triangle battle!

here's a version of the semiotic triangle from seb's last post:
it was made famous by ogden & richards in a 1923 book known as 'the meaning of meaning.' it's important to note that the line along the bottom is dashed and labeled 'an imputed relation,' since symbols can only refer to objects (referents, that which is referred to) through a concept or thought.

here's how ferdinand de saussure, writing slightly earlier, saw the relation between thought and language:
where A is the medium of thought (nebulous, undifferentiated), and B is the medium of language (undifferentiated sound material). the vertical lines are the arbitrary connections between the two media.

roland barthes, an interesting theorist who bridges the structuralist/post-structuralist gap in the mid-20th century, used this model: i personally like the more specific labels of the relations between the three vertices of the triangle. later, he turned to this image to explain the structure of the 'myth': here, the sign is a more complicated amalgam and the whole process of sign formation/understanding is recursive. (derrida, in particular, is known for his claims about the infinite play of signs and meanings).

another more recent semiotic triangle is extended to include the term 'definition'. this one is from 1997 and is credited to Suonnuuti, who i've never heard of before. i guess the definition is added based on other conceptual systems or something like that.

here's what i guess could be called a post-structuralist semiotic schema. it's greimas' semiotic square. it's not actually about the structure of a symbol, but the structure of a particular opposition within a text. remember, post-structuralism isn't a philosophy per se, it's just a way of handling texts and their meanings. in this example, the 'deconstructed' binary is 'beautiful/ugly', and the corners represent (more or less) different positions that characters in a story can occupy or represent.

and here's an epistemological model of the semiotic triangle that i think tries to explain what an artificial intelligence would have to have in order to understand signs: pretty, no? i don't really understand it, but it has the most lines, squiggles, and circles so far!

i guess the point is that these kinds of models are very vague. what lines and circles mean is pretty debatable and not even very empirically useful. also, the value of using a little picture to talk about symbols seems dubious at best to me. these kinds of diagrams only make sense when they're responding to one another, or when one philosopher says 'but what if it did work like this...' and uses an illustration to demonstrate their difference from some other tradition. someone should probably launch a study of these kinds of diagrams as a form in the semiotic/linguistic/cognitive fields. maybe someone already has...

Semiotic Triangle

Discuss.

this is awesome

A quick link:

http://www.secrettechnology.com/commercial/comvid.htm

More about this later after I have some time to putz around with it.

usage of the creek

Bonus! today's invented usage is actually a whole pattern of word formation!

when a friend of mine looked up some other word on urban dictionary, she stumbled across 'mugly,' and was immediately able to figure out its etymology. (we guessed 'mother-fucking ugly,' but the site also lists 'mad ugly,' 'monkey-ugly' and 'man ugly.') at any rate, these formations all have something in common. they all take the onset (first consonant sound or group of consonant sounds) of the first word in a pair and use it to replace the onset of the second word. fans of the movie Mean Girls also encountered this in the word 'fugly,' and if you can guess what that means, then i feel justified in saying that this is a productive morphological process!

it's interesting that in most of these cases, the word-formation combines the first letters of an adverb with the end of an adjective to form a new adjective. also, the 'adverb' in some of the cases i cited above is just a noun placed before the word. this too is a pretty slang-ish usage, i think, and i read it as 'adjective as a noun,' like 'ugly as a monkey.' it also seems possible to derive a new noun by combining an adjective and noun in the same way.

some examples that i found on urban dictionary:

foned
flunt
fex (pretty much any consonant followed by -ex is a word, whether by this formation process or not)
croned
grunjin
fimp
mex (the first definition at least)
fexy
grungry
mussy/mangina
fangsta

it's amazing what we have words for. (though more than a few of these did not mean what i expected them to.) a couple use additional morphological processes (changing vowel sounds, inserting another consonant after the onset...) but seem to be based on the main one we're talking about here. also, note that many of them have alternate definitions; for instance, i'm not sure 'f' can be considered a true morpheme since it has multiple meanings ('fake,' 'fucking,' 'female').

another key example is 'crunk,' a term made popular by rap producer lil jon (thank you urbandictionary). i always thought it was an adjective meaning 'crazy drunk,' since it has similar distribution distribution to 'drunk.' but, as evidenced by the contention on urban dictionary, the word has beaucoup de ambiguity. whereas 'drunk' (almost) exclusively applies to people, one can go to a 'crunk party,' and some claim there is a genre of music by the same name. there are also claims circulating that 'crunk' is a mix of 'chronic' and 'drunk,' and means to use alcohol and marijuana at the same time.

despite these ambiguities and alternate definitions, it's important to note that upon being introduced to a novel word a speaker of english slang can propose a systematic formation process. after hearing any one of these words we can create infinitely many more, whether we know the 'true meaning' or 'actual' formation process of the original example or not. after all, one example does not a pattern make. that is, it's possible that a morphological process actually becomes systematic for the first time when we try to come up with a coherent explanation for how morphology relates to meaning and then use the process (which the hearer has imagined!) to create more words. it's just possible.

a tomato is a vegetable

such a vegetable, in fact, that people frequently have to remind each other that it's 'actually' a fruit. these are often the same people who like to correct grammar mistakes in conversation:

Me and Bob are going to add some tomatoes and other vegetables to the pasta.

You know tomato is actually a fruit. And I think you mean 'Bob and I.'

Oh, then you must not have meant to start a sentence with a conjunction just now...

anyway. we can tell that the tomato IS a vegetable because that fact organizes things physically in the world. for example:
1. the produce aisle.
2. the garden patch.
3. the hamburger. ask a friend: "have you ever tried fruit on your hamburger? it's actually great..."
4. it tastes like a vegetable, whatever that means.
and so on.

that is, the 'technical' definitions of a fruit ('the sweet and fleshy product of a tree or other plant that contains seed and can be eaten as food') and a vegetable ('edible part of a plant cultivated for food', thank you dictionary.com) are useful in some speech communities: scientific, botanical; but are incomplete and unable to explain certain facts about the physical tomato (it goes in the vegetable section of the supermarket). nevermind for the moment that 'vegetable' seems to include 'fruit' under these definitions. i'm fairly sure that in most speech settings they're a binary. enough to make the point, at least.

Scott gets credit for the observation that 'fruit' is by far the privileged side of the 'fruit'/'vegetable' binary. consider calling a person a 'fruit;' this is either a derrogative term for a homosexual man (but not nearly as offensive as some other words) or just a goofy person. calling someone a 'vegetable,' on the other hand, is an offensive way of saying that they are literally comatose or brain-dead, or a very offensive way of saying that they are a 'couch potato.' consider the brave tomato, following its instincts in spite of confusion from humans and jeers from the other fruits.

the Essentialist school of philosophy (and philosophy of language), which claims that any specific type of entity can be defined as a class such that every member of that class must share some finite list of characteristics (thank you wikipedia), would have a hard time with the tomato. poor confused tomato. it seems trivial, but figures like the tomato, which straddle two or more categories, have major implications in certain fields: the weeks-old fetus - human or not? the transgendered person - male or female? meaning - inside or outside of language? the answers to these questions are essentially decided by the usage of the terms, which can never be completely controlled by dictionaries, laws or experimentation.

calling 'a tomato is a vegetable' a category error means several things. it means you rely on a certain scientific and physical definition to determine the 'actual' 'real' 'true' category of an object. it also means you believe much of the world is often making errors by not adhering to that standard definition. it might also mean you think that everything definitively fits in one category or the other, and that this category can be determined (a transsexual IS actually male or female, a fetus actually begins living at a particular instant) as long as you have enough physical evidence.

and, while that isn't necessarily bad, it does, like the questioning tomato, make me slightly uncomfortable.

viewn as viewn from above

Well, it turns out I'm not cloud nutzo after all. A quick scan of google hits for "viewn" revealed that there are other speakers/writers out there who ride the 'viewn' train.

Take this website for example. You'll see a lovely picture and a usage of "viewn". Now, what's interesting to note in this example is that the usage appears to be from a native german english speaker (note the ".de" extension on the URL).

Also, I'm no expert computer programmer, but you'll notice if you check out the search results that many of the URL extensions contain a "viewn" modifier such as the one in the URL above.

http://www.google.com/search?q=viewn&hl=en&lr=&safe...

Maybe someone more adept at programming could enlighten us, but I suspect it's actually "viewn" and not, say, "view N".

The moderater on this board (which seems to have something to do with an internet radio station) demonstrates what I'd conjecture is the most common usage of "viewn".

Under no circumstances should this station be viewn as an opportunity to go off on a tangent and play only things you like.

"Viewn" amounts to basically a passive form of "view" and the two seem function as a pair much like "see/seen", "show/shown", "tear/torn" "grow/grown" or "shear/shorn". In an impromtu test of my roommates just now, I asked them to construct a sentence in the passive voice using to verb "to view" that functioned as a caption that explain what on was looking at in a picture of the Empire State Building from the top of the World Trade Center. One roommate didn't react at all, but the other said "you want me to say viewn, but I know that's not right."

Interesting! Here is one other potential candidates for the "viewn" treatment (unforunately the only one I can think of):

Shoon (Shoo) - "The rat was shoon from the house."

