The Creation of Meaning in Language

[dkw]

So, I'm reading Paul Ricoeur's The Rule of Metaphor:  Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language and I'm starting this thread to throw out interesting ideas I encounter for discussion.  And also to have a place to ask the linguistically edjumacated folks for help when I run into terminology problems.

First interesting idea:  In a section commenting on the work of I.A, Richards, I think he's saying that, according to Richards, meaning rests not at the level of individual words, but at the level of sentences.  A word has no "proper meaning" of its own, but its meaning is derived from what would be lost if it were left out of a given sentence.  

I'm trying to decide what the implications would be for the production of dictionaries.    

[Jonathon]

Well, consider this: when you learn a word by looking it up in a dictionary, chances are you'll use it in ways that seem at least a little off to other people. This is because dictionaries can't fully capture things like connotations and the contexts in which words are used. Words lose some of their meaning when removed from context, though I'd say that they still have some meaning—quite a bit, actually.

[dkw]

It seems that Richards would not agree with you on that last bit.  

Next interesting thought:  "metaphor holds two thoughts of different things together in siultaneous performance upon the stage of a word or a simple expression, whose meaning is the result of their interaction."  

[pooka]

Did the term "Theta grid theory" appear in this work so far?  The classic illustration of theta gird theory included:

die
kill
murder
assasinate

in which each shade of meaning involves a layer of additional modifiers.  

Subject dies
Subject kills Object
Subject murders object preposition [weapon]
Subject assasinates object preposition [weapon] for [motive of shared interest with others]

Of course, most verbs don't follow this rubric very neatly.

But, yeah, there are lots of languages that can express an entire sentence with a single pimped out word.  vixerunt is a specimen from Latin that means "They had lived" which was a euphemism for "They are dead now."

[Annie Subjunctive]

there are lots of languages that can express an entire sentence with a single pimped out word.

Ooh. This is totally how I'm describing Japanese from now on.

[pooka]

I don't know how Japanese works, but Chinese has very little morphological shading.  They make up for this by having tones, though, I think.  I could never find any definitive support for the idea that every language has it's own special way of being a pain in the patootey, but it certainly seems to be the case.  

So does Japanese have morphological depth, or is it just the case (as it seems from my limited exposure) that some words are given shades of meaning independent of any morphological complexity?  Like, there may be a word that refers to a feeling of looking at a plum blossom that is no longer waxing on a rainy twilight in the west, but it's not the case that it's a root meaning feeling with morphemes to add in all the other stuff.  

English gets some words that have morphological complexity, but these tend to be from romance languages, as opposed to the germanic roots of English.  It may well be that for English, meaning does depend on groups of words together.

But then you take this syntactically complex language and throw in a lot of morphologically complex elements from Latin, and you wind up with really dense prose.  

[Amilia]

die
kill
murder
assasinate

in which each shade of meaning involves a layer of additional modifiers.

Subject dies
Subject kills Object
Subject murders object preposition [weapon]
Subject assasinates object preposition [weapon] for [motive of shared interest with others]

Murder is a tawdry little crime; born of lust, of greed, of liquor.  Adulterers and shopkeepers get murdered.  But when a President is killed, when Julius Caesar was killed, he was assassinated.  And the man who did it . . . . Ah, you know his name?  Brutus assassinated Caesar, what, 2000 years ago, and here is a high school dropout with a dollar twenty-five an hour job in Dallas Texas who knows his name.  And they say fame is fleeting.

/Assassins

[pooka]

It seems that Richards would not agree with you on that last bit.   

Next interesting thought:  "metaphor holds two thoughts of different things together in siultaneous performance upon the stage of a word or a simple expression, whose meaning is the result of their interaction."

Like in buttbuttination?

(the result of a sensitive spelling and grammar checker).

[Annie Subjunctive]

It's hard to say whether Japanese is morphological because it's hard to say what is an actual word. It's agglutinative, and so all your grammar gets tacked on as phonemes on the end.

??
iku = to go
?
ikitai = to want to go

ikitakunai = to not want to go

ikitakunakunatta = became to the point of not wanting to go

The kanji is the same in all of those and the endings are all added on as kana, but there aren't any spaces, so it's hard to say whether they're still one word or not. Romanizations vary.

But I do like the fact that ikitakunakunatta is a complete sentence.

"Did you go?"
"ICameToThePointOfNotWantingToGo."

[Jonathon]

No offense, but you're using "morphological" and "phoneme" in strange ways. Every language is morphological in the sense that every language has morphemes, so it actually doesn't make any sense to describe a language as being (or not being) morphological. And a phoneme is an abstract representation of a sound or group of related sounds, not an actual piece of something that you can tack on to the end of a word. If you're talking about building words, the term you probably want is morpheme.

