the abyss means...

I have realised today that part of my apathy (or possibly mind-rot) may be due to fact that I am no longer studying anything after all these years. (OK. Nothing outside of technical stuff...)

So, I am refreshing my knowledge of linguistics starting with this (which I found when looking for details of the Dani colour experiments*). I find it odd that I have studied philosophy of language and cognitive linguistics and have never read any Saussure. That may well be my next stop after this essay...

I have also started applying for more jobs in a sudden renewal of hope.

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* Berlin and Kay argued, against the assumption of limitless cultural variability in colour categorization, that in fact different languages use a very limited number of 'basic colour terms', originally taken to be a maximum of 11. Although different speakers of a language draw the boundaries of each colour category differently, they tend to agree on the 'best example' or 'focal point' of the category named by each basic term. Dedrick stresses the crucial importance of the next step in the retreat from relativism. Focal colours are still linguistically embedded, in that they are chosen relative to the basic terms of a language: a substantive universalism requires evidence for the non-linguistic salience of certain colours. This was provided by Eleanor Rosch's work with the Dani, who have just two basic colour terms. Rosch showed that certain colour categories, those which happened to have a 'focal' colour in a central location, could be more easily remembered than others, even without the existence of a word for those categories. The salience of such colour 'prototypes' thus transcends language. These results set the agenda for the universalist tradition in trying to map a remarkable set of regularities, both linguistic and psychological, onto the regularities being sought in psychophysics and physiology.
John Sutton

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I studied physics as an undergraduate, but I have never read Newton's Principia. At some point I'll get around to developing my idea that the need to engage directly with the original texts of the discipline is one of the reasons I don't consider linguistics to be a science in the same way that physics is. (I might get to use the word "historicity" in a real sentence, too, which would be a bonus.) Not that I like the subject any less for that, of course.

Bizarrely, though, when I was first getting all exuberated about semiotics I _did_ borrow a friend's copy of Saussure and have a bit of a read. It's notoriously a mess, the "course". It has this kind of weird geological stratification of Saussure's ideas all piled on top of each other. By contrast Jakobson's "Sound and Meaning" is quite old but also lucid and coherent, and since it develops ideas very much within an acknowledgement of its own historicity (tee hee), there's a very patient unpacking of Saussure's conception(s) of the sign. (Disclaimer: I am an appalling Jakobson fanboy.)

des on January 8, 2003 11:31 AM

Thanks for that pointer. I shall read this next, and then see where it takes me.

joh on January 9, 2003 12:09 AM