Reinventing Structuralism: What Sign Relations Reveal About Consciousness 9783110304978, 9783110303735

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Rodney B. Sangster Reinventing Structuralism

Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs

Editor Volker Gast Founding Editor Werner Winter Editorial Board Walter Bisang Hans Henrich Hock Natalia Levshina Heiko Narrog Matthias Schlesewsky Niina Ning Zhang Editor responsible for this volume Volker Gast

Volume 264

Rodney B. Sangster

Reinventing Structuralism What Sign Relations Reveal About Consciousness

DE GRUYTER MOUTON

ISBN: 978-3-11-030373-5 e-ISBN: 978-3-11-030497-8 ISSN: 1861-4302 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2013 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Meta Systems, Wustermark Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

In memoriam Roman Osipovich Jakobson Cornelis Hendrik van Schooneveld

Preface This study has been a long time in the making. It began in my senior year at Hamilton College, in 1963–64, when I took my first courses in linguistics from the brilliant bio-anthropologist Earl W. Count. Little did I realize at the time that his theory of the biogram–of an underlying structure of mind that determines how a species operates in the world–would resurface years later and become a capstone to my own work on this monograph. From Count we learned about the American structuralists, via Boas and Sapir, and about Chomsky, whose Syntactic Structures was already in its fourth printing and garnering all the attention. Then at Stanford University as a graduate student in the interdepartmental linguistics program a year later, I heard that the Dutch linguist Cornelis van Schooneveld was teaching courses in the Slavic department. His work was as exciting as Chomsky’s, taking European structuralism to an entirely new level, developing a theory of language based on Jakobson’s insights into form/meaning relations in the Russian grammatical system. Two years later, in 1966, when Stanford still had not committed to creating a stand-alone linguistics department, a number of us graduate students followed him when he moved to Indiana University. What we found at Indiana was a linguistics department in a state of virtual civil war between transformationalists and the American structuralists, the new guard against the old. The atmosphere was so intense that outside readers had to be engaged to evaluate our doctoral exams. We actually navigated this scene somewhat apart, as European structuralists, enjoying the delicious irony that it was van Schooneveld himself who had contributed to launching Chomsky’s career by agreeing (reluctantly, prodded by Morris Halle) to publish Syntactic Structures in the series he was editing with the then Dutch publisher Mouton. (See Hinrichs 2001: 7–9, for the documented history of this relationship.) Although it was rather obvious which way the wind was blowing politically, I thought that the promise of European structuralism was too great to be abandoned. The monosemic approach to the analysis of form-meaning relations championed by Jakobson, I was convinced, provided insights into the ultimate structure of mind that other theories were dismissing prematurely. I took the opportunity to work with Jakobson himself, visiting him in Cambridge as I completed my doctoral dissertation, the first work to treat his wide-ranging views on the nature of linguistic signs as a coherent theory of language in its own right, entitled “The Linguistic Thought of Roman Jakobson”. (Sangster 1970) Fast forward to the late 1970s, when as a professor myself at Indiana I completed a second work, Roman Jakobson and Beyond, incorporating van

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Schooneveld’s insights with those of Jakobson and pointing the way forward in “the quest for the ultimate invariants in language”. I will never forget Jakobson’s first teasing words to me upon reading a draft of this book, which he had assumed would be a revision of my dissertation: “I thought this was going to be a book about me!” I responded by saying that so much had been written about him in the meantime–the 1970s were rife with books about Jakobson as both a Prague School structuralist and a Russian Formalist–I was now more concerned with his legacy. I mention this and the preceding anecdote about Chomsky because that is what the story behind the present monograph is all about: an evolutionary progression from classical European structuralism and the struggle to keep it alive (the dissertation), to the implications and the promise of that thought (my first book), and ultimately to the establishment of a new foundation upon which to base it (the monograph before you now). The positive yet tepid reception that first book received convinced me that no matter how committed one was to the promise of European structuralism, so much had already been accomplished in generative grammar and especially in cognitive linguistics, the only way to remain true to one’s convictions was to completely reinvent the enterprise. Criticism of that book and of my presentation on markedness theory at the first International Roman Jakobson Conference held three years after Jakobson’s death, in 1985 (Waugh and Rudy 1991; Sangster 1991), focused on two key concerns. Both Erica Garcia in her contribution to the conference (Garcia 1991) and Edwin Battistella in his subsequent monograph on markedness theory (Battistella 1996) questioned the viability of the way in which the concept of invariance was being applied. And Henrik Birnbaum in his earlier review of my book in Language (Birnbaum 1984) raised the specter of circularity in the very notion of the invariant general meaning of a sign that lay at the heart of Jakobson’s approach. Clearly, what was needed was to recast structuralist tenets in a more current and viable framework, recognizing their fundamentally cognitive roots. Hence the present monograph. I knew that such a major overhaul could not be accomplished overnight; and even with the security of tenure, putting out ideas piecemeal in article form did not seem the best way to proceed. What I needed was an extended “sabbatical” to launch a comprehensive study of cognitive principles in other fields and other disciplines where similar ideas had taken root, concepts that could then be applied to justify the search for meaning in the sign relations of language by erecting a new edifice within which to situate them. I was not sure where this journey would lead until I came across the description of the water metaphor in consciousness research, where the six stages in the metaphor and the hierarchy they comprised mirrored in striking detail the features

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uncovered by the systematic analysis of form-meaning relations that we had been working with already for some three decades. This convinced me that the answers were not to be found at the rational level of consciousness where current cognitive linguistics operates and polysemy is the rule, but rather at the supra-rational or transpersonal level, where the real relational and topological invariants of language reside. But unlike much of the work in transpersonal psychology, where transcendental phenomena are often equated with the spiritual or the mystical, such an enterprise, I was convinced, had to be undertaken with full appreciation of the neuronal structure of consciousness. Thus began an extensive period of research into the nature of self-organizing systems and their application to brain science, bio-anthropological theory as represented by biogenetic structuralism, studies of the supra-rational or “autistic” end of the spectrum of consciousness and the structure of myths, and ultimately the philosophy behind quantum mechanics as a model for living systems as well. This research was pursued on personal time after leaving Indiana to serve as Regional Director for Europe in the University of California Education Abroad Program. Along the way, a number of scholars have been kind enough to give me feedback on previous drafts of this work, and especially important, encouragement to persevere at all costs. Among these I must mention the late Russell Campbell at UCLA, Robert Blake at UC Davis, Jean-Jacques Courtine at UC Santa Barbara and the University of Paris, and especially Efrain Kristal at UCLA. Fritjof Capra and I briefly worked together on aspects of mutual interest involving the theory of self-organizing systems known as autopoiesis. Gerald Edelman also gave his encouragement as I was working with his theory of neuronal group selection known as neural Darwinism. Stanislav Grof kindly sent me materials to better acquaint me with the tenets of transpersonal psychology. Most of all, Charles Laughlin, co-founder of biogenetic structuralism, has given much of his time in personal discussions and careful reading and critique of drafts, for which I am most grateful. I am also indebted to Volker Gast at the University of Jena for his very helpful criticism and thoughtful editorial eye. Much of the structure of this book is due to his involvement and that of Julie Miess, my editor at de Gruyter. Birgit Sievert kindly guided the manuscript through the acceptance process, and Hannes Kaden through the production process. Finally, it is to my long-time partner and very best friend, Rebecca Morrison, that I dedicate this book–for her unwavering patience and loving support during all the hours spent after work, on weekends and even on vacations pursuing this project.

Contents Preface

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Introduction: The promise of modern-day structuralism

1

15

1

Seeking the correlates of meaning in language

2

Sign relations as organic properties of mind

3

Language as a self-organizing system

4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

35 Applying the sign principle to grammatical meaning 36 Past/non-past: The cancellation feature 40 Future/non-future: The objectiveness feature 44 Perfective/imperfective: The dimensionality feature 46 Plural/non-plural: The plurality feature 49 Relations creating separation: The distinctness feature Relations defined on the present as a conceptual property: The 51 extension feature

5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

55 Case relations as a product of grammatical selection 56 The Russian accusative and instrumental 60 The Russian genitive and genitive/accusative 64 The Russian dative and subjectless sentences 66 The system of Russian cases

6 6.1 6.2

69 Extending the sign principle to syntax The modification relation in English: The extension feature The modification relation in Russian: The dimensionality 85 feature The modification relation in French: The plurality feature

6.3 7

21

29

7.1 7.2 7.3

The potential of sign theory in the domain of lexical 101 meaning 108 Preliminary concepts Verbal lexical systems 114 Nominal lexical systems 124

8 8.1

The feature hierarchy that defines human conceptual space The evidence from transpersonal psychology 140

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137

xii 8.2 9

Contents

The evidence from the study of myth

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9.1 9.2 9.3

Neurological evidence for the evolution of higher-order 153 consciousness The neurological structure of consciousness 153 The evolution of the language faculty 162 The sign relation and the origin of image-making 170

10 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6

The position of structuralism in the modern era Saussure’s langue and parole 181 Derrida’s différance 183 Lévi-strauss’ contentless structure 185 Lacan’s symbolic order 187 Bybee’s usage-based grammar 189 Jakobson’s relative autonomy 191 Epilogue: The wisdom of the primal mind 201

Bibliography Glossary Index

207 213

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Introduction: The promise of modern-day structuralism It is quite popular … to criticize and reject old masters. This happens periodically in the history of any scientific discipline. But science should progress by incorporating past evidence into the new and not rejecting it. Claude Lévi-Strauss To modernize is not to make a brand-new thing; it’s to bring an old thing up to date. Louis Menand

Though we are told we live in a post-structuralist world, there is much about the structuralist enterprise that has survived and contributes today to furthering our understanding of human cognition. While certain tenets of traditional structuralism have rightly been superseded, others have been adapted to meet the requirements of current scientific thinking. Whether acknowledged or not, the pivotal role given to metaphor in modern cognitive linguistics, for example, owes much to the pioneering work of one of structuralism’s initial architects, the Russian linguist and polymath Roman Jakobson. And one noteworthy current movement in anthropology, biogenetic structuralism, acknowledges the tradition in its very name. In the present study, we will be concerned with one particular strain of the structuralist enterprise, building upon Jakobson’s seminal work in linguistics, specifically his views on the nature of the linguistic sign, modifying them as appropriate to address current issues raised in linguistics, anthropology, and cognitive science. Our ultimate goal will be to define the role of linguistic sign relations in structuring human cognitive processes at the most profound level of consciousness. In developing this thesis, we will at the very least need to reformulate some of the well-known dichotomies articulated by Saussure in launching the structural revolution in linguistics at the turn of the last century, most notably the distinction between synchrony and diachrony. This distinction certainly served its purpose at the time, to initiate investigation into the structure that the relations among linguistic signs evince at a given moment, something that was lacking in the Neogrammarian historical bias of that era; but it created (for a while, at least) an equally unsound bias towards stasis in synchrony. Ultimately, we must achieve a Hegelian synthesis in this as with other Saussurian oppositions, and recognize the evolutionary foundation of any structural system, especially a living system such as language. And we will do so in the present study by reformulating another of his dichotomies, that between langue and parole–between the underlying structure of sign relations and their expression in actual speech events–into a theory of contextualization of the

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sign’s underlying meaning, where meaning is understood in the Peircean sense of a potentiality inherent in the nature of the sign itself that is never fully realized. We will also need to recast that most maligned of structuralist tenets, the concept of binary relation that Lévi-Strauss borrowed from Jakobson’s (and Troubetzkoy’s) structural theory of phonology and made the cornerstone of his own approach. We will freely concede the shortcomings in previous applications of the principle outside of phonology, but will not succumb to the temptation to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as so many have done. Binarism must not be treated as either a theory or a dogma but as an empirically verifiable attribute of both phonological and grammatical systems that can legitimately be extended to other domains of conceptual structure where language is concerned. But enough of the negatives about historical structuralism. Let us consider some of the positives that have not generally been acknowledged, that have occasioned the citations at the head of this introduction. Chief among these, I would submit, is the contribution of structuralism to the advent of the cognitive revolution. One could well make the argument that structuralism was a cognitive science well before that movement got its name. What the arch-structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss achieved in building upon the seminal ideas of the nineteenth-century ethnographer Adolf Bastian and others, bringing ethnographic studies into the era of anthropology proper, was a monumental shift from describing racial and cultural traits to uncovering the cognitive rules that underlie the way in which cultural artifacts are produced and organized in the mind of so-called primitive man. (Wilcken, 2010. For a review of the precursors to Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism in cultural studies, see Laughlin 2011.) As his work matured, he viewed structural analysis as a way of uncovering the nature of the unconscious as a logically structured universe, “a symbolic structure evoking the hidden order of experience”. (Wilcken 2010: 182) What is most significant about this development, as Patrick Wilcken notes in his comprehensive presentation of Lévi-Strauss’ life and thought, is that Lévi-Strauss did not consider structural analysis to be a kind of metaphysics but rather a metascience, situated on the border between anthropology and psychoanalysis. This distinction is extremely important because both Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson have sometimes been labeled Kantian idealists, whereas neither of them viewed mind and body as detached realms. Throughout his career Lévi-Strauss was concerned to bridge the gap between nature and culture, to show that the same set of principles operate in both domains. As he put it, “structural analysis … can only appear in the mind because its model is already present in the body”. (Wilcken 2010: 315) One can’t get much closer to the cognitive linguist’s

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notion of “embodiment” than that. In the end, Lévi-Strauss may have won the battle by solidifying anthropology as a cognitive science, but he lost the war in that his contribution to the birth of the new science is largely overlooked. One could say much the same thing about Roman Jakobson. Despite living and working in the US for the last forty or so years of his life, Jakobson’s influence on the development of linguistic theory in this country was severely overshadowed by the Chomskyan movement; and few appreciate the extent to which his approach, too, was what we would today call cognitive. This is no doubt due at least in part to the fact that he used the term cognitive in the narrow sense of distinguishing between the referential or cognitive function of language as opposed to its grammatical or purely linguistic function: “In its cognitive function, language is minimally dependent on the grammatical pattern, because the definition of our experience stands in complementary relation to metalinguistic operations”. (Jakobson 1971: 265) Yet those of his studies that provide the most telling evidence of the underlying functioning of mental processes, of how structuralist principles can inform our understanding of conceptual categorization in the human mind, were made precisely in the area of grammatical meaning. We will demonstrate in the study that follows that it is the conceptual patterning first uncovered in these studies, and the linguistic principles employed in that endeavor, that provide a comprehensive foundation upon which to understand the role of the linguistic sign in human cognition. Like Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson was also concerned to bridge the artificial gap between mind and matter without resorting to either extreme of Kantian idealism or the Chomskyan version of Cartesian linguistics, where the two sides are separate but still connected by a truth relationship that requires structures in the mind to match up with those in the so-called real world. Chomsky’s repeated criticisms of Jakobson’s foundational concept of the phoneme, the ultimate meaning-distinguishing entity in a linguistic sound system, are very telling in this respect. (Chomsky 1964) He claimed that the phenomenon known as phonemic overlapping, where two different phonemes are sometimes implemented by one and the same absolute phonetic (physical) value, invalidated Jakobson’s approach. But this is only a problem if one views the phoneme as a mechanical aggregate of materially invariable components. The very concept of the phoneme, however, is based on its being an aggregate of distinctive features which themselves are not identified in absolute physical terms, but by the relation they create in the system in which they participate as meaning-distinguishing elements. Thus, for example, an acoustically acute consonant is acute only in terms of its relation to non-acute or grave consonants in the same system. There is no absolute definition of acuteness or gravity, only

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a relative distinction between the two poles of the opposition, which poles can be implemented in different ways in different environments. In fact, Jakobson’s concept of the distinctive feature was based not on the notion of absolute invariance but on that of topological invariance: an abstract, relational quality that remains constant throughout the various transformations it undergoes as a result of its occurrence in concrete contexts (its contextualizations, as we will term them here). In the final analysis, absolute phonetic value, he argued, must always be measured in terms of the rule of dichotomy imposed upon it by language. (Sangster 1982: 18) One should more accurately conclude, as we shall demonstrate throughout this study, that both of these early structuralists operated with an essentially monist philosophy, a phenomenological structuralism as Elmar Holenstein termed Jakobson’s approach. (Holenstein 1974) Of particular importance to us here in this regard will be the concept of self-reference that constitutes the basis upon which meaning in the cognitive realm is produced. As both Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss insisted, the essence of a cultural artifact or a sign is not to be found in its representational properties–in its associations with one or another aspect of exogenous reality–but rather, and quite explicitly, in its relation to other terms in the system of which it is a part. In other words, the search for the mind’s capacity for conceptual categorization must be based strictly on the self-referential properties of the formal elements that constitute the system, and the resulting properties are therefore properly defined as conceptual relations governing the structure of higher-order consciousness. Thus the seminal attempts to apply the binary principle, especially by Jakobson in the realm of grammatical meaning, were already imbued with systems thinking: the conceptual relations uncovered–the grammatical features he proposed, modeled on the distinctive features in phonology–constituted a network where each individual term derives its meaning from its relation to other terms in the system. In the final analysis, as we will show in the study that follows, individual signs by themselves have no meaning, but a given sign experienced in praesentia is already by definition a contextual variant of an underlying meaning derived from the relation of the sign involved to other signs in absentia in the mind of the speaker. And we shall see that it is this interplay between the experienced sign and the underlying relation from which it has been contextualized that dissolves the mind-body problem where language is concerned. There is no question that Lévi-Strauss considered self-reference to be “the organizing principle” of his thought. (Wilcken 2010: 118) Although an individual may be inducted into the bear clan because he has exhibited traits of strength and superiority associated with bears in the wild, the operative cul-

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tural relation is between members of the bear clan and, say, those of the salmon clan, which relation constitutes a “cultural equation”. (Wilcken 2010: 257) And it was Jakobson’s development of the concept of binary relation to explain the organization of phonological systems as a universal cognitive structure that gave Lévi-Strauss the tool to turn this fundamental observation into a viable method of investigation. This early structuralist agenda, however, was fraught with complications precisely when it came to applying the binary principle in the conceptual sphere, where one was no longer measuring the relative physical properties of sound but the qualities of far more intangible phenomena. As so many critics remarked at the time, and as Lévi-Strauss himself acknowledged at the end of his massive, three-volume study of myth, there was no ultimate conclusion to be drawn from all of the elaborate structures that he discovered by mapping and plotting the seemingly endless “bundles of relations”, no “final meaning” to which all of the “mutually significative meanings are referring”. In the end, all that he would say was that “each matrix of meanings refers to another matrix, each myth to other myths”. (Lévi-Strauss 1958: 87 and Wilcken 2010: 287) In other words, all that ultimately exists is the mind’s capacity to build structures of relations, an essentially non-substantialist position. Exactly the same seeming circularity can be found in Jakobson’s statement defining the nature of reference in language: that meaning is not a correlation between a symbol and its referent in extra-linguistic reality but ultimately, “for us as linguists and as ordinary language users, the meaning of any linguistic sign is its translation into some further, alternative sign”. (Jakobson 1971: 261) This may have been Jakobson’s way of defining what constitutes self-reference in human cognitive systems, but it doesn’t get us anywhere in terms of determining the ultimate nature, the substance if you will, of the invariant relations that underlie the system where the problems of meaning and reference are concerned. Because Jakobson viewed this realm of language to be an ontological matter “minimally dependent on the grammatical pattern”, he did not view his own substantialist analysis of grammatical meaning, which did uncover a pattern of underlying relational invariants or features, to be relevant in the lexical sphere, leaving meaning in the latter realm to be essentially a matter of intralingual translation. For Jakobson, the study of meaning and context, like that of the grammatical pattern, was “an intrinsic linguistic topic, distinctly separate from the ontological problems of reference”. (Jakobson 1971: 577) In the present study, on the other hand, we will demonstrate that these two cognitive realms need to be viewed as two sides of the same coin, united by a process of contextualization that governs how the underlying semantic

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potential inherent in all linguistic signs is realized. Then we will be able to apply the same structural principles that Jakobson demonstrated in the grammatical sphere to uncover the relational invariants that ultimately govern the human capacity for making meaning in all cognitive realms where language is concerned, not only in the properly grammatical or meta-linguistic sphere but also in the ontological realm of reference and therefore of conceptual categorization itself. In the lexical realm as in the grammatical, the signs of language allow us to make inferences about what is being referred to, to conceptualize properties that are not immediately evident in things themselves, by contextualizing their underlying meaning in exactly the same manner. In making this equation, we will see that sign relations must be understood as potentialities whose contextualization, whose ability to make reference, is therefore never static or predictable, but is entirely a matter of probabilities (technically a stochastic process) that gives a system of relational invariants its dynamic and creative power. The conceptual potential inherent in sign relations guarantees that their capacity for contextualization, and therefore the resulting contexts in which they materialize in actual speech events, must by definition be infinite in their variability. And it is this very variability that allows the speaker to exploit the linguistic sign at will to make the kinds of cross-domain mappings that lie at the heart of the cognitive linguistic enterprise. Thus the ontological process of reference is embedded in the contextual power of linguistic signs, putting the sign relation at the core of conceptual categorization at the most profound levels of consciousness. The concept of contextualization lies at the heart of a sign-based theory of language. It unites the process of communication with that of conceptualization in a single over-arching process of sign-formation, where a given contextualization necessarily meets with the legislative authority of the speech community–what we will call the process of grammatical selection–automatically triggering a feedback mechanism that determines whether the given contextualization will have survival value or not. We will insist that the production of meaning in language must be understood as a stochastic process, one which guarantees the freedom of the speaking subject to contextualize the underlying meaning of a sign relation virtually at will, in a purely probabilistic manner; and the feedback from this process in terms of the degree of acceptance by the speech community constitutes the selection mechanism that determines the ultimate trajectory that the system will take. This is the very process that biologists like Gregory Bateson have insisted must lie at the heart of learning, and therefore of evolution itself, in any organism. (Bateson 1972: 255) And we will show how just such a process could have evolved from the signaling behavior of antecedent species.

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The position we will develop in this study is that context is not separable from the sign itself and its relation to other signs in the system in which it participates. The sign’s capacity to signify is based rather upon its ability to create its own context, which is what it means to say that the meaning of a sign is self-referential. This implies, of course, that the meaning of a linguistic sign is necessarily monosemic and that we must therefore resist the temptation to split up the various seemingly polysemous meanings of a given sign into separate contextual categories where more explicit referential or representational properties can be discerned. Our position in this matter will be very clear: that the various polysemous meanings commonly assumed to govern conceptual categorization operate at the ego-oriented or rational level of consciousness, whereas the relational invariants governing the structure of signs themselves as organic properties of mind display a semantic cohesiveness that operates rather at a higher, supra-rational order of consciousness. And it is the structure of meaning at this level that we should be striving to explain. Now this conclusion has its own challenges that will need to be addressed forthrightly in the present study. Linguists have consistently argued against the monosemic principle on the grounds that it requires us to operate at a level of abstractness that virtually defies description, let alone verification, using currently available scientific tools. And indeed, there is little question that at this point the proposed conceptual properties–from Lévi-Strauss’ mythemes to Jakobson’s grammatical features–were couched in such impressionistic terms as to almost defy independent verification. So the question is: is this sufficient reason to have all but abandoned structuralist principles as the cognitive approach in linguistics evolved? Or is it not rather the case that the very abstractness of the conceptual properties uncovered by this type of analysis is its strength, leading semantic investigation to a level beyond that of current cognitive linguistics, beyond associations with ego-oriented psychological principles of categorization to the supra-rational level where it may be possible to ascertain true “archetypes of meaning” in the domain of higherorder consciousness, and to find correlates for such semantic properties in other domains of mental structure at this level? In order to realize this agenda, we will need to recast the impressionistic definitions of the resulting conceptual relations (features) that have been identified by previous investigators building on Jakobson’s insights, including those of the present author, and define them in more objective, quasi-logical terms, so that they can be verified by comparisons with similarly abstract properties uncovered independently by investigators in other realms of mental structure. In this effort, I coin the term “glottological” to describe the uniquely linguistic properties that consistently underlie formal relations across a wide

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spectrum of grammatical categories, including tense, aspect, case and number, as well as the syntactic structures of English, French and Russian. We will then go on to show that the conceptual properties uncovered, and even more importantly the logical hierarchy they comprise, is recapitulated in striking detail both in the field of transpersonal psychology and in the recurring “elemental ideas” of mankind’s myths, the motifs that Jung later developed into his theory of archetypes. This analysis will provide compelling evidence that we may indeed be dealing here with genuine properties of mind at the most profound level of higher-order consciousness. Perhaps the most significant conclusion that we can draw from the evidence that will be presented here is that the conceptual properties (the relational invariants or features) uncovered in a strictly sign-based analysis of meaning find correlates only at the supra-rational or transpersonal level of consciousness. Such correspondences simply do not exist at the ego-oriented level at which other theories of conceptual structure and the psychological principles they employ normally operate. At the same time, however, we need to be mindful of the metaphysical and often mystical implications attributed to phenomena at this level and be sure that sign theory is firmly grounded in the biology of the brain. For the purposes of the present study we will utilize Gerald Edelman’s neural Darwinism, a widely accepted evolutionary theory of consciousness, to explain how the signing (newly acquired non-iconic) activity of Homo sapiens could have evolved from the signaling (strictly iconic) behavior of antecedent species. Briefly, we will suggest (though Edelman himself does not draw the same conclusion) that the additional massive re-entrant neural connectivity that Edelman shows occurred with the evolution of Homo sapiens would have converted primate signals, which were up to that time linked solely to behaviors in the immediate present, into signs which would henceforth be linked rather to one another, thereby expanding cognition beyond the immediate present and allowing the creation of alternate realities (alternate forms of consciousness)–not only the conceptualization of past and future time but also, and most importantly, of other realities entirely. It will be our contention, therefore, that since the evolution of the linguistic sign was intrinsic to this process, we should be looking for the ultimate constituents of meaning within the structure of those signs and should not be surprised that they correspond precisely with constructs in those domains of consciousness– myths, dreams, and reports from altered states–made possible by the very evolution of human symbolic behavior, the transition from signals to signs. Are we to conclude from this, therefore, that conceptual structure is a “closed” system that operates solely within the confines of linguistic structure, that the advent of the language faculty converted pre-linguistic conceptual cat-

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egorization into a purely linguistic structure that differs from language to language? That would be tantamount to taking a radical Whorfian stance that claims we cannot think outside of the categories our language imposes on us. This we will not do, but will seek a middle ground between the naive interpretation of this hypothesis and the equally unhelpful Chomskyan view that the signs of language are mere surface variables. Our position will be two-fold. In the first place, as will become apparent as this analysis proceeds, there is every reason to believe that the resulting relational invariants are themselves universal properties of the human mind, so that we are all, as a species, operating with the same fundamental set of conceptual categories at the most profound level of consciousness, while the signs of individual languages merely pattern this ultimate reality in different ways. The proof of this, if one can call it that, is that we can relatively successfully translate from one language to another but our translations are always, at best, approximate because languages code that reality in different ways. And in the second place, since the underlying conceptual relations are by definition potentialities, the organism is always in control of where the process of semiosis may lead; and this process is ultimately governed by the socialization of linguistic acts, feedback from which determines its eventual evolutionary trajectory. Thus the communicative aspect of language is a necessary correlate to the process of conceptual categorization as it is continuously realized and reinforced in individual languages. To begin to formulate this position in more technical terms, let us look now at the movement known as biogenetic structuralism, whose neuro-phenomenology of human consciousness is especially relevant to this thesis. (References here are taken from Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili 1990.) Of particular interest to us here is their focus on the symbolic function, the process by which meaning and form are integrated to become symbols in the brain. They insist that the sign must be understood as an evolutionary development upon an already existing symbolic process, one in agreement with Edelman’s neural Darwinism insofar as it is perceived as having proceeded from a more primitive state where the evocation of models in the brain was stimulusbound–i.e. fundamentally iconic–to one “removed from the pressure of immediate perception”. (Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili 1990: 182) This symbolic process, therefore, was already well established before the advent of higherorder consciousness in humans; it was in their definition “a function of the nervous system by which the neural network mediating the whole is entrained by and to the network mediating the part; that is, the mechanism by which the neurocognitive model(s) of a noumenon is evoked by partial sensory information stimulated by the noumenon”. (Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili 1990: 163) Put more succinctly, “a minimal symbol [is] any stimulus that provides

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significant patterning for entree into a model that contains more information than that provided by the stimulus.” (Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili 1990: 165) Since a symbol in this sense can be any type of stimulus that evokes a model in the brain, a distinction is made between a “symbol” (lower case) and a “SYMBOL” (upper case) in describing the evolutionary process that ultimately brought about the linguistic sign. In their view, a sign is an evolutionarily advanced and specialized SYMBOL. A sign is specialized for participation as a unit in a greater SYMBOLIC system. The evolutionary sequence has been from the primitive symbolic process to cognized SYMBOLS. Coinciding with the development of SYMBOLS, the cognized environment became less stimulus-bound, an occurrence indicating that the cognitive associations and intentionality of models could be, to some extent, removed from the pressure of immediate perception. As the cognized environment became less stimulus-bound, the relationship between SYMBOL and intentionality in expression reciprocated. This reciprocation produced (was the necessary condition for) a greater semantic arbitrariness in the intentionality of SYMBOLS over and above symbols. Arbitrariness of intentionality (“noniconicity”) became complete in the next evolutionary phase, the development of sign systems. The most important forms of sign systems are spoken and written natural languages. Loss of stimulus-boundness in SYMBOLIC expression produced the problem of providing a context or “frame” (Fillmore 1976) for transmitting the information. A sign system, by combining the primitive symbolic process with a structural hierarchy of plans, provides to a large extent (but not completely) its own frame. The evolutionary course has been from reliance on the perceptual field as frame, to reliance upon intentionality as frame. More properly, as perception is a lower-order intentionality, the move has been from perceptual intentionality, which is highly influenced by sensory input, to conceptual-imaginal intentionality, which is progressively less influenced by sensory input. (Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili 1990: 182–183)

We are actually on somewhat firmer ground here than with neural Darwinism in claiming that meaning is inherent in the system of relations that linguistic signs comprise, for whereas Edelman (as we shall note in the course of this study) adopts the prevailing cognitive linguistic view that conceptual categorization in humans nevertheless has remained pre-linguistic throughout the course of human evolution, the evolution of intentionality from perceptual to conceptual-imaginal in biogenetic structuralism does suggest that the “framing” capacity has now become a systems property of signs themselves. There is, however, a caveat that the authors point out: But a seeming paradox arose in the development of signs. On the one hand, signs are SYMBOLS with a highly constrained intentionality and conditions of evocation. Because their intentionalities are highly arbitrary, their exact ‘meaning’ depends largely upon their symbolic context. […] On the other hand, signs are not the SYMBOLS of intent in communication, but merely the medium for the communication of conceptual and imagi-

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nal intentionalities operating in the depths of cognition. […] Because of the loss of stimulus-boundness as requisite for intentionality, sign systems are amenable to far more fluid manipulation of intentionality (since symbolic expression via sign systems provides its own frame, which is relatively free of the perceptual field), and much finer symbolic differentiation (due to the range of symbolic intentionality available within embedded plans, or hierarchical arrangement of constituent elements within the ‘language game’). (Laughlin, McManus and d’Aquili 1990: 183)

Ultimately, they hypothesize that “a neurocognitively grounded theory of language will recognize that the deepest structures of lexical intentionality are not to be found in discrete linguistic structures, but throughout the neurocognitive system and its perceptual, conceptual, imaginal, affective, and attentional structures”. (Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili 1990: 185) So where does this leave us? We will of course object to the contention that signs are “merely the medium” for communication and insist that they are fundamental to the structuring of “the conceptual and imaginal intentionalities operating in the depths of cognition.” Our task, therefore, will be to determine what their role in this might be, and biogenetic structuralism actually does suggest the answer in another key aspect of the theory. As its name implies, this is a genetic theory, one where the concept of neurognosis is vital. Neurognosis is a term coined to label the inherent, rudimentary knowledge available to cognition in the initial organization of the nervous system in a given species. The concept builds upon a principle articulated by the bioanthropologist Earl W. Count in the early nineteen seventies. (Count 1973) Count was concerned that anthropologists acknowledge when they analyze human culture that they are dealing with an animal and they must therefore recognize that the life mode of any animal kind possesses a configuration, a pattern, a gestalt, which is an integral expression of its bodily morphology. This pattern or gestalt he termed the biogram, and it is this evolutionarily determined structure that sets the terms, the initial organization of the pre- and perinatal nervous system, by which a species subsequently functions in the world. It will be our contention here that what the invariant relations underlying the structure of human sign systems reveal is an essential part of the human biogram, the cognitive structure that has evolved to set the minimal conditions for semiosis in the human species. We can make this claim because the conceptual relations (features) revealed in the structure of actual signs in a language, as we shall see in the course of this study, are not only universals, they are also few in number, have a uniquely abstract and quasi-logical (glottological) character, and constitute a well-ordered set that is complete in and of itself. That there appear to be only six of them in various permutations is supported by the recurrence of just

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these six properties, and the very hierarchy they comprise, in the structure of myth and reports of altered states of consciousness. As a hierarchy, they also reveal an unmistakably evolutionary progression of their own, demonstrating that the human semiotic biogram, as we shall call it, has an inherently phylogenetic structure. The initial three features–which we have labeled plurality, dimensionality, and distinctness–suggest relatively primitive, truly pre-linguistic perceptual properties common to antecedent species that, with the evolution of Homo sapiens, have been conceptualized (glottalized) via sign relations. Briefly, these comprise the concept of an undifferentiated group or mass (plurality) followed by the two most basic types of dualism in mental structures: that of figure/ground (dimensionality) on the one hand and separation (distinctness) on the other. The remaining three features clearly represent higher-order and distinctly linguistic concepts, ones that could only have evolved with the advent of language itself. These have been labeled extension, in which the concept of the immediate present has been reconceptualized as the event-space of language itself (i.e. the moment of speaking); followed by cancellation and objectiveness, which provide the basis for conceptualizing, in progressive stages, distancing from the present to other times and eventually to other spaces entirely. Equally important, there is absolutely nothing a priori about the identification or the modeling of this set of features. The features themselves have been gleaned from examination of the full range of contextualization evinced by actual signs in several languages; and the hierarchy among them was initially established on other grounds than what we are proposing here. That being the case, we need to understand in just what way the organization of signs in a given language reflects the underlying semiotic biogram, how this aspect of the biogram defines the “life mode” of the speaking subject, understood as both speaker and addressee. Our position therefore will necessarily be subjective in the sense that it must account for the role of speaker and hearer in activating the biogram, and this is precisely where the concept of contextualization, as we will define it in this study, comes into play. We will assume that newborns come into the world already in possession of the semiotic biogram and learn (unconsciously come to appreciate) in the course of the first ten or so years of their linguistically formative life how the world of signs in which they now participate reflects that underlying structure. This process can only be realized by the active participation of the subject as both hearer and speaker, witnessing others contextualizing and him/herself contextualizing the underlying relational invariants of the system of signs in use. (Incidentally, it is this same concept of contextualization that determines how myths are made real, as we shall see, through the indispensable process of ritual.)

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Now it is extremely important to understand that in the course of this learning process, and throughout the lifespan of the individual, the contextualization process that activates the biogram is an open-ended and free one, governed only by the legislative authority of the community of like-minded speakers that determines whether a given contextualization will have meaning in the sense of producing a contextual application with survival value, or not. Recognizing the inherent freedom of the speaking subject in activating the biogram is important because this is what determines the ultimate trajectory of the system of signs, its evolution in the course of generations. Thus while the features of this study have necessarily been gleaned from investigating the range of contextualization of a given system of signs at a particular moment in time, what we are ultimately describing is a dynamic process; and we will have occasion to demonstrate how the evolution of certain grammatical categories for which we have a historical record is best explained by appreciating how the signs themselves and the system of which they are a part have evolved rather than by invoking non-linguistic or pre-linguistic causes. We will in this study flesh out these ideas and present the data they are based on in somewhat abbreviated form, since the evidence upon which the features of this study are based has been presented in numerous places elsewhere. We will first outline a theory of sign relations as organic properties of mind. The theory will then be applied to the analysis of a number of grammatical categories at the morphological level, chosen to illustrate and begin to define each of the six features (conceptual relations) that constitute the biogram. Following this we will show how these same features can explain the phenomena of word order (syntax) understood as a grammatical category in the same sense as in morphology. We will then establish the groundwork for applying these features to the analysis of lexical meaning, demonstrating the far-reaching potential even such abstract relations as these have for explaining conceptual categorization at the seemingly most concrete level of verbs and nouns, where the ontological problems of reference are most prevalent. Once this evidence has been presented, we will be able to refine the definition of the features and establish the hierarchy they comprise, so that we have a basis upon which to seek correlates for them in studies of other areas of higher-order consciousness, in the motifs of man’s myths and in the field of transpersonal psychology. Then, to dispel any notion that what we are proposing is a theory of transcendental metaphysics, we will demonstrate how the abstract level at which these features operate is thoroughly in keeping with the neurological definition of higher-order consciousness in the theory of neuronal group selection known as neural Darwinism. This discussion will naturally lead to consideration of what the sign principle can tell us about the possible evolution of

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language itself from the signaling behavior of antecedent species. The study concludes with consideration of the place of structuralism in the modern era, specifically addressing the ontological status of the concept of structure as it has been understood historically and as it should be conceived of today.

1 Seeking the correlates of meaning in language If there is one fundamental philosophical issue that has occupied linguists from the earliest attempts of the Sanskrit grammarians in the first century B.C. to the most recent discussions among linguists today, it is the question of the role of language in the process of human conceptual categorization. The very fact that this issue has never been resolved but continues to be argued as fervently today as it has been for millennia speaks both to its vital importance and to the fact that even the most advanced scientific methods have not succeeded in providing a definitive answer. One could say that there have been three basic schools of thought on the matter within the discipline of linguistics itself, which can be distinguished by what each considers to be the ultimate correlates of meaning in language. One approach insists that semantic categories must be demonstrably correlated with their putative referents in extra-linguistic reality. This approach assumes that the mind is somehow hard-wired to reflect what we think we know about the logic of the so-called real world, invoking data that can be corroborated by appeal to our immediate sensory awareness. Adherents to this view hold to what is known as the correspondence theory of truth, or truthconditional semantics (see, for example, Saeed 1997: Chapter 10). In this view, linguistic analysis should account for the apparent convergence of reference in a pair of utterances like ‘morning star’ and ‘evening star’, to take a wellworn example, because both expressions refer to what we presume to be the same physical object (Venus); and a whole theory of synonymy is built upon the view that two distinct linguistic expressions have the “same” meaning whenever such a convergence of reference is said to take place. The same reasoning is used to claim that there is no difference in meaning between an active sentence and its passive counterpart, since both refer to the same factual situation. The notion of grammaticalness (or grammaticality) as practiced by proponents of generative grammar has also been based on this concept of truth. In this approach, senselessness is equated with ontological irreality, and Chomsky’s famous example “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is said to have no meaning because it doesn’t refer to anything that could actually be true–i.e. verifiable–in the real world. The Russian linguist Roman Jakobson was one of the first to question Chomsky’s application of the logician’s concept of truth value to language in this manner, paving the way for what was ultimately to become known as the cognitive revolution. To him, Chomsky’s famous example was anything but senseless:

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“… parsing the allegedly nonsensical sentence ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’, we extract its pluralized topic ‘ideas’, said to develop a ‘sleeping’ activity, and both terms are characterized – the ‘ideas’ as ‘colorless green’ and the ‘sleep’ as ‘furious’. These grammatical relations create a meaningful sentence which can be submitted to a truth test: do things like colorless green, green ideas, sleepy ideas, or a furious sleep exist or not? ‘Colorless green’ is a synonymous expression for ‘pallid green’ with a slight epigrammatic effect of an apparent oxymoron. The metaphoric epithet in ‘green ideas’ is reminiscent of Andrew Marvell’s famous ‘green thought in a green shade’ and of the Russian idiom ‘green boredom’ or of Tolstoy’s ‘horror red, white and square’. In its figurative sense the verb ‘sleep’ means ‘to be in a state like sleep, as that of inertness, torpidity, numbness’, e.g. ‘his hatred never slept’; why then cannot someone’s ideas fall into sleep? And finally, why cannot the attribute ‘furious’ emphatically render a frenzy of sleep?” (Jakobson 1971: 494–495)

In the cognitive view, the second of the three schools of thought referred to above, there is a whole world of meaningfulness in such a sentence, and the very creative aspect of language use is grounded in the ability of the speaking subject to make meaningful associations that transcend what we think we know about the so-called real world. In place of the correspondence theory of truth, therefore, cognitive linguists have substituted the notion that linguistic truth is relative to the way in which an observer construes a situation. The concept of construal lies at the heart of the cognitive approach. It produces an experiential view of meaning, the idea that conceptual categories are not predetermined by the mind’s innate lock onto the logic of the real world, but are the result of the dynamic interaction of the organism with its environment, both physical and social. (Saeed 1997, Chapter 11) With this change in perspective, therefore, we have moved one critical step away from the categorization of real-world properties and put the speaking subject significantly more in control of the conceptualization process. The way some cognitive linguists, most notably Lakoff and Johnson, view how such a process operates is through the mechanism of metaphor, which they see as integral to how the human organism experiences the world. In this view, conceptual categories are said to be structured in terms of a metaphorical projection of the human body onto experience in the world. The essential idea here is that “conceptual metaphors ground abstract concepts through crossdomain mappings using aspects of our embodied experience.” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 543) So, to use an example of a so-called orientation metaphor, a basic bodily-determined relationship like ‘up/down’ or ‘front/back’ builds outwards through a process of metaphorical expansion, to project itself onto other non-bodily situations–e.g. the front or back of an object–and ultimately onto more abstract situations–e.g. the various non-spatial uses subsumed under the words ‘up’ and ‘down’ in English, such as to ‘wake up’ or to ‘feel

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down’. In other words, the categories of cognitive grammar are not “in the world” for the mind to relate to; they are produced “in the mind” (they are “embodied”) and projected onto the world through experience with one’s environment. In the cognitive view, however, the actual signs of language–the signifiers or vocalized forms of morphemes and words–are not in themselves determiners of the process. Indeed, the categorization process in cognitive grammar is by definition pre-linguistic. It is grounded rather in more general psychological properties (domain-general cognitive processes); and languages, it is assumed, build upon this underlying mental structure. The resulting types of categories– image schemas (Langacker 1987), prototype categories (Rosch 1975, 1981), and the metaphors we live by (Lakoff and Johnson 1980)–are in this view ones whose correlates exist in the structure of consciousness at a level where they can be verified by current psychological experimentation and brought into conscious awareness in the realm of normal experience. There is a third school of thought, however, that gives the linguistic sign itself the pivotal role in establishing the conceptual categories that mediate our experience of the world. This approach assumes that the forms of words themselves, the actual physical attributes (uttered sound forms or signifiers) that allow us to tell instinctively that one word is or is not the same as another word, are the vehicles that create the patterning in which the human capacity for concept formation is embodied. In other words, it is the signifiers themselves that establish the “differences that make a difference”, to use Gregory Bateson’s apt phrase, in the realm of meaning. Bateson, one of the founders of cognitive psychology, defined difference as the threshold property that produces information, a property of mind that allows an organism to recognize that the relationship between two entities is significant to that organism and is therefore not to be ignored, whether it be in the realm of embryology, of meaning, or any other aspect of the organization of a living system. (Bateson 1980: 101– 111) In applying this principle to the study of conceptual categorization, we will be stipulating in this study that the property of difference resides in the relationship between linguistic signs themselves as organic properties of mind, the ultimate invariants (carriers of meaning) that establish the differences that make a difference in the conceptual sphere. Expressions of this principle in linguistics have existed in one form or another since the time of the earliest forays into the study of language, beginning with the Sanskrit grammarians, who used the term sphota to signify the sound forms (signifiers) of language specifically with respect to their semiotic value, which was said to “flow” or “burst” forth from the forms. (Jakobson 1958: 394) As Julia Kristeva notes in her insightful analysis of the history of

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linguistic thought, Indian linguistics “perhaps constitutes the most ancient basis of modern abstract thought on linguistics;” and the notion of the sphota was central to their conception of language. (Kristeva 1989: 82) Whereas previous attempts to understand human language had been primarily concerned with writing, with the Indian grammarians “linguistic operation became “mentalized” as a signifying operation, with a subject as the place of meaning.” (Kristeva 1989: 82) This view derived from the concern to properly interpret the language of the Vedic texts, where the brahman–sacred speech or magic word– was understood to have two sides: a material word (sabda brahman) and a transcendent word (parabrahman), which produces the distinction known as dhvanilsphota. (Kristeva 1989: 84) Acknowledging that the theory of the sphota was extremely subtle and difficult to interpret, especially with respect to what constitutes the material aspect of the word, one can nevertheless describe the essential characteristics of the sphota as follows: Certain philosophers and grammarians think that the term sphota designates a prototype of the word that the word itself intrinsically contains. For others, it is a question of the word’s sonority in its totality and as bearer of meaning, independent of the combination of letters. The sphota would not be exactly the sounds of a word in the order of its letters, but the sounds, or something corresponding to them, recast into an indivisible whole. Thus, when pronounced, the sounds come one by one, but the sphota appears only at the end of the articulation of all the word’s sounds, at the moment when the sounds of the morphological totality are emitted along with the meaning inherent in it. Etymologically, the sphota signifies ‘bursting, popping’, and consequently wherein meaning bursts forth, spreads out, germinates, and gives birth to itself. (Kristeva 1989: 85)

Ultimately, as Kristeva describes it, there is a “sound/signification (sound/ speech) split and [a] close dependence of the two in the same process, act, or movement of which the sphota is like a seed or an atom, an atom of both phonic and significative mobility.” (Kristeva 1989: 87) The conviction that meaning is inherent in the sound forms (the signs or signifiers) that produce or generate it has surfaced in various guises a number of times in the history of linguistics, most famously in the so-called SapirWhorf hypothesis, which takes seriously the notion that the signifiers of language shape the way we think and govern our experience of the world at the most profound and seemingly intangible levels of consciousness. Unfortunately, the argument in the latter case has sometimes been not only poorly presented, even by Whorf himself on occasion, but also criticized in the most superficial ways. It is often remembered for such trivial assertions as the Eskimos purportedly having a hundred words for snow (they don’t), or the Hopi not having a concept of time (they do), when such claims are neither strictly true nor to the point.

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What is very much to the point, as we shall demonstrate in the course of this study, is that adherence to the sign principle as the determiner of the differences that make a difference in the human conceptual sphere ultimately leads to the postulation of an order of concept formation that lies beyond the level of normal experience where the categories uncovered can be verified by conventional psychological experimentation. At such a higher-order level of consciousness, the categories we find are significantly more abstract than those linguists are normally accustomed to dealing with (some would say they are ineffable), and largely for this reason acknowledgement of this approach is usually only grudgingly given or not given at all within the scientific linguistic community. Linguists are accustomed to looking at a category like tense, for example, and concluding that it contains within it a variety of different meanings that need to be classified separately according to the conceptual distinctions that appear to be represented–temporal ones such as past, present, and future; as well as atemporal ones like the various conditional, hypothetical, or subjunctive uses of the English so-called past tense. If we take any one of the tense forms in English, however, and consider what remains invariant in the relation between that form and the other tense forms of the language, as we shall do in the study that follows, we will see that the differences that make a difference are necessarily less tangible than any of the individual connotations a given form may be capable of expressing in a particular context, and that these are precisely the qualities that require our attention. Given that we are committed to considering the potential inherent in sign relations at this necessarily more abstract level, the issue here, clearly, becomes one of verifiability; and the question we should be asking ourselves therefore is, should we ignore such promising approaches to understanding human concept formation given that conventional scientific methods are not capable of handling such hypotheses, that we have not yet developed the tools necessary to deal with constructs at such an abstract level? In fact, physicists and mathematicians work all the time with hypotheses that become testable only decades or even centuries after they have been initially proposed (proving the existence of the Higgs boson particle being the most recent conspicuous example). So it would behoove us not to limit inquiry into what could well turn out to be primordial categories of meaning that define the collective unconscious in new and significant ways, and to continue to look for the appropriate means of verifying such hypotheses in the meantime. Strict adherence to the principle that a difference in form signals a difference in meaning will allow us to determine, for example, that not only do the Hopis have a concept of time but theirs has much the same conceptual characteristics as the truly abstract concepts that lie behind categories of tense

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in Western languages, provided that one looks at the full range of reference inherent in the relations among the relevant signifiers in both types of languages with equal respect for their underlying essence. There is much to be learned when one looks beyond the conscious categories of time in the Western mindset, which adheres to the linear logic of past, present, and future, and considers the full semantic potential of the forms used to express these relatively superficial temporal categories. This we will do in the discussion that follows, which will allow us to start building a set of conceptual features that transcend the linear logic of normal, everyday experience. More than that, we will be able to show that when differences in meaning are assumed to be correlated directly with differences in the signifiers used to express them–i.e. when we consider what remains invariant in the relation between two forms despite the myriad contextual possibilities they are capable of expressing–we arrive at a level of consciousness where the distinctions that are uncovered appear to be genuine conceptual universals. Furthermore, we will find that these conceptual properties themselves correlate demonstrably with properties uncovered in those areas of psychological investigation that lie beyond the individual or ego-oriented level, at what is called the transphenomenal or transpersonal level in recent consciousness research, on the one hand, and in the consistently recurring archetypes that constitute the order of consciousness that Jung termed impersonal or collective on the other–e.g. in the human capacity for myth-making that Jung considered integral to any understanding of the deepest levels of human consciousness. What this implies, ultimately, is that linguistic signs, contrary to much superficial Whorfian thinking, do not create different and irreconcilable world views but rather organize or structure the same, deep-seated universal categories of consciousness in different ways. And this is precisely what would explain the problematic of interlingual translation: that one can translate relatively successfully from one language to another because we are ultimately dealing with the same deep-seated conceptual properties, but the translation is necessarily approximate because the organization of the forms used to express these properties differs from language to language.