Can you think of any more?

some internet 'walla'

(Note made some slight alterations and additions since first posting -SK)

By which I mean background chatter, like the chatter Al Qaida is so fond of. To diverge for a minute and if you'll make this leap with me, the chatter is part of the world wide 'walla' or at the very least a large portion of the US's 'walla'. Background noise is so important especially in a culture fueled by the notion/infatuation with/realization of conspiracy (JFK / Da Vinci Code / Enron). There is certainly a feeling, which is hard to avoid, that the surface of things is only the record needle reacting to the minute shifts of the vinyl, the noise below it. In this metaphor, it appears there is something to be said about the distinctions drawn between speech and writing. Although, I'll save this (mostly) for another time, it's my belief that a conspiracy weary culture privileges writing and the text. Conspiracy makes us question the body and the words that come out of the body's mouth. The Smoking Gun demonstrates this. It has celebrity mug shots to reveal the falseness of the rich and famous' appearance in photographs, television and movies. Then it features documents to reveal the men and women behind the mask, in all the full figured infamy. Bill O'Rielly knows this well. We know how these public figures are to be viewed, but the website asks us to look at the 'walla' of their lives so that we might see the flaw in their design. In some ways, the entertianment provided by this unmasking supplants the entertainment that these people have dedicated their lives too. It's more interesting to read about O'Rielly's penchant for Loofahs then it is to watch him enter his chaotic No Spin Zone. I'll concede that the ins and outs of Lindsay Lohan's drug addictions and paternal strife are eminently more fun than "Herbie: Fully Loaded".

Now, I digress. In writing the above, I realized that I was being dogged by a phantom word. When I was writing:

We know how these public figures are to be viewed,

I kept wanting to write:

We know how these public figures are to be viewn

"Viewn" as is a modification of 'view' that rhymes (mostly) with "loon". Now maybe I'm going cloud nutzo over here, but do people actually say "vyoon", as in "The report on North Korean was vyoon by the President and his cabinet"? I really think they do and I believe I have and will. Someone should fax a memo to Hollywood to makes sure people are using this in their 'walla'. Without it the 'walla' in Hollywood restaurant scenes might seem as bogus as ray shields or GENERAL GREEEEVOUS in Revenge of the Sith. What do they use for 'walla' in those movies, by the way, just gibberish???

This brings me to my last and final point, the one I actually started this post for. I wanted to encourage you all to check out the blog for the Electronic Writing Course I finished only a month ago. The Prof has been so kind as to provide links to all of the final and midterm projects that people produced (minus a few that weren't internet friendly). Some are, no doubt, more successful than others. My personal favorites are:

"What We Want": A mash up of the NY Times and Craigslist.

and

"30 Poems": A poem with a very inventive and mysterious navigation method.

I've already pushed mine on you all, so I won't do so again. But... THEY'RE COOL! More later.

usage of the walla

getting a head-start on planning my fourth-of-july menu, i looked up 'deviled eggs' (or is it 'devilled'?) on Cooks.com today, and i found a recipe that ended with this gem of an invented usage:

Walla - deviled eggs!

recipes on cooks.com are submitted by individual cooks, and 'walla' is certainly an easy leap from the american pronunciation of the french-loaned 'voila' - a pretty good phonetic transcription. of course, the problem with this kind of linguistic research is that it's impossible to know whether the writer was using the utterance jokingly or believed there was a word spelled 'walla.' an email client known as 'walla!mail' may be playing on exactly this confusion.

the linguistic purists over at urban dictionary have added their fiddy cent as well, listing it as slang from Arabic, Australia, and as a word meaning a stupid person. they've also already hit on the cooks.com usage:

""Walla" is a word used by ignorant people (particularly Americans) who simply don't know any better."

and from a particularly intolerant poster:

"Being stupid Americans though, they can't pronounce anything which doesn't sound 100% English (not that they can pronounce English either) so in their incredibly lazy way, they don't even try to pronounce it correctly."

they don't mention anything about the creative (and phonetically accurate!) orthography except to note that it's the result of a 'lazy' pronunciation... because writing is necessarily parasitic on spoken language, and old language is best language, and france is better than america in every way, and people who change language without realizing it are clearly inferior, and.....

but you invented users know that almost everything IS already a word. a cooks.com search for 'walla' revealed that there is a type of onion known as 'Walla Walla' or 'Walla Walla Sweets,' (assumedly named for the town) but didn't yield any more instances of the emphatic 'Walla!' (this search may also only hit the ingredients list now that i think of it.)

a google of 'walla' produces 26.1 million hits, overwhelmingly in favor of Walla Walla, Washington (a great name to begin with) and associated universities, onions, vintners...

filmsound.org also tells us that 'walla' is a standard term in the sound effects industry for crowd chatter.

"The word walla was created in the old radio days when they needed the sound of a crowd in the background. They found if several people simply repeated "walla, walla, walla, walla" it sounded like people talking."

and of course, it's now an adjective too:

"Today the walla group use real words and real conversations. The walla actors come prepared. They ... have researched the local jargon and geography so that the background dialogue will be authentic. Group walla has to be cut very skillfully like sound effects so that it does not sound artificially placed."

if there's one thing i can't stand, it's improper walla.

sentence complexity

let me briefly and profusely apologize for our extended absence. the last month or so has been filled with vacations, moving, job hunts, comments on my last post, and so on. enough with this 'sorry' blather! on to language...

speaking of jobs, i'm spending the summer as a research assistant in a cog sci lab. i'm helping write/assess a government adult literacy and vocabulary test. that's right! i'm one of those people that makes standardized tests! i think there was a point in my life when i thought it would be an interesting career... i wasn't totally wrong.

so far i've written 20 questions. each focuses on one word with multiple meanings (usually including more than one part of speech). i write three fill-in-the-blank sentences that would make sense with the target word in the blank, and then i write three 'matching' sentences that would NOT make sense with the target word in the blank. but in all cases, the wrong sentences have to match in missing part of speech and all the sentences have to use the same form of the word (that is, no plurals or past-tense or suchwhat).

now i'm collecting a wide range of statistics on each possible answer sentence so that we can make sure, for example, that the wrong answers aren't systematically different from the right answers.

i'm running each sentence and all the sentences for each question together through a readability statistics website that gives me the Flesch-Kincaid reading ease, grade level, Gunning-Fog index, and average number of syllables per word.

i'm also taking a list of statistics about what i'm calling the 'syntactic complexity' of each sentence. these include number of prepositional phrases, number of strings of modifiers, number of non-main clauses and so on. it would be really interesting if any of these statistics ended up correlating with the response time we will empirically collect for the sentences.

interestingly, since the standard readability tests are partially based on the average number of syllables per word, lots of grammatical words (prepositions, quantifiers, conjunctions, etc) tend to yield low Flesch-Kincaid grade levels, but tend to make my 'syntactic complexity' score very high. this type of complexity also correlates better with sentence length than the readability stats do, since you can't have a syntactically complex sentence that's only four words.

no real conclusions to draw yet, except to say that a lot of these grammatical categories are tough to define, and sometimes come down to my research-assitant judgement.

if anyone out there in linguo-blog land knows of any official measure of syntactic complexity or any measure that's been used to predict reading times, send it on in!

quantum language theory

since handing in my paper for 'metaphor and thought' today, i've been able to finally formulate my own metaphor for the great divide in the philosophy of language that's been bouncing around in my head since i watched that 'elegant universe' documentary.

first there was the newtonian theory of physics, which was fairly over-simplified and deterministic. then (to over-simplify a bit myself), along came albert einstein and came up with a much better theory that explained a lot more phenomena and required a major shift in everyone's thinking about the universe. einstein was pretty smart, but toward the end of his life when people started to talk about quantum mechanics, he couldn't handle it. 'gott würfelt nicht,' he said, meaning, 'god doesn't play dice, the laws of nature aren't based on probabilities.'

this is the same position analytic philosophers are in. (i think it's a nice metaphor for them too... they get to be einstein!). they cannot believe there is not a truth 'out there' in the universe to be discovered (i think a lot of philosophers might consider themselves atheists, but i'm just saying... gott might würfle). Their theories work a lot better than older classical models of language, but just try telling a philosopher that reference isn't deterministic, that language doesn't have to have a strict dependence on the world, that the odds determining how a word is used depend on the odds that another word was used two weeks ago and so on..., that vagueness isn't a problem that needs to be solved. you'll get a funny look and a bad grade.

now imagine a contemporary university physics professor who not only doesn't teach quantum physics, but doesn't believe in it. if you told them that light is both a particle and a wave (a very post-structuralist move, by the way!), they would give you a funny look and a bad grade, but then they also might get fired for being 50 years behind the times (unless they had tenure, in which case they might just be ridiculed in the literature and discussed angrily in the cafeteria and department meetings... i don't know how these things work.)

granted, from my understanding, there are more outlandish theories out there (like string theory) that aren't widely accepted or taught in most physics courses. to continue the analogy, i'm not saying philosophy classes should start teaching all the craziest semiotics they can get their hands on. i'm also not saying there's no value to studying analytic philosophy. it's smart, it's interesting, and it maps out a lot of the territory of philosophy of language and shows where the problems are. i'm just saying that philosophy departments and classes exclude out of hand, for no apparent reason other than the fact that it would force them to rethink 100 years of their own research, a huge branch of thought about the same questions they claim to be asking.

some quest for knowledge, huh?

