Punjabi two sided Dhol drum from Gandharva Loka
Sir Peter Hall started the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre and the Rose in Kingston - our local Theatre. He was on Desert Island Discs last week and said something which I am sure will now become an established meme.
Work brings work.
Is this tautological? No. It works.
But how about generalising. Does it make sense when we try other examples?
Love brings love.
Happiness brings happiness.
Understanding brings understanding.
There is a sense of reciprocity in these statements. Because you love, someone will love you, perhaps. Or because you understand someone then you have more chance of being understood. Or because you are happy then you will cause others to be happy. And yet the relationships between work causes work, love causes love, happiness causes happiness are not the same relationships, they imply a deep knowledge of the world. The kind of knowledge most proverbs imply. This was a subject pragmaticians were studying intensely 15 years ago, and if I do a search on google scholar I can see that some of them still are.
Let's try some more new minted Peter Hall proverbs with some more abstract nouns with verbs that collocate:
Hate inspires hate.
Anger causes anger.
Peace brings peace.
Pride causes pride.
Bravery inspires bravery.
Loyalty attracts loyalty.
Honesty creates honesty.
Integrity sets the example for integrity.
Compassion inspires compassion.
Charity inspires charity.
Success breeds success.
Courage inspires courage.
Deceit generates deceit.
Skill builds on skill.
Beauty attracts beauty.
Brilliance attracts brilliance.
Pain causes pain.
Misery generates misery.
*Dreams inspire dreams.
Justice responds to justice.
*Truth brings truth.
Faith inspires faith.
*Liberty inspires liberty.
Knowledge builds on knowledge.
Thought stimulates thought.
Information generates information.
*Culture generates culture.
Trust generates trust.
Dedication inspires dedication.
Progress inspires more progress.
*Education results in education.
Hospitality brings hospitality.
Leisure snowballs into leisure.
Trouble causes trouble.
Friendship inspires friendship.
Relaxation results in relaxation.
Here we try to avoid tautology and for some words its more difficult. There are fewer implicatures. The more concrete a noun the less the phrase seems to work. *Dreams inspire dreams. sounds vacuous. But perhaps Dreams inspire dreaming. less so. Friendship inspires friendliness. rather than Friendship inspires friendship. We get flexibility from the different lexicalisations. Perhaps dreaming works better in the former example because it is more abstract.
In order to make the more concrete noun work in this demi-tautological phrase we can add meaning through the verb: Leisure snowballs into leisure. In the sense that once one has taken a holiday its hard to return to work.
Take the phrase Information generates information. It sounds empty of meaning and yet it is true. Information is replicated and reinterpreted and generates discussion and so on. Why then does it sound vacuous. Perhaps these phrases don't work both if they are too vacuous and if they are too concrete. Our knowledge of the world makes some sentences very easily understood. Pain causes pain. for example coincides with our knowledge of the world. It is common for us as humans to experience pain vicariously. To sympathise with the pain of others.
Information generates information should work, but it doesn't. There's a little disconnect in the new proverb. It doesn't seem to work as a proverb because it isn't intuitively meaningful / readily accessible on first hearing or at first sight.
Of course when you play with the verb then you change the meaning and you can make the relationship less circular. Beauty attracts beauty. works better than Beauty causes beauty. because we have as encyclopaedic knowledge of the world which makes this interpretation more accessible.
Tautology, on the other hand, should be present with a neutral verb, copulative is. As in Gertrude Stein's saying A rose is a rose.
Let's test:
Dreams are dreams.
Education is education.
Misery is misery.
Trouble is trouble.
Happiness is happiness.
Justice is justice.
The do not seem to work very well. The last sentence does work. Justice is justice. implies you just have to accept justice. So what we are really talking about here is the relationship of a concept with itself or with a related concept that is more abstract of concrete - a different lexicalisation - or with a sense of reciprocity in mind. The misery in you gives rise to misery in others.
In other words these new proverbs acknowledge Theory of Mind (TOM) as part of the lexicalised meaning of the word. The words that are typical of this are Sydney Greenbaum's content disjuncts. Adverbials like actually, seriously and in fact separated from the sentence with a comma, imply an assumption is being made about what the other person really thinks. The proverbs above that include TOM seem to work better than the ones without it.
For example.Information brings information. may be true but it is not intuitively meaningful whereas Pain brings pain. is. Pride is more about personal feeling so Pride brings pride. doesn't make as much sense as Hate breeds hate. Because it is the knowledge of the hate in someone else's mind that causes hate.
Prototypical examples would be: Pain causes pain. or Success breeds success. Success breeds success was once perhaps a proverb like Information breeds information. Readily accessible because of long use. But TOM is still implied. It is the ability of some to find a way to success that inspires others to find a similar way to success.
Abstract nouns from http://www.yourdictionary.com/grammar-rules/Abstract-Nouns.html
Sydney Greenbaum Content Disjuncts
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