- Email: [email protected]
Action, thought and language
Cognition, 10 (1981) 201-208 @ Elsevier Sequoia S.A., Liausanne- Printed in The Netherlands
201
Action, thought and language DAVID McNEILL” Uniwsity
of Chicago
Psycholinguistics, wedged in between two Tleighbors, has always depended on psychology ‘and linguistics in various ways. From psychology it has taken its methodology, especially the use of experimental methods, and a taste for information processing models. From linguistics it has taken its definition of theoretical issues and indeed of the field itself. Though psycholinguistics has absorbed elements from the juxtaposition of psycholrgy arJ linguistics, there has not been a true synthesis. There is a mixture of elements, a bit from psych Aogy, a bit from linguistics, but no rationale for this particular mixture and no reason for preferring it over some other. I believe, however, that a distinctive conception of language is possible, a truly psycholinguistic approach. To see this spy Teach, we must consider the individual and his use of lznguage. Each ocellrrence or token of a given language structure has its own in,. dividual life history. Someone says a sentence. It has emerged on this occasan from a confluence witbin the speaker from many sources. Someone else understands the sentence. This too results from a cozlfluen ;e from many sources within the hearer. PsycholSnguistics and linguistics are fields which apply to successive slices along this life history of given language structures. Psycholinguistics focuses on the language structure as it emerges during acts of speaking and listening by the individual, a’nd for psycholinguistics language struttuies have an emergent, dynamic, temporal dimen:.ion. Linguistics focuses on the finished language structure, after it has been created or underst’ood, and for it language structures are complete, static and instantaneous. In a psycholinguistic approach, language structures correspond to forms of human activity, Language structures are the result of things done by inclividuals. Sentences, phrases and words (as well w other stretches of speech) define actions, or performances. In linguistics, sentences, phrases and words ,are regarded as static objects, like crystals. Language structure regarded as an object is how language activities appear to view after they are *I wish to acknowledge the fmancial support of the National Institute of Mental Health and the I am grateful to Nobuko B. McNeiUa;ld Michael Silverstein for comments on the manuscript. Reprint requests should be sent to David McNeill, Department sf Behavioral Sciences, ,UniversiSyof Chicago,5848 South University Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637, U.S.A.
SpencerFoundation.
202
David Mc.Neili
over. The linguistic approach was defined by Saussure (1959 [ 19 15 I ) as synchronic and paradigmatic. A language is considered as a whole with all its parts, in relation to each other at a single instant of time; that is the meaning of the terms paradigmatic and synchronic. This approach of Saussure’s I see as having reached a kind of climax in the development of generative grammar Saussure spoke mainly of overt (surface) linguistic elements organized into mutually defined paradigmatic sets ‘of relations. A fundamenta.lly new contribution froIm generative grammar was to include in the paradigmatic set invisible, deducible only ‘abstract’ linguistic elements. (Who& 1945, introduced covert paradigmatic linguistic elements, which he termed cryptotypes, but apprer’c:; did not carry the idea further.) These elements were called in 1965 deep structures. With this new concept:ion, the synchsonic pa.tteming of language was extended to include invisible elements. It seems to me that the S:l;assurian tradition cannot be pushed much farther without new insights comparable in depth and importance to the discovery of abstract paradigmatic rbments. The current tlisputes over whether there are or are not transformations appear to involve minor descriptive matters by comparison. To define a proper role for psycholinguistics in the study of language, one pertaining to language regarded dynamically, differentiation from the modern form of Saussure’s synchronic conception is crucial. In the definition of the field which I favor, psycholinguistics is not busy merely with confirming the psychological reality of constructs proposed in synchronic linguistic descrip tions, but must formulate a new theory of language activity Language activities yield linguistic objects, but do not necessarily directly incorporate them. I am thus involved in an approach to language structure which takes an activity point of view. In this I chiefly follow the lead of Vygotsky ( 1962, 1978), who long ago formulated psychology in general as the study of human activity. i will now sketch some parts of what I think an activitv approach to language structure could be. To make this approach intelligible requires coordinating a number of topics. These fall into two classes which I describe in parallel in this paper. First is a new arrangement of observations designed to bring out the activity aspects of language; gestures, metaphors and the systematic comparison of thes: to speech. Second are the inferred structures of language activity itself; the structure of action and the relati,onship of action (which is synthesizing) to speech (which is analytic); images and the schemas which produce them; and the use of these image-producing schemas to present other concepts. Language activities can be subdivided into smaller parts only up to a certain point. The unit of activity cannot be broken down further. While it is possible to fiid and isolate in the language activity separate structural, functional,
