Republicans serve.

Galbraith’s critique goes well beyond this; he chastises liberals for swallowing the worship of the free market, merely hoping to tweak it toward justice.  He thinks that the market fails badly in many ways, and frankly argues for government intervention, social controls on wages, and deficit spending.  His presentation can be a bit breezy, so I’m not sure I follow all his arguments nor agree with them all, but I think he’s quite right that “the market” has become an ideology designed to restrict policy options, which needs to be challenged.

 

Recent reading

1. Joseph Ellis’s American Creation, a series of narratives of key points of the American Revolution.  The Founders were admirable men who could at times be right bastards.  Most interesting is the presaging of modern libertarianism at times.

Those times, however, were not the best moments of those involved, notably Madison and Jefferson.  Madison in particular is shown as veering almost crazily from able defenses of federalism (during the writing and defense of the Constitution), to insane conspiracy-mongering (during Washington’s presidency), to a return to federalism (when he was president).  Ellis suggests many motivations for all this, but much of it comes down to Virginia planters not understanding or liking the New England / New York financial system, and instinctively resisting a federal government strong enough to outlaw slavery.

2. Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France, an investigation into the fractured, isolated world of pre-revolutionary France… a world where the vast majority of people had loyalty only to their pays, limited to a few miles from their birthplace, and where neither King nor Republic was a welcome presence.  Did you know France had its own caste of untouchables, the cagots, who were persecuted for no real reason anyone could remember?  Or that an early surveyor, invading the pays in the 1740s with his strange instruments, was murdered as a sorcerer?  Or that shepherds in the Landes moved about quickly on stilts?  It’s food for thought for conworlders, who are usually hard put to create cultural differences between their countries, to say nothing of individual villages.

I haven’t finished it yet, but my one complaint is that the author doesn’t always integrate his sometimes contradictory sources.  For instance, sometimes the individual pays are described as self-sufficient islands of democracy; other times they’re so poor and miserable that people hope for a early death and usually get it.

3. Another shout-out to Lore Sjöberg’s Monster Manual comics; today’s is the best one yet, I think.

 

The Long Tail

I just read Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail.  I can save you about 250 pages and $15.95 by explaining the main point: the Web removes the constraints of physical stores and narrow distribution channels (like movie theaters and CDs).  Sales and production don’t need to be tied any longer to a small number of hits.  There’s money to be made in the ‘long tail’ of the demand curve.  45% of the music sales of Rhapsody come from tracks not available in the largest physical stores.

Where the product is virtual, like music, sellers in effect have no storage and distribution costs, and can therefore offer everything.  Industries based on creating hits will just have to adapt.  And as eBay shows, physical products can approach this ideal surprisingly closely. 

There’s some exciting aspects to this… I’m fascinated by the democratization of production, for instance.  Conlanging, for instance, is nearly irrelevant to the publishing industry.  (Klingon was a freak hit, but it’s 23 years old now and no one’s done as well since.)  But I think there’s a market there, albeit tiny.  Traditional publishing didn’t serve it, but print-on-demand sell-via-Amazon publishing can.

So Anderson’s idea is interesting; but what do you do with it?  If you’re a minor musician or writer, you produce things, maybe with a slightly larger possibility of minor success– but you knew that already.   But for business people, the problem would seem to be that the obvious applications are already taken.  You’re not going to start a new iTunes, Amazon, or eBay. 

One side effect that will probably be a big battleground: copyright and trademark protection.  The big media companies effectively want permanent copyrights– Disney never wants Mickey Mouse cartoons in the public domain.  For Long Tail producers the benefits run the other way: e.g. a prolific YouTuber would like to be able to adapt other people’s videos, and doesn’t make money anyway so isn’t losing sales through piracy.  I’d expect the legal balance to swing more toward the interests of the aggregators rather than the hit-makers.  (Useful comparison: Viacom, which includes Paramount and Dreamworks, has revenues of $13 billion.  Google, which includes YouTube, has revenues of $22 billion.)

 

Best language theory yet

I’ve just read Michael Tomasello’s Constructing a Language (2003), and no, it’s not about conlangs.  It’s about how children acquire language.  It’s one of the best books on language I’ve read; also one of the most difficult.

As adumbrated in Chapter 1, the Generative Grammar hypothesis focuses only on grammar and claims that the human species has evolved during its phylogeny a genetically based universal grammar. 

Jeez, don’t open with a joke or anything.

Contra Chomsky

I already reviewed an essay of Tomasello’s; the book is an extended form.  In brief, he destroys the idea of the poverty of the stimulus.  Chomsky was reacting against Skinner’s stimulus-response notion of language, rightfully pointing out that there has to be a good deal of mental machinery dealing with language— language is nothing like a conditioned response.  His mistake was to assume that this machinery was innate— that children don’t hear enough language to deduce its principles.  As Tomasello shows, reviewing study after study, there is no evidence for this.  Children learn most easily precisely those constructions they hear the most often, and the more difficult constructions take longest to learn.

