[Xmca-l] Re: dappled

Wed Nov 26 13:11:07 PST 2014

I secretly agree with Annalisa (despite the frequency with which she
dots her "i"s!) that a lot of the back and forth on xmca is rather
blokish struggle for power over particular words--making sure they
mean what the speaker means them to mean and not what the hearer meant
by them. In particularly, I completely disagree with Andy that
definitions are a matter to be settled by dictionaries. Dictionaries
are a mid-eighteenth century invention, coming a full century after
systematic grammar books, and they were designed to try to "freeze"
the lexicon as a way of setting up national languages. (You can see
how successful THAT project's been!) The part of the language I'm
interested in is not the lexicon but the grammar--so for me the most
interesting part of "dappled" and "perished" is actually "~ed".

The assertion that consciousness was an illusion was first made by
James. But his nagging feeling that consciousness was reducible to an
illusion turns out to be an illusion (that is why we say that Henry
James was a brilliant psychologist, but his brother Bill just wrote
fiction). True, the feeling that our consciousness is something that
resides in our heads and peers out through the portholes of our eyes
is illusory. But consciousness is material stuff, because practical
consciousness exists in layers of moving air that are construed by
people, including myself, as voices. In the same way, letters on paper
is construed as speech and LEDS on a screen are construed as ink on
paper: the means is illusory, but the meaning is certainly real. A
play is an illusion, but the actions of the actors are real enough and
so are the tears and laughter they produce in the audience.

For me the key issue is not is consciousness an illusion but rather
more like "Is volition an illusion?" in general--and "Is choice in
language an illusion?" in particular. Tonight I have to give a lecture
on applications of chaos complexity theory to applied linguistics in
the late twentieth century. Believe it or not, this is the "latest
thing", at least as far as the leading lights in the profession and
the central journals are concerned. But it really does go back to
William James: it's a form of ultra-associationism, The chaos
complexity folks (Diane Larsen-Freeman, Lynn Cameron, now Paul
Seedhouse) all start from the obvious fact that language had to emerge
from non-language--that meaningless sounds and voiceless minds had to
somehow come together--to argue that language is nothing but happy
coincidences which are then reinforced through the power law of
practice. Grammatical rules are an illusion; it's not "turtles all the
way down" (as Annalisa puts it) but happy coincidences all the way up.
And it's that way not only when language emerges but also when we use
it.

This is, by the way, why we get units of analysis in language--that
is, units that preserve in a minimal form the phenomenon we are trying
to explain. So for Seedhouse the minimal unit is the interaction IRF:

T (initiate): What's this?
S (response): Apple.
T (corrective feedback): That's right. It's an apple.

You could, if you really wanted to, spot this unit in a lesson as a
whole (Presentation, Practice, Evaluation), or a syllabus as a whole
(Introduction, Development, Final Exam). With a certain amount of
abstraction, you can argue that it is present every time we use a
clause (which has an "independent" or indispensable proposition or
proposal and then dependent elements which initiate and manage the
response, just as our exchange does). You can spot the structure every
time we use a word like "dappled" or "perished", where the root is
independent and the past tense morpheme dependent. Even a syllable has
an independent vowel and then bound consonants. So it's turtles all
the way down.

But as far as I know I am the only one who has argued that language is
fractally structured in this precisely this way--and I don't think
it's because of chaos complexity principles. I think it is quite
intentional at every level, and I also think that the apparent
coincidence of vowels in Greg's daughters' names is the result of
deliberate choice as well--most girls' names have that combination of
vowels in them, and this iin turn is an indirect result of milliions
of parents selecting words that end in vowels as sounding more
feminine (a latent French influence on our language)! Volition's not
an illusion, and my volition doesn't cancel out yours resulting in
some volitionless soup of molecules from which language
self-assembles. That model doesn't even work in economics. It's just
that you sometimes (and perhaps always in the case of naming children)
get a lot more than you bargained for.

