Abstracting from Infinity

As I was doing the Carnie reading, my mind was stuck on a theme, which has to do with a book I'm reading currently, the Way of Zen by Alan Watts. In the book, Watts posits that most of our conventional ways of representing knowledge, in the Western world, are abstractions, and we are often incapable of capturing the world for what it "really is." The quote comes from a passage where Watts discusses the way in which humans conceptualize the infinitude of our past, into a finite understanding of history: "From the actual infinitude of events and experiences some have been picked out-abstracted-as significant... For the very nature of conventional knowledge is that it is a system of abstractions. It consists of signs and symbols in which things and events are reduced to their general outlines, as the Chinese character jen stands for "man" by being the utmost simplification and generalization of the human form" (Watts, 7).
In the first chapter of the Carnie reading, a proof is presented that language is, at least to some degree, innate, or more bluntly, there exists some Universal Grammar within the human brain. Infinite systems are un-learnable, and our capacity for language is infinite, so, it follows that some part of our understanding of language is built in. We have grammatical intuitions that were never taught to us (like those tested in the grammaticality judgment task), and can create sentences which have never been heard.
Thus, abstracting any sort of rules, or grammar, from language, or applying it onto language, seems to be a rather bulky task, when dealing with something that is in theory infinite. Sure, language generally sticks within recognizable forms, but as great authors like Kerouac have shown us, it doesn't have to. Thus, linguistics (or any form of science really, which seeks to explain events in the world) seems to do that very thing that Watts suggested we do when we look at history- it reduces events down to their general outlines.
Along this same theme, Carnie breaks down pieces of the system of language- or what we call parts of speech. When semantic definitions seemed too simplified (and not very correct), linguists moved on to distributional criteria to help us determine what "type" a word is. But again, this is just an abstraction. Destruction sounds like a noun, it tends to be placed next to determiners and adjectives, it goes in the right place in the sentence, it is modified by the proper suffixes- we call it a noun. We abstract some set of rules that seem to apply by descriptive grammar, and we use grammaticality judgment tests (or other tests of our human intuition) to further develop how we use these rules in perception. But, we don't know what's going on in our head exactly, when we know that we can make decide a noun by saying decision. Do we refer to these set of rules? Or are these ascribed after the fact in our attempts to understand grammar? On page 8, Carnie addresses this very question, and admits that linguistics only claims to "model" our conceptions of language- we are not sure how the brain uses or doesn't use these rules in its generation of speech. Abstraction abounds!
Later in the reading, the psychological reality of constituency experiment seems to show us that our brain truly does perceive these boundaries and grammatical separations, and perhaps we utilize more of the model than we know. This gives a case for hierarchal, constituent based grammar as less of a model, and more of a psychological reality.
Either way, language is a crazy simplification of what is truly going on in the world. My sentence "that apple is red," seems true enough, but I've just reduced the apple I'm seeing, which is probably incredibly complex and of some specific type, origin, variant of apple, to the word "apple." Even the color red, which might come in infinite hues, has been reduced to one type, "red." Thus, abstraction is perhaps the most crucial element of language as we know it. This reading gave me new insight into the ways linguists attempt to break down and study our abstractions, to know how we acquire and produce this most crucial and fundamental tool we have as humans- language.


Works Cited:
Watts, Alan. The Way of Zen. New York: Pantheon, 1957. Print.