I think this conflates different uses of language. Back in my writing tutor days, I learned that language use generally fits into one or more of three categories:
Self-expression (including magnificent yawps)
Communication (including the vast majority of language)
Aesthetic usage (including rhetorical flourishes, poetic devices, and the like).
If you’re judging the efficacy of any particular utterance/writing/linguistic gesture, you gotta figure out what the person was trying to accomplish. Were they just expressing themselves? Were they trying to communicate a particular idea? Were they trying to fill you with a sense of joy?
You can talk about a “usage community” of one, but then you’re no longer talking about communication, and then the conventions dissolve. You can let any word mean whatever you want because you don’t need anyone else to understand. But that’s pure self-expression devoid of communication, and is’ a fundamentally different kind of language use.
When it comes to whether a communicative/aesthetic use is “improper,” I think the term gets really confusing. If I’m trying to communicate to some the urgency of stopping talking, “It is important that you stop talking now” is less proper than “Shut the fuck up!” even if it more closely follow conventions of business English. If I want to signal membership in a certain subculture, saying, “I ain’t got no money” may be a proper way to do so, whereas “I haven’t any money” would fail to do so.
Way I see it, you just backed your claim up with further assertions and hypotheticals.
None of the relevant ideas of speech communities or discourse communities have any acceptance of this idiosyncratic idea of a one-person “language community”. They all emphasise the group nature of communication communities.
Sociolinguistics is the study of language use within or among groups of speakers.
What are groups? ‘Group’ is a difficult concept to define but one we must
try to grasp. For our purposes, a group must have at least two members but
there is really no upper limit to group membership
I’m not interested in debating whether it makes sense to call a single person a community. I appropriated Riemann’s term, “usage community”, because I did not and do not feel like arguing over terminology. As far as I am concerned, “usage community” might as well be “lingtext”. Lingtext is a word I just now invented and it means “the-unit-of-people-who-share-the-same-linguistic-context-including-the-meaning-of-words-used-during-the-given-conversation”, which is very similar but possibly distinct from Riemann’s original “usage community” of “a dialect, […] a culture”, etc.
My point to Riemann (and now to you) was that this so-called lingtext can consist of only one person. Almost everything Riemann said of usage communities can be said more accurately of lingtexts. Words have objective meaning within a lingtext of two or more people; usage within a lingtext of two or more people establishes objective meaning. Words have subjective meaning when lingtexts consist of only one person. Usage may vary among lingtexts or evolve over time as new lingtexts grow and replace old ones. Some words might mean different things among different lingtexts - teenagers vs the older generation, for example. Lingtexts grow by a viral process of consensus-forming (or indoctrination) and meaning is objective in the sense that individual speakers in a lingtext of two or more people do not get to choose their own idiosyncratic meaning without abandoning that lingtext.
A lingtext can consist one or more people, and furthermore, the meaning of words is derived from usage within a lingtext. For support I am citing the examples from post #35. As further evidence I cite anybody who could understand my usage of the novel word “lingtext”. Before I published my definition of lingtext, the meaning of that word was entirely subjective to me. If you read and accepted my definition, even if for the limited purposes of comprehending this post, then I claim the word has taken on objective meaning. A scientist could ask you what the word means, and you could recite the definition I gave you. The same scientist could ask me what the word means, and I could point to the definition I gave you. The definitions having matched, the scientist may demonstrate to third parties that a new word has been defined and has objective meaning for at least two people in at least one context. What is your objection?
Left_Hand_of_Dorkness, would you characterize a diary entry as communication or self-expression? What if an older you goes back and makes a new entry that counters an argument made when you were younger? What if an even older you replies, taking the side of the youngest entry?
“June 2. Truly, the apricot is the worst fruit in existence. It smells sickly in the heat and secretes a horrible sticky juice. X also smells sickly in the heat of summer and he is always sweaty because he is so fat. He is very much an apricot.”
“June 3. The above entry is mistaken, and its author foolishly overlooked culinary applications of the apricot. Surely there are worse fruits than the apricot, which has at least thirteen different culinary uses! Whereas X is very much useless and so cannot be an apricot.”
“June 4. Apricots are truly the worst fruit in existence. It matters not how many dishes can be made with a fruit if they all taste horrible. X is repulsive in every way, and useless to boot, therefore X is best described as an apricot.”
