The concept of sense constancy

nd ~ubiish~~

Company

ercived August 1975

e mad& of sentence processing advanced m the field of generative mar have orw important characteristic in common: production and of a sentence are described hy a flow diagram. At certain points of the generating process certain parts of the speaker/hearer’s competence (rules, lexical entries . ..) become effective. Chomsky’s first model (1957), the Chomsky-Katz-Fodor model, (i.e., syntax plus interpretive semantics (1965)), and the different models proposed by different authors in the field of generative semantics (e.g., Lakoff, McCawley), differ as to the place and therefore to the sequence in which differently conceptualized parts of competence are brought into action.’ However, L:i:y all maintain one basic tenet, which might be formulated as follows: a correct (grammatical, well-formed, semantically normal, ‘happy’ . ..) sentence will be processed if, and only if, all stations of the flow chart have become active in the prescr+ed order. If, on the other hand, the sente ce which is ta be processed gets stuck, as it were (for instance, because the semantic readings oi’ two words are incompatible), no correct sentence is produced or understood. Semantic (‘the paint was silent”), is an example of this conception; Katzodor’s Se tic Component was introduced into the generative ’ To be exact, generative grammarians have up to now published only models of linguistic competence, not of the actual :,erformance of producing and understanding sentences. But since generative grammarians claim precedence of competence over performance (see, e.g., Chomsky 1965; Schlesinger 1967), the structure of their competence models is a decisive constraint on any performance model containing a competence model. So Garrett and Fodor (1968) or Mackay (1971), are quite justified in drawing flow charts of the competence models mentioned. 269

270

Ii. Hoermann / The concept of sense comtancy

model expressly to avoid the occurrence of phenomena like these. However, everyday experience shows that we actually &I understand sentences or utterances wV::h just cannot (or at least should not) been l>rocessed by a mode! of this kind. A smiling meadow in spring is easily understood and et zn the famous ‘silent paint’ loses 1ts exceptionality

:

Behind a newly constructed and painted wall the body of a rnurdercd man was found. Intensive s
ermam f The corxept

so s~r~~~~,l~ly by Chafe

is ~nai~~sed accordin e we come to

and

(1970).

of sertse constancy

271

If the sentence

to one Of the models of generative grammar, at some

to

??hen now the meanings of the words ‘to drag and ‘foot’ are looked up in the lexicon, a semantic interpretation of this sentence beco,mes possible. The interpretation one arrives at in this way might roughly be paraphrased by ‘John is awfully tired so that he doesn’t lift his feet from the ground when walking’. f we present this paraphrase to the speaker of John is dragging his feet he will in all probability tell us that this is not what he had intended to convey. His intended meaning was ‘John is reluctant to do-what he is supposed to do; he temporizes’. Why didn’t our analysis of the sentence - Zegcartis as it was - arrive at the intended interpretation? Or, if ut this question in a slightly different form: what would have bee this case - the correct course of the analytical processing of the sentence? The first answer is this: we should not have separated the verb ‘to drag’ ect ‘feet’. But how could we have known beforehand that in rocess verb and object separately? In many other cases this separate processing would be exactly the right thing to do. By what mechanism do we decide whether to use a word-by-word analysis in processing a sentence or an analysis which comes down only t; :2phrase level so as to operate upon ‘dragging his feet’ as a unit? The meaning of the sentence obviously depends upon what is accepted as the unit of analysis; but by what criteria do we choose the appropriate unit? Should we

272

II. Hoertnat~tt / The cottcept

of setlse constattcJ*

invent anot]_rer ad hoc competence? Or should we try t0 revise the basic -rammar? We have already stated that in this oomflow model of genertitivl: ‘. man model a ser,tence (in pro luction as we11as in perception) is considered to be 5yept&ic after having passed a prescribed number of instances in a prescribed order. This basic 11k pothesis is no longer tenable. Xui.brightness of an object wIli& are &I, to &anges in lighting, in order to guarantee rrcogmtion of tl;c particuiar ot>ject. When we walk around a rectangular table, the retinai image 6‘ this table will go through a series of rather formidable deformations, which are cancelled out in perception: this we call the phenomenon (or ‘the mechanism’) of

shape ~nGancy. not

#Ow

;I> it

hi

wart’.

