Whence cometh linguistic meaning?

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its two-hundred-and-eighty-seventh issue:

"Emotion, Reason, and Language: Meanings Are Made, Not Retrieved" by J. Marshall Unger.  A free pdf of this paper is available here.

A B S T R A C T

Most researchers of writing are no doubt familiar with the historical, general linguistic, and neurolinguistic arguments in works by DeFrancis (e.g. 1984, 1989), Unger (e.g. 2003, 2014, 2016), and others against the conceptualization of writing systems as either phonographic or logographic, and thus against the disjoint classification of their graphic units as either phonograms or logograms. Here I discuss new studies of reasoning and conscious thought (especially Barrett 2017 and Mercier & Sperber 2017) that shed light on the classification of writing systems and their components from yet another direction. These studies make new and cogent arguments that emotion and reason are not stored routines or algorithms retrieved by mental processes akin to computer programs but are rather thoughts and behaviors that emerge in real time. Recent studies of brain states during the transition from word recognition to word understanding (Kutas & Federmeier 2011, Broderick et al. 2018) strongly suggest that linguistic meaning likewise is dynamically created on the occasion of each linguistic interaction. Given the failure of the metaphorical understanding of emotions, reasoning, and lexical meanings as prestored context-independent entities retrieved during cognitive activity, the notion of a pure logogram — a symbol representing a unit of meaning possessed by an individual word or morpheme — becomes vacuous.

On the phonographic-logographic spectrum of the conceptualization of writing systems, I must confess that I am on the phonographic side, definitely not the logographic side, whereas Unger tries to bridge the gulf between the two sides.

 

Selected readings

"The horror of ideograms" (2/25/09)

"Pinyin for the Prez" (10/25/18)

"'Arrival is a tree that is still to come'" (10/10/16)

"Firestorm over Chinese characters" (5/23/16)

"Which is worse?" (1/21/16)

"Chineasy? Not" (3/19/14)

"Writing: from complex symbols to abstract squiggles" (6/11/19)

"Homophonophobia" (2/7/15)

"Zhou Youguang 1906-2017" (1/14/17)

"John DeFrancis, August 31, 1911-January 2, 2009" (1/26/09)

"Miracle" (12/21/14) — especially in the comments

"Dumpling ingredients and character amnesia" (10/18/14)