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General Linguistics Dinneen, Francis P. Georgetown University Press 0878402780 9780878402786 9780585257853 English Linguistics. 1995 P121.D478 1995eb 410 Linguistics.
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General Linguistics Francis P. Dinneen, S.J. GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS / WASHINGTON, D.C.
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Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C. 20007 © 1995 by Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1995 THIS VOLUME IS PRINTED ON ACID-FREE OFFSET BOOKPAPER. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dinneen, Francis P. General linguistics / Francis P. Dinneen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Linguistics. I. Title. P121.D478 1995 410 dc20 ISBN 0-87840-278-0 (cloth) 93-37008
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Contents Foreword 1 The study of linguistics
xv 1 1
Studies of Language 2 Written Language 2 Objectivity and Subjectivity 3 Technical terms 4 Univocal, Equivocal and Ambiguous Terms 5 The objectivity of technical terms 7 Linguistics as a science 8 Assumptions 9 Purposes in studying language 10 A simple example 11 Fields in linguistics 12 Comparison and History 12 Unfamiliar Languages 12 Uses of Linguistics 13 The best language 14 Language and Technology 14 Objective properties of language 15 Some empirical properties of speech 17 Composition, Distribution, and Function 17 Linguistic systems
18 Systems of systems of contrasts 19 Kinds of `meaning' 20 What mean meant 21 Conventions 23 The plan of this book 23 Reading 2 Language as a system of sounds
25 26
Phonetics vs. phonology 26 Articulatory Phonetics 28 The objectivity of phonetic information 29 Technical terms 31 Presuppositions in phonetic terminology 31 Modifications 32 Vowel modification 35 A central focus of phonology 35 Phonemics 36 English phonemes 37 The phoneme 37 Distribution of sound units 28 Picturing speech units 40 Allophones 40 Phonetic symbols and Pronunciation 43 Symbols 43
Symbolic representation 44 Phone, Allophone, Phoneme 45 Representing speech sounds 47 Pattern through Omissions 47 Phonemic analysis 49 Segmental phonemes of English 49 Motivated and unmotivated contrasts 50 Suprasegmentals 51 Juncture 53 A Hierarchy of Presuppositions 53 Phonemic Pitch 54 Science and Phonemic Theory 55 Description and Explanation 56 Science and Constructs 57 Phonemics or phonology Appendices: 58 2.1 Some definitions of phoneme 59 2.2 Some English vowel sounds 60 2.3 Stress contrasts in English 60 2.4 Contrasts of stop + fricative vs. affricate 61 2.5 Some British vs. American lexical differences 62 2.6 Scottish lexical items 62 The International Phonetic Alphabet 63 Some Minimal Pairs in American English 77
Reading
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Document Page vi 3 Language as a system of forms
79
Purposes for Grammars 79 80 Classifying Forms 81 Parallel and complementary distribution 82 Constants and Variables 83 Grammatical Function 84 Morphemes and allomorphs 85 Defining morpheme 88 Allomorphs and Morphs 89 What languages signal Structural morphology and syntax 90 90 Function as `mean' 92 Public description and private explanation 92 Talking about language 93 Constituents 93 Elements and Units 94 The word: A minimal free form 95 Perspectives 96 A public method 98 Distribution 98 Functional classification: Hierarchy 99 Co-variation 100 Messages and Signals
103 Optional expansions 104 Contexts 104 What English speakers actually say 106 Substitutes 110 Answering Questions 111 Description and Explanation 112 Reading 4 Ancient linguistics
113 113
Greek concern for language 113 Rhetoric 114 Rhetoric and the sophists 114 Physis/Nomos 114 Anomaly/Analogy 116 Correctness 116 SoSEEM-SAID 116 Plato on language 117 Technique of Division 118 Logos 118 Logic or Grammar 119 Parts of Speech 119 Aristotle on Language 119 Categories 120 The categoric syllogism 121
Necessary and Contingent 122 Proposition and Sentence 123 Words for words 123 Speaker's Choice 124 Unhappy word choice 125 Meaning 125 The Stoics 126 Grammatical or logical terms 126 Logical rivals 126 Speech, grammar and logic 127 Stoicheia: constituents 128 Stoic theory 128 Stoic `Parts of Speech' 129 Logic, Science and Wisdom 129 Stoic `tri-vs. di-vision' 130 Structural contrast 130 The Stoic Lekton 131 Classification of lekta 131 Stoic levels 133 Logic and Language 133 Logic and Linguistics 133 Analogy 134 3-Term Analogies 135 4-Term Analogies
136 Analogy and Proof 136 Terms vs. Propositions 138 Varro 138 Varro's definition of `word' 139 Varro's Method 140 Usage 141 Declinatio naturalis & Declinatio voluntaria: `Phobias' 141 Greek grammar 142 Athens as a center of learning 143 Pergamon & Parchment 143 Alexandria 144 Dionysius Thrax: Excerpts from the Techne Grammatike 146 Apollonius Dyscolus 147 Dyscolus and Transformation 147 Dyscolus and Analogy 148 Dyscolus and Universal Grammar 151 Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae 151 On the letters 152 On the syllable 152 Dictio 153 Oratio 153 The parts of speech 154 Priscian and Latin verbs 156
Construction types 157 Basic forms 159 Reading Notes 160 5 Some medieval roots of traditional grammar
165 165
Description and Explanation 166 An age of synthesis: Philosophic assumptions 167 Logical assumptions Psychological assump-
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Document Page vii 167 tions 167 So-Seem-Said 168 Ways of knowing 168 Knowledge is perfectible 168 Linguistic Structure 169 The Modistae 170 Modistic Method 170 Modern analogical `modes' 171 Modal Distinctions 171 Translating Modally 173 Non-formal Study 173 Use of modistic terminology in theology 174 Peter of Spain's Summulae Logicales 178 The Square of Oppositions 176 The Tree of Porphyry 177 Supposition 178 Modern Modes 179 Ambiguous Modalities 180 Equivocal Terms & Constructions 180 Syntactic & Semantic Roles 181 Meaning and Reference 182 Meaning, Understanding, Representation and Attention
183 Progress in Logic 183 Nonlogical essentials 183 Studying Dialectic 185 Some senses of smoke 186 Terministic Logic 186 Sense 187 So-Seem-Said 187 Reference 187 Equivocation & Modification 188 Subjects `in' Predicates 188 Proposition and Syllogism 188 Syllogism Designs 188 Validity vs. Truth 190 Fallacies 190 Facts and Extension 190 Usage and Meaning 191 Intuition & Empirical Classification 191 Reading 193 Notes 6 Etymology and historical linguistics
199 199
Language change: better or worse? 200 Isidore of Seville's Differences 201 Grammar 202
Etymology 202 Interpretation 202 Etymologists 203 World Vocabulary 204 Tooke 204 Ascertaining the language 204 John Wallis 206 Hugh Jones 206 Samuel Johnson 207 Robert Lowth 210 Ways languages change 212 Sanskrit: Sir William Jones 213 Etymology and History 214 Reconstruction 216 ProtoIndoEuropean 217 Fact and Fancy 218 Historical identity and contemporary difference 218 Rhotacism 219 Grimm's Law 220 Grassman's Law 221 Verner's Law 221 The NeoGrammarians 222 Later developments in analogy 223 Indo-Germanic
223 Concrete data 224 Unity and Uniformity 224 Consonants changed 226 Changes Change 226 Intervocalic consonants 228 The vocalic system 228 The initial accent of intensity 229 Effects 229 Word endings 230 Reading 232 Notes 7 Ferdinand de Saussure
235 235
Science 235 Models 236 Insight 236 Émile Durkheim 237 Social Science 237 Collective Conscience 238 Social Fact 238 Reification 239 Human=Social 239 Social Behavior 240 Suicide 240
Ferdinand de Saussure 241 Langue, parole, langage 241 Abstraction and Science 242 Abstraction and Uniformity, La Langue and Perspective 242 Language as state or process 242 Description and Explanation 243 Whitney 243 Linguistic Science 244 Language and Thought 244 Passive Convention vs. Active Invention 245 Linguistics is not a Physical Science Languages are not wholly autono-
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Document Page viii 245 mous 245 Comparative Philology is too narrow 246 Saussure and the goals of linguistics 246 Languages Change 246 Causes of Change Goals in the Cours 247 247 Linguistics Autonomy 248 Abstraction = Conventional Simplification 249 État de langue 249 The linguistic sign 249 Saussure and the Stoics 250 Nature of the Sign 251 The `concrete and integral object' of linguistic science 251 Intrinsic, constituent properties of the sign 252 Relational properties of the sign 252 Linguistic value 253 Examples of Value 253 Signification, value, and content 255 La langue is pure form 255 Saussure's Substance 255 Pure Form 256 Langue's sole positive factor 256
Saussure's Conclusions 256 Note 257 Reading 8 Edward Sapir
259 259
Science explains and predicts 260 Language for linguists 261 Franz Boas 262 Boas' linguistic theory 262 Boas' Consonant Chart 262 Difference and Class 263 Analytic consequences 264 Meanings signalled 265 Meanings understood 265 Edward Sapir 266 Sapir's definition of language 267 Critique 268 Elements of speech 268 Cognitive vs. Affective 268 Autonomy of Language Design 269 Importance of Radicals 270 Form and Meaning Essentials 270 Form in Language: Grammatical processes 271 Word Order 271 Composition
271 Affixation 272 Infixation 273 Internal Change 273 Consonantal Change 274 Reduplication 274 Form in language: Grammatical concepts 276 Linguistic Diversity 276 Reservations 277 Language, thought, and culture 277 Static or Dynamic? 278 Language, race and Culture 278 Linguistic Relativity 279 The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis 280 The Real World 280 New Thinking 281 Inference, Assumption and Evidence 282 The Hypothesis 283 Critique 283 Note 284 Reading 9 Leonard Bloomfield
285 285
Mentalism and behaviorism 286 Linguistics is Talk about Language 286
Old and new language about language 287 Psychologists talk about language 287 Subjective talk about language 287 Objective talk about language 287 Language as Response 288 Leonard Bloomfield 289 Starting to talk about language 289 Postulates 293 Bloomfield's Language (1933) 293 The study, use and spread of language 293 Speech Communities 294 The phoneme 294 Presuppositions 295 Phonetic Basis 295 Contrasts 295 Meaning 297 Bloomfield on meaning 298 The fundamental assumption of linguistics 298 Bloomfield's conclusions 299 Grammatical forms 299 Stable States 300 Basic and Modified Meaning 300 Sentence types 301 Words
301 Syntax 301 Forms resultant from Free Forms 302 Order 302 Parts of Speech 302 Binarism revisited Structure,
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Document Page ix 303 Pattern, Design 303 A Priori vs. A posteriori 303 Rationalists and Empiricists 304 Binarism and constituency 305 Valid 305 Correct 306 Suggestive Symbols 306 Notation and Insight 307 Form-classes and lexicon 308 Written Records 308 Dialect Geography 309 Borrowing 309 Bloomfield's Conclusions 309 Bloomfield's influence 310 Note 311 Reading 10 Malinowski and Firth
313 313
Bronislaw Malinowski 314 Eclecticism 315 Purpose and Culture 315 Description and Explanation 317 Explaining Language Use
317 Linguistic Fact 317 Contextual analysis 318 Abstraction 319 Induction and deduction in Malinowski 320 Objectivity 321 John Rupert Firth 321 Meaning 322 Context of situation 323 Facts 323 Ecology 324 Firthian contextual analysis vs. Malinowski's 324 System and Structure 325 Malinowski's strong points 325 Constructs 326 Context of Situation 327 Dictionary Definitions 327 Translations Meaning 327 Linguistics' Translation Contributions 328 Structure and Structuralism in Firth 328 Implications 329 Actual and Potential Data 329 Polysystemic Analysis 330 Collocation and colligation 331
Lexicon and Grammar 331 Connotations 331 Structural Conditioning 332 Prosodic analysis 333 Phonemes and phonematic units 334 IPA 335 Prosodies vs. Phonemes 335 Non-lexical Distinction 336 Notes 337 Reading 11 Louis Hjelmslev
339 339
Autonomy of Linguistics 339 Glossematics 340 Glossematics and Column A 341 The Prolegomena and the empirical principle 341 Practical Problems 342 Prediction and Explanation 342 The Empirical Principle 342 Text 343 Langue as Pure Form 344 Logical Implication 344 Valid vs. True 344 Arbitrary vs. Appropriate 345 Text as System-and-Process
345 Principle of the analysis: Hierarchic relations 345 Translating Metalinguistic Terms 347 `What is a' and `What functions as a' 347 Exclusion 348 Langue, Text and Context 348 Signs and figurae 349 Meaning is Contextual 349 Content: Purport, schema, and usage 350 Catalysis 351 `Meaning' Systems 351 Cognitive Systems 352 Stratificational grammar 353 Stratificational Texts 353 The Stratificational Approach 353 `Higher' and `lower' strata 354 Stratal Composition, Distribution and Function 354 Interstratal Relations 354 Stratal Realizations 355 Text 355 Arrangement vs. Process 356 Text vs. Sentences 356 Group vs. Individual Abilities 356 Strata and Elements 357
Examples vs. Formalization 358 Stratificational Notation 358 English Number Stratification 359 Generation and Communication 359 Exclusion 359 Morphemic, Sememic and Lexemic Strata Strata mutually define
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Page x 360 each other 361 Stratal Representation 361 Notes 362 Reading 365 Appendices: Part of Sampson's Graphic Representation 12 Transformational Grammar
367 367
Syntactic Structures 367 Preface and Introduction 368 Demonstration: The independence of Grammar 368 Semantics cannot define `grammatical' 369 An Elementary Linguistic Theory 369 `Presence' vs. `Absence' 369 Phrase Structure 369 PS Constituents are not just Words 370 How to draw `Trees' Correstly 370 Bloomfield, Chomsky and Hjelmslev 371 A Terminal Language 372 Limitations of Phrase Structure Description 373 Sentences are not all Isolates 374 Kernel Sentences 374 On the Goals of Linguistic Theory 374 Description and Explanation 375
Transformations 375 Oblligatory and Optional 376 Descriptive Presuppositions 377 The Explanatory Power of Linguistic Theory 377 Syntax and Semantics 378 Peroration 378 Katz and Postal's 380 Collocations 380 Description and Explanation, Rules and Theory 381 Before Aspects 382 Syntactic Structures 382 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax 383 Competence and Performance 383 Langue and Competence 384 Actual and Potential 384 Performance needs Interpretation 384 Expressions of Competence 385 `Deep' and `Surface' Structures 385 Formal and Substantice Universals 386 Linguistic Theory and Language Learning 386 Chomsky's use of Empirical and Fact 387 Rationalists and Empiricists 387 Categories and Relations 389 Subcategorization
390 Factors and Subcategorization 392 Such label-sets base a Structural Index 393 The Lexicon 393 Obligatory Transofrmations 394 Sense and Reference 394 Syncategorematic and other Functions 395 Organization of the Grammat 396 Residual Problems 397 Innovations in Aspects 398 Phonetic Representation 398 Proposed Universal Definitions 399 Filters 399 Semantic Problems 400 Reading 401 Note 13 Non-Transformational Constants
403 403
Constants and Variables 404 Languages are Unique 404 Languages are the same 404 Language is Logical 406 Lexical Individuality and linguistic Universality 407 What Transformations Change 408 `Meaning' Contrasts 408
NEG and Q as Predicates 409 Visualizing Referents 409 Surface Semantics 410 Global Rules 412 Lexical Items 412 VSO Order 413 Ranking Categories 414 De Re & De Dicto 415 Intra- and Extra-Linguistic Semantic Determination 415 Performative Verbs 416 Transderivational Constraints 418 Tagmemics 419 Tagmemics' Focus 419 Etic and Emic Analysis 420 Particle, Wave & Field 420 Reduction 422 Tagmemics and Drama 422 Relations and Things-related 422 String Analysis 423 The Need for `Deep Structure' 424 Case Grammar Cases and Prepo-
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Document Page xi 424 sitions 424 Distribution vs. Composition 425 Predicate Types and Case Roles 426 Universals and Case Roles 428 Defining Case Roles 428 Analogical Interpretation 429 Agent and Instrument 429 Instrument, Word Magic and Semantic Interpretation 430 Time 430 Location 430 Benefaction 431 Modality Types and Representations 431 Tagmemics and IC Analysis 431 Translation 432 Proposition vs. Sentence 433 Case Grammat 433 Case Roles 435 CG Notational Conventions 436 Propositional Domination 438 Realization 438 Analogy and Metaphor 439 Literal and Nonliteral
441 Lexical Decomposition 442 Tentative Lexical Decompositions 442 Reading 444 Notes 14 After Aspects
445 445
Standard Theory 445 The Aspects Standard 446 ISH and the Extra-Linguistic 447 Actual and Potential ISH 448 What gets Interpreted 449 Meaning 449 Meaning Change 450 Rationalism and Empiricism 450 Questions 451 Coreference 452 Structure Dependence 452 Revision 453 Extended Standard Theory 453 Internal Cohesion 454 X-Bar Syntax 455 Spatial Tree-Relations 455 Other Tree-Relations 455 Bar-Notation 455
Precedence and Dominance 456 X-Bar and Quirk's NP & VP Analysis 456 Constituents and Non-Constituents 458 Degree of Derivation 458 Syntax and Semantics 460 NEG as an Operator 462 Natural Distributional Classes 464 Complements of Prepositions 464 Mutual Subcategorization 466 Redundancies 467 Semantic Information 467 Transformations 468 Redundancy Rules 468 Pro-forms and Underlying Forms 470 Movement from Fixed Slots 471 WH-Movement 474 Adjunction 476 COMP Paradigmatically 476 Abstract identity in concrete difference 476 From Specific to Generic Structure 477 Subcategorization 478 Lexical or Modal 479 Empty NP-positions 479 Empty Nodes
481 MOve Transformations 481 Move Anything 482 T-NEG & T-Q 482 An Interim Formalization 482 Filters 483 Constraining the Base 483 Are all Likenesses Analogies? 484 Constraints on Variables in Syntax 486 Functives may not be Functions 487 Adverb-Move 487 Island Constraints 487 Complements 488 WH-Phrases 488 Complex Nps 491 `Naturalness' 492 Multiple Moves 493 Raising 494 Lexical Subcategorization 495 Subject-Raising 496 Generalizations 497 Passives 498 Zero Allomorphs 499 Relative Clauses 499
D- & S-Structures 502 Recoverability 504 Deleting NP or PP 504 `Zero Anaphora' 505 `Inherent' Semantic Content 506 Government and Binging 506 Competence in GB 506 d-Heads in GB 507 The Pro-Drop Parameter 507 C(ategory)-Selection 508 Correlation with spatial relations 508 A Maximal Phrase 508 Movement 509 Random Movement 509 Case Theory The Intralinguistic relation of
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Document Page xii 510 C-COMMAND 510 The intralinguistic relation of GOVERNMENT 510 Control Theory 511 Empty Categories 512 Reading 513 Note 15 Different Constants
515 515
Questions 515 Real Units 515 Characterizing Relation 516 Characterizing Categories 516 Lexical-Functional Grammar 516 Characterization vs. Realization 516 Aspects' Realism 518 Static Properties & dynamic Operations 518 Ts & Lexical rules 519 Abstract and `real' forms 519 T-independent `surfce' forms 519 Coreference 519 Argument structure 520 Lexical Entries 521 Interpreting lexical entries
522 Passives in Complex Sentences 522 Lexical Functional Structures 522 Indices & Interpretation 523 Verbal Complements 523 Bresnan's VP symbol 525 Function vs. Structure 526 Subject-less Passives 526 Some NPs cannot be `preposed' 527 Unnecessary T-Roles 527 Simplifying TG. 528 LFG Simplifies TG 528 Rule Ordering 528 Undeletable `basic' forms 528 Ellipses 529 Surface N-V Relations 529 A Psychological Model 530 Networks and Arcs 531 The Augmented Transition Network 532 Traces and Gaps 532 Conclusions 533 Relational Grammar 534 Signification, value and content 534 Initial and final 534
Function, functive, entity 536 Two-object constructions 536 Restriction on Benefactives 536 Propositional and Non-propositional Roles 537 Global Rules 537 Marked and Unmarked 539 Common Advancements 539 How to read RG Graphics 541 Relational laws 542 Abstract Competence or concrete Performance 542 Global Rules 542 Motivation of Relational Grammar 543 How to establish Grammatical Relations 544 Linearization 544 Arc Pair Grammar 545 Montague Notation & PS Rules 545 A Grammar of Categories 547 A Montague Grammar 548 Logical Notation 550 Drawing `references' or `referents' 550 Formal Notions and Notation 550 Central Questions for Syntax 551 Testable Texts 551 Recursive Definitions & Well-Formedness
553 The importance of Semantics 554 T-Raise-to-object 554 T-Dative-Move 554 T-Conj-reduce 555 TG & MG Compared 555 The Nature of Syntactic Representation 558 Defining Grammatical Relations 559 Syntactic Rules and Languages' Semantics 560 Universal Validity 561 Tectogrammatics 561 Functional Grammar 562 Raids are not Wars 562 Sentence and text 562 Central and Peripheral 563 Communicative Dynamism 563 Context and Meaning 563 Context Independence 564 Central vs. Peripheral 565 Text vs. Sentence 565 Reading 567 Notes 16 Summary and Conclusions
573 573
Talk about Talk 573
Talk about Talk about Language 574 Relevance and Revision 574 Analogy and Structure 575 Scientific talk
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575 Logical talk about S --> NP VP 575 Grammatical talk about S 576 Facts and Patterns 577 What Languages share 577 SAID does not define SO 577 Generic - Specific - Individual 578 Doing Linguistics 578 Describing and Explaining 580 SO's autonomy 581 Endocentric tolerance & exocentric demand 581 Phonic talk 582 Unspeakable Language 583 Language as a State 583 Phonetics, Phonoogy, and grammar 583 Linguistic levels 583 Parallel and complementary distribution 585 Lexical and grammatical senses 584 Correct combinations 584 Morpheme 584 Parallels 584 Elements and units 585 Word as a minimal free form 585
IA and IP analyses 585 Physis/Nomos 586 Words like motorman and if 586 Aristotle's syndesmoi 586 Stoic pto:sis 587 Priscian's Parts of speech 588 A Modistic view of Language 588 Hispanus' terms and non-terms 588 Language origin and change 589 Sound Laws 589 Durkheim's Social Facts 590 Fiction & conventional simplification 591 Sounds, signals and meaning 592 Sapir's form 593 Blookfield on Sapir 593 Speech Community, Density of Communication, Standards, Dialect, and Borrowing 595 De-/con-notative semiotics & phatic communion 595 A priori vs. a posteriori 595 Glossematics as a deductive calculus 596 All grammars are stratified 597 Stratal inventory and tactic rules 597 Sentences, utterances and Speech Acts 598 Tagmemics' Questions 599
Case Grammar 599 Tagmemics, Competence and Peformance 600 Case Grammar 601 +WH & -WH complementizers 602 Types and Tokens 602 Traces, zeros and empty categories 603 Autonomous syntactic generation 604 The Complex NP Constraint 604 The Coordinate Structure Constraint 604 Subjacency Condition 605 Zeros 606 Heads in X-bar 606 Morphology, Syntax & Projection Principle 606 0 roles and CG roles 607 Adjuncts, Complements & C-Command 607 Function, Constant and Variable 608 Inappropriate Transformations 609 Lexicon and Transformations 610 Arcs, grammatical relations & levels 610 Chômeur 611 Concrete vs. Abstrat Lexicon 612 A Categorial Lexicon 615 Montague Grammar 615 Simple senteces and relative clauses
616 Px components of Pxyz 617 Minimalism 624 Reading 624 Notes Subject Index
631
Author Index
643
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Foreword In the late 1940's, Bertrand Russell's I am firm, You are obstinate, He is a pig-headed fool inspired The New Statesman and Nation to offer prizes for the best ''conjugation" of "irregular verbs" on that model. That challenged contestants to make explicit what they "knew" implicitly as native speakers. One way of contrasting linguistic studies with other approaches to language is to compare the technical vocabulary which disciplines develop to answer questions about language. Linguists propose many explicit terms to deal with facts that other scholars "know" but do not discuss. Everyone "knows" that Russell's example contains three statements but not every discipline finds it necessary to distinguish, for instance, a verb from a predicate nor a predicate from a predication. Native speakers know that English you can be indifferently singular or plural, masculine or feminine, polite or familiar but few bother to point out that, unlike English, Hawaiian pronouns neglect gender, distinguish singular from dual and plural you, and both of the latter as inclusive or exclusive, whereas Chinese only contrasts first, second and third person pronouns with no distinction of gender. Linguistic studies are basically structural. They detail both what the composition of language forms is as well as how comparable forms differ, how those forms must, may or cannot be distributed and sketch what they must, may or cannot mean. Some studies add information about how forms are used in nonlinguistic contexts for different purposes on different occasions. This book suggests that one thread of continuity throughout the history of language studies is that linguistics has made the ancient search for the bases of four-term analogies more precise as the study of immanent language structures at distinct but interrelated levels (phonetic, morphological, lexical, phrasal, clausal, sentential, functional, discursive, etc.). Linguistic studies can be more abstract than others. Transformational Grammar, for instance, shows how simple English sentences can be "produced" from, or "reduced" to, a generic formula like S ---> NP VP, since VP can be rewritten as ---> V, or ---> V NP, or ---> V NP PP, or ---> V AP, etc.
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1 The Study of Linguistics 1.00 Studies of Language. Many disciplines deal with language, and Linguistics is one of them. The names of some traditional studies suggest a focus on different objects, but no one would deny that language is intimately involved when Grammar, Rhetoric, Poetry, or traditional Logic are discussed. When a `linguistic' approach is mentioned, a question naturally arises about whether what it studies is not already covered by the others. In the traditional approaches, we might agree that what they study is pretty much `the same thing', but that they differ in how and why they are studied, and perhaps that they are mainly distinct because only a part or aspect of language is singled out for attention. No one is disappointed to find no Poetry in a book about Logic, or very little about Poetry in elementary Grammars. In a work on Rhetoric, there might be some mention of Logic and Poetry, but a good deal of what is appropriate to a Grammar will most likely just be taken for granted. Romance Philology and Germanic Philology are more generic studies of language, and in these fields, we expect to find facts about the authenticity, original form, or interpretation of a variety of written texts in a language or a related group of languages. 'Fancier' language studies include Orthoepy, (about correct pronunciation), Etymology (when correct word derivations are involved), Orthography as correct spelling, Calligraphy or Penmanship for more attractive writing, Elocution, as correct control of voice and gesture, Remedial Reading for better understanding, Speed Reading for more efficiency, Epigraphy, dealing with the peculiarities of inscriptions, Graphology, which deals with character and personality traits individual handwriting reveals, and Paleography, study of ancient writing. To study Language rather than particular languages, to ask about what is used rather than its use or users, deserves a special label to stress its peculiar interests: such a study ought to deal with factors presupposed by specialties or the Philologies, and General Philology would be an apt name for it. It just happens that Linguistics has been generally agreed upon for the study differing from the others in that kind of focus (e.g. on signal theory rather than what is signalled, on representation possibilities over what is represented). It may seem that no such object exists, or that its invention is more ingenious than useful: the only `language' we really encounter is something like English or Chinese. `Language' that is not `a language' is obviously an abstraction. Even English cannot be found in the concrete, and no one has ever spoken it. In order to speak `English', one would have to simultaneously
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speak Cockney and all other British dialects, to talk at the same time just like those Irish, Nigerian, Scottish, Canadian, Indian, Australian, Filipino, American, etc., speakers whose native language is `English'. That none of these speakers have trouble understanding the books the others write, and that most can usually grasp what the others say, would suggest that there is something about `English' which is not identical with its concrete manifestations. Linguists go further than that. They assume there are aspects of Language common to any language, and that one stage of the study called Linguistics ought to try to make explicit what they are. 1.01 Written Language. It is easy to forget that once we were all among the illiterate, especially if we learned to read and write when very young. It is inevitable that normal humans will speak. There is nothing inevitable about learning to read and write: either someone teaches us or we do not learn. If there is nothing to teach, we cannot learn: only a fraction of the world's population can read and write, because their societies have no way of representing what people say. Writing re-presents not only what has been spoken, but anything experienced, imagined, or thought. But writing is not Language. Nor are poetic, rhetorical, or logical skills reserved for the literate. Many societies flourish by memorizing and passing on their wisdom, and have astonishing abilities to do this; others may think there is nothing to learn beyond normal local experience, but all are poorer when links with the past are broken. Writing is neither moody nor absent-minded. It neither comments nor improvises. Its report need not vary when copied or moved, and it indifferently records the beautiful, offensive, or challenging, for those who could never experience or hear of things alien to local conditions and perspectives. So there is something about Language to be learned even by considering a successful writing system; and two complementary studies linguists cultivate, Phonetics and Phonology, will be sketched in Chapter 2, as a simplified version of more complex properties of Language. These two studies exemplify a first contrast between the how and why of linguistic concerns, compared to those of traditional disciplines. But the fundamental acquisition of writing is a fairly low level skill compared to those it takes for granted, such as learning the meaning and use of new words and constructions, more effective ways of putting this knowledge of language to subtle particular uses. It will become clear that there are limitations as well as advantages in the objective approach of Linguistics. 1.02 Objectivity and Subjectivity. Subjective is a pejorative term when opposed to objective, the quality just claimed for Linguistics. Both subjectivity and objectivity are indispensable for learning anything, particularly about Language. Recall the oddity that every individual's speech could be aptly called subjective in one of its several senses. Yet the fact that people
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routinely communicate so well presupposes something objective, something speakers of a language share as a common, public, external factor. That you are you, an individual, is not diminished by the fact that you also function as a member of a group when you speak and are understood. Could individuals insist that society form around them by acquiring their private / subjective language? Obviously infants could not, and speakers at any age would already have to have acquired the public language of a society to make that presumptuous demand intelligible. Sorting out in what sense Language can be viewed objectively, and not just as an invention by linguists, has its own interest. In the process, we can gain insight into questions like why this language is an instance of Language, how individual languages compare, how one would decide whether a potential message from outer space was part of a language or not, how languages change, often independently of the uses made of them, or whether information like that can help decide whether the change all languages undergo is a good or bad thing. 1.03 Objective and Bad. Associating subjectivity with evaluations like correctness or good and bad is meant to stress the importance of this eminently human duty. Nor should there be any misunderstanding if objectivity is claimed for Linguistics and subjectivity assigned to Traditional studies, since a claim like that can initially be no more than a subjective evaluation by linguists. Nor should the guardians of traditional values associated with refinements in grammatical, poetic, or rhetorical sensitivity find anything strange about basing their prescriptions on expert, subjective, individual judgments rather than some normalized, objective generalization. An opposition like subjective vs. objective is relative rather than an absolute matter in private affairs, and the idea of turning an opposition into an either-or vs. a more-or-less by agreeing on some public norm does not attract everyone. What is heavy for a child is light for an adult, while heavy for an adult might be light for a weight-lifter: the evaluation is relative to `who does the lifting', a subjective affair. By shifting from the private and subjective heavy to the public and objective 100 pounds, we deal with an either-or instead of a more-or-less for each unit of measure, with steps more precise than more-or-less for ranges. Why anyone would want to do this is another matter, but it should introduce some proportion into invidious comparisons rating traditional studies as purely subjective while holding that Linguistics attempts to be wholly objective. 1.04 Technical Terms. To foster their own kind of objectivity, disciplines substitute technical for ordinary word to communicate more precisely. Heavy and pound do not seem to show the contrast particularly well in the foregoing example, but one can suspect that the chemist's use of heavy water would be clumsily expressed in pounds. In linguistic and in traditional language studies, terms like word and sentence are in common use, but since
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the objective approach of Linguistics is contrasted here with the subjective, we can expect these expressions can differ in linguistics just like heavy water does in Chemistry and ordinary language. Technical terms coined for only one field present a different learning problem from those adapted from common use. Linguists have innovated many terms, but their usage evolves much the same way as in ordinary language: we have to know who uses some term, and when. For example, atom was used in ancient times, but no one would expect that its modern counterpart occurs in the same way. Among Roman grammarians, oratio was in common use, but that one word indifferently covered what we would distinguish as a phrase, clause, or sentence, as well as an oration. When ordinary words are adopted or adapted with technical restriction, things are a bit different: sport in Biology is `a mutant animal, plant, or part deviating from the normal type' (the latter sense is adapted in Statistics), while obsolete English equates it with amorous dalliance. We speak of the flow of electric current, its impedance and resistance in terms appropriate to liquids, without expecting electricity to have trouble going uphill; technical restriction can lessen the ordinary associations, but not remove them: ordinary language locates a problem for us; technical restriction refines its discussion. We can then appreciate some traditional distinctions about terms, and conditions under which they can be used with precision. These distinctions involve different ways of discussing objectivity and subjectivity. 1.05 Univocal, Equivocal and Ambiguous Terms. A term can be called univocal when the expression always has the same sense and reference: H2O always has the same sense (two molecules of Hydrogen, one of Oxygen) and refers uniquely to objects meeting these specifications. Water may often refer to the same thing, but it rarely does outside of laboratory conditions. Like English, H2O might be said not to occur `in the concrete', but unlike English, H2O can refer to a physical object. A term is equivocal when it coincides with another in pronunciation, but differs in sense and reference. For other reasons, it is also called a homonym. The difference is clearer for spellings like raze and raise: their spelling suggests that the two have different origins, something we might not have suspected from their spoken form. That is a fascinating sport has at least the three interpretations mentioned above (there are others), while the written form of the spoken version occasions other problems. An ambiguous term is one whose sense or reference varies in context, and deciding whether homonyms are involved may not be obvious: coarse is interpreted differently with thread, hair, sand, glass, features, manners, language, etc. The number of dictionary entries for a word indicate in how many ways ambiguous the isolated expression can be, and ordinary language, which uses many such terms together, can multiply the ambiguities. Coarse is a systematically ambiguous term, one in which the variable interpretation of sense or reference can be predicted and explained according
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to the context or universe of discourse in which it occurs. Systematically ambiguous terms are also called analogous: when all or most of the conditions which allow for systematic interpretation are known, an analogy (a type of system) and ways of discounting both similarities and differences are understood. This takes one sense or reference as its clearest interpretation, against which the others are to be measured. Many basic terms in ordinary use are like that, as in good applied to God, angels, men, dogs, mosquitoes, microbes, liars, books, knives, and murders, or same applied to any two things. Why a given sense or reference is taken as clear or basic (both analogous terms themselves) is not fixed. Classical Mythology was once taken for granted as a source (He's a real Apollo), but today, the popular press or the Guinness Book of Records are more likely. Or it might be some trivial but striking fact: can coarse be used as casually after associating coarse used of a metal file and cow arse? Important aspects of objectivity and subjectivity arise from these simplistic distinctions. One is that Language and languages can be viewed as subjective tools for dealing with objective nature by human subjects equally part of that nature and learning as involving appreciation of the difference. Another is that much scientific writing mixes ordinary and technical language, with the pressing need to sort out where they overlap. A third follows from these, that technical advances make different kinds of objectivity possible (e.g. just ordinary looking at things, then through magnifying glasses, then with optical and electron microscopes), but human intelligence, a defining part of subjectivity, does not change as rapidly as the supply of new information. To confuse information and intelligence will not assist our investigations. 1.06 The Objectivity of Technical Terms. All speakers assume they know a great deal about their language. To say that this knowledge is subjective, particularly as embodied in our traditional disciplines, is not to demean it, just to characterize it in a particular way. Another way of contrasting this with the sort of objective knowledge Linguistics seeks about language is to distinguish it as implicit vs. explicit. Socrates once elicited answers correct for Geometry from an untutored boy by the way he questioned him, and there are many things we `know' which can be made explicit by an analogous approach that makes us aware of what we take for granted. Since one function of written language is for marks on a piece of paper to be the visible sign of a stranger's invisible thought, it is normal for facile readers to look through writing rather than look at it. What a sign is can be subjectively unimportant compared to what it is objectively a sign of, and in Linguistics, it is often the case that what a sign is objectively is even less important than what it is not. This cryptic remark will become obvious, but it suggests part of the different how that distinguishes traditional from linguistic study. A study should begin with a clear idea of the what it studies. So a first step in Linguistics is to be clear about what its object is (compared to that of
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other disciplines), and what that object does; in this case, to separate signs from their sign-function. As already noted, a vast number of languages are unwritten, but all normal humans speak, so the obvious candidate for a basic aspect of Language study is an account of speech. We know what a good deal of speech in our own language `means' (a difficult word to deal with) and can guess what it might mean in cognate languages. We need only assume that it means something in a wholly unknown language, as a start in finding out how it functions there as a piece of language. This point of view brings us closer to talking about Language rather than a language, and linguists cultivate that perspective by the methods they use. This is a kind of objectivity: the investigator is (or puts himself) outside the subjectively shared codes ny which a society communicates messages in a language. Even when we don't understand them at all, the noises people make and some of the mechanisms they use to produce them are empirically observable: we can hear them, we can see some, and feel in our own experience how we produce similar sounds. To the extent that these data of the senses are public, the terms used to discuss them can be made exact. Technical terms in linguistics aim at being exact by being based on empirical evidence. That in turn constitutes their objectivity, their public availability to normal observers. Some training is needed for an advance in precision, of course, but when the terms can be checked against what anyone can hear, see, and feel, they are to that extent objective. Statements involving terms like that can be verified or falsified by the same senses of hearing, sight, and touch. Subjective reactions by individuals to the same sounds might rate them as harsh or melodious, measured or sing-song, or any other number of things. What is problematic about human reactions is their lack of uniformity, and the difficulty of persuading someone to have the same reactions as we do. It is less difficult to direct their attention to, and to agree about, what we can all hear, see, or touch. Another type of subjectivity common in discussions about language has to do with what expressions mean. It is even more complicated to get agreement about what some individual "really' intends when using them. One could argue that no amount of objective data of the kind we have been talking about so far could solve such a disagreement, and to the extent that this is fair criticism, it points out a striking limitation of the method. Disputes about proximate objective evidence are more easily settled than disagreements about the diffuse reasons for feeling more at home with varying interpretations of it. Compare Ambrose Bierce's 1911 satirical definition of dictionary and that in any standard one: Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work. (The Devil's Dictionary. 1958. New York. Dover)
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It is obvious that Linguistics is not uniquely objective in terminology or method, or that calling traditional studies subjective somehow puts them beyond some pale of serious consideration. There is no nonsubjective way of even deciding why one would search for an objective norm for what is serious. We read Bierce for pleasure as well as enlightenment, Webster for more sober pursuits, but a decision to define serious as a univocal rather than an analogical term is not a scientific matter. By the same token, the kind of questions, and what constitute valid answers in linguistic and traditional approaches, can be taken as complementary rather than mutually exclusive: each has a different purpose. 1.07 Linguistics as a Science. We have been edging toward a suggestion that Linguistics might merit the definition of the scientific study of language: a claim made often enough for this to appear in dictionaries. But dictionaries can only record what words have meant up to the date of their publication. Both critics of the field and some practitioners in it have become less certain, particularly as the scope of what is called linguistic study expands. Readers will have to decide this question for themselves, since only samples of the evidence can be provided, with some general outlines of how the discussion might proceed. Later chapters will detail how Linguistics as a discipline differs from the institutional perspectives of traditional studies. While it deals with the same matter language its assumptions and the kind of questions it asks are not the same. No solid information from any source is neglected in linguistics, but the data must undergo some rethinking. In an area where the methods and assumptions of physical sciences were considered inapplicable, claims have been made that there are aspects of language that can be studied scientifically, that without this scientific basis, even the humane interpretation of the role of language cannot be pursued on a sound basis. A claim to scientific status is disputed within and outside Linguistics. For some linguists, it now describes the actual state of the discipline; for others, only its potential; for still others, a status lately abandoned because of the increased role of subjectivity: intuitions about one's native language now count as scientific evidence. Some dismiss such a claim as pretentious or demonstrably misleading. Many think nothing more than a discussion of labels is involved. Since academic degrees are awarded in Linguistics, its standing as a discipline is a matter of some interest, both for the selfesteem of those who are already in the field or intend to enter it, and for the public who might be confusing a persuasive but temporary subjective stance with the solidity attached to findings of pursuits no one disputes as scientific. Linguists' recommendations have important consequences in education and other arenas of public concern. They are called upon to judge language teachers and texts, make recommendations to governments, advise psychologists and psychiatrists,
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influence decisions of lawyers, juries, doctors, teachers of the deaf, etc. why should responsible persons pay attention to what they have to say? Involved in these questions are others like what science is, and what scientism involves; is there just Science, or are there sciences? Is science identical with a particular method, or does the object of study determine whether a scientific study can be made of it? Is the distinction between `Natural' and `Social' Science legitimate, illusory, or a matter of degree? Some of the allusions to the complex continuum of subjectivity and objectivity are involved here. Answers to questions like these are often presupposed rather than made explicit when discussing Linguistics as a science, so some of the presuppositions of this present text ought to be outlined here, and others will emerge. 1.08 It is Assumed Here: (1) that Science may be about causes and effects; that the kinds of causes and effects discussed in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc. are not identical with those operative in linguistic behavior. (2) that in addition to these natural or objective causes, peculiarly human or subjective ones are involved in language use. (3) that in ordinary expectations, a science explains a definable range of phenomena by showing how it coheres with other areas defined in the same way: that allows us to predict them, and may lead to comprehension, control, or both. (4) that we can comprehend some things (like laws of planetary attraction) without being able to control them, or control some things (like electricity) without understanding them fully; that we can predict some things without either comprehension or control (like the accurate prediction of eclipses within Ptolemaic astronomy). (5) that there are objects impervious to scientific study, and methods incapable of achieving the kind of scientific results just sketched. Before microscopes, microbes could only be abstract or theoretical objects; now we can observe them instrumentally. (6) that if some object of investigation is random, it is not susceptible of scientific analysis. A random method is incapable of scientific results, regardless of its object. `Randomness' may result only from deficient conceptualization, methods, or instruments. (7) that the objects of science are abstract while the objects of ordinary experience are concrete, as talk about objects like `English' and `H2O' show. (8) that science aims at uncovering the universal rather than the individual, though sciences are constructed principally from, and should apply to, individual instances. (9) that sciences can differ according to their purposes, and that these purposes are not immanent in data, but determined by scientists, so studies
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of the same material for different purposes deserve different labels (like those proposed for Philology and Linguistics). (10) that sciences should construct precise technical terms and conventions appropriate to their own objects, methods, and purposes first: translatability into other sciences is a secondary priority. 1.09 Empiricism. These considerations suggest why and how technical terms in any discipline should be made exact, and why empirical methods lend themselves to objectivity. There are degrees of empiricism, ranging from the directness of unaided vision through the indirectness of instruments that increase its scope; or from simple forms of human touch and hearing through mechanical and electronic interactions where we see what we cannot hear or feel (as in dial-readings), so that the empirical data becomes increasingly remote from the original inputs; or ultimately, in the fact that human observers have to agree about what they observe and on the relevance of those observations. Empiricism guarantees (in principle) the public aspect of scientific objectivity. It makes experiments replicable under conditions independent of individual people, places or times. It allows for objective falsification of results independent of subjective disagreement about interpretations. The Physical Sciences make the greatest strides when data are quantifiable. But a notable problem about quantification in human or social sciences is that no science tells us what to manipulate mathematically or why only how. The difference can be discussed in terms of subjectivity and objectivity, and is often mentioned as a qualitative vs. a quantitative contrast. A similar problem arises when technical terms are taken from ordinary language: a refinement in perspective is adopted on the basis of a qualitative or subjective decision of the scientist, but when ordinary terms are retained, their vagueness can be misleading or a source of imprecision. The adoption of empirically objective technical terms no more constitutes a science than the use of subjective ones robs humane disciplines of their precision, as any student of traditional logic can attest. Traditional grammars also make use of many terms that are empirically quite defensible. But the overall data, purposes, and methods of traditional grammar are not the same as those in Linguistics, even when they coincide. 1.10 Purposes in Studying Language. Purpose is a humane word empirical sciences avoid. Function is sometimes found instead. But traditional studies of language accept an unabashed discussion of what the author had in mind (e.g. in writing a book about Grammar, Poetry, Rhetoric, or Literature). Ruskin coined the expression pathetic fallacy in 1856 for the attribution of human traits and feelings to nature (e.g. smiling skies and undaunted cliffs), but while subjective poetic turns like this are not likely to mislead in literature, empirical terms should be objective. This is not easy: what objective data, for instance, could you supply even about humans that
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would distinguish smiling from smirking or simpering? There are questions about language which some stages of objective linguistic study do little to illumine. Subjective purposes determine what the object of study should be even in science, and what is relevant to it; of what use the results will be, and how apt a method was chosen in view of the purpose. If the object of a study is to present standard English, a method that records only nonstandard language would be as inept as one that never mentions it in dubious cases. The inclusion of details about Bantu usage in such a work would be irrelevant unless the study were designed for Bantu learners of English. For instance, two books that organized Greek thought on Poetry and Rhetoric are preserved from the prodigious output of Aristotle along with a few others in which he pioneered Logic and Grammar. Although they are fundamental to all Western thought about language and traditional grammar, many could not name them, few read them in translation, and fewer in Greek. What makes them foundational is their conceptual perspective, not the physical texts. Many ideas they originated are part of the culture of those who have never heard of them. Assume that someone presents a manuscript acclaimed as one of Aristotle's lost works about language: how would this object be approached by linguistic and traditional scholars? How would their purposes differ, and what would each find relevant or irrelevant? What methods would promise useful results? Both would look for physical indications of authenticity (e.g. what it was written on, the script, vocabulary, construction types, etc. compared to accepted originals). Where others would then debate consistency of the manuscript's message with its contemporary culture, linguists would focus on it as a set of signals transmitting whatever that message was. As scholars, none would dream of ignoring the findings of the others, but there would be a complementary division of labor. For those equally competent in both fields, a new subdiscipline deserving a separate title could result, just as within Linguistics there are specializations wedding generic linguistic insights with those of other approaches. So while there are some purposes common to traditional and linguistic study, they are unlikely to coincide perfectly, even when retaining the same labels. Traditional Grammars have as their legitimate purpose the prescription of a language standard and the proscription of offenses against it. Traditional grammar applied to unwritten languages is surely an anomalous expression. Any grammar of a language like that would more aptly be called a Descriptive Grammar (a common title in linguistic studies). 1.11 A Simple Example. Assume that only a single speaker of such a language is available, but he assures us that he really doesn't speak his own language `correctly'. While neither traditional grammarians nor linguists would prefer to study a substandard variety, linguists might be happier with their data as an instance of Language than grammarians concerned with norms
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of correctness. Yet we might never know exactly how this speaker's language is incorrect in his own society, if the other speakers rarely used language to talk about language, and our informant never listened when they did. It might be that for him, to speak incorrectly involves only an inconsistent avoidance of tabu expressions (comparable in Western societies to the use of earthy language where a euphemism or medical term would be more polite). It would also be difficult to explain that we are interested in his language, when neither he nor his compatriots have shown much concern. Probably the only thing that would make sense to him would be that somehow our investigations were to uncover the secrets of his culture for some occult or imperialistic purpose. But there are other kinds of correctness that have concerned Western traditional grammars, such as the avoidance of contradiction, inconsistency, or ambiguity. We find it ambiguous if someone answers Yes to a question like `Are you a Democrat or a Republican?', or says that `The Democrats maintain that the Republicans are wrong and they are right'. `Really out of this world, and only in America' (Reagan's comment on the 1984 pre-Olympic Games Gala) seems at least inconsistent; and if we are assured that The mummified Pharaoh has consistently voted Democratic in Chicago for years is to be taken literally, there seems to be some kind of contradiction involved. Traditional grammars make rules proscribing expressions like that, since they can involve questions of truth and falsity. Deviations like these can often be called extralinguistic, since a sure appreciation of their standing may require native competence. There are stages in linguistic investigation (as in early acquaintance with our exotic informant) where suspicion of logical fallacy is premature, and where the basic concern of traditional logic about truth and falsity rather than consistency or validity is irrelevant. Lies are more convincing when their grammar is faultless. 1.12 Fields in Linguistics. Just as traditional studies of language developed into quasi-autonomous disciplines, we expect Linguistics to show similar diversification. Once some general principles are established and basic findings are taken for granted, the linguistic aspects of other disciplines can constitute a new subfield, informed by techniques and perspectives peculiar to Linguistics. Particularly in the case of the linguistic study of one's native language, modern grammatical work coincides increasingly with, and accepts, most of the conclusions and presuppositions of traditional grammar. Some of the fields in Linguistics commonly used are General or Theoretical Linguistics, Anthropological and Applied Linguistics, Descriptive, Historical or Comparative Linguistics, as well as Psycho-, Socio-, Mathematical and Computational Linguistics. The labels alone suggest reasonably well how the fields are related and distinct. The process or activity that cumulatively results in an overall view of language phenomena, how they might be studied and compared, and how they are relevant to other intimately connected pursuits, lies within the field of
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General or Theoretical Linguistics. There is no single Linguistic Theory to which all linguists subscribe. But a distinction between Theory and Model, clear in some disciplines, can be elusive in Linguistics. As a consequence, there are inconsistencies, basic or superficial, when different purposes dominate. Criteria for dividing intralinguistic from extralinguistic data waver. There are inconsistencies in viewing linguistic data as static or dynamic. Part of the task of General or Theoretical Linguistics is to sort out the continuities. 1.13 Comparison and History. The comparison of languages began in antiquity, but the study did not merit labeling as a separate discipline until the development of Comparative and Historical Philology in the nineteenth century. Before that, there was little sound information about non-European languages, and little interest in them, or in the historical development of European ones. Early interest was aroused because of cultural concerns, but to the extent they are different, the philological focus is on access to cultures through language, the linguistic stress on the developing and differing forms of language. Here, the contrast of static vs. dynamic might seem obvious: one could compare the present state of English with that of contemporary German, the dynamic development of both from a common source, or in either case, the dynamisms at work in each. A static comparison of dynamic forces seems promising. These complementary concerns belong to the fields of Comparative and Historical Linguistics. 1.14 Unfamiliar Languages. Descriptive Linguistics in America has been closely allied to Anthropology: unfamiliar speech can be described more confidently than the significance of social norms connected with it. But speech is universally recognized as a key for access to the culture. Connections between such studies and Comparative Linguistics are easy to see: new data results to which comparative methods can be applied, and as information accumulates, theories in Historical Linguistics may prove useful when dealing with suspected cognate languages. 1.15 Uses of Linguistics. Applied Linguistics is a very broad term: if one wanted to teach English to the groups our Anthropologists have been studying with the tools of Descriptive, Comparative, and Historical Linguistics, we can see why the effort would be called an exercise in Applied Linguistics. Any description is an implicit comparison, but what has been outlined here is an explicit one: there would be precise details about the kinds of sounds speakers hear and produce, and how they differ from those of English. The grammatical description would show any marked differences in the way English and the other languages exemplify general linguistic categories. Languages differ markedly in what they must express, simply because one is speaking a particular language, compared to what they may express, depending on what interests the speaker.
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If there were question about which of the languages our Anthropologists studied should become the standard for a new political unit, Applied Linguists' experience could suggest which might be more easily learned by the others, and which, when mispronounced by nonnative speakers, would be more intelligible to other nonnative speakers (it could be that the language easiest for all to learn on those norms was that of a numerical or cultural minority). Since the new standard language might be the only one that all would have to learn to read and write, Applied Linguists would be in a position to propose a writing system whose symbols made best use of factors common among these languages and English. Anthropological Linguists routinely collect culturally important texts, and these could provide material for elementary readers, evaluated for linguistic and crosscultural acceptability. None of these tasks could succeed unless technical expertise were supplemented by the humanity and sensitivity of the linguists consulted. Part of that sensitivity can be honed by the kind of work done in the fields of Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics. There are barriers as well as norms in the normal acquisition and use of native language, and the hypothetical situation we have been discussing could be fraught with difficulties. 1.16 The Best Language. In a hypothetical situation, it is easy to imagine some possibilities: e.g. that some sounds or intonations neutral in language A are threatening in language B; when these pronunciations mark the nonnative speaker of a new standard C, speakers and hearers are both disadvantaged: the A speaker because his subgroup has always supported and rewarded proper usage, the B hearer because in her and C subgroups, negative reactions to them are as powerful as they are certain. Or it may be that one cannot speak A grammatically without distinguishing personal experience from hearsay, so the nonnative transliterates that into the standard language C; when B and C speakers do not volunteer such information, an A speaker demands it: an A-speaker may impress B and C speakers in much the same way `namedroppers' bore us, but he will find B's and C's evasive or untrustworthy. The hypothetical situation may seem so unlikely that such specializations seem esoteric. But it describes the situation nonstandard speakers encounter. This is the case even when the standard is only a local one, so that all that is known about the nonstandard speakers is that they aren't ''one of us". `Standard speakers' have less motivation to become aware of how ignorant we all are of the way any language functions: the weight assigned to automatisms is never comparable to those deliberately chosen. Fortunately or not, it just happens that standard automatisms are standard. But while some modes of speech (like the examples used above) are not chosen by A speakers, they may be available to B and C speakers for deliberate threatening or boasting. Given the initial misunderstandings, experience suggests that A's, B's, and C's are more likely to find further confirmation of their prejudices than to learn how
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to discount them. While the lesson is a truism in Linguistics, linguists, too, speak A, B, or C. 1.17 Language and Technology. The connections for Mathematical and Computational Linguistics might be just as mysterious, but less surprising now, when computer illiteracy is becoming an embarrassment. Quantification of much language data resulted from years of linguistic work. Even if one does not really understand advanced Math or computer design, the omnipresence of transistorized and programmable calculators suggests to the innocent that the enormous details of language might be amenable to simplification if we knew enough about what, when, and how to calculate. It seems obvious that addition or subtraction of words would account for differences from some model, but it is much less obvious what the analogue of multiplication or division would be how do you divide or multiply a sentence like Mary had a little lamb by if or although? A Linguistic Analysis is intended to reduce a language to its elements. If elements can be counted, does it follow that they should be manipulable mathematically and whizzed through complex computer programs? Unfortunately, human languages are not as simple as signal systems like semaphore flags or Morse code, and what has to be `counted' is not as overt as semaphore and Morse code units. Within some ranges, computerized programs for translating one language into another can produce remarkably acceptable results, but we are still far from understanding Language well enough to make programs connecting language A and language B so obvious that inclusion of language C is just incidental. 1.18 Objective Properties of Language. Pi represents a quantity variously presented as 22/7 or 3.14+. It is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The decimal version can be carried further but not concluded, and this fact is part of what is meant by saying that a quantity is a continuum: `something indefinitely divisible'. Each additional step can be counted beyond the +, and, like the example about heavy and light vs. measurement in pounds, we can quantify the accuracy of 3.141592+ compared to 3.14+ rather than just qualify the two as more or less accurate. The first procedure is said to be more objective and empirical; the second, more subjective and less empirical. Carrying out the decimal value further is said to be mathematically `uninteresting', when we know or anticipate that no new principles are involved, and instead of +, we could write etc., since we just keep repeating the same procedures. One reason for this is that the Circle is considered here as a static object. It is also a theoretical object, comparable to English. But if we apply pi to the real world of bouncing balls and racing tires, there is nothing static at all about circumferences. The dynamics of their behavior will depend on whether they are solid or inflatable, as well as a number of other factors like heat, weight, and force of impact. In the study
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of Language, we find similar options. Many slim books elegantly present the facts of English, but no static account of any size can do justice to its concrete use. So the problem for Linguistics or any science is its degree of removal from the concrete: how abstract can it afford to be, yet still be informative, or how concrete must it become without getting lost in detail? The sketch of fields in Linguistics shows that they differ in emphases. The general theory sets what to look for; its applicability shows whether a theory is vacuous or promising, given the kind of objects it defines, the purposes of the study, and the methods it makes possible. In the stage called Descriptive Linguistics, the data considered relevant derive from Speech, since it is a universal manifestation of language compared to writing. Speech is `objective' because it is more empirically accessible than subjective reactions, and while these reactions are ultimately the most important to us (i.e. appreciation of what is being communicated), they are less stable, less predictable, and considerably less public. 1.19 Some Empirical Properties of Speech. A readily observable property of speech is succession. If five people simultaneously pronounced a word apiece of Are you angry with me?, it would be unintelligible. Speed readers take in this entire message at a glance, and in Sign Language, the same question can be asked by gestures made at one and the same time. So a derivative empirical property of Speech can be called its linearity, a one-to-one relationship between the temporal succession of the sounds produced in Speech and the way it can be represented: Are you angry with me? The representation would still be linear whether in rows, columns, circles, or spirals, whether it is in two or more dimensions, as long as it is to be followed in sequence in any continuous or discontinuous order. A linear representation provides a suggestive picture of what does, may, must, and cannot occur when comparing any part of the utterance Are you angry with me? with any other, or that expression with others most like it. That is because speech is not only sequenced in a linear fashion, but unlike some conceivable representations, it is systematic. The successive members of the example cannot occur randomly. Some combinations are producible but do not occur (e.g. With are me angry you?) and alternative arrangements that can occur get a different or puzzled interpretation (e.g. With me are angry you?). If we generalize the notion of system as what restricts a finite number of items to a finite number of combinations, some meaningful implications for speech are revealed:
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(1) Only some combinations are readily interpretable, and some combinations are uninterpretable or meaningless. Two speech sequences will contrast because one is allowed and meaningful but the other excluded, hence nonsense (e.g. *With are me angry you?) or because both are allowed and meaningful, but differently (e.g. Are you angry with me? or You are angry with me!). (2) Ordinary options must be within the system, unless speakers choose to speak nonsense. For example, Are you angry at me? Are you angry with me? Are you angry because of me? but not: *Are you angry few me? *Are you angry but me? *Are you angry democracy me? or the many other unacceptable options, with their systematic implications, for are, you, angry, and me. (3) Each segment in lawful successions is a point at which options appear, but the range of options (as just illustrated) is no more random than the succession. Even this trivial example suggests that Language should be approached as a system of systems. (4) These factors are just as observable in unknown languages as they are in our own, with a few notable differences. Nonsense is easy to produce in unknown languages but some kinds are quite difficult in our own. We can know or suspect about foreign utterances that they mean something without knowing what, or discover that natives find them meaningless without our knowing how or why, when trying to imitate native speech: since language is a system of systems, violations of one system can shortcircuit others. (5) The example exemplifies points about English that are important for Linguistic analysis. The first is that only angry belongs to a class or system that is large and comparatively open-ended, while each of the other words belong to closed and rather small classes. This suggests that if a finite number of classes and how they interact can be identified, there is a norm for deciding when to stop the analysis (it can never `finish' in the case of a living language: it is a kind of `etc.' comparable to writing pi when no new principles operate at that level of analysis). The second is that historical study shows that the class to which angry belongs is more likely to change with external exigencies than the closed ones. Members of the closed classes are few, but occur very
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frequently; members of the open classes are so numerous that few of them can occur frequently. 1.20 Composition, Distribution, and Function. To say that violation of one system can `short-circuit' others suggests subordination of one system to another, or interdependence among them. Both views can be justified, although abstraction is just as clearly involved as in distinguishing various systems in the human body. There, the same physical parts may be important to the function of several systems which a medical specialist may seem to treat as autonomies, and in linguistic study, different points of view allow us to discuss the same facts from different perspectives. E.g. the phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. of `i' in Latin, which can be discussed as a high, front, unrounded vowel phonetically, as one of a small number of vocalic contrasts in phonology, as a morph or morpheme in morphology, as a word or independent sentence, etc., telling some individual rather impolitely to Go!. 1.21 Linguistic Systems. Many systems can be distinguished in an utterance as simple as Are you angry with me?, and about each, we can ask what makes them up, where they are found, and what they do in the example. Assuming that speech can be analyzed into discrete sounds, for instance, we can inquire about their composition, alone and in comparison to each other; about their distribution, or where they occur relative to each other; and their function, what they do, what role they play, in speech. Since speech-sounds are a central concern in Descriptive Linguistics, we must notice that a definition of the object sound is not so obvious. (We are really not talking about the way the example is written, although it is a useful shortcut here). In terms of sound composition, there are several points of view to take: (a) sound as produced by what the speaker does, (b) sound as disturbances in the air, or (c) sound as it impinges on the hearer. (These are clearly interdependent, but can be examined in terms of temporal subordination). Having decided on one or the other of these objects or combinations of them, study of their distribution in a language would ask where they do, do not, cannot, or may occur, and having established that, what their function is. Then, since we expect any language to be a system of systems, it is of interest how these three aspects interact (e.g. does the Distribution of a sound affect its Composition or not, and how does this affect their Function in either case?). For instance, a sequence like disruptic instead of angry in our example might occasion observations like: as such, disruptic does not introduce sounds alien to English or distribute them strangely; dis- is as easily pronounced as -ic or rupt; dis- and -ic are familiar affixes, and rupt a common root; but perhaps it is a slip of the tongue for disruptive, or a new word related to cryptic... Our effort to interpret disruptic in the environment of Are you ... with me? would be to make explicit the many systems within which such a
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form, on the basis of its actual or altered composition and distribution, might 'make sense' or function within the English system. If the sequence ngtkst had appeared, we would not even be tempted to appeal to the morphological system (are there prefixes, infixes, suffixes and roots involved?), syntactic system (would it work in another position?), or other systems, since it already violates the English phonetic system, and whether or not that is autonomous or interdependent with the others, its occurrence causes a definite short circuit. 1.22 System of Contrasts. There is another aspect of the interdependence or subordination among composition, distribution, and function and that is the relative unimportance of composition. Recall that when sounds were distinguished into what speakers produce, disturbances in the air, and impressions on the hearer, it seemed that only humans were involved. But what is important in language is not even that it is a system of systems where the units involved have an explicit, positive definition in terms of composition, so much as that it is a system of contrasts. If this were not the case, we could not write or represent language messages visually. We might rather loosely be said to `hear' writing indirectly, but there is nothing at all to hear in the international picture of a burning cigarette with a red line through it. Writing and signs cause no disturbances in the air, and there are as many ways to `say' what that sign `means' as there are languages. If language were defined in terms of composition, we would all have to be mimics to learn it, not just repeat what we hear. Human speakers cause disturbances in the air that are physically different from the activities of tiny radio speakers or talking birds, but what we accept as speech from machines and birds resembles it most in the systematic distribution of a similar number of contrasts, to which we attribute the same functions. Linguistics focuses on the essentially contrastive basis of language communication. Just as Beethoven's Minuet in G or Chopin's Waltz in A Flat cannot be confused with other melodies no matter what key they are played in, or what instrument they are played on, language functions in many media. Mary had a little lamb functions in much the same way whether it is written, or recited by an adult, child, or bird. Despite considerable differences in composition, what are involved in these different media are interdependent. 1.23 System of Systems of Contrasts. Linguistics at some stage is to study Language independent of, or antecedent to, other disciplines, so its treatment of `meaning' can be expected to differ from theirs as well. Language Itself as an academic abstraction is as justifiable as the object of any autonomous science is: while separating Language from its use and users is a fatuous proceeding from many points of view, that process is simply indispensable to any science, and is anchored in the fundamental difference between what we experience and what we can or have learned to pay attention to.
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If the first line of a friend's letter were Are you angry with me?, her handwriting contains information a typed letter cannot. When a stranger who is a native A speaker says the same thing to you in C, you might misinterpret his mood if your native language is B. And if either had only written or typed You angry with me?, You angry?, Y' angry?, Angry with me?, or just Angry?, there are more overt clues to attend to than in the single words Angry or angry clipped from a newspaper. Speech can be an objective representation of what is subjective and individual. Phonetic transcription, handwriting, typing, and printing communicate through increasingly abstract systems of contrasts rather than through concrete detail. Voiceprints are less reliable than fingerprints for identifying individuals; handwriting comes closer, and while many technicians can distinguish individual typewriters, few experts would guarantee that only this single person could have used this machine to type this message. In an isolated clip of the printed words Angry or angry, there is one overt, objective difference in composition to which you may or may not attend, and other covert (absent, unseen, empirically inaccessible) systematic contrasts in distribution and function of which you may be unaware, e.g. Is either of the clips all or part of a word? Are they from the beginning, middle, or end of a sequence? Did the compositor know about capitalizing conventions or just reproduce a text? Is Angry someone's name or a common noun, and is either related to anger? If neither clip is taken from English, none of these questions may be relevant. 1.24 Kinds of `Meaning'. H2O and English compare as abstractions even though H2O involves physical elements and Language does not; and while H2O might occur freely in our atmosphere, neither element can occur here alone, although both may outside that system (e.g. under artificial laboratory conditions or in space). Systems of `meaning' elements appropriate to different levels and stages of linguistic analysis are obtained by a process of abstraction similar to that by which physical elements are successively hypothesized, tested, and verified. When Are you angry with me? works, or fails to communicate, with what kind of elements can we correlate either result? You and me differ from the other words because you and me may point to people, while are and with certainly do not, and if angry `points', it is not to people. So we can divide expressions that refer from those that do not, and subdivide on the basis of kinds of referents (e.g. you and me can be used to refer to objects we can see, angry cannot, among other differences). Natives may or may not quibble that Are you angry with me? correlates with a different scenario than Are you angry at me?, but would agree that Are you angry because of me? can have to do with a different situation. While there may be nothing different to point to, subjective attention has shifted, and there is an objective way of signaling the difference. But *Are you angry if me? does not belong to this public system. Are you angry
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with/at me? can be said to communicate the same sense, Are you angry because of me? communicates a different sense, but *Are you angry if me? communicates nonsense (or fails to communicate) within this restricted public system, while it might be readily understood in another system. The questions we ask can have different answers, depending on how many systems are considered, and how the systems interact. We have isolated two types of `meanings', sense and reference, and the complications ahead are not difficult to foresee (e.g. one might want to anchor discussion first in a kind of situational `meaning', such as what Out! means in different sports). If sense and reference are taken to involve the cognitive aspects of Are you angry with me?, we can distinguish the public or objective factors of an agreed-upon situation from affective or subjective aspects. The pair of terms, denotation and connotation are sometimes used to make this discrimination. A Psycholinguistic study might suggest that early use of angry could destroy the subjective effectiveness of anything said later. Or, if it is unthinkable for a speaker of B that an inferior put any question to a superior, while the situation is neutral in standard C, A speakers will still offend B's even if they humbly transliterate honorific signals from A into their use of C by saying something like Art glorious thou angry with worthless me?. There is no question that the cognitive meaning, both in terms of sense and reference, has been clearly and correctly communicated by the public norms of C, nor that there is confusion about the situation, but the connotations or affective content can constitute a short circuit in communication: connotations communicate speakers' attitudes to the hearer, an estimate of how they think the hearer regards them, as well as the view they all are supposed to have toward the situation and topic discussed, not just the kind of information one expects from a traditional Dictionary, concerned largely with word-meanings. Topics like this are discussed more systematically in Sociolinguistics. 1.25 What Mean Meant. Descriptive Linguistics, as discussed in Chapters 2 through 7, identifies various static levels of analysis as largely autonomous systems which contribute in their own way to the signalling of Cognitive and Affective meaning, but not precisely in terms of what those meanings are. Some findings may coincide with Traditional statements, like this account of what mean meant shortly before the Unabridged Random House Dictionary was printed in 1966: mean1 (men), v. meant, mean-ing. - v.t. 1. to have in mind as one's purpose or intention; intend: I mean to talk to him about the show. 2. to intend for a particular purpose, destination, etc.: They were meant for each other. 3. to intend to express or indicate: What do you mean by `liberal'? 4. to have as its sense or signification; signify: The word `liberal' means many things to many people. 5. to bring, cause or produce as a result: This bonus means that we can take a trip to Florida. 6. to have (certain intentions) toward a person: He means you no good. 7. to have the value of; assume the importance of: Money means everything to him. His mother means the world to him. - v.i. 8. to be minded or disposed; have intentions: Beware, she means ill, despite her solicitous manner. 9. mean
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well, to have good intentions; try to be kind or helpful: Her constant queries about your health must be tiresome, but I'm sure she means well. [ME mene(n), OE maenan; c. G meinen, D meenen] -Syn. 1. contemplate. See intend. 2. destine, foreordain. 3. denote, indicate; import, imply, connote. This, of course, is an account of what dictionary editors thought writers were thinking when they wrote down the same word mean in all documents the editors thought worth examining, and what the ordinary reader would think the writers had in mind. These intentions are clarified by explicitating what we have called the `sense', and showing it in an example, which again appeals to native intuition. It deals predominantly with the cognitive meaning, rather than connotations arising for individuals or in peculiar situations. Connotations can include emotional reactions to a word and its referent by particular speakers and hearers: Druids, city folk, environmentalists, and lumberjacks can share an objective sense or reference for tree, differ about where bush and shrub are appropriate, but react in varied ways to each. Isolable bits of language cannot function, except within a system of systems. While Greek kudos is a singular, 1970 Webster III indicates it as English singular or plural, 1966 Random House leaves its number open, while Latin plural agenda is now commonly used with singular concord. But system as restriction on random or possible occurrences prepares both for predictable and unpredictable factors, and the connotation of humor, or ignorance of standard conventions. Some words only appear as negatives, and their use as positives becomes a joke (*We want leaders who are ept and kempt). Other negative expressions contrast oddly with positives (*That's the ten foot pole I use not to touch things with), and nouns used only in the plural form a subsystem of those found in both singular and plural (*They laughed when he showed up in only one pant). In English, differences in connotation can be signalled more appropriately by one or other of the systems of language. Vowel length, for instance, does not distinguish cognitive meanings in English, while Latin populus is `poplar' and po:pulus is `people'. The phonetic difference between an enormous debt and an eno::rmous debt, or It's hot and It's ho::t is debatably more `cognitive' in American than British English. [here, the colon (:) indicates a long vowel (o:, o::) vs. a short vowel (o)]. Cognitive situations differ connotationally: physicians deal with cases or patients more than buyers, customers, consumers, clients, or patrons; they speak of fees and stipends more comfortably than price tags. Using phrases instead of words can have the same effect: describing the same situation, you can be said to eat, gobble, fress, gnosh, sup, or dine; have a bite, get it down, partake of food, share a repast, or join them at the groaning board of their condescending munificence. 1.26 Conventions. So far, some personal vs. social, some subjective vs. collective (perhaps a bit different from `objective') aspects of communication have been touched upon. Keynes once described investing in the stock market
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as `anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be', and the conditions for communication are similar. While speakers may have crystal clarity about what they intend to communicate, their acquaintance with an inherited convention as diverse as English can differ as widely as the experience of each hearer and every overhearer. The latter have a fantastic range of guesses to make about connotations and a daunting inventory of cognitive data to master. Linguistics tries to set up frameworks within which objective conditions for communication can be discussed. Linguists have no privileged access to hidden facts about language but their methodology insists that many properties of language taken for granted be made explicit. While we identify our messages with our own intentions, others can only judge us as we judge them in terms of what we actually say. So no message can be unambiguous to the cynical listener. That speakers' motivation is private, often unconscious, or denied, are truisms: we share public conventions, not access to private minds. To just reinforce feelings, most any utterance will do. But when promising possibilities, dangerous change, unexpected shifts, and uncertain consequences for the future come from strangers, mastery of the public conventions and clues to individual peculiarities become more important. To the extent that an objective, exact, public, verifiable approach to the structure of a possible human language is even the goal of a discipline, it deserves serious attention. This lies behind the claim, or the goal, of Linguistics as a scientific study. To the extent that the universal quality of Science is not an illusion, the notion of Language Itself is not an insignificant abstraction. There are many properties of language that are shared by traditional and linguistic views. The West has long accepted that each language is arbitrary and conventional. Arbitrary opposes Natural, suggesting why a language is learned in social interaction rather than by biological endowment. Languages reflect different societies and their conventions, which accounts as well for the unique and similar aspects of languages. If they were not unique, there would be neither mysteries nor surprises about them, and if they were not similar in basic ways, they could be neither taught nor learned. Since human languages report human experience, no natural language exceeds human capacities, but while artificial languages are not absorbed `naturally', there is no guarantee an intelligent nonhuman using these objective means would perceive and report great differences between humans and animals, particularly intelligent domestic pets. At its simplest, different names for sun and food, weather and animals, show arbitrariness, while the observed fact of survival presupposes convention and the consequences of each: the objects named do not predict what sounds will be used to name them. From this seemingly random base, all languages emerge as systematic systems of systems. Arbitrariness entails unpredictable isolates; conventionality, the predictability of the systems consisting of arbitrary words, word-parts, or sounds. Human language adapts to needs for which physical contacts alone could not
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prepare us: its abbreviation of ponderous descriptions frees us for other tasks, as in Fetch! instead of get up, go there, get that, bring it back here, and give it to me!, or Vote! Its creativity allows clear expression of what exists only in imagination: poetic or scientific fiction, or a future we can seek to create or arm ourselves against. Creativity works out complementarities of inherited facts and principles of relation not identified with them, violates one aspect of convention and exploits the second. Within the two, prediction of what is possible, impossible, and why, can be determined. 1.27 The Plan of this Book. In the next few chapters, simple examples of an objective approach typical of Descriptive Linguistics will be sampled. With those tools, it is easy to criticize statements about language from older eras, which had inferior information, and different purposes in mind. Since that work is finished, we can see more easily what they were taking for granted. We can see also why some technical terms survived, others were changed, abandoned, or modified when purposes shifted, better information and methods became available, or new problems were appreciated. These samples are closed sets within which it is easier to guess how and why new insights emerged, and what was overlooked. Occasionally, they show that `new' ideas are rediscoveries. But since today's studies are in process, it is more difficult to understand, let alone evaluate them. Linguists abandon or redefine traditional terms, and produce such a welter of innovations, that it is not easy to find a neutral framework within which they can be compared. What unifies them can appear rather banal. But many linguistic insights are so obvious, so fundamental, that they are difficult to absorb, appreciate and express with fresh clarity. Some of the more basic ones will be isolated from accounts of scholars who earned their contemporaries' respect. Reading Bolinger, Dwight. 1975. Aspects of language. 2nd ed. New York. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Dinneen, Francis P. 1967. An introduction to general linguistics. New York. Holt, Rinehart and Winston; Reprint: Washington D.C. Georgetown University Press. Fromkin, Victoria and Robert Rodman. 1983. An Introduction to language. 3rd ed. New York. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Gleason, Henry A. 1961. An introduction to descriptive linguistics. New York. Holt, Rinehart, Winston. Hockett, Charles F. 1958. A course in modern linguistics. New York. Macmillan. Lyons, John. 1968. Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. . 1974. Linguistics. In: Encyclopedia Brittanica, 10.992-1031. Robins, R.H. 1971. General linguistics: An introductory survey. London. Longmans. Supplementary reading Aitchison, J. 1976. The articulate mammal: An introduction to psycholinguistics. London. Hutchinson.
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Clark, V., P. Eschholz and A. Rosa, eds. 1985. Language: Introductory readings. New York. St. Martin's Press. Conant, J.B. 1951. Science and common sense. New Haven. Yale University Press. Goshgarian, Gary, ed. 1983. Exploring language. 3rd ed. Boston, Little, Brown & Co. Langacker, R. 1972. Fundamentals of linguistic analysis. New York. Harcourt, Brace. Martinet, André. 1960. Éléments de linguistique générale. Paris. Colin. . 1964. Elements of general linguistics, tr. by E. Palmer. London. Faber & Faber. Northrop, F.S.C. 1959. The logic of the sciences and the humanities. New York. Meridian. Suppe, F. 1977. The structure of scientific theories. 2nd ed. Urbana. University of Illinois Press.
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2 Language as a System of Sounds 2.00 Assuming that languages should be approached as systems of systems, the composition, distribution, and function of sounds in language systems are among the most accessible data we have. No one pays much attention to normal breathing as the air passes from the lungs through the throat, mouth, and nose. But in speech, that air stream can be modified in many ways that we can learn to identify in our own experience. When you sigh or hum, the air stream is said to be voiced: a characteristic vibration is set up in the vocal cords. Linguistic analysis of language sounds takes such familiar facts as its point of departure and proceeds in three stages: describing discrete units of sound (composition), where they occur relative to each other (distribution), and what they do in the system of the language (function). Phonetic analysis is as old as writing, but its modern stamp derives not just from better technology and knowledge of physiology, but also from the kind of questions linguists ask about sounds. The invention of writing particularly alphabetic writing is neatly explained by the kind of insights discussed in Phonology. Unfortunately, we have only bits and pieces of paleographic history of how `writing' passed from hieroglyphics, through syllabaries, to the alphabet. One consequence of linguistic study is to make explicit knowledge that is sometimes only implicit in traditional work. Writing conventions for languages with a long literate history allow speech to be represented with varying degrees of directness, as in English compared to Spanish. Phonetics avoids the inherited particularities of writing by setting up objective norms for choosing a universal set of symbols which can represent any speech sound, whether it occurs in a particular language or not. There are three different `objects' which Phonetics could study objectively: the (1) composition, (2) distribution, or (3) function of sounds. The composition of sounds can be viewed (a) as what we hear, or (b) as disturbances in the air, or (c) in terms of the physical movements required to produce either of them as effects. The distribution of sounds defined in Auditory or Expressionistic phonetics (a), would involve how we hear differences in sounds following each other or occurring together. In Acoustic or Instrumental phonetics (b), the same sounds are studied as successive air disturbances. In Articulatory Phonetics (c), differences in sounds are attributed to modifications of the air stream by the vocal organs and channels through which it passes. Predictably, the notion of function will differ when we discuss just `sounds' (as opposed to `sounds in this language'). The general phonetician need not be concerned about (or can abstract from) whether a sound occurs in a language or not, or what it does if it occurs.
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From that point of view, the occurrence or function of some sound in a particular language is irrelevant. The features of sound which enable us to identify individual speakers for instance, are often present no matter what language is spoken, but they are not results of conventionality. 2.01 Phonetics vs. Phonology. One definition of Phonology is Functional Phonetics. While the first focus of Phonetics is what a sound is (its composition), in a phonology, it is precisely what a sound does, how it functions, that is relevant. Assuming that languages are systems of contrasts, it can be appreciated why one could say that phonetics studies what a sound is, while Phonology studies what a sound is not. Of course, no phonology can dispense with accurate phonetic definition, and contrasts in sounds can have more than one function. So the kind and number of questions the phonologist decides to investigate will distinguish one phonology from another. Typical phonological questions include whether the composition of a sound is predictable in terms of its distribution (i.e. is it pronounced this way because it precedes or follows another sound?); whether a difference in pronunciation makes a difference in meaning, or just functions as the signal of a dialect difference (e.g. does the speaker's duty rhyme with beauty or booty?), while articulatory phonetics would be content only to describe how any of these sounds are produced. Both Phonetics and Phonology use terms found in ordinary language as well as those that only occur technically. This mixed vocabulary is common in all sciences, but confusion is usually avoidable because the differences are predictable: technical terms in any discipline always involve some restricted sense or reference, compared to ordinary usage. For instance, terms like vowel or consonant must have a different sense and reference when defined through articulatory movements human beings make (in articulatory Phonetics), compared to how machines react to the disturbances in the air these articulatory movements produce (in Acoustic or Instrumental Phonetics), compared to how humans react to the same disturbances in the air (in Auditory or Impressionistic Phonetics). It is equally predictable that phonetic definitions of consonant and vowel in terms of composition will differ from phonological definition in terms of function, from a printer's definition in terms of letter shapes, or from what children learn when they shift from printing to cursive writing. 2.02 Phonetics and its Technical Terms. Articulatory Phonetics describes, classifies and transcribes speech sounds. To describe sounds phonetically requires some elementary physiological information. Professional phoneticians investigate all this in considerable detail, but the simple outline of factors involved in articulation suggested by a sketch of the vocal tract will serve our present purpose: classification of sounds by what each articulator contributes toward their phonetic composition (e.g. production and gross impressions on hearers).
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There are several widely used systems of phonetic transcription, but the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet are known and accessible worldwide. Printers depend on available typefonts (IPA or another phonetic one), on whether handwritten phonetic transcription can be reproduced, or whether only ordinary or special typewriter keys are used. Phonetic examples in this text will show some of the compromises required. This branch of phonetics proceeds as though articulators are substantially identical in all speakers, and variations in headshape (with the concomitant differences in jaw, teeth, internal cavities, etc.) are unimportant. Describing the speech of a single speaker must sometimes serve for a description of how an uncommon language is articulated, but even for common languages, no matter how many actual speakers are examined, they can only be fractional samples at the level of billions. Phonetic charts in language texts, for instance, omit mention of age and sex differences as irrelevant. These omissions (or abstractions) tacitly assume that contrasts are more important than positive characteristics found in the informants' speech. IPA and other systems provide diacritics to be used with basic symbols to indicate subsidiary factors, thus distinguishing between broad and narrow transcription, comparable to the opposition to be discussed between phonemes and allophones. It is assumed that if a phonetician repeats sounds to the satisfaction of a native speaker, his account of how he articulates them counts as an objective description of native production. Production and description can be correlated with various electronic and mechanical aids. Some obvious qualifications of that assumption reinforce the focus on patterns of difference rather than mimicry: even a skilled phonetician need not be a mimic. Voice qualities of individuals are irrelevant, so children acquiring English need only repeat, not mimic what is said, and they are successful if they sound American or Australian, rather than phonetic replicas of their peers or parents. `Satisfaction of the native speaker' is vague. Informants vary in ability to hear, in concepts of politeness, and estimates of whether correction is worth the trouble. Even professional training and practice cannot supply native talent, receptive or productive. Linguists assume languages are importantly patterns of contrasts, rather than inventories of positive facts, so they do not find these drawbacks serious. Palatography, X-ray, and other types of photography can supply evidence about disputed articulations; Sound Spectrography can specify objectively the ranges within which native speakers report that contrasts function. In Palatography, a thin cast is made of the upper portion of the mouth that can be inserted, then removed without interfering with normal articulation. When the cast is coated with powders a tongue contact removes, the consequences of articulations made in that area can be examined to corroborate subjective sensations. Still and moving X-rays were formerly used, but their cumulative effect is now appreciated as dangerous. Sound spectrograms can be produced from electronic recordings of speech to give a permanent and objective visual record of the duration, intensity, and type of disturbance in the
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air within adjustable sensitivity-ranges of the sound spectrograph. A paper attached to a revolving drum is burned by an electronic are firing at different energy levels dictated by filters for different frequencies in recordings of speech (e.g. from 50 cycles per second (cps.) in increments up to 5000 cps.: normal hearing is sensitive well into the 20,000 range). The result is a visual record of successive changes of air pressure produced by speech, the frequencies at which they occurred, how long they lasted and how intense they were at a given instant. The picture can also be made variably detailed by changing the speeds at which the recording or printing is done. 2.03 The Objectivity of Phonetic Information From these different sources is still variable. Machines do not `hear' as humans do: native speakers can `tune in' or `tune out', and so seem to amplify, or even supply missing physical signals, as is commonly the case in poor telephone connections. This explains why it is difficult to understand foreign languages on the telephone. It also takes training for ordinary speakers to discriminate sounds they have heard and have been producing differently all their lives, but perceive identically in their own and others' native pronunciation. Even training sometimes fails to equip them to produce or hear different sounds foreign to their native language. Machines simply respond uniformly to physical input. Most descriptive linguists start with basic articulatory phonetics. This involves objective training in the production and recognition of sounds, common and uncommon. In the British phonetic tradition of Daniel Jones, a standard set of sounds he called Cardinal Vowels is modelled and listened to intently; eventually the student is capable of locating on a standard diagram where a vocalic sound is articulated. Besides this personal training, Jones made a recording that is still available. By repetition, both receptive and productive, a high level of agreement can be attained between instructor, students, and instrumental confirmation. Other programs in phonetic training make extensive use of recordings of native, instructor, and student production. Most difficult to discriminate (even in electronic recording such as tapes or sound spectrographs) are fricatives the native ear distinguishes easily, some palatograms display clearly, and articulatory description deals with rather well. Since Phonetics seeks to make explicit what occurs in speech, the use of objective, technical terms instead of popular and subjective expressions, is important. Despite the desirability of uniformity, technical terminology is not fixed: one reason is discontinuity in the traditions and language of works on physiology. It is useful to learn one technical vocabulary and use it consistently, and to know the IPA symbols with which they correlate. Technical usages adopt, adapt, or replace ordinary language expressions. English uses both Germanic and Romance resources (as in tongue, lingual, lip, labial) in ordinary language, in addition to Greek roots for technical purposes. Where ordinary forms are lacking, technical terms are often formed from both Latin and Greek roots, as in velar, larynx, epiglottis.
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Technical restriction often derives from a single method, rather than several alternative ways of specifying a referent, or from substituting an absolute term for a relative one. Ordinary words about language sounds include loud/soft, high/low, long/short, hard/soft. Technical terms stand for mechanical or electronic measures of air disturbance in terms of amplitude or intensity instead of loud or soft. These objective measures are independent of subjective impression. The frequency of sound waves in the air, measured in cycles per second, is more precise than high and low; matching air perturbation with a clock ticking in milliseconds correlates exact numbers with external physical phenomena. Clearly, long and short report subjective impressions. Phonetics shows that some English vowels distinguished as long and short (a common description of the a in hat vs. the a in hate) do not differ only by the duration of the same articulation. Their phonetic composition changes one is a phonetically simple vowel, the other a diphthong, as will be explained. The initial sound of gun is sometimes called `hard' compared to the soft initial sound of gin. The technical labels stop and affricate are more objective. Some common popular and technical terms for articulatory classifications and their adjectival or combining forms include: Popular
Technical
Adjectival Combining form
Lips
Lips
labial
Teeth
Teeth
dental
Gumridge
Alveoli
alveolar
alveo-
Hard palate
Palate
palatal
palato-
Soft palate
Velum
velar
velo-
End of soft Palate
labio-
uvular Uvula
Back of the mouth/throat
pharyngeal pharyng(e)oPharynx
Adam's apple (outside)
laryng(e)al laryng(e)oLarynx
Voice box
Glottis
glottal
Throat
Esophagus
esophagal esophago-
Throat
windpipe/Trachea tracheal
tracheo-
Tongue
Tongue
lingual
lingua/o-
Tip
Tip, Apex
apical
apico-
Blade
Front
front
Front Center
glotto-
central
centro-
dorsal
dorso-
radical
radico-pharyngal
Center Back Dorsum Root Radix
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Articulatory Phonetics as discussed here is no substitute for accurate physiology, but is presented as a practical contrastive taxonomy or table of classifications. There are some factors phoneticians discuss which can be readily observed and lead to objective agreement. Refinements are to be expected in explicitly phonetic works. The air flow in the articulatory tract can be restricted or unrestricted in its passage; it can be restricted by interruption or constriction, and be voiced or voiceless, whether restricted or not. If the velum is raised, sound exits only through the mouth and is said to be oral; if the velum is lowered, it can pass through the nose and is called nasal: some sounds exit by both the nasal and oral passages. These either-or characterizations are considered part of the phonetic composition of language sounds, but each can be a matter of degree. For instance, friction must result from the passage of the air through the respiratory tract: but in normal breathing, it is relatively inaudible compared to the friction resulting in pronouncing an s. Shift from inhaling to exhaling is a manner of interruption, but less commonly used linguistically (a sound written tch tch in English is called implosive, and is less common than an explosive like the t in ten). When the vocal cords are at rest in speech as in normal breathing speech sounds are said to be voiceless; the degree of excitation in the vocal cords can vary. In addition to exiting through the nasal passage, the degree of resonance varies in nasal sounds, from the relative inaudibility of breathing normally through the nose, to sighs and voiced oralnasal vowels. In terms of phonetic composition, a consonant is a restriction of the air stream that involves interruption or audible friction. Phonetic vowels are uninterrupted and involve no audible friction: they can be defined in terms of composition as consisting of the free passage of the air through the vocal tract, with passage through the oral or nasal cavities, or both. Composition is understood here in terms of the effect on the air stream due to the place where, and manner in which, the air stream is divided into successive or simultaneous segments by an articulator. Common places of consonantal articulation are named for the (relatively) immovable area a (comparatively) movable articulator touches, approaches, or involves. The tongue is most moveable, and in different ways, so are the vocal cords, uvula, soft palate, lips, and cavity walls. The teeth, gum ridge, and hard palate are fixed, but the lower jaw and teeth can shift position. Illustrations from English places, or points, of articulation show how some common terms can be used: (bi)labials include p, b, m; labio-dental f, v,; t is sometimes dental, sometimes alveolar; the initials in thin and than are interdental; s and z are alveolar, the middle sounds of pressure and treasure, alveopalatal. Other places or manners of articulation are called retroflex, palatoalveolar, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, glottal. Common manners of consonant articulation (interruption, stricture) are found in these words: stop (in pip and bib), fricative (in fie and vie), affricate
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(in chunk and junk), nasal (in mom and nun), lateral (in lie), roll or flap (in some pronunciations of r). Besides, there is a very common factor of composition in some pairs cited here: the presence or absence of vibration in the vocal cords basing the qualification of the voiced initial consonants of bib, vie, junk, mom, nun, and lie), as opposed to the initial voiceless ones (in pip, fie, and chunk compared to the first three of the set mentioned). 2.04 Presuppositions in Phonetic Terminology. If Phonology is viewed as Functional phonetics, phonetics becomes an extra- or a prelinguistic study. It concentrates on composition, while Phonology focuses on the distribution and function of the units phonetics describes. Continuity between the two studies is helped by the use of common technical terms (e.g. consonant, vowel, diphthong, semivowel, syllable, etc.). Given their different perspectives, discontinuity is also to be expected between these complementary studies. Phonetics attempts to describe sounds objectively, but articulatory phonetics has an understandable linguistic bias: phonation of birds and animals would only be relevant for comparative purposes. A central concern is the provision of grounds for deciding what is basic, and what is modification in languages. General phonetics can describe frequently attested articulation-types. But even the Phonetics of a particular language does not, strictly speaking, intend to describe individual sounds: it accounts for what a `normal' speaker normally does. Description of sounds produced by an individual under individual circumstances is of interest only when the norm for the individual speaker's language is established. The mutuality of description and explanation, of universalist aims and data that are relevant for Science are illustrated here: only that data is of interest which exemplifies the universal; but universals can only be discovered in concrete data. Since part of the concrete data is always irrelevant, meticulously detailed phonetic descriptions of enormous numbers of speakers are needed to sort out the universal (or very common) factors from those which only characterize individuals or subgroups. 2.05 Modifications. Discussing modification of consonants and vowels in a language presupposes that the `basic' ones have been identified; that some factors are always present in their realization, while others may or may not be. Some of these factors were alluded to previously: adults have to be trained to hear sound differences they produce without some degree of attention. Among these differences for speakers of English are the following phonetic `modifications' of basic or unmodified consonants: comparing pat, spat, happy, appoint and stop, there is a notable difference in the sounds the p represents in (i) how tense the lips are, (ii) how much air is bottled up then suddenly emitted, and, (iii) what state the lips are in after pronouncing all the sounds represented p. Describing p as having this phonetic composition: voiceless, bilabial, stop, is valid for each instance of p. In that sense, that is its basic definition. Other factors that may or may not `modify' p are
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discussed for (i) in terms of a tense/lax articulation, for (ii) as ± aspirated, and for (iii) as ± released. Comparing kill, cull, and cool (especially when concentrating only the initial consonants energetically pronounced, without attention to the vowels) a basic definition of: voiceless, velar, stop, is posited for the initial consonant in each word. But the three differ in two other factors: (a) where the bulk of the tongue is during their articulation, and (b) the position of the lips for each. In kill, the lips are spread, neutral in cull but rounded and protruded for cool; the tongue contact is forward in the velar area for kill, compared to cull, and retracted in cool compared to both the others. Technical phonetic terms presuppose the basic / modified distinction: articulations can be fronted or palatalized, backed or velarized, and in the case of cool, labio-velarized (i.e. made with rounded lips, and with the tongue in a more back velar area compared to the median or neutral cull). When an articulation is said to be palatal or velar, the assumption is that this is its basic stable articulation; when palatalized or velarized, a modification of a neutral or differently defined articulation is involved. Other modifications are called pharyng(e)alization, glottalization, (de)nasalization, or (de)voicing, etc. Discussing modification of consonant articulations involves identification of interruptions or restrictions of the air stream. These can be observed in others, felt in our own speech, and in some cases, made public using a removable palate in palatography. But vocalic articulations neither interrupt nor restrict. They are harder to sense, difficult to see, and X-rays show a continuum or sliding scale of tongue height and position, to be correlated with often uncertain perceptions of vowels as `same' or `different'. 2.06 Vowel Modification. Phonetic vowels are unrestricted, uninterrupted, normally voiced and oral sounds. Their phonetic composition can be compared in terms of articulatory place, manner and modification. Place of articulation correlates with tongue position (high, mid, low: front, central, or back). Manner correlates with an oral aperture-continuum, arbitrarily divided (close, 1/2 close, 1/2 open, open) and with contours of the lips (neutral, spread, or rounded). Modification correlates with departures from the norm by the superimposition or subtraction of nasalization, devoicing, glottalization, pharyngealization, diphthongization, etc. Important to the description of both vowels and consonants are the factors of voicing and resonance; more appropriate to vowels are nasalization and acoustic prominence. (1) Voicing. The undifferentiated air stream is given periodicity when produced through vibrating vocal cords. Periodicity correlates with the rhythmic pulse we can feel and the wave-form such sounds produce in spectrograms. If the vocal cords are at rest, the exiting air stream produces non-periodic disturbance which may be modified by the resonances of the cavities through which it passes. Some of these non-periodic sounds are
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popularly (and technically) called noise. Speech is a mixture of voiced (or periodic) sounds, modified by consonantal interruptions and strictures. (2) Resonance. Sounds (periodic and non-periodic) are acoustically amplified and modified by the texture, combinations, and changeable shape of the cavities through which they pass or which they affect by sympathetic vibration. The distinctive sound of Stradivari's violins is a consequence of such factors, as are the sounds of individual voices. Some cavities are distinguishable structurally within the whole tract, by connective passages or closures, and impressionistically by resonances associated with them. The esophagal cavity involves both the stomach and the esophagus: its use in speech is uncommon except after a laryngectomy. The pulmonic cavity involves the lungs and the passage to them from the oral cavity. The tracheal cavity is commonly involved in normal speech. The pharyngeal cavity involves the pharynx, covered by the raised velum. The oral cavity is what lies within the cheeks (the buccal cavity), shaped by the position and configuration of tongue-parts. The nasal cavity is separated from the pharynx when the velum is raised, connected to it when the velum lowers. (3) Nasalization. Nasal phonetic composition (i.e. resonance characteristic of articulations exciting through, or exciting vibration in, the nasal cavity) is probably found in all languages. In some languages, normally oral vowels are automatically nasalized when coarticulated with nasal consonants (as in English man or no); in others it is nonautomatic and can occur in the absence of nasal consonants [e.g. French sceau vs. son, (`seal') and `sound')]. (4) Acoustic Prominence (Subjective Loudness vs. Objective Amplitude) Seems to be objectively determinate but sometimes subjectively enhanced. The difference is relevant to the phonetic and phonological determination of what constitutes a syllable. This topic is discussed at length in phonetic and phonological literature, but only one aspect of it is dealt with here. The question What is a syllable? may suggest that all languages have syllables and that the answer to the question ought to be a definition valid universally, or at least for a particular language. Since General phonetics is not about particular languages, that is where a language-neutral definition might be sought. But its applicability to particular languages can be dubious, without the kind of universal survey mentioned before. A phonetic answer would be in terms of composition (and perhaps distribution); a phonological approach would distinguish function from both. If the question What is a syllable? is thought to be answerable in general terms, what is of interest in particular languages is the number of syllables there are in a stretch of speech (particularly in a word). One answer may be that
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whatever it is that can be counted so easily is based either on objective or subjective evidence, or both. The term syllabic is phonetically neutral: count as many syllables as there are syllabics: define syllabic as the acoustically prominent factor: candidates then include the presence, absence, or degrees of voicing, stress, pitch, duration, or combinations of all of them. As a result, a phonetic syllabic, clearly definable in one language, may not be aptly applied to another. In some languages, units formed by a complex of stress and voicing are counted; in others, an ideal standard of length during articulations, or of delay between them, called a mora, is counted. (5) Diphthongs Can be approached phonetically and phonologically using the following notions. In articulatory terms, we can distinguish simultaneous from successive components. Change of articulatory position (mentioned in the confusion of 'long vowels' with diphthongs) introduces successive composition. We can identify simple vowels on articulatory and instrumental evidence, and establish vocalic sequences on the same bases. A diphthong can then be defined as `a sequence of vocalic sounds, only one of which is syllabic'. This is a phonetic definition whose applicability to a particular language would have to be investigated. The distinction between successive vowels and unitary sequences of vocalics (e.g. diphthongs, when there are two), is established in English not just on the basis of phonetic composition, but also by distribution and function. The definitions of terms like sonant, affricate, and semivowel clarify this. Phonetic vowels are normally voiced; consonants may or may not be. So any voiced sound is a candidate for the label vocalic sound. Some voiced sounds may never be syllabic. What is the difference? Whether they are continuant or not. Continuants include laterals, nasals, and fricatives, voiced or voiceless; but sonants are voiced continuants, which can be syllabic. By comparing the pronunciation (not spelling) of the words grasps and bungle, it is clear that the notion acoustic prominence is dubiously identified with voicing or continuance, since the final s in grasps is made more prominent because it follows the silence induced by the voiceless stop just before it. And even though there is a voiced stop before the l sound in bungle, most would agree it does not constitute a separate syllable; it is voiced, but it is not continuant, compared to the lateral l. (6) An Affricate Is definable phonetically as a stop, immediately followed by a fricative, interpreted as constituting a single functional consonant. A definition like this is not just in terms of phonetic composition. Phonetic composition alone cannot distinguish units from unitary sequences, because that difference is distributional and functional, as will be explained. Phonetic definitions of vowels exclude audible friction and define consonants through it. But sounds, defined in phonetics, can be considered `subordinate to' distributional and functional criteria in phonological perspective, and the
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phonetic grounding of basic vs. modified articulations becomes more problematic: a `too-high/close i, `too-low/close' a or a `too-back/close' u have the phonetic composition of consonantal fricatives; distribution and function determine their phonological classification. Semivowels (e.g. the initial and final sounds represented by y and w in yey and wow), are often defined as sounds vocalic in composition but consonantal in distribution. They could just as well be classified as semiconsonants. In terms of composition, they involve no stoppage, no restriction; they are normally voiced. In distribution, they never appear as syllabics; they contrast only with other consonants. Within a given language, the classificatory or taxonomic decision is made chiefly on the basis of distribution and function. 2.07 A central Focus of Phonology. Phonology concentrates on function, but relies on phonetics for the determination of the phonetic composition of a language's sounds. The actual sounds of any language are indefinitely many. The perceived sounds of any language are definitely limited. Phonology reduces indeterminacy by invoking function and distribution. Concrete distribution affects phonetic composition. Distribution can downgrade composition when function is in focus. Phonetics. General Phonetics provides language-neutral data about articulatory composition for Phonemics. A phonetic alphabet is a set of individual symbols for basic sounds. While it has a set of diacritics for types of modification, Phonetics does not directly consider how basic or modified sounds function, nor how distribution enters into modification of their composition in a particular language. Phonemics is a part of Phonology that studies the most economic way of writing language. It aims at symbols that need no diacritics for modifications, because speakers modify the basic composition automatically. Since a complete phonemic analysis is based on exhaustive phonetic study, its explicit justification for each symbol is equivalent to phonetic diacritical markings, as well as the reason why they are not needed. The result is an economic phonemic alphabet: each symbol stands for differences in `basic' sounds. In discussing sound in speech, three different objects of study have emerged: (1) air disturbances that (2) impress the hearer, because (3) articulations differentiate them. There is enormous range for individual variation in each: Phonetics describes them, Phonemics tries to explain and predict them. If the hearer's task were to attend to each concrete effect of every individual articulation, hearing would be a counterpart of mimicry, an exhausting activity for the untalented. But language communicates as a system of contrasts, and identical messages are intelligibly repeated with no talent for mimicry.
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Page 36 2.08 Phonemic Symbols for English Consonants. 2.08 Phonemic symbols for English consonants. Bilabial Stop
Labiodental
Interdental
pb
Fricat.
Alveolar
Alveopalatal
Palatal
Velar
td fv
qð
Glottal
kg
sz
h
Affric. Lateral
l r
Nasal
m
Semiv.
w
n y
2.09 Phonemic Symbols for English Vowels. 2.09 Phonemic symbols for English vowels. Plus glides: Simple vowels: Front
Central
Back
High
i
i
Mid
e
Low
æ
u y Palatal glide, o w Bilabial glide,
a H centering, length, or both.
As long as the same number of contrasts are made, the means is comparatively unimportant. That is why we can write, print, use Morse code, flags, blinking lights, and sign language to communicate the same message; why we understand the half-heard sounds distorted by cheap radios or public telephones, and follow the speech of talking birds. 2.10 Contrast. The same number of contrasts could be presented to the sense of touch, sight, or smell. Sensitivity to other factors peculiar to each medium differs, as does our experience in interpreting them. We appreciate a certain delicacy of touch, beauty of writing, or subtlety of smell, but are far more skilled in detecting a whole range of information in voices: we readily infer the personality character, mood, local origin, social intentions, level of education, degree of attention, state of health, and many other things about
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speakers reciting `the same thing'. This additional information has been called connotation as opposed to factors variously referred to as denotation, sense, reference, or cognitive meaning of otherwise identical messages. Handwriting experts find many of these connotations in their analysis, regardless of the cognitive meaning. Descriptions of successful methods of handwriting analysis show that they concentrate more on patterns of contrast than on individual, positive details of letter formation. Similarly, Phonology is more directly concerned with establishing negative or contrastive units, defined partially by what they are not, while Phonetics establishes positive units, defined predominantly by the additive list of articulatory components. Phonetics studies composition; Phonology takes that for granted, then investigates their distribution and function. 2.11 The Phoneme. The units phonetics defines are appropriately called phonetic units; what phonemics deals with is a phoneme. Units in each are the result of the methodology and assumptions appropriate to these complementary disciplines: an articulatory phonetic unit involves a positive additive list of the adjustments in the vocal tract that typically produce a typical disturbance in the air. In General Phonetics, this need not correspond to a sound in any particular language but the illustrations, of course, are given from many languages. The phonetics of a particular language may often list the adjustments only normal speakers of the standard language use, without necessarily detailing differences restricted to nonstandard speakers, peculiarities of umpires, actors, politicians, TV commercials, age, or sex, etc. Both phonetic and phonemic units are clearly abstract classifications. They are abstractions at the level of words and syllables which ordinary people manipulate easily, even if they use no technical terms, particularly in a language like English. 2.12 Distribution of Sound Units. English has so many one-syllable words that it is easy to list pairs differing in meaning through contrasts between consonants and vowels, as on the charts provided in Appendix 2.7. Longer words contrast with them by having more syllables, but combinations of consonants and vowels making up syllables are not notably increased. Differences in meaning, however, may be signalled by stress rather than by segmental contrasts (i.e. by consonants and vowels) in words of more than one syllable. So the simple abstraction of syllables and words from the flow of speech provides a readily grasped framework within which we can state the distribution of the units constituting an important part of The Sound System of a language. This correlates neatly with the linearity of language, and provides an orderly way of analyzing speech. Voicing makes speech audible. Transitions in voicing distinguish segments. Syllabics may be continuant voiced sounds, and syllables may contain more than syllabics. Using the symbol V for syllabics and C for nonsyllabics, a formula like (C)V suggests what must or may constitute a minimal
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syllable. The formula (C) (C) (C) V (C) (C) (C) (C) represents the simplest, most complex and all intermediate syllable-types found in English. The minimal pair charts (in Appendix 2.7) do not show all combinations, but gaps in the occurrence of individual sounds illustrate the arbitrary constraints on distribution characteristic of `system' as the notion has been used so far: a finite number of units, combining only in a finite number of ways. For instance, the maximum syllable-initial cluster of consonants found in English is (C)1, (C)2 (C)3 (as in words like split, squeeze, skew, and string). In this maximum cluster, C1 can only be filled by /s/; C2 can only be filled by one of the following: /p/, /t/, or /k/; and C3 can only be filled by /l/, /w/, /y/, or /r/. We do not find that other consonants occur in these environments (i.e. in these positions, defined relative to each other as syllable-initial). We So we can say that the permissible consonants are in parallel distribution with each other in those environments, and that they are in complementary distribution with all the other consonants which cannot appear there. We can say that only those units in parallel distribution offer a meaningful option to English speakers, and that introducing other units will result in nonsense (aside from difficulties in pronunciation). These are arbitrary facts about English, not natural consequences of what humans can pronounce: some languages allow only (C)V as a syllable, and others have syllables more complex than those of English. 2.13 Picturing Speech Units. This image of speech as a linear succession, where units are distributed systematically, is a powerful tool for the first steps in describing a language objectively. It can be applied to languages we know or do not know. It results in summaries like the formulae for English syllables which can be checked exhaustively for combinations not attested in early stages of gathering data. It can be applied not only to sound units, but to units of any size or complexity, with the modification appropriate to each. Of any unit, at any level, we can inquire: given this unit what does it demand what does it
exclude
and what does it tolerate
when it occurs?
An assumption common to both Phonetics and Phonology is that `distribution affects composition'. This takes for granted that there is a typical, basic, or normal sound (composition) which is to be modified; that there will be a stable, central set of elements appearing in different positions or combinations, sometimes with, sometimes unaccompanied by the modifying factor. But symbols for voiceless stops in isolation represent silence: in initial position, these symbols stand for a manner of releasing pressure building up in the air stream; in final position, how the flow has been cut off. In the concrete, silence is neither `pronounced', `heard', nor a disturbance in the air.
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As silence, no voiceless stop is distinguishable from another, despite the different articulatory positions assumed, e.g. English [k]: Keir kilt (a) [kir] [kIlt] leak Rick [lik] [rIk]
coal [koul]
Kate [keit]
cod [kad]
cow [kau]
lock [lak]
ache [eik]
dock [dak]
root [rut]
Voiced stops, on the other hand, can be pronounced as isolates. Since they involve vibration of the vocal cords and produce a disturbance in the air, they can be heard. With some difficulty, they might even be discriminated from one another because of cavity resonance in sympathetic vibration with high, mid, low, front, center, or back vowels, e.g.: gear (b) [gir]
gilt goal gate god good [gIlt] [goul] [geit] [gad] [gUd]
league rig [lig] [rIg]
log [lag]
ague [eig]
hog rude [hag] [rud]
Notice the difference between attempting to articulate a voiced vs. a voiceless stop in isolation: the position of the articulators for any voiceless stop can be maintained indefinitely. Since air is being forced from the lungs over the vibrating vocal cords in voiced stops, there is urgent need for release of that building column of pressure. Continuants can be pronounced as isolates only as long as breath holds out. Release is a type of transition. Normal speech involves transition from silence to sound, from one sound to another, or from sound to silence. Phonetic symbols stand for these events. As abstract states, symbols for voiceless stops stand for silence; in the dynamic concrete, for types of transition. They share classification in Phonetics on a par with voiced sounds aptly described as stable sets of articulatory positions: both are phonetic distributional abstractions from the flow of speech. That is, voiceless stops occur in the same positions as voiced ones; and form obvious pairs, as illustrated in (a) and (b), since the differences between them also function to distinguish one signal from another. So we can reword our initial assumption to say something like `distribution affects and in some cases constitutes composition'. Notice too, that there is a systematic difference between that assumption and its interpretation in Phonetics and Phonemics: Phonetics deals with positive, physical events such as changes in the air, articulation, and acoustic impression; Phonemics studies patterns of contrast (a negative aspect of positive composition). Phonetics is not concerned with how sound units function, but this is a basic focus of Phonology. Phonemics finds the contrast
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between sound and silence is frequently functional, while silence is not an object for phonetic study. 2.14 Allophones. General phonetics discusses basic articulations and their modifications. General phonetic articulations are basic and subject to modification, in the sense that sounds found in many languages answer to similar descriptions, but are produced with additional or fewer factors, or produced and heard in various ways within a language. Phonology tries to predict and explain the variation. Phonemics discusses the Phonetic abstraction of an articulation and modifications in terms of its own characteristic abstractions: a Phoneme and its allophonic realizations. Appealing to Distribution, some call allophones positional variants. The examples in (a) and (b) illustrate why this is so. [Note that the ordinary word-forms cited differ from the others by being set in italics. Linguistic convention includes a phoneme or a sequence of phonemes within slanted lines, phonetic units or sequences within square brackets. Citation of ordinary words varies. In the practice followed here, ordinary late, phonetic [leit], and phonemic /leyt/ will differ in this way.] Even small sets like (a) show that English is not as regular as other languages in correlating the phonetics of the sounds with its writing system: Keir kit cope Kate cod suit [kir] [kIt] [kop] [ket] [kad] [sut]
soot [sUt]
reek tick poke take dock Tooke [rik] [tIk] [pok] [tek] [dak] [tuk]
took [tUk]
Given the examples of contrast between [i] and [I], [u] and [U], English speakers should have no trouble in pronouncing these forms correctly from the phonetic transcription, nor others on the same model. Foreign speakers could be misled. The phonetic symbol [o] for cope and poke stands for a simple vowel, common in other languages; the English sound is a diphthong. If cope is pronounced [kop], it is dialectal in English, while [koup] is standard. Phonetic symbols have a unique interpretation: phonemic symbols are realized in a variety of ways. Their differences are produced automatically by the native, but only with the help of explicit rules by a foreign speaker. The use of phonetic symbols in phonemic transcription is not exactly phonetic. 2.15 Phonetic Symbols and Pronunciation. The phonetic symbol [k] is identical here in initial and final positions; but English speakers invariably aspirate an initial [k], never a final [k]. Romance speakers aspirate neither. Omission of initial aspiration in these words would be distinctly foreign in
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English (and likely mistaken by native speakers for a voiced stop in these examples). More accurate phonetically would be: Keir kit cope Kate cod suit [khir] [khIt] [khop] [khet] [khad] [sut] reek [rik]
tick poke take dock [thIk] [phok] [thek] [dak]
soot [sUt])
Tooke took [thuk] [thUk]
But: no phonetic vowel symbol in these examples is modified for length, while in English, vowels are perceived as longer before voiced sounds than voiceless ones. Also, (a) and (b) differ by ending in velar stops, the top set being voiceless, the bottom one, voiced. Just as no English speaker would be likely to omit aspiration of the voiceless velars ([k]) or modify the voiced velars ([g]) anywhere by adding aspiration, so too the length of vowels will vary because native habits introduce it automatically. The phonetic symbols used here do not make these differences explicit: leak [lik]
rick [rIk]
lock [lak]
ache [ek]
hock [hak]
root [rut]
league [lig]
rig [rIg]
log [lag]
ague [eig]
hog [hag]
rude [rud]
[ek] [e:g]
[hak] [ha:g]
[rut] [ru:d]
vs.
Phonetically closer might be: [lik] [li:g]
[rKk] [rI:g]
[lak] [la:g]
As noted, the vowels in ache and ague (like those in cope and poke) are represented again phonetically as simple vowels. Standard pronunciation makes them both diphthongs in English. Both cope and coat end in voiceless stops; code (vs. coat) in a voiced one, with the automatic difference of length. So problems of accurate phonetic representation start to mount, even for standard pronunciation: which is longer, the syllabic [e], the second part of the diphthong [i], or the diphthongal syllable [ei] they constitute? Whatever the phonetic facts are, representing ache as [eik] and ague as [e:ig] is unambiguous in phonetics, compared with [eik] vs. [ei:g]. Phonemicists study problems like this very carefully, but a single representation would suffice for each possibility, with its phonemic justification. But: the initials and finals in (a) and (b) are phonetically similar: every [k] is a voiceless velar stop, every [g] a voiced velar stop. Vowels differing in length are produced with the same articulations, etc. While the differences in the composition of every English k are automatic, habitual, and unconsciously produced, speakers consciously choose the
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differences when pronouncing Keir and gear, kilt and quilt, coal and goal, Kate and gate, cod and god. The differences involved in all the k sounds do not constitute different words, as does the difference between Keir and gear, etc. When the differences in [k] are produced, native speakers do not notice them, but they would easily remark their absence or non-English placement. We can conclude that the realizations of /k/ in (a) are positional variants or allophones, and that all the allophones can be economically represented by the a single phoneme symbol. It is economic because (as you may already have experienced) adding instructions about how to produce differences that are already automatic for the native can confuse rather than help. Using the limited typefaces available for this machine, if we employ a subscript [y] for a fronted articulation, subscript [w] for a backed or velar one; a superscript [y] for lip-spreading, with superscript [w] for rounding, and [:] for a standard of length (leaving the standards of length and position with which the assumed normal articulations contrast unmarked) some of the forms discussed so far might be transcribed phonetically as: kit cope Kate cod suit soot Keir [khyi:r] [khyIt] [khwoup] [khyeit] [kha:d] [swu:t] [swUt] When the forms listed in Appendix 2.2 are read aloud by American speakers from any of the ten major dialect areas of the country, there is agreement that vowels are shortest (the norm) before voiceless stops, then increase in length by stops before voiced stops, nasals and laterals, voiceless sibilants and voiced sibilants. The widespread conviction is also confirmed that the vowels like those in Keir and reek are perceived as long, compared to short ones like those in kit and tick, whether or not their differences are due to diphthongization (as suggested by the phonetic transcription) or different articulatory positions and some other factor (as suggested by the phonetic transcription). The speakers can be encouraged to hear the vowels and consonants as units rather than as transitions. Since voiced stops, nasals, laterals, and sibilants are all relatively continuant compared to the abrupt onset of initial voiceless stops, their brief interruption of the air stream in medial position, and momentary effect in final position, these impressions may not be confirmed by spectrographic evidence. Simple continuants are produced with articulatory positions comparable (technically: homorganically) with the vocalic qualities within a syllable. Since length is a measure of continuance, whether this length is to be attributed to the consonantal, vocalic, or syllabic unit may not be phonetically obvious, while comparatively uncontroversial for a particular language. It has also been mentioned that humans perceive sounds differently from machines. A simple, anecdotal, illustration: 1 met a friend who had been away for years. His name is Dick, but confusing him with another, I said, `Hi Ted!'. When I apologized to him later, he was surprised, since he heard me say `Hi Ken!'. His expectations supplied contrasts not actually produced, but
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which might be explained by comparing what the actual articulations were and what they were not: /t/ voiceless
alveolar
stop
aspirate released
/k/ voiceless
velar
stop
aspirate released
/e/ front
mid
vowel
/d/ voiced
alveolar
stop
unaspirate
unreleased
/n/ voiced
alveolar
nasal
unaspirate
unreleased
Assuming I knew his name, he seemed to have `tuned out' my deviations. There are many factors common to Ted and Ken, and even more numerous possible contrasts; sibilance, affrication, vowel heights or positions, less nasalization of the same vowel after a voiceless stop despite the nasal final than an /e/ in Ned would have been, etc. 2.16 Symbols. So a phonemic symbol can be regarded as not a purely phonetic symbol for the reasons mentioned: phonetic symbols have a unique articulatory, impressionistic, and acoustic interpretation; phonemes, variable interpretations. Phonemes represent first, differences in sound that can make a difference in meaning, rather than directions for concrete pronunciation. Since one of the criteria for representing different sounds by a single phonemic symbol is their phonetic similarity, the most approximate phonetic symbol is chosen to stand for phonemes, so that a phoneme symbol is derivatively or indirectly phonetic. A phonemic symbol economically represents the difference between sounds capable of making a difference in meaning. It is not necessarily a symbol which unambiguously stands far a fixed, stable articulation-complex, as does a phonetic symbol. From a phonetic point of view, a phoneme might be said to distinguish one whole set of allophones from another whole set of allophones. When one phoneme is compared to another (i.e. not to a phonetic unit), we can speak appropriately of its phonemic composition in a manner similar to, but predictably different from, the composition of a phonetic unit. The composition of each `phoneme in itself' has been described as a class, or a set, or a collection of all its phonetically relatable allophones. The basic norms involved are the place and manner of articulation, with its distinctive vs. nondistinctive phonetic modification (e.g. /t/ in English is distinctively a voiceless, apicoalveolar stop, realized positionally or nondistinctively as ± aspirate, ± released, ± tense, ± flapped between vowels, etc.). 2.17 Symbolic Representation. Phonetics vs. phonemic represent three levels on which phenomena have long been viewed in Western thought: (1) Individual
unique
graph
phone
Jane
(2) Typical
instance of class
allograph
allophone
Soph
(3) Abstract
a class concept
grapheme
phoneme
Hoya
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In line with these distinctions, we can say: That is Jane over there. She is a Sophomore. She is a Hoya but not *She is Sophomore. *She is Hoya. Our use of the article reflects those three distinctions. Corresponding to these levels, the formation of technical terms suggests continuity from the concrete or individual level, through the typical instance of a higher class, to the highest classification of interest. Individual ways of speaking have been called an idiolect, typical ways of talking a dialect. Since these terms are phonetically unlike Language, lect has been proposed as a new technical term showing commonality in form and meaning. We can label a concrete sound a phone, one of its functionally related realizations, an allophone, and the `highest' point of view we have developed about it so far, a phoneme. When an individual makes a concrete mark in writing, we could call that a graph, and the various shapes common to letters at the beginning, middle, and end of sequences, allographs, then whatever the compositional and differential factors that allow readers to distinguish one letter from another in various places, or in different hands, a grapheme. 2.18 Phone, Allophone, Phoneme. So a phoneme is a technical, abstract classification, and phoneme a technical term within a given phonological system. It is: not an individual phone like this g (a graph); not a typical realization like the allographs g vs G; but essentially the difference between the /g/ phoneme and all other phonemes in English; it involves phonetics, but cannot be pronounced (in the same sense that `English' cannot be spoken); it represents phonetically exclusive articulations: /g/ `is simultaneously' central, back / rounded / unrounded / spread, etc., just as English `is simultaneously' Cockney, Brooklynese, and fine Philadelphian. An allophone, therefore, is a technical term in phonemics for a sound in a particular distribution in a particular language. It makes precise the imprecise insight in phonetic discussion of basic articulations and their modification. An allophone is a variant realization of the contrast the phoneme represents. Allophonic realization is often predictable from its phonetic environment. `Environments' here have to do with where a `basic' sound is found, in what positions, and with what accompaniments it is found: positions are initial, medial, final, e.g. the three occurrences of /p/ in the word: p o p u p. accompaniment: e.g. with voiced or voiceless sounds; with palatal or alveolar or velar articulations; alone or in clusters; stressed or unstressed; near to, or not associated with, a nasal articulation, etc.
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Phones are classified as allophones of the same phoneme when: (1) they are phonetically similar: e.g. all the p-sounds in popup are pronounced as voiceless, bilabial stops; all the k-sounds of (A) are voiceless, velar stops; (2) their phonetic differences are in complementary distribution: in the word popup: Initial p-sound is aspirate-released, but not elsewhere; Medial p-sound is nonaspirate-released, not elsewhere; Final p-sound can be nonaspirate-nonreleased, not elsewhere; and, in general: Distribution correlates with modification of basic composition or realization and the consequent lack of differential contrast /choice; (2a) or in free variation: in play, pray, laterals clustered with voiceless stops or continuants, are sometimes voiced, sometimes voiceless: the final p-sounds in popup are sometimes released, sometimes not: and, in general: since /r/ and /l/ are not opposable in English by voiceless counterparts (like /t/ vs. /d/ etc.) they may vary freely, be modified, or resist modification in clusters with /s/ (+) /p/, /t/, or /k/ (voiceless), less commonly with /b/, /d/, or /g/ (voiced); (3a) there is pattern congruity among similar sets: e.g. among the voiceless stops: in pat Initial p-sound is aspirate
/p/ [ph]
in spat Cluster p-sound is unaspirate /p/ [p] in top Initial t-sound is aspirate
/t/ [th]
in stop Cluster t-sound is unaspirate /t/ [t] in cat Initial c-sound is aspirate
/k/ [kh]
in scat Cluster c-sound is unaspirate /k/ [k] and, in general: English voiceless stops are aspirate in initial position or before stress, but nonaspirate after initial sibilants, unstressed medial and final positions; (e.g. the noninitial voiceless stops in oppose, attain, recall are aspirated, and they occur before stressed vowels). 2.19 Representing Speech Sounds. The sort of information the two ways of representing speech sounds provide can be contrasted in their respective primary focus as displayed in Figures 2.1 and 2.2.
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Phonetic representation: Positive: what articulations are directly Specific, international, for nonnatives
Phonemic representation: Negative: what articulations are indirectly excluded Generic, for natives or standard speakers Independent of distribution
Broad or narrow composition depending on distribution Explicit: unmarked articulations excluded: interpreters must be trained even it they are natives
Implicit: unmarked articulations automatically interpreted by natives; nonnatives need rules
Figure 2.1 Phonetic representation vs. phonemic representation. American English simple vocalic IPA composition:
American English vowels as phonemic contrasts:
iu
iiuy
IU
eo+w
ei ou
æa
H
æo a Phonetic units subject to modifications Phonemically identical in dialects by individuals of height, except for distribution, not contrast: fronting, backing, rounding, spreading, length, etc. Phonetic representation of samples: Phonemic representation: [pit] [pul]
/piyt/ /puwl/
[pIt] [pul]
/pIt/ /pul/
[peit] [
][mout]
/peyt/ /
[
>]
/pet/ /
][
[pæt]
/pæt/
[pat]
/pat/
/ /mowt/ /
Figure 2.2 American English simple vocalic IPA composition vs. American English vowels as phonemic contrasts.
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Ordinary orthographic representation: Pete pool pit pull pate moat pet putt sought pat pot Note 1. The `barred i' /i/ is not illustrated since the sound does not occur in my speech. It is included phonemically to handle some attested dialects, on some historical evidence, and found attractive on the basis of `elegant' patterning. Where other authors invoke it, I find allophones of /i/ in my speech. Note 2. The phonemic transcription might suggest that the difference between /sit/ sit, /siyt/ seat, /pul/ pull, and /puwl/ pool consists of diphthongization, while the phonetic transcription ascribes it to different simple vowels. Phonemic analysis is not directly phonetic: e.g. /H/ clearly has no single or physically relatable phonetic interpretation. 2.20 Pattern Through Omissions. Phonemic concern for pattern economy among contrasts justifies abstraction from phonetic fact in /iy/ /i/ vs. /i/ /I/ and /uw/ /u/ vs. /u/ /U/ because most English dialects diphthongize all but the high front and high back vowels. A smaller inventory of phonemic symbols results, making dialects with the same phonemic differences just differently distributed neatly comparable. Lists of minimal pairs show phonemic, not phonetic contrasts (e.g. `Brooklynese' diphthongs may not be phonetically broken o + /y/, but + higher, + central schwa ( ), or -high, +central [i]). The phonetic basis of phonemic symbols is best seen as a memory aid, a phonetic suggestion, an indication of the phonetic areas within and among which contrasts take place: the phoneme written with a digraph (æ) is particularly variable, as in regional American pronunciations of hand. 2.21 Phonemic Analysis. So far, we have suggested that phonemic analysis identifies the consonantal and vocalic contrasts in a language, and that its notation may only be suggestive of an approximate phonetic value. The method by which this is done deliberately is analogous to that of controlled experiment in the physical sciences, and so is relevant to our general concern about the status of Linguistics as a Science. The differences (say, between a chemical test and even a controlled interview about language) should be obvious. English minimal pair lists are easy for a native speaker to prepare. In studying exotic languages there are obstacles: lack of a common language, or differences in how one is shared, plague both informant and investigator; there can be unsuspected tabus, differences or mismatches in grasping what is going on, attention span, memory, etc. Where English has many short words
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illustrating sound contrasts, other languages do not. A list of 200, and another of 400 words prepared by anthropologist-linguist Morris Swadesh are commonly used for absolute beginnings and comparability. Notice that most minimal pairs are words. The lexical system is only one of the System of Systems presented as the object Linguistics studies. Elicitation methods, how data are gathered, and the way conclusions are presented, whether dealing with English as one's native language or another language encountered for the first time, are different. Describing the phonology of a language through minimal pair evidence for the sake of clarity is a most useful technique. Contrasts absent or neutralized in ordinary language use do not arise when that system is isolated. Productive derivational or functional relations in sets of words like photograph, photography, photographic, photographer, or knife (sing.), knives (pl.), come to light in larger contexts. In dealing with our own language, all kinds of interdependent systems can be invoked; when working on a wholly unknown language, both in the investigatory and expository stages, a useful progression has been through phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and situational systems. In phonemics, the sequence suggests first, isolating the segmental phonemes like consonant and vowels, then isolating the suprasegmentals like stress, pitch, length, and other intonation contours. What any informant says can now be recorded with precision, but the linguist working on a language without a literate tradition must be its first phonetic expert. Who could criticize such a work? A phonemic chart of English contrasts, without the meticulous phonetic data about many dialects on which it should be based, is open to a good deal of disagreement. This is especially the case if phonetic realism, instead of contrastive ranges with approximate phonetic centers, is demanded of the symbols used. The analysis used here is particularly useful for comparing dialects with comparable sets of simple vowel contrasts and glides, / for know); or for showing differences in the but different vocalic onsets in diphthongs (e.g. British /new/ vs. American / distribution of /kast/ vs. American /kæst/ for cast). The phonetic indeterminacy of /H/ is a phonemic advantage, if contrasts rather than articulations are in focus (e.g. comparing dialects where /r/ occurs with dialects employing [r] as an intervocalic allophone of /H/ in pairs like barn and bar (of soap)). Scots requires an extra consonantal phoneme, since it distinguishes lock from loch: /lak/ vs. /lax/; standard British has more simple vowel contrasts than American standard English (e.g. a front, rounded vowel in furry vs. ferry). 2.22 Segmental Phonemes of English. The segmental phonemes of English are displayed in Figure 2.3.
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Page 49 Consonantal contrasts: Bilabial Stop
Labiodental
Interdental
pb
Fricat.
AlveoAlveolarpalatal
PalatalVelarGl.
td fv
qð
kg h
sz
Affric. Lateral
l
Nasal m
n
Semiv.w
r
y
Vocalic contrasts: Simple vowels: Plus glides: Front Central
Back w Labiovelar glide
High i i Mid
u
e
y Palatal glide o
Low
H Centering glide, length, or both
æ a
Figure 2.3 The segmental phonemes of English. Some notational considerations: phonetic analysis usefully reduces the number of phonetic symbols, but in the process, accepts basic phonetic classifications. Since simple consonants and vowels are definable in terms of simultaneous components, establishing sequences of successive components as units on a par with simple ones is peculiar to a language: phonetic and phonological definitions may differ. So on what norms would one decide that affricates (cf. examples in Appendix 2.4) and diphthongs are comparable to simple articulations? Are phonetic semivowels more appropriate to the consonantal or vocalic system? Why classify English r as a palatal lateral rather than as a semivowel? Since English has many r-less dialects (often with `intrusive r' in 'the idear of it'), to what extent do /r/ and /H/ overlap, and on what phonetic data can we decide whether they are or are not allophones of the same phoneme? The phoneme /h/ is identified here as a velar fricative, with no voiced-voiceless opposition indicated. As a continuant, it can be pronounced in isolation, but how distinguish it from heavy breathing? Does its unusual distribution in Cockney words compared to standard pronunciations give any clues? 2.23 Motivated and Unmotivated Contrasts. One way of explaining how a language is arbitrary is to show the lack of physical motivation in the things languages discuss accounting for the composition or modification of the sounds used to talk about them. Call this a lack of extralinguistic motivation to provide a framework for discussing the intralinguistic motivation for
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allophones. Allophonic differences are language-particular or intralinguistic; extralinguistic motivation correlates with phonemic contrast. Intralinguistic motivation determines how you speak a particular language; extralinguistic motivation operates because of what you are talking about in any language. For instance, English habits of aspiration are accounted for as an instance of intralinguistic motivation, since there is nothing extralinguistic which requires them. Standard English speakers round their lips with initial r whether a front, central, or back vowel follows, while with other consonants, the lips round with back vowels, spread with front ones, and are neutral with central vowels. To discuss the facts in these terms has been viewed as a pseudoquestion or metaphoric answer to a Why?-question inappropriate to the descriptive stage of a discipline. But intralinguistic motivation can be invoked for any allophonic feature, as distinguishing phonemes and allophones, whether this is considered description or explanation. In a similar vein, phonemic distinctions are described as functional, and inquiries about functions are commonly questions for other disciplines. We can assume that is `why' people say cat, gat, gnat or mat when they have decided what the modern home really needs. But phonemic contrasts can be distinguished as showing actual as well as obligatory, and optional, therefore only potential, distributions. This is often discussed as neutralization of contrasts. For instance, American English usually neutralizes the voiced/voiceless contrast (elsewhere so important to any English dialect) in pairs like better/bedder, butter/budder, latter/ladder. If confusion arises, the neutralized distinction is readily produced. Some dialects distinguish expressions that are homophonous in others for different reasons: lexically in Are you seriously concerned about the condition of whales/Wales?, or phonetically in He stuck me with a pen/pin. Spelling gets around some ambiguities, but some writing conventions are less well known: They took him to the Poor House / Poor house / poor house / poorhouse; They took him to the greenhouse / green house / Green house. Some never distinguish them, some never hear them, because contexts are clear. Some can be kept apart if need arises, by suprasegmental phonemes. 2.24 Suprasegmentals. Phonetic and phonemic analyses extract recurrent units of objective factors from the continuous flow of speech that correspond to subjective impressions of difference. Differences involving contrasts of cognitive meaning must be noted fairly directly, those connected with affective meaning less so. But only static segments, not their live relations, have been discussed, while in speech, the same sequence of segments can contrast in ways comparable to the notes in music under different dynamics. Stress is a familiar, but complex, phenomenon of this kind: this dynamic factor concerns approximately (a) the degree of force involved in the production of a sound and (b) the degree of loudness (amplitude) perceived in it. In English, stress correlates with (1) duration or strength, (2) loudness or
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amplitude, and (3) pitch or frequency. Any desired number of objective degrees can be measured in the continuum of speech. That there are two phonemic degrees no one seems to doubt; that there are three degrees seems easy to establish, but that there are four phonetic degrees is controversial. Primary Stress. Primary stress (/'/) is heard and pronounced on all monosyllabics in isolation, as in the reading of a list, firm answers, or clear questions. Weak stress (unmarked) (or the absence of at least primary) is that said to be heard and pronounced on most disyllabics under the same circumstances mentioned for primary stress. Tertiary stress (/'/) is that said to be heard and pronounced on many trisyllabics in the same contexts. Secondary stress (/^/) is that said to be heard or pronounced by many in connected speech. Given the origin of most phonemic distinctions from minimal pairs in the lexical system, it is invoked to disambiguate compound words from phrases with similar segmental sequences and is postulated as cooccurring in connection with plus juncture (/+/) e.g. That's what I call a real lighthouse keeper vs. That's what I call a real light housekeeper 2.25 Juncture. Plus juncture (/+/) is phonetically a phenomenon of `open' vs. `close' transition which involves a sequence of sounds, with a phonemic contrast realized in the modification of the proceeding or the succeeding sounds, by degrees of (1) voicing, (2) aspiration, (3) duration, (4) type of onset (in succeeding) or (5) release (in preceding sounds). The examples in Appendix 2.3 should be read aloud to see what contrasts speakers actually make or hear, since the distinctions are often neither produced nor heard in concrete situations. Contextualized utterances show a difference between the actual and potential phonemic status of segments vs. suprasegmentals. Sounds frequently used to make important distinctions are said to have a heavy functional load, those used infrequently, little functional load. As the lists of minimal pairs make clear, some distinctions are important to all, some only to a few intralinguistic environments. Suprasegmentals differ in functional load, both as to the variety of distinctions they make and the frequency with which they occur in different environments. Stress has a more limited function than pitch or Terminal Contour, and Terminal Contours than Plus Juncture. For example, contrasts of TCs for statement, question, command, or exclamation vary with the use of explicit words of command, question, or exclamation, whereas some pairs of sequences can be differentiated in isolation as verbs or nouns by Stress: CONvict vs. conVICT PERmit vs. perMIT
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But these pairs involve different form-classes which are rarely in parallel distribution, except in metalinguistic contexts (that is, where language is used to talk about language rather than nonlinguistic matters), as in: Did you say PERmit or perMIT ? Stress makes CONvict a noun, conVICT a verb. Regional stresses in general use serve only to call attention to local pronunciations without introducing grammatical ambiguity: He won't perMIT you to have a perMIT. He won't perMIT you to have a PERmit. The following are a minimal lexical pair distinguished by two phonetic degrees of stress (weak/none vs. primary), but examples are rare: There is no need to inCENSE the congregation There is no need to INcense the congregation More commonly, a combination of secondary stress and plus juncture can be used to distinguish words from phrases: His ill-gotten gain was only in CENTS. His ill-gotten gain was only INcense. The Sheik's delight was in TENTS. The Sheik's delight was inTENSE. The distinction in stress is systematically predictable for: The CONtent of this letter will not conTENT, but conVICT the CONvict. I'll perMIT you to use INcense, but it's no PERmit to inCENSE them. Pairs like the following are potentially disambiguated through Plus Juncture /+/ and its associated secondary stress: We searched the CONtents carefully. We searched the KAHN tents carefully. Turn left at the `Wheatsheaf Inn'. Turn left at the `Wee Chief Inn'. I'll take those for openers. I'll take those four openers.
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Just give me an ice cube. Just give me a nice cube. All I want is a cupful. All I want is a cup full. Look at that man! Look at that, man! Go, get him surgeons! Go get him, surgeons! 2.26 A Hierarchy of Presuppositions. The contrast sketched between a phonetic and phonological point of view suggests a step by step, hierarchic approach to language appropriate for the orderly description or acquisition of an unknown language rather than the way one could easily progress through an account of one's native tongue. It implies a hierarchy of presuppositions: that is, `what is taken for granted', `what makes sense of', or `what can be said to explain, bring order into' information as it is incompletely acquired. They mark out what is relevant, point to why anyone would be interested in first mastering the complexities of data, what makes the early steps valuable. Some could be tentatively proposed as: Phonetics presupposes Phonology Phonemes
Morphemes
Morphemes
Words
Constructions
Sentences
Sentences
Discourse
Discourse
Human communication
Human communication Symbolic organization Symbolic organization
Rationality
Rationality ... 2.27 Phonemic Pitch Is posited at four levels: Normal:
/2/ a contrastive level, phonetically indeterminate
Low:
/1/ a lower level compared to `normal'
High:
/3/ a higher level compared to normal and low
Extra-High:
/4/ a higher level compared to high
The actual or `normal' phonetic range varies with individual voices, as does the phonetic distance between what is posited as higher or lower than that. Phonetic contrasts among the possible ways of coming to the end of an utterance in American English are called terminal contours which fall, rise,
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or remain level, symbolized phonemically with arrows, as: / /, / /, / /. While pitches are quasi-fixed or unchanging points of contrast, terminal contours are groups or sequences of pitch change, associated commonly with a few frequent types of utterance, but not identical with them. Falling statement:
2That's really quite 3nice1.
231
Rising questions:
2That is really quite3 nice3 ?
233
Things are not this simple since Question-words neutralize the need for a singular intonational signal, as in: Falling questions:
3What's 2really quite nice2.
322
2Who is your 3friend1 ?
231
This suggests that questions and statements can have another factor in common: Level continuation:
2That's 3 really quite nice3...
233
Level question:
2Is that 3really quite nice3?
233
These three are proposed as phonemic rather than phonetic signals: they are all contrasts and ranges of contrast which allow for considerable phonetic variation. This can be better appreciated by considering various definitions of `phoneme' quoted in Appendix 2.1; they approach the `same' material phenomena from quite different points of view: do any of the definitions contradict each other? do they supplement each other? how would one account for the lack of a uniform basis? Since contrasts rather than positive facts are involved, lists of minimal pairs are provided in Appendix 2,7 which are meant to exemplify the differences discussed. Some are easily identified, but others may not be exemplified when read aloud by speakers from the same dialect area. 2.28 Science and Phonemic Theory. Phonetics and phonology ask different kinds of questions about the same object (speech), much as traditional grammarians, logicians, poets, and rhetoricians have different concerns with the same material. There are problems about written languages that do not concern phonetics, and a stage where writing is quite irrelevant to phonemics, but the existence of an orthography poses puzzles for phonemics irrelevant to phonetics. To that extent, phonetics and phonology do not study the same object, just as the very same person may be said to be a different object as a lawyer's client, a grocery consumer, or a shop's customer. It is in this sense that a particular methodology, or point of view, can define its object. Although people resent being treated as objects, as `mere' consumers or clients, instead of individuals, few of those who must deal with large numbers
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of people have the time to get to know many individually. In medicine, we are often actually better served as `cases'. Selection of an approach or methodology defines as well as excludes objects to which it is applicable, determines what can count as evidence, what a legitimate question and answer is within that approach. Medicine is fortunately about abstract Man directly, and for lucky me indirectly, if my doctor is as scientific as he is human. All sciences are like that. Their questions may be trivial or just wrong-headed from some point of view, but they should accomplish what they set out to do. How about phonemics? What questions does it answer, what linguistic systems does it explicate or fail to integrate? More pertinently, it is worth asking whether it constitutes a theory at all or whether it is nothing more than a more sophisticated way of classifying sounds, compared to General phonetics. It was suggested that phonetics, in its frequent disregard for objective composition, implicitly relies on the contrastive distributional/functional viewpoint of phonology. It could be argued that phonology similarly presupposes the morphological distinction of syllabic vs. morphemic sequences; that morphology presupposes the syntactic distinction of word vs. phrase, phrase vs. clause, clause vs. sentence, etc., and that Syntax must presuppose Semantics, which must presuppose Pragmatics, which etc., in a continuously ascending fashion to yet other perspectives about language. Phonetics can be prelinguistic description for phonology's functional purposes just as phonology is prelinguistic compared to Grammar, and Grammar to the various uses made of it. Put this way, the question arises whether any part of Linguistics is autonomous, and whether Linguistics itself can sensibly aim at being or becoming an autonomous science. 2.29 Description and Explanation. The question involves the relation of Description to Explanation, central to deciding what is and is not a Science as sketched earlier. No dogmatic answer is helpful, but some reflection on the relationships seems appropriate. It can be assumed that any description is an implied comparison, and that comparisons imply a norm. E.g., by describing all qualities of all horses, a correlation might appear between some qualities and horses that win races. If locating race winners were the purpose, describing cart horses would be irrelevant. The sounds squeaky hinges make are irrelevant in linguistic phonetics, as are many phonetic facts in phonology. From such considerations, it seems that phonemics might be judged an elegant form of description from one theoretical point of vantage, and inept from a different one. For instance, phonemics establishes lexical contrasts through English stress (e.g. Testimony of this CONvict will surely conVICT the others.). But a prime criterion in phonology is the non-contrast of items in complementary distribution. In English, nominals and verbals are most commonly in complementary distribution: sequences otherwise segmentally the same (e.g. IMport, imPORT) will differ predictably in nominal and verbal stress. If
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phonology is to be lexically autonomous, ignoring syntactic distribution is odd if phonology and grammar are expected to complement each other. So different conclusions can be anticipated when judging phonemics in isolation or as a subpart of a general linguistic theory. As in Ptolemaic Astronomy, correct predictions can be made in phonemics on the basis of what we might now view as unsatisfactory premises. If we accept what a descriptive approach takes for granted as its theory, and the way it identifies data as relevant as its model, and method as the procedures theory dictates for confirming the model's aptness, we have one measure of its scientific status. If the theory were that speakers primarily produce and hearers attend to words, then a model of language as a collection of words would be appropriate, and dictate the minimal pair test as a way to discover words. Some linguists avoided distinctions like that as subjective: the only objective criterion was a difference in meaning, not a subjective decision about kinds of meaning. Whether such a stance was defensible or unintelligible, some assumed that Linguistic Methodology forbade mixing levels, especially by appealing to the higher levels just discussed. This seems to leave interpreters free to align Phonemic technique with or against overall linguistic or other kinds of theories, since the technique is divorced from other views about language as determinants. 2.30 Science and Constructs. The phoneme is a scientific construct, more abstract than a phonetic unit, since it is less directly relatable to concrete experience. That it is abstract is hardly an objection to it since it is just the result of active thinking rather than passive experiencing. It has claims to respect: it reduces concrete variety to underlying unity; phones are infinite in number and variety because they are concrete and individual; allophones are numerous and complex, but considerably simpler than phones; phonemes are even more readily countable, often few in number and simple in contrasts. Sciences deal with units at various degrees of abstraction, from elements only observable momentarily under laboratory conditions, to mathematical relations verifiable in the concrete only on a statistical basis. Phonemes are proposed as the contrasts by which messages can be distinguished. How individuals actually distinguish them is another question. The answers may or may not be coherent with this fundamental assumption of phonemics. In popular understanding, sciences discover rather than impose system. Systematic organization allows confident identification of the factors involved, which are coordinate, subordinate or dominant, how they cohere, how their behavior can be predicted, controlled or inhibited. Events first considered random become intelligible, or explicable, to the extent that they can be seen to cohere with other systems. When such information is explicit, it becomes part of our inherited knowledge. Even if language acquisition were no longer viewed as mysterious, we are a long way from understanding it. Yet some insights of phonemics cohere
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with discoveries in other, `higher' systems involved in language. The properties of the phonemic system proposed for English is a sample. This analysis is relevant to the size of part of the learning task. It enumerates what English speakers have to learn: 22 consonantal, 2 semivocalic, 9 simple vocalic, 3 glide, 4 contrastive pitches and stresses, 3 contrastive contours and a contrastive transition. This is a set of 40-odd contrasts: the eye is capable of millions of potential discriminations, and hearing may be able to make as many, even though most of us get along with very few indeed. These contrasts constitute an economic system capable of representing the differences among an infinity of messages. Since it is contrastive rather than positive, it dispenses with the rare gifts for mimicry or memory. Because it presents an arbitrary system, it provides clarity despite the complexities of individual pronunciations. Because it presents a conventional system, its retention is reinforced by other speakers. Because it presents grounds for discovering intralinguistic motivation of arbitrary conventions, it suggests that redundancy permits the comparative inattention involved in our hearing. Much of the theory is not peculiar to Phonemics or Linguistics. That assumes communication is facilitated and delimited by a small set of contrastive patterns. It suggests that systems at higher levels may share, yet redefine properties of lower systems. If communication shares experience, only the common area ought to be communicable because of positive conventions. A foundation for understanding the familiar phenomenon of individuals mastering others' private experience which ought to be uncommunicable is also laid. Others discuss it in terms of metaphor, analogy, projection, imagination, etc., where content rather than empathy is concerned. It also suggests (since even contrasts have to hold between things with some positive identity) why communication can never be entire, nor can it be about what is wholly peculiar to an individual, nor where no experiential or patterned overlap is possible. Some experiences are as incommunicable as frequencies beyond our threshold of hearing are imperceptible. 2.31 Phonemics or Phonology. Phonemics or phonology does not directly concern the content of what is to be learned, only the signals involved in its communication. Other factors of the model of language with which phonemics developed will be discussed later. Roughly, it assumes that symbolization is involved, and that the function of sounds is to discriminate symbols. Speech symbols are peculiar in that arbitrary ones only stand for things, but in no way inform us about them through their phonetic constitution. To the extent that a model is involved, sounds are viewed as the meaningless constituents of meaningful symbols. The arbitrary nature of symbols guarantees they are precisely not what they symbolize; conventionality results from pragmatic agreement that similar patterns of contrast are involved. The method of phonemic analysis is appropriate to that conception. In a universe of things, words naming things are assumed to be universal
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phenomena, isolable with a bit of ingenuity, whatever the structure of the language to be investigated. The only useful words are social institutions, not private possessions. The method allows us to ignore the difference between words that carry cognitive meaning and those likely to have only grammatical function or affective content. Grammatical words are notoriously difficult to handle in the languages that have them. Affective reaction is less general in a society than cognitive agreement. From the phonological point of view, however, any difference in meaning is sufficient to establish the distinctive function of a contrast. Scientific studies are to be concerned with the universal. The properties phonemics assumes about language may not be appropriate for developing neat writing systems for all languages, and that fact will emerge as more languages are dealt with. Doubt was expressed, for instance, about the applicability of phonemic analysis to Chinese (cf. Chao 1934). But confusions about standard languages, dialects, systems in change, and systems as isolates rather than systems integrated with other systems could suggest what has been called the `fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness': an instance would be requiring phonemic analysis to portray realistic phonetic composition rather than functional contrast. Appendices 2.1 Some definitions of phoneme 2.2 Some English vowel sounds 2.3 Stress contrasts in English 2.4 Stop+Fricative vs. affricate 2.5 British, Scots, and American lexical differences 2.6 The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) 2.7 Minimal pairs in English Appendix 2.1 Some Definitions of Phoneme. (1) A minimum same of vocal features is a phoneme or distinctive sound; a minimum unit of distinctive sound-feature. (Bloomfield 1926:153-64) (2) One of an exhaustive list of classes of sounds in a language, such that every word in the language can be given as an ordered series of one or more of these classes and such that two different words which are not considered as having the same pronunciation differ in the order or in the constituency of the classes which make up the word. (Chao 1957 [In: Joos 1957:39]) (3) A mental reality the intention of the speaker or the impression of the hearer or both. (de Courtenay) (4) An element which stands in contrast with all other elements in the phonological system of the language (a phoneme in a given language is defined only in terms of its differences from the other phonemes of the same language). (Hockett 1958:26) (5) A family of sounds in a given language which are related in character and are such that no one of them ever occurs in the same surroundings as any other in words. (Jones 1950:10) (6) A speech sound represented by a number of unimportant varieties but interpreted as a unit in a given language at a given time. (Graff 1932 [In: Joos 1957:59]) (7) A family of sounds which from an objective point of view may be regarded as distinct, but which are felt naturally by the speakers of a certain language as identical, because they are not used to keep words apart. (Jespersen [In: Joos 1957:59])
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Page 59 (8) A group of sounds consisting of an important sound of the language together with others which take its place in particular sound groups. (Palmer [In: Joos 1957:64]) (9) One of the significant units of sounds arrived at for a particular language by the analytical procedures used by the linguist; a contrastive sound unit (every segment is a separate phoneme) unless it is a submember of some more inclusive phonemic unit; the procedures eliminate as distinct units any segments which occur only as slurs into their environment, or as noncontrastive fluctuations, or as part of some phonetically complex phoneme. (Pike 1956:245) (10) A functionally significant unit in the rigidly defined pattern or configuration of sounds in a particular language and peculiar to it. (Sapir 1933:246-65) (11) An acoustically minimal and homogeneous segment of speech. (Saussure ) (12) A smallest potential unit of difference between similar words recognizable as different to the native, definable in terms of a norm and deviations from the norm. (Swadesh ) (13) A defined abstractional fiction. (Twaddell [In: Joos 1957:55]) (14) A class of noncontrastive and phonetically similar phones. (Bloch 1942: ) Appendix 2.2 Some English Vowel Sounds. (1)
bit
bid
bin
hiss
his
(2)
bet
bed
Ben
Bess
fez
(3)
cat
cad
can
Cass
has
(4)
put
Pud
(5)
butt
bud
bun
bus
buzz
(6)
cot
cod
Don
doss
Oz
puss
cease
(7) seat seed
seen
(8) boot booed (9) coat
sees see
boon
loose
code
dose
lose
do
doze
dough
cone (10) bout
house loud
rouse
down
now
(11) late
lace lade
lays
lane
lay
(12) light
lice lied
lies
line
lie
(13) Hoyt
choice Lloyd
joys
boy
loin Hoyle
soil oil
(14)
coat
code road
home
whole
(15)
sorry
gloss
log
dog
(a) spirit (b) dear (c) dearie (d) bitter
merry
marry
dare fur
far
Mary
furry
boor hoarse
furry starry boorish better
batter
butter
beater
hog Murray
sorry
horse
wore
jury pier
pouring warring purring booter
bought'er
story
(e) bidder bedder badder budder beader brooder broader (f) Can l have a can for merry Mary, who'll marry furry Harry Murray if the dog and the hog don't get lost in the fog and spoil the show? (g) Down on the land is our brown cow who is hoarse and our horse who is cowed. I want to warn the warring nations that they'll be sorry.
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Appendix 2.3 Stress Contrasts in English. The Last Column Contains Expressions Some Speakers Claim to Pronounce and Heard Differently from their Near-Matches in the Third. PRIMARYPRIMARY WEAK
PRIMARY WITH TERTIARY PRIMARY WITH SECONDARY WITH + JUNCTURE
wait
waiter
waiting room waiting groom
hot
hotter
hotbox hot box
run
runner
runningboard running board
part
party
party line `phone' party line `political'
dead
deaden
deadbeat dead beat `exhausted'
wood
wooden
woodwork wood box `for, made of'
child
childish
childhood child bride
long
longer
long Island. . . . . . is a long island
dream
dreamy
dreamland dream maker
hot
hotter
hotshot hot shot `cannon'
main
mainly
mainline `drugs' Main Line `Phila. to Pgh.' mainsheet `a sail' main sheet Main Street main street
stand
standing
Standfast `Scotch' stand fast!
make
maker
makework make work makeready `printing' make ready makeweight `supplement' make weight `boxing' Makepeace 'Thackery' make peace
shoot
shooter
shootout shoot out
hand
handy
handful hand full, `has a . . .'
pale
paler
paleface pale face
pape
paper
paperback paper back
past
pastor
pastime pass time
march
marcher
marchtime march time
quick
quicker
quicktime quick time quickstep quick step
rare
rarer
rarebit rare bit
fill
filler
Fillmore fill more
Appendix 2.4 Contrasts of Phonetic Stop + Fricative Analyzed as a Unitary Phonemic Affricate Phoneme: cats
mats
eats
heads
flits
belts
catch
match
each
hedge
flitch
belch
cadge
Madge
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(Table continued from previous page) catches
Tuts
matches
leads
gnats
Ritz
cadges
touch
Madges
ledge
natch
ridge
rich crutches
nuts
hats
beets
huts
Judds
grudges
nudge
hatch
beech
hutch
judge
batches
Suts
Dodds
Wades
mutts
seeds
badges
such
Dodge
wage
much
siege
bridges
Vets
paids
bots
rods
britches
vetch
page
botch
Rog
Appendix 2.5 Some British vs. American Lexical Differences: Standard Terms in an Owner's Car Manual. British
= American
accumulator
battery
dynamo
generator
windscreen wiper
windshield wiper
kerb, carburettor, tyre
curb, carburetor, tire
gear change lever
gear shift
caravan
trailer
sparking plug
spark plug
gearbox
transmission
boot
trunk
bumper
fender
wing
fender
bonnet
hood
hood
roof
bright work
chrome trim
Saloon
sedan
Estate wagon
station wagon
wheel brace : spanner
wrench
Fascia
dashboard
parafin
kerosene
petrol
gas(oline)
silencer
muffler
damper
shock absorber
the rear offside damper
left rear shock absorber
underground
subway
subway
underground passage
lorry
truck
articulated lorry
trailer truck
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(Table continued from previous page) truck
cart
van
large truck
pantechnicon
moving van
Appendix 2.6 The International Phonetic Alphabet (Revised to 1989)
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Document Page 63 Appendix 2.7 Some Minimal Pairs in American English Contrasts between one-morpheme lexical items are clearest. 'Names' are capitalized and forms with more than one overt morpheme are italicized. 'Barred i' is not productive in my speech. /i
e
æ
a
/p/
pin
pen
pat
pot
/b/
bin
Ben
bat
/t/
tin
ten
tat
/d/
din
/k/
kin
/g/
*gin
/f/
fin
/v/
Vin
u
iy
ey
ay
oy
ow
aw
uw /
putt
pull paw
pee
pay
pie
poi
Poe
pow
pooh
bot
butt
bull Baugh
be
Bey
by
boy
bow
bow
boo
tot
tutt
taw
tee
Tey
tie
toy
toe
town
too
den
*dat dot
dut
daw
Dee
day
die
doe
down
do
ken
cat
cot
cut
caw
key
Kay
Ky
coy
Coe
cow
coo
gat
got
gut
ghee
gay
guy
goy
go
gown
goo
fen
fat
*fought
fee
fey
fie
Foy
foe
Ven
vat
vee
*weh vie
/q/ thin /d/ /s/
sin
/z/
faugh
*thought then
that
Sen
sat
Sut
thaw
saw
Zen
/ / shin Shen
*foo vow
voo
thigh thee
they
thy
see
say
sigh
soy
tho
thou
sew
sow
sue
zow
zoo
zee shat
shut
Shaw
she
shay
shy
/ / chin Chen chat
Chut
chaw
cheat Che
Chi
/ / gin
jut
jaw
gee
jay
mutt
maw
meat
may
nut
gnaw
neat
law
show
shoo
/ /
Jen
/m/ Min men
mat
/n/
nit
net
gnat not
/l/
lit
let
lot
/r/
Rin
wren
rat
Mott
chew
joy
Joe
jew
my
Moe
moo
nay
nigh
no
lea
lay
lie
loy
low
Roy
row
rot
rut
raw
Rhee
ray
rye
what
*war
we
way
why
woe
yaw
ye
yea
yi!
yo!