Action, thought and langmge
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motivational and actional elements, doing so results in the destruction of the activity itself (Zinchenko, 1980). What remains is a list I:..fparts, .not a unified activity. A unit of language activity contains elements of various types which have in common that they are acted upon together. I have been particularly interested in the role of manual actions in language activities, especially gestures, and the evidence they provide of concrete imagery during language acts. Gestures of a type I will call iconic are evidence that speakers create, concurrent with speech, concrete depictions of meaning. Iconic gestures offer a second channel of observation of the speaker’s mental representat:ions (speech being the first channel). Such gestures are expressions in action of images which exist simultaneously with the meanings being expressed li.nguistically. Kant ( 1973 [ 178 1 ] ) defined a schema as a procedure for producing an image of a concept. Iconic gestures appear to be images of concepts, and imply the existence of schemas which produce them. These schemas are, I lbdieve, fundamental elements in language activities which can be seen as playing a role in speaking itself. Examples of iconic gestures are the following from a child: Speech
,they urn wanted to get,,where Anansi was,
Gesture
BH in midair, move together L tG R
LH goes to rest
RH goes up and index finger extends, and makes arc in the air
The first gesture, co-occurring with ‘they urn wanted to get’, depicts pursuit without contact; the second gestar e, co-occurring with ‘where Anansi was’, depicts an enclosure. Pursuit without contact and enclosure are suggested as the i_lnagesused on this occasion to portray the speaker’s meaning, or concepts; these concepts were, in this case, the effort to reach, but the inaccessibility of, the character called Anansi, and the locus of Anansi at this point in the narrative inside of a fish (Anansi is a spider; the referents of “they’ are Anansi’s six sons; and the story itself is based on a folk tale of the Ashanti people of G.hana). Thus the images of pursuit without contact and enclosure were connected by the speaker to the concepts of effort-plus-inaccessibility and entombment, and imply the presence of schemas which produced of these concepts the images depicted by the two gestures. The concrete depictions of meaning enacted in iconic gestures are produced (a.ccording to the Kantian formula) by schemas, or procedures. Why should
204
LkvidIucAkill
these procedures operate during language activities? I am very much intrigued by the idea that they are., in some way, a fundamental part of the linkage of the action of speech production with thought and meaning structures. During the production of speech, speakers are able to control their motor movements (various articulators) by something seemingly incommensurable, m.eaning decisicns. Meanings from different sources (different lexical items) must be brought together and into contact with action (speech articulation). Procedures, or schemas, are, I propose, the meeting ground of meanings with action. This proposal entails that actions carry with them meanings; and iconic gestures demonstrate this fact. The proposal also leads to the idea that meaningful actions, those performed on objects in the world, underlie actions in other modes, those performed with the speech articulators. Image producing schemas can also be seen to play a role here. Schemas which produce images of concepts I equate with the type of mental representation termed sensory-motor by Piaget ( 1952) and actional by Werner (1948). Such sensory-motor, or actional, schemas represent meanings (concepts) which have the potentizl of being displayed in actions. Sensory-motor schemas are simultaneously actional and meaningful (i.e., are representations of things other than themselves). This property is perhaps the fundamental form of a mingling of meaning with motor action (Vygotsky, 1962) and can Be regarded as underlying the control of all speech articulation. Motor actions., even simple movements, are complex and hierarchically structured (Bernstein, 1967; Greene, 1972; Turvey, 1975). Only at upper levels of action is there consciousness of effect and intentionality. A person intends to pick up a pencil and is conscious of the effect of the action he performs. This intentionality and consciousness are parts of the action at the highest level, and it is at this level, therefore, where the person is conscious of the effect of his actions on the world, that actions can be organized into schemas which are able to represent things other than themselves. At lower levels of the motor control hierarchy are various synergisms which regulate the details of action performances as physical processes; force, velocity, timing, the selection of specific effecters, as wellas the moment-by-moment monitoring and changing of movements_ Because of the hierarchical structure of motor control, lower nodes can be substituted for by other lower nodes, without disrupting the higher levels of the hierarchy. Flexibility of motor pefiormance depends on this type of substitution. Actions can shift from hand to hand, for example, without the relation of the action as a whole to the individual’s goals and consciousness of effect changing. In the production of speech the same principle of substitution of lower nodes in motor control hierarchies perhaps applies. Into a hierarchy originally