2 Sign relations as organic properties of mind There have been a number of efforts made in the history of linguistic science to promote the sign principle in one form or another. In just the past century one can name the work of the Harvard linguist Dwight Bolinger; of William Diver, the founder of the Columbia school; Gustave Guillaume, founder of the Psychomechanics school; and the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson and his followers, most notably C.H. van Schooneveld and his students, of which the present author is one. (See, for example, Bolinger 1977–the quotations below are from the Preface; Tobin 1991; Jakobson 1936, 1958; van Schooneveld 1978; and Sangster 1982) Many of these scholars, however, have stopped short of taking the sign principle to its ultimate conclusion as we will do in this study. Bolinger, for example, was known for taking syntacticians to task for equating two expressions like active and passive sentences and claiming that there was no significant difference in meaning between them, employing his inimitable wit and wisdom to attack “the theory that it is normal for a language to establish a lunacy ward in its grammar or lexicon where mindless morphs stare vacantly with no purpose other than to be where they are.” Yet while he championed the notion that “the natural condition of a language is to preserve one form for one meaning, and one meaning for one form,” he nevertheless still operated with the assumption that language is largely idiomatic, a significant part being jerry built, as he put it, so that while there may be some underlying system in languages, it was neither necessary nor crucial. As Charles Ruhl has pointed out, Bolinger tended to underestimate the role of unconscious linguistic knowledge, where order is paramount, and overestimate the mind’s capacity simply to store a large percentage of specific linguistic items willy-nilly. (Ruhl 1989: 18) Roman Jakobson likewise believed that his own seminal studies of the invariant conceptual relations that define the Russian cases as a wellordered system of grammatical signs did not necessarily hold beyond the specific realm of grammatical, as opposed to lexical, meaning. (Personal communication) Nevertheless, as we noted in the introduction, Jakobson’s analyses of the Russian case system are crucial to the understanding of how a system of sign relations functions, and we will use them as a starting point for the present study. Jakobson’s case analyses (the two references cited in the previous paragraph) were as path-breaking as they were controversial in two important respects. In the first place, they demonstrated that one could establish a single underlying, general meaning for each distinct formal case despite the evident fact that the range of reference associated with a given case could be disconcertingly broad, and its individual applications seemingly too heterogeneous

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to be subsumed under a single conceptual rubric. Thus the Russian genitive is used to express not only possessive and other adnominal senses common to the genitive in other Western languages (the ‘of’ relationship, if you will); it also occurs as the case of any noun quantified by a numeral other than one. Furthermore, it replaces the accusative in a range of circumstances, including certain instances when the object is animate, when the verb expresses a distancing from the object (such as fearing, avoiding, striving for, and the like), or when the action of the verb is negated. It may even replace the nominative in the context of an existential verb under negation (as in ‘there is no bread’). To identify a common denominator of meaning for such a range of usage does indeed require that the resulting conceptual property be of a highly abstract nature, and this very abstractness is what has often been considered unacceptable, especially because it is difficult if not impossible to falsify an analysis pitched at such a level with existing scientific methods. Critics of this approach, such as Uriel Weinreich, claimed at the time that it “condemn[s] linguistic inquiry to perpetual informality” and that it “empties the notion of class meaning of all content.” (Weinreich 1966: 469; referring specifically to Jakobson’s case analyses.) The sign principle has also been challenged on methodological grounds, for example by Henrik Birnbaum in reviewing the present author’s previous book on Jakobson’s linguistics, that “it gives the impression of a circular argument: a particular ‘general meaning’ is usually established on the basis of generalizing (abstracting) from a set of ascertaining contextual meanings, which in turn are all claimed to be derivable from precisely that underlying general concept.” (Birnbaum 1984: 414) What these critiques fail to appreciate, however, is that we are not in the first place dealing with class meanings here at all, in the sense of a logical set and its membership, but ultimately with a network of conceptual features which exist in a different order of consciousness altogether, and which must of necessity be highly abstract if they are to function as such. We are, in other words, not engaging in a type of componential analysis of semantic terms and relations, which was popular in linguistic anthropology at the time Weinreich wrote his criticism. As the proponents of biogenetic structuralism have noted, componential analysis, while it may be an extremely useful tool in anthropology, nevertheless “is primarily a methodology based on a calculus of the classproduct form. It is an analytical tool that makes no statement about the way the human mind operates at all times and in all places.” (Laughlin & d’Aquili 1974: 8) Since this type of analysis makes no reference to mental process, it is essentially static and therefore not at all the sort of analysis we are engaging in here. The impression of circularity too will disappear once it can be established that there are correlates for just such abstract conceptual properties in other

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domains of higher-order consciousness outside of language proper. But we will need to refine our definitions of the conceptual properties involved if we are going to be able to make legitimate comparisons with properties in other realms of mental structure. The criticism itself, however, is a valid one that we need to take seriously, and indeed Birnbaum’s review has been one of the major inspirations for the present study, forcing us to come to grips with the ontological status of the underlying invariant relations uncovered in this type of analysis. In the end, we will be obliged to conclude that, if the abstract categories of this study are to be something more than Platonic ideals, and the proposed relation between general and contextual meaning more than a tautological proposition hardly conducive to scientific verification, then we will need to construct a theory grounding the concept of sign relation in what we know about the neurological structure and functioning of the human brain as a dynamic, self-organizing system. Once we do this, we will be able to respond to another of the major criticisms of this approach, that one cannot accurately predict from the definitions of such abstract categories in which contexts they will or will not occur in actual speech situations. (e.g. Timberlake 1982: 327) As will become clearer as we proceed with this analysis, however, it is in the very nature of such categories that we should not be able to make such predictions; otherwise we would again be dealing with an essentially static system with none of the vital characteristics that define sign relations as organic properties of mind, primary among which is the ability to create new, never-before-experienced contextualizations of a sign’s underlying essence as a potentiality. While there will be certain constraints that we will consider in the chapter on syntax later in this study, the correct way to address this issue is to recognize that, as was suggested in the introduction and will be further discussed in the next section, the production of meaning needs to be viewed as a stochastic process, where a random generator is coupled with a selective feedback mechanism; and in such a system all that one can do is to measure the probabilities of occurrence of one or another contextualization. It is the strictly probabilistic nature of the contextualization process that ultimately explains how such a set of abstract sign relations functions in structuring conceptual categorization at the most profound level of consciousness. Still, there are those who see no reason why human conceptual categories should be in an isomorphic relation with the signs used to express them in a given language. Linguists commonly think of a metacategory like case, for example, to be a universal, one whose subcategories (subject, object, indirect object, locative, etc.) can be found in one form or another in any language– i.e. what is expressed in Russian by the set of inflectional endings on nouns

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(actual case forms) is expressed more or less the same way in English by syntactic means (e.g. word order, prepositional phrases, or other constructions), and so forth. By carving up the continuum of grammatical meanings in this way regardless of their means of expression in a given language, one remains on relatively safe ground operating with conventional categories–just like past, present, and future–the definitions of which we can all more or less agree on. On the other hand, if we were to insist that the actual articulated (spoken) forms of linguistic signs are the carriers (the embodiment) of the ultimate meaningful relations in a given language, we are suggesting that there is an underlying patterning process going on here that operates well beyond the realm of our immediate awareness; and to the extent that we limit our analysis to those particular categories that can be more readily observed and described, we deprive scientific investigation of the possibility of making some of the most significant discoveries about the nature of human concept formation as not only an intrinsically evolutionary process but one that also exhibits the characteristics of a well-ordered system. In Jakobson’s case, again, and this is the second of the respects in which his seminal analyses were path-breaking, far from positing merely a set of individual meanings for each of the Russian cases, what he proposed was that the forms themselves create a pattern of recurring entities, which he called “features”, that relate one case to another in a remarkably systematic way. In other words, there is a network of relations at work here which, precisely because the individual features are highly abstract and vague in nature, allow the organism (the native Russian speaker in this instance) to create new and consistently meaningful distinctions at will, distinctions that are not made in a language like English because they are not part of the obligatory patterning of grammatical signs in English. (We will look more closely at these distinctions later in this study.) Therefore, despite the challenges involved in defining such abstract features, it is their systems characteristics that give the theory its more immediate viability. In fact, we must conclude, individual signs by themselves have no meaning, since they necessarily occur as contextual variants of some underlying potentiality. What ultimately gives them meaning is their relation to other signs in the same system. Consequently, what we need to be studying is the nature of sign relations as the fundamental principle upon which meaning in language is predicated. Provided, then, that we maintain the integrity of the linguistic sign and investigate its capacity to determine the differences that make a difference in the conceptual sphere, we inevitably arrive at a level of cognitive processing that lies beyond conventional psychological categorization, a level that is more in tune with the Jungian concept of symbol: “a term…that possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning. It implies

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something vague, unknown, or hidden from us.” For Jung, a symbol “has a wider ‘unconscious’ aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. […] As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.” (Jung et al 1964: 20–21) Once we accept the proposition that our rational categories of meaning do not necessarily represent the ultimate structure of mind, then we can investigate the nature of such symbols as are represented by the phenomenal sign relations of a given language to determine what their own, unique “glottological” structure may be. (The term ‘glottological’ is a neologism that we will use throughout this study to identify the specifically linguistic logic that underlies the organization of sign relations as organic properties of mind.) In seeking to clarify the nature of conceptual properties inherent in sign relations, Jakobson was fond of quoting the American philosopher and pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce, particularly his notion of interpretant, which is based on the conviction that the mental representations associated with human signs and symbols do not refer to things; they refer to other mental representations. In this view, sameness and difference are not things that exist in the world, they are what is created in the mind; and he established a theory of signs based on this conviction. More importantly, he insisted that what constitutes sameness in a given system of signs is always necessarily changing as a function of experience. For Pierce, any symbol or word is a general law which signifies only through the individual instances of its use. However varied these incarnations may be, the mind “knows” that it is dealing with one and the same word. But at the same time, whatever is general necessarily has an indefinite future. As he put it, “a general law cannot be fully realized. It is a potentiality, and its mode of being is esse in futuro”. (Quoted in Jakobson 1971: 358. For a superb exposition of this aspect of Peirce’s thought, see Menand 2001: Part V, Section 6.) If this sounds like the meanings of signs are indeterminate, that is exactly what is being proposed here, and this is another important sense in which this approach goes beyond that of current cognitive theories. Cognitive linguists, particularly Lakoff and Johnson in their work on the philosophical implications of their concept of embodied mind, are at some pains to show that their controlled use of metaphor does not violate the conventional philosophical dictum that concepts and meanings must not be unstable or indeterminate, as metaphors certainly can be. (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 543) Ironically, however, the logicians have it right when they complain about natural language generally being too vague and indeterminate to serve as a vehicle for logical expression, and the various attempts to create an artificial and more logically precise vocabulary for philosophical exposition only serves to prove the point. It is the

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very indeterminacy of meaning that endows the linguistic sign with its capacity to project its essence onto whatever situation the speaker chooses, thereby assuring that the system of such signs will continue to evolve spontaneously, without the need for mechanical or other extraneous devices to give it its creative or generative power. Indeterminacy must therefore be a cornerstone of any theory of signs as organic properties of mind, where language is conceived as a self-organizing system of sign relations whose natural condition is necessarily one of ambiguity. There is an extensive literature on self-organizing systems, one of the central tenets of which is that they function as a stochastic process. This means that their normal activity produces random effects from which certain ones are selected and, through a process of feedback, establish the direction in which the system evolves. (See, for example, Bateson 1980: 163; Allen and Sanglier 1980: 111–113.) Such a system “learns” by experience rather than by being rule governed. In applying these observations to language, we can avoid one of the main pitfalls of conventional linguistic thinking, which abhors ambiguity and therefore seeks to insert disambiguating devices into the structure of the system itself, which is what the assumption regarding polysemy of meaning is all about. In the view being presented here, where ambiguity is considered inherent in the very nature of the linguistic sign, the process of making meaning involves an essentially random generator – the role of the speaker whose freedom to produce utterances (contextualize the underlying essence of sign relations) is guaranteed by the indeterminate nature of the signs invoked–and a non-random selector–the role of the hearer who must disambiguate (decode) the sequence of signs as presented in the stream of speech to determine to what extent they “make sense”, thereby establishing which of the potentially limitless possibilities being generated will have survival value and ultimately determine the evolutionary trajectory of the system. From this perspective, disambiguation is not a function of the system per se, which relies on ambiguity in order to perpetuate itself, but of the process that occurs in acts of contextualization. Conventional linguistic theories therefore effectively conflate two fundamentally distinct characteristics of living systems, disambiguation and differentiation. Differentiation is a property of the system itself, of the sign relations that determine which differences make a difference to the organism in question, while disambiguation is what occurs in the process of communication. This distinction is most evident in the approach the listener must take to the disambiguation of homonyms in the stream of speech, and it is the basis upon which punning and plays on words generally operate, so it is of fundamental importance in any sign-based theory of language. It is important to understand in this regard what Jakobson meant when he stated that “for the speaker hom-

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onymy does not exist.” (Jakobson 1971: 575) It is the speaker’s prerogative to utilize the ambiguity inherent in linguistic signs to create new contexts at will, whereas it is the hearer’s job to disambiguate the message received according to the context that has been given. This is why the existence of homonyms is not a problem for a sign theory of language based on the monosemic principle. A self-organizing system of signs can tolerate even as much homonymy as occurs, for example, in English (which is actually quite a lot) because contextualization itself provides the hearer with more than enough information to effect the requisite disambiguation. In a sign-based theory of language, conceptual categorization and communication are necessarily complementary – two sides of one and the same stochastic process of sign formation. Determining whether or not we are dealing with homonyms in a given instance is, of course, another issue the framework for which ought to take the following direction. Whether we are talking about homonymy or polysemy, linguists tend, as Charles Ruhl has noted in his book on monosemy, to “find too much multiplicity too easily”. (Ruhl 1989: 5) We too often jump to conclusions about differences in meaning without taking into consideration the role of context in determining whether or not a given lexical item has a single general meaning. The monosemic approach, on the other hand, requires that we not rush to judgment, not rely so much on our intuition but study systematically all of the pragmatic inferences that are being drawn with respect to a given lexical item from the context in which that item is embedded, as we shall do in this study, and not assume that such differences are inherent in the word itself. Only then can we eliminate many of the more superficial differences that we think we perceive in the use of a given word and concentrate on the differences that actually make a difference with respect to the word in question. Since we shall be invoking the principles of self-organizing systems throughout this study, let us look more closely now at the nature of such systems and demonstrate in what ways they are relevant to the appreciation of sign relations as organic properties of mind.

3 Language as a self-organizing system Modern systems thinking can be traced back to the ideas initially formulated by organismic biologists, Gestalt psychologists, and ecologists in the period before 1930, which have gained considerably in sophistication in the years since. Where once it was commonplace to recognize that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”, we now realize what quantum physics has demonstrated so convincingly in the meantime that ultimately we should not be dealing with parts at all. What we are used to calling a part, an object, is really a pattern in an inseparable web of relationships. This shift from objects to relations, from parts to patterns, constitutes a fundamental principle of systems thinking. (See Capra 1996 for a very readable overview of the theory and the evidence behind the concept of self-organizing systems.) Recognition of the primacy of relations was, for example, integral to Gregory Bateson’s approach to his “ecology of mind”. Bateson considered there to be a “profound analogy between grammar and anatomy” in precisely the sense that “in both anatomy and grammar the parts are to be classified according to the relations between them. In both fields, the relations are to be thought of as somehow primary, the relata as secondary.” (Bateson 1972: 153–154) There is no question this was also a cornerstone of structuralist thinking, especially as practiced by Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss. Jakobson’s case features were based on the conviction that individual case forms derive their meaning from their relation to the other case forms in the system in which they participate, ultimately creating a pattern of relations. Lévi-Strauss applied this Prague School linguistic principle to everything from the study of kinship relations to the ultimate structure of myths. Now it needs to be understood that, in both of these instances, there is no denying that the individual forms in question, be they case forms or kinship terms, have relevance to our actual experience in the world, but such associations do not constitute the operative relations that comprise the ultimate structure of mind. In a language with an overt accusative case, the accusative is indeed, in many instances, the “case of the direct object”, but its essence as a mental construct must be defined by its relations to the other cases, creating the pattern that describes the ultimate structure of consciousness. Likewise, it is evident that the bear clan is so named in part because of the qualities that are attributed to bears in the animal world, but again it is the relations to the other clans that define the totemic system as a cultural construct and ultimately give it meaning. It is in this sense, therefore, that we insist that individual linguistic signs, by themselves, have no meaning, but necessarily derive their meaning from their relations to other signs in the linguistic system of which they are a part. And what we must ultimately under-

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stand by this statement is that the sense that is imparted by any individual sign is already necessarily a contextual (or contextualized) token of the sign’s underlying conceptual essence, which in turn is derived from the relations that pertain between and among that and the other signs of a given language, the latter constituting the ultimate structure of consciousness. In the final analysis, the shift from relata to relations, from objects to patterns, forces us to redefine the distinction between meaning and reference. And this leads us to the next principle of systems thinking: that what distinguishes living organisms from classical physical systems is their organizational closure. Living systems are by definition energetically open but organizationally closed: that is, they are open to energy but closed to information and control. Living organisms are physically, or energetically, “open” systems that require a continual flux of matter and energy from their environment to stay alive, but they are organizationally closed in the sense that they do not process any information in terms of discrete elements existing ready-made in the outside world, to be picked up by the cognitive system. Rather, they interact with their environment by continually modulating their own structure. Such systems have been termed autopoietic systems. Autopoiesis is the term originally coined in the 1970s by two Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, to describe living organisms as closed, self-organizing and self-referring systems. They initially worked on the experience of color and concluded that color sensation is a product of relations that involve the entire field of vision, which are internally determined by ratios of neural activity in different parts of the organism’s own retinal field. As they explained it at the time, the light fluxes reaching the retina can be thought of as in fact perturbing three separate retinal surfaces: the ‘red-’, ‘green-’, and ‘blue-’ retinas…. These three surfaces are by no means identical or homogeneous…. It is the local differences in activity weighted by the activity of the entire retinal surface which are compared, relative to one another, so that abrupt transitions in their levels of activity become the differences that make a difference. (Varela and Maturana 1981. Italics added. This and the quotations below are from an unpublished typescript of a paper presented at an international symposium on “Disorder and Order” at Stanford University in 1981, one of the very first presentations of the theory of autopoiesis.)

In this view, there is no question that color sensation “could not exist without interaction with light…; but color is not to be found in light flux-wavelength.” It is the “actual pattern of coherences of the nervous system of an animal [that] specif[ies] its range of possible chromatic behaviors.” Furthermore, “such chromatic behaviors [are] not an optimal fit to an ideal environment of colored objects but instead different paths of internal coherences within the broad

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constraints set by [the] starting structures: the organism and light.” Thus “our universe of colors … is an expression of one possible viable phylogenic pathway within many others realized in evolutionary history.” Self-organization and self-reference are therefore integral to the very nature of living systems, and we shall be using the concept of self-reference in this sense as fundamental to the understanding of how meaning is generated in a linguistic system. Once we have established that reference is not a matter of relating the conceptual content of an individual linguistic form to some aspect of external reality, but is rather and strictly a matter of contextualizing the conceptual properties inherent in the forms themselves as terms of relation, we will be in a position to understand the production of meaning as a dynamic process in exactly the sense of an autopoietic system. Maturana and Varela initially described the dynamics of such a system in specifically structural terms: An autopoietic system is a structure-specified system. This means that at any instant of its operation the structure of an autopoietic system specifies into what structural configuration it goes as a result of structural transition, regardless of whether this results from its internal dynamics or from its interactions with the medium. Therefore the medium, as an independent entity that interacts with it, does not specify through the interactions the structural configurations it adopts in its continuous structural change, but it selects them through its differential triggering. Consequently the structure that an autopoietic system has at any moment is the central determinant of its becoming, even as it interacts with the medium which only constitutes a field for structural selection in its domain of structural coupling. (Varela and Maturana 1981)

Or, as Niklas Luhmann describes it in his book on self-reference: Autopoietic systems … are not only self-organizing systems, they not only produce and eventually change their own structures; their self-reference applies to the production of other components as well. This is the decisive conceptual innovation. It adds a turbocharger to the already powerful engine of self-referential machines. Even elements, that is, last components (in-dividuals) which are, at least for the system itself, undecomposable, are produced by the system itself…. Autopoietic systems, then, are sovereign with respect to the constitution of identities and differences. They, of course, do not create a material world of their own. They presuppose other levels of reality, as for example human life presupposes the small span of temperature in which water is liquid. But whatever they use as identities and as differences is of their own making. In other words, they cannot import identities and differences from the outer world; these are forms about which they have to decide themselves. (Luhmann 1990: 3)

A particularly vivid example of the spontaneous emergence of components that a self-organizing system is capable of can be seen in the process by which termites build their nests. These nests are constructed from successive deposits of mud carried by the termites and can reach a total weight of several tons.

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The construction process begins with a completely random phase in which the deposits of mud are in no way correlated with one another, and culminates in the erection of regularly spaced walls and pillars. At some point in the initial, random distribution of deposits a coordinated phase begins, “when, by chance, a particular point exceeds a threshold size, after which it polarizes the termites’ activity, inhibiting deposits over a certain characteristic distance, and in consequence enhancing its own growth.” (Allen and Sanglier 1980: 114–115) What triggers the second stage is the accumulation of a pheromone, which the termites mix with the mud they carry. The termites’ activity is thus governed by the recognition of a certain level of concentration in this chemical substance, of a difference that makes a difference, within the organism’s own structure. Now the process by which such random events include a selection mechanism that recursively governs the dynamic operation of the system is known as a stochastic process. Gregory Bateson considered all mental process, from evolution to embryology, and anything that falls under the rubric of learning, down to “the most transitory case–the firing of a single sensory end organ”, to be fundamentally defined as a stochastic process. Both genetic change and the process called learning (including the somatic changes induced by habit and environment) are stochastic processes. In each case there is, I believe, a stream of events that is random in certain aspects and in each case there is a nonrandom selective process which causes certain of the random components to ‘survive’ longer than others. Without the random, there can be no new thing. (Bateson 1980: 163)

This type of evolutionary process, involving both determinism and chance, is known as “order by fluctuation” in the physical sciences; and it is precisely this kind of process that induces self-organization in physical systems. In its normal, closed or isolated state, a complex physical system will move towards thermodynamic equilibrium–that is, the variables that are normal for the system in question will tend to float in the middle of their ranges, determined by the laws which govern normal functioning of the system. But when such a system is subject to perturbations from the outside, the stress can cause the values of certain variables to move away from equilibrium to their threshold levels, at which point instability occurs and the least fluctuation can then cause the system to be driven into a new state. Such newly organized states are known as “dissipative structures” and have been confirmed in both chemical and biological reactions. As Allen and Sanglier describe this process in chemistry, it contains both deterministic mechanisms (the chemical equations) and stochastic, random effects (the fluctuations) and it is these latter that are of particular importance when the

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system is near to points at which a new organization may emerge. These points are called bifurcation points… Between two bifurcation points, the system follows deterministic laws (such as those of chemical kinetics) but near the points of bifurcation it is the fluctuations which play an essential role in determining the branch that the system chooses. Such a point of view introduces the concept of ‘history’ into the explanation of the state of the system. (Allen and Sanglier 1980: 111,114)

This view of how systems spontaneously evolve has recently become popularized with the notion of “tipping points” (e.g. Gladwell 2000), and it is crucial for understanding living systems, where the history of an organism determines the “state of mind” in which the organism finds itself at any given moment, and where, with the addition of the random component, the internal dynamics of the system spontaneously generates new structures. From this we can conclude that one need not introduce mechanical explanations to account for the generative capacity of complex living systems, and language is certainly such a system. And it is with this concept of the fundamentally stochastic nature of dynamic living systems that we need to understand the role of contextualization as the underlying mechanism by which signs produce their meaning. As we will insist throughout the course of this study, the production of meaning in language consists in the first instance of the speaker’s prerogative to randomly select a context for a given sign, which is then subject to a process of grammatical selection by which the legislative activity of the community is applied to determine whether or not the particular contextual application will be reinforced. By this definition, the full range of possibilities obtain. Either an entirely novel contextualization may be reinforced or it may not; and by the same token, a reiteration of an existing contextualization may or may not be reinforced. In this way, both creativity and decay are incorporated organically into a dynamic system of signs together with momentary stasis, thereby accounting for all possible outcomes in a truly probabilistic theory of language use. This conforms to one of the essential characteristics of such systems, as expressed again by Luhmann in his book of essays on self-reference: Conscious systems and social systems have to produce their own decay. They produce their basic elements, i.e., thoughts and communications, not as short-term states but as events that vanish as soon as they appear. Events too occupy a minimal span of time, a specious present, but their duration is a matter of definition and has to be regulated by the autopoietic system itself: events cannot be accumulated. A conscious system does not consist of a collection of all of its past and present thoughts, nor does a social system pile up all of its communications. After a very short time the mass of elements would be intolerably large and its complexity would be so high that the system would be unable to select a pattern of coordination and would produce chaos. The solution is to renounce

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all stability at the operative level of elements and to use events only. Thereby, the continuing dissolution of the system becomes a necessary cause of its autopoietic reproduction. The system becomes dynamic in a very basic sense. It becomes inherently restless. The instability of its elements is a condition of its duration. All structures of social systems have to be based on this fundamental fact of vanishing events, disappearing gestures or words that are dying away. Memory, and then writing, have their function in preserving – not the events, but their structure-generating power. The events themselves cannot be saved; their loss is the condition of their regeneration. Thus, time and irreversibility are built into the system not only at the structural level but also at the level of its elements. (Luhmann 1990: 9)

Combining these observations with the concept of tipping points in the case of language, we get the following picture. In the normal course of everyday language use, the vast majority of contextualizations will most probably result in reinforcement of existing contextual applications (momentary stasis). A smaller percentage will involve novel contextualizations of existing sign relations, and these will either die on the vine through lack of reinforcement, as most highly poetic usages for example normally do, or they will expand or extend the range of possible applications of the forms involved, and therefore of their underlying relational meanings. In the latter instance, since this process proceeds in a purely stochastic manner, it will not, as in current cognitive theories, consist of linguistic forms being applied in new and different prelinguistic cognitive domains but rather, the contextualization process, as a fundamentally self-referential one involving the manipulation of linguistic signs, will itself be largely responsible for the expansion of the cognitive domains in which the organism operates, in a purely probabilistic manner. Once primate signaling behavior had been transformed into a system of signs, this monumental evolutionary transformation would have given the linguistic sign a unique role in facilitating and structuring cognitive behavior. But the process, of course, doesn’t end there. From time to time the signifiers themselves, by dint of their constant use, particularly in colloquial speech, will undergo changes–as for example when word-final phonemes start to be dropped in the vernacular, affecting the very nature and functioning of the signs involved. As this parallel process develops, it too may reach a tipping point where the system as a whole necessarily evolves into a new state–such as happened in the history of English, when just such a process engendered the massive loss of grammatical morphemes at the ends of words, converting English from a primarily inflectional language to an essentially syntactic one. It is in this manner, then, that we need to understand the autopoiesis of sign systems as self-regulatory structures operating at the most profound level of consciousness.

4 Applying the sign principle to grammatical meaning We are now at the point where we can begin to consider what sorts of conceptual categories or features result from a systematic analysis of the relations that pertain between actual linguistic signs. The analyses presented below summarize several decades of investigation into the nature of linguistic sign relations, research that was inspired by a steadfast commitment to the sign principle pursued by the Dutch linguist and Slavist, C.H.van Schooneveld and his followers. The conclusions being drawn here are intended to take these studies to another level, to determine the extent to which they may provide insights into the nature of higher-order consciousness and hopefully inspire future investigations into the role of linguistic sign relations as organic properties of mind. In order to achieve that goal, the conceptual relations described below are presented in a manner that differs in important respects from that of previous work, including that of the present author, making it more feasible to realize meaningful comparisons with similar concepts in other fields of investigation. Since one of the main criticisms of this approach has been the difficulty scholars have faced attempting to duplicate the results of this research, the intent here is to make what are necessarily highly abstract concepts as accessible as possible. It is in the realm of grammatical meaning that some the most telling discoveries have been made, findings comprehensive enough to allow us to draw some significant conclusions about the possible structure of higher-order consciousness as evidenced by linguistic sign relations. The fact that we have a more thorough idea of the nature of grammatical categories should not be surprising because, unlike the lexicon, the grammatical domain consists of a relatively small, closed set of categories, whose most essential characteristic is that they require the speaker to make a choice between one or the other pole of a sign relation in order to construct a sentence that is, as we say, grammatical. These are the categories that generations of members of a given speech community have legislated to be essential for the constitution of communicable experience in an entirely subconscious manner. So it would be natural for us to expect that the grammatical signs of a language are fundamental to the constitution of experience at the highest orders of consciousness, and that investigation into their underlying properties would provide a set of conceptual primitives or features–archetypes of meaning–that might be correlated with equally fundamental properties in other domains of mental structure–that is, be constituents of the collective unconscious.

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At the morphological level (the level of individual words and their component parts), grammatical signs include such categories as tense, aspect, person, number, gender, case, and the like, the types of categories that are often treated as universals in other, non-sign-based theories of language, whether or not they are expressed in any consistent way by the phenomenal sign relations in a given language. When we assume a priori that these categories are universals, however, we short-circuit inquiry into the true nature of their underlying properties, limiting investigation to their more evident characteristics, such as, for example, that tense consists of the linear notions of past, present, and future. (Note that this is precisely what gets Whorfians in trouble, assuming that the Hopis do not have a concept of time because they don’t express time in such a material fashion.) A more discerning analysis of the actual sign relations present in a given language would indicate that the linear concept of time central to the Western mindset is itself derivative from deeper, more abstract concepts that underlie both temporal and non-temporal categories of experience; so let us turn to that analysis now, beginning with the category of tense itself, using English as a particularly revealing example. In each of the following sections, we will identify the grammatical relation involved and describe the conceptual feature that defines the relation.

4.1 Past/non-past: The cancellation feature Anyone who observes the signs representing tense in English can see right away that there is one, and only one, fundamental tense opposition that occurs obligatorily whenever tense is expressed–that is, constitutes an opposition one pole or the other of which must be chosen by the speaker every time a verb is expressed, thereby constituting a genuine difference that makes a difference. That is the opposition of simple past to simple present–i.e., the opposition of the –ed form in the past to the zero ending in the simple present (e.g. ‘walk/ walked’, ‘dress/dressed’) or in many core verbs an equally systematic alternation of vowels (e.g. ‘drive/drove’, ‘come/came’). This absolutely necessary and consistent sign relation forms the basis of all the other compound tense oppositions in the language, where it is attached to either the so-called auxiliary or the modal form of the verb phrase–e.g. ‘is/was coming’, ‘has/had come (been coming)’, ‘does/did come’, ‘will/would (have) come’, ‘shall/should (have) come’, ‘can/could (have) come’. It is especially important to note that this opposition also includes the future which employs the present tense of the verbs ‘will’ or ‘shall’, and the conditional which uses the past tense of these and other lexical elements (‘would’, ‘should’, ‘could’, etc.). In other words,

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underlying all of the concepts that we call tense in English is this one basic sign relation, the opposition of simple past to simple present. Of these two most basic tense forms, the simple present clearly has the broader range of usage, indeed the broadest possible range, allowing for the expression of events in virtually any timeframe whatsoever, including those that are timeless: cf. a past event as in a newspaper headline like ‘President wins reelection’; a future event when used in the context of a temporal adverb as in ‘I go to Chicago tomorrow’; or a timeless expression of fact like ‘The elephant inhabits Africa’. By contrast, the use of the so-called past tense is clearly more circumscribed, but by the same token it is not limited only to expressions of past time. Significantly, this is the form that is also used to express conditional, hypothetical, and subjunctive senses–that is, events that are presented “as if” they had occurred in the past: e.g. ‘Wish you were here’, ‘I would if I could’, ‘If you dressed like that more often…’, etc. In linguistic parlance the former, unspecified pole of an opposition like this (and we will insist that all conceptual oppositions have this specific character) is termed the “unmarked” member, and the more circumscribed one the “marked”. And our task therefore is to determine how to define the nature of such a sign relation, which we will do by considering what remains constant, what is invariant in the mark of the past tense that identifies it as distinct from the otherwise unspecified or unmarked present tense–i.e., the feature that distinguishes the past tense form from its non-past counterpart, and therefore defines the relation, the difference that makes a difference. Now it is vital to understand the way in which we are using markedness theory here, since there have been various interpretations of the concept of markedness in the history of linguistic science. (See, for example, Battistella 1996, where this and other approaches are compared.) These differences and their consequences will become especially apparent when we consider how to define plurality as a conceptual feature in terms of this study further on. For the moment, suffice it to say that the notion of invariance that we are adopting here demands that we respect the integrity of sign relations and their ability to contextualize by understanding that if the sign is indeed self-referential, the notion of context cannot be separated from that of the sign itself, and consequently neither can the marking be separated from the feature that defines the relation, since the concept of markedness has everything to do with the way we understand how context relates to the general meaning of a sign. We conclude, therefore, that a sign relation is necessarily (and invariantly) defined by the feature that identifies the marked member of the relation. Now one can argue against this position, illustrations of which will be provided later, but we will show in the course of this study that it is only by holding to this principle that

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we can free our definitions of conceptual features from the relativity inherent in lower-level, contextual applications of markedness and site our definitions at the supra-rational level where the features of this study are presumed to reside. Applying these observations to the marking of the English past tense, we should note that in seeking a common denominator of meaning from the range of variation attendant to any linguistic sign, it is almost always wise to look at those connotations that lie beyond the sign’s conventional and obvious meaning, as Jung might say (above, page 24). In this case, it is the ‘as if’ quality of the non-temporal uses of this tense form that provide the clue to what is actually governing the totality of usage associated with the form. These connotations suggest that rather than past time per se, it is the past experience of the speaking subject that is being evoked, whether one is talking about an event that is presumed to have factually taken place in the past, or not. When you stop to think about it, even the temporal uses of the past tense depend upon the speaker’s knowledge apart from the speech event itself, since past time implies that something is not happening, and therefore is not verifiable, at the moment of speaking; and all we have to go on is the speaker’s “word” that something actually did take place in the past. So the difference between the temporal and non-temporal uses isn’t even necessarily factual, language itself being fundamentally narrative; and we should conclude therefore that this distinction is not a difference that makes a difference, that the concept of linear time is not intrinsic to the nature of this particular sign relation in English, at the supra-rational level of consciousness at which the relation is presumed to operate. Rather, what is relevant, what defines the mark of the socalled past tense and therefore the sign relation in which it participates, is a more generalized concept of “not now” as viewed from the perspective of the speaker’s past experience embodied in the collective unconscious knowledge of one’s language. Having identified the common denominator of meaning that unites the temporal and non-temporal uses of the so-called past tense, we are now in a position to name and define a concept, a feature in Jakobson’s parlance, that captures this crucial observation. We can start by considering the rather evident fact that the notion of “not now” implies that there must be some concept of “now” that has been undone or broken. Linguistic science has long had a term for any conceptual category that is defined on a relationship to the hic et nunc of the speech situation itself, called “deixis” (from the Greek, meaning ‘pointing’ or ‘indicating’ – i.e. something that requires being present at the moment of speaking to identify). This term has traditionally been understood in a materialist sense, denoting anything that depends on knowledge of the

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spatio-temporal coordinates of the utterance itself for its identification, and it has included such linguistic elements as the temporal uses of tense, the demonstrative pronouns (‘this’ and ‘that’), the personal pronouns, and so forth. In this conventional sense, past time (the past tense in its temporal uses) requires knowledge of (participation in) the moment of speaking in order to recognize that the event represented takes place “before” that moment. Now all we have to do to transpose this traditional notion of deixis into one that is more compatible with the concept of sign relation that we are outlining here is to remove its material aspects (the linear or spatio-temporal notions) and treat the speech situation more abstractly, as a higher-order conceptual property inherent in the definition of certain linguistic categories that depend on its recognition for their meaning. Then we can appreciate that certain grammatical categories establish a link to the speech situation as their defining quality, one which we shall name and explain in greater detail later, while certain others signify that these links have been broken or cancelled. From this perspective the marking associated with the past tense in the more appropriately abstract sense of this study obviously stipulates that the link has been cancelled, since it implies that the events being reported are taking place not at the moment of speaking but in some other frame of reference. And this other frame of reference, since it is now truly atemporal, able to express both temporal and non-temporal senses equally, must be some sort of antecedent ideality that exists in the mind of the speaking subject, in precisely the higher order of consciousness that we are seeking here. In previous work, the feature that defines the past tense in this strictly glottological manner has in fact been termed cancellation. (NB: This feature was originally named restrictedness in van Schooneveld’s and my own work: van Schooneveld 1978b and Sangster 1982.) And the sequencing of categories that is already evident here between establishing a link to the speech situation and then cancelling it suggests that there must be a hierarchy among the kinds of features being uncovered in this type of analysis, one which will prove to be of critical importance when we look later at the sequencing of events in reports of experiences in certain consciousness research. We will also return later to consideration of the role that this same feature of cancellation plays in the system of Russian cases, to demonstrate that a particular feature, when defined at this more appropriately abstract level, can be seen to recur in different grammatical categories (nominal as well as verbal) and in different languages altogether. But let us remain with verbal categories for the moment, and consider next how one might define the future, in languages that have a distinct future tense (unlike English which expresses futurity obliquely by means of the present tense of the verbs ‘shall’ and ‘will’, with

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attendant lexical connotations consideration of which would take us beyond the scope of this discussion; or Russian where futurity is expressed through the aspect distinction as well as the auxiliary bud-).

4.2 Future/non-future: The objectiveness feature The future as a genuine grammatical category (as in French where a distinct future desinence forms part of a complex network of desinences that include no fewer than seven distinct forms, not counting compound constructions) also in some sense stipulates that the events being described take place in another frame of reference than the moment of speaking, and in this sense the future also has the speech situation as a reference point. But in this case the validation depends only indirectly on the prior experience of the speaking subject. With the past tense, the experience evoked is relatively more direct or immediate, a form of “not now” that is only one step removed, as it were, from the reality of the speech situation. The antecedent nature of the temporal past suggests a more or less direct link to the present; conditional expressions are just that, conditioned on another event being invoked in the speech situation; and the various hypothetical or subjunctive uses are connected by a desire, a wish, or an ‘if’ situation, all of which indicate a subjective link to what is being expressed in the speech event. In fact, it is no doubt due to the overall subjective nature of this link that the temporal and non-temporal senses have been able to coalesce in this manner in a single tense form in English. The future, on the other hand, is far more loosely connected, twice removed, if you will, even potentially maximally distant depending on the context in which such a form occurs. The future evokes a more independent and objectivized reality, a situation that is projected from past experience in a far more indirect manner. A future event is, as it were, predicated on the code of language itself; it exists by virtue of the potentiality inherent in the signs of language which, hierarchically speaking, places it “beyond” the speech situation and any other more direct connections there may be to that situation. Because the future indicates a relatively independent realm of consciousness, the feature that identifies this particular property has been termed objectiveness, not because there is anything materially objective about the concept but strictly in the sense of a phenomenon that has an independent existence of its own. As such, the place of this feature in the hierarchy we are building here would certainly appear to be next after the cancellation feature. From the evidence so far adduced with regard to tense systems, therefore, it would certainly appear that the sequence or hierarchy of features that governs the

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expression of tense is grounded in the conceptualization of the speech event as a higher-order construct and builds upwards or outwards from this quintessentially glottological phenomenon in stages, through cancellation to its ultimate expression in objectiveness. Let us pause for a moment and make sure we understand the sense in which the term “objective” is being used here, as this will be vitally important when it comes to recognizing the occurrence of a similar concept in consciousness research and in the structure of myths. It is not of course to be taken in the ordinary, dualistic sense of existence outside the mind, where objective is opposed to subjective as external to internal. Rather, the feature of objectiveness is to be understood glottologically as a form of remoteness or independence from the present, where the present has been conceptualized in terms of the speech activity that takes place there, what we might call the event-space of language. This understanding of objectiveness, moreover, requires that we distinguish between what is actual and what is real, and not conflate these two qualities as we sometimes do. In a self-referential system of signs, the actual is what takes place in the event-space of language, whereas reality must be conceived as an ideality evoked by the signs themselves, experienced through the contextualization of sign relations. Depending on which relation is being expressed, therefore, reality in this sense may include anything from the actual to the remoteness of other worlds, for that is precisely the genius of the language faculty. Viewing the nature of sign relations in this more appropriately abstract manner, moreover, allows us to explain concepts of time as different from our own as that of the Hopi with the same set of conceptual properties. As we have noted, we consciously conceive of time in the Western mindset as a linear sequence of events progressing from past to present to future, and we are oblivious to the fact that the signs we use to express these concepts may be of a different order altogether. In fact, the sequence as we have been able to determine it so far from an analysis based strictly on the sign principle is hierarchical rather than linear (actually cyclical, as we shall demonstrate later), and consequently has a demonstrably different order, progressing from the conceptualization of the present as the underlying property (the speech situation) from which the various tense relations ultimately derive, to the past as the tense with the relatively more direct link to the speech situation, and ultimately to the future as the more distant, independent and objective (from the point of view of the signs themselves) category. So when we study the Hopi language and fail to find anything resembling the linear concept of time embedded in the Western mindset at the rational level of conciousness, we should not conclude that the Hopi have no concept

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of time. Not only do they have a concept of time, theirs appears to be explainable by the very type of features we are uncovering here. When Benjamin Whorf initially studied the Hopi language and suggested it was lacking a concept of time, he noted that they do nevertheless differentiate systematically between two categories which he termed unmanifested vs. manifested–a deep-seated distinction that reflects the cultural belief that there are two orders of reality, the world that we physically inhabit (the manifested) and the spirit world (the unmanifested). Not only that, but the spirit world in this view is considered the real world, and the realm of our immediate sensory awareness rather a mirror image of that world. As we know, this is a commonly held view of reality, shared not only by many indigenous peoples (e.g. the Australian Dreamtime) but also by increasing numbers of scholars in the scientific community–e.g. Grof’s holotropic mind or Talbot’s holographic universe (Grof 1993, Talbot 1991). What is particularly interesting about this distinction as it relates to its expression in a language like Hopi, as Ekkehard Molotki has concluded in his insightful and thorough study of Hopi time, is how parallel this is to certain aspects of our own Western view of time, provided that we view our own concepts in a non-linear manner. (Molotki 1983: 622–627. I am projecting from Molotki’s analysis somewhat here.) Molotki shows that Whorf’s nomenclature can be transposed into a markedness relation of just the type we are describing here, where the unmanifested side of the opposition represents the marked aspect, and the manifested the unmarked, in keeping with the understanding that the manifested world is but a reflection of the unmanifested. He then suggests that this distinction is comparable to the relation between future vs. non-future which, when viewed in its properly abstract perspective of this study would be akin to exactly what we have been describing here as a relation marked by objectiveness – a remoteness from the present that constitutes the mark of this important aspect of time in the Hopi world view. It would appear, therefore, that an analysis of sign relations that seeks to define concept formation at this higher level of consciousness allows us to uncover universal properties of meaning that may well constitute the semiotic biogram of the species. In her very insightful book on how the mind conceptualizes time, K.M. Jaszczolt draws much the same conclusion that we are drawing here. (Jaszczolt 2009) She asks the question: “Is time a primitive concept or do humans conceptualize time in terms of something else more basic?” Real time, she insists, “does not flow; the flow of time belongs to human experience.” And this flow “is best explained as detachment from certainty, and hence as modality.” “Humans conceptualize time in terms of certainty and possibility. In other words, the concept of time supervenes on a more basic concept of modality.”

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In human consciousness, “the conceptual category of time [is] a conceptual category of modal detachment,” specifically of “degrees of detachment from the certainty of now.” (Jaszczolt 2009: 31–38) In her view as in ours, the linear flow of time as it is experienced at the rational level of consciousness is not basic but is derived by degrees of detachment from the certainty of now, first by the memory of the past and ultimately by anticipation of the memory of the future: “for human agents it is the now that has the privileged status. […] It is the privileged status of the now that forces us to conceptualize the not now not as an experience but as an anticipation or a memory of an experience.” (Jaszczolt 2009: 49) While this view of the underlying conceptualization of time in the human mind is thoroughly in keeping with the hierarchy of conceptual properties we have just presented based on an analysis of sign relations, it is important to note that Jaszczolt does not derive the concept of modal detachment from any such principle. Tense, in her view, “is a grammatical category, while time is ontological and psychological”, that is, time is both external (real or metaphysical) and internal (conceptual or psychological), but not grammatical. Since tense, in this view, is only one of the linguistic devices used to express temporal distinctions, “this device is neither necessary, as tenseless languages as well as tenseless utterances in tensed languages demonstrate, nor sufficient, as the heavy reliance on temporal adverbials in tensed languages shows.” (Jaszczolt 2009: 82) She cites among other examples the various representations of future time in English, ranging from the use of the simple present or the present progressive with a future adverbial–e.g. ‘I leave tomorrow’ or ‘I am leaving tomorrow’–to the future with ‘will’–‘I will leave tomorrow’. And citing the work of Peter Ludlow (Ludlow 1999), she notes that “in Italian, to express futurity, one standardly uses a present tense form (e.g.vado, ‘I go’) reserving the future tense form (andrò, ‘I will go’) for situations of lesser probability or uncertainty.” (Jaszczolt 2009: 44) On the other hand, if we were to take at face value the invariant meanings of the forms being used in these instances, we would arrive at much the same conclusions regarding the modalities involved. The difference in meaning between ‘I leave tomorrow’ and ‘I am leaving tomorrow’ is precisely what is given by the distinction between the progressive and simple present tenses in English: where the present simply makes a statement without further qualification (i.e. is unmarked), the progressive present, as we will demonstrate in greater detail later when we analyze the meaning of the ‘-ing’ form in English, puts the situation squarely in the moment of speaking, giving the expression a clear sense of certainty, just as Jaszczolt’s analysis of present time would indicate, regardless of the addition of the future adverbial, which in this case

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serves to further qualify the certainty. Then, when the modal ‘will’ is used, the expression is much more a matter of intention than of either certainty or potentiality proper, English not having a distinct future tense. Likewise, the difference in meaning between the two Italian expressions of future time is precisely what we would expect from the preceding analysis of the future in languages with a distinct future tense: andrò introduces probability or uncertainty–i.e. is marked for objectiveness–as opposed to vado. With a sign-based analysis, therefore, we have a solid foundation upon which to draw conclusions regarding the differences that make a difference across languages where the conceptualization of time is concerned. We have here, in other words, every reason to believe that the structure of linguistic signs themselves recapitulates the structure of consciousness at the highest level, where the grammatical and the conceptual-psychological constitute one and the same underlying structure.

4.3 Perfective/imperfective: The dimensionality feature Let us turn now to those verbal categories that do not have temporal connotations, those that do not appear to participate in the hierarchy at the level we have seen to this point. One of the most common of these is aspect, which is again one of those categories that grammarians generally assume to be a conceptual universal, since it is capable of being expressed in various ways in any number of languages whether or not it is associated with a specific grammatical sign relation. Whole books have been written about aspect as a language independent conceptual category, defining it in more or less concrete terms and finding representations of it willy-nilly virtually anywhere where it appears as a possible connotation of one or another form or combination of forms (e.g. Comrie 1976). Historically, the study of aspect derives from knowledge of Slavic languages, particularly Russian, where the category is in fact associated with a consistent set of sign relations, and it is these relations that we need to analyze to determine what the invariant nature of aspect as a higher-order concept may actually be. There is no doubt that the aspect correlation in Russian is a genuine grammatical category in the sense of this study. Just as with the past/non-past relation in English, the native speaker of Russian is obliged to choose, in every utterance in which a verb is selected, either the perfective or the imperfective form of the verb. Non-native speakers of the language know this only too well, since learning which form to choose in which context is one of the most difficult challenges any second language learner of Russian faces. This very fact

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testifies to the level of consciousness at which the distinction must be being made, a level well beyond that of normal awareness, yet something that native speakers of Russian employ intuitively every day, whether or not they can explain its usage satisfactorily in a classroom or anywhere else. Studies of the range of reference associated with each pole of this relation in Russian generally agree that the imperfective is the unmarked form, allowing any number of possibilities for indicating contextually how an action may be characterized: by its duration, progressively, habitually, iteratively, etc. By contrast, the perfective treats the verbal process as a unitary phenomenon, indicating only its inception or its completion, depending on which side of the tense opposition it is associated with. When used in conjunction with the past tense, the perfective specifies completion of the action or focus on a result rather than performance of the action itself. When used with the present tense, it expresses inception of the action or simply that the action will take place in the future. The perfective is also used to indicate a sequence of actions, where the succeeding action doesn’t start until the previous one has been completed. More sophisticated analysts, looking for a common denominator among these individual characteristics, have suggested that the perfective therefore presents the action as a single whole without internal differentiation, in contradistinction to the unmarked imperfective which can indicate all manner of characterizing the action itself (e.g. Comrie 1976: 23 et passim). Put in the quasi-logical or glottological terms of this study, the perfective can be said to frame the action by giving it limits or boundaries that set it off from its background. It is this framing property, then, which endows the marked perfective with the sense of unity or wholeness, of indivisibility, and it is this property that is left unspecified in the imperfective, permitting the internal structure of a verbal event to be depicted any way the speaker chooses. In previous work, this property has been named dimensionality, a term intended to indicate a very basic kind of conceptual feature, one akin to the psychologically and perceptually primitive notion of figure/ground, where what one sees are the outlines or dimensions of an otherwise indivisible entity set off against its background. Dimensionality is such a fundamental conceptual primitive that one would expect it to occur in a variety of other, non-verbal categories, as we shall see later. For the moment, we may note that it commonly occurs in prepositional systems. In English it is fairly evident that it distinguishes ‘in’ from either ‘on’ or ‘at’, where an object of the preposition ‘in’ frames its subject, no matter how concrete or abstract the situation; while the other two prepositions present the relation merely as a point of reference: cf. ‘in/on the house’, ‘in/ on time’, ‘in/on the hour’, ‘in/at/on the corner’, ‘in/at the/a distance’, ‘in/at

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war’, ‘in/at hand’, etc. So here we have a fourth feature, a rather primitive and very basic perceptual property that has been conceptualized by the sign relations in a given language, which would seem to place it at or very near the origin of the sequence, certainly before any of the features that we have considered so far, which are of an inherently conceptual nature, no doubt engendered by the evolution of language itself.

4.4 Plural/non-plural: The plurality feature Another conceptual relation that is undoubtedly fundamental to the organization of signs in both verbal and nominal systems is plurality. The opposition of singular and plural clearly also represents a sign relation of a more primitive kind, one that occurs regularly in many languages as a bona fide grammatical category in the sense of this study, one that obliges the speaker to choose between one or the other pole of the relation in every utterance where either a noun or a verb has been selected. In this relation, the singular would seem to represent the unmarked pole, since it is normally used to refer to situations where either one or more than one entity is invoked – may have both a singular and a collective sense, for example (e.g. ‘The elephant inhabits Africa’)– whereas the plural is normally restricted to the expression of more than one entity. There are cases, however, where this material relation breaks down, and it is these instances–the connotations, again, that lie beyond the sign’s conventional or obvious meaning–that we need to investigate to determine the true, underlying property that defines the relation. These are the instances where, significantly, the poles of the relationship between singular and plural do not correspond to their material counterparts in the real world. Such is the case, for example, when the plural is used to designate a single individual, as with the so-called polite forms of conjugated verbs with the second person vous in French, vy in Russian, etc.; or with the so-called editorial ‘we’ in English; among other fairly common occurrences. To account for this type of discrepancy, scholars like Edward Stankiewicz have proposed that it is the singular that is marked in the first and second persons, while the plural is marked in the third person only, since the first and second person plural pronouns can refer variously to one or more than one individual. (Stankiewicz 1991: 24; see also Newfield and Waugh 1991: 230– 231.) Trying to solve the problem by postulating such contextualized markedness, where the poles of the markedness relation are presumed to switch in different contexts, also runs into difficulties, however, because the same phenomenon occurs in the third person, in languages like English, where for

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example one hears utterances like ‘Someone phoned but they didn’t leave their name.’ Here the plural ‘they’ expresses the fact that while there was only one person calling, it could have been one of any number of individuals, the essential point therefore being, from the perspective of how the signs are used, that one is expressing an undifferentiated multitude of possibilities regarding who might have called rather than counting the callers–perhaps the most telling example of what plurality ultimately implies, as we shall see in a moment. Postulating such contextualized marking relationships presents a serious theoretical and methodological issue, one that we referred to earlier. Assuming that a given sign can be marked in one context and unmarked in another for the purposes of aligning the sign with its perceived referents in extra-linguistic reality implies that context is a separable phenomenon, one distinct from the underlying sign relation. In the present study, on the other hand, we must insist that context remain an inherent property of a sign relation because contextualization is the process by which reference in language is achieved. This is what it means to say that meaning in language is self-referential. In fact, if meaning is truly self-referential, then there is no sense in which we should be trying to match markedness relations with material elements of reality in the first place. The whole exercise, therefore, is artificial, keeping us from uncovering the genuine relational invariants that ultimately lie behind the contextualization process. And there is no better demonstration of this than the way we should treat a relation like plurality as a linguistic construct. When the plural is uncritically thought to signify more than one, then it is assumed that there must be more than one element in external reality for it to refer to. This perpetuates the notion that there should be a correlation between plurality as a property of language and number as an attribute of objects in the real world. On the other hand, if we were to cease looking for correlates of meaning in real world properties and consider instead that the meaning of a sign as a member of a self-organizing system of sign relations is by definition self-referential, then we can shift our focus away from this fixation with material reality and seek the properly abstract correlates of a sign relation like plurality. This will allow us to conceive of plurality as having nothing necessarily to do with counting per se, but rather as a higher-order phenomenon whose essence lies in the qualitative rather than the quantitative aspect of “number”. As psychological studies have repeatedly shown, it is the qualitative character of number that more accurately captures the essence of the concept in human consciousness. Quite apart from individual appearances, the mind orders our ability to experience reality. Measuring and counting operations are but one manifestation of this order, the linear or sequential aspects of the

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phenomenon which are apparent in everyday experience, and have been the most highly regarded in Western culture, in the same fashion as the linear appreciation of time. Behind such material aspects, however, lie the myriad other more qualitative characteristics that inform our myths and dreams, and play an important role in artistic creativity, from musical structures to the patterning of poetical discourse. If this is not sufficient to suggest that number in human consciousness is more than a quantitative construct, we need look no further than the field of mathematics itself. The progression from positive whole numbers through negative numbers and irrational numbers to the notion of imaginary numbers and beyond is a virtual journey through levels of consciousness. Where the positive numbers are based on the ability to count objects or other discrete elements as they are presented to our immediate senses, the association with objects already begins to weaken with negative numbers. With irrational numbers we move to the next stage, where comprehension depends on the prior experience of the logic underlying the rational numbers. Then, when we come to imaginary or complex numbers – such as i, j, k, or the square root of a negative number – the mathematical concepts which make quantum mechanics possible, by the way – we are in an entirely different realm of experience. Here the quantitative aspect of number, which is grounded in the experience of sequential ordering, gives way to the concept of qualitative units, some of whose qualities even mathematicians don’t yet fully understand. Ultimately, when we get to the higher hypernumbers, we are dealing with concepts that probably have only to do with the ultimate nature of consciousness itself. (This discussion follows Paul 1956: 179–95.) As Charles Muses has noted, “numbers are … powers of transformation of which change of magnitude is merely the most elementary one. The essence of number is qualitative, not quantitative. Higher kinds of number are distinguished from each other by their nature, their unique properties, and not by their magnitude.” (Muses 1972: 111, 125) We should conclude, therefore, that it is the more abstract, qualitative aspect of number that constitutes the difference that makes a difference in the human mind; and the quantitative realizations that are present to our immediate awareness are properly understood as contextual manifestations of this more fundamental conceptual property. So it is in this more abstract or generic sense that we should approach a concept like plurality as a glottological phenomenon, if we are going to attribute it as a differential property to the human mind. Then we can appreciate the fact that, although grammatical number certainly allows us to count objects, just as grammatical tense permits the expression of linear time as a common contextual possibility, the essence of plurality as an invariant concep-

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tual relation lies in the distinction between a phenomenon which has, as it were, a “multiplex” character (the marked plural) versus one which is not specified in this regard (the unmarked singular). Thus the plural form of the verb may designate more than one individual, or it may indicate a single individual with the further connotation of politeness, indefiniteness, or other attribute. Since the multiplicity that defines the underlying semantic relation is qualitative rather than quantitative, we are not adding apples and oranges here but recognizing that the multi-faceted character of number at this level of consciousness is defined by the complexity, not the magnitude, of the resulting phenomenon–expressing the complex nature of a situation from the perspective of different modes of experience simultaneously–which is precisely what the language faculty, conceived as a self-referential system, would have evolved to do. In other words, nothing is necessarily being added to anything in terms of objects of perception; rather, what plurality as a grammatical sign relation expresses is complexity rather than multiplicity per se, which allows the speaker to make reference to a range of potential situations in which such a property might be considered potentially relevant. Ultimately we must recognize, in redefining the essence of plurality in this way, that it is the language faculty that has allowed the perception operation of counting to evolve into a properly conceptual one indicating a complex of attributes whose individuality is not the issue. This fact will become especially important later when we consider the place of plurality in the hierarchy of features and their relation to parallel hierarchies in other realms of consciousness. We will also demonstrate later that by defining plurality in this properly glottological manner, we can gain a better appreciation of the concept of transitivity: that implicit in transitive verbs is also a complex of perceptions that anticipates the additional presence of a phenomenon onto which the process denoted by the verb will ultimately be directed.

