Six Laws of Language: An Addendum

[Salinas17 at aol.com]

I hope Alex will forgive me for taking a tangent to his post.  I find a good 
deal of his Six Laws very compelling.  But I thought I might humbly offer some 
corollaries that might be worth considering.

Alex wrote:
<< If two people do not share sufficient context, then not all the words in 
the world may be enough for them to grasp each other's meaning. >>

Supplemental Law #1 - "Chocolate!  Chocolate!":  Understanding and meaning 
are NOT the objectives of language.

- Common understanding and meaning are merely a frequent operational 
requirement of language, not the ultimate objective.  They are equivalent to two 
football teams agreeing on what is out-of-bounds, where the goal lines are and who 
gets the ball, often even as the game is being played.  But this is not WHY 
the game is being played.

The ancient and reasonable metaphor that makes language a shared "mirror of 
the world" does not explain the purpose of language, but rather how it 
operates.  Grammar, syntax or any other structural aspect of language makes common 
understanding manageable.  

But all these features of language are the means and not the ends.  A lot of 
the mystery of language may come from artificially focusing on the means 
rather than the ends.

Thus the parable:  A man is visiting a chocolate factory.  He accidentially 
falls into a vat.  About to drown in the melted confection, he yells "Fire!  
Fire!"  When rescued, he is asked why he yelled, "Fire!  Fire!"  He replies, 
"Well, do you think if I yelled "Chocolate!  Chocolate!" any one would have come?"

As Alex implies, the "right word" is sometimes not the grammatically correct 
word, nor is it even the word as understood by the speaker.  I can say the 
wrong thing, but it can have a happy outcome.

The right word is basically the word that will produce a desired change in 
the listener -- or change how the listener responds.  Grammar may aid common 
understanding.  Common understanding may aid the speaker in affecting the 
listener.  But affecting the listener is the objective.  

Neither grammar nor common understanding are the ultimate objective of the 
speaker -- except if you are a language teacher.

Alex also wrote:
<<...often the content of the message must also change to some extent, if 
fully successful communication is to take place.>>

Supplemental Law #2 - "'Heed my words, Pinocchio,!' hiccuped the Cat":  A 
communication is not successful if it doesn't work, understanding not 
withstanding.

- Corollary to Supp Law #1.  Language success certainly can't be measured as 
a meeting of minds.  In fact, what the speaker really thinks may be irrelevant 
to the form and content of a "successful" message.  Deceptive language for 
example may be nearly as old as language itself, so there's no justification for 
measuring success against what the speaker is really thinking.

It is possible, however, that we might measure success by whether the 
listener understands what the speaker WANTS him to understand -- whether it's 
accurate or inaccurate, true or false.

This is still an incomplete measure.  What if the listener understands the 
message, but does not act accordingly?  Should we consider that effective 
communication?

If I say "Stop! a car is coming" and the listener understands me, but goes 
anyway and gets hit by a car, do I really consider that a successful 
communication?

If all that human language were used for was creating understanding, then I 
would consider my communication successful whether the listener got run over or 
not, as long as he got my drift.  

A lot of mystery about language is created by arbitrarily terminating it at 
understanding.  As if what happened because words worked or didn't work had no 
connection to the words themselves.  As if humans only used language to create 
an understanding, rather than to benefit themselves in many other ways.

That is a very non-Darwinian view of language.  It means that that human 
language could evolve because it created understanding, without regard to whether 
that understanding was effective or ineffective, accurate or inaccurate.  
Using words in a way that created understanding in listeners, but was ineffective 
at helping a human survive, would make language an undesirable trait.

Regards,
Steve Long