Professor Ronnie Cann, Personal Chair in Linguistic Semantics, delivered his inaugural lecture entitled "Doing Language".

Abstract:

One of the features of human language that distinguishes it from the call systems of other species is that the former can be used to refer to situations, objects and other things that are not in the immediate context of an utterance. It is, on the other hand, also well recognised that certain aspects of an utterance, written or spoken, depend for their interpretation on the context in which the utterance occurs. Expressions like "here", "now", "she", "that person" depend on the context to identify what is meant while the import of clauses like "it’s hot in here" or "I’ve got a headache" depend on the social situation of the speakers and the situations they are engaged in for their precise interpretation.

Less often considered, at least within linguistic theories, is the extent to which contextual dependence pervades natural human languages that are notoriously vague, with expressions used often only being partially expressive of a concept that we can nevertheless readily use and understand. Indeed, it is abundantly clear from any cursory look at "real" natural language data, spoken or written, that languages display an endemic sensitivity to context so that meanings, intentions, and other information that they can convey may never be fully fixed. Indeed, it appears that languages are inherently dynamic in use and structure and that is this notion of language as a practice or process that allows us to exploit inherent context sensitivity for effective and generally efficient use of linguistic resources in acts of communication, even with ourselves. Notoriously, however, neither of these properties, context dependence and dynamicity, are typically addressed by current theories of grammar.

In this talk, I argue, to the contrary, that they are central to understanding natural language in general and the grammatical properties of particular languages and that the current view that languages are analysable as context independent objects is untenable and that a radical rethink of current approaches to grammatical theory is necessary if we are ever to understand the nature of human language.

Recorded on Tuesday 27 November 2012 at the University of Edinburgh's Appleton Tower lecture theatre.