Style, Symbolic Language Structure and Syntactic Change: Intransitivity and the Perception of Is in English [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9783112330289, 9783112330272

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ROBERTA KEVELSON

STYLE SYMBOLIC

LANGUAGE

STRUCTURE AND

SYNTACTIC

INT RANSITI VIT Y AND THE OF

IS

IN

CHANGE PERCEPTION

ENGLISH

LISSE

THE PETER DE RIDDER PRESS 1976

© 1976 by Roberta Kevelson All Rights Reserved ISBN 9 0 3 1 6 0 1 2 5

X

Photoset in Malta by Inteiprint (Malta) Ltd. Printed in Holland by Intercontinental Graphics Dordrecht

PREFACE

Like the fashion industry, linguistic theories often seem to move in cycles. Hemlines rise, and fall, only to rise (and fall) again. Notions about language go in and out of vogue at a slower although no less inevitable pace. This pattern of cyclical reintroduction has been true of the study of semantics (important at the turn of the century, taboo in the first decade of transformational grammar, and once more now a bona fide domain of inquiry), of transformational grammar itself (if we believe Chomsky's analysis of the Port Royal Grammar in Cartesian Linguistics), and of the topic of this monograph — the interface between linguistic and social theory. Attempts to explain linguistic structure in terms of social (or, for that matter, psychological, political, or economic) structure have an uneven reputation in the history of linguistics. Linguists today are amused by Jakob Grimm's thesis that the first Germanic sound shift was a reflection of the independent spirit of the Germanic people, although Grimm was entirely serious about the proposition. In the early 20th century, another German, Karl Vossler, argued that cultural differences accounted for many of the grammatical changes between Classical and Vulgar Latin: the future tense was done away with because the unsophisticated folk lacked the degree of introspection necessary for contemplating the future; and the neuter gender went by the board because of an 'unconscious antiformalist stream'. A more modern proponent of the same line of thinking is André Martinet. Martinet argues that an increasing complexity of social relations will be accompanied by an increasing complexity of syntax. Division of labor will involve the appearance of new forms of human and material relations which will determine the appearance, in language, of new functions. (A Functional View of Language, 1962, p. 137) While Martinet's thesis holds promise, his examples comeasadisappointment. He argues that the evolution of Indo-European from an ergative

4

PREFACE

to a nominative-accusative system resulted from advances in the cultural and economic level of the Indo-European people, and that the Latin case system was superceded in modern Romance by prepositional constructions because the restricted case system was 'no longer capable of taking care of the expression of all the relations needed in Roman society'. Noble theses, but practically impossible to prove. It was probably Franz Boas who was at base responsible for separating the study of language from society in the United States. In his attempts to establish linguistic equality between natives of North America and citizens of the civilized West, Boas insisted upon an objective analysis of linguistic structure which could, in principle, stand apart from an analysis of culture. Later American anthropological linguists made a virtue out of necessity as an ever receding American Indian population made it impossible to study native American languages 'in their social contexts'. Soon American Structuralism was to emerge as the science of linguistic structure studied in and of itself. This structural isolationism remained the norm in transformational grammar, the last stronghold of American Structuralism. In a recent interview, Chomsky said: I think that very good linguistics is done, and always has been, without any social or sociological metatheory. For this reason, I do not agree that we have to accept a social or sociological metatheory to do good linguistics, fortunately. (H. Parret, ed., Discussing Language, 1974, p. 53)

while Chomsky goes on to add that he can imagine no objection to the project of studying language in its social and cultural context, or to the project of developing a theory of 'communicative competence', if it can be accomplished.

It is clear that he views the analysis of social patterns as extraneous to the analysis of linguistic patterns. Kevelson's monograph represents part of a growing move against the Boasian-Chomskian separation of language from its speakers. But unlike the hemlines which rise only to fall back to precisely the same length, the new surge of interest in language as a function of social requirements brings to bear a high degree of linguistic sophistication on the problem of the relationship between language and society. This renewed interest in 'social linguistics' began with the groundbreaking paper of Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968), and has since appeared in an increasing number of studies of language variation, dialectology, language change, and the emergence of new languages such as pidgins and

5

PREFACE

Creoles. Kevelson extends the domain of inquiry still farther into the realm of what we might call 'historical semiotics'. The grammatical area whose history Kevelson explores is the system of transitivity and intransitivity in English. Kevelson's argument is, in a nutshell, that perceptual distinctions between Being and Having, which were expressed in Old English by appropriate, semantically-sensitive prefixes, are signified in Modern English by Intransitivity and Transitivity, which function as stylistic oppositions in discourse.

Social changes and alterations in the political power structure taking place during the Middle English period underlay the linguistic change: Public life demanded speech that expressed the causal I-IT order of relationships, and became characterized by a Havestyle . . . Impersonality was superseded by the personal, both in the political order and in the order of words.

Kevelson's monograph presents at once both a wealth of information and a challenge. Linguists of a structuralist bent will welcome her discussion of the transitivity system in English, but may stop short of accepting her analysis of social motivation for linguistic change. Practioners of 'social linguistics' will, however, find that Kevelson has developed an intriguing thesis which may well serve as a prototype for future attempts to demonstrate in formal terms that language changes because people do. Brown University

NAOMI S.

BARON

CONTENTS

Preface

3

I.

9

II.

Contextuality, Social Reality, and Language Theory Structural Significations

14

III.

Intransitivity and Criteria for Complementation

.21

IV.

Shifting Roles of Being and Having in English . . . .

V. The Real and the Actual VI. VII. VIII. IX. X.

24 28

Be and Have: Constant Functions, Changing Forms

31

Intransitivity in Retrospect

34

Semantic Particles and the 'Burden of Existence'

. . .

Be and Have Differentiation as Language Universal Intransitivity and 'Clock-Stopping'

38 . 40 43

Bibliography

46

Index

50

I

CONTEXTUALITY, SOCIAL REALITY, AND LANGUAGE THEORY

Linguistic theory which presumes an ideal 'speaker-listener situation' (Chomsky 1965) and which is based on analyses of context-free sentences cannot begin to account for the ways that distinctive syntactic structures function as Signs in discourse to convey information about the speaker's attitudes and perceptual values shared by a community of speakers. A functional approach to language, which includes consideration of stylistic tendencies in a context-sensitive discourse, would seem to offer more insight about the alternate ways speakers use language to express how they view themselves in relation with their world. Much of the recent work on the stylistic, or pragmatic level, of the semiotics of language theory and use derives from the Prague School, which maintanis that texts which are 'stylistically neutral', i.e. meaningless, do not exist (Dolezel 1972:37-8). My concern in this paper is with the contrast between 'transitive and intransitive styles' in modern English as a recent adaptation to systemic language change which permits speakers to continue, through available linguistic devices, to communicate a basic perceptual distinction between relationships of HAVING and relationships of BEING. As Percy reminds, linguists often fail to note how the syntax of an utterance is not only the relationship between the linguistic elements of that utterance and what the sentence-as-unit indicates cataphorically and anaphorically within a specific context, but what a syntactic 'shape' may signify on the symbolic level when considered as a discursive sign (Percy 1975:150-58). My assumption is that the transitive construction symbolizes the perception of causal HAVING; the intransitive style of construction expresses the perception of non-causal, 'revealed' BEING. At earlier stages in the development of the English language different linguistic means were used to communicate perceived distinctions and changes

10

CONTEXTUALITY, SOCIAL REALITY, AND LANGUAGE THEORY

elsewhere in the language system necessitated the innovations of changing linguistic functions to express a kind of constant human response to environment. The conclusions of my earlier study of transitivity and intransitivity (Kevelson 1971) as allofunctions in a context-free sentential grammar opened questions that have to do with how language changes from the perspective of considering new uses (linguistic functions) from old forms. Theoretically, in neither context free nor context bound discourse, no real distinction can be made between 'classes' of transitive and intransitive verbs. This distinction holds only if some verbs can be complementized and others can not. All verbs can be 'objectivized' either directly, indirectly, or by the non-finite verb where no other object is grammatical (Joos: 1964). It seems more fruitful, also, not to consider certain verbs that are commonly used either transitively or intransitively as homonyms, but to consider the more general distinction between transitive and intransitive functions in discourse, that is, in context-bound utterance. The four major distinctions are: 1) unmarked 'process' (tr) v. marked 'development/discovery'; 2) thematic (tr) v. rhematic (intr) signifiers; 3) order, agentive causation, predictability (tr) v. randomness, autonomy, emergent novelty (intr); 4) open, socially exchangeable (tr) v. covert (intr) Thus, the anomalous utterance relates to the language as a whole just as aesthetic language is marked in relation to ordinary informationbearing language. (For a complete discussion of the aesthetic function as a 'social fact' see Mukarovsky 1970). Following the work of the Prague School in Functional Sentence Perspective and the fixing of a characteristic word order in English, Halliday has extensively explored the relation between Theme and Transitivity. Some of the implications of his work will be discussed further. Although the principle of FSP and Communicative Dynamism (Mathesius 1928; Travnicek 1939, 1966; Firbas 1959, 1962, 1964; Danes 1966; Palek 1968) is integral to my assumptions in this paper, I will not be focusing directly on aspects of FSP theory but only where relevant for clarification in context. It is important to note here that although linguists (and scientists, generally, in the latter half of the twentieth century) are prompted to investigate phenomenal processes — causal in one sense or another, including the phenomena of coordinative causality — in response to

