Hi Shoshana
In my recent comment inthis thread I said something of the order that I don't
produce speechacts. This, superficially, should entail difficulties with
linguists,who think that speech acts exist, and that everybody produces
them,and linguists might also think that my non-production of speech actsmight
produce difficulties in communication with my psychiatrist, butI assure you, my
psychiatrist, Thomas Fuchs of Heidelberg University,and I, get by fine.
I also don't producesentences, and with that meanings. My initial explanation,
is 'Whywould I?', but, in present company, at some time, I should
providefurther explanations as to why I don't produce sentences and such,and
why you might imagine that I, and you, do. A lot of it has to dowith taking
utterances, killing them so that they can have noconsequences, and then looking
at their poor corpses, while imaginingwhat they might have been like if they
were half-alive. Damn, thatsounds deprecating doesn't it. I don't mean it to
be. The problem isextremely widespread in the study of semiosis, and I am
currentlybuilding up to tackle a core example of the kind, to whit, thePeircean
notion of sign.
My 'why would I?'argument would be supported by you failing to give me ten
pounds whenI tell you 'give me ten pounds'. And why when I say 'this is
that',here, you have no clue, whereas, in my life I have many times said'this
is that', with no problems whatsoever, and, as it happens, withconsequences.
But, the origin of my'Why would I?', lies in discourse semantics, or text. The
problemcropped up initially, many a many a year ago, with respect toHalliday
and Hasan's work on text and cohesion, while following Jim'scourse on the same
issues. The initial problem wasn't a question asto why I would produce
discourse, but why would I care whether a text'coheres' or not? And then,
noting my disinterest in the text'scoherence, I wondered what part/whole
relations, and other aspects ofparticipant tracking, would have to do with the
cohesion of a text,if I were to be interested in the cohesion of a text. I
followed thecourse of course, and did the analyses as required, which were
oftenenough awkward enough, but, I was lucky enough not to get mmm, thiswill
sound disparaging, suckered into it.
I am entirely notwanting to be rude. The problem I see here is a very difficult
thingto deal with. In your paper, for example, you talk about
'entities',following on from Jing Hao.
6. Entities
Entitiesbuild lexical cohesion in a text, as they are the “things” in atext
that we can track.
Movingup to register, and looking from the perspective of field, entitiescan
construe
items;and finally, looking from below, they are realised through thenominal
group
constituentof Thing, with a potential elaborated structure of
Classifier^Thing,as presented in Table 7.
Hao(2015, forthcoming a) classifies entities into a number of types,including:
●thing entities, which typically refer to tangible and observableitems, such as
chair,
window,room;
and you seem to approveof entities being classified into various types, such as
'thingentities', which would be 'tangible and observable', and thiseverywhere
error of thinking that 'things' are tangible andobservable is the kind of error
which leads us off towardsConstantinople, which is a very hard word to spell,
can you spell it?My usual example of a 'thing entity' is a cup, and I am unable
to seea cup. Yes, in the morning, desperate for my morning cuppa coffee, Iwalk
into the kitchen and 'see' various things, such as jug and cup,but for a cup to
be a cup, it must be able to be ready carriedupstairs, it must be of a shape
which will accommodate my lips, itneeds have an excrescence at the side of a
certain size such that myfingers will slip into it, with this excrescence being
solidlyattached to the cup, etbloodycetera, and these 'features of the cup,that
which makes some lump which might at best be seen as a chunk ofporcelain into a
cup, are not bloody perceptible. There is a quietquantity of careful work which
has been done to elucidate problemslike this, by Wilfred Sellars and G.E.Moore
and such. But there is arelated disease, which may be infecting SFL rather
severely, that weare running around in circles, identifying things as
something,because we have already identified them as such. In Jing Hao's set
ofentities, she talks about place entities and people entities as ifthey might
be phenomena of language, but, any status that they mighthave in language as
place entities or people entities, would bebecause in our lived world we have
already identified them as placeentities or people entities.
