If at first glance the collection of all the members of the category to nurse seems vaguer and less “real”, somehow, than the collection of all members of the category bridge, that’s simply a prejudice and an illusion. The bridges of the world are not given to us without effort and without blur. Even if all the existing bridges could oblige us by simultaneously lighting up in response to a button-push, there would still be all the bridges from ancient Roman times, ancient Chinese dynasties, and so forth, which have long since disappeared, not to mention all the bridges that are yet to be constructed during this century and all centuries yet to come. And of course, we haven’t even touched on the fictitious bridges seen in paintings and films and described in novels. And what about the miniature bridges built by children out of wooden blocks? Or tree trunks fallen over creeks? Or “jetways” (those tunnels on wheels that link an airplane with a gate)? And then there are bridges (or do they count as such? — that’s the question) built by ants, for ants, and made out of ants! And what about a toothpick casually placed between two plates, affording a shortcut for a wandering ant? What to say about bridges inside one’s mouth, bridges built between distant cultures, bridges between distant ideas? A moment’s thought shows that the category bridge is highly elusive. At this point, one might even wonder if situations that deserve the slightly abstract verbs “to nurse”, “to menace”, and “come on!” aren’t rather straightforward in comparison with situations that deserve the visual noun “bridge”.
Much Ado about Much
Let’s move on now to such an everyday word so mundane that most people would never think of it as the name of a category or concept. Namely, we’ll focus on the word “much”. What is the nature of situations that cause this word to spring to one’s lips? What do they all have in common? In short, what is this much category? Let’s take a close look at some examples of this abstraction.
That’s much too little for him. That’s a bit too much for me. Much less than that, please. Much the same as the last time. Don’t go to too much trouble. How much will that be? Much obliged. I’d always wanted it so much. It’s not much, but it’s home. I’m very much in agreement with you. Much though I wish I could… Much of the time it doesn’t work. Your hint very much helped me. Just as much legitimacy as her rival had. Moths are much like butterflies. As much as I’d like to believe you… So much so that we ran into trouble. She got much the better of him. It didn’t do us much good. Her florid writing style is just too much!
What is the shared essence of much situations? A much situation involves an opposition (usually unconscious) to an imaginary some or somewhat situation; in other words, a much situation involves a mental comparison in which a particular mental knob is “turned up” relative to a milder, more common situation. For example, “I wanted it so much” can only be understood by means of a fleeting comparison with a hypothetical scenario in which the speaker’s desire is less intense. In short, the word “much” is evoked in the mind of English speakers when they want to describe an unexpectedly large quantity or large degree of something, whether it’s concrete (“too much peanut butter”, “not very much air”) or not concrete (“much to my displeasure”, “much more prestige than it deserves”). As for listeners, when they hear the word used, they understand this intention on the part of the speaker, and consequently, in their heads they turn up a small mental knob in order to reflect the speaker’s apparent desire to intensify some part of speech, or even to intensify a phrase or clause.
A much situation is thus a situation that resides partly in the objective, outside world and partly in the subjective, inner world of one’s expectations about the nature of the outer world. In order to recognize a much situation as such, you have to be concentrating not only on something in the world “out there” (such as the amount of soup you’re being dished up by someone), or on some internal situation (like being hungry or sleepy), but also on your own expectations in such a situation, or on a typical person’s expectations. The exclamation “Hey, they sure didn’t give me much soup!” means that, in comparison with one’s expectations of the amount of soup typically served in restaurants, this serving is on the low end of the spectrum.
If a speaker didn’t feel that some milder contrasting scenario needed to be hinted at (at least subliminally), the word “much” wouldn’t pop to mind. “Too much peanut butter”, when spoken in a given situation, is aimed at evoking in listeners a hypothetical contrasting situation where the right amount of peanut butter was used. It’s in this contrast that the phrase’s meaning resides. Likewise, “Thank you very much!” is aimed at evoking in a listener, in a subtle fashion, the idea that the speaker could have voiced a less ebullient sentiment; it is therefore heard as a desire to convey gratitude more intensely than some other people might do in the same situation, or more intensely than the same speaker might do in a different situation or in a different mood.
We have seen that much situations concern the disparity between the external world and an ideal inner world filled to the brim with expectations and norms. Just as one can hope (though always vainly) to pin down what the essence of the category bird is, so here we’ve tried, with the aid of extremely blurry words, at least to hint at what the essence of the category much is.
Grammatical Patterns as Defining Mental Categories
As the above list of examples shows, when one is talking, there are certain readymade syntactic slots into which the word “much” fits very neatly and there fulfills its function. In fact, these syntactic slots themselves constitute another facet of the nature of the word “much”. As we grow up and go to school, we encounter the word “much” many thousands of times, and if certain spots where that word sits among other words strike us, on first hearing, as a bit surprising, after a while they become more familiar, then turn into a habit, and in the end they wind up being a reflex that is completely unconsciously integrated into us. Ways of placing the word “much” that at the outset seemed odd and unnatural gradually become so familiar that in the end one no longer sees what could at first have seemed puzzling or confusing about them.
