1.2.4. Contextual Specification: The linguistic meaning of an utterance

is not by itself sufficient to recover the specific conceptual event

which it attempts to represent. The elliptical derivation relies on implied

information from a number of sources. Contextual specification refers

to that aspect of the implied information which is provided by other

utterances that relate to the one under question. For instance: "It was a

monstrous thing, ugly and evil": Somebody's action? A being from outer

space? The information is recoverable when the adjacent utterances

are supplied: "The flying saucer landed in the middle of the city square.

What came out frightened everyone. It was a monstrous thing, ugly and

evil."

Titles of books and newspaper headlines are often unintelligible until

the context supplies the necessary information: vd. "Blackboard Jungle"

(juvenile delinquency in school), ''Missile gap narrowing" (the U.S.S.R.

is catching up to the U.S.A.), etc.

1.2.5. Situational Specification: The implied information is often left

unstated by the linguistic context to which the utterance in question is

related. In such cases, knowledge of the situation in which the

utterance appears is necessary to recover the conceptual event which

the utterance attempts to represent. For example: The message

contained in "You're on" is recoverable when given the information that it was

uttered backstage addressed to an actor during a rehearsal. "He

deserves the chair" carries the intended message when it is known that it is

said of a convicted murderer and that capital punishment can be carried

out by electrocution. The signs "He" and "She" appearing on adjacent

doors in some restaurants do not convey the intended message to

anyone not familiar with public lavatory facilities in the U.S. "Let it stand"

carries one message when uttered in a lawyer's office by a client to

whom an error in a contract was just pointed out, and quite another

message when uttered in a restaurant by a customer and addressed to the

waitress who is preparing to pour the tea. Television commercials

often make use of utterances whose message would remain completely

obscure were it not for the viewer's knowledge of the situation implied

(vd. "It's quicker by plane": quicker than what? It sticks to the road like

that white line": what white line?). Note also the ecological

information about American cities required to understand the intended

message in "He comes from the wrong side of the track."

1.3. Implicative Meaning: Within the context of the earlier discussion on

implicative meaning, the following distinctions appear salient.

1.3.1. Sociolinguistic Factors: Utterances provide clues about the

social background of the speaker.

1.3.1.1. Geographic Origin: phonological variation and the <

choice of certain lexical items associated with a particular dialect.

1.3.1.2. Education and Socioeconomic Background: richness

of vocabulary and the adherence to a standard of grammaticalness.

1.3.1.3. Profession: the use of technical vocabulary.

1.3.2. Emotional State: hesitations, disfluencies, non-standard

stress pattern, etc.

1.3.3. Intention: including attitude of the speaker toward the

message and his intentions in the communicative interaction. The

following distinctions appear necessary:

1.3.3.1. Mands: A type of utterance which the speaker

uses when he attempts to induce some action in the listener. A

number of these can be specified:

1.3.3.1.1. Request: The speaker assumes that the

listener is already disposed to act in the intended manner. E.g. "Pass the salt, please."9

1.3.3.1.2. Command: The speaker implies that lack of

compliance may result in retributive action on his part. E.g.

"Hands up"' or "Stay at your post. It's an order."

1.3.3.1.3. Prayer (or entreaty): The speaker attempts

to induce compliance by generating an emotional disposition in

the listener. E.g. "Do it. I beg of you."

1.3.3.1.4. Question: The action the speaker expects

on the part of the listener is in the form of verbal behavior. E.g.

"What time is it?"1O

1.3.3.1.5. Advice: The speaker makes the claim that

his purpose is to promote the interest of the listener. E.g. "Take

your coat off. It'a hot in here" (Cf. "Take your coat off! It's mine"

- which is not an advice but a command.)

1.3.3.1.6. Warning: The speaker implies that the

listener is in danger. E.g. "Look out"' or "Fore!" (on the golf course).

1.3.3.1.7. Permission: The speaker releases the

listener from restraint for an action that the latter is already

predisposed to follow. E.g. "Yes, you may."

1.3.3.1.8. Call: The speaker attempts to attract or

maintain the attention of the listener. E.g. "Hey, Charlie"' or "Now listen to this."

1.3.3.2. Pseudo-mands: The speaker expresses a wish

for some action to take place in the absence of an effective listener.

