[Editor’s Note: The following sequels are from For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange by Genevieve Vaughan. Footnotes may differ from the original text.]
General and Particular Processes
One aspect of communication through language is that it narrows down the range of possible experience at the moment to a shared present which, of course, may include mention of other times and places, as well. It often provides a theme or story line around which we can organize our behavior, revisit and interpret our experience together. The story line, and the topics of our conversations, are also gifts of common ground from which our diverse subjectivities grow.
I believe the way language works is by combining constant and general items in particular and contingent ways. We can identify the constant and general items by taking them out of the flow of speech in naming and definition. Their generality is in evidence when they stand ‘alone’ in this way. ‘Dogs are four-legged tail waggers that bark’ lets us consider dogs in general and the word ‘dogs’ in its generality. However, it is the use of words by the many in innumerable combinations in particular sentences that gives them their generality. Words are the common products of the collective, but so are general communicative needs.
When any ‘thing’ becomes pertinent or valuable enough to the many, so that people often need to form inclusive relations with each other in its regard, a word arises socially to fill that need. If the need to form the inclusive relations is only contingent and fleeting, we satisfy it by creating a sentence–combining words that satisfy needs regarding the constant aspects of the thing or topic. A contingent and fleeting communicative need can arise regarding any part of on-going experience.
In ‘After the storm, the sun made the water drops sparkle,’ a contingent communicative need for a relation with others regarding a particular transitory situation is satisfied by combining words, which are also used elsewhere in other sentences regarding other contingent situations. The elements of those situations are relevant to the society of verbal communicators repeatedly, so that a common need arises for a verbal gift that can be given for them, and a constant word arises to satisfy the need.[1] A single word can also be used to satisfy needs regarding different kinds of things in homonymy. One kind of ‘thing’ can become related to different words in synonymy.
Needs build upon each other, and communicative needs can arise with regard to verbal as well as to nonverbal contexts. If the situation giving rise to a contingent communicative need is complex, we can put together a discourse by combining sentences, which we use to satisfy a variety of contingent communicative needs regarding that situation. Sentences work together in discourses to bring forward a common topic and to satisfy a variety of communicative needs arising in its regard.
(To be Continued)
Meet Mago Contributor, Genevieve Vaughan
I have found in my clinical trauma work that the nonverbal is what research states 97% of all communications. And, this essay points to having both verbal and nonverbal communications- all of it is the whole or the semiotic “umwelt”. According to the paper Life and language: Is meaning biosemiotic?
“people draw on wordings that derive from phonetic gestures, their silent surrogates, and inscriptions. By contrast, in linguistics the focus falls on tracing repeatable patterns to ‘knowledge’ of a language system (e.g. a language, competence or the output of a function like Merge). Language is taken to link phonology to grammar/vocabulary in a play of pattern which is distinct from ‘non-language’. Linguists focus on utterances (or discourse) that can be described in terms of form and function (i.e. as what Love (2004) calls second-order constructs). Language is thus separable from interactional, social, bodily and material constraints. ”
Wonderful post– it is much appreciated.