The Joannas

The Joannas

John Bjarne Grover

I published this article on the web in 2005 and removed it after some years but now 2014 put it in again - could be crashing airplanes and other flying objects could be part of the background. Also, if 'Breitensee' phenomena with magical sensory impressions is part of the historic construction, it could be wise to have it on the web.

I wrote the following article after I discovered an article in Journal for the Society of Psychical Reseach in 1996 which seemed to be strangely relevant to some of the ideas in my "Submorphemic signification", which I self-published in 1995 after having tried to have it published in 1994-95. After the rejection accompanied by the Oklahoma bombing, it was time to publish it on my own. The article in JSPR appears to put my concepts on child language into a 'psychotronic' framework - in a way which even could be traced to my meeting with 'Kongit' in Zagreb in 1983. I suspected that the article was a case of swindle based on some 4-5 pages of the first manuscript to my PhD dissertation which I in 1995 had given to my obligatory scientific advisor at the university of Bergen - Helge Dyvik - before he left for Edinburgh where John Beloff, the editor of JSPR, had his office. I had to change to a new advisor after this story. I wrote the following article to try and re-establish the sensible basis for analysis of reports on 'psychic' phenomena which my theory was suitable for. Dyvik later composed the evaluation committee for my dissertation which (of course) was rejected.

At the end of this article, I also reproduce the pages from my dissertation which I then suspected could have been used for giving shape to the article in JSPR. My book was published in June 1995 and I think I gave it to Dyvik in the course of the summer. Today, I see that the article in JSPR also apparently relates to the story from Zagreb, including the reference to the fur, the footgear and other elements. For the Rubik's cube, there are the two possible references in 'red ruby' and in 'Helge Dyvik'. Cp. also the 'TV'.

If this article in JSPR served to ridicule one chapter from my book, the article in Language 1996 by Jo[h]anna Nichols and A.Peterson may have served to ridicule another chapter of the same book. It was the one about the universal redundancy in personal pronoun signification: My discussion, which served to give some empirical basis for my general theory of 'submorphemic signification', showed that there is a strong redundancy in the encoding of person in pronouns across languages. The same had been launched by Joseph Greenberg and his important work had been broadly rejected by academix, and the article in Language was apparently mixed up with some confusion of astringency in the logical reasoning. Nichols was nevertheless lifted to the board of the Linguistic Society of America after this article. I wrote to the editor (Mark Aronoff) and pointed out the puzzling similarity with the chapter from my book, which had been reviewed via Michael Noonan who also had asked for a 'rework' before he rejected it a second time, in concert with the Oklahoma bombing. Language Editor Aronoff wrote back and suggested that I made a rework of the chapter with the empirical data and he would consider it for his journal. I wrote back to him that the chapter alone is a little uninteresting and it really is old stuff - it has been a standard theme since Plato, even if my chapter contained some new things and was not about that old theory of 'motivation in signification' - and therefore I would be happy if he could find or suggest a suitable publisher for my book. He did not answer, but my new obligatory scientific advisor Arild Hestvik, whom I had got after Dyvik, was then engaged by Language as a reviewer for other articles. I eventually had to change to a third advisor, who kept his fingers off my work and asked only for a brief progress report once every third to sixth month. I had asked to work without advisor but that was denied me. The system of scientific advisors has been introduced to prevent progress in science and to ensure that research is limited to word-games and puns on names in the new nazi institutions of scholarship.

The meeting in Zagreb in 1983 did not lead to a 'romance', as the author name 'Roman Bugaj' in JSPR could suggest. My book is also somewhat in the school of Roman Jakobson. The article is about strange phenomena reported in a 'psychotronics' conference in Zagreb in 1986, about two Polish Joanna's in 1983-84 who had experienced strange things - whether that was because of a 'curse' that had come upon them in meeting with a beast or whatever could have been the reason. Bugaj had only met one of them personally. Whether that is supposed to be the same Joanna as Johanna Nichols in Language 1996, I don't know. (I don't know which scholars Noonan used for his reviews in 1994 and 1995). If the Orderud case, the Darfur crisis and a 'Japsen Jebsen' security council project - including a 'psycho' Chineses - relate to Bergen university, it is certainly possible that the JSPR and Language stories may be about such an antisemitic political project as an attempted copy of the Dreyfus-Balfour story.

Bugaj reports that he had only met the Joanna called Sokol - the word means 'the falcon', as for 'Falchaasen' where LSJ/'JFK' lived or 'Tor Hauken', my neighbour in the office house at the university of Bergen at that time.

It is my impression over and over again, that academic institutions often are characterized by a striking inability to evaluate theories on a scientific basis, and tend to fall back on science-external factors. Which only means that the academic institutions are undergoing a nazification process. It is this process which it is urgent to stop before it all turns into pure power and pure nonsense.

A linguistic analysis of a report on psychokinesis

Preface

This paper discusses a report in The Journal of Society for Psychical Research 842:26-34 (January 1996) on PK (psychokinesis) phenomena, and suggests a linguistic framework for interpreting reports on such phenomena, relying on the explanatory potential in the role of associative complexes in child language and the syntactic decomposition of this early knowledge-space in the middle of the child's second year of life. The data in the report in JSPR 842 serve to illustrate the account.

