[luckyme]

[ QUOTE ]
Well, what if we remove the author? Imagine I program a computer to randomly string characters together, and it happens to spit out "There's a ship in the harbor." Did the computer randomly create a sentence with a certain literal meaning, or are we interpreting a random pattern as something coherent?

[/ QUOTE ]

The cut on my toe is the cut on my toe whether I dropped the knife on it by accident or the neighbor deliberately tossed it on it. You won't be able to tell the cause without investigation but the end result speaks for itself.

Of course, "the ship is in the harbor" found on a crab shell in burma won't have the meaning it does to an english reader. But, finding one in boston, surely we're entitled to ask, "how the heck did THAT get there?" and none of us would have to have THAT explained to us. Then the analysis of the cause of that crabstatement starts. If we never figure it out, it still says the same thing, after all if it just looked like lobster claw scratches we'd have never noticed it.

I've found this interesting because I never realized that others used 'literal' so differently than I do. 'Literal', from here, has essentially meant, "you don't have to know the author, his mood, or what he wrote yesterday or tomorrow on the subject, the literal statement means what it would if we found it on a crab shell." author-smauthor.

I'm going to be very sensitized to it's use now, and can't wait for the next dozen or so times I see it used by others. I'll try your 'author-author' variety, and my "crabspeak" variety on them and see what falls out.

[ QUOTE ]
You say it's a group effort - I have trouble understanding how the reader and the writer can collaborate in creating a literal meaning.

[/ QUOTE ]

The writer has no role in a literal meaning, he could be a crab virus after all. The literal meaning exists in the context of the current reader(s). Delving into what the writer was trying to say is 'interpretation' or up to 'figurative'.

[ QUOTE ]
How can any work written thousands of years ago have a single literal meaning?

[/ QUOTE ]

The literal meaning occurs in the timeframe/place of the reader(s). It's no different than reading Chaucer. "He was a verray, parfit, gentil knyght" perhaps those adjectives have different meanings in chaucers time but a person then could read that statement and not have to deal with the irony chaucer intended, just read it literally. Humor often depends on there being a literal meaning. We can today, even without knowing what the words meant in chaucers time, still get our literal meaning out of it. What we consider Chaucer meant by it is ‘interpretative’, not everybody may think he was being sarcastic about the knight ( their loss).

So ancient text, well, all texts really, start as crabspeak. It may mean nothing in Burma, it may say something 'literal' in Newyork 2007, another literal thing in Rome 400 AD.
We read an old text, “he was cocky”. Np, it has a literal meaning to us. Then some linguist points out that in Rome it actually meant he was well hung. Ok, so the literal ‘crabspeak’ meaning back then was that. If we want to know more, we’ll have to dig into the authors political leanings, his mothers maiden name, … and we’re into interpretation.

That’s about as well as I can lay it out, I need a whack on the head every so often when I’m the only one in step, so thanks for challenging my ‘literal’, I’ll see what it morphs into now,
luckyme