RSSNo “Distanciation” During Logogenesis
Apr 18
Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 587):
A text is thus a unit of meaning — more accurately, a unit in the flow of meaning that is always taking place at the instance pole of the cline of instantiation.
“it’s all semantics”
Apr 15
epistemology affect, consciousness, emotion, unsw No Comments
i guess i’m remembering the discussions i had with fellow art school inmates way back in the 70’s, but at a certain point in these discussions, someone would always come up with the disclaimer that it was ‘all just semantics’. that is, that the point over which we were arguing was not ‘real’ in any sense, but a matter of how we interpreted the meanings of the words.
nowadays, i might hear some people exclaiming instead that “it’s all semiotics”.
so the other day we attended UNSW’s school of english, media and performing arts’ (EMPA) 2nd “hall conversation” (which however, was held in a small theatre in webster) to hear three colleagues speak to the notion of “affect” as they understood the term within their discipline and research.
we linguists were there in support of peter white of media and who classes himself as a linguist, while the other two speakers were from music and theatre and performance studies. they each gave an account of how they used and viewed the concept in their disciplines, and as i listened, i felt a growing sense of unease about the divide between the treatment of affect as a ‘real’ felt somatic phenomenon of the body/consciousness that could be discussed, and a linguist’s perspective that such feelings do exist but they were beyond the purview of our analysis – or that once someone talked or wrote of such feelings then we could discuss those items of language use…
eventually peter white in his short presentation mentioned this – that is, linguists’ orientation toward the phenomena we study (i.e. language use, the grammar of that use, the meanings in context of that use, etc) as contrasted to what was classed as phenomena for their study.
and then the floor was open to questions and comments.
we already knew that we were vastly out numbered here, and that theatre and performance people, and those who ‘used’ writers such as deleuze in their own work were in the majority in the room. we were aware that the definitions on which they based their work were not of sufficient clarity for us to work with…
so it was no surprise that most of the commentary was directed towards one of their own.
but what we all became particularly interested in (as we discussed later) was more centred on the heat which seemed to be generated over the use of the terms ’emotion’ versus ‘affect’ in descriptions of afferent processes in the brain stem.
it seemed that it was very important (to one attendee in particular) that the word ’emotion’ was not used to refer to those un-labelled feelings that arise before conscious labelling of them, and that ‘affect’ needed to be retained as the term for that, while ’emotion’ should be used for those states which were then classed or labelled with language items.
discussions of the states of ‘arousal’ that babies experience before being socialised into comprehending those states would fall into this sphere of being labelled as ‘affect’ perhaps, but one should refrain from calling these ’emotions’. [something, i remarked to myself, would perhaps ruffle the neuroscientist participants of the mid 90’s conference i followed, who were not chary about labelling these pre-self-conscious states as ’emotion’. this highlighted by the very name their conference had been called: “emotion and consciousness”, its main premiss being that without emotional arousal, consciousness and other social learning in the infant could not be expected to occur.]
examples pertaining to animal consciousness, and dogs in particular, their sense of deference, shame, etc, were also brought up in the course of the hallway conversation the other day…
of course, as appraisal analysts, we use the term ‘affect’ to refer to one class of attitudinal terms that one can find in texts in general (see the appraisal website for details). but the need to carefully distinguish between the terms ‘affect’ and ’emotion’ for this group of researchers who were not linguists, was of paramount importance to (some of) them, and pointed to their need for precision in this area.
it seemed to me that for them, the term ’emotion’ carried with it too much semantic ‘baggage’, and connoted states that were recognised and labelled, as well as given some evaluative status, whereas the term ‘affect’ remained somewhat neutral in this regard. that is, it seemed that the term ‘affect’ did not carry any reference to socially dis/approved responses, but merely denoted a general class of phenomena related to bodily states.
it was this need to distinguish between two terms we had all hitherto not considered of much difference, or at least not seen how it was of significance to those directed towards the discussion of these matters, that excited our interest.
dialect map of USA comes to our attention
Apr 13
general observations american, dialect, phonology, pronunciation No Comments
thanks to twitter, followed a link to this most interesting website, maintained as a hobby by someone called Rick Aschmann. he apologises to those whose emails he has not yet answered – the site has generated many more, apparently, since several other websites posted notes and articles about his work on this site…
interesting for the design for a start.
it’s a cornucopia in concept, boxes of this and that all neatly separated according to sub-topic, with heaps of blue underlining which normally signifies links to further information, and small headings in red for notes, dates and so on.
there are links to recordings of speakers, and a map which shows the different dialects of the north american continent, along with related links to audio of representative speakers for that area. as well as calls for more sample recordings of speakers from areas that he has not been able to collect yet…
the dialect map is also available in pdf form so interested parties can print it out.
what more can you ask for?
a MAP plus audio recordings of speakers linked to the map????
