Why every utterance you make begins with a leap of faith

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Why every utterance you make begins with a leap of faith

https://psyche.co/ideas/why-every-utterance-you-make-begins-with-a-leap-of-faith

Julie Sedivy is a language scientist and writer. She has taught linguistics and psychology at Brown University in Rhode Island and at the University of Calgary, and is the author of Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self (2021) and, most recently, Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love (2024).

Edited by Matt Huston

언어란 각자가 매일 쓰면서도 그 신비한 특성을 아마도 한 번도 생각하지 못했을 것인데

언어학자의 설명을 읽어보니 당사자의 종교가 무언지는 알 수 없지만

그 복잡하고 난해한 불가시적인 언어체계가

우연히, 점진적으로 인간의 두뇌에 형성되어

단어의 의미며 발음 등을 상황에 맞게 순식간에 우연히 맞는 단어로 짜인 문장을 생각하여

의미와 논리가 통하는 문장을 말로 표현하니

듣는이가 우연히 말해진 한 단어의 의미와 같은 의미를 우연히 찾아 화자의 생각을 전달 받는 다는

실험실에서는 증명할 수 없는 불가시적인 말/단어의 의미특성이 우연-자연 진화적 발상을 무참하게 박살낸다

생각에서 나온 말은 두뇌 속에 시공을 초월하여 존재하는 정신적인 존재이지만

입으로 말하는 현재의 순간에서 과거로 흘러가면서 앞으로 나올 미래의 생각/단어도

현재순간으로 끌어내어 말하는 것이니 과거/현재/미래가 다 포함된 영원성을 보여주는 걸 볼 때

언어는 하나님께서 생기로 불어넣어 주신 초자연적인 것이라는 설명이 초간단하다 보인다

이런 내용을 이전에 생각해 본적도 없었지만 언어학자의 긴 글을 일부 읽고

순간적으로 의미와 논리에 문법에 맞는 말/글로 쓰는 건

영원하신 하나님의 한 영적특성인 불가시적인 음성에 소리를 입혀서

무형의 정신/영적인 존재가 한 순간에 현실로 현상화되는 것이기에

인간의 영적/신적인 특성을 잘 설명하는 것이라 생각되며

시편기자도 언어의 소리없는 소리의 정신적/영적 특성을 잘 설명해 주고 있다

(시 19:2) 날은 날에게 말하고 밤은 밤에게 지식을 전하니 

(시 19:3) 언어도 없고 말씀도 없으며 들리는 소리도 없으나

(시 19:4) 그의  소리가 온 땅에 통하고 그의 말씀이 세상 끝까지 이르도다

혹시 생각은 소리없는 소리로 돈다는 걸 생각해 본적이 있는가?

그 소리없는 영적 소리를 시편기자가 밤하늘의 별들을 보면서 말하고 있는 것인데

이 언어학자 역시도 부지불식 간에 언어의 그런 면을 논하고 있다

과학 실험실에서 증명할 수도 없지만 현실적으로 현상화되는 정신적인 믿음을

진화론자는 어찌 규명할 것인가???

Time pressure and the limitations of memory compel you and your listener to engage in a fascinating linguistic trade-off

It seems obvious that the shape of a bird has everything to do with its struggle against gravity. Its entire physiology bears witness to the triumph of flight despite the tug of Earth’s forces. Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that human language is shaped by an equally powerful force acting upon it: the stricture of time.

People perceive language, like everything else, through a tiny pinhole known as the present. What lies in the future remains out of view, then very briefly passes through that pinhole before it vanishes into the past. The language used in everyday conversations – whether it’s spoken or sign language – is by nature fleeting. The information it contains is different at every slice of time. So, for any of us to use language, we must rely on our memories of a no-longer-existent past and our imagination of a not-yet-existent future. Think of someone who is midway through a sentence: ‘The co-worker who my boss promoted the other day ac— …’ A stream of linguistic elements has been tossed out, and it’s already quickly receding into the past. Meanwhile, the sentence could fork out into any one of a number of different trajectories, and the likelihood of each depends on what has already been uttered.