New Version of the Keats Machine

Hey folks! I've got a new version of the keats machine online for you to try. This one uses the entire poem as its word bank, and allows you to create your own poems with the scrambled lines. It's still not 100% done, but it's probably 75-80.

Please, go on and check it out, and leave your comments here.

The New Keats Machine

(It's the 2nd link from the top)

Seconded

I would like to formally second cristi's post about our birthday. It's awesome! One year and 106 posts later... Just genius!

We love you guys. Keep reading and we'll keep writing. Actually, if you stopped reading we'd probably keep writing anyway.

To Invented Usage and blog for all seasons and a waste of time for all reasons!

happy birthday to us!

laughing in the face of the ridiculously high blog infant mortality rate, Invented Usage is celebrating its first birthday today!

we'd like to thank our approximately 11 faithful readers and 20 daily random readers who've given us the motivation to keep going through midterms, finals, writers block and many other obstacles that keep lesser blogs down.

in addition, we invite you to visit our May 2005 archives and remember the days when Scott and I were scratching out a foothold for the current dynasty and posting almost every day--sometimes twice a day! May 2005 is a classic vintage; it's got fights we picked with older and more qualified bloggers, prose poetry, the original 'like' posts, the conversation that led to our name in the first place, and a link to kittenwars.com. worth a look, indeed!

thank you again! please commence the singing of 'the birthday song' loudly into your screens at 20:00 EST, 5/9/06.

semantics and the body

I LOVE this book. Semantics and the Body by Horst Ruthrof is the missing link between post-structuralism and linguistics that I've been waiting for.

The author briefly summarizes the history of philosophy of language before really delving into the nitty-gritty of why traditional formal semantics can't handle essential things like negation and metaphor. It's clear he knows his stuff.

While he doesn't buy post-structuralism hook, line and sinker, he does make an important move that is clearly based on literary theory. Instead of beginning with 'normal' language or 'positive' statements and considering meatphor and negation as marginal phenomena that can be described later (as linguists do), he begins with these as things a philosophy of language must account for, and goes on from there.

Ruthrof does buy the claim that everything is textual. That is, in opposition to Lakoff et al., he doesn't think there's some realm of unmediated physical experience that we code into language via metaphor. He believes the body has an essential place in a theory of language because it is a mechanism for interacting with and encoding various perceptual sign systems. It is these non-verbal modes of signification that make ALL linguistic expressions meaningful.

Metaphor, then, simply highlights the play (and the slippage) between the various systems. There is a continuum from metaphor to literal speech that we must negotiate (with varying degrees of uncertainty) every day. This is a pretty elegant theory. It buys a lot of things (for example) a theory of metaphor that meshes with a theory of literal language, without a lot of the explanatory baggage that Lakoff needs to pull along (does each individual's experience shape their metaphorical domains? what is the role of historical change in moving from 'live' to 'dead' metaphors?).

Pay attention, philosophers of language: these divisions (literal/figurative; live/dead; negative/positive) are not as clear cut as formalism would like them to be. Admitting that is the first step toward getting help.

Another Project

I've started working on another flash project. It's called "The Keats Machine". Simply, it's a slot machine whose jackpot is "truth is beauty, beauty truth"... However, it's an unlikely jackpot, and the other combinations of words it comes up with are bizarre and, potentially, more fun to discover.

So, if you have the time, go take a look at it. It's still very rough, and I'm probably going to redesign it soon. I'd appreciate any feedback someone reading this might have to offer.

Click on "Keats Machine" to CHECK IT OUT!

know his priorities Yoda does

today in syntax, we began talking about 'extraction,' a process for moving parts of sentences out of lower clauses and (in the pertinent case) to the beginning. this is known as 'topicalization.' it's used in certain instances of discourse to signify the centrality of a certain part of the sentence:
'he promised to fly'
'fly he did!'
here 'fly' has been moved from its normal position at the end of the sentence for emphasis.

this technique is also effective to demonstrate contrast:
'did he go to the store?'
'went to the MOON he did.'
this time a whole verb phrase has been moved to emphasize the contrast between 'store' and 'moon'

these are pretty believable example sentences, but for the most part the professor just sounded like Yoda all class period. and then it struck me: a while back there was a thread in several of the linguistics blogs about why Yoda talks so funny.

Eric Bakovic at Language Log 'lumps' Yoda together with all the fanciful Lucas characters and provides a breakdown of who can understand whom in the Star Wars universe. He claims that because it takes longer for us to decipher Yoda-speak, we think he must be smarter than other characters.

Eric Lippert cites another well-known use of linguistic tom-foolery in fantasy: Tolkien. He believes that Yoda is written to sound ancient, the same way as Tolkien's elves. Comments discuss whether Yoda is supposed to be German or Japanese. Neither seems right.

I know there's more out there than this, but I'll leave you with the most syntax-heavy (but still requiring little to no background) of the bunch:
Geoffrey K. Pullum, also at Language Log explores the fact that Yoda sometimes nails English syntax perfectly. Other times he extracts the object and places it first (leading many to comment that he speaks in Object-Subject-Verb word order--unnatural if anything is!), and other times he extracts a verb, adjective or verb phrase. Pullum concludes that this variety simply reflects the fact that Yoda is an alien and might not have learned English very well.

But I think that confusion sounds pretty familiar. It sounds just like topicalization! It doesn't slow down comprehension too much, and anyone who's seen a Star Wars movie can mimic Yoda pretty well without too much thought.

I believe Yoda sounds wise because he puts the most important part of his thought first. He knows what's critical. He saves his breath in general, speaking mostly in short declarative sentences. Additionally, he's a great teacher, and he knows how to make Luke focus on only what is important. All great reasons to topicalize your sentences.

Yoda sentence insert here!!

Son of 'On Like Usage'

Once upon a time, I posted this classic: On Like Usage, which briefly shot Invented Usage to the top of search engine results everywhere and sparked a most interesting debate about the meaning and usage of "like."

As I draw close to the conclusion of my first actual syntax class, I have a few more tools with which to discuss 'like' and why it illustrates a challenge to the contemporary study of linguistics.

Categorial Grammar (CG) operates on the assumption that we can tell what type of word we're dealing with by where it's found in relation to other words. That is to say, we know 'ran' is a certain type of verb because it follows a noun phrase and provides a sentence. Another way to think of these relationships is as input-output functions. 'Gave' requires three noun phrases as inputs, and then provides a sentence (or, more accurately, a truth value) as output.

in the post linked above, I illustrated the myriad ways 'like' can be distributed throughout a sentence. it can modify nouns, adjectives prepositions, verbs... pretty much anything, now that i think of it. most linguists probably wouldn't consider this a problem, since they would claim that 'like' does not contribute to truth conditions. that is, that 'she went to the store' and 'she went, like, to the store' are true in exactly the same instances. if that's the case, 'like' doesn't contribute any meaning, and doesn't have to be accounted for in the grammar. linguistics adheres to a strict separation between language as a formal system (which syntax can describe) and language as it is used by people.

but 'like' DOES change the meaning, and in some cases the truth conditions (i don't believe they're the same thing) of sentences. it's one of many reasons why I think language use cannot be separated from language itself.

while syntax is interesting as an attempt to understand the patterns that arise from language use, the way it is actually implemented seems to forget that purpose. all linguists can do, at this point, is describe (to a limited degree) an idealized language that no one actually speaks.

check this out!

After much work last week, my flash project is finished. If you want to take a look it's pretty simple. A grid of letters each containing a sound. Two words per grid spot forming words reading left to right and top to bottom.

THE PROJECT

PLEASE! Leave me comments and let me know what you think.

usage of the week

after a recent episode of sleep walking around the dorm, there's been a lot of cause for people to use the past participle of 'to sleep walk.' The past participle is apparently NOT 'sleep walked,' but 'slept walked,' or 'slep walked.' this phenomena is VERY wide-spread around here. I'd estimate at least a dozen people have understood and used these forms in the last few days.

no observed forms so far have dropped the 'ed' from 'walked' and marked only the vowel change and 't' ending on 'sleep,' leading me to wonder why the construction ends up with this double-marking. if it's treated as a single lexical item, then the vowel change makes a lot of sense (witness the two changes from 'sleep' to 'slept'). This is the best explanation i've thought of so far...

a google search for 'slept walked' returned almost 10,000 hits, some hyphenated, mostly from xangas. and a search for 'slep walked' asked 'did you mean 'slept walked'? this leads me to believe that the difference between the two is just the result of a phonological change, and that writers believe 'slept walked' is the proper form. 'sleepwalked,' however, still seems to be the dictionary-sanctioned form, returning 54,000 hits. 'sleep walked' had 23,000 hits, and a suggestion for the one-word variant.

comparison to other verbs hasn't helped much yet. the most similar construction i can think of is 'to speed walk,' and i'm fairly certain most speakers would find '*he sped walked' incorrect. it yields only 233 google hits. send in your examples, if you've got 'em!

a crisis of conscience

what if i don't hate model theoretic semantics as much as i once thought?