The paper was completed in November 1996 and rejected by the JSPR in January 1997, with recourse to the statement that the minimal pairs discussed in this text do not exhibit the same patterns in Polish. This puzzling fact, which I myself discuss on p.11f., should imply that the phenomena I discuss are seated in the innate architecture of human cognition, and surface differently in Polish as compared to what they do in English. The editor of JSPR (John Beloff) says that the Polish author of the paper in JSPR does not understand English, so I suppose he is prevented from assessing the rigor of the translation. This may perhaps (as always) add a moment of uncertainty to the account, but it is my contention that this does not seriously affect the interesting aspects of the general problems I discuss. Bugaj's paper illustrates well the fine boundary to credibility which all such accounts must balance on, and it is, as such, an interesting account of a distorted reality.

A linguistic analysis of a report on psychokinesis

1. The data in the report

In JSPR 842, Roman Bugaj reports on some observations of macro-PK (macro-pscyhokinesis). Among the two cases he discusses, the most interesting and surprising is the one on the observations he made of a 13-year old Polish girl, Joanna Sokol, in 1984. The other case is another Joanna, here Gajewska, whom he does not claim to have observed personally, but for whom he relies on press accounts. I found the paper interesting, both for its reports and the style of it, and also for several strong correlations with a book I made a prepublication of in the summer of 1995. There were even something which looks like allusions to the place I lived in when I made it (Bergen, Norway), which suggests that coincidences may have been generously allotted in this case. I am going to discuss the paper both as a report and as a narrative.

Of the two subjects Bugaj discusses, I will restrict myself to the first, Joanna Sokol, 13 years old at the time of the reported investigation in 1984, in her home, and in the presence of witnesses. I refer to Bugaj's paper for details, and sum up the most important psychokinetic phenomena he lists as follows:

1. A bootee ascended from a corner and followed the girl.
2. A small metal pot flew through the air and hit the wall.
3. A small metal coal shovel flew through the air in the kitchen.
4. A small China plate flew through the air and smashed towards the wall.
5. Bugaj's fur cap flew through the air and hit him in the face.
6. The cap was put back, but repeated the flight and hit Bugaj in the knee.
7. A cup, filled with hot tea, levitated from the table and emptied its contents over Bugaj before it crashed.
8. The girl's slippers where pulled off her feet (while she was sitting) and hit the wall.
9. The girl was suddenly pulled under the table.
10. Two stones jumped in through the door after the girl's entry.
11. A paper utensil for experiments disappeared mysteriously.
12. A Rubik cube rose in the air and hit a witness in his head.
13. Bugaj's house door key was bent 90 degrees, but this was discovered only on his return to Warzaw.

2. The role of associative complexes

The explanatory framework I will invoke for the reported phenomena is the one of socalled associative complex use of language in early childhood, a frequently reported phenomenon in the research on the language of small children. The term is normally traced to Vygotsky (1986). Such complexes consist in words' reference spreading associatively, to cover a set of referents which as a sum total may have no features in common, but for which each element is tied up to other elements in a chain-like association. As such, the phenomenon is closely reminiscent of Wittgenstein's 'family resemblances'. The words involved in associative complexes are typically 'overextended', which means that their semantic reference in use covers a much wider range of application than adults are inclined to allow for. The range of words which a child is prone to overextend is normally restricted to a subset of the child's lexicon, typically to be found among the words acquired earliest (Rescorla 1980). The mapping from word to referent may often appear surprising to adults.

When I, some years ago, scanned much of the literature in search of data on such associative complexes, I found that, even if the phenomenon is very well attested and frequently reported, the exact data are fairly scant after all. There are a few wellknown sets of words which tend to be referred to when the topic is discussed, and it is these which seem to possess some similarities with the data in Bugaj's paper. A wellknown case of such overextension is the one reported in Leopold (1949:129) on his daughter Hildegard and her use of the word BOW-WOW. She used it with reference to dogs, to other animals, to a picture of an old man clothed in furs, to her toy dog, pictures of herself as a baby with her toy dog, to her picture book, and to her house slippers. This shared reference to dogs and slippers recurs in an even more telling complex, reported in Lewis (1936) from Idelberger's data on his son's early use of language, when the following referents were found to the same word 'wau-wau': Porcellain dog (three occasions), picture of sewing table, dog's barking, hobby-horse, picture of grandfather, clock on the wall, lady's fur collar with head of a dog, ordinary fur collar, squeaking rubber doll, buttons on a coat, dogs, toy dog, bathroom thermometer, his brown slippers, his new-born brother, as well as various animals in zoo.