Our ability to speak and understand each other, then, hinges on the spaciousness of our memory and our accuracy at prediction. The properties of human language are determined largely by the limits of these capacities.

When you are speaking, the dilemma is that your short-term memory isn’t capacious enough to hold the details of a full sentence. Its form would dissipate in your mind in the time between uttering the first syllable and the last. You are, in this sense, working against time when you speak. And so, you begin talking with only a vague sense of how the sentence will unfold, taking a leap of faith that you can work out the details of what comes next by the time the earlier part of the sentence has scrolled into the past.

Within that pinhole of the present, you simultaneously map out the sentence’s structure, rummage for upcoming words in your long-term memory, and draw up a plan for the movements of the lips, tongue and mouth that form the word you’re on the verge of uttering, all while actually speaking. The future comes bearing down mercilessly on the present, and occasionally you find that you are stalled at an uhm, not ready to utter the word that comes next, or that you’ve rushed things and lined up the wrong word or sound. What we call a slip of the tongue is really a slip of the mind under time pressure.

Language exists between the cognitive demands of the disappearing past and the nebulous future

Time also exerts pressure on the receiving end of language. A listener’s memory for the bare form of language, untethered from meaning, is fleeting. (Notice how much harder it is to remember a nonsensical list of syllables than a meaningful phrase of the same length: ‘lep blintasp lorset ap lep howd’, versus ‘the smartest person in the room’.) To avoid the accumulation of free-floating phonetic bits, the listener races to extract meaning from the first sounds that drop from a speaker’s mouth. If you hear ‘the cap—’, you are automatically rifling through your vocabulary to decide whether this snippet of speech refers to a hat or whether it will continue as ‘the captain’, ‘the capital’, or ‘the cappuccino’.

As words unfurl into phrases, you scramble to give them structure, well before you have clear evidence for how they fit together. ‘I told the teacher that the school …’ might continue with ‘… needed better programmes for disabled kids’, or it might take an unexpected syntactic turn, and continue as ‘… had just hired about my child’s disability.’ Sometimes, you’re able to leap into the future and predict the shape of the sentence to come, drawing on your stored memories of how language tends to pattern and your assessment of the current context. But if a sentence is complex – or you’ve predicted wrongly – you risk drowning in the flow of incoming speech as you struggle to recover meaning from the sounds that have vanished into the past.

Language exists in this tenuous space between the cognitive demands of the disappearing past and the nebulous future. These demands become apparent to language scientists when cracks in performance appear – as disfluencies, slips of the tongue, wrinkles in comprehension. Language is a compromise between the limitations of speakers and perceivers who are perpetually under time pressure. It’s an imperfect solution, riddled with ambiguity and indeterminacy of meaning. In fact, given its imprisonment in linear time, language could not exist at all, if not for the fact that we are surprisingly good at coping with linguistic uncertainty.

Some ambiguity is the inevitable result of language being laid out in time. The indeterminacy of the syllable ‘cap—’, or of the structure of a phrase, comes from the fact that we comprehend language from within the pinhole of the present, assigning meaning to what has been uttered even before its full shape is revealed. But ambiguity is endemic to language to a degree that may seem perversely unnecessary. There are times when it seems akin to a choice.

Both speaking and listening are complicated juggling acts but, of the two, speaking seems to be especially prone to logjams or outright collapse under the pressures of time. Hence, the speaker aims to offload as much work as possible on to the hearer, leaning on the latter’s fluency at toggling between memory and prediction, and resolving ambiguities. Hearers are rarely aware that they regularly navigate a minefield of ambiguities, and yet it is everywhere.

We almost always mean somewhat more than what we say, leaving the hearer to infer the full meaning

For instance, languages like to reuse the same sound combinations for multiple meanings. The preval‎ence of these ambiguous words across languages may be the result of speakers exploiting the strengths of hearers as a way to shave off some of the effort of speaking. In a study of English, German and Dutch, researchers found that the words most likely to be ambiguous were short, frequent and contained sound patterns that were common to the language. Notice, for example, how many different concepts can be expressed by the words ‘run’ and ‘see’ (as opposed to ‘quench’ or ‘eczema’). The researchers suggest that speakers are especially likely to repurpose such words because these are among the easiest syllables to produce. The time saved in mentally assembling their sounds can be allotted for some of the other demanding tasks of planning a sentence. But this need for efficiency in speaking leads to greater ambiguity for the hearer.

