accidentals and substantives

double articulation

In an entry on artist programmers over at GrandTextAuto, Michael Mateas writes that computers are at core "meaning-making machines":

"Fundamentally, the computer is a meaning machine. Inside the computer, long meaningless chains of causally-linked physical events take place. The magic lies in the fact that these meaningless events inside the machine can be connected to the world of human meaning – correspondences can be established such that we can read the computer’s behavior as meaningful."

I'm not a programmer, but for me this idea recollects a basic linguistics tenet known as "duality of patterning" or, alternately, "double articulation." Double articulation denotes the structural organization of natural languages, thought to consist of two abstract levels: a lower level made up of segments of sound (phonemes), and a higher level of morphemes and words. Segments are generally regarded as meaningless in and of themselves until they combine to form morphemes. The locus of meaning is thus this upper level. I wonder if double articulation isn't useful crossover terminology for capturing Michael's sense of a double-tiered structure in programming, a "meaningless" level of "causally linked physical events" that "connect" to form "human meaning."

If blurring the line between natural and artificial languages in this way is reckless, it is also, to some extent, normative. "Algorithm" receives an entry in
David Crystal's standard dictionary of linguistics--and not in the context of linguistic computing, but rather with reference to the formal rules of Chomskyian generative grammar. Makes me wonder what articles are out there that explore the overlapping ontologies of human and computer languages.