Re: Irony and Cultural Neutrality

[Jim Carter <jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU>]

On Tue, 25 Nov 1997 21:34:59 -0500, <lojbab@access.digex.net> writes:
> ...Nor do I think that this definition is all that correct.  Indeed, I think
 that
> the focus on "rules" of whatever kind is not part of the definition of
 language
> at all.  Rather I see most of language (but not all) to be abiding by
> "conventions" (which are agreements and not rules per se) within
 communications
> groups to enable communication within the group.  Violate conventions and
> yyou still might communicate so the language still "works", but you have also
> broken the tacit "agreement" and therefore to some extent ostracized yoruself
> from the norm.

Tangentially relevant to this point are two articles.  The first (I've posted a
summary: http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc/lojban/scirules.txt) reviews experiments
indicating that both rule-based and association-based parsing occur and are
implemented in separate programmable hardware in the brain.  The second gives
experimental evidence that grammatical "rules" are implemented as a list of
guidelines, such as "in this culture we prefer subjects to be first, and
we verbs at the end like", and when a meaning is mapped into words the "best"
arrangement, with culturally learned scoring, is emitted.  I have to look
for my summary of this article at home, but when available it will be called
http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc/lojban/gramguid.txt.

James F. Carter        Voice 310 825 2897       FAX 310 206 6673
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