Context Builders and Referential Anchoring

In comparison to the elementary quasi-predicate, creatures gain with the complex sign act ‘assertion’ and its clearly separated partial acts ‘nomination’ and ‘predication’ the following essential advantage: it allows them originally to communicate about objects that are not present – not perceivable for them – in their actual environment. Using assertions is the only way at all to make “reachable” other contexts of action.

Indeed, we continuously use more or less consciously many verbal indications of con- texts / discourse universes. Applying tempus is a typical example, since assertions about past or future affairs do precisely not refer to the present situational context as their proper discourse universe; the latter must be derived from the former. The grammatical modifications of the verb are quite an implicit indicator. Explicit specifications of loca- tion and time may also serve to reconstruct the context used as the discourse universe to be considered further on.

In order to adequately fathom this crucial aspect of assertions we assume another necessary partial sign act beside nomination and predication. GILLES FAUCONNIER, who

is particularly interested in the linguistic potentials and consequences of such a proposal from a cognitive science perspective, uses the expression ‘mental spaces’ for contexts; correspondingly he speaks of ‘space builders’ – the verbal constructs that open up ex- plicitly or implicitly contexts as the relevant discourse universes [FAUCONNIER 1985,

17]. In the following, the expression ‘context builder’ is used analogously for character- izing the partial sign act that in the frame of an assertion allows the interlocutors to re- construct the underlying context.

A special form of context building is the sequence of previous assertions, the co-text: the (intentional) objects introduced or modified there may easily be referred to again by means of definite descriptions that employ the distinction mentioned before. Thus, each continuous propositional text can also be conceived of as the complex context builder for subsequent assertions: “In Tolstoy’s ›War and Peace‹, Platon is shot dead by a French soldier” (context builder in italics)

The distinction between the referential and the intra-lexical “way of being given” of objects has already been mentioned: only in the first cases, assertions about objects can be empirically checked – or as we shall say: can the assertion be referentially anchored. Context builders pointing out locations give us at hand a method of how to transform the context meant by an utterance into the situative context in which the referential an- choring could actually be performed. Spatio-temporal coordinates play an important role [TUGENDHAT 1982, Sect. 26II]. Referentially anchoring an assertion then involves

two steps: first, one has to know / recognize how the sensory-motor test routines linked to the nominations descriptive part (i.e., the one using distinctions formerly mentioned) are “prepared” – positioned, orientated, etc. (by transforming the context pointed out by the context builder into the situational context); second, one has to know how to actu- ally perform the sensory-motor test routines for the newly communicated habit of dis-

tinction associated with the predication (e.g., that I have to look in order to recognize whether something – take the photo mentioned in the example above – is really “blurred”). Therewith, the “local” habits of distinguishing already associated with the elementary, i.e., strictly context-bound sign acts (quasi-predicates) may be employed. However, they are modified by extra conditions that are necessary for the individuation of objects, i.e., the integration of their absent aspects. Such conditions are essentially stabilized socially.

Assertions may be conceived of as derived from quasi-predicates (gray arrows in Fig. 22) since they fulfill a very similar overall function – to harmonize situations of behav- ior. The additional differentiation into the three clearly distinguishable partial acts “con- text building”, “nomination”, and “predication” is the precondition for redeeming communication from the strict binding to the actual situation. So far, all contexts but the actual situation of communication can apparently be constituted only by means of being verbally evoked. That is, we are in the interesting situation of considering, on the one hand, creatures that are able to communicate in an elementary manner but are in a way completely restricted to the “here and now”.22

On the other hand, we think of creatures with a more complicated behavior; they master a kind of communication that is inde- pendent of the actual situation. However, this art of a relative independence from situa- tion depends circularly on their ability to communicate in such a complicated manner. The tool for overcoming that horizon is given only in communication. We hardly know yet how to understand this sharp transition (cf. [ROS2005]).

The problem we have reached here is indeed the question of the origin of (the field of concepts of) geometrical space (and measured time) per se: the medium needed for con- taining objects in the full-blown sense. A strange abstraction is necessary here for pre- object creatures: to learn to differentiate the places in space (and time) from the events and (pre-)objects “there”. Perceptoid signs may play a crucial role for this step, though this is not the place to continue investigating this thread of thoughts.

22

This includes more precisely all the locations in space and time that are directly connected with the pre- sent activity, i.e., not just a single (ideal) point of time or space.

The human fact par excellence is perhaps not so much the creation of the tool but the domestication of time and space, i.e., the creation of a human time and a human space.

[LEROI-GOURHAN 1984, 387]