Wikipedia:Peer review/Force Dynamics/archive2

Force Dynamics

Did you ever see the relation between trying to open a jammed door and arguing with a stubborn person? Well, the cognitive linguistic theory of Force Dynamics has something to say about it. Read this article and post your thoughts here. Non-experts are especially invited to comment. Is it clear enough? What can be improved? What is missing? Thank you for reviewing this article! — mark ✎ 15:19, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Earlier request at Wikipedia:Peer review/Force Dynamics/archive1. Resubmitting because last time it was here for a month and no-one looked at it, except for User:MIT Trekkie, who did an awesome EAL copyedit.

• I like this; a clear and, as far as I can tell, comprehensive enough overview of a complex area, though my expertise is limited. I've made a couple of small edits, mostly layout. I would ask why the list is both bulleted and lettered. Filiocht 15:58, Mar 1, 2005 (UTC)

• Good point. The letters refer to the elements in Figure 2. I've removed the bullets and indented the list items. — mark ✎ 16:24, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• It seems faily clear overall. A few terms could benefit from wikilinks to articles that explain them: for instance, "semantic category", "closed-class", "open-class". Also, you might add some external links if you can find anything sufficiently relevant and helpful. You'd be a better judge than I of whether this, this, this, this, or any of the links returned by these searches would be relevant or useful. --Jim Henry 19:28, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Clever searches :). It's a good idea to add external links. I'll review your suggestions and add the ones that suit best (and I have some in stock myself). As for the wikilinks: another good idea — I have added some wikilinkage as per your suggestion (incidentally, 'closed-class' and 'open-class' are slightly problematic because those notions are used in another sense than the traditional linguistic notions of Open class word and Closed-class word). Thanks for reviewing! — mark ✎ 21:23, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• In the context of the section Context does nominals mean nouns/noun phrases? --Theo (Talk) 17:44, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Yep. I changed it; nouns is more common indeed. — mark ✎ 18:34, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Interesting and unusual subject! The article is written in a simple, clear, helpful style, but I'm still barely able to get my mind round it, as the ideas are so unfamiliar compared with the few outdated linguistic concepts I've met before. It may actually be easier to grasp for somebody coming at it with even less linguistics than I have, and therefore fewer hindering preconceptions. I take this stupidity to be a valuable resource for peer review, since it'll make me mulishly demand grade-school level explication of every detail. Here goes:

1. I think the sentence "The diagram at the top of this page represents the sentence 'The door cannot open' Force-Dynamically" points the reader (well, me) wrong: scarily, it sounds like it claims the diagram represents only the sentence about the door. I'd at least turn it round to: "The sentence 'The door cannot open' can be Force-Dynamically represented by the diagram at the top of this page." Maybe I'd also immediately say something about what else--what classes of sentences and situations--the diagram can represent, though I'm unsure about that, it may not be a practical option. Still, I'd like the issue addressed somewhat, because my stupid-reader gut feeling is that the diagram could easily represent nearly 50% of force-dynamic sentences and situations, while another nearly 50% of them might be represented by its sibling (=the same except that the agonist is the stronger and movement results). And the feeling of a couple of simple diagrams doing for all, in turn, tends to cast doubt on how much help the theory can be for understanding "the cognitive basis of language". Help with this feeling is at hand, in the section "More complexity", but that still leaves me suspecting that the two simplest diagrams might represent most FD sentences. (Especially since sentence d in "More complexity" is so unnatural that it hints there might only be three convincing complex FD sentences altogether, a, b, and c. ;-))

2. When the account gets to "More complexity", an unspoken assumption also seems to be in place that we know how to decide which force is agonist and which antagonist. I for one was surprised to find the wind, the headmaster, the breaking of the dam and the abating of the wind to be antagonists; why wouldn't they be agonists? The wind is mentioned first, it's the grammatical subject, and it's the more active force, so I expected it to have "primacy", if anything did, and to be designated the agonist. What do the leaves of the book have going for them? That they're part of "my" book, and my point of view determines the matter? That the book existed before the gust did? Or, another idea, are we supposed to pick one alternative at random for each sentence, and produce one of two equally valid diagrams? I just think too much is assumed here.

3. The paragraph about how different representational devices are supposed to interact with one another is very abstract. It's not that it's hard to follow, but it just hardly conveys anything at all to the layman. I suppose the theoretical level of the problem makes it impossible to bring in an example and expound on how some particular other device doesn't play well with Force Dynamics? (Hey, draw an FD diagram of what happens when they meet! :-)) If it is at all possible, please try.

