>>CB: My thought is that there was an arbitrary connecting between "g" and the >>thing, <<
Certainly not iconic, but not entirely arbitrary, but rather 'motivated' by human psychology (hence the use of a velar for much of the same purpose across cultures and languages). >>CB: I don't have a feeling that repetition represents endearment.<< Well it most basically represents enhancement, extension, plurality. There is no plural form in Japanese like the one in English (a cat, two cats), but, for example, ki is tree, ki-gi is trees (repetition of the ki morpheme, morphophonological voicing of the [k] to [g]). As for what I called endearment, that would depend on us hearing you interact with a baby or a beloved pet. >>CB: The point is that alphabetical writing is arbitrary and picture writing >>is not .<< Well alphabets are typically used for glottographic writing, pictures are not--that is, they do not represent a written language derived from a spoken one. However, the alphabets we know today descend from writing systems that had pictographic elements in their development. Moreover, you can still see motivated relics in alphabets (such as the letter o, the shape of letter r vs. letter l pointing out an articulatory difference). Korean hangul is not an entirely arbitrary writing system because it represents a systematic working out of how to pronounce Korean--it has phonological motivation. >>CB: But the p and g are not simultaneously articulated. They are in a sequence.>> But the point is they are not discrete segments, which is one popular view of the phoneme--that is what gives it its theoretical 'unicity'. In speech, in acoustics and in auditory perception, however, that unicity does not exist. >>CB: How are words distinguished based on the articulatory gesture concept ?<< One difference is that if we use the articulatory gesture as an abstract model of speech, it is hard to put into written discourse. The beauty of the phoneme is that it helps you turn dynamic, co-articulated speech into static linear segments for reading (though research on reading processes show that a text is not 'bar code scanned', that reading processes are not straight forward linear either). So once you grasp the dynamic nature of speech, you can find it easier to embrace the articulatory gesture as a 'unit'. I would say a second difference is that we can use the articulatory gesture to move away from a negative differential view of meaning to a positive differential view of meaning. Phonological encoding is actually (I hope) an integral part of a language's grammar. And most likely the basic unit is a psycholinguistic ability to control, store, process, encode and decode the spoken syllable, not the phoneme. >>CB: Categorical perception is still fundamental to how language works, and how symbolling and culture works. In what sense is categorical perception a house of cards ? Categorical thinking is fundamental to humans, and it is fundamentally social/communicative/communal, so that it must use conventional or agreed upon uses of percepts.<< As it has been identified and researched, categorical perception is not limited to human language or humans--even though it has been argued before as something that separates human language and humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. Most importantly though as it has been identified and researched, it appears to be an epiphenomenon. >>CB: This paragraph in the article you give us below, says that Chomsky and >>Halle do use phoneme.<< Well the explanation there is largely schematic, and an uneven mix of linguistics and philosophical ontology. But as I understand their position, they reject the way phonemes were derived from distributional methods (in structuralism), they embrace the use of minimal pairs (which I reject--due to the circularity of using your lexicon to delimit your phonological unit and then using your phonological unit to delimit your lexicon ), and then they analyze phonemes into features. In this version, the analysis is still static, but the contrastive phoneme becomes unnecessary and the contrastive feature is given prominence. However, the weaknesses of the approach include it is still static, confuses articulatory aspects with acoustic and perceptual ones, fails to produce an exhaustive agreed-to list of features. It is also important to remember that in a static analysis, the key thing to remember about the feature is that it is not a discrete element in that it spreads across segments, syllables, and whole words (like, for example, the feature of nasality in the word 'can'--contrast 'can' with 'cap'--the vowel is different and the nasality starts in the transition between the onset ([kj-] and the nucleus vowel). Since then the contrastive feature (which is really, I believe, what the structuralist Jakobson called them) has morphed into extremely abstract models like 'metrical frames'. One British linguist was so certain that it was this sort of thing that underlay speech processing that he got a patent on his version of the model and sold it as a surefire way to program computers to process rapid human speech. He got the patent, I'm sure he sold it to some programmer who didn't know anything about linguistics and speech perception. Have no doubt this was one of the 'holy grails' of programming in the 90s (successful speech recognition). However, the subsequent software didn't work any better than the ones flailing about with phonemic models programmed into them. I think it didn't work at all actually. If a computer can not be programmed to process complexly co-articulated speech, it can not process spoken human language. And a static model is not going to work. Most likely up to a point anyway increasing memory and processing power combined with a syllabic and word model will work better. CJ _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
