Reduction in Language [Reprint 2021 ed.] 9783112415801, 9783112415795

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JANUA LINGUARUM STUDIA

MEMORIAE

NICOLAI VAN WIJK DEDICATA edenda curai C. H. V A N S C H O O N E V E L D Indiana University

Series Minor,

53

REDUCTION IN LANGUAGE Inequality and

Economy

in Linguistic Production

and

by R. S. MEYERSTEIN

California State Northridge,

University California

1974 MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

Attention

© Copyright 1974 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 73-92545

Printed in Belgium by NICI, Ghent.

To Z, M, and P

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction: Objective 1.1. Non-uniqueness of 1.2. Non-uniqueness of 1.3. Non-uniqueness of 1.4. Non-uniqueness of 1.5. Non-uniqueness of 1.6. Summary

and Approach Form Function System Motivation Terminality

1 1 11 18 27 36 42

2. Reduction traditional - Productive and Monosystemic : + P -* - P , - S 2.1. Background of Ranking 2.2. Reductive Taxonomy 2.2.1. Subwords 2.2.2. Semiwords 2.2.3. Words 2.3. Summary 3. Reduction Productive in Multisystemic +P - P , +S 3.1. Background of Multisystemic Focus 3.2. Reductive Taxonomy 3.2.1. Subwords 3.2.2. Semiwords 3.2.3. Words 3.3. Summary

46 46 53 53 58 66 76

Focus: 79 79 87 87 96 100 109

VIII

TABLE OF CONTENTS

4. Reduction Attentive: + P -»• —A 4.1. Background of Attentive Focus 4.2. Motivation of Attention: + M -> ± A 4.2.1. Background in Production 4.2.2. Elaboration in Attention 4.3. Reductive Taxonomy 4.3.1. Subwords 4.3.2. Semiwords 4.3.3. Words 4.4. Verification 4.5. Summary 4.6. Application to texts 4.6.1. Material and Analysis 4.6.2. Text Analyzed 4.6.3. Analysis Excluding Motivation: — M + A 4.6.4. Analysis Including M o t i v a t i o n : + M — A

.

113 113 121 121 126 135 135 140 145 151 161 162 162 163 165 171

5. Conclusion

176

References

179

Index

201

1

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

1.1. NON-UNIQUENESS OF FORM

This is a study of inequality within language expressions. Its objective is the identification of paradigmatic and syntagmatic constituents dispensable.1 Dispensability will evolve from an inspection of omission by traditional criteria productive, (mono-) systemic, and (non-)motivational; in relation to productive omission in other linguistic systems; as conditioned by exolinguistic variables of motivation; as well as by omissibility in attention. Reduction by constituents thus dispensable will isolate residuals essential to the expression, i.e. the floor of expressive reducibility. Prevailing taxonomy has viewed each phonological or grammatical constituent as having a status equal to that of its peers lexically, as a member representing its paradigm the same as does any other member; in the text, as one of the syntagmatic units standing equally tall. This equality, based on identical potential of affecting or effecting semantic yield, amounts to typological UNIQUENESS OF FORM.

Paradigmatic uniqueness in phonology views phonemes as classes of equal allophonic representatives. Thus, there is an English paradigm with the distinctive feature of lateral articulation, the phoneme /l/, which contains as its members the frontal

1

Paradigmatic reference will pertain to comparison of constituents available or replaced, in contrast to syntagmatic relation of simultaneous or successive occurrence. Cf. Ebeling (1960), 7-14, 59-82, on paradigmatic association, and 15-58, 83-101, on syntagmatic correlation of phonetic and semantic units. Cf. also Dubois (1965); Salzinger (1965); Seiler (1967b).

2

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

(acute) [1] and the back (grave) [l u ]. 2 Neither member is dispensable where its use is required, respectively, at the beginning or end of certain syntagmatic strings, and neither, in that sense, is of any more or any less relevant rank than the other. Variance, of course, may originate with the speaker rather than the rules of the language. Above the phonological level, the speaker's selections may be shown to prevail whenever syntax does not decree otherwise. There is no optionality in you are here versus you were here contrasting in respective signaling values in the absence of context-specificity or in such post-present statements as I know you are \ were here. After past-tense expressions, however, are and were may be interchanged: I did not know you are here and I did not know you were here may mean the same.3 Grammatical constraint may be a matter of certain specific words if indeed it is a factor at all: we may make or deliver a speech in which we state or remark that we have or deal with verb paradigms characterized by respective members of seemingly identical denotative potentials, with either member deemed equal in relevance to the other, yet solely sufficient at the expense of its counterpart. Each of the paradigms may be viewed as a syntagmatic unit, a constituent link of its chain. Customarily, each of these links each phoneme or letter, each morpheme, each word - is regarded as being equally essential to a 'well-formed' phrase, and none is thought of as negligible relative to its cooccurrents. Regardless of analytic philosophy - 'item + arrangement' structuralism or transformational 'derivation' of phrase structures - none of the items or phrasal constituents has traditionally been the object of discriminatory treatment. 4 As a matter of inventory or as a representation of the speaker's competence, an /a/is no less important than an /e/, and a verb phrase in one part of the sentence is assigned the same significance as a verb phrase elsewhere.

2

Jakobson et al. (1965), 19, 29-30. The symbol [l u ] is used in anticipation of its selection by Vachek; cf. p. 4, below. 3 Allen (1966), 80. 4 On the two types of analysis, cf. Chomsky (1964a), 926, 929.

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

3

Whatever ranking we do usually encounter in previous evaluation pertains to potentials of formal recurrence or cooccurrence. Certain options within a paradigm outrank others in respective incidence. Among the set of English phonemes, /z/ (independent of /d/, or as in some taxonomies, /z/ as distinct from /j/) is of significantly lesser lexical frequency than, for instance, /t/; that is to say, there are far more words in the lexicon of the language which contain /t/ than there are words with /z/.5 There are thousands of French words with /a/ yet merely a few with /ce/.6 Frequential imbalance along these lines may be either confirmed or counteracted by data of text recurrence: French word potentials involving /ce/ are small in number, yet one of these, the indefinite article or numeral un, is among words most often reencountered in actualized sentences. In simple terms of frequency of recurrence, performance of actualization in this case belies data of lexical competence. Yet, neither /z/ nor /de/ assume secondary status in traditional representations of respective phonemic inventories. Similarly, sound-units, syllable-sequences or words may competentially permit or exhibit (perform) preferment by cooccurrent support-features. Suprasegmental emphasis, for example by a special articulatory effort of stress placed on certain constituents, would betoken cooccurrence in a simultaneous sense; successive cooccurrence of constituents expanding a string, in turn, may bring about 'major' or 'basic' sentence types. Some sentence constituents have potentials of 'standing alone'; others, less self-sufficient, are inconceivable except in bondage to certain cooccurrents. Still, a constituent has traditionally not stood any less tall for its low frequency, its inability to be emphasized, or its bondage. The potential of syntactic behavior has not usually been drawn upon to acknowledge difference in relative import of one sound compared to another, of 'bound' endings compared to 'free' stems, or of verbs compared to nouns. Thus, any inequality of constituents that may have been recognized has not affected phonological or grammatical inventories as traditionally constituted. 5 6

Hockett (1955), 215. Martinet (1955), 54-55, 58.

4

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

Previous scholarschip is not, however, devoid of recognition of NON-UNIQUENESS OF FORM based on status dissimilarity, i.e. one m e m b e r of the p a r a d i g m outranking a n o t h e r m e m b e r . F o r example, the two members of the English p h o n e m e / I / have been correlated as follows: [la] [1], primary [lb] [l u ], non-primary 7 [The term allophone] has often been used by the Anglo-American scholars to denote a sound which replaces, in some specific positions, the sound which most commonly implements the phoneme. In other words, "allophone" seems to be equivalent rather to the Prague term "combinatory phonemic variant" than to the term "phonemic variant" at large. To put the matter more concretely, the ... two [l]-sounds of Modern English could both claim to be denoted by "phonemic variant", while "allophone", as often used in Anglo-American writings, could only be used for the "dark" [l u ]. In Prague terminology, the clear [1] sound would be denoted as the "principal phonemic variant" (in French, variante fondamentale), i.e. as that variant which depends least on the neighboring phonemes, and which, besides, is free from emotional coloring. The dark [l u ], on the other hand, would come under the heading of "combinatory phonemic variant" (in French, variante combinatoire), whose occurrence is conditioned by that of the neighboring phonemes - in the case of [l u ], by its word-final, postvocalic position. Clearly, the Anglo-American term allophone would have to be adapted, if it were to serve equally well with the Prague rival terms - one would have to distinguish between the principal (main) allophone and the (combinatory) allophone, which would naturally result in its extension - at least occasional - into a two-word term. 8 The chief variable of r a n k discrimination as p r o p o s e d by Vachek is that of relative context-freedom, a frequential criterion. T h e primary m e m b e r [la] predominates in occurrence potential as a non-semantic f u n c t i o n in the Bloomfieldian sense. 9 T h e r e is a larger n u m b e r of positions calling f o r the articulation of [la], 7

In this study, illustrations, identified by numbers and letters in square brackets, precede the passages referring to them. The symbol [l u ] is that of Vachek (1966a); cf. the passage of fn. 8, below. 8 Vachek (1966a), 51-52. 9 Bloomfield (1939), 26. The function of a form is its privilege of assuming a given position.

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

5

hence a greater probability for its use in text, than is the case for [lb], and this evokes the impression that [la] is less contextdependent than [lb]. The identification of a PARADIGM LABEL, the primary member of a paradigm, with which the paradigm may be associated, is then a first area of reduction, the constituents reduced being the other members of the paradigm - in the case under discussion, the nonprincipal allophones.10 To say that these allophones are reducible is not, of course, suggesting that the speech community does, in fact, strip the phoneme of any variants, any more than the representative of any class would eliminate any other members of that class. It is, however, worth anticipating that speakers of an uncondoned subsystem such as Learner's or Immigrant English, to facilitate the acquisition process, may well be inclined to settle for the label, in the present example for [la], as the sole paradigmatic constituent produced, in the justifiable expectation of covering the majority of instances where this production will be correct, and with the hope that wherever it is not correct it may pass as adequate because the label represents the paradigm in its entirety, i.e. with the hope that [1] will be taken as standing for /1 / even in the minority of cases where "correctly" it does not. That this hope is not unfounded may be seen in the listener's response which is likely to disregard allophonic variation in any event, except for countervailing motivation of 'aesthetics', and in the fact that even in the latter case the rendition remains understandable, i.e. communication remains unimpaired, something that may matter more to the "incorrect" speaker than the listener's motivational reaction. To the argument of communicational realities we may add that of accepted descriptive procedure. What, indeed, do we call the lateral phoneme ? In spoken English, as it happens, the letter-symbol in use is referred to as [el u ], i.e. by the secondary member of the paradigm, due to the accident of lateral performance in final position in the 10 As will be suggested below, the label may or may not be a paradigmatic member marked in the sense of current operation with distinctive feature marks; cf. Greenberg (1966a).

6

I N T R O D U C T I O N : OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

chain. The symbol itself, however, is I; its phonemic counterpart, /l/, not */l u /; that is, the symbol is that of the front rather than the back articulation. Tradition might readily have adopted the back rather than the front member as the one referred to by the label, as it does in the case of /k/, but the fact is that it did not for /I/. What /k/ and /I/ as respective labels share is the representation by the primary member of the paradigm; thus [k]back outranks [k]front in the same sense, and on a similar communicational basis, as in the case of [l]front outranking [l]back- One might, of course, deemphasize conventions of orthographic or phonological representation as mere exolinguistic accidents, but that amounts to no more than begging the question: is not the 'accident' a reflection of linguistic preponderance or negligibility? A reductive inventory on the sub-phonemic level, which we shall not present in detail, is then a first area of application of the principle of taxonomic differentiation. In theory there is no difficulty in identifying a number of label-members resulting from inspections of relative frequencies and, by definition, equal to the number of phonemes labeled. In actual practice, one may feel uncertain about the statistical cut-off points: how discrepant should the respective distributions be to sustain principal or secondary ranking? What about instances of equality or near-equality of occurrence of the candidates under consideration? On occasion, this may raise questions which admit of no easy answer, but we venture to suggest that cases of this type are not numerous and do not militate against the principle of differential treatment proposed by Yachek and to be explored in this study. 11 Illustrated above among the representatives of phonemes, inequality of relevance attaches to phonemes themselves, in relation to other phonemes. Yardsticks and manifestations in a paradigmatic focus are much the same as before. Whenever we refer to an archiphonemic or feature-correlative paradigm, one of the phonemic members will serve as its label. French //O// a double timbre 11 On sufficiency of formulas mathematically non-specific, cf. R. S. Meyerstein (1970), 61-71.

INTRODUCTION : OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

7

consists of Jo/, its label, as well as /o/; and /s/, rather than /z/, labels French or English //S//. 1 2 Relative context-freedom as the determinant of paradigmatic labeling is reencountered in such morphological preference as that of English knife rather than knive-, or /dis/, rather than /diz/ or /di/, for dix in French. Similarly, we may say we are discussing ways of making a speech - namely, making, delivering, giving or presenting it. Status inequality has so far been outlined as a feature of paradigms independent of the accidents of confrontation on a higher level. Thus, [1] remains the label for /I / regardless of the occurrence of that phoneme as a constituent of specific morphological or syntactic expressions. Yet, a phoneme, traditionally in a semantic frame of reference with a meaning-distinctive potential equal to that of any other phoneme, may in that frame be more or less relevant than its cooccurring peers. Here we focus on syntagmatic relations as much as on 'what-versus-what' : [2a] [2b] [2c] [2d] [2e] [2f]

/amâde/ /emâde/ /emôde/ /emâdô/ 1 3 */emâpe/ */emôpe/

In comparing the French 5-phoneme strings of [2a-f], above, we notice that the accident of certain morphological units existing, [2a-d], or lacking, [2e-f], confers on certain string constituents a potential of semantic distinction which others do not possess. Lexical oppositions are limited to the first and third positions, [2a, b] and [2b, c]; grammatical ones are restricted to the fifth, [2b, d], while the fourth position lacks contrastive power in the 12

Léon (1966), 12, 43-46, 56-61, for the French association. For similar associations in general, it should be noted that this study registers, but does not verify, previous associative statements cited, and thus does not concern itself with a supposedly unique "truth" in selecting paradigm labels, such as that asserted by Vennemann (1971), 74, in opposition to Gleason (1961), 82. 13 On émonder, émender, in connection with functional load assessment, cf. Martinet (1955), 56; R. S. Meyerstein (1970), 82-83.

8

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

absence of [2e, f]. This reflects a rank order of respective functionality.14 In the phonological frame /-made/, the preceding position contains units (/e: a/) capable of effecting a semantic contrast, the remaining units (i.e. the constituents of the frame) being no more than constitutive complementations. We may then proceed to examine a second frame, /em-de/, allowing for the semantically contrastive /a: 5/, with the remainders again merely serving to complete the respective words, but without similar contrastivity of their own. The emphasis is here on the "similarity" relative to the opposition in the first position. That context excludes accidental phonological identity of grammatically dissimilar émenderétendez, though, except for non-comparable morphological transformations, the respective transforms (émender —>) émendez and (étendre ->) étendez could indeed be taken to reflect a third area of significative contrastivity.15 For the sake of simplification we shall disregard the second-position /m: t/ contrast, as well as any other theoretically possible oppositions. It is then observed that the constituents italicized in /emode/ are of a primary order of rank relative to the non-italic units, as far as lexical options are concerned. It is, in turn, the final phoneme alone which permits grammatical permutation, e.g. /emade, emadS, emade/. With the somewhat disparate criteria of lexical and grammatical semantics combined, we may then establish the italicized units in /emadej as outranking those in Roman print. To this rank discrimination, which centers on contrastive semantics of vocabulary or grammar, we might add one based on formal self-sufficiency with emphasis on code and, to a degree, on system. The respective limitations are those of the written code which permits reductions prohibited in the code of the spoken language, 14 On ranking of grammatical constituents on the order of 'function words' relative to lexical 'parts of speech' in English, cf. Fries (1952), 87-141. For an application to French, cf. R. S. Meyerstein (1954). 15 On significative (as opposed to merely constitutive) phonemes, cf. Pottier (1948); Krámsky (1965), 45; Krámsky (1967); R. S. Meyerstein (1970), 82-83. For unequal contrastivity of phonemes, cf. also Harris (1963), 185; Chomsky (1964a), 956.

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

9

and feature typicality such as that of the abbreviations characteristic of a Worker System. Here we arrive at evaluations intersecting, in part, with those noted above. We now enhance those constituents which suffice to guarantee functionally adequate recall, and we reduce those which, given semantic-situational support, a note-taker may eliminate. Assuming emd to be adequate for that purpose, we represent the floor of irreducibility in italics, with dispensable units left in Roman type: ¿mender. In a comprehensive assessment including all of the preceding variables, the initials (e- in the word analyzed above) stand out as being reduction-resistant throughout, i.e. of supreme rank among other primary units recognized. Obviously, discrimination of rank based on possibilities of arrangement, i.e. the presence or absence of morphological forms, presents problems of classification which can merely be suggested, but not solved in detail, in this study. A constituent primary in one string where it may contrast, e.g. /a: e/ in [2a: b], is secondary relative to another string where it may not, such as /a: e/ in [2b: c]. The contrastive power of French /o/ in /emode/ is not reencountered in /arondi/, since there is no word with a different vowel in the frame /ar-di/. Yet, this ad hoc (though not non-competential) status of constituents, which defies classificational treatment similar to the distinctions within paradigms suggested above, is of far greater import, in practical terms of communicational peaks and troughs, than paradigmatic potentials. 16 The present discussion will primarily deal with syntagmatic distinctions of this type. Some outline of differential taxonomy will emerge as the result of identifying certain types of secondary members of morphologyrelated strings - secondary in terms of various productive or attentive criteria to be reviewed below. The important aspect of reduction will be seen, not in precise classification but in its potentials in various areas of analysis. Heterovalence of form, whether paradigmatic or syntagmatic, may at this point be generalized as follows: 16 On communicational peaks and troughs, cf. R. S. Meyerstein (1967); R. S. Meyerstein (1968).

10

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

[3a] + P = produced string with constituency ab; plus-long, i.e. expanded [3b] — P = produced string with constituency a; minus-long, i.e. reduced [3c] a — constituent of primary function (essential) [3d] b = constituent of secondary function (reducible). The constituent a, shared by [3a] and [3b], hence undeletable in relation to these two expressions, is essential to either expression and as such of primary significance, while b, deleted in [3b], is secondary, i.e. reducible in the context of [3a] and [3b] correlated by function, for example, by the fact that both [3a] and [3b] denote the same meaning, with [3d] consequently inessential to the communication of the meaning involved. [3a] versus [3b] represents the paradigmatic component of the relation; [3c] ± [3d], its syntagmatic emphasis. Among constituents of syntactic strings, [3a] and [3b] may, respectively, be illustrated in [4a] (I) have been living (in New York for the last ten years) [4b] (I) have lived (in New York for the last ten years), with [4a] and [4b] said to document two expressions with a "seeming lack of any difference in meaning". 17 Assuming the validity of this semantic equation, we may reduce [4a] to [4b], implementing [3b, c], i.e. to have sufficient to convey the message; the reducible constituent is been -ing as an implementation of [3d], In [4a, b], paradigmatic options "synonymous" hence semantically isofunctional, the productive recurrence implies indispensability; partial omission implies the opposite. In other words, syntagmatic formreduction in part of Paradigm [4a, b] is taken as one element of evidence for reducibility. In traditional terms of redundancy, the selection of [4a] or [4b] is determined syntagmatically by the semantic environment 'past to present' actualized in for the last ten years, with grammatical determination of —en -\-ed and + e n +ing as in have livedand 17

Allen (1966), 77.

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

11

been living. In over-abundance in terms of [4a], the paradigm consists of options redundant per se, i.e. context-independently, relative to [4b].18 Exceeding terminological convention, we recognize been as being redundant not merely in [4a], where its occurrence would respond to the traditional meaning of redundancy between have and living, being predictable in that position, but also because of [4b] which gets along without it. Abandoning established terms in unusual applications, we may say, instead, that been is reducible anywhere within the confines of the paradigm cited, because of its deletion in part of the paradigmatic options and the functional equivalence of either option. Redundancy, in this comparison, relates to obligatory production, i.e. expansion; deletability implies partial non-production (with non-deleted production required elsewhere); reduction refers to the non-deleted remainder. Thus, ab {have been living) is reducible in production by deletion of b (been ing) leading to reduction to a (have lived). By the same token, have, though redundant to lived in [4a] (cf. [9b], below) or to been living in [4b] (cf. [9c], below) but undeleted in either [4a] or [4b] and to that degree indispensable, is not a candidate for reduction in a productive sense within the confines of the system of Standard English.

1.2. NON-UNIQUENESS OF F U N C T I O N

Beyond operating with unique types of phonological or morphosyntactic form, tradition has as a rule also equated different types of formal functions or yield. Its commitment to UNIQUENESS OF FUNCTION takes little if any account of dissimilar functional relevance. 18 On recent statements concerning redundancy which are of specific import to this study, cf. Weaver (1949); Hockett (1955), 86; Herdan (1956), 165; Cherry (1957); G. A. Miller (1958), 484-491; Hockett (1963), 19; Weinreich (1963), 128; Krdmsky (1965), 44; Roberts (1965); Rapoport (1966), 51; Bernard (1967); MacKay (1967), 28; Bossaert and de Kock (1968); Carterette and Jones (1968), 103-123; Duskova (1969), 35; Menyuk (1969), 50.

12

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

Recognition of the functional disparity of forms is not, of course, in and by itself a novel concept.19 We must notice, however, that discrimination in terms of formal cooccurrence, relative contrastivity (functional load), demarcative function, or semantic output in essence pertains to forms, form-sequences, or generally form-features plus or minus endowed in one or the other respects noted, and as we have seen in Section 1.1, above, these distinctions do not traditionally entail first or second class membership in the paradigm. Syntagmatically, a constituent may be more or less 'expressive' or 'redundant' - without consequence either in conventional taxonomies or in regard to generative significance. Whenever we ... a speech, the verb phrase is incomplete without its verbal part and its vocabulary concretization as make or deliver in the eventual structure performed. Both the verbal part, as a matter of one hundred percent predictability in a 'well-formed' performance, and its concrete representative (in a lexical paradigm limited for the sake of the argument to make, deliver, give, and present), with all other criteria being equal, predictable with 25 % probability, are to varying degrees reflective of a redundancy of signaling, yet not of a dispensability of the respective forms in the production of the chain to which they belong. It has long been recognized that much of what we say in each sentence is not worth saying from the point of view of new or unexpected information conveyed, but is not for that matter omissible in the context of grammatical completeness. That being the case, it is only logical that a description of 'well-formed' expressions, i.e. a form-centered approach, should have ignored such function-centered discrimination as that between constituents 'informative' and their 'redundant' counterparts. At this point we have yet to progress beyond evaluation of forms in terms of functions. It is evident that functions themselves are of diverse status. The fact is implicit in such terminological distinctions as that between denotation and connotation, though these terms are not usually correlated in terms of dissimilar ranking. System-internally, absence of functional discrimination in ranking is bound to militate against the notion of free variation on any 19

Biihler (1934); Vachek (1966a), 35-36; R. S. Meyerstein (1970).

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

13

level, as well as synonymy as one of its manifestations on the level of semantic exponence. 2 0 If all functions rank equally, and if Expression A differs f r o m Expression B in some functional respect, any equation of the two expressions is vitiated by the disregard of some functions in one of the expressions. Descriptive tradition, especially of the Bloomfieldian period, has in fact been ambivalent about synonyms. They are not supposed to exist in theory, yet in practice we operate with them: If the forms are phonemically different, we suppose that their meanings are also different... in short, that there are no actual synonyms.21 Bloomfield did, however, correlate [5a] transpire: Meaning ' a ' , shared by [5a, b, c]; Meaning ' b ' = 'elegance' [5b] happen-. Meaning ' a ' (5c] occur: Meaning ' a ' , when he noted that ... transpire figures as an elegant synonym of happen, occur.22 In a subsequent statement, [morphemes] which... are distinct because of different phonemic shapes, but which have identical meaning... are ordinarily called synonyms, [yet these morphemes] are not entirely synonymous. This is what we find, in general, when we examine the sets of words classed as synonyms in a dictionary. 23 But if we "suppose" semantic difference yet concede its possible absence except by exolinguistic criteria such as 'elegance', if "in general" expressions are not "entirely" synonymous, this scarcely supports a theory, nor does it guide us on how to account for the synonymic implication of r a n d o m variation noticed in the speaker's production. Allen's observation of the apparent absence of semantic 20 21 22 23

Free variation: Harris (1963), 65 and passim. Bloomfield (1933), 145. Bloomfield (1933), 442. Hockett (1958), 130-131.

14

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

difference between [4a] and [4b] implies that "apparently" the speaker does, in fact, use either expression interchangeably, and that there appears to be no controlling variable of distinction disproving the randomness of occurrence. Thus, different forms which unequally represent equally relevant functions - forms supposedly unequatable - are in fact equated as synonyms within one and the same system. Across systems, we similarly encounter the translator's equation of supposedly untranslatable forms. [In] flower, heart, love, death ... oder in fleur, cœur, amour, mort... jedes dieser Wörter is jeweils richtig, gut, schön, unersetzlich und unübersetzbar. 24

Translational practice, as well as the very juxtaposition of the "untranslatable" forms, clearly disprove the contention quoted; yet, something does appear to be "lost". Rather than deplore the loss of meanings in synonymic or crosslingual matching, we may assume, as a matter of NON-UNIQUEWESS OF FUNCTION, that whatever semantic distinction is ignored in the matching process is of necessity irrelevant, and that the feature ignored is one of SECONDARY DENOTATION, as opposed to fully functional, hence irreducible, contrasts of PRIMARY DENOTATION. 25 Within the system, secondary status is seen to attach to the association of 'coloring' which Vachek attributes to [l u ] as a member of the English /1/ phoneme. The association is insufficient to bestow on the variant a primary rank as the paradigmatic label. 'Coloring', if in fact generally acknowledged among the speech community, is scarcely regarded as a significant function of typically asemantic units. Upon the assumption of denotation outranking connotation as the chief objective of communication in general, the paradigmatic reduction of were: are (wherever it 24

Wandruszka (1971), 19. Cf. R. S. Meyerstein (to appear). On "central and peripheral elements of meaning", cf. Stern (1932), 60-63; on "average" incidence as an evaluative criterion, cf. Cherry (1957), 115-116; Riffaterre (1959). On "basic" meaning conditioning reduction, cf. Guiraud (1964), 40. On "relevance" as a criterion of denotative rank ordering, cf. Quine (1964). 25

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE A N D APPROACH

15

is not ruled out grammatically) or state: remark, or syntagmatic deletion such as that of please, is sustained by the secondary nature of the associations of 'stylistic refinement' or 'politeness' calling for the respective expansions. In a comparable primacy of lexical over grammatical denotation, the aspectual difference between [4a] and [4b] would likewise be of secondary rank, i.e. of reduced status, as evidenced by its disregard in random production. Assuming, further, agreement with the equation offered by Bloomfield, we attach primary value to recurrent meaning in [5a, b, c], with the semantic addition in [5a] secondary, unless enhanced by exolinguistic variability to be outlined below. Functional relativism, in the sense suggested above, may be applied also as the basis of 'sufficiency' in intersystemic correlation. All is not translatable, but then all is not equally worth translating. As a corollary to "intra-language" multisystematicity of form, discussed in Section 1.1, above, learners and immigrants fail to represent certain functional distinctions made by the community of 'native speakers', but not all instances of such failure, not all deviations from 'correctness', are equally disapproved. The 'natives' acknowledge this in tolerating some of the deviations, and the 'non-natives' take advantage of this acknowledgment in effecting more or less uncondoned yet tolerated reduction. In the 'truly' interlingual context of such matching as flowerfleur, heart-cceur, love-amour,

and death-mort,

we may view the

denotative (horticultural, anatomical, attitudinal, and thanatological) features respectively represented by the four EnglishFrench word pairs, as well as those respective connotations which are translatable similarly to the denotations, as constituents of a semantic paradigm: [6a] Meaning Unit 1: 'literal' (denotative) meaning [6b] Meaning Unit 2: the connotative equivalent. The paradigmatic constituency further comprises [6c] Meaning Unit 3: the "untranslatable" feature, which is not encountered in all the languages correlated.

