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Re: THEORY: Underspecification

From:John Cowan <cowan@...>
Date:Saturday, December 11, 1999, 16:20
And Rosta scripsit:
> > Ed Heil
> > > 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.
I think that Ed is using "meaning" in its pragmatic sense (the meaning of a message is just its effect on the listener) whereas And is using it in some other sense, which perhaps is more common, but which I cannot clearly understand. -- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin