Confusing Discourse

Confusing Discourse Also by Karol Janicki LANGUAGE MISCONCEIVED. ARGUING FOR APPLIED COGNITIVE SOCIOLINGUISTICS (2006...

Author: Karol Janicki

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Confusing Discourse

Also by Karol Janicki LANGUAGE MISCONCEIVED. ARGUING FOR APPLIED COGNITIVE SOCIOLINGUISTICS (2006)

Confusing Discourse Karol Janicki University of Bergen, Norway

With illustrations by

Siri Fuglseth and

Tine Erika Fuglseth

© Karol Janicki 2010 Original illustrations © Siri Fuglseth and Tine Erika Fuglseth 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his rights to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–23260–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Preface

vi

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

x

1 What are You Talking About? – Language and Abstraction

1

2 Learning New Words – How We Develop Meaning

32

3 Words are Not What They Refer to – The Map is Not the Territory

53

4 Words, Words, Words . . ., and Tables, Cars and Elephants – Intensional and Extensional Orientation

88

5 The Good Guys and the Bad Guys – Two-Valued and Multi-Valued Orientation

125

6 The Unfortunate Word ‘is’: ‘Is’ of Identity and ‘is’ of Predication; E-Prime

142

7 Can You Tell the Difference? – Non-Verbal Phenomena, Descriptions, and Inferences

171

8 Can You Imagine It? – The Role of Visualization and Context in Understanding Discourse

190

9 No Bamboozlement, Please – How to Disclose Others’ Equivocation and Make Your Own Discourse Less Confusing and Easier to Understand – A Summary and Some Warnings

205

Conclusion: Can We Go Bananas? Discourse and Health

216

Suggestions for Further Reading

219

References

220

Index

228 v

Preface

Aristotle could have avoided the mistakes of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. (Russell 1976: 115) You must have found yourself often in situations in which you did not understand what was being said to you. You, most likely, thought that it was your fault, that there were things that you probably did not know, that you were not listening carefully, that your knowledge of the language was not sufficient, and so on. While on some occasions and in some situations it may have indeed been your fault, it very likely was not. When we do not understand, or find other people’s language unclear, we often blame ourselves for the difficulty. Should we? Or should we perhaps blame others for not expressing their ideas clearly? Or is it perhaps the way that language works, its basic principles that cause the problems and confusion? This book addresses these and related questions. The basic objective of this book is to make the reader aware of how language in use (which we call discourse) works and how important and even essential this awareness is to avoid or alleviate conflicts among family, in professional realms, and in politics. As the title indicates, of special interest to me are the kinds of discourse that are most likely to be seen as confusing. I assume that much of discourse is highly ambiguous and confusing. In the title of this book, ‘confusing’ stands for a wide range of labels that might in fact be used to describe what the book is about. This one label might be used as shorthand for ‘incomprehensible’, ‘meaningless’, ‘hardly comprehensible’, ‘difficult to understand’, ‘highly ambiguous’, ‘unintelligible’, ‘hardly intelligible’, ‘confusing’, ‘confused’, ‘convoluted’, ‘discombobulating’, and a host of other related ones. I do not intend to argue how ‘difficult to understand’ differs from ‘incomprehensible’, how ‘convoluted’ differs from ‘hardly intelligible’, and so on. I do not find these questions rewarding, at least for our purposes, as they basically concern definitions of these words, which can never be uncontroversial. As will be shown in the course of this book, vi

Preface

vii

words can be defined in many different ways, and seeking absolute consensus about what words mean or should mean is not possible. In view of this fact, my simple working definition of ‘confusing discourse’, in the present book, is what I assume it usually is to most people using everyday English; no technical or narrow definition is necessary for us to understand the message that I will be trying to pass on. Needless to say, notions of understanding and misunderstanding will be central to our discussion. This book has a very practical goal and goes far beyond theoretical considerations. It is supposed to help you understand and handle the verbal world effectively. Each chapter (except for Chapter 9) concludes with a section reviewing the main points to remember. In the epigraph (above), Russell belatedly advises Aristotle to look into Mrs. Aristotle’s mouth. Keeping this epigraph in mind, I have written this book to draw your attention to the following: for us to be better understood and to demand that others produce understandable discourse, we need to be aware of how we abstract reality and whether the words that we or others utter or write can or cannot be traced back to any tangible objects in the real world. Aristotle is said to have known that women have fewer teeth than men. However, he must have only heard this. Someone must have told him using some words. Aristotle does not seem to have checked the tangible reality these words referred to. If he had looked into Mrs. Aristotle’s mouth and checked, as Russell suggests, he would have known better what these words stood for, what they referred to. This story warns us of the importance of checking words with respect to what they refer to. We need to think of whether we or others know what we are talking about. Do you easily understand other people? Do you fully comprehend what the journalists are saying in the morning paper? Do you fully understand your doctor? Do you always know what your teacher at the university is saying? Do you think that some religious sermons are difficult to understand? Do you always understand your wife or husband? These are some of the questions to which I believe many of us will give negative answers. A question that substitutes all of these may be: do we always know what people are talking about? It is very easy to detect that a person is talking, but this is very different from the certainty that you detect what he or she is talking about. Trying to establish what another person is talking about, we are often in trouble and unable to answer the question. If that is indeed the case, producing confusing and meaningless discourse is hardly an insignificant matter. In this book you will learn about some of the most important reasons why much discourse

viii

Preface

is confusing, difficult to understand, or totally incomprehensible. Most importantly, you will also learn that total comprehension, and even the most conscientious attempts to completely avoid misunderstanding, is not possible. Misunderstanding may only be increased or decreased. Fortunately, it may be decreased to the extent that any final differences in understanding may not matter for practical purposes. A goal of the book will also be to show in what ways misunderstanding may be diminished. The present book is intended primarily for graduate students of language in linguistics, foreign languages, and in communication departments. However, it may also be found useful at a higher undergraduate level as a major textbook companion, focusing on confusing discourse understood as part of the phenomenon of discourse in general. For standard length (24–30 contact hours) courses, a combination of a classical textbook (such as Johnstone 2008; Stubbs 1983) and the present volume may turn out to be very rewarding. This book may also be recommended to anyone trying to find out how language works and how its use and abuse relates to palpable everyday life problems.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Stephen Warner and the anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments and suggestions for improvements on earlier versions of this book. I would also like to thank Stephen for his editorial work.

ix

Introduction

There are many books and textbooks on discourse analysis on the market. These include Stubbs (1983), Brown and Yule (1983), Schiffrin (1988), Cook (1989), Mills (1997), Howarth (2000), Bloomaert (2005), Widdowson (2007), Johnstone (2008), to mention only some of the recent or influential publications. These works deal with a variety of phenomena that come under the heading of discourse analysis (DA), whichever of the many definitions of DA one wishes to adopt. While the books mentioned above, and others similar to them, treat a wide variety of discourse-related topics, (for instance, culture and ideology, discourse structure, genre, coherence, intertextuality, discourse strategies), my main interest in the present book is in the question of understanding (or misunderstanding, or failing to understand) written texts and other people in the daily interaction. Any topic that I discuss is to be viewed as related directly or indirectly to that subject. I will point to a selection of aspects of language which I see as fundamental to the understanding of how misunderstanding and conflict arise. As background to questions of understanding and misunderstanding, an important issue that this book discusses is how verbal behavior and non-verbal physical reality relate to each other. I view explaining the relation between the two to be crucial for how we perceive misunderstanding and the frequent conflicts that arise. Another major question that I deal with in some depth in this book is that of how we abstract and how our awareness of abstracting relates to successful communication. An important point to remember is that it is not specific discourse (language, words, sentences, utterances) that is understandable in some abstract sense. In other words, it makes no sense to ask questions such as ‘Is the sentence “We need more money for good schools” understandable?’, or ‘Is the sentence “Semantic prosody is the semantic aura of meaning” confusing?’. Sentences, or utterances, as sentences in use are often called, may only be understandable to people. We should then rather ask the question ‘Do you, or does he, understand the sentence “Semantic prosody is the semantic aura of meaning”?’. Understanding should be viewed as a faculty of a human being, and not as an inherent feature of a written or spoken text. x

Introduction xi

Another important point to remember is that understanding a text (written or spoken) should be viewed as a continuum. That is, while there are obviously texts that many people will not understand at all and others a person will feel he or she understands fully, there are many others that we understand to a degree. Some texts will be more difficult to understand than others; we may sort of understand some texts, while we may almost fully understand others. Compare the following three short texts:

Text 1 – Jerry left home at 3 o’clock. He walked along Grand Street up to the gas station. He ran into his friend Bob there and talked to him for about half an hour. They are really good friends, and whenever they see each other, they spend quite a while chatting. Text 2 – The principles of science and the techniques of personal adjustment which we have considered earlier are to be more fully understood by examining the ways in which they are commonly abused, and the consequences of their neglect. Text 3 – A safe position may consist in adopting a view of ideologies as materially mediated ideational phenomena. Ideas themselves do not define ideologies; they need to be inserted in material practices of modulation and reproduction.

Don’t you feel that you easily understand Text 1, less so Text 2, and hardly at all Text 3? If that is indeed the case, and, if, to you, Texts 1, 2, and 3 are easy to understand, less so, and hardly at all, respectively, your individual comprehension of these texts overlaps mine (I, the author of this book, view these texts this way). But we might as well differ, and your, an individual reader’s, reactions to these texts may be slightly or significantly different from mine. In other words, again, these texts are not easy or difficult to understand in some sort of absolute sense. They are more difficult or easier to understand to you or to me. Why am I concerned with confusing discourse? Is its existence a problem to people? It certainly seems to be the case. If the interest of the general lay language user can be taken as a reliable measure of the seriousness of the problem, one cogent piece of evidence comes from the immense appeal of some of Deborah Tannen’s popular publications.

xii Introduction

Many of her books (especially Tannen 1986, 1990) treat miscommunication and misunderstanding; they have been translated into several languages and were bestsellers for many years. Also, in two of my own recent studies (Janicki 2002, 2010) I found that understanding other people and miscommunication due to confusing discourse can often be seen as a practical problem. In one of these studies (Janicki 2002), 195 university student respondents from the USA, the UK, Norway, Poland, and Germany took part. In the core section of the study, they were asked which professional groups they found to be using difficult language. Several such groups were mentioned as standing out: authors of legal documents, politicians, computer specialists, lawyers, academics, authors of university textbooks, medical doctors, and journalists. While these groups were mentioned by a significant number of the respondents, others (for instance, priests and economists) were only occasionally mentioned. In another section of this study, I found that about 50 per cent of the student respondents highly respect the university teachers that they do not understand. I found this result most baffling. Why should we respect someone that we do not understand? Baffling as this result may seem, the explanation appears to be fairly simple; namely, we often feel that the people we do not understand are smarter than we are, and the reason we do not understand the teacher is not, we may feel, the teacher’s ignorance or inability to speak intelligibly, or, it is not, we may feel, because language works the way it does. What we often seem to feel is that we, the listeners, are to blame. When listening to others that we do not understand, we tend to blame ourselves and not the others and the way they handle discourse. In still another section of this study, I found that the very same university teachers whose students openly talked about the teachers’ incomprehensible and confusing discourse were often irritated, got offended, felt attacked, were surprised, put the blame on the students, made remarks such as ‘this will be understood in the future’, and so on. All in all, the teacher’s reactions were negative. Interestingly, when asked the question ‘Do you think that research in the area of “incomprehensible language” might be useful to improve education?’ an average of 67 per cent of the student respondents answered the question positively. This result and others indicate to me that many people find incomprehensible and confusing language to be a serious social issue and addressing it a matter of social significance. The results of the study above are consistent with those of another study that I have conducted (Janicki 2010). In it, over one thousand

Introduction xiii

lay language users were questioned regarding what they would consider to be language problems that they or other people they knew faced in their daily lives. In that study a problem was understood to arise when something was perceived as having gone wrong. When your car breaks down, you have a problem. When the roof on your house starts leaking, you have a problem. You also have a problem when you discover that you have no money to pay some unexpected expenses. When do we face language problems? What do people perceive to be language problems? When do they think something goes wrong with respect to language? In this second study, a majority of respondents said that they find much discourse confusing and that non-understanding and misunderstanding other people was for them, and for many people they know, their most serious problem concerning language. As in the first study, many of these respondents pointed to medical doctors, lawyers, and computer specialists as the main culprits. These professional groups were mostly blamed for producing the kind of discourse which is hard to understand. Most interestingly, however, very many respondents in the second study (N357 = 33.1 per cent) indicated that understanding other people is a general, everyday problem, not only an incidental phenomenon in medical or legal encounters. To put it in very simple terms, my respondents told me that they find many other people difficult to understand: they misunderstand them, they are themselves misunderstood, or they find other’s discourse completely meaningless or confusing. As the respondents in this second study were native speakers of several languages (Spanish, English, Dutch, Polish, Lithuanian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Italian, German, and Japanese), and as the study was carried out in eleven countries, we can safely make the assumption that confusing discourse (and what we might see as the related phenomena of non-understanding and misunderstanding) may be seen as a legitimate problem for very many users of language throughout the world. It seems to be the biggest problem concerning discourse. I take the results of my two studies and others to be a good reason for writing a book on discourse which largely focuses on questions of confusing language and on understanding and misunderstanding. Text comprehension and misunderstanding have been dealt with by many authors, for instance, Bransford and Johnson (1973), Coupland et al. (1991), Taylor, T. (1992), Brown et al. (1994), Tzanne (2000), Anolli et al. (2002), and House et al. (2003). Although not a central issue, and not necessarily addressed in a direct way, these topics were also tackled by, for instance, Korzybski (1933), Chase, S. (1938), Lee (1994), Johnson, W. (1946), Rapoport (1950), Weinberg (1959), and Hayakawa

xiv Introduction

(1992), a group of scholars usually referred to as general semanticists. In my view, it is especially the general semanticists that offer a powerful body of knowledge which allows us to understand many aspects of how language works, how it is acquired, how it can be manipulated, and, importantly for my present purposes, why discourse may be confusing and why it may be misunderstood or not understood at all. Not realizing how language works in light of these issues may cause serious practical problems; you may get into trouble and you may be easily manipulated by others. As Hayakawa (1950) puts it, ‘General semantics is the study of how not to be a damn fool’ (10). I will frequently refer to the work of some general semanticists. This book is meant to be both theoretical and practical. However, you will not be tormented with long theoretical sections. On the contrary, theoretical points relating to confusing and meaningless discourse will be briefly discussed individually and each theoretical point immediately illustrated with examples from real life situations. Examples will be taken from newspapers, magazines, television programs, book blurbs, and political events, to name a few.

1 What are You Talking About? – Language and Abstraction

Some authors like to begin their books on discourse or language by asking questions such as ‘what is discourse?’ and ‘what is language?’ I will not do so for reasons that should become clear later (see Chapter 6). I will begin by saying that language may be seen as different kinds of things. It may be seen as something that we know, or write; it may be seen as behavior, that is, something that we perform or produce; it may be seen as something that you can hear, that you can preserve with writing materials, and so on. In other words, language may be seen as different kinds of objects. As a result, it can also be studied in many different ways, partly depending on what you view it to be. Among all kinds of views on, approaches to, and disagreements about language, one position appears to be indisputable, namely, the position that language may be treated as a symbolic system. Studying language as a symbolic system leads us to the question of the various functions or uses of language. We use language for several reasons or, we might say, language serves several functions: we use it to pass information on to other people; we use it to warn other people of approaching danger; we use it to express our feelings; we use it to challenge other people, we also use it to show to the interlocutor where, socially, we come from, and so on. Some of these functions we, the language users, are fairly well aware of; others less so. For example, we usually seem to realize that language is used to pass on information, but we often seem to be unaware that by using language we give ourselves away socially; that is, that we inadvertently inform our interlocutor about our social and/or geographical origin. Importantly, in these uses and many others, we engage language as a symbolic system. What this means is that we use words to refer to other things. Symbols (words, in our case) stand for other things. The ‘other things’ may include physical objects to which we can easily point, such 1

2

Confusing Discourse

as cups, buildings, elephants, and torpedoes. So, for instance, we use the word ‘elephant’ to refer to the animal depicted in Picture 1 below:

Picture 1

The word ‘elephant’ (which we treat as a symbol) is not the elephant in the picture (which we treat as another symbol) and neither is it the elephant that you can see and possibly smell and touch in the zoo. The word ‘elephant’ refers to something else – real-life elephants (and, metaphorically, possibly to other objects sharing some characteristics with these animals). The ‘other things’ may also include inner feelings such as anger, happiness, and love. These are much more difficult to depict in a picture other than by showing their external manifestations such as those in a human face demonstrating anger, which you can see in Picture 2:

Picture 2

What are You Talking About? 3

Again, the word ‘anger’ is not the feeling depicted in the picture. The word refers to some internal feeling that we call ‘anger’. We give the feeling a name, a label, the label (word) ‘anger’. The ‘other things’ may include abstract relations, such as comparison, deduction, and equation. The ‘other things’ may also be language (or words, if you like); you may talk about what you have said or written, or you may talk or write about a single word, say, the English article the. What is most important to remember, however, is that we should distinguish as clearly as possible between the world of words and the world of other things, much of which includes non-verbal reality like the elephant and the anger reflected on the face of the man. I say ‘much of which’ because, remember, as one of the above examples shows, we can also talk or write about ‘verbal reality’. We do this when we talk or write about how we talk or write. When words as symbols are discussed, linguists often use the diagram below (Figure 1.1) to visualize more effectively the relationship between symbols and referents. This figure has been adapted from Ogden and Richards (1923). The diagram includes a third element, ‘concept’. You may place the concept in the mind (or brain, if you like) and think about it as something mental, something you can imagine, envision, or see as a mental picture or description. If I say, for example, ‘I have just bought a pair of socks’, what comes to your mind immediately is the

Figure 1.1

4

Confusing Discourse

concept (a mental picture of) something like what you find in Picture 3 below:

Picture 3

You do not need to go to a shop to see a real pair of socks to know what I refer to. Our minds, or brains, appear to be crucial in mediating between the symbol and the referent, between words and what they refer to. We will return to the world of concepts (the upper corner of the triangle in Figure 1.1) in later sections of this book. Still, while the fact that we can talk and write about verbal reality (language) should be kept in mind, what is most important at this point to remember is the difference between language as a symbolic system (words, the verbal reality – the left corner of the diagram in Figure 1.1) and the non-verbal reality, mainly the world of physical objects (pens, computers, cars, turtles, tanks, and so on; that is, things you can, for example, see, touch, hear, and smell,– the right corner of the triangle in Figure 1.1) and the world of inner feelings such as pity, sadness, anger, and love. Let us concentrate now on showing how the world of physical objects relates to words. In doing so, we need to consider the process of abstraction.

The process of abstraction In Figure 1.2 below, the top most part in the drawing, the parabola, is intended to depict the physical reality at the sub-microscopic level. It is often referred to as the event (process) level. In other words, it is the physical reality which human beings cannot really perceive. At this level, reality is viewed as billions of electrons, protons, and neutrons in


Figure 1.2

STRUCTURAL DIFFERENTIAL (adapted from Korzybski 1933, with permission of the Institute of General Semantics). constant motion and change. We abstract from many physical details and tend to experience reality as relatively stable when we view the objects around us (the round figure in the drawing – the object level), such as lamps, computers, cars, and so on, which, in fact, are whirlpools of electrons, protons, and neutrons at the event-process level. You need to keep in mind that what appear to you to be fairly stable objects in a stable state (such as chairs, clocks, buildings, and cars) are in physical terms processes, little tiny parts of matter which are in constant motion and which are continually changing. Nothing stands still in this world. Everything is in constant motion and undergoing change. We do not

6

Confusing Discourse

normally think of this on a daily basis, but when we do, it becomes obvious even in cases such as buildings and cars. I am sure you have seen dilapidated buildings and rusty cars in a scrap yard (or in front of some houses!). These buildings and cars look the way they do because they have been undergoing a long-lasting process of change. To put it still differently, when we see buildings and cars, we do so having abstracted from the billions and trillions of aspects of the process. We do not perceive the process with our naked eye. We cannot normally observe a building dilapidating (unless we happen to be an unlucky victim of a roof tile falling on our head!); what we normally observe is a building which looks already dilapidated to us. We do not ordinarily see the process of dilapidation; we see the result of it. We abstract from the process of dilapidation and perceive the building to be a fairly stable object. In any case, what we normally observe in our daily endeavors is a result of abstracting at the perceptual level. Note that at this stage of our analysis of abstraction we are not talking about language at all. When we reach the next level, the descriptive level (the first oblong in Figure 1.2), we begin to deal with language. At this level we abstract again, but this time by using words (language) to refer to non-linguistic objects. For instance, we use the word (the symbol) ‘tiger’ to refer to the animal in Picture 4 below:

Picture 4


Note that the above example is not absolutely correct. Namely, in the example, the word (the symbol) ‘tiger’ in fact refers to another symbol (the drawing of a tiger). It is not possible to illustrate in a book how the symbol-word ‘tiger’ refers to the animal living out there in the zoo or in Asia. I have to rely on your imagination! At this level of abstraction, we name (give labels to) non-linguistic reality (for instance, objects such as animals). This level should be seen as the naming, or descriptive, verbal level. At this descriptive level, we talk (or write) about non-verbal reality. Additional examples of using language at this level of abstraction could be these: ‘Jerry is walking into the house’; ‘Euphegenia Doubtfire is cooking dinner’; ‘I can see a gas station in front of me’; ‘There are thirty pictures in this book’. Note that at this level, you refer to things and activities that you yourself have experienced. The next level (the second oblong in Figure 1.2) depicts a still higher level of abstraction. At this level inferences are made. At this level we use language to talk about things that we ourselves have not experienced but which we infer, for instance, ‘If Jack is not here, he may be in Rome’; ‘If he is wet, it must be raining’, and so on. The next level (the third oblong image in Figure 1.2) illustrates a still higher level of abstraction which we can reach using language. This level is well exemplified by generalizations. For instance, ‘Tigers are dangerous animals’; and ‘Most people are jealous’. The broken-off oblong image one level below indicates that we can go still higher and higher along the levels of abstraction and produce verbal constructions in the form of further inferences, conclusions, premises, hypotheses, generalizations, and allegations, for example, and indefinitely continue making generalizations about assumptions, generalizations about generalizations, and so on. An example of the last one, generalizations about generalizations, may be ‘Young boys say that girls are clever’. What is important to realize is not at which exact level of abstraction we are producing a particular utterance (other than the first three, it will, in fact, in most cases be very difficult to establish at which level of abstraction we are producing a particular utterance), but to realize that we abstract all the time, and that language plays a significant role in raising the level of abstraction as we handle our daily affairs. The dangling strings in the drawing (Figure 1.2) depict the fact that we always disregard some characteristics of the things at the nonverbal level. When we see a car, we do not see (that is, we disregard) very many electrons, protons, neutrons, and so on, that make the car at the submicroscopic level and that are in constant motion and are constantly

8

Confusing Discourse

changing. A car at the sub-microscopic level looks more or less like what you can see in Picture 5:

Picture 5

A car at the macroscopic level (that is, as we actually see it) looks more or less like what you see in Picture 6 below:

Picture 6

The line linking the broken parabola on top of Figure 1.2 with the broken oblong image at the bottom is to remind us that we gain our knowledge about the non-verbal event level largely through making inferences and claims at the higher linguistic levels and that the natural direction in abstracting is from the non-verbal physical reality to the verbal one. This line may also serve to remind us that the world of words (language) should be viewed as ultimately connected or connectable to the non-verbal world and that anyone not seeing


the connection between these two worlds may be producing language which will appear to many as very confusing or even totally meaningless. The strings from the ‘object’ circle that hang down unconnected to the descriptive level oblong convey the point that a word label or description cannot cover all of the non-verbal experience it is used to label or describe. Understanding how abstraction works may be seen as crucial for our understanding of how discourse works, for our successful handling of the world, and for our sanity, as Korzybski (1933) would have it. Ignorance about how abstraction works, confusing levels of abstraction (that is, identifying one level with another), and confusing or disregarding the essential link between the verbal world (language, words) and the non-verbal reality may cause misunderstanding, confusion, enormous social tension, conflict, or, at best, be a waste of time. Another way to understand the process of abstraction and the levels of abstraction is to consider words related to each other by what they refer to and which can be placed at different levels of abstraction. We can place such sets of words on what is often called the ladder of abstraction (Hayakawa 1992). Figure 1.3 below (adapted from Hayakawa 1992)

Figure 1.3

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Confusing Discourse

illustrates how the five words ‘wealth’, ‘farm’, ‘livestock’, ‘cows’, and ‘Darcy’ can be placed along the ladder of abstraction. All these words refer to Darcy, the cow, the animal out there in the real world, except that the word ‘Darcy’ refers only to this one cow, the word ‘cows’ refers to Darcy and other cows – animals of a similar kind, ‘livestock’ refers to cows and other animals (such as pigs) out there in the real world, the word ‘farm’ refers to cows, other animals, and still other things such as houses, barns, and land, and the word ‘wealth’ refers to Darcy, other cows, other animals, houses, barns, and land as well as money, shares, jewelry, and so on. The higher your word is placed on the ladder of abstraction the more it refers to and the less you know what is actually being talked about. When you are at a high level of the ladder of abstraction, you disregard many details. When you say ‘he has a lot of wealth’, it is not important what kind of wealth he has; you disregard the details of whether it is cows, or cars, or jewels, or money. Being on a high level of the ladder of abstraction is not unlike stepping on a top step of a real ladder. When you are up there, you certainly see less (attend to less detail) of the ground, compared to when you step on one of the bottom steps and look down. In the latter case, you simply see more and may want to attend to more detail on the ground. Let us take another example, the list of words, or sequences of words, ‘my Toyota’, ‘Toyota sedan’, ‘car’, ‘vehicle’, ‘means of transportation’, ‘piece of machinery’, and ‘human invention’. When I say ‘my Toyota’, people who have seen my Toyota will know best what I am talking about. The referent (the black Toyota parked in my garage) is fairly clear. Part of that clear picture of my car may include at least some people’s recollection that I have a small dent in the rear left fender. When I say to someone who has not seen my car that I have ‘a Toyota sedan’, this person has to process my sentence at a higher level of abstraction. This person does not know what color my Toyota is, whether it has any dents or not, what color the upholstery is, and so on. In other words, in the latter case, my interlocutor abstracts by disregarding a lot more details than was the case at the ‘my Toyota’ level. When we move still higher, to the ‘car’ level, and I say ‘I have a car’, your understanding of the word ‘car’ requires that you disregard still more details of the object sitting in my garage. You do not know what the make of my car is, you do not know whether it is a sedan, a station wagon, a coupe, or perhaps a cabriolet, you do not know what the color of my car is, and so on. In other words, while disregarding more and more details of the thing sitting in my garage, you actually widen the number and kinds of referents that the words in question stand for. When you hear that I have ‘a means of

What are You Talking About?

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transportation’, the widening and the disregarding of details is growing further. I might have a car, a bicycle, a motorcycle, a moped, not to mention an ox or a camel, which would also fit the phrase. Needless to say, the degree of disregarding details and that of widening the range of referents is still significantly higher when labels such as ‘piece of machinery’ and ‘human invention’ are used. In addition to means of transportation such as cars, the former may include, for instance, caterpillars and tanks, while the latter may include, for instance, guns, bulbs, and computers. Importantly, however, my black Toyota with a dent in the rear left fender, the one sitting in my garage, is also included in this category. We may use the ladder of abstraction also to illustrate how whole sentences (rather than individual words) may be seen as more or less abstract. Consider: ‘Entities can be found in one place at one point of time and at another place at another point of time.’ This sentence can be placed very high on the ladder of abstraction. It can mean (its words may refer to) much of the real world (people, animals, books, cars, cities, villages, roads, streets, buildings, and so on). For instance, ‘entity’ may mean people, animals, lamps, books, pencils, buckets, and thousands of others things. The above sentence ‘stands’ extremely high on the ladder of abstraction like the man does on the ladder in Picture 7 below.

Picture 7

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Confusing Discourse

Now consider: ‘People can be moved by public means of transportation from one district of the city to another’. This sentence drags us down on the ladder of abstraction. ‘Entities’ are no longer almost anything. They are ‘people’, and the possibility of finding something at one time in one place and at another time at another place is now reduced to ‘moving it’. By introducing ‘public means of transportation’ we find it easier to understand why ‘entities can be found at different places at different points of time’; they can use public means of transportation. The sentence ‘People can be moved by public means of transportation from one district of the city to another’ appears to be much easier to understand than the sentence ‘Entities can be found in one place at one point of time and at another place at another point of time’ because the former appeals to our knowledge of fairly tangible things like public means of transportation and the activity of moving. Both are fairly tangible in the sense that they are fairly easy to imagine. This sentence drags us down on the ladder of abstraction; we are probably somewhere in the middle of the ladder, like the man in Picture 8 below.

Picture 8

Finally consider: ‘Students can be taken by bus from Magdalen College to the Bodlean Library’. In this sentence ‘entities’ are no longer ‘people’; they are ‘students’; ‘can be found in one place at one point of time and at another place at another point of time’ is no longer ‘can be moved by public means of transportation from one district of the city to another’;


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it is ‘can be taken by bus from Magdalen College to the Bodlean Library’. The referents become more and more concrete and easily imaginable as we move down the ladder of abstraction, just as the man on the real ladder in Picture 9 below. We need to keep in mind, however, that we are still on the ladder (like the man in the picture); we still abstract. Any time we use language, we do so.

Picture 9

The relation between the level of abstraction and the range of referents appears to be clear: the higher the level of abstraction the wider the range of referents; the lower the level of abstraction the narrower the range of referents. The higher the level of abstraction, the less one knows what is actually being talked about. We find a similar view of abstraction in cognitive linguistics work on categorization (e.g., Rosch 1978). Within this view, ‘the greater the inclusiveness of a category within a taxonomy, the higher the level of abstraction . . . . Thus the term level of abstraction within a taxonomy refers to a particular level of inclusiveness.’ (Rosch 1978: 30). For instance, the category named by the words ‘means of transportation’, which can be seen as representing a fairly high level of abstraction, includes much more (cars, streetcars, trains, planes, donkeys, camels, and so on – with their myriad of characteristics) compared to the category named by the word ‘car’, which will be seen as significantly less abstract. Compared to ‘car’ in turn, the category named by the word

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‘sedan’ includes still less. It will be seen then as a category at a lower level of abstraction. In a taxonomy, or classification, of related objects or ideas (for instance, sedan, car, vehicle, means of transportation), which can be placed at different levels of abstraction, one of the levels is recognized as basic. It is the level at which cue validity and category resemblance are maximized (Rosch 1978). It will be ‘car’ in our set of examples. In simple terms, it is the middle level which easily comes to mind, which invokes a mental picture (see also Chapter 8), and which we learn first (Lakoff and Johnson 1999).

Different levels of abstraction Can we avoid abstraction altogether? The answer to this question is a clear no. It has not been my purpose in what I have said above to show that we can do away with abstraction. This is impossible. The moment we use words, we abstract. Some words are more abstract than others, as the ladder of abstraction shows, but, given what I said about the Structural Differential, to suggest that abstraction could be avoided altogether would be an outrageous position to take. All I want to do is to make you aware of how abstraction works and how confusing it may be to mix the various levels at which we abstract, particularly when we mix the verbal and the non-verbal levels. While it is no doubt impossible to do away with abstraction, producing discourse at different levels of abstraction is by all means not only theoretically possible but actually done. In both our daily and academic activities, we use words and sentences or utterances at different levels of abstraction. The sentence ‘I am sitting at a computer now’ may be seen as a sentence at a fairly low level of abstraction. This is why I can be confident that most if not all readers know what I am talking about. You can easily find tangible referents for the words ‘sitting’ and ‘computers’. Although you do not know exactly what my physical posture is to which I refer by using the word ‘sitting’, you will know this more or less. You will know that I am not kneeling, lying on the floor or walking on my writing desk. As for the computer, you certainly do not know exactly what sort of computer I am sitting at (for instance, a stationary computer or a laptop, its make and shape), but you will certainly assume, and rightly so, that I am not sitting in front of a TV, a dog, or a water fountain. You will know all this because the referents for the words ‘sitting’ and ‘computer’ are fairly clear for most speakers of English. Importantly, the two words do not


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refer to all that much. On the contrary, they refer to (stand for) very little. They refer to a commonly practiced and fairly simple human activity (‘sitting’) and a commonly known physical piece of machinery (‘computer’). Now consider the sentence ‘The sublime is often the subject of philosophical ratiocinations’. Do you know what this sentence means in terms of the referents that the words in it stand for? Think only of the words ‘sublime’, ‘philosophical’, and ‘ratiocinations’. What do these words refer to in terms of tangible objects and activities? ‘Philosophical’ is probably the easiest of the three to get a grasp of. When we hear the word ‘philosophical’, we usually think of real people such as Kant, Locke, and Descartes; we think of the bookshops that we have been to and the shelves marked ‘philosophy’; we probably also think of ‘philosophy’ as standing for the books and chapters that we may have been asked to read in school. These are all relatively tangible referents for ‘philosophy’. And this is what the word ‘philosophical’ will invoke in some of the readers’ minds; that is, this is what it may mean to some of you. ‘Philosophical’ will also for many of you refer to ‘the sort of thing that we don’t understand’, which does not sound like a very tangible referent at all. ‘The sort of thing that we don’t understand’ sounds very abstract itself, and finding referents for the words in it will not be any easier than finding referents for ‘philosophical’. Now think of ‘sublime’ and ‘ratiocinations’. Can they be seen as meaningful at all? A possible answer is that these words are truly meaningful because they certainly refer to something, but the something they refer to is so big, that is, these words refer to so much, that they in fact may become meaningless. As Benedetto Croce rightly claimed ‘Sublime is everything that is or will be so called by those who have employed or shall employ the name’ (Chase, S. 1938: 217). In other words, when someone uses the word ‘sublime’, the word may refer to so much that you will have no idea what the person is talking about. Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-glass was certainly right: ‘“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”’ Let us recall that the simple relation between understanding what someone might be talking about and the level of abstraction appears to be that the higher the level the less likely we will be to know what our interlocutor is talking about in terms of tangible things and activities. The lower the level of abstraction at which a word is the more likely you will know what your interlocutor is talking about, again, in terms of tangible things and activities.

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Confusing Discourse

Some types of genre are typically more abstract than others. Consider the following text, a story intended for children:

Text 4 – A Duck Tale The bright morning rays shone through the bedroom curtains onto Farmer Huang’s pillow; making the room hot and stuffy. Farmer Huang is not an early riser but the heat woke him up. He hurriedly got up and started to head for his poultry farm. He had invested all his money in ducks. Farmer Huang got into his lorry that was loaded with ducks in cages and his two workers, Bill and Jim. Their first stop was City Primary School. Upon reaching the school gate, the lorry skidded and punctured a tire. Farmer Huang left his workers to change the tire while he went into the school canteen to hand over some ducks. Meanwhile, a boy had crept up to the lorry and opened some of the cages. Jim happened to look up; the boy jumped down from the lorry and ran into the school compound. The ducks were escaping! Jim and Bill hurriedly tried to get the ducks back into the cages but their efforts were in vain. There was a great commotion . . . ducks quacking, workers shouting. Where was the naughty boy? He was at the school gate letting some ducks into the school. On hearing the noise, many children came out of their classrooms and were watching the funny sight . . . two men chasing ducks which were quacking, waddling and flapping their wings which in turn sent down feathers floating in the air! It was hilarious. Farmer Huang came back just in time to catch hold of the boy. He then went after the ducks. He made a funny quacking sound and the ducks began to come to him. He happily put them back into their cages, changed the punctured tire and drove off . . . leaving the boy in the hands of the school principal. (http://www.vtaide.com/png/ducks-E.htm)

The choice I made is not random. This story includes a large variety of tangible objects: such as ducks, tires, poultry, lorry, school, pillow, room, and a large variety of tangible activities: morning rays shining, getting up, getting into the lorry, lorry skidding, ducks quacking, and


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so on. All these objects and activities appear to be tangible in the sense that they can be touched, heard, or seen, and, in the worst case, easily imagined. Children usually operate at a very low level of abstraction. Try to talk to them about the sublime and look at their faces! Children are happy talking about their toy cars, dolls, moms, daddies, kings, queens, potties, ducks, and nappies. These are all words used at a very low level of abstraction. It is easy to point to (find referents for) the dolls, toy cars, and the potty in your daughter’s room. We often use such words with children, and they usually understand them. Now consider a different text:

Text 5 – Analyticity In their study of conceptual knowledge philosophers have found it necessary to distinguish between truths of reason and truths of fact. According to Leibnitz, truths of reason describe invariant features of all possible worlds while truths of fact describe actual features of some but not all possible words. Truths of reason are necessarily true while truths of fact are only contingently true, i.e., true contingent on the world about which they are asserted having the features they ascribe to it. (Katz 1966: 188)

This text puts us into a world of highly abstracted words. Do we know exactly what ‘analyticity’ refers to? Do we know what ‘truth’ refers to? Do we really understand the above explanation of the meaning of ‘truth of reasons’ in the sense that we really know what is being talked about? Do we really know what the referents (distant as they may be) of the ‘truth of fact’ are? Answers to all these questions will most likely be negative. Take yet another example:

Text 6 – Semiotics is therefore a mode of thought where science sees itself as (is conscious of itself as) a theory. At every instant of its production, semiotics thinks of its objects, its instruments and the relation between them, and in so doing thinks (of) itself: as a result of this reflection, it becomes the theory of the very science it constitutes. This means that semiotics is at once a re-evaluation of its object and/or of its models, a critique both of these models

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(and therefore of the sciences from which they are borrowed) and of itself (as a system of stable truths) . . . As it is its own theory, semiotics is the kind of thought which, without raising itself to the level of a system, is still capable of modelling (thinking) itself. (Kristeva 1986: 77)

Do you really know what ‘semiotics thinks’ refers to? Do you understand the words ‘science is conscious of itself as’ in terms of what these words refer to? What do the words in ‘semiotics is . . . a re-evaluation of its object and/or of its models’ refer to? Needless to say, some of the words that stand out in Texts 5 and 6 may be better known (in terms of what they refer to) to some people (for instance, specialists in the field) than others. Nevertheless, the fact that these words could be placed on a very high level of the ladder of abstraction can hardly be denied. As compared to Text 4 above, Texts 5 and 6 may be seen as dramatically different in the level of abstraction that many of the words in them represent. Let us now consider a text which may be seen as a middle path case.

Text 7 – The imperial pomp was shattered by a decent speech by David Cameron, the Conservative leader, and by a salvo from George Osborne, the impish shadow chancellor. Mr. Osborne pledged that a future Tory government would dramatically raise the threshold above which inheritance tax is levied. Suddenly the polls, especially in marginal constituencies, looked less rosy for Mr. Brown. The prime minister announced that there would be no early vote after all. But he admitted that he had thought about one, contradicting his previous insistencies that he was focused whole on governing. Worst of all, he insulted voter’s intelligence by denying the blindingly obvious – that the adverse polls had swayed his decision. (The Economist 2007: 16)

You will probably feel immediately that Text 7 is much easier to understand than Texts 5 and 6, and more difficult to understand than Text 4. But, how easy is Text 7 to understand in terms of tangible things and activities? What do you take to be the referent or referents of the words


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‘imperial pomp’? What do you take to be the referent of the word ‘salvo’? What do you take to be the referent or the referents of the words ‘dramatically raise the threshold’? ‘Imperial pomp’ in Text 7, for example, is most probably easier to understand (easier to imagine what kinds of objects and activities these words might refer to) than ‘science being conscious of itself’ of Text 6, but in both cases the reader has to rely on guessing and one’s own imagination. It follows that what you, the reader of this book, will imagine as the objects and activities of ‘imperial pomp’ and ‘science being conscious of itself’ will be most likely different from what I, the author of this book, imagine, and what many readers of The Economist and Kristeva’s book did. While our images of ‘imperial pomp’ and ‘science being conscious of itself’, and thus our understandings of these expressions may be very different, this is unlikely to be the case when we consider, for instance, ‘bedroom curtains’ and ‘a punctured tire’ of Text 4. While we may indeed have different images, and thus understandings, of ‘bedroom curtains’ and ‘a punctured tire’, these words refer to objects that are very tangible and commonly known. You can see them, touch them, and perhaps smell them. One important conclusion follows from looking closer at the examples of discourse above, namely that the more abstract the words that we use in discourse, the less we know what is actually being talked about in terms of palpable referents. Confusion increases.

Mixing levels of abstraction The fact that abstracting at higher and higher levels leads to disregarding more and more aspects or details of the original object of abstraction should be seen as crucial. While this should be well understood already when we think of abstracting at the perceptual level (for instance, seeing a car as a stable object rather than a process involving continuous change), we should fully realize that the abstracting process is most dramatic at level three (see Figure 1.2) – the descriptive level, that is, when we start using words. Think of the dramatic difference between the real tiger and the word ‘tiger’, which we use to refer to the real thing! The word can be seen as a few letters on paper or a few sounds produced in your mouth; the real thing – a tiger – is, you will agree, full of flesh, hide, has claws and teeth, and will be seen by most people as a pretty dangerous beast. Does the word ‘tiger’ include flesh and claws? Do you think it is dangerous? Nevertheless, we use the word ‘tiger’ to refer to the beast out there. It is baffling to observe that in spite of the dramatic difference between words (stick to ‘tiger’ in our case) and what they refer

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to (or, stand for), many people take words for the things that they stand for; people mix levels of abstraction (see for instance, Johnson, W 1946; Weinberg 1959; Hayakawa 1992; Kodish and Kodish 2001). They talk about the word ‘tiger’ as if the word were the animal itself. This often leads to serious problems, confusion, trouble, conflicts, and – let us not hesitate to use a big word – war. The claim that we mix words with what they stand for gets support from psychological studies. In two recent experiments, subjects were asked to read instructions encouraging them to do physical exercises and cook a dish (Wray 2009). Some subjects were asked to read the instructions in the plain Ariel typeface while others read in the more difficult to read Brush typeface. The subjects’ brains seem to have taken the texts as a proxy for the activities; in the first experiment, subjects who read the instructions in the Brush typeface did not feel like going to the gym. Likewise, in the second experiment, the subjects who read the instructions in the harder to read typeface did not take up cooking. Those who read the instructions in the easy to read Ariel font were eager to both head for the gym and for the kitchen, respectively. The recent debate about the status of Pluto (is it a planet or not?) gives us a good illustration of how people in this case confused the word ‘pluto’ with the thing out there in space (see Chapter 7 for a somewhat detailed discussion of this debate). Confusing the levels of abstraction, that is, taking words for the things that they stand for contributes, as in the Pluto case, to producing meaningless and confusing discourse, and to misunderstanding.

The natural order of abstraction One of the main points concerning abstraction to remember appears to be that we, as people who produce and try do understand discourse, should follow the natural order of abstraction (see for instance, Korzybski 1933; Kodish and Kodish 2001). This means that we should be fully aware of how abstraction works and draw practical conclusions from this awareness when we are engaged in discourse. As the Structural Differential drawing (see Figure 1.2) shows, the abstracting process starts at the non-verbal object level and only later, at a higher level, does it involve the first verbal – the descriptive level. This should make us keep in mind that whatever is said as a simple description may be seen as a simplification (simplification is what any abstraction involves) of nonverbal facts as the speaker sees them, and whatever is said which is not a mere description should be seen as a simplification of lower level verbal


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statements. We go from non-verbal facts to the verbal world of discourse, not the other way round. We can live a silent life without words, and this life can be very meaningful, as the deaf and dumb community convincingly testify. Those who are deaf and dumb are normal, valuable, and composed people. They can easily live without the verbal world. On the other hand, people who end up living largely in the verbal world having hardly any connection with the tangible silent world of non-verbal facts are often patients of mental health hospitals (see also the Conclusion of this book). The latter group falls victim to a very dangerous view, namely, the view that disregards the natural order of abstraction. From this perspective, words are seen as having a life of their own, or, even more dangerously, they are seen as having to lead us to an imaginable, nonexistent world of non-verbal facts. People who disregard the natural order of abstraction tend to take words very seriously, not as mere labels marking abstractions of non-verbal facts. Disregarding the natural order of abstraction leads to confusion and difficulties in communicating with other people. What all this, in the last analysis, boils down to appears to be that for discourse to be meaningful, it should be traceable to non-verbal facts. Although we can be hurt by what people say, we should keep in mind that words should not matter all that much. We need to encourage the stance that words be seen in the context of the non-verbal facts that they refer to. This stance is important, and it reflects the natural order of abstraction.

Should we all talk like children? As I said earlier, it is not possible to avoid abstraction. Nor does it appear reasonable to demand or expect that we should all talk like children. If we were only talking about cars (not necessarily about toy cars!), houses, cooking, bicycles, dolls, and so on (like quite a few people in fact do), our understanding of other people would be so much easier (but never 100 per cent, see Chapter 2 for a discussion of this point); but we would then be quite unlikely to use our intellect to think of new ideas and come up with new inventions. Lowering the level of abstraction in discourse to the point at which we could talk only about things that we can easily point to does not seem to be a very good idea. It would probably not be a realistic idea, anyway. On the other hand, it does not appear appealing to be exposed to people who produce texts like Texts 5 and 6 above. These people, best exemplified by some philosophers, art critics, linguists, and sociologists (whether professional or amateur) use words mainly at a very high level of abstraction, the result being that they are

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frequently not understood; we know that they are talking, but we often do not know what they are talking about. What is important to realize is this: when I say that we find many highly abstract words confusing or meaningless, I do not mean words that you, I, or anyone else may simply not know, may not have come across, or may not have ever heard or seen. For instance, it is likely that many readers have never heard the highly abstract set of words ‘autosegmental phonology’. Obviously, in a case like that, you will not understand the words; you will not know what these words refer to. The kinds of highly abstract words that I am discussing are often words that we seem to know, that we have heard several if not hundreds of times. Still, they are so highly abstract that the readers or listeners only guess what they actually refer to. A good example of this kind of word may be the commonly used verb ‘to console’. Consider the sentence ‘He consoled her’. What does the word ‘console’ refer to in terms of tangible activities? What did he actually do? Did he tell her a story? Did he kiss her? Did he have sex with her? Did he buy her a present? Did he take her to a concert? The word ‘console’ may be seen as a highly abstract word; it seems difficult to understand in the sense that we know that a large variety of activities may be covered by it and in the sense that we do not know what kind of activity may be being referred to in a particular instance of discourse.

How professional people fail to understand each other Examples of texts like Texts 5 and 6 above are often invoked to show how abstract and difficult-to-understand texts using highly abstract words and expressions can be. We might presume, however, that understanding texts like 5 and 6 is a problem only to the outsider lay person and that insiders to a given discipline, who know the technical terminology, should have no problems understanding such texts. Unfortunately, this is not the case; that is, insiders in many disciplines also appear to have difficulties in finding referents to the words used in professional discussions. Consider the following three texts from the branch of linguistics called Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).

