{"id":193,"date":"2006-10-11T18:12:49","date_gmt":"2006-10-11T18:12:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/lencho\/?p=193"},"modified":"2018-09-04T13:39:45","modified_gmt":"2018-09-04T13:39:45","slug":"function-and-meaning-continued","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/lencho\/function-and-meaning-continued\/","title":{"rendered":"Function and Meaning (Continued)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Like many places in Slovakia, Nitra has its share of \u2018public art,\u2019 expressed in all the advertisements, instructions, graffiti, and ubiquitous tagging of buildings, trains, bridges, fences, in short, anything that represents a potential canvas, something that can be seen by the random passers-by. So I wasn\u2019t so surprised when a sidewalk in our fine city\u2019s Stare Mesto neighborhood greeted me last week with the banner \u201cMilujem \u0165a.\u201d Of course, its full meaning is as inscrutable to me as the tags surrounding me as I walk through any underpass.<\/p>\n

I look closely at the brownish paint\u2014or is it dried blood\u2014rather boldly spread out in front of my feet under the broad afternoon babie leto sunshine. Sidewalks rarely communicate so engagingly. A pleasant collection of lexical content and functional instructions which I can unpack as follows:<\/p>\n

\u201cMilujem t\u2019a,\u201d that is to say: \u2018I have a certain feeling for you, an awareness amounting to approval, appreciation, and approbation, something stronger than mere liking, more kindred in intensity to hate, yet with positive polarity.\u2019<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s investigate: there\u2019s \u201ct\u2019a\u201d . . . the single solitary walker, reader, familiar to the writer, or so the writer indicates, functioning as object of the writer\u2019s love? Could it be me? If not, then who?<\/p>\n

Continuing to decode, next there\u2019s \u201c-ujem\u201d . . . . the single, solitary writer, agent, lover? Functioning as the speaker subject of the expression. Definitions so far are hard to come by: I\u2019m left with the circularity of \u201cI\u201d and \u201cyou,\u201d but I don\u2019t know who.<\/p>\n

But, aah, there\u2019s that first part: \u201cMil-\u201d from \u201cmilovat\u2019\u201d the content laden \u2018love\u2019 with all its entailments and entanglements. With \u2018Mil\u2019 we know that the speaker is human, has feelings, and knows what it is like to experience these feelings deeply, their presence and absence. \u201cMil-\u201c concept or atom, that which is composed of basic parts, or that which stands on its own, yet is connected with so much else? . . . such are the questions that run through the linguist\u2019s mind . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like many places in Slovakia, Nitra has its share of \u2018public art,\u2019 expressed in all the advertisements, instructions, graffiti, and ubiquitous tagging of buildings, trains, bridges, fences, in short, anything that represents a potential canvas, something that can be seen … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56564],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words-and-their-meanings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/lencho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/lencho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/lencho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/lencho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/lencho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/lencho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/lencho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions\/257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/lencho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/lencho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/lencho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}