16

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

For example, German poetic language features the masculine allegory of Gevatter Tod, which runs counter to French (la) mort and is irrelevant to genderless English death. 'Gender association' might thus serve as a representative designation of Meaning Unit 3. In conventional contexts of constituent equality, in a paradigm of meanings the same as in a paradigm of forms, our response to the problem presented by Meaning Unit 3 may be an activist one : we shall overcome the deficiency in the gender-dissimilar language by grafting upon it the association it does not normally have, with some such result as Compère la Mort, a hybrid unlikely to be accepted as a satisfactory 'well-formed' rendition. Alternatively, our reaction is one of passive resignation: the translation must omit some meaning units such as gender-associative [6c], an omission usually cited as an argument against 'real' translatability. We may, of course, just as readily concede the secondary status of [6c], i.e. its irrelevance, which would establish the adequacy of a translation on the basis of [6a] and [6b] alone. In the foregoing illustration, differential functionality assessment was a recourse suggested by systemic discrepancy of expression: one system had the word for 'death' in Gender A; another system had it in Gender B; and a third system featured it detached from either gender. Failure to represent a meaning unit, of course, need not be a matter of lack of formal coverage in any of the languages compared: [7a] [7b] [7c] [7d] [7e]

English Somebody kicked me under the table German Jemand stieß mich under dem Tisch an French Quelqu'un me décocha un coup de pied Spanish Alguien me dio un puntapié Italian Mi arrivé un calcio26.

Acknowledging the adequacy of these correlations, we may isolate four meaning units variously represented in [7a-e] : [8a] Meaning Unit 1, 'type of blow' [8b] Meaning Unit 2, 'type of instrument' 26

Theexamples, [7a-e], arefrom Wandruszka(1971), 17. Cf. R. S. Meyerstein (to appear).

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

17

[8c] Meaning Unit 3, 'subject-explicitness' [8d] Meaning Unit 4, 'locality'. We may oppose the meaning units of [6a-c], constituents of one and the same PARADIGM ('death'), to those of [8a-d] as respective links of a SYNTAGMATIC chain - reflecting a distinction analogous to that between forms of Section 1.1, above. It is noticed that [8a] shows up in all of the languages sampled, [7a-e]. [8b] is not explicit in [7b]: we assume, but are not told in so many words, that the action under the table was carried out by a foot - conceivably, and in the absence of information provided by the other phrases, it might have been done, for example, with a cane. [8c] is absent from [7e]; the relevant fact, of course, is not that the translator might have used a syntactic extension initiating the Italian sentence with a word such as qualcheduno ('somebody'), but that in view of the semantic constituency of this Italian wordparadigm he did not feel prompted to do so. [8d], in turn, is absent in the Romance samples [7c-e], which appear to take as a matter of course that kicks are administered under the table (presumably, with the reinforcement of additional form-context not reflected in the samples), rather than on a chair. These omissions are clearly voluntary, i.e. not imposed by the systems involved. Wherever a meaning unit of [8a-d] was omitted, it is not ruled out and could be represented. Wherever it was represented, it was evidently deemed indispensable. Similarly to the procedure adopted in [4a-b] and [5a-c], we may assign primary status to the meaning units of 'universal currency', i.e. those represented throughout [7a-e], and regard the meaning units dispensed with as secondary features reducible. In the examination to follow, dispensability of form in conjunction with subordination of function, initially placed in conventional monolingual contexts, will be traced across sytems and assessed in the behavior of listeners relative to that of speakers as respective stages of reduction.

18

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

1.3. N O N - U N I Q U E N E S S O F SYSTEM

In their traditional setting, form-functional observations pertain to A LANGUAGE, a norm unaffected by conditions of comparable sets, and at the same time to THE LANGUAGE, a norm discounting intralingual diversity.27 Against the background of conceptual development in linguistics, a trend of thought away from earlier views of 'English through the looking-glass of Latin', and away from viewing constituents 'atomistically', in isolation rather than as they interrelate with their peers, it is interesting to note the atomistic nature of current rules formulated for one languagecompetence alone rather than relating beyond it, and the 'universal' nature of performance diversity viewed through the lookingglass of one and the same set of rules - a general impression one is inclined to maintain notwithstanding historical or bilingual inspections, and notwithstanding work on language universals based on correlation of language-individual data.28 In historical perspective of THE LANGUAGE as the result of exolinguistic accident conferring upon A LANGUAGE a preeminence in cultural, literary or political respects, geographic or social dialects 27

Bloch and Trager (1942), 5: "A LANGUAGE is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates." Chomsky (1965), 4 : "We thus make a fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of HIS language) and performance (the actual use of [this] language in concrete situations)." Emphasis added in the quotation f r o m Chomsky. Cf. also Chomsky (1965), 25. 28 On universals, cf. Hockett (1963); Greenberg (1966a). Cf. also descriptive practice as reflected in the quotations of Footnote 27, above, and Chomsky (1965), 6: "The grammar of a particular language ... is to be supplemented by a universal grammar that ... expresses the deap-seated regularities which, being universal, are omitted f r o m the grammar itself. ... It is only when supplemented by a universal grammar that the grammar of a language provides a full account of the speaker-hearer's competence. Modern linguistics, however, has not explicitly recognized the necessity for supplementing a 'particular g r a m m a r ' of a language by a universal grammar if it is to achieve descriptive adequacy. It has, in fact, characteristically rejected the study of universal grammar as misguided . . . " Cf. Chomsky's own rejection of cross-systemic correlation; p. 86 and Chapter 3, footnote 24, below. On the concern of linguistic theory with descriptive universals, cf. also Fodor and Katz (1964), 19.

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

19

are by solely linguistic criteria of comparable systematicity the equals of the system fortunate enough to acquire the prestige designation. Still, convention ignores subjacent diversity except to the extent of what the diverse 'sub'-sets happen to share with THE LANGUAGE. Rather inconsistently, A LANGUAGE inspected 'in its own terms' ignores what it shares with another system conventionally called A LANGUAGE. Diachronically there are, to be sure, the established notions of an 'ancestral language', a 'phylum', or similar suprasystemic terms. Modern systems are 'derived' from these supersystems, and some derivations modeling the generative process of the present-day language are, in fact, representations of a 'related' yet different system of a preceding period - yesterday's performance underlying today's competence.29 These are bilingual treatments in disguise, dealing with what might be called 'condoned diachronic interference', and comparable to 'uncondoned diachronic interference' which may lead to creolized languages or the learner's or immigrant's system, or to synchronic condonation implicit in studies of linguistic universals or bilingual teaching materials.30 It is worth noting, however, that the autochthony of A LANGUAGE is preserved even in studies of the types enumerated above. Bilingualism refers to different languages; there is, traditionally, no supersystem to which A LANGUAGE relates synchronically in the sense that subsystems are taken to relate to THE LANGUAGE. Whatever appears to approximate it is limited to diachronic focus; synchronically, French and Latin are different languages the same as French and English. A LANGUAGE, THE LANGUAGE: it is the same parochial yet centralized notion - a traditional approach which recalls principles of uniqueness of form and function based on typological identity, 29

This is inferrable, for instance, from Schane (1968). On competence in a context of historical grammar, cf. also Closs (1969), King (1969). 30 On Immigrant features, cf. Haugen (1954); Haugen (1956); G. P. Meyerstein (1959) and bibliography loc. cit. Cf. also Footnote 39 and Chapter 3, below. On Social Dialect, cf. Francis (1958), 45, 48, 534-539; Labov (1963); Labov (1966); Pike (1967), 585. On bilingual teaching materials, cf. Lado (1957); Lado (1964); Brooks (1964).

20

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

notwithstanding unequal potential. With respect to systemic diversification, we may say that tradition upholds typological diversity (A LANGUAGE as distinct from another). The systemic state of affairs thus appears to be the opposite of the conventional uniqueness of form and function - yet, in both A LANGUAGE and THE LANGUAGE, we recognize the principle of UNIQUENESS OF SYSTEM.

Confined to A LANGUAGE in its own terms and THE LANGUAGE discounting intralingual diversity, reduction discussed above as [4a] -»• [4b] cannot proceed any further. The paradigm [4a, b] offers no more than two options, have been ing and have ed, equivalent in primary denotation hence sustaining reduction to syntagmatic minus {have ed). Additional modification of extent develops within the frame of NON-UNIQUENESS OF SYSTEM, the expansion of purview to a number of languages and 'sub'-languages systemically equated. Wherever, contrary to undiversified competence of THE LANGUAGE, we do conventionally accord equal status to 'dialects' and 'languages' as terminologically but not intrinsically distinct systems, there would in principle be no intrasystemic conflict, and for each system the options and their exercise would be unique and undiversified. There would, of course, rarely if ever be the systemic notion of language. The existence of such a notion in a monosystemic sense has, in fact, been questioned.31 It has been suggested that anyone's native 'language' is a conglomerate of multilingual behavior patterns, not solely because of diachronic factors - there may, as a matter of fact, be no demonstrably 'pure' languages spoken anywhere on earth - but also and chiefly for the synchrony of systemic coexistence. The 'language' learned in school is our 'first second-language', a trans-regional and trans-social medium of communication. Soon there are additional media of group interaction: school slang, the jargon of college students, or sports terminology and syntax. We speak differently at home, on the job, or in public, and ordinary types of expression are unsuitable 31

Wandruszka (1971), 8-9; the balance of this paragraph is an interpretive summary of Wandruszka's suggestions. Cf. R. S. Meyerstein (to appear).

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

21

to more solemn occasions. In that context, A LANGUAGE becomes itself an abstract cover term for a multitude of coexistent systemas, polysystem. The various systematizations of this polysystem - as it were, the sub-competence manifestations of the super-competence - in turn are realized in ways which to varying extent deviate from the 'wellformed' norm of the super-competence. These deviations meet statable criteria of similarity which traditionally cause them to be regarded as sub-systemic variations of THE LANGUAGE; yet, the deviations from the norm are systematically recurrent so that each of the set of recurrences merits the designation, if not of 'language' at least of 'system', the same as the system of the 'language' that unites them. In fact, even the 'antisystemic' deviations of children, learners or immigrants may be systematized as additional types of 'language'-derived yet autochthonous competence.32 Multisystematicity, thus understood, may evoke speaker dissimilarity characteristic of historical correlations, rather than identity of bilingual speakers. As applied here, the concept is at the basis of correlation of sytems preceding or contemporary, intralingual or across languages in the conventional sense, viewed as options of one and the same 'super-systemic' paradigm. The resultant extension in a paradigmatic sense supports syntagmatic reduction beyond [4a] [4b]: [4a] [4b] [9a] [9b]

English have been living English have lived French habite Immigrant System derived from English: live (in New York for the last ten years) [9c] Social Dialect (I) been livin' (in New York ...) [9d] Telegraph System (Living) New York last ten years [9e] Situational System (supported by non-verbal clues of surrounding circumstances, e.g. data processing): New York ten. Monosystemically, have is produced ( + P ) throughout [4a, b], and 'past to present progression', expressed by have, is of primary

32

For example, Frei (1929). Cf. also Chapter 3, below.

22

INTRODUCTION : OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

denotation, whereas been may be non-produced (—P), and is reducible since the expression containing it may be avoided with 'progressive aspect', thus avoidable, relegated to secondary denotative rank. In the multisystemic paradigm [4a-b; 9a-e], have itself may be —P, i.e. deleted, and 'past to present progression', partly unexpressed, may by that fact be regarded as secondary in denotational status, as noticed in the correlation [4a, b—9a, b]. Within limits of denotational primacy, we thus correlate semantically equatable expressions. This association comprises 'non-derived' systems such as [9a] and 'derived' ones, [9b-e], as comparable manifestations of like relevance in a linguistic, i.e. non-motivational, sense, reflecting 'super-systemic' reducibility of the auxiliary verb indeed, as in [9c-e], of any (finite) verb and, beyond that, of additional syntactic units. Immigrant reduction on the order of [9b], intersystemic in origin, compares with 'non-foreign' economy of similarly derived Social Dialect as seen in [9c]. The systemic derivations of [9b, c] may be characterized by PARTICULARITY OF SPEAKER (a particular segment of the 'English' speech community) and GENERALITY OF PURPOSE (absence of limitation to particular conditions). The reverse, GENERALITY OF SPEAKER (any segment of the community) and PARTICULARITY OF PURPOSE (a particular condition in which the expressions are used), is reflected in [9d, e]. Equation of the systemic status of [9b-e] with that of [4a-b] limits consideration to a strictly linguistic context of what is producible and produced; it is not affected by such exolinguistic criteria as those of 'aesthetic non-condonation', for instance, of [9b, c]. By the same token, exo-systemic viewpoints, though of a linguistic nature, are inapplicable to individual systemic representations. Nobody claims that [9b] and [9c] represent 'good' or 'Standard' English; they are, respectively, manifestations of the speech of certain 'outsider' and 'insider' segments to whom they are 'good' enough, and they feature reduction considered 'respectable' in languages from which they do not derive, regardless of their inadmissibility in the language from which they do derive and

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

23

which does not happen to actualize the reduction. Conversely, of course, expansion required by a specific system such as Standard English [4a, b] remains unaffected by reduction elsewhere, e.g. Immigrant [9b], except for historical or bilingual interrelation. The relevance of multisystemic focus is thus, not that a particular reduction is relevant to a particular system because it occurs in another, but that the reduction is a suprasystemic competence, economy performable and to varying extents systemically performed. Operation with more than one system places this study in the context of universals in language. It does not, however, imply that reduction is necessarily of the same nature as other universals previously recognized, although recognitions on record may imply reductive principles of interest to the present discussion. In its most comprehensive conception, the notion of universality cannot be taken to apply to the problems presented here: The problem of universals in the study of human language as in that of human culture in general concerns the possibility of generalizations which have as their scope all languages or all cultures.33 While reduction in one sense or another may indeed be assumed to manifest itself in any and all languages, and to that extent indeed qualifies as a universal in the sense of the preceding quotation, it cannot, of necessity, directly compare with a more or less generalizable recurrence of (plus-) features, i.e. various manifestations of non-reduction. Carried to an absolute, reduction is non-language; obviously, non-language in the shape of zero production is a feature of all languages, but since that feature is not the only one - since language, after all, consists of more than non-language - it cannot be claimed that reduction, even in relation to certain specific areas of expression, pervades systems in the sense that, for instance, the interplay of marked and unmarked forms or categories could be shown to be universally valid. 34

33 34

Greenberg (1966a), 9. Greenberg (1966a).

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INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

In actual descriptive practice, to be sure, universals are associated merely with a 'high degree of generality' rather than omnipresence. 35 With that restriction, the notions of universality and reducibility acquire, if not identity or a relation of dependence or implication, at least a degree of comparability. For example, [a] characteristic of marked and unmarked category [relates] to the category of number. When a heterogeneous collection is to be named, that is, one which has members of two or more categories, one of them is often regularly chosen as representative in the plural [as in] such usages as Spanish lospadres for 'parents', lit. 'the fathers' ; los hijos 'the children', lit. 'the sons'. 36 The prevailing preoccupation, in the passage cited, concerns the ability of one member of the paradigms padre-madre and hijo-hija to serve in a semantic function discharged in other systems by specific words (parents, children), for the reason that the coverterms padres and hijos, unlike madres and hijas, are not semantically marked as to gender. What places paradigmatic discrimination on the order of padres (for padre and madré) or hijos (for hijo and hija) on a common ground with that of [1] (for [1] and [l u ]) or make (for making or delivering a speech), discussed in Section 1.1, above, is a similarity of associative principles and the conclusion suggested - the superior representativeness of one of the terms associated. The representative {padre, hijo, [1], make) may be said to carry functional load in excess of that of its counterpart (madre, hija, [l u ], deliver) since, in addition to semantic or occurrence function, matched by the non-representative, it also has representative function not discharged by its fellow member of the paradigm involved. 37 The cases of padres-hijos and [1 ]-make differ in the nature of the respective representations and according potentials of reduction. From the functional point of view, the existence of padre and hijo does not, wholly or partly, negate that of madre or hija. Under 35

Greenberg (1966a), 10. Greenberg (1966a), 30-31. For a related study of presence or absence of cover terms, cf. Levickij (1971), 20. 37 On functional load as understood here, cf. R. S. Meyerstein (1970), 13 and passim. Cf. also Chapter 2, footnote 37. 36

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

25

no circumstances (systemic, motivational, or those of distinctions of terminality) can madre and padre, or hijo and hija, be interchanged in production - as make-deliver can, subject to the formcooccurrence of speech and to systemic or motivational conditions. Under no circumstances can padre or hijo serve as label of its respective paradigm in the sense that either might suffice as a paradigmatic representation - as [1] does in certain systemic renditions, and as make does by comparable criteria. That does not detract from the relevance of the padres-hijos case in the context of a discussion of reduction. Thus it may be noticed that padre or hijo, to qualify as representatives if not labels as outlined above, require formal extension, i.e. the syntagmatic + P of a plural signal — s, since in its reduced singular form neither Spanish word could represent the paradigm as a 'parental' or 'sibling' cover-term. To this intrasystemic inspection we would add the intersystemic correlation of syntagmatic 'expense' (nonreduction) in return for a paradigmatic 'saving' (reduction) in vocabulary: English needs special words (parents, children)-, Spanish does without their specific equivalents. As in any kind of economy, unwillingness (or systemic inability) to 'splurge', i.e. to display paradigmatic wealth of vocabulary, may have to be paid for by exposure to functional insufficiency. A speaker of Spanish whose mother was married more than once needs to make a special (syntagmatic) effort to convince his listener that in speaking of his padres he did not mean to refer to two gentlemen (father and stepfather). Yet, apart from motivational safeguards (e.g. cultural conditions leading to the remoteness of any such interpretation), we may bear in mind the secondary nature of certain functions in the present instance, reference to fathers rather than parents as arguments against unduly dangerous consequences of paradigmatic reduction in inter-systemic perspective. It goes without saying that representational manifestations on the order of those of padres or hijos are not any more or any less 'universal' than are cases like [1] or make. Even in the absence of exhaustive statistics we may surmise that numerous languages do not use plural forms to refer to two singular forms associated

26

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

in meaning as in the instance of padres-padre-madre, and that even if they did they would not necessarily recover all areas of similar semantic signaling. French, English, or German, for example, do not proceed as does Spanish in the area of parental reference. Universality in this case does not appear to be a "high degree of generality" but, at best, recurrence of a comparable feature of production in a few systems (besides Spanish, Greenberg mentions Arabic and Sanskrit).38 It could well be asserted that reducibility of the [\\-make type is far more widespread among languages, i.e. far more universal, than the type of vocabulary reduction noted for Spanish. Contests for 'maximum universality', in fact, are beside the point of this study, which does not inquire into the number of instances of a particular reduction as the gauge of universal-designation. Just as, in intersystemic perspective, a saving is a saving no matter if in a certain system it is not effected, a saving remains a saving even if no other system effects it. Thus, the incidence of reduction is marginal to the development of the argument even if, in accounting for reduction, we find that certain historical or synchronic circumstances support the argument. For example, we may point to certain semi-words such as the article-type of determiner as a form of inherent and (depending on grammar, system, or terminality) variously extensive reducibility. The history of a language where this form-type is currently used may reveal that at one time that language dispensed with it, and we know that many contemporary languages as well as intra-language systems continue to get along without it. Quite possibly, a census of systems might reveal a majority without articles. Articles, then, by and large appear to be a non-essential part of speech, a luxury that many languages must indulge in but which, in inter-systemic perspective, does not provide coverage for communicationally crucial meaning-units. That fact, rather than the number of systems acknowledging it, is of paramount relevance to this study. The import of operating beyond systemic confines is, not how many other systems effect a 38

Greenberg (1966a), 30-31.

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

27

reduction, but that there are ANY other systems reducing, and that a reduction may recover, yet also exceed, areas in which it is noticed within a system. In other words, extension of purview beyond a system confirms reduction and adds to the number of identifications, but the extent of that confirmation is marginal to the argument of reducibility as such.

1.4. NON-UNIQUENESS OF MOTIVATION

Unique or not, representations discussed in the preceding three sections reflect traditional criteria: there is nothing unusual about reference to formal, functional, or systemic relations. Taxonomic convention in these three areas is one of explicit if UNITARY acknowledgment - one type of form, one type of function, one type of system. At this point we inject motivation as a factor of description. We shall speak of motivation in reference to the recurrence of formal expansion or reduction intersecting with features of 'language'-directed systems and sub-systems. Quite frequently, to be sure, system and motivation (in the sense that the latter term is used here) will be in a relation of concomitance: certain manifestations motivational in origin will typically associate with certain systems. On other occasions, motivational features will transcend systemic confines. One way or the other, they will reflect what may be viewed as universals of an exolinguistic nature. Injection of exolinguistic variability, though not novel in and by itself, has not as yet prompted form-functional evaluations in terms of plus or minus relevance. As of now, data in this area are not among basic components of description, and prevailing taxonomies may thus be viewed as non-motivational in terms of this study, i.e. determined by linguistic criteria only - a commitment to (zero) UNIQUENESS OF MOTIVATION. For a correlation of non-motivational (linguistic) and motivational (exolinguistic) determinance, we may return to the case of were versus are as an instance of varying extent of paradigm.

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INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

Paradigmatic diversification was seen to be linguistically mandatory, i.e. motivation-independent, under certain rules of formal cooccurrence, such as in a position adjacent to zero or to 'non-past' expressions: you were here # you are here; I know you were here ^ I know you are here. In these two types of form-environment, paradigmatic collapse, a reduction to a one-member paradigm, is not permitted because it is opposed by the functional contrastivity of the respective phrases. After I did not know, however, you were here and you are here may (though they need not) signal identical reference, and in that event grammar, as the overriding variable relative to criteria presently to be recognized, permits paradigmatic reduction to either member of the were-are set. If this reduction is effected, and all other things being equal (i.e. without further criteria injected), no contrastivity rules appear to be violated. This is what caused us, in Section 1.1. above, to regard the two sequences you were here and you are here as interchangeable within the environment stated. All other things, of course, are NOT equal. Even linguistically (non-motivationally), we should acknowledge distinctions according to sub-language systems. Concretely speaking, we notice that the 'first second-language' of the transsocial medium of communication taught in school imposes rules of tense-sequencing which uphold the principle of functional (semantic) non-diversification : if the main clause has a past-expression, so should the subordinate clause, which prescribes I did not know you were here. A type of 'familiar' system spoken at home or among school friends, in turn, is likely to settle for functional diversification, 'past' followed by 'present': I didn't know you are here. At this point we remain within the conventional boundary of A LANGUAGE. In passing, we may reiterate the typological irrelevance of 'language'-related operation : the requirement of tense-concordance, typical languageinternally for A system of (Standard) English, externally holds for THE system of French as well (je ne savais pas que vous étiez ici), while tense-dissimilarity, characteristic of A system of English other than the Standard variety, is prevalent in THE system of German (ich wusste gar nicht, dass Sie hier sind).

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

29

Distinctions of sub-language systematicity may be reinforced by one or the other motivational criterion. Variability along these lines, i.e. NON-UNIQUENESS OF MOTIVATION, might be noticed, for instance, in cultivation of features of 'refinement'. The prestige of school teaching being what it is, the speaker might be motivated by the rewards expected of refined (school-sanctioned) expression. Motivational contradiction of condoned Standard behavior is, nevertheless, likewise conceivable. Refinement may be one motivational stimulus; yet, there may be the overriding fear of being misunderstood: I did not know you ARE here (right now, in contrast to last summer), and this fear (motivation) may emphasize the dissimilarity potential of were ~ are even after 'past' expressions where this grammatical potential is normally ignored, and regardless of clarification available in a 'past' sense by had been {here). Then there is the motivation of 'laziness', unwillingness or inability to effect certain syntagmatic dissimilarity, to which one may attribute phonological assimilation, reiteration phono-grammatical in nature such as vowel harmony, or syntactic patterns on the order of tense-concordance - motivation of syntagmatic simplification in conflict with the incentive to simplify the paradigm. As a systemic manifestation, syntagmatic reduction has been illustrated by [4a-b; 9a-e]. Thus the Immigrant System form of [9b] will be consistently reproduced as long as the speaker who uses this minus-long expression remains a member of his systemic community. Comparable observations apply to reductions such as [9c]: barring education that would impart knowledge of another system, foreign or the native Standard, and would lead to removal from the group of speakers defined by this 'agrammaticality', the speaker who habitually so reduces will retain the habit. He may, of course, engage in bisystemic code switching, yet occasional interference by the 'well-formed' non-reduction will not change the systematicity of [9c].39 39 On code switching, cf. Jakobson in Lévi-Strauss et al. (1953), 16; Weinreich (1953), 73-74; Haugen (1956), 50; Pike (1967), 595; Kelly (1969); Z. P. Meyerstein (1970), 987.

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The same cannot be said about reduction of the type [10a] [10b] [10c] [lOd]

Please give me the book, Daddy! Please give me the book! Give me the book! (The) book!

While some of these curtailments, e.g. [lOd], are characteristic of systemic derivation such as that of the Occupational System of workers, they are by and large conceivable regardless of systematicity. Their recurrence does not, in general, shape up as the production by any circumscribed systemic community in the same way that [9b] represents immigrant speech. They are governed, instead, by motivational variability. In the case of [10a -» b], the variable may be the number of persons present which, if not in excess of two (i.e. if there is one listener only), permits the reduction. Another motivation, that of social criteria on the order of 'politeness', would tend to inhibit reduction along the line of the progression [10a -* d], whereas motivation situational in other respects, such as 'emergency', would favor approximation of [lOd] as much as conflicting motivational factors permit. It is thus observed that motivation appears to operate as much in the direction of + P (non-reduction) as it does in the sense of reduction (—P). Paradigmatic wealth, as a manifestation of 'refined' sub-systems supported by the motivation of 'prestige performance', will be sustained not merely for the associations attaching to the selection of non-hackneyed vocabulary items in the first place, but by the replacement of 'high-class' words with other forms of similar type, 'to vary one's style'. Considerations solely of systemic norms of grammar and denotational sufficiency, i.e. what non-motivational competence permits, would generate 'basic English' of a sort, limited to a small non-duplicative working vocabulary attractive to learners of foreign language backgrounds - i.e. hitersystemically supported by the learner's motivation - yet utterly monotonous and thus very unattractive to the 'native' speech community whose competence includes alternate forms. In the latter context, paradigmatic expansion appears to be a

INTRODUCTION : OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

31

redundancy on a non-motivational basis only, a basis insufficient to insure the completion of the communicational process, i.e. the listener's receptivity, when we notice that aversion to prolonged exposure to monotony will, likely as not, make the speaker's reduced paradigm - one word repeated over and over - nonreceived, i.e. non-functional. Thus, by motivational criteria the expanded paradigm is by no means redundant. The 'refinement' of expressive variety is, in fact, of no particularly literary order. For example, in a magazine essay selected at random, we read, Beginning in the late 19th century, a trend against capital punishment has continued, if not always steadily, in both Britain and America. In 1846 Michigan, then a territory, became the first English-speaking jurisdiction in the world to do away with the death penalty for all practical purposes (treason excepted). Various states have since tried complete abolition.... By now, 14 states have outlawed executions completely.... 40

The paradigm 'death penalty' is represented by its members death penalty

(the paradigmatic label), capital punishment,

execution.

This would be no paradigm at all in the sense of membership in excess of one expression, except for the writer's desire to effect diversification likely to be appreciated by the reader. By similar motivational incentives, 'do away' is represented by do away (verb) and abolition (noun), which adds the device of class-diversification to that of variation in vocabulary. The passage quoted constitutes 3.5 % of the essay. It is easily imagined that the reader would shortly have been 'turned off' if nothing but the paradigmatic labels had been used throughout the account. The implications for language pedagogy are obvious. Though the learner's efforts may be facilitated by reduction to paradigmatic unity, grammatically adequate instruction which will settle for this reduction is unrealistic in terms of expressive simplification inacceptable by motivational standards. And yet, on a reasonably small scale, within limits of an account short enough so that the cumulative effect of the listener's or reader's boredom is not such as to terminate the communication, the learner's reduction will be 40 Excerpt from José M. Ferrer III, "The Death Penalty: Cruel and Unusual?", essay in Time Magazine 99 (4) (January 24,1972), 54-55.

