GRICE E BRECCIA: LA METAFISICA DEL DIALOGO

 THE DIALOGUE   The universe of speech is egocentric. At the centre is the speaker  (ego) and the listener is slightly off-centre ( tu ). The listener becomes  a speaker in his turn and the axis of the universe shifts slightly, but  these are the two persons of speech, and all others are objects to be  pointed out. Ego spreads symbols in front of tu , but tu is the arbiter  of intelligibility. If ego makes unintelligible noises or speaks Greek  to the Eskimo tu , there is no communication and therefore no lan-  guage. If ego's symbols are unsatisfactory or unsatisfactorily  arranged, tu demands a new set or a better arrangement. Since  speech is a function of action, tu ' s acts determine the sense of  ego's symbols to the extent that ego must either acquiesce or come  to a new understanding.   Soliloquy, meditation, and ‘arranging one’s thoughts’ are  imitations of dialogue. They have involved in past time even  movements of lips ; hence the theatrical convention that the soli-  loquy and the read letter can be overheard. But ego does not speak  to ego ; he has far quicker ways of understanding himself. He  soliloquizes before an imaginary tu and he arranges his thoughts  with a view to addressing later some real tu .   The dialogue occurs within a frame of reference provided by  circumstances and concerns some event. Sir A. H. Gardiner 1 de-  scribes speech as four-sided, with the four factors of speaker,  1 A. H. Gardiner, Speech and Language , Oxford, 1932, p. 62.     io ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE   listener, words, and things. The things, however, should be those  of a given moment, forming an external and concrete association  which we call circumstance. It is better to think of them as external  and concrete, because so they are in all languages, including savage  ones. Two persons may discuss the square root of minus one in an  oubliette at midnight and so reach an extreme of abstract speech,  but the topic is no more than the last of a long series of abstractions  which began with the sum of two flints or cave-bears or the    Circumstances or Context    ;t:‘‘ EG<)0   V\ y    ,-N   \ /' y i \   i. \ / / A \   / s \   i T-U   i V v> !   •* s. \|    Event or  Phenomenon    Impression Expression impression  I H    like. A square was once a pattern on the ground. If one says to  another ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ there has to be a  context of ethical discussion to determine what is ‘life’, ‘worth* or  ‘examination*. An insurance agent might be puzzled by the phrase  and emend it to ‘the medically unexamined life is not worth  insuring*. Even so, though more concrete, his language represents  the end of a complex process of civilized abstraction. That speech  should be possible without visible circumstances is a relatively late  development, and is achieved by the creation of contexts. The con-  text of a discourse consists of spoken conventions which enable us  to dispense with visible objects, by siting the discourse well enough  to give the supplementary information that would otherwise have  been derived from circumstance.   The language even of savages contains some abstraction, since  they speak of some parts of circumstance and neglect others. Yet  the Australian Arunta cannot count or distinguish times or identify  themselves. Basque host ‘five* probably means ‘closed fist’, and  counting in multiples of twenty (Basque ogei) was achieved by       LANGUAGE    ii    counting fingers and toes. Getting lost in the higher figures, it  might prove simpler to proceed by subtraction (Lat. 19 undeviginti ,  18 duodeviginti , Finnish 9 yhdeksan, 8 kahdeksan , cf. 1 yksi, 2 kaksi 9  and the Indo-European for 10). Chinese characters are singularly  illuminating concerning the relations between concrete and abs-  tract. ‘Benevolence* is ‘man plus two* (a man who thinks of another  beside himself), ‘happiness* is ‘one mouth supported by a field*,  ‘peace* is ‘a woman under a roof* (indoors), ‘home* is ‘a pig under  a roof* (food and shelter), ‘spirit* is the skeleton of a great man, a  ‘great* man is one who has not only legs to obey but arms to en-  force, ‘father* is a ‘hand holding a whip*. These written analyses are,  no doubt, scholarly and sometimes whimsical. It is not exactly  in that way that abstractions have been derived from objects and  contexts substituted for circumstance, but the language of savages  is astoundingly concrete and only fully intelligible when spoken in  the presence of the objects of discourse.   Communication lies partly in what we say, partly in the circum-  stances. The latter fill in so much that actual speaking is elliptical,  erratic, incomplete, and imprecise. Even the elliptical words may  be further curtailed by substituting gestures, 1 which refer one back  vaguely to the circumstances. Thus one may overhear:   A. Hullo! How*s tricks?   B. So so ; and the boy ?   A . Bursting with energy, thanks.   The first is not a question but a breach of silence, 2 and establishes  the conversation on the basis of casual familiarity. It does not seek  or receive an answer, but an opening is made for A’s principal  interest (which is known from the circumstances), and A , when  replying with information, acknowledges the kindly intention of B.  It is possible to say quite intelligibly ‘Old what*s-his-name is just  bringing in the thingummy*, if, at a Burns dinner, Mr. McLeod is  seen piping in the haggis. It is even better to be imprecise, and to say  ‘my heart went pit-a-pat’, ‘the tray came bang, thump, crash down  the stairs’, or ‘whiff, it *s gone*, because, while the circumstances   1 Gesture-languages seem, however, to be translations of the spoken word or  of set phrases as a whole. The Arunta are said to have a gesture-language of 250  signs. This seems to be different from the gestures which refer directly to circum-  stance.   