From these two clusters we can already recognize several of the objects mentioned in the psychokinetic events which Bugaj (1996) reports. The bootee in observation 1 and the slippers in 8, both of them footware moving by themselves, are counterparts to the slippers in these two clusters. It is also a point to observe that footware is generally a semantic category of high salience in early childhood (Nelson 1973). Bugaj also mentions Chinaware (observation 4 and 7), which here occurs in the one cluster in the form of the porcellain dog. The fur in Bugaj's cap recurs in many reported overextensions of BOW-WOW in various forms. In Grøver (1995), I argue that this early word BOW-WOW often refer to the boundary to the house-space (based on data from Braunwald 1978, Piaget 1967, Bloom 1973). This even seems to suggest an association between BOW-WOW and Bugaj's observation no.10 as well, if we take the door to represent a significant boundary. Hence many of the observations occur connected in the data on associative clusters.

Pursueing this approach, it is not difficult to find an associative cluster use of most of the remaining elements. In Grøver (1995:112), I refer to Ament's (1899) report on his niece Louise's use of words containing the phonetic element [-ad-] in various contexts. The example serves to exemplify the presence of a submorphemic signification in her lexicon. The examples were the words wherein the morph or phoneme-sequence [-ad-] occurred:

lad/glad
mad
dadi
wad
baden
adi
addi
- chocolate
- money, metal kitchen objects
> - the cook Kati, said when she receivess money
- when she gets a sore/wound
- thread to guttapercha on sores/woundss
- 'adieu' by departures; cookie
- good/well/charming

We here find the metal kitchen utensils in observations 2 and 3 in the list above, and the reference to wounds (effected by the flying objects) made several times in the paper occurs as well. The departures can be recognized in the key reference in 13. If we add the presence of the kitchen in several of the reported events, there is not much here which does not occur in Bugaj's paper. Even the element of 'thread' occurs a couple of places in the report. The chocolate is absent from Bugaj's list of observations, but it can be found indirectly present in the observation no.13, if we take a couple of other enigmatic child associations into consideration: Anglin (1977) refers to a small child who used the word 'lade' = 'chocolate' in the contexts of chocolate and of door locks. Lewis (1936) furthermore reports that his subject used the word 'goga' with reference to chocolate and to his mother's hat in the context of going out for a walk. There thus seems to be some associative cohesion between chocolate and door locks as well.

Gruendel (1977) reports on a child who used the word 'hat' to designate his own winter hat, play hats of various sorts, a winter boot, various boxes, a frisbee, a page from a newspaper and a colouring book, and a set of keys. Here, again, is the association of 'hat' and 'key'. Compared with Bugaj's list, we find the bootee from 1, the cap from 5 and 6, the paper from 11 and the key from 13.

Keys and hats are indeed among the most frequently overextended words. Rescorla (1980), which is perhaps the paper on overextension most often referred to in the literature, reports that, in her data, the words which most frequently were found with an associative complex use were the following six: Daddy, key, hot, mommy, hat, and cheese. In Bugaj's list, we find that key, hot (the tea spilled over him) and hat all occur as central elements. In addition, the observations were made in the girl's home, in the environment of her family. It is only the cheese which is not mentioned explicitly by Bugaj - but it is curious that Bugaj even mentions the food in the refridgerator, which, for some unspecified reason, was badly damaged (p.29). As I analyze these early words, their role in the complexive use of children is tied up to their status as minimal pairs - with only a minimal phonological difference between them - in conjunction with a minimal semantic difference as well. I find that 'cheese' and 'keys' are very similar not only in sound but in meaning as well (functionally by their insertion into keyholes and into the mouth), for which reason this pair is chosen as an associative complex by many children. (For an account of the minimal pair MA, in the form MAMA, and PA, in the form PAPA, see Jakobson 1962). The phonological similarity is, though, even larger between the two words 'tea' and 'key', which differ only in one basic articulatory feature. The 'hot tea' in the teacup in Bugaj's report behaved abnormally by its flight and emptying over the author, and the 'hot key', which bent 90 degrees in his pocket, did so as well. Then, consulting Gruendel's and Lewis' reports on the children who associated 'hats' and 'keys', there seems to be a true complex involving early child signification here. The words 'hot', 'hat', 'tea' and 'key', as well as the combinations 'hot tea' and 'hot key' all occur in the paper, and, for the children, 'hat + key' as well. We need only add the 'hat tea' - that is, the tea which was spilt over the author from above - to fill in the matrix and find a linguistic motivation for the teacup's strange behavior, as observed by the author. On the assumption of a systematic role for associative complexes in accounting for reported psychokinesis, we may well see the typical 'filling in of the open slot in the matrix' as the essential explanatory framework for such reports. These matrices will partly be constituted by pairs of words differing only minimally in sound as well as in meaning.

Bugaj mentions the hot (hat) tea and the bent (hot) key in one single utterance on p.28. This was one of the examples which most strongly attracted my attention relative to my own book: The very strange notion of 'hat tea' so to speak emerges from the redundancy patterning in my own text. Furthermore, it remains a slight mystery how this matrix can emerge as prominent in a Polish context, for which the language does not, as far as I have been able to find out, exhibit any similar minimal pairs covering these four referents. However, it is likely that some of these examples, such as the following 'leg-log' pair, will emerge as significant across cultures and languages, and therefore be rooted in the human genetic endowment rather than in the actual surface language. The 'leg-log' example in the paper is the following telling one:

"For example, on her way to school, the girl was pursued by chunks of wood, and, in the classroom, a metal compass disintegrated in her hands during a geometry lesson. While she was stirring the sugar in a teacup, an aluminium teaspoon would occasionally break, leaving only the shank in her fingers, so she took to using a wooden spoon" (p.29).

