Reflection on Olson Ch6-12

Olson discussed three aspects of linguistic structures that must be coped with in any interpretation. This reminds me of a joke I read about in a book about linguistics. The sentence clause goes like this: An antique desk suitable for lady with thick legs. To get the joke, one needs to be equipped with basic syntactic ability that enables him to understand that the clause “with thick legs” can be used to modify either the antique desk or the lady. The sentence is ambiguous both structurally and semantically. To putative readers, reading text critically by considering what a text could mean or could have meant seems to be uncommon. As Hass and Flower (1988) noted, many undergraduates expert at paraphrasing and summarizing were limited in their ability to analyze and criticize. I felt that I have the same issue of directing all attention to the literal meaning of the authors. Instead of asking myself questions like “why does the author say this,” “what does the author mean,” “what does the author want the reader to think,” and “what’s my interpretation for the text,” I used to read through the text, take the text as the unshakable truth, and memorize it. Coming from old-fashioned education background, reading only the literal meaning and learn a lesson from it seems to be more than usual to me. The very concept of questioning the text ran counter to my commonsensical assumption as I entered graduate school in the U.S. Since then, I’ve been learning interpret the text by asking not only the literal meaning of the text but by understanding the intention of the author, what s/he wants readers to do and see, and my own interpretation of the text.

When talking about text, author’s intention, and reader’s interpretation, I thought about in ancient China, people did not adopt a punctuation system. Thus, a piece of writing may have several of interpretations because there was no exact segmentation of the paragraph, allowing readers a large space to surmise the authors’ idea and make their own interpretations.

The following is an example of a sentence comprised of the same 10 Chinese characters while they can be interpreted in seven ways based on the position of certain punctuation, and different types of punctuation.

1. 下雨天留客，天留我不留。
Rainy day, staying day, though God/weather wants me to stay, I won’t stay.

2. 下雨天留客，天留我？不留。
Rainy day, staying day, will God/weather makes me stay? No, it does not allow me to stay.

3. 下雨天留客，天留我不？留。
Rainy day, staying day, will the God/weather makes me stay? Yes.

4. 下雨，天留客；天留我不留！
It’s raining, the God/weather would like to keep guests, but I won’t let you stay.

5. 下雨天，留客天，留我？不留。
Rainy day, staying day, will you ask me to stay? No, I will not.

6. 下雨天，留客天；留我不？留。
Rainy day, staying day, will you ask me to stay or not? Yes, I will.

7. 下雨天，留客天，留我不留？
Rainy day, staying day, will you ask me to stay or not to stay?

If you’d like to check more info about this, here’s the link: http://www.gnu.org/software/chinese/otcl/topic-1.en.html