I continue to think about language as the basic computational operation of the mind/brain. The idea is that this business of stringing words together into coherent, intelligible, utterances is irreducibly computational; the linking of signifier to signified, that’s the basic “atom” of computation. Think of that as roughly analogous to a basic proposition in arithmetic as given in the tables for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Stringing signifiers together into utterances is then roughly like performing arithmetic operations involving two or more of those basic propositions. Consider, for example, adding a two-digit number and a one digit number: e.g. 25 + 8. In that particular case we invoke “5 + 8 = 13” and “1 + 2 = 3” in just the right way to yield “33”. That’s computation. And so is a multi-word utterance, but the computation is ‘hidden’.
The following passage from one of my papers on “Kubla Khan” [1] is about linguistic computation in that sense:
Nonetheless, the linguist Wallace Chafe has quite a bit to say about what he calls an intonation unit, and that seems germane to any consideration of the poetic line. In Discourse, Consciousness, and Time Chafe asserts that the intonation unit is “a unit of mental and linguistic processing” (Chafe 1994, pp. 55 ff. 290 ff.). He begins developing the notion by discussing breathing and speech (p. 57): “Anyone who listens objectively to speech will quickly notice that is not produced in a continuous, uninterrupted flow but in spurts. This quality of language is, among other things, a biological necessity.” He goes on to observe that “this physiological requirement operates in happy synchrony with some basic functional segmentations of discourse,” namely “that each intonation unit verbalizes the information active in the speaker’s mind at its onset” (p. 63).
While it is not obvious to me just what Chafe means here, I offer a crude analogy to indicate what I understand to be the case. Speaking is a bit like fishing; you toss the line in expectation of catching a fish. But you do not really know what you will hook. Sometimes you get a fish, but you may also get nothing, or an old rubber boot. In this analogy, syntax is like tossing the line while semantics is reeling in the fish, or the boot. The syntactic toss is made with respect to your current position in the discourse (i.e. the current state of the system). You are seeking a certain kind of meaning in relation to where you are now.
Chafe identifies three different kinds of intonation units. Substantive units tend to be roughly five words long on average and, as the term suggests, present the substance of one’s thought. Regulatory units are generally a word or so long (e.g. and then, maybe, mhm, oh, and so forth), and serve to regulate the flow of ideas, rather than to present their substance. Given these durations, a single line of poetry can readily encompass a substantive unit or both a substantive and a regulatory unit.
The third kind of unit, fragmentary, results when one of the other types is aborted in mid-execution. That is to say, one is always listening to one’s own speech and is never quite sure, at the outset of a phrase, whether or not one’s toss of the syntactic line will reel-in the right fish. If things do not go as intended, the phrase may be aborted. Fragments do not concern us, as we are dealing with a text that has been thought-out and, presumably, edited, rather than with free speech, which is what Chafe studied.
The starting and stopping, the disfluencies, all betray the operations of the underlying computation [2]. The goal of the computation is to produce a coherent, an intelligible, utterance. How is that judged? Both by how the speaker interprets the unfolding utterance and how they judge the interlocutor’s response.
[1] William Benzon, “Kubla Khan” and the Embodied Mind, PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, Article 030915, Published to the web on 14 November 2003.
http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/l_benzon-kubla_khan_and_the_embodied_mind.
[2] See my earlier post, Speech as computation [Trump's speaking], New Savanna, September 23, 2019, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2019/09/speech-as-computation-trumps-speaking.html.
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