/w/ win
wen
watt
/y/
yen
yacht
Yin
Choy Cho
now
new loo
row
roe woo
yow
you
*Regional, dialectal
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Document Page 64 Some minimal pairs with /i/ /p/
/b/
/t/
/p/
pip
/b/
bip
bib
/t/
tip
Tibb tit
/d/
dip
dib
/k/
kip
/g/
Gip
/f/
/d/
pit bit
bid
/k/
/g/
/f/
pick
pig
piff
Bic
big
biff
tic
/v/
/Q/
/d/
pith
tiff
dit
did
dick
kit
kid
kick
dig
kith
Gibb *git
gig
fib
fig
fit
/v/
Vic
/q/
thick
diff
Gif
give
Viv
/d/ /s/
sip
/z/
zip
sib
sit
Syd sick
zit
/ / ship
Sig
syph
Civ
zig
shit
Schick
shiv
/ / / / chip / / gyp /h/
hip
/l/
lip
/r/
rip
chit chid chick jib
nip
jiff
hid
hick
lib
lit
lid
lick
*league
rib
writ rid
rick
rig
riff
mitt mid Mick
Mig
miff
myth
nit
Nick
Nig
wit
wick
wig
whiff
*with
nib
/w/ whip /y/
jig
hit
/m/ /n/
jit
yip
live
*with
Yid Some mininal pairs with /e/
/p/ /p/
/b/
pep
/t/
/d/
pet
/k/
/g/
peck
peg beg
/b/
bet
bed
beck
/t/
Tet
ted
tech
debt
dead
deck
/d/
deb
/k/
Ked
/g/
/f/
deaf keg
/v/
/Q/
Bev
Beth
Dev
death
Kev
get
/f/
Fed
/v/
vet
/q/ /d/ /s/
Sep
/z/
Zep
set Zeb
/ / / /
said zed
Chet Jeb
*saith
jet
Zef check
Jed
Jeff
Jev
/d/
/h/
hep
/l/ /r/
rep
reb
/m/
het
head
let
lead
ret
red
met
Med
/n/
neb
net
Ned
/w/
web
wet
wed
/y/
yep
yet
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Heff leg
rec
reg
Lev ref
Rev
Meg neck
neg
yegg
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Page 65 as vocalic in CVC structures /s/ /p/
piss
/b/
bis
/z/
biz
/t/ /d/
dis
/k/
kiss
Diz
/g/
/ /
/ /
/ /
fizz
/l/
/m/
/n/
/ /
Pim
pin
ping
bin
Bing
pish
pitch
pill
Bish
bitch
bill
Tish
tch
till
Tim
tin
ting
dish
ditch
dill
dim
din
ding
kitsch
kill
Kim
kin
king
Gish
/f/
/ /
Gidge
fish
Fitch
gill fill
/v/ /q/
fin vim
this
Vin thin
thing
sin
sing
/d/ /s/
sis
sill
/z/
zing
/ /
shill
shim
shin
/ / / /
chill
/ /
Jill
gym
hill
him
Lil
limn
Lynn
ridge
rill
rim
Rin
ring
midge
mill
Min
Ming
/h/
hiss
his
/l/
Liz
/r/
*riz
/m/
miss
hitch
rich
Ms
/n/
niche
/w/
whiz
wish
witch
chin gin
nil widge
will
whim
win
wing
/ /
/l/
/m/
/n/
/ / Peng
/y/ as vocalic in CVC structures
/s/
/z/
/ /
/ /
/ /
/p/
Pell
pen
/b/
bell
Ben
tell
ten
dell
den
/t/
Tess
/d/
Des
/k/ /g/
guess
/f/
Fes
fez
/v/
ketch
Kell
fetch
fell
vetch
chem
Ken
fen
veg
/q/ /d/ /s/
them cess
says
sedge
sell
then sen
/z/
Zen
/ /
chess
/ /
Jess
Chen gel
gem
gen
/h/
Hess
/l/
less
hedge Les
hell
ledge
/r/
retch
/m/
mess
/n/
Ness
/w/
Wes
/y/
yes
mesh
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hen
Lem
Len
Rem
wren
Mel
men
knell wedge
well
wen
yell
yen
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Document Page 66 Some mininal pairs with / æ / /p/
/b/
/t/
/d/
/k/
pat
pad
pack
/g/
/f/
/v/
/Q/
/p/
pap
/b/
bap
bab
bat
bad
back
bag
baff
/t/
tap
tab
Tat
tad
tack
tag
Taff
/d/
dap
dab
Dag
Daff
Dav
/k/
cap
cab
cat
cad
*cafe
Cav
/g/
gap
gab
gat
gad
gag
gaff
Gav
/f/
fap
fab
fat
fad
fag
/v/
dad
vat
/d/
path bath
Kath
vac
/q/ /d/
that
/s/
sap
sat
/z/
zap
/ /
chap
/ /
Jap
/h/
hap
/l/
lap
lab
/r/
rap
Rab
/m/
map
/n/
nap
chat
sad
sag
Zack
zag
Chad
jab
salve
chaff jack
jag
had
hack
hag
half
have
hath
lad
lack
lag
laugh
lav
lath
rat
rad
rack
rag
Raf
Mab
mat
mad
Mac
mag
nab
Nat
hat
wrath math
knack
/w/ /y/
sack
whack yap
wag
yack Some mininal pairs with /a/
/p/ /p/
pop
/b/
bop
/t/
top
/b/
bob
/d/
/t/
/d/
/k/
/g/
/f/
pot
pod
pock
bot
bod
Bock
bog
boff
tot
Todd
tock
tog
toff
dot
Dodd
dock
*dog
doff
cock
cog
*cough
/k/
cop
cob
cot
cod
/g/
gop
gob
got
god
/f/
fop
fob
*fought
Goth fog
/v/ /q/
*thought *thawed
/d/ /s/
sop
sob
sot
sod
sock
/z/ / /
soph Zog
chop
/ /
chock job
jot
/h/
hop
hob
hot
/l/
lop
lob
lot
hod
/v/ /Q/
jock
jog
hock
hog
lock
log
/d/
/r/ /m/
mop
/n/ /w/ /y/
rob
rot
rod
rock
mob
Mott
mod
mock
nob
not
nod
nock
nog
Watt
wad
wok
wog
wop yob
*Roth
yacht
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Document Page 67 as vocalic in CVC structures /-s/ /p-/ /b-/
/-z/
/- /
Paz
posh
boss
/- /
bosh
/- /
/- /
/-l/
/-m/
pol
pom
botch
bomb
/t-/ /d-/
/-n/
pong bon
Tom Dos
dodge
/k-/
cosh
/g-/
gosh
bong tong
doll
Dom
Don
dong
Coll
calm
con
Kong
gom
gong
/f-/ /v-/
/- /
Fong vas
*vase
Vol
/q-/
thong
/d-/ /s-/
Stash
Sol
/z-/ / -/ / -/ / -/
Chas
/ -/
joss
/h-/
Hoss
/l-/
loss
/r-/
Ross
Chol
Chong
josh
Jon
Haas
Han loll
Roz
/m-/ /n-/
noz
/w-/
was
/y/
Yaz
notch wash
Lom
Lahn
Rom
Ron
moll
mom
knoll
Nam
Nang
watch
wan yam
Wang Yang
as vocalic in CVC structures
/-s/ /p-/
pass
/b-/
bass
/t-/
Tass
/d-/
/-z/
/- /
/- /
/- /
/- /
patch bash
Daz
batch
badge
/-l/
/-m/
/-n/
/- /
pal
Pam
pan
pang
Bal
bam
ban
bang
tam
tan
tang
dam
Dan
dang
Cal
cam
can
gal
gam
dash
/k-/
Cass
cash
/g-/
gas
gash
catch
/f-/
cadge
Fadge
/v-/
fan Val
/q-/
thatch than sass
sash
Satch
Sal
/ -/ / -/ / -/
fang
van
/d-/ / -/
gang
Sam
San
zam shall
sham
Shan
sang
/c-/
Chas
/j-/
jazz
Chan jam
/h-/
has
hash
hatch
/l-/
lass
lash
latch
/r-/ /m-/
razz mass
/n-/ /w-/ /y/
Yaz
< previous page
Hal
rash mash
match
gnash
natch
Madge
Mal
Jan
ham
hang
lamb
Lang
ram
ran
maam
man
Nam
Nan
rang
Nang
wham
Wang
yam
Yang
page_67
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< previous page
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page_68
Page 68 Some mininal pairs with / /
/p-/
/-p/
/-b/
/-t/
pup
pub
putt
bub
butt
/b-/
/-d/
/-k/
/-g/
/-f/
puck
pug
puff
bud
buck
bug
buff
/t-/
tup
tub
tut
tuck
tug
/d-/
dup
dub
dut
dud
duck
/k-/
cup
cub
cut
cud
/g-/
gup
gub
gut
/-v/
/-Q/
dove
doth
/-d/
tough dug
duff duff
guck
/f-/
guff
fuck
fug
thud
thug
suck
Sugg
chuck
chug
Gov
/v-/ /q-/ /d-/ / -/
sup
sub
Sut
sud
/ -/ / -/
Chubb
/ -/ /h-/
hup
hub
jut
Jud
hut
Hud
jug
/l-/ /r-/
Rupp
rub
/m-/
rut mutt
/n-/
nub
/w-/
*whup
/y-/
yup
chuff
mud
Huck
hug
huff
luck
lug
luff
ruck
rug
rough
muck
mug
muff
nut
love
'nuff
yuck Some mininal pairs with /u/
/-p/ /p-/
/-b/
/-t/
/-d/
put
Pud
/-k/
/-g/
/-f/ *poof
/b-/
book
/t-/
took
boog
/d-/ /k-/
cook
/g-/ /f-/
good
gook
hood
hook
foot
/v-/ /q-/ /d-/ /s-/
soot
/z-/ / -/ / -/ /h-/ /l-/ /r-/
hoof
look *root
rook
*roof
/-v/
/-Q/
/-d/
/m-/
*muck
/n-/
nook
/w-/
wood
woof
/y-/
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page_69
Page 69 as vocalic in CVC structures /-s/ /p-/
pus
/b-/
bus
/-z/
/- /
/- /
/- /
/- /
/-l/
/-m/
/-n/
/- /
pun
pung
bum
bun
bung
tum
ton
dull
dumb
dun
dung
cull
come gun
gung
pudge buzz
budge
/t-/
touch
/d-/
does
Dutch
/k-/
cuss
cuz
/g-/
Gus
guzz
/f-/
fuss
fuzz
gush
gull fudge
/v-/
fun Vul
/q-/ /d-/
such
sum
sun
sung
/s-/ /z-/
chum
Chung
/ -/ / -/
Jus
/h-/
Hus
/l-/
Lus
/r-/
Russ
/m-/
muss
judge hush Luz
muz
hutch
lush rush
rutch
mush
much
hum
lull
Lum
Rudge
/n-/
rum
nudge
/w-/
hull
mull
mum
null
numb
was
hun
hung lung
run
rung
nun won
/y-/
yum
young
as vocalic in CVC structures /-s/ /p-/
puss
/-z/
/- /
/- /
/- /
/- /
/-l/
push
putsch
pull
/b-/
bush
butch
bull
/t-/
tush
/d-/ /k-/
cush
/g-/ /f-/ /v-/ /q-/ /d-/ /s-/ /z-/ /c-/ / -/ /h-/ /l-/
full
/-m/
/-n/
/- /
/r-/ /m-/ /n-/ /w-/ /y-/
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page_70
Page 70 Some minimal pairs with / / /-p/
/-b/
/p-/ /b-/
*Bob
/-t/
/-d/
/-k/
*pot
*pod
*pork
bought
bawd
balk
/t-/
talk
/d-/
daub
/k-/
*cob
/g-/
gawp
caught
*gob
/f-/
*fob
*cord
caulk
*God
gawk
fought
/-g/
/-f/
*tog
*toff
dog
*doff
*cog
cough
/-v/
/-Q/
/-d/
*Goth *fog
fauve
*forth
/v-/ /q-/
thought
thawed
sought
sawed
Salk
chawed
chalk
/d-/ /s-/ /z-/ / -/ / -/
*job
jawed
/h-/
*hod
/l-/
laud
/r-/
hawk
*hog *log
wrought
/m-/
wroth Maud
/n-/ /w-/
*jog
*nob
naught
mauve
*nod
*warp
moth *north
*ward
*wog
/y-/ Some minimal pairs with /iy/ /-p/
/-b/
/-t/
/-d/
/-k/
/p-/ peep
peat
peed
peak
peeve
/b-/ beep
beet
bead
beak
beef
/t-/
teat
teed
teak
/d-/ deep
deed
Deac
/k-/ keep
keyed keek
/g-/ /f-/
/-g/
/-f/
/-v/
Tigue
/-Q/
/-d/
teeth
teethe
Keith
geek feet
/v-/ veep
feed
fief
veed
/Q-/
thief
thieve
/d-/ /s-/ seep
seat
seed
seek
Sieg
/z-/ / -/ sheep
sheet Sheed shiek
/ -/
Zeke
/ -/ cheap cheat
cheek
sheaf
sheath sheathe
chief
/ -/ jeep /h-/ heap
heat
heed
heave
heath
/l-/
leap
lead
leak
/r-/
reap
reet
reed
reek
/m-/
meat
mead meek
/n-/ neep
neat
need
/w-/ weep
weed
weak
league leaf reef
leave reave wreath /wreathe
weave
/y-/
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page_71
Page 71 as vocalic in CVC structures /-s/
/-z/
/p-/
/- / *posh
/b-/
boss
/t-/
toss
/d-/
*Dos
/k-/
cause
/g-/
gauze
/- /
/- /
/- /
*porch
*bosh
/-l/
Dawes
/-n/
*bomb
*bong
tall *doll
dawn
*cosh
call
*corn
*gosh
gall
gone
/f-/
/- /
Paul ball
*torch
/-m/
fall
*form
*dong
*gong
fawn
/v-/ /Q-/
*thorn
*thong
/d-/ /s-/ /z-/ / -/ / -/ / -/ / -/ /h-/ /l-/ /r-/ /m-/ /n-/ /w-/ /y-/ as vocalic in CVC structures /- /
/- /
/- /
/- /
/-l/
/-m/
/-n/
/-s/
/-z/
piece
pease
peach
peel
/b-/
bees
beach
Beal
beam
bean
/t-/
tease
teach
teal
team
teen
deal
deem
/p-/
/d-/ /k-/ /g-/
keys geese
quiche
Guise
/f-/
peen
keel
keen
Geach fiche
feel
/v-/
theme
/Q-/
these
/d-/ /s-/
cease
sieze
/z-/
zees
/ -/
cheese
/ -/ / -/
siege
seal
seam
seen
zeal Cheam
gees
jean heal
/- /
/ -/
lease
/r-/
Reese
/m-/
Meese
/n-/
niece
/w-/
lees
leach reach
liege
Leem reel
ream
meal knees wheeze
niche
lean
mean
Neil weal
weeb
wean
/y-/
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page_72
Page 72 Some mininal pairs with /ey/ /-p/ /p-/
pape
/b-/ /t-/
/-b/
babe tape
/-d/
pate
paid
bait
bayed
Tait
/d-/ /k-/
/-t/
cape
Dade
Kate
Cade
gate
/f-/
fate
/-g/
/-f/
/-v/
/-Q/
/-d/
pave bake
bathe
take
date
/g-/
/-k/
Dave cake
*cafe
cave gave
fade
fake
/v-/
faith vague
/Q-/ /d-/ /s-/
sate
Sade
sake
safe
save
*saith
/z-/ / -/ / -/
chafe jape
jade
jake
/h-/
hate
/l-/
late
lade
rate
raid
rake
mate
made
make
/r-/
rape
/m-/ /n-/
hake
Rafe
rave
wraith
nape
/w-/ /y-/ Some mininal pairs with /ay/ /-p/
/-t/
/-d/
/-k/
pight
pied
pike
bight
bide
bike
tight
tide
/d-/
dight
died
/k-/
kite
/p-/
/-b/
pipe
/b-/ /t-/
type
/g-/
Geib
/f-/
/-v/
/-d/
tithe
dike kike
/-Q/
dive Kaif
guyed
vibe
fife
five
vied
/Q-/
thighed
/d-/
thyed
/s-/
/-f/
tyke Tige
fight
/v-/
/-g/
sight
sighed
psych
/z-/ / -/
chide
/ -/ /h-/
jibe hype
/l-/ /r-/
chive
ripe
jive height
hide
hike
light
lied
like
right
ride
hive life
live
lithe
rife
rive
writhe
/m-/
might
/n-/
night
/w-/
wipe
/y-/
yipe
< previous page
wight
mike
wide
knife
knive
wife
wive
page_72
wythe
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< previous page
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page_73
Page 73 as vocalic in CVC structures /-s/
/-z/
/- /
/- /
/- /
/- /
/-l/
/-m/
/-n/
/p-/
pace
page
pale
pane
/b-/
base
beige
bale
bane
/t-/
tale
tame
Taine
/d-/
dale
dame
deign
/k-/
case
cage
kale
came
cane
/g-/
gaze
guage
gale
game
gain
/f-/
face
faze
fail
fame
feign
/v-/
*vase
*vase
Vach
veil
/- /
vain
/Q-/ /d-/ /s-/
sage
sale
/z-/
same
Zale
/ -/
chase
/ -/
Jase
/h-/
sane Zane
*chaise
chain
haze
jail
Jane
hail
Hain
/l-/
lace
laze
lame
/r-/
race
raze
rage
rail
/m-/
mace
maze
Maj
mail
Mame
mane
nail
name
*nane
/n-/ /w-/
ways
wage
/y-/
lane rain
wail
wane
Yale
as vocalic in CVC structures /-s/
/-z/
/p-/
/- /
/- /
/- /
/- /
/-l/
/-m/
/-n/
pile
pine bine
/b-/
buys
bile
/t-/
ties
tile
time
tine
dies
dial
dime
dine
Kyle
keim
kine
/d-/
dice
/k-/ /g-/
guys
guile
/f-/
fies
file
fine
vies
vile
vine
/v-/
vice
/Q-/
thighs
/d-/
thys
thine
/s-/
size
sign
/z-/
thyme
Zeiss
/ -/
chile
chime
/ -/
*join
/h-/ /l-/
chine
lice
highs
heil
Heim
lies
lisle
lime
line
/- /
/r-/
rice
/m-/
mice
/n-/
nice
/w-/
rise
rile
rhyme
Rhein
mile
mime
mine
nighs
Nile
nine
whys
wile
wine
/y-/
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page_74
Page 74 Some mininal pairs with /oy/ /-p/
/-b/
/-t/
/-d/
/-k/
/-g/
/-f/
/-v/
/-Q/
/-d/
/p-/ /b-/
Boyd
/t-/
toyed
/d-/ /k-/ /g-/ /f-/ /v-/ /Q-/ /d-/ /s-/ /z-/ / -/ / -/
joyed
/h-/
Hoyt
/l-/
Lloyd
/r-/ /m-/ /n-/ /w-/ /y-/ Some mininal pairs with /ow/ /-p/ /p-/
/-b/
/-t/
/-d/
pope
/-k/
/-g/
/-f/
/-v/
/-Q/
/-d/
poke
/b-/
boat
bode toad
/t-/
tope
tote
/d-/
dope
dote
/k-/
cope
coat
code
goat
goad
/g-/
both
dove coke
cove
/f-/ /v-/
vote
vogue
/Q-/ /d-/ /s-/
soap
soak
/z-/ / -/
Choat
/ -/
Job
/h-/
hope
/l-/
lope
Loeb
/r-/
rope
robe
choke Joad
joke
hoed
hoke
hove
load rote
road
loaf rogue
loave rove
loath
loathe
/m-/
mope
mote
mowed
/n-/
nope
note
node
/w-/ /y-/
< previous page
woke yoed
yoke
page_74
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page_75
Page 75 as vocalic in CVC structures /-s/
/- /
/-z/
/p-/
poise
/b-/
boys
/t-/
toys
/- /
/- /
/- /
/-l/
/-m/
/-n/
/- /
boil
Boyne
boing
coil
coin
/d-/ /k-/ /g-/
goys
/f-/
Foys
/v-/
foil
voice
/Q-/ /d-/ /s-/
soil
/z-/ / -/ / -/
join
/h-/
hoys
/l-/
loys
/r-/
Hoyle
Royce
roil
/m-/
moil
/n-/
noise
/w-/ /y-/ as vocalic in CVC structures /-s/ /p-/
/-l/
/-m/
/-n/
pole
*poem
pone
toes
toll
tome
tone
doze
dole
dome
coach
coal
comb
cone
gauche
goal foam
phone
/-z/
/- /
pose
/- /
/- / poach
/- /
/b-/ /t-/ /d-/
dose
/k-/
kosh
/g-/
goes
/f-/
foes
foal
/d-/
those
thole
/s-/
sews
sole
/v-/ /Q-/
sone
/z-/
zone
/ -/ / -/
chose Joos
Joes
/h-/
hose
/l-/
lows
whole loach
home
hone
loam
lone
/- /
/r-/
rose
/m-/
mows
/n-/
nose
/w-/
woes
/y-/
yos
< previous page
roach
role
roam
mole
moan Nome
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page_76
Page 76 Some mininal pairs with /aw/ /-p/
/-b/
/-t/
/p-/
pout
/b-/
bout
/t-/
Taub
/d-/
/-d/
/-k/
/-g/
/-f/
/-v/
/-Q/
/-d/
mouth
mouthe
bowed
tout doubt
/k-/
cowed
/g-/
gout
/f-/ /v-/
vowed
/Q-/ /d-/
thoued
/s-/
sowed
/z-/
zowed
/ -/ / -/
chowed
/h-/
howed
/l-/
lout
loud
/r-/
rout
rowed
/m-/ /n-/
*nought
/w-/
nowed wowed
/y-/ Some mininal pairs with /uw/ /-p/ /p-/
poop
/b-/
Boop
/t-/ /d-/
dupe
/k-/
coop
/g-/
goop
/f-/
foop
/-b/
/-t/
/-d/
/-k/
pooed
Pook
/-g/
/-f/
/-v/
/-Q/
/-d/
poof
boob
boot
booed
booth
tube
toot
twoed
tooth
coot Goob
*dude
*duke
cooed
kook
gooed
gook
toothe
couth goof
food
/v-/ /Q-/
*thewed
/d-/ /s-/
soup
/z-/
suit
*sued
zoot
zooed
/ -/
chewed
/ -/
newt
*nude
/h-/
hoop
hoot
whoed
/l-/
loop
loot
*lewd
root
rude
/r-/
soothsoothe
rube
ruth
/m-/
moot
mood
/n-/
newt
*nude
/w-/
wooed
/y-/
< previous page
youth
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page_77
Page 77 as vocalic in CVC structures /-s/
/-z/
/- /
/- /
/p-/
/- /
/- /
/-l/
/-m/
/-n/
/- /
pouch
/b-/ /t-/
town
/d-/
*douse
/k-/
cows
/g-/
Gauss
*douse
down couch
Gows
cowl gouge
/f-/
gown fowl
/v-/
vows
*found
vouch
/Q-/ /d-/
thous
/s-/
souse
/z-/
sows
sound
zows
/ -/ chouse / -/
jowl
/h-/
house
/l-/
louse
/r-/
rouse
/m-/
mouse
/n-/
nows
/w-/
house
howl
mouse
mound
wows
/y-/
yowl
in CVC structures /-s/
/-z/
/- /
/p-/ booze
/t-/
twos deuce
/k-/ /g-/
/- / pooch
/b-/
/d-/
/- /
dues
/f-/
goos foos
/-l/
*douche
*douche
Gooch
/-m/
pool
tool
coos goose
/- /
/-n/ poon
boom
boon
tomb
*tune
doom
dune
cool
coon
ghoul
goon
fool
/v-/
voom
/Q-/
*thews
Thule
/d-/ /s-/
Seuss
*sues
/z-/
Zeus
zoos
/ -/
Shoos
soon zoom
/ -/ / -/ / -/
choose juice
jews
Jule
June
/- /
/m-/
moose
moos
/n-/
noose
news
/h-/
whose
/l-/
loose
lose
/r-/
ruse
rues
/w-/ /y-/
mooch
moon Nuge
hooch
noon who'll
rule
woose use
use
< previous page
loom
loon
room
rune
womb huge
yule
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Reading Abercrombie, David. 1967. Elements of general phonetics. New York. Aldine. Malmberg, Bertil, ed. 1968. Manual of phonetics. Amsterdam. North-Holland. O'Connor, J.D. 1973. Phonetics. London. Penguin Books. Trager, George L., and Henry Lee Smith. 1942. An outline of English structure. Washington, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies. Supplementary Reading Chao, Yuen-Ren. 1934. The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems. Reprinted in: Martin Joos, ed., Readings in Linguistics. 1957. Washington, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies. Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle. 1968. The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row. Crystal, David. 1969. Prosodic systems and intonation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Denes, P.B., and E.N. Pinson. 1973 The speech Chain. New York. Anchor. Gimson, A.C. 1970. An introduction to the pronunciation of English. 2nd. ed. London; Longman. Hockett, Charles F. 1955. A manual of phonology. University of Indiana Memoir XI. Bloomington; University of Indiana Press. Hyman, L.M. 1987. Phonology, theory and analysis. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. International Phonetics Association. 1949. Principles of the international phonetic alphabet. London: I Jones, Daniel. 1956. An outline of English phonetics. 8th ed. Cambridge. Heffer. Kaplan, Harold. 1971. Anatomy and physiology of speech. New York. McGraw-Hill. Ladefoged, Peter. 1967. Three areas of experimental phonetics. London. Oxford University Press. pp. 180, bibliog. 173-180. 1968. A phonetic study of West African languages. Cambridge. Cambridge University press. 1971. Preliminaries to linguistic phonetics. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. pp ix, 122. bibliog 113-118. 1982. A course in phonetics. New York. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Malmberg, Bertil, ed. 1968. Manual of phonetics. Amsterdam. North-Holland. O'Connor, J.D. 1973. Phonetics. London. Penguin Books. Pike, Kenneth. 1943. Phonetics. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. 1947. Phonemics. A technique for reducing languages to writing. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. Prator, C.H. and B.W. Robinett. 1971. Manual of American English Pronunciation. New York. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
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3 Language as a System of Forms 3.00 Phonemics simplifies the representation of speech but has empirical drawbacks: it is ambiguous for a language rich in dialectal pronunciations, though its ideal is to extract the common, contrastive elements from all of them. Can grammatical systems be represented that way? Phonemic contrasts may be few and easily agreed upon, but the factors involved in grammatical judgments seem to be enormous. And if we take phonemic results as a kind of micro-model for describing other linguistic systems, we rely mainly on techniques of contrastive substitution in a linear distribution, as the minimalpair test for phonemes shows. The factors interlocking to form grammatical systems are more complex than that. That is why composition, distribution, and function will have to be defined differently in grammar than in phonology. While the basic function of phonemes is differential, one function of some meaningful forms can be called referential. Units in grammar can be the bearers of those meanings phonemes only discriminate. That difference is recognized by the points of view and methods required. Phonemics stresses a single function (meaningful contrast between segments) as objectively as public agreement can make it. Grammar deals with multiple functions, subjective as well as objective, covered by the term meaning. When phonemics deals with sequences of segments, its concern is melodic, not significant. Asparagus has four syllables, clasps only one; asparagus is not analyzed into meaningful parts, while clasps shows two. The methods and points of view relevant in phonology are quite different from those in grammar. 3.01 Purposes for Grammars. The questions one can ask about sound systems result in only a few different kinds of phonologies, but ideas about what purposes a Grammar should serve are more numerous. Prescriptive grammars can be designed for speakers who do not inherit a standard they prefer (or others think desirable for them). Descriptive grammars give an account of how some people actually speak. An explanatory grammar may define basic functions of language and then relate them to others as derived functions. A comparative grammar may show correspondences between languages with a common origin; a contrastive grammar, how languages differ; an historical grammar, how a language developed into its present state; a generative grammar, how grammatical sentences are to be accounted for and ungrammatical ones excluded. How to choose among these purposes is not obviously dictated by language data alone. What different grammars share is a common method to elicit a correct answer to questions they raise.
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Another striking difference between sound and sign systems in languages is that while sound-contrasts are few, sign-differences are indefinitely many. Even an abstract formula like (C)(C)(C) V (C)(C)(C)(C) for English syllable structures is more concrete than one like N V (N) (N) for its basic sentence types, since so much must be ignored to display sentences as types composed of only nominal and verbal elements. Whatever the purpose is, one way to describe a language as a system is to identify units and their relations of demand, exclusion, and toleration. Some facts about speech recommend themselves as basic for a descriptive grammar; people stop talking. What goes on between pauses can be called an utterance; utterances can be analyzed into words or the parts constituting words. This approach can be applied to English in an interesting way; but is not restricted to English, even though languages viewed as formal systems are very differently constructed. We know, for instance, that some languages lack words as simple as those of English, while others make isolation of word-parts dubious. But to the extent that speaking involves associating objects, properties, and relations of nonlinguistic experience with linguistic forms, its externalization can be described as objectively as the forms of our own expression-system, even when the bases for such associations appear strange to us. 3.02 Classifying Forms. Linguistic forms appear in two main size-classes: one open and variable, the other closed and stable. Members of the first occur infrequently, while some of the second must recur in every utterance. Subsets within the open class are in parallel distribution; closed-class subsets are in complementation with the open set and often with each other. The first will contain rare expressions used only by a few speakers; members of the second set are used indeed must be used by all. The first can have bound forms combining with free forms or with each other, as well as with members of the second class; closed-class units do not combine as freely with each other. If language were a static system of signals, these two classes would not overlap. But they do. If languages were not systems of contrastive patterns, we would be forced to examine them in exhaustive lexical detail, word after word. But when the formal structure of a language can be reduced to its few and clear classes, one part of grammatical analysis can be exhausted at the class-level rather than that of vocabulary. This suggests where small grammars can stop, and where the largest ones point to indefinitely extended studies. These factors correlate roughly with a distinction between the lexical and grammatical systems of a language, illustrated by these two simple anomalies: (1) All phthisis-ment both see-s. (2) -s mother-ing plenty if.
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This pair are unintelligible on two counts, violation of both lexical and grammatical conventions, while Lewis Carroll's muchquoted Jabberwocky has lines that are half-understood because only the lexical items seem deviant: (3) 'Twas brillig, and the slithy tothes did gyre and gimble in the wabe. . . Scientific objectivity is fostered in descriptive phonology because native informants can assure us when phonemes make a difference in meaning. Arbitrary languages `mean' things arbitrarily. This is a diffuse kind of social subjectivity, compared to the individual sort that might tempt us to treat Carroll's lines as part of a private language. Carroll intrigues us first because he is making use of our common conventions. We may not be sure about exactly what he means, but there seems to be something there. If subjectivities are multiples of the number of societies involved, how can languages foreign to us be dealt with objectively? By treating such forms in much the same way as phonemes were handled: that a difference in meaning is signalled is sufficient to establish phonemic status, whatever kind of meaning is involved; similarly, if we call any kind of meaningful form a morpheme, we can deal with its composition and distribution on a comparable basis, even when we are unsure what kind of meaning it is a sign of. Studying morphemes in this way, we find that similar signs are similarly distributed, with parallel functions as a consequence. 3.03 Parallel and Complementary Distribution. When we shifted our attention from the positive data of phonetics to the relational or contrastive view in phonology, the role of parallel and complementary distribution emerged as central. If we never have a choice between items, we need never notice how much or little they resemble each other. Until Napoleon decided it could make a difference, soldiers' boots were not made for left and right feet any more than stockings are today. Our socks are in free variation, while shoes and boots are in complementary distribution. But they are not signals. Distribution and functional similarity can neutralize compositional differences. Since simple consonants and affricates are in parallel distribution, the phonetic representation of (4)tin as
[tIn]
sin
shin,
[sIn]
and ,
chin
and
obscures some systemic information compared to phonemic (5)
/tin/
and
/sin/
.
Since simple vowels can be equated with diphthongs at the syllable level, the phonetic transcriptions (6) [tin]
[sin]
for:
teen
seen
vs. phonemic
/tiyn/ /siyn/
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and Chin
= `diminutive of Chino'
and
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are less suggestive of systemic relations, somewhat like noting phonetic diphthongs in words like (7)
Taine
sane
[tein]
[sein]
and
phonemically,
/teyn/
/seyn/
and
or
tone
sewn
(8)
Shane
shown
and chain ,
and Chon `small Korean coin'
as
[toun] [sown]
and
vs.
/town/ /sown/
and
The phonemic transcription suggests that a correlation between vocalic length and syllabicity in English is more commonly found in diphthongs than in simple vowels contrasting both in quality and duration. At each higher or more inclusive level, differences in composition become less important than their ability to do the same job. Dikes should hold back water; but if part of their composition fails, a cork or a Dutch boy's finger can supply the lack. Keys should open locks; but if the composition of the only keys available is ill-suited to the task, a hairpin might do. 3.04 Constants and Variables. When investigating data to see if there is an underlying system, factors of composition and distribution are more objective at any level than those of function. Disturbances in the air are more accessible than what speakers have in mind in making them. It is assumed that this feature of actual vs. (im)possible contrast is a basic factor in the signalling function of languages at all levels. It is easy to establish at the word or lexical level: phonemic contrasts are few, and the main question is whether minimally different sound sequences are meaningful or not. Analysis at higher, more inclusive, levels is less straightforward. But without a grasp of how things are related in terms of composition, distribution, and function, data about them can be as trivial as population statistics or correct answers to math problems, memorized without analyzing the difference between them. Analysis differs from description in its explicit search for some kind of organization, where each obvious level, once described and explained, becomes in turn another level of composition for further distributional and functional analysis. If there is a system, each successive, more inclusive, or higher level of organization relates as a kind of constant to the previously established, less inclusive, lower data as its variables (like the constant double to whatever gets doubled overhead, people, or anything else), as pattern-to-realization, form-to-matter, intelligibility-to-fact. Given the pair: (9a) home run (9b) run home the components of (a) and b) seem to be identically home and run, and within (a) and (b), the distribution of home and run can be accounted for, by saying:
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(1) one is first, the other second; (2) one is initial, the other final; (3) one precedes, the other follows; etc. These statements are not identical. But natives know (and nonnatives would have good reason to suspect) that the function of home and run is not the same in (a) and (b), on the obvious basis of their distribution. In that example, statements of composition and distribution seem simple, because so little appears to be involved. Just by comparing: (9c) HOME RUN
RABBIT run
RUN HOME
FOSTER home
home RULE
GOLDEN rule
run AWAY
FAR away
home BAKED
HALF baked
run THROUGH
ALL through
home MAKER
TROUBLE maker
run DOWN
RUN down
it is clear how the environments of the expressions subclassify them: that distribution is not simply identical with place-in-aline; that composition or function must be defined differently at different levels. Yet the ways in which these three factors interact are still precisely delimited: COMPOSITION
DISTRIBUTION
FUNCTION
same
same
same
same
same
different
same
different
different
different
different
different
different
different
same
different
same
same
same
different
same
different
same
different
3.05 Grammatical Function. Function has been defined so far for phonemics in terms of making a difference in meaning whatever that is. But grammatical units not only contrast with each other as phonemes do, and so `make a difference in `meaning', many may also `have a meaning'. Specifying just what `meaning' is within and across languages is far from simple. For instance, English inflation may be translated by German Geldent-wertung, and their distribution is quite similar as long as both occur in texts about economics. But they are composed of different kinds of elements. In English, -flat- never occurs alone (in the sense of blow) while German Geld (`money') and Wert (`worth') do. English in- and -ion are distributed much like German ent- and -ung. When -ion or -ung occur, they both function to mark whatever precedes them as an abstract nominal dealing with a process. German ent- functions here to negate, deprive, or reverse what follows it.
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While a different English in- functions much like German ent-, this in-intensifies what follows. What Geld is a symbol of can be picked up; while what -flat- signifies may be felt, what Wert stands for cannot. The German Man versucht, die Geldentwertung zu überwinden might be transliterated `One beseeks, the money-devaluing to wind up', or as `They try to beat inflation', or `We are trying to overcome inflation', or `Efforts are being made to bring inflation under control', or in several other ways functionally equivalent in different contexts. The senses of the compositional factors employed in German and English here are so different that our preference for one translation over another would have progressively less to do with adding up those discrete senses than with an appropriate matching of words, the common scenario of referents, and guesses about the intended readers' linguistic sophistication all increasingly independent of such composition. Cautious outside observers can simply take the natives' word for it that these sound sequences `mean something'. We need not engage in subjective dispute about what or how they mean it. Once they are identified, we have all the objective evidence needed to talk about their linear distribution. At this stage, one could allude to some contrasts between levels of analysis: where phonetics describes types of sound, phonology explains their function; where phonology describes functional sound-sequences, morphology explains their minimal sign status; where morphology describes minimal signs, syntax explains their construction. At each level, the linear distribution of elements can be accounted for objectively, but linearity is not the sole determinant of linguistic environments. The minimal sign Descriptive Linguistics studies is called a morpheme: hyphens isolate what is involved in our example: (10) Man ver-such-t, die Geld-ent-wert-ung zu über-wind-en `One be-seek-s, the money-de-valu-ing to over-wind-Ø' Morpheme, like phoneme, is a generic concept derived from concrete and typical data. 3.06 Morphemes and Allomorphs. Barbarisms and spelling aside, the German and English examples show free and bound forms: English be-, -s, de-, and -ing, do not occur alone; one, seek, value, over, wind, and up do, but the and to are puzzlers here as free forms, and for different reasons, so is money (cp. mone-tary and mone-tize). In German, a close cognate of English, the clearly bound forms are the prefixes verand ent-, the suffixes -t, -ung, and -en, and surprisingly, the root wind. Clearly free forms are Geld and Wert; in German, -suchmight qualify as a contraction, but Man, die, and zu are problematic in the same way as English the and to. Huge dictionaries cannot list all of a language's free forms, but small grammars can contain most of the bound ones. Contrastive grammar reveals unsuspected connections between
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and within each, such as English seek-s and beseech-es vs. *beseek-s and German ver-such-t, not to mention Shakespeare's pushy rhyme (11) Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thy tooth is not so unkind As man's ingratitude! (As You Like It, II, vii) and the fairly late American need to invent twister for a whirlwind. 3.07 Defining Morpheme. A morpheme is often defined as `a minimal meaningful unit'. Examples involve what the hyphens set off in the German-English comparison, where it can be appreciated how vexed careful discussion of the notion `meaning' is. Each part of the definition deserves some thought: minimal suggests that no part of the unit is, at the same time, a sign of another meaning, at the same level of analysis: neither car nor pet in carpet stands for an automobile or a domestic animal; the sequence of phonemes /rat/ (rot) represents a single unit of meaning comparable in sense to the sequence of phonemes /bayowdiygreyd/ (biodegrade). But: /r/ is not comparable to /bayow-/ as a phoneme sequence or in meaning, /a/ is not comparable to /-diy-/ as a phoneme sequence or in meaning, /t/ is not comparable to /-greyd/ as a phoneme sequence or in meaning. Neither /r/, /a/, or /t/ can be assigned any conventional connection here with extralinguistic factors, while /bayow/ is connected with `life', /diy/ with `less', and /greyd/ with `step'. The sequence of phonemes in /rats/ represents more than a single meaningunit, comparable to (biodegrade + `3rd person'+ `singular'+`active'). At different levels of analysis: rot and biodegrade are both words; rot is a simple word (analyzable in isolation into only one morpheme); biodegrade is a complex word (analyzable into three morphemes); rots and biodegrades are both complex; both share the same suffix (the suffix belongs to a closed class); de-grade exemplifies a prefix (the prefix belongs to a closed class); /rat/, /bayow/, and /greyd/ belong to an open class. Meaningful is the least straightforward part of the definition. We can well ask: `Meaningful to whom, where and when?' Biodegrade did not appear in the 1966 Unabridged Random House Dictionary, but the 1970 addenda to Webster's Third International (copyright 1966) had:
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biodegradable: capable of being broken down, esp. into innocuous products by the action of living beings (as microorganisms); biode-gradability; biodegradation; biodegrade. The forms bio-, de-, and -grade- have long been familiar formatives in the language, but not for all speakers, and not in this particular combination. So the notion meaningful predictably differs for the generic English speaker and an individual speaker of English. An objective reference or denotation for rot and biodegrade may coincide, but the subjective connotations do not. That is why milk companies might boast that their product is supplied in biodegradable containers, but deny they use rotting cartons. So there is a predictable difference between the `meaning' of a word speakers acquire from its etymology or historical sources, as opposed to hearing it used by others. The first way needs information about the history of a language; the second needs only to note the usual distribution of forms in others' speech. Given contemporary concern about ecology, words like biodegradable are used competently even by those who do not wonder why zoodecomposable has not appeared. An equally intractable problem is the difficulty of being sure when even linguists are using the word morpheme to refer (a) to spoken or written linguistic forms like /biowdiygreyd/ or (biodegrade), or (b) to whatever `meaning' is taken to be (e.g. sense or reference), or (c) to a unit which requires advertence to both. In the latter case, the difference between a phonetic and a phonemic representation, [bioudigreid] vs. /biowdiygreyd/ involves more than conventions about transcription. The phonetic focus is on sequences of sounds; the phonemic, on potential contrasts of meaning. Since these aspects are so intimately related, it is easy to slip from one usage into another. In fact, once the obvious distinction among phone, allophone, and phoneme has been drawn, it is not uncommon to find only the term phoneme employed, and a similar practice seems to hold with respect to morpheme, although both practices can occasion unnoticed ambiguities. Unit in the definition brings up an interesting mixture of compositional, distributional, and functional norms or criteria, which are relevant to the difficulty just mentioned: /r/ is a unit in a way that /bayow/ is not, while at the level of sense, both rot and biodegrade are comparable. In some contexts, either rot or biodegrade might be in perfectly parallel distribution, but milk ads are not one of the environments where that is likely. At another functional level, rots and biodegrades are equally verbal units. We might tentatively label two of the classes of minimal units discussed so far, lexical and grammatical: (12) lexical morphemes: e.g. bio-(de)-grade grammatical morphemes: e.g. (bio)-de-(grade)-s There is some indeterminacy involved in the standing of de-, compared to that of -s, if every morpheme must belong exclusively to a wholly open or closed
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class. The form de- is part of a larger and more expandable system than -s is, but small and comparatively closed, given the open class of which bio- and grade are members. The presence of -s is demanded intralinguistically (i.e. because one is speaking English, in which a singular/plural contrast must be expressed: even Chinese speakers who noted the difference would not have to express it in their language). Only extralinguistic factors would motivate the choice of biodegrade vs. bioupgrade in either language. Be that as it may, three levels of analysis, or three points of view, are as relevant here as in phonology. phone
allophone
phoneme
morph
allomorph
morpheme
As before, they are comparable to: Individual (unique):
graph
phone
morph
Typical (instance of class):
allograph
allophone
allomorph
Abstract (classification):
grapheme
phoneme
morpheme
Terms like these are designed to allow technical discussion of things that ordinary language is not as well equipped to handle unambiguously: morph: can stand for a unique phonetic or orthographic event (e.g. in the printed word rots you have just read); allomorph: can stand for a typical instance of a class (e.g. referring to the -s of the printed word rots as representing the same English `3rd singular' morpheme as in cut). morpheme: can stand for a generic classification of associations between certain sounds and their functions or meanings (which could be of the lexical type we assign to bio-, -grade-, grade-, or the grammatical type commonly found in -s). So a morpheme is an analytic classification, and morpheme a technical term within a given grammatical system about which it is useful to notice: Phonetic symbols are usually included in square brackets, [s], phonemic symbols between slanted lines /s/, but morphemes are included within brackets, often using nonphonetic or nonphonemic symbols {S1}, {S2}. The symbols chosen often have some mnemonic value from phonetics or phonology, e.g. {S} suggests a common /-s/ form for the 3rd person singular suffix in English verbs, the plural suffix of nouns, and the possessive forms.
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The terminology is not fixed. Some European linguists restrict the term morphème to what are called grammatical morphemes above, using sémantème for what have been labelled lexical morphemes; others uses do not distinguish morph, allomorph, and morpheme. A morpheme is not an individual like this s. A morpheme involves phonetics, but, unlike a phoneme, some morphemes do not even have a typical pronunciation. e.g. the English morpheme {S1} for plural might be distinguished conventionally as {S2} for 3rd person singular in the verb, or as {S3} for the possessive form of nouns, but `irregular plurals' have several pronunciations. Some morphemes are represented by mutually exclusive realizations: {S} `is simultaneously' (or realized phonetically as) [-s] in, e.g. voiceless environments, [-z] in voiced ones, and [-iz] in sibilant environments. While morphemes are not concerned directly with concrete phones, whenever some have typical realizations, they are discussed as kinds of allomorphs. 3.08 Allomorphs and Morphs. Allomorphs are as peculiar to a given language as its allophones, but some of the phenomena involved in both are common examples of modifications in general phonetics. In general phonetics, aspiration can be treated as a modification, while in English phonemics, it is allophonic, positionally predictable and lexically nondistinctive for stops; in other languages, it is phonemic, not tied to a position, and lexically distinctive. The presence or absence of voicing is a basic manner of articulation in phonetics; it is phonemic for English stops, fricatives, and affricates, allophonic for English laterals, but the phonemic contrast of (de)voicing is involved in allomorphic variation in English morphology. Morphs need not be language-peculiar; a phonetically identical sequence can be significant with the same or a different meaning in more than one language, e.g. in some pronunciations of Latin, the phonetic sequence for SCIT [sIt] can be glossed `he knows', while in English the same meaningful sequence can be nominal or verbal. Identical meanings involved in morphemes are not language-peculiar, but are likely to belong to different systems and subsystems: e.g. while many languages distinguish singular from plural, others contrast singular to dual, trial, small vs. large plural, and may have concord systems (e.g. gender) which others lack, so that their allomorphic realization will be intralinguistically motivated differently within each language.
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3.09 Allomorphic Realization In English is predictable either from (a) the phonological environment or from (b) its lexical status. In (a), the phonological environment involves the kind of sounds that cooccur, e.g. /kats/, /kowdz/, /hawziz/, /misiz/ (cots, codes, houses, misses). These examples involve phonologically conditioned allomorphs, since the {S} plural is predictably realized as voiceless after voiceless stops, voiced after voiced stops, laterals, and nasals, and as a voiced syllabic after affricates and fricatives (voiced or voiceless). In (b), the lexical status of the particular item conditions which allomorph occurs, e.g. {S plur} is not predictable by phonological environment for irregular nouns. In regular nouns, one confidently predicts /kats/ and /kowdz/, /hawziz/ and /misiz/ from the singulars, cot, code, house and miss, but irregulars can be said to be lexically conditioned. (This label seems preferable to morphemically conditioned: what correlates with such departures from a standard pattern is not the fact that a form is viewed as a morpheme rather than a phoneme, but that it is a particular lexical morpheme), e.g. criterion /kraytiyriyin/ +{S1} `plural' = criteria vs. centurion /sentuwriyin/ = centurions /sentuwriyinz/ child
+ {S1}
= children
vs. field /fiyld/ = fields /fiyldz/ ox/aks/+ {S1}
= oxen /aksin/
vs. fox /faks/ = foxes /faksiz/ 3.10 What Languages Signal. Languages encode encounters with freely occurring objects, and that their labels ought to appear as free forms might seem to follow from expectations about the similarity of languages. But experience is socially conditioned and languages are arbitrary, so linguistic uniqueness prepares us for systems different from our own. Forms characteristic of, peculiar to, and obligatory within, each language are to be expected: it is these forms and their conventional systematicity that constitute the challenge to learning them. Even grammatical elements like these can still be described objectively as demanding, excluding, or tolerating other morphemes when their occurrence cannot be ascribed to common experience in any obvious way. Factors like this make each language unique. While these subjective expectations may be persuasive, objective study shows whether and how elements isolated by analysis actually form the larger units called words, phrases, clauses, etc. in a given language. If they do, they constitute systems describable through the demands, exclusions, and tolerations appropriate to each of those levels. It can be determined whether word is usefully distinguished from morpheme or phrase in a particular language. In any case, the unit-systems that emerge can be dealt with either in terms of static relations or dynamic rules of formation; constructions can be
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distinguished as basic or derived in terms of constant cooccurence (demands), non-occurrence (exclusions), or occasional occurrences (tolerations). How to formulate the details of such rules or relations is involved in the work of sketching the grammar of a language. So one problem for any kind of grammar is to distinguish the extent to which demands and exclusions result from internal, peculiar linguistic factors of a formal kind, as opposed to resulting from external, perhaps universal restrictions. The descriptive view of grammar can still be seen as an account of correct combinations (a term usually associated with traditional or prescriptive grammar), but correctness in this approach is deduced from what is observed in use without any untoward reaction on the part of native hearers. This can be a hazardous norm for many reasons. In describing exotic languages, outsiders are not in a position to make judgments about sense, non-sense, or appropriateness in any other way. In describing one's native language, judgments of that sort might be more reliable. 3.11 Structural Morphology and Syntax. Descriptive grammars usually have a section on morphology and syntax. The German-English comparison illustrates what is involved. Sentences were analyzed in clauses (we are trying, to bring inflation under control), clauses into phrases (the moneydevaluing, under control) phrases into words (under, control) and words into morphemes connected with con- and -trol. It suggested possible word subclasses (one can be simple, con-trol complex, over-come compound). It opposed free forms (inflation, control) to bound forms (in-, -flat-, -ion, con-, -trol), open classes (-flat-, -trol) to closed classes (in-, -ion), while not excluding a possible intermediate status among free (the vs. control) and bound forms (de- vs. -s). 3.12 Function as `Mean'. One `function' grammar studies is `meaning'. Equate that with what the German and English sentences deal with, and we can compare the `sameness' of what is going on outside language with the differences demanded inside it for correctness in the unique expression-system of each language: English we are trying is 1st person plural, German man versucht is 3rd person singular; efforts are being made is passive and 3rd plural, man versucht is active, 3rd singular; trying is overtly progressive, versucht is not; English inflation focuses on rising prices, German Geldentwertung has more to do with lowering money values (views as complementary as seeing bottles half-full or half-empty). While inflation and Geldentwertung differ in sense, what they refer to can be calculated just as exactly as when one takes the `meaning' of Olympiad to be reference to the time at which the international games take place, instead of the sense the Greeks assigned their word, i.e. the interval between them. More important than any of these differences in composition is the fact that the distribution of the forms in both languages can be described and compared with the same degree of objectivity, however their function or meaning is identified.
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Some parallels between descriptive phonological and grammatical work thus appear. Phonemes are established on the basis of a diffuse notion of meanings they distinguish; morphemes are identified on an equally vague basis of having meanings. Phonemes are simple compositionally if components are simultaneous (e.g. in sibilants, stops, and simple vowels), distributionally and functionally when successive bundles contrast with simultaneous ones (e.g. affricates in /cerc/ church with stop and fricative in /kers/ curse; the syllabic diphthong of /seyt/ sate with the simple vowel in /set/set). Syllables demand a core member (a syllabic, however defined); nonsyllabic members are defined by dependence on their syllabic; free morphemes are those on which the bound depend in order to occur. Only a few higher/lower levels of analysis arise within phonology (syllabic junctures presuppose syllables, suprasegmentals presuppose segments). There are more within grammar, from minimum morpheme through morpheme constructions like words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and larger units. While they may be presented inductively from component through construction, each higher level can be seen from another point of view as explaining why isolation of the lower was relevant in the first place. For instance, the notions free and bound make different kinds of sense (pertain to different analytic systems) at different levels. Assuming that sounds between silences are the upper bound of the speech-object we study, a reply is less free than an utterance initiating the conversation. Any lower level construction (clause, phrase, word, or part of a word) might be bound at its own level of analysis, dubious at another, and free at a third: in the isolated words antitrust and protrust, the prefixes are bound, dubiously so in the pair anti- or protrust, and free in Are you anti or pro?. In the German-English contrasts, some affixes are clearly bound, some words are clearly free, and the standing of some was not obvious on the norms supplied. Money and Inflation, or Geld and Wert are reasonable replies to a question like What were you discussing? If the question were Were you discussing INflation or DEflation ?, it might get DE or IN as an answer, but to Were you discussing inflatING or inflaTION?, the reply ING is more likely than an attempt to pronounce -ion in isolation. It can be difficult to frame a simple question that has a bound form as its answer. That is one reason why it was suggested that the to1 of to fight inflation is not the same to2 in sentences like He was running to Miami. There are many forms in parallel distribution with to2 (in, for, across, into, etc.) in He was running to Miami, but no options for to1 in They are trying to fight inflation. While the will not occur as the complete and sole member of a conversationinitiating utterance, it is a sensible answer to Did you say they were trying to fight the or an inflation?. Notice that some of these questions concern nonlinguistic matters, while the others are about bits of the language itself. These are different environments.
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3.13 Public Description and Private Explanation. These observations suggest formal ways of distinguishing units pertinent to a descriptive grammar of a language in terms of composition, distribution, and function. The minimum unit dealt with in morphology is a single morpheme, free or bound; intermediate units are composed of morphemes, and larger units are composed of these morpheme constructions (if there are any in the language), justifying an internal distinction of morphology from syntax. Some bound forms define a class of free forms they demand, exclude, or tolerate in order to occur; they stick to them like labels, and other forms are just as clearly marked by not being able to have them. If this is the situation in a language, the units of classes in it can be identified formally; and while the classification often overlaps with the traditional parts of speech defined by the meanings they frequently have, different classifications inevitably result when the criteria involved are intralinguistic or formal in the one approach, but extralinguistic or semantic in another. Lower-level, formal, composition can be neutralized at higher levels in view of distribution and function. Some simplistic treatments of parts of speech in elementary grammars can be called functional, but it is based importantly on the limited semantic function of naming things. Composition and distribution are not taken into account in the order required by objective descriptive methods. Since different questions are asked in these two approaches, answers employing apparently identical technical terms may only appear to contradict each other. 3.14 Talking About Language. Compare the norms on which the technical terms noun, verb, adjective, and adverb might be employed. Elementary school grammars were prescriptive; they instructed students who never talked about language at all to use the names assigned for talking about important parts of sentences. A noun, it was said, was the name of a person, place, or thing; a verb, the name of an action; an adjective, the name of a property; and an adverb named manners of verbal action. These definitions have quite serviceable subjective validity when using language about language in simple cases, but later lead to objective difficulties. A Descriptive Grammar, on the other hand, focuses on objective properties of the same data; it can point out whether bound forms exclusively characterize the constructions of which they are obligatory members. These constructions include units now called form classes instead of parts of speech that might be defined morphologically (e.g. in terms of morpheme composition), syntactically (e.g. in terms of distribution, regardless of morphological composition), and functionally (i.e. by their ability to serve the same purposes as forms defined only on morphological or syntactic grounds). It is then possible to discuss units, their parts and elements. These are dealt with in terms of immediate, mediate, and ultimate constituents at different levels, with shifts in the criteria required, appropriate to each level.
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3.15 Constituents. For instance, if the unit we are interested in is a paragraph, the direct parts or immediate constituents composing it are its sentences. Words in those sentences are indirect paragraph parts or mediate constituents, and the simple forms, bound or free, the ultimate constituents or elements of the paragraph. They are elements or ultimate constituents because they can no longer be analyzed into smaller, meaningful segments by the same analytic procedures. A different procedure (like asking what functions as subject, predicate, or object) would produce a different list of constituents: but the criteria would not be based on significant composition. Consider the words or forms in the German-English example as its immediate constituents. The simple forms, bound or free, which compose those words, are elements or ultimate constituents of both that sentence and a paragraph in which it might occur, but clearly as the result of analyses of units established on different norms. There are many questions one can ask about forms that seem to have the same composition, but which can be distinguished as units of different kinds, serving different functions in their own right, at different levels of analysis. 3.16 Elements and Units. If morphs, allomorphs, or morphemes are viewed as elements, words are the units they constitute. Morph(eme)s as units can be discussed in terms of phonological distinction (from other sense-related morphs) and semantic representation or realization (of the sense involved), e.g. (13)
mill,
meal,
Mel,
mail,
mull
/mil/,
/miyl/,
/mel/,
/meyl/,
/m l/,
Mal,
moll,
maul,
/mæl/,
/mal/,
mole ,
/mowl/
vs. pronounceable but nonoccurrent, (hence nonsense in English) */mul/ or */muwl/. A morph or allomorph (phoneme or may represent phoneme-sequence known to be significant) may realize or represent incompatible senses (homophony), e.g. English male child of, center of solar system, or bask in actinic rays. Latin /i/ may represent `go!', hence IMPerative {IMP}, the genitive singular of amic-us (`friend') (amic-i), the nominative plural (amic-i), vid-i, -the 1st person singular of the perfect tense active of vid-ere (`to see'). A morph(eme) may be bound (never occur alone, only cooccur) or free (indifferently occur or cooccur). A morph(eme) may belong to an open class or a closed class. Dictionaries update open classes and define meanings via specific lexical types. Grammars list closed classes and illustrate both open and closed classes with typical form classes.
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So bound, closed-set morph(eme)s may serve uniquely to identify open-set form-classes (parts of speech); they occur obligatorily in one language, optionally in another. Lexical morph(eme)s, an open set, can be bound or free, but may involve extralinguistic reference or sense; they can be language-peculiar or world-common and involve, e.g. optional distinction or mention of color, natural phenomena, social status, etc. versus psychological needs, biological necessities, pervasive climatic conditions, etc. Grammatical morph(eme)s, a closed set, are commonly bound, characterized only by intralinguistic sense, and are hence less world-common, more language-peculiar, e.g. obligatory distinction or mention of temporal, spatial, units and relations, source or type of knowledge, gender, number, etc. 3.17 The Word: A Minimal Free Form. Since language has such many-faceted uses, definitions of word abound to answer the most serious of subjective inquiries. An objective definition of word proposed by Leonard Bloomfield (1933:178) does not meet those concerns, but is publicly verifiable. He defined a word as `a minimum, free form'. Just what constitutes its minimality, freedom, and formal status can vary with languages, but given those norms, it can be objectively subclassified. English words, for example, can be classified in terms of their composition as (1) simple forms, a single free morpheme, e.g., now, hat, what, horse, if, but; (2) compound forms, more than one free morpheme, e.g., bandbox, firehouse, racehorse, carbarn; (3) complex forms of one free and one or more bound morphemes, eg. restart, discount, reformulate, forego, or of two or more bound morphemes, e.g., refer, compel, unkempt, inept, illegal; (4) complex-compound forms, one bound and more than one free, e.g., metoo-ism, pro-firehorse, ex-make-do-er. Words may also be classified in terms of their morphological constructions, whose elements are (1) morphs/morphemes and (2) their principles of construction: (A) Viewed statically, words may be classified by their contrast in arrangement, (1) A+B or B+A, e.g., warehouse, houseware (compounding) vs. (2) Contrast in position of bound forms (b)+A vs. A+(b) e.g. re+form (prefix) vs. hat+ful (suffix) vs. A+(c? )+B, e.g., base+icky+ball (infix) vs. A+(b) vs. A+Ø, e.g., melt + melted vs. cut + Ø (affix); (B) Viewed dynamically, words may be classified by their process of construction: (1) A vs. A+(b) vs. A+(c), e.g., hot vs. hott+er vs. hott+est (suffixation); (2) A vs. B+(b) vs. C?+(c), e.g., good vs. bett+er vs. best (suppletion) vs. A vs. A+(b), e.g., house vs. houses (suffixation); (3) A vs. A ± ?, e.g., mouse vs. mice, vs. louse vs. lice (internal modification); (4) A + repeat (modify) all or part of A, e.g., putt, itty bitty, criss cross (reduplication ± modification) (5) A+B+(c) vs. A+B+(d), e.g. nit+pick+er
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vs. nit+pick+ing, or A+(b)+(c) vs. A+(d)+(e), e.g. damn+at+ion vs. damn+abl+(l)y, or (A)+(b) vs. (A)+(c)+(d)+(e)+(f), e.g. stab+le vs stab+il+iz+at+ion (selection of form class via marker). 3.18 Perspectives. When allomorphs are phonologically predictable, a static presentation is clear, and the forms involved are called regular. Affixation with phonological conditioning seems the obvious rule. When composition varies with individual lexical items, the resultant forms are less transparent. They appear to violate the obvious rule, so a dynamic presentation is invoked, involving process-rather than affixation-rules. English does not exemplify of all of the terminology used above as well as some regular verbs in classical Greek. 3rd singular forms, [luei (`frees'); elue (`is freeing'); lusei (`will free'); eluse (`freed'); leluka (`has freed'); eleluke-i (`had freed'), if analyzed as follows, involve the bound root lu-and affixes: suffix:
lu-
prefix, suffix:
e- lu-
infix, suffix:
-ei : he free- -S -e:
he was free- -ING
lu- -s- -ei: he will free
prefix, infix, suffix:
e- lu- -s- -e:
reduplication, pre-in-suf-fix: pre-redupl-pre-in-suf-fix:
he free- -ED1
1- e- lu- -k- -e:
he has free- -ED2
e- 1- e- lu- -k- -e:
he had free- -ED2
English past {ED1} and participial {ED2} allomorphs have the same composition, but each is in parallel distribution respectively with past proved, and its free variant participial forms, proved or proven. English was proving and Greek eluon are both overtly progressive, but both luei and proves allow a progressive or nonprogressive interpretation. All the Greek words are complex, uniquely identified by their constituent bound combinations; English has forms called auxiliaries (was freeing, has/had freed, will free) whose status is as intermediate as the derivational vs. the inflectional affixes pro- and anti- discussed. They might be better termed bonded forms on the syntactic level. In the future perfect passive lelumenos estai (`he will have been freed'), Greek uses one participle and the otherwise free form estai (`he will be'), while English has two bonded auxiliaries (finite will and infinitival have) with two participles, been and freed. So units, composed of elements which may be units at other levels are identifiable in various ways, e.g. (1) morphologically through bound forms (here `+' stands for demands, `-' stands for excludes, `±' stands for tolerates: (a) lexical roots/stems + (b) defining bound morphemes, e.g. (a)+(b): + {-s Plur.} identify nouns + {-s Poss.}
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+ {-s + {-ed + {-ing + {-ed
3rd Sing.} Past} Part.} Part.}
identify verbs
+ {-er + {-est + {-er
Comp.} Superl.} Comp, -est sup}
identify adjectives
+ {-ly
`Manner'}
identifies adverbs
and (2) syntactically through: (a) syntactic markers: e.g. determiner + N (e.g. articles, demonstratives) to + infinitive more, most, + adj/adv (b) forms in parallel distribution with nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs can be technically called nominals, verbals, adjectivals, and adverbials. This makes handsome an adjectival, not an adjective, since its comparative more handsome is in parallel distribution with regular forms like hot, hotter); then is an adverbial, not an adverb (it is not identified morphologically by a defining bound form -ly); silly is an adjective, not an adverb (since it is in parallel distribution with comparative sillier, superlative silliest, and adverbs are not); singing is a verbal and can be a nominal (it bonds with auxiliaries, finite lexical verbs as well as with determiners); then is an adverbial, and can be a nominal (Then is when we did it in parallel distribution with Christmas is when we did it); handsome is an adjectival, can be a nominal (Handsome is as handsome does is an acceptable utterance). So, in objective structural description: the level, viewpoint, formality, or scope of morphological definition is within the word in isolation or in phrase, clause, or sentence; The level, viewpoint, formality, or scope of syntactic definition is among words, always in phrase, clause, or sentence. There is no contradiction in an adjective being a nominal: In this sense, the lower level is organizable by the higher. Simple, complex, compound, complex/ com-pound words function as units at the word-level: (allo)morph(eme)s are elements. All -als by virtue of parallel distribution, function as units at the syntactic-level. Words may be elements. 3.19 A Public Method. This descriptive vocabulary for identifying formclasses through their composition, neutralizable in terms of distribution, makes possible an objective summary of how English sentence-types differ on the basis of constituents: N can stand for nominals (i.e. all forms, no matter how complexly constructed, in parallel distribution with morphologically
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identifiable nouns) and V for verbals (i.e. all forms, no matter how complexly constructed, in parallel distribution with morphologically identifiable verbs). While trivially informative for native speakers, the method has the merit of objectivity needed in describing unknown languages. Nominals (N) and Verbals (V) in: N
+
V
Simple Word:
Death
comes
Complex/Compound Word:
Misunderstandings
transpire
Phrase:
Untoward accidents
happen
Clause:
Things we cherish the rest of our lives
occur
Other sentence types consisting of these basics include: N
Ve
N
Birds
weigh
ounces
Harry
resembles
Fred
N
Vt
N
Babies
drink
milk
Harry
abominates
Fred
Equational verbs (Ve) or linking verbs are distinguished from `transitive verbs (Vt) because a Ve cannot be passivized, a Ve excludes an agent, and a Vt demands an agent, e.g. *Ounces are weighed by birds and *Fred is resembled by Harry are ungrammatical (*), but Milk is drunk by babies and Fred is abominated by Harry are grammatical. N1
Vt
(N2)
Greeks
ran
Marathons
Marksmen
shoot
targets
N1
Vt
N2
Cobblers
make
boots
Artists
create
masterpieces
N1
Vt
N2
± N3
Judges
elected
her
Miss America
The people
proclaimed
Ambrose
their Bishop
The Bishop
crowned
him
king
N1
Vt
N2
N3
We all
deemed
him
the wisest
The jury
found
him
the murderer
A writ
avowed
her
an unfit Mother
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Ve
N2
is
a jolly good fellow
was
sweet sixteen
are
not amused
N1
He
She
We At the level of morphology, constructions are described in terms of free and bound forms. Some compound words are constructions where one or both members are distributed like the whole: either motor or car in obsolescent motorcar, but only the first part in automobile. 3.20 Distribution. The same phenomena are discussed in syntax as endocentric and exocentric construction. If a unit larger than a word has the same distribution as one of its member-units, it is endocentric, otherwise it is exocentric. These facts are relevant to the overt distinction of transitive from intransitive verbs, since the latter (e.g. in The child spoke) are grammatically complete without another nominal, while The child said is not. The relation between N1 and V, and between V and N2 in The child said something is equally exocentric: neither said or something can occur alone grammatically in that environment. English John sings and French Jean chante are exocentric, but the equivalent Latin Cantat or Spanish Canta demand no overt subject: Johannes cantat or Juan canta mention the subject as an optional expansion, so both are endocentric constructions. Exocentricity is definitive of grammatical constructions peculiar to a language. Many optionally expandable (endocentric) constructions are shared in languages. Endocentrics tolerate expansion, vs. exocentric construction which tolerate expansion and demand other member(s). Thus, endocentric word-bases tolerate affixes and compounding, exocentric word-bases demand other defining bound forms, and tolerate nondefining forms. Endocentric phrases tolerate expansion by lexically compatible words; exocentric phrases demand two words, tolerate nondefining expansions. Endocentric clauses demand a verbal; tolerate expansion; and, exclude lexical incompatibles. 3.21 Functional Classification: Hierarchy. Hierarchic perspectives (i.e., where higher functions are viewed as dominating lower, or lower as subservient to higher) can involve many complementary points of view. Facts can be viewed statically, and reported independently without either denying or implying other facts, or dynamically, as being interconnected is some way. Sentences (1) and (2) below record words and the order in which they are spoken, and can be interpreted as statements about the components of a particular scene: (1) John is on the ground. (2) The barrel weighs 600 pounds.
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Once this pair is accepted as a report about the static composition of a scenario and the distribution of its members, `the same facts' can be related more dynamically. Implicitly, as in: (3) John is under a 600 pound barrel. or explicitly, as in: (4) John is on the ground with a 600 pound barrel on top of him. or (5) A 600 pound barrel has pinned John to the ground. Choosing to report, or to examine reports, statically or dynamically involves additional and different kinds of systems. They are still definable as a finite number of items combining only in a finite number of ways. Systematic relationships (how members get organized into nonrandom combinations) of very many kinds are commonly discussed, not all of which are fruitful in linguistic study. But if we have to do with a system consisting of just two members (take A and B for the simplest kind of system), the ways in which they are related within, or organized into, that system have been expressed in terms such as: (B)
(A) organizes (B)
(A) is presupposed by
(B)
(A) is a subset of
(A)
(B) reduces irregularity of
(A)
to regularity (B)
makes (A)
intelligible (B)
predicts (A)
(B) is a condition for
(A)
(B) and
co-vary
3.22 Co-Variation. The last notionco-variation has already been illustrated in several different ways, within the same level of analysis and between higher and lower ones. The traditional notions of subject and predicate co-vary (i.e., neither one can be defined without defining the other). Phonemes are identified in terms of the co-variation of phonetic and meaning differences. Allophones are identified in terms of the co-variation of phonetic differences and distribution. Members of exocentric constructions co-vary (or the notion of their construction is evacuated). Concord in person, number and gender is a relation of co-variation. Government (e.g. cases demanded by different verbs or prepositions) is co-variation in the presence of the different governors and governed forms. The relationship can be stated statically (e.g. when an English subject is singular, the verb constructed with it is singular) or dynamically (e.g. to turn the statement `That is so obvious' into a question, prepose the verb). Such relations can also be called functional, since function can be generically defined as a factor related to or dependent upon other factors.
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Co-variation among forms and meanings can be obvious. It is easy to see when comparing I see him and He sees me; less so in He sees me and I was the one seen by him, and for a nonnative, even less apparent in She bribed the warden and It was by a woman that an illegal gift was made to the one in charge of prisoners. When such relationships are objective or empirically accessible, and when they should be regarded matters of subjective intuition is disputed. Among the reasons for dispute is the diffuse notion of meaning that is involved, and so of equivalence in meaning. The last two sentences can have the same referents, but differ in sense. Analysts cannot be sure whether a native speaker of an unknown language appreciates the difference (if they themselves understand it and consider it can be used without confusing things) when asking whether a pair of sentences `mean the same thing' or not. In phonology, that minimal pairs differ in meaning is more important than what kind of meaning is involved. At the level of grammar, kinds of meaning-equivalence are more relevant. Phonemics shows how language functions as a pattern of contrasts among factors of composition, distribution, and function. Phonetic composition is equated with articulations producing acoustic impression, distribution is equated with where sounds occur in the time lapse of speech, modeled by a linear representation. Function is described there in terms of speaker reaction to that sequence. Lower analysis specifies compositional types as same or different; functional identities and variants are established by the higher: it does this mainly on the basis of distribution. The minimal pairs in Appendix 2.7 show that not all English phonemes appear at every place (i.e. `are not distributed in the same way') in otherwise identical words. Those that do are said to be in parallel distribution, those that do not are said to be in complementary distribution. The importance of this is that since language functions as a system of contrasts, only items in parallel distribution are capable of signalling a contrast: that parallel distribution and contrast are two aspects of the same phenomenon. The assumption also illustrates what is higher and lower about the analysis, since complementary distribution can downgrade the importance of compositional similarities and differences. An initial assumption made was, that if different messages are to be communicated, differently constituted signals are to be expected. This assumption is now qualified, because signals can be alternately same or different at lower, intermediate, and higher levels within the system of systems we take languages to be. 3.23 Messages and Signals. Different messages can be signalled by the same phoneme-sequence much more complicated than lexical homophones (sue, Sue, Soo, Sioux):
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The Count of Monte Christo cursed the day he was born. Phonemic analysis cannot disambiguate this sentence. Nor can morphological analysis. Yet the notion of parallel and complementary distribution applies throughout language viewed hierarchically as signals with different functions at various levels. The same, or a different, or a functionally related message, can be communicated by changing the composition, distribution, or function of the signals along a continuum that varies from paraphrase to basic differences. All of these sentences have substantially the same composition, but minor shifts of position and small changes in composition can have a great or no effect on their interpretation: (1)
Monte Christo spoke at a particular time.
(2)
Monte Christo said something about something.
(3)
Monte Christo performed (2) at a particular time.
(1) or (2)Monte Christo cursed the day he was born. (1) or (2)Monte Christo cursed the day of his birth. Monte Christo cursed the day on which he was born. (1) or (2)Monte Christo cursed when he was born. Monte Christo cursed the day which was his (2) or (1) birthday. (2)
Monte Christo put a curse on the day of his birth.
(1)
On the day he was born, Monte Christo cursed.
(2)
On the day he was born, Monte Christo cursed it.
(3)
On his birthday, Monte Christo cursed something.
(2)
The day of his birth was cursed by Monte Christo.
classifiable as:
(1) SV (A)
It N1
then came to be Ve process
(2) SVO (A)
it N2 then
He N1 caused Vt action
(3) SVO (A)
it N2 then
He N1 caused Vt action
Depending on how the overt sentences are analyzed, questions and denials will be interpreted in different ways:
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Questioning. Sentence:
Did Monte Christo curse the day he was born?
Grammatical subject:
Who cursed the day he was born?
The what of Monte Christo cursed the day he was Lexical subject: born? Lex. subj. complement:
The Count of what cursed the day he was born?
Grammatical verb:
What did Monte Christo do the day he was born?
Lexical verb:
Did the Count of Monte Christo curse the day he was born?
Grammatical subject:
What did the Count of Monte Christo curse?
Lexical object: Which day did the Count of Monte Christo curse? Temporal adverbial:
When did the Count of Monte Christo curse?
Elements indefinitely:
Who did what when? What was done by whom when? The what of where did what to the what of what?
Denying. Sentence: The Count of Monte Christo did not curse the day he was born. Grammatical subject: It was not the Count who cursed the day he was born. Lexical subject: It was not the COUNT who cursed the day he was born. Lex. subj. complement: It was not the Count who cursed the day he was born. Grammatical verb:
Monte Christo did not curse the day he was born.
Lexical verb:
The Count did not curse the day he was born.
Grammatical object:
Monte Christo did not curse the day he was born.
Lexical object: The Count did not curse the day he was born. Lex. obj. complement:
Monte Christo did not curse the day he was born.
Temporal adverbial:
The Count of Monte Christo did not curse then.
Elements indefinitely: It wasn't a whatsis of wherever who did whatever then/when. It wasn't a whosis of whatsis by whom the whatsis of whatever was done.
Abbreviating. The Count of Monte Christo cursed the day he was born The Count
cursed the day he was born Monte Christo
cursed the day he was born
He
cursed the day he was born
He
cursed it
He
cursed then
He
did it
to it
He
did it
then
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Some consequences: The more elaborate the compositional difference, the more diffuse the shared sense; The less elaborate the compositional difference, the more generic the shared reference; The more elaborate the compositional difference, the more specific the reference; Regardless of compositional complexity, functional relations can be similar. These parallel the distinction between meaning as sense or reference. Descriptives like Charles the Fat or Ethelred the Unready aside, names are used with a definite reference but no defining sense through which they can be paraphrased. Brutus and Caesar were familiar names and persons. The etymological senses of the names may even remind us of how one was born and of the other's reputation after an ugly deed. Even a name like Angel has neither a descriptive nor defining sense, however rich in connotations. 3.24 Optional 'Expansions' Compared to 'Abbreviations'. to N2
N1 did it Brutus
Caesar killed
The ablest helped to do in... Roman of abetted the murder of... them all...
his best friend was about to kill... must have been about to become
This man, party to the honor-laden
disposal of...
intimate of his was cruelly friend's table
Rome's noblest prevailed upon
and counsels,
leader, etc. not to accept
trusted beyond the pallid subterfuge narrow prudence... of being a mere accessory before the fact in the cynical decision to cut down... 3.25 Parallels. Parallel distribution is definable in terms of the environment (i.e. the place, the type of place, the function of the place, or the surroundings of the occurrence in a place like syllable, word, phrase, or larger
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sequences). Reviewing the ideas through the examples we have seen so far, its application at different levels becomes clearer. Parallel distribution is perfect in minimal pairs. Minimal must be defined through criteria relevant to the various levels of analysis. Pairs are not minimal if levels are mixed. Relevant includes what is presupposed: what makes data interesting and germane to a purpose. We distinguished some of the usual environments that determine linguistic relevance:
phonetic:
preceding/subsequent ±voice, ±nasality, ±stop, ±fricative...
initial/medial/final in syllables, ±stress, in morphs, phonological: words, phrases, clauses, sentences... ±grammatical (inflectional, derivational); ±lexical, morphological: ±cognitive; ±affective; ±bound; ±head... lexical:
±concrete; ±count; ±gradable; ±generic...
syntactic:
±basic; ±initiating; ±autonomous...
pragmatic
±cognitive; ±political; ±ironic; ±literal;
(rhetorical)
±formal...
3.26 Contexts. Utterances in context contrast the actual and potential phonemic status of segments vs. suprasegmentals. Sounds used frequently to make important distinctions are said to have a heavy functional load, those used infrequently, little functional load. Some distinctions are important to all environments, some only to a few, as seen in suprasegmental contrasts like: There is no need to inCENSE the congregation There is no need to INcense the congregation and His ill-gotten gain was only in CENTS His ill-gotten gain was only INcense. 3.27 What English Speakers Actually Say. Distinguishing sentence- or verb-types on a semantic basis is less empirical than a descriptive approach. It can be fairly exact, since native speakers do reach public agreement about basic interpretations, though no objective method resolves differences of opinion. The most thorough recent treatment of English is A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985) by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik, abbreviated in A Concise Grammar of Contemporary English (1972). Sentence patterns are shown in terms familiar in traditional grammar. The labels (and subclasses) are more detailed than an N and V sketch of the minimum and maximum number of form-types demanded for simple declaratives. Constructions abbreviated as SVA, SVC, SVO, etc., are all exocentric and mutually exclusive: i.e., they contain no optional expansions. Each function is demanded as definitive of the seven contrastive patterns, although fillers for each function can vary (e.g., in the house, or at home, or there).
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N and V can stand, not exclusively for morphological nouns and verbs, but for all forms in parallel distribution with them: such forms share a function. While Quirk's labels mix explicitly functional (subject, object, complement) and implicitly compositional norms (verb, adverb), the N and V labels could be mistaken for compositional ones. Linguistic communication as a system of contrasts shows interdependence among composition (the level of phones and morphs), distributional modification (the level of allophones and allomorphs) and functional identity of the results (the level of phonemes and morphemes). This respects the uniqueness of languages. A traditional approach takes functions Language must serve, notes how they are distributed in sentences, and concludes to forms eligible to manifest those functions. That respects the similarity of languages. Selecting units as basic, on different norms, both methods inquire about what each demands, excludes, or tolerates. Neither is completely successful in providing empirically objective evidence for how some patterns are equated by speakers. Quirk's abbreviations stand for: S = Subject, V = Verb intensive (in need of lexical supplement), monotransitive (demanding only one object), ditransitive (demanding a direct and indirect object), complex transitive (demanding a direct object + comp or adv), intransitive (a direct object is excluded). Object(s) are direct or indirect. Complement is of a subject or of a direct object, and adverbs of various types, e.g. here, an adverb of place. (1) SVA
S
V-intense
A-place
Mary
is
in the house
S
V-intense
Cs
Mary
is
kind
(2a)
Mary
is
a nurse
(3) SVO
S
V-monotrans
Od
(2) SVC
the ball
Somebody caught (4) SVOA
(5) SVOC
(5a)
(6) SVOO
(7) SV
S
V-cplx trans
Od
A-place
I
put
the plate
on the table
S
V-cplx trans
Od
Co
We
have proved
We
him
wrong
him
a fool
have proved
S
V-ditrans
Oi
Od
She
gives
me
expensive gifts
S
V-intrans
The child
laughed
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3.28 Substitutes. Depending on the point of view taken in an analysis, the same data could be classified in other ways to bring out what is more relevant within each approach, e.g., using plurals: (1) SVA
S
V-intense
A-place
They
were
there
S
V-intense
Cs
They
were
such
(2a)
They
were
those
(3) SVO
S
V-monotrans
Od
They
caused
them
S
V-cplx trans
Od
A-place
They
caused-become
them
there
S
V-cplx trans
Od
Co
They
caused-become
them
such
(5a)
They
caused-become
them
those
(6) SVOO
S
V-ditrans
Oi
Od
They
caused-become
to them
those
S
V-intrans
They
behaved (thus)
(2) SVC
(4) SVOA
(5) SVOC
(7) SV
This substitutes pro-verbs as definitive of sentence-types, since these verbs demand certain complements, exclude others. Assuming predication as the central function of every sentence (which demands a verb or verbal), the following expressions used as predicates in English are verbal-types distinguishable because (among other reasons), states exclude progressive aspect and agent; processes tolerate progressive aspect exclude agent; while actions demand agent and tolerate progressive aspect. Describing them in this fashion sharpens the difficult question of whether meaningful unit and morpheme can be equated simply at all levels of analysis: Basic State
Experimental
Benefactive
Locative
grown learned
won
near
learn
win
near
learn
win
near
Process grow
Action
grow
E.g.,
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State:
The children are grown. The scholars are learned. The prizes are won. The houses are near.
Children grow. Scholars learn. Prizes are won. Process: The storms near.
Action:
Children grow flowers. Scholars learn lore. Children win races. The children near the house.
Assuming further that every predicate (verb, or verbal) must be intrinsically stative, processive or active, or derived from one of the other types, each could be paraphrased in the following terms:
State: Process:
be (come to be):become
grown, learned, won, or near grown, learned, won, or near
grown, learned, won, or cause-be(come)near
Action: (do):
The procedure appeals to parallel distribution (PD): just as pronouns are in PD with nouns, these proforms are in PD with verbs or verbals. Other proforms arise if sentences and their parts or constituents can be sensibly questioned. Each constituent question elicits a corresponding proform answer, or a repetition of the form(s) with which it is in parallel distribution: QUESTIONING SVA Subject (1) Adverb
NORMAL ANSWER PROFORM
Mary is in the house. Who is in the house? Where is Mary? Mary in the house
she there
someone the ball
he/she/they it
catch it
do
I did
I
Someone caught the ball. SVO Who caught the ball? Subject What did someone catch? Dir. Obj. What did someone do with (3) Verbal the ball?
SVOA (4) Subject
I put the plate on the table. Who put the plate on the table?
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it Object Adverb Verb
What did I put on the table? Where did I put the plate? What did I do with/to...
do the plate on the table here put it on the table
SVOC We have proved him wrong. Main Suj. Who has proved him wrong? (5) Object What have we proved? We proved him wrong that he is wrong
We it
Subordinate Subject Verb
What did we prove about him? What did we do to him? that he is wrong proved him wrong
it do-to
She gives me expensive gifts. SVOO Who gives me expensive gifts? Subject What does she give me? Object To whom does she give Ind. Ob expensive gifts? What does she do to me? Verb Does she give or what does she (6) Lex. Vb. do? She does She Expensive gifts them To me Gives me gifts
todo-to
gives/buys
do
The child It laughed
he/she/it behaved so
SV The child laughed. Subject Who laughed? (7) Sentence What did the child do?
Since gender and number contrasts are irrelevant in plurals, they and them exemplify nominal functions; be, become, do(to)/cause, verbal ones. So far, we have seen five ways of classifying Quirk's sample:
(1)
SVA
Mary They N
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in the house there adverb
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Mary They N
is are `be' basic state
kind such N
(2a)
They N
are `be' basic state
those N
(3) SVO
caught Somebody do-to They Vt N1 basic action
(2) SVC
the ball them N2
I They (4) SVOA N1
put cause/become Vt locative action
the plate on the table them there N2 adverb
We They (5) SVOC N1
have proved cause-become Vt
him them N2
wrong such N3
We They N1
have proved cause-become Vt experiential action
him them N2
a fool those N3
She They (6) SVOO N1
gives cause-become Vt benefactive action
me to them N2
expensive gifts those N3
(5a)
(7) SV
The child They N
laughed do so V basic process
3.29 Answering Questions. These classifications are based on different questions about the same data, complementing rather than contradicting each other. Quirk's formulae are to characterize any sentence as (1) grammatical because it matches one of his 7 demand-patterns,
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(2) ungrammatical because lacking a defining function, (3) reductively identical with one of the seven, or (4) identical with one of the seven, but with an optionally added function. The child laughed in the house would be (7) SV with an optional adverbial while Mary is is unacceptable as ellipting (1) Mary is in the house). SVO (3) without its overt O is Someone caught. It is neither ungrammatical nor identical with (7) SV, but abbreviates pattern (3), Someone played catcher. (4) SVOA without A is grammatical with a different lexical item: I deposited the plate differs from I laid the plate (on the table). Unlike the other patterns, the SVOCs (5) and (5a) have compound paraphrases: (a) We proved something to someone: he is wrong, and (b) We proved something to someone: he is a fool, since (a) combines patterns (5) and (1), and (b) fits (5) with (1a). Pattern (3) would be assigned to SVO He robs banks, but He steals money from banks fits SVOA pattern (4). Pattern (7) SV would fit The child waltzed, but not (3) SVO The child danced a waltz. Natives can agree that some of these sentences are referentially equivalent despite overt differences in composition or sense. One attempt to account for that conviction is to classify verbs intrinsically: If catch is intrinsically processive, it is a derived active here, whether its object is overtly manifested or not; deposit as well as put are Locative; rob (rather oddly), is classed as benefactive, and prove is experiential. We seem to need some distinction between the plausibly universal human phenomena of changing places, minds and ownership. The basis for it is not obvious in the elemental composition of these patterns. Complementarity rather than contradiction results when basic and benefactive verbs are not identified with transitive and intransitive ones (i.e. verbs defined only by the presence or absence of an expressed object). The child steals differs from The child laughs: (1) Questioning presumed constituents of the first can elicit what the child steals from whom, and why. (2) Constituent negation produces The child did not steal anything from anyone. (3) The first is unambiguously action, and can abbreviated passively as They are stolen by them from them. (4) The child laughs is ambiguously action or process: As process it excludes agent, cannot be passivized, negated, or questioned in the same way. As action, its object is lexicalized in the verb: The child laughed a laugh, much like The child ran (a race), The child danced (a dance) or She bribed the warden, which is benefactive. As an action, the second can be questioned as to what and why, not from whom, since laugh is basic, not benefactive.
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On these different assumptions, apparently identical technical terms are used (e.g. the term Object), but the distribution of the terms is not parallel in the two approaches, so their meaning or function is also predictably different. In She bribed the warden with money The warden was bribed by her Her money bribed the warden warden, money, and her are `objects' (direct or indirect), and three different forms are subjects (she, warden and money) because of the positions they occupy when classifying verbs as transitive and intransitive. This is a two-term system contrasting subjects and objects on the basis of their linear distribution. On the functional assumption that verbs can be distinguished intrinsically, the role of warden is always object, both she or by her express agent, and money a means or instrument. This involves a threeterm system which makes minimal-pair contrast with a two-term one impossible. The technical term object cannot function identically in the two kinds of classification. The descriptivists' methods of classification are not only well-designed for a step by step, hierarchic approach to exotic languages, but useful for an account of one's own. When hierarchy is taken as a set of presuppositions (what is taken for granted, what makes sense of, or what may explain, bring order into data), native resources are superior to what any nonnative can supply. Our discussion of the different ways of classifying objects may suggest this. A method which first demands an explicit account of what any item contrasts with in composition and distribution before invoking function is more public. It is more susceptible of empirical falsification than one based only on intuitive knowledge of how that item functions alone. It is dubious whether anyone ever did or could use such a method. 3.30 Description and Explanation. Any description is an implied comparison, and comparisons imply a norm. Making implications or presuppositions explicit is a step toward the objectivity of a scientific approach. It marks what is relevant, shows why anyone would be interested in mastering complex data, and why careful early steps are valuable. While each descriptive step was supposed to be autonomous, one can suspect actual practitioners took some things for granted that did not emerge in their objective presentations. Is it impertinent to ask why phoneticians maintain their interest in refining sound descriptions well beyond the need of native speakers? Why questions put to individuals get individual answers. A professional subgroup might answer that their work is basic to larger interests in linguistics. Phoneticians describe what speakers do. Particularly in descriptive linguistics, speech is taken to be the most elementary aspect of what is studied. One may doubt whether all phoneticians go to the lab every day, buoyed by the heady conviction that their reliable data makes others' studies
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possible. But no one can be a specialist in every facet of language. In the sense of how subparts of language study are defined by immediately higher levels, and define levels immediately lower than they are in description, these can be proposed as part of what is being taken for granted: Phonetics
presuppose(s) Phonology
Phonemes
Morphemes
Morphemes
Words
Words
Constructions
Constructions
Sentences
Sentences
Discourse
Discourses
Human communication
Human communication
Symbolic organization
Symbolic organization
Rationality
Rationality
Structure of things experienced? Structuring by experience?
Just what rationality presupposes has been a topic of debate since the dawn of Western thought. Conclusions about it have influenced approaches to linguistic description and explanation in both direct and indirect ways. Subsequent chapters will explore some of them. Reading Francis, Winthrop Nelson. 1958. The structure of American English. New York. Ronald Press. Palmer, Frank. 1971. Grammar. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Sledd, James. 1959. A short introduction to English Grammar. Chicago. Scott, Foresman. Twaddell, William Freeman. 1963. The English verb auxiliaries. 2nd ed. Providence: Brown University Press. Supplementary Reading Akmajian, A., R. Demers and R. Harnish. 1984. Linguistics: An introduction to language and communication. 2nd ed. Cambridge MA. M.I.T. Press. Cook, Walter A. 1989. Case grammar Theory. Washington, D.C. Georgetown University Press. Fries, Charles Carpenter. 1952. The structure of English. New York. Harcourt, Brace, and World. Gleason, Henry Allan, Jr. 1965. Linguistics and English grammar. New York. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Jacobs, Roderick and Peter Rosenbaum. 1968. English transformational grammar. Lexington. Xerox College Publishing. Jespersen, Otto. 1933 (1964) reprint: Essentials of English grammar. Montgomery. University of Alabama Press. Joos, Martin. 1962. The Five Clocks. Bloomington. University of Indiana Press. . 1964. The English verb: Form and meanings. Madison. University of Wisconsin Press. . 1966. Readings in linguistics. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. Long, Ralph B. 1961. The sentence and its parts. Chicago. Chicago University Press. Longacre, Robert. 1964. Grammar discovery procedures. The Hague. Mouton. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and John Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London. Longman. . 1973. A concise grammar of contemporary English. London. Longman. Robins, Henry A. 1989. General linguistics: An introductory survey. 3rd. ed. London: Longman.
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4 Ancient Linguistics 4.00 Greek Concern for Language. `The Greeks had a word for it' shows admiration for the most precise thinkers in Western history. `It's all Greek to me' shows impatience with technical terms when ordinary language seems just as exact. Many technical terms used in linguistics were originally coined by the Greeks, transliterated into Latin, and then borrowed into modern languages. As more ancient and medieval manuscripts are rediscovered and edited, our grasp of what they took for granted and why will be refined. Little more than a plausible outline can be suggested here. The vocabulary of Chapter 3 can serve as a basis of comparison for distinctions made by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics about Greek. While Descriptive Linguistics developed terms to talk about signs that mean something, the Greeks were more concerned about what was meant than in the form of signs. The two goals are complementary. What linguists study is narrow, compared to the Greek works on Rhetoric, Logic, Poetics and Grammar. Logic and Grammar are still closely associated, but Rhetoric now takes the findings of the others more for granted: facts established at one level of analysis can be presupposed at another. 4.01 Rhetoric. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey took root in ancient Greece well before they were written down and long before the term fiction was invented. They were quoted, discussed and recited by heart, a model and a beloved source of Greek mythology, history, and genius. Wily Ulysses and the other heroes were admired as much for their use of language as for their adventures. When small City States constituted the political world, Sicilian Greeks were among the first to earn renown in debate. Citizens were expected to be not only articulate contributors to public life, but soldiers, statesmen, and literary figures as well. As rhetoric developed, labels for the intuitive ways speakers attained clarity, force, or interest, took on a technical status. Rhetoricians, poets, and their critics could discuss them by name. Some of those labels which we inherited confuse levels like phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, lexicon and semantics, usage and prescription. Some confuse deliberate manipulation with unmotivated change, or contrasts between older and recent expressions. Each presents a nameable challenge to formal grammarians. 1 Early orators like Pericles (497-429) were spontaneous masters, without manuals to guide them. Isocrates (436-338) then listed successful techniques: choice of words, rounding of sentences, rhythmic periodic sentences, apt
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figures of speech and the charm of the combination. His pupil Isaeus (400-350) preferred Lysias' simplicity; the latter's pupil Demosthenes and his contemporaries were the acme of Greek Rhetoric and the onset of its decline, when rhetoric was pursued as a purely practical skill. The Rhetoric of Aristotle (384-322) was more concerned with how rhetorical language differs responsibly according to subject matter and means of conviction. 4.02 Rhetoric and the Sophists. At the height of their influence, Sophists were reputed as educated and interesting lecturers, persuasive speakers useful for public life. The company of leading Sophists was sought by the best Greek minds, including Pericles, Euripides, and Socrates. But when form seemed nobler than content, they were accused of teaching that Rhetoric should be judged by its power to sway, not on the basis of the truths involving some philosophy, science, or set of facts. Their teaching, nonetheless, had produced useful distinctions for the explicit discussion of language. The first Sophist, Protagoras of Abdera (445), is credited with having distinguished either 4 or 5 sentence types, (4) prayer
command
question
statement
(5) invitation
question
answer
report
narration
as well as grammatical from natural gender, and tense vs. time. Gorgias of Leontini distinguished analytic vs. synthetic Styles, Prodicus of Ceos real from apparent Synonyms. Hippias of Elis numbered and distinguished syllable types for rounded sentences. The refinements arose within the context of serious disagreement about the characteristics of nature and society. The topics which emerged became the labels for these celebrated Disputes: Physis (Nature) vs. Nomos (Convention), and Anomaly (Irregularity) vs. Analogy (Regularity). 4.03 Physis-Nomos. The Physis-Nomos Dispute asked whether human institutions derive from nature or society's conventions. It involved competing views about the State and its organization, with consequences for how the good citizen should regard: questions of ethics and justice; the source, obligations and limits of human rights and duties; what constitutes a crime or a violation of morality, and what freedom could mean for the state or its citizens. Language became a central concern and opinions varied about its origin, how it was used, and how meanings of individual expressions were to be understood. 4.04 Anomaly-Analogy. The linguistic debate was called the Anomaly-Analogy Controversy. Greek verb morphology is so complex that regularities are hard to appreciate without taking syntax into account. Anomalists found many reasons for arguing that whatever the origin of language was, current speakers simply had to know what individual expressions meant. That must be acquired by memorization, because there are few or no organizing rules to
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discover: it was anomalous. Analogists argued that apparent anomalies must be reducible to intelligible regularities (analogies). They assumed both language and nature were organized in a regular fashion. The subtlety of early discussion of word-origins is lost on readers coming upon it after more than two thousand years of analysis. We can name the inventors and date the coinage of recent words, but most are too ancient for that. Could imitation of natural sounds account for them: are things so built that they determine an articulatory response? If so, that would constitute a direct way in which Nature (Physis) is the root-cause of an important part of language: onomatopoeia [name (onoma) making (poeia)] became a technical term for that process. That some words imitate things making a sound (like cuckoo) is more plausible than that sounds imitate what we smell, taste, touch or see. None of the Greek `experts' could analyze complex forms into roots and affixes, nor identify processes of syntactic construction. No mention is made of words that could have been but were not imitations (like crow instead of caw-caw), nor whether people could resist physical determinism. Wherever names came from, 'name'-combinations could include: (1) natural origin with (2) natural or (3) conventional development; (4) conventional origin with (5) natural or (6) conventional changes. Originals might have been (7) naturally (8) regular or (9) irregular, later becoming naturally (10) irregular or (11) regular, or (12) conventionally (13) irregular or (14) regular, developing conventionally as (15) regular or (16) irregular, or (17) conventional and (18) regular or (19) irregular, which then became (20) naturally (21) irregular or (22) regular, or perhaps (23) conventionally (24) irregular or (25) regular, developing (26) conventionally in a (27) regular or (28) irregular fashion among many other possibilities. The picture is complicated. The details are tedious. But an explicit study of language is even more complex, when seriously undertaken. At least an outline taxonomy like this would be needed as a start: NATURAL Anomalous
(Physis) Analogous
CONVENTIONAL Anomalous
(Nomos) Analogous
THINGS: now/then LANGUAGE: now/then Questions in the Physis/Nomos mode could be expressed in Descriptive vocabulary as concerning the analysis of: Simple words into letters
1, 2, 3 ...
Complex words into word-parts
1, 2, 3 ...
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Questions in the Anomaly/Analogy mode of discussion could be expressed in descriptive terms as concerning the correctness of simple forms in isolation, or of constructions involving them. 4.05 Correctness. Anomalists said Nature may or may not be regular but language is not: convention makes expressions correct. Analogists said language and nature are regular; there are parallels, even though the link is conventional. Such a connection probably motivated the one who first invented names. A `first Name-Giver' strikes us as mythical, compared to asking who invented biodegrade and how they went about it. Was Sikorski the Name-Giver who thought up helicopter? Is it impossible that no one foresaw the complex of metaphors which helicopter would have to fit into. . . port:
related to Latin porta (`gate') and portare (`carry').
airport:
where airships land or the gate they enter.
porter:
a person who carries things (among other duties)
redcap:
one badge of a porter
skycap:
an airport porter
heliport:
where helicopters land
helicopter: airship using the inclined plane (helix) principle as an airscrew:
for more than propulsion, dispensing with a wing
(pter)
for lift, unlike its predecessor, the propeller-driven
autogiro,
which landed slowly since unpowered helical blades gyrated, automatically giving extra lift to its stubby wings;
automobile:causing its own mobility automaton: self-directing. 4.06 So-Seem-Said. Put another way: have Language, Thought, and Reality each their own autonomous structure a SO-SEEM-SAID Triad among (a) how things exist independently; (b) how they appear to us, regardless of their autonomy; and (c) how we must talk about them, no matter what or whether we think about them or how they actually exist? This formulation assumes the independence and reality of what we experience, as common sense and the Aristotelian tradition do. We could focus on all three, or on one, or on different pairs. Descriptive Linguistics concentrates on SAID; the ancient Greek world dealt with the Triad, gradually distinguishing autonomous (Compositional) from relative (Distributional, Functional) terms in Rhetoric, Logic, and Grammar, and pioneering the use of SAID about SAID VS. SO-SAID, SEEM-SAID or SO-SEEM-SAID. 4.07 Plato on Language. An early work with a linguistic theme is Plato's Dialogue, Cratylos. What favors or militates against the natural vs. conventional origin of expressions is argued, but no decisive answer emerges. Some Cratylos themes: judgements are true and false, and names are deeply involved. Names are tools like knives (some well, others badly made)
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but both can be skillfully or clumsily used. Some are better than others at tools or names but gods are likely better name-makers than men; experts are chosen before the inexpert, and men are preferable to women for that task. Words with differing senses but identical references are a problem. Plato's `state of the question' recalls intralinguistic vs. extralinguistic determination: phonemes are established by extralinguistic facts (English cat does not meant the same as gat); allophones are established by intralinguistic determinations (the phonetic differences of /p/ in /pap p/ are distributionally determined). He notes that, just as some things in nature must, may, or cannot go together, so too in language: some words are sociable and others are not. Is the explanation to be sought within language or from the things outside language, things which we use language to talk about? If someone says This is a painting of my brother, and that is judged to be true, how can English speakers confidently make these other assertions? Someone used paint, not charcoal, to make a picture. The painting is present and visible. There are other pictures and painters. The father and mother of the speaker have more than one son. Some connections among them are clear because they are in English: Chinese has no obligatory distinction of tense or number (so no contrast of definite vs. indefinite) but `real world' facts about portraits might justify some conclusions in both societies. But the intralinguistic, arbitrary, demands of English grammar require overt expression of factors which Chinese grammar does not. So is there more evidence in the true English sentence for inferences made than in its Chinese equivalent? That can be glossed (vaguely for English speakers) as something like `This thing here brotherly representation'. Languages function as systems of systems of contrast, and the obligatory systems in English include more than the Chinese: This is vs. that was these will be
the paint-ing
of my
brother
a
draw-ing
of our
cousin
Ø
watercolor-colors
of her
friend
pencil-sketches
of their uncle
those
While not obliged to contrast tense or number grammatically, Chinese demands (and English does not) a lexical choice between older and younger brother; its word for painting is indifferent to oils, and brotherly is as ambiguous as English is elsewhere: painting of my brother could be the one my brother made, or a painting made of my brother as its subject. 4.08 Technique of the Division. An amusing discussion, but with a serious intent, asks how to define Sophist: is a Sophist what he presents himself to be and the name suggests (wise, a purveyor of wisdom) or is he,
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despite that name, not so admirable? A definition of fishing is a model for analyzing words which, like Sophist, may involve a necessary hierarchy of semantic dependencies. Such a set is an hyponymy: generic top terms must dominate lower specific or individual ones, but the lower ones dominate nothing above them. In English, once agreed that something is a rock, it necessarily follows that it is inanimate. But if we agree that something is inanimate, it does not follow that it is a rock. This method of discussing such topics has been seen as a first step toward a formal logic. That is, a method which guarantees the soundness of a concluding statement because of the way it relates to other statements. It is like the reliability of ways numbers can be validly put together, without regard to whatever those numbers count. 4.09 Logos. In the Cratylos, where Protagoras' distinction of a sentencetype for statement is mentioned, Plato used the expression logos. That word had many interpretations in common use, but soon became a technical term. In the Sophist, Plato compares thought to language, a `conversation of the soul with itself' (264 a), where speech is `the stream of thought which flows through the lips and is audible' (263 e). Every logos is true or false (262 e): a false one `asserts the non-existence of things which are, and the existence of things which are not' (240 e). But: can `all names can be connected with one another, or none, or only some of them?' (261 d). In a logos, `names' include rhema (`verb'), `which denotes actions' and onoma (`noun'), a `mark set on those who do the actions' (261 d- 262 a). Logos (often translatable as sentence), is a sequence in which `verbs are mingled with nouns' (262 c). Every logos must have a subject (262 c), and onoma + rhema is the first and smallest construction (262 c). 4.10 Logic or Grammar. Plato talked about language in the words elementary school teachers used, but logos, onoma and rhema later became more common in a `logical' context. Yet nothing forces us to translate them as peculiar to either Logic or Grammar, or as common to both. They were not simply coined by Plato like Kodak by George Eastman, so their translation into either technical or ordinary terms can be misleading. The fields were not then distinct. Much more time was required. Plato's expressions need not be translated as purely grammatical terms. In Plato's time, gramma referred to what English letter now refers to among other things; onoma coincides with references of English name, among other things; rhema coincides with references of English expression, among other things; logos coincides with the reference of English argument, among other things. Contemporaries used logos where we would use sentence, discourse, story, reason, ratio, rule, rational principle or definition; they could use onoma for name, word, and eventually noun, and rhema for phrase, word, saying, expression, and eventually verb or predicate.
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4.11 Parts of Speech. Could onoma and rhema be translated as Parts of Speech? That transliterates partes orationis, a Latin transliteration of the Greek mere: tou logou, (parts of the logos). In Latin, oratio had much the same range as speech in English: (1) the power or faculty of oral communication; (2) an act of oral communication; (3) what is spoken; (4) a form of oral communication; (5) a single utterance; (6) a manner of oral communication; (7) the study of oral communication; (8) an actor's section of oral communication in theatrics; (9) the field studying oral communication, and (10) (archaic) a rumor. That all these expressions are related, yet distinguishable, is obvious. Less obvious is how or whether disciplines with identical subject-matter can be autonomous: because of a different point of view, or because of a different purpose in studying it. 4.12 Aristotle on Language. The interests of the Greeks embraced the whole of human experience, so isolating individual words, or even `linguistic' topics from Plato's and Aristotle's writings, must be superficial and can be quite misleading. A summary of, and a few quotations from, Aristotle's output show the need for caution. Identical technical terms guarantee no identity in sense or reference. But Western Grammar still uses terms taken from Aristotle's usage, despite great differences in goals and assumptions. 4.13 Categories. The first chapter of Aristotle's Categories divides generic onomata (`names', `nouns', `referential terms') into more specific types. Some onomata are equivocal (homonyms), univocal (phonetically and semantically identical in each use), or derivative (paronyms: same lexical root, different form-class, e.g. wise vs. wisdom). His second chapter notes that things we say (legomena) can be combined or uncombined. But as to what those words are used to talk about, some things are predicated of but are not in their subjects, others are both predicated of their subjects and in them as well. Worth quoting are his Chapters III and IV's discussion of subjects as real, grammatical, or logical topics, and what it means to predicate: III: When you predicate this thing or that of another thing as of a subject, the predicates then of the predicate will also hold good of the subject. We predicate man of a man; so of man do we predicate animal. Therefore, of this or that man we can predicate animal too. For a man is both animal and man . . . IV: Each uncombined word or expression means one of the following things: - what (or Substance), how large (that is, Quantity), what sort of thing (that is, Quality), related to what (or Relation), where (that is, Place), when (or Time), in what attitude (Posture, Position), how circumstanced (State or Condition), how active, what doing (or Action), how passive, what suffering (Affection). Examples, to speak but in
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outline, of Substance are man and a horse, of Quantity two cubits long, three cubits in length and the like, of Quality, white and grammatical. Terms such as half, double, greater, are held to denote a Relation. In the marketplace, in the Lyceum and similar phrases mean Place, while Time is intended by phrases like yesterday, last year and so on. Is lying or sitting means Posture, is shod or is armed means a State. Cuts or burns, again, indicate Action, is cut or is burnt an Affection . . . 4.14 Categorial Terms. Some consequences of Aristotle's grasp of linguistic structure, as opposed to unordered vocabulary, include: the term Substance is systematically ambiguous (analogous); applied to actual beings, it can only refer to individuals; applied to ideas, it refers to common (universal) properties, the criteria for distinguishing That's a sophomore all right, from *That's Sophomore all right. Part of the system for distinguishing them involves parallel distribution; Substances contrast on an either-or basis, but their accidental attributes are commonly more-or-less what is said of them. Plato's Division was unable to deal with more-or-less differences. Aristotle's Logic neatly distinguished these, and the method he used indirectly involves his label for a new `part of speech', the syndesmos. This basically rhetorical term is variously rendered as connective or conjunction, because of the function it serves, and words we must use when we translate Greek. An orator's device is called antithesis: English uses stress to contrast expressions like Where I (do this). . ., you (do that); Greek used particles he called syndesmoi: ego `I' men . . . say `you' de . . Expressions like men or de are clitics, neither an onoma nor a rhema. Neither are the quantifiers (like all, some, or none) which he used to talk about more-or-less relationships in Predicate Logic's constructions, called Syllogisms. 4.15 The Categoric Syllogism. Plato's Division was a technique for subclassifying a class. A Class can be called a Category. A subcategory is a set or class included in a larger class or category. The totality of its subcategories exhaust a class. Each subclass differs by the presence or absence of some property and the division of a class is `terminated' when no more ± properties are left to distinguish classmembers. Just as a syllable is a sound-unit with combined membership, a syllogism is a judgement-unity with combined membership. A categoric syllogism shows the consequences of predicates being predicates of predicates: to predicate is to assert class membership, to categorize. A logic of predicates studies the valid formal connexity of categories, as in If
A
is
B
And
B
is
C,
Then
A
is
C.
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cf.
2 and 2
are 4:
(a) 2 apples and 2 apples
are 4 apples
(b) 2 apples and 2 pears
are 4 fruits
(c) 2 fruits and 2 vegetables
are 4 living things
(d) 2 vegetables and 2 unicorns are 4 things (e) 2 things and 2 nothings
are 4 ?
4.16 Necessary and Contingent. Ideal relations (like those in mathematics) are necessary, not contingent; real ones are more often contingent than necessary: cf.
I.
IF AND THEN
This apples This
is are is
an a
apple, fruit, fruit.
II.
IF AND THEN
Some All Some
A B A
is are is/are
some some some
B C B
no these these
apple
is are are not are
a
vegetable, apples, vegetables non-vegetables.
no some all all
A C C C
is are are are not
some some some some
B A A B
OR IF AND III. THEN
OR IF AND IV. THEN OR Natural languages have inherent ambiguities: in the expressions just cited, Some is indefinite in sense and reference; Some in II takes either singular or plural concord; These could indifferently refer to some or all (and take its sense from what some or all modify); The scope of Negation is ambiguous in these sentences; Apples are fruit is ambiguous in reference: (ALL apples? wax ones? Minicomputers? SOME apples? are apples ALL the fruit there is? Apples are (some of those things called) fruit? In IE languages, choice of is or are is a language-peculiar rule not applicable to a sign like =. Greek had a peculiar rule: neuter plurals took singular concord, but masculine and feminine plurals demand plural verbs, as in English.
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One reason for formalizing the relationships on which valid conclusions are based was to avoid the distraction which naturallanguage forms introduce, along with irrelevant arguments about how such rules arise. Part of the technique used was to attempt a more refined analysis of the parts of a logos: A: Syndesmoi. This term combines prefix syn- (cf. con-) and base desmos (`bond, barrier, link'): an etymology of Poseidon in the Cratylos suggested that the sea-god's name was assigned because water might prove a barrier to his feet. Syndesmos (sing.) is transliterated as connective. In ordinary language: syndesmoi are connectives and `qualifiers' whose function is also served in English by expressions as different as well, that is, but, and, if . . . then, on the one hand . . . on the other, and by intonational contrasts like SHE studies, HE memorizes. In Logic, the expression suits: (a) Quantifiers like all, some, none; (b) logical form-expressions like if . . . then, either . . . or, if and only if . . . and (c) logical operators like Negatives. B: Pto:sis. This has surprisingly little to do with its conventional translation as case, showing well the difference between the etymology of a word and its use. A set of Greek forms to which pto:sis is related include: piptei
: he
fall -s
epipte
: he
was
fall -ing
piptetai
: he
will
fall -Ø
epipse
: he
peptoke
: he
fell has
fall -en
The origin and function of pto:sis in logic show that clearly. One goal of Aristotle's syllogistic was to uncover Logical Form. Word-shapes required by the grammar of a language may obscure that. Technical terms (like syndesmos and pto:sis) were invented to clarify it. When a logical setting is more appropriate for deciding how to translate pto:sis than a grammatical context, ambiguous logos can be seen as referring more reasonably to a logical proposition rather than a grammatical sentence. 4.17 Proposition and Sentence. Logical Propositions (vs. sentences) can be defined as relations among elements of content, independent of the grammatical demands of a particular language, like English plural concord rules compared to those of Greek. Propositions are not identical with expressions in any language, but are expressible by a language. Formulating `propositions' challenges us to isolate what is peculiar to a language, and what 'Language Itself' demands. Sorting out what English and Chinese have in common in This is a painting of my brother parallels the problem of how to translate the Platonic and Aristotelian use of logos: Were they talking about
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propositions, about actual states of affairs, or about sentences subject to the peculiar grammatical demands of Greek? 4.18 Words for Words. The symbols for describing word-morphology in Chapter 3 (Capital A for a free form, lower-case like (b) in parentheses for a bound form) illustrate the notions of Constant vs. Variable: free forms are constants which bound forms must presuppose. But Capital letters can stand for any free form whatever, and lower case letters for any bound form at all. So the lexical examples in Chapter 3 can be considered variable realizations of a constant formal relationship, e.g. of free to bound forms, independent of sentences in English. Similarly, a logos can be reduced to its formal relationships by symbols for: Constants: form, relationship; logical constants: frames like If . . . (and) . . . then e.g. If A = B and B = C, then A = C
and
Variables: what is formed, related; logical variables = A, B, C, the lexical, referring items; e.g., if apple . . . and . . . vegetable . . .
This makes sense of another odd part of Aristotle's vocabulary: its strangeness derives from the assumption that his use of pto:sis is as relevant to grammar as our present use of case is supposed to be. It is less strange if the term is taken to play a logical, not a grammatical role. To minimize the ambiguity peculiar to sentences, a logos (proposition, argument, etc.) is defined as a timeless relationship between a logical Subject (onoma) and a logical Predicate (rhe:ma). Aristotle called any verb not in what we identify as the present tense a pto:sis rather than a rhe:ma. 4.19 Speaker's Choice. A proposition's subject-predicate relation is `timeless' because sentences with past or future tenses are excluded as ill-formed. Since language-forms define each other structurally, a 'present' no longer opposable to a 'past' or 'future' is no longer 'present': is already 'timeless/tenseless'. In Chinese, time (or tense) need not be ruled out, since no present vs. past vs. future verb-forms exist. In effect, present tense forms of ordinary language only seem to overlap with rhe:ma in logical language. So it is inconsistent with Aristotle's logical intentions to say `only the present tense is the verb. . .'. rather than `only the present tense (of normal language) can appear as representing/realizing/standing for a logical predicate (rhema).' Methods used by historians of logic recall So-Seem-Said distinctions: speakers may know what they want to say but must use the common language resources. So hearers, relying their own knowledge of that language, must deduce a plausible interpretation to fit the speakers' intentions. When speakers coin new terms, using novel combinations of existing linguistic elements (as in the case of ptosis or syndesmos) hearers look to see how those
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words are distributed and guess how they function. With insights as novel as Aristotle's, some hesitation, and later revision, are to be expected. Thus, in his early formulations about predicates, class-membership, Aristotle used the verb hyparchein, (`belong to') in syllogisms like If
A belongs to
B
and
C belongs to
A
Then
C belongs to
B
hyparchein demands nouns in the dative case where English uses tophrases. Since datives proved awkward, he replaced them with the less common, but grammatically neutral A is B, where only 'upright' (nominative) nouns can occur grammatically. A = B symbolization avoids intralinguistic peculiarities in both Greek and English. So pto:sis labeled features of language composition which disqualify linguistic forms from serving in a logical function. Logical propositions have two functions being a subject (often filled in ordinary language by nouns) and being the predicate (commonly filled in ordinary language by verbs). Propositions are verifiably ± true: not so the settled past or unverifiable future. A disqualified future or past verb expression was also called a pto:sis. 4.20 Unhappy Word Choice. pto:sis is found in nonlogical works attributed to Aristotle for any word derived from a noun, and some inconsistency resulted. For instance, peptokon is an unlikely but regularly derivable concrete nominal form from the same set to which the verb piptei and the noun pto:sis belong. English could render abstract pto:sis as falling and use (something that has) fallen for the concrete peptokon, with the (informally) valid arguments, reducible to logical form, something like: A Fallen
= is
B from above
C This
= is
A fallen
C This
= is
B from above
If
and
Then These forms are not as overtly marked, but still clearly in parallel distribution with the usual school-example of A Fallen all men
= is are
B from above mortal
If
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C This
= is
A fallen
John
is
a man
C This
= is
B from above
John
is
mortal
and
Then So pto:sis is best defined negatively as characterizing any form in natural language which cannot represent or realize or stand for logical functions called onoma and rhe:ma (subject, predicate). 4.21 Meaning. Image Theory concerns the explanation attributed to Aristotle of how terms 'mean'. In a passing definition (in the third chapter of his De anima ['On the soul']), he distinguishes voice from sounds made by others than animates, as `a sound, produced by an animal, in association with an image'. Since only `naming' expressions (onoma and rhe:ma) are eligible, and only these can `refer', syndesmoi and grammatical morphemes are said to consignify when constructed with nouns and verbs. This `theory' is found in his On interpretation, which deals with propositional expression in isolation. A more developed theory is found in other works where intellectual rather than sensory referents are discussed. In On Interpretation, he explicitly says rhe:mata are the same as onomata as naming something, but distinct because the verb's obligatory (as we would say) bound forms signal time/tense in construction with identical roots. A good example required words with the same overt lexical root in both noun and verb: he used hygi-eia (`health') and the verb hygi-ei (`he is health-y'). The relation between the noun pto:s-is (`fall') and verb pipt-ei (`he falls') would have been less obvious at the level of morphological composition. 'Images' are not restricted to visual objects, given the usual residual sensory traces of any past sense experience (a taste, weight, touch or sound). Nor must his positive definition of voice be taken as exclusive, i.e. as defining that only expressions associated with images have meaning, and no others qualify as meaningful except on that basis. 'Images' do seem to suggest a plausible definition of signification (one of several types of `meaning'). That definition distinguishes: nouns and verbs from other sentence parts like syndesmoi (they lack an immediate sensory basis); root-meanings from inflectional ones without that basis, (e.g. person, number, tense, voice) or derivational meanings, such as patronymics like Johnson from John. These are said to consignify, rather than signify. 4.22 The Stoics. We know the Sophists' work largely from unsympathetic reports. Accounts of their techniques are likely more objective than evaluations of their motives. We are even less certain about the Stoics: no entire Stoic work on grammar or logic survives and manuscript fragments
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seem contradictory. Outlines of their philosophy and language's role in it were written by those neither Stoic by training or sympathy. That is ironic for linguistics: much of its terminology is Stoic in origin, though used without reference to, possibly in ignorance of, its source. It is best illustrated from their logic. They may have been the first to construct a linguistic theory `complete (in principle) by modern standards' (Hülser 1979:16). If `complete by modern standards' means a theory which specifies how phonetic signals match messages, even an outline of Stoic work reconstructed from hostile sources provides a good deal to reflect on. 4.23 Grammatical or Logical Terms. The man in the street often sees technical terms as jargon, finding Alzheimer's Disease no clearer than senility. The same symptoms may be referred to by both, but the sense a technical term abbreviates should suggest causes of those symptoms. The senses of popular terms often coincide with their referents. Details about Stoic technical terms can be useful, because their role in a Stoic system can be compared with the place they found in an 'Aristotelian' setting. Stoic logic was presented for more than 20 centuries as showing how confused they were about formal logic as formulated by Aristotle. Studies since Lukasiewiscz 1935 show that Peripatetic Logic (taught by Aristotle's immediate successors), and what the Stoics developed, do not differ just in technical terms; the two are complementary rather than opposed, and both anticipated `discoveries' considered modern. Stoic Logic is explicitly formal, and possibly complete; it is a logic of propositions, unlike the predominantly predicate logic of Aristotle which the Peripatetics championed. 4.24 Logical Rivals. Logical and Grammatical subject and predicate have been used interchangeably for ages. That reflects a Stoic goal of defining a single, continuous object of investigation, rather than two autonomous studies. For the Peripatetics, Logic was a tool for philosophy (like the role of math in modern science); they called Aristotle's fundamental logical works the Organon (rules or principles of investigation or proof). Stoic philosophy defined its own object as highest virtue. It was directly concerned with 'correct expression', while Peripatetics seemed to devote more attention to 'correct thinking'. Logic was different in the two complementary investigations. 4.25 Speech, Grammar and Logic. For the Stoics, Logic covered all we come to know, think, and express. Dialectic begins with the plausible and aims at the true, so expressions are not only apt when grammatical, but when they fit requirements warranting truth as well. Expression is vocal: the Stoics said linguistic study should begin with voice, its articulation in speech, representation in letters, and sequencing of `letters' into meaningful utterances. Elementary texts in Dialectic reiterated those priorities for centuries, but neither Stoics nor Peripatetics were skilled nor much interested in phonetics as such. When discussing bare sound-production, however, the Stoics used the
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verb propheresthai; legein (a cognate of logos) was their technical term for 'speaking'. The first could be nonsense, the second had to 'mean' something. Then, since they held that speech started with imitation, in the study which they labelled Etymology, search for the ultimate, true, root-meanings of words involved the `meaning' of sounds constituting them. But despite its origin in mimicry, they said language changed as men coined new words, often whimsical creations complicating the rediscovery of real roots. Insofar as there was a method involved, account was taken of the (dis)similarities between familiar things and their names, assuming that names for less familiar things were produced on familiar patterns, literally or in metaphoric senses. This natural (physis) vs. conventional (nomos) position on language-origin foresaw both regular (analogous) and irregular (anomalous) language development: the Stoics stressed anomaly. 4.26 Stoicheia: Constituents. Letters, they said, compose a syllable exactly as meaningful parts constitute expressions: mere tou logou 2 and grammata (`letters') were both Constituents (stoicheia) of logos and syllaba respectively. This was not just on distributional grounds, but on compositional and functional ones as well3 and is consistent with the physis position: it denies the contrast of a solely differential function for phonemic elements, which distinguishes them from word or morpheme Constituents, which function both referentially and differentially. While the phonic elements of car and pet are established as distinctive by the phonetic differences in minimal pairs like gar and bet, they would still be distinctive elements (a) whether or not those phonemes had a different phonetic composition, (b) whether or not they had no phonetic, but only written composition, (c) whether or not the sequences meant the same thing as car, gar, pet and bet do, or something quite different or even if one of each pair meant nothing at all. As phoneme sequences, the referential constituents of houseware and warehouse are the same. But their arrangement results in a grammatical contrast between factors at the same level of analysis. A dining car does not contrast with pet car in the same way that pet car contrasts with carpet. If sounds themselves had significance comparable to what sound-sequences represent, reversing the sequence should show contrasts in meaning comparable to those of compound words. In phonetic approximations like leer [lir]
lip [lIp]
mob [mab]
peel [pil]
got [gat]
dour [dur]
real [ril]
pill [pIl]
bomb [bam]
leap [lip]
tog [tag]
rude [rud]
none of the allophonic differences (well beyond the capacity of the Stoics to discuss or represent) are even indicated.
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4.27 Stoic Theory. Some Stoic views are more compatible with language's conventional origin and development as a hierarchy of systems. They said the word gramma (`letter') referred to three things: a shape (like A), an audible impression, and a name for both (like alpha). There is no mention what a given sound should mean or how to infer meaning from sound sequences. This may not be inconsistent with a natural-origin theory, but they coined another term more compatible with phonemic insights, lexis. 4 A lexis is a sequence of sounds, known to be meaningful, the precise phonemes of which can be cited, but without mention of the meaning that sequence would have to have, on the natural origin thesis. Bloomfield (1933.138) called lexis a linguistic form vs. a phonetic form. That not every pronounceable sequence occurs in a language may not be anomalous within a natural-origin and */mUt/ cited in Chapter 2 cannot be assigned a plausible meaning is. position, but that nonoccurrent Focus on the substantive or material aspects of language (rather than the contrastive or formal) poorly accounts for change in standard language or for dialects within it. The Stoics coined dialect as a technical term: some Greeks said semera instead of standard hemera (`day'). This is easier to account for if sounds function only differentially, hard to explain if each phoneme of the language has referential function as well. If sounds were constituents (stoicheia) in exactly the same sense as those of complex words, association of sound-properties and thing-properties still needs explanation, as does the reference of words or morphemes to things describable as complexes of properties. E.g., what have the sounds in car and pet in common with the simple form carpet, or what do reverse sequences like leer-real, lip-pill, mob-bomb, peel-leap, got-tog, or dour-rude share? Stoic etymological speculations were famous. This set would tempt their ingenuity. 4.28 Stoic 'Parts of Speech'. What the Stoics called arthron covers our article and pronoun. An onoma is proper or common, definable perhaps both morphologically or semantically, but not distinguished from the adjective. Rhema is defined as essentially a predicate, subdistinguished morphologically; participles and adverbs share features of nouns and verbs; syndesmoi include what we call conjunctions, but since connection is central to their definition, our prepositions (not distinguished from prefixes) also fall under that term. They recognized subordination of composition to distribution and function. Phonetically identical sequences could be viewed functionally as a compound word or a phrase, or as realizing different constituent relationships (like English nitrate vs. night rate). Because of the mangled state in which it comes to us, central parts of Stoic thought about lekta (a cognate of logos) remain problematic. One definition identifies lekta as what signs mean: things in thought vs. things in themselves, outside of thought. Compositionally, lekta as signs are sequences of sounds; functionally, noises which natives, but not foreigners, connect with
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thought. Some lekta are incomplete (onoma or rhema) others complete (proposition or question: Plato's and Aristotle's logos). Stoics kept So-Seem-Said points of view distinct by technical terms: So is `what's out there' (independent of us), for which they used the words pragma (`thing') and tugchanon (`happening'). For Said taken phonologically, they used phone (`sound') in general and lexis for particular instances. Considered grammatically, that same object could be called to semainon (`the sign' or `the symbol'). A Seem-thing-in-thought was labelled to semainomenon (`the thing signified' or `the thing symbolized'). That single expression linked a sign, its sense, and referent, while lexis dealt with the result of articulating (legein) a logos, as opposed to sounds which humans and animals produce (propheresthai). A lekton denotes what occurs only when humans speak. 4.29 Logic, Science and Wisdom. While Logic was not an autonomous formal tool for them, Stoic study of it was formally explicit, yet subordinate to 'Philosophy'. For philosophy, read science until well into the modern era without much distortion. Given the differences between ours and the ancient world, a `philosophy' involves an attempt to relate overt Variables to the covert Constants they presuppose. The Ancients were restricted to thought-experiments; modern technology allows physical, empirical tests of hypotheses. Modern goals of physical control of the environment do not include the Stoic aim of studying highest virtue. `Highest virtue' was wisdom. For the Stoics, that meant knowledge of human and divine affairs, related in a three-fold way: some were uniquely divine, some human, and some common to both. They saw the human soul as part of a divine, incorporeal spirit permeating the Universe, but paradoxically held that the soul was essentially corporeal, a body. `Soul' was something to which they attributed the ability to act and be acted upon. One thing the human soul had in common with the divine was Understanding. 4.30 Stoic 'tri- vs. di-vision'. Stoic 'philosophy' was tripartite: Physics (roughly natural science), Ethics, and Logic (a theory of understanding). Stoic Logic considered what occurred in the directive part of the soul: understanding or reason (logos) and all that derives from it. Compared to the instrumental view of the Peripatetics, Stoic `Logic' unified what others considered separate but relatable disciplines such as Metaphysics, Psychology, Grammar, Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialectic, Logic, etc. They assigned eight parts to 'soul': the five senses, the sexual sense, the power of speech, and the highest, directive hegemonikon (`guiding') part we call will. That subdivided into to dianoetikon (`discriminating part') or dianoia (`discursive reason'), to logistikon, logismos or logos (`relational part, analytic thought, rationality'). Other terms distinguished thinking, understanding, or the power of thought. The guiding or rational part of the soul at birth was compared to a clean slate, translated into Latin as tabula rasa: 5 once humans attain ability to
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perceive qualities of things, the soul fills spontaneously with common concepts of them (koinia ennoiai) or abstractions from them (prolepseis) in this order: (1) images of what we chance on (ta tygchanonta: contingent experiences) transfer into the soul and arouse representations (phantasiai) in it; (2) what is perceived by the soul is embodied in speech and made public; (3) what is spoken is either unsolicited monologue, or alternating questions and answers in dialogue. Their 'Logic' covered what others called Rhetoric and Dialectic. In debate (Dialectic), utterances have two aspects: phonic denoting things and things denoted by sound; symbols (ta semainonta) or linguistic signs as sound (he phone) and symbolized (ta semainomena), things (ta pragmata) or events (ta tugchanonta). Grammar studies sound sequences (phone) which are signs or symbols (semainomena) as a subpart of Dialectic. Linguistic signs/symbols or their denotations as grasped in understanding, are lekta. The contrasts resemble those between sense and referent. 4.31 Structural Contrast. Aristotelian and Stoic ptosis contrast structurally. 'Case' is related to Latin and Greek for fall-ing, hence English decline, declension, French cas, German Fall. Peripatetic usage included any form at all, however `derived from' another. Stoics restricted ptosis to what later grammarians called declined or inflected (vs. derived) forms, and assigned some labels we still employ. What we call Nominative, both called the Upright Case (ptosis orthe). This 'first' was distinguished from the others as Oblique Cases (ptoseis plagiai), subcategorized as case of origin (genitive), case of giving (dative), case of being affected or caused (mistranslated by the Latins as accusative), and case of address (vocative). 4.32 The Stoic Lekton. Lekta contrast in composition and function. A lekton 6 is functionally incomplete if taken as an Element (like a proper or common noun only as a subject, or a verb only as a predicate). A lekton is functionally complete as a Unit when its constituents are such elements. Complete lekta are simple (atomic) or complex (molecular) when two simples constitute a unit by conjunction, by disjunction, or as a conditional. Simple lekta are definite or indeterminate (indefinite) when the subject-term is marked by signs like this or somebody, or intermediate when a proper name like Socrates is used. Peripatetics might deny the Stoic definite vs. intermediate distinction for an interesting reason: they were Binarists in the sense of Platonic either-or division, though they subcategorized opposing pairs. The Stoics offered more three-way basic distinctions. Unfortunately, most Stoic doctrine was preserved for us in summaries by `binarist' commentators.
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4.33 Classification of Lekta.
4.34 Stoic Levels. In classifying lekta, ptosis opposes katagorema at the same level of analysis if ptosis is glossed as `what is meant by' a noun. But equating functional subject with morphological noun confuses constituents as units on different levels of analysis. Glossequivalents can be deceptive, as in equating gramma with letter, ignoring contrast in the shape of an A, its name Alpha or its appropriate sound. As redefined by the Stoics, ptosis was no correction of Aristotle's logical usage. It functions differently in the two systems, despite overlapping composition and similar distribution. While 'logical form' as a constant sounds similar in both, variables filling predicate logic 'form' are subject and predicate terms
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(Stoic incomplete lekta); the variables in propositional logic are what Plato and Aristotle called logoi (Stoic lekta) and we might call propositions which sentences can represent. Ptosis as a unit unusable as subject or predicate of a proposition is not ptosis defined by affixes. Ptosis as a technical term in Morphology later called attention to root-identity and inflection-difference correlated with functional differences. Stoic ptosis referred to five related but contrasting noun-shapes, phoneme sequences called lexeis representing roots and morphs that signal case-differences. Stoic ptosis referred to what was meant by one of those forms when used as subject, a logical function Aristotle had included in the term onoma, while for him, ptosis labelled derived form-and-meaning-units excluded from functioning as onoma (or rhema). The Stoics also coined terms we use for verb-forms and the definition and divisions of predicate were central to their theory. Its generic definition is functional: what is `said of' something. Divisions include (a) personal+active, (b) personal+passive and (c) neutral predicates. These semantic contrasts parallel morphologically definable active, passive, and middle verbs in Greek. Predicate subclasses were atomic vs. molecular (single vs. multiple), defined apparently in terms of what they demand and exclude, not what they tolerate, in syntactic constructions. Without knowing Greek, these technical terms could be used confidently, on the basis of the formal, syntactic, properties they assigned. Constructions of a verb and case-bearing expressions were: V+nominative
= symbama
V+oblique
= parasymbama
V+nom. + oblique = elatton e symbama V+oblique + oblique
elatton e = parasymbama
`Congruent' `Incongruent' `Less than congruent' `Less than incongruent'
Some predicates are congruent, some incongruent, like Dioni metamelei ('it repents Dion' or 'Dion regrets': parasymbama = dependent on an oblique case). Others are direct (orthon), reversed (hyption), or neither. Directs construct with an oblique (plagios) case to effect a predicate, like active akouei and horai; reversed are those constructed with the passive like akouomai ('I am heard') and horômai ('I am heard'). Neutrals resemble neither, like phronei (`thinks') and peripatei ('walks). Reflexive (antipeponthos `having suffered in turn') predicates are those among the reversed, which, though reversed in form, are still active operations as in heiretai (`he cuts his own hair'), for here, an agent includes himself in the sphere of his action. The oblique cases are genitive (genike), dative (dotike) and accusative (aitiatike). The Stoics analyzed time in physics and tense in grammar, but did not succeed in relating them. They were the first to name the 'present' the `nonchanging' tense and subcategorized past and future as progressive and perfective. They elaborated lists and technical terms for nondeclarative sentences, some of
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which we still use, such as yes-no- and information-questions, commands, oaths, doubts, requests, suppositions, addresses, doubts, and quasi-propositions. 4.35 Logic and Language. For centuries, 'everyone knew' Aristotle had definitely codified formal logic and that Stoic logic was an aberration. But once the two were formalized in symbolic notation, it was obvious that they were complementary parts of an identical discipline. 7 That insight was facilitated by methods of analysis also used in formal Linguistics. Two facts make this of interest: (1) The Stoics developed formal logic in connection with their theory of language and semantics, and in the process, demanded precise, identical, technical terms for logical and grammatical distinctions. (2) Stoic attention to uses of language other than predication may be taken as a prophetic rebuke to a exclusive focus on the cognitive use of language (about things and their properties) vs. its effective and affective uses (speech acts other than true-false pronouncements). But effective or affective uses of language are functionally bound to a cognitive catalog of the kind of world in which language is best used to preserve or change the environment (its effective use); or to communicate attitudes about what is taken to be the case (its affective use). Use presupposes a determinate instrument, even if it is open to cognitive difficulties. A logic of predicates details how variables that are terms in propositions cohere; a logic of propositions details how variables that are propositions cohere. We have no record of a Stoic logic of predicates. What has Linguistics to learn for a 'logic of sentences' from all of this? 4.36 Logic and Linguistics. Bochenski's (1951) account of the development of formal logic suggests a frame for questioning linguistic study.8 Modern Logics 'completeness' was attained in five stages: (1) de facto use of rules, (2) conscious use of rules, (3) explicit formulation of rules, (4) use of technical terms (but confusing logical law and logical rule), and finally, (5) a clear distinction of logical rule and law9 `Decay' set in when Aristotle's predicate logic was thought opposed by, rather than complementary to, Stoic propositional logic (Bochenski 1935:1-13). Similar contrasts arise in linguistics when the focus shifts from morphological, formclasses to intersentential relations or sentential functions. While logic for Aristotle was a tool, for the Stoics, it was one of philosophy's three parts (`the science of [entities] which are true, false or neither'. Stoic semantics studied sign or symbol (etically, to semainon; emically, the significate: semainomenon, lekton, `that which is said') and the external thing (pragma, tynchanon) to which the symbol refers, distinct both from sign or significate (Bochenski 1935:83-4). 4.37 Analogy. After the collapse of Athens, the chief intellectual rivals were expatriate Peripatetics in Ptolemy's Alexandria and Stoics in Pergamon. The Ptolemaic dynasty died with Cleopatra, and Pergamon's last ruler ceded it
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to Rome in his will. The unique volumes of the two greatest libraries in the world were scattered, burned, or lost, and the West inherited an undigested amalgam of Alexandrian and Pergamene thought: its logical and philosophic framework was predominantly Aristotelian, its grammatico-logical vocabulary, basically Stoic. Views about language opposed a natural to a social past and an anomalous to an analogous present state, whatever its beginnings. One assumption of Descriptive Linguistics (that distribution and function can downgrade the importance of composition) suggests how such blends can be accounted for. Analogy is an abstract formula for isomorphism (`one-to-one relationships among apparently unrelated items'). It explains how lower levels of analysis are related to higher ones. An analogy is a nontrivial similarity. A geometric ratio is an analogy demonstrating, for instance, how all right angles are identical despite the size of triangles. An unknown quantity is readily inferred when it is analogous to (is a ratio of, or a function of) two known quantities. The lexico-grammatical message of If 3 is to 9 as 9 is to x, then x = 81 can be expressed in 'mathematical' symbols as 3 : 9 = 9 : x / (3 : 9 = 9 : 81) or formalized rather pointlessly as @ is to # as # is to * and more suggestively (since isomorphically) as A is to B as B is to C. These show common members, suggest a dependence like linearity in speech, but that a dependency less obvious than order must be involved (since 3, 9 and 81 do not follow as ordinal numbers). These are three-term analogies. 4.38 3-Term Analogies. In Historical Linguistics, Analogy is widely used to describe a process of change, most often in 3-term analogies. Middle English napron, for instance, is said to have become modern apron, on analogy with other forms beginning with a vowel demanding an instead of a. Neither ME naprye (modern napery) nor napkin followed that analogy. But A is to B as B is to C need not conclude to A is to C unless number ratios are involved. The conclusion might even seem trivial if we already know that A is to C as numbers are to their squares. Deciding on good questions to ask about how an A resembles a C requires us to decide how to express the = /'equals' and : 'is to' symbols. The : symbol just claims that here is a factor called an analogon, without telling what it is which relates the terms. In Aristotle's Categories, Quantity, Quality and Relation are first among the Accidents distinct from Substance: given some unity (a substance), subjective judgements about its quantity are more objective (public, replicable, interpersonal, etc.) than subjective ones about its qualities or relations.
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Page 135 Scientists use analogies to suggest hypotheses about a law or principle to account for pairs of observed regularities: e.g. observation of the moons of Jupiter suggested by analogy the operation of the solar system; Malthus' calculation about population reproducing exponentially beyond its food supply suggested the natural selection hypothesis to Darwin. Analogies are nontrivial in the humanities if they suggest new ways of looking at old facts. They are nontrivial in science if empirically testable. Quantifiable functions or relations, e.g. Jupiter's moons - solar system - atomic structure, are more testable than qualitative ones, e.g. color - appearance -subjective impression. 4.39 4-Term Analogies. Fruitful ones involve four terms, expressible as: A
:
B
= C
:
D
A
is to
B
as C
is to
D (a nucleus)
(Moons) (revolve around) (Jupiter) like (atoms) (revolve around) (Red) (Squares)
(stimulates) (relate to)
(as color) like (danger) (area)
like (cubes)
(stimulates)
(as a warning)
(relate to)
(volume)
This is called the Principle of Iso-morph-ism (`equal-shape/form-set'). The explicit principle suggests how to formalize distributional and/or functional regularities among terms with nothing common in their composition (moons are not planets and planets are not atoms: it is their relationships that are hypothesized as isomorphic). An intuitive grasp of it led rhetoricians to identify regularities in the impact of figures of speech; grammarians to see morphologically incomparable forms of Greek and Latin as syntactically identical; logicians to isolate a formal and functional pattern underlying different sentences. The explicit principle enabled ancient mathematicians to equate quantities in lyre string length and tension with qualities in the musical notes produced, and state laws of harmony which are still valid. Two main types were discussed: Analogy of Proper Proportionality. This is a four-term analogy discussed above. It is still of intrinsic interest to science, as a suggestive way of unifying quantitative functional relations among observable data. Analogy of Attribution. This is of secondary interest to science, used mostly in developing fields, such as allo, -etic, and emic terms in phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax, or in any field where comparable units and relations are involved. It is both quantitative and qualitative. 10 The Prime Analogate Is the `first, best, and most obvious example', e.g. the scientific principles resulting in a coat letting Arctic wearers to perspire while working without freezing because their perspiration turns to ice when they stop. The Guiness Book of Records is full of (usually trivial) prime analogates.
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The Secondary Analogate (or Just Analogate) Is something identified by the same label as its prime analogate, because of some similarity to the prime analogate, e.g. white scientific coat. A precise and univocal basis must be made explicit, otherwise the relationships noted are more likely to be partial and dismissed as just metaphoric. Analogon Is a single quality or property uniquely defining the prime analogate, and serves as the basis for attributing the same label to a secondary analogate, where it is found to a precise and considerable, but not identical, degree, e.g. lunar and planetary revolution around a center. It is easier to establish objective, relational, and quantitative analoga like least common denominators for fractions than qualitative, subjective, reaction to red (valued by the Chinese). These trivial examples are more metaphoric, i.e. interesting or amusing, than analogical (demonstrably ± correct): Prime analogateAnalogate(s)
Analogon
Analogy of Attribution
Isaac Newton
Thomas Edisonresults
An Edison among repairmen
Scientist
Spassky
consistency
The Spassky of Crosswords
Einstein
Balanchine
imagination
The Balanchine of Dance
Dead Eye Dick spitballer
marksmanshipKindergarten Annie Oakley
4.40 Analogy and Proof. Analogy shows why Stoic terms for languageforms were 'better' than Aristotelian. Descriptive linguistic terminology accounts for some of those differences. Aristotelians took unanalyzed morphological objects (onoma or rhema) as immediate constituents of a syntactic object (comparing sentences as though they were propositions, of which S and P were Ics). An argument like IF men are mortal AND John is a man, THEN John is mortal is a single complex/compound sentence, while All men are mortal. John is a man. THEREFORE John is mortal has three independent ones. Both restrict grammatical verbs to the present indicative, and grammatical nouns to the nominative. But both these Aristotelian syllogistic formulae focus on a relation (called Hyponymy) among subject and predicate terms: that allows us to conclude This is a flower from This is a rose. Their focus is still within, rather than between, sentences manifesting true or false propositions; Stoics studied further relations between sentences manifesting propositions, assuming them to be already provably true or false. 4.41 Terms vs. Propositions. The Stoics had no convention excluding non-nominative nouns. While a logically constant frame like IF . . . THEN may be the same, the Peripatetic variables were subject and predicate terms, while Stoic variables were propositions, a level of analysis different from one taking sentences as constituted wholly by subject and predicate. Sentences are not propositions: they manifest them. That is, in a proposition where S could be `1st person singular' and P `cold', different sentences can manifest the identical proposition more or less isomorphically:
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S
P
English: I
am cold
I
feel cold
It
feels cold (to me)
French: J'
ai
Il
froid
fait froid
German: Mir
ist
kalt
(mir is in the dative case)
Mich friert es (Mich is in the accusative) Italian:
Ho
freddo
Fa
freddo
Spanish: Tengo Hace
frio frio
Distribution neutralizes function: meanings signalled by the composition of isolated forms change. Greek indicatives signal actual states of affairs (It is raining), subjunctives potential ones (It may rain) and desirable ones in the optative (May it rain!) in independent clauses. None is interpreted autonomously: 'subordinate' status says 'superordinates' are just more frequent. In dependent clauses, Greek verb-forms 'mean' depending on the 'reality' of how the `if-clause' and its `conclusion' are connected; their mood is determined by verb tense in the `if-clause'. Forms meeting Aristotle's definition of syndesmoi are also required, as shown in this table: Type of Word Tense & mood Tense & mood of verb conditionfor `if' if-clause verb in independent clause Syndesmos
Real:
ei
Any indic. required by Present or Past sense of independent indicative clause ...
Unreal: ei
Imperfect OR Aorist (-prog) indic.
Aorist OR Imperfect indic. according to sense
Real fut. Potential ean
Subjunctive
Future indicative
future: Generic ei
Optative
Optative
present: Generic ean
Subjunctive
Present indicative
...
past:
Optative
Imperfect indicative
...
ei
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`Translating' morphologically signalled differences into English shows how language-structures differ. Adverbs are free forms in English, options we can easily omit; Greek verb-endings are bound forms. Greeks chose one or the other ending depending on situations, but they were `bound' to choose one 11. Even technical terms must be interpreted in context. Anomalist or Analogist could mislead by suggesting that anyone so labelled always produced a `knee-jerk response' to any question about language. Opponents use results both interpret as demonstrating their own position, since they intuitively, if unwittingly, use the principles they dispute. Stoic logic elegantly illustrates the principle of analogy, though Stoics favored the anomaly side of that dispute. 4.42 Marcus Terentius Varro and Analogy. (117-27 B.C.). A contemporary of Julius Caesar, Varro was ranked by scholars like Quintillian and St. Augustine as the most learned man of his time. By the age of 77, Varro had written 490 books. He died 130 books later at 89, but only two survived. One was 10 of the 24 chapters (or `books' V-X) of his De lingua Latina ('On the Latin tongue'). The other, De re rustica ('On country matters'), is still regarded as the most valuable source about the agriculture of his day. He was introduced to the Anomaly-Analogy controversy by Crates of Mallos, a Pergamon envoy to the Roman Senate. Crates stayed in Rome five years, possibly because he broke a leg while checking out a sewer (slipped on a sewer while inspecting this technological innovation, they say) or because of the interest aroused by his lectures on the Anomaly-Analogy dispute. As a Pergamene, Crates likely stressed irregular declension and conjugation to support the anomaly side. Among his Alexandrian opponents, Aristophanes of Byzantium classified words by interlocking tests: if two nouns or verbs were alike is kind, similar in inflection, identical in termination, and in the number of syllables and sounds, they are analogous to each other. The Aristarchus added another: both pairs to be classified had to be simple, or both compound. Each criterion is an analogon (a property held in common) in analogy theory. Varro's views are nonpartisan, and the explicit method he proposed to refine problem is interesting for its insights into formal Latin structure, a study then relatively undeveloped by academicians. 4.43 Varro's Definition of `Word' Verbum dico orationis vocalis partem quae sit indivisa et minima (word I-call of-sentence vocal part which is undivided and minimal si delinationem naturalem habet. if formation natural it-has) `By word I mean a part-of-speech that is simple, minimal and with normal formation.' This is given in the original, then transliterated, then translated, to
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show how language structures contrast, and the danger of anachronism in using one of many precise contemporary terms for semi-technical originals: verbum: this had as broad a sense as Greek lexis. Its reference included whatever qualified as a word, expression, saying, quote, etc. in other contexts. Since inflection is invoked, it can have the same reference, but not the same sense, as an inflected part of speech. orationis: this can refer indifferently to what we now distinguish as a phrase, clause or sentence. pars orationis: transliterates `part of a logos' with all its ambiguities. Both the Latin and Greek expressions became `parts of speech'. indivisa: not indivisible, but unanalyzed. et minima: minimal as a word-constituent, a sentence-part (Greek stoicheion), not as a morpheme or element of signification. Only the invariable words et and si (grammatical, nonreferential) in his definition meet those conditions. The criterion of minimality seems to be reference; but Latin referentials are all complex. declinatio: as generic as Aristotelian ptosis, which it presumably translates: so modern distinctions of inflection (declension, conjugation) and derivation (including comparison) are covered, and it leaves us puzzled about how Crates the Stoic used ptosis. naturalis: here best rendered spontaneously, but as following linguistic convention, rather than a natural compulsion. For the analysis of words, Varro mentions four levels of knowledge or skill rhetoricians invoked: (1) common sense (anyone would say railroad has two parts); (2) a little study (how Homer arrived at wine-dark sea); (3) a bit of philosophy (like Stoic etymologies relying on their theories about language origins), and (4) something approaching true (omni)science from a perfect philosophy. Since he has such no certainty, he will only hypothesize at that level, but is sure he can get past level (2). He assumes every word comes from three knowable sources: (a) native words (we claim to know that, and why, they are native) (b) borrowed words (for a Roman, familiar Greek or other foreign loans) (c) obsolete words and those whose origins have been forgotten. These he will either pass over, or only speculate about. 4.44 Varro's Method. He proposed a binary method, which he says derives from the Pythagorean teaching that elements come in pairs: ± finite, ± good, ± live, ± daylight, since these reduce to 2 (Rest and Movement), each of which exemplifies four kinds of things: things that are ± mobile
= body;
where things ± move
= place;
while things are ± moving
= time;
what ± moves things
= action.
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More objectively accessible are the pairs of demand-or-exclusion criteria he can apply to overt Latin words: they are either variable or invariable. If they vary, they do so either irregularly or regularly; if regularly variable, they must be one of these four types. (1) those with case only:
Noun
(regul-a-m)
(2) those with tense only:
Verb
(regul-a-vit)
(3) those with tense and case: Participle (regul-a-tum) (4) those with neither:
Adverb
(regul-a-riter)
Whether language is anomalous or analogous involves separate as well as conjoined answers to questions like: (1) are things like other things? (2) are words like other words? (3) are words like things? and (4) are word/meaning sets like sets of things? He says (2) is decidable: i.e. that technical terms should be formal, not semantic, so the criterion for the correct use of masculine should be syntactic (because of gender concord) rather than semantic (in terms of sex). Unfortunately Varro did not pursue this syntactic insight and neglected the distribution of invariable forms. Dismissed from his discussion of anomaly were pairs like vix (invariable adverb `hardly') and nix (nominative of `snow') because of their morphological difference (vix is invariable, nix is not) but did not compare their rather remarkable syntactic peculiarities as well. This left unanswered whether he thought voluntary vs. natural (spontaneous) language processes and relations were free of constraints, conventional, or natural. He finds an economy for memory in the fact that closed-set inflectional morphemes are easier to recall than derivational ones. Given constant inflection-sets, attention can focus on the variables that fill them. So he defined the analogy side of the dispute as: '. . . verborum similium declinatio similis non repugnante consuetudine' `Analogy is like formation of like words, as long as usage is not against it.' This ambiguously defines a State (`here are sets with the same declension'); a Process (`if a word is regular, it will change be conjugated or declined the way other regulars change') or an Action (`language, left to itself, ''sees to it" forms are regularly inflected or derived; speakers freely override that action'). 4.45 Usage. Whatever inherited analogies are, pragmatic considerations can override them. That distinguishes language itself as purists or descriptivists might view it from use of language. Varro used expressions which neither became technical terms nor criteria for distinguishing linguistic items. Besides opposing nomen and pronomen (like stone and it), he contrasted vocabulum to provocabulum (perhaps form to proform: a 'proform' for temporal adverbs could be then); proper nouns or names to personal pronouns (Caesar vs. ille) and common nouns to demonstrative and relative pronouns (villa vs. illa and quae). The examples are not his, but based on his four (semantic) degrees of definiteness. They match Stoic distinctions in 4.32 (p. 111) above:
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Infinitum
ut Infinitum
Effinitum
Finitum
indefinite
like indefinite particular
definite
homo
vir
iste vir
Petrus
`human being' `male human' `that male human' `Peter' Native speakers share more knowledge of the world, than knowledge of linguistic structure. The first sort keeps us alive (knowing what's poison), with fewer surprises. That is what an analogon picks out. The web of associations basing analogies are also discussed as semantic and other kinds of features. Their complexity is illustrated in what Varro called declinatio voluntaria. 4.46 Declinatio Naturalis. Native speakers use novel forms in ordinary life. Declinatio voluntaria can cover the unpredictable turns, innovations and (de)formations of familiar expressions. A Washington Post feature challenged readers to form new words modelled, for example, on stem+phobia, `fear of stem', as in Xenophobia, `fear of, or unusual preoccupation with strangers'. Several levels of analysis can be involved in a single entry; some are so tied to current events as to defy analysis. 4.47 Declinatio Voluntaria: Phobias: Vwlphb
fear of vowels
Philibosianophobia
fear of seeing my name in print
Roslynophobia
fear of being seen in the same dress twice
Friendorphobia
fear of forgetting the password
3.2 phobia
near fear
Anitaphobia
fear of fruit
Superphobia
fear of missing while leaping over tall buildings
Dannonphobia
fear of living to be 165 years old
Phastphoodphobia
fear of not having it all your own way
Zieglerphobia
fear of becoming inoperative
Aphobia
fear of nothing
Akrophobia
fear of being stranded in Akron, Ohio
Charminophobia
fear of being squeezed to death
Titophobia
fear of turning red
Reincarnaphobia
fear of having to do it all over again
Cosellophobia
fear of silence
Churchillphobia
fear of blood, sweat and tears
Titanicphobia
fear of ice cubes
Gauchederrierphobia fear of being left behind Congressionalaphobiafear of getting caught Custerphobia
fear of going bald
4.48 Greek Grammar. The Greeks were fond of arguing and their debates identified alternative solutions to many basic questions. In language, Rhetoric
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occasioned debate about its relevance to real wisdom. If, as Socrates argued in Cratylus, we agree some men are evil, Protagoras was wrong to hold that man is the measure of all things: success alone is not wisdom. Rhetoric communicates true and false ideas, some obvious, some subtle. Dialectic disputes about rhetoric were not just about persuasiveness, but truth and how to express it. When Grammar became a distinct discipline, dialecticians and rhetoricians had another norm for correct language, but ambiguity was a perennial problem. Just as rhetoricians identified the form of successful speeches, dialectic might isolate the formal properties of valid arguments, while logic might distinguish between validity and truth. For Plato's contemporaries, Grammar referred first to learning `letters', then study of correct language, and later (especially for the Stoics) textual criticism. Though a conventional origin of correctness was accepted, respect for logical coherence was never lost. Few texts show how the Stoics criticized or emended texts. Neither the existence of, nor interest in, dialects nor the multilingual Alexandrian world motivated them to undertake autonomous phonetic study. That could have lead to an explicit morphology, and a formal instead of a semantic basis for syntax. Semantics fared much better as a quasi-independent study of concepts. 4.49 Athens as a Center of Learning. Athens began to decline by the middle of the 5th century B.C. By 404, she had surrendered to Sparta, but her intellectual preeminence was never in question: when Macedonia dominated under Philip, it was the Athenian Aristotle he summoned to tutor his son Alexander. When Aristotle's Lyceum began to rival his master's Academy, interest in scholarship was such as to assure that both could thrive. Tyrants and Cities alike were zealous for learning, and libraries, public and private, were visible symbols of it. Many were as much envied for their libraries as for their writings: Euripides, Demosthenes, Plato, and Aristotle were reputed to have large collections and Alexander sent Aristotle the constitutions of 158 Greek communities. Diogenes Laertius reported that Aristotle left some 445,270 lines of his own (about 400 books: only a third are known) and many Lyceum students' writings from its founding in 335, until his death in 322, a year after Alexander's in Babylon. Aristotle's books went to his successor Theophrastus, who left them to his nephew Neleus. Stories about their later fate assured a lively trade for booksellers for years: one had found them in Neleus' secret cave; Neleus' heirs gave them to Pergamon; or sold them to Apellicon (from whom Sulla took them when he captured Athens); or sold them to Strato's pupil, Ptolemy II, for Alexandria. Each rumor had perhaps only a grain of truth, but accounted for a sea of 'genuine' manuscripts. Meanwhile, scholarship in Athens declined for want of books for its research.
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4.50 Pergamon. Two rival centers of Hellenistic culture emerged as Athens declined: Pergamon and Alexandria. Pergamon, in the far Northwest of Asia Minor (Mysia), was purportedly on the site of ancient Troy. After Alexander's death, a Macedonian deputy assumed control of Pergamon. Later, Eumenes II (197-159 B.C) strove to make Pergamon a center of Hellenic grandeur. In Pergamon, anomaly was defended against the Alexandrian Aristarchus on analogy, and its library grew. 4.51 Parchment. The great Pergamon Library became famous under Eumenes II because of his eagerness to acquire books. He more than matched his zeal with money, so agents encouraged bribery, forgery, and thefts. He spent more on his library than the first three Ptolemies together had expended on the Alexandriana. The rivalry led Alexandria to cut off its papyrus supply. Pergamon then had to fall back on the preparation of skin parchment, and so perfected the process that Varro thought it their invention (in Latin, parchment is pergamentum). The library stood intact for a century, but the Pergamenes supported the losing Republicans, Cassius and Brutus. The winners, Octavian and Antony, divided the Empire between them: Octavian took the West and Antony the East: he promptly made a gift of the 200,000-book Pergamon Library to Cleopatra's Alexandriana. 4.52 Alexandria. Ptolemy, one of Alexander's Macedonian generals, was governor of Egypt's Alexandria (several cities were re-named that way). After Alexander's death in 322 B.C., he founded, as Ptolemy I, a royal dynasty which ended with the death of Cleopatra in 30 B.C. Egypt then became just another Roman Province, known chiefly as the Granary of the Empire. Modelled on the Mouseion in Athens, Ptolemy founded the Alexandrian Museum and its famed Alexandriana Library. His tutor Strato and other Peripatetics staffed and directed the twin institutions, a combination worth calling the first 'University'. It was devoted to research into all known branches of learning, humane and scientific, supported by royal stipends. Its need of books occasioned some pseudoscholarly activities. Forgery became so common, that verifying genuine works and correcting hasty copies became a demanding scholarly pursuit. Officials impounded books from visiting ships: a building where they were stored during copying, separate from the main library, was reportedly destroyed by a fire Caesar set to delay pursuers when escaping from Alexandria. Alexandria was devoted more to research than Athens' teaching Academy and Lyceum. Literary works were Theocritus' (d 250 B.C.) Idylls, Apollonius of Rhodes' (d 188 B.C.) Golden Fleece epic, and in Math, Euclid's Elements. In Astronomy, Erastothenes held the earth was round; Claudius Ptolemy's calendar assumed all heavenly bodies revolved around it, while Aristarchus of Samos held that all revolve around the sun. Archimedes studied the theoretical bases of specific gravity, leverage and the inclined plane.
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In Philology, Zenodotus revised Homeric texts and determined the `books' we now accept. But the most influential little book on grammar ever written was the Grammatike Techne, attributed to Dionysius Thrax (c 100 B.C). In a style so terse as to suggest a papyrus shortage, it proposed absolute novelties, now so commonplace that their genius is difficult to appreciate. What appeared under Thrax' name most likely summarized the efforts of many scholars. Of interest to General Linguistics is its consistent technical metalanguage: language to talk about language. This plausibly developed in connection with the need to distinguish genuine and dubious manuscripts for inclusion in the Alexandriana: Homer's Greek differed from the contemporary language; Alexandrian Greek gradually became the speech of emigrés or colonials, not of a mainland native; forgers or careless copyists could confuse usage and doctrines of different schools and periods. The gap between the 6 proposed goals of Grammatike and its statements about language might be read as a single 'faculty's' recognition of the need for broader studies within the `University'. Of interest are the criteria Thrax used, compared to the descriptive methods sketched in Chapters 1-3. 4.53 Excerpts from Thrax' Techne Grammatike 1. Grammar. empeiria ton para poietais te kai syggrapheuisin hos epi to polu legomenon (skill of-things among poets too and writers as forthe-most-[part] being-read/said) `Grammar is the Empirical knowledge 12 of the language of poets and writers as generally current' It has six parts: (1) correct pronunciation, (2) explanation of the principal poetic tropes, (3) preservation and explanation of glosses and mythological examples, (4) the discovery of etymologies, (5) the discovery of analogies, and (6) a critical consideration of the compositions of poets, which is the most noble part of this discipline. 6. On the Letters13. There are twenty-four letters, from alpha to omega . . . Seven of these are vowels, and they are a, e, e, i, o, u, o: they are called vowels (self-sounding) because they produce a sound of themselves. Of the vowels, two are long (eta and omega), two are short (epsilon and omicron) and three are either long or short (alpha, iota, upsilon); There are five prefixed vowels, and they are socalled because they are prefixed to i and y (u) to form one syllable, such as ai and ay. Postposed vowels are i and y. Sometimes the y can stand before the i as in myia and harpyia. There are six diphthongs: ai, ay, ei, ey, oi, oy. The rest of the seventeen letters are consonants (beta, gamma, delta, zeta, theta, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, ksi, pi, rho, sigma, tau, phi, chi, psi) and
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they are so-called because of themselves they have no resonance, but combine with vowels to produce a single sound. Of these, eight are semivowels: zeta, ksi, psi, lambda, mu, nu, rho, sigma. They are so-called because they are less resonant than the vowels. There are nine mutes, beta, delta, gamma, kappa, pi, tau, theta, phi, chi, and they are so-called because they sound less well than the rest. Of these, three are smooth, kappa, pi, tau and three are rough, theta, phi, chi; three are medium, beta, delta, gamma, and are so-called because they are smoother than the rough and rougher than the smooth sounds. . . Of the consonants, three are double sounds, zeta, ksi, psi, and they are so-called because they consist of two consonants, the zeta out of delta and sigma, the ksi out of kappa and sigma, and the psi out of pi and sigma. There are four unalterable consonants, l, m, n, r. They are so-called because in the inflection of nouns and verbs they are not altered. They are also called liquids or fluid sounds. 7. On the Syllable. A syllable is the linking of vowels and consonants or several vowels with consonants, as in gar, bous. This is the syllable properly so-called. Improperly, a single vowel as a or o can be called a syllable. 11. On the Parts of the Sentence. The word (lexis) is the smallest part of a sentence, which requires composition. The sentence is a combination of words that have a complete meaning in themselves. There are eight parts. . . 12. The Noun (Onoma) Is a part of speech having case inflections, signifying a person or a thing, and is general or particular; examples: `stone', `Socrates'... 13. The Verb (Rhema) Is a part of speech without case-inflection, 14 admitting inflections of tense, person and number, signifying an activity or a being acted upon . . . 15. The Participle (Metoche) Is a part of speech sharing the formal and functional characteristics of verb and noun . . . 16. The Article (Arthron) Is a part of speech with case-inflections, placed before and after nouns . . . 17. The Pronoun (Antonymia) Is a part of speech used in place of the noun and indicative of specific personal reference . . .
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18. The Preposition (Prothesis) Is a part of speech placed before other parts of speech in syntactic combinations and in word formation. 19. The Adverb (Epirrhema) Is a part of speech without case-inflection, which says something about the verb or is joined to one. 20. The Conjunction (Syndesmos) Is a part of speech connecting the train of thought and filling in gaps in its interpretation . . . Thrax' grammar reflects an early Alexandrian empirical bent in research. While his account of what Grammar is about left some disgruntled, Alexandrian scholars had other pressing tasks. The Greek they spoke was not that of Homer's epic nor of Athens; theirs was an emigré Greek; Pergamene Anomalist attack on any nominal or verbal paradigms Analogists proposed made the formal specification of their syntactic analoga an obvious need. Most of what Thrax said about Greek is correct as far as it goes. But after some 80 generations of grammatical research, some inconsistencies and shortcomings appear. The elementary phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax touched on in Chapters 2 and 3 above, might suggest `corrections' even to someone knowing no more about Greek than these excerpted translations from Thrax' Techne. His noticeable omission of syntactic study was remedied somewhat by the Alexandrian, Apollonius Dyscolus. 4.54 Apollonius Dyscolus (Circa II A.D.). Little more is known about him than that he was born, worked, and died in Alexandria. His own examples suggest that he was a teacher. His son Herodian reportedly was also an admired grammarian who worked in Marcus Aurelius' Rome, but only fragments of his (mostly phonological) writing survived. In contrast to the Techne's restriction to 'morphology', the Books in Dyscolus' work are titled as follows: I:
The Definite Article, The Relative Pronoun
II:
Pronouns
III:
On Solecism, Verbs and their Arguments, Participles
IV:
Prepositions, Adverbs
IVa: Adverbs (continued) More than the topics mentioned are treated in each section (as excerpts from Book I will show), but there is no extended discussion of the overall purpose and scope of Grammatike. Dyscolus accepts Thrax' analysis of sentence-parts, cites other Alexandrian scholars and Stoics. While Thrax quoted no one and gave no examples, the number and variety in Dyscolus' work is striking: about 1000 from ancient writers and poets (some 800 from Homer) with another 400 or so of his own. He identifies Correctness with Hellenismos: the way a native Greek knows
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something should be said. `Errors' include faulty syntactic construction, solecisms (lexical or phonological) and barbarisms ('interference' from an alien source). Etymological change or coinage of new terms were `errors', even those offered by Plato (Cratylos 432A-C) and Aristotle (Poetics 1457b-58a). 4.55 Dyscolus and Transformation. In Plato's Protagoras 339B, Socrates mentions hyperbaton (transposition better indicating modification-scope). In his translation and commentary on Appolonius Dyscolus, Householder (1981) finds Dyscolus anticipated several notions thought first clearly proposed in modern transformational grammar. Dyscolus discusses 'transformations' from unattested bases involved in etymological development; figures and tropes with or without literal counterparts; the relation between a supposed etymon and its derivatives; the deformation of correct forms through error; the common use of ellipsis, (omission of overt forms because they can be `understood'), and various processes called enallage, such as deletion, addition, transposition, or substitution, syntactic neutralization of a morphological distinction (we, the editor. . .). Dyscolus' linguistic data is cited confidently, likely based on generations of minute textual work by Alexandrian colleagues. His use of physis (like Varro's naturalis), can suggest spontaneity rather than natural determinism. He does not invoke synthekei (`by convention'), by then a technical label for the nomos side of Physis/Nomos, but freely uses its cognate thesis (`imposition', `invention'), allowing morphological anomalies to evidence unnoticed syntactic analogies. Talk of the natural origin and placement of linguistic forms sounds odd for a Conventionalist. But Analogy can grant a subsequent determinism in 'spontaneity' different from the antecedent determinism of Stoic Anomaly. If nature is structured (Analogy), rather than random (Anomaly), and we sort out true from false statements about it (Plato and Aristotle vs. the Sophists), then what language-parts and experience-parts have in common, can be pattern identity. That's what analogies represent. Dyscolus argues that if any part of linguistic expression, or of what we experience, is structured, the whole must be (cf. the emphasis added to I.13 below). 4.56 Dyscolus and Analogy. Three factors contrast with a fourth: tribe (`abrasion by time') and chresis (`usage') with apodeixis (`logical proof': perhaps internal coherence as `subsequent determinism') are not the same as paradosis (`tradition'). That accounts for prescriptions of great writers of the past. He argues that words in a sentence relate to each other exactly as consonants to vowels. The analogy: A is a variable (Consonant) demanding a constant B (vowel), and C is a variable, e.g. preposition, demanding a constant D, e.g. noun; the analogy's 'analogon', a form of independence: Just as some phonemes ('letters') are vowels, which are complete sounds even in isolation, and others consonants, whose pronunciation is not
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possible without vowels, so also, one can consider words of two kinds. Some words are, like vowels, producible in isolation, e.g. verbs, nouns, pronouns and adverbs, when they can be applied to action in the situational context . . . Other words resemble consonants, and just as they require vowels, so these require the presence of some of the aforesaid parts of speech; this is the case with prepositions, articles and conjunctions. These words always co-signify. . . (I.12 (III): Householder 1981:22 f) 4.57 Dyscolus and Universal Grammar. Dyscolus argued that order in (1) Thrax' word-classes, (2) alphabet (3) how cases, tenses and genders are quoted or displayed, are equally natural. While we might find that based on a disputable analogon, he found the opposed Anomalist `idiotic': Perhaps also the traditional order of the letters of the alphabet, with A first, followed by B (etc.) will suggest the order of the parts of speech, in which the noun appears first, followed by verb and the rest of the parts of speech, and likewise the order of the cases, with the nominative, genitive and the rest, or of the tenses of the verb, with present first, then imperfect and the rest; or the order of genders, masculine, then feminine, and third, the negation of these, the neuter, and similarly in many other cases which we will reason about individually. But, for the reasons mentioned above, it is important to compare and justify the ordering of the parts of speech. Perhaps someone, flaunting his own ignorance of such matters, may foolishly urge that there's no need to bother with such investigations, suggesting that these matters have been arranged arbitrarily and by chance. But such people can also propose that, in general, nothing is ordered and there are no errors of ordering: but this would be quite idiotic. And if you concede order in some cases, you must grant it in all. (I.13., Householder 1981.23, emphasis added) The Analogist position on the parallel between natural and linguistic structure is unmistakable in the emphasized last line. In 'The same man who slipped yesterday fell down today', Dyscolus shows consequences for grammaticality when parts are omitted: I.13: . . . if either noun or verb is deleted, then the sense of the sentence is indeterminate, but if any of the others is removed, there is no defect in the sentence at all: Article Pronoun Noun
Participle
Adverb
ho
autos
anthropos
olisthesas
semeron kat-epesen
the
same
man
slipped
today
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Prep-Verb
down fell
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Acceptable without one or the other parts: (a) ho autos the same
olisthesas
semeron
kat-epesen
slipped
today
down fell
(b) ho autos anthropos
kat-epesen
the same man
down fell
(c) ho the (d) ho
anthropos
kat-epesen
man
down fell
anthropos epesen
the
man fell
(e)
anthropos epesen man fell
Dyscolus does not mention that a finite verb like epesen ('he fell') unlike participial olisthesas can constitute an acceptable sentence all by itself, nor that the n in epesen is an addition commonly found when verbs ending in i or e come at the end of a structure, or are in prevocalic positions. I.18: Onoma, 'because of its primacy, acquired general applicability, so that all parts of speech may be called onomata . . . just as we show how, because of the invention of the alphabet, all the letters might have been called by the name alpha. . .' I.19: Pronouns `were invented for the purpose of accompanying verbs. Since nouns indicate third person applying them in a sentence can neither serve for the person speaking, i.e. the first person . . . (nor) the . . . second person. But verbs are concerned with three persons, and therefore pronouns were invented to refer to definite persons. . .' I.20: '. . . verbs are inherently marked for the persons understood in the nominative, when they are used absolutely . . . and pronouns, which were devised for contrast of persons, occur in the oblique cases also as enclitics, which represent persons absolutely but when they are introduced in the nominative case, they are always emphatic and contrastive. So for instance, emoi (`me' dative) in paida d'emoi lusaite (Iliad I.20: `But for me, free my daughter') is in contrast with hymin ('you' pl.) in Iliad I.18: hymin men theoi doien `May the gods grant you . . .' Now how does it happen that nominative pronouns cannot occur in enclitic form? Obviously it is because verbs preexisted and contained in themselves the absolute person, so that enclitic nominative pronouns could contribute nothing useful to the sense and would be more genuinely redundant . . . I.21: The participle `in turn, took its necessary place immediately after the verb, showing by its position its direct transformation from the verb . . . (it was necessary to be able to transform verbs into forms which could be
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inflected for case and could agree in gender, since verbs could not enter into such a grammatical construction). I.23: The Article didn't just get tossed in next by chance either, but reflects the fact that it is regularly conjoined with the preceding nominals but avoids the pronoun which cannot take the article . . . I.24-5: That the pronoun is placed next won't require any consideration, since it barely missed being place right after the noun. It's obvious that what can be substituted for something naturally accepts a later place. And since the article is used with a noun and the pronoun substitutes for a noun, it must be granted that the article, which co-occurs with nouns, outranks the pronoun. Referential pronouns are equivalent to nouns combined with articles. For nouns by themselves are not referential, but only when they are accompanied by the article, whose special function is reference (anaphora). So functionally these pronouns are equivalent to articles. Incidentally, the article itself, when it lacks its normal association with a noun, changes into the next lower ranking part of speech, the pronoun, as in the following examples: ho gar * thoas epi *
(Iliad I.12)
(the/he for came straight to ships Achaeans: He came right to the ships of the Achaeans
(Odyssey 17.172.3)
hos gar . . . (he) who was . . . ton d'apameibomenos (the/him answering, (he . . . ).
(Iliad I.84)
I.26: It is clear that the preposition also does not rank first or ahead of any of the parts of speech we've already discussed and hence is placed here. The name preposition (`placed before') was not given to it because of its own inherent meaning, but because it is preposed to the previous word-types, so that if they were not preestablished, it could not be combined with them as we have explained above. From this, then, it gets its position, being preposed sometimes in composition, sometimes in construction with the aforesaid parts of speech, so that it is in rank later by nature, but initial in a structure (as can be said about the so-called preposed article: for it is not the case that it ranks higher than nouns because it is preposed to them syntactically. Note that when the article is combined with a noun, if functions to recall some prior knowledge of that noun. I.27: And since the adverb has a structural position added to the verb, just as the placement inherent in its name testifies, and since the verb is second
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to the noun, so also the adverb is second to the preposition, which in composition and construction is placed before nouns. 1.28: After all the part that have been listed we take the conjunction, which conjoins them, and cannot convey any meaning by itself without the substance of these words, just as physical bonds are no use if there are no physical objects (to connect). In the rest of his work on Syntax, Dyscolus has many acute observations about formal systems in Greek that influenced the work of Priscian, who later produced the most elaborate and respected Grammar of Latin in Antiquity. 4.58 Priscian (fl. circa 500 A.D.). Three centuries after him, Priscian had many more Latin predecessors in grammatical work than Dyscolus among the Greeks. From boorish but clever Remmius Palaemon (he'd once referred to Varro as `that swine'), Priscian took ready-made Latin technical terms: Thrax' Techne Grammatike was translated by Remmius as Ars Grammatica. Socially more acceptable, and more influential in the history of Education, was Remmius' pupil, Quintillian. His much-studied Institutio Oratoria informs us about the status and teaching of Grammar among the Romans. Donatus was the fourth century tutor of St. Jerome, whose translation of the Bible from Greek into Latin had paradoxical effects on later opinions about grammatical correctness. Donatus' short grammar, appropriate for elementary students, was known for centuries to anyone educated in the West. Events then shaping educational environment in the West included the spread of Christianity, tensions resulting from conflicting norms of Christian and secular learning, the split of the Roman Empire into Western and Eastern spheres, and the growing importance of Constantinople as a center of culture. Priscian had the distinction of being the last pagan grammarian, and naturally enough, his models for correct literary language were pagan works. 4.59 Institutiones Grammaticae. Priscian wrote his Institutiones Grammaticae in Constantinople, teaching Latin as a Foreign Language. The Medievals referred to it as Priscianus Major (Books 1-16 on the `Parts of Speech') and Priscianus Minor (Books 17-18 on `Syntax'). His acknowledged sources and models include Thrax, Dyscolus (at times in word-for-word translation), and Dyscolus' son Herodian, whom he reckoned the greatest of his authorities. His order of presentation is Thrax', as translated by Palaemon, an order followed ever since in most Western works on language. On the Letters. Like the Stoics, Prisican distinguished a letter's name (nomen), shape (figura) and sound (potestas). Sound here renders Latin vox, stressing its vocal origin compared to Latin stridor (`sound' as `noise'). His subdivisions of vox in this context are reasonable as elementary phonological statements, but the absence of a clear phonetic base is obvious:
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Vox articulata: `An articulated vocal sound'. What articulated (jointed) involves is ambiguous: phonetic distinctness? semantic function? Aristotle distinguished human or animal sounds from noise because phone among the latter was not `linked to an image'. Vox inarticulata: `An inarticulate (or unarticulated) sound' is the converse of vox articulata, with the same ambiguity. Vox literata: Literally 'a vocal sound having been written'. The word literabilis `capable of being written', `writable' was morphologically possible, but not used. Vox illiterata: `A sound not written'. This converse of literata can be identical with a sound that cannot be written when `writing' refers to conventional orthography. The Stoics distinguished propheresthai (bare articulation) from legein (meaningful speech), but an independent, consistent, phonetic notation did not exist. On the Syllable. A syllable is a sound capable of being written and uttered on one breath with a single accent; it may be as few as one, and no more than six letters, e.g. a, ab (`from, away from'), ars (`art'), Mars, stans (`standing'), stirps (`root'). There are as many syllables as there are vowels. Dictio. `A word is the smallest part of a constructed oratio' (Dictio est pars minima orationis constructae). This makes an oratio equivalent to our phrase, clause, or sentence, constructed out of more than a single, unanalyzable expression, called a dictio. Taking vires (`forces') as his example, Priscian explicitly denies that it can be analyzed into meaningful parts. His definition of dictio fits several sequences which we take as representing Latin words, phrases, clauses, or sentences (orationes). Composites within the phoneme sequence /vires/ are vi (`by force'), vir (`adult human male'), vir + es (`you are a man') or vi + res (`you think by force', or `a thing by force'), depending on the quantity of e. V alone was also a numerical, not a vocal symbol, like 5. As in English, it can be named, (`five') but not pronounced. Written `V ires', it could stand for `five hedgehogs'. Priscian's motive might have been to forestall fanciful etymologies. But an objective linguistic reason for denying this fairly clear example of morphological construction in Latin was the inability of both Greek and Roman grammarians of his day to account for the phonological and orthographic complexities of their languages. In this instance, analogies of syntax, as well as explicit phonetic and phonological insight, are needed to unscramble the bound root-and-affix pattern involved. For the singular of vires, both nominative and genitive are vis, both ablative and dative vi, and the accusative case, vim. The overlapping forms were avoided. The nominative plural can be accounted an analogical formation (vires) since there is no root vir- appears in its singular. The other plural cases are `regular'.