Text 8 – Again, we see that the richest characterization of genres of political discourse is not merely based on discursive properties per se, but also needs a systematic contextual definition in terms


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of relevant systems, organizations, actors, settings and cognitions, among others. (Van Dijk 1997: 19) Text 9 – While Henriques et al.’s arguments can be objected to on the grounds that they are attempting to demonstrate a negative (no theorization of the individual-social relation can be made to ‘work’), the problems which can be teased out of the most thoroughgoing work on connecting the individual to the social lend plausibility to their claim. (Bowers and Iwi 1993: 360) Text 10 – Finally, metapragmatic awareness can lead to metapragmatic attacks. There is in fact a normative – almost vicious – dimension in all explicit resorts to metalanguage – a dimension that is related to group identity, social stratification and power asymmetry. It follows that, by explicitly calling attention to address behavior, members set up the context through which to interpret the indexical world, which in turn involves the establishment of the communicative boundaries determining who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ (social identity), who ‘has’ and who ‘hasn’t’ (social and class relations), who ‘can’ and who ‘can’t’ (power structure). (Jacquemet 1994: 303)

Some readers might want to argue that these texts are hard to understand; that is, the referents for the words in them (such as metapragmatic, metalanguage, a negative, and cognitions) are hard to locate because you are not professional critical discourse analysts. You will presume perhaps that most, if not all, discourse analysts (insiders to this branch of linguistics) will have no problems understanding these texts. You will, however, err in your thinking. Below you will find excerpts from a recent discussion by two professional discourse analysts (Professor Henry Widdowson and Professor Norman Fairclough) addressing a selection of topics pertaining to CDA. We begin our survey of relevant quotes with the book editor’s quoting another scholar’s doubt about what one of the three words in the name of the field means: What exactly does it mean to add the word ‘critical’ to the phrase ‘discourse analysis’? (Seidlhofer 2003a: 128) We can see at the very start that disagreements arise even as to the name of the field. What interests me more is, however, how Widdowson and

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Fairclough discuss the field of CDA and how they often say that they do not understand each other. Consider the following quotations: ‘To be cynical again, we might say that discourse is something everybody is talking about without knowing with any certainty just what it is: in vogue and vague.’ (Widdowson 2003: 133) ‘If, with reference to written language, the term ‘sentence’ means ‘orthographic sentence’, then again the domain of discourse/text analysis has to be below and above it. It is all rather vague and confusing.’ (Widdowson 2003: 136) ‘A little later in the same (introductory) chapter, Stubbs tells us that the terms “text” and “discourse” are “often ambiguous and confusing”.’ (Widdowson 2003: 136) ‘These distinctions are perhaps obvious. But they are not always very obviously recognized. Both Stubbs and Chafe, for instance, dismiss the difference between text analysis and discourse analysis as a trivial matter of terminology. Others appear to make no distinction between the internal functions of semantic signification and the external functions of pragmatic significance. This brings us to the two other instances of conceptual confusion that I referred to earlier: in the area of critical discourse analysis and language pedagogy.’ (Widdowson 2003; 141) ‘We should note, again, however, a possible confusion creeping in here.’ (Widdowson 2003: 141) In the fragments of the discussion quoted above and in others, Widdowson expresses his dissatisfaction with CDA texts being difficult to understand and confusing. One would expect that his own analysis will not be such. However, in Fairclough’s reply we spot the kind of dissatisfaction about Widdowson that Widdowson expressed earlier about others. ‘I have accepted the invitation to respond to Widdowson’s article . . . not only because it is provocative and provides a good occasion for debate, but also because I think it seriously misrepresents my work in certain ways. One preliminary point to be made about Widdowson’s article is that its target is confusingly unclear’ (Fairclough 2003: 145)


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‘It is similarly unclear how the comments on language education relate to the critique of CDA.’ (Fairclough 2003: 146) ‘This is a misrepresentation of CDA. It rests upon a confusion between two senses of interpretation which are differentiated in Widdowson’s main source . . . .’ (Fairclough 2003: 146) ‘There is, however, an issue over the meaning of ideology: Widdowson uses the term in the sense of political ideologies, explicit commitments to particular political positions; whereas the term is used in CDA – and widely in the literature on ideology – in the sense of assumptions which are built into practices (especially for CDA practices of discourse) which sustain relations of domination, usually in a covert way.’ (Fairclough 2003: 149) ‘Disparity is not obvious in the case of perlocutionary effects; there is generally (or is Widdowson saying always? it isn’t clear) convergence on locutionary and illocutionary meanings.’ (Fairclough 2003: 150) ‘A galling feature of Widdowson’s article is the misleading picture he gives of current work in CDA . . .’ (Fairclough 2003: 151) And the story of ‘unclear ideas, misunderstanding and confusion’ continues with Widdowson’s reply to Fairclough: His reply indicates that all I succeeded in doing was to misrepresent him . . . . But then how could I have got it so wrong? How could I have read such mistaken meanings into his texts? One reason, as Fairclough’s comments make abundantly clear, is that I do not share the same ideological position on the nature of discourse . . . . And by the same token, my own text is subject to misrepresentation. (Widdowson 2003: 152–153) In numerous sections of both Widdowson’s and Fairclough’s articles we read about how one author or the other misrepresents, misinterprets, misunderstands, confuses, does not distinguish, and so on. It appears remarkable indeed that Widdowson, at a later point in the discussion, raises the question of what Fairclough is talking about, when we at a certain point end up reading: There is the difficulty though, that description itself to some degree implies interpretation. Fairclough himself points this out, but compounds the difficulty by ignoring the two senses of the term he has

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earlier distinguished, so we do not know whether he is talking about Interpretation 1 or 2, or both: (Widdowson 2003: 157) What the above discussion illustrates is this: Professors Widdowson and Fairclough, like many others, point to misinterpretations and confusion so many times because in the texts that they discuss and the ones that they themselves produce in their polemic, the key words appear to be words of a very high level of abstraction. Think of words such as ‘interpretation’, ‘convergence’, ‘assumptions’, ‘practices’, and ‘ideology’, just to mention a few. The words in question may refer to much nonverbal reality (again, in terms of tangible things and activities), even for a professional linguist, or, for a professional discourse analyst. The rub seems to be that neither of the polemists knows what the other’s referents for these words are in the course of the discussion. We may conclude that these two polemists largely do not know what they are talking about. This is by no means meant to be a comment belittling or insulting the two distinguished professors. It is meant to be a comment about how language works.

Moving up and down the ladder of abstraction One of the possible conclusions drawn from the discussion above may be that we should remain neither at the lowest (like young children) nor at the highest levels (like some academics) of abstraction. Importantly, however, when we find ourselves at the higher levels of abstraction, we should keep track of how our high abstraction words ultimately connect to tangible things and activities (through a series of less and less abstract words). Otherwise, our words, nice as they may sound to some people, remain meaningless sequences of sounds or letters, without any or with only very vaguely identifiable referents. Consider the following text:

Text 11 – The crucial step in the genesis of intellectual metadiscourse is the decontextualization of practical metadiscursive expressions from their ordinary rhetorical contexts and their recontextualization within the rhetorical context of intellectual inquiry. (Taylor, T. 1992: 13)


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No doubt, the words ‘intellectual’, ‘metadiscourse’, ‘decontextualization’, ‘metadiscursive’, ‘expressions’, ‘rhetorical’, ‘contexts’, ‘recontextualization’, and ‘intellectual inquiry’ can be seen as words of a high level of abstraction, that is, they may be seen as referring to very many things, and the distance separating these words (especially some of them) from anything tangible is very long indeed. How can we make this text more meaningful in the sense that we will know better what is being talked about? Below I revise the text and try to make it more meaningful.

Text 12 – The crucial step in the genesis (that is, the origin) of intellectual metadiscourse (that is, our talk about discourse) is the decontextualization of practical metadiscursive expressions (that is, using the sort of talk about discourse that does not depend on context) from their ordinary rhetorical (that is, produced for an effect) contexts and their recontextualization (that is, putting back into context) within the rhetorical context of intellectual inquiry (that is, in our thinking and wondering about how to achieve an effect in using language).

I am not at all sure that Taylor would approve of my additions to his text. What I added was my own interpretation of what I find as difficult-tounderstand highly abstract notions such as ‘metadiscursive expressions’ and ‘rhetorical context of intellectual inquiry’. What do these refer to? My additions are an attempt at lowering the level of abstraction that these expressions entail and proposing to you and myself something more tangible. For example, my ‘in our thinking and wondering about how to achieve an effect in using language’ attempts to lower the level of abstraction for ‘within the rhetorical context of intellectual inquiry’. What I mean to demonstrate is that my ‘in our thinking and wondering about how to achieve an effect in using language’ may be a little easier to understand than ‘within the rhetorical context of intellectual inquiry’. The former seems to me to be a little more tangible than the latter. It is, in my view, a little easier to imagine ‘thinking’ and ‘wondering’ than ‘intellectual inquiry’, although, one must admit that both ‘thinking’ and ‘wondering’ are still far away from anything that you can see, touch, hear, or smell.

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Let us try to go one step further and redo the above text again to make it even more tangible so that we can know still a bit better what is being talked about.

Text 13 – The crucial step in the genesis of intellectual metadiscourse (that is, our talk about discourse and our distinguishing between sentences, clauses, openings, closings, address forms, and so on) is the decontextualization of practical metadiscursive expressions (that is, using the sort of talk about discourse that does not depend on context) from their ordinary rhetorical (that is, produced for an effect, for instance, persuasion) contexts and their recontextualization (that is, putting back into context, for instance, the context of a mother talking to her daughter) within the rhetorical context of intellectual inquiry (that is, in our thinking and wondering about how to achieve an effect in using language, an effect such as persuasion, command or warning).

It has not been my intention to indicate that Text 13 should be seen as ‘good’ in some sense; the point that I have been trying to make is that Text 13 may be simply easier to understand than the original Text 11. This is because I have lowered the level of abstraction by using some of the new words and expressions. I have dragged the author of Text 11 a bit closer to the ground! A good text seems to be the sort of text which allows the reader to move back and forth along the ladder of abstraction. Lower level statements are made and higher level ones (for instance, generalizations) follow, or the other way round. Consider the following texts, which, in my view, illustrate the point just made:

Text 14 – Cars are part of our personal territory, and part of our personal and social identity. A bus can take you to the shop and back, but you do not feel at home in it or possessive about it. A train can get you to work, but it does not make socially and psychologically significant statements about you. (Fox, K. 2004: 161, italics added) Text 15 – The distance rule allows gossip to perform its vital social functions – social bonding; clarification of position and status; assessment and management of reputations; transmission of social skills,


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norms and values – without undue invasion of privacy: More importantly, it also allows nosey-parker anthropologists to formulate their prying questions in such a roundabout manner as to bypass the privacy rule. If, for example, you want to find out about an English person’s attitudes and feelings on a sensitive subject, such as, say, marriage, you do not ask about his or her own marriage – you talk about someone else’s marriage, preferably that of a remote public figure not personally known to either of you. (Fox, K. 2004: 47, italics added) Text 16 – The free-association rule states that pub conversations do not have to progress in any kind of logical or orderly manner; they need not stick to the point, nor must they reach a conclusion. When pubgoers are in free association mode, which is much of the time, attempts to get them to focus on a particular subject for more than a few minutes are fruitless, and only serve to make them unpopular. (Fox, K. 2004: 105, italics added) Text 17 – The problem is that rites of passage are by definition social occasions, involving a sustained period of obligatory interaction with other humans – and, worse, many are social occasions at which private family matters (pair-bonding, bereavement, transition to adulthood) become public. On top of all that, one is expected to express a bit of emotion. Not much, admittedly: the English do not go in for extravagant weeping and wailing at funerals, frenzied joy at weddings, or excessively gooey sentimentality at christenings; but even the minimal, token display of feeling that is customary at English rites of passage can be an ordeal for many of us. (Most of us cannot even stomach ‘the peace’ – a ritual introduced into ordinary church services by well-meaning vicars, which requires us to shake hands with the person next to us and mumble, ‘Peace be with you’. ‘Everyone I’ve ever met hates “the peace”’, said one informant. ‘It sends shivers up my spine just thinking about it.’ (Fox, K. 2004: 359, italics added except for ‘hates’ in the second to the last line).

In my view, Texts 14–17 are very good examples of how the author moves up and down the ladder of abstraction. The italicized fragments of the texts appear to be higher level generalizations and inferences. The remaining ones drag the reader down the abstraction ladder and make

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the text more concrete. Note that this can be done in different ways. In Text 14 the author does it by giving examples of what the general statement does not include. In Text 15, the author does it by giving examples of what the general statement does include (for the significance of giving examples see also Chapter 4). In Text 16, the author does it by reformulating the first general statement and then giving an example. And finally, in Text 17, the author does it, again, by giving examples. Going up and down the abstraction ladder may be seen as a powerful tool in producing understandable and engaging discourse. This is probably why Fox’s book is selling very well and why The Times calls it ‘amusing . . . entertaining’, and Oxford Times ‘fascinating reading’. It might be useful to remember that people who appear to be interesting, popular, and challenging speakers move all the time along the ladder of abstraction. This way they are neither down to earth talking about tangible objects such as cars and chairs all the time, nor up in the clouds talking about the sublime, the truth, indeterminacy, representation, oversoul, the nominal, incommensurability, qualification, and so on, which few understand, or, rather, which each person understands in his or her own way, if at all. The best practical position seems to be the middle path with, however, an important proviso: when you are in the middle path position, look down to the ground rather than up to the sky. Illustrate and give examples which are easy for people to relate to. We will take up this point as a separate issue in Chapter 4 when we discuss in some detail what is called intensional and extensional orientations in behavior.

Introduction and Chapter 1 – MAIN POINTS TO REMEMBER 1. People are reported to complain widely about miscommunication and misunderstanding. Confusing and meaningless discourse may cause anxiety and a measure of social friction among ordinary language users and professionals. 2. Comprehension should not be seen as a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. We may understand other people and we may be understood to varying degrees. 3. Discourse itself is neither understandable nor not understandable. It is people who understand discourse. 4. Using language, that is, producing discourse, involves abstracting.


5. Abstracting means disregarding details. 6. We abstract at the perceptual level (when we perceive objects) and at the linguistic levels (when we talk about the non-verbal world and when we talk about language). 7. We produce individual words and larger stretches of discourse at different levels of abstraction. 8. People often mix levels of abstraction; that is, they take words for what they stand for. 9. The natural order of abstraction is from the non-verbal to the verbal and not the other way round. 10. When producing discourse, we may move up and down the abstraction ladder; this kind of discourse often appears attractive and relatively easy to understand. 11. The higher up on the ladder of abstraction we are when we speak and write the more difficult it is to understand us.

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2 Learning New Words – How We Develop Meaning

Much misunderstanding and problems with comprehension are easily explained once we think of how we acquire new words and how they develop meaning for us. When we first hear or read a word, our brain, our nervous system, abstracts. The nervous system enables us to associate a particular word (for instance, ‘horse’) with a particular segment of non-verbal reality (the real horse with flesh, tail, hooves, and so on) The process of abstraction is closely connected with social agreement: we agree (tacitly; we usually do not discuss this!) with other people to call a particular object, or inner feeling, or relation, for example, in a particular way. We learn the label or the labels. For instance, we learn to call the animal depicted in Picture 10 below a ‘horse’.

Picture 10

The social agreement here is that speakers of English have agreed, through years of use, to linguistically (descriptively) abstract (and disregard many details of the real animal) by assigning the word ‘horse’ 32

Learning New Words 33

to the real animals of the kind depicted in the picture above. When we hear or read the word ‘horse’ for the first time, our nervous system processes the word in terms of the non-verbal reality with which the word is associated. That non-verbal reality may be a real horse in a zoo (this may be a common first word-nonverbal object association for a small child), but is also likely to be other, non-verbal, symbols of horses (pictures in films, books, and models of horses as toys).

Experience and meaning There exists a large body of literature showing the connection between the meanings of words and the experience of the people who use them (see for instance, Rapoport 1950, 1953; Lakoff 1987; Hayakawa 1992; Gibbs 1999, 2006; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Evans and Green 2006). We develop social agreements and a sense of meaning about the words that we and others use through experience. Treat experience as a crucial word in this book. You will develop no sense of what a word means to you if you have no experience to connect it with. How do you get this experience? In different ways. When you are an infant and learn words like ‘doll’, ‘toy’, ‘potty’, and ‘diaper’, your experience is your mother or father actually saying these words to you and pointing to the objects. Another situation is that these words will be written in a children’s book that your sister, for example, will read to you. Still another is that you will be walking with your brother by a toy shop and he will say something like ‘see that nice doll there in the window?’ These are all examples of how an infant will experience different situations in which the word ‘doll’ will be used and a connection between the word and its referent(s) will develop. This connection reflects a social agreement that the word (label) ‘doll’ is used to refer to the kinds of objects, things (referents) that your father will show you in your room or your brother will have you look at when you pass the toy shop. Older children, adolescents, and adults learn new words and what the social agreements about them are in a similar way – through all kinds of experience. Many new words are learned through reading, of course, or through watching television and playing computer games. These are different kinds of experience. We certainly do not learn very many words through direct experience with the referents. For instance, there are very many people in the world for whom the word ‘hippopotamus’ is by all means meaningful, that is, they have a concept of a hippopotamus, although they have never seen a living hippopotamus themselves; they have never seen, touched, heard, or smelled it. These

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people’s experience, which led them to know what the social agreement about the word ‘hippopotamus’ was, was indirect; they have read about this animal, heard stories about it, seen pictures of it in books, or seen it on television. These people have developed a feel for the meaning of the word ‘hippopotamus’ through experience, through experience that they have had. One person learns about word meanings through direct experience (for instance, seeing and touching a neighbor’s hamster); another learns about it by reading about hamsters; still another learns about it by reading about and seeing pictures of hamsters in books, watching movies, and so on. What happens when we learn a new word is that an experience is mapped onto a word (Rapoport 1950). This means that we use words to pass our experiences on to others. In other words, we pack a word with experience that we have had in connection with this word and pass on this experience to others with the help of this word. We communicate our experience with the help of words. Take an example. Let’s say that you first heard the word ‘plasma’ (in connection with TV sets) when you appeared in a small London electronic equipment shop on June 21, 1999. The shop assistant talked about it but was unable to show it to you as plasma TVs were then not yet available in ordinary shops. The story about the plasma TV that you heard from the shop assistant was your experience. You put this experience together with the word ‘plasma’. You mapped this experience onto the word ‘plasma’. From then on (until your next experience with this word) the word, whenever you used it, passed on to others the experience that you had on June 21, 1999: nothing else. Instead of giving your interlocutor a detailed description of what the shop assistant told you about this new kind of gadget, you simply used a short cut; you said ‘plasma’. Two years later, however, in June 2001, you went to a different shop in London and there you saw a new type of TV. Under the machine there was some information. Part of it said ‘Plasma 36’. Now you have had a new experience which you have automatically mapped onto the word ‘plasma’. You have now packed, if you like, the word with this new experience and added it to the first experience of June 21, 1999. What the word means to you (sic!) now appears to be the image in your mind that results from the experience (two times experience so far) that you have had. Your experience has led to the creating of the ‘plasma’ concept in your mind (see the upper corner of the triangle on page 3), and when you use this word you invoke this concept in your mind. It is important to remember that other people map significantly different, or at least slightly different, experience onto the same word. Your


neighbor may have first heard the word ‘plasma’ on television and at the same time seen one real machine that the news commentators referred to as ‘plasma’. That was your neighbor’s experience that he immediately mapped onto the word ‘plasma’. Let us assume that he has never since heard or seen the word ‘plasma’ in a different context. For him then, the word ‘plasma’ invokes (refers to, means) this single experience. Our experiences and our social agreements about what words mean to us and to others are changing to some degree all the time. Why? Because we are exposed to new experiences all the time. This point can be best illustrated with examples of new technical inventions. Take the phrase ‘cell phone’ and the real thing depicted in Picture 11 below:

Picture 11

The early cell phones of the 1990s were big and heavy and you could use them only to make a phone call. The present ‘mobiles’ are much smaller, thinner, and you can do all kinds of things with them (send text messages, take and send pictures, listen to music, remotely turn on the heating system in a house, and so on), short of telling it to cook dinner for you. Children who were born a few years ago and are now beginning to use cell phones have developed their concept of the cell phone having had a significantly different initial experience from that of the children who started using this machine in the early 1990s. In other words, when a child born in the mid 1980s hears the words ‘cell phone’, the concept that is activated (image or mental picture, description that comes to mind) for him or her includes the early experience of something which was, for example, ‘simple’, ‘big’, ‘one function’, ‘heavy’, ‘awkward to carry’, and this concept is significantly different from the image or mental description that comes to mind in the case of a child born in 2004 and beginning to use the device in 2009. This latter cell

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phone user image includes characteristics such as ‘complicated’, ‘small’, ‘thin’, ‘multiple functions’, ‘light’, ‘easy to carry’, and so on. These two groups of children have had different kinds of experience, whether direct through personal use or indirect through seeing the machine in shops and brochures, or through talking about it. Social agreement wobbles sometimes. We sometimes appear surprised that the label we use is not the one used by other people speaking the same language, and the label is perhaps not understood. We call something a ‘public house’, and we hear it referred to as ‘pub’, or, we call a project ‘attractive’ and we hear it referred to as ‘sexy’, we call something ‘tragic’ and we hear it referred to as ‘unpleasant’. Why? There are many possible answers to this question. One may be that social agreements ‘expire’, they change, that is, people start using new or different words (labels) to stand for the same non-verbal reality, which an individual language user may not have been aware of, or may not have noticed. Another possible answer to the question has to do with typical and nontypical examples of the things we refer to. Let us take up this point now. Our putting together words and non-verbal things (which may be seen as aspects of our experience), that is, developing an association between words and non-verbal things, should be seen as an individual process. It is an individual person (most typically a child) that individually experiences the first and subsequent encounters with non-verbal things and activities and that learns in a particular social situation how to associate words with these things. For instance, when you were a child, your father one day opened the door of the family car and said to you something like ‘get into the car’. This was the moment when you may have first heard the word or label ‘car’; this was the moment when your nervous system allowed you to abstract at the descriptive, linguistic, level, and this was perhaps the first time your individual nervous system associated the word ‘car’ with the vehicle the door of which your father opened for you. This was the moment when you learned to put the verbal and the non-verbal together. Importantly, this act was individual. It was individual in the sense that no other child or adult in the world ever learned the association of the word ‘car’ with a vehicle in exactly the same way. Your experience was entirely individual. No matter how similar your neighbor’s car may be, no matter how close your neighbor’s child’s experience with the word ‘car’ may have been, the experience has been different. Your neighbor’s child has an individual nervous system, an individual mind, an individual brain, which abstracted individually when the word ‘car’ and your neighbor’s vehicle were first put together for that child.


Where do we find the wobbling? In spite of the individuality of experience involved in learning new words, the degree of similarity of this experience across a population and whole cultures is very significant. We agree to a significant extent on what labels we use to stand for what referents. Importantly, our agreement as to these labels is usually best seen when we handle typical cases. For example, consider the following two sets of Pictures: 12–13 and 14–15.

Picture 12

Picture 13

(Non-typical shoe – it can broadcast your music to your wireless headphones if you want to keep your music to yourself, or play your music over the built-in speakers in the shoes if you want others to hear them). Is it not the case that most of us would agree that a possible word to use to refer to the objects depicted in Picture 12 is ‘shoes’? And is it not the case that most of us would agree that a possible word to use to refer to the thing depicted in Picture 14 is ‘lamp’? Things are a bit more complicated as we move to Pictures 13 and 15. Here we are

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Picture 14

Picture 15


likely to experience some hesitation, indecision, and maybe sometimes a measure of irritation. We are dealing here not with typical examples of things to be referred to but with borderline cases. When we confront borderline examples, our use of words, labels, or symbols may be wobbly. For some people Picture 13 depicts what they will still label as a ‘shoe’; for others, it will not be a ‘shoe’. The label these latter people will probably use is ‘music shoe’, while still others will have no special label for Picture 13 at all. Some people will have their label at hand immediately; others will stall and, if requested, think for a long time about what sort of label might be used in this case. In the case of Picture 15, a similar series of doubts, hesitation, and lack of labels might be expected. Should or could Picture 15 be labeled as ‘a lamp’? Or could the label ‘a container’ be used? Shall we coin a new label perhaps? Upon entering the University of Oxford library in which I am writing this section of the book I read the following message: Readers are reminded that no food or drink may be consumed on library premises (this includes staircases and toilets). Please note that sweats, chewing gum and water are all covered by this notice. I have just started coughing and the only thing to do to stop the cough was to take some candy. Have I violated the rules of the library? The objects depicted in Pictures 13 and 15, as well as my taking some candy into the University of Oxford library appear to be examples of borderline, non-typical cases of objects and activities, which often lead to labeling anxieties. Could I take the ‘candy’ to be ‘medicine’, which stopped the cough? It is not forbidden to take medicine in the library, so if the candy I took I rename as medicine, there is no doubt that I did not violate the rules of the library. Would the librarians, if they had seen me taking the candy, have thought the same? Different and multiple labels are often used by different people who refer to the same object, and disagreements about which labels are appropriate are common. In typical examples, multiple labels are frequently used by different people as well, but the use of these multiple labels may be due to regional, social, gender, age, and other types of variation, and cannot be attributed to the non-typicality of the object. Consider the following object: Most speakers of English will most probably perceive Picture 16 as a typical object of its kind. Some people (mainly in the UK) will label it (call it) ‘a pram’, while another group (mainly in the US) will label it

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Picture 16

‘a baby buggy’. Very likely, no hesitation or anxiety in the course of calling this thing ‘baby buggy’ or ‘pram’ will take place. This is because the example depicted in the picture is typical. When the example is non-typical, as in Picture 17 below, doubt or hesitation is very likely to ensue.

Picture 17


What is a typical lamp or baby buggy to one person may not be typical to another. Picture 18 below shows what I would consider a typical baby buggy.

Picture 18

What about you? Do you agree? Or perhaps you will consider this one, in Picture 19, to be more typical?

Picture 19

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Likewise, what was a typical phone, or lamp, or car to you today may not in your view have been typical 20 years ago. Take a typical television set of roughly 50 years ago, depicted in Picture 20.

Picture 20

If you were a child in the 1950s and if someone said that they had just bought a TV set, this is more or less what would have come to your mind as a typical image, your concept of the TV set. I happen to have had this image of the concept of the TV set in the 1950s. This is certainly not the case any longer. The typical image or description of the TV set that comes to my mind now (in 2009) is something like what you see in Picture 21 below:

Picture 21

My concept of the TV set has changed and so has my typical image, mental picture, or mental description of it.


The main point that I have tried to illustrate here is that although we tend to understand language, that is, to agree about meanings of words which pertain to typical cases of things and activities, what is considered to be typical to one individual at a particular point of time varies to different degrees. This means that our social agreements as to how words relate to other things may be unstable and that meanings that we attribute to words are never certain. Linguists often see concepts as experientially grounded (see for instance Lakoff 1987). This appears to be a technical way of saying briefly that we learn concepts, and the meanings of words that we associate with concepts, through experience, through various kinds of experience such as seeing things when we walk around the city, reading books, watching television, playing a computer game, and so on. Importantly then, the meanings that we assign to words should be seen, crucially, as relating to our experience. Why is this so crucial? It is crucial because we need to realize that each individual person’s experience is at least slightly different. This seems to be an undeniable fact. The hundreds of cars and bicycles that you have seen – experienced – in your life (on the basis of which you have worked out a concept, typical mental picture of a car and a bicycle) have been different even from the cars and bicycles that your closest friend has experienced. There are always differences of this kind. If you accept this fact, you will also be very likely to accept the fact that what an individual person means by a ‘car’ or a ‘bicycle’, understood as the mental pictures that come to a person’s mind when the words are used, will be at least slightly different. It follows that complete understanding is never possible. The crucial role of experience in generating meaning needs to be kept in mind, especially when we analyze and try to understand old texts. We tend to understand old texts in terms of current experience (how could we do it otherwise?). We resort to the experience (single or multiple) that we associate with learning the word: but a text written hundreds of years ago, or even tens of years ago, most probably reflects experiences that will be totally or partly unknown and unavailable to us. Both you and I, however, can try to make sense of these words relating them to the experiences that you or I have had. What we are doing then is replacing the original experience leading to the creation of a text and some sort of intended meaning with our own current experiences. This should lead us to the conclusion that interpreting old texts involves a large amount of guesswork. As an example, let us consider the first two paragraphs of Stowe’s 1852 classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Chapter 1):

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Text 18 Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P——–, in Kentucky. There were no servants present, and the gentlemen, with chairs closely approaching, seemed to be discussing some subjects with great earnestness. For convenience sake, we have said, hitherto, two gentlemen. One of the parties, however, when critically examined, did not seem, strictly speaking, to come under the species. He was a short, thick-set man, with coarse, commonplace features, and that swaggering air of pretension which marks a low man who is trying to elbow his way upward in the world. He was much overdressed, in a gaudy vest of many colors, a blue neckerchief, bedropped gaily with yellow spots, and arranged with a flaunting tie, quite in keeping with the general air of the man. His hands large and coarse, were plentifully bedecked with rings; and he wore a heavy gold watch-chain, with a bundle of seals of portentous size, and a great variety of colors, attached to it, – which, in the ardor of conversation, he was in the habit of flourishing and jingling with evident satisfaction. His conversation was in free and easy defiance of Murray’s Grammar, and was garnished at convenient intervals with various profane expressions, which not even the desire to be graphic in our account shall induce us to transcribe.

At least two scenarios are possible for analyzing texts like the above from the point of view of our present interest. In adopting one scenario, we may want to assume that this text is being read by someone who had never heard of the book, is ignorant of American slavery and nineteenth-century American history, and is trying to learn something about it by reading the book. In adopting the other scenario, we may want to assume that the reader is familiar with aspects of American slavery and nineteenth-century American history. In either case, we need to be aware of the fact that Stowe wrote the book in the middle of the nineteenth century and that the experiences that she mapped onto the words that she put down on paper were dramatically different from those of any modern reader of the book. How much of Stowe’s experience can the present reader actually retrieve?


In other words, reading the words in the text, how much and what kinds of experiences of the author can the contemporary reader reach and share? Answers to these questions will certainly depend on how much one knows about the times and places that Stowe describes. We need to keep in mind all the time, however, that what we have learned about these times and places, prior to reading Stowe’s book, we learned from other people. What we know we learned from other texts (for instance, a history book), which, again, was mainly or only words onto which someone else’s experiences have been mapped. Our history book was probably written on the basis of other history books and some documents perhaps. In any event, we need to realize that any text that we may have had access to should be seen as a distant abstraction being very far away from the experiences mapped onto words by the actual people living through the ages of American slave history. Let us return to Stowe’s text, point to a few words in it, and reflect on the non-verbal reality behind them. Take each word or phrase listed below and think for a moment what sort of experiences may have been mapped onto the word or phrase. Think of how much of the experience in question may have been Stowe’s, how much of this experience you are in a position to share with the author, and think about how much of the experience in question is actually yours! Note that some of the experience that you will tend to invoke will also depend on your geographical location. Here is a selection of the items from the text: ‘a chilly day in February’ ‘gentlemen’ ‘wine’ ‘well-furnished dining parlor’ ‘with great earnestness’ ‘thick-set man, with coarse, commonplace features’ ‘swaggering air of pretension’ ‘a low man’ ‘trying to elbow his way upward in the world’ ‘much overdressed’ ‘a gaudy vest of many colors’ ‘with a flaunting tie’ ‘the ardor of conversation’ ‘easy defiance of Murray’s Grammar’ ‘garnished . . . with various profane expressions’

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If we wanted to analyze these words and phrases, some of the questions (requiring a connection between the words and the non-verbal reality) that we might want to consider are the following: 1. What temperatures do you consider to give you the feeling of a chilly day in February? 2. In your view, what does a gentleman look like, and how does he behave, for instance in a dining parlor? 3. What is your idea of a dining parlor? What do you think people do there? What kind of furniture is there? What do people eat and drink there? 4. How, in your view, does a well-furnished parlor differ from a poorlyfurnished one? 5. What kind of wine comes to your mind? Any special grapes? 6. Try to be more specific about ‘a thick-set man, with coarse, commonplace features’. List some of these features. 7. Describe in some detail the idea of a ‘low man’. 8. What, in your view, did ‘the overdressed’ person wear? 9. Describe ‘the flaunting tie’ to the extent you can. 10. Were the profane expressions in the first half of nineteenth century like the contemporary ones? If not, what were they? Give examples. The above questions, and many others that we could ask, are supposed to illustrate how we can bring into focus (and into doubt!) the myriad tangible experiences standing behind words. It seems to me that only when we consciously concentrate on the multitude of experiences (of the author and reader) associated with the words used, can we appreciate the vagueness of meaning, the misunderstandings and the confusions that may be associated with reading texts, especially texts produced many years ago and in geographical locations far away from where we ourselves have lived. We could apply the same kind of reasoning and analysis to any text – another novel, a poem, a document, a leaflet of instructions, and so on. The general principle that we might want to keep in mind may be stated thus: the older the text and the further away from you (socially, culturally, professionally, geographically, and so on) it takes place the less you can imagine (never have, of course) the experience that was behind the words leading to the writing of the text, and the more difficult it will be for you to understand the text; the more of it you will find confusing and meaningless perhaps. When reading older texts, the experience standing behind the words can


be seen as largely blurred or totally unimaginable. Again, we may be tempted to conclude that interpreting such texts is, to an extent, largely guesswork. I do not want to finish this section on a negative note. In spite of the fact that all experience is individual and that we therefore cannot understand each other completely, down to every single detail, we do communicate quite successfully, don’t we? This is because our experience is very often similar or very similar. After all, the cars and baby buggies that you normally see in the streets these days are very similar to those that many other people see as well. In spite of whatever differences as to details there may be, our experiences may be seen as similar to some degree. Needless to say, the further away culturally we are from each other, the more experiential differences we will witness. However, even within close communities (for example, within a family), there will always be differences as to what sort of experiences the individual members of the family have been through. We can conclude then that we understand each other to the extent that we share the experience that is behind the concepts and words that we use. The sharing of experience and understanding of other people appears to be much easier when typical cases are handled (talked about). When non-typical cases are being used, much misunderstanding, confusion, and labeling anxiety is likely to take place. And finally, we need to remember that meaning is imputed to words by people as they experience the world (see for instance, Lee 1994; Janicki 2006) and that all reading can be seen as ‘reading in’ (Lakoff and Turner 1989); meaning is not to be found in words. We impute various kinds of meanings to words depending on what sort of experience we have had learning these words. Individual people may impute slightly different meanings to words depending on what their individual experiences associated with these words have been. The tricky thing is that we never know what sorts of experiences (and the mental pictures that derive from them) are behind the concepts that other people are using. We thus never know exactly what other people mean.

Common ground and meaning In addition to the shared experience, our understanding other people and our being understood by others depends much also on the common ground, which notion is not unrelated to ‘common knowledge’, ‘mutual knowledge or belief’, or ‘joint knowledge’, as Clark, H. (1996) points out. ‘Alan and Barbara begin with a great mass of knowledge,

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belief and suppositions they believe they share. This I will call their common ground’ (Clark, H. 1996: 12). It seems useful to think of ‘common ground’ as larger than ‘shared experience’, but, importantly, as partly building on ‘shared experience’. As Clark notes, ‘Much of our common ground is based on joint personal experiences’ (Clark, H. 1996: 112). Clark wants to view ‘common ground [as] a form of self awareness. Two people, Susan and Bill, are aware of certain information they each have’ (Clark, H. 1996: 20). And further, according to him, ‘the information people take to be common ground ranges from broad inferences about human nature through languages and dialects and jargons, cultural standards and procedures, to ineffable sights and sounds and feelings’ (Clark, H. 1996: 121). To me, this wide view of ‘common ground’ paraphrases into the simple ‘knowledge of what we think other people know, believe and assume’. Note the ‘think’ in my paraphrase. We never know exactly what other people know, believe, and assume but we do have knowledge of what we think they know and believe. For instance, when I talk to my friend about classical music, I make certain assumptions about what he knows and believes about classical music. I assume we have some common ground as to the topic. I assume that he likes baroque music and that he knows a lot about Puccini’s La Boheme; I believe that he wouldn’t enjoy himself at a Stockhausen concert, but would be delighted to hear Roby Lakatos live again, and so on. I sometimes may be right, sometimes wrong, sometimes to some extent right or wrong in these assumptions. In any event, I talk to my friend making all of these and many other assumptions based on my knowledge and beliefs about him. Obviously, my friend operates with a similar set of assumptions, beliefs and knowledge about me. All these make a very complicated network of assumptions, beliefs and knowledge, which, importantly, may change any time, may have to be revised, redefined, and so on. This is a dynamic network of relationships which comes to life as a small network when we start communicating as children and gradually develops (and gets more and more complicated) as we grow older and as new experiences enter our lives. Common ground no doubt has an important impact on understanding other people. The more of the assumed common ground turns out to be the actual common ground, the better our understanding of our interlocutors. If I assume that my friend loves Puccini’s La Boheme (and if fact he does not), my utterance about it may be understood one way. However, if my friend actually does love Puccini’s La Boheme, the utterance may be understood in another way.


Words and categorization Categorization has been a big topic for decades and most recently a top one within cognitive linguistics (see for instance, Rapoport 1950; Johnson, M. 1987; Lakoff 1987; Taylor, J. 2003). When we learn a language, one of the things that we are doing at the same time is classifying; cutting the world around us into millions of bits and pieces. We do it perceptually (without the help of language) and verbally (with the help of language). As to the former, you will remember that, as the physicists tell us, the physical world around us is in constant motion. Also, and importantly, there appear to be no natural boundaries between physical phenomena. If you think of mountains and hills for example, there is no one strict point in the physical world that would allow us to clearly distinguish between the two. Likewise (which you may find hard to accept) there is no physical ‘nothing’ between the chair that you may be sitting on reading this book and the table on which this book may be placed. However, in both the mountain-hill and the chair-table cases, as well as millions of others, we perceptually separate the two. We clearly distinguish (again, perceptually, that is, what you can see) between chairs and tables. In many cases, we also distinguish, maybe not all very clearly, between mountains and hills. One of the reasons we perceptually distinguish between chairs and tables and normally do not mix the two is that they appear to be very different to us. Related to this is the fact that we use different words to label and thus stress the differences. We could not handle the world around us if we did not cut it into bits and pieces. So we do. We cut it and we usually give names (words, labels) to the pieces that result from the cutting. Thus, as for physical objects, we end up talking about chairs, tables, computers, people, lamps, elephants, and so on. We have cut the world around us into pieces and given these pieces names or labels. We have created categories; we have categorized (or classified) the world. Not all people cut the world, that is, the universe around them, in the same way, and not all people give names, or single-word names, to the bits and pieces into which they cut the universe. For instance, English speaking people use the word ‘brunch’ to refer to a late morning meal putting breakfast and lunch together. Many other people, speakers of many other languages, for instance Poles and Norwegians, do not cut the ‘meal universe’ the same way. They do not put breakfast and lunch together, and thus they have no words equivalent to the English ‘brunch’. They clearly distinguish between the two meals and have words to refer to them, but putting

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the two together and having a word for the combined meal is not part of the cutting of the universe for the speakers of Polish and Norwegian. This does not mean of course that Poles and Norwegians could not cut the world the way that English speaking people do in this respect, but they simply do not usually do it. They categorize phenomena relating to daily meals in a different way. Note that some categorizations may seem strange and possibly useless to some of us while they turn out to be reasonable and useful to others. For example, a Norwegian hospital accepts emergency patients having been involved in car accidents that happened when the car was running under 50 k/h at the moment of the accident. This may seem strange to some people. The categories we deal with here are two: (1) casualties resulting from accidents happening at speeds under 50 k/h and (2) casualties resulting from accidents happening at speeds over 50 k/h. Strange and perhaps unreasonable as this categorization may seem to some people the first time they hear about it, upon closer analysis, it does make sense and may turn out to be very reasonable and useful. The hospital that accepts the latter category casualties is better equipped to handle severe cases, and the likelihood that one gets severely hurt when at the time of the accident the car runs over 50 k/h is, one may argue, much higher. Of course, not only physical world phenomena get categorized. For example, mental states, feelings, and relations get categorized as well. We talk about anger, support, comfort, compassion, connection, jealousy, and so on. All these words are labels used to refer to phenomena much less tangible than chairs, tables, and mountains, for example. They nevertheless indicate that we cut the non-physical world into categories as well as give these cut-out pieces names; names such as ‘anger’, ‘support’, and so on. These words indicate that we have created categories, which we need in order to talk about the world around us. As our discussion of experience and learning new words above has demonstrated, we very often deal with borderline cases, which lead to fuzziness, doubt, hesitation, and disagreements when words are used (Janicki 2006). The categories (usually labeled by words) that we distinguish in order to be able to handle the world around us should also be seen as fuzzy. This is supposed to mean that whatever category you take up, you will always be able to find examples of this category that will be doubtful examples to some people, that some people will be arguing about or be uncertain about in other ways. As in the case of the lamp and the baby buggy examples above, you will always be able to find real


examples of or invent examples that will not clearly and unquestionably fit in. This will be even more evident in the case of abstract categories such as ‘comfort’, ‘support’, ‘passion’, and so on. The category of ‘support’, for example, can be easily exemplified with someone’s giving you money if you need it. But you will always be able to find examples about which you will be in doubt whether they illustrate support or not, like ‘attending a funeral of your friend’s deceased wife’. Can this be treated as ‘giving support’ to your friend or not? As long as the question appears legitimate, the category ‘support’ remains fuzzy. Our understanding of how words are learned, how experience counts in the learning process, how ‘common ground’ contributes to interaction, how we categorize the things around us, and how meanings are imputed to words rather than found in them seems to me to be fundamental for our understanding of confusing discourse and for our understanding of misunderstanding. Discourse may be incomprehensible or confusing to different degrees and so may be misunderstood by other people. No matter how negligible the differences in meanings may be, comprehension, in terms of what the used words refer to, is hardly ever certain and complete.

Chapter 2 – MAIN POINTS TO REMEMBER 1. We learn words by associating them with personal experience. 2. What words come to mean to people may be seen as a result of a social agreement. 3. Words impart experience which had been mapped onto them by language users. 4. Concepts (understood as mental pictures, descriptions, images) can be seen as being behind the words that we learn. 5. Concepts can be seen as experientially grounded. 6. Concepts may be exemplified by typical and non-typical cases. 7. What is typical to one person may not be typical to another. 8. What is typical to one person at a given point of time may not be typical to the same person at a later point in time. 9. Changes with respect to what is typical or not bear on the meaning of words and comprehension of discourse. 10. Meanings are imputed to words by people; they are not in the words.

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11. When typical examples of concepts are dealt with, communication is more successful than when non-typical examples are. 12. People understand each other to the extent that they share the experience that is behind the concepts and words that they use. 13. We can never be 100 per cent sure about what other people mean by the words they use. 14. When understanding other people, much depends on the ‘common ground’. 15. Learning a language involves learning the categories, the terms which we use to process the universe around us. 16. People may differ in what sort of categories they use, which may bear on understanding discourse.

3 Words are Not What They Refer to – The Map is Not the Territory

. . . most people act about as conscious of their linguistic environment as fish appear conscious of the water in which they swim. (Bourland 1974: 89) Rene Magritte’s well known picture of the pipe may be taken as a wonderful illustration of how people often mix symbols and what these symbols stand for. My picture of an apple (Picture 22), modeled on that by Magritte, is to help me illustrate the relationship in question. Show this picture to a friend, cover the words saying ‘this is not an apple’, and ask the question: ‘what is it?’ The likelihood will be very high that your friend will say ‘this is an apple’. When you start talking about the picture and point to the fact that it is not really an apple, that it should

Picture 22 53

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be seen as a picture, a representation, a symbol of an apple, your friend will certainly agree and probably add that what you are saying is obvious and that you are involving him or her in a fruitless exercise. Note, however, that your friend’s answer to the original question was ‘this is an apple’, which, strictly speaking, was obviously wrong and which reflects a major confusion between a symbol (for instance, the picture of an apple) and what it refers to (a real apple which you can buy in the produce section of a grocery store). One of the main goals of this book is to make you aware of, make you constantly remember, and encourage you to continually put into practice the fact that words are best seen as symbols that refer to other things. A very good way to remember this fundamental relation between words and what they refer to is to think of maps and of how maps refer to territories (see for instance, Korzybski 1933; Rapoport 1950; Lee 1994; Lutz 1997). There are various kinds of maps – road maps, historical maps, geological maps, tourist maps, and so on. All these kinds of maps intend to give us an idea of what the territories they refer to are like. They give us information such as how streets are located with respect to one another, how roads and highways intersect, where certain buildings are located, where the fjords cut into the land. Maps can be treated as representations, as symbols, of something else, of the territory that they are supposed to help us orient ourselves to. Most importantly, maps always disregard certain kinds of details – they always abstract. Think of a tourist map of the centre of London. If the map is very detailed, you will find in it not only the main streets and historical monuments, but also all (let’s assume that you will indeed find all) the narrow and side streets as well as a significant number of department stores, restaurants, bars, and hotels. This would be a good map, and most maps are indeed like that. But, tourist maps could be still better. They could include all or most of the non-historical residential buildings, every single bar and little restaurant, and every movable stand, say, on Oxford Street. Detailed as this kind of map might be, it would still leave out (disregard) an enormous number of details that the real territory of London includes. Let us imagine a still more detailed map. Let us say that it would include information on (pictures of?) all the entrance doors to all the houses on Oxford Street, information on (pictures of?) all the tables in restaurants on Oxford Street, information on (pictures of?) all the escalators in all the department stores on Oxford Street, information on (pictures of) all the garbage cans located on Oxford Street and all the side streets.

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This kind of map would be a bit closer to the real territory, of course, but it would still disregard millions of details, millions of aspects of the ‘real thing’. We could certainly continue our exercise in expanding our map (that is, making it more detailed) hour after hour and page after page in this book, indicating on our imaginary map more and more information about, for example, cinemas, banks, and gardens, but we would still be very far away from depicting all the details of the territory of London. Our map would still be disregarding millions of remaining details. A map could never cover the whole of the territory. It always abstracts, that is, disregards details of the territory that it refers to. Note that an excellent map, including billions of details, would also have to include the person making the map, and an utterly perfect map of whatever kind would be the territory itself. No doubt, such a map would be pretty big and difficult to put into your pocket! An important fact about maps is that different kinds of maps (such as tourist or road maps) are drawn for different purposes. Also, the number of details included and disregarded in a map depends on the purpose of the map. Different maps are drawn for different people and for different purposes. What usually matters is that these maps are useful and handy. This is why we do not have tourist maps (or any kinds of maps, as far as I know) including information on garages, drive-ins, types of entrance doors, types of toilets, back yard vegetable gardens, and so on. Such maps would be useless for ordinary tourists. We need to keep all these facts in mind when we proceed to discussing the analogy between words (maps) and what they refer to (the territory). How can we see the analogy between ‘the map is not the territory’ and ‘words are not the reality that they refer to’? The analogy appears to me to be very powerful and it can be seen in many ways. The most important fact seems to be that words should be seen as the result of a dramatic abstraction. I say ‘dramatic’ because the difference between, say, the word ‘Oxford’ (five letters, or four to five sounds) and all the aspects of the real city of Oxford (all its streets, sidewalks, buildings, libraries, chapels, restaurants, people, and so on) will appear extremely big to anyone giving some thought to it. In no way can the word ‘Oxford’ be treated as similar to the ‘real city of Oxford’. Nevertheless, what we do is use the word to refer to the real place. We map all our experience of this city onto the word ‘Oxford’. How convenient! Communication would not be possible (except for very fundamental communication about things around us) if we did not have words which we use as symbols to refer to other things. For instance, I would not

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be able to tell you that I am writing this book in Oxford. In other words, when I say that I am writing this book in Oxford, I am giving you a map, the word ‘Oxford’, which stands for the territory of the city of Oxford. Think of how dramatically abstract this map is. If you have never heard of Oxford, UK (which of course is very unlikely in the case of the readers of this book!), you have no idea what territory I am talking about. This is how you would feel if you got a map of Sayre, Pennsylvania, where most of the readers probably have never been. If you have heard of the city of Oxford, UK, you will have a vague idea of where it is located. This is how much the word ‘Oxford’ will symbolize for you. The level of abstraction will be tremendously high here. This level will be much lower if you have not only heard of Oxford but also have seen a film about it, read two books about it, and heard some stories about it from people who have been there. The word ‘Oxford’ will then refer (for you) to much more territory, compared to what it refers to the person who only knows where to locate Oxford on the map. Still further, if you happen to have visited Oxford, in addition to all these films about Oxford that you have seen, the books that you have read, and the stories that you have heard, your territory that the word ‘Oxford’ refers to has grown significantly. Your map of Oxford, the word ‘Oxford’, may be a pretty informative map, but it still remains a map. The word ‘Oxford’ is not the territory of the city of Oxford. There are still billions of details that the word or map ‘Oxford’ does not invoke for you, as you, or even all the people who have lived in Oxford all their lives, have not seen and remembered all the details (the tiny streets, stones, trees, river banks, garages, and so on) of the real city. The word ‘Oxford’ should ever be seen as a vehicle of abstraction, and it will never be the city of Oxford itself. One way to see the analogy between words and maps is then to see words as invoking concepts (see the triangle on p. 3), different non-verbal territories in different people’s minds or in the same people’s minds at different points of time; your map of Oxford that the word ‘Oxford’ invokes will be different before your personal visit to Oxford compared to after your visit to the city. Another way of seeing words as maps is to realize that words, like maps, can be used for different purposes. In other words, the same territory may be symbolized, referred to, in different verbal ways, analogous to drawing tourist, historical, road maps, and so on. Let us take the following example. Picture 23 below (remember, itself being a symbol!), depicts a non-verbal territory.


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Picture 23

The non-verbal territory that the picture depicts may be referred to in many different ways. You may say, or write, that the picture depicts ‘a human being’, ‘a human animal’, ‘a girl’, ‘a guitar player’, ‘my daughter, ‘my neighbor’s son’s girlfriend’, and so on. We will use one of these verbal tools (words) or others depending on the purpose of communication. If we want to stress to the interlocutor that this is a girl rather than a boy or a cat, we will use the word ‘girl’. If we want to indicate – to satisfy the needs of our interlocutor – that this is a guitar player, rather than a piano player, a bassoon player, or a rally driver, we will employ the words ‘a guitar player’, and so on. When we say ‘a guitar player’, we certainly disregard a lot of details of the person that we refer to (for example, that she is a female, that she has long hair). We highlight the fact that she is a guitar player (see also Aitchison 1994). When we say ‘a girl’, we disregard many details as well, for instance, the fact that she is a guitar player, and we highlight that she is a young female. In any case we abstract, that is, we disregard many aspects that the territory, the non-verbal reality, shown in the picture, really includes. We construct and use maps for different purposes, and we do the same with words. The real thing that the picture depicts (the territory) is whatever it is. We may refer to it in different ways for different purposes; we construct and use different maps of the territory. Another aspect of the analogy to consider is the usefulness of the words or maps. If you are a tourist in central London and get a geological map of the city, the map will not be useful to you, and neither will be

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some words in some situations. For example, imagine that you enter a dilapidated and abandoned house to look around. Suddenly, your companion, having seen a big and fierce dog that you have not seen, yells: ‘watch out, a mammal’. Good as this map may be as a possible map, one of many possible maps (‘a mammal’, ‘an animal’, ‘a dog’, ‘a beast’, and so on), the ‘mammal’ map may not turn out to be a very useful one. Before you realize that ‘the mammal’ is a huge dog, its teeth may have been deep in your flesh. The ‘mammal’ map was not useful just as a geological map was not useful for a tourist in London.

