Language and Reality: Selected Writings of Sydney Lamb (Open Linguistics) Review

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Language and Reality: Selected Writings of Sydney Lamb (Open Linguistics) ReviewLanguage and Reality by Sydney Lamb, edited by Jonathan Webster (Open Linguistics: Continuum International Publishing Group) presents selected writings of Sydney Lamb, including five new works and several which have been re-worked for publication here. Professor Lamb's work in linguistics over the past four decades has been concerned with exposing illusions about language and with finding realities, including neurological realities, behind the linguistic abstractions that others have dwelt upon. His name is synonymous with certain landmarks in the development of linguistic theory, including stratificational grammar, relational network theory and more recently, neurocognitive linguistics. Although he is a leading figure in linguistic science, many of the papers included here are far from well-known, some of them having appeared in more obscure venues of publication and for the most part, unavailable to the wider linguistic community.
The book is divided into four parts, the first of which includes papers offering insight into the man behind this pioneering approach to linguistics that might best be summed up as 'linguistics to the beat of a different drummer'. The papers in Part II explore the theoretical origins of Lamb's ideas about language that have often been described as ahead of their time. Part III includes more recent writings outlining work done in neurocognitive linguistics. Studies of the interconnectedness of language with other kinds of human experience and with history are presented in Part IV.
Sydney Lamb is Arnold Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Rice University in Texas. Jonathan Webster is Acting Head of the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the City University of Hong Kong.
From the Editor's Introduction: Professor Sydney Lamb acknowledges he is probably best known for "the collection of ideas connected with the term Stratificational Grammar" (Chapter 2). In fact, his contribution to linguistics as a discipline goes beyond the recognition of strata or layers in human linguistic structure to the realization that the whole of linguistic structure is a network of relationships - a realization with implications for our understanding of "the wider class of phenomena of which `natural spoken language' is just one type" (Chapter 5). The linguistic system, like other cognitive systems, is a composite of thousands of nections ("hundreds of thousands if we include conceptual structure"), which are "interconnected in multiple layers" (Chapter 25).
Lamb began down the path toward this realization over four decades ago. As expressed by the title for Part One, it has been - to borrow a line from Robert Frost - "the road less traveled by." Equally apt is the next line from the same poem: "And that has made all the difference." Lamb's realization that "this puzzling, beautiful and complex human information system" is best described as a network of relationships rather than a system of symbols, rules, and entries, has made him "better equipped to understand what the real world is really like" (Chapter 1). Therein lies the difference between Sydney Lamb and many of his contemporaries. Lamb regards language as a semiotic to be studied for what it reveals about the workings of the mind. Taking Hjemslev's view, language is not an isolated phenomenon, instead it is at the very center of all science. So when, in the first chapter, "On the Aims of Linguistics" (1981), Lamb asks "what linguistics is and where it is going, or where it ought to be going, and what it is good for," it is not surprising that he answers by affirming Linguistics as a discipline "sans frontiers." Not only does he question "if there is any part of social science to which linguistics cannot contribute," but also in terms of the relationship between linguistics and the humanities, he argues that
"boundaries no longer exist to separate linguistics from poetics, rhetoric, and the study of literature in general."
Also in this first part, the auto-biographical "Linguistics to the Beat of a Different Drummer" (1998) and "Mary R. Haas: Lessons in and out of the Classroom" (1998) recall the early influences on Lamb's ideas about language and reality, including most notably Louis Hjemslev's Prolgomena to a Theory of Language, M.A.K. Halliday's network notation, and Mary Haas' course in Phonetics and Phonemics. Chapter Four, "Translation and the Structure of Language" (2001) looks back at his experience in machine translation some four decades before, when he was leading the Berkeley MT Project team's effort to develop a system for translating Russian biochemistry texts into English. Taking the use of pointers in programming to the next level, recognizing that "a system in which all structurally relevant information is interconnected by means of pointers is equivalent to a network," Lamb was closing in on the theoretically significant observation that "if all the information pertaining to a morpheme (likewise any linguistic unit) is accounted for by network connections to all of the components of that information, then the symbol that was being used to represent that morpheme becomes redundant - it can be erased with no loss of information. Where that symbol was, before being erased, there is just one point of the network, connecting to all of that information ... And so the symbol turns out to be superfluous, not part of the structure at all." Lamb had succeeded in demonstrating Hjemslev's point "that a linguistic system is made up purely of relationships and that what seem to be linguistic objects are really nothing but points in a system of relationships."