4.5 Relations creating separation: The distinctness feature Perhaps the best way to appreciate what it means to define plurality in such non-linear terms is to consider other situations, other sign relations, which contrast with plurality in this sense by generating reference specifically to more than one genuinely individual entity. These latter would be situations where there is not just a complex of perceptions involved, but also the establishment of separation between perceived entities. Whereas with plurality one perceives multi-facetedness with one look, as it were, in these latter cases it takes more than one look to appreciate the meaning of the relation. The name

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that has been given this underlying property is distinctness, and it exists in a variety of forms in different languages. It occurs, for example, in languages which possess, in addition to the plural which does not differentiate inherently between the members of the category, the so-called dual as well. Here one is dealing with the recognition of genuinely distinct entities in the given situation. That distinctness is indeed a difference that makes a difference at the higher-order level at which these invariant relations are being defined is also illustrated by the difference between the conjunctions ‘and’ and ‘but’ in English. While ‘and’ merely connects elements in the narrated situation without creating any necessary separation between them (i.e. is marked for plurality but unmarked for distinctness), the conjunction ‘but’ implies that there is a clear distinction between the elements as well, expressed in this case as a contrast. The feature of distinctness also plays a significant role in prepositional systems, where its defining characteristic is the creation of separation between the object of the preposition and its subject. Consider, for example, the distinction between ‘over’ and ‘above’ in English, two prepositions that are very similar in meaning, except that the latter consistently signifies that there is separation while the former is unmarked in that respect. This distinction is particularly evident in the vertical senses of these prepositions: cf. ‘He put the cloth over/above the table’, ‘He hung the jacket over/above the chair’, etc. It is also evident in instances where one or the other preposition does not normally occur: e.g. ‘He drove over/(above?) the bridge’, ‘She has a strange power over/(above?) me’, ‘He has always remained above/(over?) reproach’, etc. (For a comprehensive investigation of the meaning of the preposition ‘over’ and comparisons with ‘above’, including these and many other examples, see Tyler and Evans 2003: Chap.4.) The same relation pertains between the prepositions ‘below’ and ‘under’ in English, where ‘below’ is marked for distinctness–e.g. ‘below the bridge’, ‘below the town’, ‘below freezing’, where separation is evident–vs. ‘under’–e.g. ‘under the table’, ‘under water’, ‘under suspicion’, ‘under an anesthetic’, etc., where connection to the object of the preposition rather than separation from it is implied. It is especially important to note at this point that the preceding two features suffice to explain all counting operations in non-linear terms. Not only have we been able to reconceptualize the quantitative aspects of number in qualitative terms with the plurality feature, the distinctness feature allows us to appreciate that the dual number is more properly understood as simply the minimal case of separation and therefore represents one realization of a more profound and very basic conceptual relation, a property that explains a host of other linguistic phenomena as well.

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4.6 Relations defined on the present as a conceptual property: The extension feature We have now considered a total of six conceptual properties (relations), three relatively primitive ones and three more complex ones. The more primitive ones–plurality, dimensionality, and distinctness–clearly represent relatively primitive mental operations, properties that we could assume may have been conceptualized via language from more basic perceptual capabilities. The more complex set of features, as we have noted, derive from the unique human capacity to conceptualize the present as a distinct conceptual space, one now conceived as the moment of speaking or, as we have phrased it, the eventspace of language. We are now at the point where we need to provide the name for the feature that identifies this conceptual space, a name that captures the essence of the sign relations defined on the present as a distinct conceptual category, on the present in its distinctively linguistic incarnation. Now it is important to understand that not just any reference to present time would be marked for this feature. The evolution of the language faculty, as we shall discuss later in much greater detail, requires us to recognize that the present as a linguistic concept needs to be understood not merely as a point in time, but as something more than an ephemeral moment, specifically as an “extension” of that moment that is held in the mind as a distinct conceptual category now conceived as the event-space of language. Consequently, the name that has been given this feature is extension, and the signs of language that are identified by this feature are therefore defined by their thorough and comprehensive involvement in the situation being described in a given speech event. Applying the extension feature in the domain of verbal grammatical meanings clearly indicates that not just any reference to present time would be marked for this feature. The simple present tense in English, for example, is not so marked; it is, as we saw earlier, the unmarked tense because it may refer to any frame of reference, whether temporal or atemporal, depending on the context in which it is used. Nor do the signs marked for this feature necessarily refer to present time per se, since the present has now been reconceptualized as the moment of the speech event itself, that is, of the events being described in the given speech situation. Thus the so-called progressive tenses in English, the ones that are constructed with the ‘-ing’ suffix, whether they are expressed with the auxiliary verb in the present or the past tense, are so marked because they fully coalesce with the events being described in the speech event–e.g. ‘I am reading’, ‘I was reading when…’. In other words, it is the ‘-ing’ form itself, not the auxiliary, that carries the extension feature, establishing the final connection to the events being described in the speech event, in whatever time frame may be indicated.

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That it is the ‘-ing’ form that carries this feature is more than evident from the full range of its occurrence in the language, providing an excellent illustration of how a universal category (conceptual relation) such as this, when defined at the appropriately abstract, supra-rational level of consciousness, can create a rich array of contextual applications. Not only does this desinence serve as the mark of the progressive tenses, it is also the form that creates gerunds, which by definition signify a comprehensive link with the events being described in the given speech situation. It also forms the so-called present participle, creating adjectives from verbs or nouns so that they can describe a phenomenon specifically with respect to its ultimate appearance in the given situation–e.g. ‘charming’, ‘strapping’; ‘hulking’, ‘balding’. In a whole range of instances, it can indicate either an on-going activity (as a verb) or the act of performing that activity in the given situation (as a noun)–e.g. ‘boxing’, ‘crying’, ‘hoping’. The notion of functional activity is central to the conceptualization of the extension feature, implying that the phenomenon so marked is to be viewed relative to its defining role in a particular situation: it can make events out of nouns or verbs–‘banking’, ‘wedding’–or designate the material or process in use–‘roofing’, ‘siding’, ‘flooring’, ‘piping’. We will see in the course of this study that the functional aspect of the extension feature is a key to its occurrence especially in the verbal and nominal lexicon. Finally, the ‘-ing’ desinence also creates nouns that indicate the result of a given verbal activity as evidenced in the situation being described–e.g. ‘a building’, ‘a gelding’, and so forth. We will return later to consider how the sequence of features described above might constitute a truly comprehensive set of ordered relations defining the full extent of human conceptual space in this higher-order realm of consciousness; but before doing so let us look, as promised, at some further applications of the second, more complex triad of features, to demonstrate that they have relevance beyond the specific domain of verbal categories that we have considered so far. In fact, this latter set of features was initially identified not with verbal but with nominal categories, specifically with the case system of Russian, building on Jakobson’s seminal work in this area. By taking a closer look at the conceptual relations expressed in an overt case system like that of Russian, where case is indicated by the actual paradigmatic opposition of inflectional endings on nouns and adjectives, we will be in a position to see later how such a sign system compares with that of a language like English, where similar conceptual relations are instead expressed syntagmatically, by the order of signs in an utterance. By observing the specific sign relations extant in both types of languages, relations that are the product of generations of grammatical selection by the

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speakers of those languages, we will be able to appreciate the sense in which a sign-based theory allows us to arrive at an entirely different understanding of case functions than those typical of other approaches to case theory, such as Case Grammar of the 1970s and its subsequent manifestation in the Minimalist Program of generative linguistics. In these latter instances, conventional notions of case functions are treated as purely formal, syntactic phenomena and applied directly to the deep structure of sentences as universals. A systematic analysis of the actual signifiers used to express case relations, on the other hand, whether they be in morphology or syntax, provides vital evidence of the mind’s capacity for making deep-seated cognitive distinctions of a entirely different order.

5 Case relations as a product of grammatical selection In much of the research on case relations, particularly in generative grammar, it is assumed that there is a set of functions that noun phrases fulfill with respect to verbs in an utterance. Thus a given noun phrase may be marked for such notions as agent, patient, cause, effect, instrument, object, or goal, depending on the role it appears to play vis-à-vis the action denoted by the verb. These functions are taken to be universals representing various kinds of states, events, and processes. (Lyons 1977: 488) In Chomsky’s Minimalist Program, it is explicitly assumed that “Case is always present abstractly,” whether or not it is morphologically manifested or indeed has any overt formal realization at all. In this formulation, “the subject of a finite clause is assigned nominative Case, the object of a transitive verb is assigned accusative Case,” and so forth. (Chomsky 1996: 110) It is also understood in this approach, moreover, that even in languages that do have an overt case system, there is by no means always a direct correlation between such presumed universal categories and the actual case forms used to express them; and in such instances a device is mechanically inserted into the underlying system, a so-called case filter, to adjust it so that one arrives at the correct surface structure derivation. Such would frequently have to be the case in Russian, to be sure, since the objects of transitive verbs regularly appear in either the accusative, the genitive, or the instrumental; and even the subject of an existential sentence under negation, as we noted previously, will occur in the genitive rather than the nominative. Such a procedure implies, of course, that the actual case forms of inflectional languages are mere surface realizations of constructs that have no necessary relation to the signifiers used to express them. A sign-based theory of language would challenge these assumptions on several grounds. In the first place, since such obvious properties as agent, patient, instrument, object, and the like are logical categories immediately evident in the predicational structure of language at the rational level of consciousness, they are hardly the candidates we should be looking for to determine the nature of consciousness at the supra-rational level. The semantic potential inherent in actual case forms is more indicative of what underlies the process of sentence formation in higher-order consciousness than any a priori set of functions or case assignments; for the sign relations themselves tell us which differences ultimately make a difference in the mind of the speaking subject. Perhaps most important, the hypothesis that there is such an a priori set of universal case functions rests upon the commonplace but unproven assumption that underlying the human language faculty is a process

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of propositional logic, where something is predicated of a subject, mirroring what we take to be the logic of the real world where actions (events) have subjects and objects, agents and patients, causes and effects, and so on. These factors are therefore presumed to govern how words relate to one another in a sentence, government being the technical linguistic term implying that the ability of signs to concatenate with one another is dictated by such logical functions, and the speaker consequently has little or no control over a significant portion of sentence production. Sign theory on the other hand, while not denying either the appearance of a propositional structure in sentences or our evident ability to think and perform mental operations at this level of consciousness, would nevertheless insist that such linear thinking is not what ultimately underlies the human language faculty. The systematic study of sign relations indicates rather that the predicational structure of sentences itself derives from a more fundamental underlying system of higher-order properties inherent in the nature of sign relations understood as organic properties of mind, and that these are the very properties which allow the organism to produce meaningful utterances that transcend real-world logic. To realize this agenda, therefore, requires that we investigate both the morphological (inflectional) and the syntactic (word order) manifestation of sign relations that actually do govern the way noun phrases function with respect to verbs. Let us look first at the morphological evidence and consider the conceptual properties inherent in the three actual cases that express the three cardinal semantic relations in the Russian inflectional system: accusative, instrumental, and genitive. Each of these cases is marked vis-à-vis the nominative, which is totally unmarked by virtue of its indicating the ultimate modified (subject) of the verbal process and nothing more. The remaining cases indicate the manner in which other nouns characterize or modify the verbal process itself. So what we are looking for here are the differences in the markings of the three cases, the invariant distinctions that govern the speaker’s choice of one of them over the others in a network of case relations, irrespective of what role they may appear to play in the predicational structure of sentences.

5.1 The Russian accusative and instrumental Comparing the accusative with the instrumental, for example, one would immediately note that both occur regularly as the direct object of verbs in Russian, but with a clear distinction in meaning. Both also regularly occur in expressions delimiting the temporal aspect of the verbal process, with again

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the same consistent distinction in meaning. As far as the object relation is concerned, grammarians have long noted that the instrumental occurs in place of the accusative whenever the verb expresses some form of domination or control (examples follow), and that therefore all one needs to do is create a syntactic rule (a rule of government or a case filter) to mechanically produce the “proper” case after one of these verbs. Such a procedure, however, effectively neutralizes any distinction in meaning between the cases by assuming that it is the type of verb that determines the choice of case. This eliminates the speaker’s prerogative to choose that lies at the core of the concept of grammatical category in a sign-based theory of language. In sign theory, the prerogative (indeed, the obligation) of the speaker to choose between the poles of a grammatical opposition (relation) can never be taken away. The possibility of choice must always be present as a potentiality, without which the very concept of sign relation would not exist. And in fact, whenever we examine such claims about rules of government in sufficient detail, we inevitably find that they are based on statistically predominant rather than actual or potential usage; for there are hardly any of these so-called verbs of domination that cannot also occur with an accusative object in Russian, revealing the very essence of the distinction between the cases. Let us look now at some representative examples. Due to the very nature of this class of verbs, it is of course likely that their objects will be perceived more as instruments of the action than as objects onto which the action of the verb is “directed”, which explains the predominance of the instrumental (I) over the accusative (A) in conjunction with such verbs. Nevertheless, both possibilities exist, and the accusative (the so-called case of the direct object) will materialize whenever the object is directly affected by the verbal process rather than being conceived as a mere instrument. Thus we find that, in the following examples, pravit’ gosudarstvom (I) ‘rule a country’ pravit’ avtomobilem (I) ‘drive a car’ nothing necessarily happens to the country or the car in the given situation; but in pravit’ britvu (A) ‘adjust a razor’ pravit’ korrektury (A) ‘correct proofs’ something clearly does happen to the razor and the proofs. This same distinction clearly exists in the following pair of examples:

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zapravljat’ delami (I) ‘run the show’ zapravljat’ švejnuju mašinu (A) ‘thread a sewing machine’ Occasionally we even find perfect minimal pairs: vertit’ sud’bami, delami (I) ‘manage people’s fates, run someone’s affairs’ vertit’ sud’by, dela (A) ‘decide people’s fates, resolve someone’s affairs.’ One can cite numerous examples with other types of verbs where the Russian language seems to be treating what in English would be a direct object “as if” it were an instrument, appropriately using the instrumental rather than the accusative case: xlopat’ dver’ju (I) ‘slam the door’ vesti ukazkoj (I) po karte ‘draw (with) a pointer across a map’. In many such cases the accusative may also occur, however, making overt the paradigmatic relation which otherwise exists only in absentia, as a potentiality in the mind of the speaker. Compare nakapat’ lekarstvom (I) na jubku ‘spill medicine on one’s skirt’ nakapat’ lekarstvo (A) v rjumku ‘pour (drip) medicine into a glass’ Similarly, ‘krošit’ xlebom (I) na pol ‘crumble (drop crumbs of) bread on the floor’ krošit’ xleb (A) ‘crumble (make crumbs from) bread.’ One of the best ways to capture the essence of such distinctions is to compare the two types of usage and consider what the speakers of this language seem to be interested in, at a subconscious level of course. In slamming a door, one is more interested in the effect the door makes than in what eventually happens to the door. Likewise, when you spill medicine on your skirt, you are more interested in what happens to the skirt than to the medicine; but when you pour medicine into a glass, you are concerned with the ultimate status of the medicine itself; and when you make crumbs from bread you are creating

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a batch of crumbs. Clearly, when the accusative is used, the phenomenon involved becomes the object of the deliberate action of the verb; whereas when the instrumental occurs, the phenomenon is presented more like a manner adverb–an instrument, as the name of the case implies, of the verbal process. Transposing this distinction into terms that can lead us towards a more properly glottological definition of the markings associated with these two cases, we may stipulate that an accusative object is totally involved in the verbal process such that its status is altered as a result of the process, whereas an instrumental object is only marginally involved. This is precisely the distinction that one also finds with time expressions in Russian, where the accusative consistently occurs when one indicates the amount of time it takes to perform the process denoted by the verb (the time is all used up, as it were), while the instrumental will occur when the time is given only as a point of reference. Compare on sidel tam ves’ den’ (A) ‘He sat there the whole day’ on prišël dnëm (I) ‘He came (at some time) in the afternoon’ This distinction is also evident when these cases are used with one and the same preposition: where there is motion involved, the noun that indicates the place to which the action is directed (where the verbal process ends up in the given situation) will occur in the accusative; but the instrumental is used when the place is merely a location where the process happens: exat’ za dom (A) ‘go behind the house’ stojat’ za domom (I) ‘stand behind the house’ So the common denominator of meaning in each of these cases is both clear and consistent, and we need to find a way to define each of them as a glottological relation of the type we have identified previously. This we can do by asking ourselves again how each of these conceptual properties is being validated. Then we can see that the accusative presents the phenomenon expressed by the nominal element to which it is attached as critically affected as a result of the action denoted by the verb in the given speech situation, which is the same as saying that it is thoroughly and comprehensively involved in the situation being described, just as we saw with the progressive tenses noted earlier. And we would conclude, therefore, that the accusative is marked for the feature of extension. In similar fashion we can reason that the instrumental case implies that the phenomenon expressed by the noun, since it is

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only marginally involved in the verbal process, must be validated elsewhere than in the given speech situation; but it is still indirectly tied to the speech situation, so it would therefore be marked for cancellation, just as we saw with the English past tense. The parallel between the verbal and the nominal systems in the case of the instrumental may not be quite as evident as with the accusative, but neither does it represent as great a logical leap as it might at first seem, provided that we understand the underlying meaning of the past, as we did previously, in terms of modality rather than temporality. For just as the past tense in English conflates conditional and subjunctive senses with purely temporal ones as representations of “not now”, so too the instrumental case in Russian is distinguished from the accusative as a non-temporal form of “not now”. As a phenomenon that is only marginally involved in the situation being described, it does not derive its existence from the situation itself and therefore must have a “prior” existence of its own in order to be invoked. In its broader applications, the Russian instrumental acts everywhere much like a manner adverb, expressing the mode in which the verbal process is performed, the ‘by whom’, ‘with what’, ‘how’ and ‘when’: e.g. stroi’tsja plotnikami ‘be built by carpenters’ ubit’ nožom ‘kill with a knife’ exat’ lesom ‘go by way of the forest’ rabotat’ učitelem ‘work as a teacher’ guljat’ večerami ‘take walks in the evenings’ In all of these instances, the phenomenon in the instrumental is not directly affected by the process but is invoked merely as an instrument, a means of performing the process, just as the cancellation feature would indicate.

5.2 The Russian genitive and genitive/accusative As for the Russian genitive (G), we have already noted its range of uses (contextual variants, above p. 22), and we may now stipulate that all of these variants indicate in one fashion or another that the phenomenon denoted by the noun to which the case is affixed must also be validated elsewhere than in the given situation, but in a much more “objective” sense than is the case with the instrumental. This is particularly evident in the stereotypical uses of the geni-

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tive, the possessive or adnominal uses (the ‘of’ types referred to above), where the phenomenon in the genitive does not itself participate in the given situation but is invoked only as a qualifier whose existence must be validated independently–e.g. dom otca (G)‘father’s house’, where the father is not even marginally involved in the given verbal activity but is merely the person whose house it happens to be; or kryša doma (G)‘the roof of the house’, where again only the roof and not the house itself is actually engaged in the process. This more remote relation is even more evident when the genitive occurs in the context of verbs under negation, whether as the object of a transitive verb or the subject of an existential one. If there is none of the phenomenon actually present in the given situation, its representation must be predicated upon some far more “objective” projection of itself as a conceptual possibility. The use of the genitive after numerals is obviously a variant of this same underlying conceptualization: when either none or only a certain amount of a phenomenon participates in a given situation, the ultimate validity of the phenomenon itself is again projected as a potentiality rather than an actuality. And the fact that the genitive occurs as the object of transitive verbs denoting separation from, failure to attain, fear of, and so forth, verbs that maximize the distance of the object from the verbal process, further confirms the underlying remoteness of this sign relation. The systematic nature of this evidence thus points rather obviously to objectiveness being the feature that marks the genitive case in Russian. Finally, let us look at the use of the so-called genitive/accusative in Russian, a phenomenon of some interest here because it allows us to demonstrate how these features behave as part of a system of sign relations over a course of time longer than the lifespan of any given individual. The term genitive/ accusative describes the phenomenon whereby the direct object of a transitive verb occurs in the genitive rather than the accusative when the noun involved seems to indicate animacy, personification, or other unique or individualizing characteristics. This particular use of the genitive as the case of the direct object, however, occurs only with nouns in the first declension. It does not occur in the other two declensions, where the accusative itself appears whether or not the object has such an individualizing character. Looking at this phenomenon in a purely superficial manner, one might conclude that we have here a situation rather ideal for the postulation of a case filter to switch the case assignment for certain nouns in the first declension from accusative to genitive, since what appear to be the “same” types of nouns from the point of view of their referents occur in one or the other case depending only upon which declension they belong to, and declensions certainly can be considered a purely formal structure. But quite a different picture emerges when one

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ceases to look solely at the referential aspects of the forms in question and concentrates instead upon their relational properties as members of a system of sign relations. Then the evolution of the forms involved, a highly instructive development that has taken place entirely in historical times and is therefore clearly documented, tells quite a different story. (For the documentation in this case, I use that of Ward 1965: 204–208.) The point at which the story begins is towards the end of what is called the Old Russian period (between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries). The system of declensions and their case endings that existed at that time was essentially unstable and therefore ripe for evolution in one particularly critical respect: only singular nouns in the second declension and certain masculine nouns in the plural distinguished nominative from accusative desinentially (had different inflectional endings) at that point in time. In the singular of the first declension, which contained the bulk of masculine and neuter nouns, there was no autonomous accusative case. The ending of the accusative was identical with that of the nominative. Under such conditions, the potential for ambiguity not readily resolvable in the speech situation itself must have been unacceptably high whenever both subject and object designated an animate (and therefore masculine) being, especially a human. Indeed, the place where the need to formally disambiguate subject from object seems to have been felt most strongly (because the changes took place there first) was with proper names in sentences of the type ‘Ivan saw Peter’ vs. ‘Peter saw Ivan’; or ‘Ivan saw the man’ vs. ‘The man saw Ivan’. Since word order does not express case relations in Russian as it does in English, the syntax of such sentences was evidently not sufficient to make the distinction. So the inflectional system at that time was at a tipping point and needed to advance to a new state. Now we have noted previously that ambiguity is the natural condition of a linguistic sign, but since the linguistic sign functions as the vehicle for both categorization and communication, the level of tolerance for ambiguity necessitated by the categorization function cannot exceed that required for successful communication. Clearly the situation in Old Russian represented just such a bifurcation or tipping point in a self-organizing system, and it is very instructive for the thesis being presented here to observe how the system reacted, and continues to evolve to this day, to resolve this situation. It did not create a new, autonomous desinence for the accusative in the singular of the first declension; rather it shifted certain nouns whose connotation as direct objects mirrored the underlying essence of the genitive, those that indicated animacy or other individuating characteristics that tended to reinforce the more independent or objective nature of the phenomenon. And it left other nouns in the first declension that did not have these characteristics alone, demonstrating that it was

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the underlying criterion of objectiveness as defined herein that was reinforced as a sign relation integral to the system of case desinences already in existence. This is a perfect example of self-organization in a system of linguistic sign relations, one that does not operate as a top-down, rule-governed structure but spontaneously evolves as the functions of categorization and communication mutually support and regulate each other at a level quite beyond any conscious awareness. Appreciating the spontaneous evolution that lies at the heart of a self-organizing system is crucial here, for the process in the case of the Russian genitive/accusative is on-going to this day, demonstrating once again that the meaning of linguistic sign relations is not tied to any particular referential properties, such as animacy per se, but is solely a product of the self-referential capacity inherent in the sign relations themselves, which determines in a purely subjective manner how the system will evolve. So it is not an argument against this thesis that animate nouns in other declensions (or for that matter animate nouns in the first declension in the plural) do not participate in the phenomenon of the genitive/accusative. Since the meaning of a linguistic sign is not denotational, the actual animacy (or lack thereof) of any object referred to by a given sign is not relevant to its underlying essence. What is relevant is only the underlying relational properties of a sign that identify it as a member of a system of sign relations, and how or when the system needs to reorganize itself in order to maintain its integrity. In fact, the underlying concept of independent or objective existence apart from the speech situation that defines the referential potential inherent in the Russian genitive has evolved to permit a highly sophisticated demarcation of phenomena that may be treated “as if” they have such an objectivized existence, no matter what other properties they may be thought to possess in any particular contextual situation. Thus certain natural beings (God, the devil, a demon) occur in the genitive rather than the accusative, as do all the higher playing cards (not only the king and jack, but the ace and trump as well); and even the word for billiard ball. Now we can say that the inanimate members of this group are being personified if we like, but again it really doesn’t matter because it is the system of sign relations that is operating at a much higher level of consciousness that is determining the evolutionary trajectory. And the system clearly is a dynamic one. The words for deceased person (pokojnik) and dead person (mertvec, or ‘corpse’ in a more personal sense) occur in the genitive rather than the accusative, but the word for ‘corpse’ in the sense of ‘cadaver’ (trup) does not. The system also differentiates between certain animals, especially fish, depending on the degree of their involvement in the situation being described: the genitive occurs as the case of the direct object when one fishes for lobsters or breeds oysters, but the accusative occurs when

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one eats them. Interestingly, nouns signifying certain groups of individuals do not occur in the genitive–e.g. narod ‘folk’ or ‘people’, polk ‘regiment’, voysko ‘army’, stado ‘herd’ or ‘flock’–suggesting that the collective does not have the same status as the individual. Most important of all, the system is still in flux, since we currently find that words for the lowest order of living things display a certain ambiguity with respect to this phenomenon: the accusative of first declension nouns seems to still be preferred with the words for microbe, virus, and bacteria, for example, but the genitive may also occasionally occur.

5.3 The Russian dative and subjectless sentences Earlier we noted that, even more than the features themselves, it is their systems characteristics that makes a sign-based analysis of this type viable. And indeed, it is the manner in which these cardinal features combine to create the remaining cases in the Russian nominal system that has far-reaching consequences for the structure of sentences generally in that language. Take the Russian dative, for example. As the case of the so-called indirect object, it is fairly evident that it combines the features of extension and cancellation: an object that is “direct” but in a secondary role in the situation described–i.e. that is fully involved in the situation but in a subordinate role. What is most important, however, is that this particular combination of features has created the vehicle for expressing not only many of the typical senses common to the dative in various languages with which Russian shares an evolutionary heritage, but also a whole gamut of both impersonal sentences and those where the logical subject is not expressed in the nominative, demonstrating the unique potential for the Russian cases to structure the experience of reality in ways significantly different from what the normal logic of predication would indicate. The widespread use of the dative case (D) in Russian to express what is traditionally termed the logical (as opposed to the grammatical) subject, creates a semantic effect that is equivalent to the translations such sentences receive in languages like English only in a most imprecise and unrevealing sense. A more discriminating examination would reveal how expressing the logical subject in the dative case affects the major modification relationships of a Russian sentence, thereby producing a significantly different conceptualization of the way experience is categorized in the speech event. No longer is a property being predicated of a subject in such circumstances; rather, the individual designated by the dative becomes part of the predicate modifier itself, with considerably more than negligible semantic consequences. Being

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sorry, for instance, is not a property that can be predicated of a subject in Russian, as in English ‘I am sorry.’ Such a relationship can only be expressed indirectly, via the dative case: mne žal’ ‘to me (D) is sorry.’ What the linguistic categorization of experience in Russian indicates is that an individual can be sorry because of something that happened, but this does not qualify the individual as a sorry person. The žal’ must remain, so to speak, a qualification of the events experienced. And the individual experiencing them becomes both an object and an instrument of the events at the same time. Indeed, the Russian language contains a set of these predicate words– traditionally called kategorija sostojanija, or states of being–which cannot modify a subject, but must occur with an accompanying dative complement. Such states of being are not attributable to a subject because they do not express a quality acquired by the subject. Predication in Russian is everywhere sensitive to this phenomenon which, far from being negligible because it can be ignored in translation, is one of the cardinal semantic attributes of the language, a phenomenal property central to the meaning-distinguishing capacity inherent in Russian grammatical signs. A series of otherwise peculiar modal properties is also explainable by the sensitivity inherent in the nature of predicative modification in Russian. ‘Must’ and ‘need’ cannot be predicated of a subject in the nominative case (N) the way they are in English: needing is not a quality of the person who needs, but of the thing needed–mne nužna kniga ‘I (D) need the book (N)’–literally, ‘The book is needed to me’. Similarly, mne nužno idti ‘I (D) must go’–literally, ‘For me is necessary to go’. ‘Ought’, on the other hand, does identify a property of the person who ‘should’, since this modal quality expresses a responsibility that rests with the individual as opposed to one derived from the situation–hence ja dolžen idti ‘I (N) ought to/ should go.’ In other words, the force of necessity as opposed to responsibility makes the individual both a target and an instrument of the process rather than its source. Other characteristics of predicative modification in Russian are clearly related to these modal phenomena. For example, if you very much like to do something, ‘you’ can be the subject of the liking in Russian because that expresses something about you–ja očen’ ljublju plavat’ ‘I (N) really like to swim’; but if you liked the play you saw last night, the play becomes the subject because the likeability is a quality of the play–mne očen’ ponravilas’ p’esa ‘I (D) really liked the play (N)'–literally, ‘The play was very pleasing to me’. This phenomenon, moreover, is in no way limited to the use of the dative case. Thus if something ‘has’ great significance, the significance can be expressed as a quality of the thing–èto imeet bol’šoe značenie ‘That (N) has great significance’; but if you ‘have’ a book, there is no sense in which having

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a book can be a quality of you–hence, u menja kniga ‘I (G) have the book (N)'– literally, ‘By me [is] the book’. It should be clear by now that the phenomenal existence of case relations in a language like Russian carries profound semantic implications, implications about the nature of cognitive structures at a level of consciousness far more consequential than any of the treatments of case functions in universal grammar, for example. Indeed, there must be something psychologically very significant about the Russian mindset for there to be such a systematically unique treatment of what it means to be the subject of a predication, to use conventional terminology. We will delve further into this matter later in the following chapter, where we will consider how these phenomena relate to the syntax of Russian sentences generally.

5.4 The system of Russian cases The complete system of case relations in Russian has been described in detail in a number of earlier publications, so we will not rehearse that evidence here. (Jakobson 1936,1958; van Schooneveld 1978; Sangster 1982) Several observations regarding these earlier publications, however, need to be made. In the first place, the labels Jakobson himself used to identify the features–namely directionality, marginality, and quantification, which we have now renamed extension, cancellation, and objectiveness respectively–did not lend themselves to interpretation much beyond their application in specific linguistic contexts, making it difficult if not impossible to establish any general cognitive basis for their existence. They represented neither logical nor technical designations, but were rather more textual, if you will, describing how the cases appear as a function of their use in specific utterances. The use of such designations was in keeping with Jakobson’s insistence on the “relative autonomy” of linguistic phenomena–i.e. that our descriptions need to be based in the first instance on phenomena intrinsic to the domain of inquiry in question and not be short-circuited by assumptions extrinsic to that domain, leaving it to others to extend these observations into other areas of cognitive structure. So, in Jakobson’s parlance, a noun would appear in the accusative case in Russian whenever the verbal action (expressed or implied) was “directed” onto it in such a way that it was fully involved–“The meaning of the accusative is connected with the action so closely and directly that it can be exclusively governed by a verb and its independent use always suggests a missing and implied verb”; or a noun would appear in the genitive case anytime only a certain “quantity” of the phenomenon referred to participated in the utterance situa-

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tion–“the genitive always indicates the limit of the referent’s involvement in the content of the utterance”; and so forth. (Jakobson 1936) We will return at the conclusion of this monograph to the issue of relative autonomy generally, but suffice it to say in this context that his insistence on this principle led on the one hand to feature definitions that were highly specific to the grammatical phenomena they were describing–the systematic occurrence of Russian case forms that implied an equally systematic distribution of their general meanings–and on the other hand to the conviction, noted here earlier, that such features should not even be assumed to apply in other domains of linguistic structure, for example in the lexical domain, where his position was that a different set of issues involving the ontological problems of reference would eventually pertain. Nevertheless, the features that Jakobson initially proposed could be shown to structure the use of cases in a systematic way, specifically by constituting a system of binary relations between the eight cases of Russian, where the nominative was the (triply) unmarked case, the accusative marked for directionality, the instrumental for marginality, one of the two genitives for quantification and the other for both quantification and directionality, the dative for both directionality and marginality, one of the two locatives for marginality and quantification and the other for all three features. In the diagram below, adapted from Jakobson’s 1958 article, each of the cases appear at a corner of the cube while the sides of the cube represent the features and the lines between them the structural relations. Since the features are not specified in the diagram, we may assume the nomenclature developed in the present study and state that the cases on the top of the cube are marked for extension, those on the right for cancellation, and those on the back for objectiveness.

Figure 1: Russian case system

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Thus the accusative is related to the nominative as the dative is to the instrumental, the instrumental to the nominative as the dative is to the accusative, and so forth via the markedness relations that structure the system. What the diagram does not indicate, however, is anything about the hierarchy between the features themselves, and indeed Jakobson did not address that subject in either of his two studies. This was left for others to consider, as several have done and as we will do on a principled basis later in this study. (See, for example, any of van Schooneveld’s publications or Chvany 1997 for different views.) Having considered how case relations are expressed morphologically in a language like Russian, let us examine next how these same types of relations are expressed by the order of elements (words) in syntax.

6 Extending the sign principle to syntax In order to extend the concept of sign relation from morphology into syntax, one must first accept the proposition that syntax is more than a semantically empty arrangement of signs whose order relative to one another in an utterance is the product of a purely formal set of rules. Quite the contrary, in a sign-based theory the order of signs constitutes a grammatical category in exactly the same sense as in morphology, in that it presents the speaker with an obligatory choice between the marked or the unmarked pole of a paradigmatic relation – that is, a relation where the pole selected in praesentia is opposed to the one not selected, which remains in absentia in the mind of the speaker. This condition is necessary in order to actuate the conceptual property, the marking that underlies the existence of any sign as a term of relation. As such, it is the principle that guarantees the speaker’s ability to choose, which at the morphological level may be diagrammed [A:B], where B=non-A. Thus, as we have observed, the speaker is obliged to choose for example between [A] the marked plural or [B] the unmarked singular via the plurality relation, [A] the marked past tense or [B] the unmarked simple present, via the cancellation relation, [A] the marked perfective aspect or [B] the unmarked imperfective via the dimensionality relation, and so forth, the occurrence of one pole necessarily evoking the existence of its counterpart in the mind of the speaker. It is in this sense that neither pole (actual sign) by itself has meaning apart from the marking relation that underlies it. Precisely this requirement is met on the syntagmatic axis whenever one sign modifies another. At the level at which signs concatenate, are juxtaposed to one another in the stream of speech, the presence of a composite entity (syntagm) consisting of one sign modifying another in a particular order necessarily implies the existence of its counterpart in absentia where the signs are in the reverse order. This in turn may be diagrammed as a sign relation with the parallel structure [XY:YX], where XY=A and YX=B (i.e., non-A). From this we conclude that the sequencing of linguistic signs is grounded in the same principle of paradigmatic substitution as in morphology, and we posit the modification relation as the underlying principle of conceptual categorization (the fundamental generator of meaning) in syntax. Such an extension of the sign principle allows us to take a vital step beyond the conventional treatment of sentences as linear sequences of words generated by a fixed set of rules grounded in the propositional logic of predication, phrase structures, and the like, and concentrate our attention instead on linguistic activity as a process of sign formation producing a distinctive pattern of conceptual relations grounded rather in modification as a properly linguis-

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tic, sign-oriented activity. Furthermore, as with any sign relation, the modification relation is not a fixed or static rule, but an organic property that evolves along with the total ecology of a language, contextualizing its meaning in the same manner as in morphology. It is in this sense, then, that we realize the principle that the human language faculty, even (or especially) at the most basic level of sentence formation, is not rule governed but constitutes rather a properly self-organizing system. When signs are unencumbered by static rules, by a fixed, top-down structure, they are more appropriately free to contextualize their underlying semantic potential in an open-ended, naturally evolving process of concept-formation. It is the thesis of this study that every language contains one fundamental, underlying modification relation that governs the concatenation of signs at every level of composition in that language. Every instance of modification minimally contains two elements, a modifier and a modified. These elements constitute a minimal modification situation at the level of their immediate juxtaposition, where they create a larger conceptual whole. This larger entity is itself a sign by virtue of its participation in the paradigmatic structure [XY:YX] which defines modification as a genuine grammatical relation, the type of conceptual relation that obliges the speaker to make a choice. The individual modification situations we observe in particular speech events, therefore, are the result of speaker’s choosing the sequence in which the modifier and modified occur. Furthermore, since the essence of this process ultimately resides in the order of the elements, the conceptual property that defines modification as a grammatical relation must necessarily depend on the fact that the elements in the juxtaposition do not commute–i.e. are not interchangeable without a difference in meaning. And it is in this sense that word order constitutes a difference that makes a difference in the mind of the speaking subject every bit as much as any morphological opposition. The non-commutability of the elements in a modification situation is fundamental to the concept of language as a self-organizing system and represents another significant point of departure of the present approach from conventional approaches to syntax. It is commonly assumed that because there is no immediately evident difference in reference (denotation) associated with word order in a broad range of cases, the order of signs in an utterance does not necessarily carry any meaning. Thus ‘John and Mary’ is commonly considered semantically equivalent to (synonymous with) ‘Mary and John’, since both expressions appear to refer to the same two individuals. But in a sign-based theory, judgments regarding sameness and difference in meaning cannot be based on such relatively low-level denotational criteria; they must reside in the higher-order distinctions created by the sign relations themselves, where

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the order of elements always has the potential to make a difference, potentiality being the very essence of a sign relation. We can use number theory again to support this conclusion. With ordinary numbers, those that correspond to our immediate awareness of things in material reality, it makes no difference what order the numbers are in when an operation like multiplication or addition is performed; either sequence will produce the same result. Thus 2x3 = 3x2, just as 2+3 = 3+2, and so forth. In the defining case, with ordinary numbers, (2x3) – (3x2) always equals zero. Sign relations, on the other hand, occurring as they do at a higher order of consciousness, have properties more like those of matrices in algebra, which do not always commute (i.e. have the same value in either direction). In matrix algebra, (AxB) – (BxA) may not always be zero because AxB can give a different solution from BxA. Matrices have proven indispensable to the understanding of phenomena in the quantum realm, where the observer cannot be separated from the observation, and it makes a difference in which order measuring operations are performed. Thus, for example, if one first measures the velocity of a quantum particle and then measures its position, the result obtained will be different from what it would be if the measurements were performed in the reverse order. (See Peat 1990: 35–40.) Because of its special properties, matrix algebra has become the natural language of quantum physics. Likewise, when the conceptual properties of human language are treated as sign relations, we, like the physicist, enter a different phenomenological space, the quantum realm of meaning, as it were, where phenomena have different properties from those present to the senses in a three-dimensional Newtonian world in which objective measurement is the norm. In this higher-order realm of existence, the order in which operations are performed does make a difference, and the myriad constructions like ‘meat and potatoes’, ‘black and white’, ‘the king and the queen’, ‘up and down’, whose elements are not interchangeable without a recognizable difference in meaning, expose the fundamentally matrix-like character of syntagmatic concatenation. The higher-order logic of sign relations thus obliges us to acknowledge non-commutability as a latent characteristic of the juxtaposition of signs generally, and an essential condition of modification as a linguistic process. Ultimately, by viewing linguistic activity as a glottological process of sign formation, we can recognize the capacity inherent in the organic logic of signs themselves to structure all facets of their contextualization. Sentence structure can then be understood as a complex of sign relations built hierarchically from the basic unit of modification, itself conceived so as not to interfere with the autonomous capability of individual signs for contextualization but to enhance their creative potential, their freedom to concatenate and therefore signify in

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any mode of being. This essential freedom is what permits sentences like “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” to be meaningful, to be constructive of a reality that only signs themselves can generate. Recognizing this fundamental principle, therefore, allows us to account for poetic discourse in the same terms as normal everyday speech and not relegate it to a separate realm. Poetic discourse, in this view, is simply the ultimate expression of the capacity inherent in sign relations to contextualize without any constraints beyond what is dictated by the modification relation itself. Now it is important to understand exactly what this implies about the concept of contextualization that lies at the heart of how signs generate meaning. Up to this point we have been at pains to stress the freedom inherent the speaker’s ability to use the power inherent in sign relations to create contexts without regard to any perceived relation to real world properties. In a properly self-referential system, real-world situations affect how we interpret an utterance, but they cannot enter into the structure of the system itself, which necessarily remains organizationally closed, organizational closure being a cardinal attribute of self-organizing systems (see above, Chapter 3). We have also insisted that since the sign relation is by definition a potentiality, one cannot predict in what contexts it will or will not occur. But the freedom inherent in the concept of sign relation as a potentiality cannot be completely open-ended or the resulting contextualizations would risk becoming utterly chaotic and incomprehensible. So there must be some constraints on the system, and this is precisely where the modification relation plays the crucial role. As we shall see in the analyses that follow, it is the modification relation unique to each language that limits the possibilities for concatenation in an orderly and selfsufficient manner, that is, by utilizing the power inherent in modification as a sign relation itself to regulate the contextualization of sign relations generally in a language. In the case of English, as we will see, the fact that subjects overwhelmingly occur before predicates is dictated, not by any top-down rules, but by the very nature of the modification relation that defines the possibilities for concatenation in that language. As a sign relation itself, however, the modification relation is not a static rule, but an inherent property that must evolve along with the overall ecology of the language. Once we have recast the approach to syntactic phenomena in this manner, moreover, we can begin to understand the proper place of predication, and its corollary attribution, in the larger context of sign formation as a conceptual process. As we noted earlier, it is the properties of the underlying sign relations that create the conditions which permit the expression of concepts such as predication and attribution at a level where the mind can consciously manipulate them. Thus all forms of linear thinking, be they the Western conceptualiza-

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tion of time, the materialist notion of number, or the logician’s preoccupation with predication, should ultimately be derivable from the higher-order process of sign formation. In the latter case, when we speak of something being predicated of a subject, the structure of our reasoning is deliberately set to correspond to a particular level of experience, one where “things” are perceived as having “qualities” and “attributes”. In a sign-based theory, on the other hand, predication and attribution do not constitute autonomous logical devices automatically ascribable to the ultimate structure of mind; they are rather qualities we assign to different patterns of modification relations at different levels in the content of an utterance. That is to say, once we have established the fundamental sign relation on the syntagmatic axis as a modification relation of the type [A:B] = [XY:YX], attribution and predication will be appropriately identifiable as a function of the properties A and B at different points in the hierarchy of modification relations that constitute an utterance.

