The Relationship Between Continuity and Discontinuity

Human experience in spacing time is continuous, there are no natural breaks. But if these continuous flows of information are to be perceived as meaningful we have to break them down into discontinuous units corresponding analogically to the phonemes of meaningful speech. We then interpret the resulting phonemes by recognizing the component of relationships between the distinctive features from which these discontinuous units have been constructed. This kind of abstract formulation must sound very contrived but one example which will at least be familiar to the anthropologists who are in this audience and I know there are a few is provided by Van Gennep's three phase model of Rita Pasein.