Owning Conversation

Excerpt from Linguistic Insights Section

The construction of linguistic pidgins and creoles parallel the equivalent creation of social and cultural pidgins and creoles. The creoles of Urban Vernacular English and Digital English both serve two social purposes: they mark the socioeconomic background of the speaker, and they adapt to the contours of the sociolinguistic spaces produced by each language variety. When two individuals communicate, their social spaces interact to produce a social pidgin. This process creates a new sociolinguistic space from the parent spaces, with dimensional attributes analogous to each dimension in the parent sociolinguistic spaces, but not identical to either in mutual exclusion. This is analogous to the process of socialization, through which children acquire language and culture from their parents. Once this social pidgin is taught to a child as a "native culture," it becomes a social creole. When both parents and the cultures in which those parents participate share a common language, the social creole between parents and children will not vary widely: languages do not typically adopt contrastive syntactic forms in only one evolutionary generation when isolated from contrastive social spaces. When either parent or the cultures in which those parents participate do not share a common language or social space, the pidgins they form become the social creole of the child, which frequently do vary widely in one evolutionary generation. This effect is clearly visible in Urban Vernacular English.

Despite that 162 living languages are spoken natively in American homes, 82 percent of those households are monolingual, with English being the sole language of expression (Gordon, 2005; U.S. Census Bureau, 2003). This cultural isolation inhibits a person's ability to experience linguistic contrast, which in turn guides the conceptual spaces an individual can explore. In Urban Vernacular English, the environmental use of the word "be" is contrastive (Wolfram, 2004, p. 325). Urban Vernacular English is a modern variant of African American Vernacular English, which came into prominence during the migration of African Americans to the urban centers of the United States during the early to mid twentieth century (p. 319). This language is similar enough to most common variants of English in America that it shares the same base name, but the social spaces created and allowed by each are not always interchangeable. The word "be" is a verbal aspect marker in UVE, meaning it shows the habitual relations of time and completion between the subject and verb of a sentence (p. 326). For a speaker of that language to say "Dog, why you illin?" would roughly correspond to "Hey, man, why are you doing something you're not supposed to?," whereas "Dog, why you be illin?" would imply that the person is acting out of line as a substantive part of his or her essence – that they're misbehaving because they always misbehave, not just because they did in the instant during which they were addressed. Most dialects of English lack such a simple way to express this verbal aspect across all tenses (p. 325). The differences in the social spaces constructed by these languages can have lasting negative effects, outside of the stereotyping of the speaker's background to include "urban poverty and racial disparity in school performance" (p. 320). During a scenario in which a UVE-speaking child approaches a teacher who neither speaks nor understands UVE, if the child were to say "Yo, teach, my pop be illin on me," the teacher may not know whether to call the parent, call a linguist, or to rightfully call Child Protective Services. Languages create social spaces, which in turn span conceptual subspaces – the basis of human thought. As such, if any semblance of equality is going to be reached between cultures, the highest priority of law should be to protect these spaces from economic exploitation where that protection is necessary and sufficient. Law that governs intellectual property rights, then, should examine and conform to the sociolinguistic spatial geometry of ownership and control structures within a culture's language.

The main types of the genitive case in language, possessive for ownership and partitive for membership, reflect the underlying semantic contrast of cognitive influence constructions: "linguistic possession presupposes conceptual possession" (Teilbande, 2001, p. 335). This contrast mirrors a psychological distinction between relationships, but both relationships take the same overlying form. In many ways, an individual's influence of their relationships parallels their relationships' influence of him or herself, regardless of the form the relationship takes. A parent's relationship to his or her children, an investor's relationship to his or her wealth, and an employee's relationship to his or her company all represent the same underlying form of mutual benefit. The fact that they remain semantically distinct despite the frequency by which they occupy the same grammatical territory reflects an underlying truth: though they both refer to a type of social influence, these influences are distinct, but mutually symmetric types of relationships. To be a mutually symmetric relationship is to assert that the existence of one is simultaneously a prerequisite and derivative of the other. Though membership and ownership are closely related, likely arising from underlying notions of mutual benefit (Lichtenberk, 2002, p. 439), they build a unified dichotomy – neither can exist without the other, both build the other, and the erosion of one inevitably precedes the erosion of both, and the constituent whole. Since possession is the only type of genitive form represented in American intellectual property law, the asymmetry that arises – ownership without a corresponding expression of membership, or a right without a corresponding responsibility – ends up eroding both the concept of ownership and the forms of benefactive relationships from which both constructions arise.

