Resonance / Participation

What is intrinsic to human communication?

Coleridge:

For all that meets the bodily sense I deem
Symbolical, one mighty alphabet
For infant minds
-- The Destiny of Nations, 18-20 (1796)

Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels, that every Thing has a Life of it's own, & that we are all one Life. A Poet's Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined and unified, with the great appearances in nature -- & not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similies. (Letters, II, 459; 1802)

Wordsworth:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man --
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
-- "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," 94-103

. . . . . . . . . . . Not useless do I deem
These quiet sympathies with things that hold
An inarticulate language . . .
(Wu, Romanticism 3rd ed., 444; 1798)

There is an active principle alive
In all things - in all natures, in the flowers
And in the trees, in every pebbly stone
That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,
The moving waters, and the invisible air.
All beings have their properties which spread
Beyond themselves, a power by which they make
Some other being conscious of their life --
Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude.
(Wu, Romanticism 3rd ed., 473; 1798-99)

"the immersed experiencer" -- Zwaan, R. A. (2004). The immersed experiencer: Toward an embodied theory of language comprehension. In B. H. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (vol. 44, pp. 35-62). New York: Academic. [ -- role of mirror neurons, etc.]

Points out studies that show words activate brain regions involved in perception or action; that visual representations occur during word and sentence comprehension; that information in a situation model is more active than information outside; and that hand and eye movements occur consistent with described situation. This leads him to propose that "language is a set of cues to the comprehender to construct an experiential (perception plus action) simulation of the described situation. In this conceptualization, the comprehender is an immersed experiencer of the described situation, and comprehension is the vicarious experience of the described situation" (35-6).

Sound of language echoes meaning: Plato's Cratylus.

-- Phonetic variation, cf. Miall, D. S. (2001). Sounds of contrast: An empirical approach to phonemic iconicity. Poetics, 29, 55-70. [link to paper, pdf format]


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Document created November 27th 2007