Saturday, July 7, 2007

A Language Model

OK, folks, here's my 1,000-word-or-so synthesis of How Words Work. Someone please wise me up before the Transcendental Signifier doth smite or kabong me.

On.

Structuralist and post-structuralist poetics descending from Saussure treat semantic meaning as systemic. A familiar demonstration involves any attempt to define a single word, in which one inevitably involves other words.

However, the words we use we do not define.

True, the 26-volume OED fairly bursts with gorgeous definitions, and when I look up the 4 pages or so of entries for the or of, I'm startled to realize that the definitions actually do bear an unusually strong resemblance to my own understanding of these words.

Do I use these definitions to write or speak? No.

The OED's entries are more-than-usually admirable approximations, nothing more. Likewise, when colleagues in discussion refine terms to increase the rigor of a conversation, we may restrict, augment, amend, or disallow associations to one or another word or phrase, but probably few among us would attempt to rigorously defend the idea that we truly define terms.

So, what does happen?

Language seems to involve a dynamic interrelationship between processes described as semantic and syntactic. Neurologists observe that cerebral activity related to language seems to have a dual center, around Wernicke's and Broca's regions, so whatever flaws may exist in the descriptions, language would seem to be in some sense dual or bilateral, and the overall processing perhaps equally describable as an articulated process or related processes.

So, given A Word, my mind summons association which somewhat resembles that of other English speakers. This "Word" might as well be a morpheme or a short phrase, but either way, my mental tracing of that sound, along with the network-constellation of associated experiential traces thereby summoned, comprises what a saussurian or structuralist might describe as signifier and signified, respectively. It's probably worthwhile to explicitly deny that I intend by this any transcendant connection to any universal idea or to anyone else's thought. We humans are similar organisms, of a species, and we hang out together; to some extent we manage to work out what our confreres are thinking; we get by, but not too altogether awfully well.

Any definition of that Word is an entity separate from and disparate from the word itself, an attempt to represent the Word-object-process in language, the better to discuss it. We have wonderful motives to define words, but those definitions do not equal the words themselves any more than Magritte's "Celui n'est pas une pipe" was a pipe, no more than I can pronounce the word table and then brace my coffee on that word while I type.

That said, the ultimate circularity of definition pointed out by Jacques Derrida in his early critiques of structuralist linguistics holds problems for meaning in that it holds problems for definitive meaning, but only in that. This takes nothing away from deconstructive critiques of attempts to linguistically objectify and delimit, but describes differently the possibility of describing and the impossibility of defining, delimiting, or objectifying the world.

Also, much of the complexity of semiotic description comes from the difficulty of matching an understanding of semantics as largely synchronic and the meanings of words as relatively durable with the obviously temporal shifting of meanings within syntax. By eschewing the relevance of defined or definitive meaning, the following simple but admittedly rough description:

Given A Word, my mind summons association which somewhat resembles those of other English speakers. Such associations are material-energetic object-acts independent of whatever process may take place in anyone else's head; no transcendent eidos or anything terribly similar is involved.

Also, whether I describe what's summoned as association or as associations, my phrase is equally misleading, since the event could as rigorously be described as compound or articulated, as process or object.

As I maintain awareness of the Word, the composition of more or less prominent aspects of association remains provisional, pending the relative completion of syntactic and syntagmatic segments.

(I've found it useful to compare this to visual attention, in which I pay more attention to or devote more neural processing to and have more complete understanding about an arc within some degrees of a point central to my binocular focus than I do about events at the periphery of my vision. Similarly, the word dog by itself may summon a ready image, which I may freely alter when it's followed by another syllable, as in dogfish or dog days.)

As Words arrive, whether by speech or by my reading, I take cues internal to the discourse to indicate that segments of discourse have closed. In practice, I may do so because I take the speaker to intend such closure or because I find I can't retain more linguistic elements and must guess as to the speaker or author's drift (see Beckett's How It Is or certain sentences of Faulkner or Proust for different ways this may work). In any event, to whatever extent and in whatever ways I consider previous discourse-segments as closed, I may forget their independent parts or banish them from immediate attention. The process is in some manner intensively recursive.

At whatever point I do this, I make an assembled construct of meaning-up-to-now, and proceed to use that as interpretive context for whatever discourse follows.

