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chapter 2
On the logical necessity of a cultural and
cognitive connection for the origin of all
aspects of linguistic structure
Randy J. LaPolla
Nanyang Technological University
This chapter presents a view of communication not as coding and decoding,
but as ostension and inference, that is, one person doing something to show the
intention to communicate, and then another person using abductive inference to
infer the reason for the person’s ostensive act, creating a context of interpretation
in which the communicator’s ostensive act “makes sense”, and thereby inferring
the communicative and informative intention of the person. Language is not
necessary for communication in this view, but develops as speakers use linguistic
patterns over and over again to constrain the addressee’s creation of the context of
interpretation. Speakers choose which aspects to constrain the interpretation of,
and language forms conventionalize from frequent repetition. As constraining the
interpretation requires more effort than not constraining it in that way, it must
be important to the speakers to constrain that particular aspect of the meaning,
otherwise they would not put in the extra effort. Logically, then, the forms that
do conventionalize must have been motivated by the cognition and culture of the
speakers of the language when they conventionalized, even though over time the
motivation is often lost and the form continues to be used only due to convention
and habit.
1.  Cognition: Inference in understanding our surroundings
The basis of our ability to make sense of our experiences in life is our ability to
perform abductive inference. Abductive inference is hypothesis creation: when
we observe some phenomenon, we try to think of a reason why that phenomenon
might be the way it is. We do this based on what we know and believe, by creating
a context in which the observed phenomenon makes sense to us, that is, is not
surprising. So if we see the sun moving across the sky from east to west every day,
we will posit a reason for it. The ancient Greeks hypothesized that it was the god
De Busser, Rik & Randy J. LaPolla, eds. 2015.
Language Structure and Environment: Social,
cultural, and natural factors. Benjamins.
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Helios driving his chariot of the sun across the sky. Modern science hypothesizes
that it is the earth rotating on its axis that gives the impression of the sun moving.
Both of these hypotheses derive from the same cognitive ability. In fact all of the
hypotheses of philosophy, religion, and science derive from this ability. It is in fact
a human instinct, on a par with other basic survival instincts, as it is necessary for
survival: one needs to be able to understand or at least make sense of one’s surroundings
in order to effectively survive in them.1 Above I mentioned an example
of a major phenomenon, but we do this with very minor phenomena as well, such
as one time, when I was given a plate and napkin after sitting down in a restaurant,
I wondered why the napkin had a crease in the shape of a ring in the middle of it.
I hypothesized that the plates and napkins had been stacked together (with interleafing)
prior to their distribution to customers.
This sort of inference is non-deterministic, unlike deductive inference, where
the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. In abductive
inference, unless we go out and test our hypothesis or look for evidence supporting
the hypothesis, we have no way of knowing whether our hypothesis is correct
or not. Yet we will assume it is true until it has been proven wrong. This is in fact
the nature of facts in science: they are hypotheses we haven’t proven wrong yet,
and so take them as truths.
One part of trying to understand the world is trying to understand what other
humans are doing and why, and we do this also by applying our abductive inferential
abilities to infer the nature of an action when it is performed by someone, and
the intention of the person in doing that particular action. We do this automatically,
and unconsciously much of the time, and this again is part of the survival
instinct, as in order to survive we must be able to infer the intentions of others
when they do something, because what they are doing might be with the intention
of harming us. For example, if someone walks toward me with a knife in his hand,
I need to be able to infer his intention in doing so, so that I can take appropriate
action. We make the inferences on the basis of our own experiences, knowledge,
and motivations (we project our own motivations on others).
.  The initial identification of abductive inference is due to Peirce (1940), who called it
­hypothesis, abduction, presumption, and retroduction, as well as guessing. See Givón (1989,
Ch. 7); Levinson (1995) on abductive inference and its role in communication, and Deutscher
(2002,p.484) on possible uses of the concept of induction in understanding language learning
and historical change. In the philosophy of science abduction is sometimes talked about as
“inference to the best explanation” (e.g. Harman, 1965; Lipton, 1993; Josephson & Josephson,
1996). Cf. Sperber & Wilson’s 1st principle of relevance:“Human cognition tends to be geared
to the maximisation of relevance” (Sperber & Wilson, 1996, p. 260/270). See also Grice (1957,
p. 387) on the crucial role of relevance in determining meaning.
