Archive of Language Group Forum 2002-03
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Resisting Instruction
Date: 2002-02-11 23:16:11
Message Id: 935
Comments:
I found Eric and Paul's summary of our conversation a useful one--and
a useful sketching out of further possibilities for conversation;
am just adding here some bits that were particularly resonant to me,
which either weren't recorded above, or which I'd frame somewhat differently
than they did.
For me, the essential point of congruence between Pinker and Scarry
had to w/ their shared conviction that "we can shape events in each
other's brains w/ exquisite precision." Those are Pinker's opening
words; they also describe exactly the project Scarry takes on: tracing
the way in which a writer incites mental images in her reader. Some
of us found ourselves resisting that level of prescription, disbelieving
that our reading experience is (or can be) so directed--which meant
that, in the first place, we queried the ways in which Pinker and
Scarry themselves tried to instruct us (Scarry refusing to "translate"
for an audience outside of literary critics; Pinker falling to evoke
any range of denotation for his readers). Resisting our "instruction"
meant that our reading, of course, raised for us a series of further
questions:
--what does the appeal to a bodily basis of behavior mean to whose
who make it?
--how is that related to/different from a notion of the body and
brain as permeable to the environment?
--if the notion of language as an instinct turns out to be well-founded,
what difference does it make?
--for instance: is there such a thing as a pure (separable) linguistic
event? or is it impossible to extricate language from the scene
of its use?
--for instance: we got a nice account of analogical thinking on
the part of 2-yr-olds, who engage in "over-extended word meanings"
(what later would be recognized as similes/metaphors, such as calling
snow on one's head a hat, or dripping water "tick tock")
--of more interest to some of us than the so-called "purity" of
words is what happens w/in the brain when the "limited imput" of
"black marks on the page" encounter priori experiences;
--how does such a process differ when the encounter w/ language
is aural?
--even if it is accurate to say that language has no direct connection
to what it is trying to evoke, that it is absolutely and fully symbolic,
or iconic,
--what is gained by narrowing our analysis, emphasizing the exceptionalism
of the linguistic event?
--& why are we having these particular debates @ this point in time?
why does Pinker's giving a forensic account of the interior life
matter, just now? likewise, why does it matter so much to Scarry
to privilege literary methods of creating the world?
--which of these claims is most useful to each of us @ this point?
how can we use them?
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: What Categories Reveal About the Mind
Date: 2002-03-04 20:32:08
Message Id: 1333
Comments:
Dear friends of language--
Just a clarification of where I was heading in our conversation
today. I'm really not very interested in beating up on Pinker for
his "sloppy language" or his (amusingly) "anthropomorphic" and "desiring"
words (and not convinced that such a project will take us very far);
rather, I'm trying to understand the degree to which such words
are indicative of...what he "wants" to be telling us (consciously
or not, and I think the usage is actually MORE interesting if UNintended/UNconscious,
because it may reveal more about...something deeper than/anterior
to/uninflected by/or rather interestingly-and-loopily-related-to
rational choice).
What I was actually trying to work towards was an understanding
of where the structures (the "functional" words, the "scaffolding,"
the classificatory systems, the categories) that we think w/ and
through "come from." If they are largely genetic, as Pinker suggests--"Grammar
is a protocol that...must have an abstract logic of its own...the
human mind is designed to use abstract variables and data structures..[that]
have no direct counterpart in the child's experience. Some of the
organization of the grammar would have to be there from the start,
part of the language-learning mechanism that allows children to
make sense out of the noises they hear" (The Language Instinct,
p. 118)-- then how much "wiggle room" does that give us, in thinking
and talking and writing and re-imagining (what I'm interested in)
the world?
In line w/ this line of inquiry, I was delighted to find this
title by our next subject/object of study, George Lakoff. Check
it out:
Women Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the
Mind.
Along w/ our upcoming examination of the creolization of language,
another "cute" link that might interest you all is
The Jargon Dictionary, which includes an analysis of "hacker
writing style" that begins, "hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing
grammatical rules." It might be interesting, somewhere down the
line, to consider the "meta-rules" that guide the emerging forms
of on-line communication. This site suggests, for instance, that
"introverted hackers who are next to inarticulate in person communicate
w/ considerable fluency over the net precisely because they can
forget on an unconscious level that they are dealing w/ people."
To be continued (w/ much pleasure from/in today's conversation)--
Anne
Name: George Weaver
Username: gweavr@brynmawr.edu
Subject: "desiring "words
Date: 2002-03-05 15:52:13
Message Id: 1370
Comments:
Two small points about 'desiring words". It is common when trying
to explain abstract material to use a metaphor to something more concrete.
The metaphor has no offical status. For example, one does not draw
inferences using it. Sometimes what is sought is a way for the audience
to remember the abstract notion, to aid in internalizing it-a slogan
if you will. The metaphors don't always have the desired effect, but
their use in formal/mathematical disciplines is common enough that
people write about it.
That having been said, there is a certain(linguistic?) humor in
this particular example: there are selectional restrictions on the
word 'desire' and one of these is that it takes an animate subject.
Selectional restrictions are a special kind of co-occurrence restriction
- the idea is that certain subclasses of verbs can only co-occur
in sentences with certain subclasses of subjects and objects. Using
a non-animate subject violates the co-ocurrence restriction the
author is talking about. In passing it is worth noting that according
to one semantic theory those sentences which violate selectional
restrictions are not literally meaningful. This kind of humor(?)
is fairly common among graduate students in linguistics. Collecting
odd sentences is a harmless and inexpensive hobby. Consider the
following:'In English noun requires article'.
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject:
Date: 2002-03-06 10:09:31
Message Id: 1390
Comments:
An article in yesterday's (3/5/02) Philadelphia Inquirer put me in
mind of our pre-conversation conversation earlier this week, querying
the definition of "experience" as a state of "internal awareness."
The newspaper article took that inquiry into the realms of both mental
health and legal decision-making. What I noticed especially were the
observations about a "simplistic idea of the relationship between
awareness and choice" and the notion that "she did not know what she
was doing even if it looked as if she did."
Yates trial calls us to rethink awareness/impairment divide
In the film A Beautiful Mind, we saw the peculiar twist of mental
illness: that a person can appear to function normally even while
trapped in delusions.
The full article will be available
on the Web for a limited time:
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/2794302.htm
(c) 2001 inquirer and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
Name: Ruth Guyer
Username: rguyer@haverford.edu
Subject: films and forms
Date: 2002-03-11 19:44:38
Message Id: 1483
Comments:
I was thinking about Iris last week during our session and (speaking
of movies) wondered how many of you have seen that movie. There is
a wonderful moment when she and John talk about words and how crucial
they are for her experience/understanding of life.
This short scene seems to me to relate to the issue of who one
is when one is no longer the person one once was. What is it like
when one's ideas take on new forms (or are captured in new words)?
This is a central and troubling subject in bioethics, particularly
when someone has prepared an advance directive (what to do with
me when I am no longer able to make my own decisions) but seems
to be happy in her/his new "form." The dilemma for the person's
decision makers or the agents who represent that person becomes
this: which person's autonomous wishes do we now respect?
Re: A Brilliant Mind. Do you believe that a person with schizophrenia
actually can compartmentalize the disease at will or hold the demons
at bay in order to solve a mathematical (or other) problem, or is
that just Hollywood?
