Confusing Discourse

Confusing Discourse

Also by Karol Janicki LANGUAGE MISCONCEIVED. ARGUING FOR APPLIED COGNITIVE SOCIOLINGUISTICS (2006)

Confusing Discourse Karol Janicki University of Bergen, Norway

With illustrations by

Siri Fuglseth and

Tine Erika Fuglseth

© Karol Janicki 2010 Original illustrations © Siri Fuglseth and Tine Erika Fuglseth 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his rights to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–23260–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Preface

vi

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

x

1 What are You Talking About? – Language and Abstraction

1

2 Learning New Words – How We Develop Meaning

32

3 Words are Not What They Refer to – The Map is Not the Territory

53

4 Words, Words, Words . . ., and Tables, Cars and Elephants – Intensional and Extensional Orientation

88

5 The Good Guys and the Bad Guys – Two-Valued and Multi-Valued Orientation

125

6 The Unfortunate Word ‘is’: ‘Is’ of Identity and ‘is’ of Predication; E-Prime

142

7 Can You Tell the Difference? – Non-Verbal Phenomena, Descriptions, and Inferences

171

8 Can You Imagine It? – The Role of Visualization and Context in Understanding Discourse

190

9 No Bamboozlement, Please – How to Disclose Others’ Equivocation and Make Your Own Discourse Less Confusing and Easier to Understand – A Summary and Some Warnings

205

Conclusion: Can We Go Bananas? Discourse and Health

216

Suggestions for Further Reading

219

References

220

Index

228 v

Preface

Aristotle could have avoided the mistakes of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. (Russell 1976: 115) You must have found yourself often in situations in which you did not understand what was being said to you. You, most likely, thought that it was your fault, that there were things that you probably did not know, that you were not listening carefully, that your knowledge of the language was not sufficient, and so on. While on some occasions and in some situations it may have indeed been your fault, it very likely was not. When we do not understand, or find other people’s language unclear, we often blame ourselves for the difficulty. Should we? Or should we perhaps blame others for not expressing their ideas clearly? Or is it perhaps the way that language works, its basic principles that cause the problems and confusion? This book addresses these and related questions. The basic objective of this book is to make the reader aware of how language in use (which we call discourse) works and how important and even essential this awareness is to avoid or alleviate conflicts among family, in professional realms, and in politics. As the title indicates, of special interest to me are the kinds of discourse that are most likely to be seen as confusing. I assume that much of discourse is highly ambiguous and confusing. In the title of this book, ‘confusing’ stands for a wide range of labels that might in fact be used to describe what the book is about. This one label might be used as shorthand for ‘incomprehensible’, ‘meaningless’, ‘hardly comprehensible’, ‘difficult to understand’, ‘highly ambiguous’, ‘unintelligible’, ‘hardly intelligible’, ‘confusing’, ‘confused’, ‘convoluted’, ‘discombobulating’, and a host of other related ones. I do not intend to argue how ‘difficult to understand’ differs from ‘incomprehensible’, how ‘convoluted’ differs from ‘hardly intelligible’, and so on. I do not find these questions rewarding, at least for our purposes, as they basically concern definitions of these words, which can never be uncontroversial. As will be shown in the course of this book, vi

Preface

vii

words can be defined in many different ways, and seeking absolute consensus about what words mean or should mean is not possible. In view of this fact, my simple working definition of ‘confusing discourse’, in the present book, is what I assume it usually is to most people using everyday English; no technical or narrow definition is necessary for us to understand the message that I will be trying to pass on. Needless to say, notions of understanding and misunderstanding will be central to our discussion. This book has a very practical goal and goes far beyond theoretical considerations. It is supposed to help you understand and handle the verbal world effectively. Each chapter (except for Chapter 9) concludes with a section reviewing the main points to remember. In the epigraph (above), Russell belatedly advises Aristotle to look into Mrs. Aristotle’s mouth. Keeping this epigraph in mind, I have written this book to draw your attention to the following: for us to be better understood and to demand that others produce understandable discourse, we need to be aware of how we abstract reality and whether the words that we or others utter or write can or cannot be traced back to any tangible objects in the real world. Aristotle is said to have known that women have fewer teeth than men. However, he must have only heard this. Someone must have told him using some words. Aristotle does not seem to have checked the tangible reality these words referred to. If he had looked into Mrs. Aristotle’s mouth and checked, as Russell suggests, he would have known better what these words stood for, what they referred to. This story warns us of the importance of checking words with respect to what they refer to. We need to think of whether we or others know what we are talking about. Do you easily understand other people? Do you fully comprehend what the journalists are saying in the morning paper? Do you fully understand your doctor? Do you always know what your teacher at the university is saying? Do you think that some religious sermons are difficult to understand? Do you always understand your wife or husband? These are some of the questions to which I believe many of us will give negative answers. A question that substitutes all of these may be: do we always know what people are talking about? It is very easy to detect that a person is talking, but this is very different from the certainty that you detect what he or she is talking about. Trying to establish what another person is talking about, we are often in trouble and unable to answer the question. If that is indeed the case, producing confusing and meaningless discourse is hardly an insignificant matter. In this book you will learn about some of the most important reasons why much discourse

viii

Preface

is confusing, difficult to understand, or totally incomprehensible. Most importantly, you will also learn that total comprehension, and even the most conscientious attempts to completely avoid misunderstanding, is not possible. Misunderstanding may only be increased or decreased. Fortunately, it may be decreased to the extent that any final differences in understanding may not matter for practical purposes. A goal of the book will also be to show in what ways misunderstanding may be diminished. The present book is intended primarily for graduate students of language in linguistics, foreign languages, and in communication departments. However, it may also be found useful at a higher undergraduate level as a major textbook companion, focusing on confusing discourse understood as part of the phenomenon of discourse in general. For standard length (24–30 contact hours) courses, a combination of a classical textbook (such as Johnstone 2008; Stubbs 1983) and the present volume may turn out to be very rewarding. This book may also be recommended to anyone trying to find out how language works and how its use and abuse relates to palpable everyday life problems.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Stephen Warner and the anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments and suggestions for improvements on earlier versions of this book. I would also like to thank Stephen for his editorial work.

ix

Introduction

There are many books and textbooks on discourse analysis on the market. These include Stubbs (1983), Brown and Yule (1983), Schiffrin (1988), Cook (1989), Mills (1997), Howarth (2000), Bloomaert (2005), Widdowson (2007), Johnstone (2008), to mention only some of the recent or influential publications. These works deal with a variety of phenomena that come under the heading of discourse analysis (DA), whichever of the many definitions of DA one wishes to adopt. While the books mentioned above, and others similar to them, treat a wide variety of discourse-related topics, (for instance, culture and ideology, discourse structure, genre, coherence, intertextuality, discourse strategies), my main interest in the present book is in the question of understanding (or misunderstanding, or failing to understand) written texts and other people in the daily interaction. Any topic that I discuss is to be viewed as related directly or indirectly to that subject. I will point to a selection of aspects of language which I see as fundamental to the understanding of how misunderstanding and conflict arise. As background to questions of understanding and misunderstanding, an important issue that this book discusses is how verbal behavior and non-verbal physical reality relate to each other. I view explaining the relation between the two to be crucial for how we perceive misunderstanding and the frequent conflicts that arise. Another major question that I deal with in some depth in this book is that of how we abstract and how our awareness of abstracting relates to successful communication. An important point to remember is that it is not specific discourse (language, words, sentences, utterances) that is understandable in some abstract sense. In other words, it makes no sense to ask questions such as ‘Is the sentence “We need more money for good schools” understandable?’, or ‘Is the sentence “Semantic prosody is the semantic aura of meaning” confusing?’. Sentences, or utterances, as sentences in use are often called, may only be understandable to people. We should then rather ask the question ‘Do you, or does he, understand the sentence “Semantic prosody is the semantic aura of meaning”?’. Understanding should be viewed as a faculty of a human being, and not as an inherent feature of a written or spoken text. x

Introduction xi

Another important point to remember is that understanding a text (written or spoken) should be viewed as a continuum. That is, while there are obviously texts that many people will not understand at all and others a person will feel he or she understands fully, there are many others that we understand to a degree. Some texts will be more difficult to understand than others; we may sort of understand some texts, while we may almost fully understand others. Compare the following three short texts:

Text 1 – Jerry left home at 3 o’clock. He walked along Grand Street up to the gas station. He ran into his friend Bob there and talked to him for about half an hour. They are really good friends, and whenever they see each other, they spend quite a while chatting. Text 2 – The principles of science and the techniques of personal adjustment which we have considered earlier are to be more fully understood by examining the ways in which they are commonly abused, and the consequences of their neglect. Text 3 – A safe position may consist in adopting a view of ideologies as materially mediated ideational phenomena. Ideas themselves do not define ideologies; they need to be inserted in material practices of modulation and reproduction.

Don’t you feel that you easily understand Text 1, less so Text 2, and hardly at all Text 3? If that is indeed the case, and, if, to you, Texts 1, 2, and 3 are easy to understand, less so, and hardly at all, respectively, your individual comprehension of these texts overlaps mine (I, the author of this book, view these texts this way). But we might as well differ, and your, an individual reader’s, reactions to these texts may be slightly or significantly different from mine. In other words, again, these texts are not easy or difficult to understand in some sort of absolute sense. They are more difficult or easier to understand to you or to me. Why am I concerned with confusing discourse? Is its existence a problem to people? It certainly seems to be the case. If the interest of the general lay language user can be taken as a reliable measure of the seriousness of the problem, one cogent piece of evidence comes from the immense appeal of some of Deborah Tannen’s popular publications.

xii Introduction

Many of her books (especially Tannen 1986, 1990) treat miscommunication and misunderstanding; they have been translated into several languages and were bestsellers for many years. Also, in two of my own recent studies (Janicki 2002, 2010) I found that understanding other people and miscommunication due to confusing discourse can often be seen as a practical problem. In one of these studies (Janicki 2002), 195 university student respondents from the USA, the UK, Norway, Poland, and Germany took part. In the core section of the study, they were asked which professional groups they found to be using difficult language. Several such groups were mentioned as standing out: authors of legal documents, politicians, computer specialists, lawyers, academics, authors of university textbooks, medical doctors, and journalists. While these groups were mentioned by a significant number of the respondents, others (for instance, priests and economists) were only occasionally mentioned. In another section of this study, I found that about 50 per cent of the student respondents highly respect the university teachers that they do not understand. I found this result most baffling. Why should we respect someone that we do not understand? Baffling as this result may seem, the explanation appears to be fairly simple; namely, we often feel that the people we do not understand are smarter than we are, and the reason we do not understand the teacher is not, we may feel, the teacher’s ignorance or inability to speak intelligibly, or, it is not, we may feel, because language works the way it does. What we often seem to feel is that we, the listeners, are to blame. When listening to others that we do not understand, we tend to blame ourselves and not the others and the way they handle discourse. In still another section of this study, I found that the very same university teachers whose students openly talked about the teachers’ incomprehensible and confusing discourse were often irritated, got offended, felt attacked, were surprised, put the blame on the students, made remarks such as ‘this will be understood in the future’, and so on. All in all, the teacher’s reactions were negative. Interestingly, when asked the question ‘Do you think that research in the area of “incomprehensible language” might be useful to improve education?’ an average of 67 per cent of the student respondents answered the question positively. This result and others indicate to me that many people find incomprehensible and confusing language to be a serious social issue and addressing it a matter of social significance. The results of the study above are consistent with those of another study that I have conducted (Janicki 2010). In it, over one thousand

Introduction xiii

lay language users were questioned regarding what they would consider to be language problems that they or other people they knew faced in their daily lives. In that study a problem was understood to arise when something was perceived as having gone wrong. When your car breaks down, you have a problem. When the roof on your house starts leaking, you have a problem. You also have a problem when you discover that you have no money to pay some unexpected expenses. When do we face language problems? What do people perceive to be language problems? When do they think something goes wrong with respect to language? In this second study, a majority of respondents said that they find much discourse confusing and that non-understanding and misunderstanding other people was for them, and for many people they know, their most serious problem concerning language. As in the first study, many of these respondents pointed to medical doctors, lawyers, and computer specialists as the main culprits. These professional groups were mostly blamed for producing the kind of discourse which is hard to understand. Most interestingly, however, very many respondents in the second study (N357 = 33.1 per cent) indicated that understanding other people is a general, everyday problem, not only an incidental phenomenon in medical or legal encounters. To put it in very simple terms, my respondents told me that they find many other people difficult to understand: they misunderstand them, they are themselves misunderstood, or they find other’s discourse completely meaningless or confusing. As the respondents in this second study were native speakers of several languages (Spanish, English, Dutch, Polish, Lithuanian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Italian, German, and Japanese), and as the study was carried out in eleven countries, we can safely make the assumption that confusing discourse (and what we might see as the related phenomena of non-understanding and misunderstanding) may be seen as a legitimate problem for very many users of language throughout the world. It seems to be the biggest problem concerning discourse. I take the results of my two studies and others to be a good reason for writing a book on discourse which largely focuses on questions of confusing language and on understanding and misunderstanding. Text comprehension and misunderstanding have been dealt with by many authors, for instance, Bransford and Johnson (1973), Coupland et al. (1991), Taylor, T. (1992), Brown et al. (1994), Tzanne (2000), Anolli et al. (2002), and House et al. (2003). Although not a central issue, and not necessarily addressed in a direct way, these topics were also tackled by, for instance, Korzybski (1933), Chase, S. (1938), Lee (1994), Johnson, W. (1946), Rapoport (1950), Weinberg (1959), and Hayakawa

xiv Introduction

(1992), a group of scholars usually referred to as general semanticists. In my view, it is especially the general semanticists that offer a powerful body of knowledge which allows us to understand many aspects of how language works, how it is acquired, how it can be manipulated, and, importantly for my present purposes, why discourse may be confusing and why it may be misunderstood or not understood at all. Not realizing how language works in light of these issues may cause serious practical problems; you may get into trouble and you may be easily manipulated by others. As Hayakawa (1950) puts it, ‘General semantics is the study of how not to be a damn fool’ (10). I will frequently refer to the work of some general semanticists. This book is meant to be both theoretical and practical. However, you will not be tormented with long theoretical sections. On the contrary, theoretical points relating to confusing and meaningless discourse will be briefly discussed individually and each theoretical point immediately illustrated with examples from real life situations. Examples will be taken from newspapers, magazines, television programs, book blurbs, and political events, to name a few.

1 What are You Talking About? – Language and Abstraction

Some authors like to begin their books on discourse or language by asking questions such as ‘what is discourse?’ and ‘what is language?’ I will not do so for reasons that should become clear later (see Chapter 6). I will begin by saying that language may be seen as different kinds of things. It may be seen as something that we know, or write; it may be seen as behavior, that is, something that we perform or produce; it may be seen as something that you can hear, that you can preserve with writing materials, and so on. In other words, language may be seen as different kinds of objects. As a result, it can also be studied in many different ways, partly depending on what you view it to be. Among all kinds of views on, approaches to, and disagreements about language, one position appears to be indisputable, namely, the position that language may be treated as a symbolic system. Studying language as a symbolic system leads us to the question of the various functions or uses of language. We use language for several reasons or, we might say, language serves several functions: we use it to pass information on to other people; we use it to warn other people of approaching danger; we use it to express our feelings; we use it to challenge other people, we also use it to show to the interlocutor where, socially, we come from, and so on. Some of these functions we, the language users, are fairly well aware of; others less so. For example, we usually seem to realize that language is used to pass on information, but we often seem to be unaware that by using language we give ourselves away socially; that is, that we inadvertently inform our interlocutor about our social and/or geographical origin. Importantly, in these uses and many others, we engage language as a symbolic system. What this means is that we use words to refer to other things. Symbols (words, in our case) stand for other things. The ‘other things’ may include physical objects to which we can easily point, such 1

2

Confusing Discourse

as cups, buildings, elephants, and torpedoes. So, for instance, we use the word ‘elephant’ to refer to the animal depicted in Picture 1 below:

Picture 1

The word ‘elephant’ (which we treat as a symbol) is not the elephant in the picture (which we treat as another symbol) and neither is it the elephant that you can see and possibly smell and touch in the zoo. The word ‘elephant’ refers to something else – real-life elephants (and, metaphorically, possibly to other objects sharing some characteristics with these animals). The ‘other things’ may also include inner feelings such as anger, happiness, and love. These are much more difficult to depict in a picture other than by showing their external manifestations such as those in a human face demonstrating anger, which you can see in Picture 2:

Picture 2

What are You Talking About? 3

Again, the word ‘anger’ is not the feeling depicted in the picture. The word refers to some internal feeling that we call ‘anger’. We give the feeling a name, a label, the label (word) ‘anger’. The ‘other things’ may include abstract relations, such as comparison, deduction, and equation. The ‘other things’ may also be language (or words, if you like); you may talk about what you have said or written, or you may talk or write about a single word, say, the English article the. What is most important to remember, however, is that we should distinguish as clearly as possible between the world of words and the world of other things, much of which includes non-verbal reality like the elephant and the anger reflected on the face of the man. I say ‘much of which’ because, remember, as one of the above examples shows, we can also talk or write about ‘verbal reality’. We do this when we talk or write about how we talk or write. When words as symbols are discussed, linguists often use the diagram below (Figure 1.1) to visualize more effectively the relationship between symbols and referents. This figure has been adapted from Ogden and Richards (1923). The diagram includes a third element, ‘concept’. You may place the concept in the mind (or brain, if you like) and think about it as something mental, something you can imagine, envision, or see as a mental picture or description. If I say, for example, ‘I have just bought a pair of socks’, what comes to your mind immediately is the

Figure 1.1

4

Confusing Discourse

concept (a mental picture of) something like what you find in Picture 3 below:

Picture 3

You do not need to go to a shop to see a real pair of socks to know what I refer to. Our minds, or brains, appear to be crucial in mediating between the symbol and the referent, between words and what they refer to. We will return to the world of concepts (the upper corner of the triangle in Figure 1.1) in later sections of this book. Still, while the fact that we can talk and write about verbal reality (language) should be kept in mind, what is most important at this point to remember is the difference between language as a symbolic system (words, the verbal reality – the left corner of the diagram in Figure 1.1) and the non-verbal reality, mainly the world of physical objects (pens, computers, cars, turtles, tanks, and so on; that is, things you can, for example, see, touch, hear, and smell,– the right corner of the triangle in Figure 1.1) and the world of inner feelings such as pity, sadness, anger, and love. Let us concentrate now on showing how the world of physical objects relates to words. In doing so, we need to consider the process of abstraction.

The process of abstraction In Figure 1.2 below, the top most part in the drawing, the parabola, is intended to depict the physical reality at the sub-microscopic level. It is often referred to as the event (process) level. In other words, it is the physical reality which human beings cannot really perceive. At this level, reality is viewed as billions of electrons, protons, and neutrons in

What are You Talking About? 5

Figure 1.2

STRUCTURAL DIFFERENTIAL (adapted from Korzybski 1933, with permission of the Institute of General Semantics). constant motion and change. We abstract from many physical details and tend to experience reality as relatively stable when we view the objects around us (the round figure in the drawing – the object level), such as lamps, computers, cars, and so on, which, in fact, are whirlpools of electrons, protons, and neutrons at the event-process level. You need to keep in mind that what appear to you to be fairly stable objects in a stable state (such as chairs, clocks, buildings, and cars) are in physical terms processes, little tiny parts of matter which are in constant motion and which are continually changing. Nothing stands still in this world. Everything is in constant motion and undergoing change. We do not

6

Confusing Discourse

normally think of this on a daily basis, but when we do, it becomes obvious even in cases such as buildings and cars. I am sure you have seen dilapidated buildings and rusty cars in a scrap yard (or in front of some houses!). These buildings and cars look the way they do because they have been undergoing a long-lasting process of change. To put it still differently, when we see buildings and cars, we do so having abstracted from the billions and trillions of aspects of the process. We do not perceive the process with our naked eye. We cannot normally observe a building dilapidating (unless we happen to be an unlucky victim of a roof tile falling on our head!); what we normally observe is a building which looks already dilapidated to us. We do not ordinarily see the process of dilapidation; we see the result of it. We abstract from the process of dilapidation and perceive the building to be a fairly stable object. In any case, what we normally observe in our daily endeavors is a result of abstracting at the perceptual level. Note that at this stage of our analysis of abstraction we are not talking about language at all. When we reach the next level, the descriptive level (the first oblong in Figure 1.2), we begin to deal with language. At this level we abstract again, but this time by using words (language) to refer to non-linguistic objects. For instance, we use the word (the symbol) ‘tiger’ to refer to the animal in Picture 4 below:

Picture 4

What are You Talking About? 7

Note that the above example is not absolutely correct. Namely, in the example, the word (the symbol) ‘tiger’ in fact refers to another symbol (the drawing of a tiger). It is not possible to illustrate in a book how the symbol-word ‘tiger’ refers to the animal living out there in the zoo or in Asia. I have to rely on your imagination! At this level of abstraction, we name (give labels to) non-linguistic reality (for instance, objects such as animals). This level should be seen as the naming, or descriptive, verbal level. At this descriptive level, we talk (or write) about non-verbal reality. Additional examples of using language at this level of abstraction could be these: ‘Jerry is walking into the house’; ‘Euphegenia Doubtfire is cooking dinner’; ‘I can see a gas station in front of me’; ‘There are thirty pictures in this book’. Note that at this level, you refer to things and activities that you yourself have experienced. The next level (the second oblong in Figure 1.2) depicts a still higher level of abstraction. At this level inferences are made. At this level we use language to talk about things that we ourselves have not experienced but which we infer, for instance, ‘If Jack is not here, he may be in Rome’; ‘If he is wet, it must be raining’, and so on. The next level (the third oblong image in Figure 1.2) illustrates a still higher level of abstraction which we can reach using language. This level is well exemplified by generalizations. For instance, ‘Tigers are dangerous animals’; and ‘Most people are jealous’. The broken-off oblong image one level below indicates that we can go still higher and higher along the levels of abstraction and produce verbal constructions in the form of further inferences, conclusions, premises, hypotheses, generalizations, and allegations, for example, and indefinitely continue making generalizations about assumptions, generalizations about generalizations, and so on. An example of the last one, generalizations about generalizations, may be ‘Young boys say that girls are clever’. What is important to realize is not at which exact level of abstraction we are producing a particular utterance (other than the first three, it will, in fact, in most cases be very difficult to establish at which level of abstraction we are producing a particular utterance), but to realize that we abstract all the time, and that language plays a significant role in raising the level of abstraction as we handle our daily affairs. The dangling strings in the drawing (Figure 1.2) depict the fact that we always disregard some characteristics of the things at the nonverbal level. When we see a car, we do not see (that is, we disregard) very many electrons, protons, neutrons, and so on, that make the car at the submicroscopic level and that are in constant motion and are constantly

8

Confusing Discourse

changing. A car at the sub-microscopic level looks more or less like what you can see in Picture 5:

Picture 5

A car at the macroscopic level (that is, as we actually see it) looks more or less like what you see in Picture 6 below:

Picture 6

The line linking the broken parabola on top of Figure 1.2 with the broken oblong image at the bottom is to remind us that we gain our knowledge about the non-verbal event level largely through making inferences and claims at the higher linguistic levels and that the natural direction in abstracting is from the non-verbal physical reality to the verbal one. This line may also serve to remind us that the world of words (language) should be viewed as ultimately connected or connectable to the non-verbal world and that anyone not seeing

What are You Talking About? 9

the connection between these two worlds may be producing language which will appear to many as very confusing or even totally meaningless. The strings from the ‘object’ circle that hang down unconnected to the descriptive level oblong convey the point that a word label or description cannot cover all of the non-verbal experience it is used to label or describe. Understanding how abstraction works may be seen as crucial for our understanding of how discourse works, for our successful handling of the world, and for our sanity, as Korzybski (1933) would have it. Ignorance about how abstraction works, confusing levels of abstraction (that is, identifying one level with another), and confusing or disregarding the essential link between the verbal world (language, words) and the non-verbal reality may cause misunderstanding, confusion, enormous social tension, conflict, or, at best, be a waste of time. Another way to understand the process of abstraction and the levels of abstraction is to consider words related to each other by what they refer to and which can be placed at different levels of abstraction. We can place such sets of words on what is often called the ladder of abstraction (Hayakawa 1992). Figure 1.3 below (adapted from Hayakawa 1992)

Figure 1.3

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Confusing Discourse

illustrates how the five words ‘wealth’, ‘farm’, ‘livestock’, ‘cows’, and ‘Darcy’ can be placed along the ladder of abstraction. All these words refer to Darcy, the cow, the animal out there in the real world, except that the word ‘Darcy’ refers only to this one cow, the word ‘cows’ refers to Darcy and other cows – animals of a similar kind, ‘livestock’ refers to cows and other animals (such as pigs) out there in the real world, the word ‘farm’ refers to cows, other animals, and still other things such as houses, barns, and land, and the word ‘wealth’ refers to Darcy, other cows, other animals, houses, barns, and land as well as money, shares, jewelry, and so on. The higher your word is placed on the ladder of abstraction the more it refers to and the less you know what is actually being talked about. When you are at a high level of the ladder of abstraction, you disregard many details. When you say ‘he has a lot of wealth’, it is not important what kind of wealth he has; you disregard the details of whether it is cows, or cars, or jewels, or money. Being on a high level of the ladder of abstraction is not unlike stepping on a top step of a real ladder. When you are up there, you certainly see less (attend to less detail) of the ground, compared to when you step on one of the bottom steps and look down. In the latter case, you simply see more and may want to attend to more detail on the ground. Let us take another example, the list of words, or sequences of words, ‘my Toyota’, ‘Toyota sedan’, ‘car’, ‘vehicle’, ‘means of transportation’, ‘piece of machinery’, and ‘human invention’. When I say ‘my Toyota’, people who have seen my Toyota will know best what I am talking about. The referent (the black Toyota parked in my garage) is fairly clear. Part of that clear picture of my car may include at least some people’s recollection that I have a small dent in the rear left fender. When I say to someone who has not seen my car that I have ‘a Toyota sedan’, this person has to process my sentence at a higher level of abstraction. This person does not know what color my Toyota is, whether it has any dents or not, what color the upholstery is, and so on. In other words, in the latter case, my interlocutor abstracts by disregarding a lot more details than was the case at the ‘my Toyota’ level. When we move still higher, to the ‘car’ level, and I say ‘I have a car’, your understanding of the word ‘car’ requires that you disregard still more details of the object sitting in my garage. You do not know what the make of my car is, you do not know whether it is a sedan, a station wagon, a coupe, or perhaps a cabriolet, you do not know what the color of my car is, and so on. In other words, while disregarding more and more details of the thing sitting in my garage, you actually widen the number and kinds of referents that the words in question stand for. When you hear that I have ‘a means of

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transportation’, the widening and the disregarding of details is growing further. I might have a car, a bicycle, a motorcycle, a moped, not to mention an ox or a camel, which would also fit the phrase. Needless to say, the degree of disregarding details and that of widening the range of referents is still significantly higher when labels such as ‘piece of machinery’ and ‘human invention’ are used. In addition to means of transportation such as cars, the former may include, for instance, caterpillars and tanks, while the latter may include, for instance, guns, bulbs, and computers. Importantly, however, my black Toyota with a dent in the rear left fender, the one sitting in my garage, is also included in this category. We may use the ladder of abstraction also to illustrate how whole sentences (rather than individual words) may be seen as more or less abstract. Consider: ‘Entities can be found in one place at one point of time and at another place at another point of time.’ This sentence can be placed very high on the ladder of abstraction. It can mean (its words may refer to) much of the real world (people, animals, books, cars, cities, villages, roads, streets, buildings, and so on). For instance, ‘entity’ may mean people, animals, lamps, books, pencils, buckets, and thousands of others things. The above sentence ‘stands’ extremely high on the ladder of abstraction like the man does on the ladder in Picture 7 below.