A few observations, incompletely systematized ----

In these events, nothing comprises a full stop.

As I decide that segments of language have closed and I combine words, these combinations draw attention to mutually fitting or harmonious aspects of the word-string; aspects that can be mutually imagined or embodied or otherwise incorporated. I'm tempted to suppose that this involves the firing of mutually excitable neuron-patterns, and I do supose that specific spatio-temporal embodiment must be involved, but I'm just supposing.

In any event, nothing in the process seems to be actively delimiting in the sense of a definition, but poetically suggestive. Certain meanings get eliminated, but only in the way that enacting a decision to leave the room eliminates staying in the room.

In consequence, my appraisal of the language elements remains more or less provisional, contingent on the progressive and relative closure of linguistic units, and I willingly reappraise their meaning until I am hit by a blunt object, distracted, or otherwise forgetful.

For instance, certain non-assembled semantic units do cross the "full stop," the grand divide of predication and of sentence. These tend to relate to whatever we consider as noun or scene rather than to what we consider as verb or action. So, for instance, if I write "Jim studied. He passed the test," one assumes that He refers to Jim so that studied and passed relate in a way one might diagram like the two oxygen atoms in diagram of an H2O molecule.

Accordingly, no rigorous distinction between syntax and syntagma exists. Disconnection and connection are complex, partial, and distinctly articulated, like relations between movements of a symphony or sonata.

Accordingly too, lecturers in the academy aside, humans speak something far closer to verse than prose.

The music of speech, the prosody of verse, standard punctuation as prescribed by the MLA, advertising in glossy magazines, and visually sophisticated Websites all differently stylize the logic of segmentation in ways that change syntax, therefore meaning. We interpret each of these in ways that we little understand, with little or no explicit training. That is, one reading a Website aloud will tend to convert its visual cues to aural cues based on an implicit understanding of phrase boundaries. To some extent, this understanding follows lines of custom, but to some extent the reader may reinvent it upon encountering the text and guessing at "the author's intent" or at "what makes sense."

The cues that determine phrase boundaries have to be distinguishable from cues fixedly associated with semantic meaning. So, for instance, two enunciations of the word "father" must share much meaning regardless of, say, their pitch, but pitch that rises relatively towards the end of that word effectively makes the word a question.

Meaning fixedly associated with a Word or signifier may be arbitrary, iconic, or anything on a continuum in-between, but any meaning-relationships malleable by syntax and associated with that word must be arbitrary in something like Saussure's sense, as opposed to iconic or symbolic as Peirce used these.

Some difficulties remain in describing relations between what has been called sign and referent, between a composite Word and what's taken to be a solid and identifiable thing-in-itself. These may be alleviated with the realization that what's taken as a thing-in-itself is itself a neurologically constructed composite that may in some ways less resemble the circumstances of its extra-perceptual provocation than might the verbal rendering that synthesizes sensual elements with remembered and imagined categories and abstractions. For instance, I remain convinced that the chair across the room has weight although I cannot at the moment verify that sensorially.

Among other things, this suggests that discourse involves what might be called an inevitable materiality -- although, once again, materiality and ideality remains a difficult dichotomy to maintain; what this materiality amounts to is sensual palpability. The non-semantic and officially non-syntactic aspects of a material production of writing must and do signal syntax. The undifferentiated font of a book in standard typeface signals a sequential read as easily as the differentiated font-face and color of a Website or glossy magazine may signal distinct relationships of different bodies of text onscreen, and in turn a process of cherrypicking links. If early 21st-century commentators tend to neglect this, it may be because we remain accustomed to a world of uniform letters determined by movable type and typesetting. The technology has shifted, and practice is shifting although conventions and usage take time to adjust. Yet the possibilities -- the inevitability! -- of sensory and social inflection and contexting on rhetoric, narrative, and prosody incumbent on the enhanced plasticity of digital representation is boggling -- demonstrably so, given our partly generational difficulties in absorbing it. On the one hand, one grasps that new forms will be interpreted on-the-fly by global patterns; on the other hand, one must grasp that as-yet-nonexistent social customs will factor into every interpretation, so that the meanings of one's own words have not assembled yet, and leave one's control remaining radically incomplete.

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