But these are all nits, it's an excellent article! The "Psychological basis" section is great--so short, yet does so much work, and really does expand my linguistic horizons. I like the conciseness myself, but it would also be interesting to hear if others think this section might benefit from being a little fuller. Bishonen | Talk 09:28, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Bishonen, these are not nits, these are very valuable, thorough and astute comments. Thank you very much. It will take some time to adress your 'multi-layered' points (I mean, they look like three points but they are full of other important questions and comments). Let me start with a general all-important point which I think is not made clear in the article at all yet, and which might be the basis for much of your questions:

There is a difference between the actual world and our conceptualization of it (philosophical chatter about reality aside) — and Cognitive Linguistics (and Force Dynamics with it) is about the latter. This is an extremely important point which merits a quick illustration. Imagine a row of twenty little lamps, close to each other. Put a translucent screen before them. Imagine the lamps being switched on and then directly off in succession, first number one, then number two, and so on up to number twenty. Imagine it all going very rapid. What would you see? Most people will say: 'I saw a light moving.' But, of course, there wasn't one light at all; there were twenty little lamps. And surely there wasn't any movement involved; only a succession of separate events. Yet this is how people conceptualize the situation. And the very cool thing about language is that this conceptualization shines through all the time. Language shows us the world the way we humans conceptualize it.

Now your point (1).

1a — I agree with you regarding the jammed door and the top right diagram; your suggestion is better so I've changed it.

1b — about the few simplest diagrams representing nearly all FD situations. Let me first say that I agree that the article absolutely should be more clear about this. Having said that, there are a few points to make here:

1. There are not two, but four basic diagrams. This of course relates to your point 2, so now you should know that part of my answer to that point will be that it actually does matter which force you dub the Agonist and which one is the Antagonist (I'll come back to that).
2. This four 'basic' diagrams reflect steady-state oppositions as opposed to the ones under 'More complexity' where change over time is a factor. To be sure, there are a lot of steady-state oppositions; but in any event, these do not make up 'nearly all' FD situations, if only because we don't conceptualize all FD situations to be of a 'steady-state' nature.
3. The idea that the basic diagrams cover almost all situations means (I think) that you only consider part of the information in the diagrams. For example, looking only at the resultant (action or inaction), it is indeed clear (and obvious) that half of the basic diagrams will cover half of the possible situations and that the other half will take care of the rest. But there's more to it, since it's all about our conceptualization of the situation. That is why the Antagonist/Agonist distinction is imporant; and the balance; and the intrinsic force tendency. Needless to say, this is not your fault; the article clearly puts the reader on the wrong track and this should be sorted out.

1c — about sentence d in 'More complexity'. Talmy himself gives the sentence 'The stirring rod's breaking let the particles settle'. I don't know if that is better than my 'abating wind' attempt; in any case, read my partial reply to your point 2 for a possible explanation of the awkwardness of sentences a-d.

Your point (2) — the unspoken assumption should be outspoken. There is actually a way to decide which force is going to be the Agonist and which one is to be the Antagonist. This is where Talmy's view on the matter really becomes clear so thank you for pointing this out. I can't answer your question yet, however; I've already seen that answering it will involve expanding the article by some thirty percent. This means that the article is not yet comprehensive at all, so thanks again for putting the finger right on the spot. I will be sorting this issue out (hate it to write incomplete articles), but I don't have the time for it at present. A fix of the article (and a partial answer to your question) will include the following bit of theory:

In Talmy's view, sentences without an agent like the ones in a-d are more basic than forms containing an agent. To quote him (2000a:421):

[T]he inclusion of an agent in a sentence, though often yielding a syntactically simpler construction, actually involves an additional semantic complex. An agent that intends the occurrence of a particular physical event, say, a vase's breaking, is necessarily involved in initiating a causal sequence leading to that event. This sequence must begin with a volitional act by the agent to move certain parts or all of his body. This in turn either leads directly to the intended event or sets off a further event chanin, of whatever length, that leads to the intended event.

To represent a whole sequence of this sort, many languages permit expression merely of the agent and of the final event, like English in I broke the vase. Here, the sequence's remaining elements are left implicit with their most generic values (...). The next element that can be added by itself to the overt expression is the one leading directly to the final event — that is, the penultimate event, or else just its (so-called) instrument, as in I broke the vase (by hitting it) with a ball. This privileged pair of events, the penultimate and the final, forms the identifying core of the whole agentive sequence. It can in fact be excerpted from there for exmpression as a basic precurso-result sequence, as in The ball's hitting it broke the vase.