ASFLA 2011 call for papers
Apr 11
announcements conferences No Comments
click on image to see full size, or click on link to conference site in right sidebar for details –>
Everything Old Is New Again
Mar 24
general observations, language and brain, language and culture, materiality, mode and modalities No Comments
The Human Individual: Organism, Person, Meaner
Mar 22
general observations, suitable quotations 1 Comment
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 610):
The human individual is at once a biological “individual”, a social “individual”, and a socio–semiotic “individual”:
as a biological “individual”, s/he is an organism, born into a biological population as a member of the human species.
as a social “individual”, s/he is a person, born into a social group as a member of society. “Person” is a complex construct; it can be characterised as a constellation of social rôles or personæ entering into social networks …
as a socio–semiotic “individual”, s/he is a meaner, born into a meaning group as a member of a speech community. Meaner is also a complex construct. …
These different levels of individuality map onto one other: a meaner is a person, and a person is a biological organism. But the mappings are complex; and at each level an individual lives in different environments — in different networks of relations.
Academic Persona Types?
Mar 13
education and academia, general observations, suitable quotations 1 Comment
Throughout this long deveopment, from 600 BC to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them. With this difference, others have been associated.The disciplinarians have advocated some system of dogma, either old or new, and have therefore been compelled to be, in greater or lesser degree, hostile to science, since their dogmas could not be proved empirically. They have almost invariably taught that happiness is not the good, but that ‘nobility’ or ‘heroism’ is to be preferred. They have had a sympathy with irrational parts of human nature, since they have felt reason to be inimical to social cohesion.The libertarians, on the other hand, with the exception of the extreme anarchists, have tended to be scientific, utilitarian, rationalistic, hostile to violent passion, and enemies of all the more profound forms of religion.This conflict existed in Greece before the rise of we recognise as philosophy, and is already quite explicit in the earliest Greek thought. In changing forms, it has persisted down to the present day, and no doubt will persist for many ages to come.
— Bertrand Russell ‘The History Of Western Philosophy’ (pp21-2)
baby’s ontogenetic trajectory recorded
Mar 11
language development context, interaction, multimodal analysis, TED lectures No Comments
here’s a TED talk about the recording of deb roy’s baby’s first 90,000 hours of interacting with parents and family. a true multimodal analysis of patterns of interaction qua language development.
… at least they label his activities (he’s from MIT) as “designing machines that learn to communicate in human like ways”
individual/community quotes
Mar 07
language and culture, suitable quotations bateson, individual, lemke 2 Comments
4 thinkers, all men, who at different times have said almost the same things in different ways.
it’s not likely that V read any of the others, although L probably has. R&B, however, definitely did not read any of the other two. V’s was also in translation.
the meta-discursive meanings these guys were making then, were instances of different meaning “systems”, despite their being at another level instances of the same grammatical system, and dare i say, registers (this also despite the differences in orientation: the first uses a personal orientation (1st person), the second a third person orientation (it), and the third uses an inclusive ‘we’ orientation. at the same time, field may be considered similar due to repeated references to ‘individual’, and other lexical items in a sort of meronymic relation to ‘community’ [social, group]).
in view the differences in time of publication, and only one definite ‘cross-pollination’ of cultural (?) meanings, can we consider these quotation fragments as either ‘specimens’ (instruments) or ‘artefacts’ (objects) (in the halliday& matthiessen 2004 sense)? because they are not whole texts, and because they are not the subject of analysis at the grammatical level, perhaps – in this instance of their use – they should not be classed as specimens (of the language as system) – but artefacts…representative pieces of a larger puzzle? that larger puzzle, the way that meaning can be viewed, where it resides, how it comes about, how to think about meaning-making. and in this case, the mediating individual body is not viewed as the receptacle of meaning, rather the locus.
