Articles & Research

How Does Living Language Work? Cognitive Linguistics Answers

Linguistics studies language and has a rich scientific history. Its core subject is our capacity to speak, listen, write, and read. In the twentieth century, linguistics, like many other disciplines, strove to become more formal. Scholars contented themselves with studying texts and formal rules and never touched the phenomenon of “living” language at all.

Treating language as a set of rules and algorithms is convenient for developing computer technologies, an area where the findings of such research are actively put to use.

Take the supercomputer Watson, which quite recently played the role of a professor at a student forum. It answered the students’ questions, and they never even suspected they were talking to an artificial intelligence system.

And yet no computer has so far been able to write a good poem or allow itself irony in a conversation.

Living language is a vast space of meanings, one that opens up room for creativity — and no laws can describe it.

To be objective, we still do not know all that much about this gift, revolutionary for humankind. Every word carries an entire system of meanings whose emergence and development depend on our experience.

Cognitive linguistics will help us learn how researchers probe the mystery of the “living” word and how to put the current knowledge to use in real life.

IS LANGUAGE AN ALGORITHM?

Under the influence of postmodern ideas, linguistics gave up the principle of the hierarchical structure of language. When a meaning is being born, it is not entirely natural to speak of the order of its structure. Our speech experience is a complex phenomenon that cannot be represented algorithmically.

Speech experience takes shape within a certain system of symbols — a culture or a subculture. Everything we say, write, and read makes up our subjective space of meaning. And that is precisely what makes the scientific study of language especially difficult.

In a certain sense, culture is a text, and the reading of many texts shapes a person’s consciousness. That is what the poststructuralist Jacques Derrida thought — he was interested in the relation between consciousness and text. The whole world is a “cosmic library.” It sounds beautiful, but the picture of the problem does not end there.

The development of linguistic consciousness does not depend on reading alone. The ability to narrate yourself and your life experience is also an element of linguistic consciousness. Recall how you answer the question “How are you?” on social networks. If your verbal powers stretched to more than “fine,” then you managed to create a unique meaning that cannot be formalized.

P. A. Florensky wrote the following about the “living” word:

In the word, two energies that have accumulated find their equilibrium and come into unity… It is no longer either energy separately, nor both together, but a new twofold-in-one energetic phenomenon, a new reality in the world… But one cannot say: “it is on its own.” Without one or the other of the poles it unites, it is not at all.

What do you think: can a sign be assigned a precise designation of an object, a phenomenon, or a concept? If your answer is “no,” Lacan would have agreed with you.

It is worth looking at poetry together with Lacan. It may be perceived as a deliberate confusion devoid of any fullness of meaning, but that is far from the case. The emergence of an indeterminate multiplicity of meanings, the dynamic interplay of the imaginary and the symbolic — that is what happens when we immerse ourselves in reading poetic texts.

By the way, in talking about poetry we have just arrived at the origins of poststructuralism. Poststructuralism begins to dispute the perception of language as a formal algorithm.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM FOR THE VERY YOUNG

Poststructuralists were among the first to begin doubting the unconditional link between the signifier and the signified.

Imagine you are paying someone a compliment. You say: “You’re wearing great shoes today.” What does it mean? You could start running through the features of the shoes that might denote the characteristic “great,” but that is not at all what you put into the compliment. You might have been praising their color — red, for instance, which you loved in one of Stanley Kubrick’s films. As for the shoes’ owner, his experience connected with the color red may consist of something else entirely.

In psychology, a similar idea was touched upon by Freud when he wrote that several unconscious phenomena combine in a single image, word, or thought.

When we turn to metaphors, some signifiers are superimposed on others. Later, in Derrida’s works, this principle was presented through the concepts of the “sliding or floating signifier.”

The key insight of poststructuralism was the following (read carefully now!): when we replace an event with a sign, the event itself ceases to exist. The philosophers asserted: “The word, once uttered, is a lie.”

Linguists imagined the human psyche as a contradictory interaction of three forces — the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. The imaginary is the pre-linguistic stage, when there are images but no speech yet. The symbolic is the ambiguity between sign and meaning, as in the example with the shoes.

The real, meanwhile, lies beyond the boundaries of language; L. Wittgenstein said it very precisely: “The real is an arrangement of the images of things.”

TWO IMPORTANT WORDS: DISCOURSE AND SYNERGETICS

Remember, we began by saying that speech experience arises in a space of meaning? Cognitive linguists rethought the space in which language exists and introduced a new concept. It is a word you have heard and seen many times, but perhaps to this day you do not know what it means. Here it is: discourse. Explaining what it is in simple words is quite hard, so to start with we will explain it in complicated ones.

