Review of Rolf Kreyer, The Nature of Rules, Regularities and Units in Language. A
network model of the language system and of language use. (Mouton De Gruyter,
2014). Reviewed by Richard Hudson
This book is about network linguistics, based on the idea that language is a network1.
In a sense, this is an old idea, going back at least to the early structuralist dictum that a
language is a system where everything holds together ('La langue est un système où
tout se tient', attributed to Meillet - Peeters 1990). But the search for structure
rapidly turned into a search for compartments and modules, resulting paradoxically in
the very opposite of what Meillet seemed to have in mind - an analysis focusing on
boundaries rather than on interconnections. For most modern linguists, the idea that
language is a network seems like a denial of structure. After all, an attractive
metaphor for networks is a plate of spaghetti, and who wants to think that language is
like that? In contrast, modern theories offer information packaged neatly into units
called constructions, phrases or lexical items, which in turn are stacked up neatly in
compartments such as morphology, syntax and the lexicon.
Rolf Kreyer has written a worthwhile contribution to the growing literature on
network linguistics, which in modern anglophone linguistics started with
Stratificational Grammar, later named 'Neurocognitive Linguistics' (Lamb 1966,
Lamb 1998), and includes my own Word Grammar. So in this review I have to
declare a strong interest: I'm a believer. I believe that language is, indeed, a network,
and that this network is, indeed, a structure. Many other readers may protest that they
too see language as a network; after all, cognitive linguists envisage 'an elaborate
network comprising any number of conventional units linked by categorizing
relationships' (Langacker 2000:12) or a 'network of constructions [which] captures
our grammatical knowledge of language in toto, i.e. it's constructions all the way
down' (Goldberg 2006:18). But notice that in these cases the complex units which the
network connects have their own internal stucture which is not part of the network.
Similarly, there are network-based theories of individual areas, such as Network
Morphology (Brown and others 1996, Corbett and Fraser 1993, Fraser and Corbett
1996), and there are network-based theories of how usage affects storage (Bybee and
Beckner 2010). But network theory goes further by claiming that 'it's networks all the
way down'.
As Kreyer explains, one of the attractions of network linguistics is its orientation
towards neurophysiology, where everyone agrees that the neurons in our brains form
a network. This leads Kreyer to his 'neurophysiological challenge' (p.2):
Language is nothing but a network. This network mirrors the neurophysiology
of the brain in the nodes and the connections are closely modelled on what we
know from nerve cells and their connections.
Sooner or later, linguistics must meet up with its neighbouring disciplines including
neurophysiology, so the more compatible with the neighbours our current models of
language are, the better. Better still, as Kreyer also shows, the network model is just
what we need to accommodate a lot of the facts about language that are becoming
increasingly hard to ignore, and that are hard to reconcile with the more familiar
boundary-based models. For example, a neural network carries activation levels
which help to explain why frequency affects the accessibility and 'entrenchment' of
1
Thanks to the author for helpful comments on an earlier version of this review.
the various bits of language that we know; and on a much shorter time-scale, these
same activation levels explain the priming effects so familiar in cognitive psychology.
Of course it could be objected that linguists can safely leave such things to their
colleagues in psychology and psycholinguistics; but the point is that activation
follows structure, and structure is our province, not theirs. And finally, network
linguistics offers a real chance of showing that language is just like other bits of
cognition, without any of the special apparatus that some linguists like to imagine.
The real challenge, of course, lies in the detail. What is this network like? What kinds
of nodes and links are there, and how do they interact? In addressing these questions,
we are not just passive readers of research by neuroscientists because our research
complements theirs. They can tell us about the physiology of neurons in general
terms, but not about the linguistic detail where we are at our strongest. The goal of
network linguistics, then, is a theory which meshes on one side with the generalities
of neuroscience and on the other with the details of theoretical and descriptive
linguistics. This requires not only good theory, but also some knowledge of
neuroscience and descriptive linguistics, and good modelling skills - a serious
challenge for the 21st century.
How, then, does Kreyer fare in relation to his challenge? Since my Word Grammar
(WG) is one of the theories against which he reacts, this is the standard against which
I will measure his work. Surprisingly, perhaps, Kreyer does not name his theory, so I
shall refer to it simply as the Kreyer theory (KT).
Starting with their similarities, WG and KT both go well beyond linguistic theory as
such, by offering an elementary theory of mental structures which can accommodate
what we know about language, not only in terms of how we store it but also in terms
of how we learn it and how we use it. This being so, both theories have two parts: a
cognitive part, consisting of a general theory of cognition, and a linguistic part where
this theory is applied to the particular case of language.
The cognitive part of KT is presented as a symbolic network, both in the sense that
each node corresponds to ('symbolizes') one concept and also in the sense that each
node in the diagrams is labelled. As in WG (following Lamb), the labels are simply a
presentational convenience; but unlike WG, Kreyer hints that 'some concepts are
represented by a single node ... while others are represented by the co-activation of a
number of nodes' (p. 6). For example, while 'pronoun' is a single category, there is no
category for 'plural demonstrative pronoun' (i.e. for these and those) (p. 114). Instead,
these two words are picked out by the co-activation of 'pronoun' with the features (not
categories) 'plural' and 'demonstrative'. The claim may be right, but the only evidence
for it (p. 115) is that it produces a short hierarchy, with these and those immediately
under 'pronoun' rather than separated by several nodes such as 'plural pronoun' or
'demonstrative pronoun'. There are two arguments for this analysis: that it avoids
difficult choices about the relative ranking of competing contrasts, and that it is more
efficient in terms of access time. The arguments are presented too briefly to evaluate
properly: for instance, it's not clear why 'plural' and 'demonstrative' can't be
categories, or why they can't apply simultaneously to define an intersecting subcategory.