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One part of trying to understand what other humans are doing and why is
inferring their intentions when they do something with the intention of having
you guess their intentions in doing the action. That is, I might wave my hand in a
particular way, and you may guess that I am batting away flies around my head, but
I might do it in such a way as to make it obvious I want you to notice I am doing
it and want you to infer my motivations for doing it. If you then do so, that then
is communication.
2.  The nature of communication: Ostension and inference
[C]ommunication is not accomplished by the exchange of symbolic expressions.
Communication is, rather, the successful interpretation by an addressee of a
speaker’s intent in performing a linguistic act. (Green, 1996, p. 1)
I would quibble with Green’s statement in the quote above only in that I would say
this is relevant to all communicative acts, not just linguistic communicative acts.
A person wishing to communicate something does an ostensive act. ­Ostension
(from Latin ostendere ‘to show’) is doing something that shows one is doing the
action with the intent of having the other person notice the action and infer the
intentions behind it – that is, showing one wants to communicate something.
Using abductive inference, the other person must infer (guess) the communicative
intention behind the ostensive act. Communication then involves ostension
and inference.2
This inference is possible because we assume people are rational and do things
with particular goals in mind (Grice, 1975, 1978). This is the core of Grice’s (1975,
1978, 1989) Cooperative Principle. Since we assume the person has a reason for
doing the particular action, and the person has done it in an ostensive way to show
the desire to communicate, we will make an effort to find the relevance of that
action, that is, try to infer the reason for the person doing the action.
.  The idea of communication being based on getting the addressee to recognize one’s
­intention to communicate goes back to Grice (1957). The formulation of this into the idea
that communication involves ostension and inference is due to Sperber & Wilson (1996), but
I depart from Sperber & Wilson and Relevance Theory generally in not accepting a codingdecoding
stage, or explicature/implicature stages, in the process of communication. I also do
not accept their distinction between conceptual (lexical) and procedural (grammatical) information,
as I have argued that all information is ‘procedural’, i.e. constrains the creation of the
context of interpretation. This departs also from Gumperz’s (1977, 1982, 1989, 1992a, 1992b)
sense of contextualization cue in seeing all of language as contextualization cues. See LaPolla
(2003) for detailed discussion.
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The communicator also makes inferences as to what the hearer will be able to
understand, and then uses the ostensive act most likely to facilitate the inferential
process of the hearer.
Communication can take place with or without language. Functional MRI
studies show that non-linguistic and linguistic communication are processed
in the same areas of the brain, including those referred to as “Broca’s area” and
“­Wernicke’s area” (Xu, Gannon, Emmorey, Smith, & Braun, 2009).3 Language
helps to constrain the inferential process to make it easier for the hearer to infer
the speaker’s intention. The difference between non-linguistic communication
and linguistic communication is simply a difference of tool or mode, with a resulting
difference in precision: it is like the difference between ripping paper into two
pieces with your hands and cutting it carefully with scissors. You are more likely
to get the outcome you want using the specialized tool because it constrains the
process.
The inferential process can be more or less constrained, but never constrained
completely (in a fully deterministic way). Consider for example, the exchange in (1):4
	 (1)	 Guest:	(Sitting at dinner table, looks at hostess and points up and back
with raised eyebrows).
		Hostess:	It’s the first door on the right.
In this exchange the communicator did not use any linguistic form, but assumed
that using simple hand and face gestures would be enough to communicate his
meaning. In the particular context in which this happened, during a dinner party,
it was sufficient for his meaning to be understood correctly, as evidenced by the
host’s response and the guest’s subsequent successful finding of the bathroom.
Notice the host assumed she understood correctly and used a minimum expression
in replying and the guest assumed the host understood correctly and so followed
the directions without question; neither of the interlocutors ever mentioned
“bathroom”, but both assumed that is what they were talking about. If the guest
had wanted to constrain the host’s inference of his communicative intention, he
could have used a number of different linguistic forms to constrain the interpretation,
such as saying “Bathroom?” while making the gestures, or by saying something
like “Could I use your bathroom?” or “Where is your bathroom?” or “Is
your bathroom down that hall? I’d like to wash my hands.” Each of these would
.  See also Grice (1957, pp. 387–388) on the similarity of inferring the intentions behind
linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour.
