Life: No easy choices

On the platform where I catch the el homebound, there's the first clever anti-abortion ad I've ever seen. It shows a picture of a woman overlaid with a quote about how empty she felt after terminating a pregnancy and concludes with the slogan, "Something dies inside you when you have an abortion." It's the only anti-abortion ad I've seen which speaks to the effects on the mother rather than the effects on the foetus. (However, the clever bit is that the slogan can also be read as a stance on the status of the unborn child.)

I haven't seen any ads from the abortion rights camp in a while. What they really need is some way of positioning themselves as anti-abortion. This isn't as strange as it sounds. As I said in a previous entry, no one is "pro-abortion" in the same sense that no one is "pro-war": They acknowledge that it's a sucky option, but sometimes it's the only effective one and, for that reason, they want it to remain on the table.

Since Pro-Lifers generally oppose contraception and sex education as well, they're vulnerable to the charge of aiding and abetting future abortions. The question is how to work this into a campaign without coming off too negatively and alienating the average person.

Nonsense? In no sense!

I recently got into a discussion in vianegativa's LJ about the nature of language. I don't think grande knew I was a linguist by training--I didn't know he had a background in communications until I checked out his profile--but we pretty well gave the game away by the stances we took.

He seemed to be arguing Chomsky's old line that grammar is all syntax. As proof, he pointed out that he could write grammatically correct nonsense sentences. (Some of you--those who don't scare from grues--will already be thinking of Chomsky's "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" example, as I admit I was.) I responded:

Sure, you can write "nonsense" sentences. But even nonsense has a meaning and an interpretation! Even if there's no intelligible semantic interpretation of such a sentence, there's a pragmatic interpretation of what you were intending to express with such a sentence.

But it seems I ignored an even more fundamental point: How do we know the sentences are nonsense? By attempting to produce a "reasonable interpretation" and failing? Context is everything; even Chomsky's favourite example ended up being the subject of a literary contest, just to prove the point. ( The winning entry is surprisingly good. )

No utterance exists in a void. We've learned to assign conventional interpretations to sentences in isolation, but we shouldn't take this as proof that those sentences have "literal" meanings that are only altered, as opposed to completely determined, by individual situations.

I can see why linguists have worked to demonstrate the independence of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. It just makes things easier when you can concentrate on the "meaning" of a sentence without worrying about its structure or interpretation or pure structure without considering meaning or interpretation. However, simple answers are often wrong ones and tell us more about the researcher's biases than how things actually work in this messy, complicated world.