Good and bad maps Maps that confuse us will be the kinds of maps which will place London between Paris and Berlin, which will depict Oxford Street in London as not leading to Tottenham Court Road, which will depict Park Avenue in New York City as perpendicular to 5th Avenue, and so on. A good map will then correctly depict (to the extent possible) the relations (structural relations, we could say) that we observe in the territory itself. If, for instance, we know that in reality Park Avenue and 5th Avenue are more or less parallel, this non-symbolic fact should be rendered in our symbolic map. When it does not, the map may be seen as bad, misleading, and confusing. We may feel cheated having spent money to buy the map. Importantly, the relation between a good map and the territory may be seen as iconic, that is, in some sense non-arbitrary, natural. The parallelism of streets in the real New York City is depicted by parallel lines on a map; the fact that in the real city of London, Oxford Street leads all the way to Tottenham Court Road will be depicted on a good map as a line indicating Oxford Street leading up to another line called Tottenham Court Road; the city of London will not be placed in our map anywhere between Berlin and Paris, as it is not in reality. In other words, we can observe a measure of visual similarity between things we can see in a map (our symbol) and those we see in reality. Can we see a corresponding relation in the use of words in discourse? Sometimes we can; most often, however, we cannot. Sometimes we can see a measure of similarity between discourse, how we say things, and the non-verbal reality that our words refer to. For instance, when you say ‘I went home and watched a soccer game’, ‘I went home’ comes first in the sentence and ‘watched a soccer game’ comes second. This sequence in the grammatical set-up of the sentence reflects the sequence of what you actually did. You first went home and then watched the soccer game, not the other way round (Radden 2008). Also, note that houses numbered 1, 3, 5, 7, and so on (the symbols 1,


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3, 5, 7, and so on that refer to them) reflect the sequence in which real houses on real streets are located (Radden 1992). It is very unlikely that you will find house number 7 between house number 3 and 5. In other words, in the cases like those I mentioned above we may talk about a degree of similarity, or analogy between language, words, symbols, and what they refer to. This kind of similarity is often called iconicity. A significant amount of similarity between words and the non-verbal reality can also be seen in the case of what linguists call onomatopoeia. It includes basically the kinds of words that we use to refer to sounds produced by animals, such as ‘quack’ (the sound that ducks make), and by various objects, for instance, ‘boom’ (the deep sound of a bass drum). Most language is, however, arbitrary, which is to be understood as there being no natural connection, similarity, or analogy whatsoever, between words and what they refer to. Let us return to the map and territory analogy. In some very limited cases, we may want to talk about a certain degree of non-arbitrariness in language, and to that degree a verbal map may be seen as a good map. In most cases, however, whether the map is good or not may be seen as consisting of something entirely different. It seems that it is rewarding to see the goodness or badness of a verbal map as they relate to the social conventions and agreements that word meanings involve. Let us recall that, for instance, the word ‘alligator’ means to you, the reader, and to me, the author of this book, what people like you and me have agreed (in the course of our education and through talking to people, and through reading books, watching television, and so on) to call ‘an alligator’. That we refer to the animal out there in the real world as ‘alligator’ is the result of a social agreement. Our agreement could have been different. We could have agreed to call this animal out there ‘bla, bla, buba de’. In learning new words, as we do throughout our lifetime, we enter millions of social agreements about the relation between words and what they refer to. These are more or less agreements, that is, for instance, we enter an agreement that the word ‘building’ typically refers to constructions such as the ones below in Picture 24:

Picture 24

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Note the word ‘typically’ in the last sentence. The pictures depict fairly typical constructions that we call ‘buildings’ in English. Here the social agreement is fairly straightforward, and it usually works in practice, that is, in everyday communication; we usually know, more or less, what we are talking about when we use the word ‘building’. When we are faced with constructions like the one in Picture 25 below,

Picture 25

which may be seen as a non-typical, borderline example of a building, our agreement is more unstable and wobbly (see also discussion in Chapter 2). Disregarding the borderline cases, however, for the sake of our argument, we may claim that there is a fair amount of social agreement among the speakers of language communities (speakers of one language, one city dialect, one professional jargon, and so on) as to what non-verbal reality words refer to. In simple terms, when somebody utters the word ‘building’, you will normally know what kind of thing this person is talking about. This is especially true when we deal with physical objects, that is, the kinds of things that we can for example see, touch, and smell. Take some common words such as ‘clock’, ‘fork’, ‘chair’, and ‘coat’. Do we often disagree as to what these words refer to? We only do on those occasions, when we handle borderline, non-typical cases, such as the ones shown in Picture 26:

Picture 26


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Otherwise, our social agreements work pretty well and when someone says ‘I just bought a new coat’, we know fairy well what is being talked about. Although the level of disagreement about what words refer to rises significantly when we deal with very abstract terms such as love, liberation, freedom, war, occupation, and pity, still, in our use of language, we rely heavily on the social agreements that we have learned and adopted in the process of learning this kind of word. Stated another way, in spite of the different territories that words like love, liberation, freedom, war, occupation, and pity may actually represent for the different users of these words, there will be a significant amount of overlap in the territory in question. Most well-meaning people will not call ‘a spider’ what most well-meaning people usually call ‘a horse’. Likewise, most well-meaning people will not call the sort of situation where people are killing each other by thousands and where there are blood and tears everywhere ‘a peaceful situation’. If someone does, do we deal with a bad map then? My answer is yes. The latter kind of situation may be thought of as a bad map. One way of viewing bad verbal maps is to think of a word use as violating commonly accepted social agreements (see also Lutz 1997). Thus, you would be using a good map when you would be using words more or less in accordance with the social agreements that obtain in the language community that you are part of (the ‘more or less’ is an important qualification because you never know exactly what these social agreements actually are); you would be using a bad map when these agreements were violated. Are these social agreements often violated? Are they violated deliberately? Answers to both these questions seem to be positive. We are dealing here with what researchers and lay people alike often refer to as language manipulation. The best examples, in my view, come from the domain of politics and advertising. Before 1989 East Germany was officially called the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The use of the word ‘democratic’ was obviously a violation of the commonly accepted meaning (social agreement) associated with the word by most speakers of English. One of the central characteristics of ‘democracy’ was (and still is) a free election. There was no free election in the GDR; nevertheless the word ‘democratic’ was part of the name of the country. Also, in the GDR, the police were called ‘Volkspolizei’. The common agreement among the speakers of German was (and still is) that the word ‘Volk’ in German refers to the common people (folk). So, Volkspolizei, you might assume, would have referred to the kind of police that will defend or work for the ‘Volk’. In reality, Volkspolizei was an institution representing the interests of

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the ruling communist party, often persecuting the Volk, and in no way representing the Volk’s interests. Likewise, before 1989, Poland, a non-democratic country, was officially called Polska Rzeczypospolita Ludowa (Polish People’s Republic). The ‘People’ (the folk) in this name drastically violated the social agreement about the common use of the word. The common people, the folk, had nothing to say in the running of the country. The country was run by a group of people who did not represent the folk at all. I take Orwell’s famous 1984 slogans to provide us with the best examples of language manipulation ‘War is Peace’, ‘Freedom is Slavery’, and ‘Ignorance is Strength’. These may be taken to be dramatically undermining the commonly accepted social agreements about the words ‘peace’, ‘slavery’, and ‘strength’. One possible set of interpretations of the slogans is the following: when people fight, kill and maim each other – this is (should be) called ‘peace’; when you are dependent on others, when you work for free, when you get beaten for no reason, when you hardly get enough to eat, and so on – this is (should be) called ‘freedom’; when you know nothing or very little – this is (should be) called ‘strength’. Can we get any further away from the commonly accepted social agreements about the words in questions? Can we get any worse maps? As for advertisements, consider the recently widely hyped ‘free-range’ chickens (also referred to as ‘cage-free’ or ‘free-farmed’). The common social agreement about the expression ‘free-range chickens’ seems to be that the chickens run freely in the open air and spend very little time (if any) indoors. We get to hear more and more often, however, that in some farm establishments, the chickens are let free only for a few minutes a day and have very little outdoor space to use (see for instance Singer and Mason 2006). Are we dealing here with a drastic violation of social agreements associated with the expression ‘free-range chickens’? Likewise, we get to hear more and more often that some manufacturers use the label ‘fresh chickens’ to refer to chickens that have been frozen and defrosted, possibly several times, and which finally appear in the shops’ counters completely thawed and looking ‘fresh’ (see for instance Lutz 1997). Are we dealing here with a drastic violation of social agreements associated with the expression ‘fresh chickens’? Finally, as for labels drastically violating common social agreements about words in English, consider the Royal Hotel in London. The common social agreement in English about the word ‘royal’ seems to imply characteristics such as cleanliness, order, pleasant smell, large rooms, courtesy, nice dresses, gardens, sophistication, and so on. Compare these


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now with a selection of opinions that you will find on the Trip Advisor website (in July 2008) where former hotel guests express their views about this Royal Hotel. Below you will find only the titles for the shorter or longer contributions to be found on the site. The actual contributions include significantly more expressions like the ones you will find below: ‘Do not go there’, ‘Warning: stay away’, ‘Mould and dust’, ‘Crap hotel’, ‘Absolutely revolting’, ‘I wouldn’t even let a dog stay there’, ‘Terrible’, ‘For me this is the worst hotel in the world’, ‘Don’t even go there’, ‘Shabby rip-off’, ‘Horrible’. Are we dealing here with a drastic violation associated with the word ‘royal’? Is the ‘royal’ map good for you? Bad, in my sense, false verbal maps, like bad, false street maps are difficult to figure out (understand) and they are confusing. They may lead to disappointment, despair, loss of money, conflict, and so on. The kind of manipulation discussed above is easier and easier the higher on the ladder of abstraction the manipulated words are. Can we easily play around with words such as kitchen, bed, cigarette, soup? In other words, is it easy to tell people we are eating soup when we are eating potatoes and pork chops? You can certainly lie (see also the section on lying below) and tell others that you ate a pork chop while in fact you ate some soup. However, lying in cases like this can be fairly easily disclosed because both ‘soup’ and ‘pork chops’ refer to tangible objects, and the territory of these objects is relatively small; there is not really all that much that the words ‘soup’ and ‘pork chops’ refer to in the non-verbal world. In the case of high abstraction words, the situation is very different. Take words such as ‘help’, ‘comfort’, ‘compassion’, ‘grief’, ‘regret’, reliance’, for example. The territories to which these words refer are significantly larger compared to the territories covered by words such as ‘soup’ and ‘pork chops’, and these former territories may be seen as much less tangible. Consider the territories of, for example, the noun ‘reliance’, or the related verb ‘rely’. If you say to me ‘you can rely on me’, what is it that I can actually expect in terms of what you will say and do if I am in trouble and need some help? Can I easily point to (the territory of) what you will do? The answer is that I can probably list a few likely reactions of yours (for instance, you will talk to me, you will offer to spend some time with me, you will give me a call, and so on), but other than some arguable reactions like these, I will not be able to point to

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anything else relatively tangible. Will you lend me your car? Does your territory of ‘reliance’ include this? Will you invite me to stay with you if my house burns down? Will you lend me money? Will you invite me for Christmas if I am alone at home? All of these questions may get positive or negative answers depending on what the territory of ‘rely’ for individual people is. Importantly, these territories may change; they were not established once and for all when you learned the word. To put it differently, there is so much that the word ‘reliance’ may refer to other than the typical territory; the rest remains extremely large, intangible, unpredictable in actual conversation, and/or unknown. Words like ‘reliance’ are often used in advertising and politics. ‘You can rely on us’ inspires confidence and trust. The word invokes positive feelings. But what is it exactly that we can expect from someone who says or writes it? What is the territory of ‘rely’? This we may never know. The territorial size and spread (that is much territory located in different places) of words such as ‘rely’ allow the speaker to easily defend himself or herself when accused of lying. Unlike in the soup–pork chop case (when the lie is disclosed here, you are going to have a hard time convincing your interlocutor that you ate soup and thought you were eating a pork chop!), you can always claim that when you said to me ‘you can rely on me’ you had in mind a territory different from that which I may have had in mind. I may have thought that the territory of ‘rely’ includes ‘lending one’s car’; you may have thought that it did not, or, you may have thought that it did, but when I actually ask you to lend me your car, you will tell me that you had thought that it did not. The point of this (perhaps slightly difficult) example is that high abstraction words leave much room for linguistic manipulation. There is nothing we can do about it other than be aware of this fact. There is a practical conclusion emerging from the example above. We would like to know what, in a particular situation, ‘you can rely on me’ may mean in terms of tangible territory. A practical piece of advice follows. Namely, while it may not be a good idea to ask your friend to be more specific when he or she says ‘you can rely on me’ (because the promise is most probably meant to be vague), in many other cases it may. On many product labels we read ‘natural coloring’. It seems very hard to know what territory (which part of nature) ‘natural coloring’ refers to. Would you say that ‘natural coloring’ is actually a meaningful phrase to you? If not, you may want to ask the seller what ‘natural coloring’ refers to. Whether he or she will have an answer to your question is another matter. The same may be true for the ubiquitous ‘natural flavoring’. Does this phrase appear meaningful to you? If not, you may


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try to find the territory for it. I am afraid that most people almost never think about and never inquire about the territory in such cases. In restaurants, many people seem to be more curious about the territory to which all kinds of words refer. Coming across menu items such as: Creole Escargot, Voodoo Crawfish, Blackened Alligator, Cajun Popcorn, New Orleans Stuffed Mushroom, most people are likely to inquire about the territory. They want to know what territory these words and phrases refer to. This is to encourage you to check your territory more often, not only when you go to eat in an exotic food restaurant. At the end of this section, it may be useful to return for a moment to the triangle adapted from Ogden and Richards (1923), Figure 1.1, first introduced in Chapter 1. We can label a verbal map as ‘bad’ when the connection made by a speaker between symbols (the left corner of the triangle) and referents (the right corner of the triangle) deviates from the general tacit agreement among people about this connection. Again, this simply means that if most people use in English the word or symbol ‘frog’ to point to the referent like the one depicted in Picture 27 below,

Picture 27

then saying that the picture above depicts what people call ‘a zebra’ may be seen as providing a really bad map.

Lying I mentioned lying in passing above in connection with maps and territories. Let me now briefly develop our perspective on the issue of lying so we may understand it in the context of our theoretical framework.

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Some deviations from the commonly accepted connection between a symbol and its referent(s) (map and territory) may of course be fortuitous and unintended. When you say, for example, that you have just seen a horse which is grazing in the field, another person checks and thinks that there is a zebra there grazing in the field and not a horse, you may of course have made a mistake, the zebra (looked at from a distance) may have seemed to you to be a horse, and so on. In other words, disagreements about names and things, symbols and referents, occur, and not at all rarely. There may be different reasons for it. One may be a person’s perceptual deficiencies. Another might be our ignorance about what some things are normally called. Still another might be hearing deficiencies, writing deficiencies, temporary obstacles hindering our sight, and so on. These disagreements are usually non-deliberate and may be seen as relatively harmless. Disagreements for reasons like the ones mentioned above can usually be easily and quickly resolved. We do not normally call ‘lying’ these kinds of disagreements in maintaining the commonly accepted connection between words and their referents. Some deviations from what people take to be a normal connection between symbol and referent can be much more complicated and much more difficult to rectify. These deviations are often deliberate. They are meant to disorient and manipulate you as an interlocutor or listener. What I am talking about is often called ‘lying’. What people normally call ‘lying’ may be seen as a good example of providing a bad verbal map of non-verbal reality, thereby dramatically distorting the commonly accepted connection between symbol and referent. Imagine that you are driving up to a traffic light. You can clearly see that the light is red. You are about to stop because you know that the symbol ‘red light’ is to match ‘the cars need to stop’ of the real world. When you are about to stop, however, your passenger sitting in the front right seat tells you that you should proceed driving as the red light is on. You are stunned. You are confused. But the passenger then adds that you should know that ‘red light’ means ‘keep on driving’. Your passenger insists that the light is red, so you should keep on driving. Your passenger dramatically distorts and deviates from the commonly accepted agreement that ‘red light’ means ‘stop’. If you follow your passenger’s instructions and proceed through the road crossing on the red light, at least two things may follow. One is that you are fortunate and simply drive through the crossing and nothing happens. Another is, of course, that you crash. In lying discourse a similar thing happens. The commonly accepted conventions between words and referents get violated. If your friend


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tells you that he spent his vacation in Paris, and in fact he spent it in London, he is lying; the word ‘Paris’, as we commonly use it in English refers to a city in the middle of France. The word ‘Paris’ does not, again, in the common use in English, refer to a city located in the south-east of England. The fit between word and referent established a long time ago and used by millions of people has been violated. In the years between 2005–2007, some politicians and journalists in both the US and Europe expressed the opinion that the political situation in Iraq brought the country to the brink of a civil war. During more or less the same period, other politicians and journalists insisted that Iraq had already been in the state of a civil war for some time. Who was lying? If we take lying to be when a word referring to a situation in which a typical (though, as you will remember, not natural) bond between a word and its referent is violated, then what we need to do to establish whether we are dealing with a case of lying here is to check that bond. It seems much more difficult to locate the referent(s) for the words ‘civil war’ than for the words ‘Paris’ or ‘London’. We need to find out, to the extent possible, what speakers of English normally take to be the referent of ‘civil war’. If we rely on the Oxford English Dictionary, we may believe that the referent is a war: . . . between citizens of the same country. (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 2002: 416) As I say in the Dictionary section below, no dictionary reflects the complexity of meaning of any language. Dictionaries only give us typical and approximate matches between words and referents to the extent that this is possible to do through the tool of words and some pictures. Understood this way, we then take our definition of ‘civil war’ from the OED, for example, and match it against what was actually happening in Iraq. If our analysis of the referent (the situation in Iraq) fits in the definition of ‘civil war’, whoever said that there was a civil war in Iraq was not lying. If our analysis does not fit the definition, whoever said that there was not a civil war in Iraq may have been lying. Note that to say that we are dealing with a case of lying in a situation like the above may, in practice, be very difficult. One reason for this appears to be that we never know precisely what sort of definition (in our case, definition of ‘civil war’) a person has accepted. We have access to only a very limited number of these definitions: our own and perhaps one or two dictionary definitions which may deviate to some extent from ours. Another reason is that checking the referent (in our

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case, checking the situation in Iraq) and matching it against whatever definition of ‘civil war’ you might be willing to adopt, is next to impossible. We most of the time rely on others’ definitions, assessments, and opinions. Others (journalists, for example) often infer on the basis of still others’ inferences, who infer on the basis on still others’ inferences, and so on. In sum, especially in large scale political phenomena, as opposed to local, for example, family matters, whether someone lied or not – lying understood as a deliberate violation of the common fit between word and referent – may be very difficult to give evidence for. If the tangible evidence can easily be accessed, for instance, when we can see that people are killing each other, that there are numerous bodies in the streets, that there are tanks in the streets, people run around wounded, and so on, and when we then say that we are witnessing a peaceful development in the city, we are obviously lying. When, however, the referent cannot be accessed and checked, any pronouncement on whether we are dealing with a case of lying, or with liars, needs to be approached with much caution. In any event, even when we have had access to the referent, we need to keep in mind that words may be defined in different ways, and non-typically perhaps, not necessarily for vicious purposes.

Some metaphoric and metonymic expressions: How do they take us to the territory? To mislead and confuse people with words is very easy and this is actually very often done. Keeping in mind the basic distinction stressed in this book between words as maps and non-verbal reality as the territory, we may find confusing and misleading any sort of discourse situation in which the map and territory relationship is manipulated. This relationship can be manipulated because it is not natural. We may have different maps of the same territory; we may have one map referring to different territories; and the different maps may be taken by different people as good, bad, better, worse, and so on. We may use words like many other people around us, that is, to refer more or less to the same territory that they do, but we may also use words to refer to the territory that hardly anyone else uses them to refer to, and we may do it because we are funny, challenging, unorthodox, or wicked people. Nobody can fully control the way we use words in discourse. This makes us linguistically free and may make us creative, but at the same time it allows us to deliberately manipulate other people or inadvertently confuse them.


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With respect to confusing us or letting us understand things easier, how do metaphoric and metonymic expressions fare? When we attempt to put together the map and the territory, sometimes metaphors and metonymies seem to be helpful; they may lead to bringing us closer to some identifiable territory and make understanding easier; sometimes they may mislead and confuse us as well as leading to manipulation; sometimes they do neither.

Metaphor Consider the following examples of metaphoric expressions: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

You’re wasting my time. I don’t have the time to give you. How do you spend your time these days? Your position is indefensible. He’s never won an argument with her. You are using a wrong strategy in your argument.

These are all examples of what is usually called metaphor in modern cognitive linguistics (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). They show that one thing may be talked about (and thought about in fact) as if it were something else. The first three examples (1–3) illustrate the metaphoric mapping TIME IS MONEY, and the remaining three (4–6) illustrate the umbrella mapping ARGUMENT IS WAR. When we produce these kinds of metaphor, we map abstract domain things and activities onto concrete domain things and activities. ‘Time’ (very abstract domain) can be talked about as if it were ‘money’ (completely different, very concrete domain). ‘Argument’ (very abstract domain) can be talked about as if it were a ‘war’ (completely different, very concrete domain), and so on. These examples, which you will recognize as very frequent ways of saying things in English, illustrate only one type of metaphor, namely, the cases in which we talk about highly abstract ‘things’ (for instance, time) as if they were concrete tangible things (for instance, money). In English as well as in other languages we also use metaphoric expressions which allow us to talk about abstract things as if they were other kinds of abstract things (for example, ‘She drives her boyfriend out of his mind’, in the underlying metaphor LOVE IS MADNESS, the abstract madness is mapped onto the abstract love), about concrete things as if they were other kinds of concrete things (for instance, ‘My computer is crazy’, in the underlying metaphor COMPUTERS ARE PEOPLE, the

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concrete people are mapped onto concrete computers), and about concrete things as if they were abstract things (for instance, ‘This dinner was a turning point in our discussion’, in the underlying metaphor FOOD IS IDEAS, the abstract ideas are mapped onto the concrete food). We are not concerned here, however, with any of the remaining three. We are only concerned with the kind of metaphor where highly abstract ‘things’ are talked about as if they were concrete and highly tangible. This kind of metaphor is extremely frequent. Consider a few more examples: ‘We need to put aside some time for football’, ‘I don’t think we have any time left’, ‘This idea died prematurely’, ‘Could you unpack this idea for me?’, ‘Theirs is a sick relationship’. These examples may indicate that language users may be putting ideas about tangible territory and words into practice without being at all aware of how language works. Highly abstract ideas (‘things’???) labeled by words such as ‘time’, ‘life’, and ‘argument’ become meaningful when they get compared to tangible things such as money and war. The abstract-to-concrete metaphor (which predominates in the overall use of metaphor in many languages) helps people to understand each other by lowering the level of abstraction for the words included in the discourse. One type of metaphor, called personification, has the opposite effect; that is, it enhances confusion and misunderstanding. Examples of personification (where you talk, and possibly think, of abstract ‘things’ as if they were people) are listed below: ‘Only time will show’. ‘Life is treating me very badly’. ‘The past is smiling at you’, ‘The future is there to take care of you’, ‘The present predicament is robbing me of my past’. Why can these sentences be seen as confusing? They can be seen as such because they usually do not seem to mean anything at all in terms of tangible territory. When abstract things (such as ‘past’ or ‘future’) are viewed as people (people show, treat, smile, take care, and rob; time, life, the past, the future, and the present cannot do these), we are talking about the impossible. To take another example – ‘only the future will tell’ – the referent of the ‘future’, which is almost anything imaginable, obviously cannot tell anything because the word ‘future’ does not refer to a human being, and only human beings tell. The ‘future’ cannot tell us anything, so the sentence is meaningless, or confusing at best.


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Consider also: 1. ‘The university will respond to your grievances as soon as possible.’ 2. ‘The establishment is not responsible for any items stolen on its premises.’ 3. ‘This system is responsible for the failure of the students.’ Here the metaphoric mappings may be the following: 1 – Institution is People; 2 – Abstract Idea is People; and 3 – Abstract Idea is People. Who will respond? Who is not responsible? What are the referents of ‘university’, ‘establishment’, ‘the system’? Where would we find the ‘system’ if we looked for it and tried to pin it down? If we took this last question seriously, we would certainly realize that the ‘system’ should be seen as a highly abstract word and that it means next to nothing. Trying to make ‘the system’ meaningful in terms of tangible things that you can experience, we would need to climb down the ladder of abstraction. Lower on the ladder, we would find a set of laws and regulations, for instance, written documents. These documents, however, cannot be responsible for anything. Documents do not make decisions, change theirs minds, discuss issues, and so on: people do. People do these things and people establish laws and write legal documents. People are then the original source of the documents, and of the system. People are responsible. The sentence ‘This system is responsible for the failure of the students’ may thus be seen as very confusing in that it blurs the responsibility that is being talked about. Concrete people are responsible for the failure of the students and not some sort of abstract ‘system’. If you turn ‘This system is responsible for the failure of the students’ into ‘The ministerial committee consisting of seven members, who in 1994 made decisions about university education, are responsible for the failure of the students’, you are beginning to talk sense. This is so at least with respect to the word ‘system’. There still remains the phrase ‘the failure of the students’, which appears very abstract and means hardly anything. To make the latter more meaningful, we might turn it into ‘the average grade is D at the University of Wisconsin’, which would normally be taken to be much more meaningful a statement. I used the phrase ‘more meaningful’ deliberately in the previous sentence. This is to indicate again that in our entire discussion in this book, you should not think in terms of black and white (see Chapter 5). Sentences, or utterances, should not be seen as definitely meaningful or definitely meaningless, definitely difficult or definitely

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easy, and so on. They may, for example, be more or less meaningful, more or less difficult, more or less confusing, and, it must be stressed again, they may be so only to people, to individual language users. It appears then that some metaphors should be very welcome because they lower the level of abstraction, which contributes to a better understanding. Some others, however, we should be reluctant to use, unless our purpose in communicating with other people is to simply keep our channels of communication open, say something, whatever it might be, ‘shoot the breeze’, in which case trying to locate the territory and understand the interlocutor or trying to make yourself understood is not an issue.

Metonymy In what are usually called metonymic expressions, we also put two things together in a way, as in the case of metaphor, except that here, at least in typical cases, we put together two ‘things’ which we normally conceive of as relating to each other and belonging to one domain rather than two; that is, unlike when we deal with metaphor. In metonymy, we replace one thing with another which is closely associated with or related to it (see, for instance, Lakoff and Johnson 1980). When we use metonymic expressions, we operate on an ‘instead of’ principle. For example, in ‘the radio hasn’t arrived yet’, you say ‘the radio’ instead of ‘the journalists from the radio’. When we analyze metonymic expressions, we can also see that we often deal with some kind of personification, where non-human entities, such as houses and cities, are treated as human beings. Consider the following examples of personification that are often discussed under the heading of metonymy: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

‘The White House has rejected the proposal’. ‘Number 10 will have an opinion on this matter tomorrow’. ‘Paris says no to further negotiations’. ‘London will not respond until Tuesday’. ‘Europe thinks differently’. ‘The Italian love affair. The country appreciates everything about America: its cities, its celebrities and even its cowboy culture’. 7. ‘What does China think?’ 8. ‘Enron is fully corrupt’.


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In these examples, we have come up with the following swaps: 1 – place for people; 2 – place for people; 3 – city for people; 4 – city for people; 5 – continent for people; 6 – country for people; 7 – country for people; 8 – institution for people. Ordinary and competent language users process these kinds of utterances without any problem. If people’s attention is drawn to these kinds of sentences, they will certainly admit right away that ‘The White House’ has not rejected anything because ‘The White House’ is a place or a house, and houses are buildings, and buildings do not accept or reject anything: people do. Likewise, when asked to reflect for a moment on ‘London will not respond until Tuesday’, people realize that London, as a city, cannot respond, of course. It will be someone in the British government that will respond by Tuesday. Who will? Metonymic personifying expressions may be convenient vehicles to make discourse tricks blurring responsibility and hiding some facts, which may lead to confusion. Many personifying expressions like the ones above will leave us in the dark. We will not know who will do this or that, who is responsible for this or that, what or who is actually being talked about. The territory for words in this kind of expression appears to be extremely difficult to identify. In this sense, such expressions may be thought of as difficult to understand, confusing, or perhaps meaningless. Personifying metonymic expressions may be seen then as potentially contributing to confusing discourse. But it is not only personifying metonymic expressions that may be seen to do so. Consider other kinds of metonymic expressions which may be seen as equally confusing in the sense that the relationship between the map and the territory appears to have been manipulated: 9. ‘Bush will continue the fighting for another three years’. 10. ‘Solti gave a fantastic concert in Buenos Aires last year’. This kind of metonymy is often referred to as the CONTROLLER FOR CONTROLLED type (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Metonymic expressions like 9–10 above may confuse people by suggesting that the territory to which the word refers (for instance, in example 9, the person whose name is Bush) will do something, which is obviously not true because the territory in question will be a group of unidentified American soldiers; they will continue the fighting. Likewise, example 10 may be a bit confusing as well; Solti was accompanied by other artists. Solti was a conductor, and conductors cannot give concerts by themselves.

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Unlike some metaphoric expressions, metonymic expressions do not seem to enhance comprehension. Rather, they make our discourse more difficult to understand, more confusing and sometimes meaningless.

Meaning and dictionaries Many people seem to believe that whenever they do not understand a word, or are in doubt about the meaning of a word, all they need to do is consult a dictionary. Note that many people will say ‘I don’t know what this word means’, or ‘I don’t know what the meaning of this word is’, which formulations disclose the general belief that meaning is to be found in words. A good dictionary might then be the best place to find the ‘contents’ of a given word, many will think. Meaning is understood by these people to be objective, resident in words, the kind of meaning that people normally know, accept, agree about, and that you may have happened not to learn, have forgotten, or be uncertain about. For people who treat dictionaries this way (the overwhelming majority, I believe), the relationship between experience or reality and words, between territories and maps, does not seem to be an issue. Let us consider the dictionary from the point of view of the metaphor ‘the map is not the territory’ and the crucial view that words are not the things and activities that they refer to. What do we actually find in dictionaries? First of all, we need to realize that most dictionaries, even those that many people consider to be the best ones, include mainly words. We might say that these dictionaries include word entries and attempt to define these entry words with words. So, it is words, words, words about words. It is only maps; no territories. Needless to say, dictionaries cannot include territories except for cases where words themselves are seen as territories, for instance, the word ‘noun’, which may be treated as a map of or a label for a class of words. Otherwise, there is no way we could include territories in a typical dictionary. How do you put a real horse (a territory) or a real piano (a territory) into a dictionary? Some dictionaries include words (symbols) and pictures (other symbols), which invoke the territories more successfully than mere words, but still, cannot be treated as the territories themselves. Except for a few cases then, dictionaries include only words (maps, symbols) and no territories pertaining to our experiences. Looked at from the point of view of the relationship between the map and the territory, the earlier dictionaries (compiled prior to the current electronic era) could be seen as collections of words and their definitions as attempting to map mainly the compilers’ own territories or experiences, and importantly, the territories and experiences that


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people typically map onto words. The current electronic era, allowing compilations of large corpora depicting the actual usage of language in various situations, has made it possible for dictionaries to reflect a significantly larger range of usages, but still, what seems to be possible is only to reflect relatively typical usages, relatively typical mappings. In spite of the advances in electronic technology, dictionaries remain mostly words about words, no matter how much more, compared to the earlier dictionaries, people’s usage of words the current dictionaries reflect. If dictionaries include mostly words (maps) only, what about the territory? If we accept the fact that dictionaries include words that are meant to refer to typical experiences or territories, we have to keep in mind that what may be typical for one person is not typical for another; what may be typical for 100 people will not be typical for another 100 people, and so on. People’s experience, typical or not, mapped onto words varies. Sometimes it is very different; sometimes it is slightly different. Still, it varies. Looked at it from this point of view, dictionaries include information which may be seen to be a gross oversimplification. Not only do dictionaries give you almost no territory (because they cannot in principle, except for language as the territory, as I mentioned earlier), but they also give you largely oversimplified information in terms of guesses (sic!) about what kind of experience many people typically map onto words. Can anything be done about this? Not much. We can have better and worse dictionaries (see below), but no dictionary is likely to bring together even an insignificant portion of people’s experiences and the words onto which they map the experience. If we think also of how experience (and thus the meaning of words for individual people and for groups of people) is continually changing, envisaging a dictionary that could reflect the billions of relations of people’s experiences and the words they use appears to be an impossible endeavor. Are dictionaries useful then? Do they guide or misguide us? Obviously, dictionaries may be seen to be and are seen to be very useful. We have to take them, however, for what they appear to be. They are not residues of any abstract objective meaning. Neither are they residues of the whole of what words mean to people. Unlike what many people seem to believe or hope, dictionaries do not give us any exact meaning and even the best dictionaries do not solve our problems of understanding in terms of the territories that these words refer to. Dictionaries should be seen as lists of words and words about these words. These latter words are supposed to bring us closer to the territories that the former words refer to. Sometimes the latter do a good job and sometimes they do not. However, they will never be the territory and the experience itself, so they will never provide the varying experience that people actually map

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onto these words, and they will thus never tell you exactly how other people understand words. I have agreed above that dictionaries are useful. One of the reasons for this is that the words about words (these that we find on the right-hand side of the entry) may be seen as typical maps of typical experiences about which there is a significant measure of agreement among the speakers of a given language. We need to keep in mind, however, that typical meanings (typical putting together words and experiences or referents) vary. In the case of typical cases of maps relating to tangible objects such as tuxedoes, pigs, guns, and bananas; however, the agreement among people as to words and the objects that the words refer to is so remarkable that the label ‘typical’ seems to be warranted. I have stated above that no dictionary includes any tangible territory. If so, how can a dictionary be useful? Considering what we’ve discussed so far about the uncertainty of language, how can the words successfully replace the territory? An answer to this question seems to be that the words defining an entry can be less abstract than the word defined. This brings us to the question of a good and bad dictionary, again focused on the issue of how a dictionary brings the territory closer to the reader. As the actual territory (for instance, a real horse or pig) cannot be brought into the dictionary, we can only expect some sort of replacement or substitute. And the only replacement of it seems to be a word which invokes an image. Words which remain at a high level of abstraction and do not invoke an image do not seem to be very helpful when used in definitions, and thus do not seem to make good entries. If you are not familiar with botany and the word ‘clubmoss’ and would like to know what the word ‘lycopod’ refers to, will the following definition help you? Lycopod – ‘A pteridophyte of the family Lycopodiaceae; a clubmoss’. (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 2002: 1655) Does any image come to your mind that would make the word ‘lycopod’ meaningful to you? On the other hand, consider the following definition of ‘lycanthropy’: Lycanthropy – ‘a form of madness in which a person believes himself or herself to be an animal (esp. a wolf) and behaves accordingly’. (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 2002: 1655) The definition of lycanthropy seems to be much easier to understand, primarily because it invokes a number of fairly concrete images: of a person, an animal, and a wolf.


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Words which invoke images bring us closer to the actual territory, but only that; they never provide the territory itself. A good dictionary, we may assume, is thus the sort of resource which includes definitions which, in turn, include words relatively low at the ladder of abstraction, words which invoke images. These kinds of words allow the dictionary user to imagine the territory and relate the words to experience, typical or not, personal or not. When a word can be put together with tangible experience, it becomes meaningful. Otherwise it remains a set of sounds or letters on paper, no matter how familiar and frequently used these sounds or letters may be. A bad dictionary, again from our point of view, will be the sort of dictionary which includes definitions whose words do not invoke images, whose words do not appeal to any sense of your experience; that is, whose words in the definitions remain at a very high level of abstraction. The simple relationship in question seems be the following: the more words in a dictionary which invoke images in the reader’s mind (invoking the reader’s experience), the better the dictionary; that is, the better the reader understands the words in terms of real life palpable experience.

Language as an inadequate tool of handling reality As mentioned earlier, the non-verbal reality (the air, clouds, wind, steam, but also books, cars, TV sets, buildings, and so on) is seen by physicists as being in continuous flux. The little bits and pieces of matter are seen as being in continuous motion, which results in the fact that the non-verbal world changes all the time. Needless to say, some of these changes are very slow and minute, and of no practical consequences for the average human being - the changes of the physical structure of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris for instance, which can be observed over a period of two hundred years. These changes obviously take place, but they are negligible from your point of view or mine. Other changes are much faster, big and easily observed. For instance, the changes of a growing child can be easily observed, and so can those of your house before and after a party with 50 people. The child is changing all the time, which needs to be kept in mind for the rest of the argument. Also, importantly, these changes can be seen as continuous, not abrupt, not as big leaps which can be noticed between, say, the tenth and eleventh month and between the third and fourth year. These changes are gradual, though clearly noticeable over a period of time. Likewise, your house changes gradually as the party develops. It is easy to observe the changes happening. First one bottle of beer is

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opened, then a second, then a third one, and so on. First one wine glass is broken, for example, then a second one, then one type of food is gone, then someone a bit tipsy trips over your rug and makes a spot on it. The development is gradual and continuous, whether relatively slow, like in the case of the child, or quite fast, like in the case of the party. The fact that the non-verbal reality is continuously changing and that it is changing gradually and not abruptly may be seen to be crucial to support the view that language may be seen not to be a particularly reliable tool to use to talk about this non-verbal reality. My research on lay people’s perception of what they label as language problems strongly supports the view that language is seen as a highly inadequate vehicle to express our experience of the non-verbal reality (Janicki 2010). The point is that the non-verbal reality (our children, parties in our houses, cars, wars, wedding ceremonies, and millions of other things and activities) is very complicated, the structural relations among the various aspects of this reality are very complex, and to our detriment and chagrin, perhaps, language appears not to be able to reflect and handle this complexity. While non-verbal phenomena are continually changing and may be best seen as continua (that is, without our being able to identify definite ends and beginnings of these phenomena), our language suffers from at least four related problems: (1) it offers a poor set of tools (few words) to talk about the many changing things; (2) the words that we have at our disposal seem to suggest, wrongly, confusingly, and misleadingly, that these non-verbal phenomena that the words refer to are discrete, whereas in fact they should be seen as continuous; (3) many words that we have at our disposal suggest that the world is binary, that is, that we have only two options to talk about (for instance, ‘good’ and ‘bad’; see Chapter 5 for a discussion of this point), and (4) language appears static; it appears unable to catch up with the constant changes in the non-verbal world. The changes that all things living undergo may be illustrated by the following set of pictures:

a Picture 28

b

c

d

e


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In Pictures 28a–e, we are presented a variety of Elvis Presley images. In each picture he is slightly different (disregarding the clothes). In some he is a little younger than in others; his hair is different in all these pictures, and so is his face, and so on. If our language were sensitive enough to reflect the numerous changes in Elvis that are portrayed, we should have an array of words to match these changes. Elvis1 , Elvis2 , Elvis3 , Elvis4 , and so on. We could claim that only an incredibly large number of words referring to each aspect of this changing reality could correspond to the complexity of this reality. Most of the time we have only ‘Elvis Presley’ to refer to this man who was constantly changing. Words abstract and simplify reality to a dramatic degree. This may be a way to imagine the sort of confusion and difficulty in understanding that language causes. When you say ‘I have met Elvis Presley’, which Elvis Presley, which non-verbal reality, are you talking about? Given his dramatic transformation, yours is probably not the same as mine. The discreteness suggested by words, which significantly distorts nonverbal reality, may be illustrated by Picture 29:

Picture 29

In Picture 29 above you can see what most people will refer to as mountains and hills. The reality shown in the picture can be viewed as continuous in the sense that you will be unable to say exactly where a ‘hill’ finishes and a ‘mountain’ begins. The reality is continuous. The words ‘hill’ and ‘mountain’, however, appear to suggest that we can tell where one finishes and the other one begins. The non-verbal reality is continuous; the verbal means to talk about it are not. We might say that language confuses us because it inadequately simplifies things for us.

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We may reason similarly in the case of the territory referred to by, the word ‘peninsula’. We should not doubt that there is no natural distinction between the mainland and the peninsula. Where exactly would we place the borderline? Nevertheless, the two words ‘mainland’ and ‘peninsula’ suggest that we can find this place. The point illustrated by the examples above is simply this: Jerry today is not the Jerry he was yesterday, and certainly not the Jerry he was a year or two, or ten years ago. He (his body) has changed, as has every other aspect of non-verbal reality. However, we still call him Jerry. Although we sometimes spot the changes and talk about them, we never say ‘Jerry 1976 told me he ate pineapple every day . . . .’, ‘Jerry 1986 was here in Paris again . . .’, ‘Jerry 2004 bought himself a new car . . . .’. We usually use the word ‘Jerry’ only. Although the Jerry of 1976, the Jerry of 1986, and that of 2004 were different, in terms of the ever changing non-verbal reality, we use only one word – ‘Jerry’. Our language appears static, and the non-verbal reality dynamic. Our language does not offer enough words to match the complexity of reality; it does not include ‘words’ to refer to every different aspect of reality. Could it? It seems that it would not really be possible. As no two things are identical in this world (see for instance Lee 1994), for language to be able to refer to each aspect of the continuously changing reality, we would need to have a different label (one word at least) to refer to each newly evolving aspect of reality. Each word would have only a single, one time reference, a single, one time meaning. This would certainly lead to untenable communicative situations! Communication would not be possible. The fact remains, however, that when we are involved in discourse, when we utter or write words and sentences, we simplify reality to a considerable degree. There is not much we can do about it, but it is extremely important to be aware of this fact. The verbal maps that we use will give us the impression that the territory is much simpler than it actually is.

When the differences do not make a difference One of the reasons why we should not despair over the fact that the words we use are not able to reflect the complexity of the non-verbal territory is that quite a lot of the differences that can actually be seen and talked about may not really be important for all practical purposes. These differences may be seen to be negligible (Johnson, W. 1946). To return to the party example, while we could easily see the differences between the state of the house at 18:00 (when the party has just begun) and 20:00 (when the first ten bottles of beer have been drunk) and,


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say, 23:00 (when some wine was spilled and the first spot on the rug was made), the differences do not really make so much difference given what the function of a party usually is and given that the hosts are relatively normal people. In other words, to use the word ‘party’ to refer to the various stages of the occasion seems to be, for most purposes, relatively harmless. Having tens or hundreds of words to refer to the changing conditions of the house, as the evening would progress minute by minute, does not seem to be useful or necessary at all. To put it still differently, the high abstraction that we are involved in by using the word ‘party’ to call what has been going on in our house obviously simplifies the reality (you will recall that the word abstracts from many aspects of this reality), but this simplification may be quite harmless. Other abstractions, which language is the main tool for, appear, however, to be harmful, confusing, and dangerous.

When the differences do make a difference – the danger of generalizations If we agree that the option of having one single word to refer to each aspect of the ever changing reality (in which case language would be a ‘good’ tool to handle the complexity of the non-verbal reality) is unattainable and that it would, paradoxically, stop all communication, generalization appears to be a consequence. We generalize all the time because we have to. There is no other way out. When I say: ‘I picked up a loaf of bread in the local bakery this morning’, you do not know what it is exactly that I picked up; you have not seen the loaf I bought. I refer to the general category of ‘loaf of bread’, and that is fine. I generalize because if I did not, I would have to describe to you in detail the thing that I bought, or, at best, show it to you. This kind of generalization (understood as not attending to details) can be seen as quite convenient, useful and harmless, and the consequences of resorting to it positive. In other frequently encountered cases, however, the consequences may be very dire. The discourse of everyday politics offers abundant examples of the kind of sweeping generalization which may lead to such dire consequences. A salient example in my view is the phrase ‘the American people’. American politicians (especially the presidents or presidential candidates) are often talking about ‘The American people’. For example, referring to President Bush’s statement, CNNPolitics.com (2007) reports:

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‘I think I am proud of the efforts we did’, Bush said. ‘We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. That’s the problem here in America: They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.’ The president bridled at the suggestion that he has been less than forthcoming with the American people about such matters as the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the lack of any connection between the September 11, 2001 attacks and Iraq, and predictions that the war would cost about $50 billion – far short of the current $400 billion price tag. ‘I strongly reject that this administration hasn’t been straight with the American people,’ he said. ‘The minute we found out they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to say so.’ (http:// edition.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/14/bush.60.minutes/) (italics added) In a long list of quotes selected from all election-related wire stories available through Yahoo (http://www.eod.com/americanpeople/), we read, for example: Obama spokesman Bill Burton dismissed the criticism as not-forattribution complaints of staffers who aren’t knowledgeable about the campaign’s Hill coordination efforts. ‘It’s a favorite parlor game in Washington for low-level staff to take shots at anyone they can, given the opportunity,’ Burton said. ‘But as leadership aides across the Hill have confirmed even in this story, we have a constructive working relationship with the House and Senate leadership and continue to work with them to bring about the change the American people demand this November.’ (Bresnahan 2008: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11750.html) (italics added) And: Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton shot back: ‘[T]he American people know that our economic problems aren’t just in their heads. They don’t need psychological relief, they need real relief. And that’s what Barack Obama will provide as president.’ Karen Finney, the Democratic National Committee’s communications director, said: ‘What John McCain, George Bush, Phil Gramm just don’t understand is that the American people aren’t whining


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about the state of the economy; they are suffering under the weight of it – the weight of eight years of Bush-enomics that John McCain and Phil Gramm have vowed to continue’. (Allen 2008: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11658.html) (italics added) The kinds of sweeping generalizations that the phrase ‘the American people’ illustrates are intended to show how inadequate, misleading, and dramatically oversimplifying certain abstract words and sequences of words can be when they are used to refer to a very complex nonverbal reality. What can we assume the referent of ‘the American people’ is? All the American people? This is extremely unlikely. Given the complexity of the non-verbal reality (the roughly 300 000 000 Americans with all their different origins, domiciles, families, creeds, education, race, and so on), the abstract ‘The American people’ map refers to so much, that is, to so big a territory, that it may be taken to refer to nothing. When you ask the question ‘who?’, that is, if you think of the territory to which the map ‘The American people’ refers, the territory is too complex for the expression to be a helpful map. The difference among the American people makes a difference. That is why expressions such as ‘the American people’ can be seen as very poor tools to handle non-verbal reality. Note that expressions such as ‘The American people’ (or ‘the international community’, to take another salient example) could be analyzed as words at a high level of abstraction used by politicians deliberately to make their speeches equivocal, that is, to make them sound like they refer to everybody whereas in fact they refer to very few, few, or many people; we never know how many people such phrases refer to. Needless to say, we never know to whom these phrases refer. What I wish to stress at this point is that many words drastically simplify reality. We use such words, all the time, and we often have to, for instance, when we do not want to indicate exactly what we are talking about, which may not necessarily be a vicious thing to do. An awareness of how and why such words and phrases are used can diminish the harm they do. Most salient examples illustrating overgeneralizations come also from discourse reporting on events pertaining to national groups or foreigners in general. Consider the following examples: Democrat Barack Obama said Tuesday that the New Yorker magazine’s satirical cover depicting him and his wife as flag-burning, fist-bumping radicals doesn’t bother him but that it was an

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insult to Muslim Americans. (CBS News 2008: http://www.cbsnews. com/stories/2008/07/16/politics/main4264875. shtml) And, in the article entitled ‘The Poles are hastening home’ The decline of the pound has been strangely unremarked in our media; but it has been noticed by our friends from the new EU states. Working in London is no longer worth their while. They [that is, the Poles; my addition KJ] have returned home, rather to my regret – my admittedly affluent southern constituency was experiencing a massive labour shortage before they rescued us. (Hannan 2008: http:// blogs.telegraph.co.uk/ daniel_hannan/ blog/ 2008/ 06/ 25/ the_ poles_are_hastening_home) (italics added) Formulations such as ‘Muslim Americans’ and ‘The Poles’ can certainly be seen to be confusing and misleading. They can be seen as such because they largely oversimplify the non-linguistic reality. While it may in fact be true that some Muslim Americans may have been insulted, the phrase ‘Muslim Americans’ suggests that many, if not most, Muslim Americans have been insulted. Do we know how many have, or who has, actually been insulted? No, we do not: and neither does the author of the text. Likewise, the title of the article – ‘The Poles are hastening home’ – suggests that many, if not most, Poles are leaving Britain. And again, while it may by all means be true that some are actually returning to Poland, we do not know how many are, or who is, returning. In both excerpts, the impression given is that many people are involved. In all probability, most Muslims were offended, some were not, others did not even hear about the drawing, still others may be hesitating about their reaction, and so on. Likewise, for example, some Poles are returning, some are not, others are considering returning, still others are considering returning but not until a few years from now. In other words, the non-verbal reality seems to be much more complicated than the verbal expressions suggest. These expressions over-generalize and by doing so hide the distinctions which make a difference. To use the ‘map is not the territory’ metaphor, ‘Muslims’, ‘Poles’, ‘foreigners’, and so on should all be seen as highly abstract words which refer to millions or tens of millions of people, that is, to an extremely large territory. That territory is no doubt extremely varied and is constantly changing. Who are we actually talking about when we use such words as ‘Muslims’ or ‘Poles’, or ‘Americans’?


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Generalizing discourse, that is, saying things like ‘The American people want to continue the fight’, ‘The Jews do not want to give up their territory’, ‘The Poles are anti-German’, or ‘The foreigners are parasites in this country’ belongs, in my view, to the most dangerous and unrewarding linguistic behavior that we can think of. These kinds of statements simplify reality enormously. They completely disfigure or disregard the complexity and the ongoing change in the real, non-verbal world. It appears to be saliently untrue that all the American people want to continue the fight, whatever fight it might be, that all the Jews do not want to give up their territory, that all the Poles are anti-German, and that all the foreigners are parasites in whatever country is being talked about. One simple reason for the salient inadequacy of statements like these is that not all the American or Polish or Israeli people have been asked, but you only need to find one that disagrees. We simply do not know what these people think. Generalizations which give the impression that they depict reality in its complexity should be seen as misleading; they can be seen as contrary to fact. Generalizing discourse, whether produced consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or not deliberately, appears to be a clear contributor to conflict and social trouble of various kinds. We obviously need to generalize to some extent. Without it communication would not be possible. The question, however, seems to be to what extent we should do so. A scanty observation of everyday discourse or a brief browse through a daily paper (especially a tabloid) gives more than enough evidence that people generalize to an alarming degree. I see generalizing discourse as the best example of how language users disregard the relationship between the map and the territory. People seem not to care very much about the territory. ‘Poles are hospitable people’, ‘Americans can’t live without a car’, ‘Poles are thieves’, ‘Norwegians love nature’, ‘Norwegians are unfriendly’, ‘The British are polite’, and ‘The British love to talk about the weather’ may all be seen as sweeping generalizations, that is, as highly inadequate maps of the territory which is much more complex than these verbal maps might suggest. An important thing to keep in mind is that most people, when asked straightforwardly, will most likely admit that not all Poles are very hospitable people, that not all Americans can’t live without a car, that not all Poles are thieves, that not all Norwegians take walking tours every Sunday, and so on. However, most of these people will tend to act as if these sweeping generalizations were adequate maps of reality, so these generalizations, these inadequate maps, have done their damage. In other words, when approached explicitly, people will probably tell

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you that they know very well that words are not the non-verbal reality (map is not the territory), and that the reality is more complex and changing than the words to refer to it might suggest, but these same people tend to act as if they did not know it.