Name: Paul Grobstein
Username: pgrobste@brynmawr.edu
Subject: language/"experience"/awareness
Date: 2002-03-16 22:32:38
Message Id: 1499
Comments:
Matters "of definition" are sometimes important, not qua definition
but rather because when one finds oneself arguing about definitions,
it not infrequently means words are being differently understood in
important ways by different people. So, let me try and make my point
clear independently of "definition" (since I think its generally relevant
to our inquiry).
Lots of what the nervous system (and hence people) do is done
in the absence of any sense/awareness of "doing it", of either perceiving
or acting. Despite these absences, what the nervous sytem does can
often be quite significant, ie unperceived input can have dramatic
effects on behavior (present and future), and not-experienced actions
can be quite adaptive and sophisticated. Moreover, they both affect
how the nervous system works in the future. In this sense, they
are meaningful "experiences", even if they are not "experienced".
Subject to one reservation, all of the preceding can be quite
"objectively" established. The reservation, curiously, takes one
into the "subjective" realm. No one doubts that machines act as
I've described; that is the point of "artificial intelligence".
To determine whether humans do so depends, however, on "asking them".
And hence on "subjective" information. The only way to know whether
a human "had the experience of something" is to ask.
One significant relevance of all this is that language is, among
other things, a way of conveying "internal states", which may or
may not be the same as would be inferred by an outside observer
of an individuals actions. Individuals may indeed "lie" about these
internal states, but there are relatively few ways to get information
about them other than through langauge. And so one necessarily has
to make use of the "subjective" as a legitimate set of observations.
Like any other set of observations, subjective ones are not definitive;
the important thing is that if one refuses to admit them one has
no way whatsoever to gain access to "internal states" (given that
they are NOT necessarily evident in behavior, including language).
So, how about for the future we admit three things: unconscious
perception/action/learning, "feelings", and externally observable
actions, including language? What's relevant about all this, in
the present context, is that language sits "on top of" both the
unconscious and "feelings"; when one generates language it is affected,
to one degree or another by both (eg, there is some innate organization
that affects it, as per Pinker). And hence it may well have properties
that derive from what it sits on, rather than being entirely sui
generis, following rules entirely of its own. My personal guess
is that the "Chomsky approach", valuable as it is, will prove limited
because not all of the important parts of the underlying structure
of language are apparent in language itself. Similarly, I think
those of us who have gotten used to language as a primary tool of
inquiry may be missing some important parts of how brains (including
our own) work. I'm genuinely curious about whether Lakoff might
be closer to some of this stuff, starting from metaphor rather than
syntax as a take off point.
Recognizing that language sits "on top of" is also relevant in
the opposite direction, not how language is generated but how it
is received. What happens in language generation is a "squeezing"
... only part of what's in the unconscious and in feeling gets into
words. The reverse, an expansion, happens with language comprehension
(I'm modifying from a book by Norretranders,
the User Illusion, that we might want to look at at some point).
Words act not only in the rational realm but also in feelings and
in the unconscious. This was Scarry's point, and what continues
to interest me about her work. And it also bears on Anne's puzzlement
because of Pinker's use of language. Language, as it normally is
used, is SUPPOSED to generate, somewhat unpredictably, things in
the mind of readers/listeners. George and others (me included) may
discount the images Pinker's words bring up, but it is entirely
appropriate for Anne to hear/be interested in them.
This, in some ways, takes us back to the starting point for last
year's Two Cultures discussion,
the issue of whether language is precise or allusive. Within disciplines
(particularly "scientific" ones?), one may work very hard at discarding
the allusive character of language. The price of doing so, however,
is that one can then communicate only with those who have, like
onself, spent years learning the rareified unambiguous language.
If one wants to work across disciplines, on the other hand, maybe
one has to pay the price of accepting ambiguity/allusiveness? Maybe,
indeed, one comes to recognize that "misunderstanding" is as valuable
an outcome of language use as is "understanding"?
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Communication/not
Date: 2002-03-28 15:24:51
Message Id: 1633
Comments:
Another (possibly?) productive possibility: that language begins/takes
its origins not in the desire to communicate (or mis-communicate!)
@ all, but in the desire to play. In pleasure--@ the sounds, the arrangements,
the aesthetics of what is being said or written.
Name: Paul Grobstein
Username: pgrobste@brynmawr.edu
Subject: 18 march mtg summary
Date: 2002-03-30 11:12:38
Message Id: 1640
Comments:
Paul WAS indeed, at the time, "unsure
of exactly where his objection lay". And apologizes for apparently
dominating the discussion with his incohate concerns (was it really
all me against the world, as Eric implies? maybe its not so good to
see ourselves as others see us). And found it a very interesting/generative
conversation ... thanks to all for helping me ... think about these
matters.
I think I'm clearer now than I was about what was/is bothering
me, and that it is BOTH about "scientific method" generally AND
more specificially about language. It is also about the immune system
and Anne's comment immediately above and some things I
earlier said in the Two Cultures Forum ... " ordinary language
is not "supposed" to be unambiguous, because its primary function
is not in fact to transmit from sender to receiver a particular,
fully defined "story". Ordinary language is instead "designed" (by
biological and cultural evolution) to perform a more sophisticated,
bidirectional communication function. A story is told by the sender
not to simply transmit the story but also, and equally importantly,
to elicit information from/about the receiver, to find out what
is otherwise unknowable by the sender: what ideas/thoughts/perspectives
the receiver has about the general subject of the story."
Let me see if I can briefly make what I think clearer. I DO, in
one important sense, "think that the Pinker style of language analysis
is fundamentally flawed and thus doomed to failure". I think it
in the sense that this is true of ALL science (indeed of all human
inquiry). Yes, we try and detect patterns in observations (in language
as elsewhere), yes we summarize them as hypotheses, yes the hypotheses
are in turn checked and revised based on new observations, etc etc.
And yes, this works amazingly well in lots of different situations
(including language). But ... it works best when the mechanisms
underlying/giving rise to the patterns are themselves stable, at
least over the time of the inquiry. It works less well if the underlying
mechanisms are theselves changing, for any of a variety of reasons
including effects of the "observer" on what is being observed.
There is a BIG argument here about "reality" in general, which
I won't get into here (but have a book chapter manuscript about,
if anyone is interested). My point with regard to language is that
I supect that the underlying mechanisms are NOT stable, or are at
least designed (by evolution) not to generate the kinds of predictable
patterns of observations from which the underlying mechanisms can
be reliably inferred. The issue has precisely to do with whether
language is designed for communication or for something else. My
guess is that language actually evolved not to transmit information
but to "explore", to find out/try out new things. To the extent
this is true, one will never capture the essence of language by
modelling the observed patterns, something is indeed being "lost
in the endeavor": the fundamental novelty-creating character of
language. I don't assert that this CAN'T be inquired into by normal
scientific processes. Immunologists ultimately recognized that there
is indeed an undirected novelty generation which is fundamental
to the immune system (and evolutionary biologists that there is
a similar thing operating in evolution). I am only saying that it
seems to me to be being neglected in the Chomsky/Pinker/Raimy approach
to language. And to be perhaps better captured in Anne's "in the
desire to play" (see also Serendip's Playground).