Does your characterization of the above diary change when somebody else (i.e. you) reads it? Cannot one person communicate a particular idea to themselves? What happens if the author of that diary were to go out and call X (who did not read the diary) an apricot? Would that be self-expression still? What if the author lets his friends in on the new definition of apricot as someone who is useless and repulsive, and then goes and calls X an apricot?
That’s nice that you think that, but then your own definition of the word you invented is internally contradictory. Because “conversation” also has an objective meaning, and it isn’t “talking to myself”.
Now, you could resolve that by redefining “conversation”. But I have little doubt it’s going to turn out to be Humpties all the way down.
Wow, I’m not even sure what you’re trying to get at here. But I’ll try to answer on a superficial level, understanding that it might not get at what you want to get at.
A diary intended only for the use of the writer is self-expression. If it’s written entirely in emojis, and the author remembers their coded meaning, cool. How could it not be? If the writer forgets that coded meaning, too bad. If the author intended for the code to be remembered, she failed in her intent; if she did not intend for the code to be remembered, she succeeded.
If someone else reads it, and they understand the coded meaning, cool. Did the author intend for the code to be understood? She succeeded in her communication. Did she intend for her code to stay unbroken? She accidentally communicated and failed in her intent.
I don’t care about the diary when it comes to calling someone an apricot. For whatever reason, they either understand the intended meaning, or they don’t. If the apricot-caller meant for their meaning to be understood, they communicated successfully.
You’re asking a lot of “what if” and “what happens” questions that don’t have clear choices for answers. Instead, ask yourself these questions about any language use:
In the specific language use, did the speaker intend to communicate a meaning to a different audience?
If so, did the audience understand the meaning?
If so, did the speaker successfully convey any aesthetic/rhetorical/emotional nuance (if any was intended)?
Apparently so. Because I think that a communication only qualifies as a communication if it succeeds. If I have an idea and I am unable to transmit that idea to you then I failed to communicate my idea.
Let’s take the example where a group of boys have established what you call a coded word, “apricot”, with the secret meaning of “repulsive and useless”. One of the boys hurls this coded word at X who is not in the group, with the intention of communicating “X is repulsive and useless” to other nearby boys in the group, and a secondary intention of embarrassing and confusing X. Both intentions are accomplished. Would you say the communication was successful?
Here is the million dollar question: who decides what the word “apricot” meant?
Boys in the group are privy to the coded meaning and therefore I say, to them and in that context, the word “apricot” means “repulsive and useless”.
X who is not in the group and who is not privy to the code might think “apricot” actually means apricot. Or, perhaps X can catch on and realize “apricot” is somehow being used as an insult. I say, to X and in that context, the word “apricot” means either the orange fruit of the same name, or some sort of lame insult.
As to this secondary question of whether the communication was a success or failure, suppose X did not catch on. He thinks “You are an apricot” literally means “you are an apricot” which makes no sense because X is not an apricot. From his perspective, would he say the communication was successful? I think from his perspective there was a miscommunication. He may follow up with something like “what do you mean, ‘You are an apricot’?” - which is the colloquial way of communicating “you appear to have miscommunicated, would you please clarify the meaning of ‘You are an apricot’?”
The problem I have with your three questions is that all three are answered in the positive, but only when I am privy to the secret code used in the hypothetical. If you take away my perfect knowledge, I could become like X and reach a different conclusion. I believe it follows that the question of whether a communication is successful or not is subjective.
As for the diary, I shall be contented if you agree that a single person can in fact create a personal language or code (of emojis or what have you) and assign meaning to the symbols used. I think it further strengthens my position if you would also agree that a second party might look at the diary and be unable to understand the code. To this person the symbols might have different meanings, or no meaning at all. Perhaps to all people, besides the author, the symbols have different meanings or no meaning at all. If the symbols still have meaning to the author, it follows that a single person can assign meaning to symbols.
Let me address a possible counterargument. Someone might say, a personal language can only be understood by one person and therefore is useless for communication. This might be admitted, except that the author of said diary may one day teach another person the code. In the alternative, someone might decode the personal language. Therefore, a diary written in a personal language has potential for communication, even if one person cannot communicate with themselves and only one person (or none) currently knows that language.
