Purpose: Appreciating the relationship between Sylvio Ceccato and Ernst von Glasersfeld, both as people and in their work. Approach: historical and personal accounts, archeological approach to written evidence. Findings: Ceccato’s work is introduced to an English speaking audience, and the roots of Glasersfeld’s work in Ceccato’s is explored. Flaws in Ceccato’s approach are indicated, together with how Glasersfeld’s work overcomes these, specially in language and automatic translation, and what became Radical Constructivism. Conclusion: Glasersfeld willingly acknowledges Ceccato, who he still refers to as the Master. But Ceccato’s work is little known, specially in the English speaking world. The introduction, critique and delineation of extension and resolution of Ceccato’s ideas in Glasersfeld’s work is the intended value of the paper.
Bettoni M. C. (2007) The Yerkish Language: From Operational Methodology to Chimpanzee Communication. Constructivist Foundations 2(2-3): 32–38. https://cepa.info/26
Purpose: Yerkish is an artificial language created in 1971 for the specific purpose of exploring the linguistic potential of nonhuman primates. The aim of this paper is to remind the research community of some important issues and concepts related to Yerkish that seem to have been forgotten or appear to be distorted. These are, particularly, its success, its promising aspects for future research and last but not least that it was Ernst von Glasersfeld who invented Yerkish: he coined the term “lexigrams,” created the first 120 of them and designed the grammar that regulated their combination. Design: The first part of this paper begins with a short outline of the context in which the Yerkish language originated: the original LANA project. It continues by presenting the language itself in more detail: first, its design, focusing on its “lexigrams” and its “correlational” grammar (the connective functions or “correlators” and the combinations of lexigrams, or “correlations”), and then its use by the chimpanzee Lana in formulating sentences. The second part gives a brief introduction to the foundation of Yerkish in Silvio Ceccato’s Operational Methodology, particularly his idea of the correlational structure of thought and concludes with the main insights that can be derived from the Yerkish experiment seen in the light of Operational Methodology. Findings: Lana’s success in language learning and the success of Yerkish during the past decades are probably due to the characteristics of Yerkish, particularly its foundation in operational methodology. The operation of correlation could be what constitutes thinking in a chimpanzee and an attentional system could be what delivers the mental content that correlation assembles into triads and networks. Research implications: Since no other assessment or explanation of Lana’s performances has considered these foundational issues (findings), a new research project or program should validate the above-mentioned hypotheses, particularly the correlational structure of chimpanzee thinking.
Functional and pragmatic approaches to grammar, and to language more broadly, are well known. All of these approaches, however, accept a core aspect of sentences, or utterances, as consisting of encodings of propositions. They proceed on their functional and pragmatic explorations with this much, at least, taken for granted. I wish to argue, to the contrary, that the functional characteristics of utterances penetrate even to the level of the structure – the grammar – of supposed propositional encodings. More specifically, I argue that the structure that is taken as a structure of propositional encodings is not that at all, but is instead a structure of functionally organized action. Constraints on such structures, in turn – constraints on grammars – emerge as intrinsic constraints on that functional organization. My point will of necessity be made programmatically, since to fill it out completely would be to complete a functional version of universal grammar. The mere logical possibility of intrinsic constraints on the grammatical possibilities of language refutes attempts to construe grammatical constraints as logically arbitrary. Typically, because grammatical constraints are construed as being (logically) arbitrary, some additional explanation of the constraints is required should those constraints be shown or argued to be universal. That additional explanation is usually some equally logically arbitrary innateness postulate. I will show that the possibility of intrinsic grammatical constraints invalidates standard arguments for such innateness – specifically, that such a possibility invalidates the poverty of the stimulus argument. Grammatical constraints are not the only characteristics of language that are intrinsic to its nature. I also show how phenomena of implicature, the hermeneutic circle, and forms of creative language can be understood as being naturally emergent in the functional nature of language. Most broadly, then, intrinsic constraints constitute a rich realm for exploration in attempting to understand language.
Druzhinin A. S. (2016) Towards a biocognitive understanding of grammar. Филологические науки: Вопросы теории и практики 8: 110–112. https://cepa.info/6855
The article is concerned with the bio-cognitive approach to the notion of language grammar, its acquisition and the phenomena of grammaticality, grammar forms and constructions. In setting out the basic principles of the traditional conception of grammar from a diachronic perspective, the author reveals its drawbacks and proceeds to describe the alternative vision of grammar within the scope of bio-cognitive and semiotics-related researches into the nature of language.