Picture 7

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Now consider: ‘People can be moved by public means of transportation from one district of the city to another’. This sentence drags us down on the ladder of abstraction. ‘Entities’ are no longer almost anything. They are ‘people’, and the possibility of finding something at one time in one place and at another time at another place is now reduced to ‘moving it’. By introducing ‘public means of transportation’ we find it easier to understand why ‘entities can be found at different places at different points of time’; they can use public means of transportation. The sentence ‘People can be moved by public means of transportation from one district of the city to another’ appears to be much easier to understand than the sentence ‘Entities can be found in one place at one point of time and at another place at another point of time’ because the former appeals to our knowledge of fairly tangible things like public means of transportation and the activity of moving. Both are fairly tangible in the sense that they are fairly easy to imagine. This sentence drags us down on the ladder of abstraction; we are probably somewhere in the middle of the ladder, like the man in Picture 8 below.

Picture 8

Finally consider: ‘Students can be taken by bus from Magdalen College to the Bodlean Library’. In this sentence ‘entities’ are no longer ‘people’; they are ‘students’; ‘can be found in one place at one point of time and at another place at another point of time’ is no longer ‘can be moved by public means of transportation from one district of the city to another’;

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it is ‘can be taken by bus from Magdalen College to the Bodlean Library’. The referents become more and more concrete and easily imaginable as we move down the ladder of abstraction, just as the man on the real ladder in Picture 9 below. We need to keep in mind, however, that we are still on the ladder (like the man in the picture); we still abstract. Any time we use language, we do so.

Picture 9

The relation between the level of abstraction and the range of referents appears to be clear: the higher the level of abstraction the wider the range of referents; the lower the level of abstraction the narrower the range of referents. The higher the level of abstraction, the less one knows what is actually being talked about. We find a similar view of abstraction in cognitive linguistics work on categorization (e.g., Rosch 1978). Within this view, ‘the greater the inclusiveness of a category within a taxonomy, the higher the level of abstraction . . . . Thus the term level of abstraction within a taxonomy refers to a particular level of inclusiveness.’ (Rosch 1978: 30). For instance, the category named by the words ‘means of transportation’, which can be seen as representing a fairly high level of abstraction, includes much more (cars, streetcars, trains, planes, donkeys, camels, and so on – with their myriad of characteristics) compared to the category named by the word ‘car’, which will be seen as significantly less abstract. Compared to ‘car’ in turn, the category named by the word

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‘sedan’ includes still less. It will be seen then as a category at a lower level of abstraction. In a taxonomy, or classification, of related objects or ideas (for instance, sedan, car, vehicle, means of transportation), which can be placed at different levels of abstraction, one of the levels is recognized as basic. It is the level at which cue validity and category resemblance are maximized (Rosch 1978). It will be ‘car’ in our set of examples. In simple terms, it is the middle level which easily comes to mind, which invokes a mental picture (see also Chapter 8), and which we learn first (Lakoff and Johnson 1999).

Different levels of abstraction Can we avoid abstraction altogether? The answer to this question is a clear no. It has not been my purpose in what I have said above to show that we can do away with abstraction. This is impossible. The moment we use words, we abstract. Some words are more abstract than others, as the ladder of abstraction shows, but, given what I said about the Structural Differential, to suggest that abstraction could be avoided altogether would be an outrageous position to take. All I want to do is to make you aware of how abstraction works and how confusing it may be to mix the various levels at which we abstract, particularly when we mix the verbal and the non-verbal levels. While it is no doubt impossible to do away with abstraction, producing discourse at different levels of abstraction is by all means not only theoretically possible but actually done. In both our daily and academic activities, we use words and sentences or utterances at different levels of abstraction. The sentence ‘I am sitting at a computer now’ may be seen as a sentence at a fairly low level of abstraction. This is why I can be confident that most if not all readers know what I am talking about. You can easily find tangible referents for the words ‘sitting’ and ‘computers’. Although you do not know exactly what my physical posture is to which I refer by using the word ‘sitting’, you will know this more or less. You will know that I am not kneeling, lying on the floor or walking on my writing desk. As for the computer, you certainly do not know exactly what sort of computer I am sitting at (for instance, a stationary computer or a laptop, its make and shape), but you will certainly assume, and rightly so, that I am not sitting in front of a TV, a dog, or a water fountain. You will know all this because the referents for the words ‘sitting’ and ‘computer’ are fairly clear for most speakers of English. Importantly, the two words do not

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refer to all that much. On the contrary, they refer to (stand for) very little. They refer to a commonly practiced and fairly simple human activity (‘sitting’) and a commonly known physical piece of machinery (‘computer’). Now consider the sentence ‘The sublime is often the subject of philosophical ratiocinations’. Do you know what this sentence means in terms of the referents that the words in it stand for? Think only of the words ‘sublime’, ‘philosophical’, and ‘ratiocinations’. What do these words refer to in terms of tangible objects and activities? ‘Philosophical’ is probably the easiest of the three to get a grasp of. When we hear the word ‘philosophical’, we usually think of real people such as Kant, Locke, and Descartes; we think of the bookshops that we have been to and the shelves marked ‘philosophy’; we probably also think of ‘philosophy’ as standing for the books and chapters that we may have been asked to read in school. These are all relatively tangible referents for ‘philosophy’. And this is what the word ‘philosophical’ will invoke in some of the readers’ minds; that is, this is what it may mean to some of you. ‘Philosophical’ will also for many of you refer to ‘the sort of thing that we don’t understand’, which does not sound like a very tangible referent at all. ‘The sort of thing that we don’t understand’ sounds very abstract itself, and finding referents for the words in it will not be any easier than finding referents for ‘philosophical’. Now think of ‘sublime’ and ‘ratiocinations’. Can they be seen as meaningful at all? A possible answer is that these words are truly meaningful because they certainly refer to something, but the something they refer to is so big, that is, these words refer to so much, that they in fact may become meaningless. As Benedetto Croce rightly claimed ‘Sublime is everything that is or will be so called by those who have employed or shall employ the name’ (Chase, S. 1938: 217). In other words, when someone uses the word ‘sublime’, the word may refer to so much that you will have no idea what the person is talking about. Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-glass was certainly right: ‘“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”’ Let us recall that the simple relation between understanding what someone might be talking about and the level of abstraction appears to be that the higher the level the less likely we will be to know what our interlocutor is talking about in terms of tangible things and activities. The lower the level of abstraction at which a word is the more likely you will know what your interlocutor is talking about, again, in terms of tangible things and activities.

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Some types of genre are typically more abstract than others. Consider the following text, a story intended for children:

Text 4 – A Duck Tale The bright morning rays shone through the bedroom curtains onto Farmer Huang’s pillow; making the room hot and stuffy. Farmer Huang is not an early riser but the heat woke him up. He hurriedly got up and started to head for his poultry farm. He had invested all his money in ducks. Farmer Huang got into his lorry that was loaded with ducks in cages and his two workers, Bill and Jim. Their first stop was City Primary School. Upon reaching the school gate, the lorry skidded and punctured a tire. Farmer Huang left his workers to change the tire while he went into the school canteen to hand over some ducks. Meanwhile, a boy had crept up to the lorry and opened some of the cages. Jim happened to look up; the boy jumped down from the lorry and ran into the school compound. The ducks were escaping! Jim and Bill hurriedly tried to get the ducks back into the cages but their efforts were in vain. There was a great commotion . . . ducks quacking, workers shouting. Where was the naughty boy? He was at the school gate letting some ducks into the school. On hearing the noise, many children came out of their classrooms and were watching the funny sight . . . two men chasing ducks which were quacking, waddling and flapping their wings which in turn sent down feathers floating in the air! It was hilarious. Farmer Huang came back just in time to catch hold of the boy. He then went after the ducks. He made a funny quacking sound and the ducks began to come to him. He happily put them back into their cages, changed the punctured tire and drove off . . . leaving the boy in the hands of the school principal. (http://www.vtaide.com/png/ducks-E.htm)

The choice I made is not random. This story includes a large variety of tangible objects: such as ducks, tires, poultry, lorry, school, pillow, room, and a large variety of tangible activities: morning rays shining, getting up, getting into the lorry, lorry skidding, ducks quacking, and

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so on. All these objects and activities appear to be tangible in the sense that they can be touched, heard, or seen, and, in the worst case, easily imagined. Children usually operate at a very low level of abstraction. Try to talk to them about the sublime and look at their faces! Children are happy talking about their toy cars, dolls, moms, daddies, kings, queens, potties, ducks, and nappies. These are all words used at a very low level of abstraction. It is easy to point to (find referents for) the dolls, toy cars, and the potty in your daughter’s room. We often use such words with children, and they usually understand them. Now consider a different text:

Text 5 – Analyticity In their study of conceptual knowledge philosophers have found it necessary to distinguish between truths of reason and truths of fact. According to Leibnitz, truths of reason describe invariant features of all possible worlds while truths of fact describe actual features of some but not all possible words. Truths of reason are necessarily true while truths of fact are only contingently true, i.e., true contingent on the world about which they are asserted having the features they ascribe to it. (Katz 1966: 188)

This text puts us into a world of highly abstracted words. Do we know exactly what ‘analyticity’ refers to? Do we know what ‘truth’ refers to? Do we really understand the above explanation of the meaning of ‘truth of reasons’ in the sense that we really know what is being talked about? Do we really know what the referents (distant as they may be) of the ‘truth of fact’ are? Answers to all these questions will most likely be negative. Take yet another example:

Text 6 – Semiotics is therefore a mode of thought where science sees itself as (is conscious of itself as) a theory. At every instant of its production, semiotics thinks of its objects, its instruments and the relation between them, and in so doing thinks (of) itself: as a result of this reflection, it becomes the theory of the very science it constitutes. This means that semiotics is at once a re-evaluation of its object and/or of its models, a critique both of these models

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(and therefore of the sciences from which they are borrowed) and of itself (as a system of stable truths) . . . As it is its own theory, semiotics is the kind of thought which, without raising itself to the level of a system, is still capable of modelling (thinking) itself. (Kristeva 1986: 77)

Do you really know what ‘semiotics thinks’ refers to? Do you understand the words ‘science is conscious of itself as’ in terms of what these words refer to? What do the words in ‘semiotics is . . . a re-evaluation of its object and/or of its models’ refer to? Needless to say, some of the words that stand out in Texts 5 and 6 may be better known (in terms of what they refer to) to some people (for instance, specialists in the field) than others. Nevertheless, the fact that these words could be placed on a very high level of the ladder of abstraction can hardly be denied. As compared to Text 4 above, Texts 5 and 6 may be seen as dramatically different in the level of abstraction that many of the words in them represent. Let us now consider a text which may be seen as a middle path case.

Text 7 – The imperial pomp was shattered by a decent speech by David Cameron, the Conservative leader, and by a salvo from George Osborne, the impish shadow chancellor. Mr. Osborne pledged that a future Tory government would dramatically raise the threshold above which inheritance tax is levied. Suddenly the polls, especially in marginal constituencies, looked less rosy for Mr. Brown. The prime minister announced that there would be no early vote after all. But he admitted that he had thought about one, contradicting his previous insistencies that he was focused whole on governing. Worst of all, he insulted voter’s intelligence by denying the blindingly obvious – that the adverse polls had swayed his decision. (The Economist 2007: 16)

You will probably feel immediately that Text 7 is much easier to understand than Texts 5 and 6, and more difficult to understand than Text 4. But, how easy is Text 7 to understand in terms of tangible things and activities? What do you take to be the referent or referents of the words

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‘imperial pomp’? What do you take to be the referent of the word ‘salvo’? What do you take to be the referent or the referents of the words ‘dramatically raise the threshold’? ‘Imperial pomp’ in Text 7, for example, is most probably easier to understand (easier to imagine what kinds of objects and activities these words might refer to) than ‘science being conscious of itself’ of Text 6, but in both cases the reader has to rely on guessing and one’s own imagination. It follows that what you, the reader of this book, will imagine as the objects and activities of ‘imperial pomp’ and ‘science being conscious of itself’ will be most likely different from what I, the author of this book, imagine, and what many readers of The Economist and Kristeva’s book did. While our images of ‘imperial pomp’ and ‘science being conscious of itself’, and thus our understandings of these expressions may be very different, this is unlikely to be the case when we consider, for instance, ‘bedroom curtains’ and ‘a punctured tire’ of Text 4. While we may indeed have different images, and thus understandings, of ‘bedroom curtains’ and ‘a punctured tire’, these words refer to objects that are very tangible and commonly known. You can see them, touch them, and perhaps smell them. One important conclusion follows from looking closer at the examples of discourse above, namely that the more abstract the words that we use in discourse, the less we know what is actually being talked about in terms of palpable referents. Confusion increases.

Mixing levels of abstraction The fact that abstracting at higher and higher levels leads to disregarding more and more aspects or details of the original object of abstraction should be seen as crucial. While this should be well understood already when we think of abstracting at the perceptual level (for instance, seeing a car as a stable object rather than a process involving continuous change), we should fully realize that the abstracting process is most dramatic at level three (see Figure 1.2) – the descriptive level, that is, when we start using words. Think of the dramatic difference between the real tiger and the word ‘tiger’, which we use to refer to the real thing! The word can be seen as a few letters on paper or a few sounds produced in your mouth; the real thing – a tiger – is, you will agree, full of flesh, hide, has claws and teeth, and will be seen by most people as a pretty dangerous beast. Does the word ‘tiger’ include flesh and claws? Do you think it is dangerous? Nevertheless, we use the word ‘tiger’ to refer to the beast out there. It is baffling to observe that in spite of the dramatic difference between words (stick to ‘tiger’ in our case) and what they refer

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to (or, stand for), many people take words for the things that they stand for; people mix levels of abstraction (see for instance, Johnson, W 1946; Weinberg 1959; Hayakawa 1992; Kodish and Kodish 2001). They talk about the word ‘tiger’ as if the word were the animal itself. This often leads to serious problems, confusion, trouble, conflicts, and – let us not hesitate to use a big word – war. The claim that we mix words with what they stand for gets support from psychological studies. In two recent experiments, subjects were asked to read instructions encouraging them to do physical exercises and cook a dish (Wray 2009). Some subjects were asked to read the instructions in the plain Ariel typeface while others read in the more difficult to read Brush typeface. The subjects’ brains seem to have taken the texts as a proxy for the activities; in the first experiment, subjects who read the instructions in the Brush typeface did not feel like going to the gym. Likewise, in the second experiment, the subjects who read the instructions in the harder to read typeface did not take up cooking. Those who read the instructions in the easy to read Ariel font were eager to both head for the gym and for the kitchen, respectively. The recent debate about the status of Pluto (is it a planet or not?) gives us a good illustration of how people in this case confused the word ‘pluto’ with the thing out there in space (see Chapter 7 for a somewhat detailed discussion of this debate). Confusing the levels of abstraction, that is, taking words for the things that they stand for contributes, as in the Pluto case, to producing meaningless and confusing discourse, and to misunderstanding.

The natural order of abstraction One of the main points concerning abstraction to remember appears to be that we, as people who produce and try do understand discourse, should follow the natural order of abstraction (see for instance, Korzybski 1933; Kodish and Kodish 2001). This means that we should be fully aware of how abstraction works and draw practical conclusions from this awareness when we are engaged in discourse. As the Structural Differential drawing (see Figure 1.2) shows, the abstracting process starts at the non-verbal object level and only later, at a higher level, does it involve the first verbal – the descriptive level. This should make us keep in mind that whatever is said as a simple description may be seen as a simplification (simplification is what any abstraction involves) of nonverbal facts as the speaker sees them, and whatever is said which is not a mere description should be seen as a simplification of lower level verbal

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statements. We go from non-verbal facts to the verbal world of discourse, not the other way round. We can live a silent life without words, and this life can be very meaningful, as the deaf and dumb community convincingly testify. Those who are deaf and dumb are normal, valuable, and composed people. They can easily live without the verbal world. On the other hand, people who end up living largely in the verbal world having hardly any connection with the tangible silent world of non-verbal facts are often patients of mental health hospitals (see also the Conclusion of this book). The latter group falls victim to a very dangerous view, namely, the view that disregards the natural order of abstraction. From this perspective, words are seen as having a life of their own, or, even more dangerously, they are seen as having to lead us to an imaginable, nonexistent world of non-verbal facts. People who disregard the natural order of abstraction tend to take words very seriously, not as mere labels marking abstractions of non-verbal facts. Disregarding the natural order of abstraction leads to confusion and difficulties in communicating with other people. What all this, in the last analysis, boils down to appears to be that for discourse to be meaningful, it should be traceable to non-verbal facts. Although we can be hurt by what people say, we should keep in mind that words should not matter all that much. We need to encourage the stance that words be seen in the context of the non-verbal facts that they refer to. This stance is important, and it reflects the natural order of abstraction.

Should we all talk like children? As I said earlier, it is not possible to avoid abstraction. Nor does it appear reasonable to demand or expect that we should all talk like children. If we were only talking about cars (not necessarily about toy cars!), houses, cooking, bicycles, dolls, and so on (like quite a few people in fact do), our understanding of other people would be so much easier (but never 100 per cent, see Chapter 2 for a discussion of this point); but we would then be quite unlikely to use our intellect to think of new ideas and come up with new inventions. Lowering the level of abstraction in discourse to the point at which we could talk only about things that we can easily point to does not seem to be a very good idea. It would probably not be a realistic idea, anyway. On the other hand, it does not appear appealing to be exposed to people who produce texts like Texts 5 and 6 above. These people, best exemplified by some philosophers, art critics, linguists, and sociologists (whether professional or amateur) use words mainly at a very high level of abstraction, the result being that they are

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frequently not understood; we know that they are talking, but we often do not know what they are talking about. What is important to realize is this: when I say that we find many highly abstract words confusing or meaningless, I do not mean words that you, I, or anyone else may simply not know, may not have come across, or may not have ever heard or seen. For instance, it is likely that many readers have never heard the highly abstract set of words ‘autosegmental phonology’. Obviously, in a case like that, you will not understand the words; you will not know what these words refer to. The kinds of highly abstract words that I am discussing are often words that we seem to know, that we have heard several if not hundreds of times. Still, they are so highly abstract that the readers or listeners only guess what they actually refer to. A good example of this kind of word may be the commonly used verb ‘to console’. Consider the sentence ‘He consoled her’. What does the word ‘console’ refer to in terms of tangible activities? What did he actually do? Did he tell her a story? Did he kiss her? Did he have sex with her? Did he buy her a present? Did he take her to a concert? The word ‘console’ may be seen as a highly abstract word; it seems difficult to understand in the sense that we know that a large variety of activities may be covered by it and in the sense that we do not know what kind of activity may be being referred to in a particular instance of discourse.

How professional people fail to understand each other Examples of texts like Texts 5 and 6 above are often invoked to show how abstract and difficult-to-understand texts using highly abstract words and expressions can be. We might presume, however, that understanding texts like 5 and 6 is a problem only to the outsider lay person and that insiders to a given discipline, who know the technical terminology, should have no problems understanding such texts. Unfortunately, this is not the case; that is, insiders in many disciplines also appear to have difficulties in finding referents to the words used in professional discussions. Consider the following three texts from the branch of linguistics called Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).

Text 8 – Again, we see that the richest characterization of genres of political discourse is not merely based on discursive properties per se, but also needs a systematic contextual definition in terms

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of relevant systems, organizations, actors, settings and cognitions, among others. (Van Dijk 1997: 19) Text 9 – While Henriques et al.’s arguments can be objected to on the grounds that they are attempting to demonstrate a negative (no theorization of the individual-social relation can be made to ‘work’), the problems which can be teased out of the most thoroughgoing work on connecting the individual to the social lend plausibility to their claim. (Bowers and Iwi 1993: 360) Text 10 – Finally, metapragmatic awareness can lead to metapragmatic attacks. There is in fact a normative – almost vicious – dimension in all explicit resorts to metalanguage – a dimension that is related to group identity, social stratification and power asymmetry. It follows that, by explicitly calling attention to address behavior, members set up the context through which to interpret the indexical world, which in turn involves the establishment of the communicative boundaries determining who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ (social identity), who ‘has’ and who ‘hasn’t’ (social and class relations), who ‘can’ and who ‘can’t’ (power structure). (Jacquemet 1994: 303)

Some readers might want to argue that these texts are hard to understand; that is, the referents for the words in them (such as metapragmatic, metalanguage, a negative, and cognitions) are hard to locate because you are not professional critical discourse analysts. You will presume perhaps that most, if not all, discourse analysts (insiders to this branch of linguistics) will have no problems understanding these texts. You will, however, err in your thinking. Below you will find excerpts from a recent discussion by two professional discourse analysts (Professor Henry Widdowson and Professor Norman Fairclough) addressing a selection of topics pertaining to CDA. We begin our survey of relevant quotes with the book editor’s quoting another scholar’s doubt about what one of the three words in the name of the field means: What exactly does it mean to add the word ‘critical’ to the phrase ‘discourse analysis’? (Seidlhofer 2003a: 128) We can see at the very start that disagreements arise even as to the name of the field. What interests me more is, however, how Widdowson and

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Fairclough discuss the field of CDA and how they often say that they do not understand each other. Consider the following quotations: ‘To be cynical again, we might say that discourse is something everybody is talking about without knowing with any certainty just what it is: in vogue and vague.’ (Widdowson 2003: 133) ‘If, with reference to written language, the term ‘sentence’ means ‘orthographic sentence’, then again the domain of discourse/text analysis has to be below and above it. It is all rather vague and confusing.’ (Widdowson 2003: 136) ‘A little later in the same (introductory) chapter, Stubbs tells us that the terms “text” and “discourse” are “often ambiguous and confusing”.’ (Widdowson 2003: 136) ‘These distinctions are perhaps obvious. But they are not always very obviously recognized. Both Stubbs and Chafe, for instance, dismiss the difference between text analysis and discourse analysis as a trivial matter of terminology. Others appear to make no distinction between the internal functions of semantic signification and the external functions of pragmatic significance. This brings us to the two other instances of conceptual confusion that I referred to earlier: in the area of critical discourse analysis and language pedagogy.’ (Widdowson 2003; 141) ‘We should note, again, however, a possible confusion creeping in here.’ (Widdowson 2003: 141) In the fragments of the discussion quoted above and in others, Widdowson expresses his dissatisfaction with CDA texts being difficult to understand and confusing. One would expect that his own analysis will not be such. However, in Fairclough’s reply we spot the kind of dissatisfaction about Widdowson that Widdowson expressed earlier about others. ‘I have accepted the invitation to respond to Widdowson’s article . . . not only because it is provocative and provides a good occasion for debate, but also because I think it seriously misrepresents my work in certain ways. One preliminary point to be made about Widdowson’s article is that its target is confusingly unclear’ (Fairclough 2003: 145)

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‘It is similarly unclear how the comments on language education relate to the critique of CDA.’ (Fairclough 2003: 146) ‘This is a misrepresentation of CDA. It rests upon a confusion between two senses of interpretation which are differentiated in Widdowson’s main source . . . .’ (Fairclough 2003: 146) ‘There is, however, an issue over the meaning of ideology: Widdowson uses the term in the sense of political ideologies, explicit commitments to particular political positions; whereas the term is used in CDA – and widely in the literature on ideology – in the sense of assumptions which are built into practices (especially for CDA practices of discourse) which sustain relations of domination, usually in a covert way.’ (Fairclough 2003: 149) ‘Disparity is not obvious in the case of perlocutionary effects; there is generally (or is Widdowson saying always? it isn’t clear) convergence on locutionary and illocutionary meanings.’ (Fairclough 2003: 150) ‘A galling feature of Widdowson’s article is the misleading picture he gives of current work in CDA . . .’ (Fairclough 2003: 151) And the story of ‘unclear ideas, misunderstanding and confusion’ continues with Widdowson’s reply to Fairclough: His reply indicates that all I succeeded in doing was to misrepresent him . . . . But then how could I have got it so wrong? How could I have read such mistaken meanings into his texts? One reason, as Fairclough’s comments make abundantly clear, is that I do not share the same ideological position on the nature of discourse . . . . And by the same token, my own text is subject to misrepresentation. (Widdowson 2003: 152–153) In numerous sections of both Widdowson’s and Fairclough’s articles we read about how one author or the other misrepresents, misinterprets, misunderstands, confuses, does not distinguish, and so on. It appears remarkable indeed that Widdowson, at a later point in the discussion, raises the question of what Fairclough is talking about, when we at a certain point end up reading: There is the difficulty though, that description itself to some degree implies interpretation. Fairclough himself points this out, but compounds the difficulty by ignoring the two senses of the term he has

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earlier distinguished, so we do not know whether he is talking about Interpretation 1 or 2, or both: (Widdowson 2003: 157) What the above discussion illustrates is this: Professors Widdowson and Fairclough, like many others, point to misinterpretations and confusion so many times because in the texts that they discuss and the ones that they themselves produce in their polemic, the key words appear to be words of a very high level of abstraction. Think of words such as ‘interpretation’, ‘convergence’, ‘assumptions’, ‘practices’, and ‘ideology’, just to mention a few. The words in question may refer to much nonverbal reality (again, in terms of tangible things and activities), even for a professional linguist, or, for a professional discourse analyst. The rub seems to be that neither of the polemists knows what the other’s referents for these words are in the course of the discussion. We may conclude that these two polemists largely do not know what they are talking about. This is by no means meant to be a comment belittling or insulting the two distinguished professors. It is meant to be a comment about how language works.

