1. LANGUAGE ORIGINS SOCIETY
In preparation
LANGUAGE ORIGINS SOCIETY
March 2015
EMBODIED LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR
KANT AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC
Robin Allott

2. ABSTRACT So what has Kant got to do with language or grammar?
A great deal. Not only the massive effort in the Critique of Pure Reason to analyse and make clear the nature and application of terms used to discuss the functioning of mind which form an important segment of the lexicons of all languages and all nations but also his consideration in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the distinction between terms used to describe and categorise the external world (originally and basically Aristotle’s Categories) and those which derive not from external reality but from the innate structure of the human mind - or, as we would now recognise, the innate structure of the language-equipped human brain. Kant is concerned with the relation between the internal world of the human and the external world, between the ‘mind’ and ‘reality’. What we are given is what we perceive but not knowing what it is beyond what the senses show us, as Kant would term “the dingen an sich, the things in the world independent of our perception of them - essentially Kant’s distinction between ‘phenomena’ - what appears to us through the operation of senses, vision and other forms, and ‘noumena’, the forms constructed in our minds by which we represent to ourselves characteristics of what we take to be objects in the external world, postulated things, what the mind supposes the external objects to be without having any possibility of directly observing them.

3. In modern terms, before the development of neurology and neuroscience, Kant was attempting to explore the structure of the brain, the innate organisation of the brain essential for the functional systems of the living body, action, perception, hearing, touch, feeling, the whole range of senses with which human beings were endowed, not in addition to the inheritance from animals generally but as the central structures of the animal inheritance. For humans in evolution, though of course Kant could know nothing of this, the body came before the mind - with the human mind eventually transformed, constructed, by building on pre-existing bodily structures to make possible the vital linkage between speech and external reality. Before we get on to Kant in the totality and the detail, perhaps we should turn our attention first to ‘grammar’, an ill-defined topic not without complexities and difficulties and ceaseless disputes. Over the last 100 years since Ferdinand de Saussure, the academic world has devoted a massive, multi-faceted and perhaps in many respects misdirected effort to grammatical issues in the widest sense.

4. The direct relevance of Kant was demonstrated by a major advance in neuroscience.
In 2014 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to John O'Keefe (with May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser) for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain, an "inner GPS" that makes it possible to orient ourselves in space, demonstrating a cellular basis for higher cognitive function. John O'Keefe discovered the first component of this system in He found a type of nerve cell in the hippocampus that was always activated when a rat was at a certain place in a room. Other nerve cells were activated when the rat was at other places. O'Keefe concluded that these "place cells" formed a map of the room. In the BBC’s Life Scientific series (11 March 2015) John O’Keefe described how (with his student assistant) the discovery was made: “of course I had always had an interest in philosophy and I knew about Kant, Immanuel Kant, the 18th Century German philosopher who had supposed that one of the most crucial attributes that the mind had was space, time was another one, and that you needed this to actually even begin to make any sense of your observations of the world so that you didn’t learn about spaces from the world but you came to your experience with the world having this representation.”

5. References:
Allott, R The Motor Theory of Language: Origin and Function. In Language Origin: A Multidisciplinary Approach ed. J. Wind et al. NATO ASI. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Allott R Motor theory of language in relation to syntax In Syntactic iconicity and linguistic freezes ed. M. E. Landsberg Mouton de Gruyter.
Allott R. A new view of irregular verbs: Application of the motor theory of language htttp://
Allott R Time and Consciousness Wadham College Oxford
Allott R Kant's categories and function words How children acquire language: the motor theory account In The Child and the World 1-48 Able Publishing.
Allott R. Animating Greek verbs.
Buzsáki G Cognitive neuroscience: Time, space and memory.
Nature May 30;497(7451): doi: /497568a.
Buzsáki G1, Peyrache A2, Kubie J Emergence of Cognition from Action. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol Mar 9. pi: [Epub ahead of print]
Casasanto D. Jasmin, K The Hands of Time: Temporal gestures in English speakers’ DOI !"cog Cognitive Linguistics;
Howard MW, Eichenbaum H Time and space in the hippocampus. Brain Res. Nov [Epub ahead of print ]
Janiak, Andrew "Kant's Views on Space and Time", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
O’Keefe J. Dostrovsky J The hippocampus as a spatial map: Preliminary evidence from unit activity in the freely-moving rat. Brain Res Nov;34(1):171-5.