categorial grammar, as i shakily understand it, goes a little something like this: sentences can be broken down into sytactic constituents, and those pieces can be broken down (into words, say). Each constituent, though, say 'to the store' has meaning that is constant over most of that constituent's appearances in other sentences. Thus, meaning (semantics) and structure (syntax) should go together. if 'the store' has a meaning, it should be some kind of unified structure. ditto 'to the store,' and 'ran to the store.'

already we've made a lot of assumptions i'm not comfortable with: that sentences are the largest semantic unit (and that they express truth conditions), that meanings of constituents are consistent over multiple sentences/discourses, that meaning is compositional (built up from smaller units in a systematic way). yuck.

but, on the other hand, it's a pretty elegant solution once you accept all that.

categorial grammar treats each constituent as a function that operates on sets: input a noun into a verb, and you get a truth value (true if the noun is a member of the set of things that does the verb, false if it isn't). and these functions are identical to the structural categories that build the sentence up syntactically.

i'd love it if i were a math person, but i feel obligated to hate it, since it's a lifeless, bloodsucking way to look at language. i think.

i hate model theoretic semantics

there are a lot of things syntax can't account for without reference to semantics. so in syntax class, we're learning that each 'linguistic expression' is an ordered triple consisting of a pronunciation, a syntactic structure, and a semantic meaning. simple! then we just add them together in some certain way, and we can explain how larger linguistic expressions are formed.

some notes on semantics from class today:

This is pretty uncontroversial in the field today, Model Theoretic Semantics. Well, i shouldn't say that; everything is controversial. It's uncontroversial in all reasonable linguistics. [laughter]

we will treat meaning as if it is an object in the world that we talk ABOUT.

meaning is the semantic grammar that maps an expression to a model theoretic object. [little picture of a dotted line between the two.]

sentences are assigned a value of 1 or 0; true or false. there are some who argue that there are actually an infinite range of values, but whether that actually gets you anywhere...

knowing the meaning of a sentences is knowing what conditions it would take to make it true.

meaning is a function that inputs all possible worlds and returns a value of 1 in worlds where the sentence is true.

how poetic.

my rage is limitless.

in my opinion it's worth getting all 6.

Please, PLEASE,
go to your local comics agent and purchase the first two volumes of Alan Moore's SWAMP THING graphic novel, "THE SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING" and "LOVE AND DEATH" Supposing there's some group of you, oh, I don't know who, out there at the same college or university, you could split the cost 3-ways! Or more!

This is mostly a favor to yourselves. The issue with the little Walt Kelly "pogo" aliens speaking thick cartoon polyglot is worth the price of admission alone and they're stunning on your bookshelf.

pretentious pronunciation

it's a sign of education and culture to be able to pronounce foreign words with the 'proper' accent. i always pause when ordering a wrap: should i pronounce 'boursin' as 'boor-sin' (the americanized way), or 'boor-s[highly nasalized I]' (the french way)? i usually opt for 'cheese spread'. ditto for croissant.

but you'll never hear a professor pronounce the t in 'Foucault.' we need to know they have the education to know how it's supposed to be pronounced. some go so far as to glottalize the 'r' in 'Derrida.' and the difference between the 'a' in 'ash' and the 'a' in 'father' is very pronounced in 'Althusser'.

but it's an english speaking class. we haven't read the texts in french. we have no claim to linguistic authenticity. there are certainly enough non-english words in the language that we have no qualms about pronouncing english-ly. what gives?

i think words have always been a status symbol. the idea of 'proper' changes over time and given context. 'pronounced as in the native language of the word/name' hasn't always been the same as 'proper', i imagine. but when 'proper' (whatever it means) is linked to education, style, intelligence, the use of words takes on more meaning than simply their meaning.

Poly Glot Boarding House

I just regained partial custody of my Oxford English Dictionary so I think the fun can begin.

I'm going to start here an expedition after the meaty core of the word 'recognize' which can likely be stretched out forever. Suggest you all join me.


Re-Cognize :
The most common use of this word, I think, is in the sense of
"to perceive to be identical with something previously known"
or even more generally as in the case of, "I think I recognize somebody in that line-up"

But that's in definition #5... definition #2 reads "... to revise, correct, amend."

It can also have the sense of "to acknowledge" in cases where a statement or viewpoint that's presented has already been in consideration.

The word seems to have meanings that could be applied to several cognitive stages in the learning process. It's even appropriate to say that something might be recognized for the first time, in certain ways.

So, let's look at "Cognize" only. How many other words are there with that root?

We have PRE-Cognize, "To Know BeforeHand".

the root 'Cognize' in these two words seems to be dealing in part with the relationship between knowledge and experience... Recognition, after a fashion, could be generally defined as "Knowledge after experience" and Precognition as "Knowledge prior to an experience," Where the "Experience" would be of the type to lend the Knowledge in question.

There's no Pro-Cognize.
No Sub-Cognize.


There is no verb "Uncognize" listed here but we do have the adjective "Uncognizable". This would be a word that means something more than "Unrecognizable". The precognition of an uncognizable is equally impossible. Here's an event which imparts no knowledge an object of which no knowledge can be gained. Because it can't be cogn-ized.

The verb cognize doesn't correspond with the process of 'cognization' but 'cognition'. Which looks a lot like a word that might be short for "Cooperative Ignition"

Who wants to pick it up there? I only brought the 2nd volume (P-Z) upstairs with me, so I can't look up cognize or ignition or cog or any of those bits.

good night and wise dreams

usage of the week

i finally got around to taking a syntax class, so of course i'm hearing all kinds of fun terms like 'recursion'.

i wonder if anyone out there in blogland has heard of this invented usage: Recurz.

as in: "If you define a verb phrase that way, then this rule can't recurz."

it seems to be a back-formation from 'recursion' and distinct from the more conventional usage.

'recurs,' i suppose, should be a "real" word, as in, "the dream recurs every few days."

'recurz' is listed at www.marsb.com as one of dozens of alternative spellings for 'recur,' but almost all other google hits are in foreign languages.

Monkeying Around

Those friggen monkeys are at it again! Check out the link and learn about how monkeys, apparently, 'vote' for policeman of their communities. Not sure what to make of this at this point, but since we're all in love with 'language' and 'signaling', this layman science should provide some useful diversions. C'est non?

We Will Talk Language

Looking through the languages that a friend and I are familiar with (and hungry for exceptions), we found no instance except in English of the practice of using the word for 'determination' or 'strength of purpose' to establish referral to future events.

As in "The Stock Market will collapse."
or "I will try harder next time."

Constructions like "have been" are reasonably common but what is this matter of the Will?

In considering that this peculiarity was English -as in "sourced in Great Britain", at least in partial origin, I struck a nerve and you will all have to forgive me now as I am going to stray farrrr out of the current academic philosophical canon and invoke our weird departed friend Aleister Crowley, a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain in the beginning and especially the middle of the last century.

Because the word "Will" has a strong connotation in the philosophy of this strange fellow, whose magickal system (which was simultaneously a total reworking and faithful torch-bearing of a long old tradition) was nothing more complex than a system of learning to focus the will to effect change. All additional trappings served as atmosphere.

The first and biggest thing when it comes to "Doing Magick" that you learn in this tradition is to create what're called "Sigils" - 'magickal symbols' with a connotation of meaning that you define yourself. They can stand for anything, even and especially concepts that aren't well-expressed in English. In other words... a sigil is a word you make up yourself.

Essentially, in doing sigil magick, you repeat to yourself in a state of serious mystickal focus:

"I will try harder next time." "The Stock Market WILL collapse." "I will find the emerald gate to the thirteenth heaven of et cetera and whatever"
And the experience that keeps these traditions going is the experience of having this work.

The 20th century British Occult traces its root/rotes/routes back a few centuries in the UK, branches through Europe on its way on down through Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, eventually even the nation of Israel and India. Little tendrils poking out into the Celtic traditions, solid foundation in the heart of Africa - A startlingly similar map to the one that I might draw if I tried to trace the path of the English that I'm speaking these days.

What is it about a word? Trace a word's geneology and you'll find it's rooted not in your brain, or anyone's brain but in the same place that your geneology terminates. The word you speak now is the end result, still in progress, of billions upon billions of sayings, and a long slow process of finding new ways of wording and new words for saying, new sigils and ways of sigil-making, and why is it called "spelling" the same as a magic "spell"? If a word's not just a flat dead token but one stop on an unbroken chain of growth, linking people across impossible gulfs of time, who's really doing most of the talking? What are we doing when we speak carelessly in matters of importance?

why fred is linguistic

fred responds to certain vocal inflections, particularly high-pitched ones. He also reacts predictably (ashamedly) to a certain 'angry' tone.

fred also responds predictably to certain strings of phonemes. Prominent examples are 'cookie', and 'fred'. Fortunately, fred is illiterate, so 'c-o-o-k-i-e' does not induce the same reaction.

fred and i often achieve coordination of action. If i want him to bring back a tennis ball, i simply wave it in front of him, and then throw it while saying 'fetch!'. Fred retrieves the ball, and then i say 'drop it!', and he deposits it at my feet so that the process can be repeated.

fred also seems to have a limited capacity for operating under the principles of reference. upon hearing 'where's cristi?' he usually runs to the window, and, if he sees my car, runs to the back door. 'out?' spoken with a dramatically rising tone usually causes him to run to the back door as well. additionally, the afforementioned 'cookie' example demonstrates that it is possible (to a limited extent) to communicate with fred about things and people that are not present.