Druzhinin A. S. (2020) Construction of Irreality: An Enactive-Constructivist Stance on Counterfactuals. Constructivist Foundations 16(1): 069–080. https://cepa.info/6818
Context: Linguists and philosophers, as well as psychologists, have not yet offered a coherent explanation of the logic behind the intricate grammar of counterfactuals, the meaning of irreality and the role of this concept in human life. Problem: I investigate the role and mechanisms of irreality as a special form of experience. Method: Based upon the results of the philosophical analysis, I introduce the principles of experiential methodology grounded on the open-ended reflective approach to human experience proposed by Varela, Thompson and Rosch. Results: I show that counterfactuals are the experiencer’s non-linear counterbalancing of the intentional and attentional directions of her perceptual activity. Counterfactuals occur in and through the reflected abstractions from the bodily movement in which one attentional object follows another. Reflecting upon the sequence of attentional objects, the experiencer reorganizes the sequence and experiences the difference as a relational change. As a result, new experience is constructed out of the changed value of the lived past. Implications: The epistemological insight into counterfactual ways of acting helps reconsider many semantic, particularly grammatical, problems of counterfactuals in terms of the subjunctive and the so-called “irrealis.” Besides, the findings of the research have implications for psychological studies of communicative behavior. Constructivist content: To explore the problem of irreality, I offer a detailed philosophical analysis of key constructivist and enactive concepts such as reality, experience, languaging, scientific method and others.
Gardt A. (2021) There Are More Euphemisms and Dysphemisms in Heaven and Earth Than One Might Think. Constructivist Foundations 17(1): 015–017. https://cepa.info/7394
Open peer commentary on the article “Euphemisms vs. Dysphemisms, or How we Construct Good and Bad Language” by Andrey S. Druzhinin. Abstract: Druzhinin claims euphemisms and dysphemisms do not exist because it is only the specific communicative situation that determines meaning. Moreover, the author claims that language is not “some material existing somewhere,” ready to be used by the speakers. I question these views by pointing out that euphemisms and dysphemisms may well be listed in dictionaries on the basis of their standard use/meaning. As regards the use of language, if there were no pre-existing grammar and vocabulary that we all share, we could not communicate at all. To say that we use language is quite compatible with stating that it influences our thinking and being to a high degree.
Glasersfeld E. von (1969) Semantics and the syntactic classification of words. In: Proceedings of the third international conference on computational linguistics. ICCL, Sanga S’by. https://cepa.info/1308
Traditional grammars classify words according to generic syntactic functions or morphological characteristics. For teaching humans and for descriptive linguistics this seemed sufficient. The advent of computers has changed the situation. Since machines are devoid of experiential knowledge, they need a more explicit grammar to handle natural language. Correlational Grammar is an attempt in that direction. The paper describes parts of correlational syntax and shows how a highly differentiated syntax can be used to establish word classes for which an intensional semantic definition can then be found. It exemplifies this approach in two areas of grammar: predicative adjectives and transitive verbs. The classification serves to eliminate ambiguity and spurious computer interpretations of natural language sentences.
Glasersfeld E. von (1970) The problem of syntactic complexity in reading and readability. Journal of Reading Behavior 3(2): 1–14. https://cepa.info/1311
The paper examines the concept of syntactic complexity from the point of view of readability and shows that the factors that make for reading difficulty are several and that some of them remain inaccessible to studies that are based on traditional or generative grammars. The measurement of “Syntactic Depth” is adapted to the interpretive processing direction of the reader and the relevance of relational semantics as well as of the “prospective” ambiguity of phrase structures is demonstrated. Some of the features of an interpretive grammar deemed to be useful in readability studies are illustrated by reference to the correlational grammar developed for the automatic interpretation of English sentences by computer.
Glasersfeld E. von (1977) The Yerkish language and its automatic parser. In: Rumbaugh D. M. (ed.) Language learning by a chimpanzee. Academic Press, New York: 91–130. https://cepa.info/1336
Excerpt: Yerkish is an artificial language that was designed for the specific purpose of exploring the linguistic potential of nonhuman primates. It was designed under a number of constraints, both theoretical and practical. In what follows I shall try to show which aspects of the language were determined by these initial practical constraints and which by the theory underlying its design. Since the language was created at the same time as the computer system that monitors all the communication events for which it is used, there will inevitably be some overlap in the description of the language and that of the automatic sentence analyzer, or parser. Also, since the grammar we are using is a correlational grammar, i.e., one that takes into account the semantic aspects of combinatorial patterns (unlike traditional systems of grammar, which tend to consider syntactic structures quite apart from semantics), the description of the lexicon and that of the grammar will have to merge at several points. Nevertheless, this chapter will be articulated into relatively independent sections dealing with the word signs (lexigrams), the meaning and grammatical classification of word signs, combinatorial patterns, the parsing system, and, finally, a brief application of the concept of grammatical ity to a sample of Lana’s output.
Glasersfeld E. von & Notarmarco B. (1968) Some adjective classes derived from correlational grammar. The Georgia Institute for Research, Athens GA. https://cepa.info/1307
The paper demonstrates the possibility of deriving, from the Correlational Grammar developed solely for the purpose of automatic sentence analysis, a classification of words that could be useful in language analysis and language teaching. A group of some 90 frequent English adjectives serves as example; they are sorted into ten classes according to their behavior in strings of the type “John is easy to please,"“John is eager to please,"“John is likely to please,” etc. It is suggested that the members of a least some of these classes show common semantic features that could be used to obtain intensional definitions which would theoretically confirm the empirically derived extensional definitions supplied by correlational grammar.