INTEGRATED LANGUAGE SKILLS 1 Introduction to Textual Analysis Lesson 5
November 24, 2017
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Context
Word meaning explains only a fraction of how we use words to create “larger” meanings.
The crucial element that semantics does not consider is context.
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The word ‘context’ is deceptively straightforward—in fact, it refers to an infinite number of factors which could influence how an individual interprets a chunk of language; the area of linguistics that is concerned with the effect of context on meaning is pragmatics. 3
Context can be: 1) Linguistic
Sentential Textual
2) Extralinguistic
Situational
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Deixis
Some words take part of their meaning from the context.
A famous illustration of this aspect of meaning is an anecdote about a message found inside a bottle washed up on a beach. The message reads: “Meet me here at the same time tomorrow with a stick this long.” 5
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Many of the words in this message do not have a useful meaning because they are not accompanied by other information.
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These words are me, here, the same time, tomorrow and this long. 6
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All these words do have a meaning (for example me means the person speaking/writing; tomorrow means the day after today), but they need contextual information to make their meaning complete.
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Words like these are called deictics. The name for the process is deixis. 7
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Deixis is a textual or grammatical relation where the target of the referring expression (the referent) is in the (oral, written or recorded) speech situation.
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If, instead of finding the message washed up on the shore, it had been handed to you by a the writer of the message, the meanings of me, here, the same time and tomorrow would all be clear(er). Me would refer to the person who gave you the message, tomorrow would refer to the day after the one you received the message on, and here would refer to the place where you were standing at the time (though the writer of the message would still have to indicate to you how long a stick they wanted you to bring!). 9
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In this case, the deictics would be clarified by exophoric reference, i.e. by information you had obtained from outside the text.
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This information could also have been provided by the text. For example, the messagemight have read: “My name is John, and I need a stick the same height as the railings. I am standing at the end of Brighton pier and it is 3pm on August 16th 2016. Meet me here at the same time tomorrow with a stick this long.” 11
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The second part of the message now makes more sense, because of the information given in the first half The words me, here, the same time, tomorrow and this long are all explained by the earlier information. This second version of the message is an example of anaphoric reference, i.e. the information we need to understand the meaning of the deictic words like me has been given earlier by the text (in this case, it refers to someone called John).
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The message could also have been written in a different order: “Meet me here at the same time tomorrow with a stick. I am standing at the endof Brighton pier on August 16th 1996 at 3pm. My name is John, and I need a stick the height of the railings.”
In this case the referencing process works in the other direction—we can supply the meanings of me and tomorrow from information that comes later in the text. This is known as cataphoric referencing. 13
Past experiences and routines
Many of our conversations take the form of routines. We know what to expect because we’ve taken part in them so many times before. When someone says ‘Knock, knock’, you know you are supposed to reply ‘Who’s there?’. If someone you knew slightly greeted you with ‘Hello, how are you?’ you would most probably respond with a variation of ‘Fine, and you?’.
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So we bring our past experience of similar interactions to work when we decide how to interpret certain routinelike utterances.
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Your prior knowledge ď Ž
As a listener or reader, you bring all your past experiences of the world to everything you hear or read.
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These experiences influence how you interpret language; to some extent you have experiences in common with people from the same cultural background as you, and to some extent, your experiences are unique to you. 16
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The field of pragmatics is an area of linguistics which holds a particular fascination for many people, because it is clear that the human mind does something we still do not fully understand when it selects which aspects of the context are relevant to the interpretation of a text or discourse. It is one of the aspects of language use that artificial intelligence experts still have not fully explained, and one of the reasons why computers still cannot talk to us the same way people do.
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Apocryphal (and/or humororus) illustrations of the problems which computers have had in imitating this ability of humans include a computer translation of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ as ‘invisible idiot’, and of ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ as ‘the vodka is good but I don’t recommend the meat’. 18
Register
Finally there is a further dimension to word meaning to consider—the meaning words acquire through the ways they are used—and the people who use them.
This is the sociolinguistic aspect of meaning, and it is another reason why many words that might semantically appear to be synonyms are not actually synonymous in use. 19
Example:
Home, abode and residence all mean ‘the place where I live’. However, you are not likely to use these words interchangeably. You might invite a friend home with you any day of the week; you might invite them to your abode if you were making a joke, but you would probably not invite them to your residence. The difference between the words is in the degree of formality/informality. 20
Home is the least formal word and therefore the word most likely to be used in ordinary conversation. Residence is the more formal, and only likely to be used frequently in legal documents or when talking about a very high status member of society—you will hear news broadcasters observe that the Queen is in residence at Buckingham Palace, or refer to the Prime Minister’s country residence, for example. 21
Most formal English words are derived from Latin and Greek roots, while many of the most “ordinary” and informal ones have Germanic origins. Home for example, resembles the German and Norwegian word Heim, while residence comes from Latin. Word length (lexical “heaviness”) is also closely connected to how formal a word is, and often to its origins. Home has just one syllable (i.e. it is monosyllabic), while residence has three (i.e. it is polysyllabic). 22
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The difference between formal and informal language is also called a difference of register. Register refers to a style of language appropriate for a specific context. Thus a formal register is appropriate for legal documents and official occasions like the opening of Parliament, while an informal register is appropriate for casual conversations. 23
To take an illustration from a novel, consider the following extract from Small World by David Lodge: “For more elaborate ablutions, or to answer a call of nature, it was necessary to venture out into the draughty and labyrinthine corridors where baths and showers and toilets were to be found—but little privacy and unreliable suppliesof hot water.”
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The italicised words are derived from Latin or Old French; some of them (labyrinthine,ablutions) are relatively infrequent in casual speech; all of them have more than onesyllable. Compare the effect of these words on the passage with a rewritten version below which omits them: “If you wanted to have a bath or a shower, or to use the loo, you had to go out of your room, and the corridors were draughty and hard to find your way around. The bathrooms weren’t terribly private, and there wasn’t always hot water.”
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The rewritten passage, while carrying substantially the same meaning as the original is much more informal, much more like casual speech. We have not only changed some of the lexis (from elaborate ablutions to have a bath or shower; from to venture out to to go out) to create this effect of course; we have also changed the word order, changed the passive form into the active and used the second person ‘you’, which is a less formal form, and turned the one long sentence into two shorter ones. All of these contribute to making the text less formal and more like speech. 26
How close are the meanings of the two passages? In terms of the information they carry about the place being described, they are very close in meaning. But other kinds of meaning have been lost and created in the rewriting. 27
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The very fact that Lodge’s original version is more compact, elegant and formal than ours, carries meaning; one interpretation of his choice of register is to have comic effect. The rather grand register contrasts with the mundane subject matter to create humour, which is lost in our rewritten version when the register is changed. 28
People do deliberately experiment and play games with meaning and with register. Such experiments and games are frequent, and sometimes even extreme. They are to be found in the literary language of poems, novels and plays, and in language use which is non-literary as well.
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People often attempt to create new and unique meanings by manipulating factors relating to meaning that have been considered here—by combining words with opposite meanings, by using synonyms and emphasizing the slight differences in meaning between the words, and by changing register. 30