Re: pragmatics

[Robin Turner <robin@BILKENT.EDU.TR>]

la robin. cusku di'e
>>
>> You seem to be assuming that language "encodes" meaning, which I am by no
>> means sure of.  See Ellis' "Language, Thought and Reality.
>
la .and. cusku di'e

>I confess I've not heard of this book, let alone read it. Could
>you briefly explain what you have against encoding? Speaking as
>a linguistician rather than a philosopher I see no problem at
>all.

ue.u'u.
I got the title mixed up with the famous compilation of Whorf's writings.
The full reference should be:

Ellis, J.M. (1993) _Language, Thought and Logic_. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press.

It's an interesting, if somewhat extreme book, in which Ellis lays into
just about every linguist and philosopher of language around - about the
only people he likes are Saussure and the later Wittgenstein.  Ellis' (and
my own) objection to "encoding" as a metaphor for language is that in the
normal meaning of the word you encode one sign as another by ceratin rules.
 I do not think that language encodes meaning in this sense.  There is no
meaning CAT which is encoded by the word "cat"; as Ellis says, nothing is
"just a cat".  There is a category which (in English) is implied by the
written word "cat" and the vocalisation /kat/ (lack of phonemic symbols
means I've just aquired a Geordie accent!), but these do not _encode_
anything, unless you believe in "mentalese" (Pinker, 1993).

la .and. cusku di'e

>Pragmatics is partly communication and partly social interaction.
>Neither are inherently or exclusively linguistic. By "language
>proper" I meant "stuff to do with language that can be studied
>in and of itself, not as a nondiscrete subpart of some larger
>field".
>

Then you're left with very little, I'm afraid!  That's the problem with
Generative Linguistics: first you lose pragmatics, then you lose semantics,
then syntax gets compressed into an increasingly abstract set of principles
and parameters, until linguistics becomes a minute and non-discrete part of
cognitive science.  Oh yeah, and isn't "encoding" supposed to be part of
semiotics?

robin.