.  All of the data and examples used in this paper occurred naturally, and were personally
witnessed and/or experienced by me.
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constrain the interpretation to a greater extent than not using linguistic forms, and
would do so to different degrees. Adding an explanation would constrain the host’s
inference of why the person wants to go to the bathroom (which she would do in
any case). Note how the grammatical or procedural marking (e.g. tense marking)
and the so-called lexical meaning or conceptual items used are both constraining
the creation of the context of interpretation.
In (2) is another example, which occurred when I was calling role just before
a class in Hong Kong.
	 (2)	 Teacher calling role:	 Alain?
		Student points to empty chair:	 Toilet.
In this exchange I said only one word, but the students understood I was asking if
Alan was in the room. From the response I understood ‘Alain had been there, sitting
in that chair, but had gone to the toilet, and would be back, so do not mark him
as absent’. The single word plus the gesture was enough to get all of that meaning
across in that context, but it required a lot of relatively unconstrained inference on
my part. Alternatively the student could have used a much more explicit linguistic
form to constrain my creation of the context of interpretation more greatly, and/
or constrain different aspects of the interpretation, such as by saying “Alain will be
right back”, or “He’s in the toilet”, or “Alain was here, but he is now in the toilet, but
will be coming back, so please don’t mark him as absent”. Each of these constrains
the interpretation more than the one before it, but they all can be used depending
on the particular context and what the communicator assumes the addressee can
infer. Again, in the more complex version there is both so-called conceptual and
procedural information, but both are involved in constraining the interpretation
more than would be the case without them.5
Even when there is an obligatory constraint on the interpretation, such as the
use of tense in English, there is still much room for inference, as in (3):
	 (3)	a.	I have had lunch.
		b.	I have been to the mainland.
Here both clauses have been marked with past tense, and so the context of interpretation
would be constrained so as not to include any assumptions that relate to
future or present events, but how far back in the past the addressee understood the
.  Notice here that the usual lexical meaning of toilet is not what is crucial here. If you check
any definition of toilet, you will not find what is crucial about its use here, which contrasts it
with, for example, the library or the cafeteria, which would not have given the same sense: a
toilet is a place you go to and come back very soon from, and that is what is important in this
context.
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event to have happened depended on inference from relative relevance based on
the particular context. In the context of (3a) what was relevant was whether the
person had eaten in the last hour or so, and in (3b) what was relevant was whether
the person had ever been to mainland China.
The degree to which the hearer is forced to deduce a particular interpretation
depends on the degree to which the form of the ostensive act constrains the hearer
in choosing the contextual assumptions necessary to create a context of interpretation
in which the particular action or utterance makes sense.
3.  The nature of language: Language is culture
Although culture is a controversial term in some circles, I am using it here for
the evolved sets of social conventions, personal habits, and conventionalized tools
for carrying out particular tasks. Language is the set of conventions for carrying
out the task of communication, and so the ‘rules’ of language use are evolved sets
of social conventions for constraining the process of interpretation. Lexical and
grammatical meaning is simply conventionalized use, so grammaticalization and
lexicalization, the processes which create language structure (words, phrases, and
grammatical forms), are in fact simply conventionalization of repeated patterns.6
Language is not a fixed system, it is human behaviour, and changes as we
engage in it, like other aspects of our behaviour, such as styles of dress and
­cooking/eating. It isn’t purpose-built, and doesn’t exist as an entity anywhere. It is
an emergent phenomenon (Hopper, 1987, 2011, 2012), a complex system that is
more than the sum of its parts, and so cannot be explained by adding up the individual
causalities (cf. Dryer, 2006). It is like an economy or a traffic jam: it comes
into being as a by-product of our trying to communicate (Keller, 1994). It comes
to be recognized, much like a path worn through a grassy field might be eventually
paved, and so words are put into dictionaries and grammar books are written, but
that is just a snap-shot of the uses of those words and patterns up to that point. Our
knowledge of language is simply our experience of how words and structures have
been used before to achieve a certain purpose. The “rules” of language are simply
conventions, much like the convention of men wearing pants and women wearing
skirts, and change all the time.
.  Although grammaticalization is conventionalization, not all conventionalization is grammaticalization:
the speakers are free to conventionalize any sort of usage, including so-called
‘degrammaticalization’. See Burridge, this volume, for an example of degrammaticalization.
