The 9th Day of Yaris, 2719 Afternoon
“Further,” he continued, getting his thoughts back in line with the matter at hand, “since each of the Monite lexemes is fundamentally polysemous - and yes I do hear you giggling in the third row; and no, this does not mean the words enjoy a surfeit of paramours, but rather an surfeit of meanings - fundamentally polysemous, the surface interpretation of any incantation is not always clear, and may indeed be more or less impossible to understand from a purely linguistic perspective. This brings us neatly to the Polysemy Problem. If the possible meanings of an incantation are a function of the combined senses of each lexeme, how then do we arrive at anything like a functioning spell?” He turned to the great green-black slate board behind. It often gave him chills to be standing before these altars of fleeting knowledge. He was feeling it now. His hands should have been sweating. They were not. The chalk may have had something to do with that. With a flick of his wrists he began sketching out a large and complex tree diagram. Very pleasant to see it, familiar, homely.
“Now, the Spencer-Chalmers model of incantations assumes a fundamentally syntactic structure, breaking the utterance down into the familiar syntactic constituents that probably tormented you all in your composition classes.” There might have been a smattering of polite laughter. Or not. He was not sure. He did not care. Syntactic constituents were his old friends, but he’d seen enough of his fellows suffer with them to have developed some degree of sympathy. “This solves a good deal of the ambiguity by proposing that the semantics of the incantation are limited by the allowed grammatical structures of a well-formed utterance. Further work by Chalmers on trace theory also helps resolve the issue of the discontinuities among constituents by introducing the notions of movement and residual markers of this movement.” For quite a while he’d held with Chalmers on this, she was a sound theorist, one of the best, but it always seemed to him that her models were better suited to tackling mortal languages than the semantic mess that was Monite. Something else had to be going on. Still, the Spencer-Chalmers model was considered the orthodox view, and it was a little early in the term to branch out into the exciting work coming out of Thul Amat.
Unless one of the mostly-uninterested onlookers, he couldn’t really think of them as students, as his students; asked a probing question. He had some hope. That was worse that expecting failure. Every rustling sound, every inevitable cough made him think a question would be lobbed at him like a prize tomato. So far, he remained resolutely clean.
He went on, past a summary of transformation syntax, of constituency parsing, of formalisms and some of the paradoxes that each of these engendered. Was he glossing over too much? Probably. A concrete example was needed.
“Returning to polysemy in the semantics of incantations, I would like to draw your attention to the following.” He spoke a few words, time-worn and long-tested held out his hand as though he was cradling a brandy snifter. Then the sensation came. His skin seemed to turn to cold sediment in a deep pool, his veins flowed with the memory of sap, his bones became the memory of rhizomes long buried, of stems rising from the depths and towards the surface and the light. The shape of the ghostly memory took form, and in his hand a lily flower, deep purple like wine, bloomed. Only an illusion, made of light and the memory of a flower he once saw drifting down the narrow canal that ran at the back of the antiques storage warehouse. It was so bright, so perfect, that it had been burned into his memory, the wholeness of all flowers, their paragon. He recalled diving into the canal to follow it. He’d lost his shoes that day. New shoes, but he had caught the flower. Cuttings from it were still growing in the atrium pond of his mother’s house. And now the memory and the words had shaped the thing in his hands. But where did the rest of the sensation come from? He had never seen the plant from which the flower had been torn loose. He had never been a flower. It came unbidden with the words.
“A simple enough illusion, the blossom of a nenuphar. Few words spoken, and it blooms in my hand. If you would all be so good as to repeat my incantation and observe the flowers you create, we will have some very useful data about which we can ask our next questions.”