6.1 The modification relation in English: The extension feature Let us apply this reasoning now to analyze the role of word order in a language like English. It is commonplace for linguists to note that English is an SVO language, since the predominant order of elements in an English sentence is subject, verb, object; and speakers of English tend to identify which is the subject and which the object by this statistically preponderant positioning of noun phrases vis-à-vis verb phrases in an utterance. In terms of modification relations, the word order associated with predication in English represents a relatively consistent positioning of the modifier after the element it modifies, where the predicate element (verb + complement) modifies its subject, and the complement in turn modifies its verb. This word order is opposed, also relatively consistently, to the word order at the level of attribution in English, where in a noun phrase, for example, adjectival modifiers normally precede the noun they modify. From this evidence, therefore, one might superficially conclude that predicate modifiers follow the element they modify whereas attributive modifiers precede the modified, both in a relatively fixed manner that can be represented fairly easily in a rule-governed approach. Things aren’t nearly as straightforward as this in English, of course, since the opposite word order may also occur, though with greatly reduced frequency, in both types of modification–e.g. ‘over the mantel hung a portrait of his father’ (predication); ‘a complexion white as snow’ (attribution). And this is precisely the point at which the potentiality inherent in the underlying sign

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relations asserts itself, demonstrating that word order in English is not “fixed”, as is commonly assumed, but rather (and specifically) a matter of probability of the speaker choosing one word order over the other in accordance with the modification relation unique to that language. (Note that this is exactly the same argument that led us earlier to insist that the so-called verbs of domination in Russian do not “govern” the choice of case, but that the potential must always be acknowledged for either the instrumental or the accusative case to occur with this class of verbs, no matter how statistically predominant the one case over the other may be in such situations.) So the issue then becomes, what is the nature of the sign relation that guarantees the speaker’s prerogative to choose one word order over the other in English, and how does this produce the probability of one word order over the other in attribution versus predication? Some years ago, the Harvard linguist Dwight Bolinger made one of his many astute observations challenging the prevailing view that there is no significant difference in meaning between active and passive sentences, despite their generally referring to the same factual situation. (Bolinger 1977: 9–10) He noted a whole series of circumstances in which an active sentence does not normally have a passive counterpart, and he sought the reason why. One can say, for example, ‘This bridge has been walked under by generations of lovers’, but it would be strange at best to say ‘This bridge has been walked under by the dog’. Likewise, we would say ‘The pages were turned by George’ but hardly ‘The corner was turned by George’; or ‘I was approached by a stranger’ but probably not ‘I was approached by a storm’. The difference, Bolinger concluded, lies in the fact that the situation (the predication in this case) has to represent “something actually DONE TO something. The speaker has to be thinking of a patient that is somehow directly affected by the action.” In other words, passivization “demands access to the speaker’s intentions, to the meaning of whether or not an effect is produced” in the given situation. Thus the storm doesn’t affect the subject like the stranger does; George doesn’t do anything to the corner but he does to the page; and generations of lovers have defined the bridge as a place where lovers go, but the dog has no such relation to the bridge. What is particularly intriguing about Bolinger’s conclusion is that it is not by any means limited to passive constructions, but explains a whole range of syntactic phenomena in English. Take, for example, those instances where an attributive adjective occurs after the noun it modifies rather than in the normal pre-posed location. We typically say, in a manner that would be true of any such situation, ‘They conferred behind closed doors’, but if we say ‘They conferred with the doors closed’, we are thinking about the specific effect that is

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produced in the given situation by the doors being closed. The more situationspecific the modifier appears–that is, the more it produces an effect unique to the situation described–the less likely it is to occur in the usual pre-posed location. Thus it is very difficult to pre-pose the adjective in an utterance like ‘He walked into the room with his fly open.’ The potential for the opposing word order always exists, of course, and could materialize if it had already been established that his fly was open, or in the case that the modification relation is merely descriptive–e.g. ‘An open fly can ruin your day.’ Similarly, ‘They found the cat dead’ clearly suggests a condition specifically brought to recognition in the given situation, while ‘They found the dead cat’ suggests that they were looking for a cat already established as dead. Substituting the indefinite for the definite article in the latter pair of utterances changes the meaning of both, but still leaves the distinction signaled by the position of the adjective invariant: ‘They found a dead cat’ describes the type of cat they found (cf. ‘They found a black cat’), while ‘They found a cat dead’ invites one to inquire about the circumstances involved (e.g. ‘They found a cat dead by the side of the road’). Similarly, ‘They painted the barn red’ describes what happened to the barn in the specific utterance situation, whereas ‘They painted the red barn’ provides only enough information to identify which barn they painted. Since post-posed attributive adjectives seem to have some sort of predicative flavor, one might still be tempted to derive such occurrences from predication as a purely formal matter, as many scholars have; but there is clearly something semantically significant going on here, and that something is precisely what Bolinger proposed. Post-posed adjectives necessarily produce an effect specific to the given utterance situation, whereas pre-posed adjectives remain merely descriptive or neutral in this respect–i.e. are unmarked. This same invariant relation also explains why, for example, an utterance like ‘A man unhappy can be hard to please’ is perfectly normal, while one like ‘A man unhappy spoke with me yesterday’ sounds strange at best. An adjective like ‘unhappy’ will seem appropriate in postposition when its meaning is relevant to (has an effect that is brought about by) whatever conditions are present in the given utterance situation. Since being hard to please can very well be a property predicated of someone who is unhappy, the first example cited appears normal; but merely speaking with someone bears no conceivable cause and effect relation to being unhappy, and the second sentence therefore sounds peculiar at best. Similarly, adjectives qualified (further modified) by an additional phrase–e.g. ‘a complexion white as snow’, ‘a person young at heart’, ‘a glass broken beyond repair’, ‘his shirt covered with mud’–nearly always occur in postposition in English because the meaning of the adjective is once again

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further qualified in the utterance itself by circumstances directly attributable to the outcome of the given situation. Given this consistent feature associated with post-posed modifiers, it is not at all surprising that one should therefore find predicate modifiers themselves overwhelmingly occupying the position after the subject they modify as well, for they are quintessential examples of modification producing a result unique to the given utterance situation. That is, after all, what predication is normally all about. Yet even at the level of predication, one does in certain circumstances find the modifier pre-posed, as one would expect if this is indeed a genuine grammatical relation, one guaranteeing the speaker’s prerogative to choose. For example, virtually any intransitive predicational construction has the potential of occurring in the opposite word order in English, with the predicate modifier pre-posed to the subject it modifies–e.g. ‘Out came John with a gun in his hand’, ‘Up the river sped a boat’, ‘On the chair lay his favorite dog’, ‘Over the mantle hung a portrait of his father’, ‘A mighty fortress is our God’. While it may appear in these cases that the subject is being foregrounded (and therefore somehow marked) due to its placement after the verb, it is more appropriate (and consistent with the approach being outlined here) to consider what the verbal modifier is doing when it is pre-posed to the subject. Then we can appreciate that placing the verb in the position before the subject produces exactly the same effect as the unmarked pre-position of attributive modifiers, namely the creation of a merely descriptive situation or one the grounds for which have already been established in a prior utterance event. Thus the impression that the subject modified is being foregrounded is actually the result of the verbal modifier being backgrounded, so to speak, and we can conclude that pre-position of the modifier in both attribution and predication alike is indeed the neutral or unmarked word order, and post-position the marked. Certain utterance types seem to require pre-position of a predicate modifier in English, namely questions of all kinds (both yes/no and wh- questions), as well as hyper-negatives and other types of restrictive adverbial expressions– e.g. ‘Never have I seen such a sight’, ‘Not once/only once did he offer to help’, ‘Nowhere was that made clear’, ‘Rarely does he show any emotion’. There is a significant difference between these and the previously described uses of preposition, moreover, whereby these involve only the auxiliary or modal form of the verb, and must add an auxiliary when none is present in the corresponding declarative mode of the utterance–cf. ‘He came’ vs. 'Did he come? ’, ‘I never saw such a sight’ vs. ‘Never have I seen such a sight’. All of these uses are best explained as a virtual prohibition on the use of post-position, for it is in the very nature of these types of utterances to question, to emphatically deny, or to

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otherwise specifically restrict the effect in the given situation that predication normally produces. But they do so by involving only the grammatical (auxiliary) verbal element, leaving the informational content of the lexical element where it can continue to modify in the situationally relevant manner of a postposed modifier. We can observe the same phenomena occurring with adverbial modification in English. Manner adverbs, for example, because they normally qualify how an action is performed in the given situation, tend to be post-posed–e.g. ‘He acted suddenly’, ‘He spoke loudly’, ‘He did the job well’. The same is true for temporal or spatial adverbs whose inherently deictic connotations (defined with respect specifically to the speech event) make them natural candidates for post-position–e.g. ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘early’, ‘late’, and so forth. By contrast, temporal adverbs like ‘always’, ‘never’, ‘rarely’, ‘usually’, tend to appear immediately preceding the main verb in the unmarked position, since they are not deictic but merely denote the frequency with which the action occurs. There are of course “exceptions” to such tendencies, confirming again the speaker’s prerogative to choose, but these still follow the marking of the relation. Thus the less specifically manner-oriented an adverb is, the more likely it will be to occur in the unmarked position before the verb–e.g. ‘He suddenly opened the door’ or ‘He loudly proclaimed his innocence’ says more about the disposition of the subject to which it is post-posed than about the manner in which the action of the verb was carried out. We could continue to review additional constructions in English, but there certainly seems to be enough evidence here to suggest that we are dealing with a relatively straightforward case of a markedness relation, where post-position of the modifier is marked in English vis-à-vis pre-position, no matter at what level of sentence structure the modification relation occurs; and the mark, clearly, is that of extension, of producing an effect that is specific to, or fully validated in, the particular utterance situation. The absolute consistency of this relation also explains the placement of direct objects after the verb they modify; and the fact that the feature that produces this consistent relation is the same as the feature that defines the accusative case in Russian should therefore come as no surprise. Furthermore, English indirect objects normally occur in the position following the verb but immediately preceding that of the direct object (e.g. ‘gave me the book’), a relative placement that suggests that the more post-posed the object the “stronger” the marking. In other words, since English has only one sign relation (word order) to make the kinds of distinctions that Russian makes with several distinct case relations (both extension and cancellation in the case of dative indirect objects), relative word order assumes the role of gradient

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in these matters. This same gradient can be seen in those cases where a postposed adjective is further modified by an additional phrase, as in ‘complexion white as snow’, ‘door broken beyond repair’, and the like. Here the additional post-posed phrasal modifier gives a qualification even more specific to the situation described than the already post-posed adjective. So it would appear that the extension feature operates with multiple modifiers just as it does with individual ones. As for a sequence of pre-posed attributive adjectives–e.g. ‘old run-down garden furniture’, ‘handsome blond young man’–it seems fairly evident that as modifiers get added, they become increasingly generic (unmarked), less definitive of the type of noun they are modifying in the given situation. What we have here from an historical point of view, then, is a situation where, while Russian has maintained an increasingly sophisticated inflectional system for expressing relations between nouns and verbs utilizing three conceptual features (extension, cancellation, and objectiveness), English on the other hand has all but lost its inflectional system and in its place evolved a modification system for expressing the one most basic of the three conceptual properties, extension, that operates at all levels of modification throughout the language. Furthermore, given that Russian has retained its highly inflectional structure, its modification relation is “free” to express an entirely different kind of conceptual property, one that we will consider in detail in the next section. Before turning to that discussion, however, let us concentrate for a moment on the structure of the English predicate itself, specifically on the role of modification as it pertains to the verbal system of English. The English verbal system provides an excellent test of the ability of sign theory to explain complex syntagmatic structures, for aside from the basic morphological opposition past/non-past that we described earlier, all other verbal categories in this language are expressed by compound tense forms–that is, by the concatenation of signs that necessarily involve the modification relation. In order to appreciate how sign theory can explain such a structure, however, we will have to abandon many of the traditional notions of what constitutes a verb phrase in English and operate with a different set of assumptions. In particular we will need to reconsider the common phrase structure notion that compound verb forms are composed of so-called auxiliary and main verbs and analyze the signs and the modification relations involved strictly in terms of their own phenomenal structure as evidence of the contextualization process at work. What is most significant about the phenomenal structure of sign relations in the English sentence is that in any simple sentence there is only one element (word) that invariably carries the primary verbal grammatical oppositions of

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person/number and tense; and this element is also always the initial constituent of what is conventionally called the verb phrase. And the fact that this element is necessarily placed immediately adjacent to the subject (except for the occasional intervening adverbial modifier) is crucial to the establishment of the modification relations that produce meaning in an English utterance, since modification is a function of the immediate juxtaposition of signs and the order in which they occur. It makes no difference whether this initial verbal element appears to act as the traditional main verb or as a so-called auxiliary; every aspect of its phenomenal occurrence in the sentence contributes to its identification as the primary modifier of the ultimate modified of the utterance–i.e. as the principal verbal modifier of the subject. Not only is this the only sign that expresses agreement, thereby reinforcing its formal relation with the subject, it also, as we saw previously, always carries the primary tense relation of the sentence, past/non-past. More important still, since this is the only element within the so-called verb phrase capable of “inversion” with the subject, and the subject itself is an obligatory element in any non-elliptic English utterance, we must conclude that it is the juxtaposition of these two constituents which establishes the primary modification relation governing English sentence formation. This being the case, we need to reconsider the conventional assumption that the “main” verb in an English sentence is the one at the end of the verb phrase which carries the lexical meaning, and operate instead with the principle that the key or pivotal verbal element is in fact the initial one, the one which carries the primary grammatical relations and establishes it as the principal modifier of the subject. By this reasoning, the remaining constituents of what is traditionally considered the verb phrase would in their turn be properly identified as modifiers of the grammatically pivotal initial element, and their role in the structure of English utterances, including, importantly, their part-ofspeech identification, would then depend entirely on the further modification relations in which they themselves participate as an utterance unfolds in the process of contextualization. Thus a basic utterance like ‘I dress’ or ‘He dressed’ would represent the minimal case where the element ‘dress’ participates in all the oppositions (conceptual relations) that establish the meaning we associate with verbal predication in English: tense, agreement, and position immediately following the subject modified, creating a modification situation marked, as we have previously determined, for extension. In a larger construction such as ‘I am/he was dressing/dressed’, on the other hand, the element ‘dress’ does not function as the primary verbal modifier. This function is properly assumed by the inflected form of ‘be’, which is in turn modified by a form of the word ‘dress’ that is

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itself not necessarily verbal, but assumes its part-of-speech identification as a function of the totality of the modification relations in which it participates as the sentence unfolds, as the process of contextualization takes place. It is vital to the analysis being presented here to observe that even when a lexical element like ‘dress’ follows an inflected form of the verb ‘be’ and is itself formed with the desinence ‘-ed’, for example, it is not inherently verbal. Thus despite the traditional nomenclature which would categorize certain instances of an utterance like ‘He is dressed’ as being composed of a subject, an auxiliary, and a main verb ‘dressed’, we need to recognize the fundamental ambiguity inherent in the element ‘dressed’ as to part of speech and properly conclude that its part-of-speech identification derives from the manner in which it is contextualized relative to other linguistic factors in the utterance (whether overtly present or implied by the situation in which the utterance occurs)–cf. ‘He was dressed by his valet’ vs. ‘He was dressed when I walked in’, where in the latter case ‘dressed’ is rather a predicate adjective. Since neither the lexical element ‘dress’ nor the grammatical desinence ‘-ed’ are inherently verbal, this is hardly a trivial observation but goes right to the heart of what constitutes the meaning-generating capacity of sign relations and the fundamentally stochastic character of their contextualization. Neither is the desinence ‘-ing’, as we also noted previously, in any sense inherently verbal, since it is readily combinable with all manner of lexical elements to produce senses that range from the verbal through the gerundive and adjectival to the purely nominal. Even a relatively straightforward construction like ‘He is annoying’ can have different connotations that are made evident only by further linguistic or situational contextualization–cf. ‘He is annoying me with his questions’ vs. ‘He is annoying to listen to’. Since the possibilities for contextualizing a desinence like ‘-ing’ are potentially limitless, we must again avoid the temptation to assign individual instances of its use to one or another predetermined category–i.e. to write rules that disambiguate the various uses of such a form as a structural property of the language–and acknowledge instead the inherent ambiguity of a sign like ‘-ing’ with regard to part of speech as one of its essential characteristics. In this way we recognize the fundamentally indeterminate nature of sign relations as an underlying property of language and assign the role of disambiguation more appropriately to the contextualization process that governs the act of communication. Only by proceeding in this manner do we preserve the distinction between the differential properties of signs that define them as the “differences that make a difference” in the mind, in the underlying structure of language on the one hand, and the disambiguating function that resides rather in the process of communication. Then we can appreciate that the course of grammatical selec-

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tion that has culminated in the current range of usage of the ‘-ing’ form in English has produced an invariant conceptual relation that marks the lexical element to which it is attached as a phenomenon whose validity fully encompasses the speech event– that is, is marked for extension at the morphological level–while its various interpretations depend entirely on the manner of its contextualization, on the set of modification relations in which it occurs in a given instance of use. Once we conceive of the contextualization process in this manner, we can appreciate how the marking of the modification relation within the predicate in English ultimately operates. Stated succinctly, each time another post-posed modifier, whether an individual word or a phrase, is added as an utterance unfolds, it further specifies its immediate modified with respect to the situation being described in the given utterance situation. In this manner the extension feature that defines the modification relation in English contributes naturally to the disambiguation of the otherwise inherently ambiguous meaning of the individual signs involved. What we have established so far, therefore, is the principle that the traditional verb phrase or so-called compound verb in English needs to be reconceptualized in terms of the modification relations that actually do govern sentence formation, whose role is to contextualize the otherwise invariant properties of the individual signs involved. Once we have taken this vital step, we can begin to appreciate the one other phenomenon that invariably marks the relation between the primary verbal modifier and the subject modified in English sentence structure, namely the occurrence of the ‘-s’ desinence. As everyone knows, the ‘-s’ desinence in English is the sign of the plural when associated with nouns and of the third person singular when used with verbs. Superficially, therefore, one might assume that we must be dealing here with homonyms, especially since the two senses involved appear to be irreconcilable. Further consideration of the role of the modification relation in English, however, suggests otherwise, that the very evolution of the ‘-s’ form has been motivated by the development of the modification relation, which as we have just seen determines the identification of the subject and the primary verbal element in every English sentence. Since English lexical morphemes are not usually part-of-speech sensitive, it is often impossible to tell, given a word in isolation, whether we are dealing with a noun or a verb. An overwhelming and ever increasing number of lexical morphemes in English are like ‘houses’, ‘horses’, ‘hiccups’, and ‘holds’, where the only way to identify the part of speech involved is to observe the syntagmatic environment in which the word occurs–i.e. its mode of contextualization in the utterance as a whole. And what one is inevitably looking for (intuitively

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recognizing) at the level of subject/predicate modification is the placement of the ‘-s’, which will always occur at one or the other side of the boundary between the subject and the primary (in the sense of this study) verbal element, but not both. Either the subject will be singular with a zero desinence and the primary verbal modifier will have the ‘-s’, or the subject will be plural with an ‘-s’ and the verbal modifier will have a zero desinence. Furthermore, it is no doubt because the identification process works in this way that the two elements, the subject (or ultimate modified) and the principal verbal grammatical element (or primary verbal modifier) are necessarily adjacent to one another in the stream of speech, constituting the primary modification relation in the sentence. Consider the following newspaper headline, printed some years ago exactly as follows:

POLICE OFFERS HELP LESSEN THREAT OF VIOLENCE

This headline was obviously intended to read as a single sentence in which ‘police’ is an adjective modifying ‘offers’ as the subject of the verb ‘help’, and so forth. But as one scans the sentence initially, recognition of the modification relations appears to develop in a way that projects ‘police’ as a collective noun and ‘offers’ as a verb with ‘help’ as its nominal complement. (The linear arrangement and the telegraphic style of the headline certainly helps to produce this unintended reading.) This exercise demonstrates that the resolution of syntactic ambiguity is not a matter of assigning one or another predetermined phrase structure to an utterance, but is rather part of the disambiguation process by which one interprets the modification relations that constitute an utterance as it is being processed. The speaker, of course, knows what s/he intends, but the addressee must scan the utterance to disambiguate the sequence. And it is ultimately the placement of the ‘-s’ that resolves the ambiguity and determines the correct interpretation. The fact that the ‘-s’ desinence necessarily occurs on one or the other side of the boundary between subject and primary verb, identifying the principal modification relation in an English sentence, furthermore, suggests that the evolution of this particular form is anything but accidental. That it signals the marked plural in nouns and as well as its syntagmatic counterpart, the unmarked singular in verbs, is motivated, we can reasonably assume, precisely by the role it plays in identifying parts of speech within the principal modifica-

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tion relation in an English sentence. The fact that the opposition ‘-s’/zero operates in the opposite way in nouns than in verbs as the expression of the plurality relation should therefore not pose a problem but should be viewed rather in terms of its function vis-à-vis the principal modification relation, necessitated by the need to distinguish subject from verb within this relation. Such complementary distributions of forms are not at all uncommon in languages, though their ultimate functioning may be different. In Russian, for example, the distribution of positive desinences opposed to zero desinences systematically identifies the opposition between the doubly marked genitive plural vis-à-vis the doubly unmarked nominative singular in nouns, with the relationship going one way or the other depending on the declension involved. Thus nouns with a zero desinence in the nominative singular in Russian will tend to have a positive desinence in the genitive plural and vice versa, nouns with a positive desinence in the nominative singular will tend to have a zero desinence in the genitive plural.

FIRST DECL SECOND DECL

NOM SING dom kniga

GEN PL domov knig

Similarly, as the case system of Latin was being leveled in Old French from five cases to two, nominative and accusative, Latin third declension nouns with nominative singular in –us retained the –s in the nominative singular and opposed it to a zero ending in the nominative plural, and at the same time retained the –s in the accusative plural (from Latin –os) and opposed it to a zero ending in the accusative singular, producing the following mirror-image structure (Price 1971: 94–95):

NOMINATIVE ACCUSATIVE

SINGULAR murs mur

PLURAL mur murs

This latter structure is virtually identical to the situation in English:

VERB NOUN

SINGULAR houses house

PLURAL house houses

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Finally, let us note that we are not suggesting that there is any markedness reversal here, that the plural is somehow marked in nouns but unmarked in verbs. The plural is always the marked member of the opposition, defining the conceptual relation as one of plurality. As the evidence from English syntactic structure demonstrates, only the signifiers used to express the two poles of the opposition plural/non-plural may alternate when motivated by the need to distinguish nouns from verbs in the expression of the primary modification relation in a sentence. The only other systematic use of the ‘-s’ form in English occurs in relation to another syntactic phenomenon, noun+noun constructions, where it indicates possession, as in ‘John’s car’ or ‘the tree’s leaves’. To understand how the form in this case may be operating, we need to look first at the structure of English noun+noun constructions in general. Anytime one noun modifies another in English, the modification relation is necessarily understood in the unmarked sense, where the first of the two nouns is taken to be the modifier and the second the modified–e.g. ‘race horse’ vs. ‘horse race’, ‘garden flower’ vs. ‘flower garden’, ‘floor tile’ vs. ‘tile floor’, etc. This is true whether or not there is an opposing pair where the nouns are reversed–e.g. ‘spider web’, ‘tree leaves’, ‘car engine’, etc. Now we can say that the addition of the ‘-s’ to the first noun in such pairs merely indicates possession, but that would tell us nothing about what motivates the use of the ‘-s’ form in such cases, the form that participates in the plurality relation elsewhere in the language. To understand how plurality might be operating in this instance, we need to remember that we have defined plurality as a qualitative construct, where counting objects is but one manifestation of a more profound conceptual construct involving a complex of perceptions. And we have suggested that it is this feature, for example, that creates transitive verbs, where implicit in the definition of such verbs is a plurality of perceptions that anticipates the additional presence of a phenomenon onto which the process denoted by the verb will ultimately be directed. If this is the case, then we can look at noun+noun constructions in much the same manner, where adding the ‘-s’ to the first of the nouns in this particular modification situation creates a complex perception operation in which the first noun does not merely modify the second one but does so twice, as it were, once to qualify the succeeding noun generically and again to do so specifically with respect to itself, creating the sense of possession that we associate with such constructions. That this is an entirely plausible explanation will become even clearer when we consider the marking of the modification relation in French later on.

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6.2 The modification relation in Russian: The dimensionality feature Unlike English, where parts of speech are expressed essentially by syntactic means (the modification relation) and the identification of the pivotal subjectverb relation involves the placement of the ‘-s’ as a syntactic marker, Russian is a highly inflectional language where the various parts of speech are expressed morphologically–that is, word-formatively–through the addition of suffixes and desinences frequently attached to one and the same root morpheme. Therefore, since the Russian language has such a well-developed inflectional system for expressing predication and the case relations that accompany it, its syntax is “free” to express a different kind of grammatical relation altogether. Indeed, in those instances where there is a grammatical subject in the nominative case in Russian, the ratio of pre- as opposed to post-posed predicates is actually about one in three, not a ratio indicating much of a predominance in either direction. (Bivon 1971. Much of the data in this section will be taken from Bivon’s thorough presentation of element order in Russian.) With syntactic relations as free as this, grammarians have traditionally sought an explanation for the order of words in the informational value of the elements involved. The terminology frequently employed distinguishes between the “theme”, which represents previously known information, and the “rheme”, which refers to new information. Thus the more common word order at the level of predication in Russian, where the verbal predicate follows the subject it modifies about two thirds of the time, is said to represent the fact that subjects are normally themes and predicates usually rhemes, so the natural or logical sequence would be to state the old information first and then qualify it with the new. Then, when the opposite word order occurs, both elements are thought to present new information, and that given by the subject is said to be somehow more essential than when pre-posed. (Bivon 1971: 30–31) At the level of attribution, on the other hand, modifiers nearly always precede the nouns they modify in Russian, and this order is therefore said to be fixed by syntactic rule. Instances where the opposite word order occurs in attributive groups are then considered to be either informational in the above sense or “merely stylistic”. Clearly, in a sign-based theory there can be no syntactic rule that fixes the order of elements, nor is the explanation for a given word order ever merely stylistic, a subjective judgment if ever there was one. Rather, we should be looking for what the order of elements at both levels of predication and attribution have in common to determine the nature of the marking that defines the modification relation generally in Russian, just as we did with English. We can arrive at a first approximation of such a marking by observing the evident

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contrast in meaning that is associated with placement of predicate modifiers when there is a subject in the nominative case present in the utterance, and then test this analysis on attributive groups. Once we have established the common denominator in these cases, we can then turn our attention to the occurrence of sentences without an overt grammatical subject, which as we have already seen are legion in Russian. Observations such as the one above about the differential informational value associated with each of the opposing word orders are very instructive, so we can use them as a starting point. Conventional analyses of Russian word order utilizing the notions of theme and rheme suggest rather clearly that the more common word order, where the predicate element follows the subject it modifies, maximizes the differential informational value of the verbal element vis-à-vis its subject: that is to say, the new information provided by the predicate in this position is significantly more noteworthy (has greater informational value) than that of the subject, which acts rather as the basis, the background as it were, upon which the new information is provided. When the predicate element precedes the subject, on the other hand, the difference in informational value of the two elements is far less evident, and both appear to present new information in equal measure. A typical use of the latter order, common in narratives, would be a sentence like V èto vremja pokazalsja vysokij i očen’ xudoj čelovek v čërnom. ‘At this time [there] appeared a tall and very thin man [dressed] in black.’ In such a narrative, both the description of the man and his appearance on the scene have roughly equal force. The subject may appear to have somewhat greater informational value in this instance, but that is due primarily to the weight of the descriptive devices employed to modify the subject. And again, in a typical conversational usage such as Mne ponravilas’ èta p’esa. ‘I liked that play.’ (literally: ‘to me was pleasing that play’) both subject and object provide new information in roughly equal proportion. Another typical example is the type Idët dožd’ ‘It is raining.’ (literally: ‘goes rain’)

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Since there is no verb ‘to rain’ in Russian, the only way to verbalize the process is to post-pose the subject; otherwise the semantic import of the verbal modifier would be enhanced, which would imply that the rain is doing something special. From examples such as these, therefore, we may tentatively conclude that the marked word order is the one used for the more common type of predicative construction in Russian, where the predicate modifier follows the subject it modifies and maximizes the differential in informational value between the two, while the opposite, less common order is unmarked, allowing both elements to signify individually, with relatively equal strength. Such an assumption would also be supported by the evidence associated with attributive modification in Russian, where adjectival modifiers overwhelmingly occur before the noun they modify and express their attribution generically, as they would with any noun, thereby providing information equivalent to that of the noun itself. Only in exceptional cases does the opposite (marked) word order occur, and in such cases, once again, the differential in semantic force between the two elements is noticeably heightened. In these instances, which occur primarily in the literary language (hence the type of examples cited below), the noun head or modified is typically presented as a given, a generalized phenomenon, or otherwise has its independent semantic value seriously attenuated. Bivon (1971: 75–6) describes what happens in such cases this way: Very frequently the noun does not indicate a specific object but is a general word, merely classifying the area of applicability of the adjective. The normal head in these structures is often realized by a noun such as čelovek ‘person’, delo ‘affair, matter’, vešč’ ‘thing’. So important is the adjectival modifier that the clause often becomes meaningless if it is omitted…

The example given is Polučit’ dvesti pudov zerna s gektara, delo ne šutočnaja. ‘To get two hundred puds of grain per hectare is no laughing matter.’ (literally: ‘[is] a matter not funny’). Here ‘matter’ merely sums up the preceding information, while the meaning of the adjective is amplified. Bivon goes on: Alternatively, the noun may have already occurred in the text and, as a result, in the sentence in which the noun is repeated the main emphasis falls on the adjective. The noun itself is meaningful but in context it is almost completely meaningless, so much so that the omission of the adjective renders the sentence nonsensical.

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For example: Ja poprosil znakomuju podyskat’ izbu, gde by stat’ mne kvartirantom. Ja kazalsja kvartirantom vygodnym ‘I asked my friend to find me a hut where I could become a lodger. I seemed to be a profitable lodger.’ (literally: ‘a lodger profitable’) Here the second reference to the ‘lodger’ is redundant, again maximizing the semantic import of the adjective modifying it. There are some instances where post-position of an attributive modifier is required, specifically when the modified is one of the indefinite pronouns čtoto, nečto, koe-čto (all meaning ‘something’), kto-to ‘somebody’, and ničego ‘nothing’–all in keeping with the immediately preceding observation about the generalized nature of the element modified maximizing the informational value of the following modifier. Possessive and demonstrative adjectives may either precede or follow the noun they modify. When the adjective is post-posed, the noun head is once again one that has previously occurred in the same utterance situation or is metonymical with one that has. The following examples are typical, taken from Bivon 1971: 80–81. Menja porazila eë reč’ . Ona ne govorila, a napevalo umil’no i slova eë byli te samye, za kotorymi potjanula menja toska iz Azii. ‘I was struck by her speech. She did not talk but intoned with feeling and her words were just those for which homesickness had drawn me from Asia.’ prostornaja izba i osobenno priokonnaja eë čast’ ‘the spacious hut and especially the part by its window’ (Literally: ‘by the window’ its part) In this case the possessive follows another attributive adjective, ‘by the window’, which it would normally precede.) U berega stojala pristan’ , paxnuvšaja rogožej, kanatom, syroj gnil’ju i vobloj. Na pristani ètoj redko čto sxodil. ‘On the bank stood a jetty, which smelled of bast, rope, damp decay, and roach. Hardly anyone got off at this jetty.’ Sometimes the modifier itself assumes special meaning when placed after the noun, as is the case with numerals, which take on the meaning of approxima-

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tion in the marked position: desat’ čelovek simply means ‘ten people’, but čelovek desat’ means ‘about ten people’. Here the numeral is more than just a numeral, having assumed the additional connotation of approximation. Of particular significance are phrasal and clausal modifiers in Russian, which display the same tendencies as any other modifying element in the language, occurring–in noticeable contrast to English–before the noun head in unmarked position just as often if not more so than after. One might expect such extended modifiers to occur in the marked position, as they must in English, because of the special qualities they seem to present, but they may just as well occur in the normal, unmarked position in Russian whenever their uniqueness is reduced or attenuated. This may happen under a variety of conditions. In many cases, there is a clear, often deictic, reference to information already established in the utterance situation that lessens the differential informational value of the modifier: Jakobson učastvoval v osnovonnom tam lingvističeskom kružke. ‘Jakobson participated in the linguistic circle founded there.’ (literally: ‘…in the founded there linguistic circle’) Ona daleko ne srazu stala vybirat’ takogo roda pesni ‘It was not right at the start that she began to choose for herself songs of such a kind.’ (literally: ‘…of such a kind songs’). Or the extended modifier may be the second of two qualities expressed, in which case it may occur in either the marked or the unmarked position–cf. the difference in such pairs as brityj podborodok kvadratnoj formy ‘a clean-shaven chin of square shape’ where the nominal group modifier is post-posed and consequently highlighted vs. xuden’kaya, nevysokogo rosta ženščina ‘a thin, short woman’ (literally: ‘a thin, of short stature woman’) where the two modifying elements have roughly equal force. Likewise, mečta o tixom ugolke rosii ‘a dream about a quiet corner of Russia’

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where a prepositional group modifier is post-posed, maximizing its informational value, vs. širokij iz tolstoj žesti jaščik ‘a broad, thick tin box’ (literally: ‘a broad, [made] from thick tin box’) where again the modifiers are of equal status. (All but the first example in this set are from Bivon 1971: 83–4.) Having established how modification in Russian operates when there is a grammatical subject expressed in the nominative case, let us consider now how this same relation operates when there is no such grammatical subject. The sheer number and variety of these sentence types in Russian makes it rather counter-intuitive to try to derive them from some presumed underlying propositional structure with dummy or so-called logical subjects. As we have already suggested in the chapter on case relations in Russian above, the actual sign relations extant in such utterances, both the modification relations and the case relations, create their own glottological structure that more than suffices to explain how the meanings of such constructions are produced. English speakers, accustomed to inserting dummy subjects like ‘it’ and ‘there’ whenever there is no overt subject expressed in an utterance, have to be reminded all the time not to do so in Russian, as such insertions alter the conceptual content inherent in the signs themselves and create either meaningless sentences or sentences with entirely different meanings. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way impersonal constructions are expressed in Russian, where the third person singular or neuter past tense forms of the verb regularly occurs without any substantive at all in the syntactic configuration of the sentence. Svetaet. ‘Day is breaking.’ (literally: ‘is getting light’) Budit morozit’ ‘There will be a frost’ (literally: ‘will frost’) Morosilo ‘It was drizzling.’ (literally: ‘was drizzling’) There is no overt subject in these expressions because there is no identifiable entity to be modified. Such indeterminate subjects are therefore left implicit in

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the third person or neuter form of the verb itself, just as with the kategorija sostojanija described earlier. When we do find additional modifiers in the predicate with these kinds of sentences, the modifying elements may be either pre-posed, providing information on a par with the verb itself, Iz korridora duet. ‘There is a draft coming from the corridor.’ (literally: ‘from the corridor is blowing’) U menja v pravom uxe zvenit. ‘There is a ringing in my right ear.’ (literally: ‘by me in right ear is ringing’) or they may be post-posed, highlighting the informational value of the modifier Paxnet vinom. ‘It smells of wine.’ (literally: ‘is smelling with wine’). Both possibilities are evident in Polja zalilo vodoj. ‘The fields were flooded with water.’ (literally: ‘fields (acc. pl.) flooded (neut. sg. past) by water (instr.)’) Here again there is no expressed subject, the source of the action of flooding being left undetermined (in the neuter singular form of the verb itself), but the object of the flooding is pre-posed, giving it equal information value with the verb, while the means of the flooding (the water) is given greater import as a post-posed modifier. Exactly the same relations pertain with quasi-personal constructions, where again there is an indeterminate subject implied but not expressed in the utterance. These utterances frequently employ the third person plural form of the verb, which is again fully meaningful in and of itself, needing no syntactic subject. Once again, the verb may appear alone, as in the common expression govoryat, čto… '[they] say that…'

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If one were to add the pronoun oni ‘they’ in such cases, the meaning of the sentence would substantively change, indicating a specific set of individuals rather than the implied indeterminate ‘one says’. Or the verb may appear with additional modifiers, in which case the sentence is often rendered in English as a passive construction Na nego smotrjat s nadeždoj. ‘He is regarded with hope.’ (literally: ‘On him [they] look with hope’) As in the example of the flooding above, the “object” of the looking is in the neutral pre-posed position, while the ‘hope’ is given the enhanced meaning in post-position, and the indeterminate source of the verbal action is once again given only by the unspecified third person plural form of the verb. This type also occurs with the second person singular form of the verb, notably in proverbs where the absence of a syntactic subject generalizes the person reference Segodnja naboltaeš’, a zavtra raskaivaešsja. ‘Today [you] blabber, but tomorrow [you] repent.’ Again, if one were to include the pronoun ty ‘you’ in Russian, the sentence would be pointing a finger directly at the addressee. In this example, both modifiers (today and tomorrow) utilize the neutral, unmarked word order, but at the level of clausal structure, the second clause can certainly be seen to modify the first, where its very position indicates its heightened semantic status. Then there are the many instances of kategorija sostojanija that never modify subjects. In an example like Mne žal’. ‘I am sorry.’ (literally: ‘to me is sorry’) the mne is not the grammatical subject. Being in the dative case, it is a predicate modifier in the neutral, pre-posed location, giving both elements equal weight in expressing the sense of a situation. Likewise, in an utterance like Mne nužno idti. ‘I need to go.’ (literally: ‘to me must go’)

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it is the going that has the enhanced status of new information. When we initially presented this sentence type we noted that for there to be a grammatical subject present in a Russian utterance, there must be some quality specifically attributable to a subject. Given all the other sentence types exemplified here where there is also no grammatical subject present in the utterance, we may now expand upon that initial observation and conclude that there must be an identifiable subject for the predication to be attributable to. Such a unique conceptualization of the modification process does not exist in English, where the dummy subjects ‘it’ and ‘there’ materialize whenever there is no identifiable source of a verbal process, or the sentences are rendered with the English passive voice. This observation, furthermore, is particularly evident in situations where the marked word order prevails (or would otherwise prevail if there were a subject to modify). We see it not only in predicative modification but also in the rare examples of the marked order in attributive constructions cited above, where to be meaningful, there must again be an entity present to modify, even if it is represented by such allpurpose words as delo (‘matter’), vešč (‘thing’) or čelovek (‘person’). (Note that this is not the same as adding ‘it’ or ‘there’ in English because the English words have no identifiable antecedents.) What all of this suggests is that whatever the marking associated with postposition of the modifier in Russian may be, it certainly isn’t the same as in English. The fact that word order in Russian is much less restrictive with respect to both predication and phrasal modifiers, allowing either order with some frequency in these instances, suggests that even though post-position of modifiers in Russian seems to present the modification as in some sense unique in the given situation, something as restrictive as extension must not be at play here. What would it imply, for example, if fully one third of the time the pre-position of a predicate modifier creates a situation that is “merely descriptive”, as we saw in the case of pre-posed predicate modifiers in English, which occur only rarely and only with intransitive verbs? Actually, pre-position of predicate modifiers in Russian creates a significantly different kind of relation, one where both modifier and modified signify with equal distinctiveness. They are certainly not merely descriptive; quite the contrary, they present their qualities as independent, autonomous entities. The marked word order, on the other hand, restricts this independence at the level of both predication and attribution by amplifying the semantic import of the modifier and/or attenuating that of the modified, which remains more or less in the background. This cohesion of the elements in the marked order frames the modification relation, giving a profile to the modifier (the rheme) that sets it off from the background given by the modified (the theme). As

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such, it is very reminiscent of the aspect relation as we described it above, where the perfective frames the verbal process in such a way that it may not be expressed differentially, whether progressively, iteratively, duratively, habitually, etc. In much the same way, the unmarked word order in Russian allows the modifier and modified to express their meaning differentially, with equally independent force. Thus we may conclude that it is the dimensionality feature that identifies both the aspect relation and the modification relation in Russian. The fact that the modification relation in Russian appears to mirror the aspect relation, while the modification relation in English mirrors the ‘-ing’ relation, raises an interesting subject for consideration, one that we can only speculate upon at this juncture. We may observe that both the aspect relation in Russian (marked for dimensionality) and the ‘-ing’ relation in English (marked for extension) are what we might call pervasive relations morphologically in each of these languages. One cannot utter a sentence in Russian where a verb is present without making a decision as to which pole of the aspect relation is to be expressed. Likewise, the ‘-ing’ suffix in English is one of the most pervasive suffixes in the language, capable of creating, as we have seen, all manner of parts of speech, from verbal tenses to gerunds, adjectives and even nouns. That it should be morphological relations such as these that also pattern the syntax of each language is an intriguing observation that certainly deserves more attention than we can give it here.

6.3 The modification relation in French: The plurality feature As our final example of syntactic structure, let us look at word order in French. French syntax appears superficially quite similar to English at the level of predication, given its equally strict adherence to the SVO word order and the lack of a case system to express the basic grammatical relations associated with subject and object identification. But that is where the similarities end. The French language does not identify parts of speech syntactically as in English; and while there are only small (but significant) differences between the two languages at the level of predication, there are far more critical differences in the way attributive modifiers behave with respect to the nouns they modify in French. It is therefore at the level of attribution that we can best appreciate the marking associated with the modification relation in this language. Even a cursory look at adjectival modification in French would reveal that when these modifiers follow the noun, which they do in the majority of cases,

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they contextualize their meaning independently and objectively; but when they precede the noun, their meaning changes, often to the point where they appear to have a different meaning altogether. More specifically, when an adjective follows a noun in French, it modifies that noun in much the same way as it would any other noun; but when it precedes the noun, its meaning is relativized and can assume a variety of subjective connotations. Let us look at a representative set of examples. (Examples are taken from earlier work on adjective placement in French by myself and Linda Waugh: Sangster and Waugh 1978; and further work by Waugh alone: Waugh 1976. The conclusions drawn here, however, are new and are my own.) When placed after the noun, an adjective like nouveau (nouvelle) maintains its objective meaning of ‘new’ in the sense of not old, but when placed before the noun, the newness assumes an additional, relational quality. Thus une voiture nouvelle will normally mean a car that is brand new, as anything might be new, but une nouvelle voiture can refer to a used car that is new by virtue of its ownership. Similarly, the adjective vieux will convey an objective sense of ‘old’ in post-position, but takes on a more relative, subjective character when placed, for example, before a noun like ami ‘friend’, where it qualifies the length of the friendship rather than the age of the person. One can easily see how this relative quality can be interpreted in conventional terms as a “different” meaning when the English equivalent requires the use of another adjective altogether, but the consistency with which this distinction occurs, and is productive, in French indicates rather that we are dealing here with a systemic phenomenon that should be explainable by the word order itself. Thus the same explanation as in the above examples also holds true for contrasts like une route mauvaise, which would normally refer objectively to a ‘road’ in ‘bad’ condition; whereas la mauvaise route can also mean the ‘wrong’ road, a road that is ‘bad’ in the sense of one that will take you out of your way. Likewise, the adjective ancien in post-position indicates an advanced status of oldness, but when pre-posed, can mean ‘former’ as in ancien ami ‘former friend’, or an earlier stage of, as in ancien regime or ancien français, where there is nothing objectively old about the regime or the language; it is ‘old’ only insofar as the regime or the language is considered old. Again, the invariant meaning of the adjective remains in all cases a type of oldness that indicates a qualitative break with the present, and when placed before the noun, this qualitative break is given an added, relative character. Indeed, adjectives whose meaning is difficult to define in terms of a single quality tend to occur before the noun they modify in French. Adjectives like grand ‘big, great, tall, large’, petit ‘small, little, dear, cute’, bon ‘good, simple, kind, correct, proper’, beau ‘good, beautiful, admirable, noble’, joli ‘pretty,

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charming, considerable’, usually occur in pre-position and assume a sense that is compatible with the noun they modify. But they may also follow the noun in their most objective sense, since the prerogative of the speaker to make a choice never goes away. In this context, it is significant that these adjectives, when further qualified by a phrasal modifier must occur in post-position. Thus Il a un nez grand comme une trompette. ‘He has a nose big as a trumpet.’ Clearly, a quality that has already been made relative to the noun it modifies would not be qualified again; hence the post-position. Given the relative quality of pre-posed modifiers in French, it is also not surprising that numerals generally precede the noun, indicating how much of the given phenomenon is in play, except in cases like royal names–e.g. Louis Quatorze–where the numeral assumes a more objective, virtually adnominal status. Conversely, adjectives that denote qualities as inherently objective as colors almost always occur after the noun, but they can occasionally be preposed, in which case they assume a decidedly metaphorical connotation: noire ingratitude ‘extreme (literally: black) ingratitude’ noirs pressentiments ‘dark (literally: black) premonitions’ verte jeunesse ‘bloom of (literally: green) youth’ blanche neige ‘pure as (literally: white) snow’ blanche colombe ‘pure woman’ (literally: ‘white dove’). Finally, otherwise objective qualities may be presented anaphorically by preposing the adjective in instances where the modification situation has already been established. (See Waugh 1976: 98.) In such cases, the initial presentation of the modification relation establishes the qualification and the anaphoric repetition assumes the relation already established.

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J’ai vu un éléphant énorme … Cet énorme éléphant buvait de l’eau. ‘I saw an enormous elephant …This enormous elephant was drinking water.’ Vous allez raconter une affaire malheureuse et, après le récit, vous dîtes, voila une malheureuse affaire. ‘You are going to tell about an unhappy affair; and after the narration you say, there’s an unhappy affair.’ It should be fairly evident from the examples cited here that pre-position of the adjective represents the marked word order in French, and the marking anticipates the lexical meaning of the noun modified such that the quality given by the general meaning of the adjective is produced relative to that of the noun. And indeed, this is basically what was suggested elsewhere, where the phrase “deixis of the lexical context” was proposed as the definition of the marking associated with pre-position of modifiers in French. (Waugh 1976) Transposing this descriptor into a feature of the type we have been describing in this study is not difficult, if we consider just what deixis of the lexical context implies. It simply means that the marked word order requires that one consider the meaning of the modified (the noun head) in determining the meaning of the modifier (the adjective). Pre-posed modifiers, in other words, do not signify independently as post-posed modifiers do; they anticipate the meaning of the noun they modify. Therefore there must be a complex perception operation embedded in the relation, just as we saw earlier with the concept of transitivity, and in the case of the embedded possessive ‘-s’ in English. In all of these instances, it is the plurality feature that creates the complex perception that anticipates another phenomenon in the context of the utterance. Consequently, we would conclude that the modification relation in French is likewise marked for plurality. If indeed this is the mark of the modification relation in French, then we should expect to find it operating in the same fashion in the case of predicative modification. And indeed, what we find is that predicate modifiers utilize almost exclusively the unmarked word order, where the verb follows the subject it modifies. This would certainly appear to be a self-evident consequence of the marking relation; for the very nature of predication is to produce unique information about a subject, not further qualify it in terms of its own essence, as the marked pole of the plurality relation would do. The fact that French is even more exclusive than English in utilizing only one word order for predication is easily explained by the difference in the

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features associated with modification in the two languages. We noted earlier how English predication utilizes predominantly the word order marked for extension, where the modification is presented as unique to the given situation. Yet the unmarked order regularly occurs in purely descriptive situations as well as with questions and certain other expressions that question or otherwise restrict the effect that predication normally produces. In French, on the other hand, it would be difficult to imagine a similar “inversion” from the unmarked to the marked order for questioning in that language, given the essence of the plurality feature. There is virtually no sense in which either declarative or interrogative predication could constitute a qualification of something in terms of its own essence. And indeed, French questions do not invert subject and verb but use the same unmarked order as regular declarative sentences, adding the interrogative phrase Est-ce que or altering the intonational contour of the sentence. The only exceptions to this occur when the subject is a pronoun: Veux-tu?; Où est-il?; Que fait-il? ‘Do you want?; Where is he?; What is he doing?’ which being anaphoric by definition, certainly does fit the marking of plurality: in these cases the subject has already been established in the context of the utterance and is being modified accordingly, questioning as it were the viability of the verbal action specifically with respect to the entity previously identified. In fact, it is commonplace to find the actual noun subject referred to by the pronoun included in the same utterance, reinforcing the anaphora: Votre soeur, vient-elle nous voir? ‘Your sister, will she come see us?’ Sera-t-il là demain, votre frère? ‘Will he be there tomorrow, your brother?’ Very rarely the marked word order will occur with noun subjects alone: Que dit ton père? ‘What does your father say?’ (literally: ‘What says your father?’) but in these instances the noun itself is anaphoric, referring to someone preestablished or at least presupposed in the context of the situation. We may

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therefore conclude that the phenomena of word order at both the levels of attribution and predication in French are consistent, given the marking of plurality. As we move to the next chapter, bear in mind that we could not arrive at a conclusion like this if we had continued to define a concept like plurality in denotational rather than properly self-referential terms. The concept of plurality is a qualitative, not a quantitative one, where it is presumed that the mind is not counting objects but is conceptualizing an undifferentiated complexity in the perception operation at the highest level of consciousness. It should also be evident from the way in which the plurality feature operates to identify the modification relation in French that the anticipation is not in the adjective itself, as it is for example in a transitive verb; it is inherent in the marking associated with the modification relation as a higher-order property. The evidence adduced here regarding the nature of the modification relation in English, French, and Russian raises some intriguing questions, consideration of which would only be speculative at this time. For example, if there are only six cardinal conceptual relations in the semiotic biogram of the species, and each language utilizes one of these features as its modification relation, what might this say about a syntactic typology of languages? Alternatively, could the modification relation in some languages be defined by a combination of features, resulting in a far more complex typology? And what might all this say about the ultimate structure of mind, given that the modification relation acts as the primary engine of the contextualization process? Clearly, we have only begun to consider the implications of this approach, but hopefully have provided the groundwork for future research in this vital area of cognitive structure as manifested in the sign relations of at least these three languages.

7 The potential of sign theory in the domain of lexical meaning We have now provided the foundation upon which to justify a truly sign-based study of the referential capacity inherent in linguistic signs, at the levels of both morphology and syntax. We have demonstrated that the binary principle initially proposed by Jakobson and the Prague school of linguistics is not only empirically substantiated, but leads to the identification of a cardinal set of features (conceptual relations) that may well constitute the structure of consciousness at the supra-rational level. Still, the question remains just how far such a set of properties can go to explain the total vocabulary (repertory of signs) in a language. We have shown that they are more than adequate to explain the occurrence of the most basic grammatical relations, such as tense, aspect, number, and the like, in languages where these relations are expressed by overt grammatical categories. We have demonstrated how such features combine to create larger systems of grammatical relations, as with the Russian cases. And we have shown their application to syntax where the actual order of signs is conceived as a grammatical relation in itself, the modification relation, the primary engine of the contextualization process. So far, however, we have not given evidence for the existence of these features in more extensive, so-called functional systems such as the system of prepositions, for example, or in the open-ended categories of lexical meaning. In fact, it was with the system of prepositions and preverbs (verbal prefixes) in Russian that the full set of features described here were initially developed, by C.H.van Schooneveld in his pioneering effort to demonstrate that Jakobson’s original case system analysis could (ought to) be seen as a starting point for a much larger, more inclusive study of the role of binary features in structuring other domains of meaning beyond the strictly grammatical. (van Schooneveld 1978b.) It was this initial effort to describe a system larger than what Jakobson’s original three binary features could account for–23 yields only eight distinct items–which led to the realization that such a system could and should contain additional features. Developing such a framework within the system of Russian prepositions and preverbs made the most sense, given that this system consisted of an essentially closed and still manageable set of terms within the same language, from which a more general theory of sign relations could be built. We will not attempt to repeat the wealth of evidence that was adduced to analyze a system of such a size here in this study, but we can summarize its conclusions by providing in graphic form the structure that results from such an analysis.

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Though the total number of Russian prepositions is somewhat larger, the most common elements of the system comprise some twenty-two distinct forms, most of which are realized as both prepositions and preverbs, a few as preverbs only. (The latter are marked with a dash below.) That the prepositions and their corresponding verbal prefixes share a common general meaning is as evident as the fact that English prepositions and their occurrence as verbal post-positions also share a common meaning, as will be demonstrated a bit later. The set of forms that was analyzed consists of the following signs (glosses are of course approximate, but give a general sense of the meanings involved; the feature markings are abbreviated after their first appearance in the chart): Table 1: Russian prepositions with feature designations. PREP na v za pod po o u s perevyot iz vzrazpri do k pered nad pro čerez skvoz’

PREP ‘on, at, onto, to’ ‘in, into, to’ ‘behind, beyond, in exchange for’ ‘under’ ‘along, according to’ ‘about, concerning, against’ ‘at, near, by’ ‘with, (down)from, off of’ ‘across, over; re-' ‘out; up’ (as in ‘finish up’) '(away)from’ ‘out of, from’ ‘up’ (as in ‘bring up’); ‘re-' ‘un-'; various distributive meanings ‘associated with, in the presence of’ ‘until, before, as far as’ ‘to, toward’ ‘before, in front of’ ‘over, above’ ‘about’ ‘through (time or space)' ‘across, through’

MARK unmarked dimensionality distinctness dis, dim extension ext, dim ext, dis ext, dis, dim cancellation can, dim can, ext can, ext, dim can, dis can, dis, dim objectiveness obj, ext obj, ext, dim obj, dis obj, dis, dim obj, can obj, can, ext obj, can, ext, dim

As diagrammed below, the system begins with the unmarked preposition na at the lower left-most corner of the lower left cube and proceeds as follows: within each cube, the top of the cube is marked for dimensionality, the righthand side by distinctness, and the back (shaded) by extension. The top set of cubes is then marked for cancellation; and the right-hand set of cubes for objectiveness. The resulting structure looks like this:

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Figure 2: Russian prepositional system

To get a sense of how the actual analysis of such a set of signs should proceed, let us look at an example of prepositional structure in English. To analyze the full set of prepositions in English would be well beyond the scope of this monograph, but we can take as a case in point two prepositions that cognitive linguists often use to illustrate the orientation metaphor, namely the relationship between ‘up’ and ‘down’. The first thing to note about how such a relationship is understood in cognitive grammar is that one is not analyzing the meaning of the prepositions per se. Rather, the prepositions themselves are used as indirect evidence that cognitive structures are built from bodily based core categories, in this case the pre-linguistic spatial experience of verticality. Consequently, one is actually talking here about the cognitive treatment of the concepts upness and downness understood as an orientation metaphor where verticality constitutes the source domain from which all manner of radial categories (the target domains of the metaphor) derive. The metaphor is said to operate in a unidirectional fashion from the core bodily concept of up and down, radiating outwards to inform our conceptualization of other domains,

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from verticality in the external world to more intangible domains like good and bad, happy and sad, conscious and unconscious, etc. Sometimes the actual prepositions ‘up’ and ‘down’ occur in these target domains, but commonly it is related words that convey the sense of the metaphor. So, for example, in the domain of happy vs. sad, you can ‘feel up’ or ‘feel down’, but often one’s ‘spirits rise’ or one is in ‘high spirits’ as opposed to ‘feeling low’ or having one’s ‘spirits sink’. In sign theory, on the other hand, it is the signs themselves that are embodied, that constitute the means by which conceptual categories are structured and are the vehicles for their contextualization. Once one accepts the integrity of the linguistic sign in this manner, one is obliged to recognize that verticality is only one, and at that a rather limited, contextual variant of the underlying meanings of prepositions like ‘up’ and ‘down’. Hence the core properties that these signs are contextualizing must be significantly more abstract and therefore operating at a more profound level of consciousness than is evident in cognitive grammar. Let’s be clear, however, that this does not imply that the metaphorical process described in cognitive grammar is somehow misguided; it most certainly is real, as one can attest for example from the citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, which provide a historical record of how the senses of words like ‘up’ and ‘down’ have evolved from their initial spatial senses; or from studies of child language development where these more concrete senses tend to be the ones experienced or at least appreciated first. From the signtheoretical perspective, on the other hand, these data do not constitute evidence for the ultimate neurological functioning of sign relations as organizers of the categorization process. They merely indicate that the contextualization process by which sign relations perpetuate themselves has to start somewhere. When it is the sign relation itself that is embodied and its contextualization conceived as a stochastic process, there can be neither direction nor boundaries in its evolution. The process of development with respect to a given sign, both historically and ontogenetically, would naturally be initiated at a certain level of concreteness, close to the stimulus that initially triggers it. But once established as a sign, it necessarily enters into a system of relations, of potentialities that are by definition highly abstract, whose very existence depends on a continuous process of contextualization, of projecting their essence in a never-ending search for new contexts. Such a process is certainly metaphorical, indeed by definition so since we are dealing with how signs propagate themselves, but not metaphorical in the conventional sense of transposing from one pre-existing set of contexts to another in a unidirectional fashion. Rather, sign relations perpetuate themselves by a metaphorical expansion of their underlying essence in a completely stochastic manner.

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So while the spatial senses of words like ‘up’ and ‘down’ may be learned first in child language, that does not imply that these senses represent the core concepts that ultimately underlie the comprehension and use of such signs. The English words ‘up’ and ‘down’ certainly seem to have directional senses that are grounded in the notion of verticality–e.g. ‘to stand up’, ‘to go down the stairs’, etc.–but the verticality in such instances is engendered not so much by the preposition as by the context in which it is embedded. It is the standing and the stairs that create the sense of verticality; and it is perfectly reasonable to assume, therefore, that verticality is itself a contextual phenomenon which, once established in the speaker’s awareness by experience in just such contexts, can be extended to other contexts as well at the rational level of consciousness. But that still does not by any means make this the core meaning of the form. It necessarily remains a contextual variant, and a relatively minor one to boot. In the vast majority of cases there is no verticality implied in the use of English ‘up’ or ‘down’–e.g. ‘to sail up the river’, ‘to sail down the river’, ‘to walk up to the front of the room’, ‘to go down to the store’, etc.–so there must be something more abstract and significant underlying the meaning of these forms that they would be used in either vertical or non-vertical situations depending on the context, and overwhelmingly used in non-vertical ones. One might surmise that some more general sense of directionality is the key, but even this sense dissipates considerably when the forms are used as adverbs (verbal post-positions), which is in fact the more common usage–e.g. ‘tie up’, ‘tie down’, ‘shut up’, ‘shut down’, ‘dress up’, ‘dress down’, etc. What unites the adverbial usages with the strictly prepositional ones appears not to involve even direction so much as some sort of abstract distancing from the process in the given situation, to a different place or state. And this is certainly what the cancellation feature would indicate, that one is no longer merely performing the process, that one has moved away in one way or another. Then the question becomes, in what manner does this distancing occur? And there is a very significant difference between ‘up’ and ‘down’ in this respect, not the kind that one would expect if they were merely mirror images of one another, as they appear to be when they are used in more purely directional situations. In the case of English ‘up’, there is definitely a sense of goal orientedness defining the distancing, that there is a result that lies outside of the process itself. This would certainly explain the more concrete directional senses: when you ‘sail a river’ you are just out on the water, but when you ‘sail up a river’ you think of going somewhere. There is also a clear sense of finality involved in both the prepositional and adverbial usages, where ‘up’ indicates that there is no more of the activity left to do–‘to tie someone up’, ‘to bring up a child’, and so forth. On the other hand, ‘up’ may also indicate inception of the action:

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one can interpret the phrase ‘to stand up’ to mean either to assume a standing position or to complete the process of standing. These various senses–finality, focus on a goal or result, and/or inception of the action–are just what we saw as the defining characteristics of the perfective aspect in Russian, and so we can tentatively conclude that English ‘up’ is also marked for dimensionality informing the kind of cancellation involved. English ‘down’, on the other hand, implies something quite different, not at all the mirror image of ‘up’ as one might be led to believe looking just at the directional senses that these two prepositions share. Consider the following minimal pairs. If you ‘sail up the river’ or ‘walk up the road’, as we have noted, there is a sense of having somewhere (else) to go; but if you ‘sail down the river’ or ‘walk down the road’, you’re not here but you’re still focussing on the river or the road. When you’re ‘downwind’ from an animal that you’re hunting, you’re still in his olfactory space, but when you’re ‘upwind’ of him you’re not. If you ‘grind something up’, the something essentially goes away; but if you ‘grind, water, or boil something down’, the substance is still there, just in a different state. ‘Up to the present’ usually implies not including the present, and one has to add the phrase “…and including” if one wants to make sure the present is intended as well. ‘Down to the present’, on the other hand, implies that the present is still included. When you are ‘up by three goals’, you’re “ahead of the game”; but when you’re ‘down by three goals’ you may be “still in the game”. This dual sense of ‘down’ is also evident where there are no minimal pairs. To ‘calm down’ implies getting and being calm at the same time. To ‘copy something down’ or ‘get something down on tape’ implies that you have it but it’s somewhere else. To be ‘down with a cold’ implies you have a cold but it’s put you in another place. This sense of being here but not here probably explains the most intangible senses of ‘down’, the ones in those metaphorical spaces that are considered most distant from the cognitive grammarian’s core concept of down, like ‘feeling down’; whereas to be ‘up for it’ implies you really are in a different place psychologically. This sense of here but not entirely here is so reminiscent of a dative case that we can reasonably conclude that ‘down’ is marked for both cancellation and extension. The conclusions drawn here with both of these prepositions are necessarily tentative at this point, since there is a larger system to which these signs belong that is beyond the scope of this study to consider. Once the relations among all English prepositions are studied, we may well find that there are more features than the ones identified here governing their meaning. But the point remains, that features such as those proposed in this study are fully capable of explaining the semantic potential inherent in broader functional categories like prepositions, indicating a far more abstract essence at the core of their meaning.