It is the LEG-LOG minimal pair along with what can be interpreted as something close to an associative complex in the word SHANK (referring to legs, to shoe-soles and to the handles on tools such as cutlery) which gives the rationale to this passage. The chunks of wood are presumably LOGS of some kind, following after the girl's LEGS. The geometry compass has METAL LEGS, which, in this context of LEGS, suggests an allusion to METAL SHANKS. Hence the disintegration of the compass is closely associated with the disintegration of the aluminium teaspoon, which she, logically, replaces by a WOODEN teaspoon, as a sort of LOG. The quoted passage can then conveniently be understood in the framework of this minimal pair LEG-LOG, in particular as it immediately precedes the report on the experiments with the girl's bending of cutlery by the rubbing of the SHANKS. The quotation seems to constitute an associative complex (encoded in the minimal pair LEG-LOG) in its own right, thereby lending a rationale to the cutlery-bending which he discusses subsequently. The chain-like association of the elements can be taken as an illustration of an associative complex.

3. Incommensurable levels of knowledge

The essential tenet in Grøver (1995) is to be found in the assumption that early child signification addresses a linguistic level below the acknowledged morphemic level, with reference basically to states and events in the social space more than strictly to observables. From a consistent signification on a submorphemic level in early childhood, it is assumed that the child subsequently converts to a (conventional) consistent signification on morpheme - that is, roughly, a simple word - level around the age of 18 months, simultaneously with the development of the first word syntax in the form of two-word utterances. The first level addresses social states and events in lexical signification more than the latter, which favors syntactic encoding of this information. Hence the earliest coherent knowledge-space is decomposed (or 'disintegrates') into a syntactic encoding of its internal structure. The conversion entails that the consistency, which provided for a coherent system in the single-word stage, is shifted from the low level to the higher, where the new coherent system is developed. The radical linguistic change so often reported for children at the age of 18 months can then be traced to a shift of consistency in signification from the lower to the higher level.

The change may entail a change in reality constitution: While the significational consistency dominates the reference to social states and events in the first stage, with a possibly secondary or dependent role to play for the observables of later signification, it is shifted into a significational consistency dominating the reference to observables in the latter (adult-commensurable) stage. It is assumed that scientific observation and description, such as for the physical sciences, rest essentially on the signification of the latter stage.

Hence it makes good sense to assume that an account of paranormal phenomena may be sought in the strata of the first signification. The change in reality emerges when we take significational consistency to represent constraints on the constitution of observable physical reality. The PK phenomena reported by Bugaj entail a physical inconsistency in the constitution of the observable space as compared to the latter signification: When the objects moved too fast to be observed in their flight (p.28), we may conclude that this is a case of significational inconsistency: A certain piece of reality is 'lacking' somewhere in the time-space continuum, and the object suddenly shifts its position as experienced by the observers, without the intermediate observable motion.

This significational inconsistency therefore suggests that the phenomena reside in a subjective experience of states and events which can be localized to a level of knowledge different from the conventional morphemic signification. That Bugaj's list of PK phenomena presents these in the context of precisely those objects for which their labels are most prone to be overextended in the early significational competence of small children and thus be recorded as associational complexes by adults, strongly suggests that the reported PK phenomena include a shift of significational level. The desired effect for such narrative, as well as for seances or laboratory experiments organizing experiences of such phenomena, will expectedly be that the company of observers (as well as we, as readers) experience a temporary retreat to the primordial signification in early childhood, thereby addressing a level of knowledge potentially inconsistent with the conventional one.

It is from this point of view that we may turn to Bugaj's paper and consider it as a text in addition to its status as a report on observations, making seemingly systematic use of inconsistencies. On p.28 he asserts that the moving objects could never be observed in their flight (due to the large speed), while on p.27, he gives this description of the flying (hat) teacup discussed above:

"All of a sudden, one of the teacups that was actually within the range of my vision - the doors to the kitchen were always left open - jumped into the air extremely quickly and, with an amazing speed and loud whistle, flew across very close to my head; almost the whole contents of the teacup were emptied onto my clothes (coat and trousers) and the remainder of the hot tea splashed onto the adjacent wall. The teacup then fell into pieces with a loud crash near the kitchen sideboard".

It is difficult to read this passage without being left with the feeling that Bugaj has actually seen the teacup flying in the air. This is inconsistent with the remark that the objects could never be observed in their flight. Furthermore, it looks as if Bugaj has been outside the kitchen, while the teacup crashed inside the kitchen after having been into the neighbouring room just to empty its contents over the author. We are left with the impression that there is talk of two co-occurring realities making themselves present simultaneously, and that it is Bugaj's explicit intention to convey this double status of the phenomena. This may be traced to the assumed double nature of the levels-of-knowledge: The consistency on the low level is not the same consistency as is found on the higher level.

