[Xmca-l] Re: sense and emotion

Sat Apr 7 16:58:52 PDT 2018

Well, David's comments consisted of two parts. The first part was pretty
incoherent--I just objected that they hadn't read the chapter the way I
did, with an emphasis on what Halliday calls "logogenesis" as opposed to
phylogenesis and ontogenesis. After some reflection, I wrote something a
little better, in which I argued that the distinction between "phasal" and
"semantic" was key to the chapter. When I think back at what I wrote,
though, the first part is really reproaching them for not reading Halliday
and the second part for not reading Saussure. Obviously, the second part is
a little fairer than the first...but in a hundred years I daresay things
will be the other way around: Saussure will only be of historical interest,
but Halliday himself will be part of our own living history.

I always wondered about that, Mike. In the preface to Mind in Society, it
says the first four chapters are from Tool and Sign, but the fourth chapter
is clearly from the end of Chapter Two of HDHMF. Vygotsky says:

Так, Д. Дьюи, один из крайних представителей прагматизма, развивший идеи
инструментальной логики и теории познания, определяет язык как орудие
орудий, перенося определение руки, данное Аристотелем, на речь.

So it's not about the "tongue" at all--it's about "language" and then about
"speech". And what's the difference?

Here I think Peter's got a point. The difference between "znachenie" and
"smysl" is semantic. But semantics, according to Halliday, has a way of
"rising to the concrete"--that is, all the patterns, from lexicogrammar to
phonology to phonetics, can be semantically motivated one way or another.
So for example at the level of lexicogrammar, there are some words that are
closer to "smysl", because they are so embedded in the context of situation
(these are the ones favored in infant speech and early childhood, the
"this" and the "that" and the "there" and "here" and "it" and "the" and so
on, whose reference is immediate and constantly changing as a result). But
so many of these words, iin Englsh, begin with voiced interdental "th".
Why?

Well, it's not just Tibetans and native Americans who point with their
lips, Henry! There is a fair amount of pointing with the tongue going on
here. But less trivially, I think you'll find that sense is linked to
VOWELS (as well as to intonation and stress) whle signification is carried
disproportionately in consonants. Because there is meaning being made at
every level, we can see, at every level, Vygotsky's distinction between
sense and signification (which is really identical to Voloshinov's between
"theme" and "meaning").

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

Recent Article in *Early Years*

The question of questions: Hasan’s critiques, Vygotsky’s crises, and the
child’s first interrogatives
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575146.2018.1431874>

Free e-print available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6EeWMigjFARavQjDJjcW/full

