Bubbles_glow

≡ METABOLE ≡

 
Corner_fold
  • Meaning
  • Description
  • Expansion
  • Response
  • Citation
  • Personal
METABOLE
 
Flowchart_grey_24

Sequential movement through time

 


It has been pointed out that the mode of language is fundamentally one of sequential movement through time.


It follows from this that each word will have a linear or 'horizontal' relationship with the words that precede and succeed it, and a good deal of its capacity to 'mean' various things derives from this pattern of positioning. In the sentence 'the boy kicked the girl', the meaning 'unrolls' as each word follows its predecessor and is not complete until the final word comes into place. This constitutes language's syntagmatic aspect, and it could also be thought of as its 'diachronic' aspect because of its commitment to the passage of time.


But each word will also have relationships with other words in the language that do not occur at this point in time, but are capable of doing so. The word, that is, has 'formulaic' assocations with those other words from among which it has, so to speak, been chosen. And these other words, 'part of the inner storehouse that makes up the language of each speaker' (p. 123) - they might be synonyms, antonyms, words of similar sound or of the same grammatical function - help, by not being chosen, to define the meaning of the word which has. (Hawkes, pp. 26-7.)

----------


Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/See that post with different algorithms in metaboleSee the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Labels: , , ,

Send your texts


←

 



Information and contents do not simply move from one private space to another, but they travel along a network.

Engagement is intrinsically public, taking place within a circuit of larger connectedness. The vast resources of the network are always there, potential, even if they do not impinge on the immediate communication. Electronic communication can be passive, as with television watching, or interactive, as with computers.

Contents, unless they are printed out (at which point they become part of the static order of print) are felt to be evanescent. They can be changed or deleted with the stroke of a key. With visual media (television, projected graphs, highlighted "bullets") impression and image take precedence over logic and concept, and detail and linear sequentiality are sacrificed. The pace is rapid, driven by jump-cut increments, and the basic movement is laterally associative rather than vertically cumulative. The presentation structures the reception and, in time, the expectation about how information is organized.


Further, the visual and nonvisual technology in every way encourages in the user a heightened and ever-changing awareness of the present. It works against historical perception, which must depend on the inimical notions of logic and sequential succession. If the print medium exalts the word, fixing it into permanence, the electronic counterpart reduces it to a signal, a means to an end.