Meaning as Explanation: Advances in Linguistic Sign Theory 9783110907575, 9783110141221

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Meaning as Explanation

W G DE

Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 84

Editor Werner Winter

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Meaning as Explanation Advances in Linguistic Sign Theory

edited by

Ellen Contini-Morava Barbara Sussman Goldberg with the assistance of Robert S. Kirsner

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

1995

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin. © Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability. Library of Congress Calaloging-in-Publication-Data Meaning as explanation : advances in linguistic sign theory / edited by Ellen Contini-Morava, Barbara Sussman Goldberg. p. cm. — (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs ; 84). Chiefly papers presented at the 2nd International Columbia School Conference on Linguistics, which was held at the University of Virginia in 1991. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 3-11-014122-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Linguistics analysis (Linguistics)—Congresses. 2. Semiotics—Congresses. 3. Functionalism (Linguistics)— Congresses. I. Contini-Morava, Ellen, 1948. II. Sussman Goldberg, Barbara, 1942. III. International Columbia School Conference on Linguistics (2nd : 1991 : University of Virginia). IV. Series. P126.M38 1995 401'.41-dc20 95-38309 CIP Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging-in-Publication-Data Meaning as explanation / [2nd International Columbia School Conference on Linguistics]. Ed. by Ellen Contini-Morava ; Barbara Sussman Goldberg. - Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1995 (Trends in linguistics : Studies and monographs ; 84) ISBN 3-11-014122-1 NE: Contini-Morava, Ellen [Hrsg.]; International Columbia School Conference on Linguistics ; Trends in linguistics / Studies and monographs

© Copyright 1995 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Typesetting and printing: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin. Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

This volume is dedicated, with deep affection and respect, to the memory of our teacher William Diver, 1921-1995. Nil non mortale tenemus Pectoris exceptis ingeniique bonis. (Publius Ovidius Naso)

Preface Most of the papers collected in this volume were originally presented at the Second International Columbia School Conference on Linguistics, held at the University of Virginia in 1991. An important goal of this conference was to bring together exponents of the major schools of linguistics that treat language as a system of meaningful signs, in order to explore areas of agreement and disagreement in background assumptions, theory, and methodology. During the conference it became clear that there was an urgent need for a volume representing both the common ground and the diversity among sign oriented linguistic theories. The conference organizers therefore encouraged the participants to submit their papers for publication, and undertook to edit the volume; we also solicited some papers that had not been originally presented there. Robert S. Kirsner of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures of UCLA kindly agreed to help in the process of refereeing the manuscripts that were originally submitted to the volume, and the editors gratefully acknowledge his valuable assistance. We would also like to thank the conference participants for their stimulating discussions both at the conference and afterwards, and for their cooperation and patience in the editorial process. A complete list of contributors is included after the contents. A number of Departments and Programs at the University of Virginia helped make the conference possible, for which we are very grateful: the Program in Linguistics, the Departments of Anthropology, Philosophy, Psychology, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese; the East Asian Language and Area Center; the Center for Russian and East European Studies; the Center for Advanced Studies; the Special Lectures Committee. For assistance with the editorial expenses of this volume we thank the University of Virginia School of Arts and Sciences. Finally, our thanks to the editorial staff and readers of Mouton de Gruyter for a satisfying and rewarding working relationship.

Contents Preface

vii

Contents

ix

List of contributors

xi

Introduction: On linguistic sign theory Ellen Contini-Morava

1

Part I Issues of theory and methodology Theory William Diver

43

Quantitative analysis in Columbia School theory WallisReid

115

Meaning, data, and testing hypotheses Walter Hirtle

153

Remarks on sign-oriented approaches to language analysis Jadranka Gvozdanovic

169

The purpose of a grammatical analysis Alan Huffman

185

When contact speakers talk, linguistic theory listens Ricardo Otheguy

213

Part II Deixis Deixis from a cognitive point of view Theo A. J. M. Janssen

245

χ

Contents

Deixis in Swahili: Attention meanings and pragmatic function Robert A. Leonard

271

Deixis and value: A semantic analysis of the Japanese demonstratives Takashi Aoyama

289

Part III

Lexical meaning

Only vs. just: Semantic integrality revisited Yishai Tobin

323

Seeing is believing: Visual categories in the Russian lexicon Edna Andrews

361

Part IV Meaning in grammar and discourse The -ra and -se opposition in Spanish Barbara Sussman Goldberg

381

Conversational focus Flora Klein-Andren

405

Italian pronouns and the virtue of relative meaninglessness Joseph Davis

423

Acquisition of English articles by native speakers of Spanish Elena Gorokhova

441

Logical inference involved in interpreting direct message sentences Cheng Yumin

453

Author index

473

Subject index

477

List of contributors Edna Andrews Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Duke University Durham, NC 27706 USA Takashi Aoyama Kansai University Yamate-cho, Suita City Osaka Japan Cheng Yumin Department of Foreign Languages Fudan University Shanghai 200433 China Ellen Contini-Morava Program in Linguistics Department of Anthropology University of Virginia Cabell Hall Charlottesville, VA 22903 USA

Barbara Sussman Goldberg 127 High Tor Ave. Watchung, NJ 07060 USA Elena Gorokhova 32 Colonial Terrace Nutley, NJ07110 USA Jadranka Gvozdanovic Universiteit van Amsterdam Slavisch Seminarium Spuistraat 210 1012 VT Amsterdam The Netherlands Walter Hirtle Departement de langues et linguistique Universite Laval Cite universitaire Quebec, G1K 7P4 Canada

Joseph Davis 265 West 93 St. apt. 2 New York, NY 10025 USA

Alan Huffman New York City Technical College of the City University of New York 300 Jay Street Brooklyn, NY 11201-2983 USA

William Divert Department of Linguistics Box 708 Casa Italiana Columbia University New York, NY 10027 USA

Theo Janssen Vrije Universiteit Vakgroep Taalkunde De Boelelaan 1105 NL-1081 HV Amsterdam The Netherlands

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List of contributors

Flora Klein-Andreu Department of Hispanic Language and Literature State University of New York Stony Brook, NY 11794-3371 USA

Robert A. Leonard Department of Linguistics Calkins Hall Hofstra University Hempstead, NY 11550 USA Ricardo Otheguy Graduate School and City College City University of New York 33 West 42nd Street New York, NY 10036 USA

Wallis Reid Graduate School of Education Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ 08903 USA v u · Tobm τ uYishai Foreign Languages and Linguistics Ben-Gurion University of the Negev P.O. Box 653 Be'er Sheva 84 105 Israel

Introduction: On linguistic sign theory' Ellen Contini-Morava

1. What is linguistic sign theory? It has been said that all modern linguistic theories descend from Saussure's radical reinvention of the discipline at the turn of the century (see, e.g., Harris [1990: 20-22]). Most theoretical linguists accept some version of Saussure's dichotomy between synchrony and diachrony, and between an abstract language system, assumed to be shared by the members of a speech community, and individual acts of speech. However, the same cannot be said of the construct that Saussure himself regarded as the cornerstone of his theoretical edifice: the linguistic sign. As pointed out by Reid (1974), few schools of linguistics nowadays endorse Saussure's rather restrictive conception of langue as a system of signs, and some dispute the orienting principle from which this conception follows, i. e., that the structure of language (a code consisting of meaningful symbols) is determined by its communicative function. Although most linguists would regard it as a truism that language is used for communication, this has not led them to avoid positing theoretical constructs or explanatory principles that have no communicative motivation. Indeed, some linguists argue that the communicative function of language is merely one among many of its functions, almost an incidental epiphenomenon, not a basis from which to derive and motivate the units of linguistic analysis. This view, characteristic of most varieties of Chomskyan generative grammar, is succinctly described by Newmeyer (1991: 3) as follows: Fundamental to the concept of the autonomy of linguistic form is that of the autonomy of syntax. In this view, syntactic patterning is not explicable on the basis of the meanings or discourse functions of the elements involved, nor is there held to be a simple correspondence between syntactic constructs and semantic constructs and/or discourse function. Rather, syntactic patterning is largely characterizable by a set of irreducible formal principles.

From the point of view of autonomous syntax, the distribution of linguistic forms cannot be explained by any external orienting principle, such as the principle that linguistic forms occur where they do because they

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are the signals of meanings, being used by speakers to communicate messages. In the absence of such an orienting principle, the only constraints on the nature of one's model of language are the criteria of internal consistency and descriptive simplicity, neither of which provides any rationale for why language should be organized in the way it is claimed to be (see Garcia [1977], for a particularly forceful critique of this position). Exponents of the autonomy hypothesis have recently begun to moderate the extreme anti-functionalist position by seeking evolutionary explanations for the principles they attribute to "Universal Grammar" (as discussed in Newmeyer [1991]. However, like many other functionalist explanations advanced by generativists, these speculations about the evolutionary advantages of grammatical form are brought in only after the grammatical theory has already been constructed in the absence of functional principles. Thus, to seek an evolutionary explanation for, say, Subjacency or the Empty Category Principle entails acceptance of the grammatical theory on which these constructs are based, a theory in which functional considerations play no role whatever. Such after-the-fact rationalizations can hardly be regarded as providing functionalist support for the theory of autonomous syntax, nor is such support regarded as necessary (for extensive discussion of this point, see Reid [1991, chapter 1]). The contributors to this volume represent a point of view opposite to the one just described. The research discussed here reflects a tradition that has taken "functional" orientations seriously enough to invoke them not merely as appendices to an "autonomous" grammatical theory, but rather as guides to the nature of grammar itself. This means that any account of the identity and distribution of linguistic forms must be answerable to one of two language-external, controlling principles: (1) the theoretical units that are postulated must be consistent with the communicative goals that language is used to accomplish; and/or (2) the account must be consistent with independently motivated principles of human psychology. Thus for example the postulation of the linguistic sign as a theoretical unit is motivated by the communicative function of language: communication requires a set of perceptible signals each of which is associated with some conceptual content. Other explanatory principles, such as "iconicity" or "egocentricity", which have been used to explain a variety of facts about the distribution of linguistic forms, derive their motivation from the second of these controlling principles. The contributors to this volume do not all share a single theoretical perspective, nor do they all uncritically endorse the conception of language articulated in Saussure's Cours de linguistique generate. In what

Introduction: On linguistic sign theory

3

follows I will first describe the common ground among three major signoriented theories: that of the Columbia School, the Jakobsonian School, and the Guillaumean School of the Psychomechanics of Language. I will contrast their assumptions and goals with those of mainstream generative grammar on the one hand, and with the more closely allied views of Saussure on the other. I will then point out some of the differences among these approaches to language.1

2. Sign based theory vs. autonomous syntax 2.1. Definition of the data A major point of divergence between sign based theories of grammar and mainstream generativist theories is the definition of the object of study itself, i. e., the choice of data that the theory seeks to explain. As defined in both elementary textbooks of generative grammar (e. g., Radford 1988: 3-7) and in more general discussions (e.g., Chomsky 1986, chapter2), generative theory seeks to provide a formal account of at least the following: (a) native speakers' judgments about sentence structure and well-formedness, interpreted as a reflection of their underlying grammatical competence; (b) the "creativity" of language, defined as a speaker's ability to produce and understand an infinite number of formally distinct sentences.2 These types of data, regarded as the province of syntax, are cited in support of such theoretical constructs as constituent structure, recursive rules, etc. None of these constructs is thought to have any functional motivation, nor is there thought to be any direct correspondence between the syntactic structures generated by the various rules and any constant conceptual content, or between the notion of "well-formedness" and, say "meaningfulness", "coherence", "appropriateness", etc. From a sign based perspective, on the other hand, the data to be explained are conceived differently. Of major concern are the following questions: (a) Why do linguistic forms occur where they do, rather than in other imaginable patterns or at random? (b) How do we account for the fact that human beings are able to produce and infer an infinite number of novel messages from a finite number of signs? On the face of it, the first question would appear to be a common concern of all linguistic theories, whether formal or functional. However, there are significant differences between the way this question is under-

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stood and answered from different theoretical perspectives. For one thing, in sign based theory there is an emphasis on observing natural discourse, whether spoken or written, i. e., situations in which actual messages are being communicated, rather than asking speakers to make judgments about sentences invented by the linguist. Although all linguists consult with native speakers and rely on invented data to some extent, in sign based linguistic analysis such data do not take priority over actual language use, because of the frequently observed lack of correspondence between what speakers claim they can say and what they actually do say (see, for example, Labov 1970). If the focus of attention is on language as a communicative instrument, as opposed to an abstract system of rules, it obviously makes sense to use real, rather than hypothetical, communications as data. A second difference between the sign based interpretation of question (a) above and that of practitioners of autonomous syntax is the nature of the explanation that is envisioned. If one believes that linguistic forms are distributed as they are in response to "an irreducible set of formal principles" that have no external motivation, as claimed by Newmeyer in the passage quoted earlier, then there is no sensible answer to the question "why" apart from a statement of the formal principles themselves (cf. Garcia 1975, chapter X; Kirsner 1979a: 23-29, for further discussion).3 In sign based theory on the other hand, the question "why" does have a meaningful answer, which is that the forms are distributed as they are because they have meanings that appropriately contribute toward the messages that speakers are using language to convey (Garcia 1975, chapter II). The explanation for the distribution of forms consists in identifying the signs that these forms represent, establishing their meanings, and demonstrating the link between the meanings and the messages being communicated. The second question of concern to sign-oriented linguists, that of accounting for infinite uses of finite resources, also appears initially to match the generativist's notion of linguistic creativity. However, there are significant differences here, too. First of all, in sign-oriented theory the creativity of language is conceived of in terms of the ability to convey new kinds of messages, in response to unforeseen communicative needs, not merely in terms of the ability to generate mechanical recombinations of syntactic structures (Garcia 1975: 40-41; Hewson 1976: 321; Waugh 1976 a: 22; Sangster 1982: 162; Reid 1991: 24-28; Huffman, this volume). However neither the need to communicate new messages nor the ability

Introduction: On linguistic sign theory

5

to interpret them is a property of the linguistic code itself; rather, linguistic creativity results from the ingenuity of human communicators, who creatively adapt their code to continuously varying contexts. An account of this creative adaptation requires both a specification of what is contributed by the linguistic code (i. e., the meanings of linguistic signs) and what is inferred on the basis of contextual information, real-world knowledge, socio-cultural conventions, human psychological biases, and other extralinguistic factors.

2.2. Semantics and pragmatics in sign based vs. generative linguistics 2.2.1. Compositionality The emphasis on the open endedness of communication leads to another major division between sign based grammar and generative grammar: the principle of compositionality. Although generative theories differ among themselves in their treatment of the relationship between syntax and semantics, all formal theories of language subscribe to some version of compositionality, described as follows in a recent overview of semantics (Ladusaw 1988: 91): The term compositionality is used for constraints of varying strength on the mapping from syntactic structure to semantic representation; every theory, however, provides some account of how the meaning of an arbitrary complex expression can be systematically calculated from the meanings of its basic constituents and its syntactic structure.

In compositional semantic theories, the largest unit of analysis is the sentence, regarded as the upper limit of the domain of syntactic rules, and as the linguistic reflection of the proposition in logic (from which the traditional notion of sentence originally derives, cf. Diver [1977]). Each well-formed sentence is said to "have a meaning" (or more than one, if ambiguous), which is calculated on the basis of the meanings of the lexical items in the sentence together with a set of semantic rules that specify how to interpret the syntactic configurations supplied by the syntactic rules. In this type of approach, each sentence has a determinate number of meanings; creativity is achieved by assembling the prefabricated parts into previously unused configurations (but only ones that are legitimized by the rules). In a sign based theory on the other hand, the relationship between the meanings of signs and the messages they are used to communicate is not

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deterministic. First, because unforeseen communicative needs continually arise in actual discourse, there is no reason to believe that one could provide an algorithm for predicting all possible interpretations of a linguistic sign. But if the context-specific interpretations of signs cannot be entirely predicted, this also means that it is not possible to predict all possible ways that signs can be combined. Thus sign based theory differs from formal syntax in not regarding the set of possible linguistic expressions as constituting a definite system, in the mathematical sense of that term. Sign based grammar is therefore not "generative": it does not seek to define the set of "permissible strings" of a language, because this is not regarded as a definable set. A second reason why the principle of compositionality is problematic is that the meanings of individual linguistic signs are not always readily identifiable as fractional components of a notional whole. Some signoriented analysts have argued that a sign, especially one with grammatical meaning, may have an effect on the message even though it does not constitute a subpart of it. For example, a sign may function as an instruction to the hearer about how to process accompanying information, or as a hint that steers the hearer toward or away from a certain kind of inference (Diver 1975: 9-10; Diver, this volume; Tobin 1990, chapter 3; Reid 1991: 95; Huffman, this volume). For this reason, some sign based linguists prefer to describe the relationship between meaning and message as one of contribution rather than composition (Reid 1991: 40). 2.2.2. The scope of semantics In most versions of formal semantics that are concerned with natural language, the scope of semantics is limited to aspects of sentence meaning that contribute to the truth conditions of the propositions that sentences are said to express. The responsibility of semantic theory, in this view, is to account for native speaker intuitions about relationships of paraphrase, entailment, ambiguity, contradiction, and other properties of sentences that are amenable to definition by means of formal logic (Kempson 1975, 1977; Levinson 1983: 12-15; Chierchia-McConnell-Ginet 1990). Aspects of sentence interpretation that do not affect truth conditions, such as forms whose meanings express the speaker's subjective attitude toward what is being said, indices of the social relationship between speaker and addressee, or forms whose interpretation depends on knowledge of the context of utterance, are relegated to the domain of pragmatics, as stated succinctly in Gerald Gazdar's (1979: 2) famous formula: "Pragmatics = Meaning minus Truth Conditions".

Introduction: On linguistic sign theory

1

The effect of this a priori restriction on the scope of semantics is the fragmentation of linguistic form. Unitary forms whose range of interpretation fits into more than one logical category are treated, in effect, as homonyms (e. g., modals, which typically have both "deontic" and "epistemic" interpretations (cf. Palmer 1981: 152-153), pronouns like it or there, sometimes regarded as meaningful and sometimes not (see the insightful discussion in Bolinger 1977, chapters 4 and 5). Formally distinct elements whose meanings differ in non-truth-conditional ways are treated as synonyms (e.g., but and and, the and a in Kempson [1975]). Some uses of grammatical morphemes are regarded as meaningful, and listed in the lexicon, whereas other uses of the same forms are treated as meaningless, and the forms are inserted automatically into the appropriate structural slots by morphological rules (e. g., "reflexive", "ergative", and "inherent-reflexive" si in Italian, Burzio [1986: 36-42]). The result of this kind of approach is that the relationship between form and meaning appears capricious and chaotic: some forms have multiple meanings, some none at all; distinctions in form may or may not correspond to distinctions in meaning, and vice versa. By contrast, in a sign based approach there is no a priori restriction as to what can count as a "meaning": meanings could be descriptive (denote things in a real or possible world), expressive (convey information about a speaker's attitudes or social identity), interpersonal (indicate relationships among participants in a speech event), textual (help to "track" entities in discourse, foreground or background events), and so on. The sole requirement is that, in order to count as a "meaning", used in the technical sense of an element of the linguistic code (Saussure's signifie), a given piece of conceptual content must be invariably associated with a specific linguistic form. As Leonard Bloomfield wrote, "a language can convey only such meanings as are attached to some formal feature: the speakers can signal only by means of signals" (1933 [1984]: 168). The domain of pragmatics is thus defined not in terms of truth conditions, but in terms of invariance: aspects of utterance interpretation that are invariably signalled by some formal feature are called meanings, hence belong to semantics; aspects of utterance interpretation that depend on context, whether linguistic or extralinguistic, belong to pragmatics (see also Contini-Morava [1989: 33-44]). There is also no a priori restriction in sign based theory as to what can count as a signal (signifiant): a suprasegmental feature, a phoneme, a combination of phonemes, the placement of words in a particular order, or the absence of an element in a position that would otherwise be filled

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(zero, cf. Saussure 1916 [1986]: 86; Jakobson 1939; Guillaume 1941 [1984]: 75; Tobin 1990: 30; Diver, this volume). Again, the only requirement is that, to count as a signifiant, a form must convey a constant semantic content. Form and meaning in sign based theory cannot be detached from each other and treated as separate "components" of grammar. They are mutually defining: one cannot even identify linguistic forms without at least a provisional hypothesis as to their meanings, and vice versa. Thus the main distinguishing characteristic of sign based grammatical theory is the principle of one-form—one-meaning. This principle, like the linguistic sign itself, follows from the function of language as a communicative instrument. The most efficient communicative instrument is one in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between the signalling units and the things signalled. It therefore makes sense, if one is beginning with a functional orientation, to use this as an initial methodological assumption when beginning a linguistic analysis. Of course, the extent to which the one-form-one-meaning principle holds in a given case is an empirical question since, as stated earlier, neither forms nor meanings are given in advance of analysis.4 Because the one-form-one-meaning principle has been misinterpreted by some critics of functional linguistics as a sort of axiom (e.g., Newmeyer 1983: 114-118), it should be emphasized that no sign based theory requires a priori that distinctness of form necessarily entails distinctness of meaning, nor that identity of form entails identity of meaning. In fact, every such theory recognizes the existence of both homonymy and allomorphy in language. Such exceptions to the principle of one-form-one-meaning can be tolerated (and learned) by the users of language because (a) human beings have sufficient inferential powers to figure out from contextual information which of a set of homonyms is being used in a particular case, (b) in sign based grammar linguistic units are defined not only by their phonological and conceptual substance, but also by their value, i. e., their paradigmatic opposition to other units of the language (see, e. g., Saussure's discussion of the plural in German and Anglo-Saxon [1916 (1986): 83-84]; see also Jakobson [1936 (1984): 64]; Diver [1974]). This makes it possible for there to be some variation in the signifiant (allomorphy).5 However, precisely because the most efficient semiotic system is one in which there is a one-to-one relationship between signal and meaning, it is also reasonable to expect that exceptions should be relatively disfavored, i.e., that one-form—one-meaning is a reasonable initial working hypothesis. As a result of this methodological assumption, sign-oriented

Introduction: On linguistic sign theory

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linguists avoid positing homonyms wherever a form has multiple interpretations or "uses", and instead prefer to seek a unified meaning that will account for the full range of uses of a form. Although terminologies differ, all sign based theories make a distinction between the underlying, abstract, invariant meaning of a sign, which is a unit of langue, and the open-ended set of specific interpretations it can have in particular contexts of use, which belong to parole.6 In sum, sign based theores, like generative theories, make a theoretical distinction between aspects of "meaning" that are encoded into the linguistic system and ones that follow from extralinguistic principles. They are also in agreement in basing this distinction on the principle of arbitrariness: what must be listed in the grammar, and considered part of the linguistic code that speakers must learn, is only what is arbitrary, i.e., what is not explicable on the basis of external principles. In this respect both types of theory differ from approaches, including some functionalist ones, that deny that such a distinction can or should be made (cf. Lakoff 1987: 183; Langacker 1990: 4; see also Harris 1990: 48-49). Where sign based theories differ from generative theories is in the definition of what aspects of language are arbitrary (see Reid [1991: 27-35] for further discussion; cf. also Guillaume [1984: 84-88]). For sign based theories, the locus of arbitrariness is the link between signifiant (whether lexical item, affix, word order, zero, or other signal) and signifie. The observed patterning of linguistic forms is explained in terms of the contribution of the (arbitrary) signs they represent to the message being conveyed, in conjunction with pragmatic factors (iconicity, egocentricity, and the like). Generativist theories posit a much more elaborate system of arbitrary constructs, as discussed earlier in this chapter, a system in which the linguistic sign plays a negligible role. The models of language that emerge from these different perspectives are therefore very different.

3. The status of syntax in linguistic sign theory Saussure criticized the traditional tripartite division between lexicology, morphology and syntax, arguing that if one takes the sign as the basic unit of analysis, linguistic phenomena do not fit into these categories (1916 [1986]: 133-134). He also maintained a healthy skepticism with regard to other theoretical constructs inherited from the grammatical tradition, such as parts of speech, on the grounds that these constructs derive from principles external to language, such as logic or prescriptivism,

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rather than emerging from the analysis of language itself (1916 [1986]: 107-108). Saussure is also famous (or notorious) for relegating the sentence to parole. He has been criticized for this by, among others, Culler (1976: 98-99) and Chomsky (1964: 23; 1968, cited in Hewson [1976: 17]). In fact, however, Saussure's treatment of the sentence was consistent with his general principle that what belong to langue are only the arbitrary pairings of signifiant and signified he argued that a distinction must be made between "syntagms construed on regular patterns", which belong to langue, and free combinations, which belong to parole (1916 [1986]: 122-123). To a great extent, modern linguistic sign theories have concurred with Saussure's view: The traditional notion of "syntax", understood as a statement of semantically arbitrary rules for combining words into phrases, clauses, and sentences, has no direct correspondence in linguistic sign theory, because the phenomena subsumed under this label do not constitute a well-defined set from a sign based perspective. Some signoriented linguists argue that traditional syntactic notions, such as "subject", "direct object", "reflexive" and the like, should simply be discarded because they have never been shown to have an invariant association with any specific linguistic form (cf. Diver 1977, 1982). Others incorporate some traditional syntactic concepts, for example, that of "modification", into their approaches, but treat these notions as semantic in nature (van Schooneveld 1960; 1964; 1978: 15 footnote; 1988 b; Valin 1981: 83 ff; Sangster 1982, chapter 4 and 5.4).8 Other "syntactic" phenomena, such as word order, government and the like, are handled in a variety of ways, to be outlined below. 3.1. Word order as a signifiant As pointed out in section 2.2.2., the notion of linguistic sign is flexible enough to include not only signals with specific phonological content, such as morphemes, but also what Saussure called "abstract entities" (Cours Part 2, chapter VIII). A number of sign based studies analyze word order signs of this type. For example Waugh (1976b; 1977) posits contrasting meanings for the orders of Adjective-Noun and Noun-Adjective in French. According to her analysis, the N-A order is unmarked, and signifies simply "the intersection between the sets given by the partof-speech adjective and the part-of-speech noun" (1976b: 87). The re-

Introduction: On linguistic sign theory

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verse order is marked, and signifies not just the basic modification relationship, but modification of a noun with a particular lexical meaning: "the lexical meaning of the noun is presupposed by the adjective before modification" (1976b: 92). Teyssier (1968) assigns contrasting meanings to the positions of prenominal modifiers in English. In cases where three modifiers precede the noun, the first indicates Identification, the second Characterization, the third Classification. He also explains the effects when not all three positions are filled. Diver (1984, summarized in Reid [1991: 174-176]) assigns different meanings to the positions of NPs placed respectively before and after the verb in English: pre-verbal position indicates a participant that exercises a higher degree of control over the occurrence named by the verb, and post-verbal position indicates a participant that exercises a lower degree of control. Further sign based studies of word order include Klein-Andreu (1983), on adjective placement in Spanish, Gildin (1979) on subject-verb inversion in French, Kirsner (1979 a) on word order in Modern Dutch, Sangster (1982, chapter 4) on adjective and adverb placement in English, French, and Russian, van Schooneveld (1960) on word order in Russian, Valin (1981) on word order in French. Of course, the fact that some word-order phenomena have been analyzed in terms of meaningful signs does not prove that all such phenomena can or should be so handled. The question whether or not word order is being used as a signifiant must be decided on a case-by-case basis, and ultimately depends, as do all sign based analyses, on the association of form with constant conceptual content (see Kirsner 1979 a: 89; Diver, this volume).

