"Why is contiguity endowed with such a privilege? The reason lies in a kind of logical illusion -- the contiguity illusion -- which we may also observe in the works of many contemporary linguists and semiologists. This illusion, in all appearances, was born directly from Western linguistic systems and has earned a droit de cité in the written notation of these systems, that is, teh alphabetic code (in this connection, the fact hat the unit letter was isolated many centuries before the unit phoneme cannot be dismissed). These linguistic systems favor association by contiguity. What we formerly called classical logic -- i.e., Aristotelian and linear -- is the logic embodied in the Greek idiom: it is a contiguity logic. The alphabetic code -- a most powerful logical machine -- is a highly abstract discrete source of signs with digital and metonymic characteristics. Words are formed by combinatory permutations, that is, syntagmatically, and fare linked together following the pattern of predicatio (especially when the verb to be is employed; "this is that"), articulated by linkage elements called conjunctions -- first-class connections when hierarchy is implied (hypotaxis, and second-class connections when 'non-hierarchy' is implied (parataxis). . . . Ergo, when we 'talk logic,' or 'talk science,' we mean that inferences have been drawn through contiguity. But is there no possibility of another kind of logic -- that is, a logic by similarity?
"The Western mind is contiguity-based through language (the verbal code), which itself is based on contiguity." . . . . When dealing with analogy, 'scientific' minds become very cautious: analogy is a dangerous path to follow -- it is almost . . . non-scientific' (84-85).
I don't agree. What's actually going on is that time and space do function at once, though DP describes it otherwise. The mind he talks about deals with similarity in contiguity. Of course, to deal with similarity, one is dealing in difference and presumably différance as well.
Now, much of this signal must be forcibly ignored in the act of interpreting language. I have a red and a blue copy of Ulysses, but no one cares what color it is. By book-era standards, font-face, font-size and so forth were generally dismissed as noncommunication, as simply part of the logistics of presenting the "real" novel, its "linguistic" or "intellectual" content or its "meaning," to the reader. The uniformity of all that allowed readers to pretend that the materiality of the text was unimportant.
Of course, were all this ever really neutral, one could publish Tolstoy in ransom-note fonts and nobody would be bothered.
Now, one corrollary of something here is that matters used for inflection must be matters not relevant to the predicative nature of the text.
No. That's not correct. Again:
The relation of inflection to predication is of one nature, so it cannot relate in another way; the signal cannot be usefully overloaded. If a comma were used to spell some words, it couldn't be used to indicate phrase bondaries as it is.
A few observations about inflection, in no particular order ---
It's not completely arbitrary: One shouts or prints bold to call attention to something, for instance. Space indicates separation. Line indicates sequence, and that metaphor of time appears to be pretty thoroughly universal. So in written work, one of the ways that sense and materiality infect the workings of logos is through inflection.
What else? Emphasis in a word may imply semantic distinction. Emphasis in a sentence implies grammatical activity:
SHOULD I compare thee to a summer's day? (or maybe I should not)
Should I compare THEE to a summer's day? (or maybe your sister)
and so forth. In either case the question as a whole pertains particularly to the stressed word, thereby altering its semantic and syntactic meaning without changing what we usually call grammar.
Note that the differences are relative. A voice that's louder throughout does not change connotation in the same way.
Since Pound, many poets have been vocal about the inadequacy of classical scansion to designate the rhythmic changes of poetry. It's not so much a matter of "different people read it differently," the usual students' complaint, but that "the inflections of the pen" are many, as Emily Dickinson pointed out. Hence Pound's "musical line and not the metronome" and so forth. Also, there's no designation for the emphasis of an entire phrase -- unless of course one writes out the musical notation.
What's the line, though? In Pound's case, it's quite visual. Read the Cantos with stops at line's end, and things work rather well. Try the same thing with Marlowe or most of Shakespeare, certainly most all the latter work, unless he's trying to sound childish, and it all sounds dorky.
Another point: stress as in LOUD or L O N G is clearly not the only variable. Pitch is another. Seldom is an entire sentence pronounced at the same pitch. In most spoken English, pitch falls at the end of a statement and rises at the end of a question. Check Tim Allen in Tool Time when he does his signature dumb male "Uh-eé?" groan. Accents where a statement rises in pitch sound "sing-song" or just weird. Check a Welsh accent or the famous 1980's California Val slang for a couple examples; the Val slang can be found on Moon-Unit Zappa's "Valley Girl," from somewhere around 1980.
Elsewhere I have analysed the relationship between pitch and line in William Carlos Williams' oft-anthologized Red Wheelbarrow passage from Spring and All. Williams does not pause at the end of the line, but one hears the line-endings very clearly in his subtle changes of pitch. He may "read like he speaks," as Ginsberg said of him, but it's not "just" speech: he sounds out what we're told good poets do with line: not all factors indicate a stop at the same point, so that we have an articulated, variable, organic, complex statement -- and vision and music, apparently. (Of course, Ginsberg would probably have responded: "That's all part of speech.")