CONTEXTUALITY, SOCIAL REALITY, AND LANGUAGE THEORY

11

recently prevailing and dominant social values as kinds of 'power structures' the alternatively perceived reality of Things Happening, of Naming and Discovering new ways of seeing, has not disappeared as relics of language, but in my opinion, has not been adequately looked at. This, I believe, is Percy's point in calling attention to the 'mystery of language', to language's function to express that mystery, and to the semiotic method of abductive reasoning which has been so fully articulated in the work of C. S. Peirce. In following Peirce, I would have to say that, despite the assertion of so many linguists that intransitivity is obsolete in the English Language, and vestigial of more primitive perceptions of how we regard ourselves in relation to our world (Halliday, in point: 1975), speakers continue to 'coin' novel intransitive-style utterances to express, intensely, certain marked kinds of perception. The contrast between transitive and intransitive styles occurs not only in poetry, e.g. Worlds scoop their arcs . . . . Diadems drop and Doges surrender . . . . Emily Dickenson Safe in their Alabaster Chambers but continually in ordinary speech and non-aesthetic writing, as in Walker Percy's subtitle: How Queer Man Is/How Queer Language Is/and What One Has to Do with the Other The rhetorical 'affirming Is-saying' (Percy 1975:156) followed by the transitive 'symbolic structure' of subject/object relationship is an example of a phenomenon of language use that will be explored, nonformally, in this paper. The goal of this paper, then, is to show that perceptual distinctions between Being and Having, which were expressed in Old English by appropriate, semantically-sensitive prefixes, are signified in Modern English by Intransitivity and Transitivity, which function as stylistic oppositions in discourse. Despite systemic changes in English (word order, inflectional loss, nominalizing tendency, development of phrasal verbs, etc.) speakers of English continue to evolve replacements for obsolete functions of language which expresses two fundamentally different ways of perceiving objects-in-the-world.

12

CONTEXTUALITY, SOCIAL REALITY, AND LANGUAGE THEORY

Intransitivity as a 'metaphoric relation' existentially perceived, developed, in English, into perceptions of 'factually-caused' relations (Margolis 1975; Malinowski 1968 ed. Langendoen). Presumably, according to the speculations of Malinowski and others, Old English, in a period of linguistic transition, had to oppose Agent-Object inflectional markers with some other sign to indicate relationships like in, on, before, and did so by prefixal prepositions, such as the particles ge- be- for- a- to-. The evolution of prefixes will be further noted in relation to transitive/intransitive styles. Although, as Percy points out, not all languages have a form for expressing the copula is, and many languages have no way of expressing to be as an 'existential'relational verb, every language has the means, semiotically, for 'pairing' the opposition, or sign-relation, between a word and the thing it stands in place of. Similarly, all languages have means to distinguish between Us and Them, between Man andNot-Man, What we refer to as the English language has the characteristic, which may be universally shared, of functionally distinguishing between Is and Has (Being and Having). Typical of certain languages, and generic to a "family of languages" (Birnbaum, 1975), is the fundamental distinction between is and HAVE. T O say I am my thought assumes pragmatic implications shared between speaker and listener which are totally distinct from I have my thought. The former — I think — conveys the information that I emerge as the result of an internal act of thinking; the latter which relates to HAVING suggests a dichotomized self: a subject 'I' thinks an object 'something' in order to grasp or acquire it. In the former the object is implicit; in the latter the object-as-goal 'surfaces' as a logical objective. Merleau-Ponty's notion that the perception of Having evolved from Being implies an hierarchical order of value that relates the two levels of perception. Having is a later development, equivalent with a 'moral evolvement', which supersedes the ability to perceive the simple existence of a thing, and which designates a relation that " . . . the subject bears to the term into which it projects itself..." (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 175-5). In other words, the objective thought becomes linked with the subjective / that has 'appropriated' it. The idea that change, including language change, implies an ascent of moral values together with a 'higher' development of human consciousness is a continually recurring notion in the 'philosophical underpinnings' of many apparently objective scientific inquiries. The idea of progression of thought leading to a complete articulation of percep-

CONTEXTUALITY, SOCIAL REALITY, AND LANGUAGE THEORY

13

tion has become confused, in English, with the parallel but very different notion of a succession of words that build up to a complete sentence. Weil (1887:30, cited from Pierce's thesis on FSP 1973) notes the difference in communicative value between syntactic, surface word order, and subjective progression of spoken thought, which, alone, is a sign of communicative vitality. However, in talking about transitivity and intransitivity, linguists have often placed a higher value on the observance of a prescribed order of words than on anomalous ways syntactic orders are 'violated' to achieve more effective communication. The following will briefly point out where the confusion between syntactic 'rule' and subjective response to perceive reality has lead to intransitive structures being termed both 'realized utterances' and 'incomplete sentences'.

II

STRUCTURAL

SIGNIFICATIONS

Basically — and universally — all processes can be described as either transitive or intransitive, Halliday suggests (1972:350-71). Transitivity corresponds to a process which is perceived to relate an Actor, Process, and Goal (Patient). Intransitivity has come to be identified with the 'affected' grammatical subject which is not the Agent of the action/ process, e.g., The fire burned. Intransitivity is becoming more and more marginal as a central clause type, Halliday writes, and the ergative process has become co-equal with the transitive. Both are universal alternatives used in expressing or representing, linguistically, all types of processes, Halliday observes. It is often difficult to know whether what Halliday refers to as ergative is an outgrowth of what was earlier described as intransitive, or whether ergativity and transitivity both refer to action clauses and intransitivity is a term distinctly reserved to describe a kind of relation or process which is not signified by a causative verb of action. For my purposes here I'll observe the following distinctions: A transitive style is characterized by action which "extends beyond the active participant", e.g. He spills the water. An ergative style is characterized by action not caused by the participant, e.g., Water spills. An intransitive style is characterized by an action-as-attribute of the participant's internal organization, e.g., Niagara falls. Transitivity relates to Objectives. Ergativity results from Causatives. Intransitivity happens. One of the problems encountered in trying to examine changes in linguistic phenomena is linguistic metalanguage.

STRUCTURAL SIGNIFICATIONS

15

Lyons suggests that, morphologically and historically, transitives derive from intransitives and ergatives, today, jump class boundaries (1972). Halliday believes that the ergative-type clause represents the " . . . more general model of the transitivity patterns of modern English" (1972, ed. Lyons: 140-65). The intransitive verb-type is generally viewed by linguistics today as an archaism within the language system that dates back to an early stage in the development of English-speaking people when their level of perception was 'primitive' or childlike (Halliday 1973:126). According to this evolutionary view of language change the intransitve verb was used to communicate the emergence of an event that seemed to happen by itself. Notions of magic, revelation, and intransitivity are conjoined in this view, by implication (Closs 1969:19). Closs suggests that with the shift of political power from local to foreign influences the intransitive style largely disappeared, gradually, from public communication and was retained among the native Englishspeaking people to talk about the most familiar topics of common life, about which objects were shared knowledge and could be deleted, and also to express the most 'mysterious' perceptions by the act of denoting. Naming, according to Percy, has to do, not with the unfamiliar, but with the unprecedented: . . . When a man appears and names a thing, when he says this is water and water is cool, something unprecedented takes place. What the third term, man, does, is not merely enter into interaction with the others—though he does this too—but stand apart from two of the terms and say that one "is" the other (1975:157)

Speculatively, then, the intransitive style was reserved for interfamiliar personal communication, with object-deletion, and by analogy intransitivity became the means for personal intersubjective communication. Public life demanded speech that expressed the causal I-IT order of relationships, and became characterized by a Have-style. Acquisition became thematic. Impersonality was superseded by the personal, both in the political order and in the order of words (Mathesius 1928). Agent/ Process/Goal (Beneficiary) signified, in syntax, the order of relationships in community and reflected the political power structure. The intransitive style remained the 'marked style' of the clergy and pontification in general until the present; that it should have been adapted to express 'uncommon' perceptions is not surprising. The metaphoric function of Old English prefixes — 'kennings' or truncated iconic language

16

STRUCTURAL SIGNIFICATIONS

signs — marked certain verbs to which they were commonly affixed as bearers of nontransitive meaning; with the loss of the prefixes the roots themselves carried forward into history their intransitive function. Nist, in his Structural History of English, cites Baugh's work on prefixal semantics and the English language, from which I have extrapolated (Nist 1966; Baugh 1957). De la Cruz' recent study on the 'pure prefix' in English will be referred to later in this paper. Halliday implies that English-speaking people today still reflect the influence of Aristotelian causation and Newtonian mechanics in their syntax; the governing principle, he suggests, is 'action at a distance' as though people had to understand quanta theory before their perceptual and linguistic behavior is able to make 'quanta leaps'. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper, Korzybski's concept of timebinding in language, in Science and Sanity, is appropriate to an understanding of how valid models of language tend to displace observation of actual patterns of language in use. It must be noted that the models of language that linguists derive theories from are often aesthetic models — literature as marked language—which deliberately select certain syntactic patterns to reenforce social and personal values; the relations between syntax and pragmatics has yet to be explained in any formal manner. But, with reservations, we can accept Halliday's observation that the ergative-type clause " . . . represents the more general model of the transitivity patterns of modern English" (1972:140-65). There is no doubt that Halliday judges the evolved ergative-transitive clause types as morally superior to the more infantile style of the intransitive clause-type. It is this kind of judgment which is not apparent methodologically but which informs a point of view and an exlusive 'selection' of data; the 'personal knowledge' (in Polanyi's sense) is unavoidable and even valuable but one's bias should be stated, I think, in advance of 'objective analysis' of linguistic (or other) data. In his analysis of The Inheritors Halliday interprets intransitivity as a sign of infant and helpless behaviour. Transitivity, on the other hand, represents to him a sign of emergent maturity and responsible behavior (1973:126ff.). Each style signifies a distinct language type, and qualitatively different kind of person. These two languages — transitive and intransitive styles — are in opposition in Golding's text, as protagonist and antagonist in dramatic action. The text, as text, is a marked sign of social value, and what is resolved through the work as art can be interpreted, Halliday suggests, as paradigmatic of a cultural victory.