David Kellogg
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

On 27 November 2014 at 05:09, Rod Parker-Rees
<R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:
> Greg to me, not me to Greg but yes.
>
> I would agree that sense is multisensory but I am not sure I would say that words evoke this sense. I would argue that it is speaking (and sometimes writing) that evokes this 'thick' sense so it is how words and other signs are 'performed' that is particularly telling.
>
> The difficulty with this medium (or one of them) is that most of us don't really know the person whose words we are reading. I am just beginning to develop a sense of who frequent contributors are - what you, Andy, Mike, David, Larry, Vera, Huw, Martin, Haydi, Annalisa and others care about and like to write about but this is a MUCH slower process than getting to know someone in face to face conversation and this can make it hard going to keep up with the asynchronous and semisynchronous twists and turns of an online 'conversation'.
>
> Evoking in writing, to strangers is MUCH more difficult than evoking with full use of a body (and with the ability to monitor the body responses of one's conversation partners.
>
> Rod
>
> Sent from my Windows Phone
> ________________________________
> From: HENRY SHONERD
> Sent: 26/11/2014 18:43
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: dappled
>
> Rod,
> A small point, but important for me, when you say to Greg:
>         Evocative, no?
> One could argue that the physical forms of language, the signs, in any genre, EVOKE meaning, whereby we, as language users, profile some facet of the cognitive, encyclopedic, “ground" which constitutes our semantic structure. I am guessing any effort to posit an actual structure in the mind will provoke concerns in the chat, arguing for dynamic processes. But you have to get nouny sometimes! Call it a useful illusion? What I was trying to lay out was an alternative to the “packages” of form/meaning to construe “word”, certainly not what Vygotsky had in mind. I see word “sense” as collateral activation of the word profiled. And, of course, it includes all of the sound symbolism inherent in your kids’ names. Written communication, it seems to me, when done with such care as I see in this chat, gives me an idea of how deep this language-based semantic activation goes with experienced readers and published writers.
> Henry
>
>
>
>> On Nov 26, 2014, at 10:26 AM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Rod!
>> We had the exact same realization - before we added a fourth child (she's
>> an outlier), our son pointed out to us that all three kids had the exact
>> same three vowels (a, o, i)! This was totally non-intentional on our part
>> as well. And no, there aren't a ton of a, o, i names out there - something
>> we discovered with our fourth. (with the fourth, we were running low on a,
>> o, i girl names since we had used up a third a, o, i girl name with our
>> third child's middle name; we contemplated "Fiona" but in the end we went
>> with an a, e, i name that has other poetic resonances with the others even
>> if it lacks the exact same vowels - that time we did indeed think about it).
>>
>> I think this points to an important quality of meaning - it is highly
>> non-intentional in its form and structure.
>>
>> A second point follows and speaks to Andy's question - the nature of the
>> structure is not always apparent to speakers but we can nonetheless
>> reproduce it. We were reproducing a, o, i in names without knowing it.
>>
>> It is for this reason that we can understand a passage such as this:
>> "“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian
>> generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her
>> luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting
>> by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her
>> aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her
>> potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to
>> mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid
>> delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of
>> her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of
>> calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the
>> admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when
>> visible: her attraction, when invisible.” "
>>
>> Or a phrase like this:
>> “The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”
>>
>> Evocative, no?
>>
>> David?
>> -greg
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 11:44 PM, Rod Parker-Rees <
>> R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> This conversation has been playing on my mind - Henry's comments about
>>> language in the other thread (Fate. Luck , Chance) tied in closely with my
>>> own ideas about the ways in which language is dappled with varieties of