32

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

tolerated. The listener's tolerance may be reinforced by motivation of his own, including his natural tendency to reduce production of whatever origin as outlined in the following section, and whatever allowances he may be willing to make for the learner's predicament. In that event, considerations inhibitive of the speaker's paradigmatic simplification are secondary, and motivation normally prompting expansion may on occasion yield to motivational tolerance of reduction. In another type of paradigmatic compression there may, in fact, be a conscious attempt to erase diversity. An instance of this is the reduction of the set consisting of Mrs. and Miss in English by a unique term, Ms., currently promoted by some exponents of the women's liberation movement who question prevailing diversification in reference to female members of the community in the absence of similar distinctions among the male population. It is worth noting that there is a syntagmatic corollary. The deletion of Mrs. or Miss, i.e. the substitution not by unity but by zero, is quite infrequent in front of names and, if performed, tends to convey an 'institutional' if not indeed a 'penitentiary' reference. Elimination of Mr., in contrast, is quite common, for instance, in news stories and evokes no comparable associations (though being no less representative of an institutional sub-system). Systemic typologies may include characterizations by relative incidence of syntagmatic reduction or expansion affecting forms deletable per se from the point of view of message conveyance alone, i.e. as features of intersection or concurrence of motivation and system. Designations on the order of titles preposed to male personal names are among these forms. It is noticed that there is a relatively high incidence of M. {Monsieur) in French, even in indirect reference, while German tends to avoid Herr to a higher degree than we observe for Mr. in English under similar circumstances. English, in turn, economizes paradigmatically in regard to honorific titles. System-internally, this may be seen, for instance, in academic rank distinctions, meticulously cultivated by 'full' professors in relation to associate or assistant professors, yet erased in addressing Professor X. Cross-systemically we may point

INTRODUCTION : OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

33

to sir as a form of addressing the equals of mon colonel or Monsieur le Professeur in French, as well as the syntagmatic disparity of the French sequences in comparison with sir (address) or Professor (reference or address) in English. The reduction of the expanded paradigms or syntagms, while not ruled out under the laws of grammar of the expanding systems, would be out of the question on motivational grounds of adherence to elementary cultural conventions. We may then distinguish two sources of motivation, one semantically specific and pertaining to such meaning areas as 'ceremonials' (in titles or in general politeness), and one unrelated to specific semantic coverage. For the latter we have offered the example of avoidance of monotony as an incentive for expansion to the full range of paradigmatic options. Semantic non-specificity in motivation toward expansion has its syntagmatic counterpart in the 'refinement' of extended constructions, for example with the help of inexpressive verbs added to nouns which, grammatically, do not depend on the addition to convey the message. This may be our argument, but it may also be the argument advanced at this time. Again, the incidence of expansion varies with the systems involved. German appears to be adverse to it, or at any rate does not attach as much importance to it as do English and, especially, French. (Seine) gestrige Rede may, but rarely does, yield to the gestern gehaltene Rede in German; English will produce yesterday's speech as readily as, if not in preference to, the speech made yesterday, while le discours (qu'il a) prononcé hier represents the norm in French. It would be futile to look for reasons in grammar which in all three systems permits constructions reduced as the result of verb deletion. That fact, other than in relation to respective systemic typologies, would seem to eliminate systematicity of language as the controlling variable. It may then be legitimate to assume that all languages may expand or reduce along similar lines, i.e. that we are dealing with a universal feature in the most comprehensive interpretation of that notion. In view of system-independence, we may attribute the syntagmatic plus-production to a motivation of wishing to conform to accepted or imagined patterns of 'refine-

34

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

ment' or stylistic 'correctness'. As in attempts elsewhere to be correct to the point of hypercorrection, stylistically warranted expansion may degenerate into clumsiness or prolixity, while expressive reduction may appear 'unidiomatic'. In the most general sense, unrelated not only to specific areas of meaning but to any motivation other than aversion to "hermeticism", syntagmatic expansion reflects the well-known need for some degree of redundancy imposed by our neurological make up. Equality in informative status of every constituent would impose an unbearable burden on speaker and hearer alike : every constituent would have to be produced and perceived with maximum care, and articulatory and attentive effort would not be permitted to flag at regular intervals as it does in natural, informationally unequal constituency. Thus, the inequality of expressive constituents permits discriminatory taxonomies of primary and secondary ranks, and secondary features, as discussed in this study, are unnecessary in a context of primary functions as evident in production or attention, but they retain their necessity by such motivational criteria as neurological inability to do without them. The discussion to follow will be limited to considerations of motivation as related to attention. In the main, we shall focus on attention reducible as the result of clues from the account and from the listener's or reader's previous experience in matters to which the account pertains, his education, as well as the specific objectives of the attentive effort. Essentially, he takes certain parts of the message for granted, not in accordance with general information theory which is purely system-oriented, but because of the listenerdetermined knowledge of what, in terms of his acquaintance with the field, or with his limited objectives in covering the account, is more or less relevant to him. For example, a historical account may consist of a sequence of events interspersed with characterization: In 1861 there occurred the death of Prince Albert, "the best of husbands and the most noble of men". 41 41

Cf. Section 4.6, below; specifically, the passages identified in Chapter 4, footnote 82.

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

35

Adornments such as the passage in quotation marks may be seen as the 'human interest' component of the account as produced by the writer. The production is undoubtedly prompted by various motivations. In addition to neurological or cultural requirements militating against its curtailment, reduction to the bare bones of names, dates, and places would liken the account to a chart or table, rather than a connected story, i.e. detract from the appearance of the work as the writer visualizes the reader's response. The reduction, in fact, might narrow a 400-page book to a fascicle below 40 pages in length, a volume of decidedly lessened marketing value. Expansion by segments not primarily factual, in turn, may widen the circle of potential readership including non-specialists who select the book for enjoyment rather than mere gathering of professionally relevant data and who may be attracted by the 'spice' no less than the 'meat'. The writer who cares about the readers' potential reasons in selecting his book - and what writer can afford to overlook the exolinguistic (motivational) variables likely to insure completion of the communicative circuit, i.e. likely to generate readership? may deem it a wise strategy to gauge the requisite amount and types of motivations as a reflection of a maximum range of diversity of readers: scholars in the field, highschool students, and history buffs. Again, production constrained to expand for reasons of grammatical acceptability must further move in a counter-reductive direction of MAXIMUM attentive appeal. The reader's individual motivation, in contrast, may be exactly the opposite. In the first place he is governed by his own aspirations only, and is unconcerned with what other readers wish to get out of the book. His attentive scope is then MINIMAL, possibly in terms of a single motivation. If it is that of a specialist interested in 'relevant facts' to the exclusion of anything else, he will pay attention to nothing else. To do this is his privilege as much in an exolinguistic sense as it is his prerogative to rise above the 'tyranny of grammar' and ignore communicationally irrelevant expansions paradigmatic as well as syntagmatic.

36

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

With the objective of identifying the floor of communicational requirement, reducibility carried to its morpho-syntactic limits, we shall restrict consideration to a reader-hearer endowed with a maximum of educational experience as a basis of minimal attentive needs and focus. The following section will outline potentials of attentive reduction in general; Chapter 4 will suggest the application of the reductive principle in a context of motivation by specific educational background and communicational objective. 1.5. NON-UNIQUENESS OF TERMINALITY

Formal, functional, systemic and (zero) motivational uniqueness as outlined above, though reflective of the mainstream of descriptive tradition, is, of course, subject to qualification in individual instances. What may, in contrast, without reservation be asserted as a matter of current consensus is the status of generation or production of speech as the exclusive frame of formal, functional or systemic reference. Traditionally, constituents are those producible by the speaker. It is he who is required to go through the motions of performing according to requirements of phonology, grammar or vocabulary. In extent of paradigm available as in the nature and extent of selection effected, it has been a speaker's world. 42 Still, the speaker's generative (productive) ability represents only one of the terminals of communication. Communication, in fact, is effective merely to the extent that it is perceived at the other terminal, that of the listener. There is as yet no specific taxonomy of forms and functions as discriminated in attention. We may, in 42

This observation is made despite occasional claims to the contrary. Chomsky (1967a), 399: "The grammatical rules that generate phonetic representations ... do not constitute a model for the production of sentences." Watts (1970), 140: "Present-day linguistic terminology has bred endless misunderstanding ... in that 'generate' [is] misconstrued as describing production rules ..." Our point is that, regardless of the specific model, "generate" means "produce". Cf. also Chomsky (1964a), 973-975 (2 pages out of 94), on "Models of Perception and Acquisition", where a "percept" is defined as an internal representation of a full structural description of an utterance, i.e. as a mere duplication of speech production potentials. Cf. also Section 4.1, below.

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

37

consequence, note the conventional restriction of analysis to the productive terminal as UNIQUENESS OF TERMINALITY. The identification of constituents of attention in the sense of deliberate perception cannot take guidance from existing listeneroriented evaluations in the area of physical or emotional impairments. In the present study we inspect reductions effected by the listener not because he is unable to register the produced message in its entirety, but because he chooses not to pay attention to some constituents of the production. Depending on confirming or contravening motivation, the listener is likely to reduce a more or less extensive segment of the expression produced. The effort of deliberate attention is inferior to the effort of production. To ascertain additional reduction, we thus acknowledge NON-UNIQUENESS OF TERMINALITY as we pass from production to attention. Implicitly, attentive reduction is recognized in a shift from etic to emic viewpoints, and in a context of associating etic diversification with obligation imposed on the speaker and emic reduction with a privilege enjoyed by the listener.43 Speech, etically extensive, reduces to emic attention. The speaker must speak etically; the listener may listen emically, i.e. discount variety communicationally irrelevant. Paradigms such as that discussed by Yachek, [la, b], accordingly undergo reduction to unitary extent. In a description solely production-oriented, the number of variants of the Standard English /1/ paradigm is irreducible (1 + n); attentively, their number is reduced to the unity of that paradigm (1 — n), i.e. to a single constituent. Functionality of type, the contrastivity of phonemes rather than of phonetic variants, is in this instance the sole variable of attentive behavior. To the degree that 'mispronunciation', for example by inadequate selection on the part of the student or immigrant speaker, does attract the listener's attention and his negative response to 'unpleasant' speech behavior, the irrelevance of etic diversity is to a degree negated by motiva43

Pike (1967), 37: "I coined the words etic and emic from the words phonetic and phonemic, following the conventional linguistic usage of these latter terms. The short terms are used in an analoguous manner, but for more general purposes." The respective correlations with speaker and hearer behavior are added in the present study.

38

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

tional variability 'reducing the reduction', i.e. effecting paradigmatic expansion. Much the same applies to grammatical diversity of the type were: are. Semantic contrast in post-present occurrence (/ know that you...) forces attentive plus-behavior on the distinction which, in the absence of contrastivity after 'past' expressions ( / did not know that you ...), and barring 'aesthetic' counter-motivation, will fail to attract attention in a purely denotative sense. By the same token, vocabulary diversity on the order of make: deliver (ia speech) or state: remark, productively maintained by criteria of stylistic sub-systematicity, will in attention reduce not merely to unity but to zero assigned to minus-attentive constituents of the syntagmatic chain, such as 'inexpressive' verbs. The speaker, bound by grammatical and motivational criteria, cannot stop speaking, while the listener may stop listening to uninformative segments. If the speaker imitates the listener by deleting grammatically or motivationally non-deletable forms, as is characteristic of child language or telegram style, this may or may not be sensed as a loss by the listener; if anything is indeed felt to be intolerably missing, some such motivation as 'disapproval of agrammaticality' (brought about by verb elimination) or 'rejection of impoliteness' (generated by the omission ofplease) will check a reduction otherwise tolerable, in fact routinely performed in attention. The listener's treatment is omissive, not because the attentively deleted forms were not physically perceived but because they failed to generate 'storage' impression: they were allowed to fade, if indeed they were not disregarded from the start. 44 In the preceding sections of this chapter, reducibility was noted in minus production (—P) generated linguistically within the system, [2a-f; 4a-b], outside of the system, [4b; 9a, b], or exolinguistically (motivationally) as the result of situational prompting, 44

The term fade is used in the sense of the present discussion as the rapid acquisition of — A status. As such it is in some respects not unlike the use of the term by Hockett (1963), 13, but it does not refer to vanishing (physical) perceptibility, or to diachronic change e.g. in the direction of metaphorical use as in Stern (1932), 390-393. Cf. also Allen (1966), 67, on "weakening effect", and the experiment by Newman (1965) discussed on pp. 153-154, below.

INTRODUCTION : OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

39

[10a-d]. As the denominator common to these three types of variable, we may regard the speaker's projection or respective impact on the listener: [4a] is deemed avoidable since the message is equally conveyed by [4b]; [4b] is avoidable to those who expect to convey the same idea by [9b], and [10a] is avoidable whenever we believe that [lOd] suffices to attain the message objective. Attention, however, will not be absorbed by either paradigmatic choice in [4a, b]; i.e. the reduction will be not to unity but to zero. Attention may be gained but not retained for [4a ->• 9b], and whether or not it is engaged by [10a d] is a matter of primary or secondary appreciation. Attentive treatment may originate from specific replacement and succession, or 'inhere', at least in listener behavior predominant, in certain morphological classes. The former, specific disregard, may evolve from discrimination along the lines of productive fluctuation ( + P , — P), for which [2a-d] is a case in point: phonemic positions potentially contrastive (paradigmatically, +P), according to cooccurrence possible, are likely to generate plus-attention (+A); non-contrastive phonemes (+P), in turn, are attentively slighted (—A). One way to test this linguistically is to record the relative incidence of the listener's request for clarification of segments not clearly perceived - an incidence high for + P = + A , yet low for + P = —A. Inherence of —A, within the limits of frequential predominance, attaches to certain sets such as those of (inexpressive) verbs. Syntagmatic reinforcement, for example that of simultaneous emphasis (+P), may lead to the cancellation of the inherent minus-status, though it is not bound to attain that effect: regardless of presence or absence of stress, denotative assumptions primary in the direction of 'living' and 'past to present progression' neither one, strictly speaking, redundant as a matter of contextual prediction - are likely to reduce the paradigms of [4a-b] and [9a-c] to attentive zero (cf. zero of [9d-e] in production as well). This may or may not follow a transitional stage of + A , subsequently consigned to fading (—A): any + A transition might guard against such semantic surprises, in terms of statistical expectability, as

40

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

{have) thought {of New York...) which, if materializing, might retain + A status, i.e. acquire primary denotation value in the context of 'educational motivation' and the countervailing motivational variable of 'account segment statistically unexpected'. It should be noted that, beyond general suggestions, no specific claim will here be made to a cause-and-effect sequence from attentive to productive inequality. This would be a diachronic progression outside of the area of principal focus of this study, though a topic of legitimate speculation. Historically, intersystemically in time, constituent reduction is manifested by the disappearance of evidently secondary segments, compared to the preservation of primary ones, a hindsight evaluation not unlike belated upgrading of normal minus-inherence in a synchronic context. 45 Primary status in attentive potential might have prevented or reversed, and secondary attentiveness might have hastened, the process of form disappearance, and this might have applied to formal paradigms such as morphological endings, as it might have to functional categories such as case-distinctions. We may add the observation of such developments, e.g. the presumably secondary rank of Latin case endings not preserved in the Romance languages, without overlooking the relative wealth of contemporary Slavic declension, i.e. the system-inherent plus-value in production though not necessarily, in instances of predictable redundancy, in attention. As 'non-derived' systems ('languages') may in this way be connected, we may pass to 'derived' ones ('sub-languages'), in observing, without attempting to diagnose, attentive slighting of positions such as those of the verb in [4a, b -> 9b] and other aberrance by native learners, including children, or non-natives. In reduction of this type, though on the basis of the data before us prevented from linking —A -* —P, i.e. from tracing inequality of production to that of attention, we may yet consider the factor 45

Joynes and Lehman (1964), 63: "[The] 'foresight pool' or 'prediction pool' usually supplies more than one prediction; from these alternatives one is chosen as a working hypothesis and the others stored in a 'hindsight' pool, from which corrections may be made as needed on the basis of subsequent information gained from items following in the string." Cf. also Rhodes (1966a) on "foresight, hindsight, and association".

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

41

of attentivity as possibly corroborative of, if not indeed reinforcing, reductive developments on record. Reluctance to go beyond merely surmising systemic successions past or present will carry over to prognostication: no claim or inference will be made in relation to future systems, and no trend will be suggested in an expansive or reductive sense. This is a synchronic study unconcerned with predicting what economies might be in store. It is obviously difficult, though not unfeasible, to construct a taxonomy from the attentive point of view, and no more than an incomplete and sketchy suggestion of some types of form inherence of primary or secondary status will be attempted in the chapters to follow. Attentive discrimination will first be a matter of linguistic (non-motivational) ranking. Subsequently, additional attentive reduction will be traced to motivational factors of 'focus on factuality', 'education', and 'account relevance'. Returning to our sample passage, In 1861 there occurred the death of Prince Albert, "the best of husbands and the most noble of men", we would notice, to begin with, the minus-inherence of certain conjunctions, prepositions, articles, and inexpressive verbs represented by in, occurred, the, of, and, and the per se deletability in attention of certain words like there (cf. please, above), as linguistic features. To this we may add any attentive deletion motivated by 'factuality' and dispensing with the entire passage in quotation marks which characterizes but does not especially inform. That leaves 1861 death Prince Albert; motivated by education, i.e. knowledge of Albert's royal connection, the reader may ignore Prince as well. Obviously, few books other than certain memory aids will present this degree of (productively) ungrammatical reduction, but no less obviously, readers constrained to effect 'essential recall' within time restrictions may settle for precisely that reduction. Discrepancy of productive and attentive ambition, the degrees of respective reducibility, will be one of the chief topics of this study.

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INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

1.6. S U M M A R Y

In this discussion, P designates production of language expressions or of their constituents. Expansion, whether paradigmatic (par.) or syntagmatic (syn.), of the chain of constituents producible is abstracted as + P , in comparison with the reduced expression —P. Similarly, constituents favored in attention will be labeled + A ; those attentively truncated, —A. Intersystemic and motivational correlation will, respectively, be symbolized by - f S and + M , as distinct from restriction to 'the (one) language', —S, or absence of motivational criteria, — M. Plus or minus assignments may vary with the nature of the comparison and change signs in different contexts; thus [4a] have been ing and [4b] have ed are in a relationship of + P to —P, i.e. [4a] has plus-length (expansion) compared to the minus-length (reduction) of [4b]; yet either option [4a, b] shows plus-length, + P , relative to - P as in [9a] or [9b]. Deletions causing the reductions will be placed in parentheses, with the reductions themselves, the residual essentials, unparenthesized. Reduction to unitary extent, i.e. to any one option representing (labeling) the paradigm as a whole, is indicated by -» 1; disappearance of the paradigm in its entirety, by -» 0. Type

Emphasis

[la-4b] [la-b] / l , l u /

u

n, 1 /

•/I/

par.

Designation Production and attention + P —S —M —A Conventional uniqueness (equality of allophonic members of the phoneme): unique form-type; unique system; motivation disregarded ; attention disregarded. ± P — S — M + A Non-uniqueness (inequality): label = primary member (paradigm association) ; reduction of multi-member + P to label —P; production of label, i.e. + P ; attention limited to emic label.

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

43

—P—S—M—A non-label = secondary member (reducing the paradigm), i.e. —P; — P + S — M — A cross-systemic: Immigrant reduction; — P ± S + M + A attention (unfavorable) to the reduction, motivated by 'aesthetics'; — P ± S + M — A attention lacking; motivation limited to communicational adequacy; taxonomy independent of specific morphemes, par., syn. taxonomy morpheme-specific (inequality of [2a-d] phonemes) : —grammatically significative, primary unit /emâde/ +contrastive; +grammatically significative, primary unit /emade/ +contrastive; secondary unit —significative —contrastive. /emarfe/ Non-uniqueness summarized : par., syn. [3a-d] + length expansion, avoidable; ab reduction, essential ; — length a reductive (deletion), (b) syn. Non-uniqueness : [4a-b] +P-S -M have been... expansion, avoidable; - P - S - M have (been)... reduction, essential to P in -S; - A inexpressive verb phrase of (have been...) inherently secondary denotation, deleted in attention. Functional non-uniqueness [5a-8d] + A 'ab' irreducible if 'b' ('ele[5a-c] transpire par. + P gance') connotation of primary rank, hence nonreductive; —A 'a(b)': reduction if 'b' secondary; 'a' only; happen 'a' only. occur —A Productive paradigm reduced (transpire, + P to 1 (label), if 'b' secondary, happen, or to 0, if verb inexpressive. occur) orO -S Monosystemic ('synonymy'). Cross-systemic ('translation') : ±P+S [6a-c] par. prim.-denot., translated; Meaning Unit 1 prim.-connot., translated; Meaning Unit 2 [i u ]

44

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

secondary, untranslated (reducible, except if + M +A). Cross-systemic; meaning units [7a-8d] par., syn. ± P + S primary (translated) or secondary (untranslated), to varying extents in various systems, [4a-b, 9a-e] par., syn. Systemic non--uniqueness Expansion monosystemic, (have been +P-S reducible living) Reduction monosystemic have lived -P-S = expansion cross-systemic = +P+S Reductions cross-systemic ±P+S (have)been = expansions further relivin' ducible (deleted P of sec(h.b.) living ondary semantic rank) (have) live(d) Reduction to 0 in P cross(have been - p +s syst., e.g. Telegraph System ; living) -*• 0 —A Reduction of inexpressive ex±P±s panded or reduced verb phrase to 0 within or across systems. ± P - S - M + A Attention expanded to seman(have) tically surprising (statisthought... tically abnormal) production expanded or reduced, within system and without specific motivation, syn. Motivational non-uniqueness [lOa-d] + P - S + M —A Motivation 'Politeness'; Please give me the 'vocative' expansion (Dadbook, Daddy ! dy\) secondary to attention; further reducible. Please give me the ± P - S + M —A Motivations 'Politeness' and 'Situation' (one addressee book\ present); 'ceremonial 'please expansion secondary to aesthetically unmotivated attention ; reduced, further reducible. 'Denotational ± P - S + M —A Motivations Give me the book\ Sufficiency' and 'Grammatical Adequacy'; in gestural or situational context of + A , verb expansion secondary to A; reduced, further reducible. 'Denotational - P ± S + M + A Motivations (The) book\ Meaning Unit 3

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH

45

Sufficiency' and 'Emergency'; also typical of certain 'Occupational Systems'. Expressive floor irreducible in P or A.

2 REDUCTION TRADITIONAL — PRODUCTIVE AND MONOSYSTEMIC: + P -> - P , - S

2.1. BACKGROUND OF RANKING

In the chapters to follow we shall examine a progressively widened area of correlations with respect to existent coverage and to adaptations suggested by the nature of our topic. At this time we explore reduction within variability - more appropriately, the absence of variables in a setting of descriptive uniqueness - characteristic of traditional inquiry: productivity within one language, indivisible. Coverage thus restricted has not been devoid of evaluations unequal with respect to productive plus and minus. Previous treatment of reduction has not, however, engendered a taxonomy of its own - it does not recognize any secondary class inherence, for instance, on the order perceived in this study, a state of affairs to be expected in conventional limitations to status reduction of —P as a "minor" form of expression in rank, not merely in extent - in relation to + P as a basic or 'major' pattern. Thus we see minus-forms presented as instances of "minor sentence types", 1 "fragmentary sentences" or "sentence fragments", 2 "reductions", 3 "truly stunted propositions", 4 "ellipsis",5 "clipping", 6 "syncope stages",7 "truncation", 8 and similar designations. 1

Bloomfield (1933), 171-172, 176; Hockett (1958), 200-201; Kufner (1963), 3-5; Weinreich (1963), 141-142; Allen (1966), 104-109; Bowman (1966); Nida (1966), 166-168. 2 Hockett (1958), 201 ; Bowman (1966) ; Langacker (1967), 33. 3 Langacker (1967), 107. 4 Weinreich (1963), 141. 5 Stern (1932), 242; Weinreich (1963), 141. 9 Marchand (1960), 364. 7 Malkiel (1968), 102-103, attributed to E. Richter. 8 Slobin (1968) ; Watts (1970), 161,171 -172,176.

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

47

Whatever opinions have been voiced along these lines vary in consistency within their own exposition as well as in relation to other statements on the subject. Perhaps all languages distinguish two great sentence-types which we call full sentences and minor sentences. The difference consists in a taxeme of selection: certain forms are favorite sentence forms; when a favorite sentence-form is used as a sentence, this is a full sentence, and when any other form is used as a sentence, this is a minor sentence. In English we have two favorite sentence-forms. One consists of actoraction phrases. ... The other consists of a command,9 Subsequent elaboration in the Bloomfieldian vein, however, relegates such disparate expressions as the following, some of them 'major' in Bloomfield's terms, to the status of 'minor' sentence types. [11a] [1 lb] [11c] [lid] [lie] [1 If] [llg] [llh] [lli]

Come here You get out of here! Found a nickel John! The more the merrier The bigger they come the harder they fall (Where are you going?) Home Yes Ouch!

One minor [sentence] type consists of a predicate without subject: [11a]. They are common as commands, but not all commands have this form and not all subjectless sentences are commands: [lib, c]. Another minor [sentence] type is the vocative: [lid]. ... Still a third minor type is the aphoristic, [lie].... An example like [1 If] is marginal between the aphoristic and favorite types. All other minor types may be classed together as fragments ...: [Hg, h, i].io Nida's treatment of minor sentence types in English offers illustrations which partly overlap with [lla-i]: 9 10

Bloomfield (1933), 171-172. Hockett (1958), 200-201.

48

R E D U C T I O N TRADITIONAL

[12a] [12b] [12c] [12d] [12e] [12f]

Here! If you like The saints preserve Me do that!? He a gentleman! Fire!

us

[12g] Love me love my dog.

Nida recognizes the completive type betokened by [12a, b]; the exclamatory type [lli]; also the verb in the predicate, with the verb head being an unmarked infinitive [11a, b; 12c, d] or zero [12e]; or expressions without verb heads [12f] or of an aphoristic nature [1 If, 12g]." Contradictions also appear inferrable from illustrations provided by Allen: [13a] Here comes Mr. Puddleditch [13b] How strange he looks.

Allen's major sentence may be defined as one in which all sectors that are occupied occur [in a certain order], and which has in addition both a subject... and also time reference. ... A major sentence is either FULL or ELLIPTICAL. ... Any sentence that is not a major sentence is a MINOR SENTENCE. ... [13a, b] are examples of minor sentences ... , 12

Weinreich distinguishes "ellipsis from minor sentences proper": [14a] English It rained [14b] English It's a boy [14c] G e r m a n Es wird getanzt [14d] English There was a raising of

[15a] [15b] [15c] [15d] 11 12

eyebrows

Latin venit 'He is coming' Russian vojna 'It's war = There is a war on' Hungarian asztal 'It's a table' English excellent.

Nida (1966), 166-168. Allen (1966), 103-104. On ellipsis, cf. also Guiraud (1964), 62.

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

49

Ellipsis is to be defined as a family of transformations, ... yielding the isolation of a part of a sentence against the background of a full source sentence. ... A [type of ellipsis] are interjectional nominal expressions, always either as vocatives, or as symptoms of emotional stress. ... In contrast to both elliptical and interjectional elements, we encounter truly "stunted propositions" What is ... semiotically "stunted" may receive very different grammatical treatment depending on the language. In English and German, for example, stunted propositions require a dummy subject it, or even a dummy subject plus [copula], [14a-c]; but in other cases the stuntedness is marked by the subjectless sentence [14d].... Inmost languages (e.g. Latin, Russian, Hungarian ...) the verb phrase alone can function as a full-fledged sentence Such is the case in [15a] and probably also in many polysynthetic languages where the alleged one-word sentences are really only one-word verb-phrases, functioning as a minor sentence type until a subject-noun-phrase is added. Finally, languages ... may have forms which are "minor" both grammatically and semiotically; cf. [15b, c]; in English this pattern seems applicable only to evaluative adjectives [15d].13 In the light of majority in grammatical and textual potential, 'minor' evaluations may be worth reconsidering; they are certainly no absolutes, and setting them off from 'major' ones may contradict what is commonly associated with the respective terms - apart from data questioning the distinction altogether: In Chinese ... minor sentences "are more primary and relatively even more frequent" in two-way conversations than in other languages. ... Many languages seem to lack grammatical distinction between certain major and minor forms.14 Some, equating minority with expressive inadequacy, view ellipsis as "not well formed out of context"; 15 others refrain from negative judgments of this sort - mindful, perhaps, of the frequential preponderance of these and other 'minor sentences' so that, short of conceding ungrammaticality to be the norm, they are inclined to accept the norm as well-formed.