Why do we say “I much appreciate all you’ve done for me” but not “I appreciate much all you’ve done for me?” Why do we say “I don’t go out much” and sometimes “I don’t much go out” but never “I much don’t go out”? Why “I’m much in agreement with her” but not “I’m much out of contact with her”? Why “much the same” but not “much the different” or “much the other”? Why “I’m much obliged” but not “I’m much grateful”? Why “much though I’d like to join you” but not “very much though I’d like to join you” or “much although I’d like to join you”? Why is “Many thanks” as common as daisies while “Much thanks” is as rare as orchids? Or is it? A quick Google search revealed a ratio of 200 to 1 in favor of “Many thanks to my friends” as compared to “Much thanks to my friends” — but the fact that the latter exists at all suggests that things might be changing. Here we find ourselves face to face with the blurry and moving contours of the category appropriate syntactic slots for the word “much”. Who knows what the just-mentioned ratio will be in five years, ten years, or fifty? Native speakers seldom ask themselves these kinds of questions about word usages, because the patterns are deep parts of their very fiber.
What all this means is that the category much — that is, roughly speaking, the full range of situations that evoke the word “much” and a feeling of “muchness” — is a category that possesses not only a cognitive/emotional side (while speaking, we feel a need or a desire to emphasize something, to draw a contrast between how things are in fact and how they might have been or may become), but also a syntactic side (we sense, as we are building a sentence even while uttering it, various telltale slots where the word could jump right into the sentence with no problem).
A reader might react to this observation by claiming that all we’ve said is that the word “much” has two facets, one being the concept behind it, and the other be
ing the grammatical roles that the word can play in English, and thus that our claim is merely that “much” has both a semantic and a syntactic side (much as does any word), and that semantics and syntax are independent human mental faculties. Such a stance implies that the mental processes that underlie people’s choice of what to say and their choice of how to say it are autonomous and have nothing in common. But making such a distinction is highly debatable. Could it not be that the mechanisms with which we perceive grammatical situations in the world of discourse are cut from the same cloth as those with which we perceive physical situations in the world around us?
As a child, one learns to “navigate” (quote unquote!) in the abstract world of grammar just as one learns to navigate in the world of concrete objects and actions. A child starts to use the word “much” in the simplest syntactic contexts at first, such as “too much”, “not much”, “much more”, and so on. These initial cases constitute the core of the category; as such, they are analogous to little Tim’s Mommy as the core of his category mommy, and to the Moon as the core of Galileo’s category moon. The child might possibly explore risky avenues such as “a lot much”, “many much”, “much red”, “much here”, “much now”, “much night”, and so forth, but such trial balloons will be popped, sooner or later, by society’s cool reaction, and will be given up.
As the years go by, our child will hear, read, understand, and integrate increasingly sophisticated usages, such as “much traffic”, “I much prefer the other one”, “much to my surprise”. These could be likened to the other children’s mothers in the mind of little Tim, and to the moons of Jupiter in the mind of Galileo. Each time a new usage is heard (such as “much to my surprise”), that specific case will contribute to a blurry mental cloud of potential usages that are analogous to it (“much to her horror”, “much to his shame”, “much to our disappointment”, “much to my parents’ delight”, etc.) Thus the child will be led to taking further risks by making little explorations at the fringes of these expanding categories — risks such as “much to my knowledge”, “much to her happiness”, “much to his unfamiliarity”, “much to their comfort” — and to the extent that these tentative forays resonate or fall flat with other speakers, they will be reinforced or discouraged.
Children refine their sense for the category of much situations (both its semantic and its syntactic aspect) in much the same way as they refine their sense for any other category. And they do all of this on their own, because schools do not teach any such thing and do not need to; children simply become, without any particular effort (let alone a great deal of conscious effort), much-ness experts. They will randomly run into the word in poems, in song lyrics, in ancient texts, in slang phrases, and in marginal usages like “it’s of a muchness”, “thanks muchly”, “it cost me much bucks”, “too much people here”, and without realizing that they are doing so, they themselves will indulge in just this kind of pushing of the linguistic envelope. Bit by bit, this will add up to a personal sense for the limits of the category — the category of appropriate usages and syntactic slots for the word “much”. For each person, this mental category will stretch out in its own idiosyncratic fashion, but no matter who it is, it will consist of a core surrounded by a “halo”. Just as in each person’s mind there are prototypical chairs and also quotation-marked “chairs” that flirt with the very edges of the category, so there are prototypical usages of “much” and also edge-flirting usages of the same word.
Words that Name Phenomena in Discourse
A profound aspect of growing up human involves developing an exquisite real-time sensitivity to the many types of expectations that our words set up in the minds of our listeners. In so doing, we acquire a rich set of categories that have to do with these abstract phenomena. Oddly enough, though, some of the most important of these categories are labeled by words that seem boring and bland — “and”, “but”, “so”, “while”, and numerous others. Such words may at first strike us as unimportant and even trivial, but that is a most misleading impression. These words denote deep and subtle concepts, and as we shall see, those concepts are grounded in analogies, much as are all other concepts.
