A language is a social institution not a cognitive system

Monday, 5 April 2010, Colloquium

Robert Port, Indiana University.

Abstract

The best way to understand phonemes, phonological patterns (and words too) is that they are social products created by a human community. A speaker community is a `complex adaptive system’ that creates over time a partially structured set of sound patterns for coordinating activity. Individual speakers are exposed to many of these patterns and imitate them as best they can. But to perceive spoken language, a speaker has no choice but to induce his own idiosyncratic auditory version of linguistic conventions, a lexicon, phrases, idioms, constructions, etc. Typically the speaker does not have clear intuitions about any of the actual linguistic units. Of course, those of us who are literate have a vivid orthographic model for a language based on the alphabet, a recently engineered technology. Ordinary speakers have no alphabet. While a language does have some roughly alphabet-like properties, alphabets provide a completely inadequate representation of language.