[Annie Subjunctive]

I was trying to answer Pooka's question:

So does Japanese have morphological depth, or is it just the case (as it seems from my limited exposure) that some words are given shades of meaning independent of any morphological complexity?

So I guess my answer should have been "it's hard to tell if Japanese has morphological depth."

And what I meant by phoneme is what some people call Japanese phonemes but what are actually moras. In Japanese, moras are virtually interchangeable with characters.

[Jonathon]

It seems pretty clear to me from your examples that Japanese has quite a bit of morphological complexity. Japanese is an agglutinative language, which means that one word can be made up of many separate morphemes.

And I hate to be a total jerk, but that's not really what a mora is, either. A mora is a unit of syllable weight or length. From the Wikipedia article, it looks like they're not really interchangeable with characters, since a word like Nippon is spelled with two characters but contains four morae.  

[pooka]

I'd probably call those suffixes.  

But if you hadn't used it wrong, I don't know if I would have ever seen that wikipedia article, and it was kind of interesting.

With regard to meaning, it's not to hard to see that every subdiscipline of linguistics collapses into a smaller subdiscipline and that complexity ultimately collapses into patterns, kind of like fractals.  What remains a question to me is whether there is any elemental building blocks of language, and if so, what they are like.  If they are split, will stuff explode?

[dkw]

Apparently other scholars consider I.A. Richards to be anti-semantic.  
 

[Annie Subjunctive]

since a word like Nippon is spelled with two characters but contains four morae

It's written with two kanji, which are totally* unrelated to pronunciation.

When you write it with the phoenetic characters, it's written with 4: ?

*not totally

[Jonathon]

Ah, I see. My problem is that I'm really not familiar with East Asian scripts, so I get kind of confused when people talk about kanji and all that stuff. So what are the phonetic characters? Is that kana?

[Annie Subjunctive]

Yeah - there are two kana scripts, hiragana and katakana. You can write Japanese purely in kana (that's what early female authors like Murasaki Shikibu did, since they weren't allowed to use kanji) but it leads (sometimes intentionally) to a lot of ambiguity. Kanji is still relied on to prevent ambiguity and to aid in understanding of obscure words. Whenever you read a passage aloud (from the scriptures in church, for example) everyone in the audience follows along - it's very hard to understand literary language simply by listening.

From what I understand of Korean, I believe they've totally switched over to the phonetic system, though the Koreans I've known have been at least somewhat familiar with Chinese characters. I wonder to what extent they even use them any more and if it's just meaning-based or if there's a phonetic element at all.

[pooka]

Apparently other scholars consider I.A. Richards to be anti-semantic.

I'd sig that if I hadn't just switched.  

So did they have the same letter in church telling people to stop asking people to follow along in their scriptures?  That one was read on a day my husband and I were speaking.  He had great fun with it.  "And now I'm going to obediently not invite you to turn to the 29th chapter of Jeremiah, which is on page..."

[dkw]

Having finished with M. Ricoeur for the time being, I found this interesting tidbit from Herr Heidegger:  "W.V. Humboldt has alluded to certain languages which express the "I" by "here," the "thou" by "there," and the "he" by "over there," thus rendering the personal pronouns by locative adverbs, to put it grammatically."

Anybody know anything of such languages?  

[Jonathon]

I don't know any off the top of my head, but I think I've heard of such systems. Some Indo-European languages use forms derived from demonstratives for the third person (like this or that), which is sort of the same idea.  

[pooka]

Arabic does not express personal pronouns apart from verbs of being.  Hence
"Allah huwwa al akbar"
"God    he is  the greates"

[Tante Shvester]

Having finished with M. Ricoeur for the time being, I found this interesting tidbit from Herr Heidegger:  "W.V. Humboldt has alluded to certain languages which express the "I" by "here," the "thou" by "there," and the "he" by "over there," thus rendering the personal pronouns by locative adverbs, to put it grammatically."

Anybody know anything of such languages?

Is that like when I say, "By me, we're having chicken soup, by you, you're having tomato soup, and by him, they're having hog maws and chitterlings"?

Because that is a common locution, by me.  By Rivka, not so much.

[Porter]

Is that like when I say, "By me, we're having chicken soup, by you, you're having tomato soup, and by him, they're having hog maws and chitterlings"?

I have no idea what that sentence means.

[Jonathon]

Is that like when I say, "By me, we're having chicken soup, by you, you're having tomato soup, and by him, they're having hog maws and chitterlings"?

Not in the slightest.

[Tante Shvester]

Is that like when I say, "By me, we're having chicken soup, by you, you're having tomato soup, and by him, they're having hog maws and chitterlings"?

I have no idea what that sentence means.

At my house, we're having chicken soup, at your house, you're having tomato soup, and at his house, they're having hog maws and chitterlings.