Chapter 3 – MAIN POINTS TO REMEMBER 1. Most people do not seem to be very aware of how language works. 2. We should be fully aware of the fact that words are not the reality to which they refer. 3. We may see words and the reality that they refer to as analogous to the map and the territory. 4. Words refer to different aspects of non-verbal reality, like maps refer to different aspects of the territory. 5. A word is always an abstraction of non-verbal reality, like a map is always an abstraction of the territory. 6. Some words are useful in some situations and others are not, like some maps are useful for our purposes and others are not. 7. We may treat as a good word map the sort of language use which conforms to the commonly accepted social agreements with respect to what words refer to; we may see as bad maps the language use which drastically deviates from such commonly accepted social agreements. 8. The more abstract the words we use, the more difficult it is to understand them, the more difficult it is to identify the tangible reality to which they might be referring, and the more difficult it is to stick (in real communication) to the social agreements that they involve. 9. Lying may be seen as deviating from the commonly accepted connections between words (maps) and what they refer to (territory). 10. Dictionaries do not tell us what the real meaning of a word or expression is. 11. Dictionary entries may be seen as mostly words about words. 12. Dictionary entries (that is, words) do not give us access to non-verbal reality. They may only make us imagine it. 13. Dictionaries include information on typical and past meanings.


14. We may view language as an inadequate tool for handling non-verbal reality. 15. Non-verbal reality is continuous; language suggests, wrongly, that it is discrete. 16. Non-verbal reality is extremely complicated and it is constantly changing; language does not reflect this complexity and change. 17. Some generalizations may be seen to be extremely dangerous because they suggest that complex phenomena are simple, that there is less variation and change than there actually is. Such generalizations unnecessarily distort our view of nonverbal reality to a disturbing degree and may lead to conflict. 18. Some metaphors may help us be understood and to understand other people. Other metaphors may exacerbate misunderstanding and confusion. 19. Metonymic expressions may make understanding more difficult because they make it more difficult to identify the territory for the discourse.

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4

Words, Words, Words . . ., and Tables, Cars and Elephants – Intensional and Extensional Orientation

Thinking that you know when in fact you don’t is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone. I believe myself that hedgehogs eat black beetles, because I have been told that they do; but if I were writing a book on the habits of hedgehogs, I should not commit myself until I had seen one enjoying this unappetizing diet. (Russell 1976: 115) What usually matters to us is what people do rather than what they say. Having read Russell’s passage, this is what we might presume should be the case. Words may be seen as mere symbols; they stand for something else. We can change them, coin new ones instantly, manipulate them, abandon them, forget them, and so on. Why should we treat them seriously? What appears to be most important to most of us is what happens to our body – whether we are for example physically unhurt and unimpeded, well fed, warm. Are words in fact often taken very seriously? Yes, they are. Words appear to be taken extremely seriously by a lot of people. Not only do people mix levels of abstraction (that is, take words for the things that they stand for; see Chapter 7), but they also attach to words so much that they often completely disregard the territory. These people tend to live largely in the realm of words and other symbols. They orient themselves toward words rather than toward what these words refer to, to word maps rather than toward the territory. These people believe what they hear about hedgehogs’ eating habits; they don’t bother to check what hedgehogs actually do eat. 88

Words, Words, Words . . . 89

Intensional orientation The people who take words very seriously and who tend to disregard the territory to which words purport to refer are seen by some scholars as living their lives with an intensional orientation (see for instance, Hayakawa 1992; Lee 1994; Kodish and Kodish 2001). They are people who take words to be very important, sometimes more important than the non-verbal reality to which the words refer. These people attach much significance to symbols, to labels. They are also people who live their lives mainly in the world of words without caring all that much about what the possible reality that these words refer to might be. When asked to explain the meaning of some words, these people will give you more words at more or less the same level of abstraction, which often means that the explanation is no better than the word or concept that is supposedly being explained. A good set of examples showing how intensionally-oriented people cherish symbols comes from a time of major political change at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1989, when the communist system throughout Eastern Europe fell, one of the first decisions taken by the incoming politicians was to change the names of streets, buildings and organizations. Many people were enthusiastic about these changes. Street names in many cities in countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary had been changed. Before 1989, they bore the names of pre1989 (mostly communist) heroes, events, or institutions; after 1989, they were assigned the names of pre-World War II heroes, events or organizations; that is, from the time before the communist system was introduced in these countries. In some instances they were assigned neutral names (see, for instance, Bartos 1994). Also many names of religious figures (largely forbidden or discouraged in the communist era) were introduced or restored. In Poland, for instance, in the city of ´ the street earlier named after Dzierzy ˙ nski ´ Poznan, (a communist) was renamed as 28 czerwca 1956 (June 28, 1956 Street; to commemorate an anti-communist uprising), the street called Armii Czerwonej (The ´ Red Army Street) before 1989 was renamed as Sw. Marcin (St Martin Street). Probably the most cogent example of an institution changing names after 1989 is that of the police. Before 1989, the police were referred to in some of the East European countries as, for instance: ‘milicja’ (Poland), ‘Veˇrejná bezpeˇcnost’ (Czech Republic), ‘mili¸tia’ (Romania). After 1989, the police were assigned the names ‘policja’, ‘policie’, and ‘poli¸tia’, respectively. The East-German label ‘Volkspolizei’ (People’s

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Police) disappeared completely after the unification of the two German states. At least for some time, the people, the buildings, the cars, and so on were exactly the same as they had been before 1989, but the name for them has changed. The change was made because quite a few people openly expressed the wish that this be done. The politicians approved probably because they realized how important symbols are to people. One of the reasons why symbols (words) were changed so quickly may have been that they are, of course, easy to change compared to changes in the non-verbal reality. A related phenomenon showing how important symbols are to people concerns monuments. As with name changes, in most East European countries after 1989, some of the monuments commemorating communist leaders and heroes were destroyed and new ones erected. Honoring different heroes with different ideologies, for instance, in ˙ nski’s ´ Poland, Dzierzy monuments were destroyed and those of Pope John Paul II were erected. A more recent example from a different part of the world is the destruction of Sadam Hussein’s monument, an event that was shown on television around the world for several weeks. Although Hussein had not been caught and could have returned to power, the destruction of the monument was taken as the destruction of the real person and his regime. Symbols can be powerful. People take them seriously. Another example of how people remain attached to words and other symbols, and thus intensionally oriented, is that relating to brand names. In the automotive industry, the quality of products has varied enormously not only across producers but also over time. Some producers managed, over the years, to gain a very good reputation due to the quality of their products. Companies such as VW, Volvo, BMW, and Mercedes produced, in the opinion of many, excellent cars for discerning customers. Recently, however, the quality of these products, has, for various reasons, undergone significant decline. This fact has been reflected in a number of recent customer satisfaction surveys published in car magazines and available on websites. Compared to the makes where producers declined, Japanese and Czech cars (and most recently Korean cars) have gained reputation for quality and reliability. Still, the sales of the VW and the other German makes as well as of the Volvo have been high in many European countries (for instance in Norway). The sales of the Kia cee’d, which is reputed by specialists to be an excellent quality car and which offers a seven year warranty, are low in Europe. Why is that so? One of the possible answers to that question is that people are buying the words or symbols ‘VW’, ‘BMW’,


‘Mercedes’, and so on disregarding the territory, or, perhaps more likely, that many people are buying the words in addition to buying the territory. They are buying the symbols for a reason, of course; these symbols give them prestige and status. A writer in Top Gear Magazine seems to fully support my analysis of the power of symbols with regard to cars: Here is a car that should change a few misconceptions. As good as anything Ford, Vauxhall or Toyota can do, yet, it’s a Kia. If you can get over your badge snobbery and its silly name, there is not much wrong with cee’d. (Top Gear Magazine 2008: 78) Reacting negatively to words like Kia and positively to those like Mercedes without much analyzing of the territory that these words refer to shows that people tend to react to at least some words as if they were alarm signals meaning basically one thing (‘leave the building immediately, without thinking, and leave everything behind’ – ‘buy this car if you can afford it and no other’!), while they should react to them as symbols abstracting highly complex non-verbal reality (see later in the chapter for a more detailed discussion of signal and symbol reactions to discourse). Buying the words often costs motorists an enormous amount of money and inconvenience. These people are intensionally oriented to a large degree; they take words very seriously, often disregarding what these words refer to. In the case of machines such as cars, we may assume that the territory is, at least to some extent, taken into account. Some people may be buying cars like the VW simply because they like the design, the comfort, or the colors perhaps. There is, in other words, in the case of cars, a tangible object in the picture no matter how big a role the buying of the word ‘Volkswagen’ may play. By the way, the VW Phaeton, the biggest and most luxurious VW vehicle, produced since 2002, does not appear to be a success at all. A reason for that, as I recall it, was, according to a newspaper, that the German word Volkswagen (English: people’s car) will never be accepted by the wealthy, for whom this car is primarily intended. In order to understand the idea of intensionality still better, consider the following philosophical text: Machination here means the makability of beings which produces as well as makes up everything, such that only in this makability the beingness of beings that are abandoned by be-ing (and by the

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grounding of its truth) determines itself. (Here makeable is thought as ‘watchable’ = watchful. And hence makability is thought in the sense of producibility). Machination means the accordance of everything with producibility, indeed in such a way that the unceasing, unconditioned reckoning of everything is pre-directed. (Heidegger 2006: 13) In this example, any tangible territory for many of the words and phrases in the text is extremely difficult to point to. Words such as ‘makability’, ‘beingness’, ‘be-ing’, ‘producibility’, and the phrase ‘the beingness of beings’ may refer to so much that they may be said to refer to nothing. Consider also the following extracts from Husserl: But not even with the domain of this intuitionally clear or obscure, distinct or indistinct, co-present – which makes up a constant halo around the field of actual perception – is the world exhausted which is ‘on hand’ for me in the manner peculiar to consciousness at every waking moment. On the contrary, in the fixed order of its being, it reaches into the unlimited. What is now perceived and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate (or at least somewhat determinate), are penetrated and surrounded by the obscurely intended to horizon of indeterminate actuality. (Husserl 1983: 52) animal realities, characterized as Bodies with a soul . . . are founded realities, which presuppose in themselves, as their lower stratum, material realities, so-called material Bodies. (Husserl 2000: 35) the Ego is constituted out of one’s own (active) position-taking, and out of one’s own habits and faculties, and consequently is an externally apperceptive unity, the kernel of which is the pure Ego. (Husserl 2000: 278) the spirit can be grasped as dependent on nature and can itself be naturalized, but only to a certain degree . . . . Subjects cannot be dissolved into nature . . . . Nature is a field of relativities throughout, and it can be so because these are always in fact relative to an absolute, the spirit, which in consequence is what sustains all the relativities. (Husserl 2000: 311) if we eliminate nature, ‘true’, Objective-intersubjective existence, there always still remains something: the spirit as individual spirit. It only loses the possibility of sociality, the possibility


of comprehension, for that presupposes a certain Bodily intersubjectivity. We would then no longer have the individual spirit as a person in the stricter, social sense, a person related to a material world and, consequently, to a personal world as well. Nevertheless we still have, notwithstanding the enormous impoverishment of personal life, precisely an Ego with its conscious life, and it even has therein its individuality, its way of judging, of valuing, of letting itself be motivated in its position-takings. (Husserl 2000: 311) In the extracts above, as in many other philosophical works, we have to tackle many words, phrases, and clauses for which locating any tangible territory will seem extremely difficult. Think of ‘indeterminate actuality’, ‘Ego’, ‘position-taking’, ‘a field of relativities’, ‘spirit being naturalized’, and so on. No wonder Bertrand Russell states that ‘. . . explicit controversy is almost fruitless in philosophy, owing to the fact that no two philosophers ever understand one another . . .’ (Russell 1926: 29; italics added), and no wonder William James sees much of philosophy as ‘words, words, words’ (reported in Chase, S. 1938: 208), which we might want to relabel as a very intensionally oriented endeavor. Intensional orientation can also be well illustrated with definitions which include words at more or less the same level of abstraction as the word defined. Many academics, especially in the domain of the humanities, provide us with examples: A consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates is referred to in this paper as a semantic prosody. (Louw 1993: 157) Montague semantics . . . a method of assigning semantic interpretations to the syntactic expressions generated by a Montague grammar (named after the American logician Richard Montague), which is a type of categorical grammar. These semantic interpretations are formulated in terms of a system of intensional logic in conjunction with possible world semantics. (Cruse 2006: 112) We borrow the term chora from Plato’s Timaeus to denote an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases . . . The chora is a modality of significance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and symbolic. (Kristeva 1997: 35–36)

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Texture – the surface qualities of the words in a passage, considered apart from their meaning . . . texture may depend on the kinds of words used (harsh, violent, peaceful, etc) or on the sounds of the words themselves. Texture is often used to introduce a critical metaphor to describe the atmosphere or effect of a piece of writing . . . (Gray 1992: 288) All these examples are meant to show that their authors have a significantly intensional orientation in their work. Most of the words that they use in their definitions do not point to anything tangible. We are dealing only with words, with symbols, and we completely or almost completely miss the territory that would make these words meaningful to us. As we will see later, things are significantly different when we as language users are oriented extensionally. Another example of intensional orientation, which has, in my view, important social consequences, is the common practice in many educational institutions of putting great emphasis on the names or labels for things, people, animals, various kinds of activities, and so on. rather than on how these function or are performed. This practice can be observed at all the three educational levels (elementary, secondary, and tertiary) in many countries of the world. For example, in elementary schools, textbooks and lessons are packed with names of animals and plants. To take linguistics, many grammars of English (for instance, Greenbaum and Quirk 1990) are packed with numerous names of grammatical phenomena (like, adjuncts, pre-modifiers, post-modifiers, pseudo-clefts, extrapositions, and so on) which the students are supposed to memorize. To be fair, these grammars and other textbooks are not only loaded with terms and their definitions, but they are also full of examples and explanations. Nevertheless, at tests and exams, teachers’ emphasis on what a construction is called, what its name is (for instance, an adjunct or a conjunct) appears obvious to me. I endorse Chase’s statement that ‘the fact that one knows the names for birds, insects or plants does not make him a competent biologist’ (Chase, S. 1938: 197). In my view, the common practice of requiring that students know what some construction is called, rather than, or, in the best case, in addition to, how it works, can be seen as a reflection of intensional orientation. I need to stress that I do not consider learning names for things to be completely useless. On the contrary, names for things allow us to talk about these things; without them we could not. However, as there may be many names for one thing (which can be frustrating for students)


these names should not be taken too seriously. It is helpful to know the name (you probably would not trust the physician who can’t remember the name of body parts!), but on balance, it seems to be much more important to know how what you are talking about works than what it is called. If you are to forget one of the two, forget the latter rather than the former. The intensional world of words seems much less important. Intensional orientation is, in my view, also encouraged when stress is placed on definitions of terms. Students of various educational levels are often forced to remember definitions and recite or write them in exams. Definitions are often taken to be very important tokens of knowledge. It is often forgotten, however, that there may be very many definitions of one term and that definitions, especially when they remain at the level of abstraction equivalent to that of the term defined, may be seen as completely useless. One word is replaced by more words; we remain intensional, at the level of words. It is often forgotten that in order that words in definitions can be meaningful, they must connect to our experience, that is, that they must become in some way extensional. Arguments about the meaning of words and their definitions, among people who appear to be intensionally oriented, I often see as a waste of time. Discussions which remain in the sphere of words not connecting with experience are often confusing or meaningless and thus may lead to nothing.

Extensional orientation Similar to intensionally oriented people, extensionally oriented people use highly abstract words. They draw inferences and make generalizations, draw conclusions, and so on. However, these latter people tend to keep in mind that words of a high level of abstraction are meant ultimately to be related to something tangible, to a territory of some kind, rather than be hung up in the air with no connection to anything on the ground. Consider the following example: Derailment – the mistaken production of a word which has the same beginning as the intended one. For example, the motorway (motorcade) passed close by me. The speaker appears to have been ‘derailed’ from his or her original intention, and uttered a word which may be more frequently used than the intended one. (Aitchison 2003: 42)

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Here you can see a connection between the highly abstract word ‘derailment’, which the author attempts to define, and ‘motorway’, ‘motorcade’, ‘production’, ‘word’, which may be seen as less abstract and closer to a tangible territory. For this reason, to take all our examples, the definition of ‘derailment’ seems much easier to understand than the definitions of semantic prosody, chora, texture, and Montague semantics, given above. One of the ways to look at the distinction between an intensional and extensional orientation is to point to the direction that the reasoning of an intensionally oriented person takes as opposed to that of an extensionally oriented person. This direction in the case of an extensionally oriented person is from doing to speaking, from tangible things to intangible things, from low level abstractions to high level abstractions, from things you can observe with your senses to, for instance, inferences, opinions, generalizations, and conclusions about them. In other words, for an extensionally oriented person, whatever you say should, to the extent possible, be testable in terms of what you can see, hear, touch, and so on. An extensionally oriented person avoids saying things he or she has no evidence for. An extensionally oriented person will avoid repeating after others opinions and gossip about other people. For an extensionally oriented person, what is important is what he or she can experience with his or her own senses, and mainly on the basis of this sense experience will he or she venture generalizations and predictions. An extensionally oriented person will tend to ask: ‘what sort of evidence do you have for what you say?’, or, ‘what do you mean?; give me some examples’. An extensionally oriented person will do his or her best to bring parties in a conversation to identify at least roughly the territory to which the words used may refer. For an extensionally oriented person, the anchor in discourse will be the tangible territory, no matter at how high a level of abstraction the speaker may be at a particular moment in conversation. In contrast to an extensionally-oriented person, for an intensionallyoriented person, words are the anchor, not the territory that these words might refer to. Intensionally oriented people do not care so much, if at all, whether the territory is identified, or even identifiable. For an intensionally oriented person the connection with the territory, if there is any, is very loose; this connection is not really important. Words are important; not so much the kinds of things, objects, and situations that they might possibly refer to. An intensionally-oriented person does not need an anchor to prevent their ship of words from floating about.


For a final illustration of the difference between an intensional definition (and orientation) and an extensional one, consider the following two passages purporting to define ‘genotext’ and ‘demurrage’ respectively: What we shall call a genotext will include semiotic processes but also the advent of the symbolic. The former includes drives, their disposition, and their division of the body, plus the ecological and social system surrounding the body, such as objects and pre-Oedipal relations with parents. The latter encompasses the emergence of object and subject, and the constitution of nuclei of meaning involving categories: semantic and categorical fields. (Kristeva 1997: 57) Demurrage – an agreed sum to be paid by the charterer to the shipowner as liquidated damages . . . for any delay beyond the time stipulated in the contract. (Curzon 1983: 106) In the first passage, the author generally operates at a very high level of abstraction (in spite of using the word ‘body’) defining ‘genotext’ with words such as ‘semiotic’, ‘process’, ‘symbolic’, ‘system’, ‘relations’, and ‘semantic’. The words in question do not seem to help us much with grasping the meaning of ‘genotext’, as intended by the author. The author’s orientation in this definitional attempt seems largely intensional. In the latter passage, however, we move from the highly abstract ‘demurrage’ to significantly less abstract ‘charterer’, ‘shipowner’, ‘damages’, ‘contract’, and so on. These latter words appeal to our tangible experience. The latter definition appears significantly more extensional, and it makes it much easier for us to know what the author is talking about. While some people more than others seem to be more fixed on words and attribute a lot of significance to them, it would probably be a mistake to claim that we can easily say who is and who is not intensionally or extensionally oriented. Some people may easily be seen as intensionally oriented; some others may be seen as extensionally oriented. Most probably, however, most people tend to move along the intensionalextensional continuum, being sometimes very intensional, sometimes very extensional, and sometimes locating themselves somewhere in between. To recapitulate, an intensionally-oriented person attaches much significance to words and tends to disregard the territory. An extensionally-oriented person, on the other hand, takes words less

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seriously and attaches much more significance to the territory to which words refer.

When can we anticipate intensionally-oriented and when extensionally-oriented discourse? Intensional and extensional orientations in discourse can sometimes be anticipated. Problems usually arise when either of the two prevails when not expected. We can expect an intensional orientation in, for example, poems and songs. Take the following examples: An Enigma, by Edgar Allan Poe ‘Seldom we find,’ says Solomon Don Dunce, ‘Half an idea in the profoundest sonnet. Through all the flimsy things we see at once As easily as through a Naples bonnet – Trash of all trash! – how can a lady don it? Yet heavier far than your Petrarchan stuffOwl-downy nonsense that the faintest puff Twirls into trunk-paper the while you con it.’ And, veritably, Sol is right enough. The general tuckermanities are arrant Bubbles – ephemeral and so transparent – But this is, now, – you may depend upon it – Stable, opaque, immortal – all by dint Of the dear names that lie concealed within’t. My life closed twice before its close, by Emily Dickinson My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me, So huge, so hopeless to conceive, As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell. Although these poems include some words which refer to tangible things (for instance, ‘trash’, ‘trunk-paper’, ‘lady’), we find in the text many words that do not refer to anything tangible; for instance, ‘half an idea’, Petrarchan stuff, owl-downy nonsense, heaven, hell, and so on.


Of course, we also hear songs or poems including lyrics referring to fairly tangible persons, things, and activities. These we can very well identify with, for example, limericks. Consider the three below: ‘There once was a lady of Siam Who said to her lover, young Brian: “If you kiss me, of course, you’ll have to use force. But, surely, you are stronger than I am.”’ ‘A lady who walked on the Corso Displayed too much of her torso. A crowd soon collected, but no one objected And some were in favor of more so.’ ‘There was a young man of Peru Who dreamt he was eating his shoe. He awoke in the night in a terrible fright And found it perfectly true’ In contrast to poems like the limericks above, which appeal to very tangible people and events, many poems (especially those using highly abstract words) are understood to have been a result of the poet’s inner feelings and are not meant to refer to or describe much tangible territory. Poems very often console, comfort, or entertain the reader, make him or her happy, interested, maybe a little drowsy. They can encourage you to meditate perhaps. In any event, it does not seem to be the case that poems are usually expected to point to any easily recognizable non-verbal territory. They may, of course, do so (as in the case of many limericks), and they sometimes certainly do so, but by no means should it be a requirement. It is often up to the reader not only to identify the obscured territory of the words the poet uses, but invent it, imagine it. Poems are not meant to be good maps of any territory. The reader is given license by the poet’s use of abstract and obscure language to find connections with the poet’s experience. The same seems to be true with many songs. They are intended to make us happy, to make us have a musical and verbal experience, to also, as in the case of poems, summon up common poetic experiences. The sounds that come out of the mouths of singers are not intended to tell us which turn to take to get back home, which street to cross to get to the next highway, and so on. Songs, like poems, are not intended to be good maps for some territory. Again, you make up your own territory, or don’t make any, and be happy!

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In other words, in the world of poems and songs, to use this example, intensional orientation is expected, normal, and usually rewarding. Songs and poems in which we could easily locate the territory are uncommon, and even in the most sophisticated pieces of music (in opera arias) the lyrics usually appear simple; they appear to be about love, betrayal, jealousy, pity, and disappointment, for example, and do not describe complicated territories of life. In most everyday small talk and conversation, extensional orientation is not usually anticipated and its lack can turn out to be rewarding. We often talk just for the sake of talking to keep the channels of communication open. Insisting that the other fellow be extensional may actually be counterproductive. That said, however, we need to realize that much of everyday talk (talking to people on the bus, talking to colleagues at work, talking to your family members, chatting with your neighbor, and so on) may be seen as sheer gibberish without much tangible content anchored in reality. Words float around like flies on a hot day in a country farm. It’s just words, words, words . . . . Extensional orientation is usually anticipated in much of life’s contexts. Needless to say, we would expect extensional orientation in scientific discourse; scientists are no doubt expected to know what territories they refer to; they are expected to know what they are talking about. This expectation is probably true for all academics. Academics, to use this high level abstraction word, do not seem to me, however, to be an exception. I assume that an extensional orientation is also expected from many people in many everyday situations. In other words, we often expect to know what others are talking about. Other than in a restricted set of discourse categories like small talk and pep talk, extensional orientation is, in my view, a frequently expected orientation, the orientation which is highly rewarding and whose lack is highly disappointing in most situations. Probably the best examples of how disappointing a lack of extensional orientation can be come from politics. Politicians are often criticized for making their speeches too abstract, whose words do not point to much (if any) concrete territory. They make their speeches highly abstract for a reason, of course; they often seem not to want to promise anything that is tangible and that they could be held responsible for. Their speeches are often considered incomprehensible and/or confusing, and we often do not know what they are talking about. Consider the following example, which is President Bush’s 2006 State of the Union Address. In this example, some passages from the speech include very abstract terms, phrases, and clauses, and, in the context of this speech, may mean


almost anything, and may thus be seen as very confusing. I marked these words, phrases, and clauses in italics: To confront the great issues before us, we must act in a spirit of good will and respect for one another. And I will do my part. BUSH: And I will do my part. Tonight the state of our Union is strong, and together we will make it stronger. (APPLAUSE) In this decisive year, you and I will make choices that determine both the future and the character of our country. We will choose to act confidently in pursuing the enemies of freedom or retreat from our duties in the hope of an easier life. We will choose to build our prosperity by leading the world economy or shut ourselves off from trade and opportunity. In a complex and challenging time, the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting, yet it ends in danger and decline. The only way to protect our people, the only way to secure the peace, the only way to control our destiny is by our leadership. So the United States of America will continue to lead. (APPLAUSE) BUSH: Abroad, our nation is committed to an historic, long-term goal: We seek the end of tyranny in our world. Some dismiss that goal as misguided idealism. In reality, the future security of America depends on it. On September the 11th, 2001, we found that problems originating in a failed and oppressive state 7,000 miles away could bring murder and destruction to our country. Dictatorships shelter terrorists, and feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of mass destruction. Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror.

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BUSH: Every step toward freedom in the world makes our country safer, and so we will act boldly in freedom’s cause. (APPLAUSE) Far from being a hopeless dream, the advance of freedom is the great story of our time. (The Washington Post.com 2006a: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/31/AR2006013101468.html) Probably the best caricature of political discourse depicting intensional orientation will be found in Sir Humprey’s impressive answers or retorts to Prime Minister Hacker’s questions or comments, in the British TV series Yes, Prime Minister. Here is one: ‘To put it simply, Prime Minister, certain informal discussions took place involving a full and frank exchange of views, out of which there arose a series of proposals which, on examination, proved to indicate certain promising lines of inquiry which, when pursued, led to the realization that the alternative courses of action might, in fact, in certain circumstances, be susceptible of discreet modification leading to a reappraisal of the areas of difference and pointing the way to encouraging possibilities of compromise and cooperation which, if bilaterally implemented with appropriate give and take on both sides might, if the climate were right, have a reasonable possibility, at the end of the day, of leading, rightly or wrongly, to a mutually satisfactory resolution’. We should not be surprised to hear Prime Minister Hacker’s reaction: ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ (Yes, Prime Minister, Series Two, episode – ‘Power to the People’). Unfortunately, parody and comedy cannot exceed the reality of some politicians!

Making your discourse easier to understand – extensional devices There seems to be little doubt about the fact that a person oriented intensionally who produces highly abstract texts and who ignores the territory to which these texts refer is often difficult to understand. The more intension, that is, the less connection between words and tangible territory, the less understanding. Extension enhances understanding but, importantly, never leads to reaching it in full. As I show in Chapter 2, we can hardly ever be understood or understand others


completely. One simple reason for this appears to be that if meaning is taken to derive from our experience, and as nobody’s experience can be duplicated by anybody else, one person’s meaning of a word will always be slightly (quite often negligibly, we must admit) different from another person’s. That said; we can always try to make ourselves better understood. There are various ways of doing so. The general principle to be adopted in trying to make ourselves better understood should be to get our discourse as close as possible to what we are trying to refer to. We should try as much as possible to reflect the complexity of the non-verbal world around us that we are talking about. We may never ultimately be successful, but we can be more successful rather than less. While some language users may not want to be well understood (see page 114 below), in what follows, I will be concerned only with these language users who want to be understood to the extent possible and who at the same time want, again, to the extent possible, to reflect the complexity of what they are talking about. To these people, the extensional devices that I list and briefly discuss may be of some help. In the discussion below I build on the extensional devices mentioned earlier by, for instance, Johnson W. 1946, Lee 1994, Kodish and Kodish 2001, Korzybski 2002. Examples Giving examples appears to be a very simple and powerful extensionalizing discourse device. Especially in the often highly abstract academic discourse, examples must be given to make high level generalizations meaningful. People (especially educators) vary in their assessment, and especially practice, of whether descriptions of tangible things and activities should precede generalizations or whether generalizations should be followed by examples referring to tangible facts. Independent of what one’s position is on this issue, examples including references to relatively tangible objects and activities appear to be one of the few extremely valuable devices contributing to a relative meaningful discourse. Take the following definition of ‘avoidance language’: Avoidance language – a linguistic variety which is used to permit social interaction between people who would otherwise be prevented from communicating with one another by strong social taboos . . . . (Trudgill 2003: 12) Is this definition meaningful to you? Do you understand it in the sense that you know what the author of this sentence is talking about?

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Now consider an example of an avoidance language: . . . In many Australian aboriginal communities there are taboos concerning communication between a man and his mother-in-law. In some such communities they are permitted to talk to one another only if they employ a special language variety, sometimes known as a mother-in-law language, in which a special reduced vocabulary is used and sometimes also a different phonological system. (Trudgill 2003: 12–13) Has the example helped? Do you now have a better understanding of what the previous general sentence was about? Note that examples are meant to lower the level of abstraction of the original discourse. They are supposed to bring you ‘down to earth’. In the preceding case, the example somewhat lowered the level of abstraction by referring to ‘Australian’, ‘aboriginal communities’, ‘a man’, ‘a mother-in-law’, and so on. If examples do not do it, that is, if they remain at a very high level of abstraction, like the original general statement, they are not much help. On the contrary, they may actually further contribute to the confusion over or meaninglessness of the previous text. Consider the following definition of ‘wild card’, including an example which, in my view, remains at a level of abstraction comparable to that of ‘wild card’: Wild card – a character that can stand for any other character in a regular expression. Wild cards allow more sophisticated searches in corpora to be carried out. For example, a concordance program could specify that the ∗ character acted as a wild card, standing in for a string of any characters of any length. (Baker et al. 2006: 168) The example in this last case does not seem to have helped in the understanding of the general statement at all. This is because it does not point to any tangible objects, people, or activities that you could easily imagine, that you have experienced, read about, that you can somehow relate to, and so on. There are many people, often referred to as intellectuals, who seem very efficient in producing statements including words at a very high level of abstraction. These people often have difficulty producing examples to illustrate their generalizing statements. They no doubt should be able to produce these examples. High level of abstraction generalizing statements will often be meaningless and confusing to most people


if they are not extensionalized. Giving examples referring to tangible things seems to be one of the best vehicles to make your discourse meaningful to others.

Indexing In the section on generalization above (see Chapter 3) and others, I stressed the facts that the non-verbal world is very complex and that it is constantly changing, and that human languages are unable to reflect completely that complexity and change. We, language users, have a tendency to attend to similarities and disregard differences. This leads to unwarranted generalizations and all the unpleasant consequences that generalizations bring about. By indexing in discourse we usually mean pointing to and trying to linguistically mark differences rather than similarities. When indexing, we keep in mind that no two cats are identical, no two college students are identical, no two cars called VW Golf are identical, no two copies of the same book are identical, and so on. And also, no one cat was exactly the same yesterday as it is today, no one student was exactly the same yesterday as he or she is today, no VW Golf was exactly the same yesterday as it is today, no copy of a book was exactly the same yesterday as it is today, and so on. No matter how trivial and unimportant some of these differences in question might be, the fact that there is no identity in this world needs to be kept in mind. The unimportant differences aside, what you take to be important differences should be attended to and expressed through discourse. Indexing in discourse may be seen as the flip side of generalization. By avoiding generalizations, which emphasize similarities thus confusing people and giving them a highly warped picture of reality, you index, you point to the differences, to the extent that the language you happen to be speaking allows it. All phenomena (such as, all people, objects, activities) are unique. When you index, you keep this fact in mind and you stress it. It follows that, in practice, indexing will help avoid generalizations As no two taxi drivers are alike, avoid talking about taxi drivers. Rather talk about the taxi drivers that you have met and talked to. Whatever you want to say about them, index, point to them, and say whatever you feel like saying about them and do not talk about others that you have never met. As no two Oxford dons are the same, do not talk about Oxford dons. Index, that is, talk about the dons that you have seen, met, talked to, and so on. You may want to give their names if you know them. As no two Poles and two Germans are the same, avoid talking about

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Poles and Germans. These should be seen as highly abstract words that are devoid of any tangible meaning. Index, talk about Mr. Kowalski and Herr Schneider. I fully realize that indexing, understood as showing through discourse that you attend to differences rather than to similarities, may be seen as a highly unrealistic endeavor. After all, most media information thrives on generalizations, unchecked facts, and disregard for details (see for instance, Davies 2008). For indexing to be taken seriously, attitudes of large groups of people, including professional organizations like media organizations, would have to shift their ways of thinking and writing. Unrealistic as our expectations for such shifts might be, we should at least be aware of what we should be doing and what most people are not doing. Most people, including many journalists, are not indexing. They thrive on telling us about similarities; they usually ignore differences. Things should be just the other way round.

Dating Dating can be seen as another useful device that allows us to make our discourse more extensional. Dating makes us remember that everything is changing all the time and that generalizing through time leads to sweeping oversimplifications. For example, to refer to countries and the wellbeing of people living in them we will be more accurate putting in the date, the year, or the decade that we may be talking about. At present people often talk about countries like the Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, and Hungary, that is, the countries in which the communist system fell in 1989, and which several years later joined NATO and the European Union. The socio-economic changes resulting from the political upheaval of 1989 have been dramatic in most of these countries. In these countries you will still find many people who lived in the capitalist system of the pre-World War II time, during World War II German occupation, the communist system, through the transition period of around 1988–1990, and the fully capitalist system of roughly the last 20 years. These observers will tell you, on the basis of their own experience, how things have been changing and how different, for instance, the Poland of 2009 is from the Poland of 1991, that of 1988, that of the 1970s, that of the 1950s, that of the 1940s, and so on. For example, before 1989, most shops were half empty and carried goods of meager quality. In 2009 Poland may boast about its huge shopping centers and a variety of the highest quality goods commonly


available. During the World War II period, it was a country terrorized by Nazis; in the late 1940s and 1950s it was a country terrorized by communists. Since 1989 it has been a free and democratic country without any political prisoners. You do not necessarily need to think of highly sensitive and vulnerable parts of the world, like central Europe, to conclude that dating is essential. You might as well go to a very stable and quiet part of the world. For example, the Norway of 1984, when I first went to see it, was very different (in terms of wealth, social relations, legal regulations, and so on) from the Norway of 2009, when I am writing this book. The changes have not been as dramatic as in central Europe, but they have been visible to the naked eye. For example, in 1984, in northern Norway, you had to go to a special beer monopoly shop to buy a bottle of beer. Now you can buy it in an ordinary supermarket. In 1994, in the second largest Norwegian city of Bergen, you were lucky to have seen expensive cars like a Mercedes, a BMW, or a Volvo in the streets. Fifteen years later, in 2009, it seems that every second car in the city is one of these. To talk about Poland or Norway is of course possible, but whatever we say about them will smack of gross overgeneralizations. Therefore, dating (for example, the Poland of 1945, the Poland of 1988, the Poland of 2009, the Norway of 1984, the Norway of 2009) helps us make our discourse less general, less confusing and more meaningful. My own first question to those people who tell me ‘Oh, I have been to Poland’, or ‘Oh, I have been to Norway’ usually is ‘When?’ Answers to this simple question, asking for dating, make our conversional more extensional. I know at least slightly better what the other fellow may be talking about.

Et cetera Using ‘et cetera’ may not be the sort of device that allows us to be better understood, but it appears to be the sort of device that allows us to indicate that what we are talking about (whatever it might be) can always be extended, should never be thought of as complete, ultimate, unquestionable, and can always be seen from a different angle, can always be talked about in different ways, and so on. Think of simple questions such as: ‘What do people do at the university?’ There is definitely no closed set of answers to this question. Whatever you think of in response to this question, the list of things that people do can always be extended. So, you can say: at the university, people (1) study, (2) think, (3) take exams, (4) pass exams,

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(5) fail exams, (6) teach, (7) read books, (8) write books, (9) spend time in libraries, (10) write papers. Could this list ever be complete? I have only listed the first ten typical activities that came to my mind. We could certainly very quickly extend the list by adding a few less typical and perhaps less frequent activities such as ‘gossip’, ‘copulate’, ‘make intrigues’, ‘sleep’, and ‘plagiarize’. Our answers to the question of ‘What do people do at the university?’ are unlikely to grasp the complexity of the phenomenon referred to as ‘university’. There is so much that people can do there. What we say people do there will depend on our perspective, our focus, on who we might be talking about (for instance, students or teachers), whether we might be talking about typical activities or marginal activities, whether we might be talking about what we have experienced ourselves or whether we might be talking about what others have told us, whether we might be talking about this institution in the past or at present, in this country or that country, and so on. ‘Et cetera’ appears to be a convenient discourse device which draws attention to the fact that things are always much more complex than we can express through discourse, that we can never say it all. The use of ‘et cetera’, with respect to general questions like ‘What do people do at the university?’, may be obvious. Less so, however, will it be in cases like ‘What did you write your BA thesis about?’ Whatever your thesis may be about and whatever you will say answering this question, ‘et cetera’ will be a rewarding discourse device to use. Even in the, say, 30 page, BA paper that you have written yourself, you yourself can find things that you did not see yesterday but see today. What you may not see in your paper, your teacher or a fellow student of yours may. In other words, although your BA paper may be very well focused and extremely well written, to claim that you have a complete knowledge of a finite list of topics that it is about may be a distortion of reality. In reply to the question of ‘what did you write your BA thesis about?’, an answer like ‘about the phenomenon of taboo, about taboo expressions in general, about taboo words in English, about how people reacted to taboo expressions in the past and how they do nowadays, et cetera’ may better express the complexity of what you actually did. Again, as in the case of the ‘university activities’, you and your readers may see your BA essay differently. You yourself may see it differently one day compared to another. What your essay may be taken to talk about can be seen as being much more complex than you first might have thought. ‘Et cetera’ helps us be aware of this complexity.


Quotes Like ‘et cetera’, quotes (or quotation marks) should make us realize that the world we are talking about is very complex and that the words that we use to talk about it inadequately express this complexity. You should now recall one of the main points that I made earlier in the book, namely that the non-verbal reality, that is, the world around us, is continuous; there are no natural cuts which could allow us to tell one thing from another. We, the language users, with the help of our minds and languages, do the cutting. Words wrongly suggest that the world is discrete, while it is not, as the physicists tell us. Tangible objects such as chairs and computers seem discrete to us and for all practical purposes they may be safely taken as such. In other words, when I say ‘I am writing this book on a computer’, the idea of the computer is discrete to the extent that you will not suspect that I might be writing on a mechanical type-writer or that I might be using paper, a feather, and ink. Putting ‘computer’ in quotes would probably be either confusing or meaningless. When it comes to more abstract discourse, however, telling one thing from another is a much more disputable issue. Telling feelings one from another, for instance, and giving these feelings names in the form of words, may be much more disputable. For instance, feelings called ‘love’, ‘affection’, ‘infatuation’, ‘admiration’, and so on are much harder to grasp and names given to them much more elusive. In terms of social agreement about the meanings of words, the agreement about ‘computer’ seems much more stable than that about ‘infatuation’. In order to indicate that there is a lower level of social agreement in the case of ‘infatuation’, that is, in order to stress that this word may be considered by some people as the right word and not as the right word by others, in order to emphasize that ‘infatuation’ refers to something very elusive about which agreement among people may be difficult to reach, we may use quotes. Quotes as an extensional discourse device may be seen as drawing our attention to the difference between words and the things they refer to, between maps and the territory. Quotes should be taken to remind us about the arbitrariness of language, that is, about how we may use different words to talk about the same thing.

Hyphens Hyphens as an extensionalizing discourse device may be seen as another modest reminder that the non-verbal reality around us should not be

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seen to be clear-cut. The world is not the way our highly inefficient language appears to suggest. Thus, to return to our previous example, we may be extensionalizing our discourse when we talk and write about ‘love-admiration’, rather than about ‘love’ or ‘admiration’, or about ‘love’ and ‘admiration’. We will be stressing the continuity of the non-verbal world when we talk or write about ‘conversation-discussion’ rather than about ‘conversation’ or ‘discussion’. I may be getting a little closer to the extensional world when I say or write about myself ‘I am a teacher-researcher’ rather than ‘I am a researcher’ or ‘I am a teacher’. The hyphen, like the quotes, does not solve any serious discourse problems. It only helps us be aware of the fact that things in the real world are more complex than our linguistic habits might suggest.

Plurals The use of plurals may sometimes help us get more extensional in the sense that it may make us realize that the world is more complicated than it may seem. For example, we talk about ‘flying’, but once we realize that each act of taking a flight is a unique experience for all the people involved, we should in fact be talking about ‘flyings’. We should be saying ‘flyings by plane may be fun’, rather than ‘flying by plane may be fun’. Contemporary English does not, however, allow this plural usage. Rather than talking about ‘teaching at Oxford University is to be improved’, we should be talking about ‘teachings at Oxford University are to be improved’. The singular form ‘teaching’ implies that all teaching is the same, which is obviously contrary to fact. ‘Teachings’ seems to imply variation, which appears to better reflect the non-verbal reality. Again, English does not allow this usage. There are plural cases, however, which contemporary English does allow. For example, we can be talking about ‘causes’ rather than ‘cause’. As the world appears to be extremely complicated and is constantly changing, it seems extremely unlikely that anything has a single cause. When we talk about ‘causes’ rather than ‘cause’, we are probably much closer to what the non-verbal extensional world is like. We are then talking more sense and are more meaningful and less confusing to others.

Quantifying terms Being more extensional can also be achieved by providing quantity, if possible. Rather than saying ‘People were there for a long time’, we will


be more extensional when we say ‘people were there for about 3 hours’. Rather than saying ‘he has published a lot of articles’, say ‘he has published around 50 articles’. This way, you make your discourse more meaningful.

To-me-ness Characteristics such as ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’, ‘smart’, ‘smooth’, ‘crucial’, and so on. are not to be found in things, people, and activities. They should be seen as our projections onto them, as our evaluations (see also Chapter 6). For us to think and to formulate our discourse so that this fact is blurred may be seen as confusing and misleading. Therefore, in order to keep as close to the real world as possible, we should stress this fact in discourse. How can this be done? It can be done by adding the phrase ‘to me’ and like sounding phrases to any statement which may be seen as evaluative. For instance, ‘she is beautiful to me’, ‘this reading room is cold to me’, and so on. Other phrases and clauses playing more or less the same role could be: ‘in my opinion’, ‘as far as I can tell’, ‘in my view’, ‘from my point of view’, ‘as I see it’, ‘I feel that’, and so on. For instance, ‘I feel that this room is really cold’. These phrases stress the fact that we are talking about an individual person’s evaluations and not about some objective facts. In this way, our discourse becomes more extensional; it depicts better the non-verbal world. Note that I suggest that one of the to-me-ness expressions be used honestly. That is, I assume that if you say, for example, ‘this story is boring to me’, you actually believe that the story may not be boring at all to other people. If you say ‘this story is boring to me’ and then are surprised that it is not to your fellow students, then your adding ‘to me’ to ‘this story is boring’ may be seen as dishonest. You simply added the words ‘to me’ (remember, they may be seen to be merely words, letters, sounds, and so on) to ‘the story is boring’, but you may still believe that the story should be boring to other people as well. Your act of adding ‘to me’ will then be a change only at the fairly insignificant verbal level without indicating any change in the non-verbal world of belief.

Visualizations I take up visualization in a separate section of this book (see Chapter 8). Therefore I do not discuss any details here. Let me only mention briefly at this point that visualization may be treated as an extremely powerful extensionalizing device. Visualization is to be understood here as

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the use of any sort of pictures. They may be mental (that is, imagined, invoked, in your mind); they may be pictures shown on the screen of your computer, pictures shown in a PowerPoint presentation, and so on. In my view, visualization contributes to understanding discourse to an extremely high degree. We should take recourse to it as much and as often as possible.

Extensional definitions Extensional definitions are the last device that I wish to mention here. As I try to show in Chapter 6, I do not find striving after definitions to be a very rewarding task. Especially when meant to seek ultimate answers to what-is-questions such as ‘what is language?’, ‘what is love?’, formulating definitions appear to me to be a misguided activity. This is not to say, however, that definitions of any sort should be seen as completely useless. Ordinary language users’ (not to speak of academics and scientists) urge for definitions seems very strong and we in fact may be able to cater to this urge. Definitions, both in everyday discourse and in academic endeavors, may be useful as long as they meet two criteria: (1) they will be treated as working definitions, that is, understood as proposals, as suggestions to treat a word this or that way for some purpose. For instance, it might be for the purpose of a discussion about crime in Oxford. And (2) they will significantly lower the level of abstraction, bringing us closer to experience, and thus making our discourse more extensional. Of interest to us here is the latter criterion. For a definition to be helpful, it must bring us down at least a little closer to the earth, closer to our experiences. Otherwise, definitions enhance confusion and may be meaningless. Let me assume that you have never come across the word ‘ontology’. Take the following definition of the word: Ontology – the branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature of being (Concise Oxford Dictionary 1999: 996) Has it helped? Will ‘metaphysics’ and ‘nature of being’ be extensionally meaningful to you? Probably not. Now take another definition of ‘ontology’. Ontology – the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of existence and the relations between things (Longman dictionary of contemporary English 1978: 762)


The latter definition appears to be a little more helpful, in my view. It seems to have helped because it has brought us closer to tangible reality, to something that we may have experienced personally (for instance, a course in philosophy at high school or university) or to which we can relate through other people’s experience (most people have had some experience related to ‘philosophy’, ‘existence’, and ‘things’). Although these words remain at a fairly high level of abstraction (we cannot touch, see, hear, or smell ‘philosophy’, ‘existence’, and ‘things’), the latter definition may have brought many of us a little closer to the earth. The latter definition brings the discourse at least a little closer to the extensional world, and makes it a bit more meaningful and less confusing. Definitions are most helpful, however, and lead us toward the extensional alley when they are operational, that is when they point to tangible behavior, to what people can do rather than what they can think, feel, surmise, and so on. This is the kind of definition that you will encounter in science. Consider the following operational definition of a ‘modern car’: ‘A modern car – a modern car is the car which has power steering, ABS brakes, ESP traction control system, nine airbags, and remote control door opening system’. Provided you know what the notions ‘power steering’, ‘ABS brakes’, and so on refer to in the real world of the car, this definition may be seen to be extremely helpful. It seems easy for us to be able to detect, in the extensional world, whether a car has power steering, ABS brakes, and so on and given the definition above, we could easily decide whether a particular car belongs to the ‘modern car’ category or not. This definition of ‘modern car’ appears very meaningful because it has served as an extensional device. Operational definitions are often easy to understand even for the layperson because they talk about things that an ordinary human being can easily relate to, about things that he or she has experienced, even if indirectly. Extensional and operational definitions are not unrelated to what others call ‘ostensive definitions’. ‘“Ostensive definition” may be defined as “any process by which a person is taught to understand a word otherwise than by the use of words”’ (Russell 1948: 78). In these types of definitions, we move away from words toward non-verbal reality. This usually improves understanding.

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Benefits of using extensional devices The benefits of using extensional devices in discourse are many. Most importantly, they point to the complexity and changing character of the world; they point to differences rather than similarities; they encourage us to attend to individual people, things and activities and thus prevent us from coming up with sweeping generalizations. Avoiding generalizations, in turn, helps protect us from intolerance, dogmatism, and prejudice. Crucially, however, extensional devices improve understanding. By using the extensional devices listed above, and possibly others, we distort the non-verbal world less than we do when we do not use these devices. Any distortion can be dangerous socially; it can lead to conflict and war. Extensionalizing discourse through the easily available devices that we have discussed may thus be seen as a small contribution toward trying to prevent such disasters.

May we sometimes not want to understand or be understood? Sometimes we may not want to be understood; we may want to be deliberately fuzzy or imprecise; we may want to deliberately equivocate and bamboozle other people. We may want to deliberately present as simple something which we see as extremely complex, or the other way round. In other words, we may want to deliberately confuse other people, mislead them and, through our confusing discourse, make them perhaps feel inferior. Many politicians around the world seem to be masters of deliberate obfuscating discourse. Many doctors and lawyers seem to be masters of producing obfuscating discourse to make us feel inferior. It increases their authority, makes us more passive, docile, and cooperative. Equivocation makes up a significant part of studies in text comprehension. Much attention has been devoted to equivocation in political discourse. It has been studied, for instance, by Buller et al. (1994), Hamilton and Mimeo (1998), and Bull (1998, 2000): These studies and many others build largely on Bavelas et al.’s (1988, 1990) theory of equivocation. According to this theory, people typically equivocate when they are faced with situations in which any answer to questions may bring about some negative consequences. In political contexts, from a politician’s point of view, confusing language may result in some benefits. It seems that many politicians see the trade-off between equivocal and confusing discourse and political gains as worth their while.