I would also like to point out that certain conventions are in place such that i might be able to approach a dog i had never met before (let us say an american dog), and achieve coordination with it by asking it to 'sit', 'stay', 'shake hands', etc.

and if that's not language, i don't know what is.

vagueness resolved.

i promised i'd try to convince seb that we're not as different as he would like to believe. the following are excerpts from my final paper from philosophy of language last semester. the topic? vagueness, of course.

"Discussions of vagueness frequently begin by introducing sorites problems, and the challenge they pose to classical logic... On first glance, one might argue that logic is unequipped to handle these subtleties, and thus vagueness poses a clear and present threat to attempts to describe language in logic.
In this way the debate over vagueness has been restricted to a defense of logic, and most theorists maintain that vague objects must be precisified before they can enter the arena of logical language. This opposition and subsequent attempts to maintain the use of logic in the face of vagueness leads to new problems..."

"...many... problems in the philosophy of language can be shown to stem from one underlying notion: that the behavior of language can and should be described according to logical principles. Without this assumption, vagueness is a boon rather than a problem. W.V.O. Quine, who frequently questioned the uses made of logic in philosophy of language, writes, “A painter with a limited palette can achieve more precise representations by thinning and combining his colors than a mosaic maker can achieve with his limited variety of tiles.” Vagueness should not be immediately considered the enemy of truth or precision."

"Would the same definition suffice if I chopped the apple, or hollowed out the insides, leaving its appearance almost unchanged, or wrapped it in an orange skin? What constitutes an apple?
In asking this question, we have already made an assumption: that the usage of a word depends on the constitution of an object, and that the two correspond in a way that can be described by logical laws."

"The disquotationalist notion of truth, that ‘P’ is true if and only if P, hinges on this same assumption: that facts about the world can be known outside of language, and that they are somehow accessible to humans for comparison to language."

"Quine’s more interesting claim is that, in most natural language settings, vagueness does not impede our ability to utter or assess true statements. He provides examples of statements... that are clearly true, despite their reliance on a vague term. Precification is called for... only in restricted domains of speech such as law, record books, and logic. Quine writes, “When sentences whose truth values hinge on the penumbra of a vague word do gain importance, they cause pressure for a new verbal convention or changed trend of usage that resolves the vagueness in its relevant portion.”"

"‘The Vagueness Problem’ is a misnomer when applied to natural language. Such language functions passably well, despite requiring clarification many times a day. The difficulty of applying logic to vague language has important implications for the relationship of logic and language. Perhaps a more useful study would proceed by limiting the applications of logic and seeking to understand vagueness as an unavoidable part of language use. Through such an inquiry we might gain a greater understanding of how we come to learn language and understand each other in the face of so much uncertainty."

we're not so different, seb and i. i think our real debate is, once again, not about vagueness, but about the definition of 'language'.

vagueness dissolved

'Tis I, Seb. Hijacker. Fly hacker. Snidely Whiplash to Scott and Cristi's Dudley Do-Right. Or, more appropriately, the Murky Dismal to their Rainbow Brite (and those meddling Color Kids), as I attempt to wield science, analytic philosophy, and historical power dynamics to rid the world of all that is colorful and beautiful--art, the primacy of language, the culturally constructed, and (plot point!) lazy solutions to disturbing philosophical problems. No doubt, I will fail at the end of every 30-minute episode. But a recurring villian is nothing if not tenacious. So I'm back, and, in the words of Akrobatik,

"You could call it a prophecy, prediction or psychic
But I know as long as I possess my skill I'm gonna mic it"

So let's get down to brass tacks. And by brass tacks I mean mangos.

An enormous heap of mangos. That are being eaten, one at a time, by a ravenously hungry feral child.

"When is the heap no longer a heap?"

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I want to talk about vagueness again. Several weeks (months already?) ago, I went undercover to a short seminar on the subject of vagueness looking to pick a fight. And I got one, learned something, and wanted to mention it.

The fight I wanted to pick was: Why is vagueness considered a problem, as opposed to just a matter of fact?

The answer I got was informative. In most branches of philosophy, there is a particular philosophical stance that is easy to come up with, easy to say, easy to defend, but completely unsatisfying and untenable. In epistemology (philosophy of knowledge), this stance is skepticism, the belief that we cannot, in fact, know anything. It sucks. Everybody thinks so. Which is why so much philosophical time has been spent trying to get around it.

In philosophy of language, on the subject of vagueness, the bogeyman stance is less famous and more subtle, but in many ways it's the kid brother or sidekick of the skepticism monster--a chupacabra to skepticism's wendigo. According to the guy who ran the seminar, this ugly but diminutive mofo is Timothy Williamson's epistemicism--which is the view that while there is, in fact a moment when the feral child eats the last magic mango that unheaps the heap, we just don't know which mango that is.

It might be the 100th-to-last mango. It might be the second-to-last mango. Who knows?

Easy to say, easy to defend (I guess), but...well, personally, I feel the same way about heaps as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart felt about pornography: "I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it." Wouldn't you agree?

We need a way out of this mess. But don't fear--I'm packing a degree theory of truth which, like the neato tech the Ghostbusters use, looks ridiculous until you see it suck a giant, havoc-wreaking demon into a tiny box. More in a future post. Assuming this blog doesn't self-destruct in 5...4...3...2...

behaviorists: not so bad after all

everyone loves to bash BF Skinner. Scratch that, in philosophy and the cognitive sciences, no one even talks about behaviorism. usually our only exposure to it is as the missing link between the advent of modern psychological thought and the glorious revolution of noam chomsky.

in the philosophy of language class scott and i took last semester, i approached the professor about writing my term paper on WVO Quine, a theorist i had immediately felt an affinity with. i was told that i should avoid Quine because a) he's depressing - he is known for his pessimism about science's ability to describe language. b) he works to undermine a lot of the foundations we'd established for philosophy of language. where does one go from quine? and, last but certainly not least, c) one has to be careful if one strays too far from what we've discussed in class: a lot of his work is tied up in behaviorism.

and i did recoil. a behaviorist? my newfound philosophical hero? i couldn't abandon my attachment to his ideas. he tied the field of philosophy of language up in knots, but the course continued on past him as if he'd left its foundations undisturbed. i, with my lack of attachment to traditional philosophy as a discipline, felt more and more that he was right. but it's very easy to dismiss a behaviorist.

why are we so afraid of behaviorism? because it is so clearly wrong? because it led to bad philosophy and bad science? some of these assertions could definently be argued. but apparently it also led some scientists and philosophers to abandon the divinity-of-man arguments that had previously infected all of the social sciences. behaviorists were the first to treat their study of man as the study of an animal. and, admittedly they went too far, but we could learn a lot from the openmindedness that required.

quine essentially proved that language isn't necessarily logical, or at least that logic is not the place to begin investigating language. if our only conception of science, language, and man is based on aristotle, of course we'll have to treat quine as a heretic. behaviorists don't have anything to prove. they don't need to prove that man is logical, that he has free will, that there's something perfect about him, (and, often, that there's something more logical, freer, more perfect about white males...) as many philosophical schools assume from the beginning.

free verse continued

An excerpt from my paper on Robert Creeley:

A consideration of Robert Creeley’s poetics must account for this. Although later in life, Creeley was to abandon the heavy emphasis he usually placed upon the ends of lines, they could only be excised so much as they weren’t literally written into the poem. They are, in fact, an inseparable part of most of his poems. Creeley’s lines are usually heavily enjambed. Often, articles, verbs and prepositions are left dangling at the ends of lines, a device which has been said to pull the poem quickly down into the next line. This is without a doubt one of this device’s effects. His poems are quick, and true to the form of projective verse, one perception moves ‘instanter on’ another. This is not, however, the sole effect of the enjambed, end-stopped lines. Their effect reaches much farther.

“Form is never more than an extension of content,” Creeley once told Charles Olson. True to the dictum, the form of Creeley’s poems are dependent upon the content. In his poems, he moves quickly from one image, one though onto the next. This was ultimately on his goals as a poet: “I wanted the fastest juxtaposition possible, and the least explanatory manner.” The quickness of his form lends itself well to such an aim. End line pauses intensify the break between Creeley’s fast moving images, strengthening the contrast of his juxtapositions:

For love—I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

Love is dead in us
If we forget
The virtues of an amulet
And quick surprise.
The Warning, For Love

In this first stanza, the first two end words are verbs and the third a preposition. As end words, they beg for completion. What would the I of the poem do? What is being placed, and where in? In four short lines, love, a split-open head, a candle and eyes are placed in sharp contrast with one another. Form supports the juxtaposition of these disparate images against one another. The end-stopped lines serve to heighten the dramatic tension raised by the proposition of a head being split open for love. If the four lines were to be condensed into one or even two lines, the images would lose themselves in one another. It loosely scan as: For love I would turn your head into a jack-o-lantern. This is the virtue of Creeley’s form: There is, in his poems, a constant sense of what is to come. The logic of the poem is laid bare for the tensions that it creates. How will the relations implied by the verbs and preposition be fulfilled?