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Priscian alludes to something closer to morphology in his remarks about case. His use of declinatio for ptosis is like Varro's. His defense of order in the listing of cases, similar to Dyscolus': Case is the inflection (declinatio) of nouns, or of other words with case, which occurs especially at the end of the word ... the nominative is only improperly called a case because it makes the other cases ... for the nominative is the first that nature produced and it claims first place ... the genitive has the second place and has a natural link of origin, since it is born of the nominative and generates the following cases. The dative, which is more appropriate to friends, is third ... the accusative, which pertains more to enemies, comes next. The Greeks put the vocative last, since it seems inferior to the others in combining only with verbs in the second person, while the others are used with all three ... In like manner, the ablative combines with all three ... Oratio. `Oratio is a correct arrangement of dictiones manifesting a complete message.' (Oratio est ordinatio dictionum congrua sententiam perfectam demonstrans) An oratio is a phrase, clause or sentence that stands for a psychologically complete message appropriate to each level of analysis. Where Priscian had a single technical term, we now use three for distinct levels of analysis. He implicitly acknowledges that difference by allowing an otherwise syntactically bonded nominal to count as a complete oratio: the one-word Answer, Honor, to the Question, `What is the greatest good in life?'. The Parts of Speech. (1) Defining of the noun is its property of signifying substance or quality. The nomen is a part of speech that distributes to each of its subjects, bodies or things, a common or proper quality. (2) Defining of the verb is its property of signifying action or passion (passivity). The verbum is a part of speech with tenses and moods, lacking case, and significative of activity or passivity. (3) The participium (`participle') is jure (`justly') separated from the verb both because it has cases which the verb lacks, and the kinds and resemblances of the nouns, nor does it have moods, which the verb does. The participle is a part of speech which is accepted for the verb, from which it is regularly (naturaliter) derived, with kind (genus) and case just like the noun, but with the accidents of the verb, except for the verb's distinction of persons and moods. (4) It is defining of the pronoun to be put in place of a proper noun and to signify determined persons. The pronoun is a part of speech which
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is accepted for any proper noun whatever, and has definite persons. It signifies substance without any particular quality. (5) Defining of the adverb is to be used (poni: to be placed) with the verb, and to lack complete (perfectam) meaning without it. The adverb is an undeclinable part of speech, whose meaning is added to the verb. (6) Defining of the preposition is to be placed apart from (separatim) but in apposition with (per appositionem) declinable forms (casualibus) ... but when in constructions, to be constructed with both declinables and indeclinables. The preposition is an undeclinable part of speech which is preposed to other parts by apposition or composition. (7) (The interjection) seems to have within it the affect of the verb and to make manifest (demonstrare) the full meaning of mental reaction (motus animi), even though a verb is not added. (8) Defining of the conjunction is to link up (conjungere) different kinds of nouns, or any kind of declinable words, or different kinds of verbs or adverbs. The conjunction is an undeclinable part of speech which links up (conjunctiva) other parts of speech, in company with which it consignifies, (and) manifesting influence (vim) or relationship (among them) 4.60 Priscian and Latin Verbs. Priscian's classification of Latin verbs can be reworded in objective, descriptive linguistic terms to distinguish the morphological, lexical, semantic, and syntactic criteria he mentions: Those ending in -o are of two kinds, active and neutral. The active type always signifies activity, and passives are formed from them. Neutral verbs are those that end in -o like the actives, but passives are not formed from them. The verbs that end in -or are of three kinds: passive verbs, which are formed directly from the active, and always mean being acted upon; common verbs, which signify both acting and being acted upon, but have only -or endings; and deponent verbs, which end in -or only, and are called deponent, either because they are used alone or absolutely, or because they `depose' different meanings and are quite independent, requiring no addition to have meaning. Let (1) Capital Letters represent verb-roots; (2) -o and -or, the bound affixes that demand and exclude different subsets among verb-roots; (3) +O, any Oblique (non-nominative) form, and (4) +a te, the normal Latin expression of personal Agent with passive verbs [the preposition a plus ablative case te: ('by you')]. His mixed criteria result in five types:
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I
II
-o Active Verbs A-o+O
Neutral B-o+Ø
III
IV
-or Passive Verbs A-or+ate
V
Common A-or+O
Deponent D-or+O
and C-or+ate
D-or+a te
If only overt syntactic construction with O or a te is made relevant, two types, with four lexically distinguished subtypes result: I Active vs. II Passive
A-or+O
B-or+O
C-or+te: Ø
vs.
vs.
vs.
A-or+a te
B-or+a te
Ø D-or+a te
If morphological composition and syntactic construction with objects or overt expression of Agency are taken to be relevant, three syntactic types and lexically distinguished subtypes result: I
Active
A-o+O
B-or+O
II Passive
A-or+a te
B-or+a te
III Neutral
C-or+O:
(C-or+a te)
Useful classifications vary with their purposes. These alternatives focus on morphological, lexical, and syntactic levels and their intersection. None is independently ±correct or even superior, until the purpose of classifying is set. Analogies depend directly on an appropriate analogon. Linguistic levels base different similarities. Priscian's account of Latin moods confuses levels: he found an optative mood in both Latin and Greek verbs. Greek has a 3-, Latin only a 2-term system in models of verb morphology with bound-verbal-root+ bound-suffix, in these singular forms assigned traditional names and semantic glosses for their use in independent clauses: Greek: `Factual' Indicative vs. `Potential' Subjunctive 1
-o
2lu-
-eis
3
-ei
-o lu-
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-es -e
vs. `Desirable' Optative -oimi lu- -ois -oi
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Latin: `Factual' Indicative
vs. `Potential/Desirable' Subjunctive
1
-o
2am-
-as
3
-at
-em am-
-es -et
Priscian's Optative confuses a semantic function of a morphologically composed subjunctive verb-form distributed with the lexical item utinam in the syntactic construction. We translate Utinam Romae filius meus legisset autores, propter quos ibi nunc moratur as `Would that my son in Rome had read the authors because of whom he now dallies there'. This involves a mixing of levels of analysis descriptive linguistics is at pains to distinguish. Priscian agreed with Dyscolus that the only way to identify autonomous parts of an oratio was semantically, through the distinct contribution of each part. That was a needed and serviceable criterion for showing identities between Homeric forms and the divergent ones of contemporary Greek. It is equally defensible for showing identities between Greek and Latin. But concentrating on semantic similarity can obscure or overlook formal difference, as discussion of the Optative mood shows. 4.61 Construction Types. Priscian distinguished four sentence patterns by four kinds of verbs that define them. His semantic criteria required reference to situations characterized by the constructions. Verbs (and their constructions) are transitive (agent action affects another), intransitive (others unaffected by agent's action), reciprocal (agent's action only affects agent) or retransitive (agent's action affects another, but then affects the agent). His examples are realigned here to match agents (`exalted man', `Aristophanes' and `Ajax') those affected [`Aristarchus' and se, (`himself')] and the verbs [percurrit (`ran through'), docuit (`taught'), interfecit (`killed'), jussit (`he ordered') and venias (`you should come to him')]: (1) Intransitive:
percurrit
(2) Transitive:
Aristophanes Aristarchum
docuit
(3) Reciprocal:
Ajax
se
interfecit
tu ad se
venias
(4) Retransitive: Jussit ut
homo excelsus
Even the sketch of semantic verb-classification in Chapter 3 shows why Priscian's basis of comparison is only one of several. Aside from the formal asymmetry of his (1-3) with single verbs to (4) with two verbs, the semantic distinctions given above show up other gaps:
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Basic: Experiential: Benefactive: Locative: State:
grown
learned
won
near
Process: grow
learn
win
near
Action:
learn
win
near
grow
Quirk's approach mentioned in Chapter 3, mixes distribution, composition, and function: Priscian's (1) exemplifies Quirk's pattern 7 - The man ran: The child laughed, or 3 - The man ran (a race) : Somebody caught the ball; Priscian's 2) is Quirk's 3 A taught A : Somebody caught the ball, or 5 - A taught B (something) : We proved him wrong. Depending on whether they concern actual or potential nominals and verbals, the three accounts compare as follows:
I Syntactic: Quirk
The exalted man ran N
(a race)
S
(Od) V V
Aristophanes II: Syntactic: N
Aristarchus taught (something) V N
Quirk:
S
V
III: Syntactic:
Ajax N
killedV
himself N
Quirk:
S
V
Od
Oi
(Od)
Priscian's IV (He ordered you to come to him) combines his I and II, analyzable by the other approaches as: He N II: S
ordered V
(something) N
V
Od
You come N V I: S
V
(to him) (Advplace)
4.62 Basic Forms. When criteria from different levels of analysis are mixed or confused, classes are difficult to establish and compare. Priscian's classes of verbs and constructions show that, as does his treatment of nouns. The Greeks considered nouns basic. Why? If onoma is `name', then nouns are simple, but verbs are not, since the 'noun' and 'verb' run can `name' the same thing, but the verb must add time. A nominative noun was `basic' for Aristotle, since it was the only permissible form in his Predicate Logic. Priscian suggested more reasons:
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... the nominative is only improperly called a case because it makes the other cases...but if it is called a case because all the nominatives `fall' from the general idea of a name, it must be admitted that all the parts of speech have case ... for the nominative is the first that nature produced and it claims first place ... the genitive has the second place and has a natural link of origin, since it is born of the nominative and generates the following cases. The dative, which is more appropriate to friends, is third ... the accusative, which pertains more to enemies, comes next. The Greeks put the vocative last, since it seems inferior to the others in combining only with verbs in the second person, while the others are used with all three ... in like manner, the ablative combines with all three ... [This is how Priscian described how to `generate' one case from another in a subset of Latin Nouns: Singular:
`tribe'
`day'
Nom.
tribus
Gen.
Plural:
`tribes'
`days'
dies
tribus
dies
tribus
dies
tribuum
dierum
Dat.
tribui
diei
tribibus
diebus
Acc.
tribum
diem
tribus
dies
Abl.
tribu
die
tribibus
diebus
Voc.
tribus
dies
tribus
dies ]
The nominative is dies, the genitive and dative are the same, formed from the nominative by dropping the s and adding i; the accusative is formed from the nominative by changing the s into m; the vocative is like the nominative; the ablative is formed from the nominative by dropping the s. In the plural, the nominative, accusative and vocative are like the nominative singular; the genitive adds rum to the ablative singular; the dative and ablative plural are alike, formed from the ablative singular by adding bus ... The nominative is tribus; the genitive is like that; the dative is formed from the genitive by dropping the s and adding i; the accusative is formed from the nominative by changing the s into m; the ablative is formed from the genitive by dropping the s and lengthening the i; the nominative, accusative and vocative plural are like the genitive singular; the genitive plural is formed from the nominative by dropping the s and adding um; the dative and ablative are formed from the nominative by changing the i to i and interpolating bu. Priscian could not see how letters or letter-sequences matched morphemes, largely because of inadequate phonetic analysis. He is also inconsistent noting phonemic contrasts of length in Latin. Though he said it was necessary to derive case forms from a `basic' nominative, he actually uses the form closest in spelling to the next discussed in the order defended by Dyscolus. 11 cases are
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said to be `made from' the genitive and dative apiece, while only 9 are taken directly from the nominative. A form is descriptively basic which differs least within its own class (so resembles them most) but differs from related classes (so resembles them least). Greek stops are alike in place of articulation (labial, alveo-dental and velar), differ in ±voicing and ±aspiration. Other consonants in those places of articulation are not stops, so aspiration is not involved as a defining feature. Among Latin nouns, nominative singulars often do not resemble their genitive, dative, and accusative forms, while those three often have roots pronounced and spelled alike. Latin verb-conjugations are distinct by a thematic vowel in all indicative forms except the first person, which is -o for all of them. Grammarians still follow Priscian's practice of citing nouns in the nominative singular, and verbs in the first person. Neither is particularly `basic', but familiar traditions are hard to displace. Reading Householder, Fred. 1981. The Syntax of Apollonius Dyscolus. Amsterdam. Benjamins. pp 281. Indices 267-281. Pinborg, Jan. 1975. Classical Antiquity: Greece. in Sebeok, ed. Current Trends in Linguistics 13., Part I. The Hague. Mouton. Robins, Robert Henry. 1951. Ancient and Medieval Grammatical Theory in Europe. London. Bell. Supplementary Reading Allen, W.S. 1948. Ancient ideas on the origin and development of language. London. Transactions of the Philological Society of Great Britain. Barwick, Karl. 1922. Remmius Palaemon und die römische Ars Grammatica. (Reprint 1967: New York. Johnson). 1957. Probleme der stoischen Sprachlehre und Rhetorik. Berlin. Akademie-Verlag. Bochenski, I.M. 1951. Ancient Formal Logic. Amsterdam. North-Holland. 1961. A History of Formal Logic. Tr. Ivo Thomas. U.N.D. Press. Brunschwig, Jacques, ed. 1978. Les Stoiciens et leur Logique. Actes du Colloque de Chantilly 18-22 Septembre 1976. Paris. Vrin. Corcoran, John, ed. 1974. Ancient Logic and its Modern Interpretations. Dordrecht. Reidel. Egger, E. 1854. Apollonius Dyscole, Essai sur l'Histoire des Théories Grammaticales de l'Antiquité. Paris. Egli, Urs. 1967. Zur Stoischen Dialektik. Sandoz. Basel. 1974. Ansätze zur Integration der Semantik in die Grammatik. Kronberg Taunus. Scriptor. 1978. Stoic Syntax and Semantics. in Brunschwig, Les Stoiciens et leur Logique. Fowler, Harold North. 1921. Plato with an English Translation II: Theaetetus, Sophist. Loeb Classical Library. New York. Putnam. 1928 (1921). pp. 463. 1953. Plato With an English Translation VI: Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. pp. v-480. Grube, G.M.A. 1958. Aristotle on Poetry and Style. Translated and with an Introduction. New York. Liberal Arts Press. pp. xxxii-110. Introduction pp. lxxx. Bibliography pp. xxxi-xxxii. Hovdhaugen, Even. 1982. Foundations of western linguistics. Vojens. Universitetsforlaget. pp.157. Annotated bibliog. 142-150. [Readable, documented] Hülser, Karlheinz, tr., ed. 1979. Die Grammatik der Stoiker. Braunschweig/Wiesbaden. Vieweg. pp. 216, authoritative bibilog. by Urs Egli 182-213 [Classic Text of Rudolf Schmidt. Indispensable references]
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Kneale, William and Martha. 1962. The Development of Logic. Oxford. Clarendon Press. Lersch, L. 1838-41. Die Sprachphilosophie der Alten. Bonn. Lukasiewiscz, Jan. 1958. Aristotle's Syllogistic. 2nd ed. Oxford. Clarendon. Mates, Benson. 1953. Stoic Logic. Berkeley. U. Cal. Press. Nettleship, H. 1886. The Study of Grammar among the Romans in the First Century, A.D. Journal of Philology XV. Pinborg, Jan. 1962. Das Sprachdenken der Stoa und Augustins Dialektik. Classica et Mediaevalia 23.148-177. Pohlenz, Max. 1939. Die Begründung der abendländischen Sphrachlehre durch die Stoa. Göttingen. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. 1959. Die Stoa: Geschichte einer geistigen Bewegnung. 2. Auflage, Gôttingen. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Robins, Robert Henry. 1967. A Short History of Linguistics. Bloomington. Indiana University Press. Sandys, J.E. 1903. A History of Classical Scholarship, Vol. I. Cambridge. Schoemann, G.F. 1862. Die Lehre von den Redetheilen nach den Alten. Berlin. Scholz, Heinrich. 1961. Concise History of Logic. New York. Philosophical Library. Notes 1. Mimesis: Putative imitation, usually of `more correct' language: I will description the matter to you, if you will be capacity of it. (Shakespeare); or, We will not anticipate the past; so mind, young people our retrospection will all be to the future. (Mrs. Malaprop). Apherisis: departure from ordinary word formation, archaizing or innovative, as in omission of initial sounds: e.g. `gainst for against; squire for esquire; count for account; apron for napron. Prothesis: Prefixing of sounds, syllables or lost formatives: e.g. yclad for clad; Sp. escala vs. Lt. scala. Syncope: Medial loss, elision, or omission: orthographic contraction: e.g. o'er for over, e'er for ever. Apocope: Final loss, omission, elision of sound, syllable, formative, or letter: th' for the. Paragoge; Final addition: e.g. dearie for dear; /haytQ-/ vs. standard /hayt/ height. Dieresis: Syllabification of successive vowels otherwise diphthongal (also the two superscribed dots indicating this): e.g. beyiootiful, cooperate. Syneresis: Contraction of two syllables or vowels into one: e.g. I'll for I will. Tmesis: Infixation: to us ward vs. toward us; Interpolation: be thou ware for beware Ellipsis: Omission of a constructional constituent: e.g. Prithee, peace. Don't! Pleonasm: Multiplication of equivalents, redundancy, tautology: e.g. `The real, true, genuine, fact is that these gifts are free, gratis and on a no-cost basis'. Syllepsis: Semantic rather than syntactic concord; use of expression to perform more than a single syntactic function: e.g. He spoke to the country to sell them his policy, but neither he nor we were convinced.; The Government are seeing to the problem. Enallage: Syntactic neutralization of a morphological distinction; use of one grammatical form in place of another: e.g. We, the editor, think our advertising needs control. Simile: Explicit comparison of prosaically unlike: e.g. Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head. Metaphor: Implied rather than explicit comparison: e.g. He had a mental breakdown after the tragedy. Allegory: Extended metaphor, usually conveying unmentioned spiritual or abstract content through concrete expression: e.g. Pilgrim's Progress; Piers Plowman. Metonymy: Substitution of names or concepts for related, rather than similar, ones. `Relatedness' often amounts to any kind of `association': e.g. cause and effect: Soak up the sun!; effect for cause: Respect at least his gray beard!; symbol for symbolized: Down with
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Town and Gown!; container for contained: Succumb not to the bottle!; author for product: Read your Shakespeare!; Ancestor for progeny: Beware perfidious Albion! Synechdoche: Not-at-all-obviously-different from Metonymy; cited most when logical rather than causal relations are involved; again, almost any kind of association seems employed: e.g., part-for-whole: The fleet lost ten good bottoms that day.; whole-for-part: The Navy sank when she went down.; specific for generic: The Carnegie of the Erector Set.; generic for specific: A brown thumb in the garden of love; mixed: `Kind hearts are more than coronets And simple faith than Norman blood.; When this hand was a boy, he grew up strong and honest... Antithesis: Coordinate opposition of contradictories or contraries: e.g. life and death, hot and cold, feast or famine ... Macaulay: The Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators; Pope: Homer was the greater genius; Virgil, the better artist; in the one, we most admire the man; in the other, the work. Epigram: Pithy, witty, often contrastive of supposed equivalents: e.g. Beauty unadorned is adorned the most.; Oscar Wilde: A cynic is one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Irony: the intended interpretation is opposite of the overt expression: e.g. Antony to the people at Caesar's funeral: Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up ... Hyperbole: Extravagant exaggeration: easily descends into cliché: e.g. in dead earnest; awfully beautiful; profoundly grateful. Apostrophe: A digression in form of appeal to someone absent or to personified things: e.g. O death, where is thy sting? O sanity, where hast thou fled? Climax: Delay in mentioning the most important point until the end. E.g. Political introduction: Not only a man, but a man WHO ... Anticlimax: Delay in mentioning the least important until the end: e.g. Alas, alas, what shall I do? I've lost the wife and seed corn too ... Litotes: Understatement: affirmative through negation of the opposite: e.g. Noah on the Flood: It wasn't very dry that day. Euphemism: Use of non-tabu expressions for tabu; favorable for the disfavored: e.g. He passed away/over/through/on/along vs. He died. He is famed for his vivid, lively, inventive, omnivorous and tirelessly adventuresome,- but quite unreliable imagination. vs. He's a liar. Onomatopoeia: Use of sound-imitative expressions: e.g. Poe: ...the tintinnabulation that so musically swells ...From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells. 2. Parts of speech now; then parts of a logos. Like oratio, logos ambiguously referred to constructions we distinguish as phrase, clause, and sentence. 3. That is, one might defend a distributional identity between the patterns in which consonants as bound elements (variables) presuppose a free vowel (constant) to constitute a syllable, and between a bound or bonded noun (variable) which demands a free verb (constant) to constitute a nominal phrase, a clause or NV sentence. Greek trechei alone is equivalent to He runs. English demands an expressed subject, making He runs exocentric, while Greek houtos / Sokrates trechei, ('this man / Socrates runs') and trechei tis (`someone runs') are endocentric: trechei is correct without the optional nominal expansions. The three forms are distinct in logic: the grammatical nominals are demanded as part of the expression of the logical composition distinguishing definite, intermediate and indeterminate atomic (simple) lekta shown on the chart to follow. While the logical analysis is identical for English and Greek, the grammatical one is not. Different kinds and levels of analysis are involved in each case. 4. Latins transliterated lexis as dictio, matching the Greek root leg- and the Latin dic- (both roots gloss as `say') with the respective abstract nominalizing suffixes -is and -(t)io (cf. the cognate English abstract noun, diction).
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Page 162 5. Rasa is a Latin perfect passive participle: the slate is not just `clean', but has been 'cleaned'. It is then compatible with Plato's (not necessarily the Stoics') idea that what we `learn' is really something `remembered' on the occasion of our first 'experience' of it. 6. Lek-t-on can be analyzed into root leg- (`say'), passivizing infix -t- (like English suffix -ible) and neut., sing., nominalizing suffix -on, with the sense `express-ible' and referent semainomenon ('thing symbol-ized' or 'as symbolized'). Lekton is presented as the SEEM part of a three-way opposition. The second, SAID part, is assigned the sense semainon (something symbol-izing) and referent phone: (speech, not just phonation), and the third, or SO part, has tugchanon (something going on) as both sense and referent, with an alternate description as to (`the') ektos (`outside') hypo-keim-enon [hypo- (`under'), keim- (`lie'), -enon, (`ing')]: a rather thorny problem of interpretation. Semainon (like tugchanon) is a pr., act., sing., neut., participle we can gloss as `something symbolizing' (one gloss of the root of tugchanon is `happen'). The passive counterpart of the active participle semainon is se main-omen-on, glossed as `something being signified' or `something being symbolized'. The morph -ma in kategorema overtly passivizes and nominalizes the stem meaning `class(ify)' while the parallel distribution of semainon and semainomenon with nouns (like that of tugchanon with pragma, `thing') bases nominalized glosses. The nominal pragma can be analyzed into the suffixed morph -ma which passivizes and nominalizes the root prag- (`do'). 7. Jan Lukasiewicz' (1935) pioneering demand for reevaluation of ancient and medieval formal logic was supported by research by Scholz (1931/1961) Bochenski (1951) Mates (1953/1961), the Kneales (1962) and others, with subsequent revisions (cf. Corcoran 1974). 8. (1) Aristotle's is a logic of predicates or classes, Stoic-Megaric, a logic of propositions; (2) Aristotle uses object-language, the Stoics use metalogical language to express theorems; (3) while the onto-logical status of Aristotle's formulae is ambiguous, Stoic formulae always refer to lekta; (4) novel terminology concealed the complementarity of Stoic and Aristotelian logic, but the Stoics used late Aristotelian as well as pre-Aristotelian sources (Bochenski 1935:80-83). 9. Logical laws are stated in the object-language, rules metalogically; in most laws (formulated conditionally) the antecedent implies the consequent (if... then); in rules, antecedent and consequent are related through entailment (if and only if ...then, abbreviated as iff (Bochenski 1935:95-96). 10. An Analogy of attribution is subdistinguished into: Intrinsic attribution: When the basis for attributing a quality or property to a second item is essential to the definition of the first, best, or most obvious example, e.g. a scientific coat could be one designed and produced according to scientific principles for Arctic wear. Extrinsic attribution: When the grounds for attributing a quality or property is only peripherally connected with the first, best, and most obvious example, e.g. a scientific coat like the white one scientists wear. 11. English approximations of these types: some are more idiomatic as temporal clauses, both in English and Greek (Whenever it rains vs. If it rains) but identical mood-forms are required in Greek, the appropriate conjunction-words aside. Real: (actually)
it is wet
(actually)
(actually)
it was wet
(actually)
If it rains
If it rained (actually) If it was raining
it was wet
(actually)
Unreal: (but it isn't)
it would be wet
(but it isn't)
(but it didn't)
it would have been wet
(but it wasn't)
If it were raining
If it had rained
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Real future: (tomorrow)
it will be wet
(possibly)
(generally)
it is wet
(usually)
(generally)
it was wet
(usually)
If it rains Generic present:
If it rains Generic past:
If it rained 12. A contemporary commentator on Thrax explained it this way: ''Practice leads to skill; skill to art; art to understanding, and this finally to the art of the whole." (Bekker, An. Graec. 656, from Robins 1967). Thrax's grammatike: no longer matched Aristotle's pioneer rhetorical-logical-grammatical use. Protests that techne: set grammatical goals too low reflect distinctions about levels of knowledge seen in Varro, and Aristotle's Rhetoric (i.1.1), contrasting episteme: as science (demonstrably certain) to techne: (art reducible to rule), and empeiria (knack or skill that comes with experience). Simple ability was peira, and the set of terms can be glossed somewhat as follows: peira:
practice (children's drawing of letters; a handyman's skill)
empeiria:developed practice: (student writing; a shipwright's skill) art: skill and intuition reduced to rule; (teacher-training; the skill and techne: artistry of a naval architect) science/philosophy: (the complete literary theorist; demonstrable level of knowledge; all naval sciences completely mastered through the episteme: four causes) While Categories are descriptive labels, Causes are explanatory principles pairing levels related in an etic-emic hierarchy. Causes are Material, Formal, Efficient and Final; only Material and Formal causes are mentioned in Descriptive Linguistics: to explain language, questions like those in the Physis/Nomos and Anomaly/Analogy debates arose, involving Efficient and Final causes: composition; what constitutes a thing descriptively and enables us to material: distinguish it from those most like it at the same level of analysis. its intelligibility; its function; what explains it specifically at its own formal: level of analysis and accounts for behavior peculiar to it. what produces, or constitutes it as a material (etic) and formal (emic) efficient: unit. final:
extrinsic goal or purpose, specifiable within a larger level of analysis.
13. A Contemporary Commentator on Thrax: "There are three instruments of speaking: the tongue, teeth and lips. Pi is pronounced by pressing the lips together, so that no breath gets through. Phi is pronounced by opening the lips wide and letting much breath out. For Beta, which is also pronounced with the lips ... they are neither opened as wide as with phi nor so compressed as with pi, but a little bit of air is allowed to exhale. Thus beta lies in the middle between pi and phi and not other letters, since it is made at the same place as those two. "Similarly, gamma lies in the middle between kappa and chi, since it is made in the same place as they. Kappa is pronounced while the tongue is arched and presses on the velum, without allowing the rebounding stream of air through. For chi, however, the tongue is not pressed on the velum nor adherent to it, but allows the air through. With the same tongue-position, gamma is pronounced, just that it neither makes a full closure at the velum, as with kappa, nor a full opening as with chi, but allows the air a medium passage."
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14. Use of ptosis (translated `case-inflection' here) is partly consonant with the Stoic, but makes no mention of how noun and verb morphology differ. Noun-`Cases' are suffixed, verb inflections involve infixes, prefixed augments, and reduplication: Present
lu
o: (suffixed persons, omega, etc.)
Future
lu s o:
Imperfect
e
lu
Aorist
e
lu s a (infix: sigma)
Present Perfect
le lu k a (infix: kappa)
Pluperfect
on (prefixed augment: epsilon)
e le lu k e (reduplication of lambda)
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5 Medieval Roots of Traditional Grammar 5.00 Old and new, innovative and traditional can sound like relevant and irrelevant. Medievals referred to scholars of a preceding generation as antiqui, much as some equate today's Linguistics with traditional grammar. Here, 'traditional' refers to the assumptions, procedures and ideas about language before 19th century studies claimed scientific status. The prescriptive character of `traditional' school grammars are reflexes of logical, humanistic, and aesthetic norms thought to be self-evident, some developed through controversies in the Middle Ages. Grammar did not suddenly emerge as a field independent of the handful of works mentioned in Chapter 4. The work of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, was not limited to something as circumscribed as Grammar. But their views about language as a guide or impediment to knowledge profoundly influenced Western grammatical concepts. Thrax sketched a broad philology, but his text groped with elementary morphology. Dyscolus distilled a few syntactic rules from literary models, and offered some hazy ideas about their `natural' origin; Priscian quoted contemporary speakers and classic authors in terms familiar to Aristotelians. But a descriptive vocabulary many not be an explanatory vocabulary: oppositions like Matter vs. Form, Substance vs. Accident, were adapted to any discipline as readily as contrasts in linguistic composition, distribution and function at different levels of analysis. 5.01 Description and Explanation. Aristotle's Categories describe things by putting them into classes. Priscian's account of noun as a word `signifying substance with quality' tells what nouns do, not why nor how. The four causal concepts 'explain': Formal vs. Material causes correspond respectively to emic vs. etic in Descriptive Linguistics, and final cause is partially involved as an aspect of function in that approach. Efficient cause was sometimes invoked to explain language's ultimate origin, rarely mentioned as an individual's tooobvious role in speech. Aristotle did not use logical as we do. 1 His `logician' spoke and syllogized rigorously, but, like most, could be lacking in factual knowledge. Aristotle's elementary logical works were called the Organon, suggesting a tool for philosophy/science, while Stoic dialectic suggests debate largely defines philosophy/science. The term dialectic came to the Medievals through texts by Martianus Capella (430) and Cassiodorus (500), a student of Boethius. His translations of Greek masters all but defined Aristotelian thought for the
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Medievals. Sixteenth century books such as those by Melancthon, Ramus and Fonseca, were still called dialectic, but by the 17th century, the term dialectic ceded again to logic, and Francis Bacon's Elizabethan Novum organon had not reversed the trend. Three views of language in the Middle Ages influenced ideas about what it is, how to interpret it and how it functions: Dialectic, Theology, and the grammatico-philosophic speculations of the Modistae. The combination sounds preposterous today when Grammar, Debating, and Theology are simply different. For the Medievals, no man or discipline was an island. 5.02 An Age of Synthesis: Philosophic Assumptions. Aristotle accounted for transient and permanent things by describing both as composed of two coprinciples: matter and form. These mutually defining oppositions describe what is determinable or determining, potential or actual, much the way bound and free morphemes differ in (in)dependence. Taxonomies like the Categories describe by opposition: Substance as the material or etic basic unit, and other Categories as its emic or formal specifications. That contrasts Composition, Distribution, and Function of units at different levels, and separates the description of problems from their explanation. The recovery of 'lost' works of Aristotle and the revival of Dialectic in a theocentric age triggered a 'mode' sort of grammar. Theologians probed the certainties derived 'logically' increasingly problematic, compared to those of Revelation. Aristotle's universe was structured because its totality (and each member) was determined by formal and final causes rational analysis can discover. Aquinas' theocentric universe was structured because of God's creative knowledge. Aquinas said humans can discover that structure, but only in a discursive, partial, and analogical fashion. Aristotle's uncreated universe had a Prime Mover, an eternal and impersonal final cause, to account for change. Aquinas took the Judaeo-Christian view that matter was created from nothing by a personal God, the Efficient Cause Who was equally a Final Cause of His creation. There was ambivalence about whether `Logic' were an autonomous tool of certain deduction, or a debate about probabilities. As stereotypic antagonists, Anselm of Canterbury wrote as a believer looking for rational support (Fides quaerens intellectum) in opposition to those who demanded that belief be rationally justified. Opponents tended to contradict each other with dichotomies like rational vs. irrational, rather than qualify different opinions. A Stoic would probably have proposed a triad like rational vs. nonrational vs. irrational. The Medieval age of synthesis contrasts with our own age of analysis or technology. They expected harmony among disciplines, so how knowledge was attained and communicated was a central concern. Now, some defend many autonomous sciences, others a unique and unified science, others are content with technical control, regardless of theories about how that is attained.
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5.03 Logical Assumptions. A medieval Arts Faculty taught the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and Quadrivium (mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and music). Grammar was largely Priscian and Donatus, Logic Aristotelian, and Rhetoric mostly Ciceronian. Students of all nations came to the higher faculties of Law, Medicine and Theology with an international technical language. Medieval Latin usage was hardly classic, and that upset Renaissance critics. They overlooked the mnemonic role a jargon had to play when all instruction was oral: `books' were all but unobtainable. Early medievals knew the Aristotle of Categories and On interpretation. This `old' Logic developed into `New Logic' (Logica Moderna) when the rest of the Organon was circulated in the second half of the 12th century, along with encyclopedic works by Aristotle on other subjects. Disputes led to original syntheses of semantic, linguistic, metaphysical, and epistemological insights within a broad conception of Logic. As with Homeric texts, pseudooriginals abounded, to be sorted out from Aristotle's genuine works. 5.04 Psychological Assumptions. There was no medieval consensus about how we come to know things, any more than there is today. One scheme outlined in Figure 2 (derived from works of Thomas Aquinas) relates ideas then accorded singular respect: it accepts Aristotle's idea that knowing involves a kind of becoming what you know, echoed in the aphorism that you are what you read. A medieval truism was that anything known is grasped according to the capacities of the knower. It's now assumed things we know are filtered by a variety of receptors: hearing, sight, feel, smell, and taste are discrete because vibration-ranges define senses and objects in a complementary fashion. But capacities vary with maturity, socialization and insight. An infant, child, adolescent and adult do not appreciate music alike. Knowing is not just passive receiving. The Stoics said natives and foreigners `receive' speech identically as sound, but only the native `gets the meaning'. Knowing does not result from hearing identical lectures, reading identical books, and living in the same community. Interests deflect or direct attention to a portrait's plastic, color, contrastive, or symbolic aspects, or techniques used to paint it. Modern math finds Greek thought geometric, not purely quantitative; linguists find traditional grammars subjective and classicists consider modern music rhythmic but unmelodic. Medievals had nothing like our technology to examine such questions. 5.05 So-Seem-Said. This suggests that the way things are (SO) may or may not be determinate, but perceptions and consequent ways of understanding (SEEM) them clearly vary. Aristotle suggested quite the opposite. His On Interpretation held that although speech varies, the things languages symbolize are identical for all men as are human perceptions of them. Social and psychological factors aside, that view can hardly stand. The Medievals, for example, had only four names for physical `elements' (Air,
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Water, Earth, and Fire), while new elements are discovered almost yearly. Water and H2O are incomparable. It is challenging to see inherited linguistic conventions as involving a stable, common, resource, a framework underlying the varieties of literal expression (SAID). Dictionaries record what people meant by words. But some conventions (SAID) are at variance with accepted ideas (SEEM) or facts (SO). Even Analogists saw Athens (plural) vs. Rome (singular) as 'anomalous'. We use pants/scissors 'anomalies' comfortably and time sunrise precisely, though a heliocentric astronomy long ago replaced the geocentric, where talk of the sun rising and setting was taken literally. To share novel insights requires departures from inherited literal usage. But if established patterns of expression (modes of signifying) are abandoned. nothing is communicated. 5.06 Ways of Knowing. One way to account for 'misfits' was proposed in treatises called De modis significandi. They attempted to sort out the ways things are, ways they can be signified (passive modes of signification) and the ways conventional signals must symbolize them (active modes of signification). Many accepted Aristotle's view that ordinary 'meanings' are rooted in sensation, and others (numbers, constructs like gravity, phoneme, underlying or reconstructed form) derive from them. But some Aristotelian ideas like the eternity of matter, a prime mover as the final, but not efficient cause of the universe, contradicted the biblical account of a personal Creator. They raised questions about natural knowledge and how to express 'knowledge' of God at all: if God is not a sense-object, how reconcile SoSeem-Said anomalies if meanings must be verified in sensory experience? 5.07 Knowledge is Perfectible. One answer was that our knowledge is discursive, abstract, and analogical, yet indefinitely perfectible. It is discursive because we learn step by step; abstract because we only know some properties and relations of things, and analogical because communication is through shared, not identical, experience. We appeal to previous models and show how new information modifies them. We point to prime analogates clear, obvious, and basic examples. Though more often wrong than right, our ability to be sure when we are right, and see why we were wrong, leads to confidence that knowledge can be continually updated. The medieval Roger Bacon concluded that all languages are substantially the same but accidentally different, from his study of Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Latin. A modern reformulation of this is that there are substantive linguistic universals. To say there are formal universals is another way of expressing the formal basis of Analogy. 5.08 Linguistic Structure. Said can be studied autonomously. Some linguists assume linguistics should be an autonomous science; others, that corroboration from disciplines like psychology is needed if explanation, rather than just a description, of language is required. Some Medievals thought all
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disciplines should harmonize in a single rational structure; others, that non-or super-rational elements are causal factors that cannot be ignored. The latter attempted an integration of natural science and metaphysics (the way things are, and what it means `to be'), as well as of psychology or epistemology (how we know and what it means `to know'). The physis or Stoic account of language-origins predicts continuity between what language expresses and what there is to know as a mechanical fact; their anomaly position acknowledged that something went wrong. The nomos view, linked to analogy, had more stubborn facts to contend with. Figure 5.3 summarizes ideas derivable from extensive but diffuse treatment of these views in Aquinas' writings. While not directly related to linguistic analysis, it underlies many linguistic concepts he and contemporaries took for granted. It is determinedly cognitive, and as it stands, inferior to the undeveloped idea that non-cognitive language uses should be incorporated in language-study, as outlined in divisions of the Stoic Lekton. This is not a sketch of psychological steps by which individuals actually arrive at abstract ideas, but what attainment to each level presupposes in a logic of abstraction. Transfer-of-learning theory assumes that abstract ideas are more readily grasped when we have experience in formulating analogous concepts: they make explicit how emic patterns unify etically diverse data. 5.09 The Modistae. The Modistae's 12th to 14th century writings on language were called De modis significandi. Differences distinguished as concerns about So, Seem and Said have to do, among other things, with ways we must talk
Said modi significandi
ways things are
So
modi essendi
ways of conceiving things Seem modi intelligendi A linguistic structural feature shows part of their problem: the phrases modi significandi and modi intelligendi are ambiguous in Latin, since they have no morphological active/passive contrasts. Even in context, it is difficult to decide whether modi significandi and intelligendi should be translated as ways of signifying
or ways of being signified
ways of understanding or ways of being understood The Modistae marked the intended interpretation of 'modi' by phrases like modi activi or modi passivi (`active modes' vs. `passive modes' of signifying and understanding). In Stoic terms, these are `ways of being a semainon or semainomenon' (i.e. `ways of being a sign or something signified'). Like the Stoics, the Modistae saw the referent of a sign, and the fact that a referent could be referred to by that sign, as two aspects of a materially identical, but formally distinguishable thing. An etically unique identity can be distinct by an emic perspective. For example, anything taken materially,
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which we decide is rational and animal, has that passive mode of signification rational animal; anything taken as formally signifying `rational animal' has that active mode of signification. Material or etic objects are identified or described only in terms of their composition. Formally or emically, objects with identical composition are viewed in terms of functions explaining them. Given a phonetically high, front vowel [i], we can say that in Latin, it is 1 of 5 functional contrasts; in other languages, 1 of 3 or more than 5 such oppositions. Or: when I talk to myself about me, 3 distinct grammatical persons, but only a single referent is involved, etically or materially identical in SO, but functionally or formally distinct in SAID, and easy to keep distinct in the realm of SEEM. Distinct active modes of signifying (Said) can be used to refer to an identical real (So) situation: (a) Phoebus mounted his chariot, or (b) The sun rose. While (a) must signal deliberate action, (b) ambiguously signals an action or indeliberate process. We consider (a) metaphoric, but neither an action or a process interpretation of SAID (b) has corresponded to SEEM since Ptolemaic astronomy was abandoned. There is a clear conflict among SO-SEEM-SAID: areas the Modistae assigned to modi essendi, modi intelligendi, and modi significandi: in (b), rose has an active mode of signification not in contrast with a passive mode. Similarly, we still describe familiar temperaments (jovial, mercurial, saturnine; choleric, phlegmatic, sanguine) in terms of astrological and physiological theories few still credit. 5.10 Modistic Method. One of the most developed of these treatises is ascribed to Thomas of Erfurt (Bursill-Hall 1972). Its preface explains what the work was designed to deal with: (1) Rationale of the method: Because understanding and knowledge in every science come about from recognition of principles... if we want to have knowledge of the field of Grammar, we first have to pursue all its ultimate sources, which are the Modes of Signification. But before we inquire about them in detail, some generalities must be prefaced, without which a complete concept is unattainable. The first and basic question is how a mode of signification is isolated and delimited. Second, from what a mode of signification ultimately arises. Third, from what a mode of signification is immediately taken. Fourth, how a mode of signifying is distinguished from a mode of understanding and from a mode of being. Fifth, in what a mode of signification is found, as in a subject. Sixth, what relation the following terms have to each other: Sign, Word, Part of Speech, and Term. (Latin Text, Bursill-Hall 1972:134) 5.11 Modern Analogical 'Modes'. The metaphysical, logical, and psychological assumptions mentioned in Chapter 4 are all touched upon in these questions. The relations taken for granted among logical and linguistic
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modalities are illustrated in Hispanus' handbook, Summulae Logicales: excerpts relevant to the notions of Sense, Reference, and Modification will be presented. Hispanus' mode of thinking is analogical. Comparing it with modern usage 2 challenges us to see what mode, modality, mood and the like now have in common for different disciplines. 5.12 Modal Distinctions. To understand, translate, or paraphrase mode is problematic because such basic ideas are involved. A mode assumes a determinable element, identical, yet aspectually different, from one structure to the next: like the 'same' melody in major or minor key, in 3/4 or 4/4 time; or morphological paradigms, where one phonetic or semantic form is so basic that related forms are called conjugations, declensions, inflections, determinations, or modifications of it. Conceptions of `meaning' need clarity to sort the modal out from non-modal. Latin and Greek words for signify seem clearest they relate a sound-sequence as a name to the thing it names. 5.13 Translating Modally. Latin consignificat translates prosemainei in Aristotle's On interpretation III: there he says that the rhema, hygiainei (`is healthy'), differs from the onoma, hygieia (`health'), because the rhema signifies time in addition to what health names. This assumes an agreed view of what naming involves, and what can be `named'. Linguists avoid that by isolating roots (like hygi-) from affixes like -ainei and -eia, then distinguishing inflectional from derivational affixes on formal grounds. Some words can function like some affixes, as in Dixit Petrum solum scribere (glossed '3rd singular said Peter alone to write', translatable as He said only Peter writes or He said Peter is alone and he writes): solum either signifies (as a categorematic expression like subject or predicate) or signifies in addition ('consignifies' as adjectival modifier of the subject, or adverbial modifier of the predicate). Hispanus had no technical terms for the meanings of the free and bound forms he called syncategorematics, both of which had the function of consignifying. He did say that only nouns `signify', while verbs, adjectives, and forms of be `link' or `couple' their 'meaning' to the subject. Compared to English, Latin is a synthetic language: its morphology shows binary contrasts of root-and-affix, and other nongrammatical contrasts with similar relations, like: Modified:
vs. Modifier:
SUBSTANCE
ACCIDENT
a thing and its
property
condition
a thing and its
quantity
agency
etc.
relation
status
location
modification
temporality
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Morphologically: affixation root modified by its derivation base Syntactically: adjective noun modified by its adverb verb expansion head subordinate superordinate Logically: species genus individual species properties individual degrees properties Semantically: derived basic (ir)rational animal adult rational female adult Modification of SEEM semantic structures can be represented linguistically (in SAID) by morphological, syntactic, or lexical contrasts. Underlining here contrasts Latin morphological 'modifications' of the root am- ('love'), compared to the morphosyntactic contrasts English needs to manifest comparable modifications of the same Sense-unit: am- / love. Latin
English
Verb: Amat populum suum.
He loves his people.
Noun:Amator est populi.
He's a lover of his People.
Noun:Amantem se praebuit.
He presented himself as loving.
Ut amantem populus eum Noun:habent.
People think him a loving man.
Noun:Amorem populo monstravit.
He showed his love to the people.
Noun:Amor ipsa fuit.
He was Love itself.
Adv: Amabiliter locutus est plebi.
He spoke to the folk amiably.
Adj: Amabilis erat gubernator.
He was a likeable governor.
Adv: Amanter gubernat.
He governs lovingly.
Adj: Amatus periit.
He died beloved.
Part: Amaturus gubernare incepit
About to love, he began his rule
Ger: amandus vita functus est.
died as one who had to be loved
Latin morphology expresses what English handles by periphrasis, a term contrasting analytic languages where a word coincides with one or few
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morphemes and senses with synthetic ones, where a word consists of many morphemes and senses like Latin one-word verbs and English verb phrases: Latin:
English:
ament
may they love/may they be loving
amabant
they were loving
amaverunt they (have) loved amavissent they would have loved Latin was the one language Europeans shared, from elementary schooling through all levels of scholarship. Greek, once the lingua franca even for Romans, became rarer. Inevitably, some niceties of Latin phonology were neglected, but little was lost in writing. But in that theocentric era, Latin style owed more to St. Jerome's transliteration of Koine Greek than Ciceronian polish. The certainty attached to Revelation seems to have been transferred by some for quite confused reasons to the Latinity of St. Jerome's deliberately literal translation of Scripture. Koine Greek was no candidate for the Alexandrian 'purity' test of Hellenismos. 5.14 Non-Formal Study. The Modistae expressly excluded vox unde vox (phonology as such) from their study, leaving 'morphology' to intuition. Nonlexical meanings, they noticed, were added to lexical roots `principally at the end' of words. Contrasts they drew interested theologians, concerned with reconciling rational discussion with divine content. Given the ambivalence about the realm of `logic'. If there were apparent contradictions between the rules of language and truths considered divinely revealed, how could they be accounted for? 5.15 Modistic Terminology in Theology. The Theologians' concept of divine included unicity and simple perfection. They excluded limitations of time and complexity, so this expression seemed unobjectionable,: Deus
est
in-fin-itus
God
is
in-fin-ite
But Latin morphology entailed unintended modes of (con)signification: De-us is a complex form analyzable into: (a) masculine and singular, signalled by the bound morpheme -us; and (b) a bound lexical root de- for god. This is contrary to the SEEM concept of God as unique, since normal SAID contrasts include feminine dea and plural dei. est can be analyzed as either: (a) the copular use of `to be', or (b) the present tense of its existential use. But if it is copular, it suggests a predication of class-membership incompatible with the SEEM concept of uniqueness; if existential, it signals present time/tense, and contrasts with other times, while SEEM excludes limitation to time.
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in-fin-itus consists of (a) the root -fin- with negative lexical sense (`limitation'); (b) negative prefix in- whose mode of signification is either absence or privation in (c) a passive participle, marked by -itus: so (d) its mode of signification involves agency, different from, and antecedent to, its subject noun, - all incompatible with the concept simple perfection. A theologian's modistic solution could not change language, of course, but it called attention to disparities between modes of signifying, understanding, and being. Human 'meanings' relied on human prime analogates, but God was considered the ontological source of all good qualities. So they added the techniques called denial or removal viae remotionis vel negationis (of the grammatically required imperfections) and that of eminent predication. They made theological usage sensitive to contrasts between the sensory-SO-origin of human knowledge and grammatical-SAID requirements: two sorts of prime analogate were involved. 5.16 Peter of Spain's Summulae Logicales. 3 Chapter 1 above listed properties of scientific inquiry, such as public data, an explicit method, and the possibility of confirming or refuting conclusions objectively. Petrus Hispanus' Summulae Logicales are worth evaluating in light of them: he claims that dialectic is a study prerequisite to all others, because it shows how to test their fundamental assumptions. (Summulae I.1). Countable methods proposed for this rigorous examination in the Summulae are public and refutable, characteristics claimed for Linguistics as a Science. But Hispanus calls his study an Art, rather than a Science. What prevents it from being scientific, in his understanding of that term, is relevant to modern debates in linguistics. The Summulae appeared about a generation before Thomas of Erfurt's work of about 1300. Born in Lisbon about 1215, Peter may have been a contemporary of Thomas Aquinas in Paris (where Hispanus was first added to identify Petrus). Both studied Aristotle there under Albertus Magnus and Peter added Medicine. His own later medical teaching at the University of Siena won Hispanus wide respect. 5.17 Logic vs. Dialectic. Hispanus' approach to language is expressly that of a dialectician. One difference between logic and dialectic was that deductive certainty marked science, while probability `testablility' was the best one could attach to results in the Arts. For instance, once a term like circle was defined in geometry (the medievals called that a science), deductions about radii and right angles are demonstrable and acknowledged as certain. But ordinary words base only probable inferences, not certain deductions, even though the syllogistic form of arguments about both is identical. Dialecticians have the annoying habit of arguing that if you use a word, you mean it. If you mean it, you assert it. So each and every word can be challenged as though it were a subject or predicate in a rigorous syllogism.
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Some dialectic rules of thumb in the Summulae can be reframed from a linguistic point of view. Of Figure 5.1, we could say that Hispanus shows how sentences contrast or are equipollent referentially, because quantifiers like every, no and especially, some make minimal pairs with identical senses. The quantifier some still plagues modern arguments, when ± identical `meaning' is defined in terms of truth conditions. So Modern Logic excludes some as a quantifier and gradations like contradiction, contrariety, subalternation, and subcontrariety disappear. The norms now used for `truth conditions` are either-or and clearly referential (So), not conceptual (SEEM) much less tied toto the vagaries of any natural SAID. Moderns are not convinced that Aristotle (or his Medieval successors) were clear about the scope of negation (how Constituents construct with a negative). Hispanus' Summulae accepted the technical labels from 'Old Logic' in his first Tract:
Figure 5.1 The Square of Oppositions. Assertions are one kind of Proposition, and simple declarative sentences manifest them fairly directly: Modal sentences were similarly related: Contraries: For Socrates not to be running is not possible
For Socrates to be running is not possible
For Socrates not to be running is not contingent
For Socrates to be running is not contingent
For Socrates not to be running is possible
For Socrates to be running is impossible
For Socrates not to be running is necessary
For Socrates to be running is necessary
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Subcontraries: For Socrates to be running is possible
For Socrates not to be running is possible
For Socrates to be running is contingent
For Socrates not to be running is contingent
For Socrates to be For Socrates not to be running is not impossible running is not impossible For Socrates to be For Socrates not to be running is not necessary running is not necessary The Square of Opposition underlies a descriptive technique of subcategorization seen in the Porphyrian Tree (Figure 5.2) of the early Peripatetics, and comparable in form and reliance on a spatial analogy to 19th century use of `Trees' subclassifying Language Families, or to diagrams of Grammatical Derivation in Transformational Grammar. The Tree image showed which terms are inferiors of, or lower than, others, with a descent from generic to specific. It provided a basis for saying a reference was diffuse or personal, how things were said to `be in' others, and how things were same or different, with technical terms labelling each difference all terms used without explanation in Hispanus' Summulae. 5.18 Tree Divisions and Functions. Porphyry's `Tree' precludes division in two directions: A Supreme Genus is a class but not a constituent (species) of a higher class or genus; all other constituents are species with respect to higher ones and genus with respect to lower ones. But while individuals like Plato and Socrates are constituents or members of the most specific species man, they are not themselves species. Substance and individual can both be primitive terms for an etic identity in different ways, and all the intermediate ones relate to their highest and lowest instances in the way sentences are related to lexical items that realize them. Similarly, logical subjects and predicates are the immediate constituents of a proposition, so they mutually define each other's role, as in grammar, sentence, noun and verb do. To describe what a grammatical category like noun `means', compared to subcategories like proper or common noun, is not to give an account of lexical items like Plato or horse. It is useful not to confuse names for natural objects, labels for grammatical categories, and words for ideas we have about either of the other two. This was an aim of Modistic grammatical theory. These ideas must now seem abstruse. But while the terminology and methods of identification change, these logical relationships are profoundly involved in the construction of the most modern linguistic theories. To the extent that the mode of human thought is formally identical, an analogical thread of continuity links the old and the new.
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Figure 5.2 The Tree of Porphyry. 5.19 Supposition in the Summulae Logicales. The tract on Supposition is the 6th of the 12-part summary of Dialectic by Petrus Hispanus. 4 (d. 1277). Its first part reviews ideas familiar enough at that time to be called `old logic' (logica vetus); the second studies properties of terms, then considered `modern logic' (logica moderna). The two most important properties of terms (apart from their use) were supposition and signification. They contrast reference (supposition) and sense (signification) and raise the questions: how are senses and referents related? must things exist if we have words for them? should statements about such things be called true or false?
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Figure 5.3 Levels at which word-senses may be related to comparable referents. 5.20 Modern Modes. How Hispanus dealt with properties of terms is of interest for two reasons. First, he shows that identical data must be dealt with differently in related disciplines, which may study them (a) as natural objects and subjects, (b) to match objectivity and subjectivity and (c) to discuss the nature of subjective objects. Objective stresses extramental status, subjective stresses individual or social evaluations. A Stoic lexis is a subjective-object (as socially constituted,
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accessible only to natives), while phone is an objective-object (accessible to native or nonnative alike), or a subjective-object (as meaningful only to native speakers). Secondly, objects like those can be examined statically or dynamically: as end points of, or static points in, an action or process (e.g. coining words to abbreviate things' definitions [senses] or accepting terms and their senses as applicable to things [reference]. Or they can be static points in a set of descriptive labels, e.g. generic, frozen concepts like that of man or relations like grammatical number. Logical methods test the validity of how a discipline argues to its conclusions. But they endow no one with special ability to judge whether terms in other disciplines are appropriately defined. If Dialectic is supposed to show what it means for a term to have signification and supposition, it seems reasonable to expect a consistent way of dealing with accounts of sense and reference there. What subject or predicate mean in Logic, for instance, can be distinct from their interpretation in Grammar. 5.21 Ambiguous Modalities. English signification and most English words with the suffix -tio are as ambiguous as modi significandi is in Latin: that signals ways of signifying or ways of being signified indifferently. Where Hispanus distinguishes signification and supposition, terms we translate as noun, adjective, adverb, imposition, signified, acceptance, signifying, supposition, and coupling can be equally ambiguous. No definition determines whether representation is a voluntary act I perform, an unreflecting process of representing, or the simple fact that a vocal expression may represent something. If exact norms could be given, their ambiguity could be systematic and their use analogical. We would then know how to interpret terms like subject and predicate consistently in grammar or dialectic, and why indifferent use of sentence or proposition is predictably ambiguous. Ambiguity is more common in ordinary than in technical language, and Hispanus clarifies some of the differences. He says Dialecticians study only one kind of sentence and two kinds of words Grammarians define for them: the subset of sentences that signify something true or false (signs of propositions), and the subset of words into which such sentences can be resolved (terms and nonterms : categorematic and syncategorematic expressions respectively). Dialecticians also study the two functions of the terms constituting a proposition as its logical subject and predicate. Where noun, verb and other sentence-parts might be defined independently in Grammar (by shapes and meaning-types), the Dialectician's subject and predicate terms define each other relationally, through their functional interdependence. Grammar and Dialectic may overlap, but their formalities and functions are not identical.
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5.22 Equivocal Terms. If all words were technical terms, they would pair a unique meaning with a unique referent. Hispanus calls such terms univocal (III.1). But some are equivocal (identical in shape, different in meaning: II.20, III.1). Many words with a common principal signification (XI.7 f) are called denominatives or conjugates (II.21, V.37): like univocals, grammar and grammarian have the same principal/root signification. They overlap in expression (like equivocals) but differ from univocals by consignification, from equivocals by their form. Grammar has the same root signification as grammarian, but English derivational -ian consignifies person while grammar does not: /gramaH/ in some pronunciations is equivocally grandmother or grammar. Such words occasion the kind of ambiguity he calls Equivocation (VII.24ff). 5.23 Equivocal Constructions. When a construction like Aristotle's book (VII.45) principally signifies more than one referent (the book he owns / the one he wrote), the ambiguity is called amphiboly (VII.40ff). The ambiguity a Dialectician explains through properties of terms is traceable to three sources: ambiguous words, ambiguous construction, or both. In The kid's study (is astounding), both kid and study are equivocal (kid = child or goat; study = being studied or studying something). The expression is ambiguous in as many ways as kid and study are equivocal and ambiguous in amphibolous construction (being studied or studying) as well. Each interpretation of kid's study involves different sets of significations and objects, characters or scenarios, but the signification of Aristotle (if it has one) cannot dictate that term's supposition the same way as the various significations of kid do (lots of things can be called kids, only one is Aristotle). Any interpretation of Aristotle's book has the same cast of characters signified by those terms, but in different roles (Aristotle as author or owner). Hispanus says: (1) singular terms signify, suppose for, and summon (have Appellation for) the same thing but suppositions of common terms can vary (X.1-2); (2) just being this or that kind of a thing is not a matter of language, but being signified this or that way is a linguistic modality (VI.2); (3) functions like subject-as-subject or predicate-as-predicate must be distinguished from that which functions as subject or predicate (VIII.13f) just as nouns or verbs can be considered signs of terms, terms as signs of subjects and predicates, etc. (I.4ff); (4) while nominative case often coincides with the role of agent, the mode of agent can be superimposed on a patient role or patient mode on an agent role. 5.24 Syntactic & Semantic Roles. In Socrates is beaten, a nominative has a patient mode, and in Socrates sees himself, the supposition of Socrates and himself is identical, but himself has a coreferential agent mode superimposed on its patient role (VIII.3-4). A dialectic equipped to deal with
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properties of terms like supposition can deal with sentences which are not isomorphic signs of propositions (like the 'sentence' man runs for the `propositions' man runs, or man is running/is a runner) (1.7). A sentence using the term representation is ambiguous. Propositions (signs representing something statively, processively or actively) can be decided as true or false, but not by the overt sentence 'Signification is representation', because -ation forms of English are three-ways ambiguous, and therefore signs of at least nine propositions without change in expression: The act of signifying is the act of representing The act of signifying is the process of representing The act of signifying is the state of representing . . . etc. 5.25 Meaning, Signification and Consignification. Generic signification is defined as `representation of a thing by a conventional locution' and made more specific in passing remarks. For example, Denominatives (like grammarian from grammar) have both principal signification and consignification (VII.55, XI.7f, XI.22). Substantival nouns signify and stand for something, while verbs and adjectivals have principal signification, but copulate rather than stand for things (VI.2-3); a signification may be from imposition, transfer (V.35) or similarity (V.33). Consignify is the most important linguistic subdivision of signify. Aristotle (On interpretation III) says nouns and verbs with identical lexical roots signify the same thing, but verbs consignify (prosemainei) time as well: the noun sign and the verb signs differ in this way, although signs `consignifies' more than time alone. So supposition (here closest to reference) is ambiguously (a) a psychological act of interpreting a term as referring to a thing, (b) the social process associating a definition with what it defines, or (c) the state or fact that a term has a property consisting in its association with a referent. Supposition can be modified, but signification cannot. 5.26 Meaning and Reference. Restriction decreases, or amplification increases, the number of things for which a term stands, while Signification remains the same. Parthenon signifies, stands or supposes for, and summons an individual existent thing; the term temple signifies, and supposes for, any sacred building, existent or not; in Greek temple, temple is restricted and does not suppose for Romanesque temple, and in it, Greek is restricted only to temples, while neither the signification of Greek or temple is altered. Hispanus says restriction is both mutual and proportioned: the less common (Greek) restricts the more common (temple) since there are more temples than Greek temples. But the less common (temple) also restricts the more common (Greek) because there are more Greeks than temples in Greece. The signification of these terms is said to remain unaltered.
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Smoke is assigned many senses and functions in an unabridged dictionary: 'visible vapor as from burning'. Its supposition includes any generic, specific, or individual thing, state, action, or process that suits this sense: something gray, brown, or black; something evanescent, without result; obscure, or made obscure by smoke, cured by smoke, used for smoke, or for which smoke is used, involving smoke, resulting in smoke, ending like smoke. Construction (with predicate functions or other terms) can extend or restrict smoke's supposition by word order (subjects precede), copular signification (adjectival, verbal, lexical) and consignifications of substantive terms (gender, number), as well as the consignifications of the terms with which it is constructed (tense of the verb or participle, lexical significations like possible, type of relative, (which vs. another), of quantifier (such as, both), of adverbial (only). Usage modifies standard signification/supposition interdependencies: boxes are empty (of solid things, not air); a king or professor is ours, unless otherwise marked; words have consignifications one may overlook when focusing on principal signification (grammatical 3rd person in a dictio like runs which happens to be a verb). 5.27 Meaning and Understanding. Meanings include relationships speakers understand, compared to suppositions they count. International signs suggest why: they are ideographic, not in a particular language. E.g., on a white field, a red circle encloses a black line from which wispy lines arise, with a diagonal red line passing through the black line. This ideograph represents an idea or object rather than a locution. If an idea is a signification, and an object is what a significant term's supposition includes, the aptness of signs can be questioned in a way not mentioned in the Summulae. 5.28 Meaning and Representation. Ideographs are less determinate than language. As representing an object, a No Smoking sign does not actually refer to white or brown cigarettes, filter-tips, cigars, pipes, or hookahs. Words like No Smoking are indeterminate in different ways. No Smoking is ambiguous as to state, action, or process, tempting dialectically trained violators to defuse objections with 'Cigarettes don't smoke, people do' or `People don't smoke, cigarettes do' when just holding lighted ones. The sense of Smoking is indifferent to use. When referring in a neutral description, exclamation, or prohibition (the 'relation of sign-to-signified' in (VI.3)) may be unambiguous if what is signified is an institutionalized practice, but the `relation of substitute to what has been substituted for' in (VI.3) by the isolated term is not. 5.29 Meaning and Attention. In Porphyry's Tree, Genus, species and individual label aspects to which people pay attention. Most can do that even when they don't. But some cannot. One day, the young Helen Keller grasped that water may be generic, specific, or this one thing at this time: the process of socialization began; or intelligence emerged after a period of unformed
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experience, when only individual referents (individual suppositions) were noticed. To learn how to communicate, we must learn what to notice. Martians could first notice an object called Earth, then sort out smaller and smaller ones, from continents to microbes. More than observation is required to explain why, not just observe that, classes we call animals split into those inside and outside cages, then into subtypes like lice on both sides. This poses questions for Linguistics about language, meaning, and use, and the status of abstractions like word: how can 'meaning' be determinate before use? could we suspect that different uses of the `same word' were involved without that prior determination? Having distinguished sorts of meanings from use, what is the status of the those sorts, independent of use? 5.30 Progress in Logic. The Medievals moved from Logica antiqua to Logica moderna by refining relations between the Categories of Substance and Quantity: then others like Quality and Relation were added. Part of the groundwork was laid in Priscian's definitions of the parts of speech in categorial terms. Analytic commentaries on Priscian's Institutiones became required subjects at the University of Paris. `Linguistic' progress consisted in refining the kinds questions asked about language as a signalling-structure. 5.31 Nonlogical Essentials in Logic. In Aristotle's Logic, quantifiers meet his definition of syndesmoi negatively: they cannot function as onoma nor rhema. Hispanus asks about word-types alone and in construction with other word-types (VI.4). The `things' words can stand for can be ordinary objects or products of mental classification (VI.6) and Hispanus distinguished between what 'is a subject' and the function of `being a subject' implicitly (VI.6) and technically (VIII.14). Is there just science or are there are sciences (VI.6)? Others might have distinguished formal and material supposition: Hispanus spoke of personal vs. material reference (VI.6). 5 5.32 Reasons for Studying Dialectic. What were the purposes of the Summulae? If goals can be subjective (personal or social) or objective (public, replicable, empirical), what does the study of Dialectic vs. Grammar, Linguistics vs. others do to help us deal with language? To make subjective intuitions subjectively more explicit . . . To make subjective intuitions objective . . . To make the methods of successful subjective refinements subjectively more explicit . . . To make the objects, methods, and purposes of subjective refinements objective . . . If a word like smoke6 were discussed, what sort of resources would his work supply? We can distinguish, as with mode, between a basic meaning speakers share and others with which they might not be familiar. Hispanus' discussion
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of supposition supplies a framework applicable to common terms (common nouns of ordinary language) with paragraph references. 5.33 Other Reasons for Studying Dialectic. Another purpose could be to make explicit the Acts by which intuitive Processes and States relate to ± subjective Objects, Methods and Goals: Act Intuition is not an Act (subjective)
Process
State
revisable incremental insights
personal causal integration
public publication of causal basic insights integration
Objects (objective) preparatory selective (subjective) abstraction
heightened personal awareness
openness to instability of integrated
Methods formal explicit ± rejection neutrality about scepticism about of alternatives alternatives final solutions (objective) intellectual processes have integration clarify grounds for no goals for within one's scepticism/openness individuals society (subjective) Goals control for public (objective) benefit
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tautology for attaining the social Good
improved social co-operation
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5.34 Divisions of Supposition in the Summulae SUPPOSITION Common:
Discrete:
(comes about through a common term) (via singular demonstrative or proper name) Natural:
Accidental:
(acceptance for all it can be predicated of) (acceptance demands an adjunct) Personal:
Simple:
(acceptance for inferiors (acceptance for the universal (a) Verb (b) Noun (c) Adverb) restricted or extended by
(a) in Subject (b) in affirmative Pred. (c) after Exceptive)
Determinate: (acceptance for)
Diffuse: (acceptance for many because of)
Man or Some man (a) Mood or marker or (b) factual states Example: Suppositions of the term smoke. SUPPOSITION Common:
Discrete:
e.g. smoke
(that) smoke
Natural: (acceptance for all it can be predicated of)
Accidental: (acceptance demands an adjunct) rolled smoke
cigar smoke cooler hookah liquid smoke moonshine whisky etc. Personal: (acceptance for inferiors)
Simple: (acceptance for the universal)
(a) roll a smoke (b) Turkish smoke (c) merely smoke restricted or extended by
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Determinate: (acceptance for)
Diffuse: (acceptance for many because of) every smoke is harmful or every smoke is harmful (acc. to the Surgeon General)
smoke `That is smoke' or `. . . some smoke' 5.35 Terministic Logic. Hispanus' era is one of terministic logic. It dealt with terms for Substance, quantified in deductive argumentation of the categorical type, but also with their Quality. This involved the signification of substantive terms (with a basic model in the Tree of Porphyry), as distinct from their supposition. A partially shared conceptual content (signification), common to the mostgeneric and most-specific terms with the same referent (supposition) was assumed. The referents of subjects and predicates can be materially identical, but formally distinct. Linguistic modification dominates the Modistic tradition: its setting in their work helps clarify the different linguistic perspectives that led to later refinements and usage. They tried to sort out the parallels and differences between different modes of things, concepts of things, and expressions for `things' of various kinds. 5.36 Sense. The `psychological' scheme in Figure 5.3 can be read in a number of ways. Elementary ideas of predicate logic can illuminate part of what the Modistae were doing, and how Hispanus echoed their work. Predicates stand for categories to which subjects `belong'; predicates name classes, and subjects name class members; a predication says that a subject is or is in a predicate. But `membership' is expressed variously, depending on the language involved. Its most neutral, abstract, or formal representation was: S = P. Logical form dispenses with grammatical quirks. How we verbalize what = stands for depends on what the words used as subject and predicate mean. The senses of subject and Predicate terms and their relation-types are interdependent. Odd words disguise formal nonsense as easily as logical form can fail to illumine concrete expressions: Jane is a Hoya may make sense, while Jane is Hoya and Jane belongs to Hoya may not, but we must know how Hoya is used. Symbols like S = P for propositions avoid problems like that, but in sentences, we have to know something about the word-types that can stand as subject- and predicate-constituents in Predicate Logic. Propositional Logic focuses on how a pair of predications relate, not on how each one's constituent-pair relate to each other. We can compute when a complex unit like If Jane is a Hoya, then she is a Georgetown University student is valid or invalid, in Propositional Logic even if the sense of Hoya remains opaque, and even when we have no idea whether either part of the compound is actually true or false.
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5.37 So-Seem-Said. Figure 5.3 suggests levels of acquaintance with words and things. Children use heavy grammatically with limited experience of what adults find weighty. Newton would probably neither use nor deny his definition of gravity if he said his wife was getting a bit heavy. Comparable mismatches are common in individual and institutionalized concepts. The current dictionary definitions of mode show that: few speakers are aware of all of them, or of the analogies among them. Inclusion in a standard work records their institutional stability. 5.38 Reference. Speakers can 'know' the basic sense of mode without a dictionary. They may not know it can refer to everything on the dictionary's list. They may have experienced everything within norms assigned by its sense, but fail to see its relevance in particular cases. The things involved can be materially identical (etically the same) but emically different: identical in composition, but regarded from a different functional perspective. The basic sense of mode is involved in the etic/emic appreciation of how the same thing becomes a quite different thing because of what we are willing to consider basic or accessory to things that interest us. Hispanus has similar ideas about signification and supposition, shifting attention to differences between things, words, words-about-words or words-about-things, and how to sort out their associations. 5.39 Said < --- > Seem vs. So < --- > So. Signification is a relation a sign has to what it is a sign of (signi ad signatum), while supposition is a relation a sign-substitute has to its referent. It is not a signi ad signatum relation but one of suppositi ad suppositum ('thing-to-thing'). Possibly because personal names are the clearest examples (prime analogates) of 'a sign standing for what it is a sign of', Hispanus calls such relations 'Personal Supposition'. That sounds odd in English, since the suppositions of what we call Common Nouns can be extended or restricted, while those of genuine personal names (Proper Nouns) cannot. 7 But what 'nouns' can refer to and how they do it is also affected by other words with which they are constructed. 5.40 Equivocation. Consignifications are the `meanings' of bound morphemes. They are recognized as logically accidental, compared to the substantive meaning of roots. But no Medieval could sort them out on a formal basis. They figure prominently in Hispanus' section on equivocation.8 5.41 Modification. Modification has a clear interpretation within the Aristotelian substance/accident framework applied to grammar, intimately dependent on adherence to the criteria by which a form is basic. Confusion here can compound further confusions. For instance, inflection and derivation `modify' roots and bases; adjectives and adverbs 'specify' nouns and verbs; phrases and clauses 'restrict' nominals and verbals, and subordinate sentences 'qualify' superordinate ones.
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These `modifications' are in different media and have different effects. We could argue whether inflection in rex (`king') regis (`of king') shows modification of the nominative by the genitive, or of genitive by the nominative. Priscian and Dyscolus defended the priority in Thrax' listing of the noun (and its nominative form) on semantic grounds, most likely without having analyzed the grounds for Aristotle's logical conventions. But even if nominatives could have had the improbable historical role these grammarians assigned it, it clearly does not recommend itself descriptively as basic within its set. 5.42 How Subjects 'are in' Predicates. Hispanus anticipates a structural insight that in language, we must account both for what an element is and what it is not by pointing out that every difference constitutes an element as well as distinguishes it from others. 9 He examines categoric arguments, so how subjects are asserted to be in predicates is the main concern of his third Tract, On Predicaments. He lists eight.10 5.43 Proposition and Syllogism. Hispanus takes Modistic distinctions and an Aristotelian account of concept formation for granted, and advances nongrammatical definitions for the metalanguage of dialectic. For example, Latin significatio alone is as vague as English meaning, while the contrast between sense and reference corresponds roughly to Hispanus' significatio vs suppositio. Both parallel differences between objects of sense and intellection (e.g. a child's round and Euclid's circle). Words which may have nominal status in Grammar may signify nothing in Dialectic because they do not function as terms (are neither subjects nor predicates). In I only pay my bills, only is ambiguously syncategorematic or categorematic capable of being subject or predicate, or only of `modifying' one or the other.11 5.44 Syllogism Designs. (IV.3) For a Syllogism, Mood and Figure are required. Figure is the ordering of the three terms as to which is made subject and which predicate . . . the ordering is done in three ways. So there are three figures.12 Just as Geometry is developed from axioms (self-evident, indemonstrable propositions from which theorems can be deduced), Dialectic identifies a number of Sources or Topics, of which all arguments are only lexical variants. in Tract V, 21 Sources, divided into 11 intrinsic, 7 extrinsic, and 3 mediate Sources or Topics, are defined, exemplified and reduced to rule. 5.45 Validity vs. Truth. The truth of propositions is decided by whether assertions or denials in the SAID-realm parallel structures of the SEEM-scheme and match structures in the nonlinguistic SO-area. So the distinction
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of signification (e.g., norms for locating an instance of a term) and supposition (what thing a term is a substitute for) is needed. Categorial meanings include those independent of construction: (VI.1) Some things are said with construction and some without. A man runs and a white man are said with construction; man is not: by itself, man is an unconstructed term. Each unconstructed term signifies either substance, or quality, or quantity, or relation, or action, or passivity, etc. (VI.2) The Signification of a term, as taken here, is the conventional representation of a thing by a vocal expression (vox). So, since every thing is either a universal or a singular, words (dictiones) not signifying a universal or a particular ought not signify anything. So they will not be terms as term is taken here . . . One sort of Signification is that of a substantive thing and it is effected by a substantival noun like man; another is that of an adjectival thing, and it is effected by an adjectival noun or a verb, like white or runs. So signification is not properly substantival or adjectival: something is signified substantively and something adjectivally, since being adjectival or substantive are modes of things that are signified, not modes of Signification. (VI.3) Signification and supposition differ, because signification is through the imposition of a vocal expression upon a thing to be signified, while supposition is the acceptance of a term itself, already signifying a thing for someone, as in a man runs, where the term man stands for Socrates, Plato, and so on. So signification is prior to supposition. Nor do supposition and signification have to do with the same things, because signify has to do with a vocal expression, while stand for has to do with a term already composed, as it were, of a vocal expression and a signification. Therefore supposition is not signification. (VI.4) . . . Natural supposition is acceptance of a common term for everything it is naturally apt to take part in . . .accidental supposition is acceptance of a common term for those things for which it demands something added. . . . (VI.6) . . . Simple suppositions include that of a common subject term, as in man is a species or that of a common term put in an affirmative predicate, as in every man is an animal. The predicate term animal has simple supposition, since it only stands for the nature of a genus. . . . (VI.7) Personal Supposition is acceptance of a common term for its inferiors. In a man runs, the term man stands for its inferiors.
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(VI.9) Diffuse supposition is the acceptance of a common term for several things by means of a universal marker. In every man is an animal, the term man, by means of the universal marker, is taken for several, since for any one at all, of its supposits. 5.46 Fallacies. The experienced Dialectician also knows where to look for what invalidates an otherwise plausible argument: (VII.24) Six fallacies are made linguistically (in dictione): Equivocation, Amphiboly, Composition, Accent, Division and Word-Figure (figura dictionis) . . . 13 (VII.101) There are 7 nonlinguistic fallacies: 1) Accident 2) After a fashion and simply (secundum quid et simpliciter) 3) Ignoring of the point in Question (ignorantia elenchi), 4) Begging the Question or Search for what was originally conceded (petitio ejus quod erat in principio) principio), 5) Consequence, 6) Non-cause as cause and 7) Many questions as a single one.14 5.47 So-Facts vs. Said-Facts. Language is conventional and arbitrary, so factual arguments cannot be settled verbally, even though true or false expressions are verbal. Of themselves, words have no properties except those that use confers upon them. But when words combine with other words, there is a double source of deception possible: equivocation when words alone are involved, and amphiboly, from misinterpreting how words are constructed.15 5.48 Restriction and Extension. The number of things for which a term may stand (in contrast to its most generic signification) can be increased or decreased in different ways.16 5.49 Facts Imagined vs. Facts Experienced. The objects for which a term can stand may be in the realm of So or only in SEEM. Hispanus uses a term like 'summon' (appelare) to distinguish between real and imagined objects.17 (X.1) Appellation is the acceptance of a term for an existent thing. . . 5.50 Usage. Conventions of ordinary usage also affect interpretation of what terms stand for, since terms have signification or supposition, not intrinsically, but instrumentally, as determined by users. Group-members know when others use 'group-meanings'.18 5.51 The 'Meaning' of Syncategorematics. What a categorematic term (a subject or predicate) term stands for is affected by the mood of syllogisms and mood is indicated by syncategorematic markers like every. Conclusions can be
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true or false, depending on such quantification and by the functions such terms serve. 19 5.52 Intuitive Classification. Classifications recorded by Hispanus became part of Western thought habits and languages. His Summulae was required as a text for generations of students and later texts borrowed, amended, rejected, or extended parts of it without mentioning his name, perhaps even in ignorance of his identity. That was common in periods less concerned with personalities than ideas. What he reported and refined were contrasts explicitating tacit conventions of accurate communication. Fortunately, those conventions based on how things have been described and talked about have not kept the imaginative from proposing new ways, even if they have to deform the older conventions a bit. Calling those labels intuitive is relevant to the distinction between description and explanation, with which we began: without accurate description, no need for explanation arises. We can just accept facts with an attitude that takes any anomaly in stride. But if we share the Analogists' expectation that the lot ought to make some kind of sense, we construct hypotheses about how to transform a jumble of variables into patterns predictable from them as a constant. 5.53 Empirical Classification. Ancient astronomy made its predictions based on evidence both public and empirical: the sun rises and sets as anyone can see (and we still say). That made sense with the Earth taken as the constant and planetary movements as variables. On that overt evidence, Ptolemaic astronomy made mathematically reliable formulae about solar eclipses. The same observations allowed a year 360 revolutions, defined circle from that, and founded a geometry still basic for our carpenters and architects of our tallest buildings. But space travel now provides empirical evidence of what once could only have been an alternative mathematical hypothesis. Many things seem even more variable than supposed, but equally systematic. Modern grammars can simply presume facts about both the variability and constancy of linguistic structures unthinkable to older workers, and have available tools comparable in refinement to other objective methods of observation in science. But refined description is still not refined explanation. In the following chapters, it will be important to try to make explicit what covert constants are being taken for granted, and when subjective-objects might become confused with objective-objects. Reading Dinneen, F.P. 1968. Analogy, Langue and Parole. Lingua 21.98-103 1974. Review of Pinborg: Logik und Semantik im Mittelalter. Historiographia Linguistica I:2.221-149 (1974)
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Parret, Herman, ed. 1976. History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics. de Gruyter, N.Y. [esp. on `Medieval and Renaissance Linguistic and Logical Theories of Language'). Peter of Spain. 1990. Language in Dispute. tr. F.P.Dinneen. Amsterdam. Benjamins. Pinborg, Jan. 1967. Logik und Semantik im Mittelalter: Ein Überblick. Stuttgart. Frommann Holzbog. Supplementary Reading Artz, F.B. 1953. The Mind of the Middle Ages. AD 200-1500. NY: Knopf. Benson, R.L., & Constable, G., eds. 1982. Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Burrell, David. 1973. Analogy and Philosophical Language. New Haven. Yale. Haskins, C.H. 1929. Studies in Medieval Culture. Oxford. Clarendon. 1963. Renaissance of the 12th Century. New York. World (1927). Dinneen, F.P. 1980. Distinguo: Modi significandi and Covert Case Roles. Historiographia Linguistica VII:1/2.39-52. 1983. Language and Linguistics. in Roy Harris, ed. Approaches to Language. Oxford. Pergamon. pp. 17-29 Enders, Heinz W. 1975. Sprachlogische Trakatate des Mittelalters und der Semantikbegriff. Münster. Schoningh. Grabmann, Martin. 1926. Mittelalterliches Geistesleben. [esp. Die Entwicklung der mittelalterlichen Sprachlogik (Tractatus de Modis Significandi (104-146); Die logischen Schriften des Nikolaus von Paris und ihre Stellung in der aristotelischen Bewegung des XIII Jahrhunderts (222-48). Vol. I., Hueber. Munich. Koerner, K., et al., eds. 1980. Studies in Medieval Linguistic Thought Dedicated to G.L. Bursill-Hall. Amsterdam. Benjamins. Mullaly, Joseph P. 1954. The Summulae Logicales of Peter of Spain. Notre Dame, Indiana. pp. 172. Bibliog. 159-164. Indices 165-172. Pinborg, Jan. 1964. Mittelalterliche Sprachtheorien: Was heisst Modus Signficandi? Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Festschrift tilegnet H. Roos, S.J., (66-84). Frost-Hanse, Copenhagen. 1967. Die Entwicklung der Sprachtheorie im Mittelalter. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters 42.4.1967 1973. Some Syntactical Concepts in Medieval Grammar. Classica et Mediaevalia, Francisco Blatt septingenario dedicata. 496509. Copenhagen. Gyldendal. Thomas of Erfurt 1972. Grammatica speculativa. Ed. & tr. G.L.Bursill-Hall. London. Longmans. Thurot, Charles. 1964. Notices et extraits de divers manuscrits latins pour servir a l'histoire des doctrines grammaticales au moyen age. Paris 1868: Reproduction Minerva, Frankfurt/Main. Analogy Johnson, Mark, ed. 1981. Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press. Klubertanz, George P. 1960. St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy. A Textual Analysis and Systematic Synthesis. Chicago. Loyola University Press. Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press. Levin, Samuel R. 1977. The Semantics of Metaphor. Baltimore. Johns Hopkins. Sacks, Sheldon, ed. 1971. On Metaphor. University of Chicago Press. Turbayne, Colin Murray. 1971. The Myth of Metaphor. Revised: Forewords by Morse Peckham and Foster Tait, Appendix by Rolf Eberle. Columbia. University of South Carolina Press. 1962 (1970). Wheelwright, Philip. 1962. Metaphor and Reality. Bloomington. Indiana University. 1968. The Burning Fountain. A Study in the Language of Symbolism. Bloomington. Indiana University.
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Notes 1. Kretzmann (1982) is a thorough study of varying medieval conceptions of the integrative nature, scope, and purposes of `Logic'. Scholz (1961) gives a succinct formal account from antiquity to the present. 2. mode1, n. 1. manner of acting; doing; method; way; 2. the natural disposition or the manner of existence or action of any thing; form; 3. Philosophy: (a) appearance; form or disposition taken by a thing or by one of its essential properties or attributes; (b) (Spinoza): one of the nonessential qualifications of God, contingent upon other modes; 4. Logic: (a) modality, def3; (b) mood2 def2; 5. Music: any of various arrangements of diatonic tones of an octave differing from one another in the order of whole steps and half steps: scale; 6. Grammar: mood2 def1 7. Statistics: the value of the variate at which a relative or absolute maximum occurs in the frequency distribution of the variate; 8. Petrog.: the actual mineral composition of a rock expressed in percentages by weight. (ME, LL mod(us), manner). mode2, n. 1. the customary or conventional usage in manner, dress, etc., especially as observed by persons of fashion; 2. a style or fashion; 3. a light gray or drab color. (fr Fr via L mod(us), manner, measure) modal, adj. 1. of or pertaining to mode, manner or form; 2. Music: (a) pertaining to mode, as distinguished from key; (b) based on a scale other than Major or Minor; 3. Grammar: noting or pertaining to mood; 4. Philosophy: pertaining to the mode of a thing, as distinguished from one of its basic attributes, or from its substance or matter; 5. Logic: exhibiting or expressing some phase or modality. modal auxiliary: Grammar: any of the group of English auxiliary verbs including can, dare, do, may, must, need, shall, will that are used with the base form of another verb to express distinction of mood. modality. n. 1. The quality or state of being modal; 2. modal attribute or circumstance; 3. also called a mode: Logic: the classification of propositions according to whether they are contingently true, false, possible, impossible or necessary; 4. Medicine: the application of a therapeutic agent, usually a physical one; 5. One of the primary forms of sensation, as vision, touch, etc. (fr ML, modalitas). mood1 n. 1. state or quality of feeling at a particular time; 2. distinctive emotional quality or character; 3. prevailing emotional tone or general attitude; 4. frame of mind; 5. moods: irregular and varying periods of sullenness or gloom. (ME, OE mod; c.G. Mut; Goth. moths `courage'; Icelandic moths, `anger') mood2 n. 1. Grammar: (a) a set of categories for which the verb is inflected in many languages, and which is used typically to indicate the syntactic relation of the clause in which the Verb occurs to the other clauses in the sentence; or the attitude of the speaker to what he is
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saying, as certainty, uncertainty, wish, command, emphasis or hesitation. (b) a set of syntactic devices in some languages that is similar to this set in function or meaning, involving use of auxiliary words as can, etc. (c) Logic: any of the various forms of valid syllogisms. Also called mode. (from: The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged edition. 1966. New York. Random House) 3. Bochenski (1947) disclaimed critical status for his edition of one 13th century manuscript (Reg. Lat. 1205). DeRijk (1972) documents why that judgement was sound and all quotations here are taken from his text. Differences between Bochenski's and De Rijk's reconstruction from numerous texts are frequent but not substantive for this account. The 12 Tracts of the Summulae treat the following:
I:
Propositions relating predicates and subjects can be demonstrated to be contrary, contradictory, or equipollent in precise ways.
II:
Predications assert 3 kinds of class-membership: Genus, Species and Individual.
III: There are 8 ways of `being in' one of the 3 kinds of membership. Propositional elements (categorematic and syncategorematic) combine IV: validly only in 3 figures and 19 subtypes of syllogisms. V:
Arguments (about whether propositions are true or false) derive from 21 common Sources.
Suppositions (how terms stand for things) are of 7 types, with specific VI: rules appropriate to each. There are 13 fallacies (6 linguistic, 7 extralinguistic), based on mistakes VII: about Suppositions, or faults of logical form. The Suppositions of Relatives vary with their manner of recalling VIII:antecedents. IX: Supposition can be extended, but signification cannot.
X:
Supposition or signification are independent of the existence of referents or senses. Appellation names the Supposition of a term signifying something that actually exists.
XI: Suppositions can be restricted, but signification cannot. Suppositions of common terms are clarified by markers (especially XII: negatives and quantifiers) which distribute their membership. 4. Bochenski (1947) disclaimed critical status for his edition of one 13th century manuscript (Reg. Lat. 1205). DeRijk (1972) documents why that judgement was sound and all quotations here are taken from his text. Differences between Bochenski's and De Rijk's reconstruction from numerous texts are frequent but not substantive for this account. 5. (VI.8) Personal suppositions are determinate or diffuse. Determinate labels what a common term has, taken indefinitely or with a particular marker as in man runs or some man runs. Each is called determinate, since although the term man in both stands for every man running or not, they are true only if one man is running. To stand for is one thing, to make a locution true for something another. In the examples, the term man stands for every man, running or not. But it makes the utterance true for one man running. That both are determinate is clear, because in Socrates is an animal, Plato is an animal, Cicero is an animal, etc.; therefore every man is an animal, there is a Fallacy of Word Figure: shifting from many determinates to a single one. That way a common term, taken indefinitely, has determinate supposition; so too does one with a particular marker. (VI.9) Diffuse supposition is the acceptance of a common term for several things by means of a universal marker. In every man is an animal, the term man, by its universal marker, is taken for several, since for any one at all, of its supposits. Diffuse supposition is either diffuse by demand of marker or mood, or else by demand of fact. In every man is an animal by marker demand, the term man is diffused or distributed for any of its supposits. Since each man has his own essence, the verb is is taken by factual demand for as many essences as man is for men. Since his own animality is within each man, animal is
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taken by factual demand for as many animals as man is for men, and for as many essences as the verb is. That is why the term man is said to stand for things diffusely, mobilely, and distributively. It 'stands for' diffusely and distributively, since taken for every man; mobilely, since descent can be made from it to any supposit, like every man; therefore Socrates or every man; therefore Plato. The term animal is said to be diffused immobilely, since descent below it is not allowed, as in every man is an animal; therefore every man is this animal. There supposition shifts from simple to personal. So too in man is the most noble of creatures; therefore a particular man; and roses are the most beautiful of flowers; therefore a particular rose. These differ in that the latter has simple supposition in the subject, the former in the predicate. 6. Some senses (significations) of smoke: n. 1. the visible vapor and gases given off by a by a burning or smoldering substance, especially the grey, brown or blackish mixture of gases and suspended carbon particles resulting from the combustion of wood, peat, coal, or other organic matter. 2. something resembling this 3. something insubstantial, evanescent, or without result 4. an obscuring condition 5. an act or spell of smoking something, especially tobacco 6. something for smoking, as a cigar or cigarette 7. homemade drink, consisting of denatured alcohol and water 8. Physics, Chemistry, a system of solid particles suspended in a gaseous medium, v.i. 9. go up in smoke: end without result 10. give off smoke, as in burning 11. give out smoke improperly, as a stove 12. send forth steam or vapor, dust and the like 13. to draw into the mouth and puff out smoke of tobacco and the like 14. Slang: to travel at great speed 15. Australian: to flee or to abscond v.t. 16. to draw into the mouth and puff out the smoke 17. to use (a pipe, cigarette, etc.) in this process 18. to expose to smoke 19. to fumigate (rooms, furniture, etc.) 20. to cure (meat, fish etc.) by exposure to smoke 21. to color or darken by smoke 22. smoke out: to drive from refuge by smoke; force into public view or knowledge, reveal 7. (IX.1) Personal Supposition is the acceptance of a common term for its inferiors. One sort is determinate and the other diffuse . . . Restriction and Extension have to do with Personal Supposition. (IX.2) Restriction is the narrowing of a common term from a larger to a smaller supposition. In 'a white man is running', the adjective white restricts man to standing for whites. Extension is the broadening of a common term from a smaller to a larger supposition. In 'a man can be the Antichrist', the term man not only stands for those who exist, but also for those who will, and so it is extended to men in the future. I say `of a common term' since a discrete term like Socrates is neither extended nor restricted. (IX.3) One type of Extension is effected by a verb like can in 'a man can be the Antichrist'; by a noun, as in for a man to be the Antichrist is a possibility; by a participle, as in a man enabled to be the Antichrist; by an adverb, as in a man is necessarily an animal. Here, man is extended not only for present time, but also for the future. . . 8. (VII.28) Equivocation is when things of a different nature are subsumed under the same word (nomen), taken simply. This definition uses thing indifferently for things themselves, with
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respect to the double mode of things and to their relations. Exemplifying respect to things themselves is the word (nomen) dog, which signifies an animal that barks, a marine animal and a celestial body. Healthy exemplifies respect to the double mode of things, since in one mode, the word (dictio) signifies the subject, and in another mode consignifies its accidents. It thus always signifies the same health an animal, but by different modes. When we say, 'the urine is healthy', its sense is: the urine is a sign of healthiness, but only that of an animal. When we say 'food is healthy', its sense is: food can produce health, but only that of an animal, and 'a diet is healthy', because it preserves animal health, and 'a drink is healthy', because it prepares for animal health. It is always the same health, but its modes are diverse, since healthy of an animal signifies health as health of a subject, or health in a subject. When said of urine, as of a sign of health; of food, as of what effects it; of drink, as of what prepares for it. . . (VII.36) The third kind of Equivocation is from diverse consignification of a word (dictio).
As in:
whoever was being cured, is healthy someone suffering a disease was being cured therefore someone suffering a disease is healthy
The minor and conclusion are ambiguous, since the participle `suffering' consignifies present time as well as imperfect past. So 'suffering' consignifies `suffering then' as well as `suffering now'. If the Minor is taken for `suffering then', it is false, since one would be both healthy and suffering from a disease at the same time, which is false. If taken for `suffering now', it is true, since one can be suffering now and could have been cured then . . . 9. (II.13) . . . the identical difference is divisive as well as constitutive, but divisive of genus and constitutive of species: rational divides animal with a difference opposed to itself. For we say, one sort of animal is rational, another irrational; and these two differences constitute diverse species under animal. Every difference added to a genus constitutes a species, so is labelled either constitutive or specificative . . . 10. (III.2) Some things said are said without construction, like man or runs, some with construction, like a man runs . . . something is said to be-in another 1) as an integral part in its whole (as finger in hand or wall in house) 2) as an integral whole in its parts (as house in wall, roof and foundation) 3) as species in genus (like animal in man, and in general, any inferior in its superior) 4) as genus in species (like animal in man, any defining part in its definition, and all definitions in what they define) 5) as form in matter. This fifth mode is subdivided, since one sort of form is substantial (as soul is the substantial form for a man); the other is an accidental form (like being white for a man). The first of these is said to be-in peculiarly (or properly) as form in matter, like soul in body; the other is said to be-in accidentally in a subject, like whiteness in a wall and color in a body. 6) as something in its first efficient cause (like a reign in one ruling) 7) as something in its goal (finis) (like virtue in beatitude) 8) as something in a vessel and in general, as a thing located in its place . . . 11. (IV.1) A Proposition is a word-group affirming or denying something of another. A Term is what a proposition analyzes into, like subject and predicate . . . . (IV.2) A Syllogism is a word-group in which, once some things have been posited, something else necessarily happens through what have been posited . . . Every syllogism consists of three terms and two propositions. The first of these propositions is called the Major, the second, the Minor. But two propositions cannot be made from three terms, unless one is taken twice; that term is then either made subject in the one proposition and predicate in the other, or it will be predicated in both, or made subject in both. Of these terms, one is called the Middle, another is called the Major Extremity, another, the Minor Extremity. The Middle is the term taken twice before the Conclusion. The Major
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Extremity is the term taken in the Major proposition with the Middle. The Minor Extremity is the term taken in the Minor proposition with the Middle. 12. The First Figure is when what is subject in the first proposition is predicate in the second, everyanimal is
a substance,
man
is
an animal,
man
is
a substance.
every
therefore every
The Second is when the same predicate occurs in both: every man
is
an animal,
stone
is
an animal.
no
The Third is when the subject is the same in both: every man
is
an animal,
man
is
risible.
every
Mood is the ordering of the two proposition in the due quality and quantity.
13. EQUIVOCATION
Every dog is something that can bark; but a certain marine animal is a dog; therefore a certain marine animal is something that can (VII.30): bark.
AMPHIBOLY
whatever is Aristotle's is owned by Aristotle this book is Aristotle's therefore (VII.45): this book is owned by Aristotle.
COMPOSITION
I touch the one struck manually where manually can be (VII.63): construed with touch or struck.
DIVISION
every animal is rational or irrational but not every animal is rational (VII 75):therefore every animal is irrational
ACCENT
(VII.79):Latin ara (`altar') and a:ra (`pigsty') and plus juncture that distinguishes tu es qui es (`you are who (VII.80) you are') and quies est requies (`quiet is rest').
WORD-FIGURE
omnis homo est albus femina est homo (VII.95): ergo femina est albus
14. ACCIDENT
every human being is white a woman is a human being therefore a woman is white
(VII.109): an animal is an ass a man is an animal therefore a man is an ass
SIMPLY-ANDAFTER-A-FASHION
(VII.125): it is helpful to use a diet in hospitals therefore it is helpful to use a diet
IGNORING THE POINT IN QUESTION
(VII.138): my hand is closed at one time
and it is not closed at another time therefore it is closed and it is not closed (VII.146): BEGGING THE QUESTION
CONSEQUENT
medicine is a science of the well medicine is a science of the ill therefore medicine is a science of the well and the ill if it is a man, it is an animal (VII.159): therefore if it is not a man, it is not an animal
CAUSE AS NON-CAUSE (VII.168): every man is running Socrates is a man and the sun is in Cancer therefore Socrates is running MANY QUESTIONS AS A SINGLE QUESTION (VII.178):are those things good? 15. (VIII.7) In a man sees an ass who is rational (homo videt asinum qui est rationalis), the
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relative who can be referred to the term man or ass. So there are diverse statements here. Equivocation is commonly assigned . . . but (VIII.8) just as univocals are said to have the same nature, not of themselves, but in one using them univocally . . . all relatives ought to have the same nature, not of themselves, but in one using them to recall, or in what they recall. . . Therefore it is not equivocation but amphiboly, since equivocation is to be found only in a single word. 16. (IX.2) Restriction is narrowing a common term from a larger to a smaller supposition. In a white man is running the adjective white restricts man to standing for whites. Extension is the broadening of a common term from a lesser to a larger supposition. In a man can be the Antichrist, the term man not only stands for those who exist, but also for those who will, and so it is extended to men in the future. I say of a common term, since a discrete term like Socrates is neither restricted nor extended. (IX.3) One type of Extension is by a verb, like can in a man can be the Antichrist; by a noun, as in for a man to be the Antichrist is a possibility; by a participle, as in a man enabled to be the Antichrist; by an adverb, as in a man is necessarily an animal. Here man is extended not only for present time, but also for the future. For that reason, another division of extension follows: one with respect to supposits, as in a man can be the Antichrist, another with respect to time, as in a man is necessarily an animal, as was said. 17. Appellation is the acceptance of a term for an existent thing . . . while Signification and Supposition concern both the existent and non-existent. Antichrist signifies the Antichrist, and stands for the Antichrist, but calls nothing up, but man signifies man and of its nature, stands for existents as well as non-existents, and calls up only existent men. (X.2) One sort of appellation is that of a common term like man. Another is that of a singular term like Socrates. A singular term signifies, stands for, and calls up the same thing, because it signifies an existent thing, like Peter or John. (X.3) . . . one sort of common term appellation is that of a common term for the thing-itself-in-common, as when a common term has simple supposition, in man is a species or animal is genus. A common term then signifies, stands for, and names the same thing, as man signifies man-in-common, and stands for man-in-common, and calls up man-in-common. (X.4) The Appellation of a common term for its inferiors is another sort, as when a common term has Personal Supposition. In man runs, man does not then signify, stand for, or call up the same thing, but signifies man in common, stands for particular men, and calls up particular, existent men. 18. (XI.18) [in] there is nothing in the box, though the box is full of air, the term nothing by usage stands for solid or firm things. And the king is coming stands for the king of one's own country, and teacher is lecturing for one's own teacher. 19. (XII.1) Distribution is multiplication of a common term effected by a universal marker. In every man, the term man is distributed or diffused for any of its inferiors by the marker every, and that is the way multiplication of a common term occurs. I say common term because a singular term cannot be distributed. That is why every Socrates, every Plato and their like are incongruous. (XII.5) . . . the marker every . . . seems to signify nothing, since every thing is either universal or singular. But . . . every signifies neither a universal nor a singular. But . . . every does not signify something as a universal, but that something is taken universally. . .(so) every signifies a . . . a different kind of thing: the disposition of a thing that can be made a subject or a predicate. . . (XII.6) . . .predicate means two things (what is the predicate and predicate-as-predicate), so subject means two things as well (what is the subject and subject-as-subject). So `disposition of subject' is ambiguous. . .
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6 Etymology and Historical Linguistics 6.00 Some find change disturbing, so when language changes, they think the one correct way of speaking is threatened. Would exposing today's `errors' restore the 'correct' stage? Some reconstructions tell us more about what is in the reformers' heads than what they claim to recreate. Wouldn't anyone with a sense of order be an Analogist even if their ideal order were anarchy? Order, cause, basic and real, after all, tend to define each other. To show a 'cause' to be a non-cause, or even to find the notion misapplied, is to substitute one kind of 'basic reality' for another. The goals, methods and results of language reconstruction give examples of this, since investigators assumed different things are basic, or fully real, or just ideal in language. 6.01 Language Change: Amelioration or Deterioration? The biblical account can be read as though before the Tower of Babel, only one language existed, and after it, many. No original language is named, but later speculation took it to be Hebrew. That idea was promptly rejected or doubted even in its own day. Of interest to linguistics is the fact that discussion of the problem focused first on names, then nouns, less often verbs phrases or sentences even more rarely: the hierarchy of basics varied little. The account of Adam naming the animals suggests a human contribution to language development besides a divine source of its confusion after Babel. Both suit the idea that language is essentially vocabulary. Since we have long known how changeable vocabulary is, grammatical changes might more plausibly require divine intervention. But phonological differences were noted, as well, like the shibboleth test reported in Judges 12:4-6: Ephraimites could not pronounce an sh-sound, so the Gileadites could identify them by requiring it in a password. In this tradition, a basic task of reconstruction would consist of tracing current forms in all languages back to Hebrew. Greek views came up in the Cratylos: language (mostly names) had either a natural, human, or divine origin. That names change, languages differ and alter were well-known: both lexical and phonological differences were noted. Some Stoics saw unpredictable human choices as one of the mechanisms of change, while Varro's declinatio voluntaria was proposed as a test for and against Analogy in language. Some Stoics held that speech began as onomatopoeia, and all might have been well, had people not lost the skill. They coined etymology to name the discipline designed to uncover language's real lost roots. Hermogenes says in the Cratylos that the real natures which compounds stand for could be shown
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by finding the meanings of word-parts. Socrates counters that ultimate answers are more likely to be found in elements composing them, not in the mediate parts: painters choose colors to match nature, so why would not word-givers use individual sounds that `meant' or imitated what they named? 6.02 Isidore of Seville. The Etymologies of Isidore (d. 636 AD) provided unquestioned quotes for centuries. He was probably a Hispano-Roman who succeeded his brother Leander as Bishop of Seville in 600. 'Popular Etymologies' 1 like sparrow grass for asparagus echo his approach but he might have defended some 'etymologies' because Visogoth rulers in Spain had requested them: they had to be given some answer. The Visogoths, admitted to the Empire in 376, were Romanized but nonnative speakers of Latin, its official language. Spain was home, for instance, to both Senecas, Lucan, Quintillian, Martial, as well as the Emperors Trajan and Hadrian. Isidore's tiny history of the Visogoths is one of the earliest Germanic texts translated from Latin. Fancies aside, Isidore's Differentiae (Vol I, On words, Vol. II On things) recorded verifiable semantic differences between populus and plebs ('people' and 'folk'), recens and novus ('recent' and 'new'), and religio and fides ('religion' and 'faith'). For phonological history, he noted 'Spanish' homophones in bis and vis ('twice' and 'power'), hora and ora ('hour' and 'pray!'), hos and os ('these' and 'mouth'), marem and mare ('male' and 'sea'). 6.03 Introduction to Isidore's Differentiae: Many of the ancients sought to define word-differences, making some subtle distinction between word and world. But the heathen poets disregarded the proper meanings of words under the compulsion of meter. And so, beginning with them, it became the custom for writers to use words without proper discrimination. But although words seem alike, they still are distinguished from one another by each one having its own origin. Cato was the first of the Latins to write on this subject, after whose example I have in part written of a very few on my own, and partly taken them from the books of other writers. (Migne P.L., 83. col 9) Other works include his Liber Numerorum (on numbers in Scripture); Allegoriae in the Old and New Testaments; Sententiae (II Volumes on Christian doctrine and morality); De Ordine Creaturarum (on Genesis and the theory of the four elements). The contents of Etymologiarum Libri XX suggest likely reasons for its enduring popularity: 1. On grammar
11. On man and portents
2. On rhetoric and dialectic
12. On animals
On the four mathematical 3. disciplines
On the world and its 13. parts
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4. On medicine
14. On earth and its parts
5. On laws
15. On cities and buildings
6. On sacred books and offices
16. On stones and metals
On God, angels and ranks of the 7. faithful
17. On country affairs
8. On the Church and various sects
18. On war and games
On languages, tribes, kingdoms, 9. army, citizen's relationships
On ships, buildings, 19. and clothing
10. On words
On food, houseware, 20. rustic tools
6.04 Book I On Grammar. Italicized Latin original show better than English translation how heavily Isidore relies on similar forms: DE DISCIPLINA ET ARTE. Disciplina a discendo nomen accepit; unde et scientia dici potest. Nam scire dictum a discere, quia nemo nostrum scit, nisi qui discit. Aliter dicta disciplina, quia discitur plena. Ars vero dicta est, quod artis praeceptis regulisque consistat. Alii dicunt a Graeca hoc factum esse vocabulum apo tes aretes, id est a virtute, quam scientiam vocaverunt. Inter artem et disciplinam Plato et Aristoteles hanc differentiam esse voluerunt, dicentes artem esse in his quae de se et aliter habere possunt; disciplina vero est, quae de his agit quae aliter evenire non possunt. Nam quando veris disputationibus aliquid disseritur, disciplina erit: quando aliquid verisimile atque opinabile tractatur, nomen artis habebit. ON DISCIPLINE AND ART. The noun Disciplina comes from the verb disco (`learn') so can be called science. For `know' (scire) is said from `learn' (discere), since none of us knows unless he learns. Or discipline is so-called because `all is learned' (discitur plena). What consists of an art's rules and precepts is called an Art. Some say it is from Greek arete:, which is a `virtue' they call knowledge. Plato and Aristotle distinguished art from science as about what could be other (art) vs. what could not be otherwise (science). For when something is learned from true disputation, it is called science; when matters of opinion are dealt with, it is labelled art. ON THE SEVEN LIBERAL STUDIES. There are 7 liberal studies: 1) Grammar, that is, skill in speaking; 2) Rhetoric, which is found needful for more attractive and fulsome eloquence, especially in civil cases. 3) Dialectic (also called Logic), which sorts out true from false in sophistic arguments. 4) Arithmetic, which contains the causes and divisions of numbers. 5) Music, which consists of poems and songs. 6) Geometry, which involves measures and divisions of land. 7) Astronomy, which contains the law of the stars.
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6.05 Etymology. Etymology is the origin of words, whence noun- or verb-meaning (vis) is gathered by interpretation. Aristotle called it symbolon, Cicero annotation, because it makes known nouns and verbs of things by example; so flumen (`river') is said from fluendo (`being fluid') because rivers increase by flowing. Knowing this often has a necessary use in its interpretation. When you see where a word comes from you understand it more quickly; every study of a thing is clearer when etymology is known. But not all names were naturally imposed by ancients; some are arbitrary, as we often name servants and possessions whimsically, and that is why not all name-etymologies are known, since some things arose not from natural properties, but caprice. Etymologies of names are given either from cause, like reges (`kings') from reigning and right acting (regendo et recte agendo), or from source, like homo (`man') because from earth (ex humo), or from contraries like mud (lutum) from washing (lavando) since mud is unclean, and grove (lucus) because, being in shade, it gives little light (parum luceat). Some are also made by derivation from names, like prudent from prudence; some from sounds like chatty from chattiness; some from Greek etymology, declined in Latin, like silva ('woods'), domus ('home'). Others from names of places, cities, or rivers. Many are called from the language of varied tribes. So their origin can hardly be made out. Very many words are barbarous and unknown to Latin and Greek. (Differentiae I.xxix) 6.06 Interpretation. Hispanus (op. cit., V.9) distinguished convertible interpretation (e.g. philosopher from `lover of wisdom') from examples like Isidore's lapis ('stone') from LAedens PeDem ('hurting the foot'). Hispanus' definition of interpretation as `explanation of one expression through one better known' is applicable to any account, historic or fanciful. Isidore's examples are mnemonic aids. The only etymologies he proposes for which he claims historicity are for words whose origins are known, like Greek loan words. He frequently `explains' a word by a phrase suggested by sounds in the expression to be `interpreted'. For example, The Germans are called that because of their immense bodies [GerMANI and imMANIa corpora]. A consonant sequence explains that the Britons are so called in Latin because they are brutes [BRiTones - BRuTi], while the successive syllables of cadaver is derived from CAro DAta VERmibus ('flesh given to the worms'). But the scrambled sequence in fenestra ('window;) derived from FEreNS nos exTRA (`taking us outside'), or the accusative lapidem of lapis (`stone') is said to come from LAedens PEDEM (`hurting the foot') are as memorable as they are implausible historic sources. 6.07 Etymologists. Isidore's reliance on letter-sequences as memory aids of semantic units confuses questions about the origin of speech, its
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representation in writing, and how common ideas about ordinary things may coincide in related or unrelated languages. As late as 1606, Etienne Guichard's Etymologies assumed the Hebrew language provided the original stock to which words in Chaldean, Syrian, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Flemish, and English could be related. Since all these languages can be written in letters, Guichard assumed, differences are to be explained because the letter-sequence has gotten confused over the years: As for the derivation of words by addition, subtraction, transposition, and inversion of letters, it is certain it can and must be done that way to find etymologies. Nor is that hard to believe when you remember that the Hebrews wrote from right to left, while the Greeks and others wrote from left to right... Adding, subtracting and moving letters about does not distinguish phonetic from phonological differences. Some of the languages Guichard mentioned have only three, while others have five and more vowel oppositions. The number of consonants is not the same; permissible syllable structures are not comparable, and how any of those units cohere within their lexical and grammatical systems is overlooked. Letters have been assigned a kind of substantial phonetic identity incompatible with their role of representing contrasts among sounds variably produced in individual languages. 6.08 World Vocabulary. A little less confused was the comparative vocabulary ordered by Catherine the Great on the basis of suggestions from Leibniz. Pallas' (1768-87) Linguarum totius orbis Vocabularia Comparativa (`A comparative vocabulary of the languages of the entire world') expanded and edited the original 200-word list she compiled and had scholars and officials at home and abroad translate into the languages they knew. While her respondents may have had few presuppositions, they also lacked phonetic or grammatical training that could guarantee a uniform interpretation. This collection printed in the Cyrillic Alphabet, of course sampled some 200 languages, of which two thirds were non-European. Christian Jakob Kraus' insightful review of the work in 1787 regretted Pallas' lack of phonetic reliability, semantic sophistication, and geographic information, but particularly the absence of structural accounts of each language. They were obviously needed to establish relationships among peoples or languages, since Kraus saw how differences of grammatical structure determine interpretation within, and relations between, languages at every level. Even more ambitious was the Idea dell' Universo (1794-1800-1804), a collection of about 300 grammars of unrelated languages, to show the unity of human thought, compiled by the Spanish Jesuit, Panduro. He himself provided some 40 of the descriptions, unified loosely by common schooling in traditional European grammar. Adelung's Mithradates (1806-1817) gathered versions of The Lord's Prayer from all available languages. This had the
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advantage of being a text it was safe to assume would be translated with more than usual care. Some versions may have lacked current vernacular flavor, being usually in an `elevated' or archaic style. But in these efforts, what is taken to be the `basically real' shifts from vocabulary, to grammatical structure, to the combination of both in a text. 6.09 John Horne Tooke's Epea Pteroenta: Or, The Diversions of Purley (1857) mixed speculation, eclectic scholarship, and intimations of sounder ways of etmylogizing than (in his view) Samuel Johnson's `fraud, cant, and folly' (pp. 303f): all words name concrete objects or are abbreviating substitutes (pp. 13-15) for Nouns, Verbs, and Particles linking them (p. 4). Abbreviation affects word-forms as well as ideas, as shown by the `perpetual change of T into D' because of the `almost imperceptible motion of compression of or near the Larynx' which the `Welch never use', who pronounce `''I vow, by God, dat Jenkin iz a Wizzard" as "I fow, py Cot, qat Shenkin iss a Wissart"' (pp. 47-49). In the Latin word ibo (`I will go'), the i abbreviates Latin ire (`to go'), b the Greek boulomai (`I will') and o is `I' from Latin ego: that suggests that affixes abbreviate once free forms (pp. 92, 698). Contemporaries could verify his account of `Welch' pronunciation objectively, but his analysis of ibo rests on assumptions requiring considerably more than good will on their part. What is taken to be `real' in his approach is a naive notion of empirical objects. It is easier to agree with his conclusion: how objects are represented by various languages and in their dialects cannot be arrived at deductively (as onomatopoeia might permit), but demands inductive study of the history of languages. 6.10 Ascertaining the Language. The likelihood of an indigenous Standard Language in England faced competition from the official role of French after the Norman Invasion (1066) and that of Latin, universally used as the language of learning. Disputes about vernaculars and the assumed grammatical perfection of classical languages raised questions like those already noted: what is basic or universal, what peripheral or local, what is regrettably native or `respectably' related to grammatical language? Excerpts from early English works help us appreciate the excitement caused by the `discovery' of Sanskrit in the 18th century, and the development in the 19th of an empirical approach to language. John Wallis (1616-1703) united in his life and work some of the qualities expected in scientific linguistics: he was a mathematician, studied anatomy and physiology at Cambridge, and became professor of Geometry at Oxford. He knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Arabic, and Welsh. He had a method for code-breaking he kept secret, and one for teaching the deaf he touted so in public that he was accused of taking credit for another's accomplishments. He preened himself on his pioneer efforts and causes, and `...was indeed a pioneer, but where he found himself not after all first...his ambition was frustrated' (Kemp 1972.18 ff.)
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Wallis wrote his 1653 Grammar of English in Latin. It went through several editions, and in his Preface to the Fifth, he wrote: ...The English language to be described here is now spoken all over England and in Scotland also, but it is not the same as the old British language spoken by the earliest Britons, nor is it in any way derived from that language. It is entirely different and has come from a different place ... the inhabitants of our island may have originally come from Gaul or theirs from Britain, or perhaps related colonies sent by the Phoenicians or the Trojans ... Whatever their origin they certainly had a common language and customs. It is my belief that the Galli and Walli, that is, the people of Gaul (or France) and of Wales (or Cambro-Britain) have the same name. It is very common for the letters g and w to be interchanged; the French name for Wallia (which we call Wales) is Gales, and the Germans call the French Walshen ... And the French words: guerre, garant, gard, gardien, garderobe, guise, guile, gage, guichet, guimblet, guerdon (regard), Guillaum, gaigner, gaster, guetter, etc. correspond in meaning to English warre, warrant, ward, warden, wardrobe, wife, wile, wager, wicket, wimble, reward, William, to winne, to wast, to wait, etc. He adds that speculations about `The origins both of the language and people can only be a matter of guesswork' and like other mother languages, it may date `back to the confusion of Babel'. He then lists what he took to be Arabic vocabulary in English, and syntactic resemblances between Hebrew and Welsh. He wrote, he says, for the benefit of foreign learners, and for natives confused by Latin-based grammars, using a completely new method: Which has its basis not ... in the structure of the Latin language, but in the characteristic structure of our own... The whole syntax of the noun depends almost entirely on the use of prepositions, and the conjugation of verbs is easily managed with the help of auxiliaries ... there is no reason at all for introducing a collection of cases, genders, moods and tenses ... Nevertheless I thought I had better keep the Latin terminology normally used in this Art ... I have compared our own sounds with similar sounds in other languages...therefore described the various articulations of the letters as formed by the mouth and other organs of speech ... I am not aware that anyone before this has described the whole structure of speech systematically in one place. His method reformulates the problem of how languages are related and how to study them objectively: take human anatomy as the physical constant, associations of sounds and ideas as psychological variables, look for pattern in sound-differences, but expect contrasts from social and geographic isolation, and allow autonomy in grammatical processes and organization. His original phonetics was little exploited by immediate successors.
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Greeks and Romans incapable of distinguishing roots from affixes in words were clear about their semantic partition. Phonetics could have shown confusion of levels in Isidorean analyses like vulpes (`fox') into volare (`fly') plus pes (`foot'), and lepus (`hare') into levis (`light') with pes ('foot'), `explaining why the animals are appropriately named `fleet-footed' and `lightfooted'. Hugh Jones' Accidence of the English Tongue is the first grammar produced in America, though published 1724 in London after his return from Virginia, where he had been professor of Mathematics at William and Mary College. It had no particular influence, but shows the temper of his times: He says his 69 pages are for males who `never learnt Latin perfectly', the `Female Sex, the Welch, Scotch, Irish, and Foreigners' on `the true manner of Reading, Writing and Talking proper English'. Of the `5 Principal Dialects and Tones' (Northern or Yorkshire, Southern or Sussex, Eastern or Suffolk, Western or Bristol, and Proper, or London) learners will progress if ...our correct Modern Authors be herewith consulted and observed; and if the discourse of the Londoners be imitated; who with most of our Learned, Polite and Gentile People every where, and the Inhabitants of the Plantations (even the Native Negroes) may be esteemed the only People that speak true English. (1724.14-15) Printing, the spread of literacy, and especially literary periodicals with contributors from different areas, had dramatized the need for standardization in spelling and usage. Jones found Clarendon's History, the Tatler, Spectator, Examiner, and Entertainer edifying models, as were Milton, Cowley, Philips, Addison and Pope among poets, and `Dryden for translations'. Like them, We should aim at an elegant and fluent style; gliding like a smooth River and not running violently like a rapid Torrent. Our Language affords us Choice of Words, and Variety of Expression; in which we should imitate the Learned and Polite, the Correct and Pure, without jingling Terms, harsh or obsolete, vulgar or unbecoming Words, ungrateful to the Ear, difficult in Sound, or offensive to Modesty, Good Manners, or good Sense. (1724.62-63) Two works became associated with the standardization of which Jones approved: Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755) and the English Grammar of Robert Lowth (1762). In his celebrated Plan for the Dictionary (1747), Johnson wrote of the need for `ascertaining the language' in response to the genteel (for Jones, Gentile) fear that contemporary writing would become as unintelligible as Chaucerian English was in their day, unless change were arrested. His preface to the dictionary, published eight years later, acknowledged that goal to be impossible, since he had noted changes even as he wrote. But besides labelling `obsolete, vulgar, or unbecoming words,
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ungrateful to the Ear', Johnson used only about a third of the more than 200,000 citations he had collected to show how words were used in context by the `Learned and Polite, the Correct and Pure'. An additional norm was reintroduced: Prestige because of the usage of the `Learned and Polite', regardless of Origin. The Preface of Robert Lowth's English Grammar (1762) explains why a book of clear rules replacing `best authors' example' was needed: It is now about fifty years since Doctor Swift made a public remonstrance ... of the imperfect State of our Language; alledging in particular, `that in many instances it offended against every part of Grammar.' Swift must be allowed to have been a good judge of this matter ... he is one of our most correct, and perhaps our very best prose writer ... Does it mean that the English Language as it is spoken by the politest part of the nation ... oftentimes offends against every part of Grammar ... further imply, that our Language is in its nature irregular and capricious; not subject, or not easily reduceable, to a System of rules? In this respect, I am persuaded, the charge is wholly without foundation. The English Language is ... so easy and obvious, that our Grammarians have thought it hardly worth while to give us any thing like a regular and systematical Syntax. The last English Grammar...comprises the whole Syntax in ten lines... The truth is, Grammar is very much neglected among us: and it is not the difficulty of the Language, but on the contrary the simplicity and facility of it, that occasions this neglect...we take it for granted, that we have a competent knowledge and skill, and are able to acquit ourselves properly, in our own native tongue; ... we find ourselves able to go on without rules, and we do not so much as suspect that we stand in need of them ... The principal design of a Grammar of any Language is to teach us to express ourselves with propriety in that Language, and to be able to judge of every phrase and form of construction, whether it be right or not. The plain way of doing this is to lay down rules, and to illustrate them by examples... ... Universal Grammar cannot be taught abstractedly: it must be done with reference to some language already known, in which the terms are to be explained, and the rules exemplified. The learner is supposed to be unacquainted with all but his own native tongue; and in what other, consistently with reason and common sense, would you go about to explain it to him? He has a competence of knowledge of the main principles, the common terms, the general rules, the whole subject and business of Grammar, exemplified in his own Language; he then will apply himself with great advantage to any foreign language, whether
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ancient or modern. To enter at once upon the Science of Grammar, and the Study of a foreign Language, is to encounter two difficulties together, each of which would be much lessened by being taken separately and in its proper order. For these plain reasons a competent Grammatical knowledge of our own Language is the true foundation upon which all Literature, properly so called, ought to be raised. A design somewhat of this kind gave occasion to the following little System, intended merely for a private and domestic use ... The known and received Terms have been retained, except in one or two instances, where others offered themselves, which seem much more significant ... Lowth's book has no table of contents, but the number of pages on each topic shows his elementary didactic purpose, and how to remedy what he saw as Johnson's neglect of `syntax' in his Dictionary's succinct grammatical account: Grammar (1-2), Letter (26), Syllable (6-7), Word (7-15), Article (15-21), Substantive (21-30), Pronoun (31-40), Adjective (44-63), Verb (44-63), Irregular Verb (64-70), Adverb (90-91), Preposition (91-92), Conjunction (92-94), Interjection (94-95), Sentence (95-153), Punctuation (154-172), and `Praxis' (in Parsing) 173-186). Some forms he criticizes are below on the left; his emendations (or observations about grammatical principles) on the right: 18 as a means 20 About an eight days 23 antiently (sic) sowen, cowen 34 Leaning hath his infancy 38 Addison: a question whose Addison: Attend to what 43 a lesser Muse indit es 43 Dryden: worser far than arms
as a mean about eight days now written & pronounced swine, kine learning hath its infancy A question who's ... A barbarism according to Johnson: what a less Muse indites worse than arms
46 they loven, they weren
have long been obsolete for love, were
thou is not replaced by you Addison: `Would to God you 48 was within her reach'
even familiar polite thou wast, (except for poetic solemnity) an enormous Solecism: should be were
58 shall vs. will:
1st person will promises or threatens, 2nd & 3rd only foretells; 1st person shall simply foretells; 2nd & 3rd command or threatens.
75
In usage, sat has replaced sitten, `the true participle' which `Dr. Middleton hath with great propriety restored'.
76
`Set can be not part of the verb to sit' The neuter verb lie `is frequently confounded with the active to lay'
91 Raleigh: easier persuaded
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more easily
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Shaftesbury: highliest Clarendon: `He caused all persons whom he knew had spoken to him to be arrested' 97 Pope: `... pains has been taken'
more highly ought to be who, the nominative case, not whom, as if it were the objective case governed by knew have
Dryden: `Tell who loves who ...' Clarendon: `Who should I see ... Addison: `He knows who it is 99 proper to expose foremost' `It ought in all these places be whom Prior: `To that, which once 106 was thee' Swift: `I am not like other men, to envy talents I 111 cannot reach' Dryden: `... lever not deludes ...' 116 `I hope ... I not offend' Prior: `Let thee and I 117 ... dwell' Pope: `Tis these that taint ...' 121 Prior: `Tis they that give ...'
`It ought to be which was thou; or which thou wast' `Improper use of the infinitive': (should be the participle envying) `... impropriety of placing the adverb not before the verb very evident `It ought to be me' `tho' pretty common and authorized by custom... seems ... defective
Swift: `Osyris, whom the Greeks call Dionysius, and 124 is the same as Bacchus;'
Needs who as nominative subject in: `and [who] is the same as Bacchus'
Locke: `... who civil power 127 belong to
Should be whom: separating to from whom is poor in elevated style
Swift: `greater loser 144 than me; Swift: `no man so sanguine, 152 who did not apprehend ...'
than I (am), by rule of understood ellipsis Either `so sanguine as not to ...' or `how sanguine soever as not to'
The extent to which modern readers agree with Lowth's criticisms is a measure of the influence his work had on his successors who became the teachers of our own teachers' teachers (e.g., the shall-will Rule is still confidently taught, faithfully memorized, then ignored in use). Lowth's was a deliberately prescriptive grammar, needed as much in his own day as in our own. He frequently distinguishes between what custom had come to allow, but how clarity could be improved in spite of it. While his rules have defects, they are valuable records of what one careful speaker saw as dangers to the grace, force, and clarity of expression. Some problems (e.g. in agreement) are no longer found in standard writers, others (`true' participle sitten) disappeared, and others (final prepositions) persist. But after almost 200 years, `errors' like better than him or between you and I, confusion of lie and lay, sit and set,
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are still vital in nonstandard speech. Lowth mentions Saxon forms as sources, if not causes, for some forms he `corrects', as well as Latin and Greek grammatical rules to indicate ambiguity in biblical translation. But he relies mainly on options English itself provides: consistency in their use helps clarity, and the avoidance of non-English rules favors simplicity and elegance. 6.11 Ways Languages Change. With the elementary vocabulary from Chapters 2 and 3, we are already in a position to discuss a few language changes in specific ways rather than in vague terms: e.g. in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics or lexis: Phonetically. If pronunciation changes while the number and types of phonemic contrasts do not, the change is phonetic only, i.e. allophonic, as in free options of a palatal, an apico-alveolar or a uvular trilled /r/ in many languages; the wide range for fronting or tongue-height of simple vowels, or the di-to-triphthongized sounds we accept as authentic English in words like hand or back. Stated in analogical terms, the relations (distribution) can be identical while composition is subordinated to function. Phonemically. If change introduces a new, or obliterates an old, contrast, the phonemic system has changed, e.g. /s/-/z/, /f/-/v/ once occurred only as intervocalic allophones in English for /s/ and /f/; Modern Greek /i/ neutralizes Classical oppositions among /e/ - /e/ - /i/ - /ei/ - /ai/ etc. In analogical terms, compositional differences have been lost, and functional relations are no longer identical. Morphologically. If change involves gain or loss of sound differences or permissible syllable-types that had some grammatical function, e.g. length: Attic Greek 2nd. sing. Indicative lueis vs. subjunctive lueis, Modern Greek only [luis]. In analogical terms, the syntactic relations are no longer paralleled by phonological, morphological, and semantic ones. Syntactically. If change alters what is demanded, excluded, or tolerated as a semantically contrastive occurrence, as in the order and shape of morphological elements, e.g. Latin may allow any order among ille, illam and amat for He loves her. illam ille amat, or ille illam amat, etc.; Spanish He loves her is el ama a ella, while She loves him, must be ella ama a el, and English allows only He loves her and She loves him, not [*]Her loves he or [*]Him loves she. Analogically, the function of signalling can shift from composition to distribution, or combine both. Semantically. Expressions can persist phonetically while senses and referents change, or vice versa. The sense of onoma shifted in Greek studies; origins and organization of what we now call democracies differ from former ideas of them. In analogy, the intralinguistic (formal or overt composition, distribution, and function) can remain identical, but extralinguistic relations differ. That's really ba:d (once profoundly pejorative, now approves the latest, most audacious style); The loud laugh betrays the vacant mind once spoke of an untroubled spirit; now, it's hardly a compliment; It has only transpired recently once meant only become known, now it is interchangeable with occur).
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Lexically. Vocabulary changes with practical needs, resulting in loss, expansion, or shifts in. The words gas and Kodak were coined without familiar roots, unlike helicopter, radio, and television. Atom and water both do and do not have the same sense and reference for us and generations for whom water was one of the complete list of four natural elements. Many of these changes are illustrated in versions of Matthew 9:1-2 (from the original Greek or Vulgate Latin) in the English of the 10th, 16th and 20th centuries, and in Lorimer's 1983 Lallans Scots (which Wallis included in English). All the texts show Indo-European roots and word-class sequences, but vary in order of modification structures, having/lacking the article, with different options in their grammatical and lexical systems: Kai embas eis ploion dieperasen, kai elthen eis ten idian polin. Kai Greek:idou prosepheron autoi parlytikon epi klines beblemenon. Et ascendens in naviculam transfretavit, et venit in civitatem suam. Latin: Et ecce offerebant ei paralyticum jacentem in lecto. 10th Da astah he on scyp and oferseglode, and com on his ceastre. Da C: brohton hig hym aenne laman, on bedde licgende. And he entred into the shippe: and passed over and cam into his awne cite. 16th And lo they brought unto him a man sicke off the palsey lying in his C: bed. 20th So he got into the boat and crossed over, and came to his own C: town. And now some men brought a paralyzed man lying on a bed. Jesus than buirdit a boat an gaed atowre the Loch an cam til his ain town. Scots: Belyve they brocht him a blastid man lyin on a bed; Gr:
kai
embas
eis
ploion
Lt:
et
ascendens
in
naviculam,
10:
qa
astah he
on
scyp,
16:
And he entred
into
the shippe:
20:
So
into
the boat
Sc: Jesus
than buirdit
a
boat
he got
Gr:
dieperasen,
Lt:
transfretavit,
10:
and
oferseglode,
16:
and
passed
over
20:
and
crossed
over,
Sc:
an
gaed
atowre
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the Loch
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Page 212 Gr: kai
elthen
eis
Lt:
venit
in
10: and
com
on
his
16: and
cam
into
his
awne cite.
20: and
came
to
his
own
town.
Sc: an
cam
til
his
ain
town.
Gr: kai
idou
prosepheron
autoi
paralytikon
Lt:
ecce
offerebant
ei
paralyticum
10: qa
brohton hig
hym enne
laman,
16: And lo
they brought
him
man sicke off the
et
et
ten
idian
polin civitatem
unto
suam
ceastre.
a
palsey 20: And now
some men brought
Sc: Belyve
they brocht
Gk: epi
beblemenon
klines
Lt: 10: on
jacentem bedde
him
a
paralyzed man
a
blastid man
in
lecto
licgende.
16:
lying
in
his
bed.
20:
lying
on
a
bed.
Sc:
lyin
on
a
bed;
6.12 Sanskrit. Others had reported on Sanskrit before Sir William Jones' (1746-1794) frequently cited, but almost incidental, remarks about it in his 1786 Third Anniversary Discourse on the Hindus. But his blending of how perennial Spelling Reformers in England might profit from a study of Sanskrit phonology, and how fables like `Latin is corrupt Greek' might be unmasked from study of Sanskrit grammar, seem to have come at just the right time. The English were 'rather interested', but it particularly intrigued German scholars because of its resonance with the Romantic Movement's preoccupation with cultural and ethnic roots. Spelling standardized in the Roman Alphabet, Jones said, is inferior to Hindu writing because English an innocent bull has five simple vowels which an Italian might pronounce as long sá, si, só, se, sú. Jones' rendering of a passage from Addison in a modified kind of Hindu notation accentuated differences between his English pronunciation and contemporary spelling conventions. (Quoted from Lehmann 1967.9): Sò hwen sm énjel, bai divain cománd, Widh rais1n tempests shécs a gilti land, Sch as av lét ór pél Britanya pást, Cálm and s1rín hi draivz dhi fyúry as blást, And, pl1z'd dh'almaitiz arderztu perfórm, Raidz in dhe hwerlwind and dairects dhi starm
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So when some angel, by, divine command, With rising tempests shakes a guilty land, Such as of late our pale Brittania passed, Calm and serene he drives the furious blast And, pleased th' Almighty's orders to perform, Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm
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6.13 Etymology and History. Jones continues with an almost point-by-point critique of some of the etymological views mentioned above: Etymology has, no doubt, some use in historical researches; but it is a medium of proof so very fallacious, that, where it elucidates one fact, it obscures a thousand, and more frequently borders on the ridiculous, than leads to any solid conclusion. It rarely carries with it any internal power of conviction from a resemblance of sounds or similarity of letters, yet often, where it is wholly unassisted by those advantages, it may be indisputably proved by extrinsic evidence. We know a posteriori that both fitz and hijo, by the nature of the two several dialects, are derived from filius, that uncle comes from avus and stranger from extra; that jour is deducible, through the Italian, from dies and rosignol from luscinia, or the singer in groves; that sciuro, ecureuil and squirrel are compounded of two Greek words descriptive of the animal; which etymologies, though they could not have been demonstrated a priori, might serve to confirm, if any such confirmation were necessary, the proofs of a connection between the member of one great Empire; but, when we derive our hanger, or short pendent sword, from the Persian, because ignorant travellers thus misspell the word khanjar, which in truth means a different weapon, or sandalwood from the Greek, because we suppose that sandals were sometimes made of it, we gain no ground in proving the affinity of nations, and only weaken arguments, which might otherwise be firmly supported. That Cús, then, or as it certainly is written in one ancient dialect, Cút, and in others, probably, Cás, enters into the composition of many proper names, we may very reasonably hold that Algeziras takes its name from the Arabic word for an island, cannot be doubted; but when we are told from Europe, that places and provinces in India were clearly denominated from those words, we cannot but observe, in the first instance, that the town in which we are now assembled is properly written and pronounced Calicátà; that both Cátá and Cút unquestionabley mean places of strength, or, in general, any inclosures; and that Gujaràt is at least as remote from Jezirah in sound, as it is in situation. (Lehmann 1967.11) Lehmann notes that the following famous 1876 passage most quoted in Linguistics texts can obscure the subordinate position Sanskrit held in Jones' work. Part of his concluding paragraph may redress the balance: The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer
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exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the Old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia. ... Of these cursory observations on the Hindus, which it would require volumes to expand and illustrate, this is the result: that they had an immemorial affinity with the old Persians, Ethiopians, and Egyptians, the Phenicians, Greeks, and Tuscans, the Scythians or Goths, and Celts, the Chinese, Japanese and Peruvians; whence, as no reason appears for believing, that they were a colony from any one of those nations, or any of those nations from them, we may fairly conclude that they all proceeded from some central country, to investigate which will be the object of my future Discourses; and I have a sanguine hope, that your collection during the present year will bring to light many useful discoveries; although the departure for Europe of a very ingenious member, who first opened the inestimable mine of Sanskrit literature, will often deprive us of accurate and solid information concerning the languages and antiquities of India. (Lehmann 1967.15, 20) 6.14 Reconstruction. The `volumes' Jones foresaw to deal adequately with the Hindus were a tiny part of those needed to bring the other languages and cultures mentioned into fruitful contrast. Pedersen's Discovery of Language (1931-1962, etc.) is a very readable account of how order began to arise out of 18th Century data collection and discrimination of language families, through 19th Century stages of: historical and comparative linguistics based on information and methods new to Europe; refinement of phonetics; discovery of sound laws, and attempts at integrating influences from various levels of analysis. Jones did not propose Sanskrit as the original language (German, Ursprache) nor claim it antedated Greek and Latin. Whatever that relationship, he set an even more interesting challenge: there might be a vanished language from which Sanskrit and others derive. To reconstruct that PROTOlanguage (Ursprache, ProtoIndoEuropean, PIE) was the prime task of the 19th Century. German scholars so dominated research that the field was called IndoGermanisch. In the process, an acute problem was whether units isolated by various levels of analysis could be considered real or ideal, autonomous or interdependent, universal or local. Arlotto (1972) illustrates some steps in the method neatly and simply in the example adapted here. Given actual languages we know are related from nonlinguistic facts, how do we reconstruct the putative common language from which we could say they derive? How `real' are we to take the result to be?
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Maori
Hawaiian
Samoan
Fijian
Gloss
1. pou
pou
pou
bou
post
2. tapu
kapu
tapu
tabu
forbidden
3. tangi
kani
tangi
tangi
cry
4. takere
ka'ele
ta'ele
takele
keel
Assuming the spelling is phonemic, notice the vocalic correspondences: Maori Hawaiian Samoan Fijian From Example # o
o
o
o 1
u
u
u
u 1, 2
a
a
a
a 2, 3
i
i
i
i 3
e
e
e
e 4
Vowels with ostensibly the same composition are found in the same distribution and can be assumed to have the same function from the glosses, so there seems to be no reason not to posit that in each language, they derive from the same PROTOvowels, labelled as: *i *e *a *o *u. Consonantal correspondences: Maori Hawaiian p
p
Samoan Fijian From example # p
b 1, 2
t
k
t
t 2, 3, 4
ng
n
ng
ng 3
k
'
'
k 4
r
1
1
1 4
If these derive from identical sets, they have undergone some change, which leads us to ask: (1) In general, which language sounds change into what others? (2) What ought an overall Proto-system look like? Facts about sound-change in other languages are relevant to identifying PROTO-forms, marked with the asterisk as reconstructed *forms: (a) [k] often palatalizes before front vowels, giving [ç]: the opposite is unattested: given [k]/[ç] variants, *k is a preferable PROTOform (b) voiceless stops often become voiced intervocalically: the opposite phenomenon would be `surprising' though possible (c) change of [k] to glottal stop (phonetic [?], written as ' in the examples) is more common than the reverse (d) change of /h/ to another phoneme is more common than the reverse.
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Further data: Maori
Hawaiian Samoan Fijian
Gloss
hono
hono
fono
vono
stay, sit
h
h
f
v
n
n
n
marama malama r kaho
malama malama light, dawn, moon
l
l
'aho
h
n
l
'aso h
kaso s
thatch
s
These justify the reconstruction of *m, *n, and suggest *h and *l, because they are more frequent in the data (than f, v, and r). Assuming that change resulting in the `disequilibrium' of different languages is better explained as coming from a uniform source, the sound system can be reconstructed as: Labial
Alveolar
*p
*t
*f
*s
*m
*n
Velar *k
*ng
*i
*u
*e
*o *a
*l and the Reconstructed Proto-forms can be spelled 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
*pou *tapu *tangi *takele *fono *malama *kaso
Current forms are called reflexes of the Proto- or (re)constructed ones. But attested IE languages are more complex: IE syllable structure is not restricted to simple Polynesian (C)V IE languages can have more vowels than Polynesian ones IE vocalic contrasts differ in function as well as in number IE consonantal contrasts are more numerous IE Stress / duration are more clearly phonemic than in Polynesian IE Morphology is more complex than Polynesian IE Word-classes are more morphologically marked than Polynesian 6.15 ProtoIndoEuropean. One approach suggests this system for PIE (notice that some older phonetic terminology does not completely agree with what has been used in previous pages):
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ProtoIndo-European consonants (reconstructed): Stops
Labial Dental Palatal Velar Labio-velar p
kw
voiceless
t
k
k
b
gw
voiced
d
g
g
voiced bh
gwh
aspirate
dh
gh
gh
voiceless ph
kw
aspirate
th
kh
kh
Fricative s Laryngeals h, x, y, ? Germanic consonants (reconstructed): Labial
Dental
Velar
Labio-Velar
f
0
h
hw
p
t
k
kw
b
d
g
Sanskrit consonants (attested) Stops
Labial
Dental
p
t
Alveolar
Palatal
t
c
voiceless
k ph
th
th
ch
aspirate
kh b
d
d
j
voiced
g bh
dh
dh
jh
aspirate
gh
Fricatives, vl.
s
s
s.
Aspirate, vl. Nasals:
Velar
h m
n
n
ñ n
Semivowels:
v
l
r l
6.16 Fact and Fancy. What is claimed in the Polynesian examples is that all the words in the four languages are the same words: even though the sounds by which they are represented differ in Composition, they (1) `mean' about the same thing, (2) derive from an identical 5-member system of vocalic contrasts, (3) in an identical 9-member system of consonantal contrasts, (4) in an identical syllabic system which demands a vowel and tolerates only a single initial consonant: (C)V [where (C) includes the glottal stop printed as [']. More data is required to establish the mechanisms which result in other identities of function and distribution within each current languages, but that requires more than just phonological material.
For instance: the different translations of Matthew 9:1 `equate' participles (Gk embas and Lt ascendens) with finite verbal phrases (10th C. astah hë, 16th he entred, 20th he got into) and the Scots verb buirdit. Any of the
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versions might have used participles, verb phrases, or finite verbs, and their avoidance is often called stylistic. Linguists try to make style contrasts more explicit in terms of how different levels of structure interact. The original is not like a theoretical reconstruction of PIE, but an actual Greek text. Its content is represented in different stages of English, where instead of a participle, we find V + N after ða in the 10th, but N + V in the 16th and N + V + P in the 20th Century versions. As native speakers, we know that modern English has a boarded option like the Scots; that sailors are touchy about calling a boat a ship; that we can board steel or wooden ships, but would more likely enter a ship, get into a canoe, and onto a raft. We might guess that boat began to appear in English when scyp and shippe had too often to be modified by large and small. On more solid grounds, we could infer that Jerome used diminutive naviculam instead of navem because unless ploion (like scyp) were modified, it was more likely small, unlike a naus sailing the Mediterranean. In short, our intuitions about how subsystems of our language interact are reliable because we matured speaking and hearing them. Those working with ancient texts, in dead languages, never attain that kind of knowledge, even after a lifetime of intensive study. This helps correct the impression that some scholars seem to treat a language as though it were only its sound-system, or its stock of words, or its grammatical system. There are no native speakers of dead languages to consult, but in many cases, there is enough evidence around to distinguish between what we know, what guesses are plausible, and what inferences objective evidence can prove to be fallacious. 6.17 Historical Identity and Contemporary Difference. Many theories were advanced to show why contemporary languages could be seen as identical from a higher formal point of view, despite obvious material differences. Some early formulations of `Laws' relating the concrete variety of IE languages to the abstract unity of reconstructed PIE include: Grimm's Law (1822): Tenuis = /--> Aspirata = /--> Media = /--> Grassman's Law (1862):
Successive aspirates become dissimilar.
But main stress is an environmental Verner's Law (1875): determinant. Analogy:
Some changes seek pattern outside those laws.
Analogy. Like some of the `laws' just cited, analogies can be represented as static correspondence relations with the use of =, or as dynamic historical processes, symbolized by --->. Rhotacism. A Latin change into, or a correspondence between, an earlier intervocalic s with/to a later r is attested. The static relationship or process is called rhotacism, from the name of the Greek letter rho:
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Period I. nom: melios
arbos
orator
soror
gen:
melioSis
arboSis
oratoRis soroRis
dat:
melioSi
arboSi
oratoRi
acc:
melioSem
arboSem
oratoRem soroRem
abl:
melioSe
arboSe
oratoRe
soroRe
melios
arbos
orator
soror
melioRis
arboRis
oratoRis soroRis
melioRi
arboRi
etc.
melioRem
arboRem
melioRe
arboRe
soroRi
Period II.
Period III. arbos/arbor orator
soror
melioRis
arboRis
oratoris
sororis
melioRi
arboRi
etc.
melior
arbor
orator
melioris
arboris
etc.
etc.
etc.
melios/melior
etc. Period IV. soror
In Period I, -os -or forms both occurred, but -or nominatives were more numerous. In Period II, -os -or nominatives cooccur, but genitives in -oris for both predominate. By Period III, the -oris genitive is the most common, but nominatives in -os sound archaic. By Period IV, nominatives in -or and genitives in -oris are the rule. 6.18 Grimm's Law Again. Process terms are more appropriate to talk about changes through time. But contemporary English and German have forms relatable in terms of Grimm's formula. So it could be restated as: Correspondences:
IE aspirata
= ---> Germanic media
IE tenuis
= ---> Germanic aspirata
IE media
= ---> Germanic tenuis
Alternatively, since either successive stages or contemporary states can be involved, the image of a circle is suggestive. It has no necessary point which is its beginning, middle, or end, and so is neutral about `earlier' and `later', whether the change or difference is a matter of decay or improvement, etc.
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Circular:
These terms translate Dionysius Thrax' discrimination among sets of consonants like pi, beta, and phi that we would distinguish as mainly:
Neither Grimm nor his contemporaries were skilled in phonetics, despite their phonological subtlety. Grimm said `we speak from the letters'. He must have known better in more cautious moments, since that formula requires there be as many sounds as there are (printed?) letters. That is a reasonable expectation from a recent phonemic analysis like the Romanization of Turkish in the 1920s, but many systems use more than one letter for a single sound, and English even retains spellings for distinctions no longer made in all dialects. In the translations above, for instance, the voiceless velar fricative in Scots, which distinguishes Loch (Ness) from lock (the door) is also found in brocht (`brought') probably in the 10th C. brohton, and we spell it brought. German writes English Greek as Griechisch, with 10 letters for 6 phonemic segments. Sounds Grimm labelled aspirata include those we would distinguish as stops + h, affricates, voiceless fricatives, e.g. the sounds that ch as well as sch stand for in Griechisch. 6.19 Grassmann's Law. Sounds easy to pronounce alone can be `tongue twisters' when combined. A simple sobriety test in English is to repeat ten times: She sells seashells by the seashore to buy rubber baby buggy bumpers. Other sounds are not of themselves what Jones might have called `ungrateful to the ear', but their repetition can be. Grimm's Law (it was his successors, not Grimm, who called it a law) concerned the predictable changes in spelling he noted for the same words in older and later stages within Germanic, and between classical sources and Germanic. The basic formula is stated above. There were exceptions. A Greek perfect is related to its present tense by reduplication of all or part of the stem. The model verb luo in the present tense has leluka as its perfect. That predicts that the verb thelo (`wish, will') should be thetheleka in the perfect. But it is not. The proper form is tetheleka.
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This suggested to Grassmann that sound laws do not apply just to autonomous segments: consider successive syllables. Grassmann's Law says: When a sequence of two aspirate stops occurs within a root, the first one dissimilates into the corresponding plain stop. or: The first of two aspirates beginning successive syllables, or a syllable which also ends with an aspirate, loses its aspiration. nom. thriks; Proto *thrikhgen. trikos
e.g., Greek: `hair' = perfects reduplicate:
le-lu-k-a
`loose'
but:
pe-pheu-k-a
`flee'
te-thele-k-a
`will'
thel-o Cognate Exceptions to Grimm's Law: Gothic:
Latin:
hafts
captus
married, taken
speiwan
spuo
spit, spew
skadus nahts
Greek:
skotos noctis
Gloss:
shadow night
6.20 Verner's Law. There were other exceptions: some pre-Germanic stops (p t k) did not become b d g, as Grimm's Law correctly predicted for: Greek:
hypér
OHG
ubar
patér OE
féedr
hekurá OHG
swigur
Verner pointed out that where we find the voiced reflexes, the accent in Greek or Sanskrit follows the sound in question: Germanic voiceless fricatives became voiced in voiced environments if the chief accent of the word did not stand on the immediately preceding vowel in PIE: If the sound is in initial position, or immediately preceded by the accent, we get f q x, otherwise b d g. After this difference arose, the stress moved into the root syllable, although the original position is still indirectly reflected in the morphophonemic alternations q/ð. Verner's Law changed the domain of sound change from a study focused on Grimm's autonomous segments, then Grassmann's segments forming syllables in succession, into the full compass of the phonological word, by including its dynamic features. Segments, syllables, and successions of syllables are real enough, but obviously inadequate abstractions when stress, pitch, duration and the like are considered irrelevant. 6.21 The NeoGrammarians. The success of these reformulations of Grimm's basic insight led to the confident Neogrammarian formulation:
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`Sound laws operate without exception'. When apparent exceptions arise, the appropriate environment has not been taken into account. This forcefully restates the analogist opposition to anomaly, for whose adherents language was nothing but exceptions. Can such a situation be even stated coherently by a position that admitted no rule from which an expression could be exempted? After Verner's breakthrough, the Neogrammarian `school' was centered at the University of Leipzig, including such luminaries as Brugmann, Osthoff, and Leskien. One of its most respected results was Karl Brugmann's Grundriss der Vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (2nd ed., Strassburg, 1897-1916). Familiarization with Sanskrit galvanized Europe. The Romantics hoped that Sanskrit (an other exotic languages) could supply answers to questions about the identity of Man's original language and state. Among students of language, it was Panini's method of description that caused the excitement. His account of phonetic relations within a language prepared them to recognize unsuspected regularities between languages: Panini called change of sounds-in-contact sandhi: assuming an abstract prefix IN for English, its realization in impotent, intolerable, illegal, irregular. New ways of looking at the data of Botany, Geology, Biology, Physics, Astronomy supplied models. 6.22 Later Developments in Analogy. The concept, distinctions, and need to specify the basis of analogies have already been reviewed. Still largely unexplored are differences between 3- and 4-term analogies. Among the best known names in Linguistics connected with the notion are Jerzy Kyrolowicz and Witold Manzak, part of whose views are summed up in: Kyrolowicz's Rules. (1) A two-fold morphological marker tends to replace one that is single, e.g. Modern German Gast (`guest') vs. plural Gäste, earlier: Gast, Gasti. (2) Analogy proceeds from the base to the derived form. (3) Any construction of a constant plus a variable is used as a pattern for isolated entities of the same function (so we wrongly form wrong modeled on slowly from the normal adverb slow). (4) New analogical forms assume the primary function of a contrast; replaced forms are used for secondary functions: brothers vs. brethren. Manzak's Rules. (1) Long words, except in paradigms, are more often remodeled after short words than vice versa, e.g. bridegroom was remodeled after groom, not groom after *bridegroom. (2) The alternation of roots is more often abandoned than introduced (so regular verbs now outnumber strong ones). (3) A long inflectional form is more often remodeled after a short one (excluding forms of which one has an ending and the other lacks it).
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6.23 Indo-Germanic. Comparative grammar and its methods define individual IE languages as outcomes of processes that changed a single language in different ways. Reverse those processes and you reconstruct the original call it ProtoIndoEuropean. So PIE and the comparative method define each other (are in a sense the same thing) somewhat as order, cause, basic, derived, real, and so on constitute a single domain whose population is identified by those terms, since the terms themselves depend on each other for their definition. The linkage of roots, affixes, constructions in modern languages are not fixed PIE originals, but survivors of a chain of mutations. A single language is as stable as the recall, manipulation, rejection, or ignorance of former usage by later speaker. Every element continually adjusts to all others within unique systems that themselves are products of change. The options touched on in Matthew's text showed that. The unattested facts in the sets below that could prove each developed from a single unity suggests the vast amount of data the project of reconstruction demands: Gr:
eis
ploi-on
c. 100
in
nav-i-cul-am
c. 400
on
scyp
c. 900
em-ba-s Lt: a-scend-en-s 10: a-stah hë 16:
in-to the shipp-e
c.1500
in-to the boat
c.1950
he en-tre-d 20: he got Sc:
a
boat
1983
he buird-it 6.24 Concrete Data. Comparative work demands vast detail. In the heyday of Reconstructed PIE accepted in 1916 2, Antoine Meillet's Charactères Généraux des Langues Germaniques dealt only with 'Germanic languages as distinctive' among all IE languages (1970:vii). Abbreviations show the range of evidence on which the work is based: each deserves a separate library in defense of the classifications: Arm Armenian
OHG Old High German
Celt
Celtic
OI Old Icelandic
Fr
French
OIr Old Irish
Ger
German
OLat Old latin
Germ Germanic
Opr Old Prussian
Got
Gothic
OR Old Russian
Gr
Greek
OS Old Saxon
IE
IndoEuropean Osl
Ir
Irish
Old Slavic
OSw Old Swedish
Lat
Latin
Sl Slavic
Lit
Lithuanian
Skr Sanskrit
OE
Old English
Ved Vedic
OFr
Old Frisian
WGerm West Germanic
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While current forms are interesting, Linguistics is mainly concerned, as Meillet saw it, with the dynamics of change. Yesterday's hesitations (like the melios/arbor competition) can isolate directions still at work. Reliable data are not as obvious as these abbreviation suggests. Germanic lacks the abundant documentation of Romance; it was likely spoken on the Northern Plains; attested before the Christian era as Gothic diffused through Spain, France, Italy, and the Balkans. Ulfilas' 4th century Bible, even then archaic, is its earliest written witness. Scandanavian branches survive in Norwegian and Icelandic, Danish, and Swedish. Older than Gothic are 3rd to 13th century Runic inscriptions. In Western Germanic, English, Frisian, High German, Low German or Saxon, and Dutch are the least ancient: OE is about the 7th century, OHG about the 8th, OS the 9th. OHG splintered into Alemannic, Bavarian, and Franconian, all attested only in monastic usage. 6.25 Unity and Uniformity. Germanic unity was not a uniformity speakers were aware of as much as something their neighbors would notice. Nordic, Gothic, and West Germanic dialects all had analogous tendencies, of which English is an extreme example. It would be hard to show that English is IE without documentary evidence of the same Germanic changes: loss of finals, intervocalic adaptation (in voicing or loss of closure), the simplification of morphology, all varying in speed, extent, and in details. Complexities of IE grammar were adopted unequally, then a process of normalization opposed diversity: without uniformity, there is no resistance to change. 6.26 Consonants Changed. IE had many stops 3, only one /s/ fricative, and semivowels called sonant consonants: */y, w, r, l, m, n/. Western IE (including Germanic) had four types of stops: labial, dental, guttural, and labiovelar, each in three series: voiceless, voiced, and voiced aspirate (with Indo-Iranian, Gk and Armenian, voiceless). Common Germanic had: the same points of articulation, but different types: ± voiced stops and voiceless fricatives: /F/ (bilabial), /p/ ([inter]dental), /x/ (palatal) and /xw/ as well as voiced ones: /b/, /?/ (voiced [inter]dental), g (guttural) and /gw/ (which become simply /w/), as well as /s/ vs/ /z/. [Meillet did not use the later / / convention for phonemic notation] (1) Germanic voiceless consonants do not represent IE voiceless consonants, but simple IE voiced ones: Germanic
p t k kw corresponds to
IE
b d g gw
Sanskrit
bdj
Greek
bdg b
Latin
b d g gw (or u consonant)
Celtic
bdg b
Lithuanian
b d zh g
g
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(2) Germanic fricatives F p x xw represent IE
p t k kw and correspond to
Sanskrit
pt c k
(k or c; c or ch)
Greek
pt k p
(p or t or k under certain conditions)
Latin
p t k kw (k = c; kw = qu)
Lithuanian
p t sh k
(x early loses friction, becoming h as in Latin and Serbian, so the earliest texts show h for Germanic x, and hw for Germanic xw) (3) Germanic voiced b
d
g
gw
represent
IE
bh dh
gh
gwh and correspond to
Sanskrit
bh dh
h
gh
(gh OR h)
Greek
ph th
kh
ph
(ph OR th or kh)
Latin
Fp h,x F,xw
(alternate ancient forms)
Except for sibilant *s and voiced aspirates (if Germanic b is [bh]), no Germanic consonant stayed in the IE series. We say that IE occlusives underwent in Germanic the `mutation' called Lautverschiebung. (1970:17) (1) Ancient voiced sounds represented by Germanic voiceless sounds: Old English: English:
deep
tooth
foot
knee
acre
Sanskrit:
dantam
padam
janu
ajrah
Latin:
dentem
pedem
genu
ager
Greek:
poda
gony
agros
Gothic:
fotu
kniu
akrs
Lithuanian:
dubus
Old Saxon:
tand
Gothic:
diups
Old Icelandic:
diupr
queen
qino
akkar
akr
Old Prussian:
genna
Old Slavic:
zhena
Old High German:
quena
(2) Ancient voiced aspirated occlusives represented by Germanic voiced occlusives, perhaps aspirated: Old English: English:
dear bear
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goose
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Page 226 Sanskrit:
dhrsuh hamsah
Latin:
fero
Greek:
phero
Gothic:
bairan
Lithuanian:
zasis
Old Icelandic:
bera
West Germanic:
beran
(h)answer trasus (ga)dars
O.H. German:
gans
(3) Ancient voiceless occlusives represented by voiceless spirants in Germanic: O.E.:
feoh
nefa
Eng.:
cattle
nephew
Vedic:
paçu
three
pecu
tria
Greek: Goth.:
hund
hwaeðar
turn
hundred
whether
vartate
çatam
katarah
verto
centum
lend
tri
Sansk.: Latin:
weordan
tria
-katon
liqui poteros
faihu
leipo leihwan
Lith.:
katras
O.Sax.:
thriu
leku
werthan hund
Goth.: O.Icel.:
fe
nefe
OHG:
fihu
nefo
hunt
hwedar
6.27 Changes Change. Plausible hypotheses about how a language shifts from stop to a fricative are that voiceless aspirates are more weakly articulated than nonaspirates, so when they lose occlusion, they become spirants; or that intervocalics are affricated. Both `can be reduced to the same general formula' depending on behavior of the glottis. This is `naturally explained by the fact that a population, while changing its language, has kept its old articulatory habits'. (p. 21) Welsh and Irish who may be quite innocent of their `native' languages speak English with the phonology of Welsh or Irish. OHG underwent a second consonant mutation continuing the first in different forms from one German dialect to another between the first century AD and the time when the oldest OHG texts were written. Words borrowed from the Latin of the imperial epoch were affected, e.g. Lat. porta, becomes OHG pforta, and Lat. discus becomes OHG tisk, (`table'). 6.28 Intervocalic Consonants. Consonants assimilated intervocalically, voiced occlusives becoming spirants. Meillet formulates Verner's Law more narrowly: the sibilant segments *s and the spirants *f, p, x, and xw became voiced between two voiced elements, one of which is the vocalic element of the first syllable of the word, when the IE-inherited pitch accent, falling on this syllable, did not prevent the voicing.
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To Skr pitá: (acc. pitáram) and Gr paté:r, (`father'), Gmnc corresponds with Got fadar, OE faeder, OS fader and OHG fater: forms where there had been an intervocalic *d, because, as Skr and Gr show, the IE accent (elevation of voice) did not fall on the first syllable of the word. To Skr bhráta: (acc. bhrátaram, `brother'), and Gr phráter, Gmnc. corresponds with Got. broqar, OE bro:dor, OS bro:ther, and OHG bruoder, forms in which there had been an intervocalic p because the IE accent fell on the first syllable. IE accent varied in ways shown in grammar rather than lexis: strong verb preterites reflect IE perfects, and sing. Skr véda (1, 3, `know') has pl. vidmá (`we') and vidá (3sg) and viduh (3pl). Gmnc. alternates f, p, x, xw and s sing. with b, d, g, w, and z (Nordic & W Gmnc. r) pl., explained by variable accent consonant with that of Skr (1970:25f): OI
OS
OHG
toh
zoh
tugun
zugun
OE 3s
`pulled'
teah 3pl tugon 3s
ward
`became'
weard 3pl
wurtun wurdon (cf: Skr várte, Lat verto) sah
3s
sah
`saw'
seah 3p
sawun sawan (the intervocalic C is *hw: Got saihwan
3s vas
was
was
warun
warun
`see') `was'
was 3p voro waeron (cf Skr vásati `he remains') Where present tense verbs with thematic e (most Gmnc strong verbs) had initial accent, causatives shifted it to the suffix, e.g. Skr várdhati (`believes') and vardháyati (`convinces') ... IE had noun-types where accent placement varied with inflection. So when *s and spirants between two voiced elements became voiced, IE accent still `existed' undetected in Germanic of the historic epoch, and its presence on the initial syllable of the word sufficed to prevent the voicing of a sibilant or of a spirant immediately following it. Verner's Law is proved only for the spirant which follows the vocalic cut of the initial syllable of the word. In the rest of the word, the ancient voiceless spirants are also represented, sometimes by voiceless consonants and at other times by voiced consonants. In Gothic the Distribution is regulated by dissimilation. Sibilants and spirants between voiced phonemes become voiced if the preceding syllable begins with a voiceless phoneme; they remain (or again become?) voiceless if the preceding syllable begins with a voiced phoneme. Change or loss of intervocalic consonants make Latin forms less recognizable in French than in German, which preserved a `skeletal' CV structure, e.g. Fr. feu, focum, père, patrem, mi, medium, vs. German Feuer, Vater, Mitte. (p. 29)
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6.29 The Vocalic System. IE had `true' vowels and semivowels Meillet calls sonants. True vowels were always vocalic, contrasting the phonetic qualities he represented as a, e, o. The semivowels / sonants y w r l m n varied: consonantal prevocalically, preconsonantally, or wordfinal (then written i u r l m n), or sometimes diphthongal vocalic offglides or consonants after true vowels (e.g. ei, eu, er, el, en, em). Schwa designates another IE quality confused initially with Gmn short a and i, or with zero in others. Effectively, there were just three vowels which could be long and short. But Gmnc reduced it further: the qualities of a and o coalesced. The three types C, V, and SV (defined as the 2nd member of a diphthong) were not functionally distinct; the sonant consonants y w r l m n were mostly maintained in Gmnc, but i and u (`sonant vowels' because `the most vocalic') (1970:31), function as true (long and short) vowels. The four others (*r, *l, *m, *n) are replaced under certain conditions by diphthongs in u: *ur, ul, un, um. In all IE languages, diphthongs started to simplify early on. Skr ai and au occur as e and o in early texts, but Gmnc resisted this change: most ai, au diphthongs are still modern German, others varied by dialect. From such (abbreviated) details, `we expect to find in Germanic' four Vs: a o i u, long and short, plus diphthongs like ai, au, an, am, al. `Everything has happened then, almost as if there had been in common Germanic a single vowel, which became i or e according to the cases' all quite far from the IE system `because a radically new principle has intervened' (1970:32). Each IE vowel is autonomous within a word, independent of neighboring consonants and vowels in syllables. But in Germanic, vowel-qualities, first shorts, later even long ones, depend on position and on the consonant and vowel elements which follow within in the same word. Meillet's remarks now sound metaphoric: `The actions of the consonants and vowels on the preceding vowels were produced or at least completed for the most part during the historical period'. (1970:33) `The very complex ensemble of the alternations of vowels under the influence of following i j and u is known in German under the name Umlaut.' (1970:35) `Like the principle of the mutation of the occlusives and the alteration of intervocalic consonants, the tendency of vowels to conform to the articulation of neighboring phonemes is found also in Celtic; in Irish, as in Germanic, for example, it is impossible in general to determine whether an e or an i is based on an ancient e or on an ancient i.' (1970:36) 6.30 The Initial Accent of Intensity. IE accent was (a) tonal and (b) syllabic, as proven by Indian directions for the Vedas and Greek remarks that vocalic quality was unaffected by phonetic conditions. Verner's Law shows IE pitch accent still existed in Gmnc when consonantal mutation was complete. It is now gone. Nor did it affect rhythm: Skr, Anc Gr and Lat versification and rhythmic prose of Gr and Lat relied only on alternating long and short syllables. Pitch was independent of quantity in IE, and only secondary in Gr and Lat: the long/short opposition was firm, except in some finals.