Action, thought and ian!guuge
205
established to control manual movements, for example, lower nodes can be substituted which control speech articulator movements. Thus, deeply embedded within the speech process can be manual actions and the schemas of representation which they support. To initiate the production of speech, according to this model, the speaker must find sensory-motor schemas with which to represent his intended mean~gs (concepts) which may be qu,ite abstract. It is for this reason, I suggest, that schemas, or procedures, for producing images of a kind depicted in action are involved in language activities. That schemas for producing action images of concepts are a fundamental part of language activities is suggested by the depiction of images when the concepts in question are highly abstract. Iconic gesture?: dre no lcsv common with abstract meanings, yet in these cases there can be no question that the speaker has created images of the concepts. The following are examples from a discussion between two professional mathematicians: Speech
,and take its dual,
Gesture
LH, palm down, rotates so that palm is up a finite quotient,that factors through,
Speech Gesture
RH loops down and to the right in large sweep
From the concept of a mathematical dual, the speaker generated an image of something flipping over in space. From the concept of factorization through something he generated an image of something sweeping through space. These images imply schemas in terms of which the speaker presented t:ze m;thematical concepts that were his intended meanings. The schemas which generate images of concepts thus often embody metaphors (understanding one thing in terms of another). ?‘he gestures above can be interpreted as revealing metaphors. These are not hrerary metaphors, but metaphors built intoordinary language and used inday-today understanding of the physical and social world. Thus the idea of effort-plus-inaccessibility can be understood in terms of a metaphor (as in a common form of frustration dream) based on pursuit without contact. The gesture was an image which depicted the metaphoric presentation of the concept. The idea of a mathematical dual can be understood, in part, in terms Df a metaphor based on physical rotation of an object through space. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have catalogued a number of metaphors of this kind. Many if not all are easily
206
David McNeil1
enacted in gesture form. That is because the metaphors use for their vehicles (Richards, 1936), or secondary subjects (Black, 1962, 1979), the concrete manipulation of objects. An important metaphor for pres:f:nting the idea of language- _itself is called by Reddy (1979) the conduit metaphor. This metaphor is the source of maqy gestures. According to the conduit metaphor, language is a container (e.g., ‘words are fuii of meaning’), meaning is a substance (e.g., “lay it all out on the table’), meaning is put into and taken out of containers (e.g., ‘putting your ideas into words ‘, ‘digging out the meaning’), and communication of meaning is the sending of containers full of meaning-substance over a conduit’ to a destination (e.g., ‘had a hard time getting through to him’). All of these metaphors are based on manipulations of objects and produce images which gestures readily depict. For example, a common gestural accompaniment of verbs of saying, ‘I was telling, explaining, asking, etc.’ is made with the hand extended outward, the palm up. the fingers extended, separated and slightly curved--holding, in fact, a container, the image of the concept which is denoted by the verb. Xnvolved in language activities, then, are metaphors, or schemas used to present something else, and these are based in many cases on the manipulation of objects. In this sense, manual actions are a deeper element of language activities than gestures alone, for they are the basis of the metaphors used in presenting the speaker’s meanangs. Combined with the speech channel, gestures give a rich basis, beyond the basis usually considered in linguistics investigations, for interpreting language activities. The gesture channel makes evident that speakers create, concurrent with speech, concrete images of meaning, arising in interesting cases from metaphors. Gestures, however, depict meanings on a quite different principle from the verbal channel, and this difference also implies that a different princiiple is involved in the underlyling metaphors and schemas. lconic gestures CZI be effectively instantaneous (even if stretched out in time they represent everything that they represent at once), whereas in speech meaning units are segmented into words and distributed across time. The gesture which accompanied ‘they urn wanted to get’, for example, represented at a single (effective) instant everything (and more) that in the speech channel was divided into four words and distributed across time. Vygotsky (1962) argued that words are the minimal units of language activity. They are the smallest parts of the speaker’s activity, dividing this activity and distributing it across time. In this respect words differ from subword units, such as morphemes. Decomposition of complex words such as ‘unfriendly’ into morphemes destroys the cormection of the word with any form of language activity; ‘un-‘, by itself, has only an abstract meaning of negation, whereas combined into a word the prefix
