On Piggyback

LJK for the GC.

JL asked about piggybacking, which I believe is a major part of natural language. I said in a comment this morning that Natural English is smooth like a stone in a brook, not like a well-turned bowl. Which got me (doing what I flatter myself to call) thinking.

Suppose it occurs to me that this distinction between the natural smoothness of a stone and the man-made smoothness of whatever it is we choose to make smooth is worth remarking upon more generally through a piece of art. Not being an artist, I’m sure to get what happens next wrong, but this is not about actual artistic process, so bear with me.

So I decide to place side by side on pedestals or in viewing cases or whatever juxtaposed examples of natural beauty and man-made beauty. One set of items is a stone from a brook and a sculpted piece of smooth, angle-less, marble. Brook stones are all pretty much the same shape, but we can make the marble piece any shape we wish. Indeed, that choice is one of the differences between the two pieces. How do I deliver that message?

I could put a placard next to the set, saying:

The marble piece is amorphous, but, of course, it needn’t be. One difference between naturally occurring finds and man-made artifacts is that the latter can be made in any shape we choose.

Or, I could just make the marble piece a sphere. The latter approach seems to me more efficient, although, of course, the point would be lost on some people. For their benefit, a placard could call their attention to the artificiality of the marble’s shape, but that would be a different thing from the original approach.

In this example, the message that man-made stuff can be any shape we wish is “piggy-backed” onto the message that some things are smooth naturally and some things are smooth because we make them so.

But we aren’t done yet. The stone may have a nice mingling of colors. Can we make a point about color in our sphere? Perhaps we can apply the very same colors as we see in the stone, but in an orderly pattern that would not appear in nature. Maybe the viewer sees the similarities in color as a way to focus his attention on the distribution of the colors, or maybe he sees the minor differences in the colors as a comment on how futile our attempts are to mimic mature. Not only messages can be piggybacked - provocations can, too.

Language, I submit, offers similar opportunities for carrying multiple messages efficiently. The very act of U addressing A tells A that U thinks it worth his effort to address A. The manner of address tells us more about U’s view of the social relation between himself and A. The volume or speed tells us something about U’s emotional state or sense of urgency. Level of diction announces U’s educational level and, perhaps, his perception of U’s educational level. Allusion can drag in whole subroutines in a single breath.

And so on. Messages heaped upon messages, some of them way more important than the semantic freight of the utterance itself. In my alleged art work, I am not going to use the sphere at all. I am going to mention it and, thereby invite the viewer to infer things about it’s being mentioned “in the same breath” as the brook stone. The sphere’s attributes that might be analogized to an utterance’s semantic payload – they defy description, at least by me, but I believe it has them – are irrelevant. Only the attributes of the sphere, qua artifact, are relevant to the conversational move.

Efficiency, I think, lies at the heart of this layering. It’s almost Parkinsonian: any utterance will be expanded to deliver as much information as the medium can carry. There does seem to be something Gricean here, in that “informativeness,” globally understood, demands not only that the message be complete, but that the package be full.