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The question that one might well ask at this juncture–given that we are ultimately talking about how signs contextualize their meaning–is can we, and if we can how can we, predict how forms like these will combine with their respective verbs and nouns? We have indicated previously that the only intrinsic (i.e. sign-based) constraint on the concatenation of signs is the operation of the modification relation. You can’t in principle, for example, use subjectverb inversion to create questions in French because that would violate the very nature of the modification relation in that language. The only “exceptions” to this “rule” are those instances that we saw where the subject itself is anaphoric, but even those are fully in keeping with the essence of the relation. We have also insisted that so-called government, where one form is said to determine the possibilities for concatenation with other forms (as with the verbs of domination in Russian), should not be considered a rule because the speaker still retains the prerogative, indeed the obligation, to choose how to contextualize the conceptual relations underlying the individual morphemes involved, within the constraints imposed by the modification relation. So one could always, in principle, think of entirely novel contrasts between the accusative and the instrumental as direct objects in Russian despite the supposed rule of government. And the only restraint on that freedom would be that the resulting concatenations “make sense” in some realm of meaning. Now the important point to make here is that the concept of “realm of meaning” must be understood in the manner in which we previously spoke about how to conceive of reality where language is concerned. When we are dealing with a fundamentally self-referential system of signs, reality is what is created by the very contextualization of those signs. This is precisely the sense in which “colorless green ideas” are very real, and poetic discourse nothing but the ultimate expression of the potentiality inherent in sign relations and the power of the contextualization process to realize that potential. So when we find, as we observed in the preceding discussion of ‘up’ and ‘down’ that there are certain contexts where minimal pairs exist and others where they do not, what can we conclude from this? Why can we say either ‘burn up’ or ‘burn down’, ‘tear up’ or ‘tear down’; but we can’t say both ‘eat up’ and *‘eat down’ or ‘use up’ and *‘use down’? The short answer is, of course, that there is no reasonable context in which one could imagine what ‘eat down’ or ‘use down’ might mean in any conceivable mode of existence; but even having said that, someone reading this might well come up with just such a plausible context. In the end, the answer to this question has to be that in a stochastic system like the one we are describing here, the contextualization process must be understood as entirely a matter of probabilities. Then our job as linguists becomes one of studying the range of possibilities for concatena-

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tion between signs with certain feature compositions and those with others, of making statistical studies of a wide range of contextualizations across different languages. And this in turn would require us to have completed feature analyses of a large corpus of signs, much larger than what has been attempted to date, including in particular the lexicon. Which is why we turn now to the task of proposing just how such a feature analysis can be applied to lexical systems.

7.1 Preliminary concepts While the features identified in this study can indeed explain the ranges of reference, the possibilities for contextualization, in both the grammatical and the functional systems of signs, we have still not ventured into the lexical domain, where the repertory of signs is no longer limited to a relatively circumscribed number of terms but is in fact open-ended. It is easy to see how the set of six binary features we have identified here could suffice to explain any system of signs that does not exceed 26, or 64 individual elements, as in the grammatical and functional realms. It is when we move beyond such closed systems into the domain of lexical meaning that further explanation is needed to account for the additional complexity. Recall at this point what was noted earlier at the outset of this study, that even the most ardent proponents of the thesis that the differences that make a difference conceptually in language are inherent in the very forms used to express them (that the fundamental principle of language is to preserve one form for one meaning) stopped short of claiming that this could apply to all areas of language equally. Bolinger, as we have seen, considered that a very significant portion of language was simply “jerry built”, and Jakobson did not believe that his own type of feature analysis would apply in the open-ended realm of lexical as opposed to grammatical meaning. Indeed, it was his conviction that the “ontological problems of reference” (the capacity of lexical items to refer to specific aspects of experiential reality) was distinct from the operation of the grammatical pattern (an “intrinsic linguistic topic”). So it would not necessarily detract from the thesis being proposed here to concede that the archetypes of meaning we have identified herein are evidenced by just those areas that are intrinsic to language itself, such as grammatical meanings proper and the larger but still circumscribed functional categories like prepositions, and leave it at that. And there are certainly those who would claim just that. One particularly interesting thesis in this regard is that of Charles Ruhl. (Ruhl 1989) In arguing for monosemy (a single general meaning for each lin-

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guistic form) as the natural condition of language, he begins by challenging, as we have done here, the assumption that more abstract senses derive from a word’s concrete or literal core meaning. This view of concept formation, he argues, results from a preoccupation with the conscious mind’s limited awareness, which naturally leads to a preference for the concrete. One could just as well argue the reverse and conclude that words have core meanings that are highly abstract, of which their concrete realizations are simply a pragmatically modulated subspecies, that “a form has a single meaning, and that all the complicating factors that make it appear polysemic have their sources in contextual contributions to meaning.” (Ruhl 1989: viii) He asks, “on what grounds are word meanings considered different in the first place? Why can’t we say that the differing models produce varying effects on a single general meaning?” (Ruhl 1989: xi-xiv) In this way we can extend the monosemic principle from grammatical meaning, where it is arguably more applicable because the meanings of grammatical terms are fundamentally unconscious, to lexical meaning, where we are consciously making pragmatic judgments to determine which seemingly polysemous meaning is intended in a given context. Given the occurrence of a lexical item in a particular context, he argues, “we infer the most appropriate (likely, typical, plausible, contextually relevant) situation…. These inferences come from our knowledge of the world”. (Ruhl 1989: 6) From this Ruhl concludes that there exists both unconscious and conscious appreciation of the meaning of words, and more than that, words themselves can be classified according to where they are situated on a continuum from the one extreme to the other, which he calls the Vocabulary Principle. According to this principle, closed minimal classes of words reflect primary, unconscious order, remote from reality; while open maximal classes reflect secondary, conscious order related to reality. (Ruhl 1989: 21) Between the two extremes we have a cline, a hierarchy that proceeds from words with unconscious general meanings to those with concrete reference that derive from our conscious knowledge of the world. Ruhl admits that “the two extremes of vocabulary seem to imply contradictory theories of what a language is. The more concrete words are more closely linked to reality…. we are highly consciously aware of what we mean”. On the other hand, “the more abstract words are remote from reality…. They don’t refer in any clear way…. They seem to be purely linguistic, formal, and they dictate to reality and to us. We are highly unaware of what we mean”. (Ruhl 1989: 184) In the end, Ruhl asserts that there is no contradiction inherent in this view because it is the continuum that ultimately defines the scope of consciousness where language is concerned. Though he does not cite Jakobson, this I believe is basically what Jakobson meant when he stated that the ontological problems of reference are in complementary distribution

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with the grammatical pattern. Jakobson’s complementary distribution is now recast as a continuum. It is tempting to accept this view for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the very distinction we have drawn here between the nature of grammatical as opposed to lexical meaning. Grammatical meaning involves those categories that oblige the speaker to make a choice between one or the other pole of an underlying conceptual relation at a fundamentally unconscious level, whereas lexical meanings can be as seemingly heterogeneous as there are aspects of perceived reality one might refer to in a given situation, making the selection of one lexical item over another appear to be completely optional and based on conscious awareness of the referential possibilities. And there does indeed seem to be a continuum from the one extreme to the other, for if one looks at the various parts of speech it certainly appears as if the choice of prepositions, for example, while not as restricted as with grammatical meanings, is still relatively circumscribed (unconscious), but when it comes to verbs the choice is relatively more free (conscious), though still not as seemingly totally unencumbered as with nouns. This impression derives, of course, from the fact that grammatical and functional categories do not refer to anything immediately identifiable in extra-linguistic reality, while verbs describe activities or processes, a kind of reference that is a lot more concrete but still not as concrete as that of nouns, which are used to signify things as they appear to us in the real world. What is at stake here, therefore, is the very nature of reference, and the question we must ask ourselves is this: Does the way in which signs contextualize their meaning–i.e. make reference–differ depending on the type of category to which a word belongs? Is it conceivable then, from a sign-theoretical point of view, that the way in which signs contextualize their meaning grammatically operates at the supra-rational level of consciousness, where we are unaware of the decisions we are making, while the contextualization process at the level of lexical meaning operates at a different level of consciousness, where we are more aware of how the choices affect our construal of a situation? It should be evident by now that such a view cannot be supported by the sign theory espoused in this study. We may be more consciously aware of how nouns relate to the appearance of things in the real world, but that does not imply that the underlying process by which signs generate their meaning has anything ultimately to do with this form of consciousness. We have insisted all along that it is the properly abstract and self-referential nature of sign relations at the supra-rational level of consciousness that underlies our ability to conceptualize at all levels of consciousness. In short, we have taken the position that making reference and contextualizing the underlying meaning of sign relations are one and the same thing.

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We must therefore treat the referential capacity inherent in lexical signs the same way we treat the contextualization of any other sign relation, keeping in mind the cardinal tenet of sign theory that individual signs by themselves have no meaning but derive their meaning from the relations in which they participate with other signs in the system of which they are a part. Individual signs necessarily exist only in a context, where the sense that they impart is engendered by the situation in which they have been contextualized. The contextual meanings of individual lexical items (e.g. nouns) may appear to name things and therefore to make reference to what we think we know about extra-linguistic reality, but the appearance that a noun is naming something is given only by the fact that it has been uttered in a particular situation and we draw inferences from that situation. Such inferences provide the feedback that ultimately determines the trajectory that the underlying sign relation will take, but they are themselves not integral to the sign as a term of relation, which remains a potentiality whose contextualization properties are necessarily self-referential. Jakobson himself was particularly clear on this point: No one can understand the word ‘cheese’ unless he has an acquaintance with the meaning assigned to the word in the lexical code of English. [..] The meaning of the word ‘cheese’ cannot be inferred from a non-linguistic acquaintance with cheddar or with camembert without the assistance of the verbal code. […] Merely pointing will not teach us whether ‘cheese’ is the name of a given specimen, or of any box of camembert, or of camembert in general, or of any cheese, any milk product, any food, any refreshment, or perhaps any box irrespective of contents. Finally, does a word simply name the thing in question, or does it imply a meaning such as offering, sale, prohibition, or malediction? (Jakobson 1971: 260–261)

Indeed, lexical items provide some of the best evidence for this position, for once a given sign enters into the lexicon, its range of reference can evolve relatively quickly and often rather dramatically. From the moment a sign first appears and becomes part of the lexicon, its identity is determined by its relation to the other signs in the system; and this set of relations henceforth governs its referential potential. Our task, therefore, is to capture the essence of this process sui generis, and not to reduce it to factors other than what the signs themselves evince. When we respect the integrity of a sign and examine its referential capabilities in the strictly relational terms of this study, then we can appreciate the fact that so long as the signifiers themselves remain intact, so does their potential for creating reference; and consequently what evolves is the range of referential application of the underlying conceptual relation, not the relation itself. And this all happens in a completely stochastic manner, where the random insertion of a sign into a context is met with a non-random selector, the legislative activity of the speech community that determines

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which referential applications will be reinforced and which will not. The set of relations that constitute the conceptual structure of a language will itself evolve, of course, but this necessarily happens at the point when the signifiers that carry these relations evolve–that is, as we noted previously, when changes in the formal structure of the language occur, as for example when a previously inflectional language like English lost a significant portion of its inflectional structure due to the dropping of endings off of words, creating a tipping point that caused the previously existing case system to be reorganized into a syntactic structure instead. Therefore, so long as the forms (the signifiers) themselves remain intact, we have an obligation to respect their integrity as signs and analyze the full range of reference associated with them to determine the nature of the conceptual relations that underlie them and account for their contextualizing potential. We can make a first approximation of such an analysis by considering how a word like ‘table’ in English has been contextualized over time. The first and most natural association we make when we hear this word is of an item of furniture, an object with a surface supported by legs; and indeed this is the first definition given it in dictionaries. This association, however, is just what Ruhl described as our preoccupation with the conscious mind’s limited awareness, made “real” by the predominance of tables as furniture in our everyday lives. The contextual potential inherent in the word ‘table’ as a lexical sign in English is, of course, much broader; and we need to look at its other applications to determine what conceptual property or properties underlie that potential. Then we will see that it is the nature of the surface invoked that best explains its capacity for contextualization, a surface moreover that is not simply a plane but one that specifically serves a function. This is rather immediately evident from the origin of the word in Latin as a tablet (or plank or list), something whose essence involves writing, drawing, or other related activity performed on a surface. From there we get all manner of layouts on a surface as subsequent contextual applications: tables of contents, periodic tables, multiplication tables, actuarial tables, and so forth. When it comes to furniture, the functional aspect is just as evident: we speak of dining tables, coffee tables, gaming tables, seminar tables, and the like. Clearly, the surface involved has significance beyond its mere appearance: tables are more than just objects; they are there for a purpose, one that depends on the context of the given utterance for its identification. This functional aspect is also evident in expressions like ‘water table’, signifying the level that a body of water has reached; and ‘tableland’, a kind of plateau or raised surface atop a piece of land. Particularly revealing are the more “exotic” uses of ‘table’ in anatomy, architecture, gemology, carpentry, and sail-making. As we have noted on several previous

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occasions, it is frequently the more technical or figurative contextualizations of a sign that provide the best clues as to the relevant features we are looking for. In anatomy, ‘table’ refers to the bony layers that serve as the outer surface of the skull; in architecture it signifies a cornice, the uppermost decorative surface of a column that supports the roof; in gemology the upper horizontal surface of a certain kind of diamond that gives it value; in carpentry, ‘to table’ means to join two pieces of timber together by means of oblong projections in each alternately, so that they fit into corresponding recesses in the other; and in sail-making, ‘table’ means to make a broad hem or ‘tabling’ on the edge of a sail to strengthen it in that part which is sewed to the bolt-rope. The properly abstract concepts that underlie the word ‘table’, therefore, would seem to have two fundamental properties: an outer or upper surface, and functionality. The functional aspect would certainly suggest, in terms of the features we have previously identified, that extension is involved, since the surface is necessarily defined by its function or role in a given situation. The underlying conceptualization of the surface itself would also seem to have some sort of dimensionality, creating a platform for the given function to take place, one that is specifically not separate from whatever support or other thing it may be attached to, if any. Identifying these properties is, of course, somewhat speculative at this point, since we are dealing with a single lexical item and have not considered any of the other elements of the system in which it necessarily participates as a term of relation, making it highly likely that other factors may also be involved. But this exercise serves the purpose of demonstrating that even the most seemingly concrete lexical signs can be analyzed in terms of genuinely abstract conceptual properties (sign relations), provided that the integrity of the sign remains intact. While this is only an initial indication of how one might pursue such an analysis in the realm of lexical meaning, it demonstrates, in contradistinction to Ruhl’s vocabulary principle, that the essence of a sign relation, whether grammatical or lexical, lies in its ability to create distinctions that permit a member of a given speech community to conceptualize aspects of the environment that may not be immediately evident, that may not derive from what we consciously think we know about the real world. The contextualization process must at its very core be an autonomous, subjective process for creating differential values that are then used to invoke qualities that do not emanate from the objects themselves but solely from the set of sign relations that have been established in the mind as differences that make a difference at the most profound level of consciousness. It is certainly a vital psychological fact, for example, that the properties underlying the word ‘table’ in the English lexicon allow us to conceive, whether we realize it or not, that the bony outer layers of the skull

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have the same vital characteristics as the level a body of water reaches, and that these in turn have the same essential properties as the more mundane aspects of our everyday life that we associate with articles of furniture. There is a reason why the word ‘table’ has come to be used to describe the hem at the edge of a sail, for example, and not some other word. What has motivated the selection of this particular lexical item in this particular context has everything to do with the underlying semantic value associated with the word in the lexicon of English, which has governed its selection and determined that this particular metaphorical extension will be meaningful. Therefore, whether we are talking about multiplication tables and coffee tables, or about the temporal and hypothetical uses of the English past tense, the network of conceptual relations involved must be fundamentally of the same type, providing the organism with a means of spontaneously categorizing and recategorizing the essential elements of its cognitive domain.

7.2 Verbal lexical systems Let us proceed, therefore, with the conviction that even the most concrete lexical signs of a language can and should be analyzed in terms of truly abstract, underlying sign relations, such as the six features we have identified as primordial, archetypal properties of mind. The issue then remains, of course, how can a set of six binary features possibly underlie such a broad range of signifiers as are represented by the lexicon, since the mathematical formula of two to the sixth power can at the most yield sixty-four distinct elements in a binary system? Part of the answer to this question was proposed some time ago by C.H.van Schooneveld in a number of studies related to the nature and role of deixis in language. (See especially van Schooneveld 1991.) Working over several decades to expand Jakobson’s initial insights regarding the nature of binary systems into a comprehensive theory of language, van Schooneveld paid particular attention to Jakobson’s analysis of deictic categories, or “shifters” as Jakobson called them in his landmark article on the structure of verbal grammatical categories. (Jakobson 1957) In that article, Jakobson introduced a critical distinction between the speech event and the narrated event, identifying the different verbal categories according to which of the two events they were defined on. Deictic categories or shifters, such as person and tense, require knowledge of both the situation being described (the narrated event) and the coordinates of the actual utterance situation itself (the speech event) for their definition; whereas non-shifters, such as gender, number, voice and aspect, require only knowledge of the situation being described. Thus a

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particular personal pronoun identifies an actual participant or participants in the speech situation and a tense form achieves its meaning relative to the coordinates of the particular act of speaking; but aspect, for example, defines the nature of the verbal process only with regard to the events being described in the narrated situation–i.e., whether the process itself focuses on a goal, result, and so forth. Van Schooneveld took Jakobson’s distinction one critical step further. He reasoned that if language is indeed an autopoietic system, then the fundamentally subjective character of language must extend to all types of signs, not just those where the viewpoint of the subjects involved in the actual speech event determine the referents. (van Schooneveld 1987) From this perspective, the very act of reference–the contextualization process itself–is a deictic act, and all meaning is therefore fundamentally deictic. To analyze the conceptual content of an utterance, consequently, one must concern oneself with the viewpoint of both the subjective observers of an utterance (those privy to its actual transmission) and the objective observers of the situation being described (the narrated situation), who can be anybody who could perceive such a situation– that is, be privy to the given linguistic code–whose perspective as a set of observers is equally critical to defining the conceptual content of an utterance. In van Schooneveld’s parlance, Jakobson’s shifters are more precisely defined as having the property of “transmissional deixis”, while his non-shifters are more properly identified with the term “perceptional deixis”. Underlying both types of deixis, therefore, is the basic principle that the forms of language are ultimately structured by different types of acts of perception, and it is this structure that is represented by the conceptual features we have identified, in their different deictic guises. So, for example, the past tense in a language like English would be marked for transmissionally deictic cancellation, since you have to know when the present moment is in order to effect the cancellation, while the aspect relation would be marked for perceptionally deictic dimensionality, since the feature is defined only with respect to the phenomena being described in the narrated situation. By the same token, each of the features that define the modification relations given in the chapter on syntax above would be marked for transmissional deixis, since what they are qualifying is the actual order of signs in a particular speech event. And finally, in our tentative analysis of the word ‘table’, both of the features we have proposed, dimensionality and extension, would be perceptionally deictic, since each of these qualities is given for the lexical item generally, as it would appear to an observer of any situation– anyone privy to the code of English–in which this particular sign is used. While both of the features that we have identified with respect to the one lexical item considered so far appear to be marked for perceptional deixis, it

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is by no means the case that the features defining all lexical items are limited to this one form of deixis. That there are also transmissionally deictic features defining lexical items is most evident in the verbal lexicon, which codifies processes that frequently invoke the perspective of the participants in the speech event itself for their definition. As an initial illustration, consider the verbs of motion in Russian, which are especially interesting because they may be either determinate or indeterminate depending on where one ends up after leaving the starting point. As a set, it would seem rather evident that verbs of motion generally are marked for cancellation, since the subject necessarily moves from some initial position to another, leaving the starting point behind, just as we saw with the prepositions ‘up’ and ‘down’ earlier. This type of cancellation, furthermore, would be of the perceptionally deictic kind because the motion is given as a general characteristic, valid for any observer of any situation in which such a form is used. Certain verbs of motion in Russian also specify that the end point of the movement is not the same as its starting point (determinate), while others don’t specify where the end point may be (indeterminate). In the latter case it could be and often is back at the starting point–e.g. indeterminate: on xodit v školu každiy den’ (‘He goes to school every day’) vs. determinate: on idët v školu (‘He is on his way to school’) This basic distinction governs the structure of motion verbs in Russian at the lexical level because it is encoded in the opposition of lexical root morphemes: xod-it’ indeterminate; id-ti determinate. In determinate verbs, the end point or goal of the process involves knowledge of the actual speech situation in two different ways. In the first place, the fact that the subject necessarily ends up in a different place by virtue of the performance of the verbal process itself certainly indicates that these verbs are additionally marked for extension (performance of the process establishes where the motion goes), whereas indeterminate verbs are unmarked for this feature since they do not specify where the end point may be. More specifically, however, the end point or goal of the process of a determinate verb is always that which is specified in the given utterance, and so we would conclude that this class of motion verbs is marked for extension of the transmissionally deictic kind. Finally, there are other verbs of motion in Russian, such as stupat’ (‘to step’) that also imply that the end point is different from the starting point, but they don’t specify where that point may be; and we would therefore conclude that they are marked for perceptionally deictic extension. Thus we get the following structure where perceptionally deitic features are marked with a single prime, while transmissionally deictic ones have a double prime marking:

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Table 2: Russian verbs of motion with feature designations VERB xodit’ stupat’ idti

CANCELLATION’ + + +

EXTENSION’ + -

EXTENSION” +

While Russian verbs of motion provide an illustrative example of how this type of analysis can be applied to a specific class of verbal lexical signs, when investigating the verbal lexicon of a language generally, it is obviously advisable to begin at the beginning, so to speak, to initiate the analysis with what seem to be the most basic or primary elements in the system and examine how the system builds from there. Let us, therefore, take a preliminary look at the English verbal system in this regard. It should be intuitively evident that the most rudimentary and therefore totally unmarked verb in any language ought to be the one that expresses mere existence and nothing more. This would, of course, be the verb ‘be’ in English. It merely establishes the validity of the subject (‘I think, therefore I am’) or of the connection between subject and predicate. In this latter capacity it may appear to assume any number of connotations, but these are all contextual, engendered by the meaning of the other elements in the predicate. These may indicate mere juxtaposition (‘One and one is two’), an occurrence (‘The concert is at seven’), location (‘He is in the garage’), identity (‘That’s John’), condition (‘He is sick’), quality (‘He is ambitious’), an opinion (‘He is for gay marriage’), and so on. ‘Be’ is also used as a so-called auxiliary verb in certain circumstances the specific qualities of which, as we insisted earlier, are not expressed by the lexical meaning of ‘be’ itself, as is often assumed, but by the verbal element that modifies it. So when it is used to form the progressive tenses, as in ‘He is/was coming’, it is the ‘-ing’ attached to the following lexical element that carries the extension that we identified as the meaning associated with this compound verbal construction. The verb ‘be’ in such cases is simply the carrier of the grammatical markers for tense, person and number. And when it is used to form passive constructions, it is again the other modifying elements in the predicate that create the conditions for passive reference. Even the so-called past passive participle does not by itself convey passive meaning in such constructions, its passive sense also being derived from the further context (explicit or implicit) in which such expressions are used: in a sentence like ‘He was dressed by his valet’ it is the ‘by’ phrase that makes the construction passive, whereas in ‘He was dressed when I walked in’ there is no passive sense at all, the participle being purely adjectival. In all of these instances the

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verb ‘be’ is completely neutral, providing only the vehicle for the grammatical markers. Finally, in expressions like ‘He is to go to jail tomorrow’, or ‘We are to wait here’, it is again not the verb ‘be’ that expresses the sense of destiny, objective, or goal, but the ensuing infinitival ‘to’ that imparts its quasi-directional or goal-oriented meaning in the same manner that ‘to’ does as a preposition or adverb, if one abstracts away from its more purely directional senses. In all of its contextual applications, therefore, the verb ‘be’ by itself is the truly neutral, unmarked lexical form, being nothing more than the vehicle through which is expressed whatever is given in the subsequent predicate context. Another obviously very basic member of the English verbal lexicon is the verb ‘have’, which is also used in the capacity of either a main verb or a socalled auxiliary. Since it is a transitive verb, it has built into its lexical meaning a potential object onto which the process will be directed. This built-in object implies, as we observed earlier, that there must be a plurality of perceptions involved in the underlying meaning of the verb, one that is realized as separate entities in the ensuing predicate complement (the direct object). Since separate entities exist only in the larger syntactic composition of the utterance, there is no separation inherent in the verb itself, so we have here a perfect example of the plurality feature as we have defined it in this study: a complex perception operation within the lexical meaning of the verb creating transitivity. Furthermore, since the plurality inherent in transitive verbs is always realized by the object that occurs in the given utterance, we would conclude that it is of the transmissionally deictic kind, just as we saw with determinate verbs of motion above, where the extension points specifically to the location mentioned the given utterance. Note also that by defining the built-in object as a complex perception operation rather than in the traditional sense of transitivity, we can also account for the use of ‘have’ as an auxiliary verb, where in this case the “object” realized is another verbal element. Which is to say that transitivity is best understood as a contextual variant of the more basic conceptual relation of plurality conceived as a complex perception operation that anticipates another element, in this case either nominal or verbal, in the ensuing contextualization. Indeed, the documented evolution of ‘have’ as a verb in English supports just such a conclusion, for it shows how the shift from an inflectional to an essentially syntactic language affected the function of ‘have’ historically. What we call the auxiliary verb ‘have’ clearly originated in the use of ‘have’ as a socalled main verb, and the primary determining factor in its evolution had to do with the changes taking place at the time in word order. Otto Jespersen described the situation this way: The use of have and had as an auxiliary for the perfect and the pluperfect began in the Old English period, but it was then chiefly found with transitive verbs, and the real

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perfect-signification had scarcely yet been completely evolved from the original meaning of the connexion: ic hoebbe pone fisc gefangenne meant at first ‘I have the fish (as) caught’ (note the accusative ending in the participle). By and by a distinction was made between ‘I had mended the table’ and ‘I had the table mended’, ‘He had left nothing’ and ‘He had nothing left’. In Middle English have came to be used exclusively in the perfect of intransitive verbs as well as transitive; I have been does not seem to occur earlier than 1200. (Jespersen 1938: section 217).

Although Jespersen’s purpose here was to show how the conventional notion of compound verb in English developed, what he has provided is in fact a rather vivid description of the evolution of the modification relation in English. The modification relation must already have begun evolving towards its current status already in the Old English period, for as the case system began to dissolve and word order itself started to express the object relation formerly inherent in the accusative case, the participle no longer acted solely as an adjective modifying the object to which it was post-posed, but began to modify the verb ‘have’ directly, thereby assuming more of a purely verbal function. This in turn allowed new distinctions in meaning to be generated depending on where the participial form now occurred. During the course of this evolutionary process, the meaning of the verb ‘have’, we must insist, merely expanded its range of contextualization as the possibilities for new kinds of modification situations arose. It did not become two (or more) different verbs, as conventional analyses often imply, based on its new usage as a so-called auxiliary verb. This evolutionary process, therefore, would have constituted a natural and organic development, given the general meaning associated with ‘have’ before these changes took place. There is a virtually limitless number of possible nouns that may modify the verb ‘have’ when it is the main verb in an utterance today, contextualizing its meaning in a potentially infinite number of ways, from possession (‘have a book’) to a relationship (‘have a sister’), a quality (‘have red hair’) a state (‘have your house burn down’), an activity (‘have an argument’), a feeling (‘have a grudge against’), and so forth. It may also be used in the sense of causing a particular action to be done (‘have my hair cut’; ‘have a copy made’; ‘have us worried’; etc.). While it may be challenging to find a common denominator of meaning associated with such a wide range of nominal complements, the task is actually made much easier if one looks first at the use of ‘have’ as a so-called auxiliary, where the predicate complement is another verb. Here it is quite evident that the process denoted by what we are accustomed to calling the main verb, has been completed and has produced a result in the given narrated situation. When ‘have’ is used as an auxiliary to form the perfect tense, for example, the action is presented as completed and valid

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in the given situation–e.g. ‘He has come’ necessarily implies that he is here. Likewise, whether ‘have’ is used to form the pluperfect (‘had come’), future perfect (‘will have come’), or conditional mood (‘would have come’, ‘had he come’), the use of the verb ‘have’ always implies that the result of the action denoted by the accompanying verbal complement is still valid as far as the events being described in the given situation are concerned, whether it be in the past (pluperfect), future (future perfect) or a hypothetical situation (conditional). And it is just this sense of completion producing a result that unites the various senses of ownership, encompassment, inclusiveness, or containment that occur when ‘have’ is used with a nominal complement. Whether the predicate complement is a noun or another verb, therefore, we may conclude that we are dealing here with a kind of lexical perfectivity on a par with grammatical perfectivity; and consequently we would propose that ‘have’ is marked for perceptionally deictic dimensionality along with transmissionally deictic plurality. Let us pause here for a moment and consider the implications of what we have just observed about the two verbs ‘be’ and ‘have’. In traditional parlance, where one applies the linear logic of predication to the syntax of sentences in a language like English, we speak of auxiliary and main verbs, just have we have learned to do in grade school. But when, on the other hand, we look beyond the linear logic of traditional grammar and treat the order of elements in a sentence as a function of the modification relations according to which signs relate to one another at the supra-rational level of consciousness, as we did in the chapter on syntax above, then the conventional distinction between main and auxiliary verbs loses its relevance, and the properly monosemic character of the verbs ‘be’ and ‘have’ in English becomes more evident. Each, in its own way, is simply a verbal sign whose invariant meaning we are able to capture by considering the manner in which these verbs (as any verb) modify their subject and in turn are modified by their ensuing predicate complements, whether that complement be another verb, a noun, or some other element(s). Viewed in this manner, the verb ‘be’ is, as it were, a place holder, a completely unmarked verbal sign that can stand on its own (indicating mere existence) or be the vehicle for linking whatever complements modify it to the subject. And by the same token, ‘have’ signifies in all of its occurrences that there is an anticipated modifier of whatever part of speech that is, as it were, fully encompassed as a result of the subject performing the process. By viewing the contextualization of linguistic signs in this manner, we maintain their integrity as phenomenal properties of language whose function as signs is their defining characteristic, operating at the most profound level of consciousness. And the fact that

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it is only these two verbs that appear to function as auxiliaries probably has something to do with the nature of their markings as two of the least marked verbs in the language: ‘be’ the unmarked verb and ‘have’ marked for only the first two features in the hierarchy. Moving on now to other verbs, let us consider the verb ‘do’ which is also a very basic member of the English verbal lexicon. As with many other verbs in English, it may be either transitive or intransitive in the conventional sense. You can ‘do something’ or you can ‘make do’; you can ‘do me a favor’ or you can ‘do as I do’; you can ‘do the best you can’ or ‘do without’; and so forth. Therefore, since it may or may not be transitive, it must be unmarked for transmissionally deictic plurality. Otherwise, what ‘do’ signifies is pure process, either the performance of something or simply the act of performing itself. If it has an object, the object identifies what the process is; if there is no object then it is itself the process whose further identification is given only by what is implied in the given context. The verb ‘do’ also acts as a proxy for whatever verbal process has already been identified in the given narrated situation, on the one hand, and it is the element that must be inserted when questioning a given verbal action on the other: ‘Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife…? I do.’ It also functions as an intensifier of whatever other verb is expressed in the context: ‘Please do come.’ There is probably no clearer example of verbal lexical extension than this, for the verbal process is by definition the element that identifies what in fact is being validated in a given narrated situation, the core of what we call predication. And so we would conclude that ‘do’ is marked for perceptionally deictic extension. The verb ‘go’ is an especially intriguing verb in the English lexicon because while it may ostensibly be a verb of motion, it has significantly more contextual applications that do not have to do with motion per se: ‘go crazy’, ‘go to sleep’, ‘go by the name of’, ‘as the story goes’, ‘this tie goes with that shirt’, and so forth. Now we saw earlier with verbs of motion in Russian that they are, as a class, marked for the perceptionally deictic form of cancellation. What we observe with English ‘go’ is just how much contextual richness (metaphorical potentiality) there is in such a genuinely abstract conceptual property as cancellation that can be exploited by a sign like this. For even though there may not be any motion per se implied, there is in all the contextualizations of English ‘go’ a clear sense that one is in another place or state by virtue of performing the process, just as we saw with the prepositions ‘up’ and ‘down’ earlier. Thus to ‘go crazy’ implies one is no longer sane; to ‘go to sleep’ means one is no longer awake; to ‘go by the name of’ suggests there is a situation somewhere where the name is relevant; in ‘this tie goes with that shirt’ our

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attention is directed to how the tie will appear in the ensuing context defined by the shirt; and so forth. It is important to note that this other place or state is not always identified by subsequent modifiers, so in the limiting case one is merely leaving the starting point without any indication of where one might end up: ‘as the story goes’ is a perfect example of metaphorical motion pure and simple, on a par with other motion expressions that do not specify any particular goal, as in ‘Please go’. Even (or especially) the most colloquial use of ‘go’–as in ‘And then he goes…’ followed by what ‘he’ said–conforms to exactly the same pattern, where ‘go’ takes us from the initial point (the previous implied situation) to whatever it is that ‘he’ may have said. Consequently, we would conclude that English ‘go’ in all of its varied manifestations, is clearly marked for perceptionally deictic cancellation. Finally, let us consider the English verb ‘get’, which also has a wide range of contextual applications. It has a somewhat more complicated structure than the preceding verbs, but it provides a good example of how these features combine to create subsets within classes defined by one or another feature. The verb ‘get’ can be transitive or intransitive in the conventional sense of these terms: one can obtain something (‘get a commission’), fetch something (‘get the ball’), capture something (‘get a criminal’), receive something (‘get a present’); or ‘get’ can simply imply reaching a new state (‘get rich’), becoming (‘get cold’), and so forth. Additionally, there are a host of other situations that can be ‘gotten’: one can ‘get along’, ‘get going’, ‘get around’, ‘get by’, ‘get back at’, and so on. What this evidence actually shows from a properly sign theoretical perspective, however, is that the verb ‘get’ always takes a complement, whether or not it is transitive in the conventional sense; and this fact is once again accounted for precisely by the feature of plurality defined in the properly abstract sense of this study. That is to say, there is a second perception built into the verb ‘get’ that may be realized in a host of different ways: not only as a traditional direct object, but also as a state or some other condition. Therefore, ‘get’ would be marked for transmissionally deictic plurality in the same sense as ‘have’, which also always implies the existence of a predicate complement in either its main or so-called auxiliary function; but in contradistinction to both ‘do’ and ‘go’, which may or may not imply a complement. Beyond that, what the verb ‘get’ ultimately signifies, it would seem, is a kind of ‘having’ (marked for transmissionally deictic plurality and perceptionally deictic dimensionality) that is, in much the same manner as ‘go’, attained only in a subsequent situation: to ‘get’ something means to ultimately have it. Therefore it would seem logical to conclude that ‘get’ is also marked for perceptionally deictic cancellation, signifying a ‘having’ that is not achieved in the given situation but only upon leaving it behind.

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What this preliminary set of examples suggests is not only that the conceptual features we have defined in this study are capable of accounting for the full range of contextual possibilities associated with particular verbal lexical signs, but also that they and their combinatory possibilities ultimately categorize whole classes of verbs. Their systemic properties, therefore, constitute an equally essential feature of this approach to linguistic sign theory, just as we saw with the Russian case and prepositional system. Although we have provided only an initial indication of how such systems are built from these fundamental conceptual properties (relations), it is not difficult to imagine how additional combinations of these features, in both their perceptional and transmissional guises, can account for the various lexical items that comprise a given class of verbs. Thus, for example, we may assume that the verb ‘exist’ in English is a kind of ‘being’ that has been “objectivized”, and would therefore be marked for objectiveness. And ‘keep’, since it is a kind of ‘having’ that persists in the given situation, would be marked similar to ‘have’ with the addition of the extension feature. And so forth. This is not the place to engage in a more detailed discussion of verbal lexical meaning, as that would entail an entire volume in and of itself. A more extensive application of this approach was suggested some time ago by van Schooneveld, examining the Russian verbal lexical system, and the reader is referred to that work. (van Schooneveld 1983) Suffice it to say for the moment, though, that with these two deictic varieties of the six conceptual features we have identified as archetypes of meaning, we now have potentially twelve binary oppositions, and the total number of distinct signs (lexical as well as grammatical) that can be generated by such a system is therefore 212 or 4096 items, a significant number that one could argue may or may not account for the entire verbal lexicon of a language like English. Estimates of the number of verbal lexical items in English are notoriously unreliable, as it is not always clear how these counts have been arrived at–whether they consider only those root morphemes that are originally (diachronically) verbal and not those that have been derived from nominal roots; whether they include other derivational forms such as prefixed and suffixed verbs formed off one and the same root; and so forth. That may in the end not matter because as we move into the realm of the nominal lexicon, as we are about to do, we will see that there are still other ways these features multiply themselves besides the two types of deixis illustrated here, further supporting the premise that the referential potential of even the most open-ended and seemingly concrete signs ultimately derives from the archetypes of meaning that constitute the structure of mind at the most profound level of consciousness.

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7.3 Nominal lexical systems What still remains to be seen is how the kinds of abstract features presented in this study could also constitute the underlying structure of nominal systems. This is clearly the more daunting task, since the substantival lexicon is not only significantly larger than that of verbs, in fact open-ended, but also because it would seem that we are dealing in this case not with reference to processes, which certainly can be understood as less conscious mental states that are arguably more likely to be structured by such a set of features, but to the salient qualities of things as they appear to us in our conscious awareness. Nevertheless, as the example of English ‘table’ presented above certainly suggests, the same principles could and should apply, for even at this level the essence of a linguistic sign is still to structure our experience of reality by creating distinctions that may not be immediately evident, that may not derive from what we consciously think we know about the real world. Typically, however, analysis of the nominal lexicon has remained at a superficial level of relatively concrete, conscious distinctions. It is still commonplace for linguists to consider features like animacy, gender, and the like to be fundamental semantic categories, and even to employ binary theory to mark lexical items as + or – animate, + or – female, + or – human, and so forth. (See, for example, Saeed 1997: 231–233) But it should be obvious from everything that has been said previously that this type of categorization is still wedded to the notion that semantic concepts line up with the perceived properties of real-world phenomena. Words like ‘king’ and ‘queen’, to take a typical example, are not inherently male or female, or even for that matter animate, since they are used in contexts that have nothing to do with either gender or animacy. That is to say, the metaphorical expansion that is fundamental to the use of any linguistic sign naturally contextualizes signs like these in ways that demonstrate rather convincingly that something other than such superficial characteristics, something having more to do with size and status in this particular case, is what governs their true underlying meaning. So, for example, one refers to the large, dominating members of various species, whether or not they are male, with the word ‘king’ (e.g. ‘king cobra’, ‘king penguin’); or even more revealing, to the dominating characteristic of any situation (e.g. ‘king of beasts’, ‘king of the hill’). Nor is animacy necessarily an inherent feature of such words, as its use in inanimate situations clearly testifies (e.g. ‘kingpin’– a main or large bolt in a central position, or a vertical bolt used as a pivot; or ‘king post’–an upright post from the tie beam of a roof to the apex of a trust). The non-animate distinctions between ‘king’ and ‘queen’ in English are especially revealing: the ‘queen post’ is distinguished from the ‘king post’ as one

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of two upright timbers between the tie beam and principal rafters of a roof truss, clearly a relation of subordination having nothing to do with either animacy or gender. Then, of course, there is the common distinction between a ‘king-sized bed’ and a ‘queen-sized bed’. So when pursuing lexical semantics from a sign-theoretical point of view, even where nouns are concerned, we need to be looking for more abstract and less superficially evident properties than the ones we can consciously manipulate metaphorically at a contextual level, features that will allow us to understand these more superficial characteristics in their proper light, as contextual variants of the truly relational properties of higher-order consciousness. Some recent theories do posit more profound ways of understanding lexicalization as a cognitive process. Two of the most interesting ones operate on the assumption that the way lexical concepts are acquired ontogenetically reflects the way the mind ultimately structures experience. One such theory that has received much attention in recent years is Wierzbicka’s semantic primes and universals. (Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard and Wierzbicka, eds. 2002) This approach does take individual signs as carriers of meaning, operating on the principle that our most basic or primitive concepts are encoded in certain basic words. These are the words, it is said, that do not need dictionary definitions to be comprehended, that do not need other signs to define their meaning. They embody concepts that we learn from our earliest associations with language, and there is indeed evidence to show that they have universal or cross-cultural significance because virtually all languages appear to have words for these most primordial concepts. The set of proposed semantic primes also does include verbs that we in this study have considered most basic, such as ‘be’ (in the form of ‘there is’ and ‘is’), ‘do’, and ‘have’. But it also includes words that are not as basic as those that would result from a purely sign-theoretical analysis of the type we are presenting here. For example, one proposed semantic prime is the word ‘move’, not ‘go’, even though ‘move’ is surely a more marked version of ‘go’. ‘Move’ has the additional connotation of a type of motion (whether actual or metaphorical) that is defined specifically with respect to the given situation, that is by a transmissionally deictic form of cancellation. ‘Please go’, for example, implies simply leaving, initiating the action from “here” understood generically, whereas ‘please move’ focuses attention specifically on the spot where you are. The proposed set of primes also includes the word ‘say’, which is arguably a more marked form of ‘speak’. ‘Speak’ refers more to the act of speaking and may therefore be either intransitive or transitive in the traditional sense. When used transitively, its object is more generic: e.g. ‘speak one’s mind’, ‘speak

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French’, ‘speak the truth’, ‘speak volumes’, etc. ‘Say’, on the other hand, is except for one instance always transitive and its objects relate directly to the given speech situation, coming into being, as it were, in the given situation by virtue of the verbal process: ‘say your prayers’, ‘say what you feel’, ‘say there will be war’, etc. Its use as an adjective also makes this clear: e.g. ‘the said (i.e., aforementioned) document’. It therefore certainly has the more marked transmissional deixis, which its one intransitive usage, as an exclamation pertaining directly to the moment at hand, also makes abundantly clear: ‘Oh say can you see’. Staying with verbal primes for the moment, it is no doubt significant that so many of them are either transitive in the conventional sense or would be marked for transmissionally deictic plurality in any case in terms of this study. Thus the list includes ‘hear’ rather than ‘listen’, as well as ‘want’, ‘see’ and ‘feel’. It also specifically includes ‘there is’ and ‘is’ rather than ‘be’ itself. This certainly follows naturally from the underlying premise of the theory, that semantic primes are those words that are experienced at the earliest stages of language acquisition and therefore, we may surmise, are those that reflect the fact that language acquisition begins at the point where one is first recognizing the difference between the self and the other, between here and there, and perhaps even more significantly that these more basic concepts are first understood in terms of the things they produce and how those relate to the self. From this perspective there is no doubt that such semantic primes are real, and indeed they have been verified by evidence from a wide range of languages. But whether they represent the ultimate structure of consciousness that develops along with the growth of the language faculty beyond these earliest stages is an open question. That appears to be the reasoning in the theory of semantic primes, where the set of primal words and the set of rules for combining them into meaningful sentences (the “universal syntax of meaning”, as they are called) is said to constitute a Natural Semantic Metalanguage, a core language that provides the basis upon which the language faculty is predicated. On the other hand, it could well be that what we are looking at here is rather a strictly developmental process, one where this primal appreciation of words eventually gives way to a structure that has not yet been activated at these early stages. It is just as likely, for example, that at the onset of language learning, one first acquires an understanding of what words can do based on relatively limited experience first associating words with actions and things and how they relate to the self, reflecting the degree to which they provide positive feedback to the fledgling organism. At this stage the child has not yet experienced enough signing activity to fully activate the relational structure that is latent in the brain and will eventually take over and govern

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the process. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that during the initial formative stages of human language acquisition the words (signs) that are being learned are tied more to the present than to each other. By this reasoning, comprehension of the potential inherent in signing activity would not come until a later stage that would eventually entail the unconscious realization that words are related to other words and not to experience in the immediate present, activating the biogram that previously had been latent in the fledgling brain. Thus the theory of semantic primes is most likely correct in assuming that prime words are conceptualized as wholes needing no further translation in terms of other signs in the earliest stages of language acquisition, but sign theory would also be correct in assuming that this primal stage of conceptual development is eventually outgrown. The extraordinarily long gestation period of the human language faculty, not fully in place until after the age of ten, would certainly justify such a conclusion. As for the set of nominal elements in the theory of semantic primes, the list is also very revealing. It contains the substantives ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘someone/ person’, and ‘people’ and a category of relational substantives that includes ‘something/thing’, ‘body’, ‘kind’, and ‘part’. These are just the kinds of signs one would expect to find given the preceding argument, where the initial appreciation of words is made in the process of coming to terms with the self and its relation to the other in the relatively more restricted, immediate environment of early child language acquisition, where the relation to people, especially, and to the notion of thing is front and center in the learning process. Therefore, if this early stage of language development contains the seeds but not the ultimate structure of how signs contextualize their meaning, then we need to look elsewhere to determine how nouns relate to one another in a relational system of signs. That place may well be in the theory of cognitive grammar; but since there are significant theoretical differences between that approach and sign theory, let us again carefully review the differences before considering the ways in which the insights of cognitive grammar can be useful in determining how the nominal lexicon might be structured from a sign-theoretical perspective. Like the theory of semantic primes, cognitive grammar also operates on the principle that lexical categorization builds from a set of core categories established during the early stages of child language learning. The core or central senses of words are generally understood to be those that relate to the space-time coordinates of our primary neuro-physiological experience, and it is from this palpable, pre-linguistic categorization that “extended” senses are created by mappings from one conceptual domain to another. The process, moreover, assumes polysemy to be the norm:

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In the simplest cases, lexical items are pairings of phonological forms with individual concepts. But such simple cases are rare exceptions. Polysemy is the norm. Most words have a number of systematically related meanings. Many cases of polysemy … are sanctioned by conceptual metaphors – cross domain mappings in the conceptual system. (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 499)

The process is said to operate in the following manner: Because we are neural beings, we categorize. Because neural systems optimize, we extend categories radially, adding minimal extensions to the central category structures that we already have. Because children’s earliest categories are perceptual-motor categories, we all have a central category of bounded physical objects that is extended as we grow older. Neural optimization extends the central subcategory of bounded physical objects to a radial category on the basis of existing conceptual metaphors and other neurally based cognitive mechanisms. The result is a radial category centered around bounded physical objects (persons, places, and things) and extended from this simple center in many ways. Conceptual metaphor extends persons, places, and things to metaphorical persons, places, and things…: states (metaphorical locations), activities (metaphorical objects, locations, or paths), ideas (metaphorical objects or locations), institutions (metaphorical persons), and other metaphorically comprehended abstract concepts. (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 500)

We will come back to the concept of “bounded physical objects” in a moment, but for now let us look at how the different components of this theory fit together, for they do indeed create a compelling picture. The observation that child language acquisition begins with an early phase where perceptual-motor categorization is paramount and that the categories learned at this early stage extend farther afield as one grows older fits perfectly with the conventional concept of metaphor, where the projection of meaning is understood as proceeding from the literal to the non-literal in a discontinuous process of transition from one conceptual domain to another; all of which assumes the fundamentally polysemous nature of meaning. Sign theory, on the other hand, provides a quite different picture of how the “neural optimization” that lies behind this developmental process takes place. In sign theory, contextualization–which as we have also insisted is fundamentally metaphorical–is conceived as a purely stochastic process that knows neither direction nor boundaries, but is achieved by the infinite and ever expanding contextualization of underlying sign relations that are by definition potentialities embodied in the fundamentally monosemic character of the linguistic sign. But to put this process into effect requires that the early language learner has sufficient experience with the manipulation of linguistic signs to realize (unconsciously of course) that the initial attempts at playing this game were essentially trial and error, and consequently the early, necessarily sensori-motor means of relating

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to the environment would eventually be outgrown once full activation of the semiotic biogram kicks in. Cognitive grammar (Langacker 1987: 189) also maintains that it is the semantic pole of a noun, verb, or other symbolic unit that governs the conceptualization process, conceptual domains being by definition pre-linguistic, whereas we would of course insist that it is rather the phonological pole, which establishes that one signifier is different from another, that creates the differences that make a difference underlying the process of concept formation at the most profound level of consciousness. That having been said, there is of course much in common between these two approaches that deserves further exploration. Indeed, the conceptual domains of cognitive grammar, as they have been applied to the analysis of the nominal lexicon, are very revealing and, as we shall see, quite compatible with, and very helpful in confirming, the kinds of features we have identified in this study, especially in the realm of the nominal lexicon. The cognitive approach to the analysis of nouns begins with the assumption that “Nouns name Things” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 500), but not in the sense of those who insist upon the correspondence theory of truth, where the things referred to are phenomena in extra-linguistic reality. In cognitive grammar, meaning is not objectively given, but constructed, even for expressions pertaining to objective reality. We therefore cannot account for meaning by describing objective reality, but only by describing the cognitive routines that constitute a person’s understanding of it. The subject matter of semantic analysis is human conceptualization, and the structures of concern are those that a person imposes on his mental experience through active cognitive processing. (Langacker 1987: 194)

So when a noun is said to designate a thing, what is meant is that a noun “is a symbolic structure whose semantic pole instantiates the schema [THING]”. The [THING] schema, moreover, is specifically understood as a “region in some domain”, where the notion of “region” is further defined as “a set of mutually interconnected entities,” and an “entity” is “anything that can be conceived of or referred to for analytical purposes”. (Langacker 1987: Glossary) Within this schema count nouns, those whose referents are perceived as individual entities existing either alone (‘a book’) or in multiples of individual entities (‘ten books’, ‘several books’, etc.), constitute a specific kind of region, namely a “bounded” region in some domain, where the bounding is again understood in an appropriately abstract sense, one that creates individuation in whatever way that allows for enumeration of the resulting region. The concept of bounded region certainly encompasses individual physical objects and things in three-dimensional space, since what gives them cognitive significance is

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their physical or spatial discreteness. But it also includes many other kinds of entities; and this is where cognitive grammar proves to be most useful in treating the concept of thing in sign-theoretical terms. To be a genuine cognitive construct, the concept of bounded region “must be interpreted abstractly enough to overcome the limitations of its spatial origin.” Ultimately one must deal with “virtual boundaries”– “the imputation of boundaries where they have no objective existence at all”. (The quotations here and below are taken from Langacker 1987: Chapter 5.) Achieving an appropriate level of abstractness is, of course, what the conceptual features defined in this study are all about, allowing the linguistic sign to conceptualize aspects of the environment that do not emanate from external reality itself. In cognitive grammar, the way that boundaries are established is not so much by creating outlines, physically or otherwise, but by the adherence or coherence of their component parts. Where physical objects adhere as solids, other more abstract kinds of objects cohere according to the manner in which their component parts relate to one another. In both instances, therefore, what makes the phenomenon a bounded region that can be enumerated is in the final analysis its manner of individuation, which can vary from one type of thing to another. And the resulting individuation is precisely what is given by the distinctness feature in our system, the first feature in the hierarchy of features that creates the separation necessary to perceive individual entities, ones whose separate existence allows them to be counted. So with the help of cognitive grammar, we now have a viable feature specification for the category of count noun. Within this framework, different kinds of count nouns would then be analyzed in terms of additional features that capture the semantic essence of the manner in which their component parts cohere. So, for example, when nouns like ‘swarm’, ‘archipelago’, and ‘forest’, which refer to physical objects, are analyzed in cognitive grammar as bounded regions within the primary domain of space that in addition “designate an entity comprising an indeterminate number of component members that are not themselves separately profiled”, we have near perfect rendering of the features of distinctness (the bounded region) and plurality (the lack of separation among the members constituting the group). Similarly, nouns like ‘team’, ‘set’, or ‘class’, also constitute bounded regions, but they do so more abstractly. In the word ‘team’, “spatial relations are less important than cooperative activity towards a common objective”; and with ‘set’ or ‘class’, there is “commonality regardless of where (and whether) its members are located in space”. Here again the features of distinctness and plurality allow us to capture what is common to these types of words at the appropriate level of abstractness – i.e. non-spatial coherence of undiffer-

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entiated components establishing the manner in which individuation of the whole is manifested. In a noun like ‘team’, however, there is something more than just coherence of the component entities involved. There is an “interconnectedness” that needs to be captured as well. Specifically, “the members of a team are interconnected through their role as participants in a conceived relationship, namely a cooperative effort towards the attainment of a common goal”. The existence of such functional relationships as the defining characteristic of the region is also evident in nouns like ‘orchestra’, ‘ensemble’, ‘quartet’, ‘crew’, ‘cast’, ‘staff’, ‘league’, ‘army’, and ‘family’. Thus there is a whole class of nouns that can be analyzed in terms of the functional interrelationship of their component parts, which certainly suggests, recalling our previous consideration of function as a relevant property, that this class is also marked for extension. When we use a noun like ‘orchestra’, we do not just think of the orchestra as a thing nor the players as individuals; we think of the role that its various members play functioning together as a group. Likewise, the concept of ‘family’ conjures up the image of members interrelating, and it is this functional aspect again that determines how a noun like ‘family’ will be understood in a given situation. Here we have, then, some examples of how the features of this study correspond well with the characteristics of count nouns identified in cognitive grammar. Let us consider next the analysis of mass nouns, those that designate phenomena that do not enumerate but quantify rather by qualifiers like ‘some’, ‘much’, or ‘enough’. Whereas, again in Langacker’s words, “a count noun designates a region that is specifically construed as being bounded within the scope of predication in a primary domain, … a mass noun designates a region that is not so construed”. In our terms, “not so construed” would clearly imply that mass nouns are unmarked for distinctness, since they may or may not be bounded within the scope of predication. The fact that many mass nouns can act as either mass or count nouns confirms this conclusion, for being unmarked for a feature means precisely that the sign involved may or may not be specified in that regard. Thus we can speak of ‘cloth’ or ‘a cloth’, ‘stone’ or ‘a stone’, ‘beer’ or ‘a beer’, and so forth. The concept of “scope of predication” (the narrated situation, in our terms) turns out to be crucial here, for count nouns are said to function within the scope of predication, whereas mass nouns may not. “The interaction between bounding and scope of predication is responsible for this difference”. The characterization of mass nouns “does not preclude the possibility of bounding for the designated region; bounding is just not specifically imposed by the nominal predication itself”. Furthermore, the fact that only count nouns pluralize is symptomatic of the difference,

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for “the region designated by a mass noun lacks this property of replicability because there is no specification of bounding… One never reaches the point where a single instance of the category is definitely exhausted”. The phenomenon designated by a mass noun “extends without inherent limit, and consequently grows by expansion rather than replication.” In fact, “the designatum of a mass noun displays indefinite expansibility and contractibility”. Transposing this set of observations into the conceptual features of this study naturally leads to the conclusion that mass nouns, while being unmarked for distinctness, would be marked for objectiveness, for that is precisely what it means to say that a phenomenon extends without limit “beyond” (is potentially maximally distant from) the scope of predication, just as we saw previously with the genitive case and the future tense. Ironically, it is the third category, that of abstract nouns, that poses the greatest challenge, since the lexical items in this category do not appear to have thing-like qualities and therefore do not seem to lend themselves very well to the concept of a noun as the name of a thing, to be analyzable in terms of regions in some domain. Here again, however, Langacker’s analysis can be instructive. He suggests that while abstract nouns are normally considered a third distinct type of noun, they nevertheless act in the manner of either count or mass nouns and may therefore be analyzed accordingly, designating regions that may be bounded or unbounded. Some, of course, may function in either category. For example, many deverbal nominalizations act as count nouns, designating “a single episode of the process designated by the verb stem: jump, walk, dance, complaint, fight, argument", and the like–i.e., one can refer to ‘a dance’, ‘a complaint’, ‘an argument’, and so forth, indicating that they constitute a bounded region within the scope of predication. Others clearly behave as mass nouns: e.g. dispair, destruction, love, hope, concern, etc., thereby constituting unbounded regions, quite analogous to nouns like water, concrete, gold, and so forth. In the case of these latter nouns, we could therefore legitimately conclude that, despite their genuinely abstract nature and their inability to be brought into the scope of predication, they may nevertheless be treated as “abstract ‘substances’ analogous in many ways to physical substances”. That doesn’t leave us very much to go on, except to conclude that abstract nouns must be marked according to their function in one or the other category: distinctness when they act like count nouns and objectiveness when they act like mass nouns. Taken as a whole, these observations suggest that the conceptual properties identified by the features underlying the sign relations of this study are compatible with (or at the very least not incompatible with) the categories of cognitive grammar, which has provided the tools necessary to understand the

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conceptualization of things in an appropriately abstract manner. And so we have further evidence that one can operate at the level of abstractness deemed necessary in this study and find confirmation for these types of features in other studies of human cognitive processing. Before concluding this section, let us look at another area where cognitive grammar has had significant influence and consider next how sign theory would handle the kind of hierarchies or levels of categorization that are the subject of prototype theory. We will not be concerned here with the concept of prototype itself, as that is more a matter of the psychology of language use, specifically of determining which items are the so-called “best examples” of a category or which display the most features in common with the category, based largely, as the research indicates, on statistical evidence related to how words are used in particular frames of reference. (Croft and Cruze 2004: 81– 82) In sign theory, on the other hand, statistical predominance is not definitive; we need to determine what the underlying invariant features are that two hierarchically related signs have in common regardless of the frames of reference in which they may be used. Such frames of reference certainly may have psychological relevance, but they are nevertheless still by definition contextual phenomena that do not address the invariant semantic potential inherent in the underlying sign relations themselves as properties of higher-order consciousness. Let us take as an example the semantic hierarchy indicated by the signs ‘forest’ > ‘tree’ > ‘maple’. The first thing we need to acknowledge with respect to ‘forest’ is that it does not necessarily refer to a bounded region of trees. Trees are undoubtedly the prototypical sub-category of forests, but they constitute only one frame of reference in which the word ‘forest’ occurs, only one type of entity that can populate a forest. The conceptual essence of ‘forest’ is more abstract and may include any set of vertical entities: e.g. ‘a forest of masts’ (in a harbor), ‘a forest of legs’ (in a crowd of people viewed from the perspective of a toddler, say), ‘a forest of spikes’ (in someone’s hairdo), and so forth. This, of course, demonstrates that the hierarchy from ‘forest’ to ‘tree’ is itself a contextual phenomenon and not one that would be central to our understanding of either word at the level at which signs relate to one another at the supra-rational level of consciousness. Rather, we would be obliged to conclude in this case that the defining sign relation, what trees have in common with forests that ultimately makes them a candidate for the prototype, is their vertical dimension; and verticality, we may stipulate, is a property that establishes a silhouette that sets a phenomenon apart from its background. Verticality does not create separation, only a profile, a shape that becomes the focus of our attention. And we would therefore conclude that the operative feature here is dimensionality.