Action, thixlght and language
207
takes on life and meaning at the level of the activity. It is easy to imagine the type of language activity in which the word ‘unfriendly’ might appear, but impossible to imagine any activity in which ‘un-’ appears (without also specifying the rest of the word it combines with). Words have a particular kind of motivation in psycholinguistics, therefore, which object-oriented constructs such as morphemes lack. Though words are often recognized as basic linguistic elements, they reflect an ability not so much to combine elements into larger structures, as an ability to divide language activities into minimal segments. The most fundamental lesson we can learn from the combination of the gesture and speech channels is that in language activities there is an irrierplay between two quite distinct modes of meaning representation-the instantaneous and unsegmented (images and metaphoric schemas)and the segmented and successive (words and grammar). The non-reduction of language activities beyond a certain point forbids separating these modes from each other without destroying the language activity itself. In an activity approach to language structure-that is, in the psycholinguistics I am advocating--it is impossible to consider the traditional components of langllage structure (lexicon, grammar) in isolation from the unsegmented wholistic representations of meaning shown in gestures, images and metaphors. The psycholinguistic activity oriented approach I have sketched is meant to work in’rc,a synthesis with the object oriented approach to language structure pursued in synchronic linguistic descriptions. This synthesis would provide, in a comprehensive manner, coverage of the life history of given language structures by referring to successive slices of this life history. The result is a rationalized division of effort between adjacent fields which differ in their approach to language. The psycholinguistic approach I have presented is discussed at greater length in several other places; chiefly, a paper published in 1975 and two books, one published in 1979 and one to be published in 1982. The latter book treats in some detdil what for want of space I have omitted completely from this sketch, namely, the shaping of language structures for contextual and discourse functions. The ideas of the activity approach have been evolving continuously in these publications, though the basic approach has remained the same. References Bernstein, N. A. (1967) The Co-ordinationand Regulationof Movements.Oxford, Pergamon. Black, M. (1962) Models and Metaphors:Studies in Lang-rageandPhilosophy. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.
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Black, W. (1979) More About Metaphor. In A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Greene, P. (1972) Problems of Organization 0;’ Motor Sys&:ms. In R. Rosen and F. M. Snell (eds.), i+o@ss in Theoretical Biology PJ&. 2). New York, Academic Press, Kant, I. (t 973) critique of &we Reason. London, Macmillan. Lakoff,. G., and lohnson, M. (1980) &%&@zo~sWe Live By. Chicago, University of CXcago Press. McNeil&D. (1975) Semiotic Extendon. In R. Solso ted.), dnformrion Processing and Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ., Erlbaum. McNeil&D. (1979) Tdre CbnceprtutJBusisofLunguage. Hillsdale, NJ., Erlbaum. McNeill, D. (In press) Action, Thought and. Language: A New Approach to Psycholinguistics.New York, Harper & Row. Piaget, J. (1952) 7Ise &it& ofhtrelligence in Bildren. New York, International Universities Press. Reddy, M. (1979) The Conduit Metaphor -A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language. In A. Ortony (ed.),Meruphclrand ZItoughr.Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Richards, I. A. (1936) The Philowphy of Rhetoric. New York, Oxford University Press. Saussure, F. de (1959) c;oUrse in General Linguistics.New York, Philosophical Library. Turvey, M. T. (1975) Preliminaries to a theory of action with referencles to vision. In StatusReport on Speech Research (Jan.-Mm&t,1975). New Haven, Haskins Laboratory, SR-41. Vygotsky, L. S. (1962) nought aaIdLanguage. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mindin Socrety: T&eDev4ogment of HigherPsychologicalProcesses.Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. Werner, H. (1948) Cbmpamrive Bychology of Men&l Developmenr. New York, Science Editions. Wharf, B. IL. (1945) Grammatical categories, f,unguuge, 21, l-l 1. (Reprinted in J. B. CarraIl {cd.), tingzurge. 7bughr and R&i@?, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1956.) Zinchenko., V. P. (1980) The ideas of L. S. Vygotsky about units in the analysis of mind. Papergiven in Ckto’berat a conference, Culture, Communication, and Cognition: VygotskianPerspectives, at the Center fo: Psychosocial Studies, Chicago.