3.2. Semantic explanations for "syntactic control" and "free variation" A large number of distributional facts in language are treated in syntactic approaches as the output of semantically arbitrary rules in which the presence of a "controlling" element in the sentence automatically triggers the presence of some other element. Examples include the familiar notions of "agreement" and "government". In sign based approaches semantic explanations are sought for these phenomena. For example, Reid (1991) provides data from spoken and written English that cannot be handled by the putative rule of subject-verb agreement: cases where plural or conjoined subjects co-occur with a singular verb, and cases of sin-

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gular subject with plural verb. He argues that rather than being automatically inserted by an "agreement rule", the number marking on the verb makes an independent contribution to the message being conveyed, so that a referent can be categorized in two different ways at once, both of which make sense in the communicative context.9 Implicit in the syntactic notions of "agreement" and "government" is the idea that lack of choice entails meaninglessness: if the complement of a certain verb, say, is always in a particular case, then the admissible case is "semantically empty" regardless whether it is meaningful in other contexts. This view, which Jakobson called "a characteristic example of phonological contraband in grammatical studies" (1958 a [1990]: 380), has been repeatedly challenged by sign-oriented linguists, who instead explain the co-occurrence between verb and case in terms of semantic compatibility between the meaning of the case and the lexical meaning of the verb (see, e.g., Jakobson 1936 [1990]; 1958a [1990]; Garcia 1975: 342-347; Zubin 1975; Sangster 1982: 63-68, 133-137; Huffman 1983 and this volume). Another situation in which grammatical signs are claimed to be devoid of meaning is when either of two (or more) signs can occur in a given context without apparent difference in meaning. Such situations are usually described as "free variation", with the motive for the choice between the alternatives being consigned to stylistics or sociolinguistics. When examined from a sign based perspective however, it can usually be shown that: (a) each of the contrasting meanings is appropriate for the communication of the particular messages in which they apparently alternate, hence there is no reason to deny that the meaning contrast still exists; (b) if one goes beyond native speaker reports of "synonymy" and examines actual language use, one can find that the forms do not in fact vary freely, in semantic terms. Studies that address this issue include Zubin (1977), on dative-accusative alternation in German, Garcia-Otheguy (1977) on alternation between the pronouns le and lo in Spanish, Contini-Morava (1976), on alternation of locative prefixes in existential contexts in Swahili, Garcia (1983; 1985; 1991) on the alternation between the pronouns si and el as "reflexives" in Spanish, Diver (1987), on alternation between dual and plural in Homeric Greek, Waugh (1976b), on alternation between pre- and postposition of the adjective in French, van Schooneveld (1989) on alternation between subjunctive and optative in ancient Greek, and Hirtle (1982) on 0 vs. -s plurals in the English substantive. Even grammatical gender, the last refuge of the syntactician, has been shown to be amenable to treatment in semantic terms. Some sign-oriented

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linguists have suggested a general communicative function for gender. For example, van Schooneveld (1977 a) argues that "gender poses the problem to what extent a referent identified in a given narrated situation by a given parole remains identifiable outside that conjoint identification in narrated situation and parole" (1977 a: 132). Others have concentrated on gender in particular languages. For example, Andrews (1990: 176— 180) shows how the -s marker in Modern Greek nouns both defines an opposition between masculine and non-masculine, and reinforces a network of markings involving case, gender, and number. Otheguy (1977; 1978) argues that the so-called "neuter article" lo in Spanish actually contrasts with the "masculine" el and the "feminine" la in that lo signals that its referent is NONDISCRETE whereas el/la signal that the referent is DISCRETE (see also Klein 1981). He also suggests a functional explanation for the apparently arbitrary pairing of el and la with different classes of nouns (1977: 105-208). Zubin-Köpcke, in a series of papers (1981; 1984 a; 1984b; 1985; 1986) have shown that there are regular semantic principles underlying the assignment of nouns to genders in German. 3.3. Pragmatic explanations for syntactic phenomena In keeping with the functionalist orientation of linguistic sign theory, the distribution of linguistic forms must be explained either by analyzing the forms as signals of (invariant) meanings, or by showing that their patterning follows from other, independently motivated extralinguistic principles. Two such principles that have been applied in sign-oriented work are the human propensity for selective attention and that of egocentric bias, both of which have been extensively documented in the psychological literature. These are used by Zubin (1979), for example, to help explain the distribution of the German nominative case, to which he assigns the meaning SPEAKER'S FOCUS OF INTEREST. Zubin finds that there is a high statistical correlation between the nominative case and the overall frequency of mention of a particular entity in discourse. He also finds strong correlations between nominative case and reference to entities that are high on the scale of egocentricity, and between nominative case and relative pronouns, which are highly salient in their clauses. Other psychological explanations of syntactic phenomena used in signoriented work include avoidance of inferential complexity, the perceptual problem of signal recognition, iconicity, and ease of processing (see, for

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example, Garcia 1975; 1983; Kirsner 1976; 1979b; 1983; 1985; van Putte 1988; Tobin 1990, Zubin-Köpcke 1985). It is important to emphasize in this regard that no sign-oriented theory claims that all "syntax" can be reduced to pragmatics. What they do instead claim is that the distributional facts that fall into this traditional category are not arbitrary: they can be explained either in terms of semantics (the contribution of the meanings of linguistic signs to the messages being communicated) or pragmatics (the contribution of linguistic and extralinguistic context, and of language-external psychological or sociocultural factors, to the form and content of messages).

4. Critiques of Saussure's model of langue10 It should be evident from preceding discussion that modern linguistic sign theories owe a great deal to the model of language developed by Ferdinand de Saussure, as described in his Cours de linguistique generale. '' Aspects of this model that continue to be accepted by sign-oriented linguists include the following: (1) Langue, or language system, is distinguished from parole, or individual acts of speech. (2) The basic unit of langue is the linguistic sign, consisting of a signifiant arbitrarily linked with an (invariant) signifie. (3) Linguistic signs are defined both in terms of their inherent formal and semantic substance and in terms of valeur, or paradigmatic opposition with other signs in the same system.12 However, sign-oriented linguists have also extended, modified, and criticized Saussure's model in several respects. Some areas where Saussure's conception of language has been found wanting by linguists from the sign-oriented approaches we are concerned with here are discussed below.13

4.1. Over-emphasis on value at the expense of substance Saussure defined linguistic units as essentially negative entities, claiming that they could not be defined in terms of either phonological or semantic content, but purely in terms of valeur, i.e., their opposition with other units of the same linguistic system (cf. 1916 [1986]: 118, 120). While recognizing the importance of value, especially in analyses of grammatical

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meaning (see below for further discussion), sign-oriented linguists have argued that reference to substantive content is also necessary for defining linguistic units. For example, Diver (1974) and Hewson (1976) argue that there are kinds of patterning in both phonology and grammar that cannot be explained by defining units in purely differential fashion (see also Holenstein 1976: 69-77). Jakobson (1958 a [1990]: 380; 1972a: 72, quoted in Sangster 1982: 63 footnote) argues that definition in terms of pure distinctiveness should be confined to phonology; in grammar the substance of conceptual features is also essential. 4.2. Lack of distinction between lexical and grammatical meaning The examples of signs cited in Saussure's Cours include both lexical items (e.g., arbre 'tree', in Saussure's famous diagram of the linguistic sign, [1916 (1986): 67]) and grammatical signs (e.g., the plural, [1916 (1986): 119-120]), but Saussure does not make an explicit distinction between lexical and grammatical meaning either in his definition of the sign or in his discussion of syntagmatic and paradigmatic oppositions. Later signoriented theories have found this distinction to be useful, even though they do not all characterize it in the same terms. In Columbia School theory, lexical meaning is distinguished from grammatical meaning in that: (a) grammatical meanings provide information about a lexcial item, to which they are said to be "satellite"; (b) grammatical meanings, as opposed to lexical meanings, cluster into closed systems in which two or more signs provide an exhaustive subcategorization of a shared semantic domain (Diver, this volume). Guillaume distinguishes between the "word base", which expresses a particular idea or lexical content and is the product of a mental operation of "discrimination" (abstraction from the universal to the particular), and morphological forms that express grammatical information such as gender, number, and case (1984: 113 — 114, 116). The latter are described as "mediating, vector forms which provide a support for thought as it advances toward the final form [i.e., the part of speech]" (1984: 117). The essential difference between lexical and grammatical meaning, then, is a difference between a mental operation of particularizing, characteristic of lexical meaning, and one of generalizing, characteristic of grammatical meaning (Hirtle 1975: 5-6). In Jakobsonian theory, grammatical categories differ from lexical categories in the following ways: (a) grammatical categories belong to closed classes of elements, whereas lexical categories constitute an open set

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(Sangster 1982: 105); (b) grammatical meanings, unlike lexical meanings, are "obligatory categories" in the Boasian sense (cf. Jakobson 1959 a). More recently, van Schooneveld has drawn a further distinction between grammatical and lexical meaning: (c) grammatical meaning always involves some form of "transmissional deixis", i.e., it "operates with cues for perception which necessarily relate to the speaker and the receiver of the message" (van Schooneveld 1983: 158), whereas lexical meaning may also involve "perceptional deixis" (now called "identificational deixis", van Schooneveld [1991: 360]), i.e., it is more "objective" in that it "provides cues for perception which can be handled by any observer of the narrated situation (1991: 360; see also van Schooneveld 1977b: 5; 1991; Sangster 1982: 104-111, 155-162).14

4.3. Neglect of the dynamic nature of synchrony, and of the systematic aspects of diachronic change Saussure's description of his central distinction between synchrony and diachrony suggests that the language system, viewed from a synchronic perspective, consists of a static set of relationships, as opposed to dynamic processes. He also argues that language change is sporadic, unintentional, and not directed toward the effecting of any particular synchronic outcome (see especially Cows Part 1, chapter III). These claims have been disputed by sign-oriented linguists. Jakobson, like other members of the Prague School, argues that every synchronic state has both the remains of past changes and the seeds of future changes built into its structure, and that diachronic change can be systematic (cf. Jakobson 1953 [1971]: 562; 1980 [1990]; 1990: 103-108; Waugh 1976a: 10-22; Andrews, this volume). A similar view is advanced by Guillaume (1984 [1943, 1959]: 56-64). Furthermore, in the Jakobsonian view the linguistic code is not fixed but is rather creatively adapted by speakers to new communicative situations, including poetic, metaphorical and metonymic extensions (cf. Waugh 1976 a: 22; Sangster 1982: 162).15 Guillaume criticizes Saussure for creating a dichotomy between langue and parole without providing an account of the relationship between them. He accordingly interposes the acte de langage, or 'language act', between the system of langue and its output, discours (Guillaume's substitute for Saussure's term parole). The language act is further subdivided into two kinds of activity: the activity of langue, resulting in the genesis of the word (in languages that have morphologically complex words),

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and the activity of discours, resulting in the actual utterance (see Guillaume 1984: 79-99; Hewson 1976: 325-326). Moreover, the linguistic sign also has a temporal dimension built into it: the signifie of a sign, or its "potential meaning", is conceived as a "movement" that is "intercepted" by a speaker somewhere along its vector to produce a particular contextual interpretation (see Guillaume 1984: 118-119; Hirtle 1982: 16-20; 1984: xiv). It can also be argued that Saussure's dichotomy between synchrony and diachrony is theoretically valid, but that Saussure himself was simply not explicit enough about the mechanism whereby one synchronic state could change to another. The nature of this mechanism is addressed by Garcia (1985), who discusses the role of communicative factors and inference in grammatical/semantic change in Old English and Modern Spanish. Garcia argues that the differences in distribution of linguistic forms, viewed synchronically, are a consequence of the differential appropriateness of their meanings to the messages speakers are trying to communicate. Because the relationship between imprecise grammatical meanings and context-specific messages is mediated by inference, indeterminacy is built into the communicative process itself. Consequently, skewed statistical distributions can lead to reanalysis of the meanings of the forms, i.e., to a new synchronic state.

4.4. Definition of language in purely semiotic terms, without reference to its human users The importance of the "human factor" has been emphasized by exponents of the Columbia School, whose approach to language is based on two coordinate orienting principles: (a) that language is a system of communication, hence operates with meaningful signs; (b) that its users are human, hence have particular abilities, biases, and limitations that affect the nature and patterning of linguistic forms. Examples of these characteristics that have been appealed to in the Columbia School literature include: inference, or the ability to "jump to conclusions" from a minimum of information, and to integrate data from several different sources in construing a message (see Diver 1975: 10 and this volume; Garcia 1975: 42-44, 501-504; Kirsner 1979 a: 27; Reid 1991: 90-96 and this volume); the tendency to seek maximum gain at minimum effort (Kirsner 1979a: 27; Tobin 1990: 49-50); the tendency to routinize tasks that have to be accomplished frequently (Garcia 1975: 50; Kirsner 1979 a: 27; Reid

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1991: 258 and this volume; Diver, this volume); egocentricity (Garcia 1975: 203-204; Zubin 1979: 495-498; Contini-Morava 1983; Reid 1991: 132-133). These characteristics are not seen as confined to language, but are general properties of human intelligence that are brought to bear on the use and interpretation of language. Jakobson's demonstration of the pervasiveness of iconicity in language, contra Saussure's dictum that the linguistic sign is arbitrary (Jakobson 1965, cited in Waugh 1976 a: 47; Andrews, this volume), can also be seen as an introduction of the "human factor". The same is true of van Schooneveld's appeal to the psychological principle of "autopoiesis" (van Schooneveld 1987; 1988 b; 1991), used in defining a set of conceptual features that make up a "calculus of meaning" (see van Schooneveld 1978; Tobin 1990: 75-77; Andrews-Tobin in press). Guillaume's notion of "operative time" (see references cited in section 4.3.) also brings in an explanatory principle that goes beyond the communicative function of language, invoking instead a characteristic of speakers, their "human lucidity" (1984: 144-146).

4.5. Inexactness in the definition of the linguistic sign Jakobson has criticized Saussure's illustrative representation of the linguistic sign as a circle with a picture of a tree in the top hemisphere and the French word arbre in the bottom (1916 [1986]: 67) on two grounds: (a) strictly speaking, both the picture of the tree and the graphic symbol 'arbre' are not parts of a sign but rather individual signs in themselves (Jakobson 1959 a, cited in Waugh 1976 a: 39); (b) Saussure's diagram allows the erroneous inference that linguistic meaning consists of reference to ontological reality (e. g., trees in the real world), whereas the meaning of a given sign can only be apprehended by "translation" via other semiotic means (Jakobson 1953, cited in Waugh 1976 a: 39-40). Jakobson also objects to Saussure's insistence on describing the link between signifie and signifiant as arbitrary, preferring Peirce's tripartite division of signs into icon, index, and symbol (Jakobson 1957; 1965; Waugh 1976 a: 46— 48; Andrews, this volume).

5. Differences among sign based theories16 As mentioned in section 1., the sign based theories being discussed here differ in several respects. Some of these differences emerge from what has

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already been said, and space does not allow a full treatment of this topic (see Tobin 1987, 1990; Gvozdanovic, this volume, for additional discussion). In this section I will confine myself to points of difference that bear on the contributions to the present volume. 5.7. The representation of grammatical meaning As pointed out in section 4.2., in Columbia School theory grammatical meanings are organized into systems each of which exhaustively subdivides a particular semantic domain, or "substance", and provides information about the lexical item to which it is "satellite" (Diver, this volume). Columbia School analyses exhibit more types of oppositions than do Jakobsonian or Guillaumean analyses. With respect to the relationships among the members of a grammatical system, two kinds of oppositions are used. In the first, called an "opposition of inclusion", one meaning logically includes the other, which is more precise in that it conveys additional semantic information not conveyed by the more inclusive meaning. In the "opposition of exclusion", the meanings occupy two or more mutually exclusive subparts of the shared semantic substance (see, e. g., Diver, this volume). Meanings in this latter type of opposition may be arranged in a scale, indicating greater or lesser degrees of the shared semantic substance (see Aoyama, Davis, Leonard, Huffman, this volume). In Columbia School theory it is also possible for a set of signals to indicate information about more than one semantic domain simultaneously. For example, a verbal affix could signal information about both person and number. This situation is called an "interlock" (see Davis, Diver, Reid, this volume). The Columbia School has developed an additional theoretical construct that does not have any direct parallel in the other sign theories under discussion: the notion of "communicative strategy". A "strategy" is a routinized exploitation of a given meaning, so that it is regularly used to suggest/infer a particular type of message. A postulation of such conventionalized patterns of inference is justified by appeal to the human preference for habit or routine (see, e. g., Garcia 1975: 50; Aoyama, Goldberg, Leonard, Reid, this volume). The notion of strategy is invoked in part to explain the fact that in actual practice, meanings tend to underdetermine the actual range of messages they could theoretically be used to convey (Kirsner 1989: 163-164).

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Although Columbia School analyses often identify the same semantic substances in different, even unrelated languages (e.g., DEIXIS, used in analyses of Spanish [Garcia 1975], Dutch [Kirsner 1979 a], Swahili [Leonard 1985 and this volume], Japanese [Aoyama, this volume], among others), there is no assumption in this theory that semantic substances will recur across languages or within a single language, nor is there an attempt to discover semantic universals. In this respect the Columbia School contrasts with the Jakobsonian School, which has shared Jakobson's interest in developing a universal model for the analysis of all levels of language, from phonology to grammar, by means of binary distinctive features related to one another in oppositions of markedness (Jakobson 1972a; Holenstein 1976: 129-136; Sangster 1982: 68-77; van Schooneveld 1978: 11). In the Jakobsonian model, as seen in Jakobson's famous analyses of Russian case (1936; 1958 b) and verb morphology (1957) each grammatical meaning is represented as a bundle of conceptual features, in the same way that phonemes are represented as bundles of distinctive phonological features, and all the members of a grammatical system are either marked or unmarked with respect to each conceptual feature in the system (see Jakobson 1936; 1958b). In the work of van Schooneveld and his students, the original semantic features identified by Jakobson for Russian have been expanded and redefined, and applied to a variety of grammatical and lexical signs in several languages (e. g., van Schooneveld 1967; 1978; 1989; Andrews-Tobin in press). Grammatical meanings are now defined in terms of six conceptual features, called "cardinal features", which are binary and hierarchically ordered: "each succeeding feature, besides adding its own information, implies the information conveyed by the preceding feature" (van Schooneveld 1991: 343). Another innovation introduced by van Schooneveld is to incorporate deixis into the definition of the cardinal features. He recognizes four levels of deixis: transmissional, identificational (see section 4.2. and note 13), singulative (- non-generalizable) and non-singulative (= generalizable) (van Schooneveld 1989; 1991: 348-349; see also Andrews 1990, chapter 1 for a helpful summary and discussion). Recently, some Jakobsonian linguists have begun to move away from the kind of strict binarism that is associated with Jakobson's work, and have developed a semiotic model that incorporates both Jakobsonian markedness theory and Charles Peirce's theory of interpretants (see Shapiro 1983; Andrews 1990, chapter 2; Andrews, this volume).17 The emphasis on markedness and the search for semantic universals distinguishes the Jakobsonian School from both the Columbia School and the Guillaumean School. On the other hand, both Jakobsonian and

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Guillaumean analyses incorporate a principle of binarism, whereas this principle plays no role in Columbia School theory. For Jakobson, the notion of opposition itself logically entails binarism: every opposition is by definition a relationship between a minimum of two entities (see, e. g., Holenstein 1976: 122-129 and references cited there; Waugh 1976 a: 37). Guillaume instead develops a binary model of representing grammatical meanings based on his assumption that there are two basic operations of the mind: the ability to particularize and the ability to generalize. Each of these abilities corresponds to an abstract "moment of thought": "one from wide to narrow (particularizing), the other from narrow to wide (generalizing)" (Guillaume 1984: 118—119). Guillaume calls this basic mechanism of the mind "the radical binary tensor" (1984: 118-119). He further argues that, since language itself is an activity in which discours is created from the underlying potentiality of langue (Hewson 1981: 163), grammatical meanings must also be viewed as fundamentally dynamic in nature. They are dynamic in several senses: (a) The meaning of each sign involves a movement between limits offering a range of possible senses. The preconscious movement, which is represented as either a particularizing or generalizing vector, is intercepted by the speaker at the particular point corresponding to the intended sense in a given utterance, and by the hearer to retrieve the intended interpretation of a sign in discourse (e. g., Hirtle 1975: introduction; 1982, chapter 6; this volume; Jones 1976: 330). (b) Relationships between meanings that in other sign theories are treated as logical relationships, such as inclusion or markedness, in Guillaumean theory are conceived in terms of movement: a meaning that is a necessary precondition of another is said to "precede" it and is represented to the left of it diagrammatically (Hewson 1981: 165; Hirtle 1982: 124). Thus grammatical meanings are said to represent different positions or "moments" in a system, which is conceived as a "constructional act" (Guillaume 1984: 81; Hirtle 1975: 6).18 (c) The relationship between grammatical and lexical meaning is also viewed dynamically: Guillaume (1984: 114-118) describes the construction of the word in Indo-European languages as involving first a material phase (choice of lexical meaning from among all available lexical meanings, regarded as an operation of particularization), then a series of "mediating vector operations" culminating in a final process of categorization of a word with other grammatically similar words, so that the word becomes a particular part of speech (a process of generalization), (d) Finally, the relations between the meanings of words in a given sentence are viewed dynamically in terms of "incidence" of one to another, giving rise to an operational syntax (Valin 1981).19

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5.2. Parts of speech To the extent that "parts of speech" play a role in sign based theories, they are treated as aspects of grammatical meaning. However, they do not have equal status in the three theories under discussion here. In Columbia School theory parts of speech as traditionally defined, i. e., as subcategorizations of the lexicon to which syntactic rules apply, have no theoretical status. It is often pointed out in Columbia School work that traditional definitions of parts of speech are circular and inconsistent, especially in languages like English (see, e. g., Diver 1977). For example, Reid (1991, chapters 2 and 3) argues that the categories "mass noun", "count noun", and "noun" itself in English are the result of the interpretation of lexical meanings on the basis of the meanings of the articles and the morphology of the "Entity-number" system, rather than being inherent features of fixed classes of words. In this view it is the grammatical meanings that create the parts of speech, rather than the parts of speech that "select" one or another grammatical marker. (See also Otheguy 1977; Klein-Andreu 1983; Cheng, Diver, this volume.) In keeping with its generally inductive orientation, there is a reluctance in Columbia School work for postulating any theoretical constructs that are not needed for solving particular analytical problems (Diver, this volume). Thus Columbia School theory makes no attempt to provide general definitions for notions like "noun" or "verb", nor does it seek to establish a universal inventory of part of speech categories. In the Jakobsonian and Guillaumean theories, by contrast, parts of speech are given more explicit attention. In work of the Jakobsonian school, there is discussion of the general (semantic) definitions of parts of speech, as well as the question of their markedness relative to one another. As mentioned earlier (see section 5.1.), van Schooneveld and his students have expanded and modified the conceptual features originally used by Jakobson in his analyses of Russian case, and have applied them to a number of other grammatical phenomena, including parts of speech. In an early paper, van Schooneveld proposed definitions of verb, substantive, adverb and adjective for Russian, in which verb and substantive are marked for "dimensionality", whereas adverb and adjective are unmarked for this feature. The latter are marked for "objectiveness", which presupposes dimensionality and is thus lower on the hierarchy of markedness. In later work (1978: 220—221), van Schooneveld also discusses prepositions and conjunctions, which he regards as types of adverbs in that they, too, are maximally unmarked. Sangster (1982: 123-124) en-

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dorses van Schooneveld's analysis, without however limiting it to Russian. In fact he suggests that these markedness relationships lead to a universal of modification: "a modifier (whether attributive or predicative) usually belongs to an equally or less marked (lower) word class than its modified" (1982: 124). It is noted by Andrews (1990: 144-145), incidentally, that Jakobson himself regarded the verb as more marked than the noun. Guillaume, as mentioned earlier, regards the categorization of a word as a part of speech as the end result of a process that begins with the selection of a particular lexical meaning, a process that he calls "the formgenerating movement" (Guillaume 1943 [1984]: 112). This process may reach completion either in the "time universe", in which case the resulting word is a verb or verb-related part of speech, and takes on its grammatical characteristics such as marking for tense or mood, or in the "space universe", in which case the resulting word is a noun with its associated grammatical features, or a noun-related part of speech such as an adjective or preposition. Guillaume also argues that part-of-speech categorization constitutes "pure form", being devoid of notional or material content and retaining only formal content, and in this respect differs from, for example, number, person, or tense (Guillaume 1947 [1984]: 117-118). More detailed discussion of Guillaume's classification of parts of speech may be found in later works of the Guillaumean School, such as Jones (1970) and Hirtle (1975; 1985). Hirtle (1975) distinguishes between "predicative" parts of speech, such as substantives, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, which belong to open-ended classes and "predicate their import of meaning, their material significate, about something" (1975: 12), and "non-predicative" parts of speech, such as prepositions, pronouns, and articles, which belong to closed classes. Each part of speech is associated with characteristic "operational systems" - such as tense, mood, aspect for the verb or number for the noun - and the set of parts of speech in a given language form an integrated whole, a "system of systems" (Hirtle 1985: 79; see also Korrel 1993: 7).20 5.3. Methods of validation As evidence in support of a particular analysis, all sign-oriented linguists use the method of citing examples that illustrate a number of contextual interpretations of the signs being analyzed, and explaining how the vari-

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ous individual senses can be derived from the more abstract, general meanings that are being hypothesized, taken together with information from the linguistic and extralinguistic context (see Aoyama, Davis, Hirtle, Klein-Andreu, Leonard, Tobin, this volume). The Columbia School differs from the other schools however, in that it does not confine its validation to the individual sentence, but also considers the relation between grammatical meaning and the "macro-level" discourse. This attention to discourse has led to another major difference between the Columbia School and other sign-oriented schools, its extensive reliance on quantitative methods of validation.21 This usually involves comparing two or more signs with contrasting meanings with respect to a set of contextual features that are expected to show a statistical skewing in favor of one or the other meaning. Demonstration that the predicted skewing exists is taken as support for the meaning hypothesis. An important early work using discourse-level and quantitative validation is Diver (1969); since then quantitative validation has remained an important component of virtually all Columbia School analyses (see Diver, Goldberg, Gvozdanovic, Huffman, Leonard, this volume). Reid (this volume) discusses the history of this methodology and the rationale behind it in detail. For discussion of the role of quantitative data in deciding among competing hypotheses and of the question of falsifiability in sign based analysis, see Contini-Morava 1976; 1989; Garcia 1979; 1983; 1991; Kirsner 1979b; 1983; 1989.

6. Brief overview of the present volume Since most of the papers in this volume were originally presented at the Second International Columbia School Conference on Linguistics, the majority of contributions (those of Aoyama, Cheng, Davis, Diver, Goldberg, Gorokhova, Huffman, Klein-Andreu, Leonard, Otheguy, Reid) reflect this theoretical approach. The other papers represent a variety of theoretical perspectives: Guillaumean (Hirtle), Jakobsonian (Andrews), Cognitive Grammar (Janssen), Amsterdam Form-Content (Gvozdanovic),22 and a "mixed" approach incorporating aspects of both Columbia School and Jakobson-van Schooneveldian analysis (Tobin). The papers in Part I of the volume address various issues of theory and methodology. William Diver, the founder of the Columbia School, provides a broad overview of this approach from the point of view of its conceptualization of the nature of language, the specific problems it sets

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out to solve, and the nature of the solutions that are offered. Adopting a resolutely "austere" position on the problem confronting linguistic theory (to explain the form taken by the observable phenomena produced by acts of linguistic communication), Diver spells out the crucial roles played by communicative, physiological and psychological factors in determining the structure and functioning of language. This chapter provides Diver's most comprehensive account to date of the Columbia School framework, integrating both phonological and grammatical analysis. Wallis Reid addresses the theoretical rationale for the use of statistical data as evidence for hypotheses about grammatical meaning, a method that has been widely used in the work of the Columbia School. He argues that although statistical data are interpreted in early Columbia School work as direct tests of meaning hypotheses, in fact they are more properly interpreted as tests of "communicative strategies" - a Columbia School construct whose history and motivation he also discusses in detail. Walter Hirtle, a prominent member of the Guillaumean, or Psychomechanical, approach to language, like Diver addresses the question of the nature of the phenomena that linguistic theory seeks to explain. But unlike Diver, who restricts the definition of observable phenomena to that which is directly perceptible to the senses, Hirtle argues that language by definition includes a mental component, that speakers can introspectively examine and report on the content of utterances, and that therefore meaning should be regarded as a part of the observable phenomena of language. He illustrates this point with data from the English system of number. Jadranka Gvozdanovic compares the theoretical frameworks of the Columbia School and the Jakobsonian School, focusing on how meaning hypotheses are verified in these approaches. She compares the use of markedness as an explanatory/predictive principle in the Jakobsonian School with the quantitative validation methods characteristic of the Columbia School. She argues that some kinds of data, such as compulsory verb-object combinations in Russian, pose problems for both approaches, because semantic factors alone cannot account for the apparently arbitrary co-occurrence restrictions in the data. The opposite conclusion is reached by Alan Huffman, who addresses an analogous problem in French ("government" of the pronouns lui and le by particular verbs) from the point of view of the Columbia School. Using discourse data, Huffman argues that the attested verb-pronoun combinations can be fully explained by considering the interaction between the lexical meanings of the verb stems and the grammatical meanings of lui and le, which he analyzes as signalling different degrees of control by a partici-

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pant over the event named by the verb stem. He argues that the traditional, compositional view of meaning should be replaced by an "instrumental" view, which acknowledges the active role of the hearer in constructing a message. Ricardo Otheguy discusses the theoretical assumptions underlying the notion of loan translation, a staple in studies of language change under conditions of contact. The term is usually used to suggest that contact and noncontact dialects become systemically different with regard to one or several features. But in a theory that distinguishes the language system from language use, it turns out that most loan translations are simply usage changes rather than systemic ones. The papers in Part II of the volume address the semantic domain of deixis in various languages, and from different theoretical perspectives. Theo Janssen proposes an analysis of deictic elements such as demonstrative pronouns, personal pronouns, and other definite descriptions, from the point of view of Cognitive Grammar as developed by Ronald Langacker. He argues that these linguistic elements are all instantiations of a single conceptual schema, defined in terms of a speaker's vantage point and "mental field of vision", which may be subdivided into regions. He explains how this analysis can accommodate the pronoun systems of a number of languages, and discusses cases that pose problems of categorization, such as the Dutch polite pronoun u, which can be used with either second or third person verb endings. The papers of Robert Leonard and Takashi Aoyama discuss grammatical systems of deixis in Swahili and Japanese respectively. These languages are alike in that both have threemember systems of demonstrative pronouns whose meanings have traditionally been analyzed in terms of relative proximity to the speaker. Both authors provide counterevidence to the traditional analysis and argue that the demonstrative pronouns in these languages signal not spatial proximity, but position along a scale of concentration of attention. There are some similarities in the ways these meanings are used in Swahili and Japanese. For example, both authors find that egocentricity, or the degree of importance that a speaker attaches to a given entity in the discourse, is an important factor affecting choice among the deictic pronouns. There are marked differences as well, however: in Swahili discourse the deixis system is used to signal that relatively new vs. familiar information is being presented, whereas in Japanese discourse deixis helps to track and identify referents. The papers in Part III address aspects of lexical meaning, both synchronic and diachronic. Yishai Tobin investigates the semantic contrast between the English lexical items only said just, which are sometimes de-