And that, of course, takes one back to the issue of whether "desire"
(to say nothing of "play") is or is not a property of "inanimate"
things. My assertion is not quite that "desire" means "means something
along the lines of 'able to cause things to happen' so since the
thermostat can cause the heat to rise or fall, it is appropriate
and correct to attribute 'desire' to thermostats". My assertion
is that the normal usage of that words INCLUDES that meaning as
well as some others, of which an important one is "having the internal
experience of wanting something". And that we don't normally "parse"
the various meanings of words. And that doing so is itself a productive
route to better understanding things. Its a way of exploring, of
using language to discover what one has not previously seen (and
VERY common in/as a consequence of science, among other things).
Thanks again to all for a playful and for me productive conversation.
Looking forward to more.
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Test Case: Language as Undirected Novelty
Generation
Date: 2002-04-07 21:32:00
Message Id: 1738
Comments:
Paul's arguing, hard, that "language actually evolved . . . to 'explore,'
to find out/try out new things," like the "undirected novelty generation
which is fundamental to the immune system . . . a similar thing operating
in evolution . . . and . . . perhaps . . . captured in . . . Anne's
'desire to play' (see also Serendip's Playground)." Hearing a strong
echo of this idea in "The Turtle on the Fence Post," an essay in the
NYTimes Book Review 3/24/02 which describes Bill Clinton, like William
James, as "so extremely natural that there was no knowing what his
nature was, or what came next," I'd like to challenge the Language
Group to try and parse what (according, delightfully, to this review
essay) is now a Clinton entry in "Barlett's Familiar Quotations":
"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the--if
he--if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not--that is one
thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement."
Anyone want to bite?
Name: Sharon Burgmayer
Username: sburgmay
Subject: a bite...well, really a nip
Date: 2002-04-10 22:17:29
Message Id: 1783
Comments:
At Anne's request, I'll share with all what I sent to her in response
to Bill's, um, eloquent quote:
"I think it would be wise if I stuck to chemistry in this situation.
;-)
For fun, I might note that, in the context of chemistry, "is"
will be governed largely by free energy.
And free energy is that which is left over after the universal requirement
of increasing entropy (disorder) is satisfied.
So one may view this quote--indeed Bill himself--as a necessary,
nay, even
unawares participant in disorder's rule."
Or in Paul's 'language', Nature is just exploring, exploration
is messy, and
Bill helped enormously to push it along. ;-)
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Language Play: Two More Test Cases
Date: 2002-04-15 23:47:02
Message Id: 1821
Comments:
I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation in the Language Group today;
my preference/suggestion for our next/last-for-this-year's reading
would not be more Lakoff (whom I think we "got") but rather some sort
of "test case" for Carol's query: assuming Lakoff's right in his claim
that our thinking is bodily-dependent/sensorily-determined, what difference
does it make? (for the history of philosophy, for our understanding
of that history, for its future? more generally, for our uses of language?)
Whom in the philosophical/linguistic traditions might we read to see
how "useful" Lakoff's ideas are for further thinking?
Here are two short ("real-life") applications which have already
occured to me.
After the Language group meets on Monday afternoons, I visit an
elderly friend, Dorothy Steere, who is dying. Dorothy speaks, I
now know from reading Lakoff, directly from the unconscious, and
her speaking is very labile--she leaps quickly from one statement
to its counterclaim, or to another completely unrelated one (often
using completely nonsensical words), often before she has finished
a single sentence. Today I had made a circlet of marsh marigolds
for my hair, thinking it would please and amuse her--which it did.
But she kept reaching out to touch it and say, "I love your pink
. . . row." Occasionally she would add: "I love your pink row .
. . . yel . . . low." This refrain (which she repeated numerous
times while I was there) reminded me, of course, both of Stanlaw's
essay on the evolutionary sequence of color nomenclature, and of
Lakoff's description of color as an embodied concept: not just a
reflection of an external reality, but the result of the evolution
of our bodies/brains. So now I
want to know what happens when we become senile: Does Dorothy now
"see" yellow as pink? Has she just "lost" the word for what she
still "sees" as the same color?
This "evolution" (or de-volution) made me think differently about
a conversation Mark Lord and I were having as we left today's session
(I hope he'll correct me if I remember it differently than he does).
We had been toying w/ the idea that each of us feels "most real"
either when we are encountering a space of possibility--something
about to happen, but not yet realized--or when we have an awareness,
in a moment of fulfillment, of its transitoriness (as in a point
of connection w/ another human being, which we know will end soon).
Paradoxically (?), those moments which "feel" to both of us most
"real" are NOT those which are most stable/secure, but just the
opposite: those that are unstable, about to change. I'm thinking
now that a metaphor marks just such a moment: it is a link that
is tenuous, an analogy which both gestures towards what is the same
("my love is a red red rose") and towards its difference (my love
is NOT....); it only works because the two terms ("tenor" and "vehicle")
are both like AND not; it both compares and indicates the limits
of the comparison.
There is (likewise) something very "real" about my encounters
w/ Dorothy, in which language is used so unpredictably, so tenuously,
so . . . playfully. That's where the "real" world is, neither "out
there" nor "in here," but in that connection, in that tenuous, unstable
play between . . . what I think I perceive and what I think I know
(and can say) about it.
Anne
Name: Doug Blank
Username: dblank@brynmawr.edu
Subject: New Whorf-Sapir; new author
Date: 2002-04-16 08:41:53
Message Id: 1828
Comments:
I, too, would like to second the motion to pursue this new version
of Whorf-Sapir (do our bodies dictate our concepts?) and the related
questions. But, I would advocate to continue our reading of modern
cognitive scientists.
One author that would fit into this discussion rather well, I
think, is Doug Hofstadter. He has a few articles along the lines
of "analogy-making as perception". He would also be a great person
to invite next year. He also loves to play with language, and so
he is an enjoyable read.
-Doug
Name: George Weaver
Username: gweaver2brynmawr.edu
Subject: Categorization, Partitions and Pigeonhole
Principles
Date: 2002-04-16 18:23:52
Message Id: 1845
Comments:
On page 18 and following of the stuff we have been reading from Lakoff
there is a discussion of categorization as a consequence of the biology
of the brains of agents. Paul made the same point more eloquently
in the meeting and I recognized the argument that Paul used as an
application of what is called a pigeonhole principle. There are several
of these principles in both finitary and infinitary combinatorics.
The simplest one I know goes something like this: suppose that you
have n objects and you are trying to put them in m containers. If
m<n then some container, will have at least two objects in it.
The form of the argument Paul used is a little more complicated. Suppose
you have two sets A and B such that A is strictly bigger than B. (In
Lakoff let A be the 100 million light-sensing cells and B be the 1
million fibers leading to the brain.) Let f be any function that associates
things in A with things in B. Thus, if x is in A, f(x) is that member
of B that f associates with x. We can assume without loss of generality
that f is onto B(i.e. that given any y in B there is x in A such that
f(x)=y). Let y be any member of B. The inverse image of y under f
is the set of all members of A that f associates with y(i.e. {x|x
is in A and f(x)=y}). The collection of all the inverse images of
members of B under f forms a partition of A(i.e. a collection of non-empty
subsets of A with two additional properties: every member of A is
in one such set and different sets are disjoint-have no element in
common). This partition is called the partition on A induced by f.
The members of partitions are called cells. Lakoff is inviting the
reader to think of the cells in the partition induced by f as the
categories. To put partitions and pigeonholes together: note that
when A is strickly bigger than B, at least one cell in the partition
contains more than one object. If one is prepared to take all of this
seriously, categorization is a product of biology and a little combinatorics.
