now lets take a pair of words like « generous » and « thrifty » say we could probably find an axis that ran through them unfortunately we could find many more than one axis but lets take an axis an axis is a good word it suggests so much a kind of space through with it runs a kind of semantic globe domain ? hyperspace ? anyway lets call it an axis […] but what could that mean that a word could lie closer to the same axis than another it could mean that we will have to find only pure opposites or antonyms lying at ends of feature axes and that all the words in the system will have to be plotted by the intersection of various axes their spatial coordinates in some kind of hyperspace so that we know just how far off the axis of « closed » and « open » « generous » and « thrifty » may really be and how close they lie to an axis of « big » and « small » for example or « soft » and « hard » how many features will we need to map any lexeme how many features are there is there a feature axis that can be constructed by drawing a line between any two words that can be regarded as opposites seen from some point of view will we have to connect every word with every other word in practice in principle dollars and doughnuts if not will there be a finite set of such contrasts ? […] now the reason i chose to talk about tuning i was proposing a way of looking at how we understand things how we come to understand things come to an understanding with each other about things through language has something to do with a notion process i would like to call tuning
17 01 16