Michael Fortescue

Pattern and process : a Whiteheadian perspective on linguistics

The purpose of this book is to illustrate the relevance to linguistics today of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. Although largely ignored by linguists, Whitehead has in fact much to say as regards the cognitive processes underpinning language pattern. His theory of symbolism conceives of language as the ‘systematization of expression’, and relates meaning to feeling (in the broadest sense). The Whiteheadian perspective allows a synthesis of the psychological and the social approaches to language that does not fall into one or another fashionable form of reductionism. The volume represents a first application of Whitehead’s thinking to a broad range of linguistic phenomena, ranging from speech act theory to the production and comprehension of texts, from language acquisition to historical change and the evolution of language. It is argued that Whitehead’s holistic philosophy is uniquely suited to the view of language as an emergent phenomenon — regardless of whether one’s approach to cognition is via the ‘nativist’ or the ‘functionalist’ route.

Learning to speak Greenlandic: a case study of a two-year-old's morphology in a polysynthetic language

Child language acquisition data for Greenlandic Eskimo, a highly polysynthetic and morphophonologically complex language, promise to be the source of interesting evidence for general theories of the acquisition of morphological processes. The child in the pilot study here discussed appears already at the age of 2;3 to have mastered the use of a great number of derivational and inflectional affixes together with the morphohonemic patterns for their attachment to different stem types and to other affixes (up to at least four or five following the stem). This presents problems for traditional MLU calculations and calls for clearer criteria of morpheme productivity than may suffice for more analytical languages.

Eskimo word order variation and its contact-induced perturbation

Eskimo languages are commonly characterized as displaying rather ‘free’ word order as compared to the major western European languages. Nevertheless, there is in West Greenlandic at least a clearly dominant, pragmatically neutral ordering pattern. Deviation from this – when possible at all – results in specifiable contextual marking (the factors involved will be discussed and illustrated in section 2). In fact, the degree of ‘freedom’ involved may vary considerably from dialect to dialect (and from language to language), also through time and according to register/medium. Specifically I shall be claiming that no Eskimo dialect is of the purely pragmatically based word order type (lacking a syntactic ‘basic order’) which Mithun claims is typical for polysynthetic languages with inflected verbs that can stand as independent sentences (Mithun, 1987: 323). Unlike the type of language that Mithun describes, which includes (Iroquoian) Cayuga and (‘Penutian’) Coos, for example, I shall argue that West Greenlandic (WG), a highly polysynthetic language, behaves more like Slavic languages in this respect, though the ‘neutral’ pattern there is of course SVO rather than SOV. Much as described for Czech and Russian by the Prague School functionalists, word order in WG seems to reflect the common ‘functional sentence perspective’ whereby – ignoring postposed ‘afterthought/clarificatory’ material – early position in the sentence is associated with given material of low communicative dynamism, whereas later position is associated with new or important material of high communicative dynamism (see Firbas, 1974). This is the reverse of the situation described by Mithun.

Similitude: A conceptual category

A typologically based analysis of the broad conceptual domain of “similitude” is presented as a case study of the complex relationship between cognition and lexical expression. This involves lexical items and constructions as well as grammatical morphemes from a wide range of languages expressing position along an approximate SAME–LIKE–DIFFERENT continuum. Important for the analysis is the relationship of similitude to the categories of comparison and evidentiality.

The eskimo-aleut-yukagir relationship: An alternative to the genetic/contact dichotomy

Abstract Any attempt to establish an ancient relationship — genetic or otherwise -between Eskimo-Aleut and Yukagir needs to be seen in the broader context of the Eskimo-Uralic Hypothesis, the history of which is presented in Bergslands article of that title from 1959, itself an important contribution to this field of enquiry that contains such names as Rask, Sauvageot and Uhlenbeck. Yukagir has only been mentioned rather peripherally in this context, which is understandable given the controversial nature of the relationship of that language to Uralic — or any other language of northern Asia. The strongest proponent of the latter hypothesized relationship is Collinder (1940). Others (notably Angere 1956) have been more cautious in dealing with the question. Krejnovich (1958) for example, whilst presenting convincing evidence for early contact between Yukagir and the Samoyedic branch of the Uralic family cautions against a simple genetic explanation and points instead towards the likelihood of protracted i...