As mentioned previously, syntactic clusivity also plays a dominant role in biasing ownership and membership constructions within languages. Because of the sacrifice towards brevity in languages that do not contrast clusivity, the clarity of the relationship as a relationship is sacrificed to the ambiguous terminology of a person as property: An individual may mean "the relationship between my self and my wife," but the colloquial form of expression remains "my wife." This type of propertization occurs frequently in metaphor: "I'm the first house on the left," "two suits walked up to me at the trade show," and "three Ph.Ds wrote that article" all syntactically say something they do not semantically mean. A person is not a house, tailored garments do not walk by themselves, and abstract notions of higher education are clearly unable to hold a writing utensil. These underlying relationships are clouded, though, when in the presence of indirect forms of linguistic expressions such as metaphor or contracted expressions.

Language and cognition are the means by which individuals arrive at truth, and that truth is expressed in terms of contrasts, and context of relationships within conceptual spaces. These contrasts and comparisons parallel the lenses of identification and differentiation, respectively, as described by literary theorist Kenneth Burke (Burke 1969; Wess 1996). To the speaker of a language, these truths are self-evident: relationships have words between observer and observed, and those words have meanings, and those meanings build truth through self-evidence. Without contrast in form and meaning, language would fail at its fundamental purpose: effective communication (D. Silva, Linguistics lecture). Without contrast in human vision, the sight of a chair sitting in front of a wall would contain no borders, shape, or form: it would simply be a chairwall, a wallchair, or most likely another word entirely. In essence, that chair would lack its essence of chairness – the self-evident truth that there is something in front of a wall, and that something is called a chair. Without the contrast of edges, colors, and depth, the observation would be of no purpose to the viewer, or to the societies in which the viewer participates. Because individuals can perceive contrast in both visual and cognitive domains, language is possible: the word for "chair" is not the same as the word for "wall."

In a similar manner, the meanings of these words are correlated with the perception of these things through societal interaction. If one speaker points at the chair, saying "stul," and the wall, saying "styenoi," his utterances are not going to be understood by another individual pointing at the same respective objects, but saying "chair" and "wall." The second speaker might think the first meant to say "stool," being similar to something very similar to a chair in his or her own language, but the word for "wall" bears no resemblance to what he or she would call the side of a room. This contrast provides the basis for identifying languages: the language of the first speaker would be called "Russian," and the second, "English." By looking at the similarities, though, it becomes apparent that these languages are related in some way. In fact, Russian and English are distant cousins in the same family of languages: Indo-European (Gordon, 2005).

Within speakers of the same language, this same relationship between contrast and comparison builds the truths that span the distances between minds. The only means by which an individual knows that a "chair" is a piece of furniture upon which someone sits is that someone else, or more frequently a group of people in his or her speech community, pointed at the same thing and said the same word. This happens through the process of socialization, through which a child or otherwise social novice acquires the ability to interact with a society (Garrett & Baquedano-López, 2002, p. 339). Through their social upbringing, this is presented with such frequency that the chairness of that distinct, environmentally contrastive object in their mind becomes wholly self-evident. To question another on the "chairness" of a thing upon which a person sits is akin to questioning the validity of that person's perception. In absence of a contrasting language, a "chair" is always a "chair." For an individual to suggest it be called a "silla," a "chaise," or a "stuhl" would elicit a confused response from an English speaker who had no prior exposure to Spanish, French, or German, respectively. The same underlying conceptual structure exists among these languages – anyone can look at a chair and produce the word used to describe it in the tongue of their parents and native community, though the surface structures of this expression are typically unique to a language, and the conceptual structures unique to an individual: each word will have nuance and subtlety associated with its contextual use. Lakoff and Johnson reflect that conceptual structures are the basis for meaning:

The meaning of a sentence is given in terms of a conceptual structure. ... The conceptual structure is grounded in physical and cultural experience, as are the conventional metaphors. Meaning, therefore, is never disembodied or objective, and is always grounded in the acquisition and use of a conceptual system. (2003, p. 197)

The fact that ownership and membership are distinct in language reflects the underlying distinction of conceptual structure – though the ideas are mutually distinct, they are tightly related. The existence of any ownership implies the same degree of existence of the parallel membership, and the destruction of any membership implies the destruction of the parallel ownership. When a person owns or controls anything: a relationship, an observation, an idea, a piece of land, or a teakettle, they participate in the society of that ownership. When this occurs, that society, be that an individual's "society of mind" (Minsky, 1998) or a physical group of people, participates in the ownership and the control of the individual. In a cognitive sense, the things and relationships an individual or group controls also control that individual or group.

