RSSnegative parsing
Aug 08
suggestions solicited for parsing the aphorism
No news is good news
to demonstrate its two subtly different meanings.
inter-stratal tension
a place to review the delicate balance between language and reality
a place to review the delicate balance between language and reality
Aug 08
eldonlexico-grammar 6 Comments
suggestions solicited for parsing the aphorism
No news is good news
to demonstrate its two subtly different meanings.
Why is an instance ‘a token of a type’? Self Introduction
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© inter-stratal tension 2024
ThE CLOwN
Aug 08, 2010 @ 14:37:22
= ‘all news is bad’
no: non-specific Deictic ‘not any’
= ‘receiving no news is good’
no: Numerative ‘zero’
eldon
Aug 08, 2010 @ 20:44:07
yes, it interested me that reversing both negation and positive attribute produces
‘all news is bad news’
but with the other meaning you cannot do that, so was thinking on what was happening to explain this grammatically.
[no news] = [good news]
versus
all news = bad news
ThE CLOwN
Aug 09, 2010 @ 08:27:05
So grammatically, the distinction is at group rank:
Deictic ‘no’ answers the probe ‘which news?’
Numerative ‘no’ answers the probe ‘how much news?’
BTW, thanks for drawing my attention to this distinction.
pedro
Aug 25, 2010 @ 07:37:43
Coming in late
I think you’ve pretty much accounted for what’s going on here….but perhaps not quite everything.
Isn’t there something potentially polysemous about “news” – can’t it mean both “reports as disseminated by the media” and “tidings/new information” (as disseminated by anyone).
It seems to me that there’s an interaction between the possible meanings of “no” and these possible meanings of “news”.
So take the case where
“No news is good news” = “Zero news (the absence of news) is good news”
Here we could reword as “Zero tidings amount to good tidings”
In contrast take the case where
“No news is good news” = “Not any intances of news are good news”.
Here, I think, we could reword as
“No instances of media news reports involve good news”
So it seems to me “no” as “zero” activates the ” tidings” meaning of “news”, while the “not any instances of” meaning activates the “media report” meaning.
What do you think? Does this mean that a lexico-grammatical analysis (i.e. identifying what’s going on as far a functions in the group) can’t on its own account for the variation in meaning?
eldon
Aug 25, 2010 @ 10:02:16
would seem so
ThE CLOwN
Aug 25, 2010 @ 10:44:09
yes, a lexicogrammatical analysis merely provides one level of symbolic abstraction on the content of the instance. The meanings assigned to these wordings by readers brings another level of analysis that provides further insights into the content generally.
here I think the Deictic/Numerative contrast works for both semantic values of the lexicogrammatical token ‘news’:
not any tidings vs zero tidings
and
not any media reports vs zero media reports
unless i’m overlooking something …