13

Weinreich (1963), 141-142. Weinreich (1963), 142. The passage in quotation marks is from Chao (1959), 2. 15 Mulder (1968), 78. 14

50

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

Comparable observations apply to [16a] a grief

ago16

[16b] an always

thing,11

sequences which have been termed 'semi-sentences' and have been downgraded as 'ungrammatical strings', yet which are by n o means as generally uncondoned as for instance [9b], and which, though less current than the 'minor' expressions cited, for that very reason acquire 'major' communicative relevance. In generative grammar, expressions on the order o f [17a] Can he

really?,

in relation to [17b] Can he really do that? [17c] Can he really be so cruel?, as also [17d] Could be [17e] Maurice just swatted a fly, have been viewed as fragmentary, reductions, or in similar terms intended to convey minor status: Sentence fragments ... can be recognized as elliptic versions of more complete sentences, though it is not always obvious which particular sentence a given fragment abbreviates. [17a] is to be understood as [17b, c], or whatever other sentence happens to be appropriate for the occasion.... In these observations we find the reason for placing primary emphasis on full sentences and only secondary emphasis on sentence fragments: Sentence fragments can be understood and described in terms of full sentences, but the opposite does not hold true. By describing full sentences, we are going a long way towards the description of sen16

Katz (1964), 400. Hall (1965), 342: "No combination can, in the absolute, be called permanently 'ungrammatical', for new combinations, even of a type which runs most strongly counter to our feeling of 'grammaticality', are always appearing ...: A Record Hunter gift is an always thing." The passage is presented as an advertisement in The New York Times for December 22,1963. Cf. p. 151, below. 17

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

51

tence fragments. If, on the other hand, we were to focus all our attention on fragmentary expressions like [17d], we would learn little or nothing that would contribute to our understanding of the syntactic principles that account for full sentences, and hence for linguistic activity.18 A phenomenon that may be called "reduction" appears to be central, and perhaps crucial, to our understanding of syntactic systems. ... In answer to [a] question, a full sentence is really not necessary; [a] noun phrase ... is sufficient to get the message across. Some sort of reduction is therefore involved. The conceptual structure which could be manifested as the full sentence ... is manifested instead as [a] single word.... Notice that this reduction would not be possible in isolation [i.e. out of a specific context].19 Reduction is a very common linguistic phenomenon. In the give and take of informal conversation, words, phrases, and other elliptic utterances may occur with great frequency. Moreover, there is a sense in which most if not all sentences involve reduction in one way or another. [17e] seems like a complete sentence, but it would not be unreasonable to maintain that this sentence is elliptic. It does not say what Maurice used to swat the fly, nor does it say where he was at the time, and so on. ... Probably all sentences, in one degree or another, represent an abstraction away from the full, detailed conceptual situations capable of prompting them.20 Quite clearly, the transformation argument, though tenable as a model of historical cause and effect, is weakened by the fact that, in conjunction with its semantic counterpart of context-dependence, the undeleted forms [17b, c] to varying degrees are as contextdependent as their reduction [17a] (what can he do?, how cruel?, who is he ?, etc.), and by the additional observations that reduced expressions are as relatively independent of context as their expanded counterparts (as noted for [17d] Could be and That could be), and that uncertainty about independence calls even 'complete sentences' such as [17e] into question. Taken as a whole, the distinctions cited between major (full, complete, i.e. + P ) and minor (fragmentary, stunted, elliptic, 18

Langacker (1967), 33. Langacker (1967), 107. 20 Langacker (1967), 107-108. On other transformational statements concerning obligatory, optional, and prohibited reductions, cf. Lees (1969), 309-313; Rosenbaum (1969), 317. 19

52

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

i.e. —P) sequences appear to evolve in part from frequential projections of performance and partly from underlying transformation - two incompatible criteria. Bloomfield's "favorite" actoraction and command patterns would seem to be so labeled because of their alleged frequency, in the descriptive sense of employment which is observable, or at least in the prescriptive sense of what should be employed, and how frequently. As norms relative to which the shorter structures are deficient, Bloomfield's two favorite sentence-forms raise questions of descriptive adequacy as well as of value in guiding subsequent work. Commands, actor-action phrases with subjects (actors) deleted, are themselves less than complete; their inclusion in the set of derivational starting points suggests something like 'major major' and 'minor major' types hardly a convincing basis for assessment along these lines, and clearly no guideline for post-Bloomfieldian analysis, which abounds in evaluational contradictions or uncertainties. Some sentences have been viewed as 'more primary' than others - interestingly enough for our discussion, on grounds of greater frequency than is noted for others presumably 'less primary'. One of Bloomfield's 'major' models, commands, has in fact been demoted to minor by Hockett. Such expressions, however, as [17e], clearly a representation of actor-action, the other model said to be major, were claimed to qualify as an instance of ellipsis. Ellipsis, reduction par excellence, is generally equated with minor status in contrast to non-elliptic 'majority' - but then again "a major sentence is either full or elliptic". In the final analysis, the observation that "all sentences ... represent an abstraction away from the full, detailed conceptual situations capable of prompting them" would seem to moot the issue of traditional discrimination. With a bit of frivolity, one could add that in a view of language as a historical continuum of "bowwow", "ding-dong", or "pooh-pooh" origin,21 it seems implausible that in the beginning there was, not the word but a 'well-formed major sentence type'. And if ontogeny does indeed repeat phylogeny, there are obvious analogies to the —P -» + P evolution 21

Cf. Bloomfield (1933), 6.

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

53

from (reductive) Child System, discussed in Chapter 3 below, to the (expansive) system of the adult community to which analysis usually relates. In the context discussed, transformational history, even if it is that of + P —• —P, is inconsequential whenever the emphasis is not on expansions as the explanation of origin, but on reductions as the expressive objective. The objective certainly equals the starting point in respective status 'substantive' and 'appropriate' to major classification, and with focus on expressive economy indeed exceeds it in relevance, not because — P predominates frequentially (it may or may not do so), not because it is more or less of an approximation to some constructional formula, not because of its role as a generator or the result of a generation, but because the minus form represents features essential and common to either construction, because it represents the floor of formal reducibility - the features of minimal sufficiency on the sentence level, to the degree that this sufficiency has been explored at the present stage of our discussion.

2.2. REDUCTIVE TAXONOMY

2.2.1. Subwords In the present section and in perspective of productive, systemic, motivational and attentive extension to follow, reductions, including 'minor' expression types excerpted from previous scholarship, will be the object of taxonomic reexamination. Each reduction cited will represent a paradigm of forms similarly reducible but not, in general, specifically indicated. For instance if [22a], below, exemplifies formative expansion in English, it does so for any expansions of similar functionality; it betokens, but does not exhaust, the typological range in question. Under the heading of subwords we include any form of submorphemic or morphemic function below the level of the word, with the word assumed to be defined and implicit in non-subword ex-

54

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

position. In the order of sequence adopted, subwords considered will be of non-morphemic focus, of morphemic focus, and of morphemic status. Non-morphemic focus in phonological cooccurrence is illustrated in reducibility of the third formant. 22 In earlier reference to phonological paradigms, etic diversification has been noted to reduce to emic unity, as in [la, b] subsumed by the phonemic label [la]. Neutralization of emic force, and phonemes comparably non-contrastive in [2a-f], further document constituent inequality in this area. The interrelation of markedness and reductive labeling, and the absence of one-way correlations, are seen in [18a] French [J], voice-marked (non-tense); paradigmatic label [18b] French [1], voice-unmarked (tense); non-label, reductive 23 [19a] French /§/, voice-unmarked (tense); neutralization-resistant, paradigmatic label [19b] French /z/, voice-marked (non-tense); neutralization-prone, non-label, reductive24. Taxonomic explicitness, not contemplated here, would compile lists such as that initiated by [18a, b; 19a, b], providing token explicitness from the typological starting point of [la, b]. This would be a very useful procedure for establishing inventories of specific languages; for a mere outline such as that of the present study, however, it would do no more than needlessly belabor the reduction typified. Elaboration on tokens might, of course, pay dividends in typology as well : in proceeding down the list of non-label reductivity in [20a] English /p : b/ ; non-label, /b/, less frequent than /p/ 22

Delattre et al. (1951); Isaéenko (1968), 61. For marks in relation to paradigmatic discrimination in phonology, grammar, and lexicon, cf. Greenberg (1966a), 13-14, 21-22, and passim. 24 These are relative terms, based on text frequency: /z/ assimilates in je peux upon deletion of /a/; /s/ does not in cheval. Voicing of comparable constituents in "weak position" (as in Strasbourg) is a type of occurrence negligible in comparison with frequential predominance of je syntagms. Cf. Léon (1966), 74, 75, 108. 23

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

55

[20b] English /s: z/; non-label, /z/, much less frequent than /s/ [20c] English /h: 0 / ; non-label inexistent, monopoly for /h/, we intersect with disparity in functional load of phonemic oppositions. On a sliding scale of relative (ir)relevance, possibly as oriented toward a more or less arbitrary cut-off point, [20a, b, c] progressively reduces feature-opponence value. 25 Yet, accretion even in typological respects would not significantly strengthen the case for reducibility - a case considered to be made with the types and tokens presented. 26 Up to this point, our consideration of subwords has been completely disassociated from reference specifically morphemic. [18a-b] or [20a-c], for instance, are in that sense viewed in nonmorphemic perspective. Morphemic focus, i.e. sub-morphemic reduction with supraphonemic orientation, may be illustrated in allomorphemic constraint on the order of [21a] French cafet-, as in cafetière, extended (cf. non-extended thé- in théière); non-label of morpheme [21b] French café, reduced; morphemic label [21c] -t-, formative expansion; non-labeling [22a] English /faekt/, expanded; label of morpheme [22b] English /fek-/, as in /fasks/; reduced; morphemic non-label [22c] ~/t/-, formative expansion; labeling - paradigmatic and syntagmatic extensions unjustified from a functional (semantic) point of view, with paradigms (diversely) reducible in a manner comparable to [la-b; 18a-b; 19a-b], With the criterion of recurrence as the exponent of non-reducibility (cf. [4a, b], above), minus-form and plus-functionality (essentiality) combine in [21b, 22b], while [21a, 22a] exhibit formal over-extension in their inclusion of functionally unequal, i.e. minus-denotative, [21c, 22c], The correlations of [21a, b; 22a, b] reflect variant25 Hockett (1955), 215; R. S. Meyerstein (1970), 16, 36-37. 26 On typology and token representation, cf. Bazell (1949b); Voegelin (1955); Greenberg (1957); Malkiel (1957b); Pavlovic (1957); Jakobson (1958); Krámsky (1959); Greenberg (1960); Herdan (1960); Herdan (1966); H o m e (1966).

56

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

identifications, prevalent in current description, with 'empty morphs', to the degree of their recognition in connection with conventional 'formatives', suggested by [21c, 22c].27 Looking back to minus-capacity of paradigmatic labeling in [lb, 18b, 19b] intersecting with markedness, we observe that [21b] represents a reduction to the morphemic label, while [22b] indicates a reduction away from it. In similarity of reduction, distinctions among subwords, semiwords and words may prove somewhat arbitrary, as seen in [23a] ten minutes to seven [23b] ten mins sent28 [23c] -ute-, -ve-, to with the reduction [23a b] indicative of the functional minus of type-dissimilar [23c]. As types of respective heterovalence, the progression [23a -> b] retains a majority of [23a], i.e. in that sequence the reducibles are in the minority. In [24a] radio detecting and ranging [24b] radar or [25a] television [25b] TV, in contrast, reducibles make up most of the respective expansions [24a, 25a]. [24a, b; 25a, b]29 further bring out initial position of word or syllable, complemented as in the first syllable of [24b] by essentials of pronounceability, as determinants of a morphemespecific taxonomy of irreducibles (and, by implication, of reducibles) 27

Formations on the order of [21a-b] are discussed by Malkiel (1967), 318-320, though without reference to labeling as in this study. On empty morphs and formatives, cf. also Hockett (1947), 333; Bolinger (1948); Bolinger (1950); Pike (1967), 160-161, 186. 28 Noted by Jones (1950), 228; cf. Ebeling (I960), 39. 29 Discussed and grouped by Marchand (1960), 360. Cf. also fn. 30, Chapter 3, below.

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

57

evocative of that of [2a-d], p. 7, above. 'Shortening' of the type [26a] submarine [26b] sub [26c] -marine30 or 'clipping' such as [27a] laboratory [27b] lab [27c] -oratory or [28a] influenza [28b] flu [28c] in-, -enza31 is likewise in the gray area of overlap of reducibles as undisputed words, though with loss of association, as in [26c], or as subwords in [27c, 28c], In [26a, b; 27a, b] it is the initial syllable, stressed in some sub-systems and unstressed in others, which is non-reduced; in [28a, b], it is, however, the syllable consistently unstressed and in noninitial position. Syntagmatic reduction among subword morphemes as exemplified in [26b] has its counterpart in the shrinkage of paradigm, [29a] depravity (-ity) [29b] depravedness (-ness), with [29a, b] -» 1, i.e. with either member avoidable. (For paradigmatic shrinkage with equality of options, cf. [4a, b] -* 1; for similar reduction with options unequal, cf. [la, b] -> 1, above.) A frequential, if not stylistic, disfavoring of one of the 'equal' options, [29a], may, however, be inferred from the productivity of the favorite, [29b]. Additional criteria likely to militate against that pro30 31

365.

Discussed and labeled by Barber (1964), 90. [27a, b] and [28a, b] are discussed and labeled by Marchand (1960), 357-

58

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

jection must await consideration as a multisystemic problem in Chapter 3, below. 2.2.2. Semiwords Under this heading we take up, in successive chapters, some of the forms labeled by Fries as function words of his Group A, lately referred to as determiners or determinatives - in particular, the sub-group traditionally called articles; in addition, Fries' Groups E (coordinators) and F (prepositions), as well as pronouns and 'attitudinal formators', and a set which patterns as part of verb expressions and which is here termed verb-particles.32 Again, our coverage lays no claim to completeness but merely samples a few of the existent semiword sets. Some of these forms are also known as "empty words". 33 They have commonly been relegated to minor status betrayed by the terminology cited, which is more concerned with syntax or semantics than with the relatively high degree of reducibility exhibited by them in paradigmatic extent and in incidence of syntagmatic elimination. The following are illustrations of this reducibility involving definite and indefinite determiners of the article-type: [30a] This is the book I was looking for [30b] This is a book I was looking for [31a] This is the iron [31b] This is an iron [31c] This is iron [32a] This is the dolly [32b] This is a dolly [32c] This is Dolly3i [33a] I met a man ... [33b] The man was an old friend35 32 33 34 35

Fries (1952), 87-89, 94-96. For attitudinal formators, cf. p. 65, below. Langacker (1967), 67-68. Cf. also fn. 27 of Chapter 2, above. Discussed by Weinreich (1963), 129. Discussed by Hill (1958), 414.

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

59

[34a] The tallest man [34b] *A tallest man36 [35a] [35b] [35c] [35d] [35e] [35f] [35g] [36a] [36b]

The water Some water *A water Water A water hardly fit to drink Water hardly fit to drink Water boils at 212° F. Are you looking for books ? Books are in a library.

In systems such as English with articles as a recognized class, we observe contrastivity produced within the paradigm, and presence or absence in the chain of cooccurrents, yet also an incidence, high in comparison with that noted for other sets, of class-inherent weakness evinced by partial disappearance of paradigmatic or syntagmatic contrast. Overload within the paradigm, i.e. extension functionally supported by contrastivity, is encountered in [30a, b], involving identity in denotative subclass of noun determined. 37 No such identity obtains for [31a-c], yet the paradigmatic load of the distinction between articles is weakened: [31a, b] basically agree in determining 'a piece of equipment', though [31a] might be compatible with 'metallic substance' dependent upon the differentiating power of some such extension as ... mined (cf. the discussion of [35e], below); unequivocal commitment to 'metallic substance' thus hinges on syntagmatic omission in [31c], With comparably differentiated nominals in [32a, b] versus [32c], and discounting inconclusive extensions like ...I knew which may but 36

Discussed by Barton (1962), 113-114. On overload, cf. R. S. Meyerstein (1970), 58-59, 62-72, 74, and passim. In this study, we shall further refer to the opposite of this concept as underload. Overload will indicate a value in excess of that of cooccurrents; underload, a value inferior to that of occurrents. As used, in general, in this discussion, these will be 'legitimate' plus or minus values; for 'non-legitimate', i.e. uncondoned, load, cf., for instance, [116a-e], p. 157, below.

37

60

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

need not equate [32a = c] in meaning, no contrast beyond that of [30a, b] is effected by paradigmatic extent; syntagmatics as in [31c] alone is what contrasts. Over-extension of plus versus plus, i.e. of the paradigm which makes the and a available, is increasingly evident whenever optionality of membership ceases to be a reality in syntax, i.e. whenever reduction affects not only function but form, as in [33, a, b] or [34a, b]. Interplay of formal and functional reduction is further evident in [35a-g]: [35a, b] are possibilities, but not [35c], Plus-minus form-contrast may not bring about different function; witness [35b, d] or [35e, f]; in practical if not strictly 'synonymic' terms (i.e. as a matter of primary distinction; cf. Section 1.2, above), also [35a, d] - e.g. to a mother indiscriminately telling her child not to get into [35a] or [35d], i.e. to whom the 'definite-generic' opposition is secondary.38 Beyond that, zero determination is mandatory in such expressions as [35g], as in [36b] for count nouns 'generic', and optional 'partitively' as in [35b, 36a].3» Among coordinators, we find [37a] [37b] [38a] [38b]

You do that and I'll break your neck You do that or I'll break your necki0 Two and two is four *Two or two is four

[39a] *(Give me your) money, and {you'll lose) your life [39b] (Give me your) money, or (you'll lose) your life. Notwithstanding and: or contrast such as [37a, b], that is, despite some semiword oppositions endowed with greater functional potential than others, 41 linguistic as well as exolinguistic variables tend to keep that potential within limits. Linguistic (grammatical) inhibitions uniquely support and (excluding or) in such sequences as both ... and, versus or (excluding *and) in either ... or, not 38

Cf. Z. P. Meyerstein (to appear). Cf. Yotsukura (1963). 40 Discussed by Allen (1966), 161. 41 On diversity and graduality of functional potential, cf. Bolinger (1961a); Seiler (1967b); R. S. Meyerstein (1970). 39

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

61

counting certain 'embeddings' of non-immediate constituency, with exolinguistic features of 'education' of similarly limiting effect in [38a, b] and [39a, b]. Again, the limited potential of plusplus opposition compares to that of plus-minus, as in elimination of and which will leave the meaning of [37a] unaffected. Reducibility among semiwords thus far reviewed may be shown in extent of selection or in extent of string. In the case of other sets such as verbal particles, the reduction potential is primarily of the latter type: [40a] dish out, give out, hand out, pour out, serve out [40b] hang up, nail up, paste up, screw up, tack up [40c] deed over, give over, hand over [41a] [41b] [41c] [4Id]

churn up, mix up, shake up, stir up bunch up, coil up, curl up, wind up die out, fade out, freeze out, tire out, wear out broaden out, even out, stretch out, lengthen [sic], widen out

[42a] look up, think up, buy up, offer up [42b] drown out, fake out, knock out, read out, test out [42c] auction o f f , carry o f f , dry o f f , show o f f , tip o f f , work o f f . The difference between particle analysis prevalent, which one might term one of 'plus-plus' focus, and the 'plus-minus' correlations suggested in the present study, may be shown on the basis of the following two quotations: Looking ... at the three groups of verb-particle combinations [40a-c, 41a-d, 42a-c], we see immediately that in the first group [40a-c] the particles out, up and over have retained essentially their "adverbial force" and that the verb-particle combination can be interpreted quite literally in terms of the meanings of the verb and the adverb. We will call this type of verb-particle relationship literal. The second group of verb-particle combinations do not possess this literal relationship. Rather, the particle seems to modify the meaning of the verb in a completive sense. We call the relationship between the verb and particle completive just in case the combination has the meaning of bringing to a completion the action of the verb. The third group consists of verbparticle combinations sharing a figurative relationship. There is no apparent systematic way of associating the meaning of the verb and

62

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

particle so as to derive the meaning of the combination in these cases.42 [43a] The man hung {nailed, pasted) up the picture on the wall [43b] The man hung the picture on the wall Now consider [43a] ... the particle up can be deleted. It is clear that the meaning of the sentence changes somewhat but the acceptability of the sentence remains the same. We now make one further definition. The relationship between a verb and particle is systematic if ... the strict subcategorization and selectional features of the verbal element are exactly the same whether or not the particle occurs following the verb. Stated another way, a verb-particle relationship is systematic if the co-occurrence relations of the verbal element remain unchanged by the presence or absence of the particle.43 The citation preceding obviously emphasizes occurrence of forms. [43a, b] both occur as "acceptable" sentences, with deletion of up affecting the meaning merely "somewhat". It is hardly doing the intended message significant violence when in [43a, b] we interpret up as a particle denotatively omissible, i.e. of functional underload in a primary sense. The same was evidently not meant to be said about the other illustrations, [40a-c, 41a-d, 42a-c], Yet, upon examination of the 46 expressions, we are obligated to admit non-omissibility of particles in only 17 instances, i.e. 37 %, and at that strictly along the lines of "occurrence", "subcategorization", and "selection" or in less Bloomfieldian phraseology, substantial semantic inequality. Indeed, we do not normally *dish or *bunch. As for the remaining 15 cases, the verbs do occur alone (coil, curl, die, freeze, wear, look, think, buy, drown, knock, read, carry, show, tip, and work), though partly in non-identical syntactic patterns and with dissimilar meanings compared to their respective occurrences with the particles listed. In the other 29 examples (63 %) of the three "sub-categorizations" combined, particle omission, with meanings no more than "somewhat" changed if at all, is possible far beyond the wall context of [43a, b] where that possibility is acknowledged. In the set 42 43

J. B. Fraser (1965), 37-38. J. B. Fraser (1965), 38. Cf. also B. Fraser (1966).

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

[44a] [44b] [44c] [44d] [44e]

63

They're giving out free tickets to the show They're giving free tickets to the show The motor gave out * The motor gave Something's got to give

we may, for instance, freely vary [44a, b]. This picture, of course, is liable to change in specific syntactic cases: particle deletion from [44c] to [44d] is not possible, though even then one may think of reductions as in [44e], At that point we would have to evaluate the total range of occurrence potential for each verb-particle combination and determine, wherever feasible, the more representative of the two, i.e. plus or minus particle formation - frequently a more or less evenly balanced probability and, in any event, a fairly irrelevant investigation in the context of the present discussion which attempts to establish principles, rather than precise data, of formal and functional underload, and which will try to show that the presence or absence of functional significance is by no means of necessity connected with respective preferences in production or semantic data. What we do investigate here is the incidence of syntactic nonoccurrence of the minus-construction amounting to informational redundancy of the plus-monopoly; beyond that, we are interested in construction-external features conveying redundancy upon the verb-particle expression in its entirety. As the result of research along these lines, we may establish a pattern of class-inherent minus-expectancy. Concretely speaking, in [45a] [45b] [45c] [45d]

We think up an explanation * We think an explanation We offer up an explanation We offer an explanation,

[45a] has a monopoly in the absence of [45b], That being the case, the non-contrastive particle (cf. non-contrastive phonemes in [2a-d], p. 7, above) is devoid of information; that is, we

64

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

are saddled with minus-functional formal plus. Any verb-particle, of course, is denotatively redundant whenever that status applies to the verb expression as a whole, within limits outlined below. Once it is clarified that the explanation is to be given rather than received, the grammatical-semantic paradigm, including any particles attached to one or the other of its members, is functionally inflated to the degree of random selection; thus, any of the alternatives of [45a, c, d] would serve equally well. That leaves [46a] [46b] [46c] [46d] [46e] [46f]

make up make over, get up, get over a student makes up an examination (which he missed) a liar makes up a story make it over, do it over, write it over up!, overQiere)!,

cases where the particle, rather than the verb, may be the "semantic focus". In examining the paradigmatic string of [46a, b] relating to a distinction between depletion, "semantic nearemptiness", and determination, "the converse of depletion",44 we find that the four verb expressions of [46a, b], offered to illustrate determination, actually constitute instances of diverse semantic foci. Assuming, again, specific statistically likely environments, [46c, d], we have another instance of formal verb-unit (verbcentered fusion) with the functional underload of that unit produced by redundancy relative to semantic pre- and post-indicators in the cases cited (student, examination missed; liar, story) - an underload demonstrable, as outlined in Chapter 4, by respective data of 'expectancy'. In [46b], in contrast, the semantic focus in each instance is that of the non-verb (particle), in relation to which the verbal element merely discharges a grammatical obligation, and is subject to irrelevant [46e] fluctuation or to zero-replacement in [46f] commands. Still, statistical imbalance appears to be such that particle overload as noted in this paragraph is atypical, and 44

Discussed and labeled by Weinreich (1963), 147.

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

65

that for all practical purposes underload may be regarded as class-inherent. As suggested by [47a] [47b] [47c] [47d]

French done, as in dis done German ja, as in das wissen Sie ja German eigentlieh, as in wissen Sie das eigentlieh ? English then, as in if he comes then she will come, too,

the border between semiwords and words is not sharply defined. Some forms would seem to qualify for either designation yet, for their intrinsic boundness and semantic properties, have affinity predominantly with the former group. This type of particle may be functionally irrelevant even if the speakers of the language do not confirm that view. Its justification is usually stated as a matter of 'idiomaticy'. The incidence of such minus-functional idiomforms, some of them also labeled "attitudinal formators", varies with different systems and may well be cited as one element of systemic typology. Among illustrations, we have the "obviousness-particles" of [47a, b], or "metalinguistic operators" represented by [47c].45 These are instances of performance-plus which grammatical competence permits to replace by zero but which performants do not frequently so replace. We can detect no exolinguistic incentives for [47a-c], Incentives of this nature do, in contrast, appear to exist for the formal plus encountered in [47d]: the sentence would be both grammatical and idiomatic without then, a word which is possibly prompted by a certain amount of emotion ('uncertainty') about correct understanding of the condition stated. This projects to variability of motivation, reviewed in Chapter 4. It has, moreover, aspects of derived systemicness in the prevalence of [47d] reinforcement as a characteristic, for instance, of Legal System, and thus also impinges on systemic correlations of Chapter 3, below. 45

Discussion of [47a-c] and the terms "attitudinal formators", "obviousness particles", and "metalinguistic operators" are offered by Weinreich (1963), 122-123,130.

66

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

2.2.3. Words Similar to class inherence noted above, minus function is noticeable in the syntagmatic deletion of members of certain subsets of verbs, and in varying degrees of reducibility of paradigm for the verb class as a whole: [48a] Spanish decir, preguntar, responder, contestar [48b] Spanish Susana salva otra vez la situación: - Hacemos cédulas. [48c] English state, describe, assert, warn, remark, demand [49a] Latin panem! ('Give me ...') [49b] Latin pañis! ('... is here'). Syntagmatically, reduction affects, for instance, semantically identified verba dicendi including [48a] among those most frequently involved in Spanish, where their omission is illustrated in [48b],46 or 'illocutionary acts' on the order of [48c]47 and other verbs of questioning, commanding, or promising similarly omissible. In [48b] it is the arrangement of the remaining forms ('making labels ... will save the day') which attests to the minus functionality (dispensability) of the appropriate representative of [48a]; that is to say, syntax preserves meaning which the redundant verb would have carried. The expression of the deleted verb-message might, instead, be morphological, e.g. by nominal case endings as in [49a, b]: Thus, the Roman beggar asking for bread probably said [49a], but if he found some bread unexpectedly, he might have shouted [49b].48 Reduction of copular verbs is illustrated syntagmatically by [50a] I read the book while I was in England [50b] I read the book while in England', 46

[48a-b] is discussed and labeled by Blanquet (1968), 15, 19. [48b] is a passage from J. de Ibarbourou, Chico Carlo. 47 [48c] is discussed and labeled by Searle (1969), 23-24, 54-71, based on terminology by Austin (1962), 49. 48 Weinreich (1963), 141.

