Triangle of reference

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The triangle of reference (also known as the triangle of meaning[1] and the semiotic triangle) is a model of how linguistic symbols are related to the objects they represent. It was originally presented in Ogden and Richards' book The Meaning of Meaning [2].

Image:Ogden semiotic triangle.png

The relations between the triangular corners may be phrased more precisely in causal terms as follows:

  1. The matter evokes the writer's thought.
  2. The writer refers the matter to the symbol.
  3. The symbol evokes the reader's thought.
  4. The reader refers the symbol back to the matter.

Contents

[edit] Direction of fit

Main article: Direction of fit
World or
Referent		 intended
→		 Writer's
Thought
  decoded ↑
 
↓ encoded 
Thought
Reader's		 ←
extended		 Symbol
or Word
Word-to-World Fit
Writer's THOUGHT retrieves SYMBOL suited to REFERENT, Word suited to World.
World-to-Word Fit
Reader's THOUGHT retrieves REFERENT suited to SYMBOL, World suited to Word.

John Searle used the notion of "direction of fit" to create a taxonomy of illocutionary acts. [3], [4]

[edit] The Delta Factor

Main article: The Message in the Bottle#"The Delta Factor"

According to Walker Percy, the anthropological theories of the modern age "no longer work and the theories of the new age are not yet known". Percy therefore sees his task as coming up with a new theory of man, which he chooses to center on language, man's attribute that separates him from the animals. Percy regrets that no existing research really deals with the question of how language really works, of how human beings use and understand the symbols of linguistics. Percy puts this question into a sort of no-man's land, what he calls a "terra incognita", between linguistics and psychology.

The Delta Factor, first published in January 1975, is Percy's theory of language on the one hand and his theory of man in a nutshell on the other, eventually to be expanded in The Message in the Bottle (1975).[5] It adapts itself to the story of Helen Keller's learning to say and sign the word 'water' while Annie Sullivan poured water over her hands and repeatedly made the signs for water into her hand. A behaviorist reading of this scene might draw a causal relationship such that in response to Sullivan's stimuli in her hand Keller made a connection in her brain between the sign and the substance. This is too simplistic a reading, insists Percy. Keller was receiving from both the sign for water and the water itself, which make up a triangle together with Helen such that each corner leads to the other two corners. Percy argues that this linguistic triangle is "absolutely irreducible" and serves as the building block for all of human intelligence. The moment when this Delta Δ entered the mind of man, he became man.

Furthermore, the corners of the triangle depart and evolve from their behaviorist perspectives. Helen Keller becomes something other than just an organism in her environment because she is coupling two unrelated things -- water the word and water the liquid -- together. Likewise, water the liquid is made something more than water in itself because Keller has coupled it with the arbitrary sound 'water', and water the word becomes more than just the sound or sign for it. In this way, "the Delta phenomenon yielded a new world and maybe a new way of getting at it. It was not the world of organisms and environments but just as real and twice as human" -- man is made whole by the Delta Δ where the popular notions of religion and science had split him in two.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Colin Cherry (1957) On Human Communication
  2. ^ C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards (1923) The Meaning of Meaning
  3. ^ John Searle (1975) "A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts", in: Gunderson, K. (ed.), Language, Mind, and Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) pp. 344-369.
  4. ^ John Searle (1976) "A Classification of Illocutionary Acts", Language in Society, Vol.5, pp. 1-24.
  5. ^ Walker Percy (1975) "The Delta Factor" in The Message in the Bottle

[edit] See also

[edit] External links