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Then: in common Germanic, the initial syllable of every principal word in the sentence received an accent of intensity. That maintained long vocalic qualities, lengthened some short Cs or Vs by which it was separated from second syllables, tending to shorten long vowels of unaccented syllables. Germanic Rhythmn has since then depended only on this accent initial syllable importance is shown by its being the base for alliteration. `The introduction of the accent of intensity at a fixed place was a revolution, and there is nothing which is more distinctive about Germanic'. It is also infrequent in IE and other language-families. Once introduced, borrowed words are affected: Lat asellus becomes Gothic ásilus, OHG esil, Ger Esel; LAT palatium > Fr palais, but Gm Pfaltz: only through compounding like erfinden, empfangen did Germans `learn again to put the accent on a syllable other than the initial one'. (1970:38-40) 6.31 Effects. Shorts became long (geben); the long/short opposition vanished and the disappearance of short interior unaccented vowels is a characteristic trait of Germanic. Ancient Nordic and West Germanic showed a, i and u distinctly, even when short in unaccented syllables, then tended to reduce to a single schwa-like quality (represented as e). That appears first in the preverb, a particle welded to the verb in a syllable immediately preceding the accented one. Like Gothic, the most OHG in the eighth century still has ga-, which then changes to ge-, which becomes gi- toward the ninth century. Later, ge- is uniformly used, beginning with the last period of OHG, hence ga-zogan, gi-zogan, ge-zogan. Likewise fur- and for- of the most ancient OHG become fir-, and finally fer-, and so too with all the ancient preverbs. German and English unaccented vowels progressively lost their particular qualities. They have been better preserved in the Scandinavian languages, in spite of numerous alterations, because the accent is much less intense in these languages than in German and English. (1970:41) 6.32 Word Endings. Word Endings ambiguously refer to items of lexical, grammatical, rhythmic, mono- or poly-syllabic status, such as stress and various kinds of linkage between successive environments. IE final consonants were not plosive. When vowels in final syllables were arrested, the consonants tended to disappear or were treated specially. The only attested occlusive was dental and Germanic had only a final one; monosyllables retaining it show a voiceless *-t, (by Grimm's Law, an ancient *-d), Compare: nom.-acc. sing. neut. Skr `this', tat (tád before a voiced phoneme), Lat is-tud, then OI pat, OS that, and OHG daz; Got has pat-a, with the addition of a particle -a. To Lat quod (`what'), corresponds OI huat, OS (h)wat, and OHG (h)waz. A final dental in a polysyllable disappears in all dialects; compare Skr bháret ('may he carry') to Got bairai ('let him carry'), OI bere, and OHG bere. Sibilant -s (-z) was frequently final in IE words, -z in Germanic. Gothic devoiced its final sibilants, except when followed by particles so closely linked as to make them word-internal, in which case z is found: Nordic has -r for *-z
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final; in West Germanic final *-z disappeared from polysyllables, found onlyas -r in monosyllables. A nom.-sing. IE *ghostis [cf. Lat hostis ('foreigner, enemy')] became Gothic gasts (`guest'), runic Old Norse -gastiR, OI gestr, OE giest, and OHG gast. (1970:44) Final nasals appear in Indo-Iranian and Italic as -m, in other languages as -n. Germanic had n only in monosyllables after a short vowel. Compare Got hwan, (`when') Lat quom; Got pan (`then') (cf. Da in the 10th c. Matthew text cited above) and Lat tum; Skr tám (`this one'), OI pan, OS than, and OHG den. In polysyllabics, final nasals disappear: where Skr has final -am, Lat -um, Gr -on, e.g. in ploion and OPr -an, an old runic Norse has horna (`horn') as nom.-acc. neut. singular. Final vowels, if long, tended to become short, and if short, to disappear (as was the case in Slavic, Lithuanian and Latin). The tendency is still alive (e.g. Modern Ger dat. sing. Manne/Mann), but there have always been exceptions precluding a rigid formulation. Long vowels are even more uncertain. Meillet concludes that these changes increased the difference between the IE- and the Germanic-type. Elements of the IE phonic system changed, modified or shifted in value in Germanic. An r or an l in Germanic 'continues' the same phonemes of IE but no longer alternate with the vocalic forms *r and *l. Yet the initial principle of each innovation in Germanic had an exact counterpart in Celtic, as though Germanic and Celtic had been influenced by languages of the same phonic type and replaced languages articulated in a similar manner. This did not occur in all Western IE languages: Italic Latin and Osco-Umbrian do not show these changes. (p. 49) The data are so rich and the details so extensive, even in so small a book as Meillet's, as to defy an adequate summation. Yet even a sample can give some inkling of the astonishing amount of precise material the 19th Century workers brought to public attention, and of the prestige that it deserved. Reading Lehmann, Winfred P. 1962. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. New York. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. pp. 167. Pedersen, Holger. 1931. 1959. 1962. The Discovery of Language. Linguistic Science in the 19th Century. Bloomington. University of Indiana. pp. 360. Supplementary Reading: Aarsleff, Hans. 1967. Study of Language in England, 1780-1860. Princeton University. pp. vi.279. Arlotto, Anthony. 1972. Introduction to Historical Linguistics. D.C.. University Press of America. pp. 274. Bynon, Theodora. 1977. Historical Linguistics. Cambridge University Press. pp. 301. Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX. Ed. W.M. Lindsay, Tomus I. 1911. Libros I-X continens. Oxford. Clarendon. Lehmann, W.P. 1967. A Reader in Nineteenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Bloomington. Indiana University 67. pp. 266. Lorimer, W.L. 1985. The New Testament in Scots. Edinburgh. Southside.
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Malkiel, Yakov. 1976. Etymological Dictionaries: A Tentative Typology. University of Chicago Press. pp 140. Onions, C.T., ed. 1966. Corrected 1967, 1969. 1979. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. (with assistance of G.W.S. Friederichsen & R.W. Burchfield). Oxford. Clarendon. Partridge, Eric. 1958. 1959. Origins. New York. Macmillan. pp 970. Skeat, Rev. Walter W. 1910. An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language: new, enlarged ed. Oxford. Clarendon. pp xliv. 780. 1961. A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. Oxford. Clarendon. pp. 664. Sledd, James H., and Gwin J. Kolb. 1955. Dr. Johnson's Dictionary: Essays in the Biography of a Book. University of Chicago Press. Starnes, De Witt T., and Gertrude E. Noyes. 1946. The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, 1604-1755. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. [Updated 1990] Tooke, John Horne. 1857. Epea Pteroenta: or, the Diversions of Purley. Numerous additions from the copy prepared by the author for republication, revised and corrected, with additional notes, by Richard Taylor. London. Tegg & Co. pp. 740 Wallis, John. 1972. Grammar of the English Language, with an introductory grammatico-physical Treatise on Speech (or on the formation of all speech sounds). A new edition with translation and commentary by J.A. Kemp. London. Longman. pp. viii.400. Bibliography 379-387. Lexicography and Lexicographers Anderson, James David. 1972. The Development of the English-French, French-English Bilingual Dictionary: A Study in Comparative Lexicography. Word Monograph No. 6. pp. 144. Bibliography of FE-EF Bilingual Dictionaries 134-44. Friend, Joseph Harold. 1867. The Development of American Lexicography 1798-1864. The Hague. Mouton. Partridge, Eric. 1963. The Gentle Art of Lexicography (as pursued and experienced by an addict). New York. Macmillan. [folksy] Robinson, Dow F. 1969. Manual for Bilingual Dictionaries. Volume I: Textbook. Santa Ana. Summer Institute of Linguistics. Schwartz, Richard B. 1971. Samuel Johnson and the New Science. Madison. University of Wisconsin Press. Wells, Ronald A. 1973. Dictionaries and the Authoritarian Tradition. The Hague. Mouton. Historical and Comparative Linguistics Anderson, James M. 1973. Structural Aspects of Language Change. London. Longman. pp. 250. Anttila, Raimo. 1972. An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics. New York. Macmillan. pp. 438. Bibliography, 401-38. Baldi, Philip. 1983. An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages. Carbondale. Southern Illinois University. pp. ix 214. Bibliog. 173-187. Indices. 189-214. Buck, Carl Darling. 1933. Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. University of Chicago Press. King, Robert D. 1969. Historical Linguistics and Generative Grammar. Englewood Cliffs. Prentice Hall. pp. 230. Kurylowicz, Jerzy. 1966. La nature des proces dits analogiques. Acta Linguistica 5.15-37 (1945-49). also in Readings in Linguistics II, Hamp, Austerlitz and Householder, eds., University of Chicago Press. Lehmann, Winfred P. and Yakov Malkiel eds. 1983. Perspectives on Historical Linguistics. Philadelphia. Benjamins, Philadelphia. pp. xii 379. [Updates and expands. Directions for Historical Linguistics. University of Texas Press, Austin 1968. pp. 199.] Manczak, Witold. 1958. Tendences générales des changements analogiques. Lingua 21.187-93.
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Lockwood, W.B. 1969. Indo-European Philology: Historical and Comparative. London. Hutchinson. p 193. Meillet, Antoine. 1903. 1922. Introduction a l'Étude Comparative des Langues Indo-Européennes. Paris. Hachette. pp. 516. 1970. General Characteristics of the Germanic Languages. tr. by William P. Dismukes of 1916 (1930) original. Coral Gables. University of Miami Press. Paul, Hermann. 1891. Principles of the History of Language. 1891. tr. Strong. London. Longmans, Green, London. Sebeok, Thomas, ed. 1967. Portraits of Linguists. Two Volumes. Bloomington. Indiana University Press. pp. 500+ each. (no pictures!) Sturtevant, E.H. 1917. 1962. Linguistic Change: An Introduction to the Historical Study of Language. With a new introduction by Eric P. Hamp. U. Chicago Press. pp. 185. Whitney, William Dwight. 1867. Language and The Study of Language. Twelve Lectures on the Principles of Linguistic Science. Reprint: AMS Press, New York (of the 1901 6th edition). pp. xii 504. Analytic Summary of Lectures 474-490. Indices 491-504 1896. 1875. The Life and Growth of Language. New York. Appleton. [Updated, but little changed from his 1867 book] Reprint: New York. Dover. 1979. Foreword by Charles Hockett. Notes 1. Walter Skeat, M.A., Cambridge (1835-1912): Canons for etymology. Relevant Languages: English (OE, ME), German (OHG, OLG) Dutch, Old Friesic, Old Saxon, Low German, Scandanavian, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Gothic, French, Celtic, Russian, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic. (Current words are: natives, denizens, aliens, or casuals): (1) Ascertain the earliest form and use (2) Observe history and geography: borrowing requires contact (3) Observe phonetic laws. (4) Fewer syllables, more original (5) Older cognates are determinable through the principal vowel (6) Strong verbs are primary (7) Whole words, not just parts, should be accounted for (8) Disregard mere phonetic/semantic coincidence (9) Resemblance contrary to phonetic law probably due to borrowing: ''Truly cognate words ought not to be too much alike". (10) An explanation of an English word is useless if it does not encompass its cognates. Popular etymologies common in Skeat's day refuted on the bases demanded by these canons: (1) Sirloin does not come from Charles II or James I "knighting" the loin: it antedates both (chronology) (2) Whitsunday is not from German Pfingsten - rubbish: (geography) (3) English care is not a cognate of L. cura; nor whole of G. holos; nor charity with Greek charis (phonetic laws) (4) `Aryan' was monosyllabic: affixation came later, so... (5) Deriving food from feed is impossible, since AS fedan derived from fod. Similarly, the e of set owes its existence to the a of the past of sit `The other canons require no particular comment'. 2. adjusted up to 1930 for his fourth edition (references here to Dismukes' 1970 translation. 3. Meillet: `We shall note here by p the voiceless dental spirant of the type of English th in a word like thing; by d the voiced dental spirant of the type of English th in the interior of words, as in mother; by x the voiceless guttural spirant of the type of German ch, as in doch; by g the voiced guttural spirant (that one hears, for example, at the end of German tag.'
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(1970.15) Our Chapter 2 labels what Meillet calls spirants as fricatives and his gutturals as velars. 1. Meillet: `We shall note here by p the voiceless dental spirant of the type of English th in a word like thing; by d the voiced dental spirant of the type of English th in the interior of words, as in mother; by x the voiceless guttural spirant of the type of German ch, as in doch; by g the voiced guttural spirant (that one hears, for example, at the end of German tag.' (1970.15) Our Chapter 2 labels what Meillet calls spirants as fricatives and his gutturals as velars.
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7 Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) 7.00 Émile Durkheim's work in Sociology is relevant to appreciating de Saussure's Linguistics because of the failure of other sciences to serve as Prime Analogates or models for the study of language. But if Sociology or Linguistics were to be recognized as sciences, they would have to show the same characteristics which mark recognized sciences. Sociology as a distinct discipline may be attributed to the work of Comte; French Sociology as a candidate for scientific standing is the patrimony of Durkheim. 7.01 Science. One account of the nature, goals, and methods of `Science', almost contemporary with de Saussure, was proposed in Max Mueller's (1861) popular version. It is reminiscent of the degrees-of-knowledge view encountered in classical times. All sciences, he said, pass through three stages: The empirical, the classificatory, and the theoretical or metaphysical. The first stage is informed common experience; the second stage is one of discovery and classification of hierarchic order in data, and the third is an explanation of the causes and purposes found in that order. For Mueller, there were only two kinds of science, physical and historical: the first deals with the works of God, the second with those of man (the German distinctions he was probably translating are between Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft, natural vs. mental or psychological). Assuming linguistics should be a physical science, he saw obvious models for it in the methods of Botany, Geology, or Anatomy. Durkheim's explicit (and de Saussure's rather implicit) concept of what makes a study scientific are relevant to these distinctions. Some dispute whether de Saussure was directly influenced by Durkheim. They may be equating influence with acknowledged or covert use of another's ideas. Others allow a more indirect connection. Part of Hispanus' Summulae, for instance, can be read as just paraphrasing Aristotle, particularly his Sophistici elenchi, to which Hispanus repeatedly refers. But the medievals assumed that knowledge was cumulative and progressed by refining previous work. Since the procedure involved `commentaries on commentaries', inductive workers of a later period dismissed it as lacking in originality. Personality cults were less common in that era than in our own. 7.02 Models. Technical terms in Historical Linguistics (like root, stem, branches, family tree) show how Botany and Biology were models for linguists. Evolutionary Biology in particular provided an analog for the theoretical
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reconstruction of unattested ancestral forms. And the determinism of Newtonian Physics provided yet another point of reference in discussions about whether languages develop inorganically, organically, or with a mixture of mental and social causes. Ideas like these were current, and some of Durkheim's comments in defense of Sociology as a Science took them into account. De Saussure published sparingly (some 600 pages) after his epochal Mémoire. We have little in writing about the sources of his ideas; the Cours was reconstructed from the notes and recollections of those who heard his lectures on the topic. That they were novel, insightful, and ideas that still provide challenges to modern thinkers is a guarantee of his independence. That he simply `translated' Durkheim into linguistic terms is improbable. That he used expressions found in Durkheim's writings does not prove de Saussure copied from him any more than differently worded approximations would disprove that he could have arrived at similar conceptions independently. Sir William Jones knew about contemporary interest in national origins when he theorized that IndoEuropean languages derived from an ancestor no longer in existence; Durkheim and de Saussure, too, reflect contemporary concern about how to pursue humane studies like psychology and sociology scientifically: by identifying phenomena other sciences were unable or illequipped to handle. 7.03 Insight. How do geniuses arrive at unheard of ideas? How do they discover novelty in the familiar? The Medieval aphorism for both contributions to knowledge was that we are all pygmies standing on the shoulders of giants. Originality can consist in the clarity with which familiar unconnected facts are marshalled into a simpler, intellectually satisfying unity. That the thought of de Saussure does this is beyond dispute; that he did not embezzle its details from anyone is equally unquestioned; that his thought is not reproduced with complete accuracy in the student notes on which the Cours is based is unfortunately attested to by his editors. Aside from the intellectual ancestry of the vocabulary, the guiding image or model of such a synthesis, it seems immaterial who originates ideas. Ideas become the property of humanity: they are impersonal, timeless, without nationality, and valid to the extent that they serve the needs, and occasion the profitable criticisms, of those who use them. The insights that stamp de Saussure's thought are simple: he distinguished what parts of language do say from what they do not say, and what their sum teaches us about how to study language. This may not have discovered a new truth, but it was the perspective which informed de Saussure's evaluation of Diachronic Linguistics; it told him why Diachronic Linguistics fell short, and how to remedy its weaknesses. 7.04 Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). Born near Nancy, Strasbourg, Durkheim was a precocious student, and after three years at the Lycée Louis
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le Grand (1879-81) in Paris, he was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure. There he took up humanistic studies (Latin, Greek and some science), and Renouvier and Comte became important influences on his thought. He developed a distrust for atomism and reductionism: phenomena, he thought, must be explained at their own level. After his Aggrégation in 1882, there followed five years of teaching in suburban High Schools, where he gave courses on problems of freedom of the will, the nature of reality and knowledge. He was attracted by Wundt's development of a scientific approach to psychology. In 1887, the first course explicitly dedicated to social sciences was created for him at the University of Bordeaux, and in 1896, he won that University's chair in the new field. There he published The division of labor in society (1893), the Rules of the sociological method (1895), his study on Suicide (1897) and the Elementary forms of religious life (1912). In 1898, he founded the review, L'Année sociologique and was its editor for 14 years. His son André was a promising student in Linguistics (he died in 1915), and linguists like Meillet, Benveniste, and Lévy-Strauss were among the contributors to the review. 7.05 Social Science. Durkheim's defense of Sociology as a science included statements about fundamental assumptions concerning the nature and objects of knowing and the kinds of knowledge that results. Contrary to other conceptions of the field, he was sure that Sociology should neither be the study of individual psychology nor of mechanistic determinism: But it will be said that, since the only elements making up society are individuals, the first origins of sociological phenomena cannot but be psychological. In reasoning thus, it can be established just as easily that organic phenomena may be explained by inorganic phenomena. It is very certain that there are in the living cell only molecules of crude matter. But these molecules are in contact with one another, and this association is the cause of the new phenomena which characterize life, the very germ of which cannot possibly be found in any of the separate elements. A whole is not identical with the sum of its parts. It is something different, and its properties differ from those of its component parts. Association is not, as has sometimes been believed, merely an infertile phenomenon: It is simply the putting of facts and constituent properties into juxtaposition. (Rules of the sociological method, quoted from Bierstedt 1966:102-104). 7.06 Collective Conscience. In a word, there is between psychology and sociology the same break in continuity as between biology and the physicochemical sciences. The distinctive object of sociology is proposed as the collective conscience discoverable in a society: The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society forms a determinate system which has its own life; one may call it the collective or common conscience... entirely different from particular consciences, although it can be realized only through them. It is the psychical type of a society... (Collective Conscience, in The Division of Labor. 79f)
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That there `is such a thing' as a Collective Conscience is proven through the existence of social facts. That idea had to be defended against what he considered misinterpretations of his thought by others: Scholars are so accustomed to apply the forms of philosophical thought to Sociological matters that they are prone to see in this preliminary definition a kind of philosophy of social phenomena. They claimed that we were explaining social phenomena by constraint, just as Tarde explains them by imitation. We proposed not to anticipate the conclusions of sociological science by a philosophical view, but simply to indicate by what external signs it is possible to recognize the facts of which it must treat in order that the student may know how to detect them and in order that he may not confuse them with others. (Bierstedt 1966:iii) No doubt, when a science is in the process of being born, one is obliged, in order to construct it, to refer to the only models that exist, namely, the sciences already formed. (Bierstedt 1966:145) 7.07 Social Fact. A social fact, as Durkheim then explains at length, has peculiar properties, compared to the empirically observable facts of other sciences: a social fact is a form of behavior, which is (1) general throughout a society, and (2) that exercises constraint over individuals; (3) but this constraint is peculiar in that it is generally unconscious, and so cannot directly coerce: it merely leaves no options available for acceptable behavior: Here, then, is a category of facts with very distinctive characteristics: it consists of ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, external to the individual, and endowed with the power of coercion, by reason of which they control him. These ways of thinking could not be confused with biological phenomena, since they consist of representations and actions; nor with psychological phenomena, which exist only in the individual consciousness and through it. They constitute, thus, a new variety of phenomena; and it is to them exclusively that the term social ought to be applied. And this term fits them quite well, for it is clear that, since their source is not the individual, their substratum can be no other than society, either the political society as a whole or some one of the partial groups it includes, such as religious denomination, political, literary, and occupational association, etc. On the other hand, this term social applies to them exclusively, for it has a distinct meaning only if it designates exclusively the phenomena which are not included in any of the categories of facts that have already been established and classified. These ways of thinking and acting therefore constitute the proper domain of sociology. (Bierstedt 1966:3-4) 7.08 Reification. Critics accused Durkheim of reification presenting a purely subjective concept as though it had external objectivity. His replies define what he thought facts are, what a science is, the role of definitions in science, and how to define the object of a science. This involved the traditional distinction of descriptive from essential definition (e.g. featherless biped vs. rational animal for man), and what he might have called a programmatic definition (i.e. a tentative, initial orientation about what to look for): Moreover, science is not concerned with first causes, in the absolute sense of the word. For science, a fact is primary simply when it is general enough to explain a great number of other facts. (Bierstedt 1966:116)
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A theory in fact, can be checked only if we know how to recognize the facts of which it is intended to give an account. Moreover, since this initial definition determines the very subject matter of science, this subject matter will or will not be a thing, depending on the nature of the definition. (Bierstedt 1966:34-5) What, precisely, is a thing? A thing differs from an idea in the same way as that which we know from without differs from that which we know from within. Things include all objects of knowledge that cannot be conceived by purely mental activity, those that require for their conceptions data from outside the mind, from observations and experiments, those which are built up from the more external and immediately accessible characteristics to the less visible and more profound. To treat the facts of a certain order as things is not, then, to place them in a certain category of reality, but to assume a certain mental attitude toward them. (Bierstedt 1966.xliii) Indeed, the most important characteristic of a thing is the impossibility of its modification by a simple effort of the will. Not that the thing is refractory to all modification, but a mere act of the will is insufficient to produce a change in it; it requires a more or less strenuous effort due to the resistance it offers. (Bierstedt 1966:28-9) In order to be objective, the definition must obviously deal with phenomena not as ideas, but in terms of their inherent properties. It must characterize them by elements essential to their nature, not by their conformity to an intellectual ideal. (Bierstedt 1966:35) 7.09 Human = Social. Social facts vary in the way they manifest themselves. On the one hand, everything humans do is social: But on that basis, there are, as it were, no human events that may not be called social. Each individual drinks, sleeps, eats, reasons; and it is to society's interest that these functions be exercised in an orderly manner. If, then, all these facts are counted as social facts, sociology would have no subject matter exclusively its own, and its domain would be confused with those of biology and psychology. (1966.1) There is thus a whole series of degrees without a break in continuity between the facts of the most articulated structure and those free currents of social life which are not yet definitely molded. The differences between them are, therefore, only differences in the degree of consolidation. (Bierstedt 1966:12) To confirm this definition of the social fact by a characteristic illustration from common experience, one need only observe the manner in which children are brought up. Considering the facts as they are and as they have always been, it becomes immediately evident that all education is a continuous effort to impose on the child ways of seeing, feeling, and acting which could not have been arrived at spontaneously... the aim of education is, precisely, the socialization of the human being... Such is the origin and nature of legal and moral rules, popular aphorisms and proverbs, articles of faith wherein religious or political groups condense their beliefs, standards of taste established by literary schools... it is general because it is collective (that is, more or less obligatory), and certainly not collective because general. It is a group condition repeated in the individual because imposed on him.... (Bierstedt 1966:1-13) 7.10 Social Behavior. The kinds of behavior that meet Durkheim's definition of social facts in interesting ways are particularly those not found in laws or books of etiquette (although these are, of course, obvious examples of what he had in mind). Hall's Silent language (1959) and The hidden culture (1966) give examples involving violations of appropriate distance between speakers or the larger concept of space (and use of time) peculiar to different cultures.
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Other coercive factors, of which natives are unaware until others violate them, include concepts of modesty or good manners those `well brought up' simply know; how animals must not be treated; what words or topics cannot be used without offense between groups; what constitutes attractive or inappropriate dress; what times and places are inappropriate for different types of persons; how people may be addressed or referred to; how and what one eats in the presence of others; what questions must be asked or avoided with intimates or strangers; what information must be given or protected; how time is valued in different cultures. The Anglo-Saxon concept of fair play (i.e. it is not fair to beat a weak opponent) cannot even be translated into some languages, anymore than the American notion of self-consciousness among adolescents could be intelligible to one not raised in that culture. 7.11 Suicide. Durkheim's study on suicide is generally viewed by Sociologists as his best work. Is killing oneself a social fact in the same sense as the other forms of behavior? Even attempting it is a crime in some countries; it is scarcely a general practice in any society, few can be said to be forced to it, and no one can engage in it without awareness. But what Durkheim showed was that the suicide rate has the properties assigned to social fact: it is general, impersonal, cannot directly coerce, is a mere external record of individual (psychological) decisions, but while it varies from one society to another, the statistics are remarkably stable within a given society and for its minorities also found in other societies. These statistics measured a factor he called anomia in each society (a sense of rootlessness or lack of purpose). He emphatically disowns the goal of explaining individual motivation, and concedes that practically any explanation of the psychology of single cases may well be valid. But he always returns in his discussion to ideas (later mollified) about the collective conscience. In a public debate followed with great attention throughout Europe, he dismissed the view of his rival Tarde that imitation provided an explanation. His position won the popular verdict, but while unconvincing then and now to other sociologists, no one seems to have offered a better explanation on the sociological level. Similar reactions are found to la langue as proposed by de Saussure, a concept which bears a striking resemblance to that of Durkheim's social fact. 7.12 Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). De Saussure was born on November 26, 1857 in Geneva, to a family that had emigrated from France as Huguenot refugees. There was a strong scholarly tradition in the family, and when he finished his lower studies at 17, he entered the University, where he studied Philosophy, Chemistry, Physics, and especially Classical Philology. He spent the years 1876-78 in Leipzig, where Curtius, then a Grecist Comparativist of note, was his mentor. Among the Leipsig professors who became known as Junggrammatiker, Brugmann was 27, Osthoff 30, Leskien 35. At the age of 19, de Saussure became a member of Linguistic Society of Paris,
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while studying Sanskrit, Iranian, Old Irish, Old Slavic, and Lithuanian. At 20, he presented a paper to the Paris society on IndoEuropean which was published one year later as Mémoire sur la systeme primitive des voyelles dans les langues indoeuropéennes (Leipsig: Tuebner. 1879). Linguists were impressed by the cogency of his internal reconstruction of PIE vowels. His formal approach predicted an additional phonetic element of unspecified nature would account for the development of long vowels from short ones, an hypothesis later dramatically confirmed when Hittite was discovered (cf. Lehmann 1967:217). De Saussure lectured in Paris (where Meillet was his student and admirer), followed Bréal's teaching there, and from 1891-1913 was professor of Linguistics in Geneva. Despite the acclaim won by his brilliant Mémoire, he published little. Perhaps he had trouble articulating his misgivings about the scientific basis of linguistics, which his posthumous Cours de Linguistique Générale was to provide. Three sets of lectures were summarized from scraps of his own notes, but mostly from those of a few students, and edited by colleagues as the posthumous Cours. 7.13 Langue, Parole, Langage. De Saussure is known to have followed the public debates between Durkheim and Tarde about the causes of suicide, and some of his key ideas strongly resemble Durkheim's. He distinguished (but did not succeed in making technical terms out of) three common expressions concerned with communication: la langue, la parole and le langage. Each of these can be taken as implied in conditions for identifying what Durkheim called a social fact. Parole and langage were assigned properties of such individuality and unpredictability that they could not form the object of a science as de Saussure implicitly defined it. La Parole is the individual exercise of the power of speech, as whimsical, timebound, particularistic, and circumstance-dominated as concrete individual speakers: never wholly the same, often completely novel, and unrepeatable in its concrete detail. Le langage is the collectivity of all such individual acts, and therefore has, as it were, an element of the stable and universal aspects of la langue. Since it is tied to the concreteness of its members, it is lacking in that absolute principle of uniformity which an object of a science should have: it should be simply identical with itself when examined at different times. If there were to be a Science of Language, its object should be stable, uniform, identical in all instances, and not subject to reformulation when examined at a later time. That means that it cannot be something concrete. That is why de Saussure defines la langue as a pure form. 7.14 Abstraction and Science. Notice that these steps in abstraction from the object of concrete experience, through typical instances, to the establishment of an object that can be uniquely defined, correspond to the traditional account of abstraction developed by Aquinas from ideas of
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Aristotle. As an example, it was suggested in Chapter 5 that ordinary experience of pies and wheels in the concrete is time-and place-bound. But it is easy to recall typical instances of pies and wheels, and even to grasp elementary ideas about radii from spokes, or about right angles from generous wedges of pie. But such types are still tied to concrete experience. They compare, step by step, with the degrees of abstraction through which de Saussure rejects parole and langage as objects of Science. 7.15 Abstraction and Uniformity. An object of scientific study must be stable, internally coherent, and always the same. But when dealing with things that are round (like pies and wheels), the only sort of object that has such properties is a Circle (with a capital C), not the individual instances, or even typical circles (small c) we draw to illustrate them. The Circle is a geometrician's abstraction: not only is it round, it must be round by definition, and the consequences of all definition in terms of 360° flow from it almost as tautologies. That is, the definitions of a right angle, of a radius or circumference, or of parallel lines, are already contained implicitly in that initial assumption. 7.16 Abstraction and la Langue. What is there about Language (with a capital L) that is comparable to the relationships among properties deducible from the definition of Circle? If that could be identified, then one would have a science of Language comparable to the 'science' of Geometry. It would be indifferent to the accidents of unfairly cut pieces of pie, or the eccentric wheels inferior quality control permit. It would be free of the unpredictable oddities of speech, or the contradictions statistics level out in collective instances of speech. 7.17 Abstraction and Perspective. De Saussure takes pains to point out that `The point of view creates the object'. This feat of abstraction that occurs in all sciences does not, of course, deny actual or empirical properties in the object of study, but makes it easier to deal with them. This is a point that Durkheim also made, and it deserves a good deal of reflection. 7.18 Language as State or Process. Should Linguistics take language to be a state or a process? A process excludes human causality: although change is involved, no agent is presumed to account for it. States can be unchanging conditions or the end-products of either uncaused processes or actions someone started. We would only take language itself as an action in a metaphoric sense, although speaking a language or inventing one are examples of actions. 7.19 Description and Explanation. Explanation in the Aristotelian concept of science required the assignment of four causes, among which efficient cause is the initiator of an action, or catalytic agent of a process. In
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language, material causes include roots and affixes; their organization is a type of formal cause, and their communicative purposes or functions examples of final cause. Since the only literal role for an efficient cause would be that of the speaker or inventor, the problem of explaining language as a totality is difficult to formulate in causal terms. For reasons like these the study of language had been judged as belonging among the arts, until the development of linguistic science in which de Saussure participated importantly as a young scholar. Its models were initially botany or biology, which involved exhaustive classification of data. Evolutionary concepts in Darwin's biology and linguistics seem to have appeared simultaneously, and as in the case of Durkheim, publication dates and correspondence have been scrutinized by scholars to determine who influenced whom. Newton's theories in physics (e.g., to each action, there corresponds an equal and opposite reaction) also provided a model of systemic determinism which was mechanical and internal, so that dynamic Processes could be examined in a new way. Durkheim's work had proposed data which he claimed neither the physical nor psychological sciences of his day were in a position to explain: his suggestion was that objective description of phenomena at their own level was all that was needed. Explanation in science would then be autonomous, appealing neither to extralinguistic agency nor teleology. Objective description would not be a stage in science as Mueller had suggested, but its definition. 7.20 William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894). One contemporary work that de Saussure mentioned with approval was that of Yale professor William Dwight Whitney, whose 1875 (reprinted 1896) outline of Linguistic Science updated his 1867 book on the same subject. This is of interest since he deals explicitly, although too briefly, with the status of contemporary linguistics as a science. Because of editorial restrictions, he could not include his planned `fuller sketch of the history of knowledge and opinion in this department of study' (1896.vi). His revised work was published as one of a series of surveys for the general reader to summarize what the 19th Century had learned about language. He decided modern discoveries did not falsify basic traditional views, but supplemented and refined them, as he defined language and its linguistic study: Physical science on the one side, and psychology, on the other, are striving to take possession of linguistic science, which in truth belongs to neither... Language may be briefly and comprehensively defined as the means of expression of human thought... (for) scientific purposes... instrumentalities whereby men consciously and with intention represent their thought... expression for the sake of communication... the body of uttered and audible signs by which in human society thought is principally expressed .... (Whitney 1896:v, 1-2) 7.21 Linguistic Science. In Whitney's view, the scope of linguistic science included: language as a means of human expression vs. brute communication; variety of material and structure; resemblances and differences; classification
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by resemblance and difference; relation to thought; present life of language and its existence in the past; how it came into existence; language and mind; its part in the development of our race; the history of human development, races, their movements and connection, as found in the facts of language. ...the body of truth discovered in earlier times has been so small, that the science of language is to be regarded as a modern one, as much so as geology and chemistry... (Whitney 1896:5) He finds that the unique structure of each language has a profound influence on the mentality of its speakers, since it shapes and forms thought. This internal system is sometimes called the inner form of language: It amounts simply to this: that the mind which was capable of doing otherwise has been led to view things in this particular way, to group them in a certain manner, to contemplate them consciously in these and those relations. (Whitney 1896:22) 7.22 Language and Thought. Although he does not think that language is directly and solely a determinant of thinking, his expression of the role of language is remarkably similar to Durkheim's account of social facts: There is thus an element of constraint in language-learning. But it is an element of which the learner is wholly unconscious. Whatever language he first acquires, this is to him the natural and necessary way of thinking and speaking; he conceives of no other as even possible. The case could not be otherwise. For even the poorest language in existence is so much better than any one's powers could have produced unaided, that its acquisition would imply a greatly accelerated drawing out and training of the powers of even the most gifted being; the advantage is so great that the disadvantage entirely disappears before it. (Whitney 1896:22-23) 7.23 Passive Convention vs. Active Invention. The advantages of a ready-made over a self-invented language include: confused impressions are reduced to order and made the object of a common consciousness and analysis; the talented artisan is presented with well-made tools; its absence would be like the plight of a mathematician deprived of figures and symbols. Thus far we have emphasized the passive receptive work of the mind in dealing with language, because that is, especially at the outset, the bulk of its work... but nothing is to be misconstrued into meaning that the mind is not, in all its work, essentially an active and creative force, or that it gets by instruction a faculty which it did not before possess. (Whitney 1896:30) That linguistics is or ought to be a science, he has no doubt, but he sees no profit in quarreling about the use of the word: Whether in the first place, men be willing to allow to the study the name of a science or not, is a matter of the smallest moment. It has its own character, its own sphere, its own importance of bearing on other departments of knowledge. If there are those whose definition of a science excludes it, let it be so; the point is one on which no student of language need insist. (Whitney 1896:310)
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7.24 Linguistics is not a Physical Science. Unlike Max Mueller, Whitney is certain that linguistics is not a physical science like chemistry or the others: The difference may be now be regarded as pretty conclusively settled: certainly, it is high time that any one who takes the wrong view be read out of the ranks, as one who has the alphabet of the science still to learn. No study into which the acts and circumstances and habits of men enter, not only as an important, but even as the predominant and determining element can possibly be other than an historical or moral science. Not one item of any existing tongue is ever uttered except by the will of the utterer; not one is produced, not one that has been produced or acquired, is changed, except by causes residing in the human will, consisting in human needs and preferences and economics. There is no way of claiming a physical character for the study of such phenomena except through misapprehension of their nature, a perversion of their analogies with the facts of physical science. (Whitney 1896: 311) His view of properly linguistic data is narrower than the one entertained today, just as his idea of its probable applications was wider: The whole process of linguistic research begins in and depends upon etymology, the tracing out of the histories of individual words and elements. From words the investigation rises higher, to classes, to parts of speech, to whole languages. On accuracy in etymological processes, then, depends the success of the whole ... (Whitney 1896: 312-313) 7.25 Languages are not Wholly Autonomous. But this relatively narrow scope is expressed in a sweeping perspective that must have interested de Saussure, who would propose the following norm for synchronic linguistic study, as undoubtedly valid as it is simply impossible to implement, when discussing associative relations of the sign: We have already noted that no fact in any language is completely understood until there has been brought to bear upon it the evidence of every other analogous fact, related or unrelated; and doubtless, to the end, so long as any corner of the earth remains unransacked, some of the views which we hold with confidence will be liable to modification or overthrow. (Whitney 1896:315) 7.26 Comparative Philology is too Narrow. The contemporary name of the discipline Comparative Philology, he thought, was insufficient to capture what he considered definitive of a scientific study of Language: The comparative method is really no more characteristic of the study of language than of other branches of modern inquiry... the name of comparative philology like the earlier comparative anatomy and the later comparative mythology ... is still accurate enough... collecting and sifting its material, in order to determine correspondences and relationships... but it is insufficient as applied to the whole study - the science of language, or linguistic science, or glottology. Comparative philology or linguistic science, we may say, are two sides of the same study;... the latter makes the laws and principles of speech its main subject, and uses the particular facts rather as illustrations. The one is the working phase, the other the regulative and critical and teaching phase of the science.... (Whitney 1896:315) Comparative work on the broadest scope and greatest value has long been done and is still doing; but... its principles are still subjects of great diversity of opinion and of lively
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controversy. It is high time that this state of things, tolerable only in the growing and shaping period of a study, should come to an end, and that, as in other sciences of observation and deduction for example, in chemistry, zoology and geology there should be acknowledged to exist a body, not of facts only, but of truths, so well established that he who rejects them shall have no claim to be considered a man of science. (Whitney 1896:316) But while Germany is the home of comparative philology, the scholars of that country have... distinguished themselves much less in that which we have called the science of language. There is... such discordance... that German science of language cannot be said yet to have an existence... it will hardly be possible to claim that there exists a world's science of language. In the present condition... of linguistic study... and of anthropology... it cannot be that the period of chaos will endure much longer.... (Whitney 1896:318-319) 7.27 De Saussure and the Goals of Linguistics. De Saussure's discussion of this situation is only reported indirectly in the Cours from what his students understood as important among the things he had said. We have mostly an implicit account of what he thought science in general, and the science of linguistics in particular, should be. But just what could change in language involve? 7.28 Languages Change. Changes in the sounds represented by the written forms of Romance and Germanic languages are attested in written documents, and the same situation of change was assumed to be general in IndoEuropean. Meaning-changes can be deduced from written data, as can shifts in sound or meaning which did not parallel each other. Linguistic mechanisms of stabilization or change, could themselves have altered, or relationships among the blend of material and formal elements. Yet the assumption persisted that there was stability in the data of experience to be reported, of human psychology, and of the linguistic mechanisms of various sorts to match them. 7.29 Causes of Change. Even without a consistent view of what language or language-change was, its catalyst or cause was in dispute: to what extent could deliberate efforts of groups or individuals bring about change in language, whether conceived of as a vocabulary, set of sounds, or of grammatical relationships? Could the psychology of individuals or groups so alter that their means of expression no longer mirrored it? Could external conditions like economic, geographic, political, climatic, or cultural shifts be responsible, or internal factors such as shifts of interests or diet bring it about? Could it have been the loss of prestige of some forms of expression, consequences of political and marital alliances among speakers of different languages, immigration and emigration, strife between generations, the outcome of military conquest? What could have motivated individuals or groups to ban certain forms of expressions and elect new ones? What were the relative weights of greater prestige, the relative aggressiveness or docility of cultures, political or cultural influence, the desire to better oneself, to
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advance science or culture, to preserve tribal integrity, to cooperate more easily with foreigners in the processes of change? More pertinently: were there changes that are purely linguistic, independent of, unaffected by, and indifferent to all of those other factors? How could one identify them as being as unique to language as counting is to mathematics, or as Durkheim's social facts to Sociology? It was Whitney's allusion to the need for clarity about linguistic principles, the elemental resources of linguistic material, organization, purpose, and function, that seems to have the clearest resonance with de Saussure's thought at the time. He would conclude that language, viewed linguistically (rather than phonetically, grammatically, or psychologically), is best defined as a pure form, as contrastive, as independent of either its message or medium, and that unless that is the object in focus, linguistic investigations would be misguided. 7.30 Goals in the Cours. In an initial sketch, de Saussure said the goals of linguistics were: (1) to provide the description and history of all the languages it can find, which amounts to giving the history of language families and reconstructing, as far as possible, the mother-languages of each family; (2) to discover the forces at work in a persistent and universal way in all languages, and to abstract the general laws to which one can relate all particular phenomena of that history; (3) to delimit and define itself. (Cours 20) 7.31 Linguistic Autonomy. But Linguistics should be autonomous: it has intimate and varied connections with other disciplines, like ethnography, anthropology, sociology (since `langage is a social fact'), psychology (since `everything is basically psychological in la langue'), physiology, and philology, but linguistics contributes to, rather than depends upon, these studies (Cours 21). So his procedure was to distinguish the various levels at which language is encountered: la parole, the object of sensory, but socialized, experience; then le langage, no longer concretely unique, but concretely typical, and finally, la langue, with the properties of unity, necessity, and persistence: 1° It is a well-defined object among the mixed phenomena of langage. It can be localized in a determinate portion of the circuit (of speech) where an acoustic image is associated with a concept. It is the social part of langage, exterior to the individual, who alone can neither create nor modify it. It only exists in virtue of a kind of agreement among members of the community. On the other hand, the individual must have an apprenticeship to learn the game; the child only assimilates it bit by bit. It is so distinct a thing that a man deprived of the use of speech retains la langue, as long as he understands the vocal sounds he hears. 2° La langue, distinct from la parole, is an object that can be studied separately. We no longer speak dead languages now, but we can easily assimilate their linguistic organization. Not only can the study of la langue do without the other elements of langage, it is only possible if those other parts are not involved.
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3° Although le langage is heterogeneous, la langue delimited in this way is naturally homogeneous: it is a system of signs where there is nothing essential except the union of a sense and an acoustic image, and where the two parts of the sign are equally psychic. 4° La langue, no less than la parole, is an object naturally concrete, and that is a great help to the study. Linguistic signs, although essentially psychic, are not abstractions; the associations ratified by collective consent, whose ensemble constitutes la langue, are realities situated in the brain. Besides, the signs of la langue are therefore as it were tangible; writing can fix them in conventional images, while it would be impossible to photograph acts of la parole in every detail; pronouncing the smallest word represents an infinity of muscular movements extremely difficult to recognize and represent. In la langue, on the contrary, there is nothing but the acoustic image, and that can be translated into a constant visual image. Because if one abstracts from the multitude of movements needed to realize it in la parole, each acoustic image is nothing, as we shall see, but the sum of a limited number of elements or phonemes, susceptible in their turn to be recalled by a corresponding number of signs in writing. It is this possibility of fixing things relevant to la langue that allows a dictionary or grammar to be a faithful representation, la langue being a depository of acoustic images, and writing the tangible form of those images. (Cours, 31-32) 7.32 Abstraction = Conventional Simplification. Abstracting from concrete speech in these three deliberate steps defines what Saussure meant by `a conventional simplification of the data': la parole, and especially le langage, are still the data, but those properties which make them unamenable to what he considered scientific examination are methodologically excluded from consideration. So la langue is a deliberately constructed theoretical object, an ideal as impossible of concrete realization as Geometry's Circle: circles change, but Circle does not 1; utterances change, but la langue does not. But if Circle is indispensable for dealing with circles, with what kind of phenomena does la langue equip us to deal? `English' is an example of a langue: no one can speak it; even its dialects are more appropriately examples of a langue than of langage; what English, its dialects, and idiolects have in common is not so much speech as the fact that they realize Language, la langue. De Saussure's call for `conventional simplification of the data' reminds us that any science is abstract compared to the flux of concrete data, and that sciences differ in the degrees, kinds and justifications of their abstraction. He says that `the point of view creates the object' (Baskin 8, Cours 23), not in its impossible literal interpretation, but in the manner suggested by the example from Geometry. This, of course, raises the questions of relevance discussed earlier: what constitutes evidence, what methods are to be used, and how positions are to be accepted or rejected will be interdependent with one's concept of explanation, relevant to one or several goals. This state of affairs constitutes one understanding of the nature of a scientific hypothesis or theory. De Saussure seemed to think that such a stance was needed to make la parole intelligible as a consequence of the hypothetical la langue, compared to the more statistical le langage: `La langue is le langage minus la parole' (Cours 112). It is meant to simplify the problem, and remove doubts about the scientific claims of historical linguistic work.
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7.33 État de Langue. For this purpose, he requires a concept subordinate to generic la langue, which he calls an état de langue, a fictional, or hypothetical, unchanging and stable state of la langue. His defense of this theoretical construct includes assumptions about empirical linguistic fact. (1) Languages change so slowly that the differences can be ignored: within one's lifetime, shifts in pronunciation and vocabulary change, but since speakers are changing at the same rate, the alterations are often imperceptible. (2) The perspective of historical linguistics ignored that fact. Its analysis was comparable to cutting a tree perpendicularly, and tracing isolated strands from root-origins to branch-endings. It missed the fact that sets of transverse cuts would display separate faces of the trunk, where varying totalities of elements in the perpendicular strands appear as horizontally distinct and mutually defining. Whether the same thing was being pursued in the perpendicular analysis could only be established from the horizontal cuts. So language processes could be viewed as starting from, and arrested at, successive language states; and language states could be examined as contemporaneous systems of signs in a stable, mutually defining equilibrium. Language states are readily compared, while for a scientific study of diachronic process, the description of synchronic states seems indispensable. It is only when we have an equally objective and reliable account of two distinct states that we can formulate a scientific account of how one state changes into another state. 7.34 The Linguistic Sign. The elements of which an état de langue is constituted are linguistic signs. This is a unit Saussure defines through its intrinsic and relational properties: the linguistic sign is as an element constituted of two faces, the signifiant (`signifier') and signifié (`signified'). These two sides, faces, or aspects of the sign are identified as an acoustic image and a concept so intimately associated that it is impossible, or futile, to study one in isolation from the other. Both sides of the linguistic sign are defined in psychic or psychological terms: the signifié, because it is a concept, and the acoustic image as signifiant, since he finds even the most detailed phonetic accounts must be incomplete, while phonic distinctions are readily imaged in writing. This definition places the sign as a unit outside the scope of empirical observation, while the relationships already discussed between phonetic and phonological aspects are the same. 7.35 Saussure and the Stoics. The similarity of these ideas to those of the Stoics are obvious, but so are some of the differences: Signifiant is most like the Stoic se:maino:n Signifier/ Signifying Symbol/ Symbolizing Signifié is most like the Stoic se:mainomenon
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Symbolized/ being symbolized Significate/ being signified In de Saussure's terms, the relationships were illustrated by the following schemes, where sign is for the totality, not just the phonic aspect, signifié is to replace concept, and signifiant replaces acoustic image:
Saussure's signifié seems closer to the way a Stoic lekton has been explained than to the Stoic semainomenon (`thing-signified'), although there is the same sort of ambiguity involved as in interpreting modi significandi. The Modistae might have interpreted semainomenon as a passive mode of signifying thing-as-being-signified or as an active mode of understanding thing-assignified. Problems for both presentations include the fact that concepts are not just passive visual or other types of sensory images, as de Saussure's picture of a tree could suggest. Contemporary, remembered, or imagined images of pies and wheels, as well as Euclid's grasp of Circle should fit the spot where de Saussure employs the tree. Concepts with the same supposition vary in the depth of their signification. Parallels between Stoic and Saussurean terms include: semainon
phone
material
external
acoustic image
phonic contrast
psychic
internal
semainomenon is formally distinct from Stoic lekton; a concept is materially distinct from Saussurean acoustic image semainomenon involves directly the material thing being symbolized and involves indirectly the mental concept. A linguistic sign is the inseparable unity of acoustic image and concept. lekton is phone semantike or psophos semantikos psophos = noise, the product of propheresthai; phone: = sound, the product of legesthai. 7.36 Nature of the Sign. A linguistic sign is ambiguously mental and/or external. As external, both would involve symbolism, not just sound; i.e.
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there are permissible but unexploited phoneme-sequences which are different from impermissible, unpronounceable sounds or noises. Considered this way, the Stoics called a sign lexis, Latins, dictio. As internal, it is human representation of something external, e.g. a child's heavy vs. Newton's grasp of Gravity. As internal, it was immaterial for the Stoics, externally, it was a body, i.e. material; for de Saussure, elements of le langage are located in a physical brain, e.g. speech and writing in Broca's lobe, but ...it is not langage parlé which is natural to man, but the ability to constitute a langue, i.e. a system of distinct signs corresponding to distinct ideas... the linguistic faculty par excellence... it is la langue which makes the unity of langage. (Cours 26-7). 7.37 The `Concrete and Integral Object' of Linguistic Science. Concrete and abstract are relative terms: while Circle is more abstract than a circle, circles are less concrete than wedding rings. One must watch de Saussure's usage in a similar fashion. When he decides that the concrete and integral object of linguistic science is the linguistic sign, he seems to be suggesting that it is concrete because no indispensable properties have been omitted from its definition (although, from an empirical point of view, a sound-image without phonetic constituents is an abstraction). He contrasts two types of signs, simple and complex or compound ones he labeled syntagms. The distinctions were ancient, but he does not go on into further refinements we have seen in medieval work. A simple sign does not consist of sign-parts; a syntagm has sign-parts. Syntagms are illustrated by complex or compounds words. For such reasons, many consider he thereby relegated syntax to lax parole rather than orderly langue. The citations from Whitney stressed contemporary linguists' preoccupation with morphology (which he spoke of as etymology), but de Saussure was clearly not so limited: The interpenetration of morphology, syntax and lexicon is explained by the basically identical nature of synchronic facts. No boundary between them can be drawn in advance. Only the distinction made above between syntagmatic and associative relations suggests a mode of classification which imposes itself, the only one that can be made the basis of a grammatical system.... Not all syntagmatic facts can be classed as syntax, but all the facts of syntax pertain to syntagmatics. (Cours 187-8) 7.38 Lntrinsic and Constituent Sign-Properties. Signification is the indissoluble `association of an acoustic image and a concept' constituting a linguistic sign, a link as intimate as two sides of a piece of paper. Neither side can be altered independently. So neither can be profitably studied in isolation from the other. More importantly for de Saussure's predominantly contrastive or negative procedures in defining linguistic units, he stresses that signification is the sole positive aspect of la langue. Concepts are purely differential (Cours 24); both signifiants and signifiés are purely negative, differential (167-8); what is important is not so much their differences, but the fact that they differ (Cours 43, 153) and in la langue there are no positive terms (Cours 166) except for the relation defined as signification.
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The simple sign is arbitrary. There is no extralinguistic motivation for associating the signifiant with its signifié in simple signs, but there is relative (intralinguistic) motivation in the construction of syntagms. Since this association is arbitrary, there is no external reason that prevents independent alteration of concept, acoustic image, or their intimate relation. So the sign is intrinsically mutable. But this is a diachronic fact. Since the association is arbitrary, it is equally true that nothing external motivates the independent alteration of concept, acoustic image or their relation. So the sign is immutable. But this is a synchronic fact: no society has ever known la langue except as inherited as such from the previous generation. Besides, vocabulary is so huge, grammar so complex, and inertial resistance to change so pervasive, that there is next to no motive for changing language. (Cours 104-8) Since the linguistic sign involves an acoustic image, it has the linear properties of a temporal chain: this property has `incalculable consequences' since every linguistic mechanism depends on it (Cours 103). 7.39 Relational Properties of the Sign. Every sign, simple or syntagm, exists and functions by contrast with other signs which do not occur in an utterance. These can be called relations in absentia, or associative relations, that is, between actually occurrent signs, and other signs which do not, or even which could not, occur. This is a psychological relationship between a given sign, and every other sign which resembles it, or does not resemble it, in form or in meaning. Every sign, simple or syntagm, also exists and functions by contrast with other signs that actually do cooccur with it. These are called relations in praesentia or syntagmatic relations. Psychologically, each sign of an utterance actually conditions, modifies and delimits the others within its syntagmatic unity. Empirically, each occurrent sign demands, excludes, or tolerates others within its syntagmatic expression unit. The Modistae dealt with such phenomena in detail when discussing the extension or restriction of a term's Supposition. De Saussure did not pursue the matter further. 7.40 Linguistic Value. If the Linguistic sign constitutes the elemental composition of la langue, then one would expect that identical sets of signs would constitute identical sets of langue. Having distinguished the diachronic and synchronic aspects of la langue, however, one should be prepared for the fact that the situation mentioned can be viewed in two different ways. This grounds de Saussure's distinction between linguistic identities and linguistic realities. The difference between linguistic identities and realities arises from the central role of linguistic value, and might be illustrated through the economic relationships that word suggests today. The unit of currency in the United States is a dollar. An object can be bought, valued at one dollar. The same object bought today for a dollar, might also have cost a dollar one hundred
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years ago. But since factors like minimum hourly wages and the supply of goods for sale differ in the 1800's and 1900's, there are perspectives from which we can both assert and deny that the same object and same dollar are involved. This contrast is part of what de Saussure means by value: the dollar or the object in 1800 and 1900 can be called an (economic) identity, but different realities in their respective periods. They differ, from the diachronic (`through time') or from the synchronic (`at a given time') points of view. A value-relationship holds between units of one system and those of another (e.g. dollars to goods; paper to new ideas), as well as within systems (e.g. dollars to quarters to cents; modern British pounds to old shillings and pence). Value within a system depends on the number of similar elements involved; value between systems depends on dissimilar pairs of sets of comparable elements. Two utterances of It's like this seem to have the same linguistic units. A generation ago, the function of like would be unambiguous (in parallel distribution with similar to), but in recent nonstandard usage, it could ambiguously represent similar to, or a pause, silence, or a hesitation form like er, punctuated perhaps as It's... like... this. The two instances of like are diachronic identities, but not synchronically linguistic realities. De Saussure's example uses the Latin passum origin of French pas for `step' or `negative' (Il n'a bougé pas un pas `He didn't move a step'). Items of considerably different composition can have the same function, the same value, appear in identical environments. Gold or paper (money) are comparable in that fashion; words, morphological constructions, phrases or clauses within a language, or between languages, can be reckoned equivalent (as having the same or comparable value) in the same way. 7.41 Saussure's Examples of Value. De Saussure used two well-known examples to show what he had in mind. The first was a train identified as the 6:15 GenevaZürich. Any kind of cars would have the same value, as long as the train left (a) at that time, (b) from Geneva, (c) bound for Zürich. The second, more interesting, example is that of chessmen: If a piece of the set is lost, it need not be replaced by another of identical appearance. Anything at all will serve, e.g. a coin, bottle-top or button, as long as it cannot be confounded with another in the chess set. Its value, its function, how it works in the game, what its importance derives from, does not depend on its shape: it is defined by its moves in the game of Chess. While the same is true of linguistic units, the rules of language (but not of Chess) seem to change as the `game' is in progress. 7.42 Signification, Value, and Content. Part of the cover-term `meaning', therefore, involves the value of terms in a system, expressible positively and negatively for linguistic and nonlinguistic examples:
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Page 254 Exchange based on equation of items notably contrastive in composition and function; e.g. paper equated with physical, mental labor per hour; paper equated with physical objects which are not consumable, with no physical use. Nonlinguistic: positive:
negative:
Contrasts among items within their own systems; e.g. dollars vs. cents; pounds vs. shillings vs. pence; beads in wampum; crustacean shells; steel vs. glass mirrors; technical vs liberal instruction; chemo-therapy vs. exorcism; types of Railroad engines/cars; shapes of chessmen. Signification: de facto association of the acoustic image and concept (sense); de facto referential connection (supposition) of concept (signification: sense) and (thing: referent: supposit: event: situation) linguistic.
Linguistic: positive: negative:
Value: what (reference) or how (sense, modality) a sign does not signify.
Retaining the same lexical root, contrasts can be seen between what a sentence does, and what it does not communicate, and how it does it. E.g. a sentence like `That fellow really puts bad stuff across like good music' abbreviated by using modified proforms like: What:
Thatsinger
referent:
AGENT
singsunsingable
songs
ACT PROPERTY OBJECT
singingly. MANNER
How root sense:
Ø[ one who does X
'X' unfit for to X being Xed
]
word sense:
sg, far
product of suitably for X-ing X-ing
sense in construction:
DET.AGENT
Not what
This painter sketched artistic portraits facilely.
Not how
The facility of the artist's portraits seemed sketchy. The apparent sketchiness of portraits by the facile artist. The seeming facile sketchiness in the artist's portraits.
ACT ATTRIBUTE OBJECT
MANNER
The value of an expression can be estimated (arrived at, appreciated) from the number and type of expressions with which it contrasts, and the content of an expression is the sum of what it does and does not signify.
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A linguistic identity is a provable content-expression association common to two états de langue: a linguistic reality is only a content-expression association within a given état de langue; `Identity' is therefore diachronic, `reality' synchronic. 7.43 La Langue is Pure Form. La langue, as de Saussure explains it, is devoid both of phonetic and semantic `substance': it can dispense with phonetic substance, because la langue is found in speech, writing or any other representation; it has no intrinsic need for semantic substance, because la langue, as a formal system is indifferent to, or antecedent to, or independent of, particular examples of it in a particular language, dialect, sentence or utterance. What Linguistics studies is a kind of no man's land ...where the elements of the two orders combine; that combination produces a form, not a substance. (Cours 157: italics in text) His examples (distinguishing signification from value) were the 6:15 train from Geneva to Zürich, which is not formally identified by its material composition (any old engine and set of cars will do as long as it keeps to that start, destination and schedule) and that of the chessmen, which are not formally identified by means of their shapes, but through lawful moves within game rules: any old shape will do. Less concrete, but possibly more intelligible, examples of the formal nature of la langue would have been the traditional examples of relatives: Hispanus quoted Aristotle's definition of the category `Relation' as `that whose existence is to be whollyto-another'. To understand `double' we do not have to know what has been doubled, and to ask such a question about language, de Saussure suggests, is to misunderstand the nature of la langue: it is not a linguistic question as he understands it, but more properly one about parole. 7.44 Saussure's Substance. De Saussure's untraditional use of the expression substance here for material is now commonly imitated. That is misleading, and discards a hard-won distinction: the oppositions between potential and actual underly the contrast of substance vs. accident, as well as between matter and form. Following de Saussure's usage, linguists now discuss formal vs. substantive universals: formal universals are those of pattern, e.g. endocentric vs. exocentric; relationships like demand, exclude, tolerate, etc., while substantive universals are those of more concrete examples (e.g. consonant vs. vowel, noun vs. verb). Within de Saussure's concept of la langue there is clear provision for formal universals, but it certainly excludes substantive ones in the more recent, less accurate, way of discussing them. 7.45 Pure Form. Some of de Saussure's reasons for considering la langue as a pure form include:
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Psychologically, abstracting from its expression in words, our thought is only an amorphous and indistinct mass. Philosophers and linguistics are still agreed in recognizing that, without the help of signs, we would be incapable of distinguishing two ideas in a clear and constant fashion. Taken by itself, thought is like a nebula where nothing is necessarily delimited. There are no pre-established ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of la langue... Phonic substance is no more fixed or rigid... (Cours 156) 7.46 La Langue's Sole Positive Factor. `Signification is the sole positive fact about a langue': but there is nothing that a priori excludes identity of signification across languages, as Anthropologists generally assume in their investigations, and as the requirements of pronominal systems would suggest. Pronouns distinguish speaker, listener, and topic; and since it would seem that the very nature of linguistic communication demands identification and distinction of each, identity of signification seems inevitable. But there is ample evidence to show that there are considerable differences in the content of such systems, as the singular-dual-plural, inclusive/exclusive categories of the Hawaiian pronouns show. Other obligatory distinctions involve dignity, existence, etc., so the number of oppositions (value) differentiates otherwise identical signification (reference) resulting in different content. For any linguistic expression: Its content is not truly determined except by the competition of what exists outside of it. Forming part of a system, it is endowed, not only with a signification, but also, and especially, with a value, and that is quite a different thing. (Cours 160) 7.47 Saussure's Conclusions. A summary of his important points comes at the end of the chapter on linguistic value: A unit and a grammatical fact would not amount to the same thing if linguistic signs were constituted by something other than differences. But la langue being what it is, from no matter what angle we approach it, nothing simple is found there; always and everywhere, just this same complex equilibrium of terms that condition each other reciprocally. In other words, la langue is a form and not a substance. It is impossible to take this truth too seriously, since every terminological error, each incorrect fashion of designating things in la langue come from that spontaneous assumption, that linguistic phenomena are substantive. The final words with which the editors chose to conclude de Saussure's book are just as instructive: From the explorations which we have just made into the no man's land of our science, a wholly negative lesson emerges, but one that is all the more important for agreeing with the fundamental idea of this course: Linguistics has, as its unique and true object, la langue, considered in itself and for itself. (Cours 317, italics in text) Note 1. The Greeks disagreed about the ultimately real. Some found only static permanence (like langue), others only dynamic, concrete things (like parole) to be real. Aristotle distinguished real and actual: concrete things unite equally real but opposed co-principles (not things) - matter and
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form. Both can be real without being actualized (like talents or `what I should have told him'). Change is unintelligible for Aristotle unless some relevant sames remain. These can be discussed in terms of matter, form, and their causes (especially final cause, e.g. the emic rather than the etic aim of change). See Zeller, 1960. Reading de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1955 (1915). Cours de linguistique générale. Paris. Payot. 331 pp. . 1959. Course in General Linguistics. (trans. Wade Baskin.) New York. McGraw-Hill. 240 pp. [Read with the French to hand: Baskin's language translates all three distinctions central to de Saussure's thought.] Bierstedt, Robert. 1966. Émile Durkheim. Dell. New York. 255 pp. Engler, R., ed. 1967ff. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique Générale. Weisbaden. Harrosowitz. [Collects various sourees for an integrated view.] Supplementary Reading Aarsleff, Hans. 1982. From Locke to Saussure. Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History. Minneapolis. U. of Minnesota Press. 422 pp. Coseriu, Eugenio. 1958. Sincronia, diacronia e historia: El problema del cambio linguistico. Montevideo. Universidad. 164 pp. . 1962. Teoria del lenguaje y linguistica general: Cinco estudios. Madrid. Gredos. pp. 323.. L'Arbitraire du signe: Zur Spätgeschichte eines aristotelischen Begriffes. In: Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 1967.204.81112. Davis, Philip W. 1973. Modern Theories of Language. Englewood Cliffs. Prentice-Hall. pp. 404 [Ch. II (14-38) on de Saussure.] De Mauro, Tullio. 1967. Corso di linguistica generale (de F. de S.) Laterza, Bari. xxvii+487 pp. [extensive bibliog.] Godel, Robert. 1957. Les Sources Manuscrites du Cours de Linguistique Générale de F. de Saussure. Paris. Minard. 283 pp. [Collected notes from which the book was assembled, with critique.] . Nouveaux documents saussuriens: les cahiers E. Constantin. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 1958-59. vol 16.23-32. . 1960. Inventaire des manuscrits de F. de S. remis a la Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Genève. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure. vol. 17.5-11. . 1961. L'école saussurienne de Genève. In: Christine Mohrmann, Alf Sommerfelt & Joshua Whatmough, eds. Trends in European and American Linguistics 1930-1960. Utrecht. Spectrum. pp. 294-99. . 1966. F. de Saussure's theory of language. In Sebeok, ed. Current Trends in Linguistics III. The Hague. Mouton. pp. 479-93. Greimas, A.J. 1956. L'actualité du saussurisme. In: Le Francais Moderne. vol. 24.191-203. Hall, Edward T. 1959. The Silent Language. Greenwich. Fawcett. . 1966. The Hidden Dimension. Garden City. Doubleday. Harris, Roy. 1983. Language and Speech. In: Harris, Roy, ed. 1983. Approaches to Language. Oxford. Pergamon Press. pp. 115. [on the concept of le langage.] Koerner, E.F.K. 1973. Ferdinand de Saussure. Vieweg. Braunschweig. 428 pp. LeRoy, Maurice. 1964. Les Grands Courants de la Linguistique Moderne. Presses Universitaires de France. [Later edition in print: long section on de Saussure.] McCawley, James D. 1973. William Dwight Whitney as a Syntactician. In: Grammar and Meaning. Papers on Syntactic and Semantic Topics. pp. 320-32. Tokyo. Taishukan. 388 pp. Bibilog. 369-376. Mounin, Georges. 1968. Ferdinand de Saussure où le structuraliste sans le savoir. Paris. Seghers. 191 pp. Mueller, Max. 1963 (1861). The Science of Language. London. Longmans, Green and Co.
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Sampson, Geoffrey. 1980. Schools of Linguistics. Stanford University Press. 283 pp. Bibliog. 259-273. [Ch. 2: Saussure, pp. 3456; review: Dinneen, General Linguistics 24.2.131-47.] Silverstein, Michael. 1971. Whitney on Language. Cambridge. MIT. Starobinski, Jean. 1971. Les mots sous les mots. Les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure. Paris. Gallimard. 167 pp. Wells, Rulon. 1947. De Saussure's System of Linguistics. In: Word.3.1-31. Reprinted in: Joos, ed. 1958. Readings in Linguistics. Washington, D.C. American Council of Learned Societies. Whitney, William Dwight. (1896)(1875). The Life and Growth of Language. New York. Appleton; and 1979 (1875). New York. Dover. With an Introduction by Charles Hockett. . 1877. Essentials of English Grammar. Boston. Ginn. . 1977. Sanskrit Grammar. Fifth edition, Leipzig 1924 (1879). Reprint Delhi. Motilal Banarsidass. 551 pp. Indices 521-551. Zeller, Eduard. 1960 (1931). Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy. 349 pp. New York. Meridian.
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8 Edward Sapir 8.00 New explanations are exciting. By the end of the 19th Century, 'Traditional Grammar' compared to current work on language as an outmoded, subjective `explanation' external to linguistic signs, while phonetic notation promised an objective description, `explained' by their internal linguistic history. Traditional Grammar had only loosely accounted for sign-shapes involved in basic logico-semantic distinctions. Creative authors freely manipulated signs for nonliteral language uses, and codification of their techniques in metaphors, tropes, and figures of speech had long been the subject-matter of Poetry and Rhetoric. Historical Linguistics added an intralinguistic `explanation' of those same signs, based on phonetic properties and the modifications independent of semantic or logical systems. Not that these `explanations' contradicted each other: while they differed, they gave complementary answers to different questions. Their goals were not comparable, and what counted as evidence in one approach was just other than the norms in the other. But as long as attention focused on languages developed from an identical PIE source, some implications of the traditional logical basis remained without significant challenge. The assumption that `civilized' IE languages represented an ideal to which others could be compared (unfavorably) relied on disjointed and subjective glosses, not an objective descriptive method applicable to any language at all. But objectivity is one of the first requirements for Science. 8.01 Science Explains and Predicts. We have been assuming that Science may be about causes not a favorite word in modern Science and that natural science deals with nonhuman causes, while if there is such a thing as social science, it ought to include human causes as well. Science explains by relating pre conditions, ambient conditions and consequent conditions which allow causes to operate. It should predict what must, cannot, or may occur on that basis, if its hypotheses are correct. To the extent that Linguistics investigates causes in language, General Linguistics can concern the nature or possibility of a science of language. Its peculiar problems include how natural systems are reflected in non-natural, arbitrary and conventional systems. Linguistic causes have been taken to include both purely intralinguistic factors (for autonomy) and extralinguistic ones (for relevance). From this point on, we will see in more detail that since linguistic theories vary in scope, identical vocabulary can obscure the fact that they are not all studying the same thing. Theorists have different purposes,
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find others' facts irrelevant, and disagree about what is relevant. For example, Descriptive Linguistics concentrated mainly on what we have called intralinguistic causes and relations generalized from empirical data of actual speakers; extralinguistic causes, e.g. factors proposed in psychological theories, or conditions under which speakers use language, were avoided. 8.02 `Language' for Linguists. Linguists have concentrated most on four main aspects of language as the precise object of their study. Some of these are recognized in de Saussure's distinctions among parole, langage and langue. Language can be studied from the viewpoint of: (1) The ideal speaker-hearer. An ideal is not a person, but an IT, since it is impervious to human distraction and whim. It is grammar considered as a resource neutral to speaker/hearer, and might be called language itself (LI), a set of options speakers use and hearers understand in more than a single fashion. What it `does mean' is at least what it 'has meant'. (2) The actual speaker. Unless joking or trying to be kind or ironic, etc., actual speakers usually have a single message in mind for which several conventional options are available within language itself. So speakers say what they think LI demands, excludes, or tolerates if they are to be understood. (3) The actual hearer. Understanding depends on how language skills and experience match. Situations for which we are not prepared, or abrupt and elliptical expressions lend themselves to ambiguity. As hearers, we guess what options in LI the speaker is aware of, why a particular one was chosen, then make the most likely interpretation. No speaker or hearer is aware of all the options, nor is a linguist, but possibly a linguistic theory should account for them. (4) The actual speaker/hearer. This is usually what empirical linguists claim to be talking about, but in practice, they alternate between (2) and (3). Linguists are free to determine the extent to which intra- and extralinguistic considerations are relevant to the kind of work that interests them. But Linguistics involves language about language. To establish a metalanguage in which authors can write clearly, and readers can interpret unambiguously, reintroduces the same considerations about defining the object of Linguistics just outlined. These ideas will be useful for coming to independent conclusions about linguists' work. Comparing the thought of Boas and that of a pupil of Edward Sapir's caliber is particularly instructive. Boas was trained first in empirical disciplines, then self-taught in linguistics as a corrective to empirical fancies. His Amerindian experience was unique. Sapir's earlier formation was principally in Germanic Philology, studied under professionals in that field. Comparing Boas and Sapir shows why different conceptions of what Linguistics is, and what different linguists do, can be so fascinating.
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8.03 Franz Boas (1856-1942). Boas' early interests and education included little about language. His University studies were in Mathematics, Physics, and Geography. He had a Doctorate in Medicine, and did his Ph.D. in Physics in Berlin. When his mentor Theobold Fischer shifted to Geography, Boas followed. Each of these disciplines reflected or developed his concern for consistency, respect for facts, and a wariness of subjectivity. The atmosphere during Boas' student days in Bonn was predominantly empiricist, positivistic, and scientific. His letters home reported his interest in the thought of Kant, Hegel, and Goethe, and in the unity of science as a Weltanschauung a 'philosophy' or a 'way of looking at the world'. The lectures he attended in Geography proposed the idea of culture influenced by topographic determinism and laws of migration. Although Steinthal was active at Bonn during his student days, Boas' letters never mention him. He approached the then new ideas about evolution rather cautiously, and is quoted as having later remarked to one of his graduate students: There are two kinds of people: those who have to have general conceptions into which to fit the facts; those who find the facts sufficient. I belong to the latter category. (Goldschmidt 1959:22) Whether this was just a clever remark, or indicative of his whole cast of thought is not certain. What seems to have been catalytic for him was a geographical expedition to Baffinland. Fischer took him along as docent in Geography, but Boas' phonetic record of his Eskimo host's language convinced him of the value of ethnography. The experience convinced him that topography had little to do with culture: if there were to be a treatment of human phenomena on a scientific basis, he decided, it would be superficial and misleading without a knowledge of the language and literature involved. In 1889 he went to Clark University in Worcester Massachusetts, and in 1896, to New York as curator at the American Museum of Natural History and lecturer in Anthropology at Columbia University. He was active as Professor there for forty years (1899 until 1939). His publications include grammars, native text collections, works on myth, ritual and language, and general anthropology. Their overall thrust was to produce an objective, materialistic, value-free treatment of culture, which appears in them as a record of what is found persistently in human behavior, including language as a semiautonomous factor. His critics thought he was lacking in human empathy, a concern for individuals and their style, how it felt to be a participant in the situations he described. Boas focused more on perceived rules than on how they functioned, or on who, as persons, obeyed them. He seemed to be more interested in a standardized practice than individual performance (Goldschmidt 1959.3). Kroeber and Goldschmidt (1942.vii), but not Kluckhohn and Prufer (13), consider that he did not entertain an idea of culture as mutually presupposing behavior, a channel and formative of culture.
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8.04 Boas' Linguistic Theory. One of Boas' most influential works was his compact Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911; reprint 1964). It outlined the technique of the illustrative sketches by workers who had to conform to his requirements for a linguistic description. In the Handbook, many of the basic ideas he had formed about language and how to describe it are presented in a style easily grasped by the ordinary reader. For him, what constitutes language (aside from gesture and music) is `communication by means of groups of sounds produced by the articulatory organs the larynx, oral cavity, the tongue, lips and nose'. As the Handbook's studies illustrate, the number of sounds humans can make is indefinitely large. But each language employs only a limited number of them. Travellers' anecdotes about `primitive' inability to make distinct sounds are myths that tell us more about observers' phonetic naiveté than about phonetic facts. We can even detect the nationality of analysts from the way they represent sounds, since native distinctions are the first norm to which foreign sounds are compared. But while speech can be objectively described in phonetic symbols like the (now rather elementary) chart he provided, what Boas meant by phonetic units are quite different: they are unconscious, and exist only as parts of complexes conveying a definite meaning. Without using those terms, he distinguished between phonetics and phonology. 8.05 Boas' Consonant Chart (1964:17)
8.06 Difference and Class. An important parallel between the resources of phonation and those of experience comes to light in what he has to say about Grammar. Since possible phonetic groups are unlimited in number, but actual ones always countable, he concludes that the number of communicable ideas is
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restricted by the number of possible signs for them. But experience is infinitely variable: so this phonetic limitation preclassifies which aspects of experience can, and which must be communicated in a particular language. Both kinds of categorization coincide as well with what he found to be a fundamental trait of thought: a contrast between a basic same and its modification. But while base-and-modification coincide with definable ranges of articulatory habit, why one thing is classified as basic and another thing as modification varies widely from language to language: It is important at this point to emphasize the fact that the group of ideas expressed by specific phonetic groups show material differences in different language and do not conform by any means to the same principles of classification. To take again the example of English, we find that the idea of water is expressed in a great variety of forms: one term serves to express water as a liquid; another one, water in the form of a large expanse (lake); others, water as running in a large body or a small body (river and brook); still others express water in the form of rain, dew, wave and foam. It is perfectly conceivable that this variety of ideas, each of which is expressed by a single term in English, might be expressed in other languages by derivations from the same form. . . In Dakota, the terms naxta'ka (`to kick'), yaxta'ka (`to bite'), ic'a'xtaka (`to be near to'), boxta'ka (`to pound') are all derived from the common element xtaka (`to grip') which holds them together, while we use distinct words to express the various ideas. (Boas 1964:20) What is classified as basically the same, phonetically or grammatically, corresponds to interests inherited by the speakers of a given language. Each language is arbitrary in its classification (or denial of identity) from the point of view of another language, but a language's form is detected in the processes of modification it uses. These modification-processes are limited, but while their expression is obligatory, both the nature and necessity of their contrasts in meaning are largely unconscious. It was suggested above that a traditional definition of intelligence equates it with perception of structure or form; Boas has a similar idea about what makes a language intelligible: If each idea could be expressed by a single phonetic group, languages without form would be possible. But since ideas must be expressed by being reduced to a number of related ideas, the kinds of relations become important elements in articulate speech, and it follows that languages must contain formal elements, and that their number must be the greater, the fewer the elementary phonetic groups that define special ideas. In a language which commands a very large, fixed vocabulary, the number of formal elements may become quite small. (Boas 1964:19-20) 8.07 Analytic Consequences. Traditional grammatical accounts of IE languages make extensive use of words in paradigms, e.g. noun declensions and verb conjugations. That approach takes for granted that words are there to be discovered in languages, not invented in the course of describing them. But Boas finds word secondary, a product of the grammarian's analysis of a more readily observable phenomenon, the sentence. This he defines as `a group of articulate sounds which convey a complete idea', while a word is `a
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phonetic group which, owing to its permanence of form, clearness of significance, and phonetic independence, is readily separated from the whole sentence'. (Boas 1964:22) He observed that some sounds or phonetic groups occur only in the company of others, or alone, or both. Boas used traditional terms to distinguish material content and formal modification within a sentence. The Ancients distinguished the materially signified, e.g. circle from what is formally consignified (e.g. time by the affix of the cognate verb circl-ed). Boas considered these could be more objectively accounted for as a function of the objective ratio of free to bound forms in a particular language. Such an IE distinction neatly separates lexical from grammatical meanings for us, but he thought all `etymological processes and word compositions must be considered as parts of the grammar', casting doubt on the adequacy of the concepts of stem vs. affix, when the frequency of the types to be distinguished approaches equality. (Boas 1964:26 ff) Similarly, a Word-and-Paradigm model of Grammatical Description takes for granted that subcategories in IE patterns are universal, e.g., noun stem + affix for gender, number, case; verb stem + affixes for tense, person, mood, voice; personal pronouns and number; demonstratives with near/far subcategories. Boas provided examples from Amerindian which refute that assumption. 8.08 Meanings Signalled. Anticipating de Saussure's distinctions of signification, value, and resultant content signalled by paradigmatic (in the Cours, `associative') and syntagmatic contrasts, Boas analyses the simple sentence The man is sick. What Saussure could call its content in various languages depends on the contrasts obligatory in each. Eskimo is satisfied with `single man sick', while in English, the Content is more adequately expressed as the single definite man at the present time is sick. That is due to the obligatory choice of ± definite in English Articles, ± singular nouns, and ± past verbs. (Boas 1964.32 ff) Each word in The man is sick, as we saw in de Saussure's approach, functions within an associative as well as a syntagmatic network. How they interlock establishes its contrastive value, but Boas accounts only for the most obvious ones. The contrasts directly with Ø [zero] and a, but possessives and demonstratives are also in parallel distribution with the, most animate nouns with man, modalities as well as tenses of to be with is, and any appropriate adjectival with sick. Boas' statements of value are accurate, but incomplete. In other languages, a comparable English gloss of the content shows what is absent from the array Boas proposed for The man is sick: [(1) Man, (2) single, (3) definite, (4) sick, (5) at present time], or what must be added to it. Because Chinese lacks obligatory tense and number categories, glossing the Chinese content simply as Man sick is as complete in that language as it is unsatisfactory for English speakers with the peculiar demands their grammar makes. Glossing Eskimo as Single man sick says that this language must
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signal ± singular, but neither ± definite nor ± past. Kwakiutl might say That invisible man lies sick on his back on the floor of the absent house (since its obligatory contrasts involve: ± near; ± him; ± visible, but not ± definite, ± singular or ± past), while in Ponca The moving single man is sick, is complete, since its obligatory contrasts include ± static for nouns. 8.09 Meanings Understood. Boas finds that in each language only a part of the complete concept that we have in mind is expressed, and that each language has a peculiar tendency to select this or that aspect of the mental image which is conveyed by an expression of the thought (Boas 1964:34). Two analogies may help: (1) in Painting by the Numbers, identical scenes are analyzed into many details and each is assigned a number. Painters could be given any number of colors, and any number of different rules for applying them, none of which overlap. The resultant paintings are yet are not of the same scene. In de Saussure's terms, their significations can coincide, but since the values differ, the resultant content is not identical. (2) In photography, assuming the eye can discriminate details in nature on a contrastive brightness scale from 1 to 400, a transparency is rated as reproducing that 1/400 scale as 1/200 by transmitted light, while prints viewed by reflected light allow only a 1/25 contrast range. Additional differences arise when black and white films insensitive to some colors and various kinds of color film are used. All the photographs may be of the same thing (like a red-white-blue flag) but each necessarily differs from the other in a precisely predictable fashion. Boas' statements are consistent if we presuppose that what he means by a mental image is sensory (especially visual), and that such images are uniformly imposed on us independent of language or culture. This is one reading assignable to the passage from the De Interpretatione of Aristotle we dealt with in Chapter 4. If the content involved is not directly sensory, a metaphoric or analogical interpretation is required. 8.10 Edward Sapir (1884-1939). Sapir's early interest in language led to graduate studies in Germanic Philology. What awoke his appreciation of the advantages of a linguistic approach to language study was his contact with Boas, then teaching at Columbia University, where he had been appointed Lecturer in Anthropology in 1896. For many universals Sapir's philological studies had prepared him to expect, Boas had an Amerindian counterexample. Convinced of the utility of the new methods Boas was pioneering, Sapir studied and described Takelma under his direction. His background was unlike Boas' formation in the physical sciences. While he readily accepted the need for a formal basis for language study, Sapir was less doggedly empirical. Boas had concentrated on external phenomena; Sapir developed wideranging cultural and artistic interests. He published poetry, composed music, and wrote critical literary reviews. The differences show in the scholarly influence of the two men. Sapir published only one book in his lifetime, Language (his 555 page description of
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Southern Paiute appeared posthumously). Language was intended to explain the linguist's perspective to an attentive general reader. He also published specialized analyses involving not only Amerindian languages, but Chinese, African, and the classical languages as well, besides articles on language, culture and personality. The latter articles proposed conclusions about symbolic behavior, derived from his linguistic study of languages, as relevant to contemporary social and cultural issues. Where Boas may have alienated coworkers, Sapir made a uniformly positive impression on the linguists who were his students. Their accounts of his humane concern for the importance of persons, whether native informants or students, contrast with Boas' reputed preference for the scientific importance of data. Sapir's students (Spier 1944) found his linguistic work resulted in a nondogmatic spirit, with a meticulous concern for evidence and the wider conclusions it justified. He impressed upon his students the need for careful observation of linguistic form, and of psychological as well as empirical facts. His example encouraged them to draw independent consequences from this nuanced approach to linguistic data. 8.11 Sapir's Definition of Language. Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols. As a first assessment, one might agree that on present evidence, only humans communicate about a nonempirical world as Sapir's use of the word ideas suggests. An initial criticism might be to question whether using language without some of the qualifications suggested above is informative (is language to be taken as one of the objects (1), (2), (3), (4) sketched above? Of course, definitions in a popular work are meant to orient general readers, not to placate nitpicking experts. The definition did not arise in a controversial setting, nor was it meant to answer many questions not formulated in 1921. More specifically, in the definition: Purely human does not restrict communication as such to humans, only some properties of language mentioned later. Hockett (1957) dealt with the continuum to which language can refer. Two factors support assumptions about uniqueness, interaction and cultural transmission: birds mimicking speech react to, rather than interact with, humans; talking birds do not innovate like human learners, nor acquire speech from other birds, nor interact with them specifically through speech. But Chimpanzees and Gorillas that have learned sign language are reported as commonly initiating contact, occasionally innovating signs, and often producing responses not obviously due to previous human contact. It remains to be seen whether their offspring learn sign language. But if one of a bird-species that talks, or an anthropoid that signs, fails to learn language from its parents, it will not be thought pathological. Human
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failure to acquire language is considered a positive privation. (cf. Linden 1976, Patterson 1978, Premack 1971, Rumbaugh 1977) Non-instinctive stresses the social setting normal for the acquisition of language. There are relatively few well-described cases of otherwise normal humans failing to do so. (cf. Lane 1976, Curtis 1977) Method of communicating does not exclude means other than speech. To survive at all, any organism must `communicate' ecologically, and studies of Sociobiology indicates how extensive such communication can be. Ideas as the content of linguistic communication seems a peculiarly human property of language as Sapir defined it. Subjective ideas like ethical values, scientific abstractions, artistic hypotheses, educational plans, unrealized or actual alternatives, are largely independent of, or resistant to, objective limitation. Emotions are not specifically human, but the `if only. . .' aspects of desires shares the nonempirical properties of longing or regret in fictions about the present, past, and future, particularly those with an ethical dimension, whether self-experienced or attributed to others. By means of a system appeals to traditional conceptions, but alludes to intrasystemic aspects more explicitly developed in Sapir's other work. Of voluntarily produced symbols distinguishes linguistic signs from natural reactions. What is voluntary can be manipulated or withheld: humans can invent, conceal, exaggerate, disparage, lie or just joke about their own pleasure, pain, and indifference, and flatter others with respect to them. There are no reliable reports of other animals doing this. Sapir perhaps uses symbols instead of signs to suggest his own stress on their arbitrary and quasi-independent status as social substitutes for other bodily actions. 8.12 Critique of Sapir's Definition. One could inquire whether this definition could be falsified empirically. What proves chimps and gorillas lack symbolic capacity rather than a supportive social environment? If some learn language, their accomplishment demonstrates it is not beyond the capacity of their species. But if performance proves capacity, non-performance need not entail incapacity, as the cases of Helen Keller, the Wild Boy of Aveyron (Lane 1976), acquisition of Ameslan by Chimpanzees (Linden 1976), and Koko the Gorilla (Patterson 1979) show in various ways. Sapir's definition does not take up problems of individual talent vs. genetic structure: minima for brain size and its proportion to the rest of an animal; cortical complexity and the role of lateral specialization; differences between voluntary and involuntary musculature, the complexity of nervous systems, the presence or absence of vocal cords, articulators, and sinuses. One could argue that the Aveyron Wild Boy's imperfect acquisition of language was due more to instructional method than his lack of capacity; or
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that Helen Keller would have succeeded anyway with a less stubborn instructor than Ann Sullivan, or sooner with someone more skilled. Constructive criticism is premature when limited to this preliminary definition. Given Sapir's popular aims and space limitations, the absence of distinctions is justified. How this definition coheres with the rest of his book is more relevant, so some of its individual chapters are worthy of attention. 8.13 The Elements of Speech. In Chapter 2 of Language, Sapir defines speech as The auditory system of speech-symbolism, the flow of spoken words (1921.24). These can be analyzed into individual sounds, but the simplest element of speech is not a simple structure, but the resultant of a series of independent, yet closely correlated, adjustments in the organs of speech; few are independently significant elements: e.g. Fr. a (`has') or à (`to'). Echoing Boas, he says that the true, significant elements of language are generally sequences of sound that are either words, significant parts of words, or word groupings. . . the outward sign of a specific idea, whether of a single concept or image or of a number of such. . . connected into a whole. (25) As for the word, It is impossible to define the word from a functional standpoint. . . a word may be anything from the expression of a single concept to. . . a complete thought. . . identical with the sentence. . . it is a psychological reality' (32-3), `one of the smallest, completely satisfying bits of isolated `meaning' into which the sentence resolves itself. It cannot be cut into without disturbance of the meaning. . . (34) His treatment of the sentence is traditional in perspective and terminology: like the word, it has a psychological as well as a merely logical or abstracted existence. . . the linguistic expression of a proposition. It combines a subject of discourse with a statement in regard to this subject. (35) Underlying the finished sentence is a living sentence type, of fixed formal characteristics. . . freely overlaid by. . . additional matter. . . but. . . as rigidly `given' by tradition as are the radical and grammatical elements abstracted from the finished word. (37) What, then, is grammar? The habitual association of radical elements, grammatical elements, words, and sentences with concepts or groups of concepts related into wholes is the fact itself of language. . . there is in all languages a certain degree of randomness. . . all grammars leak. (37-38) 8.14 Cognitive vs. Affective. In his definition of Language, Sapir stresses cognition peculiar to humans over affectivity common to other animals: On the whole, it must be admitted that ideation reigns supreme in language, that volition and emotion come in as distinctly secondary factors. . . man shares with the lower animals. . . they cannot be considered as forming part of the essential cultural conception of language, however much they may be inseparable from its actual life. (38-39) 8.15 Autonomy of Language Design. There is one aspect of language traditional studies have failed to make clear. That is its autonomous structure,
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antecedent to, and independent of, the functions to which the whole or its parts can be put. Abstracting from the traditional interest in the qualities language and its parts communicate, Sapir focuses on an aspect the Aristotelian tradition would rank as pertaining to quantity of linguistic substance. We can see this in the Algebraic Notation Sapir borrows from Schleicher for sings, singer, singing which combine a fundamental concept, a concept of subject matter (sing) and a further concept of more abstract order: sing
=A
sings, singer, singing
= A + b.
The notation is not just for suffixation. It is applicable as well to prefixes (unsingable), infixes (Latin present vinco vs. perfect vici), vowel change (sing vs. song), consonant change (dead vs. death), accent change (sing vs. sing!), and abbreviation (`cause vs. because), so that the initial formula has to be modified into something like A + (b). 8.16 Importance of Radicals. But radicals in other languages do not coincide with words as often as they do in English. The radical in Latin hort + us (`garden') shows that hortus requires a further modification of the formula to (A) + (b): Here, capital letters represent radicals and lower case indicates affixal or subordinate members; parentheses indicate bound status and their absence allows the possibility of occurring alone, as his examples from different languages show (29): Free radical:
A
(Nootka hamot `bone')
Bound radical:
(A) + (b) (Latin hortus `garden')
Radical & Ø suffix:
A + (Ø)
(sing, bone)
Radical & affix:
A + (b)
(sings, death, sang, stop!)
Two radicals
A+B
(fire-engine)
or perhaps
A+b
(fire-engine, beautiful)
Using Ø for a zero-affix to suggest an implicit or absent sign(s), e.g. singular in bone vs. bones, can lead to considerable complexities: (Ø) can be multiple. Latin cor (`heart') is (1) singular, (2) neuter, (3) nominative or accusative case. Its genitive singular and other forms show the radical as cord, e.g. plural nominative or accusative cord + a. So distinguish: the complete grammatical formula of cor as A + (Ø) + (Ø) + (Ø), its external, phonetic formula (A)-, where (A) stands for cord- and the minus sign stands for loss of material (30). Sapir knew, but did not point out, that there is a difference between the loss and absence of material, e.g. absence of an overt signal manifested in comparable forms like cor vs. amicus, where -us signals (1) singular, (2) masculine, and (3) nominative only. This distinguishes a zero morpheme from a zero allomorph: if man is taken as base, the representation of un-gentle-
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Page 270 man-li-ness in terms of absence of material could be (Ø) + (Ø) + A + (Ø) + (Ø), while the plural of sheep or the past of cut [both A + (Ø)] can be said to show loss, not just absence, of material, compared to heaps and rutted [both A + (b) in Sapir's notation]. 8.17 Form and Meaning Essentials. Boas had mentioned that deciding about what constitutes a stem (or root, or radical, or base different formal expressions for similar material elements) and what distinguishes it from an affix can be influenced by our IE experience. IE languages have a marked imbalance between free and bound forms, paralleling our distinction of lexicon and grammar. In a language-neutral approach, the free or bound status of forms is more objectively established than their semantic correlates. Sapir gives a Paiute example he says is of unusual length even for its own language, but no psychological monster (cf. English antidisestablishmentarian). We need much optionally expressible information to use a compound noun like sheep-shearer appropriately. A comparable Paiute word must express many kinds of things left unsaid in English. The glosses he gives of this single Paiute word wiitpkuchumpunkurüganiyugwivantüm(ü) show that (30-32): `they who are going to sit and cut up with a knife a black cow (or bull)' wii - to -
kuchum -
punku - rügani -
yugwi - va
(F) + (E)
+C
+d
+A
+B
+ (g) + (h)
pet
cut up
sit
fut.
knife black buffalo
- ntü
part.
- m(ü) + (i)+ (o) an.pl. with cow
[instr][-------- object ----------- ] [ -------- verb -------- ]
[subj]
[ Verbal base (like sing- in singing) ]
[nominalizers]
[time]
A subject-noun for which the gloss buffalo-butchers is 'valid' but inadequate. 8.18 Form in Language: Grammatical Processes. In Chapters V and VI, Sapir uses form analogically, not univocally. The expression must be interpreted and systematically discounted according to its contexts. There are two principal settings: (1) in a contrast of matter vs. form, applicable to senses as well as their referents: matter or material is associated with the (main) meaning of radicals, and these in turn with concrete concepts; form is the (secondary) grammatical vs lexical meaning; therefore involved is modification of a basic meaning. This mixes Modes of Signification. (2) in a contrast of basic phonetic group vs other phonetic groups: the phonetically represented root, radical, stem, or base is subject to a grammatical process, and that is why the forms below are called formally (cf. algebraically) identical by Sapir (57):
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un
think
ing
ly
re
form
er
s
(b) + A
+ (c) + (d)
Using alphabetical order can be apt for suggesting relations of priority in composition or function. Sapir does not mention that unthink would be rare, but reform common, or perhaps that is beside the point he is making. He has already distinguished his algebraic/alphabetic notation into its phonetic (surface) and grammatical (deep, categorially syntactic or semantic) roles. Compared to ungentlemanly, gentle, man, gentleman, and gentlemanly are about equally likely, but despite its functional clarity, ungentleman does not occur. (1) and (2) represent different levels of analysis. So unthinkingly/thoughtlessly or goose vs. geese, sing vs. sang are identical on level (1), different on (2): pattern is one thing, utilization of pattern quite another (59). Sapir concludes from this that linguistic form should be studied as types of patterning, apart from the associated function (60) since every language has an inner feeling for phonetic as well as grammatical patterning (61), shown in its favorite types. The most common are: (1) Word order, (2) Composition, (3) Affixation (prefixation, infixation, suffixation), (4) Internal Modification (of Consonant or Vowel), (5) Reduplication, and (6) Accentual differences (dynamic or tonal). While such processes may be found in any language, they are only of interest linguistically if they are associated with a grammatical function. 8.19 Word Order. Word-order is practically free in Latin and Chinook, but relations are noun-marked in Latin, verb-marked in Chinook, in which verbs incorporate subject-object. Practically fixed order is found in Chinese, Siamese and Annamite. Other languages hover in between. 8.20 Composition: Functional, not just factual juxtaposition of identical forms common in English (e.g. warehouse and houseware) and Chinese and less so in French: but Eskimo, Nootka and Semitic for the most part cannot compound words, although they readily admit of complex word-synthesis (e.g. the Nootka word, glossed as 'when, as they say, he had been absent for four days' is said to have only one (surface, phonetic, syntactic) radical, the rest are said to be affixal (phonetically). What functions such affixes or radicals fulfill shows no unity at all between or within languages. Restrictions on what-compounds-with-what vary (e.g. (N) (V) (Adj) (Adv); order restrictions are also peculiar. 8.21 Affixation. By far the most common: (but Chinese and Siamese use only forms that can also be radicals in affixation). Among affixes, suffixes are the most common, sometimes exclusively (Turkish, Hottentot, Nootka, Yana), and often so concrete in meaning that what they express is signalled by radicals in other languages. Exclusive use of prefixes is rare, but found in
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Cambodian. Pre- and suffixing are found in Russian and Latin, e.g. remittebantur ['they were (being) sent back']: mitt- ('send'), ant- ('3rd plural'), -ur ('passive'), re- ('back'/'again'). In Bantu, grammatical affixes are prefixed and obligatory, the rest are optional (i.e., derivational, suggested by the topic discussed rather than demanded by the grammar of the language, regardless of subject-matter). For instance, Hupa t e - s -e - y a - t e loc def I go fut ends with te future, but it is optional (derivational) when the topic of 'going' comes up, no more grammatically (inflectionally) required than Latin re- [in (re)mittebantur: 'they were being sent (back)']. Compare English 'I came to see her' and Chinook iniáludam: i
n
i
á
l
past
I
it
her
mark a loc.
recent subj.
u
dam give dyn. loc.
obj. obj. ind. obj. away from purpose
.... incorporation ....
speaker
for verb
In this Chinook example, Sapir says, the 'message burden' is on the prefixes, but in Fox, more information is found in the suffixes, as in: eh
kiwi n
n
a
oht
ati
wa ch(i)
temp. euph- flee causal to act for recippersonal subord. move onic flight anim. subj. rocal plur. conjunct connective
(2y stem)
or then they (animate) caused some animate being to wander about in flight from one another of themselves (Perhaps equivalent to English 'Men mutually panicked an animal'). Eskimo, Nootka, Yana, and other language are formally like that. 8.22 Infixation Is not uncommon in Latin and Greek to distinguish present from other tenses: vinco ['I win' (pres.)] vs. vici (perfect); lambano 'I take' ( pres.) vs. elabon (aorist). The process is more obvious in Cambodian tmeu ('one who walks') vs. daneu ('walking'): cp. deu ('to walk'). So too in Philippine and other languages, e.g. Bontoc Igorot: Bontoc Igorot: kayu
wood
knayu
gathered wood
sad-
to wait
sumid-ak
I wait
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[-um- present]
kineg
silent
[-inm- past] [-um- future]
tengao celebrate
kuminek-ak
I am silent
kinmenek-ak
I was silent
tumengao-ak
I will celebrate
8.23 Internal Change Of consonant or vowel: Vowel change as a grammatical process is illustrated in: English goose
run
mouse
geese
ran
mice
balad
'place'
bilad (pl)
gild
'hide'
gulud (pl)
ragil
'man'
rigal (pl)
hibbak
'window'
shababik (pl)
Arabic
Navaho: bi-hi-sh-ja 'I store grain'
yah-a-ni-ye
bi-hi-ja?
yah-i-ni-yi-n 'you packed'
'I stored grain'
'you pack to stable'
bi-h-de-sh-ji'I will store grain'yah-a-di-ye-h 'you will pack' Yokuts: buchong
'son'
bochang-i
'sons'
son
'son', object
enash
'grandfather'
inashi-a
'grandfathers'
engtiyim
'to sleep'
ingetyum-adto'to be sleeping'
ingetyum-ad 'slept' 8.24 Consonantal Change Is less common: English
wreath (n)
bath (n)
house (n)
wreathe (v)
bathe (v)
house (v)
Fulani: personal nouns with initial g change to
j d b k ch and p
y/w y r w h s and f
jimo
'pal'
yim-be
'pals'
pio-o
'beater'
fio-be
'beaters'
but thing-words reverse this process: yola-re
'glade'
jola-je
'glades'
fitan-du
'soul'
pital-i
'souls'
Nootka: the t or tl of some verbal suffixes becomes hl repetition: denoting
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hita-'a
'to fall out'
hita-'ahl
'to keep falling out'
mat-achisht-utl'fly on water'mat-achisht-ohl'to keep flying...' 8.25 Reduplication: In English, reduplication is used for affective rather than grammatical purposes, as in Chinese (ping pang), Russian (ChudoYudo 'dragon'), Tibetan (kyang-kyong 'lazy'): elsewhere: Hottentot:
go
look
go-go
look at carefully
gam
tell
gam-gam
cause to tell
khoe-b person khoe-khoe
talk Hottentot
Somali:
feb
gnaw
gnaw on all sides
Chinook:
iwi
appear iwi-iwi
look about carefully
Tshimshian: am
good
am-am
several are good
Ewe:
yi
go
yi-yi
act of going
wo
do
wo-wo
done
ma
neg.
mawomawo not to do
met-
clam
metmat
Kwakiutl:
feb-fen
eat clams
8.26 Form in Language: Grammatical Concepts. To illustrate the range of grammatical concepts, Sapir uses the sentence, The farmer killed the duckling. Concepts are said to be concrete, relational, concrete-relational or relational. 'Concrete' concepts are manifested by the words farmer, kill and duckling. A concept is concrete for Sapir if 'we have no difficulty in constructing an image' (i.e. of the farmer, of the duckling, or of the killing). (83). This formulation has some of the inconveniences mentioned for Boas' outline. Sapir's distinctions are consonant with the speculative framework of concept formation sketched in Chapter 5 above: No proposition, however abstract its intent, is humanly possible without a tying on at one or more points to the concrete world of sense. . . And secondly, such relational concepts must be expressed as moor the concrete to each other and construct a definite, fundamental form of propositions. (90) Farm and duck are free radicals; -er and -ling bound forms and while farm and duck are symbols for concrete concepts, the suffixes are derivational or qualifying. The unified pairs are said to submerge the concrete, exemplifying higher level subordination of lower level functions discussed above. While expression is synthetic here, thought is not; the concrete concepts of farm and duck are now latent in the expression. The identity of sentence structure is rather indifferent to its fillers: man and chick would serve as well for farmer and duckling, and take instead of kill (85), for they express identical relational concepts in an identical manner: inherently relational, and functioning analogously are (a) the, (b) word order (S-V-O) of the concrete terms and affixation of the verb.
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Change of relational features changes the sentence: Farmer, kill the duckling! omits the and -s. The farmers kill(Ø) the duckling shows multiple functions of -s: number and time are necessary relations in English. Kills the farmer the duckling becomes interrogative by order-shift and the act may not take place. The modality of the sentence is different; and The duckling kills the farmer reverses the roles. Hence Sapir's analysis I. Concrete Concepts:
(expressed by)
1. First subject of discourse:
farmer
2. Second subject of discourse:
duckling
3. Activity:
kill
analyzable into: A. Radical Concepts: 1. Verb:
(to) farm
2. Noun:
duck
3. Verb:
kill
B. Derivational Concepts: 1. Agentive: expressed by suffix
-er
2. Diminutive: expressed by suffix
-ling
II. Relational Concepts: Reference: 1. Definiteness of reference to first subject of discourse; expressed by the first the, which has preposed position; 2. Definiteness of reference to second subject of discourse; expressed by the second the, which has preposed position. Modality: 3. Declarative: expressed by sequence of subject plus verb; and implied by suffixed -s. Personal Relations: 4. Subjectivity of farmer: expressed by position of farmer before kills; and by suffixed -s; 5. Objectivity of duckling: expressed by position of duckling after kills. Number: 6. Singularity of first subject of discourse; expressed by lack of plural suffix in farmer and by suffix -s in following verb; 7. Singularity of second subject of discourse: expressed by lack of plural suffix in duckling. Time: 8. Present: expressed by lack of preterit suffix in verb; and by suffixed -s.
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8.27 Linguistic Diversity. The same scenario is not analyzed and expressed identically in languages as these gloss-contrasts show: German: Der Bauer Yana:
das Entlein: 'cause to be dead', 'cause to die'
'kill-s-I-know-doer dig-earth-doer doer to duck-ling'
Chinese: 'man kill duck' must express contrasts of: ± visible to you/me; ± location with respect to some object; ± near/far from me/you; ± neighbor to Kwakiutl:you/me; ± me/you seated; ± personal property of you/me/doer's 8.28 Reservations. Sapir has questions about his own classification. E.g., what are essential relational concepts? He decides that no known language dodges agent and object here, but other information is variably dispensable. Is there a fundamental difference between Qualifying and Relational? between Primary and Secondary Relational Concepts? can one concept 'be raised to' the level or another concept? To provide for such possibilities, he offers this revised set of contrasts (somewhat abbreviated and using terminology from other authors we have seen): I: Basic concrete concepts as such, involve no relation II: Derivational concepts consignify - (Sapir: 'give an increment of significance'); not central to proposition; but inherently related to I III: Concrete Relational concepts indicate or imply relations transcending the particular word to which they are immediately attached. IV: Pure relational concepts relate the concrete to each other and so effect definite syntactic form (101) I and II have to do with what Sapir calls the Material Content; III and IV: have to do with what he calls Relational content. I and IV are essential, the others dispensable, or subdividable. But this analysis is not intended to be interpreted like an either/or choice we met with in Platonic Division, but rather as a sliding scale (107). Similarly, 'parts of speech' are not mutually exclusive, but differ on a sliding scale as well (117). What is termed basic or derived depends on the language: compare red, redden, be red and *it reds: which is basic the red state, the process of becoming red or the action of making something red? For whom is it said to be basic? How would such questions be relevant when comparing expressions like the height of the building to the roof of a building or the fall of an apple to the skin of an apple? Sapir concludes this chapter by saying that while no language fails to distinguish Noun and Verb in some fashion, the other parts of speech are not demanded for the life of language. (119)
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8.29 Language, Thought and Culture. These three terms recast the Modistae's study of the ways things are, the ways we understand them, and the ways they get signified. But they stress Society as a force neglected in the medieval intellectual scheme. Exploring how they are distinguishable but interdependent is the burden of Sapir's succeeding Chapters. Chapter VI on Types of Linguistic Structure combines the ideas of his Chapter IV on Grammar as Processes with those of Chapter V on Grammar as Concepts. Attempts to establish linguistic typologies based either on external processes, or internal concepts, fail to account for their interdependence. A more realistic way would be to correlate the predominant techniques sketched in Chapter IV with the characteristic concepts suggested in Chapter V, and note the degree of synthesis, although languages are analytic, synthetic and polysynthetic compared to each other, not absolutely: The terms explain themselves. An analytic language is one that either does not combine concepts into single words at all (Chinese) or does so economically (English, French). In an analytic language, the sentence is always of prime importance, the word is of minor interest. In a synthetic language (Latin, Arabic, Finnish) the concepts cluster more thickly, the words are more richly chambered. . . a tendency. . . to keep the range of concrete significance in the single word down to a moderate compass. A polysynthetic language. . . is more than ordinarily synthetic. . . (concrete) concepts. . . symbolized by derivational affixes or symbolic changes in the radical element, while the more abstract notions. . . may be conveyed by the word. . . . I believe the terms are more useful in defining certain drifts than as absolute counters. (128) 8.30 Static or Dynamic? Once established, such typologies might suggest that languages are static pairings of grammatical processes with associated conceptual distinctions. But they are not. Chapters VII and VII present language at any given moment as an historical product. VII introduces the concept of Drift. Dialects, and particularly, native hesitations, indicate not only shifts in conceptual contrasts associated with overt elements and mechanisms, but suggest a slope or direction the language as 'a slowly changing configuration', may take. Analysis of English who vs. whom shows how complex this process is. Chapter VIII discusses regularities discovered in sound change which resist simple explanation, and illustrates preservation of formal pattern despite material phonetic differences: Analogies can introduce or redress grammatical consequences of sound change. Languages are not only internally dynamic, they develop from external contact with each other as well. Chapter IX examines why borrowing and cultural contacts may or may not account for internal adaptations. Resistance or openness to change involve the formal factors IV detailed, conceptual ones V contrasted, and the (mis)matchings suggested in VI. Drifts as exemplified in VII may or may not coincide, providing additional complexities to consider, and suggesting that the ways in which languages influence each other cannot be explained in any simplistic formal or psychological fashion.
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8.31 Language, Race and Culture In Chapter X introduce a new element that departs even further from traditional, intellectual, asocial perspectives. Our spontaneous assumption that a language, race and culture are all of a piece does not bear examination. But the ways in which language and culture interact are more intimate than connections between race and the other two. Sapir's definition of language can be read as describing individual verbal activity; his concept of culture adds another dimension, the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs that determine the texture of our lives. (207: emphasis added). If the definition is one of Language Itself viewed either as a formal code, or an inventory of concepts and relational mechanisms, it is still remote as a determinant of Culture: Nor can I believe that culture and language are in any true sense causally related. Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a particular how of thought. It is difficult to see what particular causal relations may be expected to subsist between a selected inventory of experience (culture, a significant selection made by society) and the particular manner in which the society expresses all experience. (218). 8.32 Linguistic Relativity. This is only one expression of Sapir's reflections on language and culture. Each can be viewed and compared from the four perspectives proposed above (pp.2-3), and anomalies arise if those points of view do not coincide. Sapir compared two objective uses of the term culture to contrast with his third, about culture as a 'good thing' in Culture, Real and Spurious (1924): . . . (for) the ethnologist and culture-historian . . . any socially inherited element in the life of man, material and spiritual . . . coterminous with man himself. . . The second . . . is more widely current. . . (an) ideal of individual refinement, built up on a certain modicum of assimilated knowledge and experience. . . Aloofness of some kind is generally a sine qua non . . . (the) third sense shares with our first . . . an emphasis on the spiritual possessions of the group rather than of the individual. With our second. . . selected factors out of the vast whole of the ethnologist's stream of culture as more valuable, more characteristic, more significant in a spiritual sense . . . those general attitudes, view of life, and specific manifestations of civilization that give a particular people its distinct place in the world . . . not so much on what is done and believed by a people as how what is done and believed function in the whole life of that people. (Mandelbaum 1949.308-311) His article for the 1934 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Vol. XII. 85-87, New York, Macmillan) on Personality cites five definitions, from different disciplines, relevant to problems of what the actual speaker-hearer conception of Language could involve: Philosophical: 'subjective awareness of the self'; physiological: 'the individual organism'; descriptive psychophysical: 'the human being conceived as a given totality . . . of physiological and psychological reaction systems'; sociological: 'totality of those aspects of behavior which give meaning to an individual in society'; and psychiatric: 'the individual abstracted from the actual psychophysical whole and conceived as a comparatively stable system of reactivity'.
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In The Grammarian and his Language (1924), he writes of what linguistics suggests about language and thought: The outstanding fact about any language is its formal completeness. . . These forms establish a definite relation, feeling, or attitude towards all possible content of expression. . . as far as experience is capable of expression in linguistic terms. . . To pass from one language to another is psychologically parallel to passing from one geometrical system of reference to another . . . a complete and psychologically satisfying formal orientation . . . only felt in the unconscious of its speakers. . not actually, that is, consciously, known to them. . . Thus innocent linguistic categories may take on the formidable appearance of cosmic absolutes. . . The upshot of it all would be to make very real to us a kind of relativity that is generally hidden from us by our naive acceptance of fixed habits of speech as guides to an objective understanding of the nature of experience. This is the relativity of concepts or, as it might be called, the relativity of the form of thought.' (Mandelbaum 1949.150-159) In The Status of Linguistics as a Science (1929): Language is a guide to social reality . . . it powerfully conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes. Human beings do not live in the objective world alone. . . but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression in their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language. . . the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. (Mandelbaum 1949.162) In view of the name Carroll attached to it (1956.27), the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis deserves separate consideration. 8.33 The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In the Introduction to his Language, Thought and Reality, a selection of Whorf's writings, John Carroll sketches Whorf's early interests. These ranged over the general field of Science, Cryptography, vindication of the Bible against the implications of Evolution, and conflicts between Science and Religion. In Biblical interpretation, he investigated submorphemic signs and their meanings. Contact with Sapir and attempts to decipher Mayan Hieroglyphics brought about the coalescence of many of his earlier insights, and the discovery of unsuspected parallels among them. 8.34 Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorf is best known for his articles on the relation of language to habitual thought and behavior, and for his labelling of categories in language as covert which account for otherwise anomalous restrictions when a common noun like house appears, I can say I lived in it, but with a proper one like Rome, only I lived there. His work came at a time when, for some, the contemporary shock-value of evolutionary concepts was ceding to the even more challenging conceptualization of Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
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It was suggested in these articles that Linguistics had uncovered a new principle of Relativity: people speaking languages as different as Standard Average European (abbreviated SAE) and non-SAE languages can be said to live in different worlds. Boas had said simply, and Sapir restated more clearly, and Whorf insisted explicitly that: since from language to language, Grammatical Concepts (a) differ, (b) are obligatory, and (c) are unconscious, they precategorize the real world for their learners. To the extent that grammatical habits prescribe and impede observation, the habitual thought and action of speakers of differently calibrated languages is not comparable, and that constitutes a principle of Linguistic Relativity. 8.35 The Real World. Thinking people want to live in the real world. But the history of Western Thought shows that noted Thinkers have disagreed about what is really real. Since they are often alluded to in linguistic discussion, two classical extremes might be capsulized as positions to which Whorf's writings have been seen as offering an alternative. Since both have been so refined in the course of history, neither of these 'summaries' can satisfy anyone. So they are presented here as: (a) A vulgarization of Plato's thought: the really real is a world of permanence, intelligible and unchanging; what we know directly are things that 'participate' in the real, therefore we only know 'the real' indirectly. A favorite image: man lives in a cave, and so perceives only shadows of the real, sunlit things outside; the shadows we 'know' are 'real' in their own way, but neither 'real shadows', nor the 'real thing'. (b) A vulgarization of Heraclitus' thought: the really real is the daily empirical, impermanent and in constant change: there is nothing else to know but this, here, now: Permanent things are an illusion; we already 'know' the real in the ever-changing unity of the universe. Favorite image: you cannot step into the same river twice. Heraclitus has been presented as an early defender of unified science. Few hold positions portrayed in their extremes by opponents bent on ridiculing them. These two sketches caricature the polemic portrayal by opponents of conceptions of what the object is that Linguistics should study. These have been labelled Rationalism and Empiricism, and subsequent chapters will look into the usefulness of the identification. In trying to uncover continuity and novelty in linguistics, we have seen a few proposals with which Whorf's position is worth comparing. 8.36 New Thinking. Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis really novel? Was it not already contained in the Physis-Nomos or Anomaly-Analogy controversies? Does not holding language to be conventional and arbitrary rather than natural entail linguistic relativity? It could be argued that if
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language were natural, only a single phonetic/grammatical structure would be conceivable: conventionality then allows many arbitrarily different expression systems, but still permits identity at the levels of sense and reference. Arbitrariness only denies that noises are dictated by things and their properties. Mental impressions or concepts in this economy could still be natural signs. Their linguistic expression are then conventional signs like advertising logos. 8.37 Inference, Assumption and Evidence. Such seemed to be a position the West inherited from Aristotle's De Interpretatione: (my translation) Locutions are symbols of what have been impressed on the psyche, and writing, symbols of locutions. Just as writings are not identical for all, neither are locutions. But things are identical for all, as are their psychic re-presentations, of which writings are primarily signs. [I.4-7] In other works, Aristotle shared a Stoic view that concepts are subjective in individuals, but objective as verifiable about externals, as long as they were not just fabricated, independent of experience. What the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis adds are an Inference, derived from Assumptions, based on Evidence now common knowledge, but inaccessible to an older tradition lacking objective accounts of other languages: - The Inference is that speakers of radically different languages may live in incommensurate universes, defined, for instance, by SAE and Hopi spatio-temporal concepts. SAE can be ungrammatical without tense; in Hopi, mention of Time is a lexical option. SAE Time is an analogy based on spatial imagery not shared by the Hopi. But lack of grammatically obligatory number does not hinder Chinese mathematical genius; nor does English we [illogical, Boas noted, in any language (1964.31)], which conceals the ± exclusive classification obligatory in Polynesian languages result in a pragmatic impasse for English speakers. - One Assumption is that obligatory grammatical concepts form or determine thought. That they guide or facilitate it seems clear; that they determine language use at all is not even demanded by Whorf's study, The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language (Carroll 1956.134 ff). Unreflecting speech or reflex behavior are habitual. - Another Assumption (that the matter of formal concepts does not readily become an object of conscious thought) may be supported by Whorf's account of covert categories within a language, but not by a non-Chinese mathematical genius, whose language has an obligatory category of number.
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- Another Assumption is that we inherit an already-analyzed-world and rules for reporting on it with our native grammar. Many Quechua verbs are ungrammatical without suffixes indicating degrees of certainty. The Spanish of Peruvian Quechuas persistently includes such information optional in Spanish. That this is so is generally known. Why it is so may escape the notice of Quechaus and native Spanish speakers. Speakers can use inherited categories inappropriately, or without advertence; Hearers can recognize them as inappropriate without knowing why; Speakers and Hearers can grasp the imbalance by comparing Spanish and Quechua, without ever making or hearing the 'error'. - Evidence shows that one language's optional concepts can be obligatory in others. What number, gender, and tense concern are not only possible topics of conversation in Greek, Latin and English (the number, sex and birthdays of children) but no nominal or verbal form can be used without expressing these distinctions, regardless of subject-matter. - Evidence shows that formal categories are obligatory in speech. Many statements about language suggest that when we speak, we deliberately attend to what we say rather than 'just know' what we're talking about. Saussure's Signification vs. Value vs. Content is more consonant with a range from attention through subconscious to unconscious awareness, than with an either-or of explicit attention vs. complete ignorance. - Evidence shows the content of obligatory grammatical concepts varies, whether 'meaning' is equated with sense or reference, or distinguished into Signification, Value and Content in a Saussurean framework. 8.38 The Hypothesis. How much of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis of Linguistic Relativity derives from Boas, Sapir and Whorf? Facts interpreted as evidence for the hypothesis are extensive in Boas' writings. But other expressed convictions and his personal efforts to refute determinism among language, race and culture argue against a strong relativist conclusion. He was apparently never asked about it explicitly. Whorf had published all his papers proposing this view between 1936 and 1941. Boas died in 1942, and actively engaged in linguistic discussion until then (Jakobson's obituary in Sebeok 1967, II.129-139). Sapir's personal concerns matched many of Boas', but his expressions are also ambiguous. Sampson (1979) lists many which suggest a stronger view about a fundamental relativity: expressions like prepared groove or channel were replaced by determining, dominating thought. What makes thought parallels what kind of an object language is taken to be, and the sketchy oppositions with which we began this Chapter are usefully recalled.
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8.39 Critique. On Carroll's reading of his work, Whorf did not consider that the real determinism possible in language-directed thought was inevitable. Whorf saw it rather as a factor to which we should be alerted. His extensive work in trying to make different cultures intelligible to each other would be contradictory if he thought understanding fundamentally impossible. (see the bibliography in Carroll. 1956.271 ff). Criticisms (Carroll. 1956.276-278) of Whorf's work suggest the following considerations: (1) Assigning English glosses to exotic languages imposes a strangeness deriving from English, not the original. A glossed morpheme and its meaning may play no role even in the subconscious of the native speaker; the analyst may detect them on a formal or historical basis, but they may have no impact on contemporary natives. (2) Coping with real Space and Time are necessary for survival. Linguistic variety in alluding to them may have no more effect on cultural conceptions, or on our logic, than our sun and moon which still rise and set linguistically, despite our rejection of Ptolemaic astronomy. (3) Logic can mean many things4, including 'what makes sense' (to the most 'illogical' among us); psychological, rather than scientific or logical laws of thought; a traditional or formal discipline. Basic to 'logic' in all uses is seeing a contradiction. This, too, is prerequisite for survival, if not for sanity. To simply accept 'another language, another logic' is to ignore notorious polemic inconsistencies. (4) The apparent relativity-determinist dilemma is easily understood and has implications well beyond Whorf's formulation. This would suggest that whatever determinist trap is involved, only those who seldom think are likely to be ensnared by it. Those unable to accept or reject the relativist horn of the dilemma may exemplify it, but cannot appeal to determinism to explain their condition. Experimental investigation has left the question just as vague. Note 1.Random House Unabridged Dictionary 1966 entries for logic and logical: logic n. 1. the science which investigates the principles governing correct or reliable inferences. 2. a particular method of reasoning or argumentation: We were unable to follow his logic. 3. the system or principles of reasoning applicable to any branch of knowledge or study. 4. reason of sound judgement, as in utterances or actions: There wasn't much logic in her move. 5. convincing forcefulness: the irresistible logic of facts. [ME logik < L logica, n. use of neut. pl. (in ML taken as fem. sing.) of Gk logikos of speech or reason. See LOGO-, -IC] logicless adj. logical adj. 1. according to or in agreement with the principles of logic: a logical inference. 2. reasoning in accordance with the principles of logic, as a person, mind, etc.: a logical man; logical thinking. 3. reasonable; reasonably to be expected: War was the logical consequence of such threats. 4. of or pertaining to logic. [ < ML logicalis. See LOGIC, -AL1] - logicality, logicalness, n. - logically, adv. Syn. 1, 3. valid. Ant. 1-3. unreasonable.
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Reading Boas, Franz, 1964. Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages. Foreword (vii-xiv) by C.I.J.M. Stuart. Georgetown University Press D.C. pp. 70. Carroll, John B. 1956. Language, Thought and Reality. Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. MIT Press, John Wiley, Cambridge. pp. 278. Sapir, Edward. (1921) 1949. Language. Harvest Books, Harcourt, Brace & World. N.Y. Supplementary Reading Boas, Franz. 1911. Handbook of American Indian Languages I: with illustrative sketches by Dixon, Goddard, Jones, Michelson, Swanton and Talbitzer. II: Sapir, Frachtenberg, Bogoras, Hoijer, Andrade, Wagner, Bunzel & Reichard. Gov. Printing Office, D.C. (1911) 1963 The Mind of Primitive Man with a new foreword by Melville J. Herskovits. rev. ed., Collier Books, New York. 1938. General Anthropology. with contributions by Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, Ruth Bunzel and others. Heath, N.Y. pp. 686. 1940 (1982). Race, Language and Culture. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Goldschmidt, Walter R., ed. 1959. The Anthropology of Franz Boas. Essays on the Centenary of his Birth. American Anthropological Association, Menasha WI. pp. 165. Hymes, Dell, ed., 1964. Language in Culture and Society. A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology. Harper and Row. New York. pp. 764. 1974. Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms. Bloomington. Indiana University. pp. 519. and John Fought. 1981. American Structuralism. Mouton. the Hague. Kroeber, Alfred L. et al. Franz Boas, 1858-1942. American Anthropological Association, Memoir 61, vol. 45, no. 3, pt. 2. 1956. The place of Boas in Anthropology. American Anthropologist 58:151-159. Lowie, Robert H. 1943. Franz Boas, his predecessors and contemporaries. Science 97.202-3. 1943. Franz Boas, Anthropologist. Scientific Monthly 56:183-4. 1947. Biographical Memoirs of Franz Boas: 1858-1942. Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 24:303-22. Sebeok, Thomas, ed. 1967. Portraits of Linguists. Bloomington. Indiana University. Stocking, George, ed. 1974. The Shaping of American Anthropology 1833-1911. New York. Basic Books. pp. 354. Spier, Leslie. 1959. Some Central Elements in the Legacy. in Goldschmidt 1959. (146-55) Sapir, Whorf Curtis, S. 1977. GENIE. A Psychological Study of a Modern-Day 'Wild Child'. New York, Academic Press. [Cf. Maya Pines' 'The Civilizing of Genie'. Psychology Today, September 1981.] Lane, Harlan. 1976. The Wild Boy of Aveyron. Harvard University Press. Cambridge. pp. 351. Linden, Eugene. (1974) 1976. Apes, Men and Language. Penguin Books. New York. pp. 304. Mandelbaum, David G., ed. 1949. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality. UCP Berkeley [Best single source (1949): exc. bibliog.]. pp. 615. 1970. Culture, Language and Personality. UCP Berkeley (1949). [Selections from the larger work]. pp. 207. Patterson, Francine. 1979. The Education of Koko. New York, Knopf. Sapir, Edward. 1930. Southern Paiute, A Shoshonean Language. Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Vol. 65, No 1.-June. pp. 505. Spier, Leslie, A. Hallowell and S. Newman, eds. 1944. Language, Culture and Personality. Essays in Memory of Edward Sapir. Sapir Memorial Publication Fund, Menasha, Wisconsin.
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9 Leonard Bloomfield 9.00 Scientific has become such a prestige label that whatever is dismissed as the work of mere philosophers, taxonomic grammarians, litterateurs, descriptivists, etc. is taken by some to be a waste of time. Mere is a syncategorematic expression: it lacks both sense and reference; is not quantifiable, and does not function as subject or predicate in falsifiable assertions. Its use informs us about attitudes, not facts. Comparable to it is scientistic. This expression condemns the confusion of technical jargon and empirical trappings with whatever `real' science is. Debates about which studies deserve which labels can depend on contemporary intuitions about admissible evidence, legitimate data, and reasonable goals, or on the mere prestige of a novel approach promising better results. 9.01 Mentalism and Behaviorism. Language interests everyone because of its role in conveying `meaning'. But, like scientific, the word meaning locates a task without telling us how to go about its study. At least three things seem to be involved: (a) what is outside speakers, (b) what is inside them, and (c) speech relating the two. Disputes arise about an objective way of defining and dealing with the inside and outside, as this simplistic scheme might suggest:
Drawing lines connecting (a), (b) and (c) in different ways can suggest a number of things to talk about and models for them. If (a), (b) and (c) were physically continuous, they could be discussed as ecological systems, distinct from each other because of the point of view taken an odd result, since the need for a point of view should not arise, and the perennial disputes between rival conceptions would be even more puzzling. If there were no connection at all between (a) and [(b) and (c)], (e.g. the (a) objective world vs. [(b) private thought in (c) public speech)], then whatever `meaning' is, it does not have what usually passes for objectivity. If we talk about connections only between (b) and (c), excluding (a), we have a situation usually described as subjective in a different way.
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9.02 Linguistics is Talk About Language. The need to discuss these distinctions suggests that somehow, the (a) objective data can be connected with (b) how we think even if (c) our inherited language conventions are an unreliable witness of how it works. This scheme suggests that if (a) and (c) are equally, though differently, distinguishable from (b) as outside, a method designed to study the outside can be different from another best adapted for studying the inside, and perhaps a third is needed to study the triad (or different pairs within it) simultaneously. Such a simplistic image suggests the possibility of three autonomous studies, of three different objects, however related. Since any science must abstract, such studies have many precedents. If the investigator could operate in an atmosphere clearly independent of all three, it would even be feasible. 9.03 Old and New Language About Language. But we use language to study language, and if there is something important about our all having unique insides, our situation was neatly described by Householder as that of a fire in a wooden stove. Just defining the promising object(s) of study is problematic. It is here that conflicting assumptions about what can be legitimate data, what is an appropriate method, what counts as evidence, and what are feasible goals, lead to fundamental differences of opinion, even when many of the facts are not in dispute. We have seen one thread of continuity in the Aristotelian world-view that long dominated Western thought. While there are many other influences, one way we look at things and talk about them was formed by the descriptive vocabulary in his Categories and by his descriptive vs. explanatory opposition of matter-and-form oppositions. His elementary De Interpretatione account of propositions, with an overlay of Stoic grammatical terminology, led to the sensation-to-science-psychology the Medievals distilled from his thought. Much of what de Saussure, Boas, and Sapir took for granted or challenged involves these basic notions, all part of a mentalist tradition. That tradition was designed to test the consistent use or non-obvious implications of scientific concepts. It paid no attention to language-use that science considered trivial. But that concept of `science' itself was of an intellectual, logically deductive enterprise. Arguments were conducted within a relatively homogeneous culture, using the only language Latin for which participants had a metalanguage. When non-IE languages and cultures became better known, much of that metalanguage was suspected of being deficient. De Saussure's stress on negative, contrastive, function over positive phonetic or semantic composition changed that tradition's perspective, not its basics. Boas' demonstration of social determination antecedent to sensation (therefore to intellection), added a missing dimension; Sapir took its positive claims and those relativist corrections into account, but concluded that a minimum for human language is formation and expression of concrete and relational ideas.
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9.04 Psychologists Talk About Language. Bloomfield's 1914 Introduction to the study of Language relied on Wilhelm Wundt's attempt to study some traditional conceptions scientifically. But the introspection required in Wundt's work compared poorly with the prestige of scientific positivism, which excluded evidence not amenable to empirical investigation. Public, not private data however plausible, was to be the domain of science. Anything else became mere speculation. Through contact with his colleague Albert Weiss, Bloomfield was convinced that any form of mentalism was inimical to science. But even though he was personally convinced of the scientific superiority of Behaviorist conceptions, the status he wanted for Linguistics was that of an autonomous discipline, compatible with an ideal of Unified Science. This entailed the exclusion of mentalist accounts of `meaning' on objective methodological grounds, quite aside from the fact that it might coincide with his subjective convictions. 9.05 Subjective Talk About Language. Mentalism as it is portrayed in Bloomfield's Language was clearly out of step with empirical science defined by Positivists. Translated into the simplistic oppositions suggested above, he says Mentalism assumes that there are factors in mental operations (b) exempt from physical laws in the empirical realm (a). However (b) was affected by (a), this precluded physical determination of inherited language conventions (c) by the physical constitution of (a). Defining (b) mentalistically introduced a short circuit that made study of (c) wholly subjective. 9.06 Objective Talk About Language. Behaviorism offered an objective approach. Mechanism takes it for granted that there is a causal continuity from (a) through (b) to (c). Behaviorism assumed the fundamental identity of physically determined (c)-behavior with any other kind of nonlinguistic (a)-behavior. But it was conceded that while all (a)-behavior is the immediate consequence of (a) factors, (c)-behavior is mediate. For Behaviorists, (c)-behavior is labelled a substitute response to an immediate (a) stimulus; (c) is also a substitute stimulus for (a) responses otherwise occasioned by (a) stimuli. Speech is taken to be an objectively observable activity of an organism, a succession of substitute stimuli and responses. That there was indeed an identifiable (b) conditioning (c) was never questioned. But (b) was seen as really no more than a spatially isolable part of (a), individually shaped as its own piece of the entire ecology by social conditioning. Mentalists' individual and society obscure the real, material continuum. Granted there is such a continuum, there should be no such things. 9.07 Language as Response. Language can be seen as the totality of mutually effective substitute responses. Diversity of speech or languages results from diversity of conditioning-histories. Unpredictability is due to deficient conditioning of the investigator an interesting reformulation of the
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Neogrammarians' credo. In theory, prediction of an individual utterance needs only a complete history of a speaker's conditioning. No other science has or seems likely to soon attain such information, but even its factual impossibility would not necessarily trivialize Behaviorism's ideal. Mentalism differs from Materialism (so Behaviorism) by distinguishing real potentials (cp. langue) from their actualization (cp. parole). It opposes: (1) wholes or parts to material and formal principles; (2) mind to brain; (3) functions of the mind to triggering of the nervous system; (4) understanding to experiencing; (5) deciding to reacting; (6) preferring to being reinforced; (7) speaking to uttering; (8) heroism or insanity to environmental conditioning. Mentalism is dualistic: It recognizes two kinds (mental and material) of data, experience, perception, insight, causality, evidence, explanation, study goals and methods of study. Behaviorism, as a form of materialistic determinism, is monistic: It admits only a single kind (material) of data, erroneously distinguished by mentalists into experience, insight, perception, causality, evidence, explanation, study goal and method of study. 9.08 Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949). Bloomfield's early interests were in Germanic and IndoEuropean Philology. There seems to have been no single person or experience that uniquely fired his imagination, though there were several individuals he mentioned as important. They included his early acquaintance with Prokosch and later, his collaboration with Weiss. It was from the latter that he learned of the relevance of Behaviorist methodology for his preferred approach to facts of language. It seems as though his life and intellect were all of a piece. He became dissatisfied with his 1914 Introduction to Language. There (318) he had contrasted philological concern for `more conscious cultural' attainments with a linguist's interest in the 'unconscious communal grouping of ideas' (321). All `mental sciences . . . demand in differing degrees a constant psychologic interpretation'. If not based in science, it will be ... rationalizing popular psychology ... As language is in its forms the least deliberate of human activities, the one in which rationalizing explanations are most grossly out of place, linguistics is, of all the mental sciences, most in need of guidance at every step by the best psychological insight available. (Bloomfield 1914:322-323) Finding the great advance of psychology in recent decades and the rise of social and ethnologic studies have been, of course, of the highest benefit (Bloomfield 1914:312), he saw advances in Wundt's psychology as relevant to previous discussion of what the object of a social science might be: Modern psychology recognizes two sources of information. The one is introspective analysis under the control of mechanical (experimental) devices which record the physical correlates of the mental process. The information so obtained applies to the activity of the individual human mind. This activity is always conditioned, however, in varying degrees, on past experiences which in themselves are products of mental action of other individuals.
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Thus, when one speaks a sentence, the form it takes is due to the utterances which the speaker, since infancy, has heard from the other members of his community. It is due, in other words, to a series of connected mental processes extending indefinitely back into time and occurring in an indefinite number of individuals. Such mental processes, then, as those involved in the utterance of speech, cannot find their explanation in the individual he receives his speech-habits from others but must be traced for explanation from individual to individual ad infinitum. They are products of the mental action not of a single person, but of a community of individuals. These products not only language but also myth, art, and custom are the data which make possible the second phase of psychology, social psychology (German Völkerpsychologie). As language, moreover, is less subject than these other activities to individual deliberate actions which interfere with the communal nexus, it is the most important domain in the study of social psychology. (Bloomfield 1914:323-324) 9.09 Starting to Talk About Language. He made concrete suggestions for starting an orderly study of linguistics 1: (1) begin with your own language's articulation; (2) study phonetics (Sweet 1906, Jespersen 1913 and Passy 1913 and especially Sievers 1901); (3) study your language's morphology and syntax (Sweet 1906 and Lloyd 1899); (4) study the History of the English Language (Jespersen 1905, Greenough and Kitteridge 1901, Sweet's works on stages of English). At the same time, read some modern psychology: (5) both clear if now incomplete books by Whitney (`the greatest of Englishspeaking linguistic scholars' (fn.308)), supplemented by (6) the modern Delbrück 1908, Hermann Paul in English 1891 and Oertel 1886; (7) Bréal's 1897 readable but regrettably popular semantics, remedied by (8) the best and latest `great linguistic work of the philosopher and psychologist Wundt'. For ethnography, read (9) Boas' 1911 Introduction to the Handbook and Marret's excellent linguistic chapter in his 1911 Anthropology, and for linguistic typologies, (10) Finck 1909 and 1910. Finally, specialize in a language field: (11) if IndoEuropean, Brugmann 1904 is fuller and more exact than Meillet 1913. 9.10 Postulates. Thirteen years later, `A set of postulates for the science of language' (Language 2.1925; Hockett 1970:128-140) updated Bloomfield's reflections on the ongoing linguistic enterprise. It was presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. The influence of Weiss is evident. The main points were later embodied in his 1933 Language: I. Introductory. The method of postulates (that is, assumptions or axioms) and definitions is fully adequate in mathematics; as for other sciences, the more complex the subject-matter, the less amenable they are to this method, since, under it, every descriptive or historical fact becomes the subject of a new postulate. Nevertheless, the postulational method can further the study of language, because it forces us to state explicitly whatever we assume, to define our terms, and to decide what things may exist independently and what things are interdependent [footnote: Cf. A.P. Weiss' set of postulates of Psychology, Psychological Review 32.83]. . . . Psychology, in particular, gives us this series: to certain stimuli (A) a person reacts by speaking; his speech (B) in turn stimulates his hearers to certain reactions (C). By a
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social habit which every person acquires in infancy from his elders, A-B-C are closely correlated. Within this correlation, the stimuli (A) which cause an act of speech and the reactions (C) which result from it, are very closely linked, because every person acts indifferently as speaker or as hearer. We are free, therefore, without further discussion, to speak of vocal features or sounds (B) and of stimulus-reaction features (A-C) of speech. It should be obvious that Bloomfield's A, B, C are not identical with the (a) (b) (c) diagram with which this chapter began. Omitting his discussion and examples, these are the definitions he proposed for, and postulates he distilled from, scientific work in linguistics: II: Form and Meaning. 1 Def. An act of speech is an utterance. 2. Assumption 1. Within certain communities successive utterances are alike or partly alike. 3. Def. Any such community is a speech-community. 4. Def. The totality of utterances that can be made in a speech-community is the language of that speech-community. 5. Def. That which is alike will be called same. That which is not the same is different. 6. Def. The vocal features common `o same or partly same utterances are forms; the corresponding stimulus-reactionfeatures are meanings. 7. Assumption 2. Every utterance is made up wholly of forms. III: Morpheme, Word, Phrase. 8. Def. A minimum X is an X which does not consist entirely of lesser X's. 9. Def. A minimum form is a morpheme; its meaning is a sememe. 10. Def. A form which may be an utterance is free. A form which is not free is bound. 11. Def. A minimum free form is a word. 12. Def. A non-minimum free form is a phrase. 13. Def. A bound form which is part of a word is a formative. 14. Assumption 3. The forms of a language are finite in number. IV: Example of a Special Assumption. Assumption S1. A phrase may contain a bound form which is not part of a word. Def. Such a bound form is a phraseformative. V: Phonemes. 15. Assumption 4. Different morphemes may be alike or partly alike as to vocal features. 16. Def. A minimum same of vocal feature is a phoneme or distinctive sound. 17. Assumption 5. The number of different phonemes in a language is a small submultiple of the number of forms. 18. Assumption 6. Every form is made up wholly of phonemes. 19. Assumption 7. The number of orders of phonemes in the morphemes and words of a language is a submultiple of the number of possible orders. 20. Def. The orders which occur are the sound-patterns of the language. 21. Def. Different forms which are alike as to phonemes are homonyms. VI: Construction, Categories, Parts of Speech.
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22. Assumption 8. Different non-minimum forms may be alike or partly alike as to the order of the constituent forms and as to stimulus-reaction features corresponding to this order. 23. Def. Such recurrent same of order are constructions; the corresponding stimulus-reaction features are constructional meanings. 24. Def. The construction of formatives in a word is a morphologic construction. 25. Def. The construction of free forms (and phrase-formatives) in a phrase is a syntactic construction. 26. Def. A maximum X is an X which is not part of a larger X. 27. Def. A maximum construction in any utterance is a sentence. 28. Assumption 9. The number of constructions in a language is a small submultiple of the number of forms. 29. Def. Each of the order units in a construction is a position. 30. Assumption 10. Each position in a construction can be filled only by certain forms. 31. Def. The meaning of a position is a functional meaning. 32. Def. The positions in which a form occurs are its functions. 33. Def. All forms having the same functions constitute a form-class. 34. Def. The functional meanings in which the forms of a form-class appear constitute the class-meaning. 35. Def. The functional meanings and class-meanings of a language are the categories of the language. 36. Def. If a form class contains relatively few forms, the meanings of these forms may be called sub-categories. 37. Def. A form-class of words is a word-class. 38. Def. The maximum word-classes of a language are the parts of speech of that language. VII: Alternation. 39. Assumption 11. In a construction a phoneme may alternate with another phoneme according to the accompanying phonemes. 40. Def. Such alternation is phonetic alternation. 41. Assumption 12. In a construction a form may alternate with another form according to the accompanying forms. 42. Def. Such alternation is formal alternation. 43. Assumption 13. Absence of sound may be a phonetic or formal alternant. 44. Def. Such an alternant is a zero element. 45. Def. If a formal alternation is determined by the phonemes of the accompanying forms, it is an automatic alternation. 46. Def. The classification of phonemes implied in the sound-patterns, phonetic alternations, and automatic formal alternations of a language is the phonetic pattern. 47. Def. If formal alternation is otherwise determined, it is grammatical alternation. 48. Def. If the accompanying forms which determine one grammatical variant predominate as to number, this variant is said to be regular the others are irregular. 49. Def. If in a construction all the component forms are irregular, the whole form is suppletive. 50. Def. Whatever has a meaning is a glosseme. The meaning of a glosseme is a noeme. VIII: Historical Linguistics. 51. Assumption H1. Every language changes at a rate which leaves contemporary persons free to communicate without disturbance.
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52. Assumption H2. Among persons, linguistic change is uniform in ratio with the amount of communication between them. 53. Def. If linguistic change results in groups of persons between which communication is disturbed, these groups speak dialects of the language. 54. Def. A relatively uniform auxiliary dialect used by such groups is a standard language. 55. Def. If linguistic change results in groups of persons between which communication is impossible, these groups speak related languages. 56. Assumption H3. Phoneme or classes of phonemes may gradually change. 57. Def. Such change is sound-change. 58. Assumption H4. Sound-change may affect phonemes or classes of phonemes in the environment of certain other phonemes or classes of phonemes. 59. Def. This change is conditioned sound-change. 60. Assumption H5. Sound-change preponderantly favors shorter forms. 61. Assumption H6. Linguistic change may substitute sames for differents. 62. Def. This change is analogic change. 63. Def. Analogic change which creates or enlarges a glosseme is contamination. 64. Def. Analogic change which extends the use of a glosseme is adaptation. 65. Def. Adaptation which replaces one alternant with another is proportional analogy. 66. Def. Analogic change of formatives is formal analogy. 67. Def. Analogic change of words is semantic change. 68. Assumption H7. Analogic change predominantly disfavors irregular glossemes and those which diverge from their fellows; it tends to disfavor them in inverse ratio to their frequency of occurrence. 69. Assumption H8. Whoever speaks a foreign language or dialect may in it substitute resemblant features of his native speech. 70. Def. This is linguistic substitution. 71. Def. Linguistic substitution of phonemes is sound substitution. 72. Assumption H9. Whoever hears a foreign language or dialect may adopt features of it into his own speech. 73. Def. Such adoption is linguistic borrowing. 74. Def. Borrowed words are loan-words. 75. Assumption H10. The phonemes of analogic forms and loan-words may be changed so as to fit the sound patterns of the language. 76. Def. Such change is sudden sound-change. 77. Assumption H11. Glossemes may go out of use. Despite his later rejection of Wundtian Psychology, his interest in behaviorism was still peripheral to his fundamental goal of making an autonomous science of the study of language. His 1933 Language was not just a rewritten version of the earlier book, although much material remained unchanged. In Language he produced a work that gradually won `quasibiblical' status as an elementary text for establishing an autonomous field. His Amerindian studies, book reviews, technical articles, personal contacts and discussions, in all of which he exemplified and argued for a scientific approach to language problems, won him wide respect. Among the early organizers of the Linguistic Society of America, he exercised considerable influence. All these efforts, along with his teaching, contributed to the formation of a generation of empirically minded, objective, linguistic workers in the United States and abroad.
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9.11 Bloomfield's Language (1933). One academic is reported to have concluded from reading the new book that `the man is a poet'. This suggests that reading Language can elicit a variety of interpretations, and that its organization appeals variously to different readers. Reading it now is not unlike the theater-goer's puzzlement about others' enthusiasm for Hamlet, since it abounds in familiar quotations. We can approach it here as dealing with: (a) a general outline of linguistic science (Chapters 1-4: pp. 3-73); supported by (b) synchronic study of linguistic form (Chapters 5-16: pp. 74-280), and (c) diachronic considerations (Chapters 17-27: pp. 281-509). There can be no substitute for reading this dense, neatly articulated book, but a selective abbreviation is found in Dinneen 1979 (1967). 9.12 The Study, use and Spread of Language. Bloomfield proposes that the empirical science of language should study a real rather than a fancied object. Language conceived as a normative ideal does not constitute an empirical object; language as a universal phenomenon can only be established inductively; one can observe actual speech and its actual effects on hearers without preconceptions, so the Behaviorist approach provides a model. While the data of this study are outside speakers' heads, `meaning' need not be neglected. Indeed, language cannot be studied without constant appeal to the difference between factual and functional contrasts in speech. While psychologists sort this problem out among themselves, linguistics should work independently. All might agree that exhaustive description of the facts of linguistic form are indispensable to the psychological dilemma, so linguistics need not stand or fall with conclusions a particular psychology might finally draw from linguistic data. What linguistics borrows from other disciplines is an attitude, and a method of observation common to all prestigious sciences. Behaviorism happens at present to coincide with linguistic interest in `meaning'. Linguists need not adopt the behaviorist philosophy, but can and should imitate its scientific method. 9.13 Speech Communities Are best observed behavioristically. Density of communication can be empirically observed, quantified, and correlated with geography, social stratification, occupation, success in cooperation, and consequences in describable speech differences. There are behavioral correlates for determining traditional concerns about language: (1) The literary standard is accessible through general or personal educational effort, transcends geographic and social barriers, and is used on occasions described as formal; (2) The colloquial standard is observed in situations lacking formal behaviors among observably privileged classes within a larger speech community. (3) The provincial standard is observed among those remote geographically from the formative environments of cultural centers (theaters,
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government, libraries, lectures, University resources, access to a variety of views and experience, prestigious newspapers and journals, bookshops, etc.). (4) Sub-standard speech behavior is found among those who must interact daily as peers with each other, but only occasionally, and as subordinates, to the privileged; their goals, satisfactions, reinforcement and opportunities differ markedly from those of standard speakers, although they may occupy identical territory. (5) Local dialect is that of an interacting group with which others have so little contact that dialect speakers are incomprehensible without considerable attention. The occasions of difference are time, plus geographic and/or educational isolation. The languages of the world are these differences writ large: Time, distance and the indigenous, stable, prestigious, inherited means of interaction make mutual comprehension either unattractive or impossible without considerable motivation and effort. 9.14 The Phoneme. Sound-production can be described empirically. Phonetics is the branch of science that deals with it. But this study demonstrates that actual sounds lack clear-cut phonetic differences, even when refined discrimination is possible in the laboratory. But communication depends on clear-cut discrimination, so a norm for same and different must be built into successful systems of subtle communication. Language therefore must `depend upon our habitually and conventionally discriminating some features of sound and ignoring others' (77). What phonetics provides is an objective record of gross acoustic features, only part of which are distinctive for particular languages, while phonology, or practical phonetics, determines which features are the distinctive ones. 9.15 Presuppositions. So the unproved assumption of linguistics is that `in every speech-community some utterances are alike in form and meaning' (78), and we must `act as though' science had established the situations (causes) and responses (effects) that make up these meanings (77). This `acting as though' is not just a mental experiment, but an empirical procedure called the minimal pair test, an obvious example of empirical experimental method: part of the data is held identical, part varied; meaning-discrimination is attributed to the variation, identified as a primary (simultaneous, static), compound (successive, static) or secondary (dynamic, prosodic) phoneme, which is defined as `a minimum unit of distinctive sound-feature' (78-9). These bundles of distinctive features are variously typified in different languages, so that establishing a sound as phonemic in one language does not guarantee that it is phonemic in another: as categories, however,
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vowels and consonants can be found, but their distinctive features differ widely, e.g. ± muffled, murmured, whispered, nasalized, tense, long, etc. 9.16 Phonetic Basis. This predominantly phonetic account `may be viewed as a kind of basis which may be modified in various ways' (109). Modification, of course, presumes some standard from which a departure is made, and the criteria for establishing the base can vary, legitimately or inconsistently. For instance, it might be inconsistent to shift, in phonology, from subjective or objective production to subjective reception or objective disturbance of the air, or from objective measurement to subjective standards, as Bloomfield does. He notes that it is beyond our power to analyze the general acoustic effect of a language (127). Of interest to him here are familiar features seen as overlays in one language, but distinctive in another. Duration is the relative length of time through which the vocal organs are kept in a position (109). In dealing with matters of quantity, it is often convenient to set up an arbitrary unit of relative duration, the mora (110). Stress, that is, intensity or loudness consists in greater amplitude of soundwaves and is produced by means of more energetic movements . . ., which can vary in the manner of application, or where increase of loudness sets in (110-14). Pitch, that is, frequency of vibration in the musical sound of the voice (114-17); palatalization: during the production of a consonant, the tongue and lips take up, as far as compatible with the main features of the phoneme, the position of a front vowel . . . (117); velarization: in which the tongue is retracted as for a back vowel. If the lips are rounded during the production of the consonant, it is said to be labialized . . . together . . . labiovelarized (118); transition: The manner in which the vocal organs pass from inactivity to the formation of a phoneme, or from the formation of one phoneme to that of the next, or from the formation of a phoneme to inactivity (118). 9.17 Contrasts. Inability to decide on how a language sounds is less important than establishing its structural contrasts: it is differences that count, since a pair of languages might have the same phonetic inventory, yet be differently structured. Such differences among identities could be found in the distribution and functioning of the same phonetic composition (127-38). Bloomfield's Linguistics cannot be captured in the simple (a), (b), (c) sketch presented: for communication we need two (a)'s; for failures, (b)'s as part of (a); for grammatical meaning, (c)'s considered autonomously, then as linked to (a)'s and (b)'s, etc. But the elements of all needed organic constructions are usefully viewed as ways of defining and relating (a), (b), (c). 9.18 Meaning. In his Chapter 9, Bloomfield returns to `meaning' with some refinements. One way to appreciate the dimensions of the problem is to try out alternative interpretations of common terms about `meaning' within our (a), (b), (c) triangle. These tentative interpretations will not coincide with all uses of those terms.
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Distinguish sense and reference: Assume (b) is an individual speaker: Reference is a static relation, dynamic process or action linking (c) to (a), mediated by (b). Sense is a state, process, or action within (b), by which (c) is related to (a). Bits of (c) may have sense without reference to (a), when (a) is empirically defined. Bits of (c) may have reference to a (b)-sense alone or to itself (metalinguistic use), but always mediated by sense in (b). Assume (b) is a society: Identical relations hold for sense and reference taken as state or process. Metaphor or analogy are involved when they are taken as action. Taken concretely, society constitutes the totality of senses and references which ± match between individual speakers and hearers. Dictionaries and grammars record past high-frequency matches, rarely exclude infrequent actual mismatches. Assume (b) is an individual hearer: Sense is a ± match among society-sense, speaker-sense and hearer-sense. Reference is a ± match among society-reference, speaker-reference and hearer-reference, mediated by hearer-grasp of societysense and hearer-grasp of speaker-grasp of society-sense. Assume (b) is an ideal speaker-hearer: The ideal speaker-hearer is equally ideal-society. Sense and reference are the totality of individual speaker-/or hearer- senses or references matching an undefined norm, excluding undefined deviation. Admits of no degrees. Distinguish meaning and expression: [`A form is often said to express its meaning' (141)] If meaning is sense, expression is a static relation, process, or action relating (c) and (b); If meaning is reference, expression is a static relation, process, or action relating (c) and (a); If meaning is sense-and-reference as a unity, expression is a static relation, process, or action linking an aspect of (a) mediated [i.e. subjectively extended or restricted within (a)] by (b). Distinguish reference and referent:
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Reference is a static relation, dynamic process or action, whose terms are in (b) and (a); the term in mental (b) is a sense, in behaviorist (b), a disposition to respond; in (a), a thing, property, relation, state or event, of which (b) has partial experience. The thing, etc. is called a referent, a bit of objective (a) or subjective (b) now regarded as part of (a). Distinguish denotation and connotation: Denotation is reference and/or referent; connotations are subjective or socialized relations of the referent for speaker(s) to other referents and properties. Home and house may have the same denotation, but differ in connotations. 9.19 Bloomfield on Meaning. We have defined the meaning of a linguistic form as the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer (Bloomfield 1933:139). Situation includes every object and happening in their universe (139), hence an aspect of (a) which speaker and hearer equally constitute, distinct only by their individual conditioning by the rest of (a) in the past; response becomes another aspect constituting (a). We can define names, not things, and only names for which science provides a `universally recognized and accurate' classification. Science defines very few names, compared to humanly important ones like love or hate, the vast majority, and ordinary language deviates from scientific classification (e.g. German Walfisch (`whale') and Fledermaus (`bat'), English butterfly). In practice, we resort to demonstration (pointing) and circumlocution (intralinguistically, qualified hyponymy, interlinguistically, translation). Since every individual is part of his situation, situations are never identical: the pair are in process, not a state. Note that states, like minds, count as mentalist illusions for the materialist (e.g. subjective rationalist constructs, instead of objective statistical summaries of empirical data) to the extent that intelligibility is identifiable only in stability, an intrinsically mutable universe is unintelligible. That was involved in the anomalist position of the anomaly/analogy dispute. Bloomfield says we postulate distinctive vs. nondistinctive features of situations, but Since our study ordinarily concerns only the distinctive feature of form and meaning, I shall henceforth usually omit the qualification linguistic or distinctive, and speak simply of forms and meanings, ignoring the existence of nondistinctive features. A form is often said to express its meaning (141). But speakers utter forms when there is no obvious, contemporary empirical stimulus. This is called displaced or relayed speech: A speaks of absent apples to B who relays A's message to C. Involved is the primary or dictionary meaning of apple. `Lying, irony, jesting, poetry, narrative fiction and the like' involve primary meaning and derivational processes too familiar to discuss (142).
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For the mentalist, language is the expression of ideas, feelings or volitions (cf. Sapir's definition of language). The mechanist does not accept this solution. He believes (emphasis added) that mental images, feelings, and the like are merely popular terms . . . (142) for (1) large-scale bodily processes much the same for all people; (2) obscure and highly variable small-scale muscular contractions and glandular secretions, which differ from person to person, and, having no immediate social importance, are not represented by conventional speech-forms; (3) soundless movements of the vocal organs, taking the place of speech-movements, imperceptible to other people (`thinking in words'). 9.20 The Fundamental Assumption of Linguistics. To Bloomfield, the difference seemed largely verbal: The mentalist in practice defines meanings exactly as does the mechanist, in terms of actual situations . . . and wherever this seems to add anything, of the hearer's response (Bloomfield 1933:143-144). That is, he says they have the same data. But what counts as evidence is different. Subjective events are not public, hence inadmissable evidence in science. Subjective events include: experience of individuality, choice, responsibility, value, insight; objective events are behaviors. Only behavior is publicly observable and so has scientific existence; unrealized alternatives have no scientific existence, are in principle unobservable, and so are just popular terms for (1), (2), and (3) just listed. Bloomfield decides that the `fundamental assumption of linguistics' is: In certain communities (speech-communities) some speech-utterances are alike as to form and meaning. (Bloomfield 1933:144) 9.21 Bloomfield's Conclusions. The apparent clarity of speech-forms is `bought at the cost of rationality' (144); there are no actual synonyms; homonymy is undecidable (145); the linguist cannot define meanings extralinguistically but, accepting them from science or common knowledge, can do so intralinguistically with precision (145-46); this is due to the way linguistic structure signals, since formclasses entail the notion of substitutes which by definition share class-meaning, plus meaning of the substitute-type (e.g. anaphoric) and meaning of the mode of substitute (e.g. all or one of a class) (146), which `give rise to the specially accurate form of speech which we call mathematics' (147). Sub-linguistic communication uses linguistic forms in which the ordinary meaning of the forms plays no part. Hypostasis (`That's an if') is closely related to quotation, the repetition of a speech, and like onomatopoeia, consists in deviations from the ordinary tie-up of phonetic form with dictionary meaning, which still shows considerable complexity (148) but there is no greater bore than the enumeration and classification of these metaphors:
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The remarkable thing about these variant meanings is our assurance and our agreement in viewing one of the meanings as normal (or central) and the others as marginal (metaphoric or transferred) meanings' (149) which can involve narrowing (car in general to diner, street-car, auto) or widening (cat to lion, hound to any dog) (151) and `the presence of supplementary values which we call connotations.' `The meaning of a form for any one speaker is nothing more than a result of the situations in which he has heard this form.' Dictionaries are meant to restrain connotations, science dispenses with them. They arise principally from social standing (e.g., vulgar, technical, archaic, learned) and local origin (foreign, hayseed, Anglicism) of the users and combinations of these (foreign, learned, vulgar, slang) (152-154): Their varieties are countless and indefinable (tabu, improper, ominous, objects or acts with improper or technical terms); in content, reference and mode of speaking (intense, animated, symbolic, onomatopoetic, infantile, pet-name) or lacking reference (nonsense-forms) (Bloomfield 1933:154-157). 9.22 Grammatical Forms. [Prenote: Descriptive Structuralism is frequently referred to as Binarist. This orientation is its strength and weakness. The strength resides in elementary calculability, an impersonal, objective, exhausting of possibilities: given any A, B pair, however defined, the presence or absence of a value for each, however defined, can be calculated. With values of + or -: A: + - + B: + + - There can be no other combination. Its weakness is identical with that of Plato's technique of the Division: in the conceptual world, we rarely know enough about any pair to establish exclusive values beyond the most generic; in the empirical world, factual relations are just as complex. A result we can mark as ± seems to be able to handle heads-or-tails in tossing coins, but they can land on edge. 9.23 Stable States. Synchronic linguistic description proceeds on the counter-factual assumption of constant and stable forms paired with meanings within an unchanging speech-community, signaled through linguistic forms containing a discrete number of combinable phonemic contrasts. Experience shows the fundamental assumption (144) of linguistics must be modified: `In a speechcommunity some utterances are alike or partly alike in sound and meaning' (Bloomfield 1933:159). Some forms are never observable in isolated utterance. This justifies the distinction of free and bound forms, when both are establishable as linguistic forms. Constructed linguistic forms have at least two, so A linguistic form which bears a partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to some other linguistic form is a complex form and the common parts are constituents or components (160), said to be contained in (or included in, or to enter into) the complex
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form, while `A linguistic form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form is a simple form or morpheme (161). The last forms distinguishable by analysis are the ultimate constituents, but the most obvious ones, discovered by a similar analysis, are the immediate constituents, so poor John ran away immediately yields poor John as one IC and ran away as the other IC; poor John yields Ics poor and John, while ran away has ran and away as Ics; the ultimate constituents are poor, John, ran, a- and way, since the other forms are morphemes or simple forms, but away is complex (161). 9.24 Basic and Modified Meaning. The meaning of a morpheme is a sememe, constant, definite, discrete from all other sememes: the linguist can only analyze the signals, not the signalled, so that is why linguistics must start from the phonetics, not the semantics, of language. The total stock of morphemes is a language's lexicon (162). But it is not the total stock of its signals. In Poor John ran away we distinguish other signals, grammatical arrangements of: (1) Order, (2) Modulation (secondary phonemes), (3) Phonetic modification (change in primary phonemes as in run/ran), and (4) Selection of form combinations (163-165). A simple feature of grammatical arrangement is a taxeme; meaningful units of grammatical form are tagmemes and their meanings are called episememes. Tagmemes can consist of several taxemes (166). Statements of its lexical and grammatical forms completely describe an utterance (167). The grammatical forms are no exception to the necessary principle strictly speaking, we should call it an assumption that a language can convey only such meanings as are attached to some formal feature: the speakers can signal only by means of signals . . . a linguistic form, as actually uttered, always contains a grammatical form. (168) So grammatical forms can be grouped into three great classes: (1) a form uttered alone appears in some sentence-type; (2) forms uttered together as constituents of a complex form make up a construction by the grammatical features by which they are combined, and (3) forms spoken as substitutes for a whole class are substitutions. 9.25 Sentence Types. Order can imply (but is not exhausted by) position, which can be functional; a form alone is in absolute position, with another, in included position. Sentences relate through order, position, and, within a sentence, are distinguished by modulation, paratactic arrangement, and features of selection (170-71). Languages show full and minor sentence types distinguished by taxemes of selection. Favorite forms are usually full; commonly distinguished are actor-action (statement or question) and commands. Languages vary as to favorite sentence-types. Bipartite favorites are commonly called predications,
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with an object-like subject and predicate. Predications can be distinguished as narrative vs equational (Russian) or add other kinds of narratives, actor-action, goal-action, instrument-action, place-action (Tagalog) (172-174). Minor sentences tend to be completive or exclamatory (176). Selective features eliminate bound forms as sentences; forms which occur as sentences are free; a free form, consisting entirely of two or more lesser free forms is a phrase. A free form which is not a phrase is a word (177-178). 9.26 Words. Since the word is a free form, freedom of occurrence largely determines our attitude toward parts of a language. But even with our typographic conventions, we are inconsistent in distinguishing words and phrases, and in other languages, it is difficult to keep them apart. We appeal to parallelism to establish, e.g., English the as a free form, compared to this and that, French je compared to moi, though the and moi rarely occur freely. (178-179) Borderline cases include compound words (blackbird) and uninterruptible phrase-words (devil-may-care) (180). Word-unity is approximately secured in languages in various ways, including stress, freedom from insertion, ability to be uttered alone, vowel harmony within the word but not across words, permissible brevity or length, and restrictions on modulations or phonetic modifications for compounds (180-183). 9.27 Syntax. Grammar deals with constructions under morphology and syntax, and syntax takes as its constructions those in which none of the immediate constituents is a bound form. The free forms (words and phrases) of a language appear in larger free forms (phrases), arranged by taxemes of modulation, phonetic modification, selection and order. Any meaningful, recurrent set of such taxemes is a syntactic construction. (184) Sandhi is the label for features of modulation and phonetic modification important to many syntactic structures (186); selection delimits form-classes, and large classes subdivide (190); a narrower type of selection is agreement, of which congruence or concord are simple forms (191); another is government, which can control the syntactic position of a form (192); yet another is cross-reference in which `subclasses contain an actual mention of the forms with which they are joined' (193) (cf. nonstandard English `Joan, her knife', standard French `Jean, ou est-il?', Latin cantat (`he/she sings') has substitutive mention of the actor. 9.28 Forms Resultant from Free Forms. Free forms combining can be said to produce a resultant phrase, of which the form-class of one member may be determinative of the phrase's grammatical behavior: in such a case, the construction is called endocentric, otherwise, it is exocentric when the phrase or construction does not follow the grammatical behavior of either constituent (194). This can distinguish coordinate and subordinate constructions (195). The form-classes of syntax are best described in terms
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of word-classes, since it is impossible to set up a consistent scheme of parts of speech, because word-classes overlap and cross each other (196). 9.29 Order Is most important in languages, grammatically and/or stylistically. French has a complicated and rigid system of ordering certain substitute (conjunct) accompaniments of its verbs: (197-198): (1) actors such as je, il, ils, on, ce (2) negative adverb ne (3) farther goals of first and second persons, such as me, vous, se (4) nearer goals such as me, vous, se, le, les (5) farther goals of third person, lui, leur (6) adverb y (7) adverb en For example: (1-2-3-4) il me ne le donne pas (1-3-6-7) il m'y en donne (1-4-5)
on le lui donne
(1-2-6-7) il n'y en a pas
(`he does not give it to me') (`he gives me some of it there') (`one gives it to him') (`there aren't any') [literally, (`it has not of them there')].
9.30 Parts of Speech. IE is peculiar in having many parts of speech. Most languages show a smaller number, and in such languages, syntactic formclasses tend to appear in phrases rather than words: Chinese is the classic example (198-199). In Tagalog, the `parts of speech' are, as in Chinese, full word and particle. Agreement about what constitutes legitimate (1) data, (2) evidence, and (3) goals in a discipline results in clarity. Disagreement or confusion about elemental (1), (2) or (3) can pass unnoticed in seeming agreements at higher levels, or lead to reasonable suspicion that some quite literally do not know what they are talking about. A most profitable question is invariably: `Am I confused?' 9.31 Binarism Revisited. Ambiguous or inadequate elements in combination compound ambiguity or inadequacy. Clarity about the ambiguity or limitation of elements allows us to evaluate their manipulation. The calculation of ± combinations for pairs showed what an arbitrary system is NOT, as we have been using that term: `a finite number of elements in a finite number of combinations', since all combinations are displayed. Systematicity comes from constraints on random combination. Collections are random in the sense that they display, as a state, process or action, any combination as equally likely. Below, in column A, is the calculation of possible pair combinations with which we started; in columns I-IV, four restricted combinations decided to be permissible. Permissible = valid in I, II, III, IV, printed in bold face; dotted
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Page 303 lines are invalid. Validity here is determined only by stipulation, i.e. convention or agreement, as in making up the rules of a new game: A I
II
III
IV
AB
AB
AB
AB
AB
++
++
++
... ...
++
+-
... ...
+-
+-
... ...
-+
... ...
-+
-+
-+
--
... ...
... ...
... ...
--
9.32 Structure, Pattern, Design. The columns can be viewed as patterns or forms; Column A shows what columns I-IV have in common. Columns I-IV define themselves and each other by their selection of a conventional restriction upon column A; they can be viewed as four different games, four different forms, four distinct ways of organizing the same material. Or, to test the bases of their clear distinction, compare Sapir's four concept types: does this kind of scheme adequately represent their contrasts? Does it make a difference what one assumes to be basic? 9.33 A Priori vs A Posteriori. Two expressions often used to disparage others' work and invite approbation of one's own are a priori (usually bad) and a posteriori (usually good). With reference to this schema, they can be illustrated: By simply stipulating or proclaiming beforehand the form of these games, we operate a priori; our procedure may be said to have resulted, not from experience, but from (a) some vantage prior to (priori) or independent of, experience. We could say we deduced some of the patterns latent in, intelligible about, selected from, column A, as from something given. But if we had first examined 100 games, and then decided they differ only through the patterns in columns I-IV, our procedure is called a posteriori; from (a) a vantage posterior to (posteriori) and not independent of, experience. We could say that we induced the information contained in columns I-IV. Column A represents a generalization derived from columns I-IV. 9.34 Rationalists and Empiricists. Bloomfield insisted that the only useful generalization about language was an inductive generalization (20). Language studies are distinguished from each other as employing predominantly inductive or deductive approaches. The a priori or deductive approach has been said to impose structure upon data; the a posteriori or inductive approach is claimed to discover structure in data.