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

67

verb-deletion reductive in a paradigmatic sense (with either expression avoidable), in [51a] when we arrived [51b] at our arrival.

The reduction of [49a, b] is the result of a deletion of verbs ('give', 'be here', or 'find') other than 'introductory' ones exemplified in [48a, c]. Non-introductory omission independent of morphological (case) expression, and syntactically clarified in a manner similar to introduction-reduced [48b], is seen in plus-zero transformation of the type [50a -» b].49 Transformation by plus-plus deverbalization, as shown in [51a b],50 which in respective forms and frequential favoring appears to be essentially style-distinctive, will be taken up as one of the features of systemic derivation examined in Chapter 3, below. In addition to minus-functionality generating their complete disappearance, i.e. syntactic reduction to zero, verbals as a class with relatively numerous paradigms of functions (categories) exhibit reduction conditioned by functional erasure, that is by weakness of distinctions contrastive as a whole yet frequently erased and in that event devoid of contrastivity within the paradigm. There is an extensive body of data on formal proliferation beyond corresponding distinctions in function - afunctional replacive overload - a phenomenon which has generated two types of analytic response: attempts to explain the difference in form-features by statements or assumptions of functional diversity; or the abandonment of these attempts, often with reference to inexplicable 'free variation'. 51 Spurred on by insistence on 'descriptive rigor' or 'explanatory (and descriptive) adequacy', many descriptivists attempted to 'clean up' instances of free variation which to them were residues of insufficient coverage, so as to increase the number of 'cases solved'. 49 50 51

Discussed by Chomsky (1965), 219. Discussed by Wells (1960), 218. Gleason (1961), 163, 181-218; Harris (1963), 30, 65, 72, 111, 232.

68

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

For English, Allen appears to run the whole gamut of afunctional form-fluctuations among verbs, with attempts to account for each fluctuation - attempts sometimes successful, at times of uncertain validity, and often abandoned. The following are merely a few samples of traditional analytic response exemplified by Allen. They may well cause us to take a second look at free variation and, rather than reject that notion as being indicative of the analyst's inadequacy, give it its due as a prima facie manifestation of the relative functional irrelevance of certain distinctions, i.e. reducibility. Thus, rather than second-guess the speaker's choice, we might admit that the speaker did not elect to discriminate: [52a] [52b] [53a] [53b] [53c] [53d] [53e]

I will come if it will be of any use to you I will come if it is of any use to you I didn't know you are here I didn't know you were here They told me he's here They knew he's here Did you know that it's raining?

Will in [52a] (protasis), though condemned by prescriptivist grammarians, is here "quite natural". 52 There is, then, a coexistence of "prescribed" [52b] and "equally natural" [52a] usage, with no apparent contrast in denotative-monosystemic (as opposed to connotative-stylistic) functions. [53a] is "unnatural" according to Jespersen (cf. [53b], apparently favored); [53d] "does not seem to occur, at least in [Allen's] dialect"; [53c, e], in contrast, though similar in type to [53a], are presented as unobjectionable.53 Anyone familiar with colloquial English has, of course, heard, if not used, [53a, d] as often, if not indeed more frequently, than [53b, c, e]. That is to say, equality of occurrence, in denotative if not in frequential respects, and stylistic connotations aside, would point to free variation. Failure to affirm it, in turn, seems to necessitate all sorts of contrived accounting: 52 53

Jespersen (1911), 4.400. Cf. Allen (1966), 79-80. Jespersen (1911), 4.153. Allen (1966), 80.

69

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

The expressions he's here and you're here in these examples are to be taken as referring to "his" or "your" physical presence "here", rather than to residency or employment. (Conceivably, a person working in one institution might say to someone who had been working elsewhere the previous year, "They told me you're here now", meaning "working here".) 54 In other words, they knew he's (or you're) here working, but not having a good time off the job! What makes that account questionable is, not that it is not true as stated (for it may well be true), but that the "unnatural" and exodialectal strings also occur where they are not supposed to occur, again in competition with "natural" dialect-grammatical ones but again, at least part of the time, without functional opposition to the latter in a denotative-linguistic sense. This problem loses some of its acuity wherever authoritative sources lay down the law, instead of each idiolect being in a way a law onto itself. In French, where issues of the type discussed in the preceding paragraph come under the heading of concordance des temps, Academy rules and government edicts either prohibit or, as in the case of present-subjunctive expressions after past-expressions in the governing clause, condone deviation f r o m concordance. Uncondoned deviation is not, of course, decreed out of existence, but the far smaller incidence f o r French than for English of constructional fluctuation in this and other areas of grammar may not be unrelated to the presence of 'authoritative guidance', i.e. may be conditioned by an exolinguistic factor, but not of the kind suggested by Allen. Absence of fluctuation, of course, is by itself no evidence of functional import (cf. Chapter 4, below), while its presence certainly may be taken as something less than certainty of the relevance of distinctions involved. Functional irrelevance of tense-distinction, with attendant fluctuation in production, causes reduction to either expression in [54a] Your mother tells me you have been disobedient [54b] Your mother told me ... 54 55

Allen (1966), 80, and ibid., fn. 286. Allen (1966), 80.

todays

70

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

That many languages were or are far more concerned with non-temporal rather than temporal verb-categorization is a wellknown fact. In English where tense distinctions generally do matter, we observe that the time of the action, left unspecified by the verb as in [54a] as compared to [54b], may be indicated by non-verbals (e.g. yesterday)-, conversely, the speaker may not bother to specify, as in non-committal "servitude" required by concordance, or as in [54a].56 This does little to enhance the importance of tense-exponence in verb expressions of this type. Functional identity is further implicit in [55a] I enclose a check [55b] I shall enclose a check [55c] I am enclosing a check or [55d] I leave tomorrow [55e] I'll leave tomorrow [55f] I am leaving tomorrow. Tense and aspect erasure overlap in free variation of [55a-c] fluctuation usually systemic (Commercial Correspondence System), though the same kind of afunctional proliferation of form is encountered also independently of any sub-system, i.e. 'languagewide', as shown in [55d-f].57 Allen, however, would not see this as erasure of distinctions, but rather as diversity of form traceable to variability which in our study is termed motivational, specifically, non-free variation of functionally dissimilar expressions selected in accordance with one or the other motivation prompted by the data of surrounding circumstances (exolinguistic situation) and the particularity of the account. The reader will have to judge for himself whether lack of motivation due to lack of distinctive functionality of freely variant forms, as we see it, is less convincing as an explanation than a view of forms supposedly distinguished by such motivational criteria as the time of day, the mechanical 86 57

On servitude, cf. Vinay and Darbelnet (1958). [55d-f] is discussed by Allen (1966), 72-73, 188.

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

71

device of a telephone, or the nature and holder of a particular job: [56a] What do you teach this period? [56b] What are you teaching this period? [A] question like [56a], for example, asked of a teacher (over the telephone, perhaps) in the middle of a class period would probably not be taken to refer to the specific period thus being interrupted but rather to the repeated Event which occurs every day (or every week) during this period . . . . Similarly, if such a question were asked of a teacher at the very end of the period, it would probably again be taken to refer to "every day (or week) at this time." But if asked of a teacher at the beginning of a period, it could be taken in either of two ways: it could be taken to refer to the repeated Event, or it could be taken to refer to the specific class just about to get under way. (The teacher may be taking over another teacher's class for just this one day.) A question asked in the middle of a period with reference to that specific period would probably be expressed as [56b], with an expanded verb-cluster ... , 58 It would, of course, just as readily be conceivable that [56a, b] are used interchangeably in reference to habituality. Elsewhere options may be restricted, as in [57a] [57b] [57c] [57d]

My nose is running *My nose runs My nose is itching My nose itches,

without detriment to functional equivalence of the reduced paradigm (or with no more than secondary status of a distinctive semantic element if any), i.e. with further paradigmatic reducibility of avoidable expressive duplication. Hatcher suggests that we would not say [57a] ... but [57d],... The difference between these two kinds of Predication can be in terms of the opposition "public/private" - a running nose is public, while an itchy nose is private. 59 In consequence of this startling revelation, either the usual labeling of (plus or minus) 'progressivity' for the formal distinction is 58 59

Allen (1966), 201. Allen (1966), 229. Allen's reference is to Hatcher (1951), 264-265.

72

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

inadequate - something strongly suggested by Allen's material or else "privacy" entails (derives from?) "habituality". It happens, however, that [Allen] is not at all certain that he himself would never say [57c], although he agrees that he would always use an expanded verb-cluster [57a] in the other two sentences.60 As stated, this becomes a question of degrees of privacy as determined by individual choice for the itching, but not for the running, of noses - an implication hard to reconcile with explanatory adequacy. True, we do not normally say [57b]. In other words, some verbs exhibit paradigmatic deficiency in the absence of the minusform; cf., in contrast, reduction as the result of the absence of syntagmatic 'progressive' expansion for I know that ..., / believe that ..., etc. (*/ am knowing, */ am believing). Then there is proliferation of options, i.e. avoidable paradigmatic expansion evidenced by functional equivalence (or secondary distinctiveness) of the replacement, as for is itching and itches, in [57c, d] obviously interchangeable, at any rate without primary denotative contrastivity. The range of problems sampled in [58a] [58b] [58c] [58d] [58e] [58f]

We are living in New York We live in New York I hope next Sunday will be a pleasant day I hope next Sunday is a pleasant day What were you doing all day yesterday ? What did you do all day yesterday ?

and acknowledged by Allen as "unsolved" 61 is remarkably brief in relation to the many additional instances implied or suggested in his work where formal plus, paradigmatically or syntagmatically, defies reason or logic. That types of paradigm on the order of [58a, b; c, d; e, f] might reflect random variation has not, at that, gone unnoticed: 60 81

Allen (1966), 229. Allen (1966), 77-80.

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

73

[59a] How are you feeling ? [59b] How do you feel? A speaker often has his choice as to whether he will treat a predication inclusively or intrusively: he can ask a friend [59a] or [59b].62

The semantic distinction stated, 'inclusion' versus 'intrusion', seems to be no more than a matter of terminological labels for respective constructions (form); any functional significance suggested by that labeling is irrelevant if the choice between the constructions is free. In fact, previous scholarschip acknowledges that at times there seems to be practically no difference between the form with the present participle and the simple tense form. 63

In that event, it might be advisable not to try to account for the unaccountable except as the speaker's indifference to the distinction. We might, instead, conclude that fluctuation among forms with weakened categorial distinctiveness, or with distinctiveness regarded as secondarily denotative by the speaker, entails a corresponding number of alternatives avoidable, i.e. reducibility of paradigm. Clearly, verbal reduction, syntagmatically as well as paradigmatically, is rather limited within the scope of production and within a single system such as English where most options of the type outlined above are semantically contrastive. Further identification of verbal sets and options reducible, and conclusions of class-inherent reductivity, must await multisystemic and attentive criteria to be presented in subsequent exposition. Nominal expressions exhibit a smaller range of categories in a language such as English, thus less room for categorial overload, than do verbals : [60a] Child Language reflects the children's expressions. [60b] Child Language reflects the child's expressions.

62 63

Allen (1966), 220. Fries (1940), 185.

74

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

Grammatical avoidability attaches to nominal options as well: in a generic sense, [60a, b] are interchangeable, i.e. there is reducibility of the plural option. Nouns are seen to exceed verbs in lexical extent as well as functional potential in many areas. Formal imbalance of lexicon appears to be a linguistic universal: All languages use nominal phrases and verbal phrases ... and in all of them the number of nouns far exceeds the number of verbs. One can be fairly sure that a noun in one language translates a noun in another. 64 Whatever caveats may be in order are trivial in the total context of this discussion. All languages may not use noun phrases as we understand them, but instead use comparable ones. In some languages, noun phrases may superficially resemble verb phrases (cf. [15b, c], above) - a fact of paradigmatic orientation, with its syntagmatic counterpart of 'polysynthetic' expressions where the alleged one-word sentences are really only one-word verbphrases, functioning as a minor sentence type until a subject-nounphrase is added. 65 If we agree with Weinreich, any typical, i.e. subject-less, imperative verb-phrase is likewise awaiting 'majorization' by a nounphrase, but this view is not crucial to our argument. The issue we raise is not about noun-deletions and resultant surface-manifestations which obviously feature plus-functional verbs. Our interest does, in contrast, focus on [61a] do -» doing, be -> being [61b] kingdom -* ?, sonata -> ?, relative nominal plus-function such as predominantly onedirectional convertibility in [61a]. The reverse is impossible for a large number of nouns; cf. [61b], As indicated in Chapter 3, below, individual systems vary concerning the extent of nominalization. 64 65

Martin (1964), as paraphrased by Bolinger (1968), 18. Weinreich (1963), 142.

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

75

Another type of nominal primacy involves an introduction into a sentence of a nominal element or phrase replacing a finite verb of a subordinate clause and so dispensing with the clausal structure altogether. The means of condensation (for short: condensers) are mainly nominal forms derived from verbs, such as infinitives, participles, gerunds, and verbal nouns.66 Besides paradigmatic potential as suggested above, syntagmatic elimination of verbals further enhances the status of nominals as exclusive denotative exponents. [62a] A woman took a walk on the street. There was a large crowd and much traffic which made a lot of noise. She was in haste [i.e. in a hurry], when a thief snatched her bag. The loss made her utter a scream and yell for the police. [62b] Woman, street, crowd, traffic, noise, haste, thief, bag, loss, scream, police [62c] took a walk, was, made, was, snatched, made ... utter, yell Nouns, whether original or verb-transforms, may hold a denotative monopoly; we can strip off all grammatical clues to sentence structure, all affixes and prepositions [and, we might add, all verbs], and yet still achieve communication. Thus restricted to nouns, simple "stories" can be told in word chains: [62b].67 Elimination potential is thus seen to vary with class inherence. We may complete Cherry's [62b] account by a reconstruction such as [62a], It is quite conceivable that a speed-written memo might contain [62b], production limited to nouns. It is utterly inconceivable that anyone should attempt to reconstruct the story on the basis of [62c]; that is to say, the verbs, lacking generative power of reconstruction, have no potential of exclusive production similar to that of nouns, and their durability within the chain of morphosyntactic class representatives is accordingly reduced. Paradigmatically, of course, nouns are subject to lexical replacement similar to that of verbs: woman, for instance, may be replaced 66 67

Hladky (1961), 105. Cf. Vachek (1955). Cherry (1957), 119.

76

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

by lady, haste, by hurry, bag, by purse. To the contrary of verbal selection frequently determined by nouns (cf. [45a, c, d], above), nominals for the most part are selected independently of verbs. Reducibility potentials of verbals and nominals sketched above are recapitulated in the following summary (Section 2.3). For verb expressions, cf. [lld-e, h; 12a, f; 16a-b; 17a, d; 48a-c; 49a-b; 50a-b; 51a-b; 52a-59b; 61a-62c]; for a sampling of reduction of non-verbal forms, cf. [lla-c; 12g; 15a-d; 60a-b]. Relative class-inherence (reductivity potentials of verbals and non-verbals) remains to be confirmed. It is, at this point, presented within traditional production-centered, monosystemic, and (non-) motivational strictures where we observe, for example, that certain verb-particles are more likely to be reduced than verb forms, and that members of the class of verbs are inherently more reductionprone than members of the class of nominals (nouns or pronouns of certain types and syntactic positions). The confirmation of relative predominance in that sense will be found in a context encompassing the additional variables of Chapters 3 and 4, below.

2.3. S U M M A R Y

All correlations in this chapter are unrelated to conditions in other systems, i.e. all rate the symbol — S, which does not appear in the summarized presentation to follow. Similarly, all are independent of motivational variability and refer to production only; hence, M and A characterizations are likewise omitted. Type

Emphasis

[lla-17e] [11a] come... [ l i b ] you get out... [11c] found a nickel [ l i d ] John\ [ l i e ] the more the merrier [ l l f ] the bigger they come... [ l l h ] yes

Designation

syn. —P: —subject + P : + subject —P: —subject —P:—verb —P: — verb

Previous "minor" sentences command command non-command vocative aphoristic

+ P : +verb

aphoristic

—P: — verb

fragment

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

[lli] ouchl [12a] here [12b] if you like [12c] the saints preserve us [12d] me do that 11

[12e]

-P: -P: +P: +P:

he a gentleman*.

[12f] [12g]

fire\ love me love my dog [13a-b] here comes Mr. Puddleditch [14a-d] it rained [15a-d] venit [16a-b] a grief ago [17a,d] can he...'! [17e] Maurice... swatted... [17b,c] can he...do thatl [18a-20c] par.

/§/: HI [20a-c] /p: b/ :/s:z/ [21a-28c]

par. par. par., syn.

[21a-22c] /t/ [23a-c] ten mins sem [24a-25b] radar [26a-c] sub [27a-c] lab

29a-b] 30a-36b] [37a-39b] [40a-46f]

flu -ty: -ness a: the and: or give', dish (out)

—verb —verb +verb +verb

interjection completive completive unreduced verb phrase ; semi-command verb phrase reduced ±P:±verb relative to [12c], unreduced relative to [12e]; non-command deleted verb phrase ; —P: — verb non-command unspecified 'minor' type semi-command, —P: —subject aphoristic complete yet 'minor' + P : +subject, sentence +verb stunted proposition + P : +subject stunted proposition - P : —subject semi-sentence, -P 'ungrammatical' - P : —main verb elliptic + P : +main verb elliptic + P : +mainverb non-elliptic

[18a-19b] [1:1]

[28a-c]

77

par. par., syn. par. par., syn.

Subwords: non-morphemic focus reductive (non-label) unmarked reductive voice-marked reductive low-load Sub-words: morphemic focus non-labeling or labeling minority reductive majority reductive shortening clipping of ± stressed segment clipping of stressed segment Subwords: morphemes Semiwords: articles Semiwords: coordinators Semiwords: verb-particles

REDUCTION TRADITIONAL

78 [47a-d]

done

syn.

[48a-62c] [48a-c] assert

syn.

[49a-b ]panem\

syn.

[50a-b] while (I was) in Europe

syn.

[51 a-b] arrived arrival [52a-59b] are: were [60a-b] children: child [61 a-b] sonata [62a-c] woman: was

par. par. par., syn. par. par., syn.

Semiwords: related particles Verbals and non-verbals 'introductory' verb reduction; compensation syntactic 'non-introductory' verb reduction; compensation morphological 'non-introductory' verb reduction; compensation syntactic deverbalization verbs: categorial erasure nouns: categorial erasure non-denominalization reconstruction nonverbal

3 REDUCTION PRODUCTIVE I N MULTISYSTEMIC F O C U S : + P -> - P , + S

3.1. B A C K G R O U N D OF MULTISYSTEMIC FOCUS

Chapter 2 has discussed reducibility of expressions produced within A LANGUAGE, i.e. discounting assessments in reference to peer-sets precedent or coexistent, and THE LANGUAGE indifferent to variability of component peer-sets. At this time we examine recurrence of formal dispensability across systems, that is to say, para-universal 'reductive competence' and different degrees of its attainment as performed within specific systems. This will suggest to what extent certain plus-features within one system are a 'luxury' as judged by their correlation with minus-features in another system. M u c h of the previous scholarship on intersystemic inequality of extent pertains to 'languages': 1 One language will use a phrase where another uses a simple word and still another a bound form. ... Elements of meaning that appear in one language..., even though they are irrelevant to the practical situation, will be absent in another language. In English we say Pike's Peak is high with a present-tense verb; in Chinese or Russian there would be no present-tense element in a similar message.2 As to denotation, whatever can be said in one language can doubtless be said in any other: the difference will concern only the structure of the forms, and of their connotation. 3 1

Some of the previous correlations involving the term 'language' might be intersystemic without being interlingual. Cf. Hockett (1958), 137-138, on definitions and analytic decisions concerning emphasis on one or the other aspect of system and subsystem, and the application of these views to such studies as Hockett (1959); Hopp (1970); Pulgram (1972). Cf. also Pike (1967), 594. 2 Bloomfield (1933), 278. 3 Bloomfield (1933), 278.

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REDUCTION PRODUCTIVE IN MULTISYSTEMIC FOCUS

With the number of denotational objectives thus basically a universal (multisystemic) set, all languages may express meanings of this identical set, albeit by unequally extensive forms. We may assume with equal justification that whatever happens to be said in one system is possibly NOT said in another - indeed, as was noted, whatever is producible will often be reduced within the same system. One system may treat denotational distinctions as secondary which are primary in another, with according reduction or expansion in form. Post-Bloomfieldian literature on bisystemic correlation of reduction has two characteristics of interest to us: the NATURE of the data observed is that of 'well-formed' expressions, or else aberrant in relation to some normative standard; the EVALUATION of these data is that of 'surface' manifestations deemed more or less secondary in importance to monosystemic competence. For example, It is an interesting fact that English and French cannot delete as many sentence segments under anaphoric conditions as Japanese can, but it seems to me that the absence of a subject or its obligatory formal presence (as an unstressed pronoun) is a very small difference when all is said and done. This is not to say that the obligatoriness of subjects in surface structures is typologically uninteresting, but that its interest is on the level of constraints on surface structure realizations of sentences and the properties that appear to be related to such constraints.4 The observations to follow will indeed suggest the surface status not only of data of this type, but of the respective underlying structures as accidents of plus or minus development of superceding universality. 5 In addition, we shall be prompted to take a new look at 'well-formedness' in terms of monosystemic competence, and to reinterpret some performances conventionally judged 'deviant' as being, in a multisystemic correlation, coequal reductions of NON-DERIVED systems, i.e. 'languages' in the traditional sense, or systems DERIVED from the former - an acknowledgment of reductive 4

Fillmore (1969), 212. For earlier relegation of reduction to "économie de la parole", cf. Guiraud (1964), 62. 5 Cf. Chomsky (1965), 6, as quoted in Chapter 1, Footnote 28, of this study.

REDUCTION PRODUCTIVE IN MULTISYSTEMIC FOCUS

81

similarities possibly caused by similar variables such as inherent class-minus, and differing principally by the exolinguistic (motivational) variable of social condonation withheld by members of the nonderived speech-community, who are outsiders to the community of speakers of the derived system except as 'bilinguals'. Comparable 'multilinguality' is readily seen to be inevitable in normal communicational activity. Inevitably and thus condonably, nonderived performance manifests itself in the COMMUNICATIONAL BILINGUALISM of the speaker and the hearer, the latter being 'selectively deaf', i.e. effecting formal reductions paradigmatically as well as in a syntagmatic sense.6 Exolinguistic variables, in fact, may bring about conditions of COMMUNICATIONAL TRILINGUALISM - more appropriately, perhaps, dissimilarity of the performance of addressor, addressee, and bystander.7 Literacy, a criterion of education and thus likewise of exolinguistic character, entails considerations of TRANSMISSIONAL BILIN8 GUALISM opposing the speaker-writer and the hearer-reader, and similarly inevitable within the exolinguistic constraint of compulsory school attendance. Reductively, the imbalance predominant in a phonology-centered graphonomy appears to involve economy on the non-graphic side.9 In a comparison of relative extent of segmental constituents, it has been estimated that the writing, for instance, of a French text in phonetic symbols would probably require 30 percent less type than the same text written in conventional spelling.10 The significance of such observations varies according to accidents of graphonomic development and the average degree of orthographic deviation from a phonemic norm 6 On speaker-hearer relations, cf. Chapter 1, Footnote 27, above, and Chapter 4, below. On selective deafness or selective listening, cf. Broadbent (1958), 11-35; Beym (1960), 67-69; Treisman (1960); Treisman (1964); R. S. Meyerstein (1967), 86; R. S. Meyerstein (1968), 29, 34-36. On internal coexistent multisystematicity, cf. also Wandruszka (1971) and R.S. Meyerstein (1972). 7 Osgood and Sebeok (1965) 154, and discussion by R. S. Meyerstein (1968), 28-29. 8 Artymovic (1894); Artymovic (1932); Vachek (1939); Uldall (1944); Vachek (1949). 9 The term GRAPHONOMY is used by Hockett (1958), 539. 10 Boorsch (1960).

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among a given number of systemic comparisons, yet is certainly to be recognized to some extent. So is the opposite, graphic economy. Though of relatively minor import in segmental matching (English x = [ks, gz, z], for example), orthographic reduction of phonological diversity comes in for favorable notice precisely to the degree of previous deprecation in some areas. The written record that does not recover features of suprasegmental phonology such as stress or intonation suggests that those features may be of subordinate representational import. Plus-zero comparisons of the foregoing type may be followed up with matchings of unequal plus-length where speech, for instance, may do no better than announce - by such roundabout remarks as "This concludes the treatment of Problem A and we now come to Problem B" - what in writing would simply be indicated by a new paragraph, with obvious projections of imbalance in economy. It cannot, of course, be claimed that this view of status-neutrality is characteristic of contemporary speech-centered philosophy with its relegation of non-speech manifestation to secondary rank. Comparable subordination appears prevalent concerning what is here referred to as derived systems - less so for certain styles or dialects, more frequently for such 'languages' as those of immigrants, workers, or children. In particular, few existing descriptions would regard reductive recurrence in non-derived and derived systems as anything but insignificant coincidence: [63a] Derived System CS: see book [63b] Derived System TS: need reply [63c] Non-derived System (Russian): pisite pis'mo 'write a letter'. Descriptive tradition would not, for instance, allow for anything other than accidental surface similarity connecting 'Ungrammatical English' [63a, b] with 'Grammatical Russian' [63c]. Reexamined as reductions of coequal systems, however, the two 'ungrammatical' phrases [63a] and [63b] respectively represent quite 'well formed' Child System (CS) and Telegraph System (TS); in fact, both could be Telegraph actualizations, though [63b] would probably not be included in vocabulary-deficient Child

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competence. Here, then, are two derived systems exhibiting semiword reduction 'ungrammatical' in the non-derived system of uniform English, yet obligatory and thus quite 'grammatical' in any non-derived or derived Russian. We may thus observe an EQUALITY OF SYSTEMS with respect to INEQUALITY OF FORM-FUNCTIONS, the exact opposite of conventional views characterized by EQUALITY OF FORM-FUNCTIONS (that of 'the norm' to be attained) and INEQUALITY OF SYSTEMS, namely, inferiority of those which do not attain that norm. Among the vast number of entries of pedagogic bibliography, we find next to no recognition of Learner System.11 Immigrant features, extensively covered, are seen as the result of interference from an 'external' system distorting the language of origin.12 Similarly, dialects 'deviate' from competential norms in one sense; Occupational Systems do so in another sense. Pros and cons of systemic recognition may be sampled, in respective lines of argumentation, on the basis of the quotations on Child System to follow. [The] earliest acquisition of syntactic structure [is] a stage which is taken to be pre-transformational. 13 [Until] the child begins to produce utterances which are accepted by the adults in his environment as morphemes, he is said to be babbling. 14

These positions reflect traditional, undiversified views of competence. Yet once he does have 'accepted' morphemes, the child invites a large question ... about the structure of [his one-morpheme] sentences. Are they acquired as wholes with their underlying structure determined at some later stage of development, or has the child, at this stage, already acquired structures which allow him to generate utterances?

11 An example of coverage of Learner System for its own sake, rather than as a non-system to be eliminated, is Frei (1929). 12 On Immigrant System, cf. Chapter 1, Footnote 30, above. 13 Kelley (1967), v. 14 Menyuk (1969), 29-30.

