Morphology and Enantiosemantics

 

Anyone who has struggled with learning a language rich in morphology (prefixes, suffixes, verbal inflections, gender together with agreement phenomena, etc.), such as Latin or Russian, may sigh for the apparent stripped-down simplicity of English words.  But such grammatical markers, properly used, relieve the interpretive burden on the listener.   English, with its complex and barely-statable maneuvers of movement and ellipsis,  presents the ESL student with thorny complexities of interpretation and resolution of ambiguities, mostly without the morphological agreement-rules that help the reader or listener figure out what goes with what.

 

A linguistic colleague I used to work with  had a slogan affixed above his desk,

 

   (A)  “I like ambiguity more than most people.”

 

The witticism consists in the fact that that sentence is itself ambiguous.

 

(1) On the first reading, it means “I am unusually  fond of ambiguity”.   A slight rewording would force that reading:

  “I like ambiguity more than most people do.”  

Or again, stylistically diffferent:

  “I like ambiguity more than do most people.”

 

For the learner of English, even that clarified version can present diffficulties -- how to interpret those floating grammatical monads, “do”.   In an inflected language, the case-endings would  do that work: in (A),  “most people” is the subject of a gapped subordinate clause, and would be marked with the nominative case.  But English lacks that resource, except among (some of) the personal pronouns.

 

(2)  On the second reading, the slogan means  “I like ambiguity; by comparison, I find most people somewhat lacking.”

Again, that reading can be forced by a minimal rewording:

   “ I like ambiguity more than I do most people.”

On this reading, in (A), “most people” is a direct object, and would, in an inflected language, be marked with the accusative case.

(A completely different disambiguator, not available in unitalicized written form, can make use of contrastive stress:  “most people” for (1),  “most people” for (2).)

 

The barb within the witticism consists in the fact that the first reading is -- in the written form of the slogan -- more accessible  to the reader -- it  is the first thing people  will think:  and for the average person, his cognitive efffort will end right there;   he does not perceive the ambiguity.

 

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This morning, on the eve of the fraught midterms,  candidate Abdul El-Sayed stubbornly brushed-aside various objections from detractors, saying he is sticking with  the central principle of his candidacy:

 

(B)    “I want to get money out of politics.”

 

That is to say, he wishes to rid politics of influence from the ultrarich.

 

But there is another possible reading of (B), meaning “The reason I entered politics is to enrich myself (to get money).”   On that reading,  the slogan could  serve equally well  as the guiding principle of … Jared Kushner.

Enantio-oneirics

[The present snippet is a further chapter in this essay.  We print it separately here  since, unlike the parent essay, it presents some linguistic interest, and is indexed as such by the Labels.]

Nun dämmert mir aber  ein neuer Sachverhalt.  Die Zärtlichkeit des Traumes  gehört nicht zum latenten Inhalt, zun den Gedanken hinter dem Traume;  sie steht im Gegensatz zu diesem Inhalt …

-- S. Freud, Die Traumdeutung, IV.

and

Die Traumarbeit kann mit den Affekten der Traumgedanken  noch etwas anderes vornehmen, als sie zuzulassen  oder zum Nullpunkt herabzudrücken.  Sie kann dieselben in ihr Gegenteil verkehren.

-- S. Freud, Die Traumdeutung, VI.

Dream-interpretation, like literary criticism (or intelligence analysis), has its inevitable part of subjectivity;  yet here, we feel dismay.   If, a given dream feature  failing to prove analytically fruitful, we may equally replace it with its opposite,  then truly, there are no rules.

This recalls the 18^th-century quip against the then-unscientific pastime of etymology, as being one “in which consonants matter little, and vowels  not at all.”    The poster-boy for such woolly lack of methodology is

lucus a non lucendo

lit. ‘It is called a grove because it doesn’t shine’ (or, freely: ‘… because it doesn’t grieve’)  which actually was itself a satire, not a genuinely proposed etymology.

Freud’s gambit was abetted by his reliance upon then-fashionable erroneous theories of primitive language, according to which there was once no negative particle, and a word might mean equally a given thing  and its opposite.  The latter thesis has been maintained (sometimes in earnest, sometimes in jest) with respect to early Arabic, summarized in the chestnut:  “In Arabic, any given word can mean: (1) a given thing; (2) the opposite of that; (3) something obscene; and (4) something about a camel.”  I have addressed (and refuted) that assertion, in the chapter “Enantiosemantics” in The Semantics of Form in Arabic.

And yet and yet … That connection of lucus with lucere [the latter from lux ‘light’) is not nearly as absurd as generally made out:  in fact, the suggestion of such a connection is correct.

To point the apparent absurdit, the Latin word lucus in that phrase is often translated ‘dark grove’ (this is what you’ll find online).  But it doesn’t mean ‘dark grove’:  it denotes ‘a clearing (in the woods)’.  And here the present of lux  is plain.  Indeed, it becomes explicit in the German word Lichtung ‘clearing’, compare Licht (light).

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