Name Strategy: Its Existence and Implications

[43]. The above relates meaning to relevant information, supposing that rele-
vant information is frequently used in communication relates meaning to use,
compare Wittgenstein (1958) [51] p.43

”For the word ’meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a
word is its use in the language.”

7.6 Flagging by Countenance

What is the nature of the concomitant flagging which occurs when a statement
is uttered? The most important aspect of such flagging must be in the com-
parison with the passing theory of the language to preserve coherence (interior
flagging); however at sometime exterior flagging must occur. Flagging occurs
for purely auditory statements, for example a tape or telephone. This flagging
is typically of the mood, age, and sex of the speaker, and seems to give in-
formation in addition to statements rather than be an aid to comprehension.
The main component of flagging for comprehension is probably visual. Boyle,
Anderson, and Newlands (1994) [3] show that having a visible speaker improves
the efficiency of dialog and that this is more marked for young or inexperienced
speakers. This suggests that the extralinguistic information required is at least
in part conveyed by the visual acts of the speaker; as is it more marked for
people learning the language more extralinguistic information is required here.
Clearly some of visual information is in the form of demonstrable acts

D = {pointing out lef t/right, up/down etc....},           (4)

and gesture emphasis. These could be used for flagging in the form

Q = {degree of emphasis, spatial and temporal location, . . .},     (5)

but it is not clear where this list would end or the relative importance of its
components. A neater way is to note that one of the main components of
visual communication are facial expressions, and these can be considered as
contenders for the flags assigned. Of course it is possible to combine these with
flags such as the above but with a loss of simplicity. The advantage of using
facial expressions can be taken to convey the most relevant information is that
Etcoff and Magge (1992) [11] find only five or six emotions that faces express:
happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and perhaps surprise. Flagging using
these five or six emotions produces an assignment of extralinguistic information
called flagging by Ж6 facial countenance. Thus an alternative to sentences being
assigned bivalent truth values or measures of unspecific relevant information,
they can be assigned six real values

Q = {happiness, sadness, f ear, anger, disgust, surprise}.      (6)

These can be expressed in ascii smilies

Q = {    : -)    ^, : ^-(^, : -F, : ^-1, : ^-*, : ^-s}

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