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The latter assumption seems to be more correct because of the patterns observed.15 However, It might also be hypothesized that at this stage the child has the competence to express some functional relationships in sentences and that this is the present limit of his syntactic competence.16 Allowing for one-member sets syntagmatically no less than, as established, in a paradigmatic sense - i.e. one-word sentences no less than one-form classes 17 - we reduce the problem to a dispute over terms in which to relate to HIS competence (HIS system). Short of acceptance of systemic diversity, it seems, Comparisons may be made between postulated descriptions of children's sentence types and linguistic descriptions of completely well-formed sentence types. The claims that comparisons are being made between the rules postulated for children's productions and adult productions may be misleading since actual adult production may also deviate from the postulated set of rules used to derive various sentence types.18 Reluctance to recognize Child System and similar derived systematicity in their own right may be conditioned by their transitory nature or the diversity of their manifestations. Preservation or homogeneity, of course, are not of necessity determinant variables. Some chemical elements or compounds may not survive a fraction of a second and yet their status is on a par with others not similarly unstable. In fact, even without according it coequal systemic status, previous scholarship has described Child Systems as a succession of separate identifiable stages: [64a] Holophrastic stage: mama, mapank [64b] Analytic stage: mama ... [s]pank 15

Menyuk (1969), 29. Menyuk (1969), 29. For a suggestion of Child System as a systemic derivation in its own right, cf. the reference to "a language such as English, or such as the English subsets controlled by children" in Watts (1970), 193. 17 Paradigmatic one-member sets are exemplified by Fries (1952), 92, 96-98, 103-104. On support of syntagmatic counterparts, cf. McNeill (1966) , 63; and [ l i d , g-i; 12a, f; 15a-d], above. 18 Menyuk (1969), 108. Cf. Menyuk (1964). 16

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[64c] Syntactic stage : see mama, more cereal [64d] Structural stage : daddy sit baby chair [64e] Stylistic stage. The first stage of communication ... is the holophrastic stage [64a]. The second stage is analytic [64b]. The third stage ... can be called the syntactic stage [64c], [combinations] which are used as verbless sentences but are the raw material for the fourth stage in which arrangements are added to arrangements; [64d] contains an arrangement within an arrangement. This can be called the structural stage. ... The final stage is stylistic [64e].19 This says nothing about the duration of these stages; yet, their existence is scarcely in doubt. Their systemic independence, uncertain in the citation from Bolinger but specifically asserted by McNeill and others quoted below, may be a matter of analytic preference. 20 Child System coequality, rather than merely a problem of ontogenetic connection with 'established' (i.e. adult) systems, gains support from the suggestion that Child System utilizes an innate knowledge of the structure of language [and that] such innate knowledge implies the existence of language universals. All human languages must be similar to each other in the sense that each is a particular development of that sort of linguistic system for which the child is predisposed. We here seek to discover language universals by studying language acquisition.21 The present discussion does not focus on isofunctional plusreplacements such as word-order changes, contemplated by Gruber. It does, however, attempt to suggest diverse systemic 19

Bolinger (1968), 5-7. Other discussions of Child System in general, of particular interest to this study, include M. E. Smith (1926); Grégoire (1948); Werner and Kaplan (1952), on holophrastic expression; McCarthy (1954); Adelsonet al. (1955); Berko (1958); Kahane et al. (1958), on Child Systems derived from English,French,and German; Gvozdev (1961); Weir (1962); Braine (1963); Brown and Fraser (1963); Fraser, Bellugi, and Brown (1963); Bellugi and Brown (1964); Brown (1964a); Brown (1964b); Brown and Bellugi (1964); Bullowa (1964); Huttenlocher (1964); McNeill (1964); W. Miller and Ervin (1964) ; Bever et al. (1965) ; McNeill (1966) ; Bever (1970) ; Donaldson and Wales (1970); Hayes (1970). 20 McNeill (1966), 63. 21 Gruber (1967), 38.

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manifestations of supersystemic competence, and correlations on the order of the preceding two quotations are thus very much in line with those attempted in this study. Presentations of derived systems relative to one another and to non-derived systematicity, as proposed here, likewise do not lack precedent: . . . j e mehr Befunde über die Rede der Kinder und Aphatiker von verschiedenen Volksstämmen die Linguistik zur Verfügung hat, desto tiefer und gründlicher kann sie die Strukturgesetze der Einzelsprachen und der Sprache im allgemeinen anfassen. 22 Universality, conventionally seen across 'languages', is demonstrable among intralingual systems: [65a] My car has broken down and. I have lost my wallet; send money to me at the American Express in Paris [65b] Car broken down; wallet lost; send money American Express Paris [65c] my, has, and, I, have, my, to, me, at, the, in. Previous multisystemic views with emphasis on intralingual reduction are of particular interest to this study: We adults sometimes operate under a constraint on length, and the curious fact is that the English we produce in these circumstances bears a formal resemblance to the English produced by two-year-old children. When words cost money there is a premium on brevity or, to put it otherwise, a constraint on length. The result is "telegraphic" English, and telegraphic English is an English of nouns, verbs and adjectives. One does not send a cable reading [65a] but rather [65b]. The telegram omits [65c]. All of these are functors. We make the same kind of telegraphic reduction when time or fatigue constrains us to be brief, as witness any set of notes taken at a fast moving lecture.23 Monocompetential analysis is bound to regard reductions of this type in terms of deviation and defectiveness. Chomsky, for example, views 'telegraphic' sentences as deviant surface structure caused by 22

Jakobson [1941] (1969). Brown and Bellugi (1964) 140-141. Cf. also Brown and Fraser (1963), 192; Cofer (1963), 200-201; and p. 75 above.

23

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87

memory limitations. 24 The systematic nature of the child's reductions has not, however, escaped previous notice: Omissions do not appear to be random or idiosyncratic. On the contrary, it looks as if, across children and across sentences, there is a consistent tendency to retain one kind of morpheme and drop another. ... The morphemes least likely to be retained are those that occur in intermediate position [i.e. neither initially nor at the end of the sentence]; that are not reference-making forms [i.e. nouns, verbs, or adjectives]; that belong to such small-sized grammatical categories as the articles, modal auxiliaries, and inflections; that are relatively predictable from context and so carry little information; and that receive the weaker stresses in ordinary English pronunciation. This does indeed seem to be telegraphic English. There is substantial support for our findings in the results with sentence repetition for 100 children at ages two and three.. . 25 Neglect in Child and Telegraph systems accords with many of the reductions discussed or yet to be noted in this study, but also differs from these in degrees of respective inherence potentials or in nature of variability. The present chapter will proceed to outline this concurrence or disagreement in recovering previous classification of subwords, semiwords, and words, with a multisystemic reexamination within each of these three subdivisions in terms of non-derived 'languages' and systems derived. As before, inequality of formal extent in paradigmatic and syntagmatic emphases will be related to functional fluctuation.

3.2. REDUCTIVE TAXONOMY 3.2.1. Subwords As in Section 2.2, above, taxonomic distinctions offered are in the nature of typological starting points for token explicitness not provided here. 24

Chomsky (1967b), 88. Cf. fn. 28, Chapter 1, above. Cf. also Kaper (1964). One might add that recurrent telegraphic reduction alone would question the argument of defective memory. 25 Brown and Fraser (1963), 192. In addition to quotations pertaining to the reduction of specific forms classes, cf. the list of 53 replies in Ervin-Tripp (1970), 85-88. Cf. also Harwood (1959).

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Subword features of dissimilar codes are likely to produce inequality of formal extent. Syntagmatically, for transmissional bilingualism within THE LANGUAGE, this was illustrated in the minus-long graphemic supra-segmental of paragraphing matched with plus-long explanatory speech. In a paradigmatic counterpart, [66a] [66b] [66c] [66d] [66e] [66f]

/g/ /z/ g

/e/ /5/ th,

intercode bilinguality has prompted inquiry whether all contrasts in the structure of a language are equally worth recording. Is it as much inconvenient to leave out the distinction in English between [66a] and [66b], such as in 'get' and 'genre', as to leave out the distinction between [66d] and [66e], such as in 'thin' and 'though'? 26 English orthography ignores either distinction, i.e. reduces [66a, b] -y [66c] and [66d, e] -> [66f]. Ray's question suggests a sliding scale of ranking similar to that of intra-code distinctions like [20a-c], Beyond that, inter-code reduction of either phoneme pair, that is, the continuation of graphic disregard of certain historical developments in phonology may well be taken as a reflection of relative functional insignificance of the phonemic divergence involved. We may note, in passing, that the paradigmatic reduction [66a, b] -> [66c] is not compensated by syntagmatic extension (graphic expansion to two segments) of the type witnessed in [66d, e] [66f], Bilingual matching non-transmissional, of a more conventional kind, effects reductions in either code: [67a] ou as in colour, vigour [67b] o as in color, vigor 26

Ray (1963), 31.

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[68a] pin [68b] pen [68c] p ?n (intermediate). If it is an American periodical, I must carefully strike out the u's from 'colour, vigour' ... I do this adjustment because I do not wish to draw attention to the novelty or the individuality of my point of view in such areas of behavior as I consider unimportant.27 In [66a-f], graphic uniqueness is maintained; in [67a-b], there is a spelling contrast which acquires the status of systemic (eyedialectal) indicator. Restricted to monolingual criteria, [67a, b] would not be an effective paradigm since in respective dialectal zones only one or the other of the pair would function. Paradigmatic association across systems extends similar matching within A LANGUAGE of unequal forms functionally alike. [67a, b], graphic options within THE LANGUAGE (Written English), reduce to either constituent, [67a] or [67b]. [68a, b], a phonological contrast within THE LANGUAGE (Spoken Standard English), reduces to neither member of the pair; it involves, in a sense, both a widening of paradigm to a third constituent, [68c], typical of dialect varieties of Southeastern American English, and a reduction of paradigm to this intermediate unit. Reduction may be viewed as a matter of bisystemic possibility, regardless of confirming or contravening sequence of events : [69a] Spanish escuela, escolar (cf. French école) [69b] Latin schola [69c] French scolaire. For example, Romance prothesis, exemplified in [69b a], chronologically reflects expansion rather than reduction; at present, the system of Spanish has crystallized the pre-Spanish rejection of certain initial consonant groups which French [69c] has, in fact, readmitted. Obviously, languages may increase forms, both paradigmatically and, as in [69b -> a], syntagmatically, and thus move in a direction opposite to a 'hermetic' one, «

Ray (1963), 12.

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but that does not do away with relative hermeticness as a potential of intersystemic scope: it is possible to do without prothesis, sometimes at the beginning of a chronology and sometimes at its end. That s- would, in fact, be expanded as in [69b -» a] was not originally evident. The speaker may be quite ignorant of formfunctional and systemic entities to be compared, since these may be identified in hindsight only: [70a] [70b] [70c] [70d] [70e] [70f] [70g] [70h]

brightness breakfast br-eakfast lunch /-unch brunch.

In the English of an earlier period ('English 1'), it was unknown whether the segment [70c] common to [70a] and [70b] would have equal formative capacity. It is only now, belatedly in 'English 2', that we observe [70c] without functional identity in [70a] yet in [70b] with overload of diachronic potential, denoting by itself the 'early meal' constituent of [70h]. Similarly, it developed that, in [70e], [70f] was unessential and yielded to [70g] to express the 'later' culinary event referred to in the blend [70h].28 This may be compared to [71a] Latin anima (nom. sing.), animam (accus.sing.) [71b] Italian anima 28

Cf. Marchand (1960), 367-370, "Blending and Word Manufacturing". Cf. also Malkiel (1968), 374-376. For similar "reductive hindsight" involving non-related systems, establishing the diminished formative capacity of the initial phoneme in Swedish skola, Stockholm relative to Finnish koulu, Tukholma, cf. Malmberg (1963), 169. With a view to Finnish constraints on phonological sequencing, the deletion of the Swedish initial was, of course, foreseeable. The point is that reducibility in the lending system may be uncertain until the conditions of the borrowing system are known.

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[72a] Czech pilot (nom. sing.), pilota (accus. sing.) [72b] English pilot [73a] German Araber [73b] English Arab [74a] [74b] [74c] [74d]

Spanish buenos dias French bonjour Colloquial German (gute)n Tag Colloquial Czech (do)bry den.

The change from plus to minus functionality within [70b], between [70c] and [70d], and within [70e], between [70f] and [70g], occurred at a point more or less unforeseeable, specific to two words. Other divisions are generalizable on boundaries between lexical and inflectional morphemes. With categorial attrition (cf. [52a-60b]), a universal potential variously realized within specific systems, the reduction [71a -» b], elimination of a segment dispensable, was a distinct possibility and indeed occurred.29 In synchronic counterparts, suffixial reduction does not similarly 'occur' within the paradigmatically inflated system, but the implications of 'dispensability' from a multisystemic point of view are identical in inflection, [72a-b], and word-derivation, [73a-b], Widening of multisystemic scope may modify the status of relative form-extension (cf. [4b, 9a] - p. 21, above): [74b] rates —P relative to 'plural'-expanded [74a], but + P in relation to colloquially reduced [74c], with reduction at a morphemic boundary, and [74d], reduced intramorphemically. Derived systematicity recovers the reductions of the nonderived languages preceding: [75a] [75b] [75c] [75d]

approved appr. -oved ap.

29 This reflects a rank order of respective diachronic functionality (durability). Cf. R. S. Meyerstein (1970), 92, 103-104.

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In abbreviations characteristic of certain Occupational Systems, we identify the point which separates respective functionalities in [75a] so as to allow for the abbreviation [75b], the plus-functional essential, with consequent elimination of the minus-functional [75c], This point is seen to be based on the paradigmatic criterion of replacement forms such as [75d] which are insufficient to convey the message (except as noted below), or syntagmatic extent in excess of [75b] defeating the objective of economy. We may, in fact, hold [75b] to be system-neutral within a range of Occupational abbreviations. Any other separation point as the basis of different functional (signaling-potential) plus may, in contrast, depend upon a further variable of system. In a system consisting only of two signals indicating, respectively, 'approval' and 'disapproval' [75d] alone would be plus-functional. Transmissional bi-lingualism involves diversity of reduction: [76a] California [76b] Calif. [76c] CA. In spoken English, there may be no functional separation point: the only way to pronounce a certain geographical term is its unabridged form [76a]. In epistolary English, in contrast, it has long been customary to use [76b], and in current Postal Style [76c] is the abbreviation employed.30 In other correlations of systems underived and derived, [77a] [77b] [77c] [77d]

attention 'tention library libry,

abbreviations in Spoken Systems derived may be exemplified, in relation to [77a, c] of the underived system, by [77b, d] of Social or Geographic Dialect; for [77b], also Occupational (Military) 30

Subword reduction with the result of vocabulary expansion (e.g. radar) may acquire derived-systemic Occupation, i.e. technical, identification; cf. Praninskas (1964).

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System.31 The bisystemic focus is certainly called for when we bear in mind that the residual forms, [77b, d], are rarely if ever interchangeable with their unreduced equivalents [77a, c] (cf. [26b, 27b, 28b], not similarly assignable to Derived System). Suprasegmental reduction (absence of stress) in simultaneous cooccurrence may have had a reductive effect on successive segments as suggested by [77a ->• b] and [77c -» d] (cf. p. 3, above). In other words, suprasegmental favoring tends to preserve syllables, as it has been noted to do in Child System reductions: [78a] expression, giraffe [78b] 'pression, 'raff. Differential stress may then be the cause of the child's differential retention. The outcome is a maximally informative reduction, but the cause of this outcome need not be the making of an information analysis. The outcome may be an incidental consequence of the fact that English is a well-designed language that places its heavier stresses where they are needed, on contentives that cannot easily be guessed from context.32 One might hesitate to lend unquestioning endorsement to that view. Other languages, phonologically less 'well-designed' than English (and without movable stress), also feature Child reductions. English, moreover, abounds in non-contentive accentuation (cf. [105a], p. 140, below) or unaccented forms of grammatical import, and it exhibits retention of unstressed segments and loss of stressed ones as in the reduction of[28a-c]. Still, stress undoubtedly is one of the predominant factors in such developments as [78a -> b]. Child System, not unlike systems associated with certain adult occupations, also reduces 31

The abbreviations are discussed by Stern (1932), 252-253. The 'residual' systemic derivation clearly scores in increased syntagmatic economy, compared to 'the language' to which it is said to belong. The reverse relationship, 'uneconomic' derived (Dialect) system relative to 'economic' Standard, could be shown in them there (furtCners), expanding both paradigmatically and syntagmatically on those (foreigners). 32 Brown and Bellugi (1964), 142; ibid, for the reductions of [78a->-b]. Cf. ibid, and Brown and Fraser (1963) on earlier-to-later position in the sentence as a plus-functional criterion. Cf. also Weir (1966).

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[79a] did, paper [79b] /di?/, /pey?r/. It may be argued that the systemic character of [78b] is in doubt, and we may indeed be in the presence of more or less accidental realizations. Yet, sets such as the 'secret language' of a group of children replacing certain consonants by glottal stops with intersystemic derivations such as [79a b] clearly qualify as systemic, as systems artificially (in a sense, unexpectably) created and consistently adhered to by older children, to the contrary of foreseeable features of incipient speech development or recurrent articulatory defects. 33 What matters, of course, is not the origin or extent of this glottal-stop system, but the consistency of its use and the resemblance which it bears to adult derived or nonderived reductions - synchronically, to unsophisticated varieties of 'crypto' language; diachronically, to the weakening and possible loss of sounds in phonetically weak positions, with reflexes in contemporary non-derived formation such as [22b, c]. In derived systematicity not specifically encompassing child forms, yet of significance for the assessment of problems presented by learners or immigrants of any age, features are similarly comparable from the point of view of reduction. For example, Czech and English both happen to include in their respective vocabularies the forms [80a] led [80b] letM. 33

The derived system artifically created by children is reported by Applegate (1961). Cf. Stevens and Halle (1967). Cf. also Kaper (1959), 185, reporting the case of a child who created the (spoken) word hefverm, conforming to the written abbreviation of Dutch hefvermogen 'carrying capacity' appearing on streetcars - a case of idiolectal intersystemic borrowing (from Occupational reduction to Child System), similar in ad hoc creation to [78a->-b] though in 'artificiality' closer to [79a->b], and contradicting the limitations of spoken reduction suggested for [76a], p. 92 above. 34 Cf. the discussion of [80a, b], in a related context but with a different point of view, by Kramsky (1965), 43.

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In both languages, the forms differ in semantic functions (the Czech words respectively translate into 'ice' and 'flight'; cf. Russian led and let). Morphophonemic neutralization in Czech (as in Russian) leads to the deletion of word-final voice and to the articulatory reduction [80a, b -* 80b]. Hence, in one of the systems the contrastive relevance of voicing is reduced. The question arising in a bisystemic context is whether voicing is, in fact, compelling in the other system, English, which lacks similar morphophonemic constraints. Otherwise stated, would listeners of English be substantially more unhappy at the paradigmatic reduction than Czech listeners who have to put up with it? In the monosystemic context of traditional description of one undiversified language, we are bound to answer in the affirmative : the speakers of English consistently distinguish forms ending in phonemes marked or unmarked as to voice, i.e. they effect plusproduction maintaining an expanded voice-distinctive paradigm. So would the listener, in the absence of overriding attentive concerns, assuming that emic oppositions are ipso facto assured of plus-attention. After all, whenever in English we led something we surely did not let it; hence, so goes the assumption, the speaker's failure to distinguish the pair will be 'confusing' to the listener. In actual fact, voice distinction in the position indicated may be absent in such derived systems as those of the Immigrant or the Learner. The absence need not effect a statistically relevant degree of 'confusion' either in intrasystemic communication among immigrants or learners (any more than in intrasystemic communication among Czechs), or in communication between learners or immigrants and members of the non-derived-English community, due to the operation of plus-functional (primarily significant) grammatical and lexical clues. In essence, then, comparable features of diverse systems may suggest some degree of universality in the reducibility of certain marks such as voice, either in specific positions or, possibly, as a matter of inherently subordinate function.

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3.2.2. Semiwords Comparison of non-derived systems ('languages') indicates the well-known fact of syntagmatic minus-production of articles, obviously wherever the article paradigm is lacking, but also where it exists as noted in the monosystemic context of [31a-c, 32a-c, 35a-g]: [81a] English my father was a doctor [81b] Russian otec u menja byI doktorom [81c] French mon père était docteur. Equivalents to English articles as in [81a] have been designated as "nil" in Russian [81b], a language with "minus-article-potential", versus "zero" in French which has "plus-article-potential" unactualized in [81c].35 The factor of importance to this study is, not the typological distinction between Russian and French zero-expressions, but the fact that systems always or occasionally forgo the production of a form-class not universally essential. This is seen also in 'generic' expressions such as [82a] French L'homme est mortel [82b] English Man is mortal. It goes without saying that sampling on the order of [81a-c] is insufficient to establish global typologies of systems. Relative text-frequency scores of articles are, in fact, likely to show English as being more economical in this particular area of production than French, in a sense suggested by [82a, b]. 'Definiteness' may be similarly article-unmarked: [83a] [83b] [83c] [83d] [83e] 85

English the woman English a woman Russian zenscina 'the woman', 'a woman' Russian zenscina vysla iz domu 'the woman' Russian iz domu vysla zenscina 'a woman'.

Catford (1965), 29. Cf. [63a-c], p. 82 above.

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97

In addition to plus-zero matching as in [81a-c, 82a-b], we may effect correlations of inflated and reduced paradigms as multisystemic plus-plus relations. In a response sentence, for example following the question Who came out of the house ?, paradigmatic cooccurrence of [83a] and [83b] leaves room for a distinction likely to be semantically relevant in English, while the undifferentiated [83c] seems to point to a lack of functional import of a distinction not similarly made in Russian.36 As in [35c, e], environmental extension of a different kind may restore expressive potentials, and [83c] may then become equivalent to [83a] in [83d] and to [83b] in [83e]. With derived-systemic reduction, [84a] this tooth is decayed, the tree is down [84b] tooth is decayed, tree is down37 conventional comparisons of non-derived systems may again be supplemented by matching of systems non-derived and derived. The monosystemic view, restriction of article deletion to position before 'mass' nouns or plural count-nouns (except certain subsets such as names or designations of countries) and non-deletability before singular count-nouns in English, accepting [84a] but not [84b], may then be reexamined in the light of data from Telegraph or Occupational systems which are more or less exclusively committed to [84b]. The derived system of children expands or reduces as in [85a] he's a bigger, count a buttons, a hands [85b] going on floor, it fell in sand box. 36

[83c-e] is discussed by Catford (1965), 28. Cf. Barton (1962), 112: "A language without article, as Russian is, refrains from semanticizing this distinction except in special cases." On response sentences, cf. Fries (1952), 37, 40-41,165; Francis (1958), 374. On article reduction in relation to 'genericness' and 'definiteness', cf. also Collinson (1937); Hamilton (1949); S0rensen (1958); Lees (1960); C. S. Smith (1961); Krdmsky (1963); Frei (1944); C. S. Smith (1964); Annear (1965); Baker (1966); Kramsky (1968); Z. P. Meyerstein (1972); Z.P. Meyerstein (to appear). 3' [84a-b] is discussed by Frei (1956), 163-164.

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Article reduction in Child System has been noted (cf. [63a, 64d], and p. 87, above); so have previous suggestions [64a-e] of systemic division in terms of successive stages. In the diachrony of Child System, the earliest stage provides for paradigmatic reduction to one determiner, the indefinite article a. It is, in fact, possible that at that stage a is in the nature of an obligatory and inseparable substantive-prefix, i.e. semantically non-functional over-extension as illustrated in [85a],38 an analysis not without precedent in other intersystemic comparisons.39 Shortly after a, successive Child System stages produce the determiner this, then the definite article the. Development in this area is for some time restricted to predicate position, and only later appears as part of the grammatical subject. In the interim, phrases such as those of [85b] seem to represent a generalizable feature partly or wholly characteristic of one type of Child System, recalling similar reductions in Telegraph and Occupational Systems or the speech patterns of aphasiacs.40 Intersystemic verb-particle reduction is illustrated syntagmatically in [86a] [86b] [86c] [86d] [86e] [86f] [86g] [86h]

English grow (up) French grandir French on s'habitue English we adjust French il vient Spanish viene (cf. [15a-d], above) French il Vest English he is.

Predilection for expansion by adverbial or pronominal verbparticles characterize some 'plus-systems' in relation to other systems with minus-length 'translation equivalence'. The former have been referred to as "motivated" ; 41 the latter might be viewed 38

Brown and Bellugi (1964), 152, 155; Menyuk (1969), 34, 40 for [85a], Rommetveit and Turner (1967), 338. 40 Jakobson (1941) (1969); Kaper (1959), xi, 99, 108, 111-121, 185; SlamaCazacu (1963); Brown and Bellugi (1964), 139-142; Menyuk (1969), 34-35. 41 Weinreich (1963), 180. 39

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99

as segmentally economical. In relation to verb-particles, French may be seen to economize over English: [86a, b]. Preference for the plus-feature of 'reflexivity' is a further feature of intersystemic typology, and French [86c] displays it more than English [86d]: we could accustom ourselves, but this expression does not attract a majority of speakers. Other pronominal fluctuation is a matter, not of more or less predilection as in [86c, d], but for all practical purposes on the order of obligatory expansion or reduction as in [86e, f], and uniquely so in [86g, h], Relative systemic incidence of 'attitudinal formators' (cf. [47a-c], above) likewise enters into data supporting a typology of systems based on cross-systemic inspection of expansion or reduction - a typology which can here merely be suggested and will not be outlined in detail. In its paradigmatic counterpart, particle-reducibility is indicated by the semantic irrelevance of many instances of distinction among pronouns, such as [87a] you are having a good time 'one is having...' [87b] we are having a good time [87c] I am having a good time, and the acknowledgment of that irrelevance by n cross-systemically to

1 reduction

[87d] French on s'amuse, and by n -» 0 (syntagmatic) reduction even monosystemically to [87e] having a good time, wish you were here. In a correlation of non-derived and derived systems, formal distinction entails no more than functional interchange whenever no particular person is involved in contrast to any other person, [87a, b], or whenever the difference between the individual and the group with which he identifies is relegated to secondary denotative significance, [87b, c] - the latter, an equation characteristic of derived systematicity in certain types of Correspondence System [87e] or such other Occupational Systems as those featuring the 'author's plural'. Once again, functional attrition within a system as in [87a-c] (cf. [30a-36b, 52a-60b], above) is 'confirmed'

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cross-systemically by reduction of paradigmatic diversity to unity, [87a-c d], and the further reducibility of any single representative of the paradigm to complete deletion, i.e. syntagmatic reduction exemplified by [87a-d -> e]. Once again, wherever as in (subsystemically unmarked) English the rules of 'grammaticality' militate against the deletion of pronouns, such systemic derivations as that of Postcard Style will delete to [87e],42 and the reduction of the derived system will conform to such 'well-formed' pronoundeletion as that of Spanish [86f] - an instance of grammatical 'revalidation' across systems not unlike that of [63a-c]. 3.2.3. Words Syntagmatic reduction of verbals within a system has been associated with specific semantic sub-sets denoting 'assertion' as in [48a-c], 'giving' as in [49a], or simply 'being' as in [49b, 50a ->- b]. This reduction is reencountered across systems : [88a] [88b] [88c] [88d]

English he is a fool Russian on durak French le discours prononcé hier English yesterday's speech.

Intersystemically, we observe a widened domain of omission involving, for instance, 'being' as a copula verb, [88a, b]. 43 This essentially 'system-competential' reduction compares with systemgeneral preference, if not obligation, to omit other inexpressive verbs as in [88 c-»d]. Reduction in syntagmatic extent may or may not be compensated by paradigmatic expansion of varying semantic significance, prompting varying incentive for expansion in translating from a reductive system into an expansive one: 42

On subject deletion in other derived systems, cf. Gruber (1967), 59-62. For the opposite - pronominal expansion, for instance, in French on the order of mon père il dit - c f . Martinet (1962), 55, and comments by R. S. Meyerstein (1970), 109-110. 43 Cf. p. 147, below.

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[89a] [89b] [89c] [89d] [89e] [89f] [89g] [89h]

101

Russian sdelal Russian delal English he achieved English he did" German gehen, fahren English go45 French entrer en volant Russian vletet'46.

