Nygaard & Spitulnik: Language in Context

Lynne Nygaard & Debra Spitulnik
Language in Context

Lynne Nygaard (Psychology) and Debra Spitulnik (Anthropology) spoke in the last lunch of the Spring 2009 semester about language in context. Debra contextualized the meeting by identifying the various disciplines in the room. There were representatives from psychology, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, psychiatry, and philosophy. To exhibit the power of context, Lynne and Debra communicated for a short while as two giggling girlfriends in a sand box. This broke the ice and demonstrated how genres and styles are determined within a discursive context.

What does the question of context stand against? Lynne contextualized the question within the history of the field, which traditionally held the model of a speaker-listener dyad. In this model, the speaker has an intention that translates into a physical signal. This signal is multilayered and structured and the listener unpacks the structured physical signal to understand it. It sounds good but alas, such an ideal dyad is nowhere to be found. For ecological validity we need to embed this dyad within a context; in fact within several contexts. Both Lynne, who studies phonetics and the biology of speech, and Debra, who studies society and culture, include context in their studies of language, and not as an epiphenomenon that can be left out of linguistic research. Not surprisingly, each has her own context.

Nested contexts: Lynne proposed a stratified and nested structure of contexts: phonetic, lexical, syntactic, sentential, discursive, situational, social, and cultural. She discussed phonetic research that has shown that already in the basic level, the way in which we produce a vowel depends on its consonant neighbors. Debra, who resides at the other end of this context-ladder, is interested in the social and the cultural. But they both agreed with the 20th century Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, whom they cited:“There are no 'neutral' words and forms—words and forms that can belong to 'no-one'; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have a 'taste' of a profession, a genre…a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions.”

“Heteroglot?” I wondered too. This word, which many of us were unfamiliar with, encapsulates the complexity of the various levels of contexts -- how they (to use Debra’s language) “bleed” into each other -- and how, in addition, they are all contextualized within time. How while we are speaking in the “time Now” (as Lynne described the present) we are carrying a discourse with the past and the future.

Cognitive conundrums: For Lynne the challenge is to understand how a biological system – yes, that’s us -- can encompass such complexity. She listed some specific hard questions: How this biological system can encompass simultaneously the linguistic and the communicative? How do the representations of language and its emergence in social, communicative contexts relate to each other? And maybe above all, how can we study it? The reductionist approach, which makes the research more manageable, has its own pitfalls. The contextualized investigation might be too complex to be productive.

Linguistic anthropology: Debra’s is a humanistic inquiry. She is less interested in the mind/body framing of language than in its social and cultural contexts. Her questions are how do we map what gets activated in every specific situation and discourse? How do we account, for example, for the common use among young people of the expression "the fierce urgency of now"? In the Fall, they used it to connect up to the Obama campaign, and it had important echoes for them as the younger generation, but most used it without any knowledge that Obama's use of the phrase was a reactivation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s coinage (he used it in his 1963 'I Have a Dream speech').

Debra emphasized the two competencies included in the use of language, the linguistic and the social. The linguistic guides one in speaking correctly; the social guides in speaking appropriately. One has to be competent in both not only for speaking but also for understanding. An anecdote from Harriet Joseph Ottenheimer’s The Anthropology of Language made the point: Dr. Stirland, a biologist from England, visited Kansas State University, and had planned to continue to Toronto. She was overheard mentioning her plans by a Native American young man, who approached her in the parking lot and commented on how nice Toronto was, and that his family lived not too far, in Upstate New York, and that he missed them. It took a while before it dawned on Ottenheimer that the Native American young man was not narrating a family story but rather indirectly, as is customary and polite in his culture, was asking for a ride. “I miss my family” was correctly understood by Ottenheimer, who resolved the situation and told the young man that Dr. Stirland would fly to Toronto. He wished her a safe flight and left.

Roberto Franzosi (sociology) gave another socio-cultural example of how his “How are you?” in England forced him to return from 10 feet ahead to listen to the answer to his question. He had meant it merely as a greeting, as in America.