>>> knowing. There are meanings which we can be pretty confident most speakers
>>> of a language will know and recognise but then there are also etymological
>>> remains which nuance the meaning of some words and word families and then
>>> there are the 'Bouba' and 'Kiki' effects of connections between the
>>> physical act of speaking and the felt meaning of sounds/words. What
>>> particularly interests me is the middle ground of word families which have
>>> a resemblance which most speakers will recognise but which very few will
>>> 'Know'.
>>>
>>> Dapple belongs to one such family - words which suggest repetition by the
>>> addition of the '-le' suffix (spark - sparkle, crack-crackle, drip
>>> -dribble, dab-dabble) and this family includes words like dapple and
>>> freckle, drizzle and giggle which are clearly members of the family but
>>> whose lineage has faded (who knows what a dap, freck, driz or gig might
>>> be?). I suspect that perished might also belong, at least in part, to a
>>> family of 'dying fall' words which share the 'ished' ending (finished,
>>> demolished, extinguished, famished). I tried to think of more positive
>>> examples but could only come up with 'nourished' (I'm sure I will be proved
>>> wrong on this!).
>>>
>>> The point is that words have many shades of meaning and association but
>>> ALL of these depend on the fact that these shades are shared. Some may be
>>> shared only within a very small group (and than gives them a special
>>> cachet) such as those which a family preserves from the mis-speakings of
>>> children. It is the fact that we know that we share our knowledge which
>>> converts knowing into understanding and I would argue that the knowing
>>> together aspect of con-sciousness is absolutely essential (our thinking is
>>> an internalised form of our social interactions and we learn to think
>>> together in our 'own' heads).
>>>
>>> I was honestly surprised when I realised that all three of my children
>>> have names which include the same two vowels (my daughter is Sophie) and no
>>> others. This was not planned, in fact Sophie's name was chosen by her
>>> brothers (which might explain their preference for a name similar to
>>> theirs) but this has constructed a family resemblance which doubtless gives
>>> these vowels a different 'feel' for us.
>>>
>>> I have to say how much I love the thinkles which dapple this forum!
>>>
>>> All the best,
>>>
>>> Rod
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:
>>> xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Ed Wall
>>> Sent: 26 November 2014 03:41
>>> To: ablunden@mira.net; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>>> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: dappled
>>>
>>> Just a note, the term 'perished silk' is reasonably common term (and
>>> possibly older than 'perished rubber') although not given space in the OED.
>>> It refers, it seems, to a sort of worn and faded look.
>>>
>>> Ed
>>>
>>> On Nov 25, 2014, at  8:36 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:
>>>
>>>> David, thank you very much for your patient and extended response to my
>>> question. At the very great risk of even further humiliating myself, I want
>>> to say that you have nonetheless failed to give a satisfactory response to
>>> my enquiry.
>>>> Firstly, all the stuff about my name is misplaced. Although there are
>>> several Andy Blundens around, "Andy Blunden" is a proper noun and is
>>> therefore not listed in the dictionary any more than David Kellogg or Seoul
>>> are listed. In the sense in which Vygotsky rightly said "All words are acts
>>> of generalisation" "Andy Blunden" is not a word; its referent is an
>>> specific entity. But in any case, my enquiry was meant to be about
>>> adjectives, not nouns proper or otherwise.
>>>> As to "dappled" I was gloriously wrong there, but it was "perished"
>>> which set my mind going  in the first place, and I cast around for other
>>> examples, and our lovely back garden which has far too many trees for its
>>> tiny size reminded me.
>>>> But let me try this single instance, which is after all, all I need.
>>>> Meaning 2b in the OED of "perished" is "*b.* Of rubber or a similar
>>> material, or an article made from it: having lost its characteristic
>>> elasticity and become weak, sticky, etc." dating from 1922. Admittedly,
>>> meaning 2a is "*a.* Of a material object or organic substance: decayed,
>>> rotted; damaged, in a poor physical state" dating from 1587. So etymology
>>> aside, the writers of the dictionary recognise that in 1922 "perished" was
>>> given a new, specific meaning.which generalises only to the extent that any
>>> rubber or rubber-like object may "perish."
>>>> So I fully accept that being a word of the kind I am asking about is
>>> never going to be a cut-and-dry matter, but it still seems to me that my