Hence the observer of both realities is left with a difficult task when s/he is trying to make a report on the observations. Paying attention to the internal consistency on both levels simultaneously will produce a report with internal inconsistency, such as emerges somewhat implicitly in Bugaj's paper, while paying attention to one level only will fail to make the parapsychological phenomena probable. I find that Bugaj's paper is remarkable in the way that he manages to balance the text inbetween these two possibilities.

The paper is full of near-misunderstandings. They would probably be uninteresting, had they not in many of the cases occurred in the context of the keywords for associative complexes, which strongly fuel the effect of the covert reality which is invoked below the surface. For those who maintain the assumption of an ontological duality, the systematic use of associative complex words in conjunction with ambiguous reference may invoke the observationally covert reality to an extent that leaves it psychologically powerful indeed. Such use of language may therefore be a powerful tool for seances or laboratory experiments wherein such powers are invoked.

4. The flying TV set

The feeling of two inconsistent realities superimposed on each other is strongly reinforced by certain narrative traits which seem to suggest (albeit tacitly) the presence of meaningful redundancy patternings. One such series seems to serve to 'explain' a peculiar flight through the air for the TV set. The following exerpts seem related:

"Once, in the presence of the family and of Mr.Franaszek, the police lieutenant, a television set fell from the table onto the floor and, before it reached the ground, flew several metres through the air" (p.29).

"L.E.Stefanski made a Trommelin paper motor designed for the purpose of psychotronic experiments and, in the evening, placed it on a small table next to a television set. But somehow it disappeared. We could not find the motor anywhere during that evening session" (p.28).

[Footnote: A 'Trommelin motor' is, according to the author Bugaj, a small rotary motor invented by a Mr.Trommelin. It is, according to the report, activated when a person's hand approaches it. It is unknown to such experts in the field as John Beloff. Wim van Dommelen was and probably still is a linguist in Trondheim]

"Another experiment we tried included a 'stretching' operation using a 0.5 mm-diam. copper wire of 100 mm length. [... but no real stretching force was used]. Joanna took the 100 mm-long copper wire in her hands, holding one end in each hand. [...] When the time was up she handed the piece of wire to the experimenter. [...] Thus the first three specimens, initially 100 mm, were now 129 mm, 128 mm and 127 mm respectively. A fourth specimen broke off and looked as if it had been charred; a fifth and final specimen likewise broke off, but both the broken ends had become thinner, as if stretched in a similar way to a glass tube heated in a gas flame and drawn out to make a capillary tube" (p.30).

"We carried out yet another experiment: a match-box was placed close to the edge of the table top; each time the girl's hand approached it at a distance of some 20 to 30 cm it fell to the floor" (p.30).

These four seemingly related exerpts make for the following cluster of narrative event elements:

1) A TV set fell from the table to the floor - and flew several meters!
2) A paper rotary motor, to be activated by hands, disappears from the table by the TV set.
3) Copper wire held in the girl's hands extends. The measurement units of the extension count to 29, 28, and 27. That is, almost 30 units.
4) A match-box fell from the table to the floor, when the girl's hand 'shrunk' the 30 measurement units towards 20.

Assuming that the distance from the table to the floor had been 'stretched' in 1), and also that copper wire is an integral part of a TV set, we can analyze into the following features:

Disappearing from the table:
Stretching/shrinking:
Activation by hands:
Copper wire:
Paper material:

1
1

1

2

2

2

3
3
3

4
4
4

4

There are four combinations lacking from this pattern: 1-2, 2-3, 3-4 and 1-4 (in addition to the combination of all four).

For 1 and 4, there is the shared element of flying in the air. In addition, the fourth and fifth copper wires, which broke off, seem to refer to the match-box, by the charred end, and to the TV set, by the glass capillary tube. Hence, flying in the air, as well as reference to copper wire, are shared here.

For 2-3, there is in fact another example discussed in the text, on p.32, where it is reported that Joanna Gajewska

"... held an insulated, straight and very rigid cable in the palm of one hand [...] and then, using one hand only, caused the cable to twist itself into a multiple spiral!"

This represents the combination 2-3 in introducing the element of a helix. In fact, the resulting construction can be seen as a sort of helix-copper. Or, if you like, a kind of PsK helicopter, a psychokinetic helicopter (with only a T, as in the teacup, added). This strongly suggests that the socalled Trommelin device actually is a kind of psychical helicopter or chopper.

For 3-4, the number of measurement units seems to be shared (30-20), but there is a difference in milli-meters in 3 as against centi-meters in 4. That also adds a rationale to the last combination 1-2: The TV set can fly several meters (presumably, 10 times the distance from the table to the floor) through the air, simply by being lifted by the psychical chopper's rotors...

In short, if we sum all these data, and twist and turn them a little, we can have them reshaped back into a normal consistent reality. But in their present somewhat distorted form, they get their credibility from possessing a sum total which adds up to a normal reality, but which in the distorted shape which they have exhibit paranormal properties.

