This Tango was written during a NorFA course on semantics at Säröhus outside Gothenburg in 1989. In this course strikingly different approaches to the phenomenon of meaning and its study were represented among the lecturers. There was the conversation analyst with his violent reactions to anything looking like a formula, insisting that every minute thing happening during a conversation conveyed meaning and should be taken into account simultaneously; there was the formal semanticist analyzing the sentence "Anna smiles" (Anna being his daughter) in depth throughout two weeks, building a formidable formal apparatus in the process; and there was the corpus linguist complacently confident that he was the only one with access to the real language, while everyone else for some reason was sitting in "armchairs", as he mysteriously claimed.
 


Tango Sémantique
Tune: Frithiof och Carmencita (E. Taube)
(1989)
Helge Dyvik

(A, a conversation analyst:)
I, loosely speaking, sort of study conversations,
trying my best to do without formalizations.
I can dispense
with things like meaning and sense;
just give me noises in context and keep distinctions blurred,
and I account for every sound you ever heard!
That’s what I call real semantics.

(R.C., a situation semanticist:)
No, you have missed the point by miles!
Just pay attention to the fact that Anna smiles,
and you’ll se that all that matters in this world
 is to have an actual fact with a sweet and smiling daughter.
Well, now she’s also learnt to run,
so I’ve got twice as many facts with value one.
I must admit the world is changing rather faster than I like -
probably we shouldn’t have taught her!

(C, a corpus fanatic:)
Nothing comes of all your work
if you haven’t got a Quirk.
Quirk and Svartvik have a corpus which comprises
 every sentence that will ever be spoken.
With this corpus on my shelf
I don’t have to sit myself
listening to boring conversations such as this -
I can do semantics!