It is likely that some kind of trade-off also underlies vast stretches of discourse other than political, and, from the point of view of the speaker, a measure of benefit results. For instance, when you use the metaphoric ‘the system is responsible for the failure of the students’, you do produce confusing discourse in the sense that you do not state who is actually responsible for the failure; you obscure the responsibility. If you do not know who is responsible, you do not produce this confusing discourse deliberately. If you do know who is responsible, you are involved in a trade-off; you confused your interlocutor to some extent, but you did not disclose the real culprit whom you may want to protect. This may have come to your benefit. It may have paid for you to have produced this confusing discourse. While it seems that trade-offs are mostly beneficial to the speakers, they seem to also sometimes be advantageous to the hearers. I assume that we normally want to know more than less (that is why the benefit in cases like the one above is associated with the speaker). However, we may sometimes want to know less rather than more, and in such situations confusing discourse on the part of our interlocutor may be beneficial to us. For instance, if a colleague tells me ‘Although some staff members were for and others were against you, the department has decided to give you a research grant’, which I may take as confusing (who is the department?), I may be better off not knowing who voted against me, that is, who part of the department was. I may thus benefit from my interlocutor’s confusing, vague discourse. While we may indeed think of some situations in which not being clearly understood or not understanding other people clearly may be beneficial, in my view, the advantages of being understood and understanding other people clearly outweigh those of not understanding others and of not being understood.

Symbol and signal reactions to discourse When we hear people say things and when we ourselves say things (produce discourse) we may get entangled in a flow of words (sucked into an intensional orientation) or ponder questions about what these words mean in terms of extensional territory. In the former case, we usually end up reacting to discourse in what is known as the signal way; in the latter case, we will tend to react to discourse in what is known as the symbol way (see for instance, Hayakawa 1992; Korzybski 1933; Johnson W. 1946; Weinberg 1959; Lee 1994).

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Our awareness of the complexity of meaning and the basic fact that words do not mean anything (people do!) should lead us to a number of important conclusions. One of them appears to be that we need to be extremely conscious about how we should take words uttered or written by other people. Your interlocutor’s meanings assigned to the words that he or she uses for you to hear or read may not even be close to the sort of meanings that you yourself are likely to assign to these words. Unfortunately, we tend to react to the words addressed to us as if the meaning were in these words and as if we were correctly taking this meaning out of these words. Many people behave as if words were containers into which your interlocutor puts some meaning, and out of which you pull the same meaning, which makes them feel that they know very well the meaning of the utterance or written sentence. This conviction leads people to react to discourse the signal way. When we react to discourse the signal way, we react quickly and with not much reflection. A reaction the signal way may be seen as a kneejerk reaction. Reacting to words the signal way may also be seen as very close to reacting to sound symbols. When an alarm signal is turned on in your university building, you assume that there is a fire (unless you think that this is just a test) and you leave the building. You know what the sound means and you react to it basically in one way. The signal has one meaning. This is exactly the way that many people react to many words, the signal way. They assume that words have basically one meaning and also they assume that they know what that meaning is. They react to the word quickly without much thought. It is certainly a good idea to react to some words the signal way, for instance, when someone shouts ‘fire’, you are certainly better off leaving the building rather than starting to meditate about what that word might mean to different people. Or when a drowning person yells ‘help’, you had better jump into the water and try to save the person rather than embark upon a long thought process about what that word ‘help’ might mean to different people. In other words, in some situations people are expected to react to words the signal way, and they do so. Unfortunately, however, many people tend to react to words the signal way in many other situations in which they should not do so. These people do not seem to think at all about how much of the territory, what sort of territory, what sort of experience familiar to them, the words refer to. They do not seem to know at all, or reflect on how words may mean different things to different people. Good examples illustrating people’s unwarranted signal reaction to discourse come from advertising; advertisers count on people’s reacting


to their ads the signal way, and they seem to be quite successful in their endeavors. Consider the following selection of advertising statements. They have been taken from advertising pages encouraging us to buy books. ‘A masterpiece’ (Sunday Times), ‘An original and unforgettable story brimming with passion, vitality and hope’ (Xinram), ‘A wild, passionate fearless writer’ (The New York Times), ‘An extraordinary achievement’ (The Independent), ‘A masterpiece, utterly exceptional in every way’ (Harpers and Queen), ‘The most exquisite of bookish pleasures’ (Time Out), ‘A wonder indeed . . . remarkable’ (Anita Shreve), ‘A beautiful and engrossing work’ (Independent on Sunday), ‘The magnificent, poignant, fascinating novel of three generations that starts in Mandalay . . .’. In almost any book blurb you will find positive advertising statements either signed, as in most of the examples above, or not signed, as in the last example in the list. These blurbs are usually full of emotionally charged adjectives (such as ‘unforgettable’, ‘exquisite’, ‘fascinating’) meant to stimulate your emotions. A person fully aware of how discourse works will know that these highly emotionally-charged words express individual evaluations of the authors (see also Chapter 6 on the ‘is’ of predication), even in a case like the last one on our list where the evaluation is presented anonymously. Many of us, will, unfortunately, fall victim to signal reaction and take other people’s evaluations for our own. When we react the signal way, we have the tendency to think that what The Times (that is in fact a journalist writing for The Times newspaper) evaluates as, for example, ‘magnificent’, we will as well. And we end up buying the book. It is only after we have read it that we realize that the word ‘magnificent’ for The Times journalist may have meant something entirely different than what it means to us. We get disappointed and think that we have wasted money on the book or that we have been manipulated through discourse. Take two other examples of words arousing high emotions which advertisers hope will make us react the signal way. On February 26, 2008, the South East of England was hit by a very minor earthquake. The epicenter was about 200 kilometers north of London, in Lincolnshire. The only damage that was reported by the BBC on the morning of February 27 was a chimney having collapsed in the epicenter town. The BBC reporters providing the breakfast news on this day laughed and admitted that that was not really much of an earth-shake at all. On February 27, however, the London blue-box billboards advertising newspapers said: ‘Quake hits London’. On the following day, they said: ‘Quake shakes London’. Needless to say, walking around London you could not find

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even the slightest trace of an earthquake. The advertising words sound very emotional and scary, don’t they? How many people fell for them, reacted the signal way and bought the paper? Advertising agencies use us as prey to signal reactions when they promote items as ‘first’, ‘super’, ‘premium’. For instance, Sainsbury’s rum is advertised as ‘Sainsbury’s Superior Dark Rum’ and ‘Sainsbury’s Superior White Rum’. By the way, both have a very low price, so it seems extremely unlikely that they are in any sense superior. This is how they are marketed, however. Sainsbury’s Classic Cola is advertised as having ‘a distinctive premium taste’ (bold font original) and ’natural flavourings’. Of course, the intention of the advertiser is to appeal to your common usage of words and to make you fall for and become victim to words like ‘premium’ and ‘natural’. Who doesn’t want to drink something that is ‘superior’ or ‘premium’? If you succumb to signal reaction, you obviously will. Who doesn’t want natural flavors? If you succumb to signal reaction, you obviously will. If we do not think for a while about what words such as ‘magnificent’, ‘exciting’, ‘remarkable’, ‘extraordinary’, ‘premium’, ‘super’, and so on may mean to us rather than to the people who want to sell the product, we are likely to produce perfect examples of signal reaction. We need to realize that most advertisements can be seen as bamboozling and discombobulating. One of the main reasons for this is that the words in them, as we read or hear them, lack verifiable meanings. That is, they play on our emotions and they can mean anything. Language used in advertisements may be seen, as Hayakawa put it, as ‘verbal smoke screens’ (Hayakawa 1950: 113). The advertisers do not want you to think about what lurks behind the words used in the advertisements. They want you to take the words for non-verbal reality. They want to confuse you; they want you to confuse the map with the territory. If you react in the signal way and fall victim to advertising tricks, you are buying . . . words. You like the words because for you they bring positive associations. The advertisers have tricked you and sold you the words. You have bought a map but have no idea of what kind of territory it is. You do not know what city this is a map of. You ordered a meal because you liked the name of the dish on the menu. You may have ended up in London (although you wanted to go to Calcutta), and you may have eaten a pork chop (although you thought you were getting a pasta). Like advertisers, politicians and political journalists also use many emotionally-charged words to arouse the readers’, listeners’, or viewers’


signal reaction. Words that they often haste to use include ‘traitors’, ‘rogues’, ‘corruption’, ‘war’, devastation’, ‘lies’, ‘costs’, ‘huge problem’, and so on. Consider the following: The great lie . . . Labour insists the recent mass influx of migrants benefits our economy. As this devastating analysis shows, immigration actually COSTS Britain money, disguises the true extent of unemployment and, as boom turns to bust, could cause huge social problems. (Nelson 2008: 16, original capital letters in COST, italics added) Words intended to arouse a signal reaction may also be positively charged, when they are geared toward arousing a positive reaction toward a person, institution, policy, for example. As Theil (2007) reports, the current SPD leaders in Germany instructed their minister in Angela Merkel’s coalition government to ‘boost unemployment benefits for older voters’ (Theil 2007: 37) and promote their endeavors for social justice. ‘Angela Merkel’s agenda is all but finished. Germans now prefer ‘social justice’. Whatever it means . . . Now that the Schröder agenda is finally buried, the party – under its chairman and now all-but-sure candidate for chancellor in 2009, Rhineland-Palatinate Gov. Kurt Beck – can once again wholeheartedly campaign for ‘social justice’ as in days of old’ (Theil 2007: 37, italics added). Note that the author himself appears to be fully aware of the fact that ‘social justice’, being a phrase at a very high level of abstraction, may mean many different things to different people (‘whatever it means’), and he would probably agree that it can be used as a prompt to a signal reaction. In both cited texts, the words inviting a signal reaction were very likely to bamboozle the reader, to make him or her immediately develop negative or positive emotions without much thought about what stands behind the words used in the texts, without much thinking about the connection between the words as symbols and what they actually do, as intended by the writer, or what they may, as intended by other people, refer to. When you react to a text the signal way, you do not reflect on what words might mean; you react to them as if meaning were in those words. What actually happens is that you react to these words as what they mean to you, whatever they might mean to the person who wrote or said them. As for most well-meaning people, words such as ‘war’, ‘quake’, ‘terror’, ‘traitor’, ’revenge’, and so on take them to ugly and unpleasant experiences, we tend to react negatively, whatever the nonverbal reality that these words referred to for the author. Words such

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as ‘good’, ‘benevolence’, ’peace’, ‘compassion’ take most well-meaning people to nice and pleasant experiences; we tend to react to such words positively. We usually do not analyze what might stand behind these words; we get trapped by them. As opposed to signal reaction, we will be much better off reacting to discourse the symbol way. This brings us back to the initial sections of this book in which I stressed that linguists agree to see language as a symbolic system, that is, as a system of symbols standing for something else. Importantly, as you will remember, people (let us say speakers of one language), learn the meaning of the symbols of their language under highly varying and continuously changing circumstances which, in turn, means that people put together symbols and the reality to which they refer in different ways. This means that words mean different things to different people, no matter how much similarity of meaning we can actually observe. That one word used in discourse may mean, and often does mean, different things to different people is crucial for our understanding of how we should react to discourse the symbol way. In the signal way reaction, people react to words as if they meant one and the same thing to everybody. In the symbol way reaction, people react to words in an entirely different way. Here, people are aware of the fact that words in discourse should be seen as symbols, which translates into the awareness of the many different things words can mean to different people. This awareness leads people, first of all, to a delayed reaction to words (see, for instance Johnson, W. 1946). This delayed reaction is necessary because we need some time for reflection on what sort of territory or territories the maps we are given (the words) refer to. Consider the following text, posted in March 2008 in the West End area in the centre of Oxford, on a building site fence, and meant (I assume) to encourage people to appreciate and feel good about the new project. The Renaissance of the West End is an ambitious and exciting project which aims to totally transform this part of the city center, returning to its former role as the Civic Heart of Oxford. The vision calls for the creation of a vibrant, lively city quarter with a mix of uses and facilities, and exciting open spaces. BONN SQUARE is a key project within West End and its redevelopment will set the tone for the future complexion of the area, prior to the rebuilding of the Westgate Centre. The West End renaissance is not just about buildings and their uses, but about creating a community that can mature. The aim is to create


DYNAMIC SUSTAINABLE and welcoming environments for the people who live, work, study and spend leisure time here – focal points for Oxford’s energy and diversity (italics added) Note the large number of emotionally charged words (mainly adjectives) in this text. Is it likely that you will reject the project if you react to words such as ‘ambitious’, ‘exciting’, and ‘welcoming’ in a signal way? Don’t all of these words sound positive to you? If you react to this text in a signal way, will you ask yourself questions such as ‘what do I consider to be exciting?’, ‘what does ambition consist of in this case?’, ‘in what way will the center make the place vibrant; what do I consider to be vibrant?’, ‘what does “energy” mean in this context and to whom?’. If you react to the text in a symbol way, you are very likely to think about all these questions and others. Answers to these questions may make you fully support the project (which the entrepreneurs obviously want), reject it, feel lukewarm about it, and so on. All of these questions may be seen as questions relating words to reality, maps to the territories. The question of this basic relation comes up all the time; not fortuitously, we must add, because it appears to be the basic question in discourse in general and in confusing, difficult and meaningless discourse in particular. For discourse to be held in check, you need to be continuously aware of and attend to the relationship between words as symbols and the non-verbal reality that they refer to. Otherwise you lose track of what’s being said or written to you or what you are saying yourself. Keeping track of what the words addressed actually refer to allows you to avoid being manipulated by language. Your awareness of the relationship between words and nonverbal reality may be seen as what many advertisers do not want. They want you to react the signal way to that which you should react to the symbol way. Oxbridge, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, supplies us with yet another good example of how people tend to react the signal rather than the symbol way. Due to the widely accepted good reputation associated with these two universities, which can be traced back to the medieval times, the words ‘Oxbridge’, ‘Oxford’ and ‘Cambridge’ usually evoke a very positive signal reaction. For example, when my wife told an acquaintance over the telephone that I was staying and writing my book in Oxford, his first (signal, I would assume) reaction was ‘oh, I do not aspire to such places’. To people such as my acquaintance, Oxford and Cambridge seem to be immediately associated with excellent education, teachers, students, working and studying conditions, job opportunities,

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and so on, which appears to be documented by their signal reaction. While all of these may actually be true to an extent, when we react the symbol way and bother to check the words (the map) against what they refer to (the territory), we may get at least a slightly different picture. Ellis (1995), in his compelling book entitled The Oxbridge Conspiracy, gives a lot of evidence for the view that reacting the symbol way may be a very rewarding approach. While admitting that Oxbridge collects quite a number of smart and hard-working people, the author gives a great deal of evidence that Oxbridge also groups students for whom going to parties and spending their time leisurely may be much more important than gaining professional knowledge. I myself have experienced much of the territory called ‘Oxford’. In addition to an impressive (to me!) book collection and attractive (to me!) buildings, the territory I saw included very uncomfortable (to me!) chairs in some libraries (which give you a backache after a few minutes), constant noise (heard by people other than me as well, I am sure) caused by drilling and hammering, missing important (to me!) books in the library collection, uninspiring and cheap (to me!) architecture for some of the new buildings, a very uninspiring (to me!) talk offered by a celebrity, presented in a very formal (to me and many others, I think!) fashion and couched in an utmost ceremonial (to me and many others, I think!) gear (such as gowns and processions), and so on. Whenever you hear the word ‘Oxford’ for example, think of what the symbol actually refers to. Think of what Ellis and I tell you and of other positive and negative aspects of the territory that the word may possibly refer to. This way you exhibit a symbol reaction.

Chapter 4 – MAIN POINTS TO REMEMBER 1. We call ‘intensionally oriented’ the people who tend to attribute more significance to words or other symbols than to what these words or other symbols stand for. 2. Intensional-extensional orientation should be understood as a continuum; there are people who are typically intensionally oriented; there are others who are typically extensionally oriented; and there are still others (probably, the majority) who move along the continuum of intensionality-extensionality in the various situations in which they find themselves on different occasions.


3. Some people (for instance, some poets and philosophers) do not seem to attach any significance to tangible reality at all. 4. For many people symbols are extremely important. For these people, changing symbols may count as short of changing the reality to which these symbols refer. 5. Extensionally oriented people, like intensionally oriented ones, use highly abstract words. However, the former, unlike the latter, always try (by different means, for instance, by giving examples) to point to tangible non-verbal reality. 6. An extensionally oriented person keeps in mind that words should be treated as abstractions of what is largely a nonverbal reality; an intensionally oriented person seems to be unaware of this or often disregards this fact. 7. An extensionally oriented person tends to expect tangible evidence of what is being said. 8. In some genres (for instance, poetry), intensional orientation may be expected and is generally harmless. In others (for instance, in academic papers, political speeches) intensional orientation should not be expected and it may be harmful. 9. We may call ‘extensional definitions’ the kinds of definitions which bring us closer (than the word defined) to the tangible non-verbal reality. 10. Extensional discourse may be carried out with the help of a number of extensional devices. The following appear to be the most powerful ones: examples, dating, et cetera, quotes, hyphens, plurals, quantifying terms, to-me-ness, and visualizations. 11. Extensional devices make us aware of the complexity and changing character of the world; they prevent us from making sweeping generalizations. 12. Sometimes confusing discourse may turn out to be beneficial to the speaker or hearer; a trade-off between confusing discourse and social gain seems, however, much more often beneficial to the speaker than to the hearer. 13. When people react to discourse the signal way, they do not reflect on the complexity of the reality to which discourse (words) may refer; the signal reaction may be seen as a hasty and often premature reaction. 14. When people react to discourse the symbol way, they reflect on the complexity of the reality to which discourse (words)

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may refer; the symbol reaction may be seen as a delayed reaction. 15. The signal reaction is very often observed in people’s reaction to advertisements and commercials. 16. Also some politicians and political journalists tend to expect people to fall prey to signal reaction.

5 The Good Guys and the Bad Guys – Two-Valued and Multi-Valued Orientation

There are people who tend to think in terms of opposites – black and white, good guys and bad guys, and so on. There are others who tend to doubt that the world around us can be adequately grasped in terms of such opposites. There are still others who tend to mix these two approaches. The third group of people often realizes that viewing phenomena in terms of opposites simplifies matters considerably and that we often in fact face gray areas and continua rather than two clear-cut opposites. Thinking in terms of opposites (which may be seen as reflecting a philosophical and psychological position referred to as essentialism, Hallett 1991) appears to be deeply ingrained in many people’s minds (see for instance, Janicki 2006). Such thinking can be traced back thousands of years (at least to Aristotle, in the history of philosophy) and is taken by many to be a natural approach to the world around us (see Medin and Ortony 1989). We often talk about two-valued (two opposites) or multi-valued orientation. Although there is probably nobody who is exclusively two-valued or multi-valued oriented, many of us exhibit a tendency one way or the other. It is our languages (including English) that often drag us into the world of opposites.

Two-valued orientation One of the most salient traits of discourse produced in English and many other languages seems to be its bi-polarity. For instance, in much discourse, most significantly in socio-political discourse, we face the well-known Us and Others or Them distinction (Duszak 2002). In most discourse you will find a plethora of expressions that indicate that something or someone may be one way or the other. The definite article the 125

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needs to be stressed here. Note that I wrote the other and not another. Take the following examples: 1. She is beautiful. 2. He is tall. 3. The road is narrow. 4. That hill is steep. 5. Her English teacher is good. 6. This place is cold. 7. These colors are bright. 8. This course was excellent. Needless to say, what these examples appear to suggest is that ‘she might not be, or someone else is not beautiful’, that ‘he might not be or someone else is not tall’, and so on. The obvious counterparts of the words above that any competent speaker of English would normally think of appear to be: ugly, short, broad, flat, bad, warm, dark, and poor, respectively. In the way that the English word stock, and that of many other languages, has developed, these pairs of words and the corresponding words in many other languages suggest that someone may be beautiful or ugly, tall or short, that something may be steep or flat, good or bad, and so on. Of course, English, again like many other languages, allows you to express degrees of beauty, ugliness, flatness, and so on. For instance, we say in English ‘she is more beautiful now than she was when she was 25’, or ‘this hill is much steeper than the one we climbed the other day’. Still, the fact remains that the use of pairs of words like ‘beautiful-ugly’ and ‘steep-flat’ suggest that we are dealing with a major two-valued reality, leading to our two-valued orientation (see for instance, Hayakawa 1992; Kodish and Kodish 2001). What reinforces this two-valued orientation is the fact that the bi-polarity is lexicalized; that is, we have two different words (for instance, ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’) to stress the bi-polarity but no such words to express the continuity; we have no words, that is, to replace or correspond to ‘more beautiful’, ‘less beautiful’, ‘much more ugly’, and so on. We still use the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ that invoke the basic bi-polarity. And the use of these words in trying to express continuity does matter. What we have words for we tend to take as more important than that which we have no words for. This seems very unfortunate; words tend to be very powerful in that a pair of opposing words such as ‘steep’ and ‘flat’ strongly suggest to our vulnerable minds that the non-verbal reality (the territory) to which these words (the map) refer is bi-polar as well. As I tried to show at the beginning of this book, any verbal division of the non-verbal reality (not to speak of bi-polar division!) appears to natural scientists to be a gross oversimplification. The reality around does not appear to be bipolar at all. Consider again the steepness of hills such as these depicted in Pictures 30a–d below:

The Good Guys and the Bad Guys

a

b

c

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d

Picture 30

We, the language users, impose our mental categories or concepts (and then find words like ‘steep’ and ‘flat’ for them) on the reality depicted in the pictures. With the help of our language, producing discourse, we cut the reality around us into bits and pieces. Looking at Pictures 30a–d, we may certainly see various degrees of steepness or flatness. Unfortunately, by supplying pairs of words such as ‘steep’ and ‘flat’, languages such as English tend to force us into cutting reality in a bi-polar way, into two opposing alternatives. This kind of cutting simplifies reality enormously. That is why we can claim that using pairs of words such as ‘steep’ and ‘flat’, and ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ may be seen as misleading, or confusing. Such pairs of words abet a highly warped view of the world; they encourage us to cut the territory into two discrete categories. The territory cannot defend itself, so it gets cut into two categories! This two-valued orientation, reflected in the vocabulary of many languages (note the German ‘schön’ and ‘hässlich’, Norwegian ‘pen’ and ‘styg’, Polish ‘pi˛ekny’ and ‘brzydki’, for example; all meaning ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’, respectively), appears to be a result of a very long tradition which, in the history of philosophy, can be traced back, as mentioned above, at least to Aristotle. When invoking Aristotle, however, we need to make a distinction between two-valued logic and two-valued orientation. Aristotle, as far as we can tell, was concerned with logic, ‘the laws of thought’, as Weinberg (1959) puts it, or with ‘a set of rules governing consistency in the use of a language’ (original italics), as Hayakawa (1992: 121) does. According to Weinberg, the very famous Aristotelian logical system can be formulated in terms of the following three laws: 1. A is A – the law of identity 2. Anything is either A or not A – the law of the excluded middle 3. Something cannot be both A and not-A – the law of non-identity. (Weinberg 1959: 82) These three laws can be very well illustrated with our use of language when we talk about mathematics. Take five and five. Five plus five equals

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ten. The answer ten is the correct answer, and any other answer is wrong. You either get the right answer (ten) or a wrong answer (anything other than ten). This type of logic can be referred to as bi-polar, two-valued. You either get a right or a wrong answer. Note, however, that when you say that five plus five equals ten, you deal with language only. You do not talk about any aspect of non-verbal reality. What you do in fact is say that putting the words five (or 5, which can be treated simply as another way of writing ‘five’) and five (5) together yields the word ten. We remain here entirely within the realm of language, be it sounds or graphic symbols such as the English ‘five’, the German ‘fünf’, the Polish ‘pi˛ec´ ’, the Norwegian ‘fem’, or ‘5’. What we can state about ‘five plus five equals ten’, which we can judge to be either false or true, going the bipolar way, is that speakers of English have agreed to call (give the name) ‘ten’ (to) the result of putting ‘five’ and ‘five’ together. This agreement has been reached with respect to the use of words at a very high level of abstraction. Note that five or ten may refer to absolutely anything. If you say ‘five’, you produce a word, you say it or write it. But in terms of tangible non-linguistic reality nobody knows (including yourself, of course) what you are talking about. At a very high level of abstraction at which we use words and numbers without any specific reference to tangible reality, we may and in fact do operate with two-valued logic and certainty. The latter may be seen as springing from the former. When you say ‘five plus five equals ten’, you do not indicate at all whether you are talking about cows, or cars, or heads of lettuce. Obviously, five heads of lettuce and five cars equals neither ten cars nor ten heads of lettuce, but this tangible reality fact is totally irrelevant to the fact that mathematicians have agreed to call ‘five plus five’ ten. When tangible reality is of no importance in the use of words, only internal rules of language matter, and ‘five plus five is ten’ may be seen as such an internal rule of language. Things look very different when we start considering the real non-symbolic, non-verbal, non-numerical world and begin asking questions about what a given number may refer to in the non-verbal tangible world. The certainty and the two-valued logic seem to disappear. They do not apply any longer. Einstein’s words should be remembered: ‘As far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality’ (Einstein 1954: 233). Why do we begin to lose the certainty and why does two-valued logic cease to work when we start connecting numbers to real non-verbal world things? Looking for a possible answer to this question may take us back to the complexity and continuity of the world and to the fact


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that it changes all the time. It may also take us back to the phenomenon of abstraction. Simply put again, we as individuals perceive the reality around us in different (though to some extent similar, of course) ways; we cut it differently, and we give and use different names (words) to refer to these cut-out aspects of reality. This means that what may be ‘five dogs’ for you may be ‘three dogs’ and ‘two puppies’ for me. What may be ‘two towns’ for you may for me be ‘one city’ and ‘one town’. What for you may be ‘five applies’, as depicted in Picture 31 below,

Picture 31

may, for me, be ‘three apples’ and ‘two apple cores’. We may agree on what makes an apple, as we often do, of course, but we occasionally (or quite often???) do not. We may be talking about five apples (and not other things) once we have agreed to call these kinds of things depicted in Picture 31 ‘apples’. Mathematicians do not deal with our disagreements as to what we want to call an apple or what we do not. For them our disagreements are irrelevant. They make the assumption that ‘five’ of something that we have agreed to have five of and ‘five’ of something else that we have agreed to have five of equals ten of whatever it was that we have agreed to have five and five of. If you apply Aristotelian logic to non-verbal reality, you may find yourself in trouble. According to people adopting the Aristotelian way of reasoning, you cannot be in love and at the same time not be in love; your bicycle cannot be a bicycle and a car at the same time, compassion is compassion, and it should not be mixed with pity; one option or the other. Real life situations do not, however, fit into this convenient (one might think) bi-polar pattern. In real life, you may feel sort of in love, in love to a degree, or in love in some ways, and not in love in others. A bicycle does not necessarily cease to be a car. In other words, the word ‘car’ may be used with reference to what is normally referred to as a bicycle; the woman depicted in Picture 32 below

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Picture 32

while looking at the lady depicted in Picture 33, and while pointing at her own bicycle

Picture 33

may very well say: ‘this is my car’. The word ‘car’ would not be used here in a typical way, but still, its meaning would be perfectly well understood (the woman in the car might, obviously, refer to her car as ‘bicycle’ indicating that she uses her car as one uses his or her bicycle). This simple example shows that in real life A is not necessarily A (a car is not necessarily a car). Cars may be bicycles and bicycles may be cars. In other words, it is not true that something is a car and only a car, a bicycle and only a bicycle, and so on. In real (non-verbal) life, rather than talking about two-valued logic, we will find it more rewarding to talk about two (or multi)-valued orientation. In spite of the fact that viewing the world in bi-polar terms does not seem to be rewarding and in spite of the fact that it simply


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seems wrong, there are many people who tend to handle the world in bi-polar terms, as if they were involved in doing logical or mathematical exercises. In this way, they simplify what appears to be very complex. Although this Aristotelian way of viewing the world seems to have been slowly losing its clout over the last decades, in some parts of the world, including most of the Western world, it still appears to be quite strong. Many people still appear to believe that the world may be seen as bi-polar, which is, according to these people, adequately reflected in language. Opposing pairs of words such as ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ are taken then to reflect what is believed to be some sort of natural division in the non-verbal reality that these words refer to. One of the best pieces of evidence showing that bi-polar, two-valued orientation is still a commonly accepted stance toward the world and that the bi-polar pairs of words such as ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ remain largely unchallenged may be the popularity of the TV soap opera genre. As we know, its popularity around the world is enormous, and, as far as I can tell, not only among the uneducated people. We may claim with a fair amount of certainty that one of the characteristics of the soap opera that attracts so many people is that its characters are usually set up as villains and benevolent people, the ugly and the beautiful, the honest ones and the crooks, the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’. These programs simplify reality enormously. Nevertheless, millions of people around the world fall for them. A bi-polar view of the world, realized through discourse and words such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, appeals to them. They seem to think that the bi-polar pairs of words depict the world as it really is; which seems completely untrue. Two-valued orientation is often encouraged by statements we hear on the radio or television or read in books or newspapers. We hear them from people who are well known and considered by some as worth quoting. We also find many examples in collections of sayings (for instance, Latin) and proverbs. Consider the following selection of statements: ‘Aut odit aut amat mulier, nihil est tertium’ (Syrus) (A woman either hates or loves; there is nothing in between.) ‘Aut regem, aut fátuum nasci oportet’ (Seneca) (You should get born as a king or an idiot) ‘Aut vincere, aut mori’ (Latin proverb) (Win or die) ‘If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.’ (Margaret Thatcher) ‘We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.’ (Hazlitt)

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‘I can promise to be sincere but not to be impartial.’ (Goethe) ‘Kindness is in our power, but fondness is not.’ (Dr. Johnson) ‘Vows begin when hope dies.’ (Leonardo da Vinci) ‘Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.’ (Mark Twain) ‘One chops the wood, the other does the grunting.’ (Yiddish proverb) ‘He who fondles you more than usual has either deceived you or wants to do so’ (French proverb) Consider also the contorted Benchley quote: There may be said to be two classes of people in the world: those that constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not (Benchley) There is little doubt that two-valued orientation can be very well illustrated by political discourse, as is attested, for example, by Duszak (2002). In connection with the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on US cities and the then approaching second war in Iraq, US President George W. Bush’s 2001 statement ,‘You are either with us or against us’ (CNN.com/US 2001: http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen. attack.on.terror/), seems to be the best known example of two-valued orientation in recent world politics. Much more recently, during the 2008 US presidential election campaign, governor Sarah Palin said: ‘We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.’ (CNNPolitics.com 2008: http:// politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/category/sarah-palin/, italics added.) In the same campaign, Senator Robin Hayes is reported to have said that: ‘liberals hate real Americans that work and achieve and believe in God’ (CNNPolitics.com. 2008: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/ category/sarah-palin/, italics added). One of the top aides to senator McCain, Nancy Pfotenhauer, in turn, pointed out the following: As a proud resident of Oakton, Va., I can tell you that the Democrats have just come in from the District of Columbia and moved into northern Virginia, . . . And that’s really what you see there. But the rest of the state, real Virginia, if you will, I think will be very responsive to Sen. McCain’s message. (Associated Press 2008: http://ap.google.com/ article/ALeqM5iWPrEwht8KbeE6jLFd2TMngj0_3gD93T6DI00, italics added)


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And finally: In a television appearance that outraged Democrats are already describing as Joseph McCarthy politics, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann claimed on Friday that Barack Obama and his wife Michelle held anti-American views and couldn’t be trusted in the White House. She even called for the major newspapers of the country to investigate other members of Congress to find out if they are pro-America or anti-America. (The Huffington Post 2008: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/17/gop-rep-channels-mccarthy_n_135735.html, italics added) Such statements clearly foster a bi-polar view of the world, where there is no space for any middle position. In the case of President Bush’s ‘You are either with us or against us’, this bi-polar view did not seem to allow expressing support for the US on some issues and at the same time rejecting it on others. You needed to buy the whole package or nothing. As some journalists and politicians rightly stressed, with disbelief and chagrin, in the 2008 election campaign, politicians such as Palin, Hayes, Pfotenhauer, and Bachmann promote significant oversimplifications. Binary verbal divisions into ‘real America’ and ‘fake America’, into ‘real Virginians’ and ‘fake Virginians’, into ‘pro-America’ and ‘antiAmerica’, and so on, in no way reflect the complexity of the non-verbal reality. William Bennett, an American conservative politician and political theorist, may have been right when, in a discussion following the first presidential debate on September 26, 2008, he expressed his opinion about politics in the following way: ‘McCain, he wins points because in politics, it seems to me, you are on offensive or defensive’. Two-valued orientation in political discourse is often fostered by journalists: ‘Now, every reporter understands the concept of friction in a news story. Without friction – who’s up, who’s down, who’s in, who’s out, – without friction it just isn’t a “good story.”’ Friction makes the world go round since the beginning of recorded history. Nation against nation, West versus East, Capitalism–Communism, nature–nurture, religion–science, North–South, Sunni–Shia, Red States– Blue States. Friction, as a concept, is embedded in news reporting. But broadcast news, in particular, tends to be binary in language: 0 or 1, yes or no, right or wrong. Nuance and subtlety is not broadcast news’ strongest suit . . .’ (Alderman 2008: http://www.huffingtonpost. com/tom-alderman/the-blitzer-blitz-the-_b_84509.html). I am wondering how much awareness there might be among the politicians and

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journalists of the fact that such binary opposition encourages false oversimplified perceptions and is conducive to conflict. Some political systems are constructed on the two-valued orientational basis, whether they pass for democratic states or not. The pre-1989 East European non-democratic countries may be seen as having reflected a typical two-value oriented system most saliently. With only one (the communist) party in power, anyone against the party could be labeled (and often was) as anti-government, anti-patriotic, antinational. In countries like Poland, for example, the Catholic Church’s position in the period 1945–1989 was very strong and often perceived as the only political viable alternative to the communist rule. This created a two-prong, bi-polar situation in the country. Most people tended to think in terms of either for or against the church, and either for or against the communist government. There was little or no place for a middle ground position. People who sided with neither of the two tended to be perceived as strange outcasts, wishy-washy characters without integrity or commitment, as people who had no clear views or moral principles. Needless to say, the socio-political reality was much more complex. The two-prong groove, often reflected in daily discourse, appeared to be a great distortion of the non-verbal reality. In a world of bi-polar orientation, there is often no social space for people who neither follow one party nor the other; such people are often disregarded, considered strange, untrustworthy, and so on. In a somewhat different fashion, the American two-party system may also be seen as reflecting a two-valued orientation (Tannen 1998). In the USA, you vote either for the Republicans or for the Democrats. The political arena is limited to basically two opposing parties. Again here, there appears to be very little space, if any, for any middle path position expressing likes and dislikes of only part of the political agenda of the two parties. This seems to be true in spite of the fact that the American political system allows an independent, third party candidate, and that the party that doesn’t accommodate the centrists is likely to lose the national election. Another area where we can easily find examples of two valued orientation appears to be the legal system. In the USA as well as in many other countries, we find what Philips calls ‘record-oriented’ judges (Philips 1998), who encourage presenting legal cases in terms of clear black or white distinctions. The best reflection of this may be a frequent stipulation that witnesses or defendants answer questions with a definitive ‘yes’ or ‘no’. As analyses of many cases show, such short answers are often impossible to give because the reality to which the questions refer


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is much more complex than the expected or demanded simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers might imply (see for instance Shuy 1993, 1998). Disregarding the complexity of non-verbal phenomena, however, two-valued oriented people in the judicial system press us into going one way or the other. Two-valued orientation may also materialize non-verbally, as is the case in many educational and academic settings. In many schools at all levels, the teacher is granted some space and a table of some sort (and more recently, a computer perhaps) which are separated from the rest of the room, where the students sit. The teacher’s table is often raised, with respect to the students’ tables, which emphasizes the bi-polar division into the teacher and the students. The media also give us excellent examples of how the two-valued system, enormously oversimplifying reality, works. One, three, or four sided discussions are rare. In addition to the moderator, we usually have a pro- and an anti-party mirroring the political system of government and opposition. In American mass media, even in cases where no opposing view is expected, it can be brought in (Tannen 1998). TV studios are often divided into two sections even though clearly more than two positions on an issue might be expressed. In many political systems, as in the American and Polish systems, for example, in the final run for the president’s office, only two candidates appear. Why not three? Why not five? As we can see, two-valued orientation, expressed through discourse and other forms of communication such as the arrangement of space, we can locate in many institutions and situations. We can see it as in fact ubiquitous. Two-valued orientation is positively evaluated in many cultures, and thus a simplified view of the world is promoted. People who make quick decisions (go one way or the other) are usually evaluated by others better than those who hesitate, who take their time to analyze and evaluate a situation’s complexity more thoroughly before they take a position. Taking the complexity of the world into account requires time and great knowledge, unattainable quickly even to the smartest; delayed decisions and symbol reactions (see Chapter 4) should be rewarded. They usually are not. Two valued-orientation appears to take the upper hand; pairs of words such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, or ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ get very often used as reasonable alternatives, and the confusion continues. Books whose titles cover two opposites appear to be popular. They seem to be especially appealing in the political and moral domains. Examples include Lieven (2005), America right or wrong: An anatomy of

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American nationalism, Vernick (2001), How to act right when your spouse acts wrong, McDowell (1994), Right from wrong. Note that Edward de Bono, an author who argues against a two-valued view of the world in many of his publications, gives the tile I am right. You are wrong to one of his books (De Bono 1990). We may surmise that the author, the publisher, or both, may have thought that the title was catchy, that it will cater to the two-valued orientation of the general audience, and that the book with this title will thus sell well. It should seem obvious to the reader by now that I see a two-valued orientation as highly unwelcome, unrewarding, and most importantly, suggesting that the world around us is much more simple than it actually is. However, endorsing a two-valued orientation does not necessarily imply a permanent wishy-washy stance (as some critics of the reasoning that I promote in this book seem to believe) and indecision. In a way, when we make a decision, some kind of two-valued orientation (???) appears to be at play. You either go to school or play truant, you either get married or remain a bachelor, you either buy a car or not, you either cast your voting ballot or not, and so on. If these kinds of decisions are taken to reflect a two-valued orientation then not only can we be twovalued oriented in this way, but we obviously very often are. Two-valued orientation understood in this way does not at all imply, however, seeing the world in terms of black and white. All it implies is that human beings make decisions, often and quite clearly going one way or the other, which, however, does not indicate at all that the complexity of the world is not investigated and taken into account before a decision is made.

Multi-valued orientation It is, however, multi-valued orientation (see for instance, Hayakawa 1992; Kodish and Kodish 2001) and continua that we should cherish and promote. Adopting a multi-valued orientation, we stress the existence of complexity and continuity in nature and society. We reject the validity of bi-polar divisions. We emphasize the fact that it is we, the language users, who cut the cake of the world into the various pieces depending partly on the language we speak and partly on our sheer will to cut the way we want to. Languages such as English do not help us with expressing continuity and fighting bi-polarity. Bi-polarity appears to be much easier to express because of pairs of adjectives such as ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’, for example, which are frequently used and which language users feel much


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attached to. Nevertheless, we should try to do our best to promote in discourse the awareness of multi-valued orientation. How can we do this? There are no easy answers to this question. One way seems to be simply to avoid using pairs of words implying bi-polarity. In practice this may be very difficult, especially when it comes to expressing emotions. Rather than coming up with pairs of words like ‘smart’ and ‘stupid’, we may embark upon ‘quite smart’, ‘relatively smart’, ‘smart with respect to making quick judgments’, ‘pretty stupid’, ‘very stupid’, and so on. Rather than talking about people being ‘educated’ or ‘uneducated’, words which usually mean little to people and promote two-valued orientation, talk about ‘university-educated’, ‘graduated from Rutgers university’, ‘completed elementary school’, ‘has a high school diploma’, for example. These latter formulations appear to be more meaningful and no doubt better reflect the complexity of the world. The group of people from whom we can best learn how to hold a multi-valued orientation seems to be the scientists. They appear to be the people who, in their professional activities, most often measure phenomena along scales. For instance, temperatures to them are not high and low, but 3, 5 degrees, 17, 8 degrees, 45 degrees, and so on. They will measure noise in terms of decibels, for instance, 40, 50, or 85 decibels, rather than evaluate, for instance, traffic as quiet or noisy. The scientists’ behavior testifies to the complexity of the world around them, and they try to express this complexity the best way they can. We can also promote multi-valued orientation in a non-verbal way, as some people do. For example, rather than keeping separate (and at different height levels) the furniture and the various paraphernalia belonging to the teacher and those belonging to the students, a multivalued person will be much happier with a furniture arrangement where the distinction between the teacher’s space and that of the students’ is not clearly marked, and which prompts the view that the teacher (‘he’ or ‘she’) is not in opposition to ‘them’, the students. This furniture arrangement may be interpreted, probably by a slight stretch of imagination, as suggesting that the teacher not only ‘teaches’ and that the students not only ‘learn’. It may also suggest that the students can also teach (primarily each other) and that the teacher can also learn. Don’t teachers learn anything from at least some students? Don’t students sometimes learn from each other? A non-bi-polar furniture arrangement may be seen to depict more adequately the complexity of the world, and in this case the complexity of the school situation. While in a multi-valued setting, both the teachers and the students ‘learn’ and ‘teach’, in a two-valued one the former only ‘teach’ and the latter only ‘learn’.

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The danger of two-valued orientation The two-valued orientation expressed through discourse and in other ways may be seen as largely confusing and misleading and it does indeed appear to be dangerous (Janicki 2006). It may lead to conflict. This is primarily because it warps the non-verbal reality immensely, which may lead, for instance, to jumping to conclusions. Conflicts abound in all walks of life. They are also very frequent in the academic community. Let me briefly mention one. In 2003, Julia Kristeva received the first Holberg International Memorial Prize for outstanding scholarly work in the arts and humanities, social sciences, law, and theology. After the prize was awarded a ferocious debate took place (mainly in the Norwegian press) as to whether Kristeva can pass for a scientist. It became clear relatively quickly that two main sides took part in this debate: one for including Kristeva in the category of ‘scientist’; the other excluding her from this category. Fierce verbal battles were fought for a few weeks; we could certainly talk of a conflict among colleagues in the Bergen University (where Kristeva was selected for the honor and the prize awarded) academic community. In my view, the conflict was at least partly due to the fact that most participants in this debate exhibited a two-valued orientation. In other words, they defended and/or promoted the position that someone may either be a scientist or not, that certain kinds of academic activities definitely passed for scientific and others did not. The debate could have been much less heated and a conflict may have been avoided if the participants in the debate had adopted a multi-valued orientation. Having adopted such an orientation would have allowed them to perceive the complexity and variability of the activities that people often call ‘scientific’. Kristeva could still have passed for a scientist for some and not so for others, but attending to the complexities of academic activities to which the word ‘scientist’ refers could have led us to an awareness that academic activities may be placed along a continuum and that some may be more typically scientific than others. A two-valued orientation may be seen as conducive to conflict, which, we may assume, is often due to an oversimplified two-valued view of or orientation to the world (for a detailed discussion of the Kristeva conflict around the concept of ‘science’, see Janicki 2006). As I tried to indicate at the beginning of this book, the complexity of the non-verbal reality, constantly changing, cannot in fact be expressed by any symbolic system such as language. Everything is changing too quickly and the world is so complex that any attempt to grasp these


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quick changes with the help of words appears to be doomed to failure. Our only rescue is to abstract, and through abstraction, simplify and generalize. This is the fate of any human being, any language speaker. But we can simplify and generalize to varying degrees. People subscribing to two-valued orientation and producing binary discourse simplify reality to an unnecessary and usually unacceptable degree. Languages do not make us their slaves. We may feel tempted to go the two-prong way (for instance, through the existence of binary pairs of adjectives such as ‘sane’ and ‘insane’), but languages cannot force us into using only these. We are free to liberate ourselves from these binary pairs of words, coin new words that may better reflect the complexity and say things in ways which clearly show that the world is much more complex than the binary pairs might suggest. Multi-valued orientation in attitude and discourse can thus be seen as an attempt to bring language closer to the non-verbal reality. Though we can never express this complexity in its entirety, adopting a multi-valued orientation in discourse, and, importantly, putting it into practice, seems definitely to be the right way to go. The danger of conflict appears then to be significantly diminished. Returning for a moment to space arrangement, let me invoke (the idea of) the round table. While people normally tend to see it as a symbol of equality rather than complexity and multi-valued orientation, we may very well see it, I think, also as a symbol of countering bi-polarity. In Poland, in 1989, before the collapse of the communist system in Eastern Europe, the ruling Communist Party representatives met with the Solidarity opposition around a round table, especially made for this occasion. The message given by this space arrangement then (and supported by much of the political discourse of the time) was that no two opposing parties are at daggers with each other, that the division into ‘us’ and ‘them’ no longer held. (By the way, we may want to go back into the Middle Ages and the Knights of the Round Table, if not earlier, to find a precursor of this laudable idea.) Interestingly, some right wing politicians in the Polish politics of today (2009) and a host of the general public vehemently reject the round table meetings and accords of 1989. It is not accidental, in my view, that these people openly express a clear two-valued orientation; they still invoke an old, no longer existing (about 20 years after the fall of the communist system) two–prong division into communists and anti-communists, and simultaneously foster two-prong divisions in the domains of morality and ethics. The danger of two-valued orientation should not blind us to the extent that we should altogether drop the use of words such as

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‘beautiful’, ‘ugly’, ‘tall’, ‘short’, and so on, and the building of rectangular tables to seat (not necessarily) two opposing parties. We, the discourse and the table makers, certainly have the right to evaluate someone as beautiful or tall, for example, or see only two options in a given situation, which a seating arrangement may reflect. As long as we realize that, for instance, ‘she is beautiful’ should be seen as our own evaluation, and as long as we realize that ‘beauty’ can best be seen as a label for a range of features (for instance, features of the face), and as long as we realize that ‘beautiful’ should be seen only as a point on a continuum, there appears to be no danger in using the word. However, the use of word pairs like ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ as well as inviting people to talk about two opposing points of view (not necessarily sitting at a rectangular table!) does strengthen our predilection for two-valued orientation, an orientation that we should avoid. As a final note in this chapter, we should keep in mind the extremes of a continuum. We can easily find people who adopt a typical two-valued orientation. Perhaps with some additional effort we will find people who adopt a typical multi-valued orientation. There are many people, however, who adopt neither entirely and whom we may see as exhibiting a mixture of the two. My primary message in this chapter is that we will be much better off and that we will make others much better off if we steer toward the multi-valued extreme rather than toward the other.

Chapter 5 – MAIN POINTS TO REMEMBER 1. Most languages include pairs of words (for instance, nouns, adjectives) which suggest that the world should be viewed in a bi-polar way, that is, in terms of two opposites. 2. All language use reflects a distorted view of reality, but a pair of opposites (such as ‘fast’ and ‘slow’) reflects a view distorted to an extremely high degree. 3. In the history of philosophy, the two-valued orientation can be traced to Aristotle’s logic. 4. Some people appear to be clearly oriented toward two opposites; many of us seem, however, to be sometimes oriented toward two opposites and sometimes toward continua. 5. Two-valued orientation often leads to making quick decisions, which is often seen very positively. 6. Two-valued orientation may lead to conflict.


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7. Two-valued orientation is often to be observed in political and legal discourse. 8. Some political systems (for instance, those of the former, pre-1989, Eastern European countries) seemed prone to twovalued orientation. Two-valued orientation is not, however, absent in countries with a long democratic tradition. 9. Multi-valued orientation better reflects the complexity of the world. 10. Unlike many lay people, scientists tend to subscribe to multivalued orientation. 11. Multi-valued orientation diminishes the likelihood of conflict.

6 The Unfortunate Word ‘is’: ‘Is’ of Identity and ‘is’ of Predication; E-Prime

Several writers have drawn our attention to the danger of using the verb ‘to be’ in English, for instance, Lee (1994), Johnston (1991), Ralph (1991), Kellog (1991), Bourland (1991). Many scholars point to Bourland as the most prominent of these writers. He discussed the verb ‘to be’ at much length and offered the term E-Prime as the label to refer to English without the verb ‘be’. The idea of ‘beless’ English, or ‘beless’ language, can be traced back, however, much further than the early 1990s. According to Gozzi (1997), it can be traced as far back as Lycophron in ancient Greece. The ordinary English language user takes the word ‘be’ and its various forms (is, are, been, was, and so on) for granted. Any text (written or spoken) will probably include several instances of this verb. We use the verb in active and passive voice sentences, for instance, ‘She is a turtle collector’ and ‘She has been taken to art school’, respectively. We use it as an auxiliary and as the main verb. Most speakers of English can hardly imagine, I believe, the language without the verb ‘be’. When we attempt to make a simple classification of the various uses of ‘be’ in English in grammatical terms, we inevitably arrive at the following types: 1. As an auxiliary verb, in sentences such as ‘Harry is coming back to Oxford next year’ or ‘They have been painting this house since Sunday’. 2. As the main verb in existential constructions, in sentences such as ‘There are three hundred people in the market’, and in other types of sentences indicating existence, for instance, ‘Julie is there for three weeks’. 3. As a linking verb in Subject + Predicator (linking verb) + Subject Complement (realized by a noun phrase or a nominal clause) patterns, in 142

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sentences such as, ‘Jerry is a brat’ or ‘Jack is the sort of person who will never admit that he has made a mistake’. We will refer to this use of ‘is’ as the ‘is’ of identity. 4. As a linking verb in the Subject + Predicator (linking verb) + Subject Complement (realized by an adjective or adjectival phrase), in sentences such as, ‘Julie is beautiful’ and ‘Greg is really handsome’. We will refer to this use of ‘is’ as the ‘is’ of predication. The first two types do not require our attention. These two uses of ‘be’ do not appear to be confusing. The remaining two do. In what follows I will discuss these latter two very common uses of ‘be’, which can be seen as contributing to difficult and confusing discourse.