STRUCTURAL SIGNIFICATIONS

17

Within the text the social value of transitivity functions as a sign to relate the larger society (Jakobson's Addressee) to the discourse (Addresser) with reference to an ideological context which corresponds to a language Code,, the Message is the story, The Inheritors, and the Content is simply the plot in detail. The theme of the novel, Halliday says, is the functional use of transitivity as an ideological value. Thematization, in English, corresponds with syntactic word order; both theme and syntax, then, can be said to function as iconic reflections or signs of an idealized social order, as indexical signs that point to that idealization, and as symbolic signs that connote, multi-dimensionally and metaphorically, an ideal order. (For a full discussion on the hierarchical aspects and function of linguistic signs, see Peirce, Collected Papers, 1955.) As Mathesius writes (1928), thematization in English, following the change from 'synthetic' to 'analytic word order', tends to equate a personal logical subject with the grammatical subject on the surface level of the utterance; the 'personified' theme of The Inheritors is the hero Lok, who transitivizes. Halliday writes: Transitivity is really the cornerstone of the semantic organization of experience. . . . Transitivity is the set of options whereby the speaker encodes his experience of the processes of the external world, and of the internal world of his own consciousness. (1973:126)

Of intransitivity, he writes: 'It is as if doing was as passive as seeing; and things no more affected by actions than by perceptions.... There is no effective relation between persons and objects; people do not bring about events in which anything other than they themselves, or parts of their bodies, are implicated.' (1973:126)

According to Halliday's judgment, a transitive-type clause relates syntax to semantic implications which, themselves, are linguistic signs of social values that function, through language, as social facts, according to ideological percepts which are shared, presuppositionally, between reader and writer. (For a thorough exposition of this view see Volosinov 1973, Eng. tr., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.) Halliday views transitivity as a formal linguistic sign of adaption for survival, in Golding's novel (and as a general socio-linguistic principle). Transitivity relates to a positive value which is realized in expansion, acquisition, exchange, and in the context of secular social community.

18

STRUCTURAL SIGNIFICATIONS

Intransitivity, by contrast, identifies a stage prior to the development of a modern social conscience, and is interpreted by Halliday as a sign of incompleteness and/or covert a-social Being-as-State. The concept of 'covert category' as it applies to intransitive constructions will be shown, from different viewpoints as an 'archifunction' or basic category which is complemented by a 'sign zero' object, (Jakobson 1933). In Peirce's system of semiotics, transitivity would be a member of the set of dyadic relations, which are causal, dynamic, conflictual, and are characterized by the predominant indexicality of the verbal sign. On the other hand, intransitivity implies a triadic relation, and is the occasion for the creating of symbols of language (Peirce 1955:99-119; Percy 1975:161). The concept of 'zero degree' is related to but not to be identified here as Barthes' equating of zero degree writing with a nonmarked, neutral style, as in 'ideally pure journalism' (Barthes 1968). The Inheritors, in Halliday's analysis, foregrounds transitivity against a socio-cultural field which can be characterized as relatively static and obsolescent. The Hero of the text — the Transitive-ThematicSubject-Agent — ascends his goal by standing on the crest of the common order, the gravestones of an intransitively-based culture, and thereby he establishes a New Age. Halliday's stylistic interpretation of transitivity/intransitivity in the text suggests, by analogy, parallels with linguistic-historic speculations on how and why a dominant mode of intransitive expression in English was replaced by the now normative transitive-type construction: the development of the trade guilds, for example, became dramatized in popular pageantry around secular themes which focused, transitively, on social values of exchange and transaction. Those who profited by the new social order between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries presumably spoke the language of profit and exchange (Nist 1966:158ff.) and conceivably were among catalytic social groups which influenced marked changes in language style throughout the larger speech community. As brought out in 'A Theory of Language Change' (Weinreich, Labov, Herzog 186-7), certain variations in language use "assumes a certain social significance" which was grasped by the speech community as a linguistic structure isomorphic with an aspect of the perceived social structure:

STRUCTURAL SIGNIFICATIONS

19

New groups enter the speech community and reinterpret the on-going linguistic change in such a way that one of the secondary changes become primary... The advancement of the linguistic change to completion may be accompanied by a rise in the level of social awareness of the change and the establishment of a social stereotype. (187)

At the same period in England that secular and church powers were competing, with the secular gaining dynamically in importance, a secular pattern of speech seemed to 'grow', while the language patterns of clergy remained steadfastly conservative. Around 1200 also, games of chance — cards, innovation of the power structure of the chess board — and political satire expressed in popular language reenforced the value of exchange, causation, and the primacy of Have as opposed to Is. Although Samuels attributes the development of a pattern of transitivity to fortuitous speech events that lead to a gradual preference for one pattern over another, he suggest that the Is-saying characteristic of intransitive constructions were less susceptible to change because they seemed to be determined by the "semantic properties of intransitive verbs of motion . . . (which as a class of verbs) . . . was certain to be out-numbered by the use of has with transitive verbs" (Samuels 1975:56-57). The gradual change from intransitive to transitive style in utterances that centered around verbs of motion had to do with the 'degrees of concreteness' attributed to the object of a verb and to the development of what Ikegami (1969) terms the basic causative (ergative) type clause in modern English. In deciding that strict classification of verb types is much less important to a linguistic understanding of how language actually functions Halliday's stylistic approach to language use seems more promiseful of insight into how people prefer to behave linguistically than methods which are governed by concerns with categorical restrictions. The latter may yield more precise hypothetical descriptions but reveal less accurately how language actually works. In the following I'll indicate, briefly, some various views on transitivity, intransitivity, and problems of classification. In directing his attention from classifications which distinguish between transitive and intransitive verbs to clause-types which semanticize transitivity and intransitivity, Halliday's stylistic analysis focuses on the meaning of discourse beyond the sentence and so becomes semiotic in

20

STRUCTURAL SIGNIFICATIONS

scope. Correctly, he considers the relation between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics to be levels of language that are integrated as a functioning language system. To what use, he asks, do people speaking and hearing English today put 'transitive and intransitive' modes of expression? (1973:126) His failure is less, I think, in incomplete formalization of analysis, than in his valued preference for one type of structure over the other. Ironically, theories of others investigating the transitive/intransitive phenomenon appear to be more 'object-oriented'.

Ill

INT R A N SITI VIT Y A N D C R I T E R I A FOR C O M P L E M E N T A T I O N

Generally, there is agreement between Halliday (1968, 1972, 1973), Lyons (1969, 1972), and Fillmore (1966, 1969) that the most common function of verbs that are used intransitively is to signify that the grammatical subject is not the Agent, but is the Affected — Patient or Instrument — of the Agent, and that a clause of the type, The door opens, corresponds with the speaker's intention to inform the listener that there is an obligatory Caused and an optional (presupposed) Causer. The semantic relation between door and open is a process of causation more properly describe 1 as an Ergative function than an Intransitive function (Halliday 1968:181ff; Fillmore 1966:4-5). But the Ergative function does not really describe the clausal type in which the Goal/Objective is deleted on the surface, e.g., He swims. Clearly the verb-class distinction is useless, because a transitive-type clause is also He swims (some span, lap, length of water). Earlier analyses which dintinguished between transitivity and intransitivity were based on models of context-free sententail grammars and even by this method few linguists continue to maintain that the distinction was valid. Francis (1958) considers swim (tr) and swim (intr) homonyms which depend for their sense on context. Whorf (1956) terms the intransitive verb a 'cryptotype' and assigns it to a covert category distinct from the 'overt transitive category'. Closs (1969) calls the intransitive verb 'complete' and Lyons (1969) says that a simple SV sequence is 'unfinished'. Barthes (1970) notes that the intransitive verb is 'problematic' and functions to identify the logical Subject with his social role: intransitive verbs, marked by Sign Zero, point not only to the activity as Goal but to the entire area of field of activity as a special organization of activity well-defined by its own network of signs within a specific social organization, e.g., He writes (swims, farms, teaches, etc.). Heller and Macris (1967) consider transitive and intransitive as 'alio-