201
Action, thought and language DAVID McNEILL” Uniwsity
of Chicago
Psycholinguistics, wedged in between two Tleighbors, has always depended on psychology ‘and linguistics in various ways. From psychology it has taken its methodology, especially the use of experimental methods, and a taste for information processing models. From linguistics it has taken its definition of theoretical issues and indeed of the field itself. Though psycholinguistics has absorbed elements from the juxtaposition of psycholrgy arJ linguistics, there has not been a true synthesis. There is a mixture of elements, a bit from psych Aogy, a bit from linguistics, but no rationale for this particular mixture and no reason for preferring it over some other. I believe, however, that a distinctive conception of language is possible, a truly psycholinguistic approach. To see this spy Teach, we must consider the individual and his use of lznguage. Each ocellrrence or token of a given language structure has its own in,. dividual life history. Someone says a sentence. It has emerged on this occasan from a confluence witbin the speaker from many sources. Someone else understands the sentence. This too results from a cozlfluen ;e from many sources within the hearer. PsycholSnguistics and linguistics are fields which apply to successive slices along this life history of given language structures. Psycholinguistics focuses on the language structure as it emerges during acts of speaking and listening by the individual, a’nd for psycholinguistics language struttuies have an emergent, dynamic, temporal dimen:.ion. Linguistics focuses on the finished language structure, after it has been created or underst’ood, and for it language structures are complete, static and instantaneous. In a psycholinguistic approach, language structures correspond to forms of human activity, Language structures are the result of things done by inclividuals. Sentences, phrases and words (as well w other stretches of speech) define actions, or performances. In linguistics, sentences, phrases and words ,are regarded as static objects, like crystals. Language structure regarded as an object is how language activities appear to view after they are *I wish to acknowledge the fmancial support of the National Institute of Mental Health and the I am grateful to Nobuko B. McNeiUa;ld Michael Silverstein for comments on the manuscript. Reprint requests should be sent to David McNeill, Department sf Behavioral Sciences, ,UniversiSyof Chicago,5848 South University Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637, U.S.A.
SpencerFoundation.
202
David Mc.Neili
over. The linguistic approach was defined by Saussure (1959 [ 19 15 I ) as synchronic and paradigmatic. A language is considered as a whole with all its parts, in relation to each other at a single instant of time; that is the meaning of the terms paradigmatic and synchronic. This approach of Saussure’s I see as having reached a kind of climax in the development of generative grammar Saussure spoke mainly of overt (surface) linguistic elements organized into mutually defined paradigmatic sets ‘of relations. A fundamenta.lly new contribution froIm generative grammar was to include in the paradigmatic set invisible, deducible only ‘abstract’ linguistic elements. (Who& 1945, introduced covert paradigmatic linguistic elements, which he termed cryptotypes, but apprer’c:; did not carry the idea further.) These elements were called in 1965 deep structures. With this new concept:ion, the synchsonic pa.tteming of language was extended to include invisible elements. It seems to me that the S:l;assurian tradition cannot be pushed much farther without new insights comparable in depth and importance to the discovery of abstract paradigmatic rbments. The current tlisputes over whether there are or are not transformations appear to involve minor descriptive matters by comparison. To define a proper role for psycholinguistics in the study of language, one pertaining to language regarded dynamically, differentiation from the modern form of Saussure’s synchronic conception is crucial. In the definition of the field which I favor, psycholinguistics is not busy merely with confirming the psychological reality of constructs proposed in synchronic linguistic descrip tions, but must formulate a new theory of language activity Language activities yield linguistic objects, but do not necessarily directly incorporate them. I am thus involved in an approach to language structure which takes an activity point of view. In this I chiefly follow the lead of Vygotsky ( 1962, 1978), who long ago formulated psychology in general as the study of human activity. i will now sketch some parts of what I think an activitv approach to language structure could be. To make this approach intelligible requires coordinating a number of topics. These fall into two classes which I describe in parallel in this paper. First is a new arrangement of observations designed to bring out the activity aspects of language; gestures, metaphors and the systematic comparison of thes: to speech. Second are the inferred structures of language activity itself; the structure of action and the relati,onship of action (which is synthesizing) to speech (which is analytic); images and the schemas which produce them; and the use of these image-producing schemas to present other concepts. Language activities can be subdivided into smaller parts only up to a certain point. The unit of activity cannot be broken down further. While it is possible to fiid and isolate in the language activity separate structural, functional,
