Thoughts on nonlinear language & the geometry of propositional thought
| From: | And Rosta <and.rosta@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, May 1, 2006, 18:14 |
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The last on-list discussion of nonlinear two-dimensional language (i.e. such as
could be written on a page, and is not merely a representation of linear
sppech) occurred at a time when I was too busy to participate. Reading Sai's
thoughts on the subject, at
http://saizai.livejournal.com/657391.html, made me decide to get round to posting my rather conservative take on the
topic.
Irrespective of the expressive potential of the medium, propositional thought has its own
intrinsic geometry, a geometry that resembles the structure of trees in
Transformational Grammar. A proposition has the structure of a tree: the
predicate is the mother node and its daughters are its arguments. Just as with
a movement chain in TG, one node can be a daughter (i.e. argument) of many
mothers (predicates). This geometry of propositional thought therefore defines
the essence of the task facing any conlinguistic scheme that aims to map
thoughts into a given expressive medium.
--And.
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