22

INTRANSinVITY AND CRITERIA FOR COMPLEMENTATION

functions'. Chafe (1970) calls attention to two qualitatively different functions of the intransitive verb: the one is productive of idiomatication, e.g., John fished (intr) to John fished the dime from his pocket; this type of change leads to automaticity, Chafe suggests, and to subsequent change in syntactic 'acceptability' through a gradual standardizing use of what, to begin with, is introduced into the speech community as a 'violation of categorical constraints', (see Chomsky 1969). The other use of intransitivity, Chafe says, leads also to a process of idiomatication through a virtual 'nominalizing' of intransitive-type clauses, e.g., John races the wind (John the Wind-Racer) in which races the wind metaphorically equates John with his action rather than links him, transitively, with his goal, e.g., John races the boy next door. Nist (195-7) calls attention to the emergence of this kind of syntactic 'peculiarity' that begins to appear in Middle English prose and poetry around 1350. Some types of 'syntactical idioms' are the appositive, the predicate modifier, the adjective modifier, various types of verbal idioms in which the nonfinite verb, without to, functions as a verbal complement and where the participle behaves nominally, " . . . and the customary use of various forms of the verb to be as auxiliaries of the passive for intransitive verbs". However, Hill (1970) continues to caution linguistics that they must reject the 'intuition' of the layman and the lexicographer that a verb can pass from transitive to intransitive without changing identity, because, he says, once class-boundaries are permitted to blur there is danger that disciplined analyses will regress to wooly mentalism; 'intuition' in this sense threatens an entire system based, not on observed fact, but on selected theory which has been validated according to deductive methods of reasoning (for discussion on the dangers of deduction see Peirce supra 150ff; Percy on renewed respect for 'mentalism' and 'nominalism': supra 160ff.). Elson and Pickett (1965) advise that it makes sense to continue to distinguish between transitive and intransitive verb classes by a 'ruleof-thumb' which states that unless it can be shown that all verbs can be complemented (in English) the distinction is valid. But as I tried to illustrate (Kevelson 1971), not only are all verbs capable of appropriate complementation, but the criterion of objectivization for transitivity becomes meaningless in analyses of context-bound discourse. The different types of possible complementation in American English, which permit objectivization of all verbs, was illustrated by reference

INTRANSITIVITY AND CRITERIA FOR COMPLEMENTATION

23

to Allen (1964), Joos (1964), Rosenbaum (1969), Langendoen (1969), Chafe (1970), HalUday (1968,1973), Chomsky (1969), and Nosek (1966). Questions of verb classification become subordinate to questions of meaning in style, to which are closely related questions about the ways levels of language systems interact, and questions about the relation between language and the larger social system. Volosinov stresses that syntactic analyses, while essential to an understanding of the sentence, become minimally useful in analyses of discourse (Eng. trans. 1973: 24-5). Stylistics, considered as "extended applied linguistics" (Hendricks 1972:85ff.) must be viewed as part of a semiotics of language and social change, and represents a direction in linguistic inquiry which is closely associated with the work of the Prague School. In this view language changes in response to changes and activities elsewhere in a society, parallel to social changes or in reaction against certain aspects of the background of a social structure. Some speculations about the changed and changing functions of Be and Have (intransitive/transitive) styles of speech will be offered in the following.

IV

S H I F T I N G ROLES OF B E I N G A N D H A V I N G IN E N G L I S H

"Every ideological sign — the verbal sign included — in coming about through the process of social intercourse, is defined by the social purview of the given time period and the given social group . . . classification of the forms of utterance must rely upon classification of the forms of verbal communication." (Volosinov 24-5)

It is precisely because language is observed as a function of behavior in society, in the sense that function is understood as 'use' or 'role' (and not confused in linguistic terminology with its homonym, function — which refers to a term for sign of correspondence or equivalence in quantifying language — Jakobson 1975) that permits us to include Actor (speaker) and Audience (listener, Social Context) as participants with the option of interpreting the Script (Langue); we can speak, metaphorically, of types of Scripts as equivalent to formal concepts or grammars, which at any given time represent 'models' of a Common Base Language system. (For a discussion of Langue as Script see Veltrusky 1964.) Scripts as language systems offer'options', Halliday says. Options are "sets of alternative meanings which collectively account for the total meaning potential" (1973:55ff.). Meaning here refers to a form of verbal behavior, an interpretive act. " . . . options in a natural language are at various levels . . . " and the underlying option may be considered as the relation of question to statement, which implies that the speaker relates what he decides to do with what he decides he can say. The relational sign between meaning and saying is " . . . one of realization . . . ", but the mode of realization is chosen mostly by reference to social context and the projected values realizable within the frame of that context. The basic option is anterior to the selection from among the "macrofunctions of language . . . the ideational, interpersonal, and t e x t u a l . . . "

SHIFTING ROLES OF BEING AND HAVING IN ENGLISH

25

and has to do with the ordering of macro-functions in terms of intended communicative value. The method of ordering the communication 'dynamically' is decided in advance and the choice is made, on this level, between Being and Having as selected modes of verbal behavior. (For a discussion on 'communicative dynamism' and FSPsee Danes 1964.) Because Halliday implicitly equates intransitivization with outmoded language behavior, he can then freely go on to say that while the child's protolanguage has no need to distinguish between function and use, the adult language system does. The adult (one who has developed the 'mature language system') applies selected language functions suitably to specific situations. The child, by contrast, is used by its language. What has happened in the course of the evolution of language — and this is no more than a reasonable assumption — correspond(s) to what happens in the development of language in the individual. (Halliday 1973:98-9)

The problem, glossed over by Halliday here, is that we know too little about the process of how the individual refers to his own earlier language system in 'inner dialogue' and Halliday, like many, is to be faulted for reasoning by the principle of the 'genetic fallacy'. Implied is an analogy between the historically determined life-cycle of an individual and the historically defined (chronicaled) existence of a language. Another crucial problem, essential to an understanding of language change, is not recognizing that while many language functions pass out of the mainstream of common use through unsuccessful competition with other language forms, through appropriation by special social groups for special kinds of communication, and so forth, not all 'lost' functions die; many branch off from the seemingly irreversible historical mainstream of the language development and gain vitality in what Reichenbach refers to as a 'random pocket'. From these 'random' side shoots of the main language the so-called random change re-enters the language, often with familiar phonetic shape, but with changed linguistic function. The re-emergence of this type of social vitality into the main system is discussed by Reichenbach (1956:225-70), who stresses that randomness has to be perceived as random-, i.e., many linguistic phenomena are random, but not all become meaningful random changes until the randomness is, literally, recognized. In point, Lee (1948) shows many instances where adjectives and nouns of Old English, considered obsolete, reentered the language after having undergone a functional change into verbs; this process can be observed

26

SHIFTING ROLES OF BEING AND HAVING IN ENGLISH

in modern English, especially in slang and idioms, where adjectives and nouns that have become 'outdated' are picked up and used, intransitively, as functional verbs, e.g., He freaked, tripped, jived, etc. It is the awareness of this possibility of recovering from the 'has been' which presents, according to Halliday, the option at every moment prior to the act of speech of choosing to emphasize either the aspect of Being or Having. This perception of that which is present in the communicative situation, to which one responds in language behavior, is the perception of language-as-sign, according to Peirce, and which leads to a view of the language-situation in question as Interprétant, or summary of the processes of language actions (behavior) which have progressed to this point (Peirce 99). To carry Halliday's explanation of options one further step it is necessary to form a judgment (in Peirce's sense) which reviews what has been said along with what might have been said, but was not. Every moment of judgment permits the speaker to digress from the unidirectional flow or speech in order to integrate within it some random perception, or one which, from a shift in perspective, reappears. Halliday, in agreement with Volosinov, says that language signs — syntactic structures, words, idioms, phonological shapes, types of discourse, verbal art, modes of rhetoric — which are no longer active participants, that is, vital forces in social struggle, " . . . lose f o r c e . . . . " . Worn language counters . . . degenerate into allegory and become the object not of live social intelligibility but of philological comprehension. The historical memory of mankind is full of such worn out ideological signs incapable of serving as arenas for the clash of live social accents. (Volosinov 20-24)

In this view the perception of intransitivity has no place, except as relic, in a system of interchange and dialectic. In Halliday's opinion, the 'predominance of intransitivity' in The Inheritors reflects the restricted view of people to their own actions and their own bodies and their inability to extend themselves beyond the immediate grasp of themselves. Their ability to relate and reach out to one another is inseparable, Halliday says, from their inability to express themselves, in verbal behavior, in I have action. Halliday's interpretation of the 'intransitive speech community' in The Inheritors is that they are personally estranged from one another; another view of this primitive society — mine —is that they have retained

SHIFTING ROLES OF BEING AND HAVING IN ENGLISH

27

their ability to differentiate between Self and Wholly Other—me and not me—according to a hierarchy of values in which distinction is more highly regarded than relatedness. The loss or diminution of the intransitive function in language leads to a greater articulation of extensive meaning while, at the same time, to a fragmentizing of the experience of integrity and understanding (Merleau-Ponty 175). In considering the change from intransitivity as the basic verbal structure in Old English into what I regard as a marked style in Modern English, it is worth noting the contrast between 'inalienable possession and intransitivity' and transitive Have: As suggested by Fillmore (1968:61ff.) the universality of the linguistic phenomenon of 'inalienable possession can be considered a neutralization of transitivity. In other words, transitivity and intransitivity become 'neutralized' depending on whether its historic function is viewed as marked or unmarked in style. But even within this neutralization, or Zero sign complement structure, there are oppositions between transitive and intransitive forms: I have a missing tooth (tr)

/ am my song (laugh, thought, speech, body, etc.) (intr) Not only are parts of the body considered inalienable possessions', Fillmore points out, or even signs of inherent relationships, but the 'belonging perception' may (and does) include relations between kinsmen. Although not every language has separate morphemes for indicating inalienable possession, he maintains that it exists as a universal concept and is expressed in various ways by specific language means. For example, whether or not a noun is marked as inalienable has nothing to do with a particular class of nouns but with the fact that it is grammatically marked in some way to show this special relationship. The class of what may be marked varies from culture to culture: among the Arapabo the louse is an inalienable possession. Fillmore cites Frei (1939) who notes that this construction often implies a dual judgment, and represents an attempt on the part of the speaker to condense two judgments into one. These two judgments, which fuse or neutralize in the perception of 'inalienable possession' are 1) the perception of has and 2) the perception of is.

