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Imposed upon it by language, experience organized by what we know to be
expressible or that we know how to express. Sapir-Whorf::linguistic
determinism. Which is merely to label, not affirm.
It would seem that it is the fate of our project of naming to recreate
on a practical level the philosophical positions which accompanied the
last hundred years of linguistics research. This may well be a necessity,
but it does not change the outcome: the center does not hold. Nuance and
play trump structure. Or better, fleshes out a living organism on the
skeleton of constructs.
The machines will have to learn to cope. Transformations are one key to
enabling a lively, local idiom. Some constructs must live in the
stylesheets to satisfy codability (the linguistic kind) as a
comprehensive structure constitutes both the heat-death of a language as
well as a logistical impossibility in most cases.
The recent post excerpted from Orwell comes to mind.
Mike
On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, W. E. Perry wrote:
> Sean McGrath wrote:
>
> > I've just come across this quote which I really like:
> >
> > "Categories such as number, gender, case, time, mode, voice, aspect and a host
> > of others...are not so much discovered in experience as imposed upon it".
> > - E Sapir
> > Conceptual Models in Primitive Languages
> > Science (1931)
>
> Well, yes, but imposed by what? The quote above exhibits the opinion of its
> time, formed in reaction to the prescriptive grammatical conclusions of the
> Victorian era. It is however, an opinion unaware of the discovery in the 1920's
> of the true nature of poetic formulae and, by later extension, of the
> determinant role of patterns of language on everyday instances of expression.
> Grammatical choices such as those categories above are regularly imposed upon an
> utterance by the idiom to which the speaker, usually unconsciously, conforms.
> What we discover in experience, then, is not a selection of each grammatical
> variant uniquely chosen for the occasion, but the identification by pattern of
> an idiom, perhaps uniquely nuanced and in any case colored by the specific
> circumstances of its use. The grammatical choices are made as a whole, or nearly
> so, and are imposed by a pattern from the speaker's store of idiom. Choices
> among such idioms, rather than in each category of grammatical possibility, are
> the poetic tools which the speaker actually employs.
>
> Respectfully,
>
> Walter Perry
>
>
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Mike Haarman
mhaarma@socsci.umn.edu
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