These examples, pointed out Debra, are only a first step in the inquiry. They show the need for both linguistic and cultural competencies, and that we do not speak in a vacuum. But how do we understand these competencies and their context-sensitive activations?

Accommodation: Lynne introduced the concept of accommodation. In her field of study, vocal accommodation for speaking style has been observed. Utterances take on the characteristics of the interlocutor. Such accommodation has been found to be more common among women, Lynne told us. Bob McCauley (CMBC) wondered whether this is universal and hypothesized that it might be cultural. He also pointed out that his was an empirical question and can be tested.

Laura Namy (psychology), Donald Tuten (linguistics), Bob, and Lynne discussed the gender difference in accommodation. And Lynne added in favor of its universality some results from animal studies. Don spoke about how automatic or voluntary the process of accommodation is, and how gender often cannot be separated from power. In developmental studies, there is increasing evidence that up to the age of 6-7, children appear to accommodate automatically, and that it is hard to inhibit this behavior. Adults though can adopt non-accommodating strategies. And Bob was curious again about the universality of the phenomenon.

Apropos accommodation, Debra whose field-work was in Zambia, was impressed by how two people, with different yet close enough languages, often carry out dialogues in which each uses his or her own native language. The diversity of languages is culturally accepted and accommodated for. Quite in contrast to what one might see in the Balkans, where the language of the discourse expresses the power relation between the interlocutors.

That we have been left with many questions is a testament to the richness and the complexity of the topic. Studying language in isolation, as in Chomskian linguistics, enjoys mathematical elegance and can answer some linguistic questions. But at the end, how we approach difficult questions depends on context.

Lennard & Everett: Music and the Brain

Paul Lennard & Steve Everett
Music and the Brain: Neuroscientific and Musical Perspectives

Paul Lennard (Neuroscience & Behavioral Biology) and Steve Everett (Music) opened the lunch meeting about music and the brain with four questions: (1) What is music? (2) Is music a language? (3) Does music have an adaptive value? And (4) What is culture’s impact on the meaning of music?

Lennard shared a graphical model of how the basilar membrane of the cochlea responds to Bach. Yet emphasized that there is still much that is unknown about how the brain processes sounds: for instance, the way the brain processes pitch. Pitch is our perceived highness or lowness of a sound. When different instruments play the A above middle C (with fundamental frequency of 440 Hz) each has a unique recognizable quality based on its fundamental and accompanying harmonics. In the case of the oboe, when playing the A above middle C, the instrument is actually producing the harmonics (880 Hz, 1320 Hz, etc), and only very little of the fundamental frequency. The brain fills in, reconstructs, this frequency.

Everett then asked What is music, and shared with us four minutes of Francis Dhomont’s Frankenstein Symphony. Dhomont cut apart and stitched back together music elements, much like Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein did. Is this music? Often the elements manipulated are not played by musicians but are recordings of various sounds, assembled to create acousmatic music, for which any natural sound is kosher.

For Walt Reed (ILA) Frankenstein sounded like “industrial noise, not music.” Music needs to have form and intent. Bob McCauley (CMBC), and Robert DeHaan (Division of Educational Studies) joined the debate, “Must the agency be human?” Or “Maybe not being random is enough, regardless of the agency?”

Everett responded citing John Cage: The experience of sound does not depend on the intent of the composer but on the openness of the perceiver. Therefore music can be bird-chirps, the sounds of the city traffic, or the sounds of a water-fall, as well as the sounds of a string quartet. John Snarey (Candler School of Theology) agreed. Music, he said, was a construction of his own ears.

Todd Preuss (Yerkes) raised the question of whether birds perceive bird songs as music. And this deepened the question about the perceiver. Cory Inman (Psychology Department) suggested that music evokes emotions with valence for the perceiver, and that for him, like for Reed, Frankenstein sounded as emotional as a sound track.