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fined as synonyms and sometimes as stylistic or syntactic alternants. He argues that both signs share the semantic feature RESTRICTION OR LIMITATION OF ENTITIES, but are opposed to each other in that just is marked for the additional feature of "semantic integrality", whereas only is unmarked for this feature. His discussion includes both "micro" level analysis showing how the distinction works in contrasting examples and minimal pairs, and "macro" level analysis showing the effects of repeated use of one or the other form, or shifts from one to the other, in extended discourse. Edna Andrews discusses a set of semantic shifts in Russian lexemes that show a strong conceptual connection between 'seeing' and 'knowing', and relates these data to recent proposals about universals of semantic change made by Elizabath Closs Traugott, for example, that there tends to be a progression from meanings based in the external described situation to meanings based in the internal (cognitive) or textual and metalinguistic situations. However, Andrews extends Traugott's connection between metaphoric processes of shift and pragmatic inferences, reexamining these notions from a Peircian perspective. By using a narrower, less generic definition of pragmatic [abductive] inference, iconicity, and metaphor, Andrews seeks to eliminate the controversy over the exact roles of pragmatics, iconicity and metaphor in semantic change. Part IV of the volume consists of papers that deal with grammatical meaning in several languages. Barbara Sussman Goldberg analyzes the past subjunctive suffixes -ra and -se in Spanish, usually regarded as stylistic variants. She argues that these signs differ in meaning in that -ra, but not -se, signals EMPHASIS. This meaning lends itself to several communicative strategies, six of which are discussed in the paper: Insistence, Stepup, Highlighting, Foregrounding/Backgrounding, Courtesy, and Backgrounded Indicative. The analysis is supported with a variety of discourse data, both qualitative and quantitative. Flora Klein-Andreu discusses certain non-standard uses of pronouns and NPs in Spanish, in which a "subject form" is used, but the verb agrees with a different NP. Such constructions pose obvious problems for traditional syntactic parsing. Klein-Andreu examines the data (from oral interviews conducted in Spain) from a sign based perspective, taking as point of departure Garcia's (1975) analysis of the "subject forms" and verb ending as signalling FOCUS OF ATTENTION. She argues that these constructions exhibit what she calls "split focus", a situation that arises when there is competition for attention between the referent of the conventional subject-form (with which the verb agrees), which is locally focusworthy, and a different referent that is inherently focusworthy, such as the interlocutors in the conver-

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sation or members of their immediate family. Joseph Davis investigates the choice between the masculine singular pronouns egli and lui in contemporary literary Italian. The first is traditionally called the subject form, and the second the disjunctive; but in fact for many writers lui is more common as "subject" than egli. According to Davis's analysis, egli differs from lui in that the former always relates its referent to an event in terms of discourse prominence and participant role; lui does not necessarily relate its referent to an event. The analytical problem, then, is when does a writer/speaker choose to signal a semantic substance explicitly as opposed to opting out of it? Davis compares the use of egli and lui in Italian literary texts, identifying discourse factors that are relevant to the choice between the pronouns. Elena Gorokhova examines developmental stages in the acquisition of English articles a, the, and 0 by native speakers of Spanish, based on taped interviews with Spanish-speaking ESL students and native speakers of English. Using a semantic analysis of the articles of Standard English originally proposed by Diver (1984), Gorokhova regards each stage in acquisition as a separate Interlanguage system. The paper addresses two issues: the stages of acquisition of the articles, and the linguistic status of the articles at the different stages. Gorokhova provides data illustrating five sequential stages of acquisition, distinguished from one another by containing a new element or by change in the use of existing elements. She explores the implications of her findings for the teaching of English as a Second Language. Cheng Yumin argues that inference, commonly recognized as playing a role in, for example, the working out of conversational implicatures, is also essential for routine processing of the literal meanings of sentences. He suggests that inference functions at every level of language, illustrating his point first at the lexicogrammatical level, by showing the role played by inference in the disambiguation of homonymous morphemes and in the interpretation of polysemous morphemes in English. He then provides a detailed discussion of the role of inference in Mandarin Chinese, a language in which the meaning and grammatical function of lexemes must be determined very largely by inference. He concludes that inference is not merely something speakers resort to when there is an apparent incongruity between literal meaning and linguistic context, as in the case of Gricean implicatures, but also in arriving at the literal meaning itself. Notes * I would like to express my gratitude to Edna Andrews, William Diver, Yishai Tobin, and Walter Hirtle for their helpful comments on the original draft of this paper. I am especially indebted to the latter for clarifying the ideas of the Guillaumean School and

Introduction: On linguistic sign theory

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

29

for suggesting appropriate references, not to mention the actual wording of some parts of my text. If inaccuracies or lacunae persist in spite of their efforts, the fault is mine. Space does not allow a comprehensive treatment of sign-oriented theories here. For example, I have excluded the important topic of sign-oriented approaches to phonology (but see Diver, this volume). For discussion of recent developments in sign-oriented phonology see Tobin (1988), references cited there, and other papers on phonology in the same volume; a detailed treatment of Jakobsonian phonology is Jakobson-Waugh (1979). A third kind of "data" that some generative theories also aim to account for is the rapidity of language acquisition by children, who are said to be exposed to incomplete, often aberrant linguistic models by the members of their speech communities. Assumptions about the "poverty of stimulus" are advanced in support of an innate, speciesspecific component of the human mind called "U(niversal) G(rammar)", posited to explain the putative gap between the degenerate models to which the child is exposed and his/her eventual linguistic capacities. (Miller [1992] provides a lucid discussion of the contrast between the data used for theory construction in generative and Columbia School grammar.) As pointed out by several scholars (e. g., Lyons 1977: 146-147; Newmeyer 1991: 4), the innateness hypothesis is logically independent of other aspects of generative theory. Since it is also coupled with the belief that language is a unique faculty of the mind, so that what is known about other human mental capacities does not necessarily have any bearing on the properties of the language faculty, the innateness hypothesis also contributes nothing to the question why language should have one type of structure rather than another, or how linguistic analyses are to be justified. I will therefore leave this topic out of the present discussion. Obviously, claiming that these principles exist because they are wired into the brain does not constitute an explanation either, even if there were independent evidence that this is the case. As mentioned in note 1, attempts to seek evolutionary motivations for the principles of autonomous syntax are undermined by the failure to incorporate external controls on the construction of the principles themselves. It should be pointed out that William Diver has adhered to the principle of invariant meaning in grammatical analysis, but has remained agnostic on the question whether lexical items have invariant meanings or not (see Diver, this volume). In this respect he differs from the other sign-oriented theorists discussed here, including some from his own school (e.g., Reid 1991; Tobin 1990, 1993, and this volume). Not all sign-oriented theories explain allomorphy in terms of value (paradigmatic opposition). In Guillaumean theory both the physical sign and the mental significate are regarded as "potentials" that define a range of possible physical variations (allomorphy) as well as a range of contextual interpretations (cf. Hirtle 1975: 5). I thank Walter Hirtle for pointing out the difference between this view and that based on Saussure's valeur. Some corresponding terms referring to this distinction from various sign based approaches include basic meaning vs. concrete applications (Hjelmslev 1935: 84-85, quoted in Jakobson [1936 (1984): 62]); general meaning (Gesamtbedeutung) vs. particular meanings (Sonderbedeutungen) (Jakobson 1936 [1984]: 59-63); invariant meaning vs. contextual variants (Waugh 1976b: 84); meaning vs. message (Diver 1975: 4; Garcia 1975: 42); underlying meaning vs. sense in discourse (Hirtle 1982: 16—17); potential meaning vs. actual meaning (Hirtle, this volume; cf. Guillaume 1984: 84, 88-89 et pas-

30

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

Ellen Contini-Morava sim); systemic meaning vs. contextual meaning (Guillaume 1944 [1984]: 81); signifle de puissance vs. signifle d'effet (Guillaume, quoted in Hewson [1981: 166]). For further discussion of this point, see Reid 1974. It is true that Saussure's discussion of the syntagma does not differentiate clearly between syntagma and sign, thus remaining vague on the question whether a sign is to be regarded as a minimal unit. For more on this point see Otheguy, this volume. Van Schooneveld (1988 b: 110) states that "from a semantic point of view, it seems to me that all syntagmatic relationships can be reduced to the fundamental notion of modification", a view he has expressed consistently throughout his work (see references already cited in this section). It is interesting to note in this regard that current versions of Government-Binding theory, which reduce all phrase structures to Head-Complement relationships (see, e.g., Chomsky 1986: 80—84), seem to have arrived at almost the same conclusion - except, of course, that in GB theory such relationships are not regarded as semantic. Other sign-oriented treatments of agreement include Diver 1981; 1987; Hirtle 1982; van Schooneveld 1984; 1988 b; Contini-Morava in press. There is a copious literature of exegesis and criticism of Saussure's ideas from many different theoretical perspectives. For present purposes I will confine the discussion to criticisms made by Columbia School, Jakobsonian, and Guillaumean linguists. It has been claimed that the Cows, compiled from students' lecture notes, is not entirely accurate in its portrayal of Saussure's ideas, some of which are further clarified in Saussure (1993; Culler 1976: 25-26; Harris 1986: xii). However, for several generations of linguists the Cours has been the only readily available means of access to Saussure's ideas. I therefore rely on that as the basis for the present section. Terminology differs among sign based theories, as pointed out in note 6. Terms corresponding to Saussure's signiflantl'signifle include "signal/meaning" (used by the Columbia School), "signans/signatum" (used by the Jakobsonian school), and "sign/significate [or 'meaning']" (used by the Guillaumean school). The Guillaumean distinction between langue (translated as 'tongue') and discours (translated as 'discourse') differs from Saussure's langue/parole distinction in that Guillaume explicitly incorporates the notion of "operative time", or process, into his model of language, whereas Saussure's conception of langue is essentially a static system of relationships (see Hewson 1976: 325; 1984: xxi). Other differences among sign based approaches that are more than terminological are discussed briefly below. For more detailed information than space allows here, the reader is referred to Tobin (1987) and to the works cited in the bibliography. For detailed discussion of critiques of Saussure from the Guillaumean and Jakobsonian perspectives respectively, see Hewson (1976) and Holenstein (1976). In Jakobsonian theory, especially as developed by van Schooneveld and his students, all linguistic acts are conceived as acts of perception, so that "reference in language is not made to things, but to the perception of things" (Sangster 1982: 159). In this sense both grammatical and lexical meaning can be described as "deictic". This point is also made by other sign-oriented schools, as discussed in section 2.1. See for example Hirtle (1992). This section has benefitted greatly from Tobin's (1987, 1990) lucid comparisons of Columbia School, Jakobsonian, and Guillaumean approaches. I would like to thank Edna Andrews (private correspondence) for helpful discussion of this point.

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18. Interestingly, the hierarchical structure of semantic features in Jakobsonian theory is also sometimes described in procedural terms. Thus van Schooneveld (1978: 15-16) describes the genesis of the Russian sentence besedka stoit v sadu 'the gazebo is in the garden' in sequential terms as a movement through increasing levels of markedness. 19. This section has benefitted greatly from the comments and suggestions of Walter Hirtle (private correspondence). 20. It should be pointed out that the notion of parts of speech is not an a priori requirement of Guillaumean theory. For example, Lowe (1985: introduction, section 4) argues that in Siglit Inuvialuit Eskimo there are no fixed classes of words corresponding to parts of speech: words are formed from wordbases by means of lexical and grammatical affixes in a momentary arrangement, part of the act of speech (or "discourse"), in a manner comparable to the construction of sentences in English and similar languages. 21. I would like to thank Yishai Tobin (private correspondence) for reminding me of the important connection between the attention to discourse and the development of quantitative validation in Columbia School work. Tobin himself has explored the relationship between sign and text extensively in his own work (see especially Tobin 1990). 22. This is a group of scholars at the Slavic Seminar of the University of Amsterdam who have shown a special interest in the work of the Columbia School, formerly known as "Form-Content Grammar". Other work within this approach includes Barentsen (1985), Gvozdanovic (1985; 1991), Keijsper (1985), Stunovä (1986; 1988; 1993).

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van Schooneveld, Cornells H. 1960 "On the word order in modern Russian", International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 3: 40-44. 1964 "Zur vergleichenden semantischen Struktur der Wortfolge in der russischen, deutschen, französischen und englischen Sprache", Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch 11:94-100. 1967 "On the meaning of the Serbocroatian aorist", in: To honor Roman Jakobson. Essays on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 2126-2129. 1977 a "The place of gender in the semantic structure of the Russian language", Scando-Slavica 23: 129-138. 1977b "By way of introduction: Roman Jakobson's tenets and their potential", in: Daniel Armstrong-Cornells H. van Schooneveld (eds.), 1 — 11. 1978 Semantic transmutations: Prolegomena to a calculus of meaning, I: The cardinal semantic structure of the prepositions, cases, and paratactic conjunctions in contemporary standard Russian. Bloomington, IN: Physsardt. 1983 "Programmatic sketch of a theory of lexical meaning", Quaderni di semantica 4(1): 158-170. 1984 "Agreement in Russian", in: Benjamin Stolz-I. R. Titunik-Ludomir Dolezel (eds.), 189-214. 1987 "Linguistic structure and autopoiesis", in: Krystyna Pomorska—Roman Jakobson Colloquium (eds.), 123-142. 1988 a "The semantics of the Russian pronominal structure", in: Alexander M. Schenker (ed.), 401-414. 1988 b "Paradigmatic structure and syntactic relations", in: Yishai Tobin (ed.), 109— 121. 1989 "Syntagmatic relations and paradigms: Tenses and moods in ancient Greek verbal structure: A semantic analysis of the ancient Greek verb system", in: Yishai Tobin (ed.), 99-121. 1991 "Praguean structure and autopoiesis: Deixis as individuation", in: Linda Waugh-Stephen Rudy (eds.), 341-362. Waugh, Linda 1976 a Roman Jakobsons science of language. Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press. 1976 b "The semantics and paradigmatics of word order", Language 52(1): 82-107. 1977 A semantic analysis of word order. Leiden: Brill. 1979 "The context-sensitive meaning of the French subjunctive", in: Linda Waugh-Frans van Coetsem (eds.), 179-238. Waugh, Linda-Morris Halle (eds.) 1984 Roman Jakobson: Russian and Slavic grammar: Studies 1931-1981. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Waugh, Linda-Monique Monville-Burston (eds.) 1990 Roman Jakobson on language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Waugh, Linda-Stephen Rudy (eds.) 1991 New vistas in grammar: Invariance and variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Waugh, Linda-Frans van Coetsem (eds.) 1979 Contributions to grammatical studies: Semantics and syntax. Leiden: Brill.

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Zubin, David 1975 "On the distributional properties of surface morphology and their consequences for semantic analysis", Columbia University Working Papers in Linguistics 2: 189-218. 1977 "The semantic basis of case alternation in German", in: Ralph Fasold-Roger Shuy (eds.), 88-99. 1979 "Discourse function of morphology: The focus system in German", in: Talmy Givon (ed.), 469-504. Zubin, David-Klaus-Michael Kopeke 1981 "Gender: A less than arbitrary grammatical category", Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society 17: 439-449. 1984 a "Sechs Prinzipien für die Genuszuweisung im Deutschen: Ein Beitrag zur natürlichen Klassifikation", Linguistische Berichte 93: 26-50. 1984b "Affect classification in the German gender system", Lingua 63: 41 -96. 1985 "Cognitive constraints on the order of subject and object in German", Studies in Language 9(1): 77-107. 1986 "Natural classification in language: A study of the German gender system", Buffalo cognitive science report no. 2. Buffalo: State University of New York Buffalo Linguistics Department.

Parti Issues of theory and methodology

Theory William Diver

1. Introduction The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive overview of a theoretical position that has arisen from many individual analyses of human language, a position to which a number of other studies in this volume are related. (The expression "we" in this paper is intended to refer to all those who have contributed, collectively, to our understanding.) Since analysis is still in progress on many fronts, this does not pretend to be a definitive statement, to stand for all time. It is, rather, an overall view of how things look at this stage of development. The general picture of human language is that of a particular kind of instrument of communication, an imprecise code by means of which precise messages can be transmitted through the exercise of human ingenuity. The code and the ingenuity must be kept clearly separate; most of the difficulties encountered in the various schools of linguistic analysis result, simply, from the attempt to build the ingenuity into the structure of language itself. A constant theme of the paper will be the nature of the relationship between analysis and theory, and an insistence that theory be guided by analysis, rather than the other way around, no matter how unfamiliar the resulting theory may appear. 1.1. Overview of the conclusions reached We begin with a brief summary of the most fundamental points, stressing again that these are the results of analytical procedures, conclusions reached, rather than in any way a priori assumptions that we made up in advance. 7.7.7. Human communication What we informally call "language" is a uniquely human instrument of communication; it differs from nonhuman forms of animal communication as a result of certain changes that have occurred in our species with the process of evolution.

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1.1.2. Human physiology Humans have an improved sound-producing mechanism within the vocal tract, one that makes possible controlled production of a much larger number of distinct sounds, together with corresponding development of the central nervous system to provide the necessary controls. It may be noted that these (innate) properties are strictly parallel to those that make our species foremost in the use of tools. Other species use tools, just as other species communicate. We do it best because of a more precisely controllable musculature and more advanced controls. 1.1.3. Human intelligence Humans benefit from a great improvement in intelligence, or problemsolving ability, that makes it possible to put together messages of a much higher degree of complexity and to infer the point of a communication even on the basis of quite meagre information. This advantage in functioning makes it possible for the units of communication to be remarkably imprecise in comparison with the precision of the ideas that are communicated. 1.1.4. Economy This is a feature shared with other species, what is usually referred to as economy of effort; that is, a general avoidance of the use of a greater degree of precision than is necessary for the accomplishment of any given task. These characteristics of human in comparison with animal communication make it easy to imagine a gradual evolutionary development from the one to the other. It is often held that the acquisition of syntax stands as a bar to gradual evolutionary development, but it should be noted that, in all the analytical work that has been done within this school of research, it has never emerged that there is any justification for assuming that categories of "syntax" play any role in the structure or functioning of human language. When tested as hypotheses, these regularly fail. The four factors — communication, the sound-producing mechanism, intelligence, and economy - saturate the structure and functioning of language, as we have analysed it, and hence of the theory, and much that is novel in what we do, much that is difficult to understand on the part of others, arises from their virtual absence in other approaches to the study of language; that is, other approaches to what is called "linguistic theory".

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Finally, we have been led to a quite different conceptualization of the notion of "language". It seems not to be the case (by which is meant here that no evidence has been found in support of it) that there is existing out there a "language", in the sense of some ideal construct, which it is the job of learners to learn and analysts to analyze. The learner, rather, seems to create what may be fairly individualized techniques of communication, more or less on the model of what can be observed in the behavior of others. This has as a consequence a lack of anything even approaching absolute uniformity from individual to individual, and leads to the realization that such a notion as a stock of "grammatical sentences" to which analysts are responsible, and to which users are constrained, does not conform to anything in reality. In the present work the term "language" will continue to be used, as a convenient terminology, but the inadequacy of the term should be kept constantly in mind.

1.2. The nature of theory We now turn attention to the word "theory" itself. There is of course a temptation to begin by posing the question "What is a theory?" or to demand that the term "theory" be defined before we take even the first step in the discussion. But that question and that demand rest on a certain metaphysical approach to the whole problem of the acquisition of knowledge: an approach that implies the a priori existence of certain metaphysical realities, such as theories, with an accompanying analytical task of discovering the properties of those metaphysical realities. The history of the study of language has been plagued by an insistence on bringing into the discussion a priori metaphysical realities that turn out to have nothing to do with actual languages. We do not then develop a "theory of structure" on the basis of the history of linguistic philosophy; rather, we recognize that "theory" is merely a word in the English language, and that the only problem that confronts us in respect to it is merely the practical one of whether it is a useful term with which to refer to a certain kind of concept. To clear the air then, the term "theory" will here be used to refer to a summary of the general characteristics of successful solutions to individual problems. It definitely will not be used to refer to a speculative hypothesis that attempts to forecast in advance an as yet unattained solution to a problem.

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1.3. The problem to be solved The theory, then, is the solution to a problem. What is the problem? Again, there is a natural temptation to say, "Well, the problem is language." But then we would have to ask the question "But what is language?", and having got to that point we realize that we probably want to save the English word "language" and apply it to the solution to the problem. We want to be able to say, at some point, "This, then, is what language is," recognizing, in the word "language", a common-sense reference to a certain kind of human activity, but not, again, a metaphysical reality whose properties we have to set out to discover. 1.3.1. Problems not to be solved While we are about it, there are other kinds of questions that we do not want to ask in advance, and certainly not to answer in advance. We do not want to make confident statements about what kinds of innate properties our species must have in order to acquire language at an early age, if we do not yet have a sure knowledge of what it is that is being acquired. We do not want to take the position that, although we know very little as yet about language, the one thing we do know is that it has a very abstract and complex structure; for, obviously, until we are able to state what that structure is, there is no justification for saying there is any structure at all. The very term "structural linguistics", after all, is but another speculative hypothesis. Indeed, one of the ironic paradoxes of the activities of our contemporaries is their willingness to write whole books on subjects that they blandly admit they know little or nothing about. All this underlines the importance of doing the analytical work first and letting the theory arise out of successful analysis. 1.3.2. Avoiding speculation But if we want to avoid the speculative, the metaphysical, how can we go about it? The traditional entanglement with metaphysics is rooted in the original conceptualization of the problem: namely, what is the nature of thought? Particularly, how are parts of thoughts put together to form complete thoughts? And what in language corresponds to these parts and to this procedure? The study of the philosophy of language is to this day concerned with that problem, and syntactic analysis follows it faithfully. The question is asked, for example: what is the definition of the subject,

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or what in language corresponds to the subject? But there is apparently nothing that consistently corresponds to "subject" in any known language; a typical grammar of Latin or Greek will list several different things that can "function as subject". That is, a part of the thought that seems transparently self-evident finds no echo in language. Yet the concept has not been abandoned in the various schools of linguistics. In fact, it is a constant characteristic of the confirmed metaphysician that he never abandons a hypothesis, no matter how often it fails to be supported by analysis, or by any significant amount of empiricial evidence. To avoid metaphysics, then, one simple technique is purely analytical: abandon hypotheses that don't work. The longer you cling to an obviously erroneous hypothesis, the later you will come upon a better one. It may be pointed out, in passing, that a willingness to abandon erroneous hypotheses, and even an insistence on rigorous testing of hypotheses, is another characteristic that sets our work apart from the traditional syntax. There, no contradiction is even recognized when, for example, the nominative case is said to be the mark of the subject but is also said to occur in the predicate. Note that this procedure - eliminating the metaphysical by testing still leaves open the possibility that some metaphysically derived category might just happen to be useful for the solution to a problem; testing it as a hypothesis will determine whether this is so. We keep in mind, of course, that it is not our purpose to demonstrate that the tradition is wrong, but merely to find out what is right. But it would not appear to be an efficient procedure to undertake to test some long list of inherited metaphysically inspired categories on the off chance that one or two of them may turn out to be useful; if they are, we will find out about them anyway by normal procedures of analysis. 1.3.3. The role of observation

A more fundamental approach to the avoidance of metaphysics is to revert to the original conception associated with the word "science"; that is, a study based on observation, not on speculation. This in turn gives rise to the question "What qualifies as an observation?". For many, the subject of a thought is in some sense observable, as are the judgments of native speakers on matters of grammaticality. Descriptive linguists, conscientiously avoiding the metaphysical, were acutely aware that their phonemes and morphemes were in danger of being mentalistic concepts, and the more strict practitioners took care to

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point out that the morpheme, for example, was but a rubric standing at the head of a list of allomorphs. They do not seem to have entertained the problem that the allomorphs themselves, and even the morphs, were equally mentalistic conceptualizations. So also the allophones and phones. If we were to ask Ellen Contini-Morava to recite for us a Swahili proverb, I am sure most of us would agree that we are not observing any even of these categories - phone, allophone, morph, allomorph - in that language, to say nothing of categories of syntax. 1.3.4. Sound waves as observations Let us retreat then, to the most primitive, the most austere of all positions in respect to observation that has to do with human language. What is observable in the Swahili proverb, to the uninitiated, is simply the sounds themselves, acoustic phenomena that are entirely uncategorized. If we wish merely to describe them, the procedure is to make an acoustic analysis and state the purely acoustic characteristics of the sound waves. If we occupy a position of this austerity, we are immediately putting ourselves completely outside the field of linguistics, in the opinion of most other practitioners. Representatives of the principal European and American schools have agreed consistently that phonetics is outside the scope of the discipline, whereas we, by committing ourselves to a study based on the sound waves themselves, necessarily begin with the study of what would normally be regarded as "mere phonetics". Comfortable or uncomfortable as such a position may be, in taking it we pose the problem as follows: in any instance of what we informally recognize as speech, what determines the form taken by the sound waves we observe? 1.3.5. The choice of observations and the choice of disciplines We thus recognize two possibilities, in the identification of observations, and suggest that two different disciplines, not merely two different theories within the same discipline, results from the distinction. If one accepts subjective observation - the recognition of judgments and the nature of judgments as providing the problem to be solved — the task being confronted will take some form, and one possibility of such a form is to be seen in the long history of philosophy and syntax. One cannot object to that as an undertaking, but if one accepts the sound waves as the observations to be accounted for, the nature of the problem and the nature of the solution can be expected to be different in kind.

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There is, then, really no argument over what should be taken as observation; one can do as one pleases. If there is to be a confrontation between the two choices it will come from the success each has when they confront some same problem. In practical terms, that occurs in the area of grammatical analysis. Syntax seeks to relate the morphological categories of a grammar to the subjectively determined categories of thought, to relate the "nominative case" to the "subject". An approach beginning with the sound waves as observations has as a primary characteristic that it does not begin with any of the subjective categories of thought. What categories it ends with will be the result of analysis. What each method of study has to say about the nominative case, for example, can then be put to an empirical evaluation in terms of the usual criteria of scope and adequacy of coverage and of the fit between hypothesis and observation. The proof of that pudding can be left to the eating. We undertake now an elucidation of the kinds of results that have been obtained.

1.4. The structure of the theory That being the problem, discovering the motivation for the particular form taken by sound waves produced by the human vocal apparatus, what does the solution look like? Again, before going into detail, let me summarize its principal characteristics. 1.4.1. Explanation as the discovery of motivation First and most generally, we are concerned with explanation, not description; explanation in the sense of answering the question "Why?"; explanation in the sense of finding the causes that produce effects. Explanation in the sense of finding the motivation that leads the speaker to produce a certain sequence of sound waves. Not, of course, in that other sense of the English word "explanation", sometimes called "horizontal explanation", that applies the term to a demonstration that a particular item is member of a more general class, for that demonstration does not answer our question, which would then be: why does the entire class behave that way? Discovery of motivation is not the same thing as reduction to maximum descriptive simplicity. The general procedure for determining causation is simply to discover, for each individual problem, the general kind of cause, and the particular application of that cause, that is producing the effect we observe. Any such cause - that is, any cause that solves a problem for us - is necessar-

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ily introduced into the general matrix of the theory, but no potential cause is introduced unless it earns its way by solving a problem. This is the ultimate control, the ultimate cut-off, of the domain of the theory, and it is quite understandable that many of the traditional preoccupations of linguistic scholarship may never be taken into consideration at all if we proceed rigorously on this basis. In looking for causes, we of course want to avoid another metaphysical trap, the philosopher's search for a single ultimate cause that accounts for the entire universe. Our causes are to account for our observations; if someone wants to investigate the causes of those causes, OK, but that is not part of our problem. One of the responsibilities of the theory is to establish the boundaries of the discipline, the scope of the investigation. What we have decided, by practical experience, is that the explanation rests in the immediate cause, not in ultimate cause. The basis for this decision is simply that the introduction of more remote levels of causation does not provide us with any better solution to our problem than the solution we already have. For example, it is transparent that if we are to find causes of the characteristics of our sound waves, that kind of cause is to be sought, in part, within the science of acoustics. But that does not mean that we must gain a mastery of the entire science of acoustics and bring it into the theory. Such important matters, in acoustics, as the Doppler effect, Snell's law applied to the transmission of sound underwater, and the like, never turn out to play a role in the study of the sound waves of speech, by which is meant that they have not been found usable for the solution of any individual problem, and until they are they can remain safely outside the domain of the theory. The sound waves and the immediate causes thus form the two extreme boundaries in the extent of the theory. We usually refer to these as the "observations" and the "orientations", respectively. But the relationship between these two must be made explicit in the many individual cases that we encounter. To these explications we apply the term "hypotheses". Their function is to demonstrate in what way the general causation, say acoustics, manifests itself in the production of the particular observations. The theory thus has three major components in its structure: observations, orientations, and hypotheses. Note that the observations, the sound waves, exist independently of any attempt on our part to come to an understanding of them; they pose a problem that we may or may not undertake to solve; we do not invent them in the process of setting up a

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problem. Similarly, the orientations exist as bodies of knowledge, independently of any investigation of the sound waves of speech. This independence is of importance, for it is the factor of independence that enables us to introduce the notion of cause; the orientation is a something else, existing outside the problem, that we appeal to for understanding, for explanation, of the observations. The hypotheses, on the other hand, do not exist independently of the problem. They represent the details of the solution, and are created by us purely and simply to show how the causation takes effect. The characteristics of the hypotheses are subject to the same kind of control as is the selection of orientations. Any particular hypothesis, or kind of hypothesis, or category within a hypothesis, is admitted only if it solves a problem. If a potential category, such as "subject", never in fact manages to solve a problem for us, it never gets admitted as part of the hypothesis or of the theory as a whole. This is part of the consequence of treating "subject" as a hypothesis put forward to solve a problem rather than as a matter of observation. This procedure has the incidental advantage of avoiding another kind of metaphysical trap, a trap embodied in questions such as "How abstract is phonology?". The degree of abstractness of a category is determined in a very simple way: it is just that degree of abstractness that solves the problem. If it is too much so, or too little so, it will not solve the problem. There is one final metaphysical trap to be avoided, and that bears on the point alluded to before, the philosopher's desire to have a solution that depends on one single variable — an ultimate cause that stands at the end of some long chain of causes. In our refusal to undertake any a priori commitments, we do not prescribe any number of variables as admissable or necessary - just as we do not insist on binary oppositions, markedness, ordered rules, or other a priori characteristics for our hypotheses. Whatever number of variables the solution to the problem requires, that is the number of variables that must be introduced. In practice, as it turns out, those orientations that must be appealed to for the solution of all the problems we have encountered are each necessary as joint variables for the solution of every individual problem. In sum, the term "theory" is applied to the interrelationships among three components - the observations, the hypotheses, the orientations. The theory is the general form of the solution provided to the problem posed by the observations. The hypotheses provide the details of the solution by demonstrating a cause and effect relationship between the orientations and the observations.

