Semantics – Serenity Through Sweat

Presupposition

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. In continuing research for my linguistics/communication project, I found this interesting back story that I wanted to share with you.

I am a sucker for a good academic cat fight. For one thing, academics, especially linguists and philosophers, have a way with words. Their ability to feud with civility, yet use absolutely scathing remarks, is truly a hidden treasure. Sadly, it is one that often goes overlooked. Because, well, you have to be a nerd to read these papers.

This nerd was reading and researching about semantics, and came across the theory of presupposition. Presupposition in interpersonal communication is very easy to take for granted, but it is critical to an effective transfer of meaning.

Putting some more focused time on the pool

Here is a quick example. The sentence “I have lost my keys”, presupposes “I had keys before” and “I do not have my keys now”. While that seems obvious, think of all the things we say to each other every day that require significant amounts of presupposition.

Now imagine talking to a hunter/gatherer. Someone who has very little in shared cultural/societal experience. Even if they understood each of the individual words and their semantic and syntactical significance, there is a good chance they would not have the same presuppositions.

Presupposition has been explored a few times in the history of modern linguistics, but its first recorded (however, often unattributed) explanation goes back to the time of Aristotle. This leads us to our academic feud.

Easing into some recovery rides after the half iron man

The story starts with Aristotle’s bivalent theory of truth. Aristotle’s truth theory states: (a) that every proposition is by nature either true or false, without any possible middle or any possible third truth value, and (b) that a proposition is true just in case it ‘corresponds’ with reality and false otherwise.

Eubulides came from the school of the Stoa, and taught philosophy at Megara. He came up with several paradoxes to challenge Aristotle’s truth theory. You can read about them here.

The paradox of the horns lies at the basis of presupposition theory. It is illustrated by the following fallacy: “What you haven’t lost you still have”. “You haven’t lost your horns.” Ergo: “you still have horns.” (How fun is it to say ergo, right)

The statement is obviously silly and false. It does however illustrate presupposition quite well. You have to have had horns in order to lose them. So the sentence cannot be true in the Aristotelian sense, hence the paradox.

This is all great, a bunch of linguistic and philosophical shenanigans, but the story gets better. There is some evidence that this specific reference, was not only a challenge to Aristotle’s intellect, but also to his manhood.

The reference of a man having horns comes from a historical reference of the man as a cuckold. So now Eubulides is playing word games, whilst telling the world Aristotle’s wife is stepping out on him, all in a philosophy class. Shots fired.

There are several different theories about the horns referencing cuckholdry. This article from the BBC shows a more recent instance of the insult between Portuguese government officials in 2009.

The article gives a fairly succinct summary of the gesture, and it’s history. The etymology is from the cuckoo bird that would lay its egg in other birds nests. Thus leaving the chick to be raised by the unsuspecting other bird.

And of course Chaucer’s the miller’s tale gives us, “For she was wild and young, and he was old, And deemed himself as like to be a cuckold.”

In Roman times, horns were given to returning soldiers as a symbol of success on the battlefield. They took on the unintended meaning of cuckholdry when it was discovered a significant number of soldiers returned to errant wives.

Celebrating summer and the end of school

The gesture is more recognized, as well as more offensive, in certain countries and cultures. I had no idea it was even a thing, but latin countries such as Columbia, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and Italy seem to take the most offense at the gesture.

From the article again, “This is a Latin country. If you say to someone, your wife did this, it is humiliating.”
“It is a great thing to do if you want to start a fight.”

Playing operation: it’s easier to win when you cover up the light

I didn’t think I would end up exploring insults to manhood between government officials when I started my research on pragmatism, but life is full of winding roads and uncertain paths.

I hope you enjoyed wandering down this one as much as I did. Thanks for joining me, stay safe, and stay sweaty my friends.

Trade-Off

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week I want to revisit communication, specifically the trade-offs we make in expressing ourselves.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research about language and communication lately. The more I read the more fascinated I am. The more I read, the more I realize I don’t know. Not only do I not know, but really none of us do.

Our primary means of expression, the mechanics of language that come innately to us as children, are largely a mystery. This, despite the fact that it is fundamental to our existence as humans. The ability to reason, plan, and communicate via language.

I stumbled across the following article in Neuroscience, which described an experiment in language production.

The experiment tested a group of healthy participants, and a group suffering from primary progressive aphasia (PPA). You may recognize that condition, as it was in headlines recently that it is affecting actor Bruce Willis’s career.

The experiment first devised a frequency based method for characterizing syntactic complexity of naturally produced utterances. It then used that method to test the hypothesis that “patients who have difficulty producing complex syntax might choose semantically richer words to make their meaning clear, whereas patients with lexicosemantic deficits may choose more complex syntax”

The participants were asked to describe a picture of a family at a picnic. This is a common assessment used in diagnosing PPA. “Healthy individuals can shift between the use of complex syntactic or complex lexical items, perhaps depending on what is more accessible in the moment or what might facilitate comprehension.”

“The results showed that if a sentence is syntactically complex, it likely incorporates simple words. On the other hand, if a sentence contains more complex words—such as words that are not commonly used—its syntax is more likely to be simple.”