Discourse is a whole array of factors that play a role in understanding and perceiving information. The structure of discourse includes the text and the surrounding environment. You could say it is a complexly organized system with a number of synergetic properties. Complex also because, alongside the structure of the text, elements of the environment are activated.

Those elements can be the participants in a discussion, its background, the exchange of opinions, and even the noise of birds outside the window.

It is discourse that gives us super-big data for the superpower of discussing Mandelstam’s poetry.

For linguistics, the value of discourse shows itself most clearly in the dialogic nature of the linguistic personality (who said “mirror neurons”?). We would all like our conversations and our exchanges of messages with one another to be not only interesting but also harmonious. On precisely that depends how striking and synergetic the discourse will turn out.

Within the new methodology of the synergetic movement, personality appears, in its becoming, as a fan of possibilities.

— Viktor Petrenko, Russian psychologist, specialist in experimental psychosemantics

We have discussed complex organization; let us move on to another word that causes misunderstanding — synergetics.

We have two important superpowers — inspiration and intuition. Their emergence is a vivid demonstration of a synergetic phenomenon. In the most general sense, it is a state of mind in which the brain reaches its highest activity. The information we perceive spreads across the entire neural network, and it is the best time for creativity. By the way, children know this state perfectly well — and are often far smarter than their parents.

The basic principle of synergetics is that a system of relations between two or more objects generates a quality that the objects will not achieve separately. In our case, that system is formed by the relation between information from the surrounding environment and linguistic consciousness. P. A. Florensky wrote that the word is synergetic.

At any age, the subconscious allows us to run our speech stereotypes.

If you answer your interlocutor’s recurring question the same way every time, that is an easy action for the brain. And you are losing your chance at insight or inspiration.

Any speech-and-thought phenomenon is valued for its synergetic many-facedness. The quality and density of the space of meaning depend on the whole diversity of language life — write interesting messages, speak with emotion, place yourself in new language situations, read interesting texts. In this way you will create a language environment in which you can learn intensively and simply live an interesting life.

COUNTING MEANINGS

A human being can interpret symbols, both written and spoken. Here is what is interesting: the interpretation of symbols rests on a nonlinear image of the world. You could say it stands opposed to Aristotelian logic (“If A happens, then B arises”).

When we read, so many associations arise that it seems impossible to trace, linearly, all the meanings that a given word signifies.

In language, everything drifts all the time. So when a test subject is told — think of milk, or think of a key — nothing follows from it. His thought (there is even a term for it: mind wondering) goes wherever it likes — there is no knowing what he has made up in there. Besides, there are the words as well. A person who thinks in Chinese — and for him it is not just the words that are different, the whole system is different, absolutely everything is different — what are the concepts like in there, are there thousands of millions of them, in spots?

Tatyana Chernigovskaya, Russian scientist in the fields of neuroscience and psycholinguistics

The search for those ultimate meanings, so elusive in the gliding of language, is the business of semiology. Its subject is cultural phenomena that are wholly subordinate to the aims of communication. You are reading this text and are thereby already a participant in a communication whose goal is to learn the secret of the “living” word.

Around you and inside your head (which is, incidentally, a discursive space), events are constantly taking place and interacting with one another — and a synergetic phenomenon results. Another example of a discursive space is a university lecture hall with a large number of thinking students. R. Barthes represented semiology very aptly when he wrote that the symbol is a “flash of the imaginary.”

WHY DID I READ ALL THIS?

Reflection on meaning has always been the subject of numerous disputes. Perhaps the synergetic approach will allow us to rethink our relation to the “living” word. Its first requirement is to understand how a self-organizing system arises from the relation between the brain and the surrounding environment. When researchers are able to do that, we will gain qualitatively new knowledge about the structure of our language. That knowledge will be the result of interdisciplinary research and will entail a whole series of social changes.

Of course, it will be applied in education and used to help people with various speech disorders. Perhaps knowledge of the new principles of the structure of language will significantly transform research in the field of artificial intelligence.

Starting today, all of us can use the ideas considered here in our own lives and learning. Interest and creativity may be called the most important conditions of any learning. Even when you review study material, you can do it creatively. And this approach has a concrete physiological picture.

A hallmark of the modern era is that we lean more on text messages than on spoken communication. The impoverishment and simplification of the speech of people today is often attributed to this trend.

But degradation happens not because we communicate too little in real life, but because of what kind of text we write and what meaning we put into it.

The simplest interdisciplinary conclusion is this: the more effort you apply in your own language space, the more complex your brain becomes. Living, considered speech that expresses feeling opens up the possibility of an endless number of new meanings. It is good for the development of the human mind and is available to every one of us — and it is still too difficult for scientific research.