6. The Rationale of Tense Systems
Motor Theory and Tense
The Rationale of Tense Systems
The Motor Theory of Language Origin and Function is that language was the outcome of the exaptation of the structure and elements of the animal motor system to form the structures and elements of language and speech. Given the centrality of the motor system, through its link to the motor system language developed in direct and specific integration with the existing bodily systems for perception and action. Gesture and speech as aspects of motor programming emerged together as parts
of a single system. Sound structures of words were modelled on the elements
going to form patterns of bodily action in gesture. The elements of gesture replicated as motor programs the equally motoric form of the elements going to form sounds, the motor processes of articulation, the phonemes of human speech. Human phonemes had their sources in the (mute) bodily movement patterns of a wide range of quadruped animals with similar bodily structures and organisation to the human species as extensive investigation has shown over a long period.

7. Against this background to look more closely at the patterning of tenses in
a selection of languages. A comparative tense-study. There are many interesting possibilities for choosing a small number of languages where tense-patterns differ radically, or in some cases where there are no conjugated tenses, for example contrasting Korean or Japanese with Chinese or Hawaian with ancient Greek. Being less ambitious the most straightforward way is to look first at some
languages close to home in Europe, French and German with a side-look at English tenses and formations. These languages have been studied intensively over the centuries, their origins traced with more or less plausibility back to
hypothetical proto-IndoEuropean. There is less uniformity in lexicon, syntax
and tense-systems than one might expect.

8. All three have tense systems for present and past tenses but English and German form the future and some other tenses by the use of auxiliary verbs, ‘werden’ and ‘will’. All three have regular formations for the past (historic) tense but also have complicated systems of irregular past forms. There can be disagreement about the counting of the irregular forms; the standard account is that there are 638 irregular forms in English, 200 in German (classed as ‘strong verbs’) and 370 or more in French - obviously making a fully correct use of each of these languages a daunting task for the second-language learner. In addition, to make things more complicated some of the most frequently used verbs in each of these languages are radically irregular, termed ‘suppletive’ because in the extended conjugations more than one basal verb root may be introduced. There are two or three suppletive verbs in each of the language – for such essential meanings as ‘to be’ ‘to go’ ‘to stand’ ‘to have’. Apart from the suppletive verbs knowledge of irregular verbs in French is not much help in learning irregular verbs in English or German – and correspondingly for German and French (though some English forms are the same as some German strong verbs).

9. Here a quotation from an interesting article by Ljuba Veselinova who is an expert who has written extensively on suppletive verbs. In describing these she says, treatments of the phenomenon of suppletion range widely to the point of being complete opposites. A strong tendency exists to regard suppletion as an anomaly, historical artefact, and generally of little theoretical interest. I think this is definitely the case, though one must mention that suppletion is not limited in any way to French or German or English, it is widely observed across a huge range of languages and what is surprising and perhaps suggestive is that suppletive verbs tend to be within the same general category of very frequently used, very necessary verbs like go and see and have and stand and so on, the same sort of little verbs which contribute greatly to all continuous speech. Veselicova continues by saying that there is a counter tendency to view the phenomenon as a functionally motivated result of language change. For a long time the database on suppletion similarly to many other phenomena was restricted to Indo-European languages.

10. with the solidifying of wider cross-linguistic studies and linguistic typology since the 1990s, the database on suppletion has been substantially extended, large scale cross-linguistic studies have shown that the phenomena is observed by many different languages around the globe. In addition it appears as a systematic cross-linguistic phenomenon that can be correlated with well defined language areas, language families, specific lexemic groups and specific slots and paradigms. So in the choice between those two views referred to by Veselicova obviously in this presentation I am firmly on the side of the significance of suppletion, of the suppletive verbs seen so widely in world languages, but I would also add the great significance also of the existence in many grammars, the grammars of many languages, of large numbers of irregular verbs not only in modern languages but also in ancient languages like Greek and Latin; irregular verbs are prominent as well. The existence of irregular verbs is also suggestive and raises the question, how functionally they have come to exist, what was the motivation for them? Setting against the existence of irregular verbs and suppletive verbs, a natural question to ask is, why historically or just modernly, should suppletive verbs and irregular verbs be so marked a feature of many different languages?