In formal, rhymed verse, poems ride upon the backs of their end-words. When there is a set rhyme scheme, there is, in the act of reading, an anticipation of the rhyme. Although this anticipation is not the primary focus of reading, it is absolutely a part of it. If one accepts that poetry was originally rhymed to facilitate its memorization, then one must accept this proposition prima facie. In breaking from tradition, Creeley cannot escape it. Readers of poetry are no doubt familiar with the “authoritative poetry” to which he alludes. For better or for worse, these readers have been trained to pay close attention to the end words since grade school. When this model of reading is applied to Creeley it would seem to suggest that by heavily enjambing and end-stopping his lines at odd moments, Creeley brings particular focus to typically overlooked words. Many of his critics support this view. They claim that the end-stopping emphasizes the ‘thingness’ of those terminal words. No doubt, there is some truth in this. Practically, however, it is difficult to say this is necessarily so. It seems somewhat ludicrous to suggest that the ‘thingness’ of words like not, love, she, it, on, for, day (to borrow a few terminal words from The Business ) is what a reader takes away from one of his poems.

On the contrary, it seems more intuitively plausible to posit that the effect of his odd end-stopping and enjambment actually places emphasis upon the first word(s) of the following line. The end of one line and the beginning of the next, for the most part, seem to function in call and response relationship. Terminal words, in Creeley’s poetry, pose questions and the onset of the next line brings an answer (however cryptic it may be). It is this call and response relationship between his lines that, to my mind, contributes the most to the sense of Creeley as jazzy. Reading a Creeley poem, one anticipates not the completion of a rhyme sequence, but the completion of a thought. Once, Creeley wrote that a poem should be “a structure of recognition—better—cognition itself”. This rapidity of movement and juxtaposition from line to line lives up to his definition of poetry as ‘cognition’. One is constantly in following the process of the poem, each line revealing a further layer of the idea underhand.

free verse and me

You, also, by extension. A random note worth adding to the dialogue here on Invented Usage. Admittedly this dialogue has been a little slow coming lately, but -- as cristi says -- it should be more frequent given the "home" situation. Did anyone mention that Cristi will be Managing Editing the College Hill Independent next semester? Congratulations, Cristi. I'm proud of you.

To poetry. That infernal beast. The topic no one cares about, or at least far less people than should. An interesting point raised by Keith Waldrop and something I talked about for some length in a paper I just completed on Robert Creeley, involves the change in expectation created by free verse. Formal verse, rhymed verse, has a very clear form of expectation. One, simply, expects the rhyme to complete itself. A to rhyme with A, B to rhyme with B. There is also an expectation of ending put in place by a metrical system (Iambic Pentameter [that beast]). One has a conscious and unconscious expectation for the completion of these regular devices.

In free verse, this is not so. Lines can be of indeterminate length (and often are). Free verse is often blank, unrhymed. As one moves from line to line, what is one to expect? What, in a sense, pulls the reader's attention down the page? Simply, it is the expectation of completion. The expectation is not at the end of line, at the termination of the form, but upon the induction of the next thought.

This idea is exemplified well in the poetry of Robert Creeley. I will, tomorrow (later today), post a snippet of his poetry and provide a more in depth explanation. More later.

vagueness solved!

haha, just kidding. vagueness poses a critical problem for many branches of language theory. but, after writing a paper on it, and losing a lot of sleep over it, here are my thoughts on vagueness:

1. vagueness is an essential part of the functioning of language. no two objects are precisely the same, so for a word to apply to many similar objects immediately requires vagueness. without vague (and i realize i'm using the term vaguely here) extensions, words could only apply once, and then language wouldn't really function as a language at all.

2. the meanings of words are conventional. everyone says this, but what does it mean? well, David Lewis's book Convention goes a long way toward explaining it in terms of game theory. In a nutshell, Lewis defines convention as: we all want to continue doing the same action provided most other people continue also, but if the majority started doing some alternative action, we would want to switch to that alternative. But he uses it to describe the meanings of whole sentences. If his theories were applied to words, they might usefully describe how vaguenesses and ambiguities and such arise. we use a word to describe a thing only when we think other speakers will do the same. for example, our only way of knowing whether a man is bald or not bald is to consider whether others would apply the word 'bald' to him.

3. The above example is not just meant to demonstrate that the application of a term to an object is vague. The meaning of the word itself changes based on how speakers would choose to apply it. i'm not really sure how to articulate this difference, but it's very important.

that's all for now. hopefully posting will be more frequent now that we're all settled at home.

Where have I gone? Where am I going?

This shall be a short post. One to shake of the cobwebs and provide a jumping off point for further posting. It's been a busy peiod here, lots of paper writing and the like. I just finished a paper on Grice this evening. Since then, I've been trying to occupy myself and decompress.

Anyway, this is post to say I'm here. For those of you, like myself, who enjoy distracting yourself with games, I recommend that you check out Icy Tower. What's Icy Tower? Icy Tower is a game in which you play the role of Harold the Homie, a small sprite trapped inside an infinite tower of platforms. Harold has no other want in life but jump up and climb the tower of icyness. The goal? To achieve massive combos. A combo, you see, is a succession of multi-floor jumps. If you jump two floors five times in a row, you have achieved a ten floor combo. Keep the combo going and get more points. Simple.

In some ways it's a metaphor for life. We are all trapped in our icy towers attempting to achieve perfection in the limited vocabulary of moves afforded us. This is stretching it, I realize, but f**k that. What's philosophy got to do with it.

If in an icy tower then jump. From Icy Tower infer JUMP!

GET TO IT

vagueness the third

i admit it; i've had vagueness on the brain these last few weeks. to be honest, it's a pretty frustrating condition. Suddenly, everything seems vague - objects, verbs, adjectives, Kilimanjaro, heaps, baldness, redness. and there is, as yet, no theoretical or philosophical explanation. how do any of us ever know what we're talking about?

fuzzy logic seems promising - especially from a computational view - but it still supposes certain unfuzzy boundaries. if we assign a value of "1" to all atoms that are definently a part of Kilimanjaro, and a range of values between "1" and "0" to those that may or may not be, we still beg the question: how do we know where the boundary of "definently" vs. "potentially" part of Kilimanjaro is?

According to McGee & McLaughlin, who have funny names, supervaluation theory attempts to lay out a set of acceptable models "such that a sentence is determinately true if and only if it is true in each member of the collection." (I don't know what, exactly, a model is, either, but bear with me...) They cite Kit Fine (1975), who came up with constraints that a model has to meet to count as acceptable: these include classificatory and penumbral constraints. (i can't say i know exactly what these are, either.)

one thing i do know is that these constraints are dumb. "classificatory constraints are external: they require a correct classification of extralinguistic objects." how conveeeenient. for a model to evaluate whether "that object is red" is true, it has to first correctly identify whether the object is red. OUTSIDE of language.

and how is that accomplished? i'm glad you asked: "Roughly (the details are elusive), our usage of 'red' will... [consist] of things linguistically competent and visually acute speakers, observing the things under good viewing conditions, would classify as 'red'..." so... uh.... whether something is 'red' extralinguistically is based on how SPEAKERS would CLASSIFY an object. in language.

i'm starting to formulate my own theory, because i've been reading Convention with vagueness on the brain as well, but this post is too long already. stay tuned!

usage of the week-ing it up

cristi here, blogging it up in connecticut, and tracking invented usages to keep you, the reader, up to date and talking it up real cool-like.

today we'll be talking about 'blanking it up.' as with most new usages, the form of this one isn't new, but the application is.

eat it up
take it up
snap it up
mess it up

have been around for years, but new usages like

tent it up (usually refering to camping)
blogging it up
talking it up
laugh it up
smoke it up (usually refering to marijuana)

seem emergent. a google search returned 334 hits for "tenting it up," and 1050 hits for "blogging it up," many of them in phrases like "blogging it up motown style," "blogging it up here," or "blogging it up in [location]"

in the more traditional usages i've mentioned, 'it' usually stands for an object, so that one can say 'eat up all the turkey' or 'took his bag up.' in the newer usage, this is impossible - 'it' is not an object at all.

this usage - the addition of 'it up' to an existing verb - is hard to describe. it doesn't seem metaphorical in any way. it doesn't seem logical to say that these actions go 'up' in any sense of the word. it's my guess that a few uses came into favor in a cool community (maybe the ones having to do with gang life? who knows.), and the status of those usages lapped over into the phrasing itself.

the interesting thing is that the phrase is productive even though it isn't 'meaningful' in the strict sense. '-ing it up' doesn't add meaning - it just seems to add attitude and mark a certain speaking style. i'm just thinking it up out loud.

get your language now, 'cause we're using it up here at invented usage.

vagueness part deux

Timothy Williamson, clearly the most exciting guy in the world, wrote a whole book called 'Vagueness' about some of the topics in my last post. His opening chapter is about the classical history of sorities problems - logical puzzles like the baldness problem i presented last post.

the general format of sorities problems is a series of questions, in which one begins with a clear case: "is this pile of 10,000 grains of corn a heap?" to which anyone would answer "yes." Then the questioner slowly works down: "if i remove one grain, is it still a heap?"; "yes". "If I remove one grain at a time, and no one grain should make a difference to the status of the object, is one grain a heap?" based on the logic of premises and conclusions, the answerer (usually a stoic) is left in the absurd position of having to answer that one or even zero grains are, in fact, a heap. The question has always been: is there a sharp cut off determining when something is no longer a heap? is there a certain number of grains required to make a heap?

