Gradience
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See gradient for more practical applications that are less cognitively oriented.
Gradience: a word first advanced by Dwight Bolinger (Linguistics) to describe the effect 'seen' in the spectrum of a probability.
Gradience as word or trope, is made more visual with signs or images.
Words in context can be seen to evoke a kind a perceptual or practicable 'gradient' relationship or operation on an object.
- The internal character of this graded relation may be compositionally graded or not-countable. Human language use can be very reckless, therefore a great deal of nonsense is argued on this account, matters about should, would or could be true. (Modal auxiliary verbs do a lot of duty).
- A preposition such as TO may arc anywhere in relating to its object between generally "towards" or "actually at".
- Children will make repetive use of the amplifying adverb VERY to assert, persuade or insist on the object of a degree phrase, in the same way that adults will often use profanity. No strictly relevant content is added, but the object's intentional volume is shown to be a free variable.
The concept of gradience is thus composed of two types: graded and indeterminate. Unfortunately, both types can echo the concept itself. Related ideas in other disciplines have a considerable history. See the references.
When seen under syntactic theory, found gradiences are terminal objects or 'events' delivered by some grammatical function
through a verb or other functional head.
In mathematics, the number line is said to be infinitely dense. One can probe up and down, or within, but still find only more numbers.
In quantum physics, objects or phenomena apparently lose or gain exhibited gradience upon observation.
In ethology, pragmatics and sociology, human behaviours may exhibit perhaps uncountable degrees of indeterminacy or gradience
→ related problems of free will and determinism.
[edit] Questions arise:
- What cases or events constitute demonstrably valid examples of differing topograms for gradience?
- Do space and time exhibit gradience or are they discoverably atomic? See natural units.
- Can computers be taught to deal with these issues with respect to formalizing natural language relationships?
[edit] References:
Aristotelian categories, Zeno's paradoxes, excluded middle ...
Dwight Bolinger (often misspelled Dwight Bollinger) in Aspects of Language, page __.
Linguistics Pragmatics, Semiotics
JPProst@ics.mq.edu.au (provide formal language theory?)
Other Wikipedia entries?