Moving up and down the ladder of abstraction One of the possible conclusions drawn from the discussion above may be that we should remain neither at the lowest (like young children) nor at the highest levels (like some academics) of abstraction. Importantly, however, when we find ourselves at the higher levels of abstraction, we should keep track of how our high abstraction words ultimately connect to tangible things and activities (through a series of less and less abstract words). Otherwise, our words, nice as they may sound to some people, remain meaningless sequences of sounds or letters, without any or with only very vaguely identifiable referents. Consider the following text:

Text 11 – The crucial step in the genesis of intellectual metadiscourse is the decontextualization of practical metadiscursive expressions from their ordinary rhetorical contexts and their recontextualization within the rhetorical context of intellectual inquiry. (Taylor, T. 1992: 13)

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No doubt, the words ‘intellectual’, ‘metadiscourse’, ‘decontextualization’, ‘metadiscursive’, ‘expressions’, ‘rhetorical’, ‘contexts’, ‘recontextualization’, and ‘intellectual inquiry’ can be seen as words of a high level of abstraction, that is, they may be seen as referring to very many things, and the distance separating these words (especially some of them) from anything tangible is very long indeed. How can we make this text more meaningful in the sense that we will know better what is being talked about? Below I revise the text and try to make it more meaningful.

Text 12 – The crucial step in the genesis (that is, the origin) of intellectual metadiscourse (that is, our talk about discourse) is the decontextualization of practical metadiscursive expressions (that is, using the sort of talk about discourse that does not depend on context) from their ordinary rhetorical (that is, produced for an effect) contexts and their recontextualization (that is, putting back into context) within the rhetorical context of intellectual inquiry (that is, in our thinking and wondering about how to achieve an effect in using language).

I am not at all sure that Taylor would approve of my additions to his text. What I added was my own interpretation of what I find as difficult-tounderstand highly abstract notions such as ‘metadiscursive expressions’ and ‘rhetorical context of intellectual inquiry’. What do these refer to? My additions are an attempt at lowering the level of abstraction that these expressions entail and proposing to you and myself something more tangible. For example, my ‘in our thinking and wondering about how to achieve an effect in using language’ attempts to lower the level of abstraction for ‘within the rhetorical context of intellectual inquiry’. What I mean to demonstrate is that my ‘in our thinking and wondering about how to achieve an effect in using language’ may be a little easier to understand than ‘within the rhetorical context of intellectual inquiry’. The former seems to me to be a little more tangible than the latter. It is, in my view, a little easier to imagine ‘thinking’ and ‘wondering’ than ‘intellectual inquiry’, although, one must admit that both ‘thinking’ and ‘wondering’ are still far away from anything that you can see, touch, hear, or smell.

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Let us try to go one step further and redo the above text again to make it even more tangible so that we can know still a bit better what is being talked about.

Text 13 – The crucial step in the genesis of intellectual metadiscourse (that is, our talk about discourse and our distinguishing between sentences, clauses, openings, closings, address forms, and so on) is the decontextualization of practical metadiscursive expressions (that is, using the sort of talk about discourse that does not depend on context) from their ordinary rhetorical (that is, produced for an effect, for instance, persuasion) contexts and their recontextualization (that is, putting back into context, for instance, the context of a mother talking to her daughter) within the rhetorical context of intellectual inquiry (that is, in our thinking and wondering about how to achieve an effect in using language, an effect such as persuasion, command or warning).

It has not been my intention to indicate that Text 13 should be seen as ‘good’ in some sense; the point that I have been trying to make is that Text 13 may be simply easier to understand than the original Text 11. This is because I have lowered the level of abstraction by using some of the new words and expressions. I have dragged the author of Text 11 a bit closer to the ground! A good text seems to be the sort of text which allows the reader to move back and forth along the ladder of abstraction. Lower level statements are made and higher level ones (for instance, generalizations) follow, or the other way round. Consider the following texts, which, in my view, illustrate the point just made:

Text 14 – Cars are part of our personal territory, and part of our personal and social identity. A bus can take you to the shop and back, but you do not feel at home in it or possessive about it. A train can get you to work, but it does not make socially and psychologically significant statements about you. (Fox, K. 2004: 161, italics added) Text 15 – The distance rule allows gossip to perform its vital social functions – social bonding; clarification of position and status; assessment and management of reputations; transmission of social skills,

What are You Talking About?

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norms and values – without undue invasion of privacy: More importantly, it also allows nosey-parker anthropologists to formulate their prying questions in such a roundabout manner as to bypass the privacy rule. If, for example, you want to find out about an English person’s attitudes and feelings on a sensitive subject, such as, say, marriage, you do not ask about his or her own marriage – you talk about someone else’s marriage, preferably that of a remote public figure not personally known to either of you. (Fox, K. 2004: 47, italics added) Text 16 – The free-association rule states that pub conversations do not have to progress in any kind of logical or orderly manner; they need not stick to the point, nor must they reach a conclusion. When pubgoers are in free association mode, which is much of the time, attempts to get them to focus on a particular subject for more than a few minutes are fruitless, and only serve to make them unpopular. (Fox, K. 2004: 105, italics added) Text 17 – The problem is that rites of passage are by definition social occasions, involving a sustained period of obligatory interaction with other humans – and, worse, many are social occasions at which private family matters (pair-bonding, bereavement, transition to adulthood) become public. On top of all that, one is expected to express a bit of emotion. Not much, admittedly: the English do not go in for extravagant weeping and wailing at funerals, frenzied joy at weddings, or excessively gooey sentimentality at christenings; but even the minimal, token display of feeling that is customary at English rites of passage can be an ordeal for many of us. (Most of us cannot even stomach ‘the peace’ – a ritual introduced into ordinary church services by well-meaning vicars, which requires us to shake hands with the person next to us and mumble, ‘Peace be with you’. ‘Everyone I’ve ever met hates “the peace”’, said one informant. ‘It sends shivers up my spine just thinking about it.’ (Fox, K. 2004: 359, italics added except for ‘hates’ in the second to the last line).

In my view, Texts 14–17 are very good examples of how the author moves up and down the ladder of abstraction. The italicized fragments of the texts appear to be higher level generalizations and inferences. The remaining ones drag the reader down the abstraction ladder and make

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the text more concrete. Note that this can be done in different ways. In Text 14 the author does it by giving examples of what the general statement does not include. In Text 15, the author does it by giving examples of what the general statement does include (for the significance of giving examples see also Chapter 4). In Text 16, the author does it by reformulating the first general statement and then giving an example. And finally, in Text 17, the author does it, again, by giving examples. Going up and down the abstraction ladder may be seen as a powerful tool in producing understandable and engaging discourse. This is probably why Fox’s book is selling very well and why The Times calls it ‘amusing . . . entertaining’, and Oxford Times ‘fascinating reading’. It might be useful to remember that people who appear to be interesting, popular, and challenging speakers move all the time along the ladder of abstraction. This way they are neither down to earth talking about tangible objects such as cars and chairs all the time, nor up in the clouds talking about the sublime, the truth, indeterminacy, representation, oversoul, the nominal, incommensurability, qualification, and so on, which few understand, or, rather, which each person understands in his or her own way, if at all. The best practical position seems to be the middle path with, however, an important proviso: when you are in the middle path position, look down to the ground rather than up to the sky. Illustrate and give examples which are easy for people to relate to. We will take up this point as a separate issue in Chapter 4 when we discuss in some detail what is called intensional and extensional orientations in behavior.

Introduction and Chapter 1 – MAIN POINTS TO REMEMBER 1. People are reported to complain widely about miscommunication and misunderstanding. Confusing and meaningless discourse may cause anxiety and a measure of social friction among ordinary language users and professionals. 2. Comprehension should not be seen as a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. We may understand other people and we may be understood to varying degrees. 3. Discourse itself is neither understandable nor not understandable. It is people who understand discourse. 4. Using language, that is, producing discourse, involves abstracting.

What are You Talking About?

5. Abstracting means disregarding details. 6. We abstract at the perceptual level (when we perceive objects) and at the linguistic levels (when we talk about the non-verbal world and when we talk about language). 7. We produce individual words and larger stretches of discourse at different levels of abstraction. 8. People often mix levels of abstraction; that is, they take words for what they stand for. 9. The natural order of abstraction is from the non-verbal to the verbal and not the other way round. 10. When producing discourse, we may move up and down the abstraction ladder; this kind of discourse often appears attractive and relatively easy to understand. 11. The higher up on the ladder of abstraction we are when we speak and write the more difficult it is to understand us.

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2 Learning New Words – How We Develop Meaning

Much misunderstanding and problems with comprehension are easily explained once we think of how we acquire new words and how they develop meaning for us. When we first hear or read a word, our brain, our nervous system, abstracts. The nervous system enables us to associate a particular word (for instance, ‘horse’) with a particular segment of non-verbal reality (the real horse with flesh, tail, hooves, and so on) The process of abstraction is closely connected with social agreement: we agree (tacitly; we usually do not discuss this!) with other people to call a particular object, or inner feeling, or relation, for example, in a particular way. We learn the label or the labels. For instance, we learn to call the animal depicted in Picture 10 below a ‘horse’.

Picture 10

The social agreement here is that speakers of English have agreed, through years of use, to linguistically (descriptively) abstract (and disregard many details of the real animal) by assigning the word ‘horse’ 32

Learning New Words 33

to the real animals of the kind depicted in the picture above. When we hear or read the word ‘horse’ for the first time, our nervous system processes the word in terms of the non-verbal reality with which the word is associated. That non-verbal reality may be a real horse in a zoo (this may be a common first word-nonverbal object association for a small child), but is also likely to be other, non-verbal, symbols of horses (pictures in films, books, and models of horses as toys).

Experience and meaning There exists a large body of literature showing the connection between the meanings of words and the experience of the people who use them (see for instance, Rapoport 1950, 1953; Lakoff 1987; Hayakawa 1992; Gibbs 1999, 2006; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Evans and Green 2006). We develop social agreements and a sense of meaning about the words that we and others use through experience. Treat experience as a crucial word in this book. You will develop no sense of what a word means to you if you have no experience to connect it with. How do you get this experience? In different ways. When you are an infant and learn words like ‘doll’, ‘toy’, ‘potty’, and ‘diaper’, your experience is your mother or father actually saying these words to you and pointing to the objects. Another situation is that these words will be written in a children’s book that your sister, for example, will read to you. Still another is that you will be walking with your brother by a toy shop and he will say something like ‘see that nice doll there in the window?’ These are all examples of how an infant will experience different situations in which the word ‘doll’ will be used and a connection between the word and its referent(s) will develop. This connection reflects a social agreement that the word (label) ‘doll’ is used to refer to the kinds of objects, things (referents) that your father will show you in your room or your brother will have you look at when you pass the toy shop. Older children, adolescents, and adults learn new words and what the social agreements about them are in a similar way – through all kinds of experience. Many new words are learned through reading, of course, or through watching television and playing computer games. These are different kinds of experience. We certainly do not learn very many words through direct experience with the referents. For instance, there are very many people in the world for whom the word ‘hippopotamus’ is by all means meaningful, that is, they have a concept of a hippopotamus, although they have never seen a living hippopotamus themselves; they have never seen, touched, heard, or smelled it. These

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people’s experience, which led them to know what the social agreement about the word ‘hippopotamus’ was, was indirect; they have read about this animal, heard stories about it, seen pictures of it in books, or seen it on television. These people have developed a feel for the meaning of the word ‘hippopotamus’ through experience, through experience that they have had. One person learns about word meanings through direct experience (for instance, seeing and touching a neighbor’s hamster); another learns about it by reading about hamsters; still another learns about it by reading about and seeing pictures of hamsters in books, watching movies, and so on. What happens when we learn a new word is that an experience is mapped onto a word (Rapoport 1950). This means that we use words to pass our experiences on to others. In other words, we pack a word with experience that we have had in connection with this word and pass on this experience to others with the help of this word. We communicate our experience with the help of words. Take an example. Let’s say that you first heard the word ‘plasma’ (in connection with TV sets) when you appeared in a small London electronic equipment shop on June 21, 1999. The shop assistant talked about it but was unable to show it to you as plasma TVs were then not yet available in ordinary shops. The story about the plasma TV that you heard from the shop assistant was your experience. You put this experience together with the word ‘plasma’. You mapped this experience onto the word ‘plasma’. From then on (until your next experience with this word) the word, whenever you used it, passed on to others the experience that you had on June 21, 1999: nothing else. Instead of giving your interlocutor a detailed description of what the shop assistant told you about this new kind of gadget, you simply used a short cut; you said ‘plasma’. Two years later, however, in June 2001, you went to a different shop in London and there you saw a new type of TV. Under the machine there was some information. Part of it said ‘Plasma 36’. Now you have had a new experience which you have automatically mapped onto the word ‘plasma’. You have now packed, if you like, the word with this new experience and added it to the first experience of June 21, 1999. What the word means to you (sic!) now appears to be the image in your mind that results from the experience (two times experience so far) that you have had. Your experience has led to the creating of the ‘plasma’ concept in your mind (see the upper corner of the triangle on page 3), and when you use this word you invoke this concept in your mind. It is important to remember that other people map significantly different, or at least slightly different, experience onto the same word. Your

Learning New Words 35

neighbor may have first heard the word ‘plasma’ on television and at the same time seen one real machine that the news commentators referred to as ‘plasma’. That was your neighbor’s experience that he immediately mapped onto the word ‘plasma’. Let us assume that he has never since heard or seen the word ‘plasma’ in a different context. For him then, the word ‘plasma’ invokes (refers to, means) this single experience. Our experiences and our social agreements about what words mean to us and to others are changing to some degree all the time. Why? Because we are exposed to new experiences all the time. This point can be best illustrated with examples of new technical inventions. Take the phrase ‘cell phone’ and the real thing depicted in Picture 11 below:

Picture 11

The early cell phones of the 1990s were big and heavy and you could use them only to make a phone call. The present ‘mobiles’ are much smaller, thinner, and you can do all kinds of things with them (send text messages, take and send pictures, listen to music, remotely turn on the heating system in a house, and so on), short of telling it to cook dinner for you. Children who were born a few years ago and are now beginning to use cell phones have developed their concept of the cell phone having had a significantly different initial experience from that of the children who started using this machine in the early 1990s. In other words, when a child born in the mid 1980s hears the words ‘cell phone’, the concept that is activated (image or mental picture, description that comes to mind) for him or her includes the early experience of something which was, for example, ‘simple’, ‘big’, ‘one function’, ‘heavy’, ‘awkward to carry’, and this concept is significantly different from the image or mental description that comes to mind in the case of a child born in 2004 and beginning to use the device in 2009. This latter cell

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phone user image includes characteristics such as ‘complicated’, ‘small’, ‘thin’, ‘multiple functions’, ‘light’, ‘easy to carry’, and so on. These two groups of children have had different kinds of experience, whether direct through personal use or indirect through seeing the machine in shops and brochures, or through talking about it. Social agreement wobbles sometimes. We sometimes appear surprised that the label we use is not the one used by other people speaking the same language, and the label is perhaps not understood. We call something a ‘public house’, and we hear it referred to as ‘pub’, or, we call a project ‘attractive’ and we hear it referred to as ‘sexy’, we call something ‘tragic’ and we hear it referred to as ‘unpleasant’. Why? There are many possible answers to this question. One may be that social agreements ‘expire’, they change, that is, people start using new or different words (labels) to stand for the same non-verbal reality, which an individual language user may not have been aware of, or may not have noticed. Another possible answer to the question has to do with typical and nontypical examples of the things we refer to. Let us take up this point now. Our putting together words and non-verbal things (which may be seen as aspects of our experience), that is, developing an association between words and non-verbal things, should be seen as an individual process. It is an individual person (most typically a child) that individually experiences the first and subsequent encounters with non-verbal things and activities and that learns in a particular social situation how to associate words with these things. For instance, when you were a child, your father one day opened the door of the family car and said to you something like ‘get into the car’. This was the moment when you may have first heard the word or label ‘car’; this was the moment when your nervous system allowed you to abstract at the descriptive, linguistic, level, and this was perhaps the first time your individual nervous system associated the word ‘car’ with the vehicle the door of which your father opened for you. This was the moment when you learned to put the verbal and the non-verbal together. Importantly, this act was individual. It was individual in the sense that no other child or adult in the world ever learned the association of the word ‘car’ with a vehicle in exactly the same way. Your experience was entirely individual. No matter how similar your neighbor’s car may be, no matter how close your neighbor’s child’s experience with the word ‘car’ may have been, the experience has been different. Your neighbor’s child has an individual nervous system, an individual mind, an individual brain, which abstracted individually when the word ‘car’ and your neighbor’s vehicle were first put together for that child.

Learning New Words 37

Where do we find the wobbling? In spite of the individuality of experience involved in learning new words, the degree of similarity of this experience across a population and whole cultures is very significant. We agree to a significant extent on what labels we use to stand for what referents. Importantly, our agreement as to these labels is usually best seen when we handle typical cases. For example, consider the following two sets of Pictures: 12–13 and 14–15.

Picture 12

Picture 13

(Non-typical shoe – it can broadcast your music to your wireless headphones if you want to keep your music to yourself, or play your music over the built-in speakers in the shoes if you want others to hear them). Is it not the case that most of us would agree that a possible word to use to refer to the objects depicted in Picture 12 is ‘shoes’? And is it not the case that most of us would agree that a possible word to use to refer to the thing depicted in Picture 14 is ‘lamp’? Things are a bit more complicated as we move to Pictures 13 and 15. Here we are

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Picture 14

Picture 15

Learning New Words 39

likely to experience some hesitation, indecision, and maybe sometimes a measure of irritation. We are dealing here not with typical examples of things to be referred to but with borderline cases. When we confront borderline examples, our use of words, labels, or symbols may be wobbly. For some people Picture 13 depicts what they will still label as a ‘shoe’; for others, it will not be a ‘shoe’. The label these latter people will probably use is ‘music shoe’, while still others will have no special label for Picture 13 at all. Some people will have their label at hand immediately; others will stall and, if requested, think for a long time about what sort of label might be used in this case. In the case of Picture 15, a similar series of doubts, hesitation, and lack of labels might be expected. Should or could Picture 15 be labeled as ‘a lamp’? Or could the label ‘a container’ be used? Shall we coin a new label perhaps? Upon entering the University of Oxford library in which I am writing this section of the book I read the following message: Readers are reminded that no food or drink may be consumed on library premises (this includes staircases and toilets). Please note that sweats, chewing gum and water are all covered by this notice. I have just started coughing and the only thing to do to stop the cough was to take some candy. Have I violated the rules of the library? The objects depicted in Pictures 13 and 15, as well as my taking some candy into the University of Oxford library appear to be examples of borderline, non-typical cases of objects and activities, which often lead to labeling anxieties. Could I take the ‘candy’ to be ‘medicine’, which stopped the cough? It is not forbidden to take medicine in the library, so if the candy I took I rename as medicine, there is no doubt that I did not violate the rules of the library. Would the librarians, if they had seen me taking the candy, have thought the same? Different and multiple labels are often used by different people who refer to the same object, and disagreements about which labels are appropriate are common. In typical examples, multiple labels are frequently used by different people as well, but the use of these multiple labels may be due to regional, social, gender, age, and other types of variation, and cannot be attributed to the non-typicality of the object. Consider the following object: Most speakers of English will most probably perceive Picture 16 as a typical object of its kind. Some people (mainly in the UK) will label it (call it) ‘a pram’, while another group (mainly in the US) will label it

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Picture 16

‘a baby buggy’. Very likely, no hesitation or anxiety in the course of calling this thing ‘baby buggy’ or ‘pram’ will take place. This is because the example depicted in the picture is typical. When the example is non-typical, as in Picture 17 below, doubt or hesitation is very likely to ensue.

Picture 17

Learning New Words 41

What is a typical lamp or baby buggy to one person may not be typical to another. Picture 18 below shows what I would consider a typical baby buggy.

Picture 18

What about you? Do you agree? Or perhaps you will consider this one, in Picture 19, to be more typical?

Picture 19

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Likewise, what was a typical phone, or lamp, or car to you today may not in your view have been typical 20 years ago. Take a typical television set of roughly 50 years ago, depicted in Picture 20.

Picture 20

If you were a child in the 1950s and if someone said that they had just bought a TV set, this is more or less what would have come to your mind as a typical image, your concept of the TV set. I happen to have had this image of the concept of the TV set in the 1950s. This is certainly not the case any longer. The typical image or description of the TV set that comes to my mind now (in 2009) is something like what you see in Picture 21 below:

Picture 21

My concept of the TV set has changed and so has my typical image, mental picture, or mental description of it.

Learning New Words 43

The main point that I have tried to illustrate here is that although we tend to understand language, that is, to agree about meanings of words which pertain to typical cases of things and activities, what is considered to be typical to one individual at a particular point of time varies to different degrees. This means that our social agreements as to how words relate to other things may be unstable and that meanings that we attribute to words are never certain. Linguists often see concepts as experientially grounded (see for instance Lakoff 1987). This appears to be a technical way of saying briefly that we learn concepts, and the meanings of words that we associate with concepts, through experience, through various kinds of experience such as seeing things when we walk around the city, reading books, watching television, playing a computer game, and so on. Importantly then, the meanings that we assign to words should be seen, crucially, as relating to our experience. Why is this so crucial? It is crucial because we need to realize that each individual person’s experience is at least slightly different. This seems to be an undeniable fact. The hundreds of cars and bicycles that you have seen – experienced – in your life (on the basis of which you have worked out a concept, typical mental picture of a car and a bicycle) have been different even from the cars and bicycles that your closest friend has experienced. There are always differences of this kind. If you accept this fact, you will also be very likely to accept the fact that what an individual person means by a ‘car’ or a ‘bicycle’, understood as the mental pictures that come to a person’s mind when the words are used, will be at least slightly different. It follows that complete understanding is never possible. The crucial role of experience in generating meaning needs to be kept in mind, especially when we analyze and try to understand old texts. We tend to understand old texts in terms of current experience (how could we do it otherwise?). We resort to the experience (single or multiple) that we associate with learning the word: but a text written hundreds of years ago, or even tens of years ago, most probably reflects experiences that will be totally or partly unknown and unavailable to us. Both you and I, however, can try to make sense of these words relating them to the experiences that you or I have had. What we are doing then is replacing the original experience leading to the creation of a text and some sort of intended meaning with our own current experiences. This should lead us to the conclusion that interpreting old texts involves a large amount of guesswork. As an example, let us consider the first two paragraphs of Stowe’s 1852 classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Chapter 1):

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Text 18 Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P——–, in Kentucky. There were no servants present, and the gentlemen, with chairs closely approaching, seemed to be discussing some subjects with great earnestness. For convenience sake, we have said, hitherto, two gentlemen. One of the parties, however, when critically examined, did not seem, strictly speaking, to come under the species. He was a short, thick-set man, with coarse, commonplace features, and that swaggering air of pretension which marks a low man who is trying to elbow his way upward in the world. He was much overdressed, in a gaudy vest of many colors, a blue neckerchief, bedropped gaily with yellow spots, and arranged with a flaunting tie, quite in keeping with the general air of the man. His hands large and coarse, were plentifully bedecked with rings; and he wore a heavy gold watch-chain, with a bundle of seals of portentous size, and a great variety of colors, attached to it, – which, in the ardor of conversation, he was in the habit of flourishing and jingling with evident satisfaction. His conversation was in free and easy defiance of Murray’s Grammar, and was garnished at convenient intervals with various profane expressions, which not even the desire to be graphic in our account shall induce us to transcribe.

At least two scenarios are possible for analyzing texts like the above from the point of view of our present interest. In adopting one scenario, we may want to assume that this text is being read by someone who had never heard of the book, is ignorant of American slavery and nineteenth-century American history, and is trying to learn something about it by reading the book. In adopting the other scenario, we may want to assume that the reader is familiar with aspects of American slavery and nineteenth-century American history. In either case, we need to be aware of the fact that Stowe wrote the book in the middle of the nineteenth century and that the experiences that she mapped onto the words that she put down on paper were dramatically different from those of any modern reader of the book. How much of Stowe’s experience can the present reader actually retrieve?

