Sapir (1921) Language Defined. Edward Sapir. 1921. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech
Language Defined. Edward Sapir. 1921. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, available free at Bartleby.com.
Edward Sapir (1884–1939)
In this classic intro to linguistics Sapir laid out some issues that still bother language researchers, particularly cognitive and cogneural scientists.
Are we evolved to speak? It’s interesting that Sapir sees walking as an unquestionable example of "inherent, biological function of man", whereas recent research in motor development showed that the development of walking is both variable and dynamic.
The process of acquiring speech is, in sober fact, an utterly different sort of thing from the process of learning to walk. … To put it concisely, walking is an inherent, biological function of man.
Not so language. … Walking, then, is a general human activity that varies only within circumscribed limits as we pass from individual to individual. Its variability is involuntary and purposeless. Speech is a human activity that varies without assignable limit as we pass from social group to social group, because it is a purely historical heritage of the group, the product of long-continued social usage. … Walking is an organic, an instinctive, function (not, of course, itself an instinct); speech is a non-instinctive, acquired, “cultural” function.
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I have just referred to the “organs of speech,” and it would seem at first blush that this is tantamount to an admission that speech itself is an instinctive, biologically predetermined activity. We must not be misled by the mere term. There are, properly speaking, no organs of speech; there are only organs that are incidentally useful in the production of speech sounds. The lungs, the larynx, the palate, the nose, the tongue, the teeth, and the lips, are all so utilized, but they are no more to be thought of as primary organs of speech than are the fingers to be considered as essentially organs of piano-playing or the knees as organs of prayer.
The symbol-grounding problem. Here Sapir outlines the basic challenge of symbolic communication — how does the listener know what the speaker means? There has to be a mechanism that limits the potential referents of a linguistic symbol. Sapir supposes that (a) individual experiences are abstracted to a conceptual level and (b) the language community shares the conceptual framework. In other words, symbolic communications forces speakers to categorizes experiences in a way that comforms to the community’s expectation. This foreshadows the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as well as the latest surge in simulating language origin and evolution using multi-agent simulations. There much of the focus is on how agents — initially "speaking" random, multually unintelligible vocabularies, can eventually agree on a set of common lexicon. The question in my mind, though, is what happens to communications after a common language has been in place. That is, would "meta-communications" (communications about communications) make the development and adoption of a new symbol system drammatically easier?
The world of our experiences must be enormously simplified and generalized before it is possible to make a symbolic inventory of all our experiences of things and relations; and this inventory is imperative before we can convey ideas. The elements of language, the symbols that ticket off experience, must therefore be associated with whole groups, delimited classes, of experience rather than with the single experiences themselves. Only so is communication possible, for the single experience lodges in an individual consciousness and is, strictly speaking, incommunicable. To be communicated it needs to be referred to a class which is tacitly accepted by the community as an identity.
Localization of language. Here Sapir is of the idea that symbol-meaning mapping cannot be possibly localized, and therefore language is not completely localizable. The reason is that the symbol-meaning mapping is completely arbitrary and vary from language to language. Of course, the idea that localization is a result of development wasn’t there 85 years ago.
We see therefore at once that language as such is not and cannot be definitely localized, for it consists of a peculiar symbolic relation—physiologically an arbitrary one—between all possible elements of consciousness on the one hand and certain selected elements localized in the auditory, motor, and other cerebral and nervous tracts on the other. If language can be said to be definitely “localized” in the brain, it is only in that general and rather useless sense in which all aspects of consciousness, all human interest and activity, may be said to be “in the brain.” Hence, we have no recourse but to accept language as a fully formed functional system within man’s psychic or “spiritual” constitution. We cannot define it as an entity in psycho-physical terms alone, however much the psycho-physical basis is essential to its functioning in the individual.