Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (49 page)

Marking is not limited to nouns; it can also come about in the case of verbs, and it can wind up in usages that seem extremely strange when placed under the microscope. For example, the verb “to grow” has, over time, acquired a broader meaning than the one most people spontaneously think of. Thus changes that go in either direction — toward the smaller as well as the larger — are often described by the word “grow”. This claim may sound so silly that native speakers of English might deny it at first — until they are shown a sentence such as, “As soon as Alice had drunk the vial of potion, she started to grow smaller and smaller”, at which point they will admit, “Oh well, I guess we
do
say that, after all…” We frequently use the verb “to grow” in its unmarked sense without thinking in the least about how it contradicts the marked sense.

It seems that what matters is not
size
but simply the fact that things are
changing in time.
For instance, it’s quite normal to say, “The bottle grew lighter and lighter as the water evaporated”, “The ticket line had grown a lot shorter”, “The average intelligence quotient has grown lower and lower over the decades”, and so forth. No native speaker of English would bat an eyelash at any of them. We thus see that although “to grow” often means “to become larger” (this is its marked sense,
grow
₁
), the same verb can also simply mean “to change over time” (this is its unmarked sense,
grow
₂
).
However, it is overwhelmingly the idea of
grow
₁
, not
grow
₂
, that tends to come to mind if a native speaker is asked “What does ‘to grow’ mean?” For this reason, certain perfectly standard uses of “grow” can make one smile, because on the surface they seem to involve the contradictory notion of “increasing while decreasing”.

How can one explain this paradoxical property of language, whereby two words can, in one context, be each other’s violently clashing opposites, while in another context, the one merely denotes a subset of the other? Why is it that we would use the very same word to denote two different levels on a ladder of abstraction? Why do languages insist on being so miserly with their words, when it would seem so very simple if, for each different category, there were a different word? The answer is summed up by one word: “adaptation”.

Marking is actually a well-adapted and useful way of exploiting ambiguity in order to maintain flexibility, allowing people to use a word in a variety of contexts. Indeed, although precision is crucial in communication, it’s equally important that precision should not entail a stifling rigidity, preventing one from understanding familiar words in unanticipated situations. Marking allows precision (the designation of a very specific category) to coexist with flexibility (the looseness of interpretation that comes from the freedom of finding the appropriate level of abstraction).

As we will see (note that this “we” is broader than
we
₁
, which consists of just your two authors, since it includes our readers as well, hence this “we” means
we
₂
) in the next few paragraphs, if we (note that this “we” is even broader since it includes all of humanity, hence it means
we
₃
) couldn’t categorize things simultaneously at different levels of abstraction, it would lead to some unfortunate consequences:

And so, in the final analysis, are trucks cars? In this light-hearted anecdote, one sees the classic signature of marking, since trucks sometimes certainly
are
cars, yet at other times they certainly are
not
cars.

When Megan’s father says “Now watch out for cars!” as Megan is setting out for school each morning, he doesn’t expect — and Megan knows this very well — that she will blithely step out in front of the first onrushing truck that she sees approaching. What he means by “cars” is anything moving that might possibly constitute a danger to Megan along her way to school, so it includes big trucks and also pickups, motorcycles, motorbikes, bikes, trikes, and scooters — and if, perchance, some unexpected kind of moving entity came along, it too would be naturally understood as squeezing in under the rubric of “cars”, even if neither father nor daughter had ever anticipated any such entity when the warning was issued. Thus “car” as an umbrella term would cover a tank in a military parade, a horse-drawn carriage, and a group of teen-aged roller-bladers. All of those possibilities, far-fetched though they may be, were implicitly part of Megan’s father’s idea when he told his daughter to “watch out for cars” — perhaps lying out toward the fringes of the category of “car”, but nonetheless conceivable as members of the category when encountered in the street.

In other situations, however, “car” is more restricted in its meaning. It doesn’t include bikes or roller-bladers, but it does include trucks and motorcycles of a certain horsepower — this on highways in Europe where signs designate what kinds of “cars” can travel down them. When Mr. Martin goes to the car dealer looking for a good deal, he totally excludes in advance the idea of trucks and pickups from his category
car
, and also anything that has fewer than (or, for that matter, more than) four wheels.

The riddle of these highway categories doesn’t end here. Thus: are pickups trucks? Are SUVs trucks, or are they station wagons, or are they vans? Are SUVs cars? Are motorbikes and motorscooters motorcycles? Are roller blades roller skates? All these categories are marked categories, and thus they can take on wider or narrower senses depending on the context, which in certain situations leads to an affirmative answer, and in others to a negative answer. The fact that a single lexical item denotes categories at different levels of abstraction allows one to select the appropriate level as a function of the situation, and thus to deal with things in an appropriate manner. And so Megan is spared the sad lot doled out to Gyro Gearloose’s invention, because she, like other humans, has the ability to adapt her level of abstraction of categorization to the context that she finds herself in.

