Preface
I’m grateful to the linguists who read the previous version of the
article. In the current drafting I tried to take their comments into
account and to answer the questions raised. The most important are:
“It was not quite clear to us precisely what does your
proposed new level of information and analysis consist of ”. – The
proposed level of information consists of operational states and their
structures. The operational states are bits of nonsemantic operational
information and form operational structures. The questions that would
allow a better understanding of what it is would be: how is this
information used (what is its role) and how can it be detected. Here is
the summery of the responses one can find in the current drafting of the
article. The main role of operational information is to form a basis of
grammatical meanings, but it needs the following clarifications: 1) Just
as a word form can be polysemous, one grammatical meaning can combine
several operational structures. 2) Depending on the kind of relationship
constituting operational information, it serves not only as a basis of
grammatical meanings, which needs a special technique to be detected,
but is also incorporated in operations such as negation and determines
detectable quantitative and elective characteristics of some information
units.
“The argument from aphasia over recall of names is unconvincing,
unless naming and meaning are seen as the same thing. As noted above,
‘information’ is used in a variety of contexts and senses, so the
relation of information and meaning is left opaque, and there is still
no sense of how linguistic conventionality or diversity might be
accounted for ”. – The message of the example with aphasia is that the
patient possessing the notion of the thing can’t remember theword which means the notion that enables naming .
But even if this example is unconvincing, the other three arguments are
not contested and therefore are sufficient to recognize disconnecting
the meaning from the word. The choice of the proposed notion of
information not available in linguistics is based upon the phenomenon of
disconnecting meaning from the word in speech: The meaning detached from
the word ceases to be meaning but remains information. For that
“meaning”, I introduce the term information unit .
“One would like to know what has ‘quantity’, ‘boundaries’,
and ‘electivity’ in the ‘initial state’, and what are the initial
and derived states of the operations ”. – If the derivative
quantitative state can be determined as including, the initial state
remains undetermined. It can, in turn, include another state or no state
but always accompanies the derivative state. That’s what makes it
involved in quantity. Similarly, if the derivative elective state can be
determined as substituting, the initial state remains undetermined. It
can substitute another state or no state but the substituting state is
formed through it. That’s why both states are characterized by
electivity. Quantity and electivity are universal characteristics of the
perceived world. One can explain the difference between the two with
minimal number of notions (in order not to “multiply entities without
necessity”) through the use of derivative elements generated in
operations from the initial ones. The elements brought out from the
operations become static (I call them operational states ) and
constitute bits of nonsemantic information.
“Actually, ‘hyponymization’ seems to be confused with
‘specification’, when oak is taken to
‘hyponymize’ tree- oak is a hyponym of tree, but in oak
tree specifies the type of tree as a member of the subsets. Let
alone the problem of different noun-noun relations as in fruit
tree, forest tree, … ” – In all these cases the only thing
that matters in our approach is the behavior of the information of the
word tree . In each case, regardless of whether the
accompanying word means a species (oak tree ), a variety
(fruit tree ) or affiliation (forest tree ) of the tree, the
information of the word tree undergoes the operation of
hyponymization.
“The analogy between the perception of physical objects and
purported mental objects or states is unclear at best. What is the
‘value’ of a mental ‘object’? ” – The example with perceived objects
is provided to confirm that the inherent characteristic of quantity is
the property to be accumulated: The smaller is included in the larger.
The article deals only with information (not with a mental object) and,
unlike the parameters of a real object, which reflect its quantity, the
information parameters (operational states) are attached to it but don’t
reflect its value.
“The ‘linguistic readings’ used to reveal the allegedly
previously unobserved parameters look remarkably like semantic analyses
involving implicatures. – The linguistic reading, shown on the example
of Russian transitive words, is intended precisely to represent the
unobservable operational structures in a linguistic form. A complex
operational structure can be represented by lexical meanings provided
that their parameters reproduce the quantitative and elective relations
of the structure. The lexical meanings reproducing the relations of a
complex structure create a linguistic reading, which is independent of
semantic analysis and not limited to it.
The central idea of the article remains the existence of an operational
information level. My observations, such as disconnecting the meaning
from the word in speech and the distinction between meaning and
information, have a great importance for the implementation of this
idea.