V

THE REAL A N D THE A C T U A L

A sentence-utterance, in context, is a linguistic sign in communication between people, or between one person in dialogue with himself where Person, according to Whitehead, is considered an organization of one. The predominant function of some signs is to reflect, or image 'isomorphically', another structure, including the social structure, to which it refers. (For a discussion on the isomorphic properties of verbal signs see Sebeok 1975a.) At other times, for differently intended uses, the sign of a verbal structure is predominantly indexical, and functions to point to linguistic events that occur on the metonymic (historical) plane, either before or after it; the indexical function is to actualize the message 'in time'. The linguistic sign also functions in its symbolic role, and here its purpose is to realize a relation between objects not usually perceived to be related or linked. The symbol in its primarily metaphoric function creates as sign a verbal entity which corresponds to a new existence perceived to be. No verbal element is one or another of these three sign-functions, but includes at all times all three possibilities which are available as options to the speaker. In other words, any verbal sign means, simultaneously, on more than one level; one is foregrounded, and the others are operative as part of the internal structure of the verbal sign. It is in this sense that Weinreich, who does not in this context refer directly to Peirce's theory of signs, speaks of multidimensional levels of semantic meaning. All theories of semantics, he writes, operate with 'a dichotomy of signs' which he terms 'designators and formators' (1968: 150-154). The formators are logical signs and the designators, roughly, are lexical items. Not all languages can be analyzed in terms of the formators of speakers'/hearers' 'attitudes toward the content of discourse', which is the level of pragmatics in semiotics. Attitudinal formators focused on discourse (in English and other languages) or whole sentences and the relation between sentences seem to rely mostly on

THE REAL AND THE ACTUAL

29

'special "modal" adverbs or particles' and 'affixal mood categories of the verb'. When the attitude to be expressed is more complex than a simple agreement/disagreement, or good-bad dichotomy, it is particularly difficult, he says, to generalize the relation of formators to designators within a single language, either synchronically or diachronically. It is especially difficult to state the universality of the attitudinal feature in formal terms (162-3). But all languages employ 'metalinguistic operators,' i.e., particular constructions and lexical (semantic) signs to designate true, real, absolute, and to distinguish these linguistic objectives in discourse from approximations, that is, actualizations, of true, real, absolute, etc.

My point is that the function of the intransitive style in modern English discourse — clause, sentence, or extended text—is to designate the realization of a nominal, adjectival, adverbial attribute by the use of that class of verbs which have been traditionally called noncomplementable, except by a non-finite verb. E.g, appear, elapse, abide, which intersect with the existential formator X, e.g., Be, are symbolized by the intransitive verb-style to designate that "expectancy is implicit . . . in the form of the verb" (Weinreich 163). Further, the intransitive/transitive dichotomy is characterized by the rhetorical metaphoric synechdoche, with Be, and metonymy, with Has. Rhetorically, the intransitive style "logically" implies that an adjunctive relation exists with the perceiving subject; the transitive style communicates, with the logic of its form, that the subject has a relationship with its object. Although Weinreich says that in the earliest and in the latest stages of a language's development we may not be at all able to discern how linguistic changes are embedded in a social context, there are no records of any people which have not evolved from some socio-cultural system of myth, play, and which, during some stage of their socio-linguistic development, have not clearly distinguished between process as actualization and riddle, drama, 'organized chaos' as symbols of realization. If linguists note a decline in the use of the intransitive style in literature, it may be that the problem of 'relating' has taken precedence in writers' personal values over the possibility of realization; or, that journalistic headline style, nearly always transitive, functions in our society as a model for exchange and interaction (Kevelson 1976). It may be, just as Huizinga remarks, that western civilization is undergoing a period in its development where play can hardly be distinguished from non-play; it may be that we shall have to listen elsewhere for random

30

THE REAL AND THE ACTUAL

emergence of intransitivity as a marked form of speech (Huizinga 1951: 337). The recently revived interest in 'language games' among semioticians (Ehrmann 1971, Nash 1971, Bakhtin 1968, Greimas 1968) and most recently by Pike (1975) suggests new directions for exploring how people use language to express what they 'really' know. This is precisely Percy's point in The Message in the Bottle, which calls for observation of symbolization as a language fact.

V

BE A N D HAVE: C O N S T A N T F U N C T I O N S , CHANGING FORMS

It is in such times as ours, when the 'concept of vagueness' has become a scientific criteria (Levi 1968) and 'habit' becomes prescriptive of order— of the syntactic social order of Having and Transitive-Exchange —that the sign of intransitivity may be conversely viewed. If, as Halliday suggests, the earlier function of intransitivity has been replaced over the past seven-eight hundred years or so by a socially 'higher' perception of cause/effect behavior, then the ergative function, presumed to have died out at an early stage of Old English, has not only re-entered the mainstream of language but has become its strongest current. In modern English, according to Halliday, the ergative structure is used to communicate an action of which the grammatical subject is not the origin, or Agent, of Action but is moved or made to act by a force external to it. Early in the development of the language the intransitive structure was said to communicate that here, too, the grammatical subject was not the Agent of the action but acted because it was 'impelled' by a force internal to it. Viewed as a'long-term trend' (Weinreich, Labov, Herzog 1971:140—1) certain semantic associations which were prefixed to intransitive verbs in Old and Early Middle English have remained, paradigmatically, with a group of verbs sometimes called Ergative and sometimes called Intransitive. By analogy with Malkiel's idea of a semic system or set of polysemous entities which are diachronic syntagms of paradigmatic words, it is also possible to consider a function which, despite semantic loss, is retained by certain verbs of motion. Morphologically, the prefixal signifiers developed into semantic particles, or prepositions, but their meaning for intransitive function remains by association to the words they were once affixed to. If my thesis is that the perception of Being (realization) as opposed to the perception of Having (actualizing process) is an option available in English (and perhaps many other languages systems, as Malkiel sug-

32

BE AND HAVE: CONSTANT FUNCTIONS, CHANGING FORMS

gests), then language changes in transitive/ intransitive/ ergative structures can be considered diachronically as a selection from among available 'non-essential' or extra-linguistic forms to sustain a perceptual function which, from time to time, was left in the system without a distinctive, nonambiguous form. Assuming that the intransitive function was the least influenced by historic change it was also the mode of expression least used in public transaction and exchange and conveyed the least specific information which permitted the form to be adapted to other uses, temporarily. Gradually, in public use by a speech community, for other purposes than the communicating of realization, it may have seemed simply an alternative form less explicit for ordinary purposes than the more recently derived transitive form. Other means within the language had to be found, from time to time, to convey the meaning of Is-saying, affirming realization. What I'm suggesting is that while lower levels of English underwent change — morphologically and syntactically — the basic language function of opposition between transitive and intransitive structures, corresponding to perceptions of Have in opposition to Be, have remained constant within the language as system. Imbalance, from time to time, on morphological and syntactic levels, resulted in 'random' change within the scope of available random linguistic means, to right the balance. At the pragmatic level of a semiotic approach to language change, standard linguistic structures which signified non-transitive Is-saying became devitalized, or worn down, and were adapted for use in communicating transitive Have perceptions. As Schlauch, Nist, and Peters point out, throughout the development of the language there were occasional occurrences, intermittant through late Middle English, when transitive and intransitive verb forms were not even distinguishable in context, but only in retrospect, when the 'direction' a form was to take achieved a consistency of use and pattern. The concept of rival forms and sound changes which Malkiel describes (1972:24-31) is analogous with the concept of rival function and pattern change, although one can only speculate about the how and why the transitive/intransitive alternations in permanence and change were brought about during different periods in the development of the language. Perhaps at some point in late Old English and early Middle English it became necessary to express on the surface an extrapositioned verbal object, for some verbs, and thus signify, iconically, the way lan-