Action, thought and langmge
203
motivational and actional elements, doing so results in the destruction of the activity itself (Zinchenko, 1980). What remains is a list I:..fparts, .not a unified activity. A unit of language activity contains elements of various types which have in common that they are acted upon together. I have been particularly interested in the role of manual actions in language activities, especially gestures, and the evidence they provide of concrete imagery during language acts. Gestures of a type I will call iconic are evidence that speakers create, concurrent with speech, concrete depictions of meaning. Iconic gestures offer a second channel of observation of the speaker’s mental representat:ions (speech being the first channel). Such gestures are expressions in action of images which exist simultaneously with the meanings being expressed li.nguistically. Kant ( 1973 [ 178 1 ] ) defined a schema as a procedure for producing an image of a concept. Iconic gestures appear to be images of concepts, and imply the existence of schemas which produce them. These schemas are, I lbdieve, fundamental elements in language activities which can be seen as playing a role in speaking itself. Examples of iconic gestures are the following from a child: Speech
,they urn wanted to get,,where Anansi was,
Gesture
BH in midair, move together L tG R
LH goes to rest
RH goes up and index finger extends, and makes arc in the air
The first gesture, co-occurring with ‘they urn wanted to get’, depicts pursuit without contact; the second gestar e, co-occurring with ‘where Anansi was’, depicts an enclosure. Pursuit without contact and enclosure are suggested as the i_lnagesused on this occasion to portray the speaker’s meaning, or concepts; these concepts were, in this case, the effort to reach, but the inaccessibility of, the character called Anansi, and the locus of Anansi at this point in the narrative inside of a fish (Anansi is a spider; the referents of “they’ are Anansi’s six sons; and the story itself is based on a folk tale of the Ashanti people of G.hana). Thus the images of pursuit without contact and enclosure were connected by the speaker to the concepts of effort-plus-inaccessibility and entombment, and imply the presence of schemas which produced of these concepts the images depicted by the two gestures. The concrete depictions of meaning enacted in iconic gestures are produced (a.ccording to the Kantian formula) by schemas, or procedures. Why should
204
LkvidIucAkill
these procedures operate during language activities? I am very much intrigued by the idea that they are., in some way, a fundamental part of the linkage of the action of speech production with thought and meaning structures. During the production of speech, speakers are able to control their motor movements (various articulators) by something seemingly incommensurable, m.eaning decisicns. Meanings from different sources (different lexical items) must be brought together and into contact with action (speech articulation). Procedures, or schemas, are, I propose, the meeting ground of meanings with action. This proposal entails that actions carry with them meanings; and iconic gestures demonstrate this fact. The proposal also leads to the idea that meaningful actions, those performed on objects in the world, underlie actions in other modes, those performed with the speech articulators. Image producing schemas can also be seen to play a role here. Schemas which produce images of concepts I equate with the type of mental representation termed sensory-motor by Piaget ( 1952) and actional by Werner (1948). Such sensory-motor, or actional, schemas represent meanings (concepts) which have the potentizl of being displayed in actions. Sensory-motor schemas are simultaneously actional and meaningful (i.e., are representations of things other than themselves). This property is perhaps the fundamental form of a mingling of meaning with motor action (Vygotsky, 1962) and can Be regarded as underlying the control of all speech articulation. Motor actions., even simple movements, are complex and hierarchically structured (Bernstein, 1967; Greene, 1972; Turvey, 1975). Only at upper levels of action is there consciousness of effect and intentionality. A person intends to pick up a pencil and is conscious of the effect of the action he performs. This intentionality and consciousness are parts of the action at the highest level, and it is at this level, therefore, where the person is conscious of the effect of his actions on the world, that actions can be organized into schemas which are able to represent things other than themselves. At lower levels of the motor control hierarchy are various synergisms which regulate the details of action performances as physical processes; force, velocity, timing, the selection of specific effecters, as wellas the moment-by-moment monitoring and changing of movements_ Because of the hierarchical structure of motor control, lower nodes can be substituted for by other lower nodes, without disrupting the higher levels of the hierarchy. Flexibility of motor pefiormance depends on this type of substitution. Actions can shift from hand to hand, for example, without the relation of the action as a whole to the individual’s goals and consciousness of effect changing. In the production of speech the same principle of substitution of lower nodes in motor control hierarchies perhaps applies. Into a hierarchy originally