11. If one were to try to construct a rigidly logical system of tenses as a new effort the immediate inclination would be not to have any irregular verbs and not to have any suppletive verbs, that is conjugations using more than one basic root verb, but just straightforward patterns for the present, the future and the past definite.
The experiment has been conducted by the group of people involved in the development of Esperanto. Here a few sentences in Esperanto to illustrate the approach that the Esperantists have followed:
Prezenta verbotempo en Esperanto estas plene regula (Present tense formed by using 'a' followed by 's')
La autoroj de Esperanto faris la pasintan tempon plene regula uzante 'i' sekvata de 's’.
The future tense is also simply regular using the ending 'os’.
The six verb inflections consist of three tenses and three moods. They are present tense -as, future tense -os, past tense -is, infinitive mood -i, conditional mood -us and jussive mood -u (used for wishes and commands). Verbs are not marked for person or number. Thus, kanti means "to sing", mi kantas means "I sing", vi kantas means "you sing", and ili kantas means "they sing".
Very simple and logical ! But if the answer is so easy why in ancient and modern
languages have suppletive and irregular verbs been introduced and have persisted over the generations not yielding to the obvious pressure for simplification - which has led to changes in other aspects of language, for example simplification in the spelling of words?

12. Maybe that’s very simple and logical but if the answer is so easy, why in ancient and modern languages have suppletive and irregular verbs been introduced and persisted over the generations not yielding to the obvious pressure for simplification which has led to changes in other aspects of language, for example, simplification and the spelling of words. There have been attempts, for example, in Basic English and also by the Academie Francaise to issue rules for the formation of the French language but all these have made little impression on the spoken language.

13. There are no dictators for forms of language in modern languages, no grammarians prescribe what forms are correct and which forms are incorrect. What decides the forms of language are simply what the language speaking community decides to accept. There may be modifications in language deriving from changes in the composition of the population over time, but there is nothing deliberate or thought out or controlled in the way they change. In relation to language there is a parallel to what one sees in the theory of evolution. In language as in bodily formation, in changes in species, what happens is the survival of the fittest. That we have irregular verbs and suppletive verbs is because for some reason English and other major language communities

14. have been modified by what the language communities have felt to be, in practice, in what they say and do and how they use the language, in some way or other the fittest forms. In what way can words and tenses, aspects of grammar, be fittest? What is fittest is decided only by finding what exists and what survives, but why should these forms, awkward and unnecessary as they seem, survive? Is there any way we can find out the underlying reason for their survival? Survival means is that speakers of the language find the words come closest to expressing the meanings they want to convey.

15. We have the past tense for the verb ‘to go’ in English as ‘I went’, ‘you went’ and ‘we went’ and so on, even though the present tense is ‘I go’, ‘you go’, ‘we go’ because ‘I went’, ‘you went’ fit more closely to what the speaker tries to convey. There’s something in the speech sound elements which go to form the words ‘I went’ which comes closer to what people want to convey than any simple formula for the formation of the past tense. Occasionally children over-learn. They learn first ‘I went’ Later when they have told that past tenses of verbs are usually formed by adding ‘ed’ they occasionally are heard to say ‘I go-ed’

16. There’s something about the construction of a suppletive verb like ‘I went’, or something about the construction of an irregular tense for ‘I sing’, ‘I sang’, which seems necessary seems perfectly satisfactory for the English language community, something about the pattern of speech sounds forming the irregular tenses or the suppletive verbs which makes them appropriate. All very puzzling. Some process, some force operating, so far not been identified, recognised, discovered by the thousands of linguists who write penetratingly about language. What is that force

