I found the recent comments by both Helen and Eugene insightful follow-ups
in this discussion.
Helen raises a number of points, but I think they mainly all turn around
one key issue: how do the more stable structural relations, whether of
genre conventions or semantic contrast systems (slots), arise from the
meaning-making activity of speech in context?
Eugene, in elaborating and correcting my guess about Ilyenkov's Ideal and
znachenie, points to the related core issue of how we get from a znak
(sign, signifier) to a smysl (locally specific meaning), portraying
Ilyenkov's view as a sort of transaction between the 'collective fossil' of
znachenie-meaning and the 'hungry for bread' smysl-meaning of the 'bread'
znak/word. This seems to be a way of getting the social Ideal, the more
objective social-fact sort of meaning-potential or meaning-typicality of
the znachenie-meaning linked into the more personal smysl-meaning, so that
the latter does not appear as totally idiosyncratic and arbitrary. This
seems very reasonable to me. We make meaning, but we do not make it just as
we please. What we mean on any given occasion may be unique, but the way we
make it deploys words and other signs that have a degree of
conventionalization in their comprehensible uses. The more we deviate from
their typical uses (and we can do this), the more local social work we have
to do to get our innovations understood. Whether cliche or coinage, the
social is never absent from meaningful communication. Even in the most
idiosyncratic smysl, the meaning arises in part from our participation in
socially recognizable activities (eating) and our use of not totally
unexpected signs ('bread').
But what Helen is wondering about is where the ' collective fossils' come
from? Halliday uses a different metaphor to get at this issue: the
structured systems, the znachenie slot-meanings, are like the CLIMATE,
while smysl meaning-making is like the WEATHER. This is a less absolute
distinction than Langue vs. Parole; it invokes more a matter of degree, of
perspective, of time-scale. The linguistic phenomena are the same, whether
we attend to similarities in meanings-made across speakers, settings,
activities, and time (toward Climate, system, znachenie), or whether we
focus on distinctiveness of meanings made in particular events (today's
smysl or weather). On the short timescale what changes is
who's-meaning-what-where; on the long timescale (historical) what's
changing is the slot-system itself. (Maybe on the VERY long timescale,
what's changing is the evolutionary bioprogram for possible languages,
though I attribute less meaning-power to this than to the other enablers of
talk).
There are a lot of time-scales and social-scales between the smysl-event
and the evolution of the capacity to do semiosis with language. Seen from
the event-scale, the slowly changing patterns of semantic options and
probabilities in a speech community may seem static, but I don't believe in
timeless a priori structuralism. Panta rhei ... everything changes ... all
phenomena happen on one or more characteristic time-scales. Here, too,
there is a negotiation or transaction: the kinds of novelties in language
use patterns that catch on over a historical timescale (decades, say) are
partly constrained by more slowly changing (quasi-static) patterns within
which the innovations either fit comfortably or do not. A social class
accent innovation (fashion) that runs afoul of basic phonological contrasts
in the language used to distinguish many common words with similar vowels
creates more problems of ambiguity than the profit of fashionability
repays. Some other innovation with lower system cost is more likely to
catch on and spread and get used over a larger area and for a longer time.
Genres change on a fairly observable historical timescale. Chuck Bazerman
has worked a lot on this. Some work by Latour and colleagues on science
genres and technological innovations is similar. There is a lot of
intertextuality involved. We are constantly meaning-now in relation to what
we and others have meant on other occasions. This is the basis of Bakhtin's
notions about how we appropriate 'authoritative' or simply the Words of
Others to make our own meanings. We do not usually appropriate their
smysl-meanings. We are not usually enacting that similar a take on some
event. Rather we accumulate experience with the FORMS people have used to
make their smysl-meanings, and the CONTEXTS in which they have done so, and
we (cf. Peter's view of reading, which is also mine) create our own
smysl-meanings in response to the texts as signs, the contexts we deem
relevant, and our personal take on it all. We accumulate moreover a certain
set of dispositions for using the forms (znak-signs) in various contexts to
typically make various kinds of meanings, we formulate a sense of how our
usage patterns are like those we infer for other people's usage, and this
becomes our personal sense of the znachenie of the word. Writ large, across
the many scales of meaning in language (word, phrase, clause, bits of text,
longer stretches, organizational units, genres, etc.), we gain a sense,
often a tacit one, of the generic or social common-denominator meanings,
the znachenie, of our language resources at each level. We experience a
cross-section of the community's usage patterns, including our own, and
this 'sampling in the large' forms the basis for our sense of znachenie,
for the slots.
Linguists, especially historically minded ones, or empirically oriented
ones, sample across large 'corpora' of texts (and today of transcribed oral
texts) for large communities, and across time and historical eras (harder
to do). Contemporary 'structuralism' involves both a principle of
identifying systems of interrelated categorial contrasts (semantic systems)
and an approximation (the systems are only approximately static in time, on
some timescale). We do just what the ordinary speaker does, but on a bigger
scale. And we have a meta-language so we can cooperate with each other in
testing our, now explicit rather than tacit, hypotheses about what the
typical patterns are, their distribution over contexts, probabilities, etc.
When any of us come as speakers or writers to write the next word, the next
sentence, in a partially completed text-in-the-making, we are aware,
tacitly or explicitly, by disposition or in meta-language, of the znachenie
options that seem to change relatively slowly on the timescale of
utterances or even text authorship, and we find that, GIVEN what we have
already started to say, and the smysl-activity we are meaning (as a verb)
in, that some possible next choices of word/sign fit with social patterns
(idiom, usage, style, genre) that now serve as resources as well as
constraints for making a meaning for ourselves (more resource, less
constraint, since we have the nonlinguistic sources of the smysl at work in
us too) and for others (still resource, but more constrained as we
negotiate between smysl and znachenie in search of possible approximate
communicability). It is always easier to be understood if you only say
what's typically said.
So this is a bit of how I understand the dynamic between the social scale
of znachenie-meaning and the event scale of smysl-meaning, mediated by all
the doings, accumulatings of dispositions and articulatings of patterns, on
the many scales in between.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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