Andy
Since you have a very rich notion of concept, could you just expand a
little for us?
Carol
On 25 August 2011 07:09, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
As I see it, when Vygotsky says that "a word is a sign for a
concept," he is at the same time making it clear to us what he
means by word.
Andy
Carol Macdonald wrote:
David
Thank you for the carefully considered reply. Firstly, let me
wish you the
best for your new job. Eight different TESOL courses is not
funny, and
probably not a joy either. (I'll get some more on the side.)
As we know, people whose language is not written down (and
probably
illiterate people too) have no notion of a sentence--that is a
construct of
written language. And we still mess it up. Our Bantu
languages are
agglutinating and the missionaries who wrote down Zulu got
this right, and
so you get immensely long word-sentences. The Sotho
missionaries got it
wrong and made the writing disjunctive, and so all the
concords and so on
are written separately (making it much easier for me to learn).
What LSV thought a word was is a matter for speculation. I
think he meant
what we think a word is, because of its closeness to a
concept. And because
the multilayered analysis (phonology, morphology,
syntax,semantics,
pragmatics and discourse analysis) was not available to him then.
Have a good day David and we'll be thinking of you next week.
Carol
On 24 August 2011 23:08, David Kellogg
<vaughndogblack@yahoo.com <mailto:vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>>
wrote:
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 <mailto:carolmacdon@gmail.com>> wrote:
From: Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com
<mailto:carolmacdon@gmail.com>>
Subject: Re: [xmca] meaning potential and cultural artifacts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
<xmca@weber.ucsd.edu <mailto: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
<mailto: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
<mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com>> wrote:
From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com
<mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com>>
Subject: Re: [xmca] meaning potential and cultural
artifacts
To: "David Kellogg" <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
<mailto:vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>>
Cc: "Culture ActivityeXtended Mind"
<xmca@weber.ucsd.edu <mailto: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
<mailto: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
<mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com>> wrote:
From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com
<mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com>>
Subject: [xmca] meaning potential and cultural artifacts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity"
<xmca@weber.ucsd.edu <mailto: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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------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Joint Editor MCA:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g932564744
<http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7Edb=all%7Econtent=g932564744>
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>
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to do."/
Visiting Lecturer
Wits School of Education
Research Fellow
Linguistics Dept: Unisa