A visitor who advanctzs two steps to shake h;mds does SLldderily to twice his former size: Siz+constancy ensures that, :I LIit‘ftsrt:nt ~orq~ut~r prop-amme is wai in which the various

.t r;imihr

vcirr

tlw

wnccpt

of‘ wrist‘

const;tncy

shoulct

be

inttxprrted.

lit prefers tc>9x viholc c>bjUs irist~d of dots, points, parts), 11~is also preyared, even determined, to find meaning in the world he encounters. Sense constana:y is in a manner of speaking --- the effect of the ‘effort after meaning’. which is, according to Bartlett (1932), the basic trend of cognitive activity. With this conception of sense constancy we approach a specific tradition in philosophy and psychology. This tradition which leads from Brentano to Meinong, Stumpf and Husserl, stresses the intentionality of consciousness; The ego is directed in an act at its object, which becomes meaningful bg~being the object and aim of this act. ” An intentional act constitutes the nucleus for our experience of living in an intelligible world. Man presuppose events he meets in the world e, in principle, intelligible, no? to be a matter of chance; these even meaningful. He is set to find meaning. he expects objects and events to fit into the world which is structured according to his understanding. Violations of this intelligibility make him helpless to a degree which forces him to have recourse to laughter: i\lw

1s not

oniy

prt’parccl

for

the

pcrwptiot~

Mr. A meets Mr. B late at night. to find something on the ground.

of

otjccts

(so

that

is 01-iall fours, obviously trying

’ \+‘c would like to stress that thi> ‘rapproclxn~cnt’ to llusscrl dots n’,t inq)l;v. that WC also accept his ontological tenets about the existence of ideal objects, etc. Wt :.arenot so much interested in the logical content of a judgement, but rather in the psychological act of “Urteilen”, which for Husserl is only “ein fliichtiges Erlebnis” (Log. Unters. 1913, 2: 44).

274

H. Hoermanu / The concept of sense constancy

Mr. A: What are you doing? Mr. B: I’m looking for my purse. Mr. A: Where did you se,: it last’.’ Mr. B: I remember that it fell down on the road about a mile from here. Mr. A: But .(. do you think somebody picked it up and brou Mr. B: No, but I’m searching for it here because the street-la some light. This brings a smile to the fact of the reader because otherwise he cannot come to terms with B’s beha\siour. B’s behaviour does not make sense, because when the geographical location o?losing’ is fixed, ‘looking for something lost’ only does make sense when i’ ;s put into effect at the same geographical location. As we see: “When someone’s behaviour is normally (at a glance) intelhgible to me as the performance of him of such-and-such ac--_-tion my understanding is grounded on’certain presumptions” (Forguson 1968: 93). Among these presumptions are that the observed person has certain intentions, goals, motives, beliefs. “Any understanding of anyone’s behaviour .. . is dependent upon my general ability to ascribe these beliefs to him successfully: an ability to ‘place’ his behaviour as the performance of certain actions. For if I could not ascribe these beliefs to him, I could not identify his behaviour as his performance of an action” (Forguson 1968: 94).

This net of tacit presumptions and beliefs beco scious only w the operation of “placing” an observed act cannot be executed successfully, 3 A foreigner visiting for the first time in his life a comes acutely aware of what non-intelligible actions are amount of introspection shows, in this case, that he is c fo make sense by projecting a net of presumptions and his perceptions might be inserted meaningfully. “I-Iuma a semantic vacuum” (Schlesinger 197 1: 68). n psycholinguistics, a related approach has been advanced by (1970). According to him, words function “to signal, or specify, an intended referent relative to the set of alternatives from which it might

3 This is in the terminology of Polanyi (196 2) a clear case of subsidirry knowing becoming focal knowing.

be differe~ti3ted I1 i’s70: 264).