BE AND HAVE: CONSTANT FUNCTIONS, CHANGING FORMS

33

guage reflects its social context. Whether verbal structures which were predominantly iconic in one time period became predominantly indexical in another, and symbolic in still another, can be only guessed at. What we do know is that the development of a transitive verb which obligatorily required a complement occurred as a regular feature of of English over a period of hundreds of years, during which time, until the relative stabliization of a modal auxiliary system there must have been considerable ambiguity in the language, and a considerable tolerance for ambiguity by the speech community. At all levels of language organization, whenever there are competing means, of achieving some criterion of communication performance, these competing means will be related inversely as a compensating system . . . if a code becomes too tightly efficient, speakers will begin to add in redundant features in order to be understood, but as this process inevitably overshoots its mark, and the code becomes too redundant, speakers will begin to drop out certain features and 'get away with it' — and the cycle begins again." (Osgood 1968:305)

VII

I N T R A N S I T I V I T Y IN

RETROSPECT

De La Cruz writes that prior to the time of the Middle English period (roughly, between 1250 and 1550) the absence or presence ofsemanticallysignifying prefixes disambiguated the opposition between transitive and intransitive opposition in the language, which was unclear from the syntax and morphological shape of the verbs, especially in written discourse where intonation patterns could not be known. But during a later, transitional period, when 'prefixal decay' was daking place and 'simplex/prepositional' oppositions were first becoming customary in the language, transitive and intransitive forms of verbs were often interchangeable. In some cases, he points out, the prefix was developed as a component of a transitive phrasal verb, as in laugh/ laugh at {hlihhan/behlihhan, lahhen/belahhert); but the distinction is much less clear in the opposition hilhhan/gehlihhan (Old English) since the non prefixed form also appears as a transitive function (De la Cruz 1975:48-51). The prefix for-, like ge-, is usually transitivizing, but not until the prepositional verb has fully developed in Middle English is the opposition between transitive/intransitive systematically disambiguated. Of particular interest is the analogic change in verbs which were prefixed by be- in Old and Middle English, which developed from the signification of 'roundness' to the further symbolic significance of Community and Exchange, and, still further, to the extended sign of Causation. Interestingly, this prefix is not a semantic forbear of Modern English Be(ing), but an early particle signifying the nature of relationships appropriate to certain semantically-sensitive verbs, which later became classed as transitive or intransitive, plus prepositional equivalents (derived from be-) of dative and accusative (with, from, to) which became further expanded to phrasal transitive verbs. Transitive-type verbs which develop be- constructions indicate dif-

INTRANSITIVITY IN RETROSPECT

35

ferent kinds of objective relationships from intransitive-type verbs whidi develop be- constructions. It is the 'transitive or intransitive character of the verb' which develops from Old to Middle English with a be- prefixal (or a prepositional equivalent structure) which signifies, by the thirteenth century, not whether the construction is 'intransitively' object-less, but significantly, just what the nature of the object relation is. The development of the prefix be- effects, as its primary function, a transitivization. Analogously, the transitive function is further developed by the end of the thirteenth century by the prepositional verb " . . . that has developed a passive transformation which enables it to replace the prefixal structures that held a 'transitive/intransitive' opposition with regard to the simplex: Speten upon could successfully compete with bespeten" (De la Cruz 65-69). It is not the function of the verb-class, then, but the underlying sign of the function of transitivization which operates as the formator Be plus -en which signifies the perception of a Have relationship between Agent and Affected, and which expresses by its potential for passivization, the ergative-causative function. The notion of Have which characterizes transitive structures corresponds with the perception of made, or processed, surface relationships, i.e., relationships that are formed segmentally, by extension in time. Have surfaced with the development of a modal auxiliary system in Old English, as the cognate habban, used only with a transitive main verb; by contrast, the perfect auxiliary of intransitive verbs was a form of wesan 'to be' (Closs Traugott 1968:281 ff.). In both Old and Middle English, De la Cruz notes, the 'pure prefixes' which signified the 'existential' perception of Being are to- and a-, and these are characterized by the 'idea of intensity . . . ' (De la Cruz 7Iff.). The sematic meaning of to- was divide, separate (with force). To- appeared in later English as a particle in phrasal verbs such as smot togyder, to-braste, to-chyde. But the prefixal form a- in Old and Middle English carries the early perception of Forth, as Out From Within-,it also conveys the notion of transition as transformation of attribute. Until Middle English the prefix a- was used to represent equivalents of Gothic us-, German er-, and Old English on-, of-, ge-, with a semantic class of verbs that connoted internal change, such as abeodan, alyfan, aworpen, ablendan/ablenden, and so forth. By the early period of Middle English this prefixal sign had disappeared, De la Cruz notes, while its counterpart in German — er — remains productive.

36

INTRANSITIVITY IN RETROSPECT

Speculatively, it would seem that a number of influences reacted with and against each other in the development of English during this period, with the most obvious stabilization tending toward the fixing of word order and the establishment of a semantically-sensitive modal Aux system. But by the mid-fifteenth century, the contrastive function of the Aux to be with intransitive verbs of motion and to have with transitive verbs of motion seemed to disappear, especially as the concept of motion became associated with motion-through-space which could be no better stylistically emphasized than by using the transitive structure to represent spatially-perceived, lineally-structured relationships. Perceptions of intensive relations were typically expressed, by that time, by the verb to be which connoted (symbolized) an "aspect of continuing action for the notional verb", as Schlauch points out (Schlauch 1964:104ff.). At the same time, Be and Have functioned as indicators to distinguish the vernacular from the 'language of God and church'. Curiously, Shearin's exhaustive study of Clauses of Purpose in Old English (1903:53) shows that clauses of Final Purpose and Clauses of Result, designated by aefter, have almost died out by the end of Old English. The class of verbs with which this preposition occurred retained the sense of perpetual motion, however, rather than end of motion, when the preposition was no longer used to signify finite action. Aefter began to function as temporal adverbial in a comparative way, that is, in the context of a consequentially historical before/after spatial discrimination of temporal segmentation, in transitive clauses. Comparative time became a function of lineal relationships. Nosek, in his examination of the modern English clause (1966:23), finds only four instances, in the extensive corpus he analyzes, of the occurrence of Final Clause type. Of course, this may be due to the fact that the material he selected was mostly dramatic script, which, as aesthetically marked language, expresses dramatic succession of events in time. It is, itself, a sign of transitivity, characterized by Clauses of Result, but one would not expect a play-writer to use the Final Clause (realized expectation) to express the attitude of actualized consequence. But Nosek does distinguish the Final Clause from the Result Clause in a way worth noting: both express . . . the motive clause of action shifted into the future. Such a clause becomes the purpose of the action. The question 'why', 'to what end' delimiting the final clause is also a means to delimit it from a result clause. Finality implies purposeful activity which is absent from causal clauses. (Nosek: 23)

INTRANSITIVITY IN RETROSPECT

37

The Final Clause is characterized, according to Nosek's examples, by an intransitive style. It is possible to infer, then, that while the syntactic form of a Final Clause is infrequently used in modern English, other forms emerge, compensatorily, to fill the functional 'gap' for Is-saying. One such form particularly productive in Modern English, is the intransitive function of the phrasal verb.

VIII

S E M A N T I C P A R T I C L E S A N D THE ' B U R D E N OF E X I S T E N C E ' As De la Cruz notes, the modern phrasal verb contains 'residues' of a condition of finality which 'implies perfectivity'. Particles like Up, for instance, signify final realization. And, as Bolinger points out, this meaning is made explicit with the verb Be, as in His term is up, The time is up, and to say He wrote up his report is like saying He Wrote-finished his report. Yet it is important to remember that the phrasal verb (With up in this example) in no way suggests that a result remains, in actuality a final condition, but is, rather, a way of expressing the intense perception of a Moment of finality. "After something is fixed up, it is not up, and after it has been brought about it is not about" (Bolinger 1971:6-11). Meanings, semantically signified by up and about in modern English phrasal verbs are very close to the Old English prefixal a- which, as we recall, distinguished the transitive aspect of the verbal perception from the intransitive, and functioned in systematic opposition with the use of the zero sign prefix: e.g., (transitive) 0 singan 'sing' / Asingan 'sing to an end' (intr) (De la Cruz 76ff.). By the time referred to as Middle English these prefixes have given way to the more precise semantic distinctions of the locative adverbs, e.g., ge- 'up/out' for- 'up/away/off, be- 'up/away/off, to- 'up/out/away/ off, and a- 'up/away/out'; the main verb of the phrase could thus function transitively or intransitively, and interpretation of distinction depended on the speech community's 'knowing' the conventional meaning indicated by the contextual style of the discourse. Only be- and on Have and Not — remain productive into Modern English. All the prefixes may semantically convey the notion of 'up'. But not all prhasal verbs in Modern English with 'up' (or other particles) are elements of intransitive function. There are two aspects, for example, of this particle: one which derives from the primitive notion of equating finished result with ascending motion, and the other which is in spatial opposition to the word 'down'. Although Bolinger says there are any number of shades of meaning

SEMANTIC PARTICLES AND THE 'BURDEN OF EXISTENCE'