‘in this instance of their use’, the quotations are being used (by me) to highlight similarities in meta-meanings, through instances far removed in time and space. i’m always telling my students to only use quotations to illustrate or support their argument, not to make it for them. so, either i am not making an argument, or i am being hypocritical here and now.
Instead of talking about meaning-making as something that is done by minds, I prefer to talk about it as a social practice in a community. It is a kind of doing that is done in ways that are characteristic of a community, and its occurrence is part of what binds the community together and helps to constitute it as a community. In this sense we can speak of a community, not as a collection of interacting individuals, but as a system of interdependent social practices: a system of doings, rather than a system of doers. These social meaning-making practices are also material processes that bind the community together as a physical ecosystem.
[Lemke 1995: 9-10]
In point of fact, the speech act, or more accurately, its product-the utterance-cannot under any circumstances be considered an individual phenomenon in the precise meaning of the word and cannot be explained in terms of individual psychological or psychophysiological conditions of the speaker. The utterance is a social phenomenon.
[Volosinov 1973: 82]
At the group level, in addition to the verbal and non verbal processes,
present at the interpersonal level, we meet with new types of symbolization not ordinarily regarded as such. The patterns of the organization of the group leave traces in the participating individuals.
However, inasmuch as these individuals do not act as stations of origin or destination of messages, but often as channels only, codification at this level requires intactness in the organization as a whole. The group in action possesses the information, not the individual.
[Ruesch & Bateson 1951: 284]
Tiny bugs have own personalities despite being clones
Mar 05
Tiny green insects known as pea aphids have individual behavior patterns, or “personalities,” despite being clones of one another, scientists say. The researchers found differences in the way each individual responds to a threat.
The study was part of a “burgeoning” of scientific interest in animal personality variation, noted the investigators, with the University of Osnabrueck, Germany. But despite this trend, they added, few studies have been done on invertebrates, or simple animals without backbones.
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| The pea aphid, Acyrthosiphon pisum, sucks nectar from a plant. (Image courtesy Tsutomu Tsuchida)
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Studies on “clonal invertebrates,” which are all genetically identical and would thus be expected to show limited differences in behavior, are “nonexistent,” they added, reporting their findings in the March 1 online issue of the journal Developmental Psychobiology.
“This is surprising given the obvious advantages of using invertebrates/clones to tackle the crucial question why such consistent behavioral differences exist,” they went on. Personality differences not attributable to genes are generally presumed to be due to the environment in which an organism formed, though there is also a growing appreciation of epigenetic factors—chemical differences that are not genetic, but that influence gene activity.
Pea aphids, scientifically named Acyrthosiphon pisum, are pale little insects typically less than a sixth of an inch (half a centimeter) long that feed on pea plants and their relatives. A cluster of aphids infesting a given plant is typically a genetically identical, or clonal, group produced by one mother without sex, although aphids can also reproduce sexually at certain phases.
When a pea aphid is threatened by a predator—of which the species has several including wasps and grubs—it gives off a chemical alarm signal that alerts nearby aphids. They may respond in several ways: they can walk away, drop off the plant or seemingly ignore the signal. The researchers, Wiebke Schuett and colleagues, found that pea aphids can be divided into one of three categories: consistent “droppers,” consistent “non-droppers,” and some that behave unpredictably.
In experiments, “manipulations of early environmental conditions had little qualitative impact on such patterns,” the researchers wrote. Although the reasons for the differences are unclear, the findings may be important for future studies of personality variation and its evolutionary and ecological consequences, they added.
Researchers seek to understand how animals develop different “personalities” in part because they want to understand how humans do so. Animals are used as model organisms because they are often simpler and easier to experiment on. For instance, animals may be bred differently to examine resulting differences in behavior, and the early life environment of a test animal can be controlled and examined.
Studies have found that 20 to 50 percent of the variation in animal personality traits is genetic, according to researchers with the Netherlands Institute of Ecology and the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, who reviewed the subject for the December issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
“Development and learning” dominate the rest of this variation, they added. But “one of the main questions that still remains unresolved is why variation in personality exists and how this is maintained… Molecular genetic research on animal personality is still in its infancy.”
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