Learning New Words 45

In other words, reading the words in the text, how much and what kinds of experiences of the author can the contemporary reader reach and share? Answers to these questions will certainly depend on how much one knows about the times and places that Stowe describes. We need to keep in mind all the time, however, that what we have learned about these times and places, prior to reading Stowe’s book, we learned from other people. What we know we learned from other texts (for instance, a history book), which, again, was mainly or only words onto which someone else’s experiences have been mapped. Our history book was probably written on the basis of other history books and some documents perhaps. In any event, we need to realize that any text that we may have had access to should be seen as a distant abstraction being very far away from the experiences mapped onto words by the actual people living through the ages of American slave history. Let us return to Stowe’s text, point to a few words in it, and reflect on the non-verbal reality behind them. Take each word or phrase listed below and think for a moment what sort of experiences may have been mapped onto the word or phrase. Think of how much of the experience in question may have been Stowe’s, how much of this experience you are in a position to share with the author, and think about how much of the experience in question is actually yours! Note that some of the experience that you will tend to invoke will also depend on your geographical location. Here is a selection of the items from the text: ‘a chilly day in February’ ‘gentlemen’ ‘wine’ ‘well-furnished dining parlor’ ‘with great earnestness’ ‘thick-set man, with coarse, commonplace features’ ‘swaggering air of pretension’ ‘a low man’ ‘trying to elbow his way upward in the world’ ‘much overdressed’ ‘a gaudy vest of many colors’ ‘with a flaunting tie’ ‘the ardor of conversation’ ‘easy defiance of Murray’s Grammar’ ‘garnished . . . with various profane expressions’

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If we wanted to analyze these words and phrases, some of the questions (requiring a connection between the words and the non-verbal reality) that we might want to consider are the following: 1. What temperatures do you consider to give you the feeling of a chilly day in February? 2. In your view, what does a gentleman look like, and how does he behave, for instance in a dining parlor? 3. What is your idea of a dining parlor? What do you think people do there? What kind of furniture is there? What do people eat and drink there? 4. How, in your view, does a well-furnished parlor differ from a poorlyfurnished one? 5. What kind of wine comes to your mind? Any special grapes? 6. Try to be more specific about ‘a thick-set man, with coarse, commonplace features’. List some of these features. 7. Describe in some detail the idea of a ‘low man’. 8. What, in your view, did ‘the overdressed’ person wear? 9. Describe ‘the flaunting tie’ to the extent you can. 10. Were the profane expressions in the first half of nineteenth century like the contemporary ones? If not, what were they? Give examples. The above questions, and many others that we could ask, are supposed to illustrate how we can bring into focus (and into doubt!) the myriad tangible experiences standing behind words. It seems to me that only when we consciously concentrate on the multitude of experiences (of the author and reader) associated with the words used, can we appreciate the vagueness of meaning, the misunderstandings and the confusions that may be associated with reading texts, especially texts produced many years ago and in geographical locations far away from where we ourselves have lived. We could apply the same kind of reasoning and analysis to any text – another novel, a poem, a document, a leaflet of instructions, and so on. The general principle that we might want to keep in mind may be stated thus: the older the text and the further away from you (socially, culturally, professionally, geographically, and so on) it takes place the less you can imagine (never have, of course) the experience that was behind the words leading to the writing of the text, and the more difficult it will be for you to understand the text; the more of it you will find confusing and meaningless perhaps. When reading older texts, the experience standing behind the words can

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be seen as largely blurred or totally unimaginable. Again, we may be tempted to conclude that interpreting such texts is, to an extent, largely guesswork. I do not want to finish this section on a negative note. In spite of the fact that all experience is individual and that we therefore cannot understand each other completely, down to every single detail, we do communicate quite successfully, don’t we? This is because our experience is very often similar or very similar. After all, the cars and baby buggies that you normally see in the streets these days are very similar to those that many other people see as well. In spite of whatever differences as to details there may be, our experiences may be seen as similar to some degree. Needless to say, the further away culturally we are from each other, the more experiential differences we will witness. However, even within close communities (for example, within a family), there will always be differences as to what sort of experiences the individual members of the family have been through. We can conclude then that we understand each other to the extent that we share the experience that is behind the concepts and words that we use. The sharing of experience and understanding of other people appears to be much easier when typical cases are handled (talked about). When non-typical cases are being used, much misunderstanding, confusion, and labeling anxiety is likely to take place. And finally, we need to remember that meaning is imputed to words by people as they experience the world (see for instance, Lee 1994; Janicki 2006) and that all reading can be seen as ‘reading in’ (Lakoff and Turner 1989); meaning is not to be found in words. We impute various kinds of meanings to words depending on what sort of experience we have had learning these words. Individual people may impute slightly different meanings to words depending on what their individual experiences associated with these words have been. The tricky thing is that we never know what sorts of experiences (and the mental pictures that derive from them) are behind the concepts that other people are using. We thus never know exactly what other people mean.

Common ground and meaning In addition to the shared experience, our understanding other people and our being understood by others depends much also on the common ground, which notion is not unrelated to ‘common knowledge’, ‘mutual knowledge or belief’, or ‘joint knowledge’, as Clark, H. (1996) points out. ‘Alan and Barbara begin with a great mass of knowledge,

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belief and suppositions they believe they share. This I will call their common ground’ (Clark, H. 1996: 12). It seems useful to think of ‘common ground’ as larger than ‘shared experience’, but, importantly, as partly building on ‘shared experience’. As Clark notes, ‘Much of our common ground is based on joint personal experiences’ (Clark, H. 1996: 112). Clark wants to view ‘common ground [as] a form of self awareness. Two people, Susan and Bill, are aware of certain information they each have’ (Clark, H. 1996: 20). And further, according to him, ‘the information people take to be common ground ranges from broad inferences about human nature through languages and dialects and jargons, cultural standards and procedures, to ineffable sights and sounds and feelings’ (Clark, H. 1996: 121). To me, this wide view of ‘common ground’ paraphrases into the simple ‘knowledge of what we think other people know, believe and assume’. Note the ‘think’ in my paraphrase. We never know exactly what other people know, believe, and assume but we do have knowledge of what we think they know and believe. For instance, when I talk to my friend about classical music, I make certain assumptions about what he knows and believes about classical music. I assume we have some common ground as to the topic. I assume that he likes baroque music and that he knows a lot about Puccini’s La Boheme; I believe that he wouldn’t enjoy himself at a Stockhausen concert, but would be delighted to hear Roby Lakatos live again, and so on. I sometimes may be right, sometimes wrong, sometimes to some extent right or wrong in these assumptions. In any event, I talk to my friend making all of these and many other assumptions based on my knowledge and beliefs about him. Obviously, my friend operates with a similar set of assumptions, beliefs and knowledge about me. All these make a very complicated network of assumptions, beliefs and knowledge, which, importantly, may change any time, may have to be revised, redefined, and so on. This is a dynamic network of relationships which comes to life as a small network when we start communicating as children and gradually develops (and gets more and more complicated) as we grow older and as new experiences enter our lives. Common ground no doubt has an important impact on understanding other people. The more of the assumed common ground turns out to be the actual common ground, the better our understanding of our interlocutors. If I assume that my friend loves Puccini’s La Boheme (and if fact he does not), my utterance about it may be understood one way. However, if my friend actually does love Puccini’s La Boheme, the utterance may be understood in another way.

Learning New Words 49

Words and categorization Categorization has been a big topic for decades and most recently a top one within cognitive linguistics (see for instance, Rapoport 1950; Johnson, M. 1987; Lakoff 1987; Taylor, J. 2003). When we learn a language, one of the things that we are doing at the same time is classifying; cutting the world around us into millions of bits and pieces. We do it perceptually (without the help of language) and verbally (with the help of language). As to the former, you will remember that, as the physicists tell us, the physical world around us is in constant motion. Also, and importantly, there appear to be no natural boundaries between physical phenomena. If you think of mountains and hills for example, there is no one strict point in the physical world that would allow us to clearly distinguish between the two. Likewise (which you may find hard to accept) there is no physical ‘nothing’ between the chair that you may be sitting on reading this book and the table on which this book may be placed. However, in both the mountain-hill and the chair-table cases, as well as millions of others, we perceptually separate the two. We clearly distinguish (again, perceptually, that is, what you can see) between chairs and tables. In many cases, we also distinguish, maybe not all very clearly, between mountains and hills. One of the reasons we perceptually distinguish between chairs and tables and normally do not mix the two is that they appear to be very different to us. Related to this is the fact that we use different words to label and thus stress the differences. We could not handle the world around us if we did not cut it into bits and pieces. So we do. We cut it and we usually give names (words, labels) to the pieces that result from the cutting. Thus, as for physical objects, we end up talking about chairs, tables, computers, people, lamps, elephants, and so on. We have cut the world around us into pieces and given these pieces names or labels. We have created categories; we have categorized (or classified) the world. Not all people cut the world, that is, the universe around them, in the same way, and not all people give names, or single-word names, to the bits and pieces into which they cut the universe. For instance, English speaking people use the word ‘brunch’ to refer to a late morning meal putting breakfast and lunch together. Many other people, speakers of many other languages, for instance Poles and Norwegians, do not cut the ‘meal universe’ the same way. They do not put breakfast and lunch together, and thus they have no words equivalent to the English ‘brunch’. They clearly distinguish between the two meals and have words to refer to them, but putting

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the two together and having a word for the combined meal is not part of the cutting of the universe for the speakers of Polish and Norwegian. This does not mean of course that Poles and Norwegians could not cut the world the way that English speaking people do in this respect, but they simply do not usually do it. They categorize phenomena relating to daily meals in a different way. Note that some categorizations may seem strange and possibly useless to some of us while they turn out to be reasonable and useful to others. For example, a Norwegian hospital accepts emergency patients having been involved in car accidents that happened when the car was running under 50 k/h at the moment of the accident. This may seem strange to some people. The categories we deal with here are two: (1) casualties resulting from accidents happening at speeds under 50 k/h and (2) casualties resulting from accidents happening at speeds over 50 k/h. Strange and perhaps unreasonable as this categorization may seem to some people the first time they hear about it, upon closer analysis, it does make sense and may turn out to be very reasonable and useful. The hospital that accepts the latter category casualties is better equipped to handle severe cases, and the likelihood that one gets severely hurt when at the time of the accident the car runs over 50 k/h is, one may argue, much higher. Of course, not only physical world phenomena get categorized. For example, mental states, feelings, and relations get categorized as well. We talk about anger, support, comfort, compassion, connection, jealousy, and so on. All these words are labels used to refer to phenomena much less tangible than chairs, tables, and mountains, for example. They nevertheless indicate that we cut the non-physical world into categories as well as give these cut-out pieces names; names such as ‘anger’, ‘support’, and so on. These words indicate that we have created categories, which we need in order to talk about the world around us. As our discussion of experience and learning new words above has demonstrated, we very often deal with borderline cases, which lead to fuzziness, doubt, hesitation, and disagreements when words are used (Janicki 2006). The categories (usually labeled by words) that we distinguish in order to be able to handle the world around us should also be seen as fuzzy. This is supposed to mean that whatever category you take up, you will always be able to find examples of this category that will be doubtful examples to some people, that some people will be arguing about or be uncertain about in other ways. As in the case of the lamp and the baby buggy examples above, you will always be able to find real

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examples of or invent examples that will not clearly and unquestionably fit in. This will be even more evident in the case of abstract categories such as ‘comfort’, ‘support’, ‘passion’, and so on. The category of ‘support’, for example, can be easily exemplified with someone’s giving you money if you need it. But you will always be able to find examples about which you will be in doubt whether they illustrate support or not, like ‘attending a funeral of your friend’s deceased wife’. Can this be treated as ‘giving support’ to your friend or not? As long as the question appears legitimate, the category ‘support’ remains fuzzy. Our understanding of how words are learned, how experience counts in the learning process, how ‘common ground’ contributes to interaction, how we categorize the things around us, and how meanings are imputed to words rather than found in them seems to me to be fundamental for our understanding of confusing discourse and for our understanding of misunderstanding. Discourse may be incomprehensible or confusing to different degrees and so may be misunderstood by other people. No matter how negligible the differences in meanings may be, comprehension, in terms of what the used words refer to, is hardly ever certain and complete.

Chapter 2 – MAIN POINTS TO REMEMBER 1. We learn words by associating them with personal experience. 2. What words come to mean to people may be seen as a result of a social agreement. 3. Words impart experience which had been mapped onto them by language users. 4. Concepts (understood as mental pictures, descriptions, images) can be seen as being behind the words that we learn. 5. Concepts can be seen as experientially grounded. 6. Concepts may be exemplified by typical and non-typical cases. 7. What is typical to one person may not be typical to another. 8. What is typical to one person at a given point of time may not be typical to the same person at a later point in time. 9. Changes with respect to what is typical or not bear on the meaning of words and comprehension of discourse. 10. Meanings are imputed to words by people; they are not in the words.

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11. When typical examples of concepts are dealt with, communication is more successful than when non-typical examples are. 12. People understand each other to the extent that they share the experience that is behind the concepts and words that they use. 13. We can never be 100 per cent sure about what other people mean by the words they use. 14. When understanding other people, much depends on the ‘common ground’. 15. Learning a language involves learning the categories, the terms which we use to process the universe around us. 16. People may differ in what sort of categories they use, which may bear on understanding discourse.

3 Words are Not What They Refer to – The Map is Not the Territory

. . . most people act about as conscious of their linguistic environment as fish appear conscious of the water in which they swim. (Bourland 1974: 89) Rene Magritte’s well known picture of the pipe may be taken as a wonderful illustration of how people often mix symbols and what these symbols stand for. My picture of an apple (Picture 22), modeled on that by Magritte, is to help me illustrate the relationship in question. Show this picture to a friend, cover the words saying ‘this is not an apple’, and ask the question: ‘what is it?’ The likelihood will be very high that your friend will say ‘this is an apple’. When you start talking about the picture and point to the fact that it is not really an apple, that it should

Picture 22 53

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be seen as a picture, a representation, a symbol of an apple, your friend will certainly agree and probably add that what you are saying is obvious and that you are involving him or her in a fruitless exercise. Note, however, that your friend’s answer to the original question was ‘this is an apple’, which, strictly speaking, was obviously wrong and which reflects a major confusion between a symbol (for instance, the picture of an apple) and what it refers to (a real apple which you can buy in the produce section of a grocery store). One of the main goals of this book is to make you aware of, make you constantly remember, and encourage you to continually put into practice the fact that words are best seen as symbols that refer to other things. A very good way to remember this fundamental relation between words and what they refer to is to think of maps and of how maps refer to territories (see for instance, Korzybski 1933; Rapoport 1950; Lee 1994; Lutz 1997). There are various kinds of maps – road maps, historical maps, geological maps, tourist maps, and so on. All these kinds of maps intend to give us an idea of what the territories they refer to are like. They give us information such as how streets are located with respect to one another, how roads and highways intersect, where certain buildings are located, where the fjords cut into the land. Maps can be treated as representations, as symbols, of something else, of the territory that they are supposed to help us orient ourselves to. Most importantly, maps always disregard certain kinds of details – they always abstract. Think of a tourist map of the centre of London. If the map is very detailed, you will find in it not only the main streets and historical monuments, but also all (let’s assume that you will indeed find all) the narrow and side streets as well as a significant number of department stores, restaurants, bars, and hotels. This would be a good map, and most maps are indeed like that. But, tourist maps could be still better. They could include all or most of the non-historical residential buildings, every single bar and little restaurant, and every movable stand, say, on Oxford Street. Detailed as this kind of map might be, it would still leave out (disregard) an enormous number of details that the real territory of London includes. Let us imagine a still more detailed map. Let us say that it would include information on (pictures of?) all the entrance doors to all the houses on Oxford Street, information on (pictures of?) all the tables in restaurants on Oxford Street, information on (pictures of?) all the escalators in all the department stores on Oxford Street, information on (pictures of) all the garbage cans located on Oxford Street and all the side streets.

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This kind of map would be a bit closer to the real territory, of course, but it would still disregard millions of details, millions of aspects of the ‘real thing’. We could certainly continue our exercise in expanding our map (that is, making it more detailed) hour after hour and page after page in this book, indicating on our imaginary map more and more information about, for example, cinemas, banks, and gardens, but we would still be very far away from depicting all the details of the territory of London. Our map would still be disregarding millions of remaining details. A map could never cover the whole of the territory. It always abstracts, that is, disregards details of the territory that it refers to. Note that an excellent map, including billions of details, would also have to include the person making the map, and an utterly perfect map of whatever kind would be the territory itself. No doubt, such a map would be pretty big and difficult to put into your pocket! An important fact about maps is that different kinds of maps (such as tourist or road maps) are drawn for different purposes. Also, the number of details included and disregarded in a map depends on the purpose of the map. Different maps are drawn for different people and for different purposes. What usually matters is that these maps are useful and handy. This is why we do not have tourist maps (or any kinds of maps, as far as I know) including information on garages, drive-ins, types of entrance doors, types of toilets, back yard vegetable gardens, and so on. Such maps would be useless for ordinary tourists. We need to keep all these facts in mind when we proceed to discussing the analogy between words (maps) and what they refer to (the territory). How can we see the analogy between ‘the map is not the territory’ and ‘words are not the reality that they refer to’? The analogy appears to me to be very powerful and it can be seen in many ways. The most important fact seems to be that words should be seen as the result of a dramatic abstraction. I say ‘dramatic’ because the difference between, say, the word ‘Oxford’ (five letters, or four to five sounds) and all the aspects of the real city of Oxford (all its streets, sidewalks, buildings, libraries, chapels, restaurants, people, and so on) will appear extremely big to anyone giving some thought to it. In no way can the word ‘Oxford’ be treated as similar to the ‘real city of Oxford’. Nevertheless, what we do is use the word to refer to the real place. We map all our experience of this city onto the word ‘Oxford’. How convenient! Communication would not be possible (except for very fundamental communication about things around us) if we did not have words which we use as symbols to refer to other things. For instance, I would not

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be able to tell you that I am writing this book in Oxford. In other words, when I say that I am writing this book in Oxford, I am giving you a map, the word ‘Oxford’, which stands for the territory of the city of Oxford. Think of how dramatically abstract this map is. If you have never heard of Oxford, UK (which of course is very unlikely in the case of the readers of this book!), you have no idea what territory I am talking about. This is how you would feel if you got a map of Sayre, Pennsylvania, where most of the readers probably have never been. If you have heard of the city of Oxford, UK, you will have a vague idea of where it is located. This is how much the word ‘Oxford’ will symbolize for you. The level of abstraction will be tremendously high here. This level will be much lower if you have not only heard of Oxford but also have seen a film about it, read two books about it, and heard some stories about it from people who have been there. The word ‘Oxford’ will then refer (for you) to much more territory, compared to what it refers to the person who only knows where to locate Oxford on the map. Still further, if you happen to have visited Oxford, in addition to all these films about Oxford that you have seen, the books that you have read, and the stories that you have heard, your territory that the word ‘Oxford’ refers to has grown significantly. Your map of Oxford, the word ‘Oxford’, may be a pretty informative map, but it still remains a map. The word ‘Oxford’ is not the territory of the city of Oxford. There are still billions of details that the word or map ‘Oxford’ does not invoke for you, as you, or even all the people who have lived in Oxford all their lives, have not seen and remembered all the details (the tiny streets, stones, trees, river banks, garages, and so on) of the real city. The word ‘Oxford’ should ever be seen as a vehicle of abstraction, and it will never be the city of Oxford itself. One way to see the analogy between words and maps is then to see words as invoking concepts (see the triangle on p. 3), different non-verbal territories in different people’s minds or in the same people’s minds at different points of time; your map of Oxford that the word ‘Oxford’ invokes will be different before your personal visit to Oxford compared to after your visit to the city. Another way of seeing words as maps is to realize that words, like maps, can be used for different purposes. In other words, the same territory may be symbolized, referred to, in different verbal ways, analogous to drawing tourist, historical, road maps, and so on. Let us take the following example. Picture 23 below (remember, itself being a symbol!), depicts a non-verbal territory.

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Picture 23

The non-verbal territory that the picture depicts may be referred to in many different ways. You may say, or write, that the picture depicts ‘a human being’, ‘a human animal’, ‘a girl’, ‘a guitar player’, ‘my daughter, ‘my neighbor’s son’s girlfriend’, and so on. We will use one of these verbal tools (words) or others depending on the purpose of communication. If we want to stress to the interlocutor that this is a girl rather than a boy or a cat, we will use the word ‘girl’. If we want to indicate – to satisfy the needs of our interlocutor – that this is a guitar player, rather than a piano player, a bassoon player, or a rally driver, we will employ the words ‘a guitar player’, and so on. When we say ‘a guitar player’, we certainly disregard a lot of details of the person that we refer to (for example, that she is a female, that she has long hair). We highlight the fact that she is a guitar player (see also Aitchison 1994). When we say ‘a girl’, we disregard many details as well, for instance, the fact that she is a guitar player, and we highlight that she is a young female. In any case we abstract, that is, we disregard many aspects that the territory, the non-verbal reality, shown in the picture, really includes. We construct and use maps for different purposes, and we do the same with words. The real thing that the picture depicts (the territory) is whatever it is. We may refer to it in different ways for different purposes; we construct and use different maps of the territory. Another aspect of the analogy to consider is the usefulness of the words or maps. If you are a tourist in central London and get a geological map of the city, the map will not be useful to you, and neither will be

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some words in some situations. For example, imagine that you enter a dilapidated and abandoned house to look around. Suddenly, your companion, having seen a big and fierce dog that you have not seen, yells: ‘watch out, a mammal’. Good as this map may be as a possible map, one of many possible maps (‘a mammal’, ‘an animal’, ‘a dog’, ‘a beast’, and so on), the ‘mammal’ map may not turn out to be a very useful one. Before you realize that ‘the mammal’ is a huge dog, its teeth may have been deep in your flesh. The ‘mammal’ map was not useful just as a geological map was not useful for a tourist in London.