Another major cognitive issue is how activation spreads through the network. The
specific issue raised by KT concerns inhibition: can the activation in one node inhibit
the activation in another? KT recognises inhibitory links as well as excitatory ones,
whereas WG only recognises excitatory links. Maybe KT is right, but again it
deserves more discussion. It's true that inhibition is well documented at the level of
neurons, but the strongest neurocognitive evidence for inhibition seems to lie in
perception rather than in cognition, so we need a great deal more debate before we
assume that inhibition is available in a cognitive network. This matters, because
inhibition plays a major role in KT, and the theory even allows one node to inhibit the
inhibitory link from another; for example, inhibition of inhibition is used to handle
non-default word order (p. 149).
A further point on which KT and WG agree is the importance of activation: linguistic
elements must be able to carry activation. This is obvious in a theory of language use,
but even a model of language structure will eventually have to accommodate the
effects of frequency and recency. But KT demands much more work than this from
activation; for example, the ordering of elements (whether phonemes or words and
phrases) follows activation levels, on the assumption that the most active element is
realised first (p.153). The trouble with this kind of claim is that the model is so
complex that claims are hard to prove without some kind of demonstration machine
such as the computer model that Kreyer himself calls for (p.268). In the present case,
the complicating factor is that activation spreads from all sorts of sources, including
the context, so even if we want element A to precede B, we can't be sure that the
word-order pattern will achieve this by assigning more activity to A because B might
receive even more activity from some other source.
Another point of agreement is the very small vocabulary of elements and relations,
but the vocabulary for KT is even smaller than for WG. In particular, KT does not
recognise the basic relations which are so fundamental to WG: 'isa', 'argument' and
'value'. According to KT, 'all links are of a similar kind' (p.47). One could object that
KT does distinguish excitatory and inhibitory relations (as noted above), but this
would miss the real challenge of the KT claim: since the brain uses only one kind of
associative link, the same must be true of a cognitive model. When applied to
language, the result is an analysis in which the various categories and units are
simply associated with one another; for example, in the sentence John reads books,
the word John is linked to 'Agent', which is linked to 'Subject', then to 'sing.sub' and
'3rd.sub', which are both linked, via the word reads, to 'read' and 'verbsem' (p.151).
More traditional analyses would recognise fundamental differences between argument
roles, syntactic relations, word-classes, meanings, realisations and so on; but KT
claims that these distinctions can be dispensed with. Kreyer doesn't develop this claim
seriously, but the issues are clearly important, and if he is right we need to pay
attention.
The purely linguistic part of KT combines an unusual mixture of approaches,
including Halliday's Scale and Category grammar (p.74), the Quirk/Aarts theory of
gradience (p.99) and Goldberg's Construction Grammar (p. 185). The bits sometimes
conflict - for example, having introduced Halliday's rank scale Kreyer also insists on
the importance of 'rank permeability', where the rank scale is irrelevant (p.194).
Moreover, as was evident in the discussion of John reads books, the actual analyses
offered don't follow any of these theories. Unfortunately, he also ignores the WG
arguments for dependency structure, so the linguistic analyses are generally
conservative, and he faces the usual range of syntactic problems. For example, he
claims that the meaning of a ditransitive construction resides in the entire
construction, not the verb (p. 191), only to admit four pages later that the participant
roles (i.e. the meaning) are provided by the verb (p.195). It is true that verbs such as
BAKE aren't inherently ditransitive but can be used ditransitively (as in He baked her
a cake), but a grammar has to explicitly allow this extension somewhere, so simply
providing a ditransitive construction isn't enough. The extension is an extension of the
verb's valency, so why not invoke a valency change?
In short, although I approve whole-heartedly of Kreyer's enthusiasm for network
linguistics, I'm not yet persuaded that KT offers a better direction than WG for future
research. However, if we see the version of Kreyer's theory described here as 'work in
progress', it is very promising. I have criticised the very limited assumptions about
relation types, but starting from scratch, with the minimum of cognitively plausible
tools, is a good research strategy, provided there is also a testing-strategy for
recognising counter-evidence which requires some kind of enrichment of the
apparatus. If Kreyer can find a convincing testing-strategy, the results will certainly
be interesting.
References
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Timberlake, Alan (1996). Russian noun stress and network morphology.
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Bybee, Joan and Beckner, Clay (2010). Usage-based theory. In Heine, B. & Narrog,
H. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 827-855.
Corbett, Greville and Fraser, Norman (1993). Network morphology: a DATR account
of Russian nominal inflection. Journal of Linguistics 29. 113-142.
Fraser, Norman and Corbett, Greville (1996). Gender assignment in Arapesh: a
Network Morphology analysis. Lingua
Goldberg, Adele (2006). Constructions at work. The nature of generalization in
language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lamb, Sydney (1966). Outline of Stratificational Grammar. Washington, DC:
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Amsterdam: Benjamins.
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Peeters, Bert (1990). Encore une fois 'Ou tout se tient'. Historiographia Linguistica
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