1.3.3.2.1. Superstitious Mands: "Come seven"' (by a

dice player) or "Blow, blow, thou winter wind" (by an excited poet).

1.3.3.2.2. Magical Mands: "Bad luck to you"' or

''Milton, thou shouldst be living in this hour!"

1.3.3.3. Intraverbals: Included under this heading are

utterances that have zero marking for intention:

1.3.3.3.1. Grammaticalness: Conformity of

utterances to grammatical rules is not marked for intent. Deliberate

departure from some standard form may be a device used to

mark intent (e.g. irony, see 1.3.3.7.2.8.).11

1.3.3.3.2. Word Associations: Responding verbally

in conformity with culturally established norms is not marked

for intent. For example, the response "chair" to the stimulus

word "table" when instructed to "Say the

first word that comes to your mind" is predictable from tables

of norms. "Unconscious intent" is inferred in psychoanalysis

when the response does not exhibit a culturally predictable pattern

(e.g. "danger" as a response to "bed" rather than the expected

"soft"). In this instance the response is not an intraverbal.l2

1.3.3.3.3. Conventions: To be included here are

customary greetings("Good Morning", "Hello"), acknowledgements

of thanks, obligatory forms of address, and the conventionalized

exchanges typical of "small talk" (e.g. "How are you?" "Fine,

Thanks!"). Where forms of address and greetings involve optional

alternatives, selection of a particular form is not an intraverbal

convention but is marked for intent.

1.3.3.3.4. Expressions: The surface structure of

stock phrases, cliches, proverbs, platitudes, idioms and the like

represents an intraverbal selection unmarked for intent. (When

the occurrence of the utterance per se, in addition to its

structure, is unmarked for intent, it has the character of a convention.)

1.3.3.3.5. Recitations: Includes reading, reciting,

and all forms that would generally take quotation marks in an account.

1.3.3.4. Private Tacts: The speaker's intent is to

comment on some aspect of his subjective world.

1.3.3.4.1. Tacting Feelings.

1.3.3.4.2. Tacting Opinions

1.3.3.4.3. Rationalizations: Giving reasons,

explanations, justifications for one's behavior, feelings,

attitudes, opinions.

1.3.3.5. Public Tacts: The speaker's intent is to

comment on the objective world or social environment. (Includes

utterances about which the speaker makes the claim that they are

public or objective; see Footnote 9.)

1.3.3.5.1. Instructing (informing, reporting,

propagandizing, teaching): The speaker is interacting with a specific

audience.

1.3.3.5.2. Describing: Comments about events and

conditions in the environment when no specific audience is

involved. Includes journalistic, professional, and scientlific writing.

1.3.3.5.3. Entertaining: The primary intent is to

entertain others rather than to communicate specific content

(e.g. telling jokes, conversational socializing, establishing

interpersonal rapport, etc.).

1.3.3.6. Autistic Utterances: These are not

intended for a listener; they serve a purely subjective function:

1.3.3.6.1. Verbal Fantasy: day dreaming, including

poetic writings that may ultimately come to the attention of other people.

1.3.3.6.2. Self-Tacts: Describing and commenting

to oneself (as in problem solving and mental rehearsal).

1.3.3.6.3. Self-Mands: Where the action to be

controlled is that of the speaker himself (e.g. "Now, I must

remember not to . . .", "I won't let him talk me into it!" etc.)

1.3.3.7. Autoclitics: Utterances whose function it

is to comment on other utterances of the speaker:

1.3.3.7.1. Importance: We can distinguish

the following:

1.3.3.7.1.1. Stress Pattern: (e.g. "You

should not infer from this that . . .")

1.3.3.7.1.2. Repetition (e.g. "I like it very,

very, much.")

1.3.3.7.1.3. Adverbial Intensification: (e.g.

"extraordinary", "Indeed", "I, for one . . .", "We, the people of . . .",

"He was good and mad", "Did you do it, or didn't you?" etc.)

1.3.3.7.1.4. Syntactic Inversion: (e.g. "Advice

they gave us", "Difficult it is, no doubt", "Arrested in the

disturbance were three off-duty policemen", etc.)