As for your counterargument, I understand that it is your position that a coded diary entry cannot be considered a communication unless its author intended for others to understand it. Actually I think you are fine with autocommunication but let’s assume that autocommunication is not true communication (see above paragraph). If one cannot communicate with himself, and if the coded diary entry can never properly be communicated with others (because the author never intended to do so), it might be argued that a coded diary entry is truly useless as a subject of semantic analysis - that the symbols have no meaning. I have no counter to this argument (do you?), except to deny one of the premises. I don’t particularly care which premise is denied - either semantics covers things which are not communications, or autocommunication is a form of communication.
I think coded diary entries are proper subjects for semantic analysis regardless of whether the author intended to communicate. If a theory of semantics fails to consider the meaning of words in coded diary entries, I think that theory of semantics is incomplete. There are a number of other edge cases I think should be covered by any theory of semantics, such as an overheard personal prayer, self-talk, reading aloud, fictional dialogue, or maybe the recordings of the last speakers of a dead language. In my opinion, whether the authors or speakers intended for their words to be communicated to others or not is irrelevant to whether those words have meaning. The fact of the matter is that somehow, somebody other than the speaker heard the sounds or saw the symbols. Who or what decides the meanings of those words?
I agree communication was successful between you and the group of boys. You are all aware of this additional meaning of the word apricot so when you used it to say X was repulsive and useless, they all understood what you were saying. That’s normal communication.
However, I question the second half of your premise . You say that X didn’t know the meaning of the word apricot. But then you say he understood what you meant when you said it. How did that work? Was it telepathy? Because I don’t see how a person can understand the meaning of a word that they don’t understand the meaning of. You can’t just hand wave that away and declare that it happened for the sake of moving the argument forward. You have to explain how it happened.
I agree that X would be unlikely to conclude that you’re calling him a literal apricot because that doesn’t make any sense. He would probably be able to figure out that you have some other meaning of apricot in mind. But he wouldn’t know if you were saying “I think you’re repulsive and useless” or “I think you’re a great guy and we should be friends” or “I find you physically attractive and want to have sex with you” unless you gave him some other clues from which he could figure out your meaning. And if that was the case, it would be those clues and not the word apricot that carried out the communication. The word apricot by itself, divested of these clues, would not be a communication.
And I don’t see this as a subjective issue. You think X is repulsive and useless. If you convey this idea to X and he understands you think he is repulsive and useless, then there has been a communication of that idea. If you do not convey this idea to X then there has not been a communication of that idea. That’s a clear objective divide between communication and non-communication.
I’m glad you’re contented. I think I’m going to stick with the answers I’ve already given, because I think my answers to your many, many other questions can be derived from them.
You say that X didn’t know the meaning of the word apricot. But then you say he understood what you meant when you said it. How did that work?
In the example, X is not part of the group that uses “apricot” as a code word. X never knows that “apricot” is a code word for “repulsive and useless”. Boys in the group understand the code word, but X does not.
If you do not convey this idea to X then there has not been a communication of that idea.
Therefore, the speaker did not communicate to X that “X is repulsive and useless”. At the same time, the speaker did communicate to other boys that “X is repulsive and useless”. Only one sentence was uttered: “X is an apricot”. I think it follows that in context the word “apricot” has two different meanings, depending on who you ask. Is not the meaning of the word “apricot” therefore subjective?
Frankly I can’t understand how you might admit that a single instance of a spoken sentence has different contexts and meanings depending on who listens and what they know, but still deny that the words of that sentence have subjective meaning. Here I have gone my whole life thinking “subjective” means roughly ‘it depends on a person’s individual preference/feelings/knowledge/experience/etc’.
That’s nice that you think that, but then your own definition of the word you invented is internally contradictory. Because “conversation” also has an objective meaning, and it isn’t “talking to myself”.
You have again offered a flat denial of my conclusion as if it were a convincing counterargument.
A revised definition of “lingtext” might read “the unit of people who share the same linguistic context, including the meaning of words used in a given expression of language.”
“Subjective” means “depends on a person’s individual preference…”
“Context”, here, means the interpretation sharedby more than one person in each instance.
So no, even if the semantic content is different in each context, that does not render it “subjective”
Just like it’s not a synonym for “contextual,” “subjective” is likewise not a synonym for “more than one meaning”.
“Context”, here, means the interpretation sharedby more than one person in each instance.
In the example we have been discussing, X is the only person who didn’t know the secret meaning of “apricot”. If you were willing to admit there are two different contexts in the example, and that one context is the interpretation of X, we have a contradiction since X is only one person.