About HSL
The grammatical tradition in linguistics focuses on language, which is an abstraction. The conventional view of language is typically represented (or merely discussed) in terms of something like this:
This conventional view accepts that of what is normally taken into account in linguistics, only the sound of speech is concrete, and everything “above” that, from the phonemic to the semantic, is abstract. A number of authors (one of the earliest in the twentieth century being Benjamin Lee Whorf) have compared this situation to that in physics, or in another of the natural sciences, but the comparison is invalid. While one could call the theoretical objects of physics (atoms, electrons, quarks, etc.) “abstract”, it is accurate to do so only in one sense. The theoretical objects may be abstractions, but they are intended to model corresponding aspects of an objective, physical reality. This is not the case with phonemes, archiphonemes, morphemes, clauses, theta-rules, transformations, phrase-structure rules, and so on, which can be seen only as purely “mental objects”. They do not have their corresponding aspects in the physical domain.
While a chair can be thought of as containing atoms, electrons, quarks, etc., the sound of speech contains only waves of kinetic energy possessing varying intensities across a range of frequencies, varying over time. “Morphemes” and “clauses”, for example, are not among its real-world, physical components.
Since such “mental objects” exist only by virtue of having been created by assumption, the standard “data” of linguistics are not scientific data at all (as Esa Itkonnen has noted in various works dating from the 1970’s and 1980’s). This applies not only to the nearly ubiquitous self-intuitional “data”, but to all purported “data” which contains “mental objects” (Ferdinand de Saussure’s “objects of language”), since they are all created by assumption. In contrast, Hard-Science Linguistics takes as its data only objects and events observable in space and time (to paraphrase Itkonnen), never the so-called “observations” of grammaticality which are in actuality merely projections of a linguist’s mental states onto the external world. Everything labelled “abstract” in the diagram above is excluded from Hard-Science Linguistics.
This puzzles many linguists and students of linguistics. Because of their prior assumption of language, they see only speech sounds as concrete: surely, everything else is abstract. If we eliminate abstractions, we are left with almost nothing, they would say: we certainly are not left with enough to understand language.
But understanding language is not among the goals of Hard-Science Linguistics. The goal of Hard-Science Linguistics is to understand how people communicate. Once we accept this new goal in place of the goal of understanding language, we see the “problem” of having nothing left simply go away. In fact, we see that it is the original picture which was missing the most important parts.
Consider a simple example of two people communicating: a customer checking out in a grocery store and the cashier with whom the customer interacts.
Here we have what is represented in Hard-Science Linguistics as two COMMUNICATING INDIVIDUALS in a LINKAGE. The communicating individual is the theoretical representation of aspects of the person relevant to a general ability to communicate. The linkage is the representation of two or more people communicating in their surroundings. The linkage here consists of two PARTICIPANTS, in the ROLE PARTS “customer” and “cashier”. A participant is the representation of the aspects of a person relevant to the ability to communicate in a particular type of linkage. The role part is a representation of the functional relation of the person to other aspects of the interaction. Also relevant to the linkage are the SETTING, [Grocery store] — the representation of the physical surroundings — and a number of PROPS, [Cash register], [Credit card], [Counter], [Head of lettuce], and so on — representing relevant objects. Energy (light, sound waves, kinetic energy, etc.) transferring information among the entities within these surroundings is represented in terms of CHANNELS.
For convenience, we can label the participants by their role parts, [Customer] and [Cashier]. We can label the linkage [Grocery check-out]. This provides us with the opportunity to consider two separate system levels for analysis: (1) the level of the linkage and (2) the level of the communicating individual / participant.
The first corresponds roughly to the “social” level of traditional sociolinguistics, the second, to the “psychological” level of general and psycholinguistics. However, those traditional disciplines are riddled with confusions between mental and physical domains (concrete objects and abstract “mental objects”), while the two levels of analysis available in Hard-Science Linguistics focus only on physical-domain entities approachable via observations of the real world.
Introspective methods, such as the generation of examples by the linguist for the application of his/her own grammaticality judgments, interpretations of ambiguity or synonymy, and so on, are simply irrelevant to the real-world study of people communicating.
Similarly, “observations” which depend upon the “knowledge of language” of the linguist are not observations of external events, but are themselves projections of properties of the “observer” onto the external world. For example, sound waves represent physical events which can be observed, as does the change in position of an object, or the direction of a person’s gaze, or the changes in an fMRI scan of a person’s brain. In contrast, words and sentences are not physical-domain objects which can be observed, but are “mental objects” whose very existence in a person’s subjective experience is a result of that person’s properties.
We can see that this is the case because the purported properties of a word are not there to be observed in the same way that the density or mass of a rock can be measured. Whether pies is a plural noun or singular and whether it refers to a pastry or a household pet depend on whether the observer is said to speak English or Polish.
We can see this in how we view words as compared to other, real-world, objects. If I have a 25¢ coin in one hand, and another in my left. I might hold up the coin in my right hand and ask, “What is this?” The answer will be “A quarter.” If I do the same with the coin in my left hand, the answer will (again) be “A quarter.” Now suppose I point at some marks on the coin in my right hand and ask, “What is this?” The answer will be (assuming I was pointing at the marks that look something like this: STATES), “That’s the word ’states’.” Now, if I repeat this with the coin in my left hand, the answer will again be “That’s the word ’states’.” Now why is this the case? Why is it, “a quarter”, but “the word ’states’”? Why not “the coin ‘quarter’” or “a ’states’”? Obviously, it is because the person being asked sees a different coin in each hand, but the same word on each coin. Now, since we know that the same physical object cannot exist in two different places at the same time, we know that the word ’states’ is not a physical object. It cannot be something “out there” on the coin. It exists, rather, in the subjective experience of the person, as a result of that person’s properties.
Now, some linguists have leapt to the conclusion that Hard-Science Linguistics is simply Neo-Behaviorism. This is incorrect. The Behaviorists limited their theories to formulations of stimulus-response because they inappropriately treated all things which could not be directly observed as “abstractions”. This is the same error of linguists who treat only speech articulations and sound waves as concrete, and everything else in human communication as “abstract”. Indeed, language is an abstraction, a vast array of entities created by assumption. But the people and their properties, the objects involved in a communicative event and their properties, the surroundings, and the energy flow among all of them (not just the sound waves of speech but other sound waves, light waves, and other kinetic energy) are all concrete, all there in the physical domain.
So, in Hard-Science Linguistics, by eliminating language and focusing on people and other relevant aspects of the physical domain, it is not that we are left with speech and nothing else. Rather, we are able to take up all the real-world considerations of people communicating which linguistics traditionally has ignored.