The fact that one single word or phrase can be attached to a number of related categories, all residing at different levels of abstraction, encourages adaptation to the context. The construction of such categories is carried out by a process of category extension that tries to combine the two crucial features that we pointed out above: namely, categorization allows people to
make distinctions
and also to
see commonalities
.

And thus, what might seem at first merely to be a phenomenon of interest solely to some specialized linguists and philosophers turns out to be at the heart of the development of concepts, for, as we shall now see, marking provides a kind of linguistic pedigree of a category’s history over time, all the way from its babyhood to its adult state. The reason that a single term is so often used to denote different categories is that there are abstraction relations between categories, and the understanding of these relationships develops at the same time as the categories themselves develop.

Below is a pair of father–son exchanges that clearly show how the phenomenon of marking is correlated with the development of concepts in a human mind. These two short conversations took place when little Mica, aged five, was taken by his parents to Egypt. Here are Mica and his Papa talking during their vacation:

These small exchanges might be seen as merely amusing demonstrations of a child’s naïveté. Adults who read them usually don’t even see what Mica could have been thinking at first, and then when they do, they burst out laughing. And indeed, who wouldn’t find the image amusing of strange beasts wandering around the vast desert, banging into random objects (each other? cliffs? exotic trees?), and thus getting humps, bumps, or lumps? (The conversation took place in French, and all of those rhyming notions are blended together in the French word “bosse”.) And is the image of undersea divers swimming around with bottles of milk, orange juice, beer, or other drinks strapped to their backs any less amusing?

But something more than just naïve charm can be found in these snippets — namely, a revelation of how categories are born, in part through marking. In these dialogues we see major differences between Mica’s categories and his father’s. Where Mica had just one concept for the word “bosse” so far, his father had several. Their mutual incomprehension came from the fact that though they were using the same words, those words denoted different categories.

Several varieties of humpy, bumpy, lumpy things existed for Mica’s father. His most abstract category for the word “bosse” corresponded roughly to the idea of a gentle rise off of a flat surface, and it allowed him to see camels’ humps, speed bumps on roads, lumps from mosquito bites, and so forth, all as manifestations of one single, general
bosse
idea (and this even includes “math bumps” — a linguistic relic from the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of phrenology, but despite the notion’s lack of scientific validity, in France people still speak casually and metaphorically of someone endowed with mathematical ability as having “la bosse des maths”).

For Mica, however, the category denoted by “bosse” was far narrower. For him, the presence of a hump, bump, or lump meant merely that a human being or an animal had banged into something — as surely as the presence of smoke somewhere means that there is a fire nearby. And so the question that leapt to Mica’s mind becomes totally natural and obvious, since he was simply trying to get to the bottom of a fact that he had just heard.

Similar remarks hold regarding the two speakers’ understandings of the bottles strapped onto divers’ backs. Mica’s father’s life experience had given him a very wide and general concept of
bottle
, and when he said the word, he had in mind, and intended to evoke in Mica’s mind, a certain subcategory of that wide category of
bottle
, but again, it was not the one that Mica envisioned, because in Mica’s limited experience, a bottle always contained some kind of drink.

We can rewrite these two snippets from Mica’s point of view, showing explicitly how he heard what his Papa said:

Despite appearances, it’s not the gulf between a child’s and an adult’s mental mechanisms that makes the difference here. It simply depends on the repertoire of categories one has built up. The existence of a marked category reveals a good deal of experience in a domain, because the speaker has to have constructed
both
a wide category
and
a narrow one, which share the same linguistic label.

As an afterthought, it is amusing to point out that Mica’s father, who had little knowledge of desert beasts, actually replied slightly incorrectly to his son; once again, it has to do with marking. The truth of the matter is that even the word “camel” is a marked term. Officially speaking, it denotes both a wide category including both one-humped and two-humped beasts (
camel
₂
), and a narrow category including only two-humped beasts (
camel
₁
). In other words, whereas the narrow category
camel
₁
is in
contradistinction to the category
dromedary
(much as
car
₁
contrasts with
truck
), the wide category
camel
₂
is a superordinate of (
i.e.
, contains) the category
dromedary
(much as
car
₂
includes
truck
).

Mica’s father could thus have given his son a different reply, based on the wider sense of the word “camel”, as follows:

Such a strange reply, though technically correct, would have left Mica rather confused, and would still not have explained how these curious beasts managed to bang into various things. It would, however, convey the extra information that the two species of animals belong together, as well as what makes them different (
camel
⇒ two humps;
dromedary
⇒ one hump). Zoologists tend to use the word “camel” in the inclusive, abstract fashion, but non-specialists tend to do the opposite — namely, they prefer stressing the oppositeness of camels and dromedaries.