Rules (or Analogies?) of Human (or Female?) Language (or Action?): From I to I, I, and again I, e o Indefinido..,.

Part I
Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” stunned me with its strangeness and haunting beauty. There sat table-places for thirty-nine dead (or mythical) women, adorned with plates of flowers, butterflies and vaginas, all gathered around a triangle, positioned above nine hundred ninety-nine names on the floor. Not an everyday sight. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found my brain scrambling, failing to assemble any satisfying conclusion from all the symbolic matter.

Striking me most, though, were the honorees’ biographies, inscribed on nearby panels. My reaction, really, stemmed from one line in particular, which read:

English writer, feminist and pioneer in creating a female form language in literature.

Virginia Woolf, it was. Now, I won’t question the labels “English writer” and “literature.” But the rest I will.

Starting with “feminist,” consider the following passage from Woolf’s Three Guineas:

That word, according to the dictionary, means “one who champions the rights of women.” Since the only right, the right to earn a living, has been won, the word no longer has a meaning. [...] Let us therefore celebrate this occasion by cremating the corpse. [...] Observe, Sir, what has happened as the result of our celebration. The word “feminist” is destroyed; the air is cleared; and in that clearer air what do we see? Men and women working together for the same cause.[1]

Obviously, one could argue that there are rights to be won besides that of earning a living. And even today, it seems premature to conclude that that right has been achieved across the globe. Still, the social commentary should not escape reflection. The bearing of earning a living on one’s self-definition is no less powerful than it was in Woolf’s time. Moreover, it is worth considering the connotations of the phrase itself, “earning a living.”

Regardless, the real reason for cremating the “feminist” corpse may have been to promote cooperation, recasting female issues as human ones in the process. In any case, it is by no means clear that the feminist epitaph would have pleased Woolf.

As for “female form language,” the story is similar. Maureen Mullarkey has made the following criticism:

Either Chicago doesn't know or doesn't care that Woolf insisted repeatedly: "Any emphasis, either of pride or of shame, laid consciously on the sex of a writer is not only irritating but superfluous."

Apparently, Chicago did not respect the writer’s wishes. Nevertheless, we are under no obligation to accept the above statement uncritically. That Woolf wrote in the style that she did, discussing the issues that she did; that these facts would have been associated with her status as a woman wholly accidentally; it seems unthinkable. Indeed, no sane biographer of Woolf would ignore her status as woman. Not only did it have the potential to influence her output, it must also have influenced the reception of her work.

Chicago, however, goes beyond biography with “female form language.” What might this be?

Well, if Woolf’s writing is found (by somebody) to embody stereotypically feminine qualities, so be it, I suppose. However, this does not require us to say so. If Woolf had been a man, writing exactly as she had written, down to the last semicolon, would we say that they had unearthed separate beauties, or separate truths about humanity? Yes, most men don’t write like Woolf. And no, most women can’t either.

Virginia was unique; in fact, more than unique, a topic I’ll return to later. But first, rules (or analogies?)!

Part II
Two of the devices most commonly applied to language by linguists are the rule and the analogy. Starting with the latter, I will demonstrate.

Suppose a new verb is proposed: glevle. You might, perhaps, produce a past-tense form: glevled. This act, then, could be accounted for by an analogy:

level : leveled :: glevle : glevled

Of course, I don’t know that a similarity to level, specifically, triggered your response. For all I know, a whole host of past experiences contributed. For a more general analogy, then:

verb : verbed :: glevle : glevled

Which is essentially equivalent to the rule:

Add -ed to verbs for past-tense.

But this rule captures the happening, as well:

Add -ed to glevle for past-tense.

In fact, no amount of evidence can tell us what “really happened.” These are simply different ways of framing the story, although each may be more or less appropriate, depending on our purpose.

Importantly, note that if we wanted to, we could completely eliminate either rules or analogies. That is, if they’re truly interchangeable concepts.

Are they? Well, the leading American linguist of the late 19th century, William Dwight Whitney, claimed:

Everything in language depends upon habit and analogy.

Remarkably, a leading linguist of the early 21st century, Joan Bybee, has taken a similar position. But wait. Consider again:

Add -ed to glevle for past-tense.

This rule, as stated, cannot be rephrased as an analogy, at least not without additional knowledge. That is, I assume you had no prior experience with glevle on which to base an analogy. True, you could have based the analogy on other verbs, as I did above, basing glevled on leveled. But what matters here is this: if there are cases that can only be handled by such a rule, we will need more than habit and analogy.