‘Is’ of identity I indicated earlier in this book that from the physical point of view we and everything around us are constantly changing. If we take this simple statement seriously, one of the conclusions that follow may be that there are no two things or states, or activities, which we could see as identical. You, the reader of this book, were different 10 minutes ago compared to now; also, you were different when you started to read the last sentence and when you finished it. Take this seriously and you will have to admit that this may be the case. Negligible from any practical point of view as these differences between you 5 seconds ago and now may appear, still, you must admit that these differences, from the physical point of view, do hold. Why do I find it important to emphasize this? I find it important because I want to stress that there are no two identical things, or states, or relations in the universe. We may see everything as different. Small and negligent as some differences may be, still, we should not talk about identifications (that is, identical things, people, states, relations, and so on, at the event level (see for instance Lee 1994). Take the sentence ‘Euphegenia is a babysitter’. The structure used in this sentence (subject + is + subject complement) can be labeled as a structure of identification. Other examples will include ‘Jerry is a freak’, ‘Mum is an angel’, ‘Greg was a moron’, ‘You are a treasure’, and so on. In all of these sentences, we imply identifications between what is on the left hand side of ‘is’ (Jerry, Mum, Greg, You) and what is on the right hand side of ‘is’ (a freak, an angel, a moron, a treasure). We imply that one thing is some other thing. This, you will now understand

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appears false. One thing is never another thing. You may see the discourse that includes identifications like the above as misleading and confusing. Consider ‘Jerry is a freak’ in some detail. First of all, do not forget that both ‘Jerry’ and ‘freak’ we view as words and nothing else. They refer to something else. What can they refer to? The case of ‘Jerry’ you may see as relatively simple. ‘Jerry’ refers to a person, let us say, the Jerry who lives next door to you. The territory for Jerry, though changing all the time of course, appears relatively stable, tangible, easy to point to. Jerry, the man whom you see almost every day, the one who often wears two scarves and never a hat, the one who gets up at 4 a.m. every morning although he doesn’t go to work until 8 a.m. is the territory you refer to. What about the word ‘freak’? What kind of territory does the word ‘freak’ refer to? I may say one thing with much certainty. Namely, ‘freak’ refers to much more than ‘Jerry’ does, the Jerry that you have mentioned, not all the people called Jerry, of course. ‘Freak’ may surely refer to an enormously large territory. In other words ‘Jerry is a freak’ may be replaced by the following statements and no doubt by many, many others: 1. Jerry wears two scarves and no hat. 2. Jerry gets up at 4 a.m. although he doesn’t go to work until 8 a.m. 3. Jerry doesn’t watch TV, doesn’t listen to the radio, and doesn’t read any newspapers or magazines. 4. Jerry always stands on the bus even though there are free seats. 5. Jerry has 35 cats. 6. Jerry has a three wheel bicycle that he has built himself. 7. Jerry has a new girlfriend every week. 8. Jerry thinks planes are an invention of the devil. 9. Jerry cleans his apartment only on Monday morning. 10. Jerry always sits on a book. This list could be extended by tens if not hundreds of sentences illustrating possible territorial details that the word ‘freak’ may refer to for various people. When you learn the word ‘freak’, you get to see or hear about the kinds of activities listed in 1–10 and you use the map ‘freak’ to refer to the various territories that you get described in sentences like 1–10. Note the dramatic difference between the territory for ‘Jerry’ and that for ‘freak’. Identifying the two in any way appears to be a gross oversimplification. While identifying the territory for ‘Jerry’, though changing, seems very easy, identifying the territory for ‘freak’ appears


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extremely difficult. It varies significantly from person to person, or, to put it differently, different people will have different territories in their minds (due to their previous experiences) when the word ‘freak’ comes up. A general identification statement ‘Jerry is a freak’ appears then to be a very confusing piece of discourse. You can see a dramatic difference in the size of the territory in cases like the above where one uses a proper name (such as Jerry) and identifies it with a common word (for instance, ‘freak’). The size of the territory may, however, be very large for proper names other than those referring to people. Take, for instance, ‘The Bodlean library is a place of knowledge’. Here, we deal with an identification of ‘The Bodlean library’ and ‘a place of knowledge’. Now think of the territory to which ‘the Bodlean library’ refers. Does it, for you, include all the reading rooms, the copying machines rooms, the toilets, the staircases, the reception desks? Does it also include the basements, the storage rooms, and the lifts? Does it perhaps also include the scaffolding that happens now (spring 2008) to be attached to the main building and on which several workers are working, drilling and hammering nails into the building? You may see the territory for the phrase ‘The Bodlean library’ as fairly vast, complex, and identified differently (or at least slightly differently) by different people. Now, consider ‘a place of knowledge’. What territory does the map ‘place of knowledge’ refer to (to you, to your brother, to your neighbor, to your farther)? What do people do in ‘a place of knowledge’? Do they read? Do they write? Do they both read and write? Do they think? Do they read, write, and think? Do they browse books? Do they make notes? What kinds of other things do people do in ‘a place of knowledge’? It appears that both ‘the Bodlean library’ and ‘a place of knowledge’ may refer to a lot of different things and activities. Any attempt at identifying the two may lead to confusion, and seems to be a gross and highly misleading oversimplification. An even more dramatic confusion may arise when you put together two common nouns in a structure of ‘is’ of identification. Consider the following examples: 1. A pig is a mammal. 2. Boys in Goonville are criminals. 3. Cars are vehicles. In example 1, ‘pig’ refers to a type of animal, like in Pictures 34a–c below:

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a

b

c

Picture 34

‘Mammal’, however, refers to a number of pigs and other kinds of animals, such as these depicted in Pictures 35a–d below:

a

b

c

d

Picture 35

Of course, pigs of the former set of pictures are not the mammals of the latter set of pictures. We should not speak of any sort of identify whatsoever, even if we disregard the event level fact that each pig appears different and that each one is constantly changing. The word ‘pig’ refers to a vast territory of animals like those depicted in the former set of pictures; the word ‘mammal’ refers to a significantly larger territory of animals like those depicted in the latter set of pictures. Identifying the territories may be seen as confusing and misleading. As for the second sentence, ‘Boys in Goonville are criminals’, our interest in territory for the words ‘boys in Goonville’ and ‘criminals’ and their unwarranted identification should lead us to asking questions like the following: Does the word ‘boys’ refer to all the boys in the city of Goonville? If not all, then which boys in Goonville are criminals? Does ‘boys in


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Goonville’ include boys who were born in Goonville and have lived there all their lives or does it include boys who live there now and who may have been born in other places? What counts as Goonville? Do the outskirts of the city get included? As for ‘criminal’, what do these boys do? Do they mug people in the streets? Do they murder? Do they break into people’s houses? Do they all do one of these things or do some break into houses while others murder and rape while still others vandalize bus stops? All these questions and many others that I could easily ask make us think about the territory. What do the words ‘boys in Gonville’ and ‘criminals’ refer to? Whatever the answers to these questions, there seems to be little doubt that the territories of the former and those of the latter appear different. No identification should be implied. It is, however, by the use of ‘is’ in the relevant sentences that one suggests this identification. We could perform a similar exercise with the help of sentence 3, ‘Cars are vehicles’: I hope that you can see immediately that the words ‘car’ and ‘vehicles’ refer to different territories, and that any identification between these two territories, implied by the ‘is’ of identity structure in English, one can perceive as misleading and confusing. If we agree with the view that sentences such as ‘A pig is a mammal’, ‘Boys in Goonville are criminals’, and ‘Cars are vehicles’ seem confusing with respect to the territories that they refer to, should we abandon them? There are at least two possible answers to this question. One is: yes, abandon the use of the ‘is’ of identity altogether. The other is: don’t abandon it, but make sure to remember to take the ‘is’ of identity structure for what it appears to us now, namely, a misleading structure leading to confusion and misunderstanding. In discourse, if you select the former option, rather than saying ‘Jerry is a freak’, say what he does, for instance, ‘Jerry gets up at 4 a.m. every day although he doesn’t go to work until 8 a.m.’, or ‘ Jerry plays the guitar as if it were a cello’. Say ‘In the recent two months, 35 boys in Goonville have raped three women, broken into five houses, and mugged ten people in an open street’ rather than ‘Boys in Goonville are criminals’. Say ‘In the Bodlean library people read books in the reading rooms, but not in the toilets’ rather than ‘The Bodlean library is a place of knowledge’. In other words, say what happens, what people do rather than what something ‘is’, because, as Korzybski rightly put it, ‘whatever you might say the object is, well, it is not’ (Korzybski 1933: 35; original italics). If you say what happens or what people do, rather than what they are, you are still using words, of course, and you are still in the realm of words and not the territory. However, you are then providing your interlocutor

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with a better map for the territory, a more detailed map. Rather than saying that the boys in Goonville are criminals, which may mean tens, if not hundreds, of things, say what they do, or who does what, in which case you give a better map, you zero in on a small section of the territory and you guide your interlocutor there, unlike when you say that the boys are criminals, which may sound to your interlocutor like ‘go anywhere’ (or, take these words whatever they might mean to you!), which doesn’t seem to be a good guiding strategy. If you select the latter option, that is, if you select to use the ‘is’ of identification, as you will probably do for practical reasons (it may appear difficult in practice not to use the ‘is’ of identification!), make sure to remember that what sentences such as ‘Cars are vehicles’ and ‘Boys in Goonville are criminals’ can be best thought of are classifications. These sentences do not tell us, as many people think, what cars are or what boys in Goonville are (remember that ‘cars’ and ‘boys in Goonville’ should be seen as words that refer to something in the real non-verbal world). In fact, these sentences tell us how the speaker saying these sentences classifies (cuts) reality verbally (Lee 1994) and what words that person uses to refer to the various pieces cut. Incidentally, you should remember that we may cut the non-verbal reality in many different ways (see the section on categorization in Chapter 2). People have a natural tendency to ignore differences and pay considerable attention to similarities. This is one of the reasons why most of us often make, with a light heart, sweeping generalizations. One of the practical conclusions following from our discussion about identification appears to be that we should fully realize that the things that we refer to with the same word are not identical. This is in spite of the fact that the same word may strongly suggest significant similarities. Most people will probably say that they have always known this, but, unfortunately, these same people seem to act as if they did not. Most of us have the tendency to think that we dance all ‘tangos’ (a name/label/word) in more or less the same way. Most of us have the tendency to think that all ‘Arabs’ (a name/label/word) share more or less the same characteristics. Most of us have the tendency to think that all ‘McDonald’s restaurants’ (a name/label/word) serve more or less the same food and have more or less the same decorative style. One name for many things drags us in a cognitive rut, into the unfortunate thinking that one name points to one referent. Needless to say, treating as identical, or almost identical, all the things and people and activities which we refer to by the same name appears to reflect a great oversimplification of reality and a grave mistake leading to confusing discourse.


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What-is-question– a very bad question The omnipresence of the ‘is’ of identity both in everyday and in many types of professional and academic discourse can be probably best illustrated by the very frequently asked what-is-questions, for example, ‘what is pity?’, ‘what is liberty?’, ‘what is love?’, ‘what is freedom?’, ‘what is justice?’, ‘what is a noun?’, ‘what is discourse?’ If we feel we do not know what our interlocutor is talking about, we tend to ask such what-is-questions. We often see the what-is-questions as challenging and difficult to answer (Janicki 2006). Such questions commonly surface not only in everyday life; various professionals, including academics, ask them very often as well, and they find these questions also difficult and annoying. In fact, especially in academic disputes, people yearn for clear definitions of terms. ‘Define your terms before we proceed any further’ seems to be a very common conversational strategy in academic arguments. This stance leads to asking what-is-questions very frequently. In what-is-questions we ask for a definition; quite often people believe that they ask for the definition. Many academic books bear the ‘what-is’ type of title, for instance, ‘What is meaning? Fundamentals of Formal Semantics (Portner 2004), What is morphology? (Aronoff and Fudeman 2004), and What is Architecture? An Essay on Landscapes, Buildings and Machines (Shepheard 1994). Others include a number of what-is-questions as chapter and section titles. Asking the what-is type of question seems to be a very powerful and appealing discourse strategy. Consider a recent book in the area of applied linguistics. The following is a selection of subtitles in the book: ‘What is Applied Linguistics?’ (Schmitt and Celce-Murcia 2002: 1) ‘What is Vocabulary?’ (Nation and Meara 2002: 35) ‘What is Discourse Analysis?’ (McCarthy et al. 2002: 55) ‘What is Corpus Linguistics?’ (Reppen and Simpson 2002: 92) ‘What is Second Language Acquisition?’ (Spada and Lightbown 2002: 115) ‘What is Psycholinguistics?’ (de Bot and Kroll 2002: 133) ‘What is Sociolinguistics?’ (Llamas and Stockwell 2002: 150) ‘What is Listening?’ (Lynch and Mendelsohn 2002: 193) ‘What are Speaking and Pronunciation?’ (Burns and Seidlhofer 2002: 211) ‘What is Reading?’ (Carrell and Grabe 2002: 233) ‘What is language assessment?’ (Chapelle and Brindley 2002: 267)

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I do not think the editors of the book imposed these questions on the authors. I say this because not all chapters include a section starting with an explicit ‘what-is-question’. Most likely, the authors themselves considered these ‘what-is-questions’ as good and powerful, as good guides for the reading of the text of the various chapters; you will find most of these questions posed at the beginning of the chapters. All these questions seem to lead to answers which imply identification of one thing (whatever appears on the left hand side of ‘is’) with another (whatever appears on the right hand side of ‘is’) and usually offer many words replacing one (for example, sociolinguistics) or two, or three words (for example, ‘corpus linguistics’, or ‘second language acquisition’). Some words (usually a longer sequence of words) replace other words (usually one word or a very short sequence of words). If we feel like further defining some words in the definitions, which we often do, we end up producing still more words, and so on and so forth. No matter how many words we produce to define other words, we remain in the world of words and we imply identification, the identification of what the words on the left-hand side of ‘is’ refer to and what the words on the right hand side of ‘is’ do. Importantly, what-is-questions tend to perpetuate the intensional orientation. Consider the following questions and answers taken from the list above: What is sociolinguistics? . . . sociolinguistics . . . is the study of language in society . . . so, sociolinguistics is the study of the linguistic indicators of culture and power. (Llamas and Stockwell 2002: 161) What is psycholinguistics? Psycholinguistics is the study of the cognitive processes that support the acquisition and use of language. (de Bot and Kroll 2002: 133)

Do these answers really tell us much? Didn’t the authors replace one very abstract word (‘sociolinguistics’, or ‘psycholinguistics’) by a few more words which do not seem much less abstract? What would you take as the referent of ‘cognitive processes’? What would you take as the referent of ‘power’ or ‘culture’? Note that in their answers, the authors use the ‘is’ of identity actually trying to tell us what the words ‘sociolinguistics’ or ‘psycholinguistics’ refer to. Others actually use the ‘refer to’ formulation in the answer in spite of the fact that they use the ‘is’ of identity in the question:


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What is language assessment? . . . assessment refers to the act of collecting information and making judgments about a language learner’s knowledge of a language and ability to use it. (Chappelle and Brindley 2002: 267) In either case, however, the ‘what-is-question’, abetting thinking in terms of identification, stands out; the authors make these questions so prominent because they apparently think that these questions work as legitimate and attractive. We may easily reformulate what-is-questions. Answers to these reformulated questions cease to imply identification. For instance, rather than asking the what-is-question ‘What is listening?’, ask the question ‘What kinds of activities do we refer to when we use the word listening?’ This way you first of all avoid suggesting that there is any identification involved between things which we should definitely not treat as identical, and you invite extensional orientation. The question ‘what is listening?’, now reformulated to ‘What kinds of activities do we refer to when we use the word listening?’, we could now answer in a different way: ‘We call listening the sort of activity that we get involved in when we go to a concert, when we turn the radio on, when we hear someone around our house is making some noise and we are trying to find out what’s going on, and so on’. Note that in this answer we remain verbal; we use words as well, of course, but these words, first of all, do not imply any identification of things or activities and they relate to our experience, and the meaning usually assigned to the word included in the question seems so much easier to grasp. Of course, we would be significantly more extensional if we took our interlocutor to a concert hall, had him or her look at the audience in the middle of a musical piece, and said: ‘look at these people around you; what they are doing now we call listening’. Fortunately, this kind of extensive activity leading to an actual physical experience appears most of the time totally unnecessary; using grammatical structures which do not imply identification and using words that bring images to mind (like the image of a concert) usually suffices. What-is-questions, though extremely frequently asked, do not appear rewarding questions at all. In addition to implying identification, they encourage intensional orientation. Words are replaced by more and more words, often at a high level of abstraction, as in: What is pity? ‘Pity

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is the disposition to mercy, or compassion, clemency, mercy, mildness, tenderness.’ The words on the right hand side of ‘is’ imply identification with the word ‘pity’ on the left hand side of ‘is’, and they keep us intensionally oriented at a high level of abstraction. The words on the right hand side of ‘is’ do not bring us closer to any kind of tangible experience than the word ‘pity’ does. Both the question and the answer do not seem very helpful. We use many sound noises or letters on paper to replace fewer noises or fewer letters on paper (see also the section on dictionaries in Chapter 3). To avoid implying identification, we should avoid what-is-questions, or, if you like, reformulate them to the form of ‘what does the word X refer to?’, for instance, ‘what does the word pity refer to?’ To be helpful, answers to such questions should attempt to significantly lower the level of abstraction and, to the extent possible, point to tangible things and activities, as in the ‘listening example’ above. Note that answers to what-is-questions, independent of whether you handle them intensionally or extensionally, never tell us what something really is (Janicki 2006). In other words, if you are in doubt about, for instance, the words ‘a bilingual person’ (you may have heard or read many definitions, you are confused, and you would like to know what ‘a bilingual person’ really is) and, perplexed, you ask the question ‘what is “a bilingual person”?’, or ‘what is “really a bilingual person”?’, no matter what sort of answer you get, all you are learning is how people use the words ‘a bilingual person’ to refer to something else; you are learning how people use the symbol (the sounds or the letters included in the words) to stand for some phenomenon. You will be learning (if you are lucky to be talking to an extensionally oriented person) what certain types of linguistic knowledge, skills, and activities a person called (labeled) ‘a bilingual person’ has. When someone defines the notion (the words) ‘a bilingual person’ for you with other words at a high abstraction level, as in ‘A bilingual person is a person possessing the knowledge of two languages’, you will most probably not find this definition helpful because the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘language’ belong to the list of very abstract words. How much of what do we need to know to pass for a bilingual person? – you might want to ask. When, however, you define ‘a bilingual person’ in terms of what a person called ‘a bilingual person’ can do, as in ‘A bilingual person is the person who can speak and read two languages, such as English and German’, you will know much better what is being talked about because the activities of speaking and reading belong to our tangible experience. In either case you should think of ‘a bilingual person’ as words which we use to call, label or refer to or stand for other things. The belief that we can ever find out what ‘a bilingual


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person’ really is I understand as a result of mixing levels of abstraction, mixing words with things, maps and territories. ‘A bilingual person’ can never have any real meaning; look at it as words that people use to refer to some experiences (pertaining to a person that has some skills in two languages) that they have had, whether similar or not. People often ask what-is-questions in heated political debates: ‘what is democracy?’, ‘what is freedom?’, ‘what is patriotism?’ These words may mean almost anything; for that reason they may be seen as meaningless. These questions do not appear to make much sense unless we reformulate them and ask for tangible referents. Let us take up ‘patriotism’, or ‘patriot’, as an example. The word ‘patriot’, like any other word, has no real, one and correct, meaning that an answer to the ‘what is a patriot?’ question could reveal. The word ‘patriot’ may refer to a long list of activities and inner feelings. There is definitely no agreement among people as to what the word refers to. So it can refer to lots of conditions. For a person to be labeled ‘a patriot’ in a meaningful way, language users will have to agree (roughly) on how the label will be used. There may be the following agreements: the word ‘patriot’ refers to someone who (1) lives in their country of birth, (2) never complains about their country even though they do not like many things about it, (3) endorses the religious orthodoxy prevalent in the country, (4) would go to war to defend the country, and (5) thinks that every citizen of the country should be very well acquainted with the history of the country. Note that we can consider 1–5 as fairly tangible activities. People who endorse this defining list will have agreed to call a person ‘a patriot’ if he or she complies with 1–5. This is what ‘a patriot’ stands for to the people who agreed on the definition. No unwarranted identification emerges here; no mixing and confusing of levels of abstraction plays a role here. People simply agree to use the word ‘patriot’ to refer to the kinds of activities listed in 1–5. Other people could come up with a different kind of agreement. A ‘patriot’ for them might include the person who: (6) writes newspaper articles extolling the country’s traditions, like folk dancing and Christmas customs, (7) says he would never leave their country no matter what occurred, (8) has fought in a war of independence, been injured and never complained about it, (9) fights for more history of the country to be included in school curricula, and (10) thinks that his or her country is uniquely protected by God. For these people, 6–10 list the defining characteristics for a ‘patriot’. The characteristics in 6–10 point to the territory that the word ‘patriot’ refers to. Needless to say, you could point to other activities and beliefs when still different people would attempt to define ‘a patriot’. The word ‘patriot’ itself does not mean anything. It only means something to people. It means different things to different

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people, although we can detect some similarities, of course. The ‘what-is a patriot’ question appears pointless, or unanswerable. Not only does it imply unwarranted identification, but it also suggests that all speakers of English have had the same experience leading to their learning of the word, which seems entirely wrong. Intensionally-oriented people tend to believe that we can obtain one general answer to questions like ‘What-is a patriot?’ This view, you will now agree, I hope, leads us into a blind alley. Our discussion of intensionally-oriented people and their discourse full of what-isquestions and attempted answers to these you may take as a discussion of yet another aspect of understanding in language use. I wish to draw your attention to the relation that the more intensional (oriented toward words rather than the referents) a given sample of discourse appears to be, the more difficult it seems to understand it. What-isquestions, usually inviting highly abstract answers, can ensure difficult, confusing, and meaningless discourse. ‘What is it’ types of questions, then, seem to be bad questions that strive after identity that does not exist. We will do best if we discard them or understand them as expressing an invitation to disclosing a classification. In other words, these questions invite us to say how we classify some phenomena verbally. What is a snake? A snake is a reptile. If you say, ‘a snake is a reptile’, you mean that you (and other people perhaps) classify ‘snake’ as a ‘reptile’. You do only this and nothing else. Importantly, you (and other people perhaps) can also classify ‘snake’ in other ways; for instance, ‘a snake is an animal’, in which case you say (and that is all you say!) that you classify a ‘snake’ verbally as an animal. ‘A snake is an ugly creature’ appears to be yet another of the hundreds of other ways in which you can classify a snake. None of the answers tell you what a snake really is. The closest you can get to ‘what a snake really is’, at least reading this book, is to look at Pictures 36a–d below

a Picture 36

b

c

d


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You will make the best decision, however, if you to go to the zoo and look at the creatures in Picture 36. There you will see what the snakes look like nonverbally. Remember, when someone asks you the question ‘What is a snake?’, you may reply with at least three smart answers: (1) ‘a few sounds’, and (2) ‘a few letters’, and (3) ‘a word’!

‘Is’ of predication Another very frequent use of ‘is’ in English is referred to as the ‘is’ of predication. This use may be illustrated by the following examples: 1. Jacky is ugly. 2. This book collection is impressive. 3. This guy is crazy. Grammatically, you will see the above sentences as simple examples of adjectives in the subject complement position. These sentences may be easily turned into the beginning subject groups of other sentences in which the adjectives would be used attributively, namely, ‘Ugly Jacky . . . just got married’; ‘This impressive book collection . . . has now been closed’, and ‘This crazy guy . . . committed suicide’. We will assume here that ‘the ugly Jacky’ derives from ‘Jacky is ugly’, that ‘the impressive book collection’ derives from ‘This book collection is impressive’, and so on. Whichever grammatical structure we choose, the ‘is’ of predication seems to be there, and, of course, you can observe it best in straightforward and salient ‘Jacky is ugly’ Subject + Predicator + Subject Complement kinds of sentences. The point I wish to develop below boils down to this: we should avoid ‘is’ of predication because we may see it as contrary to non-verbal fact. If still used, the least we can do is to realize that it appears contrary to fact and that it does not express any inherent characteristics of the people, things, and activities described. Why can the ‘is’ of predication be seen as contrary to fact? As mentioned in several sections of this book, everything in the non-verbal world changes all the time – insignificantly – as it may appear to some of us, but still, everything changes all the time! The ‘is’ of predication, however, implies to most speakers of English that, we can safely assume, permanence and stability, or static existence. ‘Jacky is ugly’ (she wasn’t a year ago, a week ago two hours ago; she is all the time), ‘the exhibition is impressive’ (not when it opened, not yesterday, not this morning; it is so all the time), as if Jacky has not been changing day by day (which

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she obviously is) and as if the exhibition has been exactly the same over the last year since it opened (which it obviously hasn’t). By implying permanence and stability, discourse that includes the ‘is of predication’ can be seen as confusing and misleading. There is another important reason for the claim that we can see the ‘is of predication’ as confusing and misleading. This structure suggests that we should find the characteristic invoked by the adjective in the object or person. The structure suggests, in other words, that you can find the ugliness in Jacky. If that were the case all speakers of English would need to agree that Jacky is ugly, which seems extremely unlikely. Rather than finding the feature “ugly” in Jacky, we in fact project the feature onto her (see for instance, Evans and Green 2006). We will not find the ugliness in Jacky; we impute it to her. An individual person’s nervous system abstracts the real world person called Jacky, whose picture you can see in Picture 37 below,

Picture 37

taking some characteristics into account and disregarding others, and the person gives a label (ugly) to the abstracted Jacky. Jacky is not ugly


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in some absolute sense; she can be ugly only to someone (to me, she certainly is!) who abstracts from the real person Jacky and uses language to talk about her. In other words, a language user projects the characteristic ‘ugly’ onto Jacky. Does the sentence ‘Jacky is ugly’ suggest that? I do not think so. The structure ‘Jacky is ugly’ suggests that Jacky appears ugly to everybody and all the time. This seems of course contrary to fact. We know very well that different people respond to, abstract, Jacky differently; some will refer to her as ugly, some as pretty, still others perhaps as plain, uninteresting, or attractive. We also need to remember that an individual abstractor (you, the reader of this book, or me) will frequently change his or her abstraction procedure and start using another label for the same abstracted object or person. Jacky may have seemed (been abstracted as) ‘ugly’ to you a few years ago; today she appears (we may abstract her as) ‘quite beautiful’. This brings us back to to-me-ness. For the ‘is of predication’ sentences not to sound contrary to fact, we would have to use ‘to me’ (or similar phrases, such as ‘in my view’) after every single adjective we use. For instance, ‘Jacky is ugly to me’. If we wanted our sentences to sound even closer to facts, we should qualify our statements further and give a time reference, for instance, ‘Jacky is ugly to me today’, not only stressing that I (and not my neighbor or friend) project ugliness onto Jacky but also indicating that Jacky may not have appeared (‘been’) ugly to me a week or a year ago. Both postulates for less confusing discourse closer to non-verbal facts do not seem very realistic, however. Consider the following story:

Text 19 Three weeks ago I met a young to me three weeks ago woman who was very pretty to me three weeks ago. She was really very smart to me three weeks ago. She asked me all kinds of interesting to me three weeks ago questions, which were challenging to me three weeks ago. When I ran into this woman again a week later she was sitting in a smashing to me a week later red to me a week later modern to me a week later car.

Strange as Text 19 probably sounds to you, it appears to be closer to fact compared to:

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Text 20 Three weeks ago I met a young woman who was very pretty. She was really very smart. She asked me all kinds of interesting questions, which were challenging. When I ran into this woman again a week later she was sitting in a smashing red modern car.

How about Text 21 below:

Text 21 Three weeks ago I met a young to me woman who was very pretty to me. She was really very smart to me. She asked me all kinds of interesting to me questions, which were challenging to me. When I ran into this woman again a week later she was sitting in a smashing to me red to me modern to me car.

To most users of English Texts 19 and 21 will seem totally unacceptable and unrealistic stylistically in the sense that these users will perceive the texts as odd and difficult to process. But this is how we should actually render our discourse to make it closer to non-verbal facts. Most users of English will probably eschew putting ‘to me’ into their discourse every time they use an adjective. I urge you, however, to always keep in mind that this is in fact what you should do. You may see the ‘is of predication’ as a trap; if you cannot get rid of it, at least be aware of the fact that you may get trapped there! Adjectives, then, do not tell you how things or people really are; all they tell you seems to be how things, people, activities, and so on, appear to you. You should not view characteristics expressed by adjectives such as ‘beautiful’, ‘ugly’, ‘smart’, and ‘fast’ as inherent in, for example, the things, people, and activities described with these adjectives. You project these characteristics onto things, people, and so on.

Toward E-Prime Some scholars think that we could or should get rid of the ‘is of identity’ and the ‘is of predication’ altogether. David Bourland Jr., probably


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the most prominent advocate of English without ‘be’, has coined a new name for the ‘beless’ English – E-Prime (Bourland 1991). E-Prime English discourse handles the two types of ‘is’ in the following ways: The ‘is’ of identity: one simply does not ask the what-is-question at all. Rather than ask ‘What is man?’, ask what man can do, what man looks like, how we can classify man. In addition, E-Prime strongly discourages sentences such as ‘He is a Jew’, ‘She is a Catholic’, ‘I am a professor’. As argued earlier, this type of structure significantly oversimplifies reality and most language users usually overlook the fact that they make salient only one of numerous possible classifications. When using E-Prime, you would rather say what these people do, what they wear, what they look like, and so on. You would say things like ‘He wears a yarmulke’, ‘He doesn’t use electric appliances on the Sabbath’, ‘She goes to church every Sunday’, ‘She respects the Pope’, ‘I have a professorial position at the university’, ‘I teach linguistics at the university’, and so on. The E-Prime forms appear less misleading because they push us closer to non-verbal facts; they move us down the abstraction ladder closer and closer to extension. And they do not suggest, as the ‘is of identity’ constructions do, that the verbal classifications that sentences such as ‘I am a professor’ illustrate pass for the only valid classifications and that they should pass as, in some way, natural classifications. If you want to speak or write E-Prime, you jettison the ‘is of predication’ altogether. Rather than saying ‘Jacky is ugly’, in E-Prime English you say, ‘Jacky appears ugly to me’, ‘Jacky seems ugly to me’. You may have noticed that I myself in this book (especially in this chapter) avoid the ‘is of predication’, often using the verbs ‘appear’ and ‘seem’. The English of this Chapter is not, however, a pure E-Prime English as this very sentence testifies! This is because I, along with many other people, see writing E-Prime English as quite difficult. English seems to force us into using the two types of ‘is’ under discussion here. It feels a bit unnatural not to use ‘is’ and its related forms. Although the two types of ‘is’ misrepresent reality significantly, we may feel that our English is becoming extremely unnatural when we try not to use them, Paradoxically, the natural appears contrary to fact; the unnatural appears much closer to fact. In addition to discarding the two types of ‘is’, people writing or speaking E-Prime English do at least two other things. One is that they abandon sentences such as ‘It is clear that . . .’, ‘It is obvious that . . . .’, ‘The thing is that . . .’, and ‘Boys are boys’. These types of sentences appear meaningless or confusing at best. The first three suggest some

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kind of objective, person-free evaluation, like the typical ‘is of predication’ sentences including adjectives that follow ‘to be’. Person-free, objective evaluation, however, I (as well as many other people) see as impossible; human beings render evaluations and use word labels in idiosyncratic ways or those to some extent shared with other people. To stay close to non-verbal facts then, the first sentence may run something like ‘It appears clear to me that . . .’. The second one could run ‘It appears obvious to me that . . .’, and so on. The rewritten sentences suggest that the writer or speaker takes responsibility. Something remains no longer ‘obvious’ (as it could or should be obvious to everybody); an individual person takes the responsibility for labeling something as ‘obvious’. The passive voice illustrates another structure that some people trying to use E-Prime English do away with. In the passive constructions such as: ‘the product has been awarded a prize’ and ‘the bathtub was delivered to me in the morning’, the author does not mention the agent. In the following example, the author does mention the agent: ‘the product has been awarded a prize by the University Award Committee’. Note that publishers of scientific writings and many teachers recommend the use of the passive voice. This recommendation reflects people’s belief in objectivity, which the use of a passive voice construction suggests. The passive voice construction without an agent distorts the facts significantly. Behind ‘the product has been awarded a prize’ there may emerge real people, or there may emerge a real person who decided about the award. ‘The University Award Committee’, though an expression at a high level of abstraction (not giving you names and identifying members of the committee in person) appears to be closer to fact. A passive sentence without an agent blurs or hides facts and thus we may see it as contributing to difficult and confusing discourse. Researchers have shown that we understand active voice sentences, which include an agent, a doer, much more easily than passive voice ones. We do so probably because we find it easier to visualize someone doing something compared to something being done, especially when no agent gets appended to a passive sentence. For instance, ‘John (or someone) has brought the picture’ seems much easier to visualize than ‘the picture has been brought’, which makes the former easier to understand than the latter. As Ralph (1991) rightly points out, understanding problems become really acute, however, when a passive voice sentence starts with what she calls ‘subjection’ (a subject ending in ‘tion’). For instance, ‘Utilization of the proposed arrangement is effectuated’, or ‘Consideration of your unfounded suspicion is responsible for


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unnecessary delays in the completion of our project’ (Ralph 1991: 9). We can find these kinds of sentences in, for example, academic texts. Readers often see them as expressing profound truth whereas they should probably see them as meaningless gibberish. E-Prime casts doubt on a number of other English grammatical structures which will seem extremely common and obvious to most speakers of English, for instance, extraposed subject sentences such as ‘It is interesting that you should mention this problem’; ‘it is unacceptable that he should stay here for another week’, or cleft sentences such as ‘It was happy that he was all day yesterday’, ‘It was very slowly that the car was approaching the end of the road’. While we could certainly insert ‘to me’, or ‘in my view’ into these structures, for instance, ‘It is interesting, in my view, that you should mention this problem’, ‘It was happy, in my view, that he was all day yesterday’, the options with ‘my view’ seem a little stilted and do not usually occur. Most of the discussion in the beginning sections of this book led me to contend that in order to increase understanding we need to decrease the level of abstraction in discourse. E-Prime does that and thus contributes to easier understanding. Compare, for instance, the Standard English ‘The potential revision and realization of these plans is an ambition that has often been discussed by the school committee’ with the E-Prime ‘The school committee has often discussed how much it wanted to revise their plans and how realistic its plans appeared’. Don’t you find the second sentence easier to understand? Turning the passive voice sentence into an active voice one stresses the role (the responsibility) of the actor of the activity. Importantly, the alternative E-Prime sentence turns abstract nouns such as ‘revision’ and ‘ambition’ into verbs such as ‘revise’ and ‘want’. The sentence brings into focus the activities and the doer of the activities. When this happens, it seems easier for us to imagine the whole scenario that sentence purports to invoke, and we are likely to understand the sentence with more ease (see also Chapter 8 on visualization). When we try to turn Standard English sentences full of highly abstract nouns like ‘realization’, ‘objectivization’, ‘problemization’, ‘idealism’, ‘constructivism’, and so on into E-Prime, the emptiness or the shallowness of the argument often emerges. E-Prime makes it harder for us to produce obfuscating discourse. In fact, obfuscation becomes quite difficult. We feel forced to be more concrete, to say who did what and who will do what, who is responsible for what, and so on. E-Prime forces us to make our discourse more extensional and in this way makes it harder

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for us to manipulate our interlocutors. No wonder we do not find many politicians who will appreciate, speak, and write in E-Prime! E-Prime may also help us disclose how advertising agencies manipulate the general public and why many of us fall victim to advertisements, commercials, and promotional reviews, which we often later find (unfortunately too late) mendacious or highly subjective at best. Note that these often use the is-of-identity and the is-of predication. You will find tens of such ads or promotional reviews in a single issue of many magazines, for instance, in the music magazine Gramophone: ‘It’s easy to set up and the surround sound effect is extremely impressive’ (an ad for Bose; Gramophone 2008: 20). ‘Christopher Ball “is a composer and musician of rare brilliance . . . exquisite music . . . hauntingly mellifluous and melodic . . . tuneful and beautifully nostalgic music of great charm” ’ (an ad for a CD; Gramophone 2008: 34). ‘Hanslip’s sound is sensual, vocal and yearning, and totally radiant in its top register . . .’ (an ad for a CD, Gramophone 2008: 5). ‘The whole collection is a most attractive expression of Scott’s highly characteristic style, all wonderfully played’. (a promotional review for a CD, Gramophone 2008: 67) Ads and reviews like these suggest, mainly through the use of the verb ‘be’, that some piece of music is, for example, inherently ‘brilliant’, ‘exquisite’, ‘melodic’. Authors of such ads and reviews hardly ever say explicitly that they express universal truth; neither do they usually say that the opinions express their own subjective views or formulations dictated by the commercial goal to sell more products. However, the ubiquitous ‘be’ verb bombards us all the time and we probably often forget that the reviews express subjective opinions of the authors and that the ads intend mainly, or only, to make us buy products. As might be expected, E-Prime, understood as English without the verb ‘to be’, has brought about some criticism. Most of it focuses around the question of whether all of the uses of ‘be’ should be discarded or whether only some should, as only some seem rather harmful and confusing. One of the critics, Emory Menefee, proposes the term E-Choice to refer to the English which retains all the forms of ‘to be’ but takes care of the main goals of E-Prime by safety words and phrases such as ‘in my view’, ‘as the data suggest’, ‘probably’, and so on (Menefee 1994a). In a different article, Menefee (1994b) suggests that only some uses of ‘to be’ should be discarded, namely these that may be seen as most pernicious. Dallmann (1994), in turn, proposes the term E-Primemod to refer to the


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English which does away only with the ‘be’ of identification and that of predication.

Some ises seem more harmful and confusing than others In my view, the harm that the verb ‘to be’ may bring about may form a continuum from the least harmful to the most harmful structures. The least harmful (if at all harmful) appear to me auxiliary, existential, and location ises, as in ‘Dinner is getting ready’, ‘There is a mouse in your office’, and ‘Jerry is here’, respectively. These structures seem also the least confusing. As a little more harmful and more confusing we can view cases such as ‘Steve is a violin player’ and ‘This solution is inevitable’. This is so, if you will agree with the reasoning I developed above, because the sentence about Steve mostly indicates how Steve can be classified, and because this sentence at the same time disregards other potential classifications that may appear important to the discourse participants, provided classifications appear important to any party in the discourse at all (!) In the case of ‘This solution is inevitable’, the sentence suggests only one analysis of a situation, and, as we know, one analysis hardly ever depicts the complexity of the world. As the most harmful and confusing I see structures such as ‘Jack is a swine’ and ‘Bill is crazy’, which include what most people will probably see as highly emotional and evaluative terms. Some people may certainly see (or, importantly, may have seen some time ago!) Jack as a swine, but others may, or may have not. Some people may certainly see (or, importantly, may have seen some time ago!) Bill as crazy but others may, or may have not. Both ‘Jack is a swine’ and ‘Bill is crazy’ suggest permanence, stability, and common agreement that Jack and Bill have always been and will remain ‘swine’ and ‘crazy’ to everybody, that they do not change and that people may not vary in their opinions, which seems, of course, contrary to fact. The negative counterparts of the types of sentences like the above – ‘Jack is not a swine’ and ‘Bill is not crazy’, appear to me less harmful and confusing. We can treat the negation as defying, or rejecting, what one could otherwise take as an absolute statement. Unless you take ‘Jack is not a swine’ and ‘Bill is not crazy’ as implying that nobody can label Jacky as a swine and Bill as crazy, the two seem less harmful and confusing as far as their potential social consequences go. I would say ‘Jack is not a swine’ (knowing that somebody may think the opposite) rather than ‘Jack is a swine’ (knowing that someone may think the opposite). The harm that Jack may suffer from in the former seems to me much

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smaller than that he may suffer from in the latter. Somewhere in the middle of the continuum we should probably also place structures such as ‘It is interesting that you should mention this problem’. We may see them as somewhat confusing because they imply an objective opinion (‘interesting’ to me and everyone else), which in some situations may also turn out to be somewhat harmful. To sum up, both the is-of-identity and the is-of-predication suggest social agreement, finality, permanence, and stability in an open world of variation, social disagreement, fluidity, temporariness, and constant change. The ises tend to make us freeze in our minds what remains a dynamic ever-changing non-verbal reality. You may thus see them as confusing the language user and promoting a significantly distorted view of the world. In cases where adjectives or nouns referring to emotions occur, they also seem to stimulate and push us into reacting the quick signal way by which we make quick decisions about discourse; John is clever (and not stupid), Margaret is irresponsible (and not responsible), Frank is a moron (and not a reasonable person), Robert is a swine (and not a good person). In most cases when we react to discourse the signal way, we perceive as simple something which in fact we should grasp and react to as much more complicated.

E-Prime in practice Consider the following original text, written in ordinary Standard English, and the subsequent text, rewritten in E-Prime.

Text 22 (in Standard English) In Britain, the last such epidemic to win the national publicity (1) was the outbreak of typhoid, which in 1964 all but shut off the Scottish city of Aberdeen. But even this (2) was eventually traced to infected corned beef imported from South America, so that it (3) was really an epidemic caused by food poisoning. In this sense, in the absence of any more dramatic mass outbreaks of infectious disease, it (4) was less a survival from the past than a portent of what (5) was to come. What initially set the scene for the food scares that (6) were to explode through the headlines from the late 1980s onwards (7) was the inescapable fact that, in the preceding decade, reported food poisoning in Britain had suddenly begun to rise with


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dramatic speed. In the early 1970s, the average number of cases a year (8) was little over 8000. By 1982 this had shot up to 13,000, and was still hurtling upwards. The causes of this poisoning (9) were, of course, the various foodborne bacteria that can play havoc with human health, and since three of these in particular (10) were to play a significant part in the later story, they may (11) be given a brief introduction. The most prominent culprit in the rise of food poisoning in the late 1970s and 1980s (12) was salmonella. Although commonly found in poultry, cows, pigs, pets and wild animals, it includes more than 2000 different strains, only relatively few of which (13) are normally associated with human food poisoning. Because they can (14) be killed off in various ways, as by cooking or exposure to the acid in vinegar, they usually only become dangerous where the handling of food (15) is careless, either because it (16) has been insufficiently cooked, or where it (17) is infected by crosscontamination, then left in conditions which allow the bacteria to multiply. (Booker and North 2007: 11–12; numbers and italics added) Text 23 (in E-Prime) In Britain, the outbreak of typhoid in 1964, (1) which won the national publicity, all but shut off the Scottish city of Aberdeen. But even this (2) analysts traced to infected corned beef imported from South America. (3) They saw it as really an epidemic caused by food poisoning. In this sense, in the absence of any more dramatic mass outbreaks of infectious disease, (4/5) they saw it as a portent of the future rather than (4/5) a survival from the past. (6/7) The inescapable fact that, in the preceding decade, reported food poisoning in Britain had suddenly begun to rise with dramatic speed initially set the scene for the food scares that, (6/7) as it turned out later, exploded through the headlines from the late 1980s onwards. In the early 1970s, (8) analysts reported little of 8000 as the average number of cases as year. By 1982 this had shot up to 13,000, and was still hurtling upwards. (9) The various foodborne bacteria that can play havoc with human health of course caused this poisoning, and since three of these in particular, (10) as it turned out, played a significant part in the later story, (11) I may give them a brief introduction. (12) Salmonella appeared as the most prominent culprit in the rise of food poisoning in the late 1970s and 1980s. Although

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commonly found in poultry, cows, pigs, pets and wild animals, it includes more than 2000 different strains. Only relatively few of them (13) we normally associate with human food poisoning. Because (14) we can kill them off in various ways, as by cooking or exposure to the acid in vinegar, they usually only become dangerous (15) where people handle food carelessly, either because (16) someone has cooked it insufficiently, or (17) infected it by cross-contamination and then left in conditions which allow the bacteria to multiply.

Some additional comments on E-Prime In E-Prime the sentence information structure may be different from that of ordinary Standard English. For example, the principle of end focus (the tendency to present information within the sentence in the order given to new) may no longer hold. Especially in passive voice sentences, we will observe this commonly recognized structure for Standard English. For example, we tend to understand the sentence ‘the garlic has been eaten by three boys and five girls’ to indicate that the garlic constitutes something we know about from a previous sentence or from some larger non-linguistic context. The new information, as we see it here, is that the three boys and five girls have eaten the garlic and not that one boy did it, for example. In Standard English, the corresponding active voice sentence ‘Three boys and five girls have eaten the garlic’ tends to indicate that we know about the three boys and five girls from some context (given information) and that we take ‘the garlic’ as the new information; they ate the garlic and not the onions and broccoli, for example. If we avoid the passive voice structure, in accordance with the E-Prime recommendations, we can only get ‘three boys and five girls have eaten the garlic’. This disrupts the commonly understood information structure if we want to point to ‘three boys and five girls’ as the new information. There seems to be no problem in spoken English; we can stress ‘three boys and five girls’ to indicate that this information the hearer should see as new. In written English, however, E-Prime may require new practices and new linguistic analyses. We can stick to our Standard English analysis of the principle of end focus in active sentences including verbs other than ‘be’, of course. For instance, in ‘The author has just published a new book on England in the Middle Ages’, which I see as a perfect example of Standard English


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as well as E-Prime; we normally classify ‘a new book on England in the Middle Ages’ as the new information. The only possible E-Prime structure ‘Three boys and five girls have eaten the garlic’ (when we analyze ‘three boys and five girls’ not only as the old but also as the new information) violates another Standard English information principle; namely, that of end-weight (the tendency to place relatively long elements toward the end of the sentence). In Standard English, we find ‘A fascinating account is given in the book of the author’s adventures during his travels in South America’ more acceptable than ‘A fascinating account of the author’s adventures during his travels in South America is given in the book’. We consider ‘is given in the book of the author’s adventures during his travels in South America’ as much heavier (which translates into the simple ‘longer’) than ‘is given in the book’; the former sounds to most users of English more natural than the latter. As was the case with the end-focus principle, in E-Prime, the end-weight principle may require a reanalysis. E-Prime may wreak havoc with respect to still other common structures and principles in Standard English. Proponents of E-Prime will notice that extraposition (a subtype of postponement) becomes a vulnerable structure. In an extraposed type of structure, the subject of the sentence moves to a later part of the sentence. Consider: ‘It was a big disappointment that Sarah couldn’t come.’, where the subject ‘that Sarah couldn’t come’ moves to the end of the sentence in accordance with the principle of end-focus. In these kinds of sentences, the verb ‘be’ often occurs. The so-called ‘anticipatory subject’, it, followed by ‘was’ we would need to get rid of in E-Prime. This does not seem a difficult task. The E-Prime ‘Sarah couldn’t come, which disappointed greatly some or many people’ corresponds to the Standard English ‘It was a big disappointment that Sarah couldn’t come.’ Note that the E-Prime version forces the speaker or writer to be more precise (and thus closer to fact). The speaker or writer should indicate to whom Sarah appeared disappointing – to one person (named John, for example), to some people, to many people, to very many people, and so on. Rewriting into E-Prime another extraposition example may also enhance our awareness of how E-Prime makes us say things in a more precise manner (and thus closer to fact) than Standard English does. Take ‘It is a thing of beauty to see us all work together’. We may see this extraposed structure (as well as its non-extraposed equivalent ‘To see us all work together is a thing of beauty’) as very vague indeed. Who is going to see us? Who is going to see our work together as a thing of beauty? Can we see this sentence as meaningful in the sense that its

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words refer to anything tangible? Rewriting the extraposed sentence ‘It is a thing of beauty to see us all work together’ into E-Prime forces us to offer more precise information. For instance, ‘John thinks that seeing us all work together appears to him beautiful’. This way the highly abstract and hardly comprehensible phrase, ‘the thing of beauty’ disappears, and it becomes obvious that ‘beautiful’ comes from John, namely, that he considers ‘seeing us all work together’ as something beautiful. In its most radical version, E-Prime does away with all uses of the verb ‘be’. In its less radical variants, it promotes the kind of English which does away with the most misleading uses of the verb ‘to be’, the ‘is of identity’, the ‘is of predication’, and a few other related uses. At least in some people’s opinion, we may find it very difficult to put E-Prime into practice. Nevertheless, from the point of view of how human beings abstract non-verbal reality and how we use words as maps of that reality, the E-Prime way in English discourse looks like a very reasonable way to proceed. I originally planned to write this chapter refraining from the use of the verb ‘to be’ in structures that I criticized above. You must have noticed that I have not completely succeeded. I have managed, however, to reduce drastically the number of instances of ‘to be’ in this chapter. Two things appear obvious to me now that this chapter is coming to an end: the more I think and write about E-Prime the more I believe that writing in E-Prime may bring a reward in the form of clearer thinking and easier-to-understand linguistic expression. Hard as writing in E-Prime may seem at the beginning, the more often you do it the easier and more rewarding you will find it. Practice makes perfect (or at least better)!

Chapter 6 – MAIN POINTS TO REMEMBER 1. The English verb ‘to be’ appears in a number of grammatical structures including these where ‘to be’ functions as an auxiliary, in existential sentences, sentences indicating location, and in is-of-identity and is-of-predication structures. 2. Structures in which ‘to be’ occurs as an auxiliary and those where it expresses existence and location do not seem confusing or harmful. 3. Unlike those mentioned in 2 above, ‘to be’ in is-of-identity and is-of-predication structures may confuse or harm the language user, and we should avoid it.