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At the extremes of debate, empiricists accuse rationalists of proceeding a priori; of deducing what should be induced, of imposing organization rather than discovering data that is organizable; of illegitimately presupposing column A instead of gathering evidence from columns I-IV, then summarizing that evidence as a statistical statement in column A. They argue that game 101 may violate Column A. Rationalists accuse empiricists of assuming that there are such things as bare facts. They see legitimate data as facts suspected of realizing rationally determinate patterns like column A. They hold facts are only facts in light of some theory; to proceed without a shared theory results in blind men's elephant tales with no hope of falsification except from outside the system perhaps from the sighted theorist, whose vision is at worst derided by the blind as illusion, or at best conceded to have its own kind of interest, but inadmissable because it is nonempirical. Rationalists see statistical summaries of blind findings as representing disjointed collections, instead of the real unit-elephant one can see. Real unit-elephants are beyond the empirical discoveries of a blind investigator, individually, or in a group: space and time conspire to keep the constituents of the unity as discrete objects of distinct empirical observations. What counts as data and evidence for their goal dictates a method that makes it impossible in principle to discover real unit-elephants. To `take someone's word for it' is to accept subjective experience instead of empirical evidence. Both empiricists and rationalists should be in complete agreement that theories can be defined as subjective; that some subjective experience cannot be considered scientific evidence at all; that it is safer to agree on what empirical evidence makes public rather than share only a consistent but subjective theory; that empirical evidence is preferable to rational consistency without it. They disagree about the reality or reductive objectivity of subjective experience. 9.35 Binarism and Constituency. The ± combinations in any of the columns above can be described exactly to anyone's satisfaction, empirically or rationally. For some, structural description was synonymous with linguistic science. It guaranteed, perhaps constituted, the autonomy of linguistics as a science. It was to involve no disputed psychological or other theories. It might support or undermine some theory, but its findings were empirical, objective, public, falsifiable, independent, scientific. The demand for explanation, once exhaustive and objective description had been provided, was taken to be childish or unthinking. Having described Columns I-IV (now viewed as a bit of language) all one could expect had already been accounted for. Even the rationalist consensus was that the reason for some constraints rather than others was the arbitrary, conventional nature of language. Explanation beyond that (like questions about the origin of language) were considered matter of subjective speculation. The topic of the origin of language was proscribed as a scientific question as early as the
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late 19th century by the Linguistic Circle of Paris, a city where even wine has ranked second in importance to speculation since its university records began. 9.36 Valid. What is of linguistic interest about columns I-IV is the fact that these are the formulae for symbolic logical representation of some familiar structures in language. When the usual p and q (different propositions) are substituted for A and B, then the ± values involved determine logical validity, and that is intimately connected to logical truth. There are, however, some interesting anomalies between the mathematical (or symbolic) and the linguistic interpretations to be assigned. Column I says that conjoined propositions (p + q) are validly linked if both propositions are +, otherwise the conjunction is invalid. A reasonable interpretation of that says that a pair of true statements make a compound true statement only when both parts are true. Column II says that an alternation of propositions (p V q) is valid if at least one of them is +, otherwise it is invalid. This can be interpreted as saying that if you are looking for one true statement in a pair, one must be true; and if both are false, there is no alternation of true or true-and-false statements. Column III says that a disjunction of propositions (p V q) is valid if only one is +, and invalid if both are + or -. This can be interpreted as saying that if only one of a pair of statements is allowed to be true, then a pair of trues or falses is not a disjunction. q), a relationship logicians call a material implication, since it is defined Column IV gives the rules for a valid implication (p on formal grounds: an implication is valid if the first (the antecedent p) is - or the second (the consequent q) is +. Its linguistic interpretation is often counter-intuitive: If he's a heavyweight contender, then I'm the Queen of Sheba is valid (since the antecedent is -), and so is If it is always over 100° at the North Pole, then water is H2O (since the consequent is +). Recognizing that ambiguity arises from assigning interpretations to these elements, rather than from their relationships, we can evaluate their manipulation. Ordinary language contrasts `A and B' to `A but B': He is a pain and I like him to He is a pain but I like him is logically symbolized as (p + q), so that formula is less nuanced than ordinary language. `A or B is true' and `Either A or B is true' might contrast with, or be the same as in ordinary language, where adding `but not both' to either verbalization makes the options unambiguous. 9.37 Correct. Truth is not popularly distinguished from validity, but validity can be viewed as subsuming true and correct. E.g. statements are true, calculations correct: the correct mathematical mean for families might be 31/2 persons, but cannot be true of a real family. Validity is often said to be a formal consideration, truth a material matter, and pre-symbolic work
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distinguished material from formal logic on that basis. Ambiguity results when formal and material aspects are confused. Constituency relations allow the representation of level upon level of linguistic constraints within a language. Some can be precisely represented in symbolic notation: just as (p + q) represents a simple conjunction, so can the most complex construction involving conjoined restrictions be clearly symbolized. Interplay of conjunction, alternation, disjunction or implication among restrictions, once understood, may be symbolized and related by rules, so in [((p v q) V (p + q)) + (p v q)] = (p + q), the conjunction rule for the final expression (p + q) is still the straightforward one in Column I. 9.38 Suggestive Symbols. Formulations using parentheses and various kind of brackets are not as easy to read as a Platonic either-or tree. Trees show everything noted at a single glance; parentheses and brackets require left-to-right processing with careful, repeated checks to be sure of what the scope of inclusion is. Bloomfield's insight into the isomorphism of linguistic forms, form-classes, substitutes and mathematical clarity (147) is relevant here. Unity or equality can be expressed in many complex ways: mathematical operations can cancel each other, and the most complicated results, divided etc. by themselves, return us to unity. The use of symbolic notation is no guarantee of validity, truth, nor even of relevance, only of ready internal clarity and simplicity in calculating: this is a powerful tool. But we need to know what it is that we are counting, and why, and whether it is relevant to the problem at hand. Empiricists are correct in pointing out that rational schemes can be seductive in their consistency: as elegant as they may be, they may have little relation to the concrete. This was the objection to the genealogical tree-display of language families: trees suggest Platonic either-ors; facts are more like both-ands. 9.39 Notation and Insight. Notation may accidentally supply insight from the perspective it forces upon us. One convention uses the symbol v for disjunction. There is a difference between expressing disjunction as He is my father or mother and He is either my father or my mother. Alternatively, otherwise tidy notation may be incapable of handling an elementary linguistic distinction. As noted, these differ in obvious ways:
She is lovely
since
he loves her
and
he loves her
nevertheless
he loves her
yet all three can be symbolized identically in logical notation as p + q. The three are conjunctions, but since and nevertheless add relationships beyond the bare linkage dealt with in logic. Bloomfield alludes to a comparable difference in distinguishing denotation (146) from connotations (151-157 et passim), noting that science does without connotations; Sapir approached it
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by distinguishing concrete from pure relational concepts, but both apply to words within a sentence, while and contrasts with since and nevertheless in the way they operate between sentences. And is closest to Sapir's pure relational, since and nevertheless to his concrete-relational types, but none of these expressions is usefully approached by distinguishing sense and reference comparable to the traditional signification vs. consignification appropriate to nominals and verbals. Their function in ordinary language is quite different, as Bloomfield's discussion of function in Postulates 29 ff. suggests. Similarly, If dogs are inanimate, I'm a monkey's uncle or If dogs are inanimate, I am me equally exemplify a valid formula (for Material Implication) in logic, but are no truer than that most of us come from a family of three and a half members, as calculation of the mathematical mean rather than the mode for an entire population might correctly conclude. Depending on how, or whether, the parameters under (a), (b), (c) have been differentiated, defined or identified, statements about meanings that might be formulated in a notation like this can be more or less clear or ambiguous. It is a profitable exercise to reformulate observations in terms of compatible and incompatible systems. 9.40 Form-Classes and Lexicon. This chapter neatly summarizes Bloomfield's insights into structural signalling: Some elements of language have meaning, some merely distinguish meanings; meanings are of various types, and the lexicon and grammar deal with two distinct ones. Some of Bloomfield's technical vocabulary did not prosper (phememe, glosseme, sememe etc.) and that is regrettable. The hierarchic scheme into which they enter is a neat and suggestive way of registering opposition and subordination among terms about meaning. Had he interpreted the traditional parts-of-speech definitions in the same way, a surprising congruence could have resulted. Taking the definitions positively, traditional grammarians expected languages to conceive and name things in IE categories (thing-quantity-property-active-passive-relation, etc.). Amerindian study showed this apparently did not happen. But seen as structural oppositions, the traditional definitions are concerned with ways of signaling, not directly with the ways things being signaled are. Investigating the connections was the point of the Modistae's work. Bloomfield ridiculed the `person, place or thing' definition of Noun because for over a century science had been telling us that fire is a process or action, not a thing. Of course. But knowing better need not lead to a change of linguistic habits, as Bloomfield's own use of nominal forms like action and process in his uncomprehending rejection shows. Neither he nor physicists using an IndoEuropean language could have expressed it otherwise, while Sapir reported (1921.134ff) Nootka might have to say It is burning (like It buffaloes) rather than There is a fire (or There is a buffalo). No one wholly ignorant of concrete conditions survives for long. Nominal and verbal oppositions can turn on equally, often identical, concrete referents.
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The Modistae's effort was to distinguish (a) from (b) from (c), yet relate the differences of concrete things from concrete signals from concrete concepts. 9.41 Written Records. The other chapters of Bloomfield's book are only tinged with his originality as he surveyed the findings of predecessors and contemporary linguists. There is not an idle word in it. But the facts are too many to recount. Perhaps he sensed enough had been made of the behaviorist perspective in his Chapter 17, Written Records. Rewording the history of writing in behaviorist terms must have been an obvious temptation, and the account could have been quite illuminating, as his brief suggestions about how to describe the behavior called `Reading' demonstrate in Chapter 28. The importance of that has obvious implications for Chapter 18, The Comparative Method since, contrary to his relativist, particularist, preference, there is a problem to be solved in the universality of phonemes, morphemes, and the like. Characteristically, his caution suggests that we not take reconstructed forms literally, and Schmidt's Wave Theory is appreciated as behaviorally more likely than the by then traditional family-tree image of linguistic relationships. 9.42 Dialect Geography (Chapter 19) neatly fits his behavioral concept of Speech-Communities. Both dialect and genetic relationship become clearer on a stimulus-response view of geographic and social contiguity. Neither he nor those whose work he reports on Phonetic Change (Chapter 20) offer explanations. The already obvious facts are covered by descriptive labels for observed changes (e.g. environmental phonetic assimilation, palatalization, compensatory lengthening and simplification). It may be a quasiexplanation to redescribe attested changes as results of a preference for one over another non-distinctive option which later becomes distinctive, possibly on the grounds of communicative efficiency or internal pattern pressure. The title of Chapter 22, Fluctuation in the Frequency of Forms could prepare us to expect an objective, statistically refined account of Behavior in Speech Communities rather than subjective assumptions about correct ways of saying things, subverted by carelessness or ignorance. Caring and not caring are quite properly values imposed on behaviors. The two accounts are not mutually exclusive. Chapters 23 and 24, Analogic Change and Semantic Change continue the same point of view: it stresses the organic nature, or ecological continuity among environment, language and behavior, where mentalists stress points of discontinuity. But since language is the common resource for communicating the discontinuities, they are less pervious to an empirical investigation that takes language as an autonomous object. There is such a wealth of observational fact, that great service is done by cataloguing, distinguishing and labelling the various phenomena involved. Particularly important is the structural concept of conflicting forms which
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underlies ideas about basic and derived. Viewed as process the perspective most appropriate to diachronic study rather than problematic value-conflicts more appropriate to the state-view of synchronic work, a good deal becomes clearer: broadening, widening, metaphor and degeneration can all be illumined from the behaviorist's objective account. 9.43 Borrowing. Cultural Borrowing, Intimate Borrowing and Dialect Borrowing (Chapters 25-27) follow this same approach, providing an objective way of describing linguistic and cultural contact, influence and evaluation. Here the empiricist's approach is demonstrably superior to that of a putative rationalist who might be content with facile value judgements. It is interesting that Bloomfield, like Durkheim, stresses that the key to effective change or preservation of the status quo is prestige rather than factual arrangements. One of the hopes of earlier work was for a linguistic typology which would justify assumptions about cultural inferiority or superiority. This could result from an historical demonstration that IE languages started from great, and had arrived at just about perfect, while less fortunate cultures could be registered somewhere on lower rungs of the ladder. 9.44 Bloomfield's Conclusions. His last chapter, Applications and Outlook challenges the smugness he found in mentalist establishment attitudes Bloomfield would probably not have dignified those attitudes with the word thought, had he believed in it manifested in contemporary educational disasters. Children cannot read. Native Language instruction is irrational and wasteful. Foreign Language teaching is in the hands of those ignorant of the subject. He probably won few friends among academic administrators by such observations. He concludes by saying that Linguistic findings are modest so far. But they share scientific method, therefore scientific promise. Language is the key for the `understanding and control of human events' (509). The concept of understanding can be illuminated by behavioral description, but discussion of control by Behaviorists is as frightening to those convinced of the fragility of conditions permitting self-determination as it is paradoxical within the logic of Behaviorism. 9.45 Bloomfield's Influence. The objectivity Bloomfield advocated in his general writings and exemplified in particular descriptions has been of enormous influence. It was neither his discovery nor unique contribution, but the totality of his work inculcated such a healthy respect for fact over fancy among scholars, that other issues are submerged as unimportant. His taxonomy of linguistic facts with appropriate labels and hierarchic relations has long been a solid frame into which novel language data can be reliably translated. The predominantly descriptive goal Bloomfield set for Linguistics has been labelled mere taxonomy. Mere denotes nothing, but forcefully connotes
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an unfavorable evaluation. It informs the hearer about an attitude of the user, not directly about facts. But goals have changed names in linguistics. Discovery procedures have lost prestige. In their place one finds procedures identical in form, (i.e. in assumption-type, not material object) but not labelled as mechanical or merely taxonomic. The goal is said to be explanation rather than mere description. But without objective description, the need for, or possibility of, explanation does not exist. Note 1. Bloomfield 1914:315-319: Boas, Franz. 1911. Handbook of the American Indian Languages, Part I, Washington. Bréal, M. 1908. Essai de Sémantique, fourth edition, Paris. [An English translation of third (1897) ed. by Mrs. H. Cust appeared in London 1900.] Brugmann, K. 1904. Kurze vergleichende Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen. Strassburg. and Delbrück, R. Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, 1886-1900 and many editions. English translation in four volumes by J. Wright, R.S. Conway, and W.A. Rouse: Elements of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages. New York (Westermann) 1888-1895. Delbrück, R. 1908. Grundfragen der Sprachforschung. Strassburg. . 1901. Einleitung in das Studium der indogermanischen Sprachen. Fifth edition, Leipzig Finck, F.N. 1909. Die Sprachstämme des Erdkreises. Leipzig. . 1910. Die Haupttypen des Sprachbaues. Leipzig. Greenough, J.B., and G.L. Kittredge. 1901. Words and their Ways in English Speech. New York: Macmillan. Jespersen, Otto. 1894. Progress in Language, with Special Reference to English. London. 1905. . 1913. Growth and Structure of the English Language. Leipzig . Lehrbuch der Phonetik. Second edition, Leipzig and Berlin. Lloyd, R.J. 1899. Northern English: Phonetics, Grammar, Texts. Leipzig. Marret, R.R. 1911. Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston and London. Meillet, Antoine. 1913. Introduction a l'Étude Comparative des Langues IndoEuropéennes. Third edition, Paris. Oertel, H. 1902. Lectures on the Study of Language. New York: Scribner. Passy, Paul. 1913. Petite Phonétique comparée. Second edition, Leipzig and Berlin. Paul, Hermann. 1909. Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte. Fourth edition, Halle. [English adaptation of the second 1886 edition is Strong, Logeman and Wheeler: Introduction to the Study of the History of Language. London. 1886.] Sweet, Henry. [undated]. New English Grammar. [two volumes.] Anglo-Saxon Primer. Eighth edition. Anglo-Saxon Reader. Eighth edition. A Second Anglo-Saxon Reader: Archaic and Dialectal. First Middle English Primer. Second edition. 1900. Second Middle English Primer: Extracts from Chaucer. Second edition. 1906. A Primer of Phonetics. Third edition, Oxford. A Primer of Spoken English. Fourth edition, Oxford. Sievers, Eduard. 1901. Grundzüge der Phonetik. Fifth edition, Leipzig. Whitney, D.W. 1867. Language and the Study of Language. New York: Scribner. 1875. The Life and Growth of Language. New York: Appleton. Wundt, W. 1911. Völkerpsychologie, 1. und 2. Band, Die Sprache. Third edition, Leipzig. [See Bloomfield's 1913 review in Hockett 1970.39-43] 1901. Sprachgeschichte und Sprachpsychologie. Leipzig.
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Reading Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. pp ix + 564. [7 Reviews in Hockett 1970.25780.] Chomsky, Noam. 1959. Review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language.35.26-58. Supplementary Reading Bloomfield, Leonard. 1914. An Introduction to the Study of Language. New York. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. pp. x+335. $1.75. [3 reviews in Hockett 1970.45-60; reprint: Amsterdam. Benjamins. 1982. pp. x+355. paper $27.00.] 1930. A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language. Language 2.153. In Hockett 1970.128-38. Hockett, Charles, ed. 1970. A Bloomfield Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. xxix+553. [Bibliography xixxxix; Hockett on Implication of B's Algonquian studies (495-511); Moulton on B. as Germanist (512-23); Obituaries & anecdotes (513-53).] Esper, Erwin Allen. 1968. Mentalism and Objectivism in Linguistics. New York. Elsevier. 1973. Analogy and Association in Linguistics and Psychology. Athens. University of Georgia. pp. 231; bibliog 205-16. Hull, Clark. 1943. Principles of Behavior: An Introduction to Behaviorist Theory. New York. Appleton, Century, Crofts. pp. 442. Ions, Edmund. 1977. Against Behaviourism: Critique of Behavioural Science. Oxford. Blackwell. Koffka, Kurt, J.E. Anderson et al. 1927. The Unconscious, a Symposium. New York. Knopf. pp. 260. Mowrer, Orval Hobart. 1960. Learning and the Symbolic Processes. New York. Wiley. pp. 473. Nye, Robert D. 1981. Three Psychologies: Freud, Skinner and Rogers. 2nd ed. Monterey. Brooks/Cole (1975). pp. 192. Skinner, Burrhus Frederic. 1953. Science and Human Behavior. New York. Free Press. 1971. 1957. Verbal Behavior. New York. Appleton, Century, Crofts. pp. 478 1974. Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York. Knopf. pp. 225. 1978. About Behaviorism. New York. Knopf. pp. 256; bibilog. 253-56. Watson, John Broadus. 1928. The Ways of Behaviorism. New York. Harper and Row. pp. 144.
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10 Malinowski and Firth 10.00 Bloomfield and Sapir were agreed that linguistic study of Speech uncovers the form of Language. In quite different senses, both could be said to consider that study of language reveals a determinant of the form of mind. Sapir devoted comparatively more attention to the interdependence of Language and Culture. More than Sapir, Bloomfield found linguistic form definable in positive physical terms, negatively in behavioral or psychological ones. Since mental structures were as physical for Bloomfield as things outside, he faulted Sapir's conceptual account of speakers' `insides'. Those insides cannot be autonomous. They simply must be subject to the same laws as those outside a head, though more difficult to observe. Yet his brief review of Sapir's Language conceded that there was no other way of talking about such things to a general audience in 1921 (see Hockett 1965.91ff). So if it is only a plausible metaphor to say there is an (a) science like Mentalist Psychology to study that particular part of the world which is located at (A), there is no real harm in calling Behaviorism a separate science (B), and Linguistics yet another science (C). The subterfuge could conceal from us that real Science must be Unified Science perhaps worth calling Science (D) with (a) (b) (c) as subsets. For the time being, linguistics might use psychological, inside, methods and terms, which are reducible in Science (B) anyway, and that is why Bloomfield could say we `must act as though' all findings from (A) and (B) are in, or imminent. The linguistics of J.R. Firth is an attempt to study (a), (b), and (c) more as a unified, interdependent complex, rather than as independent elements related in unspecified ways. That makes linguistics a single discipline, the object of which involves the triad (a)-(b)-(c). Another conception of that totality, trying to do professional justice to its hitherto distinguished aspects, is found in concepts Bronislaw Malinowski developed for anthropology. 10.01 Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942). Malinowski was a facile polyglot rather than a linguist. He early acquired a knack for languages from his father (a pioneer in Polish language and dialects) and from his multilingual mother (in Mediterranean travel after his father's early death). He first studied physical sciences, but read omnivorously. To master English, he read Frazer's 1890 Golden Bough, and was intrigued, as his publications show, by its account of the evolution of magical, through religious, to scientific thought, from primitive to modern societies:
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For no sooner had I begun to read this great work, than I became immersed in it and enslaved by it. I realized then that anthropology, as presented by Sir James Frazer, is a great science, worthy of as much devotion as any of her elder and more exact sister-sciences, and I became bound to the service of Frazerian anthropology. (Malinowski 1948.72) Malinowski won his Ph.D. in 1908 with the highest honors in the then Austrian Empire. After two years of postdoctoral studies at Leipsig (economics with Bücher, psychology with Wundt), he enrolled in the new program in Anthropology at the London School of Economics, and was awarded its doctorate in 1916 for his 1913 Family Among the Australian Aborigines. Meanwhile, he published extensively in English and Polish, notably book reviews on topics anthropologically alien, but later incorporated into his own theories. These publications made of him a sort of interdisciplinary ambassador for Anthropology. His Trobriand Island research (1915-16, 1917-18) gave him international stature, materials for years of publications, and data for much of his theoretical work. He seems rarely to have made a neutral impression. People were attracted or repelled in about equal force and numbers, in private or professional life. For example, though technically an enemy alien during World War I, the Australian Government helped finance his Trobriand research. He published constantly, is reckoned a founder of Social Anthropology, popularized it worldwide as the functional study of culture real people satisfying vital needs. In the process, he was the teacher of most British and Commonwealth workers in that field between the two World Wars. His theoretical standing is debated. 10.02 Eclecticism. Malinowski adapted insights from diverse scholars to form his original synthesis. Influences he explicitly mentioned include Frazer (but not his determinist, evolutionary, ideas), Durkheim (while rejecting his abstractionism), Freud (though he much modified the pansexual), and Hull (but without the mechanist side of his Behaviorism). What he drew from them were holistic, internal-defining, as opposed to external-imposed, structural conceptions, such as those de Saussure expressed so well for language. But abstractions like de Saussure's langue or Durkheim's collective conscience were counter to his professed concern for empirical data. Critics see his terminological shifts as evidence either of inconsistency or an ability to adapt to new evidence. He modified earlier assumptions about cultural superiority. His early titles had `savage' or 'primitive' labels. His views about societies in the 1923 Ogden and Richards Supplement are not those of his 1935 Coral Gardens. His Encyclopedia Britannica article on Anthropology (13th ed., suppl., 1926.133), stressed functionalist assumptions: ...in every type of civilization, every custom, every material object, idea and belief fulfills some vital function, has some task to accomplish, represents an indispensable part within a working whole.
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His posthumous Scientific Theory of Culture (1944) laid out relations among things and thought. Needs for individual survival (like food or air) differ from those required in group behavior. Values set by the group are embodied in symbols that demand, prohibit, or tolerate different responses, facilitating social evaluation. These needs, in his view, are: ...the system of conditions in the human organism, in the cultural setting, and in the relation of both to the natural environment, which are sufficient and necessary for the survival of group and organism. A need, therefore, is the limiting set of facts. Habits and their motivations, the learned responses and the foundations of organization, must be so arranged as to allow the basic needs to be satisfied. (1944.90) Sapir pointed out the function of language as a substitute for symbolic action, Malinowski stressed biological determinants of cultural activities, and the delicate hierarchy of primary, derived, and integrative needs. When primary needs are frustrated, cultural change is imminent. Optional satisfaction of derived needs allows individual diversity; a tolerably similar and cohesive world-view even one embodying beliefs strange to us is a condition for group stability. The complexities with which he dealt are reflected in divergent views of Malinowski's work in Man and Culture (R. Firth 1957). This book evaluates Malinowski's personal and scientific standing, his concepts of culture, law, kinship, magic and religion, economics, social systems and change, needs, the conduct of field work, and analysis of language. Those views are not as simple as (a), (b), (c). 10.03 Purpose and Culture. The defense of teleology in culture (`some task to be accomplished') is not dominant in Malinowski's writings. But it was just that theme in Darwin's evolutionary hypotheses that critics found a backward step in natural science. It might have been explained by distinguishing inanimate nature and social reality, or by suggesting that society's purposes are no more or less inexplicable than its social contract. Malinowski might have said it was just a manner of speaking, as Bloomfield's review of Sapir's Language held. While psychologizing was not scientifically respectable, it was the only way of talking about language generally understood. ((1922), Hockett 1965. 91ff) In either case, it is worth recalling our earlier discussion of the nature of explanation which empirical science sought to replace, and weigh whether Malinowski's Functionalism was retrograde or compatible with either. 10.04 Description and Explanation. Western thought long accepted one basic conception of explanation from Aristotle: complete understanding of something resulted when its four causes were known. The four were labelled material, formal, final, and efficient causes. Cause is an analogical term in these four collocations. Aside from substituting matter for the first, and structure, pattern or function for the second, empirical science found little use for the other two.
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A familiar notion of cause was efficient cause. Its clearest example was deliberate human initiation of change, observable in common experience. This efficient causality effects accidental changes by rearranging matter, and its products are artifacts like a better mousetrap. Whatever is capable of such (re)formation is then viewed as material cause, its structure or arrangement as a formal cause, and the end or purpose of the artifact as its final cause. When dealing empirically with actual material instead of ideal matter, and with phenomena in nature rather than human products, physical sciences study a different object than metaphysical `sciences'. Until well into the modern era, as suggested in Chapter 9, philosophic was the prestige expression and the method most comparable to what would be called scientific today, particularly when applied to explanation. None of these causes is directly experienced in what we see, feel or hear. Yet sense data is what all humans have in common. Their subjective mental worlds may seem either irreconcilable or incommunicable. They are acknowledged to be inaccessible externally in any account. Mental cause may effect subjective conviction, but empirical causes are expected to produce results anyone can observe. It would be retrograde to look for scientific explanation outside the system empirical science has established. So its legitimate data must be sensible: evidence must be empirical; explanation is or involves predictive success for observable cooccurence. From the empirical point of view, traditional notions of cause are not objects for experiment or observation, but for philosophic conjecture. Human purposes and responsibility are extrasystemic considerations in natural science. Their composition, distribution or function are not empirical objects. Traditional discussion dwelt more on the composition of these concepts, their distribution and function. As structurally determined and mutually defining elements of intelligibility, they are very much intrasystemic factors when description is held to be different from explanation. So a curious tension arises when rival approaches to the same data, with different goals, confront each other. Sometimes previously accepted causes are declared pseudo-causes; or predecessors defending them are told they have been merely describing, while successors will now explain. This is quite like the atmosphere of Jakobson's teleological phonology confrontation with phoneticians at the First International Conference of Linguists (1929): Phoneticians were informed that they had been doing the -etic donkey work of description, and the -emic work of phonological explanation in terms of function could now take over. Similar `demotions' are exemplified in the suggestion that syntax could supply the missing explanatory element in largely morphological, `mere' descriptive work; proposals that a semantic perspective can illuminate `mere' syntactic description; or that pragmatics can make `mere' abstract cognitive semantics more realistic.
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10.05 Explaining Language Use. Malinowski's functional anthropology claimed to explain what others just described poorly because they either ignored teleology, or imposed putative rational goals of Western society on a (perhaps) irrational group. His work had the generic structural stamp of working within observable data. He professed not to assume the goal is known, and to refrain from judging societies according to their approximation to it. Much of his theory about language was consistent with that orientation. So his reformulations of what to look for in language use, and how to regard it, were novel and refreshing. Some of his technical terms were often felicitous in making neglected aspects of language use obvious. Such are his use of context, meaning as function, and particularly one term he coined, phatic communion, discussed in the status of sentence and word. 10.06 Linguistic Fact. His approach to language is summed up in this single passage on what he saw as central problems in translation: It might seem that the simplest task in any linguistic enquiry would be the translation of individual terms. In reality the problem of defining the meaning of a single word and of proceeding correctly in the translation of terms is as difficult as any which will face us. It is, moreover, in methodological order not the first to be tackled. It will be obvious to anyone who has so far followed my argument that isolated words are in fact only linguistic figments, the products of an advanced linguistic analysis. The sentence is at times a self-contained linguistic unit, but not even a sentence can be regarded as a full linguistic datum. To us, the real linguistic fact is the full utterance within its context of situation. (Malinowski 1935: 1965:11) 10.07 Contextual Analysis. Society makes it easier for humans to function by integrating individuals into a group. Functions are satisfactions of human needs, some universal, some individual. Nonfunctional are objects, practices or events which satisfy no need. Language is a functional component of society, and `meaningful' to the extent that it does something about needs. Primitives, Malinowski had said (1915), have little or no need for philosophic reflection. So that cannot be an important `meaning' of language: it must be something much more pragmatic. Survivors have an elemental need to survive. They don't think much, Malinowski suggested, and if they do, they don't talk about it. An elementary need in society is cooperation and avoidance of discord. Since he found people react more to attitudinal than intellectual factors, he concluded that phatic communion would be an apt name for that language use which primarily cultivates unity, rather than imparting information. The words in Have a nice day! or Love you! might elsewhere concern facts about the world. But both expressions function commonly as just the right noises to make, given the occasion and the need for relations, casual or binding. They do not disclose genuine information. Their primary function is social.
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Given that assumption, the word, and less obviously, some sentences, are `products of sophisticated linguistic analysis'. The real linguistic datum is the sentence (more or less traditionally defined) in its context of situation, with that situation in its context of culture as its immediate physical environment. Linguistic elements are distinguishable to the extent they function have some observable effect in the overall context of cultural process. Language use is one form of cultural functioning. So translation cannot be just matching words comparable in reference, or related in sense, since both differ even among the cultural siblings of Europe: Malinowski cites as imcomparables, English honor, German Ehre, French honneur, and Spanish honra; as untranslatable, English gentleman or fair-play, German Weltschmerz, Italian bel canto and French connoisseur. (1935, 1965.12) De Saussure's distinction of signification from value and content implied just that, as did Boas' analysis of The man is sick. Sentence translation based only on grammatical approximation is insufficient: it would further obscure value vs. content differences. Of course, if translation is paraphrase and extensive commentary his own practice then it is possible. It may be better than the word-for-word procedure, but it is still only an approximation. Readers still register that information, given in their own language, against the background of a very different culture. 10.08 Abstraction. These observations remind us that the problem for any science is how abstract it can afford to be yet still remain intelligible, or how concrete it can afford to get, without getting lost in details. Malinowski: But it is easy to become redundant in commentaries and by no means obvious where to draw the line between giving too much detail on the one hand and giving an insufficient and altogether dry indication to the reader. (1935. 1965.11) His approach is intelligible, but it combines (a), (b), and (c) data without an autonomous (or even subsidiary) science (C), about whose nature or possibility we are presently concerned. (A) and (B) scientists can best judge their representation in that scheme. In more recent terms, it proposes a study of performance without one of competence; Firth assumed Malinowski rejected the comparable distinction of langue and parole: ...he explicitly dissociated himself quite early from Durkheim's philosophical basis of sociology [1913b; 1916.423.n.1]. He would have nothing to do with a collective soul and presumably had no interest in the French conception of langue as a function of the collectivité... he declared that the postulate of a collectivity was barren and absolutely useless for an ethnographic observer. (R. Firth 1957.95) Malinowski's formula for stating `meaning' is identical to the Behaviorists' (the sum of practical events preceding and following an utterance). But what actually precedes includes the speaker's and hearer's history since conception, what follows is the rest of the world's history. Restricting them verbally by
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relevant and practical specifies neither the degree of abstraction required, nor its basis, nor practical techniques for isolating them. Relevance within a field defines it: phonology's vague notion of `different in meaning' is easier to specify in speakers' overt behavior than in even briefly delayed cultural impact. His stress on the function of utterances suggests that their entire system has its ultimate cause its teleology or purpose outside an empirically observable system. Or, `meaning' in this system is equated with factors subsequent to utterance: certainly not words, nor even sentences can be assigned meaning antecedent to utterance within the logic of his approach. An autonomous science of language ought to be able to do something like that. And since Malinowski troubles to write about these things, it would seem he assumes `meaning' must have just the interpretation he rejects, or no one could understand or disagree with him. His proposal is like the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: if valid in an unqualified sense, it would either have been impossible for Sapir or Whorf to suspect it, or for anyone else to grasp what little they had understood of it. What Malinowski does, then, is simply to define the goals, scope and purposes of a study involving what interests him about language (in a nontechnical sense) and incorporate that, legitimately enough, into his ethnographic theory of Language. He described or referred to it often enough as a theory of language use. He clearly hoped it would bring to light some linguistic universals, and contribute to the understanding of human communication in general. This again raises the question of whether there can be a legitimate science of language which abstracts from its use, social or intellectual. Malinowski made an unqualified claim: Translation in the sense of defining a term by ethnographic analysis... is feasible and is the only correct way of defining the linguistic and cultural character of a word. (1935, 1965.17) 10.09 Induction and Deduction in Malinowski. In defending his originality on the role of magic and religion Malinowski had encountered in Frazer's Golden Bough, SymmonsSymonolewicz (1960: v.4.36-43) quotes from his own translation of a 1915 book of Malinowski's on the subject. This antedates both his Trobriand field work and Loisy's book, from which Radcliffe-Brown thought Malinowski had borrowed. Given previous allusions to how rationalists and empiricists can view each others' work, it is instructive to see that Malinowski intended this work to refute the `rationalistic approach to the religious phenomena' (1960.40): Man, especially primitive man who lives in a constant struggle for survival, cannot be and is not a reasonable and reasoning being... His life is mainly emotional and active, full of emotions and passions, and it is these elements that shape his whole behavior, and not a philosophical reflection... Primitive man has urgent strong needs, constant, sometimes dangerous, vital pursuits, and it is easy to show that these very elements lead him to the
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performance of such acts and activities which constitute a germ of religion. Up to this time religion appeared to be an artificial theory developed out of speculations of the primitive man... To a modern student primitive religion is not any more an artificial theory... but rather a biological necessity for the man, a result of his struggle for that existence. (1960.40-41) This raises the question of when and how insights occur. Leach (in R. Firth 1957.119ff) contradicts this early Malinowski from his reading of later texts, where he finds that It was dogma for Malinowski that all human beings are reasonable (sensibly practical) individuals (127), and that in Malinowski's attempt to impose 'rationality' upon his savages... (he found) that the Trobriander was more rational than himself. (128) Empiricism as Bloomfield presents it comes to sober inductive generalizations after all the objective facts have been so marshalled, that no other interpretation of observed co-occurrences would make sense. If Rationalist thought is exemplified in Traditional Western Grammar, to which other linguistic facts were expected to conform, its civilized consistency might tempt one to ignore, deny, or explain away any divergence as primitive approximation. But both points of departure seem complementary, when faced with the need to adapt or adopt some theory to explain the facts they describe. 10.10 Objectivity. Training must equip scientists with some system of initial categorization before experience of concrete data. For objectivity, that method must be self-correcting, as Boas' fieldwork training of others insisted. In a scientific report, we expect nothing that cannot be publicly replicated or falsified. Since few could go to the Trobriands to verify Malinowski's reports, it would seem reasonable to allow, even expect, him to mention what it was that `compels us' to correlate language and activity and what `forces us to define meaning in terms of experience and situation' (1935. 1965.9), or when it was that he began to see the need of modifying his preconceived ideas. This 1935 account of a Trobriand experience illustrates Malinowski's flair for dramatizing previously dull anthropological work: ...I realized then and there what the real function of magic is. On the psychological side it leads to a mental integration, to that optimism and confidence in the face of danger which has won to man many a battle with nature or with human foes. Socially, magic, by giving leadership to one man, establishes organization at a time when organized and effective action is of supreme importance. (1960.44, quoted from Malinowski 1935) Raymond Firth's assessment of Malinowski's theory/fact posture suggests a similar interpretation: At that time, the tradition was that an anthropologist was primarily either a theoretician or an ethnographer, and that the theory should be kept separate from the facts. It was part of Malinowski's contribution, not only to combine them, but to show how fact was meaningless without theory and how each could gain in significance by being consciously brought into relation. (R. Firth 1957:2)
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10.11 John Rupert Firth (1890-1960). Firth took a Master's degree in History and Language at the University of Leeds in 1913, and was professor of English in Punjab in 1920. At the University of London, he studied and taught Phonetics under Daniel Jones for ten years (1928-38) after which he joined the School of Oriental and African Studies. He became head of its Department of Phonetics in 1941, and, awarded the first Chair of General Linguistics in England in 1944, he and Jones were important in spreading respect for linguistics as an academic discipline. He retired in 1956. Jones, Sweet, and the empirical tradition of British scholarship were among his formative influences. Others included personal contact with Malinowski, the challenge of vindicating linguistics as a peer discipline with standard University studies, his interests in the history of linguistics, and in its autonomy as a science. The latter two help account for his anti-structuralist stance, and the development of an approach to linguistics characteristic of the London School. Aside from two popular books on general linguistic topics, his publications were mainly technical papers. But he engaged in exchange of ideas with other scholars and with his faculty, carefully monitoring their publications on topics suggested by his reflections on linguistics. Exemplification of his ideas on prosodic analysis, for instance, is found in papers by colleagues rather than in his own. He seemed to communicate best an air, an attitude, a slant, or emphasis, on the need for studying actual language in actual use, and a concern for a holistic concept of `meaning' as a modality of all levels of analysis. 10.12 Meaning. Like Malinowski's, Firth's conception of the goal of linguistics can appear romantic, impossible, self-defeating, but attractively concrete. That assessment would be inevitable if the object of linguistic analysis were an entire language. But Firth saw its data as appropriately restricted languages, dialectal or stylistic subsets within languages, or in familiar situations like preaching or military drill. Others included the situation of requesting something at table: some pout, or poke, or point; others feign terminal embarrassment and inquire lengthily about the compatibility of lofty personages with the menial work of transferring objects. In much the way that lower levels of analysis have been portrayed as subordinate to higher ones, Firth took `meaning' to be the holistic function of speech and its components: It can be described as a serial contexualization of our facts, context within context, each one being a function, an organ of a bigger context and all contexts finding a place in what may be called the context of culture. (Technique of Semantics 54) Firth prided himself on his own empiricism, and extolled that tradition in British linguistic work. The highest accolade he awards in his evaluation of Malinowski was to show that he was almost British in that regard. Like Malinowski, Firth borrowed or absorbed much from the insights of others, but dissociated himself from what he considered their unempirical and empirical failings. Malinowski's material contexts, for instance, became abstract
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categorizations for Firth; his monism was not the `foolish bogey' Firth found in the antimentalism of Bloomfieldians, but was dictated on empirical grounds, since everyone claimed to know so little about minds. (J.R.Firth 1957.7) Unlike Malinowski, he saw the need for, and set about outlining, an independent science of language. Its task was the statement of `meaning'. The levels of linguistic analysis others approached as external to, only distinctive of, or the setting for, meanings (phonetics, phonology, lexicon, morphology, syntax, situation), he proposed to regard as constructs whose function it was to allow the dispersion of unitary meaning into convenient factors for specialized study. His suggestive analogy was the prismatic dispersion of light into the distinct colors of the spectrum: linguistic theory and its categories are to solidary meaning as the prism is to light both human artifacts. Reversing perspectives guarantees `renewal of connection' with experience. 10.13 Context of Situation. Firth notes that Malinowski credits Philip Wegener (1885) as the first to propose an interesting version of a contextual approach to meaning. This required neither postulation of Durkheim's collective soul or Saussure's langue, only observation of factors individuals appreciate as institutionalized in their own society, and reinterpretation by the scientist. While Malinowski could focus on culture, the linguist must concentrate on texts. The point of departure should be institutionalized concepts found in native words and taxonomies rather than those of the investigator. Hence the importance Malinowski attached to mastering the native language, and the stress Firth laid on real rather than fanciful linguistic data. He approved of Malinowski's interest in Temple's (1899) sketch of a Universal Grammar. Malinowski borrowed the technique of interlinear glosses with extended commentaries from Temple perhaps the first and chief `linguistic' formation he acquired by the reading he reported doing in Melbourne, between his first and second visits to the Trobriands. Temple said: Of course, grammarians will know that all this is syntax, and I will now explain why I consider that it is far more important to study function than form as essential to the correct apprehension of words, and how to my mind accidence arises properly out of syntax and not the other way round, as we have all been taught. . . I found myself, in building up the theory, compelled, in order to work out the argument logically, to commence where the accepted Grammars ended, viz. at the sentence, defining the sentence as the expression of a complex meaning, and making that the unit of language. (1899a.2: in R. Firth 1957.98) J.R. Firth found Malinowski made little use of those insights and remained `reasonably traditional, but grammatically unsystematic' (R. Firth 1957.98). He agreed with Malinowski that a functional method was complementary, rather than antithetic, to the then predominant historical approach: . . . the development of descriptive linguistics on a large scale is an essential preliminary for the reformulation of problems in comparative and historical work. This could only be the
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case if . . . linguistics recognizes that its principle objective is the study of meaning in its own terms. (R. Firth 1957.100-1) That tidy distinctions between purely empirical or rational approaches are to be taken with a grain of salt emerges from his conclusion: empirical Malinowski contributed little to his Ogden/Richards Supplement goal: We need a Theory, devised for the purpose of observation of linguistic fact. This theory would give a recast of grammatical definitions, based on an analysis of meaning. It would analyze the nature of syntax, parts of speech and the formation of words, and besides giving adequate and plastic definitions would open up vistas of problems and thus guide research. . . And here, I cannot refrain from repeating a favorite quotation from Goethe: Das Höchste wäre zu begreifen, das alles Faktische schon Theorie ist. [`The most important thing is to understand that ''facts" are only "facts" in terms of a theory.'] (J.R. Firth 1957.101) 10.14 Facts. Firth's quotation from Goethe more or less repeats what Malinowski often insisted on, that facts are only facts in the light of some theory. This insight so impressed Firth that he chose it as the heading for his retrospective Synopsis of Linguistic Theory 1930-1955, published a year after his retirement. (Studies in Linguistic Analysis 1957) Firth distinguishes his situational approach from Malinowski's, Gardiner's, and Wegener's: Malinowski's was enthnographic, his own, linguistic; Gardiner's position was close to Wegener's, yet differed on the basis of its `realism'. Wegener discusses three things basic to a situation as determining what one says: (1) what there is to see, (2) what one actively recalls, and (3) concomitant awareness of one's whole state of mind. Firth's approach eliminated two elements of Wegener's triad (present recall and consciousness of personal identity) but retained `the objective situation as presented and observed', since: A serious confusion of the analysis of the context of situation with the other levels of analysis such as the grammatical level, has been one of the main weaknesses of early attempts to relate statements of meaning to other social and psychological factors. (J.R. Firth 1957.103) 10.15 Ecology. What all these approaches have in common is comparable to ecological concerns: everything interpenetrates and affects everything else. This is the essential structuralist view. In The Tongues of Men ((1937) 1964.34)), Firth used the term implications to stress solidarity among parts of Language, illustrated by Saussure-like associative relations (35), the formation of sets peculiar to personal expectations (90), Pareto's residues and derivations (96 ff.), Carnap's logical syntax (105 f.), and Whitehead's concept of mutual prehension (110f.). He finds other contextualists `did not grasp the full implications of Wegener's hints. . . A general theory such as this must include similar approaches in other branches of linguistic analysis'. (in R.Firth 1957.103)
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10.16 Firthian Contextual Analysis vs. Malinowski's. Firth denied Malinowski's techniques were linguistic analysis: This expression as used by linguists refers to highly abstract analyses of a given language usually a restricted language at the phonological level, at various grammatical levels and in the summary entries of dictionaries. Malinowski fully realized his shortcomings in linguistic analysis as we now understand it, and said so explicitly. `The analysis to which I now proceed can be given only in an approximate manner, for in a full one, a long disquisition on grammar would have to be given first.' He never managed to realize what may have been his secret ambition - a technique of analysis satisfying the demands of linguistic science. (R. Firth 1957.105-6) Malinowski's technique was to give (1) an interlinear translation that matches native words and formatives with an English `fixed equivalent', (2) a free translation, (3) a combination of (1) and (2), then (4) a detailed commentary called `the contextual specification of meaning', with phonetic and grammatical notes. Firth rejects fixed equivalents as he did the distinction of primary and derived meanings (cf. Bloomfield 1933.149ff). Collocational studies (e.g. to determine interpretations of English ass) show that word-meanings are not fixed, but context-dependent in Structures; that words derive their meanings from sentences, not vice versa; that they can be `fixed' to cover systems (as he defined structure and system) is another matter: 10.17 System and Structure. Systems of units or terms, set up by the linguist, provide sets of interior relations by means of which their values are mutually determined. In order to have validity, such systems must be exhaustive and closed, so far as the particular state of the language, suitably restricted, is under description. (R. Firth 1957.107) . . . the terms structure and system (are) distinct in technical use. Structures are abstractions from utterances or parts of utterances recorded textually. Thus CVCVC and Noun-Verb-Noun might each constitute a structure specifically defined in a particular language at the phonological and grammatical levels respectively. A structure is said to comprise elements or categories in mutual syntagmatic relation. At any given level of analysis closed systems of categories, units or terms are set up to give mutually determined values to the elements of structure. The terms of a system, or of a sub-system within it, commute, thus enabling account to be taken of the elements, constituents and features which are given order and place in structure. (R. Firth 1957.107 f.n. 1) Malinowski gave six Trobriand words `equivalent' to English garden. Firth would accept them as a lexical system. In combining free and literal translations, Malinowski makes additions, or he coordinates and subordinates sentences differently with English conjunctions which are absent or vaguely represented in native texts (1922a.458; 1935 II.38; 1957.107), a `double-entry procedure' which Firth finds the same as what is `nowadays described as the "translation meaning".' Malinowski's steps 3 and 4 concern text, not situation, and Firth denies they are based on a definite grammatical and lexicographic scheme, since the
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distinction between inclusive/exclusive plurals and duals noted elsewhere is not observed. (107 on 1922a.440) Malinowski's `contextual specification of meaning' confuses phonetics, grammar, and lexicon, plus situational factors needed to account for what he calls the `telegraphic', context-dependent, nature of the language. But for Firth: Grammar is concerned with the interrelation of categories, not of the words as such, and cannot be derived from any context other than that of grammatical analysis. (R. Firth 1957.109) He finds Malinowski's grammar notional, not linguistic. Saying a phonetic element b may connect a verb with future, or perhaps potentiality in any tense, or perhaps just give emphasis, confounds levels of analysis and does not justify the English gloss might. (Coral Gardens II.31). It is more notional than phonetic to say the sound l connotes definiteness, or `places the action into a regular past, accomplished state. . . at times only gives emphasis. . . The letter l I have rendered by the fixed meaning "did". . .' (Coral Gardens II.32) Malinowksi tacitly accepts grammatical categories as universals when he says transitive and intransitive verbs are hard to distinguish, or that passive is lacking. While he deals better with classificatory particles, he has no canonical lexical entry form (108). Malinowski knew his phonetics was superficial, but debated inconclusively with himself whether more phonetic detail might not be counterproductive. He resorts instead to impressions: `alliteration dear to. . . thumping rhythm indicated by sharp and circumflex accents. . . perfunctory performance. . . fewer melodic modulations and phonetic peculiarities. . . phonetically expressive. . . vowels with Italian values and impressive ring'. 10.18 Malinowki's Strong Points. Firth lists Malinowski's positive contributions to linguistics under four headings: I. General theory, especially his use of the concepts of context of situation and types of speech function. (Coral Gardens II.53; 1923a.475-7) II. The statement of the meaning of a word by definition with reference to culture context. III. The statement of meaning by translation. IV. The relations of (i) language and culture; and (ii) linguistics and anthropology. (110) 10.19 Constructs. Compared then to his own linguistic theory, Wegener's arealism contrasts with Gardener's and Malinowski's realist approach, and that is an oddity, given Malinowski's stress on theory. It suggests that brute facts exist independent of and prior to any statement of fact, as quoted above: `to us, the real linguistic fact is the full utterance within
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its context of situation'. Firth has thought out what he considers a defensible relation between theoretical constructs like Circle, and the data of experience stated in terms of them, e.g. Tires are circular. Apparently Malinowski had not, since Firth finds that . . . the word utterance seems to have had an almost hypnotic suggestion of reality which often misleads him into the dangerous confusion of a theoretical construct with items of experience. The factors or elements of a situation, including the text, are abstractions from experience and are not in any sense embedded in it, except perhaps in an applied scientific sense, in renewal of connection with it. (111) Firth says he first used context of situation in his Speech (1930); his more recent position makes explicit that . . . the context of situation and the notion of types of speech function are best used as schematic constructs to be applied to language events and that they are merely a group of related categories at a different level from grammatical categories but of the same abstract nature. The linguist sets up interior relations of three kinds: (1) the interior relations of elements of structure, words and other bits and pieces of the text; (2) the interior relations of systems set up to give values to elements of structure and the bits and pieces; (3) the interior relations of contexts of situation. 10.20 Context of Situation. The interior relations of the context of situation may be summarized as follows: A. The Relevant Features of participants: persons, personalities. (i) The Verbal Action of the Participants. (ii) The Non-verbal Action of the Participants B. The Relevant Objects. C. The Effect of the Verbal Action. (112) Individual situations are infinite in number and variety; typical situations have not been defined structurally. Firth found Malinowski's Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1937) was one attempt, Pareto's Sociology another, and gave an offhand list of ten factors that might be profitably considered: One method of tabulation would comprise ten entries as follows: (i) type of context of situation; (ii) type of speech function; (iii) the language text and language mechanism; (iv) the restricted language to which the text belongs; (v) the syntactical characteristics of the text (colligation); (vi) other linguistic features of the text and mechanism, including style and tempo; (vii) features of collocation; (viii) the creative effect or effective result; (ix) extended collocations and (x) memorial allusions, providing serial links with preceding or following situations. (Synopsis 1957:10)
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Firth is puzzled by Malinowski's attitude toward individual words, since his ethnographic work presupposes and demonstrates that words are institutionalized. Part of his critique might have been written by one of the Modistae: The descriptive linguist does not work in the universe of discourse concerned with reality or what is real, and is not concerned with the ontological question of whether his isolates can be said to have an existence or to exist . . . Let us again emphasize that facts do not exist, they are stated, and it may indeed be a better guide to the handling of facts to regard them as myths in which we believe and which we have to live with. (Synopsis 1957:113) 10.21 Dictionary Definitions. Firth finds dictionary definitions are as dangerous as they are useful because of their preoccupation with historical values. Malinowski's analysis of freedom's multiple meanings in its universe of semantic chaos' is `perhaps the most interesting fulllength commentary on the use of a common word Firth knew of, and occasioned remarks by Malinowski that Firth thought to be of central importance (in Freedom and Civilization, 1947): all mental states which are postulated as occurrences within the private consciousness of man are thus outside the realm of science (84), and We have often stressed that in science we must run counter to linguistic usage. This is even more important in social science than in the study of matter or organism. (80) (1957.113-14) People do take fixed attitudes to words, but the physicist does not inquire through universal suffrage or a Gallup Poll what the meanings of his concepts are (81). These statements agree with Firth's idea, that linguistic metalanguage refers chiefly to structures, systems and relations. Our task is observation, analysis, synthesis, and renewal of connection. (114) 10.22 Translation Meaning. Malinowski's contributions are most important, but `translation meanings, however systematic, do not in themselves constitute linguistic analysis' (115). Recalling logic's de re and de dicto distinction what statements refer to, or statements themselves), Firth calls attention to the distinction of use and mention of linguistic items. More explicitly, he cites differences among (i) language under description, (ii) language of description, and (iii) language of translation: (iii) subdivides into (a) wordtranslation meanings and (b) translation meanings offered as a means of identifying larger pieces, or as names for other native categories supplied by informants (115). He finds Malinowski's warning worth repeating: But there is nothing more dangerous than to imagine that language is a process running parallel and exactly corresponding to mental process, and that the function of language is to reflect or duplicate the mental reality of man in a secondary flow of verbal equivalents. (Coral Gardens II.7; 1957.115) 10.23 Linguists' Translation Contributions. He invites comparison of Malinowski's contributions with the results (IJAL 1953) of a meeting of linguists, anthropologists and philosophers. Levi-Strauss there outlined the
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problematic as: (1) relations between a language and a culture, (2) language and culture, (3) linguistics as a scientific discipline and anthropology. Discussions showed superficial agreement in terminology obscures rather than fosters communication (116). He quotes from Jakobson's contribution on norms of relevance changing within linguistics, mentioned above: One of the most symptomatic features of this Conference was that we lengthily and passionately discussed the questions of meaning . . . meaning remains a No Man's land. This game of Give-away must end. For years and decades we have fought for the annexation of speech-sounds to linguistics, and thereby established phonemics. Now we face a second front: the task of incorporating linguistic meaning into the science of language. (1953.19,21; 1957.116) Firth immediately appended to this, It is my personal opinion that linguistics is suffering from a surfeit of phonemics and that our energies must turn to the second front (117). In the same vein, he thought Hockett's conclusion that ethnography without linguistics is blind; linguistics without ethnography is sterile (1954.225) should read linguistics without meaning is sterile', while agreeing with him that `it had better be the linguists who work on this systematic end of semantics (1954.250) Firth's way: . . . linguistics at all levels of analysis is concerned with meaningful human behavior in society and that the structures and systems and other sets of abstractions set up enable congruent statements of meaning to be made in exclusively linguistic terms . . . statements about language data in terms of phonetics, phonology, grammar, stylistics, lexicography and textual analysis in a background of statements of collocation and contexts of situation as I understand those terms. (117-8) In short, he finds Malinowski's contribution consists of sporadic comments, immersed and perhaps lost in what is properly called his ethnographic analysis. The two should be kept separate, but for later synthesis: His outstanding contribution to linguistics was his approach in terms of his general theory of speech functions in contexts of situation, to the problem of meaning in exotic languages and even in our own. (118) 10.24 Structure and Structuralism in Firth. De Saussure anticipated a paraphrase of Whitehead's `Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness': not what it is, but what it contrasts with, constitutes a (linguistic) reality. Firth held Phonemics neglected insights constituent of science (C) by overly stressing columnar I-IV contrasts, thus neglecting their syntagmatic, contrastive reality. Prosodic analysis was to study this neglected half of phonology. 10.25 Implications. Firth chose to praise Malinowski as being no more a structuralist than he. For him, that term referred to what he saw as obvious omissions and confusions in Linguistics as practiced by Bloomfieldians, e.g. relating phonemes as super-structures and allophones as alternations in substructures'. His evidence was Malinowski's observation that
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. . . the structure of all this linguistic material is inextricably mixed up with, and dependent upon, the course of the activity in which the utterances are embedded. (Malinowski 1923.473; Firth 1957.101) That one must study language structurally, Firth had no doubt, but he found conceptual and practical confusions in the `structuralist' grasp of language 'structure'. 10.26 Actual and Potential Data. Saussure had defined la langue as pure form, the intersection of two sets of relations he labelled associative (in absentia) and syntagmatic (in prasentia). There is an observable empirical relation between any item in parole, and other linguistic items with which it co-occurs: these are actual, present, syntagmatic relations. But even in parole, this concept of structure demands that there always be potential, unrealized, empirically absent determinants which constitute the valeur of what does occur. These are all items associated with it through similarity or dissimilarity in form or content. These are not empirical on a par with syntagmatic relations. Defining them through positive as well as negative psychological associations makes them empirically inaccessible. 1 Basing them on formal or semantic similarities and differences, makes them empirically remote. Hjelmslev proposed an axis of paradigmatic relations to replace subjective sets. This permits comparison between attested forms and identifiable substitutes. (Actes du Quatrième Congrés Internationale de Linguistes 1936.140). Firth alluded to these distinctions in his popularization The Tongues of Men in an example of syntagmatic implications among word-stresses in a string like You know what I mean; You know what I mean; You know what I mean; You know what I mean; You know what I mean; and You know what I mean: ((1937), 1964)): each shift of stress has implications for the pronunciation and interpretation of each member, as well as for interpretation of the whole. These same facts are presented more technically by restricting the terms system and systemic to a paradigmatic axis, while structure and structural pertain exclusively to syntagmatic relations. 10.27 Polysystemic Analysis. Language must be examined, he insisted, at all levels on the basis of structures and systems. But there will be as many systems to discuss as there are points of intersection that interest the linguist. His polysystemic approach in phonology predictably yields different elements and relations than the minimal pair test in phonemics, which Firth found deficient because it was monosystemic. Phonemics uses commutation (the minimal pair test) to inventory contrasts that signal `different in meaning'. The `pairing' is systemic, abstracted from structural setting. So contrast between CONvict and conVICT establishes stress as a phoneme of English. But these forms contrast only in metalinguistic use (Did you say CONvict or conVICT?). In We will conVICT
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the CONvict, they are in complementary distribution. Because phonemic method prohibits `mixing levels', syntactic phenomena are irrelevant at the morphological or lexical level. On the principle, `once a phoneme, always a phoneme', this approach provides a single System of phonemic contrasts. Polysystemic analysis yields as many elements and systems as there are relevant intersections. But relevant is defined in terms of the interests, purposes, and criteria of the analyst. When more than the lexically distinctive function of segments is relevant, different elements and combinations must be `set up' to recognize and deal with them. 10.28 Collocation and Colligation. Distinctions of system and structure are not peculiar to phonology. Firth proposed the term collocation for syntagmatic relations among lexical items, and colligation for syntagmatic relations among grammatical categories. Both are forms of implication. The constant involved in a formula for logical implication is a relationship, expressible in English by If . . . then; variables which can fill that logical form in the present discussion are lexical or grammatical items. For collocations, Firth speaks of relations of `mutual expectancy' determining interpretation of pairs like sheer hypocrisy or mere detail. For some speakers, hypocrisy and detail rarely occur without sheer and mere; for others (and in language itself) their combination is an option. Colligations, on the other hand, are intralinguistic demands among grammatical categories for all speakers. For instance, in independent clauses, Attic Greek provides options among indicative, subjunctive, and optative moods, corresponding to actual, possible, or desirable viewpoints. In subordinate clauses, many occurrences of indicative, subjunctive or optative are predictable as tied to, demanded by, or colligated with, the tense of the independent verbs. Implication 2 is more general than relations in grammar or logic, and is not limited to syntagmatic relations. Successions of events constitute syntagmatic relations (Firth's structural axis). Their kinds are determined paradigmatically (Firth's axis of system), such as past, present, or future; factual or contrary to fact; actual or potential; successions by chance, or as consequences of laws (natural, legal, moral, psychological, economic, political, social, logical, associative, linguistic, etc.). The notion of relevance here is again operative. Syntagmatic relations hold among any actual succession of linguistic items by definition (as among elements in ecology). But our control of the ecology progresses by describing ecological systems, and explanation may result when higher systems are identified. Refining the specific ways in which items in linguistic systems are interdependent requires a linguistic abstraction. Firth labelled two such abstractions colligation and collocation, because the domain of demand relations is clearer among grammatical categories than the extent of toleration among lexical items. Colligations are observable and predictable on the basis of the language spoken; collocations correlate with what just happen to be discussed in a particular language.
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10.29 Lexicon and Grammar. But if Firth's coinage of the collocation vs. colligation distinction raises, without solving, the lexicon vs. grammar distinction, it offers another resource for some perplexed grammatical usage. For instance, particles called prepositions and prefixes were confused in ancient grammars. Bloomfield distinguished them as free and bound forms. Later grammars called particles governing (implicated with) cases of other free forms prepositions, while bound particles called prefixes may not affect the forms to which they are bound in the same way. German `separable prefixes' [Er übersetzt (das Buch) (`He translates (the book))'; Er setzt über (den Zaun) `He jumps over (the fence)'], and English `postposed prepositions' (The house I was telling you about; the mess we've gotten into; much sought after, impossible to work with) seem to be halfway between grammatical demands and lexical options. Either/or distinctions distort three-term or more-term options. In IE languages, the relation of the category Verb and the subcategory Tense is colligation; in languages where time distinction is optional, it is collocation if a word like yesterday suffices to express it. Where the category Verb demands expression of knowledge vs. report (as in Quechua, Turkish, and Acoma) the relation is colligation; in English, adding as I know or so they say are phrasal, not lexical, and optional, not obligatory. 10.30 Connotations. Collocations help distinguish connotations: in American English, two professions predominate by `habitual accompaniment' (another of Firth's notes of collocation) by good the clergy and doctors. Journalists disarm suspicion of bias by referring to the good pastor or the good doctor when their debatable acts or opinions are reported, never the good lawyer or the good dentist. Occasionally one reads of the good Senator. Collocations reinforce weakening bonds between sense and reference in expressions like true facts, free elections, dedicated scholar, spirited charger, real truth. Sports collocations with awesome, fantastic, dazzling, superb, professional, etc. rival theatrical commentary in relativizing nominal senses. 10.31 Structural Conditioning. We have seen one kind of unilateral conditioning of a linguistic form in Aristotle's addition of Quantification to Plato's either/or definitions by dichotomy. A term like man can stand for man-in-general, an indifferent number of men, or a single man. The number of referents (extension) can vary while sense (intension, definition) remain identical (rational animal). These are signalled in English by zero modification (Ø/man) or addition of quantifiers like all, some or one. We then saw that by Petrus Hispanus' time, mutual or bilateral conditioning was recognized. He added qualitative modification to quantifiers' ability to extend or restrict a term's extension in his discussion of mutual influence among nouns, verbs, adjectives and restrictive relative clauses: while man can be used to refer to anything meeting the sense rational animal, in tall man, the word man refers only to tall rational animals; reciprocally, while the
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sense of tall by itself has to do with exceeding a norm, in tall man it refers only to + norm-rational-animals. Determination of colligations has always been the business, usually dispatched rather readily, of grammarians: they involve closed sets. Lexical sets are open, but woven together into the intelligible unity demanded by a language's grammatical class meanings plus possible modifications. What Firth contributed to this discussion was a way of incorporating some extralinguistic factors in the context of speech situations that also help determine interpretations. 10.32 Prosodic Analysis. Implications are to be investigated at all levels of analysis. Firth saw axes of linguistic functioning at the intersection of systems and structures: these are his technical terms for paradigmatic (systemic) and syntagmatic (structural) relations:
Studies in Linguistic Analysis (1957) contains Firth's own Synopsis of Linguistic Theory and exemplification of its ideas in papers by eight other scholars. Some terms clarify their perspective: (i) The raw material for phonetics is referred to as the phonic material. From such phonic material, phonic data are selected which may be described and recorded as percepta by the techniques of phonetics. Selected phonic data, phonetically described, are allotted to phonematic and prosodic categories, distributed in units, terms, classes, structures, and systems. (ii) A fundamental distinction is made between structures and their elements which are syntagmatic, and systems of units or terms which commute and provide values for the elements. (iii) The theory of exponents, linking the phonic data phonetically described with categories of phonology and grammar, is a central necessity of linguistic analysis at congruent levels. (1957.vi-vii) His phonology is not exhausted in phonemics' identification of systemic distinctive units. He adds a construct explicating how sounds function as structural elements as well. While morphophonemics involved grammatical meanings by relating forms like singular wife, plural wives, or nominal mouth, verbal mouth, that approach still assumes that its solutions must be stated in terms of the single paradigmatic set of phonemes discovered by commutation (the minimal pair test), or in terms of the distinctive features of which phonemes consist.
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Some syntagmatic units (Firth's structural elements) have always been recognized in labels like syllable, consonant cluster, morpheme, word, phrase, clause, sentence. If their ultimate constituents were morphemes, mediate constituents could be morpheme-words, or words consisting of morphemes with paradigmatic contrasts neutralized in syntactic analysis. No one would quarrel with the identification of with all deliberate speed and quickly as an adverbial function, despite the absence of an adverb in the former expression. This phrase and adverb are in parallel distribution; the phrase is a substitute for adverb, shares its class meaning and contributes its own constituent meanings adverbially (cf. Bloomfield 1933.251). Syntagmatic units (syllables, consonant clusters) in phonemic phonology are not established on the basis of distinctive lexical function. They are frames within which the distribution of phonemes is conveniently stated. In both, distinctive function is effected by phonemes, not their concatenation. Syllables as units of rhythmic function are not comparable with the distinctive function of phonemes. Plus juncture as phonemic in English was resisted by those who failed to hear the fourth degree of stress it entails; others could admit it as a potential clarification rather than an actual distinction on a par with segmental contrasts. Clear instances are difficult to locate and probably as rare as the potential confusions they are meant to distinguish. What Firth intuited about phonology was that there are syntagmatic units, or segmental units with syntagmatic implications of a phonetic nature, the relevance of which has not been recognized because of the monosystemic presuppositions of the phonemic approach. Linguists can agree that units define each other negatively by contrast. So emphasis on their positive composition (Firth's exponence) can be misleading. Firth distinguishes between the phonic exponence of syntagmatic units he labels prosodies and their more abstract phonological contrasts and functions. A science is free to define units within its own domain. It is neither falsified by, nor responsible for, data defined to be tractable within another discipline. It is not surprising that attempts to define prosodies in terms of `what they are' (composition) as opposed to `what they do' (function) or `where they are found' (distribution) has caused confusion even among those convinced that he was on to something important (cf. Matthews' review of Bazell et al. 1966). Their function has to do with `meaning' in Firth's idiosyncratic grasp of that term. 10.33 Phonemes and Phonematic Units. Firth labelled the phoneme a transcribeme. This seems to relegate it to a preliminary, descriptive stage in linguistics, as phonetics was demoted by phonological explanation. But Pike's subtitle of his Phonemics as `a technique for reducing languages to writing' aptly describes the monumental contribution to a civilization that technique makes. Firth had no intention of replacing phonemic transcription with his non-transcriptional analysis. To call any stage of linguistics mere description obscures the fact that any description is an implicit comparison and so an implicit explanation.
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Like familiar phonemes, phonematic units are isolated by commutation in minimal pairs. But phonic features (like the aspiration of the p's in popup) are not abstracted from different places and then assigned to a single segment taken to recur there. If popup's initial voiceless stop is aspirate and released, its medial nonaspirate but released, and its final neither aspirate nor released, there are three different systems of voiceless stops. Nothing a priori prevents assignment of features like aspiration or tense articulation to more than one phonological element such as both the phonematic unit p and the syllable po. Aspiration is a syntagmatic phenomenon, not just a paradigmatic or segmental one. The breathiness of aspiration affects the first syllable of popup, but is arrested by the second voiceless stop and does not persist throughout the second and third syllables. While isolated [i] is usually assigned spread articulation, the lip-rounding characteristic of English [r] persists throughout the production of reek. It is a syntagmatic or structural not just a paradigmatic, systemic factor. Such syntagmatic implications are prosodic. These phonic facts can have functional implications. Firth recognized `phonetic meaning', since it is part of the `meaning' of a native speaker to sound like a native speaker. Pronouncing popup without its aspirate pattern, or reek without rounded articulation, marks the speaker as a nonnative speaker of English. For such reasons, Firth rejected the Phonemic label redundant for aspiration or lip-rounding in these words as inappropriate. Turkish words show vowel harmony. Adam (`man'), plural adamlar, and dative plural adamlardan contrasts with ev (`house'), plural evler, and dative plural evlerden. The fronted vs. back vocalic articulations of these words are syntagmatic, structural contrasts, and their domain is the word, compared to syllabic domains in popup or reeking. These contrasts are syntagmatic, not paradigmatic. For Firth, the contrast is not redundant. 10.34 IPA A useful contribution of Phonetics might have been to provide a distinct symbol for every distinct sound in every distinct language of the world. If this ever had been the aim of the International Phonetic Association, it soon ceded to two practical determinations: The prohibitive cost of type for such an alphabet, and the notion of the Phoneme as a contrastive, rather than as a substantive unit. The British distinction between broad and narrow (more or less phonemic vs. refined phonetic) transcription is based upon two different facts about language: phonetic transcription equips trained personnel to symbolize signals identical in articulation to those of native speakers; accurate phonemic notation equips them to produce the same number of distinctions as natives. If phonological notation is based on sound articulatory analysis, its symbols command articulations central to realizations of a language's distinctive set of oppositions; if based on acoustic rather than articulatory distinctions, the results are as problematic as what natives actually attend to. In English, nondistinctive (hence, phonemically redundant) aspiration more often distinguishes initial stops than the presence or absence of phonemically
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distinctive voicing. If aspiration is omitted in I am very fond of cats, English speakers tend to hear I am very fond of gats. Empirically, voiceless stops, as segments, consist of silence. Phonemic analysis of English might be said to attribute allophonic aspiration to silence as to a segment (relevant to Firth's system) on a par with other continuants. Spectrographic or kymographic analysis suggest that aspiration is a mode of transition from silence to continuant (relevant to Firth's structure). No phonemicist would deny that analysis. 10.35 Prosodies vs. Phonemes. Phonemic analysis establishes contrasts. Contrasts imply choice. Choice implies options, characteristic of phonemes. Natives do not choose to produce or inhibit the automatic co-articulations called allophonic in their choice of distinctive contrasts. Automatic, allophonic articulations are part of the native's `trained incapacities'. Natives attend only to distinctive features when other natives speak. Most have to be retrained to hear nondistinctive sounds in normal pronunciation, just as natives generally notice only deviance from their own unformulated social conventions: conformity is the normal and unremarked ambience in a community. Professional retraining in how to listen can inculcate a phonetic or phonemic attitude. Firth was a student and colleague of Daniel Jones, and he of Henry Sweet, so attention to the positive, additive, data of phonetics was more habitual to Firth than the negative, contrastive perspective of the phonemicist. If the end-product of a contrastive notation is the goal, the phonetic observation of the phonemicist can be preconditioned in terms of paradigmatic contrasts. This is the basic goal of the minimal pair test. When the end-product is to be holistic, i.e., both paradigmatic (Firth's system) and syntagmatic (Firth's structure), phonetic observation is differently conditioned. The phonological level is not even methodologically autonomous, but viewed as one of a set of `congruent' techniques to deal with holistic Meaning. It attends e.g., to English aspiration syntagmatically and calls it a prosody; it attends to the paradigmatic starting point of aspiration and calls its exponence a phonematic unit. Use of technical terms like `phonetic substitution counters' instead of allophones or phonemes should not obscure the role of the minimal pair test inevitably involved in discovering the requisite segments, even in prosodic analysis, but does suggest that phonological analysis need not to stop there. Just what the function of structural (syntagmatic) units at the phonological level is will depend on the language. It is plausible to assume that some languages might not be illuminated by anything more than a phonemic analysis (cf. Lyons 1962). Evidence from other languages suggests that prosodic phenomena deserve separate statement. 10.36 Non-Lexical Distinctions. If, as the Terena analysis suggests to Bendor-Samuel in Bazell 1966, grammatical functions can be realized prosodically, then phonemic analysis alone can overlook facts. If, as Praguian
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analysis early suggested, functions of phonemes are demarcative and culminative, not just distinctive, then a prosodic analysis of languages like Turkish or Hungarian, where vowel-harmony marks out word separation, is a neat addition. The remote control explanation of retroflexion in Sanskrit (Allen 1951) held that an earlier phoneme controlled the articulation of subsequent ones. This was inexplicable empirically to some as assimilation or dissimulation, because of the affected consonants were not contiguous, so was considered an explanation repugnant to empirical sentiment. But to Firth it would be aesthetically satisfying, and regarded as empirically acceptable, to postulate retroflexion as a word-prosody with noncontiguous consonants within its scope. Eugénie Henderson's 1948 Prosodies in Siamese: a study in synthesis (Palmer 1970), often cited as a clear application of prosodic analysis, was published the same year as Firth's foundational Sounds and Prosodies (Palmer 1-26). Where Firth is theoretical and programmatic, Henderson is applied. Her opening paragraph deserves attentive reading, since Firth monitored papers of his Group, and this text can be taken to reflect precisely the thrust of Firth's insights as then understood, but only as applied to Siamese (Thai): The term prosodic feature is applied in this paper to certain properties of modern spoken Siamese which may be regarded as abstractions apart from the consonant and vowel systems. Such abstractions may be made at the syllable, word, or sentence level. Syllable prosodies include tone, quantity, and those prosodies which mark the beginning or end of a syllable. Word prosodies include tonal and quantitative features, stress, and the means whereby syllable is linked with syllable. Sentence prosodies include sentence tone, and the means used to mark the beginnings and end of phrases and sentences, and to connect phrase with phrase or sentence with sentence. Italic type is used to show the consonant and vowel units, and to name the prosodies, while heavy roman type is used for phonetic transcription in general terms. Notes 1. Inability to specify such associations publicly and objectively was pinpointed as a characteristic of nonscientific mentality, in Bloomfield's review of Wundt's Völkerpsychologie ((1913), Hockett 1956.39ff). Martin Gardiner (1983) identifies ability to link remote associations as the Art of Break-through Thinking. 2. Implication derives from a metaphor of weaving strands into a totality; it suggests the image of language as a net constituted by its intersections; it is lexically paraphrased in Collocations like: ''connected and intersecting inferences about involvement of accomplices implicated in the accomplishment of a conspiracy deducible from the logical consequences deriveable from assumed premises contained in the evidence". Matthews' 1968 review in Language of In Memory of J.R. Firth deals with a study employing the Firthian notion of Collocation.
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Reading Firth, J.R. 1964. Tongues of Men and Speech. London. Oxford University Press. 221 pp. [Popular style, but much quoted in Firth's Synopsis; outlines a program of Sociolinguistics.] 1957. Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951. London. Oxford University Press. xii+233 pp. 1957. Studies in Linguistic Analysis. Special Volume of the Philological Society. Oxford. Blackwell. vii+205 pp. [Firth's Synopsis of Linguistic Theory 1930-1955; colleagues & sympathizers exemplify or comment on his ideas.] Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1923. Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages. in Ogden & Richards 1965. Coral Gardens and their Magic. 2 vols. Bloomington. Indiana University Press. [Informative Introduction vii-xxii by Jack Berry.] Ogden, Charles Kay, and Ivor A. Richards. 1969 (1923). The Meaning of Meaning. London. Routledge and Kegan Paul. 10th edition. xxii+363 pp. Supplementary Reading Allen, W.S. 1951. Some prosodic aspects of retroflexion and aspiration in Sanskrit. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (BSOAS) 18.578-591. Bazell, C.E. et al., eds. 1966. In Memory of J.R. Firth. London. Longmans. xi+500 pp. Bendor-Samuel, John T. 1966. Some prosodic features in Terena. In Bazell et al. 30-9. Bursill-Hall, Geoffrey. 1960. Levels of Analysis: J.R. Firth's Theories of Linguistic Analysis I & II. Journal of the Canadian Linguistic Associations 6(2).124-135; (6(3).164-191). 1960. The Linguistic Theories of J.R. Firth. Thought from the Learned Societies of Canada 1960. Toronto. Gage. Firth, Raymond William, ed. 1957. Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski. London. Routledge and Kegan Paul. 292 pp. Bibliog. pp. 265-284] Gardiner, Sir Alan. 1951. The Theory of Speech and Language. 2nd edition. Oxford. Clarendon. Lyons, John. 1962. Phonemic and nonphonemic phonology: IJAL 1962.28.127-33. 1966. Firth's theory of `meaning'. In Bazell et al. 288-302. Matthews, P.H. 1968. Review of In Memory of J.R. Firth, ed. Bazell. Lg 44.2.(Part 1).306-17. Mitchell, T.F. The Principles of Firthian Linguistics. London. Longman. xvii+213 pp. Palmer, Frank R., ed. 1968. Selected Papers of J.R. Firth 1952-1959. Harlow. Longman. x+209 1970. Prosodic Analysis. Harlow. Longman. Robins, Robert Henry. Obituary of J.R. Firth. Language 37.191-9. In Sebeok II. 1967.543-54 1967. A Short History of Linguistics. Bloomington. Indiana University Press. vi+248 pp. 1970. Diversions of Bloomsbury: Selected Writings. Amsterdam. North-Holland. Symmons-Symonolewisez, K. 1958-9. Bronislaw Malinowski. Polish Review. New York. Arlington. Temple R. 1899. A Theory of Universal Grammar as Applied to Savage Languages. The Indian Antiquary vol XXVII.197-208, 225-35. Bombay.
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11 Louis Hjelmslev 11.00 Hjelmslev's early interest in languages developed into a desire to assure the scientific study of Language. Part of that maturation was a concern for the study of General Grammar at a time when this was regarded as unscientific: his thesis on the universal category of case was rejected by the University of Paris as nonlinguistic. That investigation showed his preference for the clarity of deductive generalizations over what he saw as the increasing dilution of inductive ones. In the meantime, he was sketching out a general linguistic theory that would take syntagmatic relations into account more than the usual focus on word-morphology. In 1928 he published his Principes de Grammaire Générale, and in 1935-7, the semantic study, La Catégorie des cas. He mentions no distinct turning point in his thinking, but named Wivel, Sapir, Fortunatov and Saussure as providing confirmation of his own ideas, and Uldall as all but a later twin in his development of them. 11.01 The Autonomy of Linguistics, His Prolegomena record dissatisfaction with the status of Linguistics as an autonomous science, and sketched how autonomy might be approached. The prestige of Logical Positivism, exemplified in the Wiener Kreis and the writings of Rudolf Carnap, is evident. The Prolegomena is generally reckoned the most important of his publications, and his other works as preparatory for and consistent with it. Some read the Prolegomena as a logical development of de Saussure's basic ideas and of what Structuralism implies. Others saw it as a justification for practical techniques they had developed, and a codification of what they had been aiming at. Its perspective helps make approaches like Stratificational and Systemic Grammar more intelligible, and clarifies structural bases of Chomsky's work. Hjelmslev's own views of how his thought compared with de Saussure's are also relevant to evaluating directions in linguistic study. 11.02 Glossematics. Isidore of Seville's `etymologies' had little to do with the real history of words, but did contribute to mnemonics. How could anyone forget the `meaning' of cadaver if its etymology were first proposed as CAro DAta VERmibus (flesh given to the worms') The term Glossematics was coined by Hjelmslev and Uldall. Whatever the real reasons for their choice, an Isidoran etymology of it might serve to situate it more memorably in linguistic theory.
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Glosse- in Greek matches the Romance root for tongue in the word language; -matics suggests a study with mathematical abstractness and rigor. It resembles the logistical study of language by Carnap and others, but without their neglect of the dual nature of the linguistic sign (Hjelmslev 1947:76). It also suggests how that degree of abstractness is attained, and its consequent power: computability free of subjective connotations, or even of objective denotations, which Bloomfield found a mark of scientific discourse. Mathematics and logistic deal objectively with quantity undistracted by differences in quality. Judgments about identity or difference in qualities remain clearly and nobly subjective, but once identified for the mathematician, relations among objects of even debatable qualities can be calculated, and all possible permutations computed. Glossematics ignores the peculiarities of concrete languages to establish a calculus of possible linguistic form upon which individual languages draw. For example, if language-as-system were Column A, then a language-as-process could be illustrated under Columns I to IV. Glossematics, of course, is not as simple as A, and real languages are more complex than I to IV. 11.03 Glossematics and Column A. A
I
II
III
IV
AB
AB
AB
AB
AB
++
++
++
... ...
+-
+-
... ...
+-
+-
... ...
-+
... ...
-+
-+
-+
--
... ...
... ...
... ...
--
Column A is a calculus of all possible combinations for A and B. Glossematics is to be a calculus of all possible combinations in Language. Columns I through IV show actual combinations in a language. All the Columns from A through IV are independent of interpretations that exemplify them (phonetics, semantics, games, decisions, music, heads-or-tails, sentences, etc.). Yet Columns I to IV have the premised nature Hjelmslev proposes for an object to be considered a language (Hjelmslev 1947:78): 1. Content and expression 2. Succession (text) and system 3. Content and expression are linked by commutation 4. Constraints within succession and system 5. Lack of isomorphism between content and expression, and non-expressive constituents of expressions. Columns I-IV meet these requirements, as do Hjelmslev's examples from traffic lights, Morse code, or chiming clocks. (1) They have expressions like
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A, +A or -A, and interpretations like head-or-tail, odd-or-even can be their content. (2) Drawn exclusively from (what Firth also called) the System (A, B), successive Structures are ± A, ± A ± B, ± B, or ± B ± A, and Ø. (3) These structures contrast as minimal pairs. (4) Dotted lines in Columns I-IV show structures excluded (Constraints), and the absence of C is a Constraint upon the System (A, B). (5) Since head or tail, odd or I'm a monkey's uncle are possible contents, there is no isomorphism between content and expression, and the non-expressive constituents of A and B are these visual features of how those expressions are drawn or printed (a) the slanted lines of the printed letter A, (b) the horizontal line [-] of A, (c) the straight line of B, and (d) the curved upper and lower elements of B. Glossematics and Column A are also alike in not being falsifiable by applications (like coins standing on edge in heads-ortails). They are just shown to be inappropriate for that particular interpretation. Here we find a challenging example of how abstract Linguistics can afford to be without being irrelevant, compared to how concrete it can afford to get without getting lost in concrete detail. 11.04 The Prolegomena and the Empirical Principle. This is Hjelmslev's concern: linguistic theory has suffered from premature and irrelevant involvement with uses to which Language can be put. While intimately involved with culture, psychology, logic, and so on, Language is definable without reference to those studies and autonomously investigable apart from them. Language as System is logically prior to, and independent of, Language as Process. It is `a self-sufficient totality, a structure sui generis.' (PTA 1961:5-6). Its study should be immanent, not based on derivative or associated factors; it should be exact, with each succeeding step defined on the preceding step; and it should be appropriate, based on, and applicable to, experience. The title, Prolegomena, says this work is not the theory, but a preface concerned with the properties such a theory should have, how the theory ought to proceed, and how immanent study relates language to social phenomena. That such a preface is required is direct criticism of other linguists. Hjelmslev thinks that there is little of value he can extract from the work of his predecessors: he acknowledges resonance between his own thought and what he found later in Saussure, as well as direct indebtedness to contemporaries in the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle, especially to Hans Jørgen Uldall. For a while, he and Hjelmslev formed a complementary unity like the Chesterbelloc, of content and expression. Hjelmslev's forte was a broad linguistic base and IndoEuropean content. Uldall had done phonetics under Daniel Jones, anthropology and Amerindian with Boas, and recorded Maidu texts, one of Malinowski's early interests. 11.05 Practical Problems. Development of Glossematics was impeded during the Second World War, since Uldall's absences made direct collaboration impossible. In preparing to present a version of Glossematics
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at the 10th Anniversary of the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle in 1941, Hjelmslev outlined it (translated 1973), wrote Language (1963 [1970]), then Omkring Sprogteoriens Grundlaeggelse (1943). It was translated into English by Francis Whitfield as the Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (abbreviated here as PTL) in 1953 and revised in 1961. Uldall's algebraic version in Part I of a projected Outline of Glossematics (1957) was an awkward base for Hjelmslev. He preferred his original verbal formulations: his own Part II of the projected Outline did not appear. 11.06 Prediction and Explanation. Hjelmslev mentions a barrier to progress: the a priori assumption of humanists that human acts are not amenable to scientific study; that such acts can only be described, not explained, and only inexactly described at that, because human acts are not recurrent like natural events. On the contrary, he finds it a priori reasonable to assume and this is the core of his approach that ...any process can be analyzed into a limited number of elements recurring in various combinations. Then, on the basis of this analysis, it should be possible to order these elements into classes according to their possibilities of combination. And it should be further possible to set up a general and exhaustive calculus of the possible combinations. (PTL .9) On such assumptions, history could change from a discipline working at the level of mere primitive description to a generalizing science where all events and combinations would be foreseen, and their conditions established. He sees only two options open to the humanities: to remain on the level of poetry, or to combine poetic and scientific treatment as two coordinate forms of description. Linguistic theory aims at testing the thesis that every process has an underlying system. 11.07 The Empirical Principle. This goal leads to his version of the Empirical Principle: The description shall be free of contradiction (self-consistent), exhaustive, and as simple as possible. The requirement of freedom from contradiction takes precedence over the requirement of exhaustive description. The requirement of exhaustive description takes precedence over the requirement of simplicity. (PTL 11) Hjelmslev distinguishes this from induction. He defines that as proceeding from component to class: his approach proceeds from class to component, structurally. He says that induction results only in vague reifications incapable of generalization beyond a single language, e.g. constructs like subjunctive mood common to Latin and Greek (Latin distinguishes indicative from subjunctive, Greek opposes both to an optative, etically and emically). 11.08 Text is the Sole Given. So the Empirical Principle demands that text be taken as a class analyzed into components. These components themselves can be hierarchies classes analyzable into components which are classes of
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components, etc. until analysis terminates in what he calls entities. Though recognizing that the term is debatable, he says linguistic method must be deductive, proceeding from class to component, structurally: Scientific statements must be structural statements in this sense of the word... a scientific statement must always be a statement about relations without involving knowledge or a description of the relata themselves. (Hjelmslev 1947:75, quoting Carnap 1928) That quasi-mathematical perspective is what he found even in Saussure's 1879 Mémoire. That established him as a linguist, rather than a philologist: At the outset, Saussure arrived at this view through a consideration of the IndoEuropean vowel system. As early as 1879, the analysis undertaken by Saussure of that system in his famous Mémoire had shown him that in some cases the socalled long vowels can be conveniently reduced to combinations of a simple vowel plus a particular unit which by Saussure was symbolized by *A. The advantage of such an analysis over the classical one was that of furnishing a simpler solution, the so-called long vowels being discarded as such from the system, and of revealing a striking analogy between ablaut series which had been considered up till then as radically different. But interpreting, e.g. tithe-mi : tho-mos : thetos as *dheA : dhoA : *dhA, this ablaut series reveals itself as fundamentally the same as that of derkhomai, dedorka, edrakon, which is equal to derk1 : dork1 : drk1. Thus, *eA is to *oA what *er is to *or, and A plays the same role in the ablaut series as the *r of *drk1. This analysis was carried out for internal reasons only, in order to gain a profounder insight into the fundamental system; and it was not based on any evidence available in the languages compared; it was an internal operation within the Indo-european system. Direct evidence for the existence of *A has later on been furnished by Hittite, but not until after Saussure's death. The unit *A has been interpreted, from the phonetic point of view, as a laryngeal. But it is well worth noting that Saussure himself would never have ventured any such phonetic interpretation. To him the *A was not a sound, and he took care not to define it by any phonetic properties, this being immaterial to his argument: his concern was the system only, and in this system, *A was defined by its definite relations to the other units of the system, and by its faculty of taking up definite positions within the syllable. This is expressly stated by Saussure himself, and this is the famous point where he introduces the term phoneme to designate a unit which is not a sound, but which may be represented or manifested by a sound. (1947.71-2) 11.09 Langue as Pure Form. Hjelmslev found more than one sense for langue in Saussure's pioneer work. He ...endeavored to disentangle, as far as it goes, the various layers or strata which can be observed in Saussure's meditations, and to lay bare what to my mind is the entirely new and really profitable idea in his work. This is, if I am not mistaken, the conception of language as a purely relational structure, as a pattern as opposed to the usage (phonetic, semantic, etc.) in which this pattern is accidentally manifested. [Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure. (1943:2.29-44)] He believed others could only grasp Saussure's insights when `langue is not identified with pure form, but where language is conceived as a form within the substance, and not independent of the substance' (PTL 1947:70). This was a fault he found in the Prague School's definition of Phoneme. Such a view did not agree with the last line of the Cours:
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Linguistics has as its unique and true object la langue envisaged in and for itself. Where de Saussure only spoke of la langue as form generically, Hjelmslev will list its specific logical forms. Where Saussure assumed la langue was a single form unifying two substances (amorphous ranges of experience and sound), he posits two: content-form and expression-form. 11.10 Logical Implication. This perspective identifies part of the unity of Unified Science: independent of the content of particular sciences, it involves an implicit definition of description and explanation, and the relation between them. Hjelmslev prefers an intra-, not an extralinguistic account. Its procedure relies on formal logic, particularly logical implication. He takes the form of all scientific theorems to be the `If .. then' expression of implication, or transposable into it. Such theorems, he says, assert only that `if a condition is fulfilled, the truth of a given proposition follows' (PTL 14). 11.11 Valid vs. True. This ignores the distinction between valid and true. That difference is obvious in the rules defining Material Implication in Symbolic Logic. If that's IE, I'm an allophone is a valid 2 Material Implication. Strict Implication, where conclusions involve causal connections (in his terms, appropriate more or less `verifiable in the real world'), involves factors irrelevant to formal logic's definition of truth-conditions. Formal logic only studies valid connexity among assertions relative to each other. The logician accepts truth-values of individual assertions as presented by a science, or assigns them arbitrarily for computation, as in Columns A-IV. That formally valid conclusions can be nonsense shows that a different point of view is involved. Total population divided by the number of families says 2 parents + 2.5 children are the average family, validly - but inappropriately. 11.12 Arbitrary vs. Appropriate. Hypotheses can be formed on the basis of theorems. But hypotheses (as Hjelmslev uses the term) are subject to verification while theorems are not. He discusses neither axioms nor postulates, since he finds them more primitive than linguistic theory. So glossematic theory is arealistic (as Firth said) by being arbitrary, realistic in its appropriateness (as in Firth's `renewal of connection'). Its aim is `self consistent and exhaustive description': Such a self-consistent and exhaustive description leads to what is usually called a knowledge or comprehension of the object in question. (PTL 15) Description and explanation are thus identified, or the difference neutralized, on Hjelmslev's premises (cf. 1961:78f., 1947:75, where description of substance presupposes description of form). It was in this sense that it was suggested above that a description is an implicit explanation.
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11.13 Text as System-and-Process. The procedure must be illustrated in analyzing a text. Any text is only an instance of the System-and-Process organization the theory assumes, and any analysis is only an instance of the method the theory dictates. If both are appropriate, we can construct any possible text in the language analyzed, and extrapolate that analysis/synthesis to any language whatever (PTL 1961:16-17). That is why all conceivable possibilities must be foreseen, and why Hjelmslev does not offer either a practical discovery procedure or the theory demanding it, only a prefatory discussion of what the theory will have to be like (PTL 17). 11.14 Principle of the Analysis: Hierarchic Relations. Column A is logically faultless but cannot not handle contingencies like those which come up when we actually toss real coins. Saussure said the investigator's point of view creates his object; Hjelmslev notes that naive realism assumes there is an object to partition. But for science as he conceives it, there are no things: science discusses (Firth says `makes statements about') intersections of relations of three principal kinds. These relations are Interdependence (both terms presuppose each other), Determination (only one term presupposes the other) and Constellation (terms are compatible, but neither presupposes the other). Subdesignations for these relations are appropriate in System and Process: Interdependence
DeterminationConstellation
(TWO (ONE CONSTANT, ONE (TWO CONSTANTS) VARIABLE) VARIABLES) In Process: a BOTH-AND function
Solidarity
Selection
Combination
In System: an EITHER/OR function ComplementaritySpecification
Autonomy
Since parts of a text `have existence precisely by virtue of these dependencies', Analysis is formally defined `as description of an object by the uniform dependencies of other objects on it and on each other.' (PTL 28-29) Hjelmslev calls the Aristotelian category Relation a function and a term in a relation, a functive. In a hierarchy (a class of classes), a functive can itself be a function. If it is not, the Analysis terminates in an entity. 11.15 Translating Metalinguistic Terms. Compare this terminology with (a) Bloomfield's free/bound, endo-/exocentric distinctions, (b) Hjelmslev's use of the notions of Constant and Variable, and (c) a Syntactic Structures-type of Chomskyan tree.
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(a) In Poor John runs away, Bloomfield would call Poor, John, run and possibly way `free forms'. Bound forms are -s with runs and a- in away. The constructions Poor John and runs away are endocentric: if John and runs are obligatory heads, Poor and away are respectively optional expansions of them: Poor John as a construction behaves syntactically like its member John, and runs away like its defining member, runs. The construction John runs is exocentric, because its syntactic behavior is autonomous, not like that of either member, John or runs (Bloomfield 1933. Ch. 10). (b) Expressed as a relation between constants and variables, heads and free forms are constants (presupposed but not presupposing); optional expansions and bound forms are variables (presupposing, but not presupposed). The relation between expansions independent of each other like Poor and away (for which Bloomfield has no designation) is between two variables. Exocentric constructions have no Head: the grammatical behavior of John runs is not in parallel distribution with either John nor runs. That relation is a relation between two constants. (c) In a slightly different example, but one that can highlight some problems in Hjelmslev's approach, consider this display of the sentence The Romans destroyed Carthage, where each categorial constituent of Sentence (labelled S1) has its own numerical identification:
In Hjelmslev's terms, S1 (Sentence) is a function, whose functives are NP2(Noun phrase) and VP3 (Verb phrase). But (2) and (3) are not only functives of (1), but are themselves functions. The functives of (2) are d6 (determiner) and N7 (Noun), while the functives of function (3) are the functives V4 (Verb) and NP5 (Noun phrase), and (4) and (5) too, are both functives that are functions. While (6) and (7) are functives in the function between the classes (determiner) and (Noun), the functives of (6) and (7) are entities (The and Romans), which are not functions, as this analysis presents them.
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(4) as a functive is on a par with (6) or (7), a function whose functive is an entity, destroyed. But NP5 is a function whose functives are also functions on a par with (4) (6) and (7): its functives are the entities Ø and Carthage. Hjelmslev calls the relation of a functive to its function derivation. In that relation, the functive is called a derivate. S is not presented as a derivate, but every other functive is. Porphyry's Tree has Substance as supreme genus, from which other genera and species (functives that are functions) are derived, until derivation terminates in individuals (entities). Others use labels like class, set, or category vs. subclass, subset, or subcategory: these are relations (functions) between terms (functives), terminating in elements, individuals, or entities. Firth's relationship of exponence of a category shifts the criterion from member of to manifested by, a point of view which is one reason for saying morphemes cannot be composed of phonemes. Degrees of derivation can be assigned on such trees. Assigning grade 0 to S1, to which derivates show a dependence, we compute (2) and (3) as both degree 1 derivates; (6) and (7) are degree 2 derivates, as are (4) and (5). But (8) and (9) are degree 3 derivates, compared to (6) and (7). 11.16 `What is A' and `What Functions as A'. Labels for different degrees of derivation, as well as for derivations on different norms like exponence should correlate. Hispanus, for instance, distinguished between Subject-as-Subject or Predicate-as-Predicate (`functions') and what-is-Subject or what-is-Predicate (`functives') as Hjelmslev distinguishes among function, functive, and entity. Or, as we shall see, Fillmore noted that grammatical Subject and Object are not appropriately identified by immediate derivation of NP2 from S1, compared to the immediate derivation of NP5 from VP3, or NP5,s derivation from (or, as Hjelmslev calls it, dependence on) S1. This kind of tree-display has only two dimensions (like circular figures). To include multi-dimensional factors in a two-dimensional representation is a challenge. Alternatively, the differences can be incorporated into conventions for reading trees or other representations, which are not explicitly represented in the models, as in columns I-IV. Bloomfield noted the importance of the convention that presented signs in the order of speech, in his account of the development of writing. 11.17 Exclusion. Define system as a finite number of units, in a definable totality, constrained in a finite number of ways. To paraphrase Hjelmslev, it would seem a priori reasonable to assume that the description of a System like I-IV vs. A, should answer about the Structures derivable within it: `Given X, what does it demand, exclude or tolerate?'. A structural description should do that. But there is no provision for exclusion in Hjelmslev's Interdependence, Determination, or Constellation. It might be argued that it is there implicitly, since exclusion is the opposite of demand. In The Romans destroyed Carthage, The Romans is neither obviously endocentric (determination) nor exocentric (interdependence): with Romans
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as constant and the as variable, it is endocentric or determination; with both the and Romans as constants, it is interdependent. In English, the absence (Firth's `Ø exponence') of the category determiner with Carthage could be described as a subcategory proper noun demand for the absence of an article, or exclusion of articles. Hjelmslev is specifying de Saussure's generic form in logical terms, but he does not deal with a standard logical relation: Constellation does not distinguish exclusive disjunction (where only one option is valid) from inclusive disjunction (where either of two options are valid). In this example, Poor or away are inclusively disjunctive (either can freely ± occur). No example is given of what Firth's Colligations or Collocations where one form might exclude the other. 11.18 Langue, Text and Context. De Saussure insisted on the centrality of la langue (not parole or langage) for a linguistic discussion of language and Hjelmslev presents text as the sole given. Missteps in linguistic study result from the admixture of concerns like logic, message, or nonlinguistic consequences other than System determining text as Process. For some linguists, the Prolegomena clarified the dimly perceived unity of what they had been doing; for others, its degree of abstraction foredoomed Glossematics. A simple example like Poor John ran away suggests that one root of both reactions correlates with willingness to entertain different degrees of abstraction. It also is a function of what is considered relevant in linguistic analysis. Is analysis to terminate in categories, subcategories, or entities? Are there demonstrably linguistic criteria omitted in this analysis? Are Glossematics' limitations in its theory, or in its Porphyrian lineage? Hjelmslev preferred his verbal approach to Uldall's algebraic formulations and did not use the tree representations common in linguistics since Chomsky's 1957 Syntactic Structures. 11.19 Signs and Figurae. Signs have been said to represent, or be the exponents of, or to realize content. Sign expressions are readily analyzed into nonsign components like phonemes, clusters, syllables, or phonematic units. What, if anything, is the composition of content? As formed in the Porphyrian Tree, a Western logical tradition defines all but primitives vertically through the genus and species to which they belong, and horizontally through their peculiar way of belonging to a class. Man is defined generically as a rational species of the genus animal. Specific differences proposed as peculiar to man have been the ability to laugh, or as `the only animal that can blush and needs to' (Mark Twain), or as `the ungrateful animal' (Dostoyevsky). Descriptive (or accidental) definitions include the negative `featherless biped' or the positive anthropological description, `the tool-making animal'. Dissecting men phonetically isolates the components [m] [e] and [n]: Hjelmslev calls these expression figurae. Analyzed morphologically, we distinguish root and infix, or base and phonetic modification, with contents
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like man and PLURAL; we can isolate some sense-elements he calls content figurae from the definitions given above such as: + animal
+ rational
± blush
+ mammal + toolmaker - grateful
+ ought to blush + risible
+ biped
...
- feathered
...
11.20 Meaning is Contextual. Essential to Hjelmslev's conception of content is that all meanings are contextual including the content of the term content itself in his own vs. de Saussure's use of it and that absence of meaning is not lack of content: If we think without speaking, the thought is not a linguistic content and not a functive for a sign function. If we speak without thinking, and in the form of series of sounds to which no content can be attached by any listener, such speech is an abracadabra, not a linguistic expression and not a functive for a sign function. Of course, lack of content must not be confused with lack of meaning: an expression may very well have a content which from some point of view (for example, that of normative logic or physicalism) may be characterized as meaningless, but it is a content. (PTL.49) Content is relatively determined, e.g. John Ciardi: nine is the number of fingers you have after stopping a hole in the dike; Ambrose Bierce: edible is good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm. These suggest differences among meanings as content, sense or reference, paralleling Saussure's distinctions among signification, value and content. Sense or content here can be the contextualization of a certain number of content figurae which sufficiently overlap for speakers to agree on the referent, even though senses are not identical. Registering an inventory of content figurae in systems and processes should be part of linguistic analysis as Hjelmslev sees it. Some English speakers link exit with its Latin function as a 3rd person, indicative, verb. For others, exit is just like other rootwords, so they find no anomaly in a sign that orders Exit right, though they might in Adit right. The content figurae of the verbs loom and forebode are as distinct as those for appear and predict, but share a connotation, ominous, accounting for anomalies many found in A silence looms or A derrick forebodes over the campus in student publications. 11.21 Content: Purport, Schema, and Usage. Once granted contextualization and its implications, several consequences follow in Hjelmslev's approach. (1) A principle of generalization suggests to him the elimination of what he labels variants, like ram, ewe, mare, stallion, man, woman, boy, girl for invariants like he, she, sheep, horse, human being, child of which they can be said to be composed. (2) By distinguishing forms of opposition or contextualization from what happens to fill such patterns, he defines a
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linguistic schema as a pattern to be filled, while a linguistic usage focuses on fillers of that formal pattern. (3) Bound expression-level variants (like allophones) are varieties, determined by pattern, not phonetic similarity (unlike allophones). (4) This prepares for acceptance of purport as an unorganized, or as yet unformed, aggregate of what content figurae are actually about or might have connection with. This is like traditional matter as opposed to form: he adopts de Saussure's gaffe of calling it substance. Succinctly: We thus recognize in the linguistic content, in its process, a specific form, the content-form, which is independent of, and stands in arbitrary relation to, the purport, and forms it into a content-substance. This parallels distinction of expression purport from its expression-form and expression-substance. If purport is the indefinite range of articulatory possibilities, expression-form involves the number and type of distinctive oppositions, and expressionsubstance concerns particular articulations realizing it. In a language with three phonemic vowels, the contrastive pattern could be represented as /i/, /a/, and /u/, even though dialects consistently produce them phonetically as [e], schwa and [o]. Syncretisms are also found in content-expression relations. in German, the voiced vs. voiceless contrast in stops is neutralized in word finals: leiden (`suffer') and leiten (`lead') show the contrast, but phonetic [lait] in standard Leid (`sorrow'), Austrian colloquial Leut for Leute (people) or colloquial standard Leit' for Leiter (`ladder') do not. Some Latin masculines contrast -us vs. um for nominative vs. accusative, while neuters have -um for both, by syncretism. 11.22 Catalysis. One term in an interdependent relation may be unexpressed. For instance, in a fragment of a Latin manuscript showing the preposition ad, the unattested term can be confidently supplied ad always govern the accusative case, no matter what the lexical form may be. Hjelmslev calls the process catalysis. The analysis of text in general, then, can be understood as a form of catalysis, ...through which the form is encatalyzed to the substance, and the language encatalyzed to the text. (PTL 96) This is how codes are broken: a consistent principle of deformation conceals normally formed messages. We guess what that principle is and apply it to the text. If correct, we have encatalyzed form to substance. That is, we have imposed or discovered its structure, as in the case of Linear B: once it was assumed to be Greek, its anomalous purport was seen to be structured. So it follows that neither phonetic nor semantic substance can, of themselves, be defining of Language. Hjelmslev gives a taut summary of all this in his novel terminology:
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...if the form is a language, we call it the linguistic schema. The variable in a manifestation (the manifesting) can, in agreement with de Saussure, be called the substance; a substance which manifests a linguistic schema we call a linguistic usage. From these premises, we are led to the formal definition of a semiotic as a hierarchy, any of whose components admits of a further analysis into classes defined by mutual relation, so that any of these classes admits of an analysis into derivates defined by mutual mutation. (PTL 106) 11.23 'Meaning' Systems. Games like chess fit this description. They differ from languages by functioning without the need of two planes (expression [a pawn's shape] and content [a pawn's moves]) which are not isomorphic: when there is a one-to-one correspondence between expression and content, Hjelmslev calls it a symbolic, not a semiotic system. For example, flag semaphores, Morse code, or the language of flowers are symbolic systems; English is a semiotic system. There are further differences: languages involve, not merely a semiotic system, but a connotative semiotic, distinct from the denotative one. In a denotative semiotic, no plane is a semiotic: flag systems and Morse code do not, like languages, provide for the affective use of expression figurae. To say that languages permit the use of denotative expressions for affective purposes is to define what Bloomfield called connotations in another way. 11.24 Cognitive Systems. Symbolic systems make only denotative (cognitive) distinction. Morse ... - - - ... stands for SOS (`save our ship' in English). It cannot connote a stress on our, if one of a convoy pleads for special consideration. Our is not even involved when SOS is verbalized in other languages. Within a semiotic denotative of cognitive distinctions, meaningful elements can be used as meaningless bearers (expression figurae) of connotations absent from the denotative convention. Length is not phonemic in English but can connote strong emotional `content'. From distinctions like these, the langue-like centrality of Glossematics emerges, since Hjelmslev saw no nonsemiotics that are not components of semiotics, and no object unillumined from its perspective, `... a stand from which all scientific objects can be viewed' (PTL 127). Any sign-system whatever can be translated into the system of ordinary language. (1961.46ff, 108ff; 1970.104). Whitfield's preface to Hjelmslev's Resumé of a Theory of Language (1975) diagrams the relationships as:
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So the degree of abstraction Glossematics requires by its immanent method is defensible (PTL 127): Linguistic theory is led by an inner necessity to recognize not merely the linguistic system, in its schema and in its usage, in its totality and in its individuality, but also man and human society behind language, and all man's sphere of knowledge through language. At that point linguistic theory has reached its prescribed goal: humanitas et universitas. 11.25 Stratificational Grammar. Several themes found in Hjelmslev's Glossematics are developed in Stratificational Grammar. Its principal theoretician is Sydney Lamb, and given his concern for keeping continuity in technical terms, it could have been called Levels Grammar. A stratum is a natural or artificial layer; strata parallel levels above and below them, defining them and being defined by them. Layers of sedimentary rocks form geological strata, tide or temperature ranges are oceanic strata, educational or economic levels are social strata, and the process of formation or the resultant state is stratification. Firth's image of spectral diffusion makes a similar point: light can be examined artificially as discrete bands without being confused about its unitary nature. Stratificational Grammar seeks to isolate elements, but
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reintegrate the contribution and interdependence of linguistically distinct levels of analysis to the integrity of text. 11.26 Stratificational Texts. The most accessible sources are Lamb's 1966 Outline of Stratificational Grammar, Lockwood's 1972 Introduction to Stratificational Linguistics and the 1973 Readings in Stratificational Linguistics edited by Makkai and Lockwood. In Readings, John Algeo's Stratificational Grammar (4-11) is a graceful and intelligible overview. Lamb's 1971 Crooked Path of Progress in Cognitive Linguistics accepts Ilah Flemming's 1969 assignment of four stages of adjustment within the theory. In the bibliography of Makkai's Readings, Lamb marks his unpublished 1957 thesis on Northfork Mono Grammar as stage 1 and a 1962 version of the Outline of Stratificational Grammar as stage 2. Stage 3 opens in 1965 with Kinship Terminology and Linguistic Structure, while his 1966 Outline of Stratificational Grammar starts stage 4. Accounts of applied and theoretical developments have appeared in the Forum of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (LACUS), published yearly since 1973. 11.27 The Stratificational Approach. Following Algeo's order of presentation, Stratificational Grammar (SG) is said to study language as consisting of a number of strata or levels, and finds other grammars deal with it in simpler terms, e.g. by describing morphemes as consisting of phonemes. In SG, the relation between the morpheme and phoneme levels is not membership, but realization (cp. Firth's exponence). Although recognition of levels entails stratification, other grammars can be inexplicit about how many strata they recognize, what relations within strata are, and how relations between strata are defined. The number of strata required has varied in SG (cf. Lamb 1983:189 ff). In 1979, Lamb and Gleason recognized six strata in three areas: semology: hypersememic sememic grammar: lexemic morphemic phonology: phonetic hypophonemic 11.28 'Higher' and 'Lower' Strata. The distinction of strata as higher or lower expresses a diffuse agreement that the linguist's task is to relate semantic contents and phonetic signals. So highest involves meaning, and lowest, phonetics. Intermediate levels (just like genera and species) have both upward relations (by being defined) and downward (by defining) relations. But the highest must define without being defined, the lowest must be defined
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without defining: in Hjelmslev's terms, there are functives which are also functions, but they differ from functives which are only entities. 3 11.29 Stratal Composition, Distribution and Function. Each stratum is described in terms of its elemental composition, distribution and function. Elemental units of composition are generically emes, designated by an -eme compound label appropriate to each level on which they function as distinctive features of meaning or sound. In expression, some 12 to 15 hypophonemes (phonic features like plosion, spirancy, or nasality) are mentioned. Content emes are much more numerous, e.g. hypersememes like entity, process, animate, abstract, human, male, female, etc., comparable to Hjelmslev's invariants he and sheep for their variant ram. Kinship terms, or elaborate forms of polite and familiar address in languages show the value of this sort of componential analysis. 11.30 Interstratal Relations. Relations between strata can be illustrated in idioms analyzed into sememes, realized on lower strata as phrases (bull in a chinashop, put up with), complex words (refer, housewife) or single morphemes (fox, pup). Like the sign in de Saussure's twinsided definition of it, sememes cannot be divided into segments without losing all or some of their meaning: so a sememe is the smallest integral unit of meaning. The lexemic stratum handles much of what we saw in Chapter III as surface syntactic relations among free forms. The eme here is a lexeme, the smallest unit that forms syntactic combinations, realized on the next lower stratum as a morpheme (bull, put, with, plural s) or morpheme constructions (housewife) whose internal construction does not involve syntactic relations. Lamb's morpheme compares in size to what had the same label in Chapter 3 above, but is more like a lexically conditioned allomorph (go and the wen of went, or the plural s of hats vs. the en of oxen). His phoneme resembles post-Bloomfield morphophonemes, but is close as well to Firth's polysystemic phonematic unit: the n of an, because prevocalic and never preconsonantal, must be a different Lamb-phoneme from the n of than. Although different in distribution, both n's have the same realization (cp. Firth's exponence) and so are identical on the hypophonemic stratum. A stratum's function defines its emic status; a stratum's composition is its inventory of emes; the distribution of emes is stated in tactic rules. Realization rules connect strata with those higher or lower than themselves. For example, the morpheme blue is related to various lexemes above it such as bluebird, skyblue, blues, and simple blue, as well as to the phonemes below it, e.g. /b/, /l/, /uw/, in the symbols used in Chapter II. 11.31 Stratal Realizations. Realization rules are of three kinds: (1) a pattern of alternation, connecting upward to a higher stratum, e.g. accounting for conditioned alternation; (2) a lower alternation pattern, connecting downward to a lower stratum, e.g. accounting for free variation), and (3) the
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sign pattern, connecting downward to a lower stratum. The totality is connected top and bottom to nonlinguistic reality, at the top through thought, and at the bottom through vocal-acoustic phenomena. (cp. Firth's renewal of connection with experience, and the medieval modes of being, signifying, and understanding). 11.32 Text. The totality of strata is text. A text exists on all strata simultaneously. Each stratum may (but need not) have its own tactic rules, as each may have a different structure, providing different ways of regarding the same text. The semological stratum is like a network where a unit has many connections, e.g. To be safe on the Fourth, don't buy a fifth on the third, a text that few nonAmerican native speakers of English could analyze beyond the obvious grammatical level. Grammatically, text is representable in a constituent tree, phonologically, as a string or chain of elements. But text is all these things at once: network, tree, and string. Text is a complex of relations linking man to bits of experience, its meaning, and to sound waves (or in Pike's more suggestive analogy, can be viewed as particle, wave, or field, like entities in physics). So a pair of texts may be identical except for one stratum: the texts, The sun's rays meet and The sons raise meat differ lexically, and grammatically, but overlap on the phonological level, a phenomenon called homonymy by some (amphiboly by Hispanus following Aristotle). Bloomfieldians dealt with signals, not what was signalled, so the explanation of homonymy, rather than its description, was a problem relegated to some nonlinguistic discipline. Paraphrasing an ancient example, the phrase his picture can have to do with a picture of him, a picture he produced or a picture belonging to him. Stratificational Grammar deals with homonymy as well as synonymy. Expressions like I'll miss you or allmishya and even his arrival, compared to he arrives and for him to arrive, are accounted for explicitly as phonological or grammatically different realizations of the same semological structure. 11.33 Arrangement vs. Process. Strata dispense with the need of process terms which empiricists find dubious in synchronic accounts. In SG, no linguistic item X ever appears, then disappears, is replaced by, or changes into, anything else: a semological unit WX (e.g. become dead) can be a unit x die on one stratum realized as y bite the dust on another, unchanged and unchangeable. But Stratification finds nothing intrinsically wrong with process terminology. Linguists are free to create an imaginary time dimension along which they move units, or an imaginary space for storing things, describing only their respective arrangements. Both item-and-arrangement (IA) and item-and-process (IP) ways of talking about linguistic structures are metaphors one might be preferred over the other, but not on the basis of linguistic reality. Lamb, however, believes his stratal account is more than
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metaphoric; he believes it is an analog of structural differences in the brain involved in speech production and perception. 11.34 Text vs. Sentences. Among the advantages claimed for Stratificational Grammar are: (1) SG does not suffer from the limitations of Phrase Structure Grammar which Transformational Grammar was supposed to amend, to make them adequate for dealing with natural languages. So SG is an alternative to TG on that basis; (2) SG aims at text, not sentences alone: it is concerned with anything that has that kind of formal unity; (3) SG claims to be not only a model of the abstract system behind production and comprehension, but a model of the process itself: an analogical model for the production and comprehension of speech; not only how text is produced, but how it is understood. Expressed in Chomskyan terms we will examine shortly, SG claims to model competence as well as performance. In terms used earlier, it should therefore claim to present Language Itself (a) as all options accessible to speaker(s) or hearer(s), (b) as those options speaker(s) chose and those excluded, and (c) as (i) hearer's account of (ii) speaker's choices. Lamb's Crooked Path labels his work cognitive (Hjelmslev's denotative semiotic). So some of the uncertain singulars vs plurals in the last paragraph may not be needed, if one kind of connotative semiotic is excluded, e.g. personal, instead of the institutional connotations Bloomfield (1933.149 ff) discussed. The difference involves what is understood to pertain to competence vs. performance, both expressions ambiguously interpretable as referring either to group or an individual's capacities and activities. 11.35 Group vs. Individual Abilities. It also has to do with the number of levels of analysis relevant in a cognitive theory, levels Lamb calls strata4, following Hjelmslev. For example, the words Irish or Italian, Mick or Dago may denote identically, but connote differently, for speaker or hearer. But knowledge that Mick and Dago are pejoratives is part of competence in the English language. A speaker's choice or a hearer's interpretation of either pair may be acts, part of performance. The distinction can be correlated with behavior, but cannot be accounted for in Bloomfieldian linguistics as Lamb presents it. 11.36 Strata and Elements. In that approach, fie and vie establish /f/ and /v/ as phonemes. If wife's and wives have the same free morpheme base and differ only in bound morphemes of possession and plurality, how is the otherwise distinctive contrast of /f/ and /v/ to be accounted for? Different answers have been proposed: a morphophonemic level between morphemes and phonemes (Hockett 1961.27-53); distinguish morpheme and morph; speak of morpheme1 and morpheme2; or call morpheme1 a lexon and a morphologically (lexically) conditioned morpheme2 simply morpheme.
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If the elements of morphemes are phonemes, there are only two levels or strata to describe, and only one source of generalization or explanation. Phonology as a higher level can be said to explain a lower level that phonetics describes: postulating /p/ because of its contrast with /b/ explains why [p], [ph], [pw], [py] etc. are not phonemic differences in English. If a level of morphophonemes is added, there are three strata to describe, and two sources of explanation. As expressions increase in complexity, the need for explicit terms with refined coverage becomes clearer. Saussure's distinction of negative value, positive signification, and positive-negative content demonstrate how vague a single term like meaning is: some expressions as isolates can be described as overt signals of a signification (love), others of covert values (I love vs. you love), and others overtly contrastive (he loves vs. I or you love). These distinctions remind us that Bloomfield's definitions of simple, complex and compound forms concern signals, not what is signalled. They may help clarify Hjelmslev's assertion that lack of meaning (signification?) is not the same as absence of content, since every linguistic element is defined by its value in any structural approach. For instance, one English equivalent to the Latin single, free, complex, form amabatur is he was being loved - four free forms [one simple (he) and three complex (was, be-ing, and lov-ed)]. The signals -t-and he coincide in signification, as do am- and love. But -b- covers both was and -ing; Latin -ur alone correlates with passive, where English uses the discontinuous signals be...-ed. Without a fourth level, where each element of content is represented discretely, the signals can be described explicitly, but not explained explicitly. Anyone competent in the two languages intuits the elementary difference. But Linguistics requires explicit technical terms or rules of interpretation, applicable to the pair, to pick out where contrasts in Language (like Column A) are realized or nonexistent in a language (like Columns I-IV). That is, from one gender System, where English demands an overt expression in Process as he, she, or it, Latin Process tolerates ambiguous expression of the Systemic options in -t-. Saussure could say that amabatur and he was being loved may share signification, but their values differ, so their content does as well; Firth could have applied identical colligations to System, but have different exponence in Structure; Hjelmslev distinguished Interdependence in System as complementarity (`either-or') and Determination in Process as selection, one of four terms central to Bloomfield's account of syntax. (1933.164-169 et passim) 11.37 Examples vs. Formalization. One complaint about Hjelmslev's Prolegomena was its lack of examples. Works claiming a basis in his point of view (e.g. Togeby 1951) have been received cautiously by Glossematic adherents and critics alike. But when examples of Stratificational analysis are published, its peculiar notation occasions complaint. This is based mainly on its unfamiliar stratal coverage, the patience needed to master the notation and
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then verbalize it by isolating elements and interpreting their connections above and below strata. The problem is not peculiar to SG, as difficulties with previous notation show. It is one thing to welcome a disciplined treatment of a complex matter, and another to so master its presentational peculiarities as to find it as intelligible as ordinary language. There are few native speakers of a new metalanguage: if novel insights are obscure, or terminology discontinuous with formulations it promises to clarify, it can be rejected as just a new jargon. 11.38 Stratificational Notation. Stratificational Grammar developed predecessors' terms but has its own system of notation for making linguistic statements. Three such systems are currently available: Algebraic notation (like Schleicher-Sapir's older one for morphology, Chomsky's newer S -- > NP, etc. for syntax); rigorous prose (like Hjelmslev's novel vocabulary, for which most need ordinary language equivalents or examples to judge its relevance); or circuit diagrams such as Lamb uses. The diagrams are not an indispensable part of the theory, but for now, are characteristic of its perception and presentation of linguistic relations, some of which are not treated explicitly by others. So Geoffrey Sampson's 1970 stratificational study of English numerals has advantages as a sample at this stage of our study: it exemplifies some strata and their relations, SG concepts and mechanisms; Bloomfield said numbers denote without connoting, so as a Hjelmslevian denotative semiotic it may eliminate a stratum; it is what Firth could call a restricted language, but its exclusion of a phonological stratum raises doubt about the validity of the notion restricted language; it involves a small, welldefined subset of semantic units, while the higher stratum is ill-defined in nature and extent. The subset can be well-defined because its numerical elements are structurally defined independent of any denotation. 11.39 English Number Stratification. Sampson presents the restricted language of English cardinal, ordinal, and fraction denominator (reciprocal) expressions as represented on the sememic, lexemic, and morphemic strata of SG. He excludes a hypersememic stratum since ...such a stratum, being composed largely of the speaker's knowledge of the world, should be considered as outside linguistic structure. I therefore regard English as having five strata, from top to bottom, the sememic, lexemic, morphemic, phonemic and hypophonemic strata. (45) Sampson excludes a phonological stratum because he could not deal with numericals at that level without an analysis of English phonology as a whole, and there is none at present (36). His analysis is given in graphic and algebraic form (samples appended), and discussed in more ordinary terms.
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He justifies SG in terms of general linguistic interest. He assumes traditional grammar, older linguists, and current consumers want accounts that even-handedly assist us both in producing sentences and in analyzing what others say. He finds Transformational Grammar does not address that problem, and so distinguishes between a generative and a communicational description. The theoretical contrast is neither one of conflict nor contradiction, just disagreement about what is worth doing, commonly called relevance. (7-12) 11.40 Generation and Communication. For communication, descriptions must be reversible; for generation, they need not be. If structure is order and constituency of elements, then different structures can be assigned at different levels by Tactic Rules peculiar to each. 4 Sampson suggests that SG does that on levels called strata, while TG assigns it in the Base, then alters or interprets it at levels called components (13). SG notational changes should incorporate more inclusive insights, and Sampson presents a neat account of one such innovation to show how relations between strata can either be upward, downward, both, or neither. Letters can be assigned to the four sides of a diamond, from which lines can be drawn to another stratum (19): Algebra of diamonds:
(a) line to
higher in Realization
(b) line to
higher in Tactics
(c) line to
lower
in Tactics
(d) line to
lower
in Realization
11.41 Exclusion. In passing, Hjelmslev notes that he did not treat an exclusion-relation. That is relevant to the empirical accessibility of syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic items, and to the determination of what object linguists might study: I did not aim in the present paper to provide a mechanism for eliminating branches from the decision-tree of choices in applying the rewrite rules, before this tree is complete (which is what is required for a performance model). (31) 11.42 Morphemic, Sememic and Lexemic Strata. Numerical expressions at the morphemic stratum are familiar to us, e.g. five, fifth, fifteenth, nineteen fifty-fifths). Less familiar is the representation of the identical data on the sememic and lexemic strata, of which it is asserted that their emes are the system from which we as speakers choose to form structures, and those in terms of which we as hearers analyze the options others have elected.
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The sememic structures the grammatical system permits are strings of: content units (the integers 1 to 10); operators sum-of, times, power-of, ordinal, reciprocal, and left- and right-brackets (American parentheses). Parentheses lack content, but indicate constituency relations among elements in structures by defining the domain of the operators. Sampson points out three factors that call for comment: the use of portmanteau units, the dubiety of string representation of semantic content, and the fact that trillion is the upper numerical limit of his presentation. The last is easily remedied by rewrite rules; the second is more serious as implying linearity or temporality instead of neutral order-as-dependency in networks; the first seems to favor too much, rather than too little structure, but simplifying it is easy enough. Hundred is a portmanteau for what could be represented asHN/ten times ten/ (superscript HN is read Hypersemon). Units at the top of an alternation pattern are named after the stratum above it, though Sampson excludes that level as outside linguistic structure, since it involves knowledge of the world rather than language, as mentioned above. An often used example of a portmanteau item is French au instead of the particle à and article le. Its occurrence is determined by French grammar, not by facts about the world. What it abbreviates or leaves out is readily recoverable on the basis of linguistic, rather than other kinds of knowledge. This can be appreciated by contrasting abbreviation with ellipsis. An English portmanteau baptize can be sememically put into water or put water on. The difference is abbreviation of facts about the world users may or may not know. Bloomfield describes sentences like I couldn't have helped you, even if I had known her to be a friend of his, and neither could you as involving zero anaphora (1933.249 ff): the zero-forms, supplied on the basis intralinguistic convention alone, could be neither could you have helped me, even if you had known she was a friend of his. 11.43 Strata Mutually Define and are Defined by Each Other. Intermediate strata, e.g. social levels, define those below them and are defined by those above. On the lexemic stratum, A string of downward sememes has as its realization a string of upward lexemes. The upward sememes US/power-of, times, sum-of, (,), ten-z/ are determined: they have no lexemic realization, and their occurrence is in all cases fully determined by the semotactics. Several downward sememes have alternate realizations: for instance, DS/ten/ is realized as UL/ten/ or UL/ty/ etc.; and DS/one/ will be realized as zero when used as a multiplier of ten. In all cases choices will be determined by the lexotactics, which accepts some strings of lexemes but not others. (55) French cousin, cousine or German Vetter, Base might be analyzed as lower lexemic UL realization of higher downward semes DS involving something like /son, daughter, uncle, aunt/, and the latter perhaps into upper semes US for vertical and lateral relationships. The lexotactics of English do not allow the distinctions in cousin. There is no alternation pattern, i.e. no systemic English option from which structures like French cousin, cousine are chosen.
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Similarly: In the lexotactics, the lexemes ordinal and reciprocal must still be kept apart, although most instances of either will eventually be realized phonetically as [Ø], because the reciprocal of two, half, differs from the ordinal second (note however that, e.g. twenty-second is both ordinal and reciprocal); and the reciprocal of four may optionally be quarter rather than fourth)... (55) 11.44 Stratal Representation. Representation on the morphemic stratum is by morphons. This SG term has already been compared to Firth's phonematic units and American morphophonemes and might be comparable as well to Praguian archiphoneme. Since Firth's unit can be represented directly by ordinary IPA symbols, while phonemes are only represented indirectly by them, it is not the systematic abbreviation phonemes can be taken to be. A Prague School archiphoneme is phonetic, but more importantly, a phonological opposition, often represented by a capital letter to stress its distance from phonetic fact. It stands for a factor common to several articulations opposable in general, but neutralized in a particular place in a language, e.g. nasality in bilabials, alveolars or velars. Morphophonemes have been variously presented as bundles of such factors or oppositions, also by capitals between curly brackets rather than phonemic slanted lines. At Stage II (1971) Lamb said `a morphon is a component of a morpheme; and the term may be considered a shortening of morph(oph)on(eme). (Readings 21), where morpheme was distinguished from morpheme2 (c.f. Readings 146). Although a complete SG phonology of English has not been forthcoming, the details are not expected to be complicated: ...for instance, DM/twen/ will undoubtedly be realized as a sequence of morphons MN/twen /, and these morphons will be realized regularly as P/twen/ respectively... but DM/a/ will undoubtedly be realized as MN/a N/, with some MN/N/ that is realized as P/n/before vowels, zero elsewhere; also the initial morphon of M/ty/ and M/teen/ will no doubt be a special MN/T/ that is realized as zero after MN/t/, P/t/ elsewhere. (60-61) Despite their different backgrounds and points of departure, the linguistic theories of Firth, Hjelmslev and Lamb 'translate' into each other fairly well. Notes 1. Rudolf Carnap, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (Berlin, 1928) quoted in Hjelmslev's `Structural Analysis of Language, Studia Linguistica 1.2.75.1947. 2. Column IV says a material implication is valid if A is -, OR if B is +. if + is called true and - called false, Column IV technically may be labelled a truth-functional calculus, but only validity is formally computable, not truth. So Hjelmslev distinguishes arbitrariness from the appropriateness of a theory. Cf. Andersson et al. 1977:37-40, and Irving Copi's Chapter 8 discussion of many `if-then' relationships. 3. Whitfield 1961 appends 108 definitions referring to `other, explicitly premised definitions' (131-8). Many are mutually defining, i.e. structural definitions: Hjelmslev's interdependence); some are
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definitions through genus, species, and specific difference (like rational animal for man : Hjelmslev's determination). That is why he called attention to his `peculiar' use of terms like deductive and empirical. 4. That the resulting tactics (or arrangements) differ is clear from the non-conformity of morphemic and syllabic structures: basks is a single syllable; it could be analyzed into three morphemes, if k is recognized as an old Scandanavian reflexive. Reading Hjelmslev, Louis. 1961. Prolegomena to a Theory of Language. tr. Francis Whitfield. Madison. University of Wisconsin Press. pp 144. 1970. Language / An Introduction. tr. Francis Whitfield. Madison. University of Wisconsin Press. pp xiii 144 (Sproget) 1975. Resumé of a Theory of Language. ed., tr. Francis Whitfield. Madison. University of Wisconsin Press. pp 280. Whitfield, Francis J. 1954. Glossematics. In Linguistics Today. New York. WORD. pp. 250-258. Stratificational Grammar Lamb, Sydney. 1966. Outline of Stratificational Grammar. Revised Edition. Washington, D.C. Georgetown University Press. Lockwood, David G. 1972. Introduction to Stratificational Linguistics. New York. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. pp. 365. [bibliog 351-358 [admirable text for self-instruction of linguists] Makkai, Adam and D. Lockwood, eds. 1973. Readings in Stratificational Linguistics. University of Alabama Press. pp. vi-331, bibliog 316-329. [Section I theory (1-116), II application: SG with best foot forward: must reading] Supplementary Reading Hjelmslev Fischer-Jørgensen, Eli. 1943. Review of Hjelmslev's OSG. Nordisk Tidsskrift for Tale og Stemme. 7.81-96. 1965. Louis Hjelmslev, October 3, 1899-May 30, 1965. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia X.1-33. 1967. Introduction, 2nd. ed. of Uldall's Outline of Glossematics. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague X. ????. Trends in Phonological Theory. Copenhagen: Adademisk Forlag. [Chapters 7 (Glossematics) and 10 (Stratificational Theory)] Garvin, Paul. 1954. Review of Hjelmslev's Prolegomena. Lg. 30.1.69-96. Haugen, Einar. 1954. Review of Hjelmslev's Prolegomena. IJAL 20.247-51. Hjelmslev, Louis. 1932-37. Rask, Rasmus Kristian (1787-1832). Ausgewählte Abhandlungen. Einleitung von Holger Pedersen. Kopenhagen: Levin und Munksgaard. 1943. Omkring Sprogteoriens grundlaeggelsae of Louis Hjelmslev. Kobenhavn: B. Lunos. 1949. Recherches Structurales. interventions dans le débat glossématique, publiée à l'occasion du cinquantenaire de M. Louis Hjelmslev. Copenhague: Nordisk Sprogog Kulturvorlag. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. pp 307. bibliog 305307. 1968. Langue et Parole. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 2.29-44.1959. also 69-81. 1968. Prolégomènes à une Théorie du Langage. tr. du danois par un équipe de linguistes. Avec: Structure fondamentale du langage. tr. de l'anglais par Anne-Marie Léonard. Paris. Éditions de Minuit. pp 231. 1971. Prolegomenos a una theoría del Lenguaje. Version español de Jose Luis Diaz. Madrid. Gredos. pp 198. 1968. Die Sprache. Eine Einführung. tr. Otmar Werner. Darmstadt. Wissenschaftliche Buch-gesellschaft. pp 183. 1976. Principios de gramática general. tr. Felix Torre. Madrid. Gredos. pp 383.
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1972. La Catégorie des cas; étude de grammaire générale. 2. Verbessert und mit den Korrekturen des Autors versehen. Auflage der Ausgabe Kopenhagens 1935-37. Mit einer bibliographischen Notiz von Eli Fischer Jørgensen. München. Fink. Text französisch. 1978. La Categoría de los casos: estudio de gramatica general. tr. Felix Piñero Torre. Madrid. Gredos. pp. 345. bibliography 335-41. 1976. Sistema lingúistico y cambio lingúistico de Louis Hjelmslev. tr. Berta Pallares de R. Arias of Sprogsystem og Sprogforandring. Madrid. Gredos. pp 262. 1959. Essais Linguistiques. Copenhague, Nordisk Sprog og Kultursvorlag. pp 271. bibliog 251-81. Japanese translation. 1971. Essais Linguistiques. Ratier Nourelle ed. Paris. Éditions de Minuit. pp 284. . 1972. Ensayos lingúisticos. tr. Elena Bombon, Felix Torre. Madrid: Gredos. pp 358. Lamb, Sydney. 1966. Epilegomena to a theory of language. Romance Philology 19.531-73. [Review of Hjelmslev: contemporary with Lamb's Outline] Malmberg, Bertil. 1964. New Trends in Linguistics. Stockholm. pp 140-157. Martinet, André. 1946. Au sujet des fondements de la théorie linguistique de Louis Hjelmslev. Bulletin de la Société Linguistique de Paris. 42.19-42. Sechehaye, Albert. 1909. Programmes et méthodes de la languistique théorique. Paris. Siertsema, Berta. 1954. 1965. A Study of Glossematics: critical survey of its fundamental concepts. 2nd edition. the Hague: Nijhoff. bibliog. 270-284. [readable preChomskian perspective] Spang-Hanssen. 1962. Glossematics. In Trends In European and American Linguistics. pp. 129-164. Togeby, Knud. 1949. Linguistics in Denmark: 1940-1948. Symposium III.2.226-237. 1951 Structure immanente de la langue francaise. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague VI. [Reviews: A. Martinet. Word 9.78-82.1953; M. Fowler, Lg. 29.165-175.1953] 1965. Louis Hjelmslev, Oktober 3, 1899-Maj 30 1965. Kobenhavns Universitets Festskrift November 1965. 159-68. Trabant, Jürgen. 1970. Zur Semiologie des literarischen Kunstwerkes: Glossematik und Literaturtheorie. Munich: Fink. 1975. Semiologia de la obra literaria. version español de Jose Saez. Madrid. Gredos. pp 370. Uldall, Hans Jørgen. 1957. Outline of Glossematics; a study in the methodology of the humanities, with special reference to linguistics. Part I: General Theory. Travaux de Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. X1. 1957. 2nd ed., Copenhagen: Nordisj Sprog og Kulturvorlag 1967. pp xxii 87. TLCC. Whitfield, Francis J. 1956. Linguistic usage and glossematic analysis. For Roman Jakobson. The Hague. Mouton. pp 670-675. Stratificational Grammar Algeo, John. 1973. Stratificational Grammar. Journal of English Linguistics 3.1-7 and in Makkai, Lockwood. Chafe, Wallace. 1968. Review of Lamb 1966. Language 44.593-603. Fleming, Ilah. 1969. Stratificational theory: an annotated bibliography. Journal of English Linguistics 3.37-65. [Stratified account of progress: readable on its own] Gleason, Henry A. 1964. The organization of language: a stratificational view. GURP 17.75-95. 1968. Contrastive Analysis in Discourse Structure. GURP 21.39-63 and in Makkai and Lockwood, 258.276) Hajicova, E., and P. Pitha. 1968. Review of Lamb 1966. Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics. 8.71-76. [mathematically pointed; a quick read, long thought] Hockett, Charles. 1958. A Course in Modern Linguistics. New York. Macmillan. 1966. Language, mathematics and linguistics. The Hague. Mouton Series Minor 60. 1968. Review of Lamb 1966. IJAL 34.145-153. [Lamb's work a noble scientific failure] Huddleston, Rodney. 1968. Review of Lamb 1966. Lingua 22.362-73. Lamb, Sydney. 1965. Kinship Structure and Linguistic Structure. American Anthropologist 67:5.
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Pt. 2.37-64. (In Makkai and Lockwood, 229-257) 1971. The Crooked Path of Progress in Cognitive Linguistics. Washington, D.C. GURP 24.99-123. (In Makkai and Lockwood 1973.12-33) 1983. On Determining the Number of Strata in Linguistic Structure. Ninth LACUS Forum 1982. 189-203. Columbia, South Carolina. Hornbeam Press. Palmer, F.R. 1968. Review of Lamb 1966. Journal of Linguistics 4.287-95. Pike, Kenneth L. 1967. Language in Relation to A Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior. Second edition. The Hague. Mouton. and Evelyn G. Pike. 1983. Text and Tagmeme. Norwood: Ablex. Sampson, Geoffrey. 1970. Stratificational Grammar: a Definition and an Example. Janua Linguarum Series Minor 88. The Hague. Mouton. 1980. Schools in Linguistics. London. Hutchinson. pp. 283. bibliog. 259-273. [Chapter 7: Relational Grammar: Hjelmslev, Lamb, Reich. pp. 166-186]. White, John. 1969. Stratificational grammar: a new theory of language. College Communication and Composition 20.191-197.
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Appendix 1. Part of Sampson's Graphic Representation
Figure 4.
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Appendix 2. Part of Sampson's Algebraic Representation
Figure 5.
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12 Transformational Grammar 12.00 An intuition which Hjelmslev made explicit about Immediate Constituent Analysis was adopted in Stratificational and Systemic Grammar: representations: Linguistics should not deal with isolated sentences but Text. A set of sentences, linked by what he called Constellation (a relation among independent variables), is not a text. Though anyone could agree that the sentences of a language are related through Systemic Interdependence, Hjelmslev's label was unfamiliar and not all grammarians represent language explicitly as Determination in Process between basic and derived sentence-forms. One way to make that intuition more explicit was a central message of Chomsky's Syntactic Structures. 12.01 Syntactic Structures. Dialecticians refute, Rhetoricians persuade and Narrators can do a bit of each. Descriptions are supposedly neutral, but Dialectic's ideal goal is a reductio ad absurdum proving an opponent's assumptions lead to contradiction. More modestly, a new description may just aim at pointing out a few shortcomings in others. Rhetoricians open with an introduction called an Exordium, alerting the audience to a new point of view. They next produce a Demonstration, listing discoveries and concluding with a Peroration or résumé of what has been said. They outline what they are going to say, say it, then say what they've said: Chomsky's 1957 Syntactic Structures (SS) can be read in that order. Dialectic tries to show absurdities in another's presentation, not weaknesses in its own. So Dialecticians must know opponents' positions as well as their proposers do. Some ideas can be recast in terms more favorable to an alternative proposal. Sometimes this is done in unfamiliar terms. Sometimes there is no alternative to propose, just a position to attack. 12.02 Preface and Introduction. The Exordia of SS are its Preface and Introduction. Chomsky's Preface announces goals like the 'attempt to construct a formalized general theory of linguistic structure, and to explore the foundations of such a theory' (Hjelmslev 1962.15). Just as Hjelmslev expected his ideas to alienate humanists, Chomsky anticipates other linguists might find his formalizations of theories only 'logical niceties'. But he sets down, very simply, a principle that justifies both this first step and all later revisions as organically predictable, granted the validity of that original premise:
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By pushing a precise, but inadequate formulation to an unacceptable conclusion, we can often expose the exact source of this inadequacy and, consequently, gain a deeper understanding of the linguistic data. (SS p. 5) Comparing formalizations can show why one scheme avoids the other's faults (like statistically valid families with 2 1/2 children apiece). Take syntax, for instance, defined as a device to generate all the grammatical sentences of a language and to exclude ungrammatical ones: echoing Firth 1957.xx, levels are called 'a set of descriptive devices that are made available' for the construction of grammars (SS pxx). Although 'interesting implications for semantic studies' are promised, it is decided that semantics has nothing whatever to do with grammar as defined in this approach (SS pxx). 12.03 Demonstration: The independence of Grammar. Assume a language is a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements (SS p. 13). Mathematics and symbolic logic take set as a collection of objects or elements, and Set Theory deals with relations within and between sets. But sets ought neither to be assigned or denied the label 'grammatical' on a 'meaning'-basis, nor because they approach some statistical norm. Knowing how to compute is not the same as knowing what to compute. Mathematics 'counts', but why we count or knowing how things get into sets, is a pre-mathematical matter. SS takes native intuitions about grammatical and ungrammatical sentences as 'understood', and for the purposes of 'science', can formalize grammar-design as a device which itself 'decides' dubious cases. 12.04 Semantics cannot Define 'Grammatical'. One criterion (that sentences must 'make sense') is excluded as an explanation of why we 'just know' some belong to the set labelled grammatical. This Platonic rejection (cf. p.117 above) of anything semantic in any sense (SS p. 15) could hardly be attacked by Descriptivists who had banned 'meaning' from scientific discussion. When applied to Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, equating make sense with 'meaning' as reference, or with 'meaning' as sense, or with 'meaning' as situational impact, or lumping them all together, guaranteed confusion. Would the Given X formula also be excluded (cf. p xxx above), with its demands, exclusions and especially, tolerations? Allowing toleration as a statistical measure of indeterminacy abandons the demand/exclude part of that formula. That compromises prediction, limits explanation, and banishes the study from one definition of 'science'. But if toleration becomes technical tolerance, spelled out in terms of specific restrictions on, or determinants of, occurrences in larger contexts, the Given X approach is unaffected. 12.05 Statistics cannot Define 'Grammatical'. Hockett's 1955 image of speech as studied by Information Theory is also rejected. That image suggests that, given X (here, the first word of a sentence) we can assign statistical
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probabilities to its successors. But a statistical approach precludes execution of a program for excluding the ungrammatical by specifying what grammatical demands. So one might conclude to the autonomy of Grammar vis a vis meaning and statistics. That is, Grammar is here so defined that neither statistical nor semantic facts refute the definition we have chosen. Hjelmslev would say that the definition is clear because it is arbitrary (Hjelmslev 1942.14), while Chomsky's design lets anyone test the extent to which it is appropriate. 12.06 An Elementary Linguistic Theory. Language data can be formalized as a finite state Markov Process: a set of successive either/or choices. This suggests the image of a grammar-device with a countable number of states. We can mark states + or - in binary constituent arrangements, regardless of complexity. Though a 'machine' like this is designed to take a finite number of steps, adding repeat-loops to the device makes that number indefinite. But it would still be incapable of producing English, since neither English nor any natural language is a finite state language. This device is designed to pass from one state to another only on the basis of the immediately preceding state. When we speak, we take much more into account. Natural languages use discontinuous signals like the ones capitalized in passive and progressive 'BEing ... lovED'. Both speakers and devices modelling speech need information about signals in states yet to come, and records about signals in states already past, to assure proper combination. 12.07 'Presence' vs. 'Absence'. Simple Adding Machines have no memory, and a finite state machine like that cannot be designed to retain and refer back to much less look ahead at absent data to determine its next step. That sort of thing is normal in language: to produce complex sentences like: 'If S1 ... then S2' (i.e. if the first Sentence, then the next Sentence) requires information about S1's structure if S2 is to be properly formed. If the outputs are to be grammatically coordinated or subordinated, data is needed about paired submembers, not just about the member that is next. 12.08 Phrase Structure. Formalizing Phrase Structure (PS) shows that a Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG) can produce more acceptable results in a simple way than a finite state device. Neither adding machines nor other finite state devices are designed to sort out the alternative steps PSG can be designed to take. Phrases had not been discussed this way before SS, nor had Phrase Structure the technical usage it has acquired since then in linguistics. 12.09 PS Constituents are not Just Words. PS analyzes 'sentence' into noun-phrase and verb-phrase categories, as a sentence's major syntactic constituents. It then analyzes the products of that analysis into syntactic subcategories. It then finally matches syntactic subcategories with the lexical expressions which are a sentence's ultimate constituents. SS re-forms a prose
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version of IC assumptions about free and bound forms, and about endocentric and exocentric construction, using graphic trees and formalized rewrite rules. 12.10 How to Draw 'Trees' Correctly. Graphically, trees can have many branches. In SS, all branches are binary. SS rewrite rules produce only pairs from (or just relate those pairs to) single phrasal constituents. Other pairs are then produced from each phrasal member until lexical insertion terminates the process. There is a one-to-one match between one branch and one item in lexical insertion. While the 'rules' can be read as directions for drawing trees, they leave some factors unspecified: no lexical insertion rule excludes or demands a particular lexical item, and no lexical rule distinguishes endocentric from exocentric constructions. 12.11 Bloomfield, Chomsky and Hjelmslev. IC analysis as Bloomfield presented it assumed that constructions like Poor John ran away consist of pairs of constituents; that the constituents Poor John and ran away in turn may consist of pairs of constituents, like poor & John, ran & away; and that the ultimate constituents (like run + 'past' & a- + way) may or may not exemplify the identical relationships demanded by the more abstract representations. A distinction between grammatical and lexical representations was not as obvious. SS's formalization of IC explicates these relations by matching 'rewrite' rules with spatial relationships on a tree diagram. The two differ in that in SS, the sequence of rewrite rules is numbered and syntactic rewrite rules differ from those for lexical insertion. From a completed tree in isolation, it is not clear in what sequence rewrite steps were taken. Hjelmslev's distinction of Function, Functive, and Entity says in words what SS does in formulae. But SS does not discuss functives (Chomsky's lexical items) as Constants or Variables (in endocentrics or exocentrics), nor mention possible problems connected with Degrees of Derivation. An analysis of The man hit the ball is derived from S by these six SS rules: (13)
(i)
S
--->
NP + VP
(ii)
NP
--->
T+N
(iii)
VP
--->
Verb + NP
(iv)
T
--->
the
(v)
N
--->
man, ball, etc.
(vi)
Verb
--->
hit, took, etc
12.12 These rules show the derivation (14) of this sentence, explicitly indicating where each rule applies:
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(14) Sentence produces:
NP + VP
by rule #
(i)
produces:
T+N
+ VP
by rule #
(ii)
etc.
T+N
+ Verb
+ NP
(iii)
the + N
+ Verb
+ NP
(iv)
the + man
+ Verb
+ NP
(v)
the + man
+ hit
+ NP
(vi)
the + man
+ hit
+T
+N
(ii)
the + man
+ hit
+ the
+N
(iv)
the + man
+ hit
+ the
+ ball
(v)
A scheme like this gives much the same information as the tree for The Romans destroyed Carthage (p. 346 above) and contrasts with some points for which Hjelmslev provided labels:
12.13 Hjelmslev might find the man and the ball graphically depict different degrees of derivation from S. Algebraically, SS produces both by rule (iv). (15) does not shown whether the functives NP and VP of the function S are related exocentrically (through Interdependence) or endocentrically (through Determination). Whether the 2 functions NP to the functives T and N are equally well represented will depend, not on the graphics, but on the rule that rewrites the pairs: both Romans or The Romans are grammatical in (The) Romans destroyed Carthage but *man hit the ball is not. Carthage with a the is as ungrammatical as ball without one. 12.14 A Terminal Language. Provision is made for embedding constituents within constituents in rules of the form (18) (SS p. 30). An `S-F Grammar' can generate a terminal language which is not a finite state
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language: if S is the single string Z, and F has two rules requiring Z to be rewritten as ab, it allows Z to be inserted and reinserted into it as aZb: (18)
S:
Z
F:
Z ab Z aZb
... SS takes PSG to be a single level of analysis which ignores a distinction of grammar vs. lexicon: each sentence of the language is represented by a set of strings, not by single strings as it is on the level of phonemes, morphemes or words. So: Phrase structure must be considered as a single level with a set of representations for each sentence of the language. There is a one-one correspondence between the properly chosen sets of representations, and diagrams of the form (15). (SS p.32) 12.15 Limitations of Phrase Structure Description. PSG handles some facts clumsily. SS' bibliography lists Nida's 1943 dissertation A Synopsis of English Syntax in a 1951 multilithed version. In his 1960 preface to a reprint, Nida says his account would have been different, had intonational and junctural phonology been understood in the 40's, or had grammatical concepts like Pike's tagmeme and Chomsky's kernel sentence been available. It was considered worth publishing because it was the most extensive IC treatment of English, and because of the words listed which function just like syntactic classes. No structure is assumed to be basic, and none is a transform of another. Nida adopts Bloomfield's divisions I: Major Sentence Types [A. Actor-Action (Transitive, Intransitive, Equational), B. Goal-Action], and II: Minor Sentence Types (Completive, Exclamatory, Aphoristic). The principle of constituent dependency is what gives the collection coherence: In addition to the usual set of lines used to show relationships between immediate constituents, an additional set of symbols has been employed to mark exocentric, endocentric and paratactic relationships: Hypotactic x Exocentric Endocentric = > Coordinate (with the arrow pointing toward the Subordinate head constituent) Paratactic
|| (Nida 1960.ix)
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12.16 Sentences are Isolates. This organization produces the following two examples, relevant to Chomsky's discussion:
SS finds this approach is deficient, since: (1) IC handles Conjunction poorly because it gives no simple way of identifying what constituents are; no formal IC device prevents combinations of Nida-examples as constituents in S1 or S2: Either he ran away or Sorry, my mistake (Nida 1960.ix,xii) nor demands The more the better (ibid. xii). PSG's numbered derivations, paired with branching in trees, make constituent status more obvious. (2) A transformational account generates verbal auxiliaries more neatly, reinforcing the point that PSG cannot handle discontinuities. (3) The best IC can do with synonymous active/passive pairs is to display differing numbers of morphemes in differing IC arrangements, with no way of indicating their synonymy. 12.17 Sentences are not All Isolates. It is not just discontinuity within a sentence which is faulted here, but the lack of connexity between sentences, a relation outside the domain which IC analysis had defined for itself. That sort of data is made to order for a transformational approach: it posits an identical kernel string underlying systematically related pairs, reminiscent of a phoneme 'underlying' its allophones. The pair quoted above from Nida are not referentially synonymous, as the active and passive of a single kernel would be, but that is still peripheral to the difficulty of relating sentences which have been defined as autonomous isolates.
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12.18 Kernel Sentences. A language's kernel is defined as the set of sentences that are produced when we apply obligatory transformations to the terminal strings of the [S, F] grammar (SS p. 45). Strings to which rules still apply are nonterminal strings; those to which no more rules apply are terminal (Hjelmslev sees 'nonterminals' as Functives that are Functions; 'terminal' strings are Functives which are not Functions). A kernel sentence is one produced from a terminal string by means of obligatory transformation; derived sentences involve optional as well as obligatory transformations. SS treats questions, commands and passives as products of optional transformations. 12.19 On the Goals of Linguistic Theory. One reason for showing the inadequacy of other models was the problem of justifying grammars: A grammar of the language L is essentially a theory of L. Any scientific theory is based on a finite number of observations, and it seeks to relate the observed phenomena and to predict new phenomena by constructing the general laws in terms of hypothetical constructs such as (in physics, for example) mass and electron. (SS p. 49) Martin Joos might have been quoted on how Descriptivists defined their intellectual horizon: If the facts have been fully stated, it is perverse or childish to demand an explanation into the bargain. (Readings in Linguistics 1957.v) Joos' words are like Boas' remark (p. 261 above) about what it takes to satisfy different kinds of questioners. An SS footnote contrasts the static Descriptivist stance with the dynamic view Chomsky advocates: To use Quine's formulation, a linguistic theory will give a general explanation for what 'could' be in language on the basis of 'what is plus simplicity of the laws whereby we describe and extrapolate what is.' (SS p. 14) 12.20 Description and Explanation. What Joos likely had in mind is closer to Hjelmslev's comprehensive description than Chomsky's conditions of external adequacy, when sentences can be produced by rules intuitively acceptable to the native speaker. But Chomsky adds a condition of generality as a requirement: linguistic theory's constructs (like phoneme or phrase) must be definable independently of particular language data. His account of how scientific hypotheses are formed might have suggested that what Chomsky had in mind was an account that is deductive in the peculiar sense of Hjelmslev, not one that is a priori in the ordinary sense of antedating experience. This strange expression so alienated some empirical linguists that the expression language independent was flag enough to show them where Nonscience (or Non-sense) dwelt.
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Given data we want to 'account for', can we demand methods which automatically produce an 'explanation'? Call that a Discovery Procedure. Methods which dictate a choice between otherwise plausible proposals constitute a Decision Procedure. Asking only that a linguistic theory provide grounds for preferring one approach to another, when both yield 'correct' results, can be called an Evaluation Procedure. 12.21 Transformations. Simplicity is involved in evaluation but is not mechanically decidable. Simplicity is best seen as an effect of overall clarity resulting from seeing the role of a pivotal member in a complex problem. Our goal is to limit the kernel in such a way that the terminal strings underlying the kernel sentences are derived by a simple system of phrase structure and can provide the basis from which all sentences can be derived by simple transformations: obligatory transformations in the case of the kernel, obligatory and optional transformations in the case of the non-kernel sentences. (SS p. 61) This suggests a closed set of data, which had been so promising in the Descriptivists' distinction of inflectional vs. derivational categories. A language's kernel consists of the contrasts obligatory within it: these identify constants and reduce other factors to variables. The kernel is the set of terminal strings of an [S, F] grammar, the categories of which can be characterized relationally, not defined substantively: transformations operate on underlying strings which have a categorial, functional or constituent status, not on entities, substantively defined, that realize or manifest them. 12.22 Obligatory and Optional. Transformations which delete or rearrange items differ from those introducing items absent in a kernel sentence. If perfective and progressive aspects are obligatory components of English Grammar, as past and nonpast tenses are, their categories might be expected to appear in derivations and associated trees. But SS produces derived sentences by applying optional transformations to the output of obligatory ones, like tense, affix, boundary and do where appropriate. Obligatory transformations produce kernel sentences, defined as simple, active, complete, present-tense statements (SS p. 80). Derived sentences are the complex, compound, incomplete, question, command, passive, and negative ones in different tenses produced by optional transformations from kernels. That account of kernel sentences recalls the logicians' definition of a logical proposition. But neither formulation addresses the Saussurean insight that linguistic elements function importantly through their contrast with absent factors, in addition to their contrast with present, substantive ones. Some structures are syntagmatically simple. They check books and The books may have been being checked by the auditors contrast less overtly with a sort of 'Column A' (cf. p. 340 above) scheme of English verbs opposing past to nonpast tense linked to lexical, agentive and objective functions, modality,
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Page 376 perfective, antecedent, contemporaneous and progressive aspects, aside from how parts and subparts are negated. They check them is a kernel sentence; SS introduces its passive, progressive and modal forms by transformation. For They will have to have been being checked by someone, one could trace a route from the simplest to the most complex expressions by noting when, where, and how each new element is introduced: Agency/ Subject
Tense
Perf. Aux Aux.
Prog. Aux.
Perf. Suff.
They
Lexical root
Prog. Suffix
Perf. Suffix
check
They
are
check
They
will
check
They
will
They
will have
They
will have
be
check
ing
ing
check be
en
They
check
ed ing
check
ed
They
were
check
ing
They
have
check
Subject
tense modality Perfect
Pass.
Progr.
Passive
Agency
They
will have to
have
be-en
be-ing
check-ed
by s.o.
They
have to
have
be-en
be-ing
check-ed
by s.o.
They
have
be-en
be-ing
check-ed
by s.o.
They
have
be-en
check-ed
by s.o.
ed
Nida's most complex verbal structure (1960.lii) was ought to have been aided, diagrammed as:
12.23 Descriptive Presuppositions. IC shows only that this structure is a nested set of exocentric constructions (as are to aid and ought to aid) but ought to have been aided involves additional formatives. Transformations were
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to 'explain' what IC description could not. The arguably identical reference (as opposed to the identical sense) of
12.23
(a) The auditor has had to check them (b) They must have had to be checked by the auditor
would be associated with an IC design plus a transformationally predictable dependency network, not just with the factual differences of order, constituency relations, and number of elements. Native speakers always `knew' this, but neither IC graphics nor IC prose reduced that relationship to an explicit rule. SS presented an image of grammar with three components, within which questions about the structure of sentences could be answered, (a) categorial and kernel; (b) postcategorial and transformed; and (c) phonologically distinct. It lacked a comparably autonomous lexical level. 12.24 The Explanatory Power of Linguistic Theory. How well we can explain things varies with how accurately we have described what is to be explained. Descriptions vary in imaginative appeal, but a theory capable of 'explaining' the same thing on several levels is superior to another which can only present it on a single level: compare a phonemic account of the homonymity of an aim and a name with an attempt to sort out pairs of verbs with or without overt objects. Structural ambiguity studied by the Ancients as Amphiboly (standing of the seated and seeing of the blind) reappears in Chomsky's flying planes can be dangerous and the shooting of the hunters. Both accounts locate ambiguity in the mechanics of the linguistic signalling system. 12.25 Syntax and Semantics. Syntax can be studied independently of semantics despite the correlations between them, as amphibolies suggest. Phonological, lexical, and morphemic ambiguities had been long recognized, but SS added a transformational 'explanation'. TG made more explicit what the intuitive process of 'understanding a sentence' involves: ability to isolate an obligatory kernel structure and relate it to obligatory and optional structures of sentences derived by transformations. But if grammar is to be the study of linguistic form, then intuitions about meaning must be distinguished from intuitions about form. That we have intuitions about meaning does not guarantee the reliability or possibility of intuitions about form. Unfortunately, the terms mean and meaning in this discussion are subject to so many interpretations that it is not profitable to delay now over any statement involving them. The upshot of the passage, however, is that, like Hjelmslev, Chomsky claimed immanent (purely formal) syntactic theory does not preclude semantic applications, even though it is not based on them.
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12.26 Peroration. Chomsky's 3-page Summary is partially reworded here in terms used by other linguists discussed above: (1) Once we grasp the holistic nature of Structure, we realize that 'higher' levels of analysis do not literally consist of elements taken from 'lower' ones: they differ by a perspective-shift on the same data. (2) Objections to mixing levels result from ignoring that, and (3) representing language as a discrete, step-by-step accumulation of words even with options statistically weighted would make sense only if a sentence were a Process without a System. (4) If a 'grammatical sentence' is defined as a categorial Process constrained by a categorial System, semantics is as irrelevant to explaining 'grammatical' as providing an account of statistical approximation to 'grammaticality' is self-defeating. (5) If a language's bewildering variety of sentences derives from a few basic sentences underlying them, an account of syntactically defined kernel sentences and their permissible transformations simplifies the notion 'Grammar'. (6) A 'Grammar' is tripartite: Part I is Phrase Structure, which formalizes categorial kernels (tautologically called basic with respect to derived sentences). It requires a derivational history for proper application of Part II's Transformations. Part III is the grammar-sound link in Morphophonemics. That needs neither Transformations nor Derivational history: morphophonemes are rewritable directly into phonemes. (7) Subcategories like auxiliaries demand representation as lists of Anomalies only if their transformational history is ignored, and other so-called irregularities disappear when dual representation at other levels is permitted. (8) 'Understanding a sentence' then involves Analogies among levels of RE-presentation: taking the kernel-level as `basic', an adequate distinction between lexical and grammatical 'meaning' becomes dubious: if Syntax is made the Constant, Semantics becomes a Variable. (9) How systematic use of grammatical devices correlates with Semantics could form `part of the subject matter for a more general theory of language', but that (like a future linguistic study of parole for Saussure) was more than SS was prepared to deal with at the time. 12.27 Katz and Postal's Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions appeared in 1964, and Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965, in which the semantic discussion of ITLD could be presupposed. ITLD reworded Lowth's Preface (p. 207 above) to his 1762 Grammar: (a) a description of a natural language is a scientific theory in the form of a system of rules from which the phonological, syntactic and semantic facts about the language may be derived as consequences and (b) ... a theory of the nature of language 'should represent the structure common to all natural languages in a model that explains why the rules in the description...have the form they do and which of the concepts used in these rules are linguistic universals'. (Katz & Postal 1964:ix)
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Theories are supported by successful descriptions, and justified to the extent that both the description's form and success are demanded by a theory's assignment of universal status to some of its concepts. ITLD held that semantic proposals by Katz and Fodor (Language 39.170-210.1963) could be integrated into Chomsky's generative approach to grammar; that transformations, singulary (based on one tree) or generalized (involving more than one tree), optional as well as obligatory, do not change meaning; that lexical trees showed how multiply ambiguous a word is, allowing as many readings to be projected onto grammatical structures as there were alternative interpretations. The most quoted example of this sort of analysis is that for
This 'formalizes' a dictionary entry. It resembles trees, but the branch-relations are not read as is a or consists of, manifested by nor directly as is equivalent to, as in the case of the IC boxes and PS trees: rather, Katz and Postal's sub-headings say something like X is related to the topmost antecedent by the kind of branching the labels suggest. The notation stands
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for atomic conceptual elements, comparable to Hjelmslev's content figurae. Syntactic markers are unenclosed, semantic markers are set off by parentheses, optional distinguishers are put into in brackets and selection restriction in angles. The dots under Noun suggest further subcategorization like common noun, count noun, etc. 12.28 Collocations. Dictionary entries differ from Katz & Postal's lexical diagrams by contextualizing ball or hit, for instance, with verbs, objects, instruments, manners and with contexts for each interpretation. They are not formalized, but rely on native intuitions rather than explicit graphic conventions. For sentences like
12.28
(a) Jack did it. (b) Jack is a bachelor. (c) I think Jack is a bachelor. (d) That bachelor Jack did it. (e) I think that bachelor Jack hit the ball. (f) Jack's being a bachelor is what got the ball hit.
ITLD showed that (i) there are as many interpretations of sentences using bachelor as there are entries for the word; (ii) sentence-forms contribute a kernel 'meaning' which is stable under transformation, so (iii) some sentence-ambiguities can be explained lexically. In the examples (12.28 a-f), hit and ball have ten to twenty senses which are not deducible from their sentence- or phrase-forms. Hit 1 terminates derivations starting with VP --> V or VP --> V+NP, and ball2 potentially constructs with different instruments or manner adverbials, depending on the sport (stroke, bat, putt, etc.). Other interpretations involve more than sports. 12.29 Description and Explanation, Rules and Theory. A theoretical contribution signalled by ITLD's `Integrated' was to reintroduce 'meaning'. Its Preface recalls the speech vs. language, theoretical vs. experiential objects we call language. It identifies Description-as-Rules with Theory, and so equates English with its rules. It assumes phonological, semantic and syntactic rules differ; that performances are not invariant realizations of rules; that a Theory is universal, particular facts consequences of it. Further, such a theory should represent the structure common to all natural languages in a model that explains why the rules in the descriptions of particular natural languages have the form they do and which of the concepts used in these rules are linguistic universals... (Katz & Postal 1964:ix) So Linguistics' task is now taken to be, not the bare description of language, but the construction of a theory of the nature of language, a theory supported by empirically successful descriptions; justified because these, in
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their turn, are rules of the prescribed form, elements of the prescribed nature (i.e. universal). ITLD's integration of semantic and grammatical description was answer three questions: (1) what are the syntactic structures that are semantically interpreted in describing the meaning of a sentence? (2) do transformations contribute anything to meaning? (3) what changes in syntactic description are necessary? ITLD's Syntactic Categories are labelled S, NP, VP, Aux. Tense, Pres, Prefix, Gender, Number, Masculine, Sing, Adv, and Noun Stem (Katz & Postal 1964:6-12). Semantic 'Categories' are less clear: ITLD's Semantic Component has Markers (semantic, syntactic), Distinguishers, and Selection restriction in tree-dominance. By combining lexical data with syntactic relations, readings are amalgamated: transformations neither contribute to nor subtract anything from 'meaning'. ITLD's Lexicon is in a syntactic component, its Dictionary in a semantic component. Projection Rules linking the lot are universal, since grammatical relations are identical for them: ... the dictionary of the semantic component, although formulated by using substantive and formal universals, is obviously determined in part by idiosyncratic features of individual languages. Semantic differences between languages are then wholly attributable to differences between entries in the dictionaries of the languages and to differences in their underlying P-Markers. (Katz & Postal 1964:163) Among Katz and Postal's conclusions are what they called a heuristic principle of some importance for understanding how Generative Grammar was thought to proceed: Given a sentence for which a syntactic derivation is needed, look for simple paraphrases of the sentence which are not paraphrases by virtue of synonymous expressions; on finding them, construct grammatical rules that relate the original sentence and its paraphrases in such a way that each of these sentences has the same sequence of underlying P-markers. Of course, having constructed such rules, it is still necessary to find independent justification for them. (Katz & Postal 1964:157) 12.30 Before Aspects. Syntactic Structures' impact was enormous. It reintroduced expressions and areas of knowledge proscribed in Descriptive Linguistics. Hjelmslev's appeal to Logical Positivism 3 was explicit, but informal. Chomsky used logically 'informal' ways to show the limitations he found in IC analysis, not just in a rhetorical fashion, but in explicitly formulated techniques applied to examples. The terms science and empirical then came to be used in ways uncommon in linguistics before 1965. Science had denoted something like controlled physical experiment, requiring impersonal, objective, third-person data-gathering, although it always connoted prestige. Aspects-type work involving
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subjective, first-person, introspective results were prestigious, and soon labelled `scientific'. Empirical had denoted something tangible, visible, often physically manipulable, so connoted public. Intersubjective agreement is public. So intersubjective agreement was incorporated into the extension of `empirical' evidence. But denotation and connotation are related as constant and variable, not as two constants. Chomsky avoided the verbal aspects of the debate: if insight into language results in ways of talking about it which we can share, the work is valid, whether it deserves to be called 'scientific' or not. 12.31 Syntactic Structures Focused on the role of theory. Neither intuitive orientation nor pragmatic agreement turns data into facts just because they engage common interests. A theory is an explicit proposal about how to explain explicit descriptions. Linguistic descriptions are based on extensive observations whose coherence must be accounted for. Logic has simple procedures for calculating the implications of formalized representations (e.g. Columns A-IV) whose validity is not disputed. Though it was objected that Chomsky's Phrase Structure was a caricature of IC (Chafe 1970:2) no comparable formalization of the 'real' PSG has been proposed. SS translated two hypotheses about language into formal terms: the first equated natural and finite state languages, the second restricted grammar to working within sentences, not among them. Both were shown to be incapable of (a) excluding ungrammatical sentences or (b) generating all the grammatical ones. No one denied that this was the purpose of a grammar. So any grammar with these drawbacks was labelled externally inadequate. If that inadequacy was not just a matter of temporary fact, but due to an intrinsic design feature, it failed as well to meet an external condition of generality. Needed was a theory without those design weaknesses. The appearance of ITLD and Aspects within a year of each other challenged those who took Syntactic Structures in 1957 in much the way Bloomfield's Language (1933), Gleason's Introduction (1955), Hockett's Course (1958) and Hill's Introduction (1958) had been received: developments were expected, of course, but to round out, illustrate further, or clear up minor obscurities called courteously to the author's attention by reviewers of an otherwise finished product. Books in Linguistics would never be read that way again. Rather than assuming Linguistics was a cumulative enterprise, as is the case in a developed science, attention shifted from whether data confirmed that perspective to the mode of argumentation employed. 12.32 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Aspects has four sections: Chapter 1, Methodological Preliminaries and its notes are one third of the book. It discusses: Competence and Performance; how a generative grammar is organized and justified; universals in language; description and explanation; evaluation procedures; language learning and generative capacity. The second third is Chapter 2, Categories and Relations in Syntactic Theory. This discusses: the scope of the base; aspects of deep structure and
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syntactic features and a fragment of the Base and its rules. The last third is Chapter 3, Deep Structure and Grammatical Transformations and Chapter 4, Some Residual Problems, which takes up syntactic-semantic boundaries and the structure of the lexicon. 12.33 Competence and Performance. Competence is intended to explain Performance, but what counts as 'explanation' varies widely. One sort of explan-at-ion flattens what is round: we can't see past the horizon, much less around the world, but maps drawn according to Mercator's projection 'explain' things by abstracting from a fact about the world no one denies, but does not need to drive from New York to Boston. A flat world is so negligible an abstraction that no inspectors object to skyscrapers put up on the patently false assumption that there are straight lines in nature. Grasping circularity is simple, imagining it, impossible, but real round things instance an ideal because we can draw points and lines, not just debate about conceptual oppositions. That is not unlike Saussure's ideas about la langue as a pure form. Langue and Competence are most alike in their respective contrasts to parole and Performance, but concrete instances of the two may not overlap any more than psychology and sociology. Parole differs from la langue because parole contains unpredictable actual signs which chance to be in a langue-relational contrast. Performance and Competence might be identical in cognitive aspects, but more than cognition determines performance or dictates the absence of utteranceparts. 12.34 Langue and Competence. Can langue and Durkheim's Social Fact be equated? Langue as pure form is very like, but certainly not, a Social Fact. A Social Fact is relatively substantive, realized in many kinds of matter. But langue and Social Facts are concepts on the same emic level of opposition, while bits of parole or using fingers to eat are etic acts most comparable at the level of composition and practical function. Etic acts attain static value by a process of being demanded or excluded within systems like langue or a Society. Language-as-Text, or Society-as-Behavior may indifferently rate as Acts, Processes and States at once: no one perspective denies the other. Chomsky associates Competence with knowledge so often that a pure-form conception of langue (independent of phonetic or semantic substance) seems more easily defensible, since it claims so much less. Knowledge denotes with systematic ambiguity when used of an embryo, infant, child, adolescent, and adult. Used of adults, the term connotes something more substantive than formal oppositions. If Competence must denote something in language rather than what we understand about it, we are reminded that 'language' itself is not a given, but something we postulate to 'explain' data. This makes Saussure's conclusion that the concrete and integral object of linguistic science is the linguistic sign less of a paradox.