Systemic imbalance also results from unequal diversification of paradigm. Proliferation in a system may bring about increased 'wealth' of grammatical options, distinguished by plus or minus extension, compared to 'poorer' systems. The 'poverty' will vary with the category in question: Slavic languages economize in tense-forms, relative to aspect-reductive English, and there may be comparable disparity in other categorial expressions.47 Paradigmatic extension of vocabulary may correlate with grammatical diversity. Syntagmatic reduction in grammar, [89a b], compares with the absence of a similar reductive option in another language which compensates by an increase in the semantic paradigm of 'nuances', [89a = c, 89b = d]. Semantic proliferation in one system may be reduced in another: [89e, f], a reduction in paradigm which may have a syntagmatic counterpart, [89g, h]. Proceeding in the opposite direction, that of expansion, we are 44

Catford (1965), 74-75: "A Russian writer can create a certain contrastive effect by using an imperfective and then ... the (marked) perfective. In such a case, the same effect of explicit, contrastive, reference to completion may have to be translated into English by a change of lexical item. The following example ... shows this: 'Cto ze delalBel'tov v prodolzenie étix desjati let ? Vse il' pocti vsé. Cto on sdelal? Nicego ili podti niiego!'" ... 'What did Beltov do during these ten years ? Everything, or almost everything. What did he achieve? Nothing, or almost nothing.' The Russian passage is from Herzen, cited by Unbegaun in Grammaire russe, 217. On related problems of translation, cf. Jakobson (1959b); Tosh (1965); Rhodes (1966b); Levy (1967). 45 [89e-f] is discussed by Ullman (1963), 180. 46 The reductive type of [89g-h] is discussed by Sabrsula (1968), 63. 47 On aspectual attrition (interchangeability) in Slavic languages, cf. Kopedny (1962), 8.

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likely to diversify, mindful of the contrastive actions in [89e], whereas the specification of [89g], undoubtedly of secondary denotative rank in the presence of a 'bird' or 'airplane' as the subject, is likely to be reduced, i.e. ignored, in translation. Categorial attrition, recurrent across systems, is a further feature of possible universality: [90a] English Last week I RUN into this guy and he SAYS in a couple of days he IS going to New York and all of a sudden he TURNS around and SAYS . . . [90b] French ...et tout à coup il se RETOURNE . . . [90c] German ...in ein paar Tagen FAHRT er nach New York ... We may retrace similar form-function reductions in intersystemic matching of (non-derived) language and (derived) styles. Tense reduction as a stylistic feature is seen in [90a, b] : in the lexical environment indicated, we note marking of a Familiar System by non-past runs, says, is, turns. Though the abandonment of pastselection may also be interpreted as style-unmarked erasure of categorial distinctiveness (cf. [52a-b, 53a-e, 54a-b, 55a-c, 55d-f, 58c-d], above), the sequencing of these timeless verbals in the sentence and their frequency in the text are of 'systematizing' effect. Other timelessness, without similar formal reiteration in and across sentences, may be style-neutral : while [90a, b] connote 'vividness' of style, [90c] is neutral both as to style and as to connotation, being the present-form with future-meaning common in any variety of the language. Grammatical reduction on the order of categorial simplification as in [90a-c] compares with plus or minus within lexical paradigms, again with possible implications of diversity in style : [91a] English [91b] [91c] [9Id] French [91e] [91f]

we make a speech we give a speech we deliver a speech on subit des revers on suit une méthode on exerce une influence

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[91g]

103

on a des revers, une méthode, une influence48.

[91a-c] reflects distinction in 'refinement' expressive of respective styles. Connotatively and stylistically the line is hard to draw between [91b] and [91c], yet either one would be out of place in the Spoken Colloquial System committed to [91a], [91a] is not, however, banished from Written Style. Conversely, the selection of an "expressive" verb in [91d-f] - rather than [91g] which in "colorlessness" resembles [91a] - is in such settings as Journalistic Style noticeably more prevalent than similar diversification in [91b, c]. On prononce un discours more often than we deliver a speech; we commonly have setbacks and influence, rather than suffer one or exert the other, and more frequently than on A des revers or une influence. That being the case, [91d-f] would appear to be less systemically marked than [91b-c], though this marking is difficult to establish. What may be asserted with somewhat greater conviction is the relative economy of the system featuring [91a] predominating over [91b, c] in frequency of paradigmatic neglect, compared to the system indulging in the formal selectivity of [91 d-f] to the detriment of [91g]. Degrees of cross-systemic deverbalization are reflected in [92a] French être diminué [92b] éprouver une diminution [92c] être soutenu par [92d] avoir le soutien de [92e] English be diminished [92f] be supported by [92g] have the support of. Deverbalization (cf. [51a —> b], above) - not, strictly speaking, a reduction either in length of sequence or in amount of options, but of relevance in the context of verbal minus-inherence compared in different systems - is noticeable in transformations on the order 48

[91d-g] is discussed by Legrand (1950), 24-27. On style in connection with the present study, cf. also Vinay and Darbelnet (1958), on intersystemic stylistics; Joos (1959), on diversity of style levels; Riffaterre (1959); Jakobson (1963); Chao (1964), 40, on origins of stylistic leveling; Enkvist (1964); Mounin (1964).

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of [92a -> b, c -y d], relatively prevalent in their language as compared with [92e] without credible non-verbal equivalent or with [92f] of frequency scores equal if not superior to those of [92g].49 With stylistic discrimination of degrees of 'formality', [92a] and [92b] may be heterosystemic, an observation more difficult if not impossible to make in [92c, d; 92f, g]. Relative deverbal emphasis, and relative structural predisposition for reducing a minus-inherent class to exponence of minus-denotative 'emptiness', as for the verbs in [92b, d], may amount to a 'surface' acknowledgment of the inherence in production, an acknowledgment certain to be reinforced in minus-attention as discussed in Chapter 4, below. Predominance of nominal over verbal functionality, seen earlier as synchronic preponderance in lexicon or text, has also been stated in multisystemic terms of (diachronic) duration. Wherever non-verbal frequency is expected to exceed verbal frequency as a feature of universality, evolution favoring nominals appear to be the result of adjusting to class-inherence. Thus, whenever we are told, for instance, that as the result of the increasing intellectualism of French words and thought ... the verbal sentence was rejected and only the nominal survived,50 we object to the generalization of facts as well as of reasons, but are bound to acknowledge a typology based on comparative statistics. Derived systematicity corroborates, up to a point, respective class-inherence patterns. Certain Occupational Systems feature syntagmatic reduction which on the whole is less hermetic than Telegraph System or the early stages of Child System. The following quotation from an account of Worker System derived from Rumanian may be regarded as representative of Occupational reductions reported: [93a] Paru! '(Mets le) pieu (dans l'eau)' [93b] Albastre! 'bleues' 49

[92a-d] is discussed by Sabrsula (1968), 58. Cf. also Dubsky (1966), 197. On deverbalization, cf. Dubois (1965); Dubois (1968); R.S. Meyerstein (1972). 50 Entwistle (1955), 267.

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[93c] Jos! 'en bas', sus! 'en haut' [93d] Fii aient, patrule! 'Attention (caméra numéro) quatre' [93e] Roabâ-nisip-carâmidâ! '(Apporte avec la) brouette (du) sable (et des) briques'. L'une des particularités du "langage du travail" réside dans la sélection préférentielle - donc dans la fréquence accrue - de certaines catégories ou formes, et notamment de celles qui indiquent des actions, qui donnent des précisions concernant l'action (verbes, adverbes) ou qui reflètent une "attitude impérative" ou, en général, "adressative" (des expressions impératives par leur nature, des vocatifs, l'addition d'une valeur d'impératif à la valeur de base de certains substantifs, etc.). Un phénomène qui nous semble particulièrement intéressant est celui de l'emploi de certains mots (de nombreux substantifs, adverbes, adjectifs, etc.) pour donner au message la forme d'une proposition elliptique ... avec un sens impératif. Ainsi, par exemple, durant la pêche au filet, nous avons noté beaucoup de situations où un substantif prononcé avec une intonation d'impératif - contenait l'invitation implicite d'effectuer une action ayant trait à l'objet représenté par le substantif: [93a]. ... On a enregistré aussi des adjectifs ou adverbes: dans une fabrique d'allumettes de Bucarest, [93b]... ou encore, sur un chantier de constructions de Bucarest, [93c], Si dans les exemples susmentionnés on pouvait considérer les faits comme tenant plutôt de la syntaxe, il en existe d'autres qui reflètent plus clairement une modification morphologique. Il s'agit d'une transformation de la valeur grammaticale de certains mots ou de la substitution d'une catégorie grammaticale par une autre. ... D'autres fois, des adjectifs numéraux (des chiffres) acquièrent la valeur et même les formes flexionnelles du substantif - souvent au vocatif; noté à la télévision: [93d]. ... [On] peut noter un grand nombre de messages ... constitués presque exclusivement d'éléments appartenant à une seule catégorie grammaticale...: [93e] (noté sur un chantier de construction...) ... Même si elles sont composées parfois de plusieurs éléments, parmi lesquels des substantifs, les phrases sont le plus souvent incomplètes (le verbe, qui manque souvent, est remplacé par l'intonation impérative...). [Certains] termes beaucoup répétés n'ont plus besoin de contexte, ou bien ... des formules consacrées [sont] renforcées par l'expérience commune dans un domaine d'activité. 51 51

Slama-Cazacu (1963), 74-77; ail translations and emphasis Slama-Cazacu's. On related topics of Occupational System, cf. Ostrâ (1967).

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It should be noted that although Slama-Cazacu refers to increased frequency and message exponence of non-substantives as well as substantives, the former are not much in evidence as exclusive essentials among her examples. Apart from occasional adverbial [93c] as the holophrastic replacements of (verbal) imperatives, or verbals like fii in [93d] bound to atent in quasi-prefixal fashion, substantives monopolize the field; among these, non-nominals (so identified by their overall potential of functionality), such as [93b, c], are tagmemically identical with (statistical) nouns as the typical message essentials. The systemic context of this nominal predominance, 'efficiency'-oriented Worker System, enhances the validity of data and interpretation in a denotative sense to the extent that systems of that type are less likely to present a great many exolinguistic counterarguments than, for instance, the requirements of literary style. Child System reductions include [94a] there more block [94b] that man car [94c] Fraser (will be) unhappy [94d] (that is an) old time train [94e] Eve (is having) lunch [94f] I makin a cakes [94g] Daddy uh New York [94h] Daddy car [94i] she school [94j] where pencil? [94k] what you do ? [941] no books in [94m] I not touch [94n] I good [94o] which mine ? [94p] him not feel good [94q] him going walk [94r] no want [94s] not Sarah's

REDUCTION PRODUCTIVE IN MULTISYSTEMIC FOCUS

[94t] [94u] [94v] [94w] [94x] [94y] [94z]

107

it don't have any ... why you went Mommy could have lost her purse Mommy lost her purse there go one Adam wear a shirt Mommy get it ladder.

Reduction of verbals, a feature of non-derived systems and of such systemic derivations as Telegraph or Occupational Systems, is reencountered in Child System, [94a-w], with syntagmatic emphasis for [94a-s]; paradigmatic reduction as in [94t], and the combination of the two reductive processes in [94u], are common also in systemic derivation other than that of Child System. Syntagmatic simplification over-reductive by non-derived standards of denotational significance is seen in [94v -> w]. 52 Reduction in [94w] involves auxiliary or copular verbs. 'Plain' verbs are subjected to comparable treatment which recovers nonderived reduction in form paradigms and functional discrimination. This is noticed, for instance, in the child's disregard in [94x-z] of 'person-number' distinctions (non-derived English third-person singular present-tense -s).Fj3 It should be reemphasized that we do not explore diachronic cause-and-effect sequences which undoubtedly provide explanatory support but which transcend the confines of this study. Thus we do not check on whether the child's omission of the inflectional -s in [94x-z] is a reflection of phonological inhibitions (low incidence in Child System of final /z/, for instance). Presumably, these connections exist, though we might also cite, from the same informant, such formal overload manifestations as a hands (cf. [85a], above) which would cast doubt upon the phonological inhibition as a primary cause of the reduction. 82

[94a-b]: Brown and Fraser (1963), 170, 177, 190; [94c-e]: Brown and Bellugi (1964), 137,144; [94f-q]: Menyuk (1969), 34-35, 59, 71, 73,129; [94r-u]: Brown and Hanlon (1970), 40-41; [94v-w]: C. S. Smith (1970). 53 [94x-z]: Brown and Bellugi (1964), 135, 137, 143, 153, 160.

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We do, in contrast, line up successive diachronic Child System stages as one type of intersystemic correlation, with original zero form as in [94e] followed by the formation of tense/numberunmarked forms as in [94x], simple-tense signaling, then simplepast expressions later supplemented by present-progressive constructions. At one point, however, Child production is exclusively or predominantly nominal: Children between the ages of twelve months and eighteen to twentyfour months produce only one-word utterances. Most often these are nouns in adult grammar, but verbs and adjectives appear in some numbers also. Many observers consider these single-word utterances to be "holophrastic," by which is meant that each word has a much broader and more diffuse meaning for the child than it does for adults ... . In effect, holophrastic words stand for sentences. The utterance "milk," for example, can mean for a one-year old "I want some milk," "The milk is on the floor," "Don't give me any more milk; I want Pablum," etc. A range of meanings, at least, is the impression one gets from the range of circumstances in which a child produces these single-word utterances.54

Child System thus exhibits features shared with Occupational System illustrated above. We may conclude that Worker reductions are an objective and tend to be stable, whereas the child's reductions are a starting point and characterized by their instability. In either system, nominals acquire increased frequential and denotative load. 55 In Child System, the denotative load eventually becomes intolerable, with the effect of structural evolution toward plus-forms as exponents upon which the load may be spread. In Worker System, this does not (or need not) occur. The picture of nominal plus-inherence sketched above is, of course, over-simplified. For one thing, recognition of relative suprasystemic potentiality cannot ignore specific systemic performance at variance. Thus, in Czech ... the popularity of verbal expression (and the unpopularity of nominal expression) [contrasts with] Modern English [showing] a relatively high popularity of nominal expressions ... 56 54 McNeill (1966), 63. 55 Cf. Chapter 2, fn. 37, above. 66 Danes and Vachek (1964), 24. Cf. also Firbas (1959).

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109

[92a-g] suggests that in this popularity contest French would score even higher than English. Cross-systemic noun-reduction such as [95a] [95b] [95c] [95d] [95e] [95f] [95g] [95h] [95i]

French étudiante, étudiant French professeur English student English professor French meubles, meuble English furniture English underived or derived it's on Collins Street English derived if s on Collins {Street) Russian underived èto na Goroxovoj (ulice)

shows categorial attrition, though more wide-spread among verbs which in the languages involved exhibit a larger diversification in categories than do nouns, to have its nominal counterparts, as noticed paradigmatically in monosystemic [60a, b] and in the previous bisystemic case of [71a, b]. [95a] reduces intrasystemically to [95b] as well as across systems to [95c, d] in gender, and similar cross-systemic reduction is observed in number: [95e, f]. An example of syntagmatic economy of nominals is that of [95g-i]. Non-derived [95g], also an expression in Geographic System derived from English, has in the systemic derivation the reductive equivalent of [95h] ; in some underived systems such as Russian [95i], the reduction is the usual expression. In addition, wherever productive manifestations confirm or contradict class inherence as discussed, these may be matters of specific motivation discussed in the chapter to follow.

3.3. S U M M A R Y

The correlations of Chapter 3, which are multisystemic, would rate the symbol of + S (cf. p. 42, above) which is not shown in this summary. We further eliminate -|-P and —P labels in a context

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where each type of expression shown implies a progression from plus (expanded) to minus (reduced) production. Reference to attentive variability, not part of this chapter, is likewise omitted. Statements of monosystemic orientation are designated as — S. Two-letter abbreviations consisting of a sequence of upper and lower case refer to non-derived systems (languages); systemic derivation is indicated by sequences of two letters limited to upper case. The specific sets represented by these two types of abbreviation are as follows: Non-derived systems Cz Czech Fr French German Ge Italian It La Latin Rm Rumanian Ru Russian Sp Spanish Derived systems CS Child System DS Dialect System FS Familiar System IS Immigrant System LS Learner System OS Occupational System TS Telegraphic System Type [63a-65c] [63a-c] see book; pisite pis'mo [64a-e] mapank ; daddy sit... chair [65a-c] wallet lost

Emphasis

Designation

Background non-derived — S = En, ungrammatical ; derived CS and non-derived Ru, grammatical syn. CS stages, expanding syn.

syn.

TS reduction

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111

[66a-80b] Subwords [66a-f] /g, z/-»• 1: g par., syn. code reduction paradigmatic, spoken -*• written; cf. - S [la-b]: [1, l u ] /l/ IB. 61 - > 2 : par., syn. code reduction syntagmatic, written -*• spoken; cf. — S [20a-c]: /p:b, s:z/ th [67a-b] (colour, par., syn. DS, written; reduction to either ou or o; cf. — S [la-b]: reduction to one, /l/ color) ->-1 DS, spoken; reduction to neither; inter[68a-c] (pin, pen) par. mediate sound = expansion or reduction pin [69a-c] schola, syn. diachronic chronology La -*• Sp/Fr disregarded; reduction initially or evenescuela tually diachronic reduction En 1 -»• En 2; [70a-h] ¿r( eakfast), syn. (l)unch separation intramorphemic diachronic reduction La -*• It; separation [71 a-b] anima (m) sy n. between morphemes — inflectional synchronic reduction Ru -»- En; separation [72a-b] pilot (a) syn. between morphemes — inflectional synchronic reduction G e - > E n ; separation [73a-b] Arab (er) syn. between morphemes — derivational synchronic reduction Sp, Fr, Ge, Cz; [74a-d] (do)bry den syn. separation between morphemes or intramorphemic [75a-76c] appr(oved) syn. non-derived spoken En expanded; derived written OS reduced [77a-d] (at) tention syn. derived spoken DS or OS reduced [78a-b] (ex)pression syn. derived CS, ad hoc?, non-artificial [79a -b]pa(p)er syn. derived CS, systematic, artificial par., syn. non-derived Cz, En; derived IS, LS; [80a-b] led, let reducibility of phonetic features: voice Semiwords: articles [81a-85b] [81a-82b] V homme, syn. non-derived En, Ru, Fr; cf — S articles [34a-36b] man [83a-e] the/a woman par. non-derived En, Ru; cf — S articles [30a-36b] syn. derived CS, TS [84a-b] (this) tooth [85a-b] on floor syn. derived CS; stages of expansion [86a-87e] Semiwords: particles [86a-b] grow up, syn. non-derived En, Fr — non-pronominal grandir [86c-d] on s'habitue; syn. non-derived En, Fr — pronominal; we adjust reduction preferred [86e-f] il vient, viene syn. non-derived Fr, Sp; reduction normal [86g-h] il en a; he has syn. non-derived Fr, En; expansion required [87a-e] you/we/I; on par., syn. non-derived En, Fr; derived FS, OS Verbals and non-verbals [88a-95i] [88a-b] he is a fool', syn. copular reduction En ->• Ru on durak

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[88c-d] discours prononcé", speech [89a-d] sdelal, delal; accomplish, did [89e-f] gehen, fahren", go [89g-h] entrer (en volant); vietet' [90a-c] he is going-, er fährt [91a-c] make/deliver a speech [91 d-g] subitIa des revers [92a-g] éprouver une diminution", be diminished [93a-g] parul [94a-s] I good [94t] it don't... [94u] why you went [94v-w] (could have) lost [94x-z] there go one [95a-d] étudiant(e), student [95e-f] meuble(s); furniture [95g-i] Collins (Street) ; Goroxovoj

syn.

non-copular reduction Fr -*• E n

par., syn.

categorial reduction and vocabulary expansion R u -»- En

par.

vocabulary reduction G e - * En, inevitable syn.

vocabulary reduction Fr Ru, inevitable; phrase reduction in Fr, likely

par., syn.

categorial reduction En, Fr, Ge, F S ; style-marking or style-neutral vocabulary reduction En, F S ; stylemarking or style-neutral; relatively more reductive vocabulary reduction Fr, F S ; stylemarking or style-neutral; relatively less reductive deverbalization En ->- F r ; reduction Fr - > En

par.

par.

syn.

syn. syn. par. par., syn. syn.

non-substantival reduction OS - b, 76a -» c]. Reduced production, even without denotative discrimination, may parallel attentive neglect as in the case of voice in led, let (cf. [80a, b], above). So will 'expressive lengthening' (look at the circuis!) in Child System, discounted both by the child and by the adult listener, as well as 'attention-getting' expansions of paradigm in Advertising System for cigarettes, which catches us with our Kents down or which features Krazey Daze sales supposed to make a lot of cents, or, syntagmatically, the Olde Tea Shoppe - the last, a systemic reclassification outside of its proper chronological context where it was a minus-attentive, i.e. normal feature of spelling.

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4.3.2. Semiwords Neglect of determiners, observed productively to varying degrees in Chapters 2 and 3, is generalized in attention. Paradigmatic extent, monolingually reduced to unity {I met a man ...; the man was ...; the tallest man) or zero (water) in [33a, b; 34a, b; 35b, d], above, contrastive in the book vs. a book in [30a, b] yet still reducible intersystemically (pisite pis'mo; sit baby chair; car broken down; zenscina as 'theme' or 'rheme') [63c, 64d, 65b, 83d-e], is mooted in over-all attentive omissibility. Suprasegmental cooccurrence in production (thé iron, 'the best in the world') is normally needed to overcome the attentive minus-inherence of articles. Cooccurrent emphasis may, at that, be present without corresponding attentive favoring: [105a] there is nothing tó it: + P —A [105b] she is married tò him: —P —A. Conflict between speaker and listener evaluations, features of primary emphasis in speech which the listener is bound to notice but which he regards as insignificant to the message, is illustrated by the usual rendition of [105a] where to, least important to perception, reflects the peak of articulatory performance as the segment of principal stress and special intonational treatment. In comparing [105a] and [105b], we observe that a form (to) may have (productional) plus or minus suprasegmentality yet in either case represent a perceptional minus. Conversely, in [106a] French on le reçoit de Paris: —P + A [106b] on le reçoit à Paris: —P +A [106c] décider de le faire: —P —A [106d] se décider à le faire: —P —A, two minus-accented articulations may in one case correlate with plus attention yet in another be relegated to perceptual minus. In French, the accentual treatment of de and à remains that of minus in [106a-d]; in [106a, b], the prepositions are the chief

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semantic differentiatiors, i.e. + A , while in the allo-syntactic case of [106c, d] they rate the —A of "mots vides". The latter case, based on relative text-frequency of function, reflects the attentive inherence of the set. Traditional description, production-centered, has operated with such notions as semantic emptiness, yet in general without acknowledgment of the reduced import of 'contrasts' from an attentive point of view. Thus, in [107a] French une place de libre [107b] une place libre [107c] la décadence du pays [107d] la décadence nationale [107e] les gens qui ont de la patience [107f] les gens patients, it is said that pairs of unequal syntagmatic extent, [107 a, b; 107c, d; 107e, f], are not interchangeable, i.e. that productive plus and minus correlate with respectively different meanings, and that what the three pairs have in common is that they differentiate semantically between "spécifiant" and "caractérisant" and formally between "médiat" and "immédiat". 50 If analytic paradigms such as those consisting of these three pairs are indeed tenable on the basis of comparability of distinction, it seems safe to assume that the listener will perceive the second and third pairs as respectively synonymous (when does national decadence not relate to the country, and how many people who have patience are not patient ?), and it is certainly not too far-fetched to suggest that the first pair is similarly equatable from the point of view of primary denotation, i.e. whenever expansion does not support a contrast in meaning deemed to be of primary importance. Similar observations apply to [108a] French le procès de Bazaine [108b] le procès Bazaine [108c] 'le procès "Bazaine"' 50

Frei (1956), 166, for spécifiant and caractérisant-, Pottier (1962), 194, for médiat and immédiat.

142 [108d] [108e]

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'Bazaine's trial' 'the Bazaine trial'.

We may compare analytic (if not informant) agreement on the need to differentiate [107a, b] with the less peremptory distinction of [108a, b] where de is said to "alterner avec zéro" - a remark conspicuously absent in Frei's analysis of [107a-f] - and where the meaning of the formal minus-construction [108b] is indicated as [108c].51 In addition, the Bazaine distinction might be viewed as differing from the opposition centering on place by intersystemic criteria. [107a, b], though contrastive in respective English equivalents of 'unoccupied' versus 'unpaid', will fall together in 'free'; on the other hand, [108a, b], though conceivably matched, respectively, by [108d, e], need never be kept apart in translation. Injection of exolinguistic evaluations and the frequency of these evaluations as principal determinants of functional minus confirms the triviality of many formal distinctions. Account reference will clarify the need for expansion or reduction as a matter of 'availability' or 'monetary compensation' in the place case. Education (knowledge of historical events as the stimulus of listener inattention to the Bazaine distinction) will guarantee that the number of those believing, for example, that this was a trial initiated by Marshal Bazaine himself, as the plaintiff to assess his own responsibility for military developments detrimental to his country, is not going to be exactly overwhelming - in other words, semantic distinctiveness potential (competence) will in practical terms be irrelevant in the face of indiscriminate actualization (performance of perception) of either trial, [108a, b; d, e], as the transformation of a passive phrase, i.e. Bazaine was tried. In another type of correlation of production and attention, exemplified by [109a] government of the people, by the people, for the people [109b] government of the people, 51

Cohen (1951); Pottier (1962). Cf. also Spang-Hansen (1963). For the opposite, exclusive favoring of prepositions (in Child System), cf. Werner and Kaplan (1952). For analyst-informant conflict, cf. R. S. Meyerstein (1964).

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intra-set serialization, the syntagmatic expansion by different members of the same class-paradigm, may generate the attention that we may not secure with suprasegmental cooccurrence as in English, or which, as in French, we cannot normally so achieve. Linguistic criteria of production establish prepositions as inherently minus-accented: [109b], In succession, however, [109a], prepositional stress, though even then not obligatory, will normally be entailed. One way or the other, attentive inherence, minusfunctional for prepositions, is likely to be counteracted by the serialization alone. Education, in the semantic context of [109a], might, however, restore minus-attention on the prepositions as part of the expression as a whole, 'institutionalized' as the quotation from a well-known document, with the expansion thus possibly disregarded by the listener. This establishes some types of exolinguistic determinants of reduction, such as education - as a function, if not of linguistic system, at least of membership in specific systemic communities with respective educational (cultural) emphases. The average citizen of the United States cannot be expected to possess the knowledge necessary to establish the identity of Achille Bazaine and the specific circumstances leading to his trial; translated into variability of reduction, this means that the American will be attentive to expressive distinctions [108a, b] presenting no problem to the French school child familiar with Bazaine's conduct during the Franco-Prussian War and the way he was called to account for it. Conversely, the French listener unacquainted with details of the Civil War and the Gettysburg Address will pay attention to individual constituents of what to Americans is a set phrase in no further need of constituent-enhancement in perception beyond the innumerable instances of previous perceptual favoring. 'Systemic education' of this type contrasts with its 'intersystemic' counterpart: educated listeners or readers, no matter to what linguistic community they belong, will fail to give special attentive treatment to the third member of the sequence vetti vidi vici which persons not well read will rate as deserving the attention accorded a fascinating dénouement.