>>> enquiry was not entirely nonsensical. :) It was great how Rod responded,
>>> because the reflections which led me to ask about it was actually that such
>>> words have great literary, rhetorical and poetic potential. The Gerard
>>> Manley Hopkins poem confirmed this in spades, with not only dappled, but
>>> pied, brindle, fallow, freckled.
>>>> Perhaps I ought to have phrased my question in terms of adjectives
>>> which, when used, evoke a specific kind of referent, only implicit in the
>>> adjective? Remember in West Wing, when the candidate calls his opponent
>>> "sprightly" - cleverly praising his fitness while reminding us that he is
>>> an old man. That's what I was interested in.
>>>> Andy
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> *Andy Blunden*
>>>> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> David Kellogg wrote:
>>>>> So, as Andy must realize by now, his question has to be
>>>>> de-metalinguist-icized. The original question is, do we linguists have
>>>>> any meta-linguistic term (that is, a term about terms, a terminology)
>>>>> to describe the situation where a word has a single, unique referent?
>>>>>
>>>>> Before we can answer this (and I'll do my best) we have to determine
>>>>> whether any such situation ever exists. That is, is there a situation
>>>>> where a word meaning (which is, Vygotsky tells us, always and
>>>>> everywhere an act of generalization) has a unique referent? Here the
>>>>> answer appears to be no, since generalization always presupposes that
>>>>> you are taking one context of situation and applying it to another.
>>>>>
>>>>> You might say that a proper noun like "Andy Blunden" is an exception
>>>>> that proves the rule--Andy is always Andy, no matter what situation we
>>>>> put him in, and the longer period of time we take the more general the
>>>>> generalization "Andy Blunden" becomes. But this is not so, both
>>>>> externally and internally: externally, speaking of the name in context
>>>>> as a whole, Andy the supposed Referent of the name changes as he and
>>>>> we age. Internally, speaking of the structure of the name itself
>>>>> alone, we notice that "Andy" specifies which Blunden in the Blunden
>>>>> household we mean.
>>>>>
>>>>> This suggests that "Blunden" is more general than "Andy"--and on the
>>>>> other hand if we google the name we find that in the English language
>>>>> as a system, "Andy" is far more general than "Blunden". Needless to
>>>>> say, names and nouns are quite a bit more unique in their supposed
>>>>> referents than verbs--we have proper nouns which are supposedly closer
>>>>> to Andy's ideal of a unique referent than common nouns, but there is
>>>>> no such thing as a proper verb describing a unique and unrepeated
>>>>> singularity: all verbs are common verbs.
>>>>>
>>>>> But we can de-metalinguistic-ize still further. We can ask whether
>>>>> there is a situation where a word meaning has a concrete referent. Do
>>>>> word meanings always indicate, not some thing in the world (the sort
>>>>> of thing that Andy was calling "matter"), but rather some
>>>>> generalization we make about it?
>>>>>
>>>>> Here the answer appears to be yes, but once again it's really a matter
>>>>> of degree. At one end of language we find grammatical morphemes like
>>>>> the "~ed" in "dappled" and "perished" are more grammatical than
>>>>> lexical. That is, they have the three grammatical properties Halliday
>>>>> calls "closure", "generality" and "proportion". They come from a
>>>>> closed set of morphemes--a user of English has a lot of freedom, but
>>>>> those freedoms do not include the freedom to invent a new past tense
>>>>> morpheme and have it adopted into the language. They are general--you
>>>>> can apply them to a wide variety of verbs across the system. And they
>>>>> are proportional, because every time you do this you achieve more or
>>>>> less the same effect.
>>>>>
>>>>> In contrast, you find that the roots of the words "dapple" and
>>>>> "perish" are more lexical than grammatical. That is, they are not
>>>>> closed class words--you are free to invent new words and to make big
>>>>> changes to the pronunciation of old ones, as Gerard Manley Hopkins
>>>>> reminds us with his use of "sprung rhythm". They are not general; they
>>>>> apply to much narrower and more local, more restricted situations
>>>>> (though never unique ones, as Hopkins reminds us insistently with his
>>>>> use of the plural). And of course they are not proportional--"dapple"
>>>>> means one thing applied to ponies and another applied to mackerels
>>>>> (and I find the idea that for Andy the prototypical meaning of
>>>>> "perish" has to do with rubber tells us rather more about Andy than
>>>>> about rubber).
>>>>>
>>>>> And this is where the thread on "dappled" and "perished" meets the