Your point (3) — the article should indeed be more clear on this as well. An example of another representational device is a proposition. Propositional logic determines how propositions are supposed to interact with each other (e.g., when assessing the validity of an argument, we take information from the premises, compare this information with information found in the conclusion, and apply some logic, and determine whether the argument is valid or not). Now Goddard is saying something like: 'OK, we have propositional logic to take care of way propositions interact with one another; but where to fit those diagrams in? How do we 'extract' information from them and how do we know how to apply it, and where do we apply it?'. Let me throw in another quick and dirty example. Imagine that you have two files: one .ogg sound file (an audio recording of some play) and one .png picture file (a portrait of some guy). You are saying that both have much to do with each other. Now Goddard is asking: 'But how in the world are the different representational devices supposed to interact with one another? I.e., what kind of cognitive operation would be required to relate the 0's and 1's in the png-file to the 0's and 1's in the ogg-file?'

Now this of course is a very difficult question, opening sort of a Pandora's box of other interesting questions. If you hit edit in the 'Limitations and criticism' section you'll see the statement of Newman 1996:xii (I've commented it out because it's a little long and because I thought it was reasonably summarized). Basically, he says: 'I don't care about that so much. We just intend to draw some parallels, we don't want another form of formal logic; language is simply more complex than that'. Not all cognitive linguists do think this is an unimportant issue; but the inherent distrust of formal logic as a model of natural language that many of them have certainly plays a role here. So in the background, there's another question lurking: can natural language be formalized just like the artificial language we call formal logic? Most cognitive linguists don't think so. Goddard, by the way, doesn't think so either. But I'm straying from the subject. Is my point clear? Again, I couldn't agree more with you that these things need to be clarified in the article. They will be, eventually.

Hope you don't mind the largish reply. Thanks for the food for thought! — mark ✎ 23:46, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Mark, I think much of the trouble may indeed have been that I looked at the diagrams through Formal Logic glasses, which made them seem so simple—too simple—and just as you say, I failed to take in the significance of change over time. The article does stress that that's significant, but, well, I just kept the same glasses on. :-( If readers are going to be that obstreperous, I'm not sure what you can do about it, other than just put still more emphasis on the importance of process and change, rather than of end result.

A nit, and this may be asking for "essay" or original research rather than a tertiary or whatever summary, so it might not be the kind of thing that even ought to be addressed in the article, but I was just wondering: if language "shows us the world the way we humans conceptualize it", and sentences without an agent are more conceptually "basic" (according to Talmy) than those with, then why are sentences of type d so gosh-darn awkward? Wouldn't you expect the language to accommodate them much more comfortably?

Thanks for the full answer! I can't say I've fully grasped what the 30% expansion would entail, but I'm looking forward to it. (Wanna checkout a more evolved play?) Best,--Bishonen | Talk 13:01, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

As for the second nit — this one again is a question mainly motivated by the incomplete account of Force Dynamics here (I'm starting to feel ashamed really). In starting with a neat overview of the more simple diagrams, I tried to make the article a little pedagogic. But apparently I stopped too early (the 30% expansion has to do with that, too; Talmy's account is much more complicated than the article makes it look). Talmy is by no means saying that awkward sentences are more conceptually basic and the article should clarify that. However, I don't actually remember Talmy being very clear about the difference between semantic simplicity and conceptual basality (I agree with you that the part I quoted above seems to imply some kind of conceptual basality — I just don't think he wants to say that, because he really has thought a lot about it). I have to think about this more. Thanks again for your thoughts! — mark ✎ 10:49, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• (via stressfull computer crash) I'm not going to rewrite everything I said before, that'd be too upsetting. The gist is that, although I know nothing of this subject, it seems to me that the title should be lower case, not upper case. This applies to other links in the article, such as Cognitive Semantics. I checked the external links and couldn't come up with a firm answer. If the capitalization issue is unclear then I prefer lower case. BrokenSegue 01:44, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • As you say, this is not an easy to answer question. But it is a very good point, and I tend to agree with you in most cases, so I'm going to change it. There are some borderline cases however — sometimes, the notion is really used as the proper name of a particular theory; in cases like that, it might seem best to keep it capitalized (but then, there is also the question of Force Dynamics vs. Force dynamics). I have to think about that. The literature is far from clear about this, but upon reviewing some sources, I think the uncapitalized version is the most common. Thanks for your thoughts! — mark ✎ 10:49, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)