Sometimes I want to express something like this when I hear the academic’s favorite put-down – “that’s simplistic!”
Fundamental to human cognition is the ability to conceptualize experience at different levels, to process the world around us to varying degrees os specificity and detail. The notion of granularity (Hobbs 1985) — the rendering of reality to a more course- or fine-grained level — is introduced to describe this basic characteristic of cognition, and so, of natural language …. When a speaker conceptualizes an event, he does so with a certain level of precision. At this arbitrary level of precision, as Croft (1991: 164) explains, some concepts are presented as irreducible even though they may be further reduced at some finer-grained level of conceptualization. By choosing to re-construe the event at this finer-grained level, additional details and distinctions emerge. Alternatively, the speaker may choose a coarser-grained level and focus upon the bare essentials of an event, ignoring much of the detail. (73)
–Christopher Woods. The Grammar of Perspective: The Sumerian Conjugation Prefixes as a System of Voice. Brill, 2008.
April 2, 2008 at 7:38 pm
I think Grammar writ large could totally save the world! It like nothing else introduces one to the systemic thinking and to the large degree of arbitrariness and chance and irregularity that makes any given system interesting. From there, it’s a skip and a jump to thinking of other things as systems… Or so the idealist in me thinks
April 7, 2008 at 4:10 am
That’s simplistic!