It is fashionable among cultural critics to resist looking at isolated words or strings of words because they are not, it is alleged, as rich as context, culture, and history to support interpretation. This of course is true. This truth is often used however to smuggle an unstated nonsequitor, which is to assume that the surface language used to prime audiences somehow competes with, rather than works alongside, contextual, historical, and ideological frames of interpretation. The fact of the matter is that surface primings routinely collaborate, rather than com-pete with, deep interpretation. The one initiates the interpretation process; the other helps bring to it some settled state of closure.
Although these inputs collaborate in interpretative processes, they are distinct and can be separated. There is, furthermore, value to their distinctiveness as a production strategy. Writers are able to generate words on the page quickly by focusing on the priming potency they are after. Getting words out in the air or on the page would be a slower and less efficient process if we had to interpret and evaluate the fine shadings of our words before words came out. Let’s illustrate this subtle point through an interactive demonstration you, dear reader, can test on yourself.
Without peeking ahead, write five sentences that use the English preposition for. No informant we’ve asked has any trouble doing this. Now ask yourself how you use the word for in your repertoire as a writer. It’s hard to imagine how a lan-guage user could fail to answer this question, as this is one of the most common words of English. The same writers who have no problem using for in their own practice have a very hard time explaining what they know. To explain what they know, they become readers and interpreters of the sentences they have written.
Often this strategy doesn’t work as well as they had thought because our reading knowledge of for and all the slivers of meaning to which it contributes are not systematically available to our conscious awareness.
If one consults an unabridged dictionary, like Webster’s 2ndunabridged (1948, p. 984), one finds eleven meanings, involving senses such as; in consideration of which something is done or takes place (does it for John); indicates substitutes or compensations (eye for an eye); an extended subject, as in (for me to come is impossible); the cause motive or occasion of an act (did it for money); informa-tion that can be overridden (for all her flaws, she has a good heart); proporinforma-tion (for one winner, there are a thousand losers); specification (he is tall for his age);
and duration in time and space (for many years, for many miles).
If one consults the Collins CoBuild Dictionary (Sinclair, 1995; pp. 658-660, hereafter CCD), a dictionary based on concordance data from the 200 million-word Bank of English corpus, one finds 35 senses of the million-word for, listed here, with examples we have adapted for brevity.
[1] This gift is FOR Bill (FOR = beneficiary) [2] I do work FOR Bill (FOR = employer) [3] I speak FOR Bill (FOR = representation)
[4] I made the pick up FOR Bill (FOR = substitution) [5] I feel FOR Bill (FOR = object of empathy) [6] I feel contempt FOR Bill (FOR = object of affect) [7] I make time FOR Bill (FOR = center of interest served) [8] Bill is FOR hire (FOR = services available)
[9] Bill’s knife is good FOR opening cans (FOR = purpose) [10] Bill needed a job, FOR he was recently fired (FOR = reason) [11] Bill needed a job FOR lack of work (FOR = reason)
[12] Bill couldn’t walk FOR legs that failed him (FOR = cause)
[13] Were it not FOR Bill, we would have frozen (FOR = avoided contingency)
[14] Bill was married FOR 30 years (FOR = time duration) [15] Bill drove FOR 30 miles (FOR = spatial extent) [16] Bill got it FOR a dollar (FOR = rate of exchange)
[17] Bill planned it FOR Saturday (FOR = time shift to target of occurrence) [18] Bill partied FOR his birthday (FOR = target occasion)
[19] Bill left FOR St. Louis (FOR = destination)
[20] The goal FOR Bill here is to make money (FOR = stakeholder/stakes) [21] It is possible FOR Bill to come (FOR = introduce subject of infinitive) [22] Bill was tall FOR his age (FOR = against expectations)
[23] Bill is FOR lower taxes (FOR = positive affiliation)
[24] Higher taxes were not FOR Bill (FOR = negative affiliation) [25] It’s FOR Bill to decide (FOR = responsibility)
[26] Bill is FOR bussing (FOR = agreement) [27] Bill argued FOR bussing (FOR = support)