Does it have to do with culture? Organization of sounds, said Everett, is culturally determined. Exposure to new sounds and new organizations can extend what is music to an individual. This was his own experience as a first-time listener to Javanese music. But his experience can be extended to other cultures, which he introduced in a series of rhetorical questions: “Is Tibetan multiphonic chanting evocative to any listener, or only to those who understand its symbolism?” “Is the timbre of the violin, so much loved in the West, more beautiful than the sound of the Japanese Noh instruments?” “Is beauty the ability to evoke the sublime? For the Japanese ear, the bamboo flute, shakuhachi, is intended to sound like ‘the wind blowing through grass.’”

Everett answered. There is an optimal ratio between the familiar and the novel. Too novel is not evocative. Too familiar is boring. Mozart put many surprises into a context of familiar music. The Austrian Johann Hummel did not and was greatly liked by his contemporaries, but today we hardly remember him. His contemporary Beethoven, with his many novelties, had to wait for later times to be fully appreciated. Reed, relying on Kant, suggested a different distinction. Beethoven pushed music and the concept of beauty towards the romantic and Hummel towards the classic.

We should replace “beauty” with “meaning,” suggested Lennard and took us back to one of the opening questions, Is music a language? Darwin considered music as a protolanguage preceding human language. Brain imaging studies show that the more a person is trained in music, the more lateralized the processing of music in his or her brain is, typically favoring, like for language, the left hemisphere. Closer studies of individual voxels (voxel is the 3-dimensional brain-image analogue of the 2-dimensional pixel on a computer-screen) show that the same voxels get activated in processing words and pitch; but the level of activation varies. Studies of people with aphasia – linguistic impairments – add to the convergence of music and language by showing that aphasiacs are also impaired in processing music.

Speech and music then are mixed together and processed by the same apparatus. How do we cognitively separate them? Laura Namy (Psychology Department) observed that while the apparatus is the same, different systems are involved – the aesthetic, the cultural, and the limbic. To the latter Lennard dissented, informing us that the amygdala of the limbic system is not strongly activated during listening to music. Lots of brain activation goes on but mainly in regions that are linked with culture like the temporal and the prefrontal lobes.

Namy maintained her skepticism and Lennard moved to her area of expertise. Children between 7-9 months start losing sensitivity to syllables that are not included in their native language. Similarly children between 7-11 months undergo a filtering process of rhythms. While West-European children develop preference to 1:2 over 3:2, the reverse is observed with Balkan children.

What if one never heard music, asked Inman. And Namy shared the story of a former student of hers, who after a cochlear implant, which was optimized for processing speech, lost her former ability to listen to music, suggesting that they are processed differently. Is there a critical age for the cochlea implant? for exposure to music? Is there an age beyond which the sound is not music anymore? DeHaan reflected, maybe critical age can be used to define music by understanding what gets lost beyond the critical age.

Does music have any adaptive value? returned Lennard to one of the opening questions and reminded us that in The Descent of Man, Darwin spoke of music as mysterious, but speculated that it played a role in sexual selection. Namy hypothesized on the role of music in social bonding, like between mother and infant. And Jim Rilling (Anthropology Department) added the example of social bonding through music prior to going to war. The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar was cited: Music playa a role in the rituals of grooming.

What about rhythm? Maybe the bimanual drumming of primates precedes music, proposed Lennard. Responding to a question by Richard Patterson (Philosophy Department), Everett pointed that to listen to music one needs temporal units, and he pointed to the automaticity of recognizing rhythmical units: At the moment one enters a techno club, one starts moving to the rhythm. This is an expression of the embodiment of music. While so far we limited our discussion to music and the brain, we should not neglect the heart, whose beating serves as a frame of reference. Cross-culturally, people agree on slow and fast. They all have hearts that beat in the same range.

We got closer to the end of the hour. Have we come closer to answering the first question, “What is music?” Kevin McCulloch (Candler School of Theology) suggested a new criterion: Songs tend to stick in his head. By contrast, the electronic music, to which we listened in the beginning of the hour, does not. Schumann, Everett reminded us, was haunted by music stuck in his head and attempted suicide to liberate himself from his musical ghosts.