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Trees themselves, of course, are vertical in the spatial sense, but dimensionality is not their only feature. As the metaphorical uses of ‘tree’ make clear, it is the branching as well as the verticality that underlies the concept of ‘tree’. We as linguists know all about the branching aspect of trees, having made innumerable theoretical assumptions based on the diagrammatic potential trees provide, as have other investigators from biologists to genealogists: e.g. ‘evolutionary tree’, ‘family tree’, etc. Now the nodes and branches that characterize the concept of tree are the very epitome of separation, so here we do have a visual or graphic representation of distinctness where one perceives a multitude of individual entities emerging from the vertical profile of a dimensional space. Note that while we may consider the functional relations that tree diagrams are used for by linguists to be in some sense pertinent, there is no extension here, as there is with the functional aspects germane to the conceptual essence of ‘table’ and ‘team’ that we saw previously; for while modeling functional relations may be the use to which such diagrams are put, they are not germane to our understanding of the underlying concept of ‘tree’. They are no more relevant to the conceptual content of the form as a linguistic sign than is the fact that palm trees, for example, technically have fronds rather than branches, which is a matter of biology, not the cognitive process of concept formation that recognizes fronds and branches as equivalent properties in establishing the distinctness inherent in the semantic structure of the word ‘tree’. What we have here so far, then, is a hierarchy of features that define a word like ‘tree’. At the level of count noun, it is marked for distinctness, bringing the concept of thing specifically into the scope of predication. And at the level distinguishing one count noun from another, it is marked for dimensionality and distinctness. Thus one and the same feature, distinctness in this case, occurs at more than one increasingly circumscribed level in the hierarchy that defines the conceptual content of the form. At the next level in the gradient of lexical items noted above we have the relation between ‘tree’ and ‘maple’. Now ‘maple’ may not be the best exemplar (the prototype) of the category ‘tree’, but it is one of a very large number of possible trees the words for which ought to be accounted for in some fashion by sign theory. In order to do this, we need to consider a further extension of the notion of deixis and its role in establishing the various guises in which the features of this study may occur. Previously we made the distinction between perceptionally deictic and transmissionally deictic categories, following van Schooneveld’s expansion of Jakobson’s notion of shifters. Though we haven’t specified which form of deixis is involved in the features we have identified so far with respect to the nominal lexicon, it should be rather obvious that we

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are dealing with the perceptional variety here. Unlike verbs, which determine how the process that is central to predication is effected and may therefore have either type of deixis depending on whether they signify generally or specifically with respect to the given speech event, nouns name things (in the abstract sense of this study, of course) perceivable to any objective observer privy to the code of the language. At least that is the conclusion that seems most evident at this early stage in the application of sign theory to the nominal lexicon. As van Schooneveld’s work on the different types of deixis has suggested, there is yet another type we need to consider. That is the distinction between so-called “singulative” and “non-singulative” perceptional and transmissional deixis. (van Schooneveld 1991; Andrews 1991) Singulative perceptional deixis is particularly evident in proper names, and in the phenomenon of anaphora. In these categories, reference is made to one, unique narrated event that cannot be further analyzed. Singulative perceptional deixis “generalizes the ungeneralazibility, that is, the absolute individuality of the perception act.” The signs in this category “have no generic meaning but are purely deictic in the sense of pointing”. (van Schooneveld 1991: 349) In singulative transmissional deixis, the one unique reference is made solely to the actual given pronunciation of the utterance. This type of deixis appears not to define any particular types of signs, so we do not need to be concerned with this type here, but it would be what accounts for the sequential arrangement of morphemes within a word, the concatenation of lexical roots, word formative prefixes and suffixes, and grammatical inflections. It is the perceptional type of singulative deixis that interests us here, for it may be extended in the following way to account for the individual names of trees, and indeed to any phenomena that are nothing but exemplars of some higher category. A proper noun, for example, has singulative deixis in the sense that it makes reference to a unique instance, a one-off phenomenon that cannot be further analyzed. There is no John-ness, for example, that can be defined or generalized any further than the identification of (the mere pointing to) some individual being mentioned–an exemplar of the concept of ‘person’. And it is in just this sense that we can understand the different names for trees: they are, as it were, the proper names of trees. They can be described in biological terms, of course, but linguistically they are nothing more than exemplars of the concept of ‘tree’. Therefore, the signs for ‘maple’, ‘palm’, ‘elm’ and so forth would all be marked for the singulative perceptional type of the set of features that identifies ‘tree’. With the concept of singulative perceptional deixis, therefore, we can account for a whole host of nouns that are nothing more than exemplars of

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some higher category, those signs that designate objects which would otherwise appear to be too “concrete” to ever be described by a set of features as abstract as the ones we have identified in this study. These would be the ones that in Ruhl’s analysis are situated at the extreme end of his scale from language to reality, the ones with concrete reference that are said to derive from our conscious knowledge of the world. We argued previously against Ruhl’s Vocabulary Principle on the grounds that external reality cannot play a greater or lesser role in the referential process, despite the fact that we are more consciously aware of what lexical items, especially nouns at the far end of this scale, refer to than grammatical ones on the opposite end of the scale. With the concept of singulative perceptional deixis, we now have the requisite construct to show that the notion of exemplar, as it occurs at the very lowest level in the hierarchy where nouns appear to have no further componential properties of their own and therefore seem to refer directly to objects in the real world, is explainable by the same universal cognitive process of deixis that everywhere operates at the supra-rational level of consciousness. In conclusion, let me underscore the intent of this chapter, which has been to demonstrate the potential of this type of analysis in the lexical sphere. What has been presented here is necessarily programmatic, dictated by the scarcity of existing studies on the lexicon from this theoretical perspective. Performing feature analysis at the level of abstraction required by the tenets of sign theory is certainly a challenging task, but it is one that needs to be pursued if we are going to understand the functioning of signs at the supra-rational level of consciousness. Let us continue this investigation now by looking further into the nature of the features themselves, to determine how they structure consciousness at this level, and what evidence there is for them outside of language proper.

8 The feature hierarchy that defines human conceptual space Having now established the properly glottological nature of a set of conceptual features that consistently explain the occurrence of sign relations at all levels of language, we are in a position to consider in greater detail the inherent characteristics of such a set of features, so that we have a basis upon which to examine correlations with other areas of human cognition at the suprarational level. Since the correlations that we will be examining involve realms of consciousness that are often considered transcendental in the metaphysical sense, it is important that we first explain the position we are taking here carefully. That is to say, although what we will find are correspondences in the field of consciousness research known as transpersonal psychology, for example, we will not be claiming the same transcendental status as is normally given such findings in that area of research itself. The position taken here in this regard is rather that of Lévi-Strauss who, in applying Jakobson’s binary principle to the structural study of myth–the second of the areas in which we will find significant correlations–insisted that his approach was a metascience, not a metaphysics. As we noted in the introduction, structuralism for him was a search for the “symbolic structure invoking the hidden order of experience”, a true precursor of today’s cognitive studies. (Wilcken 2010: 182) It is important to define exactly what we mean in this regard because the structural approach, and Jakobson’s linguistics in particular, as we also noted in the introduction, have sometimes been labeled a form of Kantian idealism, which this study decidedly is not. While the meaning of a linguistic sign and the relation that underlies it are by definition self-referential, they are by no means divorced from physical reality. In fact, they require the dynamic interaction with experience in actual speech events for their very existence. The concept of contextualization that we have developed here adopts the Peircean notion of symbol: a potentiality which can never be fully realized, a general rule with an indefinite future which signifies only through individual instances of its use. The two sides of this equation therefore necessarily presuppose and require each other. The process by which signification in this sense takes place is by the speaker choosing which pole of a sign relation to express in a given situation (in praesentia), leaving the opposite pole of the relation unspoken (in absentia) yet essential to the very act of choosing. Consequently, what we as conscious observers actually witness are the results of that choice, the individual contextualizations of the underlying sign relations engendered by experience in the space-time coordinates of actual speech events, feedback from which assures the continued evolution of the underlying relations. And this is

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precisely why the specific spatial and temporal aspects of a sign’s referential potential can never represent its underlying essence, which remains a relational property at an entirely different level of consciousness. It is no doubt quite significant that the distinction being made here between the sign relation as potentiality and the individual, experienced sign as actuality is noticeably parallel to the one that is made in quantum physics, where the wave function collapses upon being subjected to the conscious intervention of an observer, allowing us to measure particles in actual space-time and view events in terms of cause and effect. Underlying these material manifestations in the physical world is also a higher-order domain of reality, where Aristotelian potentia (dynamis) are more properly understood as Platonic archetypes. (Goswami 1993: 59 et passim) In physical systems as in language, furthermore, the system functions in a purely stochastic manner, such that what we can actually measure are in fact not absolutes but probabilities, the very act of measuring having a bearing on the outcome of the measurement. Given the parallel between the two kinds of systems, therefore, we may say that we enter the quantum realm of meaning when we operate with sign relations as organic properties of mind. From a philosophical point of view, then, the idealism we are describing is Platonic, not Kantian. Platonic idealism allows for what in the philosophy of physics has been called “weak objectivity”, a position that is fundamental to quantum mechanics. Weak objectivity operates on the principle of probability, that over a large number of individual observations the event, while not absolute, will nevertheless remain invariant, and consciousness will still be primary. Amit Goswami describes this position in physics as monistic idealism: In consciousness, coherent superpositions [e.g. the wave function that describes Schroedinger’s cat as half-alive and half-dead at the same time until the box is opened] are transcendent objects. They are brought into immanence only when consciousness, by the process of observation, chooses one of the many facets of the coherent superposition, though its choice is constrained by the probabilities allowed by the quantum calculus. (Consciousness is lawful. The creativity of the cosmos comes from the creativity of its quantum laws, not from arbitrary lawlessness.) According to monistic idealism, objects are already in consciousness as primordial, transcendent, archetypal possibility forms. The collapse consists not of doing something to objects via observing but of choosing and of recognizing the result of that choice. (Goswami 1993: 84)

There could be no more telling description of how signs contextualize their meaning than this, if we take the essential relational property that underlies the use of signs to be their wave function. Both the marked and the unmarked

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pole of a sign relation exist in consciousness as “coherent superpositions”, as intangible objects defined by the markedness that unites them into a conceptual relation, a “primordial, transcendent, archetypal possibility form”. The collapse of the coherent superposition in this case is realized in the contextualization process by which the speaker chooses one or the other pole of the relation for expression in a given situation, and the hearer recognizes (analyses) the result of that choice according to his or her experience in that particular speech situation, including both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. The process of contextualization, therefore, is precisely one “of choosing and of recognizing the result of that choice”. The choice, moreover, is ultimately constrained by probabilities that derive from the experience of the participants in countless prior speech events, the legislative (lawful) activity feedback from which determines what constitutes a grammatical utterance in that language and assures communicability. In the final analysis, the act of choosing one pole of a sign relation to be in praesentia in a given utterance depends upon the relation that exists to its counterpart in absentia in the mind of the speaker. It is in this sense, therefore, that sign theory represents a quantum approach to meaning. What is unique about the position we are taking here—what distinguishes it for example from orthodox structuralism—is our insistence that the sign relations of language ultimately have their source in the neurological structure of consciousness. As the proponents of biogenetic structuralism have noted, the position of orthodox structuralists “led often to the reification of those structures to an ontologically epiphenomenal level of reality. […] Unfortunately, the locus for these structures all too often turns out to be a subjective but unconscious (and hence unverifiable) ‘mind’ or ‘reason’.” In their view, “this results … in a serious defect in any theory that purports to be scientific”. We therefore agree with the biogenetic approach, which insists that “there is no reality intervening between the central nervous system and the environment”. (Laughlin and d’Aquili 1974: 11, 12. We will return to this issue again in Chapter 10.) The conceptual relations (features) of this study, therefore, are suprarational but they are not supra-natural. They are organic properties of mind that directly reflect neurological structures and processes which we will discuss in detail in the next chapter. This needs to be kept firmly in mind as we describe the correlations between these features and the conceptual hierarchies reported in the supra-rational realms of transpersonal psychology and the study of creation myths, where a more purely metaphysical, supra-natural or mystical view of consciousness often prevails.

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8.1 The evidence from transpersonal psychology Turning first to the psychological evidence, we are obliged to recognize that if the highly abstract features represented by the sign relations of language are constituents of the supra-rational level of consciousness, then the psychological correlates for them must also exist at this level of consciousness. Therefore, since the psychological properties at such a level are by definition not accessible to immediate awareness, we must look elsewhere than at conventional studies which remain tied to relatively more concrete and measurable cognitive phenomena. This is where the field of transpersonal psychology, which operates through experimentation with so-called altered states of consciousness, offers the most promising results. Of the scholars who have done extensive research in this area, the work of Stanislav Grof has provided a striking parallel to the feature hierarchy we have described here. (For descriptions of the assumptions and the methodology of this research, see Grof 1985, 1993, 1998, 2000.) Grof has been able, through carefully controlled experimentation, to authenticate individual experiences of alternate realities, documenting in depth the transpersonal dimensions of existence–akin to Jung’s collective unconscious. What legitimizes these experiments is the high degree of consistency with which subjects subsequently report on the experiences they had when in what is described as an altered state of mind, and this consensual validation demonstrates that the phenomena reported must be ontologically real. Not only are these descriptions consistent from one subject to another, they are also highly abstract, transcending the constraints of ordinary logic. And they are perforce metaphoric. One of the most frequent of these reports depicts the circulation of water in nature as a metaphor for states of consciousness. This metaphor describes a sequence of stages in the experience of water phenomena, from their source in the ocean to their ultimate culmination in the form of snow, recapitulating the hierarchy of features (sign relations) we have established herein in a manner too thorough and specific to be a matter of mere chance. Before presenting the psychological sequence, however, we need to review again the linguistic features themselves and be absolutely clear about the hierarchy they comprise. We noted earlier that certain of these features intuitively seem to be more basic than the others, involving what we can legitimately consider to be more primitive mental operations. These are the features that create fundamental distinctions perceivable in any situation or event, namely plurality, dimensionality, and distinctness. We have yet to determine, however, the precise nature of their relation to one another, which is not as evident as it might at first seem. The dimensionality feature, as we have observed, is akin to the

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psychologically primitive operation of distinguishing figure from ground, that is, of creating a perceptual subset that is perceived against a background set. Implied in the definition of the dimensionality feature, therefore, is the prior existence of a larger perceptual set, the background set from which dimensionality itself must be hierarchically derived. This set must be something that is both complex and amorphous, out of which the subset will eventually be apprehended. And what is this background set if it is not precisely the plurality feature as we have defined it in this study? Remember that plurality as a properly abstract, glottological construct is a qualitative, not a quantitative concept, so it cannot be a matter of deriving this kind of plurality from a prior singleton set, as in formal logic. For the logician, operating at a level where one consciously manipulates quantifiable entities, plurality necessarily derives from singularity; but in the supra-rational level of consciousness where these glottological invariants are presumed to reside, plurality has rather an undifferentiated, multiplex, or multi-faceted character. Therefore, what we are observing at this initial stage in the hierarchy of conceptual relations is the mind creating a unity (dimensionality) from undifferentiated plurality–that is, dimensionality creating a subset within a series of undifferentiated elements and giving it outlines. And so we conclude that these must constitute the initial two features in the hierarchy, with plurality as the primordial construct from which dimensionality is glottologically derived. Now it is vital to understand that there is no separation between the subset created by the dimensionality feature and the underlying plurality from which it is derived. Dimensionality is rather superimposed upon plurality as figure against ground. Actual separation is achieved only at the next stage in the hierarchy, where the distinctness feature presumes the previous creation of an identifiable entity and subsequently superimposes a second, distinct perceptual operation on it, producing the separation that we determined previously to be the defining characteristic of distinctness. Having established these three fundamental operations, the system them moves to the next stage where we observe the mind creating a qualitatively different kind of conceptual property, the quintessentially linguistic phenomenon of the speech event as a conceptual construct. The extension feature, as we have seen, establishes the consciousness of the present in the specific guise of the moment of speaking, allowing the present to be conceptualized as more than just the immediate moment of experience; and the remaining features then build upon this fundamental glottological concept. It is at this stage in the hierarchy that the conceptualization of time is created; and the remaining two features build outwards and upwards from there in distinct steps. First the link to the speech situation is loosened but not entirely broken via the

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cancellation feature, establishing past experience as the criterion for identifying the relation. In the final step consciousness is freed from the bonds of the present entirely with the objectiveness feature, allowing for conceptualization of the future and other independent phenomena (other realities) whose existence is ultimately predicated only upon the conceptual structure inherent in the linguistic code itself. With the objectiveness feature we reach the culmination of the hierarchy, a point that is rich in significance for what such a hierarchy tells us about the constitution of cognitive experience at this level. The fact that objectiveness closes out the system, stipulating that a phenomenon has an independent existence quite apart from the immediate or prior experience of the speaking subject, is vital to understanding the ultimate constitution of the system. As we made clear previously, the concept of objectiveness is not objective in the material sense; it is necessarily an idealized conceptual reality that can only derive from the previously established cognitive abilities. It is in this sense the ultimate expression of the potentiality inherent in the nature of sign relations themselves; and it is therefore natural that the hierarchy would terminate at the very point that defines the essence of sign relations as potentia, as “transcendent, archetypal possibility forms”. Given that this set of features and the hierarchy they comprise are derived from examination of actual sign relations extant in specific languages, it is indeed significant that the water metaphor described in the research of transpersonal psychology would recapitulate precisely this hierarchy in striking detail. In relaying a conversation with Grof, Fritjof Capra outlined the sequence of stages as they have been consistently reported, where it is the ocean that is the ultimate source or foundation of the hierarchy. (Capra 1989: 107–109) The first stages are reported thus: The universal consciousness is likened to the ocean – a fluid, undifferentiated mass – and the first stage of creation to the formation of waves. A wave can be viewed as an individual entity, and yet it is obvious that the wave is the ocean and the ocean is the wave. There is no ultimate separation.

One could hardly imagine a more apt description of the manner in which the dimensionality feature derives from plurality than this. The ocean (plurality) is an undifferentiated fluid mass, a background, again, that is highly complex in character, whose fluctuations we can appreciate as having the potential to create individual entities but have not yet done so. The fluidity (complexity) is purely qualitative at this initial stage. With the formation of waves (dimensionality) we perceive for the first time individual entities, but these still are not distinct from the ocean itself, so there is not yet any separation. They are

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merely framed against the background of the ocean. The water metaphor then continues: The next stage of creation would be a wave breaking on the rocks and spraying droplets of water into the air, which will exist as individual entities for a short time before they are swallowed again by the ocean. So there you have fleeting moments of separate existence.

As we might expect from the hierarchy of conceptual features, this next stage (distinctness) creates phenomena that are for the first time perceived as separate entities. However, the entities at this early stage are so far only fleeting, in keeping with what we concluded about the initial three features in the hierarchy still merely describing the fundamental characteristics of any perception, any perceivable event, where time itself has not yet entered the picture. Once again, therefore, the water metaphor recapitulates the feature hierarchy in significant respects. The distinctness feature creates the minimal conditions for separation, just as the water metaphor at this stage describes the effect of such separation in a freeze frame, as it were, where we appreciate many individual separations at the same time. The separation is “fleeting” precisely because at this stage time itself is ephemeral. True temporal existence occurs only at the following stage: The next stage in this metaphoric thinking … would be a wave that hits the rocky shore and withdraws again but leaves a small pool of tidal water. It may take a long time until the next wave comes and reclaims the water that was left there. During that time the tidal pool is a separate entity, and yet it is an extension of the ocean which, eventually, will return to its source.

Just as the feature hierarchy would predict, it is at this stage that time is first introduced as a defining characteristic: the tidal pool is “present” for a certain extended period of time before it too is eventually reclaimed by the ocean. The fact that the water metaphor describes this kind of separation as an “extension” of the ocean is also remarkable, for even if the use of the word in these reports may be merely fortuitous, the descriptive parallels are undeniably significant. Extension creates the possibility of holding on to the concept of the here and now as a conceptual property, even if the present appears to be an instant in time that is constantly changing. The metaphor then continues: … evaporation … That’s the next stage… Imagine water evaporating and forming a cloud. Now the original unity is obscured and concealed by an actual transformation, and it takes some knowledge of physics to realize that the cloud is the ocean and the ocean is the cloud. Yet the water in the cloud will eventually reunite with the ocean in the form of rain.

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At this next stage the water evaporates and forms clouds, and the physically observable link of water from the ocean to the tidal pool that was created in the preceding stage appears to be broken or cancelled. And it is precisely at this point in the hierarchy that, as with the cancellation feature, prior experience is needed to establish that the cloud and the ocean are nevertheless connected through the action of rain. It is no doubt very significant that at this stage in the sequence we find the first transformation from immediately observable phenomena (the initial tier of relations that are perceivable in any situation and their extension into the actual present as tidal pools) to phenomena (clouds) whose relation to the preceding stages requires a non-immediate ability, namely the recognition of a relation that can only be made by extrapolating from prior experience. Finally, the last stage in this sequence is presented as follows: The final separation […], where the link with the original source appears to be completely forgotten, is often illustrated by a snowflake that has crystallized from the water in the cloud, which had originally evaporated from the ocean. Here you have a highly structured, highly individual, separate entity which bears, seemingly, no resemblance to its source. Now you really need some sophisticated knowledge about water to recognize that the snowflake is the ocean and the ocean is the snowflake. And in order to reunite with the ocean, the snowflake has to give up its structure and individuality; it has to go through an ego death, as it were, to return to its source.

Just as with the feature of objectiveness, here we have the establishment of what appear to be truly independent and individualized phenomena, presented with the full realization that they too must ultimately derive from the preceding stages in the sequence. And like the feature hierarchy, this is the stage that brings closure to the psychological series. The snowflake is the ultimate expression of potentiality, a phenomenon whose individuality virtually belies its provenience: it has to undergo an “ego death” to return to its source. We will see precisely this again when we consider the study of myth below, where something has to die for the process to begin anew. The death in both instances is of course metaphorical, representing the fundamentally cyclical nature of the hierarchy and therefore of existence itself. It is in this sense also that the future, marked for objectiveness, has to “die” in order to become the present, the flow of time proceeding from the anticipated future to the actual present and then to the remembered past. That both the linguistic features and the water metaphor, therefore, should have the same fundamental structure suggests that we may well be dealing here with a conceptual hierarchy that represents the primordial structure of higher-order consciousness, the hierarchy of differences that make a difference at the most profound levels of the human mind. We can draw this conclusion

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in no small measure because there is absolutely nothing a prioristic about the phenomena described here in either domain of investigation. The phenomena and the hierarchy they evince is derived on the one hand from systematic reports of subjects having experienced altered states of consciousness, and on the other from the equally systematic observation of the actual signifiers of languages, the relations among which are taken completely at face value. And lest there be any doubt, the unique glottological nature of the feature hierarchy described here was established completely independently from, and long before, any knowledge of the existence of the psychological sequence by the present author.

8.2 The evidence from the study of myth What makes this correlation all the more significant is that it is not the only such correspondence between phenomena in the supra-rational order of consciousness. We find equally striking parallels to both the feature hierarchy and the water metaphor in another ontological realm, one that Jung deemed central to our appreciation of the collective unconscious, namely the human capacity for myth-making. Here again we are dealing with primordial categories of consciousness that cannot be explained by appeals to our immediate awareness. As Mircea Eliade put it, “mythical images are structures of the collective unconscious and are an impersonal possession. They are present in all peoples, though resting in a state of potentiality, and may become activated in myth or dream at any given moment.” (Eliade 1990: 20) That myth-making and sign formation would share some of the same underlying processes of categorization, therefore, should come as no surprise, since both constitute potentialities that exist in a higher-order realm of consciousness. Just as with sign formation, myth making operates at the level where humans are able to conceptualize phenomena that, as Karen Armstrong most recently described them, are not immediately present, have no objective existence of their own, and are incomprehensible as such in a profane setting. (Armstrong 2005: 2–3. The interpretation of myth and the examples in this section are taken largely from her work.) What makes mythological phenomena real–i.e. gives them truth value–is their ability to be effective in addressing the issues of everyday life. Therefore, just as the sign relations (conceptual features) of language require continuous contextualization and concomitant feedback in actual speech events to realize their potential, the primordial elements of our myths require constant reinterpretation, commonly in a ritual setting, in order to maintain their existence as human mental constructs. In both cases, therefore, the cognitive systems evolve naturally as a product of their very use, their contextualization.

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The concept of myth in our modern industrialized world, however, has unfortunately also become the victim of the prevailing linear thinking. Myths tend to be understood literally these days, as reports of material events which, to the extent that they cannot be proven to have actually taken place, are consequently construed as non-sense–in common parlance, “merely myths”. But myths were never intended to represent historical truths. Their purpose was rather therapeutic, their truth value, again, resting on their ability to give meaning to life. They were intended to challenge us to “make sense of” existence in the material world, to see beyond the profane to something more profound. In order to function as such, therefore, there could never be a single, orthodox version of a myth. What makes a myth real is not its correspondence to any historical reality but rather its effectiveness. As Armstrong put it, “If it works, it’s a valid myth.” (Armstrong 2005: 10) And this is just the sense in which the conceptual relations embodied in the sign relations of language as we have described them in this study are validated: by the legislative activity of the participants in countless speech events, feedback from which assures that the survival elements of the system are just those that “work”, that achieve the goal of communicability, of “making sense”. There is yet another respect in which the underlying elements of myths should be seen as constituting valid mental constructs, despite their status as supra-rational phenomena lacking correlates with real-world properties. Just as we insisted earlier regarding transpersonal phenomena, where the high degree of consistency with which subjects report on the experiences they had when in an altered state of consciousness proves that such phenomena are ontologically real, so too the unmistakable similarities among the myths of widely separated cultures testifies to the ontological reality of certain very basic mythological concepts, concepts which the nineteenth century ethnologist Adolf Bastian originally termed elemental ideas (Elementargedanken) and Jung enlarged upon with his concept of archetypes–recurrent motifs that are locally transformed into specific cultural or individual manifestations, all the while maintaining their fundamental underlying essence as universal properties of mind. These primordial forms are properly understood as conceptual constructs on a par with the sign relations of language. While invoking Jung here, however, we need to clarify that the hierarchy of primordial forms (features, conceptual relations) proposed in this study are still more fundamental than many of those posited by Jung himself. Claude Lévi-Strauss made this point quite clearly in arguing for a deeper, properly structural study of myth than Jung’s. Jung’s concept of archetype–the idea that a given mythological pattern possesses a certain signification–was more a search for iconic associations than of truly underlying meanings. (Lévi-

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Strauss 1958: 84) Where Jung talked of number, for example, being an archetype of the human mind, he was frequently thinking of actual numbers and what they expressed in different mythological traditions or dreams. To understand the deeper, universal significance of numbers, however, one needs to look beyond the numbers themselves and consider what logical relations are producing them, that causes them to recur in so many different guises in different traditions. So for example, in this study we have concluded that the dual number, which frequently occurs in the form of dualities in the structure of creation myths worldwide, is actually the minimal or primordial case of separation, captured as a higher-order conceptual construct in the feature of distinctness. Provided that we understand the notion of primordial categories in this more fundamental sense, then, we can find significant parallels to the feature hierarchy in some of the most basic of man’s elemental ideas or myths. Creation myths are one such set of elemental ideas that has striking similarity with the linguistic feature hierarchy. Virtually all societies, from at least the Neolithic to modern times, have developed some version of a creation myth. With the exception of modern Western societies, where the Judeo-Christian tradition has transposed the creation myth into a uniquely linear, one-off historical event in which a remote and omniscient God created the world single-handedly out of nothing in six days and rested on the seventh, creation in so-called primitive societies is rather conceptualized as a non-linear phenomenon that penetrates deep into the psyche of peoples coming to terms with the very meaning of existence by attempting to explain how the gods themselves came into being and consequently live among us all the time as emblems of our most profound psychological needs. In these more universal interpretations, the source of all existence is, significantly, an undifferentiated force or substance out of which evolve, in a sequence that recurs in widely disparate cultures, the various sacred elements and their worldly counterparts. In the earliest Neolithic version, as Karen Armstrong describes it, there was initially “a creative energy that pervaded the entire cosmos. It was at first an undifferentiated sacred force, which made the earth herself a manifestation of the divine. But the mythical imagination always becomes more concrete and circumstantial; what was originally amorphous gains definition and becomes particular.” Thus “the maternal, nurturing earth became the Mother Goddess.” (Armstrong 2005: 45–6) Here we have a perfect rendering of the first two features in the glottological hierarchy: the initial undifferentiated force (plurality) gains definition and becomes particular (dimensionality). But the Mother Goddess is not separate from the nurturing earth; she is the personification of it, a form that becomes recognizable from the amorphous background from which it is created.

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An even more explicit rendition of the initial stages in the hierarchy occurs in the Babylonian epoch known as the Enuma Elish: The poem begins with a theogony that shows how the gods themselves came into being. There is no creation ex nihilo, but an evolutionary process, in which the first deities emerged from sacred primal matter, a sloppy, undefined substance, where everything lacks identity. Salt and bitter waters mingled together; there was no separation of sky, earth or sea; and the gods themselves were ‘nameless, natureless, futureless’. The first deities to emerge from the slime were inseparable from the elements. […] These primal deities are still shapeless and inert. But other gods emanate from them in couples, each pair more clearly defined than the last. An ordered cosmos comes into being, as these divine elements separate from each other. (Armstrong 2005: 65–6)

Here we see all three initial features in exactly the order we predict: the sacred primal matter that is undefined and lacks identity (plurality), giving rise to the first deities which, pointedly, are still inseparable from the elements from which they appear to emerge (dimensionality). It is only in the third stage (distinctness) where an ordered cosmos comes into being and the divine elements attain separate existence, in the prototypical sense of pairs. In yet another version, the Hindu Markandeya Purana, Brahma emanated from the formless realm of pure ideas (plurality) and first showed himself, interestingly enough, as a golden embryo of sound (dimensionality), more specifically a vowel which re-echoed back upon itself, its waves criss-crossing to become water and wind (distinctness), ultimately weaving the misty womb of the world. (Eliot 1976: 63) The fact that the undefined substance or undifferentiated force that is depicted as the source of all creation is also frequently identified as an ocean of some sort suggests that the water metaphor reported in experiences of altered states of consciousness is itself a realization of one and the same deepseated psychological need to make sense of man’s existence in other than a purely material way, as consciousness itself. Examples of the watery source of being abound in creation myths, from the watery waste (ocean) from which Turtle and Muskrat brought forth the earth in the Huron tale, to the ocean of milk in which Mount Meru stood in another Hindu myth, to the watery slime called Mot in the Phoenician account of creation. (Eliot 1990: 60 et passim) At some point we are bound to wonder if the preponderance of evidence suggesting mankind’s origins in an ocean of some sort isn’t in fact a recapitulation of evolution itself. Dualities (the prototypical exemplars of separation, of distinctness) also play a critical role in stories of origins, from the struggle between Marduk and Tiamat in the Babylonian tale to Cain and Abel in the Biblical version. As Eliot

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notes, “twins often appear very near the beginning of things in mythology and have important roles to play in human imagination.” (Eliot 1990: 65) Whether personified or not, it is evident that vital dualities such as heaven and earth, good and evil, and the very distinction between myth and logos are crucial to man’s appreciation of the most basic forms of existence. And just like the linguistic sign itself, the projection of such separate entities always implies their underlying relationship–the one cannot exist without the other: in mythology, earthly objects presuppose divine ones; the tangible implies the intangible; that which exists in praesentia necessarily invokes its counterpart in absentia in the mind. Thus the concept of binary relations, of oppositions whose poles presuppose and require each other, constitutes one of the most basic properties of man’s conceptual universe at the most profound level of consciousness. What all of these accounts of origins ultimately produce, of course, is a coming to terms with the present, with life itself and finally with death; for that is their intended purpose. And coming to terms with the present entails an appreciation of the past as something that didn’t just happen once (the Judeo-Christian tradition notwithstanding) but necessarily keeps happening. Once we understand how the present was created, mythology tells us, we can then appreciate existence in the present as a reflection of times past, that Dreamtime or “everywhen” whence our archetypal ancestors continue to teach us how to live in the present. And is this not in essence what the signs of language have made possible, by converting the experience of the present into a concept (extension) that allows us to hold onto the present long enough to contemplate the past and relate it in a properly modal fashion (cancellation) to existence in the here and now? Ultimately, of course, comprehending the meaning of life involves coming to terms with death, and the myths and legends of countless cultures are replete with stories of struggles where one of the players has to be destroyed in order for the world to be reborn anew. This fundamental archetype, which implies that in the final analysis creation requires sacrificing oneself, is fully in keeping with the final stage of the water metaphor, where the snowflake is described as a phenomenon that must undergo an “ego death” in order to return to its source and by implication begin the process anew. And by the same token, the final linguistic feature (objectiveness) ultimately signifies existence only in terms of the very potentiality that defines the source of the linguistic code itself, where the ego-oriented level of consciousness has been transcended altogether. So here we have direct correlates in all three arenas of the supra-rational sphere. But the correlation is not limited to the recapitulation of the various

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stages of the hierarchy. The very existence of myth as a life force, especially in so-called primitive societies where we can still witness it in its most fundamental form, illustrates how symbols must have initially been used and provides us with living evidence of how the human capacity for sign formation as presented in this study could ultimately have evolved. As we have already noted, mythical narratives were not intended to describe historical incidents but rather unseen (mysterious and ineffable) events that must be enacted in order to be made real. The enactment of such events in praesentia creates the necessary link (relation) to the invisible reality in absentia, which thereby establishes the unity of the symbol as a bipartite relation of the type described herein. Just as with sign relations, where the meaning of a given sign in praesentia necessarily invokes its counterpart in absentia, “in the ancient world, a symbol became inseparable from its unseen referent. Because likeness constitutes some kind of identity, it makes that invisible reality present.” (Armstrong 2005: 69) And so we may surmise that the evolution of the human capacity for sign formation would have made possible just this kind of symbolic behavior. And Homo sapiens would henceforth be distinguished from antecedent species by the creation of a higher order of consciousness, one whose relational structure allowed the organism to sustain and manipulate concepts that were not limited by its immediate awareness, to create parallel worlds beyond the immediate present, and to recognize material existence as but one mode of experiencing reality. The parallel that we find here between the mythological structures and the linguistic ones illustrates what existence in absentia in the mind ultimately implies. It is crucial to our understanding of mental structures in both domains that what is assumed to exist in absentia is a pattern of conceptual relations that is of necessity made real by its enactment in praesentia–either via ritual in the case of mythological structures or by the process of contextualization in the case of language. There are no assumptions here about the existence and nature of conceptual properties at the supra-rational level beyond what is observed in the operation of the vehicles of their expression. The process of contextualization is therefore central to this understanding of what constitutes the ultimate structure of consciousness, the process without which the structures themselves could neither exist nor evolve. It is via the mechanism of contextualization that the signs of language constantly probe the limits of conceptual categorization, activating the semiotic biogram in a purely stochastic manner, thereby allowing us to recognize and act upon the results of this process at whatever level of rational thought we choose. Providing we can provide a neurological foundation for conceiving of how this mechanism operates, we would have further evidence of the ontological

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reality of what we are describing here. To preface that argument, let us note initially that the earliest stages of the feature hierarchy also recur in ontogenesis, in the developmental stages of human life itself, in both its non-linguistic and linguistic phases. At birth the child has neither an appreciation of the self or the other, corresponding to the initial undifferentiated stage in the hierarchy (plurality). The next step is the realization of a self as a unique entity (dimensionality), followed ultimately by the realization of the other as separate from the self (distinctness). These stages are mirrored exactly in the development of child language, where initially there is nothing but a babbling phase, producing all manner of sounds willy-nilly (plurality), followed by the appearance of the first non-random sound, generally understood to be the vowel /a/ (dimensionality), which ultimately leads to the production of other phonemically separate sounds upon which the meaning differentiating capacity of signs is based (distinctness). With this in mind, let us proceed now to consideration of the biological evidence for such a higher-order categorization process.

9 Neurological evidence for the evolution of higher-order consciousness We have repeatedly made the point that the transcendental nature of the concept of higher-order consciousness in this study is not metaphysical, but embodied in the cognitive linguist’s sense of the term and ultimately in the neurological structure of the brain. We have also insisted, moreover, that the concept of embodiment is itself grounded in the existence of the linguistic sign, that the actual signifiers produced by the human vocal apparatus and apprehended by the human aural faculty constitute the devices by which the conceptual relations that govern the process of semiosis at the supra-rational level are organized and ultimately realized (contextualized) in the process of communication. These relations are transcendental in the sense that they underlie the speaker’s ability to conceptualize reality in ways that lie beyond our conscious awareness; but because they are embodied in the very forms (the vocalizations or signifiers) used to express them, their organizational structure must have a neurological foundation. Furthermore, given the proposed universal nature of these features (relations), we have suggested that they may well constitute the semiotic biogram of the species. Finally, since the underlying sign relations so conceived are by definition potentialities with the specific capacity to spontaneously generate new and unique contextualizations, they need to be understood as fundamentally evolutionary structures. Consequently, as we seek confirmation for such structures in the properly neurological study of mind, we need to look for theories that are based on evolutionary principles.