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1.5. The relation of theory to analysis Let me make explicit here what has already been indicated. The theory, for us, is not the beginning of analysis but the endpoint. The theory was not assumed, much less known, in advance. Rather, it gradually dawned on those of us engaged in this kind of analysis. Analytical experience with many small problems gradually built up a body of precedents to which we have turned in addressing each new problem. But even precedents thus developed do not exercise any absolute control over analytical procedure. The theory, as the embodiment of analytical experience, is constantly open to reappraisal arising out of the exigencies of new analysis. This, then, is not a treatise on the nature of theory; this is simply a report on what our analyses are about, what ideas they have led to. That is what we call theory.

2. The relation of the observations to the hypotheses With the general outline of the theory laid out - observations, orientations, hypotheses — attention turns first to the relation between observation and hypothesis, and this for two reasons. As has already been indicated, the observations themselves have been an area of de facto neglect in most approaches to the study of human language, and it is important to specify how the difficulties that led to this neglect can be successfully confronted. Secondly, the working out of the hypotheses constitutes the major analytical task confronting us, and it is important to specify just how the hypotheses are to be made accountable to observations generally regarded as insuperably recalcitrant. The hypotheses may be divided into two kinds: those that deal directly with the sound waves, and those that deal only indirectly with the sound waves. The terms "Phonology" and "Grammar", respectively, will be applied to these two, and of course it is the former that provides the more immediate problem in the present section. (Later, there will be a further subdivision of "Grammar" into "Grammar" and "Lexicon", but for the present classification these two differ from "Phonology" in the same way.) 2.1. Accountability to the observations The observations confront us with chaos, and the analytical problem is to impose order on the chaos. You might be happier if I were to say "find

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order in the chaos" rather than impose order on it, but the truth is that there is no order there; it really is chaos. By chaos, I refer of course to that truism of phonetic research, that the same sequence of sound waves never occurs twice, that no matter how hard we try we cannot repeat even a single word without introducing some variation. In other words, for all our superiority of control over the musculature of the vocal tract, in comparison with that of other species, we are still a long way from perfect. At the very beginning of the undertaking then, the factor of imprecision introduces itself, and the need for human intelligence to compensate for the imprecision and to interpret in spite of it. This factor suggests one more remark about the attempt at a descriptive linguistics. One formulation of that methodology was that the task was to establish the identity of "recurrent partials". But, of course, there are no recurrent partials in the observations themselves; even the "phones" do not recur. So if we take description in its most austere sense, as the description of observable physical phenomena, we must conclude that a descriptive linguistics is in fact not possible. Inevitably, then, we begin our study, not with description but with the formation of hypotheses. How do we do that? Perhaps the simplest way to put it is that human intelligence recognizes an intended similarity, not an actual identity, between two instances of the recurrent partials of the descriptivist. Human intelligence interprets a certain range of imprecision as being an approximation of a certain category. In the analytical procedure, that category is a hypothesis. Further, human intelligence can recognize an intent even where there is no physical similarity at all; outright mistakes in pronunciation, or even choice of words, can be silently corrected, in the same way that we correct typographical errors. One step in the analytical procedure then, will be to pin down the nature of the intent. In fact, more generally, pinning down the nature of the intent is the solution of the problem as a whole, the motivation for the configuration of the sound waves is largely to be found in an intent, an hypothesized intent, on the part of the speaker. Now of course we can't do this for Swahili, those of us who don't know the language. So the first requirement of analysis must be that we, in some sense, learn the language. In what sense? Again, the procedures of descriptive linguistics are instructive. There was a tendency there to insist that the analyst need not know the language; instead he worked with an informant who did know the language. It was the task of the analyst, then, by skillful questioning, to elicit what the native speaker knew, and this form of analysis was uniformly success-

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ful in establishing two kinds of hypotheses: the phones, allophones and phonemes; the morphs, allomorphs and morphemes, of a language. The success of the procedure was based, avowedly, on the notion of distinctiveness: minimally distinctive units of sound and of form. Distinctiveness of course means nothing other than "distinctiveness in communication". From the routine successes of phonemic and morphemic analysis we may extrapolate to the position that order is imposed on the chaos by the devising of hypotheses that have to do with, at least, communication. The intent that is recognized, the error that is recognized, is by reference to its relationship to the remainder of a communication. The learner of the language, then, devises hypotheses by repeated comparisons of sound waves with communications; the analyst discovers the hypotheses by essentially the same procedure, although the technique itself is of course very different. It is probably not necessary to point out that the idea of an ordered discovery of the hypotheses by the analyst a procedure of working "from the bottom up": phone, allophone, phoneme, morph, allomorph, morpheme - cannot actually take place, as descriptive linguists got around to admitting. One cannot entertain a hypothesis concerning the identity of a phone without at the same time entertaining a hypothesis of the identity of a morpheme. Observation, of course, is based on the recognition that a given morpheme is made up of certain phonemes and that, in the midst of all the variation, there is a certain consistency in the sound-producing characteristics of each phoneme. The possibility of making this kind of observation is, obviously, what underlies the procedure of making a phonetic or phonemic transcription, or even making use of an alphabet. These activities can be carried on readily enough, regardless of what the point of the undertaking may be. The successful techniques of descriptive linguistics, then, provide us with the identity of a certain list of distinctive units, phonemes and morphemes; they do not, however, provide us with a statement of the characteristics of these units, and, hence, they do not provide the kind of explanation that we are looking for. In particular, the phonemes do not specify the relationship to the observations, the sound waves, and the morphemes, although they recognize that communication is involved, do not provide us with an understanding of just what it is that is being communicated. It is by stopping short of explanation at this point that the approach earns the label of "descriptive". Ironically, however, even thus they were not actually being descriptive, for the discovery even of phones and morphs is a first step in a series of explanatory hypotheses.

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This network of hypotheses based on distinctiveness alone, limited though it was, provides the fundamental organization, the bare bones, of our hypotheses and their interrelationships. These bare bones provide the irreducible minimum of our responsibilities to the observations. Phonemics and morphemics alone result in an incompleteness of treatment that is most marked at the extremes, the phonetics of the phoneme and the meaning of the morpheme, an ironic incompleteness for anyone who, as Saussurean or Bloomfieldian, held a fundamental commitment to the role of communication, for without these two the basic necessities of communication — the signal and the meaning — are not met. What needs to be added to these bare initial hypotheses is a statement of how the distinctive unit of sound, the phoneme, is to be related to the sounds themselves, and how the distinctive unit of form, the morpheme, is to be related to the communication. The general plan of the solution to these problems of relatedness consists of a recycling of a same kind of problem, as follows. In the material being confronted, there is a certain ordering of observations and then of identifiable units - the phonemes and the morphemes. The constant problem is, why these units in this position and why this order? What is the motivation? At the most primitive level, we have an ordering of sound waves. Certain aspects of this ordering follow from the ordering of phonemes. To demonstrate this, it is necessary to assign to the phonemes certain characteristics that will have the effect of producing the appropriate sound waves; that is, characteristics that are physiologically and acoustically realistic. Attention then turns to the next step in the problem: the phonemes themselves stand in a certain order; Why? The first answer to this is that certain phonemes stand in a certain order because that is the order in which they regularly stand within a certain morpheme, so we now have an ordering of sound waves traceable to a selection of a particular morpheme. But a second answer is also necessary: given the morpheme, why do the phonemes stand in the order they do within it? For, of course, phonemes do not stand in just any order within morphemes; there are readily observable favorings and disfavorings in the range of possibilities. Indeed we find these stated by descriptive linguists, again, under such terminology as the canonical shape of the syllable, or of the word. To answer this second question, characteristics must be assigned to the individual phonemes that reveal the motivations for the favorings and disfavorings within the morpheme. By the time all these characteristics have been added to the original bare distinctive unit, the phoneme, we find ourselves confronted by a

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unit sufficiently different from the bare phoneme that it deserves a distinct label. We will therefore retain the word "phoneme" for its original application and use the term "phonological unit" for the fuller characterization. Now at the level of the morpheme, we find our problem again: What motivates the appearance of this particular morpheme? or, more generally, What motivates the selection and arrangement of morphemes in the text, or utterance, written or spoken. For the descriptive linguist, it was held to be sufficient to state that selection and that arrangement, but we again want to know the motivation, so we have to assign characteristics to the morpheme, in addition to mere distinctiveness, that will account for the selection and the arrangement over a certain extent of text. These characteristics turn out in analytical practice to be closely related to what is being communicated; they signal what might be referred to as a kind of semantic content, and it is to the semantic content specifically associated with a morpheme that we first apply the term "meaning". The connection between sounds and communication, then - between "sound and sense", if you will - is made by the analyst through the repetitive solution to problems of identity and arrangement, or of distribution, as we usually call it. The manner in which each problem builds on the preceding sets up an unbroken connection among all the hypotheses of the theory. At the same time, the characteristics assigned by the hypotheses to each unit, phonological and morphological, are consistent with the two extremes of the procedure, the observations and the orientations. This relationship of consistency, in return, exercises an ultimate control over all the individual characteristics assigned to the various units. If the point is to be made that the hypotheses demonstrate how the orientations motivate the observations, and how the observations, conversely, are particular instances of the orientations, the hypotheses must contain nothing that contradicts either.

2.2. Delimitation of accountability This analytical procedure leaves unanswered one important question arising from the observation: to what level of detail is the analyst responsible for the characteristics of the sound waves? For it really does seem a wildly impossible task to go out and collect recordings of people talking, and then to find the motivation for every tracing to be found in an analysis of the sound waves. Is the totality of such a task the responsibility of the linguist alone, or must it be freely admitted that some of it must be left

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to other disciplines? But if the responsibility of the linguist is to be limited, how do we find out where to draw the line. 2.2.7. Working from the outside in One approach to the solution of the problem is to take the entirety of the sound wave observation and proceed by peeling off those details for which we do not want to take responsibility. 2.2.1.1. Non-vocal sound Under normal everyday conditions of speaking, the sound waves typically contain characteristics from sources other than that of the human voice: what may generally be characterized as background noise. In posing the problem, above, as that of accounting for the characteristics of the sound waves, this factor was not taken into consideration. If we were setting up the study in the framework of a laboratory experiment, we would automatically control the experiment by seeing to it that background noises do not interfere. We would thus be led to define the problem more narrowly: accountability for those features of the sound waves that are produced by the human vocal apparatus. 2.2.1.2. Vocal sound But even this exclusion, obviously, does not narrow the problem sufficiently. Variations in fundamental frequency are introduced in singing. Variations in the selection of morphemes (ultimately affecting the sound waves) are introduced into metrical composition simply in order to fit the scansion or the rhyme scheme of the line. Worse yet, temporary malfunction of the vocal apparatus itself - a stuffed up nose, a sneeze may produce variations in the sound waves. Our instinct is that these too should be peeled off from the area of accountability. But any consensus thus obtainable ultimately confronts observations where disagreement and arbitrariness are likely to set in. The most obvious example of this is in the area known as "prosody". How are linguists to treat variations in amplitude, in frequency, in speed of production? Descriptivists labelled some of these "suprasegmental phonemes", suggesting a treatment parallel to that of the "segmental phonemes". But others would lump these "prosodic features" together with the general area of phonetics that is "outside of linguistics". In other words, if we begin by peeling off obvious layers from the outside, we still arrive at a point where we are confronted by an unanalysed complex of observations, with no guidance as to what might be peeled off next.

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Since there would be no point in coming down arbitrarily somewhere in the midst of all this confusion, and since decisions cannot be made simply on the basis of listening to the sounds themselves, it becomes apparent that any decision would have to be made in some way that arises out of the theory as a whole. And since the characteristics of the theory are ultimately derived from analysis, it is to analysis that we must finally turn. That is to say, it is to analysis that we must initially turn. 2.2.2. Working from the inside out

The alternative to peeling off from the outside the things that obviously don't matter is to begin from the inside. In other words, instead of beginning with a total responsibility to the entire package of the sound waves and proceeding to get rid of our responsibilities step by step, we begin with zero responsibility and look for anything in the sound waves that we can account for. As we succeed with small initial steps we gradually bring segments of the chaos under control. We are then confronted with a straightforward analytical problem: How far can we push this procedure? The answer seems to be that at any point in the progress our responsibility extends just as far as our success in analysis. How much farther it can go remains an open question. This procedure has the very distinct advantage that we do not begin by inadvertently setting ourselves a task so impossible of achievement that we are never able even to get well started on it. It also has the advantage that as we succeed with a few small problems what remains is cast into a clearer light. To jump far ahead in this procedure for an example, if we are confronted by a language in which "certain verbs govern the dative", solving the problem of what the dative is contributing is likely to give insight into why it is that just these verbs are so closely associated with it. Without that initial information about the contribution of the dative itself, the constructions remain arbitrary and inexplicable, for we are very likely to attribute to the verb, in this instance, properties that are actually being provided by the dative. This, in fact, is what has turned out to be the hallmark of our analytical procedures: always begin with the smallest possible problem. Get it solved, and then look around for the next smallest problem, taking advantage of the leverage obtained by the solution of the previous ones. 2.2.2.1. The primary hypotheses So where do we begin? Where is that first step? It was indicated above that the analyst, like the learner of a language, comes very readily to the

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recognition of an inventory of phonemes, in the usage of those who already know the language, and the recognition of an inventory of morphemes made up of those phonemes. It was said that these bare bones provide the irreducible minimum of our responsibilities to the observations. It is also probably true that these are the easiest problems to solve. We can approach the potential units one by one, with cautious approximations, and gradually build up the analytical experience that will permit us to move on to more difficult problems. One might suppose that, in beginning with the phonology, one might take one phoneme and solve entirely the problem of what characteristics to assign it. But of course it doesn't work that way analytically. In practice, we jump around from unit to unit and back and forth between phoneme and morpheme, and gradually build up a number of possibilities. As we do so, there emerges an awareness of the relationship between units, leading to a more uniform characterization and even to the idea of a system of which the units are individual members. The result of this is the building up of an inventory of phonemes as phonological units and an inventory of morphemes as "morphological units". Both of these do turn out to form systems in ways that will be discussed more fully below, and the morphological units can to some extent be assigned a single consistent contribution to the communication. It should once more be emphasized that these "systematic" characteristics were not decided upon in advance on the basis of some form of theoretical speculation. The interrelationship among units, and the relationship of the units to the process of communication, emerge gradually from our study of the initial smallest problems. 2.2.2.2. Variation But if we are to do all this in terms of actual observation, it is first necessary to specify exactly what it is that is being observed. Fundamentally, we begin the process of hypothesis formation by comparing a configuration of the vocal tract with an acoustic product, but what we find is that - in respect to any individual phonological unit, any individual hypothesis - both the configuration and the product are inconsistent from one instance to another. This follows from a number of factors, truisms of phonetics, which must be taken specifically into consideration. No two individuals have the same physical characteristics, in respect to the shape of the vocal tract. We are thus able to recognize the "voice" of an individual. The same individual does not utilize the vocal tract in precisely the same way on different occasions. Given whatever characterization there

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may be of the phonemic unit, there is plenty of room for variation without trespassing on the domain of another unit. Groups of individuals who are in converse with each other much of the time regularly prefer some areas of variation, within the unit, over others, in comparison with other groups of individuals. We are thus able to recognize the "dialect" of an individual. One "dialect" may differ from another not only in preferring certain areas of variation, but even in the number and character of the items in the inventory itself. Thus some "dialects" of "English" differentiate the pronunciation of "hue" and "you"; others do not. To accommodate all these differences, the hearer must work around all the inconsistencies involved, in particular must infer the intent of the speaker, in reference to the inventory of phonemes. Must indeed correct for any disparity in the inventory itself. Factors mentioned earlier thus come immediately into play. The intelligence of the hearer is required in the interpretation of the imprecise, the varying, production of the speaker. The success of the hearer in interpreting reinforces the speaker's inclination to be no more precise than necessary. And the control over the procedure is the relative success of the communication: if there is lack of success, the speaker must try again. We thus recognize that the hearer is confronted by what appears to be a formidable interpretive problem, yet one that humans are ordinarily sufficiently well equipped to cope with. But if we attempt to take over the experience of the hearer and make it the basis for analysis, we are again confronted by, if not chaos, a bewildering multiplicity of possibilities. It is another wildly impossible task to undertake analysing all this variation at once. Again, we must begin with the smallest possible problem. The most austere procedure is, then, to observe how one individual "talks", and to accept this as one representative of all the different ways there are of "talking". Problems such as "What is a dialect?" as well as "What is a language?" must, again, be postponed. We recognize that this blurred outwelling of variations cannot be pronounced on in advance. Note how this procedure differs from that of setting up an "ideal speaker/hearer", one who is to be representative of every and all speaker/ hearers. Setting up an ideal requires a priori assumptions over which the theorist has little practical control, assumptions that necessarily ignore the reality of the observations and result in analysis that is of little practical, or even theoretical, value in the long run.

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The extent to which such an austerity of procedure can be maintained will be taken up separately within the sections on phonology, grammar, and lexicon.

3. The hypotheses The observations, the sound waves, are produced by people. The problem is to discover what motivates people to produce particular sound waves on a particular occasion. The purpose of the hypotheses is to reveal motivation by demonstrating the relation of the observations to the orientations, for the orientations represent the controlling circumstances of the entire procedure. The way this works out, in analytical practice, is that the essential motivation is communication, and that the details of how communication is effected are controlled by considerations of the available human physiology, by principles of acoustics, and by normal characteristics of human behavior; that is, by the other orientations. The first task of the hypotheses is thus to establish the identity of the inventory of the units of language (beginning with phonemes and morphemes) and the nature of those units, their nature being an inference from how they are made use of in the process of communication. The other orientations constantly feed in to the process of reaching the primary goal, particularly in regard to why the units are made use of in the way they are. As analysis proceeded (in our work), the hypotheses sorted themselves into three distinct groups, distinct in the way in which they are related to the process of communication: hypotheses about phonological units, about grammatical units, and about lexical units.

3.1. Phonological units The phonological hypotheses characterize an inventory of units that produce distinct sounds for the primary purpose of communication. Since the production is performed by the speaker, the question becomes one of specifying just how the sounds are produced, why they are produced that way, and what motivates the choice of which one to use. It should be pointed out immediately that the discussion to follow introduces no particular novelties into the field of phonetics; indeed, the goal is to be extremely faithful to the phonetic realities generally recog-

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nized in that field. The point of the discussion is to find answers, as suggested above, to the questions of motivation: why are certain sound waves produced, and why are they produced in the way they are. The sounds are produced through the control of the musculature of the vocal tract. The first requirement is that audible sound be produced, if the communication is to be transferred from one person to another; clearly audible sound if the communication is to take place over any distance. The second, that a fairly extensive inventory of distinct sounds be built up, if the resources of human communication are to exceed those of animal cries. There are two important considerations here: first, given the variety of ways in which sounds could be produced by the vocal apparatus, why is there so much agreement in general across languages, in the midst of a great deal of difference in matters of detail? Second, given that an inventory of grammatical and lexical units is to be built up through the combination of phonological units, just how is an expanding inventory of phonemes related to the expanding structure of the morpheme? The order of presentation here will be directly addressed to this second phase of the problem. The effect will sometimes be as though we were tracing the history of the development of sound production in evolutionary terms, and though this need not be taken too seriously, it may serve as a useful device of presentation. 3.1.1. The inventory of clearly audible sounds

The principal means of producing clearly audible sound is the same as that used in animal cries - the vibration of the vocal folds. With animals, an inventory is usually built up, to whatever extent it is, by variations in the use of the vocal folds themselves. Thus with the domestic cat one hears meowing, purring, spitting, growling, caterwauling, etc. - all variations in the sound-producing possibilities of the folds themselves; the mouth may be more or less open, but this difference is merely concomitant to the kind of sound being produced, not a variable used to increase the inventory of distinct sounds. Distinct animal cries, then, may ordinarily be regarded as without distinction between phoneme and morpheme, since the members of the inventory are not combined with each other to form larger units. 3.1.1.1. Increase in the inventory of human speech With humans, the development - the increase in the inventory - of these clearly audible sounds has been transferred from the folds themselves to

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a varying shape of the "supraglottal" resonant cavity; this of course requires a greater precision of control over the musculature involved than is available to animals. The input of the folds is now relatively constant - a means of exciting the different cavity shapes. Variations in frequency and amplitude of the sounds produced by the folds are used to effect communication, but not, with certain exceptions, by increasing the inventory of phonological units or by contributing to the formation of morphemes in the same way that the phonemic units do. The supraglottal cavity extends from the glottis to the lips, and the principal technique for producing clearly audible sound is to use the dorsum of the tongue and the lips to determine the shape of the cavity. The dorsum divides the cavity into two cavities, each with its own resonant frequency. The position of the dorsum determines both the size of the two cavities and the size of opening of the back cavity; the positioning of the lips determines the size of the opening of the front cavity. The resonant frequency of each cavity is of course determined by its own cavity size and size of opening. The basic inventory of distinct units is developed by varying these two frequencies and combining the variants in different ways. The excitation of the cavities continues to be provided by vibration of the vocal folds. These procedures are of course entirely consistent with the principles of acoustics as well as with the greater precision of control over the musculature. Even at this early stage, the development of the inventory, as hypothesized, reveals the linkage between the observations and the orientations. 3.1.1.2. Increase in inventory and increase in precision All this is well known to any student of phonetics. What we want to emphasize here is the readily observable relation between the increase in the inventory of distinct sounds and the increase in precision of control of the musculature that is necessary to bring it about. The first step in this procedure has already been outlined: an increase in precision of control over the dorsum and the lips that enables the production and interaction of the two cavity shapes. 3.1.1.3. The basic inventory and maximum imprecision Within an inventory of potential cavity combinations, the least precision of control is required by what may be called the truly basic inventory — across languages and in the history of individual languages - that which is produced by the extremes in the combinations of the two resonant frequencies: the results usually recorded in the notation /i a u/. These are, of course:

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1) the "high front unrounded" /i/, with the back cavity at its lowest resonant frequency - large size and small opening - and the front cavity at its highest - small size and mid opening; 2) the "open" /a/, with the back cavity at a middle resonant frequency large size and large opening - and the front cavity at a middle frequency — large size and large opening (looking at this from the "evolutionary" point of view, one can imagine this as the "original" unit, a single cavity for the entire supraglottal volume); 3) the "high back rounded" /u/ with both cavities at low resonant frequency, produced by small volume and small opening for the back and mid volume and small opening for the front. The relations are seen in Table 1. Table I. Maximum acoustic differentiation and minimum precision of control Back

i a u

Front

Volume

Opening

Frequency

Volume

Opening

Frequency

Mid Large Small

Small Large Small

Low Mid Low

Small Large Mid

Mid Large Small

High Mid Low

These extreme positions not only produce the maximum acoustic differentiation but also require the minimum precision of control, since the various configurations of dorsum and lip are the distance apart, and even a considerable variation in actual production gives little danger of blurring the acoustic distinctness between units. One can imagine an alternative differentiation of three units, all of which were "high front", but this would require a very high degree of precision of control to effect the same distinctness of inventory, with much less acoustic distinctness, and in practice such arrangements seem not to occur. That would be an obvious instance of a greater degree of precision of control than is necessary to achieve a same communicative advantage. 3.1.1.4. Intermediate positions in the basic inventory This basic inventory is increased by introducing intermediate positions: a smaller acoustic difference requiring greater precision of control. The basic three are almost invariably present. "Five-vowel systems" are common, inventories of six and seven are not uncommon, simply by subdivision within the original basic inventory.

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The inventory may also be increased by a different mixing of the two resonant cavities, producing results that have a different set of intermediate values in terms of acoustic distinctness: "front rounded" and "back unrounded" combinations. The inventory may further be increased by other techniques for changing the shaping of the resonant cavities, such as by "nasality" from opening the nasal cavity, or by producing modifications in time: distinctions of "length" or the transitions in the position of dorsum and lips known as "diphthongs". And these motivations may be combined with each other in various ways. All of these increase the inventory by means of an investment in greater precision of control, of one kind or another. But we find that precision of control is not utilized to such an extent as to bring the positions of dorsum and lip into absolute positions. For each unit, the positions must be kept sufficiently distant from the others to maintain an acceptable acoustic difference (one readily observable by the human ear), which means that the range of variation - the acceptable degree of imprecision in actual production - is limited by the nearness of the neighbors, not by any absolute yardstick. And, of course, the excitation of all these shapes is provided by vibration of the vocal folds. All this gives an inventory of a certain number of distinct units, varying from language to language. In each language, in general, basic three-, five- or even seven-member inventories will be more or less permanent features, while larger numbers of units, together with the modifications mentioned above - all requiring greater precision of control — are likely to come and go with the history of the language. 3.7.2. Use of the inventory in the formation of morphemes 3.1.2.1. Morphemes formed with the basic inventory alone Members of this inventory may be used alone for the formation of morphemes, as with the English "indefinite article" a. In the form of English speech used as the corpus of phonological observations by this writer, morphemes formed in this way are proportionally much more numerous than are morphemes built up by a sequence of more than one unit. This is a point that will be returned to later. 3.1.2.2. Combining the units of the basic inventory If the inventory of morphemes is to be extended beyond the inventory of phonemes as established so far - if the number of morphemes is to exceed the number of phonemes - it must be expanded either by combina-

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tion of these basic units alone or by an increase in the number of units. The former is occasionally seen, as in the Homeric Greek word /oieai/ 'you think', where more than one morpheme in sequence has this characteristic, but the usual procedure is to expand the phonological inventory by additional techniques of shaping and exciting the cavity, and to place these additional units - in flanking position - before and after the basic units, the clearly audible units, in the formation of the morpheme. 3.1.3. The inventory of flanking units The development of flanking units provides the second sharp break in the development of an inventory of phonemes and morphemes beyond that of the animal cries, and of course requires further increases in precision of control. 3.1.3.1. The musculature of the apex These "new" units are based, in the first place, on another musculature, in addition to the dorsum and the lips: the apex, or blade, of the tongue. It may be used in two ways: 1) as another way to shape the cavity (as with /I/), still relying on the vocal folds for excitation; but also 2) as a quite diffferent means of exciting the cavity (as with lil and /s/). These three - /!/, /t/, and /s/ - may be considered the primary units of the apex, showing again the characteristics of maximum differentiation and consequent low demand on precision of control. The intermediate positions would then be whatever is written as /r/, and "thorn", /p/, the English "th". 3.1.3.1.1. Shaping the cavity The /r/ "competes" with /!/, resembling it in using the vocal folds for excitation of the cavity, but differing from it, in the extreme case, as "apical trill", with which there is excitation as well as shaping of the cavity. This trill, though common enough and providing a large acoustic differentiation, is not all that easy to control, and we find historical evolution in various languages drifting away from the trill and even away from the apex to the dorsum. In my speech, the "/r/" is formed with a position of the dorsum midway between that of lyl and /w/. And in the extreme case, as in certain Asian languages, there is no two-way phonemic distinction between an /r/ and an /!/. 3.1.3.1.2. Excitation of the cavity The /t/ and the /s/ are maximally distinct in terms of method of excitation. The lil is produced by complete closure of the air passage, build-up of

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pressure, and excitation produced by explosion. The /s/ is produced by a sufficient closure of the air pasage so that turbulence is produced in the channel, and the turbulence is enhanced by directing the air stream against the barrier of the teeth. Note that the /t/ cannot of course be brought closer to the place of articulation than complete closure, but also that the /s/, if the opening were made wider, would be less likely to continue to produce a sufficient turbulence for excitation (unless of course an unusual demand is made on the air supply) and excitation would again have to be provided by the vocal folds. The size of opening is also controlled by the size of opening of the glottis, which would capture any turbulence, /h/, if it were the smaller of the two openings. Intermediate between the extremes of/t/ and /s/ is the English "thorn". It produces excitation by an incomplete closure of the air passage, an imperfect seal, and by the friction that results from forcing air through the closure. The precision required for control over the closure — not so tight as to lead to pressure build-up and explosion, not so loose as to result merely in turbulence — is made easier by placing the apex against the knife edge of the upper teeth, a surface against which it is easy to avoid a perfect seal. But even so its intermediate position militates against it; it appears and disappears in the history of individual languages, and many languages show no trace of it. 3.1.4. A possible order of development

For the "primary" units we thus get a picture of an imagined sequence of development, ordered in terms of the need for precision of control. The units are here symbolized in ways that foreshadow their later phonemic status: 1) The single-cavity /a/, furnishing undifferentiated resonance for the excitation of the vocal folds. 2) The development of a two-cavity system, using the dorsum and lips as articulators, introducing III and /u/ and thereby converting /a/ to a third member of a system, maximally differentiated from the other two, rather than a unique unit. 3) The use of the apex in a fairly undemanding way, giving another shape to the cavity, /!/, without recourse to dorsum and lips, still with excitation by the vocal folds. 4) The development of fine motor control over the apex, as it is brought into use as a means of excitation, as well as shaping, of the cavity, in the maximally differentiated positions of /t/ and /s/.

