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Understanding Meaning:
"When you come to a fork in the road, pick
it up."
---Yogi Bera
Making meaning---creating an appropriate understanding---of a text
written by someone else can be a troublesome task, but there it is.
One difficulty in making meaning comes from having to determine the
most appropriate meaning of a word in a sentence when that word could
have more than one meaning. For example, an offer of "Let's meet
at the pool after lunch," might involve wearing a swim suit or
meeting in room full of people working with word processing software
(a typing pool). This type of ambiguity is called lexical ambiguity
and the difficulty here lies in determining the appropriate meaning
of a word with multiple meanings.
What meaning should one make from the following sentence:
The White Queen ordered her servants to wash the apples before she
ate them.
- Is the White Queen going to eat washed apples, or has the White
Queen already eaten her servants?
- Perhaps the queen was just threatening to eat the servants because
they hadn't got around to washing the apples soon enough to suit the
queen.
The sentence, "The White Queen ordered her servants to wash the
apples before she ate them," is an example of structural ambiguity---an
instance in
which a reader is unsure of the most appropriate meaning of (in this
case) a sentence despite knowing the meaning of each individual word
in the sentence. In other words, the ambiguity is not in the meaning
of the words, but in the syntax (or structure) of the sentence.
Still, as you will begin to see in today's activities, making meaning
is even more complex than unraveling the meaning puzzles posed by lexical
and structural ambiguity.
Pre-Journal Activity---Part One of Two
Do this section by yourself. For each of the following words, create
a written list of words/phrases (no fewer than five for each word below)
by free association:
- I
- cat
- kitchen
- saw
- strange
Cross out the words on your list that have meanings that are antithetical
(somewhat opposite) to the meaning(s) of the original word.
For example, if the following were a free association list for "dog"---big,
growl, dog breath, cat, tail, fur, good, Boxer, German shepherd, dog
food, cat food, fetch, fido---then you would remove cat and cat food.
Pre-Journal Activity---Part Two of Two
- Form a small group with at least two other people.
- Compare your free association lists.
- Write as many paraphrases (new, similar sentences) as you can that
express different meanings of the sentence, "I saw a strange
cat in the kitchen."
Each paraphrase should emphasize an alternative, possible meaning of
the original sentence. If you can't get at least ten, then you need
to examine your approach.
For example, "There was an unfamiliar cat in the kitchen, and I
saw it from outside of the kitchen." Discuss some of the items
in "Things to Ponder."
Things to Ponder
- Do you think that everyone in your group possesses the knowledge
to differentiate the roughly fifty species of cats (felidæ)
from all the other species of animals in the world? In other words,
does everyone in the group know a cat when he or she sees one?
- Do you think that this knowledge is based on difference (e.g.,
the differences between cats and other animals) or on the intrinsic
characteristics that make up "catness"?
- If we all agree that the word/symbol "cat" should generally
identify a something innately feline---a member of the cat family
(felidæ)---then how might one account for differences among
your groups' free association lists for the word/symbol "cat"?
- How do the words on your own free association list for "cat"
compare to your knowledge of what a cat is(can be) or does?
- How might making meaning be different from knowing something?
- How might making meaning be the same as knowing something?
- Suppose you saw a strange cat in the kitchen. Identify some similarities
and/or differences between the thing/act itself, you seeing a strange
cat in the kitchen, and the sentence about the thing/act itself, "I
saw a strange cat in the kitchen."
Journal Assignment:
Explore your experience with today's journal activity and group activity.
Use the questions in "Things to Ponder" (above) as a springboard.
Possible Structural Interpretations
I saw (in two) a strange cat in the kitchen.
I was outside of the kitchen, and I saw a strange cat in the kitchen.
I was in the kitchen, and I saw a strange cat in the kitchen
Possible Lexical Interpretations
Cat:
a felis domestica---a housecat
a member of the cat family, felidæ, like a house cat, tiger, or
leopard
a person
Strange:
unfamiliar/unknown
odd/curious/abnormal
unaccountable/puzzling
Strange cat:
an unfamiliar cat;
a cat that looked strange, un-catlike---possibly miscolored or malformed
a strange animal that was probably a cat
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