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4. The use of ‘to be’ in is-of-identity and is-of-predication structures we may see as promoting a distorted view of reality because it suggests homogeneity, social agreement, finality, permanence, and stability when we in fact talk about the reality characterized by heterogeneity, openness, change, and instability. 5. The ‘to be’ in is-of-identity structures (as in ‘Jerry is a teacher’ or ‘Jerry is a moron’) suggests that two things may be identical, which, however, we should see only as a verbal classification. ‘Jerry’ refers to one person; ‘teacher’ and ‘moron’ do to very many people. Identifying one with the other appears to be a gross oversimplification. 6. The ‘to be’ in is-of-predication structures (as in ‘Jerry is courageous’ or ‘Jerry is smart’) suggests that ‘courageous’ and ‘smart’ exist in Jerry (that they inherently belong to Jerry), and that they are permanent and stable characteristics about which we may have learned having access to some source of absolute knowledge. The adjectives in the structures in questions we should view, however, as expressing subjective evaluations of individual speakers, who select and highlight a feature, such as ‘courageous’. Unlike what the isof-predication structure suggests, such features may not be stable at all as the reality around us constantly changes, and so may the Jerry in our example. 7. We should avoid asking what-is-questions, such as ‘what is linguistics?’ These questions never lead to a final answer. They perpetuate the intensional orientation. They do not give us much reward. They seem to strive after identity, which does not exist. 8. Anyone insisting on formulating what-is-questions should realize that for questions such as ‘what is linguistics?’ to make sense, we should understand them, with reference to our example, as ‘what does the word linguistics refer to in the nonverbal world?’ or ‘what do we want the word linguistics to refer to in the non-verbal world?’ 9. The confusion and possible harm the verb ‘to be’ seems to bring about we can see as a continuum. Some uses of ‘to be’ may confuse and harm us more than others. 10. The verb ‘to be’ enables people to produce convoluted discourse often devoid of any tangible meaning; E-Prime may

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disclose obfuscation and the emptiness or shallowness of argument. 11. We may see E-Prime as a weapon helping us to disclose the mendacity of advertisement and propaganda as well as the subjectivity of opinions which may otherwise pass for absolute truths. 12. E-Prime may lead to reformulating the basic principles of English language information structure, such as the principle of end-focus and the principle of end–weight. 13. Given the habits of the average speaker of English who uses the verb ‘to be’ all the time, switching to E-Prime looks like a very challenging task. It may take long periods of practice before we manage to do away with the verb ‘to be’ altogether. We may begin, however, by avoiding the verb and by using it as seldom as our linguistic intuition allows.

7 Can You Tell the Difference? – Non-Verbal Phenomena, Descriptions, and Inferences

As I mentioned earlier, people have the tendency to mix the various levels of abstraction. This includes mixing non-verbal phenomena (for instance, things like buildings, wheels and pajamas, someone’s doing a somersault), which we may perceive with our senses, and verbal means – words – (for instance, the words building, wheels, pajamas, and someone is doing a somersault), which we use to refer to what we perceive. People also mix things up at the verbal level itself; they mix up descriptions and inferences. To illustrate the former in some detail, let us turn to the recent debate over the status of Pluto. Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 as the ninth planet. In August 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided at a meeting in Prague to relegate Pluto to the status of ‘a dwarf planet’. In recent years, many icy objects have been newly discovered. Some of them appeared to be smaller than Pluto, some bigger. The list of these objects includes, for example, Varuna (1000 kilometers wide), Quaoar (1250 kilometers wide), and Sedan (1800 kilometers wide). In 2005, NASA announced the discovery of what was unofficially called Xena, whose diameter was found to be 2398 kilometers, that is, slightly longer than that of Pluto (Chadha 2006). Xena, like Pluto, had a moon, which has played a role in defining an object as a planet. As the newly discovered objects had been coming to the fore, astronomers opened a discussion of what characteristics define a planet. All kinds of arguments and criteria relevant for the definition of a planet were raised. For instance, the size, the roundness, and the absence of moons were taken into account in trying to determine the status of Pluto, and astronomers argued for or against allowing Pluto to maintain the status of a planet. One professional opinion was that ‘a sensible 171

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definition [of a planet] would be a body which orbits a star directly (i.e., not a satellite), and whose mass is sufficient that its shape is determined by gravity rather than by material strength. By this definition, Pluto remains a planet’ (Chadha 2006: 39). Another specialist opinion was: I prefer a scheme of classification in which planets are ‘major bodies’. If one looks at the types of Solar System object, two of the major ones are terrestrial and giant planets. I am comfortable with these qualifying as planets. On the other hand, the properties of Pluto mean that it does not easily fit into either grouping, and is much more reasonably placed in the Kuiper Belt. I don’t consider Pluto a planet. (Chadha 2006: 39) These two opinions illustrate the fact that astronomers disagree about the definition of the planet and thus argue about the status of Pluto – should it be seen as a planet or not? At least some astronomers and science journalists seem to be fully aware of the fact that the debate has not been so much about Pluto (the ‘object out there’) as about language, that is, about the definition of a planet: The problem appears to be the catchall word ‘planet’ from the Greek ‘planetas’, meaning ‘wandering star’. These were bright star-like objects in the sky that the ancient Greeks noticed. If we continued the use of ‘planet’ in the Greek way, there would only ever be five; Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (Earth wouldn’t count, and Uranus and Neptune aren’t visible to the naked eye): But clearly there are more than five planets, so how do modern-day astronomers define what a planet is? (Chadha 2006: 38) Some people felt that a meaningful, ‘correct’, definition of a planet is both desired and possible: ‘Gingerich and his committee had grappled with the problem of a meaningful planet definition rather than an arbitrary one.’ (Clark, S. 2006: 28)1 Note that others acknowledge the existence of what they see as a big definitional problem and openly acknowledge that they see no solution. For instance, Mark Bullock, director of the Center for Space Exploration Policy Research is reported to have said: ‘It is difficult to see a way forward from here . . . . I don’t think anyone will come up with an answer to this problem . . . we are left in a state of limbo.’ (Clark, S. 2006: 30) Meanwhile, facing the

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definitional problem, the community of astronomers was viewed by some as an incompetent group of people: The soonest the IAU redefinition [of a planet] can occur is in 2009, when the body meets again in Rio de Janeiro. Until then, expect the argument and the discussion to rumble on. The fractious nature of this debate is doing astronomy no favors and is, unfortunately, making astronomers look silly. Everyone knows Pluto is up there. They learnt it in school. For astronomers to now say that it isn’t a planet after all, when Pluto has not changed makes the whole thing look faintly ridiculous. This is made worse by the fact that no one can say what a planet is . . . and give a single defining characteristic that is obvious to all. (Clark, S. 2006: 31) In the meantime we heard demands that astronomers give the public the official definition that should satisfy the public so that the discussion could stop: But shouldn’t the IAU even have tried to give the word ‘planet’ a scientific definition? . . . . The public deserve a scientific definition, one that reflects the world as accurately as possible. (Battersby 2006: 16) Some astronomers and journalists are no doubt fully aware of the fundamental difference between the Pluto ‘out there’ and the word ‘pluto’ which refers to it. ‘Pluto hasn’t changed just because of our nomenclature. It is the same today as it was yesterday and as it has been for thousands of years.’ (Vedantam 2006: A02)

What did the public think? After the August 2006 IAU decision to demote Pluto to the position of a ‘dwarf planet’, an outcry over the demotion was expressed in various forms and in various media. To all the astronomers who voted in Prague this week to demote our solar system’s smallest planet to the status of ‘dwarf planet’ we ask: What do you know? Ask any third-grader how many planets there are. Nine. Ask whether Pluto is one of them. Of course it is. Ask them whether they care how a bunch of telescope jockeys voted. Of course they don’t. (Washington Post.com 2006b: A20)

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People asked questions such as: ‘But if it’s not a planet anymore, then what is it?’ (Chandler and Otto 2006: A07) As The Economist reported: ‘Never cheer for the coup until the countercoup has failed. Though Pluto has officially lost its lofty title of “planet”, a rebellion against its demotion is brewing.’ (The Economist 2006: 77) And further, ‘. . . a web petition against the decision was promptly set up at www.ipetitions.com/petition/planetprotest. Members of the public are also wielding the web. Sites such as www.plutoisaplanet.com and www.pleasesavepluto.org have been launched.’ (The Economist 2006: 77) One typical contribution to the former blog was ‘The definition of a planet by the IAU is fundamentally flawed and needs to be replaced . . .’ (www.ipetitions.com). Emotions ran high as magazine covers included headlines such as ‘Requiem for Pluto: 1930–2006’,2 and as articles such as ‘Rejected as a planet, Pluto has a space in people’s hearts’ (Brown 2006: 1) appeared. In the latter we read: ‘Outside the Smithsonian Castle, people have come to mourn the “death” of a planet’ As The Economist reports: ‘Sales of “Pluto is a Planet” T-shirts are high. And a band called Jimmy and the Keyz has written a song called “They demoted Pluto.” ’ (The Economist 2006: 77) Evidently a large number of people express concern regarding Pluto’s losing the status of an ordinary planet, and claim that astronomers are irresponsible and perhaps incompetent, the issue is serious, and an ultimate solution as to the definition of a planet and, by extension, to that of the status of Pluto is called for. Some astronomers and science journalists appear to have been fully aware of and concerned about the linguistic aspect of the problem as well.

Is Pluto a planet? It is a word – at best! ‘Planet’ might be seen as a set of sounds, a set of graphemes, a set of marks on paper, and so on. It might also be seen as a word to refer to something else, to an object in space. Pluto (the object in space) should be seen as an object abstracted at the second, object level of the Structural Differential (see Chapter 1). ‘Pluto’ and ‘planet’, in turn, should be seen as labels (words) used at the third, descriptive level of abstraction of the Structural Differential. Squabbles about whether Pluto is a planet should be seen as mere verbal quibbles at the descriptive and higher levels of abstraction having very little (if anything) to do with the object out there in space that we abstract at object level. Such quibbles lead nowhere. If we argue, as many people do, about Pluto’s status as a planet, we remain intensionally oriented (that is, we remain in


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the world of words-symbols). We then do not realize or take seriously the difference between words and the non-verbal reality that these words refer to. We need to realize fully that words (language, the word ‘pluto’) and non-verbal reality (the icy object out there) are entirely different worlds, worlds that belong to entirely different levels of abstraction. The relation between verbal (words) and non-verbal reality (for example, the objects in space) being a relation of symbols referring to something else appears obvious. Many people would probably feel offended when told that the word ‘pluto’ is not the same thing as the icy object out there. The big problem appears to be, however, that many people are often unaware of this simple relation, and, even more frequently, if they are aware of it, they do not make use of this awareness; that is, they do not behave as if they are aware of this relationship. The discussion concerning Pluto is, in my view, a shining example of this. In other words, people are unaware of the different levels at which they abstract and/or mix these levels. Mixing levels of abstraction causes confusion, unnecessary discussions, difficulty in discourse comprehension, and conflicts, as the example of Pluto shows. The Pluto case contributes also to our consideration of non-typical cases. Pluto was (until it was demoted) the smallest of the nine planets (Earth counts in this number); it is 2288 kilometers in diameter. In other words, in terms of size, it was a non-typical, borderline case. This actually may have been one of the main reasons for the conflict around Pluto’s status as a planet. Anxiety and hesitation arose, and arguments started after the new icy objects of similar size had been discovered. Referring to Pluto as ‘a planet’ became a labeling problem, as I see it. We will now be able to see better that the conflict could be seen, again, at least partly, as a labeling problem around a non-typical example. Most importantly, however, many people seemed unaware of the fact that the whole issue seemed to be primarily, if not exclusively, about labeling (using words) when talking about non-verbal objects. Those involved in the argument confused the various levels of abstraction (they confused words with things), and the fact that Pluto is, size wise, a non-typical, borderline case exacerbated the problem. In conclusion, we may say that arguing about whether Pluto is a planet or not is a hopeless endeavor. If we behave intensionally, that is, if we remain in our discussion at the verbal levels of abstraction (level 3 and higher on the Structural Differential) our discussion may have nothing to do with the object out in space. We only use more words about the word ‘pluto’. When we are using language without any regard for the object out there, and when, at the same time, we believe that

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we are saying something meaningful about the object out there, we are only fooling ourselves. We then remain in the domain of symbols that may be taken by different people to refer to different kinds of objects. Both ‘Pluto’ and ‘planet’ should be seen as sets of sounds, sets of graphic symbols, words, as symbols. That is why we may answer the question of whether Pluto is a planet by saying that it is a word, at best! What the word refers to is something else. The conflict around Pluto shows that many lay people (and some astronomers perhaps) are not aware of the obvious difference between symbols and the non-linguistic reality that they refer to, and of how we abstract reality at different levels. More importantly, these people mix the different levels of abstraction, which leads to confusion, disagreements, or outright conflict. A mixture of the non-verbal and the verbal levels of abstraction seems to underlie also some kinds of arguments for and promotion of euphemisms and politically correct discourse. In, for instance, ‘head count reduction’ (the dismissal of numbers of employees) or in ‘special needs children’ (ill children with conditions such as the Down syndrome or autism), all we are dealing with is different words or phrases which refer to a non-verbal phenomenon. The alternative words or phrases are meant to make us think in positive or neutral terms about something that we usually think about in negative terms (as in the case of the euphemism ‘head count reduction’). Or, the alternative words or phrases are meant to make us develop a positive attitude to something to which our attitude may not have been positive (as in the case of the politically correct ‘special needs children’). I do not intend to take up the question of whether euphemisms are effective in turning our attention from unpleasant, negative phenomena such as dismissals. Neither do I intend to take up the question of whether politically correct discourse is effective in generating positive attitudes toward phenomena otherwise conceived of as unpleasant. Independent of whether euphemistic and politically correct discourse is effective, the actual phenomena (with respect to our examples – the dismissals and the children with medical conditions) will remain whatever they are. Whether you call a person ‘sanitary engineer’ or ‘lavatory cleaner’ will not directly influence the job actually done by this person; the physical activities carried out in the lavatory will be the same. Words arouse associations along the positivenegative continuum, of course, which may influence our feelings and attitudes, but words are never the phenomena that they refer to. It should be obvious to you by now that distinguishing between words and the non-verbal reality (like the bodies orbiting the Sun out there in space, or the ill children) appears to be crucial for our understanding of


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how discourse works. You certainly knew before you started reading this book that words are not what they refer to, but you will have been convinced by now, I assume, that although all people know that words are not what they refer to, many people behave as if they did not know this. Incidentally, note that many people do not want to talk about unpleasant things (‘let’s not talk about it’), which may be taken to mean that not talking about something will make it disappear or at least diminish its gravity, whatever the ‘it’ is. In Polish, some people say ‘wypluj to słowo’ (in English, ‘spit this word out’), when you say something referring to an unpleasant phenomenon, like ‘cancer’, as if not using the word would make the illness disappear out of sight. Needless to say, the well known avoidance, on the part of many people, of taboo topics rests on the belief that words replace the things that they refer to. ‘Don’t talk about death because if you do the person will die. If you don’t talk about it, he or she may be able to survive’, seems to be the position that many people adopt. So, although most people seem intelligent enough to understand that words should be treated as something different than the things they stand for, still, putting this obvious distinction into practice seems to be a difficult problem.

Mixing at the verbal levels – telling descriptions from inferences Mixing verbal and nonverbal phenomena may be relatively easy to disclose and declared obvious. What I take to be much less obvious, and maybe very difficult to keep in mind while you talk to people, however, is the distinction between describing phenomena (facts) on the one hand and inferring about them, on the other. When do we describe (nonverbal and verbal) facts? What do people consider to be facts? There is no one answer to these questions, of course. Philosophers, philosophers of science, and linguists have been debating the latter question for centuries (see Labov 1975 for a discussion of what constitutes a linguist fact). I endorse Johnson’s position on ‘facts’: . . . a fact appears different depending on the point of view; your facts are not exactly like those of someone else. Actually, one man’s fact is not infrequently another man’s fiction. This means, finally, that facts are, in important measure, a matter of social agreement. Unless these elementary points are clearly recognized, telling people to stick to the facts is usually a sure-fire way of getting them embroiled in hopeless argument. (Johnson, W. 1946: 94)

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For the purposes of our discussion, I assume that we describe ‘facts’ when we report on what we personally consider to be ‘facts’ experienced with our senses; that is, when we report on what we hear, see, smell, taste, and touch. We describe facts when we refer to what is often called firstorder reality, or first order facts (see for instance, Johnson, W. 1946), the kinds of things that other people can also experience, check on, and compare with what you have experienced: dogs bark, planes land and take off, students go to the library, parents change babies’ diapers, people speak (the last being an example of first-order verbal reality), and so on. These are the kinds of physical objects, people, and activities that we personally experience, abstract, and may say something descriptive about. For instance, ‘There is an engine in this car’, ‘The artist has just stopped playing and started his interview’, ‘The oven has exploded’, ‘They just saw the train leaving’, ‘Robert is now reciting a poem’. These are all examples of descriptive statements which you could make when looking under the hood of the car, first hearing the music and then not hearing it any longer, seeing the artist give an interview, getting parts of the oven in your face, seeing the train leave, and hearing Robert recite a poem, respectively. People will normally agree about the existence of such ‘facts’. The word ‘descriptive’ is important here. You describe, or give a statement on, an event that you have yourself experienced. You yourself (and not your brother, neighbor, or colleague) see, hear, touch, or smell the things around you (and not anybody else) and you yourself abstract the reality around your own way. You are as close to the nonverbal reality around you as possible. You describe this reality as you see it, and do not repeat after others as they see it. ‘Descriptive’ should be distinguished from ‘inferential’ (see for instance Lee 1994). Although these two labels should not be treated as discrete categories, that is, although you will always be able to find examples that could be seen as sort of descriptive and sort of inferential, for our purposes, distinguishing between ‘descriptive’ and ‘inferential’ appears useful. In what follows I will address only typical descriptive and typical inferential discourse which can be kept apart quite easily. Consider the following examples: (1) ‘Part of the computer has come off; two screws are under the computer on the floor’. (2) ‘I think this computer isn’t working because the hard disc has crashed. (3) It is a horrible computer. Sentence (1) can be seen as a typical descriptive statement. This is because you can actually see part of the computer coming off and you can see the screws that belong to this part sitting on the floor under the computer. You abstract this state of affairs and describe it with words the


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way you are able to do it. Provided the computer has not been dismantled, sentence (2) can be seen as a typical non-descriptive, ‘inferential’ statement. You can not see the hard disc; you infer what is wrong with the computer on the basis of what you can indeed see (the outside of the computer) and hear; you can hear the irregular way the computer is running. If you follow my reasoning, sentence (3) cannot be treated as a descriptive sentence, of course; it should be seen as a typical example of an inferential statement, including a personal evaluation. The computer is horrible to you; it may not be so to other people. As for the distinction between ‘descriptive’ and ‘inferential’, although most of us seem to appreciate getting first-hand knowledge (seeing computers with our own eyes rather than being told about them, visiting places rather than reading about them), most of our knowledge is unfortunately not collected in this way. Most of our knowledge can be seen as inferential; it is second-hand knowledge, and it comes in the form of assumptions, judgments, generalizations, hypotheses, conclusions, and so on. By ‘inferences’ I mean all kinds of discourse that build on descriptive discourse. You may think of it, for instance, as statements about statements, and then of statements about statements about statements, and so on. Throughout our lives, no matter how long they are, we can personally experience (and be able to describe this personal experience of) only an extremely limited number of things and activities. Most of what we know comes from others, who either had personally experienced what they talk or write about, or, which is much more likely, who report on what others had experienced. What we hear from others on a daily basis is probably what they had heard from other people who, in turn, had heard it from other people who, in turn, had heard it from other people, and so on. Who and when and in what way first experienced the accident that you heard about from your colleague at work this morning, remains uncertain or, most likely, unknown. Stories we hear from other people who we know have heard them from other people who we know had heard them from other people, and so on, we normally think of as unreliable reports. Those of us aware of the fact that the original source may be unreliable or unidentified are usually cautious about taking such stories seriously. We are mostly also aware of how gossip works and at least some of us try not to spread it. Ordinary inferences, which are made every time you talk about something that you have not experienced yourself, language users do not seem to be normally aware of when producing discourse. Take the following excerpt of a newspaper article.

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Mixed Markets Reflect Hope for Plan WASHINGTON – Overseas markets refused to panic and United States stock futures rose as President Bush prepared to address the nation on Tuesday morning, a day after the House rejected a $700 billion proposal, sending markets plunging. The mixed market reaction reflected optimism that Congress may still act this week to approve an economic rescue plan, after lawmakers in the House defied the president and leaders of both parties to reject the plan, leaving lawmakers groping for a resolution. . . . The stunning defeat of the proposal on a 228–205 vote after marathon talks by senior Congressional and Bush administration officials on Monday lowered a fog of uncertainty over economies around the globe. Its authors had described the measure as essential to preventing widespread economic calamity. Frédéric Rozier, at Meeschaert, an asset manager in Paris, said the market there was also heartened by the gains in U.S. stock futures, and he cited a ‘technical rebound’ after the aggressive sales of recent days had triggered some automatic buying. . . . Asian stocks trimmed some losses in afternoon trading after plunging at the open. In Tokyo, Asia’s largest market, the Nikkei 225 fell 4.1 percent to close at a three-year low of 11,259.86 points. . . . For 25 more minutes, uncertainty gripped the nation as television showed party leaders trying, and failing, to muster more support. Finally, Representative Ellen Tauscher, Democrat of California, pounded the gavel and it was done. . . . Among opponents of the rescue plan, some Republicans cited ideological objections to government intervention, and liberal Democrats said they were of no mind to race to aid Wall Street tycoons. Other critics complained about haste and secrecy in assembling the plan. But lawmakers on both sides pointed to an outpouring of opposition from deeply hostile constituents just five weeks before every seat in the House was up for election as a fundamental reason that the measure was defeated. House members in potentially tough races and those seeking Senate seats fled from the plan in droves. (Hulse and Saltmarsh 2008: http://voteforminnesota.com/newsArticle.jsf?documentId=2c9e4f 691cb1d880011cb345cb690324) With reference to the above excerpt, would you normally think about questions such as: On what basis did the authors give the title of the


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article ‘Mixed Markets Reflect Hope for Plan’? How did the authors know about overseas markets? On what basis did the authors say that the mixed market (by the way, what does ‘market’ refer to?) reaction reflected optimism? How did the authors know that lawmakers (by the way, who were they?) were groping for a resolution? Were the authors present at the marathon talks by senior Congressional and Bush administration officials? On what basis do the authors say that uncertainty gripped the nation? What do you have to experience to say that uncertainty gripped the nation? As the authors most likely were not anywhere close to the overseas markets; as they most likely were not anywhere close to what they call ‘market’; as the authors most likely were not close to any lawmakers; as the authors most likely did not participate in any marathon talks, and so on, all they do when they write articles like ‘Mixed Markets Reflect Hope for Plan’ is infer. They read or hear what others say, and they infer. They do not describe their own experiences. Why does the distinction between ‘description’ and ‘inference’ seem so important? It does so, in light of how abstraction works, because using words that others used (and very likely still others before them, and still others before them!) gets you further and further away from non-verbal facts, from the original experience that is being talked about. Inferences based on other inferences, on assumptions, conclusions, hypotheses, and so on, take you further and further away from what a word meant to an individual when it was first used with respect to the original experience. You are obviously very far away from this original experience and meaning of the word. Keep in mind the fact that the world around you changes all the time and for words to be meaningful to people, and not just empty combinations of sounds or letters, they need to refer to something more or less identifiable, an object, an activity, a feeling, or a relation perhaps. When someone tells you something about someone else who heard something from someone else who had read it somewhere . . . and so on, you find yourself very far away from the original experience, whatever it was. The interesting point for us here is this: you hear words in a story, you don’t know what sort of experience these words were used to describe (because you did not have that experience; someone else did), and you normally take the words to refer to the experience that you would describe with the help of these words. You imagine the experience that other people had, but you can only do so making a mental image, a mental picture, of the sort of experience you yourself have had. What you normally do is substitute the original meanings of the words in the story with your own. You should not be faulted for this of course. There is no other way.

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You could not experience what other people did because you are not those other people! This should make us realize that the further away we find ourselves from the kinds of things that we can experience with our senses, the more the meanings of words to us become fuzzy, uncertain, doubtful, difficult to understand, misleading, and confusing. In many cases, we may not realize that these words mean simply nothing to us and they might as well be sounds produced by some machine or a wild hog. It appears important to keep in mind that inferences be thought of in the context of the fact that we abstract all the time. You will recall that descriptive statements may be seen as the first-order verbal abstractions and that abstractions always involve disregarding some aspects of a phenomenon. When we infer, assume, hypothesize, conclude, and so on, we abstract further. We abstract abstractions and we get further and further away from non-verbal (and verbal, if we happen to be talking about language-verbal behavior) facts. The necessary connection between words and what they refer to becomes more and more nebulous. Discourse begins to include words that float around without any anchor in tangible things in the real world. This kind of discourse may be very misleading and confusing because you may think that you are talking about one kind of experience while you may actually be talking about another kind of experience (yours as opposed to somebody else’s). When you are not quite sure what sort of experience you are talking about, the big question seems to be ‘what are you talking about?’ An answer seems to be that in the world of inferences, generalizations, and assumptions, for example, which result from high level abstractions, we very often do not know what we are talking about, little conscious of this rather depressing state of affairs as we may be. This kind of discourse appears then to be like music or poetry. It may mean something to you but not necessarily so, and whatever it means to you may be very far away from what it may mean to other people. Producing more and more inferences, becoming more and more abstract and getting further and further away from the original experience may be illustrated by the following analogy (based on Lee 1994). You come into a new restaurant for the first time and experience perceptually (non-verbally) the various pieces of furniture in it, the dishes on the tables, the utensils, the flowers, tablecloths, pictures on the walls, and so on. Let us assume that the restaurant in question looks like the one in Picture 38 below. You see all the dishes, utensils, chairs, and so on, and you experience them. Let us also say, that you happen to be a very


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Picture 38

talented painter. Stand at the doorstep and paint the restaurant, paint what you have just experienced. Then show the painting to someone and have that person take a good quality photograph of your painting. Then get hold of another very talented painter and have this person paint the restaurant on the basis of the photograph taken. Then take a photograph of the second painting and ask another painter to paint yet another picture of the restaurant based on the most recent photograph. You can continue this exercise for a long time asking for new pictures to be painted and new photographs of the most recent picture to be taken. You won’t have to continue this exercise for a long time to realize that each picture and each photograph in the row gets further and further away from your original experience which you had when you first entered the restaurant. In each subsequent picture and photograph, more and more details will be omitted, and more or more subjective impressions and judgments on the part of the painter will be introduced. Not only, obviously, is the first painting not the restaurant you experienced (the painting may only be seen as a map of the restaurant, the territory), but each further painting and picture may be seen as a map of the map of the map of the map, and so on. When you decide to stop the exercise, you will probably end up with a picture or painting quite different from the first painting, perhaps something like what you can see in Picture 39 below:

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Picture 39

Inferences in discourse work in a similar way. You come up with inferences based on inferences (such as, judgments based on judgments, assumptions based on assumptions) and you get further and further away form the original experience which was first abstracted by someone you have never met. When we formulate first level inferences (that is, the inferences that we formulate on the basis of a description), we say things that we do not know on the basis of things that we do know. For instance, when I see a giraffe turning around continuously, I may want to describe this fact and say ‘This giraffe has been turning around for the last fifteen minutes’. This I will take as a description of what I am experiencing, of what I know; I have actually been standing in front of the giraffe and watching it turning around for the last 15 minutes. I can say then that I know that this giraffe has been turning around for the last 15 minutes; I have been watching it doing just that. When I say, however, for instance, ‘this giraffe is sick’, I am coming up with an inference. I then say something that I do not really know (that the giraffe is sick) on the basis of something that I do. When we formulate second, third, and all higher level inferences, we say things that we do not know (in the sense that we have not


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experienced them) on the basis of other inferences, that is, statements (ours or somebody else’s) which also do not reflect any observations. In other words, we say things that we do not know on the basis of statements that do not reflect any direct experiential knowledge either. The higher the level of inference the further away we get from any tangible knowledge deriving from experience. When I say, for instance, that ‘this giraffe must have eaten something bad’, I make a higher level inference on the basis of the first level inference that the giraffe is sick. One descriptive sentence may lead to many inferences. For instance, the descriptive sentence ‘There is a police car in front of George’s office’ may lead to the following inferences, and many others: ‘The police have come to George’s office to make some inquiries’, ‘One of George’s friends is a policeman and he stopped by George’s office using his police car’, ‘George has bought a car from the police, and will be repainting it soon to turn it into a privately-owned vehicle’, ‘The police have come to arrest George’, and so on. Consider the following sequence of sentences: 1. There is a police car in front of George’s office – descriptive statement. 2. I think George has been accused of some crime – inferential statement. 3. Mary said that George may have been accused of some crime – higher level inferential statement. 4. It is commonly known that Mary expressed the opinion that George may have been accused of some crime – still higher level inferential statement. Statements 2–4 offer one possible inferential sequence which can be traced to the descriptive statement 1. Now consider another such sequence: 5. There is a police car in front of George’s office – descriptive statement. 6. I think George has bought a used police car and will be repainting it soon to turn it into a privately-owned car – an inferential statement. 7. Mary thinks that George may have worked for the police because he has access to used police cars – a higher level inferential statement. 8. It is commonly known that Mary thinks that George has something to do with the police – still higher level inferential statement. Statements 6–8 offer another possible inferential sequence. Many sequences of this sort could be produced. Importantly, however, all that

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is known and that has been experienced is a police car parked in front of George’s office. What I wrote above should by no means be seen as an attempt on my part to encourage people to do away with or avoid non-descriptive discourse including low level inferences, and higher level assumptions, hypotheses, and so on. It would be silly and totally unrealistic to make such a proposal. We need to abstract at high levels and come up with high level inferences. When we make inferences we attend to similarities between phenomena rather than to differences between them, for example, we can give advice to people, warn them, we can produce science. It is, however, essential that we keep in mind the distinctions that I mentioned above and that we do not take inferences for descriptive statements about facts. Mixing the two seems, unfortunately, to be a common phenomenon, and finding the way to low level descriptions often seems very hard. When inferences can be traced back to some descriptive statements, even if these inferences appear to be highly debatable, they may turn out to be interesting, useful, challenging, and so on. In other words, they may be in some sense positive. However, high level inferences often appear outrageous, in that not even a trace of tangible territory that they may have been derived from can be identified. These kinds of inferences we need to be very cautious about. In my opinion, probably the best way to illustrate the main point that I am trying to make in this chapter is to consider aspects of the language of the press. Take the following newspaper headline selections as examples: ‘Boris kept Cameron in the dark to coup to oust Blair’ (Daily Mail 2008: 4) ‘Judge takes pity on drug addict with 145 crimes against his name’ (Daily Mail 2008: 13) ‘Sophia still stunning at 74’ (Evening Standard 2008: 1) ‘West End theatres on brink of deal to open on Sundays’ (Evening Standard 2008: 3) ‘Super Thursday sees bookshops start Christmas countdown’ (Evening Standard 2008: 9) ‘London has best and worst NHS cash managers’ (Evening Standard 2008: 22) ‘Banking meltdown is nothing compared with global warming’ (Evening Standard 2008: 25) ‘Palin passes debate test’ (The Independent 2008: 2)


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‘Retailers braced for a tough Christmas’ (The Independent 2008: 7) ‘A reshuffle that sends out conflicting messages’ (The Independent 2008: 32) ‘The real economy takes a hit’ (The Independent 2008: 32) ‘Ecstatic reaction from the City but union leaders are left smarting’ (The Times 2008: 7) ‘Frowning speed indicators have little effect on drivers’ (The Times 2008: 36) When we are confronted with highly inferential statements of this sort, we should be on our toes. What descriptive statements may ‘Banking meltdown is nothing compared with global warming’ derive from?; what descriptive statements may ‘Palin passes debate test’ derive from?; what descriptive statements may ‘West End theatres on brink of deal to open on Sundays’ derive from?; and so on. We should always keep in mind that such inferential statements may not offer honest attempts to generalize or express an opinion on an observed fact, but may be empty verbiage without any connection with descriptive statements and non-verbal reality whatsoever. All these headlines seem to suggest that the authors give descriptive statements that directly report on observed facts. Do they indeed? It is very likely that the ‘facts’ you read about in the daily papers are anything but descriptive statements. They will most likely be inferences, or inferences made on the basis of earlier inferences, made on the basis of still earlier inferences. We should keep in mind, however, that these kinds of headlines sound like descriptive statements, which they are probably not. For this reason, they may gravely mislead and confuse the reader. In a recent, well researched book concerning journalism (Davies 2008), we learn that most of the stories we get to read in the quality English papers such as The Times, The Independent, and The Guardian cannot be traced to any original sources, that is, to any sort of material checked or generated by an identifiable journalist. According to Davies, only about 12 per cent of the stories can be traced. In other words, the overwhelming number of stories that you get to read in quality English papers appear to be fabrications or inferences based on inferences based on inferences, based on inferences, and so on. At the same time, you are led into believing that you are reading descriptive stories about facts. Davies (2008) tells us that most news items are first delivered by the Press Association (and who delivers the news to them???) and then quoted verbatim, slightly changed, rewritten, or recycled in other ways, and subsequently distributed by the individual papers. The reasons for this state of affairs are, according to Davies, many. One such reason may

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be trying to save money through cutting reporter jobs. Others may be fraud, negligence, or political manipulation. These reasons do not concern us here, however. What is most important for our purposes is to realize that what the words, the sentences, the stories, the discourse in the newspapers, mean to us may be extremely far away from what they meant to the person that first experienced the event described. We get inferences most of the time, hardly ever first hand descriptions. Even these descriptions, we will remember, result from individual abstractions of the process and object world, which you, the reader of this book, or I could have abstracted in a different way, leading to different descriptive statements and different inferences. People tend to mix descriptive and inferential discourse all the time. They tend to take inferences for directly described facts! Most of the time we are unable to check our inferences or the inferences others make (like those in paper articles), but we need to be aware all the time that these are inferences. Most of our historical knowledge is inferential; has any living human being ever seen Napoleon, Cromwell, or Henry VIII? We ourselves have not seen any of these people or observed any facts connected with their lives; someone else has, or some other people have, and they later told others, who told still others who told (or wrote about to) still others, and so on . . . What we get in the form of a book on history appears to be highly abstracted discourse which is based on a sequence of further abstractions. How reliable are history books on wars in the ancient times? How many abstractions does our knowledge about the ancient world result from? Hundreds? Thousands? How many individual people’s judgments, assumptions, distortions, manipulations, and hypotheses is such knowledge a result of? If what we read in contemporary quality newspapers is to a large extent mainly inferences of alleged and unchecked ‘facts’, that is, if these are inferences of unidentified, or rather nonexistent territories, how reliable can texts be that tell us about what happened centuries or millennia ago? Reading these texts, what kind of first hand tangible facts, abstracted differently by the different people of the time, do we have access to?

Chapter 7 – MAIN POINTS TO REMEMBER 1. People tend to mix (identify) non-verbal and verbal phenomena. 2. People also mix descriptive statements; that is, statements about what can be experienced, and inferential statements; that is, statements that build on descriptive statements.


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3. Descriptive and inferential statements belong to different levels of abstraction. 4. The higher the level of your inference the further away from tangible experience you find yourself. 5. I encourage language users to become fully aware of the differences between non-verbal facts, descriptions and inferences; I do not encourage language users to avoid or to try to do away with inferences. 6. We should be conscious of how often journalists and politicians formulate inferences rather than provide descriptions. 7. Most of our historical knowledge can be seen as inferential.

Notes 1. Owen Gingerich, a professor of Harvard University, chaired the planet definition committee. 2. Cover page for Newsweek magazine, September 4, 2006.

8 Can You Imagine It? – The Role of Visualization and Context in Understanding Discourse

Walter Lewin, professor of physics at MIT has recently been acclaimed as an outstanding teacher. Films shown on YouTube, newspaper and magazine articles, and interviews with Prof. Lewin give evidence to support this expectation. Since his course in physics was put on YouTube, enthusiasm for his teaching methods has skyrocketed. What makes Prof. Lewin’s methods so successful? Visualizations. He not only or mainly talks about physics; he not only shows students pictures and graphs (which may certainly be seen as a form of visualization), he takes visualization to the extreme. He acts in class. He uses real metal balls, containers, vehicles, sticks, and so on, that he rides or throws around in class to illustrate the basic laws of physics. Moreover, he swings himself on real ropes and throws heavy balls against his head to further illustrate the laws.

Picture 40 190

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The students seem to love Lewin and his teaching methods; the short videos shown on YouTube allow us to hear the students giving the professor a spontaneous applause (http://pl.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zc 9Nuoe2Ow). It does not seem very important, at least for our purposes, that they love Lewin and his methods. What matters most of all for our purposes is to realize that the students understand, and, according to Lewin, will never forget the course content. Understanding seems crucial here. What you can sense, you are much more likely to understand better than what you cannot sense. As for the senses, what you can see, you are most likely to understand the easiest. According to Korzybski (2002), the human being is eye-minded (as opposed to animals, which are significantly more ear-minded). Of all the senses, sight, seeing, appears to be the best tool in trying to understand and remember things. Prof. Lewin’s popularity seems to fit in this observation. There exists much cross-disciplinary evidence that visualizations play a key role in understanding and all learning (see for instance Gilbert et al. 2008). A special status of the eye (compared to other sense organs) also seems supported by current medical findings. For example, Graham-Rowe (2009) reports that thanks to an optical version of ultrasound, doctors can now look through the eye into the brain and diagnose brain tumours and other brain abnormalities. You should not understand visualization in a narrow sense as concerned with being exposed only to concrete things such as, people and activities, where people dance in front of you, when a car is driving in front of you, when a house painter is painting the walls of your room, and so on. This kind of visualization may most probably be seen as the strongest and the best, and that is probably why Walter Lewin makes such an outstanding teacher. However, direct non-symbolic visualization, as we might call cases like the above, should not be seen as the only type of visualization which we may use in enhancing understanding. Direct non-symbolic visualization will certainly be very difficult in practice to achieve. It would be ridiculous to expect direct non-symbolic visualization when understanding a text becomes a problem. To put it differently, it would be ludicrous to drag your friend to the zoo each time he or she is wondering about what words like panda, or leopard, or woodchuck stand for. Very often, visualizations obtained via pictures (in books, on TV, on your computer, for example) are also extremely helpful in improving understanding and remembering. Pictures are obviously used in

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foreign language teaching, and for a good reason. Look at Picture 41 below:

Picture 41

If you never heard a word of Polish, and if I now show you Picture 41 and tell you in Polish ‘on maluje dom’, and add that ‘on’ means ‘he’, ‘dom’ means ‘house’, and if I then ask you what you think the Polish word ‘maluje’ means in this context, you are extremely likely to tell me that ‘on maluje dom’ means to you ‘he is painting a house’. Your visual experience with the picture is by all means sufficient to map the activity of painting onto the word ‘maluje’. If you never heard of the ‘bongo’, I do not need to take you to Africa to give you a general idea of what the animal looks like. I can show you a picture of the bongo (like Picture 42 below)

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Picture 42

and you will know, at least more or less, what I am talking about. Note that talking about the bongo without showing you a picture or taking you to the zoo, or to Africa, would be meaningful only to the extent that I could perhaps describe the animal as similar to the cow, zebra, horse, or a goat. However, without any visual experience your understanding of what I would be talking about would be very doubtful or limited. A picture would improve the situation dramatically. Visualization as a tool in helping us make ourselves understood better may obviously be seen as pictures (still or moving), which should be seen as symbolic. These pictures, although symbols of other things, seem to help tremendously in our understanding of texts. I do hope that the pictures included in this book have helped you understand the various points that I have been trying to make. For pictures to facilitate understanding, they need to invoke our earlier experience. If you never saw a horse, a zebra or a goat, or any animal perhaps, Picture 42 of the bongo will not be much help. You will not understand the sentence ‘I bought myself a bongo when I lived in Africa in the 1990s’ anyway. If you never studied geography and never saw maps, showing you a map of Asia in order to inform you about where the various Englishes are spoken today, will of course, not be helpful at all. Other than in extraordinary situations like the ones mentioned above, visualization in the form of pictures helps you understand texts because, among other reasons, it invokes your experience that you then put together with the words used. Words no longer hang in the air; they

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point down (considering the ladder of abstraction) to the ground. Visualization lowers the level of abstraction and thus makes whatever gets said more meaningful. To put it yet another way, visualization makes your discourse more concrete. Through visualization, you make efforts to disambiguate your discourse; abstract words which may mean almost anything to you before you have seen a picture become more focused; they begin to mean less to you (sic!), something more concrete that you can relate to through your previous experience. What the other fellow (your teacher, for example) is talking about is beginning to make more sense. Why do many students not understand academic textbooks? (see, for example, Janicki 2002) One reason may be that they are too abstract; they may lack examples, and they usually lack pictures relating the text to our tangible experience. In these textbooks, words appear to mean so much that they ultimately may mean nothing to the students. Pictures make words mean less; they narrow down the potential meaning; these words are then easier to grasp and relate to the experience that they may be meant to refer to. Note that, for instance, philosophy, sociology, theory of literature, or linguistics books do not usually include pictures. This may be one of the reasons why they are viewed by students as very difficult to understand. One reason why pictures are usually not there may be that these books’ discourse is often at a very high level of abstraction. Try to draw ‘substance’, ‘truth’, ‘reality’, ‘society’, ‘permutation’, ‘transformation’, and so on! Visualizations may take place only in your mind. We often say things like: ‘imagine two people standing in the street and talking to each other’. What we do then is pull out from our memory a rough picture of the kind of situation requested. We are often asked to pull out this kind of mental picture in order to understand better whatever the other person intends to communicate to us. Mental images, imagination, imagery, image schemas, mental pictures, and related concepts play a central role in cognitive linguistics (see for instance, Lakoff 1987; Johnson, M. 1987, 1993; Gibbs 1994, 2006; Palmer 1996; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Evans and Green 2006). According to most cognitive linguists, many aspects of mental imagination play an important role in our handling of concepts, the little bits and pieces in terms of which we process and understand the world around us; concepts may very well be viewed as mental descriptions, or pictures. Importantly, as mentioned in Chapter 1, cognitive linguists often stress that the basic-level concepts (for instance, ‘dog’, ‘table’, ‘car’)

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invoke a single mental image (see for instance Rosch 1978; Lakoff 1982). These are also the concepts that children learn first and understand best (see, for instance, Lakoff and Johnson 1999). These basic-level concepts are contrasted with superordinate level concepts (for instance, ‘animal’, ‘furniture’) where no such single image emerges (see, for instance, Lakoff 1982, 1987). It should be no surprise to us then that visualization plays an important role in facilitating understanding. As mentioned above, visualization connects with concreteness. The relationship between the two appears to be that the more concrete a concept the easier it is for a language user to visualize (pull out a mental picture of) it; the more abstract the concept the more difficult it seems to visualize it. Take the following continuum exemplifying growing difficulties in visualizing the kinds of things and activities that the words (behind which, you might say, there stand the concepts) listed invoke: The word ‘sunglasses’ will easily invoke in your mind a mental picture of something like Picture 43 below:

Picture 43

The word ‘university’, which I take to be much more abstract than ‘sunglasses’, will invoke in your mind, perhaps with a measure of some difficulty, something like the following set of images shown in Pictures 44a–d:

a Picture 44

b

c

d

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In other words, you cannot create a simple mental picture (visualize) ‘university’; all you can do is create relevant mental pictures by attending to lower level concepts relating to ‘university’. How about visualizing ‘fuel’? The word ‘fuel’ will invoke in your mind, perhaps with a measure of even more difficulty, something like the following set of mental images, shown in Pictures 45a–d.

a

b

c

d

Picture 45

Here again, a simple image of ‘fuel’ is not possible; we actually create images of concepts that in some ways relate to the highly abstract ‘fuel’. The visualizing task here seems to be even more difficult than in the case of ‘university’. Words like ‘pity’, ‘relation’, ‘substance’, and ‘wealth’ will get you into even more trouble. Can you imagine ‘wealth’? My answer to this question would be ‘yes’ and ‘no’. The answer is ‘no’ if you are after one single, coherent picture of the type that you easily pull out for words like ‘sunglasses’. The answer is ‘yes’ if you are after any mental picture (or rather pictures), incoherent or scattered in your mind as they may be. Yes, you can imagine ‘wealth’ as, for instance, expensive luxury and sports cars, a big house with two swimming pools, the owner on a plane in a first class seat on a flight to the Bahamas, loads of money in the bank (which in some sense can be imagined as well), and so on. All these things can make up a conglomerate of mental pictures. ‘Wealth’ as basically one kind of thing, like sunglasses, cannot be, however, imagined. The Internet will give us some support for the above analysis. Google for pictures of ‘sunglasses’, ‘tables’, and ‘chairs’, and you will come across a multitude of pictures which are different of course but all of which you will be able to recognize as ‘sunglasses’, ‘tables’, and ‘chairs’. In other words, the set of objects you will see on the screen of your computer will be relatively homogeneous. When you Google for pictures of ‘university’, you should not be surprised to see pictures of, for instance, buildings, students sitting on a lawn, classrooms, library books, students

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in a canteen, and . . . Albert Einstein riding a bicycle – a relatively heterogeneous collage, you have to admit. Continue the exercise and Google for ‘substance’ or ‘reality’. When you Google for the latter, you pull out pictures of, for instance, a couple in bed, a comic strip, three people sitting at a table, a book, a young woman sitting on a sofa, a car mechanic at work, a man with a gun, or six chickens watching a seventh one being grilled in a microwave! Quite a heterogeneous collage, you will have to admit again. If visualizing ‘reality’ almost anything comes to your mind, it is probably fair to claim that you do not visualize ‘reality’ at all. This seems to tie up with one of the major points of this book made earlier: namely that the higher a word on the abstraction ladder the more difficult it is to understand it. We can add to this: that the more difficult it is to visualize a concept or word the more difficult it is to understand it. And further, the easier it is to visualize a single object or activity (such as sunglasses, cup, walking, or jumping), the easier it is to understand these concepts or words. Google now for ‘car’, ‘compassion’, and ‘truth’ in order to see still better what I mean. You have certainly had a hard time visualizing anything tangible and homogeneous for ‘truth’. There seems to be at least one reason why these kinds of highly abstract words usually mean very little or nothing to people. There is nothing that we can use to connect them to in the outside world. The fact that ‘truth’ cannot be visualized is an example. We cannot visualize and connect these highly abstract words to any direct experience that we might be going or might have been going through; we cannot connect them with any pictures to be seen on a classroom wall or drawn on the blackboard or shown in a PowerPoint presentation; we can’t connect them to any mental pictures in our minds. If so, the words will hang in the air and we will have extreme difficulty assigning meaning to them. I don’t think it is possible to state which words will invoke visualization in language users and which will not. Maybe even words like ‘sublime’ and ‘truth’ trigger off some imagery with some people. Whatever the words, some of the imagery that they invoke may be more concrete, coherent, homogenous, and so on, than others. Under any circumstance, imagery appears crucial in communication, in our understanding of other people and in making ourselves understood. That the more abstract the word the more blurred or more complex the visualization seems to be hardly a disputable point. The more complex the mental picture (like a more complex picture on a wall, or like a more complex real life situation that we may be watching) the more

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varied the meaning assigned to the words that the pictures attach to, and the more potential confusion and misunderstanding in discourse. Whatever the complexity of the ‘thing’ visualized, and whatever the form of the visualization (for instance, a picture on the wall or a picture in your mind), for the attaining of any meaning and especially for making meaning easier to grasp, for making discourse more meaningful, the significance of visualization seems unquestionable. I think we can risk the claim that for any meaning to be possible, in the absence of first hand tangible experience, some form of visualization or imagery seems necessary. I realize the vagueness of the formulation ‘some form’, but I think we have to accept this formulation. ‘Some form’ of visualization may stand for the most diffuse and fuzzy glimpses of mental pictures that we can think of. Any flash of something resembling an extremely vague picture would do. If we follow this scenario, for very abstract words or concepts such as ‘the sublime’, ‘reality’, or ‘truth’ – to be understood at all – some sort of visualized entity connecting to some form (again!) of experience should come to our mind. If that is not the case, we may safely assume that the word means nothing to us and may be treated as the buzz of a fly that has just flown by. While most of us are probably used to thinking that ‘more is better’ (having more money is better than having less money; having more time is better than having less time; having more space is better than having less space, and so on), having less in your mental picture may in fact be seen as better than having more in it. In other words, as to mental pictures, the less you visualize in your mind when you hear a word, the better, in the sense that the less you have in your mental picture the clearer the meaning. Highly abstract words bring lots of material into your mental pictures; words of a low level of abstraction bring relatively little into them. Consider for example the amount of material that you might be visualizing when you hear the word ‘countryside’. Some of these things are included in Pictures 46a–d below:

a Picture 46

b

c

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Now compare the picture(s) of ‘countryside’ with that or those of an ‘ironing board’. Below you find some pictures of what will probably come to your mind as a mental picture when you hear the words ‘ironing board’ (see Pictures 47a–d):

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Picture 47

You can now see the dramatic differences in the potential visualizations. In the case of ‘countryside’, you are likely to visualize quite a lot of material; compared to ‘countryside’, in the case of an ‘ironing board’, you are likely to visualize fairly little. This is at least one reason why ‘He told me about ironing boards’ seems so much easier to understand than ‘He told me about the countryside’. Concreteness, supported by visualization, not only improves understanding and communication in general but also significantly contributes to memorizing and remembering information (Heath and Heath 2008). Using concreteness as a foundation for abstraction . . . is a basic principle of understanding . . . . Concreteness helps us understand – it helps us construct higher, more abstract insights on the building blocks of our existing knowledge and perceptions. Abstraction demands some concrete foundation. Trying to teach an abstract principle without concrete foundations is like trying to start a house by building a roof in the air. (Heath and Heath 2008: 106). According to Heath and Heath (2008), people find it easier to visualize and remember the meaning of nouns which concern concrete objects such as lamps and cars. Remembering even the rough meaning of words such as ‘equity’ or ‘panacea’ seems much more difficult as they do not refer to anything concrete. Neither are they easy (if possible at all) to visualize. All this brings us to context. The significance of visualization in understanding discourse ties up with that of context. Visualization may be

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thought of as a way of providing context, and the role of context in understanding appears crucial (see for instance Bransford and Johnson 1973; Bransford 1979; Sperber and Wilson 1986; Gibbs 1994). Whether or to what extent you understand a text depends not only on your knowledge of the language but also on your entire prior knowledge of the world (Bransford and Johnson 1973). Most importantly, however, you activate only part of this knowledge depending on the context. Different contexts will activate different parts of your knowledge, which may lead to your different understanding of the same text. If you are confronted with a text and given no context, you will try to conjure up a context yourself. Also, unexpected and what you might think of as ‘wrong contexts’ are likely to confuse you and decrease understanding. Bransford and Johnson present convincing evidence for the claim that ‘presenting subjects with a context or, more generally, a cue to a context, made relatively incomprehensible materials much more comprehensible’ (Bransford and Johnson 1973: 409). And further, ‘rather than trying to memorize the input, subjects are trying to figure out a context for it in order to understand the meaning of the information’ (398); ‘. . . subjects may be better off creating their own context than attempting to find relationships between an input and the wrong context’ (409). Bransford and Johnson (1973) show that understanding may be low when no context of any sort is provided. In a study they report on, compared to subjects who were given no context, subjects who were given 30 seconds to look at a picture (which provided context) before hearing a passage rated it as much more understandable. Importantly, subjects that saw the picture after they had heard the passage and before they did the understanding and recall tasks did not score any better than those that had no access to the picture at all. Context may be defined in many different ways. There is little doubt, however, that, whatever the definition, the more concrete the context the more helpful it will be in our understanding discourse. This seems to be why we appear in the most favorable position, comprehension wise, in face to face interaction, which provides immediate visual and concrete context. And this seems also to be why picture-induced visualizations may be thought of as good replacements of real-life situations. If you can’t take the child to the zoo to point to the animal and say ‘look at this big zebra feeding the small one, Jane’, show the child a picture of a big zebra doing just that. Visualizations may be seen as context in which you activate your prior knowledge of the world and which helps you understand discourse. If you are shown a picture of a boxing ring with two sweating men in it, a context is created immediately and you

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will tend to understand the sentence ‘they are fighting for a gold medal’ quite easily; if you hear a concrete word or phrase (for instance, ‘boxing glove’) you are likely to conjure up a mental image of it immediately (which will lead to the activating of the boxing context), and you will tend to understand the word or phrase quite easily. If you hear ‘they are considering various options’ and given no context or cue to context, the sentence can mean almost anything. Importantly, if you are shown a picture of two old men sitting on a bench in a park, and are told ‘these two men are fighting for a gold medal’ (that is, when you are given what you will most probably think of as an unexpected or wrong context), you will try to match the context with the sentence (Bransford and Johnson 1973), to activate a section of your knowledge and generate some possible meaning, for instance, ‘they are competing as to who can sit on the bench the longest’. Other possibilities seem to be that you will not understand the sentence at all, remain puzzled or confused. In the process of discourse production and comprehension both speakers and hearers operate within contexts, which are provided by real life situations and all kinds of visualizations induced by pictures or descriptions including relatively concrete words. As Sperber and Wilson rightly point out, a speaker who intends an utterance to be interpreted in a particular way must also expect the hearer to be able to supply a context which allows that interpretation to be recovered. A mismatch between the context envisaged by the speaker and the one actually used by the hearer may result in a misunderstanding. (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 16) I see the idea of activating knowledge in a provided context as relating closely to that of relevance as advanced by Sperber and Wilson (1986). Understanding a text will depend, among other things, on what information you will consider to be relevant in a given context. According to Gibbs (1999), ‘understanding what a speaker intends to communicate requires, among other things, that a listener find a context that provides the best framework for interpreting what the speaker meant’ (118). Within this context we attend primarily to relevant material; ‘the relevance – theoretic account of utterance interpretation proposes that a fundamental assumption about human cognition is that people pay attention to information that seems most relevant to them’ (Gibbs 1999: 119). Sperber and Wilson (1986) define relevance in terms of contextual effect: ‘an assumption is relevant in a context if and only if it has some

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contextual effect in that context’ (122) and processing effort: ‘mental processes, like all biological processes, involve a certain effort, a certain expenditure of energy. The processing effort involved in achieving contextual effects is the second factor to be taken into account in assessing degrees of relevance’ (124). I view my own discussion about confusing discourse as fully compatible with that about context and relevance as carried out by authors such as these that I refer to in the preceding paragraphs.