Another way to save time when speaking is to leave unsaid what the hearer can reasonably reconstruct. We rarely truly mean what we say. We almost always mean somewhat more than what we say, leaving the hearer to infer the full meaning. Our sentences are not so much blueprints for meaning as they are decipherable clues to what we intend to convey.

This opens the door to elegant compression. It allows you to say: ‘The bridge collapsed. The wood was rotten,’ rather than lumbering your way through the more precise statement: ‘The bridge collapsed because the wood out of which it was built was rotten.’ You can be reasonably sure your listener will fill in the blanks, that they won’t entertain the possibility that the bridge was knocked down by a nearby tree whose wood was rotten, or that you happen to be describing two entirely unrelated events.

A subtle compact exists between speaker and hearer: the speaker, eager to avoid the time-consuming steps of planning a complex sentence, can afford to jettison linguistic information that is readily inferred while making the effort to utter that which is not. No one is likely to say: ‘Ben moved the car’ if he did so by carrying it down the block with the help of five of his burly friends. In reporting that someone was stabbed, the speaker might leave the weapon unmentioned if it was a knife, but take pains to mention if it was an icepick.

Every utterance reflects a split-second decision about what to explicitly say and what to leave implicit, a balancing of the time it would take to plan and utter a phrase against the hearer’s ability – or need – to quickly recover its meaning if it were left unspoken. Languages reflect the accumulation of such decisions over historical time, congealed into grammar. The solutions take a variety of forms. In Turkish, any statement must include a tag on the verb to show whether the speaker witnessed the event directly (‘di’) or knows about it secondhand (‘miş’), whereas English offers some clunkier options (‘Apparently, John died’ or ‘I heard that John died’), which may be expressed or omitted as the speaker sees fit. The Turkish solution forces the speaker to encode this information, but then offers quick and easy syllables to minimise the time and effort of uttering it.

All languages must contend with the fact that time presses upon both the speaker and hearer

Similar contrasts abound: English forces speakers to commit to verb forms that express the past, present, or future; in Mandarin, the same form is used for all three and the hearer is left to infer tense through other means; Yagua, a language spoken in the Amazon, requires speakers to choose one of eight tenses, five of which slice the past into fine-grained categories.

The outcomes for different languages likely reflect the specific balance struck between the burden of speaking and the burden of inference. Subtle trade-offs occur within each language as to what is said and what is left unsaid, but all languages must contend with the fact that time presses upon both the speaker and hearer. As a result, there don’t seem to be some grammars that overwhelmingly require information to be explicitly encoded or others that leave airy gaps everywhere for the hearer to fill in.

All languages use the strategy of reducing information where it is easiest to infer – witness the ubiquity of pronouns, which tend to be very short and contain almost no information at all. The linguistic content of the pronoun ‘he’ tells us only that the referent is male. But because the use of this anaemic word is usually clear from the context, its lack of content poses little problem. Pronouns save the speaker from having to utter the person’s entire name repeatedly (‘Bernardo arrived. Bernardo brought a cake …’) Some languages use pronouns with even less content than English – Farsi pronouns, for example, do not commit to gender. And in Spanish, the pronoun can be entirely silent. To convey ‘He died’, one simply says: ‘Murió.’

All of this, of course, means that human language has uncertainty – even fragility – baked into it. Failures of communication can and do occur. Perhaps this is why, when much is at stake, people still seek out face-to-face dialogue, even though time pressures are most acute in spontaneous conversation. Along with our linguistic tools, we humans have developed the social skills to negotiate understanding – the nod to confirm‎ that we’re following, the furrowed brow when we’re not, the patience with a speaker’s disfluencies and backtracking, the ability to instantaneously repair misunderstanding – so that our language is not grounded by its imperfections. If studying language patterns is like examining a bird’s anatomy, witnessing a conversation is like seeing it in full flight.