An Experimental Approach to the Functional Analysis of Text Building Behaviour. Part II. The Information Flow. No. 48.

In contrast to the mass-related verbal flow description given in part I, this report focuses on the cooperative interaction of textual agents and objectives in the production of information flows. Perspective Text Analysis (PTA) is used with the purpose of establishing their physical and functional significance in a non-mass based description of text building behavior. The most important feature of part II is the double aspect of the methodological approach to text building. One aspect of text building is an elaboration of Gibson's methodology into the study of a language-specific pickup of ecological invariants, exploring the abstract projections of ecological optics onto language spaces and the way in which projected optical flow fields constrain the coupling of perception and action, i.e. locomotor activities. The other refers to physical conditions as provided by the famous Visual Cliff experiments and their theoretical significance in an explanation of the established temporal morphologies. These have been represented within a topological space. This space is conceived of as a collection of points that are connected by affinity relations determining the As and Os of the AaO schema. It is shown that each point can be represented by a different number, and that the concentration of these points in the topological space ultimately becomes helical. It is also demonstrated that self-references and self-organization have significance for the embedding of the perceived topological properties of the experimental environment into text. The results of the analysis show that the ensemble of texts macroscopically is dominated by highly similar flow-field properties. Three figures, one table. An attachment contains cluster analyses. (Contains 15 references, 3 tables, and 1 figure.) (Author)