39

to 'up', the basic distinction is between an aspect of completeness and a locative marker of space/time. Almost any noun can be used to express either transitive or intransitive perceptions by the addition of a phrasalverb particle, e.g., He boned up, He lighted up, He gassed up, etc., and what is implied is not the lack of objective relation (in Halliday's sense) but a way of indicating the perception of a linguistically synthetic relation. (This contrasts with Mathesius' view, that with the development of transitivity, fixed word order, and passivization, English changed from a 'synthetic' to an analytic-type language (Mathesius 1964, Eng. trans.) Rather, we can regard the 'synthesizing intransitive-style' as a marked feature of modern English.) Almost any verb which is commonly complemented, i.e., Objectivized, can express the aspect of intensity and finality by the addition of a phrasal-verb particle, e.g., He tallied up (the score). As with all transitives, the sentence can be passivized, and the use of the particle in this type of structure is regarded by Bolinger as simple an intensive 'aspect'. On the other hand, the intransitive phrasals cannot be passivized, except as 'psuedo-passives', e.g., *The cigarette was lighted up by him. As a fairly recent linguistic device in English, and predominantly metaphorically based, Bolinger considers the phrasal verb as a new way of creating relational forms in the language to correspond with the new perceptions of ordinary objects, that is, of the world not perceived in an habitual way. The usual pattern of development for a freshly-coined phrasal is that it begins as an intransitive-style verb, and then passes, with accepted 'common' usage, into transitivity: e.g., to dress up (intr) is different, in perception, from to dress (ergative); by extension, to dress up (someone) would suggest that a 'habit' of dressing up as an attitude has been established and one can then indicate a Has perception of relation between Agent/dresser-up and Patient/ dressed-up. While the examples I used here are specific to the particle up, all particles in phrasal verbs behave similarly, Bolinger points out. As a generalization, the phrasal verb has developed from a 'metaphoric core', which is intransitive, to an indexical, transitive sign in the language. The derivation from intransitive (symbol) to transitive (index), e.g., They stare down (intr) to They stare the man down (tr), can be regarded less as an historical language change than as a change in the way people improvise with linguistic tools to express alternatives in attitude. The neutral form, or 'Zero degree of intransitivity', can be expressed as They stare 0, which is, stylistically, a continuing, 'fixing' action.

IX

BE A N D HAVE D I F F E R E N T I A T I O N AS L A N G U A G E U N I V E R S A L

What I have tried to show in this paper is that, while specific language forms change, or lose significance through redundancy, or are deleted in speech because of shared community presuppositions that tolerate significant absences such as objects of 'intransitive verbs', certain functions of a language must be constantly available to express some fundamental ways of marking duality in perception. The intransitive structure in English seems to correspond to the perception of a Gestalt; the transitive structure conveys the sense of the mechanics of how things fit together; intransitivity expresses That things are; transitivity expresses How they are made. Figuratively, transitivity seems to correspond with a 'down-to-earth' perspective, and intransitivity to an awareness which is non-habitual. Throughout the history of the English language, the perception of the extraordinary has been marked by semantically-significant morphology, syntax, and style. When one means, formerly available to a speech community, has been taken up for other more practical purposes of communication, some new linguistic device has either been discovered as available within the existing system or has been improvised from 'discarded' parts of the system. The semantic meaning of prefixal particles has permitted a continuity of 'intransitive meaning' to develop by a kind of analogy. In concluding, I want to call attention to renewed interest among linguists in the notion of 'deep-seated' — covert — semantic categories which is discussed in Bimbaum's article, "Typology, Genealogy, and Linguistic Universals" (1975:5-26). Birnbaum's thesis derives in large part from work in this area by Uspenskij (1965), McCawley (1968), Chafe (1970), and Lakoff(1971).ThekeypointsofBirnbaum'sarticleare: 1) universals in language can be established only after a typological, semantic 'infrastructure' which relates specific languages can be identified and described;

BE AND HAVE DIFFERENTIATION AS LANGUAGE UNIVERSAL

41

2) typologically akin languages will presumably share Hjelmslev's notion of 'category functions' which shares conceptual affinities with Fillmore's 'case grammar' and Whorfs idea of 'covert categories'; 3) included in the concept of sentence as predication are 'predicate categories' or functions, which include oppositions between active/ passive; subject-related/object-related; transitive/intransitive in verbal category-functions; and nominative/ergative in noun functions. Because of the fundamental opposition of to be (intr) and to have (tr) Birnbaum, excepting a few transitional, 'mixed types of languages', concludes that . . . it would appear reasonable to venture a typological classification of man— or perhaps even all languages of the world — into Be and Have languages . . . (18)

Clearly, Halliday has grouped modern English as a Have-type of language. Yet, I find a continuing tendency, through the development of English, to maintain a complementary oppositional pattern between transitive and intransitive functions. As Jespersen points out (1969:127), the "existential sentence structure in English" signifies that the thematic subject, as in It is . . . , directs attention from the Personal, which is typical of the thematic (transitive) function, to the a-typical Rhematic (intransitive) function,e.g., It is something . . . Here the Agent is deleted, the Beneficiary as causative objective is also deleted; typical transitive relational participants are displaced by a-typical 'super-personal' condensing It. Jakobson maintains that, universally, distinctions between noun and verb may correlate, but never merge; he cites Sapir's example of certain universal functions which refer to one another only by maintaining their own distinctions, which are termed 'existants' and 'occurents' and which correspond to perceptions of intransitive and transitive, respectively (Jakobson 1968:265). All languages, according to Jakobson, regardless of type, include an Objective in typical syntactic form. In English the typical form is SVO. When the object does not appear on the surface lineal chain of the utterance, as in an intransitive-style utterance, the intransitive style should be considered as an 'emphatic shift' or violation of the norm; this violation signifies to the listener that perception of extraordinary relations are intended to be communicated by the speaker in the speeech act. Referring to Peirce's work which distinguishes three functional characteristics of the linguistic utterance as sign — icon, index, and

42

BE AND HAVE DIFFERENTIATION AS LANGUAGE UNIVERSAL

symbol — Jakobson stresses that these three aspects are present simultaneously in all verbal messages. For example, a type of structure may function, stylistically, as symbolic of a certain complex of communicative signs through the use of conventionalized rhetorical devices; the same structure, in the context of discourse, may be indexical, according to the principles of FSP and Communicative Dynamism or crossreference (Palek 1968); and at the same time a particular structure may be iconic, or isomorphic with the perceived structure of the society which is reflected in the language. The 'iconic' aspect of word order signifies that ' . . . the order of elements in language parallels that in physical experience or the order of (human) knowledge' (Peirce 1932). Values which predominate in a culture at any given time may lead to the identifying of certain linguistic structures with that value. In this sense, I believe, Ikegami writes that 'causal relations . . . are by nature transitive, and we pick up for linguistic expression that causer we consider most relevant for the particular movement caused' (1969). Verbs which are perceived to move toward abstract goals (objectives) such as percolate, descend, ascend, depart, flow, etc. are those which, traditionally, grammarians have classified as intransitives. But, as Ikegami points out, it accords more with our perception to consider objectives not as Abstract, but as having relative degrees of Concreteness. Motion, then becomes perceived as direction through space toward a relatively concrete objective, and permits the class of verbs such as spin and twirl to function as causative/transitives in structures where the grammatical subject is not the motion-causing Agent. The basic opposition, then, which transitive/intransitive structures express in modern English is not between Concrete and Abstract but between Actual and Ideal. Metaphorically, an intransitive style may, by expansion, express transitive-actualizing relationships, e.g., Civilization advances, i.e., Civilization Is (progress) can develop into: Civilization advances (processes) goals of humaneness, i.e., Civilization Has 'goals' and expropriates them. 'Civilization' is personified, thematized, and transitivized in a structure which has become normative in modern English.

X

INT R A N SITI VIT Y A N D ' C L O C K STOPPING': SOME F I N A L R E M A R K S

In retrospect it is nearly impossible to assume that this historical event, or that hypothecized stage in the development of social conscience, or some renewed effort of a power faction to influence popular loyalty, or a counter-linguistic play in common language to retain and/ or cultivate private folk talk, or any specific idea, artifact, or activity as single factors brought about radical language change. Certainly every parameter, perceived as meaningfully operative within a society, influenced a partial change. The more fluid and mobile the society became, the more widespread, presumably, small changes could effect on the total language system. As Malkiel emphasizes, it is necessary to consider . . . multiple versus simple causation in language change . . . little attention has been paid to the wisdom of positing, under certain conditions, the agency of complex against simple causation . . . . Such fundamental possibilities as habitual complementarity, bare compatibility, or mutual exclusiveness of potentially concurrent factors deserve systematic exploration. (1971:24-31)

Certainly there is little that is systematic in this exploration of the complementary functions of transitivity and intransitivity. For the time being it is significant to have observed that this opposition is, and is open for more systematic analysis. Particularly challenging is the whole area of stylistic analysis, considered not so much from the viewpoint of literary theory as from the linguistic perspective, on a semiotics of language change, at the level of pragmatics. Certainly, as Wright points out in noting the influence of popular caricature and satire on clerical writings and court documents as early as the 1300's, literature 'borrowed' as much linguistically from the speech patterns of non-literate people in England as it returned (Wright 235-39). From the middle of the fourteenth century well into the beginning of the fifteenth, a type of popular literature circulated through households of working people in France, Germany, Italy, and, most abun-