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12.35 Actual and Potential. So by The Sound Pattern of English (1968) one was prepared for the idea that since Competence can be considered the potential performance of an ideal Speaker-Hearer, 'real' psychological discussion is unlikely to get us far. The ideal Speaker-Hearer has no human failings of memory, attention-span and the like: it is a kind of IT whose competence in cognitive contents and structures is constructed from what actual speakers do. Even when real humans speak, the cognitive aspect of language rarely accounts for the presence or absence of speech-signals. Sociological, connotative and other factors are involved as varying conscious, subconscious and unconscious determinants of what one says. If Grammar accounts for Competence, not for Performance, its technical vocabulary cannot be taxed as vague because it is uninterpretable in terms of Performance. If a Performance-account is demanded, Competence's role as the Constant which this Variable takes for granted must not be confused with a non-existent single Constant underlying Performance. 12.36 Performance needs Interpretation. Terms with unique definitions are rarely used, though 'responsible' people are judged by what they say and what that implies. We can recover what we might have had in mind, had we thought about what was implied, and kind folk let us qualify `what we said' by `what we meant'. That kind of cognitive structure is a candidate for part of Competence. It melds sociological, cognitive and psychological inputs, but, like la langue, it is still a form of which these are particular instances. 12.37 Expressions of Competence. Competence is variously described: a mental reality underlying performance (Aspects 1965:4); ability to understand infinitely many and as yet unspoken sentences (Aspects 1965:10) and as the linguistic intuition of the native speaker (Aspects 1965:17). In Topics (1966) it is a system of rules relating signals to semantic interpretations (Topics 1966.10). Its most striking aspect is 'creativity' (Topics 1966.11): it specifies a language-acquisition device as the linguistic intuition or tacit competence of a speaker (Topics 1966.21). It is native-language competence normals develop, rules we can call grammar (Topics 1966.8). Like langue, it is not to be confused with actual or potential performance: as Saussure saw, langue is logically prior. Chomsky says: This work has been based on the assumption that competence must be distinguished from performance if either is to be seriously studied. It has, beyond this, attempted to provide an explanatory theory of competence and to use this as a basis for constructing an account of performance. The theory of competence is mentalistic, naturally, in that it can at the present stage of knowledge draw no evidence from and make no direct contribution towards the study of the mechanisms that may realize the mental structures that form the subject matter for this theory, or that carry out the mental processes that it studies. Thus the theory of competence (i.e. the theory of grammar) deals with abstract structures, postulated to account for and explain linguistic data. (Topics 1966.91)
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In the Sound Pattern of English, Chomsky remarks that: One fundamental factor involved in the speaker-hearer's performance is his knowledge of the grammar that determines an intrinsic connection of sound and meaning for each sentence. We refer to this knowledge - for the most part, obviously, unconscious knowledge - as the speaker-hearer's competence... We may, if we like, think of the study of competence as the study of the potential performance of the idealized speaker-hearer. (1968:3) 12.38 'Deep' and 'Surface' Structures Are technical terms defined within a formal organization. As with Competence, others' usage led to shifts in the perceived denotation and connotation of the terms, some unimportant, some profound and misleading. That is hard to ignore for a general explanation of Language as opposed to Grammars. Aspects identifies deep structures as what the syntactic component specifies for semantic interpretation and surface structures as what it specifies for phonological interpretation (Chomsky 1965:16): each is abstract compared to a phonetic result, and each is generated made explicit as in logic, by the syntactic component assigning a structural description. Deep structure is constituted by a system of rules generating a restricted set of basic strings associated with a Phrase-marker. The transformational subcomponent generates surface structures from those bases. Kernel sentences are a proper subset of sentences with a minimum of transformation involved in their generation (Chomsky 1965:17-18). 12.39 Formal and Substantive Universals. Universals are assumed to simplify the task of explanation: if factors are independent of a particular language, and their occurrence in a language is demanded by the general theory, a particular grammar has a general 'explanation' of that fact in this restricted sense. Universals pertain to the syntactic, semantic, or phonological components or to their mutual relations. Substantive universals are fairly concrete members of a language-independent, finite set: the distinctive features of phonology, syntactic parts of speech, or lexical items such as personal names. Formal universals are more abstract, like the need for transformations, dependency relations or abstract conditions, cyclic application of rules, and the like. While kernel sentences' oppositional patterns resemble propositional contrasts in logic's Predicate-argument structures (Px, Pxy, Pxyz), conjunctions of kernel sentences are more diffuse than logic allows. TG identity-criteria are more complex than those of logic or IC-analysis, since the latter's domain is not intrasentential. If transformations can change meaning, their triggers should be in deep, not surface, representations. If that is so, just what is it that the Base manifests? Under what identities does deep = shallow structure? Defining meaning is crucial for conceptions of what is reformed.
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12.40 Linguistic Theory and Language Learning. Assumption of an innate Language Acquisition Device reflects contrasts between rationalist and empiricist views about how we acquire knowledge, of which language-learning is a subpart. Each view involves metaphor in explaining itself or discussing the other. Chomsky says that among Empiricists, Quine (1960.83f) takes innate quality space and distance as givens; Hull (1943) assumes a set of unconditioned reflexes; Bloch (1950) assumes inborn ability to identify distinctive components in gross acoustic data. Empiricists find Saussure's assumption, that we have elementary mechanisms segmenting and generalizing data, needs no proof. Besides those, Chomsky and Rationalists posit specific innate ideas and principles defining 'learnability', as do principles of inference like 'things are equal to each other if equal to a third'. A principle like that remains latent unless triggered by experience, yet it is not determined by experience. The universal form of language is inborn. Particular languages do no more than instantiate it, as parole does compared to langue. Chomsky concludes that empiricists consider only knowledge-seeking procedures innate, while the product of experience is indeterminate. Rationalists say the product, such as the general form of a system of knowledge, is pre-fixed; that experience fills in its pre-formed aptitude with actual knowledge, triggered by that experience. When such contrasting views are clearly formulated, we may ask, as an empirical question, which (if either) is correct ... a factual question ... approached in several ways. (Chomsky 1965:53) 12.41 Chomsky's use of Empirical and Fact. Chomsky thinks empiricist/ rationalist blends are possible (1965:52) but finds that empiricists present language learning as basically an accident, while rationalists view it as a necessity. They suppose a child cannot help constructing a particular sort of transformational grammar to account for the data presented to him any more than he can control his perception of solid objects. (Chomsky 1965:59) Appeal to vision to explain learning reminds us of Plato's Analogy of the Cave full of shadows of the real world outside and underlies our use of insight for the experience of understanding. It is latent in the Process vs. Action distinction in English between see and look at, extended by the common distinction between unformed and informed observation. Action vs. Process distinguishes mentalist from behaviorist accounts of learning, and the distinction between bare facts and those coherent with theoretical organization. Modern tools of 'empirical' observation include the mental ones of Logic and material sensors like electron microscopes, telescopes, and Geiger counters. These instruments provide mediate rather then immediate empirical
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contact. Mention of an empirical question, factual in nature, reclaims data resulting from intersubjective agreement about introspection for 'science'. Tools capable of objective calibration now include explicit formalization as in the use of Markov and PS models of language. 12.42 Rationalists and Empiricists. If empiricists and rationalists assume 'Logic' is innate, formalizations of Logic itself become of seminal importance. How does one determine interpretations of logical Variables? In formulae like `If x, then y', the 'IF ... THEN' form is the logical Constant; Variables are x and y, which differ notably if construed as Referents or Senses, or in combinations of both. Since scientific hypotheses are viewed by empiricists as well as mentalists as mental constructs, Chomsky's interest in their fruitfulness rather than in their disputed status is informative. One objection to Chomsky's work is a Rationalist preference for intuitive constructs over empirical, statistical summaries (Sampson 1980; Botha (1982): Chomsky says he employs the methods by which Galileo introduced the West to modern science. Botha weighs and qualifies this by comparing the dilemmas Galileo faced in the 'Tower Problem' and what Chomsky deals with in 'On Binding' (Chomsky 1980) vs. 'Government and Binding' (Chomsky 1981). Galileo's problem: Copernican theory says the earth revolves. That predicts that bodies dropped from towers will not fall in straight lines. But everyone can see that they do; Chomsky's GB problem: it predicts that some sentences are ungrammatical. But everyone can see they are not. The 'common' Galilean solution is to create a new kind of `experience' whereby we `see' things from an explanatory theoretical perspective and accept a nonempirical cause. In Galileo's case, we now `see' why things dropped from a tower appear to fall perpendicularly because of developed theories of solid bodies and aerodynamics which were only intuited as needful in Galileo's time; Chomsky appeals to a yet-to-be-developed science about markedness, dealt with intuitively by the Prague School. 12.43 Categories and Relations. Comparing the information available in a traditional grammatical account and what is representable in his approach, Chomsky lists the following for (1) Sincerity may frighten the boy. (i) the string (1) is a Sentence (S); frighten the boy is a Verb Phrase (VP) consisting of the Verb (V) frighten and the Noun Phrase (NP) the boy; sincerity is also an NP; the NP the boy consists of the Determiner (Det) the, followed by a Noun (N); the NP sincerity consists of just an N; the is, furthermore, an Article (Art); may is a verbal auxiliary (Aux) and, furthermore, a Modal (M).
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(ii) the NP sincerity functions as the Subject of the sentence (1), whereas the VP frighten the boy functions as the Predicate of this sentence; the NP the boy functions as the Object of the VP, and the V frighten as its Main Verb; the grammatical relation Subject-Verb holds of the pair (frighten, sincerity), and the grammatical relation Verb-Object holds of the pair (frighten the boy). (iii) the N is a Count Noun (as distinct from the Mass Noun butter and the Abstract Noun sincerity) and a Common Noun (as distinct from the Proper Noun John and the Pronoun it); it is, furthermore, an Animate Noun (as distinct from book) and a Human noun (as distinct from bee); frighten is a Transitive Verb (as distinct from occur) and one that does not freely permit Object deletion (as distinct from read, eat); it takes Progressive Aspect freely (as distinct from know, own); it allows Abstract Subjects (as distinct from eat, admire) and Human Objects (as distinct from read, wear). (1965:63-64) This can be represented in or on the tree
In this display, the Phrase-marker is based on a vocabulary of symbols including formatives (the, boy, etc.) and category symbols ( S, NP, V, etc.). The formatives can be divided into lexical items (boy, sincerity) and grammatical items (Perfect, Possessive, etc.). But grammatical categories differ from grammatical functions. They are inherently relational, so (3) might be clarified by the refinements in (6). Even this display does not prevent the confusion of Subject vs Predicate and NP vs VP: NP is a category, but being Subject-of or Object-of can be an NP's traditional grammatical function, and being Subject-of is not the same as being the Subject. Hjelmslev's terminology says that functives acquire their status from other functives in a function: in this case, the relation between one category (a Hjelmslevian functive) and the entire sentence (a Hjelmslevian
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function). Recall that functives can themselves be functions in Hjelmslev's scheme, but that he lacked a term to characterize functions once or twice removed from a higher function: he only suggested the degrees of derivation in which this could be counted. Chomsky suggests formal definitions like
Subject-of
can be defined as the function of NP immediately dominated by S;
Predicate-of
as the function of VP immediately dominated by S;
Direct-Objectof as the function of NP immediately dominated by VP; Main-Verb-of as the function of V immediately dominated by VP. These definitions make tree (6) redundant and tree (3) sufficient, when associated with tree-external directions for `reading' trees implicit in the rewrite-rule-type of Syntactic Structures. Those rule do not mention the pseudo-relation Subject-Object, which Chomsky takes as determining Main-verb choice, while Subject- or Object-choice are independent. Nor do they distinguish major lexical categories from others like Det (and possibly M, Aux): all can be lexical categories but not all are major categories, as these are distinguished here. 12.44 Subcategorization. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is grammatical compared to other random combinations of the same lexical items, if grammatical applies at the categorial level. Hjelmslev might say this grammaticality is a function whose functives are functions rather than entities; that functions are found in competence, entities in performance. Does making it 'more sensible' make it 'more grammatical'? Colorful new ideas percolated busily? Categorization is first a Phrase Structure step, paradigmatic and taxonomic. Aspects' categories are supplemented syntactically by the relative definitions
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just discussed, but their paradigmatic identity can be viewed as a Constant by Hjelmslev (e.g. membership in Column A), while their syntactic identity is a Variable (e.g. membership in Columns I to IV). System is logically prior to Process for the same reasons that langue is logically prior to parole or Competence to Performance. The level at which grammaticality is determined is made more specific by subcategorization. Refinements called strict subcategorizations yield (a) syntactic features (b) semantic features and (c) selection restrictions among categories. In Aspects' organization, this is not a difference of 'level' (PS is a single level), but it does seem more 'concrete'. Chomsky views Verb as Constant, Noun as Variable in this relationship. An example of Selection (which Firth calls Collocation) can be illustrated in the reasons one could adduce for ± acceptable combinations of adjective and adverb categorized as antedating, contemporary and post-dating in function for the following examples: 12.45 Factors in Subcategorization. Temporal relation as Subcategories of Adverbs and Adjectives Antedating: adjectives: earlier
former
preceding previous
adverbials: already
as yet
first
formerly
Contemporary: adjectives: contemporary simultaneous adverbials: at present
meantime
then/when
Postdating: adjectives: following
later
next
adverbials: afterwards
again
later
e.g., She is his earlier wife She becomes his wife today She is his present wife She is his wife at present She became his subsequent wife He made her his former wife She was his wife afterwards She became his previous manager He made her his former goal But Verbal Subcategorization in a larger sample shows limits on free pairing: Antedating Adjectives: STATIVE She
is
his
earlier
wife
She
is
his
former
friend
She
is
his
preceding
confidante
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She
is
his
previous
manager
She
is
his
earlier
ideal
She
is
his
former
concern
She
is
his
preceding
daughter
Antedating adverbs:
DYNAMIC: PROCESS
She
becomes
his
wife
already
She
becomes
his
friend
as yet
She
becomes
his
confidante
first
She
becomes
his
manager
formerly
She
becomes
his
ideal
already
She
becomes
his
goal
as yet
She
becomes
his
concern
first
She
becomes
his
daughter
formerly
Contemporary adjectives:
STATIVE:
She
is
his
present
wife
She
is
his
contemporary
friend
She
is
his
simultaneous
confidante
She
is
his
current
manager
She
is
his
present
ideal
She
is
his
contemporary
goal
She
is
his
simultaneous
concern
She
is
his
current
daughter
Contemporary adverbs:
STATIVE:
She
is
his
wife
at present
She
is
his
friend
for now
She
is
his
confidante
meantime
Contemporary adverbs:
DYNAMIC:PROCESS
She
becomes
his
manager
now
She
becomes
his
ideal
today
She
becomes
his
goal
at present
DYNAMIC: ACTION He
makes
her his
wife
now
He
makes
her his
friend
for now
He
makes
her his
confidante
meantime
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Postdating adjectives: is She
STATIVE: wife
his earlier is
She
friend his former DYNAMIC: PROCESS
becomes She
confidante his preceding
becomes She
manager his previous DYNAMIC: ACTION
makes
her his earlier
ideal
makes
her his former
goal
makes
her his preceding concern
makes
her his previous
He
He
He daughter
He Postdating adverbs: makes
her his earlier
DYNAMIC: ACTION wife
He
afterwards makes
her his earlier
friend
He
subsequently makes
her his earlier
confidante
He
later makes
her his earlier
manager
He
anon makes
her his earlier
ideal
He
again makes
her his earlier
goal
He
in a while makes
her his earlier
concern
makes
her his earlier
daughter
next week
He
He
in 1999
Examples which are categorially identical may be unacceptable, despite their pattern similarities. Factors distinguishing categorial acceptability from lexical incompatibility may be indentifiable intralinguistically and registered in symbol-complexes. When these complex symbols of shared features replace words, word-combinations can be coded explicitly as ± compatible. Combining marks or features can show why similarity of Category and Order (more or less what Phrase Structure Grammar restricted itself to) are insufficient for identity. 12.46 Such Label-Sets Base a Structural Index Of identities generated by derivational rules, representable in tree diagrams. Their formal identity lies in the overt sequence, constituency-type and functions assigned. A problem is, how rewrite rules are to mark the relevant subcategories of our pairs of adjective-noun, adverb-verb, etc. to exclude unacceptable combinations.
Part of the solution is to determine when rules must be context-free or context-sensitive, having first established a definition of context. When exclusions or demands are universal, a context-free categorial rewrite rule is
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an explicit tautology; tolerations still allow universal prediction, but involve conjunction of universal properties shared by categories. Neither Colorless green ideas sleep furiously nor phrases like preceding daughter vs. previous daughter vs. former daughter involve categorial violations, but subcategorial, lexical infelicities balk on varying grounds, involving intralinguistic anomalies of person and number, tenses and aspects, differing for States, Processes and Actions, and extralinguistic beliefs about wives or daughters. 12.47 The Lexicon. Also relevant is the structure of a Lexicon as an unordered word-list compared to a Dictionary. Word-lists do not give much information which conditions interpretation of their entries like daughter plus (1) biological, (2) adopted, (3) first or (4) nth degree descent from parent, (5) figurative human or (6) nonhuman, (7) by marriage the kind of information Katz and Postal's trees were to formalize for dictionary entries. Aspects speculated that the Lexicon will contain syntactic and semantic features as well. Recognizing that the distinction is elusive, it identified as semantic any feature not mentioned in a syntactic rule (Chomsky 1965:142). It would then be a subcategorization of the (sub?) categorial. Another innovation was its distinctive-feature, rather than autonomous phonemic, input for phonological interpretation. This kind of representation facilitates grammatical and etymological (or morphophonemic) statements, and was also attractive because of its clear universalist basis and the analogies Chomsky saw between generative phonology and syntax (Chomsky 1965:79ff). Structural Indices as a first approximation of what transformations operated on at the Syntactic Structures level might be identified as expressions of the terminal strings of a derivation: kernel sentences are generated by obligatory transformations, and derived sentences by optional ones operating on those terminal strings. ITLD transformations were still optional and obligatory, singulary or generalized, and were said not to change 'meaning'. This coheres with a conception of 'kernel' as propositional content (a timeless, language-neutral relation of predicate-argument(s) senses identical under all transformations). E.g., given the predicate give, and the arguments John, Bill and books, some 'identity of sense' despite differences in reference unites:
12.47
(a) John gave Bill books (b) Books gave John to Bill (c) Bill and John were given books
12.48 Obligatory Transformations. All Aspects transformations become obligatory, since markers generated by the Base (Chomsky 1965:132) demand or exclude them (e.g. demand T-PASS in actions, exclude T-PASS in statives and processives): this was a `filtering' function (Chomsky 1965:138-9, 141, 191, 224). Transformations are all singulary, applied from bottom to tree-top wherever S replaces NP or N, resulting in a generalized Phrase-marker.
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Formalization reveals options intuition can miss, such as how to test whether any formative can be negated (including the O/ with Carthage) in the tree for The Romans destroyed Carthage. Distinguishing VP from V, and allowing S as an NP or N in a VP justifies a distinction of Predicate from Predication, and that is crucial for distinguishing kernel and propositional contents. Predicate-sense identity is retained in both of these sentences:
12.48
(a) John and Bill were given books (b) John and Bill were given five books
Predication-sense is not. The senses of (a) and (b) differ, and the reference of (b) is ambiguous, while that of (c) is less so: 12.48
(c) John and Bill were given five books each
12.49 Sense and Reference. To have sense and to have reference are different. The expressions Prime Minister of England 1874-1880, Author of Sybil and First Duke of Beaconsfield have different senses but the same unique referent in Dizzy or Disraeli (expressions which synchronically lacked sense). Hjelmslev showed that to have function is not the same as to have sense or to have reference. Functions like subject-of or object-of are relational and intralinguistic. To have reference can be actually extralinguistic, while to have sense is actually intralinguistic, and potentially extralinguistic by means of reference. Functions like Negation, Coordination, and Subordination lack both sense and reference; quantifiers can lack both, or have both in different contexts: Dogs did it differs from Two dogs did it in that the -s of dogs pluralizes, and did may be said to be 'plural' by concord, without either involving a 'sense' comparable to dog or do, or 'referring' to anything. Two dogs did it can be labelled non-technically as a paraphrase of Dogs did it: There were two or technically as a transformation of those two sentences. To have sense can be said to be intralinguistic on the assumption that it is composed of, or analyzable into, what Chomsky calls a subset of the finite set of possible universal concepts. The alchemist's alkahest 'has sense' ('universal instant solvent'), but fortunately no empirical referent (what would you keep it in ? would the world be safe?). Its only referent is its sense, as in the case of mythical beasts unlike nuclear weapons, which arguably share 'the same sense' with alkahest. 12.50 Syncategorematic and Other Functions. To have function as a quantifier (like each) is to indicate intralinguistically how the object books in the example is to be constructed with the indirect objects John and Bill, and extralinguistically how books are said to be distributed to the persons to whom those expressions have reference.
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Function as Agent or function as Object or function as Instrument are distinguishable from to function as subject-of or object-of in:
12.50
(a) John opened the door with a key (b) The key opened the door (c) The door opened
12.51 Organization of the Grammar. These sentences show aspects of 'meaning' which are distinguishable. Their formal representation needs syntactic and semantic marks: the syntactic index is assigned by the categorial subcomponent of the base, to base-produced markers for Question vs. Statement, Negative, Passive, etc. and to the role of the Base transformational subcomponent. Semantic marking is in the lexicon, which contains semantic as well as syntactic features. Amalgamating these contributions is a function of the Semantic Component, which interprets them without addition or modification, since all information for semantic interpretation is to be provided by the various base sub-components. The phonological component provides a phonetic signal. Chomsky reviewed it this way: ... we now have suggested that the form of a grammar be as follows: A grammar contains a syntactic component, a semantic component, and a phonological component. The latter two are purely interpretive; they play no part in the recursive generation of sentence structures. The syntactic component consists of a base and a transformational component. The base, in turn, consists of a categorial subcomponent and a lexicon. The base generates deep structures. A deep structure enters the semantic component and receives a semantic interpretation; it is mapped by the transformational rules into a surface structure, which is then given a phonetic interpretation by the rules of the phonological component. Thus the grammar assigns semantic interpretations to signals, this association being mediated by the recursive rules of the syntactic component. (Chomsky 1965:141) The categorial subcomponent of the base has a sequence of context-free rewriting rules producing systems of grammatical relations for semantic interpretation, and assigning structural descriptions to which transformations are sensitive. Some Base rules might be universal, some not, but still subject to universal constraints, and selected from a universal repertoire. Some symbol choices here might be dictated by the formal rather than the substantive role involved. A lexical entry is an unordered set of features in an unordered lexicon. Unlike a dictionary, there are separate entries for homophonous forms of different grammatical status, like the action and process verb, grow. Each entry is represented by an array chosen from a distinctive-feature system. The complex symbols for lexical entries have redundancy rules, for instance, IF + human, THEN + animate, and the like, predictable by general rule. It also has rules which are not predictable by general rule, and so constitutes the full set of irregularities of the language. Semantic features are presumably drawn from a universal 'alphabet', but little was known about this, and Chomsky did not profess to add anything here to their explication (1965:142).
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Such features will presumably be clarified by experience, as in trying to make explicit our intuitions about oddities in the sample sentences above. That inductive note is in marked contrast with Chomsky's otherwise deductive approach in Syntax and Phonology. But the reason is obvious: our data were language-particular, closer to facts of our experience and performance than to universal need. 12.52 Residual Problems. Chomsky found uncertainties in the boundaries of syntax and semantics and in the structure of the lexicon. Degrees of grammaticalness result from violating what he considered well-defined differences of strict subcategorization (e.g. of verbs as trans, intrans, pre-Adj, pre-S) and selectional rules: colorless ideas shows faulty selection; John found sad ignores a subcategory. Selectional rules could be assigned to the semantic component by requiring ITLD's 'projection rules' to detect degrees of deviance. But, speaking empirically, Chomsky said that In general, one should not expect to be able to delimit a large and complex domain before it has been thoroughly explored ... Exactly the same can be said about the boundary separating semantic systems from systems of knowledge and belief. (Chomsky 1965:159) There are factors of belief or knowledge few reject: the finger has a cut and the cut has a finger seem closer to hyponymy violation than the ant has a kidney (Chomsky 1965:160). A need for more abstract concepts of grammatical function is seen (Chomsky 1965:162) in pairs like: (a) John strikes me as 12.52pompous (c) I like the play
(b) I regard John as pompous (d) The play pleases me
(e) John bought the book from Bill (f) Bill sold the book to John (g) John struck Bill
(h) Bill received a blow from the hands of John
Underlying strings for comparison sentences (like John is as sad as the book he read yesterday) need fairly abstract representation and transformation. This shows the need for feature analyses at different levels (Chomsky 1965:183). Aspects concluded on a tentative but confident note: Obviously, this discussion by no means exhausts the complexity or variety of topics that, so far, resist systematic and revealing grammatical description. It is possible that we are approaching here the fringes of marginal cases, to be expected in a system as complex as a natural language, where significant systematization is just not possible. Still, it is much too early to draw this conclusion with any confidence, and, even if it is eventually justified, we still must face the problem of extracting whatever subregularities exist in this domain. In any event, the questions we have touched on here have not yet been illuminated in any serious way by approaching them within the framework of any explicit grammatical theory. For the present, one can barely go beyond mere taxonomic arrangement of data. Whether these limitations are intrinsic, or whether a deeper analysis can succeed in unravelling some of these difficulties, remains an open question. (Chomsky 1965:192)
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12.53 Sentence Generation in Aspects.
12.54 Innovations in Aspects, Compared to SS and ITLD, include the possibility of Base Recursion, which allows NP or N to be subcategorized or rewritten as S, and the use of Complex Symbols, which take cross-reference into account instead of (sub)categorial tree representation in the Lexicon. Because of base recursion, Transformations now apply to a single formal object, rather than the separate ones that ITLD's generalized transformations dealt with. That object is now one which is lexically specified, not just a syntactic categorial framework. The total object is a construct regarded as one particular level of analysis, called ''Deep Structure". Some misinterpreted Deep in such a way that "Surface Structures" seemed secondary or superficial. It is not uncommon to find "Surface Structures" used for what this scheme designates as "Phonetic Representation". But within the set of Aspects' technical terms, 'Deep Structure' is defined by the application of 3 sets of rules: Phrase Structure and Subcategorization rules (which constitute 'the Base') and Lexical Insertion rules, which operate on the Base's output. PS rules provide two sorts of information about a sentence: (a) the categories of which the sentence consists, and (b) the function of those categories, identified with and defined 12.54 by their relational (and mutual) definition of each other. A VP rewritten as V is not identical with VP rewritten as V + NP, nor with V + Prep-Phrase, etc. though VP's relation to NP is identical in each instance. Topicalization is recognized as a surface problem.
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12.55 Phonetic Representation Results from the application of Phonological Rules to a Surface Structure, which itself is the output of Transformation Rules, the input to which are products of the PS and Lexical Rules: in Syntactic Structures, lexical items were simply inserted, with no controls other than a plausible category-membership that demanded or excluded their insertion by a rewriting process in the Derivation. 12.56 Proposed Universal Definitions: a. Subject-of
= [ NP immediately dominated by S ]
b. Predicate-of
= [ VP immediately dominated by S ]
c. Direct-object-of = [ NP immediately dominated by VP ] d. Main-Verb-of
= [ V immediately dominated by VP ]
Interrelated are questions of subcategorization, selection, and lexical insertion. Subcategorization can be (i) context-free (ii) context-sensitive (a) strict subcategorization rules (b) selection rules (a) Strict subcategorization rules set up lexical classes in terms of Syntactic frames in which they appear, e.g. a PS rule for rewriting (expanding) VP:
This says that V can be subcategorized by the feature + [__ NP], by the feature + [__ NP, PP], by + [__ S], or by the feature + [__ Predicate]. (b) Selection rules subcategorize Verbs because of features in their subject and object. So if the subject has the feature [ + Human __], then the Verb has the same features. Chomsky advocated using inherent features to subcategorize Nouns, because he found subcategorizing Verbs on the basis of selection rather than by of their inherent features overcomplex. If the base rules generate a set of feature-complexes, lexical items with matching ones can be inserted without further ado. So a microbe had a heart attack or the transistor regretted the interruption would be excluded.
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12.57 Filters. One role of Transformations, and the structural descriptions which signal a transformation is applicable to them, is to filter, or prevent syntactic structures from being realized. Shakespeare's 'Aroint thee!' overlaps with Avaunt! or Begone!, and all three of them with expressions about removing objects from locations. But the syntax of aroint is that of a reflexive (as is that of bask, a cognate of bathe): 12.57 (a) Get X out of here
(f) Bathe your cat in the sun
(b) Get that out of here
(g) Bathe yourself in the sun
(c) Get yourself out of here
(h) Bask in the sun
(d) Aroint ye!
(i) ?Bask yourself in the sun
(e) *Why don't you aroint that? *Why don't you bask your cat? Selected sentence-sets were related in Syntactic Structures through syntactic transformations. Once syntactic features were included in the Lexicon, a lexical treatment was also possible: There may be some point to allowing a lexical item to appear in several categorial positions... - for example, in the case of such words as proof, desire, belief. Suppose that these are specified as taking Sentential Complements of various forms, but are permitted to enter either the noun or verb position. Then the lexical insertion rule will place them in either the frame '...N that S...' or the frame '... V that S...' in the position of the Noun and Verb, respectively. Hence it will not be necessary to derive the former by transformations from the latter, as is necessary, for example, in the case of '...proving that S...' (Chomsky 1965:219) 12.58 Semantic Problems. The problem of the Lexicon raises the question of universal or autonomous semantics: is it possible to define a lexical item or lexon independently of a particular language, as it is for phoneme and morpheme? Boas and Sapir found assigning what Chomsky might call a substantive definition of word a tricky business. In his review of Sapir's Language, Bloomfield thought the norm, 'smallest psychologically satisfying bit of language' which Sapir proposed was quite serviceable, but regrettably nonformal. Bloomfield's own 'minimum free form' reworded Sapir's definition. But how do we find out a form is 'free' in a language not our own? We ask native speakers, and if they find it can be used 'alone', it must be 'psychologically satisfying' to them as an isolate. Chomsky's explanatory thrust cannot be satisfied with such 'mere' descriptions. If a child's 'Language Acquisition Device' has, and must build on, language-independent knowledge, there should be universal factors or components, substantive or formal, present before language-specific experience. An unordered set different, perhaps, from the idiosyncracies found in the Dictionary of a particular language (e.g. bath, bathe, bask; fat, fatten, *balden and the like in English). Katz and Fodor first investigated the problem in depth: semantic markers only disambiguate (as phonemes only
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distinguish). So semantic markers ought to be primitive and universal, while other factors could be language-peculiar. But morphemes have both positive and negative functions: they disambiguate by their semantic Content, but have a positive Signification as well. Where de Saussure preferred to study langue as form antecedent to, or abstracted from, matter semantic content or phonetic 'substance' as he called them, Hjelmslev suggested there is indeed something out there of a quasi-substantial nature called Purport. But that Purport all languages can have in common is formless until isolated and related by a language. That this formation is hierarchically analyzable is what constitutes the Principle of the Analysis for him; what the particular formation might be, he considers unpredictable. How would one decide that Hjelmslev's or Chomsky's is a purely Rationalist or a purely Empiricist position? Reading Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. Mouton, the Hague. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT, Cambridge. Katz, Jerrold, and Paul Postal. 1964. An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions. MIT, Cambridge. Lyons, John. 1977 (1970). Noam Chomsky. Revised Edition. Harmondsworth. Penguin. Further Reading Bach, Emmon and Robert Harms. (eds.) 1968. Universals in Linguistic Theory. New York. Holt, Reinhart and Winston. Botha, Rudolf P. 1982. On the 'Galilean style' of linguistic inquiry. Lingua 58:1-50. 1989. Challenging Chomsky. New York. Basil Blackwell. Chomsky, Noam. 1962. Explanatory models in linguistics. in Nagel et al., Logic, methodology and philosophy of science. Stanford. University Press. 1964. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. The Hague. Mouton. 1965. Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar. The Hague. Mouton. 1966. Cartesian Linguistics. New York. Harper & Row. and Morris Halle. 1968. The Sound Pattern of English. New York. Harper and Row. Fodor, J.A., and J.J. Katz. 1964. The Structure of Language: Readings in the Philosophy of Language. Englewood Cliffs. Prentice-Hall. Harman, George. 1967. Psychological aspects of the theory of syntax. Journal of Philosophy 64:75-87. Hockett Charles. 1954b. Two models of grammatical description. Word 10:210-234. Reprinted in Joos 1966. 1968. The State of the Art. Mouton. the Hague. Jacobs, Roderick and Peter Rosenbaum, eds. 1970. Readings in English Transformational Grammar. Waltham. Ginn & Co. Joos, Martin, ed. 1966. Readings in Linguistics I. 4th ed. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. Lees, Robert B. 1957. Review of Chomsky (1957). Language 33:375-408. Matthews, P.H. 1967. Review of Chomsky (1965). Journal of Linguistics 3:119-152. Postal, Paul. 1964. Constituent Structure: A Study in Contemporary Models of Syntactic Description. Mouton, The Hague.
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Putnam, Hilary. 1967. The `innateness hypothesis' and explanatory models in linguistics. Synthese 17:12-22. Note: 1. Dictionary entries for hit include: 1. deal a blow or stroke (nail with a hammer); 2. meet with impact (car & curb); 3. reach (missile & target); 4. succeed in striking (the mark); 5. bat, make a base hit; 6. drive, propel (ball to green); 7. have marked impression on; 8. assail effectively (hit out at); 9. demand (for a dollar); 10. attain a level (hit 21: drinking age); 11. appear in (the papers); 12. land on, arrive at (the beach); 13. deal (drink, card); 14. come upon (the right road); 15. agree with (your fancy); 16. guess correctly (answer); 17. succeed in representing (picture); 18. begin to travel on (road); raid (gambling den); (intransitive): 20. strike; (fog); 21. ignite (of engine); 22. collide with (door & wall); 23. discover (new idea); 24. arrive in a showy manner. 2. Ball has: 1. spherical body; 2. round, solid or hollow for baseball, tennis, football, basketball, golf, billiards; 3. game (baseball); 4. not a strike in baseball; 5. cannon, rifle, pistol projectile; 6. any round body part; 7. mass of food; 8. a testis; 9. planet; 10. globe, sphere, orb. 3. Logical Positivism rejects metaphysics and alleged scientific statements as nonfactual or meaningless unless they are verifiable by consequences in experience, logic, mathematics and the rules of language, from which they draw their validity.
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13 Non-Transformational Constants 13.00 The generative part of Transformational Generative Grammar claims that the structure of language subparts is not just related to higher categories as a matter of fact, but in a rule-governed fashion. That is easier to falsify than Saussure's langue as pure form: a pattern / structure / design as indifferent to semantics and phonology as numbers are to what we count. No one believes that there are 5 1/2 real people in the average family, despite the impeccable statistics which guarantees it. A syntactic Base neutral to impossible sounds and contradictory semantic units would be 100% pure. But the point of generating linguistic structures is that we expect they organize messages about the world. Interpretations might be murky because of lexical or syntactic defects, but Post-Aspects efforts to constrain generation of uninterpretable patterns implements Chomsky's 1957 program for adjusting built-in shortcomings. Hjelmslev labelled that problem neatly without solving it by distinguishing between the arbitrariness and appropriateness of formalisms. If semantic structure could inhibit the Base from deriving a syntactic structure like [V + (NP1 + NP2 + NP3 + NP4 + NPn)] from VP, syntax would not be a Constant related to a Variable interpretation. It might make syntax and semantics Co-Constants or make their roles reversible. `Undesirable' strings of Nps can be compared to known strings of contrasting semantic functions. Approaches to such possibilities are included here, some rather perversely, under the label of Generative Semantics. 13.01 Constants and Variables. GS starts with `meaning' in a triad completed by syntax and phonology. We can decide to look at identical data as static, or processive, or active, without being misled. Expressions saying that components `assume', `lose' or `modify' their central role, we know, are our own metaphors. Oppositions like central/peripheral, constant/variable can depend on how we choose to look at items. But the choice which makes frames `central' or `peripheral', `constant' or `variable' is usually dictated by more inclusive points of view. Choices mutually exclusive at one level may be complementary at another. The North Star, for instance, is a useful Constant for navigation (except in the Southern Hemisphere). Our Sun is a Constant for planetary movement (but not in other galaxies). The boiling point of liquids, melting points of solids, the speed of sound and light are Constants - but not absolutely.
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13.02 Languages are Unique. Linguistic structures seem capricious until a constant behind their variety is found. Shouldn't all languages be disambiguated at a deeper level like constant syntactic structures and shouldn't principled ways of accounting for options be discoverable? The extent to which this seemed feasible led to distinguishing Competence and Performance. But even if Deep Structures' grammatical hierarchies supplied all the information needed, relevance for Semantic Interpretation might co-determine what DS must, cannot, or may contain. If morphemes which are demanded, excluded or tolerated involve different interpretations of identical syntactic structures, their ± obligatory roles at that level need specification. Lexical combinations and language-peculiar semantic information might be appropriate. Calculating unrealized Functions or Structures was one of Hjelmslev's norms for an exhaustive theory. 13.03 Languages are the Same. The post-Aspects' view of selectional restrictions as semantic rather than syntactic could have disarmed debate about the `grammaticality' of `colorless green ideas . . .' Yet grammars of English usually include only factors that are English: lexical hyponymies and productive institutionalized ones at other levels. From analyses with increasingly abstract data derived from a syntactic Base difficult to distinguish from semantics it was a short step to Generative Semantics. GS identified `Base' with Semantics. In an Aspects frame, Floyd broke the glass demands 7 (sub)categories. Abstract Syntax used only 4, representing a sentence by isolating the proposition it signals. Propositional Analysis and Abstract Syntax both reduce to a pair of immediate constituents like N and V, dominated in PA by PROP(osition) and in AS by S(entence). 13.04 Language is Logical. Implicit in Abstract Syntax and explicit in Hispanus' Summulae [Chapter 5 above] is that simple declarative structures analyze into two terms, categorial N and V. Other expressions are subcategorial non-terms (syncategorematics), subordinate to the central factors in true-false judgements like Men are mortal vs. Some men are not mortal. Saying `adjectives are really Verbs' is no more daring than `adjectives and verbs are really Predicates'. Men are mortal is interpreted as a true or false message about the world on exactly the same grounds as Men die or Some men do not die. But using the same labels for morphological/syntactic constructions and logical functions confuses things. Deciding that the Base was `really' semantic (whatever that meant) reworked Dialectic's distinction between sentences and propositions, and Dialecticians' reduction of surface forms to subject-predicate terms plus expressions that operate on them. A further novelty was proposing the analysis of specific Verbs into composites of generic pro-forms like be, become, cause plus individual lexical contents. Take an Aspects-type analysis of `Floyd broke the glass':
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(Fig. 13.01)
S NP
AUX
N
TNS
Floyd past
VP V
break
NP DET
N
the
glass
(Fig. 13.01) It uses 7 (sub)categories (excluding S). Neither DET nor Tense are universal. Abstract syntax analyses the same data, using only NP and VP:
(Fig. 13.02)
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This coheres with a simple sketch of a Grammar like:
(Fig. 13.03) Although TG and GS both deny directionality (i.e. that neither semantics nor surface structure is `prior' to the other), a sketch like this suggested encoding or decoding more than a neutral ISH perspective. Competence-as-knowledge might be static and nondirectional despite its relevance to pre-Performance; yet TG arrows suggest `successive' Transformations. Chomsky granted that PREsuppositions and surface factors of Focus were relevant to semantic interpretation, but said this process-terminology was an unjustifiable metaphor, implying, perhaps, that his own construct of an Ideal Speaker-Hearer's competence is a legitimate scientific abstraction: Since surface structure is fully determined by base rules and transformational rules, it might seem natural to suppose that properties of surface structure, not being a matter of `choice', could not contribute to semantic interpretation. Underlying this assumption, one might discern the remnants of the `Saussurean' view that a sentence is constructed by a series of successive choices, and that each of these may be related to semantic considerations of some sort. Of course, such talk is only metaphorical when we are concerned with competence rather than performance. It may, however, have occasionally been misleading, suggesting, erroneously, that since surface structure is fully determined by other `choices', properties of surface structure cannot contribute to semantic interpretation. When we drop the loose and metaphoric use of such notions as `choice', we see that there is no reason at all why properties of surface structures should not play a role in determining semantic interpretation, and the considerations brought forward earlier suggest that in fact, they do play such a role. [Chomsky 1971:214(1969)] 13.05 Lexical Individuality and linguistic Universality. EST accepted T-produced Surface Structures as input for Semantic Interpretation, by way of Logical Structure. By putting the construal of constituents within Logical Structure before transformations, Generative Semantics required trees to represent all semantically relevant information. That was intended to make trees a representation of Competence, not Performance, therefore candidates for Universality. How to design universality into the Lexicon then included problems of characterizing lexical items: how to relate them to constituents;
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how transformations affect both, and especially, when and where lexical items were to be inserted. Lexical factors may be relevant to grammaticality at the categorial level or on an individual basis. That is comparable to `explaining' Porpyhrian Tree individuals that are not species, and to Hjelmslev's characterization of entities as functives which are not functions, and to Stratificational Grammar's lexical stratum: defined by a higher stratum, but defining nothing below it. Decomposition of an open-ended set of lexical items is a challenge for Universal Grammar. Hjelmslev's postulation of content figurae like `male', `female', etc. for nouns like horse, stallion and mare compared to sheep, ram and ewe hints at that. IE verbs may reduce to a closed semantic subset involving Constants like be, become and cause, but IE verbs share roots with nouns, remaining an open morphological-expression set. Closed sets like prepositions do not involve the cross-classificational properties of nominals. Recognizing that led to the recognition of both/and feature-complexes instead of either/or branching rules, although semantic features like ± animate are persistently mentioned for nominals. Individuals are just contingent complexes of factors which entail each other as a matter of fact, not by antecedent necessity which categorial trees display. That seems more appropriate to the level of Competence than Performance. How do we represent the contribution of individuals to the universal? McCawley (1968) thought lexical insertion transformations might apply en bloc at a level of shallow structure, between cyclic and postcyclic rules (in later work, between transformations and deletions). Later (1974), he thought cyclic insertion might be sufficient, but the Where, When, and Whether, of Lexical Insertion can still be a matter of debate. 13.06 What Transformations Change. A challenge to the Katz-Postal hypothesis that transformations do not change meaning suggests problems of scope familiar from Algebra, like: a + b - c vs. a + (b - c). The semantic interpretation-consequences of NEG(ation) and Q(uestion) seem to be comparable instances. How could Transformations be formulated so that they preserved Logical Structure (if that was where `meaning' was importantly represented) from alteration? Sentences like (a) Many scholars do not accept Generative Semantics 13.01 (b) Generative Semantics is not accepted by many scholars recall that grammatical subject-of in derivations or trees must not be confused with other semantic or logical relations a subject can contract. For some, more explicit statements disambiguate 13.01(a, b). Others find that 13.01 (c, d) confirm their conviction that (a) and (b) cannot be synonymous:
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(c) Many scholars do not accept GS, but many scholars do accept it (d) GS isn't accepted by many scholars, but many scholars do 13.01accept it 13.07 `Meaning' Contrasts. Disagreements about what sentences `mean' may assume there is always a question of binary oppositions (e.g., pairs of sentences, one of which is true/false; a pair could then be synonymous or contradictory). Others see contrast on a scale (e.g., contradictory / contrary / subcontrary / subaltern; true / false / undecidable). This can assume that Q and DEG(ree) operators are equatable with quantifiers like all or (n)one and many or some. While universal (all, everyone) and unique markers (single, none) signal minimal pairs decidably true or false (Men lie), synonymous (Men lie: Men are liars), or contradictory (All men lie: No man lies), degree-words like some(what) or rather involve opposites, both of which may be accepted without contradiction. Both 13.01 (a, b) can be true (many is a relative expression, not an absolute), or synonymous (since many has more than one reading) or undecidable (for the same reason). In any event, it is difficult to see how one could verify that `Meaning' had been changed or unaffected unless subcategories like `sense' and `reference' were distinguished. De Saussure's idea that associative as well as syntagmatic values are determiners of an expression's Content (another type of Meaning) is relevant, since, if every term necessarily involves its own negation (an elemental aspect of associative value), an expression like many is as inherently vague as some: in both 13.01 (a, b), it `means' simultaneously +many and -many in an affirmation or negation. Problems of Synonymy do not arise for inherently ambiguous words, nor can any more than contrariety (never contradiction) be expected when in constructions. Of course, methodological decisions (or failure to make them) about what kind of `meanings' can be verified, and how to establish stability or change in them, can leave the Saussurean distinctions as valid but useless as ever. 13.08 NEG and Q as Predicates. Some Generative Semanticists proposed NEG and Q as Predicates of an abstract type, instead of Operators with a different Logical status. While ADVs and DEG may play one of the roles assigned to only as discussed in Chapter 12, NEG, Universal and Existential Quantifiers seem ill-fitted for that function. If making NEG a predicate is an error, the systemic consequences are far-reaching; combining NEG and Q (or DEG) confuses things even further: (e) Chomsky considered that GS wasn't quite correct (f) Chomsky didn't consider that GS was quite correct 13.01 (g) Chomsky considered that many others weren't absolutely correct
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(h) Chomsky didn't consider that many others were absolutely correct (i) Chomsky considered that GS wasn't quite correct, but that GS was partly correct and many others were too (j) Chomsky didn't consider that GS was quite correct, but that GS was partly correct and that many others were too 13.09 Visualizing Referents. Referents for sentences like these can be made clearer in a chart like Fig 13.03, where (A) and (B) each stand for a Universe of Discourse, (a frame determining reference):
(Fig. 13.03) Take everyone as a Universal Quantifier of x (e.g., each and every individual is a subject of loves in (A), and someone as an Existential Quantifier of y (i.e., there is at least one individual which is the subject of is loved in B). This says that in Universe (A), it is the case that for any x at all, that x loves at least one y: the Universal Quantifier `binds' each and every x. (B) shows that there is at least one y such that it is loved by each x. But this does not have to entail in every logical system that, although (A) may have at least one unloved y, (B) must have one y that each individual x loves. An Existential Quantifier in both (A) and (B) binds `at least one' y within its Universe, but does not exclude there being more than one y. 13.10 Surface Semantics. Within EST, data like this suggested semantic interpretation had to take into account surface contrasts transformed from identical Deep Structures, but with Projection Rules prepared specifically for them. GS retained the earlier idea that surface structures with different meanings derive from different underlying structures, but that the latter `structures' were more appropriately considered Semantic than Syntactic. When NEG and Q are taken as Predicates, some found that movements required by T-pass resulted in two Logical Predicates crossing, as in
13.02
(a) Many scholars do not accept GS (b) GS is not accepted by many scholars.
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If it were found that transformations other than T-pass had the same meaning-changing effect [as some found that (13.01 e-j) suggested], then the logical and grammatical scope of NEG before and after its transformational movement is important for comparing 13.02 (a, b) for change of meaning. If only grammatical categories figure in derivations and trees, and transformations affect only them and their grammatical relations, NEG (and Q) would have to be assigned categorial status for such a comparison. But if NEG is not a grammatical category, yet represented as VP, and if many is sometimes a Q, sometimes an NP (like only), the results of the comparison would seem to be dubious. When assigned to VP, the dominance or scope of NEG and many determine their logical and grammatical interpretation, as in these trees:
(Fig. 13.03a)
(Fig. 13.03b) in 13.03a) as negating accept; NEG is interpreted in 13.03b) as negating be many. 13.11 Global Rules. Rules exceeding the scope of those in Aspects were proposed in GS to account semantically, rather than syntactically, for a number of problematic interpretations. They were called Global Rules. A
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Global Rule can require that a logical predicate which asymmetrically commands another logical predicate in Semantic Representation precede it in Derived Structure: i.e., if it is higher in the tree, and will serve to filter out 13.03 (a, b) separately. GS proposed Global Rules where surface structures are admitted as relevant for Semantic Interpretation in Autonomous Syntax, particularly when non-adjacent surface structures are involved. The relation of Presupposition (labelled PRE) between the clauses in Pat didn't realize the gun was loaded is such a case, marked as well with a Performative declare I you which labels the whole as a Declarative Sentence, in a representation like:
(Fig. 13.04): Presuppositions can also be said to control other grammatical processes globally, such as T-will-Delete in: 13.04 a) GU will play Villanova soon
b) GU plays Villanova soon
c) GU will beat Villanova soon
d) *GU beats Villanova soon
Lexical Insertion can depend upon Presuppositions. In identical frames, inserting assassinate is appropriate when its grammatical Object refers to a public person, so the lexical insertion rule for assassinate and kill differ in that respect while agreeing in others (such as being Subject; being indifferently singular or plural). Lynch demands that its Subject be plural (while execute tolerates plural). To preclude contrarieties, kill and decapitate would have to be constrained from appearing with a coordinate like but they all had a good laugh later, while poison, shoot and other lexical cognates of kill would not. Global Rules are not just the converse of Semantic Interpretation Rules, it is argued, if they have purely syntactic motivation, found in phenomena like Agreement. Take Latin and Greek participial- or adjectival-case-agreement: the adjective-participle construction in active They honored the brave fallen men takes Accusative concord, while in passive The brave fallen men were honored', Nominative case agreement with men is demanded. So Agreement should be stated globally, applying late in derivation, with ability to `look back' to earlier cases. Another Global constraint is proposed for English be, where contraction correlates regularly with reduced stress (and `missing' categories):
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(a) There is about this much difference between them (b) There's about this much difference between them (c) The game is in Los Angeles at midnight (d) The game's in Los Angeles at midnight (e) I wonder how much difference there is between them (f) *I wonder how much difference there's between them (g) Tell Jane where the game is at midnight 13.05 (h) *Tell Jane where the game's at midnight The *starred examples here involve both stress-lowering and contraction immediately preceding a place where movement or deletion took place, a phonological rule requiring global constraint. 13.12 Lexical Items. Aspects represented
13.06
(a) John likes pork (b) John likes pig meat
separately, with meat from pigs deriving from
(Fig. 13.05) T-Rel(ative formation) and analysis produce 13.06 (b). In GS, taking <meat which comes from pigs> as the Base semantic representation to get 13.06 (a or b) avoids the double statement or rule-reversal for Semantic Interpretation in Aspects. Other duplications can be avoided: when categorial Deep Structures are used, respective(ly) Transformations apply twice, once in Deep Structures and again in Semantic Interpretation. When
13.07
(a) John's beginning the book (b) the beginning of the book by John (c) the book begun by John (d) John began the book
starts from NP-begin-NP, T-Subj-raising has to be stated both in Deep structures and in Semantic Interpretation. The rule of Adverb Preposing in Deep Structures must also be related to Deep Structures and to Semantic Interpretation, as well as to Surface Structures. 13.13 VSO Order. Since Chomsky had proposed Deep Structures as the component where Lexical Insertion takes place, it was argued that Cyclic rules
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Page 413 must precede lexical insertion. Assuming a Verb-Subject-Object order for English, Postal found Max reminded me of Pete to be best represented as:
(Fig. 13.06) Otherwise, T-Subject Raising would have had to apply before Lexical Insertion in order to get Max into its surface-subject position. Similar arguments were proposed for dissuade after T-Pass, and for T-reflexive, T-Equi and T-Pass for suicide, malinger and under surveillance before Lexical Insertion. Word-internal structures can be modified. Since I ALMOST KILLED John can be analyzed as: 13.08 (a)
ALMOST cause John
become
not alive
(b)
cause John ALMOST become
not alive
(c)
cause John
become
ALMOST
not alive
(d)
cause John
become not ALMOST
alive
This was considered strong evidence for initial Lexical Decomposition, therefore against a purely syntactic Deep Structure. Ross' Constraints proscribed unacceptable passivization of meaningful lexical items as well as of nonsense entries, so rules for syntactic lexical insertion that restrict lexical items to replacing only constituents serve as one characterization of what a `possible lexical item' can be, as well as clarifying `lexical gaps'. Lexical decomposition provides valid structures for Predicate Raising even when there is no lexical item to fill them (e.g. cause become bald = *bald + NP). 13.14 Ranking Categories. If Categories can be changed by Transformations (as Aspects 184ff held), e.g. destruction from destroy, are there superordinate categories? Likely candidates would be S, N or NP, V or VP. They are much like the subject/predicate constituents of a logical proposition: hardly a coincidence, given the logical origin of Western Grammar, and the cognitive and referential orientation common to Logic and TG. They both deal with constructions regarded as ± synonymous largely on the basis of referential truthconditions, without regard to sense-distinctions common in traditional logic. But formal logic was adapted for linguistic purposes in interesting ways: following the binary ± categorematic distinction, logical operators like NEG, some connectives, and Q became GS Predicates. So a Noun Phrase many scholars is relatable to a proposition like Scholars are many (just as only Peter
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can be derived from something like Peter is the only one). The scope of negation in GS representations is indicated on trees, not by number superfixes on nodes (as in the example of The Romans destroyed Carthage on p. 371), but by its V-position in a tree. Yet it is unclear how NEG must be construed, if it had to be, with the in this representation of The man killed the woman (where Nps constructed with Predicates like Verbs are called Arguments):
(Fig. 13.07) 13.15 De Re & De Dicto. In Fig. 13.07, logical Arguments in PROP are filled with variables called INDICES which are BOUND by NP operators external to PROP. T-rules substitute the NPs for indices which can remain intact if another transformation substitutes pronouns. This identifies both antecedent and syntactic functions of the pronouns. There were two main arguments for deriving NPs from bound variables: it solved sentences like The man who shows he deserves it will get the prize he deserves, and provided a natural de re, de dicto treatment:
(Fig. 13.08) The distinction de re ('about a thing or situation') and de dicto ('about something said, a linguistic expression') is clear in a pair of sentences like (a) I think John is a poor example of a common man 13.09 (b) I think JOHN is a poor example of a common noun (a)'s John is used to refer to a nonlinguistic object, while in (b), JOHN stands for itself as a linguistic expression. The distinction solves paradoxes like Oedipus both knowing and not knowing his own mother, or that Electra both knows and does not know her own brother. Readers know that Jocasta names both Oedipus' mother and the woman he married, but Oedipus did not; and that Orestes names both the man Electra is looking at and the brother she has not seen for so long that she does not recognize him. English (and Greek) know are ambiguous, while German wissen takes facts and kennen takes people as objects, just as French savoir is used of facts, but connaitre for people. A similar confusion can be avoided in formalizing
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structures proposed for Willy said that he had seen the woman who lives at 219 Main Street:
(Fig. 13.09) 13.16 Intra- and Extra-Linguistic Semantic Determination. Factors which TG excluded as `pragmatic' (involving knowledge about the extra-linguistic world) were included in GS. Competence once referred to an innate ability: all infants have it prior to experience and acquisition of language. GS suggested linguistics should account for parallels among grammatical judgements and language-peculiar morpheme distributions. Sadock (1969:297) noted that German Machen Sie Deinen Koffer zu! ('[Please] close that suitcase of yours') mixes polite plural (machen Sie, and a familiar singular (Deinen, grammatically singular: `of yours'). The option is an intralinguistic resource, but what determines occurrence of singular or plural is the actual hearer-speaker status. If determinants of semantic interpretation should be in underlying structure, exactly where should facts like these be represented? 13.17 Performative Verbs. One proposal was to distinguish Performative verbs (like FIND GUILTY, in I find you guilty, with which judges perform the task the VP's sense requires) from those that do so even indirectly. In some Irish English, if someone asks Is that the butter?, the verb is can be said to `perform' a polite request (like please in Please pass the butter) despite its overt question-setting. No syntactically nor logically correct representation of
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Is that the butter? could account for this, since there are peculiar culture-bound factors that determine what utterances `perform' (as Malinowski's Phatic Communion stressed). In a sentence like 13.10 He said she was really BRAINY / PLUMP then SHE insulted HIM the stress indicated by Capitals is appropriate with plump, but not with brainy, for Americans. In other cultures, the reverse may be true. GS suggested that grammar should account for such facts. In similar vein, a grammar was deemed deficient if it accounted only for what antecedents are demanded, excluded, or tolerated by too in a sentence like The mayor is a Republican, and the used car dealer is honest too. Having determined syntactic, semantic and logical representations of sentences like that, how can a grammar demand their correct semantic interpretation? 13.18 Transderivational Constraints. Such questions led to proposals for transDerivational Constraints: TG's Derivational Constraints `look back' at Phrase Markers within a continuous cycle of transformations, but do not obviously sort out sentences like
13.11
(a) A woman that was pregnant took the job (b) A woman took the job that was pregnant (c) A woman that was attractive took the job (d) A woman took the job that was attractive
These SAID-structures have SEEM-presuppositions expressible in other SAID-structures like Only animates can be pregnant or Things and people attract differently. Presuppositions outside the logical structure could be dealt with by rules with transderivational power. The current TG rules could be made sensitive to conveyed meanings in that class of contexts where such meanings were appropriately marked in a GS Lexicon, while EST did not define extralinguistic situations as part of logical structure. That was taken to be a natural function in one formulation of Generative Semantics (Lakoff in Parrett 1974), where some of the developments are sketched (while exactly where Lexical Insertion is to take place is left rather indeterminate) as:
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(Fig. 13.10)
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13.19 Tagmemics. A theory arrived at by inductive research and thoroughly revised in the light of extensive empirical evidence, is a textbook ideal few fields outside of the physical sciences exemplify. Approaches like Hjelmslev's clarify fundamental ideas, but they are difficult to evaluate for more than internal consistency, because they give insufficient concrete exemplification. No language has ever been described in anything like its entirety. That is not just because theorists ignore the array of sentencetypes which may be counterevidence to their views. Each approach deals with facets it handles well, rarely just to show where other conceptions are incomplete. Quirk's survey, on the other hand, presents the data of an educated variety of English, warts and all, but in a linguistically eclectic framework. 13.20 Tagmemics, Case Grammar and Generative Semantics? It may seem perverse to discuss Tagmemics in connection with Generative Semantics. But relations between Tagmemics and Case Grammar, a basically 'semantic' approach which arose in the context of TG studies, suggests a value for this setting. Tagmemics is a form of grammatical analysis developed by Kenneth Pike and his colleagues in the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Constantly emended as a result of the experience of trainees, it aims at producing analyses useful for translating a text into languages of any structure whatever. In May 1983, the Hanga (a Northern Ghana language) translation of the New Testament was published. 1 This joint project of many organizations was the 200th translation completed since the work of the Wycliffe Bible Translators began, and between them, SIL and WBT personnel have analyzed some 1000 languages since 1934. They estimate that there are perhaps another 3000 without a vernacular Bible. Against this background, it is not surprising that factors some linguists exclude are included by Tagmemicists. Tagmemics' domain is not (1) Bloomfield's isolated sentence, nor (2) Chomsky's sentence-sets related transformationally to a common base, nor (3) Firth's utterances in a context of situation, nor (4) Text as hinted at by Hjelmslev nor (5) Text as developed in Stratificational Grammar or by Halliday as Firthian systemic and structural cohesion, combined with various ideas of Function. 13.21 Tagmemics. The purview of Tagmemics is set by the title of Pike's most extensive work, Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior (1954). A brief, updated summary of that is Linguistic Concepts: An Introduction to Tagmemics (1982). The connections between Linguistics and the requirements of translation are like debates within GS about what kind of information a grammar should contain. Albrecht Neubert (Professor of Linguistics at Leipsig's Karl-Marx-Universität) finds that:
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It has become one of the commonplaces in the study of translation that we do not translate words, but ideas. The competent translator tries to recapture the content of the source in a target version ... the translator could be likened to a messenger who carries `cultural goods' from one speech community to another... Germans have come to experience Shakespeare in translations which are closer to their language of today than Shakespeare's idiom is to present-day speakers of English. The great authors of antiquity, of Greek and Latin culture, ring true in the vernaculars of contemporary nations. The Bible has been translated into almost every language and is instrumental in the propagation of the Christian religion, although the new versions no longer represent the `original word'. The works of the founders of revolutionary movements of today, notably Marx, Engels and Lenin, have been rendered into more than a hundred languages and serve as up-to-date guidelines for the building of a new political and social world. (Neubert 1985:231) 13.22 Tagmemics' Focus. Many take language-as-signalling-system as the Constant for Linguistics. Use or setting then become the Variables defining a linguistic approach to language. Pike's Tagmemic Constant is the human person. Variables include ± consistent human behavior in shifting contexts. While sheer survival depends on adopting some perspectives, humans are free to view data as discrete particles, merging waves, or fields within which relationships are perceived. Humans are purposive, and human institutions or behavior with no discernible purpose, however remote, are unintelligible. Pike is an Analogist, not an Anomalist. He rejects three Anomalist conclusions: that data are completely accounted for as (1) reducible to particles, (2) as waves with anomalous boundaries, or (3) as figments exemplifying intelligible relations. Language data show patterns as particles, waves or fields, especially when these three perspectives are considered as complementary, rather than exclusive. Some speculative reasons for the Analogist position were mentioned in Chapter 5. Pike's inductive discovery of their relevance by empirical research into languages is documented in the publications listed in the Prefaces to his revised 'Unified Theory' (1967.5-10). 13.23 Etic and Emic Analysis. Analyzing the `particle' composition of Mixtec and Mazatec, Pike found no basis for grammatical analysis apart from subordination of data to slots with a determinate function. Phonological and grammatical borders and units were otherwise blurred (1943a, 1944). To describe the ICs of Mazatec syllables, he needed frames within which internal organization could be described. The same technique determined the number of tones in tone languages (1938, 1948), while the interplay of intonation, stress, quantity and voice quality were examined in other works (1942, 1945). In 1948, Pike started looking for a unit of grammar comparable to the phoneme in phonology. If intuitions which produced writing systems could be
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rigorously defined by isolating a unit called a phoneme, comparable intuitions of successful grammar teachers might also be identifiable. His tentative label grammeme for that unit soon ceded to tagmeme, for which subject, predicate or modifier seemed to be apt initial candidates. To fit the varied data which those labels suited, he found that the level of abstraction resulted in emic generalizations applicable to linguistic and nonlinguistic etic material: particles viewed as units have properties of contrast, variation and distribution. They are explicated as modes of feature, manifestation, and distribution. As the domain of grammar was refined, norms for identifying units also changed. TG posited autonomous syntax interpretable by phonology and semantics. Tagmemics needed a trimodal hierarchy of lexicon, phonology and grammar within which each was variably autonomous: distinguishable modules of a single unit. 13.24 Particle, Wave & Field. Tagmemic theory holds that language, as a form of behavior, must be seen in terms of particles, waves and fields: PARTICLES: data can be viewed as a collection of discrete things, of which nonempirical models can be made; WAVES: things aren't discrete - they change, turn into, blend into, merge with others. But a wave can be viewed as discrete compared to other waves, and a discrete element as a wave compared to other elements. FIELDS: particles and waves are isolated by abstraction. From what? At least from their relations to each other. But the observer experiences relations among terms in those relations. The observer experiences Units first, their Relations as secondary. These requirements contradict neither the axiomatic assumptions of de Saussure's langue as pure form, Hjelmslev and Carnap's concept of structural statements concerning relations even when the composition of relata are unknown, or Chomsky's Competence antecedent to acquaintance with a particular language. But they clearly say something quite different. Since the human observer is central in Tagmemics, a kind of performance rather than competence is in focus. In Pike's view, Units are discrete for the observer when they are partially the same, partially different in composition, distribution, function, or combinations of all three. Each factor can be viewed etically or emically. Without some point, purpose, or significance, no emic perception is possible. Without an etic foundation, no emic relationship would even be suspected. 13.25 Reduction. Insistence on hierarchic relations excludes Reductionism. Language for Pike is not reducible to mechanically ultimate particles; there are points at which a Unit is not accounted for by the totality of its
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components, and language is not accounted for as a totality of its sentences. The totality is the field of social interaction. This field allow us to isolate sound-particles, even sound-component-particles. But it sets them and sentences into a matrix of human behavior through dialogue, response, and the cosmic systems of particular men, events, and societies. Particulars are isolated and identified as implicated by, so deducible from, that complex. The most desirable complexity is one from which one can deduce the maximum number of implications, with exact manipulations consonant with its unity. The target of Tagmemics is really not 'linguistic' (if that is defined as an isolated sound-sense complex), but human emic experience as a totality: the appropriate blend of SO, SEEM and SAID. Tagmemics is incompatible with the purely empirical, unpredictable diversity-assumptions of Boas and American Structuralism. It is compatible with the universalist assumptions of TG, but Pike does not advance ideas about biological inheritance, innate ideas, or Universal Grammar as such. Tagmemics is particularly compatible with Case Grammar as a 'Deep Structure' for its 'Surface Structure' analyses. As in Chomsky's distinctions of description and explanation, the categories of Tagmemics are demanded by its theory, so it is explanatory to that extent. Descriptive adequacy is assured by reliable accounts of numerous languages. Ignoring the particlewave-field hypothesis leads to less elegant or inaccurate descriptions (e.g. whether English affricates are best taken as two voiceless stop-and-fricative-particles rather than a stop-fricative wave within the field of phonology). Tagmemics accounts less explicitly for anomalies in semantic interpretation of surface structures without deeper components. Such `deeper' levels might well be hypothesized for higher levels in Tagmemics' hierarchy, but are not obvious in most formulations of the system. Yet ambiguities are not appreciated without accurate surface descriptions: He's got me over a barrel is a common idiom for I am embarrassed, but while the idiom seems to refer to an external object in a physical location, its sense is an internal psychological experience. Case Grammar provides a principled supplement to Tagmemic formulae, simplified approximately as: Surface: Sentence:
S: +N P: + V
O:
: He died
He bit
Case Roles: Surface: Sentence:
+ det + N
O
the dust
(died)
S: +N P: + BE
Loc:
+ prep + N from Missouri
I
: Prove it
am Case Roles
(E)
(Prove)
(O)
(A)
(Fig. 13.11) A Particle-perspective is most appropriate to gross functions of units like phonemes, syllables, words, etc. Particles are usefully viewed as having
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temporal (therefore linear) and spatial order; even some non-things can be counted as things. Waves are usefully conceived as having margins like the onset, nucleus and coda of syllables; or the pre-, in- and suf-fixes of words; or the pre- medial-and post-members of phrases, clauses, sentences. Fields are appropriately conceived as fields of fields within the big field, against which significance, purpose and function are identified, contrasted, and measured, as particles, waves, or fields. Pike finds poetry lends itself to that kind of analysis. 13.26 Tagmemics and Drama. The metaphor of Drama added to the metaphors based on time and space suggests how parts of language function. Tagmemics' vocabulary distinguishes dramatic types, their mechanics, staging, scenery, characters, roles, functions and interrelations. In the Field of Drama, plays can be seen as particles or waves. Critics evaluate plays for their perfection of dramatic form, apt rolecasting, effective sequencing, staging, scenery, lighting, acoustics, etc., and audience-reaction how well plays communicate. Fields other than linguistic make particle-wave-field distinctions, as in Micro- and Macro-Economics. 13.27 Relations and Things-Related. Chomsky used Saussurean terms to distinguish substantive Subject from formal Subject-of in Aspects: an NP immediately dominated by S is a potential subject. Hjelmslev saw that as a functive in the function between S and NP. Naive realism, he noted, assumes there really are such things, awaiting labels, before Analysis, while Science as he thinks of it tells us our Analysis constitutes them, since the only givens are Relations and perhaps his Purport, which is neither form nor substance: the dependences which naive realism regards as secondary, presupposing the objects, become from this point of view primary, presupposed by their intersections. (Hjelmslev 1961:23) Pike is a realist, but hardly a naive one in either the popular or technical senses of the term. He stresses that Units are Observer's units, not entities antecedently given and incapable of redefinition. This is a useful tautology saying that Observers can only know what they know. It is no tautology to suggest that Observers can learn. One of the things Observer Pike learned empirically about a host of quite divergent languages was that there are certain function-form correlations recurring in all of them. 13.28 String Analysis. IC analysts take an utterance bounded by silence as a good candidate for `sentence'. The IC approach isolates constituents by successive deletions approved as `sayable' by the informant. IC had no presuppositions about what must or must not occur, although experienced workers had their favorite catalogues, questions, and sturdy
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results. Given an empirical `anything is possible' assumption, surface form is the obvious candidate for scientific linguistic investigation. After a lifetime of work, or perhaps even within one's own language, intuitions suggest, and testing reveals, correlations of form and meaning. Robert Longacre's String Constituent Analysis (1960) offered a technique within the tagmemic approach to isolate familiar grammatical functions and define them. Tagmemic units were `slot-and-filler' strings. Slots are identified by their positions, functions and fillers. Familiar functions are Subject, Predicate, Object(s), Complements, Locative, Temporal, Manner, expressions. Each slot has obligatory (+) or optional (±) fillers, either of which can be Nuclear (diagnostic, defining of the structure) or Peripheral (not diagnostic, but perhaps obligatory). Structures, with their congruent slots and fillers, are found at various levels, descending from Sentence through Clause, Phrase, Word and Morpheme (cf. Cook 1989). A frequently quoted example is: The slow, lumbering covered wagon pulled the pioneer family across the 13.12prairies only yesterday. This is a sentence. It consists of Subject, Verb, Object, Locative and Temporal expressions as components. Each can be examined at the levels mentioned. Some expressions are exocentric, others endocentric. One exocentric exemplifies a RelaterAxis construction across the prairies, in which the word across is the Relater, the prairies Axis; in endocentric only yesterday, only is an optional adverbial expansion of yesterday. Yesterday is nuclear and obligatory for the Temporal expression, since only is peripheral and nondiagnostic of Temporals. Both across and the prairies are obligatory, since they occur in an exocentric construction, yet across is diagnostic of this expression, therefore Nuclear for a Locative, and the prairies, while syntactically demanded as an NP Object, is optional at the lexical level. This contrast of levels was involved in Firth's analysis as categorial Colligation vs. lexical Collocation, two different levels. 13.29 The Need for 'Deep Structure'. Yet the surface analysis is deficient as an account of behaviors. Wagons didn't pull pioneers anywhere horses or oxen pulled wagons in which people rode. The role of wagon is better identified as Instrument. This example could be explained more revealingly if numerous others showed the same metaphoric mechanism used when Agent + Instrument are involved. E.g. Ford cars transformed America, The Encyclopedia Brittanica taught us about science, Machines liberate us. Is there not something obscure in Lincoln's Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation... what role did our founding mothers play?
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13.30 Case Grammar. Case Grammar treats some syncretisms studied in Modistic grammars: differences between demands in surface grammar (modes of signification) and semantic organization (modes of thought), both of which can be different from convictions about the way things `really are' (modes of existence). But Case Grammar accounts can be ambiguous as to whether they are to correct surface significations by psychological, physical, or some other kind of facts, or simply compare them. Should grammatical explanations be autonomous, or supplemented by, or corrected by, scientific fact? Time flies is grammatical. Yet the grammatical Process or Action of time flying is as irreconcilable with current science as it is with the Action interpretation of Greek mythology, which took Time to be a person called Chronos. Tagmemics studies syntactic form-function slots; Case Grammar deals with variable Noun Roles a Constant Verb demands; Tagmemics is a grammar, Case Grammar is only part of one. Tagmemics provides the Cast; Case Grammar assigns its Roles/Characters, differing as Particles (gross abstracts), Waves (experiential Particles) and Fields (alternative/complementary settings for Particles & Waves). 13.31 Cases and Prepositions. Working in an Aspects framework, Fillmore (1968) proposed that `Subject-of' is more appropriate to Surface than Deep Structure. Compare English prepositions and Latin 2 inflections: janitor opens 1) The Janitor reserat
the
door 2) The Janua
BY the janitor key A janitorE WITH a clave
3) A
key Clavis
is opened reseratur opens reserat
door 4) The Janua
is opened reseratur
door 5) The Janua
is open reserata est
door 6) The Janua
is opened reseratur
the
door januam
WITH a key clave
door januam key WITH a clave
(BY (AB
someone) aliquo)
(Fig. 13.12) 13.32 Distribution vs. Composition. Despite a preferred word-order, Latin forms can have identical grammatical relations in different positions, while English ties the function of Subject and Object to pre- and post-verbal
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slots. Latin subjects are Nominative in independent clauses and objects are Accusative with most Verbs and some prepositions. English he vs. him contrast positionally as subject and object: neither Latin nor English janitor is marked in surface form as nominative. But just as Latin janitor could be said to have a Ø surface allomorph, English can be assigned an 'underlying' preposition BY for nouns functioning as Agents (and frequently nominative subjects). By is deleted in the active, but realized in the passive. Latin distinguishes Agents from Instruments overtly when nouns have the semantic feature ± animate: a + Ablative noun occurs when the noun is an animate Agent; nouns in the ablative case without a are used for inanimate Instruments. English often contrasts Agent vs. Instrument using BY+ animates, and WITH+inanimates. An underlying preposition TO can mark Object, deletable in the surface. 'Case Roles' were first shown on trees by a K or Kø (subscripted for Case dominance) on the same level as NP, sometimes realized as surface prepositions, sometimes not. In Fig. 13.13, M stands for Modality, P for Proposition, A for Agent and O for Object:
(Fig. 13.13) K's and prepositions in trees soon ceded to graphics with symbols for NP Case Roles. A 'normal Subject Hierarchy' was revealed: the surface subject of active sentences must be the semantic Agent, Object or Instrument in that order, depending on which is lexically overt. In the scenario which all the sentence of Fig. 13.12 report on, Janitor always has a semantic A role. Janitor is lexicalized in active 1) of Fig. 13.12, and is grammatical subject; door is always semantic O, but grammatical subject in 13.12 2) because the Agent Janitor is covert, while key, the invariable semantic I in this scenario, is grammatical subject in 3) in the absence of Janitor and key. Notice that though the grammatical roles change in the passive sentences, the identical semantic roles are intact. 13.33 Predicate Types and Case Roles. Case Grammar distinguishes Propositional and Modal Case Roles for Nouns. Understood in the language-neutral way described above, it is obvious why some aspects of Propositional
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Content can be posited as Universal: with a bit of commentary, identities between the English, Latin and other versions of the `same scenario' can be calibrated. Modal Case Roles include those which may occur frequently in languages, but not of grammatical necessity: the fact is that they do not occur in some language. Neither Tense nor Gender are obligatory in Chinese. Identical roles can be both nuclear and obligatory, as well as peripheral and optional, in a single sentence: e.g. in Galileo was on a tower (in Pisa) or Peter stole money from Paul (for Mary), the parenthesized (outer) Locative and Benefactive are optional grammatically and semantically, but tower and money realize obligatory categories. Dialectal past tenses in English relate State learned, got and borned, Process learned, got and borned or Action learned, got and borned. Chafe (1970:119 ff.) assumes every Verb predicates an intrinsic State, Process or Action-Process corresponding to the trichotomy Lyons (1968:397) makes among verbs as static, dynamic or causative. Chafe posits derivational units for verbs, such as inchoative, etc., to relate verb types:
(Fig. 13.13) 13.34 Universals and Case Roles. Communication takes generic (Old) information for granted and can impart more specific or individual (New) experience. Linguistic Theories can be compared in terms of Old and New perspectives: what all theories agree on is Old Information, candidates for Universality. When different, unrecognized, or less well-formulated Universals are proposed, they are worthy of serious examination. Case Grammar makes definite Universalist claims, some explicit only for language, others implicit for the nature of human emic experience as attested in language. Like Particle-Subject or Wave-Subject (compared to Field-Subject-of), Case Roles have no substantive, only a relational or formal definition. If considered as Particles or Waves in different Fields, these terms are used with Systematic Ambiguity (cf. p. 183 above): i.e. in a 4-term Analogy of Proper Proportionality, not in a 3-term Analogy of Attribution. Within each Field or System, the content may be calculable and precise. But in contrasting Fields, inevitable differences are expected, since Fields can differ both formally as well as substantively. This seems relevant to the concept of Competence. A Microbiologist can confidently attribute Competence to a human cell, at any stage of development, since even an embryonic one must be a potential Ideal Speaker-Hearer, as Chomsky uses the term. Compared to infant, adolescent, adult, and professional linguists' competence in language, there are substantial differences. But between the competence of the DNA-identified
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embryonic cell, and that of infant, adolescent, adult, or senescent linguist, there is formal identity, according to Chomsky's argument. The argument is not even a three-termed Analogy basing an Extrinsic Attribution: We call adults 'competent' and they are human, and we call some cells 'human', so we can call them 'competent'. Nor is the conclusion contained in the premises, to be derived by straightforward deduction: IF
all humans are competent,
all
B = some A
AND some cells are human,
some C = all
B
THEN some cells are competent,
some C = some A
(Fig. 13.13) Overlapping circles show the fallacy: human and other cells may be definable in univocal terms, but competent is not a frozen expression like the H or O in H2O. The overlapping 'competent'-phrases use the key middle term competent in more than one sense, making the 3-term surface version formally invalid as a syllogism. The argument is 4-termed, called an Analogy of Proper Proportionality or the Principle of Isomorphism, as in A:B = C:D where A could be the assumed potential of a human cell as related to B (its substantive constitution), and C is the known potential of any of the others to their known D constitutions, all substantively different from that of an embryonic human cell. A DNA-identified human embryonic cell must develop into a human, and all normals learn language. So even cells are competent in language, but in a systematically ambiguous sense. This is like the stage when genes were postulated, but not substantively identifiable. Explaining how to identify competence substantively for neurological, psychological, and social development stages is a matter for other Fields, but analyzing the argument and deciding on how it could be falsified is relevant in any discipline. Popperian theory has it that statements are only Scientific
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if they are falsifiable, at least in principle. Chomsky's postulated LAD seems incapable of empirical falsification. The same reasoning could be applicable to an evaluation of Case Grammar. 13.35 Defining Case Roles. Case Role definitions are analogical, not univocal; Field-definable, but not substantively as Particles. Object roles first, then Agent, Instrument, Benefactive, Locative repay study in this light. Their differences are systematically predictable: in terms of Hjelmslev's Schema vs. Usage; from the calculable differences in each Case Frame, and from the implications that define them. As semantic Particles or Waves, Stative Objects (Os vs. bare O in Processes) exclude Progressive and Agency; Process Objects tolerate Progressive but exclude Agency; Action Objects tolerate Progressive and demand Agent. Semantic Fields show Complementation: States are Pikean Observers' conditions of no change; Processes are spontaneous changes of State; Action demands deliberate change of State. Contrasts like those distinguish Idioms and their semantic interpretation, as Process die vs. Action kick the bucket show. Some shift from Field to Field (like Grammatical The sun rises in the East and sets in the West vs. Astronomical data) and some are linguistically unresolvable: how is the Observer-Juror to decide that The defendant behaved badly involves culpable Action or an impersonal Process? 13.36 Analogical Interpretation. Consonant with Pike's assumption that human Observers identify Particles, Waves, and Fields is need for the analogical interpretation of Agent and Experiencer as Object roles. Action semantics demand deliberate human initiation of a state change or the triggering of a process or action. But many human Actions and Processes are internal, with no external effect. States of aversion or nausea, processes of mental depression or indigestion, and the activity of thought are private experiences. Semantic intuitions can concern the way things `actually are' (SO), the way grammars make us express them (SAID) or what speaker, hearer, or speaker-hearers `think' about the match (SEEM). That human experience is involved does not make predicates expressing them unchangeably Experiential in CG. We can hit those who feel it as easily as rocks insensitive to anything. Actions are intrinsically basic or experiential, not as a consequence of grammatical or real objects: we can love people or ideas equally well, yet neither need be aware of it. Predicates can be intrinsically Experiential, but not by reason of their Objects. I am sick reports a private experience CG can represent as E*O; You are sick and She is sick have the same grammatical form, but neither report the same kind of experience as I am sick and are better presented as Os (like They are tall). If the object of semantic intuitions concerns SEEM rather than SAID, one might analyze You are sick as E,O, where O is
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expandable as the assertion Os (just as NP can be derived as S): (It) seems to me (that you are tall / sick). 13.37 Agent and Instrument. Agent as an Analogous term guarantees conflicts between expression and semantic interpretation: grammatical distinction between Human Agents and Natural Forces are rare. He was struck by lightning has by, which often distinguishes Agents and Instruments. He was delayed by an avalanche is just as interpretable as He was delayed by the police or He was delayed by a storm, but They delayed him with an avalanche is interpretable Instrumentally while They delayed him with a storm resists a literal true/false one. Aside from mental activity, human Actions often involve linguistic Instruments. Some are covert (kiss, punch) or lexicalized (hoe, rake); some depend linguistically on metaphors from other disciplines do we hear or see without instruments, if lips must be `used' to kiss, and fists to punch? Since some languages demand two predications to express instrumentality where English can lexicalize the instrument, as in the verb of He knifed him vs. He hurt him; he used a knife, Instrument is not proposed as a Propositional (universal) but a Modal Case Role. Analogy is a mental mechanism or relation that can be analyzed and discounted as a source of ambiguity, as in the `competence' of cells and adult speakers. Analogies fasten upon a single factor held to unite an analogical Field. Metaphor is equally pervasive and analyzable, but often involves more than a single resemblance. The `flow' of electric `current' and the `resistance' it meets are simultaneously liquid-based metaphors and empirically measurable properties. That electric currents flow equally well up and down does not invalidate the concepts or make them less usable, but alerts us to their status. Problems about Agents and Instruments, natural and human forces, are not without scientific parallels. 13.38 Instrument, Word Magic and Semantic Interpretation. Recall popular concern with `Word Magic': the fear we might be living in a pseudo-construct of language rather than in the `real' world. Jeremy Bentham set about `laying the ghosts' of the legal fictions of his day, and tried to substitute concrete for abstract nouns or verbs in his own writing and thinking. Sapir-Whorf alerted us that linguistic forms are no guarantee of the objectivity of their normal interpretation. Korzybski and Hayakawa in General Semantics peopled the world with things like cow1, cow2 ... cown, concrete perceptions for generic common terms. Cow never existed for them, making their confident use of the term a bit of a puzzle. Pertinent to this puzzle would be the intralinguistic intelligibility of lose a lap compared to cease to smile. Are fists real or pseudo-instruments? Lips have independent justification, as do eyes, tongue, and ears, but within what Field would one decide on their Instrumental status?
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These fancies pose genuine problems about just what the object of semantic intuitions is supposed to be. The Modistae had a three-fold distinction to which they could appeal, though no better resources than we for `solving' the problem. For Linguistics, the problem involves decisions about how to deal with semantics within the discipline: intralinguistically on a universal or a language-particular basis; extralinguistically, or with a bit of each? This involves a potential distinction of a Lexicon from a Dictionary, and refinement of appropriately intralinguistic semantic vs. syntactic features, as well as the dividing line between that and extralinguistic semantics (or syntax, if that could be formulated). 13.39 Time. Whorf suggested (Carroll: 1956) the Hopi, whose language is tenseless, were Observers of a timeless world as well (cf. Carroll 1956). And instead of classifying space location, dimensions and directions like SAE (Standard Average English), Hopi focuses on types of occupancy. Where SAE Time measures things and their change by before and after, Hopi classifies them as actual or potential. While Time and Space measure survival factors in the real world, Space is a Propositional factor in Case Grammar's Locative, while Tense has a Modal Role. To decide what sorts of objects Universal Case Roles are, how can a neutral account be presented? Some languages have no Degrees of Comparison: Hualapai, a Hokan language spoken in Arizona, opposes absolute states like old vs. young or fast vs. slow, but not relative ones like faster or oldest. Children and horses, for instance, are only describable by opposing them in speed- or age-pairs: #1 is fast / old, #2 slow / young: #2 fast / old, #3 slow / young, etc. 13.40 Location Labels the Noun Case Role demanded by verbs intrinsically connected with spatial relations. The lexical content of such predicates must therefore demand a basic relation of universal, analogical, semantic CG Object and static or dynamic relations to a location; since static location and dynamic change of location are alloforms, as are changes toward or from the observer, Source and Goal Cases can be merged in emic Location. 13.41 Benefaction Labels the CG Role demanded by verbs connected with the gain or loss of things. The lexical content of Benefactive predicates demands an intrinsic state, process or action involving 'possession'. As in classifying natural forces like the wind, it is not always obvious how to classify gain or loss of experiential 'objects' like fame or reputation: He lost money, friends and self-confidence when he became a drug addict. The SEEM categories of thought need not be demanded SAID ones of grammar. If humans act always for their own benefit, Benefaction (self-interest) is a psychological universal but not necessarily a grammatical one. A content like 'for the subject's benefit' was a 'meaning' of the obligatory
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grammatical distinction between Active and Middle Verbs in Attic Greek. English uses reflexives to express the contrast: He bought (himself) a present. 13.42 Modality Types and Representations. Tree diagrams are not linguistic relations, but represent them. When cross-referential-factors of semantic features other than Hierarchy are involved, trees' precedence-and-dominance logic is clumsy. Level differences like Subject-of and Subject, and simultaneous functions like Subject-of and Agent are poorly distinguished on two-dimensional trees. Chafe (1970) suggested Semantic Representations are better seen as three-dimensional Mobiles, and TG's multi-modal, non-directional, models seem to deal with similar problems. A TG Case Component plays a different role in Semantic Interpretation than that of `Case Grammar'. CG's semantic concerns were apparently to be handled by EST's Rules of Construal into Logical Form which is input to the Semantic Component: there Indices mark co-referential items, and Binding Conditions clarify Scope conditions. When Propositional displays in CG have S immediately dominating Modality and Proposition, and PROP dominates Predicate with its Arguments or Case Roles, an inference is that Modalities like Declarative, Question, Time and Instrument indirectly dominate the entire Proposition, and ultimately the entire sentence. Chafe's representation allowed notation for inflections peculiar to V, or to Ns in various Roles. This is better suited for showing the Scope of Negation or Quantification. 13.43 Tagmemics and IC Analysis. Tagmemics accepts the basic insight of IC Analysis (that recurrent surface units are either actual strings, where each member is demanded for functional integrity, or potential strings, with members optionally added to a Head defining that string: endocentric and exocentric constructions). Tagmemics also assumes that languages have definable functions like being Subject, Object or one of their adjuncts, manifested by these strings. Tagmemic units are located as in IC, but defined positively as specific form-function correlates. IC units are located and defined on the basis of morphological composition and syntactic distribution. `Function' is relevant to their IC definition in negative or contrastive signalling, not as a positive content. 13.44 Translation Is possible because languages have something in common. Neither extralinguistic data nor internal grammatical organization dictate what view the human observer must take of common referents. Particles as `discrete things' can be dealt with as Waves, or Waves as Particles within different Fields, both within a language and across languages and hierarchic subordination reorganizes the semantic function of lower levels. One example is the subordination of surface compositional factors to the perspective of grammatical functions, in which a language is regarded as a linear set of distributional surface slots with their potential functional fillers.
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A string analysis of 13.12 can isolate functions somewhat as: 13.14. (a) The slow, lumbering wagon Subject (b) pulled
Verb
(c) the pioneer family
Object
(d) across the prairies
Locative
(e) only yesterday
Temporal
But this surface form/function approach still needs explicit subordination within a more inclusive Field, since the surface vs. semantic (or grammatical vs. behavioral) analyses can be at odds about the roles the constituents play. Wagons do not pull people, animals do; wagons are real-world Means of getting actual Objects from one Location to another, even though grammatical wagons function as grammatical Subjects. Grammatical Subject vs. a real or conceptual Role as Agent, and Subject vs. Instrumental and other Roles deserve separate representation. An Agent Role is played by horses or oxen in this example, yet they are unmentioned and their -human features overlooked. The Instrument role is played by wagon, identified only as the Subject. Wagon is overt, horses or oxen are covert. Similarly, in a pair like: 13.15 (a) The outlaw bit the dust. ?The dust was bitten by the (b) outlaw outlaw is subject, and dust is the object in the active sentence but dust subject, and outlaw object of a preposition in the dubious Passive version. Identical situations are describable in a variety of ways, including: 13.15 (c) The outlaw died violently (d) Violence killed the outlaw (e) The outlaw's end was violent (f) The outlaw met a violent end (g) The outlaw's life ended in violence Violence ended the outlaw's (h) career Case Grammar provides an inclusive Field within which these differences merge into unity. It assumes that one surface structure can manifest more than a single 'message'; that the same message can be manifested in several surface structures; that messages can be analyzed at another level of structure involving few abstract semantic (or propositional) elements, compared to the variety of concrete surface elements. 13.46 Proposition vs. Sentence. Sentences are in a language, propositions are not: they are meaning relationships that divergent sentences in unrelated languages can have in common. Some sentences are fairly direct manifestations of their propositional content, like kernel sentences structured only by
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obligatory transformations. The outlaw bit the dust is a much less obvious realization of the message native speakers recognize in it. For translation concerned with ideas rather than words, some account is needed of identical ideas speakers of different languages share, and the variety in which they are expressed. This requires Semantic Interpretation. The performance of that psychological operation is not exhausted by, nor even well described in TG's technical use of the term. But TG is intended as an account of Competence, not Performance, as defined within its own approach. 13.47 Case Grammar. ''Case" Grammar seems ineptly named, since it soon shifted from morphological signalling to networks of functional interdependences. In A Proposal concerning English Prepositions (1966) Fillmore contrasted English prepositions and morphological contrasts of traditional cases in the Latin and English versions of The janitor opens the door with a key. Semantic roles of nominals correlate directly with verb-types: Agent
instigator of change
Experiencerundergoer of internal States and Processes Instrument means used by an Agent Object
what is in a State or Process, or recipient of an Action
Benefactive involved in State, Process, or Act of possession Locative
place of State, Process, or Action
Some language functions, as Tagmemics also assumes, do not just occur but must be found: Case Grammar locates them in a semantic structure, examined here as `Generative' to make explicit what determinations link semantic and syntactic levels. One way to do this: posit a finite set of elements reducible to, or operating on, NP and VP (the Logician's Subject and Predicate or the Dialectician's Noun and Verb). 13.48 Case Roles. The elements of a Proposition are related exocentrically: both Subject and Predicate are demanded as Co-Constants, so they are mutually defining. But Verb-types are fewer than Nominal functions, so the closed set of Verbs justify taking them as Constants defining the character and occurrence of Noun Variables. Nominal and Verbal interdependences are displayed in the matrix proposed by Cook (1989). He reduces Chafe's (1970) Action vs. Action-Process verbs to a single unit, based on the ready deletion of surface Objects: BASIC EXPERIENTIAL BENEFACTIVE LOCATIVE STATE
Os
OsE
OsB
OsL
PROCESSO
OE
OB
OL
ACTION AO
AOE
AOB
AOL
Fig. 13.16
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e.g., STATE
dead cold
own
border
PROCESS
die
chill
inherit approach
ACTION
kill
freeze buy
exile
A Basic verb specifies the State its Nominal is in, the Process it undergoes, or the Action required by the lexical content of the Verbal root. Action-verbs add a second Nominal to O, with an Agent role: e.g., State:
The king is dead
Os
Process: The king is dying Action:
Assassins killed the king
O A, O
An Experiential verb is one whose lexical sense concerns internal mental or physical States, Processes or Actions. Two Nominals are demanded by that content: one for what is experienced, the other for the experiencer: e.g., State:
My ears feel cold to me
Os, E
Process: My ears are chilling Action:
You're freezing my ears
O, (E) A, O, (E)
A Benefactive verb is one whose lexical sense concerns States, Processes or Actions in which possession or loss is involved. It demands Nominals whose lexical content makes them eligible to enter such relationships: e.g., State:
She owns many estates
Os, B
Process:
She inherited estates
O,
B
Action:
She bought some estates
A, O,
B
A Locative verb is one whose lexical sense demands States, Processes or Actions that are unintelligible without the involvement of what its appropriate Nominals specify: e.g. State:
New York borders Canada
Process: The storm approached Maine Action:
They exiled Napoleon to Elba
Os, L O, L A, O, L
Roles demanded semantically can be overt (signalled phonetically, like Napoleon and Elba in the last example), or covert (inaudible, but demanded for intelligibility), as in Napoleon was exiled, where neither Agent nor Location is expressed. Some lexical roots function in State, Process, or Action roles: e.g., State:
Pat's eye was dry
Process: Pam's drying Action: So we dried our tears too.
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Few verbal roots are that versatile, though ungrammatical combinations may be easily understood, pictured, reworded or translated literally into some other language. This alerts us to handle 'semantic interpretation' with care: State:
Pam was bald
Process: Pat was balding Action: *So Pam balded Pat Use of a phrase instead of a word is called Periphrasis, and the periphrastic expression make bald in ... so Pam made Pat bald, too functions exactly like *bald as an Action. Individual verbs of each type, in a language or across languages, differ in what overt nominals may, must, or cannot occur with them. But what is tolerated, demanded, or excluded for their intelligibility remains identical for each type. Semantically, STATE
demands: tolerates:
excludes:
Stative Object
Agent Progressive
PROCESS Object ACTION
Object Agent
Progressive Stative Object Agent Progressive tolerate
ALL Experiential Benefactive Locative Second O role 13.49 CG Notational Conventions. O alone stands only for a Process, Os for a State; any Action must be indicated by A. Intrinsic Experientials, Benefactives, and Locatives by E, B, and L, respectively. Lexical sense, not real-world conditions, decide what is 'intrinsic'. Though we act for our own benefit, and are aware of it, and necessarily in a particular place, Basic verbs are non-Experiential, non-Benefactive, and non-Locative, by definition. No Case Role except O can occur twice with the same Verb. This occurs in equational sentences like Bush became President, where both Bush and President are Objects in a Basic Process. Case roles occur in a Subject Hierarchy: depending on which details an English-speaking Observer chooses to report on in the scenario referred to by Active He opens it with a key, Agent must be Subject if overt; if
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not, Instrument becomes Subject, and if neither A nor I are expressed, the semantic Object is the grammatical Subject. So: 13.17
AIOfor He opens it with a key IOfor The key opens it O
for It opens
Osfor It is open While CG attends to Propositional Content, a semantic level, it requires surface description as much as any form of linguistic analysis. Otherwise, discrepancies between levels of representation would not made explicit. Tagmemics provides techniques for locating such surface units even before the analyst acquires semantic intuitions about an unknown language. A distinction is made, therefore, both between sentence parts and propositional content, and then between Propositional and Modal roles. 13.50 Propositional Domination. In the Fig. 13.13 tree (repeated here as Fig. 13.18) for The janitor opens the door, S dominates M and P:
(Fig. 13.18) This tells us to read the graph as saying: A Sentence is a Proposition + Modality. P dominates V, O and A: that says that This Proposition consists of Verb, Object and Agent. Only Pres is dominated in this example by M, indicating that propositional open is to be expressed as sentential opens. This omits many details found in other GS representations. Instead of a Performative (like I say to you) dominating S, CG can note Declarative under Modality for The Janitor opens the door, or Interrogative (with Pres) for Does the janitor open the door?'. Entries under Modality would be more complex for Would that door really have been opened by this janitor?. Simpler illustrations are these English, German, French, Spanish and Italian expressions: a 1. I am cold
b
c
It is cold
I have a cold
2. Es friert mich Es ist kalt 3. J'ai froid
Ich habe mich erkältet
Il fait froid Je suis enrhumé
3a.
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J'ai un rhume
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4. Tengo frio Hace frio Estoy resfriado 4a.
Tengo un catarro
5. O freddo
Fa freddo O un raffreddore
English 1 and German 2 have 1st-person subjects in a, 3rd-person neuters in b. The Romance examples show 1st person subjects in a, 3rd impersonals in b. For CG notation, the surface phenomena can suggest: (a) Os
(b) 0s
1. I am cold A
Os
(c) 0s B
It is cold O
I have a cold
Os
0s A
2. Es friert mich Es ist kalt B 3. J'ai
Os froid
A
O
Ich habe mich erkältet O
Il fait froid B
3a.
O
Os Je suis enrhumé
O
J'ai un rhume (B)
Os
4. Tengo frio
(A) Hace
O frio
(Os) Estoy resfriado (B)
4a.
Os
O
Tengo un catarro (B)
5. Ho
O
(A)
freddo Fa freddo
O
(B)
O
Ho un raffreddore
Individual analyses may be debatable but the notation suggests one literal relation between the overt nominals and verbs involved. Parentheses mark covert nominals. Interpretations might suggest: Basic States
(Os, Os):in 1a, 1b, and 2b
Benefactive States
in 3, 4 and 5a; and (B, Os): 1, 3a, 4, 4a, and 5b
Basic Actions
in 2a and 3, 3a, 5a, and (A, O): 2b
All expressions under (c) are analyzed as either Experiential States or Processes [(O, E) or (Os, E): Chafe uses the case-label Ambient for natural forces or settings]; those under (a) and (b), however, are equally Experiential States, with a semantic or propositional content starting with something like:
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S M
V
Os
E
cold
it
I
Pres Declar Sing ... (Fig. 13.15) 13.51 Realization. The tree does not suggest of itself how to control the realization of propositional content and modalities in the forms demanded by a language: those details are given elsewhere. Similarly, focus on semantics deprives the Grammar-part of the `Case Grammar' label of appropriateness. But its `Case' aspects show how surface nominals like froid, frio and freddo under (a) function like surface verbals in a common stative proposition; that surface Benefactives under (c) may be more remote from propositional content than the States resultant from a Process in Je suis enrhumé or Estoy resfriado; and how the German grammatical object mich, and English subject I both have identical CG Experiencer roles in this semantic, rather than grammatical, representation. The examples also suggest that what `semantic intuitions' attend to can be inexplicit: is `real' and `identical' propositional content decided on an intralinguistic or extralinguistic basis? Is `having a cold' assigned semantic status on linguistic or medical assumptions? Presuming we can assign a literal interpretation to verbs like be and have in our examples may seem to imply that they, like other verbs have a nonliteral interpretation as well. 13.52 Analogy and Metaphor. There are traditional names for `transformations' of literal expressions, and clues in their definitions to assist in reversing the process: nonliteral uses are analogical (We discouraged some, and the weather discouraged the rest) or metaphorical (The Queen smiled on her Nobles, but only the Sun smiled on Commoners). Metaphor may be distinct from analogy because metaphors are acceptable with partial resemblances, while analogies demand systematically discountable identities. Idioms exemplify what Hjelmslev labelled the Connotative vs. Denotative function of natural language. Literal denotation can be so remote from connotative use as to defy even metaphoric parallels That's the way it crumbles, cookiewise seems universally applicable. The Abbreviation of experience in lexical items (annoying in jargon, unnoted in standard usage) is indispensable for language functioning. But some languages lack mechanisms available in others: on what norms can it be decided that the tree on p. 511 is a sufficient, too detailed, or an abbreviated representation? If some languages lack degrees of Comparison, how are such relations to be
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represented in a universal propositional content without using degree expressions or deciding on its categorial (logical or grammatical) status? 13.53 Literal and Nonliteral. Phoebus has mounted his fiery chariot is grammatical, but nonliteral, even by those unfamiliar with Mythology. The sun also rises is likely accepted as grammatical, and probably nonmetaphoric by most. Does `real' propositional content need correction from the `facts' of modern astronomy? I'm itchy is a clear example of an Experiential State. Is medical lore as relevant for itching as for colds in settling on its propositional content? The Thames ran to the sea may be `more literally' a Process than an Action, and My estate ran to the edge of the woods more a Locative State than a Process, while The boy ran into the house may be taken literally as a free Locative Action rather than an unfortunate accidental Process. Some notions are accepted as selfevident in our culture that might seem fancies in another. Less obvious ones come to light in trying to make steps in semantic analysis more mechanical, reminiscent of the abstractness of `Abstract Syntax': `Clear' cases help define `Literal' ones: Pat is tall
Os
Pat is growing
O
Pat hits Pam
A,
O
Pat loves music
E,
Os
Pam is enjoying the music E,
O
Pam owns music
B,
Os
Pat inherited a piano
B,
O
Pam gives music to Pat
A,
O,
B
Pat lives on the beach
Os,
L
The beach is receding
O,
(L)
Pat moved Pam to the beach
A,
O,L
Pat moved to the beach
A*O,
L
(*here = A co-referential with O) `Nonliteral' examples are less clear: His ethics are lofty
Os
Her popularity is growing
O
The Hurricane struck Florida
A,
O
Misery loves company
E,
O
Paranoia won the day
A*B, O
MIT owes a debt to EST
O, B
Pat lost his reputation
B,
O
Success pays tribute to zeal
A,
O, B
GS lives
Os
EST ceded to REST
O, E / L
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Idioms reduce to Literal readings: Twist arms
: persuade
Have over a barrel
: embarrass
Smell a red herring
: suspect
Fall off the wagon
: resume drinking alcohol
Cover a multitude of sins
: excuse
'Abbreviations' can be expanded: a) Institutionalized single Actions: He campaigned for President [ he travelled, debated, promised, advertised, shook hands...I He deciphered the document [ he guessed at its language; moved his eyes right/left, up/down, hypothesized about coding mechanisms...] He imports automobiles [ An Agent causes another Agent to cause Objects to undergo Location change for mutual Benefaction ] b) Reciprocals abbreviate multiple single Actions: Pat and Pam married [ Pat is coreferential A*B and Pam is O; Pam is coreferential A*B and Pat is O I Pat and Pam conversed [Pat spoke with Pam and Pam spoke with PatI Pat and Pam conspired [Pat made plans and Pam made plansl Pat and Pam exchanged rings [Pat gave Pam a ring and Pam gave Pat a ringl c) Judgemental verbs can be related to Reports: I saw his teeth
E, O
He smiled at me
A, (Olex),
He showed his teeth
E
A, (E), O
He simpered
A, (O), E
He smirked
A, (O), E
His teeth became visible
(E) O,
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d) Lexicalized Modalities can be recovered: The car moved
O, (L)
Pat moved
A*O,
(L)
Pat drove the car
A,O,
(L)
Pat drove to N.Y.
A*(O),
L
Pat roared off
A*(O),
(E)
13.54 Lexical Decomposition. Chafe (1970. 132ff) proposed that the content of every verb be regarded as originally a State, Process or Action, or as derived from one of these oppositions. Lexical decomposition can characterize verbs with PROforms by type, to which is added their peculiar lexical content. Bloomfield (1933.146 ff; p. 300 above) called attention to some intralinguistic properties of PROforms he called substitutes, which show: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
parallel distribution with a form class pure class-function (`meaning') appropriately generic lexical content neutralization of some grammatical subcontrasts `correctness' intralinguistically determined.
On the model of McCawley's classic analysis of kill as KILL = cause / become / not / alive pro-forms might provide an aid in relating some of the problematic forms just discussed. Cook's and Chafe's distinctions, and Quirk's ingenious classification of verbs like create are included. Chafe's Action-Process and Cook's Action overlap: VERBS
pro-forms
decomposition
lexicalised
STATE
be
(X be Y)
The china is dry
PROCESS
become
(X becomes Y)
The china dries
ACTION
do
(X behaves Yly)
Dad dries
ACT-PROC cause become (X c's Y bec. Z)
I dry china
QUIRK'S
I invent china
cause BE
(X c's `Y' be Y)
Pro-forms for subtypical verbals and nominals would also be needed. Although be, become and cause occur in ordinary language, they meet Bloomfield's conditions of lexical generality more readily than those that come to mind for Experientials, Benefactives and Locatives. A few `clear' and `obscure' examples may show why:
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13.54 Tentative Lexical Decompositions. 1. He is outside
Os, (L)
be / there
2. He went outside
A *O, L cause / self / be / there
3. I lost my dog
B, O
dog / become / to me / not mine
or A*B, O cause / dog / become / not here 4. She's fond of music
E, O or Es,
5. They dislike me
E, O or E, Os
be / sensed / by her be / sense / it be / sensed / by them be / sense / me sense / be / not / good
6. It is raining
O, (L)
become / here
7. The tree is tall
Os
be / such
8. I hate tall trees
E, Os be / sense / by me sense / not good
9. Put it in the drawer
cause / become / there A, O, L cause / be / there
10. The music is loud
O, (E)
11. I gave him money
cause / become / it A, B, O it / be: it / be / to him
12. Snow is cold
Os
music / be / sense / by them
be / so
or Os, (E) be / aware / it / be / so 13. Money is scarce
Os
be / such
or Os, (B) be / such / to them 14. Where is the Capitol?
Os, L
15. Mark the place with a pencil
be / there / where cause / it / be / there
A, O, (L) cause / it1: cause / it2 / be / there
The impression that these are like Pidgin-English suggests the value of the approach when dealing with languages in which one is not native. In English, the procedure distinguishes bask from bathe: bask can only be a surface intransitive, bathe may be transitive or intransitive. Lexical decomposition renders bask (in the sun) as semantically E*O, (L), reflecting its historical origin as a Scandanavian reflexive. Bathe as Process is simply O, L; as Action, A, O, L (where O is indifferently coreferential with, or distinct from, A). Reading Chafe, Wallace L. 1970. Meaning and the Structure of Language. Chicago. Chicago University Press. Chomsky, Noam 1971 (1969). Deep Structure, Surface Structure, and Semantic Interpret ation. In Steinberg and Jakobovits' 1971 Semantics, reprinted in Chomsky 1972b: Studies in Semantics in Generative Grammar. The Hague. Mouton.
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Cook, Walter A. 1989. Case Grammar Theory. Washington, D.C. Georgetown University Press. Fillmore, Charles J. 1968. The Case for Case. In Bach and Harms' Universals in Linguistics Lakoff, George. 1974. Interview. In Parret 1974. Longacre, Robert E. 1960. String constituent analysis. Language 36:63-88. Pike, Kenneth. 1982. Linguistic concepts: An introduction to Tagmemics. Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. Further Reading Carroll, John. 1956. Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Papers of B.J. Whorf. New York. Wiley. Fillmore, Charles J. 1966. A proposal concerning English prepositions. GURT 1966. Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press. Lyons, John. 1968. Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. McCawley, James. 1968. Lexical Insertion in a Transformational Grammar without Deep Structure. Papers of the Fourth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Reprinted in Grammar and Meaning by James McCawley 1976. New York. Academic Press. 1974 (1972). Interview. In Parret 1974. Neubert, Albrecht. 1985. Translation. GURT 1985. Parret, Herman. 1974. Discussing Language: Interviews with [linguists]. The Hague. Mouton. Pike, Kenneth. 1938. Practical Suggestions Toward a Common Orthography for Indian Languages of Mexico. Investigaciones Lingüísticas. 1942. Pronunciation. Vol. 1 of An Intensive Course in English for Latin American Students. Ann Arbor. English Language Institute. 1943a. Phonetics: a Critical Analysis of Phonetic Theory and a Technic for the Practical Description of Sounds. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. 1944. Analysis of a Mixteco Text. International Journal of American Linguistics 10:113-138. 1945. The Intonation of American English. Ann Arbor. U. Michigan Press. 1948. Tone Languages: A Technique for Determining the Number and Type of Pitch Contrasts in a Language, With Studies in Tonemic Substitution and Fusion. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. 1954. Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of Human Behavior. Glendale, CA. Summer Institute of Linguistics 1967. Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of Human Behavior. The Hague. Ross, John Robert. 1986 (1967). Infinite Syntax! Norwood, NJ. Ablex. (1967 MIT Dissertation, Constraints on Variables in Syntax). Sadock, Jerrold. 1969. Hypersentences. In Papers in Linguistics 1:283-370.
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Notes: 1. Naawun bukupaali. International Bible Society and World Home Bibles League. 1983. 2. Latin vowel length is phonemic and 5 nominal declensions show 2 numbers, 6 cases, 3 genders: Singular I
II
III
IV
V
door
friend
key
janitor
taste
day
Nom janua
amicus
clavis
janitor
gustus
dies
Gen januae
amici
clavis
janitoris
gustus
diei
Dat januae
amico
clavi
janitori
gustui
diei
Acc januam
amicum
clavem
janitorem
gustum
diem
Abl janua
amico
clave
janitore
gustu
die
Voc janua
amice
clavis
janitor
gustus
dies
janitores
gustus
dies
Plural Nom januae
amici
claves
Gen januarum amicorum clavorum janitorum
gustuum dierum
Dat januis
amicis
clavibus
janitoribus gustibus diebus
Acc januas
amicos
claves
janitores
Abl januis
amicis
clavibus
janitoribus gustibus diebus
Voc januae
amici
claves
janitores
gustus
gustus
dies
dies
Verb conjugations vary by thematic vowels and show 3 Tenses and Aspects, 4 Moods. Bases for all forms are present infinitive, present active & perfect passive participle. Reserare ('open': inf.) has *; pf. act. = reseravi; pass. part. = reserata. Intransitive pandere ('be open') short e; pf. pandi; lacks pass. part. like patescere, Inchoative of patere, ('be open'); pf. patui. Transitive aperire ('to open') has i; pf. aperui; pf. part. apertum. PRESENT Active
Passive
person
Singular
Plural
Singular
Plural
1st
resero
reseramus
reserar
reseramur
2nd
reseras
reseratis
reseraris
reseramini
3rd
reserat
reserant
reseratur
reserantur
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14 After Aspects 14.00 Standard Theory. After Aspects, study focused on the border between syntax and semantics. Is a grammar a model of what a speaker intends to communicate, a hearer's grasp, or the linguistic structure both share? Depending on what are chosen as constants and variables, representations of what an Ideal Speaker-Hearer 'knows' or of 'language itself' will fluctuate. We experience language holistically, but analysis isolates aspects of it. Those aspects affect each other like machine-parts designed to adjust to the changes they produce. In Newton's physical model, every action entailed an equal and opposite reaction. A model with components labelled syntax, semantics and phonology suggests clarity about their autonomy. It should also distinguish the modules labelled deep, intermediate, and surface structures. Premature formalizations are inevitable, but we can learn how to recast them. 14.01 The Aspects Standard. The Aspects model chose a PS component as Basic input to transformational rules. It assumed: (1) semantic ambiguities can be clarified transformationally; (2) only cognitive meaning determines semantic interpretation; (3) performance anomalies do not falsify a competence hypothesis; so (4) ungrammatical consequences of rules suggest rule-revision, not their abandonment; (5) syntax is best viewed as autonomous with respect to grammaticality; (6) semantic and phonological components only interpret, they do not generate, syntactic structures; and (7) a generative phonology based on universal distinctive features is superior to phonemics for linking phonetic signals and semantic functions. That defined two complementary tasks: make explicit the object called knowledge of an Ideal Speaker-Hearer and pin down what mental structures equips speakers to acquire any language whatever. Those mental structures
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define a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) - a tautology for the asymmetric relation between a particular grammar and Universal Grammar. 14.02 Particular grammars reflect substantive and formal demands of a universal Deep Structure. No matter how often Chomsky insisted on the syntactic nature of Deep Structure, many persisted in interpreting it as a psychological state. Variety in signalling was assumed to derive from language-peculiar demands; identities were assumed to arise from categorial, relational, and functional universals. Subcategorization was more thorny: how many levels or (sub)components should a grammar have? could universal factors be unrealized substantively in a language's deep structure? or unrealized formally as oppositions? No Universal could be unrealizable by a priori definition, so a posteriori evidence of formalizations leading to ungrammaticality showed at best the need for reformulation, not the falsification of the initial hypothesis. If the syntax-semantics border is indeterminate, how lexical items are represented is crucial. The Porphyrian Tree shows how an identical object can be referred to as an individual (Plato), a species or genus at various levels (man, rational animal, animal, animate body, body), or as a genus that cannot be a species (substance). Like people, individual words are factual, unpredictable collections of properties, though every property, like every person, has a generic or specific definition. 14.03 Hjelmslev labelled lexical items Functives which are Entities, but not Functions. In Stratificational Grammar, while lexical items and grammatical formatives are formally defined by their relation to the (sub)categories dominating them intralinguistically, they 'dominate' nothing at all. Lexical items have an extralinguistic function which (sub)categories lack: lexical items are linguistic items in a way that metalinguistic categories are not; they are peculiar candidates for substantive properties. They illustrate the need for an analogical interpretation of substantive and formal within a metalanguage or a grammar Representing a language, as opposed to items within that language itself. All these viewpoints agree in presenting a single object, analyzable into hierarchic levels, with a super-term that defines things below it but is not defined by anything higher [like Sentence], and ultimate terms that are defined, but do not define anything below them [words are not the things the words stand for]. 14.04 ISH and the Extra-Linguistic. So the capacity of an Ideal Speaker-Hearer (ISH) before acquiring a particular language by LAD shows complementary metalinguistic and extralinguistic aspects. ISH's semantic capacity is a supranational, acultural, asexual, nondistractable capability for
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picking out and combining lexical components. Those lexical components are melded with universal patterns by its syntactic capacity. ISH's phonological ability 'attunes' it to differential sounds, defined in a finite set of universal phonetic contrasts. The metalinguistic description of the device producing all and only the grammatical sentences of a particular language must be already conformal with, or transformable into, universal semantic oppositions, syntactic patterns, and phonological contrasts that make an individual language an instance of generic Language. Syntactic structures analyze into categorial universals. They may be of a formal category type, like the English NP-VP construction of John runs called Exocentric (Bloomfield), Interdependent (Hjelmslev) or a Constant+Constant Relation (Logic). Or they may be like English Adj-N type of Poor John, or V-Adv ran away, both labelled Endocentric (Bloomfield), Determination (Hjelmslev) or a Constant+Variable relation (Logic). Relations necessarily associated with some positive universal function like being subject or predicate are substantive semantic universals, even though relations as such are clearly not substantive. Lexical component-oppositions (unlike lexical items) must also be semantic universals. If they are universal, they must be innate. They must precede experience and their content is independent of a particular language. Katz and Postal's human, male, and the like, are of that type, and a K-P Lexicon differs from a Dictionary by dealing with universal factors deployed in a language-peculiar fashion. These factors seemed to be included in the gist of the label 'standard', but many problems remained. For instance, substantive universals in a language are those necessarily realized in it. That is because they are definitive of, and defined within, Language Itself, and so within the account of it called Universal Grammar. Aspects proposed subject-of and similar formal relations as universal: were they substantive as well as formal universals, or just formal ones? Were conditions for the connexity or realization of categories like S, NP, VP etc., universals with only a formal definition within Linguistics, yet substantive from a perspective like that of Biology or Psychology? Is Linguistics a subpart of Psychology, a branch of Biology, or could it be an autonomous field? 14.05 Actual and Potential ISH. Psychologically or biologically, the interpretative capability of a potential ISH is independent of time, place, and subjectivity. By definition, it antedates experience. Semantic interpretation of an 'actual' ISH (surely a puzzling concept) follows experience, yet is independent of it. Would the Universal-Grammar-ISH and a particular-grammar-ISH differ like Competence vs. Performance? Saussure saw la langue as imperfectly realized in individuals, in tune with his mentalist-sociological perspective. Competenceas-knowledge is ambiguous as to individual vs. supraindividual psychology or biology. Langue as pure form is independent of substantive semantics or phonetics, so independent of substantive psychology or biology. Yet langue and Competence have an
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autonomous, design-produced clarity, a facet of arbitrariness which Hjelmslev noted. Whether that concept was useful for talking about humanity or some individual human was, in Hjelmslev's view, a question of external Appropriateness, not of internal Validity. 14.06 What Gets Interpreted. Aspects' grammar located what data a Semantic Component receives for interpretation. Studies showing where that organization faltered led to alternative designs, preserving Aspects' basic insights and universalist goals. Interpretation in Aspects is subsumed under Projection Rules. Those rules produce Semantic Representations distinguishing Base-produced Deep Structures, as (a) paraphrases of, synonymous with, or contradictory of, other structures; (b) as logically implying or presupposing others, or (c) as uninterpretable on the data supplied. Semantic Representation should be incapable of (d) labelling a structure as simply ambiguous, without specifying the undecidable options. That is because Base information includes (e) syntactic (sub)categories from the PS rules; (f) syntactic functions of (sub)categories from the PS rules; (g) both idiosyncratic and predictable lexical feature-complexes from a stock of universal semantic primitives, and (h) selectional restrictions on syntactic frames from the language-peculiar Lexicon. These all guarantee the propriety of inserting these lexical items into these syntactic frames by lexical rule. How inputs cohere, and whether they are useful for Semantic Interpretation, depends for validity on the grammar's design; whether that design is appropriate a quite weak equivalent for 'true' depends on whether it responds to the questions which linguists set.
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14.07 Meaning. Much turned on definitions of meaning, as undefined in Aspects as it was in Syntactic Structures. Of course, there was a formal definition demanded internally by how design-produced items cohere, organizational components geared to answer some questions, but not others. A traditional account of sentences like The man hit the ball and its negation The man did not hit the ball assumes both have identical predicate-meaning as part of their propositional content; or different predication-sense and different reference when predicate, predication or other parts of the sentences are negated (NEG V, NEG VP, NEG NP, etc.); or if unexpressed implications of a sentence count as part of its 'meaning'. If only hit's lexical content is negated, its status as a transitive verb is intact. But the implication that the man did do something is still a categorially demanded interpretation. If the, or ball or the ball or hit the ball are negated, interpretations vary as the likelihood of different implications varies. Aspects could, in principle, have identified S, V, VP, or any formative, or any structure, or any hierarchy of structures whatever, as the scope of negation in PS-rules, by overt marking or general conventions. Saussure held any linguistic item is ill-defined without its paradigmatic oppositions: so negation is an intrinsic, universal value of contentive expressions and operators alike. In that view of 'meaning' as Saussurean 'Content', every linguistic item necessarily entails its own negation. Ignoring it led to the (for Structuralists) absurdity of the generation of NEG as a V-subcategory in Generative Semantics. Hispanus would have found that omission confounded a syncategorematic operator with a categorematic term. 14.08 Meaning Change. That a sentence and its negation differ in meaning, and that the difference is due to a negative transformation, is either a tautology or uninterpretable. It must be specified what 'meaning' or aspect of 'meaning' changed: presuppositions or entailments; sense, reference, both, or neither. If 'meaning' were Saussure's Content, a change in it involves changing the algebraic sum of positive signification and negative values. Signification was proposed as the sole positive aspect of la langue: the potential association between Expression and Content, delimited by the otherwise universal negative principle of Value. The quotation from de Saussure (p. 256 above, emphasis added) is worth reflecting on again, since it is relevant to defining what kind of an object we can take Competence to be: A unit and a grammatical fact would not be confused if linguistic signs were constituted by anything but differences. But la langue being what it is, nothing simple is to be found; always and everywhere we will find the same complex equilibrium of terms that condition each other reciprocally. In other words, la langue is a form and not a substance. One cannot be too convinced of this truth, since all our errors in terminology, all our incorrect ways of naming linguistic facts derive from this supposition which has not been thought through, that there must be a substance in linguistic phenomena . . . Linguistics . . . works on the borderland where the elements of two orders are combined: this combination results in a form, not a substance.
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14.09 Autonomous Syntax and Semantics. Saussure's langue as pure form is generic and vague compared to the specifics of an Aspects outline. Chomsky's 1972 Problems of Knowledge and Freedom gives examples of form as autonomous syntactic patterning and a popular account of how to make intuitions about 'meaning' more explicit. He quotes Bertrand Russell's question about how principles of inference (central to Semantic Interpretation) are learned: . . . how comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know? (Chomsky 1972:3) Russell had concluded that principles of inference . . . cannot be logically deduced from experience. Either, therefore, we know something independently of experience, or science is moonshine. (Chomsky 1972:4) 14.10 Rationalism and Empiricism. Since Chomsky has been called a Rationalist, it may surprise some that he answers that introspection cannot discover the answer to this conundrum (Chomsky 1972:9), since all knowledge is from experience (Chomsky 1972:17). But he adds that one must hypothesize some innate system as a Given, antecedent to, but presupposed for, the creativity of what he here labels semantic system. (Chomsky 1972:18) Systems of knowledge and belief involve language, but invariants in language are independent of both. Martians might find knowledge of language or nuclear physics equally normal for earthlings, but we do not: only abnormals fail to acquire language, but normals have trouble balancing checkbooks and mastering nuclear physics. So a distinction is called for: though explicit rules about language can seem as abstruse to some of us as propositions in Physics, there is an invariant of language called structure-dependent operation. That demands more than just communicative simplicity or efficiency, and is found in all known human languages. (Chomsky 1972:26-28) 14.11 Questions. Take questions: if all we needed in order to turn That dog in the corner is hungry into Is that dog in the corner hungry? were a structure-free movement of is, making that a general rule would predict both *Is that dog that in the corner is hungry? as well as Is that dog that is in the corner hungry? as grammatical. For questions are structure-dependent: we have to identify not only the constituents and their order in a sentence, but their functions as well. Passives also show structure-dependence: I believe the dog to be hungry can have a passive form like: The dog is believed to be hungry. It may seem that we need only identify the main verb, its following NP, reverse them, adjust and modify a bit. But following that rule consistently, from: I believe the dog's owner to be hungry, we could just as well produce *The dog is believed's owner to be hungry. Involved here is not just any NP, but the NP the dog's owner. That natives never say things like that obscures the semantic
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independence of the rule, applied without recourse to semantics in passivizing: (2) I believed your testimony (3) I believed your testimony to be false (4) I believed your testimony to have been given under duress as (5) Your testimony was believed (6) Your testimony was believed to be false (7) Your testimony was believed to have been given under duress. The NP your testimony is object of believed in (2), but neither subject nor object of believed in (3) or (4); it is subject of be false in (5), and of embedded give in (7). Lexical features are here said only to filter transformations or leave them semantically uninterpretable: the rules are otherwise independent of meaning. Structure-dependence in embedded sentences was singled out in Syntactic Structures as a common feature which Phrase Structure Grammar dealt with clumsily: was false or to be false can appear with believe, but to be false only occurs as embedded. Chomsky says 'it is difficult to call upon a given analytic procedure in the process of applying that procedure' (1972:46) and suggests that from a tensed sentence, nothing can be extracted or introduced, and in general, that no rule can involve a phrase (call it 'X') and another phrase (call it 'Y') where Y is contained in a tensed sentence to the right of X: (8) [... X ...[... Y ...]...] where [... Y ...] is a tensed sentence. 14.12 Coreference. Other complex relations, which we use all the time without adverting to them consciously, involve coreference: in John expected to win, John is somehow subject both of expect and embedded win. How we use each (e.g., in The candidates each expected to defeat the other) is not so simple. An each-rule, deleting a PRO subject of defeat, produces 'The candidates expected to defeat each other'. If it were applied to The men each expected the soldier to shoot the other, it would result in: *The men expected the soldier to shoot each other and that shows that PRO- and full-subjects ([Z...Y...]) differ. It is not 'meaning', but syntactic structure-dependence that blocks odd-sounding but intelligible results like The candidates each heard John's denunciations of each other as a transformation of The candidates each heard John's denunciations of the other. I saw us and We saw me are odd compared to They saw us or I saw them. Equally strange is I expected us to hate them vs. I expected them to hate us: coreference is 'strange' when the subject of the embedded sentence separates personal pronouns. Equally 'strange' is structure-dependence which involves the scope of NEG, the scope and denotation vs. connotation of quantifiers in I didn't see many of the pictures, or I didn't see pictures of many of the children. The conditions under which it is truly said (note that here, 'truth' is introduced as a factor in semantic interpretation) exemplify
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structural dissociation of not and many by intervening subjects of embedded sentences, a relationship Hjelmslev labelled Constellation. 14.13 Structure Dependence. These grammatical examples suggested something of greater profundity and interest to Chomsky, worth comparing to de Saussure's concept of la langue: (Structure-dependence) seems to be a general property of an interesting class of linguistic roles, innate to the mind. Following what I take to be Searle's (1969) suggestion, let us try to account for it in terms of communication. I see no way of doing so. Surely this principle enters into the function of language: we might well study the ways in which it does. But a language could function for communication (or otherwise) just as well with structure-independent rules, so it would seem. For a mind differently constituted, structure-independent rules would be far superior, in that they would require no abstract analysis of a sentence beyond words. I think that the example is typical. Where it can be shown that structures serve a particular function, that is a valuable discovery. To account for or somehow explain the structure of UG or of particular grammars on the basis of functional considerations is a pretty hopeless prospect, I would think. (Reflections on Language, 1975:57-58) 14.14 Revision. Issues involved in semantic interpretation were to be settled on grounds internal to TG as formulated in Aspects, revised by testing, and successively labelled the Revised Standard Theory, or the Extended Standard Theory (EST), predictably leading to the Revised Extended Standard Theory (REST) and stages yet to be named. Revisability was an inherent feature of TG, starting with Syntactic Structures (cf. p. 390 above) and even 'standards' need adjustment. Unlike classifications based on isolated samples like Sapir's The farmer killed the duckling or Bloomfield's Poor John ran away, TG revisions have been both pervasive and cumulative: consequences of single rules must be related to the entire interlocking network. Marina K. Burt's 1971 Where the Rules Fail, tested some thirty commonly accepted T-formulations against each other. A comparable task would be even more complex today. But while some revisions yield general simplifications, others create further puzzles. Western Language study started with Greek reflection on vocabulary, progressed through a 'parts of speech' stage to an intersentential level and beyond. Compare musical progress from pipes or strings with fixed intervals, through variable intervals, to the output of symphonies in non-diatonic scales. The same melody always might be basic, but settings differ enormously; linguistic intuitions may be universal, but metalinguistic formulations require explicit methods. Proposals were so varied after Aspects that it became difficult for 'nonnative speakers' of TG to master its literature. Readable accounts of this include Newmeyer's 1986 Linguistic Theory in America, Radford's 1981 Transformational Syntax and 1988 Transformational Grammar, Horrock's 1987 Generative Grammar, and V. Cook's 1988 Chomsky's Universal Grammar, all amply referenced and sources of many examples used here.
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Since technical details are well handled in those texts, what follows will try to show areas of continuity and contrast, rather than account for the details. 14.15 Extended Standard Theory. Some alternatives to Aspects were seen as notational variants of the Standard Theory rather than denials of its essential distinctions. EST became a field of battle between Internal Cohesion vs. External Relevance: if Deep Structure were the Constant, and Semantic Interpretation a Variable, a kind of semantic blindness might result. If Semantics were the Constant, and Syntax the Variable, external Relevance might be more prized than internal Elegance. Since Directionality or Nondirectionality were among the differences Chomsky once conceded as 'notational variants', perhaps both could be Constants. Meaning always caused trouble, and Semantic Interpretation inherited them all. Aspects accepted Katz' and Postal's view that 'meaning' be minimally defined, and dealt with as intralinguistic interpretation of cognitive information. Incorporation of extralinguistic goals or criteria might be a future task, like De Saussure's postponed linguistic study of parole until la langue was mastered. Aspects defined semantic identity as synonymy determined by truth conditions. Logic's intra- vs extraperspective distinguishes the formal validity of a logical argument from the (material) truth of assertions from which that form is supposed to derive. 14.16 Internal Cohesion. Well-formedness involves structure-dependence, defined for a set of hierarchically related word- and phrase-categories. Categories are defined independent of lexical restriction, but the Lexicon specifies what settings individual words select, their category membership, and what demands word-combinations have within and across categories. Categories labelled and assigned an order in Aspects-type derivation and representation at tree-positions have included: S
Clause/Sentence
ADV
N
Noun
ADVP
NP
Noun Phrase
DET
Determiner
V
Verb
DEG
Degree expression
VP
Verb Phrase
CONJ
AUX Auxiliary
PRO
A
Adjective
Q
AP
Adjectival Phrase
QP
P
Preposition
TOP
PP
Prepositional Phrase
COMP
Adverb Adverbial Phrase
Conjunction Pro-form Quantifier Quantifier Phrase Topic Complement
These labels mark nodes on trees. Phrasal Categories (with P-endings) dominate Lexical Categories (one-letter abbreviations). Lexical items must be dominated by one or the other. Since descriptivists showed that some phrasal categories demand only single elements definable as Heads of Endocentric
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constructions in speech, while others demand pairs, definable as members of Exocentric constructions, some identical lexical elements are eligible to be Constant or Variable constituents of phrases. Trees show that sort of constituency ambiguously. Trees manifest mainly categorial Dominance and Precedence relations. Disambiguating choices are mainly between nonterminal (sub)category nodes and terminal lexical items. Evidence for a status intermediate between Phrasal and Lexical levels suggested 'X-Bar' notation, as well as the analysis of categories into feature-complexes. Positing syntactic features may correspond to the intuition that Adjective and Predicate can be defined and distinguished as sharing properties of N and V in an endocentric construction (while the NP + VP immediately dominated by S is necessarily an exocentric construction at that level). 14.17 X-Bar Syntax. What does a Tree-diagram tell us, and how can one argue from its construction about identities, differences, or relationships among what it represents? Tree-as-a-whole represents Sentence. Tree-parts represent sentence-parts. Tree-design represents relations among tree-parts as constituting the totality S(entence). A grammatical tree is at least a metaphor (perhaps an analogy) involving a tree's trunk, branches, and leaves:
The trunk of this upside-down 'tree' is S, represented as the node or dot where 'branches' start, protracted as lines connecting to other dots or nodes as branch-origins, all terminating ultimately in 'leaves' (lexical items or formatives). This S has NP + VP as immediate, binary constituents, with DET + N and V + NP as binary mediate constituents, and lexical items or formatives as its ultimate constituents. All constituents are binary in this generic S, but not in every individual S. Neither tree-design nor dots nor category-labels demand or exclude that. Some constituents are categorially exocentric (NP + VP), some can be endocentric (V + Adv); some are categorially exocentric, but lexically endocentric [DET + N: (The) Romans], or both categorially and lexically exocentric [The man, the ball, Ø, Carthage]. Neither the nodes nor the category-labels demand such different lexical relationships in the examples used.
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14.18 Spatial Tree-Relations. Mixing botanical and biological terminology, grammatical relations are definable in terms of spatial ones in tree-diagrams: (a) A node is mother of another if it immediately dominates it (as S immediately dominates NP and VP) (b) A node is daughter of another if it is immediately dominated by it (so NP and VP are daughters of S) (c) Sets of nodes are sisters if they are all immediately dominated by the same mother-node i.e. have the same degree and line of derivation as each other (so NP and VP are sisters of the mother-node S). 14.19 Other Tree-Relations. Derivation Rules associated with Trees make explicit some differences which are not demanded by spatial relations alone. Lexical insertion rules in the Aspects organization require distinction in the Lexicon of subcategories like proper (Carthage) vs. common nouns (man, ball), and common (hard) vs. denominal adjectivals (Roman). Derivational or Lexical Rules would be redundant if those distinctions could be represented spatially in Trees unambiguously. 14.20 Bar-Notation. X-Bar syntax represents other sorts of distinctions in Trees. The X-part says Bar-notation applies to any lexical category at all, so 'X' can be Noun, Verb, Adjective or Preposition. Bars written above Category Symbols like N or V (.e.g. N, N, N) made explicit their degree of derivation from a Category. Not, as in Hjelmslev's 'degrees of derivation', just from S. For printing clarity, N'' will stand here for 'N-double-bar', N' for 'N-single-bar' and bare N for 'N-no bar'. 14.21 Precedence and Dominance. Trees show relations of immediate or mediate Precedence and Dominance. Elements to the left in a tree-constituent precede those to their right: The immediately precedes Romans, hit mediately precedes ball. Elements above dominate those below within the same constituent: VP immediately dominates V and mediately dominates ball, but no element can both precede and dominate spatially. Ambiguities can arise from other sources. John puts Mary off is ambiguous. On one reading, puts . . . off is a single, discontinuous constituent, parallel in surface distribution with dejects, and occurring at an identical position in Tree diagrams. On another reading, puts . . . off can be interpreted as an ellipsis of John puts Mary off (the train), which is in parallel distribution with John ejects Mary (from the train). Both plausibly exemplify NP + VP. But in the first, VP is rewritten (subcategorized) as V + NP, and in the second, as V + NP + PP (Prepositional Phrase). That contrast distinguishes the semantic category of Experiential
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Verb Phrase like put off from a subcategory of a semantic Locative Verb put. The Locative has a syntactic demand for an overt expression like off, while eject does not. While these distinctions sound semantic, if grammaticality is wholly syntactically determined, there should be criteria antecedent to semantic interpretation as well. One criterion worth debating might be that eject belongs to a Lexical Category, while put off is a Phrasal Category. 14.22 X-Bar and Quirk's NP & VP Analysis. Common nouns can be modified by many qualifiers. On criteria combining Composition and Function, English is found to show functional closure and fixed distribution in NP expansions. There are eight mutually exclusive classes of modifiers of a head: (Quirk 1973:375-405): (1) Determiner (2) General (3) Age (4) Color (5) Participle (6) Provenance (7) Noun (8) Denominal and Head. E.g., (1) Her (2) expensive (3) new (4) green (5) white-walled (6) Italian (7) Grand Prix (8) lakeshore racer. Gradables are further expandable in expressions like very expensive, quite new or deep blue and the like. English Verb expansions form another closed subset for Quirk (1973:26-58): They might not have been being repaired consists of (1) Modal (2) Tense (3) Negative (4) Perfective (5) Passive (6) Progressive (7) Lexical Verb which involves discontinuous and multiple signals, depending on the Modal involved. The NP her (very) expensive, (quite) new, (deep) green . . . racer can be partially represented as
where deep green racer is not shown to be a constituent: NP immediately dominates DET-AP-N (so DET-AP-N are the immediate constituents of NP), but NP only mediately dominates DEG-A (so DEG-A and DEG-A-N are mediate constituents, not immediate constituents of NP). 14.23 Constituents and Non-Constituents. Two tests distinguish syntactic constituents from nonconstituents: can suspected pairs be conjoined, and can
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be they be antecedents of a pro-form? That deep green racer and light blue boat are winners conjoins DEG-A-N strings, so deep green racer and light blue boat are comparable constituents on that basis. In He bought the light blue racer rather than hers or that one, hers has her deep green racer as antecedent (or just racer), and one has something like differently colored racer or racer alone as antecedent. An either-or choice between N and NP demanding parallel distinction of pro-N and pro-NP forms cannot represent how hers and one function here. Her deep green racer won, He bought her deep green racer and Everyone admired her deep green racer are grammatical, so Her deep green racer is shown to be a syntactic NP constituent. *Deep green racer won, or *He bought deep green racer and *Everyone admired deep green racer are ungrammatical. These suggest that if deep green racer is a constituent, it is neither aptly labelled NP, nor simply N. Very expensive it may be, but no real enthusiast balks at the price and Deep green it may be, but apple green it is not are both grammatical. Ungrammatical are *A very expensive it may be, but no real enthusiast balks at the price and ?My deep green it may be, but apple green it is not. That suggests that sometimes very expensive and deep green are constituents, and sometimes they are not. This 'Stoic' both-and, rather than 'Platonic' either-or status (cf. Chapter 4) shows the inadequacy of distinguishing only NP from N constituents. Other (sub)categories in parallel distribution are also instructive. This representation of Women vote thoughtfully
depicts women as both an NP and an N, and thoughtfully as both ADVP and ADV. Both can function alone or as heads of endocentric expansions like modern women and very thoughtfully. For some verbs, a parallel comparison seems plausible as well: if John in John must eat is both NP and N, eat qualifies as both VP and V, since it passes a Pro-VP test with so: John must eat and so must Mary or John must have had a lavish dinner and so must Mary. Allowing for subcategorial restrictions, Categories like NP-N, VP-V, AP-A and their pro-forms can be recognized as Heads of their own construction-types. But there is still no intermediate level between Phrasal and Lexical categories between Nps and Ns, Vps and Vs. X-Bar notation
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is to remedy this by representing our example (using X" and X' instead of Bars) as:
14.24 Degree of Derivation. Item can then be checked for a comparable degree of constituent-derivation. If the antecedent of hers in His blue one is faster than hers is her deep green racer, hers is a Pro-N"; if the antecedent is deep green racer, it is a Pro-N', and if racer alone, a Pro-N: hers and one are not Pro-Ns, but Pro-N's: not Pro-forms for X with no bars, the lexical category X, but for X-bar or Xsingle-bar. Is the surface ambiguity of German teacher in I like the German teacher lexical in paraphrase (a) or structural in (b)? (a) I like the teacher who is German (b) I like the teacher who teaches German corresponding to:
14.25 Syntax and Semantics. Identifying constituents on a syntactic basis has its own justification. An equally compelling reason for it is to find syntactic grounds for alternate semantic interpretations. The German teacher type is like a Hispanus' discussion of (Dixit) Petrum solum scribere ('(He said) Peter only writes')), an 'Indirect Discourse' version of Petrus solus scribit. The 'direct' Latin (Petrus solus scribit) is unambiguous because masculine, singular and nominative solus agrees with Petrus. Neither solum as an invariable adverbial nor solum as an accusative adjectival 'agrees with' Petrus.
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But in Indirect or Quoted Discourse, subjects of Latin infinitives must be in the accusative case and so must their modifiers. That leaves solum indistinguishable from the adverbial form. An unmodified constituent which has the same distribution as a corresponding double-bar constituent is assigned double-bar status: in PSG, Petrum solum would have been assigned Phrasal status. In John loves Mary, both John and Mary get N-double-bar notation: (21)
S N" N'
V1 V
N"
N
N' N
John
loves
Mary
14.26 Even though any constituent containing an X is an X-bar and one containing an X-bar is an X-double-bar, it does not follow that every embedder contains one more bar than its embedded, otherwise the principle of recursion would be denied. So the cellar up
from
down
in
is [P"up [P"from [P"down [P"in the cellar]]]]] exemplifies constituents recursively embedded one within the other, not domination from quadruple-bar to treble-bar to doublebar, etc. Similarly, a slim, pale, mysterious visitor can be assigned a structure like
Syntactic categories must be abstract enough to require their Semantic Interpretation to recognize how an overt construction like German teacher relates either to an underlying A teacher of German or to A person teaches German. And the Lexicon must be abstract enough to provide teacher with a complex symbol tolerating + Agentive because of its -er affix in both Phrases, and German with + Attribute in one, and + Object with forms involving teach in the other as well. An affix like -er can be said to operate
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Page 460 on the lexical root to which it is bound in a complex word and some 'words' can be viewed as operators devoid of lexical content. 14.27 NEG as an Operator. NEG, for instance, can presumably operate on S or on any of its constituents, or on any of its elements. DEG constructs construct only with some constituents: DEG forms no construction with S, nor with any inflection. This suggests a distinction between Lexical and Nonlexical Categories: in a simple tree of The Romans destroyed Carthage, Negation indicated here by superscripts on what is negated, thus leaving its constituent parity with DEG undecided would look something like:
1) NEG [The
Romans
destroyed
Ø
Carthage]
2) NEG [The
Romans]
destroyed
Ø
Carthage
3)
Romans
Ø
Carthage]
The
NEG[destroyed
4) NEG [The]
Romans
destroyed
Ø
Carthage
5)
[Romans]
destroyed
Ø
Carthage
Ø
Carthage
The NEG
6)
The
Romans
NEG[destroyed]
7)
The
Romans
destroyed
NEG[Ø
Carthage]
8)
The
Romans
destroyed
NEG[Ø]
Carthage
9)
The
Romans
destroyed
Ø NEG [Carthage]
expressible more idiomatically as: 1) It is not true that THE ROMANS DESTROYED CARTHAGE 2) It was not THE ROMANS who destroyed Carthage 3) The Romans did not DESTROY CARTHAGE 4) It was not THE Romans who destroyed Carthage 5) It was not the ROMANS who destroyed Carthage 6) The Romans did not DESTROY Carthage . . . 7) It wasn't CARTHAGE the Romans destroyed 8) It wasn't THE Carthage the Romans destroyed 9) ?The Romans destroyed (the unique) NON-CARTHAGE Hjelmslev suggested that Linguistics should exhaust all possibilities, even those which are counter-intuitive. Not all of these 'idiomatic' negations are equally acceptable in English and some are impossible in other languages. A
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semantically neutral syntactic tree of possible negations, therefore, might look like this (IF NEG were the same kind of constituent as DEG, and IF it were feasible to simultaneously negate S and all its constituents):
How could a well-formed phonetic representation be related to this deep structure? Must an overt lexical item correspond to each grammatical formative? Must there be a lexical signal for each semantic distinction? One problem is that X can only substitute for Lexical Categories, and NEG is not a Lexical Category, although it freely constructs with any kind of Category in any position. Using X has another advantage: since it stands for any Lexical Category, at any degree of derivation (X", X', X), it can be used to represent complements common to categories like those constructible with Indirect Questions introduced by whether: (a) My question
(NP)
whether he would do it
(b) I wondered
(VP)
whether he would do it
(c) I was dubious
(AP)
whether he would do it
(d) I asked about
(PP)
whether he would do it
summarizable as X' --> X - S To the extent that Categories are sets of items (words or phrases) in parallel distribution, some overlap in compositional and distributional criteria might be expected, e.g. the WH-question appropriate to different categories: (e) NP AP
Which men did you want?
NP
= N"
How tall must they be?
AP
= A"
ADVP How soon will you want them?
ADVP = ADV"
PP
For what job will you want them?
PP
= P"
QP
How many will you want?
QP
= Q"
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Page 462 Taking Grammatical Categories as feature-sets rather than sources of dominance with nothing in common is compatible with PS and X-bar. But it is intended to characterize sentence positions where not all categories can occur. (f) NP
It was A CAR
that she bought
(g) PP
It was IN THE SHOP
that I met her
(h) AP
?It is VERY PRETTY
that she is
?It is VERY CALLOUS
that she has become
It is VERY (i) ADVP CONSCIENTIOUSLY
that she works
?It is VERY RECENTLY (j) QP
(k) VP
that she has arrived
*It is VERY MUCH
that he loves her
?It is VERY LITTLE
that he has ever cared
*It is GO HOME
that I will
?It is TO SING
that I prefer
Some starred or questioned expressions might be acceptable in Irish English dialects. If only NP or PP can occur in these focus positions to the left, these might simply be listed. But lists as such explain nothing. 14.28 Natural Distributional Classes. Showing what members have in common is a more adequate explanation. We can 'capture the intuition' (as a common TG phrase has it) that NP and PP form a natural distributional class. Chomsky (1972:48-61) suggested analyzing all syntactic categories as sets of syntactic features, reducing the four main ones to (± N, ± V) pairs: +V V=
V N=
N
+V A=
+N
V P=
+N
N
N and P 'share' a typical paradigmatic relation of not being Verbs [-V]. V and some AUXes are also comparable since they inflect for present and past: work like play open
/ / / /
worked liked played opened
may will can shall
/ / / /
might would could should
They differ syntactically since AUX is often in pre-subject position in direct questions (Will you go? *Went he?). So another feature-set emerges: +V N AUX V=
+V N + AUX AUX =
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allowing interlocking paradigmatic and syntagmatic generalizations to apply only to V, to Aux, or to V & AUX. Invoking a feature [± PRO] allows pronominal and nonpronominal NPs to be distinguished as: V +N he = +PRO
tall man
V +N = PRO
[-V] OR
[+N]
PPs could be subcategorized by complement-constituents with features like [± LOC] and [± DIR]: He lives in/near Dallas; went to/towards Dallas. 14.29 The Lexicon. Problems arise when trying to match flexible ranges of lexical items with a Grammar with a finite number of syntactic categories. Words in the same category are unlikely to have identical frames as simple as generic V + NP. Any variation on that frame, as well as properties unique to a word, should be part of a useful lexical entry. Compare, for instance, lexical entries like own
: V, + [_ NP], and
elapse
: V, [_ NP].
Such frames SUBcategorize verbs, and alternates are shown with ±, as in eat : V, ± [_ NP] or + [_ (NP)]. A frame for a verb like hide
: V, + [_ NP] _ PP]
would be insufficient: since hide is locative, its defining PP must also be Locative, and that can be marked in entries like : V, ± [ _ NP -PP +LOC] hide Compare : V, + [ _ NP _(PP) ] present and present
: V, + [ _ NP _ (to-NP) ]:
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In this tree, V is immediately followed by NP-to-NP, so present or introduce can be inserted under V, but hide could not: hide demands a PP that is +LOC as well. Nor are problems of SUBcategorization restricted to Verbs: : A, + [ _ to - NP ], and averse of A, + [ _ about _ NP, + [ _ (that) - S'] vs. certain : with respect to as in He is certain of her He is certain that she is averse to him He is certain with respect to most things 14.30 Complements of Prepositions. Prepositions can be subcategorized for the kinds of complements with which they occur. (Commas here indicate the required options): about : P, + [ _ ADV], + [A], + [Q], + [NP], + [S], + [P] as in He came
about then
She's
about middle aged
It comes to
about ten dollars
He's
about the house
He's sure
about what you want
We were just
about in
Some nouns must be subcategorized for the NP-types with which they cooccur: trip : N, + [ _ (from - LOC ( _ (to - LOC ], as in He took the trip from here to there He made the trip from Europe She made the trip to America vs. idea : N, +[ _ that - S ], in The idea that she'd make the trip was startling Every lexical item must mesh precisely with other lexical items within the system of systems that constitute a language. None is an isolate: each belongs to some category (call it 'X') and is subcategorized with respect to an X-Phrase-type, where it will either function as an endocentric head or expansion, or as an exocentric construction-partner. 14.31 Mutual Subcategorization. Members of Phrase-types subcategorize each other, determining phrasal sense and syntax. But once X-bar syntax is
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introduced, it is less obvious what is included under 'an X-Phrase': is this restricted to, or indifferently exemplified in, a single or double-bar phrase? Phrasal categories can be represented in this notation as X double-bar, so these examples suggest that combinations with the first type of Prepositional Phrase are more open-ended than with the second:
A semantic difference between them is that in a), critic is not subcategorized because of its Experiential root, but equated with any N. In b), that experiential subdistinction is relevant. A syntactic difference between them is that in a), P'' is a sister of critic (that is, at the same degree of derivation) while in b) it is not. This refines the question of whether 'sisters' are indifferently relatable in an exocentric or endocentric construction, and at what level of analysis: categorially or grammatically (Firth's Colligation) or lexically (Firth's Collocation)? It also suggests intralinguistic grounds for distinguishing between lexical associations demanded by a given language, or by odd quotations, in a song like 'Mighty lak a rose':
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N" a rose is a sister of P like but DEG mighty is not. Most any lexical DEG would do (very, considerably, etc.), and neither requires much subcategorization. Just as Hjelmslev subordinates Simplicity to Consistency and Exhaustiveness, Aspects suggested using only subcategorization features demanded by sister complements, leaving exclusions to a redundancy rule. For example, if give can be subcategorized as V: +[_ NP - to NP], +[_ NP - NP] assume that similar structures are possible for direct/indirect object constructions with hand, tell, send, write and the like. This ignores the 'Benefactive' vs. 'Experiential' factors by which these verbs also differ. Similarly, many verbs can be subcategorized doubly as either active or passive- --as V, + [__ NP], + (be en (by - NP)]. A redundancy rule with either active or passive would be even more economical, if the active/passive relation were freely reversible. But there are passives without active counterparts and actives without passives, like Pat resembles Pam vs *Pam is resembled by Pat, This hat fits me vs. *I am fitted by this hat or He is reputed to be generous vs. *(to be) generous is reputed by him. 14.32 Redundancies. Other redundancies derive from grammatical, phonetic, and semantic factors: formation of -ly adverbs from adjectives, of verbs from adjectives by -ize, of nouns from verbs with -ment, etc. None of these patterns is so universal that gaps are impossible: what is the most economical way of writing lexical entries to provide for them? BLOCKING would include both the 'common' and 'uncommon' formations in the lexical inventory or LEXICAL GOVERNMENT marked by a specific rather than by a generic rule. If its application is too narrow to warrant the formation of a rule, only LISTING related forms is left. LEXICAL RESTRUCTURING RULES can account for the difference between apparent exceptions like *John was taken a picture of and John was taken advantage of. The second has two passive counterparts, the first, only one. If it is assumed that the structure of
is (a)
take [ v take ]
a picture [ NPa picture]
of someone [ PP of someone]
and that the structure of take is (b) [ v take ]
advantage [ NP advantage]
of someone [PP of someone]
and that (a) rather than (b) can be restructured by rule, as then (2) Advantage was taken of John would be the passive of (b), and (1) John was taken advantage of would be the passive of (a).
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This solution would be generalizable to collocations of take with lexical items like care, notice, account, note, umbrage or offence, but not with mockery. 14.33 Semantic Information. Various sorts of semantic information might be included: Lexical Decomposition of Verbs suggests pro-forms standing for semantic primitives similar to Hjelmselv's content figurae or Stratificational Grammar's sememes. On such bases, kill is analyzed as cause become not alive or as cause to die. 'Functional structure' like categorematic or syncategorematic roles of expressions (e.g., Latin solum or English only) often seem at variance with the syntactic structure of their exponents. Put off can either be in parallel distribution with, and function like, either deject or eject. These might be worth distinguishing in the lexicon with entries like: Subcategorization Frame V, +[__ [ PPoff - NP2]]
Functional Frame NP1 PUT-OFF NP2
put : where the capitalized forms stand for factors like Stratificational sememes. Terms for Thematic Relations were developed by Gruber (1965, 1976), and alluded to above in distinguishing Agent, Experiencer or Instrument, in Fillmore's labels (1968: cf. Cook, 1989). 'Thematic' discussion was introduced into the EST framework by Jackendoff (1972). In (a) John rolled the ball to the bottom of the hill and
(b) The ball rolled to the bottom of the hill
Jackendoff labels ball THEME in both (Fillmore calls it OBJECT); both label John the AGENT in (a). So a lexical entry for roll might look like:
roll :
V, + [ NP THEME
(traditional 'intransitive') [ PPto - NP] GOAL
+ [ NP - NP AGENT THEME
(traditional 'transitive') [ PPto - NP] GOAL
Equating lexical subcategorization with feature-specification avoids the limitations of binary both-and / either-or constituencyrules in the syntactic component. Complex symbols of features which overlap show Toleration-rather than Demand- or Exclusion-relations. 14.34 Transformations. Grammar-designs are like programs for assembling elements in a one-to-one relation to the structure we assume a language to be. When Syntactic Structures' ability to add, delete, move, or modify elements was seen to lack systemic closure, it became clearer why it is undesirable to modify elements within mutually defining and abstract structures without checking on the impact upon substructures. SS could not exclude lexical insertion on the basis of categorial information alone: both fall and fell are equally V, yet neither *Will he fall
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the tree? or *Will the tree fell? are grammatical. Subcategorization which demands, excludes or tolerates complements avoids this by distinguishing fall -NP and fell + NP; marking dance ±NP in I could have danced (the Samba) all night; or plant + NP, ± PP LOC in Plant a tree, plant a friend); or proud ± PP (of), (about) in She's quite proud ((of, about) (that, him)); or after +(NP), (S) in I'll come after (school), (school's out), and so on. 14.35 Redundancy Rules Eliminate the need to represent Interdependent relations: since many adjectives and adverbs or active and passive verbs can be mutually predicted morphologically, subcategorization of either may suffice. But a syntactic, rather than semantic, subcategorization of verbs like resemble and fit makes them equally 'transitive' (+NP) in the active, while their surface passives do not occur (*Noam Chomsky is not resembled by Nim Chimsky, *He is not fitted by his hat). That the first involves a semantic Experiencer, not an Agent, and the second a Process rather than an Action, may not be considered syntactic information. Amphiboly was defined by the Ancients as ambiguity resulting from alternative deep constituency among identical surface elements. He looked over the books, can be analyzed as either (a) [V + {P + NP]] or (b) [V + NP], a 'drawing convention' which distinguishes a verb with a phrase from a phrasal verb. Like that are take a shot at or have an in with. The 'passive' *Old Faithful was taken a picture of may be ungrammatical, while Mary was made sport of is not. Ambiguity can be avoided by Lexical Rules ± allowing the conversion of a structure like (a) into its (b) counterpart for complements with common verbs like TAKE (care, note, account, cognizance) OF. 14.36 Pro-Forms and Underlying Forms. Syntactic Structures' Questions were produced by Optional Transformations operating on strings underlying kernel sentences. Aspects' Base-generated Q-markers made SS' optional Questions 'obligatory'. While SS kernel sentences were Basic and Declarative by definition, any Base-marker in Aspects made sentences involving them equally 'basic', but on explicitly different norms. Four kinds of English questions are (a) Yes/no Questions like Did you see her?, (b) Information questions like How much is it?, (c) Echo Questions repeating corresponding statements with different intonation like He died vs. He died?, and (d) an Information-subtype questioning S or one of its constituents without being an Echo of them. Appropriate Answers should be conformal with the kind of Questions eliciting them:
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(a) We proved him irresponsible (b) You WHAT ? (c) You proved WHO irresponsible ? (d) You proved him WHAT ? (e) WHO proved WHO WHAT ? (f) WHO did WHAT to WHOM ? Questions like (b-d) are called WH-Questions (cued by words or phrases like who, what, why, where, when, which or how many). In Syntactic Structures, a question like Which bone will your dog hide in the part? could be derived by optional transformations from a kernel sentence like Dogs hide things. Aspects' Q-marker generated in the Base made transformations involving Q obligatory. In both versions, the constituents of the resultant sentence include (1) NP
which bone
(2) AUX
will
(3) NP
your dog
(4) VP
hide in the park
composed of (4a) V
hide
(4b) PP
in the park
now generable by four PS rules: (i) S
> NP-AUX-NP-VP
( NP1 demands the feature WH)
(ii) VP > V-PP (iii) PP > P-NP (iv) NP > DET-N producing: S NP DET
AUX N
NP
VP
DET N
V
PP P
NP DET
which
bone will
your
dog hide in
the
N park?
If subcategorization rules applied indifferently to deep and surface structures, the Lexicon's entry for hide would predict that inserting it into V here would be grammatical (hide demands an NP, tolerates PP LOC, and we have both). But it would predict inserting go is ungrammatical, since go tolerates the syntactic frame ± [ __ PP LOC ] but excludes NP). Would an optional NP between V and PP, as VP --> V _ (NP) - PP be better ? It would then generate Will your dog hide the bone? or Will your dog hide the bone in the park?, and Will your dog go in the park? as well. This would revise former PS rules by allowing an optional (N) in (ii):
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(i) S
> NP-AUX-NP-VP
(NP1 demands the feature WH)
(ii) VP > V-(N)-PP (iii) PP > P-NP (iv) NP > DET-N But then this should be grammatical: S NP DET
AUX N
NP DET
VP N
V
NP DET
which
bone
will
your
dog go the
PP N
P
bone
NP
in
DET
N
the
park?
Had the initial which bone constituent been after the verb, there would be no problem, as in a WH-non-echo question: Your dog will hide which bone in the park? A tree without which bone in initial position shows: S NP DET
AUX N
VP V
NP DET
PP N
P
NP DET
Your
dog will
hide which
bone
in
the
N park
since hide can be subcategorized as discussed above. It also predicts that *Your dog went the bone in the park is as ungrammatical as *Your dog will hide which bone the ball in the park. 14.37 Movement from Fixed Slots. This all coheres if we postulate an abstract underlying structure to which WH-MOVEMENT rules apply: Your dog will hide which bone in the park WH-MOVEMENT = = => Which bone will your dog hide __ in the park where __ indicates where which bone 'used to be' before WH-MOVEMENT applied. This realigns Aspects components and technical terms: complex lexical symbols and their insertion rules are in the Base, generating Base rather than 'deep' structures; 'Transformations' now reduce to Movement Rules, thereby upgrading the importance of positions:
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B A
Categorial (sentence(i) formation) Rules
S
(ii) Lexicon
E
(iii)Lexical insertion Rule generating BASE STRUCTURES
TRANSFORMATIONAL COMPONENT (iv)Movement Rules generating SURFACE STRUCTURES Two rules are needed to produce Which bone will your dog hide in the park?: one to prepose which bone to initial position, and another to assure that AUX precedes the NP your dog (or that NP follows AUX). That more than one rule is needed is shown by similar inversions in non-WH-phrases like Never will he do it, non-preposed Whs like He hides bones wherever he can, and embedded WH-Questions that do not invert, I don't know which bone he will hide ___ ___ there. Again, the ___ blanks indicate where which bone 'came from' in an underlying or hypothetical structure. 14.38 WH-Movement Preposes elements in some clauses and NP-AUX INVERSION interchanges them in others. An NP containing WH-words like who, what, when, where, why, which and how can be preposed (and its 'origin' noted) in sentences involving NPs:
PPs:
WHAT
has he discussed
HOW MANY POUNDS
will he ship
___ there ?
WHICH ONE
will they tie
___ to the tree ?
WHO
could he be thinking about
___ ?
BECAUSE OF WHAT would he refuse you
___ ?
ON WHOM APs:
___ with Pam ?
are you putting the blame
___ ?
HOW DISAPPOINTED
must Pat be
HOW INFAMOUS
did Captain Kidd become
___ ?
will we do it
___ ?
did he paint it
___ ?
ADVPs:
___ in the answer ?
HOW SOON HOW WELL
Not just any Phrasal Category can undergo WH-MOVEMENT: neither a VP nor a V" (to ___ VP), nor an S nor an S' shift in this way with a grammatical output: Turn which coat inside out can he
____ ?
(VP or V')
To start what does she want
____ ?
(V')
They plotted what do you suspect that
____ ?
(S)
That we said what have they heard
____ ?
(S')
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English appears to restrict WH-MOVEMENT to non-verbal categories. 14.39 One would expect COMP to have other intralinguistic dependencies besides those derived from subcategorization of the immediate syntactic environment. Samples suggest other similarities supportive of the non-actual COMP analysis as an underlying form: (1) CASE-MARKING: I, he and she are found mostly before verbs in English, me, him and her occur in postverbal position and after prepositions. The forms are traditionally distinguished as Nominative and Objective, as are who and whom. Whom did you see coming? and Who did you say is coming? have WH-preverbals. These facts can be seen as part of the overall System in English if we posit a hypothetical or underlying You see WH that comes, and You say that WH comes, with WH-MOVEMENT of the appropriately case-marked form. (2) AGREEMENT: English shows agreement in person and number between V and the immediately preceding NP in statements, WH-Echo, and WH-non-Echo Questions: (a)
He says
that
girl
likes you
(b)
He says
which
girl
likes you
(c)
He says
those
girls
like you
(d)
He says
which
girls
like you
(e) Which girl
does he say
____
____
likes you ?
(f) Which girls
does he say
____
____
like you ?
The blank ___ 'origin' (and resultant NP trace, later abbreviated as t) immediately precedes, so the rule is indeed applicable, not in spoken or written sentence-forms, of course, but in positions of a unifying, postulated, underlying structure. (3) IDIOMS: Some NPs are used mostly in constructions with certain verbs (take advantage, take note, keep tabs, pay homage), rarely in other environments (... in love with lip-service, ...fond of note, ... preserve tabs, heed amuses me vastly, accept tabs, there was this lip-service I kept.... The restriction is not 'semantic', since near-synonymous expressions occur (capable of lipservice, contribute homage). Nor do there seem to be 'pragmatic' (real-world) confusions - just the kind of habitual company certain words keep. What Firth called Collocations include what others call idiom chunks, formulable either as relations of demand or exclusion. Expansions of them like How much heed to pay bothers me, or How much advantage to take is a problem found initially in sentences (i.e. not immediately in V + ___) can be dealt with by postulating a similar underlying structure with WH-MOVEMENT.
