Pragmatic Homonymy and Polysemy: Bedrock of 307

Basically this whole class and all of communication hinges on the problem of making sure that the signs you are using are being received by your addressee in the way that you intended them. When this is successful, you have achieved a high degree of intersubjectivity.

The beauty of the arbitrary nature of language is also the bane of communication-- any sign can represent any meaning. Unfortunately (?), it can only do so through the process of a convention--the agreement of two or more people that a given sign refers to the same meaning (thing, idea, verb, whatever).

The arbitrary nature of semiotics (all modalities of human communication, the system of symbols) means that a given sign (word, gesture, intonational contour, etc) can have an infinite number of different meanings applied to it by people across the world and centuries.

When a sign has two (or more) meanings it is pragmatically homonymous. When you and your hearer share schema for said sign, you can anticipate that it will be understood as you intended it. The problem is that schema is invisible and you can't stop at every word or utterance to ask, Do you know what I mean by 'ho'? Do you realize I am using the word 'bitch' to indicate that you are one of my best friends?? Moreover, any semiotic/utterance etc can have more than one meaning SIMULTANEOUSLY. In the example from Out of Africa, the word baroness served several functions at the same time. That is the polysemy of language.

There is not world enough or time to spell out every single thing you mean (defining each word for your hearer as you go). Most of the time you have to speak out in faith that the other person shares the required schema for understanding you rightly. This is also why we tend to spend most of our time with people who do share most of our schema--we are comfortable with them and don't have to be on our guard all the time for misunderstandings. They will still happen, but they will be far less frequent. It is a good argument for staying in your hometown all your life.

It takes a lot of energy to move to a new place and learn a new set of semiotics, a whole new schema for communication norms in that community, be it another region in the U.S. or a whole nuther country and language. :) If you have schema for schema and for the universals of positive and negative face needs, you will do a thousand times better than if you keep trying to just translate every word and action you normally would use in English into that other language. There are many things you say in English that no one would Ever say in that Other culture. This takes us to Pete Becker's notion of exuberances and deficiencies-- any translation of a word will simultaneously say a little more and a little less than the word you are translating. You have to stay on your toes to make sure this doesn't result in a troublesome misunderstanding.