00HFSTAHLKE@bsu.CSNET (Herb Stahlke) (05/12/87)
Max Webb's interesting contribution raises some definitional questions, "definitional" perhaps being redundant since most of this ill-defined discussion has been definitional. Animal language studies clearly show that animal languages can make use of "reusable 'parts'," as in bee dance. One might say that a major distinction between human and animal language involves the degree to which the message can be segmented into such reusable parts. Both have a strong analog component, e.g., the use of pitch, intensity, and duration to express intent, urgency, etc., but human language makes use of much richer segmentation. Animal languages do, however, make use of very context specific distinctions. Some monkey danger calls can distinguish the nature of the danger (snake, leopard, etc.). Furthermore, the work done, especially at Yerkes in Atlanta, on training chimps to communicate through language-like symbol systems proves conclusively that chimps are capable of using a rich syntax, words, reference to objects as well as to classes, prevarication, etc., and that they are capable of teaching this language to their young. This fulfills most of Hockett's design features for language. But the question of whether animals are capable of language and of literacy is beside the point. The essential definitional question has to do with what language is. The best I've been able to come up with or find is that what we call language is an adaptive externalization of cognition for social communication. The brain must operate an internal language for purposes of cross-modal perception and multimodal problem solving and representation, and it is that internal language that we externalize in speech. However, even this definition begs the question of speech vs. language, but that question gets a better answer when we look at J. L. Austin's definition of the speech act, which Webb was just a little inaccurate on. To quote Austin (How to Do Things with Words, OUP 1965, p. 108), who invented the terms, a locutionary act is "roughly equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and reference, which again is roughly equivalent to 'meaning' in the traditional sense." An illocutionary act is an act "such as informing, ordering, warning, undertaking, &c., that is, utterances that have a certain (conventional) force." And a perlocutionary act is "what we bring about or achieve *by* saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and eve, say, surprising or misleading." A passable way of paraphrasing this is to say that a speech ace consists of an intention on the part of the speaker to express some meaning and to bring about some result, a physical event in which the speaker produces a signal encoding that meaning and intent, and response from the hearer indicating understanding or the lack of it and the other sorts of effects Austin lists. In Austin's sense, then, the written word may be a record of a locutionary act, but it is not a locutionary act, much less a speech act. It's worth bearing in mind that the vocal-auditory channel is only one of several possible channels for locutionary acts, one that evolution has selected as particularly successful. A visual-spatial channel works well also, although it prevents one from using one's hands for other purposes at the same time and it doesn't do too well in the dark or from the bathroom to the kitchen. The written word eliminates the effects of the design feature Hockett calls "rapid decay of the signal," which is very important in terms of how the brain processes auditory input, and, of course, the written word creates the possibility of cultural functions for language that are impossible without it. If we want a definition of literacy, it must have something to do with a person's ability to participate in writing-dependent cultural functions. Literature is one of these, but to identify literate and literacy with literature is to confuse both denotative and connotative senses of the words. Herb Stahlke Department of English Ball State University