Under the tumtum tree : from nonsense to sense, a study in nonautomatic comprehension

128 Pages·1984·30.522 MB·English

by  Marlene Dolitsky

UNDER THE TUMTUM TREE
Pragmatics & Beyond
An Interdisciplinary Series of Language Studies
Editors:
Hubert Cuyckens
(Belgian National Science Foundation,
University of Antwerp)
Herman Parret
(Belgian National Science Foundation,
Universities of Louvain and Antwerp)
Jef Verschueren
(Belgian National Science Foundation,
University of Antwerp)
Editorial Address:
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
University of Antwerp (UIA)
Universiteitsplein 1
B-2610 Wilrijk
Belgium
Editorial Board:
Norbert Dittmar (Free University of Berlin)
David Holdcroft (University of Leeds)
Jacob Mey (Odense University)
Jerrold M. Sadock (University of Chicago)
Emanuel A. Schegloff (University of California at Los Angeles)
Daniel Vanderveken (University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières)
Teun A. van Dijk (University of Amsterdam)
V:l
Mariene Dolitsky
Under the Tumtum Tree
From Nonsense to Sense, A Study in Nonautomatic Comprehension
UNDER THE TUMTUM TREE
From Nonsense to Sense,
A Study in Nonautomatic Comprehension
Marlene Dolitsky
University of Paris VII
DERELVANS
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1984
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Dolitsky, Marlene.
Under the tumtum tree.
(Pragmatics & beyond, ISSN 0166-6258; V:l)
Bibliography: p. 115
I. Psycholinguistics. 2. Semantics. 3. Comprehension. 4. Meaning (Psychology). I. Title.
II. Series.
P37.D64 1984 401'.9 84-28471
ISBN 0-915027-39-9 (U.S.)
ISBN 90-272-2534-6 (European)
© Copyright 1984 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
0. Introduction 1
1. Nonsense 5
2. The comprehension of nonsense 13
3. Nonsense and word meaning 27
4. Children's comprehension of nonsense 41
5. The nonsense of an unknown language 73
6. Nonsense in our daily lives 93
7. Nonsense — conclusion 101
Appendixes 107
Footnotes 113
References 115

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Books are rarely written by an author-as-an-island. Contact with one's
entourage breeds participation by others. It is in this section that one can
take account of how important that participation is and how dependent one
is on it.
First, I would like to express my most heartfelt thanks to Jacob L. Mey,
whose confidence in me was greater than my own and without whose interest
this book would only be a number of scattered articles.
Anne-Marie Béasse-Arnaud at the Ecole Alsacienne deserves special
thanks for accepting to submit her class to this nonsense and for her support­
ing rôle with all the work done with the children in spite of very heavy
demands on her time.
Thanks also go to Eric Thouvenin of Lanser without whose loan of office
and equipment I would still be typing, and to Martine Bertrand and André
Berthier for their artistic support.
I would also like to thank Daniel Blanchard and the Association de
Psychanalyse Existentielle for both their criticism and their support of my
work, Frédéric François and the members of his seminar for accepting to
participate in this study and for their analysis of it, and all my students and
colleagues who participated in this study without whom it would not be.
colleagues who participated in this study without whom it would not be.
Last but not least, for their unfailing support and encouragement, I want
to thank my parents on the other side of the ocean who accepted book lists
and postcards in lieu of letters, understanding that their daughter could apply
herself to only so much writing.
It is my fondest hope that the result of all the confidence, support, and
effort that everyone, including those too numerous to mention by name, will
be considered by you, the readers, as having been worthwhile.
Marlene Dolitsky

0. INTRODUCTION
As the popular saying has it, one must 'Call a spade a spade'. But why?
Is a spade [ speid]? Is the word the thing? Obviously it is not. "A name is
not the thing named"; if not, one "could eat the menu card instead of the
dinner" (Bateson 1972: 280). The name is only a string of sounds whose
function is to refer to or represent the thing it is not.
The expressive power of a sign comes from its being part of a system
and the fact that it coexists with other signs in that system, and not because
its meaning has been assigned by God or Nature (Merleau-Ponty 1969). The
organization of an individual's network of signs is partially idiosyncratic and
partially conventional, just as is his or her view of reality and word-world
associations. New signs or combinations of signs bring into play these
interlocking relations.
The result of making up new signs and of combining them with known
signs and recombining these known signs themselves in uncustomary ways
is often called 'nonsense'. It is the name commonly used when word-to-world
relations are obscure. And in the absence of automatism, the mechanism of
word-to-world relations becomes more visible; this absence of automaticity
makes the macrostructure of mental events apparent (Swinney 1981).
In usual dinnertime speech, Please pass the butter will produce an act
of 'butter-passing'. Comprehension, the decoding of speech, takes place so
automatically under usual conditions that no conscious thought is lent to the
problem of how speech is imbued with meaning. It is only when comprehen­
sion is not automatic that a question arises, and when the symbolic relation
is opaque that the mechanism of the symbolic process may become transpar­
ent. Thus for this study, it was considered that nonsense might produce a
key to the phenomenon of linguistic comprehension. The study of nonsense
in all its glorious opacity might be able to remove some of the covers of
automatism from the meaning-finding process by bringing into the open the
strategies of comprehension which are normally applied to linguistic stimuli.
This is a study of the comprehension of nonsense, and yet, hopefully,
what is spoken of here is far from nonsense itself. Nonsense is not non-sensical.