Date: Fri, 14 Nov 1997 09:34:30 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199711141434.JAA29091@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Robin Turner Sender: Lojban list From: Robin Turner Subject: Re: pragmatics X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan In-Reply-To: <199711131830.UAA15366@firat.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr> X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2067 X-From-Space-Date: Fri Nov 14 09:34:35 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU la robin. cusku di'e >> >> You seem to be assuming that language "encodes" meaning, which I am by no >> means sure of. See Ellis' "Language, Thought and Reality. > la .and. cusku di'e >I confess I've not heard of this book, let alone read it. Could >you briefly explain what you have against encoding? Speaking as >a linguistician rather than a philosopher I see no problem at >all. ue.u'u. I got the title mixed up with the famous compilation of Whorf's writings. The full reference should be: Ellis, J.M. (1993) _Language, Thought and Logic_. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. It's an interesting, if somewhat extreme book, in which Ellis lays into just about every linguist and philosopher of language around - about the only people he likes are Saussure and the later Wittgenstein. Ellis' (and my own) objection to "encoding" as a metaphor for language is that in the normal meaning of the word you encode one sign as another by ceratin rules. I do not think that language encodes meaning in this sense. There is no meaning CAT which is encoded by the word "cat"; as Ellis says, nothing is "just a cat". There is a category which (in English) is implied by the written word "cat" and the vocalisation /kat/ (lack of phonemic symbols means I've just aquired a Geordie accent!), but these do not _encode_ anything, unless you believe in "mentalese" (Pinker, 1993). la .and. cusku di'e >Pragmatics is partly communication and partly social interaction. >Neither are inherently or exclusively linguistic. By "language >proper" I meant "stuff to do with language that can be studied >in and of itself, not as a nondiscrete subpart of some larger >field". > Then you're left with very little, I'm afraid! That's the problem with Generative Linguistics: first you lose pragmatics, then you lose semantics, then syntax gets compressed into an increasingly abstract set of principles and parameters, until linguistics becomes a minute and non-discrete part of cognitive science. Oh yeah, and isn't "encoding" supposed to be part of semiotics? robin.