Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (20 page)

Children refine their sense for the category of
much
situations (both its semantic and its syntactic aspect) in much the same way as they refine their sense for any other category. And they do all of this on their own, because schools do not teach any such thing and do not need to; children simply become, without any particular effort (let alone a great deal of conscious effort),
much
-ness experts. They will randomly run into the word in poems, in song lyrics, in ancient texts, in slang phrases, and in marginal usages like “it’s of a muchness”, “thanks muchly”, “it cost me much bucks”, “too much people here”, and without realizing that they are doing so, they themselves will indulge in just this kind of pushing of the linguistic envelope. Bit by bit, this will add up to a personal sense for the limits of the category — the category of
appropriate usages and syntactic slots for the word “much”.
For each person, this mental category will stretch out in its own idiosyncratic fashion, but no matter who it is, it will consist of a core surrounded by a “halo”. Just as in each person’s mind there are prototypical chairs and also quotation-marked “chairs” that flirt with the very edges of the category, so there are prototypical usages of “much” and also edge-flirting usages of the same word.

A profound aspect of growing up human involves developing an exquisite real-time sensitivity to the many types of expectations that our words set up in the minds of our listeners. In so doing, we acquire a rich set of categories that have to do with these abstract phenomena. Oddly enough, though, some of the most important of these categories are labeled by words that seem boring and bland — “and”, “but”, “so”, “while”, and numerous others. Such words may at first strike us as unimportant and even trivial, but that is a most misleading impression. These words denote deep and subtle concepts, and as we shall see, those concepts are grounded in analogies, much as are all other concepts.

Let’s look at some examples involving the word “and”. No one would be at all surprised if a friend, upon returning from a trip to France, enthused, “I like Paris and I like Parisians.” On the other hand, we would certainly be confused if our friend first declared, “I like Paris” and then stated, after a short pause, “I like Parisians.” This would give the impression of two ideas that were unrelated to each other, which of course is not the case. Our friend could make it a bit more logical-seeming by adding “also” at the end of the sentence; doing so would acknowledge the fact that listeners want to hear an explicit, sense-making link between the two utterances. Indeed, that’s precisely one of the key roles of the word “and” — to set up a natural link between two statements. Thus if our friend declared, “I like Paris and I just bought a pair of pliers”, we would be caught off guard by the lack of coherence. A central purpose of the word “and” is to convey to listeners a clear sense of the logical flow that, in the speaker’s mind, links one thought to the next one uttered.

The flow of discourse is just as real to human beings as the pathway of a fleeing zebra is real to a pursuing lion. They are both varieties of motion in certain kinds of space; it’s just that the space of hunting is physical and the space of discourse is mental. Lions live mostly in the physical world, and although we humans live there too, we also live in the world of language, and a large part of our category system revolves around phenomena that take place in that intangible but no less real world. We perceive and categorize situations that arise in discourse space, and we do so just as swiftly and just as naturally as the pursuing lion, on the savanna, chooses its direction of motion in a split second in chasing its prey.

We all acquire the word “and” and the concept behind it just as we do for other words and concepts — through analogical broadening. Can anyone recall the very first occurrence of the word “and” that they ever heard? Of course not. But as with all other words acquired during early childhood, it was never defined explicitly; rather, its meaning was picked up from context (“Mommy and Daddy”, possibly). At first it linked people, we might well suppose. Then it linked people and objects (“Sally and her toy”). Then it linked sequences in time (“I went out and looked”). Then it served to represent causal links (“It fell and broke”). Then it linked combinations of abstract qualities (“hot and cold water”), as well as of relationships (“before and after my haircut”) and other abstract attributes (“a hot and healthy meal”). And then many more came, in an avalanche.

Like any category, the category of
and
situations expands gradually and smoothly in each human mind — indeed, so smoothly that after the fact the resulting urban sprawl seems, albeit illusorily, monolithic and uniform, as if it had been constructed all at once, as if there were but one single elementary idea there, which had never needed any generalizing at all. There are no conscious traces left of the many concentric layers of outward expansion of
and
, just as there are no conscious traces left of how we acquired categories that give the impression of being considerably more complex, such as
mother, stop
, and
much.
And so this innocent little conjunction, which very few people would think of as standing for a
category
, fits right in with the story of words and concepts that we are here relating.

Now let us deepen and broaden our discussion by looking at some examples involving the conjunction “but”. A totally logic-based view would claim that “and” and “but” mean exactly the same thing except for emotional shadings. However, that’s a pretty parochial view of the matter. Let’s take a closer look. Were our just-returned friend to say to us, “I like Paris but I like Parisians”, we would surely wonder, “What does
that
mean? It makes no sense!” The reason is that hearing the word “but” leads us to expect a
swerve
or a
zigzag
in discourse space, but there was no such sudden switch in direction. Stating that one likes Paris and also Parisians does not challenge common sense, does not violate reasonable expectations, and thus it does not in any way, shape, or form constitute a swerve or zigzag in discourse space. Our hypothetical friend’s hypothetical sentence faked us out by
announcing
a swerve but not carrying it out. There is a puzzling inconsistency between the conjunction and the two phrases that it links. Indeed, if such a sentence were to show up in an email message, you might well guess that it was a typo and that your friend had intended to write, “I like Paris but I don’t like Parisians.” Now that would indeed constitute a zigzag in discourse space.