●place entities, which provide resources for the naming of places,such as New
South Wales, Australia; and
● people entities, which refer to the roles and titles of peoplesuch as my
grand-
mother, or their collective groups such as community, assembly, etc.
Cirular arguments canbe very difficult to avoid. I am currently reading two
dogmas ofempiricism and agreeing with Quine as he tears a new afterburnerfor
his good mate Carnap, rejecting the analytic/syntheticdistinction of truth.
And, if you can argue that the well-travelledpath of the analytic/synthetic
distinction is actually a circle,well, almost anything is possible.
On Wednesday, 7 February 2024 at 11:00:08 GMT, Shoshana Dreyfus
<shooshi@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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Here’s my paper that tries to unpack circumstantial meaning cross-stratally.
Maybe if you read this, you might see what I’m getting at
From:asflanet-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <asflanet-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of
Kieran McGillicuddy <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wednesday, 7 February 2024 at 9:44 pm
To: asflanet@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <asflanet@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [asflanet] Re: grammar analysis only
4,600 years ago? I've got unwashed socks older than that.
But we are here for Annabel's query, and I am now interested in
some 4,600 years ago
Shoshana says,
Well as far as I am concerned it instantiates circumstantial meaning, telling
us when something happened and it’s also fairly uncommitted – they are not
saying EXACTLY when, just roughly when. It answers the probe question of
circumstance location time: when?
I don't understand what it could mean to 'instantiate circumstantial meaning'.
That doesn't seem like something I would want to do. And I doubt whether
Shoshana understands either. Yes, my instincts tell me that it has something to
do with 'time', but it is poor form to be relying on instincts, so the question
should probably be what is it that tells me? or perhaps far more aptly, what it
is that 'points me' to time? and 'years' and 'ago' should possibly serve as a
clue. But, the problem here would be, that I am not arguing 'grammatically'.
And, this is not a criticism, but I see very few grammatical arguments here in
this discussion, and I fail to see linguistic structure, to boot, if that's
your idea of fun. But, enough fun, this should be very important for us.
My grandfather got shot in the Khyber Pass
In fact, my grandfather was not shot in the Khyber Pass, he died in Changi, and
in saying that he died in Changi, I don't mean precisely that, since I know
that although he started off in Changi, he actually died somewhere near the
Myanmar border with Thailand, and even that isn't quite accurate, since in my
thinking, he died in 'Burma'. So, when I say that he died in Changi, what 'I
say', and what you hear, are rather substantially different things. And Changi,
Myanmar, and Burma, are not similarly 'meaningful' to you and to me, or even to
me at different points in time.
This matters to what we are doing here, and what we think we are doing. And
even, note how easy it is for us to deal with 'here', when what 'here' might
be, would seem to be on your screen, or perhaps lurking in the pixels.
So,
My grandfather got shot in the Khyber Pass.
Or perhaps not quite yet.
Within some of the discussion here, we are assiduously attempting to identify
structural components of nominal groups, and with that 'circumstances'
(something like prepositional phrases) applying skills carefully developed over
a rather long period of training and studying linguistic analyses, such that we
are able to produce substantial important conclusions from those analyses. But,
at some point, our 'linguistic analyses' produce results with which we may be
not quite satisfied. And our commitment to 'linguistic' analyses may be (by
which I mean 'is') obscuring whether what we are analysing is actually
'language'. Are the analyses of the nominal group which have seen recently
promoted in systemic linguistics, actually linguistic analyses, or rather,
fully dependent on cognition and the nature of the 'entities' involved, that
is, 'is language construing or being construed', and more generally, 'Is
language dependent on context?' (which I would like to be understood broadly)
or 'Is context dependent on language?'.
So, I am drawn to the comparison of
My grandfather got shot in the Khyber Pass.
and,
My grandfather got shot in the Khyber Pass.
