Re: THEORY: Underspecification

I wish I had known this book when I was doing so much work ten
years ago on "explicitness" in poetry.  This is a wonderful resource!
I drew at the time on an older authority: Peter Abelard,
who addressed this issue by suggesting the impossible "infinite
sentence," wherein "no statement is linguistically or meaningfully
complete while anything which can contribute to the sense remains
unsaid."  Oratio, in the _Dialectica_ 68.34-39; paraphrased and
discussed
in Brian Stock's _Implications of Literacy_, 376....

Of course the point of the infinite sentence, according to Abelard, and
to
Stock, is to examine how it is we make and derive meaning from
utterances that leave so much out.  This was a fascinating thread
about a year ago on Conlang, when we were wrangling about ambiguity
and logical languages, and so forth.

Sally
**************************************
Ed Heil wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>                        edheil@postmark.net
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Roland Hoensch wrote:
>
> > Three letters granted.  That leaves English with 30-35 seperate
> > sounds and 26 letters.  I won't say that's good or bad... but three
> > letters when about a good 10-12 were needed is a small start
> > if anything.
--
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SALLY CAVES
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Niffodyr tweluenrem lis teuim an.
"The gods have retractible claws."
                                from _The Gospel of Bastet_
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