Ed--
It's possible to rewrite it like this:
"The meaning of a typical perceptual category thus has no counterpart in
our conscious representation of things. There can be no exact paraphrase of
'blue" or "green" or "red"– because there is no language-independent
clustering of phenomena in our experience to which they correspond."
So for example a rainbow has seven bars in some cultures, including our
own, but only five in other cultures.
"If there was, we should not need perceptual categories to create them. If
perception was a purely passive partner, ‘expressing’ a ‘reality’ that was
already there, its categories would be eminently glossable. But it is not."
So for example, the cone cells of the eye have peak responses at certain
frequencies (roughly, indigo, green, and orange-yellow) and not others.
But I didn't want to rewrite THIS part:
" Language is an active participant in the semogenic process. Language
creates reality – and therefore its categories of content cannot be
defined, since we could define them only by relating them to some
pre-existing model of experience, and there is no model of experience until
the linguistic categories are there to model it. The only meaning of 'red'
is the meaning that has evolved along with the category itself. …"
I could have changed this to "perception is an active
participant...perception creates reality...etc." But reading it over, I do
think that languages are also active participants in creating color. That
is where we get our sense that some colors go with others, a sense that
varies with culture, age and class. That is where we get studies like this
one:
He H, Li J, Xiao Q, Jiang S, Yang Y and Zhi S (2019) Language and Color
Perception: Evidence From Mongolian and Chinese Speakers. Front. Psychol.
10:551. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00551
What I don't understand is where the border lies between color categories
created by the eye and color categories created by language. Both are
evolved systems. Both are ineffable.
But they seem ineffable in different ways, because one is changeable only
in Darwinian ways (that is, through natural selection) while the other
seems Lamarckian to me (that is, change through cultural selection).
I don't think Chafe is helpful here-I found his analysis of intonation
units too fussy and too functional--not as elegant as Halliday and Greaves
2008, which is much more parsimonious. But I agree that intonation is a
really good place to look for the border between sensory and semantic
categorization (it's a better place to look than phonemes---as Halliday
said, Saussure's error was to find the ONE place in the whole system that
really was completely conventional and then overgeneralize....).
dk
2022년 1월 17일 (월) 오후 9:33, Edward McDonald <laomaa63@xxxxxxxxx>님이 작성:
Dear David:
I fear you may be overestimating my knowledge of the relevant work in
philosophy and cognitive science!
But - to continue the Chafe theme which I've been exploring myself in
recent months - I was interested to see that his last book, published the
year before he died (blurb below), was on the relationship between language
and thought. I don't agree with what he seems to regard as a commonsense
claim - "Language begins with thoughts in the mind of a speaker and ends
by affecting thoughts in the mind of a listener" - but I do share his
suspicion that "the role of thought [in linguistic theorizing] is usually
usurped by semantics" - although I would draw the opposite conclusion to
him: i.e. that we should be doing "proper" semantics, i.e. semantics that
comes through the lexicogrammar, rather than being "imposed on" it as some
kind of putative cognitive universal. Nevertheless, although it's not an
area I know much if anything about, his book does appear to take seriously
the issue of what kind of cognition it is that lies behind language
And there is a - perhaps tangential? - Saussurean connection here as well,
as I comment in an unpublished paper that I think you've seen, drawing on
a recent re-evaluation of Saussure by Beata Stawarska (2020) *Saussure’s
Linguistics, Structuralism, and Phenomenolog*y: *The* Course in General
Linguistics *after a Century - *brought to my attention by Gerard O'Grady:
Despite the cognitive bias of much contemporary linguistics in the last
half-century, one of the issues that has not received much attention is
precisely the dynamic, performative relationship between *langue*
(system) and *parole* (discourse): in other words, the nature of
speakers’ “linguistic cognition” as a behaviourally-formed habit, a habit
which, moreover, for much of the time is not under speakers’ conscious
control. The recently discovered writings show that Saussure was by no
means unaware of this aspect of language, as noted by Stawarksa (2020:
198-200):
[T]he *la langue*–*la parole* distinction draws a line between the
enabling forms that are “subconscious, in the depths of thought” (65) and
the enabled ones that alone are produced in speech and, henceforth,
directly available to consciousness…:
The notion of consciousness is highly relative, such that there are two
degrees of consciousness, the higher of which remains that of pure
unconsciousness when compared to the degree of reflection which accompanies
most of our acts. (Saussure 2006, 106)
The relation between consciousness and the unconscious is approached here
from the perspective of language acts (rather than a presumed
non-linguistic thought), where the act of speaking involves a degree of
automatism even when executed with full awareness. Speaking does not
proceed solely from consciously available signifying intentions, but it is
animated partly by the deep language structures lying beyond the individual
ken and control.
But whether that's what you were getting at in your rewriting of the
Halliday quote, I'm not quite sure...
all the best
Ed
Thought-Based Linguistics: How Languages Turn Thoughts Into Sounds
<https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=CHATLH-2&proxyId=&u=http%3A%2F%2Fbooks.google.com%2Fbooks%3Fid%3DenVSDwAAQBAJ%26printsec%3Dfront_cover>
Wallace Chafe <https://philpapers.org/s/Wallace%20Chafe>
Cambridge University Press (2018)
Abstract
The extent to which language is inseparable from thought has long been a
major subject of debate across linguistics, psychology, philosophy and
other disciplines. In this study, Wallace Chafe presents a thought-based
theory of language that goes beyond traditional views that semantics,
syntax, and sounds are sufficient to account for language design. Language
begins with thoughts in the mind of a speaker and ends by affecting
thoughts in the mind of a listener. This obvious observation is seldom
incorporated in descriptions of language design for two major reasons.
