What language?
At the heart of NLRG's work is matching mechanism with behavior. In particular, we are interested in neurobiological mechanisms for communicative behavior. I will write up our approach to neurobiology another day, but today's focus in on what we mean by language.
Language, if one reads theoretical linguistics, often gets collasped or confused with grammar. This means that language is its structure and its possible structures. No one is saying that language is unstructured. However, along with the rest of the functional linguistic community, NLRG places the use of language, its communicative function, as its most salient feature. Therefore from this perspective, language structure serves language use.
At this point, we find it difficult to understand the value of linguistic experiments based on artificially created sentences. Close analysis of everyday language use through conversation analysis indicates that the sentence types used in many of these experiments are rare in speech. (If we can get Lisa to contribute, you can get a much more detailed explanation of this.) Believing that our neurobiology is an evolved neurobiology, we are first interested in the mechanisms underlying evolved behaviors. We highly doubt that the environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA) included many of these types of utterances.
Therefore when we refer to language we are referring to language in use. What you hear on the streets and engage in on a day to day basis. Of course a variety of technologies press on our use of language and different contexts may call for different registers, but when we talk about the neurobiology of language we generally mean language in its everyday, relaxed form. A neurobiology of walking starts with the generic variety knowing that people can dance, skip, and jump. Those, however, are probably either extensions of the walking system or entirely other systems--likewise our view of language.
Language, if one reads theoretical linguistics, often gets collasped or confused with grammar. This means that language is its structure and its possible structures. No one is saying that language is unstructured. However, along with the rest of the functional linguistic community, NLRG places the use of language, its communicative function, as its most salient feature. Therefore from this perspective, language structure serves language use.
At this point, we find it difficult to understand the value of linguistic experiments based on artificially created sentences. Close analysis of everyday language use through conversation analysis indicates that the sentence types used in many of these experiments are rare in speech. (If we can get Lisa to contribute, you can get a much more detailed explanation of this.) Believing that our neurobiology is an evolved neurobiology, we are first interested in the mechanisms underlying evolved behaviors. We highly doubt that the environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA) included many of these types of utterances.
Therefore when we refer to language we are referring to language in use. What you hear on the streets and engage in on a day to day basis. Of course a variety of technologies press on our use of language and different contexts may call for different registers, but when we talk about the neurobiology of language we generally mean language in its everyday, relaxed form. A neurobiology of walking starts with the generic variety knowing that people can dance, skip, and jump. Those, however, are probably either extensions of the walking system or entirely other systems--likewise our view of language.
posted by Andrea Mates at 12:19 PM
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