2 *To a natural man, another man’s silence is not a reassuring factor, but, on  the contrary, something alarming and dangerous.* B. Malinowski, Magic , Science  and Religion , Boston, 1948, p. 248.     12    ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE   would explain either these sentences or explicit statements, these  expressions give an impression of the immediate event, not  generalized as one which might occur elsewhere. This is the basis  of the astonishing development of ideophones in Zulu and other  Bantu languages which will be discussed later. When we ‘speak  like a book’ we provide explicit contexts as if circumstances did not  exist visibly to complete our meaning, and this procedure, neces-  sary in writing, is recognized as a defect in conversation.   Grammatical and verbal completeness is thus not required of the  sentence, and there is nothing to be, as older grammarians said,  ‘understood’. It was difficult under the old regime to say precisely  what word or words were to be ‘understood* since the phrase could  be completed in various ways, but older grammarians, obsessed by  literary contexts, did not sufficiently allow for the completion by  environment. R. Lenz 1 gives the following conversation: .   A. Where are you off to, Peter?   B. Valparaiso.   A . At once ?   B. No. Tomorrow, by the slow train.   A What for?   B . A matter of business.   A. Something important ?   J5. Yes; the sale of my land.   A . Have you a buyer in sight?   B . It seems so.   A . Well, congratulations.   B. Thanks.   This is what the linguist must accept. He is not at liberty to rewrite  the sentences so that each should have subject, verb, object, and  other principal parts. They are already complete and fully intelli-  gible in the circumstances. They are even intelligible as parts of a  context. Circumstance, and context eliminate uncertainties which  theoretically exist. Thus of eighty-four words in the fourth tone of  i in Chinese, 2 only ‘thought, will, intention* can exist in the vicinity  of ‘understand*. The same sound may mean ‘a mountain in Shan-  tung*, ‘dress*, ‘I* (in speaking to rulers); ‘licentious*, and ‘hiccup’,   1 R. Lenz, La Oracion y sus partes , 1925, p. 32.   2 Chinese words are quoted according to the transliteration adopted in D.  MacGillivray’s Mandarin-Romanized Dictionary of Chinese , Shanghai, 1925. It  is according to Wade’s system, which has no special advantage beyond that of a  wide diffusion. See also the pocket dictionaries by Goodrich and Soothill.     LANGUAGE    13    but none of these are things one ‘understands*. Actually, by com-  bining synonyms (i+-szu l ‘thought, will, intention’) modern Chinese  gives the hearer more time to identify the meaning, but these  compounds are readily dissolved when no ambiguity is possible.  The written language provides ninety-two different signs for i A so  that the precise meaning identifies itself, without dependence on  visible circumstances or even on context. By way of compensation,  the old literary style was sparing of doublets or other helps to  understanding.   Within the frame of circumstance each sentence refers to an  event or phenomenon as it appears to, and interests, us at the  moment of speaking. We distinguish activities and states, but the  distinction is partly an illusion. ‘Rome is the Eternal City’ now and  as things appear to us, though founded traditionally in 753 b.c.,  and still not so long-lived as Babylon. Damascus and Jerusalem are  older and still exist, but do not appear to us to have the enduring  quality conferred by the succession of the Papacy to the Caesars.  I am content now, but the phrase does not prevent my being dis-  contented in half an hour ; you are a Grand Duke or a soldier, but  a revolution may cancel all titles or you may be demobilized to-  morrow. The event is not known to us in all its cosmic significance ;  we can only speak of what appears to us (represented by the wavi-  ness of the line in the diagram). Of what appears, we put into words  only what momentarily interests us, as in the celebrated observa-  tion: ‘What a lovely day! Let’s go and kill something.’ We make  a mock of the objective statement ‘Queen Anne ’s dead’ because we  are not accustomed to make affirmations without immediate inter-  est ; though historians have devised for such statements a measure  of interest by the postulate that all historical dicta are, in some way,  worth while. Each event is, of course, unique. ‘Bear kills man’ and  ‘Man kills bear’ are totally dissimilar events. It is thus not sur-  prising that many languages should have word-sentences which  express each event by a unique construction, and all show a  phenomenal residue (the verb) after analysis has gone so far as to  provide names for the parties, their qualities, and their modes of  action and being. The verb continues to show formidable com-  plexities in such a language as French, though the noun has become  almost an invariable unit. The Latin verb offered a complex para-  digm which was simplified by analysis in primitive Romance, but  the Romance languages have used these analytical simplifications     14 ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE   to build new synthetic paradigms. It is clear that the result is not  due to analytical failure, but to an appreciation of the need to dis-  criminate between phenomena.   