5. The role of narrative structure

This is also where we can find an essential similarity with the associative complex data: The complex object formed by the TV set, the paper, the hand, the foot (30 cm), the meter, the motor, the copper, the 'chopper', and so forth, possesses as a sum total an associative complex nature which we cannot recognize in ordinary adult cognition, but which has certain similarities with the complexes occurring in early child language. In the present case, the complex object is scattered not only over the reported events, but also over the text. We can reconstruct the object much in the manner which we can (re)construct a family resemblance in Wittgenstein's sense of it: There is not a single feature which is shared by all the elements in this series, but the elements are interconnected into a 'family' or a complex associative object by the fact that they form a chain of interconnectedness, wherein each significant feature is shared by at least two of the elements.

The report therefore constructs complex semantic objects not only by means of invoking the associative complex words from early childhood, thus pointing to objects in the primordial reference space before the development of the child's self in the middle of the second year, but also by constructing them narratively. The linguistic (productive) competence of the small child before the middle of the second year is normally without any knowledge of syntactic organization of the words. Hence the early associative complex words refer to complex objects in a knowledge-space which is as yet not representable syntactically. This again explains the scatteredness of the complex objects represented narratively in adult language. When the semantic elements which enter into such narratively complex objects in addition possess primordial associative complex properties, it appears that we obtain an advanced semantic reference to a potentially very different knowledge-space as compared to the ordinary adult's. We get two narratives running in parallel: The overt, simple text, and the advanced reference to a developmentally undifferentiated space of primordial objects. These two simultaneous texts will constitute what may appear as two different consciousnesses.

This linguistic organization of the text supports the access to the primordial knowledge-space which ordinarily is lost (or grows opaque) for adults in their everyday reality, and invokes the as yet undifferentiated reality wherein objects which later fall apart into 'adult' time and space still possess unity and coherence. Normally, the primordial object referred to in the early signification will decompose in a culturally / socially appropriate way. Certain forms of psychopathology may be conceived of as a culturally inappropriate decomposition, generating a distorted time-space projection of it into the cultural space which responds with significational tension or rejection. The text in JSPR 842 seems to represent not only a primordial object, but also a somewhat deviant decomposition of it, encoded in its narrative structure. We may here see the traces of an explanation to reports on such PK phenomena more generally: The primordial object is invoked in the context of some observable object before it is decomposed in an inappropriate manner which causes it to behave abnormally due to the significational tension.

It is, I conjecture, this paranormal decomposition which creates the feeling of PK-forces, presumably both for the observers / reporter and for the reader. The form which Bugaj has given to the exposition of the material allows for a simultaneous but somewhat non-integrated experience of both of these realities: The primordial knowledge which the small child lives in, and the advanced knowledge represented in the time-space coordinates of later semantic reference. The widely reported feeling among mediums and believers in paranormal phenomena that alien forces or consciousnesses are present may well be traced to a similar narrative constitution of objects in a primordial knowledge-space, long-since lost for adults, but then regained with a feeling of a presence of aliens. The assumption that the forces well may be constituted through or represented by others' language or narrative event structure is in line with claims that such consciousnesses are indeed different from the subject's own consciousness, at least as long as the subject does not succeed in integrating them as part of his/her own personal low-level signification.

© John Grover 1996

References

Ament, W. (1899): Die Entwicklung von Sprechen und Denken beim Kinde. Verlag von Ernst Wunderlich, Leipzig.

Anglin, J. (1977): Word, object and conceptual development. Norton, New York.

Bloom, L. (1973): One word at a time. The use of single word utterances before syntax. Mouton, The Hague.

Braunwald, S.R (1978): Context, word and meaning: Towards a communicational analysis of lexical acquisition. In: Lock, A. (ed.): Action, gesture and symbol. The emergence of language. Academic Press, London.

Bugaj, R. (1996): Macro-PK in Poland: An account of two cases. JSPR 842:26-34.

Grøver, J. (1995): Submorphemic signification. Prepublication, available from the author at PO Box 320, 5001 Bergen, Norway.

Gruendel, J.M. (1977): Referential extension in early language development. Child Development 48:1567-1576.

Jakobson, R. (1962): Why "Mama" and "Papa"? In: Jakobson, R.: Selected writings, Vol.1. Phonological studies. Mouton, 'S-Gravenhague.

Leopold, W. (1949): Speech development of a bilingual child: a linguist's record. Vol.3: Grammar and general problems in the first two years. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois.

Lewis, M.M. (1936): Infant speech. A study of the beginnings of language. Harcourt, Brace and company, New York.

Nelson, K. (1973): Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monographs of the society for research in child development. Serial no.149. Vol.38, nos.1-2. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Piaget, J. (1967): Play, dreams and imitation in childhood. (Transl. by Gattegno, C. & Hodgson, F.M.). Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London.

Rescorla, L.A. (1980): Overextension in early language development. Journal of Child Language 7:321-335.

