Semantic Restructuring is the pursuit of enlightenment, enlivenment, empowerment through the creative re-arranging of the building blocks of meaning. For a better description, Start Here.
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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
In what discipline do adherents say:
There is no such thing as grammar, it's an intangible entity, and we might do well to identify the set of tangible, experiential and conceptual entities that are conflated to arrive at "grammar."
Probably none. But that is a question I would ask. I understand it's not a question likely to be asked in any discipline that water-skis in the wake of Chomsky, but it's a question I'd like to see asked in a meaningful way. Hell, just the "what do we conflate to create grammar?" would be a good one to work on. One thing that really strikes me is the notion of grammar seems to flow from hierarchicalized social structures in which an authority can dictate what is and isn't "proper" communication. Grammar seems, to my eye, inextricably linked with prescription, proscription, social order, force, inequity. It's enough to make a flower girl say, "Garn."
Think for a bit about Chomsky's stated goal, rules for generating all and only the grammatical sentences of a language. Now think about the overwhelming percentage of language (not to mention the rest of communication and interaction) that is fully acceptable, effective, and ungrammatical. It's a cousin of Aristotle's error of excluding the middle. Sure, we can do some neat tricks by excluding the middle, but that doesn't make the method empirically valid; life is lived pretty exclusively in that excluded middle, made up not only of greys but the infitite blend of colors. Likewise Chomsky's "Language = Set of Grammatical Sentences." Neat, useful, but in no way the whole shebang, quite limited in scope, and, seemingly, an unacknowledged byproduct of prescription, proscription, social order, force, inequity.
Now, maybe it's just that within a discipline, like linguistics, the folks accept these lacunae, either because the resulting efforts seem still to have merit and bear worthwhile fruits, or simply because that's the price of discipleship. And maybe that's why I've never been able to find a discpipline, because I can't accept these huge gaping holes and I'm not presonally tied to any group enough to accept their orthodoxies just for membership.
Thanks, by the way, to Eve Sweetser, on cogling, for introducing me to "conflation" in this context. I haven't yet tracked down the source article she cited, and so am probably using the term differently than the literature. But in the meantime it works wonders for me as a means of thinking about nominalization, in the N-LP sense of the word (in Semantic Restructuring we call them "intangibles.")
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