There is some other stuff that can be said here once one starts filling
out the details about A, B and f. On particularly interesting line
is to look for "structure" on A and B and for functions which are
called homomorphisms-functions that preserve the "structure".
The Revealing Unknown
Revealed
Actually, all of George's comments DID get posted (see below for the
concern). The problem was, amusingly, one of language intepretation.
I heard something different from what George said. In particular,
the symbol "<", which George used in a formula to mean "less than",
means to me "what follows is to be understood as formatting instructions"
and I behaved accordingly in using my own language to tell other computers
what to display on their screens. Its an interesting case suggesting
that there is some "play" even in cases of languages largely stripped
of their metaphorizing. Maybe relevant as well is that clarification
was facilitated by a third party familiar both with my language and
George's and able to infer the underlying intent in both cases. Sorry
about the problem, but hope you all find it as amusing/instructive
as I do. I'm enjoying your conversatons, and hope you don't mind if
I occasionally throw in my two bits.
Fondly,
Serendip
Name: George Weaver
Username: gweaver@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Categorization, partitions and Pigeonhole
principles- Again
Date: 2002-04-16 19:02:32
Message Id: 1850
Comments:
For some unknown reason not all of my comments got posted. So I'll
try again. Suppose that you have n objects and m containers and that
m is strictly smaller than n. Them one container will have more than
one object. Paul's argument was more complicated. Suppose that you
have two sets A and B where A is strictly bigger than B. In Lakoff's
example think of A as the 100 million light-sensing cells and B as
the 1 million fibers leading to the brain. Let f be a function that
associates things in A with things in B. Thus, given x in A, f(x)
is that member of B that f associates with x. For simplicity assume
that f is onto B- for all y in B there is x in A such that f(x)=y.
Given y in B, the inverse image of y under f is the set of those members
of A that f associates with y-{x|x is in A and f(x)=y}. The collection
of inverse images of members of B under f forms a partition on the
set A-i.e. a collection of non-empty subsets of A with two other properties:
every member of A is in one of the sets and differnt sets have no
member in common. The partition is called the partition on A induced
by f and the members of the partition are called cells. Lakoff invites
the reader to think of the cells of the induced partition as categories.To
put partitions and pigeonholes together: since A is strictly larger
than B some cell in the induced partition contains at least two members
of A. If one takes all of this seriously, categorization is biology
and a little combinatorics.
There is a more interesting story here when one fills in some of the
details about A, B and f. In particular, if there is some "structure"
on both A and B and f is a homomorphism- preserves the structure.
Name: George Weaver
Username: gweaver@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Categorization, Partitions and Pigeonholes
Date: 2002-04-17 10:57:21
Message Id: 1863
Comments:
There is a point I neglected to mention in the last posting: the number
of cells in the partition on A induced by f is the same as the number
of things in B. This follows from the assumption that f is onto B
and the observation that if y and z are different members of B, then
the inverse image of y under f and the inverse image of z under f
have no member in common. In Lakoff's terms the number of categories
is determined by the number of things in B. Pigeonhole Principles
provide information about the size of the categories.For example,
if n is the number of things in A and m is the number of things in
B,and k is the result of rounding n/m up to the nearest integer, then
some cell contains at least k objects.
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Planning Ahead
Date: 2002-04-21 20:32:55
Message Id: 1900
Comments:
Despite several attempts on my own, plus tutorials from both Paul
and George, I'm still scratching my head over most of the details
of George's postings, intrigued that the language of logic, intended
(I think?) to be so precise, is so-very difficult for me to follow
(maybe simply because I've never had a course in logic, and so just
haven't learned the language; or maybe because, to be engaged by language,
I need a space for "play" this kind of language doesn't allow?). Even
more interesting, perhaps, is that George was most successful in explaining
this logic to me when he drew a picture. Maybe it's time to give up
on our inquiry into language and move on to images....?
Another entirely unrelated suggestion to keep in mind as we plan
(next week?) for continuing our discussion (next year?): I'm editor
of the newsletter for a national Quaker college teachers' organization
(FAHE, Friends Association for Higher Education). In the Spring
2002 volume we just put out is an report by Hal Schiffman about
his work @ Penn on the consortium for language policy and planning.
I checked out their website @ http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/plc/clpp
and found that, besides language policy and planning, they are exploring
"language maintenance, language death, language loss, language abandonment,
language preference, language prestige, language loyalty, language
switching, language shift, language spread, language suppression,
language conflict, and so on." What REALLY interests me in this,
besides the turn from "abstract and synchronic linguistics" to what
Saussure called "external linguistics" (the role of language in
history, or of the relations between language and political history),
is the therefore-necessary attention to questions of choice, control
and rights--the sorts of questions Labov's talk might have explored,
but didn't; the sorts of questions that our speculations, last week,
about the "realness" and the verifiability of the "real" will never
get us to. "Real" questions about the "real" world. Another direction
I'd be interested in moving towards--not metaphorically, but "really."
Anne
Name: Paul Grobstein
Username: pgrobste@brynmawr.edu
Subject: musings
Date: 2002-04-24 10:00:51
Message Id: 1943
Comments:
Two sets of thoughts have been running in my mind since our last meeting,
maybe related, and maybe related to a talk yesterday by Harold Shapiro.
Maybe, maybe not ... let's see.
I was very struck by Anne's interest in the notion that "categorizing"
was inevitable (a necessary function of the nervous system whether
done consciously or not), and so any political agenda which sees
categorizing as opressive and seeks to correct opression by eliminating
categorization is doomed to failure. I think that is indeed so.
And I think it is also so that much "categorizing" is done unconsciously
and so is relatively inaccessible to many people under many circumstances.
BUT ... one can in fact become aware of categorizations and, to
varying degrees, alter them. Bottom line: it is indeed possible
(with hard work/patience) to reduce opression by identifying and
altering particular instances of "categorization" even if one cannot
eliminate the phenomenon itself. One step further, "categorization"
is not only inevitable but desirable. New frameworks can be constructed
only by standing on old ones.
I was equally struck by some remarks by Marc which I will characterize
as I remember them, hoping Marc will provide his version. Roughly,
Marc noted (more dramatically/poetically than I can replicate) that
individuals are in principle isolated not only from each other but
from the past and future as well. I don't remember the context that
elicited this but, in my terms, its an inevitable (again) consequence
of thinking about brains. We are each a pattern of activity within
one. All else, including both other people and times other than
the present are necessarily inferences from/by that and patterns
of activity in sensory neurons. Here too one can either be upset
by the inevitability or excited by the promise. What goes on inside
each of us is truly private, yielding the potential to make worlds/pasts/futures
as we individually wish. At the same time, we can choose, to varying
degrees, to share creations, and, by so doing, we have the possibility
of making worlds/pasts/futures richer/more satisfying than ones
we can create alone. THAT may be the most important/distinctive
feature of language, what is missing in many other organisms: it
is a tool making possible the more effective sharing of internal
worlds which otherwise must be quite imperfectly and laboriously
inferred from observations of actions.
Shapiro's talk was nominally on bioethics but was in fact a particularly
rich and thoughtful reflection on what one might call "liberal democracy"
and the role of "narrative" in it. There is an earlier and slightly
different version available on the web at http://www.princeton.edu/~hts/PDFs/Science_Anxiety_Meaning.pdf.