This hypothesis was tested against both the test group (those with PPA) as well as a healthy control group. The results showed a significant correlation (n=79 and n=99) respectively) “suggesting that it may be a general property of the process by which humans turn thoughts into speech.”

There are some “semantically rich” words in there that are really more for neuroscientists and language nerds, so let’s unpack a little bit.

There are two elements of this experiment that struck me as profound. First, any general property by which humans turn thoughts into speech is a significant property. One worth some time to digest. The second, reminded me of teaching, coaching, and parenting.

Teaching and parenting have a great deal of overlap. One of the greatest points of overlap is effective communication. Specifically communication that must be effective over a broad range of topics, ages, and levels of understanding.

Even if you are only teaching one subject, to one grade level, the variety in language comprehension among students can be staggering. As a parent, your effective communication must now span a lifetime, and an endless myriad of topics.

The best teachers, coaches, and parents, are able to effectively communicate their message in a way that is understandable by their ever changing audience. This means seemlesly transitioning between complex syntax and complex lexicon depending on what is more suitable for comprehension.

While this may seem intuitive, and some are certainly more gifted in this areas than others, it is a talent that we admire in the orators and authors we idolize.

Transition between complex syntax and complex lexicon, is a skill that can be developed. It is even fun to do, and has been effectively monetized. Whether they realized their contribution or not, the game developers exploding kittens, capitalized on this very concept with their game poetry for neanderthals.

I bought the game for my wife and I and we played recently during one of our date days. Similar to charades, one person or team will draw a card with a complex lexical term (caveman definition: big word) and then must get their team to guess the word describing it using only one syllable words. If the person uses a word with more than one syllable in their description, they are bopped on the head with the inflatable “NO” caveman club. Must talk like cave man, or else get hit in head.

The rounds are timed and the object is to describe and guess as many big words as possible while speaking like a caveman (simplistic, monosyllabic, but syntactically complex).

As we saw from the experiment, there is an inverse relationship between the complexity of the words used and the syntax. These differing language construction pathways have differing neural pathways. The game forces you to use both interchangeably in rapid succession. Plus you get to hit people with an inflatable club when they screw up.

Being flexible in the way you communicate, being able to engage different neural networks and neural pathways, and finding the best path (semantically or syntactically) to get your point across, is a fascinating phenomenon to study, and one that likely leads to serenity.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Paradox

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week saw less progress on my communication project than I would have otherwise liked, but life has a habit of getting in the way.

Still I managed to read another chapter out of the Oxford Handbook on the History of Linguistics and found this interesting gem.

“The history of sound symbolism is the history of the attempt to resolve this fundamental paradox: on the one hand, if sound determines meaning, we should know what a word means just by hearing it; on the other hand, the distribution of phonemes across semantic domains is not arbitrary.”

Said another way, if sounds are the only determinate of meaning, we would have one universal language. This is clearly not the case, but as some of the examples below show, there are some commonalities among phonetic sound and semantic meaning that appear more than coincidental.

“In this way objects that evoke similar impressions are assigned words with predominately the same sounds such as waft, wind, wisp, wobble and wish, wherein all the wavering, uneasy motion, presenting an obscure flurry to the senses, is expressed by the w, hardened from the already inherently dull and hollow u.”

“We need not limit ourselves to pairs, but may look for larger patterns. One tempting example is the cross-patterning of /gl/ ‘phenomena of light’ and /fl/ ‘phenomena of movement’ with (1) /itr/ ‘intermittent’, (2) /ow/ ‘steady’ and (3) /ur/ ‘intense’: glitter↔flitter, glow↔flow, glare↔flare […] as for the terminal ‘morphemes’ in the above words, we find (1) evidenced also in titter, jitter, litter, iterate; (2) in slow, grow and tow and (3) in blare, stare and tear.”

The commonality of the phonetic sounds to their meaning across multiple words is a compelling argument for sound having a significant affect on meaning. A strong case for more than words as pure abstraction to identify an agreed upon referent.

Interestingly, a lot of the study of sound symbolism examines artists and poets. Those among us gifted with a sense of the perfect word for the perfect situation. Instances where an author’s word choice invokes the desired emotion. Paints the intended picture.

The more information I consume on the topic, or off topic for that matter, the more awed I am for the complexity of language that goes for the most part unexamined and underappreciated.

It also leaves me humbled for the distinct gifts of poetry and prose that clearly delineate the artists from the aspiring.

While working my way through the handbook, I had read three previous chapters on phonetics and struggled to place their value within the context of both my own project and language at large. Sure I see my boys struggle with certain sounds, but they are 2 and 4. Barring any sort of abnormality, they will develop a suitable phonetic acumen and likely think little of it.

But reading just a few paragraphs on sound symbolism completely changed my perspective on phonetics. It has inspired me to pay more attention to their impact especially on my own word choice.

The sound symbolism paradox is quite interesting and worth exploring. It is also a testament to how quickly you can change your mind and appreciate something that you brushed by before. All that is required is a little curiosity, a closer look, and some serenity.

Montreal running across St Helens island and ile Notre Dame

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.