Chapter 4 - The Natural And The Artificial In Language And Technology1

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POINT OF DEPARTURE

This paper takes its point of departure the question “what is natural about so-called natural languages?” Probal Dasgupta is to be credited for pointing out that many linguists fall victim to the “naturalness fallacy”, as I elsewhere have argued for sociolinguistics (Haberland, in press). In discussing the relationship between Cognitive Technology and Pragmatics, and thus between systems and language users, one might be tempted to refer to the “naturalness” of language as opposed to the

‘NATURAL’ HUMANS, ‘ARTIFICIAL’ MACHINES

As David Good has pointed out, conversation or face-to-face interaction is the “basic model from which all other forms of human communication ultimately derive” (1996: 80). Even when dealing with computers, and trying to understand how it is possible for humans to engage in something that at least resembles communication with these heaps of wired metal, we always go back to what we know existed before we invented computers: good old plain communication between people. We apply a basic

‘ARTIFICIAL’ AND ‘NATURAL’ IN SEMIOTICS AND LINGUISTICS

The term ‘natural language’ has its tradition in semiotics and modem linguistics. But the discussion about what is ‘natural’ in language goes even further back in history. The Sophists of Greek antiquity were the first in Europe to ask questions about what was given by nature and what was merely conventional, that is given by agreement. Their overall concern was probably in showing that societal institutions were human-made, hence not ‘natural’, but in applying their investigations to language,

CHALLENGING THE TRADITIONAL VIEW

The traditional view gives languages as natural phenomena a privileged status vis-à-vis their artificial extensions. Maybe not even this is historically correct: it has been suggested that ‘artificial’ writing could be at least as old as ‘natural’ speaking, since we cannot know if the earliest hominids used their vocal organs for symbolic expression prior to their producing visible marks on stone and the like. This is, of course, speculative; but it is easier to argue why the traditional view

THE PERVASIVE NATURE OF CONSTRAINTS ON INTERACTION

One could not even say that the difference between Human–Human interaction and Human–Machine–Interaction lies in the fact that Human–Human–Interaction can be analytically conceived of as symmetrical and Human–Machine–Interaction cannot. The true difference is that the constraints that work on the two kinds of communication are of different types. Constraints that define the degrees of freedom allowed for human interlocutors with humans are usually given by societal conditions at large, by ‘the

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This paper is a revised version of Haberland (1998).

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