Infinity

[Noel Rude]

Fellow funknetters,

        Thought provoking--especially Aya Katz' notion that open-endedness is
inherent in any informational system.  Perhaps the main distinction that
unites us functionalists is the communicative theory of language:
language codes and communicates information, complex information.
That's why it exists, and that's why its open-endedness.

        Now when the structuralists focus on the clause or sentence ("the
minimal unit of information"), those of us into texts should know that
every clause has a unique context, and every text is unique (except, of
course, where us old folks get into these "scripts").  The
structuralists emphasize an infinity of sentences so they can argue for
syntactic structure.  We need open-endedness too because language
communicates, and therefore we also need structure.

        One found this jabber "irritating", no doubt because of the nit-picking
over infinity.  Remember, infinity can never be traversed.  There will
never be an infinity of time.  You can never pile up an infinity of
words, clauses, sentences, texts.  The point isn't that you can never
arrive there.  It's that we're headed in that direction.  A large amount
of human language IS novel--that should be the point.

        Noel