Part Two, under the heading "The Structure of Language", includes seven papers, the first of which, "Epilegomena to a Theory of Language" (1966), introduces readers to "one of the classics of twentieth-century linguistics," Hjemslev's Prolegomena. Chapter 6, "Lexicology and Semantics" (1969), deals with the lexicological and semantic structure of language, in particular, sememic syntax, sememic components, polysemy, and lexemic components. Chapter 7, "Some Types of Ordering" (1972), argues that rules of the usual kind ("rewrite rules") produce much needless complication that gets in the way of understanding linguistic structure. The next chapter, "Language as a Network of Relationships" (1974), which originally appeared in Herman Parret's Discussing Language, is uniquely presented in Q&A style, with Lamb responding to questions posed by Parret.
A decade separates the next two chapters, "Mutations and Relations" (1975) and "Descriptive Process" (1985). "Mutations and Relations", presented at the First LACUS Forum (1974), argues against the process metaphor in linguistics, not just because it is unrealistic, but, more importantly, because "it has rather extensive unfortunate consequences for the overall view of linguistic structure of those who adhere to it, as well as for their ability to describe and explain the actual, real linguistic processes, particularly processes of speaking and understanding and those of linguistic change." "Descriptive Process" revisits the same topic on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the founding of LACUS at the Eleventh LACUS Forum (1984). Acknowledging what seems to be our natural bent toward the process metaphor, Lamb nevertheless urges linguists to "look beyond the subterfuge" brought about by the very same properties of language that contribute to its flexibility and transparency. Lamb rejects descriptive processes as fictitious, and instead focuses attention on the very real processes of speaking, understanding, and learning.
The final chapter of this part, "Using Language and Knowing How" (1988), is from the second of two formal discussions to take place at The Claremont Graduate School between Sydney Lamb and M.A.K. Halliday - the first discussion having occurred sixteen years earlier. This chapter also follows some twenty years on from when the first chapter in this part, "Epilegomena to a Theory of Language", first appeared. The notion of nection as the basic organizing unit of linguistic structure begins to figure more prominently in Lamb's writing as his theory moves beyond the uniformly layered, neat system of early stratification grammar to the realization of the rich complexity of language as a cognitive system.
Part Three, "Neurocognitive Linguistics", represents some of Lamb's more recent work, and also includes several new works. Lamb's relational network theory is shown to be both linguistically grounded and neurologically plausible. Leading off in Chapter 12, "Language as a Real Biological System", which is comprised of excerpts from a paper previously published under the title "Bidirectional Processing in Language and Related Cognitive Systems" (2000), Lamb makes clear that the notion of relational network was arrived at on the basis of linguistic, not neurological evidence. The chapters in this part describe areas in which Lamb has attempted to apply the ideas of neurocognitive linguistics. These include studies of language development, the interplay between language and thought, discourse interpretation, second language
learning of syntax, and speech perception. Chapter 17, "Questions of Evidence in Neurocognitive Linguistics", presents both linguistic and neurological evidence "for the hypothesis that the neurocognitive basis of a person's linguistic system is a relational network." By providing a plausible neurological basis for his theory, Lamb has accomplished the integration of linguistics with the rest of science.
If "linguistics is what linguists do," then Lamb's studies of "Language in the Real World" - the title of Part Four - have played a defining role in establishing the theoretical foundations for a more realistic linguistics. The...Read more›Language and Reality: Selected Writings of Sydney Lamb (Open Linguistics) Overview

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