Representation of Meaning: a Graphical and Interactive Approach

Introduction
This paper will consist a discussion of some of the
theoretical assumptions underlying the design of a piece
of software and a demonstration of its function. This software,
the Fixed Phrase Tool is part of the first release of TAPoR (text
analysis portal for research). I first saw the desirability of such
software while doing my doctoral dissertation in Toronto, a
computer-aided text analysis of the semantics of story and tale
in Chaucer. It was clear that the lists generated by traditional
texts analysis tools such as TACT were both tedious to examine
and presented information in a serial fashion that was not
suitable to data that were, in some sense, relational. It was also
clear that attempts to reformat the output of such 'listware' into
more relational forms is exceedingly laborious. Of course, this
practical need presupposes certain assumptions about meaning,
which follow this rough outline.
Theory
But if both meanings, or all of them. . . remain ambiguous
after the faith has been consulted, then it is necessary to
examine the context of the preceding and following parts of
the ambiguous place, so that we may determine which of the
meanings among those which suggest themselves it would
allow to be consistent.
(Augustine, 2.2)
The value of the chess pieces depends upon their position upon
the chess board, just as in the language each term has its value
through its contrasts with all the other terms.
(Saussure 88)
For a large class of cases —though not for all— in which we
employ the word 'meaning' it can be defined thus: the meaning
of a word is its use in the language.
(Wittgenstein 20e)
You shall know a word by the company it keeps!
(Firth 179)
We assume in the design of this software a view of
language that sees the meaning of a word as
inextricably linked to its contexts, a view that is in some ways
foreshadowed in Augustine's advice to readers of Scripture to
resolve semantic ambiguities by examining the context of a
passage (3.2.2). To some extent, our software's function and
design is also informed by a Saussurean structuralist semantics
that holds that a word's meaning is "determined by the
[horizontal] paradigmatic and [vertical] syntagmatic relations"
(Lyons 268) between that word and others in a system of
language. This is illustrated in Saussure's example of the game
of chess in which the value of individual pieces is not the result
of any intrinsic qualities but rather of their relation to other
pieces (Saussure 108, 87 ff.). Of course, the method of deducing
what a word named (its reference) for Augustine becomes a
mode of meaning for Wittgenstein, and while Saussure's focus
is upon a word's place within a language system (its sense),
that of Wittgenstein is upon a word's place within instances of
discourse.
J. R. Firth was perhaps the first linguist to give Wittgenstein's
statement serious consideration when he proposed that one
could define a word by looking at its linguistic context, or "the
mere word accompaniment, the other word-material in which
[a word is] most commonly or most characteristically
embedded" (Firth 180). Seeking to differentiate this from
context of situation, Firth called it collocation (195). In a sense,
this study of collocation, the linguistic material or linguistic
context within which a word commonly occurs, involves the
mapping of pathways leading to and from each word (Palmer
76). Firth's idea of collocation, first presented in 1951,
introduced a new type of word meaning, but would have to
await the introduction of computers and electronic texts before
it could be used to study texts of any significant size
(Berry-Rogghe 103). His ideas have most famously borne fruit
in the COBUILD dictionaries and grammar and in the field of
corpus linguistics. The collection and classification of collocates
require the computer's unique ability to perform repetitive tasks
quickly and efficiently. Software like TACT brought this ability
to desktop PC users and thus solved the problem of collection,
but introduced a new set of challenges, one of which was how
to represent the data gathered by such tools. A multitude of
familiar paths lead off from these words in every direction.
(Wittgenstein 143e, 144e)
During the initial phases of memory encoding, it is as if one is
preserving the shape of a letter by walking a particular route
on a lawn. The pattern is dynamic, and is only evident in the
way one moves. After a period of time, however, the grass will
wear through, creating a dirt pathway. At that point, one can
stop walking; the information is preserved structurally (Kosslyn
& Koenig, 351) The significance of a collocate lies repetition and syntagmatic
relation. Therefore, the Fixed Phrase Tool (FPT) focuses on
collecting phrasal repetends, a subclass of collocation. As Ian
Lancashire has noted, phrasal repetends fall into two categories:
"repeating fixed phrases" in which word order is unchanging
and "repeating collocations, in which words co-occur, although
in varying order, sometimes with words intervening" (100).
Repeating fixed phrases (fixed phrases hereafter) may most
closely represent the network of familiar paths that constitute
a person's language. From a neuroscientific perspective, as
Lancashire has noted, they are the result of such paths (188 ff).
He also attempted to represent these neurological structures in
what he called "phrasal repetend graphs" (217) .
Figure 1
We have adopted this model fully in the FPT. Although it
outputs the standard list of fixed phrases, the tool can also
automatically format such lists into a form very much
resembling that above, though, at present showing only fixed
phrases. The neurological and philosophical roots of the path
model of meaning also imply a degree of interactivity. This is
implemented in the Java version of the FPT, where each node
word in the graph can itself become a node in its own graph.
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