On Sun, Apr 8, 2018 at 8:32 AM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> Hi again, Peter--
>
> Inspired by your note, I read Rene and Ekaterina's article. It was great to
> see the
> identification of sources of all of those LSV references. Tracking them
> down has eluded editors of LSV's writings over the years --Russian and
> non-Russian alike. All the work they have been doing, like the earlier work
> with Jaan Valsiner, has enormously helped to provide a corrective to the
> shortcomings of *Mind in Society.*
>
> I tried to recover David's earlier comments on the logic of the chapter
> under discussion, but the xmca archive is down at the moment. When it is
> recoverable,
> it seems worth putting together with your comments for discussion (assuming
> that folks are moving on from the discussion of the use of facebook for
> organizing
> and the perils/virtues of activism).
>
> mike
>
> On Sat, Apr 7, 2018 at 3:49 PM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
>
> > Peter-
> >
> > I have put of reading Rene's article, but will try to get it to the top
> of
> > the always-growing stack of "must read nows."
> >
> > Just a quick comment to say that the use of the term, tongue, with
> respect
> > to Dewey
> > is almost certainly a mistranslation of the term, язык which in this
> > context should be translated as language. Another casualty of collective
> > editing of the translator's work.
> >
> > mike
> > editing.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Apr 7, 2018 at 12:41 PM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> >> I had an opportunity to read the article by Rene van der Veer and
> >> colleague on the last few chapters of Thinking and Speech, and found it
> >> interesting for a number of reasons. First, he does some historical
> work to
> >> argue that it was more a compilation of earlier work and ideas borrowed
> >> heavily from other sources than an original culminating statement on
> human
> >> development, an issue obscured by editors who removed quotation marks
> from
> >> appropriated material. The ways in which Vygotsky as we now know him was
> >> shaped by those who produced the volume is interesting in and of itself.
> >>
> >> I can't say exactly how I came to what follows, but it was something
> that
> >> occurred to me throughout the article's discussion of meaning and sense.
> >> Below, I'll paste in something I wrote nearly 20 years ago on this
> >> smysl/znachenie distinction, and I think I still believe what I wrote
> then.
> >> What struck me this time around is how smysl:sense has a deeply
> emotional
> >> foundation, consistent with LSV's insistence that cognition and affect
> >> can't be separated. This was the first time I ever saw how that process
> >> might work. Emotion, as I'm thinking about it right now, produces the
> >> material through which ideas/thoughts take shape on their way to
> >> articulation via speech (or other mediational tool).
> >>
> >> [as an aside, I recently reviewed Mind in Society prior to using it in a
> >> class I taught in Mexico, and was struck by the quote about how "the
> tongue
> >> is the tool of tools"....I'd forgotten the "tongue" part because I
> >> typically see this phrasing accorded to speech, not the more
> alliterative
> >> tongue. Very nice.]
> >>
> >> In any case, I posted Rene's article, so feel some obligation to follow
> >> up with the group, and so am offering this notion, which I find
> >> interesting. Am I on the right trail?
> >>
> >> http://www.petersmagorinsky.net/About/PDF/RER/RER2001.pdf
> >> The Russian term smysl has been translated as sense (i.e., unarticulated
> >> inner speech), while the term znachenie has been translated as meaning
> >> (i.e., the articulation of thought through a sign system such as words).
> >> Vygotsky, however, viewed both smysl and znachenie as constituents of
> the
> >> meaningful whole. I next explain each of these two zones of meaning in
> >> greater detail.
> >>             Smysl is the set of images and associations one makes with a
> >> sign such as a word in the area of consciousness Vygotsky (1987) called
> >> inner speech, that is, the abbreviated syntax and
> stream-of-consciousness
> >> properties of unarticulated, inchoate thought. Smysl corresponds to what
> >> Rosenblatt (1978) refers to as the initial zone of meaning in a reader's
> >> evocation, or what Gallas (2001) refers to as imagination. Rosenblatt
> >> describes this experience as
> >>
> >> a penumbra of "memories" of what has preceded, ready to be activated by
> >> what follows, and providing the context from which further meaning will
> be
> >> derived. Awareness-more or less explicit-of repetitions, echoes,
> >> resonances, repercussions, linkages, cumulative effects, contrasts, or
> >> surprises is the mnemonic matrix for the structuring of emotion, idea,
> >> situation, character, plot-in short, for the evocation of a work of art.
> >> (pp. 57-58)
> >>
> >>             Smysl is as yet unarticulated, being instead the storm cloud
> >> of thought that produces the shower of words, to use Vygotsky's (1987)
> >> metaphor. One great limitation of the concept of smysl is that it
> cannot be
> >> empirically demonstrated, only inferred. Vygotsky's formulation of inner
> >> speech came from his observations of egocentric speech in young
> children,
> >> which he theorized became internalized as inner speech. Once speech (or
> >> another tool) is articulated and thus observable, it appears in the
> zone of
> >> meaning that is the shower of words (or other signs) that Vygotsky calls
> >> znachenie. Znachenie, then, is the zone of meaning available in
> represented
> >> form, corresponding to the notion of a sign, regardless of modality.
> >>             Because these two zones compose a meaningful whole,
> referring
> >> to znachenie as "meaning" can be misleading. I retain the translation of
> >> sense for smysl: "the aggregate of all the psychological facts that
> arise
> >> in our consciousness as the result of the word. Sense is a dynamic,
> fluid,
> >> and complex formation which has several zones that vary in their
> stability"
> >> (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 275). For znachenie, I use articulation:
> >>
> >> It is the most stable, unified, and precise of these zones. In different
> >> contexts, a word's sense changes. In contrast, [articulation] is a
> >> comparatively fixed and stable point, one that remains constant with all
> >> the exchanges of the word's sense that are associated with its use in
> >> various contexts. (p. 275)
> >>
> >>
> >
>