Review_Author: Katya Midgette
Book_Author: Olson, D.
Book_Title: The World on Paper
Reference: 1994, NY, Cambridge University Press
Date: 10/25/2004
Time: 10:57:37 PM
Remote Name: 128.175.34.35
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Olson, D.R. (1994). The world on paper: The conceptual and cognitive implications of writing and reading. Cambridge University Press, NY: New York. The central idea of the book states that the ability to read and write affects our cognition greatly: literacy brings into consciousness thinking about representations of things, instead of thinking about things themselves. This idea needs to be explained in the view of three crucial points about literacy that the author is making in this book. 1. Writing was responsible for bringing aspects of spoken language into consciousness, that is for turning aspects of language into objects of reflection, analysis, and design. The history of writing is viewed by Olson as the history of understanding cognitive implications for writing. He believes that each of the writing systems was a representation of the spoken language, a tool for communication, and each of the writing systems brought into awareness certain linguistic features of the language, it provides a model to think about the features of the language. Logographic scripts brought word as an entity into consciousness. Word became not a part of thing that it names but just a word. Syllabic scripts made syllables into objects of consciousness, alphabetic systems made phonemes into the objects of consciousness, and so on. Written model for language allows to isolate grammar from language. In this sense writing is metalinguistic. Another important point here is that D. Olson opposes the view that history of writing is a sequence of failed attempts and partial successes toward the development of the alphabet. He believes that history of writing is a history of borrowing the scripts which were a good fit for the languages for which they were originally invented and applying these scripts to the languages for which they were ill-suited. An example could be the development of the Greek alphabet, which was based on the written script of a Semitic language, which represented only consonants, as what we think of vowels does not represent any lexical meaning but rather morphological meaning in this group of languages. As Greek belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, just as English, difference in vowels in Greek marks a semantic difference between the words. That is how the system of vowels and consonants came into being a model for representing the spoken language. Vowels and consonants became recognizable in the script, not the other way around, as Olson insists. Awareness of linguistic structures is a product of writing system, not a precondition for its development. The argument of applying scripts initially developed for one language to another as an attempt to find a model to fit perfectly to one language as opposed to attempting to find a universal solution for representing any language seem logical and persuasive. This way of thinking about the try- and-error process is analogous to fitting a model for a scientic hypothesis, where there is an overall, general model, and a fitted model that acts on specific data to become as accurate as possible. Being totally oblivious to linguistic properties of the language prior to becoming literate in a specific language seem doubtful to me when considering specific examples from Olson’s writing. The Greeks, he asserts, fitted the Semitic script for their language with a major change: making six graphic signs to represent vowels. How did they become aware of vowels, if Semitic text did not provide the distinction between vowels and consonants? I believe that although script gives us the means to systematically analyze the properties of the language, such as phonemes, it is in our innate ability to recognize certain properties of the language in a very general way, as small children (preliterate) are able to recognize the onset and rime of a word and are sensitive to hearing them. 2. What the script as a model does not represent is difficult, perhaps, impossible, to bring into consciousness and once a model is assimilated it is extremely difficult to unthink that model and see how someone unfamiliar with this model would perceive language. Any writing system can not have the same effect on one’s awareness as other writing systems. The emblems fail to bring words into awareness, logographs – syllables, and alphabet, as any other writing system, – the author’s intention of how the utterance was meant to be taken (the illocutionary force of the utterance), which will be discussed in point #3. Writing system is a model of some properties of language, such as alphabet is model for phonology. Alphabet literate people hear words as composed of sounds represented by letters of the alphabet. People not literate in the alphabetic script can not cope with the task of “erasing” in the minds a sound /s/ in spit to yield in pit. They do not think of the language in phonemic categories, it is not in their awareness, while alphabetic literates cannot understand not hearing phonemes. Non-literate informants can not understand the difference between retelling the story using “the same words” with rendering the story with the same meaning. In their view they were saying “the same words” as for them words are meanings, not a linguistic entity, as it is for literates using the script that brings this distinction into consciousness. In the writing systems that do not allow the distinction for metaphoric versus literate meaning, these two modes are not seen as alternatives. “Corn is deer” is not an example of pre- logical primitive thought as Levy-Bruhl thought. It is not a metaphor either. It simply seems that when deer as a sacrifice is not available, corn will do. It is hard for us, so used to seeing the distinction between metaphorical and literate modes of meaning understand that “I am the door” is not, as Olson insists, a metaphor and not literate meaning either: there is no great divide between the two, it should just taken as it is. Olson gives these examples to stress the main point: writing changes our cognition to such degree that it becomes almost impossible to step out of the context of our own model of the language and see other models as bringing into awareness other features of the language than does our model. This why learning to read and write is thought by him as an intellectual achievement to understand how what is said can be represented by a set of graphic symbols, rather than a skill that can be taught. Script does not make linguistic features readily available to the reader. Rather, increasing familiarity with the script