I.3.3.7.2. Existential Status:

1.3.3.7.2.1. Assertion: (e.g. "That is correct",

"That's what I mean", "The door is unlocked", "Number Five won")

1.3.3.7.2.2. Negation: (e.g. "That's not what

I mean", "It cannot be true", "John is not coming")

1.3.3.7.2.3. Obligation: (e.g. "The rent must

be paid on the first of each month", "I had to give in", "He

should take care of it", "You ought to know", "The Dean shall

be an ex-officio member of the Students Diacipline

Committee", "Employees may not participate")

1.3.3.7.2.4. Possibility: (e.g. "He can come",

"I could have kissed him", "Couldn't it happen?")

1.3.3.7.2.5. Probabllity: (e.g. "It must have

hurt'', "I don't suppose you understand", "He is likely to

forget", "If he should die . . .")

1.3.3.7.2.6. Certainty: ("He must be well aware

of the situation", "He must be mad")

1.3.3.7.2.7. Hear-say: (e.g. "He is said to . .

be rich", "The two accident victims are reported to have died")

1.3.3.7.2.8. Permission: (e.g, "May I use

your telephone?", "Shall I call the doctor?")

1.3.3.7.2.9. Imperative: (e.g. "Sit down.",

"Do not eat.", "You be the Judge.", "Somebody do something!")

1.3.3.7.2.10. Irony: (e.g. "Aren't we having

fun"', "Isn't that just dandy !", "Didn't we just love it!" (Note

that the use of an exclamation mark -or exclamation stress

pattern in speech - with a syntactic question is a common

device for irony. In some cases departure from

grammaticalness may be used to express irony: e.g. "Nope! I ain't gonna do it!")

1.3.3.7.3. Relational Status: These are

linguistic devices ("hinges") for establishing relations between <

utterances within a larger compositional framework:

1.3.3.7.3.l. Explicit Hinges: "Also, . . .",

"However, . . .", "As indicated above...", "...and...", "...but...",

"Incidentally", "We shall return to this in a moment, but first . . ."

1.3.3.7.3.2. Emplicit Hinges: "This is

true.", "That's the question."

1.3.3.7.3.3. Zero Hinges: Adjacent

placement and punctuation is often the only condition indicating

relations between utterances (e.g. "It rained; we couldn't go

out"). Sometimes, the beginning of a new paragraph implies a

relation to conclusions drawn in previous paragraphs (e.g. "I

would appreciate an anawer at your earliest convenience"

presupposes some content as stated in the other paragraphs of the letter.)

2. Elements of style.

The style of an utterance relates to the specific choices a speaker opts for in the selection of lexical items and paraphrastic expressions in the encoding of a conceptual event and the conveying of intent. Semantic modulation refers to the possibility of alternative phonological strings that have equivalent linguistic meaning but different implicit and implicative meanings. Tonality refers to a global level of description of style (e.g. written versus spoken, technical vs. popular, poetry vs. prose, etc.). Some characteristics of style are the following:

2.1. Internal Consistency: Do all choices of variants have the

same tonality? (For example "I ain't gonna answer this," and "I plead the

Fifth Amendment" have different tonalities which is precisely the reason

why the answer of the accused racketeer has the obvious implication (of

having been coached) when he answers in court "I ain't gonna answer this. I

plead the Fifth Amendment."

2.2. Appropriateness: Are the choices of variants selected on

the basis of proper rules? Selection rules must take into account the

sociolinguistically relevant aspects of the communicative context and the

situationally relevant aspects of the message. (For example "Keep quiet,

please" and "Shut your mouth" are both possible utterances for many

individuals but each is addressed only to certain categories of people; "Please

raise your hands" as a variant of "Hands up" during a bank robbery is

inappropriate to the situation; its striking effect upon the listener when it is

used by some sophisticated bank robber derives precisely from its

inappropriateness.)

2.3. Effectiveness: This can be viewed as an index of the

fidelity of the message in representing the speaker's intent. It refers to the

relation between the deprived meaning of the utterance which the listener

infers and the intented meaning on the part of the speaker. This aspect of

effectiveness is thus a measure of the amount of information maintained

in the process of encoding and decoding of conceptual events.