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3.1.5. The expansion of the inventory as a developing system This "basic inventory" is of course still a good deal smaller than what is found in most languages. It may be considered the intermediate stage in the expansion. Table 2. The intermediate stage of expansion t s l

The phonological units shown may now be categorized in terms of two variables: the musculature used in the shaping, and the size of the opening controlled by that musculature in relation to excitation. (Concomitant shaping provided by the lips is omitted simply to maintain simplicity in the diagram). The particular musculature can be referred to as the "articulator"; the amount of opening, as the "aperture". Further enlargement of the inventory can then be seen as extensions along these "axes" of a "system". It would be beyond the scope of this paper to go into any considerable detail concerning the various possibilities. Rather, some of them will be introduced as we consider the question of what kind of concrete evidence there is in current speech in support of the fairly abstract notions presented so far in terms of precision of control, physiology, and acoustics. 3.1.6. Modern corollaries of the order of development

In general the principles that underlie the ordering of acquisition, as presented above, are the same as those reflected in the construction of morphemes in current speech; that is, in the utilization of the various members of the inventory of phonemes. Those that can be characterized as being more difficult to control — in terms of intermediate position, etc. - are the same ones that are, in general, made use of less frequently (or perhaps not at all) in the structuring of the morpheme. The most audible members of the inventory — I'll, /a/, /u/, together with intermediate units - regularly form what may be called the keystone in the arch of the structure of the morpheme. It is rare indeed for a "word" to be constructed without one of the clearly audible members as keystone. The flanking members are drawn from the less audible members of the inventory, and the preference among these is very much in terms of how

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much demand is made on precision of control. Further, the extent to which a number of flanking members are combined in the formation of a single morpheme is very sharply restricted. 3.1.7. Restriction on the phonological complexity of morphemes The latter point is the easier to illustrate. In terms of precision of control, it is evident that the more phonological units are combined into the formation of a single morpheme, the more control is required, in terms of number of individual members to be produced and in terms of the coordination of the sequencing. Table 3, giving configurations in terms of Keystone and Flanking units, shows the consequences of this factor. (The source of the numbers will be given presently.) Table 3. Restrictions on the phonological complexity of the morpheme Example

Type

Potential

Actual

Proportion

eye pit plot bolt spend lynx sphynx

K FKF FFKF FKFF FFKFF FKFFF FFKFFF

20 12,500 312,500 312,500 7,812,500 7,812,500 195,000,000

8/12 1,615 610 405 140 5 2

.40/.60 .1292 .0020 .0013 .00001792 .00000064 .00000001

K = Keystone; F = Flanking Total F = 25; Total K = 20; FKF = 25 x 20 x 25. The variable count (8/12) depends on whether "interjections" are counted.

An increase in the number of phonological units in a morpheme type leads to an increase in the potential number of morphemes, but to a decrease in the actual number, in terms of absolute numbers as well as in comparison with the potential. To the extent, then, that the selection of a morpheme in the text leads to the characteristics of the sound waves, we see that the "human factor" motivation, precision of control, is favoring some kinds of combinations of sound waves over others. 3.1.8. Preferences among individual phonological units A general ranking of preference among individual units is fairly uniform across languages. In particular, it should be noted that total absence of

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a particular kind of sound in one language is usually echoed by low frequency of occurrence in another language. Thus many languages contain no "nasalized vowels"; in languages that do have them they are used less frequently in the formation of morphemes than are non-nasalized vowels. In other words, zero occurrence is here regarded as a very low frequency, a relative rather than absolute characteristic. A few of the more striking preference, and their motivations, will here be listed. The "extension" along the axis of zero aperture, from /t/ to /p/ and /k/, is very common. However, the greater investment in fine motor control in the case of the apex is reflected in a greater utilization of units formed with the apex, since its greater adroitness makes it easier to control. This is particularly reflected in terms of the communicative value of various positions in the morpheme. Initial position gives the first opportunity for the hearer to identify the morpheme, in the context of the message in which it occurs. In this position the full inventory of phonological units may well be employed. As the information in the later units becomes available, it becomes more and more likely that the hearer will have already made the identification, and that what follows is less and less necessary information. What we find is that, in this sequencing toward the end of the morpheme, apicals are progressively favored over labials and dorsals, sometimes to the entire exclusion of these two. A similar skewing is seen in Table 3, where the preference of the type plot (610) over bolt (405) shows a greater tolerance of the cluster in the early part of the morpheme. Such examples show how the motivation of communication is integrated with that of precision of control in affecting the selection of units within the morpheme. Beside /p t k/ there is often another group, using the same axes of articulation, /b d g/. These differ by the addition of the vibration of the vocal folds as one part of the articulation of the unit, providing a distinct acoustic product. The coordination of an additional articulator, the glottis, requires more precision of control, and the more complex unit is regularly used with less frequency, in some languages down to zero. Here too the communicative factor is evident: the more complex /b d g/ compete much better in initial position than in final. An entire chapter in a phonological study would be devoted to the cooccurrence of the phonological units within the morpheme. Co-occurrence is skewed rather than uniform. This is particularly noticeable in immediately adjacent units, where reuse of the same articulator is largely avoided, as in the case of //-, dl-, pw-, sr-. But it can also be seen where flanking members stand on either side of the keystone.

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Here, in fact, there are two factors at work. Use of the same articulator in the flanking members is avoided, and, looking outward from the keystone (as it were), uniformity of usage of the vocal folds is preferred; that is, the flanking members are likely to be either both voiced or both voiceless. A selection from a table of measurements of the difference between calculated frequency and observed frequency is given in Table 4. Table 4. Departures of observed from calculated frequencies + 3.52 2.93 1.14 .97 0.00 .41 .57 3.25 -3.75

B-D P-K

bad pack bib tot

B-B T-T P-G B-T

G-K B-P

pig bat gawk beep

3.1.9. Evidence in support of the hypotheses A number of hints have been given that there is a quantitative basis for the comments about the favoring of certain uses of the phonological units over others. The following procedure has been used. A collection is made of all "words" constructed with a single keystone, within which there is no morphemic boundary. Thus cat would be counted, but not cat-s. The rationale is that the combination t-s here is determined by something other than purely phonological considerations. The collection is intended to be complete, but there is a problem as to just what constitutes "completeness". Three different kinds of collection will here be noted. In my own research, the collection consisted of all words in my active vocabulary; that is, in the active vocabulary of a literate, well-educated speaker. It is recognized that the resulting list might not be exactly the same as that of another person of similar education, and that there might well be quite a number of words "in the dictionary" that would not be included. The numbers of the tables given above were taken from this count. At the other extreme is a study by Shazi Shah Jabeen (Jabeen 1993) of the phonology of Bihar Urdu in the neighborhood of Gaya, India. Here, informants were used, essentially illiterate persons without access to radio

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or television. The author is herself a native of Gaya, and checked for the occurrence of every possible phonological combination. A third alternative was a study by Joseph Davis (Davis 1987). This study based the count on essentially all the entries in a moderately sized dictionary of Standard Italian. In each of these, counts were made of the frequency of occurrence of the phonological units in various positions and in various combinations within the morpheme. In spite of the differences in the inventory of phonological units (between English, Urdu, and Italian) and the differences in methods of collection, the general principles that have been sketched above were found to be quite uniform in their manifestation. It was thus possible to check the interrelations among orientations, hypotheses, and observations, and to demonstrate that there is a relationship of motivation flowing from orientation to observation. 3.2. Grammatical units We have seen how the units of phonology are put together to form "morphemes". Keeping in mind that a "morpheme" may be composed of only one phonological unit, the important difference between morpheme and phoneme is not that the one is composed of the other, but that the hypotheses about morphemes include a statement that there is a contribution to the content of the communication, something that is not suggested as a characteristic of the phonological units themselves. Just as the phonological units pose two problems, that of identity (solved by phonemic analysis) and that of hypothesizing the characteristics that account for how they produce the sounds they do and how they are distributed in morphemes, so the morphemes pose two problems, the first of which, the identity of the inventory of morphemes, is solved by morphemic analysis. The second problem is that of characterizing each morpheme in a way that will account for its distribution in texts, in communications. The morphemes are in some sense signals of meaning, and the hypotheses here undertake to establish in just what sense that is true. Note the parallelism between the grammatical and phonological problems: in each, the units have to be identified and the motive for their arrangements has to be provided. In the process of solving the problem of utilization for individual morphemes we discover just how it is that, in general, morphemes are used for communication. This leads us to the hypothesizing of the "meaning" of a morpheme.

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In other approaches to linguistic analysis the term "meaning" is generally applied to the communicative output of a "sentence"; if a sentence is a statement of a complete thought, that complete thought is the meaning of the sentence. But since, in our analytical experience, we have never been prompted to hypothesize a unit called "sentence", we make free to use the term "meaning" to refer to the communicative output of some smaller unit, one that we do hypothesize, such as the morpheme. 3.2.1. The process of communication When analysis is undertaken in terms of a sentence, a certain role for the morpheme naturally follows. The total meaning of the sentence, as recognized in whatever way it is, is divided into its component parts, and syntactic analysis establishes the relation between these parts and the various morphemes; in this way is built up such categorizations in the syntax as "The Uses of the Cases". In that line of analysis the assumption is that every part of the totality of the meaning of the sentence is correlated with some morpheme. And since there are many more sentences, and thoughts, than there are morphemes, the consequence is usually a fairly long list of quite distinct "uses" of individual morphemes; for just as, in the phonetics of speech, no two sequences of sound waves are ever exactly alike, so also no two components of thoughts are ever exactly alike. But when we begin from the morpheme rather than from the sentence, the relation between the two presents rather a different picture, since the analytical procedure is essentially different. Our first hypothesis about the meaning of the morpheme is likely to be based on some small number of fairly obvious examples, and we are likely to be able to see how a single meaning would cover these examples. From there on, we gradually expand the collection and modify the hypothesis as necessary. 3.2.1.1. The relation of meaning to message As we go through this procedure we very soon encounter another kind of relationship of imprecision. To take a very simple and obvious instance, confronted at an early stage of analysis by the example "the three bears'' we might hypothesize that "-s" means "three", since the numerical value in the message is "three". (It would not be inconsistent, in a syntactic treatment, to have a category "The Plural of the Three", just as there are such categories as "The Dative of the Possessor".) Only after encountering a number of other examples would we come to the hypothesis that the meaning of "-s" is the much more imprecise "any number greater

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than one"; other, more precise, interpretations in the message are then enabled either by other morphemes, such as "three", or by the shared knowledge of speaker and hearer. This is the stage of the hypothesis seen in the standard grammars. Still later, we might begin to notice examples like "zero degree-s Centigrade", and would then refine the hypothesis still further, to "any number other than one". With this kind of imprecision as a common characteristic of the meanings, it is not surprising to find that they do not add up "arithmetically" to the sum total of the message being communicated (the "thought"), as was more or less assumed in analysis that begins with the sentence. Rather, the meanings are no more than a collection of hints offered by the speaker, on the basis of which the hearer makes a guess at the message intended. The guess may be either right or wrong, and the attempt at communication proceeds from there. The success of the communication thus depends to a large extent on the speaker's ability to assess how much knowledge the hearer already has concerning the intended message, and what hints should be selected for successful transmission of the new material. 3.2.1.2. The message as a vector resultant The message that results from the collection of hints bears considerable resemblance to a vector resultant, where there have been a number of different forces involved as input (the various morphemes in the utterance), and the output produced in the message as a whole is not identical with any of the inputs. In consequence, there is often relatively little correspondence between any components of the complete thought, or message, and the meanings of the individual morphemes involved. 3.2.1.3. Difficulties in analytical procedure This being so, discovering the meaning of the morpheme is a much more elusive task than establishing a semantic component of a sentence. In a thorough-going syntax of standard reference grammar we are likely to find long lists of the "uses of the dative case" or the "uses of the subjunctive mood". These uses are so different from each other that it is clearly impossible to devise a single over-arching meaning that includes all uses. The reason for this is that each "use" typically includes inputs from other morphemes, as well as the one under observation. Thus the "dative of possession" derives from a relationship of possession that obviously exists in the scene being presented in the text, and if we assign that value to the dative in this instance we find that it bears no relation to values

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similarly assigned in other instances, such as the "dative of purpose", where the value is again derived from something other than the dative itself. 3.2.1.3.1. The relation of message to scene It is useful, even necessary, to recognize that a number of different messages might be imagined in relationship to a same scene, and that the difference between them very often consists of picking up on some characteristics of a scene while ignoring others. For example, if three airlines all fly between New York and Los Angeles and all charge exactly the same fare, that being the scene, three different messages, all equally true, might be offered to the public by one of the airlines: We all charge the same fare. No other airline charges more than we do. No other airline charges less than we do. Attempts at semantic analysis are often characterized by an insistence that whatever is on the scene corresponds literally to the meanings being hypothesized. Of particular note is the "truth value" approach, which holds that differing messages have the same meaning if they refer to the same scene. Syntactic analysis, as practiced, is usually biased in favor of certain favored categories, such as "possession", and recognizes them wherever they are discernible on the scene, even though they may not have been part of the intent of the message. 3.2.1.3.2. Meaning as a satisfactory hypothesis The first and main task then is to come to an understanding of just which of the possible messages is the one being sent by the speaker or author. Paradoxically, our best guide to this is usually the tentative hypothesis about the meaning of the morpheme that has been devised thus far. Analytically, there is much stumbling along the way, and the temptation to despair is understandable, but perseverance seems to pay off in the long run. At any moment, of the alternative hypotheses we may be entertaining, we favor the one that accounts for the greater portion of the examples we have collected. We are not satisfied until we can account for all the examples, but even then we remain aware that further examples may require even further revision. The meaning, then, is a tentative judgment on the basis of the most satisfactory hypothesis we have at this point in the analysis.

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3.2.1.4. The distinction between grammar and lexicon When we begin to look carefully at potential hypotheses about the semantic contributions of morphemes, we find that we are confronted by two quite different kinds of contribution to the communication. If we were to define the word "horse", informally, as referring to an "equine quadruped", the word "cow" as referring to a "bovine quadruped", and the word "deer" as referring to a "cervine quadruped", we would find that each of these is essentially independent of the other two. They are all quadrupeds, to be sure, but if, somehow, there were no more deer and no occasion to use the word referring to them, the essential reference of the words "horse" and "cow" would remain unchanged; they would still indicate "equine" and "bovine" quadrupeds, respectively. But other morphemes do not behave in this way. In Sanskrit, there are allomorphs grouped into morphemes called "singular", "dual", and "plural", indicating "one", "two", and "more than two", respectively. In Latin we find what are historically the same morphemes, but the "dual" has been dropped out of the language, in the way we imagined might have happened to "deer", above. Now, however, we do not find the same independence observed in the case of "deer", for the "plural" morpheme in Latin means "more than one" rather than "more than two". It has, as it were, absorbed the territory covered by the dual in Sanskrit, in a way that neither "horse" nor "cow" would be expected to absorb the territory covered by "deer". 3.2.1.4.1 Different kinds of meanings Analytically, we discover this same kind of difference over and over again. Further, the difference correlates fairly well with the standard distinction between "lexicon" and "grammar". Dictionaries provide us with an alphabetical list of essentially unrelated items. Grammars provide us with groups of related items, under such headings as "number", "case", "person", "tense", "voice", "aspect", "mood", and the like. When we analyze the meanings of the morphemes within these groups (and this must be done on a language by language basis, as with the difference in "number" for Sanskrit and Latin, above) we find that to a considerable extent they reveal the same kind of intrarelationship as seen in the example with number. 3.2.1.4.2. The exhaustive categorization of a semantic substance In each instance there is a "semantic substance", like "number", which is divided up into parts in such a way that every area within the substance is included within one of the parts. The number of parts, in any one

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language, corresponds to the number of signals, hence the difference seen between Latin and Sanskrit, where Latin has only two to Sanskrit's three. Thus with the substance of number, in Latin, there is no conceivable number that does not fall either into the category "one" or the category "other than one". We refer to this as an "exhaustively categorized semantic substance", and it is this kind of dividing up of a semantic substance that we have come to recognize as the principal defining characteristic of what we call a "grammatical system". This does not mean that, under analysis, the various syntactic and morphological groups referred to above fall automatically into "systems" of this kind. The category of "case", for example, is in the standard grammars a primarily morphological categorization. But we find that, in Latin as in other languages, what is called the genitive case is typically not a member of the system, as here defined, to which other cases belong (Diver 1985; 1989). The decision we make is based on the meaning of the grammatical morpheme (i. e., the semantic substance it divides up), not on whatever morphological symmetry it may have with other forms. What we find in practice in the standard grammars, by contrast, is that the "uses of the forms" are treated in the same way the lexicon is, as a list of essentially unrelated items. Below, we will take a close look at what is going on inside these groups, but first we can take a general view of the relation of the "lexicon" to the "grammar" as defined here. 3.2.1.5. The integration of grammar with lexicon 3.2.1.5.1. The satellite relationship Our analytical procedures reveal not only that there are these two kinds of morphemes, in terms of different kinds of communicative output, but also that there is a characteristic relationship between them. This we refer to as the satellite relationship, in which the lexical morpheme stands as the "sun" and the grammatical morpheme as the "planet". The satellite effect applies not only to the "morphological" relationship (e. g., the relation of "affix" to "root") but also to the relationship between the two meanings. The grammatical meaning gives information about the lexical meaning, not the other way around; "horse-s" indicates a plurality of equines, not an equinity of plural. Of the two aspects of the relationship, the meaning turns out, analytically, to be more crucial than the morphology. We find that we need to recognize a satellite relation between meanings even where there is no "direct" morphological relationship. The standard grammars reflect this

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with the terminology "auxiliary verb", and, in English, the satellite "the" may stand some distance away from the lexical item (the "noun") about which it provides information. Morphologically, then, it is convenient to distinguish between "directly satellite" and 'indirectly satellite" relationships, although these do not involve any difference in the way the lexical and grammatical meanings relate to each other. 3.2.1.5.2. The strategy of communication The overall strategy of communication, then, turns out to be a fairly loose collection of strategies of communication. The user of the language, having been exposed to the usage of others, constructs a certain number of lexical units, a certain number of grammatical systems with their constituent meanings, and a certain number of techniques for combining these in ways that will effectively promote communication. This resource may vary considerably from individual to individual, and we can probably be certain that no two individuals share exactly the same inventories and the same techniques. In spite of all the pressures toward prescriptivism and conformity, we continue, as individuals, to do whatever ingenuity suggests for coping with the communicative problems confronting us. To be sure, there are differences, in what may well be called fashion, varying from time to time and from social group to social group, in which each social group applies pressure on its own members in the direction of a standardized usage, but the pressure is never entirely successful. Thus, such a notion as "correct English" has largely to do with the efforts of one group to enforce its norms on the members of other groups. 3.2.1.6. The human factor Among the ideas propounded over the last few decades, in the field of linguistics, is that of autonomy; particularly that there is a syntax of the sentence that has its own rules, independent of any act of communication, and that the behavior of people employing the syntax has nothing to do with ordinary everyday characteristics of human behavior. The analyses that follow from such assumptions as these have led to a generally dismissive attitude toward semantic analysis; that is, toward the possibility that the way morphemes are used in a text can be accounted for by the assignment of some semantic value to individual morphemes, rather than by rules of syntax. The usual view toward semantic analysis is simply: "It can't be done." What is implicit in our discussion so far is that the failure of semantic analysis, so conceived, follows from the very assumption of autonomy. For the relation of the "language" to the individual user is just the oppo-

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site of autonomy. As already pointed out, the individual creates a unique device of communication and exploits it in individual ways that are entirely consistent with the way any other form of everyday human activity is carried out. This includes economy of effort, which may even involve the jettisoning of ordinarily useful ways of communication, where the content is obvious enough. It includes the use of human intelligence to compensate for the imprecision of most of the units of communication, both grammatical and lexical. It is not surprising that the attempt to carry out semantic analysis without taking these human factors into consideration should lead to failure and disillusionment with the enterprise as a whole. But if we do include an awareness of them in our analytical procedures, and if we begin analysis, modestly, with the contribution of individual morphemes, rather than with an ambitious and idealistic concept of a grand scheme of the complete thought in its entirety and analysis in terms of a priori philosophical conceptions of the categories of thought, then, in practice it does become possible to make progress toward a realistic semantic analysis of how communication takes place. 3.2.2. The grammatical system In the development of the science of chemistry, there came a point when the investigation of the characteristics of individual elements led to the awareness of a certain kind of relationship between elements, a relationship captured in the notion of a "periodic table of the elements". Similarly, the investigation of individual "grammatical" morphemes led us very quickly to an awareness that the individual members are best understood, are necessarily understood, are only understood, in terms of their relationship to other individual members. Recurrent similarities in the kinds of interrelationship lead to the notion of "grammatical system", as we use the term. We turn now to the presentation of what we have discovered, analytically, about the internal structure of grammatical systems, keeping in mind that that term is intended to refer to the exhaustive categorization of some semantic substance by the signalling apparatus of a particular "language". 3.2.2.1. Delimitation of responsibility The question that immediately arises is that of what should be "in the grammar" and what should not. Here, as with the corresponding problem with the phonology, we don't know in advance. That certain mor-

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phemes are being used as signals in an exhaustive categorization is something that must be discovered analytically. Where there is a standard reference grammar of the language under study, strong initial hints may be derived from the groupings that are offered in the morphological paradigms and in the syntax. But these are only hints, for the morphological groupings in the paradigms and the semantic groupings in the syntax are each prompted by only one side of the pairing of signal and meaning that we are in search of. It has already been suggested that in Latin the genitive case is not a member of the same system as are the other cases, and in spite of such familiar differentiations as "aspect" and "voice", these two may turn out to be members of the same system. Such analytical decisions can be made only by determining what the semantic substance is, in each individual case, and what signals are dividing it up. This means, of course, that we do not expect, in advance, similarity across languages. Here too the distinction between scene and message, and between message and meaning, must be carefully observed. The fact that the same kind of message — say "instrumental" — can be noted does not justify establishing the same grammatical unit. The immediate task is to account for the use of those signals that immediately confront us. Further, the signals themselves may not be transparent. A "zero" may be a signal or it may be just "nothing"; an ordering of words may or may not constitute a signal; words called "auxiliary verbs" and "prepositions" may or may not be signals in a system of exhaustive categorization. It is only in the working out of a satisfactory hypothesis that the decisions can be made. As with the phonology, then, we develop our range of responsibility "from the inside out". It begins from nothing and extends just as far as we are able to push it by means of successful analysis. What we have "in the grammar" is just as much as we have been able to demonstrate is there. 3.2.2.2. The observations For the phonology, we required a collection of morphemes in order to study the arrangement of phonological units with respect to each other. For the grammar, similarly, we require a collection of texts within which to study the arrangement, the distribution, the utilization, of the potential signals we are hypothesizing. 3.2.2.2.1. The most useful texts for analysis As indicated earlier, we need to differentiate message from scene, the intended communication from the real world situation in which the com-

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munication takes place. A brief communication from a stranger on a subject of which we are ignorant would be, probably, the least useful of texts, since we would have very little to go on, in discovering why certain morphemes were used in the communication. Similarly with lyric poetry, intended to be allusive and imaginative, to give free rein to the hearer's imagination and to be open to a variety of interpretations. What we want then is a text containing abundant information with which we can cross check whatever hypotheses we develop. In practice, we find ourselves using long prose texts written by skilled writers, although an epic poem will serve just as well. The importance of the skill is that such a writer will exploit the resources of the language much more thoroughly, providing both a more challenging problem and a better testing ground. The other extreme, short utterances invented ad hoc and out of context, a common practice in linguistic analysis, are only of very limited usefulness. Part of the analytical difficulty that has defeated the traditional syntax stems to a considerable extent from the preoccupation with the analysis of single sentences and the lack of extensive contextual information. Similarly, judgments of grammaticality are often made on the basis of whether the experimenter can immediately call to mind a context in which the utterance would be grammatical, and various safeguards are set up to prevent others from devising more imaginative contexts, in which the grammaticality judgment would have to be reversed. 3.2.2.2.2. Examples from speech and examples from writing These considerations bring us to a debate that occasionally surfaces, on whether the linguist should deal with "the spoken language" or "the written language". That terminology, of course, suggests that there are two different such "languages", and one not infrequently encounters remarks of the type: "Such and such a usage is dropping out of the spoken language." But, under analysis, what usually turns out to be the case is not that there are two languages, or even two grammatical systems, but that the more complex and extensive organization of written discourse leads to the free exploitation of meanings which may often not be particularly useful in the brief, simple, often hurried communications that we interchange by means of speech itself. Again, the more demanding the goal of the communication, the more fully the resources of the language are likely to be exploited.

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We are, however, as analysts, responsible to all kinds of uses of the language, and to examples from any source. Our preferences for certain kinds of texts is a consequence of the usefulness of the text for the testing of our hypotheses, not of any predilection for a more "natural" or a more "artificial" style of usage. 3.2.2.3. Theoretical consequences of using written texts The use of long texts by those of us working along these analytical lines was of course a marked departure from the usual procedure, where, in a theory centered on the sentence as the principal structure of language, individual sentences were the primary object of analyis. 3.2.2.3.1. Other theories that are not sentence-based In the recent development of other analytical procedures that also confront problems other than those of the sentence itself, there has arisen the possibility of confusion among the various approaches. The similarity is, however, a very superficial one. 3.2.2.3.2. Discourse, functional, and pragmatic analysis Discourse analysis is the point of most likely comparison. The difference is this: whereas we use discourse simply as a reservoir of examples in context, on the basis of which to devise and test hypotheses about the systems within the language, discourse analysis as generally practiced is concerned with analysis of the discourse itself, not of the grammatical and lexical units that are used to construct the discourse. The analysis takes the form of establishing the existence of "discourse features", which may be whatever catches the analyst's eye concerning the organization and content of discourse. There may be some observation of correlations between discourse features and, for example, the morphological characteristics of a language, but the correlation is motivated by the discourse, not by the morphology, and certainly not by the morphology as a signal of meaning. An example might be the notions of "anaphoric" and "cataphoric" reference of pronouns. Whether a pronoun refers forward or backward in a text is a point of obvious interest in the analysis of the structure of discourse. But any attempt to link a certain kind of reference to a certain pronoun usually reveals a rather inconsistent relationship. Most pronouns can refer in either direction, and, in analyzing pronouns, there is no temptation to hypothesize "anaphoric" or "cataphoric" as the meaning of a morpheme. This procedure of developing categories that are outside the language itself - in this case categories of discourse — is reminiscent of the way

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categories were developed in the mainline grammatical tradition, on the basis of logic and philosophy. As a type, the procedure is also developed in "pragmatic analysis", where such a category as "various expressions that are used to perform so-called directive speech acts, i.e., orders, requests, advice, proposals, suggestions, etc." may be used as a coign of vantage from which to survey the morphology. Another current line of investigation that might be confused at first glance with the developments being outlined in this paper is that of "functional linguistics". The term "functional" suggests that this might have the study of the function of language in communication as its primary object, but in fact this does not seem to be the case. The point of resemblance here is of course, as already outlined, that we have found it necessary to introduce communication as a major motivation in our search for understanding of the deployment of morphemes, phonemes, and ultimately sound waves. But functional linguistics does not appear to be driven by the same considerations. 3.2.2.4. Characteristics of the signals In developing hypotheses about grammatical systems, our first responsibility is to the morphemes, since it is they that are made up of the phonological units that lead us back to the sound waves. But human ingenuity devises other methods of signalling, particularly when we are operating with an exhaustive categorization of a closed semantic substance. 3.2.2.4.1. Morph, allomorph, and morpheme In working with a relatively unknown language, as in anthropological field work, the standard analytical techniques used in descriptive linguistics are adequate for a first approximation of the signals. In particular, the use of "similar constructions" serves for grouping morphs into morphemes. What this procedure does is to recognize a similarity of usage, and it doesn't really matter how accurate or definitive the categorization of the usage is. If ten different morphs all are found in each of five different constructions, one can confidently group the ten into one morpheme, without worrying about the probable outcome, that none of the five constructions will turn out to be the meaning. Thus the basic procedure of descriptive linguistics, identifying morphemes on the basis of a difference of meaning alone, without necessarily identifying the meaning itself, is entirely adequate, as long as it is recognized as being only the first step in the analytical process. Where the language is well known to the analyst, one can of course proceed much more subjectively and get the same result.

