more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
The most comprehensible part of language is not the word itself, but rather tone, force, modulation, tempo, with which a series of words is spoken.
Gist of Idea
The pragmatics of language is more comprehensible than the meaning
Source
Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 3[296])
Book Ref
Nietzsche,Friedrich: 'The Joyful Science, and 1881-82 fragments (v 6)', ed/tr. Del Caro,Adrian [Stanford 2023], p.75
A Reaction
He exaggerates. If you watch someone talking vociferously in an unknown foreign language, the feeling of the exchange is obvious, but the content is quite unknown. I see his point that we underestimate body language etc.
| 24097 | The pragmatics of language is more comprehensible than the meaning [Nietzsche] |
| 18046 | Grice's maxim of quantity says be sufficiently informative [Grice, by Magidor] |
| 18045 | Grice's maxim of quality says do not assert what you believe to be false [Grice, by Magidor] |
| 18044 | Grice's maxim of manner requires one to be as brief as possible [Grice, by Magidor] |
| 10991 | Key conversational maxims are 'quality' (assert truth) and 'quantity' (leave nothing out) [Grice, by Read] |
| 9043 | We use expressions 'deferentially', to conform to the use of other people [Evans] |
| 14718 | An assertion is an attempt to rule out certain possibilities, narrowing things down for good planning [Stalnaker, by Schroeter] |
| 3169 | A simple chaining device can't build sentences containing 'either..or', or 'if..then' [Rey] |
| 21639 | 'Background deletion' is appropriately omitting background from an answer [Hofweber] |
| 18042 | The infelicitiousness of trivial falsity is explained by expectations, or the loss of a context-set [Magidor] |
| 18043 | The infelicitiousness of trivial truth is explained by uninformativeness, or a static context-set [Magidor] |