Re: THEORY: Underspecification

Ed Heil
> Underspecification is a phenomenon which is probably universal in
> human semiotics.  Letters, even in a very phonetic alphabet, are never
> sufficient to encode everything about the pronunciation of a text.
> The cutoff for specification varies, but something is always left
> unwritten, a blank to be filled in by inference by the speaker or
> reader.  In the Latin alphabet, fairly phonetic, vowel length was
> unspecified.  In the Greek alphabet, vowel length was unspecified only
> for some vowels.  In both of those, punctuation marks and word
> divisions were often left unspecified.
>
> But this takes place on higher levels as well.  The meaning of a
> sentence uttered in context is more than the sum of the meanings of
> the words and the syntax, just as the sound of a word uttered in
> context is more than the sum of the sounds of the letters.
>
> The book _The User Illusion_ is largely about this fact -- the fact
> that we put into our words, and get out of them, far more than one can
> ever say is "in" them.  It's (superficially) like a very effective
> compression algorithm -- megs and megs of data may be transmitted as a
>  100K JPEG image.  Because there's something intelligent on one end
> that compresses it and something intelligent on the other end that
> decompresses it.  (Always distrust computer metaphors for human
> phenomena, though. :)
>
> That's just one of my favorite cogsci/linguistics topics.  The way
> that language is not so much an encoding of meaning as a device
> intended to elicit meaning in a suitably prepared brain.  It doesn't
> "contain" meaning any more than a rider's spurs "contain" a horse's
> speed.
While accepting the first three paragraphs and the spuriousness of the
container metaphor, I would content the implication that a language is
not an encoding of meaning. I think that's exactly what it is: a set
of sentences, where a sentence is pairing of a meaning (an underspecified
proposition) and an underspecified sound (or gesture). Modulo a
certain amount of polysemy in the word "language", language is a
code, not metaphorically but literally.

--And.