I, possibly a skeptic, tried this line of questioning on a computer science major (dave, i think you know who you are). at first i thought i had failed utterly, because no matter how low the numbers got, he still considered it a heap. "alright, dave, what if there are no grains? is it still a heap?" dave: "yes, [laughter] it's just an empty heap."

but i found it hard to argue that he was wrong to hypothesize an empty heap. it was certainly an elegant way to buck a sorites problem. and it reminded us here at I.U. of a post scott wrote over the summer.

even with a c.s. major, pointing to an empty place on the ground and asking "is this a heap?" is unlikely to elicit a 'yes' response. but it's NOT hard to say that yes, after i've removed grain after grain, the empty spot left is a type of heap - namely, an empty one.

so, what's the difference? why are 5 grains sometimes a heap and sometimes not? as with most topics on this blog, we return to context. we are only inclined to call something a heap when salient that it is a heap - as opposed to anything else.

the same contextual issues are important in other circumstances - suppose i have 10,000 grains but they are spread out, for instance. suppose a heap is naturally formed by wind piling grains against a wall? is it a heap?

the neat thing about language is that we can match it effectively to these vaguenesses. i hesitate to say 'vaguenesses in the world', because vagueness isn't in the world - it's in the application of totalized terms like 'heap' to a world that isn't built out of totalized concepts. but language allows us to work around these gaps when we need to and say "it used to be a heap", "it's an empty heap"; "it's a group of grains, but not a heap".

on vagueness

it's that time of year again, when all philosophy of language students' minds must turn to fanciful musings about their final papers. Will we write anything original? Will we write anything original the night of december 5, when we stay up at the sci-li all night in a panic?

to ensure that this doesn't happen, i'm going to attempt some pre-write blogging on my chosen topic, one near and dear to all our hearts: vagueness.

Gareth Evans' now famous essay "can there be vague objects?" begins,

It is sometimes said that the world might itself be vague. Rather than vagueness being a deficiency in our mode of describing the world, it would then be a necessary feature of any true description of it.

He's right, and it's a promising idea, but I'd like to point out that what is never said is that language is what allows us to talk about objects as though they were not vague.

he then introduces logical operators meaning 'definitely' and 'indefinently' and concludes that they always lead to contradiction. and then the essay ends. very abruptly. it's only a page! turning the page over, we find an essay by David Lewis in which he defends Evans and uses the word 'precisifications' many times. well done, Lewis.

but Lewis, too, addresses a simple dichotomy in the way philosophers think of vaguness: there are those who believe that objects are vague, and there are those who believe that descriptions are vague. in either case, vagueness is a fault which, if we are to be logical, we must remedy by precisifying our concepts before using them in formulas.

over my next few posts (and maybe that paper?) i'd like to argue that vagueness is not a weakness of language or the world, but a necessary, interesting, and productive part of the connection between the two. and arguments about vagueness might provide a way to bootstrap up into a debate about the nature of properties of objects and whether or not logic bows to language.

until next time, consider this classic(al) sorites problem, which led to original formulations of vaguness:
is a man with one hair on his head bald? (yes?)
is a man with two hairs on his head bald? (yes?)
can we reasonably make a distinction between his being bald or not bald on the basis of the addition of any single hair? (no.)
then by this reasoning, we can continue adding one hair at a time until you must admit that a man is not bald even if he has 20,000 hairs on his head. (doh!)

hypothesis confirmed!

i don't know how i feel about empiricism, but this is pretty interesting anyway:

think back to my last post, bodily function poems. Last night, not two days after that post was written, I went to the restroom in New Dorm, and lo and behold, underneath the "if you sprinkle when you tinkle..." sign (which is printed in a childish, light-blue font), was a very serious looking black and white sign that read:

Please be considerate and keep the bathroom, shower, sink area clean.

Clean up messes that you are responsible for - whether it be toilet paper or bodily fluids.

I can't tell you how proud i was.

In this sign, we are addressed as responsible adults, and as such, we no longer "tinkle," but instead, "cause messes," which may or may not involve "bodily fluids."

There is fine print on the sign directing "you" to contact "facilities management" or "C.A.s" "if the toilets are clogged" or "for further complaints or information."

Perhaps it has become clear to the writers of the signs that we are no longer hapless children who inadvertently "tinkle" and forget to clean up after ourselves. Maybe we are finally to be held responsible for repeated infractions.

and the sign is much more authoritorian in another way: there is a threat of being inconsiderate if we don't follow the sign. in an anonymous situation, these methods: gentle, humorous suggestion, and appeals to responsibility and consideration might be the only course of action. at least, i can't see a middle ground. we would never rhyme about "bodily fluids" or write prose about "poo".

scott tells me the new sign also hangs in the men's restroom, where it will likely be peed on.

more on those god damn poetry readings

Was taking a look over at the Contemporary Poetry Review in an article about John Ashbery:

One problem presented by the semi-professional need for poets to deliver recitations of their poems is that it must be assumed that they are the best interpreters, if not necessarily the most gifted performers, of their own works. One might delight in the thought of James Earl Jones intoning oneÂ’s poem from the podium to awed audiences, but it is usually a whinier, less assured voice that the audience finally encounters. It is unfortunate that the aural revelation of a poem is often one of foggy meandering and droning rather than the warm illumination that should be expected. One finds in scratchy old recordings of Pound reading from the Cantos a tidier (or at the least quite amusing) understanding of some of the last centuryÂ’s most imposing and sometimes nearly incomprehensible poems. Even an otherwise undemanding poem by a poet today will be muddled up in the reading. The poet very often recites with a slight trailing up at the end of the otherwise randomly broken line, in a pompous, breathy seriousness that hardly befits the slightness of the poetry itself.

Hell yes. Well put says I. Seriously what is with the monotone poet voice? One even encounters it in College workshops, where poets (some of them even talented) deliver their poems like they were reciting from the phone book. I guess it's an image thing. Emo, maybe?

They come to witness greatness, fame, and finally, the clarification, elucidation of the poems, the revelation from the oracle.

This is what I've been telling people for awhile now. The mark of a good reader is the ability to elucidate what's being read. To have the voice ride across the piece of literature, highlighting with ARTICULATION and INTONATION the gradients of meanincontaineded within the work.

Michael Harper, a well known poet and professor here at Brown is the best reader I've heard yet. When he reads one has the feeling of "getting it" a feeling not to often felt at your average poetry reading. If you haven't had the chance to listen to him, there's a short video of a reading he gave at UC Berkeley. By short I mean an hour. In class he tends to drag on for long tracts of time telling tales of the glory days with Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden and Brooks. Apparently he had some disagreements with ol' Allen Ginsberg about something. Should try to find out that was. Office hours?

bodily-function poems

consider the following rhymes, to be found taped inside the doors of various bathroom stalls:

If it's yellow, let it mellow
if it's brown, flush it down. (Summer Camp Classic)

if you sprinkle
when you tinkle
please be neat
and wipe the seat!
(printed sign, girls restroom, New Dorm B, Brown University)

don't be rude,
flush your poo.
-The Managment
(handwritten in friends' suite in Grad Center tower C, Brown University)

I, for one, cannot imagine signs of equivalent explicitness written in prose:

If you urinate on the toilet seat, please clean up after yourself.

Please remember to flush the toilet after defecating in it.

Gross!!, right? No one would post, or stand for, such a sign.

I haven't developed a working hypothesis about this yet, but i'd like to start by examining the differences between the acceptable and unnaceptable signage above.

The most obvious of these is rhyme. Simple rhymed couplets in folksy meter seem to be standard fare. (slant-rhyme: poo and rude, is fine.)

The words used for bodily functions in the poems are of a different level of diction from my prose examples. 'poo' and 'tinkle' are not the same words as 'urinate' and 'defecate'. i'd characterize them as the words used between parents and children, who must often discuss such matters tastefully.

Who can say what words we use for bodily functions when we are alone in bathroom stalls? they are probably not 'poo' and 'tinkle', but when communication (from an authority?) takes place in the stall, it is couched in terms that are distinctly 'cute'.

And a definition of that terms is wanted. perhaps it is unoffensive, parental, endearing, even distancing? is there an implication in these signs that the management would rather not have to discuss these tender subjects? are signs on dorm kitchen doors also rhyming and cutesy, or is it only 'poo' and 'tinkling' that call for this mode of communication? these are questions for further research.

Wag the Poet

About a week ago, Cristi and I went downtown to a posh little cafe called Tazza to hear some poets on the faculty here at Brown read. It was a fundraiser for hurricane Katrina, or more aptly for those effected by the horrendous 'cane.