Reuven Tsur is another good source, though one I need more time to integrate.
Another thing that must be noted is that there are clearly segments of segments, and differences that are significant within different phrase-units, including nested phrase-units. For instance, in English, stress falls on one or another syllable of a multisyllabic word. Some words even change meaning with changed syllabic stress. Therefore, if the word itself is stressed, the relative stress between syllables is generally maintained. We vary pitch and syllable length to help separate designations and map them to their proper phrases. Each gives us what amounts to an extra dimension of distinctions in performance.
I have seen no extensive mapping of such patterns, but clearly that there we routinely emphasize smaller units within larger units within larger units, at least out to groups of several sentences, and I would presume it's longer in formally sophisticated presentations like a soliloquoy or the presentation of an exceptional orator. Emphases can nest and partially overlap as well.
Now, I mentioned earlier that there exists a materiality to the business of inflection. That is, there is a continuum of pitch, not a boolean YES|NO distinction for high|low. A rise in pitch that involves a cry in the voice, for instance, will surely tend to be read differently. Yet on the other hand there appears to be some possible systematization and some analogy to diachronic syntax. I'd take Dickinson's system of punctuation as an example, with her many dashes. They are at once certainly not categorizable in any simple way, yet they just as certainly involve distinctions.
Now, to get back to Pignatari's issue of contiguity, there do seem to be some issues with language. For instance, when Chomsky in "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" gives an example of what he calls grammatical but unacceptable language, the way he does it is to make less contiguous the elements that the reader must combine:
1) i) I called up the man who wrote the book that you told me about.
2) i) I called the man who wrote the book that you told me about up.
Now, before you classify this as a simple misplaced modifier, remember that we do quite typically separate these two-word verbs. "I called her up" is normal; "I called up her" sounds vaguely obscene and obscenely vague. Nonetheless, separating them as is done in 2i violates the reader's processes. Clearly, the phrase containging called has been assembled and must be broken and reassembled. It's not word-salad, but it is rather annoying.
Now, what this leads us to is rather interesting. It appears that not only do extra segments of information change the way we view previous information, a la Derrida and differance, but the semantic aspects and sensorial aspects of the information that we get clue us as to where to divide the segments, and what constitutes a working center.
It appears (this is out of order) that human minds re-frame and constitute a working frame and a working center and edges of a syntactic unit on the fly, deducing all this from internal information within the language-object or speech act.
This is obviously not a perfect situation, since interpretation of the smaller units must be held in abeyance, and the interpretation of the larger units must be determined by these smaller units and their arrangement. A clue is often needed, of course -- these are punctuation and the song and dance of speech.
What must be carried in the nonverbal or nonsemantic and nonsyntactic input are the kinds of things that Searle and Austin point out in discussions of speech act theory. It's probably worth pointing out again that these kind of things can attach to a particular word or morpheme within a sentence, or to the entire performance, including the nonverbal aspects. Thus, for instance, the special dress and manners of a wedding will be echoed in some ways in a wedding invitation or in a Website for a company that arranges weddings -- in ways altered by their special relations to the event itself. But visual layout in written language will designate the things that aspects of performance would have designated otherwise.
And it will do so best by doing so economically. That doesn't mean that some visual approaches might be bold, but these will still be governed by a strict economy of signification: anything that detracts from the signification blurs the sign.
Now, this is somewhat different from, say, Poe's insistence that all factors lead to one POV, one mood, in a story. We can compare Poe's insistence on the one hand with, say, Charles Bernstein's essay in Norton 20th Century American Poetry on the far end. Visual aspects might accomplish either closed or open forms, but specific continuities and discontinuities must be signaled clearly.
More Pignatari:
"A summary cannot be made of a form" (86).
Not so! But it's a sketch, not a string of words.
The work of Propp, for instance, has not been solely concerned with narrative functions, but also withthe fact hat narraive isbuilt upon the predication pattern, upon assocaitions by contiguity connected with cause/effect associations" (86).
"Prose is contiguity's natural kingdom, as it were: fictional prose is a sort of non-antagonic contradiction, and poetry, and antagonic contradicion" (87).
"The Brazilian linguist Myriam Lemle . . . has observed that parataxis previals in the speech construction of the lower classes" (94). [As opposed to hypotaxis]
Interesting to note how Pignatari's binary oppositions run skew to Nietzsche's division between Apollo and Dionysos. Here, as Pignatari gives them:
SIGN
Similarity | contiguity (similar position)
Analogic | logic
icon | symbol (I dont agree)
nonverbal | verbal
art | science
poetry | prose
parataxis | hypotaxis
east | west (not right either)
paronomasia/metaphor | metonymy
paramorphism | metaphor
first | third
model | concept
simultaneity | linearity
synchrony | diachrony
paradigm | syntagm
signifier signified
form content /this doesn't work/
synthesis analysis
unconscious conscious
right lobe left lobe
INTERPRETANT
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