Re: Tlvn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Leaving aside the question of the autonomy of syntax and semantics, I
think there is a deep issue hidden in things like "colorless green
ideas sleep furiously," in "jabberwocky"-type poetry, and in the
experience of listening to something where you only understand half
the words (whether because they're technical jargon or because you
don't know the language well).

First off, I think that comprehension of sentences is a massive
problem of meaning-blending: the meanings of words get blended
together with the meanings of the constructions in which the words
appear, and you end up with one big monster-meaning of the sentence.

Now, there's an inchoate theory of how meanings get blended together
which talks in terms of "mental spaces" and connections between them.
without going into too much detail, this theory would allow that a
mind might set up a "target space" where two meanings are supposed to
be blended together, but rather than actually going through with the
blend, just leave it there with a few minimal characteristics filled
in, and maintain the web of connections with the input spaces for
reference.

So the target space from the blending of "green ideas" would have, as
input spaces, the meaning of "green," the meaning of "ideas", and the
meaning of the "AN construction" which is an ordinary adjective
modifying a noun.  From the "AN construction" it would receive the
information that the resulting meaning ought to have the structure of
a noun, and to be a kind of idea, but not necessarily much more.  It
would stay linked to "green" but it might not actually get filled in
if the mind involved were unable to come up with a coherent way to
blend "green" and "idea."

But it would still have enough semantic structure to be usable -- it
would be assumed to be a discrete thing (a count noun) and to be a
kind of "idea" -- and that would be enough to allow it to be usefully
combined with the other elements of a sentence.

The maintained connection with "green" would be useful because if the
rest of the sentence provided enough information that you could figure
out what "green" must mean in this context, you can go back and encode
that as a possible meaning of "green."

Does this at all make sense? :)


-----------------------------------------------
Boxcars are pulling an Ed of sorts out of town.
             edheil@postmark.net
-----------------------------------------------

Tom Wier wrote:
> Oh, I never meant to imply that they're completely unrelated --
> indeed, there are highly related, but distinct notions.  I was merely
> carrying on the generally accepted notion of the "autonomy of syntax":
> a sentence like "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" makes no
> semantic sense whatsoever, but it makes perfect syntactic sense,
> and is a well-formed English sentence.