Semantic Recombination

Semantic recombinations are also possible using Mathews' Algorithm. It is interesting about that algorithm that it can function at every level of linguistic difference, from individual sounds, to combinations of sound that do or don't express meaning but are not yet complete words (phonemes and morphemes) to syntactic elements, the parts of a sentence. As I mentioned in an earlier post, The Writhing Society finds that syntactic recombinations don't bring up much in the way of new, interesting sentences, unless there's quite a lot of preparatory work, and even then the results often turn out clever more than generative of further new ideas. Of course we haven't really gone very far into this experiment and would be very interested to hear from anyone who has used it to greater satisfaction. We haven't tried using the Algorithm on much smaller units, such as phones, but it would be interesting to do so with a view to creating new words, some of which might be like the utterances in the dadaist Kurt Schwitters' performances. (There are recordings of these on UBUweb.com.)

But semantic units are units of meaning; that is, one or more words that don't require a context to make a statement. In practice these units are parts-of-story or parts-of-discourse. They are analytical units. Sometimes they articulate a plot or an argument. Stories will begin with a problem, essays with an issue. The structure of what follows will be fairly predictable, even though the content may not be. That is, a story may contain a peripety in which the action changes direction drastically; we may not know which way it will turn, but we still will expect a peripety or more than one.

Because these are analytical units, various scholars have tried to complete the analysis by creating an encyclopedic schema. "Freytag's Pyramid" divides tragic structure into a rising action (inciting moment, exposition, complication) leading up to climax/crisis, and then descending through reversal (that's peripety), catastrophe, to "moment of last suspense," which I imagine is when we're wondering exactly how everyone will die. More recently, Joseph Campbell found a structure to all myth, his "monomyth," and laid it out first (in 1949) in The Hero With a Thousand Faces (3rd. ed., Princeton: Bollingen, 2008). Comparing the story of the hero's quest from every culture where such myths had been recorded, he found a pattern that was independent of the processes of cultural diffusion (i.e. stories invented in one place being retold in another by merchants, conquerors, slaves, etc.). He ascribed this uniformity to the omnipresence in all cultures of Jungian archetypes. The book is worth reading if only for the wealth of stories it brings together.

Another semantic unit, also found in myths and legends though not always occurring predictably at a given point in the story's unfolding, is the "folklore motif." Vladimir Propp published his Morphology of the Folk-Tale in Russia in 1928. The American scholar Stith Thompson followed with his Motif-index of folk-literature: a classification of narrative elements in folktales, ballads, myths, fables, mediaeval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books, and local legends (6 vols. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1932-7). Here is a part of his classification:

J0--J199. Acquisition and possession of wisdom (knowledge)

†J10. Wisdom (knowledge) acquired from experience

†J30. Wisdom (knowledge) acquired from inference

†J50. Wisdom (knowledge) acquired from observation

†J80. Wisdom (knowledge) taught by parable

†J100. Wisdom (knowledge) taught by necessity

†J120. Wisdom learned from children

†J130. Wisdom (knowledge) acquired from animals

†J140. Wisdom (knowledge) through education

†J150. Other means of acquiring wisdom (knowledge)

J180. Possession of wisdom

One of the interesting aspects of this sort of codification is the assumption of naiveté in the choice of materials, even though the composition of those elements may be highly sophisticated. Campbell sees mythic elements even in the modern novel, especially in Joyce's Finnegans Wake. But this post has gotten too long! To be continued!