[28] Bill prepared himself FOR the cold (FOR = restricting the verb) [29] For every winner there are two losers (FOR = ratio comparison) [30] Pound FOR pound, Bill is the best (FOR = comparison across ranks) [31] Agricola is Latin FOR farmer (FOR = definitional substitution) [32] For more information, see the website (FOR = cross reference) [33] Bill was all FOR it (FOR = strong endorsement)
[34] Bill was in FOR it (FOR = in trouble, facing punishment) [35] Bill was visiting FOR the first time (FOR = how often)
If one placed each of these meanings in even richer contexts, say the social and historical contexts of particular audiences and readings, the meanings of for could proliferate further. In a recent political campaign, a candidate was attacked for lying when he said he was for a minimum wage. This is because he had once voted against a minimum wage when other factors had made the legislation undesirable. He responded to the attack by claiming that he was for a minimum wage, but to be understood as noncontradictory, he had to rely on voters coming up with a thirty-sixth construal of for, to mean supportive of as a general policy, all things equal.
Meanings and shadings proliferate as interpretative processes move upstream from the priming of words to the downstream of interpretive completion. As soon as our informants recognize the discrepancy between their “off the top of the head”
knowledge of for and the dictionary’s copious coverage of it, we ask them if the dictionary definitions help them understand the difficulty of defining the word.
They always respond affirmatively. It is hard to articulate how for contributes to meaning because it covers such a vast territory of meaning across contexts. When we then ask informants if they feel they need to rely on the dictionary to use the word in sentences, they invariably say no.
Although not laboratory controlled, we take this informal demonstration experiment as at least suggestive that producers of the language don’t need to wait on the fine discrimination of completed meaning downstream to feel a facile control of the production process upstream. They can control much of the language simply by controlling the major categories through which the language behaves as a priming instrument, an instrument that jumpstarts audi-ences in the right direction. To be sure, writers after precision must role-shift to the vantage of downstream reader during revision. The point is that this is a deliberate role-shift and writers don’t need to see how their words play all the way downstream in order to get their audiences primed upstream.
Primings seem to depend on shallow representations that turn into much richer, more complex delineations when the writer assumes the role of down-stream reader. Recent research in written production (Galbraith & Torrance, 1999) suggests that the writer’s production can be influenced by meanings created downstream as the writer toggles back and forth between the writer and reader role. This toggling of roles permits the writer to respond not only to a surface priming interest but also to the interpretatively weighted outputs that flow downstream from the priming surface. It is not unlike the painter who can, in one moment, look down at the palette and see only a few basic colors to mix and, in the next moment, can look at the canvas and see hundreds of blended colors and shades. In the role of reviser-editor looking at a text and its down-stream effects, we see endless shadings and slivers of meaning. In the role of the writer bringing ideas copiously and quickly to the page, we seem able to rely on a simpler palette of priming properties, relying on a restricted number of primary categories that alone and in combination are enough to jumpstart audiences in the right direction.
Accordingly, when we look to enumerate the meanings of the word for from the vantage of categories within the priming properties, we seem to experience a shallower and coarser-grained phenomenon than the one we encountered when sorting through the fine slices of meanings compiled from a concordance dictionary.
Having examined the copious breakdown of for as it flows downstream to slice fine grains of meaning and shading, let us now reconsider for from the van-tage of a lightweight priming word. As a word priming audience experience, for seems to prime two key experiences for audiences — a goal of projecting ahead to the future and a positive affect that indicates a beneficiary of the projection.
Thus, the priming rule regarding for might be something like: When a word or phrase X blends both the concepts of projecting ahead and positive affect, one can say for X.