Good and bad maps Maps that confuse us will be the kinds of maps which will place London between Paris and Berlin, which will depict Oxford Street in London as not leading to Tottenham Court Road, which will depict Park Avenue in New York City as perpendicular to 5th Avenue, and so on. A good map will then correctly depict (to the extent possible) the relations (structural relations, we could say) that we observe in the territory itself. If, for instance, we know that in reality Park Avenue and 5th Avenue are more or less parallel, this non-symbolic fact should be rendered in our symbolic map. When it does not, the map may be seen as bad, misleading, and confusing. We may feel cheated having spent money to buy the map. Importantly, the relation between a good map and the territory may be seen as iconic, that is, in some sense non-arbitrary, natural. The parallelism of streets in the real New York City is depicted by parallel lines on a map; the fact that in the real city of London, Oxford Street leads all the way to Tottenham Court Road will be depicted on a good map as a line indicating Oxford Street leading up to another line called Tottenham Court Road; the city of London will not be placed in our map anywhere between Berlin and Paris, as it is not in reality. In other words, we can observe a measure of visual similarity between things we can see in a map (our symbol) and those we see in reality. Can we see a corresponding relation in the use of words in discourse? Sometimes we can; most often, however, we cannot. Sometimes we can see a measure of similarity between discourse, how we say things, and the non-verbal reality that our words refer to. For instance, when you say ‘I went home and watched a soccer game’, ‘I went home’ comes first in the sentence and ‘watched a soccer game’ comes second. This sequence in the grammatical set-up of the sentence reflects the sequence of what you actually did. You first went home and then watched the soccer game, not the other way round (Radden 2008). Also, note that houses numbered 1, 3, 5, 7, and so on (the symbols 1,

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3, 5, 7, and so on that refer to them) reflect the sequence in which real houses on real streets are located (Radden 1992). It is very unlikely that you will find house number 7 between house number 3 and 5. In other words, in the cases like those I mentioned above we may talk about a degree of similarity, or analogy between language, words, symbols, and what they refer to. This kind of similarity is often called iconicity. A significant amount of similarity between words and the non-verbal reality can also be seen in the case of what linguists call onomatopoeia. It includes basically the kinds of words that we use to refer to sounds produced by animals, such as ‘quack’ (the sound that ducks make), and by various objects, for instance, ‘boom’ (the deep sound of a bass drum). Most language is, however, arbitrary, which is to be understood as there being no natural connection, similarity, or analogy whatsoever, between words and what they refer to. Let us return to the map and territory analogy. In some very limited cases, we may want to talk about a certain degree of non-arbitrariness in language, and to that degree a verbal map may be seen as a good map. In most cases, however, whether the map is good or not may be seen as consisting of something entirely different. It seems that it is rewarding to see the goodness or badness of a verbal map as they relate to the social conventions and agreements that word meanings involve. Let us recall that, for instance, the word ‘alligator’ means to you, the reader, and to me, the author of this book, what people like you and me have agreed (in the course of our education and through talking to people, and through reading books, watching television, and so on) to call ‘an alligator’. That we refer to the animal out there in the real world as ‘alligator’ is the result of a social agreement. Our agreement could have been different. We could have agreed to call this animal out there ‘bla, bla, buba de’. In learning new words, as we do throughout our lifetime, we enter millions of social agreements about the relation between words and what they refer to. These are more or less agreements, that is, for instance, we enter an agreement that the word ‘building’ typically refers to constructions such as the ones below in Picture 24:

Picture 24

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Note the word ‘typically’ in the last sentence. The pictures depict fairly typical constructions that we call ‘buildings’ in English. Here the social agreement is fairly straightforward, and it usually works in practice, that is, in everyday communication; we usually know, more or less, what we are talking about when we use the word ‘building’. When we are faced with constructions like the one in Picture 25 below,

Picture 25

which may be seen as a non-typical, borderline example of a building, our agreement is more unstable and wobbly (see also discussion in Chapter 2). Disregarding the borderline cases, however, for the sake of our argument, we may claim that there is a fair amount of social agreement among the speakers of language communities (speakers of one language, one city dialect, one professional jargon, and so on) as to what non-verbal reality words refer to. In simple terms, when somebody utters the word ‘building’, you will normally know what kind of thing this person is talking about. This is especially true when we deal with physical objects, that is, the kinds of things that we can for example see, touch, and smell. Take some common words such as ‘clock’, ‘fork’, ‘chair’, and ‘coat’. Do we often disagree as to what these words refer to? We only do on those occasions, when we handle borderline, non-typical cases, such as the ones shown in Picture 26:

Picture 26

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Otherwise, our social agreements work pretty well and when someone says ‘I just bought a new coat’, we know fairy well what is being talked about. Although the level of disagreement about what words refer to rises significantly when we deal with very abstract terms such as love, liberation, freedom, war, occupation, and pity, still, in our use of language, we rely heavily on the social agreements that we have learned and adopted in the process of learning this kind of word. Stated another way, in spite of the different territories that words like love, liberation, freedom, war, occupation, and pity may actually represent for the different users of these words, there will be a significant amount of overlap in the territory in question. Most well-meaning people will not call ‘a spider’ what most well-meaning people usually call ‘a horse’. Likewise, most well-meaning people will not call the sort of situation where people are killing each other by thousands and where there are blood and tears everywhere ‘a peaceful situation’. If someone does, do we deal with a bad map then? My answer is yes. The latter kind of situation may be thought of as a bad map. One way of viewing bad verbal maps is to think of a word use as violating commonly accepted social agreements (see also Lutz 1997). Thus, you would be using a good map when you would be using words more or less in accordance with the social agreements that obtain in the language community that you are part of (the ‘more or less’ is an important qualification because you never know exactly what these social agreements actually are); you would be using a bad map when these agreements were violated. Are these social agreements often violated? Are they violated deliberately? Answers to both these questions seem to be positive. We are dealing here with what researchers and lay people alike often refer to as language manipulation. The best examples, in my view, come from the domain of politics and advertising. Before 1989 East Germany was officially called the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The use of the word ‘democratic’ was obviously a violation of the commonly accepted meaning (social agreement) associated with the word by most speakers of English. One of the central characteristics of ‘democracy’ was (and still is) a free election. There was no free election in the GDR; nevertheless the word ‘democratic’ was part of the name of the country. Also, in the GDR, the police were called ‘Volkspolizei’. The common agreement among the speakers of German was (and still is) that the word ‘Volk’ in German refers to the common people (folk). So, Volkspolizei, you might assume, would have referred to the kind of police that will defend or work for the ‘Volk’. In reality, Volkspolizei was an institution representing the interests of

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the ruling communist party, often persecuting the Volk, and in no way representing the Volk’s interests. Likewise, before 1989, Poland, a non-democratic country, was officially called Polska Rzeczypospolita Ludowa (Polish People’s Republic). The ‘People’ (the folk) in this name drastically violated the social agreement about the common use of the word. The common people, the folk, had nothing to say in the running of the country. The country was run by a group of people who did not represent the folk at all. I take Orwell’s famous 1984 slogans to provide us with the best examples of language manipulation ‘War is Peace’, ‘Freedom is Slavery’, and ‘Ignorance is Strength’. These may be taken to be dramatically undermining the commonly accepted social agreements about the words ‘peace’, ‘slavery’, and ‘strength’. One possible set of interpretations of the slogans is the following: when people fight, kill and maim each other – this is (should be) called ‘peace’; when you are dependent on others, when you work for free, when you get beaten for no reason, when you hardly get enough to eat, and so on – this is (should be) called ‘freedom’; when you know nothing or very little – this is (should be) called ‘strength’. Can we get any further away from the commonly accepted social agreements about the words in questions? Can we get any worse maps? As for advertisements, consider the recently widely hyped ‘free-range’ chickens (also referred to as ‘cage-free’ or ‘free-farmed’). The common social agreement about the expression ‘free-range chickens’ seems to be that the chickens run freely in the open air and spend very little time (if any) indoors. We get to hear more and more often, however, that in some farm establishments, the chickens are let free only for a few minutes a day and have very little outdoor space to use (see for instance Singer and Mason 2006). Are we dealing here with a drastic violation of social agreements associated with the expression ‘free-range chickens’? Likewise, we get to hear more and more often that some manufacturers use the label ‘fresh chickens’ to refer to chickens that have been frozen and defrosted, possibly several times, and which finally appear in the shops’ counters completely thawed and looking ‘fresh’ (see for instance Lutz 1997). Are we dealing here with a drastic violation of social agreements associated with the expression ‘fresh chickens’? Finally, as for labels drastically violating common social agreements about words in English, consider the Royal Hotel in London. The common social agreement in English about the word ‘royal’ seems to imply characteristics such as cleanliness, order, pleasant smell, large rooms, courtesy, nice dresses, gardens, sophistication, and so on. Compare these

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now with a selection of opinions that you will find on the Trip Advisor website (in July 2008) where former hotel guests express their views about this Royal Hotel. Below you will find only the titles for the shorter or longer contributions to be found on the site. The actual contributions include significantly more expressions like the ones you will find below: ‘Do not go there’, ‘Warning: stay away’, ‘Mould and dust’, ‘Crap hotel’, ‘Absolutely revolting’, ‘I wouldn’t even let a dog stay there’, ‘Terrible’, ‘For me this is the worst hotel in the world’, ‘Don’t even go there’, ‘Shabby rip-off’, ‘Horrible’. Are we dealing here with a drastic violation associated with the word ‘royal’? Is the ‘royal’ map good for you? Bad, in my sense, false verbal maps, like bad, false street maps are difficult to figure out (understand) and they are confusing. They may lead to disappointment, despair, loss of money, conflict, and so on. The kind of manipulation discussed above is easier and easier the higher on the ladder of abstraction the manipulated words are. Can we easily play around with words such as kitchen, bed, cigarette, soup? In other words, is it easy to tell people we are eating soup when we are eating potatoes and pork chops? You can certainly lie (see also the section on lying below) and tell others that you ate a pork chop while in fact you ate some soup. However, lying in cases like this can be fairly easily disclosed because both ‘soup’ and ‘pork chops’ refer to tangible objects, and the territory of these objects is relatively small; there is not really all that much that the words ‘soup’ and ‘pork chops’ refer to in the non-verbal world. In the case of high abstraction words, the situation is very different. Take words such as ‘help’, ‘comfort’, ‘compassion’, ‘grief’, ‘regret’, reliance’, for example. The territories to which these words refer are significantly larger compared to the territories covered by words such as ‘soup’ and ‘pork chops’, and these former territories may be seen as much less tangible. Consider the territories of, for example, the noun ‘reliance’, or the related verb ‘rely’. If you say to me ‘you can rely on me’, what is it that I can actually expect in terms of what you will say and do if I am in trouble and need some help? Can I easily point to (the territory of) what you will do? The answer is that I can probably list a few likely reactions of yours (for instance, you will talk to me, you will offer to spend some time with me, you will give me a call, and so on), but other than some arguable reactions like these, I will not be able to point to

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anything else relatively tangible. Will you lend me your car? Does your territory of ‘reliance’ include this? Will you invite me to stay with you if my house burns down? Will you lend me money? Will you invite me for Christmas if I am alone at home? All of these questions may get positive or negative answers depending on what the territory of ‘rely’ for individual people is. Importantly, these territories may change; they were not established once and for all when you learned the word. To put it differently, there is so much that the word ‘reliance’ may refer to other than the typical territory; the rest remains extremely large, intangible, unpredictable in actual conversation, and/or unknown. Words like ‘reliance’ are often used in advertising and politics. ‘You can rely on us’ inspires confidence and trust. The word invokes positive feelings. But what is it exactly that we can expect from someone who says or writes it? What is the territory of ‘rely’? This we may never know. The territorial size and spread (that is much territory located in different places) of words such as ‘rely’ allow the speaker to easily defend himself or herself when accused of lying. Unlike in the soup–pork chop case (when the lie is disclosed here, you are going to have a hard time convincing your interlocutor that you ate soup and thought you were eating a pork chop!), you can always claim that when you said to me ‘you can rely on me’ you had in mind a territory different from that which I may have had in mind. I may have thought that the territory of ‘rely’ includes ‘lending one’s car’; you may have thought that it did not, or, you may have thought that it did, but when I actually ask you to lend me your car, you will tell me that you had thought that it did not. The point of this (perhaps slightly difficult) example is that high abstraction words leave much room for linguistic manipulation. There is nothing we can do about it other than be aware of this fact. There is a practical conclusion emerging from the example above. We would like to know what, in a particular situation, ‘you can rely on me’ may mean in terms of tangible territory. A practical piece of advice follows. Namely, while it may not be a good idea to ask your friend to be more specific when he or she says ‘you can rely on me’ (because the promise is most probably meant to be vague), in many other cases it may. On many product labels we read ‘natural coloring’. It seems very hard to know what territory (which part of nature) ‘natural coloring’ refers to. Would you say that ‘natural coloring’ is actually a meaningful phrase to you? If not, you may want to ask the seller what ‘natural coloring’ refers to. Whether he or she will have an answer to your question is another matter. The same may be true for the ubiquitous ‘natural flavoring’. Does this phrase appear meaningful to you? If not, you may

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try to find the territory for it. I am afraid that most people almost never think about and never inquire about the territory in such cases. In restaurants, many people seem to be more curious about the territory to which all kinds of words refer. Coming across menu items such as: Creole Escargot, Voodoo Crawfish, Blackened Alligator, Cajun Popcorn, New Orleans Stuffed Mushroom, most people are likely to inquire about the territory. They want to know what territory these words and phrases refer to. This is to encourage you to check your territory more often, not only when you go to eat in an exotic food restaurant. At the end of this section, it may be useful to return for a moment to the triangle adapted from Ogden and Richards (1923), Figure 1.1, first introduced in Chapter 1. We can label a verbal map as ‘bad’ when the connection made by a speaker between symbols (the left corner of the triangle) and referents (the right corner of the triangle) deviates from the general tacit agreement among people about this connection. Again, this simply means that if most people use in English the word or symbol ‘frog’ to point to the referent like the one depicted in Picture 27 below,

Picture 27

then saying that the picture above depicts what people call ‘a zebra’ may be seen as providing a really bad map.

Lying I mentioned lying in passing above in connection with maps and territories. Let me now briefly develop our perspective on the issue of lying so we may understand it in the context of our theoretical framework.

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Some deviations from the commonly accepted connection between a symbol and its referent(s) (map and territory) may of course be fortuitous and unintended. When you say, for example, that you have just seen a horse which is grazing in the field, another person checks and thinks that there is a zebra there grazing in the field and not a horse, you may of course have made a mistake, the zebra (looked at from a distance) may have seemed to you to be a horse, and so on. In other words, disagreements about names and things, symbols and referents, occur, and not at all rarely. There may be different reasons for it. One may be a person’s perceptual deficiencies. Another might be our ignorance about what some things are normally called. Still another might be hearing deficiencies, writing deficiencies, temporary obstacles hindering our sight, and so on. These disagreements are usually non-deliberate and may be seen as relatively harmless. Disagreements for reasons like the ones mentioned above can usually be easily and quickly resolved. We do not normally call ‘lying’ these kinds of disagreements in maintaining the commonly accepted connection between words and their referents. Some deviations from what people take to be a normal connection between symbol and referent can be much more complicated and much more difficult to rectify. These deviations are often deliberate. They are meant to disorient and manipulate you as an interlocutor or listener. What I am talking about is often called ‘lying’. What people normally call ‘lying’ may be seen as a good example of providing a bad verbal map of non-verbal reality, thereby dramatically distorting the commonly accepted connection between symbol and referent. Imagine that you are driving up to a traffic light. You can clearly see that the light is red. You are about to stop because you know that the symbol ‘red light’ is to match ‘the cars need to stop’ of the real world. When you are about to stop, however, your passenger sitting in the front right seat tells you that you should proceed driving as the red light is on. You are stunned. You are confused. But the passenger then adds that you should know that ‘red light’ means ‘keep on driving’. Your passenger insists that the light is red, so you should keep on driving. Your passenger dramatically distorts and deviates from the commonly accepted agreement that ‘red light’ means ‘stop’. If you follow your passenger’s instructions and proceed through the road crossing on the red light, at least two things may follow. One is that you are fortunate and simply drive through the crossing and nothing happens. Another is, of course, that you crash. In lying discourse a similar thing happens. The commonly accepted conventions between words and referents get violated. If your friend

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tells you that he spent his vacation in Paris, and in fact he spent it in London, he is lying; the word ‘Paris’, as we commonly use it in English refers to a city in the middle of France. The word ‘Paris’ does not, again, in the common use in English, refer to a city located in the south-east of England. The fit between word and referent established a long time ago and used by millions of people has been violated. In the years between 2005–2007, some politicians and journalists in both the US and Europe expressed the opinion that the political situation in Iraq brought the country to the brink of a civil war. During more or less the same period, other politicians and journalists insisted that Iraq had already been in the state of a civil war for some time. Who was lying? If we take lying to be when a word referring to a situation in which a typical (though, as you will remember, not natural) bond between a word and its referent is violated, then what we need to do to establish whether we are dealing with a case of lying here is to check that bond. It seems much more difficult to locate the referent(s) for the words ‘civil war’ than for the words ‘Paris’ or ‘London’. We need to find out, to the extent possible, what speakers of English normally take to be the referent of ‘civil war’. If we rely on the Oxford English Dictionary, we may believe that the referent is a war: . . . between citizens of the same country. (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 2002: 416) As I say in the Dictionary section below, no dictionary reflects the complexity of meaning of any language. Dictionaries only give us typical and approximate matches between words and referents to the extent that this is possible to do through the tool of words and some pictures. Understood this way, we then take our definition of ‘civil war’ from the OED, for example, and match it against what was actually happening in Iraq. If our analysis of the referent (the situation in Iraq) fits in the definition of ‘civil war’, whoever said that there was a civil war in Iraq was not lying. If our analysis does not fit the definition, whoever said that there was not a civil war in Iraq may have been lying. Note that to say that we are dealing with a case of lying in a situation like the above may, in practice, be very difficult. One reason for this appears to be that we never know precisely what sort of definition (in our case, definition of ‘civil war’) a person has accepted. We have access to only a very limited number of these definitions: our own and perhaps one or two dictionary definitions which may deviate to some extent from ours. Another reason is that checking the referent (in our

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case, checking the situation in Iraq) and matching it against whatever definition of ‘civil war’ you might be willing to adopt, is next to impossible. We most of the time rely on others’ definitions, assessments, and opinions. Others (journalists, for example) often infer on the basis of still others’ inferences, who infer on the basis on still others’ inferences, and so on. In sum, especially in large scale political phenomena, as opposed to local, for example, family matters, whether someone lied or not – lying understood as a deliberate violation of the common fit between word and referent – may be very difficult to give evidence for. If the tangible evidence can easily be accessed, for instance, when we can see that people are killing each other, that there are numerous bodies in the streets, that there are tanks in the streets, people run around wounded, and so on, and when we then say that we are witnessing a peaceful development in the city, we are obviously lying. When, however, the referent cannot be accessed and checked, any pronouncement on whether we are dealing with a case of lying, or with liars, needs to be approached with much caution. In any event, even when we have had access to the referent, we need to keep in mind that words may be defined in different ways, and non-typically perhaps, not necessarily for vicious purposes.

Some metaphoric and metonymic expressions: How do they take us to the territory? To mislead and confuse people with words is very easy and this is actually very often done. Keeping in mind the basic distinction stressed in this book between words as maps and non-verbal reality as the territory, we may find confusing and misleading any sort of discourse situation in which the map and territory relationship is manipulated. This relationship can be manipulated because it is not natural. We may have different maps of the same territory; we may have one map referring to different territories; and the different maps may be taken by different people as good, bad, better, worse, and so on. We may use words like many other people around us, that is, to refer more or less to the same territory that they do, but we may also use words to refer to the territory that hardly anyone else uses them to refer to, and we may do it because we are funny, challenging, unorthodox, or wicked people. Nobody can fully control the way we use words in discourse. This makes us linguistically free and may make us creative, but at the same time it allows us to deliberately manipulate other people or inadvertently confuse them.

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With respect to confusing us or letting us understand things easier, how do metaphoric and metonymic expressions fare? When we attempt to put together the map and the territory, sometimes metaphors and metonymies seem to be helpful; they may lead to bringing us closer to some identifiable territory and make understanding easier; sometimes they may mislead and confuse us as well as leading to manipulation; sometimes they do neither.

Metaphor Consider the following examples of metaphoric expressions: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

You’re wasting my time. I don’t have the time to give you. How do you spend your time these days? Your position is indefensible. He’s never won an argument with her. You are using a wrong strategy in your argument.

These are all examples of what is usually called metaphor in modern cognitive linguistics (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). They show that one thing may be talked about (and thought about in fact) as if it were something else. The first three examples (1–3) illustrate the metaphoric mapping TIME IS MONEY, and the remaining three (4–6) illustrate the umbrella mapping ARGUMENT IS WAR. When we produce these kinds of metaphor, we map abstract domain things and activities onto concrete domain things and activities. ‘Time’ (very abstract domain) can be talked about as if it were ‘money’ (completely different, very concrete domain). ‘Argument’ (very abstract domain) can be talked about as if it were a ‘war’ (completely different, very concrete domain), and so on. These examples, which you will recognize as very frequent ways of saying things in English, illustrate only one type of metaphor, namely, the cases in which we talk about highly abstract ‘things’ (for instance, time) as if they were concrete tangible things (for instance, money). In English as well as in other languages we also use metaphoric expressions which allow us to talk about abstract things as if they were other kinds of abstract things (for example, ‘She drives her boyfriend out of his mind’, in the underlying metaphor LOVE IS MADNESS, the abstract madness is mapped onto the abstract love), about concrete things as if they were other kinds of concrete things (for instance, ‘My computer is crazy’, in the underlying metaphor COMPUTERS ARE PEOPLE, the

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concrete people are mapped onto concrete computers), and about concrete things as if they were abstract things (for instance, ‘This dinner was a turning point in our discussion’, in the underlying metaphor FOOD IS IDEAS, the abstract ideas are mapped onto the concrete food). We are not concerned here, however, with any of the remaining three. We are only concerned with the kind of metaphor where highly abstract ‘things’ are talked about as if they were concrete and highly tangible. This kind of metaphor is extremely frequent. Consider a few more examples: ‘We need to put aside some time for football’, ‘I don’t think we have any time left’, ‘This idea died prematurely’, ‘Could you unpack this idea for me?’, ‘Theirs is a sick relationship’. These examples may indicate that language users may be putting ideas about tangible territory and words into practice without being at all aware of how language works. Highly abstract ideas (‘things’???) labeled by words such as ‘time’, ‘life’, and ‘argument’ become meaningful when they get compared to tangible things such as money and war. The abstract-to-concrete metaphor (which predominates in the overall use of metaphor in many languages) helps people to understand each other by lowering the level of abstraction for the words included in the discourse. One type of metaphor, called personification, has the opposite effect; that is, it enhances confusion and misunderstanding. Examples of personification (where you talk, and possibly think, of abstract ‘things’ as if they were people) are listed below: ‘Only time will show’. ‘Life is treating me very badly’. ‘The past is smiling at you’, ‘The future is there to take care of you’, ‘The present predicament is robbing me of my past’. Why can these sentences be seen as confusing? They can be seen as such because they usually do not seem to mean anything at all in terms of tangible territory. When abstract things (such as ‘past’ or ‘future’) are viewed as people (people show, treat, smile, take care, and rob; time, life, the past, the future, and the present cannot do these), we are talking about the impossible. To take another example – ‘only the future will tell’ – the referent of the ‘future’, which is almost anything imaginable, obviously cannot tell anything because the word ‘future’ does not refer to a human being, and only human beings tell. The ‘future’ cannot tell us anything, so the sentence is meaningless, or confusing at best.

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Consider also: 1. ‘The university will respond to your grievances as soon as possible.’ 2. ‘The establishment is not responsible for any items stolen on its premises.’ 3. ‘This system is responsible for the failure of the students.’ Here the metaphoric mappings may be the following: 1 – Institution is People; 2 – Abstract Idea is People; and 3 – Abstract Idea is People. Who will respond? Who is not responsible? What are the referents of ‘university’, ‘establishment’, ‘the system’? Where would we find the ‘system’ if we looked for it and tried to pin it down? If we took this last question seriously, we would certainly realize that the ‘system’ should be seen as a highly abstract word and that it means next to nothing. Trying to make ‘the system’ meaningful in terms of tangible things that you can experience, we would need to climb down the ladder of abstraction. Lower on the ladder, we would find a set of laws and regulations, for instance, written documents. These documents, however, cannot be responsible for anything. Documents do not make decisions, change theirs minds, discuss issues, and so on: people do. People do these things and people establish laws and write legal documents. People are then the original source of the documents, and of the system. People are responsible. The sentence ‘This system is responsible for the failure of the students’ may thus be seen as very confusing in that it blurs the responsibility that is being talked about. Concrete people are responsible for the failure of the students and not some sort of abstract ‘system’. If you turn ‘This system is responsible for the failure of the students’ into ‘The ministerial committee consisting of seven members, who in 1994 made decisions about university education, are responsible for the failure of the students’, you are beginning to talk sense. This is so at least with respect to the word ‘system’. There still remains the phrase ‘the failure of the students’, which appears very abstract and means hardly anything. To make the latter more meaningful, we might turn it into ‘the average grade is D at the University of Wisconsin’, which would normally be taken to be much more meaningful a statement. I used the phrase ‘more meaningful’ deliberately in the previous sentence. This is to indicate again that in our entire discussion in this book, you should not think in terms of black and white (see Chapter 5). Sentences, or utterances, should not be seen as definitely meaningful or definitely meaningless, definitely difficult or definitely

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easy, and so on. They may, for example, be more or less meaningful, more or less difficult, more or less confusing, and, it must be stressed again, they may be so only to people, to individual language users. It appears then that some metaphors should be very welcome because they lower the level of abstraction, which contributes to a better understanding. Some others, however, we should be reluctant to use, unless our purpose in communicating with other people is to simply keep our channels of communication open, say something, whatever it might be, ‘shoot the breeze’, in which case trying to locate the territory and understand the interlocutor or trying to make yourself understood is not an issue.

Metonymy In what are usually called metonymic expressions, we also put two things together in a way, as in the case of metaphor, except that here, at least in typical cases, we put together two ‘things’ which we normally conceive of as relating to each other and belonging to one domain rather than two; that is, unlike when we deal with metaphor. In metonymy, we replace one thing with another which is closely associated with or related to it (see, for instance, Lakoff and Johnson 1980). When we use metonymic expressions, we operate on an ‘instead of’ principle. For example, in ‘the radio hasn’t arrived yet’, you say ‘the radio’ instead of ‘the journalists from the radio’. When we analyze metonymic expressions, we can also see that we often deal with some kind of personification, where non-human entities, such as houses and cities, are treated as human beings. Consider the following examples of personification that are often discussed under the heading of metonymy: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

‘The White House has rejected the proposal’. ‘Number 10 will have an opinion on this matter tomorrow’. ‘Paris says no to further negotiations’. ‘London will not respond until Tuesday’. ‘Europe thinks differently’. ‘The Italian love affair. The country appreciates everything about America: its cities, its celebrities and even its cowboy culture’. 7. ‘What does China think?’ 8. ‘Enron is fully corrupt’.

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In these examples, we have come up with the following swaps: 1 – place for people; 2 – place for people; 3 – city for people; 4 – city for people; 5 – continent for people; 6 – country for people; 7 – country for people; 8 – institution for people. Ordinary and competent language users process these kinds of utterances without any problem. If people’s attention is drawn to these kinds of sentences, they will certainly admit right away that ‘The White House’ has not rejected anything because ‘The White House’ is a place or a house, and houses are buildings, and buildings do not accept or reject anything: people do. Likewise, when asked to reflect for a moment on ‘London will not respond until Tuesday’, people realize that London, as a city, cannot respond, of course. It will be someone in the British government that will respond by Tuesday. Who will? Metonymic personifying expressions may be convenient vehicles to make discourse tricks blurring responsibility and hiding some facts, which may lead to confusion. Many personifying expressions like the ones above will leave us in the dark. We will not know who will do this or that, who is responsible for this or that, what or who is actually being talked about. The territory for words in this kind of expression appears to be extremely difficult to identify. In this sense, such expressions may be thought of as difficult to understand, confusing, or perhaps meaningless. Personifying metonymic expressions may be seen then as potentially contributing to confusing discourse. But it is not only personifying metonymic expressions that may be seen to do so. Consider other kinds of metonymic expressions which may be seen as equally confusing in the sense that the relationship between the map and the territory appears to have been manipulated: 9. ‘Bush will continue the fighting for another three years’. 10. ‘Solti gave a fantastic concert in Buenos Aires last year’. This kind of metonymy is often referred to as the CONTROLLER FOR CONTROLLED type (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Metonymic expressions like 9–10 above may confuse people by suggesting that the territory to which the word refers (for instance, in example 9, the person whose name is Bush) will do something, which is obviously not true because the territory in question will be a group of unidentified American soldiers; they will continue the fighting. Likewise, example 10 may be a bit confusing as well; Solti was accompanied by other artists. Solti was a conductor, and conductors cannot give concerts by themselves.

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Unlike some metaphoric expressions, metonymic expressions do not seem to enhance comprehension. Rather, they make our discourse more difficult to understand, more confusing and sometimes meaningless.

