Every individual word in a passage or poetry can no more be said to denote some specific referent than does every brush mark, every line in a painting have its counterpart in reality. The writer or speaker does not communicate his thoughts to us; he communicates a representation for carrying out, this function under the severe discipline of using the only materials he has, sound and gesture. Speech is like painting, a representation made out of given materials -- sound or paint. The function of speech is to stimulate and set up thoughts in us having correspondence with the speaker's desires; he has then communicated with us. But he has not transmitted a copy of his thoughts, a photograph, but only a stream of speech -- a substitute made from the unpromising material of sound.
The artist, the sculptor, the caricaturist, the composer are akin in this [fact that they have not transmitted a copy of their thoughts], that they express (make representations of) their thoughts using chosen, limited materials. They make the "best" representations, within these self-imposed constraints. A child who builds models of a house, or a train, using only a few colored bricks, is essentially engaged in the same creative task.* Metaphors can play a most forceful role, by importing ideas through a vehicle language, setting up what are purely linguistic associations (we speak of "heavy burden of taxation," "being in a rut"). The imported concepts are, to some extent, artificial in their contexts, and they are by no means universal among different cultures. For instance, the concepts of cleanliness and washing are used within Christendom to imply "freedom from sin." We Westerners speak of the mind's eye, but this idea is unknown amongst the Chinese. After continued use, many metaphorical words become incorporated into the language and lose their original significance; words such as "explain," "ponder," "see (what you mean)" we no longer think of as metaphorical. Metaphors arise because we continually need to stretch the range of words as we accumulate new concepts and abstract relationships.
A printed text is not simply a chain of individual words, picked one at a time; it is a whole. It has a structure, but it has meaning for us only if it represents a continuity of our experience of past texts. A text in some strange foreign language set up an abrupt change in our experience, a discontinuity, and we make nothing of it. Given a translator's dictionary we may decipher some of the words and attain some understanding, though this understanding through translation has been achieved by projecting the text onto our own language; that is, we are looking at it with the eyes of our English-speaking culture. A grammar book may help us to decipher the text more thoroughly, and help us comprehend something of the language structure, but we may never fully understand if we are not bred in the culture and society that has modeled and shaped the language.Colin Cherry
Cherry, Colin
Cherry, Don
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