The gist of the talk was the importance of recognizing that humans
create/share "narratives" that serve the function of providing individuals
with a sense of meaning/purpose (Shapiro asserts the inclination
to do this is more fundamental than curiousity; I think/hope he's
wrong). "Science" (indeed all forms of human inquiry) create anxiety
by challenging these narratives, and are progressively moving humanity
toward a recognition that "meaning/purpose" is not in fact to be
found "out there" (in much the sense of the above musings). The
challenge, as Shapiro sees it, is how to continually and appropriately
rewrite narratives, and the suggestion is to always do so in ways
that acknowledge and give recognition to the widest possible array
of existing narratives. There is a narrow "politically pragmatic"
way of seeing this but also, I think, a broader, more significant
underpinning: the idea that since there is no "correct" narrative,
the "least wrong" one is the one that successfully incorporates
the widest range of perspectives.
Needess to say, "narrative", in the sense being used here, depends
on language (yes, there are probably unconscious "stories", but
they bear the same relation to "narrative" as "category" does to
"metaphor", lacking the internal experience and hence the potential
for quick alteration). So ... there really IS a "role for language
in history"? Which makes our conversations even more interesting?
And maybe even sheds light on the theory of language? Yes, let's
make plans not only for the rest of this year (Catherine suggested
a shared evening viewing of Memento ... I have a copy and would
be up for that if others would be) but for next year as well.
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: On Losing Categories (the World?)
Date: 2002-04-24 12:23:54
Message Id: 1946
Comments:
Directly contra Paul's suggestion, that "the most important/distinctive
feature of language.... [is] making possible the more effective sharing
of internal worlds" (internal worlds, Lakoff would remind us, which
are "inherently embodied") is a posting made on Blackboard yesterday
by Rachel Wright, one of the students in my Big Books of American
Literature class. Rachel begins by referring to "something that James
Joyce toys with in Finnegan's Wake":
"he suggests that in reading, we miss the point when we look for
meaning behind the words. He says that it is like looking at a beautiful,
fully clothed woman and trying to see only what's underneath. (how
is that for a gendered image/simile?!?) If you are always trying
to get under/around/beneath you miss the point because, he argues,
the point is not in what is behind the words but in the act of arranging
the words. So maybe its not about the body at all, because the body
is a location for isolation and captivity and how we dress the body
or the voice is what really matters?"
I disagree w/ Joyce; I attended Shapiro's talk, too, and was similarly
moved by the social possibilities he described for narrative. I
was intrigued, in our discussion of language last week, not only
by the inevitability of our categorizing (which Paul describes above)
but also by the strong disjunction/paradox I saw between Lakoff's
claim that, though our thinking is shaped by our bodies, what we
think is not necessarily (or at least we cannot know if it is) a
reflection of the world outside ourselves. I think we were trying
to cross that divide, at the end of our session, by playing w/ the
notion that a metaphor expresses the relationship, is the analogy
between what we experience internally and the sensory imput we receive.
This capacity to "metaphorize" (there, I said it) is never context
free, but it is also not entirely context dependent; the "categories
of our mind are not those of the world."
My visit to Dorothy this week seemed to me another playing out
of this paradox. I could hear weaving in and out of my conversation
w/ her not only Lakoff's claim that the ability to categorize is
inherent, impossible for neural beings like ourselves NOT to perform,
but also Scarry's reflections on the "counterfactual" process of
"imagining flowers" (which she described as a "mimesis of perception,"
of the sensorily present). What I am really wondering, though, is
whether Dorothy's fragmented musings might tell us anything "new"
about Pinker's claims about the "language instinct."
Dorothy is very hard of hearing, so we communicate by my writing
out what I have to say. She reads what I have written, then responds
in speech (so one variable, in the story upcoming, is certainly
the legibility of my writing). Anyhow: this Monday I placed a bouquet
of lilacs in a vase on Dorothy's table, then wrote on a piece of
paper lying in front of them, "These are lilacs from my yard." Running
her finger under the flowers, and along the words I had written,
Dorothy read, "These are daisies from my yard." A few minutes later,
she read the line aloud again, this time decoding it as, "These
are daylilies from my yard." A few minutes after, she read and revised
once again, "These are lilies from my yard." When I asked her directly,
"Dorothy, what kind of flowers are these?" she responded, "It's
lavender." Although she couldn't remember the name for lilacs ,
she seemed still, at this point in our conversation, to be recognizing
the category "flower" and (or @ least) its appropriate color category.
But then, as our conversation turned to food, she reached out,
took hold of the bouquet, and said, "I want to eat these, they look
so good." A bit later she commented that she had never seen this
color before. When I asked her what color it was, she said, "It's
gentle....these get very quiet" (they WERE a very pale shade of
lilac). She seemed to be sliding @ this point into a wonderful sort
of jumbled synesthesia. (Liz, w/ whom I taught a CSem, many years
ago, on how we use our senses to "make sense" of the world, should
appreciate what comes next.) What struck me most was that only one
sense was missing from the range of those Dorothy was giving voice
to. Although she'd mentioned sight (flower and color names), taste
("eat"), touch ("gentle") and sound ("quiet"), her descriptions
had omitted the one sensory perception that is most remarkable about
lilacs, and was certainly a characteristic of those I had brought:
their very strong smell.
When I asked her directly, however, what the flowers smelled like,
she said, "It's a smell that I can't remember SEEING before...."
and (a little later), "Have you ever TASTED that kind of thing before?"
When I wrote that it was very familiar to me, she responded, "It's
known to you, it's known to you? I don't recall it now..." and then
(a little later), "I'm interested in things different from anything
else. For instance, I have never seen anything like this before,
and that makes it very interesting." Dorothy seemed to havehad moved,
by the end of our conversation, from a clear recognition of, if
not the individual flower before her, both the category "flower"
and its appropriate color name, through a synethesic description
of its qualities, to an awareness that she had no categories available
to her @ all for recognizing/describing what she was seeing. Several
other comments she made along the way reinforced this impression:
"My eyes get very hard, these old eyes," she said; and later, in
response to a note from a friend, "Baby goats. What kind of animal
is that?" Finally, when I wrote that I needed to get back to work,
to serve champagne to our senior theses writers, she reached out,
gathered the lilacs in her hands again, and said, "Champagne? Are
these champagne?"
Most of my questions about this very-evocative conversation have
to do w/Lakoff's description of the sensory basis of our thinking/categorizing/metaphorization.
Is it because Dorothy's sensory imput has so diminished that the
"appropriate" words are no longer available to her to describe her
experiences of perception? Is she speaking so fully from her unconscious
at this point in her life that the categories formed by our conscious
mind--such as the separation of the five senses one from another
(?) are not operative for her anymore? How would Pinker, Scarry,
Lakoff "make sense" of this story? How do you?
Anne
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Language and Spatial/Relational Reasoning
Date: 2002-05-14 17:44:05
Message Id: 2090
Comments:
Language and Spatial/Relational Reasoning
I found our final session, in which we read Li and Gleitman's
Cognition essay on "language and spatial reasoning," a rich one,
and wanted to make that observation--not Eric's account of my "dropping
big questions on the group"(!?)--my final note of the semester.
I was particularly interested in Li and Gleitman's description of
the "major cut" linguists see between language groups which orient
themselves using locations relative to the speaker (those called
"egocentric" or "body-centered" descriptors) and those that use
landmarks outside the observer ("allocentric," "geocentric" or "place-based"
classifications). Even more interesting to me was Katherine's playing
off the footnote on p. 268 of the article, which observes that some
investigators use the term allocentric to refer to the viewpoint
of the other party in a conversation ("your left," "to the east
of you"). Katherine's idea was that there is actually a third way
to orient oneself in space: in relation to another who shares it.