Ghosts or muses? Music is named after the muses. And we have just peeked into our brains and hearts, aesthetics and culture, to explore how the muses work. Our inquiry did not scare them away, and we were allowed to ask new questions and create new music. It seems the muses will continue to inspire us as composers and listeners, but the questions, the answers, and the music will keep changing.

Cook: Conceptual Blending and Shakespeare

Amy Cook
Conceptual Blending Theory and Shakespeare's Henry V

Amy Cook (Theater and Literature, Indiana University) spoke in today’s CMBC lunch. While typically we get an interdisciplinary flavor in these lunches by having two speakers from different disciplines, this time Amy was alone, speaking from an interdisciplinary space. She uses the blending theory of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner as scaffold for her understanding of the theatre. The main idea of blending theory is that we process language, and especially metaphors, by blending inputs from two or more cognitive spaces into a newly created cognitive space. The subtleties of the theory were sacrificed on the altar of interdisciplinarity; which later brought a question by Dierdra Reber of the Spanish and Portuguese department about the destiny of interdisciplinary studies. This was followed by reflection of Andrei Olifer of the biology department about the differences between science and the humanities.

While the theoretical aspects of blending theory were only touched upon to provide context, the examples generated a lively and rich discussion. Amy chose the number 0, which represents nothing and thus has no place. Yet it is used as a placeholder that can afford the expression of very large numbers, like a million with 6 zeros. That 0 has no place value and serves as a place holder, that 0 simultaneously expresses the smallest and the largest, we learn in the very beginning of Henry V .

The choir enters with: “O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention, / A kingdom for a stage, / princes to act.” And later points to the crooked figure and the million, “So great an object: can this cockpit hold / The vasty fields of France? or may we cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt?/ O, pardon! since a crooked figure may/ Attest in little place a million;”

Nothingness, like 0, can also hold blended meanings. Bradd Shore pointed to Hamlet whose completion brings nothingness. Amy brought an example from King Lear’s conversation with his daughter Cordelia. At the first scene of the first act Lear speaks with all his daughters. Finally he speaks with the youngest:

Lear: Strive to be interess’d; what can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sister? Speak.
Cordelia: Nothing, my lord.
Lear: Nothing?
Cordelia: Nothing.
Lear: Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.

Thanks to the missing foot that demands a pause for the sake of the rhythm, we discover that “nothing” can mean many things. In producing the play, the interpreter has to decide where to pause. And this affects the meaning. This was demonstrated by Amy as Lear, and a lady from the department of Theatre Studies whose name has escaped me (Help!) as Cordelia. They read the dialogue four times, and each time they inserted the pause prior to a different “nothing.” Try it. It makes a difference. And the reason is that in each arrangement we draw the “nothing” and the pause from different cognitive inputs and therefore blend them into a different new cognitive space, into a different meaning.

This dialog of King Lear and his daughter Cordelia at the beginning of the play tells us how the play will end. As though their exchange of “nothing”s serves as a place-holder for what later contains the core of the story. Similarly, the opening choir of Henry V tells us how things will end. Never before have I noticed this Chekhovian structure in Shakespeare’s plays.

The blending of two opposites kept coming. Such blending can be achieved in a theatrical performance in various ways. Ionesco’s “playing against the text,” with comical performance of a serious text, or solemn performance of a comic text is one way of blending two opposite cognitive spaces. Viola of the Twelfth Night, who is feminine yet speaks like a man to keep her disguise, is another such example of blending of opposites.

This has taken me back to some years ago when my husband David and I struggled to translate the poem “He Peeked and Died” by the 20th century H. N . Bialik from Hebrew into English. In his mystical journey towards the source, the protagonist “Struggled to limits no limits, the place at which opposites/ Blend at their root.” And when he finally arrived he sank on “The threshold of nothing.”