While reading an amazingly
interesting excerpt by S.I. Hayakawa from his book Language in Thought and
Action (an ridiculously relevant and intriguing read that I think everyone
in Ling 1 would benefit from) I was struck by the thought that abstraction in
an integral part of language and semantics that affects much of our grammar and
thinking processes. Based on some of the points Hayakawa made and my own
thoughts I will briefly talk about the relationship between abstraction and
semantics and between abstraction and thought, hoping to open a discussion
about the effects of abstraction on linguistics.
To begin a
definition of abstraction for this post is needed. For the remainder of this
post I will refer to abstraction as the idea that “the word is not the thing”
or that “the symbol is not what is symbolized” (Hayakawa). In terms of
linguistics that idea applies directly to the fact that the words we are using
are not actually what is being discussed. Also it refers to the idea that
smaller ideas can be abstracted into more broad concepts and terms. The idea of
abstraction comes into our study of linguistics very directly; both studies of
morphology and phonology have abstractions built into them. Phonology involves phonemes and allophones,
phonemes being the symbol that represents all of the symbolized allophone sounds.
Morphology following a similar pattern with morphemes representing the class of
actualized allomorphs.
By framing
the idea of phonology and morphology as examples of abstraction it can become clearer
how the idea of linguistics is a study of the relationships between abstracted
topics. In class we discussed the idea that certain allophones are not
reproducible across all spoken languages, even when those languages have the
same phonemes. We now have an idea that while multiple languages can have an
understanding and an ability to use a certain morpheme that they cannot
understand all of its more specific parts. Said another way, multiple languages
can comprehend an abstracted idea, but they cannot use all of the more specific
parts. Hayakawa refers to this idea as the “ladder of abstraction” (Hayakawa),
the idea that as you abstract an idea more and more it becomes more inclusive
and understandable but one loses sight of what actual idea is being
represented.
The
previous argument is a singular and slight example that brings to light the
more complicated and interesting linguistics question: how does abstraction in
language alter thought? To frame this problem consider how certain languages
cannot understanding specific allophones while understanding the overall
phoneme. Now consider if this problem extends to more than simply specific
voiced sounds, but to strings of voiced sounds, entire words, or sentences.
What does it say about communication that an abstracted idea could be
understood while its less abstracted parts were not intelligible. For example
using the ladder of abstraction as described by Hayakawa we can say that two
different languages might exist, one with an understanding of a cow, and
another without that understanding. But as we abstract the idea of cow from cow
to farm animal, to farm asset, to asset, to monetary representation. The idea
that by the time we get to monetary representation almost all languages will
have some sort of understanding of that concept that can then be used to
describe the cow, makes me question the value of specific language.
At its most
core this post aims to question how language shapes our understanding of the
world around us. I aimed to do this specifically by introducing the idea of
abstraction as part of our semantic usage that can easily alter how we
understand and communicate with others.
Citations:
Hayakaw, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. New York: Harcourt,
1972.
While reading your article and your comment to my article that covers a resonating topic (abstraction), I discovered that there are two types of different abstraction that we could talk about in the context of linguistics.
ReplyDeleteOne is abstraction as an approach or a method of thinking, which both you and I explained. It can be defined as omitting the details that are less of concern to extract the essential qualities to derive important results about things that we really care about.
The other is abstraction as a linguistic phenomenon, where speakers of a language assign a word to represent the abstract idea that captures the essence of any realizations of that idea; e.g. we use the word “chair” not to define one chair, but to represent a 4-legged surface on which you can sit. This notion was overlooked in my post but your definition of abstraction seems to capture this idea (“the word is not the thing”).
I believe this discussion easily extends to a discussion about the question of: “How do we see language?” Language is what resides in our mental capacity; it is an abstract concept that can be only studied through its diverse realizations that we can observe. Hence it is not surprising that abstraction is an essential concept/approach in analyzing language.
This is a very interesting point. Ultimately, language is just a way of communicating and understanding concepts that we've inherited as a result of generations of discovery and creation.
ReplyDeleteI have thought extensively about the inexactitude of abstraction as a tool for communicating thoughts as well. However, I have taken it from a slightly different angle. In our modern world where we are exposed to the use of words in a huge variety of contexts (advertising, articles, books, speech) we hear the same words used totally differently very frequently. Everyone seems to have their own interpretation of what some of these words mean -- their own connotative system. But when you expose yourself to a huge variety of connotations for the same words does the word itself not become less exact? In other words, when you hear the use of the word "discipline" in a movie, over a commercial, in a speech and in a conversation and you aggregate all its different connotations together, does the world not lose meaning? How did connotations differ in contexts where societies were more insular? Were people more wedded to certain definitions of words?
This all ties into the last question you asked about how language can control our understanding of the world around us. I would suggest google the term "linguistic determinism" which poses exactly the same question.