Meaning and dictionaries Many people seem to believe that whenever they do not understand a word, or are in doubt about the meaning of a word, all they need to do is consult a dictionary. Note that many people will say ‘I don’t know what this word means’, or ‘I don’t know what the meaning of this word is’, which formulations disclose the general belief that meaning is to be found in words. A good dictionary might then be the best place to find the ‘contents’ of a given word, many will think. Meaning is understood by these people to be objective, resident in words, the kind of meaning that people normally know, accept, agree about, and that you may have happened not to learn, have forgotten, or be uncertain about. For people who treat dictionaries this way (the overwhelming majority, I believe), the relationship between experience or reality and words, between territories and maps, does not seem to be an issue. Let us consider the dictionary from the point of view of the metaphor ‘the map is not the territory’ and the crucial view that words are not the things and activities that they refer to. What do we actually find in dictionaries? First of all, we need to realize that most dictionaries, even those that many people consider to be the best ones, include mainly words. We might say that these dictionaries include word entries and attempt to define these entry words with words. So, it is words, words, words about words. It is only maps; no territories. Needless to say, dictionaries cannot include territories except for cases where words themselves are seen as territories, for instance, the word ‘noun’, which may be treated as a map of or a label for a class of words. Otherwise, there is no way we could include territories in a typical dictionary. How do you put a real horse (a territory) or a real piano (a territory) into a dictionary? Some dictionaries include words (symbols) and pictures (other symbols), which invoke the territories more successfully than mere words, but still, cannot be treated as the territories themselves. Except for a few cases then, dictionaries include only words (maps, symbols) and no territories pertaining to our experiences. Looked at from the point of view of the relationship between the map and the territory, the earlier dictionaries (compiled prior to the current electronic era) could be seen as collections of words and their definitions as attempting to map mainly the compilers’ own territories or experiences, and importantly, the territories and experiences that

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people typically map onto words. The current electronic era, allowing compilations of large corpora depicting the actual usage of language in various situations, has made it possible for dictionaries to reflect a significantly larger range of usages, but still, what seems to be possible is only to reflect relatively typical usages, relatively typical mappings. In spite of the advances in electronic technology, dictionaries remain mostly words about words, no matter how much more, compared to the earlier dictionaries, people’s usage of words the current dictionaries reflect. If dictionaries include mostly words (maps) only, what about the territory? If we accept the fact that dictionaries include words that are meant to refer to typical experiences or territories, we have to keep in mind that what may be typical for one person is not typical for another; what may be typical for 100 people will not be typical for another 100 people, and so on. People’s experience, typical or not, mapped onto words varies. Sometimes it is very different; sometimes it is slightly different. Still, it varies. Looked at it from this point of view, dictionaries include information which may be seen to be a gross oversimplification. Not only do dictionaries give you almost no territory (because they cannot in principle, except for language as the territory, as I mentioned earlier), but they also give you largely oversimplified information in terms of guesses (sic!) about what kind of experience many people typically map onto words. Can anything be done about this? Not much. We can have better and worse dictionaries (see below), but no dictionary is likely to bring together even an insignificant portion of people’s experiences and the words onto which they map the experience. If we think also of how experience (and thus the meaning of words for individual people and for groups of people) is continually changing, envisaging a dictionary that could reflect the billions of relations of people’s experiences and the words they use appears to be an impossible endeavor. Are dictionaries useful then? Do they guide or misguide us? Obviously, dictionaries may be seen to be and are seen to be very useful. We have to take them, however, for what they appear to be. They are not residues of any abstract objective meaning. Neither are they residues of the whole of what words mean to people. Unlike what many people seem to believe or hope, dictionaries do not give us any exact meaning and even the best dictionaries do not solve our problems of understanding in terms of the territories that these words refer to. Dictionaries should be seen as lists of words and words about these words. These latter words are supposed to bring us closer to the territories that the former words refer to. Sometimes the latter do a good job and sometimes they do not. However, they will never be the territory and the experience itself, so they will never provide the varying experience that people actually map

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onto these words, and they will thus never tell you exactly how other people understand words. I have agreed above that dictionaries are useful. One of the reasons for this is that the words about words (these that we find on the right-hand side of the entry) may be seen as typical maps of typical experiences about which there is a significant measure of agreement among the speakers of a given language. We need to keep in mind, however, that typical meanings (typical putting together words and experiences or referents) vary. In the case of typical cases of maps relating to tangible objects such as tuxedoes, pigs, guns, and bananas; however, the agreement among people as to words and the objects that the words refer to is so remarkable that the label ‘typical’ seems to be warranted. I have stated above that no dictionary includes any tangible territory. If so, how can a dictionary be useful? Considering what we’ve discussed so far about the uncertainty of language, how can the words successfully replace the territory? An answer to this question seems to be that the words defining an entry can be less abstract than the word defined. This brings us to the question of a good and bad dictionary, again focused on the issue of how a dictionary brings the territory closer to the reader. As the actual territory (for instance, a real horse or pig) cannot be brought into the dictionary, we can only expect some sort of replacement or substitute. And the only replacement of it seems to be a word which invokes an image. Words which remain at a high level of abstraction and do not invoke an image do not seem to be very helpful when used in definitions, and thus do not seem to make good entries. If you are not familiar with botany and the word ‘clubmoss’ and would like to know what the word ‘lycopod’ refers to, will the following definition help you? Lycopod – ‘A pteridophyte of the family Lycopodiaceae; a clubmoss’. (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 2002: 1655) Does any image come to your mind that would make the word ‘lycopod’ meaningful to you? On the other hand, consider the following definition of ‘lycanthropy’: Lycanthropy – ‘a form of madness in which a person believes himself or herself to be an animal (esp. a wolf) and behaves accordingly’. (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 2002: 1655) The definition of lycanthropy seems to be much easier to understand, primarily because it invokes a number of fairly concrete images: of a person, an animal, and a wolf.

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Words which invoke images bring us closer to the actual territory, but only that; they never provide the territory itself. A good dictionary, we may assume, is thus the sort of resource which includes definitions which, in turn, include words relatively low at the ladder of abstraction, words which invoke images. These kinds of words allow the dictionary user to imagine the territory and relate the words to experience, typical or not, personal or not. When a word can be put together with tangible experience, it becomes meaningful. Otherwise it remains a set of sounds or letters on paper, no matter how familiar and frequently used these sounds or letters may be. A bad dictionary, again from our point of view, will be the sort of dictionary which includes definitions whose words do not invoke images, whose words do not appeal to any sense of your experience; that is, whose words in the definitions remain at a very high level of abstraction. The simple relationship in question seems be the following: the more words in a dictionary which invoke images in the reader’s mind (invoking the reader’s experience), the better the dictionary; that is, the better the reader understands the words in terms of real life palpable experience.

Language as an inadequate tool of handling reality As mentioned earlier, the non-verbal reality (the air, clouds, wind, steam, but also books, cars, TV sets, buildings, and so on) is seen by physicists as being in continuous flux. The little bits and pieces of matter are seen as being in continuous motion, which results in the fact that the non-verbal world changes all the time. Needless to say, some of these changes are very slow and minute, and of no practical consequences for the average human being - the changes of the physical structure of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris for instance, which can be observed over a period of two hundred years. These changes obviously take place, but they are negligible from your point of view or mine. Other changes are much faster, big and easily observed. For instance, the changes of a growing child can be easily observed, and so can those of your house before and after a party with 50 people. The child is changing all the time, which needs to be kept in mind for the rest of the argument. Also, importantly, these changes can be seen as continuous, not abrupt, not as big leaps which can be noticed between, say, the tenth and eleventh month and between the third and fourth year. These changes are gradual, though clearly noticeable over a period of time. Likewise, your house changes gradually as the party develops. It is easy to observe the changes happening. First one bottle of beer is

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opened, then a second, then a third one, and so on. First one wine glass is broken, for example, then a second one, then one type of food is gone, then someone a bit tipsy trips over your rug and makes a spot on it. The development is gradual and continuous, whether relatively slow, like in the case of the child, or quite fast, like in the case of the party. The fact that the non-verbal reality is continuously changing and that it is changing gradually and not abruptly may be seen to be crucial to support the view that language may be seen not to be a particularly reliable tool to use to talk about this non-verbal reality. My research on lay people’s perception of what they label as language problems strongly supports the view that language is seen as a highly inadequate vehicle to express our experience of the non-verbal reality (Janicki 2010). The point is that the non-verbal reality (our children, parties in our houses, cars, wars, wedding ceremonies, and millions of other things and activities) is very complicated, the structural relations among the various aspects of this reality are very complex, and to our detriment and chagrin, perhaps, language appears not to be able to reflect and handle this complexity. While non-verbal phenomena are continually changing and may be best seen as continua (that is, without our being able to identify definite ends and beginnings of these phenomena), our language suffers from at least four related problems: (1) it offers a poor set of tools (few words) to talk about the many changing things; (2) the words that we have at our disposal seem to suggest, wrongly, confusingly, and misleadingly, that these non-verbal phenomena that the words refer to are discrete, whereas in fact they should be seen as continuous; (3) many words that we have at our disposal suggest that the world is binary, that is, that we have only two options to talk about (for instance, ‘good’ and ‘bad’; see Chapter 5 for a discussion of this point), and (4) language appears static; it appears unable to catch up with the constant changes in the non-verbal world. The changes that all things living undergo may be illustrated by the following set of pictures:

a Picture 28

b

c

d

e

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In Pictures 28a–e, we are presented a variety of Elvis Presley images. In each picture he is slightly different (disregarding the clothes). In some he is a little younger than in others; his hair is different in all these pictures, and so is his face, and so on. If our language were sensitive enough to reflect the numerous changes in Elvis that are portrayed, we should have an array of words to match these changes. Elvis1 , Elvis2 , Elvis3 , Elvis4 , and so on. We could claim that only an incredibly large number of words referring to each aspect of this changing reality could correspond to the complexity of this reality. Most of the time we have only ‘Elvis Presley’ to refer to this man who was constantly changing. Words abstract and simplify reality to a dramatic degree. This may be a way to imagine the sort of confusion and difficulty in understanding that language causes. When you say ‘I have met Elvis Presley’, which Elvis Presley, which non-verbal reality, are you talking about? Given his dramatic transformation, yours is probably not the same as mine. The discreteness suggested by words, which significantly distorts nonverbal reality, may be illustrated by Picture 29:

Picture 29

In Picture 29 above you can see what most people will refer to as mountains and hills. The reality shown in the picture can be viewed as continuous in the sense that you will be unable to say exactly where a ‘hill’ finishes and a ‘mountain’ begins. The reality is continuous. The words ‘hill’ and ‘mountain’, however, appear to suggest that we can tell where one finishes and the other one begins. The non-verbal reality is continuous; the verbal means to talk about it are not. We might say that language confuses us because it inadequately simplifies things for us.

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We may reason similarly in the case of the territory referred to by, the word ‘peninsula’. We should not doubt that there is no natural distinction between the mainland and the peninsula. Where exactly would we place the borderline? Nevertheless, the two words ‘mainland’ and ‘peninsula’ suggest that we can find this place. The point illustrated by the examples above is simply this: Jerry today is not the Jerry he was yesterday, and certainly not the Jerry he was a year or two, or ten years ago. He (his body) has changed, as has every other aspect of non-verbal reality. However, we still call him Jerry. Although we sometimes spot the changes and talk about them, we never say ‘Jerry 1976 told me he ate pineapple every day . . . .’, ‘Jerry 1986 was here in Paris again . . .’, ‘Jerry 2004 bought himself a new car . . . .’. We usually use the word ‘Jerry’ only. Although the Jerry of 1976, the Jerry of 1986, and that of 2004 were different, in terms of the ever changing non-verbal reality, we use only one word – ‘Jerry’. Our language appears static, and the non-verbal reality dynamic. Our language does not offer enough words to match the complexity of reality; it does not include ‘words’ to refer to every different aspect of reality. Could it? It seems that it would not really be possible. As no two things are identical in this world (see for instance Lee 1994), for language to be able to refer to each aspect of the continuously changing reality, we would need to have a different label (one word at least) to refer to each newly evolving aspect of reality. Each word would have only a single, one time reference, a single, one time meaning. This would certainly lead to untenable communicative situations! Communication would not be possible. The fact remains, however, that when we are involved in discourse, when we utter or write words and sentences, we simplify reality to a considerable degree. There is not much we can do about it, but it is extremely important to be aware of this fact. The verbal maps that we use will give us the impression that the territory is much simpler than it actually is.

When the differences do not make a difference One of the reasons why we should not despair over the fact that the words we use are not able to reflect the complexity of the non-verbal territory is that quite a lot of the differences that can actually be seen and talked about may not really be important for all practical purposes. These differences may be seen to be negligible (Johnson, W. 1946). To return to the party example, while we could easily see the differences between the state of the house at 18:00 (when the party has just begun) and 20:00 (when the first ten bottles of beer have been drunk) and,

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say, 23:00 (when some wine was spilled and the first spot on the rug was made), the differences do not really make so much difference given what the function of a party usually is and given that the hosts are relatively normal people. In other words, to use the word ‘party’ to refer to the various stages of the occasion seems to be, for most purposes, relatively harmless. Having tens or hundreds of words to refer to the changing conditions of the house, as the evening would progress minute by minute, does not seem to be useful or necessary at all. To put it still differently, the high abstraction that we are involved in by using the word ‘party’ to call what has been going on in our house obviously simplifies the reality (you will recall that the word abstracts from many aspects of this reality), but this simplification may be quite harmless. Other abstractions, which language is the main tool for, appear, however, to be harmful, confusing, and dangerous.

When the differences do make a difference – the danger of generalizations If we agree that the option of having one single word to refer to each aspect of the ever changing reality (in which case language would be a ‘good’ tool to handle the complexity of the non-verbal reality) is unattainable and that it would, paradoxically, stop all communication, generalization appears to be a consequence. We generalize all the time because we have to. There is no other way out. When I say: ‘I picked up a loaf of bread in the local bakery this morning’, you do not know what it is exactly that I picked up; you have not seen the loaf I bought. I refer to the general category of ‘loaf of bread’, and that is fine. I generalize because if I did not, I would have to describe to you in detail the thing that I bought, or, at best, show it to you. This kind of generalization (understood as not attending to details) can be seen as quite convenient, useful and harmless, and the consequences of resorting to it positive. In other frequently encountered cases, however, the consequences may be very dire. The discourse of everyday politics offers abundant examples of the kind of sweeping generalization which may lead to such dire consequences. A salient example in my view is the phrase ‘the American people’. American politicians (especially the presidents or presidential candidates) are often talking about ‘The American people’. For example, referring to President Bush’s statement, CNNPolitics.com (2007) reports:

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‘I think I am proud of the efforts we did’, Bush said. ‘We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. That’s the problem here in America: They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.’ The president bridled at the suggestion that he has been less than forthcoming with the American people about such matters as the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the lack of any connection between the September 11, 2001 attacks and Iraq, and predictions that the war would cost about $50 billion – far short of the current $400 billion price tag. ‘I strongly reject that this administration hasn’t been straight with the American people,’ he said. ‘The minute we found out they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to say so.’ (http:// edition.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/14/bush.60.minutes/) (italics added) In a long list of quotes selected from all election-related wire stories available through Yahoo (http://www.eod.com/americanpeople/), we read, for example: Obama spokesman Bill Burton dismissed the criticism as not-forattribution complaints of staffers who aren’t knowledgeable about the campaign’s Hill coordination efforts. ‘It’s a favorite parlor game in Washington for low-level staff to take shots at anyone they can, given the opportunity,’ Burton said. ‘But as leadership aides across the Hill have confirmed even in this story, we have a constructive working relationship with the House and Senate leadership and continue to work with them to bring about the change the American people demand this November.’ (Bresnahan 2008: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11750.html) (italics added) And: Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton shot back: ‘[T]he American people know that our economic problems aren’t just in their heads. They don’t need psychological relief, they need real relief. And that’s what Barack Obama will provide as president.’ Karen Finney, the Democratic National Committee’s communications director, said: ‘What John McCain, George Bush, Phil Gramm just don’t understand is that the American people aren’t whining

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about the state of the economy; they are suffering under the weight of it – the weight of eight years of Bush-enomics that John McCain and Phil Gramm have vowed to continue’. (Allen 2008: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11658.html) (italics added) The kinds of sweeping generalizations that the phrase ‘the American people’ illustrates are intended to show how inadequate, misleading, and dramatically oversimplifying certain abstract words and sequences of words can be when they are used to refer to a very complex nonverbal reality. What can we assume the referent of ‘the American people’ is? All the American people? This is extremely unlikely. Given the complexity of the non-verbal reality (the roughly 300 000 000 Americans with all their different origins, domiciles, families, creeds, education, race, and so on), the abstract ‘The American people’ map refers to so much, that is, to so big a territory, that it may be taken to refer to nothing. When you ask the question ‘who?’, that is, if you think of the territory to which the map ‘The American people’ refers, the territory is too complex for the expression to be a helpful map. The difference among the American people makes a difference. That is why expressions such as ‘the American people’ can be seen as very poor tools to handle non-verbal reality. Note that expressions such as ‘The American people’ (or ‘the international community’, to take another salient example) could be analyzed as words at a high level of abstraction used by politicians deliberately to make their speeches equivocal, that is, to make them sound like they refer to everybody whereas in fact they refer to very few, few, or many people; we never know how many people such phrases refer to. Needless to say, we never know to whom these phrases refer. What I wish to stress at this point is that many words drastically simplify reality. We use such words, all the time, and we often have to, for instance, when we do not want to indicate exactly what we are talking about, which may not necessarily be a vicious thing to do. An awareness of how and why such words and phrases are used can diminish the harm they do. Most salient examples illustrating overgeneralizations come also from discourse reporting on events pertaining to national groups or foreigners in general. Consider the following examples: Democrat Barack Obama said Tuesday that the New Yorker magazine’s satirical cover depicting him and his wife as flag-burning, fist-bumping radicals doesn’t bother him but that it was an

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insult to Muslim Americans. (CBS News 2008: http://www.cbsnews. com/stories/2008/07/16/politics/main4264875. shtml) And, in the article entitled ‘The Poles are hastening home’ The decline of the pound has been strangely unremarked in our media; but it has been noticed by our friends from the new EU states. Working in London is no longer worth their while. They [that is, the Poles; my addition KJ] have returned home, rather to my regret – my admittedly affluent southern constituency was experiencing a massive labour shortage before they rescued us. (Hannan 2008: http:// blogs.telegraph.co.uk/ daniel_hannan/ blog/ 2008/ 06/ 25/ the_ poles_are_hastening_home) (italics added) Formulations such as ‘Muslim Americans’ and ‘The Poles’ can certainly be seen to be confusing and misleading. They can be seen as such because they largely oversimplify the non-linguistic reality. While it may in fact be true that some Muslim Americans may have been insulted, the phrase ‘Muslim Americans’ suggests that many, if not most, Muslim Americans have been insulted. Do we know how many have, or who has, actually been insulted? No, we do not: and neither does the author of the text. Likewise, the title of the article – ‘The Poles are hastening home’ – suggests that many, if not most, Poles are leaving Britain. And again, while it may by all means be true that some are actually returning to Poland, we do not know how many are, or who is, returning. In both excerpts, the impression given is that many people are involved. In all probability, most Muslims were offended, some were not, others did not even hear about the drawing, still others may be hesitating about their reaction, and so on. Likewise, for example, some Poles are returning, some are not, others are considering returning, still others are considering returning but not until a few years from now. In other words, the non-verbal reality seems to be much more complicated than the verbal expressions suggest. These expressions over-generalize and by doing so hide the distinctions which make a difference. To use the ‘map is not the territory’ metaphor, ‘Muslims’, ‘Poles’, ‘foreigners’, and so on should all be seen as highly abstract words which refer to millions or tens of millions of people, that is, to an extremely large territory. That territory is no doubt extremely varied and is constantly changing. Who are we actually talking about when we use such words as ‘Muslims’ or ‘Poles’, or ‘Americans’?

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Generalizing discourse, that is, saying things like ‘The American people want to continue the fight’, ‘The Jews do not want to give up their territory’, ‘The Poles are anti-German’, or ‘The foreigners are parasites in this country’ belongs, in my view, to the most dangerous and unrewarding linguistic behavior that we can think of. These kinds of statements simplify reality enormously. They completely disfigure or disregard the complexity and the ongoing change in the real, non-verbal world. It appears to be saliently untrue that all the American people want to continue the fight, whatever fight it might be, that all the Jews do not want to give up their territory, that all the Poles are anti-German, and that all the foreigners are parasites in whatever country is being talked about. One simple reason for the salient inadequacy of statements like these is that not all the American or Polish or Israeli people have been asked, but you only need to find one that disagrees. We simply do not know what these people think. Generalizations which give the impression that they depict reality in its complexity should be seen as misleading; they can be seen as contrary to fact. Generalizing discourse, whether produced consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or not deliberately, appears to be a clear contributor to conflict and social trouble of various kinds. We obviously need to generalize to some extent. Without it communication would not be possible. The question, however, seems to be to what extent we should do so. A scanty observation of everyday discourse or a brief browse through a daily paper (especially a tabloid) gives more than enough evidence that people generalize to an alarming degree. I see generalizing discourse as the best example of how language users disregard the relationship between the map and the territory. People seem not to care very much about the territory. ‘Poles are hospitable people’, ‘Americans can’t live without a car’, ‘Poles are thieves’, ‘Norwegians love nature’, ‘Norwegians are unfriendly’, ‘The British are polite’, and ‘The British love to talk about the weather’ may all be seen as sweeping generalizations, that is, as highly inadequate maps of the territory which is much more complex than these verbal maps might suggest. An important thing to keep in mind is that most people, when asked straightforwardly, will most likely admit that not all Poles are very hospitable people, that not all Americans can’t live without a car, that not all Poles are thieves, that not all Norwegians take walking tours every Sunday, and so on. However, most of these people will tend to act as if these sweeping generalizations were adequate maps of reality, so these generalizations, these inadequate maps, have done their damage. In other words, when approached explicitly, people will probably tell

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you that they know very well that words are not the non-verbal reality (map is not the territory), and that the reality is more complex and changing than the words to refer to it might suggest, but these same people tend to act as if they did not know it.

Chapter 3 – MAIN POINTS TO REMEMBER 1. Most people do not seem to be very aware of how language works. 2. We should be fully aware of the fact that words are not the reality to which they refer. 3. We may see words and the reality that they refer to as analogous to the map and the territory. 4. Words refer to different aspects of non-verbal reality, like maps refer to different aspects of the territory. 5. A word is always an abstraction of non-verbal reality, like a map is always an abstraction of the territory. 6. Some words are useful in some situations and others are not, like some maps are useful for our purposes and others are not. 7. We may treat as a good word map the sort of language use which conforms to the commonly accepted social agreements with respect to what words refer to; we may see as bad maps the language use which drastically deviates from such commonly accepted social agreements. 8. The more abstract the words we use, the more difficult it is to understand them, the more difficult it is to identify the tangible reality to which they might be referring, and the more difficult it is to stick (in real communication) to the social agreements that they involve. 9. Lying may be seen as deviating from the commonly accepted connections between words (maps) and what they refer to (territory). 10. Dictionaries do not tell us what the real meaning of a word or expression is. 11. Dictionary entries may be seen as mostly words about words. 12. Dictionary entries (that is, words) do not give us access to non-verbal reality. They may only make us imagine it. 13. Dictionaries include information on typical and past meanings.

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14. We may view language as an inadequate tool for handling non-verbal reality. 15. Non-verbal reality is continuous; language suggests, wrongly, that it is discrete. 16. Non-verbal reality is extremely complicated and it is constantly changing; language does not reflect this complexity and change. 17. Some generalizations may be seen to be extremely dangerous because they suggest that complex phenomena are simple, that there is less variation and change than there actually is. Such generalizations unnecessarily distort our view of nonverbal reality to a disturbing degree and may lead to conflict. 18. Some metaphors may help us be understood and to understand other people. Other metaphors may exacerbate misunderstanding and confusion. 19. Metonymic expressions may make understanding more difficult because they make it more difficult to identify the territory for the discourse.