This rule explains the priming in a sentence like:
34. This gift is for Bill
(Bill as part of future projection; positive affect; caused by gift)
Many other usages with for differ in surface input through what Facconnier and Turner (2002) call metonymic tightening (see also Coulson and Oakley, 2000).
Metonymic tightening means that when metonyms (words that stand for other words — Washington as a metonym for the federal government) are projected as part of a blended effect, there is pressure to tighten them within a syntactic series.
For example, employees may not consciously think of their service as a direct benefit to their bosses, but the metonymic tightening in the following example suggests that English has come to tighten the verb work + preposition for (often in the sense of on behalf of) into a metonymic shortening of the complex employ-ment contract.
35. I work for Bill.
(Bill = metonymic shortening of the institution whose well-being and future is the speaker’s responsibility)
While for can mean (in the listing of a dictionary entry) substitution, a writer can effectively prime this meaning merely by reporting an action and the person benefitting.
36. I made the pickup for Bill
(The idea of “substitution” seems a later inference that is not part of the priming. The priming only seems to indicate that I did something and Bill benefitted from it. The inference of substitution comes into play when it is assumed that Bill could have made the pickup too — so the nature of my beneficence was to substitute my labor for his.)
Although concordance-based dictionaries, as we have seen, can list over 30 meanings of for, writers can jumpstart most, if not all, these senses just by con-trolling a handful of audience experiences that for primes and then leaving it to the readers’ inference to fill in the remaining detail. In addition to its effects on future projection and positive affect, for also primes at most six other categories of audience experience — specification comparison, resistance, reason, temporal interval, and spatial interval. Consider the following:
37. He prepared for finals.
(for as future projection and specification) 38. He is the best, pound for pound.
(for as comparison across ranks) 39. For all his bad habits, I still like him.)
(for as resistance to a counter-assertion) 40. I wanted to see her, for I miss her.
(for signals the reason I want to see her) 41. He stayed imprisoned for five years.
(for signals temporal interval)
42. She walked for ten miles.
(for signals spatial interval)
We found that English for relies on eight priming categories to jumpstart over 30 specific dictionary shades and meanings. We then asked ourselves, if one can find priming categories for English for, how many priming categories can one ultimately find if we tried to explore and catalog other English words and strings for their priming properties.
This was the daunting question we posed for ourselves when we embarked on a journey to understand how ordinary strings of English prime unordinary expe-rience for audiences. We recognized that tracking function words like for would set us on a good path, for these are the most frequent and versatile words of English, with ubiquitous recurrence as playing pieces in rhetorical scrabble. If the priming categories we located across English strings could cover the range of major function words, we reasoned we would be on good grounds to think that our catalog of priming categories would clear a major hurdle for arguing some form of comprehensiveness if not completeness for our project.
Just as we have done with the word for, we let the reader witness in later chap-ters how the extremely versatile adverb just makes its way through our catalog of string categories of priming experiences. As competent language users, we have an implicit art with just that gives audiences a spectrum of jumpstarts for many varied interpretative paths downstream. We master the use of just, arguably, not because we study its dictionary meanings (most English language users surely have never looked it up) but because, like for, we corner the word within a small set of priming categories and control the word, implicitly, when we learn to control the categories to which just contributes as a priming action. The CCD (Sinclair, 1995), enumerates more than 20 concordance-derived senses of this nimble adverb. Our classification of priming categories presented later in this book captures most of the concordance senses of English just without — and this is significant — our ever having to isolate just as a stand-alone dictionary entry.* Although we don’t have direct evidence for this claim, it is tempting to speculate that to learn function words is simply to learn categories of priming rather than discrete meanings. We could then explain the versatility of such words for lan-guage production by explaining that such words, embedded in different strings, contribute, albeit barely visibly, to a much wider variety of priming experiences than so-called “content” words, the latter involving words more specialized in their meaning but less versatile as instruments of audience priming.
*All 20+ senses of just appear on pp. # 909 – 910 of the CCD.