9.1 The neurological structure of consciousness Gerald Edelman’s neural Darwinism, or the theory of neuronal group selection, is just such an approach. (Edelman 1987, 1989, 1992, 2000–the latter with Giulio Tononi. Although there are more recent publications by Edelman, these are the ones that provide the fundamentals of the theory we are espousing here.) It is of interest to us here precisely because it defines the evolution of brain functions in terms of self-organizing systems essentially as they have been described in this study. According to this approach, the brain is not a top-down, rule-governed structure but a somatic selection system which first generates variation and then selects ex post facto according to experience, just as we have described the process of contextualization-cum-grammatical

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selection in language. The brain as a self-organizing system contains a complex set of feedback loops, of reentrant paths capable of correlating new experience with old. Anatomically, the unit of selection is a closely connected collection of cells called a neuronal group. These groups form maps which are connected to one another topographically, so that they can correlate happenings in different sensory areas without a higher-order supervisor (i.e. they are not rulegoverned). From such a structure, the most basic form of categorization, perceptual categorization, proceeds by coupling the outputs of multiple maps to achieve a global mapping. (Edelman 1992: 89–90) With such an understanding of basic brain functions, no additional structures or principles need to be proposed to assure the evolution of new, “higher” brain functions. Learning, for example, will take place in such a system because the categorization process itself creates memory. In such a dynamic self-organizing system, memory is not representational, nor is it a static store of information to be recalled; it is a system property, defined as the ability to repeat a performance based upon the specific enhancement of a previously established ability to categorize. This kind of recall is not stereotypic; it results from a process of continual recategorization, that is, from the very process by which categorization occurs in the first place, triggered by repeated associations or samplings of sensory signals. Unlike computer-based memory, Edelman insists, “brain-based memory is inexact, but it is also capable of great degrees of generalization. The properties of association, inexactness, and generalization all derive from the fact that perceptual categorization … is probabilistic in nature”. (Edelman 1992: 103–4) Just as with the concept of sign relation, therefore, we are dealing with a stochastic process where indeterminacy is a principle of categorization. This process establishes certain values or norms in the system, which Edelman calls “value-category memory”, that are crucial to the development of the next level, that of conceptual categorization. In this model, conceptual categorization is simply a more sophisticated form of perceptual categorization, one that occurs at the next evolutionary level – though not yet, it must be emphasized, at the level where the language ability resides. Still, each level necessarily builds upon the preceding level, with the principles of probability and indeterminacy residing at the core. To have concepts, an organism must be capable of comparing one perceptual categorization to another, not necessarily related one. Such a form of categorization correlates one brain mapping with another to create “a mapping of types of maps”. This ability was achieved, in Edelman’s account, by the evolution of additional reentrant connections involving the cortical areas, specifically with the further development of secondary cortical areas and the various cortical appendages, such as the basal ganglia, conceptual systems emerged. At a point in evolutionary

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time corresponding roughly to the transitions between reptiles and birds and reptiles and mammals, a critical new anatomical connectivity appeared. Massively reentrant connectivity arose between the multimodal cortical areas carrying out perceptual categorization and the areas responsible for value-category memory. (Edelman 2000: 107)

Thus we see that concept formation as an intrinsic brain function also requires no particular logical sequencing or programming of a priori categories, but is brought about by the evolutionary enhancement of the already existing selection process, specifically by the development of additional “layers” of reentrant connectivity. It is at this point, Edelman suggests, that primary consciousness first appeared, that the newly-developed reentrant connectivity allowed the “mapping of the brain itself of the brain’s own areas and regions”, which gave rise to basic conceptual memory systems. This process created “the ability to combine different perceptual categorizations related to a scene or an object and to construct a ‘universal’ reflecting the abstraction of some common feature across a variety of such percepts”. (Edelman 2000: 104) Because primary consciousness operates without the benefit of symbols, it is therefore still strongly tied to associations made in the immediate present. Organisms which have achieved this level of consciousness are capable of constructing what Edelman calls a scene, “a spatiotemporally ordered set of categorizations of familiar and nonfamiliar events, some with and some without necessary physical or causal connections to others in the same scene”. For organisms with such an ability, “the salience of an event is determined not only by its position and energy in the physical world but also by the relative value it has been accorded in the past history of the individual animal as a result of learning”. (Edelman 1992: 118) Therefore, although the system is still only operating in real time, not having yet acquired the ability to function independently of the organism’s activity in a specific event-space, the conceptual categorization that defines consciousness at this level has the added advantage of benefitting from having learned from past events. Hence in Edelman’s terminology, primary consciousness is a kind of “remembered present”. It is only in the final stage of evolution, with the development of higherorder consciousness (Edelman’s term), the hallmark of which is language, that the organism is freed to conceptualize beyond the real time activity of the brain’s dynamic core, and break the “tyranny of the remembered present”. This would have occurred only with the evolution of Homo sapiens, when another series of related anatomical changes allowed for the development of symbolic speech, providing the means for conceptualizing the present as but one mode of comprehending reality. These developments are well known, but Edelman gives them new meaning with his concept of reentrant connectivity. Subsequent to the advent of bipedal posture in hominids, changes began tak-

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ing place in the basicranial structure of the skull, allowing for the creation of a new and uniquely human anatomical feature, the supralaryngeal tract. At roughly the same time, new cerebral cortical regions emerged on the left side of the brain, the so-called Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. These cortical regions served to link the acoustic, motor, and conceptual areas of the brain through yet another massive set of reentrant connections. (Edelman 1992: 126–7) Edelman himself at this point proposes a theory of language that basically follows the embodiment principle of recent cognitive theories. (Edelman 1992: 246–252) In his view, citing Lakoff and others, conceptual embodiment–the construction of cognitive models that reflect the interaction between the bodybrain and the environment–necessarily occurs prior to language. Language then superimposes symbolic models onto the preexisting conceptual system. By conceptualizing the role of language in this way, one preserves the presumed underlying propositional structure of concept formation as a part-whole schema, where in Edelman’s view “the predicate is one part, and the arguments (agent, patient, experiencer, instrument, location, and so on) are the other. Semantic relations are built from link schemas, and complex propositions are then formed from simple propositions by modification, quantification, conjunction, negation, and so on”. (Edelman 1992: 249) There is, however, another way of envisaging this process than in such a strictly hierarchical manner that gives priority to pre-existing conceptual structures over language and assumes that the higher-order of consciousness where the language faculty resides still operates at the rational level of propositional logic, of predicational structures where the mental operations involved are more readily available to our immediate awareness. As David Lewis-Williams notes in his intriguing study of consciousness and the origins of art, which we will consider in more detail below, “There is a lacuna in Edelman’s work. […] The problem is that he concentrates on the ‘alert’ end of the spectrum of consciousness and overlooks the autistic end”. (Lewis-Williams 2002: 186) And it is precisely the autistic or supra-rational end of the spectrum of consciousness, where the features we have identified in this study and their correlates in other comparable areas of mental structure reside, that concerns us here. Lewis-Williams nevertheless finds Edelman’s evolutionary approach fundamentally sound and proceeds to take account of the supra-rational or autistic level of consciousness by building upon his work, and we will do the same here. Before doing so, however, let us add another dimension to this discussion by considering the central role that the evolution of neurological structures plays in the theory of biogenetic structuralism, which represents a systematic merger of evolutionary theory with structuralism and has served as one of

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the inspirations for the present study. Biogenetic structuralism also takes as fundamental that it is “neural reorganization that underlies any behavioral (or cognitive) change in an evolving species”. (Laughlin and d’Aquili 1974: 19) The word re-organization is crucial here, for a valid evolutionary theory must look for the source of any new capacity (like language) in some biological function which, if properly selected for, could originate it. Hence the language faculty must have originated “as a consequence of neural reorganization at the prehominid level”, that is, as “a progressive elaboration of the systems laid down at the prehominid level”. (Laughlin and d’Aquili 1974: 20) And much as Edelman proposes reentrant connectivity as the major source of such evolutionary reorganization, so in a similar fashion biogenetic structuralism suggests that it was the evolution of cross-modal transfer between the various cerebral subsystems that accounts for the progressive development of abilities from the perceptual to the conceptual and ultimately to language itself. In their view, the capability for conceptual categorization would have arisen when the capacity for learning was no longer tied exclusively to, or operating exclusively through, the limbic system, but was facilitated by cross-modal transfer between the limbic system and other existing nonlimbic sensory modalities. For example, two visual percepts may generate more different visual associations than similar ones. If we use only visual associations, these percepts might not be classified together. But if we take into consideration all the possible associations in all sense modalities, it is probable that similarities frequently override dissimilarities, allowing large groups of objects to be classified together. In other words, cross-modal transfer permits the construction of classes of objects where formerly insufficient information was available in any one sensory storage system to serve as the basis for that classification. We now have an adaptive mechanism that is capable of generating classes of objects, or, in more traditional language, concepts. (Laughlin and d’Aquili 1974: 53)

The implications of such a development are highly significant. “It opens up the possibility for a referential system of communication independent of the immediate environment in which the communicators find themselves (demonstrative communication). It provides the basis for a system of communication using arbitrary symbols for classes of objects”. (Laughlin and d’Aquili 1974: 53) For the development of language, of course, other neural mechanisms are required; but the point is that the foundation is already in place. In particular, the area known as the inferior parietal lobule or parieto-occipital area, which allows for direct cross-modal association of the visual, auditory, and somaesthetic sub-systems and is distinctive in man, is already present in rudimentary form in the chimpanzee. As Luria and others demonstrated some years ago with respect to humans, lesions in this area tend to destroy the ability to organize external objects according to spatial antinomies (above/below, before/

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after, in/out, and the like), as well as the ability to align one object in direct relation to another, as with possessive and comparative adjectives. Consequently, it has been suggested that this area may at least in part be the neuroanatomic base of the concept of binary opposition. (Laughlin and d’Aquili 1974: 52–54) If this is indeed the case, then, it wouldn’t take much for the evolution of Homo sapiens to select this area for the conversion of primate signals into sign relations; and we would have at least a partial locus for the eventual primacy of sign relations in the evolution of this particular aspect of brain structure. That a capacity such as this, where the connections are in place before any experiential learning takes place–that is, are “built in” from birth in the form of the biogram of the species–is also shown by experiments conducted some time ago concerning how infants learn to associate touch and vision in perceiving objects. Where the traditional theory held that the child associates characteristics of an object presented through different sense modalities by experiencing simultaneous, or nearly simultaneous, sensations through the different modalities, T.G.R.Bower provided experimental evidence as long ago as the nineteen seventies to show that “in man there is a primitive unity of the senses with visual variables specifying tactile consequences, and that this primitive unity is built into the structure of the human nervous system.” (Quoted in Laughlin and d’Aquili: 55–56) Laughlin and d’Aquilia conclude that “so important for survival was this ‘primitive unity of the senses’ that this inherent function was probably strongly selected for, thus firmly establishing the inferior parietal lobule in hominid evolution”, and one can therefore “look upon the development of cross-modal transfer of complex input, concept formation, and basic logico-grammatical categorization as derivative functions following increasing development of the area phylogenetically”. (Laughlin and d’Aquili 1974: 56) As we know, development of the language faculty itself required the evolution of two other areas in the brain, the verbal auditory association area known as Wernicke’s area and the motor speech area known as Broca’s area. More important perhaps than the emergence of these areas themselves is the fact that in humans they are hard wired together by means of a fiber tract called the arcuate fasciculus, a connection that is well established only in man. (Laughlin and d’Aquili 1974: 56) The significance of this development cannot be overstated, for studies have shown that having these areas hard wired may well be a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the eventual recognition and production of phonemic distinctions, the differences that make a difference in the structure and function of linguistic signs. Phonemic identification of a linguistic signal is decided by the listener in terms of the articulatory controls by which he would repeat the signal when acting as a speaker. Thus

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phonemic identification requires both the auditory association area and the motor speech area to be directly connected. It is interesting that a lesion of the arcuate fasciculus connecting the auditory association and motor speech areas results in the inability to repeat words. What the patient does say is numerous associations to the word given him… This is interpreted to mean that every verbal input, once it reaches the auditory (verbal) association area (Wernicke’s area), follows two paths: one directly to the motor speech area, there to result in its automatic utterance … and one to the inferior parietal lobule where multiple associations take place…. The command to repeat certain words essentially ‘turns off’ the inferior parietal lobule or, more properly, temporarily disconnects it from the speech center, thus allowing automatic function of the speech center. This interpretation is confirmed by the fact that if the inferior parietal lobule is destroyed the patient exhibits echolalia, i.e., he blindly repeats whatever is said to him. (Laughlin and d’Aquili 1974: 57)

There is, of course, more to speech than phonemic recognition and production, which brings us to the last cerebral adaptive mechanism we need to consider, that involving the prefrontal areas of the brain. Three facts are of importance here: First of all, it is known that fibers from the inferior parietal lobule project to prefrontal areas. Second, there are also connections between the motor speech area and the prefrontal region. Third, although a lesion of the motor speech area produces total inability to speak but leaves full comprehension, a lesion of the prefrontal area may produce confused associations of words. (Laughlin and d’Aquili 1974: 58)

Now the normal interpretation of these data is as follows: The best interpretation of these data is that the ordering of associations takes place in the prefrontal area in keeping with the general frontal function of sequential ordering and goal-directed operations. The input would come from fibers originating in the inferior parietal lobule. Such ordering probably conforms to basic logic and does not represent the actual sequence of the spoken language. Thus the frontal lobes ‘make sense’ out of the multiple associations originating in the inferior parietal lobule. This material is then fed into the motor speech area, which then specifically orders it according to the spoken sequence of the particular language. (Laughlin and d’Aquili 1974: 58)

From this interpretation, it would seem that the process may indeed be directional, that what we call logic precedes language, that the language faculty builds upon the input it receives, first from the inferior parietal lobule which is then processed by the frontal lobes and eventually reordered by the signs of specific languages, much as the evolution of these areas phylogenetically might suggest, and with which Edelman would presumably agree. There are, however, other factors we need to consider. In the first place, once the language faculty is in place, the input initially received, to the extent that it occurs in the process of communication, is already necessarily “colored” by the signs

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being experienced in the process. This is anything but a trivial observation, for what distinguishes humans from other species is precisely the use of language, and communication therefore is an integral, if not dominant, component of the vast majority of our experiences in the world, most particularly in the earliest stages of life when the defining characteristic of our species is being ontogenetically established. This being the case, the most that one can say is that the “directionality” implied in the interpretation above, as well as in cognitive theories of language generally, is at best inconclusive as far as the role of linguistic signs is concerned. Even the fact that lesions in Broca’s area affect speech production but leave speech comprehension intact does not necessarily imply the primacy of domain-general cognitive processes over language. A genuinely structural view would suggest that there was no directionality of this kind once the evolution of linguistic signs from primate signaling behavior began, that neither the signs of language nor the pre-existing cognitive categories would have taken precedence, but that the two would necessarily have been working in tandem from this point on. In this view, the role that sign relations play should be seen as organizational–i.e., properly structural–and therefore neither a dominant nor an ancillary one. The evolutionary development of the cerebral sub-systems noted above, coupled with the all-important assistance of greatly increased cross-modal transfer, all occurring in conjunction with the anatomical developments in the laryngeal tract and bi-pedal posture, would have provided the capacity to move both conceptual categorization and signaling behavior to a higher level of consciousness at the same time, allowing for the creation of the universal set of higher-order categories that we now claim constitute the semiotic biogram of the species. That these higher-order categories can be “discovered” by systematic analysis of the range of reference associated with individual linguistic signs strongly suggests that the evolution of signaling behavior has been an integral part of this process from the beginning, allowing for the creation of sign systems that now serve to organize what is an otherwise highly abstract and ineffable (from the perspective of rational thought) conceptual categorization capacity and bring it to the service of communication via a contextualization process that assures its continued evolution. And the fact that binary relations can be empirically shown to constitute an essential structuring device for such a system of signs should not be surprising, given that there is evidence (noted above) that the establishment of just this type of relation (of the mechanism of opposition as a deep-seated principle of organization) may already have been present in the inferior parietal lobule prior to the evolution of language, which the evolution of linguistic signs would have selected for as the most expedient structuring device.

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The key to this development would have been the fact that the new layers of reentrant connectivity, the greatly increased capacity for cross-modal transfer, established the anatomical possibility to link not just the acoustic, motor and conceptual areas of the brain, but to link one primate signal to another signal, converting signals into signs by creating a powerful relational structure of its own that would for the first time have made it possible for the species to conceptualize its own vocalizing activity, independent of experience in the immediate present. Once this cardinal evolutionary step had been achieved, the tyranny of the remembered present would indeed be broken, for it would now be possible to see the world through the word–that is, to conceptualize and to signify metaphorically, not by cross-mapping signs to different preexisting conceptual domains, though that would always be a possibility at the level of conscious awareness (of logical thought), but by expanding or probing the conceptual horizons of signals that have now become signs at the most profound, supra-rational level of consciousness in a stochastic manner, consistent with the operation of ‘mind’, as Bateson would say, at all levels of organic structure. To further justify the position being taken here, we need to make one further crucial observation. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that at the time the evolution of the language faculty took place, the repertory of conceptual categories available to the species must have been very limited. After all, we had only just recently come down out of the trees, so the vast majority of the conceptual domains we recognize today, on which we base our assumptions about “the metaphors we live by”, simply did not exist in the primitive brain of emerging Homo sapiens. So it is a legitimate question to ask where they came from. Why would we necessarily assume that the signs of language have for millennia been chasing around after categories that our brains have constructed independently, when we can make the equally valid assumption that since the elevation of the conceptualization process to the level of higher-order consciousness took place at the same time as, and in conjunction with, the conversion of primate signals into signs, this would have put the newly acquired ability to organize primate vocalizations into a network of sign relations in a unique position to structure the entire conceptual enterprise from that moment on? And this process would have taken place not at the level of our conscious awareness, but at the most profound, “autistic” level, so that what the advent of the language faculty ultimately achieved was nothing less than the ability to rise above and beyond the “alert” end of the spectrum of consciousness and make possible the supra-rational categories of consciousness that are evidenced today in the sign relations of language. These categories, then, would have constituted the newly evolved semiotic biogram of the species, represented by the features identified in this study.

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9.2 The evolution of the language faculty Let us look more closely now at just how the human capacity for language could have evolved, practically speaking, from the signaling capabilities of antecedent species. In order to appreciate how sign relations of the type being described here could have evolved from earlier primate vocalization, we must insist again that the process of making meaning is never denotative but always strictly connotative–i.e. self-referential and not tied to any presumed association with real-world phenomena. This is an extremely critical point in explaining evolution because self-reference is not just a property of linguistic systems but, as we have observed previously, of the organization of living systems generally. As proponents of self-organizing systems have noted, and as we have also stated before, the only legitimate way to account for evolution is to recognize that for any new capacity to emerge, there must be some prior organic function from which it could have originated; and in the case of language, there are no antecedent functions we know of that could have given rise to a capacity for denotation. So the key must lie in the self-referential property of connotation. As Humberto Maturana has put it in arguing for the theory of Autopoiesis, The understanding of the evolutionary origin of natural languages requires the recognition in them of a basic biological function which, properly selected, could originate them. So far this understanding has been impossible because language has been considered as a denotative symbolic system for the transmission of information. In fact, if such were the biological function of language, its evolutionary origin would demand the pre-existence of the function of denotation as necessary to develop the symbolic system for the transmission of information, but this function is the very one whose evolutionary origin should be explained. Conversely, if it is recognized that language is connotative and not denotative and that its function is to orient the orientee within his cognitive domain and not to point to independent entities, it becomes apparent that learned orienting interactions embody a function of non-linguistic origin that, under a selective pressure for recursive application, can originate through evolution the system of cooperative consensual interactions between organisms that is natural language. Particular orienting interactions, like any other learned conduct, arise from the substitution of one type of interaction for another as a cause for a given behavior, and their origin as a function of the general learning capacity of the nervous system is completely independent of the complexities of the system of cooperative interactions to which their recursive application gives rise. (Maturana and Varela 1980: 30–31)

Despite such an admonition, however, most analysts of primate signaling behavior still assume a pre-existing capacity for denotation, reasoning backwards, as it were, from such presumed human symbolic activity and claiming to find in certain other species similar abilities to manipulate signs. Such anal-

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yses beg the question of where this ability came from in the first place; whereas if one recognizes self-organization as a general system property, then the origin of the human capacity for sign formation as a properly self-referential phenomenon can be shown to have already been inherent in the structure of consciousness in our pre-hominid ancestors, at what Edelman calls the level of primary consciousness. And the evolution of higher-order consciousness would have selected vocalization as a medium for further self-organization of the conceptualization process, enhanced communication being an essential ingredient in the successful evolution of Homo sapiens. One of the most frequently invoked examples of primate signaling behavior is that of the vervet monkey, whose vocalizing activity has been given much study. Let us look briefly at one such analysis, which assumes the conventional denotational position, and consider what it really tells us about the origin of human language. For many years now field observations of vervet monkeys have indicated that they produce three distinct alarm calls, a different one each for snakes, leopards, and certain eagles. When a vervet sees one of these predators and makes the appropriate call, the other members of the troop respond instantly and appropriately. At a snake alarm, they stand on their hind legs, look around in the grass, and then either mob the snake or scamper for the safety of trees. At an eagle alarm, they look upward and run for safety into the bushes. Eagles are able to take vervets both in trees and on the ground. So we see here a set of specific calls that elicit specific and behaviorally appropriate responses. Now, when a vervet makes a chutter noise – the snake alarm call – it is not the exact equivalent of the word ‘snake’ in a human language. We can use the word ‘snake’ in many different contexts and many different abstractions. A vervet cannot. For this reason, a number of linguists have argued that primate calls should not be viewed as precursors of human language. This criticism might have some merit if the call-response system were absolutely inflexible, but even this is debatable. As Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth have shown in recent years, vervets’ abilities are much broader than had been imagined. These University of Pennsylvania researchers … have shown that the monkeys are able to modify their use of alarm calls in subtle ways, depending on the precise circumstances. On one occasion they saw an eagle swooping to attack a monkey that was feeding on the ground. Several mature males saw the bird just as it was about to strike. Instead of giving the eagle alarm, which would have caused the intended victim to gaze up to the sky and then head for the bushes, they gave the leopard alarm call. The “wrong” call sent the individual running for the trees, just as it would have done if the warning was about a leopard. The animal survived the attack, but would not have done so had an eagle alarm been given and the appropriate response been followed. (Leakey and Lewin 1992: 241– 242)

While the conclusion drawn here certainly follows from the assumptions made, it is the premise of the argument itself that needs to be questioned. The argu-

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ment assumes that each of the different calls denotes a particular object frequently encountered in the animal’s environment–snake, eagle, leopard–with which a specific behavioral response is then presumed to be associated. But if we remove the denotative premise of the argument, the situation that these researchers describe has a far simpler and more elegant explanation: the vervet monkey has developed a set of vocalizations which correspond, not to the association with any particular objects, but to a set of behavioral patterns that have proven essential to their survival. The chutter noise, we should more properly assume, is not a snake alarm call per se, but is a signal intended to elicit a certain kind of behavior in those attuned to its meaning, one that may well be triggered by the presence of a snake in the grass, but not necessarily so. And in the particular instance cited above, the monkey did not make a clever transformation in the use of the so-called leopard alarm call in the presence of an eagle; rather, it simply gave the appropriate signal for the behavior of running like hell for the trees. From this perspective, then, the monkeys’ signaling behavior should be seen as properly connotative in that there are only correspondences with structures in the organism’s own cognitive domain to begin with. Therefore, reasoning now in the forward-looking manner of evolution itself, rather than backward from an anthropomorphic point of view, we can appreciate how such signaling behavior would be a natural precursor of the signing behavior in humans, without invoking special transformative powers. We can assume that the limited repertory of signals available to the vervet monkey is indeed connotative in the same sense that human sign relations are, and this would then constitute the value upon which human signing activity was subsequently predicated. Furthermore, recalling Edelman’s concept of “remembered present” as the defining characteristic of organisms with primary or pre-linguistic consciousness, we would also conclude that primate signals are necessarily tied to the present in a way that human speech is not. That is to say, the monkey uses signals connotatively, as a function of its own structure of consciousness, but only in the immediacy of the moment and like moments that have been entered into memory at this primary cognitive level. The contextualization process for such signals is necessarily tied to the situation at hand and equivalent situations (the remembered present), and therefore operates in only one dimension, in praesentia, rather than in the two dimensions of higherorder consciousness, where a given linguistic sign achieves its meaning by its opposition to another sign in absentia. Consequently, what makes the signals in primate vocalization appear fixed is not that they are tied to the denotation of particular objects in the environment of the organism, but that their mode of being is esse in praesentia rather than esse in futuro, to build on Peirce’s metaphor.

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We may speculate on how the second dimension of human signing activity might have evolved from such unidimensional primate signaling behavior in the following way. Human bipedal posture must have been both a blessing and a curse to the evolving species–a curse because it must have cut down considerably on the organism’s ability to maneuver quickly to stay out of harm’s way or to successfully hunt for food, especially when no longer living in trees, but a blessing because it would have contributed enormously to the socialization of the species, freeing the front limbs to pursue all manner of social and cultural activities, not the least of which would have been hand signaling, a likely precursor or at least co-conspirator in the ultimate evolution of spoken language. In order for this blessing to be ultimately realized, however, the severely restricted repertory of vocal signals would have necessarily had to expand so that the species could overcome its physical limitations with its social superiority–i.e. communication would have needed to drastically improve beyond a relatively few primitive sounds and hand signals. And this could not be done simply by adding more signals, for there would have been a limit to just how much jerry-building the system could manage before it reached a tipping point and had to evolve into a new state. It is at this point that the development of a new laryngeal space and the concomitant expansion of the cortical area in the brain through the massive development of new reentrant connections would have allowed for the creation of the second dimension, for as the repertory of signals increased, so too did the network of reentrant connections in the brain, with the result that the connotative content of the signals would now derive its existence from that of other signals rather than from behavior in an immediate situation. Once this happened, the organism would have been freed from the tyranny of the present, and be conscious of its own signing activity. And the meaning of signs no longer tied to the immediate present would at this point have become true potentialities. Accordingly, we may stipulate that the very definition of immediacy is relative to the neurological structure of consciousness. Each organism relates to its physical surroundings by creating its own domain of immediacy. All organisms, including humans, necessarily live in the present because they live in a physical world. Thus even the language capacity, the contextualization process as we have defined it, is grounded in the primary consciousness of the present. But the way the present is experienced–i.e. how the organism defines its eventspace–is what distinguishes one form of consciousness from another. The evolution of higher-order consciousness has allowed Homo sapiens to conceptually categorize the experience of the present as one type of moment, and therefore to metaphorically expand its cognitive domain to include other modes of experience built upon the experience of the present (now reconceptualized in

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the most fundamental way as the event-space of language). Thus the conceptual capacity in humans does not so much free the organism from the present as it allows the speaking subject to contextualize the experience of the present in ways no other organism that we know of can. Through the miracle of language, the remoteness of other worlds becomes part of the immediate environment of man, which has now been expanded to include a potentially infinite variety of modes in which reality may be experienced. We may summarize this development from a systems perspective in the following way. The emergence of the human capacity for sign production represents a stage in the evolution of the genus Homo where a threshold was reached, technically a bifurcation or tipping point in a self-organizing system, which we may call the threshold of potentiality. The crossing of this threshold, we may surmise, was a direct consequence of the organism’s having reached a stage in the production of meaningful vocalizations where the exigencies of the individual as a member of an increasingly complex social organization and the limited repertory of signals at its disposal required that the system go into a new state if the organism was to survive. As the fossil evidence shows, all members of the hominid group have disappeared save one, which did develop the requisite neurological structures to support a more sophisticated repertory of vocalizations. The emergence of the linguistic sign relation would have been the key to this development because a more complex relational structure, specifically a network of paradigmatic oppositions invoked in absentia, would have been required to manage more than a relatively small number of primitive terms. The threshold of potentiality is crossed in such a system the moment the tyranny of the present is broken, for once the meaning of a term is no longer related to the performance of a particular type of behavior in the present, the present becomes one of many possible reference points for its interpretation. At this point the when of primary consciousness gives way to the if of higher-order consciousness, and the organism begins to realize that it is in control of the contextualization process. The self has now been raised to a new level of experiential reality, one where the ability to categorize has become metaphorical in a fully open-ended and indeterminate sense, specifically as an ability to contextualize the underlying potential inherent in sign relations without regard to the boundaries of any particular conceptual domain. It is also important to note that the evolution of the human capacity for tool making parallels the development of the language capacity as we have outlined it here, providing further evidence for the emergence of this second dimension. Where it was once thought that man was the “tool-making animal”, it is now generally understood that what actually sets man apart in this respect is the ability to “use a tool to make a tool.” (For a discussion of the evidence,

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though not the conclusion, described here, see Corballis 1991: 62–63, and references therein.) Rudimentary tool making exists in a variety of forms in other species, and may be defined as the modification of an object for the purposes of performing an immediate task, the likes of which have been “remembered” from past performance of equivalent tasks. This is still behavior in a relatively fixed context, since the modification takes place with respect to a specific task or set of tasks, and is repeated each time such a task is performed, in praesentia. But to use a tool for the purpose of making another tool requires a comprehension of the concept of tool in absentia–that is, of the ability to hold onto the notion of tool long enough to disassociate it from its use in any particular situation. At this point the concept of tool has become a relational one, which derives its “meaning” from an awareness of other tool-making tasks, conceptualized in absentia from any one particular type of task. It is encouraging to note that the evolution of the human language faculty is once again receiving the attention that it deserves, enriched now by a vast array of new data on primate signaling behavior. Unfortunately, a lot of the research has, as we have just noted, been hindered by the continued assumption that signals are primarily denotational in nature, referring to objects or events in external reality rather than the structure of the organism’s own consciousness, making it theoretically impossible to find antecedent properties or faculties from which the human capacity for symbolic behavior could have evolved. Nevertheless, work in this area by linguists has usually centered on finding some fundamental ability upon which the human language faculty could have been built, and this work is worth reviewing for the purpose of further clarifying the approach being taken in this study. (For a more complete review of recent developments, see Kenneally 2007.) Those who consider syntax to be the fundamental underlying property of a relatively autonomous human language faculty and insist that language is essentially rule governed behavior, as in the generative approach, tend to look to recursion as the answer; and recursive behavior certainly can be witnessed in antecedent species. The question remains, however, to what extent recursion implies the existence of top-down, rule-governed structures. We would contend, of course, that there is no such necessary implication. It seems highly probable, for example, that the recursive nature of human language derives from the mechanisms of reentrant connectivity or cross-modal transfer that developed exponentially with the evolution of Homo sapiens, mechanisms that we have demonstrated lie at the heart of language conceived as anything but a rule-governed structure, but rather as a properly self-organizing system. It is these mechanisms that would have been largely responsible for creating the possibility for one sign to be mapped onto another sign, establishing the prin-

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ciple of paradigmatic relations that governs the structure of language not only at the morphological level but also at the syntactic level where, as we have shown, the modification relation has exactly the same paradigmatic structure. And it is the modification relation that ultimately governs the contextualization process, where the recursive properties of language are most readily evident, regulating the freedom that characterizes the concatenation of signs on the syntagmatic axis. Indeed, in sign theory as we are presenting it here, this freedom is in no way constrained by rules but is an open-ended referential (i.e., contextualization) process governed only by the particular modification relation that has evolved with a given language, which can be recursively applied in a potentially infinite variety of ways, the relation itself being by definition a potentiality. As we have demonstrated in the course of this study, it is the modification relation that guarantees the speaker the freedom to create new and innovative configurations of signs at will, to use the metaphorical power inherent in those signs to convey all manner of images and alternate forms of reality, from puns to poetry, from oxymorons to fantasy worlds. Therefore, rather than looking for rules that would account for existing constraints on syntactic configurations in ordinary language use and ascribing to such rules psychological reality, sign theory operates on the assumption that what underlies the human language faculty is precisely the ability to see beyond the mundane expressions of our common experience, beyond the ego-oriented logic that exists at the rational level of consciousness (and leads us to posit that phrases like ‘Colorless green ideas’ and poetic discourse generally need to be accounted for differently), and realize the truly creative potential inherent in the formal properties of language that evolved with the sign function. Once the threshold of potentiality had been crossed, and the stimulus-boundedness and dependence on actual events in the real world was overcome in the evolution of primate signaling behavior, the recursive power of language would henceforth reside in the very nature of the sign relations themselves and their mode of contextualization. Cognitive grammar, for its part, views human language as fundamentally intentional behavior and looks for its roots in the ability to construe a situation in multiple ways, reflecting the embodied metaphors and image schemas that are presumed to govern language use. As we have noted previously, the cognitive view of metaphor assumes that language is grounded in the evolution of domain-general cognitive mechanisms, and the referential process therefore consists of applying linguistic signs in one or another pre-existing conceptual domain. This process, moreover, is presumed to proceed over the long haul in the direction from more concrete to more abstract representations, where core concepts are those that derive from our most basic spatiotemporal experience.

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While agreeing in principle with many of the tenets of cognitive linguistics, sign theory, as we have seen, nevertheless departs from the cognitive approach in significant ways. At the risk of being repetitive, let us review our position here one more time. The most important distinction between this and other cognitive approaches is that sign formation and conceptual categorization operate in tandem with one another, with the contextualization of sign relations proceeding in a purely stochastic manner, irrespective of any direction or boundaries. While this process may also appear to consist in the long term of a trajectory radiating outwards from relatively concrete to more abstract associations, it still must be at its very core, at the supra-rational level at which the process is ultimately operating, a matter of contextualizing a system of abstract relations, of potentialities, whose conceptual “content” is by definition indeterminate, allowing the speaker to utilize the inherent ambiguity of sign relations to create new, unique contextual associations virtually at will. From the moment a sign first appears and becomes part of the lexicon, its identity is determined by its relation to the other signs in the system; and the ambiguity inherent in this set of relations provides the freedom that governs the contextualization process and assures its continued evolution. Every time a sign relation is activated, by the insertion of a sign into a specific linguistic and situational context, its meaning is contextualized anew to accommodate the circumstances of that particular situation. What we have called grammatical selection then takes place, where the “new” connotation is either reinforced or not by the legislative activity of the speech community, feedback from which determines whether that particular contextualization has any survival value. This feedback establishes the ultimate trajectory of the life of the sign relation, thereby asserting control over the otherwise indeterminate nature of the underlying relation in a completely self-organizing manner, without having recourse to anything beyond the structure and function of the sign relations themselves and the brain functions that underlie them. In the case of the lexicon, this trajectory will naturally proceed in the direction of increasingly less stimulus bound connotations simply because the process has to start somewhere, and the initial contextual application of a newly coined sign, a neologism for example, will perforce be made in a relatively concrete situation engendered by the stimulus that initiated it. Once such a word has entered into the lexicon, then, it will drift as a matter of course farther and farther away from its initial contextualization (what else could it do?), giving the impression of increasing abstractness as it seeks new contexts for its expression. But that is nothing more than a perfectly natural consequence of the stochastic nature of the contextualization process, which remains fundamentally random.

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Let us again be very clear about what we are proposing here. We are not saying that the image schemas of cognitive grammar, the metaphoric associations we observe as words are used in different contexts, and even the trajectory that these associations appear to take, are somehow misdirected. We are merely saying that what we observe at this level of consciousness should not automatically be attributed to the ultimate structure of mind. That structure is governed by a far more abstract mechanism that exists at the supra-rational level, one where the evolution of the language faculty has put linguistic sign relations in a position to organize or guide the process. To reinforce this case, let us look now at one particularly coherent and convincing theory about the origin of image-making in human evolution, to further justify having recourse to the supra-rational level of consciousness in order to understand the evolution of those capacities that are unique to man.

9.3 The sign relation and the origin of image-making In his recent book, The Mind in the Cave, David Lewis-Williams presents a closely argued analysis of the evolution of higher-order consciousness and the origins of art. (Lewis-Williams 2002) The principal subject of his analysis is the Transition period from the middle to upper Paleolithic when the recently acquired mental capacity of Homo sapiens eclipsed that of the Neanderthals and brought forth the very first examples of so-called parietal or rock art: the images in the caves of Western Europe. His thesis is that the origin of this primal art had nothing to do with aesthetics or with totemism or sympathetic magic; nor was it representational in the sense of drawing pictures of things experienced in material reality. All of these attempts to explain the origin of man’s capacity for image-making assume that someone (or some people) somewhere got the idea that one could make images of things in the environment and started drawing them (for whatever purpose). But, Lewis-Williams insists, this begs the question of where the concept of image came from in the first place. Rather, the earliest forms of art must have constituted a new-found ability to manipulate mental imagery, which implies that the concept of image must have been in existence as a mental construct to begin with; and the making of images in rock art was therefore a matter of expressing in material form the essence of the images that were already there in the mind. For LewisWilliams, the issue must be understood in terms of the evolution of consciousness, specifically of explaining how the evolution of a new form of consciousness in humans provided the ability to hold onto (to fix) images that had previously been locked up, so to speak, in the primate mind where they could

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be recognized only in the immediate moment of their experience and therefore not communicable in any form, whether visual or auditory, after the fact. In short, the evolution of image-making involved an ability to transform what had heretofore been only ephemeral images into lasting impressions of those images in material form as art. Note that this is the same argument that we made previously with respect to explanations regarding the evolution of language itself, where we insisted that one cannot explain the origin of the language faculty so long as one holds to the notion that meaning in language is essentially denotational (representing things in external reality). One can only do so by acknowledging that the capacity for language must have been built upon a pre-existing condition of connotation, of unlocking the self-referential capacity of hominid signaling behavior that was previously tied to the “remembered present”. The work of Lewis-Williams allows us to recognize, therefore, that image-making is also connotative behavior whose origin needs to be explained in terms of how images came to be realized in the form of non-representational art, of signs if you will, depicting not the things observed in external reality but the images already existing in the hominid brain. Thus one may surmise that the origin of art and the origin of language must have developed from one and the same evolutionary process, where both signals and images that were previously tied to experience in the immediate present were able to be held onto long enough to be reproduced in entirely different contexts. There are a number of factors one can cite to demonstrate the essentially connotative nature of this process. Since this is not the main point of the argument here, however, we will mention only two. In the first place, the arrangement of figures that we observe in cave art has relatively little relation to the arrangement one would expect to find in the wild of the figures (frequently animals) depicted. Nor are the figures themselves necessarily faithful to what we might expect if the art were intended to be representational. These facts are often explained by saying that the techniques used were simply “primitive”, that the primal mind had not developed enough to understand issues of perspective and such. But there is another more reasonable explanation for the features we see in this art, features that are in many important ways identical to those we find in the art produced by Amerindian and Aboriginal societies today in conformity with their traditions–people who are at the same time fully capable of producing art for the commercial market that departs significantly from their societal norms and often conforms to what the Western mind expects to see. In a word, the structure of this art–indeed of all art, as of language–is intentional. The figures depicted are not meant to represent reality, they are intended to express the content, the form and meaning

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of images developed in the brain that needed to be communicated, to be freed from the “tyranny of the present” at this critical moment in hominid evolution. Thus, for example, the ritual significance of an animal may be what is being represented, not the manner in which the animal is observed in the wild. The second important feature of this art is the very fact that it is found in caves. Here again, the explanation frequently given is that the reason we find this art in caves and not out in the open is that whatever may have been produced elsewhere would have long ago eroded away. But that ignores certain other vital features of this art, that it doesn’t just occur in caves but deep, deep inside them where the undulations in the walls themselves frequently constitute important elements of what is being depicted, are incorporated into the art itself. Why else would this art have been produced in the darkest possible places where it must have been very difficult to see, where one must have needed artificial light (the flickering light of fire) in order to produce anything at all, if the sites themselves did not constitute chambers, cathedrals if you will, in which not just the art but the inspiration for this art took place? And this fact brings us to the essential point of Lewis-William’s presentation, that both the form and the location of man’s first attempts at image-making provide the explanation for how and why it evolved. Lewis-Williams specifically singles out and applies Edelman’s view of evolution from primary to higher-order consciousness to develop his thesis. Evidence that this process was taking place at the time of the Transition from the middle to upper Paleolithic can be seen in the differential abilities of the Neanderthals, who were living at that time in close proximity to the emergent Homo sapiens communities. If the Neanderthals had a form of primary consciousness, where conceptualization was confined to the “remembered present”, that would explain why they were able to borrow certain things from their human neighbors but not others. Because their consciousness and form of language were essentially confined to ‘the remembered present’, Neanderthals could learn how to make fine blades but they could not conceive of a spirit world to which people went after death. Nor could they conceive of social distinctions that depended on categorizations of generations, past, present, and future. Elaborate burials with grave goods were therefore meaningless, though immediate burial may not have been. Carefully planned hunting strategies that foresaw the migration of herds at particular times and places and required complex planning were also impossible. All in all, social hierarchies that extended beyond the immediate present (in which strength and gender ruled) were beyond their ken. (Lewis-Williams 2002: 189–190)

And there is absolutely no evidence that Neanderthals were able to produce representations of the images that must have been present in their primary form of consciousness: they were not capable of holding on to those images

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long enough to create art. Only a form of higher-order consciousness would have made that possible. It is at this point that Lewis-Williams’ view of higher-order consciousness goes beyond Edelman’s, to a level that Edelman’s work does not address in any depth but that we here in this study have made central to our thesis as well, namely the supra-rational realm. In Lewis-Williams’ words, as we noted previously, Edelman “concentrates on the ‘alert’ end of the spectrum of consciousness and overlooks the autistic end”. (Lewis-Williams 2002: 186) And it is precisely at this latter, more profound level that the explanation for the emergence of both art and language resides. Lewis-Williams asks us to think of consciousness not as a state but as a continuum, a spectrum progressing from outward to inward states. At one end of the spectrum is our waking consciousness, which then gives way to problem-oriented, rational thought, and ultimately to supra-rational or altered states of consciousness. All parts of the spectrum, he insists, are “equally ‘genuine’ … generated by the neurology of the human nervous system … and wired into the brain”. (Lewis-Williams 2002: 125–126) As we proceed up the spectrum, there is a progressive distancing from outside stimuli, just as we illustrated previously in the discussion of number above, where the progression from whole numbers through negative and irrational numbers to the notion of imaginary numbers is a virtual journey through the different levels of consciousness. Most important of all, since the full spectrum of human consciousness is wired into the brain, we do not have the luxury of ignoring the supra-rational or autistic end that is farthest from its alert or waking state, either because we equate it with mysticism or because most of us have not personally experienced it in its full-blown form in socalled altered states of consciousness. It is a biological fact, one that most of us have indeed experienced in its “mildest” form, of course, in dreams. This is exactly what we have been insisting on all along, that the features of this study, which find correlates only in the supra-rational realm, represented by altered states of consciousness and the motifs of man’s myths, must still be grounded in (embodied in) the biology of the brain. To fully appreciate Lewis-Williams’ thesis, we must now add dreaming to this picture, for it is through dreams, in his view, that the latent images lodged in the primate brain ultimately found their expression in art. As he explains it, sleep, and therefore dreaming, is more biologically than psychologically important. There was no evolutionary selection for dreaming as such. Dreaming is a non-adaptive biproduct of sleep, the latter being selected for the superior ability of the organism to rejuvenate itself (in large part to produce proteins) when not in a waking state. By the same token, however, dreaming was not a maladaptive bi-product, for in its more intensified form as visions or hallucinations lies the answer to

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the origin of art, and with it of religion, aided and abetted by the evolution of the language faculty. (Lewis-Williams 2002: 191) We know that many other species have dreams, but what separates man from other species in this regard is that “human beings … can remember their dreams and are able to converse with one another about them. They are thus able to socialize dreaming. […] Homo sapiens could dream … and speak about dreams, but Neanderthals could not. They could not remember their dreams”. (Lewis-Williams 2002: 191) It was the evolution of higher-order consciousness that provided the necessary reentrant connectivity in the brain (Edelman’s phrasing again) that qualitatively increased memory capacity so that dreams could be “held” beyond the immediate moment of their experience; and “at a given time, and for social reasons, the projected images of altered states [dreams] were insufficient and people needed to ‘fix’ their images”. (LewisWilliams 2002: 193) This they initially did in the caves of Western Europe, where the need to socialize what otherwise would have been one-off personal visions by those who held the most intensive dreams (visions and hallucinations) was realized by recording or reproducing them in material form. Thus was born in the caves of Western Europe, where these individuals went in search of their vision quests, the shamanistic tradition that gave rise to both art and religion at the same time and still pervades so-called primitive societies to this day. So what does all this have to do with the evolution of the sign principle that we have been espousing here? Simply put, once the requisite reentrant connectivity had been established in the brain of Homo sapiens, what were previously ephemeral images that could only be experienced in the immediate present, in praesentia, as a personal possession now became images held in absentia that could again be made real after the fact for all to see and to appreciate (and act upon) as socio-cultural artifacts. That this was exactly the process that made linguistic symbols out of primate signaling behavior, also previously only appreciated in the immediate present, suggests very strongly that a single evolutionary process was at work, creating the ability to hold signals in absentia in tandem with the ability to hold images in absentia so they each could be contextualized at will. And the lesson we can take away from Lewis-Williams’ hypothesis is that none of this would have happened if it were not for Homo sapiens developing and activating the supra-rational side of the brain, the higher-order of consciousness where we have been insisting that the relational invariants of language ultimately reside. The suggestion here therefore is that language and art both have their source in the activation of the supra-rational realm of higher-order consciousness in the brain, the most distant end of the spectrum of consciousness, that

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which is the farthest removed from our immediate experience of reality. The implications of this fact are enormous both for our appreciation of human evolution and our understanding of how the language faculty ultimately operates. In evolutionary terms, what this implies is that the structures that evolved to allow the production of language and art alike now reside in a neurognostic network at the deepest level of human consciousness that is present from birth and that ultimately sets the conditions upon which these two unique capabilities of man now function. What those structures may be in the case of art is beyond the scope of this study even to suggest, but their implications in terms of language should by now be clear. When we base our understanding of how language functions by observing and drawing conclusions from the way linguistic forms seem to relate to phenomena more readily apparent to our sensory awareness, be they physical or psychological, we are from the point of view of this study concentrating on a level of consciousness somewhere midway between the ultimate functioning of the human mental apparatus at the neurognostic level and our experience of that functioning in real time. Linguists do this, of course, because the structures we find at this intermediate level can be shown to be real, are no doubt indeed real, and genuine correlates for them can be found by applying current methods of psychological experimentation. In particular, we insist upon polysemy as the condition of linguistic signs because we can more readily find associations between the structure and functioning of words at this level on the one hand and principles of conceptual categorization conducive to current, generally accepted principles of psychological verification on the other. And we do so, in many cases, because we do not believe in, or at least are highly skeptical of, the validity of an order of consciousness beyond that with which science today is generally comfortable working. But in so doing, we lose sight of what may actually be taking place at the interpersonal level of consciousness, the so-called collective unconscious that may ultimately constitute the biogram of the species, that may actually be responsible for generating these intermediate structures. As Lewis-Williams would say, all three levels of consciousness are biologically real and need to be accounted for in any serious investigation of human mental activity. For example, cognitive theories frequently use prototype theory to describe the structural properties of conceptual categorization, often denying the validity of binary oppositions because they are perceived to be not only too abstract but also too fixed or rigid and therefore incapable of explaining the fundamentally gradient nature of the categorization process. Hopefully we have now been able to demonstrate that such a conclusion is unwarranted, since the process by which the conceptual relations of this study are contextualized is

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itself gradient in the most rigorous sense of the term. Rather than operating with fuzzy groupings of polysemous meanings, sign theory insists that the process of conceptual categorization originates in the neurognostic structure of the brain, and the potential inherent in sign relations is realized in a purely stochastic manner, allowing the truly abstract properties of signs to generate contexts (create polysemous meanings) at any and every conceivable level of consciousness. This is what allows the human organism to manipulate the contextualization process at whatever level of concreteness or abstractness it wishes. In his just published book, Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks notes that sensory deprivation can contribute significantly to the mind producing images involuntarily, not in response to immediate outside stimuli: “the deprivation of normal visual input can stimulate the inner eye instead, producing dreams, vivid imaginings, or hallucinations”. (Sacks 2012: 34) And he observes that the darkness and solitude sought by holy men in caves provides just such a condition. Echoing Lewis-Williams, he notes that “Hallucinations have always had an important place in our mental lives and in our culture. Indeed, one must wonder to what extent hallucinatory experiences have given rise to our art, folklore, and even religion”. (Sacks 2012: xii) While shamans purposefully seek out such places for their vision quests, prisoners, on the other hand, often are subjected to them against their will in isolation cells, for the most nefarious purposes. Scientists, for their part, have learned how to harvest information about such involuntary image-making in a broad range of instances that are neither necessarily mystical nor morally repugnant. And it is from these latter studies–which include Charles Bonnet syndrome, Parkinsonian illusions, visual migraines, to name a few–that much has been learned about the structure and functioning of the perceptual apparatus at different levels of neural activity in the human brain, a rather exhaustive sampling of which is provided by Sacks in his latest book. Of particular interest to us here is the fact that these scientific studies provide vital information about the differential functioning of the higher cortical areas, which give structure to the visual landscape, and the perceptual apparatus that processes stimuli at the lower, more basic levels in the human brain. For when images are generated in the absence of normal input from the outside, the neural activity at the lower levels being disconnected from the stimuli that normally serve to set it in motion, this lower level activity is left on its own to function independently; and the higher cortical functions are then put in the position of processing the input it is receiving from what is now an essentially intrinsic operation. As a result, we are provided with a unique window into the intrinsic structure and functioning of the human mind, where the brain is operating, as it were, on its own internal states.

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What one learns from these studies is indeed quite intriguing. Perhaps the most constant recurrent motif reported by subjects who have experienced hallucinations under such conditions is that they appear to begin with a highly unstructured phase, one that involves both a mish-mash of color sensations, including even ones not experienced under normal circumstances; and/or an equally jumbled constellation of dots, lines, and matrices ultimately forming shapes, repeated multiple times before any more discernible “objects” appear. For example: As I write this page, it is becoming more and more covered by a pale green and pink lattice…. The garage walls, covered in white cinderblock, continually mutate … coming to resemble bricks, or clapboard, or being covered with damask, or flowers of different colors…. On the upper part of the walls in the hallway, shapes of animals. They were formed by blue dots. (Sacks 2012: 16)

And again: For the last few months I have been seeing hexagons, often hexagons in pink. At first there were also tangled lines inside the hexagons, and other little balls of color, yellow, pink, lavender, and blue. Now there are only black hexagons looking for all the world like bathroom tiles. (Sacks 2012: 11)

From reports like these, Sacks himself observes: By far the commonest hallucinations are the geometrical ones: squares, checkerboards, rhomboids, quadrangles, hexagons, bricks, walls, tiles, tessellations, honey-combs, mosaics. Simplest of all, and perhaps most common, are phosphenes, blobs or clouds of brightness or color, which may or may not differentiate into anything more complex. (Sacks 2012: 22)

One gets the distinct impression that there is some kind of progression involved: In the simplest form the visual field, with the eyes closed, changed from dark to light colour; next in complexity were dots of light, lines, or simple geometrical patterns. All 14 subjects reported such imagery, and said it was a new experience to them. Still more complex forms consisted in 'wall-paper patterns,' reported by 11 subjects… (Sacks 2012: 35)

Even when there are discernible objects, they almost invariably appear in multiples without any further context: …and isolated figures or objects, without background (e.g., a row of little yellow men with black caps on and their mouths open; a German helmet), reported by 7 subjects. Finally, there were integrated scenes (e.g., a procession of squirrels with sacks over their

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shoulders marching 'purposefully' across a snow field and out of the field of 'vision'; prehistoric animals walking about in the jungle). Three of the 14 subjects reported such scenes, frequently including dreamlike distortions, with the figures often being described as 'like cartoons'". (Sacks 2012: 36)

There are many other types of involuntary image-making described in Sacks' monograph, but from what we have seen here, we may draw some tentative conclusions. We may assume, for example, that what we are observing, given that we are dealing in these instances with the mind processing its own internal states of perception, is nothing less than the construction, by higher-order consciousness, of the means to “make sense” of what is being activated at the lowest levels of neural structure in the perceptual sphere when no immediate outside stimuli are involved--a unique opportunity to observe the mind processing a range of neural activity sui generis. And what we may surmise from this evidence, in terms of the structure that we have claimed in the present study to have resulted in the evolution of higher-order consciousness, is once again that there is a hierarchical structure to this intrinsic image-making, one that in its initial stages consists of a primordial sense of plurality, in this case of an undifferentiated multitude of colors (phosphenes) and simple graphic elements (dots, lines, and lattices) with no evident structure of their own. This plurality, furthermore, seems to persist throughout the later stages of the hierarchy, where what evolves next are the outlines of various repeated shapes, the geometric patterns observed (dimensionality), leading ultimately to the apparition of individualized objects (distinctness) that, interestingly, are sometimes said to take the form of stick figures or “cartoons”, frequently involving animals, reminiscent of the figures in the cave art of Western Europe. That these three features and the hierarchy they comprise should recur under these conditions should not be surprising, given our previous conclusion that these are the features that have evolved with Homo sapiens to process (to conceptualize) the most essential perceptual elements at the level of higherorder consciousness in the human mind. Moreover, given that what we are observing in this instance is the mind processing its own internal states at the most profound level of consciousness, what we ultimately have here is a perfect example of spontaneous self-organization in an informationally closed living system. As we observed in the chapter on self-organizing systems above, the crucial features of such systems are not only their ability to modify their own structure but also to create new structures irrespective of the medium in which they operate (their environment). This latter ability, as we noted in Niklas Luhmann's words, is “the decisive conceptual innovation”, the “turbocharger” that adds even more power to an already powerful system. (Luhmann 1990: 3) And the picture that presents itself as subjects describe the progres-

The sign relation and the origin of image-making

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sion of images experienced in these hallucinatory states is just such a selforganizing succession, from undifferentiated masses of colors, dots and lines organizing themselves initially into basic geometrical shapes and ultimately into distinct figures, just as we would expect given the first three stages in the feature hierarchy, where each feature is built upon the preceding one. So here we have further confirmation of the conceptual features gleaned from the analysis of linguistic sign relations, an additional set of correlates for such features in yet another arena of consciousness at its most profound level, where we have suggested the biogram of the species ultimately resides.

10 The position of structuralism in the modern era The purpose of this monograph has been to demonstrate the continuing viability of structuralist principles as they relate to our understanding of the linguistic sign as a cognitive construct, building on the work of Roman Jakobson where the binary principle stood as a cornerstone of his approach to the study of language. Since labels like structural and cognitive can be deceiving, we have been at pains in this study to clarify the position being taken here with respect to certain important recent trends, particularly cognitive grammar on the one hand and generative grammar, which has been labeled at different times both cognitive and structural, on the other. Hopefully we have made it clear that, while the conceptual features of this study are considered innate, biogenetic properties of mind, our position differs significantly from the monolithic view of Chomskyan linguistics where the language faculty is conceived as an autonomous top-down, rule governed structure. We have also gone to some lengths to position the present study within the tradition of cognitive linguistics as it is practiced today, but we have also been at pains to demonstrate where the present approach is consonant with the principles of cognitive grammar and where it differs. And finally, we have taken a critical view of Jakobson’s own version of structuralism, expanding upon his narrower conception of the cognitive function and providing the framework for a neurologically informed study of language as a truly self-organizing system of signs. To close out this study, let us look more closely at how the various structural and post-structural trends in modern linguistics have developed, from the time of Saussure down to the present. This exercise will give us yet another opportunity to clarify the position we have been developing here and more clearly situate sign theory in the context of both its theoretical antecedents and current theories of language. Since such an exercise can take us in many different directions, we will limit this discussion to two key areas: the ontological locus of structure in language, and the role of internal as opposed to external factors in determining the ultimate nature of language.

10.1 Saussure’s langue and parole We begin with Saussure, rather than other pioneers of structuralist principles in anthropology, who include of course Emile Durkheim and ultimately, as Charles Laughlin argues in his most recent book (Laughlin 2011: Chap.2), the

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nineteenth century ethnographer Adolf Bastian, only because we are concentrating here specifically on the provenience and development of a theory of signs within this movement. Saussure’s position is in many ways difficult to pin down, in part because he wrote so little himself and consequently his major contribution to intellectual history derives from what his students subsequently published from his lecture notes, but also just as significantly because his work has been variously interpreted over the years to support one or another thesis about the ultimate nature of the structuralist enterprise. (For a comprehensive overview of these interpretations, see especially Strozier 1988.) Nevertheless, certain relatively indisputable conclusions can be drawn. Robert Strozier has presented the issues noted above in terms of the following questions regarding Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole: “Where is langue? what is its locus? and what is the locus of parole?” (Strozier 1988: 2) Strozier presents the issue, as far as Saussure is concerned, in the following way: langue is a mental structure, a phenomenon of consciousness, specifically of group consciousness; and parole is also an interior phenomenon: it is “the executive part of the psychological phase of the speaking circuit”. (Strozier 1988: 2) Now it is important to note in this regard that Saussure did not make the tripartite distinction that was made afterward between signans, signatum, and designatum, which is how later on it was assumed you get from langue to parole. The designatum, or thing referred to, was specifically added as a way of associating external and internal states. For Saussure, on the other hand, everything that was outside the organism was excluded from his concept of system. There was, therefore, only the signifier and the signified, the signans and the signatum, and the signified was itself a concept, “a mental phenomenon, not a referent or an external object or event referred to by the sign”. (Strozier 1988: 5–6) There is no question that Saussure recognized the importance of external phenomena–there is a chapter on that subject in the very introduction to the Cours (Chapter V); but since the subject matter of “external linguistics” did not constitute part of the “system” as he understood it, he mentions it only to get it out of the way. External linguistics for Saussure involves such subjects as the interface between language and ethnology, language and political history, social institutions and their ties to literary language, and ultimately to the graphic representation of language itself, the latter being a subject that would eventually become central to the post-structuralist challenge to Saussure championed by Derrida and others. One can only conclude, therefore, that the notion of referent was totally subsumed under the aegis of the signatum as Saussure envisioned it. And so we have a closed internal system that noticeably

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presages the concept of informational (but not operational) closure in theories of self-organizing systems today. Having established that we are dealing with a system that privileges internal states and functions over external phenomena, the question then becomes, what is the ultimate nature of this system? Clearly, for Saussure, it was not a metaphysical one, not a philosophical (and certainly not a mystical) construction but a mental structure that was presumed to have its ultimate existence in the structure of consciousness as a psychological construct. But given the time at which Saussure was working, there was nothing like the research we have today to inform our understanding of the nature of consciousness as a psychological, not to mention biological, phenomenon. And so the Saussurian concept of system was ripe for criticism from those quarters where abstract theories of consciousness had been debated for ages, namely in philosophy.