Vygotsky, L. (1986): Thought and language. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Excerpt from "Submorphemic signification"

Here are a few pages from my book "Submorphemic signification" which could have been the 'inspiration' for the article by 'Roman Bugaj'. The pages were, as far as I remember, included in the first and the 'reworked' version I sent to Noonan in 1994. In a letter to me dated 5 December 1996, John Beloff wrote that he first became aware of Bugaj when he read the book "Incredible tale of the paranormal" (NY 1995) edited by 'Alexander Imich', and he wrote to Bugaj after having read his article in that book (cp. 'The incredibles'). His first letter to Bugaj was dated 15 February 1995. Bugaj answered on 1 March 1995, and Beloff on 14 March. This is according to Beloff. Bugaj's first mention of the two Joannas, Sokol and Gajewska, was in a letter of 12 May 1995 written in English, a language which Bugaj does not understand, according to Beloff, so he was dependent on an interpreter. 12 May 1995 is 25 years after the death of Sachs. I don't know if that means that they had scissored from my book. Beloff then (according to himself) wrote on 19 May, Bugaj replied on 15 May (in German), and Beloff again on 26 May...

Here is a relevant fragment from my book. The pages are about the crisis of the second year, which in many ways has correlates in the crisis of the puberty of the two reported 'Joannas':

Extensional (sensorially perceptual) irregularity

Studies in child semantics have long recognized a featural componential analysis underlying the child's use of early words. This appears from the notable misapplications of words to objects which normally fall outside the referential scope of a word in adult use. This extensional distortion is called overextension and emerges as a distortion relative to the conventional and sensorially perceptual reference of adults. Reported overextension has served as empirical support for semantic feature theory, such as developed from Clark (1973) onwards, since it conveniently explains overextended use of words: When the child labels a salient feature of an object rather than the object in total, and it uses the same term for all objects in which the child can recognize this feature, then it is clear that overextension naturally follows for most terms which in adult use apply to single referents rather than some property of the referent. However, semantic feature theory in Clark's form has been strongly oriented towards sensorially perceptual features. For example, when the word 'dog' applies to a wide range of animals which all share the common feature of being four-legged, it is assumed that it is precisely the feature of 'four-leggedness' which the child is labelling with the word 'dog'. As another example, Bowerman's (1978) daughter used the word 'moon' for a grape fruit, which suggests that there is a perceptually motivated similarity between the moon and the fruit's colour and shape which has prompted her use of this word: She extracts salient sensorially perceptual features from the labelled object and establishes the linguistic signification on this feature level.

It is this featural similarity which semantic feature theory, whether in Clark's original account or in Bowerman's (1978) later prototypical variant, addresses, and it conveniently explains why terms are applied well outside their conventional referential scope to objects which share a more or less faint similarity with the original referents of the term as it was acquired. Nelson's (1974) functional core model emphasizes the functional value of referents, and opens for a recognition of functional similarity between objects to explain overextended use of words. Perceptual and functional similarities between referents of overextended terms are well attested.

However, the present model predicts that early semantics will be strongly oriented towards the social context of use for words. That is, the early phonological features should label shared features in the social context of word use just as much as in the sensorially perceptual as well as functional properties of the referents. This context-dependency may diminish as the vocabulary grows and phonotactic structure allows for the representation of event structure, which presumably narrows down the extensional range of words, but this social dependency should still be a prominent trait of the semantics of the single-word stage.

It is here that the model receives strong support from the phenomenon of associative complexes, a term originally coined by Vygotsky (1986). In this sort of extension, a word is applied to a wide range of - from an adult point of view - seemingly unrelated referents, or classes of referents sharing only more or less vague family resemblances. A classic example of such an associative complex use can be seen in the following list of extensions of Idelberger's son for the word 'wauwau' (source Lewis 1936:315): It was used in the context of porcelain dog (on three various occasions), picture of sewing table, (unseen) dog's barking, hobby-horse, picture of grandfather, clock on the wall, lady's fur collar with head of a dog, ordinary fur collar, squeaking rubber doll, buttons on a coat, dogs, toy dog, bathroom thermometer, his brown slippers, his new-born brother, various animals in zoo. In this list of referents, it is very difficult to find any shared perceptual or functional features. The interesting facet in these extensions is the extreme absence of any common sensorially perceptual cues. It is on this background that associative complexes are interesting, since they point to an extension which maps onto not only the immediately sensorially perceptual space, but, as it seems, their complex extension strongly supports the assumption of a reference to the as yet undifferen-tiated social and sensorially perceptual space. We can only conjecture that there may have been some recurring feature in the social context of use for this word, something salient in the social or communicational nature of the context which the child has found worth mentioning by using this word 'wauwau'.

So, it is reasonable to assume that such complexive use of words belong to the earliest type of words, since it is in this stage that we can expect to find that the features inherent in words apply to maximally undifferentiated events. If, though, the earliest words apply to restricted event representations, we should rather expect to find that these words apply relatively properly in the beginning and then develop into complexive use as they undergo the first featural branching analyses. Then, as the featural analysis proceeds and provides a more and more finegrained representation of reality, the more ordinary and limited extension distortion across perceptual and functional features should become more prominent. This account is of course not restricted to the present model, but applies to any semantic feature theory assuming early reference to the jointly social and sensorially perceptual space.

Rescorla (1980) provides strong empirical support for these assumptions of typical development of extensional behavior. She studied this development in six children through the period 1;0 to 1;8, and she reports on the appearance of associative complex use:

"39% of the 149 overextended words denoted associative complexes, making this a notable type of early overextension. Inspection revealed that 62% of the associative complex words (36 words) were drawn from the first third of each child's corpus" (p.330).