See also Michael, this volume, on seeing sedimentation of activities into social practices in
social practice theory and grammaticalization as having a common basis.
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What gets repeated, and what extensions of meaning are evidenced in the
usages, are related to the cognitive categories and construal of the world of the
speakers in two ways. First, for some form to become conventionalized, it would
have to have been repeatedly used until it became a habit on the personal level
and a convention at the societal level. For the speakers to use the form over and
over again to constrain the interpretation in the particular way that that form can
constrain the interpretation would have required the speakers to want to constrain
the interpretation in that particular way over and over again. For this to be the
case having the addressee understand the particular aspect of the interpretation
that is constrained by that form must have been important to the speakers. So the
patterns that get repeated will reflect those aspects of meaning that are important
to those speakers. They would not put the extra effort into constraining the
interpretation of the meaning that way unless the aspects of meaning that were so
constrained were important to the speakers. Put another way, the patterns that get
conventionalized reflect an aspect of the culture of the people; the language will
embody the culture of the people.7
Second, once the particular pattern of constraining the interpretation has
become conventionalized, it will be passed down through the generations, and
influence how the speakers understand the world, that is, what cognitive categories
they will form (see for example Majid et al. 2004 and similar work by Melissa
Bowerman and colleagues):
[L]anguage produces an organization of experience. We are inclined to think of
language simply as a technique of expression, and not to realize that language
first of all is a classification and arrangement of the stream of sensory experience
which results in a certain world-order, a certain segment of the world that is easily
expressible by the type of symbolic means that language employs. In other words,
language does in a cruder but also in a broader and more versatile way the same
thing that science does. (Whorf, 1956, p. 55)
Our language use is a set of habits we form, which are very hard to change. We are
very much creatures of habit, and once we have a habit, it is hard to change, including
habits of language and even thought. The simplest example is the habit we
form in learning our first language: we learn to categorize certain sounds together
.  Lupyan & Dale, this volume, in trying to understand why languages develop complex
morphological systems, consider the possibility that the redundancy that comes with complex
morphological systems may facilitate language learning by children. The view presented here
is consonant with their view in that the redundancy is seen as arising from repeated attempts
to constrain the addressee’s interpretation of the speaker’s communicative intention, which of
course includes situations where children are the addressees.
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as allophones of a single phoneme, and to distinguish other sounds our language
treats as distinct phonemes. This is entirely a habit, but as anyone who has learned
a second language (or taken a class in phonetics) knows, it is difficult to break the
habit and make distinctions we’re not used to making.8 The habit even influences
our perception. For example, at a meeting here in Singapore the speaker was talking
about a sports ground using the word pitch, but pronounced [pitɕ], with an
unaspirated voiceless stop in initial position. A monolingual English speaker sitting
next to me ‘heard’ the voiceless unaspirated stop as a voiced stop and asked
why he was talking about a beach. This is also what is involved in second language
learner accents. The point is not that you can’t learn another set of habits, just that
it is difficult.
It is also difficult to learn a new way of thinking, especially if you try to do it
using words and concepts that are part and parcel of the old way of thinking. It
isn’t that language fully determines thought; the language evolves the way it does
because of the importance the culture puts on constraining inference in certain
ways, and this process is always on-going, as language is always changing, so the
culture and cognition of the people (how they profile events, etc.) influences the
language, but then once it becomes a convention in the language, it is passed on
to future generations, and so will influence how people think about those things,
and what they pay attention to. Once you have a word for something, e.g. selfie, it
makes the phenomenon a lot easier to think about and talk about, and you end up
thinking about it and talking about it more. Although thought is of course possible
without language, when we generalize some fact about the world, we give
it a name, and then we can talk about it more easily, and also pass the concept
down to following generations. Very often the name we give to some generalization,
or the way we conceive of a phenomenon, is in the form of a metaphor, and
these metaphors help to structure our view of the world (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980;
Lakoff, 1987). Language then encodes our view of the world, and also influences
our view of the world (as we learn these concepts from our ancestors). When we
speak a language we subscribe to the conventions of meaning associated with that
language, and those conventions influence the way we talk about things and ultimately
how we think about them (Whorf, 1956). A simple example of how the
language we use to talk about something influences the way we think about it is
something I experienced personally: growing up in the US, I always considered
.  This is the cause of the so-called‘critical period’for language learning.It is simply a matter
that the longer one speaks only one language, the more ingrained the habits associated with
speaking that language are, and so the harder it will be to learn another one (i.e. to change
one’s habits).
