Me (Thu 930325 15:06:56):
The behavioral outputs involved in stopping at a red light are
not controlled for conformity to social norms in the way that the
utterance of a word, a phrase, or a sentence is.
[Rick Marken (930325.1245)]
So let me see if I get this right: you CAN tell what someone is
doing by watching what they are doing if what they are doing is
uttering a word, phrase or sentence?
Yes. Specifically, you can tell that they are uttering that
word, that phrase, that sentence.
Because of the socially standardized word dependencies in
language, you can tell that they produced an utterance with a
certain structure. This structure of their utterance is the
linguistic information in the utterance. It is in the utterance,
that is, socially available and not just the private perceptions
of one party or another, because people have worked very hard to
learn to control linguistic structure in a socially standardized
way. As to why it is called information, refs on request if you
have lost them.
You CAN'T tell what they are saying it FOR, which is part of what
they mean by it. You can tell what you imagine you would be
saying it for if you were saying it. And you imagine that is
their motivation too. (Or perhaps you construct a model of them
and their motivations in imagination, but that comes back
ultimately to projection [in imagination] of your own motivations.)
And there is ambiguity. A given utterance can have more than one
structure concurrently, e.g. Harris' example (used later by
Chomsky) "Flying planes can be dangerous." If you are willing and
able to display the ambiguous possibilities to yourself in
imagination, you can tell that the other person means at least
one of a set of category perceptions, but you can't tell which
one.
But usually you are unaware of possible ambiguity. Usually you
have imagined a version of meanings and motivations consistent
with your perceptions of the subject matter domain and of the
social relations between you, and don't notice that the utterance
is structurally ambiguous (that the linguistic information in it
might be different from what you had perceived). You don't try
out the alternative branches of the ambiguity.
An example of ambiguity: substitute "one" for "you" in the
preceding, especially in case you think I am making
generalizations about you personally. This is because "you" as
an indefinite noun used interchangeably with "one, someone" is a
different word from "you" the person I am talking to. They're
pronounced and spelled the same (and have a common ancestor in
earlier English), but they are now different words, like "beet"
and "beat". Another example: "socially standardized" does not
mean society standardizes people or their references. People set
their reference perceptions in a way that they perceive (and are
willingly helped to perceive) as being the norm. This helps them
to control a perception of being able to cooperate with others.
Ambiguity is quite apart from the differences in nonverbal
perceptions (non-category perceptions) that we associated with
utterances in an idiosyncratic way that is not socially
standardized. You can't call that ambiguity, because ambiguity
is a choice between structurally defined alternatives.
I started to say more about ambiguity and motivations and social
relations, but I've ripped it out and stuffed it in a file. Not
too many steps at a time.
So when you see someone stopping at a red light you don't know
what they are doing. Your perception that they are interrupting
their travel to let other traffic cross might accord with theirs,
even probably does (robberies are not *that* common, and
passersby stopping to interfere in one even less so). But the
conforming to the social arrangement about red lights and traffic
is motivated by avoidance of direct hazards to life and limb, or
perhaps only to one's driver's license and insurance rate if
there's no traffic. And that's it. It is isolated; it is not
part of a system of socially standardized interdependencies. If
I hear a sound like "pu" it might be my little daughter blowing
out the candle. (You recall the story about how Poo Bear might
have got his name.) It might be any number of other things, a
piece of paper stuck to her lip, anything. If I hear it in
context I have no doubt that she has produced the word "put" in
the sentence "put the candle out", and that the blowing out of
the candle was an accidental byproduct, or that pretending that
it was is intended for a joke. And whatever perceptual
consequences might be associated with "put" in this case are not
the same in general (as for the hazards associated with running a
red light). They are different in "I won't put up with that",
and different yet again in "up with which I will not put," not to
mention "shot put." These differences are structurally determined
by the linguistic contexts of words and word dependencies in
which the different occurrences of the sound "put" are heard.
Too much? Are you still with me? And can you tell me about your
experience learning Spanish?
Bruce
bn@bbn.com