17. or process?
This leads onto a much wider question, the functioning of language in the brain, the evolutionary origin of language., the idea that language is originally derived by exaptation from the motor system and that the connection between words and their meanings are essentially the product of the related motor patterning of articulation and the motor patterning of gesture. The gesture origin of language is at the root of the existence of tenses with irregular formations and of tenses with suppletive verbs.
Looking at the regular or irregular verbs, what exactly are they trying to convey? Primarily the central meaning of the particular verb but also that the verb is being linked to a very specific aspect of present, past or future activity. The basic verb has to be modified in some way to point to the different

18. time element. In French for regular verbs like penser, one can point to the future by adding a standard suffix, add to the infinitive form the speech sounds ‘a’ and ‘I’ to make je penserai. The speech sounds ‘a’ and ‘i’ in some way point to the future. Was the addition of ‘a’ and ‘i’ arbitrary or did it emerge naturally over time? The addition of ‘a’ and ‘I’ is specific to the French regular future. As a romance language French is descended from Latin but Latin does not have ‘a’ ‘i’ to indicate the future. For example, for the regular verb amare, the Latin future adds different speech sounds from those in French; Latin adds the speech sounds ‘b’ ‘o’ to make amabo, ‘I will love’ - why should French not have followed the Latin form?

19. The conclusion in this presentation is that the suffixes attached to verb roots to express tense directly change the gestural pattern associated with the tense. There is a systematic attempt in the formation of tenses to attach to the verb root, any particular verb root, some additional speech sounds and therefore some additional gesture or element which reflects the time, the tense, the point of time, the time reference for future, past or present. To interrupt this comment slightly by reference to the brain, the brain of the human being obviously is so arranged that it can envisage the future, can remember the past, it can recognise the present and so there must be structures in the brain which are relevant but which could be discovered by sufficiently acute investigation of the functioning of the brain as being related to the position in time which at any moment a human being is adopting when he speaks his language and refers to the past, the future or the present.

20. Quite apart from the formation of tenses, the future tense or the past tense or the present tense, in English and other languages there are whole arrays of words which carry implications about the timing of actions, the timing of perceptions, the timing of thoughts. Words like before and after, now, when, earlier and later, whole arrays of words, many of which would be treated as function words in the classification of lexicon by standard linguistics procedures. These words about time are acquired in a rather mysterious way by children later than words for objects and clearly perceived actions. A comparative study of this is referred to in one of the papers given as a reference at the start of this presentation. In addition to listed time and space words in the lexicon of English, French or German, in the tense systems there is a collection of suffixes which can be

21. attached to verb roots to convey a point in time, a perception of the future or a perception of the past, suffixes and prefixes in the conjugation of tenses in all languages. Material referred to in the references at the beginning of this presentation, presented images showing what difference the endings used in the conjugation of tenses can make to the gestural patterning of a verb root when a suffix is added. The way these images of differences are arrived at is parallel to the extensive material available on links between particular words and actions, and gestures clearly linked to the meanings of words. What is found, not only in English or French or German but in many other languages (in Ancient Greek and Latin and modern languages generally is that the change in the gestural pattern associated with the future tense of a verb is that the main pattern

22. representation of the meaning of any particular action or object verb represents the future by a stretching forward of the representation, the future in gestural terms is the basic gesture associated with the verb root projected forward some way, in a way perfectly comprehensible since we normally, in bodily way to indicate the future it is found by people who study gestures that it is represented uniformly by stretching forward, pointing forward with the arm, moving forward the arm to indicate your thinking of the future. And similarly to indicate the past, the past as a noun so to speak in gesture research is shown that the arm and hand point backwards. They use the phrase behind, at a point behind the ego one doesn’t need to introduce the go into all this, it’s simply we move our arm backwards to, say, represent as a noun the past, conception of the past. Now obviously that’s such a broad

23. representation in gesture, if one tried to add it to any particular verb root to indicate the past it would totally destroy the gestural representation of the meaning of that word. So what we find is that besides the gesture representing the past as a noun, as an idea, in the case of the past tense of verbs we say you have to go and then you have went, and the past of go is represented by a slight movement of the position of the arm in the gesture out to the right hand side. So that is how the past is represented. And the effect of this is that the gestural structure of the verb root is maintained but the whole gesture is moved slightly to the right to indicate that this is the past. The future in a regular verb and in an irregular verb as well, is shown for the verb root by the gesture associated with that root moving forward directly in front of the head to show that future is associated with that pattern of gesture. In this way the pattern of gesture which gives the meaning and link in one’s brain to the particular object or action is maintained but the idea of future is added to modify the total gesture slightly by stretching it forward slightly. So that’s the description.

