Re: [xmca] meaning potential and cultural artifacts

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Oh, I'm not in the business of tearing people apart, Carol. I'm not in the business of child language any more, either, you know: starting next week I will be teaching eight different TESOL courses, sixteen hours a week.
 
Each one has been planned to the minute for me, so that any native speaker of English can get off an airplane and take up where I left off. I am now much more of an academic proletarian than a polymath. So this is really something of a last hurrah for me.
 
We know that Vygotsky himself uses the word "word" in every different ways: sometimes he means "utterance" (e.g. "In the beginning was the word" and "the word was made flesh" from the Gospel of Saint John) and sometimes he means an orthographic word (e.g. the words "bik", "mur", "lag" and "cev" which are, at the beginning of the experiment, really ONLY words by virtue of their orthography). 
 
I think what I said was that I myself wondered if we could call "That on that" words, and if so how many words we should call it. What is and what isn't a word varies from language to language, just as what is and what isn't a sentence does. 
 
So for example in English bound morphemes such as "-s" to denote the plural and "-ed" to denote the past tense are not considered words and "a" and "the" are considered words (Microsoft Word is treats contractions as a single word).
 
But the Korean equivalents of the indefinite articles "a" and "the" are not considered words and not written as words. Actually, I think it was Gleitman who discovered that English speaking children do not consider them words until they start to go to school.
 
I agree with you that functionally "That on that" is a word. But it seems to me that therein lies the whole problem: functionally, it is ONE word and not three, and so "that" can't be a functional word even though structurally it must be, because such an utterance has to be synthesized. 
 
Perhaps this is another instance of what Vygotsky calls the contradiction between the child's understanding (which is functional, and holistic) and the child's expression (which is structural, and synthetic). Vygotsky tries to replicate Stern's experiment with the photograph of the men in prison and finds that the children understand at a very different level than they express, and can role play a much more complex story than they can tell in words. 
 
This kind of "sandwich" of two somewhat "hard" pieces of language ("that") and one "soft" piece of language ("on")  is highly suggestive to me: it reminds me of the syllabic structure of "that" (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant) and also the typical structure of a verbalized action (Subject-Verb-Object). 
 
It seems to me that what the child MIGHT be thinking is that a sentence is a kind of mega-word, and that in the child's mind the language is fractal in structure, with the same basic hard-soft-hard units that his or her own actions have, at every level we care to think about. 
 
And of course that is sort of true, and can explain what is perhaps the core unit of discourse for children: question, answer, response. Later, children might even apply this kind of reasoning to the relationship between independent clauses and dependent ones.
 
David Kellogg
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
GS-TESOL
 

--- On Wed, 8/24/11, Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com> wrote:


From: Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] meaning potential and cultural artifacts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Wednesday, August 24, 2011, 11:38 AM


Excuse me to go back to "That on that."  What on earth do you mean those
aren't words?  I bet the little boy was shrieking AND pointing.  Either
way--that is referential. *"That {Those Coco-pops} on{ top of} that
{washing powder}"* and both the parents knew exactly what he* meant.*  Can
you *not* mean in such a situation? That little boy knew what he meant--as
he could have said it in two other languages, very articulately.  I realize
that David is an articulate polymath who will probably tear me to pieces
(and yes David, of course I know those are grammatical words--so what, *in
context*?)  This is me speaking for the child language people.
Carol

On 24 August 2011 11:14, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:

>
>
>
>
>
> Vygotsky says that signification-znachenie-semantic value is simply the
> most stable (the most "external", socially ratified, self-identical) form of
> a much larger set of word values he calls sense-smysl-pragmatic value.
>
> Of course, this APPEARS to contradict his use of sense in another sense. He
> ALSO uses sense to mean inner speech, something that is
> highly psychological, something which feels extremely intimate and
> immediate, and not at all like a vast nebulous set of potential meanings.
>
> However, when we look at sense not as a single individual sense but at the
> sum total of all individual senses in a speech community, we can see that
> the set of all senses in which a given signification is deployed in a whole
> speech community is going to be very close to the meaning potential that
> the signification of that word has for each individual. (This is why Mike is
> so interested in etymology and historical linguistics!)
>
> But to see this, we really need three completely non-Saussurean
> assumptions:
>
> a) Real meaning and potential meaning are NOT like "form" and "content";
> they are NOT mutually exclusive: potential meaning is simply an idealized
> set of real meanings, just as real meaning is an instantiated potential.
>
> b) A speech community is an historical community; meaning potential must
> include the past of a word and also its future.
>
> c) Meaning is, in the final analysis, always reducible to sense and not to
> signification. The material reality of language is not idealized langue
> but concrete, material, mass parole.
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>  --- On Mon, 8/22/11, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] meaning potential and cultural artifacts
> To: "David Kellogg" <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> Cc: "Culture ActivityeXtended Mind" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Monday, August 22, 2011, 9:24 PM
>
>
> Yes, very interesting. Not sure I was saying what you said I was, but no
> matter, very
> interesting.
> It made me think of this, not even picking up and using, or breathing on,
> just looking at "perceiving."
>
> "A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates
> it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral."
> — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)
>
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 8:59 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Mike:
>
> Leo van Lier, who currently edits the Modern Language Journal, uses
> Gibsonian affordance to talk about meaning potential. His favorite example
> is his own son, who grew up speaking Quechua and Spanish.
>
> When they moved to California, the little boy was around five or so, and
> refused to speak English, the way children often will when exposed to a
> completely new language. One day, van Lier was going through the local
> Safeway with the boy in a shopping cart, and a box of Coco-Puffs. They
> passed a similar shopping cart also containing Coco-puffs, and the little
> boy stood up and shrieked "That on that!"
>
> His first English sentence. Of course, it's really only a potential
> sentence. There is no grammatical subject, and no finite verb, and no
> predicator. In fact, there is some question in my mind as to whether what we
> find in his sentence can really be considered words.
>
> He has a demonstrative ("that") and a spatial preposition ("on"). These are
> considered orthographic words in English. But in many languages, including
> Korean and Chinese, demonstratives and prepositions appear as dependencies
> of other words, the way that "~s" appears on the end of an English noun to
> suggest plurality and "~ed" appears to indicate tense. That is, they are
> particles that have no real "signification" but which do contain "sense".
> They are potential, but not actual, meanings.
>
> The usual way we refer to this is rather structural, and always reminds me
> of early boarding on airplanes and the parts of the train that I never get
> to sit in. These are "closed class" words (that is, they are few, they
> cannot really be invented or retired from the language, and they consist of
> more sense than signification).
>
> Unlike the "open class" words (e.g. "shopping cart", "Coco Puffs", and so
> on), they have almost no inherent meaning potential of their own but depend,
> parasitically, on the meaning potential to be found in surrounding
> affordances.
>
> Where these affordances are not available (e.g. when we find ourselves in
> the middle of connected text) we look, as van Lier's son did, to what
> Malinowski calls the context of the culture rather than the context of the
> situation.
>
>  So we find that we CAN understand Heideggerian expressions like
> "that-ness". We even have a vague sense of an association between "on" and a
> two-dimensional plane as opposed to "in" and a three-dimensional space. It
> is just as Wallace Stevens says: when you place a jar on a hill, it has the
> knack of surrounding itself with signification.
>
> But what Mike is pointing to is the opposite. We may TRY to set up, not on
> a hill, but in a desert somewhere, or in a bell jar, a signification
> that cannot ever, in any situation, really be realized (e.g. "Colorless
> green ideas sleep furiously..." which I often think of enviously when I
> cannot sleep).
>
> But there is not, and never can be, any such thing as meaning potential
> without realizability. As soon as you moisten the meaning potential of
> signification with the humidity of human breath, you will find colorful
> green shoots of sense.
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
>
> But you can see that as soon as that happens, teh
>
> --- On Mon, 8/22/11, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
> Subject: [xmca] meaning potential and cultural artifacts
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Monday, August 22, 2011, 8:30 PM
>
>
>
>
>
> I am changing the header because the activity/practice thread was clogging
> my computer. I will respond to that separately.
>
> Here I want to comment on David K's discussion of meaning potential and
> cultural artifacts. David is putting into technical language an idea I did
> not have technical terms for, and have not used in print before, but often
> use when teaching. My way of discussing meaning potential was to like an
> artifact to one of our local desert flowers. It contained the dormant seeds
> of a beautiful flower that cast off many seeds, but most of the year, or
> years if need be, it was a tiny, shriveled, obscure
> bit of the local ecology. But when picked up and put to use by a human
> being, it came to life, and swelled, and, perhaps, cast of seeds, depending
> upon what awaited it.
>
> I previously thought of this in connection with Jame's Gibson's ideas of
> affordance. With rare exceptions, Gibson was concerned with
> natural/physical
> constraints and affordances, but I was seeking a way to understand the role
> of
> cultural constraints, not biological ones. I think that meaning potential
> and cultural affordances might be connected concepts.
>
> Does that resonate, DavidKe, or am I on the wrong path?
> mike
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-- 
"*It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work
to do."*
Visiting Lecturer
Wits School of Education
Research Fellow
Linguistics Dept: Unisa
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