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3.2.2.4.2. Signals that are not morphemes Another terminological distinction may here be useful. The term "morpheme" has regularly been used to indicate "a minimal distinctive unit of form", that is, a signal of meaning. Let us here restrict the term "morpheme" to a signal that is made up of phonological units, and reserve the term "signal" to a more general category: anything that indicates a meaning, whether it is based on phonological units or not. Hence, just as an inventory of phonemes gives us a first approximation of the number and characteristics of the phonological units, so an inventory of morphemes gives us a first approximation of the inventory of signals. The two chief kinds of signal to be considered in this regard are "zero" and "word order". Both of these have been viewed with suspicion in the history of grammatical analysis. In American descriptive analysis, it was accepted that an allomorph might be a zero, but not a morpheme. Thus, in English, it might be granted that there is a zero allomorph of the past tense, among other allomorphs (He put-Φ it there yesterday I He lef-t it there yesterday), but not a morpheme whose only representation was a zero. The strict consequence of this would be that in the pair cat I cat-s there is a morpheme for plural but no morpheme for singular. The reason behind this differentiation is understandable in terms of the notion of exhaustive categorization introduced here. If there is a known number of allomorphs of a morpheme, one of them is sufficiently differentiated from the others by having no phonological makeup, zero. But if morphemes, including grammatical morphemes, are but members of an indefinitely long list, there is no way of maintaining control over a procedure that adds zero members to the list: where does one stop? If applied to the lexicon, the ludicrous character of such a procedure is obvious. But if the members of a grammatical system form a closed set, just as do the allomorph members of a morpheme, then here too one member is adequately differentiated by being distinct from all the others. The test for this, in general, is in two parts. That at the position where the other morphemes regularly appear there be nothing, and, more importantly, that the meaning of the zero morpheme should contribute to the message in a way that is consistent with the hypothesized grammatical system. For example, the set: He went to the jail I He went to a jail I He went to jail. (That the first requirement is met is evident, but we cannot of course present here a full substantiation of the hypothesis that the zero in front of jail is contributing as it should to the message.)

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The diffidence about word order as a signal may well be drawn from the background of the classical languages, Greek and Latin, in which there was never any temptation to put word order on a par with the morphological apparatus to which grammarians felt themselves responsible. In these languages the motivation for the arrangement of words was of an entirely different nature. But in English it is much more plausible to recognize systematic differences in the use of order in the signalling apparatus: Mary loves John, but John loves Susan. The book is on the table I Is the book on the table? He painted the red barn I He painted the barn red. The control over the procedure is again, of course, that these differences in order correlate with a hypothesis of a difference in meaning, which in turn leads to a major difference in the message. The use of word order as a signal introduces certain restrictions. Most obviously, words are always in some order, and there is constantly the question of whether a particular instance of ordering is an instance of a particular signal. He sent Mary candy I He sent Mary home. The test again is by reference to the hypothesized meanings of the grammatical system involved. In English in fact, there is more than one grammatical system making use of word order as a signal, and in the absence of analysis there is likely to be confusion where both are being used at once, as in the classic example She made him a good husband because she made him a good wife in comparison with She made him a good dinner. The other restriction on word order signals is actually shared with morphological signals: There can only be as many distinctions of meaning as there are distinctions of signal. But the relative nature of word order has consequences. In the familiar "indirect object construction" of the standard grammars, a language that differentiates a dative case from an accusative case has a stable and precise distinction whether both are present or only one. But in a similar arrangement based on word order the absence of one of the words changes the nature of the signal: She told him a story I She told him I She told a story. That is, there is a loss of precision in signalling when the number of words in the signal is reduced. 3.2.2.4.3. Imprecision in signalling This point leads us on to the more general problem of imprecision in signalling and how it relates to the process of communication. The point was made in the introduction to this paper that both the structure and the utilization of human language rely on human intelli-

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gence; the methods of coping with imprecision, particularly on the part of the listener, the methods of understanding the communication in spite of imprecise as well as meagre information, is a good illustration of this. A notorious example is that of the English final s, which can have any of three values "depending on the context". What is actually depended on, in terms of the kind of analysis being used here, is an awareness of three distinct grammatical systems and an ability to identify which one is being used in the particular instance. That is, the same phonology can be used in three different signals if it can be recognized that there are three different systems, with three different semantic substances. The task then is simply one of "first" identifying the system and then giving the signal its appropriate meaning as a member of that system. (It may be pointed out in passing that we are not undertaking to demonstrate just how this is done. Our task is to analyze out the signals and meanings in the grammatical systems, on the basis of how they are made use of in texts. In doing so we come to recognize that human intelligence is capable of handling whatever problems arise.) But it is not quite true, as one might think from this example, that phonologically identical signals must be in different systems in order for the recognition to work. Within a system, signals must be distinct, but they are often not so distinct as they might be. In the history of English, the "singular-plural" distinction was lost in the case of the word you, although it was retained elsewhere in the system. What seems to happen in such instances is that the distinction made, precisely, in the system as a whole is used as a reference point for setting up the possibilities from among which to choose where the signalling is imprecise. A more complex example is to be seen in the morphology of the Latin cases. Here there is a distinction labelled "dative" and "ablative" that is phonologically differentiated in (some forms of) the singular but is never differentiated in the plural. For the understanding of the Latin text, the imprecise plural case form gives the information that the word is to be regarded as not nominative, not accusative, not genitive, and what is left in doubt is only the distinction between dative and ablative. The reader, knowing the ways in which the dative and the ablative are used, can then decide which of the two is the more appropriate. The need for the application of an intelligent appraisal is evident. 3.2.2.5. Internal structure: substance and value We come now to the meaning side of the signal—meaning pair and the ways in which the semantic substance have been found to be divided into categories.

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We find it convenient to make use of the Saussurean terms "substance" and "value" in discussing the interrelation among the semantic elements of grammatical systems, but we do so without any of the philosophical implications attached to these terms by Saussure. In particular, we have found no reason to grant a primacy of value, or form, over substance. In the famous example of the train leaving Paris, it may be true that it is the "same" train, regardless of which particular cars are used to make it up; still, substance can not actually be disregarded. If the train is made up entirely of dining cars, with no engine, etc., it is clearly no longer the same train. The term "value", then refers only to the manner in which the substance is divided up. The substance is of crucial importance for our understanding of how communication takes place. The Prague School term "opposition" is also made use of, but again without any of the extended analysis that is developed there. Hence no distinction between bilateral and multilateral oppositions, no marked and unmarked members, no neutralization. These are all terms introduced within the framework of the analytical framework of that school; here, we use the term in its simplest possible application. The fundamental distinction in the way the semantic substance is divided up is that between oppositions of exclusion and oppositions of inclusion. Let me stress once more that these are distinctions that have arisen as a result of analytical procedures, not assumptions that we began with. 3.2.2.5.1. Oppositions of exclusion In an opposition of exclusion the semantic substance is divided up into parts in such a way that there is no overlapping between the parts. The Sanskrit system involving number can again be used as illustration. The semantic substance is "number" in the ordinary, nontechnical, application of that term. As in general with what we classify as grammatical systems, the coverage of the substance is such that any point whatever within it is included in some one of the divisions of the substance. That is, in this case no number is left outside the system. The classification of different types of value relations, different kinds of opposition, is in part a response to the method by which this complete coverage is achieved. In Sanskrit there are three morphological classes, labelled "singular", "dual", and "plural". We can take this categorization as adequate for the purposes of our present discussion. The numbers covered by the three classes are 1, 2, and any other number, respectively. The term "plural" is

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of course usually taken to indicate "more than one" (or "two" in this instance), not "other than one". And in a culture that does not concern itself with, say, numbers less than one, there may be no practical difference between the two. But complete coverage is obtained by the use of the term "other", and it has been found to be a very accurate designation in a number of analyses, of a number of different kinds (substances) of grammatical systems. At any rate, the three categories are exclusive of each other. A number cannot be in two of these categories at once. Hence the opposition of exclusion. Analytical problems may arise in instances where whatever it is that is being talked about may be regarded from more than one point of view. In syntactic analysis there are many instances where a lack of concord must be recognized, when the speaker shifts from one viewpoint to another. A classic example is a "collective noun", where something may be regarded either as a single group or as a number of individuals. But this difference is a difference in the scene, as discussed earlier, not a difference in the meaning, not an overlap among the categories of the semantic substance. It is convenient to refer to this kind of relation between scene and meanings as "a spanned opposition"; that is, in comparison with an opposition present in the grammatical system, the scene may be regarded, with complete accuracy, as corresponding to either one, or to both, of the meanings. The speaker may then choose which of the two is the more appropriate for the particular message to be communicated, or may use both, as seen in examples where there is "lack of concord" between "subject" and "verb", the ending on the subject indicating, say, singular, and the ending on the verb indicating plural. We usually call the "other" member of such a system (as in "any number other than") the "residual member". In a system of number it is easy enough to recognize; we are all willing to grant that 6, 23, and 114 are all numbers other than one (or two). But with other semantic substances the residual member may present a bewildering variety of correlations with various aspects of the scene. In Homeric Greek there is a grammatical system of three members (Diver 1985), with a semantic substance having to do with relations of place. One of the members is residual, and is found being used to refer to such place relations as above and below, in front and in back, from and toward, near and far, within and without, on the right and on the left, etc., to name only the more obvious. What all these have in common,

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as with the numbers above, is that they are not one of the place relations indicated by the other two members of the system. An encounter with a system of this kind helps to dispel some of the myths associated with attempts at semantic analysis. There is a notion that a meaning might be an abstraction over a number of categories that are different at first glance. The inevitable second step in such a procedure is the realization that, particularly with the kinds of opposites listed above, any such abstraction would become hopelessly vague and therefore analytically unacceptable. And so it would. But what we find in this system is not an abstraction over specific place relationship. These relations exist, and can be identified, on the scene, but the meaning is neither that list of relationships nor an abstraction over them. The meaning is an extremely imprecise indication that some relationship exists; if the hearer wants to go to the trouble of pinning down just what that relationship is, it must be done on the basis of other information, not on the basis of the meaning of the residual member. As with the dative—ablative example above, all the meaning is communicating is that we are within a certain semantic substance and that the relationship involved is not that indicated by one of the other members of the system. The system with a residual member provides a very unequal division of the semantic substance. A less puzzling alternative is to be seen in systems where there is an essentially equal division, particularly if it is just into two parts. This value relation is often on a kind of affirmativenegative basis. One meaning says something is so, the other says it is not. In Latin, for example (Diver 1987), what is called the nominative case signals that the referent is in the center of our attention at the moment. The accusative case signals that it is not. The opposition is one of exclusion, and of course the same word cannot be simultaneously in both cases. (There are further complications in relation to other semantic substances, in Latin, but this much will serve as an illustration of the equal division of a semantic substance.) Where the equal division is into more than two members, although this is found with only two members also, the relation between them is often found to be in terms of a scale rather than in terms of absolute categories. It is as though, in a semantic substance of number, the division was not into "one" and "other" but into "more" and "less", or into "most", "more", 'less", "least" of the substance involved. It will be seen that in terms of the relation between the very many different ideas we have to communicate and the necessarily many fewer

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signals we are likely to have with which to communicate them, this kind of relativity and flexibility may work out to be very useful. Provided, again, of course, that the human operators of the system have sufficient intelligence to cope with the imprecision involved. The notion of "case" in the standard grammars, and in some forms of modern syntax, is often associated with such concepts as Agent, Instrument, Beneficiary, Patient, and the like. But we do not seem to find languages that devote morphology to these absolute categories. What we find instead (Diver 1987) is a scale relationship between relative degrees of control over the activity. Thus the order of the four categories listed above can be thought of in terms of degree of control, particularly if the beneficiary is recognized as being a motivator of the action. Languages that have morphological distinctions called Nominative, Instrumental, Dative, and Accusative may appear at first glance to reflect the four categories directly, but there are always many more utilizations of the cases that do not fit the absolute categories. The scale relationship is perhaps best seen where there are fewer signals used to divide up the scale. Thus in Greek (Diver 1985) there is no morphological distinction between an instrumental and a dative case, and what we observe is that this "central" part of the control scale leaves the "adjacent" members undifferentiated. What is called the dative signals a range of control that is more extensive than in languages with fuller systems. It may be a useful reminder, again, that the analytical problems confronted with such factors as residual members and scale relationships require a careful distinction among characteristics of the scene, characteristics of the message, and meanings actually signalled in a particular language. 3.2.2.5.2. Oppositions of inclusion The opposition of inclusion provides a much more subtle instrument of communication than does the opposition of exclusion. With the spanned opposition and an opposition of exclusion, we saw that an object on the scene may be described with equal accuracy by two different meanings, even though these exclude each other, as with the example of a collection being referred to either as a single group or as a number of individuals. There is a certain complexity about the nature of the object and either of the two meanings may be appropriate, depending on which aspect the speaker wants to concentrate attention on. With the opposition of inclusion, this is carried one step further. Even without spanning an opposition of exclusion, an object may be referred

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to by either of two meanings. This time the overlap is within the system, not a characteristic of the object. Continuing with our basic example of systems of numbers, we find in Greek (Diver 1987) a three member system similar to that of Sanskrit. But now the forms called singular, dual, and plural have the meanings 1, 2, and "other than 1". That is, what is called plural has the meaning other than 1 rather than other than 2. In consequence, if there are two of something either the dual or the plural can be used. In technical terms, the relationship of the plural includes the meaning of the dual, while excluding the meaning of the singular. The question then comes up, what motivates the speaker to use which meaning, given that either provides an accurate reflection of the scene? There seems to be no general rule on this, either within the same language or across languages. In Greek there are two such instances, and it may be useful to compare them. The picture that emerges reminds us once again of the extent to which the solution to our problem of motivation depends not only on the strict communicative factor of the available signals and meanings, but also on the exercise of human ingenuity. The choice in the system of number depends directly on, first, the difference in precision of the two meanings, and, second, on the uses to which one might put a variation in precision. The dual, of course, is more precise than the plural. It indicates twoness precisely; the plural leaves open the possibility that there are two, but how many there actually are is left to other kinds of information. What we find generally in the process of communication is that more information, and more precise information, is provided for that in which the speaker has a greater interest, for that which he finds more important or more striking, for whatever reason. This can be applied to the standard notion of the subject of the sentence as what the sentence is about, what we are paying the most attention to. In a passage in the Iliad (Books I-VI) in which there are over 500 references to two of something, referred to either in the dual or in the plural, 37 per cent are in the nominative and 63 per cent are in the oblique. But of those in the dual, 54 per cent are in the nominative and 46 per cent are in the oblique. That is to say, the center of attention, as represented by the "subject" is skewed heavily toward the dual. Another opposition of inclusion is found in the system of place, already referred to. Here the strategy is in effect the opposite. Instead of using the more precise included member to underline matters of importance, the less precise including member is used where the reference is vague.

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Thus one of the included members has the approximate meaning of 'at'. The expression at Troy would routinely be expressed in this way. But if the speaker wants to bring out uncertainty about the location, the including member is used, even though the at relationship is equally true: Alive or dead, my father is in some other land. As can be imagined, the opposition of inclusion presents many intriguing analytical challenges. Even more than with other motifs within grammatical systems, you never quite know what you are going to find. 3.2.2.6. Competition between systems One of the disadvantages of a "universal" approach to grammar and syntax is the expectation of a certain sameness from language to language. There may then be an expectation that, in a semantic analysis, one should be able to predict the characteristics of one language from the characteristics of another. One encounters remarks such as, "If it works that way in French, why doesn't it work that way in German?" With the implication that there must be something wrong with the analysis of French. One of the reasons for the differences between languages is that the user is making use of an entire network of interrelated grammatical systems and lexical items. What looks like an exactly similar communicative problem may be handled in a different way because the languages have different alternative possibilities. Suppose an event is to be referred to that began in the past and is still going on in the present. If the language has both a "present tense" and a "past tense", that opposition is spanned. Which one is to be used? English uses neither, in fact. It has a third form - usually called the "present perfect", although the label hardly describes the way it is used — which in this situation is the one likely to be used. If another language uses its "present tense" for that time reference, its use of the "present tense" will be different from the use of the "present tense" in English. Similarly, in Greek there is also an "extra" form. It too is labelled the "present perfect" usually, but the more perceptive grammarians say that it means a "present state" as opposed to an action in the present. It too is an appropriate choice for solving the communicative problem of the event that began in the past and is still going on. But its use is in many respects different from that of the English form, so its actual meaning is without doubt something quite different. This reminds us again of the need to begin from the inside and work out, and of the importance of not beginning the analysis of one language from the point of view of another.

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3.2.3. The interlock In the previous section we have been considering how individual grammatical meanings relate to each other, and what kinds of grammatical systems these relations lead us to set up. We now move on to the next step, the relation between grammatical systems. It is not uncommon to find two semantic substances, each with its own exhaustive categorization, using a common set of signals for differentiating their meanings. In descriptive linguistics, the possibility that one morpheme could simultaneously indicate two meanings was recognized under the term "portmanteau". In the standard reference grammars, particularly of the more fully inflected classical languages, one might encounter the expression: "the third person singular present active indicative". What might well be meanings in five different systems appear to be signalled by one form. This arrangement we call an "interlock". It is particularly common, and transparent, with the morphology of case, where the ending signals both number and whatever the value of the case itself is. Hence "dative singular" and "nominative plural". But a more precise analysis of the semantic substances included in the interlock, and the way they are divided into meanings, may help elucidate some of the problems inherited from syntacatic analysis. The term "subject" is used, not quite indiscriminately, to indicate what appear under analysis to be two distinct meanings in two distinct semantic substances. A fuller terminology differentiates between "logical subject" and "grammatical subject", where the former equals "agent" and the latter equals "what the sentence is about" or "what the verb agrees with". These are of course quite different kindds of contributions to the message. Translated into the terms of an interlock, this overlap would be clarified by having one semantic substance concerned with control over an event (agent, patient, etc.) and another indicating whether the word is being focused on as the center of attention or not. Then the "nominative case" would signal high degree of control and in focus simultaneously (as well as a third meaning, from the substance of number). A simple terminological translation doesn't solve all the problems of a language like Latin, where the tradition also has a "passive voice" ("the logical object is the grammatical subject") and "deponent verbs" ("passive in form but active in meaning"), but it serves much better as an initial hypothesis from which to launch further analysis. In certain interlocks, those corresponding to the traditional category of "subjunctive mood", the signalling within the interlock takes on par-

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ticular complications. The semantic substances here have to do with the time of an occurrence and with the degree of doubt as to whether the occurrence actually took place. These two notions are actually not entirely independent of each other, and it is this factor that leads to the complications. If I say My understanding was that if the hard disk failed..., I may be using the tactic of saying was rather than is in order to introduce an element of doubt into the statement. Maybe I was wrong. We use this tactic all the time, but recurringly, in various languages, the tactic gets incorporated into an interlock, the "past tense" form comes to be used with non-past reference and an element of doubt (If he left tomorrow...), and we are immediately confronted by a new kind of signal. The simplest version of this is seen in Homeric Greek. We can see from the morphology that in the prehistoric period there was a simple interlock between the time and what we will call probability (Diver 1985). The form called "subjunctive" had a certain suffix and endings used regularly for nonpast time; the form called "optative" had a different suffix and endings used regularly for past time. So if you wanted to say He came that he might free his daughter, the optative would correspond to might; in He comes that he may free his daughter, the subjunctive would correspond to may. But by the time of our texts the optative, with its suffix and its "past" endings, is also being used in the nonpast: He comes that he may/might free his daughter. In the nonpast, the subjunctive is now restricted to signalling more probable events; the optative, less probable, something like the difference between may and might. But in the past the older arrangement is still in effect: the optative is used for any degree of probability. This now raises the question: of what meaning is the optative the signal? (A parallel question could be asked of might.} We are thus led to introduce into the hypothesis a notion of a "signal of the interlock", where the meaning of a form depends on what part of the interlock it is in (nonpast or past) in a particular usage. We have, then, another kind of imprecision in signalling, and another exercise of human ingenuity in coping with it. 3.2.4. Satellite clusters The interlock represents the highest degree of complication we have found so far in the formal interrelationship among grammatical systems. It may, however, be useful to say something about the way in which grammatical systems are coordinated in the construction of messages.

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It was noted earlier that there is a satellite relationship of the grammatical meaning to a lexical meaning. Since then we have seen that each individual use of a grammatical meaning constitutes a selection of one meaning from the system of which it is a part. But the grammatical systems are not mixed freely in their association with lexical items. Thus in English we might use the lexical item dog in either the expression The dogs or in He dogged their footsteps. The grammatical signals the and -s are used in one; the signals -ed and a word order signal in the other. But the choices are not mixed. We do not combine the and -ed with the same lexical item. It is convenient to set up the terminology of "Satellite Clusters": Satellite Cluster A and Satellite Cluster B. The members of the one are used to create one kind of effect in the message (so that the lexical item is then classified as a "noun"); the members of the other, an effect that leads to classification as a "verb". It is not then that there is a part of speech classification existing independently in the lexicon, such that a particular class "takes" certain endings, but that "part of speech" is an effect in the message produced by the meanings of the grammatical systems associated with it in the particular instance. There is one circumstance in which the systems of A and B can be satellite to the same lexical item. This is what in the tradition is called a "verbal substantive", a category, anomalous in that classification, that includes "participles" and "gerunds". Here, a certain flexibility in the communication is furnished by the possibility of at least a limited mixture of Α-type and B-type meanings. This discussion leads us into the neighborhood of the part of speech classification proposed by Marcus Terentius Varro, in his de lingua latina (VIII 44): Quod ad partis singulas orationis, deinceps dicam. Quoius quoniam sunt divisiones plures, nunc ponam polissimum earn qua dividitur oratio secundum naturam in quattuor partis: in earn quae habet casus et quae habet tempora et quae habet neutrum et in qua est utrumque.

I shall next speak of what concerns the individual parts of speech. Since there are several methods of division thereof, I shall now take by preference that by which speech is according to its nature divided into four parts: that which has case-forms, that which has time-forms, that which has neither, that in which both case and time are indicated. (Kent 1951: 405)

Except, of course, that we turn the definition inside out. (The "neither" category includes prepositions and particles, the "both" category is for participles.)

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3.2.5. Non-satellite systems At this point it might be tempting to set up an explicit distinction between lexicon and grammar by including in grammar all signals and meanings that enter into exhaustive categorizations and that are satellite to lexical items. But we can't quite do that, for there are also grammatical systems that show the characteristic of exhaustive categorization but do not stand in satellite relation. These, in the main, are what are traditionally called "pronouns". "Personal pronouns' in the strict sense of the term, "stand alone" as "substitutes for nouns". "Demonstrative pronouns" may either stand alone or be used in combination with a lexical item: that dog. But the combination has more the characteristic seen with two lexical items (old dog), rather than that of a satellite. The fine distinctions here, of course, could only be brought out in detailed analysis. If then we want to make a "formal" distinction between lexicon and grammar, it should be primarily on the basis of the way in which the meanings relate to each other "paradigmatically" - the exhaustive categorization and the kinds of oppositions - but with a keen awareness of the satellite factor.

3.3. Lexical units As pointed out above, at a certain point in our investigation of morphemes, indeed very early, we found the morphemes sorting themselves into two categories, those that have the systematic characteristic of an exhaustively categorized semantic substance, with a proclivity for satellite relationship, and those that do not. The research we have done on the lexicon is, admittedly, casual and superficial in comparison with the work on grammar (as here defined, of course). The reasons for this are in part practical and in part, frankly, that the problems of the lexicon do not offer the same kind of fascination that has been encountered in the working out of the much more subtle and obscure problems offered by the grammar. Actually, the practical side dovetails with, and derives from, the very subtlety and obscurity of the grammar. We early came to the conclusion that we had better get the communicative contribution of the grammar straight before turning to the communicative contribution of the lexicon. The reason for this was that the very obscurity of the grammar, particularly as it is encoded in

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syntax as a host of arbitrary and idiomatic uses, made it very difficult to draw a line between the contributions of grammar and of lexicon. For example, in He left the house windowless, there is a natural temptation to suppose that the semantic contribution of the lexical unit left includes a "causative" component, that the factor of "becoming windowless" is to be attributed to the "verb", the part of speech that, by definition, indicates an action. But when we discover that there is a grammatical meaning signalled by the order house windowless, as opposed to windowless house, it becomes apparent that the "causative" effect is to be attributed to that meaning, not to the verb. A few encounters of this kind make it clear that we have very little chance of an accurate analysis of the lexical units in advance of an understanding of the contribution of the meanings of the grammar. What we can do, however, is look at the lexicon at least by comparison with the features of the grammar, as they have now been worked out, and present what appears to us to be aprimafacie case. It may of course turn out to be largely wrong. 3.3.1. Imprecision The lexicon, like the grammar, is marked by imprecision. A lexical unit provides something of use in the communication, but leaves much to the imagination. But what is provided and what has to be inferred is different in kind from what we encounter in the grammar. Imprecision in the grammar is sharply restricted by the domain of the semantic substance, and by the value relation to other members of the same system. The multitude of "uses" listed in the syntax do not come from the grammatical meaning itself, but from the various ways in which that meaning is combined with other components of the communication, giving, as suggested earlier, a great variety of "resultants". But what our analysis reveals over and over again is that the contribution of the grammatical meaning is a constant. To revive the earlier comparison with chemistry, hydrogen is always hydrogen, in all of the many different molecules in which it may be found. The lists found in syntax may thus be said to be analysis at the level of the molecule rather than at the level of the element. But this is by no means what is apparent in the lexicon. It is true that, in certain fortunate cases, disparate uses of a word may be traced to a common element, but the lexicon in general has a potential for a very different kind of networking, a potential that is often realized.

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3.3.2. The etymological word and the phonological word

A typical development within the lexicon has a new concept, or nowadays a new technology, arising, and a realization that it would be convenient to have a word for it. Looking around, one finds a word that is already in use for a similar concept, object, or activity, and appropriates that to the new usage. This may happen again, and there may build up links in a chain of connection in which the new applications become more and more remote from the earlier ones. For example, words like galvanic and galvanize were formed from the name of a scientist who was one of the early experimenters with electricity. The word galvanize was used for the production of an electric shock, and we have the expression "galvanize someone into action". The word galvanize was also used for the process of electroplating, and we have the expression "galvanized iron" to describe iron that has been electroplated with zinc to arrest corrosion. So far so good. The two expressions may seem to have nothing to do with each other for the average person, but the connection can be traced by way of the electric current. But the next step is a technological innovation in which iron is coated with zinc by immersion ("hot dipped galvanized") and the result is referred to as "galvanized iron". Now the rules have been changed: the word is associated with a coating of zinc, not with an electric current. This kind of thing happens all the time, as can be discovered by browsing through a dictionary based on historical principles. What is more, the next generation of shipyard workers may never encounter the expression galvanized iron in reference to electroplating; their iron will all be "hot dipped". For them, what will be the meaning of the word galvanizedl This brings us to the formidable question: what is in the mind of the speaker in using lexical and grammatical units? We don't know, of course, in any direct way. But judging by their behavior, as we study the way in which the forms are used, the lexicon and grammar seem to be handled in very different ways. The success of the speaker in working out appropriate uses for the grammatical meanings, obscure though they may be to the linguist, suggests that the grammatical system, with its semantic substance and its relations of value, has in some sense been "learned" as an entirety. The appropriate use depends crucially on this overall awareness. Recall the instance of the Sanskrit and Latin systems of number, in which the dropout of one member brings with it a reshuffling of the value relations of the remainder.