Action, thought and ian!guuge
205
established to control manual movements, for example, lower nodes can be substituted which control speech articulator movements. Thus, deeply embedded within the speech process can be manual actions and the schemas of representation which they support. To initiate the production of speech, according to this model, the speaker must find sensory-motor schemas with which to represent his intended mean~gs (concepts) which may be qu,ite abstract. It is for this reason, I suggest, that schemas, or procedures, for producing images of a kind depicted in action are involved in language activities. That schemas for producing action images of concepts are a fundamental part of language activities is suggested by the depiction of images when the concepts in question are highly abstract. Iconic gesture?: dre no lcsv common with abstract meanings, yet in these cases there can be no question that the speaker has created images of the concepts. The following are examples from a discussion between two professional mathematicians: Speech
,and take its dual,
Gesture
LH, palm down, rotates so that palm is up a finite quotient,that factors through,
Speech Gesture
RH loops down and to the right in large sweep
From the concept of a mathematical dual, the speaker generated an image of something flipping over in space. From the concept of factorization through something he generated an image of something sweeping through space. These images imply schemas in terms of which the speaker presented t:ze m;thematical concepts that were his intended meanings. The schemas which generate images of concepts thus often embody metaphors (understanding one thing in terms of another). ?‘he gestures above can be interpreted as revealing metaphors. These are not hrerary metaphors, but metaphors built intoordinary language and used inday-today understanding of the physical and social world. Thus the idea of effort-plus-inaccessibility can be understood in terms of a metaphor (as in a common form of frustration dream) based on pursuit without contact. The gesture was an image which depicted the metaphoric presentation of the concept. The idea of a mathematical dual can be understood, in part, in terms Df a metaphor based on physical rotation of an object through space. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have catalogued a number of metaphors of this kind. Many if not all are easily
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enacted in gesture form. That is because the metaphors use for their vehicles (Richards, 1936), or secondary subjects (Black, 1962, 1979), the concrete manipulation of objects. An important metaphor for pres:f:nting the idea of language- _itself is called by Reddy (1979) the conduit metaphor. This metaphor is the source of maqy gestures. According to the conduit metaphor, language is a container (e.g., ‘words are fuii of meaning’), meaning is a substance (e.g., “lay it all out on the table’), meaning is put into and taken out of containers (e.g., ‘putting your ideas into words ‘, ‘digging out the meaning’), and communication of meaning is the sending of containers full of meaning-substance over a conduit’ to a destination (e.g., ‘had a hard time getting through to him’). All of these metaphors are based on manipulations of objects and produce images which gestures readily depict. For example, a common gestural accompaniment of verbs of saying, ‘I was telling, explaining, asking, etc.’ is made with the hand extended outward, the palm up. the fingers extended, separated and slightly curved--holding, in fact, a container, the image of the concept which is denoted by the verb. Xnvolved in language activities, then, are metaphors, or schemas used to present something else, and these are based in many cases on the manipulation of objects. In this sense, manual actions are a deeper element of language activities than gestures alone, for they are the basis of the metaphors used in presenting the speaker’s meanangs. Combined with the speech channel, gestures give a rich basis, beyond the basis usually considered in linguistics investigations, for interpreting language activities. The gesture channel makes evident that speakers create, concurrent with speech, concrete images of meaning, arising in interesting cases from metaphors. Gestures, however, depict meanings on a quite different principle from the verbal channel, and this difference also implies that a different princiiple is involved in the underlyling metaphors and schemas. lconic gestures CZI be effectively instantaneous (even if stretched out in time they represent everything that they represent at once), whereas in speech meaning units are segmented into words and distributed across time. The gesture which accompanied ‘they urn wanted to get’, for example, represented at a single (effective) instant everything (and more) that in the speech channel was divided into four words and distributed across time. Vygotsky (1962) argued that words are the minimal units of language activity. They are the smallest parts of the speaker’s activity, dividing this activity and distributing it across time. In this respect words differ from subword units, such as morphemes. Decomposition of complex words such as ‘unfriendly’ into morphemes destroys the cormection of the word with any form of language activity; ‘un-‘, by itself, has only an abstract meaning of negation, whereas combined into a word the prefix
