A new picture of language

If you've taken Linguistics 101, you know what language is. It's a system for conveying meaning through speech. We build words out of sounds, and then complex ideas out of those words. Remarkably, the relationship between the sounds and the meanings they convey is purely arbitrary. Human language consists, in other words, of abstract symbols. Now, of course, there are also sign languages, but these operate in the same way, just in a different medium. This, anyway, is the view of language that has dominated and defined linguistics for many decades. But some think it gets some pretty fundamental things pretty wrong. Some think we need a new picture of language altogether.

My guest today is Dr. Neil Cohn. Neil is Associate Professor at the Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication, in the Netherlands; he is also the director of the Visual Language Lab at Tilburg. For about two decades, Neil has been studying the rich properties of graphic systems—especially comics—and has built an argument that some constitute full-blown languages. His latest book, co-authored with, Joost Schilperoord, is titled A Multimodal Language Faculty. It challenges that longstanding, deeply held view of what language is. Instead, the book argues that the human language capacity combines three different modalities—the vocal modality (as in speech), the bodily modality (as in gesture), and the graphic modality (as in comics and other visual narratives). And each of these modalities is naturally able to support full-blown languages.

Here, Neil and I talk about the basic assumptions of modern linguistics and where those assumptions come from. We discuss the idea that there are three expressive modalities that come naturally to humans, with each modality optimized for certain kinds of meaning. We talk about Neil's career, not only as an academic, but as an illustrator. We discuss cross-cultural differences and similarities in comics, and how comics have changed over the last century. And, finally, we consider how Neil's framework challenges current theorizing about the evolution of language. Along the way, Neil and I touch on sign languages and homesign systems, visual style vs visual language, Peircean semiotics, animal tracks, cave art, emoji, upfixes, sand drawing, Manga, the refrain "I can't draw," and the idea that the graphic modality is the only one that's truly unique to our species.

After this episode we'll be taking a bit of a summer break, but we'll be posting some old favorites to tide you over. Alright friends, hope you enjoy this one. On to my conversation with Neil Cohn. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:30 – An earlier paper by Dr. Cohn on the well-worn refrain "I can't draw." His more recent Twitter thread covering the topic.

9:00 – An overview of research on homesign systems. For a broader discussion of differences between gesture, homesign systems, and established sign languages, see here.

15:00 – A comic, 'Chinese Room,' commissioned by the philosopher Dan Dennett and drawn by Dr. Cohn.

19:30 – The webpage of Dr. Cohn's graduate mentor, Ray Jackendoff.

25:00 – A brief overview paper by Dr. Cohn and Dr. Schilperoord on the need to "reimagine language."

25:30 – The classic book, based on lecture notes, by Ferdinand de Saussure, 'Course in General Linguistics.'

44:00 – For an overview of "bimodal bilingualism," see here.

50:00 – A study by Dr. Cohn and colleagues on the processing of emoji substituted for words.

56:00 – A recent study by Dr. Cohn and colleagues on anaphora in visual narratives.

58:30 – For our previous audio essay on animal (and human) tracks, see here.

1:01:30 – For examples of scholarship on non-Western methods of visual storytelling, including Aboriginal Australian sand drawing, see Dr. Cohn's earlier edited volume here. For a deeper dive into sand drawing, see the monograph by Jenny Green here.

1:03:00 – Dr. Cohn also recently published a book on cross-cultural aspects of comics, The Patterns of Comics. The book is the fruit of his lab's TINTIN project.

1:11:00 – For a video of Aboriginal Australian sand drawing, see here.

1:13:00 – See Dr. Cohn's earlier book, Who Understands Comics?

1:15:00 – A study on "upfixes" by Dr. Cohn and a colleague.

1:22:00 – A popular article by Dr. Cohn on the linguistic status of emoji.

1:31:00 – For a deep dive into Peircean semiotics, see here.

1:36:00 – For my own general-audience treatment of "gesture first" theories of language evolution and the "modality transition" problem, see here.

1:37:00 – A paper by Dr. Jackendoff and Eva Wittenberg outlining their "complexity hierarchy."

­­­­1:50:00 – For the Getty museum exhibit associated with Dr. Cohn's lecture, see here.

Recommendations

The Texture of the Lexicon, by Jenny Audring and Ray Jackendoff

Battle in the Mind Fields, by John Goldsmith and Bernard Laks

History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, hosted by James McElvenny

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

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