In the previous unit, we said that, in our mind, there has to be a sort of inner code, or subverbal
code that, based on our perceptive experience, classifies possible perceptions (including perceptions
of words) and subdivides them into cognitive types (CT) that are not words, but not entirely defined
mental entities. Eco (1997) uses as an example the Aztecs and the horse: this animal, before the
Spanish landing, was unknown to them, therefore alien to any cognitive types of their cultural heritage.
| Nevertheless, where was, to an Aztec, the concept of horse, since he did not have
it before the Spanish landing? Of course, after seeing some horses, the Aztecs must have created a
morphological pattern not so different from a 3D model, and it is on this basis that we should infer
the consistency of their perceptive acts. When I talk about CT, however, I do not mean just a sort
of image, a set of morphological tracts or motorial features [...] That is to say, we can state
that the CT of the horse from the beginning possessed a multimedia character
1.
|
At first, the cognitive type is something absolutely independent from the name of the object,
or even the possibility to name it; it is something that only the person who has perceived the
object in question can cause himself to recognize what he has perceived; therefore it is catalogued
in a sort of inner subjective, idiomorphical code.
| It was not necessary to name the object-horse to recognize it, in the same
way as I can eventually feel a sensation inside me that is unpleasant, though indefinable,
and understand just that it is the same I felt the day before
2.
|
In other words that we need to name something just if (and when) we behave as social animals
and want, or have to, communicate with others. In contrast, in the autistic relation between my
ego and itself, in order to reason about concepts or objects, I do not need any external language:
neither the natural code made of words, nor other, artificial, codes. I nonetheless do need
what Eco calls "cognitive type" (and Vygotskij "inner language") in order to identify a sensation
or an object and classify them mentally so as to make more and more complex and differentiated
the structure of my perceptive-cognitive apparatus.
When we read a text or listen to a speech, as we held before, "we compare tokens to
a type"3 and this process
occurs at two levels, twice in a row.
In a first phase, we put side by side the graphic/auditory token to a graphic/auditory
type that is part of our repertoire of signs, of phonemes, or, more often, of recurring graphemic
or phonemic patterns. This first phase allows us to make out the letter or word or locution or
phrase ' or, whenever the given token doesn't match exactly any types found in our repertoire
' to find near matches of the tokens with the types present in the repertoire, and to choose among
them the most plausible in the given context and co-text.
Moreover, simultaneously, our mind analyzes the quality and the quantity of the
discrepancy between token and type, and conjecture what sense we can attribute to such discrepancy:
we therefore create also a (meta-) typology of variances from the type.
If, for example, I find on paper the word "tonite" [sic] and in my repertoire I
can't find this graphical pattern, but I find a near match with the word "tonight", I can
infer that "tonite" may be a peculiar or local form of that word. Moreover, basing myself on
previously registered deviations from the standard pattern (i.e. on my encyclopedic knowledge),
I can infer that it is a word often found on signs outside restaurants and inns of a given area
(because, let's suppose, I had previously met the graphical pattern "lite" and I had realized
it was a local way of writing "light". From that experience, I had got to the standard deviance
that, in my mind, matches the way of writing in a given geographical area).
During the second phase, when we already have hold of the relation graphic
token-graphic type, we have to enact a second token-type comparison in order to identify,
based on the graphic type, the cognitive type evoked by the given graphic type. In other words,
we have to pass from the phase when we "think of a word"4
to the phase in which we think about every meaning evoked by that word.
The images evoked in one's mind by a given word do not match perfectly the ones
evoked by that same word in the mind of any other speaker of that same natural code. The first
limitation of inter-subjective communication lies therefore just in this rough match between the
mental images corresponding to "horse" in the writer/speaker and the mental images linked to
"horse" in the reader/listener. This happens because the subjective experiences (and the subjective
images) linked to "horse" for the transmitter and for the receiver are not the same.
The first loss produced in the act of verbal communication ' in the case of reading
' is caused by the subjectivity of the sign-sense match, due to the different individual experiences,
to the idiomorphic nature of the relation of affective signification characterizing every speaker
even within one natural code.
«This requires processing at the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels [...]»
5.
The mental processing of the read verbal material is of a syntactical nature when
we try to reconstruct the possible structure of the sentence, i.e. the relations among its elements.
In contrast, it is of a semantic nature when it identifies the relevant areas within the semantic
field of any single word or sentence; and it is of a pragmatic nature when it deals with the
logical match of the possible meanings to the general context and to the verbal co-text.
Moreover, the text is analyzed in two ways:
| [...] micro- and macro-analysis of the actual text: monitoring for cohesion
and coherence, and checking for coherence between the actual text and the potential text-type of
which it is a token realization [...]
6.
|
Microanalysis has the purpose of verifying text cohesion and inner cohesion of the single units
of text among them. Macro-analysis is aimed at controlling coherence and cohesion between the
created text and the category, the model to which the text refers. For example, if the text is
an instruction booklet for a household appliance, or a story for a newspaper, often there are
models for such types of text to which we frequently ' consciously or unconsciously ' adhere.
The decoding of a message in the mind of the reader is a sort of compromise between
these two kinds of analysis, because the bottom-up analysis, one semantic unit at a time, doesn't
ever turn out the same results as the top-down analysis of the text as an entity that has its
own coherent structure.
| There is, in other words, a trade-off between the micro-/bottom-up analysis
of the text at clause level and the macro-/top-down analysis of text as an entity
7.
|
As we can see, the reading of a natural code is not an aseptical or passive process of
assimilation of universally definite concepts as it happens in a mathematical equation. Reading
involves in itself cognitive differences and, consequently, interpretive differences. Even while
we are reading, and the object of our perception are words and not things, we are led by cognitive
types that help us catalogue the experience of possible writings, both in graphic and in semantic
terms, in order to increase our perceptive-cognitive apparatus as readers, to speed up our
decoding processes, to sharpen our critical capacity. The reader
| may try to understand the meanings emanating from the text, or abandon
himself to bizarre associations and free developments. I speak in terms of polarities, because
no reading can prevent imagination to run free [...]
8.
|
The difference between a reader and a critic is negligible: the reader trying to understand
has the same attitude as the critic, who is a systematic, methodical, self-aware reader. While
reading
| it is inescapable to compare two systems, the text system and the reader system;
the critic action is substantially made up of such comparisons.
9
|
In the next unit, we will deal with mental processes linked to writing.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES:
BELL R. T. Psycholinguistic/cognitive approaches. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies.
London, Routledge, 1998, p. 185-190. ISBN 0-415-09380-5.
ECO U. Kant e l'ornitorinco. Milano, Bompiani, 1997. ISBN 88-452-2868-1. English translation:
Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition; translated from the Italian by Alastair
McEwen, New York, Harcourt Brace, 2000.
SEGRE C. Avviamento all'analisi del testo letterario. Torino, Einaudi, 1985. ISBN 88-06-58735-8.
English translation: Introduction to the Analysis of the Literary Text, with the collaboration of
Tomaso Kemeny; translated from the Italian by John Meddemmen, Bloomington, Indiana University Press,
1988. ISBN 0253331064.
VYGOTSKY L. S. Myshlenie i rech´. Psihologicheskie issledovanija. Moskvà-Leningrad, Gosudarstvennoe
social´no-èkonomicheskoe izdatel´stvo, 1934. English translation: Thought and Language; translated
from the Russian and edited by Alex Kozulin, Cambridge (Massachusetts), MIT Press, 1986.
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