I am strongly inclined to say that these two clauses are identical, but there
are some subtleties of presentation. The fact that I have juxtaposed them
spatially, entails that they are not identical, and sets them up for contrast,
but I am going to pretend that that is not the case. And though I may want to
say that the two clauses are identical, some of the older of you who have
watched too many Carry on movies, might identify some difference between the
two. The identified difference, if such there be, is not to be found in the
'language' as it appears. Perhaps we could (and would) detect subtle
differences in intonation but that is not where the 'meaning' differences are
to be found. Some might want to say that the differences between the two
clauses are 'structural' differences, but no 'structural differences' will deal
with what Isee here, and in any case, any 'structural' 'difference would need
be a product of my understanding of the entities involved, rather than
vice-versa.
Relatedly, language, or a language system, doesn't tell me that there is a
relation between 'ago' or 'away'. I know, in my language independent lived
life, that there is a relation between 'ago' and 'away', but this relationship
is not between 'words', but between place x and place y, or between time a and
time b. David's contrast here is useful.
some 4,600 years ago : Time ::
about 4,600 miles away : Place
and I am happy to see that the contrast is a matter of time and place, but
there is nothing about 'language' per se which produces the distinction, it is
a difference between kinds of things, of time and place, as years are different
from miles.
Incidentally, I understood the issue of distance between things, well before I
could say 'between'.
But before proceeding, a cautionary tale. We need to be careful with what we
mean by 'time'. 'Some 4,600 years ago' sets up a distance between what at first
appears two 'times', 'then' and 'now'. But, essentially, 'then' and 'now' are
empty signifiers, deictic elements akin to 'this' and 'that'. 'Then' and 'now'
are deictic to states of affairs which may or do change. Some 4,600 years ago
is 4,600 years in the past from now, presuming that 'ago' is not a typo of
'agogo'. That is, 4,600 years ago is ago from now. The 4,600 years ago, is not
much of itself, but substantially more as the event to which it points, to
whit, the formation of the earth. Whereas 'now' might be thought of as a speech
act, as the time of utterance. But, the temporal distance between the formation
of the earth and my or anybody else's speech act, seems like a rather strange
distance, even embarassing, especially for me, as I don't produce speech acts,
but it might be a reasonable temporal distance between the state of the world
as this issue is being discussed, that is, the (degenerating) state of the
world 'now' with its building and border-collies, and less importantly humans,
in contrast with the state of the (pre-incipient) world 4,600 years ago.
But of course, my now state of affairs is not yours, and is certainly not
Davids. His 'then', 4,600 years ago, is dramatically more elaborated,
sophisticated and complex, than mine.
We need to be (very) careful of 'grammar' and arguing grammatically, at the
risk of undermining the extraordinary achievements of SFL. Grammatically, for
example we might be willing to say that 'this is my nephew' is reversible to
'my nephew is this', and imagining that we are dealing with 'language' leads us
to imagine that naming of 'components' is to be doing something, and it is to
do something to recognize that 'this is my brother' and 'my brother is this'
are both identifying relational processes. But 'this is my brother' is a far
far different utterance to 'my brother is this', with the differences not
accountable for through interpersonal or textual meanings. To equate the two
'clauses' is wildly reductive. In any case, to treat 'this' and 'my nephew' as
language could of itself be worryingly reductive, but less problematically if
we aware of what we are doing.
Sorry, I'll have to stop here. I need to wash some socks.
On Monday, 5 February 2024 at 00:56:14 GMT, Annabelle Lukin
<annabelle.lukin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear colleagues,
I'm keen to hear thoughts on the analysis of this clause:
The earth formed some 4,600 years ago from a vast cloud of gas and dust.
Cheers
Annabelle
Annabelle Lukin (she, her, hers)
Associate Professor Linguistics
Department HDR Director
Department of Linguistics
Level 5, 12 Second Way Room 507
Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia
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