In later years Chomsky, faced with the vast array of human languages, elaborated the idea of parameters: there are a bunch of switches (OS or SO?  pro-drop or not?  AN or NA?) which determine a language’s particular grammar; all the child has to do is learn what the settings are for the language she hears.  Again, the evidence is against this.  Simply put, children don’t suddenly acquire settings; their competence increases slowly and (this is a key point) item by item, construction by construction. There’s not a sudden point where (say) they realize that English isn’t pro-drop.  They mix constructions with pronouns and those without. 

A major argument for innateness is that children learn languages “naturally”, supposedly within a window of opportunity and much easier than adults.  I’ve addressed this before, and Tomasello repeats some of the same objections, but adds a good new one: children have the advantage of having no first-language interference. 

Attention!

How do children learn language?  We know most about the years from 1 to 4, which have been best studied.  Tomasello doesn’t believe in a language organ at all; he maintains that human language depends simply on human cognitive abilities, and the key one, appearing at about 2 years of age, is the ability to maintain joint attentional frames… that is, the child interacts with an adult, about some situation.  The key word is attention: the child only now can understand that others have mental states, and seek to affect them.  Animal language is all about expressing states: the animal is horny or hungry or wants to go home, or sees a predator.  Other animals may react to these expressions, but they’re not intended as communication— in fact the animal is quite likely to make the same expressions when alone.  What distinguishes human language is the ability to model other minds (and thus to try to affect them). 

Joint attentional frames are Tomasello’s response to Quine’s dilemma about ostension: pointing to a rabbit, do we mean the rabbit, the rabbit’s foot, the act of running, the color of the fur, or a bag of rabbit parts? 

Tomasello points out, by the way, that ostension is of less use than we might think in language learning.  Verbs, for instance, are most often used not to point out an ongoing action, but to describe one that just occurred or that’s about to occur— neither of these are things that can be pointed to.  Even nouns often occur when not present (“Where’s Daddy?”  “What does a cow say?”).

What the frames provide is meaning and context.  Basically, toddlers learn language because it’s the commentary to a situation they already understand.  (To put it another way, if you leave the TV on, they won’t learn about elections or American Idol.  There’s no attentional frame to give them a handle on the words from the TV, so they don’t learn anything from it.)  A child won’t learn ‘rabbit’ from a random act of pointing.  They learn the word in a familiar, information-rich context: playing with a pet, visiting a zoo, reading a book, whatever.  They pretty much already understand what the adult is doing and what the utterance means, and they can use that to figure out what any unfamiliar words mean.

Bag those trees

Tomasello rejects generative grammar and formal linguistics entirely.  The language organ hypothesis posits that children have a full adult understanding of grammar and only need to learn how to activate it.  This just doesn’t match the years-long struggle children have to acquire language and the mistakes they make.

How do they acquire language?  Item by item— and the items may be words, phrases with open slots, or entire constructions (e.g. passive voice).  The evidence is that they don’t learn to link up these items right away.  E.g., learning the verb hit, they don’t really have a concept of the verb’s subject and object.  They learn the word’s particular slots: hitter and hittee.  It’s only much later that they abstract out general syntactic categories like subject; and particular items may indeed remain as anomalies in adult speech. 

As an example, generative grammar treats questions as a transformation of statements… “Where’s the rabbit?” is related to locatives like “The rabbit is in the cage.”  But Tomasello points out that for many children, the first multi-word constructions they produce are questions: where X, what’s X?  They can hardly be transforming statements when they’re not producing statements yet.  Rather, they learn the questions because they hear similar questions from adults. 

Some aspects of language are delayed because they require more cognitive sophistication.  The proper use of pronouns and definite articles, for instance, requires an understanding of what other people know.  Young children use these features based only on what they themselves know.  There are items and constructions that aren’t mastered until well unto school age.

Further research needed

The book starts with words and simple constructions, and progresses to more complicateed ones.  It gets weaker as it goes on, not because Tomasello’s argument declines, but because the research gets thinner.  There just aren’t enough studies of how children learn the more complex constructions of their language.

Still, his usage-based linguistics is perhaps the first overall theory of language that strikes me as being on the right track in general.  He rejects generative syntax and innate linguistic competence entirely, and that may be going too far.  But as a heuristic, it’s completely correct: we should explain as much as we can with general cognitive abilities before positing language-specific ones. 

Chomskyan linguistics in particular seems like arid speculation verging on pseudo-science.  The whole idea of parameters, for instance, is an invitation to fool oneself: any anomalous data can be swept under the rug by adding a new parameter.  The best alternatives so far have been people who are more sensible (e.g. Lakoff and McCawley) but who still are very far from the neurochemistry of the brain.  I’ve long felt that we won’t be getting near the truth till linguistics is a lot more like color theory: read Hardin’s Color for Philosophers and note how much vision and color perception derive directly from facts about neurons.

Tomasello isn’t at the neural level yet, but he deals refreshingly in facts, both facts about child language acquisition and facts about human cognitive development.  It doesn’t exactly liven up the book, but a few decades of this and I think we’ll get a whole lot closer to exactly how we do this language thing we do.