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Words, Words, Words . . ., and Tables, Cars and Elephants – Intensional and Extensional Orientation

Thinking that you know when in fact you don’t is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone. I believe myself that hedgehogs eat black beetles, because I have been told that they do; but if I were writing a book on the habits of hedgehogs, I should not commit myself until I had seen one enjoying this unappetizing diet. (Russell 1976: 115) What usually matters to us is what people do rather than what they say. Having read Russell’s passage, this is what we might presume should be the case. Words may be seen as mere symbols; they stand for something else. We can change them, coin new ones instantly, manipulate them, abandon them, forget them, and so on. Why should we treat them seriously? What appears to be most important to most of us is what happens to our body – whether we are for example physically unhurt and unimpeded, well fed, warm. Are words in fact often taken very seriously? Yes, they are. Words appear to be taken extremely seriously by a lot of people. Not only do people mix levels of abstraction (that is, take words for the things that they stand for; see Chapter 7), but they also attach to words so much that they often completely disregard the territory. These people tend to live largely in the realm of words and other symbols. They orient themselves toward words rather than toward what these words refer to, to word maps rather than toward the territory. These people believe what they hear about hedgehogs’ eating habits; they don’t bother to check what hedgehogs actually do eat. 88

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Intensional orientation The people who take words very seriously and who tend to disregard the territory to which words purport to refer are seen by some scholars as living their lives with an intensional orientation (see for instance, Hayakawa 1992; Lee 1994; Kodish and Kodish 2001). They are people who take words to be very important, sometimes more important than the non-verbal reality to which the words refer. These people attach much significance to symbols, to labels. They are also people who live their lives mainly in the world of words without caring all that much about what the possible reality that these words refer to might be. When asked to explain the meaning of some words, these people will give you more words at more or less the same level of abstraction, which often means that the explanation is no better than the word or concept that is supposedly being explained. A good set of examples showing how intensionally-oriented people cherish symbols comes from a time of major political change at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1989, when the communist system throughout Eastern Europe fell, one of the first decisions taken by the incoming politicians was to change the names of streets, buildings and organizations. Many people were enthusiastic about these changes. Street names in many cities in countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary had been changed. Before 1989, they bore the names of pre1989 (mostly communist) heroes, events, or institutions; after 1989, they were assigned the names of pre-World War II heroes, events or organizations; that is, from the time before the communist system was introduced in these countries. In some instances they were assigned neutral names (see, for instance, Bartos 1994). Also many names of religious figures (largely forbidden or discouraged in the communist era) were introduced or restored. In Poland, for instance, in the city of ´ the street earlier named after Dzierzy ˙ nski ´ Poznan, (a communist) was renamed as 28 czerwca 1956 (June 28, 1956 Street; to commemorate an anti-communist uprising), the street called Armii Czerwonej (The ´ Red Army Street) before 1989 was renamed as Sw. Marcin (St Martin Street). Probably the most cogent example of an institution changing names after 1989 is that of the police. Before 1989, the police were referred to in some of the East European countries as, for instance: ‘milicja’ (Poland), ‘Veˇrejná bezpeˇcnost’ (Czech Republic), ‘mili¸tia’ (Romania). After 1989, the police were assigned the names ‘policja’, ‘policie’, and ‘poli¸tia’, respectively. The East-German label ‘Volkspolizei’ (People’s

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Police) disappeared completely after the unification of the two German states. At least for some time, the people, the buildings, the cars, and so on were exactly the same as they had been before 1989, but the name for them has changed. The change was made because quite a few people openly expressed the wish that this be done. The politicians approved probably because they realized how important symbols are to people. One of the reasons why symbols (words) were changed so quickly may have been that they are, of course, easy to change compared to changes in the non-verbal reality. A related phenomenon showing how important symbols are to people concerns monuments. As with name changes, in most East European countries after 1989, some of the monuments commemorating communist leaders and heroes were destroyed and new ones erected. Honoring different heroes with different ideologies, for instance, in ˙ nski’s ´ Poland, Dzierzy monuments were destroyed and those of Pope John Paul II were erected. A more recent example from a different part of the world is the destruction of Sadam Hussein’s monument, an event that was shown on television around the world for several weeks. Although Hussein had not been caught and could have returned to power, the destruction of the monument was taken as the destruction of the real person and his regime. Symbols can be powerful. People take them seriously. Another example of how people remain attached to words and other symbols, and thus intensionally oriented, is that relating to brand names. In the automotive industry, the quality of products has varied enormously not only across producers but also over time. Some producers managed, over the years, to gain a very good reputation due to the quality of their products. Companies such as VW, Volvo, BMW, and Mercedes produced, in the opinion of many, excellent cars for discerning customers. Recently, however, the quality of these products, has, for various reasons, undergone significant decline. This fact has been reflected in a number of recent customer satisfaction surveys published in car magazines and available on websites. Compared to the makes where producers declined, Japanese and Czech cars (and most recently Korean cars) have gained reputation for quality and reliability. Still, the sales of the VW and the other German makes as well as of the Volvo have been high in many European countries (for instance in Norway). The sales of the Kia cee’d, which is reputed by specialists to be an excellent quality car and which offers a seven year warranty, are low in Europe. Why is that so? One of the possible answers to that question is that people are buying the words or symbols ‘VW’, ‘BMW’,

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‘Mercedes’, and so on disregarding the territory, or, perhaps more likely, that many people are buying the words in addition to buying the territory. They are buying the symbols for a reason, of course; these symbols give them prestige and status. A writer in Top Gear Magazine seems to fully support my analysis of the power of symbols with regard to cars: Here is a car that should change a few misconceptions. As good as anything Ford, Vauxhall or Toyota can do, yet, it’s a Kia. If you can get over your badge snobbery and its silly name, there is not much wrong with cee’d. (Top Gear Magazine 2008: 78) Reacting negatively to words like Kia and positively to those like Mercedes without much analyzing of the territory that these words refer to shows that people tend to react to at least some words as if they were alarm signals meaning basically one thing (‘leave the building immediately, without thinking, and leave everything behind’ – ‘buy this car if you can afford it and no other’!), while they should react to them as symbols abstracting highly complex non-verbal reality (see later in the chapter for a more detailed discussion of signal and symbol reactions to discourse). Buying the words often costs motorists an enormous amount of money and inconvenience. These people are intensionally oriented to a large degree; they take words very seriously, often disregarding what these words refer to. In the case of machines such as cars, we may assume that the territory is, at least to some extent, taken into account. Some people may be buying cars like the VW simply because they like the design, the comfort, or the colors perhaps. There is, in other words, in the case of cars, a tangible object in the picture no matter how big a role the buying of the word ‘Volkswagen’ may play. By the way, the VW Phaeton, the biggest and most luxurious VW vehicle, produced since 2002, does not appear to be a success at all. A reason for that, as I recall it, was, according to a newspaper, that the German word Volkswagen (English: people’s car) will never be accepted by the wealthy, for whom this car is primarily intended. In order to understand the idea of intensionality still better, consider the following philosophical text: Machination here means the makability of beings which produces as well as makes up everything, such that only in this makability the beingness of beings that are abandoned by be-ing (and by the

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grounding of its truth) determines itself. (Here makeable is thought as ‘watchable’ = watchful. And hence makability is thought in the sense of producibility). Machination means the accordance of everything with producibility, indeed in such a way that the unceasing, unconditioned reckoning of everything is pre-directed. (Heidegger 2006: 13) In this example, any tangible territory for many of the words and phrases in the text is extremely difficult to point to. Words such as ‘makability’, ‘beingness’, ‘be-ing’, ‘producibility’, and the phrase ‘the beingness of beings’ may refer to so much that they may be said to refer to nothing. Consider also the following extracts from Husserl: But not even with the domain of this intuitionally clear or obscure, distinct or indistinct, co-present – which makes up a constant halo around the field of actual perception – is the world exhausted which is ‘on hand’ for me in the manner peculiar to consciousness at every waking moment. On the contrary, in the fixed order of its being, it reaches into the unlimited. What is now perceived and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate (or at least somewhat determinate), are penetrated and surrounded by the obscurely intended to horizon of indeterminate actuality. (Husserl 1983: 52) animal realities, characterized as Bodies with a soul . . . are founded realities, which presuppose in themselves, as their lower stratum, material realities, so-called material Bodies. (Husserl 2000: 35) the Ego is constituted out of one’s own (active) position-taking, and out of one’s own habits and faculties, and consequently is an externally apperceptive unity, the kernel of which is the pure Ego. (Husserl 2000: 278) the spirit can be grasped as dependent on nature and can itself be naturalized, but only to a certain degree . . . . Subjects cannot be dissolved into nature . . . . Nature is a field of relativities throughout, and it can be so because these are always in fact relative to an absolute, the spirit, which in consequence is what sustains all the relativities. (Husserl 2000: 311) if we eliminate nature, ‘true’, Objective-intersubjective existence, there always still remains something: the spirit as individual spirit. It only loses the possibility of sociality, the possibility

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of comprehension, for that presupposes a certain Bodily intersubjectivity. We would then no longer have the individual spirit as a person in the stricter, social sense, a person related to a material world and, consequently, to a personal world as well. Nevertheless we still have, notwithstanding the enormous impoverishment of personal life, precisely an Ego with its conscious life, and it even has therein its individuality, its way of judging, of valuing, of letting itself be motivated in its position-takings. (Husserl 2000: 311) In the extracts above, as in many other philosophical works, we have to tackle many words, phrases, and clauses for which locating any tangible territory will seem extremely difficult. Think of ‘indeterminate actuality’, ‘Ego’, ‘position-taking’, ‘a field of relativities’, ‘spirit being naturalized’, and so on. No wonder Bertrand Russell states that ‘. . . explicit controversy is almost fruitless in philosophy, owing to the fact that no two philosophers ever understand one another . . .’ (Russell 1926: 29; italics added), and no wonder William James sees much of philosophy as ‘words, words, words’ (reported in Chase, S. 1938: 208), which we might want to relabel as a very intensionally oriented endeavor. Intensional orientation can also be well illustrated with definitions which include words at more or less the same level of abstraction as the word defined. Many academics, especially in the domain of the humanities, provide us with examples: A consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates is referred to in this paper as a semantic prosody. (Louw 1993: 157) Montague semantics . . . a method of assigning semantic interpretations to the syntactic expressions generated by a Montague grammar (named after the American logician Richard Montague), which is a type of categorical grammar. These semantic interpretations are formulated in terms of a system of intensional logic in conjunction with possible world semantics. (Cruse 2006: 112) We borrow the term chora from Plato’s Timaeus to denote an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases . . . The chora is a modality of significance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and symbolic. (Kristeva 1997: 35–36)

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Texture – the surface qualities of the words in a passage, considered apart from their meaning . . . texture may depend on the kinds of words used (harsh, violent, peaceful, etc) or on the sounds of the words themselves. Texture is often used to introduce a critical metaphor to describe the atmosphere or effect of a piece of writing . . . (Gray 1992: 288) All these examples are meant to show that their authors have a significantly intensional orientation in their work. Most of the words that they use in their definitions do not point to anything tangible. We are dealing only with words, with symbols, and we completely or almost completely miss the territory that would make these words meaningful to us. As we will see later, things are significantly different when we as language users are oriented extensionally. Another example of intensional orientation, which has, in my view, important social consequences, is the common practice in many educational institutions of putting great emphasis on the names or labels for things, people, animals, various kinds of activities, and so on. rather than on how these function or are performed. This practice can be observed at all the three educational levels (elementary, secondary, and tertiary) in many countries of the world. For example, in elementary schools, textbooks and lessons are packed with names of animals and plants. To take linguistics, many grammars of English (for instance, Greenbaum and Quirk 1990) are packed with numerous names of grammatical phenomena (like, adjuncts, pre-modifiers, post-modifiers, pseudo-clefts, extrapositions, and so on) which the students are supposed to memorize. To be fair, these grammars and other textbooks are not only loaded with terms and their definitions, but they are also full of examples and explanations. Nevertheless, at tests and exams, teachers’ emphasis on what a construction is called, what its name is (for instance, an adjunct or a conjunct) appears obvious to me. I endorse Chase’s statement that ‘the fact that one knows the names for birds, insects or plants does not make him a competent biologist’ (Chase, S. 1938: 197). In my view, the common practice of requiring that students know what some construction is called, rather than, or, in the best case, in addition to, how it works, can be seen as a reflection of intensional orientation. I need to stress that I do not consider learning names for things to be completely useless. On the contrary, names for things allow us to talk about these things; without them we could not. However, as there may be many names for one thing (which can be frustrating for students)

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these names should not be taken too seriously. It is helpful to know the name (you probably would not trust the physician who can’t remember the name of body parts!), but on balance, it seems to be much more important to know how what you are talking about works than what it is called. If you are to forget one of the two, forget the latter rather than the former. The intensional world of words seems much less important. Intensional orientation is, in my view, also encouraged when stress is placed on definitions of terms. Students of various educational levels are often forced to remember definitions and recite or write them in exams. Definitions are often taken to be very important tokens of knowledge. It is often forgotten, however, that there may be very many definitions of one term and that definitions, especially when they remain at the level of abstraction equivalent to that of the term defined, may be seen as completely useless. One word is replaced by more words; we remain intensional, at the level of words. It is often forgotten that in order that words in definitions can be meaningful, they must connect to our experience, that is, that they must become in some way extensional. Arguments about the meaning of words and their definitions, among people who appear to be intensionally oriented, I often see as a waste of time. Discussions which remain in the sphere of words not connecting with experience are often confusing or meaningless and thus may lead to nothing.

Extensional orientation Similar to intensionally oriented people, extensionally oriented people use highly abstract words. They draw inferences and make generalizations, draw conclusions, and so on. However, these latter people tend to keep in mind that words of a high level of abstraction are meant ultimately to be related to something tangible, to a territory of some kind, rather than be hung up in the air with no connection to anything on the ground. Consider the following example: Derailment – the mistaken production of a word which has the same beginning as the intended one. For example, the motorway (motorcade) passed close by me. The speaker appears to have been ‘derailed’ from his or her original intention, and uttered a word which may be more frequently used than the intended one. (Aitchison 2003: 42)

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Here you can see a connection between the highly abstract word ‘derailment’, which the author attempts to define, and ‘motorway’, ‘motorcade’, ‘production’, ‘word’, which may be seen as less abstract and closer to a tangible territory. For this reason, to take all our examples, the definition of ‘derailment’ seems much easier to understand than the definitions of semantic prosody, chora, texture, and Montague semantics, given above. One of the ways to look at the distinction between an intensional and extensional orientation is to point to the direction that the reasoning of an intensionally oriented person takes as opposed to that of an extensionally oriented person. This direction in the case of an extensionally oriented person is from doing to speaking, from tangible things to intangible things, from low level abstractions to high level abstractions, from things you can observe with your senses to, for instance, inferences, opinions, generalizations, and conclusions about them. In other words, for an extensionally oriented person, whatever you say should, to the extent possible, be testable in terms of what you can see, hear, touch, and so on. An extensionally oriented person avoids saying things he or she has no evidence for. An extensionally oriented person will avoid repeating after others opinions and gossip about other people. For an extensionally oriented person, what is important is what he or she can experience with his or her own senses, and mainly on the basis of this sense experience will he or she venture generalizations and predictions. An extensionally oriented person will tend to ask: ‘what sort of evidence do you have for what you say?’, or, ‘what do you mean?; give me some examples’. An extensionally oriented person will do his or her best to bring parties in a conversation to identify at least roughly the territory to which the words used may refer. For an extensionally oriented person, the anchor in discourse will be the tangible territory, no matter at how high a level of abstraction the speaker may be at a particular moment in conversation. In contrast to an extensionally-oriented person, for an intensionallyoriented person, words are the anchor, not the territory that these words might refer to. Intensionally oriented people do not care so much, if at all, whether the territory is identified, or even identifiable. For an intensionally oriented person the connection with the territory, if there is any, is very loose; this connection is not really important. Words are important; not so much the kinds of things, objects, and situations that they might possibly refer to. An intensionally-oriented person does not need an anchor to prevent their ship of words from floating about.

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For a final illustration of the difference between an intensional definition (and orientation) and an extensional one, consider the following two passages purporting to define ‘genotext’ and ‘demurrage’ respectively: What we shall call a genotext will include semiotic processes but also the advent of the symbolic. The former includes drives, their disposition, and their division of the body, plus the ecological and social system surrounding the body, such as objects and pre-Oedipal relations with parents. The latter encompasses the emergence of object and subject, and the constitution of nuclei of meaning involving categories: semantic and categorical fields. (Kristeva 1997: 57) Demurrage – an agreed sum to be paid by the charterer to the shipowner as liquidated damages . . . for any delay beyond the time stipulated in the contract. (Curzon 1983: 106) In the first passage, the author generally operates at a very high level of abstraction (in spite of using the word ‘body’) defining ‘genotext’ with words such as ‘semiotic’, ‘process’, ‘symbolic’, ‘system’, ‘relations’, and ‘semantic’. The words in question do not seem to help us much with grasping the meaning of ‘genotext’, as intended by the author. The author’s orientation in this definitional attempt seems largely intensional. In the latter passage, however, we move from the highly abstract ‘demurrage’ to significantly less abstract ‘charterer’, ‘shipowner’, ‘damages’, ‘contract’, and so on. These latter words appeal to our tangible experience. The latter definition appears significantly more extensional, and it makes it much easier for us to know what the author is talking about. While some people more than others seem to be more fixed on words and attribute a lot of significance to them, it would probably be a mistake to claim that we can easily say who is and who is not intensionally or extensionally oriented. Some people may easily be seen as intensionally oriented; some others may be seen as extensionally oriented. Most probably, however, most people tend to move along the intensionalextensional continuum, being sometimes very intensional, sometimes very extensional, and sometimes locating themselves somewhere in between. To recapitulate, an intensionally-oriented person attaches much significance to words and tends to disregard the territory. An extensionally-oriented person, on the other hand, takes words less

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seriously and attaches much more significance to the territory to which words refer.

When can we anticipate intensionally-oriented and when extensionally-oriented discourse? Intensional and extensional orientations in discourse can sometimes be anticipated. Problems usually arise when either of the two prevails when not expected. We can expect an intensional orientation in, for example, poems and songs. Take the following examples: An Enigma, by Edgar Allan Poe ‘Seldom we find,’ says Solomon Don Dunce, ‘Half an idea in the profoundest sonnet. Through all the flimsy things we see at once As easily as through a Naples bonnet – Trash of all trash! – how can a lady don it? Yet heavier far than your Petrarchan stuffOwl-downy nonsense that the faintest puff Twirls into trunk-paper the while you con it.’ And, veritably, Sol is right enough. The general tuckermanities are arrant Bubbles – ephemeral and so transparent – But this is, now, – you may depend upon it – Stable, opaque, immortal – all by dint Of the dear names that lie concealed within’t. My life closed twice before its close, by Emily Dickinson My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me, So huge, so hopeless to conceive, As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell. Although these poems include some words which refer to tangible things (for instance, ‘trash’, ‘trunk-paper’, ‘lady’), we find in the text many words that do not refer to anything tangible; for instance, ‘half an idea’, Petrarchan stuff, owl-downy nonsense, heaven, hell, and so on.

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Of course, we also hear songs or poems including lyrics referring to fairly tangible persons, things, and activities. These we can very well identify with, for example, limericks. Consider the three below: ‘There once was a lady of Siam Who said to her lover, young Brian: “If you kiss me, of course, you’ll have to use force. But, surely, you are stronger than I am.”’ ‘A lady who walked on the Corso Displayed too much of her torso. A crowd soon collected, but no one objected And some were in favor of more so.’ ‘There was a young man of Peru Who dreamt he was eating his shoe. He awoke in the night in a terrible fright And found it perfectly true’ In contrast to poems like the limericks above, which appeal to very tangible people and events, many poems (especially those using highly abstract words) are understood to have been a result of the poet’s inner feelings and are not meant to refer to or describe much tangible territory. Poems very often console, comfort, or entertain the reader, make him or her happy, interested, maybe a little drowsy. They can encourage you to meditate perhaps. In any event, it does not seem to be the case that poems are usually expected to point to any easily recognizable non-verbal territory. They may, of course, do so (as in the case of many limericks), and they sometimes certainly do so, but by no means should it be a requirement. It is often up to the reader not only to identify the obscured territory of the words the poet uses, but invent it, imagine it. Poems are not meant to be good maps of any territory. The reader is given license by the poet’s use of abstract and obscure language to find connections with the poet’s experience. The same seems to be true with many songs. They are intended to make us happy, to make us have a musical and verbal experience, to also, as in the case of poems, summon up common poetic experiences. The sounds that come out of the mouths of singers are not intended to tell us which turn to take to get back home, which street to cross to get to the next highway, and so on. Songs, like poems, are not intended to be good maps for some territory. Again, you make up your own territory, or don’t make any, and be happy!

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In other words, in the world of poems and songs, to use this example, intensional orientation is expected, normal, and usually rewarding. Songs and poems in which we could easily locate the territory are uncommon, and even in the most sophisticated pieces of music (in opera arias) the lyrics usually appear simple; they appear to be about love, betrayal, jealousy, pity, and disappointment, for example, and do not describe complicated territories of life. In most everyday small talk and conversation, extensional orientation is not usually anticipated and its lack can turn out to be rewarding. We often talk just for the sake of talking to keep the channels of communication open. Insisting that the other fellow be extensional may actually be counterproductive. That said, however, we need to realize that much of everyday talk (talking to people on the bus, talking to colleagues at work, talking to your family members, chatting with your neighbor, and so on) may be seen as sheer gibberish without much tangible content anchored in reality. Words float around like flies on a hot day in a country farm. It’s just words, words, words . . . . Extensional orientation is usually anticipated in much of life’s contexts. Needless to say, we would expect extensional orientation in scientific discourse; scientists are no doubt expected to know what territories they refer to; they are expected to know what they are talking about. This expectation is probably true for all academics. Academics, to use this high level abstraction word, do not seem to me, however, to be an exception. I assume that an extensional orientation is also expected from many people in many everyday situations. In other words, we often expect to know what others are talking about. Other than in a restricted set of discourse categories like small talk and pep talk, extensional orientation is, in my view, a frequently expected orientation, the orientation which is highly rewarding and whose lack is highly disappointing in most situations. Probably the best examples of how disappointing a lack of extensional orientation can be come from politics. Politicians are often criticized for making their speeches too abstract, whose words do not point to much (if any) concrete territory. They make their speeches highly abstract for a reason, of course; they often seem not to want to promise anything that is tangible and that they could be held responsible for. Their speeches are often considered incomprehensible and/or confusing, and we often do not know what they are talking about. Consider the following example, which is President Bush’s 2006 State of the Union Address. In this example, some passages from the speech include very abstract terms, phrases, and clauses, and, in the context of this speech, may mean

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almost anything, and may thus be seen as very confusing. I marked these words, phrases, and clauses in italics: To confront the great issues before us, we must act in a spirit of good will and respect for one another. And I will do my part. BUSH: And I will do my part. Tonight the state of our Union is strong, and together we will make it stronger. (APPLAUSE) In this decisive year, you and I will make choices that determine both the future and the character of our country. We will choose to act confidently in pursuing the enemies of freedom or retreat from our duties in the hope of an easier life. We will choose to build our prosperity by leading the world economy or shut ourselves off from trade and opportunity. In a complex and challenging time, the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting, yet it ends in danger and decline. The only way to protect our people, the only way to secure the peace, the only way to control our destiny is by our leadership. So the United States of America will continue to lead. (APPLAUSE) BUSH: Abroad, our nation is committed to an historic, long-term goal: We seek the end of tyranny in our world. Some dismiss that goal as misguided idealism. In reality, the future security of America depends on it. On September the 11th, 2001, we found that problems originating in a failed and oppressive state 7,000 miles away could bring murder and destruction to our country. Dictatorships shelter terrorists, and feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of mass destruction. Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror.

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BUSH: Every step toward freedom in the world makes our country safer, and so we will act boldly in freedom’s cause. (APPLAUSE) Far from being a hopeless dream, the advance of freedom is the great story of our time. (The Washington Post.com 2006a: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/31/AR2006013101468.html) Probably the best caricature of political discourse depicting intensional orientation will be found in Sir Humprey’s impressive answers or retorts to Prime Minister Hacker’s questions or comments, in the British TV series Yes, Prime Minister. Here is one: ‘To put it simply, Prime Minister, certain informal discussions took place involving a full and frank exchange of views, out of which there arose a series of proposals which, on examination, proved to indicate certain promising lines of inquiry which, when pursued, led to the realization that the alternative courses of action might, in fact, in certain circumstances, be susceptible of discreet modification leading to a reappraisal of the areas of difference and pointing the way to encouraging possibilities of compromise and cooperation which, if bilaterally implemented with appropriate give and take on both sides might, if the climate were right, have a reasonable possibility, at the end of the day, of leading, rightly or wrongly, to a mutually satisfactory resolution’. We should not be surprised to hear Prime Minister Hacker’s reaction: ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ (Yes, Prime Minister, Series Two, episode – ‘Power to the People’). Unfortunately, parody and comedy cannot exceed the reality of some politicians!

Making your discourse easier to understand – extensional devices There seems to be little doubt about the fact that a person oriented intensionally who produces highly abstract texts and who ignores the territory to which these texts refer is often difficult to understand. The more intension, that is, the less connection between words and tangible territory, the less understanding. Extension enhances understanding but, importantly, never leads to reaching it in full. As I show in Chapter 2, we can hardly ever be understood or understand others

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completely. One simple reason for this appears to be that if meaning is taken to derive from our experience, and as nobody’s experience can be duplicated by anybody else, one person’s meaning of a word will always be slightly (quite often negligibly, we must admit) different from another person’s. That said; we can always try to make ourselves better understood. There are various ways of doing so. The general principle to be adopted in trying to make ourselves better understood should be to get our discourse as close as possible to what we are trying to refer to. We should try as much as possible to reflect the complexity of the non-verbal world around us that we are talking about. We may never ultimately be successful, but we can be more successful rather than less. While some language users may not want to be well understood (see page 114 below), in what follows, I will be concerned only with these language users who want to be understood to the extent possible and who at the same time want, again, to the extent possible, to reflect the complexity of what they are talking about. To these people, the extensional devices that I list and briefly discuss may be of some help. In the discussion below I build on the extensional devices mentioned earlier by, for instance, Johnson W. 1946, Lee 1994, Kodish and Kodish 2001, Korzybski 2002. Examples Giving examples appears to be a very simple and powerful extensionalizing discourse device. Especially in the often highly abstract academic discourse, examples must be given to make high level generalizations meaningful. People (especially educators) vary in their assessment, and especially practice, of whether descriptions of tangible things and activities should precede generalizations or whether generalizations should be followed by examples referring to tangible facts. Independent of what one’s position is on this issue, examples including references to relatively tangible objects and activities appear to be one of the few extremely valuable devices contributing to a relative meaningful discourse. Take the following definition of ‘avoidance language’: Avoidance language – a linguistic variety which is used to permit social interaction between people who would otherwise be prevented from communicating with one another by strong social taboos . . . . (Trudgill 2003: 12) Is this definition meaningful to you? Do you understand it in the sense that you know what the author of this sentence is talking about?