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In the sequence [109a], diversity of 'empty' and 'full' prepositions erased by equal treatment in serialization, was ignored in attention: all of the prepositions were either neglected of favored. Non-serialized 'full' prepositions may not, however, escape 'empty' evaluation in attention. With the 'aura' of words such as chair causing us to expect the speaker to refer to something or someone on it, attention will normally be preserved (i.e. fail to 'fade') only in the event of unexpected production (by the chair, for instance). Coordinators have similar reductive potential. Sometimes, production takes account of this: paratactic you do that - I'll break your neck reduces the expression with identical meaning expanded to and in [37a]; oral correlation of a series of mathematical addenda likewise dispenses with the conjunction in [38a], and when production does not conform to attentive erasure as in [39b], money or your life, no listener is likely to inquire whether the proposition was cumulative or an option, should he have failed to hear what was said to him. Much the same may be asserted for verbal particles. Attention may focus on the verb alone - dish it (out) - or on the particle (pour it) out; cf. [40a], above - according to presence or absence of semantic duplication and prevalence of a particular meaning non-specifically localized on one form rather than another; for example, lexical 'intuition' seems to identify the idea of 'elimination' in the second but not in the first of the two verb expressions noted, and in that case out 'eliminates' in general, while pour specifies the way this is done, a specification of normal attentive minus-value counteracted only by motivation of specifying 'disposal technology'. (Comparably, determiner specification of the, a, this, some, any, my in give me...book would normally be ignored in primary denotation minus-inherent for the entire set, and only attracts attentive interest with a motivational incentive of 'property control'). Fluctuation among pronouns attests to attentive indifference to specific productive options or sequential expansions [86c, d; 87a, b, c, e]. Even where that fluctuation is on the whole restricted

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to derived system and not a normal feature in non-derived counterparts such as [86h] where he is expected, attention on the pronoun (absent in many other non-derived systems as well; cf. [86e, f], above) depends on contrastivity as suggested by the account. 'Attitude' expression being normally as secondary to attention, based on communicational essentials, as are 'politeness' formulas, it is evident that the class of 'attitudinal formators' [47a-c] is of attentive minus-inherence. Elimination of a member of this set may generate some response to non-idiomaticity but none concerned with communicational consequences. 4.3.3. Words Previous concern with attentional inequality of verbs and nouns is to a degree implied in work on functional sentence perspective operating in terms, both linguistic and exolinguistic, of relative 'communicational dynamism'. Related to distinctions of this study, the thematic (topical) form may indeed have a higher inattention potential than the constituent which is rhematic (commentarial), depending on its link to preceding topicality-forming statements. Evaluations in either sense do not, however, inhere to one or the other form-class. Beyond that, it seems hazardous to establish specific attention values for either perspectival constituent, and every so often perspective identification may be at variance with attentive treatment expected. For example, regarding [110a] a poor country woman went to the forest to collect litter [110b] in a country reigned a king who ..., previous scholarship has stated that the agent of the action in [110a] (the poor woman) is "communicationally less important than the action itself", and that the verbal indicated as reigned in [110b] "shows a higher amount of [communicational] dynamism" than the reference to the country in its sentence. 52 From the 62

Firbas (1964), 271,277. [110a, b] are Firbas' translations of Czech sentences

which he analyzed; the latter, respectively, are: chuda selka sla do lesa na stlani

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attentive point of view as outlined in this study we must, in contrast, focus on woman as much as on forest and litter, and reigned in its sequence is just as negligible as all of the other words except king. The subject of [110a] is 'perceptually contrastive': any number of different individuals might have undertaken this trip. This, at any rate, is a 'linguistic' fact. Exolinguistically, attention on woman might be somewhat diminished as the result of account motivation. As for the nominal constituents of the rhematic portion of [110a], forest would indeed generate plus-attention, especially if there were no additional noun: the purpose of the woman's activity (or whatever may happen to her) is of primary interest to the listener. On a scale of attentional priorities, the collection of litter undoubtedly tops the location where the litter is collected. What is certain in terms of minimal educational experience on the part of the listener is that the collection is a matter of course (what else does one do, what else would a poor country woman do, with litter in a forest), and the same is to be asserted for reference to the woman's locomotion (how many poor country women does the average listener know who fly to a forest to collect litter?) Likewise, in [110b], a king normally hence expectably reigns in a country; the nominal constituents of that phrase do, however, happen to fall into the pattern of discrimination of respective communicational "dynamism" suggested by Firbas, though not, as that author implies, because of syntactic status (order of introduction), but because a king normally and expectably reigns in a country - that is to say, hindsight detracts from normal plus-inherence of this noun once the account reference to another constituent of the sentence has rendered country 'perceptually non-contrastive' while, given a certain amount of contrastivity of perception for the noun which happens to constitute the rheme of the phrase, the king does indeed (in conformity with class inherence of nouns) generate preferential attention. Quite clearly, however, all of the verbals (3 words out of 18 in production), as noted above, are of minusattentive value. In attentive progression operating on foresight and v jedne zemipanoval jeden kral, ktery ... Cf. also Firbas (1959); Lambert and Jakobovits (1960); Firbas (1961).

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alone, king might appear to score below reigned. We must indeed acknowledge that within a semantic paradigm the listener effects further discrimination, and while it is in theory true that after reigned we might have to allow for a prince or duke rather than a king, it is the last-mentioned term which most readily comes to mind, that is, which is paradigmatically primary - and it would then seem that king is indeed expectable, hence minus-functional in attention, relative to reign. It may, however, likewise - and possibly on a higher order of priority - be anticipated that classinherence, reduced for verbals, may prompt the listener to lessen attention at the point of verbal production and in consequence forgo the basis of a foresight evaluation. Existing bibliography permits some inference of previous recognition of inherence (class typicality) in the sense of attentive verbal minus. 'Full'-word (verb) status has indeed been questioned for be and auxiliary have, and verbals have been discriminated according to lexical or grammatical use, or full versus empty function. 53 Analytic consensus seems to be lacking - significantly enough in the light of attempts to restrict functional underload to 'auxiliary', 'grammatical', or 'empty' copulas, rather than acknowledgment of copular verbs as a subset sharing the reduced functional potential of the class as a whole: [Linguists] differ widely in determining the [set] of "copula verbs". Some scholars delimit this [set] very narrowly and class it with only the verbs of the type to be ... and to become ...; according to others, there is a great variety of copula and semi-copula verbs (e.g. also verbs denoting various phases of a state or its modality). To our knowledge, one can hardly find two scholars who would fully agree in determining the range of such verbs. 54

It certainly does appear that previous relegation of members of certain verbal sets to minus-functionality in attention goes beyond copulas as the term may be understood in common parlance, when we consider references to "meaningless do",55 to "empty" tun 58

Bally (1950); Chomsky (1964b); Catford (1965), 10; Benveniste (1966), 188; DuchdCek (1967), 39. 44 Dane§ (1966), 11. 55 Joos (1964), 59-60. Cf. also Rensky (1964), 290.

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in German, 56 to occurrence predictability of verbs,57 or to their reinforcement by non-verbs,58 as well as to the typology of verboriented versus noun-oriented systems,59 and systemic degrees of functional depletion.60 For example, in relation to [111a] [111b] [111c] [11 Id] [llle]

take offense take charge take medicine take notice take effect,

it was noted: When we contemplate the variety of "meanings" which a word like take has in English [llla-e], we come to the conclusion that this is a case not of abnormally overdeveloped polysemy of a word, but rather its semantic near-emptiness.61 It has been claimed that the phenomenon of depletion, the functional weakening of certain form distinctions, is more common in French than in German or English.62 Previous applications in this study have included [91a-c] for English and [91d-g] for French: the recording, present in making, giving, or delivering a speech, is ignored; its absence in two dollars, [97a], is unregretted. Considerations, on a motivational order, of 'stylistic refinement' are outweighed by indilference of primary denotation in the first instance; other motivation may unfavorably notice the 'abruptness' of productive zero in the second case. In addition, 'situational' considerations may support attentive indifference in the first instance (variables of education and statistical probability - what is normally done with a speech?) and in the second (education and 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Folsom (1966), 16-17. Seiler (1967a). J. B. Fraser (1965). Cf. Footnote 56 of Chapter 3, above. Weinreich (1963), 145. Weinreich (1963), 144. Ullmann (1952); Ullmann (1953); Weinreich (1963), 145.

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specific circumstances - money offered at an auction sale, yet demanded by sales personnel). With attentive elimination of the verb as such, we may dispense with concern over one or the other specification of verbal category (cf. [52a-59b, 90a-c], above). Attention is then seen to reinforce productive imbalance of respective inherence, subject to previous reservations, i.e. counter-arguments of 'expressive' sub-set specificity (cf. p. 40, above), different systemic emphases (cf. pp. 47 and 108, above), or motivational favoring, in addition to nominal reduction. In the absence of nouns in a syntagmatic sequence, there is obviously non-nominal expression of message essentials: [112a] English come along! [112b] English do it over, French á refaire [112c] English over, French re-. That in the absence of nominal cooccurrence the perceptual essentials should be represented by verb-forms is possible, [112a], but not assured: imperative [112b], for instance, primarily attracts attention to non-verbal [112c], rather than do or -faire, as the carriers of the 'repetition' meaning central to the request. Verbal predominance, counter-inherent by statistical criteria, is illustrated by [113a] French pécher á la ligne [113b] pécher [113c] Vhomme a rendu son déjeuner [113d] Vhomme a rendu [113e] monter á cheval [113f] monter63. Nomináis cooccurring in the verb phrases of [113a, c] take second place for functional reasons linguistic or exolinguistic in nature. They may be relatively dispensable as surface-actualizations of underlying non-nominality, such as the adverbial specification of [113a], as a matter of secondary relevance of specificity and of reducibility to [113b]. In the case of the denotative power of verbs 63

[113b-f]: Bernard (1967), 23.

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exceeding that of their nominal expansion as in [113c], the expansion is lexically if not syntactically redundant, again from the standpoint of the central part of the message; in the lexical context provided, the 'emetic' message is clearly conveyed by [113d] and the nominal expansion in [113c] is therefore relegated to the status of a non-central element. In instances on the order of [113e, f], systemic or situational variables may acquire an importance not noticed in normal verb-redundance (cf. [9 ld-g], above) ; for example, Les textes médiévaux présentent souvent [113f] là où nous nous emploierions [113e]. Le terme [113f] s'entend encore dans les manèges et sur les champs de courses, mais reste incompréhensible en dehors d'un contexte "équestre" ... 64 Discrimination in attention, plus or minus on a cooccurrent subject and plus on particles or verbals - either of the latter, minus-attentive classes, albeit to different degrees (cf. Sections 2.22 and 2.23, above) - distinguishes [114a] English pedestrians keep out: + A on non-verbal out [114b] French accès interdit aux piétons: + A on verb-derived interdit. The citation of fn. 64 has injected the intersystemic viewpoint in a diachronic sense. Synchronically, we may consider attentive emphasis on non-verbs or verbs across systems in comparing English [114a], labeled "pragmatically ambiguous" by Weinreich 65 - an ambiguity, we might say, "pragmatically irrelevant" in minusattention to the verb and + A on the non-verbal with French [114b], where —P of verb-particle confers + A status to the verbderived modifier 'perceptually contrastive'. The similarly contrastive subject-noun of [114a] earns + A ; so does, for identical reasons, the object of the preposition in [114b], whereas the subject-noun of [114b] is attentively slighted : situationally, not much else might be interdit aux piétons (a state of affairs different from that of [110a], above). 84 85

Bernard (1967), 23. Weinreich (1963), 156.

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Systemic derivation may feature a combination of paradigmatic and syntagmatic reduction in which attention focuses on the intersection of these two devices. This is shown in the 'deliberate ungrammaticality' of an always thing, [16b] above,66 a syntagmatic reduction from a thing that will always be with you, with always syntagmatically positioned so as to enter (i.e. expand) the paradigm of adjectives semantically appropriate to that position, and with attention focusing on a usual form in an unusual spot, the grammatical reinforcement of its semantic + A potential to the detriment of lexically (if not morphologically) minus-inherent thing. The motivational setting of situation common to systemic derivation in Advertising System is that of 'unusualness' as a device of attracting attention. 4.4. VERIFICATION

Evidence for attentive reduction may assume various forms. Beyond material on redundancy in general we may mention observations and experimentation of specific interest to attention unequal according to system and motivation. For example, test subjects called upon to disregard 'noise'-value constituents and to concentrate on the perception of segments indicated to them have yielded data on discriminating phonological impressions. Even without being so instructed, listeners are known to have sifted the wheat from the chaff in non-linguistic systems: [It was] observed that control tower operators ... could sometimes identify two aircraft call signs arriving at the same time but could understand only one of the two messages that followed. The call signs penetrated because the operators knew pretty well which aircraft might call. They did not know what the pilots might say. 67

From similar testing of the perception of certain sounds, we have evidence of involuntary two-to-one reductions, deliberate selectivity, and respective reducibility in syntagmatic and paradigmatic sequences. 88 87

Cf. Chapter 2, Footnote 17, above. Broadbent (1964), 147.

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Intelligibility, the limiting factor of reduction, has been stated in terms of the measure of the fraction of letters which can be randomly deleted from a reasonably long message without making the message unintelligible.68 Normal attentiveness does not, of course, proceed on random elimination but, on the contrary, as conditioned by formal inherence and motivational variability, i.e. on knowledge of the system permitting attentive guessing beyond reduced production. This is not tantamount to supplementation as a normal response, but an artificially created sequence of events for purposes of verification : we could guess if we chose to - and the result of the guesswork will attest to the dispensability of additional productive plus. Shannon has described a technique for assessing the redundancy in printed texts (of a given class)... by observing how much is ... guessable by the reader. ... Any individual has an enormous knowledge of his language statistics, as habits and conventions, at both syntactic and semantic levels. He knows rules of spelling, word orders, grammar, idioms, and clichés; again he knows typical vocabularies and phraseology which are used for specific subject matters, and he can predict to some extent from his knowledge of topics or of the writer's point of view. All such prior knowledge is brought to bear on the reading of a text.... Shannon's experimental technique is to ask a person to guess an unseen text, letter by letter. As he guesses correctly, the letters are written down for him to see; if he guesses wrongly, a note is made and he is informed correctly before proceeding. An alternative technique is to refrain from correcting the recipient's errors, but to require him to guess until the correct letter is found, noting the number of guesses he made. 69 For our purposes, tests of this type, important though they are to attentive behavior in their examination of the modalities of guessing as a reductive factor, raise questions on two grounds. They tell us more about productive expansion than about attentive reduction; as the passage identified (i.e. attentively favored) progresses, there 68

Rapoport (1966), 51. Cherry (1957), 116-117. Cherry's reference is to Shannon and Weaver (1949). Cf. Herdan (1956), 59, on guessing; Carterette and Jones (1968), 121-123, on redundancy measures, and 150, on diphones, triphones, and tetraphones. 69

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is less and less room for elimination in attention. Furthermore, the test results are not as yet generalizable; differences in general education (in the linguistic sense of knowledge of submorphemic, grammatical, and lexical patterning, and in the exolinguistic sense of identifying "typical vocabularies and phraseology ... used for specific subject matters" or "knowledge of topics") and what we have referred to as the specific education provided by the account (including, in the larger sense of that concept, 'the writer's point of view') are bound to lead to much individual variation. [Des] expériences ont été faites ... pour savoir avec quelle probabilité on peut prédire une lettre dans un contexte quand les lettres précédentes sont connues. ... Ces tests, conduits sur des contextes très courts, ne fournissent, toutefois, que des indications de valeur relative: la prédiction dépend du degré de culture de la personne interrogée .... Pour un même mot les résultats varient de la sorte d'une personne et d'un texte à l'autre. 70

Reduction of specific grammatical sets, tested with articles as minus-functional forms, raise similar problems of general applicability to attentive behavior: [In] an experiment ... all the articles were omitted from a sample of newspaper English and forty native speakers were asked to put back articles where they felt they were required. There were a few cases of 100 % agreement, some of 50/50 balance and, more significantly, some instances of a twenty to one, or ten to one, majority for a given position. 71

Again, we have a test of something not normally occurring: the expression of units neglected in attention. Again, the results are inconclusive : consensus underload (50/50) as an index of performance fluctuation may be as indicative of functional irrelevance as is consensus preponderance on usage predictable (and perceptually non-contrastive). In a test bearing directly upon relative denotation values with corresponding treatment in attention, material used consisted of three short stories, each about three hundred words in length and constructed so that it contained a number of items 70 71

Bossaert and de Kock (1968), 5-6. Barton (1962), 119.

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which were not essential to the plot. After some experimentation, the material was so arranged that each story contained an approximately equal number of essential and nonce points. ... Ideas essential to the plot of a story are reproduced equally well after intervals of sleep and walking (87 % compared with 86 %), while non-essential items are reproduced twice as well after an interval of sleep as after an interval of waking (47 % compared with 23 %).72

These data pertain to delayed manifestations of attention beyond the normal type of communicational acknowledgment with which we are concerned. Their interest to this study lies in the operation with the notion of fading, as well as the systemic applicability to non-derived as well as to derived (e.g. Children's or Learner's) systems. Experimentation with memory span in Child System has been noted (p. 133, above). The older child's comprehension of reduced production has been studied in relation to efficiency of learning. In a test in this area, speech sounds were mechanically compressed in time, with attendant decrease of time allotted to communicate the message - based on observation of excessive time usually allowed and contributing to the child's inattention. Four variables of comprehension were investigated: rate of presentation, grade level, intelligence, and amount of practice. The response was to fiftyseven imperative sentences. It was assumed that all of these sentences were equal in inherent comprehensibility.73 A reduction in time of production with expressions otherwise unreduced, the injection of the referential variables cited, and the relative homogeneity of verb-expressions responded to, limit the import of experiments of this type for the present study, a study which pertains to linguistic reduction by omission of constituents rather than mechanical reduction of productive speed, to motivational criteria resembling but exceeding Wood's, and in principle to any grammatical sequence and not merely verb phrases inherently above normal 72

Newman (1965), 282, 289. Cf. Broadbent (1958), 11-35, on experiments with selective listening, and 140-173, on data of individual differences. 73 Wood (1965). On similar experiments, cf. Goldstein (1940); Nelson (1948); Miller and Licklider (1950); Garvey (1953a); Garvey (1953b); Fairbanks and Kodman (1957); Hampleman (1958); Petty (1962); Duker (1963); Duker (1964); Cf. also Flanagan (1965).

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deletability in attention, though our study, the same as Wood's, is committed to objectives of economy in perception. Deviation in Learner System production from the norms of corresponding non-derived systems as indications of attentive reductions have, of course, been studied many times though, as noted before, with explicit or implicit orientation toward deprecation and correction, as in [115a] French je désire que cette lettre parte aujourd'hui [115b] Learner je désire que ce lettre part aujourd'hui. 'Functional relativism', the separation of minus-motivational communicational equivalence from plus-motivational evaluation of [115b] socioculturally uncondoned in relation to [115a], has as yet found very few spokesmen, such as Gougenheim who notes the incorrectness yet lack of ambiguity of [115b], significantly enough involving determiners and verbs : Imaginons un étranger qui prononce dans un bureau de poste cette phrase: [115b]. L'employé pensera que cette personne parle mal le français, mais il la comprendra sans ambiguïté possible. C'est que le genre d'une part, le mode subjonctif d'autre part n'ont qu'un rôle très faible dans l'intercompréhension .... C'est que le genre est un moyen de répartition des mots en classes qui correspond à un ordre de faits réels en ce qui concerne les personnes et certains animaux, mais purement fantaisiste et résultant d'une tradition historique en ce qui concerne les choses (et les animaux dont le nom n'a qu'un genre). Son utilité pour la compréhension est très restreinte. Elle se borne à la différentiation de quelques mots homographes .... La liste est plus longue si nous y ajoutons des homonymes dont la graphie n'est pas identique .... Elle reste assez courte pour que l'utilité du genre ne compense pas la complication que cette catégorie impose à la langue.... S'il ne s'agissait que de la compréhension, il serait possible de jeter par-dessus bord la différentiation de genre et le subjonctif.74 If, thus, paradigmatic overload {cette, ce; parte, part) in [115a-b] is seen to be in no direct proportion to functional overload in a purely communicational (non-motivational) sense of comprehension - no startling revelation in an age of operation with afunc74

Gougenheim (1968), 55-56, 58.

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tional 'alio' (etic) variance of numerous kinds - we may reappraise, as part of our pedagogic priorities, the import of relatively high incidence of performance inadequacy in a particular area of language learning in the light of inconsequential impact on communication. Specifically, we may identify the reduced impairment of perception caused by a large number of productive deviations involving minus-inherent sets. In a bisystemic correlation of production, by speakers of (non-derived) Czech, of derived (Learner's) 'English', nine areas of aberrance were investigated: morphology, modal verbs, tenses, articles, word order, syntax, construction or government, prepositions, and lexis. The area with the highest percentage of the total number of errors (1007) was identified as that of articles (260, i.e. about 26 %), the lowest-ranking area being that of modal \erbs (17, or 1.7 %), followed by tenses (50, or 5 %). In 'recurrent systemic errors', i.e. mistakes other than of the nonce variety, tenses top the list with 100 %, followed by modal verbs, 94.2 %, with articles in fourth place with 87,7 %. Though productive plus, for instance, of articles in English correlates with productive minus in their language, the learners had been exposed to the target language for some time (they were "50 post-graduate students who had sufficient knowledge of English to be able to read their scientific literature and converse on subjects related to their work"). 75 Deficiency in production, to a degree ascribable to "negative transfer" of previous productive habits, is certainly not helped by the attentive irrelevance of the set. It has been noted by teachers that many of the common errors can hardly be ascribed to interference from the mother tongue. S. P. Corder ... proposes as a working hypothesis that a learner's errors provide evidence of the target-language system he is using .... While failure to use any article might be attributed to interference from Czech ... the use of the definite article instead of the indefinite or the zero article is probably due to interference between the various functions of the articles themselves. 76 75

Duskovd (1969), 31, 34. Duskova (1969), 32-33. Duskovd's reference is to Corder (1967). Cf. also Frei (1929). 76

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157

DuSkovâ's data include the following, supplemented by our analysis of respective expressive load: 77 [116a] [116b] [116c] [116d]

Overload formal, paradigmatic : would, for should 'ought to' Overload formal, syntagmatic: I had spended ('spent')... Underload syntagmatic: would you ('be') so kind Overload functional: I have written this letter yesterday ('remote', besides 'recent', past) [116e] Underload functional : should restricted to certain meanings.

Quite clearly, these data are replete with load dissimilarity in form and function leading to attentive and, possibly, subsequent productive reduction as the cause of a wide range of error. Aberration on the order of [115a-b] and [116a-e], primary denotative inoffensiveness notwithstanding, is, of course, highly offensive with the injection of motivational variability. [Les] sujets parlants sont sensibles aux "fautes" qui les concernent. [Il s'agit du] respect pour la langue [et] du point de vue pratique, ... l'utilisateur ne trouvant pas des formes [du genre et du subjonctif] qu'il est accoutumé à voir, sera désorienté.78 Inefficiently yet as a fact of linguistic life, of course, any relativistic attitude which rests content with communication disregarding aesthetics would be valid within the monosystemic and non-motivational confines of derived (Learner's) system only. Still, 'functional relativism', complete or partial acquiescence by listeners of the non-derived 'correct' system, is likewise a fact of communication, and accessible to verification. The value of testing in this area is in the increase and diversification of the 'test population', i.e. in a test not only of the learner's own attention reducing the paradigms or syntagmatic extent of the target language, but also the attentive behavior of members of the targetlanguage community who discount errors inconsequential to the reception of primary denotation and who dwell upon aberration only to the extent of 'perceptual contrastivity' or of motivational preoccupation with unaesthetic performance. 77 78

Duskovâ (1969), 32-33. Cf. fn. 37, Chapter 1, above. Gougenheim (1968), 55, 58.

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There are three manifestations to be assessed: the listener's rejection of a distinction that matters; the listener's 'tolerant' acceptance, his forbearance manifested by his failure to correct under non-pedagogic conditions; and the listener's 'mandatory' acceptance necessitated by equally 'correct' renditions. In comparing [117a] French au dessous, au dessus [117b] French place de libre, place libre (cf. [107a-b], above) [117c] Arabic kitaabeen, English books, we observe that some contrasts, such as [117a], are inherently significant. They must be distinguished in translation, and failure to make the distinction will with a high degree of certainty (diminished only by the listener's unusual indifference or politeness) call forth correction of the learner. Confusion of [117b], in contrast, is unlikely to meet with a great deal of correction by anyone other than instructors; the error will simply be too inconsequential (denotatively secondary) to generate much perceptive attention or disorientation. Translators may reduce the paradigm in translation and 'get away with it', as discussed above (p. 142). Wherever bisystemic matching fails to unearth identity or even similarity of paradigmatic or syntagmatic overload in one of two systems compared, formal reduction ceases to be 'tolerated' for its functional irrelevance and, instead, being inevitable, becomes 'respectable': [Since] every language is formally sui generis and formal correspondence is, at best, a rough approximation, it is clear that the formal meanings of [source language = SL] items and [target language = TL] items can rarely be the same. A TL dual may on occasion be the translation equivalent of an SL plural - for instance, [117c] - but it cannot have the same formal meaning.79 Of course it cannot - but it evidently does, to the same extent of practical if not theoretical equivalence as any other translation (cf. Sections 1.2 and 1.3, above). At issue is, once again, the acci79

Catford (1965), 36.

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159

dent of reducibility across systems, and the testing criterion of typological similarity of features which, for want of contrast or even distinguishability in one of the systems, has to be ignored: sometimes we ignore 'tolerantly', and sometimes, as in the lastmentioned instance, inevitably. In summary, verification of attentive reduction may assume the form of direct experimentation, of indirect testing through stimulation of production, and of inferences from what the listener says or does. Beyond previous experimentation of the type referred to earlier in this section, we may visualize elaboration on these experiments as well as additional procedure. Direct testing of attention has revealed the discriminating reception of non-linguistic signs by the operators of aircraft control towers. The message value of linguistic signaling may similarly be assessed by soliciting informant testimony, a device popular in Bloomfieldian methodology to ascertain speaker behavior, and extendable to the discriminations effected by the listener. The listener may tell us that attention is reduced, and that it is reducible because the expanded and the reduced expressions are equivalent in primary denotation. Instead of attesting functional equivalence, our witness might display unsolicited verbal behavior discriminating functionally unequal production, by the fact that he is stimulated to respond rather than by the intended response to a statement, command, or question. We may offer an indistinct articulation of the pronoun in give me the book (cf. [97c] and p. 144, above). Demand for clarification (Would you please repeat that. Are you asking me to give it to him or to you?) will show the listener's attentiveness to this segment; failure to demand it may not necessarily by itself reveal attentive reduction though it may permit inference in that direction in conjunction with other clues noted below. Solicited verbal behavior, reported in progressive expansion of word-fragments or restoration of experimentally deleted formclasses, has also included more extensive recall of 'essential' and 'nonce' constituents. Accordingly, the adequacy of attentive reduction in general, i.e. the avoidance of under-attention, may be

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verified by recall production of the 'entire' text.80 The entirety is a matter of what is functionally adequate. The restoration of the segment reduced is expected to be syntagmatically and paradigmatically sufficient as a matter of primary denotation. Syntagmatic adequacy tolerates fluctuation on the order of offering up] offering an explanation; paradigmatically, any member of the group offering up / thinking up / proposing / suggesting (cf. [45a-d], above) will serve equally well. It is appropriate to reemphasize that we are relating to VERIFICATORY EXPANSION, a testing device involving procedure in the direction opposite to that of the process verified - a reclassification, of denotationally secondary portions omitted, to a status of primary import. Further corroborative evidence might originate, not from what a listener says or how he says it, but from what he does in another area of communicational bilingualism.81 Ignorant of shorthand though not of (established or individually created) codes of 'speed writing', and asked to record within a limited period of time, he is likely to produce a 'writing-translation' of perceived oral messages in accordance with attention conditioned by primary reference alone, or by varying degrees of secondary injection determined by his education, the nature of the account, the decision to 'splurge' on not strictly necessary expansion within some time gained by previous efficiency, as well as other variables of a comparable order. Section 4.6 will attempt to illustrate the cumulative effect of some of these ^actors.

80

On recall, recovery, and related problems, cf. Miller and Selfridge (1951); Miller and Friedman (1957); G. A. Miller (1958); Cofer (1959); Glanzer and Clark (1960); Oleron (1960); Mehler (1963); Chomsky (1965), 144-147; Newman (1965); Savin and Perchonok (1965). On recoverable deletions to guard against meaning losses, cf. also Watts (1970), 159. On 'over-production' or overly specific recovery, cf. Brown and Hanlon (1970); Watts (1970); and Section 1.5 and Footnote 22 of this chapter, above. 81 Cf. p. 81, above.

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4.5. SUMMARY

For abbreviations, cf. pp. 42 and 110, above. Type [96a-b]

Emphasis Ellen: Allen

par.

Designation

Background: attention directed vs. normal [97a-102f] Motivation [97a-e] (the) scalpel syn. situational: — P; au secours syn. non-motivational + P [98a-e] Mr. Jones; syn. social: M. le + M — S: system-neutral, Professeur +'polite'; —M + S : motivation-neutral; Ge, Fr, En, OS [99a-b] you-know-what par. social: taboo (—P) -> paradigmatic +P [100a-f] le lycée/ par., syn. educational: reduction to either Jules Verne segment (cf. [67a-b], above) [101a-c] Jacob (Grimm) syn. Supplementation [102a-f] you know\ syn. Systemic mark: + P ± A ; CS, DS, FS Subwords [103a-104d] [103a-c] Nightmàre syn. + P +A, + P - A , - P - A , —P + A ; simultaneous [104a-b] book(s) syn. + P — A; successive [104c] -ment, -ness par. Affix —A [104d] dé( tacher) syn. Affix + A Semiwords [105a-109b] [105a-b] tô-.tb syn. + P —A, —P —A [106a-d] de\ à par. -P +A.-P-A [107a-108e]