Are there? Well, Noam Chomsky, the leading linguist of the late 20th century, has repeatedly argued that there are. In Knowledge of Language, for example, he suggested that a sentence like the following cannot be understood on the analogy of attested English sentences:

1) John is too stubborn to visit anyone who talked to.

Let us imagine that we know John and that we overheard this sentence in a conversation between two other people. How would we interpret it? To be sure, this is no simple matter, and space limits me to a few alternatives.

For one, it is possible that the utterance, above, would engender a sensation of having heard one of the following. Or, one of these, we might imagine [2], is what the speaker intended:

2) John is too stubborn to visit anyone who he talked to.
3) John is too stubborn to visit anyone who talked to him.

Each of these presents a pronoun ambiguity which must be resolved for the sentence to be understood “fully.” That is, he and him could refer either to John or to someone else. It seems doubtful that this decision would be based solely on analogies to previously experienced utterances. At the very least, we could take into account whatever we had happened to catch of the conversation before 1) was encountered. Irrespective of how we characterize this process, it would seem strange, at least to me, to refer to it as “analogy.”

Still, perhaps others would not object. But then, consider the following: what if 1) was heard as 1) and it was believed that this was intended? We would then have to decide what the speaker meant, or decide how to interpret the utterance (or decide whether to interpret it at all), or both. At this point, analogy clearly fails, at least without some radical redefinition of the term.

Yet, I may have skeptics, still. The sentence “John is too stubborn to visit anyone who talked to” seems odd, I admit. Therefore, we might imagine that we never encounter anything analogous to it. However, a simple thought experiment is sufficient to demonstrate the insufficiency of analogy. That is, long ago, at some undefined point in our collective history, no language - however we define language - existed.[3] The burden was on us to create it (unless we are willing to entertain that aliens, angels, or innate computer programs taught us).

In any case, we don’t need a time machine. Our creative potential did not disappear once language - however we define it - was established. Rather, it has always been with us (so long as we define ourselves by it), as Wilhelm von Humboldt noted in the mid-19th century.

We should thus celebrate our power - though not unlimited - to devise new words and expressions, and to interpret our experience as we wish. No amount of prior experience and theorizing can tell us for certain what we will do - or what we should do - in a given situation, as every situation is unique, in an uncertain way. It is therefore not surprising that Chomsky has characterized the problems of what he calls “poverty of stimulus” as “awesome.”

Granted, a lot of apparent contradictions appear in Chomsky’s output.[4] For instance, though he has attacked the notion that a community language (i.e., an E-language) has a concrete existence, he has maintained that an individual’s language (i.e., an I-language) reaches a “steady state.” Never, however, has any evidence been provided for this claim, nor could any evidence ever be provided for it. To maintain that a language (of any sort) arrives at a steady state, it is necessary to abstract away from history. Abstractionary motions such as these rely ultimately on decisions, not evidence. Whether they be called rules, or somethings elses, I leave to the reader.

Part I, I and again I

The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.
–Louis

After Virginia, Noam’s I-language metamorphosizes to I, I, and again I-language. Multiple linguistic acts, in other words, can be basketed as belonging to (what we consider to be) the same person, but they need not be, just as we are not forced to encode language with race or gender. Of course, labels may serve certain purposes. It might, however, be worthwhile to transcend such categorizations and examine language in context.[5]

But, if we stop at language, what is it, exactly, that we are examining? Our own interpretations, ultimately. As Nigel Love puts it, language is “interpretively terminal.” Of course, interpretation does not take place in a vacuum. Nor is it that assigning interpretations to “traces” of activity (to borrow B. F. [F.?] Skinner’s terminology) has not been pro[fi/phe]table. Regardless, we should heed Chomsky’s conclusion:

[T]here is no way to avoid the traditional assumption that [...] intuition is the ultimate standard that determines the accuracy of any proposed grammar.

Yet, we can go further: why grammar? As Humboldt warned, we shouldn’t study language as though it were a “dead plant.” If we look beyond freezed trees and traces, we delve into history: no shame in that. As Edward Sapir remarked:

It is important to realize that language may not only refer to experience or even mold, interpret, and discover experience, but that it also substitutes for it in the sense that in those sequences of interpersonal behavior which form the greater part of our daily lives speech and action supplement each other and do each other’s work in a web of unbroken pattern.

The perspective of history, still, has suffered (to say nothing of future), as Robert de Beaugrande notes, for bearing an “obtrusive mismatch against such ideals as Meillet’s ‘system where everything is rigorously held in place.’”

Why such (rigorous?) ideals? The answer is doubtlessly complex. Certainly, it has something to do with beliefs about what qualifies as science. In turn, this owes something to the success (and glorification) of Newtonian physics, which appeared (to some) to yield timeless laws. Such laws, or rather a desire for such laws, was infused into history (or future?) by the famous last paragraph of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species [6]:

There is grandeur in this view of life, in its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cyclically on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful, have been, and are being, evolved.