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shrimp, prawns, and lobsters as three very different animals because they have
very different names in English, but in Chinese they have the same basic name,
and only differ in terms of size, xiā (‘shrimp’), dà-xiā (‘big shrimp’), and lóng-xiā
(‘dragon shrimp’). When I learned this I was able to think of them as just variants
of the same type of animal.
In many discussions of ethnosyntax9 (see Enfield, 2002 for this term), the etymological
opaqueness of certain structures is taken to be evidence that it is not
possible to show a link between language and culture or cognition, but to say that
the original development of a particular pattern is motivated does not imply that
the motivation will always be transparent. As Michael, this volume, §5, argues, “it
is not plausible to simply project modern communicative habitus into the past”. In
many aspects of our lives, once a particular way of doing something is conventionalized,
the original motivation may be lost, while the conventionalized behaviour
continues, simply because it is already a convention and a habit, such as the habit
of pouring the milk before the tea in Britain.10 In English we have expressions and
symbols, such as those in (4), that are still used even though the original motivation
for using them is no longer motivating the expression and may not be transparent:
	(4)	pig in a poke
		 pass the buck
		 put it in the hopper
		 the stars in the firmament
		 carriage return
		ka-ching!
		 dial a phone
		RSVP
		
.  The concept of ethnosyntax can be understood in at least two different ways: it can refer
to the study of the interaction of (or the interface between) two separate entities, culture
and grammar, or it can (on analogy with morphosyntax) refer to the view that language and
culture form one entity. I am arguing for the latter position, that language is culture, in that
a language is a set of social conventions which have evolved in a particular way in response
to the need to constrain the inferential process involved in communication, just as conventions
of, for example, eating with a fork and wearing clothes are social conventions that have
evolved in response to the need to eat and stay warm, respectively.
.  When the English first started drinking tea, the porcelain was of poor quality, and would
crack if the tea was poured directly into the cup. So the milk was poured first to protect the
cup. Later this was no longer necessary, but the practice continues for many people.
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All of these were fully motivated at an earlier time, but now most people who use
these expressions don’t know what a poke is or what the buck is that is passed or
why a hopper is called a hopper, or why we can call the sky the firmament, and
computers have no carriage return, and cash registers no longer make a ka-ching
sound, and phones no longer have dials, and computers no longer have floppy
discs, and most people don’t know what RSVP stands for, but we still say dial a
phone and use an image of a floppy disc for the ‘save’ function in computer software
and use these other expressions.11 We have to turn to books such as Loose
Cannons and Red Herrings, and Other Lost Metaphors (Claiborne, 2001) and Amo,
Amas, Amat and More (Ehrlich, 1985) to learn the original motivations for the
expressions we use.12
Another aspect that affects transparency is the fact that the form can also be
reduced due to its predictability, as with God be with ye being reduced to Goodbye.
4.  How the grammars of languages differ
Each language has its own history of development, and so each language is unique.
The cognitive categories manifested by the language will be unique to that language
(even translation equivalents will differ in terms of the prototype of the category
and in terms of the items or phenomena that the expression can be used for).13 In
the process of trying to communicate, the speakers of each language will, according
to what they think is important to get across to the addressee, constrain different
aspects of the inferential process of the addressee, and even if they constrain
the same semantic domain as speakers of other languages, they may constrain it to
different degrees, and may do so with different formal means. Languages, or, more
correctly, the constructions of languages, then can differ in three ways:
.  RSVP is used as a noun to mean ‘(make) a reservation’ in Australian English, e.g. Please
note this event is now fully booked out. No further RSVPs will be taken (announcement of an
event at La Trobe University). What I am calling the image of a floppy disc is actually the
image of the 3.5 inch hard shell disc that replaced the true floppy disc. The former was not
floppy, but in that case we kept the name floppy disc, even though it was no longer motivated
by the flexibility of the disc.
.  Loss of motivation and transparency is also what motivates reinforcement and layering
(see Hopper, 1991 on these phenomena).
.  Except in the case of cultural convergence in language contact areas. See LaPolla (2009)
for discussion.
