Lexis Three

1.    ¡Hasta el infinito, y más allá! 

In Japan the traffic lights are ‘blue’ despite there being a separate word for ‘green’, and the sun is red not yellow. It’s right there on the flag.

So those “perceivable differences.” The question is, ‘perceived by who(m)?’ I’m sure we’ve all had discussions of various levels of heatedness with friends, sales clerks, and shopping buddies over whether a particular item of clothing is black or just very very dark blue. How much are those perceptions cultural (the red sun in Japan), linguistic (yellow most everywhere else), or individual (Newton, of course, spoke of ‘white’ light)? How do they feed up and down? If a word holds a meaning simply because a critical mass of people thinks that it does, then whose ‘perception’ really matters?

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“Limited resources.” Really? It’s possible to count to infinity using binary notation. That is: it’s possible to express a limitless amount of information with merely two differentiated units. The English language has about fifty phonemes (and 52 characters to express those phonemes, not including spaces and punctuation). Clearly once you’ve gone to infinity there’s no exceeding that, but having more units to utilize increases your options for doing so.

              “… language is faced with the choice of either having a unique word or of labelling by using a combination of existing items;”

Surely almost every ‘unique word’ is already a ‘combination of existing items’? Unless we’re going to suddenly start insisting that ‘unique labels’ are all and only monosyllabic monophonemic(?) then they’re all combinations of individual sounds. What kind of link are we assuming between sound and meaning? Does deny mean making a lot of noise by yourself?

You could make a case that it’s perfectly possible for every lexical item to have a ‘unique’ designation, some of them would just have to be very, very long. And so we come back to efficiency and redundancy. At some point I’m actually going to have to read that damn Shannon paper.

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In Japanese 12 translates literally as ten two and 20,564 as two ten-thousand five hundred six ten four. In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell volunteers a theory that ‘Asians are good at math[s]” because their number names are simpler and more systematic, and thus easier for the brain to process. My gut feeling is that this is bollocks of the highest order, but I’ll put it out there for your consideration nonetheless.

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Mary Queen of Scots? Booo. Chicken. Use Osama as an example and see what really happens.

Interestingly, and perhaps not irrelevantly, people’s views on capital punishment are literally the textbook example of confirmation bias.

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              “… a British charity recently proposed the term loli, an acronym for ‘low opportunity, low income, to refer to the poor…”

Oh dear. Didn’t really think that one through, did they?

2.    Apples

“…without collocation theory and associated tests, crucial factors in the determination of stylistic effects can be too easily overlooked…”

(Carter p39, emphasis added)

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              “…in summaries of Hemingway’s short story Cat in the Rain informants unanimously preferred the term cat to alternatives… This seems to suggest that… prepositions conveyed should be represented without stylistic, rhetorical, or evaluative overly.” (p42)

It would also seem to suggest that the word cat is in the fucking title of the story.

Our piscine exclaimed, “Fie! Fie!”

“Cause yon feline to depart!”

“Proclaim to yon feline in millinery

That you decline to cavort!”

Catchy. See also Viridian Ova and Swine Flesh.

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              “..it is more accurate to speak of clines and gradients and of degrees of coreness…”     (p45, emphasis in original)

I’m not going to be sarcastic about this because I really think there’s something important here. Not least in connection with the first sociolinguistics unit and differentiating between a language and a dialect. The overlap of ‘core vocabulary’ could offer a decent, measurably proxy for mutual intelligibility, or lack thereof, and enable a more systematic and less political method of separating out one language from the other.

The observations on British English Anglo-Saxon based words being core also tie into the notion of ‘Strong’ verbs. I wouldn’t pretend any expertise in this area, but if nothing else they represent a useful was to explain to non-native speaking colleagues why some of the most fundamental everyday verbs are so irregular in their conjugation.

3.    Oranges

I don’t know whether to praise or bemoan Carter for writing something like, “the observation that language is a ‘loaded weapon’ and can be used for persuasive and exploitative purposes is not an uncommon one,” (p109) and then completely failing to mention Orwell. Christ, Aristotle got there a couple of thousand years ago, and that kind of highlights my unease with this second section of reading:

              “We are clearly not at the stage where a systematic analysis of lexicalization and ideology in discourse can be offered.” (p111)

I know this book is 25 years old, but there have been attempts to systemize the understanding and teaching of rhetoric stretching back millennia. Literary criticism is a well established mode of communication with its own well developed “specialized technological lexicon and… jargons” (ibid). This seems to cut to the heart of how the Social Sciences see their role and place in the academy. The drive for “adequate and replicable analysis” (p114) represents the fundamental underpinning of how we tend to distinguish between a science and an art, but in terms of discourse analysis, or at least the discourse analysis presented in this example, there really is nothing new here.

Bruno Latour has suggested that, “in their hearts social scientists deeply doubt the quality of their own explanations,” (p110). When Carter notes that, “this is another domain… which requires further investigation,” (p108) I don’t know whether to applaud or weep. It’s not further investigation which is required, it’s further systemization which is desired.