meaning and syncopation

So, today I utilized my absolutely bizarre "ski-week" vacation to take a little field trip down to Stanford University to talk with a linguist who happens to go to my church. He works in the absolutely mind boggling field of computational linguistics. Specifically, he works in natural language processing... Which, quite frankly, means that his job is to build castles out of air.

I mean that pretty seriously. Looking at his work today left me with an incredible sense of just how bizarre a concept meaning is.

Everything is tala, to use Ben's and my term. Everything is just... Well... Meaningless. I think we can agree that the objective world alone carries no meaning. Yet somehow we humans have, from meaninglessness, created meaning. It really is like building a castle out of air. A better analogy might be building atmosphere out of vacuum. Quite literally, we have managed to take something and use it to build it's exact opposite. It's astonishing.

And now, as we build computers, we have to reinvent the wheel, more or less. It was rather magical, watching as my friend demonstrated how his incredibly complex grammar took what to us is a simple sentence such as "the dog chased the cat," took the meaningless bits that make up those words, and somehow figured out from that absolute meaninglessness that "the" is a determiner operating on the noun phrase "dog" which is the subject of the verb "chased." Later, as I sat in on a class taught by my friend, I got to watch him outline how to get a computer to understand that in the sentence "the dog that barked chased the cat," there's a hole, a lack of meaning, positioned right before the word "barked", and that that hole must propagated up through the tree of meaning until the computer figured out that the noun phrase "the dog" is what was supposed to fill that whole. And then, to know that from that exact same process, with no modification, the computer was suddenly able to understand that "the cat, the dog chased" is identical to "the dog chased the cat" in terms of meaning, and that "near the aardvark, the dog chased the cat near" is ungrammatical. All these are basic things that we English speakers do absolutely unconciously, all day every day. Unconcious activity that somehow shapes meaningless into meaning. I got a front row seat to see tala get turned into something we humans can more easily process.

On the way home from Stanford, after a few different modes of public transportation, I found myself on a K-line Muni Metro bus, just a few stops from my home. Next to me, standing by the door, were a little boy of about kindergarten age and his older sister, who looked to be a senior in high school at least. He was so tiny, and she so tall... Just before the train started to pull into my stop, I heard this conversation:

Boy: Syncopation! Syncopation!
Sister: What's that?
Boy: I don't know!
Sister: Well, who told it to you?
Boy: My teacher! Syncopation!
Sister: Well what does it mean?
Boy: It's when you sing louder... or lower... That's syncopation! Syncopation!

As I got off the train, they were walking just ahead of me. They got separated, and the sister reached behind her for the boy's hand, not looking back.

Sister: Is it Spanish?
Boy: No! It's English! Syncopation!
Sister: Oh.
Boy: Syncopation!

I lost them in the crowd of the station, catching one last glimpse as I left of them turning the other way. As I walked the few blocks towards home, I was left marveling at the problems of meaning. Syncopation... When you sing louder or lower. And why Spanish? A lot of meaning was being lost, here. The teacher was talking about syncopation, the boy wasn't understanding, he was talking to his sister, she wasn't understanding, and then she was talking about Spanish, and I wasn't understanding. So much meaning just dissipated.

It struck me then that meaning and tala are, somehow, fluid things. We humans take tala and force it to mean something, but we can never fix it down. It dissipates, going back into the meaninglessness from which it came. Thermodynamics, entropy, but for meaning.

For one, I rather liked the kid's definition of syncopation.

"When you sing louder... or lower..."

-lelandpaul