Visualization as an extensional device Visualization can be seen as an extensional device. It allows us to be more concrete; it allows us to either directly see the territory (like in the case of the teacher acting in class) or see symbols (pictures) of it which get you closer to the real thing out in the real world. It is not always necessary to take someone to the zoo and point to an echidna to make people understand what the word ‘echidna’ refers to. You may try to imitate the movements and body contortions of an echidna, or you may show a picture of an echidna (which in this particular case seems to be a much better solution!). Either of the last two options will, however, be much better than telling people what an echidna looks like. People will understand better and remember longer. Visualizations are instigated mainly by acting, by showing pictures, and by language (producing words of a lower level of abstraction) which leads to forming mental images in the language user’s mind, which improves communication. E-Prime (or its variants E-Choice and E-Primemod ) seems to promote lower level abstractions and thus boosts visualizations. Why does E-Prime boost visualization? It does so because it brings the language user closer to the territory. For example, by recommending the eschewing of the passive voice, especially the agentless passive constructions, E-Prime forces you to indicate the agent of the action; an agent is usually easy to visualize. For instance, instead of the Standard English ‘the drinks have been brought into the room’, you will have the E-Prime ‘a tall waiter has brought the drinks into the room’. ‘A tall waiter’ is probably quite easy to imagine for most people. No matter how different the mental pictures of ‘a tall waiter’ will come to the individual language user’s mind, they will be there, as opposed to no visualization of any sort in the case of the passive voice agentless counterpart. Discarding, or at least significantly restricting, the use of the isof predication also seems to boost visualization. When you say, for

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instance, ‘I loved that show’ (an E-Prime version) or ‘That show was great to me (an E-Choice version) rather than the Standard English ‘It was a great show’, you introduce ‘I’ or ‘to me’ and thus enhance the scope of visualization. A real person comes into the scene, and a real person stands in front of you (and appeals directly to your visual sense) or seems very easy to visualize. As visualization brings us closer to tangible reality, we may in fact think of it as an extensional device as well. Like context in general, visualizations appear to be a powerful tool in making understanding easier. This is because visualizations quickly invoke past experience, and, as we will remember, we can understand other people only to the extent that we pull out (consciously or unconsciously, usually within split second reactions) some past experience mapped onto the words popping up in discourse. Deprived of visualizations completely, we seem to be most unlikely to understand anything. When we make use of them, in whatever form, we make our discourse more meaningful and less confusing. The use of the UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING metaphor (see for instance Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Gibbs 1994), in sentences such as ‘I see what you mean’, ‘How do you view this idea?’, or ‘I can’t get the whole picture of what you are saying’ seems to support my argument.

Chapter 8 – MAIN POINTS TO REMEMBER 1. Context and your prior knowledge play an important role in the understanding process. 2. A portion of your prior knowledge gets activated in a given context. 3. If context is not provided, language users conjure up their own context and pick on the relevant information in it to make sense of what is being said or written. 4. Providing unexpected and ‘wrong contexts’ may turn out to be confusing. 5. Visualizations may be seen as providing a relatively concrete context. 6. We may see visualization as a powerful tool in improving understanding and reducing confusion. 7. Visualization may be seen as an extensional device. 8. The best stimulus for visualization seems to derive from direct sense encounter with non-verbal reality.

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9. Visualizations derived from pictures (for instance, in books or PowerPoint presentations) also appear very helpful in increasing understanding and remembering, and in decreasing confusion. 10. Low level of abstraction words (such as window, garage, fence) enable visualization. 11. Visualization seems most successful and salient in the case of basic-level concepts; a mental picture of a ‘dog’ comes easily to your mind. ‘Airedale terrier’ or ‘a mammal’ does not come as easily. 12. The more concrete an object or activity, the easier it is to imagine it. 13. Highly abstract words such as ‘truth’, ‘substance’, and ‘reality’ hardly lead to any visualization; if you can imagine almost anything (like in the case of ‘reality’), you are just as likely to imagine nothing. 14. The more concrete an object or activity the more homogeneous the mental picture that emerges. 15. The less (in terms of quantity) we visualize the better we understand the discourse we are involved in. 16. Visualizations allow us to quickly invoke past experiences, which, mapped onto words, make these words more meaningful and less confusing to us.

9 No Bamboozlement, Please – How to Disclose Others’ Equivocation and Make Your Own Discourse Less Confusing and Easier to Understand – A Summary and Some Warnings

In this chapter, I summarize the main points of the book. I do so by formulating what you might think of as pieces of advice or warnings regarding how you can handle everyday or academic conversation: how you can be prepared for and possibly how you can react to attempts at bamboozlement; and how you can try to defend yourself against being fooled through discourse. 1. Make sure to distinguish between the verbal world (the world of words) and the non-verbal world (the world of objects such as chairs and tables, activities such as walking and signing, feelings such as anger and sadness, and so on). Distinguishing between the two will prevent you from living by some fundamental misconceptions and in confusion about how communication works. 2. Think of words as symbols. It seems very rewarding to view words as symbols that refer to other things. These symbols may refer to, for instance, objects and activities in the non-verbal world, or to other words. In the former case, you say or write sentences such as ‘The garlic that I have just eaten has made me a bit sick’. In the latter case, you say or write sentences such as ‘You should put the noun in front of the verb’. 3. In situations of importance where you think the content of discourse should matter, ask yourself the question of what you or your 205

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conversational partner is talking about. What you are talking about is what your words refer to. If someone says, for instance, ‘I’m very agitated’, you may assume that the person refers to some feeling of his or hers. That feeling, difficult to locate as it may be, you can take as ‘what the person is talking about’. If someone says, ‘my aunt has just passed away’, this person is talking about his or her aunt’s death. In the latter example the referent (the body of the aunt) is very tangible and can be easily imagined. In the former example, the feeling of agitation is certainly much less tangible, but, through the tangible contortions of the face, for example, the emotion can, to some extent, be located or imagined. In most discourse situations, we expect and are expected to talk about something in order that our discourse be meaningful. The more tangible the referent the better we know what is being talked about. If you cannot locate or imagine anything as a referent, no matter how tangible, of your interlocutor’s words, uttered or written, this person is talking or writing, but you do not know what this person is talking or writing about. 4. Not all discourse should be formulated in such ways that it should be understood in terms of tangible things and activities. In other words, it is not true that all language is intended to communicate facts about the world. Some discourse has functions other than the informative, for example, many kinds of poetry appear to be intended only or mainly to evoke emotions, not to inform us about anything. In cases like that, reference to anything tangible may simply be not necessary, redundant or even counterproductive. Most importantly for everyday interaction, however, you need to keep in mind that we often talk to people just for the sake of talking. We often refer to this kind of talk as ‘small talk’ and the linguists often call it ‘phatic communion’. We need small talk to lubricate relations with other people, to get through the day, to relax emotionally, and so on. Understanding is less important in such situations. It simply does not matter all that much what the other fellow means or is talking about. In such discourse situations, requiring reference to tangible objects and activities might sound outright ridiculous. 5. Remember that the more abstract the word, the more that word refers to. The more the word refers to, the less you know what your interlocutor is talking about. If your interlocutor tends to use mainly highly abstract words, which may indicate a large variety of things, try to pull this person closer to the ground by, for instance, asking the person to give you an example.

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6. Try not to remain exclusively at a low or high level of abstraction. Do not, like children, talk only about lamps, chairs, and dolls, and do not talk only about substance, reality, and the infinite, like many philosophers. Move back and forth on the abstraction ladder. Remaining at a higher level of abstraction for a considerable amount of conversation time seems especially conducive to misunderstanding and confusion. Do not, however, try all the time to bring your interlocutor to the very lowest level of abstraction. In other words, do not criticize or express unhappiness about any words that may appear too abstract for you. If you did this, you would be working toward freezing the discourse at the lowest level possible. When you force your interlocutor to drastically lower the level of abstraction for the words he or she is using, you and he or she are likely to understand each other fairly well; no accusations of producing confusing or meaningless discourse would be likely to emerge, but you would then be talking only about cars, pots, knives, coats, computers, glasses, and so on. You would be like children. Your discourse would very likely be perceived as extremely uninteresting. 7. Keep in mind that words build on non-verbal objects and events, and not the other way round. To state it another way, we use words as abstractions of the non-verbal world, and not the other way round. This may be taken to mean that the natural order of abstraction is from the non-verbal world to the verbal one. In some way then, the non-verbal world of objects, activities, and so on, may be taken as more important. Although language plays a crucial role in our lives, we may say that we live most of our lives at the non-verbal silent level of objects and activities. 8. Do not be surprised when you do not understand or misunderstand other people, or when they do not understand or misunderstand you. Non understanding and misunderstanding may be seen as inevitable natural phenomena. Understanding may be improved, or misunderstanding diminished, but you can never be sure that you have understood another person in accordance with his or her intentions, and you can never be sure that you yourself have been understood in accordance with yours. Even among people who are very close to each other (for instance, members of the same family or the same professional community), misunderstanding or non-understanding is very common. 9. Think of the meaning of a word or a phrase as of the sum total of the experiences that a person associates with it. As anybody’s experiences will always be at least slightly different from anybody else’s

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experiences, differences in meanings assigned to words may emerge anytime. These lead to non-understanding and misunderstanding. Keep in mind that we understand each other only to the extent that we share the experiences that we associate with the words used in discourse. 10. Do not mix levels of abstraction. Do not treat words as if they were the things and activities that they refer to. And do not take words too seriously. You should see them as less important than what they refer to. We may use different words to refer to the same object or activity, but the object out there (like Pluto in the example discussed in Chapter 7) or the activity in the non-verbal world will be there in a form independent of the words used to refer to it. 11. Do not take symbols too seriously. They refer to something else, and in the final analysis, the something else is usually more important than the symbols. If the name of a street is changed, you may feel happy (because, for instance, you may have nice associations with the new name as opposed to the old one), but remember that the street will not change even in the slightest degree only by being given a new name. When you buy a car, think, for instance, of how you like its looks, how reliable it is, how it is for service, how much money it costs, and so on, not about what it is called. Many people get into the symbol trap. They attach considerable value to symbols, also to symbols other than words (for example, types of clothing, sunglasses, cell phone, address, size of office). Try not to be caught in the symbol trap. It may cost you a lot of money, and the reward is questionable. 12. Remember that words (other than onomatopoeic words imitating natural sounds) are associated with other things (their referents) only by conventions, or social agreement; there is no natural connection between the overwhelming majority of words and their referents. Social agreements may hold or they may be broken. They may be broken deliberately or by accident. When they are broken deliberately, we may call it a lie. If you say ‘I went to town’, and in fact you stayed at home, you lied. You can say anything about what you did. In addition to saying that you stayed at home, you can say that you went to Paris, that you slept in your car, that you went for a walk with your dog, or that you went to Honolulu, or to the moon. You can say anything in fact. Whatever you say will never be what you actually did, that is, stayed at home. We can easily lie because words are not glued to objects and activities. Although we combine the two following social agreements, violating these agreements is extremely easy. That is why lying is extremely easy.


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And that is why many people lie. When you want to try to disclose a lie, try to locate the territory that the words refer to. It may not be an easy task in practice, but it can occasionally be rewarding. 13. When you are confronted with metonymic expressions such as ‘the university will take care of this case’ or ‘it’s not my fault; the system is guilty here’, ask the question ‘who’ will take care of the case or ‘who’ is guilty. Universities and systems are not guilty and can not take care of anything. Only people can. By requesting the information in question, you make your interlocutor lower the level of abstraction, and you thus make the discourse more meaningful and less confusing. Whether you will achieve your goal is another question. The strategy seems worth trying. 14. Do not overestimate the value of even the best dictionary. Dictionaries are useful of course, but they provide less than people normally believe they do. Dictionaries do not supply us with the real meanings of words as such meanings do not exist. Dictionaries supply us with typical past meanings only. Do not be surprised when you are confronted with meanings not reflected in any dictionary. Meanings of words are individual (as they invoke individual experiences) and only partly shared with other people. Even the best dictionary cannot reflect all the possible meanings people attach to words. 15. You should not despair that you often find it hard to express your thoughts, feelings, and other non-verbal aspects of reality. This is because language appears to be an inadequate tool for talking about reality; language does not have enough resources (for instance, words) to reflect the complexity of the non-verbal reality. Attend to detail, talk about individuals (for instance, ‘John Nelson’, ‘Harry Goodwinn’) and individual events (for instance, ‘Roby was unfaithful to his wife’) rather than about groups (for instance, ‘Americans’, ‘Jews’, ‘Poles’) or generalizations (for instance, ‘men are unfaithful to women’). Use extensional devices such as examples, dating, and indexing. Using extensional devices improves understanding. Avoid generalizations; generalizations (for instance, ‘the French like wine’) warp reality. Non-verbal reality is usually much more complex than the verbal generalizations might indicate. ‘The French like wine’ is no doubt a distortion of reality. Although there seem to be many French people who do like wine, there are also others who do not. Generalizations may reflect tendencies, but they usually depict reality in ways which simplify what in fact appears to be much more complex.

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16. Beware of people who approach the world in terms of black and white, the good guys and the bad guys. While in discourse we always simplify the complex non-verbal reality, discourse which promotes seeing the world in terms of twos usually simplifies the world to a dangerous degree. Think of the world around you in terms of continua, or clines. There are no natural divisions in the world around us; we slice the world around us with our language. If we cut it into several sections (as is the case when we use continua) we are more likely to get a little closer to what the world is really like. When we cut it into two sections, we are much further away from what the non-verbal world is like. In soap operas for example, we usually have a bad and a good guy. In reality most people probably exhibit characteristics that we might call ‘bad’ and others that we might call ‘good’. People are hardly ever totally bad (that is, seen as bad in all respects) or totally good (that is, seen as good in all respects), no matter what criteria for goodness or badness you apply. Thinking of people, things, and activities in bi-polar terms (for instance, good vs. bad) usually involves an enormous simplification. 17. Do not react to language the signal way unless someone in danger calls for help or wants to warn you about a fire or a dangerous dog. React to language the symbol way, that is, always remember that words may mean different things to different people. Do not jump to conclusions about what a word means (to you or to your interlocutor) in a particular situation. Take your time; react in a delayed way. Do not offer yourself or others quick judgments about someone’s being, for example, ‘inquisitive’, ‘impolite’, ‘arrogant’, or ‘obnoxious’, on the basis of small discourse samples. When the person sitting next to you at a dinner party asks you many questions about your personal or professional life, that person may indeed be seen as ‘inquisitive’, but he or she might as well be seen as ‘concerned’, or as ‘caring and willing to know about others rather than talking all the time about him or herself’. Delay judgment about what words and longer stretches of language mean. This will allow you to delay your judgments about people. As a result, you may be involved in fewer misunderstandings and conflicts, and you may become a more tolerant person. You are likely to be appreciated as a mature and enjoyable person. When you react to discourse in a symbol way, you may also save some money; you will be immune to advertising tricks! 18. Pay particular attention to political discourse. Many politicians, independent of their political provenance or persuasion, tend to present their political position in bi-polar black and white terms. Beware of such politicians. They usually antagonize large groups of people and divide


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communities or even whole nations into ‘us’ and ‘them’, insiders of the group and outsiders to such groups. These politicians usually see simple solutions to complicated problems. Such simple solutions usually do not work. Simple dichotomies (such as ‘for our policy’ and ‘against our policy’, ‘pro-American’ and ‘anti-American’, ‘patriotic Americans’ and ‘unpatriotic Americans’) usually push people into one of the two categories, neither of which you may want to fit in. In politics, if you feel that you do not fully belong to either of the two categories, you will tend to stand or will be perceived as standing outside of the two categories. This may lead to frustration, anger, or political indifference at best. 19. Avoid the verb ‘to be’, especially when used as a linking verb. In structures such as ‘Jerry is a fool’, it suggests identification, objectivity, permanence, and stability. All you do when you produce sentences such as ‘Jerry is a fool’ is give your own verbal classification of how you see Jerry. And you only give one possible classification. In addition, Jerry may be a father, a brother, a teacher, a musician, a football player, and so on. You express your own opinion and invoke your own classification and do not state any objective classification or opinion. In structures such as ‘Jerry is stupid’, all you do is express your own opinion; Jerry is not stupid in any absolute sense; the characteristic ‘stupid’ is not inherent in Jerry. You, as a language user, impute the characteristic ‘stupid’ to Jerry. The sentence ‘Jerry is stupid’ does not seem to indicate that. Jerry has not been stupid to everybody and all the time, as the sentence may suggest. We may see sentences such as ‘Jerry is a fool’ and ‘Jerry is stupid’ as harmful in some situations. Some structures including the verb ‘be’ may be seen as more harmful than others. Avoid using ‘to be’ especially in these cases where they imply permanently negative characteristics. ‘Jerry is a fool’ seems to be harmful because the structure implies permanence and stability and no way by improved behavior. ‘Jerry acted like a fool’ (a corresponding sentence without the verb ‘be’), however, does not imply the permanence and stability in question, and makes no predictions as to the future of Jerry’s characteristics or behavior. Whether you do or do not refrain from using the verb ‘to be’ in structures like the above, use ‘in my view’, ‘in my opinion’, ‘to me’, and related phrases to indicate that ‘Jerry may be a fool’ only to you and not necessarily to others. If you do not use any of these phrases, or when you do not witness others using any of these phrases, make sure to remember

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that you should take sentences such as ‘Jerry is a fool’ or ‘Jerry is stupid’ as expressions of your or somebody else’s subjective simplified views (possibly shared by others to some extent) of a very complex real life phenomenon that you refer to as ‘Jerry’. 20. People often say and write things that they have little or no experience to support. They usually make inferences only about what others have experienced personally or what others have said about what still others had experienced personally. Make sure to distinguish between (at least the typical) situations in which people describe their experiences and when they infer, assume, generalize, hypothesize, and so on, about their own experiences and the experiences of others. One nonverbal fact (for instance, ‘my kissing a female student in class, with no resistance, in front of a large group of students’) may lead to several inferences; for instance, that I am crazy, that the student is crazy, that we are both crazy, that I want to be relegated and dismissed from the university. At least one more inference is that I and the female student had a prior agreement that I kiss her as part of a class experiment and that she offer no resistance or objections. Do not jump to conclusions about what happened when you only heard what happened. It is very easy to use language without having any tangible evidence for what you say. It is very easy to infer, generalize, express opinions, formulate assumptions, and so on. When you do this, make sure to keep in mind that you are doing only this and not describing your own experiences. 21. Do not overuse the extensional devices such as indexing, quotes, and hyphens, and do not require from others that they use them all the time. The use of extensional devices would probably be best if you took the middle path stance. I happen to be a great enthusiast for the ‘middle path’ position in life in general. I believe that it is compatible with the theoretical framework promoted in this book. Taking a middle path position in discourse with respect to the extensional devices and others seems to me to be very rewarding. 22. If you want to be understood and as little confusing to others as possible, provide as much context as possible. If convenient, resort in your discourse to visualizations. If you are a teacher, use pictures (for instance, in your PowerPoint presentations) or drawings. Compared to instruction in which you do not use any visualizations, you are much more likely to be understood and the students are more likely to remember what you told them.


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In ordinary conversation, in non-teaching situations, use at least some words which may easily invoke images in your interlocutor’s mind. Lower the level of abstraction of your discourse from time to time and use words that refer to tangible objects and activities that people can easily imagine or which they have most likely experienced in some way. Also, use your body to imitate imaginable objects and activities. Body language helps us to get closer to the intended meaning. Visualizations of whatever kind seem to be an enormous help in effective communication. 23. When you recite a poem, write a novel, are engaged in small talk, for instance, that is, when you are engaged in discourse activities and situations where meaning can be treated loosely, when what you mean may not really matter, when you may not want to be understood clearly, when you may deliberately equivocate, and so on, you may simply forget the main ideas that I have been trying to pass on to you in this book. When you, however, want to be understood to the extent possible, model your discourse on that of the scientists. Say and write things (that is, use words) that connect to tangible things, to people’s experience. This does not mean, of course, that you should not use highly abstract words. Scientists use them too. Like scientists, however, you should always keep in mind that even these highly abstract words should somehow, in a complicated chain of relationships perhaps, connect to the real world of people’s experience that they have gained through their senses: seeing, hearing, and so on. This way, you make what you say easier for others to understand. You diminish potential misunderstanding and confusion. 24. Producing vague and perhaps to some extent confusing discourse may be beneficial sometimes. When you get invited to a party to which you do not want to go, and when you produce ‘I am sorry, but I have another commitment’ in reply, both you and the other person seem to profit compared to the possible unpleasant scenario in which you would produce something like ‘I don’t feel like coming to your party’. The extremely vague and in some sense confusing ‘I have another commitment’, which may mean anything, may be seen as a useful compromise between giving the true reason (‘I don’t feel like coming to your party’) and coming to the party against one’s will. 25. Always be aware of the abstracting process. Remember that it seems rewarding to treat words as maps of some territory that they refer to. What is a map? Well, a word, at best. It refers to the kind of foldable

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big sheet of paper you may have in your glove compartment or in your suitcase when you are off to Paris on your vacation! 26. Your awareness of how words relate to things and of how confusing and meaningless discourse works may also bring about a measure of frustration. If you realize that most of what you read in newspapers can be seen as inferences quite distant from the original facts described by people other than the journalist whose articles you get to read, you immediately realize that you may be in fact very far away form ‘the truth’. You normally do not read direct first hand reports on what happened, but you read about what people thought they were told happened, what people interpreted as what happened, what people were told others had been told still others thought had happened, and so on. No doubt what you read in your daily newspaper or in a magazine is often hundreds and thousands of miles (both literal and metaphorical) away from what actually happened. Realizing this fact may cause frustration and perhaps may make you stop buying newspapers. You may also feel equally frustrated walking around the streets or reading newspapers or watching television and being bombarded with advertisements and commercials. You can now analyze them in some detail and you are aware of how they simplify reality and how they count on your falling victim to the signal reaction. Many people hate advertisements because they know intuitively how they are being cheated by them. These people may not be able to say in what ways they are being cheated. You, however, go beyond intuition. You now know that you are the advertisers’ prey which reacts to discourse as if it involved signals and not symbols. You may feel that you are surrounded by people in pursuit of your money, or support, or sympathy, and so on. This may cause frustration or anger. You will probably feel a similar way when you read the blurbs on book covers. Almost all the books that you look at are praised in these blurbs. ‘There is no single bad book in an entire bookstore’, might be your impression. This will appear to you most amazing, and frustrating perhaps. Of course, you will start feeling that you are being deceived because it cannot be true that the thousands of books housed in a bookstore are all good, no matter what criteria are used for evaluation. Your frustration should be tamed, however, when you fully realize how advertising language is designed to work, how the advertisers aim at you and what they count on. You need to realize that reviews and encouraging comments that you get to read, for example on the blurbs


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and in book review sections of newspapers, are often tricks to make you react to them as signals. You also need to realize that these reviews and encouraging comments express an individual’s or a group of individuals’ subjective opinion. You should then use this knowledge of the way advertising works and not fall into the advertising trap. Your frustration should not discourage you from buying books. As Lewis (2007) tells us, many blurbs are written by the authors’ friends and may be positive because the blurb writers want to be nice to their friends rather than say what they really think. Some of these blurbs may, however, be genuinely positive in the sense that what the blurb writers say they may actually believe. If you take these blurbs and other advertising texts for what they should be taken for – subjective opinions, rather than some objective opinions of experts, your initial frustration and anger will perhaps quickly evaporate and you will often be seen in bookstores laughing rather than moaning. 27. Put the principles discussed in this book into practice. You are now aware of the many phenomena that I have discussed in this book. However, awareness does not seem sufficient. There is often considerable distance between being aware of something and making use of this awareness; that is, putting it into practice. Theories concerned with tackling confusing discourse are not an exception. Putting them into practice appears to be difficult even to people who have studied them thoroughly and who are fully committed. This is, in my view and in the view of many others (for instance, most of the early general semanticists of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s), a fundamental thing. As a reader of this book, you should apply the ideas discussed here in practice.

Conclusion: Can We Go Bananas? Discourse and Health

Alfred Korzybski, the founder of general semantics, has entitled one of his books Science and Sanity. Surprising, and perhaps shocking, as the word ‘sanity’ might be to some readers, it encapsulates an important, if not the most important, aspect of Korzybski’s message, namely, that the scientific extensional orientation of attending to tangible reality allows us to maintain mental health, whereas moving in the other direction, that is, in the direction of highly abstract words and symbols, and developing an intensional orientation, may reduce our sanity. It is Korzybski’s and many other general semanticists’ opinion that developing an extensional orientation may prevent us from mental disturbances and some basic maladjustments and misevaluations. Of the many points that I discussed in the previous sections of this book, identification stands out as a crucial factor in the maladjustment and confusion likely to lead to mental disturbances. ‘There is no “identity” in this world: but the whole old orientations are based on “identity”. Insanity is based on identifications, identifications in a world where there is no identity. You will find in daily life endless serious problems produced by identifications, or improper evaluations.’ (Korzybski 2002: 102). Identifying the verbal and the non-verbal levels seems especially dangerous: ‘In psycho-logical and evaluational processes we mostly identify our verbal statements or judgments about the facts with the actual facts, which facts are on the silent unspeakable level, not on the verbal level. Psychiatrists know well enough the tragic consequences of identifications in their patients.’ (Korzybski 2003: 24). It is Korzybski’s contention that . . . in practically all ‘mental’ ills, a confusion of orders of abstractions appears as a factor. When we confuse the orders of abstractions and ascribe objective reality to terms and symbols, or confuse conclusions and inferences with descriptions, a great deal of semantic suffering is produced . . . . confusion of orders of abstractions is always very prominent in ‘mental’ illnesses. (Korzybski 1933: 499–500) 216

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And further on confusing the order of abstraction, he claims: experience shows again that among humans, this order in manifestations is sometimes reversed; namely, that some individuals have ‘idea’ first; namely, some vestiges of memories, and sensations’ next, without any external reason for the ‘sensations’. Such individuals are considered ‘mentally’ ill; in legal terms, they are called ‘insane’. They ‘see’, where there is nothing to see; they ‘hear’, where there is nothing to hear; they are paralyzed where there is no reason to be paralyzed; they have pains when there is no reason to have pains, and so on, endlessly. Their survival value, if not taken care of, is usually nil. This reversal of order, but in a mild degree, is extremely common at present among all of us and underlies mainly all human misfortunes and un-sanity. (Korzybski 1933: 169–170) Caro and Schuchardt Read (2003) bring a collection of articles testifying to the fact that psychiatrists are often confronted with patients suffering from conditions which may be traced to a lack of awareness of the abstracting processes. In other words, the central issues discussed by general semanticists, many discussed earlier in this book, appear to relate very closely to some of the central problems of the practicing psychiatrist. Issues such as the awareness of abstracting (Caro 2003; Presby 2003), extensionalization (Caro 2003), signal reactions (Caro 2003), excessive verbalizations (Caro 2003; Fox, W. 2003), intensional orientation (Goldberg 2003; Johnson, K. 2003; Peters 2003), and strong reaction to symbols (Peters 2003) all can serve as good examples of what psychiatrists need to address. To finish with a personal note, you will recall from our earlier discussion that being unaware of the identification issue and mishandling the levels of abstraction in discourse often leads people (including academics) to ask the utterly unrewarding ‘what-is-question’. Many years ago, at a linguistics conference, I read a paper in which I discussed in some detail the point of how unrewarding and perhaps detrimental it was to take the ‘what-is-question’ seriously and to look for one final answer. After my talk, a member of the audience came up to me and admitted that he had spent years on studying the question of ‘what is grammatical co-ordination’. Having admitted this, he said something like this: ‘you know, I do hope that you are wrong because if you are right then I have wasted (many years???) of my life’. I still remember this person’s unhappy and slightly terrified face. I never saw or talked to this person again, but I would not be surprised to learn that this person

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may have developed a psychological condition, especially if he had continued working on the question that he had been devoted to over the years and to which, obviously, he would never be able to find one ultimate answer satisfying to everybody. Had this person been familiar with the consequences of unfounded identification, he would have known that ‘coordination’ can be seen only as a word that refers to something else; that person would not have identified the word with what it may be taken to refer to; that person would never have taken the ‘what is grammatical co-ordination’ question seriously and would not have devoted much time to it; he would probably have been happier and healthier.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Chase (1938) and Hayakawa (1992) may be considered to be relatively easy-to-understand introductions to general semantics and problems of misunderstanding and miscommunication. Hayakawa (1992) has been a bestseller. Johnson, W. (1946), Lee (1994) and Kodish and Kodish (2001) may be recommended as more advanced but also accessible introductions. Tannen (1986, 1990) may be recommended to all those who are very interested in descriptions of how misunderstanding and miscommunication occur and in practical solutions to problems caused by incomprehensible and confusing discourse. Authors such as Rapoport (1950), Lakoff (1987), Johnson, M. (1987), Palmer (1996), Taylor, J. (2003), and Janicki (2006) discuss categorization, classification, and taxonomies. For a discussion of metaphors and metonymy see, for instance, Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Gibbs (1994), and Kövecses (2002). Bourland and Johnston (1991) offer the most extensive one volume treatment of E-Prime. Sequels to this book, Bourland et al. (1994) and Bourland and Johnston (1997) can also be recommended. These three books discuss a selection of issues including arguments for and against E-Prime and its versions. Bourland and Johnston’s 1991 book should be read before the other two. A short discussion of the main points concerning the verb ‘to be’ and E-Prime the reader will find in an article by D. Bourland entitled ‘To be or not to be: E-Prime as a tool for critical thinking’ (1991). Heath and Heath (2008) offer a treatment of what we should do for our ideas to be understood and remembered. The authors also treat concreteness. Sperber and Wilson (1986) give a detailed presentation of relevance theory. Gibbs (1994) discusses context in relation to a multitude of phenomena, for instance, metaphors, proverbs, idioms, metonymy, and so on. Gibbs (2006) discusses the question of imagery and memory. Mental images, imagery, and related concepts are discussed also in a number of standard cognitive linguistics works, for instance, Evans and Green (2006). 219

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Index abstraction levels of, 7, 9, 14 mixing levels of, 19–20, 88, 153, 171, 175–7, 208 natural order of, 20–1, 207 non-verbal level of, 7, 14, 111, 176, 216 the process of, 4, 9, 32 verbal level of, 7, 14, 111, 171, 175–7, 216 active voice, 160–1 advertisements, 116–18, 121, 162, 214 Aitchison, J., 57, 95, 220 Alderman, T., 133, 220 Allen, M., 83, 220 Andor, J., 220, 225 Anolli, L., XIII, 220 Aristotle, 125, 127 Aronoff, M., 149, 220 bad verbal maps, see maps Baker, M., 220, 225 Baker, P., 220 Bartos, H., 89, 220 Battersby, S., 173, 220 Bavelas, J.B., 114, 220 be, see to be Benchley, 132 Berman, S.I., 224 bi-polarity, 125–6, 136–7, 139 Black, A., 220 Bloomaert, J., X, 220 Booker, C., 165, 220 Bourland, D.D., 53, 142, 158–9, 219–21, 223–5 Bowers, J., 23, 221 Bransford, J., XIII, 200–1, 221 Bresnahan, J., 82, 221 Brindley, G., 149, 151, 221 Brown, D., 174, 221 Brown, G., 11, 221 Bryson, L., 220

Bulcaen, C., 220, 226 Bull, P., 114, 221 Buller, D., 114, 221 Burgoon, J., 221 Burns, A., 149, 221 Caro, I., 217, 221–2, 224–5 Carrell, P., 149, 221 categorization, 13, 49–50, 219 CDA, see Critical Discourse Analysis Celce-Murcia, M., 149, 226 certainty, 128 Chadha, K., 171–2, 221 Chandler, M., 174, 221 change, 5, 19, 36, 48, 64, 77, 85, 90, 105, 155, 164 Chapelle, C., 149, 221 Chase, S., XIII, 15, 93–4, 219, 222 Chase, W., 221–2 Chovil, N., 220 Ciceri, R., 220 Clark, H., 47–8, 222 Clark, S., 172–3, 222 classifications, 148, 159, 163 cleft sentences, 161 cognitive linguistics, 13, 49, 69, 194, 219 common ground, 47–8, 51 communication, X, XII, 55, 80–2, 197, 199, 202, 213, 219 purpose of, 57 comprehension, VIII, XI, XIII, 30, 32, 51, 74, 114, 200–1 see also understanding concepts, 4, 43, 47, 56, 127, 194–8 basic level, 14, 194–5 as experientially grounded, 43 superordinate level, 195 concreteness, 195, 199, 219 conflict, VI, X, 9, 20, 63, 85, 114, 134, 138–9, 175–6, 210 confusing discourse definition of, VI–VIII 228

Index 229 context, 190, 199–203, 212, 219 continuum, XI, 97, 138, 140, 163–4, 176 intensional-extensional, 122 Cook, G. X, 222 Coupland, N., XIII, 222 Critical Discourse Analysis, 22 Croce, 15 Cruse, A., 93, 222 Curzon, L.B., 97, 222 DA, see discourse analysis Dallmann, W., 162, 222 dating, 106–7 Davies, N., 106, 187, 222 De Bono, E., 136, 220 de Bot, K., 149, 150, 220 definitions, VI, 74, 76, 149–50 extensional, 112–13 and intensional orientation, 93–5 operational, 113 ostensive, 113 descriptions, 171, 177, 188, 194 descriptive level, see reality dictionaries, 67, 74–6, 209 and meaning, 74 discourse analysis, X, 22–4 and health, 216–18 Dr. Johnson, 132 Duszak, A., 125, 132, 222 Ebesu, A., 221 E-Choice, 162, 202–3 Einstein, A., 128, 197, 222 Ellis, W., 122, 222 E-Prime, 142, 158–62, 166–8, 202, 219 in practice, 164–6, 168 and visualization, 202–3 E-Primemod , 162, 202 equivocation, 114, 205 essentialism, 125 et cetera, 107–9 euphemisms, 176 Evans, V., 33, 156, 194, 219, 222 event (process) level, see reality examples, 103–5 existential constructions, 142

experience, 7, 9, 33, 75, 77–8, 95–7, 103, 108, 110, 112–13, 152, 178–9, 182, 185, 198, 207–209, 212–3 mapped onto a word, 34, 55, 74–5, 203 and meaning, 33–47, 181 personal, 48, 179, 181 similar, 37, 47 typical, 75–7 visual, 192–4, 197–8, 203 extensional definitions see definitions devices, 102–12, 209, 212 benefits of, 114 orientation see orientation extraposed subject sentences, 161 extraposition, 94, 167 facts, 170, 177–8, 182, 186–8, 214, 216 non-verbal, 20–1, 157–60, 181 Fairclough, N., 23–6, 222 finality, 164 fluidity, 164 Fox, K., 28–30, 222 Fox, W., 217, 222 Francis, G., 220 Fudeman, K., 149, 220 functions of language, 1, 206 generalizations, 7, 29, 83, 85, 95–6, 103, 105–7, 114, 148, 179, 182, 209 danger of, 81 general semantics, XIV, 216, 219 Gibbs, R., 33, 194, 200–1, 203, 219, 222 Gilbert, J., 191, 222 Giles, H., 222 Goethe, 132 Goldberg, A., 217, 222 Goldwag, A., 223–4 good verbal maps, see maps Gozzi, R., 142, 223 Grabe, W., 149, 221 Graham-Rowe, D., 191, 223 Gray, M., 94, 223 Greenbaum, S., 94, 223 Green, M., 33, 156, 194, 219, 222

230

Index

Hallet, G., 125, 223 Hamilton, M., 114, 223 Hannan, D., 84, 223 Hardie, A., 220 Hayakawa, S.I., XIII, XIV, 9, 20, 33, 89, 115, 118, 126–7, 136, 219, 223 Hazlitt, 131 Heath, C., 199, 219, 223 Heath, D., 199, 219, 223 Heidegger, M., 92, 223 Hollósy, B., 220 House, J., XIII, 223 Howarth, D., X, 223 Hulse, C., 180, 223 Humpty Dumpty, 15 Husserl, E., 92–3, 223 hyphens, 109–10, 212 iconicity, 59 imagery, 194, 197–8, 219 images, 34–42, 76–7, 151, 213 mental, 42, 181, 194–6, 201–2, 219 image schemas, 194 imagination, 194 indexing, 105–6, 209, 212 inferences, 7–8, 29, 48, 68, 95–6, 171, 177, 179, 181–2, 184–8, 212, 214, 216 intensional orientation, see orientation is-of-identity, 143–55, 162, 164 is-of-predication, 155–8, 162, 164 see also to be Iwi, K., 23, 221 Jacquemet, M., 23, 223 Janicki, K., XII, 47, 50, 78, 125, 138, 149, 152, 194, 219, 223–4 Johnson, K., 217, 224 Johnson, M., 14, 33, 49, 69, 72–3, 194–5, 203, 219, 224 Johnson, M.K., XIII, 200–1, 221 Johnson, W., 14, 20, 80, 103, 115, 120, 177–8, 219, 224 Johnstone, B., VIII, X, 224 Johnston, P.D., 142, 219, 221–5 Kasper, G., 223 Katz, J., 17, 224

Kellog, E.W. III, 142, 224 Klein, J., 221, 224 Kodish, B., 20, 89, 103, 126, 136, 219, 224 Korzybski, A., XIII, 5, 9, 20, 54, 103, 115, 147, 191, 216–17, 224 Kövecses, Z., 219, 224 Kristeva, J., 18–19, 93, 97, 138, 224 Kroll, J.F., 149–50, 220 Labov, W., 177, 224 Laczkó, T., 220 ladder of abstraction, 9, 10–14, 18 moving up and down the, 26, 28–30, 63, 71, 77, 194 Lakoff, G., 14, 33, 43, 47, 49, 69, 72–3, 194–5, 203, 219, 224 language as an inadequate tool for handling reality, 77–80, 209 manipulation, 61–4, 69 problems, XIII, 78 as a symbolic system, 1, 4, 120 law of the excluded middle, 127 law of identity, 127 law of non-identity, 127 Lee, I., XIII, 47, 54, 80, 89, 103, 115, 142–3, 148, 178, 182, 219, 224 Leonardo da Vinci, 132 Lewin, W., 190–1 Lewis, M., 215, 224 Lieven, A., 135, 225 Lightbown, P.M., 149, 226 Llamas, C., 149–50, 225 Lloyd, B., 226 Louw, B., 93, 225 Lutz, W., 54, 61–2, 225 lying, 65–8, 208 Lynch, T., 149, 225 Malmkjær, K., 221 map is not the territory, 53–5, 74, 84, 86 maps, 54–8, 74, 85, 153, 213 verbal, 61, 63, 80, 85 different kinds of, 55, 68 good and bad, 54, 58–65, 99 Mason, J., 62, 226

Index 231 mathematics, 127–8 Matthiessen, C., 225 McCarthy, M., 149, 225 McDowell, J., 136, 225 McEnery, T., 220 meaning, 32–48, 51, 103, 109, 116, 119, 151, 197–8, 207, 209 and common ground, 47–8 and dictionaries, 74–7 and experience, 33–47, 181, 207 real, 86, 153, 209 Meara, P., 149, 225 Medin, D., 125, 225 memorization, 94, 199, 200 Mendelsohn, D., 149, 225 Menefee, E., 162, 225 metaphor, 68–72, 219 metaphoric mappings, 71 metonymy, 72–4, 219 Mills, S., X, 225 Mineo, P.J., 223 misunderstanding, VII–VIII, X, XII–XIII, 9, 20, 32, 46–7, 51, 70, 147, 198, 207–8, 210, 213, 219 Moi, T., 224 Mullett, J., 220 multi-valued orientation, see orientation Nakhleh, M., 222 naming, 3, 7, 13, 15, 39, 49–50, 94–5, 109, 129, 148, 208 Nation, P., 149, 225 Nelson, F., 119, 225 non-typicality, 37, 39–40, 47, 60, 68, 175 non-verbal phenomena, 78, 135, 171–7 non-verbal reality, see reality North, R., 165, 220 object level, see reality Ogden, C.K., 3, 65, 225 Oliver, K., 224–5 onomatopoeia, 59 opposites, 125, 135

orientation extensional, 30, 95–102, 151, 216 intensional, 30, 88–95, 98–102, 150–1, 216–17 multi-valued, 136–7 two-valued, 125–36 danger of, 138–40 Ortony, A., 125, 225, 227 Otto, M., 174, 221 Palmer, G., 194, 219, 225 passive voice, 142, 160–1, 166, 202 Pearsall, J., 222 Pelyvás, P., 220 permanence, 155–6, 163–4, 211 personification, 70, 72 Peters, H., 217, 225 Philips, S., 134, 225 pictures, 74, 111–12, 190–1, 193–4, 202, 212 mental, 3, 14, 43, 47, 194, 196–8, 202 plurals, 110 Pluto, 171–6 as a planet, 174–6 politically correct discourse, 176 Pollitt, A., 221 Portner, P., 149, 225 Presby, S., 217, 224–5 principle of end focus, 166–7 principle of end weight, 167 Pütz, M., 225 quantifying terms, 110–11 Quirk, R., 94, 223 quotes, 109, 212 Radden, G., 58–9, 225 Ralph, R., 142, 160–1, 225 Rapoport, A., XIII, 33–4, 49, 54, 219, 225 reaction delayed, 120, 135, 210 signal, 115–22, 164, 210, 214, 217 symbol, 115, 120–2, 135, 210 Read, C.S., 221–2, 224–5

232

Index

reality changing, 79–81 descriptive level of, 6–7, 19–20 event (process) level of, 4–5, 8, 143, 146 non-verbal, 3–4, 7, 9, 32, 57–9, 78–81, 89–91, 109, 118, 126, 129, 131, 133, 134, 138–9, 148, 164, 168, 175, 187, 209–10 object level of, 5, 20, 174 verbal, 3–4, 178 referents, 3, 10–11, 13–15, 22, 33, 37, 65–6, 76, 153–4, 208 Reiner, M., 222 relevance, 201–2, 219 remembering, 191, 199, 202, 212 Reppen, R., 149, 226 Richards, I.A., 3, 65, 225 Riva, G., 220 Rosch, E., 13–14, 195, 226 Ross, S., 223 Russell, B., VI–VII, 88, 93, 113, 226 Saltmarsh, M., 180, 223 Schiffrin, D., X, 226 Schmitt, N., 149, 220–21, 225–6 Seidlhofer, B., 23, 149, 221–2, 226–7 Seneca, 131 Shepheard, P., 149, 226 Shuy, R., 135, 226 signal reaction, see reaction Simpson, R., 149, 226 Slade, D., 225 small talk, 100, 206, 213 Smith, D. R., 220, 227 social agreement, 32–3, 35–6, 43, 59–61, 109, 164, 177, 208 Spada, N., 149, 226 Sperber, D., 200–1, 219, 226 stability, 155–6, 163–4, 211 Stockwell, P., 149–50, 225 Structural Differential, 5, 14, 20, 174–5 Stubbs, M., VIII, X, 24, 226 symbol reaction, see reaction symbols, 1, 3, 39, 53–5, 65, 74, 88–91, 94, 120–1, 128, 175–6, 193, 205, 208, 214, 216–17 and referents, 3, 66 Syrus, 131

Tannen, D., XI–XII, 134–5, 219, 226 taxonomy, 13–14 Taylor, J., 49, 219, 226 Taylor, T., XIII, 26–7, 226 temporariness, 164 Thatcher, 131 Theil, S., 119, 226 to be, 142–68 as auxiliary, 142, 163 see also is-of-identity, is-of predication Tognini-Bonelli, E., 220 to-me-ness, 111, 157 Trudgill, P., 103–4, 226 Turner, M., 47, 224 Twain, 132 two-valued orientation, see orientation Tzanne, A., XIII, 226 understanding, VII, X–XIII, 15, 19, 21, 43, 47–8, 69, 72, 75, 79, 102, 112–5, 160–1, 190–3, 195, 199–201, 203, 206–9 see also comprehension, misunderstanding Van Dijk, T., 23, 226 Vedantam, S., 173, 226 verbal level/reality, see reality Vernick, L., 136, 227 Visualization, 111–12, 190–203, 212–13 and E-Prime, 202–3 as extensional device, 202–3 Vosniadou, S., 225, 227 Washburn, D., 220, 227 Weinberg, H., XIII, 20, 115, 127, 227 what-is-questions, 112, 149–54, 159, 217 White, C., 221 Widdowson, H., X, 23–6, 222, 227 Wiemann. J.M., 222 Williams, J., 221 Wilson, D., 200–1, 219, 226 Wray, H., 20, 227 Yule, G., X, 221

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