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But sucessful use of any one link in a lexical chain does not seem to depend on a comprehensive grasp of the chain as a whole. If you learn just one link you can use that link "correctly". A later encounter with another link seems to have no effect on the use of the first one; compare the various "senses" of galvanize. And we can hardly expect that the dropout of one link in the chain would have any particular effect on the use of the others. This leads us to the next question: how many "words" is galvanize! The usual procedure is to classify on the basis of etymology. The two galvanized are one word because they have a common origin, known at least to etymologists. But how many words are they to the speaker? Another point: bare and the two bear's make up three etymological words even though they are phonologically identical. But are they actually any more different from each other than the two galvanized! Or, how many speakers, or readers of this article, have a connection between the box of box tree and the box of box score! If we're in the business of occupying austere positions, perhaps the only reasonable conclusion is that the lexical unit is differentiated by its phonology, not by its history. 3.3.3. Reliance on inference

This line of reasoning, with its highlighting of the great amount of indeterminacy constantly present in the lexicon, reminds us again of how much our human habits of communication depend on our human intelligence and ingenuity, on our human ability to "construe through a brick wall". 3.4. The development and testing of hypotheses 3.4.1. Semantic analysis and syntactic analysis Throughout this paper I have been referring with great confidence to hypotheses rooted in semantic analysis. Since there is a large body of opinion in the field of linguistics that "it can't be done with semantics, but only with syntax" - that is, that semantic analysis of the kind that is alluded to here is essentially impossible - it may be useful to report on how matters stand from out point of view. The first and most essential point is that semantic analysis cannot be done on a superficial basis. A typical refutation of semantic analysis, by

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a syntactician, is one in which two lexical items, "synonyms", are held to have the "same" meaning, and it is then demonstrated that the two words have different distributional properties: they don't appear in the same syntactic constructions. From which it follows that semantic analysis has failed to solve the problem and resort must be had to syntax to state the different constructions. Thus, if I were to undertake such a demonstration for Latin, I could point out the syntactic rule that "verbs of ordering sometimes take the dative case"; that is, that the person ordered sometimes appears in the accusative, sometimes in the dative. I could then invoke a rule of "government" that iubeo governs the accusative case and that impero governs the dative case, and settle for that as a syntactic solution to the problem. But if we were to investigate the matter more thoroughly (Diver 1985), beginning with a collection of a large number of examples of the use of the two words, we would soon find that they are used under very different circumstances. To put it briefly, these circumstances depend on the power relation between the person ordered and the person doing the ordering. If we also have a semantic analysis of the difference between dative and accusative case in Latin, we would recognize an excellent fit between the power relationship and which parties appear in which case. We would also realize that another syntactic rule, that what is ordered to be done appears as an infinitive with iubeo but as a subjunctive with impero, also fits into this scheme, provided we have a semantic analysis of the difference between infinitive and subjunctive. But none of this can be done on the basis of a snap judgment that the two words have the same meaning. That notion arises from translation; both are translated as Order'. It ignores all the subtlety and ingenuity with which authors discriminate between the two options, and it ignores another point, the exercise, in Roman law, of two different kinds of power, that of ius and that of Imperium. In other words, the substitution of what amounts to philological reasearch for snap judgment would put the whole matter in an entirely different light. But it is a curious feature of the history of the standard grammatical analysis that the enormous investment in philological research, which does so much to illuminate many aspects of our understanding of the texts, stops abruptly when it comes to the presentation of the syntax. The chief reason for this is probably the conviction that syntax concerns itself only with the sentence, and that syntactic constructions have little or nothing to do with anything outside the sentence. Such a choking off of the sources of information would simply not be tolerated in respectable

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philological research on any other subject. Think of the centuries of research that have gone into the Homeric question, the question of the single vs. multiple authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Here, collection and classification of varying usages ranges throughout the entire text, and even beyond to a study of the characteristics of oral composition in other cultures. Those of us who are primarily interested in the epics as works of literature or as instances of a language may not be entirely convinced that this philological game, carried out to this extent, is worth the candle, but for those who are convinced, the game is played to the hilt. In syntactic analysis, no one plays the game to the hilt. There, a preexisting cast iron schedule is filled in with everything that fits, and all the rest is tucked into the fine print, full of disclaimers and contradictions. Philological thoroughness takes the paradoxical form of a scrupulously complete noting of all the violations of the leading rules of syntax. The chief difference between this tradition in the standard reference grammars and the practise of current syntactic analysis, is that in the current analysis the fine print is left out. 3.4.2. The development of the hypothesis The development of the semantic hypothesis depends, then, on the collection of a large number of examples that were composed to meet a wide range of communicative problems, independently of the linguist doing the research; the semantic problem cannot be solved by recourse to "grammaticality judgments" based on what the linguist happens to be able to recall at the moment, judgments that usually turn out to have overlooked various possibilities. As indicated earlier, the collection of examples accumulates gradually, and of course we cannot resist the temptation to plunge into hypothesismaking at the earliest opportunity. But, and this may well be the most crucial step in the process, we must be perfectly ready to abandon our early hypotheses when examples that do not fit are encountered. In fact it is usual that a hypothesis gets improved (is able to account for a wider range of examples) by the "accidental" discovery of a kind of example that had not previously been noticed. At any rate, a rich collection of examples that do not fit, whether relegated to the fine print or simply set aside, cannot be tolerated. The search for more examples never really stops, although we can recognize a kind of maturation point for the hypothesis when for long periods of time nothing new is discovered.

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In the historical evolution of this kind of analysis, we soon discovered that the first thing to look for, in a hypothesis, was the identity of the semantic substance and the way it was divided up, the value relations. As soon as some analyses revealed the characteristics of the exhaustive categorization of a semantic substance, we naturally began anticipating this as a possibility in subsequent analysis. We are then confronted by two straightforward questions: what is the semantic substance?; what are the value relationships? Analytically, the most puzzling value relations, to consider those first, are regularly those of the "residual member" and the "including member", already discussed, for these combine a single signal with a wide variety of effects in the message. But we learned to be alert for those possibilities, and it was in this process that the need to differentiate meaning, message, and scene became apparent. Also, the inherited truism, that a unit is identified by the oppositions into which it enters, applies in important ways to our understanding of the value relations. Not infrequently, we find one meaning in a system being used, in a way that is initially puzzling, because of the relative inappropriateness of all the other meanings. The options within the system are few, and as speakers, improvising, we do the best we can. So we select the meaning of the system that is "least inappropriate" and compensate for its inadequacy with other kinds of information. The semantic substances that we have encountered align themselves to some extent with the groupings to be found in a typical standard syntax. In fact, one can readily take such categories as "aspect", "mood", etc. as early hypotheses to account for the uses of the morphology; indeed, these are often, in the first place, hypotheses formed on a strictly semantic basis. Thus it may be said that the subjunctive mood may be used to indicate that an action is merely hypothetical, not real. Syntax sets in when it becomes necessary to account for the many examples of the use of the subjunctive when the action did in fact take place. It is then that we are likely to find rules placing the subjunctive arbitrarily in various kinds of syntactic constructions. What we do at that point is to begin searching for a semantic notion that will do a better job than "hypothetical" in accounting for the way the morphology is used; as always, the range of examples to be accounted for must be extended beyond the scope of the initial hypothesis (and that hypothesis abandoned). As we succeed in doing this, the need to relapse into syntax becomes more and more limited. At any point, the syntactic constructions still unaccounted for can then be regarded simply as unsolved problems.

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The number of semantic substances turns out to be relatively few in number. Just as a common physiology steers the possibilities within phonology, so the common communicative problem strongly influences our devices of communication. The speaker speaks in relation to some scene, a scene that, in fact, is made up of an inexhaustible collection of details. The taciturn speaker, like the headline writer, will leave out most of the detail. But the skilled story-teller, at the other extreme, will bring in a great deal more, and it then becomes useful and even necessary to keep the audience informed of the relative importance — of persons, things, incidents - in relation to the entirety of the message that is being communicated. Consistent with this is the discovery, in language after language, of a semantic substance that may be characterized in general as "Concentration of Attention": where, and how much, should attention be concentrated on this or that one of the details that are actually presented. This communicative problem appears to be the single most important factor in determining the makeup of grammatical systems. It occurs ordinarily in interlocks with other substances, corresponding regularly with the traditional categories of "aspect", "voice", "demonstrative pronouns", and, most transparently, the "nominative case". But the semantic substances by no means constitute a closed set. The most dramatic hypothesis revision usually takes place when we realize that we are in the presence of an entirely new kind of semantic substance, one not previously encountered in our analytical work, for of course we have been patiently building up a hypothesis on a more familiar basis; then some sudden, blinding example throws all into a new light. With an increase in expertise, of course - the accumulation of analytical experience — various short cuts offer themselves. One, paradoxically enough, is the very standard reference grammar that we usually find we have to discard. Encountering in the syntax such categories as "aspect" or "demonstrative pronoun", the analyst has a shrewd notion of what the semantic substance is going to be; we have encountered them in other grammars. Those cast iron schedules do have certain constant characteristics, and the grammarians are very consistent in recognizing what in the language should go into which mould. 3.4.3. Qualitative testing But how do we know whether the example supports the hypothesis? There is no alternative to a patient examination of example after example

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after example. In each one, the signals and meanings have to be identified, the point of the message as a whole has to be clearly understood, and the connection between them carefully traced. How difficult this is depends in part on how many of the other grammatical systems of the language have already been analysed. At an early stage there are so many unknowns floating around that it may be difficult indeed to decide what effect is to be attributed to what signal. Sometimes, of course, we do not understand what message the author intended. Or, in a work of considerable extent, it may be only several chapters later that we get the information needed for understanding. Once again, extensive philological research may be required to get to the root of the problem. The impression the outsider gets, at the outset, is that this kind of judgment is hopelessly ad hoc. What is gradually realized is the infinite variation in the messages to be communicated, the limited means offered by the actual meanings of the instrument, and the unlimited ingenuity with which the skilled user of a language can manage to put across the communicative point. It becomes the task of the analyst to reconstruct the communicative devices of the author, and of course each demonstration is to some extent ad hoc, since no two communicative problems are ever exactly the same. What the analyst has to ferret out is the working of the constant contribution of the meanings, of the hypothesis under consideration, from among all the other variables that are sure to be present. 3.4.4. Quantitative testing A hypothesis that a certain signal has a certain meaning, and that that meaning has a certain potential for various exploitations in the composing of messages, leads naturally to an expectation that certain other, closely related, characteristics of messages will appear in the same stretch of text. This in turn leads to the possibility of a quantitative evaluation of hypotheses. That is, it should be possible to establish correlations between the meaning assigned to the signal within a grammatical system and other semantic features of the text. One advantage of such a procedure would be that if it can be kept sufficiently objective, it might reduce some of the impression of ad hoc subjective judgment, although, to be sure, subjective judgment can never be entirely eliminated. 3.4.4.1. Predictions from the hypotheses about the characteristics of texts In the simplest case the expected correlation is very readily grasped. Returning to our system with the semantic substance of number, and a

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meaning distinction between "singular" and "plural", we can expect that, in a text, the numeral 1 will co-occur more often with singulars; the numerals 2 and above, more often with plurals. This is so obvious that one hardly need make a count, and the obviousness of course arises from the transparency of the grammatical system. But where the meaning does not appear so obviously in the message the quantitative procedure requires more judgment. We can take as an example one of the grammatical systems falling within the general category of "Concentration of Attention". This example will also show some of the characteristics of the development and qualitative testing of hypotheses. Latin has six pronouns that we shall group together into such a grammatical system (Diver 1986). The standard grammars offer the following account of them (leaving aside some minor inconsistencies), which will here be regarded as initial hypotheses: 1. ipse — the emphatic pronoun. 2. 3. 4. hie, iste, ilk - the "demonstrative pronouns of the first, second, and third persons". 5. is — the weakest of the demonstratives, often used as a third person personal pronoun. 6. se - the reflexive pronoun (standing in the predicate and referring to the subject). The replacement hypothesis suggests that the six are arranged in the order given in a scale of degrees of concentration of attention. (When this semantic substance shows up among "pronouns", we use the term "deixis" in referring to the grammatical system.) First, compare this with the initial hypotheses: 1. That the highest degree of concentration should be labelled "emphatic" is natural enough. 2. 3. 4. The "person" effect is a common strategy in these systems of deixis; we call it the "egocentricity strategy". Greater attention is paid to whatever is more closely associated with the speaker. In narrative texts written entirely in the third person, this strategy is of course not used at all; hence the strategy cannot be taken as the semantic substance for the system as a whole. 5. Use as a personal pronoun means that often no demonstrative force is felt at all with this "weakest" member, an appropriate observation as we get toward the bottom of the scale.

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6. "Reflexive" is a purely syntactic hypothesis, having to do with the relationship between two parts of the sentence, and cannot be compared directly with a semantic hypothesis; we'll get back to it in a moment. For five of the six forms there is a fair fit between the initial hypotheses and the replacement hypothesis. What we want to do here, leading into a quantitative test, is to introduce an additional strategy, one that is common in systems of deixis but that is not noticed by the standard grammars. Pronouns are used, of course, in situations where the reference is obvious enough that the noun need not be repeated. But there may be a good deal of variation in the obviousness of the reference. The strategy we find is that there is an instruction to concentrate more attention as the reference becomes more difficult to locate. The "reflexive" pronoun, referring chiefly (although not exclusively) to the "subject", requires the least concentration of attention, because that party is already in the center of attention, for example as the principal character in a narrative. Note that, unlike the other members of the system, se does not differentiate singular and plural, another useful bit of information for locating a reference. In the instances where se is used, the identity of the referent is so obvious that the distinction of number is not required for locating, and the number distinction seems to have dropped out during the prehistory of Latin, presumably as a consequence of the development of this grammatical system. The second party in a narrative passage (the next most obvious person) is regularly indicated by level 5, is. Where there is some complicating factor, such as the presence of a third party, the level 4 ille may be used instead, to be sure the reference is kept straight, but this is not often done. In Caesar's de bello gallico, which is very much straight narrative, is is the most commonly used member of the system; the next most common is the level 2 hie. We will use a quantitative procedure to test their positions on the scale in respect to the reference-finding strategy. 3.4.4.2. Measuring the strength of the correlation As correlates in the count to be made we will take two sets of opposed factors: whether the reference to be located is something concrete or something abstract, and whether it is singular or plural. The prediction to be made is that a lower concentration of attention will usually be employed for referring to a concrete object and a higher for referring to an abstract idea, that a lower concentration will be preferred for a single

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Table 5. Correlation of deictic meanings with other factors

is hie

is hie

Concrete

Abstract

HIGH Low

Low HIGH

Singular

Plural

HIGH Low

Low HIGH

object, or idea, a higher where what is to be recalled consists of a number of different entities. A count was made of all instances of the two forms in the first five books of Caesar's de bello gallico, with the results in Table 6. Table 6. Observed frequencies in the correlation Observed frequencies

is hie Totals

is hie Totals

Concrete

Abstract

Totals

500 176 676

251 193 444

751 369 1120

Singular

Plural

Totals

455 156 611

296 213 509

751 369 1120

To provide a "level playing field" for the comparison, since the difference in totals can be expected to affect the numbers in the four individual cells, we calculate a "null hypothesis"; that is, which numbers we would expect on the basis of the totals alone, assuming that considerations of number and concreteness play no role whatever in the author's use of the two forms. If we compare the difference between calculated and observed with the prediction, we see that the prediction is confirmed. The plus numbers and the minus numbers (as shown in Table 8) occur at the appropriate intersections, the low concentration of attention in combination with the more easily recalled items: concrete and one; the high concentration with the vaguer items: abstract and many.

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Table 7. Calculated frequencies for the correlation Calculated frequencies

is hie Totals

Concrete

Abstract

Totals

453.28 222.72 676

297.72 146.28 444

751 369 1120

The calculation has the form, e. g., (751 x 676) /1120 = 453.28. Table 8. Departure of observed from calculated Concrete

Abstract

is

HIGH +46.72

Low -46.72

hie

Low -46.72

HIGH +46.72

Table 9. Departure of observed from calculated Singular

Plural

is

455 409.70 +45.30

296 341.30 -45.30

Observed Calculated Difference

hie

156 201.30 -45.30

213 167.70 45.30

Observed Calculated Difference

The count based on singular and plural is shown in Table 9. With four-cell tables, such as these (where there is only "one degree of freedom", so that the amount of difference is the same in each cell), it is convenient to borrow the mathematics of the chi-square test for evaluating the reliability of a sample. (We are not actually using a sampling procedure here. The question we are asking is simply: "In these five books, does Caesar use hie and is in a way that is consistent with the concentration of attention hypothesis and the reference-finding strategy?" Since we are not using the text as a sample, certain precautions that would ordinarily have to be taken with a

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chi-square procedure - such as determining that there is no dependency relation that is biasing the sample to begin with - can be by-passed.) The chi-square procedure calculates the probability that the difference between observed and calculated in the given conditions might be due to chance. In these counts the chi-squares would be 36.87 and 33.46 respectively, for a probability of far less than one in a thousand (.001). In the standard use of chi-square, less than .05 is usually considered "significant" and less than .01 "very significant". Returning now to the problem itself, we see that the quantitative procedure in this instance gives an insight into the motivation provided by this strategy and this hypothesis that would otherwise be difficult to detect. Recall that these were not noticed by the grammarians, although a very thorough study of the Latin texts has been conducted with great sensitivity to all kinds of nuances. In other problems, where the count is based on a larger number of variables, the chi-square procedure is less useful. Thus with a 4 by 4 rather than a 2 by 2 count there would be nine degrees of freedom rather than one, and the difference between observed and calculated would be different for every cell. If we are predicting that certain differences would turn up in certain cells, the general test of significance for the entire count, as provided by the chi-square, would not tell us what we want to know. In such cases, we evaluate the prediction on the basis of the differences alone. Without going into the details of a particular example, the presentation would be as shown in Table 10. Table JO. Disparity between observed and calculated

1 A B C D

2

3

HIGH

4 Low

HIGH HIGH Low

HIGH

For a particular prediction, the highest plus numbers would be along the diagonal, each being in comparison with the other numbers on the two axes that intersect at that point. The highest negative numbers would be in the LOW cells, again in comparison with the other cells on the two axes. Other cells would have intermediate values. In a case where there is a very good fit between the prediction and the languages there would

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be a kind of "watershed" effect, with the differences flowing downhill, along the axes, from HIGH to LOW, from positive to negative. In other words, the relationships would be the same as with the 4-cell table, but spread out over more cells. One danger in making predictions for quantitative procedures should be pointed out. What might be thought of as a perfectly "logical" prediction from the hypothesis may turn out not to be true at all. We can exercise our ingenuity to invent ways to take communicative advantage of a particular meaning, but the actual users of the language may have thought of other ways. In practice, we have found it better to take our cues from the actual usage rather than to invent what seem to be plausible exploitations of a meaning. Essentially, this is another instance of working from the inside out.

4. Conclusion This is essentially a summary of the points made in the paper. Theory is extrapolated from analysis, as a generalization over the results of individual analyses, rather than being set up in advance as a guide to analysis. The theory spells out the way in which the problem is solved. The problem is posed by certain physical, acoustic, observations - the sound waves produced when a person talks. The problem is solved by establishing what motivated the speaker to produce those particular sound waves. What began as a problem in physics is thereby transferred to a problem in human behavior. More precisely, in order to provide a satisfactory analysis of the acoustic problem it is necessary to introduce an analysis of the human behavior that is the source of the acoustic observations. The general motivations (here termed Orientations') discovered by analysis are derived from the principles of acoustics, from the characteristics of human physiology in respect to a certain sound-producing mechanism and to the sound-perceiving mechanism (this includes vision to the extent that lip-reading plays a role in the phonology), from normal traits of human behavior that can be grouped under the labels of economy of effort and intelligence, and from principles of communication. It is held that the principles underlying these motivations are known by the analyst independently of the attempt to solve the problem. They are not new ideas invented as part of the solution to the problem.

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The demonstration of how the orientations motivate the observations is developed through a network of hypotheses that show in detail how the one is connected with the other. The hypotheses are devised solely for this purpose, and must contain nothing that is contradicted either by the observations or by the orientations. The network of hypotheses can be presented as though they formed an orderly progression from the observations to the motivations, although that does not reflect the actual procedure of analysis and hypothesis formation, which is very much a catch-as-catch-can undertaking. (It is a useful principle of analysis to begin with the simplest possible problems and to proceed gradually to those more complex, but in practice analysts jump in at various points in the network, necessarily taking for granted various provisional assumptions about the other hypotheses.) The hypotheses closest to the observations are those normally provided by a phonemic analysis (or by the learning of the use of an alphabet); that is, an inventory of distinct sounds used differentially for the purpose of communication. The connection between the phonemes and the observations is established by hypothesizing certain of the physiological characteristics of the sound-producing mechanism to each phoneme. These characteristics are in terms of the use of the musculature of the vocal tract to shape and excite resonant cavities. Such a characterization of the units reveals that there is an organization of the various musculatures into the axes of a system based on articulators and apertures. Each articulator is a particular musculature and the apertures are the various sizes of opening formed in part for shaping the cavity and in part for exciting it. The power source for the actual production of sound is a difference in air pressure, usually but not necessarily provided by air from the lungs. The actual sound waves produced by any one unit vary considerably in individual instances, but the acoustic and physiological targets are sufficiently spread out so that considerable imprecision can be tolerated. The hearer is constantly confronted by the task of identifying the intended phonological unit on the basis of all the available information. The phonological units are combined with each other to form the kind of units revealed by morphemic analysis. The way in which they are combined is determined by an interaction of principles of economy of effort with the progression of muscular movements associated with each phonological unit. The morphological units are revealed under analysis to be signals of meanings; that is, semantic elements that can be used to suggest the mes-

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sage that is to be communicated. In each instance, they are combined with each other in ways that are appropriate to the particular message. The point of the message, and the way the speaker chooses to compose it, thus feed down through the morphological units and the phonological units to the production of the actual sound waves. The morphological units are divided into two classes, differentiated by the kind of semantic element they signal: the labels are "grammatical units" and "lexical units". The grammatical units are organized into systems in which a semantic substance is completely divided up into parts, and each part assigned a signal. Each part is called a meaning. Each signal is usually a morphological unit, made up of phonological units, but within the closed system one member may be "zero"; that is, an absence of any member of the system in the position where a signal of the system would occur. Meanings of the system may also be signalled by varying the order of words. There is a certain amount of imprecision in the signalling, which must be compensated for by the intelligence of the users. The internal organization of the system - the relations of "value" — may take various forms. Oppositions may be of inclusion or of exclusion. The relation between meanings may be in terms of absolute categories or in a scale of relative degrees. The substance may be divided into equal parts or into very unequal parts. Systems may be combined into interlocks, where two (or more) semantic substances and their meanings are simultaneously signalled by a single set of signals. The interlock is the most complex organization yet discovered among the grammatical units. The most complex type of interlock is one made up of "phases" - different ways of combining the semantic substances - in which the same signal may have different meanings in different phases. The lexical units are essentially without organization; although there may be an appearance of organization if the lexicon is being used to label the parts of an organization in the culture, as with a kinship system. The relation of signal to meaning is generally kept consistent within a grammatical system, probably because of the tight interrelation among the parts, but the lexical signals are used much more inconsistently. The word as label is freely extended from one object to another having similar characteristics of some kind. Over time, this process may result in a chain of links, and the individual links in an extended chain may come to have nothing in common with each other, insofar as the actual reference is concerned. The imprecision of signalling that results again requires the exercise of intelligence for the appropriate interpretation of the message.

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In the communicative process, lexical units are commonly grouped with grammatical units in a satellite relation, the grammar being satellite - both morphologically and semantically - to the lexicon. The grouping typically takes the form of a cluster: certain grammatical systems combine with each other in being satellite to a lexical element. There are usually two such clusters; the members of one do not combine with members of the other. The result is a semantic coherency feeding into the message, giving rise, among other things, to the traditional part of speech classification, particularly the differentiation between noun and verb. The overall network of relationships may be viewed as having communication as its driving force, its principal motivation. The communication is effected by the production of sound waves, but just how this is accomplished depends on the whole network of hypotheses available to the speaker, together with the speaker's judgment as to the network available to the hearer. The hypotheses are dependent not only on the factor of communication but also on the realities of the other orientations. The hypotheses themselves cannot be said to have been "learned" by the speaker. Rather, they have been devised on the basis of observation of the performance of others, particularly the relation between what people say and the social context in which they say it. This means that each individual creates a unique method for communicating, with enough overlap between individuals (the result of trial and error) so that communication can actually take place. What is required is normal human intelligence, sufficient to cope with all the imprecisions and uncertainties of the apparatus, together with the unending variety of ideas to be communicated. These hypotheses of course cannot be observed directly. They are inferred by analysts on the basis of the way people communicate. When we study this process of communication in great detail, we come to the decision that speakers are behaving as though they are operating with a particular network of particular hypotheses. Coming to that decision is what the task of the analyst is all about. The general picture then is that of a peculiarly human method of communication, one that exploits the advantages of physiology and intelligence that have been developed in the evolution of the species. References Davis, Joseph 1987 "A combinatory phonology of Italian", Columbia University Working Papers in Linguistics 8: 1-99.

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Diver, William 1985 The grammar of Greek and the grammar of Latin. (Columbia University. Published for class use only.) 1986 "The Latin precursors of the Romance reflexive", Studies in Romance Linguistics 24: 321-342. 1987 "The dual", Columbia University Working Papers in Linguistics %: 100-114. 1989 "A primer of Latin", Columbia University Working Papers in Linguistics 10: 155-242. Jabeen, Shazi Shah 1993 Economy of articulation in the phonology of Bihar Urdu (as spoken in and around Gaya). (Unpubished Ph. D. dissertation, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, U. P., India.) Kent, Roland G. 1951 Varro on the Latin language. Harvard University Press 1951: The Loeb Classical Library.

Quantitative analysis in Columbia School theory Wallis Reid

1. Introduction Columbia School linguists rely heavily on quantitative data. This reliance is not unique for equantitative data now figures in much contemporary linguistic research. Yet it is by and large employed by linguists whose interests lie outside grammar proper in, say, discourse analysis or sociolinguistics. By contrast, grammar proper is the interest of Columbia School linguists: their object of study is not language use - conceived as an investigation separate and apart from linguistic structure - but the core grammar of a particular language. The special role of quantitative data in Columbia School theory stems from its unorthodox conception of both language and grammar, and from the analytical procedure that conception engenders. Columbia School theory conceives of a language as an inventory of signs. The "signal" of a sign may be any morphological feature that facilitates its recognition: a bound or unbound morpheme, (e.g., dog, chase, the, -ed, ing -s), a discontinuous morpheme (e.g., have...-ed), a zero (e.g., the booktyi) or a fixed feature of word order (e. g., the syntagmatic position of dogs and cats in dogs chase cats). The "meaning" of a sign is a semantic invariant consistently paired with its associated signal. Some parts of this inventory are tightly structured, the "grammar"; other parts are loosely structured, the "lexicon". The grammar consists of a collection of semi-autonomous subsystems. Each subsystem is comprised of a set of linguistic signs whose meanings categorize a particular semantic substance: for example, Time, Person, Number, Degree of Activity, Focus, Deixis, Probability, Differentiation. Though the systems themselves are language-particular, the principles governing their deployment are universal and reflect general psychological characteristics of human beings. This sign-based conception of linguistic structure redefines the task of grammatical analysis. Whereas mainstream linguistic theory focuses on the sentence and its structural parts, Columbia School theory focuses on the structure of grammatical systems. The analytical problem is to deter-

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mine the formal and semantic structure of each such system - the identity of its signals and their meanings - and then to test those meanings against the distribution of their signals in language use. If the distribution of the signals can be explained in terms of the contribution of their meanings to the messages being communicated, then the grammatical system is supported empirically. This two-part procedure calls for different analytical strategies. In initially hypothesizing a grammatical system the analyst relies upon a variety of informal qualitative techniques: minimal pair contrasts, close textual analysis, informant reports and introspection. In the subsequent testing stage, however, the procedures must become more rigorous and objective, and here quantitative analysis plays an important role. Quantitative techniques of analysis are useful in this testing stage for two reasons. First, in a sign-based conception of linguistic structure there is no reason to distinguish intra-sentential from inter-sentential phenomena. As a consequence, a grammatical system must account for both. At the sentence level the relevant data can be categorical facts about which there is no dispute; but beyond the sentence they usually involve statistical tendency. Quantitative analysis is then the appropriate tool for isolating and formulating such tendencies. Secondly, even at the sentence level the expected interpretive effect of a grammatical sign is sometimes too subtle to be reliably identified through introspection alone. In such cases it must be inferred from the presence of another morphological feature in the larger context. Again, statistical analysis is useful in establishing a predicted relation between a grammatical sign and some independent feature of the larger context. While the use of quantitative data in this testing capacity is easily graspable on an intuitive level, articulating the logic behind it proves more difficult. This article traces the evolving rationale for quantitative data in Columbia School work from its introduction in Diver (1969) to the present. Section 2 examines Diver's original rationale, in which quantitative data served as direct tests of linguistic meanings. I will argue that the connection between data and hypothesis was understood in two ways, one orthodox and the other metaphorical. The metaphorical interpretation came to supplant the orthodox interpretation but required problematic assumptions. Section 3 will examine Garcia's (1975) introduction of the notion "communicative strategy", an innovation which laid the ground for a new conception of how quantitative data relate to analyses. Garcia observed that speakers often develop multiple ways of using a particular

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meaning to communicate a variety of different messages. These ways are all plausible and reasonable exploitations of the meaning, but they by no means exhaust all the logical possibilities. In her analysis of the Spanish pronominal system Garcia proposed a cognitive conflict between two of the strategies for the clitic se. That conflict is the reason, she argued, that speakers never employ both for a single referent. This reification of strategies altered their theoretical status. Whereas before they could be thought of more or less as a presentational device - the analyst's way of grouping and discussing examples - in Garcia (1975) they became constructs imputed to the psychology of speakers. Section 4 will offer a new rationale for how quantitative data test meanings, a rationale already implicit in Garcia and Otheguy (1983). In this conception quantitative data test meanings indirectly: meanings relate to messages via communicative strategies, and statistical data then serve to test a hypothesized communicative strategy.