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(4) CONTRACTIONS: Written's for is, and 'd, 've, 'll, 'm, 're and the like for would or had, have, will, am and are found in coordinates, and wanna for want to occurs under comparable conditions: (a) Joe is good at golf,
and Mary is
good at tennis
(b) Joe is good at golf,
and Mary's
good at tennis
(c) Joe is good at golf,
and Mary (is) ____ at tennis
(d) *Joe is good at golf,
and Mary's
____ at tennis
(e) How good do you think
Mary is
____ at tennis
(f) *How good do you think
Mary's
____ at tennis
(g) I want to do it
/
I wanna do it
(h) What do you want to beat?
/
Whadda ya wanna beat?
(i) Who do you want ___ to win?
/
*Who do you wanna win?
(5) REFLEXIVES: A Reflexive is normally construed with some congruent preceding NP within its own clause: (j) Al said that Bea spoke about himself to Charlie (k) Which victim did you say you thought ____ injured himself ? In (k), himself is not in the same clause as victim, but it is in the same clause with ____ (where victim 'used to be' in underlying structure). (6) SELECTION RESTRICTIONS: (l) He was plotting a new ploy / cat (m) Which new ploy / cat was he plotting ? (n) He was plotting which new ploy / cat ? are perhaps equally odd: but as with Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, making the constructions more or less 'sensible' does not render them more or less 'grammatical' from the perspective of autonomous syntax. (7) EMBEDDED QUESTIONS: can be taken as giving reasons to justify the positing of preposed WH-phrases in underlying structure on a par with direct questions: (o) I wondered IF such tales were true ____ (p) They asked WHETHER you are planning ____ for Christmas In the direct versions, the WH-forms are in initial position here, the one immediately in front of the surface subject of the interrogative: IF
such tales were true
WHETHER you are planning for Christmas
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If and whether are 'Complementizers' particles demanded to make their clauses complete (I said that I would go home and I asked whether you would come, too). There are two syntactically related types: a Noninterrogative like that and Interrogative like whether. A derivation producing them could be: (a) S' -->
COMP - S
(b) COMP -->
± WH
(c) WH -->
appropriate form
With Categories as complexes of syntactic features, Rule (a) says every clause (S') has a complementizer introducing it. WH- is 'attracted to' that position, either as substitution (an aspect of parallel distribution) or Adjunction. There is no motivated way of choosing between them now, but historically, Middle English once used WH + COMP constructions, and other languages still do: (a) a man who that he knew well
Middle English Informal French
(b) Ou que tu vas? (Where that you are going?) 14.40 Adjunction. A formulation for Universal WH-MOVEMENT might suggest that we adjoin a WH-phrase immediately to the left of COMP. Two procedures have been proposed to implement that: sister-adjunction and Chomsky-adjunction: Before Adjunction
Sister-adjoined left Chomsky-adjoined
C
C
C B
B
A
B
A
B
Pronominal You can't tell what I will do can be analyzed as having an empty COMP (e), compared to the slot filled by the locative ou que of French, above: with sister-a adjunction: S NP
AUX
PRO
VP V
S' COMP NP + WH PRO e < I will do ___ >
You
can't
tell what
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with Chomsky-adjunction: S NP
AUX
PRO
VP V
S' COMP COMP + WH e
< I will do ___ >
NP PRO You
can't
tell what
I will do ___
This seems plausible for indirect questions, but how about direct ones like What will he do ___ ? Chomsky recommends similar treatment: S' S < he will do what COMP + WH e and by WH-MOVEMENT as Chomsky-adjunction: S' COMP
S
COMP + WH e < will he do ___ > NP PRO will he do what It is then proposed that main clauses be considered as universally introduced by COMP even though it is empty in English (which uses that and whether only for subordinate questions), since such particles are common in other languages even for main questions: (a) Latvian
Vai
(b) Ukrainian Chy
mate maja?
Is your mother home ?
Mariya (ye) v xati?
Is Mary in the house ?
(c) Estonian
Kas
suisetate?
(d) Persian
Aya
ketab darad?
Do you smoke ? Does Ali have any books ?
(e) Indonesian Apaka Maria ada si rumah? (f) Polish
Czy
(g) Pashto
Walay sarai kjaza khuwakhae
(h) German
Ob
er wohl wiederkommt ?
(i) Latin
Num
te fugi ?
(j) Mandarin
zamykacie okna?
Mali zai jia
Is Mary in the house ? Will you close windows ? Does the man like the woman ? Will/won't he come again ? Did I avoid you ?
ma?
Is Mary in the house? ?
The German example is questionable, since natives take this to be an ellipsis of an indirect question, omitting something like 'I wonder ...'. How much this judgement is influenced by traditional analysis, and how traditional
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analysis should be distinguished from ''intuition" about abstract underlying structures is not easy to determine. In Latin, an overt num expects a negative answer like an English Tag-question: I didn't avoid you, did I?. Num-constructions contrast minimally with those beginning with nonne. Nonne te fugi? expects a positive answer: I [did avoid]/[avoided] you, didn't I? 14.41 COMP Paradigmatically. Demanding a syntactic element COMP universally for Declaratives seems counter-intuitive. But has solid paradigmatic value on structural assumptions about how language elements contrast. The Base is to contain information controlling semantic interpretation before phonological rules apply: positing + COMP or -COMP there can represent utterance-pairs distinguished as statements or questions without overt intonation, or punctuation in writing: Two strings - You are leaving - could be unambiguously represented syntactically as: S'
vs.
COMP - WH NP S VP e PRO AUX V You
are
S' COMP + WH NP S e PRO AUX
leaving.
You
are
VP V leaving?
14.42 Abstract Identity in Concrete Difference Rewords the traditional principle of Isomorphism (cf. p 135 above): identity under transformation should characterize something about a base and its transformed output. Katz and Fodor held that what remained identical was 'Meaning'. But it is difficult to say whether 'meaning' is created, preserved, annihilated, or just shifted around a bit without agreeing on which of its many factors is involved. Historical Phonology offers a fairly neutral analog for 'abstract identity in concrete difference', since sounds distinguish 'meanings' but have none to lose. It was presumed that the sounds of later languages were those of older stages, but 'transformed'. What was unclear was what changed; what 'change' was; and how to establish anything as the consequence of, or as resulting from immunity to, change. That required criteria for 'belonging to a domain', and a grasp of how domains interact (e.g. sounds taken as isolated consonants and vowels; then as parts of syllables; then as syllable-sequences; then as within the word; and then in larger domains within which laws operated, cooperated, or were inhibited). Changes that were puzzles from one point of view seemed simpler when more inclusive domains were identified, weighted, and related, in their essentials and varieties (cf. pp. 219ff above). 14.43 From Specific to Generic Structure. SS proposed fairly concrete kernel sentence-bases for semantically related sentences. Aspects substituted more abstract structures serving the same purpose as kernels. But they and the former SS 'derived' sentences were then equally Base-products subject to
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Lexical Insertion Rules and Transformations. 'Underlying' or 'Deep' Structure was a single construct in both TG stages, not two distinct levels of analysis involved in 'understanding a sentence' or for 'semantic interpretation'. When passives were transforms of active kernels, the NPs involved contrasted fairly overtly. When actives and passives must have a neutral underlying source, their neutral origin and function is less obvious. An underlying structure for passive Carthage was destroyed by the Romans and active The Romans destroyed Carthage in an EST framework with COMP and empty nodes might look like:
Combined evidence from (1) subcategorization (2) idioms and (3) selection restrictions lead to the assumption that transformations can account for the fronting NP-MOVE of Carthage in the passive to the initial empty NP position, and a preposing NP-MOVE of the Romans in the active to that same empty NP from PP, triggering the appropriate semantic interpretation. 14.44 Subcategorization (1) is defined in underlying structures where positions are fixed and associated with functions: hide is subcategorized as demanding both NP and PP after it, so The bone was hidden ___ in the yard is relatable to an underlying structure like [COMP -WH] ___ was hidden the bone in the yard]] where these conditions are met. NP-MOVE then shifts the bone to the ___ position both in Was the bone hidden in the yard? and in The bone was hidden in the yard. Similarly, in the idiomatic expressions (2), the NPs
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involved (advantage, attention, tabs) precede the verbs with which they are peculiarly distributed, while in these sentences, their ___ origins follow: Little attention was paid ____ to the problem No tabs at all were kept ____ on the dissidents No advantage was taken ____ of the veterans When subcategorization applies in underlying structures, an NP-MOVE accounts for the difference. Selection restrictions (3) show the same pattern: readily interpretable or not, pairs of actives and passives are alike: Pam stitched a new pattern/laugh Few new patterns/laughs have been stitched recently 14.45 Subject-Raising Is another type of NP-MOVE. Consider the behavior of seem, dare and need: they appear to function as lexical verbs or as modal auxiliaries. What is subject in the structure underlying pairs like Pam seems to me ____ to be distracted. It seems to me that Pam is distracted. They differ in having finite vs. infinitive forms of be. Infinitives commonly occur with modal auxiliaries, but if seems is a lexical verb, perhaps Pam originates as subject of the subordinate clause, but is moved from that ___ position to the subject slot of the main clause. That this is not an isolated phenomenon, is suggested by the behavior of reflexives. In Pam seems to Pat to have cut herself It seems to Pat that Pam cut herself Pat thinks Pam cut herself the antecedent of herself must be Pam, even though Pam is in a different clause in the first example (where seems functions as a lexical verb). 14.46 Lexical or Modal. If Pam originates as an ___ subordinate subject, Subject-Raising allows normal antecedent interpretation within the same clause in underlying structure. If seems is a modal auxiliary, Pam and herself are in the same clause, and problems of determining the antecedents between clauses do not arise. Idioms like The cat is among the pigeons compared to The cat seems to be among the pigeons can be handled in the same way. That need to can be considered a modal like must is at least not semantically controversial. Since used to parallels ought to syntactically, and other languages inflect verbs for habitual, the modal status of used to is worth considering. But it is less obvious with dare compared to seem. If seem or dare are treated lexically, sentences like Pam seems to/dares to admire Dali are comparable, but sentences like
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(a) Does Pam seem to admire Dali ? (b) Does Pam dare to admire Dali ? (c) Has / had / will / would Pam dare(d) (to) admire Dali ? (d) Has /had / will / would Pam seem(ed) to admire Dali ? (e) Pam seems to dare to admire Dali (f) Pam dares to seem to admire Dali (g) *Seems Pam (to) admire Dali ? (h) Dare(s) Pam (to) admire Dali ? (i) It seems that Pam admires Dali (j) *It dares that Pam admires Dali suggest that just as words like only may sometimes be categorematic (NP) or syncategorematic (like NEG or DEG) verbals like seem and dare may sometimes have lexical status, and sometimes function as auxiliaries:
14.47 Empty NP-Positions. These contrasts suggest that an empty NP position may be filled by it, or that a lexical NP may be moved into an empty one, but that no lexical NP may replace another lexical NP. One kind of identity any transformation is to preserve is structural: that is unchanged when only constituents of the same category substitute for each other. Must they be at the same level of derivation? Pro-form substitutions for Lexical Categories is structure-preserving; it may be a phonologically demanded 'expletive' or a pro-form for the S Pam admires Dali in It seems that Pam admires Dali; she is a proform for Pam, and him for Dali in She seems to admire him. But it might be desirable to distinguish between proform substitution and transformation, or to refine the notion 'structural identity' to include the level of categorial substitution. 14.48 Empty Nodes. Empty nodes are not without grammatical effect. In standard English, Whom do you want to win in the raffle? and Who do you want to win in the raffle?, are two different questions. Wanna contraction is possible in Whom do you wanna win?, but not in *Who do you wanna win?, since the former can be assigned the structure [NP who ] [ you want [NP e ] to win
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while the latter can be represented as: you want [ NP who to win ] where there is no intervening category between want and to. Similarly, in Pam seems to Pat to have cut herself, if we assign this structure: NP Pam seems to Pat [[ s [ NP e ] to have cut herself ] herself selects the appropriate clause-mate which has been subject to NP-MOVE as its antecedent and not Pat, which is not in its clause. To guarantee this interpretation, the NPs involved can be indexed by subscripts showing co-reference, as in [NP2 Pam ] seems to Pat [NP2 e ] to have cut herself In this way, a trace of Movement Rules has been left: both herself and the empty NP2 node are anaphoric to the NP2 Pam, so such a node might be more appropriately indicated by a t for 'trace' than by an e for 'empty'. The structure of Pam seems to admire Dali can now be best indicated as:
Simple examples conceal problems arising when subordinated clauses are involved. To avoid this, as a general principle, cyclic application is required: i.e., when the domain (the set of elements eligible for application of a rule) is dominated, the rule applies first to the dominated, and only after that to the dominating constituent. In a sentence like How many steps seem to have been taken with respect to inflation? the underlying structure might be something like:
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14.49 Move-Transformations. Three transformations are required: first, to get the NP how many steps under V2 by NP-MOVE into the empty position under NP2; then to NP-MOVE it by T-PASSIVE into the empty position under NP1, and then to adjoin it to the left of COMP1 by WH-MOVE. These separate steps are needed, because how many steps is at one stage a subject by Subject-Raising of the S2 taken-clause; at another stage, how many steps is subject of the S1 seem clause; and in the final stage, by WH-MOVE, how many steps is moved out of NP1 to be adjoined to the left of COMP1. If what WH-MOVE and varieties of NP-MOVE have in common is the operation of substituting categories for each other, what those categories share is presumably an essential factor. One basic constraint on movement is preservation of structural identity. Among the tests for structural identity are: (a) only members of the same category substitute for each other; (b) lexical categories only shift into empty nodes; (c) different lexical categories cannot replace each other; (d) structure (dominance) is preserved by applying transformations cyclically; and (e) a moved category leaves behind a trace of its categorial identity, (f) indexed for co-referentiality. 14.50 Move Anything. Chomsky calls this common factor MOVE-ALPHA. It is a metarule 1: any category can be moved from any position to any other position. Given the identity between positions and categories we might have come to expect, this seems clearly untenable. But as with any formalism, its predictions should be tested. It challenges us to discover conditions under which it is not possible to move one category into the position associated with another in underlying structure. While Chomsky's views about the autonomy of syntax seemed to exclude 'semantic' determinations, co-reference may be a clue. Let identity of 'meaning' be identity of 'reference', and let identity of 'reference' be identity of scenario (a scene, set, or complex of factors as an interpretation of a set of structural relations). If they are one aspect of the structure to be preserved, independent of disputes about sense-interpretations, then transformations, as
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spatial movements within a range of positions, are testable on the basis of interpretability the ability to refer to gross scenarios or to parts of them. 14.51 T-NEG & T-Q. Two transformations that fostered interest in Syntactic Structures were Negation and Question. Any element may be questioned or negated with quite different results on the (sub)categorial vs. the lexical level, as when negating or questioning VP or V, vs. the lexical root of destroyed or its tense in the Romans/Carthage example (cf. p 416f above). Some of these operations overtly affect the presence or order of formatives; others differ phonologically; others have only ambiguous results. 14.52 An Interim Formalization. On the basis of what we have seen so far, these are the factors taken to be basic in the generation of sentences: B
PHRASE-STRUCTURE RULES AND LEXICON
A (lexical entries, redundancies, formationand S lexical restructuring-rules etc.) E
LEXICAL INSERTION RULES Output of the BASE: D-Structures
TRANSFORMATIONS: MOVEMENT:WH-, NP- or perhaps just Alpha-Movement TCONDITIONS:Structure-preservation; empty-node condition; TRACE condition; CYCLICITY; CO-REFERENTIALITY Output of the TC: S-Structures 14.53 Filters. Aspects' transformational rules acted as 'filters' to permit only certain generalized Phrase-markers to qualify as deep structures (Chomsky 1965:138f). After Aspects, 'constraints' prevented improper derivations by which one Phrase Marker becomes a different Phrase Marker, as by moving a WH-phrase from the first to the second position. Constraints apply to S-Structures derived from D-Structures, while filters are relevant to Surface Structures. Some embedded clauses in surface structures are grammatical, some dubious, and others clearly ungrammatical: (a) That love makes the world go around is a truism (b) *Is that love makes the world go around a truism? (c) For me inherit a million would be lucky (e) ?Would for me to inherit a million be lucky? (f) Inheriting a million is a delightful prospect (g) Would inheriting a million be a delightful prospect?
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Since (b) involves a finite verb, (c) an infinitive, and (f) a gerund, it may be that grammatical embedding of finite, infinitive and gerundial clauses varies on the basis of that constituency. X-bar Syntax suggests that clause can be used ambiguously for S-bar or just S. Besides that, in sentences like (h) We hesitate about whether we ought to do it (i) We hesitate about whether to do it (j) *We hesitate about whether doing it (i) seems to lack the COMP position of (g) or (h) or that of We hesitate about whether doing it would be legal, where the complementizer whether introduces the clause would be legal, not the gerund phrase doing it. That is why we distinguish: (k) We hesitate about how we are to go _____ (l) We hesitate about how to go _____ (m) *We hesitate about how going _____ It is coherent with examples these to (1) define a clause as what an S' (S-bar) immediately dominates, (2) to deny S' (S-bar)status to gerunds and define them as NP complements, (3) to define finite and infinitival clauses as VP complements, and (4) to define a filter which proscribes a particular kind of structure as an Internal S' (S-Bar)-Filter: Any surface structure containing an S-bar embedded within another clause, and flanked to left and right by overt lexical material from the clause, is ill-formed. 14.54 Constraining the Base. Exemplifying the terms system or systematic as having to do with constraint on combinations among elements like 'heads or tails' in Columns A-IV (p. 340 above) obscured the fact that TG does not deal just with elements like Hjelmselvian functives, but with functions as well. Its inventory does not consist of simple elements like A and B, but of 'elements' which are themselves systems, analyzable into further elements. Hjelmslev's Exhaustiveness requirement foresaw a need to compute combinations unrealized (perhaps even unrealizable) in language. Computing unrealized transformations may have this weakness: if tranformations can delete, rearrange, or even add absent elements to structures, what could prevent them from producing unrealizable as well as unrealized combinations? And on what norm could they be described as unrealizable? 14.55 Are All Likenesses Analogies? Peters and Ritchie (1969) showed that TG as formulated in the 1960's was an unrestricted rewrite system: it excluded nothing, demanding only that its results have a structure. Neither deletion-recovery nor cyclic application were sufficient to falsify the Universal
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Base Hypothesis. The problem was not seen as an insufficiency of category-and rule-types, but as a lack of constraints on rules. That characterizes a difference between trivial (metaphoric) and nontrivial (analogical) resemblances as well (cf. pp. 133ff above): unless a productive basic example (an analogon) is identified, resemblances may interest or amuse us, but no one is tempted to argue about whether they are 'true' or not. Early proposals for constraining Base-rules were so mixed that no coherent view emerged of what was to be constrained. How was the problem perceived? What was it that might be interestingly, but as yet unpredictably, related? Sentences with constituents similar to those in Pat saw Pam reading include: (a) Reading, Pat saw Pam (b) Pat, who was reading, saw Pam (c) Pat saw Pam who was reading (d) Pat saw Pam reading what? (e) Pat saw Pam reading who? (f) What did Pat see Pam reading? (g) Who / what did Pat see while he was reading? The initial, apparently simple, (a) sentence is equivalent semantically to either (a1) [Pat saw [s, Pam reading]] or (a2) [Pat saw [np2 Pam [s, reading]]] When constituents are questioned, structures like Pat saw WH can have a WH originating either from a sentence or from one of that sentence's constituents. Chomsky (1964a, 1964b) proposed, then modified the idea, that a rule with identical dominant-anddominated categories within its scope applies only to the dominant one. Counterexamples seemed to be sentences like (h) and (i) below, where a relativizing Transformation cannot extract who from (i), only from (h): (h) [NP who] would you approve of [ NP my seeing ____ ] (i) [NP what] are you uncertain about [ NP my giving _____ to John ] 14.56 Constraints on Variables in Syntax. Ross (1967) dealt with such limitations in terms of the formal structures the Base generates. An analogy might help: jigsaw puzzles are easier to assemble, picture-side up. While it is cheaper to make a small number of figure-types than many unique ones, border pieces form a closed straight-edged set as the one identical feature in jigsaw puzzles. The rest can be cut subject to no constraint, other than being able to fit each other. Put together on that basis, the pieces might mesh perfectly upside down, but show no recognizable picture when turned over. Cutting-patterns are designed without regard for pictures. In a cleverly
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designed puzzle for a particular scene, it might be impossible to assemble the puzzle, upside-down or not, except according to its jigsawed structure: shapes, fits, and images could then be said to be both autonomous as well as interdependent. But it would be quite a challenge to produce a jigsaw cutting pattern so that its own autonomous design had important consequences for assembling any picture at all say of seascapes or of people. The analogy is unpromising. It provides for an inventory (pieces) and restrictions on their acceptable combination (jigsaw design). The bordersubset prevents all possible combinations from being put together in a random fashion, but in a puzzle approaching the complexity of a language, the consequences of that constraint are negligible. The problem for TG is not static arrangement, but conditions ± requiring pieces of one obvious type to function like pieces of less obvious cut. Formulae for dealing with this sort of problem included Ross' (1967): A. The Complex NP Constraint: No element may be extracted from an S dominated by an NP with a lexical head noun. *[NP who] do you believe [NP the claim [S that Bill saw _____]] B. The Coordinate Structure Constraint: No conjunct in a coordinate structure may be moved, nor may any element in a conjunct be moved. *[NP what ] was John eating [NP [beans ] and ____ ] C. The Left Branch Condition: No NP on the left branch of another NP may be extracted from that NP. *[NP whose ] did you like [NP ____ [N book ] ] D. The Sentential Subject Constraint: No element may be extracted from the sentential subject of an S. *[NP what ] [NP [S that John will eat _____ ] ] is likely? Adjustments and revisions multiplied, but never supplanted the basic insights of these rules. Among those Newmeyer (1980:179 ff) lists are: (1) Grosu 1972: The complex NP constraint, coordinate structure constraint, and the constraint on extraction from adverbial subordinate clauses can be replaced by a single constraint making use of the notions nucleus and satellite; (2) Horn 1974: Almost all of Ross's constraints can be replaced by a single one: no constituent can be extracted from an NP; (3) Catell 1976: Most of Ross's constraints can be replaced by the 'Ecological NP Constraint' - the number and identity of argument Nps
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within a syntactic configuration must remain constant under the operation of movement rules; (4) Cullicover 1976: The 'Binary Principle' involving the structural notion 'master of' can replace most of Ross's constraints; (5) Shir 1973: Most of Ross' constraints have a semantic explanation - extraction can take place only out of clauses which are semantically dominant (i.e., not presupposed and without contextual reference); (6) Bresnan 1976b: Ross' constraints can be reinterpreted essentially as a constraint involving unbounded movements or deletions and the COMP node. 14.57 Functives May Not be Functions. When the Base contains elements that are either Phrasal or Lexical Categories, some mechanism should prevent transformational rules indexed for one category from operating on the other. Otherwise, unlike constituents will be treated alike. If a WHconstituent is defined as a phrase containing a WH-word, there should be a way of distinguishing a WH-interrogative from a WH-relative. WH-MOVE involves the potential of a WH-constituent being moved out of a subordinate clause to be adjoined to the main clause COMP. But seemingly grammatical (b) below cannot be a transformation of (a): (a) +WH you have read the book that teaches how to tat? WH-MOVE + AUX INVERSION = = = > (b) *How + WH have you read the book that teaches ____ to tat? Fronting constituents for emphasis is called TOPicalization: (a) I wouldn't be caught dead reading that kind of book. TOPICALIZATION = = = > (b) That kind of book I'd never be caught dead reading _____. but when a relative clause is involved, (c) I distrust men who read that kind of book T-TOP produces the ungrammatical (d) *That kind of book I distrust men who read _____. Again, if the lexical item though is involved, freedom of movement can also be curtailed: (e) Though I suppose such books are quite interesting, I don't like them THOUGH-MOVE = = = > (f) *Though quite interesting I suppose they are _____ I don't like them since when a relative clause is involved,
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(g) Though I've found one that is very readable, I wouldn't buy it THOUGH-MOVE produces the ungrammatical (h) *Very readable though I've found one that is ____, I wouldn't buy it Again, V' or V''(VP) can be preposed: (i) I knew he'd be tatting something, and tatting something he was ____ but not when in a relative clause, (j) *They expected to find a man who was tatting something, and tatting something they found a man who was _____. 14.58 Adverb-Move. Adverbials are traditionally supposed to be movable without much restriction: (a) Drop in on us next week ADV-PREPOSING = = = > (b) Next week, drop in on us but not when the adverbial is in a relative clause: (c) We were expecting someone who'll drop in next week ADV-PREPOS = = = > (d) *Next week, we were expecting someone who'll drop in _____ 14.59 Island Constraints. These could be handled by five separate rules or by a general rule about relative clauses. Or (if there is something about relative clauses other structures share) as an even more pervasive Constraint or Condition on Transformations. Ross labelled them Island Constraints: Relatives are Islands constructions, no part of which are detachable. Other island-forming constructions include: Noun-Complement Clauses which are arguably endocentric constructions with nouns like fact, idea, claim and theory: (a) the fact
THAT HE READ
(b) the idea
THAT YOU MISSED
(c) the claim
THAT YOU SUFFERED A LOT
(d) the theory
THAT THIS IS STRATIFIED
14.60 Complements. While any noun can be expanded by relative clauses, not all take complements (constructions for which they can be peculiarly subcategorized). One such set are Experientials (the IDEA that S, the CLAIM that S, the FEAR lest S). From X-bar syntax, one would expect that Relative Clauses would be complements (graphically sisters) of N' and Noun Complement Clauses complements (graphic sisters) of N:
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(b)
(a) N"
N" DET
DET N'
N'
S' S1
N' < that you lost >
< lest you lose me >
N the
fear that/which you lost
the
fear
lest you lose me
14.61 WH-Phrases. Examples suggest that WH-phrases cannot be extracted from Noun Complement Clauses: WH-MOVE *which can you tell from the fact that he reads _____? *such books, I wouldn't credit the idea that he reads _____
TOP
THOUGH- *Quite readable though I admit your impression that MOVEMENT they are ____, I still wouldn't be caught dead reading them V'-PREPOS *Many think that he was reading Tatting books, but reading Tatting books I'll never credit the rumor that he was _____ ADVPREPOS *Next week we have abandoned the idea that someone will drop in on us _____ 14.62 Complex Nps. What makes an island an island, if Relative Clauses and Noun Complement Clauses are the prime examples? Ross called them Complex Noun Phrases: they contain a Noun modified by a clause like [NP ... [S1 ... X ... ] ... ]: COMPLEX NOUN PHRASE CONSTRAINT: No rule can move an element out of Complex Noun Phrase Clause (i.e. any constituent X out of the bracketed clause in any structure of the type just characterized). Other islands include Clauses that are Subjects of Clauses: (a)
For you to read books on Tatting is a waste of time
(b)
That real men don't tat seems generally conceded
not WH
*What for me to read _____ would be a waste of time?
TOP
*Books on Tatting for you to read _____ is a waste of time
THOUGH *Very readable though that these books are I may admit _____, but I wouldn't be caught dead reading them V'PREPOS *Reading stuff like that, for him to be _____ while I was training him for the Olympics, seemed perverse So another constraint arises:
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SENTENTIAL SUBJECT CONSTRAINT: No constituent can be moved out of a clause that is subject of another clause. Embedded Questions (with + WH complementizer whether, or left empty, with preposed WH-phrase adjoined) also form islands: (a) They asked me whether he ejected us (b) They asked me whom he ejected _____ WH-MOVEMENT cannot extract the WH-phrase out of an embedded question clause of either type: WHMOVE
*Whom might they ask me whether/where he ejected _____?
TOP *Unticketed passengers, they asked me whether/whom he ejected _____ *Ticketed, they asked me whether/whom he ejected THOUGH passengers though they were _____ V'PREPOS *Ejecting passengers, I'm puzzled why/whether he is _____ ADVPREPOS *Next week, I wonder why/whether he was leaving _____ A list of Island-forming subordinates now includes: Adnominal clauses, Sentential Subject clauses and WH-clauses. Ross adds Coordinate Structures like (X and Y), and (X or Y) which also block WH-MOVE: COORD *WHAT have you read War and Peace and _____ as well as TOP
*Sauerkraut, I eat with gusto Bratwurst and _____
*On a no-charge basis though it's free, gratis and _____ I THOUGH wouldn't take it as a gift *In my experience, he's always interfering and making trouble, and always interfering you've found he's making V'-PREP trouble and _____ ADVPREP
*Last week, he was going to drop in tomorrow or _____
14.63 A Over A. That Islands as wholes, not parts, can be moved: (a) Did you read War and Peace or Candide? (b) *What did you read War and Peace or _____? suggests the A-OVER-A CONSTRAINT: When a category is dominated by a category of the same type, the dominated category cannot be moved out of its dominance. E.g.,
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(a)
(b) PP P
PP PP
P
PP P
P
NP
NP out of < which informer >
in on < what secret >
which helps account for sentences like: (a) You got all of this out of which informer? (b) Which informer did you get all of this out of _____? (b) Out of which informer did you get all of this _____? (c) *Of which informer did you get all of this out _____? (d) You say you're in on what secret? (f) Which secret do you say you're in on _____? (g) ?In on what secret do you say you are _____? (h) *On which secret have you been boasting that you're in _____? compared to: (i) Some day you will get all of this out of some informer (j) ?Some informer you will get all this out of _____ some day (k) Out of some informer, you will get all this _____ some day (l) *Of some informer, you will get all this _____ some day But Verbs with prepositional phrases and Phrasal Verbs are not the same: (a) Pam was put off about the rumors (b) Pam was put off about what? (c) What was Pam put off about _____? [ VP put off [ PP about] [ NP the rumors ]]] (d) Pam was put off about then *Pam was put off about what? (e) Pam was put off about when? ?When was Pam put off about? (f) Pam was put off about what (time)? *What was Pam put off about? [ VP put off] [ ADVP about then]] where another object-NP is excluded. So this does not violate the A Over A Constraint and exemplifies a more general principle formulated by Schwartz (1972):
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The Unit Movement Constraint: No single application of any transformation can move a string of elements which do not form a continuous constituent. 14.64 In some sets, constituency is ambiguous, so that both grammaticality and appropriate interpretations are debatable: (a) He was making off with scandalous sums (b) He was making off with what? (c) What was he making off with? (e) ?With what was he making off ____? (f) ?Off with what was he making ____? In others, constituency is clearer: 161 (a) Some resent the guard's preoccupation with prisoners' rights. (b) Which guard's preoccupation with prisoners' rights do they resent ? (c) *Which guard's preoccupation do they resent ____ with prisoners' rights ? (d) *Which guard do they resent _____'s preoccupation with prisoners' rights ? Here, if guard is an NP1 dominating the NP2 guard's preoccupation, which in turn dominates the NP3 prisoners' rights, the A Over A Constraint predicts WH-MOVEMENT only for NP1 in (b), but disallows it for both NP2 in (c) and for NP3 in (d), since they are dominated by NP1. Most of these constraints were proposed in the 60's: since the 70's, their descriptive accuracy is less prized than proposals promising more explanatory adequacy, such as telling us why these and not other 'islands' are so constrained, or just what it is that makes an island an island, or why there should be such things. 14.65 'Naturalness'. If psychological plausibility (a likely SO-SEEM-SAID match: cf. p 162f) is involved, then a more general Subjacency condition, exemplified in Extraposition of some NP elements rather than others, might be investigated: A simple law about theft should prove easy EXTRAPOS FROM NP = = = > A simple law ____ should prove easy about theft and pronominal clauses might be related in the same way: A simple law that abolishes theft should prove easy EXTRAPOS FROM NP = = = > A simple law ____ should prove easy that abolishes theft When the NPs get more complex, restrictions increase:
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The idea that a simple law about theft should prove easy is rather naïve EXTRAPOS FROM NP = = = > The idea that a simple law should prove easy about theft is rather naïve ?The idea that a simple law should prove easy is rather naïve about theft What seems to be permissible is a constituent shift from the front to the right at the end of the 'simple' clause, but not in the 'naïve' clause. The Subjacency Principle seeks to explain which and how many constituents can cross boundaries, rather than just listing constraints on movement, by identifying NP and S as Bounding Nodes: Subjacency Condition: No constituent can be moved out of more than one containing NP- or S-node (in any single rule-application) When the structures involved are included within labelled brackets,
it is easier to see that PP (2) about theft, dominated by NP (1) the law, can be taken out of the NP of which it is a dominated constituent and postposed to (3) should prove easy and still be within the S-structure of which the NP the law about theft is a dominated constituent. To postpose it to (4) is naïve would require either taking it out of a single NP or out of a single S, by a single movement rule. 14.66 Multiple Moves. In WHO do you suppose they mean _____ ? this would be violated, if produced by a single movement from an underlying structure like COMP [S1 you suppose [S, they mean WHO ]]] but not if two of the relevant movements are involved, from underlying [S' COMP [S1 you suppose [S2 [ COMP that] [S2 they mean WHO ]]]] where who is adjoined to the subordinate clause COMP on the S2 cycle, and then by reapplication of the rule, on the S2 cycle. An interesting consequence of this analysis is that only S, not S' (S-bar), is taken to be a Bounding node for Subjacency, and (within this formulation of the Subjacency Condition) only one such bounding node has been crossed. NP-MOVEMENT is subject to a Subjacency Constraint: in a situation describable by something like It was hoped that POWs would help get Reagan elected, we might isolate constituents like
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Which of the Lexical NP's could substitute in the empty position? If worded as (a) POWs were hoped ____ to help Reagan to get elected (b) *POWS were hoped Reagan to help ____ get elected to get Reagan into the empty slot for (b), it must move from (3) over (2) into (1), while POWs needs only to cross a single boundary from (2) to (1) in (a). Nor could Reagan move into the NP slot of (2), since that is already filled by POWs: substitutions are allowable only at empty positions. 14.67 Raising. Similar restrictions are found in the NP-MOVE called Raising. Idioms like The fat is in the fire resist transformations of elements like ± definite, number, or lexical items like in (*A fat is beside the fires) but not subordination, modal, tense, and adverbial manipulation (Bet the fat will have to be in the fire soon), involving something like COMP [S1 I bet COMP [S2 e must COMP [S3 fat be in fire]]] where the Subjacency condition predicts insertion of fat into the empty position will be ungrammatical. But The fat I bet ____ will have to be in the fire soon can be explained on the same cyclic-application principles applicable to Who do you think they mean ____? The subjacency condition filters unbounded NP-MOVES, and is therefore suggested as both more general and 'natural'. Ross' Complex-NP Constraint rejects *Who are you reading a book that criticizes ____? The subjacency principle formulates the conditions as applicable in: COMP [S1 you are reading [NP1 a book[S'2 [COMP that [S2 criticizes who]]]]] since the restrictions of the COMPLEX-NP constraint are also provided for by the Subjacency Conditions. 14.68 Structures like: *WHAT for me to say ____ would be a lie ? from
For me to say WHAT would be a lie ?
or
My saying THAT would be a lie
relatable to
To say something like that would be a lie
occasioned formulation of the Sentential Subject Constraint mentioned above. But if a sentential subject complement is regarded both as an NP and a nominal clause (S'), as in
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what might be adjoined to COMP2 on the S2 cycle (moving only across one bounding node), then to COMP1 on the S1 cycle. But since this would involve movement out of two bounding nodes (NP1 as well as S1), Subjacency violation alone predicts ungrammaticality as reliably as the Sentential Subject Constraint which it can now replace. Similarly, the WH-Island Constraint characterizes as ungrammatical sentences like: *WHAT should they ask whether Shakespeare wrote _____? from They should ask whether Shakespeare wrote that with an underlying structure like: [S'1 COMP [S1 they should ask] [S'2 [COMP whether][S2 he wrote WHAT]]]] What cannot be directly adjoined to the initial COMP without subjacency violation. But even though it could be first adjoined to the COMP whether in an S2 cycle, then to initial COMP on an S1 cycle, the result is still ill-formed. A WH-Complementizer Constraint supplements Adjacency independently: it prevents the adjunction of a constituent which already contains a WHConstituent to an WH-COMP. This WH-Complementizer Constraint is seen to be not just a deus ex machina when allied with the Unit Movement Constraint (UMC): both show a limit in Subjacency's generality. The UMC prevents who and what from being adjoined to COMP by a single rule, since they do result in a single constituent, as the ungrammaticality of relatable sentences like these suggests: (a) You ought to say something to him (b) You ought to say WHAT to him ? (c) You ought to say WHAT to WHOM ? (d) What ought you to say ____ to WHOM ? (e) *WHO(M) WHAT ought you to say ____ to ____ ? (f) *WHAT WHO(M) ought you to say ____ to ____ ? 14.69 Lexical Subcategorization. Subcategorization of particular lexical verbs may also diminish the generality of subjacency. Its scope is determined by bounding nodes. Both S- and NP-nodes are bounding, but by comparing (a) She said that she can't stand him. (b) She said that she can't stand WHOM ? (c) WHOM did she say that she can't stand _____ ?
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with an underlying structure involving [S'2 COMP1 [S1 she said[S'2 [COMP2 that [S2 she can't stand WHOM]]]] we can see that if both S and S' (S-bar) are bounding nodes, the movement of whom to COMP1 on the second cycle is predicted as ungrammatical by the Subjacency Constraint, because of the two boundaries S1 and S2. S2 is S' (S-bar), but Whom did she say that she can't stand? in (c) is as grammatical as it is a bit stuffy in ordinary talk. Allowing S'(S-bar) to be a bounding node for subjacency would universally prevent moving elements from one clause to another, while WH-MOVE seems common enough in English. If particular verbs (like say) allow it, this could be stipulated in their lexical entry. 14.70 Subject-Raising. Some NPs can be raised from subordinate subject-position to subject in the main clause with Experiential verbs like appear or be reputed, as in Dogs are reputed to hate cats: [ comp np are reputed [S1 comp [S dogs to hate cats ]]] NP-MOVE = = = > [ comp dogs2 are reputed [S1 comp [S' e2 to hate cats ]]] (here lower case comp and np stand for empty nodes and the subscripts indicate nominal co-reference). The fact that are reputed is inflected for person and tense, while to hate is not motivates the Tensed-S Condition: No rule can involve X and Y in structures of the type: ... X ... [ s1 ... Y ... ] ... X ... where S' (S-bar) is tensed. (Chomsky 173:89) That is, no rule can move any element out of a tensed clause. When the movement of dogs to the empty NP node is out of a non-tensed clause, the result is grammatical. Had the underlying structure been [ COMP e are reputed [ S' COMP [S dogs hate cats ]]] NP-MOVE = = = > [ COMP dogs2 are reputed [ S' COMP [S e2 hate cats ]]] the resultant *Dogs seem hate cats would be ungrammatical, because hate would have originated in a tensed clause. The same restriction applies to (a) Heads will roll (b) Heads are expected to roll (c) Heads will be expected to roll (d) *Heads are expected will roll with an underlying structure like
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are expected [ s' COMP [sheads to roll ]]] [COMP e NP-MOVE = = = > are expected [ s' COMP [se2 to roll ]]] [COMP heads2 compared to are expected [ s' comp [ sheads will roll ]]] [COMP e NP-MOVE = = = > are expected [ s' comp [ s np2 will roll ]]] [COMP heads Since (c) extracts heads from an untensed clause, it is grammatical, while heads in (d) derives from a tensed one, and so is not. This formulation also shows a set of relations within which it is coherent to predict that the subject of an infinitive can be passivized, but not be the subject of a tensed clause. 14.71 Generalizations. Interactions between specific rules lead to the kind of insights prized since Aspects: initial formulations can be made more generic and particular ones be refined as constraints. The rule that reflexive pronouns are construed with preceding NPs in the same clause with the same person, number and gender, is more realistic and more generally formulated than one requiring only an 'appropriate' antecedent within the same sentence. The matched-pair in that rule suggests the pairs mentioned in the Tensed-S Condition: 'No rule involves X and Y in structures like ... X ... S1 ... Y ... ] ... X ... where S-bar is tensed'. This can be made even more general as: No rule construes anaphors inside a tensed S' with antecedents outside it. If (a,b) are related to underlying structures like (a', b'): (a)
He fancies himself to be athletic
(a') COMP He fancies [ S1 himself to be athletic ] (b)
*He fancies that himself is athletic
(b') COMP *he fancies [ S1 himself is athletic ] he can be the anaphor of athletic in (a) at least by the Tensed-S Condition (even though they are not clausemates), while it cannot athletic's anaphor in (b) because it is in a tensed S' (S-bar) clause. In (c) of a set like (a) They must think they are kidding someone. (b) They must think they are kidding WHO(M) ? (c) WHO(M) must they think they are kidding ____? with an underlying structure like [S' COMP1 [S' they must think [S'2 [COMP2 that][S2 they kid WHO(M) ]]]] who(m) must be extracted on the second cycle from tensed S' they think. It originated in S2, but as adjoined to the left of COMP2 within it. So while the first move does not violate the Tensed-S Condition, the second obviously does:
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yet (c) is grammatical. Rather than label this an 'exception', the Tensed-S Condition can be generalized as: No rule can involve X and Y in structures like: ... X ... [S1 ... Y ... ] ... X ... where S1 is tensed, and where Y is not in COMP. This allows the first WH-MOVE to Chomsky-adjoin who(m) to the left of COMP2 that, and still be within a tensed S'2, as permitted by the usual Tensed-S Condition. Under the revised formulation, since who(m) is already in COMP, the second WHMOVEMENT of who(m) to the left of COMP1 is allowed when applied in the required cyclic order. 14.72 Specified Subject. Another proposal was called the Specified-Subject Constraint: No rule can involve X and Y in structures of the type: ... X ... [ a ... Y ... ] ... X ... where a is an S-bar or NP which contains a specified subject. (Chomsky 1977:74) i.e. a subject not containing Y and not controlled by X: a nonsubject constituent (what is neither subject nor part of it) cannot be moved out of a clause (S') or NP with a specified subject. Raising made dogs subject of are reputed in Dogs are reputed to hate cats with the underlying structure: [COMP np are reputed [S1 COMP [S dogs to hate cats ]]] but neither the Subjacency Condition, NP-Move nor the Tensed-S Condition as such block Cats are reputed dogs to hate. This cats and the empty np are in subject positions, while cats in S is not. It would even have to be moved across dogs in the subject position of S to fill the empty np. 14.73 Passives Are different: in an underlying structure like COMP [np are obliged [[S1 COMP [lifeguards to save drowning swimmers]]] lifeguards is in a subject position of an infinitive and the Specified Subject Constraint concerns only non-subjects. So NPMOVE resulting in Lifeguards are expected to save drowning swimmers is expected, and grammatical. If NP-MOVE were applied to drowning swimmers, the result would be the ungrammatical *Drowning swimmers are expected lifeguards to save. These constraints are consonant with semantic expectations as well. Take (a)
Pat thought himself to have outspent Pam
(b)
*Pat thought Pam to have outspent himself
with underlying structures like (a') COMP Pat thought [S1 COMP himself to have outspent Pam] (b') COMP Pat thought [S1 COMP Pam to have outspent himself]
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While the Specified Subject Constraint permits the Reflexive Rule to take Pat as antecedent to himself in (a) [both are in subject positions], it eliminates Pat in (b) as antecedent, because himself is in object position, and the Specified Subject Constraint applies to nonsubject anaphors. The (b) sentence remains uninterpretable, but if the anaphors had been plural as in (c) The women thought themselves to have outsmarted the men (d) The women thought the men to have outsmarted themselves (e) The women prided themselves on having outsmarted the men (f) *The women prided the men on having outsmarted themselves Both (c) and (d) would be (differently) interpretable and that of (f) would coincide fairly well with that of (d), while (f) would be ungrammatical. But the Specified Subject Constraint predicts that Who do they think they are kidding? is ungrammatical, because the second movement of who out of S2 to be adjoined to COMP1 in S'1 involves moving nonsubject who out of an S-bar, [S'2 they kid WHO]. So that must be revised: Specified Subject Constraint (Revised): No rule can involve X and Y in structures of the type: ... X ... [a ... Y ... ] ... X ... where a is an S-bar or NP with a specified subject, and where Y is not in COMP. 14.74 Zero Allomorphs. For de Saussure (cf. pp. 252ff above), the Content of a linguistic form results from the 'algebraic sum' of two relations: syntagmatic Value (contrast with what actually precedes and follows it) and associative Value (contrast with forms ± like it in expression or meaning, which ± might occur in its position). So part of the associative Content of polyunsaturated can be saturate, represented as: Ø + Ø + saturate + Ø. Are these zeros just absent in, or deleted from, saturate? Would saturate be better compared to pro-anti-poly-un-saturat-edability-ness-es, which Hjelmslev's 'exhaustive computation of unrealized combinations' (cf. p. 342 above) might establish? It is economic in Morphology to represent a zero allomorph to contrast words like sheep + Ø vs. cat+ -s but not zero morphemes in saturate. The zero allomorph invoked for sheep is a variant grammatical inflection (which produces closure in morphological construction), while all but two of the zeros suggested for saturate are derivational. They do not close word-level construction. Learners can be taught to delete an overt inflection of plurality in *sheeps because it is recoverable at a grammatical level of analysis from regular forms like cats. It would be more difficult to learn (and uneconomic to represent) words as the result of numerous derivational deletions. A closed set of inflectional affixes yield a specific number of exocentric constructions. The range of endocentrics with derivational affixes is open.
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14.75 Relative Clauses Are endocentric expansions of a nominal head: (a) He played Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone (b) He played the man that invented the telephone (c) We all use the telephone he invented (d) The man had considerable legal problems who invented the telephone (e) Bell, who used to live there, invented the telephone (f) Bell invented the telephone, which is lucky for us (g) What he did brought convenience to millions (h) This is where he did it The restrictive relatives (a-d) differ from the others semantically because they narrowly characterize Bell, allow the ±absence of a complementizer [ (a) who, (b) that, (c) Ø ], and are often remote from their expressed antecedent [man in (d)]. The appositive relatives (e-f) exclude that, cannot delete their WH complementizer, and resist extraposition. (g-h) differ from both in not demanding an expressed antecedent. Since (c) would be equally grammatical as (1) Ø We all use the telephone
(2) that
he invented
(3) which the difference is comparable to sheep+Ø vs. cat + s vs. fox + es, where one morpheme is realized by differing allomorphs. Positing e, WH, and non-WH relative complementizers, we can assign partial structures like (1)
[S1 [COMP e ]
(2) [NP [NP the telephone ]
[S1 [COMP that ]
(3)
[S1 [COMP which ]
[S he invented ]
and plot the adjunction of e, WH, and non-WH to COMP by WH-MOVE which can then be deleted by a WH-DELETION rule. 14.76 D- & S-Structures. The lack of derivational parity between the zero vs. phonologically conditioned plural allomorphs of sheep, cat and fox is obvious. The zero plural of sheep and the -en plural allomorph of oxen are lexically conditioned. The voiceless, voiced, and syllabic plurals of cats, dogs and foxes are phonologically predictable. Not unlike the need of an intermediate level between Lexical and Phrasal Categories in X-bar syntax, the former dichotomy between Deep and Surface Structures now yields to a 'Stoic' three-term opposition (cf. p 129 above): what the Base categorial component produces can be called D-Structures reminiscent of, but not identical with, 'Deep Structures'. Transformation- or Move-Rules produce S-Structures suggestive of 'Shallow Structures' and both differ from Surface Structures, as in this representation:
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(a) the telephone
[s1 [COMP
that ]
[she invented which ]]
WH-MOVE = = = > (b) the telephone
[s1 [COMP which that ]
[she invented ____ ]]
WH-DELETE = = = > (c) the telephone
[s1 [COMP
that ]
[she invented ____ ]]
where (a) is a D-Structure, (b) an S-Structure, and (c) a Surface Structure, as they are in: [s1 [COMP
e]
[she invented which ]]
(a) the telephone WH-MOVE = = = > [s1 [COMP which e ]
[she invented ____ ]]
[s1 [COMP
[she invented ____ ]]
(b) the telephone WH-DELETE = = = > e]
(c) the telephone The appropriateness of this analysis is supported by data from other structures: the subcategorization of hide and put require both a direct object NP and a Locative expression, but in the sentences below, (a) through (e) are grammatical, while (f) and (g) are not: (a) The dog hid in the park (b) The dog hid the bone in the park (c) The dog hid the bone (d) The dog hid (e) The dog put the bone in the park (f) *The dog put the bone (g) *The dog put in the park It is a lexical peculiarity of hide that overt signals of either its locative or object can be deleted in Surface Structure, but put demands expression of both. We readily supply locatives like someplace with occurrences of hide, and reflexive objects for (a) and (d), both of which are NPs. Go and come are equally 'Locative' and the prepositions to and from, frequently associated with them, do not usually occur without an object. But sentences like (a) He came from Wayne and went to Ardmore (b) That was the town he went to from Wayne (c) Ardmore was the town which he went to from Wayne (d) Which did he come from? (c) *He went from Ardmore to (d) *He came to Wayne from suggest, as in earlier analyses, that (b) (c) and (d) are parallel as (b) That was the town he went to WHICH from Wayne (c) Ardmore was the town THAT he went to ____ from Ardmore (d) WHICH he came/went from/to ____?
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if (as Hjelmslev could say) a D-Structure WH-pronoun can be encatalyzed to the that, which and e in Surface Structures (cf. p. 350 above), resulting from WH-DELETION of the S-Structures produced by WH-MOVEMENT. 14.77 Agreement-Data Support this analysis: in People (that) I doubt are interested will be in the audience, concord for are is not obviously dictated within its own clause, but is determined in a clause of a D-structure like people (that) I doubt [S1 comp] [S which are interested] The contraction that's is normal in That's the kind of guy I am but I'm for I am is acceptable only in a song like `I'm bidin' my time `cause that's the kind of guy I`m' since that's the kind of guy is preposed to I'm, accounting for the `missing constituent' that blocks contraction after I'm. With the kind of D-Structures suggested above, produced by WH-MOVE, the abnormality appears as: the kind of guy [S1 [COMP which2 (that)] [I am np2]] where the trace np2 marks the `missing constituent' (now adjoined to COMP), blocks normal contraction, and WH-DELETION can erase which in either event. 14.78 Whether non-WH relatives could be deleted before being moved to COMP is complicated by how the lexicon defines its inventory and semantic interpretation is to be carried out. One would be loath to abandon the wellmotivated constraints dealt with so far, so seeing how additional evidence interacts with them is a normal approach to solving the problem. For instance, neither of a pair of coordinates can be moved, so Check the oil and what? cannot yield What check the oil and ___? If this Coordinate Structure Constraint holds for non-WH relatives as well, then positing a structure like (a) the man WHO that first ate an oyster I admire Bell and ___ after the proscribed WH-MOVEMENT from (a') I admire Bell and the man that first ate an oyster predicts the ungrammaticality of the sentence (b) *The man that first ate an oyster I admire Bell and. The WH-Island Constraint also says no element can be moved out of a clause beginning with a WH-phrase, and so predicts the ungrammaticality of (c) WHICH you ask when he chose ___ of them?
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But if question and relative WH-phrases are not distinguished (allowing any WH-phrase in COMP to be freely deleted), then from a D-Structure like (d) COMP you chose which? WH-MOVE produces (d') [COMP which] you chose ___? Free deletion of the WH-interrogative results in (e) *You chose ___? and from that, there is no principled way of determining whether something is just absent or deleted after chose. 14.79 Recoverability. To assure objectively replicable deletions, Chomsky and Lasnik proposed a Recoverability Condition: Items from the lexicon cannot be deleted unless they are specifically mentioned in the deletion rule. [Filters and Control. 1977] Since WH-phrases contain lexical material, they cannot be deleted. Like freely deletable for and that, non-WH is considered a categorial, semantically null feature set, not a lexical category. Yet in interrogatives, ... the wh-word actually has semantic content. It is, in fact, a kind of quantifier. In relatives, however, the wh-word has no semantic content. Thus it is reasonable to suppose that one of the rules of interpretation assigns to (54) representations such as (55) in logical form, where the variable x fills the position of the trace: (55a) I wonder: for which x, he saw x (55b) for which x, he saw x But there is no reason to assume a quantifier representation in LF [logical form] in the case of relatives. We may assume, then, that the appropriate form of the Recoverability Condition will prevent deletion of the quantifier-like wh-word, with its intrinsic semantic content, but not the wh-form that appears in relatives, which simply marks a certain category. (Chomsky & Lasnik. 1977:447) So some words ± have intrinsic semantic content. As in Syntactic Structures, the notion `semantic' is obscure. Hispanus dealt with a similar problem in logical form: if every word must be either a categorematic term (like the Noun men Subject or the verb die Predicate) or a syncategorematic expression (like the quantifier all in All men die), how does only in Peter only writes function? With intrinsic semantic content (categorematically), only says either that Peter is alone (when construed with Peter), or that writing is the sole activity in which he is engaged (when construed with writes). Without intrinsic semantic content (syncategorematically), only `quantifies' Peter as one (oddly, since Peter is already unique) or assigns `quantity' or `degree' to writes (again oddly, unless writes and practices calligraphy are
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`degrees' of the same predicate). In Hjelmslev's contextual approach involved in his proposal that a word's lacking `meaning' does not deprive it of `content' some grasp of what is involved may be gathered from remarks about other word classes. For instance, a principled account is proposed for why prepositions cannot be deleted along with WH-relative pronouns: a DStructure like (a') the one COMP you were complaining TO WHOM might be posited from sentences like (a) You were complaining to someone (b) You were complaining to whom? (c) To whom where you complaining? from which WH-MOVEMENT would produce (d) the one [COMP to whom] you were complaining ___ But if the WH-phrase to whom can be freely deleted in COMP, what results is *the one you were complaining ___, and we would be just as much at a loss to account for what is absent or deleted as in *You chose ___? Chomsky and Lasnik's Recoverability Condition would preclude deletion of to whom, because prepositions are said to have inherent meaning a meaning different from that of other prepositions like at, around and so on. Presumably, neither quantifiers nor WH-relatives (to the extent that they resemble quantifiers) have meanings discriminable on the same basis. I want a partner with whom to dance the samba has an overt WH-relative; I want a partner to dance the samba with does not. One could say of the second sentence that its D-Structure WH-pronoun was moved to COMP and deleted, leaving an infinitival non-WH-relative. Positing the underlying form is defensible because *I want (a) a partner to dance the samba with (b) a group to square dance with and violates the Coordinate Structure Constraint by moving the coordinates (a) and (b) [as opposed to a partner to samba with]. A D-Structure like a group COMP PRO to square dance with which is presupposed, where PRO is taken as the empty NP-subject of the infinitive. After WH-MOVEMENT adjoins with which to COMP, the result is a group [COMP with which] PRO to square dance ___ But the Recoverability Condition proscribes deletion of elements with semantic content (among which are prepositions), and predicts that *a group to square
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dance ___ is not grammatically relatable to our sources (though allowable in other contexts). 14.80 Deleting NP or PP. If only the WH-NP which (instead of the WH-PP with which) were adjoined to COMP and deleted, the grammatical Surface Structure a group to square dance with results. But if WH-DELETION is optional, as in The telephone (that) he invented, exercising that option results in *a group which to square dance with. Besides, when we compare (a) She needs a guru who she can consult with (b) *She needs a guru who she to consult with a basic difference between tensed and untensed (infinitival) clauses emerges, one that appears to function in verbal as well as prepositional contexts: (c) We want books which we can sell later (d) We want books we can sell later (e) *We want books which to sell later (f) We want books to sell later where the WH-pronoun is deletable optionally in tensed, obligatorily in untensed, clauses. But life is never simple, nor is language: there are extended collocations that defy the distinctions made so far, as in (g) We need someone [COMP in whom] we place confidence (h) *We need someone to place confidence So Chomsky proposed a revision of the Recoverability Condition: Delete WH-phrase in COMP obligatorily (up to Recoverability) in infinitives, optionally in tensed clauses. (On Binding 1980.49). This prevents deletion of PPs like in whom in (g), since Ps are said to have inherent meaning, and deleting them would violate the condition. 14.81 `Zero Anaphora' Is describable in terms of deletion: in Mighty Joe Young is stronger than Tarzan, the `zero' Bloomfield would assign after Tarzan would have is strong as antecedent. The sentence is relatable to a D-Structure like Mighty Joe Young is stronger than Tarzan is WHAT WH-MOVE = = = > Mighty Joe Young is stronger than [S1 COMP what] Tarzan is ___] WH-DELETE = = = > Mighty Joe Young is stronger than Tarzan is.
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Assuming a COMP what has been moved and deleted is coherent with malformations like (a): *Tarzan is stronger now than Variety asks whether he used to be ___ since this would violate the WH-Island Constraint about moving a WH (what) out of its WH-clause (whether he used to be ___); and Topicalized (b): Tarzan, I've always admired from I've always admired Tarzan with a D-Structure like [S1 [TOP Tarzan] [S1 COMP [S I've always admired ___]]] is subject to the Coordinate Structure Constraint. This accounts for the ungrammaticality of *Tarzan, I've always admired Mighty Joe Young and, as well as the WH-Island Constraint on *Tarzan, Variety asked when I had met. 14.82 `Inherent' Semantic Content. If prepositions are allowed as lexical categories because of inherent semantic content seen in contrasts like at the fire vs. around the fire, how is content denied to which vs. who in distinctions like (a) The sweep whom I hired (b) The sweep which I hired (c) *The sweep whom I hired (d) The sweep which I hired (e) The sweep whom I hired Here sweep can be (1) a person who cleans with a broom or (2) a kind of oar. Both (a) and (b) are grammatical under readings (1) and (2) respectively, though (c) is not if an oar is the antecedent. Yet (d) and (e) are both grammatical when sweep stands for a person. They convey differences in attitude. English gender is mostly determined extralinguistically. German gender is also determined intralinguistically. Mädchen für alles [girl for everything: `maid of all work'] corresponds roughly to sweep but does not notably mark a social attitude. The diminutive affix -chen makes the word grammatically neuter, demanding a neuter relative like das. Part of the problem may reside in analogies suggested by the formalism involved. If a category is deleted, are its contents deleted as well? This depends on what is essential to a category (e.g. node or branch) and whether its exponence is essential to it (e.g. manifestation in `leaves', overt lexical items, what Hjelmslev called entities - functives which are not functions). Stratificational Grammar says a single object is represented by its various strata. Intermediate strata are defined by those above, and define those below them. In neither analysis is S or the highest stratum defined by any higher
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Category. In neither are phonic material nor lexical items categories defining of anything below them. In Porphyry's Tree, a supreme genus like Substance cannot be regarded as both genus and species (categories and subcategories) from different perspectives as animal can; and individuals like Plato are not species with members they include. From a formal point of view, these various representations seem to be isomorphic. 14.83 Government and Binding. Syntactic Structures' 1957 demonstration of the superiority of generative grammar over PSG led to Aspects' 1965 defining a deep vs. surface structure `standard' and the `Extended Standard Theory' (EST) of the 1970s. EST rules linking abstract and concrete sentence-representations led through 1981a's Lectures on Government and Binding to more specific modifications in later work (e.g. Knowledge of Language 1986a and Barriers 1986b). 14.84 Competence in GB Is an Ideal distributional Language-unity analyzable into modular units with interdependent Parameters and Principles. Principles are `universal', Parameters language-peculiar. X-bar syntax (cf. pp. 437ff above) describes P-structures and GB identifies their composition in terms of head Parameters. GB's PROJECTION PRINCIPLE requires all syntactic levels to incorporate the Lexicon's account of the semantactic (distributional-functional) composition of individual items in the Lexical categories (N, V, A and P). X-bar hypothesizes that S's d-structure will manifest these design Principles: XP --> ...X... (x-Ps have x-heads) X'' --> specifier X'
(an x"-category's head is an x') with
X' --> X (an x'-category's head is a lexical category complements with potential complements) Design Parameters allow maximal ("-bar) category-heads to occur predominantly to the right or left of their complements: X' -> X+ complements or X' --> complements+X. 14.85 d-Heads in GB Are not defined on s- or speech norms (cf. p. 301 above). So a lexical item like with a entity dominated by functive P of the function PP (cf. p. 345 above) is the GB `head' (paradoxically) of a non-headed `performance' exocentric PP like with songs. On the same associative basis (cf. p. 252 above), the V sing of VP sing songs or the N songs is `head' of endocentric NP singable songs, as is the A singable of AP more singable. MOVEMENT relates the composition and distribution of functional s-structure elements to their distribution in d-structure through traces in s-structure of where a functional d-element `used to be'. BOUNDING THEORY spells out what restricts movement and q-THEORY criteria link semantic roles
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and sentence elements, while CASE THEORY assigns `Cases' to NPs, even those of monomorphemic languages like Mandarin or Thai. BINDING THEORY defines how NPs ± corefer. CONTROL THEORY handles subjects of infinitival clauses. The PF (PHONETIC FORM) COMPONENT interprets s-structures as articulations and LF (LOGICAL FORM) COMPONENT represents the syntactic aspect of semantic representation (like Pat's tall as Px, Pat likes Pam as Pxy and Pat gives things to Pam as Pxyz. 14.86 The Pro-Drop Parameter `Determines whether a clause's subject ± can be suppressed' (Chomsky 88:64) and has two settings, depending on whether INFL ± is a proper governor in a given language. The EMPTY CATEGORY PRINCIPLE says an e must be properly governed. English and Latin he came
*came
*came he
ille venit
venit
venit ille,
show that languages with INFL as a proper governor allow Ø subjects (pro is properly governed); those lacking one will not (pro will not be governed). 14.87 Binding Theory `Is concerned with the relations, if any, of anaphors and pronominals to their antecedents' (Chomsky 82a:6) yielding three BINDING PRINCIPLES (Chomsky 86a:166): A An anaphor (like himself) is bound in a local domain B A pronominal (like him) is free in a local domain C A referring expression (like Mike) is free So in (1) Pat said Mike1shot himself1 (2) Mike1said that Pam shot him1 (3) People said Pam shot them the anaphor himself in (1) must refer to the same person as Mike because it is within the same local domain (PRINCIPLE A); in (2) pronominal him ± may refer to the same person as Mike because it is in a different local domain (PRINCIPLE B); in (3) what expressions like people and them refer to may or may not coincide. (PRINCIPLE C). 14.88 C(ategory)-Selection Entails THE PROJECTION PRINCIPLE: representations at each syntactic level (LF, and D- and S-structure) spell out what is predicted by the subcategorization properties of lexical items. (Chomsky 81a:29). Lexical entries mark each item's peculiar category details, meaning, and specifics about the syntactic categories (complements) each entry projects onto sentence structure. An entry like give [___ NP1 NP2] says V give demands a V' with two N" complements.
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14.89 Correlation with Spatial Relations Define GB's GRAMMATICAL FUNCTIONS: Subject is the NP of S (the N" immediately dominated by S). Object is the NP of VP (the N" immediately dominated by V'). Object of Preposition is the NP of PP (the N" immediately dominated by P'). GB recognizes no spatially independent grammatical functions. q-THEORY assigns `thematic' roles like Agent (Chomsky 81a:5-6). The q-CRITERION demands that each argument have only 1 q-role and that each q-role be assigned to 1 & only 1 argument (Chomsky 81a:36). Central q-roles (cf. CG's roles, pp 425ff above) include: AGENT the person or thing doing the action the person or thing affected by the PATIENTaction GOAL
the recipient of the object of the action
A lexical entry for a verb like hit [__ NP]
c-selects two q-roles which are assigned to positions capable of accepting them (those slots are called A-positions: the grammatical functions just defined above). Internal roles are assigned within a maximal projection, [e.g. V"= VP]; external q-roles like Agent may be ± assignable to the GF subject outside the maximal projection. 14.90 A Maximal Phrase (Like N"=NP) has a cognate head (like N) and potential specifiers (like DET+N'); a maximal phrase's cognate head (like V" = VP) consists of a final related head (like V) and potential complements (like V+NP). A maximal phrase's final head (like V) is a lexical category intimately linked to a lexical entry (like hide [__ NP1 NP2 PP]). Peculiar lexical properties (e.g of `synonyms' like hide and conceal) ± may demand that appropriate complements cooccur in the phrase (like Pat hid (himself) (in the closet) vs. Pat concealed himself (in the closet) but they always demand recognition of the semantic roles associated with the entry (like NP1 Pat = [Agent] NP2 himself = [Goal] PP in the closet = [Locative]). 14.91 Movement Is central to GB, as expressed in the `MOVE-ALPHA' PRINCIPLE (move a lexical category). Movement-Types include:
- NPmove:
move NPs from A- to non-theta-marked Apositions, leaving an NP trace
- Whmove:
move wh-phrases from A- to the non-Aposition of C's specifier, leaving a variable wh-trace
- V-move: move V to INFL and V1 to the head of C Restrictions on `move a category' include: (i) only maximal or zero-level bar categories may move (ii) movement must only be from an A-position
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(iii) movement must be to a non-theta-marked position: i.e. an empty A-position for NP-movement, or a non-A-position for whmovement. Pat was killed are derived by NP-move from a Passives like de (a) structure likewas killed Pat Questions Who did Pam kill derive by wh-move from a like d-Pam (b) structure likepast kill who Relatives (c) like
The man who Pam killed was lazy are derived by
wh-move from a d-structure like The man Pam past kill who was lazy Inversions like Was Pat killed? involve V-move of be into I, and of (d) the resulting amalgamation into the head of C 14.92 Random Movement Is precluded by BOUNDING THEORY which'... poses locality conditions on certain processes and related items' (Chomsky 81a:5), and this leads logically to the SUBJACENCY PRINCIPLE: moved categories may not cross more than one bounding node. Bounding nodes for English may be S, S', NP but Parameters recognize that languages vary as to whether S or S' is a bounding node. Accordingly, in: A What song did Pat sing? B *What song did Pam buy Mike's idea that Pat sang? C *The task which I don't know to whom they would entrust (Italian) il carico che non sapevo t1a chi avrebbero D affidato what song in A moves only from t across S; what song in B moves across S', NP and S, so is ungrammatical; in C & D, moves are across S & S', ungrammatical in English, but acceptable in Italian. 14.93 Case Theory `... Deals with assignment of abstract Case and its morphological realization.' (Chomsky 81a:6) and Case is assigned to all NPs by case assigners: - Nominative by the Tense part of INFL, in s-structure, to the GF subject - Accusative by V in s-structure to the GF object - Accusative-(oblique) [`indirect object'] by P to the GF object of Preposition - Genitive is assigned by the structure NP(NP ___). CASE FILTERS recognize that languages like Chinese and Thai lack overt case forms, while `Every phonetically realized NP must be assigned (abstract) Case' (Chomsky 86a:74), subject to these Parameters: adjacency: some languages require case assigners to be adjacent to the NP (i)that receives Case
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direction: some languages require case assigners to be to the left, some to (ii) the right Exceptional Case Marking: the lexical subject of infinitival clauses in (iii)English exceptionally has Accusative Case 14.94 The Intralinguistic Relation of C-Command: `Alpha c-commands every element of its domain that is not contained within alpha' (Chomsky 86a:162) and `The domain of alpha is the least maximal projection containing alpha' (Chomsky 86a:162). C-command relates an element to those inferior to it but not dominated by it. In The woman will arrest John, since the domain of NP the woman is C"(=S'), that NP c-commands all elements except the and woman (which it dominates). Since the domain of arrest is VP, it c-commands John but not the subject-NP the woman (which is outside its domain). 14.95 The Intralinguistic Relation of Government: `A category governs a maximal projection X" if alpha and X" c-command each other' (Chomsky 86a:162) and `only lexical categories and their projections can be governors' (Chomsky 86a:162) Government relates a pair of elements defined by mutual c-commands within a `ceiling' and `floor' of maximal projections, provided one element is a governor. Latin gubern-are (`govern') derives from Greek kuber-na-ein (`steer a boat'), from which cybernetics (`study of feedback') was coined. In They will give it to him, the V give governs it because give is a governor within the same maximal projection VP, and ccommands it. So: (i) Case is subject to government (the NP him is governed by the case-assigner to) (ii) c-selection is subject to government (the NP it and the PP to him are governed by the Verb give, projected from give's lexical entry) (iii) s-selection is subject to government (the q-roles Goal and Patient are assigned to A-positions governed by give) (iv) Verbs' number agreement is due to it being governed by the AGR feature of INFL (v) a variable parameter is whether INFL(AGR) governs the subject (in pro-drop languages) or not (in non-pro-drop languages) 14.96 Control Theory Deals with abstract `terms', e.g., determining'... the potential for reference of the abstract pronominal element PRO' (Chomsky 81a:6). The basic Principle is that `PRO is ungoverned' (Chomsky 86a:183), so Obligatory Control expects that PRO has the main sentence subject as antecedent (as in Pat asked PRO to go) or the object as ante-
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cedent (as in Pat asked Pam to go), while in cases of Arbitrary Control, PRO refers indefinitely to people in general (as in It is time PRO to go). 14.97 Empty Categories: Though rejected in Barriers (Chomsky 86b:57), the functional definition of empty categories (Chomsky 81a:321-23) postulates 4 distinct types, determined by how they function in sentences. Binding Theory can be redefined to include the empty categories by requiring the theory to refer to FEATURES rather than to ACTUAL NPs: A: An anaphor (+ a) is bound within its local domain B: A pronominal (+ p) is free outside its local domain C: A referring r-expression (-a,-p) is free. PROPER GOVERNMENT lends INFL unexpected properties: `governors' include INFL along with lexical categories and their projections. But INFL without AGR is not only a non-governor, but not a lexical category the sole `PROPER GOVERNORS', hence the PRINCIPLE OF PROPER GOVERNMENT: alpha governs beta if and only if alpha governs beta and alpha is lexical (Chomsky 81a:73). GB C-commands:
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Reading Cook, V.J. 1988. Chomsky's Universal Grammar. An Introduction. New York. Basil Blackwell. Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA. Further Reading Allen, J.P.B. and Paul Van Buren. 1971. Chomsky: Selected Readings. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Allwood, Jens, Lars-Gunnar Andersson, and Östen Dahl. 1977. Logic in Linguistics. Cambridge University Press. Bach, Emmon and David Harms (eds.) 1968. Universals in Linguistic Theory. New York. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Burt, Marina. 1971. From Deep to Surface Structure. New York. Harper and Row. Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague. Mouton. 1959. Review of B.F. Skinner Verbal Behavior. Language 35:26-58. 1964. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. The Hague. Mouton. 1966. Linguistic Theory. In North-East Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, ed. R. Mean. Reprinted in Allen and Van Buren 1971. 1969. Linguistics and Philosophy. In S. Hook (ed.), Language and Philosophy. New York. New York University Press. 1970. Remarks on nominalization. In R. Jacobs and E. Rosenbaum (eds.) Readings in English Transformational Grammar. Waltham, Mass. Ginn & Co. 1972a Language and Mind (enlarged) New York. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1972b Some empirical issues in the theory of transformational grammar. In Stanley Peters (ed.) Goals of Linguistic Theory. New Jersey. Prentice-Hall. 1972c Problems of Knowledge and Freedom. London. Fontana. 1976. Reflections on Language. London. Temple Smith. 1979. Language and Responsibility. Brighton. Harvester Press. 1980a Rules and representations. Oxford. Basil Blackwell. 1980b On cognitive structures & their development. In M. Piatelli-Palmarini (ed.), Language and Learning: the Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. London. Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1981a Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht. Foris. 1981b Principles and parameters in syntactic theory. In N. Hornstein and D. Lightfoot (eds.), Explanations in Linguistics. London. Longman. 1982a Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press. 1982b On the representation of form & function. In J. Mehler, E.C.T. Walker and M.F. Garrett (eds), Perspectives on Mental Representation: Experimental and Theoretical Studies of Cognitive Processes and Capacities. Hillsdale. Erlbaum. 1982c The Generative Enterprise: A Discussion with Riny Huybregts and Henk van Riemsdijk. Dordrecht. Foris. 1986a Knowledge of Language: Its Origin, Nature and Use. New York. Praeger. 1986b Barriers. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press. 1988a Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press. and Harold Lasnik. 1971. Filters and Control. Linguistic Inquiry 8:425-504 Fillmore, Charles. 1968. The Case for Case. in Bach and Harms 1968. Gruber, Jeffrey. 1976 (1965-1967). Lexical Structures in Syntax and Semantics. New York. North Holland.
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Haegeman, Liliane. 1991. Introduction to Government & Binding Theory. Cambridge, MA. Basil Blackwell. Horrocks, G. 1987. Generative Grammar. London. Longman. Jackendoff, Ray. 1972 (1966-1969). Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press. Newmeyer, Frederick. 1986. Linguistic Theory in America. Second Edition. New York. Academic Press. Peters, Stanley and Robert Ritchie. 1973. On the Generative Power of Transformational Grammar. Information Sciences 6:49-83 Quirk, Randolph and Sidney Greenbaum. 1975 (1973). A Concise Grammar of Contemporary English. New York. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. New York. Longman. Radford. Andrew. 1981. Transformational Syntax. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1988. Transformational Grammar. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Ross, John Robert. 1967. On the Cyclic Nature of English Pronominalization. in To Honor Roman Jakobson. Reprinted in Reibel and Schane 1969. Reibel, David and Sanford Schane. 1969. Modern Studies in English. Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Prentice-Hall. Searle, John. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press Note: 1. Metarules are common in some logical notations, where a Greek letter stands for a set of categories (such as a Porphyrian genus like substance), a Roman capital letter stands for a category (such as a Porphyrian species like Man) and Roman lower case letters stand for individuals (such as Plato or Aristotle) Cf. p. 177 above.
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15 Different Constants 15.00 Questions. How many tons does the Earth weigh? sounds as though it ought to have wrong answers. Does its weight vary with the number of life-forms, should viruses be counted among them, and weigh in what: Earth's atmosphere, or...? Questions like those can be asked about `meaningful' language elements. Sketches of Langue- or Competence-possibilities are remote from what is actually `alive' in Parole or Performance (ISH is speechless). But since Aspects' answers to Competence-questions set a well-defined Standard, other work in Linguistics can be compared to it. Contrasts among them include shifts in level, detail and purpose. 15.01 Real Units Words marked lexico-functionally (pp. 496-513) need no Transformations to fit them for Semantic Interpretation: they trigger an intralinguistic semantic interpretation; sense, referential and pragmatic data can be added for extralinguistic ones. Speakers are unaware of Ts, but do recognize `structure' in language, so it is time to outline a grammar closer to real Performance. Expressions we are aware of, know or recognize, and how possible ones ± can be used are all `real' but differently. Because early T-pass focused on syntactic design, it ignored functional information. That confuses `(psycho?)-logical' and `grammatical' functions like subject. One plausible psychological model pictures PS rules as state-sets connected by process arcs. Transitions among states can be drawn isomorphic with labelled-bracketings, which in turn are equivalent to surface structures or surface phrase-markers. Of course, realization presupposes characterization. 15.02 Characterizing Relation. Can Relations be defined apart from examples of them or must both be understood simultaneously? Can we define what a subject is without a prior understanding of a Relation like subject-of or the reverse? Saussure had three answers to What is it?questions about linguistic forms: 1 positive (signification), 1 relative (value) and one combining the relative and positive (content). These are relevant to the status of `primitives' in Relational Grammar (pp. 514-526). Grammar and Relation can both be characterized as self-defining Systems: they demand a countable number of members which may combine only in a countable number of ways;
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Dependency and Function overlap with these terms when we introduce the notions, Constant and Variable. 15.03 Characterizing Categories. Early TG isolated features common to natural and artificial languages, but Lewis (in Partee 1976) finds ITLD just translated natural language into an artificial one he calls `Markerese'. Montague Grammar (pp.526-544), like a symbolic logic, relates basic categorial symbols through syntactic rules and semantic rules. Cooper's Montague Syntax and Dowty's Grammatical Relations and Montague Grammar illustrate how some of these relations can be graphed (pp. 536 ff.). 15.04 Lexical-Functional Grammar. Bresnan's `Realistic Transformational Grammar' (in Halle 1976) denies Ts are Constants in semantic interpretation. They may change the composition and distribution of abstract lexical items, but not the underlying meaning of stable structures. But real lexical items defined by relevant syntactic and functional factors are by definition units grammatically insertable into a syntactic frame. Fodor, Bever and Garrett (1974) report psychological evidence that language-use shows an awareness of structures, none of transformations. Though its models may be dubious, what Psychology proves to be unrealistic can refine linguistic accounts. 15.05 Characterization vs. Realization. Chomsky defined TG's early research objectives by proposing that A reasonable model of language will incorporate, as a basic component, the generative grammar that expresses the speaker-hearer's knowledge of the language. (Chomsky 1965:9) How language-knowledge fits within a model of language-use is not specified. Aspects-research amounted to grammatical characterization: grammatical realization is different. In his Psychological Reality of Linguistic Concepts, Levelt found the term grammar misleading but useful, because it brings up the question of whether constructs which are apt for ... description of one form of verbal behavior (intuitive judgements) are equally suited to the description of other verbal processes (the comprehension and retention of sentences, etc.). (Levelt 1974: vol 3, p. 70) 15.06 Aspects' Realism. A psychologically real grammar would so graph rules and units that they can be read indifferently as imaging grammatical elements and rule-types or psychological information units and processing functions. Essential to Aspects is a variable semantic interpretation determined by constant deep structure: that puts a central descriptive burden on transformations. Yet despite its intuitive appeal and fruitful results,
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Aspects' design needs reexamination. Bresnan models Aspects (15.1) and a new Lexical-interpretive approach as (15.2):
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LFG rotates the Aspects (TG) model 90 degrees clockwise and highlights its invisible lexicon as well as its semantic component. In a Lexical Functional model, non-T-rules (lexical and interpretive ones) play a larger role. 15.07 Static Properties & Dynamic Operations. Chomsky's (1970a) static lexical rules (distinct from syntactic Ts) constituted the lexicalist hypothesis: word-formation `rules' are `regularities' of word-formation. Lexical rules (1) and (2) form adjectives from verb (cf. Siegel 1974): Rule (1) Noun or Verb + -d = Adjective E.g.
[N salary] + -d = [A[N salari] ed] `a salaried employee' [V hurry] + -d = [A[V hurri] ed] `too hurried a manner'
Rule (2) un- + Adjective = Adjective E.g.
un- + [A happy] = [A un [A happy]] `unhappy'
These Rules show patterns syntactic Ts do not explain: to derive (5) Antarctica is uninhabited from (6) Not [something inhabits Antarctica], put (6)'s syntactic negative operator on the front of lexical inhabit. That yields (7) [something un-inhabits Antarctica] 15.08 Ts & Lexical Rules. To produce (7), a syntactic T-pass would have to ignore rule (2) to allow un- (prefixable only to adjectives) to result in the V *uninhabit. But passive Vs are Verbs, not Adjectives, as shown by the fact that Vs may have direct NP complements, while their cognate Adjs do not: (8) a. Jeff suspected Mary b. *Jeff was suspicious Mary
V NP *Adj NP
c. Jeff was suspicious of Mary Adj PP (9) a. Mary was taught French
V NP
b. *Mary was untaught French *Adj NP Rules (1) and (2) analyze (5) as NP be Adj: Rule (1) produces [A[V inhabit] ed] Antarctica is [V inhabit] + -d = [A inhabited ] Rule (2) produces un- + [A[inhabit] ed] = Antarctica is
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15.09 Abstract and `Real' Forms. T-pass must derive Antarctica as (5)'s subject from a supposed object of an active inhabit as in (6). This predicts that forms like un-V-ed will be transitive, and make (1) and (2) predict that the -d of rule (1) can be suffixed to intransitives like descend or hurry, yielding intransitive Vs like *undescend/ed, *unhurry/ied. Their nonexistence suggests that syntactic Ts play no role in word formation, motivating the elimination of Ts that change syntactic categories, like verb --> adj, adj --> noun. 15.10 T-Independent `Surface' Forms. No Aspects-type Ts are needed to explain regularities in lexical selectional restriction. We assume parts of a jigsaw puzzle go together if they make an acceptable picture, not because they suit the few patterns used to cut the whole picture into 1000 parts. Active frighten goes with an animate object, its passive with an animate subject, while undaunted takes an animate subject, like its verb-root daunt: (15) a. ?John daunts nothing
b. Nothing daunts John
(16) a. ?Nothing is undaunted
b. John is undaunted
An LFG model needs no `deep' and `surface' word-structures, since their morphological and semantic relations can be expressed by non-T rules. 15.11 Coreference. By dropping TG's assumption that coreference is syntactically determined, LFG can treat it within and between sentences identically. Aspects-Ts mostly relate `deep' meaning to `surface' expressions, while a LFG model exploits interdependence among separate information-systems. As non-T-relations are isolated, sentences' transformational complexity reduces, making `deep' more like `surface' structures. A T-free grammar is more directly realizable in a model of language use. 15.12 Argument Structure. Verb-entries in an LFG lexicon include logical argument structure: intransitive sleep occurs in a 1-place relation, transitive hit, in a 2-place relation, as in (28) x SLEEP (29) x HIT y Sleep and eat both occur as surface intransitives, yet John ate implies semantically that he ate something: eat has a `logical object' even if its grammatical expression is inaudible. To relate logical argument-structures and syntactic verb-contexts, Chomsky (1964a) proposed the `delete unspecified object' Transformation: (30) a. John ate something = = > b. John ate
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This T-delete defines a DS context where eat can be inserted, but sleep cannot: eat + grammatical object is isomorphic with a logical `object'; sleep is not. Argument-structure produces a neater result than syntactic-structure: eat's argument-structure converts from a 2- to a 1-place relation. The variable-binding operation of logical quantification does just that: (31a) is a 2place relation, (31b) a 1-place relation: (31) a. x b. ($y)x
EAT y EAT y
[logic's $ is an individual or `existential' quantifier, which `binds' the variable y. The logical expression can be verbalized as: `there is at least one y, such that x eats y' 1] 15.13 Lexical Entries. Lexical items serve many grammatical functions, so entries must specify them. LFG defines grammatical Subject and Object by tree-domination as Aspects does, assigning V a `functional' formula: (33) sleep: V,
[ ___ ],
NP1 SLEEP
(34) hit:
V,
[ NP ],
NP1 HIT NP2
(35) eat:
V,
[ NP ],
NP1 EAT N2
[ ___ ], ($y)NP1 EAT y (36) lie:
V,
(37) rely: V,
[ PP ],
NP1 LIE LOC
[ ___ [pp on NP]NP1 RELY-ON NPon
[Brackets include the syntactic context for V's lexical insertion. On the right are ] [functional structures: they pair grammatical functions and logical argument structures.] [These syntactic-contexts ignore VP surroundings, while functional structures refer to ] [NP1 and/or NP2 as well as to PP. Combining with PP rather than NP may be said to ] [make a V syntactically intransitive, though it is logically transitive. ] Compare (38) and (39): (38) [He is someone you can rely [PP on whom]] = = > [He is someone [PP on whom] you can rely] [Here is something you can lie [PP on (39) which]]
==>
[Here is something [PP on which] you can lie] (37)'s on NP may well be a PP, but rely on is represented as a logically intransitive function: its prep object can be passivized: (47) All of us are relying on her for her support = = > She is being relied on for support by all of us while the same algorithm applied to (48)
All the cats are lying on the mat
results in *The mat is being lain on by all the cats
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15.14 Interpreting Lexical Entries. On in (37) makes its V transitive, associating a logically transitive semantic unit with a structural non-unit. It also incorporates prep into the V-category, like the verb care for which is synonymous with tend. Notation for active verbs expresses the function of passive verbs as well: (55) The cat was eating (56) The cat was eaten (56)'s passive (be) eaten is syntactically as intransitive as (55)'s (be) eating, but they contrast, since (55) eliminates expression of the logical object while (56) eliminates expression of the logical subject. In (57) ($y) x EAT y (58) ($x) x EAT y (55)'s grammatical subject cat can be (57)'s logical subject x, but the logical object y in (58) can be (56)'s grammatical subject cat, expressed in functional structures as (59) ($y) NP1
EAT y
(60) ($x) x
EAT NP1
Lexical entries for (be) eaten, (be) hit and (be) relied on can be (61) eat + en: V, [be ],
($x) x EAT NP1
(62) hit + Ø:
($x) x HIT NP
V, [be ],
(63) reli + ed: V, [be ___ [on]], ($x) x RELY-ON NP1 with an agentive by-phrase as an optional PP, functioning semantically to identify the logical subject of a passive verb: (64) eat + en: V, [be ___ [pp by NP ]] ($x) (x EAT NP1 & x = NPby) The Nps after (38-9)'s lie on or rely on have identical V [pp P NP]-structures, showing the lexical, not the syntactic, relation between NP and V governs passivization: its function-structure shows that an NP is passivizable. Entries (61-63) vs. (34-37) show syntactic contexts related by a rule like: [ ___ (P) NP ... ] ---> [be ___ (P)...]. Passive functional structures are related to active ones by an operation like `Eliminate NP1', and either `Replace NP2 by NP1', or `Replace NPpp by NP1'. This operation doesn't apply to non-passivizing verbs, but given the (65) entry for put, it will produce (66): (65) put: V, [___ NP PP], NP1 PUT NP2 LOC (Someone put your clothes into the closet) (66) put + Ø: V, [be ___ PP], ($x) x PUT NP1 LOC (Your clothes were put into the closet)
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15.15 Passives in Complex Sentences. The forms of Active-Passive sentences vary in languages which have that contrast. Perlmutter and Postal's (1977) Relational approach saw operations on grammatical functions (`Eliminate subject', `Make object subject') as universally defining `Passive'. Semantic structures may be stable across languages, but syntactic ones are not. To relate argument-structure to syntactic-context, TG constructs an abstract syntactic DS where logical subjects and objects of verbs are isomorphic with grammatical ones: Ts then map this DS into SS where the verb appears. LFG counters: define a set of lexical functional structures (LFS) providing direct mapping from a Verb's argument-structure to its syntactic-contexts. These static lexical-functional relationships can be depicted as active operations on logical argument structure, making active-passive a universal relation in LFS, rather than T-operations on syntactic ones. 15.16 Lexical Functional Structures Allow us to extract, directly from surface structure, information equivalent to that provided by TG's Deep Structure. This (functional) interpretation deliberately excludes the semantic interpretation of pronouns, articles, quantifiers and other logical elements: that is to be provided by a separate inferential system. A Lexical entry represents the functional structure of a Verb as well as its immediate syntactic context: (69) Mary was annoyed by John annoy + ed: V, [be ___ [pp by NP]] ($x) (x ANNOY NP1 & x = NPby) S NP1 = NP Mary
VP V
VP
was
V
PP
annoyedP by
NP
= NPby
John
(Fig. 15.3) giving the information formalized in (70): ($x) (x ANNOY NP1 & x = NPby) NP1: Mary (70) NPby: by John 15.17 Indices & Interpretation. Interpretation is completed by assigning a functional interpretation to phrases with respect to the verb. (1): assign indices to subject Mary, prepositional object John and (2): substitute indices in the appropriate argument positions in the LFS, as in:
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(71) (1) ($x ANNOY NP1 & x = NPby) NP1: Mary = i NPby: John = j (2) Mary = i, John = j ($x) (x ANNOY i & x = j) From (71 (2)), we can infer `John annoyed Mary'. 15.18 Verbal Complements. Passive verbs in complex sentences lack an object (an NP complement), but may have a verbal complement: tends is followed in . Fig. 15.4 by an infinitival VP, functioning as a verbal complement, symbolized by (Fig 15.4)
S NP John
VP V tends
to
VP V
NP annoy
15.19 Bresnan's
Mary
Symbol.
A syntactic NP is not identical with its grammatical function as subject (NP1) nor object (NP2). Nor is a syntactic category VP is defined as an immediately dominated by a identical with its grammatical function as verb complement. The symbol ( ) VP, since not all infinitival VPs function as verbal complements: those immediately dominated by NP do not. The symbol ( )VP indicates that a verbal complement is functionally incomplete. The functional structure of a verb like annoy is incompletely satisfied within VP, because VPs as such do not demand grammatical subjects. In this sense, a verbal complement is functionally incomplete: the LFS of its main verb should contain an unsatisfied NP1. The LFS of a complement-taking verb like tend specifies which syntactic phrase provides the index needed: (73) tend V, [ __
], TEND((NP1)VP)
i.e., the verbal complement, ( )VP, is to be completed by the index of tend's grammatical subject, NP1: that is not the logical subject of tend, since it has none. Like a modal verb, tend functions semantically as an operator (not as a lexically referring expression) upon its functionally closed complement.
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(Fig. 15.5)
S NP
VP
Mary
V tends
to
VP V
VP
be
V
PP
annoyed
P
NP
by
John
Interpretation of Fig. 15.5 requires the use of ], TEND((NP1)VP)
(73) tend: V, [ __
Linked to the definitions of NP1 and ( )VP sketched in Fig. 15.6 below, these coalesce as the information in (74): (74) TEND ((NP1)VP) NP1:
Mary
( )VP:
to be annoyed by John:
(Fig. 15.6)
S NP
VP
NP1 =Mary
V tends
to
VP V
VP
be
+( )VP
V annoyed
PP P
NP
by
John
Phrases are then assigned their functional interpretation with respect to the verb: indices are assigned, first to the subject Mary and the verbal complement to be annoyed by John. Those indices are then substituted at the appropriate argument positions in the LFS. The first step is shown in (75) TEND ((NP1)VP) NP1:
Mary = i
( )VP: to be annoyed by John = f where f denotes a function (of subject and object indices): when applied to i, it applies to Mary. Substitution (step 2) results in Mary = i, to be annoyed by John =f (76) TEND (f(i)) Without an interpretation of to be annoyed by John, MARY TENDS TO... would be left dangling. But (76) is to be read as saying that to be annoyed by
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John `applies to' or `is a function of' i: this requires that in the function interpretation of f, NP1 = i: (77) f
= to be annoyed by John
NP1 = i As in simple sentences, the LFS of annoyed is found in the context, [be ___ [pp by NP ]], and the grammatical functions of the phrases in syntactic structure. That adds up to the information in (78) f
= to be annoyed by John
NP1 = i ($x) (x ANNOY NP1 & x = NPby) NPby = John 15.20 Indices and Interpretation. To complete the interpretation, first assign (78)'s prepositional object John an index; then substitute indices in appropriate positions in the LFS. Label the result f(i): (79) f(i): John = i, ($x) (x ANNOY i & x = j) so combining (76) and (79) produces Mary = i, TEND (John = j, ($x) (x ANNOY i & x (80) = j)) Idiom-fragments, like the cat in The cat tends to get his tongue serve as their own indices (as do non-referring NPs like expletive there) and derive their interpretation from others, like the reflexive pronoun in John likes himself. A general interpretation rule for reflexives is (96) A reflexive pronoun is coindexed with the subject NP1 so when a reflexive is syntactically an NP2 as in John likes himself, it is assigned the index of NP1 (John), so in (97), an interpretation is automatic: (97) John tries to like himself John = i, i TRY (i LIKE i) (96) excludes reflexives from a subject-function, since reflexives lack an NP1 to provide their indices. If (20) is read as a condition on indexing, it says that a nonpronominal phrase cannot be coindexed with an NP preceding and commanding it. 15.21 Function vs. Structure. TG derived a passive by transforming its active deep structure: move preverbal NP1 into a by-phrase and NP2 to the
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preverbal subject position. This neither explained nor recognized dependence on grammatical functions. Ts were structuredependent operations and functional information was irrelevant to the syntactic structures to which Ts apply: in (100), children can be the first NP to the right of disapprove of: Doctors disapprove of children (100) smoking so T-pass must produce *Children may be disapproved of smoking by (101) doctors but the object of disapprove of is the NP children smoking 15.22 Subjectless Passives. Passive verbs appear where there is no subject, yet T-pass requires operation on `the first NP to the left of the verb', so Bresnan (1972) proposed that tend takes a sentential complement in DS: [S [NPdummy][VP tend [s John annoy (104) Mary]]] Dummy accounts for tend being logically subjectless. Thus, T-pass applied to the sentential complement of tend, then T-raise moved the passivized subject into the subject position for tend, replacing dummy. T-raise had to be made obligatory, since tend never cooccurs with sentential complements like it, in *It tends that John annoys (105) Mary *It tends for John to annoy Mary 15.23 Some NPs cannot be `Preposed' By T-pass, even though they have no logical relation to the passivizing V: The hot dog is believed to be dangerous to our (115) health Hot dog is not believe's logical object, but the logical subject of to be dangerous to our health. To conclude that T-pass is purely structure-dependent, regardless of the grammatical functions involved, confuses grammatical and logical functions: once those functions are distinguished, sentences like (115) are easily accounted for. Active believe has this lexical representation: (116) believe: V, [ ___ NP
], NP1 BELIEVE ((NP2)VP
the active-passive relation provides (117) believe + d V, [be ___
], ($x) (x BELIEVE ((NP1)VP)
like (73) tend: V, [ ___
], TEND ((NP1)VP)
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Verbs like believe take a grammatical object as the logical subject of their verbal complement; those like compel do not. Their grammatical objects also function as their logical subjects: We must compel John to see a doctor ] NP1 COMPEL NP2 compel: V, [ ___ NP (118) ((NP2)VP) but the grammatical objects of both can be reflexives: (119) We compel ourselves to be honest (120) We believe ourselves to be honest showing differences which parallel those between try and tend. 15.24 Unnecessary T-Roles. If the DS and SS of active-passive sentences are identical, a DS/SS distinction is not needed. LFG depicts the active-passive relation as function-dependent. Even Ts interacting with T-pass can be depicted as function-dependent relations, making their interpretation equally function-dependent: the procedure combines lexical functional structures. 15.25 Simplifying TG. T-Question Movement solves problems unrelated to number, like the demand of verbs like put for PP complements in simple sentences. Put demands both a direct N-object and a PP LOC: (126) a. You put the money on the drum
V NP PP
b. *You put the money
*V NP
c. *You put on the drum
*V PP
d. *You put the money a drum
*V NP NP
e. *You put the money shamefacedly
*V NP Adv
T-QM changes structure into that needed for (127) On which drum do you think you put the money? the phrase structure of which is Fig. 15.7, below. While You put the money on which drum is grammatical as an isolate or subsentence, it is ungrammatical when inserted into *Which drum do you think you put the money on the (129) box? since it is not well-formed for T-QM.
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S Q
S NP
VP
you
V
NP
think
S NP
VP
you V
NP
put
the money
PP P on
NP which drum
(Fig. 15.7) 15.26 LFG Simplifies TG. A lexicon replacing basic PS rules, by codefining canonical patterns and lexical functional structures, eliminates structuredependent rules. Lexical argument-structure maps directly onto syntactic-structure. Rules of functional interpretation combine elements of meaning in complex sentences. A few structure-dependent Ts deform or restore basic patterns, pairing displaced functions with their functional positions. 15.27 Rule Ordering. Passives are interpreted recursively, as embedding demands: each clause is interpreted by the same procedure. Lexical items are freely insertable as long as they can receive a combined interpretation dictated solely by their intrinsic lexical structure, generating sentences directly: John wants to appear to be loved by (131)a. Mary John appears to want to be loved by b. Mary c. Mary is expected to be elected Sentences like these are produced by cyclically applicable T-pass, T-raise and T-equi-NP-Delete, requiring different orders (131a,b) or multiple application for the same derivation (131c). Why Ts are not extrinsically ordered (Koutsoudas 1972, 1973; Chomsky & Lasnik 1977) is explained by the present theory. 15.28 Undeletable `Basic' Forms. Children use wanna-sentences before using want with a full complement, as in I want John to go (Brame 1973). That's a puzzle for the TG analysis: it must derive the infinitive by deletion. But if children lack the `basic' structure, there's nothing to delete. In an LFG model, V + INF is a basic structure like modal + infinitive. 15.29 Ellipses. Sentence fragments often occur in discourse, like Does Sally still get silly at staff (141) A: parties? B: She tends to
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LFG assumes speaker B interprets f as get silly at staff parties, retrieves the index, then applies it to the current subject, inserting both into an LF structure for tends. LFG says ellipses like (141 B) are less complex than sentences like (114 A) without them. VP ellipsis plagues TG, since it can occur in `transformed structures'. 15.30 Surface N-V Relations. If sentence comprehension results from grasping N-V functional relations from surface forms, actives and passives present the same problem: (150)The girl hit the boy The boy was hit by the (151) girl NPs are assigned functional interpretations with respect to their VPs; indices are assigned to the NPs, then substituted into lexical functional structure appropriately: (152)
NP1:
HIT
NP2
NP1:
the girl
NP2:
the boy
($x) (x HIT NP1 & x = NPby) NP1: the boy (153) NPby: the girl These are not identical logical structures: the girl is less directly associated with the logical subject in (153) than in (152), but other information (e.g. involving + animate) might facilitate interpretation:
(154)
The hot dog was eaten by the girl
(155)
($x) (x EAT NP1 & x = NPby) ANIMATE
NP1:NP2: the hot dog the girl 15.31 A Psychological Model. A realizable grammar should match a realistic model of reception and production. A syntactic pattern-recognition system known as a Transition Network System (more fully discussed in Halle et al., 1978, Ch. 6) is proposed as meeting that requirement:
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(Fig 15.9) PS RULES TRANSITION NETWORKS This model accepts sentences word-by-word and makes appropriate transitions defined by the progression of PS rules. That sequence is stored and can be reconsulted. The fact that a sentence is producible by rules makes that sentence recognizable to a transition network system. 15.32 Networks and Arcs. Isomorphic with PS rules here are networks (sets of states connected by arcs). Four types are shown: (1): CAT-arcs permit transition if a scanned word belongs to the lexical category marked on the arc: given a match, the input string is advanced one word. (2): JUMP-arcs allow transition without advancement of the input string: so partially similar networks can be merged, just as partially similar PS rules can be collapsed with parenthesis notation. (3): Unlabelled arcs which leave one state without entering another, mark `accepting states'. (4): SEEK-arcs allow transition if a specified phrase-type has been accepted: if accepted, the input string is advanced to the next word after that phrase. SEEK-arcs are thus equivalent to calls for a subcomputation involving another arc. The girl hit the boy starts in state S0, then switches to state NP0 and `asks' whether the belongs to DET: Yes. So on to state NP1, where girl is verified as an N, allowing transition to state NP2, an `accepting state' for an NP. When the NP the girl is found, the scanner advances to the next word, and so on.
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(Fig. 15.10) AUGMENTED TRANSITION NETWORKS 15.33 Transitions made in accepting sentences are isomorphic with well-formed labelled-bracketing. Initial states (S0, NP0 and VP0) correspond to left-bracketed ones like [s and accepting states correspond to right-bracketed ones like NP], etc. CAT-transitions correspond to labelling lexical categories: if girl satisfies CAT N, it can be labelled [ N girl N ]. Such bracketing is equivalent to surface structures or surface phrase-markers (Peters and Ritchie 1973), so the transition network system can be said to `accept surface structures'. Operations assigning grammatical functions to parsed phrases can be added. 15.34 The Augmented Transition Network (ANT) of Fig. 15.10 extends to complex sentences with verbal complements. Given The girl tried to hit the boy, it automatically extracts this structural / functional information: (156) [ s [ NP [ Det [ the ] [ N girl N ] NP ] [ VP [ V tried v ] [
to
[ VP[ v[ hit V ] [ NP [ Det the Det ] [ N boy N ] NP ] VP [ VP ] S ]
]
[ NP1: the girl ] [ Relation: NP1 TRY ((NP1)VP) ] Clause:[ [Relation: NP1 HIT NP] ] [( )VP: [NP2: the boy ] ] Comparable procedures can be applied to T-QM: since the grammar is realized within a model of sentence comprehension, it is assumed that T-QM applies in reverse order to surface structures, where the interrogative phrase occurs in its displaced position outside the clause:
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(Fig. 15.11) 15.35 Traces and Gaps. Labelled brackets surrounding no terminal string correspond to Chomsky's (1977) trace and Bresnan's (1976:389) structural residue: call that a gap. Chomsky's conception is broader than that of a gap because it is involved with Ts which are lacking in LFS. Experiments identify increased memory load at a sentence's critical region: that lying between a displaced relative pronoun and the gap. The conception of a TG presented here is realizable in several performance models. The one sketched above was designed to be neutral to `top-down' or `bottom-up' parsing systems as well as to perception/production: it emphasizes inadequacies of AN systems: in recognizing sentences, they make little use of lexical information, as Fig. 15.11 shows. The V categorized between state VP0 and state VP1 could be sleep, hit, tend or compel. Natives are aware of contexts to which the AN routine is blind, so much back-tracking is built into it. To overcome this indeterminacy, lexical information could be incorporated into the syntax, like Chomsky's subcategorization of verbs (1965:79-127). Other solutions are developed in Kaplan (1977) and Marcus (1976). 15.36 Conclusions. A realistic grammar should be psychologically real in a broad sense: that is, it should help explain linguistic behavior and enlarge our grasp of the human language-faculty. That is what inspired Chomsky's early work, but that has resulted in divergent theories of grammar. We are no more obligated to choose
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Page 533 among them than to reject a useful geometry, but we must find or construct the best theory. The difficulty is that we can depict language-knowledge in too many ways. The `grammatical characterization problem' of how to represent ISH's knowledge is not well-defined. It is pointless to argue characterization before solving the realization problem, and it is unclear that we will ever solve the characterization problem as defined in the past. Still, studying realization problems clarifies and delimits those of characterization. We can narrow the class of possible theoretical solutions by psychological experiment and linguistic investigation. Collaboration among linguists, computer scientists and psychologists may lead to deeper scientific understanding of the role of language in cognition. 15.37 Relational Grammar. The Modistae saw extralinguistic SO-aspects differ from mental SEEM-constructs and that neither were the same as signaldemands in SAID. Relational Grammar focuses on SAID-constructions corresponding to one SEEM interpretation of SO. Unlike Syntactic Structures' attention to how SAID-units like kernel (simple, active, declarative, present) sentences relate to other types, Relational Grammar focuses on SAID/SEEM functions like Subject, Direct and Indirect Object. Aspects defined them in terms of underlying tree-dominance in a Base common to many sentence-types. Relational Grammar finds that sort of definition presupposes universal SAID requirements. So it is inadequate for languages which may share the same SEEM interpretation, but have different SAID demands. RG views sentences like Logic's grammarfree Propositions: indifferent to time or number, without connotation or other grammatical accidents. Regardless of sentencecomposition (as in His magic astounds them or They were amazed by his sleight-of-hand), RG concentrates on Subject, Object and Indirect Object-terms plus a few Obliques, just as Hispanus distinguished categorematic nominals and verbals from syncategorematic expressions like adverbials. Terms in Logic and RG are defined intrasystemically, like numbers or units in any self-defining structure. 2 + 2 = 4, regardless of what the numbers are used to count. Propositions in Logic demand 1 Predicate [P] and at least 1 Argument [x]. They tolerate 2 or 3, but exclude more than 3 arguments: 1 = x, 2 = y, 3 = z, which can be abbreviated in a formula like Px(y)(z). Relational Grammar assigns grammatical functions to what logicians call arguments: 1 = Subject, 2 = Direct Object and 3 = Indirect Object. The labels may (but need not) name the same functions associated with them in traditional logic or traditional grammar, nor in any other form of grammar. Logical Relational Predicate & form scheme Argument(s)
Lexicalized Sentence Categorial derivation from S
Px
P:1
x RUN
NP + VP; VP --> V
Jo RAN
Pxy
P:12
x HIT y
NP + VP; VP --> V
+ NPJo HIT Mo
Pxyz
P : 1 2 3 x GIVE y x NP + VP; VP --> V + NP + PP
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15.38 Signification, Value and Content. RG develops what Saussure labelled structural value, of which Active-passive pairs are elegant examples. Sentences are interpreted by contrasting what is actually said to what ± could be said. For instance, Passive [1b] below may have the same signification (sense and/or reference) as Active [1a] because they share an identical Predicate and identical Arguments. They differ in content, of course, because the number of items involved (part of their value) is not the same: [1a]Somebody catches the ball The ball was caught by [1b]somebody Aside from non-propositional factors demanded by English grammar, the propositional elements of [1a] and [1b] are the sameyet-different. Like the H2O constituents of ice, steam and water which Chemistry can isolate, catch, somebody and ball are abstracted in Relational Grammar as terms of [1a] and [1b] because they have the same sense and reference, despite their difference in value. Though Arguments of the same Predicate, somebody and ball can have different semantic/functional roles. An `argument' which has `lost' its grammatical role in an initial structure is called a chômeur (French for `unemployed') in another structure as Relational Grammar presents them: catch
somebody
ball
[1a']
P
1
2
[1b']
P
Cho
1
15.39 Initial and Final. [1a'] as `basic' or initial occasions identical semantic intuitions, and is taken to be semantically interpretable as an isolate. Since that defines [1b'] as structurally non-initial or final, [1b'] must be interpreted in relation to [1a'], from which it is now pictured as `derived'. A lexical Cho is only a Cho through its `lost' or `different' function on a `lower' stratum. 15.40 Function, Functive, Entity. Hjelmslev's function, functive and entity label terms and relations at different levels. A derived Cho functive keeps its lexical properties but loses grammatical properties: it has been revaluated, as in its number concord for the SAID forms of catch in [2]. Since [2c]'s Agentless Passive is a function whose agent-functive dominates no entity: RG can symbolize that Ø-factor as PRO [for a generic nominal]: [1c]
The ball was caught catch
someone
ball
[1a']
P
1
2
[1b']
P
Cho
1
[1c']
P
PRO
1
or [1c'']
P
---
1
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Perlmutter & Postal's 1984a:97 Universal Alignment Hypothesis proposed that the term-hierarchy of subject-object-indirect object had an invariable semantic interpretation. Two-object constructions, in which the second is what RG defines as 3 indirect object, falsify that. Benefactive and Locative sentences differ semantically, despite their identical syntactic structure: [2a] He stole a fortune from the shelf [2b] He stole a fortune from the child vs. [3a] He left a fortune with the food [3b] He left a fortune with the child paralleled syntactically by paraphrases like [4a]
*He defrauded the shelf of a fortune
[4b]
He defrauded the child of a fortune
[5a]
*He bequeathed a fortune to the shelf
[5b]
He bequeathed a fortune to the child
Non-linguistic facts can make a literal semantic interpretation unacceptable. 15.41 Hierarchy is not Sequence. The sentences in [6] show that a hierarchy of dependence among RG's 3 terms is not the same thing as sequential order or identical with given positions: [6a]
She gives expensive gifts to me
semantically equivalent to [6b]
She gives me expensive gifts
[6c]
I am given expensive gifts by her
[6d]
Expensive gifts are given me by her
[6a]'s basic or initial standing justifies this stratal picture: give
she
gift
me
[6a']
P
1
2
3
[6b']
P
1
Cho
2
[6c']
P
Cho
Cho
1
[6d']
P
Cho
1
2
with each Cho's initial roles marked with chômeur's circumflex as: give
she
gift
me
[6a']
P
1
2
3
[6b']
P
1
2
[6c']
P
î
1
[6d']
P
î
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1
2
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If [6a] She gave expensive gifts to me is initial and absolute, representation in a single level or stratum is enough to determine its semantic interpretation. That would require interpreting [6b] She gives me expensive gifts as involving two strata: the indirect object me of initial [6a] is pictured as having advanced to direct object in [6b]. That takes over the direct object role of gifts in [6a]. 15.42 Two-Object Constructions. Traditional analyses may simply lump all two-object constructions together as `direct-indirect'. But benefactive `objects' [which name the one getting or losing the `benefit' commonly follow benefactive verbs immediately and few can become subjects of their corresponding passives: [9a] All the guests contributed gifts to the bride *The bride was contributed gifts by the guests [9b]Some donated money to the church *The church was donated money by some This indirect-to-direct-object (3--> 2) interpretation also holds for double object constructions that lack acceptable indirect object counterparts, such as: [10a] No one envies you the task [10b]Forgive us our debts [10c] They could have spared him the trouble [10d]Liz allowed Richard a second chance They refused his wife permission to visit [10e] him No one begrudged lottery winners their [10f] success 15.43 Restriction on Benefactives. An English benefactive can be advanced to direct object where it is the possible benefactive of the direct object (as in [11]), not where it is just the benefactive of the action, as in [12]: [11a] The groom built a house [for his bride] [11b]The groom built [his bride] a house Tom Sawyer whitewashed the fence [for his [12a] aunt] *Tom Sawyer whitewashed [his aunt] the [12b] fence 15.44 Propositional and Non-Propositional Roles. Case Grammar allots non-propositional roles to bride and aunt here because neither build nor whitewash demand a benefactive for grammaticality or semantic interpretation. Deleted surface terms define benefactive verbals like lend and borrow, as in [11a] Tom loaned a brush [to his friends] [11b]Tom loaned [his friends] a brush His friends borrowed his brush [from [12a] Tom] [12b]*His friends borrowed [Tom] his brush
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but some reject the further advancement of a benefactive to a subject role via passive: [13] ?His bride was built a house by the groom His friends were loaned a brush by Tom A brush was borrowed from Tom by his friends 15.45 Global Rules. Global rules referring back to earlier strata dictate that a direct object 2 arising from a revaluation of a benefactive 3 cannot advance to subject 1 [cf.2.8]; these sentences are adduced by Baker [1990:6] to test that: [14a] The mayor presented the sash to the winner [14b]The mayor presented the winner with the sash [15a] Bruce fed the stale bread to the pigs [15b]Bruce fed the pigs with the stale bread [16a] I supplied free milk to/for the orphans [16b]I supplied the orphans with free milk The army provided pointie-talkies for all [17a] personnel The army provided all personnel with pointie[17b] talkies [18a] ----------------------------------------------My grandmother rewarded me with lots of sweets [18b] for getting top marks in Conservative Dentistry These [b]s relate to their [a]s in much the same way as [5b]'s `double-object construction' [He bequeathed the child a fortune] relate to [5a]'s indirect object or [11a] benefactive constructions. So RG identifies the [a]s as isomorphic with initial relations, direct objects in the [b]s as advancees, and the with-marked prepositional object as a direct-object chômeur. [18b]'s reward would reflect an obligatory advancement to direct object 2, since there is no construction in which the verb reward takes what Jackendoff calls theme or patient to be the direct object. 15.46 Marked and Unmarked. After a term becomes a Chômeur, it is either re-marked or retains its initial marking. Passives register valency-change by introducing grammatical be and the lexical past participle. No verb-change marks a 3-2 advancement. When obliques advance to term status, most languages register a revaluation mark on the verb. When Indonesian locatives advance to 2, the verb acquires a -i suffix; and since this makes it a transitive verb, it acquires a me(n)(g)- prefix as well:.
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Ali duduk diatas banku itu 1 locative Ali sit on bench that [19a] 'Ali sits on the bench' Ali men-duduk-i banku itu 12 [19b] 'Ali occupies the bench' The effect of the advancement is stylistic and connotative, leaving its referential or propositional meaning intact, so [19b]'s -duduk- is translated occupy rather than sit in English here, since has a military usage in Indonesian. The passive of [19b] is [19c]: Banku itu di-duk-i (oleh) Ali [19c] bench that pass-sit-loc (by) Ali Indonesian benefactive-advancement in a clause with direct objects, as in [20a], puts the direct object in chômage as in [20b]. This may be proven by the fact that the supposed direct object 2 can be further advanced to a subject 1 [20c] but the 2-chômeur cannot: Ali me-masak ikan untuk Hasan Ali cook fish for Hasan [20a] 'Ali cooks fish for Hasan' Ali me-masak-kan Hasan ikan Ali cook-ben Hasan fish [20b] 'Ali cooks Hasan fish' Hasan di-masak-kan ikan oleh Ali Hasan pass-cook-ben fish by Ali [20c] 'Hasan is cooked fish by Ali' *Ikan di-masak-kan Hasan oleh [20d] Ali in stratal diagrams: duduk
Ali
banku
[19a']
P
1
loc
[19b']
P
1
2
[19c']
P
î
1
Ali
ikan
Hasan
2
Ben
masak [20a']
P
1
[20b']
P
1
2
[20c']
P
î
1
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15.47 Common Advancements. The most common advancement in languages is from Object-to-Subject (2--> 1), but Wilkinson (1983) finds an oblique-toindirect object (oblique--> 3) advancement in
[22a]
Der Vater nahm das Spielzeug von dem Jungen weg the father took the toy from the boy:dat away 'Father took the toy away from the boy'
[22b]
Der Vater nahm dem Jungen das Spielzeug weg
When a revaluation is marked, it is plausible to take its unmarked form as basic or initial. Unmarked forms like get are less clear than marked ones like gotten, so RG invokes the Universal Alignment Hypothesis which assigns an initial's linear 1-2-3 roles to 1-2-3 relations. So it is simple to take [22a] as basic [its forms relate one-to-one to initial roles] and [22b] as derived [its form-order show a revalued sequence]. This hypothesis assumes that terms do not become obliques [*term--> oblique] but oblique--> term is tolerated. [22b]'s dem Jungen is marked as dative, commonly used for German benefactives, so it rates an RG 3 label. [22a]'s von dem Jungen might be seen as an oblique like source or location rather than a chômeur, since von frequently signals location: when a chômeur is distinguishable by affixes or oblique case-markers, its frequent meaning may not be appropriate, as with English by: sit by the window vs. travel by rail; sit with a patient vs. hit with a hammer. Similarly, von in [22b]'s passive: Der Junge bekam vom Vater das Spielzeug [22c] weggenommen 'The boy had his toy taken away by his father' Much less common is oblique-to-indirect object (3) advancement than oblique-to-direct (2) and this is frequently registered on the verb than an advancement from oblique-to-2. They may involve the recognition of alternative initial strata (as in Quirk's She gives me expensive gifts vs. She gives expensive gifts to me) Early RG preferred to view one alternative as a revaluation when two versions were available. 15.48 How to Read RG Graphics. Sentence structures are theoretical objects in graphs which demand 3 types of primitive elements posited in Relational Grammar. `Primitives' in RG are elements which are not predefined nor definable within the graph; if they are not simply intuited (understood) that way, further discussion is pointless (Perlmutter & Postal 1983c:82-3)]: primitive
linguistic
elements
primitive
grammatical
relations
linguistic
levels
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(abstract) constituent nodes logical/semantic Terms of primitives phonological (primitive) features relations are: grammatical categories Arcs
represent relations
Levels (at which relations hold)
are represented by co-ordinates
The rules for reading an Arc like [23a] include: a letter like b at the top is called the dependent node and tells us that b has the subject relation to a, called the governing node. The drawing also tells us that this relation holds at the levels (or on the strata) marked as c1 and c2. [23b] gives the same information in a notation that is equivalent to the Arc, much as TG rewrite rules and tree diagrams:
[23a]
a 1 | c1 c2 b
[23b]
[1(b,a) (c1c2)]
so the four relations (P,1,2,3) of [5a] She gives expensive gifts to me can be depicted like [23a] or [23b] as having a common tail (another label for the governing node a) by the intersection of arcs as in [24]
It is not easy to read a relational network when it involves more than one stratum, as [6b] does:
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Columns representing arcs are easier to read and accept the convention that they have the same tail. [7]'s relations could be pictured as [26]
to me
were given
gifts
by her
3
P
2
1
2
P
Cho
1
1
P
Cho
Cho
15.49 Relational Laws. What excludes a possible linguistic construction in a language, and which tolerated constructions does a particular language instantiate? These RG Laws have been proposed as falsifiable universals: The Stratal Uniqueness Law (P&P 1983c:95): There can only be one dependent term for a given relation in a SUL: stratum. [This may apply to obliques but not chômeurs] The Final 1 Law (P&P 1983c:100): every final structure has a subject. It may be covert, as in these italicized F1L: clauses: [27a] Try and tickle yourself [27b] Kiss one salamander and people say you're a pervert [27c] Joe went home and then called Betty [27d] Which of those nurses do you think likes Ted the most? The Oblique Law [P&M 1983c:90]: dependents in oblique relations have them initially, not by revaluation, and nuclear terms cannot be revalued as obliques. A passive's 'Agent' has not acquired an ablative relation: it is a chômeur. Now RG allows nuclear terms to demote OL: spontaneously, though according to the Motivated Change Law [P&P 1983c:99], demotions to chômeur are never spontaneous but only as the consequence of a relation-usurpation from ascension or MCL:raising or dummy origin The Chômeur Advancement Ban [P&P 1983c:117] excludes Chômeur advance but allows Obliques. CAB: Revaluations are: [28] Advancements: 2 -- > 1
3 -- > 2
3 -- > 1
Obl -- > 2
Obl -- > 3
Obl -- > 1 Demotions: 1 -- > 2
2 -- > 3
3 -- > Cho
1 -- > 3
2 -- > Cho
1 -- > Cho
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Page 542 15.50 Abstract Competence or Concrete Performance. Advancement, Revaluation and Ascension can label a neutral state or process or a human action. Just as TG denies its graphics depict directionality, RG strata are presented as unordered theoretical constructs, like surface and deep structures or the autonomy of Noun vs. Verb, Lexicon vs. Syntax. Case Grammar describes valencies in Verb-Noun constructions and Logic prescribes well-formed Predicate-Argument combinations: [29] Px
x RUN
Pxy x HIT y
P:1
NP + VP; VP - > V
P: 1 2 NP + VP; VP - > V + NP
O
Jo ran
AO
Jo hit Mo
Pxyz x GIVE y xP: 1 2 3 NP + VP; VP - > V + NP + PPAOB Jo gave dough to Mo Grammatical Structures resulting from PS-rules like S -- >
NP VP
VP -- > V (NP) (PP) PP -- > P NP NP -- > N are isomorphic with tree diagrams or Phrase Markers: S
S NP
NP
Jo
S VP
V
ran
NP
VP V
Jo
V
NP
hit
Mo
Jo gave
NP
dough
PP P
NP
to
Mo
15.51 Global Rules. TG, RG and CG all study isolated sentences. Their contexts in actual discourse require recognition of extended valence. In Mary had a little lamb but Peter ate the beef, the had in the first part is less likely to have the 'possess' interpretation a dictionary assigns as 'basic'. But TG's sequential derivations differ from RG's simultaneous relational networks, in that RG-rules for one stratum must be sensitive to those of another. A RG control rule can distinguish a final Indirect Object that is also an initial Indirect Object (one that has not been revalued) and a final Indirect Object that is an initial subject. Such global rules are common in RG. 15.52 Motivation of Relational Grammar. RG is a reaction to TG's PS rules, which TG supplements by transformations to handle paraphrases of the initial patterns it has constructed. TG defines subject spatially (via domination in a Phrase Structure Tree). From RG's perspective, that makes Subject (and other grammatical relations) a derived function. P&P 1983a[1977] decided that this precludes the universal definition of passive's relation to active which might have been plausible in traditional
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grammar. English Active-Passives show different order, preposition marking and word-shape, but in a language like Tzotzil, Active-Passives have the same order, while Turkish A-Ps use postpositions and Russian signals the A-P contrast-relation morphologically. RG claims to have isolated what is the same in these structurally different relationships: a correspondence between the 2 of an active and the 1 of the passive. RG's Passive involves (a) a 2 in a transitive stratum which (b) advances to a 1 in a passive stratum. The contrasts of order, agreement, case-marking and adposition which languages show are required, not by the passive, but by expression-demands peculiar to subject, direct object and oblique. Much depends on how the concepts of definition, description and explanation are identified and how they are taken to be interdependent. Transformational Grammar does provide a universal definition of passive: on the assumption that there is a VP at some deep level of structure, Passive is definable through the movement of the NP immediately dominated by VP to a position immediately dominated by S. Movement is irrelevant to surface structures of languages where word order is free: just compare Man bites dog vs. Dog bites man contrasts to Latin-3-word versions in any order and languages where, in some constructions, no surface VP is demanded [German Ende gut, alles gut vs English All's well that ends well]. 15.53 How to Establish Grammatical Relations. Grammatical relations can be established by order (even without a VP) and that is how RG distinguishes the two objects of a double object construction. The central problem is: is any structure other than surface structure needed? Government and Binding derives PASSive from a deep structure where Subject is an empty [e]: V assigns a semantic role to its object, but no (abstract) case, and because it is passive no semantic role to the subject. The object then moves to the subject position to satisfy the case demands of a finite verb: it takes its semantic role with it but leaves an i-indexed trace, as in this analysis of Hasan is seen by Ali: [e] see-en Hasan (by [36a] Ali) [36b] Hasani is seen ti (by Ali) (Agency) is here presented as what Pike might call non-nuclear. That ranks see as a CG (Experiential) Processive verb and assigns the agentive phrase (paradoxically) a semantically modal role, marked by the preposition. Van
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Riemsdijk & Williams (1986:44) find that this separates RG's advance/demote relations and shows TG's T-NP-move is optional in T-Pass, as shown in the destruction of (the city) Carthage by (the enemy) Rome or (the city's) Carthage's destruction by (the enemy) Rome. This is still a structural analysis but Starosta's Lexicase (1978, 1988) has derivational rules that alter the case frame of verbs which include grammatical relations, but ignore order. Bresnan's (1982:9) Lexical Functional Grammar formulates passive in Universal Grammar as [37a]
(SUBJ) --->
Ø (OBLIQUE)
[37b]
(OBJ) --->
(SUBJ)
This produces an intransitive from a transitive verb with its separate entry, specifying (by OBJ) for (OBLIQUE), spelling out the correspondence of subject to object of the preposition. The categories realizing relation-terms vary widely (as in put him in it/there) and it is simpler to specify relations than categories. Relational Grammar has so concentrated on predicate-argument structures that other areas (and surface details) have been relatively neglected. All revaluations are completed at the level of the final stratum, which is not identical with 'surface structure'; nor need final strata involve 'overlay' relations like Topic, Overweight, Relative and Question. Much is yet to be done. 15.54 Linearization. Relational Networks are interpreted as unordered: final strata may be closer to surface linearization, but Perlmutter's [39] afterword to P&P 1983b gives this basic English word order: [39] 1-P-2-3-Non-term as in [40] The students gave silver trays to Bazza and the boss 1
P
2
3
[40b] The students gave Bazza and the boss silver trays 1
P
2
Cho
[40c] The government was overthrown by Rabuka 1
P
Cho
Marked word order often involves an overlay function, like the preposing of Question words. 15.55 Arc Pair Grammar. Johnson and Postal's 1980 Arc Pair Grammar uses relational networks rather than stratal diagrams. It is even more difficult to decipher.
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15.56 Montague Notation & PS Rules Simple TG-designs isolate two features which natural and artificial languages have in common: an aspect of 'meaning' and rules to assign a meaning to a compound, based on those of its constituents. Lewis (1976) knows his approach may not deal with what Katz & Postal's Integrated Theory is intended to handle, but he sees ILTD's semantic markers as `Markerese': an artificial language, into which a natural language may be translated. 'Markerese' may seem to simplify the problems of real semantics, but Latin could have done just as well: truth conditions for both could be defined, regardless of the real-world semantics of either. Designing grammars which are insulated from actual psychological and sociological determinants may be fascinating, but only confusion comes of mixing the two. Lewis follows the referential/model-theoretic tradition of Frege, Tarski, Carnap and Kripke: put marks ± in a box. Anyone can see when x is in and y is outside of that box/predicate. 15.57 A Grammar of Categories A categorially based grammar is like a context-free PS grammar, consisting of: (1) Basic categories: Sentence (S), Name (N) and Common Noun (C). Alternative basic categories like Verb Phrase (VP) or Noun Phrase (NP) can be used instead of Name. (2) An infinity of derived categories: `Whenever c, cj ..., cn (n > 1) are categories, basic or derived, we have a derived category written (c/c1 ... cn ...)' (3) Context-free PS-rules like c --> (c/c1 ... cn ...) + c1 + ... + cn, to be paired to each category. PS-rules are implicit in any system of derived categories. (4) A lexicon with a finite number of expressions words or morphemes assigned to categories of lexical expressions, basic or derived. No non-lexical compounds could be generated unless lexical expressions belong to derived categories. Though the lexicon can have an infinite number of derived categories and a finite number of PS-rules, only a few categories and a few rules will be used. Yet the lexicon is still capable of generating an infinite number of compound expressions. To make a categorial grammar specific, specify its lexicon. The rest is common to all categorial grammars. Here is a sample lexicon: [
(S/(S/N))/C>
C>
]
[
(S/N)/S>
(S/N)/(S/N)>
]
[ <every
(S/(S/N))/C)
N>
1
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[
S/N>
<something
S/(S/N)>
]
[
(S/N)/N>
(S/(S//N))/C>
1
[
(S/N)/N>
<which
(C/C)/(S/N)>
I
[
N>
C/C>
I
Categorial grammars are notational variants of a context-free grammar: [NP + VP S
Porky
--> [VP + Npr
[Adv + VP S
--> [Vt + Npr
Npr -->
Petunia
NP -->
something
Nco -->
pig
VP -->
grunts
[Vs + S [loves
NP
--> Art + Nco
Vt -->
[is
Vs
believes [a
Nco --> Adj + Nco
Art >
[every [the
Adj --> Rel + VP
Adj -->
yellow
Adv -->
piggishly
Rel -->
which
This grammar has three peculiarities: (1) proper Ns are not NPs: proper Ns or NPs may be subjects (though word-order changes) but only proper Ns may be objects; (2) nothing prevents inappropriate iteration of modifiers, and (3) word order is sometimes odd. All three oddities can be overcome. The rewrite rules in the following example are the eight PS-rules matched to the eight derived categories Lewis uses: LEWIS' EQUIVALENTS
GRAMMATICAL SYMBOLS VOCABULARY EXAMPLES [NP + VP S--> [VP + Npr
[Adv + VP S--> [Vt + Npr
Porky
N
Npr -->
Petunia
N
NP -->
something
S/(S/N))
Nco -->
pig
C
VP -->
grunts
S/N
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[Vs + S
NP
--> Art + Nco
Nco --> Adj + Nco
Adj --> Rel + VP
[loves
(S/N)/N
Vt -->
[is
(S/N)/N
Vs
[believes
(S/N)/S
[a
(S/S/N))/C
[every
(S/S/N))/C
[the
(S/S/N))/C
Adj -->
yellow
C/C
Adv -->
piggishly
(S/N)/(S/N)
Rel -->
which
(C/C(/(S/N)
Art -->
Though a bit hesitant about it on logical and on natural language grounds, Lewis' Representation of the `base structure' of Some pig grunts is: S S/NS
N
some
X
S S/SS and
S
S
S/N
N
S/N
N
pig
x
grunts
x
15.58 A Montague Grammar And Lewis' Representation both contain a LEXICON, SYNTACTIC RULES and SEMANTIC RULES. Montague Grammar's 'syntax' is a set of rules for 'rewriting' Categories. These redefinitions of syntactic categories result in a PS-grammar. Semantactic rule-pairs construct an interpretation of Propositions which underly Sentences, using the norms of truth-conditional predicate logic. Montague equated natural and formal languages theoretically (1970a.189) and found semanticfree 'syntax' uninteresting (1970a.373). So he found early TG lacked `adequacy, mathematical precision and elegance' but was willing to suspend judgement until a `more definitive and intelligible' account was available. Linguists were impressed by his formalization of semantic statements, though a Montague Grammar seems skeletal, compared to an Aspects' model (cf. p 448 above). That must be more complex than Montague's approach because it includes data irrelevant to his focus. Units and interdependences in a Montague Grammar involve three basic factors: A. LEXICON. Items pairing a representation in an intensional logic notation and marked for syntactic category
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B. SYNTACTIC RULES like the following: If a$ A and b$ B, then g$C, where g = F1 (a,b) 'if a is a member of A and b a member of B, then c is a member of C, where c = (a and b)' [alpha, beta, gamma (transcribed as c) = strings of terminal symbols and A,] [B, C = syntactic categories. F1 is mostly a simple concatenation operation;] [quantification-rules are more like T-rules. Since there is no strict ordering,] [there are no analogues of 'deep/surface' structure in Montague Grammar.] C. SEMANTIC RULES are unique translation rules, representing a phrase resulting from a syntactic rule in an intensional logic formula as a specified function of the translations of its parts. A second stage of `interpretation' matches modeltheoretic semantics with that of intensional logic. Generalized Transformations had `P2' projection rules, so Katz & Fodor's (1963) `P1' projection rules also say phrase-structure rules correspond to different P1 rules. Partee (1973) saw that hypothesizing syntactic-rule/semantic-rule-association motivates a preference for a given analysis, as in the alternatives for the relative clause in (the boy) who lives in the park: (a)
S NP S DET N the
boy
(b)
who lives in the park
NP DET NOM NOM S N the
boy
who lives in the park
If each syntactic rule entails a semantic consequence, then only (b) is the appropriate structure, since only there are the two class-denoting phrases [boy and who lives in the park], combined to form a class-denoting phrase interpretable as the intersection of the two classes: those entities which both live in the park and are boys. Combining the with the result leads to the correct assertion that it is that class with a unique member (Partee 1973.512). 15.59 Logical Notation Confirmation from other languages is an acid test for universality-claims. Logical notation aims at a kind of universality, but familiarity with it may be as uncommon as knowledge of Montague Grammar. Bach (1989) is a lucid introduction to concepts involved and Allwood,
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Andersson and Dahl (1977) explain a common notation (c.f note 1). Allwood et al find that linguists define language well in phonology, morphology and some aspects of syntax, but do poorly in providing an objective and formal structure for the content of natural languages. Logic excels at that, though logicians are not concerned with content-sense or content-reference. Representing the latter was a concern of traditional logic, as in (1)
All
men
are
John
is
John
is
mortal a man mortal
A less language-bound way of expressing (1)'s message is: (2)
ALL
C are
A
ONE
B
is
a C
THIS
B
is
A
Elimiating variable BE forms allows a `more formal' and `less substantive' expression: (3)
ALL
C
=
A
ONE
B
=
C
THIS
B
=
A
But (2) is still English-bound: all says that whatever it constructs with is wholly associated with whatever follows the BE-form in (2) or the `=` sign of (3). The signs one, a (C) and this share grammatical singularity; this is appropriate because its antecedent is tied to one, and natives know that this one refers to an instance of A. (3) is still ambiguous as to whether the association which `=` posits for left-side members equates A with grammar's some A, an A, or all A on the right of the equation. (1) as well as its (2) and (3) `abstract paraphrases' respect common IE conventions (singulars man and is, plurals men and are, Ø men/man vs. a man, all material or etic details. Some limitations can be avoided emically (formally), with language-neutral, logical signs: math-like characters which Aristotle would say, signify but do not consignify. That is best done by inventing symbols different from ordinary words, and spelling out how the symbols function within such a framework, free of languagepeculiar rules and connection to external data. Speakers without a common language can count the same way. Draw a box with some letters inside, others outside of it. Everyone can agree about one aspect of those symbols' `meaning': they are either inside or outside of the box.
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15.60 Drawing 'References' or 'Referents'. If we agree that our box represents ENGLISH, we can see whether a or b are ± inside it. That makes part of `Meaning' (Reference or Denotation) visible: if a = Churchill and b = Stalin, stating that a = English and b English derives from both a valid and a true representation of a state of affairs the drawing represents. But if ADMIRABLE replaces ENGLISH, we may agree that the `in-or-out-statements' are visually valid, but disagree about their truth. Truth-decisions are subjective while those about validity are inter-subjective or objective. To assure validity, logic uses no expressions where subjective interpretation varies. Objective validity needs empirical evidence; subjective truth involves other linguistic and culture-bound factors. How would you establish empirically that the Mona Lisa is not smiling, but smirking? Connotations inevitably dilute the clarity of technical terms when they are used in ordinary conversation. An `unabridged' 1976 edition of Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary, for instance, cites mathematically defined uses of set 2, element3, relation4 operation5 and function6. Since Formal (symbolic) Logic aims at the tautologous accuracy of mathematics, this is not a complete loss. Counting is independent of information about what is being counted. Take, for instance, the logical notion of Set: 15.61 Formal Notions and Notation: For all its complexity, Set Theory starts simply: a Logical Set is a collection. A set's members ± may share something. So Sets = their members or elements and we readily sub-distinguish those sets whose membership is exhausted by one unit [you], no units [female US presidents], or only by all units [things]. The symbols used in logical writings are of a considerable variety, but a few are reproduced in the end-notes with their glosses. 15.62 Central Questions for Syntax: Seeing why ''2 plus 2 what make 4?" is an irrelevant question is like seeing why ignoring some to focus on other properties can better handle particular aspects of language. Phonologists study factors neglected by phoneticians; phonemics is a subpart of phonology; we can study the vocabulary or grammar of languages we are unable to pronounce. Adjusting to novel perspectives is demanding. Moravczik and Wirth (1980) sent questions like these to help participants in their Syntax-Semantics Conference highlight their particular focus: Given the Goals of Syntax, what are your primary data and in what domains do you operate? How does your representation distinguish constants and variables? With those goals, should syntactic accounts describe, predict and explain data? Are meaning-sound relations central and what empirical interpretation do your syntactic statements have? To what practical use can they be put and what kind of syntactic arguments do you consider legitimate? Does your approach formulate discovery procedures? Can
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more than one grammar result from your approach, or do you assume that only one is correct? Is there more than one level of syntactic representation in your approach to syntax? Do you distinguish between terms and relations? Do you consider the effect of your syntactic statements to be 1. Rules 2. Constraints on individual syntactic representations 3. Constraints on syntactic derivations 4. Constraints on sets of syntactic derivations 5. Principles 6. Strategies 7. Hierarchies 8. (Other)? Are constraints imposed in your syntactic statements and how is your syntax used? Is `syntactic derivation' applicable? Does your approach distinguish obligatory and optional rules? Is the order in which your rules apply crucial? How do you determine the directionality of process statements? How do syntax and semantics relate within your grammar? Does your approach require that syntactic statements be made in some formal language? What do you consider your most significant and distinctive claims, and what aspects of your grammar are empirically falsifiable? How do you relate your approach to others and what do you consider the problem areas for yours? 15.63 Testable Texts: Robin Cooper contributed a paper on Montague Syntax. Like Hjelmslev, Montague ignored the suggestion that inductive formalizations of language-fragments could be proposed and later revised for incorporation into an overall grammar. His procedure was to write rules generating precisely defined subparts (e.g., in propositional logic) then find what properties carry over to first order predicate calculus. 15.64 Recursive Definitions & Well-Formedness: For his `Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English' (1972: now commonly PTQ), Montague gives an a priori definition of Sentence as: the set of all strings consisting of a's and b's and containing at least either a or b, i.e. [a, ab, aa, ab, ba, bb, aaa. . .]. That is what Rule (1) produces: (1) X and beta;
X(
= `is a member of')
BASE:
alpha;
RECURSION CLAUSE:
IF alpha
EXCLUSION CLAUSE:
Nothing X except as required by the base and the recursion clause
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X, then alpha-beta
X
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PTQ syntax elaborates on Rule (1) by defining a set for each category of a language. This identifies both an expression in it and the category to which the expression belongs. The BASE lists the basic elements (LEXICON) of the language. The RECURSION CLAUSE is not always single as in (1) nor simply for concatenation. A sample might be worded as (2) If alpha
PC and beta
PD, then Fi (alpha, beta)
PE, where F ~ (alpha, beta) is...
in more ordinary language, (3) If alpha is a phrase of category C and beta is a phrase of category D, then the result of applying the syntactic operation Fi to an alpha and a beta is a phrase of the category E, where the result of applying Fi to these arguments is... Subsequent Montague Grammar takes PTQ's syntax as its model. Cooper sees contrasts between this approach and TG worth noting: Well-formedness Constraint: What recursion rules generate is, as stipulated by convention in Logic, well-formed by definition. No expression can cease to be well-formed nor become well-formed by another rule within a Montague Grammar. No Extrinsic Rule-ordering: Since no rule is obligatory, ordering among rules is excluded. To discover that something is of category C, for instance, check the rule which has C in its antecedent. Call this intrinsic ordering: Subject-Aux, for instance, applies after wh-Question Formation because of intrinsic ordering. No Abstract Levels in Syntax: Transformations relate pairs which are defined at different syntactic levels; Montague's syntax lacks 'levels' in the same sense. Think of syntax as generating trees which demonstrate that some expression is a member of a set. Montague-Trees are like TG-trees, except that complex expressions replace category symbols in higher nodes. E.g.: (4) the farmer
[ kill ] the duckling [ MV ] [ PAST ] [ kill ]
the farmer T.2.2
the duckling IV.4 [ MV ]
farmer CN, 1 [ kill ]
TV, 1 the duckling T, 2.2
[NV ] the duckling, CN, 1
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[ letters to the right of phrases indicate their category, numbers identify the syntactic operation applied ] Montague grammar is organized more simply than TG: its complexity is found in the typology of operations [cf. Bach 1979a and Partee 1979b]. Yet some examples of M-syntax are equivalent to TG, and Cooper thinks they can be combined. 15.65 The Importance of Samantics: Linguists found Montague's most important contribution is formulation of a publicly refutable semantics: every language has NPs (phrases denoting property-sets); they dominate proper and common Ns constructed with determiners and quantifiers. They are what mathematical logicians work with. NP-quantifier-pair vs. NP-determiner-pair suggests why a whole NP seems involved in Movement or in receiving wide scope interpretation rather than just the determiner part being involved. Interpreting NPs semantically as quantifiers, and the association of traditional movement rules with wide scope quantification, may help explain why, if anything undergoes movement in a language, NPs do. Earlier TG work tied regularities to syntax which it later located in the semantics: active/passive sentences could then be related without Ts by using a transitive V in both structures, but combining that V's NP-arguments in different orders. Corresponding to active (4) above is passive (5). The rule combining TV (transitive verb) kill and the agent phrase (the farmer) is paired with a semantic rule: that says that the interpretation of the farmer occupies first-argument-place in the interpretation of the verb kill and that the passive phrase combined with a subject will fill the second argument place with the interpretation of the subject. So (5)'s interpretation is that of (4). [ be ]
(5):
killed by the farmer t, 3
the duckling [ MV ] [ PAST ] the duckling T, 2.2
[ be ]
killed by the farmer IV, I
[ MV ] [ be ],
[V/PassPhr, 1 killed by the farmer
duckling, CN, 1 [ MV ] Pass Phr, 10 [kill], TV, I the farmer, T, 2.2 [MV] farmer, CN, 1
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15.66 T-Raise-to-Object. In M-grammar, believe is in two categories [IV/t & IV//t] related by a lexical redundancy rule: IV = intransitive V(P) and t = a truth-value-denoting expression / sentence. This notation means that words in these categories combine with a sentence to make a VP. Slashes (/) distinguish them: if V is in category IV/t, then (6a) results, and V combines with a tensed sentence. If V is in category IV//t, then (6b) is appropriate, and V becomes infinitival at the point where the combination takes place: Since the interpretations of believe in (6 a,b) below are identical, T-raise-to-Object is not needed. Alternatives analyses are possible: in a Montague-framework, Partee (1975) invokes that transformation; Thomason (1976) and Dowty (1978b) analyze raising-verbs as being in the category TV/INF (i.e. they combine with an infinitive phrase to make a transitive verb).
(6) (a) [ believe ]
that John[ kill ] the farmer, IV, 7
[ MV ] [ believe ]
[ PAST ] John[ kill ] the farmer t, 3
[ MV ]
[ MV ] [ PAST ]
(6) (b)[ believe] John to have killed the farmer, IV, 8 [ MV ] [ believe ], IV//t 1 [ MV ]
John[ kill ]
the farmer, t, 3
[ MV ] [ PAST ]
15.67 T-Dative-Move. Give belongs to two lexical categories, related in M-grammar by a lexical rule like a TG redundancy rule. One give combines V with two objects; the other give combines V with an object and a to-phrase: Harriet denied her husband the opportunity to go to (7)a. Australia b.*Harriet denied the opportunity to her husband c. *I donated the library the book d.I donated the book to the library 15.68 T-Conj-Reduce: Semantically, (8) involves the same kind of conjunction which occurs between sentences: (8) John loved the woman and killed the farmer
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Some TG analyses derive (8) from (9) and apply a T-Conjunction Reduction: (9) John loved the woman and John killed the farmer Montague grammar generates (8) directly by a VP-conjunction rule, yet captures the fact that and is identical with Sconjunction, which TG finds hard to define. The conjoined VP (10a) matches the property represented in (lOb): (10)a.love the woman and kill the farmer the property of being an x, such that x love the woman and b. x kill the farmer Cooper concludes that transformational and Montague Syntax diverge mostly in that M-Syntax is a recursive definition-set of well-formed expressions: its PS- and T-like operations are thus not distinct, as in TG. Montague's T-like operations apply as phrases are built up, pairing semantic with syntactic formation rules. 15.69 TG & MG Compared. Would interpreting the rules themselves provide an alternative to these devices? Since both interpretations of believe are identical, a T-Raise-to-Object is not needed. Alternatives analyses are possible: in a Montague-framework, Partee (1975) invokes that transformation; Thomason (1976) and Dowty (1978b) analyze raising-verbs as examples of the category TV/INF (i.e. they combine with an infinitive phrase to make a transitive verb). Cooper sees TG and MG converge in approaching a less abstract syntax: what Ts once did can now be done by the lexicon and semantics; treating Passive as a rule which changes an active verb into a passive verb phrase resembles work by Bresnan. The lexical treatment proposed by Dowty for rules like Dative Movement is essentially what Bresnan suggests. Montague initiated a nonabstract syntax to show how to define a semantics directly on English without an artificial logical form. Linguists try to develop nonabstract syntaxes because they are concerned about the psychological reality of syntax. It seemed encouraging to Cooper that the two points of view lead to such similar results. 15.70 The Nature of Syntactic Representation: A conference organized at about the same time as Moravczic and Wirth's by Jacobson & Pullum resulted in their The Nature of Syntactic Representation (1982). Some had argued that the lexicon accounts for most of what Ts handled in terms of derivations; others thought semantics could be adapted to the task: much within the tradition known as Montague Grammar has been in the latter
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direction. Chomsky (1977, 1980) invoked trace theory to reduce the role of derivation. The lines of inquiry seemed to be logically independent. David Dowty's Grammatical Relations and Montague Grammar (Jacobson & Pullum 1982.79-130) presented features of Montague's syntax and semantics. Instead of using a PS Grammar to define syntactic structure, Montague's recursive definitions constructed S from the inside out: start with words, combine them to form phrases, and combine these to form sentences. A typical syntactic rule says: take a term phrase (Montague's label for an NP, not Relational Grammar's term), combine it with an intransitive verb, and you get a sentence: John is a term phrase and walk an intransitive verb, so John walks is an S by this rule. An 'Analysis Tree' diagrams it as (1) [John walk(s) ]t JohnT
walkIV
where t stands for S (and S has a truth value), T for term phrase and IV for Intransitive Verb. Montague grammar lacks a + Lexical Category, so IV doubles as VP; combining a TV (transitive verb) with a T by a rule, gives an IV. If love = TV and John = T, then love John is an IV by this rule. Using this first rule, take the IV love John and combine it with another T Mary to produce: (2)
[ Mary love(s) John ]t MaryT
love JohnIV loveTV
JohnT
Montague's semantics unites expressions and the things they denote or situations they describe within an isomorphic representation. Relating expressions to non-linguistic entities makes the semantic notions truth and denotation basic. The theory associates each name with an individual which that name denotes in each possible situation. Take the IV walk: it is associated with a function that picks out the set of things having the property `walk'. A semantic rule makes subject-predicate-sentences true only in situations where the individual denoted by the subject is in the set of things denoted by the predicate. Every syntactic rule is paired to a semantic rule: sentence-meaning is each word's meaning added to the meaning(s) of every syntactic rule applied to it - in an absolutely uniform fashion. Most logicians take transitive verbs to denote a relation between ordered pairs: love<x, y>, such that x loves y not Montague. A TV does indeed combine with the names of two individuals, but the verb combines with these
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terms by means of two separate rules for the sentence, not one rule. Besides, the second semantic rule must be the same as that used for intransitive verbs. Montague's solution is to let a TV denote a function which in any situation applies to one individual to give a new function. That function will then apply to another individual to give a truth value. A diagram may help: (3) below is the kind of function that would be the denotation of a one-place predicate if the domain of discourse consisted of these individuals a and b: { a, b } Given the set (3) assume the domain of discourse
= { a, b, c } [ a --> 1 ] [ b --> 1 =]
then the Denotation of walk(x) [ c --> 0 ] (4) exemplifies the usual denotation of a TV assumed by logicians: the situation where the individual a loves only the individual b and the individual b loves only the individual c, while the individual c loves only himself, and no one else loves anyone else except for these three cases: (4) Denotation of love(x, y) = [ --> 0 ] [ --> 1 ] [ --> 0 ] [ --> 0 ] [ --> 0 ] [ --> 1 ] [ --> 0 ] [ --> 0 ] [ --> 1 ] (5) shows an equivalent denotation for a verb love in Montague's approach: that 'denotation' is a function applying to the individual named by the object-of-the-verb to give a new function which then is applied to the individual named by the subjectof-the-verb: [ a --> 0 ] ] (5) Denotation of (love(y))(x) = [ a --> [ b --> 0 ] ] [ c --> 0 ] ] [ a --> 1 ] ] [ b --> [ b --> 0 ] ] [ c --> 0 ] ] [ a --> 0 ] ] [ c --> [ b --> 1 ] ] [ c --> 1 ] ]
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If the name John denotes individual c, the meaning of the phrase love John is obtained by applying the function (5) to c, a new function not represented in (3) or (4). If the name Mary denotes individual b, the denotation of Mary loves John is determined by applying this function to b, yielding the value 1 - true. Just by looking, one can see that (5) represents the same information about who loves whom as (4) does, but the two diagrams isolate the pairs in reverse order: (4) lists the individual denoted by the subject first in each pair, while in (5), the function applies to the object first. These details are basic to grasping the theory of grammatical relations proposed: the identical method applies to verbs with any number of arguments. Though give has 3 arguments in non-Montague images, it is not treated as denoting a set of ordered triples, but a function that applies to one individual and gives as value a second function which applies to the third individual to give a truth value. Any verb, no matter how many arguments it has, can always be treated as a function which applies to one thing at a time. 15.71 Defining Grammatical Relations: Montague's `one argument at a time' approach to others' one-, two-, or more-argument-verbs (intransitive, transitive, [potentially] ditransitive) bases a viable semantic treatment of such verbs and is crucial to the account of Grammatical Relations which Dowty proposes. It implies a certain interrelationship among the syntactic categories involved in sentences with n-place verbs as well as with the syntactic rules used to form sentences with these verbs. This is a consequence of the sort of isomorphism Montague requires between syntactic and semantic rules. So the `Principle of grammatical relations' needed is: (6) A verb that ultimately takes n arguments is always treated as combining by a syntactic rule with exactly one argument to produce a phrase of the same category as a verb of n - 1 arguments. Montague distinguished the operation which a syntactic rule performs on an expression from the rule itself. The rule specifies what categories of expressions are inputs to, and outputs of, the rule; it also specifies what operation must be used in putting expressions together. The same syntactic operation might be used in more than one rule. Dowty suggests that syntactic operations may vary, language by language, while syntactic rules (and their corresponding semantic operations) may be formally identical. Montague's 1970 Universal Grammar specified the format of a syntactic rule as an ordered triple: the rule names a syntactic operation (using capital F (I) with a subscript), (2)the rule lists the sequence of input-categories, and (3)the rule gives its output category.
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So the subject-predicate rule used in (l) and (2) would be formalized in (7) (one would also have to specify just what operations F1 and F2 perform): (7) S1: < F1, , t> (Subject-Predicate Rule) S2: < F2, , IV>
(Verb-Direct Object Rule)
15.72 Syntactic Rules and Languages' Semantics. Dowty exemplifies how these rules are used in essentially the same form in English, Japanese, Breton and Latin, and that the corresponding semantic operations are the same. They differ in how the operations F1 and F2 are defined. Languages vary in their preferred order of Subject, Verb and Object. In SVO English, F1 and F2 do not just concatenate forms, but effect their number-marking as well as case-marking, as sketched in (8). In SOV Japanese, F1 and F2 effect the suffixation of -ga to the subject and -o to the object term, but here, F2 concatenates its 2nd argument to the left of the first instead of to the right, as in (9). For VSO Breton, (10) shows the subject-predicate operation cannot just concatenate: it must insert the subject term phrase after the first word of the verb phrase (Bach 1979's `right wrap') - which no PS rule can do. Latin's order is flexible but Montague's theory does not demand natural sentences be either ordered strings of symbols or Pmarkers. So operations F1 and F2 may be those shown in (11): subject and object are marked by case-endings, derived expressions are otherwise the union of 2 unordered sets. (8) English (SVO) [ Mary love(s) him ]t MaryT
love himTV loveTV
heT
(9) Japanese (SOV) F1(alpha, beta) = beta + ga-alpha F2(alpha, beta) = beta + o-alpha [ John-ga Mary-o butta ] JohnT
[ Mary-o butta ]t butTV
MaryT
"John hit Mary"
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(10) Breton (VSO) F1(alpha, beta) = the result of inserting beta after the first word in alpha F2(alpha, beta) = alpha-beta. [ E tebro Yannig krampouezh ] YannigT
[ e tebro krampouezh ]IV tebro1V
ktampouezhT
''Jonny will eat crepes" (11) Latin (`free') F1(alpha, beta) = alpha' U beta' [where beta' is the result of marking beta nominative and alpha' is alpha marked to agree with beta] F2(alpha, beta) = alpha U beta' [where beta' is beta marked with the accusative case] { Marcus, Fulviam, amat }t { Marcus }T
{ Fulviam, amare }IV { amare }IV
{ Fulvia }T
"Marcus loves Fulvia" It is syntactic rules like F1 and F2, minus specifics about what operations F1 and F2 effect, which constitute the universal definitions of relations like Subject-of and Object-of: any term-phrase in any language combined with an IV by means of S1 is defined as a subject term, and any term-phrase combined with a TV via S2 is defined as a direct object. 15.73 Universal Validity. These are still language-independent semantic definitions: the semantic rules corresponding to the syntactic rules S1 and S2 will be identical except for language-peculiar morphology and word-order. So Dahl (1977) quoting Curry (1963.65) suggests what to ignore in establishing 4-term Analogies: see a language algebraically as a finite set of elementary expressions plus a set of operations recursively applicable to them, forming new and larger expressions. What proves a grammar to be an analogically
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defined Grammar is the sequence of formative step-series, not the linearity of its Representation nor morphological markings: We may conceive of the grammatical structure of a language as something independent of the way it is represented in terms of expressions. This gives us two levels of grammar, the study of grammatical structure in itself and a second level which has much the same relation to the first that morphophonemics has to morphology. In order to have terms for immediate use I shall call these two levels tectogrammatics and phenogrammatics. 15.74 Tectogrammatics. Dowty sees universal grammatical relations as aspects of tecto-grammatics, not pheno-grammatics: like a Montague Grammar analysis tree with Ø expressions at non-terminal nodes:
Recall that a 3-place verb can be related to a 2-place transitive in the same way that a 2-place transitive can be related to an intransitive: the rule defining the Indirect Object relation is S3:
(13)
(Verb-Indirect Object Rule)
S3: ,TV> English:
F3(alpha,beta) = alpha-to-beta, where beta is the accusative form of beta the rule in English inserts to before the term phrase; in other languages, it marks it with dative case. Ditransitive verbs are labelled TV/T. 15.75 Functional Grammar Composition, Distribution and Function are neither ambiguous nor univocal expressions. They are analogical terms (cf. pp. 133ff above), technical labels used by different authors to discuss phonetic, phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic and semantic units in predictably different ways. Simon Dik's functional perspective takes 'language' to be a symbolic tool used for pragmatic communicative purposes: its structure, therefore, cannot be understood adequately if its actual use is excluded (in Moravcsik and Wirth 1980.45-75). M.A.K. Halliday's Systemic theory exploits Firth's formal contrast of System/Structure (cf. p. 324 above). Halliday sees his functional approach as describing more concretely how speakers use that theoretical system to get others to behave in a certain way. Success or failure may be explainable in terms of how well speakers and hearers share systems of systems (Halliday 1985.xiiif). Firbas (1992) also sees
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the need for a double perspective: written language (which is more like Saussure's static langue) and spoken language (like dynamic parole). 15.76 Raids are not Wars Firbas agrees with Vilem Mathesius (1882-1946) that Fortress Language must be attacked from all sides and by all means. His own tactics for isolating how that unconquered redoubt signals 'meaning' uses terminology which overlaps with that of others'. The uninitiated must continually recur to his abbreviations to follow Firbas' insights. Frequently occurring ones are B (bearer of quality) and Q (quality), CD (communicative dynamism), FSp (functional sentence perspective), Ph (phenomenon to be presented), Pr (presentation of phenomenon), d (context-dependent), TME (exponent of tense and mood) and Set (setting). 7 15.77 Sentence and Text For English, German and Czech versions of a paragraph from Hugo's Les Misérables8 Firbas sketches (a) the concepts involved, (b) how the interplay among FSp factors determinine the CD degree which (c) elements ± gain, all serving prove that "FSp constitutes a system". (Firbas 1992.3). This illustrates what is meant by his Functional Sentence Perspective: given the units and structure of a text, what message are they best designed to express? The communicative purpose of Hugo's first sentence: (1) There is, in the cemetery of Père Lachaise, in the neighborhood of the poor side, far from the fashionable quarter of this city of tombs, far from those fantastic sepulchres, which blazon in the presence of eternity the hideous fashions of death, in a deserted corner alongside an old wall, under a lofty yew upon which bindweed climbs, and amid couchgrass and moss, a tombstone. he finds, is to present a phenomenon (a tombstone) toward which the development of the larger communication is `oriented/ perspectived'. The other sentences have another orientation: to specify the object or ascribe a quality [an action or state, ± permanent or ± concrete]. 15.78 Central and Peripheral How do elements not completing a communication contribute to its development? 'Irretrievable' information contributes more but irretrievable items can be less dynamic than those which complete it. While a finite verb may complete development, its competitors can be items with superior CD. Any element can have a higher CD than others: though positions are important, an element's CD is relative to more than linearity. A Quality Bearer carries less CD than an irretrievable quality or specification. While generally valid for IE languages, basic need not be equated with the most natural, most frequent or unmarked. Semantic and contextual factors may interfere with linear modification and their interplay may determine sentences' functional perspective: language is
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indeed a system, but not a rigidly closed one. Intonation may determine the interpretation of factors as Settings or Specifications. 15.79 Communicative Dynamism (CD) shifts with a factor's dominating or dominated place in FSp (functional sentence perspective). Firbas uses communication as an undefined constant in relation to which factors are to be variably rated. A sentence is a relational unity within which grammatical and semantic units define each other: 'names' for 'thought' about 'things' are structured semantically by syntax, so "...the communicative (functional) perspective is implemented in the course of the twofold process outlined..." (Firbas 1992.14). While After the row, he went to bed and slept. Fast and soundly. are marked as two written sentences, they are worth considering as potential structures which intonation could actualize as a single utterance. (Firbas 1992.16) 15.80 Context and Meaning How Context is to be interpreted depends on whether it is defined in terms of overt tokens or covert knowledge. Firbas labels the referent of one written expression retrievable if a co-referential expression co-occurs within a given stretch of text. While an identical third person may be derivable from (Caesar) venit, vidit, vicit ['(Caesar) came, (he) saw, (he) conquered'] an identical first person is retrievable in Veni, vidi, vici. Where Chafe (1973.30) allows what speaker and hearer should both know to distinguish old from new information, Firbas demands actual forms for retrievable information. (Firbas 1992.37) Semantic covers "the impact that the semantic character of a linguistic element, as well as the character of its semantic relations, has on the distribution of degrees of CD" (Firbas 1992.41): CD as 'communicative dynamism' is quite different from 'grammaticality', so in a set (p. 44) like a) *She broke. b) She broke a vase. / *She broke it. c) She broke the vase. / *She broke it. d) She broke it. e) She did it. a) demands a complement syntactically and semantically; since b)'s vase is context-independent, it cannot be pronominalized, while c)'s context-dependent vase can (but need not) be; d)'s communication is wholly developed by the lexical verb, while e)'s content is bare 'assertion'. 15.81 Context Independence The generalization that "a context-independent object exceeds a verb in CD" (Firbas 1992.44-6): is subject to 4 restrictions: (1) when the context-independent [c-i] object is something or an interrogative (He wanted to ask her something or What did he mean by saying...); (2) when a sentence's verb is 'perspectived towards' the c-i subject
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(as in A cold blue light filled the window panes); (3) when its c-i object is contrastive with an initial element (The towns they attacked with tanks, the villages with aeroplanes); (4) when a c-i object occurs before its c-i subject, as in Einen Löwen hat ein Jäger erschossen [like '(It was) a lion a hunter shot']. A Verb is usually context-independent. Competition for its CD comes from c-i adverbs, subject- and object-complements. A complement (like objects) "conveys important amplificatory information...a description...of the subject or object to which it is related by the verb...has something new to say about either... and as a rule proves to be dynamically stronger than they or the verb..." (Firbas 1992.46). "...it is in terms of visual and acoustic perception that the notions conveyed by the subjects are presented to the reader's attention, and in this way induced to appear on the scene". (Firbas 1992.48) 15.82 Central vs. Peripheral The 'centrality' of one communication factor makes others 'peripheral', as in a head-expansion unity, in which the head is the foundation/core or notional theme. In (Caesar) venit vs. (Illa) venit, the overt c-i subjects compete differently with the verb's CD than in Caesar came or She came. English demands an overt SV, while Latin sentences allow V: (Poor) John ran (away) might be (Infelix) Johannes (ef)fugit. Verbs either orient their content toward a subject-presented phenomenon or (a specification of) a quality it expresses: they Present (Pr) or ascribe Quality (Q). Subjects express either the Phenomenon (Ph) or Quality Bearer (B) and Verb competitors express a Setting (Set) or Specification (Sp). These two functions vary dynamically with the flow of communication, yielding scales of Presentation and Quality, varying in their CD increment. The scales reflect an interpretative rather than a linear arrangement, though they may overlap. as in: Linnets (Ph) sang (Pr) in the trees (Set). Ages ago (Set) a young king (B) ruled (Q) his country (Sp) capriciously and despotically (FSp) Since both scales start with a setting and a Ph-element precedes a B-element, a Combined Scale could be Set - Pr - B - Q - Sp FSp. Elements, of course, can implement more than one function as units or unities. (p. 67) Some verbs, for instance, serve a copular function: in A writer (B) felt (AofQ) despondent (Q), felt ascribes a quality (AofQ) to writer just as is does to Mary in Mary is kind, so its positions in the Quality and Combined Scale are Set - B Set - Pr
- Ph
- AofQ - Q
- Sp
- FSp
- B - AofQ - Q
- Sp
- FSp
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though not every element need be implemented. These scales are of context-independent items. 15.83 Text vs. Sentence Firbas deals with texts, not isolated sentences, so a verb's notional ("lexical") vs. categorial ("grammatical") content acquires extra-sentential determinants: in He really has, replying to Has he ever read such a book? (Firbas 1992.70]), categorial has acquires higher CD than notional read. Verbs performing Pr, AofQ and Q-functions mediate between other elements by developing the communication beyond contextdependent B- or Set-elements, thus surpassing them in CD. Temporal and Modal Exponents [TMEs], as in He couldn't possibly have read such a book, uniquely link and divide a message's foundation (theme) and core (non-theme). No function is position-bound, but rheme and transition must be implemented. Any context-dependent (c-d) element is thematic, and cedes in CD to c-i non-thematic ones. Within a non-theme, transitionals cede to rhematics, the transition itself being lowest on the CD scale. The rheme proper (the element with the information toward which the communication is perspectived) has the highest CD, though competitors may lower it, as his analyses of texts show (Firbas 1992.74-81). There are also predictable differences between the interpretation of static texts and dynamic utterances in varying contexts (p. 86). Reading Blake, Barry J. 1990. Relational Grammar. New York. Routledge. Bresnan, Joan W. 1978. Toward a Realistic Model of Transformational Grammar, in Halle & Miller eds., Linguistic Theory and Psychological Reality. Cambridge, MIT Press. Firbas, Jan. 1992. Functional Grammar in written and spoken communication. New York. Cambridge. Jacobson, Pauline, and G.K. Pullum, eds. 1982. The Nature of Syntactic Representation. Dordrecht, Reidel. Moravcsik, Edith A. and Jessica R. Wirth (eds.) 1980. Syntax and Semantics Volume 13. Current Approaches to Syntax. New York. Academic Press. Partee, Barbara H. (ed.). 1976. Montague Grammar. New York. Academic Press. Further Reading Akmajian, A., P. Cullicover and T. Wasow. 1977. Formal Syntax. New York, Academic Press. Anderson, Stephen. 1977. Comments on Wasow's paper: The role of `theme' in lexical rules, In Akmajian et al. Berry, Margaret. 1975. Introduction to Systemic Linguistics. Vol I: Structures and Systems. London. Batsford. 1977. Vol. 2: Levels and links. London. Batsford. Brame, M. 1976. Conjectures and Refutations in Syntax and Semantics. Amsterdam. North-Holland. Bresnan, Joan W. 1971. On Sentence Stress and Syntactic Transformation. Language 47.257-281. 1972. Theory of Complementation in English Syntax. Doctoral dissertation, MIT, published by Garland Press, New York.
