the frustrations of crossing disciplines

[fox]

me, in my paper's draft introduction: "Assuming that adult speakers have a preference for the minimal and maximal length in syllables of lexical words in their native languages (we may discount function words and grammatical shifters, like articles and pronouns, as these are not carriers of content and are stored differently in the lexicon, assuming they are stored there at all), at what stage do children begin to exhibit this preference?"

psych prof, in the margin next to "stored differently in the lexicon": "Cite?"

argh. argh. i mean, of course grammatical shifters and articles and prepositions and whatnot are different from "real words". of course they are. you mean i have to explain how?

for the professor who's not a linguist, yes. grr. grr.

Comments

Re: Shudder

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

okay -- written words are more or less arbitrary stand-ins for spoken words. and according to saussure, actually, even spoken words are arbitrary signs for referents in the real world. so they don't have inherent content -- but when you say "we make them mean something", i mean, once we've done that, they do mean something, don't they? and a word like "cookie" has (is given) not just a different actual meaning from a word like "and", but also a different kind of meaning. that's my point, and one that seems both (a) intuitive and (b) not really the relevant to the paper i'm writing. :-)

i hope i will see you soon. it looks like i'll be up for new year's, possibly with the bro and fsil, and then painting my new place thursday and/or friday -- want to help? :-D

Re: Shudder

[wholenother.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree with what you're trying to say, it's just that the word "content" makes me shudder. It's the reification thing (oh, crap, there I go punning by mistake), that people begin to believe that words actually contain something or, worse yet, that who documents contain something. Because then you get people wanting to "preserve the content" or have someone just "relay them the content" and crap like that. As if you could somehow separate the content from the expression.

Why do I care? Because we end up believing and therefore doing some really questionable things. Here's a reference for you: Reddy, Michael J. (1993). The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language. In Andrew Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (2nd ed.) (pp. 164-201). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

As for painting, depending on my back, you might actually be able to convince me. Or I might be looking for a job for the summer. I fly back on the 7th.