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Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1882-84 [1883], 3[296])
Book Ref
Nietzsche,Friedrich: 'Fragments from the period of 'Zarathustra' (v 14)', ed/tr. Loeb/Tinsley [Stanford 2019], 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] |
18044 | Grice's maxim of manner requires one to be as brief as possible [Grice, by Magidor] |
18045 | Grice's maxim of quality says do not assert what you believe to be false [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] |
18043 | The infelicitiousness of trivial truth is explained by uninformativeness, or a static context-set [Magidor] |
18042 | The infelicitiousness of trivial falsity is explained by expectations, or the loss of a context-set [Magidor] |