<[Bill Leach (96089.1934 EDT)]
[Avery Andrews 960809]
A little PCT-linguistics observation:
Avery, this sort of thinking in combination with some creative applications
of the TEST will surely further both PCT and linguistics!
Your examples seem to me to suggest a fondational way to study the nature
and development of what I have heard termed "natural grammer".
bill leach
b.leach@worldnet.att.net
ars KB7LX
[Avery Andrews 960809]
A little PCT-linguistics observation:
If you say something like:
Here is the lamp (more naturally, Here's the lamp)
There is the dog (more naturally, There's the dog)
My intuition is that your goal is for your conversational partner to
perceive (by sight if sighted, maybe by touch if blind) the thing
you're referring to with the noun-phrase after the `is' (the lamp,
the dog). If you get the idea that they're not seeing it, you keep on
making noise until you think they do (wife says `there is your coffee',
husband does not even move his eyes in the direction she's pointing
...).
Using a prepositional phrase, such as `in the corner', or `on the
table', produces a completely different effect:
on the table was/?is the lamp
in the corner was/?is the dog
Here I think the goalis for the conversational partner to merely know
the location of the noun phrase at the end; the past forms with `was'
are quite natural as narrative, but the present ones seem a bit odd;
I think however they would be quite natural if you were delivering
a verbal description while moving through the environment (so that
your hearers can know something about what you're looking at, but you
don't expect them to be able to look at it themselves, or to produce
a vivid description in a novel.
What's interesting about this is that a particar kind of grammatical
choice seems to be correlated with a subtle difference in the speaker's
reference level for perception of the audience's cognitive state.
Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au
i.kurtzer (960813.1615)
A brief consideration in the linguistics vein:
For those who attended the conference three years ago and/or the most
recent you were able to hear the fine presentations of M.Taylor and
K.McClelland, respectively. In brief, they both centered around socal
artifacts as consequent to a population of control systems controlling
some same state of the world, so that it might appear as though the
artifact had either an independent status ("Republican", "norms") or was
the result of some overarching entity ("gaia", "group mind"). Kent termed
the interaction a "virtual control system" and likened it to an 800 lb
gorilla--slow, dumb, and powerful. We all see this in situations were
there is consensus, but noone seems to agree with each other. Everyone is
maxed out in defending their position but there is another equally
vehemenant at the other end of the contiuum resulting in an stable
consensus that might not be held by anyone.
Now there are precious few items I know of linguistics, but I have heard
that there are "core words" to a language and these are also "core" to
other languages. So while there might be a word for that substance that
we call water in many (all?) languages a word for drifting , dirty snow
would not be expected from Aborigenes.
Now in the evolution of language it is told that these core words are the
ones that change least. Why? Why is it that water is still awfully
close to vodka though we think that the people that spoke the previous
language had separated long ago. (I am assuming common origin and not
borrowing). Well, it falls out that the larger the population that is
using the word (though potentially containing more variabilty for
individual pronounciation) then the less it will change as the virtual
control sytem is in effect as function of the gain across all members.
This can be seen by us when we consider changing terminology to avoid the
common impolications of "control", "feedback", "perception", etc while if
use ones that are less common the is less controversy.--see Powers
X-phenomenon paper in LCS II.
All that for one sentence, see above.
i.\