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Multivalency and Indeterminacy
The account of the mechanism for the production of meaning from writ-
ten language can be made to yield a distinction between multivalency and
indeterminacy. Multivalency (that is, having many values or meanings) is
a condition of words used as ordinary written discourse. It is most acutely
revealed when a word is torn from its syntagma— effectively released into
paradigm—and reinserted into a number of syntagmas, from which we
can legitimately infer different meanings. In a particular syntagma, the
multivalency of a particular word is restrained by determining its mean-
ing from the meanings attached to proximate words in the surrounding
line of utterance. Indeterminacy, or difficulty in reaching definiteness in
interpretation, may still exist as a remaining possibility. Once formulated,
the distinction of multivalency from indeterminacy is simple and analyti-
Box 6.2
Indeterminacy and Multivalency
Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him
or her that I write a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a
Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will
stay split and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate
syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes
wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive.
—Raymond Chandler. Letter to Edward Weeks, January 18, 1948 (Chandler,
1962/1997, p.77).
The language used by Chandler is intended to give an appearance of preci-
sion, with restrained anger conveyed by the repetition of “split” and its
assonance with the “it” of “God damn it.” On a syntactic level, an appro-
priate oral reading would emphasize the separateness of words and their
boundaries, or splits from one another, in the crucial passage. The mean-
ing of crucial words, “velvety,” “vernacular,” and “attentive” is controlled
by their syntagm—for instance, “
bar-room
vernacular”—and is not idio-
syncratic.
Indeterminacy
has been deliberately avoided at the levels of
expression and of meaning. Remaining indeterminacy could be regarded
as a manifestation of the central paradox of writing, that its appearance of
exactness is continually betrayed by the possibility of different interpreta-
tions (McKenzie, 1990).
Multivalency
, in distinction from indeterminacy, is still potentially pres-
ent, with many values or meanings for crucial words possible in other syn-
tagms. The potential for multivalency could be empirically confirmed by a
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