For the s^ke of simplicity we are considering the first com-  munication of a series. Ego's primary impression of the event may  be derived from any of the senses, though it is most likely to be  visual. It will be more agglomerative than any expression, and  probably either total or of selected parts modified by all their  minor characteristics. Infants, like Humpty-Dumpty, endeavour  to speak in a total way, packing their whole meaning into some  such phrase as din-din. One can take din-din as equal to ‘I am  thirsty’ or ‘Why don’t you give me a drink?’ or (in the case I have  in mind) ‘I want more fizzy lemonade’. The situation is unanalysed  and the whole of it is expressed, so far as the infant can, in two  syllables and their accompanying intonations. On the other hand,  the agglomerative type of structure is common in primitive tongues.  The primary impression is thus intrinsically unlike tu's secondary  impression, which depends on the co-ordination of a linear series  of symbols. The older linguists spoke of ‘inner speech-form’ and  ‘outer speech-form’ as if these had a one-to-one correspondence,  and it is still deemed legitimate to speak of the mental image of a  speech-sound and its actual enunciation. Whether the mind works  in that way a linguist is hardly qualified to know, since his task  begins with the audible sentence . 1 The disconformity between  global impressions and a linear series of symbols seems to be what  convinces so many that their thoughts are too rich for words. There  is an act of translation involved. Impressions are collected at some  point of the brain, co-ordinated, transformed into orders to the  speech organs, transmitted as a series of vibrations, collected by  the ear-drum, and retranslated into meaning. The various mental  movements have been identified to some extent by physiologists.   Ego displays his impression to tu in the form of a linear symbolic  expression. Any symbol that tu accepts is valid for communication  with tu y and any that he rejects is invalid. Ego may offer any one of  many gizon y homoy anthropos , czlowieky mard y ember , mies, jen y hito t  insdn, adamy orang , muntu, oquichtli, runa or tree y zugatz , arbor y  Baum , dendron , derevo y car and so on. The relation between sound  and thing is entirely artificial, and according to the language so is   x See, however, A. H. Gardiner, Speech and Language , 1932, ch. ii, ‘An Act of  Speech*.     LANGUAGE    15    the convention. Even onomatopoeia is conventional. The imitations  serve, not because they are good, but because they are conventional. 1  To a Frenchman one offers subject-verb-object, and to a Turk  subject-object-verb ; to a Chinese attribute-substantive is the same  as substantive-attribute to a Siamese or Malay. Increased stress  has the effect in one language that play on tones has in another.  The symbols are just symbols, valid in any agreed convention, but  without conventional agreement, unintelligible.   Expression is a linear succession of sounds, and the sentence is  a complete expression. It is understood, as we have seen, within  the frame of circumstance or context, and we cannot presume that  it has any necessary grammatical form. A sentence need not have  a verb ‘expressed or understood’, though it must have the quality  of phenomenality. It need not be a judgement. Most sentences  consist of parts, and this is true even of polysynthetic word-  sentences. The parts are not necessarily words, for in primitive  languages we find embryonic stems which are not precisely deter-  mined for form or meaning, and in synthetic and agglutinative  languages we find affixes which are significant parts of a sentence.   Tu hears the expression and is the arbiter of its intelligibility.  He collects and retranslates the individual syllables as soon as they  begin to be heard, and combines them for meaning. If he cannot  achieve a meaning he asks for further symbols, whether in the  same language or in another. He reacts either by himself becoming  a speaker or by performing some action. But in either reaction it  becomes plain that tu’s impression is not identical with ego’s. Their  minds are somehow differently constituted (symbolized in the  diagram by the size of the circles). Despite all conventional agree-  ment, there is no perfect understanding between ego and tu . What  tu understands, more or less in agreement with ego , are (1) the  reference of symbols to things, which is the ‘logical’ or grammatical  sense of the sentence, (2) an emotional supercharge represented by  agreed stylistic symbols (which may be zero), and (3), since tu is  also an artist in words, something of the event itself. He under-  stands this in his own fashion. He may, for instance, be specially  susceptible to the word torpedoed as having gone through the experi-  ence or as being endowed with a vivid imagination. In this third  aspect of meaning, however, though it is not expressed in symbols,   1 e.g. the sound of a shot is in English bang or crack , in Spanish pum or pa$  (the latter perhaps more appropriate to the slither of the bullet as it lands).     16 ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE   there is something on which the artist in words can reckon; a play  of mind on mind, through language but above convention, which  is presumably the secret of great poetry and oratory. There is here  an aspect of language which is beyond exact measurement but can  be intuitively felt. The speaker not merely conveys a logical mean-  ing and an emotion to the hearer, but stirs the hearer to a secondary  act of creation. The reactions to great literature are diverse and  some of them stimulate further reactions, so that works as funda-  mental as the Authorized Bible, Hamlet , and the Aeneid become  encrusted with added meanings, and are hard to reduce to their  original intention. Nor is the original intention, say of the Aeneid ,  necessarily the highest value of a poem on which the imagination  of a Dante has operated so profoundly.