Science of language
in the language of science
Linguistics in the paradigm of empirical sciences
Dorota Zielińska
Kraków, Poland
DorotaZielinska@yahoo.co.uk
Plan
Part One:
Methodology: 3-stages;

Part Two:
Major descriptive frameworks

Part Three:
An application

Part One
The three stages of scientific research

1.1 Description (depends on the purpose)

1.2 Search for patterns
(phenomenological laws)
1.3 Search for explanatory laws
(principles) implying the patterns
observed
Models and theories
 According to Bunge (1972), theories describe
general assumptions concerning a certain type
of behaviour. They are not testable per se.

Theories are tested indirectly by applying them
to models, which are testable. Models, however,
include approximating conditions and may also
depend on additional laws.
Part Two: Basic descriptive
frameworks
2.1
2.2
2.3
Rductionism (ontological and epistemic)
(Holism)
Relationalism
2.4
Systemism cum Emergentism
(ontological, but not epistemic reductionism)
Bunge, (2003)
Relational description
“All that we can know in nature are relations
and in the final analysis any kind of
knowledge is just the knowledge of
relations.” I.Z. Tsekhmistro
”Thus, for instance, when investigating the characteristics
of elementary particles, all we can really establish is how
they interact with the surroundings – the measuring
device. In other words, we may know their states only in
relation to the measuring device and with the precision
limited by possible experimental set-ups.”
Relational methodology in
linguistics
“We know the word by the company it
keeps”. Firth (1934)
Wittgenstein, in turn, brought to our attention the
relational character of meaning contained, e.g.,
in kin terms, and in the names of chess pieces
(not to mention pronouns). Still in a precomputational era, Harris (1988) proposed to
define the meaning of a lexeme by syntagmatic
relations it enters.
RM in Quantitative corpus
linguistics
Corpus linguists study wide ranging collocations,
contextual properties of thematically organized
items, correlations between specific linguistic
items and their position in texts, properties of
linguistic items acquired in social contexts.
As recent studies on priming in corpus linguistics
indicate, virtually all items have specific
environments, which they favour. Reversely,
these environments identify the meanings of the
respective items. This fact has already been
exploited, for instance, in spell checker software.
Systemism cum emergentism
System: components combine and interact as a
whole with a new environment, fulfilling a new
function (an interaction not active for the
components). This new interaction influences
the components.
Atoms in water/ ice
a bird in a tree, could you open the window?
Material system description
Bunge (2003): First, defining the mechanism which
has created and which supports the observed
behaviour of the given material system or the
process in a given environment - its structure
and components. Second, defining the relevant
environment, which will restrict possible
behaviour of the system considered.
Bunge (2003: 20) defines a mechanism as “a set of
processes in a system, such that they bring
about or prevent some change – either the
emergence of a property or another process – in
the system as a whole.”
Part Three: an application
3.1 Search for patterns:
The ordering of adjectives in English AAN
noun phrases (adjective adjective noun)
opinion, size, shape, age, colour, nationality, material
a pretty rectangular table, a comfortable wooden bed
Gradable (descriptive) categorizing
English, Polish, Hungarian, Chinese, German, Italian (in a reversed order)
Experimental results Wulf (2003)
The independence from comparison index (IndComp)
- the ratio of the number of occurrences of a given
adjective in non-comparative degree to the number
of all occurrences of the given adjective in a given
corpus.
The mean IndComp values for adjective1 and
adjective2 in her study differ highly significantly (p
< .001).
Wulf’s Semantic closeness of an adjective. Zipf’s
privilege of occurrence, Behaghel’s Law .
3.2 Search for principles:
Linguistics as an empirical science
”Languages do not develop or evolve by themselves
and there are no mechanisms of linguistic changes, in
particular evolutionary forces. Only concrete things,
such as people can develop and evolve. And, of
course, as they develop or evolve, they modify,
introduce, jettison linguistic expressions. The history
of mathematics is parallel: mathematicians do come
up with new mathematical ideas, which are adopted
or rejected by the mathematical community, but
mathematics does not evolve by itself.”
Bunge (2003: 62)
Language is a bio-psycho-social phenomenon
which can be presented within a systemism
cum emergentism framework
Language depends on the history of the
contingencies of its creation. Only statistical
relations can be postulated. Analogy: defining
the relationship between the height of a child
and that of his/her parents.
Besides, we have access only to a sample of
„language”.
 Statistical character of linguistic principles
Objectivity of measurement
Degree of being gradable (evaluating) = the
number of tokens in comparative and
superlative forms/the number of all tokens
Degree of being categorizing in Polish = the
number of post modifying uses of adjectives /
the number of both postmodifying and
premodifying uses
gradable adj. + descriptive adj.
+ categorizing adj. + noun
The basic mechanisms (theory)
of language use and formation


Mechanisms forming form-reference correlations in
the brain have been selected for by evolution. They
lead to automatic local optimisation (regularization)
of the semiotic system. They are approximately
reductionist and bio-cognitive in nature.
Non-reductionist (systemic) bio-psycho-social
mechanisms driven by the natural selection like
processes (depending on the function of language)
(Altmann 1978) lead to global optimisation of the
semiotic system (reflected, e.g., by implicational
universals). These changes have been selected for
because they allowed a given community to
dominate due to communicating more effectively.
A Model of AAN ordering
Principle: The ordering observed makes language more efficient
Processing categorizing adjectives first, and gradable ones second
increases the precision of the information conveyed.
długi drewniany most (a long wooden bridge) vs. długi
kamienny most (a long steel bridge)
When categorizing adjectives are used first in A2A1N phrases,
the resultant encoded content of categorizing adjectives is
more precise, while the encoded content of evaluating
adjectives is not affected.
a big red bird, a red big bird*
With such an ordering, processing effort is also decreased
Experimental results: Zielinska(2007)


The division of the colour category into a category of
intuitively highly relative colour terms, such as light,
pale, vivid, dark and intuitively less relative ones such
as red, blue, yellow, results in the category ‘relative
colour’ being statistically more likely to precede other
semantic categories than the category ‘non-relative
colour’.
Similarly, the subdivision of a given category of
adjectives containing the information about age into a
subcategory of the adjectives more and less
categorizing, respectively, e.g. into {pre-war,
renaissance, baroque, etc.} and such ones as {20year old, centenial, etc.}, results in more categorizing
subcategory following other selected categories
statistically more frequently than the other subset of
the category ‘Age’ does.
Future research on the order of
adjectives


Checking the order „Opinion_size ///
Shape_Age_Colour/// Origin_Material in several
languages
Operationalizing categoriability and gradability
In Polish:
Categoriability = the number of Postpositional vs.
prepositional uses
= the number of separated postpositional usage to all
uses (separated and not)
Ciepły barszcz czerwony, czerwony barszcz ciepły
Marta ma: długie, ciemne włosy: włosy długie,
ciemne,ciemne włosy długie, długie włosy ciemne.
Bibliography



Gabriel Altmann 1978 in: Glottometrics
Mario Bunge 1973 Matter, Model, Methodology
2003, Emergence and convergence
Stephane Wulf. 2003. Multifactorial Analysis of
the order of adjectives (Tom Grice)
Thank you
Relational approach in physics

Such reconstruction led to the development of
quantum mechanics, and a similar reasoning
underlies also the philosophy of Einstein’s
general and particular theories of relativity. It
does not follow however, that quantum world
does not exist independently of the
measurements as was assumed by Copenhagen
interpretation of quantum mechanics, but
merely that our knowledge of it depends on the
ways we can interact with it.