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Posted by Andy Dingley on 02/20/07 01:08
On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 14:14:03 -0600, Ben C <spamspam@spam.eggs> wrote:
>On 2007-02-19, Andy Dingley <dingbat@codesmiths.com> wrote:
>[...]
>> Saussure's distinction between langue and parole is relevant here.
>> HTML expresses the parole or "speech" but the stable underlying
>> meaning (which we need to recognise before we can attach a stable and
>> relevant presentation to it) must depend on the langue or "language"
>> instead.
>
>I'm confused. Do you mean HTML itself is the speech, or that the
>author's actual content is the speech?
I'm not surprised - neologism always tends to do this.
In Saussure's langue / parole model, "content" is the underlying langue
and HTML code is the visible but less vital parole. "Signified" and
"signifier", if you prefer the terms that are usually applied to "signs"
(as HTML elements would be termed in linguistics or semiotics).
Wiki is good on philosophy and linguistics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism
>You might think: HTML is a language, a document written in HTML is some
>speech in that language.
No, I mean a lower level than this. The simpler, nmore obvious level is
the HTML, the expression of a set of elements applied to specific usages
in one page's situation. The deeper level represents the structure that
re-occurs between pages in a site and is expressed through the same
recurrent groupings of element-meanings. It's hard to describe this any
more clearly because it is simply hard to do so -- our problem is that
we must first invent terminology to do it with. I think the concept
here is probably clearer to web authors than to some other groups -- it
is precisely those structures that are hard to define in HTML, but that
we find ourselves attaching the same CSS to them, because these complex
multi-element groupings (e,g a particular set of headers before a list,
followed by a paragraph) find themselves requiring to have the same
presentation styles applied to them.
>What, in terms accessible to the meanest intelligence, is Saussure's
>distinction between langue and parole?
It's famously difficult to read Saussure in the original (It was written
after he was dead, which is always hard on an author). However he first
defined the field, so we keep his terminology. It's easier to understand
by reading the later commentaries than the primary texts. I found
Structuralism through the structural anthropologists such as
Lévi-Strauss, who is a bit more accessible than the better-known
philosophers such as Derrida, Althusser or Foucault.
The core of Saussure's analysis could be said to be that signs
("elements" in our world) have two aspects: signifier and signified. The
signifier is the sound or symbol with which we express them and the
signified is the concept we actually mean behind them. Only the
signifier is immediately obvious, but only the signified conveys real
meaning. Any discussion about meaning must therefore keep this mapping
and its possible fluidity in mind. "Corpus linguistics" is thus not just
about the theoretical grammar of language, but about how it's actually
used in everyday use, so as to track the real meaning that's being
applied.
If the parole is restrictive and the conceptual langue deep, then this
mapping becomes complex and difficult to follow. It may not even be
_possible_ to (i.e. the text has become an ambiguous expression of what
may still be a strong concept). Often the concept only manages to
transmit itself by repeated readings of a number of different texts, or
by some additional information through another channel (does our editing
tool need an additional database?)
Then you can wander off into post-modern Foucaultian analyses where the
subjective perception of the text is mistaken for some great Illuminati
meta-narrative, positivist science flies out of the window and we all
start talking bollocks in black turtlenecks.
>Is "structure" to "speech" as "meta-structure" is to "language"?
There's a risk of re-defining a new term that someone else has already
bagged, but within the narrow confines of my post today, then yes.
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