This thought led us into a discussion of the fundamentally relational
nature of language,and the ways in which the subjects in the various
experiments described by Li and Gleitman (try to) use language,
by asking questions to (try to) reduce the ambiguity of instructions
which are otherwise "socially
impoverished."
I drew heavily (and gratefully) on this distinction, and its refinements,
for the final lecture I gave in my 19th c. American lit course later
in the week, on the "geographical imagination" of Walt Whitman and
Emily Dickinson: he projected his body onto the landscape, "incarnated"
the nation's geography by literally becoming part of different topographical
features; she--contrariwise--used place names metaphorically to
describe the large capacity and expanse of her brain. See
Geographical Imagination for a full discussion of this distinction.
Whitman spread himself over the landscape, Dickinson brought the
landscape into herself; in Li and Gleitman's terms, he made the
"egocentric" "geocentric," while she made the "geo" "ego" (cute,
huh?). But, in Katherine's terms, both did so in language that was
relational, that profoundly (literally?) incorporated the reader
into the speaking self. See, for instance, the opening stanza of
Dickinson's # 632:
The Brain--is wider than the Sky--
For--put them side by side--
The one the other will contain
With ease--and You--beside--
as well as the final canto of Whitman's "Song of Myself":
I depart as air . . . . I shake my white locks at the runaway
sun,
I effuse my flesh in edies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you
[important, in the earliest draft: there no period to close....]
Grammatically, relationally, gratefully "yours,"
Anne
P.S. Ruth just passed on to me two short pieces from Science
magazine, Vol.
291 (Feb 16, 2001) which we might look @ together as a group:
"Hunting the Metaphor" describes the various metaphors used to describe
the human genome; "In the Beginning was the Word" describes the
ways in which molecular biology relies on metaphor both to construct
a world view and formulate methods for its analysis-- "as if the
metaphor were the thing itself "(?!).
Name: Paul Grobstein
Username: pgrobste@brynmawr.edu
Subject: New year/directions
Date: 2002-09-17 19:22:37
Message Id: 2734
Comments:
Apologies to any/all who felt I took up too much air space at our
first meeting, and/or was preoccupied with old issues. My excuse is
that I thought an old issue became particularly crisply posed, and
that that made it possible to get it firmly behind us so we could
move on to new things.
The issue, as I saw it, was "is it the case that there are non-conscious
and non-cultural dependent influences on language"? Color categorization,
in particular the early processing dependent on cone pigments, provides
one line of evidence that this is indeed so (I apologize again that
the paper didn't help to make this clear). Cathy's question, what
OBSERVATIONS support such a conclusion, was a good one, and Eric
has in his notes indicated several general classes of such observations.
I promised some more specifics, and so:
- The Scientific American article I mentioned is Bentley, David
and Hoy, Ronald R. (1974) The neurobiology of cricket song. Scientific
American, August, 1974, pp 34-44.
- http://serendipstudio.org/gen_beh/course02/syllabus2.html
is a set of references for part of a course Anjali Thapar and
I did last year on "the signficance of genetics and evolution
for understanding behavior" with relevant on-line links.
- There is a recent review of the burgeoning exploration of genes
related to language at
http://news.bmn.com/hmsbeagle/118/notes/feature11.
So now let me reiterate my point: there IS an unconscious, cultural
independent INFLUENCE on language. That's quite a different thing
from saying unconscious, cultural independent factors DETERMINE
language (see http://serendipstudio.org/gen_beh.
My wish was/is not to assert the latter, but rather to be sure we
all have the in common the unconscious/culturally independent tool
for use as we go on to explore the complexities of language which
it is unable alone to account for.
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Surplus of Cognitive Linkages
Date: 2002-09-28 11:41:37
Message Id: 2959
Comments:
A number of the members of the language group have also been participating,
this fall, in the brown bag series on The
Culture of Science. For those of you who have not: the most recent
brown bag discussion about metaphor and metonymy picked up wonderfully
on our last language discussion about Shakespeare's Brain and
how we might understand the "surpluses of cognitive linkages," the
"subversive effects of wordplay" that expose "buried links and structures."
There was also discussion of Jakobson's
work w/ aphasiacs which might serve as a rich source for our further
conversation. For a humorous feint @ some of these issues, see also
the recent Culture
of Science posting about The Logic of Jokes.
Anne
Name: Doug Blank
Username: dblank@brynmawr.edu
Subject: The Songs of Eden
Date: 2002-10-08 11:54:02
Message Id: 3203
Comments:
[On Monday last, I mentioned an article by Danny Hillis called
"The Songs of Eden". I found it on-line at http://www.tmeg.com/ai/ai_hilli.htm,
but, since it isn't that long, I have copied the main "story" below.
-Doug]
Once upon a time, about two and a half million years ago, there
lived a race of apes that walked upright. In terms of intellect
and habit they were similar to modern chimps. The young apes had
a tendency to mimic the actions of others. In particular, they had
a tendency to imitate sounds. Some sequences of sounds, or "songs",
were more likely to be mimicked than others.
Consider the evolution of the songs. Since the songs were replicated
by the apes, and since they sometimes died away and were occasionally
combined with others, we may loosely consider them as a form of
life. They survived, bred, competed with one another, and evolved
according to their own criterion of fitness. If a song contained
a particularly catchy phrase that caused it to be repeated often,
then that phrase was likely to be incorporated into other songs.
Only songs that had a strong tendency to be repeated survived.
The survival of a song was only indirectly related to the survival
of the apes; it was more directly affected by the survival of other
songs. Since the apes were a limited resource, the songs had to
compete with one another for a chance to be sung. One successful
competition strategy was for a song to specialize; that is, for
it to find a particular niche in which it was apt to be repeated.
Songs that fit particularly well with specific moods or activities
of apes had a special survival value for this reason.
Before songs began to specialize they were of no particular value
to the apes. In a biological sense, they were parasites, taking
advantage of the apes' tendency to imitate. As they became specialized,
it became advantageous for apes to pay attention to the songs of
others and to differentiate between them. By listening to songs,
a clever ape could gain useful information, e.g. that another ape
had found food, or that it was likely to attack. Once the apes began
taking advantage of the songs, a symbiotic relationship developed;
songs enhanced their own survival by conveying useful information
to ages; apes enhanced their own survival by improving their capacity
to remember, replicate and understand songs. Thus the blind forces
of evolution created a partnership between the songs and the apes
that thrived on the basis of mutual self-interest. Eventually this
partnership evolved into one of the world's most successful symbiont:
the human race.
Unfortunately, songs do not leave fossils, so we may never know
if the preceding story describes what really happened. But it if
is true, the apes and songs became the two components of human intelligence.
The songs evolved into the knowledge, mores and mechanisms of thought
that together are the symbolic portion of human intelligence. The
apes became apes with bigger brains, perhaps optimised for late
maturity so that they could learn more songs. Homo sapiens
is a co-operative combination of the two...
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Making Strange
Date: 2002-11-19 21:44:03
Message Id: 3799
Comments:
"It would be easier to talk about this if we weren't familiar w/ language."