Let’s look at some examples involving the word “and”. No one would be at all surprised if a friend, upon returning from a trip to France, enthused, “I like Paris and I like Parisians.” On the other hand, we would certainly be confused if our friend first declared, “I like Paris” and then stated, after a short pause, “I like Parisians.” This would give the impression of two ideas that were unrelated to each other, which of course is not the case. Our friend could make it a bit more logical-seeming by adding “also” at the end of the sentence; doing so would acknowledge the fact that listeners want to hear an explicit, sense-making link between the two utterances. Indeed, that’s precisely one of the key roles of the word “and” — to set up a natural link between two statements. Thus if our friend declared, “I like Paris and I just bought a pair of pliers”, we would be caught off guard by the lack of coherence. A central purpose of the word “and” is to convey to listeners a clear sense of the logical flow that, in the speaker’s mind, links one thought to the next one uttered.
The flow of discourse is just as real to human beings as the pathway of a fleeing zebra is real to a pursuing lion. They are both varieties of motion in certain kinds of space; it’s just that the space of hunting is physical and the space of discourse is mental. Lions live mostly in the physical world, and although we humans live there too, we also live in the world of language, and a large part of our category system revolves around phenomena that take place in that intangible but no less real world. We perceive and categorize situations that arise in discourse space, and we do so just as swiftly and just as naturally as the pursuing lion, on the savanna, chooses its direction of motion in a split second in chasing its prey.
We all acquire the word “and” and the concept behind it just as we do for other words and concepts — through analogical broadening. Can anyone recall the very first occurrence of the word “and” that they ever heard? Of course not. But as with all other words acquired during early childhood, it was never defined explicitly; rather, its meaning was picked up from context (“Mommy and Daddy”, possibly). At first it linked people, we might well suppose. Then it linked people and objects (“Sally and her toy”). Then it linked sequences in time (“I went out and looked”). Then it served to represent causal links (“It fell and broke”). Then it linked combinations of abstract qualities (“hot and cold water”), as well as of relationships (“before and after my haircut”) and other abstract attributes (“a hot and healthy meal”). And then many more came, in an avalanche.
Like any category, the category of and situations expands gradually and smoothly in each human mind — indeed, so smoothly that after the fact the resulting urban sprawl seems, albeit illusorily, monolithic and uniform, as if it had been constructed all at once, as if there were but one single elementary idea there, which had never needed any generalizing at all. There are no conscious traces left of the many concentric layers of outward expansion of and, just as there are no conscious traces left of how we acquired categories that give the impression of being considerably more complex, such as mother, stop, and much. And so this innocent little conjunction, which very few people would think of as standing for a category, fits right in with the story of words and concepts that we are here relating.
Contrasting “And” with “But”
Now let us deepen and broaden our discussion by looking at some examples involving the conjunction “but”. A totally logic-based view would claim that “and” and “but” mean exactly the same thing except for emotional shadings. However, that’s a pretty parochial view of the matter. Let’s take a closer look. Were our just-returned friend to say to us, “I like Paris but I like Parisians”, we would surely wonder, “What does that mean? It makes no sense!” The reason is that hearing the word “but” leads us to expect a swerve or a zig
zag in discourse space, but there was no such sudden switch in direction. Stating that one likes Paris and also Parisians does not challenge common sense, does not violate reasonable expectations, and thus it does not in any way, shape, or form constitute a swerve or zigzag in discourse space. Our hypothetical friend’s hypothetical sentence faked us out by announcing a swerve but not carrying it out. There is a puzzling inconsistency between the conjunction and the two phrases that it links. Indeed, if such a sentence were to show up in an email message, you might well guess that it was a typo and that your friend had intended to write, “I like Paris but I don’t like Parisians.” Now that would indeed constitute a zigzag in discourse space.
For effective communication, speakers have to pay close attention to the nature of the flow in the sequence of ideas that they are conveying — in other words, they have to carry out real-time self-monitoring. When motion in the space of discourse continues smoothly along a pathway that has already been established, then the word “and” (or some other cousin word or phrase, such as “moreover”, “indeed”, “in addition”, “on top of that”, or “to boot”, to list just a few possibilities) is warranted. We’ll call situations of this sort “and situations”. When one recognizes that one is in an and situation, one can say “and” and be done with it. By contrast, when motion in the space of discourse makes a sudden, unexpected swerve, then the word “but” (or some other concessive word or phrase, such as “whereas”, “however”, “actually”, “in fact”, “although”, or “nevertheless”, “even so”, “still”, “yet”, “in spite of that” to list just a few possibilities) is warranted. Analogously, these are but situations, and of course, when one recognizes that one is in a but situation, one can say “but” and be done with it.
Surfaces and Essences Page 13