44

INTRANSmviTY AND 'CLOCK-STOPPING': SOME FINAL REMARKS

dantly, in England, where for the first time a genre of 'jests' or clever sayings were told in the vernacular, and written by poets such as Skelton, to parody authorities of Church and Court. The style of the language as well as the content of the tales caricatured the pontifical style of edicts and sermons. Tension and suspense were built up through the special use of intransitive structures; this same stylistic pattern, Wright suggests, became adopted in ordinary conversation by ordinary persons to give marked importance to the describing of what was intended to be understood as 'uncommon attitudes'. When Skelton hard every man bustle himselfe upward, and some of them were naked, and some were halfe asleepe and amased, amd Skelton dyd crye, Fier, Fier! styll, that everye man knewe not whether to resorte. (Wright 52-3)

From a somewhat different perspective, Schlauch notes that . . . while the auxiliary have was steadily taking over the perfective function everywhere in popular speech (in England) during the 17th and 18th century, formal religious prose remained strikingly conservative . . . the Authorized Version of the Bible (1611) consistently preferred the more archaic treatment of intransitive verbs in the perfect tense and this in turn affected sermons and other types of solemn discourse. (Schlauch 1964:104)

Schlauch writes that the social and political influences from the sixteenth century onward in England standardized the 'preferred' structure of the language. Grammarians tended to codify prescriptive structure at this time with reference to logical models analogized from literature and classical discourse. Presumably, the preference of the clergy for archaic 'intransitive' style was transferred down the line of an hierarchical power structure so that Be, associated with the use of the perfect in intransitive structures, became subsumed in the intransitive-style of the clause, with or without a to be Aux. At the same time, the use of to be became standardized in its function of "expressing continuous action, as today" (Schlauch 143). Perceptually, and by analogy, the notions of inwardly-impelled motion, i.e.,continuing action and associations of Be+ intransitive with religious and other authoritative texts, fused. The intransitive, by analogy, has come to designate, as a marked form, non-usual phenomenal process. By the nineteenth century the transitive and intransitive forms were not used to express only the difference between 'heightened discourse in the perfect' and 'normative' discourse in the perfect, with verbs of motion; but the intransitive-type clause, either with or without an object on the surface, or nonfinite verb complement, signified in a more special-

INTRANSITIVITY AND 'CLOCK-STOPPING': SOME FINAL REMARKS

45

ized way, that a particular part of the discourse was to be regarded as more marked and intensitive. The intransitive structure can be regarded as a stylistic device to foreground new or novel information in the utterance: it is Rhematic, in contrast to the background against which» it appears, which corresponds with the Given, the Known, and Thematicity. Perhaps one of the more striking examples of this contrastive function in English appears in the tendency among the speech community in England, shortly after the Norman invasion, to assume nicknames which best described the qualities people recognized in themselves. This tendency is noted as a reaction against the custom of parents to name their children for social goals, or achievements. The nicknames, by contrast, were epithets that people chose, to express how they wanted to appear to themselves and their friends. The attainment of a quality of Being — an existential Is-saying — was opposed to the person's christened or 'given' name. One could say, for example, I have the name Hrodwaru; I am Bugga the Bug (Wright 53).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Freud, S., Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Strachey (ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963. Fries, C., "On the Development of the Structural Use of Word-Order in Modern English," Readings in the History of the English Language, Scott and Erickson (eds.). Boston: Allen and Bacon, 1968. Greenberg, J., Essays in Linguistics, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Greimas, A. J., and Rastier, F., "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints," Game, Play, Literature, Ehrmann (ed.). Yale French Studies 1968. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. Halliday, M.A.K., Explorations in the Function of Language, London: Edward Arnold, 1973. ——, "Transitivity and Theme in English III", JL 1968. Harmon, G., "Three Levels of Meaning", Semantics, Steinberg and Jakobovitz (eds.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Heller, L., and Macris, J., "Perspectives in Functionalism", Word 23, 1967. Hendricks, W. O., "Current Trends in Discourse Analysis", Semiotica 1972. Hjelmslev, L., Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, Whitfield (trans) U. of Wisconsin Press, 1969. Hoenigswald, H., "Universals of Linguistic Change", Universals in Language, Greenberg (ed.). Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963. Holjer, H. (ed.), Language History, from Language by L. Bloomfield. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965. Huizinga, J., Homo Ludens. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Ikegami, Y., "The Semological Structure of the English Verbs of Motion", Linguistic Automation Project, New Haven, 1969. Jakobson, R., "Signe Zero" (offprint) 1933, reprinted in Readings in Linguistics II, Hamp, Householder, Austerlitz (eds)Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Jespersen, O., Growth and Structure of the English Language New York: Doubleday and Company, 1956. , Analytic Syntax, New York; Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969. Joos, M., The English Verb. University of Wisconsin Press, 1964. Kevelson, R., "Objectives of Intransitive Verbs", 1971 (unpublished). , The Inverted Pyramid, Studies in Semiotics. Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies (forthcoming) Bloomington; Labov, W., Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973. Lakoff, G., "Presuppositions and Relative Well-formedness", Semantics, Steinberg and Jakobovitz (eds.). Cambridge University Press, 1971. Langacker, R., "Functional Stratigraphy," CLS 1975 (to appear in Papers from the Parasession on Functionalism). Langendoen, T., The Study of Syntax. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969. Lee, D., Functional Change in Early English. Wisconsin: George Banta 1948. Lehmann, W. P., and Malkiel, Y. Austin (eds.), Directions for Historical Linguistics. University of Texas Press, 1971. Lekomcev, J., "On Some Aspects of Linguistic Typology", Semiotica 1975. Levickij, J., "Levels of Analysis and Levels of Functioning", Linguistics 144, 1975. Levi, J., "Meaning of Form and the Forms Meaning", Poetics II. The Hague; Mouton, 1966. Lyons, J., New Horizons in Linguistics. Baltimore: Penguin Books. 1972. ——, Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, 1969. Korzybski, A., Sdence and Sanity. The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Co., 1958.

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INDEX

Actual vs. Ideal 28,31 Abduction and Intransitive Structure

Folk literature 43-45 Functional Sentence Perspective

10

10-11

Aesthetic function as social fact 106 Agent-Patient relationship 14-15, 21, 31,39,42 Allofunction 10,21 Ambiguity, tolerance in speech community 32-33 Analytic vs. Synthetic language types 17 A nomalous utterance 10,26 Archaisms, semiotics of 11,15, 19,25 Attenuation of linguistic sign 26, 32 Attitudinal formatore 28,29 Availability of linguistic form 31-33 Categorical restrictions 19, 22 Categories vs. Functions 19,40 Causative structure 14-16, 19, 34-36, 42; see Ergative Clause types 16,21,36 Communicative Dynamism 10 Complementation criteria 10, 22, 29, 43 Concreteness of verbal object 19,42 Covert Categories 18,21,40 Cross-reference in discourse analysis 42 Designators, lexical 28 Dialogic base of language 28 Dual judgments 27 Dyadic and Triadic relations 18 Economic exchange and transitive structure 31 Epithet as perceptual primitive 45 Ergative (see Causative) 14,19 Evolution of moral order and language development 15-18

Habitual action and intransitivity Having vs. Being: Universals in Language 32,41

21

Idiomatication 22,26 Inalienable Possession and intransitivity 26-27 Inner Dialogue, relation to Person as Fact in Social System 29 Interprétant 26 Is-Saying and affirmation-sign of Intransitivity 18,28 Kennings

15

Language-games

29-30

Markedness as style-function 10,16, 27,30,41,44 Metalinguistic operators 28-29 Metaphoric relations and intransitivity 12,29,42 Middle English: Transitive/Intransitive distinctions 32,34-39 Modal auxiliary system 33 Multilevel meaning, semiotics of 28 Neutralization of Transitive/Intransitive opposition 27 Neutral style 29, 39 Object-deletion 42-43 Old English: Transitive/Intransitive signs 16,22, 24-29 Options in style 24-25,31

INDEX

Passivization 35 Pattern recognition 16,29 Perceptual hierarchy in Be/Have relation 11-12,16,25,32 Permanence and change: linguistic function and forms 11 Phrasal Verbs 11,38-39 Prefixes and semantic particles 12,16, 24-25 Presuppositions in speech acts 26-27, 40 Protolanguage 25 Randomness 10,25,29, 32 Realized utterances vs. incomplete sentences 13,21 Rhetorical process and Transitive/Intransitive 'figures' 11,26,29,42 Rival forms and rival functions in language change 32, 34-35 Scripts as language systems 24-25 Semantic categories 28, 34,40,42

51

Semiotics of style 9,24,28,38-42, 44-45 Sentential grammars 9,10,19 Shifting sign-functions 22-23, 38-39 Sign Zero 18,21,27,39 Slang and Intransitivity 26,39 Speech Acts 10, 12,24,26,28,42 Style-features in Discourse Analysis 10, 23 Style and Social Facts 16-18,23-24, 25-26, 38-41 Stylistics as extended applied linguistics 23 Symbolization, process of 9,28,30 Temporality and Transitivity 35 -36,43 Theme/Rheme relationship 45 Typology of languages and linguistic opposition 40-42 Vagueness, concept of 31 Verb classes 10, 11-13, 15, 19, 36,42 Violation of normative order 13,41