(Just wanting to be sure that comment this got recorded for posterity,
along w/ "metaphorization," "desire," "furries" and the several other
remarkable locutions/shorthands which have evolved as the members
of the language group have used language on&w/ one another....)
Now cf. this (from a review of Robert Wilson's Woyzeck, which
i saw @ the Brooklyn Academy of Music this weekend...): "what he
was doing w/ language was quite strange."
Seriously: I've been chewing for a while on Katherine's suggestion
a month ago (when we were discussing Jakobson) that our by-now-much
vaulted & valorized distinction between metaphor and metonymy (and
our obsession, since, w/ figuring out how to manage the transition/translation
from one to the other) might both be subsumed into the "master trope"
of synedoche, or the relation of parts to wholes. (Synedoche is
a part of speech which uses a less inclusive term for a more inclusive
one--i.e. "head" for "cattle"--and comes from a Greek word meaning
"to take up with another.")
Seems to me, from the perspective of synedoche (yes, as seen by
an English prof) that we're spending an awful lot of time trying
to build bridges across categories we have ourselves constructed
which are not (to quote Eric) "furry" enough (pardon a quick association
here to a recent student paper about my "hairy" teaching...and its
risks/costs). We have become preoccupied w/ building bridges because
we need them to get from one self-contained (that is, inadequately
furry) category to another.
So...I'm proposing we turn the wheel, shift gears, look @ metaphor
and metonymy in different relation to one another, both as means
of categorizing that work to pull parts out of (and put them back
into) wholes, to attend to them, to dwell in them, to make them
live, to (as Mark said) "tell you where Christ is." What astonishing
language does--language that calls attention to what it's doing--is
make the familiar strange, e-strange us from what we think we know.
That's when it's alive, when it tunnels out of me into other cells,
makes a connection that..."shouldn't" connect. That surprises. Delights.
E-stranges.
Strangely yours,
A.
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Purging All (Self-Respecting? Abstract?)
Punctuation
Date: 2002-11-26 16:23:10
Message Id: 3892
Comments:
I realize that I'm pretty much holding down the fort/this forum on
my own these days....but I still can't resist (even if/while talking
to myself) archiving this very funny conversation I just had w/ Jan
Richards, the Serendip Webmistress. I'd written her that
when i use serendip's search function for "Language: A Conversation"
it told me it couldn't find that combination of terms.
and she replied,
In general, the search engine doesn't like punctuation and does
weird things with it, but I'm not sure what. Here, it will find
what you're looking for if you search for "Language A Conversation"
without punctuation or "Language : A Conversation" with the colon
disconnected from the word, even though in the page it appears attached
to the word, as any self-respecting, parasitic colon should. The
search engine appears to index the colon as if it were a separate
word, and then looks for it in the page as a separate word, which
it isn't. I can't take credit for this creative and bizarre behavior
since I didn't write the search engine but merely downloaded it
off the Internet somewhere and installed it. In any case, you're
better off purging all punctuation from your thought processes when
you do a search and just search for "Language A Conversation" without
any punctuation. As you know, Serendip is not human and can't deal
with such abstract concepts as punctuation colons. It only knows
the colon that's an organ, which is about as concrete as it gets.
pretty funny, i thought. pretty apt also.
Anne
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Pump Head
Date: 2002-11-27 11:08:03
Message Id: 3898
Comments:
Me again.
Feeling @ first blown away by Lakoff's notion of "embodied thinking,"
I've found myself increasingly impatient w/ and disinterested in
the further elaboration/demonstration of this idea in the remainder
of Philosophy in the Flesh. MUCH more interesting (@ least
this morning) is this piece in The Chronicle of Higher Ed
(11/29/02)
"Battling for Hearts and Minds," by Lila Guterman, which explains
the cognitive disfunctions which often follow heart surgery, and
explores some possible causes ("pump head"? "trash sent to the brain"
during surgery? damage from anesthesia?) and ends w/ this observation
that "The brain is not like a light bulb.... You don't just turn
it on and turn it off. When it comes back on, it might be a little
dimmer, for longer than we thought."
Now THIS is the kind of thinking about embodied thinking that....
interests me.
See you after Thanksgiving--
A.
Name: Paul Grobstein
Username: pgrobste@brynmawr.edu
Subject: for future?
Date: 2002-11-29 13:05:35
Message Id: 3908
Comments:
Eric turned me on to Ray Jackendorf, an "alternative" linguist. Jackendorf
apparently has a new book coming out: Foundations of Language:
Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. A precis of the book will
appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences along with commentary from
others. That precis is available to potential commentators at http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Jackendoff-07252002/Referees/.
The abstract, below, looks interesting/related to our conversations
about the syntax/semantics relationship.
ABSTRACT. The goal of this study to reintegrate the theory of generative
grammar into the cognitive sciences. Generative grammar was correct
to
focus on the child's acquisition of language as its central problem,
leading to the hypothesis of an innate Universal Grammar. However,
generative grammar was mistaken to assume that the syntactic component
is
the sole course of combinatoriality, and that everything else is
"interpretive." The proper approach is a parallel architecture,
in which
phonology, syntax, and semantics are autonomous generative systems,
linked
by interface components. The parallel architecture leads to an
integration within linguistics, and to a far better integration
with the
rest of cognitive neuroscience. It fits naturally into the larger
architecture of the mind/brain and permits a properly mentalistic
theory
of semantics. It leads to a view of linguistic performance in which
the
rules of grammar are directly involved in processing. Finally, it
leads
to a natural account of the incremental evolution of the language
capacity.
To think about for next semester?
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Apostrophe, Lack and the Generation of
Narrative Meaning
Date: 2003-03-20 12:40:54
Message Id: 5114
Comments:
Still chewing over the (rather charged) ending of yesterday's conversation,
when we found ourselves arguing about Jerome Bruner's characterization
of what results from an "impoverishment of narrative resouces."
Bruner claims that in Palestinian refugee compounds (not to mention
modern bureaucracies), "the 'worst scenario' story comes so to dominate
daily life that variation seems no longer to be possible," that
without resources which "nourish our sense of breach and of exception,"
rich narrative will not be generated.
Well, now. As I was saying before we began (arguing), I am this
semester supervising Kat Fallon's senior thesis on "apostrophe"
(not the sort that concerns Eric, "the sign indicating the omission
of a letter, or possession, or plurals of abbreviations and symbol";
but rather) the sort that concerns--and was actually inspired by--Jane's
work: "a digresion in the form of an address to someone not present,
or to a personified object or idea (fr. Gk meaning 'a turning away')."
At this point, Kat is trying to decide whether apostrophe succeeeds
in "resurrecting" the dead subject/absent object of the poem OR
rather in testifying to her/its utter "goneness." Earlier this week,
I was trying to nudge her beyond that binary, suggesting that she
experiment with getting comfortable in the paradox that a good apostrophe
accomplishes both, that by the very force of its resurrective qualities
it reminds us of what is lost, and vice versa: that the very strength
of loss can generate a strong sense of presence. I found myself,
in the course of our most recent conversation, extending that invitation
by reading Kat a passage from Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping,
which I have always found very moving (italics mine):
Imagine a Carthage sown with salt...What flowering would there
be in such a garden? ...where the world was salt there would be
gretaer need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations
it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and
its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly
as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into
so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses
know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?...to wish for a hand
on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose,
very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and
hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our
hair, and brings us wild strawberries.