This, obviously, is not simply science. A religious tone is interwoven, an influence of natural theology on Darwin, perhaps. That nature, life, and even human activity should be underlain by laws; such ideas come down to faith.

Not to say, however, that such beliefs are either good or bad. Regardless, it is reckless not to recognize their influence on our conceptions of science, how they have favored us asking certain questions over others, and - ultimately - how this has affected our ability to confront the problems of the world.

Why, might it be asked, has a belief in timeless laws been so powerful? Woolf provides an answer with a question:

For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment?

Uncertainty, certainly, may breed terror. Yet, likewise may it yield wonder, joy, disappointment, opportunity, curiosity, madness, passion, sadness, pain, love, ecstasy, etc. Hence, Alexander Lowen penned Fear of Life.

As he argues, fear thrives - paradoxically - when the surrounding culture places great emphasis on a belief in progress. For those of us submerged in such a culture (probably most of my readers), we cannot appreciate fully what it is like not to be.

Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes, though, provides a fascinating glevle into such a different way of being. True, we don’t have to rough it like the Pirahã. But Dan Everett makes a strong case that we could learn more than a thing or two from them.

Particularly striking is how he, who went to the Amazon as a missionary, was (effectively) converted to atheism by the natives. This is not to say, either, that we must give up God. The danger, rather, is naturalized progress. And although this has oftentimes been associated with God, it need not be.[7]

In any case, aside from our Amazonian friends, we can learn from those fiction-writers of our own culture. As Woolf pleads in The Waves:

[I]t is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military progress; a convenience, a lie.

If Bernard is right that this “progress” is a convenience, who does it convenience? If an “invisible hand” cares for us, why a financial disaster, and a bailout? If “freedom” is sacred, why don’t we ask, as George Lakoff urges: whose freedom?

Postlude
To come full triangle, if tables full of vagina-like plates inspire, awesome. (At minimum, they kindle conversation).

However, we need more than just plates and essays. Tables of all shapes and sizes should welcome live bodies and minds to do more than eat dinner. Let us accept Fernand Braudel’s invitation:

Let us then set in motion the movement toward unity which is being sketched out the world over, and if need be, as soon as intellectually possible and profitable let us press on with it, as quickly as we can. Tomorrow is already too late.

Let us not wait to discover when tomorrow is.

notes
[1] This should not to taken to suggest that there is any strict binarity of the sexes in nature. Woolf herself did not seem to think so.

[2] This act of imagination - or decision, perhaps - might be enough to convince my reader of the insufficiency of habit and analogy.

[3] This is also true, in a sense, at a more definite point in an individual's history.

[4] Consider the following remarks of Chomsky, from Language & Politics:

Those of you who are going on in the ideological professions, the social sciences, etc., you’ll learn this. You’ll learn that you’ve got to conform. [...] What happens is that if you decide, well, I’ll conform a little, I’ll do what they say but I’ll keep my independence of mind, if you begin to do that you’re lost unless you’re a very rare individual. What happens is that you begin to conform, you begin to get the privilege of conformity, you soon come to believe what you’re saying because it’s useful to believe it, and then you’ve internalized the system of indoctrination and distortion and deception and then you’re a willing member of the privileged elites that control thought and indoctrination. [...] It’s a very rare person [...] who can tolerate what’s called “cognitive dissonance”—saying one thing and believing another.

[5] Of course, the labels of society should not be ignored. However, for those who may argue that we ourselves as researchers and teachers should use society’s labels to facilitate communication, please take into consideration the fact that if medical professionals acted analogously, they would risk - in some cases, at least - being sued for malpractice or negligence.

[6] The so-called laws of Newtonian physics can also be viewed as generalizations over historical events, where the phenomena are of a much more longue durée nature than those approached by biology and linguistics. (Note, for instance, that the half-life of a proton is probably about an undecillion years).

[7] Besides the last paragraph of On the Origin, Darwin uses the phrases “plan of creation” and “natural selection,” although he doesn’t explicitly mention God. Perhaps the independence of naturalized progress from God is made clearer by the titles of two books of Richard Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion. In any case, note further that the rhetoric of progress entered Darwin’s text in spite of influence from Thomas Malthus, famously manifesting itself in a strictly diverging tree diagram, a model which contemporary biologists contend is ill-equipped to capture life’s history, although it is still useful for those who demand strict taxonomies. It ought to be questioned, finally, whether divergence and progress really go together in the first place.