Now, I've tried to go to several of these readings. There was one several weeks ago, which due to my own ineptness at reading signs, I showed up mostly too late for. Just in time to hear this guy read some political poem about the situation in Iraq (*yawn*). The poem wasn't bad, necessarily, it's just not my style to indulge politics with poetry. The two, to me, have always seemed at odds. Politics is the doggerel of the masses. This is, of course, perhaps overstating it too much, but the discourse of politics--especially these days, and on these college campuses where "liberal-minded" students are flopping around proclaiming their hatred of Bush every time someone even thinks to say the word "government"--is self perpetuating. The very discussion of politics, supreme court nominees, taxes, war etc. just plays into the system of corruption that no one wants but everyone claims those who disagree with them are for. Poetry, and more generally all art, should be above these base arguments. Leave it for the pundits. Chris Matthews can write the Ballad of John Kerry. The real problems are more deeply rooted than the national political tit-for-tat. A piece of art that wears its political agenda on its sleeve can only become part of that discourse, a ball punted around by those trapped up in the dead end rhetoric of the national politic. The concern of art is the greater philosophical and metaphysical concerns of our time, the "politics" of it (if you want to call it that) will handle themselves.

This distracts me from the point I had wished to make: Poetry readings are very boring. Sitting in the back of the room listening to the poets recite there work, I was struck by how unmoving the whole event was. This frightened me. After all, studying poetry for four years in college has basically made it my milieu (for better or worse). I should be enjoying these types of things. I should be aspiring to read in front of audiences at trendy cafes, lecture halls and bus stops. But after a rash of attending these readings, I can't see why anyone would want to come hear me.

Wag the poet. The poems are wagging the poets. The poet stands before an audience, sidles up to the microphone, opens her book of poems and begins to recite. Hello! Recitation is not reading. Not even close. I like poems an awful lot. Most people do, I've found, despite the fact that most people spend .01% of their time on it. So why get up there, and just... PRESENT... the poem(s). Poetry reading is, at its root, an act of storytelling. This was of course sustained by the nature of the poems being read by wandering bards and minstrels. They were narrative poems. They were stories. Now, though, with most poetry experiencing the postmodern hangover, the poems do not tell stories themselves. This isn't bad. Far from it. But why not use the reading as an opportunity to deliver those anecdotes (stories) which contextualize the more abstract poetry of our times, and sell the idea that they are worth listening to (and not as daunting as they appear to be).

There are the slam poets. I hate slam poetry. So I'm not going to discuss it. Watch Def Poetry Jam and tell me what you think. That's a discussion I'd like to have.

... A poetry reading should be a gathering of friends, a time to unwind and listen. It should not be a time to sit in a room feigning rapt attention before an edifice of words that is for the most part delivered unemphatically and with supreme arrogance. I'd like to conclude with a quotation which I think sums up the "attitude" I witness at these readings:

"Peter Ackroyd's biography of Eliot claims that the first reviews [of The Waste Land] in England were "variously baffled and respectful"-- partly because of the notes and references, which left some critics mystified enough that they couldn't come out and say they didn't like the poem for fear their ignorance of his learned and sophisticated methods would be discovered."

Everyone, let's stop pretending we understand and start asking to be helped along. We'll all be the better for it.

our philosophy of language homework

well, we've come head-to-head with the enemy. an upper-level philosophy course purportedly all about language that has, so far, been all about truth, and i'd like to share and ridicule a "logical" "proof."

this is a real answer from our first problem set. the comments in brackets were not on our homework.

6) Given the definition of truth: For any proposition x, x is true iff [if and only if] (for some p)(x = the proposition that p and p). Does this definition entail the proposition "The proposition that John is bald is true iff John is bald."? Yes!

1. By the definition of truth provided, the proposition that John is bald is true iff (for some p)(the proposition that John is bald = the proposition that p and p).
[The proposition that p is a concept, keep in mind, and 'p' is a statement about the real world. a fact, if you will. from outside language. but i shouldn't have written it in quotes just there, because that makes it a sentence, which is different from either a fact or a proposition.]
2. By Assumption, the proposition that John is bald = the proposition that q and q.
[we all konw what they say about assumption...]
3. By Assumption, the proposition that John is bald is a true proposition of language L.
[oh ho! yeah, this seems like a good place to start.]
4. It follows from the given Equivalence Principle that if the proposition that John is bald = the proposition that q, then John is bald iff q.
[if the propositions are the same, then the facts in the world are the same. ?]
5. By 2, 4, and logic, John is bald iff q.
[don't ask me what logic is.]
6. By 2, 5, and logic, John is bald.
[don't ask me what logic is.[did i just state the same proposition twice?]]
7. By 1 and 6, and the Rule of Existential Instantiation, John is bald.
[honestly, i've forgotten what the REI is already, but it was very handy for situations like this, where we needed to be able to get from the proposition that John is bald to the fact that John is bald via our previous assumptions both implicit and explicit... clearly, if 'john is bald' is true, then john is bald. don't quote that.]
8. By 2 and 7, if the proposition that John is bald is a true sentence of L, then John is bald. (conditional proof).

there's a second argument to this proof, but we don't know if it's necessary or not... just to give you some idea, though, it begins with "1. By assumption, John is bald."

i'm so glad language is actually illogical. all this common sense makes my head hurt.

Can Poetry Matter?

Recently, I've been picking through Dana Gioia's book Can Poetry Matter? which seems, thus far, to be a worthwile read if you have the time and interest. In the title essay, Gioia more or less comes down hard on contemporary poets for hiding in the academy. He laments the lost times of poetic bohemia when poets were out amongst the people.

Honestly, I have a little trouble buying this. Poets (writers in general, pretty much) have always been of the academy. Eliot, Creeley, Cummings, Ashbery et al. are Harvard chums (Creeley dropped out though.) Poets of the time period Gioia is dealing with, seem to me, to have always been a part of the academy.

It is true, though, that the Creative Writing boon has shaped the nature and practice of contemporary poetry. It could not have done otherwise. I'm less quick to indict this as a bad thing. If anything I see it as a chance to open up a populace to the idea of reading poetry. This is, of course, the central problem. Poetry just isn't vital to people. Who now can afford time to it? Can this ever change?

Lit mags though. He hits them pretty soundly. Currently, I'm editing the poetry section of Clerestory, which is Brown University literary magazine (more or less). I'm pretty daunted by the possibility of having to select undeserving poems for publication. The magazine simply demands a certain number of poems, which must be filled. There are, of course, several excellent even awesome submissions, but generally... Pretty weak.

Speaking of Clerestory and poems. This poem of mine appeared in the most recent edition:

Zapruder Film

Your death transpired
just as I had imagined it.

Except, of course,
for pink explosion.

That was a surprise.

Yep. And then this little gem (which I loved) from Brian Stefan (who is apparently a graduate student here).

Mail Art

as
an introduction
to language
"pringles"
fails

*

you could say i'm trying
too hard
and be right
you could
fuck a horse

*

male
art
i
make
male art

*

shackleton, the explorer
died at forty-seven
in antarctica
while you read this
again

usage of the next week

Consider the sign posted next to the elevator in the science library:

Handicapped Restroom Located on Level B.

First of all, (to once again quote the Big Lebowski), dude, "Handicapped" is not the preferred nomenclature. It's "differently abled," please.

But really, is

Differently Abled Restroom Located on Level B.

any better?

Why is it we feel we can't address differently-abled people themselves on signage? We'd never see

Restroom for Differently Abled Students Located on Level B.

Maybe that's in poor taste.

So we go on, ignoring the fact that the restroom is handicapped on the sign. And we all understand it anyway.

usage of the week

well, we're back from our fabulous new york weekend trip, and the big apple brought to our attention an invented usage!

at all the metro-card vending machines, when you opt to pay by debit card, a message appears on the screen:

Please dip ATM card.

What!? "dip"? we were shocked! crazy new yorkers, we muttered...

but it makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. after all, what is to "dip" but to put something into something else and then remove it quickly? what more convenient phrasing could the metropolitan transit authority have come up with? "please insert card, and remove it quickly"? "

also, any phrase of the form "please ____ ATM card" probably has a pretty obvious meaning... give them your money.

thank you, come again.

That's what i'm talkin' about!

In a certain informal speech style (the same one that uses 'like' frequently?), speakers often use tags like "you know" and "i mean," perhaps to check that the listener is following.

Consider Scott's recent observation: after any sentence, it is possible to meaningfully insert the phrase "you know what i'm trying to say." For example, "i think you're great. you know what i'm trying to say" or "the sky is blue... you know what i'm trying to say" or even "the taste of mango... you know what i'm trying to say?"

and this is the vagueness and power of language. we don't say things in the interest of logic or truth; we speak so that people will know what we're trying to say. each word or phrase is a stand-in for all the things we know we can never describe.

articulation is a personal favorite example. it is impossible to describe the condition of the tongue in real time, because as we speak, it moves, and we can never catch up with it. so we generalize to statements like: "every time i laugh, the base of my tongue hurts." here we've used language to simplify our experience into cause and effect (or at least correlated events) that recurr in patterns. if my statement isn't true EVERY time i laugh, or the pain is a little different each time, it's ok because you know basically what i'm trying to say.

well it's been... awhile.

So, it's been some time. Right now Cristi and I are back in Providence and in the midst of settling in and getting our rooms in order. There's been a lack of updating. This will change.

Stayed tuned. More updates to follow. Classes start next week!