First, the role of thought is usually usurped by semantics. But semantic
structures are imposed on thought by languages and differ from one language
to another. Second, thought does not lend itself to familiar methods of
linguistic analysis. Chafe suggests ways of describing thoughts, traces the
path languages follow from thoughts to sounds, and explores ways in which
thoughts are oriented in time, memory, imagination, reality, and emotions.
On Mon, Jan 17, 2022 at 2:58 PM 데이브드켈로그_교수_영어교육과 <dkellogg60@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Chris, and especially Ed (who will immediately see what this is really
about).
I don't think I have any problem understanding what Halliday meant by the
ineffability of grammatical categories. In fact, Subject is quite language
specific: it means something quite different in English, where Mood tags
are possible and even frequent, than it does in Chinese. So it almost goes
without saying that "Subject" is ineffable.
I do have a problem understanding why what Halliday says about
grammatical categories wouldn't apply, say, to perceptual categories.
Suppose I take Chris's quotation and replace "grammatical" with perceptual
and think up appropriate categories.
"The meaning of a typical perceptual category thus has no counterpart in
our conscious representation of things. There can be no exact paraphrase of
'blue" or "green" or "red"– because there is no language-independent
clustering of phenomena in our experience to which they correspond. If
there was, we should not need the linguistic category to create one. If
language was a purely passive partner, ‘expressing’ a ‘reality’ that was
already there, its categories would be eminently glossable. But it is not.
Language is an active participant in the semogenic process. Language
creates reality – and therefore its categories of content cannot be
defined, since we could define them only by relating them to some
pre-existing model of experience, and there is no model of experience until
the linguistic categories are there to model it. The only meaning of 'red'
is the meaning that has evolved along with the category itself. …But
perception is an evolved system; and evolved systems rest on principles
that are ineffable – because they do not correspond to any consciously
accessible categorisation of our experience. Only the relatively trivial
meanings of a natural language are likely to be reducible to (meta-)words.
Fundamental semantic concepts, like those underlying the Kantian categories
of time, space, color, etc. in an entirely positive way, ineffable."
I don't think this leads Halliday into neo-Kantianism, because as he says
we are talking about evolved systems and not about a priori knowledge. But
perception is an evolved system too, it just seems a priori to us because
we weren't around when it evolved.
dk
2022년 1월 17일 (월) 오전 8:44, Dr ChRIS CLÉiRIGh <c.cleirigh@xxxxxxxxx>님이 작성:
Dear Colleagues,
The following explanations might be helpful for anyone keen to
understand what Halliday means by 'the ineffability of grammatical
categories'.
Halliday (2002 [1984]: 303, 306-7):
*The meaning of a typical grammatical category thus has no counterpart
in our conscious representation of things.* There can be no exact
paraphrase of Subject or Actor or Theme – because there is no
language-independent clustering of phenomena in our experience to which
they correspond. If there was, we should not need the linguistic category
to create one. If language was a purely passive partner, ‘expressing’ a
‘reality’ that was already there, its categories would be eminently
glossable. But it is not. Language is an active participant in the
semogenic process. Language creates reality – and therefore its categories
of content cannot be defined, since we could define them only by relating
them to some pre-existing model of experience, and there is no model of
experience until the linguistic categories are there to model it. The only
meaning of Subject is the meaning that has evolved along with the category
itself. …
But a language is an evolved system; and evolved systems rest on *principles
that are ineffable – because they do not correspond to any consciously
accessible categorisation of our experience*. Only the relatively
trivial meanings of a natural language are likely to be reducible to
(meta-)words. Fundamental semantic concepts, like those underlying Subject,
or Theme, Actor, New, definite, present, finite, mass, habitual, locative,
are, in an entirely positive way, ineffable.
--
dr chris cléirigh
*Education: teaching how to think*
*Indoctrination: teaching what to believe *
====================================
My Linguistics Sites
Factoring Out Structure <https://yaegandoran.blogspot.com/>
Martin's Discourse Semantics, Register & Genre
<http://discourse-semantics.blogspot.com.au/> (凌遲
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingchi>)
Working With Discourse: Meaning Beyond The Clause
<http://workingwithdiscourse.blogspot.com.au/> (凌遲
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingchi>)
The Cardiff Grammar <http://cardiff-grammar.blogspot.com.au/> (凌遲
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingchi>)
Thoughts That Cross My Mind
<http://thoughts-that-cross-my-mind.blogspot.com.au/>
The Thought Occurs <http://thethoughtoccurs.blogspot.com.au/>…
Thoughts That Didn't Occur <http://master-bateman.blogspot.com.au/>…
Informing Thoughts <http://informingthoughts.blogspot.com.au/>
Systemic Functional Linguistics <http://systemictheory.blogspot.com/>
Sysfling <http://sysfling.blogspot.com.au/>
Sys-Func <http://sys-func.blogspot.com.au/>
Attitude In Systemic Functional Linguistics
<http://attitude-in-sfl.blogspot.com.au/>
Martin's Model Of Paralanguage <https://sflparalanguage.blogspot.com/>
Lexis As Most Local Context
<https://lexisasmostlocalcontext.blogspot.com/>
Making Sense Of Meaning <https://meta-sfl-theory.blogspot.com/>
====================================
--
David Kellogg
Sangmyung University
,
New book of translations, with N.N. Veresov:
Vygotsky, L.S. (2021). L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works, Volume 2: The
problem of age. Singapore: Springer
With outlines, footnotes, and two free, downloadable chapters by the
editor/translators. See the "frontmatter" and "backmatterr" pdfs:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-16-1907-6