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1976a. Evidence for a theory of unbounded transformations. Linguistic Analysis 2.353-393. 1976b. On the form and functioning of transformations. Linguistic Inquiry 7.3-40. 1980a `Polyadicity'. In T. Hoekstra, H. van der Hulst & M. Moortgat eds. Lexical Grammar. Dordrecht, Reidel. 1980b. ed. The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations. Cambridge MA. MIT Press and J. Grimshaw. 1978. The syntax of free relatives in English. Linguistic Inquiry 9.331-391. Brown, Roger. 1973. A First Language: The Early Stages. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1964. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. The Hague. Mouton. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MIT Press. 1970a. Remarks on Nominalization. In Jacobs and Rosenbaum. and H. Lasnik. 1977. Filters and Control. Linguistic Inquiry 8.425-504. Fodor, Janet, T. Bever and M. Garrett. 1974. An Introduction to Psycholinguistics and Generative Grammar. New York. McGraw-Hill. Halle, Morris, Joan Bresnan and George Miller, eds. 1983(1978) Linguistic Theory and Psycho logical Reality. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press. Halliday, M.A.K. 1985. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London. Arnold. Jacobs, R. and R. Rosenbaum. 1970. Readings in Transformational Grammar. Boston. Ginn. Kajita, M. 1968. A Generative-Transformational Study of Semi-Auxiliaries in Present day American English. Tokyo. Sanseido. Kaplan, R. 1977. Computational Linguistics: The syntactic component. Lectures presented at the IV International Summer School in Computational and Mathematical Linguistics. Pisa, Italy. Koutsoudas, A. 1972. The strict order fallacy. Language 48.88-96. 1973. Extrinsic order and the complex NP constraint. Linguistic Inquiry 4.69-81. Langacker, R. 1969. On pronominalization and the chain of command. In Reibel and Schane, eds. Modern Studies in English. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice Hall. Lasnik, H. 1976. Remarks on coreference. Linguistic Analysis 2. Levelt, W.J.M. 1974. Formal Grammars in Linguistics and Psycholinguistics. 3 vols. The Hague. Mouton. Marcus, M. 1976. A design for a parser for English. In Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery Conference. Houston, Texas. Perlmutter, D. 1968. Deep and surface constraints in syntax. Doctoral dissertation. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. and Paul Postal. 1977. Toward a universal characterization of passivization. In Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley, California. Peters, P.S. and R.W. Ritchie,. 1973. On the generative power of transformational grammars. Information Sciences 6.49-83. Perlmutter, David. M. (ed.). 1983. Studies in Relational Grammar I. Chicago, Chicago University Press. and Carol G. Rosen (eds.) 1984. Studies in Relational Grammar 2. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. Ross, John Robert. 1967. On the nature of English Pronominalization. In To Honor Roman Jakobson. The Hague, Mouton. Sag, Ivan. 1976. A logical theory of verb phrase deletion. In S. Mufwene, C. Walker and S.\ Steever, eds. Papers from the 12th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago, IL. Sampson, Geoffrey. 1980. Schools of Linguistics. London, Hutchinson. Schmerling, Susan. 1977. The syntax of English imperatives. Unpublished ms., Department of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin. Siegel, Dorothy. 1974. Topics in English Morphology. Doctoral Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Siewierska, Anna. 1991. Functional Grammar. New York, Routledge. Wasow, Thomas. 1976. Anaphora in Generative Grammar. Ghent, Story-Scientia.
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1977. Transformations and the Lexicon. In Akmajian, Cullicover and Wasow. Williams, E. 1977. Discourse Grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8. Yip, Moira, 1977. Cantonese pre-transitive marker Jeung. In Symposium on Chinese Linguistics. Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute. Hawaii. Notes: 1. There are several conventional symbol-sets. One subset includes: (Italic) CAPS for Sets
A, B, C... American, French
(Italic) lower case for Elements
a, b, c ... John, Jean
`is a member of' : `a `is not a member of':
Member(s) {Curly brackets}
Unit set
B' - `John is a Socialist'
`a B' - `John is not a Socialist'
identified by enumeration: {Athos, Porthos, Aramis} (are the three Musketeers) identified by description: `a is a five pointed star' include Members in a Set: {a,b,c} = A `the set consisting of individuals a, b, c (like the three Musketeers) a set with one individual as its member: a can be {a} [this does not make a identical to {a} in sense or reference] (George Washington was our first president).
set with no member: {0}: {the first female US Empty set president} `for 2 sets to be distinct from each other, there must be one thing that is an element of A that is Principle of not an element of B' (no woman has been extensionality: president) 1 (or {1}); the set of all individuals in a universe of discourse: `all loyal Martians'. Compare Universal Set Saussure's 'the point of view creates the object'. Sets related in several ways: one set can include another or be included by it (set-members can themselves be sets, as in a target's concentric circles). Circles overlapping or drawn separately suggest other possibilities. Proper inclusion: read as: `is properly included in'; `is a proper subset of': A B: [all members of B are included in A, and at least one member of A is not a member of B]
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Ordinary Inclusion: read as: `is included in'; `is a subset of'; A B [nothing is claimed about any A non-member of B] Set identity: read as: `is identical with' A = B : `is a member of', not `is a subset of': to `be a subset of' requires sets. Some sets have members which are themselves sets: from set Ac we can form another setp, which consists of all the subsets (As) of Ac
= C Complement
: CA Intersection :A B U Union :A B - Difference :A-B (often) within angled brackets < Oedipus, Oedipus >; the assignment of an element in one set to an element in a second set: there must be exactly ONE element in ORDERED the second set for each in the first, or at least one FUNCTION element in the Second, to which several in the first are functionally related, - or of which they
are functions
- or to which elements
have a function,
- or so that there is
a function from A into B
- or that
maps A onto (or into) B.
If every element of B is the value of the function for some element in A, the function maps A onto B (rather than into B): if A and B are the same set (i.e. the function maps A onto itself), the function is called an OPERATION OPERATION, e.g., (27 is) `The cube of...' (9). an element in (e.g.) a left-hand column compared to that or those in a right-hand column, which are its ARGUMENT VALUES: f(Sweden) = 8,000,000
f
(lowercase - not bold-face): f(x) denotes the value a function has for an argument x: f(Sweden) = 8,000,000 says the value a function has for the argument Sweden is 8,000,000 (e.g., Sweden's population).
between sets, when one is a subset of the other, a third can be established by assigning the function 1 or 0 to Characteristicmembers that are or are not members of the including function: set
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-- hence to the complement of the including set. This is called the characteristic function of the set B relative to the DOMAIN A. Assignment of t (true) or f (false) is an instance. 2. set: in mathematics, a prescribed collection of points, numbers or other objects that satisfy a given condition. 3. element: in mathematics, (a) an infinitesmal part of any magnitude; differential; (b) the point, line, etc. that generates a line, surface, etc. 4. relation: in mathematics, ratio; proportion; something in common by means of which two quantities may be compared: any dependence of one quantity upon another. 5. operation: in mathematics, any process involving a change or transformation in a quantity; as, the operation of addition, subtraction, etc. 6. function: in mathematics, a variable quantity whose value depends on and varies with that of another quantity or quantities: Carnot's function; in thermodynamics, a function expressing the ratio of the heat expended to the work it does; the reciprocal of absolute temperature. continuous function; a quantity whose real values are not affected by the values of its variables between certain given limits. elliptic function; a function which returns to the same value when its variable changes; a doubly periodic function; the inverse of an elliptic integral. explicit function; a quantity whose value is expressed directly in terms of another quantity; as, in x = 2y, x is an explicit function of y. implicit function; a quantity whose relation to a variable is not directly expressed, but implied in an equation. transcendental function; a quantity whose relation to a variable cannot be determined by algebraic processes; as y = 7x trigonometric function or circular function; any function of any arc of a circle or of its angle expressed by a line related thereto; as, in a circle, a line drawn from one extremity of an arc perpendicularly to a radius drawn to its other extremity (radius being unity) is a function of that arc and of the angle it subtends, and is called its sine; other principal functions are cosine, tangent, and cotangent. 7. There are clusters like Rh (rheme), RhPr (rheme proper), DTh (diatheme), DTho (diatheme oriented) as well as Th (theme), ThPr (theme proper), ThPro (theme proper oriented), Tr (transition), TrPr (transition proper), TrPro (transition proper oriented).
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Others are IC (intonation center), M (mood/modality), ME (exponent of mood and/or modality), NE (exponent of number), NegFocA (negation focus anticipator), NegPolE (exponent of negative polarity), N-R INT (non-reevaluating prosodic intensification), PE (exponent of person), PERF CORR (perfect correspondence), PNE (exponent of person and number), PosPolE (exponent of positive polarity), pp (prosodic prominence), QFocA (question focus anticipator), rfl. pron. (reflexive pronoun), R INT (re-evaluating prosodic intensification), Sp (specification), TE (exponent of tense) and VE (exponent of voice). 8. (1) Il y a, au cimitière du Père-Lachaise, aux environs de la fosse commune, loin du quartier élégant de cette ville de sépulchres, loin de tous les tombeaux de fantasie qui Etait en prEsence de l'éternité les hideuses modes de la mort, dans an angle désert, le long d'un vieux mur, sous un grand if auquel grimpent, parmis les chiendents et les mousses, les liserons, une pierre. (2) Cette pierre n'est plus exempte que les autres de lèpres du temps, de la moisissure, du lichen, et des fients d'oiseaux. (3) L'eau la verdit, (4) l'air la noircit. (5) Elle n'est voisine d'aucun sentier, (6) et l'on n'aime pas aller de ce côté-là, parce que l'herbe est haute et qu'on a toute de suite les pieds mouillés. (7) Quand il y a un peu de soleil, les lézards y viennent. (8) Il y a, tout autour, un frémissement de folles avoines. (9) Au printemps, les fauvettes chantent dan l'arbre. (Paris. Nelson 1935) (1) There is, in the cemetery of Père Lachaise, in the neighborhood of the poor side, far from the fashionable quarter of this city of tombs, far from those fantastic sepulchres, which blazon in the presence of eternity the hideous fashions of death, in a deserted corner alongside an old wall, under a lofty yew upon which bindweed climbs, and amid couchgrass and moss, a tombstone. (2) This stone is no more exempt than the others from the ravages of time. (3) Water turns it green, (4) and the atmosphere blackens it. (5) It is not near any path, (6) and people do not care to visit that part because the grass is long and they get their feet wet. (7) When there is a little sunshine, lizards disport themselves on it. (8) All round there is the rustling of wild oats, (9) and in the spring linnets sing on the trees. (London. Collins. no date). (1) Auf dem Friedhof Père-Lachaise, in der Gegend des Massengrabs, fern dem vornehmen Viertel dieser Gräberstadt, fern der mit Bildhauer-phantasie prangenden Gruften, die vor dem Angesicht der Ewigkeit die häßlichen Moden des Totenkults zur Schau stellen, in einer verlassenen Ecke, an einer alten Mauer, unter einer grossen Eibe, an der Winden hochklettern, zwischen Quecken und Moos, steht ein Stein. (2) Er ist so wie die anderen vom Ansatz der Zeit versehrt, von Schimmel, Flechten und Vogelunrat. (3) Das Wasser färbt ihn grün, (4) die Luft schwärzt ihn. (5) Kein Pfad ist nahe, (6) und man geht nicht gern nach dieser Seite, weil das Gras hoch ist und man sofort nasse Füsse hat. (7) Wenn etwas Sonne scheint, kommen die
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Eidechsen. (8) Ringsherum beben die Halme des wilden Hafers. (9) Im Frühling singen die Grasmücken auf einem Baum. (Berlin. Verlag Volk und Welt. 1983).
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16 Summary and Conclusions 16.00 Talk about Talk. The earlier chapters of this book were arranged to suggest continuity from the most ancient to the most modern work in Linguistics. That always involved talk about language. Though some talk takes more for granted than others, a precise question can elicit a good answer. Specialists' replies may seem evasive: Metrologists, for instance, study measurement-norms. When asked How are you?, cautious ones answer, Compared to what? Specialists in different times and fields have interests remote to, or ignored by, others. Three perspectives which are often difficult to keep apart when talking about language were proposed: SO [how the world is] SEEM [how we look at things] and SAID [how we express the way we look at things]. The first is only communicated by uniting the other two, but as knowledge and experience with one or the other become discrete, different needs become important. Survival was more pressing than scholarship during Europe's Dark Ages: perspectives had narrowed and much information from Antiquity had been lost. The relevance of deductive Medieval Syntheses was challenged during the Renaissance, and after the Age of Discovery, the inductive focus in Modern Times became more precise and more atomistic. Ours is an Age of Specialization, in which few claim mastery beyond their own fields. Computerized formalizations of hard-won insights are now commonly available yet even esoteric researchers rely on computational technicians to validate their findings. As the ancient Analogists held, the results of particularist studies are now expected to form a coherent picture. 16.01 Talk about Talk about Language Different concentrations on language emerged at different periods. Some technical terms coined in ancient Greece are still used in today's reports, but while the universe, our minds and the nature of language may not have changed much, ways of talking about it have. Toward the beginning of the 20th century, scientific study and talk about Language was relabeled Linguistics. General Linguistics includes discussion of how linguists talk about Linguistics. Some linguists are as uninformed as they are uninterested in others' specialized findings in Phonetics and Phonology, Meaning, Grammar, Models and/or Theories of Language and Language Change all known to be properties of the Object specialists study in detail. That accounts for the characteristic Topics which they discuss.
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16.02 Relevance and Revision Greek works on Rhetoric are among the oldest writings about language. Distrust of mere persuasion and interest in a quasiautomatic way of arriving at 'true' rhetorical definitions inspired Plato's technique of the Division. That launched what we now call formal Logic, while for centuries, Logic was only waveringly distinguished from Grammar. Aristotelians codified a Logic of Predicates; Stoics focused on a Logic of Propositions. Though all written in Greek, expressions these logicians used (like All C = some A or If 1, then 2) were formalized: that is, put into symbols as nearly language-neutral as numbers. While rhetorical definitions were relevant to persuasion and Poetic ones to pleasure, Logic simplified both for precision much like Mathematics. No one is just persuaded that 3 + 4 defines 7 more nicely than 8: we see that numbers define each other recursively within a self-defining system. Language-parts define each other too, but they shift with other changing conventions. Ancient Greek had 3 grammatical number-subsets: singular for units, dual for pairs and plural for more than two; Modern Greek has dual relics like English both, and the two languages accept all his feet more easily for a centipede than for a man, demanding some further context before deciding about about both his toes for either. 16.03 Analogy and Structure The Peripatetics sought 4-term Analogies and linguists prize Structures. An analogy like A is related to B exactly as B is related to C has 3 terms (formalized as A:B = B:C). It reflects lexical conventions more readily than grammatical ones. 2 is to 4 as 4 is to 8 may seem plausible in mathematics, either because 4 and 8 are called doubles or because 2, 4 and 8 are called even numbers. A 4-term Analogy like The relation between A and B is proportionate to the relation of C to D is formalizable as A:B = C:D. Languages are not as lexically uniform as Mathematical terms, so *WALK is to WALK+ED as GO is to GO+ED may be called a false analogy, while Time heals all wounds during office hours is a mixed metaphor. Metaphors are found to be apt or lame, but we tend to argue about whether analogies are true or false. A more recent example of analogical extension started with observation of the moons circling Jupiter leading to a model for our present heliocentric vs. the previous, Ptolemaic geocentric conceptions. This can be quantified and tested: not so Metaphors about the Sun being King of the Day with the Moon as Queen of the Night. Number-Proportions can be unambiguous: if B is the cube root of A, x MUST, by a kind of tautology, be 4 in an expression like 27:3 = 64:x. Not so in language: more than mutually defining quantities are involved. All his feet might be acceptable when referring to a centipede, while all his toes may not. Numbers constructs are ± acceptable on numerical norms; languageconstructions are sensitive to many other criteria.
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1 Studying Language Scientifically 16.04 Scientific Talk Logic and Math are methods or tools of science, not Science. Scientific applies to behavior, information or data studied objectively and publicly. Rejection of an objective method and proof is unscientific. Use of purely private criteria can be scientistic. 'Expert' opinions can be non-scientific. 'Science' has a consistent viewpoint. Findings of one 'science' inapplicable to another needn't show that one of them is faulty. Descriptive methods vary with a science's objects, and Subjectivity can only be minimalized. Taxonomy is not explanation, which presupposes objective description. Descriptions based on what always happened is not thereby explanation. Describing co-occurrence is logically prior to explanation. Usage suggests analysis as a public procedure, abstraction as a private one. Replacing empirical verification by possible falsification broadens the sense and reference of scientific. Cause and Effect are rarely empirical terms. Opinions are less often right or wrong than uninformed, inconsistent, or poorly thought out. Is scientific Linguistics an all-ornone distinction? If only partly, why ?: how wholly? Scientistic work apes scientific methods but Problems can be so defined as to elude the criteria of Science. Traditional grammar's prescriptivism is less bold than claims of universality. 16.05 Logical Talk about S-- > NP VP While Rhetoricians labelled S-types because of their semantic effects, Plato analyzed S (logos) as demanding onoma + rhe:maexpressions, suggesting an either-or semantic Division adequately defined each member. That launched formal Logic. Aristotle's 10 semantic classes and optional syndesmoi allowed an S-construction to be either + true or -true or ± true. But only what Aristotle called an 'upright' onoma and a 'present' rhe:ma assured validity: any other forms of onoma or rhe:ma were undecidable derivates (pto:seis) in his system. Onoma+rhe:ma constructions other than simple assertions were all part of the Stoic study of Proposition-types (logoi). So they restricted the Aristotelian pto:sis-label to onoma-forms, a convention we still follow. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans distinguished verbal tenses and real-world time adequately and while Predicate Logic concentrated on statements as isolates, Propositional Logic studied sentence-pairs labelled p and q (like S1 and S2). This presupposed a definition of Language as text, not just a collection of sample sentences. 16.06 Grammatical Talk about S Thrax' analysis of S identified distinct shapes and meanings for 8 sentence-parts (Greek, mere: tou logou; Latin, partes orationis; our parts of speech). That approach could not isolate morphological elements, yet their distinctive semantic functions were intuitively known. The many authors whom Dyscolus quoted supported Thrax' bare assertions, as did Priscian's. Before vernacular works of Dante's stature, Latin or Greek were effectively equated with civilized thought and expression. Other languages and
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peoples were largely reckoned 'barbaric'. In medieval Western Europe, Greek was esteemed but became less known, Hebrew revered but little known, and Arabic all but unknown. 16.07 Facts and Patterns Appeal to lexical and semantic facts preceded appreciation of morphological patterns; 'syntax' applied within the simple sentence. Priscian refined Dyscolus' work but neither treated complex sentences extensively. Emulating the clarity of logic, they dealt mostly with simple, isolates declaratives. Pronouns, connectives and cognate complements were seen to be omissible in context, and not only in imperatives (I tell you that you must) SIT (down here/on this chair). Descriptions of familiar things are easier than those of the unknown; explanations seemed more needed for the unusual than for what was taken to be common. Phonetics and Phonology were little known or distinguished until well into the 19th century. Meaning is a term as broad as signification. While we can agree about what men and mortal signify in isolation, all depends more on what it is constructed with (all men are mortal vs. the men are all in vs. all right, men, etc.). Most words have 'sense' but not all words refer. Grammar concerns the shape of words, how they combine, and how shape-changes signal meaning-changes. Grammars alter over time and the bases of appropriateness shifts. Mathematical findings are more stable. Models and/or Theories of Language suit different interests and we know how different those of the Ancient and Modern world are. Since languages change, there is no fixed Grammar. The appropriateness of a given account varies with its period, origin and use. A Logically based Grammar stresses SAID-SO correspondences more than pragmatically oriented studies of men's and women's usage. Mathematics is an elaborate tautology and Logic imitates its closure, but since living languages lack Math's closure, no grammar must be forever valid once it has been formulated. Language Change is less studied by today's scholars than by those of the 19th century. Characteristic Topics shifted from a logical true/false tradition to (a) the empirical consequences of language use in Bloomfield's appeal to Behaviorism to (b) the same-yet-different mental worlds of Sapir's language-types to (c) the sociolinguistic orientation of Firth and Malinowski, to (d) the abstract model-theoretic orientation of Hjelmslev, to (e) the generation of concrete sentences from abstract patterns in TG. There are many other specialized studies in Linguistics.
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16.08 What Languages Share Semantics matches SEEM (our interests) and SO (how the world is) by means of SAID (signals). Inert signals 'mean' nothing, but are apt tools sharing new or old information. Linguistic theories/models can take any of the 3 perspectives as their constants or variables. Demanded/Tolerated and Universals. Languages vary in what they must or may say and how they qualify their expressions. IE demands mention of number, tense and gender; Chinese and Thai do not. Quechua demands speakers signal how sure they are of some assertions; most languages do not. All languages distinguish statements and negations, but IE can negate roots or affixes, while Chinese and Thai cannot. What all languages demand suggests one way of defining what it means to be human. What only some demand suggests a distinction between Competence and Performance. 16.09 SAID does not Define SO We can't read minds and do mistake what speakers intend. We can agree on what SAID has meant and what this utterance may convey: since dialects overlap, we guess about how a speaker's idiolect and background influence utterances and these assumptions base the tentative Semantic Universals embodied in Case Grammar. Nominals pair alike with State-Process-ActionVerbals, even in non-IE languages like Chinese. That raises one distinction between Description and Explanation. Tagmemic Descriptions of utterances are public, exhaustively reexamined and reliable. Adding a Case Grammar component to a Tagmemic account can suggest Semantic Explanation. 16.10 Generic - Specific - Individual No one can speak English. What individuals say is part of an idiolect of a dialect like Bostonian. There are at least three levels of composition, distribution and function to account for, in any language-dialect-idiolect, as recognized in X-Bar Syntax and that makes picturing language complex. The TG convention of a ± WH complementizer, for instance, redefines Saussure's pair of absent-paradigmatic and present-syntagmatic axes as a single level. Since Saussurean langue-forms are generic and unpronounceable, his langage-specific forms figure at an X'' level, to be further specified for correlation at other levels, invoking Movement and Transformation. X-Bar syntax aptly images intralinguistic relations as both generic and language-specific in a text. Hence the study of what language-neutral design predicts languagepeculiar relations of Government, Binding and 'Heads'. Competence 'heads' are not as distinct as Performance specification and complementation: Prepositional Phrases demonstrate that. Lexical-Functional Grammar dispensed with the necessity of transformations to relate abstract categorial elements to their utterance by allowing only fully specified grammatical forms in the Lexicon. It studies Performance more than Competence.
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Relational Grammar recognizes a textual rather than a sentence unit and shows that forms with identical reference within sentence-sets shift or lose their grammatical roles (are chômeurs) if one form (e.g. the active rather than the passive) is intuited to be the basic constant. Montague Grammar unifies syntax and semantics as what C.-J. Bailey calls semantax. It suggests that for every grammatical operation, there is a semantic justification and/or correlation. This combines levels of description and explanation as opposed to alternative or cumulative descriptions. Making something like the semantic roles isolated in Case Grammar the constant in Functional Grammar both justifies and necessitates alternative definitions of Sentence and Text. 16.11 Doing Linguistics Linguists do Linguistics in as many ways as Musicians make Music. All linguists can be said to be doing Structural Linguistics in that they provide an empirical and public account of how language-units define each other intralinguistically, rather than concentrate on what speakers intend or hearers understand. Having described the structure of actual utterances, they generalize them as potential sentences. Quirk's typology identifies minimal pairs among simple sentences structurally: each demands SV, ± constructed with uniquely defining A, O, C constituents. TG posits a few patterns underlying (common to/shared by/discoverable in/abstracted from) all simple sentences, with something demonstrably in common - like the referents of active/passive forms. Both Structuralists and Generativists consider they deal with real data, but only utterances are actually real. The patterns common to them are projected as potentially real in the sentences or utterances which native speakers agree exemplify them. In the early 1940's, A-Bomb designs could only be potentially real: after its detonation, one design was known to be actually real. Chomsky faulted Skinner's Behaviorist account because it ignored how mind organizes speech: language 'means' nothing speakers use it to 'mean'. Chomsky's cognitive (ability to know) approach studies universal competence, not individual use (performance). A sentence is not an utterance: the cognitive content of greetings like How are you? is not that of Have you eaten? nor of Where are you going? nor of What's happening? but each is equivalent in situational force to Aloha ['love'] and Shalom/Salaam ['peace'] -integral to Performance description. 16.12 Describing and Explaining No one has proposed a generally accepted account of explanation distinct from exhaustive description for a social science like Linguistics (vs. natural sciences like Physics or Chemistry). Simplicity is a factor for preferring one account to another, but does not decide why or when people might say (a) She don't love him or (b) He ain't loved by her. Structuralists find (a) has 5, while (b) has 7 formative elements; TG could
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Page 579 derive both from an identical underlying pattern, That provides competing pairs of descriptions. Empiricists see the demand for explanation as childish, given empirically exhaustive description. International picture-signs about smoking are verbalized as No smok-ing or Rauch-en ver-bot-en ['to smoke for-bid-den'] or De-fen-se de fum-er ['pro-hibition of to smoke'] or Se pro-hib-e fun-ar ['self pro-hibit-s to smoke']. Their 3 to 6 elements' reference and grammatical construction communicate the same message 'describing' a state of affairs 'explainable' in terms of comfort, danger to health, or local law. One concept of their Deep Structure approximates that of a Proposition: a mental construct of a message not shaped by the conventions of a particular language, such as IE voice, mood, tense, gender, number nor Quechua signals of ± certainty. Pictures may recall neutral visual experiences; words label objects subject to role-contrasts imposed on them in a society, as in Quirk's caught
Somebody
the
ball
kura
Ar Amsaka < > atrapó
Sp Alguien Fr Quelqu'un
la
a attrapéla
Jp Dareka ga
pelota balle booru o
torae-masi-ta English, Arabic, Spanish, French and Japanese must subcategorize NP for ± common nouns, ± definite pronouns and ± articles vs. other 'determiners'. Latin, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian mostly omit pronominal subject-expressions. Arabic's marks an indefinite N by -n. Arabic and Japanese do not share English rules to distinguish 'deep' and 'surface' VP positions. French needs an extra rule to produce simple and phrasal verbs, as does Japanese to distinguish polite -mashi- from other Vforms, in addition to extra rules to introduce the formatives ga (marking subject/topic) and o (object), as in these simple Question forms: somebody
catch
the ball ?
Did Ar
amsaka
al kura ?
<>
Hal Sp
Alguien
atrapó
la
pelota ?
Fr Est ce que
quelqu'un
a attrapé
la
balle ?
Jp
Dareka ga
booru o torae-masi-ta
ka?
Questions produced in SS by Transformations inserted, deleted, moved and altered items. Transformations seemed to create Qformatives out of nothing [like preposed English do, Arabic Hal, French Est-ce que and postposed Japanese ka] then inserted them before, after or around what they questioned (Sentence, subject, verb, or object). In Aspects, kernel sentences ceded to the assumption that a Q-Sentence has a base Q-constituent. Then all sentences were
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said to have ± WH in Base/Deep Structure which, though real, need not be actualized much as every native-born American has the real capacity to be elected President, though that potential can only be actualized for a single citizen among some 250,000,000 + every four years. 1957's Syntactic Structures popularized ideas in the process of being made more precise. It stressed that only explicit claims can be tested for adequacy. Inexplicit statements and implicit assumptions can rarely be so evaluated. Later Lexical trees, for instance, presuppose different rules for representation-reading than Syntactic ones:
While spatially similar, lexical trees need Platonic or Porphyrian either-or reading-rules, while syntactic trees demand both-and. Besides, lamb can being used to refer to nonlinguistic items, while but can be used to 'refer' only to itself (But me no buts!); lamb is an intralinguistic item applicable to extralinguistic ones, but Lamb exists solely within language. Lamb can belong to a lexical category in a way but cannot, as but can be part of a grammatical category in a way lamb cannot. There are "SO-lambs" we can see, feel, smell and hear, unlike a SAID-lamb which readily constructs with inflexional and derivational morphemes and other lexical categories, or serves as an antecedent to pronouns in ways but cannot. Human, animal and the like are called 'semantic' features; linking and opposing may be labelled 'syntactic' features, while both can be profitably discussed 'semantactically'. 16.13 SO's Autonomy The non-linguistic world is self-determining in the sense that it is unchanged by our grasp or ignorance of it, SAID shifts by common consent. Autonomous syntax can suggest a countable number of patterns underlying all messages about 'the world'. Autonomous semantics can suggest countable messages about SO underlying all sentence patterns. Since messages are tacitly determined by conventions in changing societies, their content alters as we learn, so semantics cannot be autonomous in that sense. Since syntax communicates and discriminates messages, it lacks autonomy from that instrumental perspective.
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16.14 Endocentric Tolerance & Exocentric Demand Constructions are SAID combinations rather than SEEM or SO combinations: endocentrics are generically complete (unitary) because of the single unit member (the head) which defines them; non-heads are grammatically optional, as in the lower-case words in her expensive, new, green, white-walled, Italian, Grand-Prix, lakeshore RACER. These words are specifically complete on extralinguistic norms in isolation from RACER. Exocentrics are incomplete or simply 'other' if one defining member is missing: The RACER(s)
might have
not
been
being
repaired
have
not
been
being
repaired
*not
been
being
repaired
* been
being
repaired
*being
repaired * repaired
X-bar replaces the earlier NP-N genus-individual distinction with a trichotomy (closer to Porphyrian Tree-distinctions) of a 3part genus-species-individual-distinction as N", N' and N. 'X' stands for lexical categories like N, V or A (all 'constructs' in linguistics) and the Phrase Structure rules are then like S--> N" + V", X"--> [Specifier X'] + X' and X'--> X, allowing for a tolerated `third', optional, non-defining constituent instead of two demanded and mutually defining ones. If these labels apply to abstract competence unities, not concrete performance units, it raises the question of how 'scientific hypotheses' can be falsified. Hjelmslev held they could not be, but distinguished a theory's arbitrary clarity from its appropriateness: if baby weighs 30 pounds, mom 100 and dad 200, each family-member has an average weight of 110 pounds (330 divided by 3 valid within ± 80 pounds). 2 Language as Sound 16.15 Phonic Talk Articulated phonation is Phonetics' composition, writing & signing its derived composition. A frequent articulation can thereby be basic. IPA lists basic articulations and common modifications. An individual's articulation is not described in Phonetics. We hear best what can be distinctive and mostly ignore the rest. We can listen without hearing or hear without listening. English stress correlates with force, length and loudness: pitch & duration are automatic. Stress can be energy, tenseness, length, amplitude, etc. as a peak of prominence for native hearers. Japanese biru ('building') contrasts with bi:ru ('beer') by duration alone; Chinese ma signals several things, depending on tonal contrasts. Phonology considers social function as well as phonetic composition and distribution. Phonology's Composition-Distribution-Function is a 3-term vs. Phonetics' 2-term Type-Token-System, where type = class vs token [member, realizat-
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ion, instance, manifestation or representation] of a class. Only phones are realizations; allophones & phonemes are classes. The oppositions among individual-type-class suggest 2-term interpretations of empirical can be simplistic. Phonological units have a single contrastive function; Morphological, a double one: contrast and Representation/Realization. Allo-s in phonology and morphology presuppose a base form, the composition of which can vary without losing functional identity. Meaning implies choice. What is automatic is not chosen, so is not differential at that level. 3 Language as a Form-System 16.16 Unspeakable Language English cannot be spoken and communication among speakers of its many dialects is uneven. Concepts of different levels of structure, abstraction, theory, and model 1 overlap but differ. Structuralism covers any approach focused on how items form structures and systems. So too in other Social Sciences2. Numbers, ideas, and social climates are abstract, what can be seen, touched or heard are concrete, but to varying degrees of abstractness. A Tree diagram (1) images Plato's either/or lexical options or (2) TG's both/and syntactic demands: (2) ignores lexical qualities, so is more abstract / more of an abstraction than (1). Yet (1) is abstract to the extent that it pictures lexical exclusions instead of their more common overlap. Abstraction also suits descriptions or theories which distort in order to simplify things. Taking economic man's single motive to be acquisition makes mathematical theories of economic processes applicable. But that false characterization fails to predict or explain what actually happens. Distortions for the sake of simplicity or elegance are also called idealizations or schematizations, or Models. A model represents a thing in several forms, depending on its purpose: (1) to remind us of what we already know: solid models represent an airplane's appearance; (2) to discover something: a model in a wind-tunnel helps predict how real airplanes will behave. Or (3) to explain something: using the solar system as a model of the Atom. Models may not resemble what they represent: a system of gravitational equations can image the behavior of planets moving around the sun in a theoretical model.3 Models map an original's systemic elements onto the model. If every relevant element is so mapped, a model is an absolute replica (like a paste copy of a real jewel). That mapping is isomorphic. Experts know real jewels at a level of abstraction where a fake's mapping is no longer isomorphic. When real complexity is deliberately sacrificed by rules governing the Transformation, the mapping is homomorphic. Since mappings reduce to mathematical transformations, models are frequently expressed in mathematical notation. Computers increase the complexity of models which can be handled, but complexity is no guarantee of
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validity. Simple rules often have remote consequences which can be extravagant. 16.17 Language as a State A State is a stable, unchanging condition, within which relations can be stated. A Process is an internal condition of change (like organic growth and decay). Action entails external change alteration due to something outside of what changes. Saussure's la langue defined the object of synchronic linguistics. Study of change, as an unmotivated process of development, that of diachronic linguistics. That language acts to change itself is a personifying metaphor. Clarity is attained when we ignore real but irrelevant factors. Math ignores qualities to focus on quantities, even though bare quantities do not exist. La langue is math-like in that it abstracts from use, users and history. 16.18 Phonetics, Phonology, and Grammar Anthropomorphism attributes human motives to inanimates. We study phonetics for its phonological value, and phonology because of its relevance to grammar: sounds and sound-sequences do not endow themselves with such values. Human values may be imposed on, or discovered in, nature, so Phonetics can be said to be presupposed by Phonology, that Phonology makes sense as leading to Morphology, and that no one would do Morphology if it were not for Syntax, etc. 16.19 Linguistic Levels As a conventionalized way of talking about Language, Linguistics uses techniques to Represent linguistic data: TRUCKS DO duw nat paes/. Many actual vs. potential contrastive combinations plausibly involve: phonetic or NOT PASS becomes / phonemic features and units (segmental, suprasegmental) which could represent the graphic message; allo-types in printing; allomorphs, and contrastive order/combinations, including PASS NOT TRUCKS, TRUCKS DO PASS, PASS TRUCKS DO NOT, PASS TRUCKS DO, but EXTRAlinguistic factors tell us this typical road sign is a Prescription (uniform in shape, size & color) not a unique sign on the road. 16.20 Parallel and Complementary Distribution Items in parallel distribution can fill the same slot: Clark Kent and Lois Lane are mutually substitutable as reporters. As in math, phonological, morphological or syntactic form can be identical though material is quite diverse. Complementary distribution is mutually exclusive: Clark Kent and Superman never co-occur; initial aspirate/final unaspirate. Abominable and adorable are lexically complementary, morphologically parallel and Gimme!, Salt, please, and Can you reach that? are complementary functionally but contrastive in morphological, phonological, lexical and syntactic composition. 16.21 Lexical and Grammatical Senses IE gender-markers are unlike the Hawaiian lexical items kane and wahine ('boy' and 'girl'): IE gender is grammatical. A German child (Kind, neuter) can become ein Fraülein (neuter),
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eine Frau (feminine) or ein Weib (neuter), ein Junge (masculine), Männlein (neuter) or ein Mann (masculine). Turkish cojuk, German Kind and English child share the same sense and reference, but Turkish lacks grammatical gender, while IE nominals must match their articles, demonstratives and relatives grammatically. Hawaiian distinctions are lexical, based on natural sex, not grammar; English natural and grammatical gender trios mostly match, while German's 3 and Romance's 2-genders are intralinguistic. There is just as much social uncertainty in English and German about when to refer to, or address a person as, child, girl, or woman, none about using the appropriate articles or relative pronouns with the words for those different stages. 16.22 Correct Combinations Description contrasts with both Prescription and Explanation (why, not just the fact that, forms occur). Intuition supplies far more about our own language than brief contact with exotic languages can give. While Language Prescription by foreigners is absurd, a descriptive approach to one's own shows the ± strengths of the method. Correctness is often based on social approval, not just intralinguistic consistency. Historically 'incorrect' are This data is unconvincing (data is a Latin plural) or He got a kudo at graduation (kudos is a Greek singular). 16.23 Morpheme: a Minimal, Meaningful Unit Ambiguities abound: minimal (how many sounds, associations, syllables, in what situations?); meaningful: referential? conceptual? for whom? now or historically? in native or foreign sources? lexical or grammatical? unit: phonological, orthographic, synchronic vs. diachronic, for all or some speakers, in all or some uses . . . 16.24 Parallels: Phone Allophone Phoneme Morph Allomorph Morpheme Bush, Clinton and Perot are unique individuals; Bush and Clinton belong to the specific classes Republican and Democrat, respectively; Perot to a category we can label Independent. All three belong to several kinds of genus (a class of classes) like American, Male, Married, over 35, etc. and necessarily to a super-class or most generic genus like thing. Current usage confounds classical specific with individual, possibly because both are concrete compared to abstract common nominals. 16.25 Elements and Units Phonological elements in one approach are phonemes, in another, phonological features or articulatory-acoustic corellates (like ± strident, ± coronal). Elements constitute units generally established for a function (such as distinctiveness or syllabicity). Morphological elements can be significant or representative (e.g. a feature or contrast of ± number, person, tense); expressive units are morphemic representations (written s) or significations represented (e.g. plural).
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Depending on grammatical method, syntactic units can be form-classes, syntactic functions (Subject, Object) and forms in parallel distribution with their overt or covert manifestations; syntactic constructions such as NPs, VPs, etc. and grammatical categories. 16.26 Word as a Minimal Free Form English is analytic compared to Latin and Greek: wine vs. L. vin-um, Gr. oin-os. some Amerindian languages are so synthetic that Latin and Greek appear analytic by comparison, though Chinese and Thai remain analytic compared to both. If the composition of free forms varies, an appropriate definition of word covaries with it: many English nouns and verbs are morphologically simple; few are in Latin or Greek; most Chinese and Thai forms are simple. Languages have open and closed classes, so closed classes presuppose (are bound or bonded to, cannot occur without) the open ones: whatever occurs freely does so as part of its defining dependencies, and can be called a word. Even 'simple' forms can have many connections: i functions in Latin as (1) phonetic [i], a high, front, unrounded vowel; (2) phonological /i/, 1 of 5 vocalic contrasts and a single syllable; (3) a single morph /i/ representing more than 1 morpheme {i} signalling a lexical unit glossed as 'go'; grammatical 2nd person, singular, present, imperative; stylistically 'direct'. (4) a word actually uttered alone in imperative, but not declarative contexts (5) a sentence accepted as a command (not a question, statement or exclamation) Each linguistic level organizes different aspects in isolation from other level factors. 16.27 IA and IP Analyses Structuralists distinguished a language's (paradigmatic, potential, unobservable) past and its (syntagmatic, actual, observable) present to account for related forms: synchronically (at a given time), Item-and-Arrangement statements take language to be a system which defines itself statically. Item-and-Process statements image language diachronically (through time) as gaining or losing elements which redefine its system. 'Non-structuralists' construct underlying forms which make no empirical claim: they may be imagined and understood, but their non-occurence does not falsify them. 4 Ancient Linguistics 16.28 Physis/Nomos If non-biological factors impinged only through physical and chemical channels on us, linguistics would be subordinate to disciplines like Biology, and factors like weather, geography, and diet might account for language diversity. That language would be regular would be no surprise; that it would still be arbitrary, yet conventional, a more daunting problem. Despite the fixity which Dictionary definitions suggest, nothing prevents the 'misuse' of old expressions or abuse of new ones.
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16.29 Words Like Motorman and if Both constituents of motorman refer and come from the otherwise free forms motor and man, the second of which determines motorman's inflected forms. If has no constituents, doesn't refer, and cannot be related to theoretical underlying forms or historical ancestors. Motorman is relatable as a base for motorman's, motormen, and motormen's; if is invariable in normal use, though it is the base for discussion of forms like if's, ifs (with ands or buts) and ifs' (and ands' and buts') in metalinguistic use (language about language). Motorman has a history we might discuss with profit, while if is less likely to start arguments. 16.30 Aristotle's Syndesmoi Have functions which Plato's onoma and rhe:ma cannot serve. In a set like some apples, these apples, vs. apple, the apple, apples and the like, an ordinary lexical item like apples refers ambiguously to 'all', 'some', or 'these' apples: logic's quantifiers can make references more precise: A (type of) Car is a Nova
(x = member of y) [by name]
A Nova is an Exploding Star
(y = member of z) [by name]
A Car is not an Exploding Star (x
member of z) [by nature]
The conclusion is true since actual words rather than abstract symbols are used. Had the sole form been: IF x = y, AND y = z, the only valid conclusion would have to be THEN x = z ('a Nova is an Exploding Star'). Ordinary expressions often mean more than one thing; technical terms and symbols ideally have a single interpretation but their labels can conceal it. A & B (or A + B) symbolize a logical conjunction (A and B) but not A but B or A though B. The ordinary equals sign = may symbolize the partitive, entire-or-partial identity functions assignable to the logical uses of is, belongs to, is predicated of, symbolized in logical formulae. If the = in A = B can be glossed 'is identical with', the order in which A or B are glossed is indifferent. It cannot be indifferent when = stands between A and B as 'is a member of or 'is predicated of'. 16.31 Stoic pto:sis We translate pto:sis as case: In Aristotle's Predicate Logic, only nominative nouns and present verbs could licitly represent Subject & Predicate within propositions: any other noun- or verb-forms were equally called 'cases'. The Stoics studied relations between propositions, so any form of a noun or any form of a verb are indifferently admissible. Thus pto:sis had a quite different role in deciding what constitutes a well-formed formula for Stoic Propositional Logic. Superficially, the Peripatetics' bent was rather Platonic in their fondness for either/or (±, binary) distinctions. The Stoics seem to have been more fond of triads like ABC or 123. They distinguished letter-name (like Eta), letter-sound (like 'ee'), and latter-shape (like h).
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Another Stoic triad contrasted things (pragmata / tungchanonta) vs. signified things (se:mainonta) vs. signifiers (se:maionomena) Pragmata ('things done') is static, tungchanonta ('things happening') dynamic, both part of SO, to which symbols refer. But: one set of things ('sounds') are symbols for other things (metalinguistically, e.g. alpha names a letter and sound) so a symbol is called a se:maino:n literally a (thing) symbolizing (present, active participle, nominalized: SAID) and the items or events which it means/symbolizes/ refers to are se:mainonta ('things being symbolized': SO again). Compare Hispanus' significatio ('being made a symbol of') and suppositio ('standing for, 'being referred to'). In our poor records, Stoic lekton is as vague a term as meaning. Consider its psychological (SEEM) status: experience evokes biological reaction (images; representations); imagination can manufacture images, as poetry and science fiction show. But the lekton is not just a passive reception: it is an active creation based ultimately on experience of external objects, and in that sense an 'objective' concept. Se:mainonta ('things being meant / symbolized') only stresses the passive aspect: lekton stresses what the experiencer does with his experience: what the passive and active experiencer 'learn' from all this distinguishes the creative from the passively receptive. 16.32 Priscian's Parts of Speech His distinctions may fit IE languages, but not isolating languages like Chinese or Thai. That humans (and their languages) categorize ('put things into classes') seems generally accepted. What strikes different cultures as salient for classification differs widely. His verb classification was morphological + semantic based; the constructions he cites are clearly syntactic. Linguistic units can be evaluated like tools: axes are poor can-openers, and using can-openers instead of axes makes for slow lumbering. Each might do the other's job, so there are many norms for evaluation. In construction-types, Priscian ranked human not grammatical, activities first. Greek distinguishes active vs. middle vs. passive verbs, while Latin has only active/passive verb morphology, and syntax distinguishes them. If it were meant to be a comparison, Greek examples are lacking to show the contrast. His example (He ordered you to come to him) involves two predicates in Latin (as does the English translation and Quirk's We have proved him wrong). He possibly thought Latin jussit ('order') was not just an experiential transitive like teach, nor a basic reflexive like hide (oneself), but inherent Experiential where the subject of order is coreferential with the Object of come to one basic factor of the semantics of Greek middle voice verbs. But that is irrelevant in Latin. 5 Medieval Linguistics
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16.33 A Modistic View of Language Categories can be label-types but modern concerns are label-systems rather than isolated labels. One root of Aristotle's analogist position was his metaphysical conviction that the universe is purposefully oriented toward an unmoved prime mover, the final cause of each thing. He had no concept of creation accepted by the medievals from the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Against that background, talk of autonomous modes of being made this kind of sense: God's creative understanding of things constitutes their essential natures. Such natures in themselves are correctly, but only partially, analogically, and cumulatively intelligible to human minds. The Modistae were content with a mix of science and theology unacceptable to modern insistence on nonsubjective objectivity. 16.34 Hispanus' Terms and Non-Terms As hispanus defined them, terms are what constitute a proposition: the function of a term is to serve as members of the logical Subject- or Predicate-Categories, so they were called categorematic. The referents of most categorematics are candidates for thinghood, while those of most syncategorematics are not. But syncategormatics like quantifiers shape a language's expression of logical form, and so are of the greatest linguistic interest. Signification is like institutionalized thought; consignification like obligatory, language-peculiar (semantic) modifications; Signification dictates what kind of things expressions can refer to; their numbers wax or wane (Extension, Restriction) depending on co-occurrent expressions. Appellation distinguishes mere conceivables from real existents. That expressions have an understandable sense (significatio) is no guarantee that anything corresponds to the thought (first woman US president, my second million). That a thing exists is no guarantee that minds understand it, or think it, or express it. Expression is not even a guarantee that the expressor is thinking. Hispanus' dialectic system of semantic interpretation arose within a modistic view of language, thought, and reality, and is most at home within its assumptions. Instead of concepts (subjective, empirically unobservable in individuals; only inferable for a society), Behaviorists now claim to study dispositions to respond: behavior can be more or less likely to be observed. Both can be equally hypothetical, but subjective evidence which counted directly in the medieval approach, is proscribed as irrelevant in much modern work. 6 Historical Linguistics 16.35 Language Origin and Change Since the Bible depicts Adam and Eve talking and the account is in Hebrew, some concluded that Hebrew was the language they spoke, while other languages arose by divine intervention at Babel. Some Greeks speculated that man's original tongues were a divine gift which had changed for a variety of reasons or that men lost their natural ability to mimic things through vocal sounds. They disagreed about whether stable linguistic structures still existed or were continually reinvented.
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Isidore's Etymologies suggested semantic continuity between phonetically unlike words native to Latin because of shared lettersequences (CAro DAta VERmibus ['flesh given to worms'] for cadaver). He shows how to remember words by assigning an etymology which does not pretend to be an historical account, but a memorable likeness. Johnson hoped that freezing grammatical usage could assure the accessibility of current works for later readers. As his work progressed, he came to see that a language's lexicon must be timely in a way that its grammar need not. The assumption that there was a single language from which all others derived was widespread. Romantics found it easier to suspect that more languages descended from this ancient form than from Hebrew. Jones found it more plausible that Sanskrit and other IE languages descended from a language-form no longer found among native speakers. Rhotacism is a language Process, saying arboris instead of arbosis a speaker's Action, the conditions under which either occurs are different observers' States. Just as guns don't kill people, it is people who perform Actions on language States, resulting in new language Processes. Skeat's etymologies assume that a language as a system of systems responds to temporary and permanent needs. These must be distinguished, and grammar studied apart from grammatical instances. Phonological and grammatical systems have their own laws of adaptation independent of that found in its words. Languages do not affect each other unless they are in contact, so lexical resemblances might be due to sheer coincidence. Language change is not only lexical Analogies among a system of systems affect the organization of subsystems. Some find a palatalized allophone of the /n/ in news /nyuwz/ preferable to /nuwz/, others find it pedantic. A Baltimore radio announcer used to read the /nyuwz aet nyuwn/. How would he handle unpalatalized booty /buwtiy/ and palatalized beauty /byuwtiy/? 16.36 Sound Laws The strength of Grimm's Law lay in its verifiable prediction of attested historical changes in isolated consonants. Its weaknesses lay in 'exceptions' seen when isolates are considered in successions, syllables, and related to stress. Grassmann explained some exceptions to Grimm's Law by showing the relevance of successive syllable-locations of the 'same' sounds. Verner extended the framework for segmental sound-study to the domain of the word, including word-stress. The Junggrammatiker's Exceptionless sound change was not a summary of facts already discovered, but the hypothesis that phonological changes were not random, though phonetic shifts might be: if a change were genuinely phonological (part of, and effective within a system), it would have grounds in other phonological facts. 7 Saussure 16.37 Durkheim's Social Facts Were practices or values observed by a society which account for what is done or avoided unreflectively, with no sense
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of external coercion, nor need for external legislation. GU's dress code in the 1960's ruled that Gentlemen must wear a coat a tie in class: not another stitch of clothing was mentioned. He was convinced that Social Facts are real, but Durkheim distinguished things in the physical world of SO, in the mental world of SEEM, and in the conventional realm of SAID: things are what we take things to be because they have thing-like properties which need not be physical to be effective. Public agreement separates what individuals imagine from what most accept as real. Suicides were real, but suicide rates in different countries are stable but variable in each. Durkheim theorized that reflects subgroup-members' sense of how they ± respond to their community's Social Facts. Anomia suggests a disequilibrium among 1st, 2nd and 3rd 'persons': equating SO with me is the most asocial; you+me is better but fails to recognize its me+you+them unity. La Langue is most like a social fact. Although it does not coerce directly, it has a comparable social effect because of the absence of a viable alternative. Parole is as unpredictable as individuals. Langage dilutes the generic predictable by the unpredictable individual level. Self-defining langue compares in clarity to the fixed relationships of geometry: any circle at all has 360 degrees, regardless of size. Entities in la lange should can be just as exactly definable and relocatable, unlike the changeable facts of le langage or la parole. Parole as is unique as an individual. Statistics do not describe you or me, and can only be applied to groups with caution. For historical linguistics to account for change, it must have a pair of synchronic static systems with a mechanism linking predictive of additions, losses and modifications. Diachronic science depends on autonomous synchronic sciences. 16.38 Fiction & Conventional Simplification Are rooted differently in SO, SEEM and SAID. Language details not what individuals experience, only what conventions allow. Fictions can omit what is real; conventions put real factors aside for the moment. A fiction makes no claim to reality; a conventional simplification of the data assures contact with reality once we restore what we knowingly omitted as harmless or unimportant. Food producers guage production accurately based on average family figures; shoe manufacturers need data about the family mode. A single linguistic sign has inseparable semantic and phonic parts and separable syntagmatic contrasts fewer than its paradigmatic oppositions. Since any phonic oppositions at all suffice, SO-SEEM-SAID connections are arbitrary. Since sounds occur only in time, language's phonic side imposes linearity on the semantic side as well. Words like tree and if, or government and nonetheless only compare partially on these bases, yet Saussure says the sign is linguistics' concrete and integral object. Syntagms have simultaneous sign-parts, simple signs do not. Descriptivists take syntax as the study of how words construct externally to form phrases, etc., while morphology deals with internal word-construction.
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The signification, value and content of signs are distinct. Mutton and sheep share the signification (reference) of Saussure's mouton but have 2:1 vs. 1:1 sense-values. The words' content is not the same. The concept associated with both may be reductively the same, as Slick Willy, Tricky Dick and Jack the Ripper are equally individuals under the same genus, rational animal. Modern English pronouns oppose 3 persons, singular/plural and masculine/feminine/neuter. Older English had grammatical gender and polite (thouthy-thee) vs. familiar (ye-your-you) where ye/you matched modern he/him. Significations are the same but ± polite is no longer lexically signalled. The value and content of OE and ME pronouns contrast with those of Modern English, though their gross significations remain the same. 8 Boas / Sapir 16.39 Sounds, Signals and Meaning Boas assumed humans select subjective and objective factors to correlate. Correlation pattern defines a formal structure. Individuals must communicate some things because of their language; they ± may communicate others for personal reasons. Constraints on the infinity of phonetic signals paradoxically predict that predictable parts will be irrelevant at the obligatory, unconscious grammatical level. That pre-selection parallels grammar's pre-classification of experience. Language escapes the rigidity of animal-systems and their use-conditions. Some emotions are peculiar to man, a few are shared by animals, but signals about ideas as well as emotions are peculiar to man. While both are systematic, sense and reference of stupid human signals are not restricted as narrowly as the most intelligent animal ones. Human signalling can be voluntary (stimulus-independent), that of animals is mechanically inevitable, given a stimulus. Lies and signals about ± possible future alternatives are peculiar to humans. Few non-cognitive uses of language cannot be related to some ideational base and Sapir declared that in language, ideation reigns supreme. Behavioral change can be a sign, but humans innovate and institutionalize signs as symbols. Automatisms like allophones are not voluntary but socially determined. Men die for solely possible options. Quirk's 7 basic-sentence types are all simple, active, declaratives the cognitive tools of human language-communication, par excellence. The alphabet, like the sequence of numbers, is a closed set of mutually defining units: a pattern or structure. The logic of lettersequence for adults is a matter of rote; that of grammatical bits, a hierarchy of constituents at different levels (subject-predicate; noun-verb; root-grammatical process; concrete/derivational/relational concepts). So the 'algebraic' analysis of un lovable as (a) + B + (c) distinguishes (1) sequence of (2) root vs affixes; (a) + A
+ (b) (3) logical priority of root over affix, and (4) the sequence of (2) - root vs. permissible affix
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(c) +
+
(5) logical priority of root over affix and
A (6) logical priority in the order of affixation; (c) +
+ A
(7) sequence, (8) an unquestionably free form from b (9) a dubiously free form.
(c) (10) compositional complexity from distributional + [A (b)]similarity and/or functional identity. u n d e c i d a b l e involves no free root-word we can symbolize as an A like lov(e): de-cide is a complex form of two bound members, one for the concrete concept also found in in-cis-ion, the other pure relational represented by de-, so Sapir could represent decide as (a)+(B), not as a compound A+B like fireman; un- cannot be prefixed to just any lexical form: we can undo or untie but not *unlove or *undecide. 16.40 Sapir's Form Fundamental to form and matter is the view that matter is (viewed as) determinable, form is (viewed as) what determines it: sequence and priority may ± coincide. As `levels', higher form determines lower matter. Formal processes (part of grammatical form/design/pattern) do not determine function. Function is logically prior to grammar, though observationally, grammatical form is prior to function. In Sapir's notation, A + B suggests two forms are equals on a norm other than lexical difference (e.g. as radicals or roots). Since B follows A in the sequence, they are not simply equal. At the word level, A + B well represents John runs. It also suggests contrast at the lexical level, though not for Heat heats; it less well represents overt simple forms (John, Heat) as opposed to complex forms (runs, heats) on the morphological level. Functionally, as subject and predicate, John and runs are equals: subject demands predicate as much as predicate demands subject. Choosing A + A on that basis loses representation of overt order, lexical contrast, and simple vs. complex forms. To the extent that Subject vs. Predicate are universal, this is appropriate, since manifestation modes in individual languages is language-peculiar: in Latin, Johannes currit or Currit Johannes (John runs), order is not grammatically functional. Allowing for analogical reinterpretation of A and B in relationships appropriate to different systemic levels, we might represent a sentence variously as: Sentence
(
A
)
Subject, Predicate
(A
+
A)
[ (Poor John) NP, VP
(runs away) ]
(b + A)
(A + b)
[ (poor) John] Word Morphology
E+A (poor) (John)
[runs (away) ] +
B+(Ø)+(d)+C (ran) (a-) (way)
This notation loses some distinctions and obscures others: e.g. while present heat vs. past heated is aptly represented as A vs. A+(b), English strong verbs
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use internal modification to distinguish present run from past ran, making the value of sequential notation like B vs. B+(Ø) less clear. 9 Bloomfield 16.41 Bloomfield on Sapir Reviewing Sapir's Language, he wrote that defining word psychologically as one of the smallest...bits of isolated 'meaning' into which the sentence resolves itself was defensible, though regrettable. That and his own empirical minimum free form suit both IE root-affix structures or isolating Chinese forms. But he rejected ideation reigns supreme as empirically unjustifiable. If empirical method is objective because quantitative, it makes no qualitative distinctions: murder and self-defense are empirically identical, but given what subjectively rate as good or bad, they can be counted. Ideation covers classification and intellectual operation. Since ideation varies with attention (as when actors mouthe Shakespeare), linguistic form should be studied in and for itself as the sole constant. A language must oppose at least concrete to pure relational data; IE adds derivational vs. concrete-relational as in The farmer killed the duckling and more than four were possible. Sapir's Algebraic Notation illustrates, but does not define, the four: farm, kill and duck are 'concrete', farmer and duckling are 'derivational'; farmer, kill and duckling are also `concrete, but the -er agentive and -ling diminutive are derivational. Relational are reference, modality, personal relations, number and time. The psychological word-unity of farmer supersedes its grammatical analyzability into visually concrete farms and conceptually concrete humans who run them. Unresolved: is a field not a farm until a farmer farms it? Is someone preparing a field for farming, a farmer before, during, or only after the crops come up? Is an evicted farmer not a farmer? Are these questions a linguist-as-such should be expected to answer? Is poor as concrete as farmer? These involved the subjectivity of which Bloomfield despaired: the bound or free status of forms can be established without psychologizing as can grammatical functions without getting into (im)pure relations. A suasive argument for that view: most philosophies are a history of disagreement; empirical techniques have an excellent record of concrete results in control of nature. Against: human values (and technical progress) never benefit from just looking at data but from seeing it in a new light. That occurs when looking is informed by seeing in terms of some theory. While empirical evidence is its own best argument, rational interpretation of it seems to be a human necessity. One of its own paradoxical products is Behaviorist theory. Having freed his own linguistics from the mentalist psychology of Wundt, Bloomfield saw good reasons for not tying the fortunes of linguistic science to the success of behaviorist psychology, whatever its merits as a science. 16.42 Speech Community, Density of Communication, Standards, Dialect, and Borrowing Involve larger stimulus-response-groups than empiric-
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ally observable S --> r s --> R-pairs between individuals, like Jill's remark about an apple followed by Jack's tree-climbing. A substitute stimulus-response theory of language behavior cannot handle unsuccessful or potential stimuli. Response-free stimuli are as empirically unobservable as non-existent responses: Jack could have done nothing after Jill's What a nice apple! Later Behaviorists speak of dispositions to respond and invoke statistics to deal with them. This allows for weakening or sporadic stimuli, response- chains when real or social distance, motivation, time, and talent vary. Density of communication measures the number, frequency, efficacy, or possibility of substitute stimulus-response interactions. The results can be labelled languages, dialects, standards, registers and styles. That language has meaning Bloomfield has no doubt; what is meant is not within the competence of linguists as such to establish, while how meanings, whatever they are, are distinctively signalled is indeed their province. One can observe that (and how) people respond to some sound-differences (phonemes) and not to others (gross acoustic features) in the minimal pair test: that establishes meaning-difference but can leave us no wiser about what is signalled. If all meanings and meaning-differences had to be signalled overtly, a signalling-pattern would underlie and antecede the signal. Signals suiting the same pattern could share a meaning(-difference) associated with the pattern-location which served to identify them. To that extent, substitutes would have or share the class-meaning of the pattern-identified class, plus their peculiar manner of substitution: substitutes behave in a fashion similar to what they substitute for. He calls the relation between word and referent Denotation (others call what is referred to a denotatum). In addition to denotation, he notes supplementary values: we can tell where speakers come from by their referring vocabulary as well as by their pronunciation. Connotation includes information about speakers' attitude toward referents and interlocutors in addition to what they denote. While nominals filling the same slot can have identical reference and comparable sense, they have different connot-ations: [John, a guy, a person, a gent, a chap, a fellow, a man] wants to see you. Linguistic forms are contrastive signals. Acoustical Engineers call non-functional sounds (like a radio's basic hum) noise. Lexical forms are obvious and numerous; grammatical forms (arrangements of lexical forms) are less noticed and fewer, but occur more frequently. Both are linguistic forms because their contrasts function as signals. Sentence Types contrast on norms of frequency (favorite, minor sentence-types), use (replies vs. initial statements or questions), function (narrative, equationals) and composition (`parts of speech'). His terminology is a concession to traditional mentalist interpretations. 10 Malinowski and Firth
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16.43 De-/Con-notative Semiotics & Phatic Communion No plane of Hjelmslev's denotative semiotic is a semiotic, while a connotative semiotic demands one that is, used like a tool without denotation to express a different message. Phatic communion within one community can be mistaken for denotative use of language by members of a another: Have you bathed yet? or What's happening? are stereotypic greetings or genuine questions). I'm dying to meet her exemplifies what Tannen calls rapport-talk as opposed to report-talk. 11 Hjelmslev 16.44 A Priori vs. A Posteriori a priori (`before experience') and a posteriori (`after experience') connote differently in 1st, 2nd and 3rd person usage. Hjelmslev might say, A priori, I find it counter-intuitive to assume any Process (like historical succession) lacks a System. Humanists could retort You are using System equivocally, in an a priori fashion. Hjelmslev agrees with Carnap: scientific statements are best expressed as implications (If ... then), so when a condition is fulfilled, the truth of a given proposition follows. Humanists find this a priori notion equivocates implication and condition, valid and true, as a posteriori evidence in coin-tossing for heads or tails shows: `leaners' are neither. Of induction, Hjelmslev reports that in his experience (a posteriori), their a priori inherited procedure (from component to class) leads to vague reification. By pre-(a priori)-defining classes arbitrarily, clarity is assured and appropriateness is publicly testable (a posteriori). Empiricist induction as a priori Firth and Hjelmslev present comparable cases: both had wide experience of languages other than their native ones; both had clear (a priori) ideas before all the evidence has been collected for their programs (a posteriori) for describing or explaining language. Hjelmslev presents his program in the public language of logic; Firth's empiricism is common-sensical: more people use language to be better-liked than to communicate serious thoughts. Traditional grammar's a priori ignoring of Phatic Communion is faulted in view of these a postierori facts. Firth's demand for renewal of connection saw need of a theory mixing arbitrary clarity and appropriate characterization; Hjelmslev anticipates that his constructs cannot be falsified, but may be shown to be ± appropriate. Assumption-free study Boas' experience prepared him for endless surface variety in language, Sapir's for substantial functional identity. Neither proposed any a priori concepts about what the ideal / best language ought to be like in a material sense, but Sapir came closer to sketching a formal ideal; Hjelmslev claimed universality only for his principle of analysis. 16.45 Glossematics as a Deductive Calculus Hjelmslev defends his definitions as arbitrary (a priori) but clear; that provides for the self-consistency demanded by the goals of linguistic theory, and by his Empirical Principle. He
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might say quarrels are only about appropriateness, and that his unrecorded previous (a posteriori) experience assures him that his approach is appropriate. The formula, Given X, what does it demand, tolerate and exclude? could allow a notion like Constellation as long as toleration conditions are not required. The formula is neutral to concrete restrictions like Speak! compared to ?Speak something and *Say! compared to Say something! Italian indicative Mangia has a lexical zero-valency compared to English 1-valent He eats or 2valent He eats something while both Mangia! and Eat! have zero-valency as surface imperatives. Demand can be defined by its contrary or contradictory exclude, so exclusion is arguably contained in Interdependence. Poor and away in Poor John ran away is syntagmatic Constellation. Choices can be either-or, not just or (alternation vs strict disjunction) at different levels of derivation: Romance nouns and gender are interdependent, a (both-and-relation) at one level, while masculine vs. feminine for each is an either-or, not just an or-Constellation. 'Either one' at one degree becomes 'choose only one' at another. If Hjelmslev's Purport is an amorphous, segmentable Variable, both Expression and Content will be the Constants that segment it. Hierarchy presents entities as concrete terminals or endpoints in relations of Determination, Interdependence or Constellation to higher functions. In Schema, only relations are found, independent of fillers; in Usage, both entities and relations (functions) are involved. The largest expression figurae are syllable types; the largest content figurae, lexical or semantic components like animate. Others probably required are syntactic ones like subject-of. Form relates to substance as determiner to determined: Form is a Constant, substance a Variable. Hjelmslev's entities are substantial, in expression or in content; organization (e.g. syllable types, endo- or exocentricity) derives from Schema; realization or manifestation (e.g. simple, complex, compound words) pertain to Usage. But Form as System or Schema is logically independent of any content or expression Usage or Process, and indifferently determines English, Chinese or Martian Phatic Communion as much as it does technical reports by lights and whistles, etc. Music exemplifies (Hjelmslev's) System (an inventory) and Process (combinations of inventory-elements) yet Air on the G String as form demands neither a stringed instrument nor performance in the Key of G. It is less clear that music has his Content and Expression, since its content is what Bloomfield would call connotative. Sousa's marches can connote action, but cannot denote who is to do what to whom, nor how, nor when, nor why, much less under what circumstances. 16.46 All Grammars are Stratified Surface can ambiguously manifest more than one content or a single identical content, structurally, homophonously, elliptically, idiomatically, by being a quotation, pun, irony, deliberate mistranslation.
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In TG, units at higher levels can be transformed into quite different kinds of elements at lower levels. Lamb's approach has no fictitious metamorphosis, since apparent differences between elements at different levels are due to the points of view constituting those levels: intermediate strata are defined by higher levels and definitive of lower ones without the elements changing nature on either. Lamb views language described by strata as a state, not a process; items do not become stratified in a state, they simply are stratified. Relational Grammar's terminology is like that for the geometry of circles not viewed as being produced by first drawing centers, then radii etc., but just as mathematically relatable, stative, objects. Chomsky excludes directionality in his separation of stages, levels, or components, but the process metaphor he uses in discussing learning, acquisition, or interpretation seems more than a state metaphor of knowledge to most readers. 16.47 Stratal Inventory and Tactic Rules Randomness is not even toleration: that presupposes some norm from which there is a departure. Systems constrain random composition and distribution, and so constitute internal function (here: co-variations defining permissible composition and distribution). Functions can hold between systems as different as content and expression. So Lamb's sememic, syntactic and phonic strata have autonomous conditions of composition for appropriate members correlated with constrained distribution, allowing them to function with respect to higher or lower strata. Text-expression is a complex of systems which internally determine how a totality must, cannot, or may cohere, therefore how its whole must, cannot, or may cohere with respect to the content external to it. Alternatively, Textcontent as a focus of interest can be defined in exactly the same fashion, determining what expression can manifest it. So Text as an expression/content totality exists on all strata (sememic, phonic, grammatical) simultaneously. Simultaneity is a concept more definitive of state than process. 12 Syntactic Structures 16.48 Sentences, Utterances and Speech Acts Are not identical. A literal paraphrase of His singing really kills me could be I tell you: the fact that this single male is at the present time producing melodic vocal sounds causes me to become no longer alive. That conflates the senses and references of ± overt forms and ± contrasts intralinguistically. It could be in isolation from, or in addition to, or part of, a grammatical comment. It could be irrelevant as an extralinguistic interpretation when applied to an idiom. A grammatical theory/model labels and contrasts morphemic, lexical, phrasal, clausal and sentential factors or semantic (functional) aspects of each
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unit and their cumulative effect. It may use terms, the sense and reference of which shift in different usages, as do subject, object or predicate. Speech Acts intended to communicate more than facts have varied felicity conditions: His singing really kills me is unlikely to be taken literally. The nominals presuppose literally that me and a singer exist; the verbal that he actually sings. The presupposition common to Speech Act analyses is that natives can sort out a speaker's optional intentions. 16.49 Tagmemics' Questions Are designed to elicit uniform Answers. Individual Answers vary, distinguishing signals emically and etically as discrete particles, combined as waves, and unified within generic fields at the levels of Sound, Lexis and Grammar. Each perspective complements the others as a peculiar mode of Composition, Distribution and Function. Tagmemics' expectation that Answers universally show sentence-clause-phrase-word level-slots is deduced from cumulative inductive evidence that (a) cultures do not structure observations and reports randomly and (b) sub-word morphology is not a universal signalling technique. A theoretical tenet of Tagmemics is that humans behave in a universally human way, and one mode of that behavior is the use of language. To generate mathematically is to define the membership and structure of a (mathematical)-set explicitly, by symbols expressing a rule and its output, or representing an object to which that rule applies. So xn-1 can be read as a setlabel for any quantity squared, cubed, or multiplied by itself one time less than the number n, or as a rule defining set-members. To generate linguistically is to define structured membership in a grammatical (sentence)-set or a phonological (feature)-set. A generative linguistics can define membership and structure by transforming x into y and/or z (as Chomsky does) or by relating x to y or to y and z in a hierarchic fashion (as Tagmemics may). TG Representations seems to be deductive since it 'starts' with generic symbols, (though Chomsky rejects any directionality); Tagmemics 'starts' with individual data, and so seems to be inductive. Workers using either drawing procedure already 'know' the concrete/abstract-pairing they are looking for, but their modes of presenting results differ. No one learns a structurally new fact by pure induction nor recognizes one by pure deduction. These modes of explicitating 'new' knowledge are complementary. Every accurate description is an implicit explanation; any explanation without explicit description is fatuous; explicit descriptions and explanations are implicit contrastive statements. By a conventional simplification of its data, TG ignores performance; Tagmemics focuses expressly on concrete behavior to better show its abstract universality. Sentences are generated in TG in/by a syntactic base and interpreted in/by phonetic, phonological, semantic and other components. Tagmemic sentences are generable in any mode, informed by a speaker's purpose: TG's ideal
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speaker-hearer lacks time-perspectives, making purpose uninterpretable. Tagmemics' informants are assumed to manipulate common patterns for their personal purposes. We know some acts flow from our choice no matter how they are described, but have no experience of that connection in a nonhuman realm. Since we tend to project human motives into non-human processes, it is safer to view such explanations as a pathetic fallacy. Theories and models vary in their degree of abstraction, suggesting the more abstract the description, the better the explanation. A more convincing kind of explanation is the integration of objective accounts of phenomena not before seen as interdependent. Pike aims at explanation and excels in understandable description. Chomsky describes elegantly and assumes linguistic data are explainable biologically. Both deepen our understanding of language structure, but neither compels assent to a sole explanation. 13 Non-Transformational Linguistics 16.50 Case Grammar Neutralizes several contrasts in a language and across languages, as SVO Spanish, SOV Japanese and VSO Arabic versions of Fillmore's classic examples show: 4 (a) The janitor opens the door with a key (b) The door is opened by the janitor with a key (c) A key opens the door (d) The door is opened with a key (e) The door is open. Active (a)'s janitor is CG Agent and grammatical ('surface') Subject; door is CG & grammatical Object and key a CG Instrument, surface 'O' in a PP. Passive (b)'s grammatical S is CG O, the PP O (janitor), CG A, while surface PP O (key) is still CG I. Covert A in active (c) promotes I (key) to active grammatical S; door remains CG's and surface O, while passive (d)'s grammatical S is CG O while PP O (key) is CG I. In stative (e), surface S is CG O. 16.51 Tagmemics, Competence and Performance Performance is individual and Tagmemicists first investigate languages with data from strangers, whose personality and reputation for reliability may be unknown. Such failures of empirical control could make any data scientifically questionable and exclude claims about universal Competence.5 But Competence is not subject to direct empirical ± verification. Though individual performances may be degenerate languagesamples, communities are reliable critics of faulty projection of patterns onto new utterances. Idioms do not follow literal patterns: Some beans were spilled by Helen is a dubiously acceptable passive of the idiom Helen spilled the beans ('betrayed a secret').
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Competence as an ability is only verified in Performance; if performance exceeds the competence hypothesized (like a child's pseudo-profound remarks) repeated performance may weaken that hypothesis, but non-repetition cannot disprove it. From a real-world perspective, they are both Constants; from differing psychological perspectives, either may rank as Constant or Variable. Tagmemics developed when appeal to nonempirical data was reckoned unscientific. Case Grammar developed when semantic input was becoming relevant to a TG account. To Tagmemic surface-signal description, Case Grammar offered a small set of semantic oppositions which those signals may ± match - and to that extent, 'explained' them. Idioms need not be just listed, and ordinary expressions with idiomatic potential could be distinguished as in AO(B) for He bought the farm literally, or just O as an idiom for He died. Calling CG a Deep Structure for Tagmemics can be misleading: Chomsky equated Deep Structure with an underlying syntactic base manifested in phonetic surface structures, not directly with their putatively universal semantic relationships. Particle-, Wave- and Field-perspectives on identical data are mental constructs (private creative operations) applicable to (or imposed upon, or abstracted from) physical sense-experience. Behaviorists deny mental entities empirical status since they are not empirically universal. That makes Quechua's 7-fold discrimination of observation-reports like That's an alpaca intractable, since a Behaviorist's stock of generative Semantic Elements must be reducible to physical stimuli. Capitalized Behaviorist accounts are not identical with lower-case behavior data in Tagmemics, which stresses the Performer's mental input. If The child laughed were a translation from Chinese, it could be suspect: ± singular and ± past are not demanded in that language, nor are articles and gender contrasts. Neige xiaohai xiao le translates The child laughed and le marks completion which might match laughed, has laughed or had laughed but there is no mark for definite nor whether 'child' refers to one or many. This poses problems for generating isolated sentences from a universal stock of semantic units or contrasts. 16.52 Case Grammar Fillmore noted that English case-governing prepositions are often deleted in surface structures [I loaned (to) him my book] while the semantic roles of the nominals involved remain stable. The preposition by in passives often signals Agent vs. with for Instrument, so it is plausible to hypothesize both are deletable in actives. Though the semantic roles may be universal, the label Case Grammar was inept 6 for uninflected languages like Chinese or Thai, or inflected languages which manifest those roles in other ways. Syntactic transformations vary surface case-forms and change surface subject-object positions, but leave semantic roles intact: The key opened the door, The janitor opened the door with a key or The door was opened with a key all have key in Instrumental, door in Object and Janitor in the Agent role.
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Semantic 'Cases' vary for underlying and surface structures. Literal, isomorphic semantic structures are not ascribable to the messages which surface bite the dust or buy the farm can signal idiomatically. Only views about what the real world is like dictate that. Common beliefs would reject The dog murdered him, but might find He murdered him with a dog more plausible than He murdered him with an earthquake. Gruber & TG analysts' q-roles do not distinguish Agent and Instrument thematic roles central to CG's and Pike's concern for the Human observer. That non-syntactic distinction might be treated in a semantic interpretation module. The contrast is inconsistently signalled in surface contrasts. English allows Caesar was killed by/with a knife but only Caesar was killed by/*with Casca. Latin Agents in passives are marked by the preposition a + a noun in the ablative case, Caesar a Casca: interficitur ('Caesar is killed by Casca') Instruments by the ablative alone, Caesar mucrone interficitur ('Caesar is killed with/by a knife'). Agents and Instruments are only lexically distinct in actives Casca/mucro interfecit Caesarem ('Casca/a knife killed Ceasar'). Surface and underlying pro-forms. One characteristic of a surface form is its phonetic composition; its distribution is nonrandom; its signalling function is deducible from its paradigmatic and syntactic relations. Surface pro-forms have the distribution of those for which they substitute: are co-referential with them; share their basic grammatical functions and central lexical sense. For a full semantic interpretation, pro-forms require (con)-textual (inter-sentential) correlates, not just utterance-(or intrasentential)-factors. Sentence structure is not necessarily identical with Utterance structure. Then they did it may have a single deictic (in a context of utterance situation) interpretation or an indefinite number when performance-criteria are disallowed. Surface structure is not Performance structure. Then they did it consists wholly of pro-forms for phrasal units [like four score and seven years ago] or single lexical units [like Today the faculty abolished exams]. Its propositional form Pxy ['predicate, argument x, argument y'] / they did it (order aside) is isomorphic with an acceptable Syntactic Deep Structure [S--> NP VP; VP--> V NP] which may include a syntactic but nondefining pro-(temporal) adverb; a pro-(proper or common) noun; a pro-(past)verb and pro-(nonpersonal) noun. While each substitute lacks independent lexical sense, two of them share (a) category-meanings of both proper and common nouns, one has the syntax of (b) non-present transitive verbs and one the sense of (c) semantactically optional appropriate adverbials. 14 After Aspects 16.53 +WH & -WH Complementizers Yes and No are lexical variants of a functional Reply category. But Reply is not a syntactically defined category. Does that disqualify yes and no from being discussed as alloforms? Putting the question that way suggests the analogical nature of the term complementizer and the varied references terms can have in different domains.
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Allophones have identical phonic functions and are composed of different phonetic features, some predictable by distribution. Lexically Distinctive Features identify phonemes positively and distinguish them negatively from those most like them [e.g. ± voiced, bilabial, stop]. They differ in nondistinctive phonetic composition [e.g. ± aspirate, ± release, ± long etc. in English] correlated with their distribution. Allomorphs' identical 'lexical' functions vary in phonetic realization easily correlated with their distribution in phonologically and/or lexically defined constructions [e.g. cat-s, dog-s, ros-es, child-ren, etc]. ± WH complementizers oppose each other in composition [± question form], function [± assertion] and parallel distribution [People ride bikes vs. Who ride bikes? vs. People ride what? vs. What do people do?]. So they are not 'allos' of an identical 'eme' parallel to phonological or morphological units on the basis of overlapping composition, distribution or function. People, ride and bikes are not functionally marked ± N or ± V by composition alone. They resemble functional 'allos' as a set of unordered lexical items like ride, bike, people. 16.54 Types and Tokens Label-pairs designating token-type oppose each other like obligatory-optional or surface-deep or phonetic-semantic or abstractconcrete, etc. A phonetic set like Pat seemed to admire Dali uses five 'lexical' tokens to represent a 3-type message [Pat] [seemed to admire] [Dali] or a 4-type message [Pat] [seemed] [to admire] [Dali]. These require different syntactic images with the two interpretations. That is an alpaca is analyzable as a 4-token set for a 2-type message [that] + [alpaca] while Quechua verb-tokens must distinguish 7 message-types, including [that] + [alpaca] + [quite sure] vs. [pretty sure] vs [I guess] and 4 other assertion-types. Constituents can be assigned fixed positions associated with a grammatical function in deep structure trees, yet + WH-forms may occur in more than one of those positions, hence the need to invoke Movement. 16.55 Traces, Zeros and Empty Categories In Saussure's image, every token's value [one factor in estimating its whole meaning or content] is determined by combining its positive signification with its negative ± possible associative contrasts. These are endless, so Hjelmslev suggested replacing an open axis of difference with a closed set of paradigmatic contrasts: the (business) contrasts with a (business) and Ø business in an objectively determinable fashion, compared with your or some or good etc. (business). TG pictures potential paradigmatic as well as actual syntagmatic contrasts on a single syntagmatic/syntactic level. That motivates one interpretation of e as what could be (but isn't) actual/phonetically realized. Movement can only be to an empty slot like the e object of He answered (what/whom). Movement from one slot leaves an emptied one behind, and t records its absence (+ What did he answer t?) there. A syntactic 'slot' is recognized as a slot on grounds of functional paradigmatic contrast. Phonetic
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That is business and What is business contrast lexically and functionally; phonetic Business pays and Business pays? contrast functionally like Business pays and Does business pay? suggesting an underlying syntactic ± WH image where + WH may be Ø or lexically filled. Phonetic Whom does business pay? can thus be related to two underlying syntactic images like Business pays whom? which 'becomes' Whom does business pay t? after movement. 16.56 Autonomous Syntactic Generation Hjelmslev wanted linguistic analyses to be exhaustive: in the process of testing for all permutations, we may discover its arbitrary clarity might be inappropriate. That is why his approach includes factually non-existent possibilities. Chomsky recommended formalizing structures, expecting them to be revised when proven inappropriate. A Chinese version of Jo wondered who his mother saw
is glossable as
Jo xiang-zhidao
ta mugin kanjian shei
Jo want-know
his mother see who
Though Chinese lacks IE's (affix)ROOT(affix) structure, it has free-but-bonded Predicate expressions arguably representable as VP--> VV + NP. That is not English, which prefers a standard analysis like VP--> AUX + V + NP. Jo has to know. . . is analyzable as modal + infinitive, especially since has to is no DS lexical verb without an NP object. Chinese xiang can be used independently (like double-status dare, vs. seem and tend, lexical verbs or modal auxiliaries in English). But needs to know and wants to know suggest lexical verbs with S-complements rather than modal auxiliaries of a lexical verb. Jo xiang-zhidao [ta mugin kanjian shei has two otherwise independent predicate forms translatable as desire & know, which correspond referentially to English's single Jo wondered [who his mother saw. A syntactic Base is only relatively autonomous. The Projection Principle allows an NP like a horseshoe (Det NN) in many languages but rejects English horse-a-shoe (N Det N), since articles do not occur as post-positions. A VP like shoe-a-horse (V Det N) is equivalent to an appropriately subcategorized V entry for verbs like shoe or clothe or dress [ ___ (NP)]. The 3rd in a 3-Argument Predicate in English is (grammatically) an underlying PP, though Jo gave Mo money looks like logic's Pxyz, as does They elected Clinton President, analyzable grammatically as a structure like N1 V S --> N2 be N3. English Vps with Modal auxiliaries can match unitary morphological constructions in other languages. Greek lu-ei matches English indicative loose-s while subjunctive lu-e:i contrasts with it [as in he ± might loose] and with optative lu-oi [as in I wish he'd loose]. Greek is a pro-drop language, so its problems about subject-raising are not those of English. Quechua's verbmorphology modifies the message of its verbal roots with 7 modes of certainty which English glosses with modal auxiliaries like seem or might or could. The syntactic behavior of words is not that of semantically equivalent phrases, but when 'words' have more than one semantic interpretation, doubts about their syntactic status arise. 7
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16.57 The Complex NP Constraint: No element may be extracted from an S dominated by an NP with a lexical head noun, as in *[ NP who ] do you believe [ NP the claim [ s that Bill saw ___ ]]] which might be reformulated as NP = S = NP1 V NP2 If 'ungrammaticality' results from anomalies in the (re)location of grammatical categories, syntax may be said to be to that extent autonomous with respect to semantic interpretation. Colorless green resists lexical matching with real-world factors and Who do you believe the claim that Bill saw resists obvious matching with real-world situations. We accept Bill claimed (that) he saw someone and Do you believe Bill's claim (that) he saw someone as both grammatical and interpretable and relatable to an underlying construct like ± WH You believe the claim that Bill saw ____. Bill claimed that he created someone shares colorless green interpretation-hesitations more than Do you believe Bill's claim that he created someone? which is both grammatical and interpretable. Descriptivists assumed whatever native speakers said was grammatical. Prescriptive grammars reject sentences like That don't make no never-mind as ungrammatical because they use two negatives. Generativists rely on their own native intuition and look for syntactic reasons to refute counter-intuitions. Their arguments can only be rejected by those familiar with TG conventions. Those who reject Who do you believe the claim that Bill saw assert that any sentence modelled on moving the object NP in ± WH You believe the claim that Bill saw ____ to the otherwise empty ± WH slot will be 'ungrammatical'. Move Alpha may seem to overlook the fact that functions are not wholly determined by location (part of their distribution) and can be interdependent with compositionally defined factors at different levels of construction. Islands like in a hurry, compound APs like devil may care and Nps like Jack in the box are constituent unities and moving subparts may destroy that unity. The scope of operators like Q(uestion), QU(uantifier) and NEG limits movement variously because of word/phrase/clause/sentence boundaries, restricting the number and kind of appropriate and empty 'landing sites'. 16.58 The Coordinate Structure Constraint No conjunct in a coordinate structure may be moved, nor may any element in a conjunct be moved, as in *[ NP what ] was John eating [ NP [ beans ] and ___ ], ± reformulable as NP = [NP + NP]. The square brackets of [X + Y] picture a unit like 2x(3 + 4) = 14 vs. 2x3 + 4 = 10 and suggest a contrast between an exocentric (3 + 4) vs. an endocentric construction 2 + 3, no matter which number is taken to be an 'utterance'-head or -expansion. Reference and sense differ, as phrases like light housekeeper and lighthouse keeper show in syntactic constraints: regrettably light housekeeper vs. *regrettably lighthouse keeper 16.59 Subjacency Condition: No constituent can be moved out of more than one containing NP- or S-node (in any single rule-application). Why does
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WHO do you suppose she is accusing ___ ? violate it, or fail to do so, if it is produced by a single movement from an underlying structure like COMP [ s1 you suppose [ s2 she is accusing WHO ] ] Where ungrammaticality is acknowledged or debatable, Chomsky 1957 advised formalizing a rule to find whether and where that rule fails or is violated. Conditions on Transformations' (1973) Subjacency Condition would make Who do you suppose she is accusing ungrammatical on the assumption that who crossed two S-nodes to get to COMP when a single rule applied one only time. Succcessive images of how WHO progressed from its post-verbal object-position to S2's empty COMP-position could show two traces instead of one. Repeated but cyclic rule-application of the 'same movement' avoids this 'violation' of the Subjacency Condition. In many comparable sentences, when linguists' intuitions fail to converge, degrees of *grammaticality/acceptability might be ranked by the number of violations noted. Bounding Theory in Lectures on Government and Binding (1981) proposed S and NP nodes as limits within which movement could take place grammatically while others suggested those rules may apply to English, but not all languages. Cf: *[WHAT country does [IP Jon fear [NP the possibility [CP that [IP Israel will attack t soon ]]]]] *[CP WHEN does [IP [IP Jon fear [NP the possibility [CP that [IP Israel will attack Syria t ]]]]] 16.60 Zeros In representing pro-anti-poly-un-satur-at-ed-abil-ity-ness-es and John expected to win, different absent-but-realizable forms can be posited, somewhat as in John expected pro to win, or John expected e to win or John expected PRO to win. The many Zeros which can surround satur-ate are images of real but unrealized associative/paradigmatic (mostly derivational, not inflectional) factors which can cooccur with this bound lexical-root+bound suffix item. They contribute to the positive+negative values of satur-ate which make up the content of that particular word. Since it is difficult to foresee how coinage may derive new complex forms, this Ø-device has little practical application except for noting Ø-alloforms like the grammatical (not derivational) past tense cut- Ø compared to heat-ED. Non-phonetic pro, e and PRO can be used to distinguish unpronounced but syntactically and semantically relevant coreferential forms as in John1 expected pro1 = himself to win OR, since some languages don't expect a clarifying pronoun to be insertable, John expected e to win, OR in pro-drop languages like Latin, where pro amat is, must and can only be a masculine, feminine (less likely, neuter) pronoun OR a 'parasitic gap' in sentences like What expenses1 did you run up t1 without PRO justifying e1? The John expected PRO to win example is a poor one as can be seen by comparing it to It's fun PRO to win. The first PRO is clearly coreferential with John, but the second PRO does not refer clearly to anything.
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16.61 Heads in X-bar Bloomfield's headed expressions are identified on the basis of syntactically acceptable utterances. Nominal, Verbal, Adjectival and Adverbial phrases are in parallel syntactic distribution with bare Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives and Adverbs (Our horses have run really great races very well). Native intuitions about the semantic interpretation of bare Prepositions in IE surface structures (John ran up) justify hypothesized underlying nominals (John ran up stairs). These are deletable in an otherwise exocentric Prepositional Phrase construction in surface structure. X-bar is to fit Language, not just IE. X-bar head-labels (NP VP AP PP) pick out units which trigger similar semantic interpretation of IE and non-IE word-groups. None suit Chinese or Thai morphologically. X-bar omits Adverb Phrases: while Adverbs form a morphologically distinct IE form-class, PPs are often their semantic equivalents (very well/with great results). To that extent, Adverbials are not universal. X-bar head-labels suggest semantically central constituents; IC-heads are indifferent to semantic interpretability. 16.62 Morphology, Syntax & Projection Principle Languages like Thai and Chinese function without the (bound) roots and affixes which determine IE words in construction. But IE and nonIE texts can report common messages with sentences analyzable into comparable words, phrases or clauses. These units overlap but differ, suggesting that syntax (internal and external word-relation-complexes) can be seen as what IE and nonIE families share as languages. The Projection Principle recognizes that subjectively isolated levels of analysis must be objectively complementary: levels are isolated as a result of our choice to attend to different aspects of an otherwise autonomous unity. 16.63 Hide [____ (NP) (PP)] and Conceal [____ NP (PP)] Synonyms may share reference yet differ in sense. The lexical items in Your ugly brother was detected and They saw Joe may ± overlap in sense yet share the same reference for ISH. When only intralinguistic sense and reference determine semantic interpretation, hide and conceal are as synonymous as Nps like masculine/feminine human being and neuter rational animal. Neither is indifferently acceptable in utterance. A Linguistics focused on an abstract ISH finds Performance factors irrelevant. If Lexical Functional Grammar proposes to treat language realistically, its lexical entries should be relevant to actual as well as possible speakers' situations, feelings and purposes. They would be more like Dictionary-entries than lexicon-entries. 16.64 q Roles and CG Roles Case Grammar proposed 12 roles, while GB's q roles are markedly fewer. The 3 central ones, AGENT, PATIENT and GOAL, may be abstract answers to CG's 12 more detailed questions about 'meaning'. Is shovel in I turned the ground with a shovel more plausibly a recipient of the object of the action (GOAL) compared to town in He drove to
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town or charity in He gave money to charity? Ogden's work in BASIC English showed that restricting its normal 20,000 or 30,000 newspaper vocabulary to BASIC's 850 or 1000 items sacrifices sense-precision to referential overlap. GB's syntactically focused theta-roles differ from those in semantically oriented Case Grammar, despite their label-overlaps. Expressions for human and non-human 'agents' have identical syntactic distribution (John/Curiosity killed the cat) while CG excludes inanimates & abstracts as literal AGENTs or EXPERIENCERs. It may be neater to merge semantic AGENT and EXPERIENCER as syntactic AGENT and more plausible semantically to equate the role of shovel with a syntactic AGENT than a syntactic PATIENT or GOAL. Despite the similar terminology, these are two distinct perspectives. I turned the ground is complete syntactically and interpretable semantically as it stands. CG sees INSTRUMENT (e.g. with a shovel) as a Modal Role compared to the Propositional Roles of AGENT I and OBJECT ground - many languages require a proposition-pair (I turned the ground/I used a shovel). CG allows language-peculiar modal roles like ACCOMPANIER (for with a friend), INSTRUMENT (with a shovel) or MANNER (with a will or with all deliberate speed. Not unlike Quechua's CERTAINTY-markers, English is unusual even among IE languages in lexicalizing nominal roles in the verb: After I shovelled the ground, hoed the garden and forked the hay, I trucked the produce to town, marketed it and pocketed the proceeds. 16.65 Adjuncts, Complements & C-Command Constituents are items demanded to qualify as a conventional unity. Disputes start when one is absent. Adults are definable as rational-animal units; infants are not rational, but they will be; whether or when children become fully rational is debated. There are comparable problems about when one expression is an adjunct or a complement to another: compare The woman arrested John (at the station) and I put the plate on the table. C-command labels a convention for how nodes and lines connected in a tree-drawing are to be interpreted as constituting a graphic unity, which correlates with a unitary semantic interpretation. He hid is distinguished from he concealed: where He hid is syntactically complete, He concealed demands an overt complement. Both can be interpreted semantically as entailing 'absent' factors which CG labels as covert OBJECT, EXPERIENCER and LOCATIVE. 15 Different Constants 16.66 Function, Constant and Variable Dead can signify a state of no reaction, die a process of changing reactions and kill an action by which a capacity to react is deliberately destroyed. The relations and functions among the three differ. Though kill and die relate equally to the resultant state signified by dead, die excludes an agent which kill demands: die can be logic's one-argument-
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relation Px, as can dead, but kill demands a two-term syntactic & semantic representation, Pxy. Their grammatical proforms differ (N-be-dead, N-become-dead, N1 cause-N2 be(come)-dead) as does their literal semantic interpretation in adverbial constructions: ?willfully dead/die, deliberately kill. In phonological frames like CeC vs. CaC, the production of unpronounceable /e/ vs. /a/ alters (only phones are pronounceable, phonemes are not). If English initial C is a voiceless stop, both spoken vocalics have an aspirate onset; if final C is voiceless, the voicing of /e/ and /a/ ceases more quickly than when final C is voiced. If initial or final C is /r/, the vowels may be produced with lip-rounding. These real changes may not be perceived by native speakers, and they are not chosen. But their contrasts are chosen. Alterations which are perceived as not distinguishing signs are variables with an identical function from the perspective of the constant contrast which /e/ vs. /a/ signal in English. The labels phon-eme and allo-phone oppose a 'phono-semantic'constant to its sound-variables. The labels morph-eme and allo-morph oppose a minimal sign-constant [identified 'phono-semantically'] to its sign-variables, as in the automatically different plurals of cat, dog and rose. Very many SAID versions referring to what The farmer killed the duckling stands for can be called sentence-variables if we assume their shared constant factor is a concrete SO scene or a SEEM Proposition, formalizable as Pxx or Pxy or Pab or P12, etc., where P opposes Predicate (signalled by kill-ed) to its 2 logically and grammatically minimal arguments, farm-er and duckling. What determines the constant or variable status of a 3rd argument like axe in such paraphrases? English can lexicalize Instrument in Duck axed! while other languages may demand 2 verbs when instruments are involved (Duck killed! + Axe used!). Arabic Duck killed by farmer! is as ungrammatical as it is understandable (agent-expressions are excluded in passive sentences). Languages vary in how they match SO events, SEEM thoughts about them, and SAID signals a speaker takes as constant (given) or variable (added). Japanese marks subject with ga, a topic with wa. If the subject is also the topic, it is only marked with wa, while a 'topicalized' indirect object can be marked by ni as well as wa. Functions vary as empirically perceived or perceivable, mentally conceived or conceivable, and linguistically expressed or expressible. It is a particular speaker's perspective which relates items as constant or variable. Within a particular perspective, relations may be valid and coherent, yet irrelevant or inappropriate, given a shift in perspective. 16.67 Inappropriate Transformations Hjelmslev (1963:11) required a linguistic description to be free of contradiction, exhaustive, and as simple as possible, allowing exhaustiveness to cede to clarity. Chomsky (1957:5) said pushing a precise, but inadequate formalism to an unacceptable conclusion shows where adjustment is needed: all TG work exploits that dynamic orientation.
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Colorless green ideas. . . was no contradiction in 1957's syntactic formulation, though unacceptable to anyone lexically. The Competence-Performance contrast was not used in that dispute to subordinate Performance-objections to Competenceformulations: by 1965, semantic ± interpretability was an added variable within an extended model of what was to be accounted for. Bresnan saw Performance as crucial for attesting to the adequacy of Competence hypotheses. Empirical evidence convinced her that Aspects had not succeeded in modeling knowledge-of-language realistically. No one ever considered ISH as 'real' as actual speakers or hearers. One test of realism is what speakers are (or can be made) aware of. While performance might argue for awareness of what words ± demand and ± tolerate in construction. Speakers can be unaware of the abstract structural relatedness which an Aspectstype grammar views as a constant, independent of lexical variables. Children use structures which Aspects saw as variables derived from underlying constants without ever using those constants. Bresnan argued inductively against the acceptability of deductively defined constants. She concluded that there are an indefinite number of frameworks within which aspects of language can be related coherently to each other, but that so far, no single model meets the test of matching realization- with characterization-accounts. 16.68 Lexicon and Transformations Bresnan contrasts TG's characterization of a syntactic frame as a constant syntactic complement-structure of believe or persuade + (to be honest) to her lexical account. That views complements as variables of lexically specified verbs and also predicts their differing semantic interpretations. Believe's complement is semantically interpretable as static or processive (I believe him to be wrong/to be making a mistake) while persuade's complement must be active (*I persuaded him to be wrong vs. processive I persuaded him to make a mistake). Statives demand one-argument predicates as do Processives (Px); Action-predicates demand two arguments (Pxy), while Benefactive-Action-predicates as in I gave him money demand three (Pxyz). The referential interpretation of actives and passives may be identical, but both contrast with statives and processives. Transformations may be useful for distinguishing the surface formation of actives vs. passives, but are not needed for lexical and semantic interpretation. A full lexical account of a verb like take, for instance, would include its occurrence in verbal phrases such as semantically stative, 1-argument take a break [like rest: Px] and distinguish it from a 2-argument, basic action like phrasal take-a-picture or monolexical photograph: Pxy] as opposed to a 3-argument, benefactive action like take or steal a picture (of someone vs. from someone: Pxyz].
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16.69 Arcs, Grammatical Relations & Levels Arcs and relational networks in strata are proposed as better pictures of relations among linguistic elements than the constituency- or realization-image of a tree. There, dominating categories are to be read as portraying an is a- or RE-represents a-connection to what they dominate. Arcs and relational networks may suggest priorities which trees are claimed to lack. Linguistically defined level-differences are not supposed to be analogs of geographic 'locations' or geological 'strata' so much as alternate perspectives/points of view, responding to different inquiries, prompted by different grammatical realizations, centering about the same unitary object. Relational Grammar Arcs, Networks and Strata are awkward to reproduce in print. Blake's image of coordinates is presented on even lines, illustrated here for Cats give happiness to everyone compared or related to Everyone is given happiness by cats as 3
P 2
2
P
1
Cho 1
1
P
Cho
Cho
While this may not match a common citation-order, the letters and numbers stand for intuitively grasped, but empirically indefinable, relations: P for Predicate, 1 for Subject, 2 for (direct) Object and 3 for (indirect) Object. Cho covers relational role(s) for which no other label has been proposed: in this instance, that of 2-happiness and/or 1-cats on other strata, when a simple active form is taken to be 'primitive'. 16.70 Chômeur Ancient Greek had three distinct finite verb-paradigms (Indicative, Subjunctive & Optative) so labelled because of their frequent semantic interpretation. Their morphological affixes (lu-ei, lu-e:, lu-oi 'he looses') are distinct. Latin had only two form-sets (Indicative and Subjunctive: am-at, am-et, 'he loves'), but older grammarians called a Subjunctive form like am-et, an Optative verb, when used for wishes. English has one set of finite forms. Heat-ed is called indicative by traditional grammarians in They heated the house 'because it states a fact' like Latin and Greek Indicatives. But heat-ed would take a subjunctive form in the Latin (and Greek) for If they heated the house, we'd be warm and I wish they had heated the house, while Greek would have demanded an Optative form for the second example. What Saussure would call the content of English, Latin and Greek finite verbs differs: despite shared signification (reference or sense), the number of opposing forms constituting their value is not the same. President Bush became a chômeur when Clinton succeed him: identities, overlaps and contrasts between SO, SEEM and SAID merit distinct labels and we call Bush, Carter and Nixon 'former presidents'. Though Chinese lacks syntactically obligatory number, gender, tense and ± definite markers, it can
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signal those distinctions lexically, compared to English grammar's demands for appropriately contrastive word-shapes in examples like She gave it to him. Where Case Grammar studies verb-dictated semantic nominal roles, Relational Grammar focuses on syntax-dictated labels for lexically identical nominals in relatable clause- or sentence-pairs or -groups. Identical Nominals in active-passive pairings have different syntactic roles in RG, but keep their identical semantic roles in CG: The boy kills the
cat The cat is killed
RG 1
2
1
TG S
O
S
by the
boy Cho
PP O
CG A
O
O A Latin:
Occidit puer
felicem Occiditur
felix a puero
RG
1
1 2
TG
Cho
S
S P PO O
CG
A
O O
A Arabic:
Katala alwaladu alkittata
Kutilat
alkittatu ____
RG
1
2
1
TG
S
O
S
CG
A
O
O
____
(A)
Arabic's suffixed -u marks a sentence's subject, -a, its object (in alkittat-A /alkittat-U). While agent expressions are excluded in passives, Arabic grammars require a passive's substitute subject (semantic 'Agent') to be in the accusative/objective case. Comparably, Latin infinitive subjects take accusative case. He said the boy kills the cat = Dixit puer-UM occidere felic-EM. Passive He said the cat is killed by the boy = Dixit felic-EM occidi a puer-O. 16.71 Concrete vs. Abstract Lexicon A category is a class and classes can have countable members. 8 Since 1 and 0 are numbers, a 'class' can have one,9 none10 or many members. Items in a lexicon [man, Noun and if, Conjunction] are mental-class [SEEM] members. While those in Chinese are mostly monomorphemic, SAID-units in IE are root+affix constructions which incorporate factors of sense, reference and grammatical function as solidary units. Items like Cerberus vs. dog vs. chien vs. Hund are said to 'exist' in SO, SEEM and SAID on quite different evidence, smoothed out by tacit agreements. Elements of Language or a language as such really 'mean' nothing of themselves: yet they are 'used to mean' whatever cultures agree on with confidence in their successful communication.
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SAID Morphemes link sense & referENTS by referrING (via referENCE); non-lexical-categorials in SAID have senses unlike those of roots such as S-NG in constructions like SiNGing SiNGer-s SaNG SiNGable SoNGs but not SiNGing + ly. It is reasonable to assume that if people perform, they must be competent to do so: so we construct a competence-image of Language which fits or fails to match the performance of Cockneys and Bostonians speaking English. Lexical-functional grammar claims to deal with units of which speakers are aware. Analysis isolates constituent elements of which we can be made aware. While the number of possible lexical items is indefinite, their known elements and constructionprocesses can be counted. Though always aware of water, we have recently been made aware of hydrogen, oxygen and the 104 + other chemical elements and their ± possible combinations. That information is without influence on our ordinary behavior or perception of water. Categorial grammars have a double attraction: (1) The semantics of a Categorial Grammar's lexical items is single and invariable in reference like numbers, and in sense + reference like H and O as technically isolable. But where free chemical elements must be discovered inductively, Categorial Terms are defined deductively by recursive (tautological) syntactic relations. As such, they are equatable with definitions like 1 + 1 = 2 so 6x3 = 18. We can use these public definitions identically, assuming a universal intuition of unity. What we accept as a unit varies widely in SO, SEEM and SAID in ways predictable from the norms appropriate to each focus. (2) The semantics of syntactic categorial grammars is as indifferent to SEEM or SO as (a) Syntactic Structures, (b) the senseindependent function of (proper) Names like Dizzy, Disraeli, Prime Minister, Author of Sybil and Lord Beaconsfield, of (common) Nouns like cow, jump, moon and jabberwock or (c) a statistical definition of average family. 16.72 A Categorial Lexicon To interpret stick-drawings of a man & dog, we match circles & lines with familiar body-parts. To interpret tree diagrams 'semantically' is to match SAID unities imaged as single nodes dominating-or-dominated-by nodes connected by lines with parts of SEEM paralleling a tiny part of SO. We do this while admitting that not even a Ideal human Speaker-Hearer's SAID or SEEM can be isomorphic with SO. A 'lexicon' like the one on p. 545 above says that English entities a or every (like some as quantifiers, yet lacking some's refinements) can be imaged as occurring immediately under a node labelled C, dominated by a node labelled S/N, which in turn occurs under a node labelled S; child and pig as C's (dominated mediately by S/N) are graphically different from N-dominated John or Petunia and these, in turn, contrast with is and loves dominated by S/N/N and cries dominated by S/N. A context-free grammar images connections between higher and lower nodes by -->, but ambiguously: 11 rewrite a single node as a node-pair as in
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S--> NP + VP and rewrite the single node VP / as node-pair VP + Npr / as single Node V and rewrite single node Npr as single entity John or single node NP as Art + Nco and single node Art as a, every or the and single node Nco as child. These conventions hold that (proper) Ns are not interpreted as indentical to NP's dominating 'common' nouns. While either 'proper' or 'common' nouns may be grammatical subjects, only proper Ns may be objects. Does this Lewis representation of Some pig grunts/Some child cries fit Children cry:
a plausible interpretation of it might require reading-rules such as it is asserted (top S) that there exists at least thing (x) named indefinitely (some), it is also (S/SS: and) asserted (lower S) both (since lower S dominates a pair of subordinate S'es) that: there exists at least one thing (named x) such that this x is named child/pig and there exists another thing (also named x) such that this x is named cries/grunts. Equating nouns and verbs as 'names' for 'things' is not new: Verbs (rhe:mata) by themselves, then, are nouns (onomata) and they stand for or signify something. . . (Aristotle On Interpretation III.20; trans., Cooke. Harvard 1940]). Nouns signify 'thing'; Verbs consignify 'thing + time'. Aristotle excluded past & future verbs from logic (effectively evacuating the contrastive sense of present). He argued that the past is set and the future unknowable, while things can be demonstrated as truly or falsely 'present'. Syntactic Structures might have had
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SS equated quantifiers (found in all languages) with Articles (found only in some). Context-free Porcus grundit contrasts with its plural in Latin; in (performance) context Porcus grundit might mean A/The pig grunts as indifferently as Pigs grunt, Some pigs grunt, All pigs grunt, The pigs grunt or If it's a pig, it'll grunt. Latin lacks articles, definite or indefinite as does Chinese, which has no obligatory singular/plural contrast for all forms. But both have quantifiers and indefinite modifiers. While X-bar pictures could be like
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vs.
The terminology which became part of the way of talking about language for more than 20 centuries is not isomorphic with the way the same phenomena can be described and discussed in the 20th century. 16.73 Montague Grammar A Montague Grammar ignores analogical semantic bases like S*NG which can be found in other than directly naming roles. It cannot answer questions about colorless green ideas' admissabiity on grounds of sense-incompatibility nor about catch-et vs catch-ed on grounds of phonological nor morphological deviance, nor questions about which among Kids cry, Any kid cries, All kids cry, If it's a kid, it'll cry, etc., is more adequate for, or acceptable in, different non-linguistic situations. It answers questions about its own image of the literal reference of a logical Pxyz construct like John gave Mary the boot by breaking it up into discrete unities such as John x, Mary x, boot x and give x linked by S/SS and. It is uninterested in accounting for the idiomatic interpretation of John gave Mary the boot. If all humans are rational, we expect them to be able to understand, produce, analyze, distinguish, prefer or reject the sense, reference and appropriateness of linguistic items and their constructions. Though real humans vary in those abilities, we understand how an ideal speaker-hearer is always aware of them. While Montague's semantactic approach unifying sense-construction-reference) can rate the acceptability of Bush was inadequate so all Republicans must go interestingly, it is not designed to compare Alqhaest is conceivable to Mary is kind in an equally revealing manner. 16.74 Simple Sentences and Relative Clauses Government and Binding studies pronominal (± co)-reference of pronouns in relative clauses. Language involves much more than reference. What A Man for all Seasons 'means' can be paraphrased by what is 'referred to' in This is a man who is suitable for all seasons, as opposed to Some men are suitable for easy times, This man is a man who is suitable for times which are good, bad, or indifferent. With or without
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relative clauses and their pronouns, native speaker can agree that they 'mean' ('refer to') the same extralinguistic data. Since both superordinate and subordinate expressions can be clausal (containing a finite verb) while subordinates can be nonclausal (without a finite verb or relative pronoun), it has been assumed that an account of main clauses is basic and adaptable to studying others. In one logical symbol-set, lower-case epsilon ( ) between a and A says an individual a is a member of class A while 'backward capital E' ($) after a says at least one individual (named) a exists. Since a 'class' can have 0, 1 or all individuals as members, and members can themselves be classes, or entities, or functions, both verbalizations must be weighed carefully. 16.75 Px Components of Pxyz John gave money to Mary The lexical items in this sentence are the Names of the individuals John and Mary and the common nouns money and give. Montague's syntactic rules demand a semantic (referential) interpretation but are more sophisticated than the Px (Predicate-argument) images of a Categorial Grammar. Etymology relates the English proper-noun Henry to Germanic Heinrich, and the latter to common-noun roots underlying Heim (home) and reich (reach, extend, realm). These can be interpreted as turning an implicit predication (x rules y) into an NP-ish home ruler or an NP + S-ish lord of all he surveys. Math has no -ishy numbers nor does Montague Grammar admit N-ish or Sish symbols: they must stand for or refer to either names or sentences, derived or original. Montague distinguished a rule from what a rule does (the same rule has different input and output in morphologized IE and monomorphemic Chinese). Dowty's analysis tree produced by the Subject-Predicate Rule F1 , t> for John gives would be [ John give ]t JohnT
giveIV
where t marks an S with a ± true value, T a Term (phrase) and IV an intransitive verb. Though give ultimately takes n arguments, the Principle of grammatical relations treats it by a syntactic rule with exactly one argument to produce a phrase of the same category as a verb with n - 1 arguments, so an analysis tree for John gives money is produced by the Verb-Direct Object Rule F2: , IV> [ John gives money ]t JohnT
give money IV
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giveTV
moneyT
and an analysis tree for John gives money to Mary can be produced by the Indirect Object Rule F3: , TV>, like [ John gives money JohnT
to Mary ]t
give money IV
giveTV
moneyT
MaryT
16.76 Minimalism In 1992, Chomsky circulated A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory which incorporated recent comments on an earlier draught. It had five sections (of which the first laid down some general considerations) and proposed that some version of X-bar Theory was apt for isolating design features of language identical in all humans. It is also sensitive to some of the main perspectives that characterize the main contributions of many other approaches to the goals and methods of Linguistics. 1. Some General Considerations Minimalism sees language as part of the natural world and the human brain as containing a faculty enabling us to use and understand language. A component of that faculty is a procedure for generating structural descriptions (SDs: the semantic and phonetic expressions of the language). Universal Grammar is then a theory of the initial state So of that language faculty. UG specifies linguistic levels, representations of symbolic systems of information about expressions. In EST variants, each SD was a sequence of representations at the D- & S-structure, PF & LF levels. TG had always assumed that language produces infinite results from finite means, ''what is plus simplicity of the laws by whereby we describe and extrapolate what is." 12 The simplicity of those laws is expressed in the principles of economy most neatly determining the computations and Sds they generate. Sds may be thought of as instructions for a pair of performance systems: articulatory-perceptual and conceptual-intentional. An expression contains instructions for each of these two interface levels (A-P and C-I). Most agree that the A-P level is phonetic form (PF) but the status and character of C-I has been more controversial. Or: a language has two components: the lexicon specifies elementary items individually and the computational system uses them to generate derivations and Sds. A particular expression's derivation therefore involves choice of items from the lexicon and a computation that constructs the pair of interface representations. Minimalism assumes these two interface levels (A-P & C-I) to be the only ones relevant to its perspectives.
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Early TG took the C-I interface to be the level of T-markers; in EST descendants, C-I was taken to be Logical Form (LF). Each language determines a set of pairs drawn from PF and LF as formal representations of sound and meaning. In the acquisition of language, the initial state So is a function mapping experience of primary linguistic data to a language. UG is concerned with So's invariant principles and variation. If variability is limited to nonsubstantive parts of the lexicon and general properties of lexical items, only a single computational system and lexicon need be postulated. A long tradition identified levels with their particular interrelated properties and UG provided a format for permissible rule systems. Minimalism's grasp of the principles-and-parameters approach breaks with this tradition: UG provides a fixed system of principles and a finite array of parameters. Language-particular rules reduce to choice of values for these parameters. That eliminates the notion of peculiar grammatical constructions and with it, construction-particular rules. In the computational system, Minimalism assumes So has invariant principles with restricted options (functional elements and general properties of the lexicon). Language acquisition fixes a selection s; the grammar of the language states only s (lexical arbitrariness and the PF component aside). Conditions on representations (from Binding, Case and Theta Theories, for instance) hold only at the interface, motivated by interface properties, taken to be modes of interpretation by performance systems. Linguistic expressions are the optimal realizations of interface conditions, with "optimality" determined by the economy conditions of UG. Within Minimalism's principles-and-parameters approach, the once prized evaluation metric is completely dispensable. The principles recognized as minimal are so restrictive that primary linguistic data normally suffice to set the parameter values that determine a language. Yet economy principles are important and their proper formalization may make the move toward the minimalist design possible a theory of language that takes a linguistic expression to be no more than a formal object satisfying the interface conditions in the optimal way. Invariant principles define possible derivations and derived objects (Sds). Given a language, these principles both determine a specific set of derivations and generate pairs of Sds. A derivation converges if it yields a legitimate SD, otherwise it crashes. In the EST framework there were other possibilities. Within the minimalist program, it is assumed that a derivation converges if it converges at PF and at LF, as determined by independent inspection of the interface levels. 2. Fundamental Relations: X-bar Theory Minimalism reencodes its data for the computational system in some version of X-bar's projection of heads from the lexicon. To grasp what this procedure entails requires mastery of an intricate set of technical terms, making any
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summary simplistic and/or misleading. Since an XP can be indifferently an NP, VP, AP or PP, Move a envisages the functional shifting of these Lexical Categories, subdistinguishable as XP, YP or ZP (or CP, SPEC, AGR etc.) Fundamental relations in Xbar Theory are expressed in local terms. Structures like (1) have two main relations on that basis: the C-head relation of ZP to X, and the head-complement relation of X to YP:
The Head-complement relation (typically associated with q-relations) is so fundamental that it demotes the SPEC-head relation to an "elsewhere" category. While minimalism dispenses with notions like government by a head, head-government plays a critical role in all modules of grammar, so that all such notions must be reformulated in X-bar terms. For instance, one assumes the SPEC-head relation enters into structural Case for the subject position, while the object position is assigned Case under government by V. Minimalism recasts structural Case in X-bar theoretic terms, under the SPEC-head relation. One theory of inflection can take the basic structure of the clause to be (2):
Agreement and structural Case can now be seen as manifestations of a SPEC-head relation (NP, AGR). But Case properties depend on characteristics of T and the V head of VP. So we assume that T raises to AGRs, forming (3i) and V to AGRo, forming (3ii); the complex includes the ø-features of AGR and the Case features provided by T, V:
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(3) (i)
[AGR T AGR]
(ii) [AGR V AGR] The structure of CP in (2) is largely determined by other properties of UG, given Minimalism's abstraction of AGR as a property common to adjectival agreement and the subject-object inflectional systems. Assume branching to be only binary, as it is in (1): without adjunction to complement, we have a segment-category distinction. So the structures most important to Minimalism's study are of the form (5), where XP, ZP & X each have a higher and lower segment, noted by subscripting (H and X heads):
Minimalism's basic elements of representation are chains. (5) can only have arisen by raising H to adjoin to X. So H heads a chain CH = (H, . . . t), and only this chain (not H in isolation) enters into head-a relations. The categories established are defined for H as well as X, but while they enter into head-a relations for X, they do not for H, but only for the chain CH. On the standard notion of domination for a pair (s, b) where s is a segment,
the category a
dominates b if every segment of a dominates b.
the category a
contains b if some segment of a dominates b. So
the segment category XP dominates ZP, WP, X', and whatever they dominate; XP
contains UP and whatever UP and XP dominate;
XP
contains WP but does not dominate it, and the
2-segment category X contains H but does not dominate it. For a head a, take MAX(a) to be the least full-category maximal projection dominating a. Then in (5), MAX (H) = MAX (X) = [XP1, XP2], the 2-segment category XP. If domain of a head a is the set of nodes contained in MAX(a) that are the distinct from, and do not contain, a, then domain of X in (5) is {UP, ZP, WP, YP, H} and whatever these the categories dominate;
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the
domain of H is the same, minus H.
The fundamental X-bar theoretic relation is thus head-complement: complement domain of a is the subset of the domain reflexively dominated by the complement of the the construction: YP in (5). complement domain of X (and H) is YP and whatever it Thedominates. Theremainder of the domain of a is the residue of a. So in (5), the residue of X is its domain minus YP and what it dominates. Theresidue
is a heterogeneous set, including the specifier
and anything adjoined to it (adjunction is allowed to the maximal projection, its SPEC, or head; UP, WP and H, respectively, in (5)). Since the operative relations are local, we are more interested in minimal subsets of the sets just defined, that include just categories locally related to the heads. So for any set S of categories, take MIN(S) (minimal S) to be the smallest subset K(appa) of S which is such that, for any set Gamma (a member of the set S), some Beta (a member of the set Kappa) reflexively dominates the set Gamma. In interesting cases, S is a function of a head Alpha (e.g. S = domain of a). Keeping to MIN(S)(a)), for some head a, in (5), the minimal domain of X is {UP, ZP, WP, YP, H}; its minimal complement domain of X is YP; and its minimal residue
is {UP, ZP, WP, H}.
The minimal domain of H is {UP, ZP, WP, YP}; its minimal complement domain is YP; and its minimal residue
is {UP, ZP, WP}.
minimal complement domain of a is its internal domain The and the minimal residue
of a is its checking domain.
These terms are chosen to stress that elements of the internal domain are typically internal arguments of a, while the checking domain is typically involved in checking inflectional features. Understand the notion MIN(S(a)) derivationally, not representationally: it is defined for a as a part of the process of introducing a into the derivation (not for the representation of the resultant state MIN(S)a)). The notions defined so far for one-membered chains must be extended to a nontrivial chain CH with n > 1 (a1, a zero-level category): (6) CH = (a1, ..., an) Take the case where n = 2, normal enough for lexical heads. The issue arises if we adopt an analysis of multi-argument verbs along the lines of Larson (1988), e.g., taking the underlying structure of (7) to be (8):
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(7) John put the book on the shelf
V2 raises to the empty position V1, forming the chain (put, t); subsequently, NP1 raises (overtly) to (SPEC, AGRS) and NP2 (covertly) to SPEC, AGR0)). The result we want is that minimal domain of the chain (put, t) is {NP1, NP2, ZP} the (the three arguments), while internal domain is {NP2, ZP} the (the internal arguments). Define the
domain of CH in (6) to be the set of nodes contained in MAX(a1) and not containing any ai. complement domain of CH is the subset of the domain
The of CH reflexively dominated by the complement of a1. Residue and MIN(S(&sign;)) are defined as before, now for a = CH. It is in terms of minimal sets that the local head-a relations are defined, the head not being the nontrivial chain CH. In (8), then, the relevant domains are as intended after V-raising to V1. Note that V2 is not in the internal domain of CH (= put, t) because it dominates t (= an of (6)). 3. Beyond Interface Levels: D-Structure Lectures on Government and Binding (LGB 1981) assumed the computational system presents lexical items for further computation by an operation called SATISFY, which selects an array of items from the lexicon and presents it in a format satisfying the conditions of X-bar theory. SATISFY is an "all-at-once" operation: all items that function at LF are drawn from the lexicon before computation proceeds, and presented in the X-bar format. So beyond the two external interface levels PF and LF, LGB postulated an additional level, D-structure. D-structure is the internal interface between the lexicon and the computational system, formed by SATISFY.
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The LGB solution failed because we may have an NP of arbitrary complexity in place of simple ones. Within anything like the LGB framework, we are driven to a version of generalized transformations. The problem was recognized at once in the very earliest work in generative grammar, but left as an unresolved paradox. More recent work has shown expressions interpretable at LF but not in their D-structure positions, along with other reasons to suspect that there are generalized transformations or devices like them. If so, the special assumptions underlying the postulation of D-structure lose credibility. Since these assumptions lacked independent conceptual support, we are led to dispense with the level of D-structure and the 'all-at-once' property of SATISFY, relying in its place on a theory of generalized transformations for lexical access though the empirical consequences of the D-structure conditions remain to be faced. 4. Beyond the Interface Levels: S-structure If D-structure is eliminable, what about S-structure, another level that has only theory-internal motivation? The basic issue is whether there are S-structure conditions. If not, we can dispense with the concept of S-structure, allowing the operation SPELLOUT to apply freely. There are two kinds of evidence for S-structure conditions: Languages differ as to where SPELL-OUT applies in the course of the derivation to Logical Form [are wh-phrases moved or in situ? is the language French-style with overt verb-raising or English-style with LF (i) verb-raising?] In just about every module of grammar, there is extensive evidence that the (ii) conditions apply at S-structure. To show that S-structure is nevertheless superfluous, we must show that the evidence of both these kinds, though substantial, is not compelling. It is suggested that in the Minimalist program, we can eliminate S-structure conditions on raising and lowering in favor of elementary morphological properties of lexical items. 5. Extensions of the Minimalist Program The preceding is only a sketch of a minimalist program, identifying some of the problems and a few possible solutions. It omits a wide range of topics, some of which have been explored successfully. Several desirable conclusions suggested by each section seem within reach: A linguistic expression (SD) is a phonetic / semantactic pair generated by an (i) optional derivation satisfying interface conditions (ii)The interface levels are the only levels of linguistic representation
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All conditions express properties of the interface levels, reflecting (iii)interpretive requirements UG provides a unique computational system, with derivations driven by morphological properties to which syntactic variation of languages is (iv) restricted Economy can be given a fairly narrow interpretation in terms of Full Interpretation, length of derivation, length of links, and the principles (v) Procrastinate and Greed Reading In addition to those noted for each chapter: Chomsky, Noam. 1985 (1955). The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. 1992. A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics. and H. Lasnik 1991. "Principles and Parameters Theory" in J. Jacobs, A. van Stechow, W. Sternefeld and T. Venneman, eds. Syntax: an International Handbook of Contemporary Research. Berlin, de Gruyter. Larson, R. 1988. "On the Double object Construction" in Linguistic Inquiry 19, 335-91 Notes 1. cf. Bullock and Stallybrass eds. 1977. The Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Thought. Harper, New York. 2. For Claude Levi-Strauss, a social structure is not definable on concrete behavior, but only on a systematically transformable MODEL. His Structures élementaires de la parenté (1949), found varieties of kinship-behavior and kinship INSTITUTIONS derive from a communication-principle underlying INCEST-prohibitions and the exchange of women in marriage. In that work, he conflated modes of action and thought. His later works on TOTEMISM and MYTH focus on modes of thought. Structures themselves derive from binary principles of the mind, a feature of structuralism most distinguishing his Sociology from Anthropology. Like Anthropology, it starts from cultural variety, but unlike it, his sociology seeks ultimate bases from which the variety is generated. 3. Theoretical models are static or dynamic; partial or complete; segregated or disaggregated, deterministic or Stochastic; descriptive or optimizing. Established models in Physics are formalized as laws used in Engineering. In Economics, models are usually static, partial, aggregated, deterministic, and descriptive. All have their
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limitations. Theoretical model-building analyzes into 5 steps: (1) The variables for characterizing and understanding the process are specified. (2) The relational-forms connecting variables are specified. (3) 'Simplifying' guesses entail error, so error terms are specified for statistical reliability (4) The Parameters of a model are estimated and the extent of its identification determined; if inadequate, the model is reformulated. (5) Reformulated models are rechecked for coverage and reliability. In SOCIAL SCIENCES, the term model often means the results of step (1) or at most steps (1) and (2) above, and may not be expressed in mathematical form. In Sociology, especially, model may be almost interchangeable with Ideal Type. 4. SVO Spanish: (a)
El conserje
abre
la puerta con una llave
The janitor
open-s
the door
se abre
por el
with a key (b)
La puerta conserje
con una llave
The door
self-open
by the
abre
la
janitor with a key (c)
Una llave
puerta
(d)
A key
open-s
the door
La puerta
se abre
con una
self open-s
with a
llave The door
key (e)
La puerta
esta abierta
The door
is open(ed)
SOV Japanese: (a)
Sono shei-wa sono doa-o
kagi-de
ake-ru this janitor
this door
key-with
open-s (b)
Sono doa-wa
sono shuei-ni-yoto
kagi-de
ake-rare-ru this door
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key with
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open-ed-is (c)
Sono doa-o
kagi-ga
ake-ru this door
key-by
open-s (d)
Sono doa-ga
kagi-de
ake-rare-ru this door
key-by
open-ed-is (e)
Sono doa-wa
aite-iru
This door
open-is
VSO Arabic: (a)
Yaftahu
al bawwaabu
al baaba bi muftaahi n
open-s
the janitor
the door with key
(b)
Futiha
al baabu
bi
is opened
the door
with key
Fataha
muftaahun
al baaba
open-s
a key
the door
Futiha
al baabu
bi
is open-ed
the door
with key
Al baabu
muftuuhun
The door
is open
muftaahin
(c)
(d)
muftaahin
(e)
There are surface contrasts despite semantic parallels: a conserje's or bawwaabu's job is likely more inclusive than a janitor's. Spanish se-verbs are not simply English ± transitives, so (b) & (d) sound odd. abierta is ambiguously the result of an Action; unmarked open contrasts with open-ed. While Arabic min tarafi al bawwaabi sounds like 'translation-talk', the f-t-h elements of 'open' and 'key' forms suggest IE 'root-persistence' while Japanese ake-ru compared to aite-ru does not; the sono demonstrative is more definite than English articles the (vs. a and zero) 5. Competence as a quasi-quantitative model derives its tautological rigor as Math does: real-world differences distinguishing human individuals and groups are ignored. It is pointless to object to half-children when calculating the average family as mother + father + 2.5 children. A mathematical mode entailing non-mathematical norms-
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eliminates most real-world families from its scope. Studying ISH-Competence allows manipulation of language-data without distraction from Competence-irrelevant qualities associated with individuals. Introduction of personal factors redefines the object studied as communicative rather than cognitive Competence. 6. German Fall ('case') reminds English speakers better than Romance cad- in Fr. cas or Spanish caso of the original Greek expression (pto:sis), which suggested that non-nominatives 'fall' from the top form in declensional paradigms [cf. Chapter 4]. The term signalled a parallel between morphological contrasts and semantic messages. English marks Greek 'case' forms only in genitives like man's, while Finnish shows 16 nominal contrasts, justifying labels like inessive vs. elative and illative 'cases' for locative contrasts. Since Chinese is monomorphemic, it is 'caseless'. Active Chin gie kong yon yiaoshi kaile men ['janitor with key open door'] contrasts with its Passive Men BEI chin gie kong yon yaoshi DA kaile ['door PASS MARK janitor with key make open PASS MARK door'] with identical semantic 'case roles' as in inflected languages. Korean has partially exclusive suffixes like by and with for Agents and Instruments. Agent Casca (below) is marked by -i or -ka in the active and -eIhe in the passive, but only passive constructions are allowed for Instruments (marked by -(I)lo) and natural forces; so the wind is marked by -eIhe. The semantic+grammatical Object is marked by -Il in the active, while the grammatical subject/semantic Object is marked by -In in the passive: John-i
changmun-Il
John
window
broke
Changmun-In
John-eIhe
kkejetta
Window
John-by
Caesar-In
Casca-eIhe
Caesar
Casca-by
Caesar-In
kal-lo
Caesar
knife-with
Mun-In
palam-eIhe
kketiletta
broken
salhedwetta killed
salhedwetta
killed
yeletta
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door
wind-by
opened Some Japanese Agents in passives are marked by a postposed ni, Instruments by de. Active or Instrumental subjects are by wa, Instruments by de: Kanazuchi de
mado o kowashita
hammer
window
broke Biru wa
mado o kowashita
Bill
window broke
Mado wa
kanazuchi
window
with hammerwas
de kowasareta
broken Naifu de
kare o koroshita
knife
him
Jon wa
kare o
killed
koroshita
de
John
him
Kare wa
naifu
killed
korosareta he
with knife was killed
Kare wa
jon ni
korosareta he
by John was killed
These less clean-cut examples are grammatical in Japanese: a.
Kare wa
ni
uta-re-ta he-TOPIC
inazuma
lightning by struck-
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wasPAST OBJECT
INST?/
AGENT? 'He was struck by lightning' b.
Kare wa
Tom ni
karaka-ware-ta he-TOPIC
Tom-by tease-be-PAST
OBJ/EXPER
AGENT
'He was teased by Tom' c.
Kare wa
neko o mi-ta
EXPERIENCER
OBJECT see-
PAST 'He saw a cat' d.
Kare wa
rajio o teuke-ta
AGENT T
OBJEC turn onPAST
'He turned on the radio' e.
Kanazuchi ga
kugi o
INSTR/AGENT OBJECT
ut-ta strike-
PAST 'The hammer struck the nail' f.
Kare wa
doa o
kagi de
AGENT
OBJECTINSTR
aketa
open-PAST 'He opened the door with a key' g.
Kaminari wa lightning
Tom o
ut-ta strikePAST
AGT/INSTR 'Lightning struck Tom' 7. cf. Postal's On Raising (1974.285. Cambridge MA. MIT Press) and Radford's Transformational Grammar (1990.154f. Cambridge U. Press)
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8. the class man includes all rational animals as its members. 9. If it actually existed, alkahest ('the universal instant solvent sought by medieval Arabic alchemists') would have to be a unique entity in SO - a 'class' with a single individual which exhausts its class-membership. It would nonetheless be one of many classmembers in both SEEM [as 'a thing'] and SAID [as 'a noun']. 10. SEEM and SAID entities like square circle and US woman president 'refer to' or 'stand for' no SO items or all possible members (like thing). Classes do not exist as such in nature: they are mental constructs based on (and ± verifiable in) natural individuals. 11. [NP + VP S
John
-->
Npr--> [VP + Npr
Mary NP-->
something [Adv + VP
Nco-->
[Vt + Npr
VP-->
child S
--> cries
[Vs + S [loves Vt--> [is NP
-->
Art + Nco
Vs--> believes [a
Nco -->
Adj + Nco
Art
-->
[every [the Adj
-->
Rel + VP
Adj
-->
yellow Adv--> childishly Rel--> which 12. Chomsky in Syntactic Structures (1957: f.n. 1, p. 14), quoting Quine 1953.
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Subject Index A Abstraction of Malinowski, 318-19 related to langue of de Saussure, 241-42 Accent of intensity, Indo-European, 228-29 Acoustic prominence, 3-34 Adjunction, 474-76 Affixation, 271-72 Affricate, 34-35 Agent, 429 Allomorphs free and bound forms, 84-85 phonologically predictable, 95-96 zero, 498 Allophones, 40 See also Phones defined, 44 Alphabet phonemic, 35 phonetic, 35 Ambiguity amphiboly as, 180 of terms, 4-5 Amphiboly, 180, 190, 468 Analogates, prime and secondary, 135-36 Analogon, 136 Analogy, 429, 438-39 in ancient linguistics, 133-36 of attribution, 135-36 controversy, 114-16 differences between three- and four-term, 222 of Dyscolus, 147-48 four-term, 135, 547 interpretation, 428-29 three-term, 134-35 of Varro, 138-41 Anomaly, 114-16, 138 Arc Pair Grammar, 544 Arcs in networks, 530-31, 610 Arealism, 325, 344 Articulatory classifications, 29 Aspiration (Firth), 334-35
Assumptions of linguistics, 294, 298 Sapir-Whorf hyothesis, 281-83 Attribution, 135-36 Augmented Transition Network (ANT), 531-32 Autonomy in ancient linguistics, 116 of Chomsky, 450 of language design (Sapir), 268-69 of languages (Whitney), 245 of linguistics (Hjelmslev), 339 of SO, 580 in syntactic generation, 603-4 Auxiliaries, English language, 95 B Behaviorism, 285, 287-88, 292, 293, 318, 578 Benefaction (Case Grammar), 430-31 Binarism (Bloomfield), 299, 302-5 Binary method (Varro), 139-40 Binding Principles, 507 Binding Theory, 507 Bound forms, 93 Bounding Theory, 506, 509 C Case filters (Chomsky), 509-10 Case Grammar (CG), 424-42, 599-601 non-propositional roles, 536 notational conventions, 435-38 as supplement to tagmemics, 421 Case roles, 425-28, 433-35
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Case Theory (Chomsky), 507, 509 Catalysis (Hjelmslev), 350-51 Categories, grammatical, 388-90 See also Subcategorization of Malinowski, 325 nonlexical, 460-62 phrasal and lexical (Chomsky), 453-54, 460-62, 499 ranking of, 413-14 syntacic, 462-63 syntagmatic relations among, 330 traces, zeros, and empty, 602-3 Categories (Aristotle), 119-20 C(ategory) Selection, 507 CD. See Communicative Dynamism (CD) CG. See Case Grammar (CG) Classification empirical, 191 of Hispanus, 191 intuitive, 191 Cognitive systems, 351-52 Collective Conscience, 237-38 Colligation, 330-32 Collocations, 330-31, 380, 390 See also Colligation; Connotation Combinations correct, 584 SAID, 581 Communication speech communities (Bloomfield), 293-94, 308 sub-linguistic (Bloomfield), 298 Communicative Dynamism (CD), 562-65 COMP (Chomsky), 476 Competence, 383-85 Complements of prepositions, 464 relative clauses as, 487-88 Component semantic, 44 Composition languages, 271 messages and signals in, 100-103 of speech, 17-18 Concepts of culture (Sapir), 278 grammatical (Sapir), 274-77
of science, 242-43, 286 speaker-hearer (Sapir), 278 Connotation, 331 See also Collocations of Bloomfield, 297, 299, 306 defined, 37 Consignification, 181-82, 187 Consonants clusters as syntagmetic units (Firth), 333 intervocalic, 226-27 modification of articulation, 31-32 phonemic symbols for English, 36 phonetic composition and articulation, 30-31 Constants, 82-83 Constellation, 345, 452 Constituents in ancient linguistics, 127 bound forms as paragraph, 93 embedding (Chomsky), 371-72 immediate, 93, 370, 372-73, 376-77, 422-23, 431 syntactic, 456-60 Constraints complex NP, 604 coordinate structure, 604 island, 487-91 specified-subject, 497-98 on variables in syntax, 484-86 Constructions co-variation, 99-100 endocentric and exocentric, 98 equivocal, 180 SAID combinations as, 581 Contextual analysis, 323-24 Contrasts established in phonemic analysis, 335 phonemic, 49-50 structural (Stoic), 130 suprasegmental, Suprasegmentals 50-53; 50-53 add Control Theory (Chomsky), 507, 510-11 Coreference, 451-52 Cours de Linguistique Générale (de Saussure), 241, 247-56 Co-variation, 99-100 Culture Sapir's concept, 278
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D Decomposition, lexical, 441-42 Deep Structure, 385, 397, 412-13, 423, 446, 448, 506 See also D-Structure Definitions, dictionary (Firth), 327 DEG(ree), 408, 460-61 Deletions recoverability, 502-3 WH-DELETION, 504 zero anaphora, 504-5 Denotation (Bloomfield), 297, 306 Derivation constituent, 458 derived sentences, 375 of Hjelmslev, 347 transderivational constraints, 416-17 Descriptive Grammar, 92-112 Descriptive Structuralism (Bloomfield) Determination in science (Hjelmslev), 345 semantic, 415 d-Heads, 506 Diachronic Linguistics, 236, 249 Dialectic of Hispanus, 174-75, 183-86 medieval, 165-66 Stoic, 165 study of, 183-84 Differentiae (Isidore of Seville), 200-201 Diphthongs, 34 Distribution parallel and complementary, 81-83, 103-4, 107-9, 583 of speech sounds, 17-18 D-Structure, 499-505, 622-23 Duration, 295 E Empirical observations, 6 Empirical Principle (Hjelmslev), 342 Empiricism, 6, 9, 579 of Bloomfield, 280, 303-4, 320 of Chomsky, 386-87, 450 of Firth, 321 Empty Category Principle (Chomsky), 507, 511 Episememes, 300
Equational verbs (Ve), 97 Equivocal terms, 4 Equivocation, 180, 190 EST. See Extended Standard Theory (EST) État de langue (de Saussure), 249 Etic and emic, 316 analysis, 419-21 medieval, 169 Etymologiarum Libri XX (Isidore of Seville), 200-201 Etymologies (Isidore of Seville), 200 Etymology, 127 defined, 202 views related to, 210-14 Explanation concept (Aristotle), 315-16 Extended Standard Theory (EST), 452, 453, 506 F Fields in tagmemic theory, 420-22, 424, 428 Figurae (Hjelmslev), 348-49 Filters (Chomsky), 399, 482-83, 509-10 Forms See also Bound forms; Free forms; Language forms; Linguistic forms of Bloomfield, 299-302 bound and free, 92-95, 270 from free forms (Bloomfield), 301-2 la langue as pure, 241-42 pro-forms and underlying forms (Chomsky), 468-70 of Sapir, 270-76 Free forms, 93 Functional Grammar, 561-65, 578 Functionalism (Malinowski), 315, 317, 322 Functions grammatical, 388-89, 508 of Hjelmslev, 346-47; 446 of malinowski, 317 of speech sounds, 17-18 Functives, 446 of Chomsky, 486-87 of Hjelmslev, 346-47 G GB. See Government and Binding (Chomsky) Generalizations, 496-97 Generative Semantics (GS), 403, 406 Global Rules comparison of Transitional,
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Global Rules (continued) Relational, and Case Grammars, 542 in Generative Semantics, 410-11 Glossematics (Hjelmslev), 339-42, 344, 351-52, 595-96 Government and Binding (Chomsky), 506-7, 615-16 Grammar See also Stratificational Grammar (SG) in ancient linguistics, 118, 126-27, 144-46 categorical, 545-46 Chomsky's organization, 395-96 composition, distribution, and function in, 79 distinct from lexicon (Firth), 331 of Dyscolus, 148-51 Greek, 141-42 independence (Chomsky), 368 medieval, 166-67 of Priscian, 151-59 purposes for, 79-80 Sapir's definition, 268 signals in arrangement of, 300 study of meaning in, 90-91 Grammars, stratified, 596-97 Grammatical analysis, 418 Grammatical Relations establishing, 543-44 Montague's definition, 558-59 Grassman's law, 220-21 Grimm's Law, 219-20; 229 GS. See Generative Semantics (GS) H Hearer concept (Sapir), 260 Hierarchy in approach to language, 53 in Descriptive Grammar, 98-99 of Hjelmslev, 345 of Malinowski, 315 in Relational Grammar, 535-36 Hypersememes, 354 Hyponymy, 136 Hypophonemes, 354 Hypostasis (Bloomfield), 298-99 I IA. See Item-and-arrangement (IA) IC. See Immediate constituents (IC)
Ideal Speaker-Hearer (ISH) actual and potential, 447-48 capacity of, 446-47 of Chomsky, 406 Identity abstract, 476 diachronic linguistic, 255 Immediate constituents (IC), 93, 370, 372-73, 376-77, 422-23, 431 See also String analysis Implication (Firth), 330 Inference principles of, 450 in Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, 281-82 Infixation, 272-73 Information, semantic, 467 Instrument, 429 Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions, 378-400 Interdependence (Hjelmslev), 345 International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), 27 International Phonetic Association (IPA), 334-35 Interpretation, semantic, 429-30, 446-49, 452, 458-60 Intervocalic consonants, 226-27 IP. See Item-and-process (IP) ISH. See Ideal Speaker-Hearer (ISH) Isomorphism, 135, 476 Item-and-arrangement (IA), 355, 585 Item-and-process (IP), 355, 585 ITLD. See Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions K Kernel, 374-75 Kernel sentences, 374-76, 385, 476-77 See also Transformations Kyrolowicz's rules, 222 L LAD. See language Acquisition Device (LAD) Langage (de Saussure) as data, 248 as social fact, 241, 247 Language Acquisition Device (LAD), 446-47
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Language forms grammatical concepts (Sapir), 274-76 grammatical processes in form (Sapir), 270-74 Language-forms (Aristotelian), 136 Languages abbreviations, 22-23 acoustic effects (Bloomfield), 295 affixation and infixation, 271-73 in Aristotelian concept of science, 242-43 autonomous structure, 268-69 changes in, 210-12, 223-30, 246-47, 273-74 Hjelmslev's interpretation, 341 levels (de Saussure), 247-48 main aspects of, 260 meaning of sense and reference in, 19-20 overlays, 295 properties, 14-15, 22 radicals, 269-70 Sapir's definition, 266, 268, 278 signals in, 300 as a state, 583 static and dynamics aspects (Sapir), 277 as system of systems, 16 in tagmemic theory, 420-21 variation in, 577 word order and composition, 271 Language study inductive and deductive approaches to, 303 subparts of, 112 Langue (de Saussure), 240-41, 247, 383, 589-90 See also État de langue (de Saussure); Linguistic signs abstractness of, 248 description of, 247-48 diachronic and synchronic aspects, 252 Hjelmslev's interpretation of, 343-44 as pure form, 255-56 Lexemes, 354, 359-60 Lexical-Functional Grammar, 577 Lexical morphemes, 86-88, 94 Lexical morphs, 94 Lexicon categorical, 612-15 of categorical grammar, 545 of Chomsky, 393, 399, 448, 453, 463-64
concrete and abstract, 611-12 distinct from grammar (Firth), 331 of Montague Grammar, 547 LF (Logical Form) Component, 507 Linearity as empirical property of speech, 15 linearization, 544 Linguistic forms classification of, 80-81 grammatical (Bloomfield), 299-300 Linguistic Relativity (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), 280, 282 Linguistics ancient, 585-88 assumptions of (Bloomfield), 294, 298 descriptive, 20-21, 260 Diachronic, 236 fields in, 11-14 Firth's critique, 328 goals (de Saussure), 247 historical, 588-89 Malinowski's contributions (Firth), 325 models in historical, 235-36 as science, 7-9, 54-58, 235, 241-46 structural, 578 study of (Bloomfield), 288-90 uses, 12-13 Linguistic signs See also Signification comparison of Stoics' and de Saussure's ideas, 249-50 defined, 249 distinctions of de Saussure, 251 nature of, 250-51 Linguistic systems, 17-18 Linguistic theory of Boas, 262-65 Chomsky's view, 374, 377, 382-86
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Literal cases, 439-41 Literal interpretation, 439-41 Location (Case Grammar), 430 Logic adapted for linguistics, 413-14 in ancient linguistics, 118, 126-27, 129-30 formal, 133, 574, 575 medieval, 167, 183, 186 Set Theory, 550 terministic, 186 M Manzal's rules, 222 Markov Process, 369 Materialism, 288, 297 Maximal phrases, 508 Meaning See also Signals; Signs in Aspects, 449 of Bloomfield, 285-87, 295-98, 307-8 of Boas, 264-65 contextual approach of Wegener, 322 contextual (Hjelmslev), 349 contextual specification of (Malinowski), 325 defined in mentalism, 298 Firth's interpretation, 321-22 in Generative Semantics, 403 of Hispanus, 181-83 of language, 19-20 of linguistic form, 297 of morpheme, 300 of Sapir, 270 statement of (Malinowski), 318-19 of tagmemes, 300 Meaning systems, symbolic and semiotic, 351-52 Mediate constituents, 93 Mentalism, 285-86, 297-98 Bloomfield's interpretation, 287 features of, 288 Metaphor, 429, 438-39 Minimalism, 617-24 Minimal pair test, 294, 335 Mnemonics, 339 Models in historical linguistics, 235-36 Modification, 187-88
Montague Grammar, 547-65, 578, 615-16 Montague Notation, 545-47 Mora, 295 Morphemes, 81 defined, 84-88 defined (Bloomfield), 300 as elements of words, 94-95 free and bound forms, 84-85, 91-94 as generic concept, 84 grammatical, 86-88, 94 of Lamb, 354 lexical and grammatical, 86-87, 94 morphemic strata, 359-60 open and closed classes of, 93-94 as units, 93, 584 Morphology in descriptive grammars, 90 elements of, 584-85 Greek verb, 114-15 Latin, 172-73 morphemes, 92 relation to phonology, 583 Morphs, 87, 88 as elements of words, 94-95 free and bound forms, 93-94 grammatical, 94 open and closed classes of, 93 as units, 93 Movement (Chomsky) adverbs, 487 move-transformations, 481 multiple moves, 492-94 random, 509 types, 508-9 WH-movement, 470-76, 489-91, 503 N Nazalization, 33 NEG(ation), 407-10, 460-61, 482 Neogrammarian school, 221-22 Network arcsin, 530-31, 610 Networks relational, 544 N (nominals), 96-97, 105 Nodes, empty, 479-81 Nonconstituents, syntactic, 456-58
Nonliteral cases, 439-41 Nonliteral interpretation, 439-41
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Notation insight from, 36 logical, 548-49 Montague, 545 symbolic, 306 NP and VP analysis (Quirk), 456 NP-positions, 479 O Objectivity, 2-7, 259 of Bloomfield, 309-10 of empiricism, 9 of Malinowski, 320 of phonetic information, 28-31 Order (Bloomfield), 302 P Palatalization, 295 Palatography, 27 Paradigmatic relations, 332, 334 Paragraphs, 93 Parallel distribution (PD), 107-9 Parole (de Saussure) as data, 248 defined, 241, 247 Particles, 331 See also Prefixes in tagmemic theory, 420-22, 424, 428 Part of speech (Bloomfield), 302 Parts of Speech (Priscian), 587 Passives, 497-98 in complex sentences, 522 interpretation of, 528 rule ordering, 528 subjectless, 526 in Universal Grammar, 544 PD. See Parallel distribution (PD) Peripatetics, 126, 133, 176-77 PF (Phonetic Form) Component, 507 Phatic communion (Malinowski), 317-18 Phonemes, 37 See also Transcribeme (Firth) of Bloomfield, 294 definitions, 44, 58-59 differences in languages, 294 differential and referential functions, 79
hypophonemes, 354 of Lamb, 354 representations, 43 as scientific construct, 56 segmental English, 48-49 Phonemic analysis, 35, 47-48, 57-58, 334-35 Phonemic pitch, 53-54 Phonemics criticism (Firth), 329-30 function of, 83 relation to phonetics, 35 Phonemic symbols, 43-44 Phones, 45 Phonetics See also Phonology analysis, 25 articulatory, 26-31 functional, 26 function of, 31 of language, 300 relation to phonemics, 35 representation, 398 Phonetic symbols, 43-44 Phonic system, Indo-European, 230 Phonology See also Phonemics defined, 26 elements of, 584-85 focus of, 31, 35 function of, 581-83 Latin, 173 relation to phonetics and phonemics, 35 syntagmetic units in (Firth), 333 Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG), 369, 372, 451 Phrase Structure (PS), 369-70, 445 PIE. See ProtoIndoEuropean (PIE) Pitch, 295 Polysystemic analysis (Firth), 329-30 Porphyrian Tree, 176-77, 182, 347, 348, 446, 506 Prague School, 343, 361, 387 Praguian analysis, 335-36 Prefixes, 331 Prepositions, 464 Pro-Drop Parameter, 507 Projection Principle, 50, 507 Prolegomena (Hjelmslev), 339-41, 348, 357
Pronunciation (stress), 50-51, 60, 295
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Propositions in ancient linguistics, 122, 136-38 of Hispanus, 175-76 in Case Grammar, 432-38 Prosodic analysis, 335-36 ProtoIndoEuropean (PIE), 223 PROTOlanguage, 214-18, 223-24 PS. See Phrase Structure (PS) PSG. See Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG) PS rules. See Passives Psychology, 288-90 Q Q(uestion), 407-8 482 R Radicals in language (Sapir), 269-70 Rationalism of Chomsky, 386-87, 450 Malinowski's refutation of, 319-20 in study of linguistics (Bloomfield), 280, 303-4 Reality, 255, 344 Realization allomorphic, 89 in Case Grammar, 438 rules of stratal, 354-55 Real world in Heraclitus's thought, 280 in Plato's thought, 280 Recoverability condition, 502-4 Reductionism, 420-21 Redundancy derivations, 466-67 rules, 468 Relational Grammar (RG), 533-44, 578 Relational Laws, 541 Relational networks, 544 Relativity, linguistic (Sapir-Whorf), 278-83 Representations phonetic, 448 semantic, 448 stratal, 361 Resonance, 33 REST. See Revised Extended Standard Theory (REST) Retroflexion, 336 Revised Extended Standard Theory (REST), 452
RG. See Relational Grammar (RG) Rhetoric in ancient linguistics, 113-14 medieval, 167 S Sandhi, 301 Sanskrit, 212 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 279, 281-83, 319 Science in ancient linguistics, 129 Aristotelian concept of, 242-43 as concept in mentalism, 286 connotation in, 299, 306-7 de Saussure's objects of, 241-42 interdependence in (Hjelmslev), 345 of language (Bloomfield), 289-93 linguistics as, 7-9, 235, 241-46 Semantic component, 448 Semantic determination, 415 Semantic Interpretation, 433 Semantic rules (Montague Grammar), 548 Semantics, 377 of Montague, 553-58 SEEM-SO-SAID, 577 Sememes, 300, 359-60 Semiotic system, 351-52 Senses, lexical and grammatical, 583-84 Sentences, 432-33 in ancient linguistics, 122 of Chomsky, 373-74 as constituents of paragraphs, 93 defined (Montague), 551-52 Set theory, 550 SG. See Stratificational Grammar (SG) Signals in language, 89-90, 300 See also Meaning; Signs Signification See also Consignification of Chomsky, 449 defined, 187 de Saussure's definition, 251-52 distinguished from supposition (Hispanus), 179 English, 179 generic, 181-82 relation to langue of de Saussure, 256 Signs
See also Linguistic signs; Syntagms
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of de Saussure, 249, 251-56 of Hjelmslev, 348-49 linguistic, 249-51 Situation (Bloomfield), 297 context of (Firth), 326-27 as determinants of what is said (Wegener and Firth), 323 Social Facts (Durkheim), 238-40, 383, 589-90 See also Langue (de Saussure) Sociology as discipline, 235 Durkheim's work in, 235 as science (Durkheim), 236, 237-38; 237-39 Sonants, 228 Sophists, 114 SO-SEEM-SAID in ancient linguistics, 116, 127-28 medieval, 167-70, 187 The Modistae, 169-70 Sounds in articulatory phonetics, 26-31 composition, distribution, and function, 25-36 functional load, 51 function of, 57 in a phonology, 26 speech, 45-47 as structural elements (Firth), 332 units of, 37-38 Sound spectrography, 27-28 Speaker-hearer concept (Sapir), 260, 278 Speech See also Parts of speech in ancient linguistics, 119, 126-29 of Bloomfield, 302 composition, distribution, and functions of sounds, 17-18 elements of (Sapir), 268 empirical properties, 15-17 phonemic and phonetic representations of sounds, 45-47 Square of Oppositions, 175-76 S-Structure, 499-501, 623 Stoics de Saussure's concepts compared to, 249-50 dialectic, 165 lekton, 130-31, 169
logic of, 125-27, 129-30 parts of speech, 128-29 philosophy of, 129-30 terms for language-forms, 136 Stratificational Grammar (SG), 352-61, 446, 505-6 Stress contrasts in English, 60 in production of sound, 50-51, 295 String analysis, 422-23, 432 Structuralism ecological concerns in, 323 in Firth, 328-29 in linguistics, 578-79, 582 Structures See also Deep Structure; Surface Structure deep and surface, 385, 412-13 dependence, 452 of Firth, 328-29, 335 at intersections of systems (Firth), 332 Subcategorization of Chomsky, 389-92, 396-98, 446 lexical, 494-95 mutual, 464-66 in underlying structures, 477-78 Subjacency Principle, 491-92, 509, 604-5 Subjectivity, 2-4 Subject-raising (Chomsky), 478, 495-96 Substitutions (Bloomfield), 300 Succession, 15 Suicide de Saussure's view, 241 Durkheim's view, 240 Summulae Logicales (Hispanus), 171, 174-75, 177-78, 183-91 Supposition distinguished from signification (Hispanus), 179 divisions of, 185-86 Surface Structure, 385, 397, 412-13, 448, 499-500, 506 See also S-Structure Syllables as syntagmetic units (Firth), 333 Syllogism categoric, 120-22
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Syllogism (continued) of Hispanus, 188-90 Symbols of Bloomfield, 306 phonemic, 43-45, 87 phonetic, 40-45, 87 speech, 57 symbolic system, 351 symbol-sets, 567-69 Syncategorematics, 171, 190-91, 285 Synchronic states, 249 Syncretisms (Hjelmslev), 350 Syndesmoi (Aristotle), 586 Syntactic pattern recognition. See Transition Network System Syntactic rules (Montague Grammar), 548 Syntactic structure See also Deep Structure; Surface Structure of Chomsky, 367, 382, 506 rules, 370-71 Syntagmatic relations (Firth), 329-30, 332, 334 Syntagmatic units function (Firth), 335 identified (Firth), 333 Syntagms, 251, 590 Syntax Bloomfield's interpretation, 301 Chomsky's theory, 377, 382-85 constituents and nonconstituents, 456-58 constraints on variables, 484-86 in descriptive grammars, 90 endocentric and exocentric construction, 98 X-bar, 454-55 Systems at intersection of structures (Firth), 332, 335 languages as (Hjelmslev), 341 T Tagmeme of Bloomfield, 300 of Pike, 420 Tagmemics, 418-19, 431 Taxemes (Bloomfield), 300 Techne Grammatike (Thrax), 144-46 Tectogrammatics, 561 Terena analysis, 335 Terms
ambiguous, 4-5 in ancient linguistics, 136-38 equivocal, 4 grammatical or logical in ancient linguistics, 126 of Hispanus, 178-80 technical, 5-7 for thematic relations, 467 univocal, 4 Text in Empirical Principle (Hjelmslev), 342-43 in Stratificational Grammar, 355 as system-and-process (Hjelmslev), 345-47 as totality of strata, 355 TG. See Transformational Grammar (TG) Q-Criterion, 508 Q-Theory, 506-7, 508, 606-7 Transcribeme (Firth), 333-34 Transformational Grammar (TG), 356, 359, 377, 406 Case Component, 431 revisability of, 452 transderivational constraints, 416-17 Transformations See also Analogy; Derivation; Kernel sentences; Metaphor of Chomsky, 375-77, 393-94, 399, 467-68 of Dyscolus, 147 inappropriate, 608-9 move-transformations, 481 Transition Network System, 529-30 See also Augmented Transition Network (ANT) Transitions, 295, 531 Transitive verbs (Vt), 97 Translation of language (Malinowski), 317, 324 meaning of (Firth), 327 in tagmemics, 431-32 Trees diagrams and relations, 431, 454-55 in Extended Standard Theory, 454-56
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in Generative Semantics, 406 of Montague, 552 Porphyrian, 176-77, 182, 347, 348, 446, 506 Truth (Hjelmslev), 344 U Ultimate constituents, 93 Units function of grammatical, 83 in grammar, 79 morpheme as, 85, 92-93 phonetic and phonemic, 37 phonological and morphological, 584 of Pike, 422 of sound, 37-38 of speech, 38-40 Universal Alignment Hypothesis, 539 Universal Base Hypothesis, 483-84 Universal Grammar, 447 Universals, 446-47 in Case Grammar, 426-28 of Chomsky, 398, 406-7 formal and substantive, 25, 385 of Malinowski, 325 Univocal terms, 4 V V. See Verbals (V) Validity of Bloomfield, 305-6 of Hjelmslev, 344 logical, 305-6 opposed to truth (Hispanus), 188-90 universal, 560-61 Value of Boas, 264 of Chomsky, 449 of de Saussure, 252-56 linguistic, 252-55 Variables, 82-83 Ve. See Equational verbs (Ve) Velarization, 295 Verbals (V), 97 Verbs equational and transitive, 97 performative, 415-16
Verner's Law, 221, 227, 228 Vocalic system Indo-European, 228 Voicing, 32-33, 37 Vowels cardinal, 28 modification of articulation, 31-35 phonemic symbols for English, 36 phontic symbols for English, 40 sounds of English, 59 unaccented, 228 vocalic, 228 V (Verbals), 97, 105 W Waves (tagmemic theory), 420, 422, 424, 428 WH-movement. See Movement (Chomsky) Word endings, Indo-European, 229-30 Word Magic, 429-30 Word order of Bloomfield, 302 languages, 271 linearization, 544 verb-subject-object, 412-13 Words Bloomfield's interpretation, 301 classification by morphological construction, 94-95 as constituents of paragraphs and sentences, 93 definitions of, 94 as minimal free form, 94, 585 Varro's definition, 138-39 X X-bar syntax, 454-56, 459, 483, 499, 606, 618-22
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Author Index A Adelung, 203 Albertus Magnus, 174 Algeo, John, 353 Allen, W.S., 336 Allwood, 548-49 Andersson, 548-49 Anselm of Canterbury, 166 Antony, 143 Apellicon, 142 Apollonius of Rhodes, 143 Aquinas, Thomas, 166, 167, 174, 241 Archimedes, 143 Aristarchus of Samos, 143 Aristotle, 114, 119-20, 123, 126, 129, 132, 133, 165, 166, 167, 168, 202, 281, 286 Arlotto, Anthony, 214 B Bach, 548, 553, 559 Bacon, Francis, 166 Bacon, Roger, 168 Baker, 537 Bazell, C.E., 335 Bentham, Jeremy, 429 Benveniste, 236 Bever, T., 516 Bierce, Ambrose, 6, 349 Bierstedt, Robert, 238-39 Bloch, 386 Bloomfield, Leonard, 128, 285-310, 324, 333, 340, 346, 347, 356, 358, 370-72, 382, 399, 441, 447, 593 Boas, Franz, 260-65, 280, 281, 286, 289, 320, 374, 399, 591-92 Bochenski, I.M., 131, 133 Botha, Rudolf P., 387 Brame, M., 528 Bréal, M., 289 Bresnan, Joan, 486, 516, 517, 532, 544, 609 Brugmann, Karl, 222, 289 Brutus, 143 Bursill-Hall, G.L., 170 Burt, Marina K., 452 C Carnap, Rudolf, 323, 339, 340, 420, 545
Carroll, John B., 279, 281, 283, 430 Carroll, Lewis, 81 Cassius, 143 Catell, 485 Chafe, Wallace L., 382, 426, 431, 433, 441, 563 Chao, Yuen-Ren, 58 Chomsky, Noam, 339, 358, 367-73, 377-79, 381-89, 393-99, 406, 412, 420-21, 426-28, 446-511, 516, 518, 519-20, 528, 532, 556, 608 Ciardi, John, 349 Cicero, 202 Comte, Auguste, 235 Cook, V., 452, 467 Cook, Walter A., 423, 433, 441 Cooper, 516, 552, 553, 555 Crates, 138 Cullicover, 486 Curtis, S., 267 D Dahl, 548-49, 560 Darwin, Charles, 135, 243 Delbrück, R., 289 Demosthenes, 114 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 235-56, 286, 329, 343, 348, 357, 400, 408, 453, 498, 515, 589-90 Dik, Simon, 561 Diogenes Laertius, 142
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Donatus, 151 Dowty, David, 516, 554, 555, 556, 558, 561 Durkheim, André, 237 Durkheim, &Emile;mile, 235-40, 241, 243 Dyscolus, Apollonius, 146-51, 165, 575-76 E Erastothenes, 143 Euclid, 143 Eumenes II, 143 Euripides, 114 F Fillmore, Charles J., 347, 424, 433, 467 Finck, F.N., 289 Firbas, Jan, 561-65 Firth, John Rupert, 313, 321-36, 344, 354-55, 361, 368, 423, 465 Firth, Raymond William, 315, 318, 320, 322-23 Fischer, Theobold, 261 Flemming, Ilah, 353 Fodor, J.A., 379, 399, 476, 516, 548 Fonseca, 166 Frege, F.L.G., 545 G Gardiner, Alan, 323, 325 Garrett, M., 516 Gleason, 353 Goldschmidt, Walter R., 261 Gorgias of Leontini, 114 Grassman, 220-21 Greenbaum, Sidney, 104 Greenough, J.B., 289 Grimm, Jacob, 220 Grosu, 485 Gruber, Jeffrey, 467 Guichard, Etienne, 203 H Hall, Edward T., 239 Halle, Morris, 516, 529-30 Halliday, M.A.K., 561 Hayakawa, 429 Henderson, Eugénie, 336 Hermogenes, 199 Herodian, 146, 151 Hill, 382
Hippias of Elis, 114 Hispanus, Petrus, 171, 174-91, 202, 235, 331, 347, 588 Hjelmslev, Louis, 329, 339-61, 367, 369-71, 374, 388-89, 394, 400, 407, 420, 422, 446, 460, 466, 467, 483, 498, 503, 505, 608 Hockett, Charles, 266, 289, 313, 315, 356, 368, 382 Homer, 113 Horn, 485 Horrock, G., 452 Householder, Fred, 147, 286 Hull, 386 Hülser, Karlheinz, 126 I Isaeus, 114 Isidore of Seville, 200-203, 339 Isocrates, 113 J Jackendoff, Ray, 467 Jacobson, Pauline, 555 Jakobson, 316, 328 Jesperson, Otto, 289 Johnson, 544 Johnson, Samuel, 206-7 Jones, Daniel, 321, 335 Jones, Hugh, 206 Jones, William, 212-14, 236 Joos, Martin, 374 K Kaplan, R., 532 Katz, Jerrold, 378-81, 399, 453, 476, 545, 548 Kemp, 204 Keynes, John Maynard, 21-22 Kitteridge, G.L., 289 Korzybski 429 Koutsoudas, A., 528 Kraus, Christian Jakob, 203 Kripke, 545 Kroeber, Alfred, 261 Kyrolowicz, Jerzy, 222 L Lakoff, George, 416 Lamb, Sydney, 352, 353, 354, 356, 361 Lane, Harlan, 267 Larson, R., 621 Lasnik, Harold, 502, 503, 528 Leech, Geoffrey, 104 Lehmann, W.P., 212-14 Levelt, W.J.M., 516
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Lévi-Strauss, 236, 327 Lewis, 545, 547 Linden, Eugene, 267 Lloyd, R.J., 289 Lockwood, David G., 353 Longacre, Robert, 423 Lowth, Robert, 206-10, 378 Lukasiewiszc, Jan, 126 Lyons, John, 335, 426 Lysias, 114 M McCawley, James, 407, 441 Makkai, Adam, 353 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 313-20, 323, 324-28 Malthus, Thomas, 135 Mandelbaum, David G., 278-79 Manzak, Witold, 222 Marcus, M., 532 Marret, R.R., 289 Mates, Benson, 131 Mathesius, Vilem, 562 Matthews, P.H., 333 Meillet, Antoine, 223-24, 226-30, 236, 241, 289 Melancthon, 166 Montague, 545-48, 551-52 Moravczik, Edith A., 550, 561 Mueller, Max, 235 N Neleus, 142 Neubert, Albrecht, 418-19 Newmeyer, Frederick, 452, 485 Newton, Isaac, 243 Nida, 372-73, 376 O Octavian, 143 Oertel, H., 289 P Pallas, 203 Palmer, Frank R., 336 Panduro, 203 Pareto, Wilfredo, 323, 326 Parrett, Herman, 416 Partee, Barbara H., 516, 548, 553, 554, 555
Passy, Paul, 289 Patterson, Francine, 267 Paul, Hermann, 289 Pedersen, Holger, 214 Pericles, 113-14 Perlmutter, David M., 522, 535, 539, 541, 542, 544 Peters, Stanley, 483-84, 531 Pike, Kenneth L., 333, 372, 418-22, 543 Plato, 116-17, 118, 120, 129, 132, 142, 147, 165, 386 Postal, Paul, 378-81, 453, 522, 535, 539, 541, 542, 544, 545 Premack, 267 Priscian, 151-59, 165, 575-76, 587 Prodicus of Ceos, 114 Prolemy I, 143 Protagoras, 114, 118, 142 Ptolemy, Claudius, 143 Ptolemy II, 142 Pullum, G.K., 555 Q Quine, W.V., 386 Quirk, Randolph, 104-5, 157, 418, 441, 456 R Radford, Andrew, 452 Ramus, 166 Remmius, 151 Ritchie, Robert, 483-84, 531 Ross, John Robert, 484-90 Rumbaugh, 267 Ruskin, John, 9 S Sadock, Jerrold, 415 Sampson, Geoffrey, 282, 358-60, 365-66, 387 Sapir, Edward, 259-83, 286, 303, 306-7, 315, 399, 592-93 Schwartz, 490-91 Sebeok, Thomas, 282 Shir, 486 Siegel, Dorothy, 518 Sievers, Eduard, 289 Socrates, 114, 142, 147, 200 Spier, Leslie, 266 Starosta, 544 Strato, 142, 143 Sulla, 142 Svartik, John, 104 Sweet, Henry, 289, 321, 335
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Symmons-Symonolewicz, K., 319 T Tarde, Gabriel, 240, 241 Tarski, A., 545 Temple, R., 322 Theocritus, 143 Theophrastus, 142 Thomas of Erfurt, 170 Thomason, 554, 555 Thrax, Dionysius, 144-46, 151, 165, 575 Togeby, Knud, 357 Tooke, John Horne, 204 Tuebner, 241 U Uldall, Hans Jorgen, 339, 341-42 V van Riemsdijk, 543-44 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 138-40, 143, Verner, 221 W Wallis, John, 204-6 Wegener, Philip, 322, 323, 325 Weiss, Albert, 287, 289 Whitehead, Alfred North, 323, 328 Whitfield, Francis, 342, 351 Whitney, William Dwight, 243-46, 289 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 279-83, 430 Wilkinson, 539 Williams, 543-44 Wirth, Jessica, 550, 561 Wundt, Wilhelm, 287, 288 Z Zenodotus, 144
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