However, as expected, the strong tendency was for the children to start out with normal extension of these early words and then to develop a gradual expansion of the extension before it finally was narrowed down to ordinary use again. It was, nevertheless, the words acquired earliest which were most subject to develop into overextended use:

"Averaging across children, the figures indicate that early words were more likely to be overextended than words acquired late in the acquisition period [which lasted from 1;0 to 1;8]: words 1-25: 45% overextended; words 26-50: 35%; words 51-75: 20%. While early words were more likely to be overextended, this overextension did not typically occur in the earliest months. The percentage of words currently overextended relative to total words in use was tabulated for the last seven months of acquisition: 11%, 9%, 24%, 29%, 28%, 28%, 24%. These data indicate that while overextension was rather infrequent in the earliest months of vocabulary acquisition, overextended words constituted about one-quarter of words in active use for most of the months of the acquisition period. Thus, generalization of words to both correct and incorrect referents is a process which accelerates as acquisition proceeds. Just as early words were slow to generalize, so early words were much more likely to have a period of normal or underextended use prior to their overextension than were late words. Sixty-three per cent of overextended words from the first third of the corpus had one month or more of normal usage prior to their overextension, compared to 21% and 8% in the last two-thirds respectively" (Rescorla 1980:329).

Hence the broad tendency is the following: When a word is acquired, it tends to be associated with one single referent in one single context: That is, the word maps onto a state in the primordial socio-perceptual space. Then as the event partitioning proceeds, the word follows a perceptual feature inhering in referents or a social feature inhering in contexts. As the set of features onto which the word maps is narrowed down, the set of referents possessing these features expands correspondingly by having the context-dependency reduced. This expansion of referential scope continues through additional featural splits and structural delimitations unto the point when the child discovers the appropriate feature composition (possibly also the structural property) of the particular referent which the word conventionally applies to. In this moment, the excessive generalization can be narrowed down by restricting the word's semantic feature properties to the appropriate subset of features uniquely character-izing the conventional referent, and the child can then convert the signifying phonological representation of the word into a conventional morphemic string without internal signifying structure. In the same moment, this conventional string applies to the approriate subset of semantic features which then allows the child to correctly generalize to the referents which the word maps onto in normal usage.

This produces the characteristic developmental curve starting with context-dependent labelling, going through a stage of overextended use before the extension is narrowed down to conventional scope in context-independent labelling. Since it is the words acquired earliest which will map onto the most undifferentiated space, it is also clear that these are the words which will undergo the strongest overextension, in the sense of being applied to the widest range of inappropriate referents. Hence the tendency for earliest words to be the most prominent candidates for overextended use.

This account suggests that the excessive generalization inherent in featural signification is redirected into (adult) appropriate generalization in the moment when the basic symbolic unit expands to morpheme size. It should therefore expectedly coincide with the onset of the second (lexical) component, which, as the examples have suggested, may occur at highly varying points in the child's development. We must therefore take Rescorla's data as average values. That the overextended use reaches a maximum around the middle of the second year is, though, supported also by Gruendel (1977). She studied the referential extension of two children through their first year of language, and found:

"Across both children, the recorded duration of individual overextensions ranged from 1 week to 1 month. The developmental pattern of overextension was similar for both children. Initially, each child produced only one or two overextensions, then the number grew to a peak of five to seven during the 17-18- month period. Cumulative lexical acquisition at that point numbered approximately 50 words. At about 18 months, the number of overextensions in use began to decrease, culminating in the absence of overextension during the 25-26-month period" (p.1569).

Also, the shift in signification towards a more conventional reference to objects seems on the average to occur around the middle of the second year (McShane 1991). If, therefore, we take Rescorla's data as representative of a typical development, we are probably not too far from reality. The average amount of distorted extension in the second year will then show a steeply rising curve from the 14th to the 16th month, and then a gradual decrease unto the 19th month. Hence we may conclude that there is a peak of semantic distortion around the months 15-18, and then a continuous decline towards adult conventional extension thereafter.

References in the fragment from 'Submorphemic signification':

Bowerman, M. (1978): The acquisition of word meaning. An investigation into some current conflicts. In: Waterson, N. & Snow, C. (eds.): The development of communication. John Wiley & sons, Chichester.

Clark, E. (1973): What's in a word? On the child's acquisition of semantics in his first language. In: Moore, T.E. (ed.): Cognitive development and the acquisition of meaning. Academic Press, New York.

Gruendel, J.M. (1977): Referential extension in early language development. Child development 48:1567-1576.

Lewis, M.M. (1936): Infant speech. A study of the beginnings of language. Harcourt, Brace and company, New York.

MacShane, J. (1991): Cognitive development. An information processing approach. Basil Blackwell, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Nelson, K. (1974): Concept, word and sentence: Interrelations in acquisition and development. Psychological Review, Vol.81, no.4, pp.267-285.

Rescorla, L.A. (1980): Overextension in early language development. Journal of Child Language 7:321-335.

Vygotsky, L. (1986): Thought and language. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.