These distinctions are reflected in information's nature as simultaneously an expression and a conversation. As Alfred Korzybski famously mused, "the map is not the territory" (as cited in Chandler, 2007, p. 70). The painter René Magritte reflected this in his work, "The treachery of images" (Figure 1), which depicts a painting of a pipe above the phrase "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," meaning, in French, "This is not a pipe." The painting demonstrates this relationship between the expressive and conversant relationship of information: nobody in their right mind would pick up a picture of a pipe and try to smoke it any more than they would ask a text book what it thought about the snow storm last week. The painting is obviously not a pipe – it's a painting of a pipe. Similarly, the words on a page are not the things, people, or ideas they represent, just as the words exchanged in a conversation are created by the substance of thought, but are not the substance of thought itself.

The phrase "intellectual property" itself can be misleading in this discussion, as Stephan Kinsella, columnist for the Mises Economic Blog points out, "it would be nice to take the word ‘property' out, and just refer to the rights conveyed," since "... intellectual property is neither intellectual, nor property" (2008b). The phrase "intellectual property" is itself decontextualized from its underlying representations: social-spatial relationships. This construction artificially modifies the sociolinguistic space of those who necessarily discuss the topic by biasing that discussion with inaccurate terminology. This decontextualization devalues the phrase itself as a linguistic map of the underlying cognitive territory, and further devalues both notions of "intellectual" and "property" through its haphazard use in discourse. With such a flawed, but ubiquitous designation, this devaluation is both necessary and constructive: it leads theorists to examine the underlying cognitive territory and suggest new linguistic maps thereof. Kinsella himself led such a discussion, offering "pattern rights," "innovation rights," "pattern privileges," and "information privileges," (2008b), though none of the existing suggestions completely fit the contours of the underlying cognitive and social spaces.

In a culture driven by this flow of information, when the words that give substance to thought erode, their relationships with the things they signify change in ways that recreate the societies built upon the free expression of the words themselves: "Money, science, edifice, and figure ... comprise a positivist culture in which writing loses its distance from reality and thereby reproduces it" (Agger, 1989, p. 34). This reproduction between word, thought, and conceptual space recreates the societies based thereupon, shifting language along with the flow of information. When this occurs, "everything is material, everything produces, [and] everything reproduces, including textuality" (p. 58). When words lose the distance between the signifier and the signified – between the map and the territory - the gap closes quickly between the conversation and the expression thereof, and the reproduction of words is required to reproduce societies and cultures. Because of this, "... every reading is also a rewriting ... readers, in any case, construct authors" (Chandler, 2007, p. 200). This cycle recreates substance from words and words from the substance of expression in the image of conversation: the context in which words are inexorably based. This is how a Chomskyist knows a Chomsky, how a Marxist knows a Marx, and how a Christian knows a Christ: "In the beginning was the Word..." (John 1:1, New American Standard Bible).

The information contained in the relationship between a thought and a word is distinct from the relationship itself, emerging from the mutually beneficial, creative, and destructive properties of control and influence. The expression of these properties, in the form of ownership and membership are both linguistic universals – that is, they exist in every known human language (Teilbande, 2001, p. 335). Furthermore, human language itself is an anthropological universal – it exists in every known human society (Ember, et.al., 2002, p. 218). The free enjoyment of those universals within human societies should be protected as a human right (Doubek, 2007b, p. 5), so long as a person's enjoyment of that right does not inhibit the same enjoyment by another person (Mill, 2005/1861, p. 56; Locke, 1823/1689a, p. 7; Rousseau, 1762/1968, p. 61; Wilhelm, 1999, p. 145). Those human rights can take the form of natural or positive rights, as governed by natural law or social contract theory, respectively. These necessary and sufficient enjoyments of natural rights are reflected not only in the manners by which individuals create conceptual spaces of property, but also through the physical manifestations of that creation. Ray Jackendoff, professor of linguistics at Tufts University in Massachusetts, elaborates, "Whereas the fundamental units of spatial cognition are physical objects in space, those of social cognition are persons in social interaction" (1999, p. 72).

Linguistic behaviors form these social and sociolinguistic spaces through their treatment of ownership, membership, benefit, clusivity, and social distances. These contrasts allow communicators to differentiate between relationships in conceptual space, which in turn generate linguistic maps to underlying cognitive territories. When property in sociolinguistic spaces is structured according to tangible property conventions, those social and sociolinguistic spaces degrade through the erosion of the human condition. This erosion occurs when linguistic maps are removed from their native contexts: the communicative nature of words degrades as a direct product of that decontextualization. This decontextualization is evident even in the name of the topic discussed in this paper, which transforms the existing conversation into a search for the deeper structure of this form of property. Since relationships of property emerge from human minds as a means of production, this discussion will benefit from a clearer understanding of social and physical economics.