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Now consider an example of an avoidance language: . . . In many Australian aboriginal communities there are taboos concerning communication between a man and his mother-in-law. In some such communities they are permitted to talk to one another only if they employ a special language variety, sometimes known as a mother-in-law language, in which a special reduced vocabulary is used and sometimes also a different phonological system. (Trudgill 2003: 12–13) Has the example helped? Do you now have a better understanding of what the previous general sentence was about? Note that examples are meant to lower the level of abstraction of the original discourse. They are supposed to bring you ‘down to earth’. In the preceding case, the example somewhat lowered the level of abstraction by referring to ‘Australian’, ‘aboriginal communities’, ‘a man’, ‘a mother-in-law’, and so on. If examples do not do it, that is, if they remain at a very high level of abstraction, like the original general statement, they are not much help. On the contrary, they may actually further contribute to the confusion over or meaninglessness of the previous text. Consider the following definition of ‘wild card’, including an example which, in my view, remains at a level of abstraction comparable to that of ‘wild card’: Wild card – a character that can stand for any other character in a regular expression. Wild cards allow more sophisticated searches in corpora to be carried out. For example, a concordance program could specify that the ∗ character acted as a wild card, standing in for a string of any characters of any length. (Baker et al. 2006: 168) The example in this last case does not seem to have helped in the understanding of the general statement at all. This is because it does not point to any tangible objects, people, or activities that you could easily imagine, that you have experienced, read about, that you can somehow relate to, and so on. There are many people, often referred to as intellectuals, who seem very efficient in producing statements including words at a very high level of abstraction. These people often have difficulty producing examples to illustrate their generalizing statements. They no doubt should be able to produce these examples. High level of abstraction generalizing statements will often be meaningless and confusing to most people

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if they are not extensionalized. Giving examples referring to tangible things seems to be one of the best vehicles to make your discourse meaningful to others.

Indexing In the section on generalization above (see Chapter 3) and others, I stressed the facts that the non-verbal world is very complex and that it is constantly changing, and that human languages are unable to reflect completely that complexity and change. We, language users, have a tendency to attend to similarities and disregard differences. This leads to unwarranted generalizations and all the unpleasant consequences that generalizations bring about. By indexing in discourse we usually mean pointing to and trying to linguistically mark differences rather than similarities. When indexing, we keep in mind that no two cats are identical, no two college students are identical, no two cars called VW Golf are identical, no two copies of the same book are identical, and so on. And also, no one cat was exactly the same yesterday as it is today, no one student was exactly the same yesterday as he or she is today, no VW Golf was exactly the same yesterday as it is today, no copy of a book was exactly the same yesterday as it is today, and so on. No matter how trivial and unimportant some of these differences in question might be, the fact that there is no identity in this world needs to be kept in mind. The unimportant differences aside, what you take to be important differences should be attended to and expressed through discourse. Indexing in discourse may be seen as the flip side of generalization. By avoiding generalizations, which emphasize similarities thus confusing people and giving them a highly warped picture of reality, you index, you point to the differences, to the extent that the language you happen to be speaking allows it. All phenomena (such as, all people, objects, activities) are unique. When you index, you keep this fact in mind and you stress it. It follows that, in practice, indexing will help avoid generalizations As no two taxi drivers are alike, avoid talking about taxi drivers. Rather talk about the taxi drivers that you have met and talked to. Whatever you want to say about them, index, point to them, and say whatever you feel like saying about them and do not talk about others that you have never met. As no two Oxford dons are the same, do not talk about Oxford dons. Index, that is, talk about the dons that you have seen, met, talked to, and so on. You may want to give their names if you know them. As no two Poles and two Germans are the same, avoid talking about

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Poles and Germans. These should be seen as highly abstract words that are devoid of any tangible meaning. Index, talk about Mr. Kowalski and Herr Schneider. I fully realize that indexing, understood as showing through discourse that you attend to differences rather than to similarities, may be seen as a highly unrealistic endeavor. After all, most media information thrives on generalizations, unchecked facts, and disregard for details (see for instance, Davies 2008). For indexing to be taken seriously, attitudes of large groups of people, including professional organizations like media organizations, would have to shift their ways of thinking and writing. Unrealistic as our expectations for such shifts might be, we should at least be aware of what we should be doing and what most people are not doing. Most people, including many journalists, are not indexing. They thrive on telling us about similarities; they usually ignore differences. Things should be just the other way round.

Dating Dating can be seen as another useful device that allows us to make our discourse more extensional. Dating makes us remember that everything is changing all the time and that generalizing through time leads to sweeping oversimplifications. For example, to refer to countries and the wellbeing of people living in them we will be more accurate putting in the date, the year, or the decade that we may be talking about. At present people often talk about countries like the Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, and Hungary, that is, the countries in which the communist system fell in 1989, and which several years later joined NATO and the European Union. The socio-economic changes resulting from the political upheaval of 1989 have been dramatic in most of these countries. In these countries you will still find many people who lived in the capitalist system of the pre-World War II time, during World War II German occupation, the communist system, through the transition period of around 1988–1990, and the fully capitalist system of roughly the last 20 years. These observers will tell you, on the basis of their own experience, how things have been changing and how different, for instance, the Poland of 2009 is from the Poland of 1991, that of 1988, that of the 1970s, that of the 1950s, that of the 1940s, and so on. For example, before 1989, most shops were half empty and carried goods of meager quality. In 2009 Poland may boast about its huge shopping centers and a variety of the highest quality goods commonly

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available. During the World War II period, it was a country terrorized by Nazis; in the late 1940s and 1950s it was a country terrorized by communists. Since 1989 it has been a free and democratic country without any political prisoners. You do not necessarily need to think of highly sensitive and vulnerable parts of the world, like central Europe, to conclude that dating is essential. You might as well go to a very stable and quiet part of the world. For example, the Norway of 1984, when I first went to see it, was very different (in terms of wealth, social relations, legal regulations, and so on) from the Norway of 2009, when I am writing this book. The changes have not been as dramatic as in central Europe, but they have been visible to the naked eye. For example, in 1984, in northern Norway, you had to go to a special beer monopoly shop to buy a bottle of beer. Now you can buy it in an ordinary supermarket. In 1994, in the second largest Norwegian city of Bergen, you were lucky to have seen expensive cars like a Mercedes, a BMW, or a Volvo in the streets. Fifteen years later, in 2009, it seems that every second car in the city is one of these. To talk about Poland or Norway is of course possible, but whatever we say about them will smack of gross overgeneralizations. Therefore, dating (for example, the Poland of 1945, the Poland of 1988, the Poland of 2009, the Norway of 1984, the Norway of 2009) helps us make our discourse less general, less confusing and more meaningful. My own first question to those people who tell me ‘Oh, I have been to Poland’, or ‘Oh, I have been to Norway’ usually is ‘When?’ Answers to this simple question, asking for dating, make our conversional more extensional. I know at least slightly better what the other fellow may be talking about.

Et cetera Using ‘et cetera’ may not be the sort of device that allows us to be better understood, but it appears to be the sort of device that allows us to indicate that what we are talking about (whatever it might be) can always be extended, should never be thought of as complete, ultimate, unquestionable, and can always be seen from a different angle, can always be talked about in different ways, and so on. Think of simple questions such as: ‘What do people do at the university?’ There is definitely no closed set of answers to this question. Whatever you think of in response to this question, the list of things that people do can always be extended. So, you can say: at the university, people (1) study, (2) think, (3) take exams, (4) pass exams,

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(5) fail exams, (6) teach, (7) read books, (8) write books, (9) spend time in libraries, (10) write papers. Could this list ever be complete? I have only listed the first ten typical activities that came to my mind. We could certainly very quickly extend the list by adding a few less typical and perhaps less frequent activities such as ‘gossip’, ‘copulate’, ‘make intrigues’, ‘sleep’, and ‘plagiarize’. Our answers to the question of ‘What do people do at the university?’ are unlikely to grasp the complexity of the phenomenon referred to as ‘university’. There is so much that people can do there. What we say people do there will depend on our perspective, our focus, on who we might be talking about (for instance, students or teachers), whether we might be talking about typical activities or marginal activities, whether we might be talking about what we have experienced ourselves or whether we might be talking about what others have told us, whether we might be talking about this institution in the past or at present, in this country or that country, and so on. ‘Et cetera’ appears to be a convenient discourse device which draws attention to the fact that things are always much more complex than we can express through discourse, that we can never say it all. The use of ‘et cetera’, with respect to general questions like ‘What do people do at the university?’, may be obvious. Less so, however, will it be in cases like ‘What did you write your BA thesis about?’ Whatever your thesis may be about and whatever you will say answering this question, ‘et cetera’ will be a rewarding discourse device to use. Even in the, say, 30 page, BA paper that you have written yourself, you yourself can find things that you did not see yesterday but see today. What you may not see in your paper, your teacher or a fellow student of yours may. In other words, although your BA paper may be very well focused and extremely well written, to claim that you have a complete knowledge of a finite list of topics that it is about may be a distortion of reality. In reply to the question of ‘what did you write your BA thesis about?’, an answer like ‘about the phenomenon of taboo, about taboo expressions in general, about taboo words in English, about how people reacted to taboo expressions in the past and how they do nowadays, et cetera’ may better express the complexity of what you actually did. Again, as in the case of the ‘university activities’, you and your readers may see your BA essay differently. You yourself may see it differently one day compared to another. What your essay may be taken to talk about can be seen as being much more complex than you first might have thought. ‘Et cetera’ helps us be aware of this complexity.

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Quotes Like ‘et cetera’, quotes (or quotation marks) should make us realize that the world we are talking about is very complex and that the words that we use to talk about it inadequately express this complexity. You should now recall one of the main points that I made earlier in the book, namely that the non-verbal reality, that is, the world around us, is continuous; there are no natural cuts which could allow us to tell one thing from another. We, the language users, with the help of our minds and languages, do the cutting. Words wrongly suggest that the world is discrete, while it is not, as the physicists tell us. Tangible objects such as chairs and computers seem discrete to us and for all practical purposes they may be safely taken as such. In other words, when I say ‘I am writing this book on a computer’, the idea of the computer is discrete to the extent that you will not suspect that I might be writing on a mechanical type-writer or that I might be using paper, a feather, and ink. Putting ‘computer’ in quotes would probably be either confusing or meaningless. When it comes to more abstract discourse, however, telling one thing from another is a much more disputable issue. Telling feelings one from another, for instance, and giving these feelings names in the form of words, may be much more disputable. For instance, feelings called ‘love’, ‘affection’, ‘infatuation’, ‘admiration’, and so on are much harder to grasp and names given to them much more elusive. In terms of social agreement about the meanings of words, the agreement about ‘computer’ seems much more stable than that about ‘infatuation’. In order to indicate that there is a lower level of social agreement in the case of ‘infatuation’, that is, in order to stress that this word may be considered by some people as the right word and not as the right word by others, in order to emphasize that ‘infatuation’ refers to something very elusive about which agreement among people may be difficult to reach, we may use quotes. Quotes as an extensional discourse device may be seen as drawing our attention to the difference between words and the things they refer to, between maps and the territory. Quotes should be taken to remind us about the arbitrariness of language, that is, about how we may use different words to talk about the same thing.

Hyphens Hyphens as an extensionalizing discourse device may be seen as another modest reminder that the non-verbal reality around us should not be

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seen to be clear-cut. The world is not the way our highly inefficient language appears to suggest. Thus, to return to our previous example, we may be extensionalizing our discourse when we talk and write about ‘love-admiration’, rather than about ‘love’ or ‘admiration’, or about ‘love’ and ‘admiration’. We will be stressing the continuity of the non-verbal world when we talk or write about ‘conversation-discussion’ rather than about ‘conversation’ or ‘discussion’. I may be getting a little closer to the extensional world when I say or write about myself ‘I am a teacher-researcher’ rather than ‘I am a researcher’ or ‘I am a teacher’. The hyphen, like the quotes, does not solve any serious discourse problems. It only helps us be aware of the fact that things in the real world are more complex than our linguistic habits might suggest.

Plurals The use of plurals may sometimes help us get more extensional in the sense that it may make us realize that the world is more complicated than it may seem. For example, we talk about ‘flying’, but once we realize that each act of taking a flight is a unique experience for all the people involved, we should in fact be talking about ‘flyings’. We should be saying ‘flyings by plane may be fun’, rather than ‘flying by plane may be fun’. Contemporary English does not, however, allow this plural usage. Rather than talking about ‘teaching at Oxford University is to be improved’, we should be talking about ‘teachings at Oxford University are to be improved’. The singular form ‘teaching’ implies that all teaching is the same, which is obviously contrary to fact. ‘Teachings’ seems to imply variation, which appears to better reflect the non-verbal reality. Again, English does not allow this usage. There are plural cases, however, which contemporary English does allow. For example, we can be talking about ‘causes’ rather than ‘cause’. As the world appears to be extremely complicated and is constantly changing, it seems extremely unlikely that anything has a single cause. When we talk about ‘causes’ rather than ‘cause’, we are probably much closer to what the non-verbal extensional world is like. We are then talking more sense and are more meaningful and less confusing to others.

Quantifying terms Being more extensional can also be achieved by providing quantity, if possible. Rather than saying ‘People were there for a long time’, we will

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be more extensional when we say ‘people were there for about 3 hours’. Rather than saying ‘he has published a lot of articles’, say ‘he has published around 50 articles’. This way, you make your discourse more meaningful.

To-me-ness Characteristics such as ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’, ‘smart’, ‘smooth’, ‘crucial’, and so on. are not to be found in things, people, and activities. They should be seen as our projections onto them, as our evaluations (see also Chapter 6). For us to think and to formulate our discourse so that this fact is blurred may be seen as confusing and misleading. Therefore, in order to keep as close to the real world as possible, we should stress this fact in discourse. How can this be done? It can be done by adding the phrase ‘to me’ and like sounding phrases to any statement which may be seen as evaluative. For instance, ‘she is beautiful to me’, ‘this reading room is cold to me’, and so on. Other phrases and clauses playing more or less the same role could be: ‘in my opinion’, ‘as far as I can tell’, ‘in my view’, ‘from my point of view’, ‘as I see it’, ‘I feel that’, and so on. For instance, ‘I feel that this room is really cold’. These phrases stress the fact that we are talking about an individual person’s evaluations and not about some objective facts. In this way, our discourse becomes more extensional; it depicts better the non-verbal world. Note that I suggest that one of the to-me-ness expressions be used honestly. That is, I assume that if you say, for example, ‘this story is boring to me’, you actually believe that the story may not be boring at all to other people. If you say ‘this story is boring to me’ and then are surprised that it is not to your fellow students, then your adding ‘to me’ to ‘this story is boring’ may be seen as dishonest. You simply added the words ‘to me’ (remember, they may be seen to be merely words, letters, sounds, and so on) to ‘the story is boring’, but you may still believe that the story should be boring to other people as well. Your act of adding ‘to me’ will then be a change only at the fairly insignificant verbal level without indicating any change in the non-verbal world of belief.

Visualizations I take up visualization in a separate section of this book (see Chapter 8). Therefore I do not discuss any details here. Let me only mention briefly at this point that visualization may be treated as an extremely powerful extensionalizing device. Visualization is to be understood here as

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the use of any sort of pictures. They may be mental (that is, imagined, invoked, in your mind); they may be pictures shown on the screen of your computer, pictures shown in a PowerPoint presentation, and so on. In my view, visualization contributes to understanding discourse to an extremely high degree. We should take recourse to it as much and as often as possible.

Extensional definitions Extensional definitions are the last device that I wish to mention here. As I try to show in Chapter 6, I do not find striving after definitions to be a very rewarding task. Especially when meant to seek ultimate answers to what-is-questions such as ‘what is language?’, ‘what is love?’, formulating definitions appear to me to be a misguided activity. This is not to say, however, that definitions of any sort should be seen as completely useless. Ordinary language users’ (not to speak of academics and scientists) urge for definitions seems very strong and we in fact may be able to cater to this urge. Definitions, both in everyday discourse and in academic endeavors, may be useful as long as they meet two criteria: (1) they will be treated as working definitions, that is, understood as proposals, as suggestions to treat a word this or that way for some purpose. For instance, it might be for the purpose of a discussion about crime in Oxford. And (2) they will significantly lower the level of abstraction, bringing us closer to experience, and thus making our discourse more extensional. Of interest to us here is the latter criterion. For a definition to be helpful, it must bring us down at least a little closer to the earth, closer to our experiences. Otherwise, definitions enhance confusion and may be meaningless. Let me assume that you have never come across the word ‘ontology’. Take the following definition of the word: Ontology – the branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature of being (Concise Oxford Dictionary 1999: 996) Has it helped? Will ‘metaphysics’ and ‘nature of being’ be extensionally meaningful to you? Probably not. Now take another definition of ‘ontology’. Ontology – the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of existence and the relations between things (Longman dictionary of contemporary English 1978: 762)

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The latter definition appears to be a little more helpful, in my view. It seems to have helped because it has brought us closer to tangible reality, to something that we may have experienced personally (for instance, a course in philosophy at high school or university) or to which we can relate through other people’s experience (most people have had some experience related to ‘philosophy’, ‘existence’, and ‘things’). Although these words remain at a fairly high level of abstraction (we cannot touch, see, hear, or smell ‘philosophy’, ‘existence’, and ‘things’), the latter definition may have brought many of us a little closer to the earth. The latter definition brings the discourse at least a little closer to the extensional world, and makes it a bit more meaningful and less confusing. Definitions are most helpful, however, and lead us toward the extensional alley when they are operational, that is when they point to tangible behavior, to what people can do rather than what they can think, feel, surmise, and so on. This is the kind of definition that you will encounter in science. Consider the following operational definition of a ‘modern car’: ‘A modern car – a modern car is the car which has power steering, ABS brakes, ESP traction control system, nine airbags, and remote control door opening system’. Provided you know what the notions ‘power steering’, ‘ABS brakes’, and so on refer to in the real world of the car, this definition may be seen to be extremely helpful. It seems easy for us to be able to detect, in the extensional world, whether a car has power steering, ABS brakes, and so on and given the definition above, we could easily decide whether a particular car belongs to the ‘modern car’ category or not. This definition of ‘modern car’ appears very meaningful because it has served as an extensional device. Operational definitions are often easy to understand even for the layperson because they talk about things that an ordinary human being can easily relate to, about things that he or she has experienced, even if indirectly. Extensional and operational definitions are not unrelated to what others call ‘ostensive definitions’. ‘“Ostensive definition” may be defined as “any process by which a person is taught to understand a word otherwise than by the use of words”’ (Russell 1948: 78). In these types of definitions, we move away from words toward non-verbal reality. This usually improves understanding.

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Benefits of using extensional devices The benefits of using extensional devices in discourse are many. Most importantly, they point to the complexity and changing character of the world; they point to differences rather than similarities; they encourage us to attend to individual people, things and activities and thus prevent us from coming up with sweeping generalizations. Avoiding generalizations, in turn, helps protect us from intolerance, dogmatism, and prejudice. Crucially, however, extensional devices improve understanding. By using the extensional devices listed above, and possibly others, we distort the non-verbal world less than we do when we do not use these devices. Any distortion can be dangerous socially; it can lead to conflict and war. Extensionalizing discourse through the easily available devices that we have discussed may thus be seen as a small contribution toward trying to prevent such disasters.

May we sometimes not want to understand or be understood? Sometimes we may not want to be understood; we may want to be deliberately fuzzy or imprecise; we may want to deliberately equivocate and bamboozle other people. We may want to deliberately present as simple something which we see as extremely complex, or the other way round. In other words, we may want to deliberately confuse other people, mislead them and, through our confusing discourse, make them perhaps feel inferior. Many politicians around the world seem to be masters of deliberate obfuscating discourse. Many doctors and lawyers seem to be masters of producing obfuscating discourse to make us feel inferior. It increases their authority, makes us more passive, docile, and cooperative. Equivocation makes up a significant part of studies in text comprehension. Much attention has been devoted to equivocation in political discourse. It has been studied, for instance, by Buller et al. (1994), Hamilton and Mimeo (1998), and Bull (1998, 2000): These studies and many others build largely on Bavelas et al.’s (1988, 1990) theory of equivocation. According to this theory, people typically equivocate when they are faced with situations in which any answer to questions may bring about some negative consequences. In political contexts, from a politician’s point of view, confusing language may result in some benefits. It seems that many politicians see the trade-off between equivocal and confusing discourse and political gains as worth their while.

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It is likely that some kind of trade-off also underlies vast stretches of discourse other than political, and, from the point of view of the speaker, a measure of benefit results. For instance, when you use the metaphoric ‘the system is responsible for the failure of the students’, you do produce confusing discourse in the sense that you do not state who is actually responsible for the failure; you obscure the responsibility. If you do not know who is responsible, you do not produce this confusing discourse deliberately. If you do know who is responsible, you are involved in a trade-off; you confused your interlocutor to some extent, but you did not disclose the real culprit whom you may want to protect. This may have come to your benefit. It may have paid for you to have produced this confusing discourse. While it seems that trade-offs are mostly beneficial to the speakers, they seem to also sometimes be advantageous to the hearers. I assume that we normally want to know more than less (that is why the benefit in cases like the one above is associated with the speaker). However, we may sometimes want to know less rather than more, and in such situations confusing discourse on the part of our interlocutor may be beneficial to us. For instance, if a colleague tells me ‘Although some staff members were for and others were against you, the department has decided to give you a research grant’, which I may take as confusing (who is the department?), I may be better off not knowing who voted against me, that is, who part of the department was. I may thus benefit from my interlocutor’s confusing, vague discourse. While we may indeed think of some situations in which not being clearly understood or not understanding other people clearly may be beneficial, in my view, the advantages of being understood and understanding other people clearly outweigh those of not understanding others and of not being understood.

Symbol and signal reactions to discourse When we hear people say things and when we ourselves say things (produce discourse) we may get entangled in a flow of words (sucked into an intensional orientation) or ponder questions about what these words mean in terms of extensional territory. In the former case, we usually end up reacting to discourse in what is known as the signal way; in the latter case, we will tend to react to discourse in what is known as the symbol way (see for instance, Hayakawa 1992; Korzybski 1933; Johnson W. 1946; Weinberg 1959; Lee 1994).

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Our awareness of the complexity of meaning and the basic fact that words do not mean anything (people do!) should lead us to a number of important conclusions. One of them appears to be that we need to be extremely conscious about how we should take words uttered or written by other people. Your interlocutor’s meanings assigned to the words that he or she uses for you to hear or read may not even be close to the sort of meanings that you yourself are likely to assign to these words. Unfortunately, we tend to react to the words addressed to us as if the meaning were in these words and as if we were correctly taking this meaning out of these words. Many people behave as if words were containers into which your interlocutor puts some meaning, and out of which you pull the same meaning, which makes them feel that they know very well the meaning of the utterance or written sentence. This conviction leads people to react to discourse the signal way. When we react to discourse the signal way, we react quickly and with not much reflection. A reaction the signal way may be seen as a kneejerk reaction. Reacting to words the signal way may also be seen as very close to reacting to sound symbols. When an alarm signal is turned on in your university building, you assume that there is a fire (unless you think that this is just a test) and you leave the building. You know what the sound means and you react to it basically in one way. The signal has one meaning. This is exactly the way that many people react to many words, the signal way. They assume that words have basically one meaning and also they assume that they know what that meaning is. They react to the word quickly without much thought. It is certainly a good idea to react to some words the signal way, for instance, when someone shouts ‘fire’, you are certainly better off leaving the building rather than starting to meditate about what that word might mean to different people. Or when a drowning person yells ‘help’, you had better jump into the water and try to save the person rather than embark upon a long thought process about what that word ‘help’ might mean to different people. In other words, in some situations people are expected to react to words the signal way, and they do so. Unfortunately, however, many people tend to react to words the signal way in many other situations in which they should not do so. These people do not seem to think at all about how much of the territory, what sort of territory, what sort of experience familiar to them, the words refer to. They do not seem to know at all, or reflect on how words may mean different things to different people. Good examples illustrating people’s unwarranted signal reaction to discourse come from advertising; advertisers count on people’s reacting

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to their ads the signal way, and they seem to be quite successful in their endeavors. Consider the following selection of advertising statements. They have been taken from advertising pages encouraging us to buy books. ‘A masterpiece’ (Sunday Times), ‘An original and unforgettable story brimming with passion, vitality and hope’ (Xinram), ‘A wild, passionate fearless writer’ (The New York Times), ‘An extraordinary achievement’ (The Independent), ‘A masterpiece, utterly exceptional in every way’ (Harpers and Queen), ‘The most exquisite of bookish pleasures’ (Time Out), ‘A wonder indeed . . . remarkable’ (Anita Shreve), ‘A beautiful and engrossing work’ (Independent on Sunday), ‘The magnificent, poignant, fascinating novel of three generations that starts in Mandalay . . .’. In almost any book blurb you will find positive advertising statements either signed, as in most of the examples above, or not signed, as in the last example in the list. These blurbs are usually full of emotionally charged adjectives (such as ‘unforgettable’, ‘exquisite’, ‘fascinating’) meant to stimulate your emotions. A person fully aware of how discourse works will know that these highly emotionally-charged words express individual evaluations of the authors (see also Chapter 6 on the ‘is’ of predication), even in a case like the last one on our list where the evaluation is presented anonymously. Many of us, will, unfortunately, fall victim to signal reaction and take other people’s evaluations for our own. When we react the signal way, we have the tendency to think that what The Times (that is in fact a journalist writing for The Times newspaper) evaluates as, for example, ‘magnificent’, we will as well. And we end up buying the book. It is only after we have read it that we realize that the word ‘magnificent’ for The Times journalist may have meant something entirely different than what it means to us. We get disappointed and think that we have wasted money on the book or that we have been manipulated through discourse. Take two other examples of words arousing high emotions which advertisers hope will make us react the signal way. On February 26, 2008, the South East of England was hit by a very minor earthquake. The epicenter was about 200 kilometers north of London, in Lincolnshi