Dear Velina,

By the way, 'Happy New Year' for you and everybody else in this site and and in the whole world.

Regarding your question. I think there must be, I shoud say, there must have been a kind of pragmatics for or discoursive performance in 'the' pristine language' the human being performed.  In this way, Language pre-existed humans, but not the human performance of it.

I believe you should look into the complexity of the PRONOUN category, not only regarding the form but also the use of pronouns. A concordancing software with authrentic language corpora would be useful in your search. Good luck.

My five centavitos

Thank you Jorge. Happy New Year to you too.

Pre-existing... Pronouns... I try to follow.

It seems to me that you are somehow involving self-consciousness?

I'm interested in the the idea of identity through discourse. It is a very complex area in which the use of pronouns is key. Can you imagine, who was the first human being "person' who said (though) 'I'. Very difficult to even imagine. And to who(m) did this person say 'you' (implied as when we say something to someone. I am interested in deixis, the study of deictic words like pronouns, a very exciting field.

My five cents 

Jorge, So you are dealing with self-consciousness. True. (?)

If I understand you correctly, I don't belive there is a performance "constant" as such, even within a single language. I would suggest performance parameters, in terms of complexity (syntax, lexicon, semantics and rate of speaking), with speakers adjusting the complexity of their language depending on listener feedback. There would be a physiological maximum, possibly based on phoneme duration, in addition to auditory memory capacity. Perhaps phoneme production rate data is available for language comparison? This article may be of interest;

http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_to%20appear_Language.pdf

Thank you Aidan,

Yes, you are right that is what I'm speaking about in general!

"Speakers adjusting the complexity of their language depending on listener feedback."

However I guess there would be a physiological maximum, possibly based on "computation" and WM resources as the process runs using these all resources.

I will of course read the suggested paper, thank you!

If you are curious to see why do I think so, you may take a look on the old paper about the WM and language on my profile, as well as on the Fibonacci-tree calculus.

Velina, what do you mean by ‘performance’? This is culturally and historically motivated. We may say that Homeric Greek was more performant than Latin, because—according to accepted axiological references—Greek literature and Greek philosophy were much ahead the Latin counterparts. 

Sorin,

Thank you. I try to speak about something like computational performance that relates time-capturing-meaning in the context of information/knowledge exchange. Of course the "hard" for the computation concepts should have more complex/abstract meaning. In this sense they are culturally and historically determined, right.

OK, I am afraid you have to have a clearer definition/scope of what you are planning to study, otherwise all seems to me as too vaguely contoured. If the contours are too vague, you cannot except precision either.

I agree, Sorin, you are right.

The problem arises becouse I don't know to whom and with wich terms to ask such a question. As the process that I point is the cognition, with reguards of language. Should I speak about concepts and features or should I speak about grammar or perhaps about the phonological level. These all (with many more language properties) are carying meaning and treated by a single "machine".  Which machine has a limitted working memory resourses. So... As an example, it has been shown that primates can mannage a language with only  concepts (nouns) of style... triangle is banana and circle is chair. But can't accord a sign to events (verbs) as verbs are much more abstract. This result has been interpreted (and I agree) with the fact of the  more limitted cognitive resources (namely working memory) that primats have compared to humans.

But since then nothing happens (I think) - are we affraid to discouver that human cognitive resources are limited?

If you ask me, I think your scope is too large for a single-person enquiry. Without a clear definition of what you plan to do, and without a limited scope, the discussion is too ambiguous and without clear limits.

Yes. You are right, Sorin.

I can drop out the phonological level. We agreed on the concepts - the question is related to learning (individual and civilisational).

Computiational complexity of synactic-semanic features alone?

Does that make sense?

My problem is the term ‘performance’, and perhaps the same for others. What does ‘performance’ mean in this context, and—once defined—how can we measure it?

Sorin, thank you. Yes, what is performance in the context of my question?

I see Performance as the capacity of human language to create a meaningful picture of what has been said/conveyed by the language. So I imagine (as a first approximation) on one axe the complexity of the meaningful picture created by the language message and on the other - some composite (time -number of word forms-grammatical rules) that have been used to create this picture. Perhaps the space is more that 2D. (I know that computers have damaged my brain... Of course I don't know how exactly to measure the complexity of the meaningful picture, but  I suppose that such thing exists and that it  can be evaluated with a set of convenient criteria. )

That all deals with a kind of evaluation of the "computational" resources. They  should include "mental" procedures of treatment of the information flows and working memory resources. I agree that we can not measure them inside of the brain. But they certainly show up on the language level, in some statistical sense. In all languages.

What comes to my mind as possible strategy  - one has to determine how complex is (I say whatever, but just for the example) the calculus of the syntactic role using for example Genitive or... how long is the average (clear) sentence when the language is synthetic v/s when it is not... I don't know.