The development of morphophonemic complexity in Eskimo languages

Abstract As I have recently argued (Fortescue, forthcoming 1992), the Eskimo-Aleut languages appear to have developed from an earlier, more agglutinative stage towards full-blown polysynthesis hand in hand with increasing mor-phophonemic complexity, the latter having today reached - especially in Alaskan Yupik - a daunting degree of complexity. I discuss there in “teleological” terms why this perhaps unexpected linkage might have come about without generalization of individual allomorphs having continually counteracted the complications resulting from normal phonological drift. The purpose of the present article is to sketch the route whereby this state of affairs was reached. The reconstruction is based upon the now virtually complete first version of the Comparative Eskimo Dictionary (Fortescue et al., forthcoming) and the recent comparative Eskimo-Aleut work by Knut Bergsland (especially Bergsland 1986 and 1989).

How to catch a mental model by the tale

Abstract It has long been clear that narratives are rarely retained verbatim — what is typically stored in memory (as a ‘mental model’) is rather far removed from the original wording. The particular framework adopted in this paper is the Pattern and Process approach inspired by Whitehead. In considering what minimal set of ‘instructional’ processes might be required to create a mental model from the words of a story that are read it is suggested that the ‘propositional prehension’ plays a central role. A distinction between propositional structure and propositional content is crucial here. This approach exploits the notion of the decay of the ‘weak’ nexus links that characterize the relationship between form and function in symbolic systems — these contrast with the strong nexus links binding memory traces of real world situations and events. It assumes that the memory trace left by a simple story (read or heard) is the result of the gradual disintegration of weak links between strings of words and their content, ultimately leaving just the strong ones between the relevant parts of the associated content. In order to substantiate this claim, the retelling of an anecdote by 24 native English-speaking subjects was elicited to abstract the constant structure behind the idiosyncratic versions produced by individual subjects. Although the individual ‘mental model’ may remain hidden, its trace left in reconstructing new ‘products’ is open to public scrutiny.

The Abstraction Engine

The main thesis of this book is that abstraction, far from being confined to higher forms of cognition, language and logical reasoning, has actually been a major driving force throughout the evolution of creatures with brains. It is manifest in emotive as well as rational thought. Wending its way through the various facets of abstraction, the book attempts to clarify – and relate – the often confusing meanings of the word ‘abstract’ that one may encounter even within the same discipline. The unusual synoptic approach, which draws upon research in psychology, neural network theory, child language acquisition, philosophy and consciousness studies, as well as a variety of linguistic disciplines, cannot be compared directly to other books on the market that touch upon just one particular aspect of abstraction. It is aimed at a wide readership – anyone interested in the nature of abstraction and the cognitive processing and purpose behind it. (series A)

Icelandic, Faroese and Greenlandic orientation systems: all absolute?

Abstract Orientation systems found around the North Atlantic Rim – those of Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands – have much in common, although two quite unrelated language families are involved. This has much to do with comparable geographical situations and may be taken as supporting Palmer’s Topographic Correspondence Hypothesis. The actual orientation of north–south–east–west terms can vary around the coasts of Iceland and the Faroes as it does around Greenland. All three regions arguably display ‘absolute’ systems, but most noteworthy is the fact that they apply differently at different spatial scales, ranging from the individual house and its surroundings, via specific stretches of coast, up to the broadest frame covering the whole country. The same terms may be used at all levels, only disambiguated by context. There are of course also differences between the systems of the three regions, reflecting their different cultural and technological backgrounds and the geographical alignment of their convoluted coastlines. The question as to whether such systems represent a distinct ‘landmark’ sub-type of absolute system is addressed. It is argued that distinctions of scale are more relevant here than the distinction between ‘cardinal’ and ‘landmark’ sub-types.

How ‘concrete’` is West Greenlandic?

Abstract Anyone familiar with West Greenlandic - or any other Eskimo language - is unlikely to disagree with the suggestion that this language is in some sense more ‘concrete’` than that of modern European languages. Statements to this effect can be - and have been - made for various languages spoken by hunter-gatherers, particularly within the anthropological linguistic tradition of North America. However, convincing evidence for claims that a given language is lacking in abstract expressions is hard to come by. In fact, counter-evidence is readily to be found in the case of West Greenlandic: one need only think of such derivational suffixes for forming abstract nouns as -ssuseq (‘quality of), to be discussed in section 2 below.