10.2 Derrida’s différance Enter Derrida and the post-structuralist movement in literary criticism, one of the research areas that Saussure had deliberately excluded from consideration, thereby leaving the enterprise wide open to assault from the “outside”. Derrida did a masterful job as a philosopher punching holes in the notion of system as an internal structure, insisting that the evidence that exists for such a system can only come from consideration of its external projections, from the actual signs or words that issue from it; and when you analyze these phenomena, the conclusion you have to draw is that they are always and only contextual entities whose “meaning” is necessarily always “deferred”, always colored by the associations being made in the given context. Derrida insisted that language could only properly be studied through the analysis of concrete texts, and the content of a text is necessarily always given in a con-text, a sign or group of signs whose meaning is determined by the associations that are made to other elements in the text and, so to speak, its para-text: non-textual associations that affect the reading of a text. Therefore, applying the logic of a philosopher whose preferred notion of system is a metaphysical one, there can be no context-free notion of meaning. The notion that signs have meaning in relation to other signs in a system of paradigmatic oppositions existing in the mind of the author/speaker, apart from their actual representation in texts, must be a fiction in this view because the only observable relation between signs is already by definition syntagmatic, that is, con-textual. To demonstrate this point, Derrida coined the French term différance, with an ‘a' instead of the expected ‘e', a clever synthesis of the notions ‘differ’ and ‘defer’, to suggest

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that the differential meaning–the differences that make a difference–we assume to underlie the use of signs is always deferred, constantly changing by the very act of use. Consequently, the notion of system as a metaphysical possibility, and by extension the existence of an underlying general meaning of a sign, is denied. In the words of George Steiner, echoing Gertrude Stein: “there is no there there”. (Steiner 1989: 121) Now the attentive reader will have noticed in this description of Derrida’s position that it comes perilously close to what we have been insisting on here: that individual signs by themselves have no meaning, since their existence as distinct, observable entities always by definition occurs in a context, and their individual, discernible meanings are therefore necessarily contextual. But the concept of system that we have developed here is in no sense a metaphysical one; it is a biogenetic one. So the conclusion that Derrida draws is not necessarily germane to what we have proposed in this study. What Derrida is ultimately addressing is the metaphysics of ‘presence’. As Strozier, again, explains it, ‘presence’ indicates the assumption that something is ‘there,' ab ovo, as a given. ‘Being as presence’–in spite of Derrida’s use of the phrase to implicate all of western thought– means, very simply, the assumption that some thing exists in such a way as to be ‘present’; that is, western metaphysics entails an assumption that will allow it to be there, in place, ready to serve as the origin and possibility of subsequent thought. Thus the supposed origin is endowed with presence by the very fact of serving as an origin; such presence is capable of allaying fears by promising a grounded certitude, by proposing itself as beyond question and operation and by promising what Derrida calls in a linguistic context ‘a reassuring end’ to the infinite process of signifiers in the signified. (Strozier 1988: 185)

It was this concept of presence that Derrida was criticizing in what amounted to nothing less than an indictment of much of the history of Western metaphysics. Saussure bore the brunt of that criticism, but that was neither the kind of presence he was ultimately talking about nor the kind we have espoused here. Fortunately, our investigations are not impoverished by a lack of information regarding structures of consciousness as they were in Saussure’s day. There is a wealth of information now from neurological studies and studies of selforganizing systems that provides the grounds for a properly biogenetic theory of mind that would justify Saussure’s notion of system as something more than an abstraction. Specifically, with the knowledge currently at our disposal, we can overcome the static implications of the Saussurean concept of synchrony and arrive at an understanding of langue as a truly relational structure of signs and parole as the manifestation of a contextualization process that assures the continued evolution of the system as a dynamic, self-organizing and self-referring structure grounded in the biology of the brain.

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Given these advances, we can also address Derrida’s insistence on the primacy of the text without succumbing to the artificial distinction between internal and external phenomena. To the extent that the individual signs (the signifiers) of language are produced by the vocal apparatus and apprehended by the aural faculty, they may and should properly be conceived as organic properties, not things that exist apart from the organism that produces and apprehends them. If working back from the text where meaning is constantly deferred does indeed preclude the possibility of an underlying system, of sign relations as potentialities, as Derrida’s approach would imply, then that is a problem for metaphysics, not for the concept of language as a properly biogenetic system. We, too, of necessity “work back” from the text to find the general meaning of signs, but we do so on the understanding that individual linguistic signs are the manifestation of an organic process that is ultimately informed by what we know about the structure and function of the human brain. This is in no sense a logical exercise but a principled one where the signs of language are understood as organic properties whose integrity must be respected if they are to be dealt with as such. One must not, therefore, treat their individual occurrences atomistically and study only their contextual implications, nor for that matter give priority to non-linguistic conceptual categories, which equally disrespects the integrity of the sign. Semantic analysis has to start with the actual occurrences of signs–i.e., with their usage and therefore also with texts, if you will–for that is the only place where signs manifest themselves. But it does so in the principled way we have outlined in this study.

10.3 Lévi-strauss’ contentless structure In his treatise on the structural revolution, Jean-Marie Benoist specifically addressed the issue of the “site of structure” in the work of Lévi-Strauss and Lacan (with an occasional nod to Jakobson). (Benoist 1978) This work is of particular interest to us here because it explains in the most explicit terms the philosophy behind Lévi-Strauss’ conclusion, in his trilogy on the study of myth, that the relations he uncovered do not have an ontological reality of their own but lead rather to other relations–the position we noted in the introduction, which we equated with Jakobson’s insistence that the meaning of a sign is its translation into some further alternative sign (above, page 5). For Benoist, this was the very genius behind the structural revolution: that in contradistinction to Chomsky’s reductionist and “substantialist” position, as he calls it, structuralism “is not and cannot be reductionist”. Unlike Chomsky’s innatism, “Lévi-Strauss’ is a relational innatism close to that of Piaget, and not

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a substantialist, subjectivist innatism”. (Benoist 1978: 184) Quoting from LéviStrauss, he notes that “structure has no content: it is the content itself apprehended in a logical organization conceived of as the property of the real”. (Benoist 1978: 210) Benoist is quick to add, though, that Lévi-Strauss “is not trying to destroy the philosophy of consciousness, but simply to axiomatize it, and at the same time to set it free, to break its enslavement to the object. The great contribution of structuralism is that it presents thought as thought about a relation and not as consciousness of an object”. Quoting again from LéviStrauss: Hence we see how much the effacement of the subject is what may be called a methodological necessity: it reflects the determination to explain no part of the myth except by the myth itself and to eschew the viewpoint of an arbiter inspecting the myth from the outside and hence inclined to find extrinsic causes for it. (Quoted from L’homme nu in Benoist 1978: 184.)

In Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism there are no archetypes, no “heraldic and emblematic substantialism,” as with Jung. His is a completely “decentered innateness”: An apparatus of oppositions somehow built into the understanding functions whenever recurrent experiences, be they of biological, technological, economic, sociological or other origin, take control, much like those innate forms of conduct that we attribute to animals and whose phases succeed one another automatically whenever an appropriate combination of circumstances triggers them off. Similarly elicited by such empirical combinations, the conceptual machinery is set in motion, ceaselessly extracting meaning from every concrete situation, however complex, and turning it into an object of thought by adaptation to the imperative demands of a formal organization. In the same way also, it is by the systematic application of the rules of opposition that myths are born, rise up, become transformed into other myths which are transformed in their turn, and so on… (Quoted from L’homme nu in Benoist 1978:186.)

From statements like these, we can only conclude that the position being articulated here is not only relational, it is entirely relativistic as well, almost Derrida-like in its anti-substantialism and therefore in this extreme form not a position we would want to take here either. It is all the more significant, therefore, that towards the end of his treatise, Benoist is forced to acknowledge what Lévi-Strauss wrote at the conclusion of L’homme nu, which we also referred to earlier in this monograph, that “In reality, the structural analysis which some debase to the level of a decadent and gratuitous game can emerge in the mind only because its model is already in the body”. And therein lies the rub. Writing nearly forty years ago, with consciousness research still largely on the horizon, Benoist ultimately had to admit that it is here that we will find “a

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new frontier for structuralism”, in “the unparalleled relationship between the structurality of the symbolic body and biology’s recognition of the living as a type of language”. (Benoist 1978: 226) Take away the relativistic aspect of structure and replace it with a neurologically informed understanding of relational structures and you can recast the property of self-reference not as pure structure without any content–of myths referring only to other myths or signs to other signs–but as a property of self-organizing systems operating stochastically to keep an underlying neurognostic structure, one of genuine archetypes of meaning, alive.

10.4 Lacan’s symbolic order So where does Lacan fit into this picture? Here again, Benoist sees in Lacan the same non-substantialist concept of structure, specifically in his understanding of the Symbolic as the locus of a decentralized subjectivity. In this view, the all-important mirror stage, whereby the subject (the new-born child) first recognizes the split between the ego and the imago (between itself and its mirror image), creates from the very start a decentralized subject, one that is ultimately held together only by the subsequent development of the Symbolic order. The mirror stage creates the conditions for the ultimate transition to the Symbolic, setting in motion “a profound semantic process”. (Benoist 1978:133) It is the Symbolic (the unconscious recognition that thought is fundamentally an operation of tropes) that provides structure to the Imaginary and secures the previously fragmented ego. And what provides the structure in the Symbolic order in Lacan’s terms is precisely the signifier, the dimension proper to language where the elements have no positive existence (no content) of their own aside from their sound shapes but are negative entities which only serve to establish differences. As Benoist put it, “The structural ‘reality principle’ is not to be found in the real but in the efficacity [sic] of the symbolic itself, if one bears in mind that this symbolic order is affected from the outset by a ‘disinvesting’ negativity that contests all forms of the ‘personal’ and the real”. (Benoist 1978:153) This again is a position that we cannot ascribe to here in such an extreme form. While we agree whole-heartedly with Lacan’s insistence on the primacy of the signifier, and have made it clear that individual signs (signifiers) by themselves have no meaning, nevertheless the relations that signs create, that exist in absentia in the mind of the speaker, serve to organize a neurognostic structure that is anything but empty, and must of necessity be kept alive by their contextualization in the form of their representative signifiers.

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This having been said, there is much in Lacan’s approach that can be of interest to us here, provided we are afforded the latitude to abstract away from the specifically psychoanalytic (i.e. Freudian) aspects of his work. As most scholars agree, Lacan was a notoriously enigmatic figure and his writings no less so, but that is perhaps what gives us the liberty to “read” him in ways that can be instructive to the thesis being put forth in this monograph. For Lacan, the Symbolic order is what ultimately structures the visual field of the Imaginary order (of images). Furthermore, this order is necessarily linguistic in a very particular sense, not merely a matter of language but of the structuring possibilities that are specifically provided by the signifiers of language. Lacan always put the signifier first, as the device that allows for the creation of tropes, the syntagmatic configuration of signifiers that establishes the grounds upon which consciousness operates to bridge the gap between the imaginary and the real. Not only is primacy given to the signifier, as we have insisted it should be throughout this study, the Real in Lacan’s view is also defined as the “impossible” because it necessarily lies outside of the Symbolic and cannot be attained by it. In psychoanalytic terms, the Real is the source of anxiety, of trauma, precisely because it cannot enter into the realm of the Symbolic. In our terms, this is exactly what it means to say that self-organizing systems are energetically open but “organizationally closed”–i.e. they cannot take in anything from the outside in terms of information or control. Finally, let us look somewhat speculatively at two concepts that dominate Lacan’s work: that of the other (lower case ‘o’), and the Other (upper case ‘O’)– developmental phenomena that correspond remarkably well with the features we have identified in this study. The little other corresponds to the realization of the other in the mirror stage, the projection of the ego in the specular image. The split in this case, therefore, is not a real separation but rather a distinction within the self, one that would be represented by dimensionality as we have defined the feature here. It is only with the realization of the big Other that true otherness is achieved, that separation occurs and distinctness comes into play. Now for Lacan, this latter form of otherness refers not only to another subject, separate from the self, but to something that is necessarily inscribed in the Symbolic order, since it is only through language that we can relate to the Other. Since the Other cannot be apprehended as a “thing in itself”, as an element of the Real order, it can only enter consciousness via language. Thus the realization of the big Other as necessarily incorporated in the symbolic order anticipates the next stage in the feature hierarchy, that of extension, which is what gives existence in human event-space, in the immediacy of the Real order, its symbolic essence and allows us to appreciate the Other as something more than a mere perception, a stimulus-bound one-off experience. It is

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significant, furthermore, that the initial recognition of the Other as a symbolic construct normally occurs in moments of immediacy with the mother, a relationship that is itself dominated by the discourse (such as it is at this early stage of child language development) between the two, where attention to the role of signifiers is set in motion. Lacan’s insistence on the primacy of the signifier ultimately implies that language (the Symbolic order) is essentially a play of tropes, of figures of speech. The way in which the signifiers of language combine in the process of their contextualization, how they are used, is therefore the key to understanding how the system ultimately operates.

10.5 Bybee’s usage-based grammar If there remain any doubts about how linguistic investigation should proceed under these assumptions, how usage should be understood and treated in terms of this study, let us consider one further approach in linguistics garnering much attention today that focuses directly on this issue. This is the usagebased approach, championed by Joan Bybee and others, the major theses of which received a thorough review by Holger Diessel in the December, 2011 issue of Language. (Bybee 2010; Diessel 2011. The discussion below follows Diessel’s presentation.) Looking closely at the principles of the usage-based approach will provide an opportunity to further clarify the position being taken in this study. The logical place to begin is the usage-based approach’s own explicit critique of Jakobson’s feature analysis of grammatical meaning, as presented by Diessel: In the structuralist approach, the meaning of grammatical categories, such as aspect or number, is analyzed in terms of binary oppositions that are defined by a limited number of semantic features (e.g. perfective vs. imperfective, singular vs. plural). There is a tendency to characterize the meaning of each category member by an invariant set of semantic features across different contexts of use. Challenging this approach, B[ybee] argues that grammatical meaning does not involve binary semantic oppositions, as proposed by Jakobson, but reflects the language users’ experience with particular situations. Since our experience of the world is open-ended, the meaning of linguistic expressions cannot be adequately analyzed by means of a restricted set of semantic features; rather, what is needed is a dynamic theory of meaning, in which the semantic features of linguistic expressions are determined by their use in different situations and contexts. Since linguistic expressions are never tied to one particular situation – that is, they are always used in multiple situations and contexts – they are usually polysemous. (Diessel 2011: 837)

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This description of the two positions sets up an either-or situation that it should by now be clear has been resolved in the present study by the concept of contextualization applied to the relation between linguistic signs. The assumption above is the common one found in arguments against the strict view of invariance and the monosemic principle: that a limited set of (presumably static) semantic features cannot explain the open-ended use of grammatical categories. The conclusion drawn in the case of usage-based grammar is that not only are linguistic expressions usually polysemous, the grammaticalization process itself is determined by their usage. Usage-based grammar does not deny the existence of abstract representations but it definitely favors the role of usage in creating grammatical categories. The present study, on the other hand, is biased in neither direction, taking the view that the relation between general and contextual meaning, between meaning and reference, is fundamentally a chicken-and-egg one. In this view, what we are talking about is in fact a dynamic process of sign-formation that necessarily operates in both directions at the same time. Usage depends on the existence of the abstract relational structure of signs present in higherorder consciousness and by the same token this underlying structure could not exist (would not be alive) without it being activated in actual speech situations through the process of contextualization and its corollary grammatical selection. One of the key tenets of usage-based linguistics involves the role of token frequency in the process of categorization and language change. “Frequency of occurrence is an important factor in almost all cognitive processes that are involved in usage and development: it underlies the emergence of exemplarbased categories; it influences analogy and pragmatic inference; and it has a major impact on grammaticalization”. (Diessel 2011: 833) There is no question that repetition of a stimulus is the way brain-based memory is created. As we saw in the discussion of neural Darwinism above, in a dynamic, self-organizing system memory is a system property defined as the ability to repeat a performance based upon the specific enhancement of a previously established ability to categorize. And it is precisely in this sense that the mechanism of feedback or what we have called grammatical selection operates to explain the role of frequency in the process of contextualization that lies at the heart of sign theory as we have been presenting it here. All possible outcomes of the grammaticalization process are accounted for through the feedback mechanism that is a necessary corollary of contextualization, what we have called the legislative activity of the speech community. This aspect of the contextualization process accounts for all possible outcomes, be they new meanings, reinforcement of existing ones, or decay through lack of reinforcement.

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In the same spirit as cognitive grammar, usage-based grammar operates on the assumption that what underlies the process of grammaticalization in language are domain-general cognitive processes, thereby automatically relegating the linguistic sign to subordinate status in the structure and functioning of mind. There are two closely related reasons for modern linguistic theory holding to this bias, a predisposition we have been at pains to remedy. First is surely the fact that far more has been learned about cognitive processes generally in the past several decades for linguists to work with than has been the case with the study of signs themselves; and secondly, what remains of the structural analysis of signs today, aside from some interesting but inconclusive forays into markedness theory, is rather antiquated, leading to the kinds of dismissal that we find in the quotation cited earlier in this section about Jakobsonian structuralism. Together these two facts have constituted a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that it has been the purpose of this monograph to dispel. There is no question that such superficial notions as perfective/imperfective or singular/plural referenced in the above quotation amount to little more than labels whose ultimate cognitive significance is rightly questioned by proponents of usage-based grammar and others. Labels like these tell us little if anything about the possible cognitive reality of such oppositions as relational properties of mind, even when coupled with explanations of markedness. Such attempts, as we have seen with the opposition singular vs. plural, can even be deceiving when treated uncritically as representations of relations presumed to correlate with phenomena in the real world–in this case with number. The same can be said of Jakobson’s own case features, which were still defined in impressionistic terms that made determining their ultimate cognitive reality highly problematic. The features of this study, on the other hand, have been refined and redefined in such a way that they can be shown to have correlates at the most profound, supra-rational level of consciousness, made possible by the very evolution of the linguistic sign from the signaling behavior of antecedent species.

10.6 Jakobson’s relative autonomy Throughout his long career as one of the world’s great polymaths, Jakobson constantly came back to the theme of what might best be termed “relative autonomy”, which he applied consistently both within the study of language (between the various domains of linguistic structure) and between disciplines where cooperation on issues regarding language is required. Though he rarely used the term itself, the theme he always came back to was the need to respect

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the integrity of scientific investigation in terms of the subject matter of a given discipline, such as language, while at the same time appreciating what the equally autonomous investigation of properties in other disciplines have to offer our appreciation of the whole. Interestingly, the one time he actually used the term relative autonomy was in the context of the relation between spoken and written language: Whether written characters in a given system render single phonemes, syllables, or entire words, as a rule they function as signantia for the corresponding–lower or higher–units of spoken language. Nonetheless, as it was realized throughout the age-old history of linguistics and as it has been particularly stressed and demonstrated by the phonologists of the Prague Linguistic Circle, the graphemic aspect of language displays remarkable degrees of relative autonomy. Written language is prone to develop its peculiar structural properties so that the history of the two chief linguistic varieties, speech and letters, is rich in dialectical tensions and alternations of mutual repulsions and attractions. (Jakobson 1971: 706. Italics added.)

Jakobson was not addressing Derrida here (the citation above is from 1968), but espousing a general principle of scientific investigation: whether we are talking about internal or external phenomena, we must respect the intrinsic properties of the different subject matters in any properly interdisciplinary study. In a somewhat supercharged presentation of the argument, he stated that …unless these two complementary notions–autonomy and integration–are linked intimately with each other, our endeavor becomes diverted to a wrong end: either the salutary idea of autonomy degenerates into an isolationist bias, noxious as any parochialism, separatism, and apartheid, or one takes the opposite path and compromises the sound principle of integration by substituting a meddlesome heteronomy (alias ‘colonialism’) for the indispensable autonomy. In other words, equal attention must be paid to the specifics in the structure and development of any given province of knowledge and, furthermore, to their common foundations and developmental lines as well as to their mutual dependence. (Jakobson 1971: 656)

And this was nowhere more important in Jakobson’s day than with the relation between linguistics and psychology. In all these cases there is a clearly delimited area for psychologists’ fruitful intervention, and so long as experts in psychology do not intrude in the intrinsically linguistic sphere of verbal form and meaning with specifically psychological criteria and methods, both linguistics and psychology can and must derive genuine benefit from mutual lessons. One must, however, constantly remember that verbal processes and concepts–in short, all the signantia and signata in their interrelations–require, first and foremost, a purely linguistic analysis and interpretation. (Jakobson 1971: 671)

By heeding this advice, we have been able to use an appropriately autonomous investigation of the signantia and signata of various languages to arrive at

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set of conceptual relations and the hierarchy they comprise that is verifiable independently by the equally autonomous investigation of properties of mind in consciousness research and in the structure of creation myths worldwide. But in order to construct a theory of language as a self-organizing system with a properly neurognostic structure, we have had to violate, if you will, Jakobson’s principle of complementarity when it comes to what he considered the relative autonomy of the grammatical pattern versus the referential function of language. Only by appreciating that making reference in a self-referential system of signs is tantamount to contextualizing their underlying essence or potential have we been able to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of human concept-formation at the most profound level of consciousness.

Epilogue: The wisdom of the primal mind “…between life and thought, there is not the absolute gap which was accepted as a matter of fact by the seventeenth-century philosophical dualism. If we are to believe that what takes place in our mind is not something substantially or fundamentally different from the basic phenomenon of life itself, and if we are led to believe that there is not this kind of gap… then perhaps we will reach more wisdom, let us say, than we think we are capable of.” Claude Lévi-Strauss

As Fritjof Capra observed in The Tao of Physics, the roots of physics and of Western science in general date back to the Greek philosophers of the sixth century B.C., when there was no separation between science, philosophy and religion. He documents the complex history of Western thought that gradually led to the definitive split between mind and matter credited to Descartes in the seventeenth century A.D. Before that split, many of the great Greek philosophers held to an essentially monistic and organic view of life, sometimes quite mystical, as with the Milenesians, but not for example with Heraclitus, the reputed ancestor of the Stoics, who held to a philosophy of eternal becoming arising from the “dynamic and cyclic interplay of opposites”, where any pair of opposites constituted a unity, which he called the Logos. (Capra 1977: 6–7) Then, from Descartes onward, Western science became captivated by what can be learned by treating the material world as an independent realm apart from that of the mind, and Newton’s mechanistic world view dominated Western thought, producing several remarkable centuries of scientific discovery. Until, that is, the advent of the twentieth century, when it became clear that the artificial separation of mind and matter can only go so far in revealing truths about the universe. For as soon as we leave the sensual domain of observable phenomena and enter the sub-atomic realm, it becomes apparent that one cannot separate the observer from the observation. Here absolute measurement and quantifiability give way to the calculation of probabilities of occurrence for phenomena that are more accurately conceived as events than as objects. With the unification of space and time, and its corollary, the equivalence of mass and energy, the target of investigation ceases to be an object and becomes instead a dynamic pattern of events. To describe such events requires the intervention of an observer, whose very activity then becomes part of the event itself. Consequently, over a wide range of scientific inquiry, from quantum theory to the holographic universe, Gaia theory, and modern consciousness research, we are witnessing a return to our own roots, as it were, where mind is again one with nature. The point of The Tao of Physics was, as its title indicates, to show how this return to a holistic way of thinking, to the roots of Western thought before

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Descartes, represents a convergence of Western science with Eastern mysticism. We can broaden our perspective on this development, however, and include the world-view of many indigenous peoples as well, populations where truly holistic thinking is not only a matter for trained philosophers or scientists to engage in, but a practical matter that penetrates deep into the psyche and governs the way people actually lead their lives. For many native Americans and Australian aborigines, for example, this way of thinking constitutes the very stuff of life–an entirely natural way of experiencing man’s place in nature. To be sure, many of these populations have a shamanistic tradition, where certain individuals are specifically trained in the practice of mysticism, and the population at large may treat them as a kind of priesthood to be engaged with in times of trouble; but these individuals operate, so to speak, at the extreme mystical fringe of society. In matters of everyday life, there is nothing necessarily mystical about their holistic worldview, just as there is nothing mystical about quantum mechanics. There appeared some years ago a strong desire among native Americans to “tell their own story”, to explain to a Western audience what the mindset was behind the way their people try to live their lives, to preserve traditions that were being overrun by so-called Western progress. One of the phrases used to describe their way of thinking was the ‘primal mind’, where primal is understood not in the sense of primitive or primeval, but in the sense of fundamental–a deep-seated and highly sophisticated holistic view of man’s place in nature that is full of wisdom lacking in Western culture. One should therefore understand primal as a more natural way of thinking, unadulterated by the artificial separation of mind and matter. One of the most lucid presentations of this kind was Jamake Highwater’s The Primal Mind: Vision and Reality in Indian America. (Highwater 1981) He notes, for example, indigenous peoples’ preoccupation with their relationship to the land and compares it to the mindset of the dominant Western culture. Where we tend to focus on a piece of land as real estate, as property in a materialist sense with geometric correlates that can be mapped and otherwise quantified, the primal concept of place is rather one of relational space, one which derives its essence from the experience of events that “take place” there. To the primal mind there is a truly symbiotic relationship between Being and Place, in which the concept of geometrical space has little or no meaning (and maps are no help at all). As Highwater put it, The primal experience of space is not linear; it does not fit into the grid patterns so common in Western spatial orientation. The abstraction of space in the West … is an atomization of space that provides us with loci–with points in a determined space–but not with the actual experience of space as natural and sensual phenomena. The primal

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mind knows space experientially. This affective relationship with space of the primal person, however, does not limit his experience to pragmatic spatial actions, for he sees space as the sacred theatre of his life. (Highwater 1981: 131–132)

Any such unified view of man’s place in nature ultimately becomes spiritual because it conceives the locus of man’s existence here on earth as an experiential construct, an event-space as we have called it in this study, where the sacredness that informs the conception of place constitutes the temporal aspect of Being in its non-materialist sense–a unification of space and time that informs and transcends any fixed points of reference in the material world. As another writer at the time, Joseph Epes Brown, expressed it, Native experiences of place are infused with mythic themes. These express events of sacred time, which are as real now as in any time. They are experienced through each landmark of each people’s immediate environment, … thus, it gives meaning to the life of man who cannot conceive of himself apart from the land. (Quoted in Highwater 1981: 122)

In this view of what constitutes life, one cannot separate the spatial from the temporal, nor the actual from the spiritual, for all are woven together in a dynamic and unified process of contextualization, where what occurs in praesentia is necessarily seen in relation to events in absentia. Consequently, we as scientists should not be concerned by the appearance of sacred or mythic themes in presentations of this sort; on the contrary we should welcome them as evidence that science and spirituality are not antithetical, and that our myths are real, operating at a supra-rational level of consciousness that cannot be ignored. Even more important than the relation to nature is the primal conception of language itself. The parallel between the role that words play in this kind of indigenous thinking and the principles of a sign-based theory is strikingly evident. In this world view, for example, one does not separate the meaning from the word uttered. Meaning flows forth from the spoken word much as in the Sanskrit concept of sphota. And just as the concept of sphota had its origin in Vedic religion and ritual, so too the concept of the word in native American thought derives from a spiritual appreciation of life. As Joseph Epes Brown, again, put it: “In Native languages the understanding is that the meaning is in the sound, it is in the word; the word is not a symbol for a meaning which has been abstracted out, word and meaning are together in one experience”. (Brown 1989: 13) Of course, what this implies for the Native American may be something experientially more profound than what we have been proposing in this study, even mystical in this case, but this can only mean that the principle is taken very seriously. Thus, in Brown’s words,

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…to name a being, for example an animal, is actually to conjure up the powers latent in that animal. Added to this is the fact that when we create words we use our breath, and for these people and these traditions breath is associated with the principle of life; breath is life itself. It is because of this special feeling about words that people avoid using sacred personal names, because they contain the power of the beings named, and if you use them too much the power becomes dissipated. (Brown 1989: 13)

Abstracting away from the mystical implications of this attitude towards the spoken word, we can appreciate what is being affirmed here, that the word (the linguistic sign) is an organic phenomenon which itself structures experience. To the Navajo, for example, what occurs in the event-space where conversations take place “is not seen simply as passing information objectively between total strangers, but it is seen as a form of close relational intercourse in and of itself.” (Toelken 1989: 61–62) There is a very revealing scene in the movie “The Black Robe” that dramatizes this point well. The film, and the book of the same name (book and screenplay by Brian Moore) has a lot to say about how the Europeans considered the Indians inferior and stupid, while the Indians for their part considered the Europeans (and especially the Jesuit priest who was leading them in this case) not just ignorant but downright evil. The Europeans thought it their mission to convert the Indians to Christianity, both to save their souls and to teach them a superior way of life; but at the same time the Indians witnessed on a daily basis how incapable the Europeans were at surviving without their help in the Canadian wilderness, so detached were they from nature and basic human relations in their quest for the perfect afterlife (epitomized by the actions of the priest). For the Jesuits, life was a sequential affair, a linear progression from the challenges of material existence to the life of the soul after death. For the Indians, on the other hand, life in the material world was necessarily coterminous with the life of the spirit world, which manifested itself not only in the unbroken relation with nature but also in the “sacred” nature of human relations themselves, a vital aspect of which was language. At one point in the story, the priest is writing in his diary when the Indians come upon him and ask him what he is doing. When he explains that he is putting words down in a book, the Indians have no idea what he is talking about, so he proposes an experiment. They will tell him something that they haven’t told anyone in his party before and he will write it down. Then he will show what he wrote to his cohorts and ask them to tell the Indians what they had read. When the Indians hear their words repeated back to them in this circuitous and materialist manner, they are not only surprised but horrified; and from that point on the priest is branded by them a demon, and a shaman is engaged to exorcise his evil soul. In this story, therefore, not only do the

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Indians give no currency to the “superiority” of literacy, the Europeans are incapable of appreciating the Native American belief that the spoken word is the embodiment of human relations, and as such cannot be converted into a material object without violating the sacred order of things. Now obviously, by telling this story we are not advocating the demise of literacy, but by the same token, the fact that such an attitude toward the spoken word emanates from the deep-seated convictions of an indigenous people, rather than from the carefully constructed reasoning of a particular philosophical or scientific tradition, should be taken as prima facie evidence of a truth that is verified daily in the life of a community, and not dismissed as merely folk psychology. It is a form of wisdom that Western scientific culture has lost in its search for objectivity in a material world, and has not yet regained even with the return to its properly holistic roots. There is much to appreciate when the linguistic sign is given its due as the arbiter of meaning in the human mind, without going so far as to endow the sign with mystical value. Even in those of our theories about language that do not espouse Cartesian dualism there remains a commitment to, an entrenched philosophical bias towards, the primacy of pre-linguistic conceptual categorization and the resulting assumption that the structure of meaning is not inherent in the nature of the sign itself. The wisdom of the primal mind suggests, on the contrary, that meaning may well be embodied in the word, that the evolution of the human capacity for sign-formation has put the sign itself in the preeminent position to structure consciousness at the most profound level.

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Glossary Items in small caps refer to other entries in the glossary. Autopoiesis. The name given to the theory of self-organizing systems first proposed by the Chilean biologists Umberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Biogram. The evolutionarily determined structure that establishes the initial organization of the pre- and peri-natal nervous system, the neurognostic structure by which a species ultimately functions in the world. The pattern or gestalt that is the integral expression of one’s bodily morphology. Cancellation. The fifth feature in the hierarchy of sign relations in higher-order consciousness. Establishes the concept of “not now” as a modality distinct from the hic et nunc of the moment of speaking. Allows for the conceptualization of past time as well as atemporal expressions that create other frames of reference separate from, yet still linked to, the immediate present–e.g. conditionals, subjunctives, and hypotheticals. Defines the Russian instrumental case, and is a component of the Russian dative and locative. Recurs as the fifth stage in the water metaphor and in creation myths worldwide. Contextualization. The engine that drives the process of sign-formation and the production of meaning, that keeps a self-organizing system of sign relations alive. The process by which specific senses are generated in the real world from the underlying semantic potential inherent in sign relations, in a purely stochastic manner. In tandem with grammatical selection, unites the phenomena of communication and concept-formation into a single, indissoluble mental process. Deictic category. Traditionally, any category of language that depends on knowledge of the specific coordinates of the speech situation (time, place, participants, etc.) for its identification. Redefined here to include both the speech situation and the narrated situation, producing two different types of deixis: transmissional deixis and perceptional deixis. Dimensionality. The second feature in the hierarchy of sign relations in higherorder consciousness, where the mind first conceptualizes the perception of an identifiable phenomenon. Defined as a framing property akin to the relation between figure and ground, where the mind first apprehends the outlines of a phenomenon, with no separation yet between it and its background. Identifies the aspect relation as a grammatical category and the modification relation in Russian. Describes the ‘in’ relation, among others, in the prepositional systems of English and Russian. Recurs as the second stage in the water metaphor and

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in creation myths worldwide. Appears as the second stage in hallucinations engendered by sensory deprivation, where the “mind’s eye” perceives identifiable shapes arising from a mass of indiscriminant lines, dots and colors. Constitutes the second stage in child development where the organism first realizes it has a self, equivalent to the “little other” in Lacanian psychology; and the second stage in child language acquisition, the appearance of the first properly phonemic sound. Distinctness. The third feature in the hierarchy of sign relations in higher-order consciousness, where the mind first conceptualizes the perception of separate, identifiable phenomena. Epitomized by the dual as a grammatical category, the minimal case of separation. Distinguishes ‘but’ from ‘and’; ‘above’ from ‘over’; and ‘below’ from ‘under’ in English. Is a basic feature of count nouns in English. Recurs as the third stage in the water metaphor and in creation myths worldwide. Appears as the third stage in hallucinations engendered by sensory deprivation, where individually identifiable “objects” begin to appear. Constitutes the third stage in child development, equivalent to the “big Other” in Lacanian psychology, the realization of an Other apart from the self; and the third stage in child language acquisition, the appearance of distinctly different phonemes. Event-space. The time and place of real-world experience, where consciousness is activated and the contextualization of sign relations is actualized. Extension. The fourth feature in the hierarchy of sign relations in higher-order consciousness, where the immediate present is established as a distinct conceptual phenomenon, able to be held in the mind (extended) long enough to be recognized as such. Makes possible the subsequent recall of previous unrelated experience, and the ultimate realization of itself as but one of any number of potential moments. Introduces time as a modality in the conceptualization of presence. Defines the progressive tenses and the ‘-ing’ desinence generally in English. Identifies the Russian accusative case and is a component of the Russian dative, genitive and locative. Is the mark of the modification relation in English, and of those count nouns that constitute bounded regions whose membership indicates functionality. Recurs as the fourth stage in the water metaphor and in creation myths worldwide. Glottological. Neologism: the uniquely linguistic logic that defines the nature of sign relations at the highest, supra-rational order of consciousness. Grammatical relations. The closed categories of language that require the speaker to make a choice between one or the other pole of a sign relation in

Glossary

209

every utterance. Include morphological categories like tense, aspect, number and case; as well as the syntactic phenomenon of word order. Grammatical selection. The necessary counterpart to contextualization as a properly stochastic process, whereby the members of a given speech community legislate which contextual applications of an underlying conceptual relation will have survival value and which not. The feedback mechanism that constitutes the selective component of the process of sign-formation. Higher-order consciousness. The level of consciousness achieved by the evolution of Homo sapiens. Epitomized by the appearance of the language faculty, understood here as the ability to map one signal onto another to create sign relations that allow the organism to make reference in a purely probabilistic manner, not dependent upon stimuli in the immediate present. Includes in the present study both the rational and supra-rational orders of consciousness. Invariance. See topological invariance. Marking. Identifies the feature that defines a conceptual relation, the property that is attached to the marked member of the relation. In the view of invariance espoused here, the contextualization process by which meaning is generated from the underlying potential inherent in a sign relation demands that there be no contextually relative application of markedness, no instance where the marked and unmarked poles of a relation switch places in certain contexts in order to match up with some presumed aspects of an external reality, as in other theories of markedness. In a self-referential system where context is intrinsic to the sign relation from which it is generated, it is the experiential reality created by the contextualization process that the marking evokes, that reflects the structure of consciousness itself. Modification relation. The conceptual relation established by the order of words in an utterance, a grammatical relation of the same fundamental (paradigmatic) structure as in morphology, requiring the speaker to choose between one or the other pole of the relation. Consists of a modifier and a modified in one or the other order at each level of concatenation in a language. In a properly sign-based theory of language, syntactic concatenation is conceived as a property of signs themselves, whose most evident property at this level is modification. Monism. Any theory denying the duality of matter and mind. Used here in the sense that the order of reality in which an organism functions is ultimately governed by its consciousness, even as it interacts with its medium. Every organism operates in the event-space of its own making, continuously categorizing and recategorizing the essential elements of its cognitive domain. Hence

210

Glossary

mind and matter are one in the consciousness of the organism, where the activity of the observer necessarily affects the nature of the thing observed. Narrated situation. The situation being described in a given utterance. Distinguished from the speech situation, the act of speaking itself. Grammatical categories defined on the narrated as opposed to the speech situation include gender, number, voice, and aspect. See also perceptional deixis. Objectiveness. The sixth and final feature in the hierarchy of sign relations in higher-order consciousness. Establishes remoteness and independence from the present as a distinct conceptual possibility, allowing for the expression of future time and alternate spaces or states with an objective status of their own. Explains the Hopi concept of the “unmanifested” as a temporal construct distinguishing the spirit world from the material. Defines the Russian genitive and is a component of the locative. Explains the “indefinite expansibility and contractibility” of mass nouns in English. Recurs as the sixth and final stage in the water metaphor and in creation myths worldwide. Perceptional deixis. Recognizes the fact that all speech is ultimately a deictic act, of referring to what is being produced in a given utterance. Since speech acts do not refer to elements of exogenous reality, they must be defined on what is generated by the contextualization of the underlying sign relations themselves that constitute an utterance, including both the speech situation and the narrated situation. Distinguished from transmissional deixis, in which reference is made specifically to the coordinates of the speech situation per se. Plurality. The initial feature in the hierarchy of sign relations; the conceptualization in higher-order consciousness of the most basic perceptual construct. Defined as the qualitative aspect of number, where the mind apprehends undifferentiated complexity, the primordial cognitive structure out of which conceptual categorization emerges. Provides the cognitive foundation from which the quantitative aspect of number derives. Identifies the plural as a grammatical category; transitivity as a lexical category; and is a basic feature of count nouns in English. Defines the modification relation in French. Recurs as the initial stage in the water metaphor and in creation myths worldwide. Appears at the earliest stage in hallucinations engendered by sensory deprivation, where one perceives an unstructured mass of lines, dots and colors. Constitutes the initial stage in child development before the mind realizes that it has a self; and the babbling stage in child language acquisition. Reference. Redefined here as the ontological phenomenon equivalent to contextualization of the underlying potential inherent in sign relations. See self-reference.

Glossary

211

Self-organizing system. A self-regulating system that requires no top-down or rule-governed structures to perpetuate itself. Such a system is energetically open but organizationally closed. It processes no information from the outside, but interacts with its environment by continually modulating its own structure. Operates as a stochastic process, spontaneously generating new components even as it interacts with its medium. Self-reference. The referential process whereby the speaker contextualizes a token of the underlying essence of a sign relation rather than making reference to phenomena in external reality. Allows a self-organizing system such as language to conceptualize phenomena that are not immediately evident in things themselves. Sign relation. The underlying conceptual relation in higher-order consciousness between the embodied signifiers of language that establishes their potential for contextualization. Singulative deixis. Defines those categories that constitute a single, unique instantiation of a linguistic property, one that cannot be further analyzed. Includes proper names and the phenomenon of anaphora. Expanded here to include any lexical item that is no more than an exemplar of some more general category, such as the different names of trees. Speech situation. The act of speaking itself, as a phenomenon upon which certain categories of language are defined. See transmissional deixis. Sphota. The early Sanskrit concept that meanings are inherent in the forms of words used to produce them, that meaning “flows” or “bursts forth” from those forms. Arguably the oldest expression of language as a signifying operation, establishing the essentiality of the monosemic principle–that differences in meaning in the conceptual sphere are ultimately embodied in the differences in form used to express them. Stochastic process. The process by which self-organizing systems maintain themselves and evolve spontaneously without a top-down, rule-governed generator. Consists of a production component that is random and a feedback mechanism that selects from the random output of the system. Establishes probability as the underlying generator of evolution in living systems. Topological invariance. An abstract, relational quality that remains constant throughout the various transformations it undergoes as a result of its occurrence in concrete contexts. This type of invariance is dynamic, capable of producing potentially infinite variability and expansion of contexts. Responsible for the fundamentally gradient nature of the contextualization process.

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Transmissional deixis. Expands upon Jakobson’s notion of “shifters” to define any category that requires knowledge of the coordinates of the speech situation for its identification, including not only person and tense, the demonstrative pronouns, temporal and locational adverbs like ‘now’ and ‘then’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, and so forth, but also any aspect of the lexical meaning of a word that invokes the coordinates of the speech situation for its identification, such as the determinate verbs of motion in Russian and other lexical items noted in this study. Transpersonal psychology. Also known as transphenomenal psychology. The study of phenomena at the highest or supra-rational end of the spectrum of consciousness, where myths, dreams, and altered states of consciousness occur. Akin to Jung’s study of the collective unconscious, an impersonal property of the human mind. Here understood as an essential part of the biogram of the species, the neurognostic structure that overlays and ultimately sets the conditions for its operation at the ego-oriented or rational level.

Index abstract noun 132 Allen 36, 32 ambiguity 26, 62, 80, 82, 169 Andrews 135 animacy 62–3 archetype 8, 20, 35, 108, 146, 149, 186 – Platonic archetype 138 Armstrong 145, 150 art, origin of 170–175 aspect 44–46, 94 attribution 72, 73–100 autistic ix, 156, 161, 173 autopoiesis 30, 34, 115, glossary – See self-organizing system Bastian 2, 146, 182 Bateson 6, 17, 26, 29, 32 Battistella viii, 37 'be' 117–118 Benoist 185–187 binarism 2, 4–5, 67, 101, 108, 114, 123–124, 137, 149, 157–158, 160, 189, 195 biogenetic structuralism ix, 1–2, 9–11, 22, 139, 156–160 biogram vii, 11–13, 42, 127, 129, 150, 153, 158, 160–161, 179, glossary Birnbaum vi, 22–23 Blake ix Boas vii Bolinger 21, 74, 108 bounded region 129–130 Bower 158 Brown 197 Bybee 189–191 Campbell ix cancellation 12, 36–40, 60, 64, 66–67, 69, 77–78, 102–103, 105–106, 115–116, 121–122, 142, 144, 149, glossary Capra vii, 29, 195 Cartesian linguistics 3 case 21–24, 29, 52–68 – nominative 56 – accusative 56–60 – genitive 60–64

– genitive/accusative 61–64 – dative 64–66 – instrumental 56–60 – locative 67 case grammar 53 categorization – conceptual vii–ix, 4, 6–10, 13, 15–17, 23, 62–65, 69, 150, 154–155, 157 – perceptional 12, 46, 49, 51, 141, 154, 157, 176–179 child language development 125–127, 151 Chomsky vii–viii, 3, 9, 15, 55, 185 Chvany 68 cognitive linguistics/grammar viii, 1, 6–7, 10, 15–17, 25, 34, 103–104, 127–136, 153, 160, 168–169, 175, 181, 191 cognitive science viii, 2–5, 15–17, 137 collective unconscious 19–20, 35, 38, 140 communication 9, 26, 35, 62–63, 80, 139, 146, 157, 159–160, 163, 165 commutation 70–71 componential analysis 22 Comrie 44–45 conceptual property 22–23, 51 conceptual relation 4, 7, 11, 13, 35, 101, 123, 137, 139, 150, 153 connotation 19, 24, 38, 40, 44, 46, 49, 62, 77, 80, 89, 95, 117, 125, 162, 169, 171 consciousness 48, 109–111, 113–114, 124, 138, 150 – higher-order 4, 8–9, 13, 19, 35, 39, 47, 52, 55–56, 70–71, 125, 133, 144, 150, 153– 179, 190, glossary – primary 155, 163, 172 – rational/ego-oriented ix, 7–8, 20, 25, 43, 55, 105, 156, 161, 168, 173, 175 – supra-rational viii–ix, 7–8, 20, 38, 44, 55, 101, 110, 120, 133, 136, 137, 139, 140– 151, 153, 161, 169, 170–176, 191, 197 See transpersonal psychology, autistic construal 16, 168 context 7, 19, 27, 33, 37, 72, 105, 111, 124, 133 contextual meaning 4, 20, 24, 29, 48, 104, 109–110, 117, 119, 190

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Index

contextualization 1, 5–6, 12–13, 23, 26, 31, 33–34, 37, 41, 47, 70–72, 78–81, 101, 104, 107, 110, 112–113, 115, 119–120, 128, 137–138, 145, 150, 153, 160, 164, 168–169, 187, 190, 197, glossary – See ritual Count vii, 11 count noun 129–131 Courtine ix Croft 133 cross-modal transfer 157–160, 167 – See reentrant connectivity Cruze 133 d'Aquili See biogenetic structuralism deixis 38–39, 79, 97, 114, 134, 136, glossary – perceptional 115–117, 123, 134–136, glossary – singulative 135–136, glossary – transmissional 115–118, 123, 125–126, 134–136, glossary denotation 63, 70, 99, 162–164, 167, 171 Derrida 182–185 Descartes 195 designatum 182 Diessel 189–191 difference 17, 19–21, 24–26, 32, 36–38, 44, 48, 50, 55, 70–71, 80, 108, 113, 124, 129, 144, 158–159, 187 dimensionality 12, 44–56, 51, 69, 85–94, 102–103, 106, 113, 115, 120, 122, 133, 140–142, 147–148, 151, 178, 188, glossary dissipative structure 32 distinctness 12, 49–51, 102–103, 130, 132, 134, 140–141, 143, 147–148, 151, 178, 188, glossary Diver 21 'do' 121 'down' 103–107 dreams 173–174 Dreamtime 149 dual number 50, 147 dualism 12 – See binarism dualities (in mythology) 148–149 '-ed' 36, 80

Edelman 157, 159, 163–164, 172–174 – See neural Darwinism Eliade 145 Eliot 148–149 embodiment 3, 25, 103–104, 153, 156, 199 English verbal system 78–84 Evans 50 event-space 12, 41, 51, 155, 165, 197–198, glossary evolution 153–180 extension 12, 51–53, 59, 64, 66–67, 73–79, 81, 93–94, 98, 102–103, 106, 113, 115– 116, 118, 121, 123, 131, 141, 143, 149, 188, glossary features – conceptual/semantic 11–12, 20, 22, 101, 137, 189 – distinctive/phonological 3 – grammatical 7–8, 13, 24, 38 French 94–99 Garcia vi Gast vii generative grammar viii, 15, 53–55, 167–168, 181 – minimalist program 53–55 genitive See case 'get' 122 Gladwell 33 glottological 7, 11–12, 25, 41, 45, 49, 59, 71, 90, 141, 145, glossary 'go' 121–122 Goddard 125 Goswami 138 government 56–60, 74 gradient 77–78, 134, 175–176 grammatical category/relation 43, 46, 57, 69–70, 76, 101, 190 – definition of 35, 110, glossary grammatical meaning 3–6, 13, 21, 35–68, 108, 189 grammatical selection 6, 33, 52, 80–81, 169, 190, glossary grammaticality 15 Grof ix, 140 Guillaume 21

Index

Halle vii hallucinations 173–174, 176–179 'have' 118–121 Heraclitus 195 Highwater 196–197 Hinrichs vii Holenstein 4 homonymy 26–27 Hopi time 19–20, 36, 41–42 image 131, 145, 168, 176, 179 – in Lacan 187–188 image-making 170–176, 178 image schemas 17, 168, 170 indeterminacy 25–26, 80, 154, 166, 169 '-ing' 51–52, 80–81, 94 invariance 4, 17, 20, 37, 43, 80, 138, 190 – topological 4, 17 – relational 5, 7–9, 21, 23 Jakobson vii–viii, 1–7, 15–17, 21–22, 22–27, 29, 38, 52, 66–67, 101, 108–109, 111, 114, 134, 137, 181, 185, 189, 191 Jaszczolt 42 Jespersen 118–119 Johnson 16–17, 25, 128–129 Jung 8, 20, 24–25, 38, 140, 146, 186, 191– 193 Kant 2–3, 137–138 kategorija sostojanija 65, 92 Kenneally 167 Kristal ix Kristeva 17–18 Lacan 187–189 Lakoff 16–17, 25, 128–129 Langacker 17, 129–133 langue/parole 182–184 Laughlin 181 – See biogenetic structuralism Leakey 163 Lewin 163 Lewis-Williams 156, 170–174 Lévi-Strauss 1–5, 7, 29, 137, 146, 185–187, 195 lexical meaning 5–6, 13, 21, 101–136 – nominal 124–136

215

– verbal 114–123 linear logic 20, 36, 38–39, 41–53, 47–50, 56, 69, 72, 82, 120, 146–147, 196, 198 logical subject 64, 90 Ludlow 43 Luhmann 31, 33, 178 Luria 157 Lyons 55 markedness viii, 37, 42, 45, 46–49, 67, 69, 75–77, 84–85, 93–94, 97, 131, 139, 191 – markedness reversals 46–47, 84 mass noun 131–132 matrix algebra 71 Maturana 30 – See autopoiesis McManus See biogenetic structuralism Menand 1, 25 metaphor 1, 16, 25, 103–104, 114, 121, 124, 128, 140, 165–166 Miess ix mind-body problem 4, 195–196 modification relation 69–100, 107, 119–120, 168, glossary Molotki 42 monism 4, 138, 195, glossary monosemy vii, 7, 108–110, 120, 128, 190 Moore 198–199 Morrison ix Muses 48 myth 5, 12–13, 137, 145–150, 197 narrated situation/event 114–115, 131, 135, glossary neural Darwinism ix, 8–10, 13, 153–156, 190 neurognosis 11, 175, 187, 193 Newfield 46 number theory 48, 71, 173 objectiveness 12, 40–44, 60–64, 66–67, 78, 102–103, 123, 132, 142, 144, 149, glossary ontogenesis 12–13, 125, 151, 160 paradigmatic opposition 52, 58, 69–70, 166, 168, 183, 205 part of speech 80–82, 85, 94, 110, 120 passive voice 74, 92–93, 117

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Paul 48 Peat 71 Peirce 1, 25, 137, 164 phonemic distinction 3, 158–159 Platonic idealism 148 plurality 12, 37, 46–51, 69, 83–84, 94–99, 118, 120, 122, 130, 140–142, 147–148, 151, 178, glossary poetic discourse 72, 107, 168 polysemy ix, 7, 26, 109–110, 127–128, 175– 176, 189 potentiality 6, 9, 19, 23–26, 40, 49, 55, 57, 71–73, 104, 107, 111, 121, 128, 137, 142, 145, 149, 153, 165–166, 168–169, 176 – Aristotelian potentia 138 – See stochastic process predication 56, 64–66, 69, 72, 73–100, 121 prepositions 45, 50, 101–108 probability 74, 107, 138–139, 154, 195 propositional logic 56, 69, 156 – See predication prototype theory 133–136, 175 quantum theory 29, 71, 138 recursion 167–168 reentrant connectivity 153–156, 161, 165, 167, 174 – See cross-modal transfer reference 20–21, 29, 31, 63, 67, 70, 108–111, 115, 136, 190, glossary – and truth 15 – ontological problem of 5–6, 13, 109 – self-reference 4–5, 7, 31, 34, 37, 41, 47, 49, 63, 99, 107, 110–111, 137, 162, 187 – See denotation, connotation relative autonomy 66–67, 191–193 remembered present 155, 161, 164, 171–172 ritual 145, 150 Rosch 17 – See prototype theory Rudy viii Ruhl 21, 27, 108–110, 112–113, 136 Russian vii, 21, 23, 40, 44–46, 77–78, 83, 102 – cases 56–68 – syntax 85–94 – verbs of motion 116–117

'-s' 81–84 Sacks 176–179 Saeed 16, 124 Sanglier 26, 32 Sangster vii–ix, 4, 21–22, 39, 66 Sanskrit grammar 15, 17–18 Sapir vii, 18 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 18, 20, 36 Saussure 1, 181–182 semantic primes, theory of 125–127 shifters 114, 134 Sievert vii sign relation 4–6, 10, 13, 23–24, 35–36, 37, 42, 47, 56, 62–63, 71–72, 101, 128, 137–138, 140, 145, 153, 160–161, 168– 169, glossary – See conceptual relation signifier 17–18, 20, 34, 111–112, 129, 145, 153, 185, 187–189 speech situation/event 38–41, 51, 59, 114– 115, 137, glossary sphota 17, 197, glossary Stankiewicz 46 Steiner 184 stochastic process 6, 23, 26, 32–34, 80, 104, 111, 128, 138, 150, 161, 169, glossary Strozier 182, 184 substantialism 5, 185–187 symbol 10–11, 24–25 synonymy 15, 70 syntax 13, 23, 69–100, 167 system 24, 29, 64, 66–68, 123, 154, 163, 166, 182–183 – self-organizing ix, 26, 29–34, 47, 63, 70, 72, 153–154, 162–163, 167, 169, 178– 179, 183–184, 187–188, 190, glossary – system theory ix, 4, 10, 13 'table' 112–114 tense 19–20, 36–44 Timberlake 23 time 141–143 – as modality 42–44, 60 – See Hopi time – See tense tipping point 33–34, 62, 165–166 Tobin 21

Index

Tononi 153 tool making 166–167 topological invariance ix, 4, glossary transitivity 49, 55, 61, 84, 99, 118–119, 121– 122, 125–126 translation 20 transpersonal psychology ix, 8, 13, 20, 137, 140–146, glossary Trubetskoy 2 truth value 15–16, 129, 145–146 Tyler 50 'up' 103–107 usage-based grammar 189–191

van Schooneveld vii, 21, 35, 39, 66, 68, 101–103, 114–115, 123, 135 Varela 30 vervet monkey 163–164 Ward 62 water metaphor 140, 142–145, 148–149 Waugh viii, 46, 96, 97 weak objectivity 138 Weinreich 22 Whorf 9, 18, 42 Wierzbicka 125 – See semantic primes Wilcken 2, 4–5, 137

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