An individual's cognitive processing capacity is relatively limited,even for a gifted individual, when compared to the exponential maginification in processing power achieved through spoken and probably more significantly, written communication, when groups of people can asynchronously collaborate on processing and co-ordinating  complex problems and tasks. Once learning has started, when an individual performs a cognitive task, they are benefiting from the cognitive processing of other individuals. Individual's deprived of contact with other people during their development generally demonstrate severely impaired cognition.

Generally, there is a degree of syntactic processing preceding semantic processing, otherwise, what would be our motivation to communicate? However, due to the distributional properties of lexical items and the markhovian structure of linguistic sequences sometimes we can sometimes complete a sentence before someone.........

and you are much more likely to be able to successfully complete my sentences than you are to begin the next one.

Your definition of working memory is somewhat underspecified; various memory processes are involved when language is processed - long term memory for semantic context, short term memory for maintaining relevance by remembering recent comments, auditory memory for lexical and syntactic processing, 

Other processing is at work also, for example, embodied simulation. Some of these processes and the trade-offs are described in the paper below - is this the sort of thing you were thinking about?

Language occupies the strange territory between understanding and non-understanding; sometimes we are on one side, sometimes the other. It is this fuzziness which sometimes eludes the operations of the researcher, and is part of the strength and flexibility of language.

Agreed, Aidan. Completely.

But do you suggest that it is not evaluable - this kind of communicative performence? As the performing subjects are humans with brains/minds?

Excuse me, you forgot to attach the "in the paper below - is this the sort of thing you were thinking about?", would you, please, attach it?

It happens to me too... but I hope that you could imagine what am I thinking about if you take a look on an old model attached here (I hope I'll attach it). Don't be very critical to my English there, please.

Conference Paper A Generalized Net for Modeling Working Memory and Language Processing

Sorry for that  mistake,  I'll just upload the paper for now. Could you send me a copy of your paper please. I am having trouble downloading from researchgate. Thanks

Aidan, yes, yes, Barsalou, Exactly!  "Concepts within a broader situational context that

includes perceptual, motor, affective and social information... "  This is an excellent  model of conceptual knowledge, including the "Basic level concepts",  I completely agree. I think this type of reasoning includes somehow the global workspace...

Excuse me, I forgot to say you thank you for the link... Thank you!

Critical Social Psychology, and Social Constructionism, approaches human language as performative - as action-orientated. From this perspective, talk (talk and text) is functional, consequential, constructive and variable. Thus, a study of language represents a method (and theory) of studying directly those cognitive states which people make live in their discourse, and how they act to make sense of the world around them, and its contents. In other words, and to borrow John Austin's phrase. people do things with their words.

Thank you Lesley. Yes, I agree. Language is one excellent path to be followed when wanting to clarify the deep insides of human cognition. Perhaps the most complete and complex one.

However, I stand that the performers of this high-level cognitive task are homo sapiens and that they have some innate limits of the performance.  From where my question.

If you follow the general thrust of investigations of consciousness vs unconsciousness, then yes, there are limits to explicit performance resulting from limitations of working memory, and that most of our decision-making and discursive actions, for instance, operate at the tacit or unconscious level (see Bargh and Chartrand, 1999, for a really good critical review). Some suggest that we directly control only around 5% of actions. Which all means that what goes on at the unconscious, tacit level, is the playing field of interest, and it is those actions, functions, consequences and the like, which discourse analysis in the Critical Social Psychology tradition seeks to study - although most don't call it that!!

Lesley; you are right, thank you.

Language is very related to consciousness, even following some it is ... the same issue.  However, even knowing that it the very rationalistic and evolutionary sense language seems being mostly related to the development of the interaction between the self and the environment, and even if we add to this that it seems that the genetic roots of the language ability are related to the performance of the motor cortical areas, it seems to me that in Homo Sapiens there are cognitive resources specialized for language faculty only. It seems to me. I'm not sure. I suppose that a part of the apparatus of the working memory treatment is related to language alone.

Velina, who knows how the mind works! We can only examine the available evidence and seek to draw some reasoned conclusions. I think that the evolutionary development of language, its role in how we construct identity, interact with and make sense of our environment - and a myriad of other phenomena besides - is one of the most fascinating topics one could study. Good luck with our investigations - you are on an incredibly complex and deeply interesting road.

Lesley, yes, you are right - no one knows how the mind works. Exactly.  And honestly speaking, I don't think that we will know it one day.  We may go deep in neuroscience, in brain imaging, in cyto-skeleton quantum phenomena, in genetics, and enlarge to the explanation and models of consciousness, of cognition, of global workspace, of society, of civilization and of the Universe... and we will not know it. At least it is interesting. Thank you for saying "one of the most fascinating topics one could study". 

There could be some evidences about how should some processes which are related to cognitive capacities run, and namely -  where are their limits. I have imagined that the information exchange via language has certain limits of power and, because of that -  some more global rules. We could find out something of interesting that concerns all languages, but I don't know how...

So, thank you for wishing me luck... I need it. Thank you a lot.