[UA] Re: Emoticons

[Patrick None]

> > > 6. "But I need to show I'm being sarcastic/that it's a
> joke!">
> Which is why, given an informal communication to any number of
> people who I may or may not know, many of which do not like
> emoticons, I eschew them.
>

 Fair enough.  I think emoticons are sort of a logical progression for
written communication over the internet - as part of the sheer speed of it.
I think they also serve a really important function of setting the formality
of the letter, for better or worse.
 But I can't disagree with NOT using them.  I think now that, using just the
language over email is equivilant to speaking to a buisness partner, or
closer to an actual letter.  What I think will happen - what I'd like to
figure out a way to track - is if this changes measurably.  In another five
years will it be the equivilant of refusing to use a contraction in spoken
language?
 That's just part of my general nerdiness regarding how politeness is
expressed.

> > Lastly on this dry bit - which is to me the most UAable part.
> > What if someone took the (to most researchers) indescrete,
> > basically unanalyzably complex aspects of conversation -
> > including body language - and made each unit discrete?
>
> People do this in the real world, but I can't recall their field
> of study's name. Physiolinguistics?
>

 A lot of fields in linguistics are involved in this; it depends on which
"discrete" aspect you're looking at. Body language is usually under semantic
study, just because its hard to pin down what it is.
 I don't have any references handy, but I can email my old semantics
professor.  A lot of that research is part of the umbrella of
sociolinguistics, such as Robin Lakoff and Debra Tannon (sp?), especially
trying to make explicit the difference between communications in person and
over media (Lakoff) and male/female communicative differences, including
usage and interpretation of body language (Tannon).


> > My initial thought was from being able to par down what
> > a certain group of people consider "basic," -  the emoticons
> > and the usage those emoticons see on the WWW - and extrapolate
> > that into the real world by taking semantics, Chomskyian
> > theory on the "language structures within the brain," head-
> > driven syntax (for a predictable range of response), and
> > pureeing the whole thing with a  fine dusting of failed Self
> > checks.  Mind, I keep wandering back into "booogieee! its the
> > alter toungue!" land, but I really, really dig the alter
> > toungue.
>
> Sort of a verbal version of the extra letters of the Alphabet in
> Morrison's INVISIBLES or the words/symbols in Hite's GURPS
> HORROR scenario "the Madness Dossier"?
>

 I haven't read the Hite scenario, but almost exactly like the Invisibles
child/enlightened/pure language.  Very much the concept that, fundamentally,
there are core ways to express things, and language falters because it
doesn't just communicate things, it has to pass through speech and body
language and context.  If you sorted through all those things, then the idea
of "language" wouldn't be seperate from the idea of "reality" - the map
would be 1:1.

> Hm. I think I've seen that in fiction -- Delaney's BABEL-17 and
> Vance's LANGUAGES OF PAO, perhaps? Then there's the Bene
> Gesserit Voice...
>
>

 I'm only familiar with the last, but i've got a library card and lots of
time while in Canada.  The Voice would definitly be a differnet route.
Instead of some fundamental level at which language is reality, its some
fundamental level where everything about a person can be read from their
behavior and speech, and where language (including body language, context -
the entire package) - can bypass the victims thought, cutting right to the
patterns of their brain that make things happen.
 Hm. I guess that would be more...Chomsky and Frank Herbert, rogue avatars
of the Demagogue?
 certainly more human-focused then (my take on) the Alter toungue.


=====
> Chad Underkoffler [chadu at yahoo.com]
> http://www.geocities.com/chadu/index.html

Patrick


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