Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Okay.
Theodoros warmed you up perfectly for what I have planned for you,
so what I have to - I'm going to make you shout out stuff as well,
but it's going to be much easier than what he made you shout.
Okay, so like he said, I'm interested in human language,
and what I'm interested in, in particular,
is how we can talk about the world.
We can talk about what we see;
we can talk about what we do;
we can talk about what we see other people do.
For instance, let me take a look.
What can I see right now?
Ah, so there's a guy down here in the front row.
He's wearing a beautiful shirt.
Okay? I can say it. It's so easy for me.
I can just spontaneously describe the things I see.
You can look at me and say something similar.
Or maybe not, depending on how you think.
Or remember before, when those acrobats were here?
You could easily say, "Oh man, there are these two acrobats
who are climbing up silken ropes which are, you know, which are red.
So it's very easy for us to talk about what we see.
This picture kind of demonstrates this.
Here's a person; he's got a speech bubble, and he's talking about the world,
and he's interacting with the world as well.
But the interesting thing is
that even though it's very easy for us to do this thing,
it's very hard to know how it works
because there are two groups of scientists who study this situation,
and they don't talk to each other very much.
(Laughter)
So the uncharted water that I want to get into today -
because the whole conference is about uncharted waters -
is the uncharted waters in science
when you have two groups of scientists
who are studying something which is kind of the same,
and yet these two groups of people aren't talking to one another.
So let me just illustrate.
Here we have one group of scientists, described here as a linguist,
and he's looking at that speech bubble, and he's focusing on that,
and he's not focusing on how the man interacts with the world.
Right?
Then there's another group of scientists;
I'll call them - well, these are people who study perception,
and they study motor control and actions and how we recognize actions in the world,
how we perceive the world.
Let's call her a neuroscientist, or we could call her a psychologist -
it doesn't really matter.
But the point is that she is not studying language.
And so there's this interesting situation we have
where we've got two groups of scientists who are studying the same system,
but they're studying different parts of the system
and not really talking to each other.
So linguists and sensorimotor neuroscientists
don't go to the same conferences,
they don't write in the same journals.
So we're in uncharted waters
when we try and describe how it is that we can talk about what we see.
So, my talk is going to be into two parts.
I'll start off just by thinking a little bit
about what linguists do in their everyday jobs,
and I'll give you some examples of that,
and then later on, I'll talk to you about what sensorimotor neuroscientists do,
and I'll give you a very simple example of that as well,
and you'll be involved with a bit of participation in each case.
So stay ready.
Hope you can understand.
Let me start with language.
So, the thing which linguists focus on when they're thinking about language
is the fact that language is infinite.
It's an infinite system.
Almost every sentence that you ever hear,
whether it's in Greek or in English,
you're hearing it for the first time.
For instance, these sentences that I'm saying now,
you've never heard them before - I've actually never said them before;
it comes out slightly different every time, right?
It's the same when you read a newspaper.
You're reading sentences that you have never ever seen before,
and yet you can understand them.
And you can produce sentences that you've never ever said before,
very easily.
This is something we do very easily, and linguists are fascinated by that,
and they want to know how it happens.
And clearly,
it's not the words that you are encountering for the first time.
The words in the sentences, all these words that I'm saying here,
I learnt them when I was a child,
and you learnt them when you were in English class in school, I expect.
It's the way that the words are put together,
and that's the novel thing.
And that's, well, called syntax.
It's a Greek word, right?
You guys invented it.
So what I'll be telling you about is syntax,
and this is a rather complicated, technical topic,
and I want to introduce it in a way which is nice and concrete and simple.
And so the metaphor that I'm going to use
is one which I hope that you will understand.
It's a Lego block.
So words are what we put together into sentences,
and so you can think of sentences as being built up of things.
When you create a sentence
like the sentences I'm producing at the moment,
I'm building a sentence, brick by brick, out of something.
So the question is what.
And when you listen to my sentences,
you're taking my sentences and breaking them apart
in the same way as you might decompose a piece of Lego.
So the interesting thing about Lego, I hope you can appreciate,
is that out of a single block, I can build all sorts of different shapes, right?
So here I am building a tower.
I broke it.
Now I'm building something else; I don't know what this is.
I think it actually looks like half a Space Invader or something.
And here's another one.
I want you to tell me what this is.
We're in Athens, right?
This is my tribute to Athens, in Lego, right?
(Laughter)
In fact, when I was doing my presentation earlier,
someone pointed out that these blocks here would fall down,
so it's a good thing I didn't build the Parthenon.
(Laughter)
I hope you understand the point that I'm making.