For effective communication, speakers have to pay close attention to the nature of the flow in the sequence of ideas that they are conveying — in other words, they have to carry out real-time self-monitoring. When motion in the space of discourse continues smoothly along a pathway that has already been established, then the word “and” (or some other cousin word or phrase, such as “moreover”, “indeed”, “in addition”, “on top of that”, or “to boot”, to list just a few possibilities) is warranted. We’ll call situations of this sort
“and
situations”. When one recognizes that one is in an
and
situation, one can say “and” and be done with it. By contrast, when motion in the space of discourse makes a sudden, unexpected swerve, then the word “but” (or some other concessive word or phrase, such as “whereas”, “however”, “actually”, “in fact”, “although”, or “nevertheless”, “even so”, “still”, “yet”, “in spite of that” to list just a few possibilities) is warranted. Analogously, these are
but
situations, and of course, when one recognizes that one is in a
but
situation, one can say “but” and be done with it.

Occasionally one hears sentences like “I don’t know what country the florist comes from, but she seems very nice.” Why the “but” here? What kind of a zigzag in discourse space is this? Well, first consider how it would sound with “and” instead: “I don’t know what country the florist comes from,
and
she seems very nice.” It simply sounds like a
non sequitur.
One wonders what these two thoughts are doing in the same sentence. On the other hand, with “but”, there is a definite logical flow, although it’s a bit subtle to pin down. The feeling being expressed is something like this:
“Despite
my near-total lack of knowledge about her, I would say that she seems affable.” “Despite” is a concessive that is a close cousin to “but”. The point is that the first part of the sentence is about a hole in one’s knowledge, and the second part is about a small but
significant counterexample to that tendency. Thus the first part of the sentence suggests a pattern and the second part states an exception to the pattern. Whenever we are about to tell someone a “piece of news” and just before doing so we realize that in some way or other it goes against expectations likely to be set up by what we had just told them moments earlier, we have detected the telltale signs of a
but
situation. The two-clause sentence about the florist has exactly that property, and that’s why putting “but” between its clauses makes sense and sounds right to our ears, whereas putting “and” there would make it sound very strange.

Likewise, if someone says “He has big ears, but he’s really a nice guy”, it doesn’t mean (despite the way it sounds on the surface) that the speaker has a stereotype of large-eared people as being unpleasant. Rather, it means something more like, “Although this person is on the negative side of the norm in a certain physical way, he is on the positive side of the norm in terms of his behavior.” Once again, we see that the conjunction “but” signals a swerve in discourse space — the person in question is on one side of
one
norm and yet (despite that fact) is on the other side of
another
norm.

The category of swerves that the word “but” denotes is just as real as the category of swerves made by vehicles on roads, though it is more intangible, and the use of the word “but” comes about because as people speak, they are always paying some amount of attention to their trajectory in discourse space and are categorizing its more familiar aspects in real time, just as they are always paying some amount of attention to the scene before their eyes (and the sequence of sounds coming into their ears, etc.) and are categorizing its more familiar aspects in real time.

Sometimes a speaker becomes aware of the real-time linguistic self-monitoring going on as a background process in their brain, and this can affect the flow of speech. It can result in one verbal label being canceled and swiftly replaced by another label. One example is when someone says, “Oh, look at that horse — uhh, I mean
donkey”.
The following story involves such a relabeling, but the self-correction involves an event in the speaker’s linguistic output stream rather than an object in the environment.

Frank and Anthony, lifelong friends, hadn’t seen each other in a long time and were pleasantly catching up on the news of each other’s families. Frank wanted to tell Anthony about his daughter, who had been hit by a mysterious illness and, to everyone’s relief, recovered from it after a couple of years. One of his sentences went like this: “She got to be an excellent skier during her stay in Montana, and one day on the slopes she just couldn’t keep her balance — or rather,
but
one day on the slopes she just couldn’t keep her balance…”

As he launched into his sentence, Frank thought he was in an
and
situation, and then suddenly — or rather,
“but
suddenly” — when he started to flesh out the second clause, he clearly heard the abrupt swerve in what he was telling Anthony (it would strongly violate anyone’s expectations that a highly accomplished skier will, without any warning, start to fall a lot), and so he quickly spun in his tracks and, changing conjunctions in mid-stream, jumped from “and” to “but”, as he realized that from a listener’s point of view, the story he was relating involved a kind of zigzag — thus a member of the category of
but
situations rather than of the category of
and
situations.

Making the distinction between
and
situations and
but
situations is not a high art, but it is a most useful skill to pick up, and that dichotomy is perfectly adequate in many situations. However, there are numerous subcategories inside the broad categories that we’ve labeled “and situations” and “but situations”, and people, first as children and later as adults, gradually pick up the finer nuances that will help them to recognize these subcategories and thereby to choose, in real time, the sophisticated connecting word or phrase that best describes the situation in discourse space.

Sticking to just the categories
and
and
but
while making no finer distinctions is rather like making the useful but coarse distinction between the categories of
car
and
truck
, but not venturing into finer details. The
car/truck
distinction is good enough for many purposes. People who are fascinated by motor vehicles, though, are eager for much more detail, and they’ll often use a much narrower category than is designated by the generic word “car”. In the same way, fluent speakers depend on making finer distinctions than just the coarse “and”/“but” dichotomy. However, just as recognizing whether a vehicle is a Honda or a Hyundai, a coupe or a sedan, automatic or manual, fuel-efficient or gas-guzzling, sporty or family-style, and so forth, takes considerable experience, so deciding whether one finds oneself in a
nonetheless
situation in discourse space, a
however
situation, an
and yet
situation, a
still
situation, an
on the other hand
situation (and so forth) is a subtle skill, since it requires having constructed these subcategories and having a decent mastery of them.