Reflections on Knowledge of Language:
2. Where does "Knowledge of the World" Fit it?
Introduction
The Coding Conception of KOL
INTRODUCTION
Some discussions of KOL indicate that the authors conceive of the role of the KOL as essentially one of translation--of decoding and encoding messages. In this conception, processing an incoming message is a matter of decoding it--analyzing it into its constituent lexical items and the grammatical rules that compose it. Speaking would be preceded by a parallel encoding step. In such a view then, the entirety of a person’s knowledge would presumably be divided between the KOL, which is restricted to this single narrowly-conceived “coding” function, and everything else s/he knows--sometimes called “knowledge of the world”. (In fact, identifying the instrumentalities that would permit such a coding function to be performed has been a central preoccupation of linguistic theory).
The whole question of what kinds of knowledge are involved in the possession of language seems to be of central importance if we’re to have any hope of understanding what it is about humans that permits them and only them to have language. Moreover, we’ll be handicapped in trying to figure out how language evolved in the first place if our assumptions about what changes needed to be achieved are wrong.
THE CODING CONCEPTION OF KOL
What I’m calling the “coding conception” of the knowledge required for using a language tends to evoke for me the picture of a schoolboy, equipped with grammar book and dictionary, decoding a text in, say, Latin. This decoding results in a translation of the text into English. In fact, the English translation is the expected evidence that he has completed the assigned task.
Note that in this little scenario, no recourse to “knowledge of the world” was required. The only knowledge the boy needed for his decoding was that provided by the dictionary and grammar. In the coding conception, the KOL--or at least its essence--seems generally to be thought of as consisting just of knowledge of grammar cum lexicon.
But of course this scenario has nothing to do with what we ordinarily do when we use language. When someone speaks to us, our immediate task is to try to understand it. If it’s in a language we understand, there’s no translation involved--there’s nothing to translate it into. Well, some have spoken of a “language of the mind”, but to translate it into such a language would still leave the problem of understanding to be solved. It should be noted of my Latin schoolboy scenario, that the boy didn’t actually succeed in understanding the Latin text itself: what he did was translate it into English--a language that he did understand. The actual (mysterious) process of understanding would only have been performed on the English.
Of course, I’ve just made up the schoolboy Latin scenario. And probably nobody has exactly claimed that understanding is just a matter of translating, or that what we know when we know a language can be fully and accurately represented by a grammar cum dictionary.
But what is involved in understanding something that has been said? How much do we actually know about that? One thing that seems apparent is that there are different degrees of understanding. For example when someone is explaining something to me, I often have the experience of feeling that I’ve understood everything so far, only to realize later that I hadn’t. However, that isn’t really an accurate description of what was happening in many such cases. It wasn’t so much my feeling that I’d understood everything up to that point as feeling that I’d understood enough that it made sense to let the presentation continue--that letting it continue was probably a more efficient strategy than interrupting for clarification would be (since the clarification might be supplied anyway by what would come later). In other words, understanding isn’t a yes or no matter.
The point at which it’s appropriate to say finally that we understand is the point when we judge our motivating purposes to have been satisfied. Since any individual actually has many purposes--some more general and some more context-specific--in play at any time, determining when these purposes have been sufficiently satisfied can require a pretty complex internal negotiation. (In Grace 1986 [reference below], I attempted a preliminary description--under the rubric “communicative transactions”--of the complexity of motivating purposes).
In any case, understanding an utterance (or a speech act) involves making sense of it. Making sense of it presumably involves extracting what’s perceived to be the useful information from the message, and integrating it into one’s general “knowledge of the world”.
But there’s more to it than that. What we need to make sense of is not just a piece of abstracted text, but a speech act. What does it mean that the speaker is saying this now? What are his/her motives? The general “knowledge of the world’ into which our answers are to be integrated includes our knowledge of the personality of the speaker and of our relationship to him/her.
It should be added that the schoolboy Latin example doesn’t account for language production any better than it does for understanding. Production also is driven by some of the speaker’s purposes and involves designing and executing a strategy for achieving them. And this process also is likely to be dependent on various aspects of “knowledge of the world”.
Is there any reason to postulate a separate decoding step in the process of understanding--a step that employs only the kind of knowledge required by our schoolboy Latin exercise? Or a separate encoding step in the process that passes through a decision to speak and eventuates in utterance? Will it ever really be possible to isolate out some particular part of a communicative transaction that could be performed by anyone with recourse only to the resources that are sometimes attributed to KOL?
[For any who may be interested, I’ve discussed some related points in the following:
Grace, George W. 1986. Perlocutionary Translation. Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 3, number 26. Computer Printout. Also available as http://www2.hawaii.edu/~grace/eln26.html.
Grace, George W. 1989. Recognition Strategy and Analysis Strategy in Language Use. Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 3, number 37. Computer Printout. Also available as http://www2.hawaii.edu/~grace/eln37.html.
Grace, George W. 1997. Linguistic Change: 5. The individual's knowledge of language. Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 4, number 6. Internet WWW page at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~grace/elniv6.html.
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