With a single building block of Lego,
it's like an atom - another great concept -
you can build all sorts of different things
by putting them together in different ways.
And language is a little bit like that.
And what I want to do is to give you an example -
first of all in Greek -
of what a sentence might look like
if you're thinking about it in terms of Lego, okay?
So one way you can think about a sentence
is as a list of words, a sequence of words - something like that.
But in fact, that's not the way linguists think about it at all.
For a linguist, a sentence is a structure that you can plug words in to.
And I want to give you an example of what that might look like in Lego.
So here's a wee sentence.
Now, I'm going to do this in Greek, actually, so bear with me.
I hope you understand my accent, okay?
So what I'm going to do is to plug a few words into this sentence.
Otan
tha -
okay? -
pao
kira -
You know what's coming.
(Laughter) (Applause)
For the benefit of those who are not Greek speakers,
this is a nursery rhyme or at least a children's song -
Otan tha pao kira mou sto pazari.
Yeah. That's right.
I feel like I'm in church if you say it with me; that's good.
(Laughter)
This means when I go to the market,
my darling or my lady or something like that.
(Laughter)
Okay.
Can you complete it for me? Tha sou agoraso ena ...
(Audience) Kokoraki.
Very good. Very good. Okay.
Let's put it up in Lego.
So, tha sou agoraso ena kokoraki.
You plugged it in for me, okay?
You knew what you could plug into that position.
And the interesting thing about this song -
I should translate:
When I go to the market, my darling, I will buy you a kokoraki,
which is a rooster or some sort of cockerel or something like that.
Oh, in fact, before we carry on:
to kokoraki
(Audience) Ki ki ri ki ki.
Very good. Very good. Okay.
The cockerel goes ki ki ri ki ki.
Yeah, right. Yeah. Not in English, it doesn't.
(Laughter) (Applause)
No, no, no. Not in French.
(Applause)
You'd think that the EC might have standardized these animal noises by now,
but apparently not.
It should fall underneath the agricultural policy somewhere,
but apparently not.
Anyway, so my point is that if you think about a sentence
as a structure that you can plug words into,
then this kokoraki song is a really good example.
You can plug the word kokoraki in there,
but you can also unplug it and plug in other words.
In the second verse, we have skilaki, which goes bow, bow.
I think. Is that right? I'm not sure.
So you can plug that one in instead,
and you can plug many words in there.
I think I spelt this one wrong, I'm sorry.
But gourounaki, gourounaki you can plug in there instead.
And of course,
it's not just in that position there that you can plug in any word.
Any of these words,
you can unplug the Lego block and plug in another word.
You can do it yourselves, right?
Let's do one more, just to practice.
So, we'll unplug agoraso,
so instead of buying the kokoraki or whatever it is,
you could do something else with the kokoraki,
like you could, I don't know, kiss it or chase it or slap it or something.
(Laughter)
Let's stick with a -
let's not get our imaginations running away with us -
but we'll stick with a buying a poulaki or whatever it is.
Okay.
So, having introduced that, I have to say I'm being too simplistic
by thinking of a sentence just as a flat piece of Lego
that you can plug words in at any position.
It's more complicated than that.
And just to demonstrate,
if you take some other word,
some arbitrary word for that thing and try and plug it in,
it doesn't go, it doesn't fit.
And so it's too simplistic to think of a sentence as just a flat structure.
And now I want to give you just a tiny insight
into the way that linguists think about sentences,
so you have to pay attention to this.
This is an insight which was originated by a man called Noam Chomsky,
who you've probably heard of,
whether in the field of politics or the field of linguistics.
He's wonderful, had many, many insights, but a very interesting one,
which has permeated the hall of linguistics,
is that there's a single building block for the syntactic structure of sentences.
This is how linguistics think about it, but not how I want to
because it's complicated and mathematical and formal.
Let's just think about it as a special piece of Lego.
So if you imagine building a sentence,
you have lots and lots and lots of these structures here,
and you can plug together in different ways
to make different sentences.
So I'll give you an example from a very simple sentence.
So, I'll first create the structure of the sentence
the way that Chomsky and linguists think about it.
So we take a few of these and plug them together.
This is the sentence:
A man grabbed a chair.
This is an action we'll do later on
because we've all got chairs in front of us,
and so we can do this action quite easily.
If you're a Chomskyan linguist,
you think there are two positions in the sentence
where the word "man" appears,
where the subject, or the agent, of the sentence appears,
and there's two positions
where the object, or the patient, of the sentence appears -
the thing that gets grabbed.
And then there's actually lots of different places
where the action appears, the verb appears.