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Do they constrain or not constrain the interpretation of a particular
semantic domain?
For example, English constrains the interpretation of the time of an action with
reference to the speech act time (or some other reference point) obligatorily (i.e.
it has grammaticalized tense), whereas Chinese does not. In Chinese it is possible
to use adverbials and aspect marking to constrain the interpretation, but it is also
possible to have an utterance as in (5a), where there is no constraint on the interpretation
of the time of the action, and so it corresponds to three different possibilities
in English. Notice also English constrains the interpretation of the gender
of the 3rd person referent, whereas Chinese does not.
	 (5)	a.	Tā	 qù	xuéxiào.
			 3.sg	go	school
		b.	She went to school./He went to school.
		c.	She is going to school./He is going to school.
		d.	She goes to school./He goes to school.
If they constrain the interpretation of a particular domain, how much do
they constrain it?
For example, English obligatorily constrains the interpretation of the time of the
action to being before, at the same time as, or after the speech act time. Other languages
may cut this up differently. Japanese has only past and non-past. English
(and also Japanese) does not constrain the interpretation of how far in the past
an action is, as pointed out in reference to Example (3) above. Rawang (a TibetoBurman
language of northern Myanmar) also constrains temporal reference, but
to a greater extent than English or Japanese, in that it requires the speaker to constrain
the interpretation of how far in the past an action has happened, that is, it
has four past tenses.14
	 (6)	a.	àng	dı̄	á:m-ı̀.
			 3sg	go	dir-intr.past
			 ‘S/he left, went away (within the last 2 hours).’
		b.	àng	dı̄	dár-ı̀.
			 3sg	go	tmhrs-intr.past
			 ‘S/he went (within today, but more than two hours ago).’
.  Data from my own fieldwork. Abbreviations used: dir: directional adverb; intr.past:
­intransitive past tense marker; npast: non-past tense marker; r/m: reflexive middle voice marker;
tmdays: tense marker for actions within the past few days up to a year; tmhrs: tense marker
for actions within the past few hours; tmyrs: tense marker for actions more than one year ago.
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		c.	àng	d ı̄	ap-mı̀.
			 3sg	go	tmdys-intr.past
			 ‘S/he went (within the last year).’
		d.	àng	dı̀	yàng-ı̀.
			 3sg	go	tmyrs-intr.past
			 ‘S/he went (some time a year or more ago).’
If they constrain the interpretation of a particular domain, how do they
constrain it?
For example, in the Chinese utterance in (7a) there is no constraint on the interpretation
of whose hair the person is washing. In English we would say He is washing
his hair, with the interpretation of the owner of the hair obligatorily constrained by
the possessive pronoun. In the Rawang example in (7c), the interpretation of the
owner of the hair also is obligatorily constrained, but not by a possessive pronoun
on the noun for ‘hair’, but by a reflexive marker on the verb.
	 (7)	a.	Tā	zài	 xı ̌ 	tóufa.
			 3sg	 prog	wash	hair
		 b.	 He is washing his hair.
		c.	àng	nı̄	zv́l-shı̀-ē.
			 3sg	hair	wash-r/m-npast
			 ‘S/he is washing her/his hair.’
5.  Final remarks
The view I am presenting here is that the fundamental aspect of communication
is not the linguistic structure, but the interaction of the speaker and hearer in
performing a communicative activity. The role of the context in the performance
of this activity is not to simply supplement semantic meaning; the context is the
base on which all communicative activity depends. That is, rather than saying that
the context constrains the interpretation of the linguistic form, I argue that it is
the linguistic form that constrains the context (i.e. constrains the creation of the
context of interpretation by the addressee). Culture and cognition are the fundamental
organizers of experience, and so necessarily influence the construction of
the context of interpretation.
As language structure is formed from repeated discourse patterns that constrain
the hearer’s interpretation in particular ways, it necessarily must be the case
that those aspects that were being constrained were salient to the speaker and
also assumed by the speaker to be salient or relevant to the hearer, at least in the
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	 Chapter 2.  On the logical necessity of a cultural and cognitive connection	 
contexts where the pattern was used, otherwise the extra effort to constrain the
interpretation in that way would not have been necessary. That is, though we give
examples of the most striking connections, the point is that all aspects of language
are determined by the culture and cognition of the speakers.
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