.. . thus, the meaning

of an utterance

is dependent

on the contest

of alternatives”

he weakness of

son’s theory is its exclusive concentration on “language as reference“. is asst’Hion that “‘language is merely the specificaiion of ma in tended rent rel;fti\e to a set of alternatives” (p. 272) is ~~rt~l~fllynot E~‘n;ibl ore cautious is Oiler‘s f0rnWlation:

ro~~nding world and a concrete detail thrown into relief must not be confuued with the relation existing between code and sign. When talking about code, sign, information, we talk about a proceeding which involves the selection of one sign from a pool of signs (called code). After this selection is niHde, the j2001 of (non-selected) signs is of no importance whatsoever. In our case, throwing into relief ;i meaningful det;iil bef’ore the horizon of ;1generally significant structure of our verbal iW1 nonverbal tYWironrnent presupposes the sin~ult;.tn~ous q~pt’rception, by the Nt‘nt‘r, of both the specific m~ss;lge ;1nci its g~ner,rlly meaningful blckground. “Die Aktualitht des Erlebens :-J . . . rnit der Transzendenz seintrr anderen Mtiglichkeiten integriert” A~1lnlmIl 197 1 : 3 1). This simultaneous appercept on of’ a wrtut utterance and of its meaningful general background is tht! nucleus of understanding. If this simultaneous ajq-erception is acliievc d, we become conscious of being able t0 respond (verbally or by non-verbal behaviour) appropriately. Deese has -$eenthis very clearly. For him “understanding hear ..,‘* (1969:

is the inward 516).

sign of the potential

for reacting

appropriately

to what we see or

Man presupposes, as we have put it, the events in his perceived world to make sense in a very general way. III a communicative situation the speaker intends to induce the listener, by his utterance, to make a con-

’

276

H. Hoerrnann / The concept of sense constancy

Crete realization at a specif‘c point of the horizon of sense. This is what the speaker means by his utterance. 111the listener, the conscio ‘feeling’) of having understood (Deese’s “introspectively disco ward sense”) signals the ability to respond adequately. To understan what a speaker means can be paraphrased, according to our hypothesis, as the introspectively discovered conviction of the listener that he would be able to interpret successfully the meaning intended by the speaker if he were put to a test. Whether such an interpretatic;l would actually be a ‘successful’ one could be confirmed, strictly speaking, only by the speaker himself. And we all know, of course, of cases m which the speaker says, after hearing or seeing the listener’s ‘interpMiie behaviour’, ‘no, that’s not what I have meant’. This caze shows us precisely that understanding as a ‘feeling of being able if necessary’ actually does not depend on having made the concretizing realization actually at that point of the horizon of sense which the speaker intended. This ‘feeling’ signalizes only a subjective conviction -of having grasped what the speaker meant. Perhaps this is the place to remember Lashley’s famous experiment: he told his audience something about rapid writing and then after a short time asked them to make a careful introspection while he was to read aloud the following sentence: Rapid righting with his uninjured hand saved fro the capsized canoe

loss the contents of

en hearing the word ‘capsized’, the processin listener is completely set off. Up to this point, he was subjectively conwould be able to understand the sentence. The occurrence of ‘capsized’ tells him that he ‘underst d’ something, but what the speaker meant. In our terminology, the word ‘capsized’ the sentence made sense for after having re-structured it to accommodate the whole sentence to ‘, did the sense which the listener ex g intended by the speaker. w we may compare the two concepts) of ‘making sense’ and “underce makes sense if the listener is able to interpret it se structures which make world and behaviour inunderstands the same utterance, when his ensuing se proves (or eventuallly might prove) that the con-

211

onds to that meant by the g sense at a point intended by the speaker’. far wider range of mental states than ?.HIof sense constancy guarantees that the processing of al state is’reached which falls within the m advances, in his discussion of metaunds the quite similar concept of “Sog der he important mark of sense ctivity is not confined to changes e. Sense conskncy quite often works by he apprehending frame of reference of

the listener keeps within the area of making sense by thinking of a world in which handkerchiefs are starched. Oiler (1972) has convincingly shown that the apperce of the sentence theory of relativity is blue ntil it arrives at presupposing a situation in which a book on relativity theory is soug t or filed acco the colour of its back. this one do not make sense. . . . crucial to our underependent of settings canstanding. A theory which y for such strange sennot explain them” (p. 47) terxes as ‘the theory of relativity is blue’ -- Uhlenbeck quite rightly says thnt in the absence of any situational data it is impossible for the hearer to know how he has to interpret even a sentence like ohn is playi

oes the speaker want to ex elf, is playing this ga (1963: 15).