And actually,
Chomsky thinks that this structure underlies all sentences,
whether they're English or Greek or Swahili or Japanese.
His suggestion is that the only thing that changes -
basically, babies know this structure already when they are born,
if you're a Chomskyan,
and all they have to learn when they're growing up
is which of these words you should pronounce
in your particular language.
And so in English, for instance,
you pronounce the top man and then grabs down here in chair,
and you get the man grabs the chair.
But in other languages, like in Greek, it's often this way - I believe -
grabs the man a chair.
It's like this in Māori as well,
the language of the native people in New Zealand, where I'm from.
That's all I'm going to say about language now.
Now, I actually want you to try grabbing a chair, okay?
You've all got a chair in front of you unless you're in the front row,
in which case , I don't know - grab your neighbor's or something.
It's almost the simplest action you can imagine.
Just reach forward and grab the chair.
Just do it naturally, completely naturally as if you -
don't reach the person in front, just the chair, okay?
(Laughter)
What's the very first thing that you did?
It turns out there are building blocks, even in this very simple action
there are building blocks that construct this action.
Think about it.
What is the first thing that happened when you grabbed out for that chair?
It's nothing to do with movement,
nothing to do with movement.
It's actually a decision to act;
you first of all have to decide to act
because you could be doing other things.
You could have a memory, you could be planning something
or all sorts of things.
You could watch someone else do something - that's very different.
But you said, "No, I'm going to act."
And when you decide to act, you attend to yourself;
you know you're going to be the agent of the forthcoming action,
and so you attend to yourself.
What's the next thing that you think happens?
After you've decided to act, what comes next?
Do you think you move your arm next?
Do it. Do it. Do it.
Do it. What comes next?
The next thing you do is you look at the chair.
Do it again. Do it again.
True, right?
You look at the thing you're reaching for;
you need to know what shape it is and where it is,
and so you look at it.
What happens next?
Then you start to reach for it.
So you first decide to act, then you look at it,
then you reach for it.
Are we done? No.
It turns out that while you are reaching for the object,
you attend to yourself again.
Think about it - when you move, you're aware of your body moving,
and you're aware of your own personal self in a different way than you first were.
Now you think about yourself
as a pattern of movement, as an articulated entity.
And finally, when you reach the object that you're grabbing for,
when you touch the chair,
that's another sensation again
because now you're aware of the chair again, you're feeling the chair.
To start with, you just saw it, but now you're feeling it.
Let me just step through this in slightly more detail.
I'll summarize it for you.
Let's say we're a man grabbing the chair, okay?
We'll put a woman in the chair to make it more interesting.
So the first thing that he does is decide to act,
and then he attends to the chair,
hopefully - there we are - he attends to the chair,
and he gets a representation of the chair,
and then he starts to move.
So my animation skills are not up too much.
There's someone talking from Pixar tomorrow;
he might not be very impressed.
(Laughter)
Anyway, while he's moving, he's re-attending to himself,
he's thinking of himself as a pattern of movement.
And finally, when he gets to the end of the action,
he re-attends to the chair.
So if you think about this like neuroscientists think about it,
as building blocks of actions and movements,
it turns out that there is a building block behind this
which is repeated several times.
There's a sensory operation that takes place in an initial context,
and you get a piece of feedback,
and that leads to a new context.
So if you're thinking in scientific terms
the way that neuroscientists think about this action,
they think about it like this.
You're in some initial context; you decide to act;
you get a representation of yourself,
and then that gets you into a new context.
And in that new context,
you attend to the chair and get a representation of the chair,
and then you get into another context where you can do an action on the chair.
You decide to do a grasp action;
you re-attend to yourself while you're grasping,
and finally, you re-attend to the chair when you reach and touch the chair, okay?
That is what the neuroscientists sees
when they look at the reach-to-grasp action.
But now what I want you to do is to compare that picture,
built up from basic building blocks,
with the picture that the linguist sees of the sentence "the man grabs a [chair]."
Now, I hope you can see that there is an isomorphism between these two,
and this is what I think
may be able to build a bridge between these two areas.
What the neuroscientist sees as the sensory representation of a man,
here and here,
is what the linguist sees as the word "man."
And what the neuroscientist sees as the sensory representation of the chair
is what the linguist sees as the word "chair."
So maybe what's happening is that when we say a sentence,
what we're doing is internally simulating, or rehearsing,
the actual process of experiencing a man grabbing a chair,
and that's why the sentence means what it does.
And if that's true, then we're suddenly in a position
where neuroscientists and linguists are actually talking about the same thing
and may be able to start talking to each other.
Thank you.
(Applause)