[Corpora-List] Bootcamp: 'Quantitative Corpus Linguistics withR'--re Louw's endorsement

Thu Aug 28 07:59:25 UTC 2008

Dear Linas,

Thank you for your two letters which are such a nice discussion of the phenomenon of meaning. Perhaps I should point out that I am not pretending to speak for corpus linguistics in general (if there is such a thing) but for my very own way to look at it.

You mention qualia, and they are indeed puzzling. It is Dan Sperber who insists that we all have many ineffable concepts. He may be true. But if there are, then we cannot communicate them. In reality, people like to talk a lot about them, and seem to have little problem in labelling them. These citations I selected from the first ten given by Google:

-The Ineffable Feeling Of a Fixed-Gear Bike.

-Can you name any movies/TV shows that really capture the ineffable feeling of falling in love?

-a deep tender ineffable feeling of fondness

-ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person

How do we learn to fall in love? It is, no doubt, an acculturated feeling, as not every ethnicity has it. It is, I believe, TV and movies, but also what we hear from our peers, our parents and our other carers, and what we read about that tells us what you have to do and how it feels and how you are supposed to behave. We learn it. It takes a while. It is, like oysters, an acquired taste. But unlike oysters, it is kind of expected from us. If we are twenty five and have never fallen in love, something must be wrong. The pressure is strong. 

Do we really know what we feel when we have just fallen in love? How different is it from being excited? How do we know to call what we feel being excited or being in love (Wittgenstein's problem, of course)? We must have heard other people use the word in certain situations and exhibiting a certain behaviour. When we were little, we may have tested it out with our carers: "Mom, I'm excited." - "of course, my darling; it's you birthday today." - "Mom. I'm excited." - "No, darling, you are not excited; you are worried because Granma is in hospital."

Our qualia are the result of input , input from this kind discourse, I would say. Of course with our mental powers (drawing analogies, seeing similarities, looking for cause and effect [Hume springs to mind]) we are able to apply what we have learned to new situations. I am sure there are many people looking into these things.

For me, this isn't part of language. Language is symbolic interaction. It involves signs. What a sign means needs to be negotiated between the people using it, actively or passively. Qualia, the way we talk about them, are non-symbolic. We experience them. Basta. They are, to a large extent, the result of symbolic input. But as long as they are 'raw feel', as long as they are experience, they are non-symbolic. They are ineffable. As such, they do not matter. They only matter if they are expressed in some sort of symbolic interaction, in form of our behaviour, or in form of giving testimony of what we think they are.  Then we can talk about them. A lot of our 19th and 20 century Western discourse deals with feelings. 

Feelings are objects of our discourse. As such, they are labels for someone being in a certain situation and having certain ideas. This is how I can distinguish feelings of guilt from compunction from repentance from regret or remorse or pangs of conscience or what else. People use these words for people's behaviour in different situations. Now, where does that leave our 'raw feels'? I think not that we can distinguish between them. Pangs of conscience feel not much different from remorse, or guilt, I believe. For us, for our identity, for us feeling unique, qualia are irrelevant. Our identity is something we owe to the discourse. Feral children don't have a sense of identity. 

Meaning is only in the discourse. It is what is exchanged between and shared by people. It is what we together can analyse. Most of what we are doing when we talk is trying to make sense of what has been said. But interpretation is not the same as summarisation, as following a set of lexical implication rules. There is no interpretation without intentionality, without knowing what a text is about, and there is no machine that has intentionality. The result of summarisation is predictable; the result of interpretation is not. How you read the table-citations is different from how I read them. We can discuss them. We may agree or not. The collaborative act of interpretation has us come up with things neither of us thought about. It can make an impact on what people will think about tables in the future. If there is such a thing as a table-quale, that would be completely irrelevant as long as you don't talk about it. It will make no impact on the discourse. It cannot be observed. 

For me, everything that has been said about tables contributes to the meaning of the word 'table'. If it exists in recorded form and if it is accessible, than we can accept it as evidence. What is in our heads does not matter a bit unless we tell ourselves about it. Then it becomes discourse matter. What you are looking for seems to be some neat formula, involving categories like artefact, concrete, inanimate and what else. I believe they don't work that well. Can we really apply them to our table-citations? Not so very often, I think. The same is the case with intensional or extensional definitions. They are good for things that can be counted and measured. I can go to a furniture shop and come up with probably both. (But what do I do about the 'tables' in catalogues and other texts in the shop? Are they tables?. What about painted tables? What about miniature or oversize table models? Intensional and extensional definitions are perhaps good for taking stock of the content of a furniture shop, once we have agreed on the rules of the game, again in the discourse. But they are not that good, I believe, for accounting for the meaning of 'table', as we find the word used in the discourse. 

All mechanical, rule-based ways for describing the meaning of 'table' (including the statistical devices developed by corpus linguists) cannot replace our collaborative interpretation of the word as it crops up in the discourse. Interpretation is a collaborative act, and as an act, its outcome is not predictable. Interpretation is not 'hard' science. It presupposes intentionality. How else could it be? Words do not come with their meanings. Words mean what we together make them mean. There is no hidden but discoverable formula that we, the language users can apply but also violate. We can use 'table' any way we want. Our use of the word will have had an impact if others react to it. If no one ever refers to my use of 'table', than it will have had no impact. But what people react to and what not is as unpredictable as the course of a hurricane. If Barak Obama uses 'table' in a way the word has never been used before, he could well set a trend. For the meanings of words there are no rules. All we have, all we can analyse is the discourse. Bottom-up, not using top-down categories, like inanimate. I can always use a cow's back as a picnic table.

Cheers

Wolfgang

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