ss the fact that John, who never plays e to the surprise of his environ

278

H. Hoerrnann / The concept of sense constancy

When processing a sentence like John is dragging his feet we arrive at an interpretation making sense because a very ‘shallow’ analysis, which takes ‘dragging his feet’ as a large or molar unit, already does make sense - and therefore the processing is discontinued before it breaks up the complete phrase into the separate units of verb and noun. Recent advances in the psychology of memory processes stress a related concept of ‘levels of processirt,‘. For Craik and Lockhart (1972). for instance, the ‘depth’ to which analysis proceeds is correlated with storage and availability for retrieval of the stored verbal material. “Trace persistence iS a function of depth ok analysis, with deeper levels associatd with more elaborate, longer lasting, and stronger traces” ( 1972: 675 j. Highly familiar, meaningfui st’muii, which are (by definition) compatible with already existing cognitive structures, will - according to this hypothesis -- be processed to a deep level more rapidly than less meaningful stimuli. Craik and Lockhart point to the fact that depth of analysis is dependent upon different factors, one of them being the type of task to be performed with the verbal material stored. This conception implies, of course, that it is a matter of decision to which level the process of analysis is continued. Combining the linguistic with the psychological description we mig demonstrate the working of the ‘mechanism of sense constancy by a ittle experiment. ong been thought that certain types of sentences are considered sent little or no difficulty for analysis: the so-called analytical or ant sentences: The circle is round e bachelor is an unmarried man en are female ecause of their simplicity, these sentences are very sensitive to negation. ey are negated, the incompatibility between subject and predicate should render the whole sentence meaningless or incomprehensible - or itshouki demonstrate the effects of sense constancy! Let us take the last of the three sentences and observe what is going on in us when we read its negated form.

ot all WQ ation in the conscious meaning of “female’ le’ now signifies not the mere ical manifestation of sex body-build, female is characterized by such anages to make sense, notwithNegation is compensated, ssary 10 account the language user. rnarily describe ais orientation in an on from any conenerative grammar. ss will make sense. nerative grammar allows. If talking about language has anyhing to do with talkin ::5out understanding language, we need a concept ike sense constancy.

Abra~am~ W., 1941. Stil, Pragmatik und Abweichungsgrammatik. In: A. von Stechow (ed.), Beitraege zur gene:ativen Grammatik. Braunschweig, pp. 1 -- B3. C., 1932. Remembering. London: Cambridge U 1970. Meaning and the structure of language. ‘liicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. ., 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouto.?. Chomsky, N., 1965. Aspects of the thc:ory of syntax, Cambridge, : MI’I. Craik, F.I.M., and R.S. Lo&hart, 1972. Levels of processing: a fr ork for memory research. J. Vrrb. Learn. Verb. Beh. 11, 671-84. ehavior and fact. Amer. Psychologist, 515-522. 968. On “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it”, Theoria 7, 90-101. and J. FoAcx,1968. Psychological t ories and linguistic constructs. In: T.R. Dixon ton teds.‘,, Verbal behavior and neral behavior theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Hoermann, H., 1972. Semantische A malie, Metapher und Witz. Fclia Linguistica 5, 310-330. Husserl, E., 1913. Logische Untersu Katz, J., and J. Fodor, 1963. The structure of a semantic theory. Language 39, 170-216. Lakoff, G., 1971. On generative semantics. In: D.D. Steinberg and I_. Jakobovlts (eds.>. Semantics. London: Cambridge C &iv.Press. Leisi, E., 1961. Der Wortinhalt. 2. Aufl.

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H. Hoermann / The concept of sense constancy

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