24. Gestural forms for English and French Tenses of ‘to drink’ ‘boire’
Present Future and Past
Present - basic gesture for DRINK Future - forward movement of complete gesture
Past - movement of complete gesture to the right side

25. Gestural forms for English and French Tenses of ‘to go’ ‘aller’ Suppletive verbs with auxiliaries
1-2 Present two segments Future (extended forward) Past (shift to right)
7 Incorrect ‘regular’ formation of past tense of ‘to go’ GO_ED (generates wrong gesture)

26. Movement as change of (? relative) position ?
Time and Space - Philosophy Neuroscience and Language
sleep as alternative to death?
Space as (? Relative) position
Time (objective) as momentary positional state ? Change
Movement as change of (? relative) position ?
Relation of time and space ?
Kaleidoscopic change ?
The existent body as the base position (relative position ?)
subjective time - perception of body and brain change from moment to moment

27. Cosmic time - moment to moment - reshaping of patterns within the unchanging base totality ?
Individual time - moment to moment reshaping of patterns (relative positions) within the individual totality ?
Kant ? Heraclitus ?
Parmenides - Anaxagoras ?
Sleep and continuity of time ?
Movement - Berthoz ?
Time and Space - Philosophy Neuroscience and Language

28. CONCLUSION
1. Kant correctly discerned the essential innateness for human beings of the concepts
of time and space, noted by O'Keefe in his pioneering experimental investigation of place-cells.
2. As innate constituents of its body and brain organisation. Space and time are not
concepts to be learnt by instruction or observation. They are the structure in which we live and operate.
3. Space and time are what any creature finds itself in, operating in.
4. Space and time are part of the organisation of the total central neural system. With
animals, for example, the just born calf or colt will get up on its feet and move around successfully in space and time from the moment of its birth.
5. What language has been for humanity is a gradual coming to consciousness of the structures of space and time within which we operate.
6. Before we had such a thing as speech and before we had such a thing as gesture, communicative gesture, human beings were hunting and living and moving and planning in space and time..

29. 7. The grammar of language in the widest sense is the manifestation of the gradual
awareness of the elementary features of space and time and the transfer of this awareness of each individual feature of space and time to the articulatory mode so that a sound could be made which is distinctively related to some aspect of space or time
8. Despite the apparent diversity of grammars throughout the 6000 languages of the world the basis on which languages or grammars are built is pre-speech, pre-language, is the same basis in terms of body and brain organisation.
9. The attachment of sound to an aspect of space or time does not need to have been invented once and handed down over the ages spreading gradually to all 6000 languages.
10. To make a sound related to a particular aspect of space or time would be a possibility for any single human being or single human group.
11. The number of external objects which are dealt with in the lexicon of all languages can be immense and growing and diverse and each of them can have acquired a specific articulation in the form of the word by which it is called where the word by which the object (or action) is called has a distinct relation in some way to the characteristics of its shape or the sound it makes or the action it indicates..

30. 12. In contrast for space and time particles without any external visual or motor pattern the accretion, acquisition, of grammar particles can be an aspect of the total growing consciousness of the human being, the awareness of the innate elements of the human being's own functioning in thought and memory and action
13. The basis of all grammars for human beings is closely related to the basis of organisation of space and time for all animals which have reached a certain level of complexity. One can assume that the basis for the analysis of space and time exists (without articulation) in closely related animal species to human beings, particularly primates. The ability to make use directly of the knowledge of aspects of space and time is widespread and demonstrated in the many remarkable performances of a whole range of animal species.
14. Some guidance as to the neural, neuroscientific, basis for the construction of grammars by different groups of humans, can be found, can be explored, from two sources. One is close examination of the behaviour in time and space of freely moving research animals, particularly rats, where most of the work has been done; the second can be observed in the acquisition gradually by small human children over time of function words and of tense and declension variations.