Hundreds of people have asked me "what is psycholinguistics?" i have explained it a hundred times too but this friday I actually got an opportunity to delve in the linguistics side of it.Wow, what a seminar.
The english department at my university coordinates a seminar series every spring.So this year their first speaker of the series was a Polish Professor, Dr. E.Tabakowska from Krakoff, Poland.
A very learned lady with an excellent sense of humor.
I thought let me share some of the highlights of this talk with other language enthusiasts.So essentially we come to a question ' Why do we need language?'
Answer isn't complicated at all.
Language is a medium to express.However how the iconicity is interpreted universally alike is a mysteriously interesting proposition of study.
Dr. Tabakowaska began with a simple sentence .............'The language I use is because I see what I see and I want you to see what I see.'
Well we all agreed to that. We do communicate because we want the other person to know our perspective but then the next statement she said,raised a few sighs and gasps.............' We see icons of a language, could be pictures, symbols or letters (also symbols in a way), these are arbitrary but they each have an assisgned motivational value to them.And this motivation helps us communicate and interpret.Often when the signs are assigned the same motivation in a culture, they convey the same meaning.However there are symbols that are universal and grammar that is universal and we often make sense of the world from the world itself.'
Now this was a little heavy to take it at face value but she made it a point to give us apt examples to explain what she meant by iconicity and language perception and comprehension.
To quote a few would be as follows.
" People took pride in the peruque(instead of using a word like wig and the puffed petticoat, in the landscaped park , in the painted porcelain and the powdered pudendum (ibid, 595)
Now this statement not just describes the people of that historical period.......just the sheer use of words conveys their proud behavior, their uptightness and so many other things that the word order could have not if it were differently put.
Another one was about how a statement can be made into a command or it can be impinged on the memory sheet forever by minimum usage of words and also it can be a much more sharp / decisive command if the words are equal length.Like Caeser's description 'Veni, Vedi, Vici.
Three words, crisp and starting with V which somehow reminds people of distinctiveness.
Also another interesting thing was...........Ever thought about it...whenever we give instructions/ descriptions to people about where things are located/ kept , we give them in such a way that if the listener were to look for them they would just follow the sequence of the sentence and then get to the destination concerened.Although grammatically placing one clause before the other wouldn't be wrong we never do so.An instance would be as follows.
The book is upstairs, on your right, in the top shelf of the cupboard, right across from the blue folder.Now the right across from the blue folder could have been before we described that the book was in the top shelf, but we do not do so.
Now is it that cognitive linguistics are trying to study this phenomenon.However what remains to be found is whether it will make a huge difference in perception if this order were changed.I think it would certainly affect their cognitive maps.
I would leave you with an age old Chomskian argument "Words do not make sense without meaning even though they follow the right syntax, for e.g the following sentence is grammatically correct but semantically it doesn't make any sense at all.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously!!!!!!!!!!!!
So well think about why you speak the next time you do and wonder whether the motivation behind your language is the same as another person's......................................................