>>>>> thread on "Fate, Luck, and Chance", and begins to form some answer to
>>>>> Vera's and Martin's twenty thousand dollar question on how
>>>>> consciousness develops. If we go back in time to the moment when Andy
>>>>> was an infant, we can imagine that Andy engaged in infant activities
>>>>> like ostension and indication. Because the objects the infant Andy is
>>>>> picking up and holding are completely new, we can imagine that in his
>>>>> undifferentiated consciousness they are in fact singularities. He
>>>>> doesn't use words to indicate them (because in order to do this he
>>>>> would have to generalize), but his act of picking up and holding do
>>>>> have unique referents.
>>>>>
>>>>> We can't call this consciousness as we know it (which is why we cannot
>>>>> say that "Andy Blunden" refers to any singular context of situation).
>>>>> But we can certainly call it consciousness, and we can even see
>>>>> fossils of this primitive undifferentiated consciousness in Andy's
>>>>> adult language (e.g. his use of "he he", which is what we call in
>>>>> Korean "ouiseongeo", that is words that only mean their sounds--Korean
>>>>> also has a category of "ouitaeeo" which are words that only describe
>>>>> the sound of the way actions look, such as "hurly burly" or "hanky
>>>>> panky"). And that, in my humble de-metalinguisticized linguist's
>>>>> opinion, is the origin of consciousness.
>>>>>
>>>>> My original question on Fate, Luck, and Chance was--it seems to
>>>>> me--related. "Luck" is the way I (as an individual) generalize
>>>>> unrelated chance events. But "fate" is the way we (as a speech
>>>>> community) generalize the notion of "luck".
>>>>>
>>>>> David Kellogg
>>>>> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>>>>>
>>>>> On 26 November 2014 at 01:38, HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I am coming late to this, but I think "collocation" would be of
>>> interest. Wikipedia has some good stuff on that.
>>>>>> Henry
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Nov 25, 2014, at 12:00 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I have a trivial question for the linguists on this list.
>>>>>>> Do you have a word for words like "dappled" and "perished" (or dapple
>>> and perish) which can describe only one thing (shade and rubber
>>> respectively)?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Andy
>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>>>> *Andy Blunden*
>>>>>>> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ________________________________
>>> [http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/images/email_footer.gif]<
>>> http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/worldclass>
>>>
>>> This email and any files with it are confidential and intended solely for
>>> the use of the recipient to whom it is addressed. If you are not the
>>> intended recipient then copying, distribution or other use of the
>>> information contained is strictly prohibited and you should not rely on it.
>>> If you have received this email in error please let the sender know
>>> immediately and delete it from your system(s). Internet emails are not
>>> necessarily secure. While we take every care, Plymouth University accepts
>>> no responsibility for viruses and it is your responsibility to scan emails
>>> and their attachments. Plymouth University does not accept responsibility
>>> for any changes made after it was sent. Nothing in this email or its
>>> attachments constitutes an order for goods or services unless accompanied
>>> by an official order form.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
>> Assistant Professor
>> Department of Anthropology
>> 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
>> Brigham Young University
>> Provo, UT 84602
>> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
>
>
> ________________________________
> [http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/images/email_footer.gif]<http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/worldclass>
>
> This email and any files with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the recipient to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient then copying, distribution or other use of the information contained is strictly prohibited and you should not rely on it. If you have received this email in error please let the sender know immediately and delete it from your system(s). Internet emails are not necessarily secure. While we take every care, Plymouth University accepts no responsibility for viruses and it is your responsibility to scan emails and their attachments. Plymouth University does not accept responsibility for any changes made after it was sent. Nothing in this email or its attachments constitutes an order for goods or services unless accompanied by an official order form.
>