On the Ambiguity of the Notion 'Transfer'

HANS W. DECHERT

Introduction

In the 'Practical Information' provided by the organisers of the conference on 'Language Contact and Language Transfer' a portion of the text reads like this:

The fee [for this conference] is all-inclusive and will be paid at the conference desk. There is a possibility, however, of transferring the payment to our bank account earlier, for which the participants will be given an "early bird bonus" [...] Earlier transfers must be paid to our bank account at [name of Polish Bank Institute], with additional annotation SZCYRK-ARABSKI, by 30 April 2003. The annotation is very important, as this ensures the allocation of the money in the right sub-account. The participants are requested to fax their certificates of account payment to the Institute. (Emphasis through the italicised words is mine)

Since I have not only been interested in being attributed the privileged status of 'early bird', but in the use and meaning of the verb 'to transfer' (transferring) and the noun 'transfer' relevant to this information, I have got involved with this problem relating to the topic of my paper. The following considerations are the result of my investigation through looking at ordinary and etymological dictionaries and G. Fauconnier's (1997) seminal work Mappings in Thought and Language.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (1961), Vol. XI, 257:

– the verb to transfer means to convey or take from one place, person, etc. to another, to transmit, transport, to give or hand from one to another,

– to convey or make over (title, right, or property) by deed or legal process.

(No question, the status 'early bird' , according to this entry, could be transferred on to me, but that is a different question)

– the noun transfer in Law stands for conveyance from one person to another, spec. of shares or stock.

(I have been wondering, of course, whether this legal connotation of the term suggesting an explicit person-to-person exchange of financial property would permit the holder of the annotated sub-account to claim legal possession of the money)

– the act of transferring or fact of being transferred; conveyance or removal from one place, person, etc. to another; transference, transmission.

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary (2001), p. 1797 the connotation between transfer and transference of money is more evident:

– the verb to transfer (to trans'fer; to 'transfer: note the transfer of stress shift in modern English) means to move (someone or something) from one place to another. Ex: he would have to transfer to his own account.

– the noun stands for an act of moving something or someone to another place. Ex: a transfer of wealth to the poorer nations.

These entries, to come back to the first possibility of paying the conference fee mentioned in the information, seem to indicate that, appearing at the congress desk in a one-to-one person context I might have said: 'May I transfer the conference fee to you?' The answer most likely would have been: 'When may we expect to receive the money?' My invented statement, in other words, would have indicated an inappropriate linguistic transfer caused by my dictionary studies totally neglecting the inappropriate meaning of the term blended with a different analogical mental space, one of the sources of the ambiguity of the term transfer. Or to put it differently, my question would have been an intralingual pragmatic error, not caused by a crosslinguistic interaction with my primary language, but by a lack of expanding the term's standard meaning to its analogical or figurative meaning.

The second case of payment referred to in the Introduction is much more complicated in that there is no actual or very little person-to-person 'transference' involved, but on both ends and countries of the implicit communication process a large number of bureaucratic business activities between persons and banks, different currencies and dynamic exchange modalities, paper work as well as electronic information exchange, etc. This short outline of the complexity and shortcomings of the recommended kind of payment, quite in accordance with national and international financial vocabulary labelled 'transfer', referring to the early bird solution, may suffice to justify the expansion of the given dictionary meaning of transfer and the underlying ambiguity of the notion.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966: 936) the English verb to transfer is related to French transférer and to the Latin transferre. The basis of the Latin verb is the Greek verb [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.].

The English noun metaphor according to the same dictionary (p. 572) means a figure of speech involving the transference of a name to something analogous. The figurative meaning of transfer, in other words, depends on a relationship or mapping with analogy and metaphor in a blended mental space. This mapping, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (1961: Vol. XI: 257) is already...