Another aspect to effectiveness relates to "the power of words to

move." Here, it is a measure of the degree to which utterances affect

listeners in terms of action, emotion, or cognitive reorientation. It is the

manipulative aspect of speech. The speech Octavius delivered after the

assassination of Caesar was highly effective in all three respects.

2.4. Aesthetic Value: This aspect of style relates to the larger

problem of aesthetic judgment in other areas (visual arts, music, dance).

The factors that are known to affect aesthetic judgment in general, such

as complexity, novelty, sensory quality, rhythm, harmony, Gestalt quality,

are also relevant to linguistic utterances. In poetry aesthetic value is of

primary importance and rules have been worked out that are intended to

achieve specific effects (assonance, rhythm, synaesthetic metaphors, etc.).

Aesthetic value has no doubt arbitrary elements that are culturally

defined and must be learned; on the other hand, I would expect that some

aspects of it are dependent on the innate organization of the human mind and

on basic preferences for certain sensory qualities and cross-modality

relations that are universal to the species.

2.5. Affective Value: Affect relates to certain implied

correlates of an event. As discussed in Section 1.2.2., the affect of words

appears to be a culturally stable characteristic. The projection rules for

affective meaning which would specify the resultant affective tone of an

expression or utterance remain to be worked out. For example, although "OLD

MAN" is coded for A-7 in our culture, one can nevertheless appropriately

say "The old man is very active" (similarly,"I had a bad mother" is not

anomolous despite the E+ coding of "MOTHER" in our culture, and probably in

all other cultures). That affective value is linguistically relevant can be

shown by the fact that the following two utterances are paraphrases of

each other: (a) "Don't worry about him, He can't interfere. He is just an old

man." (b) "Don't worry about him. He can't interfere. He is just a passive

old man." The addition of "passive" in (b) is redundant showing that "old

man" is coded for passivity. And, of course, (c) ia anomolous: (c) "Don't worry

about him. He can't interfere. He is juat an active old man."

The factors responsible for the development of the affective value of

words have not been investigated. I would like to suggest two possible

sources. The first relates to the conceptual properties of the object, event, or

quality which the word represents. Thus "AIRPLANE" is coded as A+ since

within the class of objects of which it is a member (e.g. means of

transportation), an airplane is faster than all or most of the others. "FATHER"

is coded as P+ since within the family structure fathers have more status

and power than the other members of the family. The aspectual quality of

words (see Section 1.2.1.) may offer clues to their affective value. For

example, gradualness (see section 1.2.1.5.) may be expected to mitigate the

dominant affective value of an event; thus, "to say" or "to deteriorate"

should be less E- than "to collapse" or "to crash" respectively; they should

also be less P+ - for the same reason. Termination (see Section 1.2.1.7.)

should increase Activity, (compare "the pages have yellowed" and "the pages

are yellow") while nonchalance (see Section 1.2.1.12.) should decrease it

(compare "to toss", "to nibble" and "to throw", "to eat", respectively).

The second possible source of the affective value of words lies in the

culturally given attitude toward the conceptual event represented. For

example, REINCARNATION has an E- coding in the American culture and an E+

coding in the Hindu culture of Delhi, India; PRAYER is high on E+ for

Americans but high on E- for Serbo-Croat speaking youngsters in Belgrade,

Yugoslavia; SUNDAY is the day of the week with the highest E+ coding in

Christian societies, while for Moslem societies FRIDAY takes that

distinction, and I would suppose SATURDAY would win out in Israel.13

The fact that speakers of a language are able to rate words on bipolar

scales (as in the semantic differential technique) and that they show

remarkable agreement with other speakers about these ratings needs to be

incorporated in a general performance model of language. One may want to

argue that affective components are part of the semantic features which

one learns about a word when its meaning is acquired. There are at least

two good arguments one can raise against such a position. The first is that

bilinguals are notoriously insensitive to the affective tone of words in

their second language. The second is that speakers will readily rate a word

on any number of scales one can devise, and were it not for fatigue and

boredom, there would be no limit to the number of such scales. (There is no

requirement that the scales be adjectives: they can be nouns (Bogartz and

Sippola, 1967), pictographs (Osgood, 1959), phrases, etc. so that the task

is theoretically infinite.) It is clear that we are dealing here with a

general and abstract process of semantic utilization: one of the novel aspects

of language whereby we create metaphors and

(continue here)