2. Quantitative data as direct tests of meanings In the late sixties William Diver developed a method for testing grammatical systems statistically. The seminal paper was "The relevance system of Homeric Greek" (Diver 1969). Diver begins with a statement of the initial pretheoretical problem that confronts the linguist. The task confronting the linguist, or grammarian, has been posed in a number of ways.... Here, the task is posed in a manner that makes it parallel to the task confronting other disciplines: to explain the non-random character of the observable phenomena. The phenomena of language that are directly observable are of two kinds: sounds heard, which we perceive with our ears, and messages communicated, which we can examine with our intelligences. Since, as a matter of fact, a language is a device of communication that transmits messages by means of sounds, the task presents itself specifically in the following form: in correlation with the particular message being communicated, why does the distribution of sounds uttered depart from a random distribution in the particular way it does? (Diver 1969: 45)

Note here the intent to ground linguistics in a range of directly observable phenomena, the sounds of speech. After acknowledging that speech sounds are grouped into units of morphology, Diver characterizes the kind of solution he will propose to the problem of the non-random distribution of sounds.

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Thus posed, the task takes on a decidedly Saussurean flavor; it is tempting to assume that the morphological units are signals that signal meanings, and that it is the meanings that are in fact being grouped together, because they jointly and coherently contribute to the intended message. (Diver 1969: 46)

Here Diver crosses from observation to theory; the signals represent a principled categorization of the observable sounds, one motivated by the communicative function of language, while the meanings serve as the explanatory link between the signals and the observable messages. Signals are distributed in a certain asymmetrical fashion, says Diver, because their meanings are contributing to messages which are structured and distributed in that same asymmetrical fashion. From this follows a twopart analytical procedure: a) postulate certain linguistic forms (sounds or letters) as signals of certain meanings; b) test for the predicted parallelism between two asymmetries — one among signals and the other among messages. The parallelism serves to confirm the postulated meanings. Once confirmed, the meanings become the explanation for the observed parallelism between signals and messages. 2.1. The meaning-to-message interpretation of quantitative data Diver demonstrates this procedure in its classic form in his analysis of Greek aspect. On the basis of an initial qualitative analysis of individual sentences, he hypothesizes certain verb morphology — traditionally known as the aorist active, the aorist middle, the imperfect active and the imperfect middle - as signals of meanings in a system of Relevance. The meanings of the four signals designate different degrees of thematic salience of the event named by the verb. This system appears as Figure 1. (All four signals bear the temporal meaning PAST as well.)

Relevance

(1) (2) (3) (4)

signal

meaning

aorist active aorist middle imperfect active imperfect middle

MORE CENTRAL LESS CENTRAL LESS PERIPHERAL MORE PERIPHERAL

Figure 1. The relevance system of Homeric Greek

(or (or (or (or

MOST RELEVANT) MORE RELEVANT) LESS RELEVANT) LEAST RELEVANT)

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Diver then identifies two passages in the Iliad which contrast with each other in that one is fast-paced narrative and the other is leisurely narrative. (Both passages are cited in full.) This is the asymmetry at the message level: events which move the narrative forward are clumped together in one part of the text and events which do not are clumped together in another part. Next, Diver identifies an asymmetrical distribution of signals in the two passages. In the fast-paced narrative, aorist actives predominate, and in the leisurely narrative imperfect actives predominate, as illustrated in Tables 1 and 2. Each number represents the level of relevance of the finite verbs in the two passages as they appear in sequence. Table 1. Distribution of relevance signals in fast paced narrative 1 1 1 1

11

1 1 1 1 1 1 1

2

11 2

"..."

1

2

3

Table 2. Distribution of relevance signals in leisurely narrative 1 1 1 [no verbs at level 2 (WR)] 3 3 3 3 3 "..." 3 4 4 4

Ninety per cent of the verbs in the fast-paced passage are either Is or 2s while only twenty-five per cent of the verbs in the leisurely passage are Is or 2s. Since one would expect a speaker to favor the upper range of the relevance scale for fast-paced narrative ("containing almost nothing to distract from the action itself [Diver 1969: 50]) and the lower range for leisurely narrative, the results support the hypothesized meanings of the signals. In this first demonstration - which I argue is the purest form of quantitative evidence — Diver presents a direct correlation between particular signals and particular message types. The identification of the message types relies on the translations of the two passages in the Loeb Library edition of the Iliad. Diver expects us, as experienced readers of narratives, to recognize that one is fast-paced and the other is leisurely purely on the basis of its English translation. In a later demonstration, Diver shows how it is possible to avoid reliance upon subjective judgments about particular passages. Rather than

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asking us to agree with his characterization of a particular passage in the Iliad, Diver asks us, in the passage quoted below, to agree about certain characteristics of narratives in general. We can now turn to a quantitative validation within the area of leisurely narrative. The qualitative basis is: we may suppose that actions that do not take place in a narrative (although they might have and their possibility is mentioned) will in general be designated as more peripheral than will actions that do take place. Hence we may predict that in the usage of Homer negative sentences will be abnormally displaced toward the bottom of the scale of relevance. To get some idea of the normal distribution along the scale in leisurely narrative, a count was made of the first 100 forms in the Iliad (covering about 300 lines of the first book). The results are shown in Table 3 (from Diver 1969: 58). Table 3. Normal distribution of the four members of the relevance system (1) (2) (3) (4)

aorist active aorist middle imperfect active imperfect middle

MORE CENTRAL LESS CENTRAL LESS PERIPHERAL MORE PERIPHERAL

49 8

21 23 101

Diver then collects the first 500 instances of the negative on. At this point one anticipates a simple demonstration of the favoring of the lower end of the relevance scale by morphological negation. Instead, he keeps morphological negation a constant and divides negated verbs into two classes: those that name non-occurring events and those that, by naming a non-occurring event, imply the occurrence of its antonym. Diver explains as follows: In making a count of this kind it immediately becomes apparent that Homer does not confine his use of the negative to the description of actions that do not take place. He also uses it ... as an indirect stylistic device for indicating, in reverse, things that did happen. That is, he produces a kind of double negative by combining the negative particle with a lexical meaning opposite to the effect intended: 'he did not disobey' = 'he obeyed'; 'she forgot not' = 'she remembered'; 'he ceased not' = 'he continued'; 'he was not ignorant of = 'he knew'; etc. Opposed to this are the "straight" negatives 'they did not fight', 'she did not speak', 'he did not accomplish' etc. Keeping this distinction in mind, and separating out the occurrences in fast action, we get the following distributions... [see Table 4] The distributions are as anticipated. All negatives in the fast action are aorist actives [= level 1]; the double negatives, which have no special status, show about the same

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distribution as the larger sample [see Table 3]..., and the straight negatives in leisurely narrative are definitely displaced toward the bottom of the scale. (Diver 1969: 59) Table 4. Differing distribution of relevance signals with negation Fast action

Leisurely narrative double negative

(1) (2) (3) (4)

aorist active aorist middle imperfect active imperfect middle

8 0 0 0

straight

9 1 4 4

1 2 11 10

18

24

2.2. The meaning-to-meaning interpretation of quantitative data The first two demonstrations have both illustrated direct correlations between the distribution of the verb forms under analysis and the thematic structure of Homer's narrative. The next demonstration contains the seed of the metaphorical interpretation that came to dominate our thinking. It involves a different kind of asymmetry: the asymmetrical pairing of lexical and grammatical signals. Some verbs in Homeric Greek are defective; that is, they fail to occur in certain tenses. Diver begins by asking us to recognize, on the basis of our experience with narrative prose, that certain events are more likely to be thematically important than others. ... we might expect that the act of sitting would be more often associated with retirement from the scene, that of standing with entry onto the scene, and that a count of the relative frequency of occurrence of the various forms of the two verbs would show a bias in a peripheral or central direction accordingly. So also with such pairs as 'to sleep' and 'to rouse', 'to lead' and 'to follow'. Further, such a verb as 'to throw' may be expected to be regularly central rather than peripheral, as may also a verb that is regularly used to indicate movement from one place to another on the scene of action [i. e., go (WR)]. The following tabulation gives, for these verbs, the total number of occurrences in the Iliad of uncompounded forms in the third person in combination with the members of the four-fold scale indicated. [See Table 5.] (Diver 1969: 63)

I have circled the figures that confirm Diver's predictions. The verbs throw and go strongly favor the highest level of relevance, as expected.

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Table 5. Favoring of relevance signals by verbs of contrasting thematic importance throw

1

go

sit

Θ

12

5

2

© 16

3

11

8

4

5

0

stand

sleep

0

© 1

0 0

0

2

©

18

© 2

rouse

35

follow

© 1

0 8 2

21

©

lead

0 0 © 2

So also, the thematically more-salient verbs stand, rouse and lead all rank higher on the relevance scale than their thematically less-salient counterparts sit, sleep and follow. Diver concludes: Again the picture is clear. What might be called the "relative defectiveness" of the various verbs follows reasonably well from the interaction of their lexical meanings with the relative likelihood of such a meaning's being used in the central or peripheral part of a message. (Diver 1969: 63).

This passage is open to misinterpretation. The phrase "the interaction of their lexical meanings" can be understood as 'the interaction of each lexical meaning with the central or peripheral part of a message'. But one might also interpret the phrase as 'the interaction of lexical meanings with the grammatical meanings in the relevance system'. In fact, it is quite likely to be interpreted in this fashion because Diver speaks just this way in introducing the discussion of defective verbs. The position being taken in this paper demands that such failure of cooccurrence be explained in exactly the same way as other non-random distributions; that is, in terms of the relative coherency or incoherency of the meanings being combined, and not on the basis of a capricious or arbitrary morphology. The argument is as follows. The speaker is engaged in communicating messages by means of grammatical and lexical meanings. For any particular pair of such meanings, there is a certain probability that they will combine readily to produce a coherent non-contradictory, message. To use, again, an obvious example from the system of number, we would anticipate that a lexical meaning having to do with something of which there is only one would rarely occur in combination with the grammatical meaning plural. Since there is only one sun, in popular usage, we would expect the plural suns to occur much less frequently than the plural stars, of which there are many. The tendency for sun to be "defective" is therefore the result of mutual incompatibility between lexical and grammatical meanings. (Diver 1969: 62-63)

Diver seems to be lapsing into a kind of conceptual shorthand with the phrases "the relative coherency of meanings" and "mutual incompatibil-

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ity of ... meanings"; that is, he isn't really claiming a strictly logical incompatibility between the meaning of sun and the meaning of -s when considered in the abstract. Rather, a sympathetic reading would be that the reason the word star occurs so often in the plural and sun so infrequently is that we, as speakers, often have call to talk of a plurality of 'stars' and little call to talk of a plurality of 'suns'.

2.3. Comparison of the two interpretations Let me put in schematic form how these two rationales differ. Figure 2 diagrams the rationale employed in the first two demonstrations, the one appealing to the semantic suitability of (combinations of) meanings for a particular kind of message. message: meanings: signals:

(frequent message) 'multiple stars' STELLA + MORE THAN ONE star + -s (frequent combination of signals)

(infrequent message) 'multiple suns' SOL + MORE THAN ONE sun + -s (infrequent combination of signals)

Figure 2. The meaning suitability rationale

Figure 2 shows two asymmetries: at the message level are two messages which we as speakers recognize differ in frequency; at the morphological level are two combinations of signals which differ in frequency. The explanatory link between these two asymmetries is the meanings posited for the forms sun, star and -s; (glossed here as SOL, STELLA, and MORE THAN ONE). The meaning of star and the meaning of -s jointly contribute to a message we know to be frequent whereas the meaning of sun and the meaning of the -s jointly contribute to a message we know to be infrequent. Thus the statistical favoring of stars over suns in running text is a direct reflection of an asymmetry in the kinds of messages people wish to express. Figure 3 diagrams the rationale appealing to the intrinsic compatibility of meanings. meanings: signals:

STELLA MORE THAN ONE star + -s (frequent combination of signals)

SOL MORE THAN ONE sun + -s (infrequent combination of signals)

Figure 3. The meaning compatibility rationale

Figure 3 has only one asymmetry, a morphological one. In place of the message-level asymmetry of Figure 2, there are relations of semantic

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compatibility (suggested by the smiling face) and incompatibility (the frowning face) between the meanings STELLA, SOL and MORE THAN ONE. The trouble with this rationale is its claim of semantic incompatibility. There appears to be nothing illogical or contradictory in the pairing of the meanings SOL and MORE THAN ONE, as there seems to be in the pairing of married and bachelor in the collocation married bachelor. Rather, it simply seems to be a question of the relative utility of the two pairings in normal communication; in other words, the situation represented by Figure 2. While Diver's initial example of semantic incompatibility is ill-chosen, other examples work quite well, which is why the notion gained such a firm foothold in our thinking. Take the case of verb tenses in English and the temporal adverbs yesterday and tomorrow. The meaning of -ed is PAST, and the meaning of yesterday also designates a time in the past; the two meanings thus complement each other semantically. By contrast, the meaning of tomorrow designates a time in the future which, in effect, contradicts the meaning PAST of -ed. From this one would predict that speakers will regularly combine yesterday with the past tense and never combine tomorrow with the past tense. And indeed, a cursory examination of conversational English will yield many examples of yesterday in combination with -ed and no combinations tomorrow with -ed, as shown in Table 6. Table 6. yesterday and tomorrow with the past tense

-ed yesterday tomorrow

meanings: signals:

+ 0

He left yesterday. He left tomorrow.

THE DAY BEFORE TODAY PAST yesterday -ed (frequent combination of signals)

THE DAY AFTER TODAY

PAST

tomorrow. -ed (non-occurring combination of signals)

Figure 4a. The meaning compatibility rationale

Now the meaning compatibility rationale, which didn't work so well for suns and stars, seems to work perfectly. Figure 4a illustrates the rationale. What is it about this explanation that we found so appealing? To my mind it is the unspoken metaphor it subliminally evokes, that of molecular theory. Chemical elements have differing propensities for interaction

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as a consequence of the number of electrons in their outer valence ring, and it is possible to predict which elements will combine to form compounds purely on that basis. Just so, Diver seems to suggest, meanings interact all by themselves on the basis of their intrinsic semantic properties, quite apart from a consideration of the communicative goals of speakers. 2.4. Empirical failure The problem with the meaning compatibility rationale is that if two meanings are truly incompatible, then it would seem that they should never co-occur; yet in fact they sometimes do. Consider example (1). (1)

You read the latest polls every morning... You listen to the latest polls every evening... As a result you know President Reagan was re-elected next week by a thumping majority. And you are puzzled, right? Waking up in the morning, tuning in to the world, hearing the hourly poll about the great victory Mr. Reagan won next week, you ask yourself "How come I don't remember voting next week..." Thanks to the amazingly scientific science of polling ... it is not necessary for you to have voted next week. (Russell Baker, the New York Times, October 31, 1984, p. A.27)

In (1) verbal indications of past time co-occur with the phrase next week though, admittedly, the effect verges on incoherence. Nevertheless (1) makes us realize why semantic compatibility, with its evocation of valence theory, sometimes breaks down. Chemical elements combine all by themselves, purely on the basis of their intrinsic nature, but linguistic meanings are combined by speakers, and speakers are doing so for a specific communicative purpose. The collocation of linguistic meanings, then, is a goal-directed event, whereas a chemical reaction is not. And it stands to reason that speakers will feel free to combine meanings guided by the goal at which they are aiming, unconstrained by any semantic calculus operating on meanings in the abstract. This realization suggests that the meaning compatibility rationale should be revised so as to allow for the possibility of incompatible combinations. Diver provides the inspiration for this revision in the passage above. "For any particular pair of ... meanings, there is a certain prob-

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ability that they will combine readily to produce a coherent, non-contradictory, message." (Diver 1969: 62) Note here the reintroduction of messages. Predictions of statistical skewings are still to be deduced from meanings, but not by assessing their purely logical compatibility; rather, one estimates the likelihood that they will combine to produce a coherent message. Figure 4b presents this alternative rationale for the yesterday example. message: meanings: signals:

probable coherent message THE DAY BEFORE TODAY + PAST yesterday -ed (frequent combination of signals)

improbable coherent message THE DAY AFTER TODAY + PAST tomorrow. -ed (infrequent combination of signals)

Figure 4b. The coherent message rationale

This revision can now accommodate the fact that speakers sometimes combine meanings that would seem incompatible in the abstract. Diver even invented a metaphorical term to designate such combinations, calling them "forced marriages". The idea was that speakers will sometimes combine incompatible meanings to produce a special communicative effect. Diver's example was the English phrase a certain person, in which indefinite a is combined with the word certain, claiming definite reference, to produce the special effect of reference to someone who is known by the speaker but unknown to the hearer. Similarly, one could argue that Russell Baker was aiming at a special communicative effect, temporal incoherence, in combining indications of past time with the phrase next week. Throughout the 1970s Columbia School analysts employed one or the other of these two rationales, 4a and 4b, in discussing counts. In those early years we spoke of meanings "favoring" each other; of "coherent combinations" of meanings; of people preferring "compatible" combinations. Certain meanings "liked" each other while others "disliked" each other, and it was these propensities that were being reflected in our counts. This picture was attractive because it made it appear that we could deduce statistical predictions from meanings themselves: either by assessing their logical compatibility or, alternatively, by assessing their propensity to produce coherent messages. And this, in turn, made counts appear to be direct tests of meanings. 2.5. Questionable assumptions The trouble with both rationales is their assumptions. The semantic compatibility rationale assumes that speakers will at least shun, if not avoid

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altogether, incompatible combinations, while the coherent message rationale assumes that speakers favor more coherent messages over less coherent messages. In other words, both assume that forced marriages will always be rare. But could it not be that forced marriage combinations might occasionally outnumber "harmonious marriage" combinations? For if the special communicative effect motivating forced marriages arises often enough, then incompatible meanings (or alternatively, meanings that would seem unlikely to produce coherent messages) will, on occasion, predominate in the particular text chosen for statistical analysis. It would seem that the Russell Baker passage presents such a case. The incompatible combination of past tenses and next week outnumbers the compatible combination of the present tense and next week by three to one. One could counter that the Russell Baker passage is atypical of English prose, and that if we enlarge our scope to include additional texts, the favoring will quickly reverse. Yet the objection still holds, for compatibility is a matter of degree, and not all putatively incompatible meanings produce an incoherent message; e. g., a certain person. Could it not be, then, that forced marriage combinations might be so communicatively useful that they are statistically favored by the general population?1 To flesh out this speculation, consider example (2), the opening paragraph of Gone With the Wind. It contains an instance of suns, the form that Diver chose to illustrate a combination of lexical and grammatical meanings that have a low probability of producing a coherent message. (2)

Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton Twins were... Above [her eyes] her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin — that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against the hot Georgia suns. (Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind, 3)

Now in point of fact Diver is right; suns is extremely rare. But the crucial question is his basis for assuming that such usage will necessarily be rare. The message is not incoherent or conceptually novel as was example (2); the message is simply the daily hot sun in Georgia. Furthermore, Mitchell is not doing anything linguistically innovative; she is simply reckoning the grammatical number of sun in a more subjective way, registering its daily appearance in the sky rather than its objective uniqueness in the solar system. English speakers already do this with the names of the

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seasons (e.g., he spent two summers there) and occasionally, for wry effect, with moon as well (e. g., many moons ago). Is it not possible, then, that English speakers and writers could easily adopt Mitchell's usage? If so, there would undoubtedly be texts in which the occurrence of suns outnumbered the occurrence of stars. With what confidence, then, can we predict on the basis of meanings alone whether a particular combination is likely to produce a coherent message? It seems clear that Diver was basing his prediction of the rarity of suns on something more than just the meanings of sun and -s, namely, his knowledge of how speakers currently use those meanings to communicate messages. But how does such knowledge fit into the hypothesis-testing procedure, and how exactly do statistical skewings support a meaning hypothesis?

3. Communicative strategies In the 1970s, Erica Garcia introduced the notion "communicative strategy" in her analysis of the Spanish pronominal system (Garcia 1975; 1977). Although the notion was implicit in earlier work it became reified in Garcia's analysis because it figured crucially in a new kind of explanation for a non-occurring form. Conventional Spanish grammar would lead one to expect se se Ιανό One washed oneself; but that construction is, in fact, never heard. Garcia posits a cognitive conflict between the communicative strategies underlying the two se's. Section 3 will summarize Garcia's explanation and section 4 will show how her reification of strategies led to an answer to the question of how facts of usage fit into the testing procedure. Garcia posits three major grammatical systems involving pronouns. Two of them will be sketched only in brief because se is not formally a member of either. Their presentation, although somewhat taxing to the reader, is necessary to show how se functions as a de facto member of both systems by being unmarked for their respective distinctions.

3.1. The activity system In Garcia's first system the dative and accusative clitic pronouns le, lo and la bear meanings which designate the relative activeness of a participant in an event. Le signals that its referent is LESS ACTIVE (than the most

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active participant, referred to by the verb ending). Lo and la, which differ only in gender, both signal LEAST ACTIVE. (This system only exists in the third person.)

Degree of activity

the verb-ending

(inferred to be "most active")

le

LESS ACTIVE

la (feminine) lo (non-feminine)

LEAST ACTIVE

(se)

neutral to the activity distinction as well as to gender and number

Figure 5. The activity system

The most straightforward way the meanings LESS ACTIVE and LEAST ACTIVE are employed is to indicate the actual degree of activity of a participant in the particular event named by the verb.

(3)

le compre el sombrero

(4)

lo compre de Pedro I bought // from Pedro' (least active)

Ί bought the hat from him/her'1 (less active)

In (3) the referent of le is actively cooperating in the event of buying whereas in (4) the referent of lo (presumably the hat) is completely inactive in the event of buying. As shown in Figure 5, se is not a member of this system because it signals no information about the relative activeness of its referent. (In this respect, it resembles me and te, the first, and second person pronouns.) As a consequence, se can, depending upon the context, refer to a participant who is either most, less, or, by some assessments, least active.

(5)

en Francia se come un pan muy rico

'In France one eats tasty bread' (se = most active)

(6)

se lo compre Ί bought it for him/her' (se = less active)

(7)

Pedro se bano

'Pedro bathed himself (se = least active)

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3.2. The Focus system Garcia posits a second system which corresponds to the traditional distinction between nominative and oblique pronouns. This system categorizes participants in terms of their position at either the center or periphery of attention with respect to the event named by the verb. the verb ending (also ellella2) Focus (vis-a-vis the event)

\

fo//fl.

fe

FOCUS (= center of attention) NQN pocus (= periphery of atten.

tion) (se)

neutral to the focus contrast

Figure 6. The Focus system

The verb ending, as well as el and ella, all refer to the entity in focus, the entity at the center of attention with respect to the event. (8)

quito la manzana 'he/she took away the apple' (verb ending)

(9)

el quito la manzana 'he took away the apple' ("subject" pronoun)

Lolla and le, on the other hand, refer to the entities which flesh out the communication - the "complementary" entities. (10)

la quito 'he/she took it away'

(11)

le quito la manzana 'he/she took the apple from him/her'

Se stands outside this system as well because it is neutral to the contrast of focus. Thus se can refer to the entity in focus: (5)

en Francia se come un pan muy rico 'in France one eats tasty bread' (se co-referential with verb ending)

Or, it can refer to a second third-person complement: (6)

se lo compre Ί bought it for himlher' (se not in focus)

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Finally, se can refer to an entity which, while in focus, is also involved in the event in a way typical of referents of lo and la. In this case, the entity in focus receives our undivided attention; that is, the usual contrast between central and peripheral participant collapses. (7)

Pedro se bano

'Pedro bathed himself (entity in focus receives all our attention with respect to the event)

3.3. The Deixis system Both the Activity and the Focus systems characterize se negatively, by excluding it as a member; se is simply the non-specific third-person pronoun available when, for one reason or another, speakers do not wish to categorize a participant in terms of either activity or focus. In Garcia's third system se is a full-fledged member.

Deixis

ellella le; la/lo

HIGH DEIXIS

se

LOW DEIXIS

(+ FOCUS) (+ NON FOCUS; + LESS/LEAST ACTIVE) (no Activity or Focus meanings)

Figure 7. The deixis system

"Deixis" is the technical term for the semantic substance 'concentration of attention'. The Deixis system differs from the Focus system in that whereas the focus distinction categorizes participants thematically from the speaker's standpoint, the deixis meanings function as low level processing instructions for the hearer. HIGH DEIXIS and LOW DEIXIS are used most often to distinguish among various third-person referents in terms of the degree of difficulty — the amount of attention required to identify them. When reference is being made to the entity already in focus - already at the center of our attention - only a small effort is required, and LOW DEIXIS is employed. But when reference is made to some other entity — in effect, a fourth person — more effort is required, and HIGH DEIXIS is employed. (7)

Pedro se bano

'Pedro bathed himself (se co-referential with verb ending [= FOCUS])

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Pedro la bano 'Pedro bathed her' (la not co-referential with verb ending)

3.4. "Impersonal" se Since, however, the semantic substance of the Deixis system is merely 'concentration of attention', not '+/—' co-reference with the "subject"', its meanings can be used for a second, but related, purpose: that of telling the hearer how important it is to identify the referent. This second use of deixis is best illustrated by contrasting se with el. (Note that according to Figure 7 HIGH DEIXIS is signalled by both the NON-FOCUS pronouns lol la, le, and the FOCUS pronouns el and ella. Since se is neutral to the focus distinction, se directly opposes both sets of pronouns.) (5)

en Francia se come un pan muy rico 'in France one eats very tasty bread'

(13)

el come un pan muy rico 'he eats a tasty bread'

The effect of the deixis contrast is now no longer that of +/— coreference but that of definite vs. indefinite reference: 'he' vs. One'. The mechanism is the following. The meaning HIGH DEIXIS of el instructs the hearer to make a significant effort to identify its referent. The implication is that referential identity is important to the message, and the hearer will thus go as far back in the preceding context as necessary to find a suitable referent. On the other hand, the meaning LOW DEIXIS of se instructs the hearer to exert only a minimal effort in identifying its referent. If no likely referent is readily available in the immediate context, the hearer will make no further effort to find one. He will conclude that he is being instructed to exert only a minimal effort because referential identity is unimportant to the message; hence, an indefinite or impersonal interpretation of se. Sometimes this "subject defocusing" effect of se is best rendered in English by the passive voice. (14)

se habla espanol 'Spanish spoken (by some unknown party)'

Note that this interpretation of se is highly context dependent, triggered by the absence of an appropriate referent. When an appropriate

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referent is available, the hearer concludes that LOW DEIXIS is being used for a different purpose, namely, that its easy-to-find referent is playing an additional role. (15)

se lava 'one washes' (in a context lacking a referent for se)

(16)

se lava 'he/she washes him/herself (in a context with a referent for se)

3.5. Communicative strategies To summarize the results so far, the deixis contrast is employed for two quite different purposes: a. to imply that the referent is easy vs. hard to find (se vs. la) (16)

se lava 'he/she washes him/herself

(17)

la lava 'he/she washes her'

b. to imply that the referent is unimportant vs. important to find (se vs. el) (5)

en Francia se come un pan muy rico

'in France one eats very tasty bread' (13)

el come un pan muy rico

'he eats a tasty bread' Each of these purposes Garcia calls a "communicative strategy". A communicative strategy is a particular semantic rationale for using a meaning to communicate a message, and a particular inferential path for a hearer to follow in constructing a message. The se in (16) and the se in (5) represent different communicative strategies because: a) each se reflects a different paradigmatic contrast: se vs. la; se vs. el; b) the rationale for the choice of each se is different in detail; c) each se produces a different effect in the message. At the same time, the two se's are grammatically identical because the same construct, LOW DEIXIS, in the core grammar of Spanish serves to explain both uses of se. The two se's do not differ grammatically, only pragmatically - only with respect to what the speaker is attempting to accomplish with LOW DEIXIS on a particular occasion.

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3.6. "Double-mention" se We turn now to a third use of deixis. Since the semantic substance of this system is merely "concentration of attention" not "+/— co-reference with the 'subject'" nor "+/— defmiteness of 'subject'", its two meanings can be used for still another purpose: simple emphasis. In this case, the relevant contrast is not intra-systemic (HIGH vs. LOW) but simply DEIXIS vs. nothing. 3.6.1. high deixis vs. nothing This contrast is difficult to render in English because English always adds a pronoun or noun to identify the entity in focus, and the pronoun thus produces no discernible emphatic effect. (18)

el Ιανό 'he washed' (el - HIGH DEIXIS; [FOCUS; third person; -Fern; singular])

(19)

(0) Ιανό 'he/she washed' (verb ending = no deixis [FOCUS; third person; singular])

3.6.2. low deixis vs. nothing The addition of LOW DEIXIS has a more diffuse effect on the message. By slightly increasing attention on the entity in focus, se indirectly implies that its referent performs the activity with greater than normal thoroughness, or exercises a greater than normal control (since these are both plausible reasons for deserving greater attention). Garcia dubs this the "double-mention" strategy of se because the entity in focus is mentioned twice, once by the verb ending and once by se. Again, the effect is difficult to translate because English lacks any grammatical device comparable to Spanish se. Its effect must often be approximated by an adverbial particle or a shift to another lexical item. (20)

(