brings linguistic categories into consciousness. When a person is becoming literate, he/she starts thinking about those categories, in other words, starts thinking about thought. The discussion about literate versus metaphoric properties of the languages raises a few questions. There is no indication that Mexican Indians did not have a distinction between literate and figurative meanings. Just because we take “corn is deer” as metaphoric and they take it as simply a statement, does not mean that they do not have metaphors, it only means that for this particular statement we lack cultural knowledge to understand it as intended, and they have that knowledge. I believe that children do not have this distinction though. K. Chukovsky in his famous and frequently cited book “From 2 to 5” gives examples of children’s speech as speaking in early metaphors. Now, after reading Olson’s book, I am inclined to believe that such statements as “clouds are horses” uttered by a 3 year old, can not be taken as metaphors. For children they are not metaphors as the distinction between a metaphor and literate meaning is not in their consciousness. For them it is just what it is: cloud is a horse. In a particular example of “I am the door” Olson mistakenly generalizes this statement as the one that does not have a distinction between metaphorical and literate meaning. Jesus continuously repeats that He speaks in parables, thus denoting that He deliberately makes a distinction between literate and figurative meaning. How does a written script brings into our consciousness the distinction between literate and metaphoric meaning? This assertion never became clear to me as I was reading the book. I believe that this distinction is an intellectual, developmental achievement independent of literacy, that is why it is not available to little children, not because of their unfamiliarity with a particular written script. 3. No writing system including the alphabet brings all aspects of what is said into awareness. Olson disputes the classical view hold by Aristotle, de Saussure and Blumenfield that an ideal writing system, such as alphabetic script, is a full representation of the oral speech. Writing serves as mnemonic because of its permanence. It preserves the lexical and syntactical properties of speech, of what was said, but it loses the intention of the author - what was meant. Thus reading becomes, for the major part, the attempt at recovering the communicative intention of the author – something that was lost in the script. Writing is, for a major part, a decontextualized locutionary act: what is said is there, but the illocutionary force of the writer’s intention, which in oral speech is provided by the means of pragmatics and prosodic elements, is to be interpreted by the reader, and those interpretations might be not a precise version of what the author had in mind. For example, Luria’s syllogism was intended as a premise and was taken by the illiterate subjects as an implausible factual claim. Ways of taking the authors intention should not be thought as universals. Understanding is contextual. Thus, the history of reading and writing can be viewed also as matter of learning to compensate for the lost illocutionary force. At first, the texts were taken as an unlimited source of unlimited interpretations, which is evident from the medieval interpretations of the biblical texts. The major achievement of Renaissance, Olson thinks, was the invention of the new approach to read the texts – by recovering the intentionality of the author. Literal meaning became to be seen intended meaning. Hermeneutical devices (looking at lexical, syntactical markers for the author’s intentions) to isolate this literal, historical, intended meaning were applied to interpret the texts. In this way, the interpretation became algorithmical: the attempts to understand illocutionary force involved looking at the property of the texts themselves, rather than the outside sources. Writing also evolved to make the author’s intentionality as explicit as possible, but employing syntactical and lexical devices to help the readers to decide whether the utterance is metaphorical or literate, whether it was meant as an assumption or an inference, and so on. Thus interpretation could now be justified by the lexical, syntactical, and contextual evidence, which became possible by having these metalinguistic concepts brought to consciousness by literacy. The new way of reading, the author believes, gave a start to the new approach to studying science, or the Book of Nature. It provided an algorithmic approach to studying science: the natural phenomena became interpretable as evidence or data for establishing the truth. This point is excellent and revealing. The script is the tool of recovering the author’s intention. The whole science of stylistic analysis of the text is based exclusively on this principle. Although the interpretation is never precise, it is often an acceptable approximation of the author’s true intention. I believe that authors also make an effort to bring their intention into consciousness of the readers by using the same lexical and stylistic devices. A piece belonging to a certain genre is written with certain criteria in mind, which enables a reader to identify the tone of the writing. In view of all these points, it is evident that the author believed that our mind is shaped by our interaction with literacy. Olson comes to the conclusion that literacy changes our way of thinking and these changes should not be taken as universals: they may take a different form in different cultures. The commonality of the changes brought by literacy is in producing the shift from thinking about things to thinking about the representations of things. Olson’s book is highly representative of socio-cultural perspective in writing. He believes that reading and writing are contextual on many levels. The metalinguistic awareness that is brought by writing to our consciousness takes a different form in different languages, thus understanding how to read and write is also a cognitive achievement that differs among languages. The understanding of what is intended in the writing is also contextual, it is set in the context of particular writing and the clues to proper understanding are specific to that writing. This book provides a way of thinking about a written language as a specific context able to transform one’s thinking in the context of a specific culture in which it is used, not as perfect or not so perfect device for transcribing spoken language.
Review_Author: comparison rate
Book_Author: for young driver
Book_Title: teisco motor
Reference: safe
Date: 3/2/2007
Time: 9:37:54 AM
Remote Name: 68.189.125.12
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