Re: Natural Order of Events

--- On Thu, 11/6/08, Eugene Oh <un.doing@...> wrote:

> From: Eugene Oh <un.doing@...>
> It is, actually rather logical. (Or so I have always
> thought, and wondered
> why there was a need for such research.)
>
> To do an action, everything you need has to be present
> first. Logically,
> this extends to conveyance of information: Your listener
> needs to know
> everything involved in the action before he or she can make
> a link.
> Therefore all arguments need to be enumerated before the
> interaction between
> them is described. Speech can do away with that, because of
> the added
> parsing flexibility with pauses, intonation and other
> suprasegmental
> features.
My own opinion is that spontaneous gestures are inherently more ambiguous.
Knowing what sort of things are involved in the action helps narrow down the
possibilities for what the action might be. The same ambiguous gesture might
mean one thing when done with paintbrush and canvass, and quite another thing
when down with butter knife and toast. The correct interpretation can only be
guessed when the items involved are already known.

--gary