The larger question, for me, is this one: if, as Lacan taught
us, language is an index to loss (we only use words if we lack the
thing itself; the very use of langauge is a mark of absence), is
language most accurately/most usefully understood as emerging out
of a sense of loss or out of plenitude--especially a plenitude of
others who will encourage, listen and respond to the narratives
we construct? Are we more generative in creating imaginative worlds
when the one in which we live is "narratively impoverished" (whatever
THAT means...) or rich?
This series of questions is fueled right now, of course, by my
trying VERY hard to figure out a narrative that makes sense of the
current impoverishment of political leadership in this country...
Anne
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Decoding and Desire
Date: 2003-03-31 14:30:45
Message Id: 5217
Comments:
I have some thoughts this afternoon which go in two very different
directions. The first is about the language of war; the second is
about the language of intimacy. Here comes the bad stuff first.
In the Philadelphia Inquirer this morning (Mon, Mar. 31,
2003) there was an article entitled
"Decoding the Language of Wartime," by Marian Uhlman and Beth
Gillin. It's the sort of thing that...
gives language a bad name. Just a taste:
Why does the military describe the current war as Operation
Iraqi Freedom?
Or human beings as soft targets?
Or bombing everything in sight as sanitizing the area?
"It is very difficult for people to speak accurately about war,"
said James Dawes, author of The Language of War. "It is a self-protective
move."
It's easier for soldiers and civilians alike to think in less personal
terms about war. By using euphemisms, people can keep a psychological
distance from gruesome details. For instance, wayward bombs that
hit civilians are incontinent ordnance, and the civilians' deaths
are referred to as collateral damage.
"The military does disguise the meaning to make things less dirty,
to make things more palatable," said Frank Farley, a Temple University
psychology professor.
Masking words "create distance between ourselves and the consequences
of our actions by turning war into an antiseptic, clinical abstraction,"
said Michael Hanby, a Villanova University associate professor of
humanities.
Arms and legs, then, aren't blown off, they are severed in a traumatic
amputation, noted William Lutz, an English professor at Rutgers
University-Camden.
People don't want to talk about "burned skin and corpses piled high,"
Dawes said. Far easier to use "the military metaphor of the enemy
as one colossal body," with an attackable rear and exposed flanks.
While the euphemisms can be protective, they also can be desensitizing.
"What we are in danger of losing is the real sense of the embodied
horror of war," said Hugh Gusterson, associate professor of anthropology
and science studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"My concern would be not only that we dehumanize our enemies, but
we dehumanize ourselves with this rhetoric," Hanby said. "Because
the rhetoric helps detach us from what we do"....
"What's most remarkable about war rhetoric is its continuity over
the ages," Dawes said. "You can look back as far as the Civil War
memoirs of Generals Sherman and Grant, and you'll see the same sanitizing
verbal reflexes: 'our flank was damaged,' 'we delivered a message'"....
Rather than being the generator of new words, Lutz said, the military
often morphs common language into new meanings. "Attrition" is now
shortened to attrit and attritted - referring to destruction through
bombing.
Military language has become ever more businesslike and bureaucratic,
experts say.
"It's cool, precise, objective language," said Lutz, author of Doublespeak
and The New Doublespeak.
And anything that can be abbreviated is: TOC for tactical operations
center; KIA for killed in action, even WMD for weapons of mass destruction.
"War exerts incredible pressure on language," said Dawes, professor
of English at Macalester College in Minnesota. "Language shrinks
to an efficient kernel."
In some regards, the military is no different than any group in
devising a jargon for what it does.
"But like any jargon, this one offers not just efficiency but cohesion,"
said Clark McCauley, a Bryn Mawr psychology professor. "It provides
a badge of membership that allows fast discrimination of insiders
and outsiders."
For everyone else, it provides a reference point.
"All kinds of events, when they are important, gather a particular
jargon to them," said Donna Jo Napoli, a linguistics professor at
Swarthmore College. "It unites us in knowledge and interest in the
event."
Unites SOME of us. Separates others. See the next post.
Anne
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Intimacy: Good/Bad?
Date: 2003-03-31 14:45:45
Message Id: 5218
Comments:
So...I finally got hold of the essay Jane had been teasing me w/
for weeks, Ted Cohen's "Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy"
(in Sheldon Sacks' collection On Metaphor, UChicago, 1978).
What tickles me about this piece is its argument about the emotional
work that metaphors do. Listen up:
"I want to suggest a point in metaphor which is independent of
the question of its cognitivity and which has nothing to do with
its aesthetical character....the achievement of intimacy. There
is a unique way in which the maker and the appreciator of a metaphor
are drawn closer to one another. Three aspects are involved: (1)
the speaker issues a kind of concealed invitation; (2) the hearer
expends a special effort to accept the invitation; and (3) this
transaction constitutes the acknowledgement of a community....."
What's even more interesting, however (after Cohen traces examples
of this process at work--and it works just the same way jokes do,
creating an "insiders" who get it, and "outsiders" who do NOT) is
his willingness to admit that
"linguistic intimation...is not...an invariably freindly thing,
nor is it intended to be. Sometimes one draws near another in order
to deal a penetrating thrust. When the device is a hostile metaphor
or a cruel joke requiring much background and effort to understand,
it is all the more painful because the victim has been made a complicitor
in his own demise....Some of the most instructive examples will
be ones in which intimacy is sought as a means to a lethal and one-sided
effect."
Which returns us, of course, and sadly, to my last post, on
Decoding the Language of Wartime."
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Metaphor and Metonymy Resurrected
Date: 2003-04-06 13:53:23
Message Id: 5280
Comments:
Carol Bernstein's retirement gala, this weekend, put me in mind of
our musings, last fall, which had taken off, in turn, from Ted Wong's
Brown Bag on
Metaphor and Metonymy.
Carol's talk was preceded by presentations given by a teacher
and student of hers; in her thanks she said (hoping that the student
"wouldn't misunderstand") that she "was a metonym of all the voices
I hear in this room." The student herself (Alison Weiner) talked
about the poet Hart Crane embracing a "logic of metaphor," what
he described as the "illogical impingements of the connotations
of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay
in metaphor on this basis)"; refusing to explain his poems in prose,
he expressed a desire to "free up connotation, vs. the stricture
of singular, totalizing denotation." This sort of associative work
is what Mary Thomas Crane talks about in Shakespeare's Brain,
a text we discussed last fall.
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: worldly relevance
Date: 2003-04-07 12:39:34
Message Id: 5294
Comments:
For the worldly/political relevance of our conversations, see
Peacekeeping Stories
Name: Anne Dalke
Username: adalke@brynmawr.edu
Subject: More on War-Speak
Date: 2003-04-08 10:06:49
Message Id: 5321
Comments:
More thoughts on Bruner,
narrative and war-speak ....
Name: Paul Grobstein
Username: pgrobste@brynmawr.edu
Subject: war-speak continued
Date: 2003-06-22 19:46:58
Message Id: 5769
Comments:
Try "War
is a Bad Metaphor."
Home
| Calendar | About
| Getting Involved
| Groups | Initiatives | Bryn Mawr Home | Serendip Home
Director: Liz McCormack -
emccorma@brynmawr.edu
| Faculty Steering Committee
| Secretary: Lisa Kolonay
© 1994-
, by Center for Science in Society, Bryn Mawr College and Serendip
Last Modified:
Wednesday, 02-May-2018 11:57:04 CDT
|