Monday, May 15, 2017
Cognition is PURELY human and NATURAL
Europe and the World is waking up to the
crucial question of the origin of language: without a clear and scientific
answer to this question there will be no Artificial Intelligence device able to
speak like us.
We have to understand the phylogenic
origin of language, how emerging Homo Sapiens some 250,000 years ago or more,
on the basis of what he inherited from previous Hominins from which he was
descending invented and developed articulated language around three successive phylogenic
articulations that no one before him had mastered. Neanderthals and Denisovans
had maybe or even probably been able to use the first articulation but all the
rest in their communication was tonal and body language, including of course
intonation.
In the same way we have to understand
how our own children learn from the communicational situation in which they are
plunged from even before birth how to capture the syntax of this
communicational situation and invest it into the three articulations they learn
mimetically.
The most important element in this
perspective is the cognitive dimension of such a linguistic approach, and I
insist it has to be seen as linguistic and not anthropological, archaeological
or even socio-psychological. We will be able to produce a real translating
machine when that machine is able to learn human languages the way humans
invented them and the way humans learn them and develop them. Any big data
approach, à la Google, will only be good enough for stereotyped languages (Language
for Special Purposes) that does not vary from one person to another. But any
creative use of language will evade such machines.
They are actually pathetic when they try
to translate Shakespeare’s sonnets.
To advance in this direction we have to
be cognitive and to stick to linguistics, cognitive linguistics actually, and
the best one in that line, the most developed one in this perspective is Gustave
Guillaume’s psychomechanics provided we learn – learn again: there is no
scientific progress without some simple and basic learning – how to step up to
our time, integrate the enormous progress of archaeology, anthropology and
socio-psychology, if not socio-psychiatry. The worst fate for any scientific
theory is to stop evolving and absorbing and digesting new data from its very
field and from all surrounding fields.
I personally regret This psychomechanics
has not had the power to become a movement, a real inspirational force and it
remained locked up in a few university departments in even fewer countries. I
guess we are still looking for our Emperor Constantine and his founding
council. The danger then will be to elect a Pope.
Jacques Coulardeau, Gustave Guillaume & Jacques Teyssier at
Academia.edu (63)
Jacques COULARDEAU
Jacques Teyssier
Cours de maîtrise de linguistique germanique
1972-1973
Université de Bordeaux
III Michel de Montaigne
Dr Jacques Coulardeau,
ed., 1992-1996
Rule
Syntactica, Issues 1-11
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:14 PM 