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takes on life and meaning at the level of the activity. It is easy to imagine the type of language activity in which the word ‘unfriendly’ might appear, but impossible to imagine any activity in which ‘un-’ appears (without also specifying the rest of the word it combines with). Words have a particular kind of motivation in psycholinguistics, therefore, which object-oriented constructs such as morphemes lack. Though words are often recognized as basic linguistic elements, they reflect an ability not so much to combine elements into larger structures, as an ability to divide language activities into minimal segments. The most fundamental lesson we can learn from the combination of the gesture and speech channels is that in language activities there is an irrierplay between two quite distinct modes of meaning representation-the instantaneous and unsegmented (images and metaphoric schemas)and the segmented and successive (words and grammar). The non-reduction of language activities beyond a certain point forbids separating these modes from each other without destroying the language activity itself. In an activity approach to language structure-that is, in the psycholinguistics I am advocating--it is impossible to consider the traditional components of langllage structure (lexicon, grammar) in isolation from the unsegmented wholistic representations of meaning shown in gestures, images and metaphors. The psycholinguistic activity oriented approach I have sketched is meant to work in’rc,a synthesis with the object oriented approach to language structure pursued in synchronic linguistic descriptions. This synthesis would provide, in a comprehensive manner, coverage of the life history of given language structures by referring to successive slices of this life history. The result is a rationalized division of effort between adjacent fields which differ in their approach to language. The psycholinguistic approach I have presented is discussed at greater length in several other places; chiefly, a paper published in 1975 and two books, one published in 1979 and one to be published in 1982. The latter book treats in some detdil what for want of space I have omitted completely from this sketch, namely, the shaping of language structures for contextual and discourse functions. The ideas of the activity approach have been evolving continuously in these publications, though the basic approach has remained the same. References Bernstein, N. A. (1967) The Co-ordinationand Regulationof Movements.Oxford, Pergamon. Black, M. (1962) Models and Metaphors:Studies in Lang-rageandPhilosophy. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.
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Black, W. (1979) More About Metaphor. In A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Greene, P. (1972) Problems of Organization 0;’ Motor Sys&:ms. In R. Rosen and F. M. Snell (eds.), i+o@ss in Theoretical Biology PJ&. 2). New York, Academic Press, Kant, I. (t 973) critique of &we Reason. London, Macmillan. Lakoff,. G., and lohnson, M. (1980) &%&@zo~sWe Live By. Chicago, University of CXcago Press. McNeil&D. (1975) Semiotic Extendon. In R. Solso ted.), dnformrion Processing and Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ., Erlbaum. McNeil&D. (1979) Tdre CbnceprtutJBusisofLunguage. Hillsdale, NJ., Erlbaum. McNeill, D. (In press) Action, Thought and. Language: A New Approach to Psycholinguistics.New York, Harper & Row. Piaget, J. (1952) 7Ise &it& ofhtrelligence in Bildren. New York, International Universities Press. Reddy, M. (1979) The Conduit Metaphor -A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language. In A. Ortony (ed.),Meruphclrand ZItoughr.Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Richards, I. A. (1936) The Philowphy of Rhetoric. New York, Oxford University Press. Saussure, F. de (1959) c;oUrse in General Linguistics.New York, Philosophical Library. Turvey, M. T. (1975) Preliminaries to a theory of action with referencles to vision. In StatusReport on Speech Research (Jan.-Mm&t,1975). New Haven, Haskins Laboratory, SR-41. Vygotsky, L. S. (1962) nought aaIdLanguage. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mindin Socrety: T&eDev4ogment of HigherPsychologicalProcesses.Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. Werner, H. (1948) Cbmpamrive Bychology of Men&l Developmenr. New York, Science Editions. Wharf, B. IL. (1945) Grammatical categories, f,unguuge, 21, l-l 1. (Reprinted in J. B. CarraIl {cd.), tingzurge. 7bughr and R&i@?, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1956.) Zinchenko., V. P. (1980) The ideas of L. S. Vygotsky about units in the analysis of mind. Papergiven in Ckto’berat a conference, Culture, Communication, and Cognition: VygotskianPerspectives, at the Center fo: Psychosocial Studies, Chicago.